One thing I’m compulsively obsessed with is finishing things. That tube of toothpaste. That last bottle of olive oil. The expensive wonder-serum I hoped would magic give me celebrity-type skin.
I’m leaving Mexico in two weeks after having lived in a port-town in the central west coast lapping at the Pacific Ocean for the past year and a half. And I’m finishing things.
Today’s story, specifically, is about finishing a bag of black beans I had bought more than 6 months earlier but never got around to using. Beans… legumes in general… and I are not particularly close. They generally are hard on my rather delicate digestion and so I avoid them.
However, I also have a hard time eating enough protein and we all know that beans are an excellent source of protein and well… it’s all a conundrum where every couple of years or so I try to trick myself into loving beans.
Except, this time, for the very first time ever, it has worked. I soaked the beans overnight, slow-cooked them for bicarb soda (I read somewhere that it helps remove the stuff that makes beans hard to digest) for an hour and turned them into life-changing chocolate brownies. That I now eat for breakfast.
They are genuinely so delicious.
Here’s how to make them.
Put into a blender: 3 cups of black beans / 1 cup of honey or maple syrup / 1 cup of instant oats / 1 teaspoon baking powder / let everything soak together / melt 2 tablespoons coconut oil and 4-5 tablespoons cacao paste in a saucepan / add to the blender and blend until smooth / preheat oven to 180°C / grease pan / pour mixture into pan / bake for 20 – 25 minutes.
If you have a basic blender as I do, you might have to blend in two batches. Let them cool before trying to cut them. I found they were still a tiny bit gooey inside but after a night in the refrigerator, they were perfect and even more delicious so…
Also, 2 things:
You can obviously use canned black beans instead of cooking your own.
If you can’t get cacao paste you can use 2 tbsp cocoa powder and mix in 1/2 cup to 2/3 cup chocolate chips at the end to get that chocolate consistency right.
The history of cacao [chocolātl] began in Southern Mexico sometime in 450 BC.
The Aztecs believed that cacao seeds were the gift of Quetzalcoatl — a feathered serpent — who was connected to the planet Venus. Perhaps that is why, alongside its large quantities of magnesium, cacao is considered to open one’s heart. Originally prepared only as a drink, chocolate was served as a bitter liquid, mixed with spices or corn puree. It was believed to be an aphrodisiac and to give the drinker strength.
When the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, they didn’t like the bitter taste and added sugar, and made it a fashionable drink amongst high society.
Cacao is the unprocessed raw cacao bean, ground into a sort of paste that then looks like chunks of chocolate. Most people are familiar only with cocoa, the processed and roasted version that usually comes in a powder or store-bought chocolate which is the powder mixed with fats, sugar and flavours.
When I first moved to Mexico in 2018 I was pleased to discover how easy it was to purchase locally-grown cacao. Being caffeine sensitive but loving the ritualistic motions of making a hot beverage in the mornings’ cacao is one of my favourite go-to’s.
Since I am asked so often how I make my cacao, here are 3 ways to make real Mexican cacao [chocolātl] at home.
Morning Beauty Cacao
The perfect ritual to start to the day and bring presence, mindfulness and connection as well as some beauty-enhancing ingredients into the mix.
20g (2 tbs) cacao paste (I chop it up and put it in a jar for when I want to use it) / 1 cup of filtered water / placed in a small pot on the stove / heat / a pinch of sea salt / a pinch of chilli powder / pour into a blender / a dash of vanilla essence / a scoop of collagen powder / blend until smooth and frothy.
For any of the 3: self-love or to give love to someone or encourage someone to fall in love with you, this love spell cacao drink works.
1 cup of filtered water / placed in a small pot on the stove / heat / 1 tsp cinnamon / / 1 tsp sprinkle of organic edible dried rose petals / 1 crushed cardamom pod / pour into a blender / 1/2 tsp ‘I Am Gaia’ powder / blend until smooth and frothy.
Ceremonial Cacao
You don’t have to wait to go to a cacao ceremony to create your own ceremonial cacao for deep connection, meditation and practice.
30–40g cacao paste / 1 cup of filtered water / placed in a small pot on the stove / heat / 1/2 tsp cinnamon / pinch of cayenne / pour into a blender / blend until smooth and frothy.
If sharing in ceremony, you can gently reheat the blended mix on the stove when you’re ready to serve.
Always keep on low heat and never let the cacao come to a boil as this changes its molecular structure and the way our bodies are able to absorb its nutrients.
Try cacao unsweetened for a deeper, potent dose. Cacao’s bitter medicine is good for us… For added sweetness, I recommend adding raw honey.
It’s the early morning after the winter solstice and I’m sitting in bed with a homemade almond latte and a breakfast tray balanced on my bed holding the laptop keys as I tap away. Last night I lit 3 white candles and made 3 wishes: 1 for love, 1 for abundance, 1 for creativity. I let them burn until I went to sleep.
The veils are thin, we say at these times, meaning that the space between the physical and non-physical world is lessened. We can touch the things we cannot see.
Ever since I was a child I knew the world was full of extraordinary things that we couldn’t explain. As an adult, I’m privileged to experience many of them. The last few months have been full of them.
Which is not to say that it’s all been glorious days full of sunshine and joy. I won’t lie, the turbulent emotions I’ve felt the past 6 months have been really hard to navigate. I want to be better at it but it’s been ugly and messy and some days I just want to stay in bed and cry not do anything. Not because things are ‘bad’ but because I am outgrowing my old shell and sensitive and easily feel overwhelmed by it all.
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I recently watched an interview with Jane Fonda about how she healed from bulimia where she quoted Tomas Jefferson “revolution begins in the muscles”. In the past 2 months, I’ve learned that here’s something so empowering to being physically strong. I hired a personal trainer when I returned from the UK and have been training with him 3 times a week since October. He’s a gentle soul with a cheeky grin when he’s about to make me do some extra-hard.
Much like with running, I had lots of stories in my head that lifting weights wasn’t for me. And I also knew I wanted to challenge myself and my body in a new way. After a month, I noticed some big differences. How much more at home in my body I felt. How much less I fought with food. How much stronger my immune system felt. How much easier it was to hold my boundaries. How much stronger I was, not just physically, but emotionally. Bonus: how toned my arms and bum suddenly were.
I have a feeling that lifting weights has become a direct accompaniment and reflection of the inner growth I have and continue to move through. In order to hold more of all the good things I have been manifesting lately, I’ve had to expand my ability to meet those things within my physical body. As without so within. I am becoming stronger in every way.
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By some strange set of circumstances that can only be explained as kismet, I found myself in the office of a medium one November afternoon. A small Asian man with an American accent in his mid-40’s sat down opposite me with an open pad and paper and closed his eyes. I closed mine. A few minutes in a voice entered my thoughts. There is a feminine energy coming through, gentle, nurturing. Stop it Vienda, I thought. Let him do his job.
A few seconds later I open my eyes. He’s randomly scribbling shapes, lines, squiggles on his pad and says “There is a feminine energy coming through, gentle, nurturing. She feels like she comes from your mother’s line. She says she’s your grandmother.” He started sharing information from her as he channelled my Austrian Oma that no-one else could know, saying phrases and words that only she would say. Then another soul joins her. My Italian Papa comes through and tells me the intimate details of his death. The things I have never know but always wondered about. He calls me by all those familiar endearments I hold close to my heart and tears start to pour from my eyes feeling a combination of relief and love.
They leave me with a remarkable sense of closeness and promises that, with my permission, they want to take up more presence in my life. So many things from my childhood are explained and confirmed, apologies made, recognition given for the challenges I endured, and confirmation around what I am moving towards into the future.
For 3 weeks afterwards, I am left with a sense that I am mourning them in a way I never had been able to before. I am mourning the person I had to become to make it on my own, and I am mourning the person I am leaving behind now as I become more whole and clear in who I am and what I am here to do than ever.
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Last week I went to see a clairvoyant channel an alien with messages for our planet. She said:
The world stage may get even more hectic. You need to take care of yourself more than ever to stay grounded and centred in your body.
Make self-care, rest and nourishing, strengthening and moving your body a priority to you can navigate these times. Don’t be afraid to take a day off when you feel you need to. Honour yourself in this way.
You must let go of the old stories, narratives and not make excuses. Reliving the past and re-hashing old memories isn’t going to serve you anymore.
You need to feel all your emotions fully. It is time to tear down the walls you have created to protect your heart and truly feel all of it.
Make sure you lead with the heart and make all your decisions from the wisdom and intelligence of your heart and body. The mind is here to do the hearts work. Allow your heart to command the way. The poles are shifting and entering us diagonally directly through the heart now. This is the only way forward.
We are at the leading edge of a new way on earth, a new consciousness. When we reach 51% consciousness we will tip over and everything will change. Be prepared. It will be akin to an energetic apocalypse.
I never used to do go see mediums of intuitives or clairvoyants. Not because I’m not a believer but because I didn’t feel the need for external input or validation. I prefer to listen to my own intuitive insights over others. But recently I’ve been led in this direction and it’s a confirmation and strengthening my resolve around leading with love and letting spirit guide me and being ok with things not making any sense for my mind.
So much magic happens when I let go of the steering wheel and this year has expanded me like none ever before. I feel like I’m preparing for the future. After 18 months of cutting my hair short, I’m letting it grow. It feels significant. My hair speaks volumes to what I am keeping and cutting out of my life. In October I started straightening my slowly-crowding teeth and loving the results which will be final in February. I’m getting stronger physically, emotionally, mentally. I’m working on 3 big, exciting projects including plannher and a rebrand for next year. The uncertainty of Brexit is encouraging deeper trust than ever as I take steps to return to the UK in March to make it my permanent home, the god’s willing. Everything is shifting.
It’s time to take a break. Low-key RSI in my right wrist from using my phone too much is a powerful reminder that all things require time off to bloom and grow which is exactly my intention. For the next two weeks, I’m deleting IG off my phone. I already did that with FB a month ago. And absorbing myself in laughter, sunshine, indulgent novels and beach time.
I don’t particularly enjoy drinking alcohol. When I was 20 and all my university friends were getting really drunk and going out to clubs, I would stay for a while, just long enough to watch them embarrass themselves, and then go home by midnight.
Then I found drugs and I was the last to peel herself off the dance floor. One tiny pill, or a few lines, or a baby finger-nail of crystals and I could fly. No messy alcohol. No going to the bar a thousand times. A bottle of water and the left-hand speaker and complete surrender to let the music move me. That’s all I wanted and needed.
It started in the middle of my psychology degree and I rationalised my choices with numerous studies that read something to the effect of occasionally taking recreational drugs causes much less damage on the brain and weekly binge drinking. I like reading evidence that supports my intuitive life choices.
Over the years, those choices waned. My spiritual devotion, my practices connecting inward, became more compelling. I discovered that I really like myself. And I like myself best, stone-cold sober.
In my experience, like everything in life, drinking alcohol has its place. It’s not what you do, but how you do it. Spirit exists in all things, and our purpose as self-aware observers is to nod to the universe and offer our acknowledgement and gratitude. I don’t believe that drinking is unspiritual.
I do think using drinking as a coping mechanism is, however, unhealthy and takes us away from our connection to spirit. It can be a social lubricant used to overcome awkwardness in new situations. I’ve certainly had a few human moments where I’ve done exactly that.
It can help bring your deepest emotions, joy and enthusiasm for life to the surface, especially if you’ve yet to develop a relationship with your authentic self. I certainly used drugs in that way. But once you truly know yourself and embrace all that you are, you learn to express yourself without abandon and no longer feel compelled to reach for external crutches.
Now, I drink occasionally, when I feel to. I like a couple of glasses of wine at dinner with friends, sometimes. Or a tall pint of tart cider on a grassy knoll one sunny afternoon. Or a few mezcals straight up on the rocks, when I’m dancing in a bar or at a party. My drink number is 4. A drink number is the maximum amount of drinks you can have, and still, get yourself home safely and somewhat coherently. I have a low tolerance. I like it that way.
We all have a different relationship with alcohol. We all have to honour our journey with it. We have to keep it simple. We tend to make life so complicated when really, we ought to be having the time of our lives. It takes mindfulness to create an authentic, fulfilled, fortunate human life.
The ability to be with ourselves, moment-to-moment when drinking or not drinking, and being able to notice, when your body gives you cues around what it wants and needs from a deeper spiritual level. This inner-awareness is what takes drinking to a new level which can become a devotional spirit-filled practice.
I like both number 3 and number 8. 8 in particular. Those 2 numbers sitting next to each other feel like comfort, like 38 is a warm, safe, fuzzy space to find me in. I found 3 grey hairs and some cellulite on my upper thighs this year and I’ve worried more about the worry lines that a gentle wedging their way between my brows this past year than any other and I wonder what it would like to truly cherish these indications of aging.
I don’t mind them but they bewilder me because I don’t feel the way I imagine a 38-year-old should feel. I feel like I’m 10 years younger but am armed with a strong sense of self: self-love, self-worth, self-compassion, self-understanding, self-respect, that I wish I’d had 10 years earlier.
A few things happened this past year, but not any big things. This year was a quietening for me. A time to indulge myself with time to me, to do, well… nothing. I needed a year like this. Here are the highlights:
— I celebrated my last birthday in Hungary at a music festival dancing the days away in the shade of ripped lycra panels under the dry East-European heat with 8 friends for 6 days and then returned to my little flat in North London and my work as if nothing had happened at all. I wrote This is 37. then and felt an unbridled sense of freedom am like anything was possible with my life.
— And I spent a lot of time dreaming up a new future for myself. I seem to find myself in this place once again. Perhaps it comes with the reflection of the year just passed that provides the fertile ground to sow new seeds for the person I am becoming and the life I am creating. Every year those dreams adjust and ebb and flow and evolve and stretch and morph as I reinvent myself over and over again.
— After I wrote about my career — and how I got to where I am today, I started to feel the pillars upholding the foundations’ shift. Businesses tend to have a soul, a voice and a vision of their own once they grow strong enough, and I have been feeling the tendrils of those changes waft in with little messages, inspired ideas, and a sense of resistance or resentment to some parts that I used to love. The clarity is still not fully present with me. Change tends to happen very slowly at first and then all at once for me. I do believe that this time next year, I will be holding the infant of a whole shape and form in my work.
— I spent a week in Edinburgh and fell into a deep poetic obsession with this magical little city. I have romantic notions to come back and live there for the summers in my future. To indulge myself in creative nonsense, to just make art for the sake of beauty and making and art and frivolous romances with young men well below my age.
— And then I left London for Mexico for the winter, I cannot manage to live more than a month without direct sunlight covering every inch of my skin, and this place calls to me, and with the move life became entirely my own. Suddenly 2018, was over and left me realising that its biggest gift fro me was teaching me what I don’t want.
— I lived between a tiny triangle that consisted of my little casita on the hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my favourite, hidden little bay that takes 20 minutes of clambering over rocks and rock pools and other bays to get to, and the Old Town known locally as Romantica to go to the markets and meet friends for long chats over drinks. I deleted Instagram and Facebook off my phone for 10 days…. and thought often about love, men and relationships and what I was calling in, romantically. I started running. I’m still running.
The past year taught me that life has its own ebb and flow and that I have control over nothing… except for how I respond and how I choose to feel. The only thing I can control is my perception.
The past year has been a massive clearing out, like the storage system of my mind and body were Marie-Kondo’d. Does this bring me joy? No? Goodbye. It hasn’t finished yet. I’m still in the midst of this big energetic de-cluttering, sometimes catching myself like a hoarder, holding onto something so old that I definitely don’t want or need, but thinking but I like it or maybe one day it’ll come in useful…
This year has edified my central nervous system. I am calm, I sleep well, I feel whole and yet I sense that many more years of life had to be released into the ether to make space for a whole new way of showing up. I am still in the midst of this.
This desire to move my body until it was wrung out… Until it was drenched in sweat.
But I had so many stories in my head about why I couldn’t run. I have no idea why. Stories like: “I don’t have the right body shape to run.” Somehow I had this idea that runners are tall and lanky and don’t have any curves. “Runners look so miserable all the time. It must not be fun.” I had decided that running made people unhappy. “I’m an arty girl, not a sporty girl. I write poems and paint watercolours and yoga.” Running did not fit with my self-image. “I’ll start, and I’ll quit, and it’ll all be for nothing.” I had tried running before. And it didn’t last. As if starting and quitting is some kind of crime. “Running damages the joints. It’s probably not good for me. Plus, I don’t want to exhaust my sensitive central nervous system.” I developed a habit of guarding myself against demanding experiences because of the adrenal fatigue I’d experienced in 2017.
But that feeling persisted. So, one morning a month ago I tied up my laces, walked myself to a starting point, pressed play on my most aggressive playlist, and started to move. “Just 15 minutes.” I had told myself. “Let’s ease into this slowly.” And I run.
Along the highway until the pedestrian path ran out. Down the steep cobblestones towards the beach. Past the construction site and the foreman who waves at me as I pass. Along the palm trees lining the Pacific Ocean. Up another hill of cobblestones. And I’m back where I started.
I’m grinning. There’s something exhilarating to this. I felt a freedom I haven’t felt since devoting most of my 20’s to standing in front of powerful speaker-stacks and letting the bass carry my body away. I was wrong. Running doesn’t make people miserable. It felt good. I can’t wait to try it again tomorrow.
The next day I download the Nike+ Running app. I have no idea what I’m doing. I need some support to guide me forward. The app creates a 4-week plan for me, for beginners. I choose a guided run ‘First Run’ track. A voice comes on tells me to, slowly, start moving. The voice talks to me through what I might expect as I navigate this new concept. Running. There’s something about the way he speaks, the reassuring way he makes me feel understood, the ideas he shares, that makes me realise that running is a lot like personal development. It’s all about mindset and how you approach it and showing for yourself consistently. It’s also not about pushing yourself too hard but about being a witness to your body and letting it guide you.
20 minutes later I have a massive crush on the voice in my run training app and want to practice making babies with him. He makes me feel emotionally and psychologically held as I steer myself into this new experience. I don’t think any man has done that for me before. I tend to be “the strong one“ in the face of emotional and psychological adversity. I’m usually the one who holds space for others as we embark into a new foreign space of growth and evolvement.
We fear the pain and toughness of any situation, but what we don’t realize is how resilient the human body is and how smart the human body is.
The first week my ankles ached. I interchanged running with yoga every other day. Then my app started adding a couple of runs back to back into my week. My 15 minutes grew to 35. My 2.5 kilometres progressed to 4.5. I was racing no-one but myself. I waited for the morning I’d wake up and be ready to quit. I surprised myself with the innate compulsion I felt to keep showing up for my body this way. Again and again. Each day different. Each day a new lesson.
My body started to change. My eyes felt clearer. I could feel my lymphatic system being wrung out. There was fresh energy moving through me. My stomach was flatter when I woke up.
The changes I was processing emotionally and psychologically were being released and integrated physically and running had become the conductor. I started to run to escape the heavy sensation I felt settling into my body. I keep running to chase the intoxicating high I feel for the rest of the day.
“Run, baby, run.” I hear these words whispered inside me every morning.
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