🍵 Sunday SELF - C. 🫐 A. 🧑‍🌾 R.🫂 E. 🫒

Hi friend,

I hope your past week brought you unexpected mini miracles like this full-on sunflower that I spotted from inside my living room first thing Friday morning.

Enjoying your connection with nature feels like the theme for this week’s Self - C.A.R.E reflection 🌻🫒🥕🥒🧺🪺🪻🐐🌞

SELF - C.A.R.E.

Cooking: So this is more blending than cooking, but my intention for this section is to share how I’m nourishing my body with whole foods so this healing smoothie recipe fits. 

Hopefully, you haven’t glanced ahead and felt slapped with overwhelm by the length of ingredients… Hear me out first 🙏

Some kind of magic takes place when you blend up a smoothie that makes it so you can literally throw anything inside there and somehow none of it clashes.

This recipe started out much more simply before it evolved into this so don’t hold back from making it if you don’t have every single ingredient. Toss your own favorite healing remedies into the blender and experience the magic 🪄 It’ll still taste just as delicious if you strip it down to simply blueberries, banana, and coconut milk.

But here’s what I throw into my blender:

It’s like ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ for wellness 🌎🦋🤸‍♀️ Fun, right?

Let me know if that was way too overwhelming of a recipe 😬 OR if you’re down to try it! 🫶

Art: My latest creative inspiration is coming from a show on HBO Max called, Homegrown. If you don’t think gardening, landscape design, or even TV shows are art… 🤨 

You didn’t think this section was just to show off my elementary-level paintings, did you?

I chose this art section to share the things that are inspiring me to live more creatively and more in tune with nature. The way the woman in this show is able to so beautifully turn regular backyards in the city into farms that nourish an entire family is everything.

Plus, I’m learning a lot about how to expand and improve my own mini backyard garden, which hopefully one day is not so mini.

Reading: I’m currently listening to You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir by Maggie Smith. 

I’ve had this book on my wishlist for a while and I’ll be honest, the first few chapters were not really speaking to me. I find that sometimes when authors are academically trained poets, they spend a lot of time skating around the story. I started to feel like, “Okay, enough with the metaphors! Just tell me what happened.”

This is just a personal preference for writing style. But here’s my favorite thing about memoirs: no matter how much you think you dislike the person or the story, if you just keep hearing them out, you will start to feel connected. I’m about halfway through now and enjoying the beautiful process of how someone learns to navigate the unexpected life experiences that we all face.

Speaking of straight to the point, no fuss, fluff, or academic show-offing, last week I finished reading, The Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer. This is a classic personal development book told from the author's personal knowing, not like the many in this genre that just restate a bunch of boring scientific research.

One of the quotes I highlighted while reading is,

Enthusiasm: Before I tell you what I’m excited about, let me tell you about one thing I absolutely can’t stand… going to the grocery store.

I can’t explain why, but ever since my mom would drag me through the grocery store on Sunday afternoons as a kid, I hated it. Now, no matter what store I go to from Winco to Whole Foods, I feel extremely uncomfortable.

Shopping for your food should feel pleasurable and exciting, especially for someone who loves cooking like me. 

But I always find myself holding my breath, trying not to touch anything except the carefully analyzed food item I need, picking it up with two fingers and quickly tossing it in my cart. Everything about it is wrong.

So to get to the part I’m enthusiastic about… I feel like I finally found a system for getting high-quality whole foods that feels enjoyable and appetizing.

This means getting my groceries from a couple different locations, but having this new system for ordering and shopping is making it feel effortless.

First is the easy part, and something I’ve already been doing for the past 6 years: Ordering the bulk of my grocery list on Thrive Market.

Thrive Market has all the best health food brands for snacks and pantry items. They also have household & personal care products, and organic meat, seafood, and frozen produce.

Like I said, you can get meat from Thrive Market, but I most often order from a regenerative farm like these three: Force of Nature, White Oak Pastures, and Polyface Farms.

For the items I do want to pick out fresh myself, I just discovered this database to find local farm stands. I tried utilizing farmer’s markets in the past, but it always meant Saturday mornings in a random parking lot that just was not the vibe.

Now with the search results from that website, I found farms that are open to customers during the week, selling the most beautiful seasonal produce, raw milk, cheese, & butter, pasture-raised eggs, AND the farm’s olive oil 😭💓💫🪽

Oh also! The farm near me has a giant flower garden that you can pick from and make your own bouquet 💐 

I got a lot more food than I planned including olive oil all for less money than a single bottle of lower-quality olive oil at a grocery store. So use this, and shop at a farm stand. It’s changed the game.

Do any of these tips / recommendations resonate with you? Reply and let me know which one! 

Talk to you soon👋🩷 Have a beautiful week!

🤍 Jaclyn

P.S. Be sure to add 6 Pillars of Holistic Well-Being to your files app so it doesn’t get lost in your inbox & you can easily come back to it as you need support or recommendations for healing and living your fullest life 🫶