Inspirations and Illuminations

In 2023, I had weekly appointments with an eating habit coach who changed my life. Let me back up a little.   Since college, I’ve steadily put on weight every year.   My caloric intake has been high, and my activity level has been low.   I was active in my 20s, doing as many as six musical theater shows a year, but once I got married in my late 20s, and then had kids in my mid-30s and early 40s, my lifestyle became more sedentary.   I had a management job for almost 20 years that was increasingly stressful and draining of my energy, so my motivation to keep active and eat well decreased to almost nothing.   By the late 2010s, I weighed 250 pounds. In September of 2022, I discovered Kate M. Johnston, an eating habit coach for professional women.   I subscribed to her weekly email, and finally it clicked—my problem was not my weight or my lack of activity, but my eating habits, and more importantly, my self-image.   Kate sent out a free worksheet, an...

I'm losing count of things I've heard or read about Sabbath in the last few years.  While Sabbath is far from a new concept, it seems the recent resurgence of talk about Sabbath has coincided with the rise of the minimalism movement.  Marie Kondo talks about ridding oneself of things that are not useful, or don't "spark joy."  Margareta Magnusson brought awareness to the practice of "Swedish Death Cleaning," or decluttering so that your heirs don't have so much to deal with upon your demise.  The Minimalists,  Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, operate from the thesis that the less stuff we have, the more meaning we can find in our lives.  This is a spiritual concept--the more stuff we keep for ourselves, the less we have to share with others, the greater our carbon footprint, the further we find ourselves from God/our spirituality (" it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kin...