2 Ingredient Organic Face Scrub

As we age, our skin stops turning over as quickly as it used to. This process makes it more important to exfoliate our skin to promote healthy turnover of cells. Here are some basics to help give your skin a healthy glow:

1. Sleep! If you are tired, your skin will show it. Get at least 7-8 hours of sleep each night.
2. Hydrate. Proper hydration will keep your skin "plump," while dehydration will increase the appearance of fine lines.
3. Eat a healthy diet full of antioxidants.
4. Put some of this antioxidants on your skin. This is where our recipe comes in for an organic, simply face and body scrub you can make with items you likely currently have in your pantry.

Coffee is one of the world's strongest antioxidants. It is also highly acidic, so it can be tough on the gut when consumed. Thankfully, we can use coffee in our beauty regimen to benefit from its potency. For this scrub:

Combine:

• Organic olive oil
• Fine ground coffee (I recommend fresh grinding to an espresso grain)
• Ratio is 3:2 coffee to olive oil

Whisk

• Whisk it up until it is the consistency of grainy mud

Scrub

• It is messy! I recommend scrubbing in the shower or tub to keep things contained.
• Apply liberally to your skin and rub in circular motions, careful not to press too hard, especially around the delicate skin of your eyes.
• Rinse away.

Benefits

• Coffee
• Antioxidant
• Rough grain is perfect for exfoliation
• Subtle darkening of skin like a fake tan without the chemicals
• Caffeine will constrict your blood vessels to decrease puffiness
• Olive Oil
• Incredibly hydrating
• Don't worry about getting all of the oil off of your skin. Instead, allow a little to sit to encourage your pores to close back up after your scrub.

That's it! Your bathroom will smell awesome after this one.

Sondra's Secret to Vitality

Disclaimer: This recipe is not vegetarian-friendly. We fully support efforts to eliminate animal cruelty caused by factory farming. 

The first time I told Sondra I wasn't feeling well, she said, "You need bone broth. Wait, you're not vegetarian are you? Of course you are."

At the time, I had been vegetarian for about five years. I was diagnosed with multiple auto-immune diseases a few years into my stint as a vegetarian, and doctors everywhere were telling me I needed to change my diet. My M.D., who is also an Ayurvedic doctor, told me I was eating wrong for my body type. My acupuncturist encouraged me to eat some meat to heat up my digestion, as vegetarianism is actually contraindicated in Chinese medicine. 

Sondra took one look at me and knew my dosha type - vata dosha - and knew it wasnt't being served by my diet. It took me some time to come around to the idea that some meat may help me heal. Once I did, I set out to find the healthiest and most responsibly sourced meats to add to my diet. Here is my experience making Sondra's prescribed "bone broth." As a recovering vegetarian, I'll warn you there is a chicken caracas involved. 

But, my theory has always been, if I'm going to eat the meat, I want to feel very connected with the animal and use its gift to the fullest potential. This recipe certainly does that.

Step One: Find a responsibly-sourced chicken

I recommend Healthy Family Farms which makes weekly visits to the South Pasadena Farmer's Market. From their website: "Healthy Family Farms is a sustainable, pasture-based farming operation in Santa Paula, California." You can even tour the facilities to see for yourself how the animals are raised. Animals raised in a pasture-based system are not only happier and healthier but serve the Earth they live on.

I purchased a half-chicken, bones and skin, for my recipe. If your farmer will sell you chicken carcass  (i.e., the left overs from their butchering), you can skip straight to step four. I enjoy using the chicken in my own meals first.

Step Two: Roast the chicken and enjoy it for a meal

I love a simple roast chicken. It helps connect me with the food I'm eating, which stimulates digestion and pays homage to the life given for my health. 

Here is my recipe:

• Preheat oven to 200
• Clean chicken and pat dry
• Prepare a roasting dish with a tablespoon of olive oil or grass-fed butter
• Dust the chicken in salt and pepper, rubbing in with your hands
• Line the pan with chopped carrots
• Rub minced garlic (3-4 cloves) over the chicken
• Sprinkle thyme over the chicken
• Pour a tablespoon of olive oil or grass-fed butter over the chicken
• Roast for 30 minutes, covered at 200 degrees
• Increase temperature to 400 degrees, roast for 30 minutes
• Take lid off the roasting pan, watch for the chicken to start to brown
• When internal temperature of the breast and leg have reached 180*, take the chicken out of the oven and allow it to rest for 20 minutes. It should continue to cook to 190* while resting.
• Enjoy!

Step Three: Pick the bones

Pick the leftover meat off the chicken bones. If you have pets, this is a great add-in for their meals to give them some good fats and healthy protein. If you have some quality meat left over, it is excellent on salads and sandwiches for your week. You'll want to pick the bones relatively clean before making the broth. 

Step Four: Chop your veggies

You can add any veggies to your stock, but I recommend at least setting a base with aromatics. For one-half chicken, I recommend:

• 3 large carrots
• 1 head of celery
• 1 medium onion. I replaced onion in my stock with leeks because I love their flavor in soups and broth.
• Anything you have in your fridge! You can add mushrooms, radish or beets to your stock. 
• Reserve part of the onion or leek if you'd like to add it to your broth as a finishing ingredient. I love some fresh leeks or green onion on soup. I also reserved some radish for topping

Step Five: Prepare your stock pot

• Start by adding a very small amount of olive oil or butter to your pot, and turn the heat on to medium
• Add your seasoning FIRST! This is an Indian cooking tip that will greatly improve your flavor profile. Here are some spices you can use:
• Celery salt
• Bay leaves
• Oregano
• Thyme
• Ground pepper
• Cinnamon (just a pinch)
• Mustard seeds
• Once your spices start to smell yummy, it's time to add your onion or leeks. Cook these down until just translucent.
• Add the rest of your veggies, stirring with the spices for about 5 minutes

Step Six: Add the chicken bones

• Add the chicken bones
• Add enough water to cover your bones and veggies with at least a few inches to spare
• Turn down the heat to low

Step Seven: Walk away

• Stir about once an hour for 6-8 hours
• Add water if needed
• That's it! Drain your both over a strainer. The ingredients can be used again for a second stash. Your soup should have a healthy dose of collagen (i.e., should have a jello-like element to it). This is the beneficial part! 

Step 8: Enjoy warm

Spoon your broth as is into a cup for drinking or a bowl. The benefits of bone broth come from the collagen, which will help nourish you from the inside out. The warmth will stimulate your digestion and heat up your agni (inner fire). 

Step 9: But for real, what about the vegetarian/vegan folks?

We hear you, it's not easy eating meat. If you are adamantly veggie, you can still enjoy the benefits of broth. We recommend fermented vegetable broth for the biggest health benefits. You can find great stuff at Dave's Gourmet Korean, featured at the South Pasadena Farmer's Market (and others around town).

Enjoy!

Namaste,
Bethany

Get Well Soon! Love, Your Teachers

Cold and flu season are upon us. Feel a sniffle coming on? Here are some tips from your teachers to help you get well soon.

Epsom salts ease muscle pain and encourage rest. 

I usually do oil pulling with coconut oil at the first sign of a sore throat (*Instructions below!*) Tons of vitamin C. Ample sleep and rest. Lots of hot herbal tea and local raw honey. Neti pot with Alkalol added. Oil of oregano can knock out most bugs, and if you can't handle the taste try colloidal silver instead. Keep up with the probiotics. Restorative yoga is great when you get sick! - Matthew 

I take lots of ashwagandha, vitamin c, and some wellness formula. A nice Epsom salt bath can be very helpful, and truly give myself good time to rest. - Shoshana

Healing myself from a sickness is a practice in itself. The moment I feel symptoms, I go to Eagle Rock Juice Co. and get myself a "Flu Shot" (2 oz. of cold pressed lemon juice, ginger, oregano oil & cayenne). Then I ingest foods high in probiotics such as kombucha, miso soup, sourdough bread and take probiotic pills with every meal. I take echinacea and goldenseal herbs with colloidal silver. And drink all kinds of fluids- ginger tea, licorice & marshmallow root tea (for the throat), hot water with apple cider vinegar, and lots of alkaline water. If that wasn't enough I see my Traditional Chinese Herbalist and gives me these herbs tailored to knock the symptoms out almost immediately. Last but not least, I always give myself Reiki while I'm resting. - Chona

Ingest probiotics like those in Health-Ade Kombucha 

When I get sick I feel like the world is coming to an end. I like to be active and outdoors so being sick really interrupts my day to day life. I have found that nothing cures an illness like rest. I try to get as much sleep as I can, coupled with as much water as I can drink. If it's an upset stomach I limit my food intake to just bread, rice, apples or applesauce, and tea. These are very easy for me to eat and help to settle my upset stomach. - Steve

This is a "when I think I'm getting sick" or "when my allergies are bad," remedy. I make a healing juice (*recipe to follow!*) My other go-to for sinus troubles is raw garlic. All it takes is chewing and sucking on a single raw clove to get my nasal passages nice and open-- it's nature's spicy, mean lozenge. I do usually spit it out, as raw garlic can be a little rough on the digestive system. Lastly: zinc. Whenever I'm feeling run down, I take a zinc after dinner-- 9 times out of 10, I wake up feeling back to normal. In addition to nutrients and liquids, the best possible thing really is rest. It took me many years of trying to "work through" being sick, only to realize that if I take just one day of rest (usually the first day of symptoms), my sickness doesn't last nearly as long. Oh, and by rest I mean actual sleep-- if I am dying to watch netflix, I opt for something monotonous that might put me to sleep. Okay that's my 2 cents :) - Ani

When I start to feel as though my health is suffering, I use it as an excuse to downshift. I curl up on the couch with my dogs and a mug of tea and read books for hours. I do this a lot even when I'm perfectly healthy, but it's nice to take the time to mindfully relax and let the rest of the world fall away. - Jamie

Start the day with hot water, honey, lemon and apple cider vinegar. Sleep a lot, snuggle your pets, and call your mom if it gets really bad! - Bethany 

Ani's Killer Cold Kicker

• 4 oranges
• 2 lemons
• 2 cucumbers
• 1 palm-sized piece of ginger
• turmeric (to taste, I shook it maybe ten times)
• cayenne (to taste)
• 4 drops oregano oil
• 1 tsp raw honey

From Ani: FYI this juice is no joke and will really burn-- but it really opens up the sinuses and cleans everything out.

Matthew's Oil Pulling Secret

The Sound That Makes the Bath

Namaste Highland Park Instructor Sondra Sun-Odeon collaborated this summer with musician and recent LA transplant Ian Paige for a yoga class with soundbath accompaniment. The second in the series celebrates the full Hunter Moon and takes place at the studio October 27th at 8pm. The two musicians and yoga enthusiasts sat down for a conversation about how the two worlds intersect.

Sondra Sun-Odeon: I wanted to have you be part of the classes and, with the Full Moon Yin Class, the sonic component helped move the subtle body. Being a musician myself, I've always been interested in sound healing and its power so I'm glad you can join me for the Full Moon Flow and Restore with Sound Bath. Why does this collaboration appeal to you?

Ian Paige: When you invited me to the Yin class, I made sure to attend as a class member before actually performing. The pace and intentionality of that program reminded me of the kind of music I gravitate to. Holding the poses and settling the mind through that slower pace felt like the yoga equivalent to the music I love to make.

I also like that it is live. I'm bringing sequences and predetermined stuff to the set but really i'm working completely off the audience which, unlike a regular concert when you're blinded by the stage lights, it's an interactive situation to feel the audience participation in this really intense way. You can literally hear breath and it becomes the rhythm! So the music itself changes. What i had imagined for that class didn't happen at all. Instead it rolled along with the program itself and they spoke to each other.

SSO: Well you may find in this next class we'll have more movement since it will be both flow and restorative. It'll be interesting to see how you react to the energy of the class differently from the last one.

IP: So what's your intention with the class?

SSO: The Flow and Restore that I usually teach is 45 min of Flow followed by half an hour of Restorative. Since it's the Full Moon though I think we'll go more half and half and it'll be a more gentle flow.

IP: Yeah, that's good for me to know that there's an entrainment for that first half that's a little less droney.

SSO: Does that change things for you? You shouldn't be stressed! You look stressed!

IP: Ha! No, I'm glad we're having this conversation! I literally haven't started planning it yet! No it's cool to know so I can make some preparations for that ... the dynamics ...

SSO: Tell us about the instruments you use in creating these sound baths and what you hope to do for the experience of the listener and yogi participant.

IP: The synths are analog. Digital synthesis is ubiquitous right now and that's a-okay but for this particular scenario, it's like vinyl versus mp3. The waves are deep and real. They hit your eardrums and move through your body in a different way. I use a Roland Juno 60, a Sequential Circuits Six Trak and an old Nord Modular which is admittedly digital but it requires patching voices on a computer (I had to resurrect my 13 year old PowerBook to talk to it because Nord won't support the synth anymore) and I love the flexibility that instrument allows in building sounds and sequences from scratch.

SSO: What artists are informing and influencing the kind of music you make?

IP: I'm into music that creates states. States of being and mind. Psychedelia, less as a genre and more as an approach, has always been important to me. The first LP I ever nabbed out of a bin was Stereolab's  Emperor Tomato Ketchup. I'm thinking of it now because there are elements from the last album from the YIN class that remind me subtly of Stereolab. I dunno, maybe there was a sixteen year old kid a generation before me where it was an ELO or Floyd record or something. For me that band was my entry point. Then of course the decades go by and you trace out all of the branches of the family tree and what I'm looking towards now is more focused and rarified. Anywhere from Terry Riley to Robbie Basho, not that I purport to be anywhere at that level musically, I just feel the spirit of it. JD Emmanuel has become very important to me as a touchstone. Suddenly a lot of these New Age dudes don't sound so cheesy.

SSO: Like Vangelis and all that?

IP: Weeeeeell, he has more than a few moments of being cheesy but there are gems! I guess for me, as an untrained musician, I come at it caring more about the witchier aspects, the incantatory aspects of making music? Is that a word? Does that make sense? I'm from Maine; we're weird woodsy folk. Lots of pagan vibes so I'm less about techno futurism and more about the the more ancient aspects of music as transformation. Ooooh, here's an example. Kraftwerk is another touchstone and they're mostly known for their hyper futurist tropes like in their hit "Pocket Calculator". That album "Computer World" is total genius but my favorite albums from them are right at the moment where they're straddling this transition from psychedelic band with traditional instrumentation into the super synthey group they became famous for. "Ralf and Florian" and "Autobahn" show that beautifully uncomfortable transition. That parallels with the yoga practice. It's not supposed to hurt but you are supposed to be pushing your boundaries to arrive at your destination.

Sondra is a musician and yoga teacher. She will blend her artistic ear for music with her careful eye for energy in this special class to create an irresistible environment.

Ian's latest album, recorded live at Namaste Highland Park, is called YIN I and is available at his band camp site here.

All attendees of the Full Moon Flow and Restore class will receive a free download of the album. The latest video from the album can be seen here.