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Mind Body Spirit - Living Your Truth

Dance Your Way to Authentic Freedom: Embrace the Power of You

Authentic freedom develops when you life from the the core of your being. It is all about discovering what you chose to incarnate on this earth to do or to be. Why? Because this brings each of us the greatest joy and satisfaction possible. After all, we can only collect so many BMWs, university degrees, and new lovers. All of these things are nice, but none of them leads to true freedom. Freedom is the birthright of every human being. Deciding you deserve your own is the first step in claiming yours. For many of us this is also the most difficult step to take, for it means deciding to respect and honor yourself enough that you allow freedom into your life. Doing this enables you to bring the very best of yourself to your day to day life—in your family, your community, the earth as a whole. Mind Body and Spirit ARE ONE When people begin Cura Romana, they experience their body as something separate from themselves. Their minds are filled with the false idea that changing their weight and their lives can never be more than a dream. Then they learn otherwise. They discover just how connected it’s possible to become at every level, and how exciting it can be to live one’s life in wholeness. As the program brings together body, mind and spirit in a harmonious way, you begin to experience a natural lifting off and clearing away of limiting beliefs and false notions that have dogged you, bringing a new sense of self-respect and authentic freedom to your life. This process greatly clarifies and expands our experience of the world around us too. For every blinkered view of reality blocks freedom, entraps creativity, limits bliss and disconnects us—not only from our essential nature, but from the Universe as a whole, in all its beauty, wonderment and the power it can bring for growth and transformation of our lives and our world. AUTHENTIC POWER IS YOURS Connecting with who you really are, accessing authentic power, and living your freedom requires that you expand your consciousness in a major way. In this chapter we explore the way that, as human beings, we have a natural capacity to move beyond our limited experience of five-sensory three-dimensional reality—how we can learn at will and with total control to enter the expanded realms of consciousness. In doing so, you begin to learn about your own seedpower—those divine, highly individual soul qualities which are unique to you. WORLD VIEW REVOLUTION The new expanding worldview is called holism. It looks upon the nature of the Universe as holographic. It was named after the work of scientists who demonstrated that living organisms are integrated energetic systems within an integrated Universe. They showed that our brain and body are holographic. Each small part of us, like each part of the Universe, is not only connected to the rest, it actually embodies the nature of the whole within it. The tension between the new holism and the old mechanism—which depended on a belief in separation between spirit and matter, form and substance—is important to resolve if we are to break out of whatever self-imposed prisons still limit our lives. Each of us is being asked to let go of our preconceived notions about what’s real, in order to explore the further reaches of a wider, more exciting and transformative Universe. And for reasons I still don’t fully understand, Cura Romana has become the perfect opportunity for most people to let this happen. DANCE YOUR FREEDOM To experience real freedom you need only allow more and more of your essential soul nature into your everyday experience of life— through dance, through ritual, through prayer, through your work and your relationships, and in your interactions with the world around you—in ever more direct and fearless ways. Such freedom not only brings an immense sense of joy and satisfaction, it’s also self-perpetuating. The more you do of this, the easier and more satisfying it becomes. There is nothing more fun than being who you really are. Learn to dance with freedom, and the Universe dances with you. A true expression of living your mind body spirit truth.

Erotic Power - Set Yourself Free

Unlocking True Ecstasy: Helen's 20Kg-Loss Journey Revealed

Before we begin I would like to share a short interview I did with Helen Musset, who was on Leslie Kenton's Cura Romana and lost 20 kilos while on the program. I was lucky enough to interview her about her experience. You can listen to the interview here. Now back to my newsletter. Frequently discussed yet little understood in our post-industrial society is the value of ecstasy and the spiritually creative power of the erotic. For power, it is of an order that can be both frightening and tremendously creative. It is no accident that in all of the Eastern religions it is the erotic which symbolizes man's pathway to realizing the Divine. In our capacity to experience ecstasy at the deepest levels may lie both the key to our survival and our ability to create. Studies of the human brain and its interfaces with the body have for the first time in history begun to chart what takes place biologically when one allows oneself to enter fully into the erotic state. PATH TO FREEDOM The results of this research are not only helping us see just how important this can be to health and wholeness, they make us conscious of just how far away the so-called sexual revolution has taken us from our being able to experience true ecstasy. For the mechanistic approach to sexuality with which we have lived for the past four decades, with all its sex-manuals and all the advice on “how-to-do-it-better”—instead of leading us towards a state in which we are more able to plunge into the irrational, oceanic, all-trusting state which every ecstatic encounter demands—has taught us to intellectualize sexuality. We’ve made it into something which too often we do and watch ourselves doing; something that we learn about and something that we try to control. Yet right at the core of every truly ecstatic experience is a fundamental demand that we give up all control, so that for a time we allow ourselves to dissolve our boundaries and merge into a celebration of the body, of life itself. In doing so, we experience being fully present in the moment. THE PRIMITIVE BRAIN Each man and woman has not one brain but two: The rational brain or the neocortex, which like an immensely complicated computer enables us to make conscious choices and to collect, store and interpret the data we receive from our sensory organs. We also have the subcortical nervous system known as the primitive brain. This primitive brain is sometimes referred to as the “reptilian structure”. From an evolutionary point of view, it is the oldest part of our brain. Unlike our conscious mind, it can never be disassociated from our basic adaptive systems such as the hormonal system and the immune system, on which survival depends. Your emotions and your instincts are bonded to the activity of your primitive brain. The hormone control center area regulates the activity of all your endocrine glands through complex feedback mechanisms. When you experience joy, your hormonal functioning is better. When you grieve or when you engage in intellectual thought, it is subject to greater stress. This complex feedback network between our mind and body, mediated through the primitive brain, is often referred to as our primitive adaptive system. On the quality of its responses and how well it is balanced with the functioning of our neocortex depends how healthy we are physically, mentally and spiritually. LOSS OF TRUST But being human in the so-called civilized world is not always easy. In our culture, the neocortex—our rational brain—has become highly developed. It is this development which gives us the capacity to make rational decisions, to define what we perceive to be “reality”, and to consciously manipulate the outside world to our advantage. In a truly healthy person, the balance between the two brains is good. However in most of us, our rational brain inhibits the primitive brain. In truth, in our 21st century world, this neocortical inhibition of the primitive brain has been carried to extremes. So much is this the case that we have undermined our ability to experience ecstasy, diminished our capacity for creativity and joy and have forgotten how to trust in the wisdom of our instincts. Take the experience of childbirth, for example. Instead of our being able during the birth process to give over our bodies to the event and trust that at the right time the appropriate hormone will be secreted to dilate the cervix and bring the child into the world. This leads instinctively to the desire to nurture new life at the breast and experience the oceanic love that comes with mother/child bonding. When we try to exert conscious control of the process, we undermine our natural, primitive adaptive processes. As a result, hormones shift in inappropriate ways and we lose touch with the ecstatic experience of surrender to the body, as well as with all the joy this brings. In short, Whenever we bring into play the rational brain at an inappropriate time we suffer for it. (So, incidentally, does the baby.) Then we experience ourselves as separate from what is happening to our body, and we feel pain. THE PAIN OF SEPARATION It is not our rational brain that is the problem, but the inappropriateness of allowing it to come into play at the wrong time, which results in an experience of separation and anguish. Human instincts, which need to be valued, trusted and allowed freedom to be for us to live in real health and wholeness Fragile things, they are easily repressed and inhibited, constantly changed and controlled by the power of the neocortex. So much is this the case in the majority of people nowadays these inhibitions have become so unconscious and habitual that they are not even aware of them—something which eliminates the possibility of choice. Quite simply, we have forgotten how to let go and trust to our body. We deny the power of our instincts. Then, instead of working for us they work against us. Each woman is a great deal more than her rational mind. To be whole, to be healthy, to live the power of her own individual truth, she requires a highly developed emotional and instinctive life as well as a strong rationality. She needs to learn to trust her body so that, at appropriate times, such as in childbirth or lovemaking, she can abandon herself to it fully. Then the highly developed neocortex—responsible for the development of culture and rational achievement—instead of working against our vitality, can help channel her instinctive and emotional life in exciting and creative ways. We become able to experience joy in simply being, the way a child can—a joy and a radiance which does not depend upon what we do or have, or on how clever we are, or how admired: We come to live life moment by moment, simply by being fully present to whatever is happening. THE SERPENT AWAKENS How do we rediscover this kind of trust in our body and our instincts? The answer is not simple. It involves experiment, listening, adjustment. Usually it develops slowly, in fits and starts, by learning to trust ourselves, by becoming aware when instinctive responses begin to take place and allowing them to happen. This is especially important in the experience of sexuality—a realm in which the primitive brain comes into its own more easily than in any other. The erotic, the ecstatic, has a power far beyond the experience of pleasure it brings. Ancient philosophical and religious traditions teach that the font of our sexual power, known as the kundalini, lies coiled like a sleeping serpent at the base of the spine. When aroused, this intense procreative energy, the most powerful energy known to human life, begins to uncoil and rise up the body, activating our energy centers—chakras—one by one. There are seven main chakras in the body. These locusts are where life energy, which controls biological processes, interfaces with the physical body. Each chakra relates to particular endocrine glands and each manifests a different quality of powerful instinctive energy. For instance, the first chakra which lies near the base of the spine deals with our survival. The next chakra, located in the pelvis, looks after procreative energies. The chakra at the solar plexus is involved with our will, the heart chakra with compassion, the throat with our higher creative energies, and so forth. The seventh chakra at the crown of the head is known as the thousand petal lotus. It has long been believed to be responsible for man's spiritual development at the highest level. When fully activated, this crown chakra can emit a radiance which you find depicted in every religious tradition in the form of the halo around the head of saints, the Christ, the Buddha and all the rest. CREATIVE FREEDOM The kundalini or life force is not something which can be aroused or activated through rational effort by the conscious mind. For its energies, being sexual in the very deepest sense of the word—a sense which encompasses self-expression and creativity in every way from giving birth, to art, to Dionysian celebration of the erotic in sexual intercourse—are irrational in nature. They belong to the realm of the primitive brain. As such, they defy definition and elude any who would classify, categorize or try to control them. Since we belong to a civilization that places great value on classification and control—and which therefore has sought conveniently to ignore or dismiss as non-existent any part of experience which does not fit into whatever is rational and controllable. We often feel particularly unsettled whenever the power of these profound life energies surface. They can make us decidedly uncomfortable. After all, if we decide to follow them, we risk dissolving the boundaries of ourselves. Then we fear a loss of the very control which the overdeveloped rational mind so loves. The irony is that it is this very loss of this control that we most long for. Here’s the bottom line: Without an ability to live the instinctive as well as the rational, we will never experience our wholeness. Without this, the full creativity of our longings and our humanity can never be realized. For it is the inhibition of this ability to experience the ecstatic and to trust in ourselves and our bodies that bring feelings of powerlessness and meaninglessness which are now widespread in our society. CELEBRATE ECSTASY As black American writer Audre Lorde says, “The Erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling... As women we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge... It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.” Exploring the realms of ecstasy, the truly erotic in your own life, is a long way from experimenting with all the mechanistic sexual stuff you will find in the popular press which tells us how we are supposed to get more pleasure from sex by doing this or that to your partner. Sadly, instead of freeing us to explore ecstasy, the so-called “sexual revolution” has crushed our erotic power not set it free. When this happens, what is meant to bring ecstasy instead turns pornographic then our powers for creativity and freedom are truncated. It is time that we develop the ability to surrender ourselves to the realm of instinct, to trust our bodies and stop relegating our sexuality to the realm of the neocortex. To experience high level health and wholeness, we must find a marriage between instinct and reason. It is a union which like any marriage takes time to develop and grow, but a union which in terms of our wellbeing, self-respect and capacity for joy in day to day life can bear infinite fruit. DOWNLOAD MY FREE BOOK 7 STUNNING SECRETS FOR WEIGHT LOSS FREE It Will Bring You: • A clear understanding of why conventional weight loss diets fail. • A step-by-step guide to help you shed excess fat permanently. • Insight into food cravings and why they are not your fault. • Actions you can take right now to move forward towards a leaner and healthier body. latter Download 7 Stunning Secrets For Weight Loss HELEN LOST 20 KILOS ON CURA ROMANA - INTERVIEW Helen Musset, who was on Leslie Kenton’s Cura Romana lost 20 kilos while on the program. I was lucky enough to interview her about her experience in this short audio conversation. Many people find it hard to understand the transformation that occurs through out the Cura Romana program as it almost always seems to good to be true. I hope this sheds some light into this process from someone who has been through the program and experienced it’s powerful weight loss properties as well as it’s ability to provide tremendous personal transformation. I hope you enjoy. Listen to Helen’s Interview

Renew Yourself For Summer

Recharge Your Vitality for Summer: 3 steps to Zero in on Radiant Wellbeing

Summer is on its way—at least for those of you who live in the Northern Hemisphere. The rest of us have some weeks to wait for it. Doesn’t matter. If you start now, even in winter, by the time summer arrives you will be far ahead of the game in every way. Vitality is the secret to successful summer living when so much of your body is revealed—skin, hair, hands and feet. It is now that holistic health and beauty come into their own. It’s time to leave self-neglect behind, charge your batteries, get savvy about what to eat and drink, what supplements to take for radiant wellbeing and energy, and what to use both internally and externally for great hair, skin and nails. It’s easier than you think once you know the ropes. BUILD YOUR ENERGY Few of us cash in on optimum energy levels. Our lives are too full of personal ‘energy thieves’, from excess toxicity to negative attitudes. Both drain away natural vitality, and undermine potentials for looking and feeling great. Decide now to create for yourself a vitality-centered way of living that makes room for delicious exercise, good food, restorative sleep and effective self-care. Step One—Claim Your Right to Energy Energy levels depend a lot on our self-perceptions—how you think about yourself. There are important physical changes you can make through exercise, diet, and relaxation, but attitude is just as crucial. Now is the time to just stop doing everything yourself and start delegating at work and at home. Don’t say yes to everything. Guard your time jealously, and limit the hours you spend on inessential things such as people you don’t really care about just because you feel it is expected of you. Decide today that you matter. Put yourself first for once. Make time at least twice a week for doing whatever brings you bliss. It can be walking in the park, watching a good movie, or even taking a deeply relaxing bath filled with Pure Magnesium Flakes—highly-concentrated crystals of magnesium chloride sourced from the ancient Zechstein seabed in the Netherlands—nothing added and nothing removed. These magnesium flakes are extremely pure because the seabed lies 1,600 to 2,000 meters beneath the surface of the earth where it has been protected. Take one of these baths three times a week, before bed. Not only are they relaxing, they are deeply healing and cleansing for both body and mind. Here’s how: Pour 1-2 cups (400 grams) of Life Flo Health Pure Magnesium Flakes in the bathtub and then soak for 20 to 30 minutes. The temperature of the magnesium bath should be warm (101°F to 105°F) rather than hot. If the water in the bath starts to feel cold, add some hot to it. If it starts to feel too warm, add some cold. It’s just that, when you add the flakes to warm bath water, your body experiences the healing results faster. Then crawl into a warm bed and sleep blissfully. Step Two—Clear Out The Junk Eating packaged foods, as 95% of people in the Western world do, drains your body of essential vitamins and minerals. It also causes wastes to build up in the tissues. Any manufactured food squanders your vitality because your body has to wrestle with the health destroyers they carry instead, so it is unable to maintain your cells in peak condition. Drink lots of clean water—2 litres a day is ideal—to flush out your system. Cut out sugary snacks, which are terrible energy robbers. It is time to clear the junk from your shelves and drawers too. Step Three—Bite Into Beauty Take advantage of the warmer weather and the spirit of the great outdoors to try out some delicious and nutritious new recipes, designed to detoxify your body in an on-going way while you’re developing a new high level of wholesome nutrition. For instance, start the day with a super-quick fruit and protein breakfast. It will help keep you cellulite free and brimming with energy. You can use one of the new powdered, micro-filtered whey protein products athletes so love for the most easily assimilated low-fat protein in the world, or simply an organic or free-range egg: Summer Smoothie: Place a dozen raspberries, strawberries or blueberries in a blender or food processor with ½ apple. Add 1 cup of unsweetened coconut water, 1 organic/free range raw egg or 2 tablespoons of Vita Whey Vanilla whey protein, and several drops of English Toffee Stevia. Blend well, sprinkle with a little cinnamon and serve. A great summer resolution for health and good looks is to make one meal a day a delightful meal-in-one raw salad plus protein. It supplies everything you need in one bowl and takes only 10 minutes to prepare for 4 people. Forget the old limp lettuce leaf and slice of tomato and cucumber and go for splendor. When you shop for vegetables, bring them home, wash them and put them in bins in the fridge so they are ready in a moment. Summer Festival Salad: Chop and/or grate a selection of raw vegetables (include 1 grated apple for sweetness): carrots, celery, rocket, radicchio, raw beetroot, spinach, red or yellow pepper, or any others you happen to have. Place them in a salad bowl. Add 2-3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and either the juice of 1 lemon or 2 tablespoons of cider vinegar. Sprinkle with sea salt and ground black pepper, add a dash of Worcestershire sauce, toss and serve with slices of cooked chicken breast, tuna, sliced organic tofu or grated hard boiled eggs. If you use tofu, make sure it is organic... 95% of all soy products are GMO and very dangerous to your health. Check out some of the great recipes in my New 10 Day Clean-Up Plan e-book for soups, salad dressings, stir fries and main courses. Step Four—Charge Your Batteries There are two kinds of fatigue. One comes from doing a lot of hard physical work, like chopping wood or chasing after several young kids. That kind needs physical rest—sleep, relaxation by lying in a warm scented bath or learning a simple meditation technique. The other fatigue (which most of us suffer from these days) comes from stress. It depletes our energy reserves and undermines vitality. To counter this sort of tiredness, you need to exercise. Your body thrives on movement—even the simplest kind. Go for pleasant unhurried walks. Climb stairs instead of taking the lift whenever you can. Take your children with you if you need to; it is good for them too. Swim at your local sports center or even consider taking up weight training, which I love. There is no age barrier to beginning. If you are over forty, fifty, or even sixty—great news: New research shows it is actually easier for you to build lean body mass (good firm, sleek muscles instead of flab) than your younger brothers and sisters. Another way to charge your batteries and develop great-looking skin, nails and hair at the same time is to make some of the best food-state nutritional supplements part of your summer vitality program. Vitamin C is important for good firm skin. Make sure you get plenty throughout the day—even more when you are under stress. So are the bioflavonoids which are essential for your body to build new collagen on which youthful-looking skin depends. Green supplements can be the way to go for minerals and nature-made vitamins that beautify hair and nails. They are based on algae like spirulina—rich in Vitamins E, B1, B6, B5, C and B12—and on young cereal grasses rich in fatty acids which bolster skin moisturization. Why not try one of the new vitality-enhancing herbals too—they come in capsule form—such as guarana from Brazil, Korean Ginseng, or the root of the wild Suma plant. Step Five—Grin And Bear It Laughter is a great energy maker. Three minutes of laughter a day is every bit as good for you as a ten minute aerobic workout. It increases oxygen consumption, reduces muscle tension and even lowers blood pressure. It also makes you look and feel years younger than your chronological age. Go to a funny film whenever you can. Get together with friend and throw a ‘laughter afternoon’ where everybody brings jokes and crunchy summer vegetables. This way you get two bites into vitality energy at one go. Laughter works because it is one of the faces of joy. Self-care is another. Psychologists confirm that men and women who look after their appearance experience far less depression that the general population. Take pride in yourself. Hair longs to glow in the summer sun, but it needs protection from UV light which can do as much damage to your crowning glory as it can to your skin. Use a shampoo that is gentle enough for daily washing plus a conditioner containing a UV protector to nourish your hair while keeping out harmful rays that destroy elasticity and split ends. If you color or perm your hair, leave at least a month before going into the sun and make sure you pile on the protein-based deep conditioners and treatment products in the meantime. Forget complicated styles for the holidays, keep blow drying to a minimum and use a low setting. The mineral element silicon or silica is also a great strengthener for hair taken as a nutritional supplement. Make use of it daily. The benefits will last all the way through next winter. It will make nails and skin stronger and more radiant too. Step Six—Dare To Be You The best way of all to get lasting vitality and glowing good looks into your life this summer (forever after, for that matter) is to discover what gives you your greatest satisfaction and make space for it in your life. Each of us is totally unique. True beauty—like lasting energy—depends on our living out that uniqueness. This is not only the secret of charisma—that mysterious quality that seems to draw every good thing to you no matter what your age. When we love what we do, we bring love to others too—fulfilling our own goals and offering the very best of our unique gifts to our families, our communities and the world at large. Begin today to do some little thing that brings you joy. Plant seeds of joy and they will bear rich fruit for you and those around you. Have a great summer! Below is a list of some of my own Get Ready for Summer Favorites. As you probably know by now, I order almost everything from iHerb.com wherever I am in the world. Take a look at those which interest you. You may well be able to find them online in whatever country you live. If not, do use iHerb.com. Their prices are the best anywhere and if you get things shipped with DHL they arrive within 3 to 5 days. Even the shipping is the cheapest I’ve found anywhere in the world. Here are a few products you might find useful: The New 10 Day Clean Up Plan I created the original 10 Day Clean-Up Plan as a step-by-step guide for regenerating energy, transforming the way you look and feel and enhancing wellbeing all round—in a mere 10 days. The book was, and is, a complete home-spa program, spring cleaning your body, firming skin and muscles, trimming a few excess pounds, clearing your mind and brightening your spirits. Order My Book - The New 10 Day Clean Up Plan Life Flo Health, Pure Magnesium Flakes, Magnesium Chloride Brine Pure Magnesium Flakes are highly-concentrated crystals of magnesium chloride sourced from the ancient Zechstein seabed in the Netherlands—nothing added and nothing removed. The magnesium flakes are extremely pure because the seabed lies 1,600 to 2,000 meters beneath the surface of the earth where it has been protected. Refresh your body and mind by using Pure Magnesium Flakes in a full bath or foot soak. For relaxing your body and mind, we recommend you put 1-2 cups (8-16 ounces) or more in the bathtub or footbath, and then soak for a minimum of 20 minutes. Note: The temperature of the magnesium bath should be warm (101 F to 105 F) rather than hot. When you add the flakes to warm (i.e., not hot) bath water, your skin will feel the results more effectively. Order Pure Magnesium Flakes from iherb Devita Solar Body Block SPF 30 For over ten years now DeVita has been dedicated to developing beautifully pure age defying skin care products. Devita now brings that care and expertise to their exclusive line of color cosmetics - |ab·so·lute| minerals. Just great, healthy coverage you can count on absolutely...|ab·so·lute| minerals. Order Devita Solar Body Block SPF 30 from iherb Horsetail Organic For Teas Frontier Natural Products, Organic Cut & Sifted Horsetail Horsetail is also known as scouring rush, shavegrass, bottlebrush or pewter wort. Because of its large quantity of silica, it was used to clean metal. Our horsetail consists of the sterile, aerial parts harvested in the summer months between June and August. Order Horsetail Organic For Teas from iherb Green Barley Frontier Natural Products, Organic Powdered Barley Grass Barley Grass is a whole food loaded with essential vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and many more nutrients your body needs every day. A wonderful way to ensure you're getting enough dark leafy greens in your diet. Order Green Barley from iherb Hair Health And Growth Superior Hair is a synergistic formula that contains well-recognized and scientifically researched nutrients to support the repair of damaged hair follicles and the health and growth of hair. Order Hair Health And Growth from iherb Well Wisdom, Vital Whey, Natural Vanilla Vital Whey is a delicious, 100% natural nutritional protein supplement. Vital Whey is a proprietary, non-denatured, native whey protein that is produced to maintain the full range of all the fragile immune-modulating and regenerative components naturally present in fresh raw milk. The milk for this product is derived from cows that are grass-fed and graze year-round on natural pastures. Our whey does not contain genetically engineered materials. It is hormone-treatment-free, pesticide-free, chemical-free and undergoes minimal processing. Grass-Fed Year-Round Hormone-Treatment-Free The Finest Biologically-Active Non-Denatured Whey Protein Dietary Supplement Comes in Natural. Vanilla and Cocoa Order Well Wisdom, Vital Whey, Natural Vanilla, 21 oz (600 g) from iherb Best Liquid Stevia Wisdom Natural, SweetLeaf, Liquid Stevia, English Toffee Sweet Leaf liquid stevia with all natural flavors is convenient and easy to use. As a supplement, add this nutritious stevia to water, tea, coffee, milk, sparkling water, protein shakes, plain yogurt or anything else you can imagine. It comes in many different flavors including lemon but English Toffee flavor is the best by far. Order The Best Liquid Stevia from iherb IMPORTANT - Do not be fooled by the artificially made Stevia products such as Truvia and Purevia. These products are not the natural Stevia plant. To learn more read my post here called beware of Truvia. Carlson Labs, MedOmega Fish Oil 2800 From Norway: The finest fish oil from deep, cold ocean-water fish. Concentrated to supply 2800 mg. (2.8 grams) of total Omega 3's per teaspoonful. Bottled in Norway to ensure maximum freshness. Refreshing natural lemon-lime taste. Balanced Concentrate DHA 1200 mg & EPA 1200 mg Professional Strength Promotes Heart, Brain & Joint Health Order MedOmega Fish Oil 2800 from iherb Great Fiber Nature's Way, EfaGold, Hemp Protein & Fiber, Cold Milled Powder Nature's Way EFA Gold is the highest quality hemp seed powder, and one of nature's richest sources of protein, fiber & essential fatty acids. 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Kill Death Curses And Live!

Unlock the Secret to Graceful Aging: Discover the Death Curses in Modern Society

Everybody’s heard of death curses. Literature is laced with accounts of how Aboriginal witch doctors have brought about the death of the young and healthy by cursing them. No sooner do these people learn about the fate which has been cast for them than, inexplicably, they begin to sicken and die. Through complex biological processes, their simple belief in the curse foisted upon starts to bring about their downfall. MODERN-DAY DEATH CURSES In civilized society we look upon such phenomena as anthropological curiosities—products of primitive superstition which can’t touch us in our “enlightened age”. What we don’t know, however, is this: We in the so-called civilized world are, more often than not, living under our own brand of “death curses”—most of which we are not even aware of. They are subtler than those issued by witch doctors, yet every bit as deadly in creating the physical and mental decline that we have been taught to associate with aging. Common charged words and phrases associated with aging like “retirement”, “middle-age”, “It's all downhill after forty”, and “At your age you must start taking things more easily” are widely voiced. They can exert a powerful effect on the process of aging for all of us by creating destructive self-fulfilling expectations of age decline. Then, instead of facing our future full of confidence and excitement about what lies ahead, optimism gets replaced by anxiety as we are warned to “Be careful”, or “Never take chances on a new career at your age.” The list of such frequently proffered “sensible” advice is a long one. Such suggestions often lead us to make changes in the way we live that actually encourage physical decline—like decreasing the amount of exercise we get, or altering our eating habits away from fiber-rich natural foods towards “softer” foods and “convenience foods”. We may even limit the amount of social and intellectual stimulation we have been used to. What’s worse, this kind of advice tends to undermine our self-image and destroy our self-confidence. This in turn interferes with the proper functioning of the immune system, which plays such a central role in protecting the body from aging. An essential ingredient in healthy aging is becoming aware of just how powerfully our emotions, state of mind, and unconscious assumptions influence susceptibility to illness and the rate at which we age. Once this awareness penetrates your consciousness, you can begin to make use of a few powerful techniques that quite automatically banish death curses from your life, and help you live healthy, decade after decade. MIND-BODY CONNECTIONS The notion that your state of mind can influence your health and the rate at which you age was once something that had to be taken on faith. Now it’s been scientifically proven, thanks to a scientific discipline with a tongue-twisting name: psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). PNI has established that the body's immune system, that bulwark of defense, is undeniably affected by your unconscious assumptions, your emotional states and your behavioral patterns. They lead either to a significant resistance to rapid aging on the one hand, or to an increased susceptibility to decrepitude and degenerative diseases on the other. The happier you are, the better you feel about yourself and the more positive are your expectations about the future, the more likely is it that you will age slowly and gracefully, and the less likely you will be to fall prey to illness of whatever sort—from a common cold to a chronic life-threatening disease. LIVE LIKE ZORBA No area of what I call “ageless aging” is more fun to explore than this one. I always think of positive aging as “Zorba the Greek” consciousness. It makes possible the most amazing physical and mental feats by quite ordinary people living ordinary lives. Take the man who is able to work eighteen hours a day, drink whisky by the tumblerful, dance on tables until the early hours of the morning and still live to be 110, thanks to the sheer joy of his passion for living. (I had a grandfather like this whom I absolutely adored!) You also find this positive vision of ageing amongst saints and holy men who carry out their day-to-day activities, from writing letters to peeling potatoes, in a state of bliss—samadhi. Take a look at their superbly unlined faces. Many could as easily be thirty as seventy. Mainstream medicine has long acknowledged that emotional states such as anxiety and depression can make some illnesses worse. These include asthma, diabetes, peptic ulcer, ulcerative colitis, migraine and cardiovascular problems. But until the advent of PNI, it has paid little attention to examining the power—both positive and negative—of their psychological components, nor has it explored ways and means of improving these conditions by altering a patient's mental state or behavioral patterns. Meanwhile, it still ignores psychological components in the vast majority of other illnesses—from lung disease and cancer to rheumatism and allergic reactions—choosing to treat them instead as nothing other than physiological conditions, little affected by whether the patient experiencing them felt good or bad in himself. Western medicine, bound by the Cartesian notion of a split between mind and matter, fails to consider the people it treats as psychobiological beings, whose feelings, thoughts, expectations and perceptions are intimately bound to their physiology and biochemistry. They never bother to ask the question: Why do some people who smoke forty cigarettes a day for 20 years end up with lung cancer, while others following exactly the same pattern don't? TIME TO TRANSFORM Just as prolonged unmitigated stress, depression and anxiety suppress immune functions, a positive frame of mind frees us from death curses. It brings us a sense that we can cope with whatever comes our way, offers potent protection from illness and age-degeneration. Those of us who succumb to anxiety, depression and a sense of helplessness when life difficulties arise invariably show suppressed immune functions. The Zorba-like people who feel they can deal effectively with whatever comes their way most often have good immune functions, even when faced with major life changes. In a well controlled study of women suffering from breast cancer who underwent mastectomy, British researcher Dr Steven Greer reported that women who react to their diagnosis by denying that they are seriously ill or with a determination to conquer the problem are far more likely five years later to be free of the disease than those who stoically accept a diagnosis while feeling hopeless or helpless. MAKE AGE WORK FOR YOU What can you do, starting right now, to develop your mind as a tool for positive aging? Begin by exploring the benefits of mind/body techniques that alter your mental attitudes and emotional states from negative to positive, therefore encouraging good immune functions and slowing down the rate at which you age. There are many. Some 40 years back, Dr Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School developed a simple meditative technique, called the Relaxation Response. It consists of sitting with your eyes closed for 15 or 20 minutes morning and night and repeating a single word—say “one” or “peace”—over and over again silently. Practiced regularly every day, it not only counters the immune-suppressing tendencies of stress, but even brings about major psychological shifts in belief systems that gradually change a self-defeating sense of helplessness into a free spirit who, like Zorba himself, can dance on tables just for fun. I recently wrote about Benson’s amazing work. You’ll find it here. I’ve even posted a video so you can learn the technique and practice it with me every day if you like. Finally, there is an excellent video by Benson about working with the Relaxation Response and the amazingly positive benefits research shows it to have on those who practice it daily. HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT AGING? Explore how many negative expectations you have unconsciously connected with aging. Then you simply and methodically go about changing them. Start right now: How many of the following notions would you agree with? They have been adapted from a questionnaire designed by gerontologist Erdman Palmore from Duke University Medical Center in the United States. TAKE THIS QUIZ Then check your answers at the end. (Just mark “T” for true or “F” for false.) The majority of old people (past age sixty-five) are senile (i.e. defective memory, disoriented or demented). All five senses tend to decline with age. Most old people have no interest in sex. Lung capacity tends to decline in old age. The majority of old people feel miserable most of the time. The majority of old people are seldom irritated or angry. At least one-tenth of the aged are living in long-stay institutions (i.e. nursing homes, mental hospitals, homes for the aged, etc). Aged drivers have fewer accidents per person than drivers under age sixty-five. Most older workers cannot work as effectively as younger workers. About 80 per cent of the aged are healthy enough to carry out their normal activities. Most old people are set in their ways and are unable to change. The majority of old people are working or would like to have some kind of work to do (including housework and volunteer work). It is almost impossible for most old people to learn new things. The reaction time of most old people tends to be slower than reaction time of younger people. In general, most old people are pretty much alike. The majority of old people are seldom bored. The majority of old people are socially isolated and lonely. Older workers have fewer accidents than younger workers. Older people tend to become more religious as they age. Most medical practitioners tend to give low priority to the aged. NOW CHECK YOUR ANSWERS The even-numbered questions are true. The odd numbered ones are false. How many of your own answers are correct? AGE REBORN Contrary to popular opinion, a mere 2 or 3 per cent of old people are institutionalized because of psychiatric disorders. The vast majority of older people do not have memory defects. Most people over sixty-five continue to be interested in sex, and sexual relations often continue well into the eighties between healthy men and women. Studies made of morale and happiness amongst the elderly show no difference between their enjoyment of life and that of younger people. Meanwhile, people over sixty-five have fewer accidents per person driving than younger drivers do. They also have fewer accidents at work. The majority of old people are not “set in their ways” as we have been taught, although it can take them longer to learn something new than their younger counterparts. Studies show that very few old people suffer from boredom. Neither are they socially isolated or lonely. More than 10 per cent of older people work and two-thirds of those who don't would like to. Finally, older people are seldom irritated or angry. This has been established by three separate studies. VISUALIZE AGE ANEW Becoming conscious of any false assumptions you make about aging is a good first step. The next is to create for yourself a new vision of what it means to have time passing. Make use of creative visualization techniques where, in a state of relaxation, you allow your mind to play on positive images of yourself five, ten, thirty years from now. It is only a matter of letting yourself indulge in positive daydreaming. Or practice a meditation or deep-relaxation technique once a day, and finish off by repeating silently to yourself Coue's formula for personal growth and healing: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” It is exquisitely simple, yet enormously powerful when practiced daily in a deeply relaxed state so that it is your imagination rather than your will which is brought into play.

MultiVitamins Matter - Shun The Synthetics

Grow Stronger & Get Healthier With Whole-Food Multivitamins!

The shelves of health food stores are chock-a-block with vitamin and mineral supplements. If you want to get the very best of them for the sake of your own health and that of your family you’ll need to choose them carefully. Despite their big price tags and the sexy designs that appear on their labels, the vast majority of multi vitamin and mineral products consist of synthetically manufactured chemical lookalikes of no value to your health. You’ve got to go for feed-state multivitamins and minerals if you want health supporting benefits. More about this in a moment. WHO NEEDS VITAMINS ANYWAY? We all do, despite the fact that a myriad of medical professionals completely untrained in good nutrition continue to tell their patients that taking supplements does nothing but produce expensive urine. This is nonsense. As far back as 20 years ago impeccable research was being published in reputable scientific journals making it obvious that human beings benefit from taking the right kind of multivitamin supplement. For instance, one excellent study which appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association showed that women who take over-the-counter multivitamin supplements in the first months of pregnancy dramatically reduce the risk of giving birth to a neurologically damaged child. Neural tube defects are amongst the most horrible and most common birth defects. They cause everything from death to paralysis in the child and they affect between 1 and 2 babies in every 1000 births. The study was carried out under the direction of Aubrey Milunsky, director of Boston University's prestigious Center for Human Genetics. It involved 23,000 women, half of whom took multivitamin pills containing folic acid (a B-group vitamin in particularly high demand during pregnancy). The results were astonishing. The incidence of neural tube defects in babies born to the women who took the multivitamin pills was only a quarter of what it was amongst those women who took no supplements. SHAKING THE FEDS So remarkable were these results that they shook United States Federal officials who have for generations claimed that taking nutritional supplements is not only unnecessary but can be damaging to an ordinary 'healthy' person's wellbeing. Nonetheless, the FDA and CODEX still insist that “nutrition is not relevant to health” and that if any vitamins and minerals are to be allowed on the market they will only be permitted in ultra-low doses. Clinically effective nutrients and doses are month-by-month being treated as “toxins” and removed from public access. How do we get around this? By taking good quality Food State Supplements instead of the run-of-the-mill chemically produced varieties. WHY YOU NEED FOOD STATE Most vitamins sold in stores and online are synthetic man-made vitamins that have been produced in the laboratory in an attempt to match the molecular structure of naturally occurring vitamins normally found in our foods. As a result they tend to contain high doses of the chemically-made nutrients in an attempt to make enough of each nutrient biologically available to the body. It is just these high dosages that the FDA and CODEX are targeting by making them illegal to be sold over-the-counter. But there is a wonderful way around this which I strongly urge you to explore—to shun chemically made vitamins (which over 90% on the market are) and go for their Food State cousins. Our bodies have been accustomed to absorbing with ease the vitamins and minerals that we get from our foods. Man-made synthetics, even though they try to match the molecular structures of vitamins and minerals, are not the same. Our bodies do not handle them as well, so you may be taking a high potency man-made synthetic that has come recommended, but you may not actually be absorbing the vitamins and minerals it contains. This is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about whole-food, natural multi-vitamins and minerals. GROWN NUTRIENTS Good manufacturers of whole-food vitamins and minerals grow the majority of the foods and botanicals that go into their formulas themselves. Then, using state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation, they test, validate and document the potencies of all the raw materials that make up the formula. This is achieved by using high performance liquid chromatography to test vitamin potency and inductively coupled plasma optimal emission spectrometers to test mineral potency. They are also very careful in how they handle the food extracts that are often added to these supplements. For instance, they use a very specific system of drying which transfers heat gently and efficiently, removing moisture from delicate foods and botanicals while preventing oxidation of the raw materials. This protects the integrity of the food and the botanicals as well as protecting against the degradation of their nutrient content, maintaining the color and the flavor. TREMENDOUS BENEFITS Because natural Food State vitamins are indeed natural and food-state, you will find that the recommended daily serving of vitamins per person is usually somewhere between six and eight tablets a day in order to be able to obtain the full benefit. In addition to the usual vitamins, i.e. vitamin A, C, D3, E, K1, folate, and so forth, there should be a good broad spectrum of minerals: calcium, iodine, magnesium, selenium, chromium, molybdenum, manganese, etc. These wonderful food-state vitamins also often contain extracts taken from other plants that are beneficial to the body, things like extract of barley grass and green papaya, extract of carrot for instance, as well as astragalus. They may also contain many of the Ayurvedic herbs or the herbs that are used in Chinese medicine—reishi and shitake mushrooms, foti and kudzu root. This is the kind of vitamin that I think you will benefit most from. BUYER BEWARE There are many vitamins on the market that claim to be whole-food vitamins but that are not of top quality. Always make sure, whatever vitamin/mineral complex you choose, that it is free of corn, soy, yeast, wheat and dairy products, and it has been formulated without the use of preservatives, artificial flavors or coloring. Here are some food-state vitamin and mineral supplements at the top of my own list. Tried and tested, they are worth every penny you pay for them. I have used all of these products personally and can’t recommend them highly enough. If you try some of them, I’d love you to let me know how you have found them yourself. MegaFood, Women's, Whole Food Multivitamin MegaFood cares about doing things the right way - they refuse to take shortcuts, and never compromise on quality or the things that matter. Since 1973, they have been going out of their way to source fresh and local foods from trusted farmers. They then make all their wholesome supplements using a one-of-a-kind process to deliver the most authentic nutrition - much more than vitamins alone. Order MegaFood Womens Whole Food Multi from iherb MegaFood, Baby & Me, California Blend, Whole Food Multivitamin Ideal for pregnant and lactating women Order Baby And Me Multi from iherb MegaFood, Men Over 40, Whole Food Multivitamin & Mineral, Iron Free Formula MegaFood cares about doing things the right way - we refuse to take shortcuts, and we never compromise on quality or the things that matter. Since 1973, we have been going out of our way to source fresh and local foods from trusted farmers. We then make our wholesome supplements using our one-of-a-kind process to deliver the most authentic nutrition - much more than vitamins alone. Order Men Over 40 Multi from iherb MegaFood, Skin, Nails & Hair, Whole Food Multivitamin MegaFood cares about doing things the right way - we refuse to take shortcuts, and we never compromise on quality or the things that matter. Since 1973, we have been going out of our way to source fresh and local foods from trusted farmers. We then make our wholesome supplements using our one-of-a-kind process to deliver the most authentic nutrition - much more than vitamins alone. Order Skin, Nails & Hair Multi from iherb

Retreat Secrets

Plumb the Depths: Discovering Your Potential Through a Retreat

I smile when the word “retreat” comes up and people get all “starry eyed” and “new age” about the idea. In my experience, a retreat—an enormously valuable event in one’s life which needs periodically to be repeated—has little to do with sitting beneath jasmine scented trees, communing peacefully with God. I have done many retreats of different lengths and kinds, including one in a Tibetan monastery, in which I spent some six weeks learning more about fleas than I would ever want to know. I believe each retreat is meant to be an experience of profound inner transformation, carried out with both feet planted firmly on the ground. PLUMBING THE DEPTHS Like any experience of real change, it asks that we plumb the depths of our being to come closer to what is real, as well as to access creativity, power, and energy we may never have touched before. In many ways, the process is like that of detoxifying your body by shifting from a low-carbohydrate diet to a way of eating that brings clarity to the mind and strength to the body. Retreats often bring to the surface a lot of the toxic “junk” from emotional damage and wrong thinking that all of us carry on a psychological and mental level, so it can be cleared. This is not always a comfortable process. DISCOVERING YOUR POTENTIALS Like the proverbial iceberg, most of us live with the lion’s share of our potential for freedom, joy, creativity, and power submerged beneath a sea of unknowing. We go about our day-to-day duties and pleasures, conscious only of what comes to us through our five senses. How does it taste and feel? What does it sound like? What do we see in front of our eyes? And most of the time—because of the stress that we live under in our urban lives —we are not even fully aware of our senses. Meanwhile, beneath the vast ocean of consciousness that constitutes what it is to be fully human, our greater selves hibernate, waiting to be awakened. It is this awakening that a retreat can help bring about. For like exceptional events in our lives which break through comfort zones—when we fall in love perhaps, or when we’re faced with an event of life-shattering proportions like a critical illness or the death of a close friend—a retreat in silence and solitude can cause submerged areas of our being to erupt in magic, in surges of passion, in vitality, in anxiety, in stunning beauty. EXPANDED AWARENESS For a time, the mundane quality of everyday life is replaced with a sense of expanded being. We not only feel more alive; we wake up to find that familiar things—the tree that stands outside the bedroom window, the cat that greets us when we come home each day, the simple shell we picked up and slipped into our pocket while walking on the beach—has taken on a luminosity we cannot explain. On retreat sometimes, without warning, while listening to music or walking down a street, we can be hit with a feeling that the world is far greater than we ever imagined it to be, or a sense that all we see around us somehow is us. We are all part of the same stuff. While the experience lasts, everything seems right in the world. Then, as our retreat ends, like the sun at the point of setting, it can all fade beneath the mundane horizon—leaving only the faintest wisp of colour to remind us that we once stood in glory, felt the rays of the sun upon our bodies, and knew that sense of being at one with the universe which gives every struggle meaning. A retreat, whether or not it is simply 2 hours set aside a week for you to do something that you absolutely love doing so that you are following your passion; whether you go into a monastery or a retreat centre for a long weekend; or into the wilderness on a vision quest, helps connect us with what is real, and remind us of who we really are. In the silence, when we are removed from the day-to-day structures of our lives which both support us and imprison us, we can begin to plunge the depths of our being and make a better connection with our inner visions, longings, passions, and creative power. DETOX FOR THE SOUL One of the most important gifts of a retreat is to help make us aware that the life we are living may not be entirely our own, or that it is not as authentic as we would like it to be, or that we are not getting as much out of our lives as we feel we should be. Such discoveries are never easy. Yet they often herald exciting changes for the better and help clear away much of the toxic “junk” we have been carrying. The process of reclaiming power and rebalancing energy, by walking away for a time from the ordinary structures of your life, is very much like the process of detoxifying the body. When you stop putting convenience foods into your body and begin eating in a way that supports life-long health, something remarkable happens. Not only do our physical distortions rise to the surface; you might experience fatigue, perhaps a headache as a result of giving up coffee, a deep cleansing of the body. In many ways a retreat acts as a detox for the soul. On a spiritual level, the distortions that we have picked up in our lives also tend to rise to the surface to be cleared away. We may find ourselves temporarily riddled with depression or a sense of meaninglessness, fear, the feeling that the life we are living in no way satisfies our inner need. WRITE IT DOWN On any retreat, it is essential to keep a journal of what you are thinking and how you are feeling, both physically and spiritually. We often forget that mind and body are one, not two separate entities. Nothing brings this truth more to consciousness than the process of retreating from our day-to-day life. For when you let go of the structures of your life for a time, the ideas, feelings, memories, and concerns that have been floating beneath the surface rise up into awareness. This is where it is important not to identify with them, but rather to just remark that they are there, record them, and learn to look at them objectively knowing that the fact they have risen to the surface means that they are probably ready to be got rid of, often leaving us lighter and freer than ever before. LISTEN TO YOUR INNER VOICE Simultaneously, probably because the psyche is so rich and complex and when you are on retreat you hear the whispers of your soul better than any other time, we tend to get tiny messages from the soul. We often get a sense of things that we want to do or be, learn, or try. Some of these things may be insignificant, while others seem to be very large indeed. Record these “whispers” in a journal, right alongside any negative or confusing feelings which surface. At the end of a retreat, you can then go back to these whispers which you have recorded. Make a decision to act upon one or two of the things you want, whether they be apparently insignificant things such as I want to change the way my hair is cut, or large issues such as I want to go back to university and learn new skills. DISCOVER YOUR PASSIONS A retreat can help us come in touch with passions of the soul. Passion, I believe, holds the key to everything, and more than anything else, the stressful demanding lives that we live, where we are living mostly by other people’s rules (being the good employee, the good mother, the good wife etc.) tend to make us deaf to the whispers of our soul. A retreat can awaken again our ability to hear these passions. A NEW LIFE BEGINS The real trick to making retreats work for you comes after the retreat is over. It’s at that point, when you look back into your journal and find out what it is, and are reminded of the things that you most want. These are not just things that you think might be possible, but what you really want in your life. Decide to bring into being only one or two of the things that you want most to do. This is how we ground our spiritual insights in our day-to-day lives and then gradually, bit by bit, day by day, we not only find that the “distortions” we have carried so long have lessened, loosening their hold on us. With each action we take, following one or two or more of what one hears from within, it becomes easier and easier to connect with our soul’s whispers and therefore easier and easier to live an infinitely rewarding, authentic life. And, as often as not, all this can begin with a simple intention to retreat.

Moon & Ovarian Cycle Rites

Unlock the Secrets of Women's Sacred Menses: A Journey of the Female Endocrine System

Quite literally, the menses is the period of waxing and waning between one new moon and the next. Once menstruation begins at puberty, which is a woman's first rite of passage, the ebbs and flows which her body goes through each month are the stuff of which the second movement in her life's hormonal symphony is made. This part of her life has one major goal - childbearing. Its success depends greatly upon the two major steroids - the oestrogens and progesterone - working in close communication with her body's major control centers, the pituitary and hypothalamus. Only since the late nineteenth century have women's menstrual cycles - the menses - been investigated scientifically. The name menses also comes from a Greek word - meaning `month'. It in turn is derived from an even older word meaning `moon'. master controls A neural nuclei in the limbic brain, the hypothalamus, is the control center for homeostasis. It balances and oversees biochemical and energetic changes throughout the body. The limbic system in which it sits is the most primitive part of the brain. It is the part which deals with emotions and with our sense of smell, with our passions, and with all the unconscious interfaces that take place between mind and body. The actions of the limbic lie beneath the level of the thinking mind. This is one of the reasons that the hypothalamus is often referred to as the `seat of emotions'. When excited, the hypothalamus triggers desire - for food, for water, for adventure, for sex. Its actions can also be influenced by inhibitory thought patterns. In a woman frightened of becoming pregnant, for instance, the fear itself - via the hypothalamus - can dampen sexual desire or even disrupt menstrual cycles so she remains barren. The hypothalamus also responds to alterations in the electric and magnetic fields of the earth and of moon, and to other planetary events, as well as to electromagnetic pollution in our environment and the positive stimulus of energy medicine. It reacts to bodily changes that take place as a result of meditation, and its activities are influenced by spiritual practices - which is a major reason why women who meditate regularly tend to develop greater emotional balance, as well as why repeated experiences of joy or stillness can dramatically improve various female complaints such as PMS and hot flushes in both menstruating and menopausal women. sacred cycles There are three main branches of the female endocrine system involved in menstruation. The first is the master gland, the hypothalamus. It releases gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH). The second is the anterior pituitary, which releases follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH) - both of which are secreted in response to GnRH from the hypothalamus. The third is made up of the oestrogens and progesterone which, during a woman's non-pregnant childbearing years, are secreted by the ovaries in response to FSH and LH. It is the symphony of interactions and feedback mechanisms between these three branches that bring about the blood ritual of menstruation. All of the hormones released during a menstrual cycle are secreted not in a constant, steady way, but at dramatically different rates during different parts of the 28 day period; a cycle which like everything else in a natural world involves birth, maturation, and death, only to lead to new birth again - in this case, of the egg a woman's body produces. Menstruation itself is simply the elimination of the thickened blood and blood filled endometrium in the womb - the lining developed in preparation for a possible pregnancy. For when a pregnancy does not occur, this lining is shed at monthly intervals under the control of oestrogen and progesterone with a little help from their friends GnRH, FSH, and LH. When ovaries are not stimulated by the gonadotrophic hormones from the pituitary, they remain asleep, as they were during childhood and as they become again after menopause. For the first 8 to 11 days of the menstrual cycle, a woman's ovaries make lots of oestrogen. Within the ovary itself are little things called follicles - partially developed eggs. One of these will be released each month in hopes of meeting up with the sperm and creating an embryo. It is oestrogen which prepares the bloody lining of the uterus and causes the follicle to develop in the ovary, bringing it to the surface of the ovary and preparing for the release of one of the eggs. The word oestrogen, like the hormones produced in a woman's body which belong to this family - oestrone, oestradiol, and oestriol - comes from oestrus, a Greek word meaning `frenzy', `heat', or `fertility'. It is oestrogen which proliferates the changes that take place at puberty - the growth of breasts, the development of a girl's reproductive system, the reshaping of a woman's body. It also alters your vaginal secretions, making them more viscous and less watery, and it causes your body's temperature to rise at the time of ovulation, by about one degree. Each girl baby is born with all the primary follicles she will ever need. At the time of puberty, a girl's ovaries contain about 300,000 of these follicles. And while each woman only produces one or two fully developed eggs each month, somewhere between 100 and 300 follicles have to start developing in order for one to become fully grown, so a woman can lose between 100 to 300 follicles a month. However, since she started with 300,000, she will have enough to last all her reproductive life. On day one of each monthly cycle - that is, the day of the onset of menstruation - first the production of FSH and then of LH increases. This increase in hormones from the anterior pituitary triggers a group of ovarian follicles each month, causing accelerated growth in the cells surrounding them. As cells around the eggs grow, they secrete a follicular fluid which contains a high concentration of the oestrogen oestradiol to bring about many other changes, developing the potential of one of the follicles so that it becomes capable of being fertilized by the male sperm. It is not the oestradiol alone secreted by the follicle which brings about the maturation of the egg, however. Luteinizing hormone (LH) from the anterior pituitary continues to be secreted to help the process along until after a week or more, when one of the follicles outgrows all of the rest. This is the one that will become the female egg ready for impregnation. The remainder of the follicles now begin to involute. LH becomes particularly important at this stage in order for the final follicular growth to be completed and ovulation itself to occur - that is, the release of the egg into the fallopian tubes for its journey down into the uterus. So the rate of secretion of LH by the anterior pituitary increases markedly, rising 6 or 10 times then peaking about 18 hours before ovulation - the release of the egg into the fallopian tubes for its journey down into the uterus. The production of FSH also increases at this time, and these two hormones act together to cause a swelling of the follicle during several days before ovulation. Finally ovulation takes place usually around the fourteenth day, in the middle of your cycle. enter progesterone LH also alters the cells around the egg follicle, so that now they secrete less oestradiol, but progressively rising amounts of progesterone. This means that the rate of oestrogen secretion begins to fall about day thirteen, one day before ovulation occurs. But as small amounts of progesterone begin to be secreted, very rapid growth of the follicle takes place. Beginning with this secretion of progesterone, ovulation occurs too, triggered yet again by the luteinizing hormone from the anterior pituitary. During the first few hours after the ovum has been expelled from the follicle, more and more rapid physical and chemical changes take place to the egg in a process called luteinization. At this stage - known as the luteal stage of a woman's cycle - the follicle becomes known as the corpus luteum, or yellow body. The cells around the egg begin to secrete larger quantities of progesterone, as the level of oestrogen decreases. Some of the cells around the egg become much enlarged. They develop inclusions of lipids or fats which give them their distinctive yellow color. From now on, development becomes rapid until seven or eight days after ovulation, when it peaks. As soon as a follicle releases an egg, the ovary switches over from pumping out oestrogen to primarily making progesterone. Progesterone is only synthesized when you ovulate. In fact, ovulation changes the whole ball game. No longer is there a need for further build up of the womb lining. The challenge now is to hold on to the secretory endometrium, and to render it capable of nurturing a fertilized egg long enough for it to grow into a baby. That is progesterone's task. The progesterone released with the egg has a negative effect on the other ovary. Its release tells the other ovary: "Hey, we've got an egg out now, so you don't have to worry about producing any." For even though women have two ovaries, they usually produce only one egg a month. The business of fraternal twins - that is, both ovaries releasing an egg at the same time - only happens once every three hundred months, which is why fraternal twins are so rare. The corpus luteum, which forms each month, is a tiny organ with a huge capacity for hormone production. It releases large quantities of progesterone, plus some oestrogen, which cause a feedback decrease in the secretion of FSH and LH by the anterior pituitary, so that no new follicles begin to grow. But as soon as the corpus luteum degenerates at the end of its 12 day life - which is about the 26th day of the female sexual cycle - this lack of feedback triggers the anterior pituitary gland to secrete several times as much FSH, followed a few days later by more LH as well. This in turn stimulates the growth of new follicles to begin the next ovarian cycle. And at the same time, a fall in progesterone and in oestrogen secretion trigger menstruation. peaks and falls From day 1 until about day 13 of a woman's menstrual cycle, the level of progesterone in her body is very, very low. Yet the point at which a follicle is released, it continues to rise dramatically until day 21 to 23, at which point it begins to fall down again to its lowest level, as menstruation begins around day 28. In addition to maintaining the endometrium and shifting down activity in the other ovary, the progesterone provided each month travels to other parts of a woman's body to fulfill other roles. It protects her from the side-effects of oestrogen for one thing, helping to protect her from getting breast cancer, from retaining water and salt, from high blood pressure, and from becoming depressed. Progesterone also brings surges of libido. You still hear a few so called experts say that oestrogen increases libido. But think about it. Which hormone would you rely on for sex-drive - oestrogen, which is present before the egg is made, or progesterone, which comes after the egg is released and is ready for fertilization? Libido increases with progesterone surges. When this rhythmic cycling of oestrogen and progesterone during each lunar month gets out of sync (and many things in modern life can cause this) then all sorts of things can go wrong - from infertility to PMS, depression, bloating, endometriosis and fibroids. For the oestrogens and progesterone, each have their characteristic roles to play, and for a woman to be healthy they must balance each other. the last and the first So do all the other steroids: This group of hormones to which cortisol, aldosterone, progesterone, DHEA, testosterone and the oestrogens belong, is intimately involved in how you feel both physically and emotionally, as well as how rapidly your body ages. Steroids have a characteristic molecular structure which resembles cholesterol, from which they are all ultimately derived. Cholesterol is the vital fatty substance that has had such a bad press in recent years, but which is absolutely essential to life. Out of each steroid hormone made from cholesterol, yet another - and following that another - can be made in a knock-on effect. For instance, pregnenolone is the steroid manufactured directly from cholesterol. It in turn becomes a precursor to progesterone, as well as to other hormones. Natural steroid hormones such as progesterone, made by biosynthesis in your own body, have this remarkable capability to act as precursors. In other words they are capable of being turned into other hormones further down the pathways as and when your body needs them. Progesterone is mother of many other hormones. It can eventually be turned not only into various oestrogens, but also into cortisol - the anti-inflammatory hormone - and into other steroids such as corticosterone or aldosterone, with equally important jobs to do. All of these conversions happen through slight alterations in the shape of a molecule, thanks to the actions of enzymes, each of which carries out a specific task. But these conversions can only take place if the molecules on which the enzyme is acting "fit" precisely - both electromagnetically and stereochemically - into its structure. All of these changes which take place through the magic of enzymes occur in the presence of vitamin and mineral cofactors such as magnesium, zinc, and B6, which catalyze each enzyme reaction. They are all carefully modulated by elaborate feedback mechanisms as well. The names and chemical transformations from one steroid to another are not important to remember. What is important is that you get some sense of just how complex hormone synthesis and interactions can be, and how important it is to have sufficient cofactors as well as `primary' hormones, such as pregnalone and progesterone, to be able to synthesize others. A rich hormonal symphony? Immeasurably. Yet all this still does not even begin to take into account the myriad pathways by which these steroid hormones interact with other hormones, or master central mechanisms within the hypothalamus and pituitary, or psychoneuroimmunological pathways by which hormones effect our emotions, and emotions our hormones. sabotage It is in coming face to face with the rich textures of such hormonal symphonies that the synthetic progestagen drugs can come a cropper. When you look at the structures of their molecules, in every case you find that although they resemble your body's homemade hormones, their shapes have been altered slightly by adding extra atoms here or there at unusual positions. It is this that has enabled them to qualify as patentable drugs. However, unlike the natural hormones - which they attempt to mimic, and which not only fulfill their own functions by binding with their own receptor sites but also act as precursors for a myriad of other hormones with other important jobs to do - the progestagens are end-product molecules. They are also completely foreign to the living body. Unlike nature's own steroids they can also not be augmented or diminished as necessary to maintain balance, and to keep the body's hormonal symphony flowing smoothly. They also cannot easily be eliminated when their levels get too high. Although the synthetics can still bind with the receptor sites of the hormones they are made to mimic, they don't fit as well as the homemade steroids do into the enzymes meant to act upon them. This means they are not under the watchful eye and control of these enzymes, nor of the body's self-regulating capacities. Drug-based oestrogens and progestagens in contraceptives and HRT cocktails can significantly disrupt a woman's normal hormonal cycles by introducing foreign elements into her body. They also virtually wipe out the moon cycles to which a woman's natural fertility and spiritual balance are inexorably bound from puberty onwards. So although in the short term they may temporarily do a job such as provide birth control or quell heavy bleeding in a menopausal woman, in the long run they only sabotage hormone balance, by turning harmony into dissonance - a dissonance capable not only of causing disruptions in a woman's health and physical body, but also of creating emotional and spiritual confusion in her life. This, sadly, is not something you will find described in the Merck index that warns doctors of a drug's side-effects, however. For the spiritual aspects of health and healing tend to be all but forgotten in the linear thinking that underlies most twentieth century medicine. In the mechanistic western world of drug-based treatments, where we are trained to take a pill for whatever ails us, this concept can be a little strange for some women to grasp. Especially if they are well educated, intelligent, and if they have been urged from puberty to rely on oral contraceptives - even told they are irresponsible if they don't. Or if they have been filled with fear that if they don't take HRT as menopause approaches their life is going to fall apart. friends and lovers Quite apart from their biochemical actions, rather like people, hormones have characters with highly individual personalities. To the biochemist, the `personalities' of the oestrogens and progesterone will always remain a mystery. He is interested in nothing beyond their molecular configurations. But many women come to know these personalities well - by allowing intuition and instinct to be their teachers. When progesterone is surging through the body, a woman can feel high. Provided her body is producing enough of this steroid, she is likely to feel great. Your senses are keen when progesterone is running. Smells smell sweeter - or more horrible. Touching, sensing, tasting, hearing, are all richer experiences than usual. In the presence of progesterone, women have a desire to do something, to create something, to work in the garden, to dance or sing a song, or make love. Sometimes progesterone surges can feel like falling in love. They can bring feelings of balanced wellbeing together with excitement - a desire to explore new worlds, and to try new things. This can happen during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle after ovulation, when the follicle turns into the yellow body (or corpus luteum), but it becomes far more intense when you are pregnant. It is a high level of progesterone that makes a woman feel on top of the world during the last months of pregnancy. At this time the placenta churns out an amazing 300 to 400 milligrams of the steroid, while during the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle it will have only been producing 20 milligrams or so a day. I suspect that among those women who seem to get pregnant over and over and who so love the whole experience, you are likely to find high progesterone levels. You also find them in women who have trouble-free menstruation. Sadly the opposite is true too: When progesterone is low - as it is in a growing number of women now, who have been subjected to manufactured hormones and who, living in the polluted world, have become oestrogen dominant - women never seem to feel well even during pregnancy. Many have all sorts of troubles with their female organs and cycles including PMS - sometimes from puberty right through to death. when oestrogens flow The oestrogens have quite a different character. When oestrogens peak in the menstrual cycle just before the `fall' of ovulation, a woman feels less independent. She is more willing to adjust herself to the needs of others. She is more inclined to see herself in relation to men too instead of as a woman in her own right. When the oestrogens are running, women like to attract a mate not so much to draw him into her body as to comfort, admire and care for her. Her ovaries seem to be smiling - `whatever you want, I'm happy to give', they seem to say. A few women who by nature are high oestrogen producers feel quite dependent on others for approval, and for the definition of their being. While such an experience can be lovely and make a woman feel highly `feminine', it can also go too far. However, in these women, when menopause finally arrives and oestrogen levels drop dramatically, often they find to their surprise and delight that for the first time in their lives they begin to feel complete in themselves - as though they don't need anybody else to validate their lives. Provided they are otherwise well, menopause can be sheer joy in the sense of freedom it brings these women - that is, once they get over the shock of being such a `different person'. From a biological point of view, there are many important actions that progesterone and oestrogen exert upon the body and psyche. Since these are little known among women and doctors alike it is worth looking at a few: Effects of Progesterone Effects of Oestrogen Increases libido Decreases libido Prevents cancer of the womb Increases risk of womb cancer Protects against fibrocystic breast disease Stimulates breast cell activity Maintains the lining of the uterus Proliferates the lining of the uterus Stimulates the building of new bone Slows down the resorption of old bone Strengthens skin Thins skin Is a natural diuretic Encourages salt and water retention Brings antidepressant effects Can produce headaches and depression Encourages fat burning and the use of stored energy Lays down fat stores Normalizes blood clotting Increases blood clotting Concerned with the procreation and survival of the fetus Concerned with the development and release of the egg Precursor to important stress hormones End-molecule steroids The reproductive hormonal menstrual cycle of a woman between puberty and the menarche is a superbly ordered natural work of art. It becomes so much a part of our lives that unless we have some particular difficulties with PMS or fertility, we hardly give it any thought. Not, that is, until things begin to alter. Once they do begin - in most women sometime between the age of forty and fifty - they usually change gradually, until finally a woman senses that something deep in her being has shifted. Such feelings herald the coming of menopause - the third phase of a woman's life.

Keto-Adaptation for Health, Performance An Beyond

Discover the Benefits of a Low Carb Lifestyle with The X Factor Diet

This is an excellent video about keto-adaptation which will give you a real insight into what this remarkable metabolic process is all about. Every one of us, regardless of age, has the capability of producing ketones. But unless we are following a low-carbohydrate way of living, this remarkable ketogenic program continues to be suppressed. So long as we continue to eat a lot of carbohydrate foods, the body doesn’t have an opportunity to boot up and run its keto-adaptation process. The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living Carbohydrate restricted diets are commonly practiced but seldom taught. As a result, doctors, dietitians, nutritionists, and nurses may have strong opinions about low carbohydrate dieting, but in many if not most cases, these views are not grounded in science. Order Low Carbohydrate Living from Amazon The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance A Revolutionary Program to Extend Your Physical and Mental Performance Envelope. Our recent book 'The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living' was written for health care professionals, championing the benefits of carbohydrate restriction to manage insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and type-2 diabetes. Order The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance from Amazon The KetoDiet Book—Real Food & Healthy Living The ketogenic diet is high in fat, adequate in protein and low in carbohydrates. Most people follow the diet in order to lose weight. However, weight loss is just one of the many benefits that include improved cholesterol levels, lowering risk of stroke, heart disease and diabetes, treating of cancer, epilepsy and more. Order The KetoDiet Book from Amazon Then there is my own book on the Ketogenic and Insulin Balanced Diets: The X Factor Diet Permanent weight loss without hunger or hardship is everyone's dream. In this ground-breaking book Leslie Kenton reveals how to achieve your ideal body shape and weight in this way while simultaneously overcoming the health hazards that excess weight brings in its wake. Order The X Factor Diet from Amazon

Kids In The Kitchen

Creating Veg Meals for Your Growing Child: An Enthusiastic Parent's Guide

The important thing when feeding children is to build your own menus around what you yourself like best and then share your enthusiasm with your growing child. Enthusiasm tends to be contagious. These menus are vegetarian. This is not because I think all children should be vegetarian. It is because, generally speaking, babies and young children seem to thrive on vegetarian dishes and some find meat constipating and hard to digest. Also much of the meat and chicken and fish these days is either highly processed (i.e. breaded fish pieces) or comes from animals which have been overmedicated with antibiotics. I have raised most of my children from the beginning on vegetarian foods only, introducing them to fish and game and free-range chicken if and when they showed an interest. However, if you and your family are committed meat eaters then the soups or stews you make will simply have meat or chicken or fish added. They can still be pureed or chopped to serve to a child in whatever way is appropriate to his age. meals for nature's child breakfast babies 6-12 months Mother's milk and 4oz porridge made from wholegrain oats or wheat or millet or rice flakes toddlers 1-2 years 1 small piece of ripe fruit or a small bowl of ripe stone fruit mashed or chopped with1 cup almond milk or yogurt or a dish of Live Muesli children 2 years up A dish of Live Muesli or 1-2 pieces of fruit with almond milk  or yogurt, and Scrambled egg and 1-2 slices of gluten-free bread with butter and honey lunch babies 6-12 months Mother's milk and 8oz vegetable stew puree or vegetable soup and Mashed fruit 1-2 years Vegetable stew or vegetable soup either pureed or in bigger chunks or Wild Nut Burgers or Lentil Soup or Stew 2 years up Vegetable stew or vegetable soup or Wild Nut Burgers or Pitta Pockets tea babies 6-12 months Mother's milk and Nut milk perhaps pureed with a small crust of gluten-free bread 1-2 years Small plate of raw vegetables (grated carrot with celery, beetroot, tomato, & dressing) cut up small or `Spiderman Salad' Serve with wholegrain crackers, rice cakes, oat cakes etc spread with butter, nutbutter or honey. 2 years up Fruit with a slice of gluten-free bread or oatcakes, rice cakes, etc, spread with cottage cheese or nut butter or butter or honey and Small plate of raw vegetables (grated carrot with celery, beetroot, tomato & dressing) cut up small supper babies 6-12 months Mother's milk and 8oz Live Muesli pureed 1-2 years Live Muesli with slice of gluten-free bread or toast Live Muesli sprinkled with chopped nut kernels and If desired, a warm dish of soup or a baked potato or brown rice measurements & quantities I have given approximate measurements such as cupfuls (abbreviated to C - an ordinary cup holds about 8 fluid ounces), handfuls, tablespoons (tbsp), teaspoons (tsp), pinches and so on. Each time you make a recipe it will be slightly different, which is the whole fun of cooking and eating and one reason why children love it. Sticking to cookery book rules takes all the spontaneity out of things. Embroider these recipes to suit your taste and imagination. You will quickly grasp the basic principles of texture, color, nutritional value, taste combinations and presentation.

Get Energy

Unlock Your Inner Potential: Learn to Live a High Energy Lifestyle

Nothing gives a woman power so much as energy. It brings a light to your eye, a glow to your skin, an edge to your personality. When you are riding a wave of energy, it seems to carry you wherever you want to go. When it crashes, it can leave you feeling lost and lumpy. Energy is elusive stuff. High energy means, more than anything else, an ability to live fully, to give of your very best and to be open to all the good things life has to offer. In many ways it is a little like being a child again, where the colors are so vivid and the world is so full of wonder. Now is the time to take a look at your own energy habits and see if maybe some of them need changing. Then, gradually, you will be able to create for yourself a high-energy lifestyle which in time will become second nature. Once you learn how to tap into the energy within yourself, once you experience how good a high-energy life style can make you feel, energy will never again be something you have to worry about. All of us have a lot more potential energy than we ever access. For most of us our natural energy lies buried deep in a sluggish body burdened with excessive toxicity, or a psyche wrestling with frustration or disappointment. Break through the barriers by making changes in how you think, eat and live to help you turn potential energy into lasting vitality. Certain underlying conditions such as food allergies, yeast overgrowths and environmental pollutants can undermine our natural energy rights. Identify the presence of any of the big energy drainers in your life, and take steps to clear them. There are tricks and treatments to help you build steady energy week after week and year after year, and to get that extra energy temporarily when you most need it. Discover for yourself the greatest energy secret of all, that living a high energy life is ultimately about learning to listen to the whispers of our own souls and to live out the truth of who we really are and what we really value. power when you need it Everyone has experienced the ability to summon up energy almost magically,  when we need it most, to cope with particularly demanding situations - the appearance of a ‘second wind'. It happens when you have been up all night nursing a sick child and thought you couldn't possibly drag up another ounce of strength. It happens when all-encompassing fatigue somehow disappears into thin air with the unexpected arrival of a much-loved friend you haven't seen for years; and when an athlete discovers he can call forth extra strength on the last lap of a long race. All of these things summon energy because, in our psyche, we ask for it right then to do what we want passionately to do. Feeling passionate about anything releases potential energy, both in immediate circumstances such as these where it is needed, and also long-term where we need energy to carry out some task we are deeply committed to, or do something we love. And living with energy has a lot to do with living with passion. The more passionately you live your life, the more energy you will generate. Do what you love, love what you do and be honest about it. Much of our energy comes from within. lifestyle energy factors But this is only half of the energy picture. The amount of vitality available to you day by day to live your life also comes from external forces - from the way you eat, exercise, deal with stress, look after your body, as well as how skillful you can become at listening to its needs and its promptings. For most of us, this doesn't happen automatically, nor does a high energy way of life. We have to learn what creates more energy in our lives and also learn to be wary of all the things which can impede it. Take toxicity in your body for instance. The build up of waste products in the cells restricts metabolic processes and depletes us of energy both biochemically - so we become more prone to illness and premature aging - and in terms of over-all stamina and vitality, or how energetic we feel subjectively. Internal pollution can also result in a great variety of unwanted conditions, from cellulite to poor skin, anxiety and degenerative conditions such as arthritis, obesity and cancer. In the highly polluted environment in which most of us live these days, our bodies tend to build up more waste than they are able to eliminate efficiently. Such a build-up suppresses our energy. It needs to be eliminated and prevented in the future. We will look closely at how to do this in chapters to come. To maximize vitality you also need to learn to manage your energies when they need managing - how to get down when you become strung up, how to stimulate vitality when it is low, and how to create stamina and sustained power that acts as a foundation of energy which you can always call on when you need it. We will take a good look at how to do this too. living high It may surprise you, but the first step towards a high energy life is not a physical one, but is a change in how you think: Begin to visualize what living with sustained energy feels like. This can be hard to do when you feel chronically fatigued, depressed and discouraged. "Will my life ever get better?" We ask ourselves. I know. I lived for many years with chronic fatigue and depression - for which doctors could find no apparent cause. I have experienced the struggle and sense of hopelessness one can feel. In fact,in a very real way, those years helped shape the values of my life and set me on the road to learning, writing, and broadcasting on health - because nobody seemed able to help me, I began to look for my own answers. What I learned did help me and I went on to share it with others through books, television, videos and workshops. shift your perspective Our culture teaches us that all phenomena in the Universe, even life itself, are no more than a complex, yet explicable, series of chemical and physical reactions devoid of any unseen organizing principle. Such a worldview has its limitations. We tend to favor the notion that man's task is to ‘harness nature' for his own ends - and then are appalled at the results. Such a materialistic worldview has contributed to a sense of human alienation expressed in our art, literature, and in destructive social behavior. It is also responsible in no small part for our flagging energy. For we often tend to dissipate ourselves trying to fulfill all sorts of roles and follow all sorts of rules imposed on ourselves from outside. We are told that we need to go to the gym to give us more energy, and also that we need to eat the latest ‘healthy' margarine promoted by the food industry. We are urged to do our jobs well, no matter what distractions or restrictions we may have, and we feel we need to keep going to meet all our deadlines however much our bodies may be telling us we need to stop and rest. We have also been conditioned by a culture that affirms the value of altruism and insists that one should forget oneself in constant service and self-sacrifice to others. If you are serious about wanting more energy, you need to make a shift in how you think about yourself and your life. Gaining more energy is not simply a case of changing a few seemingly unrelated things in your life, it is a change in attitude and lifestyle that follows a simple yet powerful personal choice: The choice to support your body and mind in the best possible ways. Once you make such a choice, then you can begin to make positive changes towards creating more energy. As you do you will also find other positive changes taking place, and still more, as the greater access to energy in one area of your life allows you to deal more clearly with fatigue in another.

Truth About Weight Loss Eat Fat Grow Lean

It's Time to Wake Up to the Truth: Ditch The Carbs To Lose Weight & Boost Energy!

Millions of people believe that eating masses of carbs is vital for health, for energy and to keep their bodies running properly as well as aiding in their weight loss. This will surprise you: IT JUST AIN’T TRUE! The rising rates of obesity and diabetes worldwide in the past half century attest to this fact. The powers-that-be including most so-called scientists, the lion’s share of the medical profession, and the mainstream media are still churning out the same old advice: “Eat carbs for energy and cut out the fat from your diet.” Ignore it. THE REAL STORY It’s time to wake up to the truth about weight gain and degenerative illness in relation to carbohydrate foods such as grains, cereals, and all that packaged convenience stuff we have been devouring all these years: A lot of carbs deplete your energy when you eat them often. They also make us fat and are major culprits behind the development of virtually all degenerative illnesses—from heart disease to cancer, arthritis and the rest. If you want a lean, strong body, lots of energy, weight loss, and great protection against early aging, forget the carbs. You don’t need them. Instead, eat lots of green vegetables as well as—wait for it... THE RIGHT KIND OF FAT. Read on for a real eye-opener… DITCH THE CARBS When we look back to our evolutionary past, we see that carbs from sugar and grain, which we now eat so much of, did not even exist before the agricultural revolution. Our paleolithic ancestors ate mostly raw vegetable, nuts, and fruits, and thrived on them. Fast forward to today. Most of the carbohydrates we consume come from grains, cereals, and sugars. This is the complete opposite of what we have been genetically programmed to survive on. It’s no wonder that, as a species, we are fatter and sicker than ever. INNER TURMOIL When you eat high-sugar or high-carb foods (which, by the way, turn into sugar the moment you eat them) several chemical reactions get set off inside your body. These reactions interfere with good metabolic function, making it easier for fat stores to be laid down—and harder for them to be shifted. One type of sugar in particular, fructose, found in things like corn syrup (a main ingredient of fizzy drinks) and fruit juices, is especially bad news. It flicks the “fat-switch” in your system, making you feel hungry even when you’ve eaten. It wreaks havoc on your blood pressure and blood sugar levels. The results? Frequent consumption of fructose leads to increased body fat, obesity, and insulin resistance—often resulting in type 2 diabetes and/or heart disease. This, clearly, is something that you do not want to feed your body. So how can we rectify this modern-day dependency on foods that are both making us fat, and worse, killing us? YOUR BEST FUEL If you’re like most people, you’ve heard that weight gain—and the associated health impacts such as low energy levels—has a simple cause. “It’s just a matter of eating too many calories, too much fat and exercising too little!” The truth? It’s not how many calories you eat, but where you get them from, that counts. Here’s the fact: eating the right kind of fats won’t make you fat. Nor will it impact negatively on your energy levels—in fact, quite the opposite is true. Good fats and proteins, plus green vegetables and some fruit, are the fuels that your body is designed to thrive on. Aim for 90% of your food intake to come from these foods. As for your carb intake, you will need to eat more vegetables than you did before. By the way, green vegetables are also carbohydrates, as well as a great source of the best fiber you can get anywhere. But these carbohydrates are great for you...the more, the merrier. It is the grain, cereal, and sugar carbs you want to keep to absolute minimum. Meanwhile experiment with the so-called “safe starches”, such as brown rice and potatoes occasionally, to see how much your body can happily handle. Start eating in this way and watch your energy soar. GREAT FATS FOR HEALTH AND ENERGY Olives and olive oil Raw nuts Coconuts and coconut oil for cooking Organic nut oils Avocados Organic or free-range egg yolks and butter. Not only are these good fats delicious additions to your diet. They will satisfy your appetite much more effectively than sugars and grains can ever do. This increased ratio of good fats being introduced into your body also helps “reset” your genes to their natural, evolutionary setting, gradually turning body into the fat-burning machine it was meant to be. Want more information? Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It An essential book. It is infinitely important that you understand the truth, in the midst of so much distortion in the media and amongst so called medical and scientific "experts". Do read it. It can change your life. In this exciting new book, Gary Taubes, addresses the urgent question of what’s making us fat—and how we can change. He reveals the bad nutritional science of the last century and the good science that has been ignored, answering the most persistent questions along the way: Why are some people thin and others fat? What roles do exercise and genetics play in our weight? What foods should we eat, and what foods should we avoid? Order Why We Get Fat

Come Alive

Unlock True Health: Discover Alignment & Unlock Your Soul's Passion

There is no greater joy than becoming fully alive – experiencing day to day life as a child does, being protected from the ravages of premature aging and degeneration, able to call on high levels of energy, and live out your creativity and natural capacity for joy. This is what true health is all about. It is far more than simply being well. It is more a process than a state – a process by which you become more and more with each passing year who you really are. Within each of us lies an essence, a truth, a core of self, with one and only one intention - that it may be fully expressed, wholly manifested in material form while we live on this earth. Each year I become more aware that illness, lack of energy, a sense of confusion or lack of meaning in one’s life stems from a basic frustration of the expression of this essence. These things are often calls from the soul, asking you to become more aware of who you are at the deepest level, and live out your unique soul nature in your day to day life. True healing is a transformation. Energy, power and authentic freedom grow as we engage in the process of connecting with our true essence and soul’s purposes, and express them in our lives. To do this we need to call on all sorts of tools and techniques – from detoxifying body and mind, to herbs and natural treatments, to exercises for expanding awareness. each person is totally unique Take energy, for instance. Being able to live out your energy potential depends on how well you nourish yourself - physically, emotionally and spiritually - day by day. This means developing a lifestyle which incorporates exercise, good food, restorative sleep, and the myriad of other possible factors - from hydrotherapy to super nutrients - that help support your own brand of vitality at peak efficiency. But energy too depends on living from your core – not by other people’s rules. It depends on living what you love most in some way, what feeds you most at the deepest levels. In discovering this, and living more and more in this way, you not only fulfill your own life more richly than is possible in any other ways (after all we can only collect so many PhDs, BMWs and lovers). You also bring the very highest gifts that you have to give to your family, your community, and the earth as a whole. Live your soul’s passion and you call on virtually endless energy. For health not only depends on how you eat and what exercise you get. Ultimately, health is nothing less than the process of unfolding which each one of us goes through to become more fully who we really are. Once you begin to align your life with your own truth, the universe supports you in a way most people seldom dream possible. Working with people through their own health process, helping them discover whatever is most appropriate to their needs on both a physical and spiritual level, and teaching them how to work with these things, is the most exciting thing in my life. To do this I call on leading edge biochemistry - how natural substances can be used to shift anxiety or depression, to enhance hormonal balance in the body, to help you tap into high levels of vitality. I work with detoxification, not only of the body through foods and juices, but also of the psyche, using ancient tools and techniques based on shamanic principles that work to help connect people with their inner power for healing, vitality and authentic power. I explore what herbs and plant factors can do to support aliveness at the highest level. There is nothing I love more than sharing experience and knowledge abut these things. For each person is totally unique. Each of us carries a divine spark of soul which we are here to live out to the full – bringing our own individual brand of spirit into material form as we walk the earth. The beauty of watching this happen in those I work with is, for me, like walking in a garden and seeing flowers and plants, trees and rocks that I have never seen before. I continue to be dazzled by their beauty. That, to me, is what coming alive is all about.

Get High On Juice

Unlock Raw Energy Rush with Fresh Juice!

It‘ll change your life. As soon as you begin to incorporate freshly-extracted raw vegetable and fruit juices into your lifestyle, something amazing starts happening to you. First you notice the terrific lift that just one glass of fresh juice can give you, particularly if taken first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. Ten to fifteen minutes after drinking fresh-made juice, you can feel yourself perking up. Your head clears. Even your vision seems sharper. These are the characteristics of the Raw Energy Rush. I never tire of initiating someone to the experience. Sometimes they're skeptical, but are persuaded to try our freshly-extracted juice because it tastes so delicious. Half an hour later they're back, with a gleam in their eye, demanding to know `what is the secret ingredient?' LIFE POWER HOLDS THE SECRET This is the most profound mystery of the universe—and raw juice is bursting with it. Raw juice is a perfect fuel, since it's easily assimilated to cleanse and nurture the body while supplying it with a full range of essential nutrients—especially minerals which are so lacking in most people’s diet. Raw juice also has another property—the mysterious factor X. Scientists have yet to understand it. Sometimes it’s ascribed to the high redox potential of live juices, or the inscrutable action of enzymes, or just the vibrational energy that live raw foods carry. The nutritional and recuperative value of raw juice has become well known to doctors and natural health practitioners since the 19th century, when several of the most eminent pioneers in the field started experimenting with raw foods to improve their own health. The famous Rohsäft Kur (raw juice cure), developed by Dr Max Bircher-Benner and Dr Max Gerson in the early years of this century, is acknowledged to be the single most potent short-term antidote to fatigue and stress, but until recently it's been the preserve of the privileged few who could afford to go to an exclusive health spa. GO FOR BODY MIND TRANSFORMATION Never forget that body and the mind are inseparable, interdependent, synergistic parts of the same whole—YOU. People working in the soul-sapping environment of, say, a modern office building will reach for coffee and fizzy drinks in the middle of the afternoon in the hope that these will give them enough mental energy to make it through to the end of another hectic day. Then they experience a corresponding energy slump on the way home, arriving irritable and exhausted and good for nothing but going early to bed. The end result of living like this is a kind of chronic fatigue that often manifests itself as indifferent, fatalistic lethargy. As you master the basic principles of juicing and get into the practice of drinking raw juice on a daily basis, energizing your life and rejuvenating your body, you will find yourself becoming better able to cope with the debilitating stresses of modern life. Raw juice will help you to build the stamina to cope, but it will also transform the way you see the world around you. As your body re-balances itself, you'll find that your moods stabilize, too. Trivialities cease to upset you, and you are able to keep things in perspective. Detoxifying the system and flushing your colon with raw juice actually helps you to think more clearly and rationally, concentrate for longer, and maintain a more optimistic frame of mind. Want to experience a juice high for yourself? Start with one of these: APPLE ZINGER This is a terrific breakfast time enlivener that perks up the whole system and really wakes up your taste buds. 2 or 3 whole apples 1 whole lemon, peeled 1 centimeter cube of ginger (or more!) GREEN SATIN This is a delicious aromatic introduction to drinking green juices. Smooth as satin and beautiful to sip at sunset. 2 - 3 apples 2 stalks celery bulb of fennel

Time For Reaping

Finding Meaning in Life: Explore Ageless Aging Beyond the Three Score and Ten

At the moment we have about a quarter of a century allotted to us in which to grow to adulthood. The next forty years are generally directed towards accomplishment in the outside world, realizing the goals of adulthood, procreation and raising a family. Then we tend to slide headlong downhill until we die. The character Vitek in Karel Capek's celebrated play The Makropoulos Secret describes the plight of modern man: . . he hasn't had time for gladness, and he hasn't had time to think, and he hasn't had time for anything except a desire for bread. He hasn't done anything. No, not even himself... What else is immortality of the soul but a protest against the shortness of life? A human being is something more than a turtle or a raven; a man needs more time to life. Sixty years - it is not right. It's weakness, it's innocence, and it's animal-like. Within the confines of our three score and ten years and under the pressures of contemporary social values, modern man and modern woman have become quite extraordinarily obsessed with accomplishment. Since for most of us the time for worldly accomplishment is limited to this middle period we push ourselves forward, often at health-breaking and heartbreaking speed. To many of us the concern with fulfilling ourselves in our career, paying the rent, buying the baby a new pair of shoes, during what are supposed to be the best years of our lives, forces us to postpone the pleasures of a time to dream, a time to think and a time to play - in the very highest sense of the word. If we are to find a means of coping with the problems of our society-problems of poor statesmanship, overpopulation, Third World famine, pollution and economic inequities - we desperately need this time to dream. We need this time to recreate our own world and to take our destiny responsibly into our own hands, aside from the demands of adult life. connectedness - a priority Nobel laureate novelist Hermann Hesse wrote about such a time-expanded world in his Glass Bead Game. There, time's limits become the rules of the game of life and each human being is freed to order his existential choices. Such a time-expanded world could help us draw together our learning and re-synthesize our knowledge. It might enable the coming together of disciplines such as mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, art, literature, politics, theology and law - in fact the whole gamut of human concerns and disciplines - into a kind of connectedness which is urgently needed in the excessively fragmented postindustrial society that has become our home. Healthy longevity - ageless aging - would make available to us the steadily maturing wisdom of our old people - people whose experience and awareness have not become distorted by ill-functioning minds and rapidly waning energies. Such wisdom is, I believe, exactly what we need to help guide our species into its further evolution. Moreover, such time expansion takes hold of our personal sense of the present and in a very real way draws it into the future. For when we are able to project ourselves into the future, that future becomes not an abstract consideration but of active concern to all of us. The future of the earth is our future. We become responsible for it and we will live to see it as caretakers instead of irresponsible tenants of a rented property. Ageless aging will help us become its owners and like all owners we are far more likely to look after our property. In George Bernard Shaw's preface to Back to Methuselah - the play in which his character Dr Conrad Barnabas promotes an extended lifespan of 300 years - he writes: `Men do not live long enough; they are, for the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they die.' He then goes on to consider some of the creative possibilities of our being able to lengthen life: This possibility came to me when history and experience had convinced me that the social problems raised by millionfold national populations are far beyond the political capacity attainable in three score and ten years of life by slow growing mankind. On all hands as I write the cry is that our statesmen are too old, and that Leagues of Youth must be formed everywhere to save civilization from them. But despairing ancient pioneers tell me that the statesmen are not old enough for their jobs . . . We have no sages old enough and wise enough to make a synthesis of these reactions, and to develop the magnetic awe-inspiring force which must replace the policeman's baton as the instrument of authority. creators of destiny For me this magnetic awe-inspiring force of which he speaks is nothing less than man's potential to become the creator of his destiny on earth. The situation in which we live with all the global dangers to which we are exposed from the possibility of mass nuclear extinction to world economic collapse - are not accidents of nature. We have created them. And no act of God can suddenly remove their potential destructiveness from our future. Only we ourselves have the possibility of doing that. If we are to succeed, we will need to call forth every resource that we have - intelligence, wisdom, strength, courage, and patience, wit, compassion - and work with them. Ageless aging can help us do that. Life extension, the freedom from mental and physical degeneration, is no curious artifact of twentieth-century science. Who cares if, at the age of 85, we are all capable of running a marathon or if we look 30 years younger? Such things matter little on their own. But the high-level health, mental clarity and wellbeing, which are rewards of ageless aging, are of urgent concern to our future as residents of the earth. They form the foundation on which we as human beings can build if we are to make use of our full potential for creativity. In the full use of such creativity lies the future of our children our planet and ourselves. Again in the words of Capek's Vitek: Let's give everyone a three-hundred-year life. It will be the biggest event since the creation of man; it will be the liberating and creating anew of man! God, what man will be able to do in three hundred years! To be a child and pupil for fifty years; fifty years to understand the world and its ways and to see everything there is; and a hundred years to work in; and then a hundred years, when we have understood everything, to live in wisdom, to teach, and to give example. How valuable human life would be if it lasted for three hundred years! There would be no fear, no selfishness. Everything would be wise and dignified. Give people life! Give them full human life! Capek's Vitek An idealistic plea in the midst of the profound disillusionment with man that is so much a part of modern life? A dream? Perhaps. Yet our dreams become the myths by which we live. And right now we urgently need new myths to give our life direction - dreams which, having been tempered by the wisdom of age and experience, are large enough and rich enough to take us forward. Such dreams have power. They also have a remarkable way of becoming reality: All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. T.E. Lawrence

Electric Youth

Unlocking Life Energies: Bio-Energies, Biophoton, & Quantum Magic

Now we come to the exciting stuff - energy. This is where life breaks all the rules. Biological science is just beginning to penetrate the mysteries of life energies. For thousands upon thousands of years, until now, they have remained the province of mystics and sages. When it comes to rejuvenating the body, energy is where it's at. Put simply, successful rejuvenation depends on being able to activate energies which support the life force within. It is this life force that governs growth, nourishes us, sustains us, deep cleanses our bodies, regenerates our cells, heals us and makes us feel grateful just to be alive. buffalos and daffodils This ineffable life force is found in abundance in each of us as it is in all living things from buffalo to daffodils. Different cultures call it by different names. The Indians speak of it as Prana. In Polynesia it is know as Mana. The Chinese call it Chi. All of these words describe various forms of subtle energy which until the advent of quantum physics remained largely unknown to Western science. Yet throughout history all forms of traditional medicine from Paracelsus to Chinese and Ayurvedic herbalism have worked with it. biophotons and quantum magic Long ago quantum physicists established that wave particles such as electrons, atoms and molecules in living systems behave as biophoton energies. These energies appear to help regulate and control enzyme activities, cell reproduction and other activities in living systems. Experiments such as those reported in the March 1995 issue of Scientific American by Brumer and Shapiro established the existence of these particle/wave reactions in organisms. Like light bulbs, atoms give out radiant bio-energies which can either act constructively or destructively on the body's own molecules. Scientists are beginning to define how the interference wave forms generated both by internally manufactured toxins and by environmental pollutants act either constructively on the body to support health and vitality, or destructively, interfering with the harmonious biophoton energies (another name for life energies) on which health and protection from premature aging depend.  In the future we are going to hear a lot more about these biophoton energies and their effects on our health but for now we can make practical use of the knowledge there already is of how to influence them for healing and regeneration. energy consciousness From the point of view of quantum physics, as human beings we are not only immersed in an energy field.  Our bodies, our minds, our selves, are energy fields. These fields are constantly expanding, contracting and changing as our thoughts, diet and lifestyle change. The aim of any form of natural treatment, from dietary change and detoxification to hydrotherapy, exercise and meditation, is first to enhance positive bio-energies in an organism and second to help to balance them and create order. sheer radiance In University Parapsychology Research Laboratories such as the one at UCLA in California, scientists like Dr Thelma Moss have experimented with techniques such as Kirlian photography to examine, record and analyze the unique energetic patterns living things emanate. Kirlian photography is one of the methods whereby ordinary non-visible force-fields around and through living and non-living things can be recorded visually and studied. Kirlian photographs are extraordinarily beautiful. Researchers find they get consistent results when working with the Kirlian method to photograph plants and foods when comparing cooked foods with their raw counterparts for instance, or the leaf of a healthy plant to the leaf of a damaged one. The luminescent energy corona recorded on film from a living thing such as a healthy plant, or one of the superfoods such as organically grown herbs, wild crafted algae, organic green juices, and plant enzymes, is significantly stronger, more radiant and wider than in that of a processed food. The corona produced by well harvested spirulina or an organic raw carrot or cauliflower is dramatically reduced when these foods are cooked or processed. Uncooked vegetables and fruits radiate brilliant spikes of light, harmoniously surrounded by geometric shapes. Cooked and processed foods show only the dimmest evidence of corona discharge. Foods, plants, and herbs with a wide corona carry a lot of the life energy useful for rejuvenation. etheric forces Chromatography is another tool useful for studying energy. It is widely used in chemistry, biology, medicine and industry as a way of analyzing complex substances such as the amino acids in a protein or for detecting impurities in a compound. The use of chromatography to measure energy differences between living things and between natural and synthetically made substances was originally developed by European chemist Ehrenfreid Pfeiffer. Early on in his career Pfeiffer was asked by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner to find a chemical reagent that could be useful in charting the quality of life energy - what Steiner called the formative etheric forces - in living matter. After experimenting with many different substances Pfeiffer discovered that when he added extracts of living plants to a solution of copper chloride then let it evaporate slowly it would produce a beautiful pattern of crystallization typical of the species of the plant used. Radiant form and shape consistently indicated the life strength of the plant. Pfeiffer established that strong crystallization patterns indicated health, while weak ones indicated ill-health. Nowadays scientists working with techniques like chromatography, Kirlian photography, photomicrography and polarized light field photography - as well as clairvoyant healers who can actually `see' changes in energy patterns around plants, people and animals - confirm that certain foods, herbs and plant products carry high levels of harmonious bio-energy. They can be used to enhance the beauty of a living organism's energy patterns. So can techniques of breathing, meditation and deep relaxation as well as the laying on of hands or spiritual healing, hydrotherapy, bodywork and autogenics. That is why all of these things can be so helpful in the rejuvenation process. healing the impossible One of the most interesting researchers to look into the area of life force treatments for healing and regeneration is the American healer Mitchell May. At the age of 22 May was in a car accident that rendered him profoundly damaged. He lost several inches of bone from his legs, and the tissue and nerve damage was extensive. He lay in insufferable pain. His physicians told him he would never walk again and that it was necessary have his right leg amputated. They also informed him that his immune system would be permanently compromised and that his health would be severely restricted for the rest of his life. May was lucky enough to have been hospitalized at one of the most important medical research centers in the world, the University of California Medical Center at Los Angeles. There he became part of a special study involving ongoing experiments into life force healing and extrasensory perceptions using skilled spiritual healers working under strict scientific controls. He met and worked with a very gifted healer named Jack Gray. Gray had a great gift in his ability to activate powerful and natural healing life force energies within a person. Within a week of Gray's having begun simple laying on of hands treatment, May discovered he was able to turn off and on his experience of excruciating pain using the techniques Gray taught him. energy healing May became fascinated with the whole area of life force healing and become an apprentice to Gray. He developed an interest in states of consciousness, subtle energy and in discovering ways to enhance life force through the use of spiritual healing, plant foods and biological compounds - those which have a particularly high quality of energetic radiation. May's own story is one of the most well documented tales of impossible recovery in medical annals. Not only did his body heal, he was able to learn to walk again and eventually regained full use of his body. In the process he has also become one of the most respected and acclaimed healers in the world. During the period of his recovery May worked intimately with Gray and with Thelma Moss in her Parapsychology Research Laboratory at UCLA, photographing energy patterns around foods and other nutritional substances. He also carried out wide searches of scientific literature and conferred with physicists, health professionals, doctors and practitioners of natural medicine both trained in Western science and Oriental health traditions. He set out to discover, test and record information about specific foods and plant compounds which can enhance human health not only chemically by supplying an abundance of vitamins, minerals, phtyo-antioxidants and immune enhancers, but also by providing an abundance of life force. May wanted to find ways of making it possible to help people live at their fullest energy, vitality, and wholeness, in maximum health and wellbeing. entranced by beauty Before long May became totally fascinated by the beauty of energy patterns certain foods and plants emitted. He also became convinced - as had many researchers before him and since - that the fundamental processes of healing and rejuvenation depend on intensifying the life force within an individual and then helping to bring about a harmonization and balance of its movements within the living system. He saw that there was so much potential to help people by working in an energetic way. He also discovered (as have practitioners of natural medicine) that it is not just food and plants that are able to enhance the life force. He experimented with many forms of meditation and breathing, shifts in attitudes of mind, and various healing modalities, energy-shifting exercise such as Tai-Chi, yoga and the martial arts, which enable us to awaken the life force within. Most of all, he loved working with plants. Slowly, painstakingly, he identified plants, algae, mushrooms, sprouted seeds and grains, all of which carry an abundance of this life energy. He also found they could be used to intensify a person's own life energy and help create coherent and harmonious patterns of energy within. As early researchers into the healing effects of living foods such as Dr Max Bircher-Benner and Dr Max Gerson had insisted, plants are holders and emitters of quantum sunlight - life force which we can use to our advantage either taken fresh and live or when grown, harvested and dried properly. These plants are able to transfer their life force to us. perfect balance May's highly practical experiments were carried out over 20 years, during which he conferred with the very finest medical practitioners in Western medicine as well as experts in Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, and spiritual healers. Slowly, painstakingly, he was able to identify foods and plants - organically grown - with a particular abundance of life force and to develop ways of further heightening their powers for healing by combining them in a carefully formulated synergetic way, so that the energies of each balanced and enhanced the energies of the others. Out of this he developed what I believe to be the most remarkable and potent nutritional supplement that I have ever come across. It is called Pure Synergy. Its combination of 62 of nature's most potent and nourishing components include organically grown freeze-dried herbs, organically grown immune supporting mushrooms, plant enzymes, freeze-dried royal jelly, wild crafted algae, organic green juices and many other natural ingredients, and is the finest super food made so far. energetic rejuvenation May, and others like him such as Dr David Peat and twice nobel nominated Robert O Becker, have delved deeply into the field of subtle energy. They have helped to build bridges between orthodox, chemically-based, allopathic medicine (which until recently paid little attention to the energetic aspects of healing) and the ancient traditions of medicine which have always viewed healing as primarily an energy art. Breathing, movement, thoughts and dreams as well as the metabolism of the foods that we eat, all contribute to active energy `information' or life `intelligence' capable of bringing about a continuous circulation of harmonious energy to transform and heal the body. Energetically speaking, illness and degeneration are viewed as some sort of misalignment or blockage which interferes with the natural flow of energy, perverting its natural balance or siphoning energy off from its natural vital function of supporting the body. Rejuvenation takes place by using everything at one's disposal to enhance this harmonious and orderly circulation of life energy. The dynamic harmony within body/mind and the restoration of energetic balance which energy-based rejuvenation aims to bring about is not a static state but a dynamic process whereby energy continually circulates and health continually unfolds. This is living in the zone at its very best. This in turn helps bring about a process of renewal, regeneration and expansion of the individual spirit and its life purpose. After all, everything each of us needs to regenerate and rejuvenate ourselves lies within. pure alchemy There are no magic bullets for rejuvenation. What works is creating a lifestyle for yourself that continues to support your energetic flow at a very high level. The Chinese, who have probably delved into the whole process of rejuvenation more than any other culture, consider the whole process an alchemical one. They see it as a great art and science in which ultimately a person becomes more fully who they truly are, living out their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual potentials to the full. To put it another way, rejuvenation is a process in which `base metal' undergoes a remarkable series of transformations first by being broken down into its materia prima (here is where detoxification comes in) and then transformed into `gold'. This alchemical process which is also recognized by the Sufi tradition, and the Ayurvedic one, not only occurs on a level of external and material change such as a younger, stronger, healthier body, but also on a spiritual, psychological level whereby the soul, the heart and the head are united together with the material body in what is traditionally referred to as a `mystical marriage'. urgent needs At this point in history we have a greater need than ever to learn to practice such alchemy within ourselves. Our air and water have become polluted. There is less and less good quality fresh food readily available. Much of our food is poisoned by herbicides and pesticides which distort bodily processes, polluting our bodies and undermining our clarity of thought and visions in ways that can seriously interfere with our ability to maintain health on a physical and spiritual level. Only we can change that for ourselves. I believe it is time we began to turn away from the whole idea of magic bullets, symptomatic treatments and quick fix ideas, replacing them with foods and natural techniques that enhance our energies and support our lives in the best possible ways. Once the life force energy is built the body heals itself.

The Electric Universe: Thunderbolts Of The Gods

Unlock the Mysteries of the Electric Universe: Thunderbolts of the Gods

This Documentary is a remarkable eye opener to the nature of our universe and the power of electricity. This is a must see for everyone but particularly for anyone who is interested in learning about the nature of the magical universe we live in. Details of the Electric Universe Thunderbolts of the Gods by David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill introduces the reader to a former age of planetary instability and earthshaking electrical events. The 108-page full-color monograph, based on the life’s work of the two authors, offers a revolutionary synthesis of historical investigation and the newly discovered “Electric Universe.” Talbott and Thornhill claim that cosmic upheaval occurred so recently as to have profoundly affected early human cultures, provoking “incomprehensible” myths, symbols, and commemorative practices. Through a synthesis of ancient testimony, high-energy plasma experiments, and space age discoveries, the authors bring the ancient world to life. If their hypothesis is correct, it will surely alter many paths of scientific investigation as well. The little-known study of powerful electrical discharges in plasma is a new and exciting development in plasma cosmology, with profound implication for space age astronomy. Talbott and Thornhill have followed these developments because they see plasma science as a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. To advance their case, they present side-by-side comparisons of laboratory plasma experiments and globally recurring symbols of the ancient sky. The evidence, they report, shows an ancient obsession with extremely violent electrical discharge formations in the heavens. At the core of this reconstruction lies the unique behavior of plasma. Plasma, often called the “fourth state of matter,” has been studied for less than a hundred years, and only in the recent decades of the space age have some physicists begun to realize its importance to the understanding of structure in space produced by electric currents. All stars and astronomical objects ranging from supernovae to beautiful filamentary nebulae are now known to be constituted of plasma—a conductive medium that permeates the near-vacuum of space. Charged celestial objects move within insulating cells of plasma that may discharge spectacularly upon close encounters. The plasma discharge currents take complex filamentary forms resulting in the panoply of astonishing structures seen by Hubble and other new telescopes. From these discoveries, a new approach to the understanding of the physical universe is emerging. This approach is called plasma cosmology. Through unimaginable labors, our ancestors carved unexplained pictures on stone, numbering in the tens of millions. But what inspired this massive endeavor around the world? The laboratory experiments make clear that the ancient artists were copying spectacular electrical phenomena in the heavens. Indeed, the global correspondence between laboratory discharge forms and the pictographs on stone is so detailed that same-scale images.

Child-Raising—Trust In Nature

Release Perfection and Open Yourself to a Child's Seedpower: A Parent's Magical Ride

"Your children are not your children," wrote the Lebanese poet Kahil Gibran, "They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself...You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth." It is a quote I like, not only because—having raised four children by four different men on my own—I believe it to be just about the most accurate description of parenthood I have ever come across, but also because it emphasizes the 'lightness' which develops when you give up trying to be perfect and come to trust the processes of Nature—in feeding, in healing, in guiding you and your child towards what is best for his or her development at any moment in time. SEEDPOWER HAS WISDOM Like the seed of a plant that has encoded within its genetic material the characteristics that will in time produce the full-grown flower, every baby comes into this world carrying a package of as yet unrealized, but incredibly rich, potential. Within each child is nestled his or her very own brand of unique seedpower, encompassing far greater physical, creative and spiritual potential than he or she could realize in ten lifetimes. Your child is like the brush stroke the zen painter uses to represent one leaf on a shaft of bamboo. The leaf he paints is totally singular—like no leaf that has ever existed. Yet within this uniqueness is encompassed universal beauty and life energy of the highest order. Just as I tried to do with my first son, most conscientious parents try their best to mould their children from the outside by imposing upon them their own ideas about what they should act like, think like, look like and all the rest. Not only does it work a lot better the other way round—listening to the individual echoes of a child's own seedpower coming from within, and responding to it by offering whatever at any moment is most appropriate, in the form of food, health, guidance, education, toys and so forth—it is also infinitely easier. CONTRACTS HOLD A KEY Taking on the job of guardian for a child from birth to adulthood also involves making 'contractual agreements'—agreements which need to be re-negotiated from time to time. Like every contract, the parent/child relationship is always a two-way deal. It has to be fair on both sides and nurture both people involved. How well your own contracts develop and how much joy there is for both of you in living them will depend to a great extent on how clearly the agreements between you are understood. Let me show you what I mean. In establishing 'contracts' with my own children, I decided I wanted to supply them with wholesome food and clean surroundings, as well as physical warmth, safety, and the right to their own needs and opinions even if they differed from mine. In return I expected them to accept the home and food and care I provided even though it would never be perfect, and to be as honest, respectful of my decisions and as reasonable with me as their age would allow. What I would never ask of a child—and where so many parents, in my opinion, go wrong—is to ask that the child love me. Get into that contract and you automatically create trouble. For whether or not your child loves you is ultimately beside the point. Your responsibility is simply to use the best of your wisdom and physical resources to help that child grow. I decided long ago that I would do my best for my children always, but that they were stuck with me as a parent for better or for worse—complete with all my warts. I also decided that, while I didn't expect them to love me, I did expect them to know that whatever I did, I did because I believed it to be right. When some decision I made or action I took turned out to be wrong, I owned up and, where appropriate, asked for their forgiveness, just as I forgave them their mistakes. MAGIC HAPPENS I discovered quite by accident that there is a certain magic to all this. For when you genuinely give up all claim to being a 'good parent' or to having your child love you, you create a remarkable expanse of freedom for you both. In the end, not only do your children end up loving you of their own accord, they also respect you (even when they don't agree with you). Most important of all, they feel safe because they know that although at times you may seem unreasonable and unbending, your strength—on which they rely for security—remains uncorrupted by flattery or emotional blackmail (which even very young children can be very good at). They learn that your strength is there to serve them.

Live Life

Unlock Life Extension Potentials: Ageless Aging Challenges Society Limits

Thanks to our growing understanding of the natural laws of health and advanced research into high-tech biochemistry, what was once little more than a pipe dream - the notion that the length of human life can be extended - is becoming a reality. Gerontologists have now challenged the maximum lifespans of many species of animals. Man is next. Already physicians are using antioxidant nutrients, electromagnetic techniques and other anti-aging tools to prevent physical degeneration and to restore health and balance to ailing bodies. Meanwhile psychiatrists and psychologists trained in biochemistry and in the orthomolecular treatment of the brain are not only beginning to cure mental and emotional problems associated with age, they are even using the tools of their trade to expand consciousness. It becomes important to ask the question, `With what consequences?' The first worry about life extension for most people is usually, `What will we do with these old people we are creating?' `Won't they be yet a further burden to society?' Naturally they want to know about the effect that longevity will have on housing, medical costs and the rest. Such questions are valid. But it is also important to penetrate the point of view from which they come - the assumptions and paradigms which underlie them. Our society has imprinted its members with negative concepts about being old. In the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, Why Survive? Being Old in America, Dr Robert Buffer outlined the enormous practical problems of dealing with the aged: housing, pensions, personal security, need for meaningful occupations and the rest, and the horrific conditions in which many old people in modern Western society live. He also pointed out that we hold many unconscious assumptions about the aged which continue to create these conditions. They are always with us and they greatly distort our view of aging, old people and their place in society. These assumptions include a belief that the aged are inflexible, senile, unproductive people waiting for the inevitable arrival of the grim reaper. Basically not interesting, of little value, they are people worthy of being assigned to a foreclosed existence. Alex Comfort refers to these common views of age and the elderly as `ageism' which he defines as `the notion that people cease to be people, to be the same people or become people of a distinct and inferior kind, by virtue of having lived a specified number of years'. The assumptions of `ageism' lie behind many of the most often asked questions about the social and political consequences of ageless aging. They make such questions impossible to answer adequately from our current perspective and with our current views of reality. They also force us to ignore a number of important realities. We forget for instance that chronological age at its very best is only a limited indication of biological and functional age. Even our present old people are capable of far more than society allows them to express or contribute - indeed more than they themselves allow. We also forget that every major disease is age-dependent and all of the major causes of death and disability are secondary to the progressive degeneration of aging. Little wonder, for until now, after the age of 30 we have been witnessing a steady and inexorable increase in the probability of morbidity and mortality from one disease or another. But people living by the principles of ageless aging will be different. Highly resistant to the ravages of degeneration which manifest themselves in our major destructive chronic diseases such as cancer, coronary heart disease, arthritis and the rest, they will be less rather than more of a burden to the state in terms of medical, social and psychiatric care. Application of these life-lengthening and life-enhancing principles to health on a wide scale should lead to an increase in the ratio of productive to nonproductive men and women with prolonged life spans. This has been the conclusion of Yale's Professor Larry Kotlikoff, one of the few academics to look seriously at the issue. Kotlikoff initiated an inquiry into the economic effects of increased lifespan. He also concluded that this increase in the ratio of productive to nonproductive people would result in an increased per capita output whether or not the working period increased year for year with life expectancy. With the increased longevity and the improved resistance to degeneration which are the natural outcome of applying the findings of age-researchers to our everyday lives, the population of our old people will also change. So will our attitudes to them. No longer a burden, like the Vilcabamba Indians or the Abkhazians of the Soviet Caucasus they will become not `old people' but `long lived people'. Such a simple shift in attitude could revolutionize us as human beings not only in terms of politics and economics but by shifting us towards a more value orientated society. At that point the question of `What will we do with all these old people?' begins to take on quite a different meaning. For the challenge now becomes not how we house, feed, and care for a growing sector of the nonproductive population but rather how we can best use the energy and wisdom of the older members of our society.

Sprout Magic

Amazing Benefits of Sprouting: Grow Organic Salad for Year-Round Energy Boost!

I cannot recommend sprouts highly enough. Not only can they be grown in your kitchen to provide delicious and inexpensive organic salads all year round, but they boast some extraordinary energy-giving properties. When a seed, pulse or grain begins to germinate, it becomes a wondrous energy factory, producing vast amounts of essential nutrients. For instance, the vitamin E content of wheat grains - already one of the best sources in nature - increases up to three times upon sprouting. The B2 content of oats rises by at least 1300 per cent. Apart from the vitamins, sprouts also contain considerable quantities of minerals and even protein, all in readily-assimilable form. The process of germination, like the process of digestion, converts complex energy reserves into the simple energy compounds needed for metabolism. Sprouts are in effect a 'predigested' food, so that when you eat them your body is able to absorb their nourishment. They are also rich in chlorophyll, which supports your body's production of hemoglobin (the oxygen carrying molecule in the blood), vital for cell energy metabolism. In just a few minutes a day, you can cultivate a continual sprout supply so that you never run out of fresh salad ingredients. One of the simplest ways to grow a variety of sprouts is as a mix. I particularly like a combination of alfalfa with lentil and mung. To this I occasionally add a few fenugreek or radish seeds for extra zest. Another of my favorites is wheatsprouts, which have a delicious chewy texture and nutty flavor. These I sprout on their own because they are ready so quickly - usually in 2-3 days. Incidentally, even someone with a food sensitivity to wheat can usually enjoy wheat sprouts problem-free, thanks to the changes that occur in the grain during germination. Leslie's sprout magic mix In a large glass jar place 6 tablespoons of alfalfa seeds and 2 tablespoons each of lentils and mung beans. Fill the jar with water and leave to soak for about 12 hours (or overnight). Drain the excess water away by placing a sieve over the neck of the jar, and then rinse and drain twice more. Divide the mixture between two (or more) jars so that there are no more than two inches of sprouts in each. This way your sprouts will have room to breathe and grow. Rinse and drain the sprouts twice a day. Alternatively, take a seed tray and line it with paper kitchen towels, then spread the sprout mix over the bottom of it. Simply spritz the sprouts with water from a plant spray twice a day and stir them around gently for aeration. After 4-6 days, when the alfalfa seeds have developed little green leaves, the mix is ready to harvest. Rinse the sprouts well and drain. Store them in the fridge in an airtight container or in sealed polythene bags, to be used abundantly in salads and other vegetable dishes.

My New Book, Healthy And Lean For Life Is FREE - Please tell me more about what you want

Free E-Book: Transform Your Life! Hurry, Only 2500 Downloads Available

Get Your Free Copy Now But HURRY only 2500 downloads available I’ve just finished writing an e-book that is now up on the www.curaromana.com site. It’s called HEALTHY AND LEAN FOR LIFE. In writing this book, I have drawn on knowledge and experience amassed over more than four decades of researching and working in the fields of natural health and spiritual development. Some of what you will read in this book may shock you. Why? Because, since the mid-1950s, most of what we have been told about what is supposed to be a healthy diet has been nothing more than conjecture. Not grounded in solid research, current widespread beliefs about nutrition are not based on hard science but on many unproven hypotheses. GUIDE TO LIFE-TRANSFORMATION This book sets the record straight. It's a guidebook for transforming health as well as preventing and even reversing the Diseases of Western Civilization. It is also a testament to an important truth: Aging is meant to be a joy, not an experience of growing disabilities. It tells how to make this so. My wish in writing this little book is to bring to the thousands of men and women who continually struggle with their health and weight practical, simple information with which we can transform lives. In the pages that follow you will find life-changing discoveries, new ways of thinking and powerful cutting-edge technologies that can help heighten vitality, restore natural size and shape to your body, slow aging and bring greater freedom from degenerative diseases. Here’s a extract from the first chapter: JOIN THE HEALTH ELITE Informed people—among them some Hollywood stars and a growing number of the world’s top endurance athletes—know and make use of information that you will find in this book—stuff that most have yet to discover. I call them the health elitists. Their work requires an ongoing ability to access high levels of energy, creativity, freedom, stamina and good looks. Their goal is to live life at the peaks, no matter what their age. Living this kind of life is no longer the preserve of a privileged few. What I’ve learned in 45 years of researching and working in natural health, as well as mentoring people on Leslie Kenton’s Cura Romana, is this: Each one of us can change our current life experience into one of expanded wellbeing by drawing on the work of visionary scientists and leading-edge clinicians, and taking guidance from the finest pioneers in human health and development. Some of the information you’ll find in this little book stretches back to discoveries made more than half a century ago; other revelations are so new that they may be mind blowing. For the media, nutritionists and the medical profession as a whole have yet to pick up on them in any significant way. Make use of the tools, technologies, information and inspiration you find here. Put them into practice. You, too, can change your life for the better. For, when you supply your body and psyche with what they require to function optimally, your own innate powers for healing become activated and profound transformation begins to take place. GET IT FREE HEALTHY AND LEAN FOR LIFE is available for free right now to the first two thousand five hundred people who download it.  II want to share with you my intention in providing a copy of it free. I would love to know from you what else your would like to see in the book that is not yet there.  Menus? Recipes? More information? About what in particular?  I'm excited about doing this.  In the next three months, HEALTHY AND LEAN FOR LIFE will double in size, incorporating more practical advice about how to use the cutting-edge information it now contains. Then we will be selling it on Amazon and elsewhere. If you would like to share with me what more you would like to see in the book, do click here to download you FREE copy.  I would love to hear from you.

Nature's Child

Secrets of Unleashing Your Child's Hidden Potential: It's All in the Parenting

"Your children are not your children," wrote the Lebanese poet Kahil Gibran, "They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself...You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth." It is a quote I like, not only because - having raised four children on my own - I believe it to be just about the most accurate description of parenthood I have ever come across, but also because it emphasizes the `lightness' which develops when you give up trying to be perfect and come to trust the processes of Nature - in feeding, in healing, in guiding you and your child towards what is best for his or her development at any moment in time. Like the seed of a plant which has encoded within its genetic material the characteristics that will in time produce the full-grown flower, every baby comes into this world carrying a package of as yet unrealized but incredibly rich potential. Within each child is nestled his or her very own brand of unique seedpower encompassing far greater physical, creative and spiritual potential than he or she could realize in ten lifetimes. Your child is like the brush stroke the zen painter uses to represent one leaf on a shaft of bamboo. The leaf he paints is totally singular - like no leaf that has ever existed. Yet within this uniqueness is encompassed universal beauty and life energy of the highest order.

Think Young

Reveal the Secrets of Zorba-Like Age Defying: Psychoneuroimmunology

Almost everybody has heard of death curses: psychological literature is laced with accounts of how Aboriginal witch doctors have quite literally brought about the death of the young and healthy by cursing them. No sooner do these people learn of the fate which has been cast for them than they begin inexplicably to sicken and eventually to die. It appears that through complex biological processes, their simple belief in the curse brings about destruction of their organism. modern-day death curses In civilized society we tend to look upon such phenomena as anthropological curiosities - products of primitive superstition which simply don't touch us in our more enlightened age. What we are not aware of however is that many of us in the civilized world are also under our own brand of `death curses'. They may be subtler than those issued by witch doctors but they can be every bit as potent in bringing about the physical and mental decline which we have come to associate with aging. Common (and usually unconscious) notions such as `retirement', `middle-age', `It's all down hill after forty', and `At your age you must start taking things more easily', are widely held. They can exert a powerful effect on the process of aging by creating destructive self-fulfilling expectations about age decline. Instead of facing the future full of confidence and excitement about what lies ahead, optimism is replaced by anxiety as we are warned to `Be careful', or `Don't take chances on a new career at your age.' The list of commonly proffered `sensible' advice is a long one. Such well-meaning suggestions often lead people to make changes in their lifestyle which encourage physical decline - for instance decreasing the amount of exercise they get, altering their eating habits away from fiber-rich natural foods towards `softer' foods, and even decreasing the amount of social and intellectual stimulation they have been used to. Even worse, this kind of advice can undermine your self-image and destroy self-confidence, which in turn interferes with the proper functioning of the immune system which plays such a central role in protecting your body from aging. An essential ingredient in ageless aging is a strong awareness of just how powerfully your emotions, state of mind, and your unconscious assumptions can influence both your susceptibility to illness and the rate at which you age. Once that awareness has penetrated your consciousness then you can begin to make use of some simple and pleasant mind-bending techniques in aid of ageless aging. mind-body connections The notion that your state of mind can influence your health and the rate at which you age was once something which had to be taken on faith. Now it is not only being scientifically proven, it is even being put into effective practical use thanks to a rapidly developing scientific discipline with a tongue-twisting name: psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). PNI has discovered that your body's immune system, that bulwark of defense, is undeniably affected by your unconscious assumptions, your emotional states and your behavioral patterns. They can lead either to an increased resistance to aging or to an increased susceptibility to degeneration and illness. In simple terms the happier you are, the better you feel about yourself and the more positive are your expectations about the future, the more likely you are to age slowly and gracefully and the less likely you are to fall prey to degeneration and illness of whatever sort - from a common cold to a life-threatening disease. No area of ageless aging is more fun to explore than this one. I always think of its positive side as `Zorba the Greek' consciousness. It can make possible the most amazing physical and mental feats by quite ordinary people living quite ordinary lives. Take the man who is able to work eighteen hours a day, drink whisky by the tumblerful, dance on tables until the early hours of the morning and still live to be 110 thanks to the sheer joy of his experience of life. I have seen it too amongst saints and holy men who carry out their day-to-day activities, from writing letters to peeling potatoes, in a state of bliss - samadhi. Take a look at their superbly unlined faces. They could as easily be thirty as seventy. Psychoneuroimmunologists are working to find out why. So new is the PNI discipline (the name was only coined in 1981) that the average physician is unlikely even to have heard of it. But so profound and wide-reaching are the consequences of its findings that they threaten to revolutionize medical theory about the origins and development of degeneration. Research into psychoneuroimmunology is already describing the pathways through which mind and body are inextricably bound together. These pathways include neurological connections linking glands and organs with the brain, the antioxidant system and the blood, thanks to hormonal secretions triggered by thought patterns and emotions and - most important of all - via the immune system. PNI researchers have discovered for instance that several kinds of lymphocytes involved in your body's immune response carry receptors which recognize hormones found in the brain that alter mind and mood. They have also found that some of these neurotransmitters or peptide hormones stimulate T-cells to produce more lymphokines such as interferon while others have the opposite effect. In fact listening to leading PNI researchers talk about mind-body connections makes you realize there is probably no state of mind which is not faithfully reflected by a state of the immune system. beyond psychosomatic consciousness Western medicine has long acknowledged that emotional states such as anxiety and depression can make a limited number of illnesses worse. These include asthma, diabetes, peptic ulcer, ulcerative colitis, migraine and cardiovascular problems. But until the advent of PNI it has paid little attention to examining the nature of their psychological components nor has it explored ways and means of improving these conditions by altering a patient's mental state or behavioral patterns. Meanwhile it has almost completely ignored possible psychological components in the vast majority of other illnesses - from lung disease and cancer to rheumatism and allergic reactions - treating them instead as pure physiological occurrences little affected by whether the patient experiencing them felt good or bad in himself. This is mostly because Western medicine, bound by the Cartesian notion of a split between mind and matter, has failed to consider the people it treats as psychobiological units - total beings whose feelings, thoughts, expectations and perceptions are intimately bound to their physiology and biochemistry. Happily this is now changing in no small part thanks to a few visionary scientists who began asking some penetrating questions. Why for instance do some people who smoke forty cigarettes a day for twenty years end up with lung cancer while others following exactly the same pattern don't? The first, most obvious answer is that the former have an hereditary disposition to the disease. True, genetics are important, but these scientists found that they were by no means the whole answer. A large and very important piece of the puzzle was still missing. So they began to look at psychological factors. let go and live longer In a pioneering study carried out over twenty years ago, Scottish researcher Dr David Kissen examined more than 1000 Glaswegian industrial workers suffering from respiratory complaints. Before diagnosing them he gave each man a psychological test designed to delineate personality patterns. He came up with some quite fascinating and highly significant results. He discovered that those who were later found to have cancer showed a striking inability to express their emotions. Intrigued by Kissen's study and other similar investigations which suggested that emotional repression was an important component in the development of cancer, two doctors, R.L. Horne and R. S. Picard, at the Washington University School of Medicine in the United States, decided to carry out an in-depth study of the psychosocial risk factors in lung cancer as measured on a psychological scale developed from the findings of previous studies including Kissen's. They confirmed that emotional repression was indeed the central component of a complex personality pattern which led to the development of the disease. In fact, so important were the relationships between psychological states and the development of lung cancer which they uncovered that the two researchers found they could predict with an amazing 73 per cent accuracy which men had cancer and which men had simple lung disease, from psychological testing alone. They discovered that cancer sufferers, because of their emotional repression, tended to find great difficulty coping with life's challenges and sorrows. After losing an important relationship such as a job or a wife the cancer victims often suffered profound depression for from six to eighteen months before the discovery of the illness. These findings have been confirmed by others. mind and biochemistry Similar studies linking other psychological factors to other diseases, including infections, arthritis, allergies and premature aging, have also recently appeared. One of the best known is that done by Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosemann which demonstrated that what they called `type A behavior' - a behavior pattern characterized by a fierce and unrelenting struggle to do ever more things in less time against harsh competition - appears to cause a number of bodily changes predisposing one to coronary heart disease. They include alterations in blood-fat and blood-sugar levels, changes in circulation and increased levels of the hormone noradrenaline. And each disease is beginning to appear to have its own collection of psychological characteristics. Studies have now established that psychological factors are primary determinants in a host of illnesses while in others psychological factors appear to interact with biological ones determining whether disease tendencies, initiated either by heredity or your environment or both, will in fact turn into degeneration or whether your body will be able to fight them off. But how does it all work? Through what physiological mechanisms do emotional repression in the case of cancer, a frustrated power drive in the case of high blood pressure, and all the various other psychological and behavioral traits linked with their illnesses help create their respective illness and age decline? Perhaps even more important, once one can find these physiological mechanisms how can we make use of them first to prevent aging and even perhaps to reverse some of its processes once they have occurred? The key to both questions appears once again to lie in the immune system. mysteries of mind and immunity The immune system has two major branches, each with its own particular kind of defense cells or lymphocytes. It also includes other less important factors such as large scavenger-type cells called macrophages which gobble up antigenic material. The first branch confers on your body what is known as cell-mediated immunity and is responsible for about half of your body's resources for defense. It is centered around T-cell leucocytes - warrior cells produced in the thymus which battle the thousands of potentially lethal organisms, cancer inducing ultraviolet radiation from the sun and toxic chemicals from our highly industrialized environment. T-cells also produce a group of hormone-like substances such as interferon. They are called lymphokines and are considered the immune system's natural drugs. Some are poisonous to foreign tissue, others trigger white blood cells to keep an immune reaction going. The second branch of the immune system offers humoral-mediated immunity. It relies on what are known as B-cell lymphocytes, which produce antibodies specific to whatever invaders the body is being challenged by. B-cells are carried in the blood. They can combine with antigens in the body and neutralize them or they can coat them, making it simple for white blood cells to destroy them. The actions of both T and B cells are mediated through the thymus gland - often called the master gland of immunity. As we have seen, the rate at which you age appears to be very much influenced by the function of the thymus gland and the state of the immune system which it governs. It has also been well established that immune functions can be disrupted or depressed by such things as malnutrition, free radicals, infection and certain drugs. Recent research shows too that lymphocytes from people suffering from all kinds of stress and from grief, say after the death of a close relative, have a markedly decreased ability to rise to the occasion when challenged by antigens threatening the health of the body. What psychoneuroimmunologists are now trying to explore in experiments with animals and in studies of people are the pathways between brain and body through which this occurs - to delineate the means by which mind affects immunity both as a result of direct input from the brain and the indirect influence of hormones associated with specific emotional states and personality patterns. stress and immunity One of the questions currently being most seriously investigated by PNI researchers is how biological changes associated with stress diminish immune response and increase susceptibility to illness. Stress of any kind triggers the `fight or flight response' - a matrix of hormonal reactions designed to prepare the body for action. Adrenaline is released, for instance, and corticosteroid hormones from the adrenal glands. They in turn trigger other hormonal reactions. PNI researchers have now found that within fifteen minutes of its hitting the bloodstream even a small dose of adrenaline challenges the immune system and triggers the release of lymphocytes. It also inhibits the function of mature white blood cells needed to ward off invasion. Other studies have shown that the corticosteroids can also seriously depress immune functions and increase your susceptibility to disease. They inhibit the functions of both lymphocytes and macrophages and they undermine the ability of lymphocytes to reproduce themselves in the body. In fact if stress is prolonged enough and the levels of corticosteroids become high enough in the body they even cause a withering away of lymphoid tissue altogether. At St Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, Dr Richard Shekelle headed a research project which examined death certificates of more than 2000 men who had been tested psychologically for depression and other emotional states seventeen years before. He found that the death rate of men who had been very depressed at the time of testing was twice that of the rest. One of the most widely held theories about cancer states that each of us develops small malignancies all the time in our body but that these are rapidly destroyed in a healthy person thanks to the actions of the immune system. If, however, you have strong feelings of helplessness or depression this can result in elevated corticosteroid levels and other changes which impede your immune system from doing its proper job and rejecting the cancer cells before they can take hold. pni alters paradigms The mind-body links which PNI research is uncovering are beginning to have far-reaching consequences, consequences which ultimately will go far beyond helping people avoid life threatening diseases and slow the aging process. There is a strong resonance to be found between PNI and much of the new physics which is busily exploring the view that the observer is essential to the creation of the universe just as the universe is creator of the observer. As Nobel laureate Roger Sperry has said, `Current concepts of the mind-brain relation involve a direct break with the long-established materialist and behaviorist doctrine that has dominated neuroscience for many decades. Instead of renouncing or ignoring consciousness the new interpretation gives full recognition to the primacy of inner conscious awareness as a causal reality.' It is a causal reality that you can begin using to your advantage right now. For just as prolonged unmitigated stress, depression and anxiety can suppress immune functions, a positive frame of mind and a sense that you can cope with whatever comes your way offers potent protection against illness and age-degeneration. At Beth Israel Hospital, another researcher, Dr Stephen Locke, has used psychological tests to evaluate students' abilities to cope with the shocks and challenges of their lives. He has found that the `poor copers' - those who tend to succumb to anxiety, depression and a sense of helplessness when life difficulties arise - show suppressed immune functions, while the `good copers' - people who feel they can deal effectively with whatever comes their way - had normal immune functions even when faced with major life changes. Meanwhile in a well controlled study of women suffering from breast cancer who underwent mastectomy, British researcher Dr Steven Greer discovered that women who react to their diagnosis with a denial that they are ill or with a determination to conquer the illness are far more likely five years later to be free of the disease than those who stoically accepted the diagnosis or who felt hopeless or helpless. making immunity work for you What can you do, starting right now, in the way of using your mind as a tool for ageless aging? You can begin by exploring the benefits of mind/body techniques which can help alter your mental attitudes and emotional states from negative to positive and therefore encourage good immune functions and hence slow down the rate at which you age. There are many. Dr Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School developed the simple meditative technique, called the relaxation response, which consists of sitting with your eyes closed for fifteen or twenty minutes morning and night and repeating a single word - say `one' or `peace' - over and over again silently. Practiced regularly it will not only counter the immunesuppressing tendencies of stress but even bring about major psychological shifts in belief systems that can gradually change a self-defeating `poor coper' into an optimistic `good coper'. Contrary to popular opinion only 2 or 3 per cent of old people are institutionalized because of psychiatric disorders. Neither do the vast majority of old people have memory defects. Most people over sixty-five continue to be interested in sex, and sexual relations continue well into the eighties between healthy men and women. Studies made of morale and happiness amongst the elderly show no difference between their enjoyment of life and that of younger people. People over sixty-five have fewer accidents per person driving than do younger drivers. They also have fewer accidents at work. The majority of old people are not set in their ways although it does take them longer to learn something new than the young. Studies show that few old people suffer from boredom. Neither are they socially isolated or lonely. More than 10 per cent of old people work and two-thirds of those who don't would like to. Finally old people are seldom irritated or angry. This has been determined by three separate studies. visualize age anew Becoming aware of false assumptions about aging is a good first step. The next is to create a new vision of what it means to have time passing. Make use of creative visualization techniques where in a state of relaxation you allow your mind to play on positive images of yourself five, ten, thirty years from now. There are some excellent books available on the subject which you can use as a guide. But really the technique is very easy. It is only a matter of letting yourself indulge in positive daydreaming. Or practice a meditation or deep-relaxation technique a couple of times a day and finish off by repeating silently to yourself Coue's formula for personal growth and healing, `Every day in every way I am getting better and better.' It is exquisitely simple yet enormously powerful when practiced daily in a deeply relaxed state so that it is your imagination rather than your will which is brought into play. affirm youth and well-being Another simple technique which has real power for altering unconscious expectations and creating new realities is that of writing out `affirmations' - seven times seventy - for a week or two. This can be something as simple as `I am well and will continue to be so as the years pass' or `I let go of past confusion and day by day make my life anew.' The mere act of writing out such words over and over for several days helps break through old thought patterns and negativity that may be hampering you from realizing your full psychobiological potentials. You might be surprised at how quickly they penetrate your consciousness and bring about positive shifts in expectations and in your reality. For they can generate positive mental states and emotions and make them your common everyday experience of reality. And, just as PNI researchers have been discovering, it is the simple positive experiences and emotions like love, hope, faith, laughter, playfulness and creativity which can not only make life worth living, they can actually keep us alive, youthful and well. As effective as massive doses of antioxidant nutrients, fresh-cell therapy and all the other biological methods of age retardation available to you? Very probably. Besides they'll cost you absolutely nothing but a smile.

Orange Ginger Beer Recipe

Make Orange Ginger Beer with Stevia: Get Recipe & Buy Supplies at iHerb.com

Based on a traditional recipe for ginger beer, I created this drink for the first part of Cura Romana Journey. But it was such a hit that every one (including me) just kept using it even long after the program was over. Sometimes I use only half a liter of water instead of a full liter, then top up just before serving with half a liter of sparkling water. My Orange Ginger Beer keeps for three days in the fridge. WHAT YOU NEED FOR THE ORANGE GINGER BEER RECIPE 50–100g of fresh ginger root, grated finely—preferably with a ginger grater—depending on how strong a ginger flavor you like. 1 liter of spring water (only half a liter if you plan when serving it to add fizzy water) Stevia to taste (see below) 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon The juice of 1 large freshly-squeezed orange 1 tablespoon of finely-shredded orange zest HERE’S HOW TO MAKE ORANGE GINGER BEER Place the grated ginger and the water in a blender or food processor. Add the stevia and the cinnamon and blend. Stir in the orange juice and zest. Put in the refrigerator for 24 hours so the flavors meld. Strain, then chill for another hour. Pour over ice to serve. I use Spoonable Stevia by Stevita or several drops of Wisdom Natural SweetLeaf Liquid Stevia in Lemon Drop flavor which I order direct from iHerb.com who ship ultra-fast worldwide. STEVITA:SPOONABLE STEVIA Stevita Spoonable Stevia uses only stevia extract with at least 95% pure glycosides (extremely sweet tasting ingredients of the Stevia herb leaves), and erythritol, a crystal granulated naturally produced filler found in fruits, vegetables and grains. Buy Stevita English Toffee Stevia All Natural, Zero Calories, Dietary Supplement. SweetLeaf liquid stevia with all natural flavors is convenient and easy to use. As a supplement, add nutritious stevia to water, tea, coffee, milk, sparkling water, protein shakes, plain yogurt or anything else you can imagine.. Buy English Toffee Stevia ORDERING FROM IHERB.COM: They ship all over the world very cheaply, and their products are the cheapest and best in the world. Get your order sent to you via DHL. I use them for almost everything no matter where I am.

An Almost Perfect Food

Experience Perfect Nutrition with Sprouted Seeds: Supercharge Your Health!

A seed has more power for generating life than any other part of a plant. Little wonder, since seeds are designed to grow new plants. Although the needs of a growing plant are not identical to our own, seeds come packed with the superb balance of protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals and plant factors necessary to launch a new plant. As such, they are the finest natural food that “home farming” can provide. Sprouted seeds and grains, grown in a bowl in a kitchen window or airing cupboard, are the richest source of naturally occurring vitamins known. A mere tablespoon of tiny seeds can produce up to a kilo of sprouts. Sprouts come in all shapes and colors, from the tiny curlicue forms of mustard to the round yellow spheres of chickpeas. Common seeds for sprouting are mung beans, adzuki beans, wheat, barley, fenugreek, lentils, mustard, oats, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. The Chinese invented living sprout foods centuries ago. They carried mung beans on their ships, sprouting these seeds to provide vitamin C and prevent scurvy in sailors. In their dormant state, chickpeas, mung beans, and lentils are filled with enzyme inhibitors. This makes them hard to digest even when cooked and is one of the reasons why eating beans and lentils creates so many digestive troubles. Our bodies are not very well designed to handle them in this form. Enzyme inhibitors can interfere with our ability to absorb minerals present in a food. But when you sprout a seed, all this changes. Its content of B vitamins and vitamin C soars. Enzyme inhibitors get neutralised. Meanwhile, the enzymes dormant in these embryonic plants spring into life to improve the way your own body’s enzymes function. Sprouted seeds of mung beans, chickpeas, unshelled sesame seeds, lentils, adzuki and buckwheat are delicious in salads, as snacks, or used to create live muesli for breakfast. You can buy them from a shop already growing, or sprout them yourself in bowls on the kitchen windowsill. Because they are young plants, and because they are eaten raw, they also convey the highest level of biophoton order to your living matrix. This quote from Clive McCay, professor of nutrition at Cornel University says it all, really. “A vegetable which will grow in any climate, will rival meat in nutritive value, will mature in three to five days, may be planted any day of the year, will require neither soil nor sunshine, will rival tomatoes in vitamin C, and will be free of waste in preparation…They are an almost perfect food.”

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Leslie Kenton’s Cura Romana®

Fast, Healthy Weight Loss

Leslie Kenton’s Cura Romana® has proudly supported 20,000+ weight loss journeys over the past 17 years. With an overall average daily weight loss of 0.5 - 0.6 lb for women and 0.8 - 1.0 lb for men.

Yesterday’s Average Daily Weight Loss:

on the 25th of April 2025 (updated every 12 hours)

-1.19 lb
for women
-0.94 lb
for men
-1.19 lb
for women
-0.94 lb
for men

Yesterday’s Average Daily Weight Loss:

on the 25th of April 2025 (updated every 12 hours)

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