RECIPE: Morning Warm Lemon Water Tonic

This morning while I was at the sink tidying up, my husband apparently grabbed a glass of what he thought was lemonade to gulp down. He'd been too frantic to sit down and eat breakfast since he was
going to be flying out of town, and was behind schedule. I heard him gag, "Blech! What IS this stuff?" Little did he know.

Well, it was my daily lemon water that I drink right after J'ai fais la toilette, or "done my morning toilet". (Meaning, filled my mouth with ice cold water and splashed my face with ice cold water (while my mouth is still filled), brushed my teeth, scraped my tongue, chewed a
handful of sesame seeds, and gargled with sesame oil.)

Any change in habit for me comes a lot easier if I see it as a change of where I move, put things, when I move and put things where, and how. So, after my little morning Ayurvedic routine that takes less than 2 minutes, I scuffle, sometimes skip and hum, or walk into the kitchen, all freshened up, and do my lemon water routine.

Level of Difficulty: Easy

Time: 30 seconds

When: Upon waking and scuffling down to the kitchen

Why: To keep your digestion moving. To detoxify the liver. To clean your skin from the inside

Ingredients: 1 lemon. 1 glass of warm, purified water. Salt (if your adrenals are stressed)

• I turn on the kettle
• select a large, sparkly glass (an IKEA root beer mug, big enough to fill a sink)
• squeeze the juice of a lemon through my fingers into the glass (cleverly catching the seeds so I don't have to filter them through my teeth)
• add a heaping teaspoon of salt (which is what surely caused Patrick to gag. I can't even taste the salt)
• then pour the warm water from the kettle from way up high into the glass. 

The last little trick gives me a great amount of joy that I'm sure those who strongly dislike singing, Love at Home, would mutter amongst themselves and decide not to invite me to any more social events. I'm so easily delighted. I should feel embarrassed by it, but I'm not. I feel delighted that I'm so easily delighted.

The salt is optional. Since I have Vitiated Vata (that feels so good to say), which basically means my thin, bird-boned body is out of whack and severely over stressed, salt is good for me. Vata bodies crave salt. In my case, I crave whole jars of olives, and spoonfuls of salt in lemon water.

For those who have Addison's disease, it's really common to crave anything salty. Thankfully, I'm no longer suffering from the worst symptoms, and prefer to see that my little walnut-sized adrenals are smiling and doing their job swimmingly. But I do still crave salt and lots of it.