Harsha and Sufi Rigney produce a wonderful calendar every year that is full of wonderful hint, tips and tid-bits about gardening by the moon, your health and various other aspects. I have been reading Harshas horoscopes for years and they are always amazingly spot on. They live in New Zealand so the calendar they make is geared towards the Southern Hemisphere. As we are now living in Canada I am hoping to generate enough interest in this wonderful Moon Calendar that they will make a version for us in the Northern Hemisphere as well. To further this aim, I am posting Harsha’s health horoscopes for 2010 from this years calendar. If you like what you see, please send Harsha and Sufi a message begging them to make a calendar for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. You can contact them through their website www.astrovision.co.nz. The following is taken from the Moon Calendar 2010 and is written by Harsha Rigney. I have added in the details of this years solar and lunar eclipses of which there are four this year. Please read more–find your sign and learn what you can do to help yourself stay healthy and strong.

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Most of my life I have been excessively healthy. No cavities, never sick, and with rapid healing powers so that I have no scars despite the multitude of oven burns, chopped fingertips and other disasters that being a chef generally involve (I have chopped off the tip of my left pointer finger several times but you wouldn’t know by looking at it!). I took that amazing health for granted, assumed that it was just who I was and didn’t stop to think for a second that it might not last. Working in the fast-paced and highly demanding culinary industry stresses your body physically, the long hours and high pressure alone are quite enough to wear you down over time, but along with that for years I maintained a diet of coffee and cigarettes, and generally didn’t really put anything else into my body. After a couple years of this I discovered that I was highly neurotic, with blood sugar swings that left me an emotional basket case.

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A couple years ago I read a book about how women used to be given electro-shock treatment for their ‘hysteria’ and assumed that those terrible days were over decades ago so I was very interested in this article about how electroshock treatment has had a revival and is now being used with even higher voltage than in the ‘good ole days’.

Excerpts taken from:

Think Again–Even toddlers and pregnant women are being shocked

By Dr. John Breeding, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses

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After reading Anna’s positive experiences with the GAPs diet I ordered the book and have just finished reading it, I have tried a lot of diets over the years especially after living in a moldy apartment in Wellington, NZ which has resulted in problems with my digestive tract ever since. November last year was a month of non-stop rain here in Vancouver, BC and with the temperature change, was the perfect breeding ground for mushrooms, mold and yeasts. As a result our health problems reared their ugly heads again and showed us that we still have an overgrowth of harmful yeast in our systems. In some ways this is good because we at least know that we need to deal with it.

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There is an amazing lady Harsha Rigney who is an Astrological Councellor. She lives in New Zealand and writes the most spot on and comprehensive horoscopes I have ever had the opportunity to read. She also produces a fantastic Astrovision Moon Calendar, which is specific to the Southern Hemisphere but is full of very pertinent information. Her health horoscopes for 2010 were recently published in the Healthy Options December issue and brings light to the challenges we are all facing…

“We have all stepped into the pressure zone–no one is exempt; we are all under the challenge to break through the confining control of fear to come to a new dimension of living. Humanity is in the process of metamorphosis–both globally and for each of us individually. As in the stages of metamorphosis, as each new life form beckons, it initiates the process of death for the old identity before the new life can emerge.”

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I was given a special treat this year for my birthday–lunch out at the Sha Lin Noodle House in Vancouver, BC. They don’t take reservations so we crowded into the doorway to get out of the rain and hovered hungrily over the nearest table, the wait wasn’t long and we were soon seated with a great view of the glass-enclosed kitchen where noodles were being tossed, cut, pulled and cooked. We ordered noodles in various states as well as cucumbers in a toasted sesame dressing which was fantastic. The helpings were huge, even though we were stuffed we walked out the door with some hefty doggy-bags.

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This week I was finally able to send in my application for Health Insurance in Canada. It has been 4 years since I had coverage, and during this period I was the unhealthiest that I have ever been (so typical eh?). In one of those synchronistic events a friend also sent me the link to the video To Your Health by Meena Nanji and Ofunne Obiamiwe. It is hard to fathom what it means on an individual level when we hear numbers like 47 million Americans do not have health insurance and half of all bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills. Embarrassingly, the US also comes in very low on the scale of universal health coverage–ranked at 37th in the world. This video helps to make these facts personal.

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I have just finished reading the incredible book Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts who escaped from an Australian jail and ended up in Bombay (Mumbai) where he got in to all kinds of crazy and dangerous situations. It is a huge chunk of a book, but written so well. Some parts of it are very hard to stomach, making it similar in some ways to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. In reading the book Gregory mentions the incredible phenomenon of the lunch-box delivery system that has been running in Mumbai since 1880. It is a fascinating daily event. It seems the lunch-boxes are called dabba or tiffins and the carriers are called wala and they even have their own website called My Dabbawala. Seems like something that might be good for school lunches…yum!

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Published September 2009 in Healthy Options magazine, New Zealand

When I was a kid I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to live in every city in the world. I wanted to get to know the feel of the place and the people that lived there. Although I am nowhere near having reached such a goal, I have lived and worked in several widely different places and can say that there is definitely a personality to a place which infuses the various species that reside there. For example, Aotearoa (New Zealand), seems to call people to her and then challenges them to the Nth degree, often bringing them to the point Odin reached as he hung upside down from Yggdrasil, the world tree. For many people this challenge comes instantly in the form of asthma and allergies, for others more slowly through relationships and interactions with other elements.

I saw this more clearly when my man, Fred, arrived from New York. Aotearoa was a big shock to him in many different ways, the first of these was the amazing hospitality we received from friends of a friend. We were moving to Wellington, winter was beginning and we had just spent a freezing night camping. When we called them, they’d just gotten back from a funeral in Napier, but opened up their home to us for the night and even fried us up some tasty egg sandwiches. We were fortunate to have found a place to move into the next day and they sent us off in the morning with their extra space heater to get us started. Both of us were utterly flabbergasted by this open spirit of hospitality, but Fred’s sense of order from his upbringing in New York—where you never leave anything unlocked—was shattered.

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Last month I got a great email in my inbox from Out of The Box Sampler inviting me to share a sample for their monthly box. This was great news and I started trying to figure out what in the world I could make 25 of that wasn’t gonna take me a whole month, but that would also be a sample of the items that I have in my handmade store Hella Delightful.

There isn’t much there, but I hope to add to it as projects show their faces. At the moment I am in a new location and need to find some wild spots that are forage-able, so all the stock I have is it. Anyway I thought of making bundles of half-sized yarrow stalks, but I found the size too small to be usable counting the I Ching.

I had collected a bunch of cherry blossoms during the spring this year and had taken photos like mad as well and was really wishing I could find a good way to share these photos. As a kid I used to make boxes out of old Christmas cards to look like miniature Christmas presents to hang on the tree as decorations, I used to love doing it, so I decided to try making some tiny boxes out of the photos of cherry blossoms. I may have made them too small in retrospect, but I didn’t really collect that much of the cherry blossoms.

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