Soul Food - Eat Right, Think Right, Feel Right

For Claudia Holl, soul food means eating holistically for your own good, i.e. providing yourself with nourishing food, but also nourishing thoughts, nourishing feelings, a nourishing environment and beneficial exercise.

Everything influences each other! Because, as the wise old saying goes, “You are what you eat!”

Do Eating, Thinking And Feeling Really Affect Each Other?

Yes, they do, more than most people realize!

Feelings and emotions accompany us every day. And that's a good thing! Help us to feel what is good for us and what is not, so that we can make appropriate decisions. However, sometimes we get stuck in emotions, e.g. fear and/or anger. And this is exactly where everyone can turn to self-help, and with nutrition and many other easy-to-integrate ways to get out of stressful emotions, to bring yourself back into balance and to live the positive sides such as trust and courage!

schen medicine (TCM), which Claudia Holl has practiced for 35 years with local, regional, seasonal and mostly organic food and herbs.TCM assigns positive and blocking emotions, as well as tastes, senses, meridians, climatic conditions and much more to each of its 5 elements wood, fire, earth, metal and water.TCM sees people as a whole, i.e. not only nutrition in the physical sense, which provides people with energy and vitality, but also how people nourish themselves with their thoughts, feelings, their environment and through movement.

Because TCM ascribes a certain thermal effect to every soul food (there are, for example, foods that have a cooling effect and foods that have a warming effect), as well as the different cooking methods (roasting/steaming), an effect on our organism opens up the possibility of using to be able to influence our diet on our physical as well as mental and emotional well-being. In this way, everyone can contribute to activating the positive sides of each element in themselves, so that they can also be lived!

The Interplay Of Eating, Thinking And Fe lpeling

• Sometimes it is the food that makes our thinking unclear, makes us pessimistic and listless/powerless because, for example, under stress we increasingly reach for sweets, such as cakes, tarts, sweets, etc. On the one hand, TCM treats the sweet taste assigned to relaxation, on the other hand also the build-up of life energy Qi. However, in TCM we do not mean conventional sweetness when we speak of a sweet taste - conventional sweetness makes the organism mucous - but naturally sweet things such as cereals, root vegetables, pumpkin, etc. This sweet taste relaxes and builds energy at the same time.
• Sometimes it is our feeling, e.g. fear or anger, that in turn makes us reach for sweets, with the same "background", thereby building up life energy Qi and/or relaxing it, but from the conventional sweetness through mucus again unclear thinking , a lack of drive and tiredness develops.

What You Can Support The POSITIVE SIDES Of Each Item Like

• instead of anger, courage/strength and patience (wood element),
• instead of losing the meaning of life, joy and enthusiasm (fire element),
• instead of low self-esteem, security and stability (element earth),
• instead of hardness and distance, openness and closeness (metal element) and
• instead of fear and control, trust (water element)

Claudia Holl has to activate and keep in mind for every element

• Basic Information About The 5 Elements And Their Qualities As Well As 

• Everyday examples written about the emotions,
• Support through a balanced diet from the perspective of TCM,
• supplemented by exercises from kinesiology and Jin Shin Jyutsu,
• naturopathy
• and essential oils.
• For each element she has also recorded a meditation in nature, mostly in the mountains, which the reader can listen to using the Freya app. So it's become an interactive book.

An example: LOSS OF JOY OF LIFE - element fire and the bitter taste

TCM associates the element of fire with the bitter taste and in the free-flowing mode with the joy of life and wisdom, in the blocked mode with the loss of meaning in life.The bitter taste has been gradually bred out of food over the past few years or decades. Honestly - a pity.

When you think of Italy - this is where Italians like to drink an espresso after their meal. Why? Coffee contains a lot of bitter substances and, according to TCM, bitter stimulates the digestive powers, brings the digestive energy “down”, so to speak, and thus enables better digestion of the food and subsequent elimination of what is no longer needed.

Bitter herbs such as dandelion , yarrow , ground ivy, rosemary, thyme do the same, as do bitter spices such as turmeric and paprika , and of course bitter foods such as chicory , sugar loaf, endive, rocket, rhubarb , buckwheat , rye, parsnip, quince , quinoa , amaranth , poppy, …

The bitter taste may remind many people of "bitter experiences." But the bitter taste also makes it possible to digest them well !

"Bitter makes fun" - this saying is no coincidence! After all, the bitter taste frees the element of fire with its associated heart and small intestine meridians. And with a good metabolism, even bitter things can simply be well digested and the wisdom from experience can be integrated.

So - don't be afraid of the bitter taste, but - on the contrary - invite it into your own kitchen and into life as a part of life and nature. So that the joy of life can be freed and lived again!

Recipe: ROASTED VEGETABLES prepared according to the 5 elements

Ingredients

• 10 whole date tomatoes
• 200 g button mushrooms (or other mushrooms) cut in half
• 2 red peppers, cut into large pieces
• 4 artichokes, sliced
• 1 zucchini, sliced
• ½ tsp salt
• olive oil
• 1 teaspoon each of oregano and basil
• ½ tsp dried parsley
• 1 pinch turmeric
• 2 pinches of sweet paprika powder
• good wholemeal rye bread

Preparation

• Remove the hard parts of the artichokes and then cut them into slices about 1 cm thick.
• Cut the courgettes (Eku) into ½ cm thick slices, the mushrooms (Eka) you can halve or even quarter, depending on their size. Cut the red pepper(s) into larger pieces. You can halve the tomatoes (eku-ka) or leave them whole.
• Turn on the stove (F).
• Heat the olive oil (eku) in the pan.
• Then first put the mushrooms (Eka) in the pan and roast for a good 5 minutes. After turning, add the artichokes (Eku) and the red peppers (En) and roast everything again for a good 5 minutes. Finally, add the zucchini (Eku) and the tomatoes (Eku) to the pan and roast everything for another 10 minutes (turning the vegetables every now and then).
• Meanwhile, season each type of vegetable extra with oregano (Mw) and basil (Mw) and mix the respective vegetables well with the spices.
• Finally, season with salt (W), parsley (Hn), turmeric (Fku) and paprika (En) and mix the respective vegetables again.
• Serve the finished vegetables by variety on a large plate with a slice of valuable wholemeal rye bread.

Effect: balancing and strengthening for the heart - Bon appetit!