Cover Girl Culture
08/25/10, Sag Harbor, NY
Macha and I recorded this conversation after watching the new documentary, "Cover Girl Culture."

www.byoaudio.com/play/WbcwpwXx

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I rarely feature a full out endorsement for a book in this blog space but I've just read and digested what may just be the clearest, most revelatory and most helpful books on modern relationships for our time. The book is called, Grant Me A Higher Love. It's written by gifted mystic and counselor, Cindi Sanasone-Braff who I've had the great pleasure of communicating with over the phone and hope to meet in person soon as she is near by on Long Island. I was moved to call her immediately to thank her for this great contribution that will no doubt bring about a greater state of relationship for all who open to her teachings.

This is one of those very special books that you will not be able to put down and that will change how you view relationships forever. It removes old lenses and enables you to see relationship dynamics with radical clarity. This is a book that everyone at any stage of relationship -- romantic, platonic, familial should read. I cannot recomend it enough. I know you will enjoy and benefit! Here's to higher love, Natalia

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Hi Everyone!

I just wanted to take a moment to fill you all in on what's going on here at Detox The World and what you can look forward to in the coming months.

1. Emotional Eating S.O.S.! is now complete and available for free on the membership DetoxCommunity and for purchase on the site. This project is very close to my heart and definitely the hardest thing I've ever had to write because I had to retrace my steps and recapitulate my life--all that wired me for emotional eating and all that liberated me from it. But I persevered and went into that dark space for hours at a time until it was done because I think this is one of the biggest challenges people face today. The material can be applied to any self-destructive behavior, not just disordered eating.

2. Our Detox Walks have been so much fun this year! In the last two weeks, the groups have grown quite a lot and it's been wonderful to meet more new people. Our lively, large group snakes through the park like a beautiful cobra, drinking in all the great collective energy and soaking in the vibes from this very special nature reserve in the middle of Manhattan. This coming Thursday, June 24, will be the last walk I'll be able to attend for a while, but the walks will continue without me. We have a torch-bearer, Lisa, who has been with us every week and who will lead the group until I come back after Labor Day. So please keep going strong. Many people have told us that the walk is the highlight of their week!

3. The larger Detox The World International Community is still incubating, but we hope to launch this summer. So please stay tuned. Soon there may be a group near you!

4. The Parents Community is also in production, as is a newsletter, which we're working on to offer you even more guidance and support. You'll soon see a "call out" area on the homepage to sign up if you'd like to receive it. You'll find recipes, tips, discounts on local colonics and juices bars, and much more!

5. The Rose Program Culinary Institute is booking up its maiden course in October very quickly. Anyone who has tasted Doris's food, attended one of Doris's cooking deomos, or tried her recipes in the DetoxCommunity knows why. She is a genius--ever at the cutting edge of our culinary future!

6. I send out a Good Luck wish to all my former and current students who are taking the Rose Program Certification test. It is not an easy test--if you pass, you really know your stuff. We are receiving many completed tests, so please be patient while we grade them with detailed care and feedback. Please give us 2 to 3 weeks to get back to you.

Ana will remain hard at work all summer, and she still has a few openings available for personal consultations (in person or via phone). I am taking July and August off to spend time with my family. So, more than ever, please remember that between the blogs on this site and the extensive guidance offered in the private DetoxCommunity, you will find everything you need.

We receive more correspondence than we could possibly keep up with, so please understand if we cannot reply to all of your questions. This is what the DetoxCommunity is for. There are many advanced students here who can answer your quetions. We are not expanding to meet the increased demand with more employees. We have no corporate ambitions. We believe there is a way to serve you while remaining tranquil and connected, in the moment, instead of falling victim to the technocratic pace of modern life that depletes inner power.

I'll write a few blogs and post a few more audios with Macha over the summer to stay connected with you all. I look forward to seeing many of you at the September Advanced Training Class and the Rose Program Culinary Institute in the fall. Remember to visit our Events page!

Wishing you a wonderful summer (and to our friends down under, a beautiful fall).

Love,
Natalia

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With the release of the new Karate Kid, I suspect there is going to be a resurgence of interest in all things related to kung fu. I was nine years old when the original Karate Kid came out, and I got a life-size poster of Ralph Macchio for my bedroom wall. While I was a die-hard fan of the original version and soundtrack, and generally do not like remakes of films, I believe that this new version is going to strike a deeper chord with viewers than the original did.

In this version of Karate Kid, there is a depiction of ancient Taoist power in the monastery scene in the mountains. I go to my authority on Taoist chi practices, Kostos Danaos, author of Magus of Java and Nei Kung: The Secret Teachings of Warrior Sages (both of which I highly recommend for those of you who are interested), for the definition of kung fu. Danaos writes:

…the first term, kung, is written as a combination of the characters kung and li. Kung means “to build, to construct.” Li means “power or strength.” The second term, fu, is made up of the single character fu, which is a complex ideogram to interpret. Fu is derived from the character for man, with added widespread arms and an adult man’s hatpin through the character (in medieval China each adult male wore a hatpin through his hat and hair). The implication is of a mature, large, responsible adult man or father figure; the character is also used in other contexts to denote someone’s husband. In other worlds, the term kung fu actually means: “the construction and development of one’s energy over time, through daily effort, such that in the end one obtains mature power and the spiritual development of a Master.” Kung fu, in other words, is a path of continual discipline and training, of nonstop growth over your entire life.

I feel this movie is going to strike right to the hearts of filmgoers because it arouses an ancient knowledge that has lay buried deep in the unconscious mind—knowledge about essential human power—chi, or life force energy. We are a culture that has taken active, living things and rendered them dead in exchange for materials that we think we want, that we think drive our world forward. But the attraction to kung fu betrays a far more magnetic attraction: our innate desire for life force energy.

We have grown lazy and calcified in our patterns, but in kung fu we are reminded of the beauty of physical, mental, and spiritual discipline—the ingredients for progressing cooperatively with life and the living power within us. This is what is deeply fulfilling for us, not the Ferris wheel of plasticity that we culturally subscribe to through the regular purchase and consumption of industrial foods, products, and blueprints for socially accepted living.

The power we are instinctually attracted to is living power, in all its fullness and abundance, in all its beauty and health-generating inspiration. But we cannot attain that kind of power through laziness and the herd mentality. Where does the herd’s uncultivated energy go? To the cattle driver, of course!

We can cultivate our power through the disciplines that shape it, or we can relinquish our power by stepping into line with the social norms that routinely destroy our greatest resources. The choice is ours.

Traditional Taoists are among the few remaining keepers of an ancient wisdom—a knowledge of energy so powerful that it can be lethal in immature hands. It tells us something about the power we carry within, and what happens when we relinquish rather than cultivate that power. With this power we can shape what indigenous peoples call “the dream,” “maya,” or “illusionary reality.” With this power we can also change the dream, as the remaining keepers of this ancient wisdom have long been urging us to do.

You, as a living being, are brimming with tremendous potential power. It is yours to cultivate and craft, to create and direct toward the life you want. By the same token, it is also yours to relinquish, whittle away, squander, or ignore.

Our culture has raised the last few generations to give their life force away—in exchange for a prepackaged life—in the form of packaged foods, relationships, careers, indulgences, entertainment systems, and so on. We now live in a world of devitalized adults and children who know nothing of their inner power, only of where to go for their next purchase.

Yet, even in our devitalized world, a young person will sometimes catch a glimpse of kung fu or feel a surge of chi. When that happens, what do we tell them? That it is the stuff of fantasies? Try telling that to the Shaolin monks, for whom telekinesis, the absorption of enormous amounts of momentum, displacement of matter, and electrogeneration are not supernatural events, but entirely natural and normal for a mature human being.

When our chi falls away from us like sand through our fingers, simply because we cannot see it with our modern-day eyes, so too do our forces of intuition, instinct, and connection—all those things that keep us alive and progressing.

As Danaos explains in his books, in order for there to be life, there must be a balance of yin and yang, the dance of the energies of life – the yin personified by the female (the inner negative pole, representing night, etc.) and yang personified by the male (the phallic positive pole, representing day, etc.). Within us we find the yin and yang energies running concurrently, parallel, side by side, propelling life in all its electromagnetic power. These energies can combine powerfully when we learn how to cultivate and harness their flow.

Eastern energy practices are a great place to begin appreciating the value of life force. Whenever you are vigilant of your inner power, where it resides and where it is going, and whenever you make the life choices that honor it, you are practicing kung fu, you are cultivating and maturing your physical and spiritual power. This is true wealth. Don’t let anyone take it from you!

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Macha and I explore (unbridled) the critical subject of reproductive health in this approximately hour-long audio. Enjoy and BENEFIT!

http://www.byoaudio.com/play/WF5rL82s

About Macha Einbender: Macha Einbender (a.k.a. the Spiritual Makeover Artist) is devoted to lending her voice to help others enhance their lives through meditation, healthy lifestyle, and overcoming negative thought addiction. She is a mentor for women and a spiritual activist. She is commited to supporting women on their individual journeys.

For access to Macha's audio blogs and interviews:
http://www.herfuture.com/profile/MACHA

For her Overcoming Negativity Addiction Radio Show with author Denise Coates:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/denisecoates

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Summer is here and it truly is the season of power. The sun is the great generator. For the next three months, solar energy is at its peak in this part of the world, which means that we have access to more energy now than at any other time of the year. It means that we can greatly benefit from this power if only we know how to connect with it. In summer, we can get charged up by this solar power and feel deeply infused with energy.

If you open yourself up to this solar power, you’ll feel it in your blood stream, in your muscle tissue and bones, in your womb if you’re a woman (this is a great time to boost fertility), in the creative centers of your mind and body, and last but not least, in your heart. Summer is not the time to melt and become lethargic, but a time of great opportunity for every living being.

There is nothing like the electric feeling of waking up to the summer sun in a clean body, with electromagnetic life force, chi, solar fire running though your blood, with your heart beating strong and your mind brimming with creative thoughts, propelled with a desire to capitalize on this power. This feeling is among the greatest gifts life has to offer. So let me give you a few tips to get you there.

In order to receive this solar energy, you need to be clean internally and externally, and connected to the earth and to nature at large. While it helps to live in the country, you can tap into nature’s energy almost anywhere. As I write this, I am fully linked up with enormous solar energy right here in the middle of New York City. The flow is intense, not because I’m tanning to a crisp in the noonday sun, but because I’ve consciously opened myself up to great web of energy all around me.

Unity consciousness—the perspective that life is an interconnected whole, ever pulsating with life-generating energy—keeps me connected. Separation consciousness, the typical perspective in our culture, keeps most people disconnected from the web of life and thus choked off from all the power it carries. Most people believe they get their energy from calories alone (usually unnatural substances completely devoid of life force) and seek security merely in following the social norms—such as maintaining steady jobs, signing up for health insurance plans, accumulating credit, investing capital, and so on.

The problem is that these things can be stripped away at any moment. Banks can close, jobs come and go, health insurance plans offer no insurance of health, emergencies strike, governments fail—the list of social insecurities is endless. But rooting your energy, your power, your raison d’être in nature’s great web of life is the best investment decision you could ever make. If your job, your health insurance, your stocks, and good credit were stripped away, if society were crumbling around you, you would still have your breath, your energy, your health, your passion, your inspiration.

This is not to suggest that we should ignore the workings of society and reject the world. You can certainly hold down a job (hopefully, one that you are passionate about), live in a beautifully appointed home, pay taxes, and so on. The difference is where you get your energy, where your consciousness is. Real energy and power do not unravel based on day-to-day events, news cycles, and financial markets—all the whims and vicissitudes of the social order. Real power, the energy that propels the life cycle at large, is never-ending, continually fortifying, evergreen.

We human beings are part of a great network designed to receive the electromagnetic power of the sun. That power is the life force that flows in such abundance through every atom in the natural world, in every unseen wave particle that charges the air. It is in the sun’s rays and in the earth’s electromagnetic field. The energetic field is all around us, but in this culture of separation consciousness we all too often cut ourselves off from it.

We are made up of layers of energy and energetic pathways, from our very subatomic structures—the electrons that carry the electromagnetic energy from one atom to another, from cell to cell—through our neurological pathways, bloodstreams, lymph systems, brain waves, muscles, organs, reproductive systems, spinal fluids, skeletal systems, and the unseen nadis and meridians of our energy body.

Our culture is all about separation, wielding one power over another, taking power at the expense of another. Our culture is hierarchical; we understand life only mechanistically, in parts, not holistically. Thousands of years of separation consciousness have cemented this disconnect in the minds of its citizens. Separation consciousness manifests in every single thought and practice in modern society. No wonder so many tramp off to work each day, only to come home deeply exhausted, laden with waste and disappointment. We are seeking energy and life in all the wrong places, in all the wrong ways, when there is more than enough healing, invigorating, creative energy to go around!

To perceive the great web of life, to connect with its energy, takes an enormous leap in consciousness. To step into it requires the heart and passion of a hero. You are invited every single moment of your life to link up with this great force. A powerful, pulsating sea of energy is always ready to fill your pathways and revitalize every cell of your being. Think of summer as the season of high vitality. Unblock yourself, open up your pathways, step into the light, fuel your creativity and all that is closest to your heart.

Here’s to your Summer of Power!

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I'd like to share this entry that my senior detox counselor, Ana Ladd-Griffin posted on the Detox The World membership community today on her Q&A area. It is such a timely and popular topic. If this topic interests you, keep an eye out for an audio interview on the reproductive system, menstruation and fertility in a few weeks which we will also post here on the blog area. I trust you will find Ana's insights very enlightening! Thanks for sharing, Ana!

Q: Marie writes, “I stopped taking the pill a little over a year ago, and started the Detox4Women meal plan. I have only gotten my period once since then. I’m a little worried. Why is this? And when will it return? My husband and I want to start trying to get pregnant.”

A: There are several parts to answering this question. First, I want to address oral contraceptives, as well as all hormone-based contraceptives (rings, shots, etc. I am keeping pharmaceutical brand names out of this). I do not wish to contradict medical advise, I am not a doctor. However, my experience with many many women dealing with the same issue is that after stopping a hormone-based contraceptive, the menstrual cycle can take a long time to return to normal. I have seen it take over two years. My own cycle took even longer to return to normal after stopping the pill, and this was even before I began to cleanse and work with Natalia. After only a few months, most medical professionals will recommend that you get back on some form of birth control to bring your period back. This decision is at your discretion, I only ask that you make an educated and informed decision. This is a fact: almost all of my clients who stop the pill while cleansing do not see a full return to normal menstruation for at least one year.

Secondly, I’d like to address what is really happening in our bodies when we menstruate. Yes, it’s the body preparing a womb for a potential fertilized egg as we’ve been taught. But there is a second component. Our bodies are storing toxins in menstrual fluids so that they will be kept away from our baby. The release of blood-like fluids every month is a powerful detox! The body stores the toxins so they cannot interfere with pregnancy, and then releases them when no egg is fertilized. Men should be so lucky! This is a detoxifying monthly function that is specific only to the female body, and is a great aid in mobilizing toxics we ingest and encounter through poor air quality, compromised water, etc. However, this is why periods have become such a trial for us. They are starting in younger and younger girls, lasting for up to eight days, smelling strongly, and are accompanied by intense emotions and cramping. This is the result of our toxic load! We can look forward to shorter, lighter, cleaner, and less emotional visits from Aunt Flo as our bodies become cleaner. It is sometimes said that a perfectly clean body will menstruate without a fluid release (read: no toxins were stored for removal). I’m not sure this is possible in the modern world, but it illustrates the profound change that comes with cellular cleansing.

The third issue in this question is the effect of the cleansing program itself on the female cycle. Just like every other system in our bodies, the reproductive system is profoundly effected by our toxic load. All of you out there who struggle with poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, PMDD, uteran fibroids, etc understand better than anyone. As we begin to awaken and release toxic matter, these systems will slowly start to reset, and regulate themselves without the influence of bacteria, carbonic gas, yeasts and fungus, environmental estrogens, and not to mention the influx of animal-sized doses of hormones that make up the biomass of conventional meats (and dairy).

This is not an overnight process. But please rest assured, a clean body can perfectly regulate every system better than we could ever have dreamed. Patience, and progress. Keep moving forward knowing you are doing the absolute best thing for your reproductive system, and that all of the issues you experience will come out in the wash (literally!). You need to know that this detoxifying regime will never harm your body's cycles, but will only help them to become perfectly regulated. You also must throw out any timeframe you have put upon your process. We have the stored toxins of our lifetime, combined with the damages of generations of accumulation on our lineage.

I would never make a 6 month, yearlong, or even five year promise to you. Some of these things run dark and deep. Perseverance and trust are what you need now, not false timelines to keep you motivated with baseless information. You know this intuitively. Think about all that we have dome to this planet, reflected in our poor bodies. Could you fix the problem with a 10 day juice fast? Never. It's time to set aside your panic and deadlines, and fall in love with the process. The promise I will make is this: If you are cleansing your body you are walking in the right direction and taking the only possible steps towards restoring your body to the vitality it deserves.

Natalia has said what I am about to say before, and please forgive me if I am not as delicate as I could be with these issues. I have deepest empathy for all of us. Reproductive issues are the result of a failing planet. We are a true reflection of the clogged and poisoned waterways, the smog, and the deforestation. We cannot escape the damages we continue to do to fragile ecosystems, and fragile reproductive systems. This is the mess we have made: many men and women have become so toxic that their bodies decline to produce viable offspring. Men have testicular cancer, prostate cancer, and erectile disfunction. Women have ovarian cysts, uterine tumors, and devastating monthly cycles.

These are the facts, and the only right step we can now take is the start to clean up what we've done. We have all played a part in this destruction, and now we have a chance to be heroes to the generations to come. Keep this in mind as you're cleansing. The female and male reproductive organs press directly against our over-worked, impacted, clogged colons and intestines. What more evidence do you need?

Last, I just want to give a nod to the importance of pre-conception cleansing. If you can give your son or daughter a clean nine-month home, clean breast milk, and superior DNA blueprints that come with this lifestyle of cellular cleansing, you are already winning parenting awards. There is no greater gift.

Ana has addressed the following subjects on the membership community for those of you who are interested:

Menstruation
Simple and Delicious Summer Dinner Options
Simple and Delicious Winter Dinner Options
Birth Control
Ideal Food Combining
Wine
Grain, Sprouted Grain Bread
Organic Butter and Cream
Juice Fasting
Soy
Laxative Products
Coconuts
Eating Out
Traveling
Colonics
Enemas
Nuts and Seeds
Detox Symptoms

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Well, well, well, it’s finally happened—the truth about the carcinogenic effects of sunscreen has finally reached the headlines. The facts about cellular destruction by way of sunscreen have not only been, at long last, officially documented and researched per the nation’s standards of credible news, but they are far more dire than most people ever guessed. You can read all about it below.

But I find it sad that it takes an “official” report to wake everyone up to such an obvious affront to our blood chemistry and cellular health. The general public had to wait for ten years after the initial scientific study for enough evidence to warn us of the damage sunscreens cause. People are always waiting for the authorities to tell them what to do or what not to do, failing to consider the obvious: When you put chemicals on your skin, they will penetrate and enter the bloodstream! The sun’s rays will cause mutations of these chemicals, making them even more harmful! An antioxidant does not have the same effect on cells when synthesized and internalized inorganically!

All it takes to see the truth is a little attention to what we know of organisms and synthetic chemicals. Otherwise, why spend twenty years in school? Why even bother with biology if we don’t apply the laws of life to our own bodies and the life around us? Intuition, reflection, and common sense are all well within our reach. We don’t need research studies to direct our next moves. Besides, the research always comes too late. Remember thalidomide?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The sun is the most powerful cleanser and regenerator of all life—yes, including human life—on our planet. It is our ally, not our enemy! Humans, however, are not clean enough for the sun, and our relationship with the sun is counterintuitive. We live indoors all year and consume rubbish, and then go on vacations, spending hours on end in the midday sun, which magnetizes the body’s acidity to the surface as we sweat out the toxins between beers and sodas. Skin cancer is the sun magnetizing poisons from deep in the body to the surface. This is the sun’s attempt to heal the body, or at least to reveal internal sickness that would otherwise remain hidden. In about ten years, the authorities will get around to publishing a report on this.

Do you want to frolic in the sun? Of course you do, but do it with respect for yourself and for the sun. Cleanse internally, so that the sun doesn’t magnetize all your impurities. And honor the power of the sun. Remember, hot-blooded animals do not sunbathe at the peak of the sun’s intensity.

The sun is our healer, our generator, our bliss, our light—indeed, the infuser of the most powerful electromagnetic current of life force energy into soil and cells! Our vilification of the sun is one of the most misguided perceptions of our time.

When people ask me what I use in the sun (because I love to bask in its healing rays whenever I can), I tell them I use either nothing at all or coconut oil. They look at me in horror. But I’ve become clean enough for the sun, and coconut oil does not mutate at high temperatures. It’s dreamy! Don’t try this yourself until you are sufficiently cleansed. You will know you are when the sun makes you feel and look better, not worse. In fact, I shun all products made with SPF. They just feel and smell so toxic to me.

When my kids’ camp counselors tell them it’s time to lather up with sunscreen, my kids are the only ones who say they don’t wear sunscreen. As a family, we travel all around the world chasing the sun when we can escape our day-to-day lives in the Big Apple. My kids respect the power of the sun, and the sun honors the cleanliness of their cells. No one gets burned. Everyone has a blast!

Bottom line: don’t use sunscreen unless you are actually forced to be in the midday sun for long periods, in which case there are plenty of smart alternatives, such as sun-protecting T-shirts and natural sunscreens like those by Purple Prairie and Hara Sport, where the active ingredient is zinc oxide. (When I was a kid growing up on the beaches of Southern California, it was cool to apply strips of zinc oxide on the nose, under the eyes, and on the shoulders). Otherwise, in the mild hours of the sun, just keep your skin clean with a natural oil like coconut, avocado or jojoba if desired, and be aware of your skin's relationship with the sun. For the face, I just wear a straw hat or cap after some gentle exposure.

Slathering on traditional sunscreen is akin to suffocating your cells and poisoning your blood. Time to let your skin breathe in all the life force it’s been thirsting for! Have a wonderful summer!

AN ADDENDUM: A reader recently wrote in saying, “. . . this one has me puzzled. The sun as you commented is not our enemy but our healer. But for those days when we need protection, because the sun is different now, what can we use to slow down the penetration of the rays. What products do you use especially for your children?”

I’d like to address this because it raises a core issue that is so important to confront honestly. The hard fact of the matter is, there is no way to avoid being bitten in the tush by the damage we have done to the natural world. We dissolve the ozone layer and then want to find a nice, neat solution so we don’t get hurt ourselves. We want our products and our cars, and yet we don’t want to be harmed by the ultraviolet rays. We cannot have it both ways. At some point, we have to accept the consequences of our actions—both individually and collectively. The ozone is continuing to thin, and no health plan under the sun can completely protect toxic bodies under such rays.

We are one interconnected, interdependent organism. No class of person can buy his or her way out of this. No amount of science can rebuild the ozone layer. We have to start from the bottom up by creating a viable world, and only then, eventually, will the ozone be able to rebuild itself like tissue regenerates itself in the body if allowed to heal. No one can escape the repercussions of our actions as a society. We like to think we’re independent, but we are all connected, feeling the collective pain that our way of life inflicts on the world, and depending on each other for our survival.

Something else to think about: As the soil deteriorates further, more and more trees (the few that are still living anyway) will become as diseased as we are. If we maintain this course, eventually there will be no trees, which of course means no oxygen. This is the endgame. “Checkmate,” says the life-deteriorating team.

The deep shift in consciousness needs to happen now, and it needs to happen swiftly. As I say to my kids when they are being silly at an inappropriate time, “I’m not interested in the nonsense. Just use your common sense and get the job done. You’re smart. Figure it out.” I know, poor kids. I’m pretty tough, but they are extremely resourceful for it. The fact is, when we have to be, we can all be pretty resourceful!

I leave you with this quote by the wonderful Jungian scholar, Robert A. Johnson (from his book, Balancing Heaven and Earth). This is one of the best expressions of how to think interdependently that I’ve ever read: “Each understands that nothing that causes another pain is worth the having; nothing that diminishes another is of any value; nothing that is won at the expense of another is workable; no happiness that causes another loss is worthy.”

Kowabunga,
Natalia


Study: Many Sunscreens May Be Accelerating Cancer

Andrew Schneider Senior Public Health Correspondent

WASHINGTON (May 24) -- Almost half of the 500 most popular sunscreen products may actually increase the speed at which malignant cells develop and spread skin cancer because they contain vitamin A or its derivatives, according to an evaluation of those products released today.

AOL News also has learned through documents and interviews that the Food and Drug Administration has known of the potential danger for as long as a decade without alerting the public, which the FDA denies.

The study was released with Memorial Day weekend approaching. Store shelves throughout the country are already crammed with tubes, jars, bottles and spray cans of sunscreen.

The white goop, creams and ointments might prevent sunburn. But don't count on them to keep the ultraviolet light from destroying your skin cells and causing tumors and lesions, according to researchers at Environmental Working Group.

In their annual report to consumers on sunscreen, they say that only 39 of the 500 products they examined were considered safe and effective to use.

The report cites these problems with bogus sun protection factor (SPF) numbers:
• The use of the hormone-disrupting chemical oxybenzone, which penetrates the skin and enters the bloodstream.
• Overstated claims about performance.
• The lack of needed regulations and oversight by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the most alarming disclosure in this year's report is the finding that vitamin A and its derivatives, retinol and retinyl palmitate, may speed up the cancer that sunscreen is used to prevent.

Environmental Working Group

A dangerous additive

The industry includes vitamin A in its sunscreen formulations because it is an anti-oxidant that slows skin aging.

But the EWG researchers found the initial findings of an FDA study of vitamin A's photocarcinogenic properties, meaning the possibility that it results in cancerous tumors when used on skin exposed to sunlight.

"In that yearlong study, tumors and lesions developed up to 21 percent faster in lab animals coated in a vitamin A-laced cream than animals treated with a vitamin-free cream," the report said.

The conclusion came from EWG's analysis of initial findings released last fall by the FDA and the National Toxicology Program, the federal government's principle evaluator of substances that raise public health concerns.

EWG's conclusions were subsequently scrutinized by outside toxicologists.

Based on the strength of the findings by FDA's own scientists, many in the public health community say they can't believe nor understand why the agency hasn't already notified the public of the possible danger.

"There was enough evidence 10 years ago for FDA to caution consumers against the use of vitamin A in sunscreens," Jane Houlihan, EWG's senior vice president for research, told AOL News.

"FDA launched this one-year study, completed their research and now 10 years later, they say nothing about it, just silence."

On Friday, the FDA said the allegations are not true.

"We have thoroughly checked and are not aware of any studies," an FDA spokesperson told AOL News. She said she checked with bosses throughout the agency and found no one who knew of the vitamin A sunscreen research being done by or on behalf of the agency.

But documents from the FDA and the National Toxicology Program showed that the agency had done the research.

"Retinyl palmitate was selected by (FDA's) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition for photo-toxicity and photocarcinogenicity testing based on the increasingly widespread use of this compound in cosmetic retail products for use on sun-exposed skin," said an October 2000 report by the National Toxicology Program.

FDA's own website said the animal studies were done at its National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson, Ark. And it was scientists from the FDA center and National Toxicology Program who posted the study data last fall.

In a perfect world

The ideal sunscreen would completely block the UV rays that cause sunburn, immune suppression and damaging free radicals. It would remain effective on the skin for several hours and not form harmful ingredients when degraded by UV light, the report said.

National Cancer Institute
Graph of melanoma of the skin rates from 1975 to 2006. APC stands for annual percent change and AAPC stands for average annual percent change.

But in the U.S., there is currently no sunscreen that meets all of these criteria. European countries have more chemical combinations to offer, but in the U.S. the major choice is between the "chemical" sunscreens, which have inferior stability, penetrate the skin and may disrupt the body's hormone systems, and "mineral" sunscreens zinc and titanium dioxide.

Increasingly, as AOL News reported in March, the industry is using titanium dioxide that is made nanosized, which a growing number of researchers believe have serious health implications.

The sunscreen industry cringes when EWG releases its yearly report -- this is its fourth. The industry charges that the advocacy group wants to do away with all sunscreen products, a claim that is not accurate.

The report's researchers clearly say that an effective sunscreen prevents more damage than it causes, but it wants consumers to have accurate information on the limitations of what they buy and on the potentially harmful chemicals in some of those products.

EWG does warn consumers not to depend on any sunscreen for primary protection from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Hats, clothing and shade are still the most reliable sun protection available, they say.

Don't count on the numbers

Some of us are old enough to remember when the idea of having a tan was good, a sign of health, when billboards and magazine ads featured the Coppertone girl showing off her tan when a puppy pulls down her bathing suit bottom.

Going for that tan, we coated our kids and ourselves with sun blockers with sun protection factors of 1 or 2. Some overly cautious parents might have smeared on a 4 during the hottest part of a day.

But we've learned of the dangers that come from exposure to the sun's rays, especially ultraviolet A and B. So today, drugstore shelves are crammed with sunscreens boasting SPFs of 30, 45, 80 or even higher.

However, the new report says those numbers are often meaningless and dangerous because products with high SPF ratings sell a false sense of security, encouraging people using them to stay out in the sun longer.

"People don't get the high SPF they pay for," the report says. "People apply about a quarter of the recommended amount. So in everyday practice, a product labeled SPF 100 really performs like SPF 3.2, an SPF 30 rating equates to a 2.3 and an SPF 15 translates to 2."

In 2007, the report says, the FDA published proposed regulations that would prohibit manufacturers from labeling sunscreens with an SPF higher than "SPF 50." The agency wrote that higher values would be "inherently misleading," given that "there is no assurance that the specific values themselves are in fact truthful."

This is being widely ignored by the sunscreen makers who are heavily advertising their 80, 90 and 100 SPF products.

"Flouting FDA's proposed regulation," companies substantially increased their high-SPF offerings in 2010 with one in six brands now listing SPF values higher than 50. "Neutrogena and Banana Boat stand out among the offenders, with six and four products labeled as 'SPF 100,' respectively," the new report says.

The full list of the best and worst sunscreens can be found on the EWG's searchable database. (Update: The database has been loading slowly today. You may want to try it again later.)
Filed under: Nation, Health, Top Stories

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These freakish, non-organic cherries are your cells on modern living. I’m not speaking just metaphorically, either. Make no mistake: there is no difference between the havoc that modern living wreaks on your cells and the cellular degeneration of these cherries. Only the limitations of the naked eye keep us from witnessing this cellular holocaust in real time.

On our current course, however, we will increasingly see this mutation of cells in our degenerated offspring. This bowlful of cherries is a very real manifestation, on the micro- and macrocosmic levels, of our cultural choices. Shall we all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” with our eyes closed and pretend it’s not really happening?

My associate, Ana, was recently among the many women who never think they are thin enough, who are disappointed in their diets for not making them look emaciated, who are products of a certain Upper East Side social class who spend their days in plastic surgeons’ chairs when they are not purchasing thousand-dollar frocks and clinking vodka tonics at lunchtime on Madison Avenue. They would rather be skinny with cancer than clean-celled and glowing from head to toe like our lovely Ana is today.

Not thin enough, eh? The next time you think this, consider: Would it appease you if you were twenty pounds lighter on a diet of saccharine, cigarettes, and caffeine, with maybe a little “blow” now and then? Would it ease your conscience if the dresses you were buying were for philanthropic galas? Let’s not carry on this lineage of thinking that deteriorates our world from the top down. This mindset would be almost comical if it didn’t lead to birth defects, suicide, and oil spills.

Modern life is just this bowl of cherries, ain’t it? Well, in this bowl is where the blind, programmed marionettes of civilization and their children will wind up. This is the endgame. Are you benching it, or are you going to get in the game and fight for your cells, your future, and the fate of humankind?

Let’s hussle, team!
Natalia

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We had a magical morning yesterday on our Detox Walk. We met at the fountain and ventured up through the brambles until we reached the Shakespearean Castle and enjoyed the view before continuing up to the reservoir and ultimately reaching the botanical conservatory all abloom with tulips, lilacs, apple blossoms, and roses just peaking out. There were so many species of flowers that I confess I couldn't name. But suffice it to say that the place was as fragrant as it was beautiful. It was hard to leave the gardens, sundrenched in all their glory, but little buds and seedlings promised more to enjoy next week as the symphony of flowers continues all through the spring and summer. We had a wonderful group this week (photo above).

Emotional Eating S.O.S., Part III, is up on the community site as of this afternoon. I hope it serves you well. The final section, Part IV: Practical Applications, will be ready in a few weeks.

Wishing you all the joys of springtime!

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I know there are lots of raw-food enthusiasts who encourage a 100% raw-vegan and even fruitarian diet all year-round. Of course many of them live in Florida, Costa Rica, and Southern California and do not experience the winters that those of us nearer the other pole do!

I can only speak from my experience. As someone who has been living this way for ten years, what I have found is that eating all raw and even juice-fasting throughout the cold months, while certainly doable, requires enormous discipline (discipline that is not always necessary for cellular cleansing and improvement).

It’s true, some of my best and longest fasts have been in December, but it took all I had to commit to them. (As most fasters know, it’s those first 24 to 48 hours of the fast that are the most difficult. After that, if you’re keeping your intestine cleared of the accumulated and awakened rubbish and by-products, each day gets easier and easier.) In addition, there are a handful of days each winter when I eat only winter fruits, bananas, and dried fruits, but they usually come as a need for yin after too much yang.

Typically, given my druthers, what I want to eat in the cold months are not fruits but vegetables—big, raw, leafy green salads with chunky, hearty vegetables and raw goat cheese, some baked beets or steamed spinach, and a little dark chocolate for dessert. We also eat out a lot in the winter, so I can enjoy my favorite vegetable-centric meals in restaurants.

For me, the cold winter months are made bearable with lots of good lovin’, food I actually desire, and plenty of fun (as well as my beloved infrared sauna). Quality time with family and good friends and festive nights out enjoying some great red wine are my sources of warmth. I don’t consider myself weak because I pepper my winter with such pleasures. Rather, I just respect my natural cycles and what works for me. Those things transform the cold and drab seasons into an inviting, enjoyable passage. Along with that, I look forward to the Cerignola and Castelvetrano olives that I get at my gourmet store and organic, long-stemmed carrots. These are all part of my daily feasting.

What I’m getting at is that all things are cyclical. Much as I love the vegetable-centric meals, goat cheese, chocolate, and wine in the cold months and find “fruit nights” a less satisfying choice, I find that, come the warmer temperatures, the opposite happens. Without any prompting, I desire fruit meals over vegetable meals. I choose date balls and dried figs for dessert over chocolate, and have only the rare desire for wine. In the warmer months, I crave fruits, fruit-based soups, frozen-banana-carob milkshakes topped with cinnamon and shredded coconut, and avocado salads—while things like goat cheese, chocolate, and wine feel dense and acidic* most days (I still want them from time to time, but usually with the addition of lots of cucumber and cherry tomatoes or salsa in the salads to make them more “fruity” and refreshing). Wine, cheese, and chocolate are still on the scene, but less so—they are more my go-to staples when I’m eating out or entertaining guests. In short, the meals that serve me best in fall and winter are different from those that serve me best in spring and summer. It’s an intuitive thing, not a strict “by the nutritional book” thing.

I have found it serves me well to trust, embrace, and respect the seasons of life in all aspects. I’ve learned after all these years to go with the flow. If I’m really honest with myself, I will be fully aware if I’m on a slippery slope of devitalized vegetables or too much wine or chocolate, or even overeating. If I am honest with myself, I will gravitate toward what will truly satisfy me, what I truly want, in both body and spirit. This also ensures change and variety, even if there is a lot of repetition during the course of each season. The repetition will eventually make way for a shift that will bring a different sort of repetition, but there is nothing wrong with some repetition if it springs from genuine desire and intuition.

Here’s another bit of food for thought: Any of the foods discussed in this diet-lifestyle are fine as long as we enjoy them correctly—that is, in the right combinations, with plenty of fresh, raw juices to keep the system alkaline, and while paying respectful attention to intestinal cleanliness to keeping yeast colonies at bay, as needed.

Acknowledging the wisdom of our relationship with the seasons and understanding the nuances of the “petri dish” of the human body are two excellent guideposts we can use to make sure we never veer too far off course and consistently progress.

So, without further ado, here’s what I’m eating now…

Now that the weather has warmed up, I find that all I want are juicy fruits and fruit soups or salsa-guacamole-style green salads. Here are two meals I’m just LOVING these days:

DINNER #1: THE FRUITY DINNER
(Note: this meal is not for those who are battling yeast issues.)

2 to 3 Fuji apples (I know apples are out of season, but I have been chomping at the bit for them!)

The Spring Cell Cleanse (my amazing new fruit soup):

2 cups fresh pineapple, cubed
5 ounces fresh, organic baby spinach
1 cup organic alfalfa sprouts
2-3 dried, organic Turkish figs
½ medium Hass avocado (ready to eat but not overripe)
5 frozen strawberries, or a couple of ice cubes instead if needed (used to keep the mixture from warming while blending)
1-2 cups of water (to blend)
stevia to taste (use sparingly, as the soup is naturally pretty sweet, but I sometimes add a little stevia for extra sweetness)

Blend in a high-speed blender until smooth. Makes approximately 5 cups. Some nights I eat it all; other nights it’s too much. Use your intuition to gauge the right amount for you.

Dessert:
1-2 bananas
2-4 dried, organic Turkish figs
1 container of Salud-brand macaroons (about 7 macaroons per container)

These macaroons are stunning, made with only coconut, honey, and spring water. They are not a raw product, but they are lighter and a “quicker exit” macaroon than any I have found in the raw marketplace (the raw ones either have coconut oil, nuts, or both, making them very heavy). I get them at Health Nuts in my neighborhood in New York City. They are also carried by Health n’ Harmony in Manhattan (and probably several other store locations I’m unaware of). Salud is based in Brooklyn and their macaroons can be ordered by calling 347-295-1191.

Our brilliant Chef Doris has undertaken the challenge of outdoing Salud—so watch out, Salud! She aimed to create a rendition of macaroons that uses half the amount of honey that Salud uses, supplementing with NuNaturals stevia, to reduce the yeast-feeding component. She has come up with a brilliant rendition, and I’m encouraging her to package them for purchase, so stay tuned!


DINNER #2: THE COOL SOUTHWESTERN

To start: a bunch of Cerignola and Castelvetrano olives and yummy, organic, long-stemmed carrots with green tops (No, I don’t eat the green tops, but these carrots taste the best, and the greens hanging off the ends make me feel like Bugs Bunny!)

The Cool Southwestern Salad:

Serves 2

8 ounces mixed greens with herbs (by Earthbound Farms; or make your own by adding cilantro, dill, and parsley to some tender baby greens) ½ cup of the best quality guacamole you can find (or make your own)
1 medium Hass avocado, diced
1 cup Green Mountain Gringo-brand mild salsa
2/3 cup fresh cucumber, diced
1 cup cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
Juice of 2 lemons
NuNaturals stevia to taste

Enjoy the amount that feels right to you. You can mix the remainder into your next salad—just pop it on top of fresh greens and watch it come to life!

Dessert: Same as for DINNER #1, more or less.

I hope that wherever you are, in whatever season, you tune into what the season is telling you. Temper all that you have learned about what is best for your bio-terrain, your detox level, and your social and emotional stages, so you don’t ever push beyond your comfort zone. Most of all, enjoy the moment, because soon this season will be over, carrying us all into a new phase with new tastes, new pleasures, new ways of seeing things.

Now that The Rose Cleanse guidebook is completed (it’s up on DetoxCommunity now, and will be available for non-members tomorrow) and Emotional Eating S.O.S.!, Part III is completed (to be posted later this week on the community site, sorry for the delay), I hope to get back to posting regularly.

In the meantime, I hope to see some of you at the Advanced Detoxification Course starting Tuesday at Organic Avenue here in NYC, or for Detox Walks (every Thursday morning), also here in NYC. The information is on the Events page. This is a great way to get your questions answered. I’m actually amazed that more people haven’t been taking advantage of this opportunity. I’m not taking clients anymore, but here is a completely free opportunity to ask me anything you want! The weather has been spectacular for us, and this coming Thursday promises another stunning, sun-drenched morning!

*NOTE: If you are a beginner, these things are far less dense and acidic as part of a largely raw vegetable “Detox 4 Women approach” than what you were consuming before, so they will be advantageous (as we affectionately call them, “safe poisons”). One person’s poison is another’s antidote!

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For those of us who see through the illusions and injustices of the world, it is easy to get riled up over them. Speaking for myself, if left unchecked, my passion for truth can quickly turn into aggression. But aggression is aggression, whether it’s coming from egotistical oppressors or impassioned activists, whether its intention is to overpower or to reveal truth.
Passion is a key emotion that can lead to great positive change, but in the hands of those who do not understand its inherent trappings, it can lead to tragedy.

Here’s what truth-seekers and change-makers need to know about the passion for reform: We can only make life-generating contributions by maintaining healthy, life-generating passion, not falling into the trap of aggression. This is not an easy task because passion is inherently active, boisterous, lively, expressive—all excitable qualities that resist being governed.

But to get carried away by our passions is to let them own us instead of using them as tools to reach our goals. In my case, my deepest desire has been to recognize the illusions that stand between me and a life-generating experience—personally, communally, and globally—and then to apply these insights to create life-generating results.

Aggression and depression are two common traps of passion. They are the negative polarities to which the pendulum of passion can swing when left unchecked. When passion turns into aggression or depression, it becomes dangerous and gains momentum toward life-deteriorating results. In this way, even the best intentions can turn ugly.

The best life-generating results come from clarity. Passion can be clear or cloudy, depending on how we exercise it. When we let passion veer off toward aggression or depression, we lose our place and spin away from our goal. And like any trap, this one is not always obvious.

The trap of misdirected passion is rage on the one hand and impotence to effect change on the other. It is understandable that we sometimes fall into the trap of feeling inconsolable, depressed, or furious at the state of the world and the powers that be. But if we do slip into such traps, we must not dwell there for long, lest they render us impotent.

Nobody wins—neither you nor I, nor our evolution—by getting stuck in clouded, negative passion. Furthermore, there’s just no time for it. We, our communities, and our planet are already terribly sick, and getting more so by the minute.

So how do we open our eyes and the eyes of others to the realities of our world, and how do we watch the slow motion of the wheels of justice without becoming impatient and aggressive—or so furious as to become apoplectic, or so depressed as to become suicidal? I have spent a lot of time chewing on this question because it has been part of my personal journey.

If our passion for truth can swing toward the extreme of blind aggression and anger (e.g., hatred, shouting, fighting, violence, dogma, etc.) and toward the related extreme of depression (apathy, impotence, surrender, self-numbing, substance abuse, addiction, suicide, etc.), we must ask ourselves, “What will bring the passion back to a healthy range?”

The answer is joy. According to the great modern mystic, Almine, joy is “the desire to live.” Almine also coined the concept that joy is the emotional mate to passion. That is to say that passion, like any emotion that falls out of balance, must be “checked” by its partner emotion, joy, in order to remain in the sweet spot. Joy can bring us back to equilibrated, life-generating passion.

For example, when I catch myself leaning toward imbalanced states of passion, I immediately remind myself what all this work is about—I envision a world that works for humans and for all life. I hold close the vision of a world that embodies joy, like Anastasia’s, like life-generating native communities that work in inter-dependant harmony. I focus on what makes our inner and outer worlds brim with natural life. The desire to live guides me back to a passionate approach that serves my purpose rather than diluting it.

This approach lifts me out of aggression and into that sweet place where passion and joy pulse together. It brings my warrior out of imbalanced fight mode and into productive protection of all that is good, magical, beautiful, and harmonious.

To give you a visual illustration, think of desire as the key that turns on the ignition, passion as the accelerator, and joy as the wheel. Passion gives us the energy to create that which we desire to manifest. The desire is the reason we choose to pursue a vision. Joy keeps us on the life-generating road.

Notice there is nothing remotely passive about pulling passion out of aggression. Passion in its equilibrated state is actually more powerful and effective than aggression. It actively works to build a new reality, rather than strengthening its opposition with knee-jerk resistance and ineffective battles that only spill vital energy and fan hatred.

Remember, we always run the risk of strengthening that which we oppose. Instead of fighting against big business and insane cultural paradigms with just another brand of brute force and insanity, we should use our energy creatively. We can do more good by healing those aspects of ourselves that reflect the destructiveness of the world. In reforming ourselves, we can liberate ourselves, and thus empower ourselves to help others heal as well.

We must lead by example. By creating alternative ways of life that actually work, we can create a whole new template for others to try when they, too, are worn thin by the old ways.

So many people talk the talk. They want you to know they eat a raw diet and practice consciousness, and so on and so forth. They desperately want to be seen in this light because they do not yet own it. They want to be whole but they are not yet whole, so they fly in a holding pattern around the life they want, never quite landing on it because growing and changing are so hard to do. This kind of change requires a leap over a chasm, which requires an enormous amount of energy.

The energy must come to the individual in the form of desire, passion, and will. Typically, this potent blend of desire, passion, and will comes to a person only after hitting the intolerable lows of a life that doesn’t work. Sometimes people unconsciously create horrible events in their lives in order to effect change for the better. More often, though, people get stuck in life-deteriorating patterns because their will is inactive.

We all have those aspects of ourselves that stand in the way of personal growth that we tend to shove under the bed rather than face. But this is the first obstacle to change, on any scale. We have to address the need for change within ourselves, not just point fingers at the world. For everything we want the world to overcome, we should overcome something within ourselves.

We have to lead life-generating lives and practice—day by day, moment by moment—what we feel is true, not just talk about it, not just keep on wrestling the same old demons. At a certain point, it’s time to move beyond them, beyond indulgent self-reflection, and take action.

What must you change in your personal life? What dragons must you slay for you to be able to live your truth? Identify the steps you must take, and take them. Don’t be afraid of making a mistake, for there is no greater mistake than inaction in the face of suffering. This is the only way to find your equilibrium and create a way of life that sustains that equilibrium. Be vigilant moment to moment, so you don’t fall into those old traps that would corrupt your passion and leach your joy. If you do get pulled one way or the other, toward aggression or depression, work to reclaim your sweet spot as soon as you can. Keep practicing until you can hold that space longer and longer—until it comes naturally to you.

I know this is a major task. But this is your chance to have a real life, to be free of your demons and dragons (call them what you will), to live and to lead by example. Everyone wants to be free of the old traps, but who is going to show them that it’s possible if not you? If you merely wallow in your issues for too long, you will miss this amazing opportunity to live, truly live, in all the wonder and beauty of the human form. This is your chance to bust out of your cage, to lead a life of exhilarating growth and ever-greater levels of freedom.

People usually enter this work wanting to change their bodies and improve their health. What I hope most people come to realize is that correcting misguided eating patterns is just one obvious part of becoming whole again. It is an essential step to regaining our clarity and equilibrium—breaking free of the cages that hold us, the illusions that paralyze us with fear, the clouds that loom overhead and dictate our future—not just to look good and stay out of the doctor’s office. We do this work to increase our joy, to embrace life and to give life with every fiber of our beings.

So when I find my inner warrior falling out of balance and lashing out in rage against authority figures, I remember that this is my passion succumbing to imbalanced aggression. I remember the vision of life that I am working for and hold that vision until I am clear about my real mission. Then, if that assertive part of myself still wants to express itself, I can allow it to do so from a place of awareness. I give it some room and watch it act out its part, and then I put it neatly away, like an actor might remove his or her costume and makeup after a performance. This way, I can maintain balance even while letting my inner warrior express itself. Of course, I am not always so perfectly aware, but the more I witness myself in this manner, the more I am able to remain centered and empowered with clarity of purpose.

My personal quest has always been one of equilibrium (it also happens that I am a Libra, the symbol of the scales, or balance). Finding equilibrium is like finding the Holy Grail—or the alchemical recipe for transforming our lower (base) self into our higher (rarified) self. It is an experience that comes with great clarity.

People tend to equate equilibrium and balance with moderation. I think this is a mistake. The common saying, “Take everything in moderation,” is a pet peeve of mine. When I hear it, I always chime back, “Especially moderation!” Moderation and balance have become intertwined concepts, defined by our culture as having a little bit of everything. The problem is, if you have a little bit of everything in our culture, you’ll be sick and very mentally and emotionally imbalanced.

The Buddhist tradition speaks of the middle way, but this is not moderation as our culture knows it. The Buddhist middle way is the place where the body and mind are extremely clear, only after being purified by asceticism. It is the middle way because it is the place where life can flow, where the stream is fresh in the center of the flowing river. It is the place where you are so abundantly filled with life force and inner peace that you are not lured into states of extreme happiness or sadness by outside events. Rather, you are whole because your inner life is whole. You are aware of what is truly life-generating, and you are able to hold yourself in that place consistently.

The modern individual cannot achieve this by partaking of his or her unnatural world “just in moderation.” A cup of coffee, a single donut, a nine-to-five job, a turkey sandwich, a bag of chips, a coke, a cigarette, an hour of television, a single beer, a small burger, a couple of medications, a bit of Metamucil, a touch of milk of magnesia, twenty minutes of exercise three times a week, and a prayer before bed—here is a life of modern moderation. Here is something utterly out of balance.

Equilibrium is the sweet spot in all things. It is the place to look when you are healing aspects of yourself that seem impossible to overcome. Ask yourself in each case, “What is disrupting my equilibrium here?” Then apply what you learn, and remember to employ joy to keep your passions as a truth-seeker and change-maker positive and fruitful.

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Because of industrial agriculture, and because of changes in ocean currents caused by industrially induced global warming, there are increasing numbers of ever-larger hypoxic zones in oceans all over the planet. In some regions, such as off the coast of southern California, oxygen levels have dropped by 25 percent in the last twenty years. In some regions, such as a 1200-square-mile patch off the coast of Oregon last summer, there is essentially no oxygen in the water whatsoever. This kills bottom-dwelling creatures like crabs and stationary creatures like anemones, and forces fish to at the very least change their migration routes. It allows jellyfish and squid to move in, and causes great mats of anaerobic bacteria to grow.

Do you think that if these zones—caused by the activities of industrial civilization—were in the air and not water, and do you think that if these zones frequently passed over major cities and caused people to flee their homes or die, that those in power would stop the activities that were causing these zones?

Nah, I don’t think so either. I think they’d figure out a way to make a dollar selling tanks of oxygen. Soon enough, a lot of people would consider this normal. And a few environmentalists would get really fed up, and, why, by gum, they’d sign a petition, and maybe even ride their bike (recycled oxygen tank strapped to their organic cotton backpack) to their next Voluntary Transformation Club meeting. The earth can’t take this much longer. I don’t know about you, but neither can I.

—Derrick Jensen, from a letter to his inner-circle “reading club” and his upcoming book, Dreams


Our culture takes away all the real essentials in our lives—the things that naturally conduct health, joy, and connection—and then, in their place, offers “solutions.” These solutions are often welcomed and celebrated, and in time they become a seamless part of our reality.

To recognize this phenomenon, we must see through many layers of cultural illusion. It sounds absurd that one day we’ll think it’s normal to walk around with tanks of lab-generated oxygen strapped to our bodies for survival—can you imagine?!—but wait, look what we’ve already accepted as normal…

Our civilized climate is already inhospitable to the human organism. Yet we completely ignore this fact and assume that the shortcomings of our bodies, minds, and emotions in this setup are normal. In fact, we pay homage to modern medicine, psychology, and technology for providing solutions because, from this cultural vantage point, the alternative would be to perish, or at least to suffer as humankind did before these advances.

The very fact that our civilization is not life-generating to our species (let alone other species) remains hidden to most people. We are under the spell that our civilization should set the standard for all others—it should be revered. It brings to my mind the image of elegantly attired couples dancing on the Titanic as it’s sinking.

The so-called solutions reinforce the illusion that everything is running smoothly, that all is well and normal. They keep people believing in this culture. Sure, any number of citizens might see a movie like The 11th Hour, Food, Inc., or Revolutionary Road and feel a surge of outrage, but just as quickly that feeling fades and they fall back under the old spells that keep them dancing on the Titanic.

A culture (in our case, post-agricultural civilization) provides a blueprint for the life of its people, and the solutions it offers are like the nuts and bolts that hold the structure in place.

Imagine for a moment the common blueprint for the life of a child living the American Dream, with all its ups and downs: school, sports, play dates, getting sick, wearing glasses, getting braces, playing video games, skateboarding, watching television, sleepovers, tests, friendships, losing virginity, getting drunk, feeling reckless, summer jobs, graduation ceremonies, dates, proms, disappointments, finding a job, trying to please parents, running into trouble, making bad choices, excelling at something, feeling great about life, failing at something, feeling horrible about life, not understanding life but carrying on nonetheless, finding a mate, and so on and so on.

Cramming our lives with activity after activity, we become so busy, so intimately and multiply connected to the cultural blueprint, that we mistake it for who we really are. We become so entrenched in the demands of the blueprint that we fail to recognize that it enslaves us. The blueprint is so profoundly reinforced that it’s hard to recognize that it’s the cause of our pain and confusion—that is, if we’re aware enough even to acknowledge our pain and confusion.

If we take this cultural blueprint as our only guide, as our only means of navigation, we must accept all of its conditions and solutions:

• It fills the air with substances that inhibit the flow of our breathing. Solution: a steroid inhaler.

• It ruins our water supply and makes living spring water largely inaccessible. Solution: bottled water.

• It offers a life plan that begins with miseducation—forcing children to sit for hours on end indoors, imposing a curriculum that excludes essential information about the nature of our world, and filling the brain with facts that are drilled into memory only to be forgotten. Solution: PE classes that are more about discipline and competition than joy and playfulness.

• It offers stimulating, refined substances for our food and drink that make people of all ages expand with toxic by-products (e.g., gas pressure, fat deposits, yeast overgrowths). Solution: fewer calories and more exercise.

• It gives us many strained relationships with family and friends that suffer from deep disappointment and poor communication and remain broken in ways we don’t know how to fix. Solution: therapy, self-help books, and a “that’s life” approach.

• It gives us birth defects and childhood leukemia. Solution: fundraisers.

• It gives us infertility. Solution: Clomid, Clomid, and more Clomid. (Who knows, the next round might take!)

• It gives us cancer and so-called incurable autoimmune diseases. Solution: chemotherapy and more fundraisers.

• It programs us to be insatiable, materialistic, status-conscious consumers. Solution: credit cards and debt. (Or wait, is it the other way around?)

• It gives us self-serving, impotent governments and political parties. Solution: more of the same and fundraisers.

In the context of this cultural blueprint, the solutions (like the oxygen tank in Derrick Jensen’s above scenario) make sense and seem completely acceptable, normal, and necessary. But in the context of the natural laws of life, they are flat-out insane.

The natural health world of Pilates classes and power shakes may pose as an alternative solution, but it has actually been co-opted as a reinforcement of the mainstream blueprint. It has become an industry much like any other. Do you think the Aborigines, Cheyenne, Bushmen, or Hunzas ever attended exercise classes or drank power shakes? C’mon!

As adults, we must be told how to breathe deeply, something we were born knowing how to do (most children breathe properly without any instruction) but lost through acculturation. Moreover, there was a time, before the environmental assaults of our civilization, when the air was so well oxygenated that we could get more vitality by sipping the air than we can get today by deep breathing in our cities and suburbs.

We are encouraged to take multivitamins and mineral supplements. Why? Because the topsoil has been denatured by civilized methods of agriculture and food production, and people can’t be expected to eat enough fruits and vegetables.

We are offered antidepressants to combat the feelings of a blocked and imbalanced body (chemically, physically, and emotionally) because of the way we live.

We hand our children off to childcare facilities so we can work all day in jobs that support this juggernaut of madness. We even suggest such a modern setup proves the evolution of our culture and the empowerment of women. Sister Suffragette, please! It’s just another oxygen tank in a dying world—another of our civilization’s mad solutions!

We have places to put our parents when they can no longer live alone. Poetic justice for all those hours of being cared for by strangers and coming home to empty houses after school? We have lost touch with the life-generating, inter-generational threads. Rarely do we see a family in which the grandparents are honored as contributing forces of guidance.

We go to gyms to offset sedentary jobs. During the workday, we look forward to the lunch hour just as much as we looked forward to recess when we were in grade school.

We spend half our attention on communication devices but never really connect from the heart or even hear what our own inner voices are trying to tell us.

We have very few examples of real love relationships but an endless stream of romantic entertainment, matchmaking services, and dream weddings.

We spend our precious lives working jobs we hate to pay for things we’ve been programmed to think we need.

We have no oxygen. We are wearing oxygen tanks. We perceive it to be normal. This level of cultural absurdity has already come to pass. What are we going to do about it?

Our bodies are dying, suffering all manner of illnesses because we are so clogged up and the vital fluids of life cannot do their job. Blood flow, lymph flow, and intestinal flow are all blocked and septic. What do we do? We turn to doctors, pharmaceuticals, “natural remedies,” vitamins, and super-food supplements to help us counter symptoms that we fail to understand. With these in hand, we go about the “bon continuation” of our toxic lives and accept the toxic norms, teaching our children how to follow in our footsteps.

Many who see through the illusions of our world end up turning on themselves because they don’t know what else to do. They often hide behind substance abuse and addiction. It seems that every day another celebrity or former child-star has died of a drug overdose or other form of suicide, not to mention all the non-celebrities who slip away from life unseen. Many more will follow. Rich or poor, famous or unknown, the set design is the same—whether elaborate or Spartan, it’s still a façade.

If we continue to accept the “solutions” offered by our cultural blueprint, we will come to accept that oxygen tank. As long as we work in jobs we hate to buy more junk to distract us and reinforce our illusions, we are working toward this oxygen tank. One day, we will heed the advertisement, “Yes, it may be expensive, but your life is worth it!” We will save for it like parents save to send their kids to college—working our whole lives so our children can break through to the next level of societal acceptance, the ultimate validation in a world gone mad.

If we continue to ignore the depletion of oxygen in our oceans, rivers, and lakes—which are the very lifeblood of the earth and all of its inhabitants—there will come a day, sooner than we realize, when we will all need artificial oxygen just to live. The scariest part of this scenario is that we will come to accept it as normal.

The earth can't take this much longer. I don't know about you, but neither can I.

For Love of Oxygen and Consciousness,
Natalia

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At first glance, becoming raw-vegan or vegetarian seems a logical way of honoring life. Most people do so for their health or for moral reasons. I, for one, applaud anyone who looks for alternatives to the mainstream diet-lifestyle and wants to be part of the solution. But this is not the solution it is thought to be, nor does it exempt anyone from a society that kills animals and wrecks the environment for its food.

The raw-vegan/vegetarian paradigm indeed offers a lot of useful information, but much about it is still misunderstood and misinterpreted. That’s because most people fail to examine it within its full context (e.g., how the plant life is cultivated, what is consumed in the process, etc.).

Mention to a raw-vegan or vegetarian that agriculture is the single most destructive human act against life on this planet and you are likely to be met with either silence or disbelief. In most cases, people who embrace such a diet not only eat that way but identify themselves as “raw-vegans” or “vegetarians”—it’s who they are! Many of them will be stunned to hear about evils of agriculture because it calls their whole identities into question. It’s not a nice experience. This is the same reason that many mainstreamers keep their heads in the sand about the realities of our culture. They can’t face a reality that would shatter everything they know to be true.

I may be the bearer of this difficult experience for many of you, but I know the majority of you would rather know more and face this dilemma than avoid reality. It is vitally important for this topic to come out in conversation, especially when there is so much dietetic judgment being tossed around. Too many people are sporting raw-veganism and vegetarianism as a badge of honor or, worse, as a proxy pulpit for dogmatic self-righteousness.

It is time for all that to end. I hope I can offer this information in a gentle way, in a safe place to look at it, process it, and see where it leads. Ultimately, I hope that this information sparks conscious appreciation of how to nourish the body and enjoy the fruits of the earth in a less destructive way.

Most vegetarians have no idea that commercial farming (organic or otherwise, regardless of species of crop, including grain, corn, and soy) decimates animal habitats, kills animals under plow, eradicates plant species as well as millions of microbes and insects, and permanently destroys critical topsoil to the point of infertility. Commercial farming not only cruelly impacts the habitats in the immediate land that’s specifically cleared and groomed for said crops; it also dams up rivers to irrigate and provide power to these farms (often causing chemicals to leach into the water), thereby killing countless species of local fish and birds.

The common vegan-vegetarian diet, due to modern agricultural methods, is as destructive to life and to the environment as a carnivorous diet is. I hate this fact, but I accept it. In light of this knowledge, we must go further to find a real solution. We cannot just become vegan or vegetarian and stop there. (And no, I’m not suggesting breatharianism. Relax, keep reading!)

I still cringe to think of it: if I’m buying produce in the average market, I may not be buying, cooking, ordering, or otherwise serving up grilled fish, baked chicken, or impala stew to chew through with my little canines, but fish, animals, and poultry are nevertheless casualties of my salad.

I live in a city and buy produce from my local health food and gourmet stores. I enjoy and physically benefit immensely from the delicious plant-based meals I make from those purchases. But I would be gravely mistaken if I thought countless species of animals didn’t suffer and die for that salad (or even for those life-generating veggie juices and blended shakes that we use to detox and neutralize the radiation and positive ions in our environment).

As much as this distresses me, I know in all honesty that my lifestyle is not harmless. I am sullied by the stench of society; no butterfly or blue bird is likely to land on my shoulder like I’m Snow White in the forest. I am party to the destruction of our planet through agriculture. My actions support life-deteriorating acts. That’s a fact. It is some comfort to know that I am trying to do more each day to evolve my life in a life-generating direction. I dream of the day that the production of my shakes, juices, and salads will be as life-generating to the world community as it is to the community of cells in my body.

If we want to lead harmless, life-generating lives, we need to incorporate all the information we can, take the full context of what being raw, vegan, or vegetarian really means: eating small amounts of mainly light, living foods grown and gathered by the most inoffensive, conscious methods possible. We must also be willing to adjust our lives even further, in ways that might require even more sacrifice and dedication of us. Take heart: the degree to which we must change to regain our balance directly reflects the degree to which our culture has veered off course. These are the hard facts we face as children of a grossly misguided generation. Of course, it’s not all our fault: we have inherited the accumulation of so many wrong turns dating back to thousands of years ago. But it is our fault if we do nothing to get ourselves back on course!

Remember, the earth, like our bodies, is an interconnected organism. If a great portion of it is toxic, the whole is toxic. The earth’s blood (i.e., its oceans and rivers) has been compromised, and the poisons are flowing everywhere. Further, manure, the very substance that fertilizes the ground, is comprised of either dead animal flesh, bones, and blood or chemical fertilizer, NPK. By all means, eat vegan (I do, with very few exceptions, and without the label) but be conscious of this wee fact of life!

In the life cycle, the earth effectively consumes animal carcasses to yield food and give rise to more life. In other words, life consumes life to continue living and evolving. The ancients all knew and supported this. They didn’t try to live in avoidance of death. Rather, they lived with awareness of the role of death and venerated all life, especially when life was sacrificed for their continued sustenance!

It would be nice, I agree, if we could avoid encountering death on our way to nourishment, but the very cycle of life requires all bodies to return to the earth. Arguably, the microbes of earth (the soil) are at both the bottom and the top of the food chain!

The beef, poultry, dairy, and fishing industries have been rightly cursed by animal rights activists, but we cannot stop there. Nor should we assume that the consumption of animal flesh is always inappropriate. A native hunter who fully understands and honors the life he himself is taking for his sustenance, and grasps his connectedness with the whole community of life that sustains him, is doing less harm than the average uninformed raw-vegan or vegetarian of today.

Our civilization’s approach to agriculture is just as offensive to ecosystems as it is to topsoil. Agriculture has decimated the land in this country with the clearing of trees and shrubs and all that lived within them—this is in addition to destroying our topsoil. In the 1400s, the topsoil was at least 20 feet deep, and today it can barely boast a measly 2 inches, but those are 2 oh-so-precious inches! That’s not to say we should not be vegans or raw foodists, but that we should understand our dietary lifestyles in the right context.

“So what is the right context?” you might be wondering. The best I can offer at this stage, all things considered, is something that most people won’t be ready to embrace: to live with a very small vegetable garden (“Anastasia style” per Anastasia from the “Ringing Ceders” series by Vladimir Megre), encouraging the renewal of the soil and enabling wild edibles as well as wild non-edibles and the local animal species to regenerate.

In this context, with the understanding that much time and healing will be required, I can envision life returning to this planet. Not surprisingly, the solution hearkens back to a model that worked for humankind for millions of years before the thorough corruption of civilization. Our civilization emerged with agriculture; the two concepts are inseparable.

I am aware of what this would mean for life as we know it. For such a vision to take root, people would have to let go of the old paradigms. If that seems impossible, consider the unprecedented physical and emotional pain that people are suffering nowadays. We are hitting more walls than doctors have diagnoses and medications for; our health workers cannot keep up with the ills of our current way of life. The pain of civilization is closing in on our maximum thresholds of tolerance and becoming physically unbearable. Our greatest hope at this stage is that people, pushed to the brink of survival, will be forced to consider the alternatives.

New realities grow from seeds of consciousness. We have to see a future, have a vision of it, in order to find a way to get there.

It’s funny and ironic really. The only way for the soil to heal, the endangered species to multiply, our bodies to be fed the way they need to be, for all living beings to be honored and given the natural right to thrive (or die out as the case may be) is for life to go back to its wild state. This idea will likely be a stretch for most of you. I couldn’t swallow that reality until relatively recently myself.

Again, I don’t believe this has to happen immediately. What should happen immediately is for us to become conscious of how the food cycle and all natural life cycles work—the basic concepts that we should have learned before we were 5. If you can understand the nuances of the natural world and bring them in to your day-to-day consciousness and thought processes, you will be heading in the right direction.

Allowing both plants and animals to reorder themselves from the industrial chaos will recover (a) the soil, (b) many perennial plant species that are best for us, as opposed to annuals and domesticated hybrid plants that we’ve developed for taste and appearance, (c) many endangered species, and (d) the natural predator-prey relationship. For example, as the mountain lions and wolves come back, the overpopulation of deer on this continent that crowds out and threatens the lives of many bird and land species will be rebalanced.

Of course, for mountain lions and wolves to come back, cities, industries, and deforestation projects would have to be stopped and reversed. That’s a tall order, but just that mean we should avoid it. We can’t just scrap the truth because it’s scary or requires tectonic changes to our civilization. Rather, I believe we should adapt ourselves to the truth of the world in which we find ourselves. This level of change will have to come from a profound shift in worldview, a realization that there is far more value in the thriving of natural life than in material riches and positions of power.

In the meantime, we can at least be as honest and conscious as possible. I’m not quite ready to stop eating the commercially grown, domesticated hybrid we call carrots or stop buying lettuce because a bunny may have been plowed right out of this world for that lettuce to reach me. But I can be conscious of it! Further, I cannot know these things and condemn a meat eater, now can I?

I will hold onto a vision of a time when we’ll all have small gardens of our own that bypass the devastating effects of large-scale agriculture, and thus allow much of more of the earth to grow wild. It’s an evolution that starts with consciousness and may someday result in a world filled with people who have passed through the gauntlet of modern life, gleaned the lessons from it, and then left it behind for the far sweeter, more balanced path of the natural world.

We need not avoid death to practice harmlessness. We need only be conscious of our interconnection and truly love and appreciate the fluid exchange of life and death. Can we live without death? Can the lion lie down with the lamb? I tend to believe we are part of a much bigger, more spiritual vision, but as long as we’re not conscious enough to embrace what’s real in the physical world, we’ll never be ready to expand our awareness to greater parts of our being. We must begin with learning how to be good stewards of the physical world.

This will require our patience and dedication. Nothing will happen overnight. Baby steps, progress—not perfection. When we shift our consciousness, we shift our world. True change comes from within and sends meaningful ripples outward. We need to build a vision for a new world to take form. And that’s the short, easy answer, friends.

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Dear Friends,

This blog is actually coming as a surprise to me and emerging as a result of a recent series of not merely coincidental events. They all happen to circle around the same theme: judgment.

I have always been completely honest with you all--both because I have nothing to hide and because I have always felt that the more we share openly, the more we can help one another heal and become more free. I have openly shared my life’s journey, including the physical, mental, and emotional anguish that fueled my indefatigable search for answers.

As you might imagine, for all the people who are attracted to the wisdom of this work, there are always going to be some people who are offended or threatened by it. Sometimes these people express their criticism to me in highly unconstructive ways (fortunately not that often). I usually consider their comments, appreciate their perspective even if I don't agree with them, and move on with my day.

Recently, I stumbled upon a litany of really callous remarks on the comment area of a video interview I did last year. My initial reaction was to feel hurt (I’m human), but then I thought about all the judgment and confusion that haunted my childhood and young adult life. And I thought about how painful it was to be under the shadow of all those projected expectations. I don't have that experience anymore. What's more, I realize that all the harsh words and criticisms were merely a reflection of these individuals' wiring--a result of a culture of immature judgment. A knee-jerk sense of entitlement to judge without facts is all too common among people in our cuture--particularly when armed with letters on a keypad and undisciplined opinions behind the anonymity of the internet.

I have learned over the years not to take these comments personally. Their words are like swords that they have pointed at themselves, albeit unconsciously. How can one not feel compassion for that kind of pain if one has suffered it oneself? Such comments serve to remind me of the wide variety of people out there who are observing this work, peeking in to see what we're up to over here.

On this particular occasion I was criticized by about a hundred viewers for the following reasons: first of all, because my breasts are way too small (assumed to be a result of the detox lifestyle rather than my genetic dice); next, because my chest bones are visible on my décolletage, I am far too thin, and I look unhealthy; because I am a poor public speaker and use my hands too much when I talk; and, finally, one person even commented that I didn’t seem like a happy person. Well, I certainly hope no one is going to them for psychic readings! I resisted reading further.

My first reaction was a deep disappointment. I wanted people to take in the information, not my cup size. But I guess this was naive of me, given our cultural attitudes. The point of these critics' commentaries was to dismiss the ideas about cleansing by systematically stripping away my credibility based on my on-screen image--in their estimation, not what a healthy woman should look like.

As you have been learning here, most people do not know what a healthy body looks like because they are either overly conditioned to accept the norm of overweight, puffy mainstreamers or they assume that anyone who is of a lean girth is a disordered dieter. We don’t see many truly healthy specimens--male or female--in our culture. Strip away the gas pressure, yeastedness, and water retention and what's left are tight but healthy, energetic, clean cells. Without those acidic waste by-products, the body will look more contracted. But despite leanness, the skin and eyes should be clear, vibrant, and bright. This is not to discount the day-to-day fluctuations in the body (please refer to my blog on the motion created by living foods: A Salad in Motion Remains in Motion), but overall the net result is often (not always, but often) a surprisingly slender physique. Most women don't complain about this!

I was teased in middle school for having virtually nonexistent boobs. It’s interesting to see that some people are still in the middle school mind-set. Perhaps if I had elected to surgically enhance my breasts, that would have secured their approval? I respect everyone’s right to elective surgery, but that’s just not my beat.

Frankly, I like my boobs. They are small but they fed my two babies who are now thriving children of 7 and 9 years old. My breasts have served their purpose as breadbasket to them, sealing their future health. Moreover, the man I love adores them and has for 18 years. Need I say more? Eating a cheeseburger (as several of the commentators recommend I do) or accumulating gas pressure and bloat will not serve my highest good (though it may make my critics feel better about their choices). And it's certainly not going to make my boobs grow a cup size.

I’m not here to make the authors of such thoughtless comments feel more comfortable. If I were to strike back, I might suggest that they consider their own body fixations, since they appear to be the ones with the issues. Of course, it is not my place to force anyone to look at their issues. I can only be true to myself and be of service to those who want this service.

I’m grateful for my body. I spent many years being hard on it, and it survived my abuse for eight years from ages 13 to 21. Since then, my body has run on exotic sands, pedaled many hundreds of miles, climbed mountains, borne and nursed children, soaked up sun, and danced all night, many nights. My body also survived a horrible accident when I was a child--I was run over by a bus when I was 4 years old. Both sets of tires crossed and crushed my core, shattering my pelvis and causing internal bleeding that nearly did me in. An entire hospital staff of doctors told my parents that I would never walk again--that was if by some miracle I happened to live. They were also confident that I would never be able to have children. And now there are nearly a hundred comments about my boobs being too small...the irony! On the one hand, it's comical; on the other, it's really sad that so many people think and communicate from that space.

The other irony, of course, is that these comments are being made by people who are obviously surfing the web for diet information--not because they are content with their bodies, I can assure you of that.

Our culture is full of people who are ready to dole out judgments but incapable of compassion. Their hearts are wired shut, and perhaps these judgments are their cries for help. This is a group of people who are quick to swallow the advice to be found in eight-second soundbytes spoon-fed to them by their media gods, but slow to take responsibility for the larger context of their personal health. And they are quick to look to the government for social security and Medicare solutions, but slow to realize the impact of their way of life on the next generation.

You or I may never measure up to the standards of these people, who will always find someone to project their own shortcomings onto, but why would we ever aspire to? I do admit, though, that it’s a real disappointment to be confronted with so much ignorance when all you want to do is grow with your community into a more evolved way of life. It’s a very real reminder of what we’re contending with, and that we must maintain a steady course, full speed ahead, even while respecting the fact that others are at different stages of their own journeys. We must remember to honor everyone on their journeys and really mean it.

Those who misinterpret this work and do not understand the context of cellular cleansing have accused me of being anorexic or orthorexic or extreme in some fashion. I understand that this work appears extreme to the uninitiated, but I can assure you that I am not suffering from an eating disorder. My path started with disorder at the tender age of 13. I have been there and know what that is about. I could not in good conscience be a leader in this work if I were still under that influence. I can only be true to myself and in so doing live out my purpose. That is all I can do. Like I said, I understand that this way of living appears extreme to many people. But I caution that it's the mainstream lifestyle that's extreme. Reclaiming our natural balance in the face of it only appears extreme from that worldview.

I welcome your questions, and I understand where they are coming from. I will openly and honestly answer any genuine questions you have about me or about this work. My goal is to help illuminate the way, not to shroud it in more confusion or make it seem scary. What I will not do is engage with catty, mean-spirited kindergartners who do not want to understand but only criticize in order to continue courting the old paradigm that feels familiar but not safe, consistent but not liberating.

As you walk this path, I urge you to be thoughtful and discerning rather than self-righteous. We can all be better at this. Whenever we dole out this type of unconstructive criticism, we are usually projecting our own pain, limitations, and self-judgments onto others. We can try to avoid undisciplined commentary, and, when invited, offer constructive, thoughtful reflections. But let's check our motives and shadows before we judge. If we are to be of any good use, we cannot indulge in dogma, self-righteousness, and lowest-common-denominator criticisms. We do not need to one-up our brothers and sisters. We won’t get anywhere on that merry-go-round. Rather, let’s first look within ourselves for what's obstructing our ability to see and love one another. Then what we offer can serve the highest good of all.

If you have any questions for me, be they personal or otherwise, I will be happy to answer them. Feel free to post them as comments and I will respond in kind. In the meantime, I hope you will join me in diffusing the unloving judgments that are so common today, particularly in the dietary wars and self-righteous dietary communities. They do not serve anyone’s highest good and they certainly do not make anyone’s blood cleaner (or boobs bigger) ;)

With Love in Unity,
Natalia

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Many of you are noticing that, in my writings, I seem to be coloring further and further outside the lines. Some of you welcome this, while others of you find it unsettling. I can understand both reactions.

As I was walking through the snow-laden paths of Central Park at daybreak this morning, I thought about what has helped me through this transition—from seeing our world through the eyes of a typical girl raised in L.A. to someone who has started to see through its illusions. Let me start by emphasizing that it has not been easy for me; it has taken me more than ten years of rigorous focus, and of feeling my way through the dark.

Having encountered countless teachings and teachers along the way, I can count on only one hand the ones that have been truly useful. One thing they all said in common, in recognition of my busy city life, is that this work is hard to do “in the world.” They emphasized that it is advisable for people who undertake this work to go into isolation for several weeks, months even. As for most of you, that wasn’t an option for me. With a family, my projects, and my husband’s work, I would to have to be creative enough to go through this process in a Midtown Manhattan apartment.

Shifting your perspective this dramatically is a shock to the system. It requires a deep desire to grow—a desire beyond anything else in your life. If it’s not your deepest passion, it’s not going to happen for you. To put it another way, your desire to live has to be so strong it moves the mountains in your way. It also requires a daily dedication to growth. This is not like homework; it’s not merely a matter of forcing yourself to sit down for twenty minutes a day to complete a page of boring exercises. Not at all. This work should be a deep source of joy, something that helps get you out of bed in the morning. It’s that part of your day when you follow whatever lead is working best for you at the time—such as something you’re reading, like the Anastasia, Daniel Quinn, or Derrick Jensen books, or an audio recording that takes you deeper, like the Almine meditations, or simply sitting in contemplation. Devote that time to whatever you respond to best, whatever contributes most effectively to your growth.

If you miss a day, no biggie. If you spend a whole day on it, great. Do what works. No one is watching or judging you. Again, this is not homework! It’s the call of your heart, your blossoming.

Sometimes it won’t feel like you’re blossoming. Sometimes it will feel like you’re confused and stuck. That’s par for the course. You will open up again. Take a break. Read something else. Go clubbing. Whatever. Don’t worry about getting stuck. Trust your heart to lead you toward truth, and you’ll get there sooner or later.

This work is processed in cycles. There are times when you’ll take in new information and process it, and you’ll feel it very intensely. This is the time to cocoon yourself, to try to stay out of the fray. Stay home, keep warm, do those things that keep you feeling cared for. Limit your exposure to stores, crowds, and social events. Then, once you’ve absorbed what you’re capable of absorbing from that cycle and you feel energized by it, you’ll discover that you own the knowledge and no longer feel imbalanced by it. You’ll incorporate it into your worldview and lifestyle and start to really benefit from it. Then, when it’s time to take in more, you’ll go through the learning and processing cycle once again. Recognizing the differences between successive cycles and honoring what they require is essential to a smooth progression.

I used the word “shock” earlier. Shock and trauma are important to understand. They are a disturbance to both the emotional and physical body. We hold our shocks and traumas in the body, and when they are awakened they can make us shake (emotionally and physically) because they ring an incoherent energy pattern through the system, which needs to keep moving through in order to exit. If they don’t find an exit, they become a chronic disturbance.

Ours is a culture of fear—everyone is so afraid. Our fears are primal, and date back from our childhoods. We fear punishment from authorities. We fear stepping out of line, rejection from the community, looking different, being ridiculed, being alone. We fear other people’s anger, and our own. Challenging our culture means challenging the power that holds us under its thumb and wants to keep us there. We are programmed to be very afraid of this shadowy dictator, though we don’t normally think of it as such. Consider how hard it is for people to stand up to their own family members just to be able to eat vegetables instead of burgers and bread. Dietary views are the stuff of kindergarten compared to worldviews. This is why we have to take great care to work through the shifts in our worldviews at a pace we can manage. We must also anticipate the shaking that comes when the fear wells up in us.

As fears well up within us, so will the repressed traumas of the past. It’s the same awaken/release process that we go through when we physically detoxify. Expect to shake—a lot. It will pass, bit by bit. The more you shake, the more that incoherent energy pattern of fear and trauma will leave you, and the more powerful you will become. You will begin to see the world much more clearly. You will become more yourself, an effective and peaceful warrior.

When an animal in the wild has a traumatic experience—say, for example, narrowly escaping the jaws of a predator—that animal will immediately rush to a safe place and shake. It will shake until the energy connected with the trauma has been fully released. Instinctively, it knows to release it. Why? If the incoherent energy is not released, it will cling to the animal’s physical and emotional systems, acidifying its blood, organs, and cells. The animal will be compromised.

Animals that are traumatized in captivity cannot retain the internal communications that would keep its instincts intact in nature. Humans are similarly compromised in a culture that delivers too many blows to our emotional and physical bodies and blocks their means of release. They ring through the body, wrecking its integrity.

How many people have you seen whose repressed internal traumas are evident in their gaits, in the positions of their head and shoulders, in their mannerisms? If you’re at a loss, just hop on the number 6 subway train that runs through the main artery of Manhattan and you’ll see what I’m talking about. But, of course, it’s everywhere, throughout rural and urban communities alike. We should all move like happy, relaxed children—easy in our skins, light and limber. But the traumas of the world cause all living beings to morph into the shapes of our pains.

Along the way, I’ve sometimes questioned myself. I’ve wondered, am I the one that’s crazy? Is there something wrong with me to see this world as a mad place, when everyone else seems to think this is how life ought to be? As crazy as I might sound to the uninitiated, I have finally concluded, no, I am indeed seeing very, very clearly. There is nothing wrong with my vision. I stand in my peace and clarity and see the madness all around me. And I invite you to do the same every time you start to question the sanity of your heart’s deepest desire to find a better way of life.

I’m not trying to scare you with doomsday talk about the conditions of our world, our produce, and our progeny. I’m simply describing the way the natural world is responding to the trauma that our civilization is continually inflicting upon it. Personally, I find the doomsday entertainment and “end of times” dramatizations put forth by some groups and religions reviling. To me, they betray an insensitivity, a mentality of people who have fallen into the cultural trap of perceiving life as cheap and disposable.

By contrast, my purpose is to show you what is really going on—so the problems are neither vague nor overly dramatized. By understanding how the life cycles work in nature, you can see the future all by yourself. In describing the degeneration of seed, soil, and DNA, I am not trying to make you afraid, but to empower you with new vision, to make you ultimately unafraid. I want each one of us to face the truth, not sugar-coat it, so that we can begin to do the necessary work of cultivating life, of reversing the destruction of our bodies and our world before it’s entirely too late.

I realize that I do not always deliver this information in the softest, most palatable way. I hope to become better at this over time. But for now, please know that I offer it in the spirit of love. I want us all to grow together, to help each other grow in knowledge, perception, strength, beauty, and vitality. It is not an easy process, but it is ultimately as deeply joyful and fulfilling as it can sometimes be painful and shocking to the system. I am here to help you through the inevitable shivering and shaking along the way, to help guide you through the dark forest to the great clearing that awaits you.

Love,
Natalia

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Hi Everyone:

It’s been an extremely busy time and I want to apologize to those of you who are waiting for Part Two of Emotional Eating S.O.S. It will be available in the next few days. The project has become much bigger than I originally anticipated. It looks like it will now be a guidebook in four parts, instead of just two. Part Three should be available by the second week of March. The guidebook is currently only available to members of the DetoxCommunity, as a work in progress, but will be available for purchase on the main site once it is complete. I am also developing an audio meditation to accompany the book.

The dynamic of the living world is changing rapidly now as the affronts to the human body and to nature at large have reached a critically harmful stage. There is so much I wish to share with you about how to contend with these changes, what the signs are, and where it’s all destined to go, so that you can live with greater awareness and protect yourself. If this sounds dire, that's because it is. There's a great deal for us to discuss and understand. I cannot emphasize enough that the old health and diet methods are impotent in this new climate (and supplements, powders, and similar products are less relevant than ever).

If you are a newcomer to this work and are craving more detailed diet and weight loss tips, please refer to the many blog posts of the last few years that cover diet, and to the membership DetoxCommunity where we--either I, Ana, or the advanced community members themselves--can address all of your concerns.

At present, due to the shifting natural climate, there is too much new knowledge to restrict our discussion to diet alone. There are macro- and microcosmic devastations occurring in the living world. Both the Earth's soil and the cells of our bodies are being further depleted of life force by the day. I want you to understand what’s going on, how best to care for yourself, and how to diminish the effects of these devastations on your well-being. Nothing is more important to me than to share this information with you, which I will continue to do in the Emotional Eating S.O.S. guidebook and in my future blogs.

I will also be presenting this information as part of the March workshop. We still have a few spots available. If you’ve ever thought about attending, perhaps this is the time for you. These intimate gatherings are the best way to deliver this information. You can read more about the workshop here: http://detoxtheworld.com/events.php

I am very thankful for all of your kind e-mails and comments, and regret that I cannot always respond to them, due to intense time demands. I am also continually warmed and gratified by the supportive, loving communications among the DetoxCommunity. This is a group of admirable character, strength, and passion. Thank you for your confidence. I hope to be of continued service.

Love,
Natalia

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This morning, I just took my first exercise class in probably a decade. My beloved, adorable, oldest childhood friend recommended it (bless her heart) and convinced me to go. Even in the middle of winter, I still make a point of trekking through Central Park on foot or bike almost every day, but the weather conditions have been particularly challenging this week.

On the brochure, the profile of a young, tiny, firm buttock gracing the cover promised a worthwhile time investment. The place was close by, and offered lots of attractive amenities, so I thought, why not, it could be nice to shake things up—I might even learn something new.

The class was described as a blend of Pilates, Lotte Berk, yoga, and ballet. Images of finely whittled torso leaping across the floor in grand jetés came to mind. I dropped the kids off at school and made my way through the fifteen or so blocks of headwinds to the Madison Avenue location. That walk would turn out to be the most effective part of the excursion.

But before I continue, I should mention that I generally stay out of gyms and exercise classes for a few reasons:

1. Fresh air is essential. I place a premium on fresh air, especially when it is high in negative ions; in New York, that means in the winter, fall, and spring. The indoor lifestyle requires city dwellers to take as much time outdoors as possible. Maximize your daily intake of new, clean air with long walks, jogs, ice-skating, skiing, biking, outdoor yoga, martial arts, team sports, or whatever else gets you breathing deeply outdoors. The more time you spend outdoors and the more deeply you breathe, the more you bathe your cells in freshly charged air and revitalize your body.

The fresh air factor is gravely overlooked in the exercise class and “gym rat” culture. Without a regular bath of simple, negative-ionic-charged air, the cells will get sluggish, weak, and prone to the mutations of free-radical damage from stagnation and acidity. A brisk walk for an hour outside in the fresh air will always beat an indoor exercise class. This is also why it’s so important to sleep with the windows open—to renew the blood with oxygen to maximize the benefits of sleep.

2. I have far better alternatives. I’ve got my feet and my bike. Sometimes, I can even get to a tennis court or a mountain or a beach. (Next week, I’ll be in Jackson, Wyoming, stocking up on mountain air). At home I have my rebounder, and when the mood strikes, I can move all the furniture and dance my heart out. Yes, the body has to move every day, but we need to know how to move it without someone telling us what leg to lift when and how many times! I’ve studied yoga and dance for years and strongly believe that they should be learned not as ends unto themselves, so one can take classes from here to eternity, but so one can learn how to use and move one’s own body. You have a body. Master it. These disciplines can offer guidance so you don’t make mistakes of alignment. But then take what you know and own your moves!

Learning to master your body is not something we should even have to be taught. It’s basic and intuitive, though the right guidance can certainly accelerate the learning process and help prevent injury. Owning our bodies, rather than just blindly entrusting them to exercise instructors year after year, is yet another aspect of our life education that is undervalued and overlooked.

3. Gyms and exercise classes are hotbeds for self-loathing. Gym-goers constantly compare themselves to each other and either hate or worship what they see in the mirror. Either way, their physical self-esteem is dictated by the mirror or the eyes of others. I often forget that women especially are vulnerable to this competitive reflex, because in the detox lifestyle it tends to dissolve. But the moment I step into a gym—BAM!—I’m reminded of all the bad feelings that keep everyone pounding away on the machines. In my experience, I find gyms and exercise classes to be unhealthy for the mind and self-esteem.

4. They depress me. Gyms carry a heavy air of disappointment and resignation. Women especially are chronically disappointed with the results, yet resigned to spending hours of their lives in exercise classes in hopes of eventually feeling better about their bodies—or at least maintaining the status quo. They follow regiments that will never give them the body they want, but they do it anyway because they don’t know what else to do.

5. They frustrate me. Gyms remind me of all the people who need help but are beyond my reach. I wish I could emancipate them from their old, useless patterns. While I already have wonderful clients who inspire me every day, I need only go to a gym to see that there are still masses of people who are still stuck in the caged mentality. Meanwhile, they look terrible—you can see it in the way they are retaining water, in the puffiness and dark circles around their eyes, in the lines and weight in their faces (not to mention elsewhere) that indicate struggling livers and kidneys. In short, their blood chemistry is way out of whack, yet they keep attending their exercise classes and slathering on expensive creams and makeup.

6. The music is bad. What more do I have to say?

But today, I went to this exercise class with an open mind. I was looking forward to lifting, reaching, and twisting my torso, moving my body in elegant, fluid movements, tuning into my core power. I enjoy engaging my body’s strength and flexibility and remembering the importance of good posture, a nimble spine, and an open center.

This class didn’t offer anything remotely like what I was hoping for. For all its popularity among Upper East Side women (think The Nanny Diaries types), there was nothing modern or evolved about it. As I said to my husband, it could have been 1983 with Olivia Newton John on the speakers and Jane Fonda calling out the moves. In fact, that would have been more fun and more effective—and the music would have been better!

I lost heart about twenty minutes into the class. The moves were not even intuitive, let alone evolved. For an hour we were asked to move in ways that made the body more tense, more in need of correction! This class was an unnecessary stress all around.

I thought back to the cover of the brochure, with its promise of a tight, tiny set of buttocks. Then I looked around the room at the women who seemed to be regulars. I don’t mean this in a catty way at all, just as an observation in light of the advertising: no one had a good figure (really, not a single one among thirty women, not even the teacher).

Here’s the thing. That image on the brochure, were it not so obviously photo-shopped, could only belong to a more evolved type of human, one who lives in harmony with the natural world like a “native”—not a Manhattan socialite or any member of the “civilized” race over age thirteen. You cannot have a set of buttocks like that unless you’re living like a native or you share a gene pool with one!

So here are all these women looking for sleek, fit bodies, trying desperately to fight the clock. They are gathered for an hour of agony with all their accumulated intestinal waste matter and corresponding gas pressure and water retention. They suck in their cores and lift their legs five dozen times in a variety of movements for sixty minutes, but they are never going to get anywhere. They’ll go for a ladies lunch over grilled hormone (I mean “chicken”) salads and decaf cappuccinos and be back again later that week, or the very next day, to suck in their stomachs and contract their muscles again. They’ll sign up for another series of classes and rush to make it on time, grabbing a protein bar on the way.

They’ll hate every second of it (this class was not remotely enjoyable) and they’ll still hate their bodies when they strip their impeccably tailored designer pants off their legs and stand in front of the mirror. What they will not get from this class or the lifestyle that goes with it is that set of buttocks advertised on the brochure, or that wonderful innocence of sometimes forgetting you have a body when you feel so good in your skin.

The way I understand it, this class is booked up on the hour, every hour, every day. This is what these women—who are supposedly in the know on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and who can afford anything—do with their resources. (Why on earth aren’t they calling Doris for food delivery, drinking veggie juice, and eliminating all that accumulation through a colonic tube? But who am I to suggest such a thing?!)

As I was pulling my things out of my locker, I overheard a couple of the women discussing the many businesses they’ve created and successfully sold. These are not a bunch of dim gals. It would be easy to pigeonhole this group as brainless ladies who lunch and shop—but no, these are highly educated, ambitious entrepreneurs and executives between the ages of 25 and 60. Yet, for all their higher learning, they know nothing about how to care for their bodies.

Sometimes I feel like a puma pacing around in a circus cage. We live in the Big, Bad Apple, which I both love and hate. Half the time, I’m in love with this city; the rest of the time, I find myself looking out, hands clenched around the bars, praying for escape (especially around this time of year, when my kids are climbing the walls!).

So I take laps around Central Park, and I find ways to keep myself connected with my center so I don’t hurl myself against the cage and hurt myself. But it is a cage, nonetheless, and not a place for either a puma or a human.

However, on days like today I realize that my cage is not what it used to be. I sometimes forget that people still beat themselves up mentally and physically in search of a better life experience in their bodies. I used to live in a cage like that, a cage of unfulfilled promises.

Yes, I’m still in a kind of cage; I still move within a culture that is a threat and affront to the human spirit. My cage still makes the cherished untamable part of me hugely resentful at times. But my cage is not what it was ten years ago. I’m not in a supermax lockdown prison like I was during the first twenty years of my life. Today, it’s more like what in penitentiary lingo is called “pre-release.”

As I suffered through the remaining forty-five minutes of class, reluctant to put my body through some of these unnatural maneuvers, I couldn’t help thinking: It’s such a pity. Here all these women are investing all this time, energy, pain, and hope in this torture chamber with hideous music (filled with lyrics that objectify women), when all that lean vitality is right there, waiting to be freed. If they’d remove the waste and gas pressure, they’d find natural, outstanding muscle tone, skin that naturally hugs the body, and cells and tissues glowing with wellness.

I continued along that train of thought: Give me two weeks with them, with no exercise at all, but all the right moves for removing waste, gas, and fluid imbalances, and watch them start to see what they are looking for. But I couldn’t very well stand up in the middle of the class and say this.

I waited until class was over, feigning as much participation as I could, gathered my things and headed home. I would love nothing more than to help these women. But, I’m not going to get into the commerce game and build the kind of establishment that will attract them. I had a fleeting thought of speaking to the manager about doing a lecture series there or joining forces somehow, but all the worldly logistics that go into something like that would take even more time away from my understanding children, from my own reunion with my wholeness, and from what I can offer all of you! So, I take the experience for what it’s worth—a reminder that the diet and exercise world has not changed much.

Now, allow me to return once more to the perfectly poised buttocks on the brochure. (Really, you should see them!) What makes such buttocks native to the world but alien to our culture? Such buttocks come from clean lineage, lived in the outdoors on alkaline water, air, and sunshine. They come from cells that have remained pristine by their very interconnectivity with the natural world—cells that have soaked in the rays of the sun through the skin, absorbed that powerful substance into the blood and circulated it throughout the body. Such a body is unfazed by its beauty because it is one with the world, in love with life. There’s no place for vanity or one-upmanship in such a body.

Sometimes it seems like there's a big time and energy investment in this lifestyle -- from arranging the fresh veggie juice, fresh salads, food combining and bowel cleansing to contending with the critisism of friends and famiy. Whenever I get the least bit annoyed with what it takes to keep myself in high states of health and mental clarity, I think about what life was like before I knew and implemented this knowledge. This class reminded me of what unnatural and uncomfortabe lengths other people go to to try to get some physical balance and aesthetic appeal. It was yet another reminder that I should never complain about my rituals and the time and effort they may take. I'm so fortunate to have the knowledge I have and to put that time and energy into things that work and are not only to my immediate and aesthetic benefit but to my long term vitality and ease of being.

Tomorrow, I’ll bundle up and head out into my little wilderness of Central Park. I’ll be grateful for the crisp (ok, Arctic) air and I’ll give my cells their bath in the renewing, oxygenated atmosphere and the cage won’t feel so limiting.

As a native of California, for years I wished away the months of brutal cold in the Northeast. But because of what I know now about clean Arctic air, I embrace it as the cornerstone of my winter health regime. I just make sure to have the right accessories: wooly hat, gloves, and iPod. The only healthy and sure way to get your buttocks looking more like a native’s is to do everything in your power to renew your blood chemistry.

So get outside and go native, not neurotic!

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John Gast’s the "Spirit of the Frontier" (1872), portraying settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure and aided by technology.

As you might remember from grade-school American history, Manifest Destiny was the 19th-century U.S. claim that its settlers were divinely ordained to expand across the North American continent. This was the defense for the cold-blooded extermination of countless natives, whole communities that had been thriving on this land for at least tens of thousands of years.

Peace was never an option with the European settlers, who treated human life as cheap and disposable. Nothing short of complete possession and power over the land would satisfy the self-declared new owners. This was implicit in the "blessed" mission. Besides, once they secured ownership of the land, the settlers aimed to "civilize the redskins" and allow them to pay taxes.

A kind of poetic justice has come to pass. By a series of events, this land--once rich in minerals, metals, and fecundity for millions of years--is now comparatively lifeless. After just 250 years in the hands of "civilization," the land has none of the lifeblood and resistance to disease it had when the settlers claimed it from the natives. With all of our science, higher learning, and so-called breeding, we've thoroughly leached the land of its vitality. Gold stars all around, my fellow Americans.

Mother Immunity

But contempt for this dark side of U.S. history is not the point. The point is much more fascinating. It is the story of "mother immunity" and what happens to her--and to all of us--when greed and egoism, in pursuit of fame and fortune, assume leadership and don the hat of public service.

Let's start at the beginning. It all begins with topsoil and something called humus (not the kind you eat with pita). Humus is the precious substance that ensures nutritional balance in the soil. Humus is waste metabolized by soil--not the compost itself, but the compost that the soil has metabolized. Plentiful humus guarantees natural protection from disease. The absence of it guarantees disease, pests, and weeds.

Unadulterated, pre-colonial North American soil was as fertile and rich with humus as any that you could find anywhere. Plant life flourished in it and the animals that consumed those plants received protection from the soil as well. Nature was just doing what she does best--conferring her immunity on her creatures, just as a mother's milk confers her immunity on her baby. This is all normal in an interdependent, mutually sustaining system of life.

But when lust for ownership and domination comes swaggering in, the system breaks down.

"The Father of Chemical Agriculture"

Let's go to Germany in the early 1800s where we'll find Justus von Leibig, a scientist who managed to convince farmers that humus was not actually the source of highly fertile soil. He presented a compelling theory to suggest that nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash (potassium carbonate) were the basis of soil fertility. Consequently, widely distributed propaganda convinced European and American farmers that nothing would grow without this German-mined blend.

During the First World War, U.S. farmers had to resort to finding the potash cocktail on their own shores. It turned out that the elements were abundant in the States, and they were mined so successfully as to become a profitable export.

Leibig's theory spawned more chemicals that made him and his supporters rich while rapidly impoverishing the soil in Europe and North America. When Leibig finally realized his mistake and retracted his theory just a short ten years later, admitting that the organic extract, humus, was indeed the secret to soil fertility, it was too late. Companies were growing rich on these chemical fertilizers, and they were not about to relinquish their projected future profits.

Our Bodies

Given the importance of humus to soil and plant life, it should be no surprise that chemical farming practices result in devastating, irreversible effects on our bodies. Any good organic farmer will tell you that humus is the source of a plant's disease resistance. Artificial fertilizers not only fail to restore immunity and fertility to plants and soil, but poison the whole food chain.

By charging recklessly ahead in the name of Manifest Destiny, we have decimated the soil, robbed ourselves of our greatest survival tool, and rendered the human body helpless. By eating food grown in chemically treated, nutritionally devoid soil with low immunity, we are not getting our share of balanced nutrition.

As a greedy superpower, we took over 3.79 million square miles of fertile soil and squandered it. Now the majority of the remaining farmland is home to fields of inedible GMO corn and soy, and filthy factory farms where animals are raised on GMO crops, antibiotics, and hormone injections. And the corporate-governmental Goliaths are working hand over fist to perpetuate the madness that keeps us eating what they feed us.

Now consider this analogy: vaccinations, antibiotics, and synthetic growth hormones are to human tissue and blood what chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers are to soil. We've raped the land, and now we inject poisons into our children's bodies--denaturing them and causing mutations to their cellular structure and DNA--and call it disease prevention. Yes, companies are getting rich off of this, too.

Our Destiny

We manifested our destiny, no doubt. We are reaping in tears what we sowed in tears. Call it karma or cultural comeuppance, but it's really just Nature doing her thing. Far from setting out to hurt anyone, she is simply sending the decomposers (pests, fungi, bacteria) to break down that which is not viable so she can self-clean. We are the ones who have created a non-viable cultural organism and living with the consequences: widespread cancer, disease, mental illness, and infertility.

Frank Kafka once said, "You may not destroy someone's world unless you are prepared to offer a better one." Sure enough, we'll have to shimmy our way out of this deadly agricultural system through reeducation and a major reshuffling of our priorities. We need to focus on what works for the earth, water, air, plants, animals, and humans--not what works for satellite dishes, SUVs, Pop-Tarts, and countless other products and technologies that do not generate life.

Agricultural health is our health. We cannot separate the two. We need to think not only like scientists, but also like organic farmers to understand how our bodies interact with what we consume. The Renaissance man and woman who will survive and seed the future will have to come home to the basic facts of life: biology.

This land is your land, this land is my land--for better or for worse. We must understand the land before it's too late, before we lose it forever.

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What humanity came up with and held onto during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn’t work well for products, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn’t work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. That’s what we have, a social organization that works beautifully for products—which just keep getting better and better every year—but very poorly for people, except for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. Our ancestors lived in societies that every anthropologist agrees were nonhierarchical and markedly egalitarian. They weren’t structured so that a few at the top lived lives of luxury, a few more lived in the middle in poverty, just struggling to survive. They weren’t riddled with crime, depression, madness, suicide, and addiction. And when we came along with invitations to join our glorious civilization they fought to the death to hold on to the life they had.

—Daniel Quinn, from If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways


You know the parable of the frog: If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger. But if you put a frog in a pot that is filled with water that is cool and pleasant, and gradually heat it until it starts boiling, the frog will not become aware of the threat until it is too late.

This is a pretty good illustration of how our culture, through slow but steady changes away from ancient communities that worked for humans for millions of years, now finds itself in acute distress—on the verge of snuffing out human life.

Undertaking the cleansing lifestyle is a little like reversing this process. As the accumulated waste with its accumulated toxins and bi-products leave the body, the proverbial boiling water gets turned down. What a relief to escape the jaws of death! However, the cooled water is a gateway to another stage: although the water temperature is no longer a threat, you look around and realize that you’re still in a pot!

The roots of our suffering are in this pot—in the civilization in which we find ourselves. The towering, cylindrical walls rise up around us and separate us from our home in the natural world. The pot isolates us from the interconnectedness of the greater living world, which our pre-technocratic ancestors simply took for granted. The best I can determine is that this isolation is the cause of all modern psychopathology. As long as we are cut off from our interdependent relationship with the living world, we are like a plant cut from its roots—roots that would otherwise generate and regenerate us. Cut off, we become madmen, consumed with ourselves, our fears and shortcomings, our need to possess and protect ourselves against this world in which we’re stuck.

If you have escaped the boiling water by successfully cleansing your cells and tissues, you’re sensitized now to the myriad other injustices to the human organism that most people just accept as normal life. People, like frogs, don’t belong in pots. They are a part of the whole natural world. This is the reality beyond the immediate peril of the murderous water temperature. Frogs and people belong in nature doing what frogs and people do best—leaping across stones and streams, creating life-generating communities, and bathing in sunlight at the break of day.

At this stage, seekers may look for respite in spiritual or philosophical systems, while isolating themselves further, suffering in silence and antisocial behavior because the world doesn’t make sense to them. Or they may just ignore the internal unrest and tell themselves that this better place they have reached is the best one can expect from life—that it’s the end of the road, a dead end they should accept. Only when it dawns on them that they are in a place they don’t belong will they initiate the next cycle of growth and liberation.

The next step toward more gratifying life experience is to leap out of the pot, regardless of the water temperature. The more we respond to things that disturb us, instead of writing them off as normal, the more we discover that we can make liberating changes.

The wonderful thing about life and growth is that there is no endpoint. It’s nice to stop boiling, but even tepid water can’t make the pot our home. It’s a tomb. Frog or man, being buried alive in a pot is far worse than suffering a short, painful death.

The beauty is that with every cycle of growth another one awaits, as illustrated in the upward spiral of the double helix—the very promise of human life, past, present and future! Life-generating challenges satisfy and vitalize the mind, body, and soul. (Hell is stagnation and decay, the opposite of alchemy.)

If we think of heaven as an adventure of greater vistas, greater knowledge and creativity, and the opening of gateway after gateway, we can begin to create heaven on earth.

Time to jump the pot, turn it upside down, and play drums froggy-style!

Ribbit!
Natalia

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That’s when a smoke was a smoke and groovin’ was groovin’ . . .
—from “Cherry Bomb” by John Cougar Mellencamp

Before I left for my trip to South Africa last month, I went to at least ten different groceries and farmers markets trying to find a carrot that tasted like a carrot instead of a piece of crisp cardboard. All I wanted was a simple bunch of tasty carrots—a request that should not have been so hard to come by in a culture that is meant to be so advanced, in a city admired the world over for affording its residents access to anything at any hour. Turns out you can get just about anything just so long as it’s not one of the hundreds of plant species that are made obsolete every hour by our “civilized” way of life.

In the end, I was only mildly successful, having found a farmer in the Union Square market that offered something that vaguely reminded me of why I liked carrots in the first place.

A week later I was consuming locally grown carrots in a remote beach village in South Africa like they were going out of style. They may not be going out of style, but it seems they are going out of print! That’s because their BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL, or BIOMASS for short, is deteriorating.

First let’s do a little Biomass 101 and then we can see how it’s affecting our food. Here’s how the biomass cycle works:

1) A species with its unique DNA composition proceeds through life in the conditions that formed it. As long as the environment stays the same, that species will continue to self-replicate, renewing its biomass from its sources of nutrition, air, sunshine, etc.

2) Changes to the species’ environment means changes to its biomass. Every adjustment made to that which it consumes and in which it’s immersed is manifested in its renewing cells (which consequently make minute changes to the DNA as well).

3) This is how all life adjusts and changes with its environment and explains how life is ever evolving, never stagnant. On a healthy planet and in a life-generating world, species will develop and evolve. In an unhealthy environment, species will deteriorate or devolve (only the rogue bacteria and decomposer species will be strengthened by such an environment).

Take the orangutan, for example. The orangutan is a frugivore (fruit is the mainstay of its diet). The orangutan consumes fruit and its body transfers that “sun food” into its biomass, creating new bone cells, new muscle-tissue cells, etc. The same thing happens with the herbivorous horse, cow, and elephant, animals that simply eat fruits and grasses to maintain their enormous muscles and skeletal systems.

4) All changes to the quality of the air, soil, water, and sunshine will have an effect on the biomass of the animal that consumes it. Devitalized environment = devitalized biomass of the animal. As our environment becomes exponentially more acidic, all factors become devitalized. If, in addition, there are synthetic chemicals introduced to the environment, the subsequent new biomass will be made up of that too.

5) So the constant renewal of biomass for the species is subject to the environment. If that which the species is exposed to changes, the biomass of that species will change to reflect that. So the old saying “You are what you eat” is a lazy way of saying “Your biomass is what your body converts from your environment and consumption into your renewed flesh and blood.”

6) Every species on the planet is subject to what its biomass is renewed from.

This is why my beloved carrot, along with all our favorite edible pants are going the way of the passenger pigeon. The carrot we used to know is becoming extinct because of the enormous shift in its environment. No more is it developing its biomass from nutritionally sound, balanced seed and soil. Quite the opposite: it’s losing its vitality, which is all too evident in the taste and smell of the vegetable (as is all the Earth’s bounty), ipso facto.

Even organically grown carrots are losing their “carrot-ness.” Sure, there may still be orange-colored, carrot-shaped substances coming out of the ground comprised of carrot-y biochemical components, but the generations of carrots to come will be a sadly compromised version of their former, proud carrot lineage.

The biochemical composition of an organism (the chemical components that make up the plant’s cellular structure) is affected for better or worse by:

1) The integrity/purity of its seed;
2) The composition of its soil (the earth and water);
3) Its time in the soil and/or connection to the soil through its vines and branches (i.e., its time left to ripen);
4) The quantity and quality of direct sunlight it receives; and
5) The quality of the air in which it grows.

All of these things that I list as seemingly separate pieces are actually one factor: the plant’s agricultural sphere, or, if you prefer, its “incubator.”

As most of you know, modern soil is tragically nutritionally deficient and the water that flows through it is contaminated with chemicals (only less so if organically grown, as we must remember that air, soil, and water mix no matter how much we would like to think we can isolate a piece of land and its production). But this is why our beloved vegetables are literally endangered species, arguably already extinct in many regions!

In addition, the air quality is vastly more acidic than ever before. The plant that breathes acidity and is rained on by acidity is going to suffer deterioration of its biochemistry. Our produce is in crisis.

How do the FDA and USDA help prevent further deterioration or address this crisis? It supports destructive genetically modified (GMO) farming and deplorably rank animal raising/slaughtering conditions. The governmental agencies are working hand-in-glove with the food industry Goliaths as part of a juggernaut of corporate-government greed. The promotion of this kind of decimation of plant and animal (and ultimately human life as well) is born of either an extremely low intellect or extremely perverse agendas (serving, for example, the pharmaceutical industry).

Consider that in 2007 the USDA mandated the irradiation of green leafy vegetables (with the exception of organic leafy greens). How do laws like this get passed? Fear. The FDA/USDA convinces the masses of the dangers of raw produce. I would not be surprised if they staged the E. coli contamination in spinach. Raw dairy products are also largely outlawed in most states. Slowly but surely, our freedom to consume life-generating substances is being taken away.

If you want to be able to eat real carrots, greens, and almonds (another irradiated U.S. product), you’ll need a good “dealer.” If you want to eat them in a few years’ time, I suggest taking up a new hobby: start collecting unadulterated seeds—and please let me know if you find a good source!

If you know which farms to buy from, you can still get your hands on fairly tasty produce, but with every passing harvest the fruits of the earth are deteriorating—losing more and more of their vitality and alkalinity, as evident in their smell and taste. Think about that for a moment: the biochemistry of the plant is not just in its material component, but also in its smell and taste. We can detect the biochemical deterioration, the loss of integrity, with our noses and palates. If we could see the plants’ energetic/vibratory fields, we would see that they, too, are continually dimming.

Meanwhile, the sloppy, filthy way of raising animals for the mass production of meat and dairy continues, but no one is getting immediately sick from it because they are pumped with antibiotics.

This finally brings us to Fung-eggs and Corn-fish.

As you are well aware, today, the average store-bought eggs come from factories filled with hens that are injected heavily with hormones and antibiotics so they can grow big quickly, produce copiously, and not carry disease despite the deplorable filth they are raised in. But what you may not have realized is that the very biochemical composition of the animal’s flesh, eggs, and milk becomes those substances.

To put it another way, what they consume today becomes their flesh the next day. When you eat the flesh or offspring of the unfortunate, tortured hens, you are not eating an egg: you are eating a fung-egg, an egg combined with fungus, puss, synthetic hormones and antibiotics that come to comprise the hen and the egg. You might call it “the incredible INEDIBLE egg.”

Fung-eggs are what you’ll find in your local grocery store. Your average store-bought eggs are rife with the fungus that developed from the biomass of the hen’s diet of GMO corn, hormones, and antibiotic injections.

These are not eggs; they may come in an egg-shaped shell in a cute retro carton, but they are a biochemical aberration!

I used to be able to recommend eggs to yeasted dieters all the time. Not only were they non-yeast feeders, but they were filling and familiar. Eggs once seemed so gosh-darned normal and made this lifestyle seem so easy. “Have a four-egg omelet with goat’s cheese and sundried tomatoes—just have it with a salad instead of bread or potatoes,” I would enthusiastically offer. “Throw a few raw egg yolks into a veggie juice and shake it up for a body-builder elixir,” I would tell my male clients.

Up until a few years ago, eggs made an excellent transition food for people getting into this lifestyle. Now, they must be consumed only if raised free to range on pastureland, eating what chickens should normally eat: bugs, greens, and whatever else they scrounge up.

The same is unfortunately true for all animal products, including fish, another previously ideal go-to food for yeasted transitioners and nearly everyone else; fish is light and easy to digest, easy to get in restaurants, easy in social situations, and just so delicious and satisfying. However, today, the normal store-bought fish is raised on CORN! And not just any corn, GMO corn—the stuff that is taking over most of the farmland in our country (along with GMO soy)! When you take a fish and feed it corn, its biomass will become starchy. You are not longer eating fish but a biochemical composite of corn-fish!

All the animals that are raised on soy, corn, and other starches (which is an utterly foreign diet for all beings, including the human variety) and injected with antibiotics and hormones are no longer what they were originally. They are replacing their old cells with these substances, and these substances create copious amounts of fungus and gas pressure as bi-products in their flesh, so what you eat is their meat or milk or eggs mixed up with hormones, antibiotics, fungus, and noxious gasses. You may as well be mainlining antibiotics and hormones yourself and eating the GMO starches in cookie form. The irony of the Atkins Diet should not be lost on you!

In the past, an egg was an egg and fish was fish. If you bought and cooked eggs, you were actually consuming amino acids and fats of the offspring of a chicken. If you bought, caught, or ordered a fish, you were getting the flesh of a fish composed of the environment of the ocean.

Today, fish, eggs, and all animal products are quite another thing. Today, what you are getting when you bite into an omelet, filet of grilled fish, rotisserie chicken, filet mignon, rib eye, etc. is a mixture of the GMO starches that animal was raised on, the antibiotics and hormones it was injected with, and the fungus those substances created in the cells and tissues of the animal when you take that bite.

So look before you bite. And don’t shoot the passenger pigeon!

Your free-range, grazing friend,
Natalia

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Tom DeVito Colon Therapist Owner, Release NYC releasenyc.com

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I would like to share a concept I personally enjoy using that has helped me to understand the way things unfold in our world—why some beings grow beautifully and radiate life while others wilt with lifelessness. I like to call this tool The Book of Life.

This version of The Book of Life is not a giant leather-bound document that sits on a podium at the entrance of the proverbial pearly gates with a list of names of those who will (or won’t) be permitted into heaven. This Book of Life does not discriminate arbitrarily according to the bias of an anthropomorphic judge, or of a more charitable benefactor dolling out forgiveness like Hail Mary’s. I’m not talking about any biblical or manmade book.

Rather, this version of The Book of Life is the very living soup in which we live and swim; it tells the story of what generates life and what deteriorates it. The ability to read this living story playing out all around us gives us a unique power of perception to understand why some things in our world thrive while others face sure ruin. This is perhaps the most essential form of literacy for a human being, a language that everyone should know but that no educational institution in our culture teaches.

Reading this Book of Life is something of a lost science. The wizards, magi, white witches, high sorcerers (call them what you will) were the keepers of this sacred knowledge. They understood the Natural Laws that explained why something would thrive or deteriorate. They were fluent in the essential communication of life and practiced vigilance as their world unfolded in patterns of blossoming or wilting based on the seeds of what was set in motion.

They observed life in its macrocosmic expressions such as in the health and viability of the solar system as well as in the most microcosmic expressions such as in the cleanliness of the smallest cells. Both the micro- and macrocosmic universes told them the story of these life forms and how they interacted with the whole.

Sickness and deterioration were not mysteries to those fluent in the language of life as they are to modern science. The wise ones would not go into laboratories or pass buckets around community centers to fund experiments for cures. They would trace the undesirable outcome back to its source, the original offense to the Natural Laws, and take steps to correct it. Their fluency would also allow them to divine the outcomes of myriad situations—whether individual, social, or organic—before it was too late.

Once you become literate and fluent in the language of life, you, too, will be able to divine the probable outcomes of the choices you make. Blossoming and wilting are not punishment and reward; both are the predictable expressions of natural energetic flow. A life-generating choice will render a blossoming effect. A life-deteriorating choice will render a wilting effect.

When you step back far enough to gain perspective and read The Book of Life in this way, coming to recognize the patterns of how life unfolds, the effects of your choices will become astonishingly predictable. In fact, the first time you make this connection, you will suddenly wonder, How could I not have seen that before?

We all have the ability to become our own “prophets” and “seers”—it is actually more of an analytical exercise than a magical one because the Laws of Nature undergirding our physical world are scientifically rooted in fact. Certain things add up to support life and other things add up to undermine it. Most people today fail to put these pieces together because this way of seeing is so foreign to our culturally skewed perceptions.

We learn lots of facts in school and gain some practice in critical thinking, but I have never in all my years of schooling found an institution to teach me about the laws of life. I had to find those on my own, after much searching.

Every generation experiences a distinct mix of the lows to which it has sunk and the heights to which it’s capable of rising. The lows and highs of our generation are engaged in a bit of a tug-o-war, but the risers among us will help to lift all of our brothers and sisters by becoming more “life literate”—by learning The Book of Life as we might have learned a history text in grade school. Becoming “life literate” means literally learning how to read the signs that life is constantly showing us—all of the blossoming and joy and pain and deterioration around us.

Pain, as I have written previously, is not a nuisance, but an alarm bell that tells us something is wrong and requires an adjustment or change somewhere in the works. But we have so many false ways to silence the alarms that only suppress rather than dissolve the pain. We must learn to recognize and receive its message. Only then can we begin to return ourselves—physically and emotionally, individually and universally—to peace and wellness.

I enjoy reading The Book of Life. To me, it is the most engaging book of all. Life is spread out all around us, imparting the most vital stories available to humankind. To learn the language of life is to discover that all the pain, chaos, beauty, and harmony makes sense. When you learn what supports life and what doesn’t, you realize that you really can choose your experiences, not because of some trendy new-age ideology, but because there are indeed Natural Laws undergirding life: certain things that sow a future harvest and others that seal certain drought.

The book is open all around you. Tune in and take pleasure—the more you read, the better reader you become.

Here’s to a new kind of literacy!

Natalia

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In December of last year, I wrote a two-part blog titled “What I Really Want to Do Is Direct.” But I never got to finish it—to include the essential final touch for any movie: the score! After all, what’s a great film without a great soundtrack?

I’ve always been super proud of my dad’s contribution to music in the last century. He was born in 1906 (yes, you read that correctly) and he had a hand in so much of the great music of the ’50s through the early ’90s, including a great many movie soundtracks. (He passed in 1992, but I like to think he was “promoted” to work on “the music of the spheres.”) Sometimes he’d take my brother and me along to early screenings of the films whose scores he was involved in making, before the music had been added. There’s something disconcerting about a film without music, and the same can be said of life without music.

Sometimes life gets heavy and we need to psyche ourselves up if we are to persevere with our highest ideals, our greatest sense of purpose, our most inspired energy. In such moments, I’ve found that nothing beats switching on a personal life soundtrack. Everyone should have one: music that can resuscitate our power and sense of purpose when we need it, or simply re-center us and remind us of our joy, our inner passion, our essence.

So, if you don’t already have a personal motion picture soundtrack for your life that will lift you up when you’re feeling down for the count in the middle of the fourth round, I encourage you to make one. I think everyone will enjoy seeing their Detox The World Friends’ personal soundtracks! Simply post yours as a comment, and it will be listed right here to help inspire others.

To help get you started, your movie soundtrack is ideally a compilation of music that makes you feel instantly more yourself, reminds you of aspects of yourself that you enjoy most, or just makes you feel at home. It should have the power to bring you quickly back to your center, and to give you the energy to serve your highest purpose of productivity and conductivity.

In the spirit of sharing, I will start the ball rolling by offering my soundtrack here. It might seem really hokey to you, but I’m not afraid of hokey, and this is what works for me!

“America The Beautiful” by Lee Greenwood
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Lee Greenwood
“Burning Heart” (from Rocky IV) by Survivor
“The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and The News
“Dogs in the Yard” (from Fame) by Paul McCrane
“Give Yourself to Love” by Kate Wolf
“We Don’t Need Another Hero” (from Mad Max) by Tina Turner
“God Love Her” by Toby Keith
“I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” by Barbara Mandrell
“It’s A Great Day To Be Alive” by Travis Tritt
“The Happiest Girl In The Whole USA” by Donna Fargo
“I Can’t Be A Slave” (from the country soundtrack of The Prince of Egypt) by Toby Keith
“I Got Mexico” by Eddy Raven
“Independence Day” by Martina McBride
“Any Dream Will Do” (from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) by Andrew Lloyd Webber
“Let The River Run” by Carly Simon
“Let Your Love Flow” by The Bellamy Brothers
“Little Bit O’ Soul” by The Ramones
“Me and Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin
“The Moment of Truth” (from The Karate Kid) by Survivor
“Sidewalk Surfin’” by Jan & Dean
“Put Some Drive in Your Country” by Travis Tritt
“Born to Boogie” by Hank Williams, Jr.
“Six Days On The Road” by Dave Dudley
“You’re The Best” (from The Karate Kid) by Joe “Bean” Esposito
“When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going” by Billy Ocean
“We Shall Be Free” by Garth Brooks
“Watchin’ The Wheels” by John Lennon
“The Last Dragon” (from the movie) by Dwight David

Here’s to the music you make, from your fellow DJ at the great party of life!

Natalia

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On August 25th I could be found in the lap of luxury at the larger-than-life Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in the storybook Swiss Alpine village of St. Moritz. Just one month later, on September 25th, I was checked in at the Courtyard Marriott in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Boy, did my coach ever turn into a pumpkin! That aside, what I want to underscore here is that a first-class trip through life is determined not by the number of stars at the hotel entrance, but by the quality of life force flowing through the cells (the stars, if you like) of your body’s internal pathways.

I have enjoyed the good fortune of a colorful life that’s taken me through a wide variety of experiences. But no matter where I am or where I go—whether I have the good fortune to ride in the “front of the plane” and be escorted through fairytale European villages in a Maybach, or to zip through Manhattan’s underbelly in its equally fabled subway system (where I am more often found)—one thing never changes: traveling through life in a clean-celled body is always a first-class experience.

A clean-celled body is the epitome of luxury, so no matter how posh or depraved material things are around me, I can ensure a pleasure-filled life experience by keeping my system clean and high-vibing. Sure, my life experience can be enhanced by certain luxuries, but it’s not dependent (either way) upon outside circumstances.

Life in a clean-celled body is grand wherever you are! This is why I make the daily choices that are central to this way of life. I want to LIVE every moment—to drink in fresh air, breathe deeply, and feel my heart center expand. When I have a clear, open (gas-pressure-free) skull (most people don’t know what this feels like), I feel my spirit dwelling within a sensory body of flesh and blood, which is nothing short of amazing. It makes every moment—everywhere, with everyone—enriching and pleasurable.

When I boarded the flight to Switzerland, my clean-celled tool kit traveled with me. (Rule #1: Have your key ingredients with you; don’t leave them to chance.) My “traveling kitchen” filled with frozen fresh-pressed juices, organic carrots, raw goat cheese, lemons, organic baby greens, stevia, and of course dark chocolate were all in tow. These went into a suitcase in the, uh, “bowel” (aka cargo hold) of the plane. My colon-cleansing devices, and the normal stuff like running and hiking shoes, were also in there.

My personal lifestyle quirks also help me get to know my new surroundings quickly. That’s because I always visit the local markets, which is a superb way to get to know a new place and its people. Upon arriving in St. Moritz, despite toting along my own fare, I was much more interested in the local produce, the local raw cheese selection—and, of course, the local dark chocolates (this was Switzerland after all)! So, I set out on a mission to find the best produce, dark chocolate, and raw goat and sheep cheese in the area. After an immensely pleasurable stroll through the hilly village, I discovered exactly what I was looking for—a little local store run by a couple who refreshed their produce daily with the bounty of the small, local farms.

There before me was a cornucopia of the most appealing just-picked blueberries and raspberries, ripe cherry tomatoes on the still-verdant vine, about ten different varieties of hydroponic greens and sprouts, and the sweetest, crispest, juiciest carrots! And to top it all off, there was a selection of local raw goat and sheep cheeses that went beyond my wildest daydreams!

Fortunately, I was there for a whole week, so I had time to taste them all—there were the sweet, creamy, and soft cheeses; a Manchego that I would have liked to bring back by the case; and others like a Locatelli (a goat-style Pecorino Romano) that I would never have believed was made was with raw goat cheese if I hadn’t known the proprietress was an equally enthusiastic raw goat and sheep cheese connoisseur. This outing to the produce market became a daily ritual over the course of our week in that gorgeous mountain retreat.

We were there for my husband’s best friend’s weeklong wedding celebration, where no expense was spared and the food and drink flowed day and night from one over-the-top venue to the next. The hot Russian girl band was flown in from Moscow; the top DJ flown in from Johannesburg; even Maori (that’s right, as in New Zealand) priests and performers were brought over the Alps to help our friends seal the deal and give their guests the time of their lives. We danced into the wee hours of the morning to these “Spice Girls of Moscow” and the other entertainers who kept the parties raging day after day, night after night.

In between, we stole away to recover in the pristine mountain air, cycling to the purest icy lake to swim and then bask in the glow of the late-summer sun.

But every night, do you know what accompanied me to all the posh venues, where gourmet dishes were plated for the most discerning, worldly palates? That’s right, the real pinnacle of fine dining was my local peasant produce! I discovered a long time ago the remarkable quantity of baby greens one could fit into an evening bag. When all the air is removed, you can fit about half a pound of those greens into a Ziploc back and it takes up a minute amount of space (think vacuum-packed greens). My little evening bag doubled as my tool kit. (Who needs lipstick, cash, or an ID? Make way for the really important stuff like goat cheese). I could make a feast with the items from my bag: a base of baby romaine, topped with some veggies from the served dinner, a generous squeeze of fresh lemon, a touch of stevia, and the crowning glory of some goat cheese. Every meal was for me a bonafide masterpiece!

Then there was the chocolate, of course! Since it’s a treat that begs to be passed around and shared, I take at least three bars with me whenever I go out. In the end, I have a stunning meal regardless of what is on the menu—particularly at weddings and organized seated gatherings, where it can all be very unpredictable, and where what we call the “good stuff” (i.e., raw veggies, avocado slices, raw cheeses, and such) are usually in short supply.

I pull my items out ever so discreetly. After all these years, I am not shy, but nor do I want to draw attention to myself or cause offense. However, what invariably happens is that my makeshift salad looks so appealing in contrast to the served dishes of cooked animal protein and starch that everyone around me wants to know what I’m having…then I briefly explain that I keep an unusual diet…no, I’m sorry this isn’t on the menu…but there’s a great roadside produce stand at the top of the hill…sure, I can draw you a map… (Hey, I’m supposed to be off duty and on vacation here! Here’s the website—I’m going back out on the dance floor!)

Despite all my conviction, I never want to offend (particularly when I am an invited guest), and I know it’s unusual to bring one’s own food to an event. Therefore, I am truly discreet when I am in this type of situation. However, to my very pleasant surprise, in this case my fellow guests not only weren’t bothered in the least by my traveling kitchen and resulting creation, but thought it was pretty cool (and that was before I pulled out the multiple bars of chocolate to pass around)! This gesture never elicits an untoward reaction—quite the contrary. Even my husband, who never knows what the reaction will be and whether he will want to crawl under the table and hide, enjoys the opportunity to boast about his wife’s bag of tricks and how she keeps him in such great health.

In the end, careful adherence to the clean-cell principle, combined with lots of fresh mountain air and sunshine, enabled me to enjoy all this fun and frivolity (which with the typical fare, combined with the wine and the late nights, would have been aging and acidifying) and not be any worse for wear.

Back in Bethlehem, PA, a month later, I was cruising around looking for a fresh produce market. I would be staying in with the kids for the night, and the small town didn’t appear to offer much in the way of decent restaurants, so we searched for a farmers’ market. But sadly, after asking around, all we found was a warehouse store. I’m sure there were some amazing co-ops and fresh markets, but in a pinch they were not evident. But even this warehouse store at least offered organic boxed baby greens and other non-organic produce for which I was grateful. And hark! I had my traveling kitchen, so there wasn’t much I was really dependent upon. I wanted some extra lemons and carrots, so my daughter and I ran into the store while my husband and son waited in the car. We stood at the checkout line and paid for our earthy-looking groceries.

I was put off but not surprised by the plastic smells and endless aisles of needless, harmful items. But I didn’t express this to my daughter. Living in a world apart from the mainstream American lifestyle of strip malls and warehouse stores, I had almost forgotten these places and their life-annihilating products existed. It was my daughter who commented. I wish I could remember exactly how she put it, but she was astounded at the carts lined up at the checkouts full of plastic, boxed foods and “wormy poop” (I had to chuckle when I finally realized she was referring to ground beef)! She couldn’t believe that people could eat hamburgers knowing what they are made of. She noted the pallor of the children and the girth and weariness of the patrons. Even though New Yorkers are a far cry from living in harmony with nature, many of us don’t see this kind of consumption. Furthermore, every store we went into reeked of plastic. I began to understand what water feels like when it’s sealed in a plastic bottle.

Back at the hotel, I tossed a great big salad (in a bowl I got at the dollar store—another toxic store that I had to put to use under the circumstances). I put together all the great items I don’t leave home without, as well as those things I picked up in town. Once again, a little preparation and effort to stick to what I know works best kept me in the great life-wave. It’s never ideal to be exposed to poor-vibration energy like chemically cleaned, poorly ventilated, non-life-generating stores and hotels, but if you can keep this exposure to a minimum and hold fast to what creates and maintains clean cells, you can still surf the great life-wave!

Whether you’re in Bethlehem, PA, Saginaw, MI, St. Moritz, or Tuscany, riding in the back of a Bentley or riding shotgun on the Greyhound, the ultimate luxury is in your hands. Never forget it!

Here’s to the ultimate in luxury—clean cells and all the love and vitality they bring!

Ever One,
Natalia

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When you launch into a diet high in living foods, you will discover that these foods contain a force that creates motion. Non-living foods (cooked proteins, cooked starches, nuts, etc.) do not have this effect on the body. Given the physical laws of motion, if you eat foods with no life force, your intestines will be mostly stagnant.

When living foods suddenly enter your stagnant, acid-waste-impacted intestine, you may feel like you swallowed a bunch of expanding jumping beans! People usually embark on a diet of living foods for the weight loss and digestive benefits, so they are perplexed when their midsection suddenly starts moving and expanding!

One thing I am stressing to everyone these days is that WE MUST ALL BECOME SCIENTISTS. People are too quick to cry confusion in the face of all the conflicting information circulating in health and raw food circles. If everyone would just take a moment to sit with the common scientific sense of chemical reactions and what we know about the laws of motion, they could find all the answers they need without opening a single book or visiting a nutritionist, spa, doctor, or raw food guru.

Pay close attention now, and you’ll gain something of real value. I’m going to give you two scenarios that illustrate the two important concepts that will serve you well in this lifestyle:

1. Imagine taking the remains of dinner and tossing it into a garbage can. Seal the lid. The next morning when you wake up, go to the garbage can and open it. That stench is noxious carbonic gas that has started to grow rogue bacteria. This is what happens in your body—but your body is much warmer, so the chemical reaction and resulting bacteria are much more pernicious.

Now imagine what would happen if you took fruit—the cleanest, healthiest food known to humankind—and added it to the garbage, or to the contents of your stomach, at this moment of chemical decomposition. Would that be healthy? Health means cleanliness, so even though fruit is wonderful, it is not going to generate health in this scenario. Since the chemical reaction in the body is already troublesome, the fruit in this case would just make it worse. If you are bloated and gassy and have not moved your bowels, it’s time to think scientifically about what your next move should be: something that reduces the gas and bloat and annihilates the bad bacteria.

Given the kinetic motions and chemical properties of foods, when you place fruit sugar on top of acidic waste and gas, the result is more gas, fermentation, and putrefaction. This scenario adds insult to injury, contributing to the intestinal distress, and ultimately endangering the bacterial balance of the intestine and constipating the bowel.

Therefore, if you were a scientifically minded live-foods enthusiast, you would take one of the following steps:

(a) wait to have a bowel movement (use an enema, if necessary) to remove waste and gas before it creates more gas and supports the proliferation of bad bacteria;

(b) choose a vegetable juice or vegetables, which will have a neutral effect at worst, and a beneficial effect at best, by hydrating the waste and contributing good microbes to fend off the bad bacteria (ideally, you would first consume some quality probiotics to help the process along); or

(c) just wait a few hours before eating or drinking to give the body a chance to clear up this digestive upset (which is commonly caused by poor food combining, poor food order, overeating, eating while stressed, etc.).

Remember, living food is only potentially health-generating. It is only health-generating if it has an advantageous chemical reaction with everything else going on in the great petri dish of the body.

2. Next, imagine the average person off the street who has consumed mainstream food or “gym head health food”—meaning lots of high protein, lean meats, soy, peanut butter, etc. This food is dead; it has no kinetic energy. Living foods are alive; they have a lot of kinetic energy.

Again, most people come to living foods because they want to lose weight and heal digestive issues and other illnesses. So they don’t expect what usually happens as soon as they eat their first living-foods meal—a ballooning midsection with lots of gas and motion! But if they put on their scientific thinking cap, they would remember Newton’s first law of motion: “A body persists in its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.” Dead food piled on top of dead food keeps the intestine pretty dead. But add living foods—with all their live enzymes kickin’ around having a party—to that dead system, and that system will be moved according to the rate and force of the added food. Living foods will act upon the body in a state of rest.

It’s important to understand that this is ultimately a very good thing. If living food enthusiasts of all levels keep their science caps on and make choices that minimize the development of new carbonic gas—following my guidelines for food order and combinations—they will eventually have clean, contracted, healthy cells. This will correlate to a lean body with tremendous vitality. As you progress, keep this in mind so you don’t fall into the trap of misunderstanding the changes your body undergoes as you introduce more living foods into your diet.

Here’s another scenario: If you’re like me and you enjoy lots of raw salads, along with cooked vegetables, goat cheese, and dark chocolate, you will see your body contract a lot because the goat cheese and chocolate are not expansive in the body like grains and fruits are. This is a good choice if you want to get really nice and lean. But remember that the goat cheese and chocolate can stick in the body (even though they are better than many other foods and very helpful in this lifestyle). But if you switch it up and add fruits (even appropriately timed on an empty stomach) or some all-raw, water-containing meals like blended raw soups and bananas after consuming a lot of goat cheese and chocolate (or fish, which is also contracting, not expansive), your midsection will very likely swell up. This is because even cleaner, living foods, with all their enzymes and motion-filled energy, will hit and awaken the acidic waste residue from these other foods that haven’t fully left the body.

Most people will assume that this reaction is unfavorable and means that the cleaner living food meals don’t agree with their system. But this is not the case. The all-raw hydrating substances are just having a chemical reaction as they meet and help eliminate the acidic waste. This is why many people think that raw foods don’t agree with them when, in fact, it’s a temporary state of awakening the old matter in the intestine. The only way to help clean out the waste is to introduce these ultra-clean living foods (think of them like soap for the intestine), allow them to awaken and magnetize the waste, and then eliminate the awakened waste from the bowel. (You never want to awaken and then fail to release, as all great scientists know!)

If you understand these principles, you can use this knowledge to play with your food choices. For example, I love my goat cheese and dark chocolate, and I’ll enjoy them for several days in a row (with a raw salad and maybe some steamed veggies, but only after I’ve had my green lemonade that day)! I know that the cheese and chocolate, while not heinous, are imperfect, but I enjoy them. I also enjoy my all-raw meals. Currently, my favorite meal is to start with some just-in-season Honeycrisp apples, followed by a raw green salad with lemon and stevia, followed by my ultra-favorite banana-carob-alfalfa-sprout “milk shake” topped with shredded coconut.

This all-raw meal is going to create a bit of temporary expansion in my system when it hits the residue of anything impure (like the cheese and chocolate that didn’t fully leave; only water-containing fruits and vegetables, their juices, and young coconuts fully leave the body, and even that only occurs in a clean, microbially sound intestine). But am I going to freak out because of it? NO! I’m expecting it and using it as a “cleanup tool”—a tasty one at that! I’m doing it on purpose. I’m a scientist and I know exactly what I am doing in my intestinal petri dish. When the water-containing living-foods meal awakens anything sticky or acidic in the intestine, it hydrates it, magnetizes it up and out of the tissues, and carries it out of the body. Therefore, as soon as it leaves with the next morning’s bowel movement, I am better off, despite that temporary expansion.

Isn’t that cool?!

So let’s all keep our science caps on and consider the chemical reactions and the laws of motion as we make our meal choices. This way, we can use food and our food preferences as tools for our health, while understanding the various reactions occurring in the body. It’s really fun getting to know your body in this new way.

Here’s to the kinetic energy of living foods and harnessing the laws of science to improve our life experience!

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Dearest Friends,

I realize that I have not written a blog or recorded a new audio for the community for some weeks. In addition to all the traveling I have done this summer and having my children out of school for the break which just came to a close, I have been processing some very intense experiences. I beg your pardon for the lag but it has been a time of great revelation and I've needed to minimize my expenditure so I could fully receive this new information. Many of you have been extremely patient with me as I have not been able to get back to you with your various requests and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your gentle understanding!

There is a time to inhale and a time to exhale; there is a time to receive and a time to radiate; there is a time to be the student and a time to be the teacher. These last few months have been my time to be the student -- to receive and learn on a new scale. This process will only translate into me being a more effective conduit for you.

To your credit, not a single one of you has complained about the absence of material and for that I am extremely appreciative. You have been patient and turned to each other instead (the community has been bursting with brilliant correspondence, support, recipes and inspiration)! The selfless, loving support that is flowing among you touches my heart. I could not be more pleased and more humbled by how brightly your lights shine and how freely you share that illumination lifting one another up!

What you have learned (and I have enjoyed witnessing) is that there are enough of you on the community with sound understanding and leadership ability that you can lean on one another for your answers until such a time as each of you has mastered this work enough to find all of the answers among your own personal storehouse of knowledge and experience. I've also encouraged my precious associate Ana Ladd-Griffin, who is overworked as it is to try to respond to the community posts when she can steal a few moments away. She will have more and more of a presence on the community over the next few months as I segue her away from some of the day-to-day opperations so that she can do more teaching which is where her talents and knowledge are most needed!

My goal has never been to create followers but rather to give you the tools to your own mastery of this subject and it's periphery subjects (Natural Law, the interconnectedness of all life, becoming literate in the Book of Life by becoming adept at discerning in the world around you what is life-generating versus what is life-deteriorating, etc.). To my immense delight I am observing your conversations on the community and seeing just that -- you are mastering it and those of you who are getting it more quickly are lifting your sisters and brothers up! This is marvelous -- well done!

I have several new articles, blogs and audios (and a new book in the works) that I am now ready to prepare for you. After the Advanced Training seminar next weekend (which I sense is going to be a uniquely special experience for us all), I will begin to pull those together so I can hand over some new material to you this fall. In the meantime, please know that the material that is out there now, particularly in Detox For Women (but all of it in effect) has never been more accurate or more timely. So as I gather more information to reinforce the foundational information in my previous books, writings and audios, bear in mind that the cornerstone has already been created. Keep studying, keep contemplating and integrating the material according to where you are each day on the transitional bridge.

I send my Love, Praise and Gratitude to you All always and I look forward to the day when you are all masters of your physicality so that you never suffer a moment for being in human form -- but rather enjoy the experience immensely because of it!

Your constant surfing companion on the Great Life Wave -- Kowabunga!

Natalia

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Why is just about everyone you or I know taking a pill or some other substance to assuage their emotional pain? Why is everyone numbing themselves, and why is it accepted as normal? What is the common denominator here?

These are questions we need to address. A slow but steady detour away from the independent values that made our country great two hundred years ago has landed us in Prozac Nation: land of the numb, mind-controlled, programmed masses. As a people, we have lost our consciousness, and with it a tremendous amount of knowledge. We have confused what is considered desirable with what is life-generating. We have lost touch with our true emotions—that voice within which speaks for inner balance and self-knowledge. Too many of us sleepwalk through life following a set of socially programmed norms that can only lead to ruin: physical, mental, and emotional.

The hard fact is that just about everyone is an addict today because a sinister social conditioning has quietly snuck its way into “normal” living: the consumption of foods unfit for the human blood stream and intestines. These foods are profoundly harmful and highly addictive. That’s right: the most insidious addiction today is not to recreational drugs, but to grains, sweeteners, food additives and preservatives (such as hormones and antibiotics, just for starters) in the mainstream diet. Thus, addiction is a problem not only for the drinker, the smoker, and the drug abuser; it is a problem for every human being who is not highly aware of what he or she consumes.

But here’s the gem: The cause and cure of addiction hinge on the same all-important factor: consciousness. It is time to wake up, take responsibility for our choices, and protect our freedom with vigilance. It’s not the path of least resistance, so it’s not for everyone. But if you are reading this, you are not everyone.

We can understand addiction as a loss of consciousness, and it’s a reality of today’s diet-lifestyle, which in myriad ways poisons the biochemistry of the blood and ravages the intestine, cells, and tissues. Yet, we keep eating and living according to the customs that have been programmed into us by the so-called authorities, the media, and the influences of our peers. Rather than making smart, life-enhancing choices, for too long we have denied our true nature and thus become little better than robots, addicts, and herd animals. To the unaware masses—the sleepwalkers of society—life appears to be a random set of causes and effects that lead more often than not to suffering.

When our inner voice knows better, when our spirit rises up to question the status quo and to resist the whole program, we are quickly labeled “depressed” or “chemically imbalanced” and written a prescription. In the meantime, the dictates of mainstream culture urge us to silence our distress with “comfort foods,” alcohol, cigarettes, and mind-numbing diversions.

The more we suppress our true emotions and physical ailments with these substances, the more pain we’ll ultimately feel, and the louder our inner alarm bells will ring. How long will we slap names on diseases without truly understanding them? How long will we continue suppressing the symptoms so that more virulent forms of illness crop up? How long will we blame the imbalance rather than the source of the imbalance? After all these millennia of medical achievements, we have missed the obvious universal law of nature: when there is pain, it is a call for change, not a call for suppression!

Anyone who wishes to be free of addiction and to enjoy a balanced, beautiful, drug-free life can do so if they are willing to do the work. No one needs to be medicated if they understand the vicious cycle behind the problem. Addiction is like a pacifier, a stopgap to quiet the noise and numb the pain rather than examine the root of the problem. There is a solution to the problem: stop accepting the social norms and cultivate the power of conscious choice.

Social norms dictate not only how we should live, but also how we should feel. We are taught to avoid “negative” emotions and embrace only the “positive” ones. Over the last few generations we have completely lost touch with the wisdom of our emotions. Emotions are the signposts that tell us what is life-enhancing and what is not, and yet we have learned to repress “undesirable” emotions with substances without even knowing that we are doing it. These repressed emotions become the harbingers of addiction.

All the spiritual leaders and great minds of history—including the Buddha, Christ, Socrates, and Jung—emphasized the importance of awareness. And contemporary teachers like Eckhart Tolle have made the concept more familiar to people today. However, there is still a great chasm between the desire to practice this virtue and the practical application of it. For so many people, living in the present is so hard to do—seeming like an intangible, elusive concept that slips too easily from one’s grasp. Nonetheless, it is the single most essential tool of personal liberation available to us. Once you start to live with awareness, it becomes second nature. You gain clarity about yourself and the world around you; you see through the clutter of social expectations to hear your own authentic voice.

In the Western world, we come up against a unique, two-fold roadblock to self-awareness: The first component is our deeply compromised biochemistry due to the over-consumption of harmful substances (which lodge toxins in the cells, blood, and tissues, leading to all kinds of illness). The second component is the social conditioning that overrides the freedom of choice that’s innate to human greatness. Therefore, we must (a) correct the biochemical imbalances through intelligent cleansing; and (b) expose the social conditions for what they are and restore ourselves to our authentic needs and desires.

There is a cycle at play that, once revealed, becomes wonderfully obvious and easy to override. The discovery brings instant self-advancement, freedom, and personal power. Here’s how it works:

(A) Erroneous social conditionings create painful events that cause distressing emotions.

(B) The same social conditionings teach us to repress these emotions and silence our authentic voice.

(C) The repressed spirit naturally rises up for release every so often, but we have become such expert repressors that, at the least sign of welling up, we reach for the substance of choice to silence our real emotions yet again.

These substances take many forms, all of which are acidic and therefore addictive (e.g., acidic food, alcohol, cigarettes, mind-numbing entertainment, material consumption, etc.). The more we consume that acidic substance, the more accustomed our bodies become to the stimulation of that substance. Further, we need more of that substance to achieve the same result the next time. This is the origin of addiction.

To put it another way: erroneous social conditioning leads us to deny our truth by repressing it through an addictive distraction. Thus we get trapped in a cycle that feels like a normal life experience rather than an aberration of nature. Living in the dark, without self-awareness, makes us prone to destructive influences. Frittering away personal power, we get ever more lost in the quagmire, blind to the road signs of our emotions, and we follow only the path of our addiction.

The emotions of pain, anger, and fear arise to tell us to pay attention. They come to us as practical friends, to pull our hand away from the flame. When we allow ourselves to fully experience these emotions, they pass right through like water in a flowing stream, and we can let them go. In heeding them and letting them go, we can also let go of our addictions.

Any set of social expectations that fail to honor a person’s essence and allow for its pure, honest expression is an agent of repression, and is therefore antithetical to life, which is all about growth. To release the emotional blockage, we must watch with heightened awareness for each emotion the moment it arises. Before long, we discover that we can apply awareness to any given situation, ideology, or question with a penetrating power of discernment. We can ask ourselves: “Is that a social conditioning or is a life-generating truth?”

We are a Prozac Nation because we have been living in the dark. Too many widely accepted norms are destructive for our bodies, minds, and spirits. We are a Prozac Nation because our authority figures perpetuate the madness by creating more drugs for more illnesses and building more infrastructures for them—pacifying feelings with all that glitters and sells.

“Don’t feel this,” our culture whispers in our psyches. “You don’t need to feel sad. Here, take this instead. Have a donut and a latte. There, there. Now, isn’t that better?”

Could the cure for depression, obesity, and even cancer be far simpler than we ever realized? Let’s make emotions our friends, not our foes, by releasing the accumulation of repressed pain, anger, and fear. Let’s wake up, open our eyes, and see what we are really made of us—as fully empowered human beings who know our own value rather than mindless automatons of an addiction-fueled society.

We all want to lead great lives and achieve wonderful things, but a great outer life is only possible through a healthy, balanced, and beautiful inner life. Let us feel deeply and let our emotions nourish our personal growth through smart, life-enhancing choices.

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Why is just about everyone you or I know taking a pill or some other substance to suppress emotional pain? Why is everyone numbing themselves, and why is it accepted as normal? What is the common denominator here?

A slow but steady detour away from the independent values that made our country great two hundred years ago has landed us in a nation addicted: land of the numb, mind-controlled, programmed masses. As a people, we have lost our consciousness, and with it a tremendous amount of wisdom. We have confused what is considered desirable with what is life-generating. We have lost touch with our true emotions—that voice within which speaks for inner balance and self-knowledge. Too many of us sleepwalk through life following a set of socially programmed norms that can only lead to ruin: physical, mental, and emotional.

The hard fact is that just about everyone is an addict today because a sinister social conditioning has quietly snuck its way into “normal” living: the consumption of foods unfit for the human body. These foods are profoundly harmful and highly addictive. That’s right: the most insidious addiction today is not to recreational drugs, but to grains, sweeteners, food additives, and preservatives (including hormones and antibiotics, just for starters) in the mainstream diet. Addiction, therefore, is a problem not only for the drinker, the smoker, and the drug abuser; it is a problem for every human being who is not aware of what he or she consumes.

But here’s the gem: the cause and cure of addiction hinge on the same all-important factor—consciousness. We can understand addiction as a loss of consciousness, and it’s ubiquitous in today’s diet-lifestyle, which in myriad ways poisons the biochemistry of the blood and ravages the intestine, cells, and tissues. Yet, we keep eating and living according to the customs that have been programmed into us by the so-called authorities, the media, and the influence of our peers. We have thus become little better than a nation of addicts.

When our inner voice knows better, when our spirit rises up to question the status quo and to resist the whole program, we are quickly labeled “depressed” or “chemically imbalanced” and written a prescription. In the meantime, the dictates of mainstream culture urge us to silence our distress with “comfort foods,” alcohol, drugs, and other mind-numbing diversions.

How long will we slap names on diseases without truly understanding them? How long will we continue suppressing the symptoms so that more virulent forms of illness crop up? How long will we blame the imbalance rather than its source? After all these millennia of medical achievements, we have missed the obvious universal law of nature: when there is pain, it is a call for change, not a call for suppression!

Social norms dictate not only how we should live, but also how we should feel. We are taught to avoid “negative” emotions and embrace only the “positive” ones. Over the generations, we have completely lost touch with the wisdom of our emotions. We have learned to repress undesirable emotions without even knowing that we are doing it. These repressed emotions become the harbingers of addiction.

All the spiritual leaders and great minds of history—including the Buddha, Christ, Socrates, and Jung—emphasized the importance of awareness. And contemporary teachers like Eckhart Tolle have made the concept more familiar to people today. However, there is still a great chasm between the desire to practice this virtue and the practical application of it. For so many people, living in the present is so hard to do. Nonetheless, it is the single most essential tool of personal liberation available to us. Once we start to live with awareness, we gain clarity about ourselves and the world around us. We see through the clutter of social expectations to hear our own authentic voice.

Any set of social expectations that fails to honor a person’s spirit and allow for its honest expression is an agent of repression, and is therefore antithetical to life. The emotions of pain, anger, and fear arise to tell us to pay attention. They come to us as friends, to pull our hand away from the flame. In heeding rather than repressing them, we can let them go, and also let go of our addictions. Soon, we can bring awareness to any situation, ideology, or question with a penetrating power of discernment. We can ask ourselves: “Is that a social conditioning or is a life-generating truth?”

We are a nation of addicts because we have been living in the dark. Too many widely accepted norms are destructive to our bodies, minds, and spirits. Our authority figures perpetuate the madness by creating more drugs for more illnesses and building more infrastructures to keep the vicious cycle alive. Frittering away personal power, we get ever more lost in the quagmire, blind to the road signs of our emotions. Addiction feels like a normal life experience rather than an aberration of nature. The modern ethos is to pacify feelings with all that glitters and sells. “Don’t feel this,” our culture whispers in our psyches. “You don’t need to feel sad. Here, take this instead. Have a donut and a latte. There, there. Now, isn’t that better?”

The cure for depression, obesity, and even cancer may be far simpler than we ever realized. It is time we (a) correct our biochemical imbalances through cleansing, and (b) expose destructive social norms for what they are and cultivate the power of conscious choice. It’s time we wake up to what we are really made of—as fully empowered human beings who know our own authentic needs and desires, not mindless automatons of an addiction-fueled society.

We all want to lead great lives and achieve wonderful things, but a great outer life is only possible through a healthy, balanced, and beautiful inner life. Let us feel deeply and let our emotions nourish our personal growth through smart, life-enhancing choices.

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Hi There Everyone!

In addition to all of the other hats she is wearing here at Detox The World, Ana Ladd-Griffin is also going to be managing the questions that come through the Detox The World submissions inbox (they will no longer be coming to my inbox directly).

I love reading your mail and Ana will share much of it with me but in order for me to be of service to you and keep creating new content that will help you along on your path I cannot spend hours each day in front of the computer answering one email at a time.

Ana is fully equipped with the knowledge and the heart to be a sure-footed guide to any of you that reaches out to her. All I ask is that prior to sending her a question you read all the information on the website (all the books, blogs - both current and archived as well as the FAQs) to find your answers (which you will find therein more often than not). I have strictly advised Ana not to spend time responding to questions that are already answered in the Detox The World books and online content. Spending time answering the same questions (99 percent of the time they are the same core questions) prevents us from using our resources to move forward with all the important information we still need to share with you. Yes, there is more -- so much more!

As always, we encourage you to send us your testimonials and always appreciate your personal stories and suggestions for improving the site. Your input is extremely valuable to us as we wish to provide you with the best support possible. Ana is also available for personal consultations; her reputation for excellent counsel is spreading quickly. I am no longer seeing private clients but Ana is an adept at this work and I encourage those of you looking for personalized guidance to reach out to her. She can be reached at Ana@Detoxtheworld.com. You can read more about personal consultations with Ana here: http://detoxtheworld.com/about-personal-consultations-with-natalia-rose.php

Please keep checking the Events Page: http://detoxtheworld.com/events.php for upcoming gatherings as we have such a wonderful time together at our hikes and Detox Dates parties and I look forward to meeting more of you on these special occasions!

I will be traveling through the end of August but this Fall will bring many wonderful opportunities to connect!

With Love of Service to each of you,

Natalia

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Dear Energy-Seekers:

Energy is a hot topic in our culture, and for many it is the ultimate currency. Just as all the misleading dietary information is confusing people, so is all the erroneous information about energy. I think it’s high time to set the record straight about energy. Fortunately, like all great truths, it’s really very simple.

There is only one thing to know about energy. Energy is a current of electromagnetic force of dual polarity (-)/(+). In the physical body it is at its greatest potential when the body’s cells are clean and clear. You are ENERGIZED when you have open pathways (no mucoid matter in the bloodstream, lungs, or throat and no waste matter stuck in the intestines or intestinal walls) and when the energy can move freely between the cells and tissues. I like to imagine cells conducting energy by “kissing” each other with electricity. Energy can only reach the cells and conduct if there are no blockages.

Let’s be absolutely clear: You do not become energized by consuming calorie-dense substances. Instead, you become energized by removing blockages between cells and within pathways so that the electromagnetic current can travel like a lightening rod through the body. If you are feeling weak or lacking power for your workouts when you eat this way, it is ALWAYS due to one or more of the following three reasons:

1) You have awakened matter that your bowel cannot release on its own. Therefore, your center is blocked and the awakened poisons have been released into your bloodstream, making you feel ill and tired. You need either bowel cleansing or a less than perfect meal to give your bowel a break from the transition to clean foods—one or the other, but preferably the former.

2) You are so addicted to the stimulation of cooked proteins, whey or soy protein workout products, coffee, refined sugar, flour, soda, etc. that your body is not coping with the change. The problem is that you’re having withdrawal symptoms—not that the clean diet is failing to deliver energy. You probably need to transition more slowly. People are often deceived into thinking they need meat when, after a week of a meat-free diet, they go out and eat a steak and suddenly feel “energized.” This is a FALSE FIRE!

The wave of false fire is not real energy. It is just the stimulation of the acidic animal protein that an addicted body responds to. Additionally, when the animal is killed, the “fight or flight” hormone—adrenaline—surges through the bloodstream of the frightened animal. That adrenaline is in the meat when consumed, and is often confused with a feeing of energy—again, FALSE FIRE! Acidic, dense substances—whether animal flesh, dense nut/seed bars, protein bars, or yogurt and granola—can never give you real energy, only stimulation. To an unclean body addicted to the stimulation, continuing to consume such substances feels good and familiar. Stopping too suddenly leads to withdrawal symptoms and a feeling of weakness. Hence, people often associate a clean diet with feeling weak. This is why making a gradual TRANSITION away from the old foods, rather than going cold turkey, is so crucial. It will help you avoid many pitfalls!

3) You are mentally programmed to believe that only consuming calorie-dense substances can sufficiently energize you for a workout. The fact is, eating muesli, granola, a power bar, or a shake before a workout can actually physically drain energy from you. But mental programming is a powerful thing; for years you’ve been absorbing the erroneous propaganda that you need these substances for energy. So now it’s a case of mind over matter: work to reverse your thinking and align with the greater truth.

Most of all, keep an eye on the big picture of cleansing. A clear body is an energized body. Arnold Ehret said it nearly a hundred years ago in his equation: Vitality = Power – Obstruction. “Power” may not have been the clearest word choice. “Electromagnetic Conductivity” is more accurate. So, with all due respect to Ehret, I’ll take the liberty of rephrasing his equation: Vitality = Electromagnetic Conductivity – Obstruction.

Every time you’re feeling a little less energized than you want to feel, revisit these three points. Ask yourself how clear your pathways are and how well your cells are conducting the electromagnetic power. Even when you’re blocked, this energy is always lying dormant within you, ready to be unleashed. Do all you can to remove any blockages, and then watch your body come alive with the blissful vibration of life force conducting through you!

Then do the happy dance!

Here’s to your energy-kissing cells,

Natalia

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Declare Your Independence!
07/01/09, New York, NY

If I had to choose a favorite holiday, I would choose Independence Day. This is not merely because it is the least consumer-oriented holiday or because I love my country (which I do), but it's also because independence and freedom—on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic scale—are so essential to our lives.

I like to think of every day as a personal Independence Day. As a human on this earth, and particularly in this country, I can walk through life every day choosing what to allow into my sphere and what will ultimately make up my life experience. We each have the freedom to do this, but it takes vision, courage, and, yes, sometimes our own revolutionary war to reach that level of sovereignty. But once we win that sovereignty, we must protect it: we must soldier on and defend ourselves from destructive forces.

Some of you have had to soldier through a lot of conflict in pursuit of your personal freedom. This is a time to celebrate your hard-won independence, your triumph over false rulers. You’ve charted new lands (hopefully you were nice to the natives!). But, of course, this is only the beginning. You must set up essential infrastructures in this new land—for example, adjusting your grocery list, ensuring a daily intake of green juice, and scheduling rebounding time.

Your ability to maintain your independence and freedom is directly related to the governing body you put in place. Do you have a good Bill of Rights? A strong Constitution? Are your desires, intentions, and actions in harmony? Let’s not forget Abraham Lincoln’s famous words: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He went on to specify: “this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Nor can you remain sovereign in the detox lifestyle and enjoy its abundant fruits if you are divided—part slave to the social norms, part free. Eventually the societal riptide will pull you under. Short-lived firecracker enthusiasm won’t cut it. Those who succeed in the long term are vigilant, flexible where needed, and have the stamina and strategy of great generals to defend their hard-won liberty, day by day!

Now let’s turn our attention to our troops and our veterans. When we think of supporting our troops, we usually think in terms of moral support, patriotic support, or financial support. Sometimes, we tend to support our soldiers like a cheering squad who sits around doing our nails while the team hustles out on the field; the cheerleaders merely pop out of their seats every now and then with a “sis-boom-ba!” The life of our nation and our planet is not at a pep rally or a football game. So why do we send our troops off to war while we watch our nails dry?

Whether fighting in the caves of Afghanistan or taking musket in hand against the redcoats, our soldiers on the front lines need our support on the home front. We, too, must be warriors (albeit peaceful ones), ever alert against forces that impinge on our freedoms. We must start at home, where the social norms of consuming hours of mindless media and heaps of packaged foods and unfit substances render us mere marionettes. We must begin with ourselves, and then lovingly nudge others awake to all that threatens our freedom. If mainstream forms of consumption, health care, and self-maintenance are turning us into addicts and slaves to widespread disease, it’s time to take a stand! We are the soldiers at home, so let’s defend freedom and independence right here!

Otherwise, despite all the lives and limbs lost by our troops and the trillions spent on the greatest weaponry in the world, we will have passively yet unforgivably allowed the deterioration of our hard-fought freedoms. I love my country deeply and I do not want to see this happen. But it is happening, just like rogue bacteria is taking over the intestine of the average unsuspecting American. We remain blind to that which is eating away at our liberties—from both the inside and the outside—at our own great peril.

I would like to suggest a new way of supporting our troops and honoring our veterans: via the path of personal responsibility. We support them by strengthening our country at home, starting with ourselves. We, as ambassadors of peace and a people of higher knowledge, each take responsibility for our own personal harmony. The more peace, love, and understanding we emit, the greater our chances of one day achieving peace on earth. It will only take a small percentage of people with a higher consciousness to ignite this movement—then it will spread like a glorious wildfire!

The more we depend on our soldiers to maintain our independence as a free nation without supporting their efforts from home and from within, the more we stand to lose. The good microbes can only fight off so much yeast and harmful bacteria. The inhabitant of the body must back up the troops with smart choices! Just as each cell in the body is a hologram of the entire body, we are each a hologram of our nation. Let us support our troops, our forefathers, and the birth of a beautiful new world.

Let freedom ring! Happy 4th!

Love,
Natalia

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A Tribute to Michael Jackson and Neda Agha-Soltan
06/26/09, New York, NY

What do Michael Jackson and Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful young Iranian girl shot through the heart in Tehran earlier this week, have in common? They are mirrors—or what I like to call “perception-givers.” Their lives and deaths reflect to us the tragic effects of our commonly accepted ways of seeing, being, and engaging.

My father, Ben Barrett, was in the music business and recorded a great deal of Michael Jackson’s music—from the early days with the Jackson Five right up to the “Dirty Diana” album (one of the last albums he recorded before his death in 1992). My brother Roman and I spent a lot of time in the studios when our dad was recording; he would even take us with him on the nightshifts. So the two of us spent time with Michael playing video games and consuming “studio snacks” (sugar cubes, Hershey’s Kisses, Melba Toast, and Coffee-mate). Michael was always kind and engaging—never once inappropriate with us, just for the record.



I imagine that just about everyone born prior to 1980 feels an emotional tug in response to the news of Michael’s death. He was, after all, probably the most famous person after Jesus and Elvis. I’m certainly not immune. But what I feel is a tremendous relief for him. I can’t help but feel like Grace released him from the torment of his existence.

For many years, Michael lived with his parents and siblings down the road from us in Encino, California, on a street called Havenhurst just off the main road of Ventura Blvd. (famously referenced in Tom Petty’s hit “Free Fallin’” for you music trivia buffs). When he was a kid, Michael and his brothers would ride their bikes up to our house and visit my dad. Just take a moment to imagine Michael as a ten-year-old—that gorgeous little boy singing “My Cherie Amour”—riding his bike around his neighborhood like any ordinary, innocent kid. He was beautiful and, by anyone’s standards, uncommonly talented.

His father, as it is famously documented by his sister Latoya’s memoirs, was a hideous character. He was dominating, violent, and abusive. Young Michael’s truth was usurped by his father’s soul-annihilating abuse. From his father’s behavior and words came the stories and lies (reinforced by those who neither challenged them nor taught Michael to challenge them) that would imprison Michael for the rest of his life. To varying degrees, we have all accepted the stories and lies imposed upon us as children.

Yet, despite this, young Michael’s light shone so brightly. The brighter a light shines in the presence of a bully stuck in darkness, the more desperate that bully becomes to snuff out that light for fear of exposure. Many of us, in our defenseless innocence, have been at the mercy of such abuse. (Of course, these bullies, who have likely been abused themselves, need love more than most. But that is a separate issue.)

Young Michael was natural, innocent, exploding with creativity, and in enough possession of his own soul power to radiate his personal essence—making him and his music positively irresistible. Let’s all take a moment and acknowledge that what he expressed in 1970 in his recordings of “ABC” and “The Love You Save” was his true, irrepressible essence—inspiring, enchanting, and downright magical! That was the real Michael. That was before the world of UNTRUTH had at him. This, I believe, is what his spirit and soul are returning to as he sheds the cage of his physical body and the false stories it absorbed over the course of his life on earth.

Michael and Neda (whose name means “voice” in Farsi) are two innocent, pure souls who demonstrated the lies of our world and what we communally deem acceptable. The painful unfolding of Michael’s public life and the tragic, rapid-fire death of Neda in Iran have showed us the EFFECTS of the CAUSES supported by such a world. What happened to Michael and Neda could happen to any innocent, and indeed does—every second of every day. Dramatic displays of suffering and wasted life can sometimes jolt humans out of our programmed, blinkered ways of seeing so that we can begin to discern the truth. But then most of us get distracted again and fall back into our old ways.

To varying degrees, we are all PERCEPTION-GIVERS: those who reflect through personal experience the truths and untruths of our humanity. We must also pay attention and be PERCEPTION-GETTERS. This is the way of the Peaceful Warrior, who does not draw a machine gun or send out a drone against injustice. The Peaceful Warrior knows there is more power in simply holding a mental posture of attentiveness and knows exactly what to watch for. An effective Peaceful Warrior is fluent in the language of Life—able to discern between that which is life-generating and that which is life-deteriorating—and from there is able to make swift life-generating choices.

How perceptive are you? How adept a Peaceful Warrior? How many of the lies, stories, and life-deteriorating but commonly accepted ideas can you see though? What do you do with what you see? Do you passively pray that the world will change or do you change yourself based on what you discover?

Our world can change only if individuals truly perceive and understand the EFFECTS of every CAUSE, and can discern between life and death. How the term “life” is misused! That which is truly living is harmonious and beautiful. Can we stop going around saying “Well, that’s life!” when something undesirable happens? It would be more accurate to say, “Well, that’s death!”

If Michael was taking substances to ease his inner pain and these substances played a role in his passing, this would bear closer examination. Whether it’s pharmaceutical or recreational drugs, alcohol, overeating, or other perverse forms of consumption like excessive shopping and sex addiction,