12 Rules for Life – Jordan B. Peterson
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What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson’s answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.
Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street.
What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world’s wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers.
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The State of Affairs – Esther Perel
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Iconic couples’ therapist and bestselling author of Mating in Captivity Esther Perel returns with a provocative look at relationships through the lens of infidelity.
Affairs, she argues, have a lot to teach us about the human heart—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They offer a unique window into our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment. Through examining illicit love from multiple angles, Perel invites readers into an honest, enlightened, and entertaining exploration of modern marriage in its many variations.
An affair: it can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness, their very identity. And yet, this extremely common human experience is so poorly understood. Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too the prohibition against it—in fact, it has a tenacity that marriage can only envy. So what are we to make of this time-honored taboo—universally forbidden yet universally practiced? Why do people cheat—even those in happy marriages? Why does an affair hurt so much? When we say infidelity, what exactly do we mean? Do our romantic expectations of marriage set us up for betrayal? Is there such a thing as an affair-proof marriage? Is it possible to love more than one person at once? Can an affair ever help a marriage? Perel weaves real-life case stories with incisive psychological and cultural analysis in this fast-paced and compelling book.
For the past ten years, Perel has traveled the globe and worked with hundreds of couples who have grappled with infidelity. Betrayal hurts, she writes, but it can be healed. An affair can even be the doorway to a new marriage—with the same person. With the right approach, couples can grow and learn from these tumultuous experiences, together or apart.
Fiercely intelligent, The State of Affairs provides a daring framework for understanding the intricacies of love and desire. As Perel observes, “Love is messy; infidelity more so. But it is also a window, like no other, into the crevices of the human heart.”
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.
Movement Matters – Katy Bowman
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Movement Matters is a collection of essays in which biomechanist Katy Bowman continues her groundbreaking investigation of the mechanics of our sedentary culture and the profound potential of human movement. Here she widens her You are how you move message and invites us to consider our personal relationship with sedentarism, privilege, and nature. Bowman explores:* how convenience often means less movement, not more time
* the missing movement nutrients in our food
* how to include more nature in education
* the impact of adding movement to permaculture and ecological models
* our need for vitamin Community and group movement
Unapologetically direct, often hilarious, and always compassionate, Movement Matters demonstrates that human movement is powerful and important, and that living a movement-filled life is perhaps the most joyful and efficient way to transform your body, community, and world.
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 Love and your Life’s Legacy:
- I’ll explain how your legacy is a gift to the world that just keeps on giving
- I’ll talk about how what you value and what you love determines the legacy you will leave behind
- Finally, I’ll share a simple exercise that will help you create a life worth loving and a legacy worth leaving
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS THAT WILL BRING MORE LOVE INTO YOUR LIFE
A legacy is something that is given from the past and received in the present and that will most definitely change the future.
There are many different types of legacies that you can leave behind after your passing. They may include tangible material things like a car, a house, money, a business, a cure, or even a child. Your legacy could also be abstract experiential things like an idea, a philosophy, a religion, a physical training program, or a procedure for dealing with grief.
Now your legacy, whether it is a person, a place, or a thing, whatever it is, it will always leave an impact in the world of the living for many years, long after you’ve moved on and it will change the world. The change may be small or large, but there’s still an impact. Even the smallest of events can lead to massive change, like a butterfly flapping its wing can contribute to the eventual formation of a hurricane, your legacy will have ripple effects on the world stage.
For instance, you and I are products of a lasting loving legacy known as humanity. Each generation of life is a legacy by default. Just by being born you have already impacted your parents, your caregivers, everyone who you’ve come into contact with throughout your lifetime, you have changed. So no matter how short or long your life or how small or big of an impact you have:
“You are legacy in full expression”
And you are leaving a legacy that will change the world, whether you’re fully aware of what that change is or not.
Now the type of legacy you leave behind will be determined by what you love and what you love about life comes from your personal core values.
Your personal core values are the needs you have when it comes to living an awesome life. They define how you want to live. They guide your choices and they determine the type of person you want to be. Core values also influence the types of personal relationships you want to be in and also what communities and organisations you wish to join.
If you value fast cars, big mansions, and money than those material objects will be what you want in your life and these are what you will leave as your legacy. If you value family, friendship, connection with others, than personal relationships and their affect on the people in your life will be the legacy that you will leave behind. If you value food, music, and wine a restaurant may be your legacy. A piece of music could be your legacy, or maybe a food, music, and wine festival, that could be your legacy.
Whatever you love you will pursue based on your values and after the game of life is over for you, those people, places, and things that you valued and have nothing but love for, will become your legacy.
There is one exercise I’d like to share that will help you determine your values, what you love about life, and ultimately your legacy. That exercise is writing your own obituary. Yes it may sound a bit of a morbid thing to do, but once you get into and finish your obituary you’ll be left with a sense of fulfilment and will find yourself really passionate about getting after life.
Really take the time, which could be hours, days, or weeks, to write your obituary and keep in mind these two things:
- How you would like to be remembered as a person? and
- What would you like to leave behind as a lasting loving legacy?
After the exercise look at what you’ve written down and you will figure out what your personal core values are. If you wrote down he was a rich man who supported a lot of charities, then you know you value money and also generosity and that you love to give, and your legacy will be the many charities that you’ve helped. If you wrote down she was a nurturing mother who adopted and raised many abandoned and orphaned children, then you know you value family and giving children a second chance of having a loving family and home, and your legacy will be the next generation of adults who once felt alone, but now feel nothing but love.
Whatever you wrote down use it as a stepping stone to align the life you live with what you want your legacy to be.
There’s no right or wrong legacy. No matter what you value you will leave behind a legacy. The point I’m making here is that you’ll either be consciously aware of that legacy or completely ignorant to it.
I’ll leave you with you this thought.
Feeling loved or being loving isn’t really about sharing material things.
“Love is about sharing experiences with others.”
I am grateful for the lasting loving legacy my ancestors have given me and I will do my best to live a life full of unconditional love so that I leave a lasting loving legacy for those who one day I shall leave behind.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Love:
- I’ll explain some of the ideas, the emotions, and actions of human love
- I’ll talk about universal love and its absolute nature
- Finally, I’ll give one loving practise you can use to transform any thought, word, or deed into an expression of love
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS THAT WILL BRING MORE LOVE INTO YOUR LIFE
Love is a word with many many meanings. Thinking about love is not the same as feeling love and they are not the same as acting out of and being love.
The ideology behind love or the way most people think about love is that it is an emotion that creates a bond and a connection between two beings. The bond between a parent and its offspring, or the bond between a plant and the soil, and even the bond between the Sun and the Earth, these connections and relationships between different forms of life can be considered love.
The idea of human love usually brings up images of intimate romantic partnerships between two people. But there’s also family love, and friendly love, national love, and enemy love, fiery love, free love, violent love, and the love to complain and to hate things, and the love to give and to share, etc. There are many forms of human love. So thinking about love it isn’t just one thing, it’s many things.
Now just like the idea of love the emotion of love isn’t just one feeling. Love brings up many different emotions. Actually human love is a collection of hormones and neurotransmitters interacting together. The coordination of these molecules of energy in motion or molecules of emotion create different sensations in your bodymind that we call love such as:
- Gratitude
- Joy
- Happiness
- Peace
- Serenity
- Hope
- Awe, and
- Inspiration
For example, when I see a sunset I feel inspired and in awe of its beauty. It gives me hope for tomorrow, which gives me peace and serenity in the moment. I feel a sense of joy and happiness and I have nothing but gratitude for being alive and being able to experience such a fantastic event. Altogether I could simply say I loved witnessing the sun setting over the horizon. Again like the idea of love, feeling love isn’t just one thing, it’s many things.
When it comes to acting out of love and being love, again this ain’t one thing. Acts of love or loving deeds and being love are actually the culmination and the final expression of the way you think about love and the way you feel about love.
If you think love is being loyal to your nation and this inspires you to want to protect your country and the values it represents, your act of being love may lead you to sign up to the army and defend your country. If you think love is being listened to where people give you their undivided attention and you get filled with joy at being the focus of attention, then your act of being love will most likely make you quite the talker in your tribe where you seek a lot of the attention. And if you think love is all about food, something I know personally all too well, and eating makes you happy, then your loving deed will be to eat and the more love you seek, usually the more food you will eat.
So your thoughts about love, dictate how you feel love, and then ultimately how you express that love.
Now I’d like to move on from the human concept of love, where it can be many different things depending on your own unique view of the world, to the universal picture of love where love is absolutely everything.
This quote from the book The Voice of Knowledge by Don Miguel Ruiz perfectly summarises what I mean by universal love:
“The energy of love is just like the light that comes from the sun. Like sunlight, the emotion of love looks different depending on what is reflecting the love.”
This quote means that universal love is whatever it reflects. You see universal love is a form of energy that permeates everything, including you and me, and this energy reinforces and reveals the true nature and essence of the object that it’s infused with.
Universal love is the full experience. By that I mean it is all of the experiences one can experience in the universe even the negative experiences, such as fear, or neutral experiences such as the experience of no experience or emptiness and nothingness. So looking at it this way, love and fear are really two sides of the same coin, the yin and the yang of the same energy that I call universal love.
In this sense love is good and bad. Love is health and disease. Love is pleasure and pain. Love is laughter and sobbing. Love is for and against. Love is kindness and abuse. Love is peace and war. Love is order and chaos. Love is life and death. Love is the teacher and the student as well as the lesson and it can be all of these things because universal love is potential energy and it’s only when this potential energy fuses with a physical entity does love manifest and become what it needs to be depending on what it is a part of in that moment.
Human love again is many things dependant on your personal thoughts and feelings, whereas universal love is everything and shines a light on whatever it touches.
Now in the previous podcast I gave you three ways to accumulate more love for yourself:
- Understand how you give and receive love
- Practise being in an attitude of gratitude
- Build a loving tribe and community
The loving practise I’m going to give you now will help you reflect more love instead of fear and to transform any fear you perceive into love and I hope you practise this as much as possible until it becomes second nature, a habit, a loving habit that becomes a part of your way of being. It really can change your life.
Whenever a person, or your environment, or anything, anything at all causes you to react and to think about fear, feel fear, or act in fear one of the best things you can do in that moment is to do nothing, absolutely nothing.
Just pause.
Stop everything, except for your breathing of course.
But do take a moment to sit with what’s coming up in your bodymind. The thoughts, the feelings, what you want to do. Now don’t stay too long in these thoughts and feelings of fear. Just take a few secs to a minute to wash yourself and wallow in this stew of fear.
Now focus on your breath and nothing else. Breathe through your nose and as you inhale focus on expanding your belly out in front of you, make yourself look full. As you exhale focus on shrinking your belly and bring it in, make yourself look empty. Focus on the flow of the air in and out of your nose and the movement of your diaphragm. Feel the air come in and out of your lungs. Feel your rib cage and core muscles expand and contract.
No matter how hard you concentrate on your breath and your body your mind will always want to wander and want to go back to that fear. Every time it does this, gently bring it back to your breath and your body by refocusing your attention here.
The idea behind this practise isn’t to forget about what just happened or to avoid fear entirely. The idea is to see the situation from a new perspective, from a perspective of love, shining a new light on it, hopefully changing how you see what just happened.
You don’t need to do this focused bodymind breathing for long. Just long enough where instead of feeling vulnerable and unsure about what’s going on and how you should react, you feel more empowered to come from a place of peace and love with a more holistic and grounded personal understanding of what just happened.
This mindfulness practise of learning to respond from love instead of react from fear, if you can practise this daily, multiple times a day as is necessary, over time you will begin to see things and life in an entirely new way where loving options that were once hidden from your view suddenly appear out of nowhere.
As inspirational speaker and author Wayne Dyer used to say:
“Everything in the Universe came from nowhere, now here.”
And Wayne Dyer also said:
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
So if you can see fear as another form of love you will be more present to the love that has always been there, surrounding you this entire time.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
You won’t always give love to others as they want it and you won’t always receive love as you want it, and universal love doesn’t always give you what you want, but universal love will always, and I mean always, give you what you need in that moment.
In my Universe and how I see life, love is the circle of life, the beginning and end of all things. It is the alpha and the omega of everything that exists.
“Love is creation.”
Love is the process of creation. It is the creative process and this process is eternal, it never ends and it’s constantly changing and in flow. This creative process begins with the receiving of love from another, which is received as a thought. This thought is then transformed into a feeling, and this feeling manifests itself in reality as a physical act of love being given from within to without, from you to another.
So in essence to me love is the transformation of itself between itself from itself to itself. To put it another way:
“Love is love experiencing love.”
And all there is, is love.
Links and Resources
- The Voice of Knowledge — Don Miguel Ruiz
- The Official Website of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
- A Course in Miracles — Foundation for Inner Peace
Please leave a 5-s tar iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Healing and Love:
- I’ll explain the difference between conventional and natural healing methods
- I’ll talk about unconditional love and why it is the most important factor when it comes to healing
- I’ll talk about a couple of things that can stop the healing process from happening properly
- Finally, I’ll share a few ways you can make love your drug of choice to help you with any healing journey you may be on
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS THAT WILL BRING MORE LOVE INTO YOUR LIFE
There are two main belief systems out there when it comes to healing. One is used by the conventional mainstream model and the other by more traditional natural healers.
The current conventional medical model used mainly in western societies focuses on treating health symptoms and disease with medication or surgery. So they have a pill or a procedure for every illness. What conventional treatment misses is the fact that health symptoms and disease are really signs of underlying hidden malfunction that has been going on in your bodymind for days, weeks, months, perhaps several years in terms of certain cancers and neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Conventional mainstream medicine is based on a mechanistic, reductionist, allopathic model of healing where the human body is separate from the mind and works much like a machine that can be reduced down to different parts and by treating the symptomatic issues that are appearing in the parts you will fix the rest of the machine.
On the flipside of this you have natural traditional ancestral healers that use a holistic approach to healing where they may or may not treat health symptoms and disease directly, but they do look for the underlying root cause of the issue and they will look to support your bodymind’s own innate ability to heal.
This holistic approach by natural healers aligns with the theory of Vitalism, which is the understanding that there is a life force energy that beats your heart, breathes your lungs, and heals your bodymind.
To compare these two very different models of healing let me use the engine check light on a car’s dashboard as an analogy. Conventional mainstream medicine would treat the check light in the following ways. They would test the bulb, make sure that there wasn’t anything wrong with the bulb. They may remove the bulb. They may also tape over the check light so you can’t see it. They may even ask you to put a blindfold over your eyes so you can’t see the check light. This is what it means to see things as a machine and to reduce things to their smallest parts and to treat only the symptom.
Now natural healers would see the check light as a sign of some other underlying issue going on. Then they would find that this engine check light relates to an issue with the engine itself and so they would go directly to the engine and do further tests on the engine. Once the problem is found a natural healer would choose from a number of different strategies that they feel would fix the specific issue that they found in the engine and once the engine is fixed wouldn’t you know it the engine check light on the dashboard inside the car is no longer lit. That’s how a holistic root cause healing model works. It treats the underlying cause of the symptom.
Earlier I mentioned life force energy and how your bodymind can heal itself. Think about a cut on your skin. A band aid or plaster over the cut isn’t actually healing it. It’s simply preventing the cut from getting infected and getting worse and can actually improve the speed of healing, but the band aid or the plaster isn’t doing the healing. Think about a broken bone. A cast isn’t actually healing the bone. It’s job is to prevent the bone from healing out of alignment, but the cast isn’t doing the healing.
This life force energy that is healing the cut and healing the bone has many names:
- Qi
- Prana
- Breath
- Spirit
- GOD that’s god all in capitals
- Innate Intelligence
- Universal Intelligence or simply
- Energy
There is another name for this life force energy that heals your bodymind – Unconditional Love.
Not to be confused with conditional love, which I’ll talk about soon, unconditional love is love without conditions, without boundaries, with no limits, labels, or separation. Unconditional love is holistic and integrated and given without any real thought or expectation. It just is. The perfect example of unconditional love is the sun. The sun gives its energy willingly. It doesn’t ask for anything in return nor does it expect anything in return. It doesn’t need specific conditions outside of it to be met before it shines it just shines from within to give its energy without. The sun just gives and gives and gives off radiant energy to the entire Solar system supporting all life.
Compare this to conditional love which is all about setting conditions that must be met before love is given or received. Conditional love means there must be a giver and a receiver so there is also separation in conditional love. For example a parent may show love for their child only after they’ve cleaned up their room. Or someone may love you only if you do x, y, or z. Another example is you will love yourself and your life only when you have the money, the car, the house, the spouse, etc.
Remember that life force energy that heals you. It doesn’t wait for x, y, or z. It just is. Your bodymind is constantly breaking down and being rebuilt every second. You have 2 million blood cells turning over every second in your bodymind right now. There’s 2 million, there’s 2 million, and there’s another 2 million. When you get injured this life force energy actually gives even more of itself and doesn’t stop, it won’t stop. Now that is what I call unconditional love and without unconditional love you would never heal.
Now there are a couple of things that can disrupt this healing process and block unconditional love from working its miraculous magic: human thought and incorrect application of healing techniques.
The book A Course in Miracles teaches you that human beings experience two fundamental emotions that all other emotions come from: fear and love. When you come from a place of fear you are excluding unconditional love from the experience. Fear can be seen as another form of conditional love where you feel it is safe to let go of fear only when certain conditions are met. The problem with this type of conditional love is that it is born out of fear and love that comes from fear is finite, it’s not consistent, it’s not empowering, and it’s not fulfilling real deep-seated needs. Whereas unconditional love that doesn’t come from fear, because it doesn’t come from anything it just is, is infinite, it’s persistent and consistent, it empowers all and it fulfils everything.
If you get into a fear mindset you’re blocking unconditional love from entering your life and entering your bodymind, and your bodymind’s ability to heal will diminish. Because fear blocks love and when there is no love there is no healing.
Think about the many stories about someone who was as fit as a fiddle until they get diagnosed with a terminal illness and die weeks or months later. Would they have died so early if they hadn’t visited the doctor’s office and hadn’t been diagnosed? Was the fear that was instilled into them by the doctor what actually caused their death? And some diagnoses turn out to be wrong, but people still get sick because their fear is so strong that they believe what they are told and this stops unconditional love from giving them vitality, from maintaining their bodymind, and from healing. So fear sucks the life right out of people who have been misdiagnosed all because of a thought that grew in their bodymind, which was planted there by someone else.
So human thought, very powerful.
“The perception of fear will block love and prevent healing.”
Another thing that can block healing is using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Whether you use natural holistic therapies or conventional pharmaceutical and surgical techniques if what you are doing is getting in the way of unconditional love from doing its own thing you are not helping with the healing process. For example if you break a leg, sure you could choose to avoid the hospital and not get a cast and let unconditional love do its thing, but unconditional love works without conditions or boundaries and so it just gives and it will just heal the bone no matter the orientation it is in. So you need some type of cast to support the healing process otherwise you’d be left with a very wonky looking leg and terrible posture. Plus the initial pain of breaking your leg may be so great that a pain-killer would most likely help more than even the most potent of essential oils and herbal teas.
Or another example if you get an infection, a slight small infection can be taken care of naturally with antibacterial herbs and raw honey and even coconut oil. With all of them working together to aid in the healing process and supporting unconditional love. But if your infection is left to linger for too long and grows deep and wide then at this point the healing process on its own becomes stunted. So before the infection becomes systemic and spreads now would be a good time to get out the antibiotics and give unconditional love some conditioned loving support with medicine.
It’s not about one method of healing being better than the other. It’s about understanding which method of healing will support unconditional love and your bodymind’s innate ability to heal. It’s as simple as using the right tool for the right job.
So how can you ease your fears and find the right healing techniques for your specific healing journey? How can you allow unconditional love and healing to flow effortlessly through your bodymind? Well you are going to have to cultivate, accumulate, build more love into your life.
Love begets love. Love attracts love. If you’re sick physically, sexually, emotionally, or mentally then it’s not just tree bark, herbs, essential oils, medicine, antibiotics, antipsychotics, and surgery that you need to be looking into. You also need to cultivate a sense of love and wellbeing into your being, into very your essence, into your soul.
If you’re sick and come from a place of fear this will lead to confusion, to anger, anxiety, and poor choices. But if you’re sick and come from a place of love this will lead to certainty, to confidence, and to the best choices you can make in the moment.
The first love you need to work on cultivating is love for your self. Self-love and self-directed loving are prerequisites for you to give and receive love. You cannot give what you do not have so if you don’t have love for yourself how can you give love to anyone else and how can you allow love to heal you.
Learning what love is and what love means to you is critical when cultivating love for self. Because even though people may be loving you with what they perceive as love you may not see it as love.
I like the book The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman for helping you understand how people give and receive love. The 5 love languages are:
- Words of affirmation
- Quality time
- Receiving gifts
- Acts of service, and
- Physical touch
Personally I love to give gifts as an expression of my love, but I feel more loved by other people when they choose to spend quality time with me compared to if they were to buy me a gift. So the way you receive love can be different to how you express love. Understanding how you receive love will make it easier for you to love yourself. Since I feel loved when people give me their time I love myself by giving myself time with myself. I do this by going on solo walks, but mainly I spend time with myself through my daily Qi-gong movement meditation practise. So find out what your love language is and begin loving yourself in that way and let others know that this is how you feel loved and let the receiving of love begin.
Another way to cultivate love is to appreciate more of what you have in your life and not concern yourself with what you don’t have or are missing out on. Remember fear blocks the flow of unconditional love and if you’re watching the news or focusing on comparing yourself to other people’s highlight reel on their social media accounts then this may stress you out a bit and is going to cause you to have negative feelings of anxiety and jealousy all of which stem from fear.
So practise being in an attitude of gratitude to fear less and love more. Giving gratitude daily is a simple yet powerful way to feel awesome about what you have going on in your life and to not worry about what you don’t have. Gratitude keeps you in the here and now, in the present, in this moment, and in this moment there is no fear, there is no past, there is no future, there is no learnt fear from the past, there is no projected fear of the future, there is just love for what is right now. Just like unconditional love which is always in this present moment.
A very simple way and yet very powerful strategy to cultivate more love is to surround yourself with a loving community. Whether it’s family, friends, and if you are on a healing journey specifically health practitioners they should all be on your side. They are your cheerleaders and they will help you move in the direction that allows for the effortless flow of unconditional love and to support healing using all available and relevant resources at your disposal. If you have people in your life that promote fear or demand conditions before love is given than don’t focus too much of your time and attention on them. You don’t have to completely shut these people out of your life if that’s too difficult. But if you can spend as little time as possible with these energy vampires the better off you will be. Spend as much time as you can, however, with people that give willingly and freely and who love you for being you.
So what’s love got to do with healing? Everything! Unconditional love is what’s breathing your body, what’s beating your heart, what’s growing your nails, what’s allowing the sounds and the sights to be downloaded, transformed, and uploaded into your nervous system. Unconditional love is what heals your bodymind.
Remember:
“Love isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Links and Resources
- A Course in Miracles — Foundation for Inner Peace
- The 5 Love Languages — Gary Chapman
- 5 Love Languages Online Test
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Obesity:
- I’ll explain why obesity is a disease and also a major hidden cause of other diseases
- I’ll talk about the difference between being obese and being overweight
- I’ll explain how obesity is caused by hormonal imbalances and not by eating too many calories
- Finally, I’ll give you a few holistic lifestyle strategies to reduce obesity, regain health, and feel awesome in your own skin
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FAT BURNING FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
It’s no secret. The world today has a lot more fat and sick people than there were 150 years ago. Seeing an obese person way back in the day meant having to visit a carnival or circus that’s how rare obesity was. Unfortunately today you just got to walk outside or turn on the tele and you’ll see excessively large people everywhere.
Since the 1980s obesity rates have doubled. Hmm, I wonder what happened in the 80s? Ah that’s right the low fat recommendation from the American health authorities. Good one guys. Today this misguided unscientific nonsensical low-fat strategy has lead to about 13% of the world’s adult population being categorised as obese and about 50 million kids worldwide under the age of 5 being defined as obese. That’s what gets me the most, seeing overweight and obese infants and children.
Now the World Health Organization has a list of the top 10 leading causes of death and smoking tobacco isn’t even on the list, but we all know that smoking causes many chronic diseases that eventually will lead to death. This is what the World Health Organisation says about smoking:
“Tobacco use is a major cause of many of the world’s top killer diseases – including cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive lung disease and lung cancer. In total, tobacco use is responsible for the death of about 1 in 10 adults worldwide. Smoking is often the hidden cause of the disease recorded as responsible for death.”
Interesting right? In fact the World Health Organization label smoking as the number one killer, but they still don’t put it on the list. Instead you’ll see diseases relating to the heart, brain, lungs, and infections.
This is where obesity comes in. Even though it’s not listed, just like smoking as a leading cause of death, obesity is a major hidden cause of many of those on the list. The top 3 by the way are heart disease, stroke, and lung related diseases all of which are due to the obstruction in blood and oxygen flow to the heart, brain, and lungs.
The thing about obesity is that most people think it’s just a weight issue and obese people are eating too much and not exercising enough. While I agree that some of the health problems associated with obesity is due to the large amount of weight on the body causing physical dysfunction, obesity causes more harm through physiological and biochemical damage because of its ability to disrupt the function of other systems in your body.
You see your body isn’t stupid. It has specific feedback loops and safety mechanisms to prevent the excessive loss or accumulation of fat and it has to control the amount of fat on your body because your fat cells are actually another organ. So when your fat levels get out of balance the key functions that they perform will be disrupted.
One of the functions of fat is fat acts as a warehouse for toxins. When your body is unable to fully metabolise, process, and eliminate toxins it stores the toxins in fat cells. Fat also sends signals and hormones that can have a positive or negative effect on your immune system and your metabolism. Your fat cells send out immune signals controlling inflammation and stress in your body. Your fat cells also send out hormones telling you that you’re full and will increase fat metabolism, i.e. fat-burning.
But when you have too much fat this will increase the amount of pro-inflammatory signals called cytokines increasing the amount of inflammation and stress in your body putting it in a catabolic state or a state of breaking down. Too much fat will also cause your satiety hormone leptin to be produced in excessively large amounts and your brain will become leptin resistant because there’s too much to take in. Meaning you will still feel hungry even though your body may already be carrying a lot of fat. Plus leptin resistance reduces fat metabolism and the amount of fat you burn causing you to hold onto more fat.
So just as there is heart disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, kidney stones, thyroiditis, arthritis, osteoporosis, autoimmune conditions and many other illnesses centred around particular organs and systems there is an illness, a disease of your fat cells and that my friend is called obesity and obesity is a disease that can cause further health issues in the future.
Now I don’t like to use the conventional classification system for defining whether someone is overweight or obese. Currently this is defined by your body mass index or BMI. BMI is supposed to calculate body fat based on your weight and height, but the calculation has a massive flaw. It doesn’t take into account lean muscle mass and bone mass and water weight. So you could have a fit athlete with 10% body fat, but a high BMI and have a very sick person with 30% body fat, but a medium BMI and the athlete would be categorised as obese and the sick person overweight, and this is not a good indicator of a healthy body.
So I define being overweight as holding on to a few extra kilos of fat and looking a bit soft and fluffy and chubby in the mirror, but still having normal healthy metabolic, hormonal, and immune function. This is very different to being obese, which is a person who is also carrying extra fat weight and has a broken metabolism and a weak immune system because their hormones are out of balance.
Okay so what causes obesity?
“Obesity is not caused by consuming too many calories.”
Yes you heard right. Obesity is not caused by consuming too many calories. It is true that you can become overweight by eating a huge amount of calories even those calories come from whole real food sources, but you would never become obese. Your hormonal system regulating hunger and appetite would kick in and prevent you from eating more then you need. Once you do become obese this is when you will be unable to control the amount of calories you take in and will begin to eat well beyond your body’s requirements.
What pushes you over the edge from being overweight to becoming obese isn’t the calories. It is an underlying hidden malfunction in your body’s hormonal system. When your sex hormones, growth hormones, hormones regulating metabolism and stress, when these are no longer playing the same song and in sync with each other a lot of things go wrong in your body including broken detox pathways, lowered immunity, decrease in muscle mass, increase in fat mass, and an increase in appetite for nutrient-poor foods.
So in this respect obesity turns out to be a symptom of other health issues that are already going on in your body.
The leading cause for your hormones going out of balance and for obesity in my book is eating a nutrient deficient diet. Your body is not a finite object, but an infinite process in constant flux and change. It’s constantly breaking itself down and building itself up. If you don’t consume enough nutrient dense foods then your body is left hanging without the right building blocks to build hormones, neurotransmitters, immune cells, bone, muscle, cartilage, ligaments, organs, blood, etc. Also after a meal your body will search for the nutrients it needs in that meal and if it doesn’t find it guess what happens? You get hungry again a lot sooner than you should and you eat more food. And while your body is craving nutrition you begin to crave less nutritious food.
So if all you eat is junk nutrient deficient fake pretend food-like products like commercial bread, biscuits, corn chips, French fries, candy, vegetable oils, soy milk, etc then you are setting your body up for hormonal havoc and mayhem and chronic hunger as it won’t have the necessary parts to make hormones and this will increase your chances of becoming obese. As you can see here it’s not how much you eat, but what you eat that matters most.
“You can be overfed, but so undernourished”
Which is the sad state for a third of westernised populations today.
Another cause for hormonal dysfunction deals with insulin sensitivity. When your cells are insulin sensitive nutrients are taken out of your bloodstream and absorbed. However, just as you can become leptin resistant due to excessive leptin production, excessive insulin production will cause your cells to become insulin resistant. This means that when there are nutrients in your blood, like glucose it will not be absorbed by your cells and this will cause damage to your tissues. So in order to prevent further damage from happening sugar in your blood will be turned into fat and stored away in your fat cells. Eating too many carbohydrates especially processed and refined sugar and fructose and not getting enough quality restorative sleep will cause high insulin production and insulin resistance.
Another cause for obesity is an underactive or hypoactive thyroid gland. Your thyroid produces thyroid hormones that regulate your metabolism and temperature and if your thyroid is hypoactive your metabolism slows right down making it very difficult for your body to burn stored fat as fuel. Here’s a list of things that can disrupt thyroid function:
- Gluten
- Stress
- Too much exercise
- Chemicals in tap water
- Chemical compounds found in plastics and
- Certain medications
Another underlying cause for hormonal mayhem and obesity is stress. Whether it be physical, emotional, or mental any perceived stress if left to linger long enough becoming chronic will cause chronic inflammation upsetting your normal hormonal rhythm moving you from an anabolic and growing state to a catabolic and breakdown state and unfortunately in this catabolic state the one thing that does keep growing are your fat cells.
The health of your gut and gut microbiota will also determine the health of your hormonal system and your fat levels. If your gut is leaky, meaning it’s damaged, and if you have dysbiosis, meaning you have more harmful pathogens than beneficial probiotics living in your gut this will cause a rise in inflammatory signals, stress hormones and depending on your genetics and epigenetic expression this may lead to obesity. Plus a damaged gut will mean you won’t be digesting and absorbing the full amount of nutrients from your foods leaving your body in a nutrient deficient state, which I talked about earlier.
Probably the least known root cause for obesity are obesogens. Which is ironic because these obesogens are Persistent Organic Pollutants or POPs and they are actually out in the open in plain sight for all to see. Obesogens are chemical compounds found in the environment that act as endocrine disrupters, meaning they screw up your hormonal system. They hijack it and create chemical chaos throughout your entire body. This hormonal havoc causes a whole wealth of health issues from cancer to autoimmune conditions and it also increases fat cell number and fat cell size. Obesogens can be found in:
- Plastics
- Pesticides and herbicides
- Flame retardant materials (such as in clothing and furniture)
- Treated wood and textiles (such as in building materials)
- Additives used in paints
- Non-stick cookware and even in certain
- Pharmaceutical drugs
Let me put all these obesogens together into a pretty terrifying yet common scenario we see today. Let’s say you have a new born baby. You bring him home to your brand new house with building materials, furniture, paint, and new carpets all chemically treated, some of them containing flame retardant chemicals and all of this is off-gassing or releasing chemicals into the air, also known as that beautiful new house smell. You dress your beautiful boy in flame retardant pyjamas. You use a plastic bottle to feed him non-organic formula, which contains sprayed ingredients. And finally you put him to bed in a brand new non-organic chemically treated cot. This is just a chemical toxic soup that this poor kid is living in and he doesn’t stand a chance against growing up without becoming obese or at least experiencing other health issues.
Now along with obesogens I have to mention environmental toxins and toxic chemicals. Remember fat cells are used by your body as a storage unit for toxins. So if you’re chronically exposed to heavy metals, air pollution, and eating a lot of pesticide and herbicide sprayed foods and eating meat from sick toxic animals your liver, kidneys, your entire detoxification system will become overloaded and will be unable to process, breakdown, and eliminate the excessive amount of toxins. As a last resort, so your body doesn’t shut down and die due to toxic poisoning, all those toxins that are not eliminated will be shoved into your fat cells.
“Fat cells don’t just store energy they also store poison.”
This is also why a rapid and dramatic reduction in fat isn’t a good idea without proper supervision and guidance. A lot of obese people their health actually gets worse when burning a lot fat too quickly. Just keep in mind the saying slow and steady wins the race. If you lose fat too fast those toxins are going to be flooding your system and you do not want that.
So those are a few examples and there are more of how a person can become obese without eating a lot of calories. Obesity like every other disease is not caused by one thing, but many things related to your environment, your food, and how you perceive life.
It isn’t just a physical weight problem, but more a physiological, biochemical, and really a hormonal problem. Obesity is a symptom of an underlying hormonal issue in your body and is not caused by eating too many calories, but it will cause you to overeat.
Obesity is also a disease that gives rise to the top leading causes of death.
Alright let’s get into how to heal from and prevent obesity and how to get your hormones humming to a happy and healthy tune.
First up, watch what you eat. Watch it. Get off the inflammatory foods, the chemically sprayed foods, and the highly refined and processed junk fake pretend food-like products. No gluten, no sugars, no pasteurised dairy, no industrial seed oils, no junk. Watch out for the carbs especially as eating too many carbs will cause a lot of insulin to be produced and you want insulin and blood sugar to be in the Goldilocks zone, just right. Real food from Mother Nature communicates with your hormones on an informational level where they speak the same language. By just eating real food you’ll keep your hormones in balance and in harmony and this hormonal bliss will keep your body composition balanced and in check.
Next up, reduce your perceived stress. Practise relaxation techniques. Get a massage, meditate, breathe mindfully, and watch the amount of physical stress you’re under. If you don’t have a formal exercise routine get moving and start working out. If you do exercise regularly and religiously maybe you’re overdoing it and need to do less working out and more working in. If you’re obese then your body is already under enough physical stress as it is, so working out would just add to that stress so look at working in. Working in is where instead of expending energy with a workout you’re cultivating energy, building up your energy stores. Movement practises like:
- Tai-chi
- Qi-gong
- Restorative yoga
- Hatha yoga
- Iyengar yoga
Are the perfect work in exercises.
Biggest thing you can do to prevent and heal from obesity is to clean up your environment. Remove the obesogens and toxic chemicals and clean up your habitat. Use glass and stainless steel drink bottles instead of plastic. Wear organic chemical-free clothing and buy organic chemical-free furniture and use chemical-free building materials. Cook with ceramic and stainless steel cookware. Actually there’s a lot more to this topic and you can find an entire podcast I did on this quite a while back about how to purify and clean up your environment and support your detoxification system. Look for episode 12.
Along with clean eating, clean thinking, and clean living there are other holistic lifestyle principles to consider in order to fully heal and to keep your bodymind in a happy and healthy state. Listen to episode 30 about the 7 Holistic Lifestyle Principles you can follow in order to live happy, healthy, whole, and complete.
An awesome book that covers everything from diet and exercise to cleaning up your environment and your thinking is How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! by holistic health practitioner Paul Chek. This book is my bible and really is a one-stop shop for holistic living.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
“Obesity isn’t about energy in and energy out.”
It’s about so much more.
If you’re fat or overweight, sure you may be eating more than you should.
But if you’re obese then it’s not about how much you eat, but what you eat and the environment you’re eating in. If you’re obese you are probably eating nutrient-poor and sugar-rich foods and you’re living in a very stressful and very toxic environment.
Remember your health is 100% your responsibility so make the choice to own your lifestyle and eat, drink, move, breathe, live, sleep better, and think and feel like you deserve a happy and healthy life. The only person who can save you is you. So don’t play the victim. Be the hero. Because you are awesome and very much worth it.
Links and Resources
- WGP 012: How to Love Your Liver and Detox Your Life
- WGP 030: Want the Good Life? These 7 Holistic Health Principles Will Guide You There
- How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! — Paul Chek
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Epigenetics:
- I’ll explain the difference between genetics and epigenetics
- I’ll talk about how your environment impacts the activation and expression of your genes
- Finally, I’ll give a few holistic tips on how to activate and express health-boosting and life-affirming genes
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST HEALING FOODS FOR YOUR GUT
The study of how genes control life is called genetics. Genetic looks at genetic differences, mutations, heredity, and of course of lot of today’s genetic research looks into genetic diseases. Genetics and the study of genes is a very important and valid science, but the belief behind genetics is outdated old-school thinking and that belief is that genes control life.
This belief came from the hypothesis that there is a gene for every protein. The more complex an organism, the more cells and proteins there are, the more genes there would be. That was the idea. This idea turns out to be incorrect.
The Human Genome Project, which started back in the late 1980s, was setup to uncover the entire sequence of genetic information found in human DNA with the side benefit of discovering the genetics of every disease and how to prevent and cure them. The human body has about 100,000 protein molecules, so science expected to find about 100,000 genes. Fast forward 15 years and guess how many genes they found at the end of the project in 2001 – only 35,000. Fast forward another 15 years to today and after further study and research that initial number has shrunk to about 20,000 genes.
There was a lot of hype in the science community about the Human Genome Project, but funnily enough when the scientist’s expectations proved to be wrong, very wrong, there was no big deal made about the unexpected results. This massively incorrect assumption about a gene coding for a protein fell off the radar. Science tends to work this way unfortunately where the good news is reported and the bad news is swept under the rug.
So now we know that there are only 20,000 genes in the human genome and these 20,000 genes code for over 100,000 proteins and alongside this fact is the news that the largest number of genes found in a single animal is 31,000 genes and that animal is the near-microscopic water flea Daphnia. Imagine that, a near-microscopic simple organism with hardly any cells and proteins compared to the 35 trillion cells and 100,000 proteins in your human body and yet this tiny little life form has 11,000 more genes than humans do.
What this shows you is that genes do not control life. No matter the complexity of an organism the number of genes present will vary a lot. It’s not the genes that say how life will be from birth to death. It’s the life that is lived that will determine which genes get expressed or activated or switched on and which genes don’t. Say goodbye to the old belief that your genes control your life and hello to the new way of thinking – that your life controls your genes.
This new way of thinking is actually 50 years old and is called the science of epigenetics, which looks at how environmental signals affect gene expression.
Epigenetics means above the genes and studies how your environment affects the biochemical and physiological processes that are happening outside of your genetic code, but have a direct effect on which sequence of your genetic code to read and which genes to express or not.
Remember the old way of thinking says that genes are in control like a foreman of a construction site. Genes dictate what gets built and so decide the health or disease of your cells.
The new way of thinking, epigenetics, says genes are actually just simple blueprints. They don’t do anything at all. It’s all the proteins and enzymes and cellular signals and every other process that’s going on in and outside of your cell that dictate which blueprints to read (gene expression), which parts of those blueprints to create proteins from (gene variation), and whether or not those blueprints need updating (gene mutation).
What this means is that epigenetics has actually shown that some genes will lay dormant and may never get expressed while other genes will be switched on and switched off and that other genes may undergo spontaneous mutation and transform into a brand new gene all based on your environment, on your surroundings.
So how does your environment impact your genetic expression? How does the environment influence your biochemistry and physiology and determine which genes to read or not, which parts of that gene to express and make proteins from, and which genes to mutate or leave unchanged?
Let me give a little background information first. Your genetic code is one long sequence of molecules like the alphabet is a sequence of letters. Your genes are subsets or small groupings of these molecules like words are groupings of the alphabet. This long sequence of your genetic code is called DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid. Your DNA is covered in a protein sheath. Altogether the proteins surrounding your DNA and the genes contained in your DNA this is called a chromosome. You have 23 pairs or 46 strands of chromosomes in your body. Chromosomes are found inside the nucleus of your cells.
Remember your genes don’t do anything; literally they don’t perform any physical action or function. Everything that happens with genes happens to the gene and is entirely dependent and reliant on signals that come from outside the chromosomes. So your genes are merely blueprints and blueprints don’t build structures.
The life your parents and grandparents lived designed and created your blueprints, your DNA, your genes. You had little say in the matter, but the expression or activation of your genes is all on you.
How epigenetics work can get pretty complex and I’m just going to give a summary here, but I will put a link to a video in the blog post for this episode which will give you more detail and a visual on what I’m talking about.
Your genes get read, expressed or activated, and mutated via signalling, that is the transmission and reception of information that come from your environment and go right down into your cells and ultimately reaching your genes. These environmental signals include everything that your six senses can perceive. Examples of these signals include your thoughts and feelings like fear or love, a physical threat or loving embrace, or digested nutrients from food. These environmental signals are the primary signal the first signal you receive.
Your brain, your heart, and your gut all have nerve centres and communicate with each other and they can be thought of as the primary organs that make up your conscious and subconscious mind. They receive this primary signal from your environment and then based on your beliefs and perceptions about life they interpret and translate this primary signal into a secondary signal, and it’s this secondary signal that is sent to other organs and cells in the form of hormones and neurotransmitters.
When this secondary signal is delivered to your cells it is picked up by a protein receptor in the cell membrane. Once this secondary signal is received this sets of a chain of events where a number of proteins and enzymes in the cell membrane and within the cell itself they bind to each other performing specific functions until eventually they either create a tertiary signal within the cell or they allow a tertiary signal to enter the cell through the cell membrane. This tertiary signal is the last signal that will bind to other proteins within the cell to perform a specific function.
Alright so you get a primary signal from the environment. Your conscious and subconscious mind changes that primary signal into a secondary signal. Your cells take the secondary signal in and they transform that into a tertiary signal and then there’s a function that is performed in the cell.
Now if that tertiary signal is unable to perform its function because the specific protein its wanting to bind to is missing, the signal molecule will enter the nucleus of the cell where your chromosomes are. It will bind to a specific regulatory protein on one of your chromosomes and when it does this that regulatory protein releases itself from the chromosome uncovering a specific sequence of your DNA of your genetic code. This exposes the gene that codes for the missing protein. The gene is then transcribed and copied and finally converted into that missing protein. The regulatory protein returns and covers up the DNA, and the tertiary signal can now bind to this newly created protein to perform its original function. This transcription, copying, and conversion process is called gene expression, gene activation, or a gene being switched on.
Here’s where it gets very interesting. If the tertiary signal is unable to perform its function due to a missing protein and it cannot locate the specific gene for that protein in your DNA, guess what happens next? The tertiary signal will activate a specific genetic engineering gene, which in turn will rewrite another gene in a different part of your DNA. Meaning the signal is now causing a genetic mutation. With the newly mutated gene now in place this tertiary signal can now activate the new gene, creating the missing protein and the signal will bind itself to the new protein and finally perform its function.
There’s nothing random about these mutations at all. It’s the environmental signal creating specific mutations to perform a specific function.
That may have been a lot to take in, so please watch the video for a visual detailed representation of what I just discussed.
Let me give you a real world example of how this works.
Let’s say you’re scared of spiders and you see a spider. Or let’s say you’re prone to road rage and you get cut off in traffic. Or let’s say your body is sensitive to dairy, but you don’t know it and you’ve been drinking dairy for a long time, for years and you’ve just had another glass of milk. Seeing the spider, getting cut off in traffic and drinking the milk are examples of a primary signal from your environment.
Since you have a belief that spiders are scary, and that bad drivers are a valid reason to get mad, and your body perceives dairy as indigestible and a possible toxin you transform the primary signal to an emotion of fear, an emotion of anger, and your body’s immune system gets activated yet again – this is the secondary signal. These secondary signals, which are now a bunch of hormones and neurotransmitters like epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol, are sent to your cells.
When your cells receive these secondary signals they activate proteins and enzymes that allow negative tertiary signals to enter the cell activating genes that stop growth, repair, reproduction, digestion and elimination; that cause muscle breakdown and fat storage, and your immune system to go crazy. These negative tertiary signals can also cause gene mutations and enhance cancerous cell growth.
Alright time to flip this around. We’re going to change your beliefs and your perceptions. The primary signals don’t change. You still see a spider, you still get cut off in traffic, and you still drink a glass of milk. But this time you love spiders, you are a calm and relaxed driver, and your body is not sensitive to dairy and can digest it without any issues.
So again the primary signals don’t change, however, because you’re now smiling at the spider, giving gratitude for not getting into an accident, and your body is nourished from the milk you get secondary signals like oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, feel good hormones are now being received by your cells.
When your cells receive these secondary signals they activate proteins and enzymes that allow positive tertiary signals to enter the cell and activate genes that promote growth, repair, reproduction, digestion and elimination; they promote muscle-building and fat-burning, and regulate your immune system. These positive tertiary signals can also activate genes that suppress cancer growth and cause cancer cells to die.
So what is this showing you? What this is showing you is that it’s not the primary signal from your environment that affects your genes. It is the secondary signal that comes from your conscious and subconscious mind that affects the tertiary signal and your genes. Whatever situation or event happens in the real world, in reality, it is you, your beliefs and your perception of that situation, of that event, that has the final say on which genes to activate and which genes to leave switched off.
It is your thoughts, your feelings, what you eat and drink, how you move, how you breathe, the toxicity of your environment, the quality of your sleep, the quality of your relationships, all of these control your genes.
Your mood, your health, your life these are the stimulus to your genes and your genes simply respond to that stimulus. If you have a sucky mood and are depressed about life then your genes will simply reflect this fact. So if you want to feel awesome and love the life you have it all begins by changing your beliefs about your life, positively changing your perceptions about life itself, which will change your behaviour and change your genes, eventually making the inside of your bodymind reflect the outside world that you positively perceive.
Now I’m not saying the goal is to think positive and live a naturally holistic healthy lifestyle 100% of the time. That’s impossible. What I’m saying is when you are aware, when you are conscious of your surroundings and of what’s going on around you, know that you have a choice in that moment to choose either a positive or a negative experience. I suggest you make the kind choose for yourself.
Here are three kind choices you can make to positively impact your health and to express health-boosting and life-affirming genes.
First, get rid of your ANTs – Automatic Negative Thoughts. Do this through critical thinking and questioning yourself, your beliefs, and asking yourself are your thoughts and beliefs true? For example is it true that you’re worthless, or that you’re not smart enough, or that no one will ever love you, or that you’ll get cancer because of your genes? Really, is that true? I highly recommend doing The Work by Byron Katie. She takes you through a powerful process of inquiry that’ll show you whether or not your current way of thinking is actually worth paying attention to.
Secondly, practise some form of daily meditation. Mindfulness meditation, movement mediation like Qi-gong or even walking meditation, any task that has you focused on one thing is a form of meditation. Meditation has been shown to boost your immune function, reduce stress levels and inflammation, reduce depression, and improve your mood and your outlook on life.
Third kind choice is to choose to live a holistic healthy lifestyle and you can do this by following the 7 Holistic Health Principles as I outlined in episode 30.
- Eat real food
- Drink natural water
- Move often
- Breathe properly
- Purify your environment
- Get quality restorative sleep and
- Form positive relationships with nature, with yourself, and with others
These 7 principles bring your bodymind back into sync with the rhythm and flow of Mother Nature and these principles give happy and healing epigenetic signals to your genes.
Okay I’m going to give a quick recap on epigenetics because I really want you to get that your genes are not your destiny.
“Genes DO NOT control your biology! Your beliefs about your life control your biology.”
It’s your habitat and environment, your habits and behaviour, your feelings and emotions, your thoughts and beliefs that influence your genes.
It is your beliefs that change the biochemistry of your blood and your blood carries the signals sent to your cells, and ultimately these signals determine the expression of your genes.
Perceive love and you get feel good hormones in your blood, sending positive signals to your cells where they read and express healthy genes.
Perceive fear and you get stress hormones in your blood, sending negative signals to your cells where they ignore healthy genes and may read and express disease-promoting genes.
Dr Joseph Mercola creator of the number one natural health website mercola.com says:
“Epigenetics shatters the idea that you are a victim of your genes, and shows that you have tremendous power to shape and direct your physical health.”
Meaning the power to live an awesome happy and healthy life lies within you. Take ownership and responsibility for your thoughts and your beliefs about life and you will no longer be the victim, but the victor in the beautiful story that is your wonderful life.
Links and Resources
- Video — Dr Bruce Lipton Presenting on Epigenetics
- The Biology of Belief — Bruce H. Lipton PhD
- The Work — Bryon Katie
- WGP 030: Want the Good Life? These 7 Holistic Health Principles Will Guide You There
- mercola.com
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Leaky Gut Syndrome:
- I’ll explain how a leaky gut can lead to chronic disease
- I’ll talk about what causes a leaky gut
- Finally, I’ll give you 5 steps to healing and sealing a leaky gut
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST HEALING FOODS FOR YOUR GUT
Hippocrates was an ancient Greek physician and considered the father of western medicine, although I’m sure he’d be quite upset at the current health-care system and medical model we use today, which is really a disease-care model, but anyways… Hippocrates said:
“All disease begins in the gut.”
And he is absolutely 100% correct and let me explain how. And by the way when I say gut I’m talking about the small and large intestines in your body.
Your entire alimentary canal, your entire digestive system is one long tube that begins in your mouth hole and ends in your south hole so anything you put in your mouth and swallow is still technically outside of your body. If it gets digested and absorbed into your bloodstream then it’s inside your body, but if what you swallow gets eliminated then it technically was never in your body. That’s not to say it won’t affect your body only that the effect will be minimal compared to if what you ate did get into your bloodstream.
Now your gut performs many functions in your body besides digestion and elimination and its primary role is to act as a barrier controlling what’s allowed in and what stays out of your body. Nutrients are allowed into your body and unwanted unknown foreign materials are kept outside of your body. So it’s similar to a mosquito net. It allows oxygen in while keeping mosquitoes out. When this barrier becomes compromised and unregulated or when this mosquito net gets punctured and has tears in it this is called leaky gut syndrome.
When you have a leaky gut unwanted unknown foreign materials get into your bloodstream and then all hell begins to break loose in other parts of your body. When undigested food particles, pathogens, toxins, and other irritants that usually get eliminated find their way into your body, into your bloodstream your immune system gets activated and this causes an inflammatory and stress response at whatever site the foreign material settles in. The longer this inflammation and stress goes on the higher your chance of getting a chronic disease.
For example, if you have had leaky gut for a while and unwanted material settles in your joints you may get rheumatoid arthritis. If they settle in your arteries your chance of having a heart attack or stroke skyrockets. If this foreign matter settles in your thyroid you may experience hyper or hypothyroid issues. If they settle under your skin you may get rashes, eczema, or acne. If they settle in your brain your ability to focus and think clearly may reduce dramatically giving you brain fog. If this foreign material stays in your gut you may experience digestive issues like bloating and foul-smelling gas that can eventually lead to Crohn’s or coeliac disease. And if these non-nutrient substances don’t settle anywhere in particular this chronic low-level inflammatory and stress response will cause your hormones and your neurotransmitters to get out of balance with either too much or not enough being produced causing body composition problems (fat gain or muscle loss), reproductive issues (infertility), energy imbalances (feeling tired or fatigued), and mood disorders (depression).
Not only does bad stuff get into your bloodstream with a leaky gut, but because your gut wall is damaged you’re no longer able to absorb the full amount of nutrients, minerals, and vitamins from the food that you’re eating and this leads to nutrient deficiencies. This malabsorption of nutrients causes your body to start cannibalising itself in order to meet its own nutrient requirements. So if you’re not absorbing enough calcium your bones will begin to breakdown. If you’re not absorbing enough protein your body will get this protein from your muscles. Not absorbing enough natural fats? Say goodbye to proper brain function. And if you’re not absorbing enough vitamin A your cells will no longer form and grow properly causing dysfunction of many of your bodily systems.
So having a leaky gut is a serious problem with serious health consequences and it’s not limited to your gut. Your entire body is fair game.
“If you’re experiencing health symptoms of any kind there’s a 99.9999% chance that your gut is leaky.”
Your skin is a dozen cell layers thick and you can see the layers of your skin when you get a cut or you scrape yourself. The mucous lining of your gut, also known as your gut wall, is only one cell thick or should I say one cell thin. The cells that make up your gut wall are called enterocytes. This single layer of enterocytes makes it easy to absorb and transport nutrients into your bloodstream, but this also makes your gut very easy to damage.
Your gut wall isn’t smooth, but is made up of very tiny finger-like projections called villi that stick out increasing the surface area of your digestive system and this makes it easier to break down food and absorb more nutrients. Villi are connected to each other at their base by tight junctions and these tight junctions can open slightly to let certain nutrients in, but they remain closed when there’s foreign material around like undigested food particles, toxins, and pathogens.
There are certain substances, however, that can cause these tight junctions to open even in the presence of foreign material. There are even more substances that can cause direct physical damage to your single-celled gut wall. The term leaky gut syndrome comes from the fact that these tight junctions are opened and your gut wall is damaged. The technical term for this is intestinal hyperpermeability.
The unwarranted opening of these junctions and damage to your gut wall is caused by many many things and a variety of factors including:
- Anti-nutrients like gluten, lectins, saponins, and phytates
- Industrial seed oils aka vegetable oils
- Grains
- Instant coffee
- Pasteurised dairy
- Processed and refined sugar
- Foods your body is intolerant and sensitive to
- Nutrient deficiencies
- Inorganic foods raised with inorganic fertilisers and pesticides
- Tap water and water that is deficient in minerals
- Alcohol
- Artificial sweeteners
- Artificial colourings, preservatives, additives, thickeners, emulsifiers, bulking agents, flavourings, and texturants
- Synthetic vitamins
- Parasitic infections
- Dysbiosis, which is not an infection, but simply having more pathogens than probiotics in your gut
- Environmental toxins including personal and homecare products
- Lack of exposure to the sun, to bare skin on the Earth, and to time in nature
- Pharmaceutical drugs like antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, acid-blockers, and pain-killers
- Caesarean birth or being born via C-section
- Sedentary lifestyle
- Lack of quality restorative sleep
- Chronic stress and
- Chronic inflammation
So how do you seal and heal your leaky gut? How do you prevent those tight junctions between your villi from opening when they shouldn’t and how do you repair the damage to the enterocytes the cells of your gut wall?
Here are five steps to healing a leaky gut.
First things first – Redefine your dream for healing.
Without a big enough why, a big enough reason to keep you moving forward you will end up stressed out about the whole healing process. If you stress about how difficult it’s going to be for example to stop eating bread or cheese or having to buy plant-based organic deodorant and homecare products then forget about moving onto the next steps. This stress about changing and healing is just as bad as continuing to eat gluten or drink alcohol. You need to create a dream that matters, a dream that will inspire you to make change happen, to make change stick, and to make healing feel less of a burden and more of a passion, more of a right like you deserve this. Checkout episode 14 for more details about how to build your dream.
Second step – Remove all possible gut irritants.
This includes everything in the list I gave you earlier. Well as much of it as you can handle without stressing out about it. Hopefully your dream keeps your stress levels or your perception of stress in check. Even if you do find yourself feeling a bit stressed about this step you can always practise meditation and movement practises like Qi-gong to help reduce the amount of perceived stress you’re experiencing.
Step three – Refeed your body with holistic nutrition.
This isn’t just about eating real food. This also includes drinking natural water, moving often, breathing correctly, getting quality restorative sleep, and engaging in loving relationships. When it comes to food to heal your gut though you can’t go past:
- Bone broth
- Fermented foods like raw milk kefir and sauerkraut
- Fatty fish like salmon and sardines, and
- Eating more natural animal and fruit fats
Fourth step – Repair your gut with smart supplementation.
You could heal your gut naturally without the use of supplements, but strategic use of supplements will help support and boost your body’s own innate healing abilities increasing your chances for success. The enterocytes that make up your gut wall, these guys love to feed on an amino acid glutamine and you can get glutamine in real foods like bone broth, but you can also find it as a supplement powder called l-glutamine. Digestive enzymes are a fantastic way to supplement your body’s digestive system and will ensure the proper digestion and absorption of nutrients. Aloe vera juice and deglycyrrhizinated licorice or DGL are two very potent plant-based gut-healers. High quality fish and krill oil with their anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids will also help your gut heal. Lastly, a probiotic supplement preferably containing soil-based microorganisms will help bring your gut microbiome back into balance.
Fifth and final step – Remember to laugh.
There’s an age-old saying:
“Laughter is the best medicine.”
A real hard laugh boosts your immune system and lowers your levels of the stress hormone cortisol for at least a day so be sure to watch something funny, go to a comedy show, or do some laughing yoga. Yeah, you heard right, laughing yoga. I’ll put a link in the blog post for this episode to a video showing what laughing yoga is all about. It’s actually quite funny, obviously. Also I’ll put a link to the Chewbacca Mom viral video. It’s a video I’ve come across recently and it made me laugh pretty hard the first time I saw it.
Here are a couple of books to help you on your gut healing journey. How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! by Paul Chek covers how to heal holistically. Gut and Psychology Syndrome by Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride gives you the GAPs Protocol and this goes deeper into gut healing and is a great option for those with severely damaged guts.
I’ll leave you with this thought. Life is short. Don’t live life so seriously. The time it’s going to take to heal your gut will be long though. So take the time now to heal your gut so you can enjoy yourself later and have more fun before your time is up.
Links and Resources
- WGP 014: Dream Building – How to Create the Life You Really Really Want
- Aloe Vera Juice
- DGL Licorice
- Krill Oil
- Digestive enzyme and probiotic supplements
- Laughing Yoga Video
- Chewbacca Mom Video
- How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! — Paul Chek
- Gut and Psychology Syndrome — Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride
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