Last night I was walking through Shibuya Food Show, one of my favourite department store basement food spots (or depachika in Japanese) in Tokyo.
If you’ve never been to Japan - on the basement level of most department stores you will find a seemingly endless rabbit warren of food related stalls. Think high end food court meets a fancy grocery store… and then times it by twenty. It’s a dream come true.
You could easily spend hours (and a small fortune) in these places and it'd be worth it.
One of my favourite solo activities in Japan is to trawl through a new section of the depachika, taking 15 minutes in the rice cracker section, another 10 sampling new crop green teas or searching for my favourite freeze dried natto snack (in ume flavour, of course).
Last night, I was walking through Shibuya Food Show take-away section looking for something to eat for dinner and a salad very literally stopped me in my tracks.
When I stay stopped me in my tracks, I mean it felt like the thinly sliced pink daikon on top of an impossibly crispy bed of lettuce reached out and beckoned me towards it.
I kept walking — telling myself it was freezing outside, that I should eat something warm instead of salad, but of course I circled back around almost immediately and found myself asking for 200 grams of the kyoto vegetable salad please. When the staff was packaging up the salad (adding frozen ice packs to keep it fresh even though it was five degrees out) she mentioned the fluffy potato croquettes were half price and it was the quickest yes I ever said.
Later that night, eating the salad, the insanely fluffy croquette, as well as a little ginger eggplant soup and tofu stew to round it out, I thought to myself: this is not the first time I’ve had a life changing salad in Japan.
It was that good.
It was exactly what I needed (and wanted) to eat.
I talk about the life changing salad not only because it was life changing, but because something I have been asked a lot this year, as a person who has almost non-stop travelled for the past eight months is:
How do you stay balanced when you’re on the move?
How do you look after yourself without a permanent place to land?
It’s a good question.
When I first started my yoga and meditation practice, it made me feel so much better in almost every way. Because of this, I became incredibly rigid about it.
It’s almost like I saw the practice as something seperate to myself.
It’s almost like I saw the practice alone as making me ‘good’ or ‘better’ as a person — completely ignoring the person who was doing the practices.
I was unable to see that these practices were not actually changing me, but allowing me to BE and to see more of who I truly was with a little less anxiety, self - criticism, doubt and insecurity clouding the view.
(Note that I said a little less. Even a little less of all of those things can actually change your life - even more than a salad.)
In those first few years, when I travelled, I spent a lot of time worrying about what might happen if I let my practice slide. The days I didn’t do it, I felt a lot of guilt. The days I did do it, I felt accomplished even if I was very distracted and not present at all.
It was more about ticking a box than anything else.
I also spent a lot of time focusing on eating as ‘healthy’ as possible. Chugging green juice, eating a truly insane amount of fruit, ordering things because they seemed healthier rather than what I actually wanted to eat.
It’s almost as if I thought I would go backwards if I let myself soften.
It’s almost as if I thought I would get in trouble if I let myself eat whatever I want.
It’s interesting how much charge eat whatever you want has.
I think when we read these words we picture ourselves not so much as even looking at a vegetable and smearing whipped cream from a can all over our face.
I think of tanned health influencers with too-white teeth screaming down a camera lens about how poisonous our food is, how everyone in your family who eats from the regular grocery store is ‘asleep’.
I know food is a deeply layered (and emotional) topic for a lot of us, and there is so much that comes into it BUT for many of us, trusting our bodies to guide us to what we actually want to eat (if we have a semi-healthy relationship with food, no health issues or intolerances) could potentially be the healthiest thing we can do.
Of course, this may be the opposite of true for you.
We are all different! Please ignore what isn’t meant for you!
All I want to say is: this has definitely been true for me.
Over the last two years or so it has felt like such a relief to let go of strict spiritual routines and diets. It has brought me a huge amount of confidence to learn that when I am honest and present with myself, I can trust myself enough to give myself what I really need in terms of my spiritual practice and my health.
Sometimes that looks like a salad stopping you in your tracks when you haven’t had one for a couple of days.
Sometimes that looks like calling yourself out and choosing to drink more water or herbal infusions even when it feels boring as hell.
It’s the same with the practice.
Sometimes, the practice is sitting your butt down and meditating or stretching even when you don’t really want to and there’s a million things you would rather do, but you know you need it.
Sometimes, the practice is sleeping in because you’re exhausted.
Sometimes, the practice is being woken up by the sound of your friends kids laughing downstairs and choosing to spend time playing with them instead.
Sometimes, the practice is taking five imperfect minutes of pranayama sitting up in bed.
So often for me, those imperfect practices, the ones where there’s harsh lighting right over my head or I’m wearing jeans or there’s like 12 people mowing on my street the moment I begin or it’s much shorter than I’d hoped for end up being the best of all.
Of course, there are certainly times when we need to be a little stricter with ourselves if we’re constantly resisting something we know we need or want to cultivate in our lives (aka me continuing to actively study Japanese). But I think even in those moments we often benefit with starting super small.
And of course, there are people who genuinely thrive with strict spiritual discipline and dietary guidelines, which is beautiful too.
But it’s not inherently ‘better,’ or for everyone.
Back to the salad.
The siren song of the salad really sums it up for me.
In those early spiritual practice days of travelling I felt like I was forever chasing after something that was just out of reach.
A decade in now, the loudest call to me sounds a lot like: let go.
Let go, but stay present, stay attentive.
And you’ll know.
You’ll be called forward into what is meant for you. Salad or otherwise.
For me that’s Self - Reverence.
It’s walking this delicate line between surrender and deep trust, while also seeing yourself with extreme clarity and gentleness.
It’s the ability to both let go, and to call yourself out with love. To take action to make necessary change.
This is our January theme in TDR Studio.
When I think of the practice of Self - Reverence, I think of a golden threads of light woven in the aura (really, I do).
These golden threads come from the often difficult but beautiful choices to take more time to truly tend to ourselves: through our spiritual practices, our creative practices, the way we talk to ourselves, the way we hold ourselves, the way we make this often difficult and mundane life as sweet as possible, by taking the time and the space to notice the sweetness already surrounding us: even when it’s hard to see.
Self - Reverence is a practice, cultivated over time.
Remember: once the threads begin to come together, to weave in, they are here to stay, forever.
January Favourites
~ Tokyo winter is dryyyy and as someone who thrives in 85+ percent humidity I need all the help I can get. I know they say beauty is all on the inside but I swear to you this serum and this cream made an incredible difference to my winter skin overnight.
~ This has become a staple too. 100% shea butter in a cute and handbag friendly package.
~ I am completely and deeply obsessed with these candles.
~ Flicking between the January playlist and my new favourite bi-lingual pop artist
~ I’ve been reading this a chapter at a time over the last month or so and enjoying most of it. Like any self-help related work I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s very relevant to self-reverence, if you’re in the space for some tough love.
~ Despite popular belief I am not a huge anime girl, but this series about a medicine maker hooked me immediately. I think some of you might like it too.
~ If you want more writing on my time in Japan you might like this post from a few months back.
Self - Reverence Month
I am SO excited about this months theme. The new mini classes around womanhood, loneliness and forgiveness are some of my favourites in TDR history, too.
TDR Studio Live Workshops in January
New Moon Rest
The Soft Business Circle
Full Moon Rest
Herbal Body Oiling Workshop (!!!)
A Daily Practice for Inner Beauty & so much more.
See you in there :)
Emmie xo
The Mountain Is You changed my life FOREVER, not just because Brianna Wiest is one of my fave authors of all time but because I was reading it at a time where I knew I needed to start doing things I didn’t want to do but desperately needed to 🏔️ that’s the energy I receive from this post, too. Thank you Emmie for the reminder to listen to our internal nudges, that honoring them and getting the damn salad 🥗 is sometimes the highest form of self reverence of all.