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Susie Castillo is our guest blogger during the week of July 7th. If you have any questions for her, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Confidence is Queen:

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If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water. ~ Bulgarian Proverb

This Beliefnet blogger is just back from teaching a week-long workshop (entitled: Our Lady of Weight Loss ~ Your Fat-Burning Journey to Sveltesville) and wants to know ...

What are you tolerating? Putting up with? STOMACHING?

An Illuminating Question that LIGHTENS.
This question was discussed at length this past week, as we explored, discovered, and investigated the various things in our lives that are WEIGHING us down. Things from dust behind the refrigerator to people in our lives; from bad hair days to our own thoughts and beliefs.

I promise you that as you take the time to be honest, be brave, look deep and write down at least 50 things that you are STOMACHING, you will be brought to a place where you can see, feel, experience and even taste your 'lite.'

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Berlin in the summer oscillates wildly between thirty degree heat and wind driving the rain horizontally across broad road and exposed platz alike. It's like Germany, but different: comfortably lived-in, extensively graffiti'd but basically tidy and sane, except for the football thing.

(We arrived near the climax of the European Cup, right after the semi-final that saw Germany trounce Turkey and go into the final against Spain. And the place went wild. Convoys of flag-flying cars and bikes honking their horns, crowds on foot shouting up and down the Ku'damm ... it's a potentially explosive mixture, and in England it would have ended in a riot, but in Berlin they just drank the bars dry and went home.)

I was there on vacation, so I'm short of publishing-related anecdotes to share with you. But it's hard to switch off the authorial observation engine (that keeps making notes and filing them away for future use), and Berlin gives you plenty of fodder for fiction. You can focus single-mindedly on relaxation and still find it impossible to ignore the urgent visions of a bygone century's futurism. Berlin is modern, by the standards of European capitals; it only really got going in the late 19th century, as the hub of a new empire obsessed with progress and competition. It's littered with the spoor of stale futurism, from the bizarre impaled geodesic dome of the Fernsehturm to the Bauhaus - archive. This is the country which brought us Vorsprung Durch Technik as a marketing slogan, where engineers list their PhD's before their names as an honorific, and the futures are never far below the surface.

» Alexandra Fuller discusses why she wrote about a boy who died while working an oil rig in Wyoming, and reads an excerpt from The Legend of Colton H. Bryant.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, oil rig, Penguin Podcast, podcast, books, Penguin Books

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"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." ~ Galatians 5:22

Pineapples are juicy, delicious and good for you, too. They are loaded with fiber, manganese (a mineral that helps with digestion), and vitamin C, which is helpful when fighting colds and coughs.

And if I may be so bold, I dare say that pineapples are filled with the juicy and scrumptious spirit of love, goodness and self-control. Fresh pineapple is a natural and delicious way to enhance your health and improve your ability to heal.

The Healing Pineapple also contain an anti-inflammatory enzyme called bromelain.

Bromelain is believed to help:

* reduce inflammation and swelling,

* strengthen bones,

* reduce symptoms associated with sinusitis,

* alleviate symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis,