The Healing Feeling by Byron Bay author Samantha Gowing represents her life work and passion for spreading the health and wellness word in a way that’s fun and accessible. Across 143 beautifully designed colour pages Samantha shares not only her health-giving recipes and remedies but also her engaging personal stories and extensive knowledge of nutrition and Chinese medicine. All done with her trademark great humour and word play.
The Healing Feeling is packed with information and inspiration to eat and live well every day. You’ll find natural remedies you can easily whip up in your own kitchen to cleanse your liver, calm your nerves and restore your gut with the good bugs. If eating well, losing weight, gaining energy and better health are on your wishlist then The Healing Feeling is for you.
A friendship across the seas
It all began with yoga and the idea of a good health, well-being, yoga festival in Ubud. It transpired into a friendship across the seas that has spanned a decade of jokes and joyous meetings.
It has been said we are like sisters and there is no doubt that there is a timeless bond that unites us.
We share the same philosophy about eating and being supremely kind to ourselves, about only ever eating the finest food, savouring the finest wine and enjoying every minute of life.
Our medicine is love and laughter and, between the two of us, we are very good at that! Sam’s knowledge about the secret life of food is extraordinary and I bow to her endless knowledge on all that is edible.
Janet DeNeefe Founder & Director
Ubud Writers & Readers Festival Bali
Casa Luna Bali, The Honeymoon Guesthouse Ubud Bali
The need to thrive,” says internationally renowned Spa chef and local identity Samantha Gowing, “is beyond raw food, yoga moves and green smoothies; It’s about finding our innate self, our essential nature and allowing all of these aspects to integrate.”
Gowing, the daughter of restaurateur Dennis Gowing, originally hails from gritty Melbourne where she was the licensee of the historic Grace Darling Hotel in Collingwood, steering it to a coveted chef’s hat before transplanting herself to Byron Bay (the home, some might say, of raw food, yoga and smoothies). But Gowing, an avowed entrepreneur, who founded Gowings Food Health Wealth in 1999, came to further her holistic approach and to further study the idea of happiness, and how we find it.
Now a spa cuisine and lifestyle specialist, Gowing, the founding Executive Chef and Nutritionist at the Cabarita Ocean Health Retreat, decided to write her first e-book, The Healing Feeling, to incorporate delicious healthy recipes with remedies, nutritional analysis, seasonal foods and extra things to do with each component.
The e-book was so successful Gowing decided to create a printed version, and with her partner formatting the book for her they designed a funky, fun-filled, foodie-fabulous book for all of us who know we should improve our diets but are not sure quite how to do it. Gowing began her own healing journey many years ago when she had a motorbike accident as a teenager, fracturing her leg in numerous places.
“I ended up with my right leg a few centimetres shorter than my left – give or take the weather,” she says. “I discovered yoga about ten years after the accident, and I took to it so much that I studied to become a yoga instructor.” As she began to get more interested in yoga, Pilates and diet, it occurred to her that perhaps she should think about updating the menu for the hotel.
“A lot of people were doubtful that the traditional clientele would take to a new menu, but once people had tried the food, they embraced it,” she says. In this book she de-mystifies and provides delicious recipes for many ingredients that could still seem a little exotic and mysterious, or even a little too healthy – think shitake mushrooms, miso, quinoa, mung beans and kelp. With amazingly simple recipes, personal anecdotes and mouth-watering photographs Gowing shows exactly how easy it is to add some healthy superfoods into our diets.
CANDIDA BAKER, THE NORTHERN STAR
