Valentine’s Day is usually thought of as a holiday for lovers, but it’s really a holiday dedicated to all kinds of love: friendship, family, and romantic love alike. Whether you’re single or attached Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate what’s great about the people you love.
Traditionally, celebrating Valentine’s Day involved giving a romantic gift to that special someone. The typical gifts we’ve come to associate with this occasion are jewelry, lingerie, roses, chocolates, heart-shaped candies, champagne, and candle-lit dinners. So much so that if you do celebrate this day then it’s almost expected that you conform to this tradition. This generally limits the occasion to couples, and even for couples, following this script takes a lot of the magic out of the day, leaving a little more to be desired.
So how can you make the most of this occasion? This year, why not commemorate Valentine’s Day by giving a different type of gift –a gift of that celebrates your relationships or friendships, or for singles, one that simply celebrates you! Following on the theme of my previous posts on gift giving, think of giving gifts of experiences –valuable time spent together sharing things you love to do or memories of times spent together.
If you’re on a tight budget, consider some simple but fun crafts projects you can do with your loved ones. Art projects are a great way to connect and bond with others while opening a channel for creative expression. Since it is Valentine’s Day you’re celebrating, then your projects should be themed around love and sharing. You can use items you already have laying around as a source of materials (magazines, miscellaneous buttons or fabric swatches, crayons, highlighters, miscellaneous memorabilia) or you can visit a local crafts or fabric store and pick up some low cost fabrics (like felt) and other tidbits (lace doilies, feathers, etc.), or painting and drawing supplies. The sky’s the limit really … all you need is love!
Remember when you were a kid and Valentine’s Day was kind of a fun and maybe even a little scary event because you never knew who was going to hand you a Valentine (card, gift, or message on a candy) and how you might feel about that? Worse yet, you knew that Valentine’s Day was the perfect opportunity to reveal a secret crush to that special someone by giving them a Valentine offering of some sort –a decision riddled with agony and the fear of rejection!
Even as young children we are taught to have certain expectations about this day. Those expectations (good or bad) have influenced our feelings and shaped our experiences over the years and may explain how we react to the whole Valentine’s thing as adults. For many people this has become a non-event or an overly commercialized occasion they would just as soon forget. For others it is a time of affirmation, celebration, or indulgence.
So get your Valentine’s game on! This year Valentine’s Day is on a Sunday and coincides with Chinese New Year and President’s Day (Monday), not to mention Fat Tuesday (for all you Mardi Gras revelers out there). That makes for a nice L-O-N-G weekend of celebration! How will you celebrate?
There’s one more important step you need to incorporate into your efforts to go green, and that’s to arm yourself with as much information as you can from reliable and trusted source, and last but not least, enlist the support of others to increase your odds of success and possibly convert them in the process.
Get Support and Enlist Others to Help You Do it
Changing any habit or behavior generally requires repetition over a minimum amount of time before it sticks but getting the support of friends, family, neighbors and co-workers is priceless.
Tell other people what you’re doing and why it’s important to you. Ask them if they would like to join you in accomplishing one or more of the items on your list. Inspire them to come up with their own list. Remember this is a process that starts with you, but in the end it’s a movement whose success depends on recruiting as many participants as possible.
And don’t forget to consult the numerous online resources available to you to help with the process and share them with everyone you know.
Building on Steps 1 & 2 from my last post, here are two more steps you can take right away to help you make progress sooner rather than later:
Challenge your Beliefs About What’s Possible and Be Open to Changing Them
This is where you have to go a little deeper with yourself to understand why you do something in spite of your awareness that doing it may not be the best thing for you or others.
It’s important not to judge or blame yourself or others, while doing this. There may be many legitimate reasons for engaging in a behavior or habit - ranging from not knowing it was a problem to not having the resources or knowledge to change it. In some cases it could be laziness or apathy, or just a bad habit that’s hard to break.
Remember that everything you do is a choice. Even not doing something is a choice. In any given situation you can think and choose differently. So what are some of your limiting beliefs that you can challenge right now to help you take action towards positive and meaningful change?
Don’t make decisions based on assumptions. Get the facts first so you understand the real impact of doing your chosen steps and affirm that it’s possible.
Set a Realistic Time-frame for Completing Action Items and Reward Your Self for Doing It
Give yourself a realistic deadline to accomplish this and be practical. If your deadline is too far out into the future then you won’t be motivated to do it sooner and might lose momentum early in the process. If your deadline is too soon then you might lose motivation if you can’t accomplish it fast enough.
Next to each item write down a deadline for completing it and how you will reward yourself for accomplishing it. When you’ve completed the top 3-5 items, move down the list and start on the next 3-5 items. As you get better at this and learn more about being green you may want to re-visit and re-prioritize the list you created in Steps 1 & 2.
It only took a few years, but the Green movement here in the United States has finally gone mainstream. What was once the province of crunchy granola hippie types trying to save the planet is now almost everyone’s concern, and with good reason. Climate change, over-use of pesticides, other food safety issues, toxins in personal care products, air pollution, rising fuel and energy costs … all these things have taken a tangible toll on our environment and our health and wellness that we can no longer ignore.
While most people want to do the right thing, they don’t always “walk the talk.” With so much information and chatter out there on the subject, it’s easy to see why. Whether it’s confusion over conflicting ideas, perceived economic barriers to changing behavior, or simply a case of information overload, just figuring out where to start can be overwhelming.
From the outside looking in, being green seems complicated and hard to do. The truth is, with all the information that’s out there and the many resources and new alternatives to help you do it, being green has never been easier!
There are so many little things you can do right now, that when done on a larger scale (i.e. adopted by many people) can have a MASSIVE impact on some of the daunting challenges we face today.
Here are 2 of 5 simple steps you can take to get started, or to deepen the work you’re already doing:
Make a List of all your “Eco Sins” and pick 3-5 areas that you want to work on or improve.
Eco Sins (or Guilty Pleasures) are things you know you shouldn’t or probably shouldn’t do because of their potentially harmful impact to the environment or to your own well-being, but you do them anyway. None of us is perfect. We’re all at different levels of awareness or willingness to make changes to our habits or lifestyles based on what’s most important to us.
A simple first step is to identify specific habits or behaviors that we might be able to modify or eliminate relatively quickly. Start by making a list of your perceived “Eco Sins” with the goal of prioritizing and converting it into a checklist you can use to measure your progress.
Some examples of Eco Sins are things like driving a gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting vehicle; leaving lights turned on when you don’t need them; eating meat more than once or twice a week; not recycling waste that is recyclable, etc.
There’s no need to rationalize why you do these things, you just want to come up with a list to help you identify where you can do better. Once you have it, take a look at which ones you think you can easily change or eliminate. You’ll be surprised how much easier it is to do once you have them written down on paper.
Convert it Into an Action Item Checklist & Prioritize It for Maximum Results.
Prioritize your list based on one of two ways: 1) what’s easiest for you to accomplish or 2) what’s likely to have the biggest impact.
This is entirely up to you and the criteria you use to decide should be based on whatever motivates you the most. If you are results-oriented you’ll be more motivated by tackling items that are measurable and have the biggest impact. Or maybe you feel a greater sense of accomplishment by crossing more items off your list faster, so focus on what’s easiest for you to achieve in the shortest period of time.
Little things that can have a big (and measurable) impact typically fall in the categories of energy, fuel, and water consumption, and reducing your carbon footprint.
Less tangible or harder to quantify but equally important are things like food, clothing, and personal care product consumption, purchasing habits, recycling, re-using, and eliminating toxic exposures.
Just for fun, prioritize your list both ways to see how different (or similar) the results are. Seeing where they overlap may give you even more motivation!
Share some of your eco-sins or action item checklists with us here so we can offer support and encouragement!
The New Year is a time of renewal - looking ahead, visualizing, and anticipating positive changes and developments for our selves in the year to come. This time-honored tradition takes on many forms: new year’s resolutions to lose weight, get fit, stop smoking, find ways to reduce stress in our busy lives; give away or recycle old possessions that have outlived their usefulness; and clear out all manner of clutter to make room for new and better things.
If you’ve resolved to take better care of yourself this year and be healthier, there’s never been a better time to give the medicine cabinet in your bathroom a New Year’s Makeover. I’d like to encourage you to take a closer look at what’s inside yours. Even the most seemingly innocuous items can contain a veritable of soup of chemicals that may be doing you more harm than good.
Read the labels and familiarize yourself with the ingredients. Start with the products you use daily - toothpaste, mouthwash, antiperspirants or deodorants, talcum powder, face creams, lotions, and cleansers, over-the-counter cold and pain medications, “anti-bacterial” soaps, and traditional cosmetics. After all, these are products you routinely apply to your skin or your teeth and gums - both the fastest routes for substances to be absorbed into the bloodstream. When substances are absorbed into the body this way they often by-pass the liver - your body’s principle detoxifying organ or worse, clog and congest it. That means many toxic substances aren’t properly eliminated and often take up residence in the fatty tissue of our organs where they build up over time, turning into a virtual “thorn in your side” that can compromise your immune system and leave you susceptible to a host of health problems. A congested liver is also one of the fastest routes to inflammation in the body.
Ironically, many of the chemical ingredients in personal care products are there to improve the texture and consistency, appearance, or shelf-life stability of the product and have no functional purpose. To add insult to injury, many are primarily there to speed up or enhance the penetration of the other ingredients into the skin; increase the thickness and intensity of the lather (making it harder to rinse off); or make the product more visually appealing.
Eliminating products made with ingredients that are at worst, toxic and potentially harmful to your health, and at best, irritants or allergens that do not serve you on your path to more healthful living, will greatly reduce your risk of exposure and may even rid you of persistent unexplained health problems. Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally), many of the ingredients that are harmful to you, are also harmful to the environment, both on the manufacturing and production side and on the back-end as they make their way down toilets and drains and into our riverbeds and streams altering the ecological landscape.
While it may not seem like that big of a deal, transforming your bathroom cabinet is actually a very good first step toward “greening” your lifestyle. If being “greener” is one of your new year’s resolutions then stay tuned as I offer some tips and advice on how to do that over the next week or so.
A couple of years ago, my friend David Bronner (president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps) put together this cute little tongue in cheek video that pokes fun at the notoriously unreliable drug-testing kits that cops use in the field, while revealing their hidden value in determining which soaps are real, honest-to-god soaps, and which ones are really just detergents masquerading as soap!
It was shot at the first Chicago Green Festival in spring of 2007. Check it out. You’ll learn a little bit about the difference in the chemical composition of each type of soap and hopefully get a little chuckle from it all as well!
These days, many of us don’t use soap in the shower or bath anymore. Instead, we lather up with bath foams, shower gels, facial washes and scrubs, all of which rely on complex detergents (often the same ones used in heavy industry) to wash away simple dirt.
I recently came across this analogy, which really highlights an important point that bears repeating: The difference between soap and detergent is like the difference between cotton and nylon.
Soap and cotton are produced from natural products with (in most cases) little modification. Detergents and nylon are produced entirely in a chemical factory. If you use mainstream commercial brands (even so-called “Premium” brands), what you basically get is the same detergents and surfactants (foaming agents) that are found in your household cleaning products, only in a much lower concentration. Many of these harsh surfactants deplete natural fats and phospholipids from the epidermis that weakens the skin allowing toxins and bacteria to invade.
If you have sensitive or perpetually dry skin, discontinue using liquid soaps or body washes that contain Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) or Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES). These surfactants (foaming agents) are among the most commonly used foaming agents in shampoos, cleansers, body washes and even toothpastes and mouthwashes, because they are extremely cheap. They work by lowering the surface tension of water, which unfortunately, also dissolves your skin’s natural oil and strips it of its protective layer. SLS, particularly in shampoos, penetrates very easily through the hair follicles on the head, and assists other chemicals to more readily penetrate as well. It can cause skin damage, flaking, drying, cracking, roughness, and breakdown of the skin’s protective barrier.
Other ingredients to be concerned about in your liquid soap, body wash products, and shampoos: Cocamide EDTA (or similar compounds ending with DEA, TEA or MEA) along with formaldehyde-forming substances such as Bronopol, DMDM hydantoin, Diazo-lidinyl urea, imidazolidinyl urea and Quaternium-15. These are ingredients that have been known to react with other nitrogen-based ingredients to form cancer-causing nitrosamines after absorption.
And one of the worst offenders of all … Triclosan - a commonly used ingredient in many of those anti-bacterial soaps that’s also a derivative of Agent Orange! It’s considered highly toxic by the EPA and is measured in parts per billion. In addition to the toxic exposure to your skin and body from using soaps with this ingredient, scientists believe that as a result of making its way down drains and into landfills and streams, this ingredient may be leading to the proliferation of Super Bugs – i.e. bacterial strains that are highly resistant to antibiotics!
Coconut oil for soap making has been around practically since the invention of soap. Coconut oil is the most logical and efficient oil or fat to use in manufacturing soap because it creates the best soaps –both liquid and bar soaps with a rich lather that cleans your skin while protecting it. Most commercial soaps today have coconut oil as their primary ingredient or one of their main ingredients.
The lather produced by coconut oil is the result of its solubility, which comes from the lauric acid content. Solubility is what gives the soap its fast and voluminous lather –which is doubly important for liquid soaps because when they’re diluted with water, their foaming action is reduced. The minerals in hard water also reduce the lather, which is why coconut oil soaps are the best performers in unsoftened water.
Because this oil produces such a great lather, a soap made with 100% coconut oil will actually create suds in salt water! That’s why it has a reputation as a popular soap among seamen and is often referred to as a “seaman’s soap.”
From a soap-making standpoint, coconut oil in soap adds hardness to your bar. This aspect of coconut oil is extremely valuable especially when you are creating soap with other oils that if used alone, would produce a softer soap bar.
The amount of coconut oil you use to make soap can vary, depending on what type of bar you are trying to produce. For instance, if you wanted to make a mild soap say, for use on your face, then a good guideline would be to have no more than 20% of the oils you use be from coconut. That’s because too much coconut oil in your soap can be overly drying to the skin because of the drying effect of the lauric acid. But smaller amounts of coconut oil, especially when mixed with other oils like olive, jojoba or palm kernel, will actually add moisturizing properties to your soap. Apparently, through trial and error, soap makers appear to be unanimous on this.
On the other hand, if you want to make a soap that has an incredible lather, cleans extremely well, and is very hard, then you would use coconut oil during the soap making process more liberally. Like many things in life, coming up with the correct proportions is a balancing act!
I remember when I was a young girl (around 8 years or so), one of my classmates was from India and her mother use to make her put coconut oil on her hair on a regular basis to condition it. Intrigued, I asked my mom if I could try it. We did it a couple of times but found it too messy to keep it up. My hair is (and has always been) very fine and lightweight so it really sagged under the weight of the oil (plus we were probably unwittingly applying way more than we needed to). My classmate’s hair, by comparison, was a lot coarser and a bit drier so she really benefited from the treatment.
So it was no surprise to me that recently, while researching the many benefits and applications of coconut oil, I discovered a little factoid: The number one reason why people in India buy coconut oil today is to condition and nurture their hair. Studies in India have been done on how effective various oils are in treating damaged hair. One study compared mineral oil, sunflower oil, and coconut oil because these are the three most commonly used oils in hair treatment products in India.
Among the three oils, coconut oil was the only one found to reduce the protein loss for both undamaged and damaged hair when used as a pre-wash and post-wash grooming product. Both sunflower and mineral oils did nothing to reduce protein loss from hair. It turns out that coconut oil, being a triglyceride of lauric acid (its main fatty acid), has a high affinity for hair proteins. Because of its low molecular weight and straight linear chain (again being a little technical here …), it’s able to fully penetrate inside the hair shaft. Due to their chemical composition, the other oils were unable to penetrate the hair shaft and as a result, failed to protect the hair from protein loss.
I imagine that the thicker and coarser your hair is, the more it can benefit from a coconut oil treatment. You probably don’t even need to apply much to see some results. You Tube abounds with videos of women who swear by it! I would start by massaging a little into your scalp before you wash your hair. Let it soak in for a while (10 minutes or so) before shampooing. See how your hair feels after it dries. If it’s still a little dry then you might want to try adding a little to your hair after it dries and see if that works better.
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Welcome to the Aroma Zone
The Aroma Zone is a great resource for learning about aromatherapy, complementary alternative health (i.e. flower essences, homeopathy, herb, yoga, meditation, etc.), Green Living practices and how you can use them to improve your health and enhance your (and the planet's) well being.
Traditionally, celebrating Valentine’s Day involved giving a romantic gift to that special someone. The typical gifts we’ve come to associate with this occasion are jewelry, lingerie, roses, chocolates, heart-shaped candies, champagne, and candle-lit dinners. So much so that if you do celebrate this day then it’s almost expected that you conform to this tradition. This generally limits the occasion to couples, and even for couples, following this script takes a lot of the magic out of the day, leaving a little more to be desired.
If you all into the former category and the thought of celebrating Valentine’s Day leaves you feeling cold, jaded, or totally disinterested, you might find this blog post helpful. It offers 
This is where you have to go a little deeper with yourself to understand why you do something in spite of your awareness that doing it may not be the best thing for you or others.
Read the labels and familiarize yourself with the ingredients. Start with the products you use daily - toothpaste, mouthwash, antiperspirants or deodorants, talcum powder, face creams, lotions, and cleansers, over-the-counter cold and pain medications, “anti-bacterial” soaps, and traditional cosmetics. After all, these are products you routinely apply to your skin or your teeth and gums - both the fastest routes for substances to be absorbed into the bloodstream. When substances are absorbed into the body this way they often by-pass the liver - your body’s principle detoxifying organ or worse, clog and congest it. That means many toxic substances aren’t properly eliminated and often take up residence in the fatty tissue of our organs where they build up over time, turning into a virtual “thorn in your side” that can compromise your immune system and leave you susceptible to a host of health problems. A congested liver is also one of the fastest routes to inflammation in the body.
If you have sensitive or perpetually dry skin, discontinue using liquid soaps or body washes that contain Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) or Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES). These surfactants (foaming agents) are among the most commonly used foaming agents in shampoos, cleansers, body washes and even toothpastes and mouthwashes, because they are extremely cheap. They work by lowering the surface tension of water, which unfortunately, also dissolves your skin’s natural oil and strips it of its protective layer. SLS, particularly in shampoos, penetrates very easily through the hair follicles on the head, and assists other chemicals to more readily penetrate as well. It can cause skin damage, flaking, drying, cracking, roughness, and breakdown of the skin’s protective barrier. 
Coconut oil for soap making has been around practically since the invention of soap. Coconut oil is the most logical and efficient oil or fat to use in manufacturing soap because it creates the best soaps –both liquid and bar soaps with a rich lather that cleans your skin while protecting it. Most commercial soaps today have coconut oil as their primary ingredient or one of their main ingredients. 
Among the three oils, coconut oil was the only one found to reduce the protein loss for both undamaged and damaged hair when used as a pre-wash and post-wash grooming product. Both sunflower and mineral oils did nothing to reduce protein loss from hair. It turns out that coconut oil, being a triglyceride of lauric acid (its main fatty acid), has a high affinity for hair proteins. Because of its low molecular weight and straight linear chain (again being a little technical here …), it’s able to fully penetrate inside the hair shaft. Due to their chemical composition, the other oils were unable to penetrate the hair shaft and as a result, failed to protect the hair from protein loss.
