Save major time and money with this grocery list template and bonus online flyer trick

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

Overwhelmed by choice, the modern hunter/gatherer can easily fall prey to the psychological manipulation of 21st century grocery stores. Arm yourself! In a retail environment specifically designed to seduce you into following its lead, this grocery list template will let you get in and out without succumbing to temptation or be paralyzed in the produce aisle. I’ve been there, bag of carrots in hand, caught in a moment of near existential angst – “where do I go from here!?”

Click Here To Download Grocery List Template

Stress, existential or otherwise, causes us to think with our limbic/emotional reactive brain. Use this structured list to guide your rational brain gently through the aisles. The vegetable section is given the largest space on the template to give a direct visual cue to load up on soil born succulence and minimize less healthy items. Yes, there are some cravings that demand satisfaction, but you can’t seriously tell me you woke up dreaming about that jumbo bag of novelty gummies on the endcap of aisle #3.

*BONUS* I saved $45 at the checkout the first time I used this trick! Most grocery store chains now post their weekly specials flyer online. Write these sale items into your grocery list template before you fill in the rest. With the sale items on the page in front of you, you can then build the remainder of your grocery list and Meal Map (details in an upcoming post) around these foods.

Follow these links to your find grocery store’s weekly specials:
Sobeys * Loeb * Safeway * Loblaws

Don’t see yours? Links to other Canadian grocery stores can be found at Smartflyercanada.com. And if you’re looking for links to American stores Click Here.

Whatever you are doing at this exact moment is exactly what you want to be doing

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

I know you don’t believe me, especially if you’re tied to a computer when it’s a cartoon beautiful day outside or you’re just about to do the dishes. But think about it. Your brain is an incredibly efficient piece of equipment. Its network of neural linkages is structured according to genetics and interwoven according to experience. You think you have to go to work. You think you have to do the dishes. But if you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t do it. Plain and simple.

Our rational mind, our prefrontal cortex, is essentially in service to our limbic system. This reptilian, emotional center is the influencing force on the parameters of our logic and ensuing rational arguments. Brain scans show that a decision can be predicted up to 7 full seconds before our conscious minds become aware of the outcome. Consciousness is the gatekeeper, and final reasoning checkpoint before we act. Self is the entire system acting together.

Your alarm goes off… “Oh gawd I don’t want to go to work!” So why do you get up? You want to maintain and support your social relationships. You want to get your paycheck so you can keep your house and enjoy the security and pride of ownership. You want to keep your car so you have the freedom of travel and mobility (I happen to be a renter who takes the bus… sigh, but the same theory holds).

Addiction and trauma can skew the system, and if you find yourself saying “I don’t want to be doing this but I can’t stop,” what you can do is stop kidding yourself. If your dopamine/reward system is getting-off on a behaviour, well, that’s the very definition of ‘want’. OCD is another example. If your limbic fear control is overreacting, it will, ever so desperately, ‘want’ relief. Own that want. I know the word gets a bad rap in our culture, but there should be no shame in admitting the truth when it can give you the power you need to start making real changes in your life.

Admitting that your adopted value system and priority scale dictate your decisions, and not some external taskmaster forcing you to keep plodding away on some determinist treadmill, will help put your world back into your hands. Changing the language that traps us in our logic loops is the first step in the challenging process of changing those worlds.

How to use brain priming to improve your productivity and quality of life

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

This simple 3 step formula will allow you to design life strategies based on your own unique neural network of associations and experiences. Brain priming, where “exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus”, is essentially the firing of neurons that are linked in your brain. This happens automatically and below the level of conscious thought. For example, student subjects primed with words related to the elderly left the experiment walking slower than the control group.

But we can make brain priming an active, rather than just a passive, process. Self-priming before an activity and extending that stimulus throughout its duration can help us tackle difficult tasks with more energy and improved perspective by taking advantage of the brain’s existing network of linkages. And what task could be more difficult, more intimidating, more soul destroying, more ‘oh-gawd-why-me’ agonizing than… cleaning the house.

Step 1: Identify the activity and hypothesis your initial linkages (concepts, associations, emotions). Try to be as honest and intuitive as you can. You can use the diagram above as a model. It shows a simplified network of what, in reality, is quite a messy bit of between-the-ears business. But I’m a sucker for symmetry, both in my men and in my visual aids.

Step 2: Identify the positive (encouraging links are in blue) and negative (paralyzing links are in red) connections/associations. The positive links are your Gateway Connections.

Step 3: Identify sensory and memory recall experiences that will stimulate these same positive attitude/energy bundles of neurons. Here’s where it gets fun! Get psyched to try a tough new recipe by Youtubing with some Anthony Bourdain… Wear a tie and watch ‘Report on Business’ TV before an economics exam… Give your partner a massage before asking them to do the dishes (maybe I should have tried that one)… Go ahead and get creative! Engage your network strategy and keep those areas lit for as long, and as intensely, as possible. In this example, cute underwear (just don’t ask about the ‘in control’) and Janis Joplin’s rockin’ blues link to my three positives about cleaning. Note: ‘setting the stage’ has an extra semantic bonus with Joplin. Joplin and panties also have their own web of interconnecting linkages (shown in green) to directly counteract the original red negatives, thereby overriding them.

And because any scientific strategy is best served with a completely gratuitous selfie, I offer you hard-core proof that this brain priming formula will make even the most intimidating task suddenly… dare I say… far more enticing.

‘Shrunken head’ man-rescue breakfast oatmeal

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

As a follow-up to the ‘I want sex tonight’ steak sandwich, this testosterone boosting oatmeal breakfast recipe will give you the stamina and extended appetite satisfaction to take on whatever – and whoever! – the day throws your way. Freud’s head shrinking was on point about one thing… it always comes back to sex! (Nutrients that increase testosterone listed in brackets)

2 servings (approx 1 cup) oatmeal (avenacosides, arginine)
1 sliced banana (potassium, B vitamins, bromelain)
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds (leucine, magnesium, omega-6, zinc)
1/4 cup raisins (magnesium, boron)
1/4 dried cranberries
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cups water
milk (vitamin D, calcium)
honey (chrysin)

Prepare oatmeal according to package (stovetop method and large flake oats recommended, but microwave and quick oats are fine). Halfway through cooking time add cinnamon, sliced banana, pumpkin seeds, raisins, and cranberries. Continue cooking until oats are tender and dried fruit ‘shrunken heads’ are plump, juicy, and engorged. Top with honey and milk as desired. Gorge yourself. Then read the inspiration story below…
I lead the waiting oddity of a man down the hall to the office I used with my first Blank Canvas Living creative counselling client, the fire-breathing redhead, but he won’t follow me through its green glass door.

“No offense, Miss,” he says, with a strange mixture of natural shyness and forced (or trained) instant intimacy, “but I’m sick of little rooms and getting my head shrunk. I already start too many mornings with my psychoanalyst. I just want you to give me another recipe like that sandwich. My wife’s been making it for me twice a week for the last month, and I was thinking maybe we could add a Saturday bonus to the repertoire?”

“So you’re married to the redhead, eh?” My memory of her abusive attitude is still painfully fresh. “Happy to hear the sandwich is working.” I wink and invite him to sit with me on the tiled hallway floor. He looks confused, but sits down obligingly with his back to the door. I’m not surprised. He’d have to be used to taking orders by now, especially from women.

“She told me it’s her prescription,” he says, “but to be honest, it’s been so long since she did anything nice for me that she could serve me Kraft Dinner and I’d be just as pumped. I’ve been feeling like shit for so long and all my psychoanalyst ever wants to talk about is how I got messed up as a kid when my father took off. But I gotta tell you, that sandwich makes me feel so much better than all that talking ever does… better about everything.”

Maybe it’s the unreality of the scene, but I can’t resist plunging straight in: “Look, I’m going to go out on a limb here. This isn’t hard science or anything, and this might come off a bit harsh, but we really do tend to marry our parents. I know I did. If your mom was anything like your… um… ‘passionate’ wife, not many men could handle it. And to blame your dad for the fact you’ve gone and got yourself stuck in the exact same situation doesn’t make any sense. Now you’re some raisin headed depressive spending a fortune just to give all your power away to the past. You say you start your mornings getting your head shrunk? I bet you don’t even have breakfast and give yourself half a chance at a decent day.”

He doesn’t say anything. Nothing. The dead air is suffocating. Why the hell did I go on like that?? I hardly have any training and now I’m digging my fingers into some poor guy’s brain like I’m some sort of oracle of marital wisdom!!? All he wanted was a f&**king weekend sex recipe. Shit.

“You know,” he says… finally (I take a deep breath and brace for the worst), “I think you might be right.”

“About the breakfast thing?”

“About everything.”

This is too easy. He’s either faking insight just to humour me, or his malleability is inherent and would make psychoanalysis that much more dangerous to his particular brain.

“Do you have kids with your wife?” I ask. He nods. “Ok, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to take three weeks off therapy and I’m going to give you a breakfast recipe to maximize your man-strength. And you’re going to spend that therapy time doing high intensity excercise. This is your official prescription. You’ve got to be at your best to take on that woman of yours – in life and in bed! You’re not going to be your dad and cop-out. You’re going to get your testosterone up, your brain healthy, and you’re going to show your family what it means to be a f*&king man!”

He nods. Hope, yes, I can see a glimmer of it deep in the wrinkled sockets of his sunken eyes. And as I watch, his shriveled head begins to swell.

This is a Story Thread post – Click to read more…

Make love to the world or make the world’s perfect salad?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Cymbria Wood

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked jobs in both industries, but there comes a time when a girl’s got to break free and make the choice to say THIS is who I am…

This brain is blessed with the genetic trick to be able to translate the raw violence of our humanity into short black strokes on a page. Words. I’ve teased them, held them, rolled them around in my mouth until they’ve begged for release. But it is never enough.

The same brain, the creator of worlds, demands a physicality. I have clothed my body in my own designs, used objects and images to pull people into exotic, intoxicating paradigms – where I’ve teased them, held them, rolled them around in my mouth until they’ve begged for release. But it is never enough.

The same brain, the woman, craves the deepest connection. Love. Faith. Family. A loyalty and consistency so in conflict with the gnashing Rimbaud mind. Love. I tease him, hold him, roll him around… But it is never enough.

I live for ideas, and for story. I am an exploration, and I am a woman. There is no ‘happy middle ground’. So what then? Be Lee Miller? Blaze through my own physicality, run a bath at the high point, then submit to decay? Be Terry Richardson / Olivier Zahm? Run around with a camera in one hand and my manhood in the other? Flash a nipple once every dozen posts or so, just to keep my audience hooked? No.

Do I blog my way to the world’s perfect salad? Harness my creative intellect and train it down, tame it down, to service the ultimate temporal/individual subjective? Just to make everybody else happy and safe? No. Not when the perfect salad is a frank impossibility, especially when compared to the tempting universality of the perfect blow job. NO.

Take ‘time’ out of the equation and the ‘world’ disappears. There is only this moment of interaction, you and I, giving and receiving. What if I told you I’ve found a way? Not to straddle, oscillate between, or deny these conflicting extremes of existence, but a format for their expression and a place to mediate alternative, individualized, solutions? Would you believe me? Would you dare? After a dedicated program of study in current brain science and the historical evolution of ideas, the time has come for me to say: “Let’s both have the balls to find out.”
If the only way to draw instant creative success in our current cultural paradigm is for me to dance naked down the street with BlankCanvasLiving.com plastered all over my body, then no. So it might be just us for a while. That’s fine with me. I’ll do my very best to tease you, hold you, roll you around in storied ideas until you beg not for release, but for permission to take our warm, close world into your own.

Secret to how to REALLY start doing things differently

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

I once witnessed a car accident while driving with my sister-in-law. At impact, the red minivan two cars ahead of us lifted up and spiraled like a football into the ditch. Mercifully, there were only minor injuries. After attending with water (and chocolate) until the paramedics arrived, we were asked to write witness statements. Upon reading each other’s, my sister-in-law and I were surprised to find that what we’d paid attention to was wildly different. Our attentions can be inherent to our coded personalities, cultural, or based on personal experience. But here’s the secret: retraining your attentions will give you incredible freedom of action.

Now let’s go to the grocery store. If you noted and evaluated every single one of the tens of thousands of products sold at your average grocery store… well, quite simply, your brain would shut down. In reality, we each walk into a markedly different store, depending on our tastes and habits. Like those big green signs on the highway, our attentions allow the rest of the landscape to blur into the background. A few weeks ago, I was standing in the salad dressing aisle with a bottle of Miracle Whip in my hand – not only Easy Squeeze, but on sale too! See that fellow on my shoulder in the illustration above? That’s Mitch – my insatiable human itch. When you give something an identity (Mitch’s origins will be explained in an upcoming post), you give yourself the freedom to open a dialogue. NOTE: This isn’t any sort of talking-to-yourself or actually seeing the little guy weirdness, just a fun philosophical allegory, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or Virgil’s guides in Dante’s Inferno (although I don’t suppose either of those two examples could be called particularly ‘fun’).

When you can dialogue with your primal human drives, habits, and interpretations (dare I say subconscious), you can begin to challenge your reflexive attentions, thoughts, and actions. In this case, choice of salad dressing. Don’t let a touch of natural, biological anxiety hold you back from trying something new. Our neurotransmitters are calibrated to keep our patterns stable in this so often unstable world… just push through (practice makes it easier). I’ve always thought about trying to make my own dressing, so told Mitch to shove off, and through the subsequent catecholamine haze, went hunting for apple cider vinegar, canola oil, and a good novelty mustard.

This shift in attentions began to change my experience of the store. New products came into focus, new flavour combinations, textures, and possibilities for combination. I was essentially shopping a different store, not literally, but a new menu for selection had opened up on familiar shelves. In lieu of an allegory brush off, you can also try this…

Practical Exercise For Retraining Attentions: Next time you’re in the grocery store, arbitrarily pick a 2′ by 2′ area of shelving. For every product within that square, imagine being served a sample at a dinner party. How does it taste? Smell? Look? What is it being served with? What are people talking about while eating? Build a story around it. Then pick one of these products (one you’ve never picked before) and have the balls, yes I said it, balls, to put it in your cart. You can stop here, or if you’ve really got kahoonas, build a dish around this product and see how your story plays out when you serve it to your family.

Risking everything to get from Here to There

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

Once, on stage, I blanked out. I stood there stupidly, holding a silent, quivering flute, cantilevered out into nothingness.

Once, before a deadline, I blanked out. I sat there stupidly, hating my hands for shaking, this time over a keyboard, poised over an article that would never be written.

Now I sit here risking everything promised by our current paradigm, but my hands are steady. These words are my own. There is no fear beyond the slow, mild panic of a human engaging her humanity. There is no composer’s melody to forget, and no interviews to transcribe. There can be no ‘blanking’ out because this is Blank Canvas Living. This is a living dialogue. This is a brain exploring, within and without. This is freedom.

Who are you? Who do you want to be? Risk asking.

But more than that – risk knowing.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom – Anais Nin

To blossom in this world takes a sharp act of will, fierce and unwavering. There can be no permission. Blank Canvas Living’s tips/techniques, personal style guide, creative living exercises, and experiments in engagement are designed to loosen our jumbled neural associations and give us the freedom to learn our brains, love them, and blossom according to our most primal coding. Backed by a five year dedicated study into the evolution of ideas (from prehistory through to today), and ongoing philosophical field testing, Blank Canvas Living is an interactive forum for passionate people who share a high need for cognition and sensory/sensual involvement.

I woke up officially too fat for all my clothes – and I’m loving it!

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

This post is about as PC as sending back an adopt Namibian baby after the novelty of carrying the little tike round on your hip has worn off. You’ve been warned! I woke up fat today, with a couple tike’s worth of pudge cantilevered out over my own hipbones. Not one single waistband would button or zip. A winter’s worth of last-hurray-before-milestone-birthday denial fueled debauchery, combined with a classic feminine retention, conspired to maximize the bloat factor – and on a Friday no less!

But I have a secret, I kinda like it. Actually, I feel like I’m breaking all the rules because I’m loving my new pounds in a sneaky, indulgent sort of way. I’m deep into a one night stand with a new partner, a strange woman with hedonistic appetites and soft, yielding flesh. I can’t help but wonder… Is this what it’s like to be a man? The lure of a novel body is intoxicating. How do men survive surrounded by so much flesh? Do they feel the same intense, driving curiosity to explore, and by exploring, possess? These curves are fresh and foreign, and I’m drawn into the passionate exoticism of knowing another body for the first time. The temporal (oh please dear gawd let it be temporal!) nature of my current weight allows a sense of detachment; my internal body image has not had time (or my permission!) to adjust. I am free to explore, to indulge – but what to wear?!

The temptation to dress for concealment, rather than display, is strong – and entirely culturally driven. But the logic is all backwards… What joy can there be in hiding? Hiding implies shame, and I feel no shame for maxing out my humanity in preparation for said epic B-Day (maybe a wee smidgen of guilt, but let’s not go there). Blank Canvas Living is, in essence, about honouring our humanity, and what could be more human than breakin’ out the cleavage.

My back-of-the-drawer-fat-day clothes don’t celebrate shit. Neither do yours. Let’s not kid ourselves. We all have go-to uniforms for when we wander too far from our own, uniquely personal, weight baselines. Instead of camouflage, I started searching my closet for something, anything, that would highlight my new curves. After various exercises in claustrophobia, I finally settled on an outfit: an extremely forgiving stretch gray A-line skirt; a serious push-up bra; and a fuchsia faux-pashmina, draped over my shoulders and cinched at the waist with a wide, embroidered belt.

So far the outfit has prompted at least one “is that Scottish…?” coworker complement. But more importantly, I think I look how I feel – powerful – like a medieval knight strapping on my house’s colours (heralding… pink?) before charging into battle. And as an added Friday bonus, I get to enjoy the delightfully fleshy treat that Tia Carerre (see left) was such a dear to sign last time I found myself in a similarly salacious situation.

Note: Ever notice how the holes on your belt form a statistical weight bell curve? The indents on my belt (shown above) reduces my waistline to a mathematical function through time. But any further ‘reducing’ requires a less numerical form of ‘crunching’ … sigh.

A ‘Slim my Viking’ Recipe: Anthony Bourdain – ing with quick & easy summer salad rolls

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

Standing in the grocery store, one body among many, all of us searching for some semblance of satisfaction, the paralysis of routine takes hold. Thousands of products, but my brain sees only the dozens it has seen before. No. Not today, not with 5 days of weekday repetition looming on the other side of this Sunday afternoon: wake up, go to work, come home, do the bastard dishes, make supper, watch TV, go to bed. No.

Facing an entire wall of salad dressings, I make a choice for change. I turn around. The opposite aisle wall is a mecca of Bourdain – ian possibilities. Anthony Bourdain (sketched at right), a man I’ve followed around the world, from arrogant naiveté to arrogant wisdom. On some strange level, I love that man; as a prophet of hope and novelty, of freedom and humanity. But my heart is held by another, my Viking…

Rice paper! I can do this. Heck, I’ve seen it on TV. Suddenly, I’m on a flavour raid – bean sprouts, red pepper, chilies… designing my own recipe and pillaging (I think we all can do without the raping) for a whole new flavour profile. And if the Viking isn’t sated, I buy his favourite bread with spinach dip to fill the void. The grocery store is instantly transformed from tedium to adventure, my brain and senses fully engaged in the exploration.

Half an hour later in my kitchen, with eyes watering and mouth on fire from testing the heat of a serrano pepper, I’m draining chilled vermicelli using a mesh splatter guard (see photo for vegetable prep). To my awe and amazement, the rice paper holds, and my improvised summer salad roll recipe proves to be quick and easy (see assembly instructions below – my apologies for the white plate!), healthy, and delicious – even to my Viking! Next time you’re lost in the grocery store, why not escape your own routine and go Anthony Bourdain – ing…

Note: Store bought peanut satay sauce shown in photo. But you can also jazz up your dipping by mixing together 2-3 parts soy sauce, 1 part peanut satay sauce, 1-2 drops sesame oil, and a few drops of Sriracha hot sauce.

‘Artistic Bondage’ – DIY hood and handcuffs turn any sketchbook into a stylish mini-tote

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Cymbria Wood

Secret freedoms… deepest passions… strappy high heels… The wording of my first official Blank Canvas Living assignment comes loaded with clues to its criteria.

In order to integrate sketching into her hectic lifestyle, the client would need a way to carry a sketchbook discreetly, protect its pages, and be inspired to let go of her inhibitions and excuses every time she sits down to draw.

The nature of this project, with its almost total creative freedom, is intoxicating. My mind races with ideas. This is the same thrill I felt designing my seismic skirt after burning those horrible ugly pants up on the roof. I’ve craved this level of creative engagement for so long, and I need to prove with this assignment that I can be part of Blank Canvas Living as more than just a tourist.

One idea dominates all the others – a two part sadomasochistic hood and handcuffs protective tote. Is a bondage sex theme too much? Too extreme? I don’t know the client’s history, but those strappy high heeled shoes keep leading me straight back to BDSM. What better way to tempt the client into artistic expression than ‘artistic bondage’? I submit to the process, and get down to work…
Hood
1-Cut calf of sacrificial black leggings to length of sketchbook + 1” (depending on thickness of book)
2-Sew cut end closed to make a pouch

Handcuffs
1-Stretch 3/4” wide elastic around sketchbook to desired tension – cut two of these lengths and stitch ends together to form ‘cuffs’
2-Cut third length (the ‘chain’) with ¾” extra on both ends to fold around ‘cuff’ loops.
3-Sew ‘cuffs’ onto their ‘chain’

Slip the hood over the sketchbook, then slide on the cuffs, leaving enough slack in the ‘chain’ to create a handle. The handcuffs can be used alone (as shown), and will hold pens/pencils securely under the ‘chain’.