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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 Depression and Suicidal Tendencies:
- I’ll explain what depression is and what suicidal tendencies are including their symptoms
- I’ll talk about from my experience what it feels like to be depressed and to have thoughts of suicide
- I’ll talk about contributing factors that can cause depression and suicidal tendencies
- Finally, I’ll give a few tips on how you can work your way out of a depressive and suicidal black hole
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU IN BALANCE
Depression is a mood disorder in which you feel extreme sadness and grief, you’re uninterested about life, and you suffer chronic mental, emotional, and physical pain. Depression affects 350 million people worldwide and that’s only an estimate. Because depression is such a difficult thing to admit to having with for fear of ridicule and looking weak or looking like a lesser person in other people’s eyes I’d say that between half a billion to a billion people suffer from some form of depression.
There are different types of depression including major, melancholic, manic, and a few others all of these have similar symptoms including:
- Persistent feelings of sadness and grief
- Feeling hopeless, helpless, worthless, pessimistic and/or guilty
- Feeling irritable and anxious
- Loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable
- Low self-esteem
- Indecisiveness
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Eating or sleeping too little or too much
- Difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions
- Thoughts or attempts of self-harm
- Thoughts or attempt of suicide
- Fatigue or low energy
- Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment
Suicidal tendencies are thoughts that you have about death and killing yourself due to not being able to cope with chronic pain and the suffering you’re currently experiencing in your life. Being suicidal is another mood disorder and an advancement from self-harm where you cut or hurt yourself in order to cope with pain. Thoughts of suicide affect an unknown number of people, but over 800,000 people worldwide commit suicide every year with someone dying from suicide every 40 seconds. A lot more people attempt suicide, which makes thinking about suicide a major health issue.
Here are some symptoms and danger signs for suicide:
- Talking about wanting to die or killing yourself
- Researching and planning suicide
- Talking about feeling hopeless or having no reason to live
- Talking about feeling trapped or in unbearable pain
- Talking about being a burden to others
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Eating or sleeping too little or too much
- Withdrawn or feeling isolated
- Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge
- Displaying extreme mood swings
- Always thinking about death
- Suddenly happier and at peace with things
- Loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable
- Visiting or calling people to say goodbye
- Making arrangements and setting your affairs in order
- Giving things away, such as prized possessions
What I’m going to do now is to do my best to describe what it feels like to be in a state of depression and thinking about suicide. Now I lived with depression for two decades and had suicidal tendencies for a decade and a half, but even that doesn’t qualify me enough to say that this is exactly what the experience of depression and thinking about suicide feels like for everybody. Even after having talked with and researched other people who have dealt with these disorders all I can give you is a description of my own personal experience.
Describing a feeling or sensation is extremely difficult though. So what I’m going to do is use two analogies to give you a sense of what depression and suicidal tendencies feel like or felt like for me. If you’ve never had to deal with these disorders I hope this gives you a better picture of what it’s like to live with these two very disempowering ways of being. And if you have people in your life that you think may be dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide, but you’re finding it difficult to relate to them I’m hoping that this gives you a sense of what they’re struggling with and how you may be able to help and support them.
If you had or are currently dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide please let me know if what I describe here resonates with you and makes some sense. If you’re finding it difficult to reach out to people who may not understand what you’re going through, you can always contact me and use me as your first step toward getting a better understanding of what’s happening with you. I’d love to hear your story and share mine with you and support you on your health and happiness journey.
Alrighty first analogy. Think of negative emotions as having weight and feeling like a burden on your back, or on your shoulders, making you feel heavy, making you feel uncomfortable and in pain. The more upsetting and painful the emotion the more weight it has. Positive emotions would be weightless and make you feel as light as a feather. Now imagine an acute short-term pain like stubbing your toe. This feels like a couple of bowling balls on your back. Imagine now that you get angry for accidentally hitting your toe. Now you have a few more bowling balls pile up. Imagine getting in an argument or feeling upset over an expectation not being met. This would feel like a car or a bus on your shoulders. Breaking up with your lover or being disconnected from family and friends. This would feel like a whole city block was weighing you down. Experiencing the death of a loved one, someone you deeply cared about, this is huge and feels like the weight of the world, the entire planet is on your shoulders.
Now imagine this sadness and grief grows where another planet jumps on your back followed by another and then another, and then the sun followed by more stars, and different star systems until eventually you feel like the weight of the entire galaxy is on your back. If deep sadness and unbearable grief were the weight of planet Earth, depression feels like the weight of an entire galaxy of stars and planets.
The longer you have this galaxy on your back weighing you down the more painful your life becomes and the more difficult it is for you to move around. Without realising it another galaxy gets plonked on your back followed by another and another until0020like the theory of the Big Bang where everything rapidly expanded into existence, you have the size of the entire universe weighing you down. You feel like you’re about to lose it and be crushed by this massive burden. This huge infinite mass of the universe causes unimaginable pain and stops you in your tracks causing you to give up all hope of living because all you want is for this heaviness, this non-stop chronic persistent pain to just go away. All you want is to be free, free of this burden, free of this pain, free of this suffering. This is when you begin thinking that ending your life is the only viable option you have left.
That’s how my experience of depression and contemplating suicide was for me in terms of pain. I felt so small and so insignificant compared to the burden that I thought I was carrying. I felt absolutely weighed down by my thoughts and by my feelings and because of them I experienced unimaginable pain and suffering.
In this second analogy imagine standing on the edge of a cliff looking into a deep dark chasm, an abyss with no end in sight. A normal experience of sadness and grief is like tripping and falling into this abyss and feeling scared and alone in the darkness and reaching out for something to grab and hold onto to break your fall, but there’s nothing around that can save you and you’re just falling for what seems like an eternity until out of nowhere a safety net breaks your fall and you’re able to climb to the top of the cliff and find yourself back on solid ground relieved from your grief.
Depression feels like tripping and falling into this abyss and feeling scared and alone and trying as you might you cannot find anything to grab onto and you’re falling and falling in this absolutely pitch-black hole with no end in sight screaming out in fear of dying, in fear of being alone forever, in fear of never being saved. The thing with depression is the fall never ends and you lose track of time and space and of who you were and you begin to fear the dark, and you’re afraid of the unknown, afraid of being alone, afraid of never experiencing love again, and you fall and fall and fall forever. You become desperate and pretend that everything is okay. You put masks on to cover up your fears. You become religious. You become an atheist. You become a team player. You become a loner. You become frustrated. You become apathetic. You become an addict. You become whatever it is you think you need to be to survive the fall, but no matter what masks you put on you are still falling and the fall never ends. You’re afraid of hitting rock bottom, but have no idea how to stop from falling.
Having suicidal tendencies feels like tripping and falling into this abyss and just like depression this fall never ends and you live in constant fear until eventually you give in to the fear and give up all hope of being saved or of saving yourself and you stop reaching out and you stop pretending everything is okay, and you stop looking for ways to put on a brave face. You turn your body and you look straight down into the darkness waiting for the inevitable, expecting it, wanting the fall to end, wanting to hit rock bottom, wanting this fear of the dark, of feeling alone, of never feeling love to end. You’re still afraid of hitting rock bottom, but rock bottom is the only way you see this fall ending.
That’s how depression and suicidal thoughts felt for me in terms of fear. I felt absolutely out of control. I felt uncertain about myself, my life, other people, the whole world. I felt completely utterly hopeless and helpless and saw other people as my enemies and saw the world as a very dark, scary, and lonely place.
This is just my personal experience and everyone has their own perspective and I hope it gives you some insight and understanding about what it feels like to live with these disorders.
Let’s move onto the contributing factors that can lead to depression and suicidal tendencies. What causes these mood disorders?
Conventional medical thinking would tell you that an imbalance either too much or not enough of feel good neurotransmitters like serotonin are the cause of mood disorders. But what causes these hormones, these neurotransmitters in your brain to get out of balance?
As a holistic and functional practitioner I always want to get to the underlying root cause. Depression and thoughts of suicide are symptoms of a bigger problem. Yes these mood disorders are very destructive, but they are not the problem. They are the result of the problem. They are actually signs signalling to you that something in your life is out of balance.
The real problem for this imbalance and the root cause to 99.99% of disease, sickness, symptoms of ill health, and dysfunction in your body, in your mind, in your bodymind they are both one and the same, the root cause is chronic stress perceived or real, physical or metaphysical. This chronic stress then leads to chronic inflammation and this chronic inflammation causes your immune system to run out-of-control.
You have to realise that your bodymind is always in flux, in flow, and shifting between anabolism, which is growth, and catabolism, which is breaking down. When you sleep you’re predominantly anabolic and when you’re awake you’re mostly catabolic. When your bodymind lives in what I call a catabolic soup, which is when the big three persistent stress and inflammation and an unregulated immune system come together, your bodymind will shift into a catabolic state and stay there for a long time and anabolic processes will no longer be deemed necessary.
Meaning your bodymind will begin to break down more a lot more than it grows and it does this because it’s now in survival mode and not your normal thriving mode. Your bodymind will turn off non-vital processes such as growth, repair, reproduction, digestion, elimination, and shut down the production of mood-regulating hormones and neurotransmitters leading to mood disorders.
In this catabolic state your bodymind will also cannibalise itself and strip nutrients from bone to ensure the proper functioning of other vital organs (osteoporosis anyone?) and will become confused and attack your own organs such as your thyroid and joints and your gut and this creates autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Coeliac Disease all because of chronic stress, inflammation, and an unruly immune system.
So if this catabolic soup made up of stress and inflammation and your out-of-control immune system contributes to the cause of depression and suicidal tendencies what creates this catabolic soup? Why are you in chronic stress? Why is there chronic inflammation? Why is your immune system attacking your own body?
“Living a lifestyle out of balance with the seasons and the rhythms of Mother Nature.”
This is the ultimate cause to all diseases physical, sexual, emotional, and mental. Not living in accordance with the laws of nature. To reduce the symptoms and eventually remove your depressed state and suicidal tendencies you need to reconnect to the natural order of life.
Your bodymind was designed to be barefoot on the land, with skin exposed to the sun, connected and working intimately together with your tribe with a sole purpose, to sleep when the sun sets and to wake the sun rises, to live in a toxin-free environment, to breathe clean air, to move often throughout the day, to drink natural pure structured water, and to eat real food from Mother Nature.
This is called living a holistic lifestyle and connecting back to your roots, to your ancestry, to who you really truly are in this Universe. A holistic lifestyle will reduce your stress, the inflammation in your bodymind, and help calm and regulate your immune system.
I have already done many podcasts on how to live a holistic lifestyle and a good starting place would be to look up the episode I did on the 7 Holistic Health Principles to give you the good life. That is episode 30.
Looking back at my life I can definitely see how out of sync my lifestyle was compared to what my bodymind needed and was expecting. I ate a lot of highly inflammatory foods like sugars and grains and pasteurised dairy, and I drank a lot of tap water, and I didn’t move my body enough, and hardly ever did I ground my body to the earth, and I’d always cover myself when I went outside for fear of being burnt from the sun and getting skin cancer.
In terms of my mindset there was one thing that I wish someone had told me when I was a teenager and it’s a piece of advice I’d like to share with anyone out there feeling depressed and suicidal and that is:
“Don’t believe everything you think, everything you feel, everything you say, or do.”
And the same goes for believing other people. I was so much in my head as a teenager, as a child really, and I believed right up to my 30s that what I thought was absolutely real, it was 100% fact, and that the situation I was in was set in stone and there was no way of changing it. In hindsight I can see how wrong I was.
One way I let go of my depression and suicidal tendencies was to start questioning everything. I mean ever since I was young I have always been very curious about life and how things worked, but when my bodymind became stressed and inflamed my curiosity started to decrease until it faded away entirely. Then I like a sponge I soaked up everything around me the good, the bad, and the ugly and believed it to be the absolute truth.
So I shifted my mindset from being an adult that accepted everything to be more childlike and to be more curious.
If you’re feeling crushed under the weight of the universe and feel like you’re falling with no help in sight or if you have beliefs that are not serving you ask yourself this one question – is it true?
Are your thoughts and feelings and sensations actually giving you the correct data or are they being twisted somehow? Really dig deep and investigate your human experience. I say human experience because my curiosity took me down a deep rabbit hole just like Alice in Alice in Wonderland I found myself in a different world that amazed and surprised me and in this world I discovered something.
I learnt that I am not only human, a creature of habit, but I am also a creature of choice. A creature who can choose is really a creator. I realised that I am the creator of all my human experiences. Actually a co-creator with other creatures.
I realised and I discovered:
“I am a spiritual being having a human experience.”
Once I began to live a holistic lifestyle and nourish my human experience I connected to my higher self, my spiritual self. All through curiosity. But of course that’s just my experience.
So be curious my friend. Question your perceived reality.
Martial artist and philosopher Bruce Lee said:
“Be water my friend.”
This means you need to adapt to the situation that you’re in. Easier said than done I know, but after making changes to your lifestyle and becoming more curious you will find adapting to your environment becomes a lot easier. So if you find yourself in a tight spot, loosen up. If you find yourself heating up, cool down. If you find yourself saying yes to everything, say no. If you find yourself feeling heavy, lighten up. If you find yourself alone, reach out. If you find yourself in a dark place, brighten up. And the major situation and change that I personally had to go through – if you find yourself stuck, move right along because spiritually and metaphysically and scientifically and quantum mechanically there’s really nothing to see here.
By living a holistic lifestyle and being curious you will clear your bodymind of stress and inflammation giving you more clarity about the present and what’s really happening right in front of you. And by being water you will be able to adapt and change and evolve and grow and flow with ease into the next moment. Hopefully feeling lighter and on solid ground.
For more information about how to heal from depression holistically and naturally read Dr Kelly Brogan’s awesome book A Mind of Your Own. Dr Kelly is a holistic psychiatrist who practices what she preaches and although it has women in the subtitle it is very much applicable to men and everyone else as well.
If you have suicidal tendencies please reach out to someone. There is always light at the end of the tunnel, but I ain’t talking about the light that takes you to the other side. If you have no one to talk to call your local suicide hotline. The people at the other end they’re not there to judge you, they are trained to understand what’s going on with your specific situation and they will give you unconditional support and guidance and it’s anonymous. I’ll put a link to a website showing all international suicide hotline numbers. Give them a call and you don’t even have to tell them that it’s for you. You can always say you’re calling on behalf of a friend.
One last thing. As I talked about in the previous podcast about selfless-connection remember you are never alone. There are millions of people out there dealing with the same stuff and they’re also struggling to find other people to share their experiences with.
Wherever you think you maybe and whatever you think is going to happen in the future remember that right now, you are here and you are now. You are always here and you are always now. Right here and now you can choose to keep moving forward, to let go of fate, and to create a new destiny and a new you.
Links and Resources
- WGP 030: Want the Good Life? These 7 Holistic Health Principles Will Guide You There
- A Mind of Your Own — Kelly Brogan, MD
- International Suicide Hotlines
- WGP 044: Universal Lessons in Film – Selfless-Connection
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring the light side to Cancer:
- I’ll explain how there’s always a flip side to every situation
- I’ll talk about 3 negative sides to cancer that can be turned into positives
- Finally, I’ll give the 3 most important steps anyone dealing with cancer needs to follow before healing can begin
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
This is the final part of a 3-part series I’ve been doing on cancer. In the previous episode I talked about what cancer is: a miscommunication between your healthy and abnormal cells. I also explored many factors contributing to this miscommunication and worked out it was because we as a species are living against the natural order of things and that we’re surrounded by and participate in activities that are not allowing our community of cells to communicate effectively. I also talked about how to heal from cancer following the 7 Holistic Health Principles that bring you back in alignment with Mother Nature and the Universe.
On to the final part.
All life is influenced by two universal forces yin and yang. Like a coin which has two sides, heads and a tails, life can also be viewed as either black or white. But you shouldn’t forget a coin also has a middle and when you spin that coin on this middle heads and tails no longer exist, but what does exist is the potential and the possibility for both. Meaning the universe, life it’s not as simple as black or white, but it’s both black, white, and even gray. So from one extreme all the way to the other including everything in between this is what life is all about.
So when it comes to cancer many shudder at the mere mention of the word, the sound, the intention behind it. But did you know in many traditional cultures and non-westernised societies they have no word for cancer in their native tongue because they’ve never experienced it. You could tell one of these non-westernised people all about cancer, what it is and describe to them in detail what you mean by it and they wouldn’t flinch.
The reason we jump when cancer shows up is because western civilised society has evolved with cancer and whether intentionally or not has turned cancer into a poisonous snake. So cancer to us is what a predator is like for more ancestral tribal communities. To these traditional cultures cancer is a ghost. It doesn’t exist to them. Is it possible for us civilised folk to turn cancer from physical to metaphysical and maybe even beyond?
Well as I just mentioned earlier life isn’t black or white so let me talk about how cancer isn’t a poisonous snake, but instead can actually turn out to be the antidote to the snakes bite.
In part 1 of this series I talked about the big 3 conventional medical treatments for cancer: chemo, radiation, and surgery. I for all intents and purposes badmouthed these 3 treatments and gave one side of the coin to how fatally flawed these treatments are. Over 97% of cancer patients die from these treatments so while what I said may be true it’s only a half-truth.
This is the Whole Guidance Podcast and I help guide people toward wholeness in all aspects of their life and show them new ways of being so I’d like to give the whole side to the medical cancer treatments story and flip my negative perspective from part 1 to show that these actually can be very positive treatments if used correctly.
It is true that chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery are not selective treatments. Meaning these procedures do not target cancer cells specifically. Yes even surgery. Recall from part 1 while surgery may remove the cancer daughter cells inside a tumour it actually misses the cancer mother cells or stem cells that produced the daughter cells and caused the tumour. Plus surgery can puncture a tumour causing it to leak cancer daughter cells giving them freedom to metastasis and spread throughout your body. So if chemo and radiation are like dropping a nuclear bomb in your body wasting everything inside, surgery is like dumping toxic nuclear waste in a specific area and leaving it to cause problems in the future and to leak and spread.
However, there is a way to turn these unselective, blind, and misguided treatments into very targeted ones where chemo, radiation, and even surgery will select just the cancer cells to kill and leave your healthy cells intact and also to ensure the effects of any leftover stem cells and spreading of the cancer is dramatically reduced. You can turn these nuclear attacks into well-trained snipers. How? The same way you prevent and heal from cancer – by living a holistic lifestyle in alignment with the laws of nature.
When you give your bodymind the physical, emotional, and mental nourishment it needs your healthy cells are able to protect themselves from these 3 treatments. Your immune cells are better equipped and armed when you’re living a holistic lifestyle and this gives them what they need to look after your healthy cells and to take out the abnormal cancerous cells. While at the same time these treatments target only the abnormal cancerous cells. By following a holistic lifestyle framework such as the 7 Holistic Health Principles I talk about in episode 30 you give yourself a significant chance of healing from cancer when using chemo, radiation, and surgery.
One thing to take note of regarding these treatments and to keep in mind if you ever have to make a choice is that a majority of cancer patients diagnosed with a solid tumour localised in the body like you’d find in the breast, lung, prostate, or pancreas, etc do not do well with chemo and radiotherapy, but patients with a systemic immune cancer like leukaemia, myeloma, lymphoma, etc actually these patients do see some benefits in using these two treatments.
Another misperception about cancer that can be seen from a positive perspective is that cancer and this actually goes for all disease, sickness, illness, and pain, all of these are great teachers. Anytime you feel pain or discomfort this is a sign from your body and it’s teaching you a valuable lesson.
You see your body is constantly talking to you and giving you a scorecard on how well you’re doing in terms of living a healthy holistic lifestyle. When you feel tired, have some pain, have low energy, a sore belly, some skin issues, all of these are signs. They are your body whispering to you. Your body is attempting to communicate to you that something you’re doing, how you’re being, the way you’re living your life and expressing yourself is not working for you. It communicates by producing these symptoms.
If you ignore these signs and continue doing what you’ve always been doing eventually these whispers they get a little bit louder and they turn into a stern talk and lecture from your body and these little symptoms turn into bigger health issues such as chronic fatigue, chronic pain, extreme gut issues, brain fog, mood issues, change in body composition, and severe skin problems.
If you still refuse to listen to your body’s lectures then your body begins to scream really loud where your chronic health problems turn into degenerative diseases like heart disease, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, stroke, MS, ALS/MND, sarcopenia, Hashimoto’s, the list goes on, and yes even cancer.
Pain and sickness is your body’s way, Mother Nature’s way of telling you to either shape up or ship out. Cancer is the Universe screaming at you like a sports coach on the side line telling you to change the way that you’re playing the game, the game of life in this case because right now you’re losing big time.
So if you can look at cancer as a teacher, a coach, a guide that’s clearly indicating to you that something in your life needs to change, instead of being stubborn about it and not changing your lifestyle and instead of pleading ignorance and believe you got cancer by some random chance you can take control of the situation and see cancer for what it really is – an opportunity for personal growth and development and the choice to change your way of being. Change how you live your life.
The last way I’ll talk about how you can see cancer in a more illuminating light is that cancer can bring you face to face with one of man’s greatest fears – death. We are one of many creatures on this planet who are consciously aware of our own individual existence and this conscious awareness brings with it many gifts including knowing your own mortality and that we are all going to die some day. Yes I’m saying death and knowing your time is limited is a gift, as it should inspire you to do more with the limited time you have in this life.
You can heal from cancer, but just as a mild infection can take a turn for the worse and conventional and natural treatments cannot fight it, cancer can linger for far too long in your body where no treatment will support your body’s innate ability to heal. For people in this situation death is no longer a future event, a rare thought, some distant experience, but an ever-present day-to-day in your face reality.
This inevitable encounter with death, this gift of knowledge that your time is limited and that you need to be living life to the full could make you freeze in your tracks and want to run away from your destiny. This refusal of the inevitable brings about much pain and suffering as your thoughts and feelings betray what your body is telling you to accept.
However, what if you could relax and connect to yourself in ways you never could before. Your whole life you’ve been looking for peace and contentment, never enjoying the moment, but seeking the next pleasurable one. With death around the corner can you accept your fate, live your life from this point on in full awareness and enjoy every moment you have as if it were your last?
Whether you believe death is the end, this is it and there’s nothing else that happens afterward or if you believe death is just a part of life and the next stage in your journey if you can live the remainder of this life in absolute awareness you will be able to bring this awareness and hopefully newfound joy for life into the death process. Meaning you will not die in pain or suffer, and you will not die in fear. By accepting cancer and the new path it is leading you toward you will be able to die consciously, in peace, and in love.
For those of you with cancer here’s a personal affirmation that you can say to yourself that may help you change the way you see cancer:
“Thank you cancer for showing up when you did, because now you have given me the opportunity to change my life and even my death for the better.”
Alright now I’m going to go through my 3 top tips, the 3 most important steps anyone with cancer needs to take before healing can begin.
First step to healing is to take responsibility. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean blaming yourself. It simply means owning the fact that this is your life and everything that happens in your life is due to the choices and decisions you’ve made. No-one can make these choices for you. It may feel at times like you have no other choice and you are forced into certain life situations, but I can tell you right now you do have the power of choice when it comes to what you put in your mouth in terms of food quality.
The reason taking responsibility is so very important is because human beings have this weird inability to take action on things that appear to be out of our control, that have nothing to do with us.
If you have this attitude with cancer where you think you have no control over it and it’s up to others to deal with it then your body’s innate ability to heal will never take place. You don’t have to take all of the responsibility for how your life is and for your cancer diagnosis if you’re not ready to, but by at least taking some responsibility for your life and where it’s at right now you will increase your sense of control and will actually feel like you can take action and make the lifestyle changes that will begin the healing process. Responsibility equals action and this equals change and change is just what the natural doctor ordered.
Step 2 to healing is to forgive yourself and others. Forgiveness is the key that balances out your hormones and unlocks emotional blockages in your bodymind. Emotions such as anger and bitterness are extremely yang energies, very hot and chronic expression of these emotions will put your stress and repair hormones out-of-balance with stress hormones coming out on top. On the flip side if you’re not expressing these energies and suppress them deep down inside they will build up in your body creating stagnant areas where energy, hormones, nutrition, and immune cells cannot flow. Because of this resentment is a big killer not just of the emotional body, but your physical and mental bodies as well. Can you see now how the saying ‘resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die’ is so very true.
Let go of resentments, balance out your energy and hormones, and release stagnant energy that is causing you pain. By forgiving yourself and forgiving others you bring your body back to centre with balanced flowing energy.
Final step to healing is to be in an attitude of gratitude. Being in an attitude of gratitude puts you in a more positive mindset as it forces you to focus on what you do have more so than what you don’t have. So instead of moping around and thinking woe is me and my cancer you could give gratitude for the lesson cancer is here to provide you. Remember cancer is a great teacher and if you can show appreciation and thanks toward your cancer diagnosis for showing you that there’s something about your lifestyle that is out of balance with what Mother Nature expects of you then you can see how very fortunate you actually are to be given this lesson as you’re no longer living life numb and blind, but now have the opportunity to live your life more mindfully and become more consciously aware of every moment you have while you’re alive.
“Giving gratitude opens your mind, your body, and your spirit to a new way of being.”
This is my personal attitude of gratitude practise. Every night before bed I give gratitude for 3 experiences I had that day and the lesson I learnt from each of them. I give gratitude: for one person I had an experience with; for one goal I had completed no matter how big or small; and for any other random experience that happened. Whether I perceived any of these 3 experiences as positive or negative, as uplifting or upsetting, I always give thanks for the lesson I learned from that person, from that achievement, and from that experience.
Those are my 3 tips that anyone wanting to heal from cancer needs to follow before healing can begin.
Can you see the one central theme running through each of these 3 steps? It’s all about giving. By taking responsibility you give yourself the chance and the choice to change. By forgiving yourself and others you give your body balanced energies and by being in an attitude of gratitude you give yourself a positive mindset allowing you to see what could not be seen before.
I’ll leave you with this quote from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu:
“A great nation is like a great man: when he makes a mistake, he realises it. Having realised it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers. He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.”
What all this means is that there’s a misperception that cancer is this evil and bad thing that’s happening to you, but if you flip this view, cancer turns into a gift that you’ve given yourself so that you can see your life and your death in a new light.
Mind you that’s only if you choose to see it that way and as always the choice is yours.
Links and Resources
- WGP 030: Want the Good Life? These 7 Holistic Health Principles Will Guide You There
- WGP 020: The Power of Choice
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The Fourfold Path to Healing – Thomas S. Cowan MD, Sally Fallon, Jaimen McMillan
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The Fourfold Path to Healing merges the wisdom of traditional societies, the most modern findings of western medicine and the esoteric teaching of the ancients. The fourfold approach includes: Nutrition using nutrient-dense traditional foods; therapeutics through a wide range of nontoxic remedies; Movement to heal and strengthen the emotions; and meditation to develop your powers of objective thought.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring your many different Bodies:
- I’ll explain how your physical body is more your energy body
- I’ll talk about four other bodies that help make the whole entire you
- Finally I’ll share how you can nourish and meet the needs of your 5 different bodies
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Humans, that’s me and you included, some of us we like to think that we’re different or better than other creatures, that we’re above other animals, plants, and sometimes even other humans.
Truth is on the surface we all look a little bit different. Okay majorly different, but if you were to zoom in, into your cells, into your molecules, into your atoms, and into the quantum particles themselves like quarks and leptons guess what you’d find? The exact same thing you’d find as if you zoomed in on a cat, on an insect, on a fish, on a tree, or even zoomed in on the sun.
Nothing.
Well you’d see nothing, but with devices like the superconducting quantum interference device or SQUID for short with such devices that measure energy you would find that this invisible nothing that you’ve zoomed all the way in on is actually energy swirling around vibrating as a wave of pure energetic potential and you only see this wave become physical reality and realise its potential when you zoom out of the very small quantum space where you see the particles form into atoms and molecules.
All this to say that your physical body, your physical being is really waves of potential energy manifesting and becoming real creating formed particles, molecules, cells, organs, muscle, bone, skin, and everything within.
Now your physical body is just one of the many parts that make up the whole you, one of the many energy bodies that you have and need to look after. I will now explore four other bodies that you may not be aware of.
Imagine looking at yourself standing on the Earth naked, your feet and legs connected to the Earth represent your physical body. This is the first of your 5 bodies.
Moving up from your legs we reach your groin area and here you’ll find your second body, your sexual body or sexual being. This body exists when you’re born, but doesn’t come into full expression until your teenage years when your hormones begin to go into overdrive so this body is concerned with your hormones and keeping them in balance is the key to a healthy sexual body. Your sexual body isn’t just about procreation and making babies. It’s also about creating experiences that take you out of your physical body and into a state of bliss and euphoric orgasmic ecstatic oneness with the universe. Your sexual body also strongly influences how you relate to your physical body and to other people in general. The more you explore your sexual way of being the more you will know thyself and the more confidence you will have being in your own skin in your physical body as well as having the confidence to be yourself when around other people.
If you have issues around sex where you find it difficult to think about sex let alone talk about it this will come down to the culture that you were brought up in and to how you were raised and there’s no right or wrong way to think about sex. There’s no right or wrong way about anything. Maybe this quote by French writer Marquis De Sade (I’ve no idea if that’s how you pronounce it) may help you see sex from a different perspective:
“’Sex’ is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”
So sex like food is a nutrient we all need and while food may feed your physical body sex feeds your sexual being.
Moving up your body we come to your chest area where your emotional body or emotional being radiate from. Your emotional body builds upon your sexual body and is about relationships with self and others. Your emotional way of being determines the kinds of energies or emotions you express externally and receive internally into your heart and how you express and receive these energies will determine the kinds of relationships you will find yourself in. This body is focused around perceived stress and about giving and receiving the most powerful stress-busting emotion of them all, love.
Moving up into the head area now we come to your mental body or mental being. Remember though that your mind doesn’t reside or live just in your brain, but lives in your entire being, your bodymind. Your head is merely a symbol for your mental being. Your mental body is all about thought energy and choices. Your mental body communicates with the brain, your heart, and your gut with neurotransmitters and by keeping these neurotransmitters in balance you keep your mind clear and focused which allows you to make better choices. Thought energy along with your emotions and how you feel will influence your choices which will control your actions which will determine the results you get in life.
Going above your head above your crown is the final and fifth body, your soul body or just your soul. Your soul symbolically lives outside your physical body, but it permeates, it runs, it beats through every single cell and every wave of energy of all your bodies physical, sexual, emotional and mental. Your soul joins these bodies to all the other bodies in the Universe. Meaning you are connected to the Universe, to Great Spirit, to Infinite Intelligence, to the Creator, to God, or whatever it is, whatever name you choose to call the thing that created you and everything around you. That connection to something bigger than your self happens through your soul body. Your soul is pure energy and the level and frequency that your soul vibrates at is determined by the health and the functions of your other four bodies as well as your environment. A high vibration and frequency is associated with happiness, health, wholeness, and peace. A low vibration and frequency correlates to sadness, sickness, separation, and stress.
So those are your 5 bodies and all of these bodies, physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and soul they need to be taken care of and I’ll go through now how to nourish and feed each of your 5 bodies.
In terms of your physical body you can really feed this body well and nourish it with all that it needs by following the 7 Holistic Health Principles as laid out in the previous podcast. Two simple tips that I can give now though is eat real food and move often. Simple, right? Well in reality, you know the real world, for a lot of people eating real food and moving often those aren’t easy recommendations to stick to. This is why I believe the best way to nourish your physical body besides the 7 principles is by nourishing your other four bodies. With your sexual, emotional, mental, and soul bodies fulfilled and nourished you will find your physical body feeds itself the right foods and moves itself when it needs to.
Your sexual body needs to express itself freely without it feeling shame. It receives nourishment through physical and mental erotic and sensual pleasures. This can include the obvious sexual goals of orgasm and ejaculation, but also includes something as basic as touch. Being touched or touching someone else can help feed your sexual being without having to get naked and making it an erotic or adult experience. Reading erotic literature may be helpful as well. Make sure though that you’re in a safe space with yourself or with other consenting partners when expressing your sexual way of being. Your sexual body also needs hormones in the right balance and this will come down to how well you follow the 7 Holistic Health Principles.
Your emotional body really loves love. Not just love from another person, but especially love for your self. Because if you can learn how to love yourself you’ll find it easier to love others. The best way to love you is to know you. Know thyself and you will love yourself. There are 3 practises that I use daily to learn more about myself and what it is in life that I really want or don’t want.
First one is meditation. 20 minutes in the morning of Qi-gong helps me train my bodymind to focus on one thought, but I also learn what other thoughts keep trying to creep in and take over. You’ll learn a lot about the way you think through meditation.
Second practise is gratitude. Before bed every night I give gratitude for the experiences I had that day and this keeps me grounded in knowing what’s important in the larger scheme of things, helps me see the bigger picture of life.
Final practise is mindfulness. Being in the now, in the present moment brings a lot of awareness to how I’m being. It doesn’t stop me from being or doing things I’d rather not, but I can observe myself and be fully aware of my actions and so there’s no regret later on for how I was or for what I did as I fully accepted in the moment that if this is what is, then so be it. But mindfulness also gives me the opportunity to choose a different way of being in that moment.
So for example let’s say I’m eating way too many chocolates a lot more than I should, which happens. I will think to myself, ‘okay I’ve almost eaten an entire bar of dark chocolate. Do I continue and enjoy the whole bar with its dark sensual bitter flavours or do I stop and leave the rest for tomorrow?’ Whatever action I take it doesn’t matter. I would have taken it in full awareness and acceptance. Mindfulness allows me to observe my behaviour and to choose acceptance on how I’m being and to choose an alternative action and to do something different if I wanted to. These 3 practises meditation, gratitude, and mindfulness teach me a lot about myself and allows me to love who I am and who I’m not and to love who others are for who they are and for who they are not.
Okay your mental body this needs information. The more information you can give it the better it will serve you. Now I’m not talking about books and logical types of information I’m talking about energetic information or informed thought energy. The more informed thought energy you can feed your bodymind the more nourished and healthy your mental body will be. One way to get informed thought energy is to meditate. Again I just talked about this meditation trains you in focusing your thoughts on one thing. This clears up the chatter, the clutter, the monkey speak in your bodymind and gives you the ability to control what it is you would like to be thinking about. This focus and control of your thoughts gives you the power of choice and in making choices that are life-affirming.
You don’t want scrambled thought energy as this will just mess up your bodymind, create confusion, cause doubt leading to indecision and poor choices and this scrambled energy will cause other imbalances in your other bodies. Organic farm-fresh scrambled eggs are healthy, but a scrambled bodymind is not.
Your mental body also revolves around your brain, heart, and gut and these organs are connected through your vagus nerve. They speak to each other using neurotransmitters and hormones. By following the 7 Holistic Health Principles you will keep these molecules of communication in balanced amounts giving you better focus allowing you to think more clearly and feeding your mental body informed thought energy.
Finally, your soul body. Your soul is connected to everything in the universe because your soul is pure energy, the very essence of the universe. The thing that breathes, that beats, that sleeps, that moves everything in the universe is what makes up 100% of your soul, energy. Now your soul is always giving and receiving energy. If your soul is starved it’ll give off bad energy. If it’s nourished and satisfied it’ll give off good energy. Now there’s a universal principle of like attracting like so if you’re giving bad energy that’s what you’ll receive, if you’re giving good energy that’s what you’ll receive. So how do you nourish your soul so that it gives and receives positive energy? By having a dream.
“A tortured soul is one without a dream. A peaceful soul is one moving towards its dream.”
When you’re following your Dharma or your duty here in this lifetime, when the way you live your life is on purpose and in alignment with your core values and your dream your soul is vibrating at a very high vibrational frequency, good vibes, positive energy, which always leads to happiness and health. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it or if you’re making life choices that are not consistent with how you really want to live then your soul, your energetic being begins to fizzle out and you begin to experience more pain than pleasure and more sickness than health.
Your soul is interconnected, integrated, inseparable from not only the universe, but also with your purpose, with your goal, with your vision, with why you’re here. By having a dream you will find your place in the universe and will soon realise the oneness that you, we, all things in the universe truly are.
So I want you to think to yourself before this day is done what’s one thing that you can do to feed your physical body (example eat real food); one thing you can do to feed your sexual body (say a sensual massage); one thing you can do to feed your emotional body (have some gratitude); one thing you can do to feed your mental body (try a 2 minute nasal breathing session); and what’s one thing you can do to feed your soul body (how about getting some clarity on your life purpose or take some action on the next step in reaching your goals).
You are more than your physical body, a lot more, and by nourishing the different parts that make the whole you, you give yourself the best chance at living the good life, an awesome life, a happy healthy holistic life.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Vitamin D and Smart Sun Exposure:
- I’ll explain the importance of Vitamin D and how it is made
- I’ll talk about how conventional mainstream sun safety advice and practises are causing more harm than good
- Finally I’ll give tips on how to practise smart sex (that’s smart Sun EXposure) and how to optimise your vitamin D levels so you can continue to live a happy, healthy, and holistic life
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
In the previous podcast I talked about some very important hormones that you needed to know about. By living a holistic lifestyle you can keep these hormones in a beautiful state of harmony and balance which in turn keep you and your body happy, healthy, and in harmony and balance as well.
One hormone I didn’t mention in the last podcast was vitamin D. I didn’t talk about vitamin D in the previous show because I believe that no matter the chaos in your physical, emotional, and mental body’s vitamin D has the power to bring all of you back to centre, in harmony, in balance, in peace and one with the universe. Yeah I know sounds pretty hippy dippy and I’ll talk more about this at the end of this, but for now let me talk more about vitamin D.
First up vitamin D has been given just the worst name ever because it isn’t a vitamin at all. A vitamin is an organic compound that your body cannot make and vitamin D is created by your body when your skin gets exposed to the sun. Technically vitamin D is a fat-soluble secosteroid so it’s a steroid hormone much like cortisone and testosterone, but let’s not get too technical here shall we.
I like to call vitamin D the sun hormone… sounds nice right.
The sun hormone controls the expression of over 1000 genes in your body meaning it can turn on or off about 5% of your entire genetic code. Whoa! The sun hormone also reduces inflammation, boosts your immune system, destroys disease, prevents tumours, fights cancer, strengthens your bones, is a powerful antioxidant, improves mood, enhances and activates the actions of the nutrients you eat, so overall vitamin D (the sun hormone) helps you live a longer quality of life.
Right now there is a worldwide deficiency in vitamin D levels in the human population. Even those in equatorial regions are vitamin D deficient can you believe it.
On top of that skin cancer rates continue to rise despite people following national health guidelines for sun safety.
In New Zealand where I live we have the SunSmart campaign where we are advised to slip on a long-sleeved shirt and into the shade, slop on copious amounts of high sun protection factor (SPF) broad spectrum sunscreen, slap on a wide brimmed hat, and wrap on some wrap-around sunnies (that’s sunglasses for you non-local folk). So Slip, Slop, Slap, and Wrap… pretty catchy right.
This campaign also recommends the following:
- During September to April (the warmer months of the year) we should be sun protected between the hours of 10a-4p, and in the early morning and late afternoon have some form of outdoor activity for 30 minutes without sun protection
- During May to August (the cooler months of the year) we should be outdoors for 30 minutes with face, arms, and hands exposed in the hours around noon
Now unfortunately it is this exact misinformation that is leading to both decreased levels of vitamin D and increased levels of skin cancer in the human population.
How so?
Well first I’ll talk about how your body actually makes vitamin D.
Okay I know I said earlier that I didn’t want to get too technical, but the way the human body makes this potent healthful hormone from sunlight or light energy is pretty cool.
When UVB rays from the sun hit your skin they react with a precursor molecule in your skin called 7-dehydrocholesterol to create vitamin D3. Now you can find this particular form of vitamin D in supplements. When this D3 is released from your skin into your bloodstream it travels to your liver where it’s converted to 25-hydroxyvitamin D3. 25-hydryoxyvitamin D3 then gets transported to your kidneys where it’s activated into the steroid hormone form that your body actually uses. This active form of vitamin D is called 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 and it’s this form of the sun hormone that regulates gene expression and makes you a happy and healthy human.
Now the sun gives off a few different ultra violet rays, but its UVA and UVB that are relevant here. Here are some details about these two different spectrums of sunlight:
- UVA does not get absorbed by the ozone layer and reaches the Earth’s surface year round. UVB is mostly absorbed by the ozone layer and only reaches the Earth’s surface during summer and the warmer months of the year.
- UVA penetrates a few layers into the skin. UVB does not.
- UVA causes skin to thicken and age, but not burn. UVB does the opposite. It burns, but does not thicken or age skin.
- UVA damages melanin-producing cells (melanin gives colour to your skin and acts as an antioxidant, meaning melanin protects against skin cancer). UVB promotes melanin production.
- UVA overexposure leads to malignant melanoma (the aggressive type of skin cancer). UVB overexposure leads to non-melanoma skin cancer (the least dangerous of skin cancers).
- UVA passes through glass. UVB does not.
- UVA will not produce vitamin D. UVB will.
Also take note that due to the fact that most of the UVB rays get absorbed by the ozone layer the angle of the sun to the Earth will determine the amount of UVB that actually hits the Earth’s surface. So during the summer and warmer months of the year when the sun is high between 10a and 4p there will be full UVB exposure on the Earth’s surface, as well as UVA of course. However, in the winter months when the sun is low on the horizon then very little to no UVB penetrates the ozone layer, but there’s still full UVA exposure on the Earth’s surface.
So if you’re living north and south of the 33rd parallels of the Earth’s latitude then you’re not getting any UVB during the cooler months of the year, but you’re getting plenty of UVA.
Okay enough about sunrays. I want to talk about sunscreens now.
Sunscreens are just the icing on the proverbial cake of misinformation. They are meant to protect the skin of the human race, but as it turns out most commercial sunscreens or sunblocks are nothing but a big disgrace.
Your skin can also be called your second mouth as approximately 60-70% of what you put on your skin gets absorbed directly into your bloodstream – bypassing your liver and its detoxifying processes. What goes on your skin goes straight to your blood.
The majority of sunscreens sold in supermarkets and pharmacies today are made with toxic chemicals that will actually increase your chances of getting skin and other cancers. These chemicals include:
- Retinol
- Retinyl palmitate
- OMC or octyl methaxycinnamate
- Octocrylene
- Avobenzone
- Oxybenzone
- Homosalate
- Octinoxate and
- Octisalate
Add to this fact that many sunscreen SPF factors are based on blocking UVB exclusively meaning you get no vitamin D producing rays, but plenty of the UVA cancer causing rays. As for the broad spectrum sunscreens, which block both UVA and UVB, most of them don’t block both rays evenly. Instead it’s more 67-95% of UVB being blocked compared to only 5-33% of UVA.
Let me put it all together then and summarise how modern living, national sun safety guidelines, and sunscreen care products create vitamin D deficiency and skin cancer.
You work indoors most of the day missing out on vitamin D production. Even worse you sit next to windows that are not UV-rated thinking that you’re getting a daily dose of sunshine. Problem is because glass filters out UVB and not UVA it’s more of a daily dose of cancer that you’re getting.
When you’re outside you’re told to cover up during the hottest part of the day which is also the time that UVB penetrates and gets through the ozone layer to the Earth’s surface. Then when it’s cooler you uncover yourself a bit more, but there’s no longer any UVB and only UVA hits your skin.
You use toxic chemical heavy sunscreens and sunblocks that not only block more UVB than UVA, but they also block your body’s ability to function 100% by overtaxing your innate detoxification system, meaning they overload your liver and this leaves the door wide open to diseases. Plus the chemicals themselves (the ones I mentioned before) they are carcinogenic, meaning they cause the overgrowth of cancer cells in your body.
So here you have two sources of cancer. You get cancer externally via UVA rays penetrating deep into your skin and into your cells and you can get cancer internally from the toxic chemicals used in sunscreens that get absorbed through your skin.
Alright so let’s get into some tips on how you can practise smart sex, smart Sun Exposure.
First, go outside during UVB penetration times. This will depend on your location, time of the year, and is based on the sun’s position in the sky. Remember when the sun is high, vitamin D production is high.
Expose as much of your skin as possible without sunscreen for the appropriate amount of time based on your skin type. You want to get a nice tan, but you never ever want to get sunburn. Sunburn causes a cascade of inflammation and immune activity in your body that over time will turn into a chronic disease. So if you’re very light skinned maybe 5-20 minutes is all you can do before the damaging effects of UVA kick in. Whereas if you have darker skin you could do between 20-60 minutes easy depending on how much melanin you have in your skin and how tolerant your skin is to the sun’s rays. Once you sense the burn in your skin then it’s time to slip, slop, slap, and wrap!
So during the summer season and the warmer months of the year expose yourself to the sun between 10a and 4p. During any other time of the season, year, or day cover up.
Second tip, keep away from windows during the day otherwise cover up as much as possible if stuck behind one.
Third tip is to eat your sunscreen. That’s right you can consume plenty of “sunscreen-like” compounds from real food that will protect you from sun damage from the inside out. How cool is that eh!
So eat plenty of antioxidant rich foods like small berries, vegetables, herbs and spices. The lycopene in tomatoes has been shown to be protective against sun damage. Omega-3 and saturated fats are great internal sunscreens so eat more oily fish and animal fat from grass-fed free-range pasture-raised happy animals. Astaxanthin is another great skin protecting compound that you can get from krill oil or in supplement form.
Fourth tip is to only buy and use all-natural organic sunscreens. A healthy sunscreen will have the active ingredients titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These do the actual UV blocking. Also almond, coconut, sunflower, jojoba, and eucalyptus oils or any other ingredient you would normally think of as natural and even eat are fine. Shea butter is another popular natural ingredient. If you wouldn’t eat it don’t put it on your skin. For a basic sunscreen recipe all you need is some zinc oxide and a nice plant based lotion.
Fifth smart sex step is if you are unable to get enough sun exposure then eat your sun hormone. You can get vitamin D from real foods like wild caught oily fish, grass-fed butter and raw full-fat dairy, free-range pasture-raised egg yolks and lard, fermented cod-liver oil as well as other organically raised animal livers.
If you are unable to eat enough vitamin D foods then you can take vitamin D3 supplements, not D2, but D3 and make sure the capsule is infused with some fat like extra-virgin olive oil as the sun hormone is a fat-soluble molecule and is a lot easier to absorb when taken with fat.
When supplementing with vitamin D it is important to get your vitamin D levels tested. What you want is the blood test for 25-hydroxyvitamin D. A healthy range is between 35-65 ng/mL. Your results will then determine your actions, meaning do not blindly believe you are vitamin D deficient or sufficient and go overboard on the supplements or not supplement enough. Test is best, do not guess. A good guideline to follow when supplementing vitamin D3 (while you wait for your results) is to take 1000 IU (international units) per 11kg/25lbs of body weight. Once you do find out your vitamin D levels you can increase or decrease your sun exposure and supplementation as is required.
Final and crucial tip and this has to do with optimising the vitamin D you do produce, eat, or supplement with, is to reduce your body fat. Remember vitamin D is a fat-soluble molecule so the more fat cells you have and the larger those fat cells are then the more vitamin D your body fat will hold onto and the less vitamin D there will be in your bloodstream to be converted into the more important active hormone needed for maintaining and building the wealth of your health.
Listen to the podcast before this one that I did on balancing your hormones to optimise your fat-burning potential for more information on how to reduce your body fat the easy way without having to count calories.
I’ll leave you with this.
I personally believe that Vitamin D is the most important hormone in the human body. The reason I say this is because the majority of multicellular life on this planet lives and dies by the sun and human beings are no different.
You and I,
“We are beings of light energy”
and none of us, not me, not you, not even the moon would be here if it weren’t for the beautiful unconditionally giving and loving sun that supports all the life in our little region of the universe.
The more disconnected you are from the source of your existence the more you disconnect yourself from who you really are, your true being.
The more you disconnect yourself from that light that birthed you, that light that currently breathes you, and that light that will one day return you to source, the less happy, the less whole, and the less complete you will feel.
In order to live an awesome life you need to get back to your roots and there’s nothing more rooted in human ancestral tradition and culture then having fun out in the sun man.
You want sun? Go get sun.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Materialism and Spiritualism:
- I’ll explain what materialism and spiritualism really mean
- I’ll talk about the dark and the light sides of each one
- Finally, I’ll share how you can best balance the material world with a spiritual life
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Depending on the definition used you could think materialism and spiritualism are two sides of the same coin or are totally unrelated.
The following set of definitions show how these two belief systems are actually connected.
Materialism is the belief that nothing exists except for physical matter.
Spiritualism is the belief that spirit is the fundamental element of all reality.
What we have here are total opposites and yet this is exactly what makes them totally connected. How?
In the podcast I did on the philosophy of Yin and Yang I explained how these two forces of the Universe are both opposing each other, but at the same time are interconnected to each other. The potential for Yin, the seed of Yin grows from inside Yang and vice versa. You cannot have one without the other.
For example day and night, hot and cold, fear and love, each of these are opposites of each other, but you could never know one without experiencing the other as it is from day that night comes, it is after heat cools that you feel cold, and it is after you’ve faced fear that love can be expressed… and vice versa for all of these.
Matter and spirit are different yes, but they come from within each other.
The physical world is made up of matter, right. The sun, the moon, the Earth, your body these are all material objects.
The spiritual world is made up of energy. The sun’s radiation, the moons gravitational pull, the Earth’s electromagnetic field, your body’s aura and light signature these are all spiritual elements or units of energy.
So here you have physical objects radiating, emanating, and producing energy. But, not only do physical objects produce energy, but physical matter itself is made up of and moved by energy.
If you had a powerful physics microscope and looked at your hand under the smallest zoom setting you would see the peaks and valleys of your skin. Increase the zoom a little and you’d see the individual cells that make up these peaks and valleys. Zoom in further and you’d see the organelles, the little organs inside one of these cells. Zoom in again and you’d see the molecules making up the parts of the cell and organelles. Zoom in even further and you’d see the individual atoms making up these molecules. Zoom in once again and you begin to see protons, neutrons, and electrons the building blocks of atoms. What, more zooming? Yes and this time you’ll see the fundamental building blocks of the universe called quantum particles and forces some of which include quarks, leptons, electromagnetism, and gravity.
Now if you were to zoom in one last time on a quark or a lepton, guess what you’d see? Nothing! You would see absolutely empty space. However, this space isn’t actually empty as it’s full of pure energy and this energy is constantly vibrating, it’s twirling and swirling, it’s moving and grooving. It’s a little vortex of energy constantly in motion.
So ultimately your hand is made up of, held together, and animated by energy in motion.
So we had physical matter producing energy and now we see that energy makes and moves physical matter. Yin and Yang at it again.
Energy is pure potential and unlimited possibility and it’s only when this energy accumulates and concentrates to form matter that you see that possibility come to life. So without energy there would be no matter, but without matter you wouldn’t even realise, you wouldn’t know that energy even existed.
In other words:
“Spirit expresses itself as matter and matter is proof that spirit exists.”
You may want to meditate on the last line I just said there as it’s actually quite a deep philosophical insight that could help you explain certain unknowns and mysteries about the universe.
So that’s how matter and spirit are connected according to the first set of definitions I gave earlier. If you’d like to have personal real world experience interacting with matter and energy I highly recommend two books by Pam Grout, E-Squared and E-Cubed. These two books have 18 experiments that you can do in your own home to see for yourself how matter and energy or spirit work together to create your reality.
Anyhoo… with this second set of definitions I’m about to give materialistic and spiritualistic ways of being look totally unrelated.
Materialism is to place more worth and receive more comfort from physical objects and material possessions. So materialism is all about receiving wealth and admiration through material possession.
Spiritualism is being able to communicate with the spirits of dead people. So spiritualism is all about receiving guidance and connection through spiritual communication.
So yeah according to these two definitions materialism and spiritualism don’t really seem to relate to each other… or do they?
As I go through the dark and light sides of each of these definitions there actually is a connection between the two.
Okay so the dark side of being too materialistic is that a materialistic person sees only what is directly in front of them and believes that they need to accumulate more and more stuff because they have been told that the more you have then the more important and the more successful you are. So unfortunately for people that follow this materialistic belief system to the extreme their self worth and happiness is directly connected to how much they have in the bank, how big and how decorated their house is, how many cars they own, or whether they have the latest clothing or tech gear.
The dark side of being too spiritualistic is that a spiritualistic person does not always see what’s right in front them and they believe that the solution to their physical world problems can only be found in the invisible spirit world. Unfortunately for people that follow this spiritualistic belief system to the extreme their ability to overcome problems in life and real world issues is directly dependent upon their relationship and abilities to connect with the spirits of the dead.
So the negative to both of these isms is that a person who follows them to the absolute extreme is either fully connected to the material world or fully connected to the spiritual world, but totally disconnected from the real world which is made up of the interactions and the connections between matter and energy. That is to say that people at either extreme take more care of their physical possessions and spiritual relationships then they do human relationships with family and friends and other people around them.
The light side of materialism is that you do understand the realities of the world as it is right now. You realise that what’s happening right now in this moment is something that must be dealt with. You understand that by having the best tools for the job you will be able to do the work you are meant to be doing fulfilling your Dharma or life purpose creating a happy and healthy life for yourself and others.
The light side of spiritualism is that you know that there’s more to reality than what you’re told and are led to believe by others. You realise that the possession of matter really doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things and that you can live a happy and healthy existence without the latest and greatest gadgets and do just fine with a minimalist approach to life that works for you and the people you care about.
So both of these isms can be very grounding. Seeing what is right in front of you and living life with the minimal amount of possessions.
So how do you avoid the trap of falling into the extremes of materialism where accumulation of matter is most important and spiritualism where relationships with the dead are more important? How do you balance living in a material world made up of spiritual elements?
First thing to do is to stop listening to all the noise around you as if it’s stated fact and truth. Marketing hype is full of nonsensical noise. Marketing hype comes in two forms.
The first is from advertising. Once you spray on that deodorant thousands of men and women are not going to be chasing you in the streets. Buying that car won’t necessarily mean instant happiness. Wearing those new sports shoes won’t make you a professional athlete overnight. Eating foods labelled healthy will usually end up making you sick. Advertising doesn’t equal fact.
The second form of marketing hype comes from news media. News on television, newspapers, radio, and yes even the Internet are full of exaggeration, scare tactics, and hidden agendas. News is told for a specific reason to make you feel a certain way, usually to feel scared and fearful, sad and unhappy. In between the news they give you the answers to all the world’s problems and your own problems through advertising. Again advertising does not equal fact and news does not equal truth.
Now the biggest noise you will have to learn to stop taking as gospel, the biggest marketing hype you will hear is that coming from your own mind – your thoughts! You think on average 68,000 thoughts a day a majority of which are negative and are thoughts you had yesterday. Most of your thoughts are marketing hype from your parents, your family and friends, your workplace, your community, news media or advertising.
When was the last time you had an authentic personally created thought? A thought that didn’t come from your mum or dad, from your doctor, your priest, or your boss. When was the last time you thought for yourself?
Don’t believe the hype whether it comes from advertising, the news, or your own thoughts.
The best way to filter this noise and to find out what is accurate and truthful information that works for you is to live life in the space of a question and become a critical thinker. Question everything. Everything you hear, see, taste, touch, smell, and feel, question whether it’s real or not for you.
Dietary guidelines, health practises, marriage, drug addiction, human sexual behaviour, religion, modern agriculture, schools and education, career and employment opportunities – I would guess that about 95% of western civilised society takes all of these topics and belief systems at face value.
People who are raised in a western society rarely ever question where cultural ideas come from. How did the dietary guidelines come to be? Where did marriage come from? What does the research actually say about drug addiction? Can modern agriculture really feed the world? Does a child in today’s information knowledge-based economy really need to go to school and pay large institutions large amounts of money for their education?
Some personal questions you can ask yourself include:
- Is that low-fat meal bar really improving my health?
- Is broccoli really as disgusting as I remember it?
- Was my ex-girlfriend really a witch or my ex-boyfriend really a dirty ape?
- Are my children really too much to handle?
- Am I as fat or skinny, mean or kind, forgiving or harsh as I say I am?
- Are my parents really to blame for my current life situation?
- Do I love my life right now?
- Have I ever put 100% effort into being healthier?
- Is what other people say about me true?
When you become a critical thinker and begin to live life in the space of a question you start to see things as they are and not what you thought they were and this gives you more clarity on how you need to be in this moment and the next.
Today people know more about what’s going on on the other side of the planet than they do their own backyard. People know more about certain celebrities and professional athletes than they do the person they sleep with in the same bed every night!
So my final tip for focusing your energy in a world full of matter is to connect, relate, and emote with the people in your life.
Fully engage in an emotional connection with people you interact with day to day. This isn’t restricted to just family, friends, and flatmates. I’m also talking about the clerk at the local supermarket or laundromat or the bus driver who always drives you home after school or work. Do you know their name? How long they’ve worked there? Whether they’re local or drive two hours in to work from out of town as it was the only job they could find at the time? Do you know your partner’s favourite colour? Do you know how your parents met? Do you know your child’s biggest fear and greatest love right now?
Be with the people who are in your life right now.
The more you can question what you’re being told and what you’re thinking and the more you can fully relate with the people in your life then the less you will need to use material possessions and spiritual communication as substitutes for peace and love.
“Having the latest in technology will not make you the best of humanity.”
Being one with the Almighty regardless of your actions here on Earth disconnects you from the rest of humanity.
Ultimately the key to receiving wealth and admiration as well as connection and guidance is through healthy relationships with your fellow human. Not by relating with objects or with people who have already passed on, but by relating to family, friends, and local communities. This is how you balance living a spiritual life in a material world.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Choice:
- I’ll explain how your choices create your life and how your life creates your choices
- I’ll talk about the three choices you can make in any one moment
- I’ll describe how meditation can improve your choice selection
- Finally I’ll share what’s really behind the Power of Choice
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Life is made up of moments and in between these moments is a gap. This gap represents the space between your thoughts. It is in this space where you will find pure potential and endless possibility, for it is in this space where you have all the power in the universe – the power of choice.
Choice has power because the choices you make determine the moments you experience.
Your life and everything in it including who you are, what you have, how you think, feel, and act, the people you surround yourself with, the job you have, the money you have, the happiness and the love you have, your entire life is a result of the choices you have made.
However, only a very small amount of the choices you end up making come from this space of possibility.
The majority of your choices I’d say over 90% of them actually come from your past, from earlier life experience. For example you know you like chocolate ice cream (well I do anyway) over vanilla ice cream because you’ve tasted them already. You know you have an issue with heights because the last time you stood near the edge of a cliff or you were on a bridge you felt dizzy and almost fainted. You know not to make noise at 2pm in the afternoon while your mother is having a nap because the last time you did that she woke up in a very foul upset mood leading to an unexpected meeting between you and her shoe… ouch!
So while you have the power to choose whatever it is you want in your life in between moments, it is your previous life experience that will determine the majority of your current choices which will determine the way you think, feel, and act in the future. Altogether these will lead to the results you get in your life.
Thus we have the circle of choice where:
“Your choices make your life and your life makes your choices.”
I’ve learnt from Holistic Health Practitioner Paul Chek that in life you have three choices.
The first is the optimal choice. The optimal choice involves having open and honest communication with yourself and the important people in your life. This choice moves you toward your dreams and helps you achieve your goals. Not only does the optimal choice improve your happiness and health, but it also helps with growing the happiness and health of people in your life. The choice that unites and is open to joy is the optimal choice.
The second choice is the suboptimal choice. The suboptimal choice means getting what you want now, but at a cost. This choice gives you instant pleasure, but will eventually cause pain within yourself or with another person. The suboptimal choice disrupts and slows your dream building and happiness and health progression. The suboptimal choice also interferes with the growth and improvement of the people you care about. The choice that divides, that is closed and depressing is the suboptimal choice.
The third choice is the choice of no-choice or doing nothing. Doing nothing has both a negative and positive side.
The negative of doing nothing is having an apathetic attitude where you lack interest in participating in life and just don’t care. This uncaring attitude means you will do nothing when in reality you should be doing something. This apathy will cause you to become isolated by creating distance between you and what it is you really want (your dream) as well as creating distance between you and the people in your life. Not only that, but by not choosing you prevent and stop altogether any further progress or growth or evolution of yourself and others.
The positive of doing nothing is you may not be able to make a choice in this moment due to not having enough information. You can use this time out to reflect on your options and to gather more info to learn more about the situation. This time of reflection may not be an optimal or suboptimal choice, but there is potential here for you to make one of the other two choices.
So the first two choices are awesome choices. They help change your way of being. They move you from one thought, feeling, and action to another. The optimal choice does it by being in flow with your dream and your dream team. Remember your dream team is anyone who is involved in getting you from where you are now to where you want to be. With the suboptimal choice even though you experience pain this choice still creates a learning experience from which change can happen.
The third choice of do nothing on the other hand keeps you from growing and evolving. However, there is the potential for change when you take some time out to gather more information before making a well-informed choice.
In today’s society where you are expected to always be on point and available and to not take any breaks to stop and smell the roses your thoughts end up going a million miles a minute and you become disconnected from your true feelings in that moment. Not being able to just sit with your own thoughts and feelings can create distance between how you think you’re being in this moment and how you’re actually being in reality. Meaning you may think to yourself, ‘Yeah I’m happy and healthy. I’m feeling good’, but that work colleague who just said hi to you and who you completely ignored and the oversized clothes in your wardrobe say something completely different.
If you don’t know who you are and what you want in life is it any wonder then that when you’re presented with a choice you either end up picking the choice that doesn’t serve you or you find the available options difficult to understand and end up not doing anything at all.
Mediation is a great practise that you can use to help you make better choices. During meditation you focus on one thing and anytime your mind wonders to different thoughts you bring it back to that one thing. Every time you notice and realise that your thoughts have strayed from what you should be focusing on there is this gap between your thoughts and a space of opportunity to choose to bring your thoughts back to your original focal point or your centre.
Daily meditation practise does one of two things.
First it increases your ability to become aware and mindful of your thoughts and feelings connecting you to your true self and how you’re being in reality
Secondly, and an even bigger benefit to practising meditation I believe is that it forces you to pause, to slow down in order for you to sense what you never sensed before… which are the gaps between your thoughts, the space where you have the power to choose.
It’s during meditation that you train your awareness of self and where you learn more about who you are. It’s also during meditation that your ability to choose improves because you learn to live not just in your thoughts, but also you learn to live between your thoughts. By living in the gaps between your thoughts you get more comfortable with emptiness and space and nothingness and will come to realise that here in this space anything is possible.
Then when you’re outside of meditation during your normal everyday life that’s when you get to put into practise this better knowing of self and improved ability to slow everything right down and to see what’s possible.
The next time you’re presented with a choice or two no longer will you be frantically trying to analyse the options trying to decide which is the wrong or right choice, and no longer will you feel flustered and confused, because now in this moment where you must choose you will know yourself better, you will know what it is you really need in that moment because you will sense your true thoughts and feelings. This will allow you to select the choice that aligns with your dreams, your core values, and your dream team.
Meditation comes in many forms including sitting, movement (such as Tai Chi and Qi Gong), and walking meditation. Whatever meditation you practise focus on one thing. This one thing becomes your centre. For example during sitting meditation you can focus on your breath. During walking meditation you can focus on your steps. You can also focus on a single thought like a mantra or positive affirmation such as ‘I receive love from the world, I give love to the world’ that you repeat in your mind or out loud. Another thing you can focus on is sound such as ‘oooommmmm’ or ‘aaaahhhhh’. No matter the meditation and focal point anytime your mind starts to think about something else bring it back to that focal point. Bring it back to your centre.
The more you practise meditation the more you will know your true self and the more aware you will become of these gaps between your thoughts, giving you more chances to pause, making it easier to bring your thoughts back to centre, giving you better focus and clarity of thought, so that you can make better choices.
I will share a couple of quotes to help show what I believe to be the true power behind choice.
The first quote is from Henri Nouwen a Dutch priest and professor who says:
“We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there… it is important to become aware that at every moment of our life, we have an opportunity to choose joy… It is in the choice that our true freedom lies, and that freedom is, in the final analysis, the freedom of love.”
And along these lines are a few lines from the 80s hit song from the Back To The Future movie soundtrack ‘The Power of Love’ by Huey Lewis and The News:
“The power of love is a curious thing
Make a one man weep, make another man sing”
What these passages are saying to me is that the power of choice lies in the freedom you have to choose love in each and every moment.
“In reality the power of choice is the power of love.”
To be loving, to have love to give, and to do loving things for yourself and others in each and every moment of your life. That’s the true power of choice.
Of course you don’t have to choose love, right? Because as always the choice is yours or as Captain Planet a 90s cartoon superhero would say:
“The power is yours!”
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Tuning the Human Biofield – Eileen Day McKusick
(Buy from Amazon; Buy from The Book Depository)
A guide to the practice of Sound Balancing, using tuning forks to clear trauma stored in the human energy field
• Provides a precise map of the energetic biofield that surrounds the body, showing where specific emotions, memories, traumas, and pain are stored
• Details how to locate stored trauma in the biofield with a tuning fork and clear it
• 2015 Nautilus Silver Award
When Eileen McKusick began offering sound therapy in her massage practice she soon discovered she could use tuning forks to locate and hear disturbances in the energy field, or biofield, that surrounded each of her clients. She found these energetic disturbances correlated with the emotional and physical traumas her clients had experienced throughout their lives, the biofield acting as a record of pain, stress, and trauma from gestation onward. Passing the forks through these areas in the biofield not only corrected the distorted vibrational sounds she was hearing but also imparted consistent, predictable, and sometimes immediate relief from pain, anxiety, insomnia, migraines, depression, fibromyalgia, digestive disorders, and a host of other complaints. Now, nearly 20 years later, McKusick has fully developed her sound healing method, which she calls Sound Balancing, and created a map of the biofield, revealing the precise locations where specific emotions, memories, ailments, and traumas are stored.
In this book, McKusick explains the complete practice of Sound Balancing and provides illustrations of her Biofield Anatomy Map. She details how to use tuning forks to find and clear pain and trauma stored in the biofield. She reveals how the traditional principles and locations of the chakras correspond directly with her biofield discoveries. Exploring the science behind Sound Balancing, she examines scientific research on the nature of sound and energy and explains how experiences of trauma produce “pathological oscillations” in the biofield, causing a breakdown of order, structure, and function in the body.
Offering a revolutionary perspective on mind, energy, memory, and trauma, McKusick’s guide to Sound Balancing provides new avenues of healing for energy workers, massage therapists, sound healers, and those looking to overcome chronic illness and release the traumas of their past.
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 topic of Detoxification:
- I’ll talk about the health impacts of having excess toxins in your body and explain how your innate detoxification system works
- I’ll talk about the hidden toxins that could be lurking in your environment
- Finally, I’ll share some tips on how to support your innate detoxification system
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Today there are over 85,000 industrial chemicals in the environment. Globally this equates to 310 kg (685 lbs) of toxic chemicals being released into the air, on land, and in waterways every second.
Toxic industrial chemicals are all around us and are the price we pay for civilisation and advanced technology.
Even newborn babies have been shown to have on average over 250 toxic chemicals in their umbilical cord blood. 180 of these chemicals were carcinogenic meaning cancer causing compounds.
The health impacts of toxic exposure include:
- Neurological disorders
- Endocrine disruption causing hormonal imbalances
- Unstable blood sugar
- Accelerated aging
- Digestive disorders causing malnutrition
- Fatigue and low energy
- Reduced bone integrity and muscle mass
- Increased fat gain
- Autoimmune diseases
- Weakened immune system
- Increased inflammation and of course again
- Promote tumour growth aka cancer
Now our ancestors never had to deal with such an overload of toxins. They would only have been exposed to a foreign toxic chemical if they lived by an active volcano, were exploring underground caves, or came across an unknown species of plant or venomous animal.
Your body has an innate intelligence that breathes you, that beats your heart, that helps you grow, that heals and repairs you, and also detoxifies you.
Fortunately for our ancestors their innate detoxification system could function without much strain or stress. Unfortunately for us that’s just not the world we live in today. Industrial chemicals, heavy metals, naturally occurring biotoxins, electromagnetic fields and radiation, high levels of perceived stress these all create a toxic load on the body and your body’s innate ability to detox is near breaking point every day.
There are two types of toxicity or toxic exposure.
Acute or sudden toxicity means your body has been exposed to a high dose of a single toxin creating an immediate reaction in your body also known as being poisoned.
Chronic or gradual toxicity means your body has been exposed to extremely low doses of many different toxins creating a slow and steady response over time.
This doesn’t mean chronic toxicity is not as bad as acute. Far from it. Both acute and chronic toxicity are equal in how they affect your life. While one will kill you in the moment the other will kill you slowly, but surely over time.
In order to explain how chronic toxicity makes for a slow and painful death I need to talk about mitochondria. These are the parts of a cell that convert fatty acids, lactic acid, and glucose a sugar molecule into physical energy. So these guys are the power-plants, the energy centres of the cell and your entire body.
A quick side note it is believed that mitochondria were one of the first single-celled organisms to have evolved billions of years ago and the fact that they have their own DNA separate to the cell and to you supports this idea. So mitochondria are bacteria that use the human body as a vehicle to feed themselves. Trippy huh? Now if you also think about the fact that there are 10 times more microorganism cells than human cells and 100 times more microorganism DNA than human DNA in your body it kind of makes you wonder… who’s running what now? I mean that’s a bit of a mind cluster right there. Definitely makes me come back to that age old question, ‘Who am I?’.
Anyhoo back to chronic toxicity… any excess toxins that your body cannot detoxify and process gets stored in your fat cells. Now why I bring up mitochondria is that these guys metabolise fat for energy and it is believed that low levels of fat-soluble toxins can poison the mitochondria. So these poisoned mitochondria are unable to metabolise these fat-soluble toxins leaving your body no choice but to store them in your fat cells increasing your waistline.
Also poisoned mitochondria are unable to metabolise glucose which leaves more sugar in the blood. Sugar in your blood begins to stick to other cells and proteins damaging them leading to accelerated aging, tumour growth aka cancer, and diabetes.
Finally with less mitochondria creating energy in your body you become fatigued and tired all the time.
So the next time you hear some authoritative figure say that your exposure to environmental toxins, to toxins in your food, at home and at work is too small to have an affect on your health realise that they’re right. But at the same time they’re wrong because these very small toxins will affect the very small energy centres in your body called mitochondria and one day you’ll wake up fat, sick, and nearly dead.
Your liver is the main detoxifying organ of the body, but it also plays many other roles that help keep you alive.
Your liver:
- Filters blood containing food nutrition from your gut
- Produces protein and cholesterol
- Stores energy as glycogen
- Turns excess sugar into fats
- Produces bile needed to digest fats
- Stores iron and vitamins and
- Detoxifies toxins and breaks down medications and drugs
As you can see your liver is a busy bee. Remember liver stands for life, for living, and the more you can support it the better your life will be. No doubt about it.
There are two phases that toxins, leftover hormones, medications and drugs, and other waste products go through when being processed by your liver.
Phase 1 neutralises the toxin setting it up for phase 2 which prepares the toxin for elimination via your bowels or your kidneys. If you find yourself constipated due to dehydration, poor nutrition, lack of movement, improper breathing, or high stress levels then the waste products in your poo will be reabsorbed back into your body and will either cause harm or have to go through a second round of detoxing causing extra strain and stress on your liver.
Phase 1 mainly uses vitamins and phytonutrients (plant nutrients), whereas phase 2 uses sulfur and amino acids. So you want to be eating plenty of vegetables and some animal and fruit fats to support phase 1 and plenty of sulfur-rich veggies as well as some animal meat to support phase 2.
I’ll put a link to the different micronutrients your liver uses in each phase in the show notes for this episode up on the Whole Guidance blog.
Your liver has a family of detoxification enzymes used to process external foreign toxins as well as internal natural toxins. There are different pathways in your liver a toxin can take in order for it to be processed for detoxification and elimination. If your liver enzymes or detox pathways get overloaded with a particular toxin then that enzyme and pathway will no longer be available to process other toxins that need them. Not only that, but if a toxin has to use an alternative pathway additional toxins, waste products, and damaging free radicals get produced causing more strain and stress on your liver.
For example, pain killers and alcohol these use the exact same detox enzymes and pathways in the liver. If you take these two toxins (yes alcohol is a low dose toxin), if you take them together then one or the other is going to last longer in your body causing side-effects. Now your liver will usually begin detoxing the alcohol first leaving the pain killer to have to use a different detox route. The problem with the pain killer having to go down this other detox pathway is that it creates a new waste product. This new waste product can only be taken care of by your body’s own innate antioxidant called glutathione. So now your body is having to produce more glutathione to neutralise this new waste product and your liver is having to do double-duty in having to process this new waste product again creating extra energy and nutrient demands on your body.
Bottom line is your liver requires a lot of energy and resources to function properly and if there’s an overload of toxins in your system then your liver is going to have to do more work draining energy and nutrients from other parts of your body. The less work your liver has to do the more energy and the more vitality you will feel and the better you will perform in life.
Toxins are hiding in everyday consumer products. You would think that if something was bad for you that your national government and local authorities wouldn’t allow it to be displayed on a store shelf and sold. But unfortunately we live in a world where dollars talk louder than cents. Literally money is more important in current society than common sense and well-being.
When it comes to food there are organophosphate chemicals used to poison life sprayed on crops and produce. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are sold as healthy. Growth hormones and antibiotics are used to increase sales of cattle, pork, and chickens. Naturally occurring metals like lead and mercury and other industrial chemicals bioaccumulate in seafood with the larger fish biomagnifying the effects. You are what you eat and your liver detoxifies what you eat and if you think your poor liver doesn’t have to deal with the chemicals, foreign genes, hormones, and drugs you get from the food you eat — you’re living in a dream world my friend.
Your kitchen is a potential toxic bomb. Are you still using teflon and non-stick cookware because it’s easier to cook with and to clean. Uh-oh. Perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) are what makes things non-sticky and are bad news for your liver and for your life if you wish to live it cancer free.
How about food containers? Do you use plastic food containers made with polyethylene, polypropylene, phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA) and bisphenol S (BPS)? These are all endocrine disruptors causing you to have unbalanced hormones and interferes with proper child growth and development, e.g. girls maturing earlier and boys developing more physical female attributes.
Don’t forget tap water is laced, yes I said laced with bleach aka chlorine and an industrial waste product that makes you and your children stupider than a single-celled amoeba called fluoride.
Home cleaning, air freshening, and laundry products are definitely a mass of toxic sludge.
- Ammonia
- Chloramine gas
- 1,4-dioxane
- Chloroform
- Bleach
- Phthalates
- Toluene
These are but a few of the chemical ingredients lurking in your living and working habitats.
Shower curtains! Most of these are made out of polyvinyl chloride aka PVC plastic and outgas, they release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as dioxins, xylene, and toluene that have no business anywhere near your liver. Every time you’re having a hot shower the increase in temperature only makes the PVC outgas even more.
Personal care products. Oh man talk about a toxic soup of epic proportions. Hair, skin, mouth products, deodorants and antiperspirants, cosmetics, antibacterial sanitisers (I used to love those things), soaps, sunscreens, baby wipes, diapers, tampons, pads etc these all have the following toxic crap. It’s a bit of a long list, but let’s do this.
- Aluminium or aluminum
- Chlorine
- Dioxins
- Furans
- Phthalates
- BPA and BPS
- Benzyl acetate
- Parabens
- Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)
- Sodium laureth sulfate or sodium lauryl ether sulfate (SLES)
- Ammonium lauryl sulfate (ALS)
- Sodium pareth sulfate
- Triclosan
- Cocamide diethanolamine (cocamide DEA)
- Diethanolamine (DEA)
- Monoethanolamine (MEA)
- Triethanolamine (TEA)
- Monoisopropanolamine (MIPA)
- Ethoxylated alkyl amine (PEG)
- Oxybenzone
- Avobenzone
- Octisalate
- Octocrylene
- Homosalate
- Octinoxate
- Sodium polyacrylate
Phew!
Finally synthetic fragrance. Whenever you see fragrance on a product remember that this one single word will have 10s of ingredients hidden behind it. It’s a loophole that businesses use to hide what they don’t want consumers or their competitors to see.
The clothing you wear also affects your health. If your clothes contain synthetic plastics and metals than these will interfere with your hormones and energy signature. This includes stain-resistant clothing.
Your furniture and carpets will be outgassing toxic chemicals including flame retardants. Baby’s new crib, could be a cesspool of poison. That new car smell, that ain’t sunshine and roses my friend. That’s a burden on your liver.
Also electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and toxic relationships create additional stress for your liver. Wifi signals, cell towers, electronic gadgets, stress, and stinkin’ thinkin’ all create an imbalance in your energetic being, your aura, your energy vortices known as chakras. Chakras that are out of sync create havoc with your physical, emotional, and mental bodies. This is due to the EMFs and perceived stress in your life causing a buildup of positive electrons in your cells that act as free radicals that damage your body from the inside out.
Okay I know that was a lot to take in, but if you want a happy and healthy life you need to know what could be causing your liver to be weak and tired and in turn making you feel weak and tired.
So right now you need to ask yourself one question:
“Do I have toxins in my body?”
The answer is a brutal yet life-changing YES!
Brutal because industrial chemicals have been found in Antarctic ice and at the tops of mountain ranges around the world. We live in a toxic world and there’s no running or hiding from it.
Life-changing because now that you know better you can do better.
So your goal isn’t to go fleeing into the woods or some cave high up in the Himalayas. You cannot escape being exposed to toxins.
What you can do though is dramatically reduce that toxic load.
The following is a list of the top 10 things you can do to love your liver and detox your life:
1. Eat organic naturally raised produce and animals that aren’t genetically modified and haven’t been treated with chemicals. You can grow and raise your own food or buy local from farmers markets.
Eat large fish like tuna on rare occasions and focus more on small fish like wild-caught sardines and salmon as well as seafood.
Remember to eat a variety of different coloured vegetables to support your liver’s first phase of detoxification and eat plenty of sulfur-rich vegetables and some animal protein to support the second phase.
According to the 5 Element theory in traditional Chinese medicine sour foods are great for supporting the liver. So a tea made with freshly squeezed lemon juice and freshly grated ginger would be ideal for loving your liver.
Drinking fresh vegetable juices (not fruit juices) with some lemon or lime and ginger is another liver tonic.
2. Drink spring, artesian, and filtered water.
3. Take liver supporting supplements that contain milk thistle extract silymarin and dandelion root.
4. Use cast iron, ceramic, stainless steel, or glass cookware and food containers.
5. Swap out standard home care and personal care products for ones with organic natural plant-based ingredients or make your own. There are plenty of recipes online on how to make natural all-purpose cleaners, toothpaste, and deodorants.
6. Wear clothes made of natural fibres. Hemp and wool are awesome choices as even some cotton today is genetically modified.
7. Buy furniture that is made without volatile organic compounds and fire retardants. Air out any new furniture, a new car, or a newly renovated house for a few days to a week before using.
8. Turn off wifi and any electronics that aren’t in use. Ground yourself to the Earth every day by spending at least 30 minutes with bare skin to soil, grass, and sand.
9. Let go of resentment. See everyone as another version of you living in another set of clothing in a different pair of shoes. Just as you had no control on the body you were given and the parents that you were born with neither did anyone else. Realise we are all finding our unique way through life and we all have our own personal ways to express love. Doesn’t mean we will understand each other’s expression, but at least we can understand we are all trying to express that One Love that drives us all.
10. Manage yourself when it comes to handling stress through proper breathing, meditation, sleeping, hydration, nutrition, exercise and play, and by being out in nature.
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