A Wanderlust Affair

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HuffPost Article: “How to follow your passions when you’re trying to pay your bills” by Gabrielle Bernstein 

During tough economic times, many people think they need to sacrifice passion and focus solely on earning money. From a spiritual perspective, this is the exact opposite approach to generating real abundance. Yes, paying your bills takes practical action. But it also requires an internal belief system powered by inspiration and passion. Without an emphasis on passion, it’s likely that no matter how many actions you take, you’ll still wind up feeling stuck.

Neglecting passion blocks creative flow. When you’re passionate, you’re energized. Likewise, when you lack passion, your energy is low and unproductive. Energy is everything when it comes to earning. Quantum physics teaches us that our bodies are made up of subatomic particles that are energy. Your thoughts, attention and focus affect your energy and therefore everything around you — including your bank account. So when you’re thinking only about the mundane to-do lists and practical action steps, you’re lowering your energy and in effect lowering your earning power.

Your life becomes what you think about most. When you focus on following your passion and letting inspiration flow, your energy is raised and your earning capacity is strong. But when you’re uninspired and bogged down by low-level thoughts, your attracting power is weakened.

Now that you have a better understanding of the earning value of passionate, positive energy, it’s time to take it more seriously. Read on for three simple, effective ways you can bring more passion into your life — even if you’re crazy-busy.

Who said your job had to be your only source of passion?

Our culture places such a huge emphasis on our careers that we lose track of our passion projects. But who said your job had to be your only source of passion? A dear friend of mine is a powerful example of balancing passion and career. He works in corporate America but moonlights as a guitar player. Though he spends his weekdays at a desk, he spends his weekends indulging his passion projects such as gigging with his band, writing, drawing and learning about art. Though he dedicates a lot of his time to his career, there is no lack of passion in his life.

The passion of being of service

When we’re of service to the world, we feel inspired and passionate about the work that we do. Perhaps the work you’re doing is service-related — getting clear about the ways in which it serves the world may make you more passionate about it. If that’s not the case with your job, maybe you volunteer for a local charity once a month, or find a way to participate in your community, or promote bigger causes. Awaken a service mentality. When you serve the world, you serve your soul.

Shift your perception about the way you make money

If you’re hung up about the fact that your primary source of revenue doesn’t come from your true passion, shift your perspective. Be grateful for the work that you have and focus on the good stuff. Find even the smallest part of your work that ignites your passion. Maybe you love interacting with clients, or the neighborhood where you work. Maybe you’re learning something new by being on that job. Focus on what you do have and you’ll create more of what you want.

Take these action steps seriously. We all have work to do to support our economy, and if we’re void of passion we won’t have the energy and inspiration to serve. The more passion we ignite in our lives, the higher our earning capacity will be and the more we’ll impact financial growth in our country. When we all raise our thoughts we’ll raise our bank accounts — and greatly serve the world.

You say there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ and we must fight.

I say there is only an us. And we must love.

I wrote this for you. 

From HuffPost Article: 

1. Develop a reasonable goal and a reasonable plan.
2. Create a list of reasons why it’s important to you to reach your goal, and read this list (even when you don’t feel like it) every morning and whenever when you’re tempted to deviate from your plan.
3. Give yourself credit whenever you engage in behaviors designed to help you reach your goal or avoid behaviors that would steer you away from your goal.
4. Set up a plan to be accountable (to yourself or to another person or group).
5. Respond to sabotaging thinking.
6. Identify obstacles and problem solve in advance.
7. Prepare for feelings of discouragement, disappointment and deprivation.
8. Decide on how you will reward yourself when you reach sub-goals.
9. Focus on the experiences you deem “worth it.”
10. Get back to basics when you get off track.

Tried another awesome recipe from FoodBuzz’s:The Tolerant Vegan, Nikki.

It’s another friend’s birthday today, a great opportunity to try a new recipe. I’ve made a couple of vegan and non-vegan chocolate cakes before but never incorporated coffee into it. Quite excited about this one, I could smell the aroma of the ingredients mixing~

So, here are the ingredients.

Cake

•  3 cups all-purpose flour
•  2 cups refined sugar
• 3/4 cup of cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 3/4 cup of vegetable oil
• 1.5 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoon distilled white vinegar
• 1 cup brewed coffee
• 1 cup water

Chocolate Melty Frosting

• 1/2 cup of margarine (or earth balance) room temperature
• 2/3 cup of cocoa powder
• 3 cups powder sugar
• 1/3 cup vanilla soymilk (or almond)
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup of chocolate chips (optional)

1) Preheat oven to 350ºC (Brew coffee while getting ingredients ready)

Mix flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and sea salt together.

2) Mix all the dry ingredients thoroughly.

3) Next, combine the oil, vanilla extract, vinegar, water and coffee.

Look at the colors!

Mix it up!

4) Time to combine the flour mix with the wet ingredients.

5) Stir to smooth

Damn, so chocolatey!

Stir in previously greased and floured pan.

Baked for 20 minutes approximately. The recipe called from between 30-40 minutes but since I was using a large rectangular pan, cake was ready faster.

6) It’s frosting time! Combine the powder sugar, cocoa, vanilla and margarine.

7) Added chocolate chips at then end and mixed them up.

8) Time to dress this chocolate cake with chocolate frost. Start with the middle.

Had some manjar blanco (dulce de leche), a caramel sauce laying around so spread it on the other half. If you’re looking to make a pure vegan cake, don’t use this sauce, it;s made with milk. (Nevertheless, cake still tastes amazing without it!) 

Chocolate madness!

Original recipe adapted from: Food Buzz’s The Tolerant Vegan

I’ve developed this obsession for red velvet cake recently. It has such a seductive name and color overall. So I was determined to make one, just needed to find the perfect occasion for it (otherwise I can easily finish it all by myself!)

So I found the recipe, you know what is even MORE awesome? The fact it’s vegan! I’m still in the flirting stage of going completely vegan. Started last summer from one day to another…which was probably not the best decision I’ve ever made. It was too much for my body to handle and well, due to lack of organization and meal planning, I became ill and lacked quite a few nutrients but that was my fault for jumping in too fast :P.

Nevertheless, I like to try as much vegetarian/vegan recipes as possible. The cake is vegan while the frosting isn’t (I used philadelphia cream cheese instead of a vegan version).

So here are the ingredients:

Cake ingredients

- 2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

- 2 cups vegan refined sugar

- 1 1/2 tbsp cocoa (added a bit more then required, I have a weakeness for cocoa!)

- 1 tsp refined sea salt

- 1 tsp baking soda

- 2/3 cups oil

- 2 cups nondiary milk (I used 1 cup of soymilk and 1 cup of vanilla almond)

- 1 tbsp distilled white vinegar

- 1 tsp vanilla

- 2 tbsp food coloring liquid

Frosting Ingredients

- 1 pack of Philadelphia reduced fat cream cheese (For vegan option: You can substitute with Toffuti cream cheese, you wouldn’t notice the difference!)

- 1 cup of margarine 

- 1 tsp vanilla

- 6 cups of confectioner’s sugar (could’ve used 5, it was very sweet)

Step 1: Preheat oven to 350ºC

For the cake: 

Combine the flour, refined sugar, cocoa, salt and baking soda (whisk together)

Next, whisk together the oil, milk, white vinegar and vanilla.

 Add food coloring after.

This is how it should look, I was a bit paranoid at first because it was far too bright but the recipe online said that’s how it’s supposed to be. Because once cake is baked, color turns into a much darker red. (And she was right!)

Now combine the wet ingredients with the dry one and whisk them together for approximately 2 minutes until you get a smooth texture.

Beautiful bright red color <3

Pour batter into pan (You could use two circular pans to join them at the end but I didn’t have two so I used a large rectangular one instead)

Bake cake for 30-40 minutes. Check it once it hits 30 minutes and stick a toothpick in to see if it’s fully done. If it comes out clean, then it’s good to go!

Put cake on top of a wire rack to let it cool.

Now for the frosting…the OH SO HEAVENLY SERIOUSLY ADDICTED FROSTING!

Have the cream cheese and butter should be at room temperature. Mix them all, pour in the confectioner sugar and beat until combined and smooth.

Results: DELICIOUS TOPPING FOR YOUR LOVELY CAKE!

Had a lot left, so just used it for cupcakes toppings and such.

Now back to the cake. After cake cools ( I waited for almost an hour, so it will be solid enough to work with without destroying it…although I had a little accident but still managed to put it together)

Start frosting the cake with buttercream cheese :)

Looked like a big ball of snow at the end haha.

Well, Voilá! Mt very first Red Velvet Cake.

And certainly won’t be my last :)