Tag Archives: Symptoms

Ana Ladd-Griffin Enters The Red Tent

I’d like to share this entry that my senior detox counselor, Ana Ladd-Griffin, posted on the Natalia Rose Institute 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 Detox 4 Women 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 toxins 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, and environmental estrogens, 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 done 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 toward 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 the 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 dysfunction. 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 overworked, 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

Calling All Frogs!

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