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Raw Blueberry Cheesecake

Raw Vegan Blueberry Cheesecake

From the book, Whole Girl by Sadie Radinsky

Yield: 8 servings

 

INGREDIENTS:

CRUST

  • 1 ½ cups roasted pecan pieces 
  • 2 Tbsp monk fruit maple-flavored syrup or pure maple syrup
  • 1 Tbsp coconut oil, melted

 

FILLING

  • 2 cups raw cashews or cashew pieces, soaked overnight in 4 cups of water, then rinsed
  • 1 cup freeze-dried or fresh blueberries
  • ½ cup coconut cream, from the top of a chilled 13 1/2-ounce can of full-fat coconut milk
  • 2 Tbsp monk fruit maple-flavored syrup or pure maple syrup
  • 2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
  • 2 Tbsp coconut oil, melted 
  • 1 cup fresh blueberries

 

INSTRUCTIONS:

CRUST

  1. Line the bottom of a 6-inch springform cake pan with a circle of parchment paper and set aside.
  2. In a high-speed blender, blend together the crust ingredients just until it forms a dough-like consistency. It might help to use your blender’s tamper, if you have one. Do not overblend or it will turn into pecan butter!
  3. Press the pecan crust evenly into the bottom of the cake pan and place in the freezer while you prepare the filling.

 

FILLING

  • Without washing your blender, combine the filling ingredients (except for 1 cup of fresh blueberries) and blend until completely smooth.
  • Pour the filling onto the frozen crust and top with 1 cup fresh blueberries. Place in the freezer for approximately 5 hours, or until it’s frozen through.
  • Using a butter knife, gently swipe around the inside of the pan to loosen the cake. Remove the cake from the springform pan. Slice and serve. Store any leftover cake in an airtight container in the freezer for up to 1 month. Thaw for 15 minutes before serving.

blueberry cheesecake

 

This recipe is featured in the young adult book, Whole Girl: Live Vibrantly, Love Your Entire Self, and Make Friends with Food by Sadie Radinsky.

 

sadie radinskySadie Radinsky is a 19-year-old blogger and recipe creator. For over six years, she has touched the lives of girls and women worldwide with her award-winning website, wholegirl.com, where she shares paleo treat recipes and advice for living an empowered life. She has published articles and recipes in national magazines and other platforms, including Paleo, Shape, Justine, mindbodygreen, and The Primal Kitchen Cookbook. She lives in the mountains of Los Angeles. For more, visit wholegirl.com.

 

 

 

 

whole girl bookSounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Indiebound

Meet the Author of Dinos Don’t Do Yoga

The Author
Catherine Bailey is the author of multiple picture books, including Harbor Bound and Mind Your Monsters. For more, please visit catherinebaileybooks.com.

Dinos Don't Do Yoga CoverThe Book
Rex is a dinosaur with a rough, tough crew. But when a yoga-loving dinosaur comes to town, Rex and his fierce friends discover there’s more to strength than big muscles and bad attitudes. This fun-filled story features timely themes about kindness, friendship, and being able to see past our differences.

 

 

 

 

Has your book taken on a new meaning in the world’s current circumstances? Is there anything you would have included in your book if you were writing it now?

Dinos Don’t Do Yoga was written back during the calm and quiet of 2018. At the time, it was simply a funny story about a grumpy T. rex. Today we are living in a very different world. Things have changed dramatically in terms of how people interact with each otherfrom social distancing to increased activism.

So now when I read Dinos Don’t Do Yoga, the relationships between the characters are more meaningful. I hope my readers see kindness, acceptance, and connection (in addition to a funny story!). I also hope that the book inspires children to explore yoga as a physical means of dealing with the stress of these crazy times. Yoga is a beautiful way to get back to a happy mental space.

After all, if dinos can do itso can we!

Q&A image

Send us a photo of you and your pet, and let us know if your pet had any role in helping you write your book!

Here we have a snapshot of the world’s most annoyed cat. I decided to share this particular picture because it reminded me of the Dinos Don’t Do Yoga cover. The illustrator of the book, Alex Willmore, brilliantly contrasted the highly disgruntled Rex (complete with eye twitch!) with his blithely happy costar, Sam. I laugh every time I see that artwork!

The same is true for this photograph of myself and our family cat, Chloe. This picture was taken right after her first (and probably last) bath. In my defense, I only bathed her because she had a small flea problem. She still has not forgiven me.

bailey cat

What is something about you that doesn’t make it into your author bio?

bailey 3

My author biography contains all sorts of fun tidbits, but it doesn’t mention this one cool thing about me: I am kid-sized! By which I mean I’m very short for my age. You cannot tell from (most) pictures, but even though I am an official middle-aged grown-up, I am only 4’8” tall. That is about the size of the average second grader! 

So why do I mention it? What’s so great about being super small? Well, a lot of things! But best of all is that it makes me empathetic and mindful of other people’s differences. And that makes me a better writer. For example, it was easy for me to create the characters of Rex (challenged by his petite arms) and Sam (a true “outsider”) in Dinos Don’t Do Yoga. It is true what they say—great things come in small packages.

 

Dinos Don't Do Yoga Cover

Learn More

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Meet the Author of . . . A Healing Space

The Author

Matt Licata, PhD, is the author of A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times, coming out in November, 2020. In addition to being an author, he is a practicing psychotherapist and hosts in-person retreats. His work incorporates developmental, psychoanalytic, and depth psychologies, as well as contemplative, meditative, and mindfulness-based approaches for transformation and healing. He co-facilitates a monthly online membership community called Befriending Yourself, is author of The Path Is Everywhere, and is the creator of the blog A Healing Space. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. For more, visit mattlicataphd.com.

Healing Space Book Cover

The Book

Is healing a matter of solving a problem, curing a sickness, or making our wounds disappear? “In my experience,” writes depth psychotherapist and meditation teacher Matt Licata, “true healing is not a state where we become liberated from uncomfortable feelings, but one in which we are free and flexible to welcome our complete experience—whether happy or difficult—more fully.” With A Healing Space, Dr. Licata invites us to explore a more vital sense of wellness—one that does not put us in opposition to life’s hardship, but instead welcomes all experience as part of the soul’s majestic vastness.

 

 

Are you learning any new tricks or skills during this time (COVID)? Has your book taken on a new meaning in the world’s current circumstances? Is there anything you would have included in your book if you were writing it now?

One thing I’ve been struck by in this time of COVID is just how formative, powerful, and challenging solitude can be for each of us, and how through confronting our aloneness we will inevitably meet parts of ourselves that we had lost contact with in times of status quo. As relational beings, wired to connect and co-regulate with one another, it can be so counter-instinctive to be alone, for there to be an absence of “good others” in our lives, and how much we take this for granted.

What has become a lot clearer to me is how we can call on these “internal others” who, through many moments of kindness, attunement, empathy, and compassion, reside as an “internal network” within us, and how important this can be in times of physical separation—and how truly available they are, even from afar, in ways that might surprise us. 

I’m happy that A Healing Space is coming out during this time as it is centered around the art and practice of “befriending” and what that might mean in our contemporary world. Had I known that we would be sheltering in place and social distancing as we are, I would have more explicitly addressed the unique ways that isolation, solitude, and even loneliness can serve as actual allies on the path of awakening and healing, portals or doorways to a more merciful, wise, and compassionate relationship with ourselves and others.

What is one unexpected thing or habit that inspires your writing practice? 

So much of my writing comes out of conversations I have with others—friends, family, students, clients, and even strangers. I often find myself deeply curious and even in awe at how others find meaning in their experience, make sense of it, and organize it in ways that are similar—and also at times quite different—to my own. 

There’s something about being in conversation that opens me to another person’s heart, to their soul, to their psyche, and I often leave a conversation with new ideas, lenses, or reality tunnels, which I tend to explore via image and language. 

It’s sometimes not easy for me to “sit down and write” in a general and abstract way. It requires live interaction with another human being or with the natural world in order to flow. It’s almost like I wait to hear a certain whisper or inner song that arises from conversation and quickly scramble to be the scribe for that to come into the world.

If there is a book that started your spiritual journey, what was it? How old were you, and how did you discover it? How would you describe its impact?

The Razor's Edge

The first overt “spiritual” book I remember reading was in my senior year of high school: The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham. I would have been 17 at the time and had always been a bit of a dreamer with a vivid imagination and deep curiosity and wonder as to whether I really belonged in this place. 

It was an identification with the protagonist, Larry Darrell, that catalyzed a certain longing in me, a knowing that there was more to this life than it appeared. To this day, I can return to some of those feelings I felt at the time, an opening or crack in reality, you might say, that invited me into a life of deeper meaning, magic, and aliveness. 

I reread the book while traveling in India in my early 20s and continued my connection with Maugham and with Darrell, especially with Larry’s journeys in India himself. I had a kindred spirit out there somewhere and I remember that meaning a lot to me at the time, that there was at least one other person who wondered and wandered in the same way that I did.

Healing Space Book Cover

Learn More

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes&Noble | Bookshop | Indiebound

Geneen Roth: No Situation Is Unworkable

Tami Simon speaks with Geneen Roth, author of the best-seller Feeding the Hungry Heart and the Sounds True audio learning course When Food Is Food and Love Is Love. We discuss the spiritual lessons which resulted from Geneen’s financial losses with disgraced investment advisor Bernie Madoff, and how this experience caused her to re-examine many of her long-held beliefs about money, loss, and the preciousness of this moment. (67 minutes)

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Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, one of the foremost researchers studying sound and its effect on the brain and body. Based on his discoveries of how specific frequency patterns can create health benefits, Dr. Thompson has created dozens of popular brainwave entrainment audio programs, including Brainwave Suite, Alpha Relaxation System, and Delta Sleep System. In this episode, Tami speaks with Dr. Thompson about the science behind brainwave entrainment and how it can affect our physiology, the discovery of the gamma brainwave state that occurs during periods of deep meditation, and the power of what Dr. Thompson calls primordial sounds. (75 minutes)

Mark Nepo: Holding Nothing Back

Mark Nepo is a poet, philosopher, and spiritual teacher who is the author of numerous books and audio projects, including the New York Times #1 bestseller The Book of Awakening, which made the list of Oprah’s Ultimate Favorite Things. With Sounds True, Mark has published many books and audio courses, including Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon has an intimate conversation with Mark about the two most important lessons he has learned from his journey with cancer, the role of effort and grace in our lives, what it means to take “the exquisite risk,” and how we can shift our perspective to see with the eyes of the heart.
(73 minutes)

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