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Goat DIY
Above image: when you take the goat for a walk (as one does) and the hens decide to follow you up the road. While we have had chickens for a few months now, there is something different about having a goat (second one is on the way). As my daughter said, ‘We’re really farmers now!’ It’s like, yes, chickens are farm animals too, but they’re birds. They’re small and more easily managed and don’t head-butt you at every opportunity. In preparation for our goats, we built a small barn with a tiny corral in front of our cabins. We used instructions that I found here at gottagoat.com to build dispensers…
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What is Kinesiology?
If Specialized Kinesiology isn’t the coolest thing you’ve ever experienced, then you probably don’t understand it. I have been working with it for over ten years and it still rocks my world with its’ power, simplicity and scope. Here is a quick answer to the question: what is kinesiology? Kinesiology is the study of movement, and most of the kinesiologists out there have gone to university to study muscles, how they work and how to train them in order to treat and avoid injury. Specialized (also called energetic) Kinesiology is a little different. Here, a muscle test is used as an indicator of what is happening on a deeper level…
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Costa Rica Confession
Above picture: Me, building a greenhouse while being shot in the butt with Nerf darts from a maniacal toddler. This is my life. I have a confession to make. This is the kind of thing that’s hard for me to say, so I’m only going to say it once. Ready? This life is harder than I thought it was going to be. This is hard to admit, because people make an assumption, when you do something that seems as crazy as sell your home and business, pack up your things and move to Costa Rica, that you are unprepared. In reality, I research everything, and I like to believe that…
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Wandering Herbalist: Costa Rica Fruits
I have a confession to make that usually puzzles my clients and students who know me to be a food “expert”: I don’t usually eat fruit. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that, for some reason that I have never fully understood, my body just doesn’t seem to metabolize fructose very well. To put it bluntly; fruit makes me fat. But, it is impossible for a self professed food fiend to travel to a new country learning about plants and food and not eat what grows locally! So, I eat it all. And I’ve gained weight, but that’s beside the point! One thing that I really enjoy about…
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Gluten-Free Pizza Recipe
Warning: This recipe is not going to be perfect pizza dough. You could never toss it up into the air while singing Italian folk songs. It is, however, fairly tasty and doesn’t fall apart instantly once it’s cooked, which is a step ahead of many gluten-free crust recipes. 4 cups brown rice flour 2 cups corn flour ½ cup arrowroot starch 3 tbsp cane sugar 1 tbsp dry yeast 1 tsp salt 3 cups warm water 1 egg 2 tbsp olive oil We live in the middle of nowhere and gluten free flour blends are hard to come by (and really expensive). I throw 4 cups of brown rice in…
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Clueless Attempts at Permaculture: 6 months and Drowning
Remember last time I wrote one of these and it seemed vaguely optimistic? Forget all that. We are currently in the depths of the rainy season. The good news about this is that, as it pours for hours every day, nothing needs additional watering. Here are the downsides: the soil just washes away and if you don’t catch it quickly and remedy the situation, it can leave delicate roots exposed. Heat-loving plants like tomatoes and peppers get moldy and rot, and weeds grow incredibly quickly. Now combine that with the fact that my free-ranging chickens have stripped the leaves off of everything they can reach and the leaf-cutter ants on…
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The craziness of DIY in the jungle
I would give anything for a Home Depot and a Michael’s right now. Let me explain. We are DIY kind of people. I blame my parents for it really – when I was growing up, our house was always in a state of renovation and my folks are the kind of people that would go through open houses “to get ideas” on the weekends, dragging their beleaguered children in tow. When I was 15 my mom bought a little fixer-upper in Prince George and we redid it ourselves; ripping out the shag carpets, refinishing the hardwood floors, setting tile, painting murals etc. The year before that, in another part of…
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Wandering Herbalist: Mamon (Rambutan)
Medicinal plants, fruit: Mamon The fruit stacked high on the table at the market looks almost alien. Spiky, with little barbs radiating outward, bright red and about the size of a ping-pong ball; here in Costa Rica, this fruit is known as mammon, though in Asia it is better known as rambutan. Don’t be fooled by its’ strange appearance – it is delicious. And at this time of year when it is in season, it is ridiculously cheap and can be found everywhere. There was a lady selling bags on the side of the highway out of the back of her truck today; one kilo for one mil colones (just…
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Beyond Massage – Muscle Testing for RMTs
No doubt about it, few things in life are as amazing as a good massage. How would you feel about a tool that would allow you to take your business as a massage therapist to another level? I fell in love with massage as a practitioner first, before I started muscle testing. I loved the immediate change in a client; the way I could literally feel them relaxing and healing themselves under my hands and the exchange of energy involved. And yet, massage has its limitations. It can be frustrating for instance, when you realize that the basis of the issue is stress-related, but you don’t have any techniques that…
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Touch for Health for Chickens – The Balancing of Prince Agatha
So everyone who has been following us on Facebook or on my blog knows by now that we bought some chicks. Despite having no idea what we were doing. And things were going pretty well with them, up until they turned six weeks old. This is the true story of how I used my Touch for Health knowledge to bring a chick back from the (nearly) dead. In the mornings, I usually open up the coop and lift the chicks out so that they go forage and run around the yard, but on this particular morning, one of the chickens was lying in a corner alone. He would not get…
