Chihuahuas

I'm going to end the month on a frivolous note. February has been less than fabulous, but I have high hopes for March. I'm going to blame the chihuahuas. Lately, when my 4 year old daughter does something she knows she's not supposed to - like, throw something, yell loudly, any general unpleasantness - she tells me it wasn't her, it was the chihuahuas. I'm not sure where this technique came from, as we don't have chihuahuas nor do we know anyone that does. Sometimes the chihuahuas come in the car with us, or to the grocery store, with Morgane carefully leading them around. There seem to be about five or so (it's hard to keep track of invisible chihuahuas). The chihuahuas are most useful as scapegoats. It's pretty hard not to dissolve into a fit of giggles when Morgane blames them for any naughtiness. And perhaps she's on to something...it makes things seem a bit less dramatic if you blame it all on the chihuahuas.

Cowgirl Amy wrangles surgery & radiation

Thanks to Amy, guest blogger and 2010 Cowgirls vs. Cancer scholarship recipient. She blogs here monthly on her journey through breast cancer treatment.

I just looked back at my latest blog and realized I haven’t written since the middle of January. Since then, I have had surgery, began the process of reconstruction, and am preparing for radiation.

I kind of thought surgery wouldn’t be that big of a deal. I made it through chemo - so I am Superwoman, right? I had even gotten to the point of feeling good again. I enjoyed being out and about more, and took a few yoga classes with friends. I even taught a class.

Also, I learned that my chemo was VERY successful. My tumor shrunk, and hardly lit up on the MRI at all (vs. my Christmas tree status pre-chemo). This and the comments from my doctors telling me the worst was over left me a bit euphoric before surgery.

So I went into surgery blind, understanding that there would be pain, but not at all prepared for the emotional hit. And it wasn’t the loss of my breast that bothered me...it was the whole sight of myself - the sickest I have ever looked - that absolutely freaked me out. I had already lost my hair, eyebrows and my once long and thick lashes. The surgery left me with two drains on my side, and the drugs made me sick and very pale. It took several days before I could comfortably walk around, and when I did it hurt to stand up straight. And I could only wear ugly baggy clothes that would loosely cover my scars and drains.

It was the "what have I been reduced to?" stage...beyond angry. I have never been a sad person, and really don’t even like reading this because I don’t like the way I sound. And yet, truthfully, I was in the darkest place I had ever been in.

I cried a lot. My family was confused by this. Not because they weren’t empathetic, but because I had been so strong up until this point. Now the cancer had been surgically removed from my body, and instead of grateful and happy, I was a heaping mess.

It just made me mad. In fact, I was mad at all of the people I loved the most...those whom carried me through the toughest times. I was mad at my mom because she got to clean my home and take care of my kids, I was mad at my friends who helped to drive my kids around because I couldn’t, mad at my sister, who everyone says I look like but who still has her beautiful hair, and even mad at my dog who obviously does not have cancer detecting skills.

Recently, the darkness has dissipated. My hair is coming in, and people have told me my coloring has returned. I'm not as nervous about going out, and don’t feel as many sympathetic second glances. And I can drive my kids around again. I'm not mad anymore, and that feeling of gratitude and awareness of the blessings in my life has returned.

I still mourn the old Amy. I miss the fearlessness and blissful ignorance. I miss time spent being involved with my kids' activities instead of at a doctor's appointment or in bed. But as I get stronger again, I am amazed at how far my body has taken me.

The next step is radiation. This week I will have tiny blue dots permanently inked on my chest to mark the area to be radiated. This seems ironic for a girl who never liked to stand in front of a microwave. I'm not so ill-prepared for the guaranteed rush of emotions this time. They say there are fewer side effects now-a-days...but I know that for me that's not the hard part. For those close to me, I'm taking this opportunity to apologize in advance for my radiation meltdown.

Fortunately, spring and summer are approaching. It is often thoughts of a concert with my husband, hiding Easter eggs for kids, an island trip with family and friends, and a Cowgirl Yoga retreat in July that help pull a girl out of her funk.

Plus, I can't wait for the next person who asks if I have any tattoos.

Food Rules: a must-read for anyone who eats

There's a new item being added to our retreat goodie bags: Michael Pollan's latest book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. It's cute, extremely portable and digestible, and could also be called Eating Sustainably for Dummies. I already thought Michael Pollan was a genius, but after breaking it down into 64 very simple tips to help anyone eat well, I'm even more convinced. It's sort of sad that most of the advice in this book our grandmothers wouldn't know the meaning of; for example, Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk. And in fact, tip #2 reads: Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. With all the food confusion out there - latest-and-greatest diets, never-ending plethora of new products, conflicting health news - Pollan's bottom line is quite simple: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This book might take an hour, max, to read. You will laugh, you will be shocked, and you will be inspired to make changes in your eating habits. I guarantee it. You can even buy it on amazon.com right now for 5 bucks. Those are pretty small time and money investments, that could result in huge payoffs for your health and well-being.

Cooking Light, one of my fave foodie mags, ran an article in their Jan/Feb issue that optimistically stated the following about where we're at right now: It's a period when the real, deep wisdom about healthy eating is coming into new focus for those who will see. This wisdom blends science, tradition, care for the environment, love of cooking, the human need for pleasure and indulgence, and the ideal of balance into a minestrone seasoned by the good old common sense of the American cook. The power to do good - to nurture our families, to enjoy our food, to celebrate culinary traditions while being mindful of the health of the earth - is in our hands.
Sure sums it up for me.

If you've read Food Rules, I'd love it if you'd post your fave rules in the comments...

Lovely Lunge: One-pose wonder

It's been a wonderful last few days, I was feeling fit after my back episode earlier this month, but also heeding my body's request - which was made so painfully clear - to remember to slow down and take rest too. So I was very careful to intersperse my skiing with gentle yoga to help restore and refresh my muscles. I took a class with my friend Jessica, who owns Be The Change yoga studio, where I also teach in Boz. Lucky me, that day the focus was plenty of gentle backbends, twists and lunges - just what I needed. I'm loving the supported lunge we did, so wanted to share it here.

You can do this lunge with or without the block; it is more intense without.

• From sitting on your heels, bring your right knee forward, and line it up directly over your ankle.
• Move your left knee way behind your left hip, so that you can feel the stretch in the front of the left hip (you can adjust this to be more or less).
• Option: take a yoga block and put it under your right sit bone (the tall way); the longer edges of the top of the block should line up with where your bum meets your leg. It should feel supportive.
  
• Use your hands to gently press off your right thigh, to lift the upper body and straighten the spine. Be sure not to hunch your shoulders here.
• Option to intensify: take your right elbow just above your knee for support. Reach back with your left hand for your left foot; be careful not to be right on the kneecap here, move your knee back so that the softer area just above the kneecap is on the floor.
• Slowly move your hips forward to deepen the pose. Repeat sequence on the other side.

I definitely recommend using the block to make this lunge lovely. Namaste.

Ski Bunny

I was very happy to get back on my skis today at Big Sky, and Morgane had her ski camp. I'm not sure which she was more excited about, her princess skis or the actual skiing...
Also, check out our yoga and ski retreat mention on vacations.com!

Interview with a Grower & a Cook

I am thrilled to introduce Kate Huston: my friend from the Co-Op; mom to Maia Luna, my daughter's BFF, and foodie extraordinaire. Kate will be joining our 5-day retreats this year as our private chef, starting with the March 7-12 yoga and ski retreat, and including this summer's June and July Cowgirl Yoga retreats. We'll savor a healthy, local gourmet meal with Kate, who will also give a talk on being a farmer, along with tips for eating sustainably. Meanwhile, I give you an Interview with a Grower & a Cook.

About Kate:
Kate Huston is the founder of Waywardraven Farms and Personal Chef Services in Bozeman, combining the growing of produce at her farm with her cooking talents. Waywardraven Farms produces gourmet lettuce mixes for the Community Food Co-Op and local restaurants, along with providing produce for several families in Gallatin County. Her personal chef business was derived from a need for locally grown, nutritious meals for people with special dietary needs. Meals are generally cooked with what's in season, using produce straight from her garden; she also outsources to other local growers and ranchers.

1. What first drew you to food and cooking?
I've been a gardener as far back as I can remember...helping my mother in the garden planting, weeding, and harvesting. Along with the gardening, I grew up with both my parents in the kitchen, concocting wonderful meals for dinnertime (almost all meals were made at home and dinner was a very important family activity) and watching Julia Child, Frugal Gourmet and Victory Garden (I was a PBS junkie growing up).
Moving to Montana ten years ago was a big shift for me, as I grew up in Boston, and attended Museum School to study art education. On a summer job in Big Sky, I immediately fell in love with the wide open spaces, the endless hiking opportunities and most importantly, the people with a strong sense of community and stewardship for the land they live on. With great determination I packed up all my belongings and left for Bozeman, where with great luck ended up with a job as a cashier at the Bozeman Community Food Co-Op.

2. Tell us about your experience at the Co-Op.
I've been employed there for over nine years, and it was at the Co-Op where my sense of how food is grown and prepared was radically changed. Not knowing what organic meant at the time, I quickly learned the importance of food grown without herbicides and pesticides, and where food was coming from. After cashiering for a year, I moved on to the produce department, where I met a local grower who was looking to pass on her knowledge of growing salad mix; she took me under her wing, and educated me on the fine art of growing greens without herbicides and pesticides, with crop rotations to maintain healthy soil and continue the growing process. I took to it with flourish and started a small farm called Waywardraven on a 1/4 acre, and started to sell to the Co-Op and a local restaurant. A year later I transferred to the deli department, where with great gusto I began my cooking career as a prep/soup/lunch/dinner/brunch cook. Although not trained formally as a cook, I quickly learned and adapted recipes to my own style, and with it came a following of people who loved to eat what I created.

3. What influences shape your food philosophy?
Learning from experience and by observation, knowing how the vegetables were grown and how the meat was raised by local ranchers all was key to understanding how to create delicious meals that are healthy and easy.
Michael Pollan, my guru, once said that a meal should only have five ingredients to complete it and make it good - I try to adhere to that principle, particularly by leaving out hydrogenated high corn fructose food additives that make food taste like something else (I call this "food on crack", because all of those chemicals seem to have the same effect on people who eat them: can't get enough of the msg, because it makes you want more but leaves you feeling really awful afterwards).
And lastly, with the birth my daughter in 2005, it really hit home to me how important it is to eat healthy and as local as possible.

4. How does having a farm influence your food philosophy?
While Waywardraven Farms is not certified organic, I steer free of herbicides and pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and gmo (genetically modified organism) seeds. Some of the farm's natural crop control methods include beneficial insects, weed pulling, crop rotation and bio dynamic use of farm materials. I'm committed to what I call "beyond organic farming": I hope to raise people's awareness about what they are putting into their bodies, and to get them to look beyond the meal presented to them and start to ask where, why, and how the food got there, and most importantly, how it will sustain them (and the land they live on) in a healthy way. And raising my daughter on the farm and around food will greatly influence how she will approach eating, and respect for the land she will inherit one day.

5. What's your absolute favorite meal?
My absolute favorite meal??? Oh boy, so many, but an especially fond food memory from Boston that I use as inspiration for cooking is simple chicken piccata, with herbed polenta and fresh calamari in a red tomato sauce. It was at a small restaurant in the North End; they would get everything fresh from the farmer's market, and make their own cheeses and sauces. Also, my all-time family favorite is Beef Wellington, that my dad makes every year for Christmas from scratch, and the Bordelaise sauce that goes with it.

Valentine's Partner Yoga 1-Pose Wonder

Happy Valentine's Day! I decided to splurge this weekend - after a week of no activity due to lingering back trouble, I'm just savoring the decadence of this holiday with cupcakes, chocolate and cookies. And instead of skiing, I watched the Olympics. And you know what, I don't even feel guilty. But I do look forward to getting back on track this coming week, on the mat and the slopes.

Meanwhile, what better day than Valentine's for a partner yoga one-pose wonder? Each position in partner child's pose stretches out different parts of your back. It's also incredibly soothing to synch your breath with your partner's. We do this on our retreats, and it's always interesting to see the initial hesitation; I think everyone gets worried they are going to crush the person under them! (I had the same concern, but after doing this with all sorts of people I know better. That's me pictured above, crushing some poor Cowgirl Yogini last summer.) You can be a different height and weight than your partner, but just make sure it's not extreme (i.e., one person being 6'4" and the other 4'10"). Give this one a try, I guarantee the warm fuzzies, plus a lovely back opener too.

Partner Child's Pose

• Decide who is on top and who is on the bottom; bottom person takes child's pose.
• Top person carefully and gently sits down just below bottom person's sacrum; the important thing is to align your sacrums when top person lays down, so sitting just below bottom person's sacrum will make that happen.
• Top person uses hands for support to slowly lay down on bottom person.
  
• Top person reaches arms overhead to take bottom person's hands.
• Stay here for 10 deep breaths, maybe more.
• Top person slowly sits up - don't roll off to the side, use your legs and arms to help you sit straight up. Try not to "collapse" all your weight into your rear as you sit up.
  
• Switch top and bottom and repeat.

Love and Namaste.

Co-ops rock!

I became a co-op convert when I moved to Bozeman. I'll admit that at first this city girl was a little freaked out; our co-op is about a quarter of the size of the Whole Foods I frequented in Washington DC. But my food philosophy has evolved since then (more on that transition here and here), and I love buying local/as locally as possible, and the feeling of community at my co-op. I joke that it is my second home, but I'm not really kidding. I enjoy the fact that I go there practically every day; I know, to some that sounds tedious, but my cooking strategy is to stock up on bulk items and then cruise in to the co-op daily to pick up the fresh items I need for each day's meals. And of course, chat with everyone too. If I lived in France, one day I'd make a great old lady who knows everyone and everything at the daily market. I've made lots of friends at the co-op, because one thing I can bond over is food. In fact, one of my co-op friends happens to be a chef there as well as a farmer, and she will be cooking on some of our retreats this year. Not only that - she'll be giving a talk on eating sustainably and her experience as a grower. (An Interview with a Grower and a Cook coming very soon!)

I was very pleased to see "shopping the food co-ops" called a hot trend in the February Bon Appetit: These worker-owned grocery stores have shed their hippie aura from to '70s and are offering better products than ever before: The bruised apples of the past have been replaced by local kombucha, cardoons, and grass-fed beef frankfurters, available alongside bulk items like red lentils sold by the pound. And with foodies flocking to co-ops, the number of such stores is expected to double in the next five years.

Don't have a co-op in your area? Check out Edible Communities and find out more about how you can go local.

Birthday in bed

I'm back from an unplanned blog break. I had a lesson in things not going as planned this past weekend, which is always tough for a control-freak like myself. We had planned to go away for my birthday weekend, and were practically out the door on Friday when I had a back episode that immobilized me with painful spasms. I know, somewhat shocking for a yoga teacher and outdoor enthusiast to have debilitating back pain, and somewhat embarrassing too. I'll spare you the details of my condition, but it's happened before. Which means I know how to deal with it, and I do everything possible to prevent it from happening, but sometimes it comes out of nowhere. Which is how it arrived on Friday. Wham.

So I basically did not get out of bed for 2 days, and husband-on-crutches was my caregiver. Which is in a way, funny. Luckily my 4-year old daughter stepped up and was an amazing little helper; poor thing asked me, "Mommy, will you need crutches too?" My body couldn't move much, but my mind wouldn't stop racing - until someone inside my head yelled, Alright already, stop the pity party and get on with it. I couldn't do anything I had planned, or anything "normal", so I might as well relax and take advantage of it. I slept. I stopped fighting the pain and the situation so my back could start healing. I read like I haven't read since I finished the Twilight series. I counted my blessings on my birthday in bed.

It's such a rude awakening to go from feeling vibrant and being active (a good state to be in on your birthday, right?), to being immobilized by pain. It makes me wonder if a Higher Power is trying to tell me something, by bringing my life to a screeching halt: So you think you've got big plans for your birthday, huh? Well, here's a different kind of gift - lay on your back for 2 days straight and use the time to reflect on just how much you have to be thankful for. I definitely misinterpreted this gift at first, with an entire WHY ME saga starring, well, me. But it became an opportunity of a different sort, when I changed my perspective. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I'm probably too much of a planner-girl to ever be an expert at this, but I'm going to keep trying.

I do have big blog plans, so stay tuned for a foodie February on Cowgirl Yoga. Namaste.

Aprés-Ski Asana

February 1 already. How did that happen? Looking back on January, I am pleasantly surprised with how much skiing I got in. My goal was to get a regular Nordic ski thing going on and get Morgane and myself up to Big Sky for alpine skiing, despite husband not being able to join us post-knee surgery. I feel pretty pleased to have at least one thing on my New Year's list that I can check off.

Yoga is soooo important to my skiing success. While many other activities emphasize what you should do to warm-up, I’ve found that what you do après-ski is even more important in terms of managing soreness and maintaining flexibility. So, when skiing either alpine (downhill) or Nordic (cross-country), make sure to plan a few après-ski yoga moves for when you come inside — preferably before you indulge in your après-ski adult beverage. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at your lack of soreness, and you can almost hear your muscles say aaaaahhhhhhh as you pamper them with a little TLC as thanks for tackling the mountain or the trail. Check out my latest yoga tutorial on the Athleta Chi, Aprés-Ski Asana. Fave poses include virasana (pictured above) and pigeon for après-alpine, and yogic lunges and prasarita padotanasana for après-Nordic.

Want to further explore yoga and skiing? Join me for our March 7-12 yoga and ski retreat in Big Sky, where we'll combine downhill and Nordic skiing, practice yoga before and after, take a sleigh ride, and eat dinner on the mountainside in a yurt. Mention that you read this blog and you'll get 15% off if you book by Friday, February 5. Tell your ski bunny friends! Namaste.