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Hello Everyone,
Happy Holidays from the Family Practice Centre of Integrative Health and Healing! This month’s newsletter is written by Dr. Conrad Sichler. It’s a thought provoking essay about the power of gratitude during this holiday season. Also included are two seasonal recipes. One, a holiday tradition from Dr. Sichler’s family and the other from Cynthia Love, our centre’s nutritionist. For anyone new to our newsletter, earlier editions can be viewed on our website www.fpcihh.com.
As the year winds to a close, and the holiday season approaches, my thoughts wind to this time of year, its festivities, and the roots of its festivities. Every year around the Christmas season, there is a tension between the overarching consumerism and materialism of the holiday, and reminders to keep the “true spirit of Christmas” in our hearts. Where did Christmas come from? From the birth of the son of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But what about before that? It is no coincidence that Christmas is very close to December 21st, the winter solstice. This is the shortest day of the year, the time when the northern hemisphere of the earth is pointed farthest away from the son. Pre-Christian cultures were sophisticated enough to track the movements of the seasons, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and knew that this time of year was special. For after the solstice, the days grow longer and, at least from a solar perspective, it signifies that the new life of spring is on its way. It is on the foundation of this birth of the sun that the birth of the Son was built. The original religion was said to be sun-worship, and it is easy to understand why. All life on earth depends absolutely on the sun, for it is the sun’s energy that brings heat, causes plants to grow, and thus sustains all other life. It matters not whether one believes that God made the sun or not - for one way or another, it is central to this process. The moon, too, is a celestial body that has a profound pull on human life, regulating the tides of the earth’s seas and often the flow of a woman’s menses. There are 13 lunar cycles in a solar year, and I can’t help but wonder if Anglo-Saxon’s superstition of the number 13 may be related to the suspicion and hatred extended towards women in the centuries of the Inquisition, when huge numbers of women were killed by Church authorities. Many of these women were the midwives, herbalists, and healers of the villages. The environment has been a hot issue in the last year, and in the past few years. I invite you to ponder it in a different way as this solar year comes to a close. What if we thought of the environment, not merely as a place we are destroying, not only as a template for products we engineer to be ‘natural’ simulations of what we might actually find in nature? What if, instead, we had a deeper connection to our roots? What if, in addition to our particular religious practices, we thanked the air, the soil, and the water for sustaining us? I was in a store last week looking for a copy of Planet Earth, the BBC documentary, and one clerk said “it makes you appreciate earth a lot more”; the other clerk said “it makes you appreciate life”. As I walked away, it struck me that in many ways, both of them had said the same thing. With all of the different modalities at the FPCIHH, there is one common thread that binds all of the practitioners who work there, namely the passionate desire to stimulate and inspire the life in each of our patients as it flow forward towards greater health. For being fully, passionately, deeply, lovingly alive is truly our natural state. So around this time of year, it might be fun for all of us, in addition to the traditions that we already hold dear, to take a small amount of time and reflect. We could ask ourselves “As the sun prepares again to be born, how can I let my own light shine forth? What can I give birth to in this world to bring greater love, light, and balance into being? How can I coax growth to happen in myself and those around me?” One way that helped me tremendously was a practice I started in medical school and have continued ever since. I had just met Dr. Patch Adams, and he was telling me about the three to four hour intake interviews he used to do when he was in clinical practice. He said that he asked people to tell him about his life, and they would go and share all of the difficulties and troubles they had lived, and once they had finished doing that, many of them would consider themselves done. Then he would ask: “Well, that sounds like you’ve got the tough stuff covered - what about the positive in your life?” And he told me something I will never forget: “It was a rare person who could talk about that for more than five minutes.” And so I began a gratitude practice every morning and night, being thankful for what I had in front of me, or what I had just experienced. It was a ritual that was pivotal in getting me through some of the heart-numbing aspects of medical training, or working 80 hours per week and facing serious illness at every turn, without much time to recharge. So it may be interesting this holiday season to also reflect on all that we are grateful for in the midst of the bustle of annual family gatherings. In the Christmas jingle “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, there is the line “he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” Presumably, we as children need to be good lest we miss out on receiving presents. The trouble is, if we focus too much on the material presents, we may miss out on the more valuable presence we can bring to the season. So on behalf of the FPCIHH, I wish you all a restful and joyous holiday, and may your light and gratitude shine into the New Year. See you then! With love, Recipes Here is a recipe that is not particularly healthy, but it sure is tasty. Diabetics should definitely avoid these cookies: Mama Sichler’s Kupfels Ingredients: (note that as this is a European recipe, ingredient amounts are given as weights, not volumes)
Directions: To grind the hazelnuts, I use a super-duper rasp made by Microplane. You could also use a hand crank grinder, or perhaps even a spice grinder or blender. I like the rasp because the ground nuts come out fluffy. Mix the three dry ingredients together, and then cut in the butter and mix it all up by hand until you have a dough. Note that it is very important to use unsalted butter, not salted. (For those who are lactose intolerant, a non-hydrogenated vegetable spread works just as well.) Roll it into a big log (about 10-15 cm in diameter), then cut off a 1 cm slice, and cut that into small pieces, about 1 cm cubed. Roll each piece out so that it forms a small log about 0.5 cm across, then join the ends into a crescent shape. Pinch the middle of the small log that is now a crescent. Meanwhile, melt a brick of baker’s chocolate in a double boiler. Put the crescents on a baking sheet, bake at 325 F for 10-15 minutes until the edges of the cookies are a light brown. Let them cool slightly, then dip the non-pinched end into the chocolate. Let them cool in the fridge or a pantry, then enjoy!
Ingredients:
Directions: In a large non-stick sauté pan with cover, sauté the broccoli, onions, peppers and garlic in water for 5 minutes. Add chili powder, cumin, salt, crushed tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, tempeh, red kidney beans and pinto beans. Cook another two minutes. Add olive oil, cover and simmer for two minutes to blend flavours. Remove from heat; add 2 tablespoons whey protein isolate powder. Serve in a bowl and sprinkle with cilantro, hemp seeds, pine nuts, grated carrots and soy cheese Variation: You can use low-fat Monterey cheese instead of soy cheese and lean organic ground beef instead of tempeh. Organic, sprouted whole wheat 10 inch tortillas can be eaten with this chili. Please feel free to forward our newsletter on to family and friends. They are welcome to subscribe and can request our newsletters at www.fpcihh.com. With our best wishes for a joyous holiday season and a happy new year, With Warm Regards, |
Gratitude During the Holiday Season 
New Mexico Chili 