HalĂ© Sofia Schatz is a nourishment educator and consultant who has been exploring the links between food, health, and spiritual awareness for 30 years. She spent her first eight years in Istanbul, where her relatives savored shopping for food, cooking, and leisurely meals together. She writes: "These rhythms connected me to my family and to my community. I intuitively understood that food's nourishing capacity far exceeded basic physical survival. Food had the power to bring a family together, to connect me to the earth and our planet's cycles, to nurture all my senses." In this well-designed volume, Schatz lays out the basics of transformational nourishment — "the process of transforming habitual, constructing patterns and behaviors into nourishing practices that encourage growth and development."

Most people give themselves something to eat or drink 15 times a day. In 10 years this works out to 54,750 opportunities to turn our attention to who we are and what we are doing. One of the first questions Schatz asks those who come to her for nutrition counseling is: Who are you feeding? The answer could be an emotion, your inner child, a rebellious adolescent inside, or some other part of yourself that is not feeling nourished. Regularly asking yourself this question can be an enlightening practice.

Other elements of transformational nourishment include: eating organic foods; using local, seasonal produce to connect to the earth's rhythms; finding the right combination of foods to improve digestion, increase energy, and release emotional blockages; and cleansing retreats to remove toxins from your body. Schatz observes that "perpetual feasting" has burdened many of us with excess on every level of our existence; from the food we eat to the images we devour to our busy calendars. Her holistic approach to nourishment challenges us to depend less on comfort and convenience foods and more on eating for a balanced spiritual life of attention, meaning, unity, and transformation.