Aglio, Olio, Peperoncino: Recipe From Cairns Local Produce

I want to share with You my favourite meal (absolutely delicious):

Aglio, Olio, Peperoncino Spaghetti with Garlic, Oil, & Red Pepper Sauce
Ingredients 3 red pepper pods, seeded 3 garlic cloves 1/3 cup olive oil 6 quarts water 6 teaspoons salt 1-1/4 pounds pasta parmasan! Saute the pepper pods and garlic in the olive oil in a small frying pan over medium heat. When the garlic is golden and the pepper dark brown, remove from the oil and turn off the heat. Cook and drain the pasta thoroughly and put it on a warm serving platter or in a warm bowl. Bring the flavored olive oil to a high heat and pour it immediately over the pasta. Turn and mix so that all pasta is covered with the oil. Scrape the parmasan onto it. Serve immediately. Serves: 6

How to count your daily intake?

When I was surfing I found an interesting site about nutrition. It briefly describes how body metabolism works, what are the energy sources, what is BMI and how to calculate it and also how to calculate your daily intake.

http://mydailyintake.net

Cairns’ Personal Trainer at Osprey Reef: Christmas on the Coral Sea to integrate my mind-body&soul

Hey folks,

I want to announce I won’t be available from 18/12/08 till 01/01/09 because I will be going diviiiiiiiiiing with Mike Ball!!!! I’m looking forward forward to this trip like a child looks forward to Santa and the elves (21 more sleeps

See this video and envy! Only kidding~ I wish each and every one of you the best in following your heart this Christmas. We must not forget to take time-out for ourselves, and to take opportunities to keep on learning, sharing and integrating our mind-body&soul.

I’ll gladly give each person who wants to /get fit over the silly season a Physical Activity Program so that you can focus on cultivating your mind and soul.

Please share your mind-body&soul agenda for the Christmas/New Year period…

An Ecstatic Presence Empowerment: Three steps to engaged gratitude by guest blogger LaSara FireFox

Do you want to increase the peace in your life? Do you want more love, more joy, more presence? Do you want to take an active part in becoming the actual manifestation of “heaven on earth”?

The most revolutionary thing we can do to increase the peace is to LIVE IT.

As Gandhi said, “there is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” The more we practice peace, the more peace becomes our lives. We can live peace in every moment. I’m not talking about some abstraction, or idea of peace. Nor am I speaking of the absence of conflict. Even in the midst of conflict, we can BE peace.

Engaged Gratitude practice, in three steps:

1: Invoke and Embody The Presence of Love

Make love real. Agapic love. The big, big love that lives at the center of all things. The
flame that burns “in every heart of man, and in the core of every star.” How to realize, or
remember, this love, you may ask. The practices are many, the goal one. Gratitude
practice, asking powerful questions, inducing positive states, prayer and meditation are
all ways to invoke love.

Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we can invoke and embody the presence of
love. In my “playshop” called Being The Presence of Love, I offer not only many
practices to make this practice accessible, but also offer the template of experiencing
being present in love, so that you have a reliable, physiological anchor that will make it
easy to access the power of Divine Love in any moment.
For now, an easy way to manifest the presence of love is to think of something that
makes you feel a love beyond limits, unconditional, eternal. The perfect love. I find this
love at the heart of deep prayer, in the arms of my beloved, sharing a smile with my
child.
Think about it, and then feel it. Ahhhh. There it is. Now feel it even more. Let your heart,
your whole being, glow with this love. Of course, invoking the presence of love is only step one.
2: Grow Your Gratitude!
Gratitude heals the heart. This is true on multiple levels. Of course it makes sense on the metaphorical level – how could becoming grateful NOT heal a broken heart? When we experience loss, healing comes from realizing that the sum total of the impact of any experience was for the best. When we get this, it becomes easy to be grateful for the experiences we encounter.

In addition to the metaphorical, gratitude also heals the actual physiology of your heart. This is wonderful, and true! Gratitude practice is recommended as part of many heartsurgery and heart disease recovery programs. How does it work? Gratitude is the antidote for stress, anger, anxiety and many other ills. Stress, of course, is a huge contributor to both heart disease and heart attack.
Gratitude offers a rest to our physiological systems. For instance, say you’re standing in line at the grocery store, and the people in front of you are taking forever. You may be late getting to where ever you’re going, but is stressing out about it going to change the fact that you’re stuck in line? Not a chance!
The one thing you CAN change is how you are experiencing the moment. So, instead of obsessing about your situation, take the time and cultivate gratitude. Even starting small will work. You can be grateful that you have the money to buy food. You can be grateful that you have a chance to read those amazing headlines on the trashy mag in the rack. I get really simple with it, and remember to be grateful to have a moment to be in stillness and silence.

(Standing in line is a perfect opportunity for a moment of meditation.)

This choice is affecting you, and as a true believer in systems theory, I would say that is affects all that is. Your stress is not just your stress – it may very well affect the whole system in some subtle way. Your gratitude is the same way. As you choose to relax instead of stress, the ripples spread. Your interaction with the cashier is going to be different.

His interaction with the next person in line may well be different, too. On the personal level alone, though, the benefits are too many to mention. Gratitude is SO much nicer to hold in our cells than the alternative.
Another wonderful bonus is that because our minds sort for, and we notice, that which we expect, when we start practicing gratitude, we start noticing more and more to be grateful for.

Gratitude practice, just like any other practice, becomes easier the more you do it!

3: Make Love a Verb; Gratitude in Action!

Love and gratitude become more powerful by far, when put into engaged action. Engagement is the final step of this process. Take your love and DO something with it.
That something might be sitting in prayer, but think of how much more prayer you’d bring if you were to start hosting a weekly group prayer night at your home.
When you find gratitude for the food on your table, let it remind you that you can do your part to reduce suffering by offering food to those in need. Make a meal, box it up, and offer it to a local homeless person you have seen around. While you’re at it, have a conversation with this person.
At the Season for Nonviolence gathering a while back, Dr. Arun Gandhi pointed out that compassion is different from pity.

I paraphrase the esteemed man here; pity offers the food and hopes the person will walk away with it. Compassion offers the food, asks the person how they ended up on the streets, witnesses the story, and does it’s part to cause an end to the reasons that this person and others end up without.
Namaste. We are one. We are none. Consider yourself empowered!
About the author:
LaSara FireFox, MPT-NLP, is a master practitioner/trainer of Neuro-Linguistic
Programming/Patterning, life coach, educator, and professional speaker. LaSara helps her
clients to find balance in their lives, and alignment with their personal and family-held
values. http://lasarafirefox.com/

Mt Whitfield Conservation Park

Mt Whitfield is a forested range surrounded by urban development. Covering an area of 300 hectares, it reaches an elevation of 365 metres.

It offers many oportunities for nature based recreation , education and sport. A network of tracks allows a diversity of tropical flora and fauna habitats to be experienced.

Walking Tracks

1. Red Arrow Circuit – The 1.3 km long circuit, which takes less than an hour to complete. There are some steep sections with steps but the track may be negotiated by most people.

2. Blue Arrow Circuit - The 5.4 km long circuit, which takes 3 hours to negotiate and return. It is an rugged bush track with steep climbs and should only be attempted by fit persons. No water available.

See this map

Made by Cairns City Council

How to get there

To get there from Cairns proceed North along Sheridan Street (Captain Cook Highway), turn left into Collins Avenue. The entrance to Mt Whitfield Conservation Park is marked by a sign on the right.

This article is an extract from Visitor Information flier.

Upper Back Stretch: A common need among Cairns’ residents

More than likely when a Cairns’ resident visits the Harmonics studio, their massage needs include stress release of the upper back area.

The upper back muscles attach to the shoulder blade (scapula) and the posterior of the thoracic rib cage. It is not unusual for these large muscle sheets to become irritated (myofascial pain).  Pain in the upper back may be due to past trauma, sudden injury, chronic poor posture or overuse.

Upper back pain is very responsive to massage and stretching. Lymphatic massage can help to prevent and relieve muscle soreness. Trigger point palpation of the proximal and distal attachments can relieve stiffness an d improve circulation to the area of congestion. Yoga and power stretching (core stretching) will also be of benefit to increase flexibility of the area. The video below provides a brief how-to-stretch demo for the upper back:

A complement to these manual treatments are a rich supply of bioflavonoids in the diet, found in good quality green tea and pesticide free dark green leafy vegetables. It is also essential that you remain hydrated, so monitor your water intake to around 8-12 glasses (i.e., 250ml per glass) each day.

Recommended Reading

Neck and Shoulder Pain

Upper Shoulder Tension Relief with Joint Mobility~ The Renegade Health Show

On Your Bike!: The weather in cairns is perfect

Beach1

Originally uploaded by basykes

We at Harmonics really appreciate living so close to the Cairns Esplanade and Whitfield Range~ because we get to ride so often!

The weather is glorious. tho a bit hot in the middle of the day. Each of us tends to have a ride in the early morning, early arvo or late evening.

Remember your hats and sunscreen, and lights for the night rides.

Won’t it be great when the 1.6 million development from the city to Aeoroglen is completed?

Inspire us with your riding ventures…

The Ministry of Burger: The opinion of a Cairns’ personal trainer

After I saw today’s Jamie’s Ministry of Food I couldn’t help myself and had to write a commentary. I like that guy very much; he is trying so hard to implement very basics of cooking – eating healthy food into heads of ordinary people.

Here in Cairns, as in most other parts of the globe, Jamie is really a big icon in this business of cooking and nutrition. Why is it, in Australia at least, that advertisers and fast-food chains try to use the televised shows, and good name, of Jamie, for their own benefits. Parasites!

It really pissed me off the other night that the commercials during Jamie’s Ministry of Food, were about crap (unhealthy food); Pizza Hut, Dominos and Hungry Jacks were the few I noticed during my rant around the house at the hypocrisy of it all. Unfortunately, The Ministry of Food, is seen merely as a tool to source advertiser income, and the income of the audience who are now more likely to spend their money on “junk for their trunk”; research shows that people who feel good during a TV report much more positive feelings toward commercials shown during that programme (references on request).

These fast-food commercials should not be shown during a program that is actively doing something about increasing obesity rates, aiding those in poverty who do have not been skilled in healthy shopping and cooking habits, and just generally creating a better standard of living for those most in need of such.

I don’t think people are stupid – they really know that burgers and pizza are not healthy food; but due to the commercials being embedded in the Ministry of Food they now have a plausible excuse for over-indulging: “OK, if burgers and pizzas are advertised together with healthy food, they can’t be so bad.”

And that’s it. That’s what the companies want. They want to claim their products as healthy food. And, of course, all of this is about money. It is not about proactively taking responsibility for the part each of us (including advertisers and fast-food enterprises), have to ensure the health and well being of our communities.

Why do governments, academics and other social critiques continue to urge us on the one hand to educate ourselves toward healthy living, and on the other not use Policy to ensure that we have access to accurate and non-biased resources (i.e., due to the goals of advertisers and fast-food chains).

No wonder we continue to pay such heavy taxes, in the form of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and children who cannot focus on studies because their bodies are starved of nutrition.

Are you wanting real lifestyle change?  Harmonics: Massage, Training & Motivation will provide you with shopping tours, a “fridge blitz” and home-cooking nutrition with our Lifestyle Consultancy programs.

Share with us your lifestyle change needs via Comment or email (harmonics@zenbe.com)

And come join us over at Jaimie Oliver’s website~ HarmonicsCairns is on the blogroll. You too can join the campaign to “Pass it On”

Cairns’ Personal Trainer Offers Free Stretching Demos at the Arrows

Cairns‘ personal trainer, Jarek Sevcik, core founder of Harmonics (massage, training and motivation), emphasizes community focus.We are organizing ourselves to provide free stretching demos at the foot of the Red and Blue Arrow rainforest tracks here in Cairns.

For many people, a power walk up and down either the Red or Blue Arrow is a must~ however, is stretching before and after also part of the routine. Harmonics wants to raise awareness about the importance of stretching as part of peoples walking/jogging routines.

Power stretching (core stretching) will be demonstrated from 3:30pm-4pm on most weekdays (weather permitting) at the base of the Red and Blue Arrow (between the Botanic Gardens and The Tanks). The grassy area is well shaded~ though you may need to bring your mozzie repellent!

We will be sharing more about the powerful benefits of stretching to health and wellbeing in future posts. Today, we just wanted to give Cairn’s residents the “heads up” as to what we have planned over the next week.

Till then, check out this 8-minute stretching routine (love his workout clothes!)

By the way, if you have ever had a massage then you may wan to participate in a PhD study on just that~ massage! The online survey can be accessed via the link below:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.psychology.announce/browse_thread/thread/e55431f3a94c4b74

Share your favorite stretches here with us.

For Cairns stretchers, this personal trainer is looking forward to meeting you at the Arrows.

Parents! Personal Training is Not an “Extra”: Use Your Lifestyle to Create Change

Yesterday while catching up with a friend (and client!) the topic of financial pressures for families came up. My friend pointed out that for many parents, personal training and massage is seen as an “extra” cost.

We at Harmonics emphasize that your current lifestyle can be used to create change~ health & well being are not extras! they are essential elements for a quality life. Your weekly shopping trip is an opportunity to have a 30m walk, and to educate the kids about how to choose foods and manage a budget.

This activity can be complemented with daily water intake, adequate sleep/naps, and nutritious food choices. The dollars not spent on low nutritional foods can be redirected to celebrating achieving your families health goals.

For example, treat yourself to a 10 or 25m massage instead of one that is an hour. The release of stress and time out for yourself is necessary for those who spend most of their time giving.

Kristinia at Loving Heart Mommy shares with us how keep  on with our efforts to “put a lil’ heart” into all that we do. Her yummy and nutritious review of iLunchbox has a wealth of handy info to aid parents coordinate their current habits with healthy lifestyle changes.

How do you reward yourself at present? What ways do you take time out for yourself at the moment? Can either of these activites redirect dollars toward massage or personal training to support your lifestyle goals?