Cha Cha Cha Chaaaaaanges
Updates from the kitchen.
Hi peas and carrots!
Death is something I contemplate often. What a way to start a newsletter right? But in all sincerity, I have found a sort of comfort in acknowledging the only certainty: We will all die.
This contemplation is inspired by the Buddhist Lojong practice, which is 59 mind-training slogans meant to be an embodied way of living the teachings of Buddhism. The first slogan “First, train in the preliminaries" is meant to set the groundwork for the on-going practice (I love the profundity of this).
Tibetan Buddhism offers four reminders about life designed to help us train our minds. These four casual reminders can be recited before we start our practice, day, a project, a conversation, ANYTHING to help us get in touch with what matters:
Human life is a precious gift.
Death is the only certainty. We will all die.
Everything we do has a result.
Everyone experiences suffering.
An Ending. A Beginning.
My personal chef business is going through it’s own death. I am letting go of my offerings for personal meals and retreat catering, while my postpartum meals will still be offered.
I will be shifting to helping people explore their relationship to food and their body through an intersectional and anti-patriarchal lens. I am currently studying with The Center For Body Trust in their provider program and am learning SO MUCH. I can’t wait to be able to officially offer one-on-one guidance.
Until then you can expect these inconsistent newsletters to be a space of exploring topics related to how a white-dominant patriarchy informs the relationship we have to our bodies, how that is reflected in food habits, anti-diet culture, intuitive eating, and whatever else may spark my interest throughout the training. I believe we CAN have a joyous, pleasurable, healthy relationship with food and our body, but we MUST dismantle the white-supremist patriarchy in our systems, and our own minds in order to liberate not only ourselves, but each other. I believe in a world where connection and belonging thrives for EVERYBODY.
I hope you stick around, but I understand if you don’t. I have greatly enjoyed you being here and look forward to sharing this new expansion with you reader.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
- Audre Lorde delivered these comments at “The Personal and the Political Panel” at the Second Sex Conference in New York, September 29, 1979. They were later published in her book Sister Outsider.