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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.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring the Best Ways to Measure Your Health:
- I’ll explain why tracking your health progress is crucial to reaching your health goals
- I’ll talk about how your body weight is really a poor measure of health
- Finally, I’ll give you 5 different health tracking techniques you can use to better manage your health
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Many people set health goals and fail to reach them, why? Two big reasons come to mind. First one is you need to know why you are doing what it is you are doing. Many people fail to reach health goals because they don’t have a big enough why, a big enough reason to push through plateaus and obstacles that will most definitely show up. Having a dream gives you that why; it gives you direction and inspiration to push through right to the end.
Second big reason people fail to meet health goals is that they do not track their health progress. Just as having a dream and setting a health goal is important in that it gives you direction and something to move toward and gives you that drive and that push, tracking your health progress is like signs and indicators that keep you on the best path toward your dream. Tracking and measuring your health is really important in that it gives you clear signs when things are working for you and when things are not.
If you suffer from chronic weight issues, whether you’re overweight or underweight, than the bathroom scale is probably your most prized and most despised earthly possession and why wouldn’t it be. You have been told that body weight is a very important indicator for health. Let explain how this is not 100% accurate.
Your body weight is made up of muscle, bone, fat, cartilage, bodily fluids of several types, and of course water. Whenever you stand on a scale and measure your weight you are weighing the totality of all of these things. This is where the Body Mass Index or BMI fails as a health measurement. The BMI is a measure of body fat (supposedly) based on your weight in relation to your height. If your BMI comes out at 18.5-24.9 you are labelled as having a normal weight. If its 25-29.9 you are labelled overweight. Over 30 and you’re obese.
Now I want you to think of the Terminator himself Arnold Schwarzenegger. During his bodybuilding days his body weight was around 107 kg or 235 lbs and he’s 6’2”. Arnold’s BMI in his prime works out to be 30.2. Meaning according to body weight and BMI that Conan, the Commando himself who helped Red Sonja save the world and who single-handedly took out the Predator is an obese fat hunk of human flesh! Remember over 30 is obese. Well of course that’s not true as Arnold’s body fat percentage when he was competing was only about 5-7% and he was in reality a mass of lean muscle and a chiselled piece of human art.
The bathroom scale is not giving you an accurate number for health. It’s giving you a number, but that number depends on so many things. Is that scale number made up of mostly muscle which is a lot more dense and heavier and healthier than fat? Or is it bone mass? Is that scale number mostly fat?
Imagine you spend a whole month off the sugars and junk food, you’ve quit smoking, and you’re now walking more and doing some resistance training. You start out at 70 kg and after 4 weeks you see on the scale the same 70 kg. Your initial reaction may be shock, horror, and confusion, but if you understand that getting off the sugars means you’re not holding onto as much water as before and that eating more real food and not smoking and doing some weight training can actually build muscle and bone and cause fat cells to empty out and die then maybe that number is a really good indication of how you’ve been doing that month. You’ve burnt off the fat and you’ve built up some bone and muscle.
This is why body weight is not a good measurement to track and using a scale is a waste of time really. It’s difficult to get a real sense of what’s happening with your body and with your health overall when you rely solely on that number you get from the scale.
Let me share 5 more effective ways to track your health progress. These techniques do not need any fancy equipment and are simple and easy to do and they will give you a more accurate measure of your health than a body weight number on a scale ever could.
First technique is measuring your waist-to-hip ratio. This gives you a better measurement of your body composition. All you need is a tape measure and a calculator. Note down your waist circumference (by putting the tape around your waist over your belly button) and your hips circumference (by measuring at the widest part of your hips). Divide your waist measurement by your hips and you will have your waist-to-hip ratio. An ideal number for men is 0.8 and for women is 0.7. Less than 0.95 for men and less than 0.8 for women puts you in the low risk disease group. Above these numbers, .95 and above for men, .8 and above for women and you move into the moderate and high risk disease groups.
Along this body composition line of thinking clothes are a great way to track progress. Are your pants or dresses starting to feel more loose or tight? If it’s tight is it due to more fat or more muscle tone? How to tell? Use a mirror and a camera. Your memory tends to be a bit biased and flaky when it comes to your body image so taking photos of your half-naked body in the mirror is a great objective assessment of your body composition over time. I suggest keeping the snaps to once a week. You can overdo tracking your health progress. We want to keep it nice and balanced so once a week taking your measurements will keep you from getting too neurotic.
Second way to track your health progress is by keeping a food and poop log. This is seriously important data you need to manage to keep on top of your health. By logging your meals, snacks, and drinks you will be able to see how well you’re keeping to your lifestyle eating plan. Remember diets are great, but healthy eating is part of your life not separate from it so healthy eating shouldn’t be something you feel forced into doing, but something that’s as natural as breathing or brushing your teeth every day. So you can use this food log data to help track down root causes of any health issues that come up.
By logging your, logs, poop that is, and using the Bristol Stool Chart as your tool to compare your stool you can get an overall picture of your lifestyle and how healthy it really is. Your body rarely lies and if your poops are in the constipated or diarrhoea ends of the Bristol Stool Chart that means some part of your lifestyle is not working for your body and needs to be isolated and changed. Luckily you’ve been tracking your food intake so you can use this as a tool during your stool analysis.
Okay third way to track your health is to see if you can hold a 60 second plank. A plank is a position you hold horizontally on the ground where you raise your body and rest on your toes and your forearms and elbows. If you can hold a plank using good form and I’ll put a link to a video in the blog post for this episode so you can see what that looks like, if you can hold a plank for 1 minute your core strength isn’t that bad.
This fourth technique may seem easy for you young’uns out there, but it’s still a valid test and may even show up some faulty movement patterns or stiff areas of your body that you didn’t even know existed. It’s called the Sitting-Rising Test or SRT for short. This test involves sitting and rising, duh, but using only your legs. You start off with 10 points, 5 points for sitting and 5 points for rising and each time you use another body part for support like your arms or knees you lose 1 point. The SRT is measuring many things including muscle strength, bone integrity, mobility, balance, and motor coordination, but ultimately it highlights your longevity. The goal is to keep the 10 points and sit and rise without assistance. This indicates a reduced risk of death from all causes, but don’t worry if you can’t get a perfect 10. Just note down your number today and once a week or month retest and see how well your lifestyle changes are working for you.
Fifth and final tracking technique is probably the most important – logging (journaling, writing down) your thoughts, feelings, and the results you’re getting in other areas of your life. So has your thinking and your ability to focus improved? Have your moods improved or are they more stable? Has your outlook on life improved or gotten worse. How are your family and work relationships? How are your career and financial goals coming along? Have these all improved?
The first four techniques that I mentioned even if they are all showing improvements in your health in the right direction this doesn’t mean all is well in your life. Your body composition and fitness is one part of your health and your health is one part of your life.
This final way of tracking your health progress, logging how you think and feel and how you’re performing in the world really shows whether looking good in the mirror and planking yourself for days on end is really working for you or not. I mean what’s the point of having 10% body fat and being able to deadlift a car if you are secretly depressed, broke, and you have no-one else to share your health with. Health is one key to a happy life, don’t forget that and this last tracking technique brings all aspects of your life together.
Millions and I mean millions of kilos and pounds of human tissue have been lost and found over the years due to people not having a dream and not having the ability to follow that dream the simplest way possible. By using these 5 health measurements you will steer yourself toward your health goals a whole lot easier and happier than if you were to use a single number you get from a scale as your only measurement.
Archimedes, an ancient Greek mathematician, he said:
“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.”
Well the scale definitely isn’t the place to stand if you want to make effective long lasting change happen. So here’s to tossing out the scale and thinking that your health is tied to a single number. Your health is dependent on so much more and then some.
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A Mind of Your Own – Kelly Brogan, MD
(Buy from Amazon; Buy from The Book Depository)
New York Times bestseller
Named one of the top health and wellness books for 2016 by MindBodyGreen
Depression is not a disease. It is a symptom.
Recent years have seen a shocking increase in antidepressant use the world over, with 1 in 4 women starting their day with medication. These drugs have steadily become the panacea for everything from grief, irritability, panic attacks, to insomnia, PMS, and stress. But the truth is, what women really need can’t be found at a pharmacy.
According to Dr. Kelly Brogan, antidepressants not only overpromise and underdeliver, but their use may permanently disable the body’s self-healing potential. We need a new paradigm: The best way to heal the mind is to heal the whole body.
In this groundbreaking, science-based and holistic approach, Dr. Brogan shatters the mythology conventional medicine has built around the causes and treatment of depression. Based on her expert interpretation of published medical findings, combined with years of experience from her clinical practice, Dr. Brogan illuminates the true cause of depression: it is not simply a chemical imbalance, but a lifestyle crisis that demands a reset. It is a signal that the interconnected systems in the body are out of balance – from blood sugar, to gut health, to thyroid function– and inflammation is at the root.
A Mind of Your Own offers an achievable, step-by-step 30-day action plan—including powerful dietary interventions, targeted nutrient support, detoxification, sleep, and stress reframing techniques—women can use to heal their bodies, alleviate inflammation, and feel like themselves again without a single prescription.
Bold, brave, and revolutionary, A Mind of Your Own takes readers on a journey of self-empowerment for radical transformation that goes far beyond symptom relief.
Disclaimer: This page contains affiliate links that may provide monetary compensation to help support the Whole Guidance Vision of Creating a Happy and Healthy Planet should you make a purchase. We very much appreciate and thank you for your support.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Greed:
- I’ll explain how greed can be a good thing
- I’ll talk about where this wanting and grasping and craving for more comes from
- I’ll explain the link between greed and unhealthy attachments
- I’ll talk about how greed creates dissatisfaction through expectation
- Finally, I’ll share a few strategies on how to manage yourself when it comes to greed and your desires
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Greed is defined as an intense or excessive desire for more.
Looking at greed from an evolutionary lens, our ancestors lived in times of both abundance and scarcity and greed comes in very handy in those scarce moments. When traditional cultures did not have enough food put aside for the winter or had their villages wiped out by natural disasters or disease these are times when you need to have a very intense desire to survive as your life depends on it.
Coming back to today to modern times where if you’re fortunate enough to be listening to this podcast I have to say, you are pretty set when it comes to getting your basic needs met. We live in a world that’s very abundant in many respects with more than enough food being produced to feed the planet, but food wastage means people still starve. We live in a world with more than enough clothes to cover every single man, woman, and child a thousand times over, but still people die due to extreme weather conditions and thermal stress. We live in a world with so much advanced technology that this could shift the human race into a new age of peace and love, but old wars still rage on with weapons of mass and mini destruction being the technology of choice.
So the problem isn’t really greed itself, but the greed mindset in abundant conditions.
Now if the world we live in today has more than enough for us to survive why the excessive intense desire, the need, the want, the grasping, the craving for more? One reason is you have been programmed by news media, marketing, food companies, drug companies, sports, fashion, military, and every other industrial complex out there to desire more. Every day you see advertisements telling you that you’re not good enough or that you haven’t made it in life until you buy x, eat y, wear z, and smell like p, the letter that is.
Another reason for excessive wanting and desires is your upbringing. Your parents and family would have installed into your under seven year-old subconscious mind as you were growing up that no matter what you do, you must do more; no matter what you have, you must have more; and no matter how you’re being you must be more! Now they didn’t do this on purpose because hey their parents did the exact same thing to them.
So this is where greed in an abundant world comes from – external sources. This is why despite having more today than anyone 10,000 years ago ever had, you have this insatiable appetite to want more to crave what it is you don’t have yet grasp at because you feel like you’re missing out on something. This greed mindset comes from outside of you.
Having an intense desire for more can lead you down a path to unhealthy attachments. Attachment itself isn’t a bad thing. A loving bond is absolutely necessary between family members, friends, and communities to keep everyone moving forward in the direction that lifts everybody up. Unhealthy attachments, however, are not bonds of love, but bonds of fear.
When you lust after and want great ideas, people, places, and things you can begin to confuse yourself with that which you desire. For example you could be greedy for money and say to yourself that unless you earn a certain amount or have a certain amount of cash in the bank you are not successful. So you grow this unhealthy attachment with an idea of success equalling having lots of money and therefore you think that without money you are nothing. Another example maybe you want to be with a particular person say a celebrity and you daydream about them and begin stalking them on Facebook and Instagram. Then one day you wake up and realise you know more about that person than you actually know yourself and you’re practically living life through them instead of in your own body and space.
This unhealthy form of attachment comes from a place of fear where we as living creatures grasp security every chance we can get. So whenever you feel insecure within your own skin or unsure about your own thoughts and feelings you may find yourself not wanting to go inside to face this doubt and instead may look externally for that safety and security. You will seek out ideas that make you feel good, people that make you feel safe, places and things that make you feel secure and you will attach yourself so strongly to them that your entire existence depends on them more than anything else.
This craving for security can lead to attachments that cause you to live outside more than inside of yourself creating disharmony in your bodymind leaving you with an unhealthy and unhappy life.
Greed, wanting and grasping and craving, leads to many expectations. Expectations of how your life should be, of how you should be, and of how other people should be. Notice a lot of shouldas there. Living a shoulda life is a surefire recipe for a dissatisfied life. How?
If you really think about it the only times where you’ve felt upset or letdown were when expectations you had about a situation or person were not met. Every single time you expect your well prepared plan A to happen, but instead plan B happens out of nowhere you get frustrated and then when plan B seems to show up more frequently than your precious plan A your frustration turns to anger and possibly rage or maybe even tears. Whenever you experience an outcome that is not what you wanted or were hoping for of course you’re going to be dissatisfied.
“Unfulfilled expectations are the prerequisite to suffering.”
Does this mean that to live a life without suffering you must live a life without expectations and greed? No and I’ll share a few tips now on how to manage yourself when it comes to greed, to wanting, to unhealthy attachments, and expectations.
Most important tip to managing yourself and your intense desires is to switch off from media, marketing, advertising, and any other bad influence that brainwash you into thinking you live in a world of scarcity and that you’re not good enough so you must buy what they’re selling before you’ll ever succeed in life. All of this stuff creates FOMO in your mind where you begin to Fear On Missing Out on what other people are doing because of the so-called importance that is placed upon them through hype and propaganda. By moving away from this hype you will lessen your FOMO and your need for greed.
Bonus tip: switch off the news as well and not only will you shield yourself from the advertising hype, but you’ll also decrease your stress levels from the negative news improving your overall health.
Another way to not lose yourself to wants and desires and lose yourself to unhealthy attachments is to practice mindfulness, awareness, and being present in the moment. ‘Be in the now man’ is hippy talk for wake up to what’s happening in you and around you right now in this moment. Many people live in the past reliving their regrets or in the future worrying about possible failures. This way of thinking creates doubt of your own worthiness and personal abilities to live a successful and happy life so you begin to look to find your worth in another person or in other material objects. You look outside instead of inside.
By being here and now you learn what it is you need in this moment and stop thinking about what you needed years ago when you fumbled that catch at school or what you need in 2 weeks to pay the rent. When you can bring yourself to what’s happening right here, right now you will find your desires grow less intense and see that what you really need could be as simple as a glass of water, a deep breath, a talk, a walk, or even a hug.
A couple ways to practise mindfulness is meditation of any type and body scanning. I’ve talked about meditation many many times before so I’ll talk a little bit about body scanning. Body scanning is not getting a CT scan or x-ray at the hospital or doctor’s office, but a mindfulness practise where you start from of your head or your feet and work your way down or up your body focusing on each body part as you go through the practise. You notice aches, temperature, and other sensations in one area of your body before moving to the next. This is a great way to centre or ground yourself to how you, your body, your mind, everything about you is experiencing life in that moment. I’ll put a link to a YouTube video in the blog post for this episode showing how to perform this body scan practise.
When it comes to letting go of expectations, um, actually don’t. Zig Ziglar a personal development coach and speaker has a quote that goes:
“Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”
Meaning you shouldn’t remove expectations, but be flexible when things don’t go your way. Instead of stewing in misery think to yourself, what’s the lesson here and what new expectations can I create from this experience? Another way to say it would be to expect to fall in life and then expect that you will get back up.
Such is the story of all life no? A constant cycle of ups and downs, life and death, new and old. If you can see the world as an impermanent place where nothing is fixed, set, or stagnant, but more like water that’s always in flow and if you can see that the future is impossible to see and predict then you may just be able to let go of suffering by moving with the flow of the world when your expectations are not met and you may just learn something about yourself along the way.
Another quote this time by superstar martial artist Bruce Lee:
“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
Do not take on other people’s baggage. You got enough personal baggage to last many life times as it is.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
Imagine putting your hand in a river to get some water and you grasp tightly. You end up making a fist which comes up empty handed. Now if you were to release your grip and open your hand more you’d be able to carry a lot more water. Grasping on to desires too tightly stops you from getting what you want. Be mindful, open yourself up to letting go of attachments, be flexible with your expectations, and use greed to inspire and move you toward your dreams – suffering being optional.
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Mindsight – Daniel J. Siegel MD
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This groundbreaking book, from one of the global innovators in the integration of brain science with psychotherapy, offers an extraordinary guide to the practice of “mindsight,” the potent skill that is the basis for both emotional and social intelligence. From anxiety to depression and feelings of shame and inadequacy, from mood swings to addictions, OCD, and traumatic memories, most of us have a mental “trap” that causes recurring conflict in our lives and relationships. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and co-director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, shows us how to use mindsight to escape these traps. Through his synthesis of a broad range of scientific research with applications to everyday life, Dr. Siegel has developed novel approaches that have helped hundreds of patients free themselves from obstacles blocking their happiness. By cultivating mindsight, all of us can effect positive, lasting changes in our brains—and our lives. A book as inspiring as it is profound, Mindsight can help us master our emotions, heal our relationships, and reach our fullest potential.
Disclaimer: This page contains affiliate links that may provide monetary compensation to help support the Whole Guidance Vision of Creating a Happy and Healthy Planet should you make a purchase. We very much appreciate and thank you for your support.
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.
Disclaimer: This page contains affiliate links that may provide monetary compensation to help support the Whole Guidance Vision of Creating a Happy and Healthy Planet should you make a purchase. We very much appreciate and thank you for your support.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring the dark side of Cancer:
- I’ll explain the truth about cancer in terms of the type of disease it is and is not
- I will bust other conventional beliefs about cancer that you might have
- Finally I’ll give a few resources that you can use to enhance your knowledge about cancer and to help you take control of your health
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
About 1 in 2 people alive right now will get diagnosed with cancer. Look around you count how many people there are divide that in 2, they’re going to get cancer. And 25% of men and 20% of women will die from cancer. The American Cancer Society have estimated that in the U.S. in 2016, that’s this year as of this recording, 3 people will be diagnosed with cancer and 1 person will die from cancer every single minute.
Pretty scary stuff right or is it?
Media, which includes not just the news and magazines, but any influence on your mind and the way you think. So media really is your family and friends, your workplace, your church, social media, anyone you’ve heard or know are forms of media and media has a huge impact on how you think and on what you believe in.
When it comes to cancer the media would have you believe that to be diagnosed with cancer is automatically a death sentence and if it’s too late to treat conventionally then you need to get your affairs in order before your inevitable early death and if the cancer is treatable according to conventional western medicine standards then you only have a limited amount of time to choose between chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery or a combination of the three, which are western medicines biggest hammers to fight and destroy the nails of cancer.
Problem is anytime you have a hammer of course everything begins to look like a nail and as a society we have been taught to believe that cancer is a nail in your coffin and that the big three, chemo, radiation, and surgery are your only hope. But like I said these are hammers and these hammers do one thing very well and that’s to nail cancer right into your body.
The truth about cancer is this – cancer is not any different or especially significant than other non-communicable diseases or other lifestyle diseases like heart disease, lung disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, osteoporoses, stroke, MS, ALS/MND, chronic kidney disease, etc.
Let me repeat.
“Cancer is not any different or especially significant than other diseases.”
So all this extra fuss and fear mongering about cancer by the media by doctors isn’t justified and in my view it’s just plain irresponsible.
What this means with a cancer diagnosis is that it’s not a death sentence and like all other NCD’s, like all other lifestyle diseases you can take control of your health and live with your sickness and manage it or even overcome it. When it comes to cancer there’s no need for additional fear than if you were diagnosed with any other disease.
You know what? And what I’m about to say may be controversial to hear, but this is just my personal opinion that has rapidly evolved over the past few months of intensive, highly intensive personal research of reading scientific papers of watching and listening to hours upon hours of doctor and patient interviews including both success and failure stories… I believe that cancer is simple to cure. Now I did not just say it’s easy to cure from cancer. What I mean is that the solutions to curing cancer, which I’ll talk about in the next episode, are simple and require one thing and one thing only – a real intention to heal. So this means dedication, commitment and staying on the path to healing.
Now I’m not the only one who thinks cancer is simple to overcome. Here’s a quote from an article written in 1990 in the ‘Townsend Letter For Doctors’ by Dr Dan C Roehm regarding the Budwig Diet, which is a very effective cancer treatment protocol that’s been around since the 50s. Keep in mind that Dr Roehm is not only a medical doctor, but an oncologist (cancer doctor), a former cardiologist (heart doctor), and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He also has many years clinical experience working with people! And it was only through this work that he came to write this:
“CANCER IS EASILY CURABLE, the treatment is dietary/lifestyle; the response is immediate; the cancer cell is [rendered] weak and vulnerable;
Cancer treatment can be very simple and very successful once you know how. The cancer interests don’t want you to know this.
May those of you who have suffered from this disease (and I include your family and friends) forgive the miscreants who have kept this simple information from reaching you so long.”
Alright let’s move on to other false beliefs about cancer which revolve around current cancer detection technologies and cancer prevention and treatment practises.
Mammograms, aka x-ray mammography, are used for early detection of breast cancer in women, but unfortunately this procedure gives more false positives and overdiagnosis, allows breast cancer if there is any to metastasis or spread throughout your body, and can even give cancer to an already healthy individual.
Let’s just imagine for one second that your body, it ain’t stupid folks! Your body knows how to heal, if you support it and get out of its way that is. When you get a cut, that area of your body swells up and it heals. If you do get cancer, is it possible that a tumour surrounding cancer cells is actually there for a reason? I say absolutely not only is it possible, plausible, and probable that tumours or neoplastic tissue are your body’s way of dealing with cancer, but to my mind it’s obvious that your body creates tumours as a way to protect itself, to prevent these cancer cells from growing out of control and spreading to other parts of your body. Your body knows what it’s doing.
So imagine now when you or someone you care about goes in for a mammogram and they take your breast and put it in the mammography machine the ‘pancake smasher’ and this may cause any tumours that are present to burst and all of that cancerous tissue gets what it wanted – freedom! And the cancer grows more aggressively and spreads throughout your entire body.
Alongside this mechanical damage to the tumour and your breast is the ionising radiation from the x-ray which is a known carcinogen or cancer causing agent. The x-rays used in mammograms actually put you at a higher risk of getting cancer in the breast so mammograms are just a bad idea anyway you look at it.
Look I’m not a certified doctor and I don’t claim to be one or play one on the Internet, but here’s a quote from Dr Leonard Coldwell a natural cancer cure expert:
“We as a medical society are giving women breast cancer with our demanding that they get mammograms. Mammograms cause breast cancer. Period. So mammograms are not healthy for women. Women should not be getting routine mammograms. That’s crystal clear, published in the peer review literature.”
Now that’s a powerful statement from someone with years of experience who deals with cancer patients every day.
Okay now the Prostate Specific Antigen or the PSA test to detect and help treat prostate cancer in men is almost as bad as mammograms. It has been shown that PSA testing has no benefit in reducing death rates and causes more harm than good due to the high rates of false positives and overdiagnosis.
Another belief is that the big three conventional western medical treatments for cancer, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery, are the only options you have and that alternative natural treatments are a bunch of baloney.
Chemotherapy, where drugs and chemicals are used to treat cancer, is like a nuclear bomb going off in your body leaving behind a massive wasteland and then expecting your body and health to recover from this. Well the statistics show that this approach hardly ever works as 97% of cancer patients that are treated with chemo are dead in 5 years. Another thing is that 42 to 46% of cancer patients die from cachexia or wasting of the body caused by the spreading of the cancer, leaving 54 to 58% that die from, can you guess?… the treatment of the cancer. I’ll say it again over 50% of cancer patients die from conventional treatments. I’m not liking those odds.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that over 90% of oncologists wouldn’t take chemo themselves and that about 90% of all doctors wouldn’t even prescribe the drugs they give to their patients to their own family.
How is it that so many patients die from chemo? First off all it is true that chemo will kill cancer daughter cells, as well as almost every other cell in your body, and shrink tumours, but the issue with chemo is that it will not kill the cancer mother cells that produce the daughter cells. When I say mother cells I’m talking about stem cells which are the precursors to all other cells in your body. Cancer stem cells, mother cells produce other cancer cells, daughter cells. Daughter cells are what you find inside tumours. Not only does chemo leave the mother cells intact, but another major issue with chemo is that chemotherapy is a known carcinogen. Chemo creates cancer. So yes chemo may shrink already existing tumours, but new ones will be created as a known side-effect of using chemo drugs.
Regarding radiotherapy everything I just said about chemo goes for radiation therapy as well. One extra negative side-effect of radiation is that it enhances cancer mother cell activity meaning more cancer daughter cells get produced after being exposed to radiation. Radiation is already known to be carcinogenic and yes it may reduce tumours in one area of your body, but it almost always will create more tumours somewhere else as well.
When it comes to surgery and cutting out tumours there are two main issues. First issue is the tumour is a grouping of daughter cells and while you may remove the tumour and the daughter cells, the cancer mother cells are still present in the organ tissue that’s left behind after surgery, and new daughter cells and tumours will eventually come back and grow from these missed mother cells. I mean how many times have you heard of cancer coming back seemingly out of nowhere. The surgeons they just never got rid of the mother cells.
Second issue with surgery is that there’s a high risk of puncturing and spilling the contents of the tumour allowing the cancer to metastasis and spread. This is absolutely the worst case scenario for anyone with cancer. You also get the same problem with biopsies, where a little bit of your bodily tissue is extracted and analysed to diagnose cancer. A biopsy could cause your cancer to metastasis and spread, but this risk is lower than actual surgery.
What is all this telling you?
To me it says that conventional mainstream western medicine has it completely backwards when it comes to treating cancer and most other diseases. Am I saying you should never use these big 3 treatments? No. I’ll talk more in the next episode on how to integrate these hammer-like treatments with a more feather-like holistic touch.
One final conventional belief about cancer I’d like to talk about is the idea that cancer is a random disease caused by genetics and it has nothing to do with your lifestyle. This is completely untrue and just really bad misinformation.
Let’s look at the stats on what’s causing cancer. About 18% caused by infection. About 23% caused by obesity. 41% by environmental factors, which leaves 18% with no known cause and of this 18% it’s estimated that about 5% of cancers are caused purely by inherited genetics.
So you have 5% of all cancers caused by genetics. Where’s the other 95% coming from? Lifestyle factors all of which are in your ability to manage. You may not be able to control the air you breathe, the people that are in your life or other factors, but you can manage your exposure to your environment and you can definitely manage your internal environment, your thoughts and feelings.
I’ll talk more about other causes of cancer in the next podcast, but for now I’ll leave you with this quote by Soren Kierkegaard that says:
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Don’t play the fool. It’s one thing to be fooled by other people, but do not let your own beliefs and ways of thinking fool you into not seeing what’s right in front you.
I ain’t nobody’s fool and I don’t want you to be fooled so I ask that you take all this information that I just laid out for you and don’t believe any of it.
Yep. Don’t believe a single word I just said. Instead do your own research. Read the science; read first-hand testimonials of people overcoming cancer naturally; read books on cancer; find out the truth and origins behind chemo (spoiler alert – it started as mustard gas used during war); and watch documentaries about cancer.
The truth is no-one cares about your health more than you do and the first step to health success is knowledge, second step is planning, and finally action. If you or anyone you know is dealing with cancer or you just want to have the tools to prevent yourself from getting cancer then do the work, do the research, get that knowledge, and see how far down the truth-about-cancer-rabbit-hole you can go.
A couple of online places I’ll point you to right now include the awesome website cancertutor.com. This is a fantastic resource and it’s packed full of real honest truthful unbiased cancer information. One of the best documentaries ever on cancer is the 9 episode online docuseries The Truth About Cancer: A Global Quest. You can find this at go.thetruthaboutcancer.com. Register and get the first 2 episodes for free, but you will have to pay to view the other 7. Trust me it’s worth buying the whole series.
In terms of books I recommend Cancer-Free by Bill Henderson, Cancer: The Problem and the Solution by Dr. Johanna Budwig, The Gerson Therapy by Charlotte Gerson, and The Fourfold Path to Healing by Dr Thomas Cowan, Sally Fallon, and Jaimen McMillan.
For real food recipes that’ll heal cancer I like the Nourishing Traditions cookbook by Sally Fallon and Dr Mary Enig as well as the ever popular Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo.
I hope this information helps put cancer in a different perspective for you and gives you hope and strength in knowing that when it comes to cancer, you got this! You do have control over your own health. You just have to make the choice to take responsibility for your own self first.
In the next podcast I’ll be talking about the many different sides to cancer: the mechanics how it works, the cause, the contributors, and of course the cure!
Links and Resources
- Cancer-Free – Bill Henderson
- Cancer: The Problem and the Solution – Dr. Johanna Budwig
- The Gerson Therapy – Charlotte Gerson
- The Fourfold Path to Healing – Dr Thomas Cowan, Sally Fallon, Jaimen McMillan
- Nourishing Traditions – Sally Fallon and Dr Mary Enig
- Practical Paleo – Diane Sanfilippo
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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 Knowledge:
- I’ll explain why having knowledge is not as empowering as you might think
- I’ll talk about two types of knowledge that are truly empowering
- Finally I’ll share how to best apply accumulated knowledge giving you phenomenal powers to live an awesome life
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Today a lot of the human experience is all about watching TV, YouTube videos, and sharing information through social media websites. Which is great! I mean it’s awesome that we can learn so many new things about so many different topics and connect to so many different people through the power of the Internet.
But, how much of this knowledge and of these online relationships are actually relevant to your life and how much of that relevant information have you actually applied and done yourself? Think about what you’ve learned in just the past 7 days. How much of that information was relevant to you and how much of it have you tried for yourself? Probably not a whole lot… and that goes for me too.
The old saying ‘knowledge is power’ doesn’t hold true. Because what you know could have absolutely no use for you in your current life situation and more importantly even though you know a lot of stuff if you don’t apply that knowledge and get it out of your head and into the real world then there’s really no power in knowing that stuff.
“Knowledge that isn’t relevant and applied is weak.”
There are two types of knowledge that are relevant though and easy to implement in your life empowering you to become a better version of yourself.
First knowledge type is a knowing. Knowing is all about self-knowledge. It’s about an innate, instinctual, intuitive know-ing that you feel emotionally deep down to your core and because it comes from within rather than without this knowing is all about you. With this type of knowledge you will know what you want and don’t want, what you like and don’t like, who you want to hang out with or not, what career or job you’d like to have, what foods work for you and don’t work for you.
There’s a musical lyric ‘to know you is to love you’ and what I’m saying here is:
“To know thyself, is to love thyself.”
With a knowing you will better understand what it is you love and what it is you don’t love. This helps guide you to filter out the crap information and to choose better info to download into your bodymind. By knowing what’s worth learning and what isn’t you ensure that what you do know is relevant to you and your life.
The second knowledge type is about being knowledgeable. Being knowledge-able. Where you are able to put your knowledge into being. Meaning applying the knowledge you’ve learned and taking action on that knowledge. So turning a learned thought and idea (which is external energy downloaded from the universe) and integrating this with your knowing of self (which is internally sourced energy from within your own bodymind) and making it a reality in the physical world (which is a combination of both external and internal energies). So being knowledgeable is all about taking action on what you’ve learned to create a new experience for yourself and others.
You could read, watch, and listen for an eternity about how to drive a car, ride a bike, or swim, but you still wouldn’t be able to do any of it until you actually get into a car, on a bike, or in the water and apply what you’ve learnt.
It’s only when you apply knowledge by being in action, by being knowledgeable and using your knowing of self that you actually get to experience life and find out your own truth about something you’ve read, seen, or heard about. So knowledge isn’t power, but potential power and applied knowledge is truly where you have the power.
As I said before in order to make sure you’re accumulating relevant knowledge you must have a knowing of your self and one of the best ways of doing this is through meditation. There’s nothing like focusing your mind on one thing for 20 minutes to 2 hours to get you intimately connected to who you really are on the inside because your mind wants to do everything else but focus so you’re constantly having to bring yourself to centre. But along the way you get insights as to what thoughts are clogging up your body and using up a lot of your thinking energy. It’s these thoughts you want to come back to after meditation to figure out why they kept coming up during your meditation practise.
The one tip I have for putting a lot of your accumulated knowledge into action is to be mindful during the learning process or in other words pay real attention while you’re learning. What I mean is when you’re not completely focused on what you’re learning or on what’s happening right in front of you then you only pickup fragments and get a partial download of what you see and hear into your consciousness.
You see there’s a difference between seeing and watching, hearing and listening, trying and doing.
For example, you could see someone cook scrambled eggs a million times, but unless you actually focus and look for the details and watch you won’t be getting the full download of what they’re doing. You could hear them talking about temperatures and egg yolks and timings, but unless you actually focus and clear the chatter in your head and listen you won’t be getting the full download of what they’re actually saying. You could try in your mind and visualise the steps, but unless you actually get up of the couch and into the kitchen and do and act and cook you won’t be getting the full experience of cooking scrambled eggs.
But then of course even if you did cook a beautiful plate of scrambled eggs, what if you got gas or stomach cramps after eating them. This would be part of knowing, knowing your self and understanding that scrambled eggs are not relevant to you at this time and that this particular knowledge while it doesn’t serve you personally it may still help someone else.
So yes of course you want to be learning and growing and enhancing your skills throughout your lifetime, but you want to make sure the information you learn and download into your consciousness, into your bodymind fits you and your lifestyle and you most definitely have to make sure you take action on what you’ve learnt, because the power of knowledge is yours only when you’re able to put that knowledge into being.
Bonus tip, pick up the awesome book The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman. It teaches you how to learn anything easily and quickly. I read this and picked up tips on how to break down complex ideas, on how to save on my learning time, and how to keep moving forward by creating an optimal learning environment.
So remember to keep learning, to keep learning about yourself, and to keep moving forward by being in action.
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