My husband and I have been enjoying this yummy banana tea inspired by Clinical Psychologist and host of The Sleep Summit,  Michael Breus, PhD, The Sleep Doctor. He recommends making a banana tea as a sleep aid. According to Dr. Breus, bananas are "nature’s sleeping pill." They contain magnesium and when our magnesium is low, it can affect our sleep. Dr. Breus says, the banana peel has 3 times the amount of magnesium than the fruit. I put a banana in my smoothie every morning, so I figured I'd experiment with the peels. Here's what I brewed up.

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Banana Tea:
1 organic banana peel-washed
3 cups water
Almond or coconut milk
3-4 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
Dash of ground nutmeg
Teaspoon raw honey

Bring the peel, water, cloves and cinnamon to a boil on the stove and boil on medium heat for approximately 10 minutes to make a tea. Pour the tea into a mug and add milk, a dash of nutmeg and honey. Enjoy! In addition to the sleep benefits of magnesium, cinnamon is warming to the body which may help it to relax. The cloves and nutmeg are also known to help promote sleep, but go easy on the nutmeg. It is a powerful spice, and too much can affect your mental health. 

Sometimes, when I sleep, I get cramps in my calves due to low magnesium, so I'm excited to experiment with this new tea. If you are pregnant, it is recommended that you avoid cinnamon, and of course, if you are allergic to or sensitive to any of the ingredients, leave them out of the recipe.

The Sleep Summit is free On-line August 8th-15th.  And can also be purchased to be viewed at your leisure at anytime in the future. 

​This week is the free on-line sleep summit. As I am writing, I am listening to my pre-summit free gifts and learning so much to share with my coaching clients in our sessions. According to the host, Dr. Michael Breus, The Sleep Dr., bananas, due to their magnesium content are "natures sleeping pill." According to Dr. Breus, the peel has more magnesium than the fruit, and a tea can be made from the peel. So, of course, I'm heading to the kitchen to experiment with crafting a banana tea, "sleep potion." I'll be posting that on my facebook page later this week.

If you are one of the 1 in 3 people experiencing symptoms of insomnia or if you are one of many people who describe themselves as "wired and tired," you'll want to check out this free summit. I decided to help promote this summit, because so many of you have mentioned difficulties with sleep to me. However, as I looked over the presenters, I noticed that no one appears to be talking about dreams. To me this is a huge oversight, so I'm filling in the gap.  This month, I'm offering discounted Dream Discovery sessions- just $49 for a 90 minute session where we explore one of your dreams. Dreams have always fascinated me, and I've been working with my dreams and the dreams of others for the past 13 years. To give you an idea of what it might entail, I've included a couple of my dreams that I explored recently with some of my dream worker friends as an example.

Dream 1, March 2016: In my dream, I'm carrying a fish tank that has hardly any water in it, and I'm going to clean it out. I wonder if any fish are still alive in there. As I'm carrying it into another room, I see another fish tank that is clean and beautiful. It looks like an antique table turned into a fish tank. There are white pebbles on the bottom and fish are swimming around. There is a light on in the fish tank and it is pristine. I wonder why I'm bothering with this dried up tank when I have a nice clean one.

Dream 2, July 2016: I'm walking in a beautiful garden. There is a Labyrinth. I bend down and touch it. It has a mosaic look with yellow, pink and orange colors. The garden is lush. There is a pool of water that is overflowing into part of the garden and there is one potted plant that is drying up. I pull it out from shelter to an area where it didn't get watered by the rain. I take water from the overflowing pool and water the potted plant.

Breaking down a dream is a process; therefore, I'll just be summarizing some of the findings and some of the questions to be pondered. I believe these dreams are calling to me to find balance in self care. Both the fish tanks and the garden can be seen as a representation of my life. They are both living ecosystems just like the human body. One tank has been neglected and the other is clean, lit up, beautiful, filled with living plants, fish and life sustaining water. In the garden, there is one potted plant that has been neglected and is starting to dry up and there is also a pool that is overflowing. In the first dream, the two fish tanks are equal in size and I'm considering discarding one of them. My fellow dreamers believe that this dream is asking me to think about how I will take care of the clean tank (which is a symbol of me) so that it doesn't end up neglected like the other. In the second dream, I am actively taking care of the garden. I moved the potted plant to an area where it will get rained on and I am taking care of the over flowing pool. The dried up area is relatively small compared to the healthy part of the garden. There is a tension of the opposites with the dry area and the overly wet area and action to create balance. The dream is calling me to identify where I have sheltered myself and held myself back from growth and where I where I might be overflowing or running over boundaries.

Some of the other things that were explored were the numbers in the dreams and their symbolic significance. We also looked at the symbolic meanings of fish, mosaics, labyrinths, water, flowers/plants and colors. We considered the zodiac and that the universe is in a transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius and what that might mean. We looked at archetypes and how all of these things are currently connected to my past, current and future life. Each dream contained layers and layers of information from my unconscious, slowly being peeled away, uncovered and brought into awareness so it could be tended to.  

Are you ready to take a close look at what one of your dreams might be communicating to you?  Click here to schedule a session with me.   
Want to read what a couple of people have said about their Dream Discovery sessions?  Click here.
If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you.