Morning Pages.

I feel I need to share about morning pages. Morning Pages was created by Julia Cameron and you can read about it in her book "The Artist's Way". I first heard about morning pages on the Rich Roll Podcast a couple of years ago. I bought the book and started doing morning pages. At that time I dealt with lots of anger so it was perfect to let that out and release it from my system. For some reason I didn't continue but a couple of weeks ago I opened the book again and got inspired and added morning pages to my morning routine.

So what is morning pages? It is a super simple tool to find out what you want to do with your life. Or boost your creativity or release emotions you are holding on to that no longer serves you. I believe it is multi-functional. All you need is some papers and a pen and then you start writing 3 pages the first thing you do in the morning. And at first you may not know what to write. Then just write: "I have no idea what to write, I'm sitting here with theese empty pages and a pen and my usually active mind is just quiet". The thing is to just start writing, whatever crosses your mind. Don't censor yourself, don't judge yourself. Don't show these writings to anybody. It is even not recommended for us to read them ourselves the first couple of months. The goal is to listen to ourselves without judgement. Just let the words flow out and dance on the paper. Some mornings I feel so creative I just can't finish after three pages so I just continue.

They are called morning pages for a reason. The morning is the best time to start writing because your chatting mind hasn't started going nuts yet. That makes it easier to find out what's really hidden inside and needs to come out.

I use a beautiful notebook for my pages. To me that is a way of showing respect for this process. But any notebook will work. The most important thing is to start writing! Keep it simple!

What I eat in a day.

Sometimes people ask me how much fruit I eat during a day. The answer is, of course, that it depends on how hungry I am and how active I am.

At the moment I start my day with a glass of water with some fresh lemon juice. After that I juice a whole bunch of celery stalks.

After this routine I make my breakfast smoothie. It often consists of:

• 5 bananas
• About a cup of frozen berries 
• Some sort of leafy greens. I rotate. I can use kale, spinach, romain or some other lettuce.
• 1 tsp of barley grass powder
• I often vary between nettle powder, rose hip powder, mesquite powder and raw cacao. I let my intuition guide me here.
• And water

For lunch I always have smoothies during the week. They are similar to the breakfast smoothie but I might add some more bananas or dates or hemp seeds or add some other fruit like pears to make it higher in calories. And if I have spinach for example in the breakfast smoothie I try to have some other greens in the lunch smoothie. 

When mangoes or persimmons are in season I might exchange one of the smoothie meals with whole fruit. During the summer I often have water melon for breakfast. 

I love having whole fruit but it's easier to bring a bottle of smoothie to work. At least that's how I see it. 

In the afternoon I often snack on grapes, oranges or dates. And some leafy greens.

For dinner I enjoy eating the same as the rest of the family so then I eat a plant based cooked dinner. Unless I'm feeling a cold is coming then I switch to fully raw until my body is feeling ok again. In this way I rarely get ill these days. 

This is a cauliflower curry I cooked the other day which is a typical dinner for me.

Throughout the day I try to drink about 2 litres of water. 

I hope this gives you a clearer picture of how I eat and hopefully it inspires you to perhaps replace one of your meals in the day to a healthier one. 

Vegan cookbooks I recommend.

I got the question what vegan cookbooks I recommend and here are some of my favourites:

"Maten är min medicin" by Janesh Vaidya. This book is actually vegetarian but it's super easy to modify the recipes to be vegan.
"VÅR KOKBOK vegan"
"Vego Hela dagen " by Mattias Krisstiansson.

The first three ones are Swedish. The "VÅR KOKBOK vegan" is not the fanciest looking and not filled with beautiful pictures of the dishes but the recipes tastes sooo goood! I highly recommend it and please don't let it down because of the not so fancy design. It contains one of the favourite recipes in our family.

The book "Vego hela dagen" is actually for teenagers but I think it's a perfect source for day-to-day recipes. They are simple and delicious and contains a beluga bolognese that we often cook in our family.

These too I recommend for my international readers. They are sooo beautiful and inspiring. "This cheese is nuts" is a book on how to make vegan cheeses and the warm cheese sauce to put on your home baked pizza that you find in this book is a go-to in this family.

My final tip is actually not a book but a Swedish Magazine. It's incredible inspiring and I recommend anyone who is curious to try the vegan diet to buy this magazine and start cooking!

Sprouting time again!

I missed having my sprouts yesterday so I took some alfalfa and broccoli seeds and put them in bowls to soak over night.

This morning I rinsed them well and put them in the sprouting box:

From now on I rinse them twice a day and in three to four days we can enjoy fresh sprouts! 
Do you sprout to? What are your favourite sprouts?

Back on Facebook again.

Yesterday I posted on my Facebook page again. It has almost been 4 years ago since I last posted! I realize how much I miss the beautiful community there. I'm not very active on Facebook myself anymore, I'm hanging around on Instagram instead but I miss the questions and the interactivity that I used to have on my Facebook page. I love to get some response otherwise it feels like I'm not talking to anybody.

We had a very sunny morning here today and even the cats enjoyed the sun. I started with a celery juice:

After that I had a fruit, berry and greens smoothie.

For lunch we enjoyed chickpeas and spinach served with rice.

Focus - throughout the day.

Good evening!

I hope you have had a lovely Friday. I started my day with yoga and meditation to be prepared to meet the challenges during the day. It can be challenges with relationships, with lack of my own motivation and so on. That's why it's so great to start the day in a prepared and focused way. As a project manager I wouldn't start a project without any preparations and I should actually value every day to be important enough to be fully prepared. This life is precious. Something to value high. And we should respect ourselves enough to make the best out of every day.

Me enjoying a smoothie this morning. I filmed 3 meditations today. One in English and two in Swedish. It's been over four years since I edited and posted videos though so I have to kind of start over again. What video editing program should I use? And so on.

Greens, greens, greens.

I confess. I'm filling up with lots of greens at the moment. Just look at this lunch plate:

Where is the food!?!?!? Ha, ha, ha. We cook almost all of our meals from scratch because we like it that way. I also want it to be simple to have a mixed salad to the meal. Therefore we buy this bag with mixed organic leafy greens. It comes rinsed and it's perfect to throw on your plate!