2011 - Page 5 of 27 - Sarah Wilson

5 inspiring things to learn about writing from Kate Grenville (a podcast)

November 3, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

I’m running an occasional series with creative people I admire who have a spark of unique “dive-into-life”-ness that I think we could all learn from.

Picture 20 5 inspiring things to learn about writing from Kate Grenville (a podcast) — pic via sandstone flies

This week Kate Grenville is my guest. Kate is one of Australia’s best-known authors, having written eight books of fiction and four books about the writing process. Her best-known works are the international best-seller The Secret River (my Mum’s favourite book) The Idea of Perfection, The Lieutenant and Lilian’s Story, which I reckon every kid of my generation read at school. Her latest book is Sarah Thornhill…you might’ve read it? Her novels have won many awards both in Australia and the UK, several have been made into major feature films, and all have been translated into European and Asian languages.

She shares some lovely thoughts on how she does what she does….

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Some points I loved:

* She doesn’t wait for inspiration. She just sits and writes and trusts that this process alone will produce.

* She writes to a routine. She sets the alarm for 5:30 and writes for an hour. She doesn’t care what comes out, but again trusts that some of it will be useable. She then goes back and collates all the bits and pieces and jig-

my little black book of natural therapies

April 28, 2015November 2, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

I get asked rather often what therapies, of all the ones I’ve tried – and I’ve tried a few – I personally use and recommend. So I thought I’d post on it.

I’ve tried just about every therapy in Christendom. It’s an occupational hazard. From the noise of it all I’ve distilled things down to a bunch of smooth routines and approaches.

123701 3 600 my little black book of natural therapies — Photo by Steven Klein

As a general approach, I keep to a morning routine. Routines are good. They create a firm launch pad and determine the tone of the day.

I also do some regular maintenance stuff. Sometimes I think to myself, “my parents would never do this kind of thing…they’d just get on with it”. Also, it can get expensive, all this “maintenance”.

But I justify it thus:

I do a lot, am engaged in a lot, and I need help to ensure I can keep doing what I love to do.

An athlete gets regular physio. TV stars get blowdries. A rally car driver gets their car serviced. I get regular treatments to keep me well and open and energised.

I rotate the various therapies, according to what continues to keep me open and intimate with life. I’m also a little challenged by the idea of taking good care of myself (I forget and burn out very easily) and so some of these healings are about getting into that space. Being intimate. This is important. I don’t buy nail polish or magazines or shoes or throw cushions. I prefer to do this kind of thing.

My daily practice:

Meditation. I practice the vedic style (with a mantra, 20 minutes twice a day). I’ve blogged about it here. My teacher Tim can be found here.

Exercise. I move every morning – a mixture of walking, jogging (I’ve taken to barefoot running), yoga, ocean swimming and home weights. I also ride a singlespeed bike. My thing is this: I set out to move every day for 20 minutes minimum. It’s the “every day” bit that matters to me, and my aim is to simply get blood flowing and to feel fresh and to get into the outdoors. I don’t focus on “getting fit” or losing weight. It’s also about flow and agility and feeling vibrant.

why the stars are saying “quit sugar” now (Yasmin Boland guest posts!)

December 10, 2011October 30, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Ever come across Yasmin Boland‘s astrological insights? The other day she wrote about how things right now are primed for quitting sugar. Or, more to the point, right now we can’t tolerate sugar….we’re all wanting to quit. Which would explain why a few of you have quite liked my I Quit Sugar ebook. Which, by the way, is still $15. You can catch up on the health changes and weight loss others have experienced here.

Picture 312 why the stars are saying "quit sugar" now (Yasmin Boland guest posts!) — photo via browneyedbellejulie.blogspot.com

So. Yasmin very kindly offered to explain the deal… it’s fun and weird and got me thinking in different directions. I thought you’d like to know about it, too. Basically, Yasmin reckons we are in the biggest Smash Sugar Forever cycle that we’ve been in for 30 years, which is the length of one Saturn cycle. And Saturn is the planet of wisdom and hard facts and truths.
I’ve asked Yasmin to share a little more:

“In astrology, every planet represents certain qualities or parts of life. Saturn is about teaching and wisdom among other things. Saturn is the mean old headmaster and the strict parent, as well as the representative of the truth in the horoscope. Right now it is in the sign of sweetness Libra. Just as with the planets, each sign governs certain parts of life. Libra is about balance and harmony, art and luxury. And sweetness, including anything made of sugar.

If you’re wondering how these classifications came about, the short answer is that astrologers have observed the movements of the planets for literally thousands of years and noted what happens when and how it coincides with events on the planet and in peoples’ lives. This is Astrology 101. If you want to know more, delve into Secrets From A Stargazer’s Notebook by the awesome Debbi Kempton-Smith.

This Saturn in Libra transit continues until October 2012. (If you happen to be a Libran, now you know why the past couple of years have been so intense! The harder you work between now until October next year, the easier the rest of this Saturn in Libra transit will be).

So if you take the keywords for Saturn and Libra, it’s easy to see that Sarah really has tapped into the skies.

We are all learning (Saturn is all about learning) the truth (Saturn is all about truth) about sugar (Libra is all about sugar) and it’s not pretty (Libra is all about All Things Pretty).

The truth about sugar is coming out. I’ve even read that sugar is more addictive than crack. People who give it up say they feel amazing. It’s everywhere and it’s hard to kick. However since I found out that the food industry actually puts sugar into our foods as a way of hooking us, it’s become a little easier to just say no.

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creating too much chaos in your life? this jonathan fields trick works

October 30, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

This week in Sunday Life I drop certainty anchors

mind on fire creating too much chaos in your life? this jonathan fields trick works — By mind on fire

So lately I’ve become increasingly distrustful of the overly certain.

When someone puffs out their chest at the head of a dinner table to emphatically declare climate change isn’t happening or that their son will grow up to follow Collingwood or that the only smoked small goods worth buying are from such-and-such-purveyor-of-such-things, it sets off alarm bells. Because nothing is certain any more. No one knows anything for sure.

We can’t be certain we’ll knock off work at 5 tomorrow or that we’ll be having Irish stew on Wednesday night or that our plane will turn up. The only certainty, beyond death, is uncertainty. Oh, and the fact that uncertainty in the world is on the up and up.

So when a leader or some blinkered commentator issues a black or white pronouncement these days I immediately think, “Hmmm, you’re sooo struggling with the inevitable anxiety of these doubtful times”. Far from giving them credibility, their surety comes across as cringefully out of step. As evolutionary epistemologist Jeremy Sherman wrote recently, today “self-certainty is weakly correlated with veracity.”

Uncertainty is the new fear. Twenty years ago we felt fear and did it anyway.

Now we accept we don’t know, and use this to humbly grow ourselves forward.

Or at least we do if we know what’s good for us. The research shows, over and over, that uncertainty – or an ability to flow with it – goes hand in hand with true creative success. It’s the very act of being in the unknown that sees us strive to know more, and thus stumble upon fresh ideas.

What distinguishes the new entrepreneurs from the rest of us who sit back waiting for our “moment” is an appreciation that we can no longer wait for a perfect understanding of a situation before acting. As Jonathan Fields, author of new book Uncertainty, reasons, “The only time we have perfect understanding before launching into something is when it’s already been done before”.

I spoke to Fields this week. He became so fascinated by this new not-knowing that he studied hundreds of successful creatives to determine what they were doing differently, culminating in his book, published this month. What did he find? “Happy, successful entrepreneurs ritualize everything in their lives but their creative work.”

how is the quitting sugar thing going for you?

October 23, 2018October 28, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

I’d love your thoughts…it’s been almost four weeks since I released the I Quit Sugar ebook and I was just wondering how you’ve been finding it. Any questions? Any results? Please do feel free to share. Fellow bloggers, is the affiliates program working for you? From my end, it’s been so heartening to see how … Read more

Friday giveaway: free institute of integrative nutrition course worth $4500

July 31, 2018October 28, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

It’s Friday. And I’d like to give a lovely reader: free tuition with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition worth more than $4000 when they buy a copy of the I Quit Sugar ebook between now and Monday EST 5pm. As you might know, the INN course saw me qualify as a Health Coach last … Read more

8 things to learn about being creative from Wendy Harmer (a podcast)

October 27, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

I’ve decided to start an occasional series with creative people I admire who have a spark of unique “dive-into-life”-ness that I think we could all learn from. There. A long sentence for you.

128220 6 600 8 things to learn about being creative from Wendy Harmer (a podcast) — Image by Tierney Gearon

Wendy Harmer is my first such guest. She is a MASSIVE spirit and her impact in Australia is huge. She’s a comedian, teen fiction writer, memoirist, blogger (you must sign up to Hoopla – smart women contributors talking important water cooler stuff) and…the rest. She’s playful and she creates from a very true and honest space. The best kind. I loved chatting with her about how she does what she does. Her words helped me enormously….mostly because she is so positive and accepting of the process. She plays. She explores.

Anyway, listen in.

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Some of the salient mantras and points I took:

* She used to dive into big new things thinking “everyone will be much better than me”. Over time she’s realised no one really knows what they’re doing…they’re all just trying. “Most people are being average”.

* She always wanted to edit a magazine. So. She created Hoopla. Because now the internet means you just. Can. Very true and good for anyone with dreams they haven’t fulfilled yet.

* When she gets a bit nervous she says to herself: “I don’t have to do this for a living”. Bam. Expectations lessened!

* She works 9am-3pm. Sometimes she only gets 3 paragraphs down. Sometimes she scraps the lot the next day. 500 words a day is about fair, to her mind. Phew…

this could be why you’re 30-something and single…and OK about it

October 23, 2018October 26, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

This is a doozie of an article that I just read in The Atlantic. We all like chatting about this stuff: the disconnect between men and women today and the peculiar place both single men and women in their 30s are in. It’s such a HUGE issue and we all try to grapple with the reasons, the ways forwards etc. Wondered why it’s such a barbeque stopper? Read on…

128220 7 600 this could be why you're 30-something and single...and OK about it — Image by Tierney Gearon

I’ve written about this stuff many times before, how women give away their feminine power and some other discussions here and here on the current relationship biso.

The Atlantic article by Kate Bolick is worth a read in full, but I thought I’d pull out some points that sparked debates in my own head. Take a deep breath:

What’s happening now on the relationship landscape is monumental, just to be sure:

“The transformation is momentous—immensely liberating and immensely scary. When it comes to what people actually want and expect from marriage and relationships, and how they organize their sexual and romantic lives, all the old ways have broken down.”

Bolick outlines in great detail how women’s wages are increasing more than men’s (in the US), are more educated etc than men, and cites the various reports on “the end of men” (which is a bigger issue in the US where the GFC hit male professions mostly):

If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction.

Or to quote Gloria Steinham: “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry.” I see this everywhere. But I don’t know that it’s doing us any favours – it’s defeminising women and emasculating men and confusing the whole equation. But Bolick provides this:

Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens termed the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction.

Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?

One would think so, but….Behold “the new scarcity”:

American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever.

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10 ways to sweeten food without sugar

August 10, 2018October 25, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Well, my I Quit Sugar ebook has been on sale now for 3 weeks. So, there’s a bunch of you who’ve already seen results.

Here’s some of what you’ve been saying:

“I can’t believe how many tasty foods there are that don’t have any sugar!” Kerry

“I’m in week 3 of I Quit Sugar – feeling really good and skin is clearer and brighter, whoo!” Jasmine

“I have been sugar free for five days now. I am starting to experience that clarity that you and so many others have talked about, and it is a nice place to be – instead of thinking about chocolate and biscuits all the time!” Sally

One of the main tricks I share for quitting sugar is to get used to using other sweeteners (but only healthy ones). In I Quit Sugar, I share recipes and supply a shopping list of things to keep in your cupboard. Funnily, Huffington Post recently ran a list of simiilar sweeteners, some of which I’ve included here…

crushed berries…instead of jam. Crush some fresh or frozen berries (perhaps with a little stevia; I find frozen ones work) and spread on toast.
vanilla powder… with yoghurt instead of icecream. In my ebook I share other tips, including where to buy the stuff.
cinnamon…instead of sugar in your coffee. Try adding a dash of it to coffee as it brews. Toss it into the french press or coffee maker and let it infuse into the grinds.
coconut flesh and flakes...to sweeten porridge.
licorice root tea…in chocolate treats and baked things. A small teaspoon of the root (ie not after it’s made up into tea) adds instant sweetness.
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My daily practice:

It doesn’t make you fat

In fact, it helps you LOSE weight

It stops sugar cravings and energy slumps