WANDERING YOGI COLUMNIST: Centuries of social etiquette and rules have made us more civil, but we may have sacrificied our ‘gut instinct’ in the process. Here’s how to get it back says Lee Carsley.

“I knew there was something wrong!”
Most of us have experienced this sense of ‘knowing’ before we know – you hesitate at a green light and miss getting hit by a speeding truck; on a whim, you break your no-blind-dates policy and meet your life partner.

Our gut instinct is very real, and managed by the most vital cranial nerves in our body – the vagus.

Unlike the other Vegas, what happens in this vagus doesn’t stay there. The vagus nerve is a long meandering bundle of motor and sensory fibres that links the brain stem to the heart, lungs, and gut. It also branches out to touch and interact with the liver, spleen, gallbladder, ureter, female fertility organs, neck, ears, tongue, and kidneys. It powers up our parasympathetic nervous system and controls unconscious body functions, as well as everything from keeping our heart rate constant and aiding food digestion, to breathing and sweating. It plays a major role in fertility issues and orgasms in women. There are two of them; in yoga we tend to focus on the left hand-side vagus nerve.

This vagus is the major emotional highway in our body transporting feelings from our brain to our heart and to our gut via the enteric nervous system (it’s like a major feeder road onto the highway). This ENS is sometimes referred to as our second brain. Western medicine now believes this nerve is an overall indicator of our longevity and quality of life. Traditional Chinese Medicine knew this for centuries. Which is why taking good care of your gut is so important.

Gut problems are epidemic – just check the stats. We know the physical steps we need to be taking for the gut – better diet, drink more water, less alcohol, no sugar. We also need to rid ourselves of those biases and experiences that no longer serve us. That way our instinct will serve us not just as a way to survive, but to thrive.

Just like fixing the set of traffic lights at the feeder road, and not bothering to maintain the highway, unless you get your vagus nerve (and your gut instinct) into shape, emotionally and mentally, you may end up on the road to nowhere.

Here are some simple things you can do to improve your gut instinct:

Compassionate meditation:
Sit silently, think compassionately about others, and repeat positive phrases about friends and family. Shown to increase positive emotions like serenity, joy, and hopes, which improves the vagal function.

Take a cold shower:
Studies show that when your body adjusts to cold, your fight/flight (sympathetic) system declines and your rest and digest (parasympathetic) system increases. Any kind of acute cold exposure including drinking ice-cold water will increase vagus nerve activation.

Gargling:
Another home remedy. Gargling stimulates the muscles of the mouth pallet, which are fired by the vagus nerve. You may tear up a bit which is a good sign and if you don’t, keep doing it until you do. It’s said to improve working memory performance.

Sing that bop-py song out loud:
Humming, mantra chanting, hymn singing, upbeat energetic singing; they all increase heart rate variability, acting like a pump to the vagus nerve.

Foot massage:
Stimulate your vagus nerve by massaging your feet and your neck along the carotid sinus, located along the carotid arteries on either side of your neck. Foot massages lower your heart rate and blood pressure and activate all energy meridians in the body (kind of like servicing for a car).

Do Yoga with the ANZA Wandering Yogis!
It increases vagus nerve activity, tones your parasympathetic system, clears the energy meridians. And it increases GABA, a calming neurotransmitter in brain. Especially helpful for those who struggle with anxiety or depression.

Lee Carsley is the ANZA Wandering Yoga founder teacher, and Yoga Alliance CE trainer. When not teaching yoga to students and other teachers, she also leads meditation workshops and bespoke yoga retreats. Be the light, show the light, and travel light.

TUCKERBOX COLUMNIST: Raelene Tan takes inspiration from this month’s football World Cup to visit the cuisine of host nation, Russia.

Held once every four years since its inception in 1930 (except during World War II), this year’s World Cup will be hosted by Russia from 14 June to 15 July, with Germany being the current champion. Thirty-two qualifying teams are set to thrill more than one million tourists, plus Russians, in 11 host cities.

National Cuisine
Some of us may be among excited fans travelling to watch live matches. What can we expect to eat in the largest country in the world? Bread is a staple, especially dense black varieties, made from rye flour. Pelmeni (dumplings of minced meat or fish in thin dough) also feature, as does borscht soup with its beetroot-red colour, often dressed with smetana (sour-cream) which is widely used in Russian dishes. Plus pancakes blini and blintz; the former made from wheat-flour batter containing yeast, the latter without yeast, with sweet or savoury fillings.

Regional Fare
Capital city Moscow, famed for its architecture, including colourful domes on Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and the Bolshoi Theatre, favours ubiquitous pirog (baked pie) with sweet (fruit, quark) or savoury (mushroom, potato) fillings, as well as Olivier, or Russian, salad with potato, egg, pickles, apple and mayonnaise, plus varenye dessert of cooked fruit in syrup. Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, is regarded as the country’s cultural seat. Golubtsi or stuffed cabbage roll is traditional, also vareniki dumplings, especially containing cherries for dessert.

Pastry dishes take centre-stage in Ekaterinburg, the most eastern of the host cities, in the Ural area. On the Baltic coast, Kaliningrad is known for its beer and vodka production, as well as local fish including sprat and Baltic herring. Pirog smetana (pie with sour cream) appeals in the south-west Tatarstan sports-loving city of Kazan. Helming Russia’s river tourism, Nizhny Novgorod, on the Volga, is known for fish, cabbage soup and popular honey biscuits, pryaniki, containing spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg. The southern port city of Rostov-on-Don with its historic Cossack culture highlights classic okroshka soup of raw vegetables, cooked meat and smetana, served chilled.

Saransk in central Russia offers Mordovian blinis (pancakes) with added potato, and fish soup. In Sochi on the Black Sea, the national Georgian dish there is khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread, with brined, sour, sulguni cheese the favourite. In the ancient southern city of Volgograd with its mammoth ‘Motherland Calls’ statue, choices include bread, pancakes and sturgeon shashlik.

Drinks
Vodka comes to mind, particularly Russian brands Smirnoff and Belenkaya. Russian beer, also. Tea is popular, as well as kvass (made from rye bread, flavoured with fruit or herbs) and mors, a sweet berry drink.

Russia in Singapore
If we are staying put in Singapore, we can still indulge in Russian cuisine, albeit with a more limited choice. Possibly the only Russian restaurant still in operation here is Shashlik, circa 1980s, at 545 Orchard Road, #06-19 Far East Shopping Centre, where blini caviar, borscht, shashlik, oxtail stew and grilled salmon are on the menu in the spacious restaurant with its vivid yellow table linen.

May the best team win!

Born in Adelaide, Raelene Tan is an etiquette consultant and food and travel writer. She has authored five books and has been a regular guest on radio and television.

THE WRITE SPIRIT COLUMNIST: Sue Mannering of the ANZA Writer’s Group on keeping in touch with far-flung families.

So. Children. I’ve got three. They are adults now and the oldest is working in another country herself, an Australian woman in New Zealand.

Our family of five started our overseas life journey thirteen years ago in the Middle East and one by one the children left for university in New South Wales. When we arrived in Singapore it was just the two of us, husband and wife, re-establishing ourselves in a new country with an empty nest and no schools to keep us wildly busy.

I’m not ashamed to say I love it. As parents we move through phases as our children mature and whilst parents of millennials in Australia might still have a full brood, our forced separation is very freeing for us – and for them.

Ok, I admit it. I visit them frequently. Sydney is so close and, after all, two of them still live in the family home and drive the family car. They are “looking after them” for us. Of course, we speak several times a day on various forms of social media. I might ask a question on Facebook Messenger, they’ll answer on WhatsApp. Send a meme on Instagram; refer to it on Snapchat. I keep up to speed with everything they do whether I want to or not. One son keeps sending me pictures of how messy the other son is and exhorting me to do something about it. The messy son calls me urgently on WhatsApp from Woolworths asking me what he should have for dinner. The neat son got messy last Friday night and the next day I woke to hourly early morning updates on his Instagram story from one of Sydney’s finest karaoke bars. At 9am, I wanted to WhatsApp “alive?” but I wrote “awake?” He responded at 11am, which we know is 1pm Sydney time with, “here”.

I accidentally left home without my phone the other day and I had a combined social media total of 98 messages, the most urgent of which was from my 28-year-old daughter. She desperately needed to know if it was ok to substitute arrowroot biscuits for scotch fingers as a base for caramel slice.

As parents, you often wonder if you have instilled life values in your children. Values such as responsibility, taking ownership and problem solving. My husband sent the following list to our WhatsApp family group:

1. Plumber
2. Car repair
3. Please attend to the bottom of the laundry door where your cat, to which your mother and I categorically said no to you bringing to the family home and to which we are both severely allergic, has scratched to transparency.

Our messy son replied with: “ABBA is getting back together!”

I’m hoping that the three points will still be checked off; maybe done so to a soundtrack of Dancing Queen.

The ANZA Writer’s Group meets every second Tuesday of the month, 7pm, ANZA Office, 47A Kampong Bahru Road, 169361