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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Depression and Suicidal Tendencies:
- I’ll explain what depression is and what suicidal tendencies are including their symptoms
- I’ll talk about from my experience what it feels like to be depressed and to have thoughts of suicide
- I’ll talk about contributing factors that can cause depression and suicidal tendencies
- Finally, I’ll give a few tips on how you can work your way out of a depressive and suicidal black hole
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU IN BALANCE
Depression is a mood disorder in which you feel extreme sadness and grief, you’re uninterested about life, and you suffer chronic mental, emotional, and physical pain. Depression affects 350 million people worldwide and that’s only an estimate. Because depression is such a difficult thing to admit to having with for fear of ridicule and looking weak or looking like a lesser person in other people’s eyes I’d say that between half a billion to a billion people suffer from some form of depression.
There are different types of depression including major, melancholic, manic, and a few others all of these have similar symptoms including:
- Persistent feelings of sadness and grief
- Feeling hopeless, helpless, worthless, pessimistic and/or guilty
- Feeling irritable and anxious
- Loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable
- Low self-esteem
- Indecisiveness
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Eating or sleeping too little or too much
- Difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions
- Thoughts or attempts of self-harm
- Thoughts or attempt of suicide
- Fatigue or low energy
- Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment
Suicidal tendencies are thoughts that you have about death and killing yourself due to not being able to cope with chronic pain and the suffering you’re currently experiencing in your life. Being suicidal is another mood disorder and an advancement from self-harm where you cut or hurt yourself in order to cope with pain. Thoughts of suicide affect an unknown number of people, but over 800,000 people worldwide commit suicide every year with someone dying from suicide every 40 seconds. A lot more people attempt suicide, which makes thinking about suicide a major health issue.
Here are some symptoms and danger signs for suicide:
- Talking about wanting to die or killing yourself
- Researching and planning suicide
- Talking about feeling hopeless or having no reason to live
- Talking about feeling trapped or in unbearable pain
- Talking about being a burden to others
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Eating or sleeping too little or too much
- Withdrawn or feeling isolated
- Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge
- Displaying extreme mood swings
- Always thinking about death
- Suddenly happier and at peace with things
- Loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable
- Visiting or calling people to say goodbye
- Making arrangements and setting your affairs in order
- Giving things away, such as prized possessions
What I’m going to do now is to do my best to describe what it feels like to be in a state of depression and thinking about suicide. Now I lived with depression for two decades and had suicidal tendencies for a decade and a half, but even that doesn’t qualify me enough to say that this is exactly what the experience of depression and thinking about suicide feels like for everybody. Even after having talked with and researched other people who have dealt with these disorders all I can give you is a description of my own personal experience.
Describing a feeling or sensation is extremely difficult though. So what I’m going to do is use two analogies to give you a sense of what depression and suicidal tendencies feel like or felt like for me. If you’ve never had to deal with these disorders I hope this gives you a better picture of what it’s like to live with these two very disempowering ways of being. And if you have people in your life that you think may be dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide, but you’re finding it difficult to relate to them I’m hoping that this gives you a sense of what they’re struggling with and how you may be able to help and support them.
If you had or are currently dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide please let me know if what I describe here resonates with you and makes some sense. If you’re finding it difficult to reach out to people who may not understand what you’re going through, you can always contact me and use me as your first step toward getting a better understanding of what’s happening with you. I’d love to hear your story and share mine with you and support you on your health and happiness journey.
Alrighty first analogy. Think of negative emotions as having weight and feeling like a burden on your back, or on your shoulders, making you feel heavy, making you feel uncomfortable and in pain. The more upsetting and painful the emotion the more weight it has. Positive emotions would be weightless and make you feel as light as a feather. Now imagine an acute short-term pain like stubbing your toe. This feels like a couple of bowling balls on your back. Imagine now that you get angry for accidentally hitting your toe. Now you have a few more bowling balls pile up. Imagine getting in an argument or feeling upset over an expectation not being met. This would feel like a car or a bus on your shoulders. Breaking up with your lover or being disconnected from family and friends. This would feel like a whole city block was weighing you down. Experiencing the death of a loved one, someone you deeply cared about, this is huge and feels like the weight of the world, the entire planet is on your shoulders.
Now imagine this sadness and grief grows where another planet jumps on your back followed by another and then another, and then the sun followed by more stars, and different star systems until eventually you feel like the weight of the entire galaxy is on your back. If deep sadness and unbearable grief were the weight of planet Earth, depression feels like the weight of an entire galaxy of stars and planets.
The longer you have this galaxy on your back weighing you down the more painful your life becomes and the more difficult it is for you to move around. Without realising it another galaxy gets plonked on your back followed by another and another until0020like the theory of the Big Bang where everything rapidly expanded into existence, you have the size of the entire universe weighing you down. You feel like you’re about to lose it and be crushed by this massive burden. This huge infinite mass of the universe causes unimaginable pain and stops you in your tracks causing you to give up all hope of living because all you want is for this heaviness, this non-stop chronic persistent pain to just go away. All you want is to be free, free of this burden, free of this pain, free of this suffering. This is when you begin thinking that ending your life is the only viable option you have left.
That’s how my experience of depression and contemplating suicide was for me in terms of pain. I felt so small and so insignificant compared to the burden that I thought I was carrying. I felt absolutely weighed down by my thoughts and by my feelings and because of them I experienced unimaginable pain and suffering.
In this second analogy imagine standing on the edge of a cliff looking into a deep dark chasm, an abyss with no end in sight. A normal experience of sadness and grief is like tripping and falling into this abyss and feeling scared and alone in the darkness and reaching out for something to grab and hold onto to break your fall, but there’s nothing around that can save you and you’re just falling for what seems like an eternity until out of nowhere a safety net breaks your fall and you’re able to climb to the top of the cliff and find yourself back on solid ground relieved from your grief.
Depression feels like tripping and falling into this abyss and feeling scared and alone and trying as you might you cannot find anything to grab onto and you’re falling and falling in this absolutely pitch-black hole with no end in sight screaming out in fear of dying, in fear of being alone forever, in fear of never being saved. The thing with depression is the fall never ends and you lose track of time and space and of who you were and you begin to fear the dark, and you’re afraid of the unknown, afraid of being alone, afraid of never experiencing love again, and you fall and fall and fall forever. You become desperate and pretend that everything is okay. You put masks on to cover up your fears. You become religious. You become an atheist. You become a team player. You become a loner. You become frustrated. You become apathetic. You become an addict. You become whatever it is you think you need to be to survive the fall, but no matter what masks you put on you are still falling and the fall never ends. You’re afraid of hitting rock bottom, but have no idea how to stop from falling.
Having suicidal tendencies feels like tripping and falling into this abyss and just like depression this fall never ends and you live in constant fear until eventually you give in to the fear and give up all hope of being saved or of saving yourself and you stop reaching out and you stop pretending everything is okay, and you stop looking for ways to put on a brave face. You turn your body and you look straight down into the darkness waiting for the inevitable, expecting it, wanting the fall to end, wanting to hit rock bottom, wanting this fear of the dark, of feeling alone, of never feeling love to end. You’re still afraid of hitting rock bottom, but rock bottom is the only way you see this fall ending.
That’s how depression and suicidal thoughts felt for me in terms of fear. I felt absolutely out of control. I felt uncertain about myself, my life, other people, the whole world. I felt completely utterly hopeless and helpless and saw other people as my enemies and saw the world as a very dark, scary, and lonely place.
This is just my personal experience and everyone has their own perspective and I hope it gives you some insight and understanding about what it feels like to live with these disorders.
Let’s move onto the contributing factors that can lead to depression and suicidal tendencies. What causes these mood disorders?
Conventional medical thinking would tell you that an imbalance either too much or not enough of feel good neurotransmitters like serotonin are the cause of mood disorders. But what causes these hormones, these neurotransmitters in your brain to get out of balance?
As a holistic and functional practitioner I always want to get to the underlying root cause. Depression and thoughts of suicide are symptoms of a bigger problem. Yes these mood disorders are very destructive, but they are not the problem. They are the result of the problem. They are actually signs signalling to you that something in your life is out of balance.
The real problem for this imbalance and the root cause to 99.99% of disease, sickness, symptoms of ill health, and dysfunction in your body, in your mind, in your bodymind they are both one and the same, the root cause is chronic stress perceived or real, physical or metaphysical. This chronic stress then leads to chronic inflammation and this chronic inflammation causes your immune system to run out-of-control.
You have to realise that your bodymind is always in flux, in flow, and shifting between anabolism, which is growth, and catabolism, which is breaking down. When you sleep you’re predominantly anabolic and when you’re awake you’re mostly catabolic. When your bodymind lives in what I call a catabolic soup, which is when the big three persistent stress and inflammation and an unregulated immune system come together, your bodymind will shift into a catabolic state and stay there for a long time and anabolic processes will no longer be deemed necessary.
Meaning your bodymind will begin to break down more a lot more than it grows and it does this because it’s now in survival mode and not your normal thriving mode. Your bodymind will turn off non-vital processes such as growth, repair, reproduction, digestion, elimination, and shut down the production of mood-regulating hormones and neurotransmitters leading to mood disorders.
In this catabolic state your bodymind will also cannibalise itself and strip nutrients from bone to ensure the proper functioning of other vital organs (osteoporosis anyone?) and will become confused and attack your own organs such as your thyroid and joints and your gut and this creates autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Coeliac Disease all because of chronic stress, inflammation, and an unruly immune system.
So if this catabolic soup made up of stress and inflammation and your out-of-control immune system contributes to the cause of depression and suicidal tendencies what creates this catabolic soup? Why are you in chronic stress? Why is there chronic inflammation? Why is your immune system attacking your own body?
“Living a lifestyle out of balance with the seasons and the rhythms of Mother Nature.”
This is the ultimate cause to all diseases physical, sexual, emotional, and mental. Not living in accordance with the laws of nature. To reduce the symptoms and eventually remove your depressed state and suicidal tendencies you need to reconnect to the natural order of life.
Your bodymind was designed to be barefoot on the land, with skin exposed to the sun, connected and working intimately together with your tribe with a sole purpose, to sleep when the sun sets and to wake the sun rises, to live in a toxin-free environment, to breathe clean air, to move often throughout the day, to drink natural pure structured water, and to eat real food from Mother Nature.
This is called living a holistic lifestyle and connecting back to your roots, to your ancestry, to who you really truly are in this Universe. A holistic lifestyle will reduce your stress, the inflammation in your bodymind, and help calm and regulate your immune system.
I have already done many podcasts on how to live a holistic lifestyle and a good starting place would be to look up the episode I did on the 7 Holistic Health Principles to give you the good life. That is episode 30.
Looking back at my life I can definitely see how out of sync my lifestyle was compared to what my bodymind needed and was expecting. I ate a lot of highly inflammatory foods like sugars and grains and pasteurised dairy, and I drank a lot of tap water, and I didn’t move my body enough, and hardly ever did I ground my body to the earth, and I’d always cover myself when I went outside for fear of being burnt from the sun and getting skin cancer.
In terms of my mindset there was one thing that I wish someone had told me when I was a teenager and it’s a piece of advice I’d like to share with anyone out there feeling depressed and suicidal and that is:
“Don’t believe everything you think, everything you feel, everything you say, or do.”
And the same goes for believing other people. I was so much in my head as a teenager, as a child really, and I believed right up to my 30s that what I thought was absolutely real, it was 100% fact, and that the situation I was in was set in stone and there was no way of changing it. In hindsight I can see how wrong I was.
One way I let go of my depression and suicidal tendencies was to start questioning everything. I mean ever since I was young I have always been very curious about life and how things worked, but when my bodymind became stressed and inflamed my curiosity started to decrease until it faded away entirely. Then I like a sponge I soaked up everything around me the good, the bad, and the ugly and believed it to be the absolute truth.
So I shifted my mindset from being an adult that accepted everything to be more childlike and to be more curious.
If you’re feeling crushed under the weight of the universe and feel like you’re falling with no help in sight or if you have beliefs that are not serving you ask yourself this one question – is it true?
Are your thoughts and feelings and sensations actually giving you the correct data or are they being twisted somehow? Really dig deep and investigate your human experience. I say human experience because my curiosity took me down a deep rabbit hole just like Alice in Alice in Wonderland I found myself in a different world that amazed and surprised me and in this world I discovered something.
I learnt that I am not only human, a creature of habit, but I am also a creature of choice. A creature who can choose is really a creator. I realised that I am the creator of all my human experiences. Actually a co-creator with other creatures.
I realised and I discovered:
“I am a spiritual being having a human experience.”
Once I began to live a holistic lifestyle and nourish my human experience I connected to my higher self, my spiritual self. All through curiosity. But of course that’s just my experience.
So be curious my friend. Question your perceived reality.
Martial artist and philosopher Bruce Lee said:
“Be water my friend.”
This means you need to adapt to the situation that you’re in. Easier said than done I know, but after making changes to your lifestyle and becoming more curious you will find adapting to your environment becomes a lot easier. So if you find yourself in a tight spot, loosen up. If you find yourself heating up, cool down. If you find yourself saying yes to everything, say no. If you find yourself feeling heavy, lighten up. If you find yourself alone, reach out. If you find yourself in a dark place, brighten up. And the major situation and change that I personally had to go through – if you find yourself stuck, move right along because spiritually and metaphysically and scientifically and quantum mechanically there’s really nothing to see here.
By living a holistic lifestyle and being curious you will clear your bodymind of stress and inflammation giving you more clarity about the present and what’s really happening right in front of you. And by being water you will be able to adapt and change and evolve and grow and flow with ease into the next moment. Hopefully feeling lighter and on solid ground.
For more information about how to heal from depression holistically and naturally read Dr Kelly Brogan’s awesome book A Mind of Your Own. Dr Kelly is a holistic psychiatrist who practices what she preaches and although it has women in the subtitle it is very much applicable to men and everyone else as well.
If you have suicidal tendencies please reach out to someone. There is always light at the end of the tunnel, but I ain’t talking about the light that takes you to the other side. If you have no one to talk to call your local suicide hotline. The people at the other end they’re not there to judge you, they are trained to understand what’s going on with your specific situation and they will give you unconditional support and guidance and it’s anonymous. I’ll put a link to a website showing all international suicide hotline numbers. Give them a call and you don’t even have to tell them that it’s for you. You can always say you’re calling on behalf of a friend.
One last thing. As I talked about in the previous podcast about selfless-connection remember you are never alone. There are millions of people out there dealing with the same stuff and they’re also struggling to find other people to share their experiences with.
Wherever you think you maybe and whatever you think is going to happen in the future remember that right now, you are here and you are now. You are always here and you are always now. Right here and now you can choose to keep moving forward, to let go of fate, and to create a new destiny and a new you.
Links and Resources
- WGP 030: Want the Good Life? These 7 Holistic Health Principles Will Guide You There
- A Mind of Your Own — Kelly Brogan, MD
- International Suicide Hotlines
- WGP 044: Universal Lessons in Film – Selfless-Connection
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring how to Heal Broken Relationships:
- I’ll explain the major reason relationships fall apart
- I’ll talk about why people relate so poorly to themselves and to one another
- I’ll explain how 3 words can heal any relationship
- Finally, I’ll give an exercise on how to use these 3 words to heal broken relationships in your life
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Relationships are part of being alive. If you’re not relating you’re not living.
Technically the first relationship you’re in is with your own bodymind. Your bodymind is made up of trillions of cells living in harmony with each other. This massive community of cells are in constant communication with one another and build and maintain healthy relationships with each other. From the day you’re conceived into this world to the day you will leave this world you are in constant communication with your bodymind and must build and maintain this relationship throughout your lifetime. The healthier your relationship to your bodymind the healthier your bodymind ends up being.
Of course today the world is full of people with sick and diseased bodyminds meaning as a collective culture and society and species we are not doing a very good job of maintaining and looking after the most important relationship we have, which is with our own selves.
The main reason for such a high rate of disease in western society today is people do not listen and communicate well with their bodymind. When you have a symptom this is your body talking to you, telling you ‘hey you’re doing something that I’m not liking, please stop right now’. But you don’t. Who does? None of us are taught in school how to be in tune with the wants and needs of our bodies and our mind so we end up playing ignorant fools to our body’s messages.
I know when I was dealing with my chronic health issues I was totally ignoring the signs and body language that my bodymind was trying so hard to communicate to me. Why was I ignoring it? Because at the time I really enjoyed my lifestyle. I loved fast food, I enjoyed not having to go to the gym like everyone else was doing, and my job wasn’t killing me either or so I thought. Of course now looking back I can see how my body was rejecting the food, the lack of movement, and the dissatisfaction in my job by giving me skin issues, digestive issues, and depression.
The same reason goes for personal relationships. Your relationship to your family, friends, neighbours and perfect strangers it all comes down to effective communication. If you have good communication with other people you’ll have good relationships with those people. On the flipside if you have bad listening skills and cannot effectively share your intentions with other people you’ll find it very difficult to relate and connect to them on a meaningful level.
So why do people plead ignorance and just not want to listen to their bodyminds or to anyone else? Why is effective communication so difficult to build and maintain? It comes down to wanting to be right or not wanting to be wrong.
We all know the feeling of being right, but we also know the feeling of being wrong or at least to be found out to be wrong. One makes you feel great joy and pride, while the other makes you want to jump off a cliff or hide.
The idea that being wrong is bad comes from human evolutionary history. When your ancestors heard a sound in a bush they had to decide whether that noise was a potential threat, a predator and to run away or was it just the wind and they could continue on their way. Get this wrong and your ancestors would have a very bad day. Get it right and nothing much happens really except knowing you made the right choice and you got to live another day.
This idea that being wrong is bad is reinforced during your upbringing and it is during this time that the idea that being right is good was introduced into your psyche. I remember growing up at home and in school being rewarded for doing things right as they were expected to be done. I also remember being punished at home for not doing things right and being made fun of at school for getting things wrong and not knowing the answers.
This is when things start to go a bit screwy and mess up your innocent young mind. You begin to confuse what you’ve done with who you are. If you make a mistake you are a mistake. If you do wrong then you are bad. If you make something awesome you are awesome. If you do right then you are good.
So when you are given a symptom by your bodymind, a sign like your skin breaking out in pimples or not having enough energy to get out of bed, or when you are confronted by someone else’s ideas and views on life that are very different to yours, your first gut instinct is to deny everything. By denying the reality of what’s happening right in front of you (and there’s a reason for calling it right in front of you and not wrong in front of you) by denying reality you reduce the risk of being wrong and being made to feel bad and so you instead choose to live in blissful ignorance. Because if you were to give in to what’s actually right in front of you it would mean having to admit that what you know or believe in or did may be wrong and you would make that mean that you are wrong.
But, and this is a big but, being wrong or right doesn’t mean anything, really. If you make a mistake or create something awesome, so what? Your actions are not you. They extend from you, but are not you. You are more than something you do or have done in any one moment. Being wrong does not mean you are wrong and same goes for being right. So the best sure-fire way to improve and better your communication skills is to change your mindset where you believe being wrong means you are wrong.
There are 3 words you can say to yourself, to your bodymind, and to others that will stop you wanting to be right all the time for fear of being wrong making you a more effective communicator. No it’s not I love you or even I am sorry. The 3 words I am talking about actually say both of these as well. Those 3 words.
“I was wrong.”
That’s it. I was wrong. This short statement does three things besides saying I love you and I am sorry.
First it immediately puts the other person at ease. When you say the words I was wrong you are essentially saying you were right to the other person. Being told you are right is like celebrating all festivals and holidays in a single moment. It feels like the best piece of high quality dark chocolate or homemade apple pie you’ve ever tasted. So give someone the gift of chocolate and pie today by telling them you were wrong.
Second thing saying you are wrong does is it makes you aware of something you were previously ignorant to. You now have the knowledge and the potential power to make change happen in your life. We make mistakes in order to learn and grow. In fact to learn something means to fail at something as the whole learning process involves ups and downs and it’s only through practise and repetition that you will have more ups than downs, but the downs are always going to be there. Remember you can only rise after you have fallen, but you must be courageous enough to take that fall. Think of it this way, when you are wrong you are learning.
Eckhart Tolle the author of The Power of Now, a really awesome book on keeping you in the present moment, he states:
“It is through the mistakes that the greatest learning happens on an inner level.”
Meaning failure creates deeper more meaningful success later on.
Speaking of the power of now the last thing I wanted to talk about that happens when you say the words I was wrong is it removes the fear of being wrong because you’ve just said you are wrong obviously. As soon as you say those 3 words you shift from being afraid to look wrong in the eyes of others including yourself, to being accepting of whom you are in the moment and this knowing of self in the here and now gives you strength to be more open and honest with your communication. Saying I was wrong shows vulnerability and being vulnerable is very empowering. When you share something personal and intimate and that’s actually quite difficult to share it’s like having a huge weight lifted off your shoulders and you feel lighter and a lot more at ease to just talk and speak your truth.
Relationships require effective communication and need to be built on a foundation of openness and honesty. By saying I was wrong to your bodymind, to yourself, and to other people you remove the fear of being wrong and the need to be right and you create stability in your relationships. In order to maintain the relationship you will have to face your fear of being wrong over and over again and keep in mind that what you’re actually doing is following the learning process. Every time you admit you are wrong you give rise to the chance of being right.
Alright I’m going to leave you with a task. Your mission if you choose to accept it is to think of one rocky relationship whether it is with yourself, your bodymind, or someone else and to think how you have been wrong in this relationship. Then to say to the other person or your body those 3 difficult words, I was wrong, and then explain to them how you have been wrong.
There might be an apology in there, I am sorry, and there might be a connection there, I love you. But it all begins with I was wrong.
Let me give you a few personal examples of what this might look like. Time for me to get vulnerable here.
My relationship with my bodymind. Growing up I’m thinking I can eat pasta, pastries, and pizza without any consequences. It sure tastes good and feels good eating those things in the moment. But I had to admit to my bodymind I was wrong. After years of ignorance and not wanting to take responsibility I finally took control of my own health and discovered I was gluten-sensitive. So I went gluten-free and my bodymind rewarded me by no longer giving me an upset stomach, by giving me smooth glowing skin, and by giving me a genuine smile on my face instead of me having to force a fake one.
Another relationship, this time the relationship with my self. For many many many years I thought that my life revolved around the good opinion of other people and that I didn’t deserve a say in it. But boy I was so bloody wrong it’s not funny. As part of this exercise I would look in the mirror and say to my self, self I was wrong to let other people control my life. And after many moons of personal development work and discovering and learning who I really am and why I’m here I now realise that my life revolves around the most important person in the world, me. Me me me. Always has and always will. Sounds selfish right? I know. But now that I know who I am all I want to do is help others find who they really are too. So this selfishness, this sacred selfishness, this looking after myself now drives me to want to serve others and look after others as well.
Okay last relationship I’ll talk about is the relationship with me mother. Growing up I used to think that my mum actually didn’t love me or my brother and sisters and that she was really just a controlling, mean women who had us kids just to be slave workers and to clean up after her and no matter how good a job we did it was never good enough for her. Well I was wrong. Mum I was wrong to think that you the source of my being and existence didn’t love me or my siblings and I was wrong to think that you were a bad parent. Sure you may not have raised us as we would have liked, but you did the best you could with the knowledge and resources that you had at that time and I just want to show my gratitude and appreciation for the awesome parenting job you did and still do. Even now you’re still telling me to put an extra jacket on when the weather’s cold. I know now that everything you say and do for me and my siblings it always comes from a place of love. Well mum I love you too and yes I will put a jacket on, when it’s actually cold.
So a few personal examples there that I hope will help you on your relationship healing mission.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
“You are never on the wrong path, you are simply on the long path to learning, to growing, and to having happy and healthy relationships.”
Before we can all be right we must all admit that we are so very very wrong.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring the light side to Cancer:
- I’ll explain how there’s always a flip side to every situation
- I’ll talk about 3 negative sides to cancer that can be turned into positives
- Finally, I’ll give the 3 most important steps anyone dealing with cancer needs to follow before healing can begin
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
This is the final part of a 3-part series I’ve been doing on cancer. In the previous episode I talked about what cancer is: a miscommunication between your healthy and abnormal cells. I also explored many factors contributing to this miscommunication and worked out it was because we as a species are living against the natural order of things and that we’re surrounded by and participate in activities that are not allowing our community of cells to communicate effectively. I also talked about how to heal from cancer following the 7 Holistic Health Principles that bring you back in alignment with Mother Nature and the Universe.
On to the final part.
All life is influenced by two universal forces yin and yang. Like a coin which has two sides, heads and a tails, life can also be viewed as either black or white. But you shouldn’t forget a coin also has a middle and when you spin that coin on this middle heads and tails no longer exist, but what does exist is the potential and the possibility for both. Meaning the universe, life it’s not as simple as black or white, but it’s both black, white, and even gray. So from one extreme all the way to the other including everything in between this is what life is all about.
So when it comes to cancer many shudder at the mere mention of the word, the sound, the intention behind it. But did you know in many traditional cultures and non-westernised societies they have no word for cancer in their native tongue because they’ve never experienced it. You could tell one of these non-westernised people all about cancer, what it is and describe to them in detail what you mean by it and they wouldn’t flinch.
The reason we jump when cancer shows up is because western civilised society has evolved with cancer and whether intentionally or not has turned cancer into a poisonous snake. So cancer to us is what a predator is like for more ancestral tribal communities. To these traditional cultures cancer is a ghost. It doesn’t exist to them. Is it possible for us civilised folk to turn cancer from physical to metaphysical and maybe even beyond?
Well as I just mentioned earlier life isn’t black or white so let me talk about how cancer isn’t a poisonous snake, but instead can actually turn out to be the antidote to the snakes bite.
In part 1 of this series I talked about the big 3 conventional medical treatments for cancer: chemo, radiation, and surgery. I for all intents and purposes badmouthed these 3 treatments and gave one side of the coin to how fatally flawed these treatments are. Over 97% of cancer patients die from these treatments so while what I said may be true it’s only a half-truth.
This is the Whole Guidance Podcast and I help guide people toward wholeness in all aspects of their life and show them new ways of being so I’d like to give the whole side to the medical cancer treatments story and flip my negative perspective from part 1 to show that these actually can be very positive treatments if used correctly.
It is true that chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery are not selective treatments. Meaning these procedures do not target cancer cells specifically. Yes even surgery. Recall from part 1 while surgery may remove the cancer daughter cells inside a tumour it actually misses the cancer mother cells or stem cells that produced the daughter cells and caused the tumour. Plus surgery can puncture a tumour causing it to leak cancer daughter cells giving them freedom to metastasis and spread throughout your body. So if chemo and radiation are like dropping a nuclear bomb in your body wasting everything inside, surgery is like dumping toxic nuclear waste in a specific area and leaving it to cause problems in the future and to leak and spread.
However, there is a way to turn these unselective, blind, and misguided treatments into very targeted ones where chemo, radiation, and even surgery will select just the cancer cells to kill and leave your healthy cells intact and also to ensure the effects of any leftover stem cells and spreading of the cancer is dramatically reduced. You can turn these nuclear attacks into well-trained snipers. How? The same way you prevent and heal from cancer – by living a holistic lifestyle in alignment with the laws of nature.
When you give your bodymind the physical, emotional, and mental nourishment it needs your healthy cells are able to protect themselves from these 3 treatments. Your immune cells are better equipped and armed when you’re living a holistic lifestyle and this gives them what they need to look after your healthy cells and to take out the abnormal cancerous cells. While at the same time these treatments target only the abnormal cancerous cells. By following a holistic lifestyle framework such as the 7 Holistic Health Principles I talk about in episode 30 you give yourself a significant chance of healing from cancer when using chemo, radiation, and surgery.
One thing to take note of regarding these treatments and to keep in mind if you ever have to make a choice is that a majority of cancer patients diagnosed with a solid tumour localised in the body like you’d find in the breast, lung, prostate, or pancreas, etc do not do well with chemo and radiotherapy, but patients with a systemic immune cancer like leukaemia, myeloma, lymphoma, etc actually these patients do see some benefits in using these two treatments.
Another misperception about cancer that can be seen from a positive perspective is that cancer and this actually goes for all disease, sickness, illness, and pain, all of these are great teachers. Anytime you feel pain or discomfort this is a sign from your body and it’s teaching you a valuable lesson.
You see your body is constantly talking to you and giving you a scorecard on how well you’re doing in terms of living a healthy holistic lifestyle. When you feel tired, have some pain, have low energy, a sore belly, some skin issues, all of these are signs. They are your body whispering to you. Your body is attempting to communicate to you that something you’re doing, how you’re being, the way you’re living your life and expressing yourself is not working for you. It communicates by producing these symptoms.
If you ignore these signs and continue doing what you’ve always been doing eventually these whispers they get a little bit louder and they turn into a stern talk and lecture from your body and these little symptoms turn into bigger health issues such as chronic fatigue, chronic pain, extreme gut issues, brain fog, mood issues, change in body composition, and severe skin problems.
If you still refuse to listen to your body’s lectures then your body begins to scream really loud where your chronic health problems turn into degenerative diseases like heart disease, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, stroke, MS, ALS/MND, sarcopenia, Hashimoto’s, the list goes on, and yes even cancer.
Pain and sickness is your body’s way, Mother Nature’s way of telling you to either shape up or ship out. Cancer is the Universe screaming at you like a sports coach on the side line telling you to change the way that you’re playing the game, the game of life in this case because right now you’re losing big time.
So if you can look at cancer as a teacher, a coach, a guide that’s clearly indicating to you that something in your life needs to change, instead of being stubborn about it and not changing your lifestyle and instead of pleading ignorance and believe you got cancer by some random chance you can take control of the situation and see cancer for what it really is – an opportunity for personal growth and development and the choice to change your way of being. Change how you live your life.
The last way I’ll talk about how you can see cancer in a more illuminating light is that cancer can bring you face to face with one of man’s greatest fears – death. We are one of many creatures on this planet who are consciously aware of our own individual existence and this conscious awareness brings with it many gifts including knowing your own mortality and that we are all going to die some day. Yes I’m saying death and knowing your time is limited is a gift, as it should inspire you to do more with the limited time you have in this life.
You can heal from cancer, but just as a mild infection can take a turn for the worse and conventional and natural treatments cannot fight it, cancer can linger for far too long in your body where no treatment will support your body’s innate ability to heal. For people in this situation death is no longer a future event, a rare thought, some distant experience, but an ever-present day-to-day in your face reality.
This inevitable encounter with death, this gift of knowledge that your time is limited and that you need to be living life to the full could make you freeze in your tracks and want to run away from your destiny. This refusal of the inevitable brings about much pain and suffering as your thoughts and feelings betray what your body is telling you to accept.
However, what if you could relax and connect to yourself in ways you never could before. Your whole life you’ve been looking for peace and contentment, never enjoying the moment, but seeking the next pleasurable one. With death around the corner can you accept your fate, live your life from this point on in full awareness and enjoy every moment you have as if it were your last?
Whether you believe death is the end, this is it and there’s nothing else that happens afterward or if you believe death is just a part of life and the next stage in your journey if you can live the remainder of this life in absolute awareness you will be able to bring this awareness and hopefully newfound joy for life into the death process. Meaning you will not die in pain or suffer, and you will not die in fear. By accepting cancer and the new path it is leading you toward you will be able to die consciously, in peace, and in love.
For those of you with cancer here’s a personal affirmation that you can say to yourself that may help you change the way you see cancer:
“Thank you cancer for showing up when you did, because now you have given me the opportunity to change my life and even my death for the better.”
Alright now I’m going to go through my 3 top tips, the 3 most important steps anyone with cancer needs to take before healing can begin.
First step to healing is to take responsibility. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean blaming yourself. It simply means owning the fact that this is your life and everything that happens in your life is due to the choices and decisions you’ve made. No-one can make these choices for you. It may feel at times like you have no other choice and you are forced into certain life situations, but I can tell you right now you do have the power of choice when it comes to what you put in your mouth in terms of food quality.
The reason taking responsibility is so very important is because human beings have this weird inability to take action on things that appear to be out of our control, that have nothing to do with us.
If you have this attitude with cancer where you think you have no control over it and it’s up to others to deal with it then your body’s innate ability to heal will never take place. You don’t have to take all of the responsibility for how your life is and for your cancer diagnosis if you’re not ready to, but by at least taking some responsibility for your life and where it’s at right now you will increase your sense of control and will actually feel like you can take action and make the lifestyle changes that will begin the healing process. Responsibility equals action and this equals change and change is just what the natural doctor ordered.
Step 2 to healing is to forgive yourself and others. Forgiveness is the key that balances out your hormones and unlocks emotional blockages in your bodymind. Emotions such as anger and bitterness are extremely yang energies, very hot and chronic expression of these emotions will put your stress and repair hormones out-of-balance with stress hormones coming out on top. On the flip side if you’re not expressing these energies and suppress them deep down inside they will build up in your body creating stagnant areas where energy, hormones, nutrition, and immune cells cannot flow. Because of this resentment is a big killer not just of the emotional body, but your physical and mental bodies as well. Can you see now how the saying ‘resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die’ is so very true.
Let go of resentments, balance out your energy and hormones, and release stagnant energy that is causing you pain. By forgiving yourself and forgiving others you bring your body back to centre with balanced flowing energy.
Final step to healing is to be in an attitude of gratitude. Being in an attitude of gratitude puts you in a more positive mindset as it forces you to focus on what you do have more so than what you don’t have. So instead of moping around and thinking woe is me and my cancer you could give gratitude for the lesson cancer is here to provide you. Remember cancer is a great teacher and if you can show appreciation and thanks toward your cancer diagnosis for showing you that there’s something about your lifestyle that is out of balance with what Mother Nature expects of you then you can see how very fortunate you actually are to be given this lesson as you’re no longer living life numb and blind, but now have the opportunity to live your life more mindfully and become more consciously aware of every moment you have while you’re alive.
“Giving gratitude opens your mind, your body, and your spirit to a new way of being.”
This is my personal attitude of gratitude practise. Every night before bed I give gratitude for 3 experiences I had that day and the lesson I learnt from each of them. I give gratitude: for one person I had an experience with; for one goal I had completed no matter how big or small; and for any other random experience that happened. Whether I perceived any of these 3 experiences as positive or negative, as uplifting or upsetting, I always give thanks for the lesson I learned from that person, from that achievement, and from that experience.
Those are my 3 tips that anyone wanting to heal from cancer needs to follow before healing can begin.
Can you see the one central theme running through each of these 3 steps? It’s all about giving. By taking responsibility you give yourself the chance and the choice to change. By forgiving yourself and others you give your body balanced energies and by being in an attitude of gratitude you give yourself a positive mindset allowing you to see what could not be seen before.
I’ll leave you with this quote from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu:
“A great nation is like a great man: when he makes a mistake, he realises it. Having realised it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers. He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.”
What all this means is that there’s a misperception that cancer is this evil and bad thing that’s happening to you, but if you flip this view, cancer turns into a gift that you’ve given yourself so that you can see your life and your death in a new light.
Mind you that’s only if you choose to see it that way and as always the choice is yours.
Links and Resources
- WGP 030: Want the Good Life? These 7 Holistic Health Principles Will Guide You There
- WGP 020: The Power of Choice
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The Fourfold Path to Healing – Thomas S. Cowan MD, Sally Fallon, Jaimen McMillan
(Buy from Amazon; Buy from The Book Depository)
The Fourfold Path to Healing merges the wisdom of traditional societies, the most modern findings of western medicine and the esoteric teaching of the ancients. The fourfold approach includes: Nutrition using nutrient-dense traditional foods; therapeutics through a wide range of nontoxic remedies; Movement to heal and strengthen the emotions; and meditation to develop your powers of objective thought.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring your many different Bodies:
- I’ll explain how your physical body is more your energy body
- I’ll talk about four other bodies that help make the whole entire you
- Finally I’ll share how you can nourish and meet the needs of your 5 different bodies
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Humans, that’s me and you included, some of us we like to think that we’re different or better than other creatures, that we’re above other animals, plants, and sometimes even other humans.
Truth is on the surface we all look a little bit different. Okay majorly different, but if you were to zoom in, into your cells, into your molecules, into your atoms, and into the quantum particles themselves like quarks and leptons guess what you’d find? The exact same thing you’d find as if you zoomed in on a cat, on an insect, on a fish, on a tree, or even zoomed in on the sun.
Nothing.
Well you’d see nothing, but with devices like the superconducting quantum interference device or SQUID for short with such devices that measure energy you would find that this invisible nothing that you’ve zoomed all the way in on is actually energy swirling around vibrating as a wave of pure energetic potential and you only see this wave become physical reality and realise its potential when you zoom out of the very small quantum space where you see the particles form into atoms and molecules.
All this to say that your physical body, your physical being is really waves of potential energy manifesting and becoming real creating formed particles, molecules, cells, organs, muscle, bone, skin, and everything within.
Now your physical body is just one of the many parts that make up the whole you, one of the many energy bodies that you have and need to look after. I will now explore four other bodies that you may not be aware of.
Imagine looking at yourself standing on the Earth naked, your feet and legs connected to the Earth represent your physical body. This is the first of your 5 bodies.
Moving up from your legs we reach your groin area and here you’ll find your second body, your sexual body or sexual being. This body exists when you’re born, but doesn’t come into full expression until your teenage years when your hormones begin to go into overdrive so this body is concerned with your hormones and keeping them in balance is the key to a healthy sexual body. Your sexual body isn’t just about procreation and making babies. It’s also about creating experiences that take you out of your physical body and into a state of bliss and euphoric orgasmic ecstatic oneness with the universe. Your sexual body also strongly influences how you relate to your physical body and to other people in general. The more you explore your sexual way of being the more you will know thyself and the more confidence you will have being in your own skin in your physical body as well as having the confidence to be yourself when around other people.
If you have issues around sex where you find it difficult to think about sex let alone talk about it this will come down to the culture that you were brought up in and to how you were raised and there’s no right or wrong way to think about sex. There’s no right or wrong way about anything. Maybe this quote by French writer Marquis De Sade (I’ve no idea if that’s how you pronounce it) may help you see sex from a different perspective:
“’Sex’ is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”
So sex like food is a nutrient we all need and while food may feed your physical body sex feeds your sexual being.
Moving up your body we come to your chest area where your emotional body or emotional being radiate from. Your emotional body builds upon your sexual body and is about relationships with self and others. Your emotional way of being determines the kinds of energies or emotions you express externally and receive internally into your heart and how you express and receive these energies will determine the kinds of relationships you will find yourself in. This body is focused around perceived stress and about giving and receiving the most powerful stress-busting emotion of them all, love.
Moving up into the head area now we come to your mental body or mental being. Remember though that your mind doesn’t reside or live just in your brain, but lives in your entire being, your bodymind. Your head is merely a symbol for your mental being. Your mental body is all about thought energy and choices. Your mental body communicates with the brain, your heart, and your gut with neurotransmitters and by keeping these neurotransmitters in balance you keep your mind clear and focused which allows you to make better choices. Thought energy along with your emotions and how you feel will influence your choices which will control your actions which will determine the results you get in life.
Going above your head above your crown is the final and fifth body, your soul body or just your soul. Your soul symbolically lives outside your physical body, but it permeates, it runs, it beats through every single cell and every wave of energy of all your bodies physical, sexual, emotional and mental. Your soul joins these bodies to all the other bodies in the Universe. Meaning you are connected to the Universe, to Great Spirit, to Infinite Intelligence, to the Creator, to God, or whatever it is, whatever name you choose to call the thing that created you and everything around you. That connection to something bigger than your self happens through your soul body. Your soul is pure energy and the level and frequency that your soul vibrates at is determined by the health and the functions of your other four bodies as well as your environment. A high vibration and frequency is associated with happiness, health, wholeness, and peace. A low vibration and frequency correlates to sadness, sickness, separation, and stress.
So those are your 5 bodies and all of these bodies, physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and soul they need to be taken care of and I’ll go through now how to nourish and feed each of your 5 bodies.
In terms of your physical body you can really feed this body well and nourish it with all that it needs by following the 7 Holistic Health Principles as laid out in the previous podcast. Two simple tips that I can give now though is eat real food and move often. Simple, right? Well in reality, you know the real world, for a lot of people eating real food and moving often those aren’t easy recommendations to stick to. This is why I believe the best way to nourish your physical body besides the 7 principles is by nourishing your other four bodies. With your sexual, emotional, mental, and soul bodies fulfilled and nourished you will find your physical body feeds itself the right foods and moves itself when it needs to.
Your sexual body needs to express itself freely without it feeling shame. It receives nourishment through physical and mental erotic and sensual pleasures. This can include the obvious sexual goals of orgasm and ejaculation, but also includes something as basic as touch. Being touched or touching someone else can help feed your sexual being without having to get naked and making it an erotic or adult experience. Reading erotic literature may be helpful as well. Make sure though that you’re in a safe space with yourself or with other consenting partners when expressing your sexual way of being. Your sexual body also needs hormones in the right balance and this will come down to how well you follow the 7 Holistic Health Principles.
Your emotional body really loves love. Not just love from another person, but especially love for your self. Because if you can learn how to love yourself you’ll find it easier to love others. The best way to love you is to know you. Know thyself and you will love yourself. There are 3 practises that I use daily to learn more about myself and what it is in life that I really want or don’t want.
First one is meditation. 20 minutes in the morning of Qi-gong helps me train my bodymind to focus on one thought, but I also learn what other thoughts keep trying to creep in and take over. You’ll learn a lot about the way you think through meditation.
Second practise is gratitude. Before bed every night I give gratitude for the experiences I had that day and this keeps me grounded in knowing what’s important in the larger scheme of things, helps me see the bigger picture of life.
Final practise is mindfulness. Being in the now, in the present moment brings a lot of awareness to how I’m being. It doesn’t stop me from being or doing things I’d rather not, but I can observe myself and be fully aware of my actions and so there’s no regret later on for how I was or for what I did as I fully accepted in the moment that if this is what is, then so be it. But mindfulness also gives me the opportunity to choose a different way of being in that moment.
So for example let’s say I’m eating way too many chocolates a lot more than I should, which happens. I will think to myself, ‘okay I’ve almost eaten an entire bar of dark chocolate. Do I continue and enjoy the whole bar with its dark sensual bitter flavours or do I stop and leave the rest for tomorrow?’ Whatever action I take it doesn’t matter. I would have taken it in full awareness and acceptance. Mindfulness allows me to observe my behaviour and to choose acceptance on how I’m being and to choose an alternative action and to do something different if I wanted to. These 3 practises meditation, gratitude, and mindfulness teach me a lot about myself and allows me to love who I am and who I’m not and to love who others are for who they are and for who they are not.
Okay your mental body this needs information. The more information you can give it the better it will serve you. Now I’m not talking about books and logical types of information I’m talking about energetic information or informed thought energy. The more informed thought energy you can feed your bodymind the more nourished and healthy your mental body will be. One way to get informed thought energy is to meditate. Again I just talked about this meditation trains you in focusing your thoughts on one thing. This clears up the chatter, the clutter, the monkey speak in your bodymind and gives you the ability to control what it is you would like to be thinking about. This focus and control of your thoughts gives you the power of choice and in making choices that are life-affirming.
You don’t want scrambled thought energy as this will just mess up your bodymind, create confusion, cause doubt leading to indecision and poor choices and this scrambled energy will cause other imbalances in your other bodies. Organic farm-fresh scrambled eggs are healthy, but a scrambled bodymind is not.
Your mental body also revolves around your brain, heart, and gut and these organs are connected through your vagus nerve. They speak to each other using neurotransmitters and hormones. By following the 7 Holistic Health Principles you will keep these molecules of communication in balanced amounts giving you better focus allowing you to think more clearly and feeding your mental body informed thought energy.
Finally, your soul body. Your soul is connected to everything in the universe because your soul is pure energy, the very essence of the universe. The thing that breathes, that beats, that sleeps, that moves everything in the universe is what makes up 100% of your soul, energy. Now your soul is always giving and receiving energy. If your soul is starved it’ll give off bad energy. If it’s nourished and satisfied it’ll give off good energy. Now there’s a universal principle of like attracting like so if you’re giving bad energy that’s what you’ll receive, if you’re giving good energy that’s what you’ll receive. So how do you nourish your soul so that it gives and receives positive energy? By having a dream.
“A tortured soul is one without a dream. A peaceful soul is one moving towards its dream.”
When you’re following your Dharma or your duty here in this lifetime, when the way you live your life is on purpose and in alignment with your core values and your dream your soul is vibrating at a very high vibrational frequency, good vibes, positive energy, which always leads to happiness and health. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it or if you’re making life choices that are not consistent with how you really want to live then your soul, your energetic being begins to fizzle out and you begin to experience more pain than pleasure and more sickness than health.
Your soul is interconnected, integrated, inseparable from not only the universe, but also with your purpose, with your goal, with your vision, with why you’re here. By having a dream you will find your place in the universe and will soon realise the oneness that you, we, all things in the universe truly are.
So I want you to think to yourself before this day is done what’s one thing that you can do to feed your physical body (example eat real food); one thing you can do to feed your sexual body (say a sensual massage); one thing you can do to feed your emotional body (have some gratitude); one thing you can do to feed your mental body (try a 2 minute nasal breathing session); and what’s one thing you can do to feed your soul body (how about getting some clarity on your life purpose or take some action on the next step in reaching your goals).
You are more than your physical body, a lot more, and by nourishing the different parts that make the whole you, you give yourself the best chance at living the good life, an awesome life, a happy healthy holistic life.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring How to get Yourself Back on a Holistic Track after Overindulging on Food:
- I’ll explain how overeating can be a gateway to many other dream-negating bad habits
- I’ll talk about some of the causes for overeating
- Finally I’ll share five tips that’ll help get your bodymind back into a holistic way of being after an episode of overeating
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Overeating, binging, and overindulging on food are habits that other animals don’t seem to exhibit. The human animal, however, practises this habitual way of eating to the extreme a lot more than it should.
When you binge eat there’s the possibility of thinking that since you’re already doing something that’s not exactly health-promoting you may as well do some other non-healthy things like indulge in some alcohol, sloth around all day, or just think horrible negative thoughts like how sucky it is to be you right now for not having the willpower to just say no to food.
As a kid I would binge eat on cookies or crackers and hot chocolate (yummy) and I still have binge eating episodes to this day. I know for myself that once I start going down the binge eating path my return to the path of a healthy way of eating can be a long and difficult one as other healthy habits fall by the wayside as well. My sleeping pattern would go all over the place, I’d forget (on purpose) about keeping up with my usual movement practise, and I’d find my thoughts heading down a dark corridor.
One reason for overeating is not being mindful and conscious of your own actions.
I know many people who literally eat like ducks. They barely chew their food and end up swallowing big portions of food down their gullets. I know many people like this because I used to be one. You can only see what you have within you, so that’s why it’s easy for me to see this because I definitely had this mindless habit for a long time. Back in the day I was one of the fastest eaters on the planet (true story) and I never took the time to chew my food, you know to just enjoy the taste. I was never fully involved in the whole eating process. I guess you could say I thought eating was a waste of time and I had better things to do. Problem is because I ate so fast I wasn’t giving my body the proper signals that I’ve eaten and it’s time to stop now. So I would have seconds, thirds, and all too often a fourth serving. Looking back at it now all I can think is ‘man I really was a pig… or a duck.
Another reason for binge eating is emotional.
Feeling alone or hurt. Feeling like you don’t have a purpose and don’t know who you are and what you want or living a life that you really aren’t in love with. So loneliness, confusion, and fear of life itself will cause many people to turn to food for comfort and this can turn into a long period of binge eating.
Last reason I’ll give for overindulging on food is the season.
What I’m talking about here are special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and holidays, all of these are perfect excuses to get off the health train and on the indulgence express (my kind of ride). I mean who doesn’t love pumpkin pies, fruit salads with ice cream, cakes, and my personal favourite homemade smoked salmon. Smoked salmon, you may be thinking how is that unhealthy? Well let me tell you how. If you can sit down and eat half a whole salmon including the head in less than 20 minutes that my friend is overindulging of the highest degree. Remember:
“Too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.”
All right so let’s get into five ways you can get yourself back to living a holistic healthy lifestyle after an episode of overeating.
So the day after your however-long binge first thing you want to do is to get back in touch with your dream. What is your dream? Do you even have a dream? Have you written it down with specific goals and outlined the steps you need to take to get you there? Have you got clear personal core values on when to say yes or no when it comes to your dream? If you haven’t got a dream with clear goals and core values then you’re living life with no real direction.
A dream is your compass, your GPS that keeps you on your chosen path.
As the saying goes:
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
So unless your dream is to gain massive amounts of weight or to outdo everyone at a buffet meal or to win an all-you-can-eat contest then overeating, binging, and overindulging on food are not dream-affirmative actions. Listen to the Dream Building podcast I did for more information on using dreams to help guide your holistic lifestyle, it’s podcast number 14.
Second tip: get outdoors. Strip to the bare essentials (not fully naked, but if you can get fully naked more power to you) and get some sunshine on your skin and ground yourself to the Earth by going barefoot on the grass, soil, or sand. Connecting with nature will help improve your mood, boost your immune system, and help reduce the inflammation caused by the excessive amounts of energy you’ve been putting into your body.
Third tip is to do a little fasting. Digestion is a 4-6 hour process and your body has to focus a lot of attention on this very important function. Nutrients and energy will be diverted to your stomach and intestines to ensure proper digestion takes place, but this means other functions in your body will be somewhat affected.
One process that happens in your cells only during times your body isn’t digesting and when you haven’t eaten in a long time is called autophagy. Autophagy is when cells destroy, clear out, and recycle old, damaged, and unused proteins. This makes for a healthier, cleaner internal environment for the cell giving it longevity and maintaining its ability to function at an optimal level. By fasting you give your cells the chance to clear out the junk and to repair or get rid of what’s not working.
Now there are many different ways to fast. You could do a 24 hour fast once or twice a week, a 48 hour water fast, 3 day fruit fast, couple weeks of juice fasting, or what I normally practise intermittent fasting where you fast between 12-18 hours and eat only within a certain feeding window of 12-6 hours.
Right now I’m doing a 12 hour fast with a 12 hour feeding window. So I usually finish eating dinner before 7 and don’t have breakfast until 7 the next morning.
Fourth tip is to move at high intensities. High intensity movement patterns include lifting heavy (at least 80% your 1 rep maximum) and high intensity interval training where you go all out for a certain amount of time and then rest for a certain amount of time and you repeat this over and over.
High intensity training helps maintain and build lean muscle mass, which is a metabolically rich part of your body, meaning the more muscle you have the more energy you actually need to maintain it. HIT also keeps your metabolism raised long after the workout, up to 48 hours in some cases, allowing your body to burn energy and fat even while you’re at rest. HIT compared to longer endurance activities stops your stress hormone cortisol from staying too high for too long, which is exactly what you want as cortisol is catabolic, meaning it breaks things down including muscle tissue. Last benefit to high intensity workouts is that they can be extremely short. So instead of going for an hour long run you could do sprints on a spin bike with the whole workout lasting no more than 20 minutes and turn yourself into a metabolic beast.
Last tip to getting yourself back on track after an episode of binge eating is to get back to eating real food. Stick to whole foods from Mother Nature and skip the packaged and processed junk from Father Industry. If for one week you can lower your starch and fruit intake that’d be even better.
Remember:
“Real food is real medicine.”
And by eating real food you’re giving your body exactly what it needs to heal and repair itself. Especially important after a period of feeding it an excessive amount of energy or significant amounts of fake pretend food-like products.
So follow your dream, connect with nature, do a little fasting, do intense movements, and just eat real food and in no time you’ll be back on track to living your dream and living a holistic healthy lifestyle.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Fear:
- I’ll explain what fear is
- I’ll talk about what limiting beliefs are and how they keep you from change
- I’ll talk about how expressing your authentic self helps you see fear in a new light
- Finally I’ll share an exercise you can practise to reframe your thoughts to help you deal with your fear
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Fear can be defined as an emotion driven by the thought of possible danger or the anticipation and expectation of pain and harm. Meaning fear is an emotion based on a thought you have about a future event.
Another way to see fear is that a lot of people believe hate to be the opposite of love, but hate like love is still an emotion that connects you to the object you have hatred toward. In my experience and what many other people have found is that fear is actually the opposite to love as fear has an energy vibration that drives you away and disconnects you from whatever it is that you’re afraid of.
Fear is an energy that you experience in the now present moment based on a future event, and it stops you from moving toward what it is you want.
One major driver of fear is a limiting belief. Now a limiting belief is a thought, an idea that you have downloaded from your upbringing that stops you and restrains you and prevents you from doing anything. This is the essence of fear.
For example you may want to play a sport or join a gym, but you have this belief that you are not coordinated or strong enough so you don’t sign up. You may want to become a fashion model, but you have this belief that you are not attractive, pretty, handsome, tall, thin, or beautiful enough so you don’t even bother looking at job ads for models. You may want to be a scientist, but have a this belief that you’re not smart enough or that people where you come from don’t normally become scientists and have other types of jobs and careers so you stop putting effort into your studies.
Or how about this example. You want to forget the past and start from scratch a relationship with a loved one that you had a fight with many years ago. You want to let go of the resentment that you’ve held toward that person for what they said or did to you or hope that they can forgive you for something you said or did. You want to reconnect with this person so badly it hurts. However, you have this belief, this thought, this idea that no matter what you say or do that person is never gonna’ change and never gonna’ want you back in their life anyway. They will shut you down, you will feel embarrassed and hurt, and you would just be wasting your time. So you don’t reach out to that person and continue to live in the shadow of regret and wondering ‘what if’, all the while missing out on the love that you could be receiving in that relationship.
A belief that holds you back from experiencing life is a limiting belief because it limits you from reaching and realising your full potential and experiencing life in all its fantastic awesome beauty.
A limiting belief is the face of fear and it will always be staring back at you for as long as you allow it. Fear keeps you from changing and you will never be able to change and develop and grow and evolve to reach your full potential if you live in fear.
One of humanity’s greatest fears is to follow one’s own dream. When you’re following your dreams and living the life you want to live and being the way you want to be this is when you shine at your brightest and show your true luminous being, your authentic self.
This fear to dream and act upon one’s dream and shine brightly was summed up brilliantly by spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson who says:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Now you may be thinking how it is possible for someone to be scared of their own light energy and their own awesomeness.
Well how many times have you seen someone else shine and be and do and have awesome things only to see them be cut down by others because they are appearing to be too showy, big-headed, egotistical, and up themselves?
How many times have you personally been told to ‘watch it’ whenever you’ve found success, because it looks like you’re showing off or making others feel inadequate?
Every time you shine you are exposing the shadows of other people, but instead of those other people seeing your light as a motive for inspiration and change, they choose to see it as a threat, so they bring you down to their level and keep you from change.
With this limiting belief that any time you dare to dream you are told to get your head out of the clouds and to do as everyone else does is it any wonder why a lot of people give up their dreams, fail to shine and ride the mediocre train into ‘surviville’ to end up living a ‘just okay’ life like everybody else, instead of dreaming big, shining their light, living an awesome life, and thriving.
The thing is when you shine not only are you exposing the shadows of people around you, but you also see your own shadows, your own fears and it is only during the times that you do shine that you can face your shadows and fears full on.
When you look at your fear in the light you will see it very differently. Expressing your true self your luminous being you will no longer turn away from fear, you will face it head on and do whatever it is that needs to be done.
Fear isn’t something to remove or to forget about. It’s an emotion you must use to drive you, motivate you, inspire you to keep moving forward, through that fear to the other side where your dreams live. Of course this is all dependent on you being able to fully express yourself and to shine your light being without regret. Because you can only see your fears when you’re shining at your brightest.
So how exactly do you shine when you have all these limiting beliefs stopping you from doing so in the first place?
By doing the work – that’s Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’ that is.
Byron Katie is an author that writes about self-inquiry and seeing reality for what it really is. Bryon suffered from depression and one day woke up to reality and realised that when she believed her thoughts she suffered and when she didn’t believe her thoughts she no longer suffered.
Byron created a free online tool called The Work, which is a powerful process of self-inquiry. I’ll put a link to the work in the episode show notes, which you can find at wholeguidance.com/blog.
I highly recommend The Work as it makes you question your own thoughts and will help you realise that your limiting beliefs are only there because, well you believe them to be real. But as you go through The Work you will realise that these limiting beliefs are only as real as you think they are and by changing your thoughts about them you can change your entire life.
I no longer run from fear. I embrace it. That doesn’t mean I’m never afraid. It just means when I feel the fear… eventually I push through it.
By questioning your own beliefs you can use fear to move you toward your dreams instead of away from your dreams.
There’s a saying:
“The obstacle is the way.”
And fear is one of the greatest obstacles to humanity reaching enlightenment, but this also makes fear one of humanity’s final hopes to reaching enlightenment and living an awesome life.
I’ll finish with the full quote from Marianne Williamson that I introduced earlier because it’s such an empowering and non-limiting belief:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Make this year the year you overcome fear.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Emotions specifically Anger and Happiness:
- I’ll explain how emotions run your life
- I’ll talk about how anger is a necessary and healthy emotion
- I’ll talk about how the pursuit for happiness isn’t a healthy choice
- Finally I’ll share how to express healthy anger and to choose happiness to get the most pleasure from life
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Ah emotions. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.
Your thoughts (your ideas) they create your feelings (your emotions) and your feelings well they determine a heck of a lot. It is your feelings that determine your words (what you say); your deeds (what you do); and ultimately your results (what you get out of life).
Let’s take a look at how ideas and emotions in your bodymind really do lead to the results you get in your life.
Human thought begins with the perception of an internal or external stimulus. This thought then creates subtle energies. These subtle energies influence your physical, emotional, and mental ways of being by mobilising chemical messenger molecules throughout your bodymind. Examples of chemical messenger molecules include immune cells, hormones, and neurotransmitters. So once these molecules have energy and motion they travel to, are received, and used by your cells as instructions that drive both your verbal and physical actions.
These molecules of energy in motion or another way to say it would be these molecules of e-motion absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it determine the course of your life because what you say and what you do will always, always determine what you get out of life.
Now there are two main emotional forces that drive the human experience: pain and pleasure.
One emotion associated with pain is anger. The root cause for you to get angry is because you have a need that is not being met. But I’m not talking about basic needs like food or shelter. No I’m talking about deep-seated, inbuilt, animal, innate, primal, evolutionary-rooted physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. The ultimate human need is the need to connect and to share your self with others.
So when your need for connection and sharing is not being met many emotions can come up and anger is the emotion that people think and feel of when they wish to express externally to another person that they have this unmet need. As I talked about earlier this anger really is a collection of molecules of energy in motion. Anger is an emotion that has very hot, unstable energy attached to it so your words and deeds will also be hot and unstable when in an angry state resulting in a heated and rocky outcome to whomever you are expressing that anger toward.
When taken to the extreme anger turns into rage, which has even hotter less stable out-of-control energy associated with it.
Now when anger does not turn into out-of-controlled rage it can be a very beneficial and healthful emotion. In fact anger is one of the most powerful and impactful emotions as anger alone can cause you to change. Your fits, your bouts, your outbursts of anger are all opportunities for change. To change what? To change anything you want.
Whether your anger causes a change in you, in someone else, in your environment, or a global change it doesn’t matter as change of any kind is what life is all about.
Many inventions, services, businesses, restaurants, and even airlines were created because one person got given a crappy deal, got angry, and then got even… an even better idea that is. For example successful businessman Richard Branson he was left stranded at an airport and instead of moping around complaining, getting worked up into a rage and eventually doing nothing about it, he got over his anger and frustration and asked other stranded passengers if they’d like to charter a plane with him and thus the seed for Virgin airlines was sown.
Unfortunately many people use anger purely as a release valve and nothing else and there’s nothing wrong with releasing pent up energy, but if you don’t do something after that release you miss out on the main benefit of getting angry, the benefit of change.
Anger can be a healthy emotion with the potential for unlimited benefits because who knows where change can take you.
Happiness on the other hand is an emotion associated with pleasure. You usually feel happy when you get what you want and need and when personal expectations are met. I say usually feel happy because even when your needs are met you may still find yourself to not be in a happy place as I’ll explain shortly.
The emotion of happiness has an energy signature that is adaptable and stable. Happiness can warm you when you’re feeling cold and can cool you when you’re feeling the heat. Happiness can help ground you to the present moment and keep you centred, even when you think that everything around you is falling to pieces.
The issue with happiness lies in its pursuit.
The pursuit of happiness is an endless everlasting game that you can never win. When you’re told by others such as your parents, well-meaning family and friends, and the media that in order for you to be happy you must act a certain way, own a certain product, buy a certain perfume, wear a certain brand of clothing, follow a certain political party and you end up getting what you thought you always wanted you find yourself still very unhappy indeed. So you begin to pursue the next false idol of desire, get it, and still find yourself unhappy and this perpetual persistent pursuit for happiness goes on and on for as long as you play it.
Even if you were to pursue your own goals you will find that at the end of that rainbow there is no real pot of gold. Think of all the personal goals you’ve set and achieved and ask yourself after the fact right now in this moment long after you accomplished what you set out to do, are you happy? Are you happy because you fulfilled your dreams and goals or are you happy for another reason?
I used to always wait for something to happen in my life before I would allow myself to be happy such as earn a certain amount of money or lift a certain amount of weight or to see a certain number on the scale before I would say to myself I was happy and I was finally successful. Now, however, not only am I extremely happy and satisfied once I’ve achieved a goal, but I’m also happy during the goal seeking process. For example, I’m happy and satisfied after eating a delicious, nutritious, and tasty dish, but I’m also happy while shopping for, preparing for, and cooking the actual meal.
What I’m saying is that in my experience being happy isn’t something that you can get out there externally. Happiness can only be found in one place, internally, inside of you. No matter how much pursuing you do to be happy, no matter how much money you make, no matter what you own or how many material objects or awards you accumulate you will never find happiness in any one of these actions specifically. In order to express the energies of adaptability and stability, in order to express true happiness you must choose to do so in any one moment.
In other words happiness doesn’t have to be a destination, but can also be the journey itself and the only thing stopping you from being happy is you.
“In order to be happy, you must choose happy.”
It doesn’t matter who you’re with, what you’re doing, where you’re going, or how you’re feeling, I believe that happiness really is a personal choice and it’s a choice that you can make in any moment.
I’m not saying it’s an easy choice to make. For some people choosing happiness will be such a foreign concept that to make such a choice may look impossible. For other people like the Dalai Lama for example choosing happiness comes as second nature. For me personally I am constantly having to remind myself daily to stop waiting for happiness to come to me and to let happiness come from me.
It’s a simple idea seeing happiness as a choice, but boy is it a bloody difficult choice to understand.
Alright so now I’ll talk about how to express healthy anger and how to make it easier to choose happiness.
Firstly, when it comes to healthy expressions of anger you must give yourself permission to express that anger. Do not hold anger or any other emotion for that matter inside your bodymind.
Remember emotions are actual chemical messenger molecules or molecules of energy in motion and when you experience an emotion and a feeling these molecules of energy are mobilised throughout your entire body. When you express that internal feeling and emotion by sharing it externally those molecules get used up by your cells and the energy releases from your body into the environment.
However, if left to linger inside your body these molecules and energy will build up and accumulate in certain areas of your body depending on your genetics and upbringing. If you chronically and consistently hold back from expressing your emotions this bundle of molecules and energy in your body will eventually create a disease and the most common disease associated with pent-up suppressed emotions is cancer.
Secondly:
“Get mad, then get over it.”
Is a quote by American statesman Colin Powell and it’s a quote that you must keep in mind when it comes to healthy expressions of anger.
Back in the day when I was dealing with depression I was also dealing with anger issues (actually I still am). Whereas back then I would attach to my anger as if my life depended on it and it would grow into full-blown rage and I would totally forget what it was that I was angry about in the first place, now I am able to let go of that anger once I’ve allowed myself the chance to fully express it. Plus I’m fully aware of how I am being and what I’m saying during the outburst of anger, which is pretty weird. It’s like I can see how much of an egg I’m being and all I can do is be a witness to my outburst. This is a good thing though because it helps me remember what I got angry about and makes it easier for me to change what it is I want to change so I won’t be triggered as easily the next time I might get angry.
So do not attach to anger and let it develop into full-blown rage. Stay in control of your aggression by fully expressing it and do not confuse yourself with those molecules of energy in motion. You are expressing anger, you are not anger itself.
Healthy anger is anger that is expressed, let go of, and learnt from.
With regards to happiness there’s a brilliant quote by James Openheim that says:
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.”
As I said before happiness isn’t necessarily the destination, but also the journey itself and the journey is always where you are in the present moment. Happiness isn’t something to pursue, but something you choose to express while in pursuit of your dream. Yes achieving your dream will definitely be a cause for celebration and joy, but you’re allowed to be happy as you make your way toward reaching your dream.
“Happiness is found in the being, not in the having and the doing.”
So in this present moment and any other moment you wish, you have the power to choose to be happy. The choice for happiness is and will always be yours.
So how exactly do you practise letting go of anger and choosing happiness in any one moment… by practising mindfulness.
How many people today are on autopilot waking up to go to school or work, coming home, going to sleep, and then repeating this all over again without being fully present and aware that there were a thousand other events and experiences they had that day.
Life and the human experience is exciting, exhilarating and extremely complex and full of ups and downs and twists and turns, but too much of modern society today is all about numbing the human experience and reducing it down to the most basic of tasks and needs making life appear to be such a boring experience.
Mindfulness practise improves your awareness of how you’re being, how you’re feeling, and what you’re doing in the now the present moment. Mindfulness keeps you in touch with what’s happening internally in your body and what’s happening externally in your environment. When you live your life with a heightened level of awareness you will find that life is so much more than work and sleep.
By practising mindfulness on a daily basis you enhance your ability to express anger and then let it go. You are also able to learn from that expressed anger what changes you need to make to reduce your chances of getting angry in the future and to learn what changes you see are necessary in order to reduce what may upset other people as well.
By practising mindfulness regularly you will come to see that happiness isn’t a reward, an object, or an end date, but it’s an energy that you have inside of you and you can choose to express that energy of happiness anytime you want. Mindfulness gives you full awareness of our ups and downs and during those times that you’re feeling down you will begin to notice, like an observer outside of your body, that you’re actually feeling down in the dumps and this awareness helps you to choose to continue to live in the sadness (and that’s perfectly fine) or to let it go and to choose happiness instead.
The best way to practise mindfulness is to take time out from your day and to just sit with your thoughts. That’s right I’m talking about meditation.
Meditation isn’t about achieving some divine connection with the universe (although that can be a nice bonus if you can receive such a gift). Meditation is about keeping your mind focused on one thing and one thing only and anytime your thoughts start to wonder, stray, and go walkabout you bring yourself back to centre which is your original thought that you were focusing on.
Meditation comes in all forms and sizes:
- Sitting
- Standing
- Walking
- Gardening
- Paddle boarding
- Dancing
- Sports
Whatever experience you can have that will keep you focused on one thing and crowd out all other thoughts you can make into a meditative and mindfulness practise.
The key words here are regular, daily, consistent, and practise.
Meditation and mindfulness they’re like everything else in life. You don’t just take one breath, or sleep for one night, or eat just one meal, you must breathe, sleep, and eat consistently in order to live and learning to enhance and improve your levels of awareness takes time, takes effort, and it’s an ongoing practise.
There’s a brilliant book by Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence that gives great insight into how your emotions influence your life and how they influence your intelligence.
There’s a saying:
“When emotions are high, intelligence is low.”
Meaning your levels of emotion determine your levels of intelligence, which brings us back to my original statement about how emotions run your life.
Don’t be scared to get angry. Use that anger to learn and grow and change to improve your life and other people’s lives.
Don’t be thinking that happiness is some tangible external object that you must get. With practise you can choose happiness whenever you feel you need it.
By learning from anger and choosing happiness sooner rather than later you can make yourself a very smart and intelligent human being indeed.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Materialism and Spiritualism:
- I’ll explain what materialism and spiritualism really mean
- I’ll talk about the dark and the light sides of each one
- Finally, I’ll share how you can best balance the material world with a spiritual life
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Depending on the definition used you could think materialism and spiritualism are two sides of the same coin or are totally unrelated.
The following set of definitions show how these two belief systems are actually connected.
Materialism is the belief that nothing exists except for physical matter.
Spiritualism is the belief that spirit is the fundamental element of all reality.
What we have here are total opposites and yet this is exactly what makes them totally connected. How?
In the podcast I did on the philosophy of Yin and Yang I explained how these two forces of the Universe are both opposing each other, but at the same time are interconnected to each other. The potential for Yin, the seed of Yin grows from inside Yang and vice versa. You cannot have one without the other.
For example day and night, hot and cold, fear and love, each of these are opposites of each other, but you could never know one without experiencing the other as it is from day that night comes, it is after heat cools that you feel cold, and it is after you’ve faced fear that love can be expressed… and vice versa for all of these.
Matter and spirit are different yes, but they come from within each other.
The physical world is made up of matter, right. The sun, the moon, the Earth, your body these are all material objects.
The spiritual world is made up of energy. The sun’s radiation, the moons gravitational pull, the Earth’s electromagnetic field, your body’s aura and light signature these are all spiritual elements or units of energy.
So here you have physical objects radiating, emanating, and producing energy. But, not only do physical objects produce energy, but physical matter itself is made up of and moved by energy.
If you had a powerful physics microscope and looked at your hand under the smallest zoom setting you would see the peaks and valleys of your skin. Increase the zoom a little and you’d see the individual cells that make up these peaks and valleys. Zoom in further and you’d see the organelles, the little organs inside one of these cells. Zoom in again and you’d see the molecules making up the parts of the cell and organelles. Zoom in even further and you’d see the individual atoms making up these molecules. Zoom in once again and you begin to see protons, neutrons, and electrons the building blocks of atoms. What, more zooming? Yes and this time you’ll see the fundamental building blocks of the universe called quantum particles and forces some of which include quarks, leptons, electromagnetism, and gravity.
Now if you were to zoom in one last time on a quark or a lepton, guess what you’d see? Nothing! You would see absolutely empty space. However, this space isn’t actually empty as it’s full of pure energy and this energy is constantly vibrating, it’s twirling and swirling, it’s moving and grooving. It’s a little vortex of energy constantly in motion.
So ultimately your hand is made up of, held together, and animated by energy in motion.
So we had physical matter producing energy and now we see that energy makes and moves physical matter. Yin and Yang at it again.
Energy is pure potential and unlimited possibility and it’s only when this energy accumulates and concentrates to form matter that you see that possibility come to life. So without energy there would be no matter, but without matter you wouldn’t even realise, you wouldn’t know that energy even existed.
In other words:
“Spirit expresses itself as matter and matter is proof that spirit exists.”
You may want to meditate on the last line I just said there as it’s actually quite a deep philosophical insight that could help you explain certain unknowns and mysteries about the universe.
So that’s how matter and spirit are connected according to the first set of definitions I gave earlier. If you’d like to have personal real world experience interacting with matter and energy I highly recommend two books by Pam Grout, E-Squared and E-Cubed. These two books have 18 experiments that you can do in your own home to see for yourself how matter and energy or spirit work together to create your reality.
Anyhoo… with this second set of definitions I’m about to give materialistic and spiritualistic ways of being look totally unrelated.
Materialism is to place more worth and receive more comfort from physical objects and material possessions. So materialism is all about receiving wealth and admiration through material possession.
Spiritualism is being able to communicate with the spirits of dead people. So spiritualism is all about receiving guidance and connection through spiritual communication.
So yeah according to these two definitions materialism and spiritualism don’t really seem to relate to each other… or do they?
As I go through the dark and light sides of each of these definitions there actually is a connection between the two.
Okay so the dark side of being too materialistic is that a materialistic person sees only what is directly in front of them and believes that they need to accumulate more and more stuff because they have been told that the more you have then the more important and the more successful you are. So unfortunately for people that follow this materialistic belief system to the extreme their self worth and happiness is directly connected to how much they have in the bank, how big and how decorated their house is, how many cars they own, or whether they have the latest clothing or tech gear.
The dark side of being too spiritualistic is that a spiritualistic person does not always see what’s right in front them and they believe that the solution to their physical world problems can only be found in the invisible spirit world. Unfortunately for people that follow this spiritualistic belief system to the extreme their ability to overcome problems in life and real world issues is directly dependent upon their relationship and abilities to connect with the spirits of the dead.
So the negative to both of these isms is that a person who follows them to the absolute extreme is either fully connected to the material world or fully connected to the spiritual world, but totally disconnected from the real world which is made up of the interactions and the connections between matter and energy. That is to say that people at either extreme take more care of their physical possessions and spiritual relationships then they do human relationships with family and friends and other people around them.
The light side of materialism is that you do understand the realities of the world as it is right now. You realise that what’s happening right now in this moment is something that must be dealt with. You understand that by having the best tools for the job you will be able to do the work you are meant to be doing fulfilling your Dharma or life purpose creating a happy and healthy life for yourself and others.
The light side of spiritualism is that you know that there’s more to reality than what you’re told and are led to believe by others. You realise that the possession of matter really doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things and that you can live a happy and healthy existence without the latest and greatest gadgets and do just fine with a minimalist approach to life that works for you and the people you care about.
So both of these isms can be very grounding. Seeing what is right in front of you and living life with the minimal amount of possessions.
So how do you avoid the trap of falling into the extremes of materialism where accumulation of matter is most important and spiritualism where relationships with the dead are more important? How do you balance living in a material world made up of spiritual elements?
First thing to do is to stop listening to all the noise around you as if it’s stated fact and truth. Marketing hype is full of nonsensical noise. Marketing hype comes in two forms.
The first is from advertising. Once you spray on that deodorant thousands of men and women are not going to be chasing you in the streets. Buying that car won’t necessarily mean instant happiness. Wearing those new sports shoes won’t make you a professional athlete overnight. Eating foods labelled healthy will usually end up making you sick. Advertising doesn’t equal fact.
The second form of marketing hype comes from news media. News on television, newspapers, radio, and yes even the Internet are full of exaggeration, scare tactics, and hidden agendas. News is told for a specific reason to make you feel a certain way, usually to feel scared and fearful, sad and unhappy. In between the news they give you the answers to all the world’s problems and your own problems through advertising. Again advertising does not equal fact and news does not equal truth.
Now the biggest noise you will have to learn to stop taking as gospel, the biggest marketing hype you will hear is that coming from your own mind – your thoughts! You think on average 68,000 thoughts a day a majority of which are negative and are thoughts you had yesterday. Most of your thoughts are marketing hype from your parents, your family and friends, your workplace, your community, news media or advertising.
When was the last time you had an authentic personally created thought? A thought that didn’t come from your mum or dad, from your doctor, your priest, or your boss. When was the last time you thought for yourself?
Don’t believe the hype whether it comes from advertising, the news, or your own thoughts.
The best way to filter this noise and to find out what is accurate and truthful information that works for you is to live life in the space of a question and become a critical thinker. Question everything. Everything you hear, see, taste, touch, smell, and feel, question whether it’s real or not for you.
Dietary guidelines, health practises, marriage, drug addiction, human sexual behaviour, religion, modern agriculture, schools and education, career and employment opportunities – I would guess that about 95% of western civilised society takes all of these topics and belief systems at face value.
People who are raised in a western society rarely ever question where cultural ideas come from. How did the dietary guidelines come to be? Where did marriage come from? What does the research actually say about drug addiction? Can modern agriculture really feed the world? Does a child in today’s information knowledge-based economy really need to go to school and pay large institutions large amounts of money for their education?
Some personal questions you can ask yourself include:
- Is that low-fat meal bar really improving my health?
- Is broccoli really as disgusting as I remember it?
- Was my ex-girlfriend really a witch or my ex-boyfriend really a dirty ape?
- Are my children really too much to handle?
- Am I as fat or skinny, mean or kind, forgiving or harsh as I say I am?
- Are my parents really to blame for my current life situation?
- Do I love my life right now?
- Have I ever put 100% effort into being healthier?
- Is what other people say about me true?
When you become a critical thinker and begin to live life in the space of a question you start to see things as they are and not what you thought they were and this gives you more clarity on how you need to be in this moment and the next.
Today people know more about what’s going on on the other side of the planet than they do their own backyard. People know more about certain celebrities and professional athletes than they do the person they sleep with in the same bed every night!
So my final tip for focusing your energy in a world full of matter is to connect, relate, and emote with the people in your life.
Fully engage in an emotional connection with people you interact with day to day. This isn’t restricted to just family, friends, and flatmates. I’m also talking about the clerk at the local supermarket or laundromat or the bus driver who always drives you home after school or work. Do you know their name? How long they’ve worked there? Whether they’re local or drive two hours in to work from out of town as it was the only job they could find at the time? Do you know your partner’s favourite colour? Do you know how your parents met? Do you know your child’s biggest fear and greatest love right now?
Be with the people who are in your life right now.
The more you can question what you’re being told and what you’re thinking and the more you can fully relate with the people in your life then the less you will need to use material possessions and spiritual communication as substitutes for peace and love.
“Having the latest in technology will not make you the best of humanity.”
Being one with the Almighty regardless of your actions here on Earth disconnects you from the rest of humanity.
Ultimately the key to receiving wealth and admiration as well as connection and guidance is through healthy relationships with your fellow human. Not by relating with objects or with people who have already passed on, but by relating to family, friends, and local communities. This is how you balance living a spiritual life in a material world.
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