Sarah Wilson

two lessons I took from Eat Pray love (the movie)

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Everyone is going to see the movie, right. Even if you’re one of those people who says Elizabeth Gilbert should build a bridge. Grab her baggage. And trundle over it.

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I saw an advanced preview of the film about two months ago. I really enjoyed it. It would be easy for me, with my scathing journalistic hat on, to go to town on the premise (when life gets tough, indulgently rack off for a year), but I’ll leave that to others…in particular the English who just LOVE to get snarky about anything self-helpy and American and sunny.

OK, so two things I took away from the movie that made me feel enrichened (which are just enactments of bits in the book…but it was good to see them played out again):

1. Smile in your liver

There’s a bit where Ketut (the Balinese guru) instructs Liz on her meditation, and suggests she backs off from the mantras and the strictures:

You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clear away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.

Yes, yes, yes! This works. Keep it simple and just smile. When you walk, when you’re driving and when you meditate (or, if you don’t meditate, when you rest a moment). I’d advise not worrying about good or bad energy. Just smile with every bit of yourself. I find smiling with my eyes when I’m meditating works all kinds of magic.

Try it.

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sunday life: how to really have a holiday

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This week I have the holiday you have when you’re not having a holiday

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On Friday, there I am, in Bali, on holiday, having a pedicure. Which is kind of the bourgeois equivalent of getting Bo Derek braids. Two hours and 15 minutes later, there I still(!!) am, having a pedicure. Sujatmi, the all-smiles Balinese girl attending my toes, couldn’t have gone slower without going backwards.

Being the Bourgeois, Uptight Westerner with A Week Off (a BUWWO?) that I am, such a protracted scenario would normally see me commit hari kari. I’d be a mess, fretting about all the nasi gorengs I could be eating and the white beaches I could be strolling. Everyone else is having The Perfect Holiday, is what I’d be thinking, while I’m bloody-well having my calluses scraped at glacial speed.

But on this occasion I remain calm. So much so that three hours later when the polish smears everywhere and sand granules get mooshed into the tacky mix I laugh. Why? Because this holiday I’m having the holiday you have when you stop trying to have a holiday.

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my 10 things

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mnmlist just posted a list of 10 essential things. It’s his take on those lists they do in magazine with famous personage where they get them to list consumerables they just can’t live without.

just a cute picture of a happy sheep, really
just a cute picture of a happy sheep, really

I avoid these kind of lists (the consumerable ones) as I don’t so much like consuming. This is probably disappointing for the reader. That said, I’ve got one coming up: “what’s inside my beautyf bag”…but I’m doing it so I can highlight organic options…does this make it OK? In my head it does.

My list. I had to make it a 13-pointer:

1. What I wear: the same thing over and over. I have a pair of green American Apparel shorts I’ve had for six years and I’ve wear them 4-5 times a week – for sport stuff, but also pretty much all weekend. I like the simplicity of having a ‘thing’ that works.

2. What I eat: kale… in juice, for breakfast (with a poached egg on top), in soups. If I’ve been a bit off-kilter, the green stuff gives me my energy back.

3. How I hydrate: Tea. In the morning I drink a stack of green tea (I make one pot and keep topping it up with hot water). Then I move to herbal. I make my own concoctions from herbs I buy at the health food shop and make it up in big coffee plungers and sip on it all day. My favourite right now: dandelion root (unroasted), cinnamon buds, licorice root, ginger root. When I’m feeling toxic I drink a lot of dandelion root (both roasted and unroasted; unroasted is better for you). The bad stuff just flushes out. Literally. (The French call the root pis en lit…piss in bed cos it makes you just want to go and go).

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Dan buettner’s morning routine

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Yesterday I posted about my morning routine. In the middle of my routine, the inspiringly languid and health-ful Dan Buettner emailed me, so I asked him to share his.

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Three things you should know about Dan:

* He’s the world expert on how to live longer and wrote Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.

* He’s spent his life as an explorer and, ok, looks a little like Indiana Jones. Which I just know he won’t like me saying. He travels the world working out what makes people happy, healthy and live longer.

* He’s a top bloke. Walks his talk.

* We met via this blog about a year ago. Common interests. Weird happenstance.

* Signs off on emails with “Live large” or “largely”. Which always makes me stop and think…”Ok, then”.

So Dan’s morning routine, from Dan:

The following three will verifiably boost your mood:
1.  At breakfast, eat fruits and grains, eschew meat.  I’m a smoothie fan during the summer months (blueberries and soy milk) and oatmeal (with walnuts and brown sugar) during the winter months

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the elegance of a morning routine

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I’m quite convinced that having some sort of structure to the start of your day is key to living a life that counts.

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It gets you out of bed with a purpose. Delays, wonderings, phaffings…they get us down at early hours.

It gives you, possibly,  the only space for yourself all day (got kids? staff? partner? an agent?  true?)

And it ensures you tick off things that are important to you…before the day grabs you by your britches and runs away with you.

And this is the salient bit: the best kind of morning routine is one that’s a fiesta of stuff that gets you grounded, that nurtures your “inside people”, that brings you home to you. You tick off these things and then you can get on with serving the world. And all the rest.

Leo from Zen Habits outlined his routine the other day:

1. Sit. I wake up and start the coffeemaker, drink a glass of water, then sit on a small pillow. I just sit, and focus on my breathing. You don’t have to meditate — sitting still, contemplating, taking in the world, is a beautiful thing.
2. Read. I read a book. The paper kind, that doesn’t require electricity. I like reading with no distractions. I’ll read for about half an hour to an hour.
3. Write. Before I check email or Twitter or read my feeds, I sit down and write. It doesn’t matter what — a chapter for my new book, a blog post, answers to an interview someone emailed me, anything. I just write, without distractions.

I have friends who do the below:

1. Write. Creatively, for fun (as per The Artist’s Way)

2. Cook. They enjoy making dinner for that night in a slow cooker, before the kids get up

3. Drink coffee. In bed and reading fiction before heading off to the office.

Me, I do this:

1. Drench. I drink two litres or so of hot water with a hunk of lemon squeezed in. I potter while I drink. Tidy a little…and, let’s be frank, hang about until nature calls.

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I’m a soul nerd. It hurts sometimes. Until I realised…

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“Literature is a yoga, a soulnerd’s intellectual-spiritual practice of contour-fitting what we know to what is so.”

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I read this in a Psychology Today article this morning. It’s given me heart on this Monday morning after a night of not sleeping and feeling really very raw about how I’m “doing life”. The article is about evolutionary thinker Jeremy Sherman’s take on what it means to be spiritual, in the context of coping with our mortality.He identifies that spiritual can either mean:

1. adhering doggedly to a doctrine of some sort that provides the answers for you (and comfort), or

2. existing in the now, such that you “let go” of the notion of the future (and impending death).

True.

But he also identifies a third way. That of the soul nerd. That of studying our predicament with considered curiosity.

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Sunday life: in which Oprah’s declutter dude Peter Walsh visits my apartment

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This week I declutter my “sentimentals” and my “collectibles”

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What did we all do before we “decluttered”? We tidied. We picked up our crap, dusted under it, then put it back down again. We also used our crap. In my house we collected toothbrushes, icecream buckets and old singlets, which were used for cleaning our BMXs (the hub ballbearings would soak in kero in the buckets, the toothbrushes and rags were for extracting crud from the chain). And Dad used the old inner-tyre tubes for just about everything – fixing fences, espaliering the tomatoes and occy-strapping things to the ute.

Nowadays we buy more new stuff, and we don’t have time to get creative with re-using the old stuff. So we have more crap. And less room. But more importantly we’ve developed a raging intolerance for this clutter and a need to clear our lives of everything that could be bogging us down, physically, emotionally or spiritually. Decluttering has become a euphemism for the enema we’d like to take to our relationships, our schedules, the floors of our cars. In the US “storage solution” stores are experiencing exponential growth, while hoarding memoirs are emerging as the new “mis lit”. I tell you, decluttering is a dirty big business.

In this column I’ve subjected myself to many declutterings, consulting some of the world’s experts on the subject. I’ve overhauled my book collection, my email inbox; heck, I even did a colonic. But this week I went the next level.  I decluttered my “sentimentals” – photos, heirloomy knick-knacks, my grandmothers’ Jesus statues and the box of school certificates I’ve kept since kindergarten (for “good book work” and “trying hard during health hustle”).

Which is how Peter Walsh ended up in my loungeroom on Tuesday morning.

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how to build a blog (a Cleo interview)

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I was quoted in this month’s CLEO magazine. I thought it might be of interest to anyone who’s thinking of start a blog and is not sure where to start. I know I had noooooo idea when I first decided to launch this one.

2010-09-20_11252010-09-20_1126The other advice I would give is:

* Follow really strong bloggers and check out which style you like. You might like a vertical style, or a text only one like Seth Godin‘s, or a visual one, or a very simple style, like mnmlist.com. I’m quite liking the text-based ones these days…they cut out the bells and whistles and rely on pure, good, substantial content. Which is good. It’s the way of the future.

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strong women: do you need a knight or a king?

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This Psychology Today article that gives a rundown of the type of relationship strong, career-orientated women want now hits  nails on heads for me.

article-1269277-0906216A000005DC-810_468x302It makes a number of strident and true points. I’ve added my own thoughts to the mix too:

* “There is a new type of male/female relationship forming in our culture not defined by who is more dominant and successful.” Indeed, there is a new whiff to things right now. I don’t know that anyone really “knows” how all this plays out yet, but we “feel” that the old “push/pull” of sexual relationships is redundant somehow. Every relationship needs a balance of yin and yang, but it can play out in so many different ways. Masculine strength can be about being a rock or being the “provider” of emotional stability to a frantically busy career woman. Sometimes all we want is a guy who can say “everything’s going to be OK” at the end of the day while massaging your foot.

* Strong women want a man who will share the responsibilities at home and won’t get his ego tied up in a knot over it.

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