IF THIS LETTER doesn’t speak for itself, then check in with us all month as we share our favorite insights from one of our sweetest, most long-standing health heroes, Natalia Rose! From her thought on living healthy in New York City, to her picks for juice flavors that will please your whole family, we’re thrilled to be sharing the thoughts of this top nutritionist and best-selling health author. Natalia’s books, The Raw Food Detox Diet and Raw Food Life Force Energy are great reads for anyone seeking more than just freedom from ‘dis-ease’, but vital healthful living! Here’s Natalia…

Dear Chalkboard readers,

For me, July is synonymous with childhood. Unstructured days and totally in-the-moment aliveness are my immediate associations with this month. I could put aside the pressures and expectations of the school year and reclaim my freedom – no ticking clock to dictate to me! Mystics call this no-time and suggest that it is only in this state that we can truly be innocent.

I rediscovered my childhood when I got into deep-tissue cleansing. The in-the-moment aliveness that left me when I became a teenager came flooding back with so many other childlike qualities after only about six months of dedicated cleansing. Today, I measure my clients’ progress by the reappearance of these childlike qualities: cells regain their juicy, spherical shape evidenced outside the body as well as inside; tissues de-bloat, returning to their elastic, tight state; a bouncy quality returns to the bones (think bungee cord rather than peanut brittle); and a rosy glow returns to the cheeks, and lips and eyes become clear and shining. But there’s so much more…

When the cells, tissues and organs regain their ideal state, they actually start to hum. This hum is the frequency of life and it brings effortless joy and open-heartedness in its wake.

People think they come to cleansing for weight loss or the myriad health benefits. I think that’s just what their conscious mind is attracted to. Their unconscious mind is attracted to the freedom and innocence that cleansing brings – the return to a life experience they vaguely recall from childhood that disappeared when the world, to paraphrase Wordsworth, became too much with them.

When we cleanse, we don’t just cleanse the waste residue from decades of accumulation, we cleanse the accumulation of disappointment, inferiority, dysfunctional competition. Innocence is the quintessential quality of childhood at any age.

Adulthood was never meant to be a discarding of these qualities. The childlike qualities are not merely for children. They are human qualities – fundamental to our full development in adulthood. These childlike qualities let you know you’ve arrived as a cleanser. So this July, my wish for everyone is that your cleansing endeavors bring about a great flooding of childlike qualities so you can enjoy July as you enjoyed it when you were 8, 9 and 10 years old, and never let go of the feeling. When we drink our green juice and raw salads and leave out the harmful stuff that blocks our life force, we can be kids of summer forever!

All Love,

Natalia