How do I find the time to cook like an old-time mama? I mean, it takes weeks to ferment a crock of sauerkraut, and I have to get breakfast ready a whole frickin day in advance?! Are you kidding? How can any real live mama DOooo that? If I start I won’t have time for anything else!!!

I know, you’ve read a couple blogs, switched to raw milk, maybe even made something with organ meats (or not). You’ve read the introduction to Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions and even though it all makes perfect sense and resonates with every cell in your body, you are finding it so hard to really get started.

Its kinda like me and meditation. I know its good for me but, dude, I really just can’t do it! Don’t even want to want to… do it. Well, I didn’t want to – until I learned Mark Silver’s Remembrance and my relationship to meditation changed forever. He taught me that I didn’t need to be in any special posture or frame of mind to meditate. In fact, quite the opposite.

Authenticity, even if it feels icky, is the first step in connecting to the Divine. And one doesn’t need to meditate for hours and hours. These two fact together changed my life as a mother. I got started right away meditating in the middle of the night while nursing my newborn son, or walking him to sleep, or standing in line at the bank. Now I meditate a lot, and I love it. Love it.

But what does this have to do with cooking the Sally Fallon way?

Well, I have a secret. You see, recovering traditional culinary rhythms is more than another healthy-eating-regime, or save-the-planet-activity that you should do. No.

  • A mother’s kitchen is her sanctuary
  • Culturing Veggies her chopping meditation
  • Her butter churn her altar
  • Grinding Grain her daily movement

The very motions of cooking traditional foods match our ancestral DNA. We long for these motions. They calm our nervous systems and allow our Soft Animal instinctual selves to emerge. The motions of creating sacred and healing foods for your family not only keeps them healthier and happier, they are healing to make.

healing to make.

They are the motions of creating home, family and community and these motions also create home for YOU mama.

Just making a start, however small or slow, builds and heals as you go. Before you know it, you will be immersed in a way of life that offers itself to future generations – returning your own grandchildren their birthright of radiant resilience and peace, one crock of kraut at a time – and nourish yourself at the same time. I promise.

So, here’s are the two things I want you to remember as you make your start:

  1. Preparing Traditional Foods is healing
  2. Your Kitchen is your sanctuary

And here is what I want you to do:

  1. Pick one thing  from the Nourishing Traditions bible and start doing it when you can.
  2. Find one thing to put in your kitchen to remind you that it is your sanctuary

Then tell me about it in the comments.