Softness triumphs over hardness, gentleness over strength.
The flexible is superior over the immovable.
This is the principle of controlling things
By going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.
—Lao-Tzu

Pursuing an alternative lifestyle is never easy. It often elicits floods of resistance from family and social circles, and requires great patience and perseverance in the face of obstacles. For me, it took more than twelve years of dedicated practice to reach my current level of self-awareness and self-sovereignty. I also had the help and encouragement of extraordinary teachers.

As for the floods of resistance, in my own case, I found that everyone had an opinion—mostly unsupportive, because my approach challenged their values. The obstacles grew based on how far away I veered from my expected course in terms of religious upbringing, social conditioning, peer pressure, and family expectations. But I knew that I had to face these obstacles and fully own my power in order to revive my authentic self, the one who’d been caged and silenced for far too long.

Take the Time You Need to Heal
Our work at Natalia Rose Institute is all about healing, nurturing, and growing, not quick fixes that have no lasting power and usually turn out to be more harmful than healthful in the long run. We are here to support true healing, in the deepest and most expansive meaning of the word—not to keep some kind of false peace with the body until all hell breaks loose again and another ceasefire is required!

We would get nowhere without patience and perseverance. My personality is naturally impetuous. I had to learn patience the hard way—by slamming into walls in my haste to achieve all my goals at lightning speed. I know for a fact that many of you are similarly wired because I read about it in your letters. Well, here in the Natalia Rose Institute community is one place where we serve ourselves far better with a healthy dose of patience and perseverance.

People tend to have a short memory when it comes to cleansing. They think after a week or so of juicing and eating only salads they should be clean. They forget all the soda, processed foods, hormone- and antibiotic-injected animal products, pasteurized cow dairy, birth control pills, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and/or recreational drugs they’ve consumed over the course of their lives—not to mention the generations of compromised DNA they received through their lineage! The cumulative damage to our cells and DNA is profound, not something that can be shaken off after only a week, month, or even a year of cleansing. It takes years to rectify our deep-rooted imbalances and achieve a truly beautiful, clean-celled body.

Keep in mind that raw foods and juices alone are not going to bring you back into alignment. For example, eating all raw or strictly vegan won’t necessarily ensure that you will live better or longer than your non-raw, non-juicing peers. You will also need to remove internal obstructions consistently over time. Eating a cleaner diet is just one essential component of the larger picture. The removal of obstruction (both physical and mental) is the actual fulcrum of healing.

This is where the patience and persistence comes in! You can juice for a weekend and drop a few pounds, but your body will go right back to its old stats unless you remove the obstruction that the juice fast awakened—and then continue to awaken and release more and more of that obstruction. Those that stay in the game, awakening and releasing for months and years, are the ones that reach the ecstasy of cleansing. The extended journey is what eventually cleans and elevates the blood chemistry and unblocks the internal pathways, enabling Life Force to surge and conduct through your body. As the cleansing reaches those depths, the alchemy happens: the internal organs are revived by the higher-caliber blood, skin tissue reflects the strengthened internal body, and energy soars. This is the true meaning of rejuvenation!

Our work here at Natalia Rose Institute is not about covering up our physical imperfections. Rather, it’s about pulling back the curtain on all the internalized toxicity that you’ve been carrying around with you and spent years of your life trying to hide. If you are still new to this work, you probably have some very deep toxicity that will emerge in waves. Don’t be embarrassed. No one who matters is judging you. In fact, here in the Natalia Rose Institute community, we’re all cheering you on! This work only gets better over time. Don’t give up. Give your body a chance to regenerate itself from the inside out.

Stay the Course of Cleansing
Physical aging and deterioration accompanied by feelings of weakness and fatigue are not factors of how many times you have ridden around the sun, but of what you have accumulated as you have gone around the sun! If you cleanse and maintain an alkaline-rich diet of primarily fresh fruits and veggies, and you are still feeling weak or lacking power for your workouts, it is due to one or more of the following reasons:

1. You are awakening waste without releasing it.You have awakened matter that your bowel cannot release on its own. Therefore, your center is blocked and the awakened poisons are flooding your bloodstream, making you feel ill and tired. You need either bowel cleansing or a less than perfect meal to help ease your bowel’s transition to clean foods—one or the other, but preferably the former.
2. You are experiencing withdrawal symptoms.You are so addicted to the stimulation of cooked proteins, whey/soy/protein energy bars, coffee, refined sugar, flour, soda, etc. that your body is not coping with the change. The problem is that you’re having withdrawal symptoms—not that the clean diet is failing to deliver energy. You probably need to transition more slowly. People are often deceived into thinking they need meat when, after a week of a meat-free diet, they eat a steak and suddenly feel “energized.”This is a false fire! Acidic, dense substances can never give you real energy, only stimulation. To an unclean body addicted to the stimulation, continuing to consume such substances feels good and familiar. Stopping too suddenly leads to withdrawal symptoms and a feeling of weakness. Hence, people often associate a clean diet with feeling weak. This is why making a gradual transition away from the old foods, rather than going cold turkey, is so crucial. It will help you avoid many pitfalls!
3. You are still a slave to the old mental programming. Mental programming is a powerful thing. For years you’ve been absorbing the erroneous propaganda that only calorie-dense substances can sufficiently energize you. You’ve also been conditioned to expect quick, linear results from health regimens. But when the average obstructed body undergoes deep cleansing, it must slow down to conduct internal triage. When this happens, you might grow impatient and lose heart, but I urge you to stay the course. It often takes persistence in the face of a temporary impasse to yield a major breakthrough. But you have to stick with it!

Keep an Eye on the Big Picture

The detox lifestyle is largely a case of mind over matter: work to reverse your thinking and align with the greater truth. Most of all, keep an eye on the big picture of cleansing. A clear body is an energized body. Arnold Ehret said it nearly a hundred years ago: Vitality = Power – Obstruction. However, “Power” may not have been the clearest word choice, so, with all due respect to Ehret, let me rephrase this slightly: Vitality = Electromagnetic Conductivity – Obstruction. In other words, when the electromagnetic conductivity can rush unobstructed through the body, you will experience uncompromised vitality!

Every time you’re feeling impatient or a little less energized than you want to feel, ask yourself how clear your pathways are and how well your cells are conducting the electromagnetic power. Even when you’re blocked, this energy is always lying dormant within you, ready to be unleashed. But you cannot expect your body to release all the obstructions and toxicity that it has accumulated over a lifetime and regenerate clean cells overnight. True healing requires visionary practice, patience, and perseverance. If the duration and requirements get you down, just consider for a moment the alternative—hospitals, medication, countless unsexy symptoms and a steady, disempowerment, and a general decline. Green Lemonade, raw salads, and colonics, please!

Do all you can to remove any blockages—physical and mental—and then feel your body come alive with the blissful vibration of life force conducting through you. Your authentic, revitalized self will begin to emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, and soon you’ll be able to take wing!

This concludes our eleventh lesson. In next week’s final edition of The Rose Program Insider, we will close with a meditation on our highest aspirations and the true meaning of beauty.

One of my biggest challenges with food and feeding myself properly has been emotional eating. I ate when I was scared, sad, lonely, tired, cold. And I ate to calm social anxiety, to celebrate happy events, and sometimes even to intentionally hurt myself when I was feeling like I’d really let myself down. Author Annie Lamott (one of my favorites) has called this assault eating, and I whole-heartedly agree.

Getting into a place of relaxation and calm before dinner is essential. Natalia always recommends a bath before a meal, and it helps tremendously.

If I don’t have time to take a bath, or if I’m out and about in the city and I am not able to run home it often seems impossible to get focused. Emotional eaters all know that once the ball starts rolling it only picks up speed if there’s no interception.

The quick and easy meditation that I recommend to clients is the one that has consistently worked for me from the beginning. It started as a non-religious way to say grace, and I have realized that gratitude and connection are the most important things for me.

I look down at my food (mostly vegetables) and close my eyes. I get a beautiful picture in my mind of where my food came from. I see a field of greens, tomato and cucumber vines. I can feel the hot sun, and smell the soil, and I silently say thank you. It takes only one minute, but honoring our food is a way to honor the body. A meal of those beautiful growing things is a wonderful way to tell yourself, “I love you.”

Perilla Salad

For Salad

• 4 heads romaine lettuce, shredded
• Handful perilla leaves, made into chiffonade
• 2 English cucumbers, julienned
• ½ package 100% soba noodles, cooked and rinsed well

For Dressing

• ½ cup Nama Shoyu soy sauce
• Juice of 1 lemon
• Juice of 2 limes
• ¼ teaspoon garlic, minced
• ¼ teaspoon ginger, minced
• Pinch of crushed red pepper
• ½ bunch scallions, minced
• Pinch of black pepper

Shred the romaine by laying down the head of lettuce on a cutting board, stabilizing the top, tip down, with one hand and slicing thinly across after the stem. Chiffonade the perilla leaves by lining them up on top of each other, rolling them up, and slicing them thinly. Using a julienne peeler, such as the Titan brand, julienne the English cucumbers into ribbons. Mix the salad ingredients together, place the cooked soba noodles on top, and dress With the Nama Shoyu mixture.

We humans cannot truly soar until we’ve first cultivated deep, healthy roots. We all want to enjoy the highs of life-including romantic love, professional success, and other forms of excitement and personal achievement-but unless our highs are equal to our depths, our highs will set us up for terrible falls. Chasing after highs without any grounding knowledge is a hollow pursuit indeed.

Yes, I can understand the temptation to escape and hide from yourself when you are suffering from constant stress, illness, and disappointment. And yes, I know that digging deep to the root causes of your suffering and cultivating a more life-generating perspective requires effort, but the rewards of such work are beyond measure. If you want to radiate true health and beauty in this lifetime, there is no other way.

I encourage you to spread your wings and take flight, but just be sure you are not merely trying to escape from your norms. The greatest highs in life come from both internal and external pursuits. There are thrills of the body, the heart, the spirit, and the mind-and when these all come together in harmony, it’s nirvana! Do not neglect the beauty and richness of your inner life for solely external pursuits.

What Is Beauty, Really?

Our culture is obsessed with beauty. And let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be beautiful and sexy and desirable? Everywhere we turn, there are glossy advertisements for products appealing to this desire to be beautiful, and there are throngs of people who are buying into their promises. We are socially conditioned from a very young age to want the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect skin, and perfect clothes-and all the trappings of vanity that come with them: sex, money, and power. But if we look closer, what is this obsession with beauty all about, really? Is it just superficial, or does it indicate some deeper biological imperative at work in our lives?

Many people come to Natalia Rose Institute seeking weight loss, rejuvenation, clearer skin, and the other hallmarks of surface beauty. But those who undertake the detox lifestyle discover that they really want so much more. The desire to be beautiful, deep down, is the desire to be given a chance to love and be loved. It is a desire to conduct joy and vitality-to be free to be oneself, not to hide behind expensive fashion trends and status symbols. When you cleanse your heart and your body, you naturally begin to shed the commonly held ideals of external beauty and awaken to the only beauty that matters: the kind that shines from within, emitting a fresh, natural, authentic glow. Any good art designer or plastic surgeon can produce a picture-perfect image based on the current marketing and fashion trends. Real beauty, however, makes you feel good through and through. Beauty is synonymous with clarity, love, and light-and no designer clothing or cosmetic product, no matter how ingeniously engineered, can deliver or even simulate these things for you.

When you release old patterns, aggressions, and fears; when you are pure of purpose and of spirit; when you have laid deep, healthy roots that can freely absorb and conduct clean energy from the soil, air, water, sunlight, and the life circulating all around you, you cannot help but radiate beauty-physically and spiritually. When you are beautiful within, you no longer have anything to hide or cover up. You become lighter and freer and more joyful in your own skin. You open yourself up to light and love and naturally connect with the inner beauty of others. You can finally stop obsessing about your looks because you actually embody and radiate beauty with every breath you take. True beauty, therefore, is the not vanity at all, but the natural expression of a deep and expansive love of life!

Plant Flowers, Don’t Cut Them

There’s a popular dermatologist with a new book out, and on the cover he appears standing with a bunch of freshly cut long-stem strawberries. The title of the book promises youth in no uncertain terms. What is the problem with this picture? Here’s a big hint: It’s why I taught my children never to pick flowers, and why those who know me well don’t bring me cut flowers.

Life cut off from its source is unsustainable. Think of it. The whole concept of this cover image is a lie, but the giveaway of the misguided consciousness underpinning the project is the cut fruit. Most people will see the promise of freshness and beauty in the fruit when those strawberries are in fact an example of life cut being tragically short in the service of instant, short-term gratification! Those strawberries, cut away from the vine of life, will be old and moldy in less than two days!

To put it most simply, life that is firmly rooted to its source will flourish-living long and well. Life that is cut off from its source will draw its last breath from its energy reserves, then wilt until all the energy has been drained away and decay takes over. The same is true for our bodies, for our whole beings.

We humans walk around in our bodies, seemingly unconnected to anything, believing all we need are some calories, vitamins, and omega fatty acids. That’s the herd mentality at work. The fact is, despite our lack of visible roots, we get our energy from the same sources that other living creatures do-from the sun and earth, unseen fibers of living energy that connect all life on this planet and reach across the solar system, and from other plant life and organisms that pass along nutrients to us through the food chain. As long as we fail to recognize our true roots, our true sources of life force, and our interconnectedness, we will never summon enough energy to soar, much less stand tall and proud within our own bodies.

So remember, first plant your roots firmly, and then spread your wings wide. There is no greater high-no greater expression of beauty-than growing and evolving as nature intended!

Eating meals in an office setting can sometimes be a challenge. The trick is to be prepared! Here are some suggestions that have worked for me and for my clients.

1. Create a small office pantry of non-perishables to make sure that lunch is flavorful and enjoyable. Keeping a small jar of Dijon mustard, stevia, and your favorite herbal tea can help ensure that you’ll love your lunch, and have something warm and delicious to get you through an afternoon slump. Add a fork and a knife and you’ll have everything you need.
2. Enhance your desk or cubicle with a decorative bowl of edibles instead of flowers. When I worked in an office environment, I brought in a beautiful glass bowl, which I filled every Monday morning with green apples, fresh lemons, and avocados. It was like a beautiful flower arrangement, and kept my desk area looking and smelling sweet.
3. Keep a selection of delivery menus that you can order from on the days you haven’t been able to prepare. Sometimes it’s easier to order in than to bring lunch from home. Getting or printing menus of local restaurants that deliver salads, steamed vegetables, veggie soup, guacamole, or other fresh, raw, well-combined options is essential. The vendors will get to know your order, and you will have the freedom of not having to bring lunch every day.
4. Shop for a selection of fresh raw vegetables on Sunday evening so you won’t have to worry about shopping during the busy work week. Keep 5 boxes of organic greens and a selection of chopped vegetables in your fridge at home, so in the morning you can grab a small container of your favorite raw salad toppings and a box of greens and run out the door. (Remember, lemons and avocados await you at work!)
5. Bake or steam a selection of veggies on Sunday as well, so you can grab and go on the following days. Slow-roasted beets, baked sweet potatoes, and vegetable soup are all great lunch options that can be cooked in advance for the week ahead. If you would like to include a cooked option with your lunch salad, it will be ready to go.

Preparing for your week by doing some shopping, chopping, and cooking will also help you stay committed to your goals. Every Sunday you are renewing your vow to yourself that you are going to spend the week caring for your body and cleansing your blood!

Love,
Ana

CHOCOLATE BEET CAKE

• 3 cups red beet puree (roast beets in oven at 400°F for 1 hour)
• ½ cup agave nectar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon red vinegar (or apple cider vinegar)
• ⅓ cup chocolate powder
• 1 cup millet flour
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• Zest of an orange (any type)
• Pinch of salt

Preheat the oven at 350°F.

Combine all the wet ingredients first, and then mix in all the dry ingredients. (Work quickly because the baking soda and vinegar will start bubbling, and they are what will make the cake moist and fluffy.)

Put the mixture in a mini loaf pan or a cupcake tin greased with a little coconut oil and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove when the cakes are slightly soft in middle.

Doris, I honestly never thought I could have my cake and eat it too! – Ana Ladd-Griffin