Roots

The Short, Easy Answer Is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspectives

The Heart of Judgment

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Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Love in Unity,
Natalia

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Part Two of Emotional Eating S.O.S. Is Up!

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Hi Everyone,

I’m writing this from the brimming-with-life-force Grand Teton National Park in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Ana and I are here with my kids and hubby celebrating his 50th birthday. We’ve been up early every day ripping up the slopes (actually, my husband, Lawrence, kids, and Ana rip it up while I attempt to keep up)! Mostly we’re just really enjoying being here in this powerfully life-generating environment! Last night we had the great privilege of dining on raw and steamed organic veggies, raw goat cheese, a great wine (fresh buffalo meat for the meat-eaters among us) in a tipi on the Snake River in the deep, pristine snow. It reminded me again of how well indigenous Americans once lived and how misguided our common misperceptions are of what their lives were like. The architecture of the tipi’s central woodburning ovens and the hot stones kept us toasty out in the middle of a snowy February night. I had a far greater desire to spend the week in the tipi than to return to the posh hotel, which all five of the children with us vocalized, emphatically! The children (aged 5 to 13) were having the most exciting, fun night of their lives. Video games, movies, and shopping were the last things on their minds, and could never have captivated them as this environment did.

Finally, an announcement: Part Two of Emotional Eating S.O.S. is now up in the exclusive content area of the DetoxCommunity. There are still several parts to come, which I am presently working on, each one addressing issues critical to overcoming emotional eating and all manner of behavioral imbalances. My goal is to decode the causes and solutions and put an empowering, practical toolbox in your hands. The first three parts lay the foundation that you will need in order to make that toolbox work for you. I appreciate your patience, and I hope this information helps to pull you up and out of these painful cycles.

Here’s to your wholeness!

Natalia

Wings

Shiver and Shake! Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
Natalia

Wings

Shiver and Shake!

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Shiver and say the words
Of every lie you’ve heard
First I’m gonna make it
Then I’m gonna break it
Till it falls apart
Hating all the faking
And shaking while I’m breaking
Your brittle heart 
—Echo & The Bunnymen, from “Bring on the Dancing Horses”

Sometimes I don’t even know where to start. How do you remove the blinders from 10,000 years of programming from people’s eyes? If people are rattled by the idea that milk and meat are killers, not healers, and resist the fact that virtually all behavior common to our world has a destructive effect upon the human body and the planet, how will they ever come to see the deeper problem—the heartless juggernaut that drives a civilization possessed by madness?

The lies of our world are so deep. If we remain blind to them, there’s no way forward. Everywhere we look, there is tremendous suffering—on both a human and a planetary level—and yet the most that people seem to hope for are patchwork solutions for their lives of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) desperation.

It seems that people today don’t expect much of a life at all: perhaps some relief for their depression, a few pounds lost, the suppression of a few symptoms. Otherwise, they ignore the fact that our culture is largely antithetical to life—human or otherwise—and merely soldier on.

This indicates a very deep programming. I don’t know many people who have truly seen through it. It takes a lot of effort, a deep and abiding desire to live, to see through all the rubbish we’ve been raised to accept without question.

I can’t think of anything more important than shattering the façade of our destructive world. I have such a desire to live—truly live—that I have devoted my life to discovering what’s on the other side, and my greatest ambition is to help you do the same.

It’s probably the ugliest boomerang effect in the history of humankind: a civilization is erected and expanded on the backs of slaves, and with utter disregard to the devastation of living communities the world over—only to come full circle to meet its end by the other side of its own sword.

Our civilization has bullied to death beautiful, vibrant people, cultures, and lands and replaced them with inanimate things. And even now, as it’s all breaking down into pain and chaos beneath the weight of so many missteps, our civilization ignores the truth. Rather than look in the mirror, it clings to glossy images of health and prosperity—all facades, all illusions. The truth is far too ugly to look at. So ugly, in fact, that when we really see it, the mirror will shatter!

My friend asked me yesterday, “So where do you think it’s all going?” This is how I explained it:

We have to observe how life operates. If an organism is cut off from its vital sources—fellow organisms and their shared, interconnected environment—its spirit begins to depart, eventually leaving the shell of the organism for dead. This occurs on a microbial level: the lack of sustaining elements causes the decomposer microbes to break down the organism. The more the good microbes are supplanted with the decomposers, the more this cycle of natural decay accelerates. All living organisms on this planet are thus losing their life force.
Vitality is also leaving the soil, rendering it infertile, unable to conduct the quality of life force into our produce that humans require. This does not mean you should go out and buy a bunch of dietary supplements! It means you change your worldview!

Basically, the planet is dying and the viability of human life is decreasing. This reveals itself multi-generationally: adults today are suffering from low vitality, as our parents and grandparents have, due to industrial living, pollution, smoking, medicines, and mainstream diets of processed foods. The younger generations will have it even worse. The babies to come will suffer even more dramatically degenerated (literally, de-gene-erated) fates. Each new generation is further devitalized, less able to fend off the repeated assaults of modern life on the body. In our civilization, we are not even managing to maintain the status quo; we are passing along ever more de-generation to our offspring.

The days of being able to live in relative physical balance are behind us. Symptoms will increase and the body is going to become a much more difficult place to be. While you may find such statements upsetting and negative, I hasten to remind you that our bodies have been sending out plenty of alarm bells of their own. Ignoring our bodies and repeatedly cutting off communication, generation after generation, has driven society far off course. Pointing out that a train is barreling our way is not being negative. It gives us the chance to jump off the tracks before it flattens us entirely.

Let me repeat, adults today are revealing signs of further degeneration to the human species than generations past. Not only are adults finding it far more difficult to reproduce, but their children are more prone to physical handicaps and mental and emotional imbalances. This will become even more visible and acute in the offspring of the next decade.

The “health authorities” and the media focus so much on obesity and diet, but to little effect. We need to pull out much further and see that it is an entire worldview that is in error, that the obesity problem is just one symptom of a whole life-threatening system.

I went to a fundraiser for autism recently. Normally, I would never attend something like this because it’s mostly a bunch of celebrities and bankers taking on a cause and raising money to give to researchers, which is often useless. It’s just like those breast cancer run-walks and ribbons, which ignore the true causes of cancer (see my 3/2/09 blog, Cancer: A Mystery?) and perpetuate the shortsighted work of laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. The kids are the ones who end up paying, while their parents remain in the dark. But I must confess, I attended this event because it was an intimate concert with Bruce Springsteen. Okay, enough said.

Again, if this discussion strikes you as overly negative or threatening, I remind you that it’s never negative to identify a problem in the interest of fixing it. That’s actually a positive thing. This is a time for being proactive, not inactive, apathetic, or delusional—those are the truly negative postures. Simply repeating the mantra of “love and light” will not help.

As long as we’re on the subject, we must recognize that spirituality and materiality fuse together to create the human experience. It seems like people are trying to escape the here and now either by focusing on a better world in the afterlife or by repressing the truth in the name of “love and light.” We can experience neither love nor light until we’ve stripped away the lies of our civilization. Let’s stop pretending to be happy. We will never experience wellness or happiness until we’ve fundamentally changed our worldview. On the other side of the coin are those attempting to escape their pain by going deeper into materiality and carnality.

We need to recognize that humans are spiritual and material. To pursue one at the expense of the other is a death trap. Yet, today more than ever, people are puzzled by the body-spirit union. All life is spirit-infused matter; and matter, as I’ve explained in Raw Food Life Force Energy, is actually light. Therein we have the oneness we seek—so let’s come home to our wholeness, and honor that instead of ripping ourselves apart by choosing sides.

We are what we do, think, and see. We are vessels of our worldview. If we continue to treat the world—and therefore ourselves—as a machine of separate, replaceable parts, nothing will change. Of that we can be sure. We must work to see through our culture of death and reclaim our natural vitality, which predates civilization as we know it, and still exists outside its limits.

In my family, we have two Bengal cats. Of course, they would be more at home in the wild, but their lives are circumscribed by the layout of our apartment. Now, imagine how much their lives would expand and open up if they knew the forest! People of our civilization are likewise limited in their knowledge of life.

Countless beautiful communities once lived in startling and enviable contrast to how we typically live today, but we destroyed most of them in our westward expansion. If you’d like to read more about this, I highly recommend reading all of the works of Derrick Jensen, starting with The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older Than Words. As long as we fail to understand the alternatives to our current way of life, we’ll be left with a kind of “Sofie’s Choice”—between death and death.

Our bodies and spirits will continue to suffer and degenerate until we wake up and see what’s really going on. Obesity is only one small symptom of a world gone mad. Slavery is another (if you think slavery is a thing of the past, readDisposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales). Child prostitution is another. The decimation of forests is yet another. The list goes on and on and on. As all of these symptoms play out on an ever larger and larger scale, who stands to win?

There is no question that the big engines of our culture are antithetical to life. The good that has survived in our culture—the love, inspiration, creativity, vitality, harmony, and beauty—exist not despite it, not because of it.

The living world is hurtling toward irreversible destruction, and we humans are asleep at the wheel. If you think that you’re somehow above it all, you’ve got a lot of waking up to do. If you think that you’ll be saved by certain social or financial privileges, or by the powers of positive thinking, I repeat, wakey wakey! If you’ve been averting your eyes, it may be the time to have a good face-to-face with your values. Believe me, I was raised on all the wrong values, too, and it took me a lot of re-education and contemplation to change them.

In Detox 4 Women, I explain how the environment has become exponentially more acidifying to the body. Radiation, GMO food, stress, low-vitality air and water, and limited exposure to sunlight in our indoor lifestyles have prevented alkalinity from conducting through the body while these acidifying elements have been pouring in. This has created a full-on devastation to the viability of the organism. Our civilization has wreaked the same kind of devastation on the planet. It extinguishes living organisms and replaces them with shrines to dead things. So the body and the planet are in a state of acidity and low vitality that may be unrecoverable. We have to face that possibility.

If we want to bring vitality back to the planet and to our bodies, we have to give it a reason to stay. For spirit and matter to unite, we have to create viable conditions.

It’s not easy to face all the lies of our world, but it’s much harder to sustain life in the presence of them. We are in the unfortunate—but, I dare say, deserved—position of having to pull ourselves up out of the muck of 10,000 years of greed and abuse of power. Our bodies are not as strong as they should be; the air and water are not the vital resources they should be. At this late stage, we have to call upon the stores of vitality in our hearts and give life a reason to come back to us.

We do this by engaging every part of ourselves: by educating ourselves so our logical minds can see the way; by cleaning our cells and maintaining them so our bodies can recognize true vitality for what it is; by envisioning both what’s wrong and how to fix it, so that we can unite our thoughts and actions in a common, life-affirming mission.

Yours in love and peace after the illusions are shattered,
Natalia

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Updates

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Hi Everyone:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
Natalia

Sprouts

Go Native, Not Neurotic!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

puma-1225021-m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So get outside and go native, not neurotic!

Wings

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Manifest Destiny

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

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

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

Mother Immunity

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

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

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

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

“The Father of Chemical Agriculture”

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

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

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

Our Bodies

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

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

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

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

Our Destiny

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

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

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

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

Sprouts

Calling All Frogs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ribbit!
Natalia

Sprouts

Fung-Eggs & Corn-Fish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your free-range, grazing friend,
Natalia

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Take a Gander…

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Hi Friends,

I’m preparing to depart for an extended vacation with my family to South Africa–no media, no computer, no hand-held devices! Just endless indulging in sea, sun, and play!

My next installment will be on the topic of “Fung-eggs and Corn-fish.” What is that, you ask? I invite anyone who wants to take a gander to send an e-mail to Ana at analaddg@hotmail.com with that in the subject line. I’ll announce the person who comes closest to getting it! (N.B. This doesn’t apply to people with whom I’ve already discussed it).

I’ll give you two hints. Hint #1: substances like fung-eggs and corn-fish are the latest in mainstream foods (but you’ll never hear them referred to that way). Hint #2: the concept of a species’ biomass is central to the explanation of what they are and how they came to be. That’s all you’re getting out of me now!

A special note to community members: Look out for a new release from me on Emotional Eating on 12/16/09. It’s Part One of a two-part e-book entitiled “Emotional Eating S.O.S.” I’ll have Part Two ready for you early in the new year.

Also, make sure to keep watching for new Q & A’s with Ana Ladd-Griffin and new recipes from Chef Doris Choi of Detox Delivery on the membership community. Check out Doris’s new sushi recipe that goes up tonight!

I send my most heartfelt love to you all. You are not alone in your desires, your struggles, your passion, or your vision. We are a family–seeding a beautiful future together to reap together!

As the locals in South Africa say during the holidays, “Happy Happy!” (pronounced “Appy Appy!”)

All Love & sunshine,
Natalia

Sprouts

The Biggest Lie

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In his 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler coins the term “the big lie,” which refers to a form of propaganda that pivots on telling a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” A “certain force of credibility” runs through this big lie so people will find it easy to accept. Of course, in accusing an entire people of this falsehood, he was employing the very technique that he was describing, and would continue to do so toward the most monstrous ends.

But don’t think for a moment that any of us are safe from the machinery of “the big lie” today. This enduring, insidious force is very much alive, woven into the very roots of our society.

In our times, governments and corporations still heavily employ “the big lie” psychology with enormous success, their minions none the wiser. In fact, just about all the foundational aspects of our culture can be traced back to one of their big lies: they have convinced us of what to consume, what to put on and in our bodies, what to expect of our health, and what to expect out of life. We accept this way of life because we believe it is correct and created for our highest good, or at least the best that we can expect, given humankind’s extensive shortcomings and iniquitous wiring (which we also accept).

The biggest lie is that it’s all okay—that while our culture may not be perfect, it is the best way of life imaginable thus far, and if we just keep following this trajectory, we’ll eventually make things even better. That is THE BIGGEST LIE!

One BIG TRUTH is that we are consuming our planet at warp speed and we are very close to the point (if we’re not already there) where we cannot save it. While everyone now agrees that change is necessary, few people seem to grasp just how dire the situation is, certainly not enough to reject the entrenched norms. No sane organism devastates the organism that feeds and supports it. Consider what cancer and autoimmune diseases are: cells that attack the healthy cells and tissue (or blood, bone, lymph) of the body.

Worse still, we have bought the diversion that merely recycling and buying more environmentally conscious products and vehicles will offset this devastation in a meaningful way. We should be as conscious as we can, yes, and obviously we should reduce, recycle, and reuse. Any awake, thinking person can figure that out!

Here’s what really has to happen: we must stop consuming products that are produced by large corporations and made from commonly raised animals and sea life. This is the only way to halt the deadly march of corporations who wreak destruction on us all while reaping the riches of the big lie! It is no exaggeration to say that they, along with everyone who purchases their products, are raping the planet, snuffing out life and deranging the biomass of the animals they raise. Clearly, this should not only be illegal, but there should be some global policy against it. There are laws, yes, but they don’t apply to those who can pay others to look the other way.

Here’s the thing: these factions can only keep up this nonsense so long as people keep buying what they are selling. Consumers need to stop buying their products and thereby put them out of business. It’s really that easy. Yes, jobs would be lost—many jobs—but the beauty of creative destruction is that something better will spring up in its place for these workers. Keeping people employed is not a good enough reason to perpetuate the carnal consumption of our precious resources. Convenience is not a good enough reason. Fear of change is not a good enough reason. Tell me one reason that is good enough—I surely cannot think of one! Yet I can think of countless reasons to support changing our way of life!

We have been brainwashed into wanting and craving and thinking we need all sorts of rubbish as we suffocate our bodies and spirits and kill off the life around us. In this way, we continually fatten these corporations, which couldn’t care less about the future of our planet—they care only about the here and now, plundering more resources for money and power. And we sit around and let them do it! Just as generations before us sat around and watched the genocide of indigenous cultures as colonialists wiped them out in the name of expansion, discovery, and exploration. Just as we sit around and wear pink ribbons and hold social functions to raise money for childhood diseases instead of seeing that our way of life is the cause of all those cancers, emotional imbalances, learning disabilities, and so on. We just nod along to the hypnotic cadence of the news reporters’ iambic pentameter as they dish up the gobbledygook.

I’m just sick of it. And frankly, I’m tired of being polite about it. What’s the point of being polite now? Polite to whom, and at whose expense? What about being polite to the life of our planet, the ecosystems, the animals being pushed out of their habitats, or to our own sick bodies and spirits? I am guilty of imposing some of these expected limitations on my own children, who are so beautifully instinctual; in a world restrained by social disciplines, I’m the first to admit what a slave I’ve been to their rules. I try to remind myself that my children need to know both the world’s ways and the alternative ways of living. I tell myself that this is how to arm them with the knowledge and experience necessary to become effective “bridgers.” I am trying to dance the dance that is required in this shadowy, transitional era.

But what do you say to a world that would rather eat cheap chicken grown at 400 times the normal rate and pumped with antibiotics and hormones than consider the alternatives? To a world that thinks nothing of wasting resources, killing off 200 species A DAY and the ecosystems in which they live in order to sustain the mass production of processed meats and substances? To a world that’s too busy Christmas shopping and worrying about health insurance but never connects the dots between these things? To a world that thinks a cancer vaccine can be created to cure cancer, or that diseases are simply a question of genetics? What you say to such a world is, WAKE UP!

I tell you, I’m just not into being polite anymore. In the dire game of survival on this planet, the sleeping masses stand in the way of life, like rogue bacteria. We are not islands. We are one organism intermingling on the same planet. We should do all we can to live cleanly as individuals, but we still have to reside among the combined emissions of the entire population and the biochemical makeup of the earth. We can fast on green juices and cleanse our internal organs to the best of our ability, but every cell of our being is still breathing in the compound substance of the entire organism.

If we want change, if we really want to keep life on this planet an option—good life, not deranged life—we have to stop consuming what we’ve been programmed to consume. We must stop destroying the fabric of our bodies and our world. We cannot carry on as if it doesn’t matter, not without dire consequences, which we’re already seeing. And as the planet becomes more and more irritated by the cancer of misguided human consumption on its delicate surface and tries to shake it off, just as the body tries to fight off illness, there will be symptoms! And symptoms on a planetary scale will surely cause mass devastation. With or without our help, the earth will have to fight to regain its balance.

Daniel Quinn writes in Ishmael: “Nonetheless, I tell you with complete confidence that something extraordinary is going to happen in the next two or three decades. The people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably or they are not. And either way it’s certainly going to be extraordinary.” I agree. Either we are going to have a renaissance and give birth to a whole new way of life that we can only begin to conceive of now or we will perish. As he says, either way it will be an extraordinary sequence of events.

Many people believe the Earth was created for humankind, but the fact is, life was here long before the arrival of our species. And even then, the planet thrived for a long time more before civilization came along coating it with cement and poisonous by-products.

As I face the New Year, I am determined to help conceive and execute a new vision. I will never again ask myself, How can I fit in or be accepted in this social structure? I will ask, How can I transform it into something that is unanimously life-supporting? 

So the question becomes, What is the vision? and then How are we going to build it? We can start by determining what’s worth keeping—all the best of human expression, creativity, and understanding. And determine what isn’t—the clearly offensive and destructive practices of humankind. From there we can create a new lifestyle that reflects this vision, even if it means losing some so-called conveniences along the way, like having the exact type of food we want when we want it, or using cheap plastic to manufacture all manner of products and packaging, or having huge homes and driving multiple cars. But first, we must truly believe, deep down, that our well-being, our life-experience, and having reliably healthy bodies and balanced emotions are worth the change!

Who among us, if given the choice between living as a man (or woman) and living for the man, would choose the latter? Yet that’s what the vast majority of us do in our culture. Food is a natural resource that our planet can easily and abundantly provide, yet we have structured our food consumption in such a way that we spend our lives working (mostly in jobs we can barely stand, day after day, decade after decade) to put dead, processed food in our family’s mouths.

I remember I was in the fourth grade when I heard someone say that the troubles of the world and the devastation of the planet would be left for my generation to fix. I thought, Okay, that seems unfair, but at least my generation will be smart enough to do it—we’ll correct what all those silly adults have done! But here we are and things have only gotten exponentially worse. Now the same is being said of my children’s generation.

What happens to us when we get older? The same thing that happens to bright leaders who take positions in government: we get scared. We question our vision, the impulses that once inspired us to act, and kowtow to the norms because the authorities behind them sound so gosh-darned bossy and authoritative! Self-doubt and fear of being wrong, or worse, haunts our true expression! It’s the primal pain of growing up: as children, filled with energy and clarity, we act on creative impulses that naturally conflict with the adult world, and what happens? We get punished!

I confess, I perceive far more than I talk about publicly. There are things I’d like to say that I censor EVERY TIME I COMMUNICATE, unless I’m with a close, like-minded friend whom I can trust. I can’t do it to that degree anymore for the simple reason that I’ve come to understand that silence kills. The more I let my fear keep a lid on what I really think, the more I allow the devastation. It’s like watching a person get abused or just standing by as a thief steals an old lady’s purse!

One thoughtful reader commented that my voice in this blog sounds angry. I agree with the mystic Almine, who explains that anger is the desire to protect. As a living being, it is natural to feel anger when something threatens the health of your world, inside or out. Being a peaceful warrior does not mean being insipid. We can practice equanimity and still hear the inner alarm bell of anger warning that something worth protecting is being threatened. To ignore or repress this siren is folly. We must honor ALL our feelings (see my 11/6/08 blog on anger). The question to ask is:What does this anger show us that we couldn’t see before? 

Friends, we have to start seeing things as they are. We have to stop consuming what we are told to consume, seeing the world as we were taught to see it, accepting things just because they have some element of credibility without looking more closely.

Increased perception is power. We can change the world. We can eradicate the old blueprint that’s destroying everything good in our world and replace it with a much greater vision. We have to believe that this is possible. We have to believe that we are innovative enough to pioneer a new way of life. We don’t need to accept the expectations and limitations imposed upon us—that’s THE BIG LIE talking in order to satisfy the agenda of those who don’t care what happens after they are gone.

There is no easy way forward. We have to start forging the way, step by step:

Step #1: See that our way of life does not work for humans, or for any life forms at all.

Step #2: Recognize that the origins of our suffering come from our way of life.

Step #3: Realize that we do not need to abandon what is good in our world or return to living in caves. We must move forward, not back.

Step #4: Recognize that we are social beings in a culture that undervalues community.

Step #5: Create a new vision for society and innovate where necessary.

So many of us today are isolated; families are scattered; individuals are depressed and lonely. We must build more wholesome, unifying community experiences. Our current approaches to education and employment are colossal failures. These major building blocks of our way of life desperately require a complete redesign—an entirely new vision that is meant for humans, not for herd animals. When children are allowed to blossom more holistically, their natural talents and curiosities turn them into self-directed dynamos, brimming with enthusiasm for learning, leading to fulfilling expressions of their talents.

In this vision of the future, balanced, sovereign individuals will be rich with natural enthusiasm, integrity, and productivity. Clear, well-balanced people want to be creative and spend their time constructively. It’s a natural human desire to envision new things, craft, build, and innovate. Most people are at their happiest when they are engrossed in something creative.

I don’t have all the answers, and I am but one voice among many brothers and sisters in our human family, but I’m confident that, together, we can knit a beautiful new world that honors life in all its miraculous forms. I hope to offer more hopeful visions and practical steps as I play my part, and I hope you will do the same. But for now, I offer these sentiments as logs on the fire of life. I also plan to share my own experiences of culling the non-necessities in my own lifestyle as I undertake to be more conscientious than I’ve ever been before.

Don’t be afraid to say that you don’t like the way things are done or how they are affecting you and the world. Do you remember what happens in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy melts the witch? The monkey soldiers, who seemed so loyal to her before, break out in celebration upon her assassination! People are walking around defending a way of life that doesn’t work because they are so confused by it and what the alternatives might be. Just think how relieved everyone will be to see there’s a way out of their suffering!

It’s time for a renaissance. Let’s pull together and create something extraordinary, for we human beings are far more extraordinary than this culture we cling to!

For further inspiration, here is a poem by William Ernest Henley, titled “Invictus,” which is enjoying the spotlight, thanks to an inspiring new film by the same name—about South Africa winning the Rugby World Cup championship in 1995, and all that it meant to the nation’s blossoming rebirth. I feel that it applies well here. Apparently, Nelson Mandela turned to this poem for support throughout his twenty-seven-year imprisonment on Robben Island.

Invictus 

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

—William Ernest Henley

Sprouts

Hitting the Invisible Detox Wall – Guest blog by Tom DeVito

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 th-tommy-devito  

Tom DeVito
Colon Therapist
Owner, Release NYC
releasenyc.com

First, I would like to say that it is an honor to have been invited by Natalia to be a guest blogger on her website. I’ve known Natalia for many years and I’m delighted to add my two cents and share my experience with you.

I’ve been involved in the health and detoxification “world” for about fifteen years, and I’ve been a colon therapist for ten of those years. I was under the tutelage of Gil Jacobs and his partner at Chakra 17. Over those years I helped many people on their journey toward health through detoxification.

Two major symptoms prevail as people transition toward the raw-food vegan diet. The first one, which occurs when folks transition too quickly, would be a rapid weight loss and a dramatic loss of strength and energy. This also shows up as a lack of vitality in the eyes and faces of the afflicted. When this happens the person must take a step back and eat some cooked foods to slow down the loosening up of waste in the tissue and bloodstream. Of course, this would be a temporary course of action, which would be followed by more colonics, juicing, and exposure to natural sunlight. Once the person stabilizes, he or she is ready to move on and resume the raw food diet, to the degree that is applicable to the individual’s process. Our age, personal history, and lineage play major roles in how radically and quickly we can move through this transition. Medication and decades of poor diet in our lineage make us move more slowly.

The second situation is one I’ve observed in many people who have been doing this with relative success but seem to have stagnated. This is “the invisible detox wall,” when weight loss has tapered off, skin is no longer clear, etc. It’s like starting a new gym regime, seeing amazing results begin, then slow, then come to a standstill. The first thing we do is talk to our trainer or someone with more experience. The trainer explains that our bodies have become accustomed to the workout and we need to change things up a bit, such as try a different cardio workout or change up the anaerobic exercises we’re doing. The same is true with the diet.

We need to look at the foods that make up our daily meals. Are we eating whole, fresh foods or are we loading up on manmade concoctions? These foods can be very tricky and difficult to digest, depending on how they’re made and who makes them. These foods usually disregard food combining principals, which makes digestion very difficult or nearly impossible. Eating this way will use up our energy in breaking down the foods. And through inefficient digestion, the foods will rot and foul up our inner ecology, leaving us bloated, uncomfortable, and polluted. This gives the body a task that detracts it from its path: DETOXIFICATION! So, the best approach here is to eat as much whole, raw foods as possible, and maybe on the weekends allow ourselves the more indulgent, vegan treats that so many of the great vegan restaurants in Manhattan offer.

What exactly are we talking about? To start with, nuts and seeds. Nuts and seeds are often overused in a lot of the raw food restaurants. They quite simply slow the process of detoxification down. It’s not that these are poisonous foods, but they are just too dense. Nuts and seeds do not break down easily. As a colon therapist, I always see that nuts and seeds come out similarly to how they look after being chewed. So how does the body derive anything beneficial from them? Consider how much of your diet is composed of nuts and seeds, and if you are eating pounds of this stuff a week you will have difficulty reaching your goals. Nuts and seeds are very difficult to digest.

Let’s look at seeds. Seeds have a protective sheath around them, which is an enzyme inhibitor. Animals eat a plant with seeds and swallow the seeds. When they excrete the waste, the seeds are fertilized and grow. So keep that in mind. Soaking the seeds will remove this sheath. Still, eat small amounts.

Nuts, on the other hand, are a different story. Not only is their high density in the form of fat content problematic, but most are not in their natural state when we consume them. Many have to be heated in order to be extracted from the shells. The heating processes alone render many varieties no longer raw. Almonds exist inside the pit of a fruit and are not the hard brittle nuts we find in the store. So-called “fresh and raw almonds” are really “dried” almonds.

If you’ve hit a brick wall and cannot move on, look at the foods you are eating. If you think you need the nuts and seeds for protein, etc., I offer myself as an example. I’ve been free of nuts and seeds for eight years, and no signs of deficiency here.

Thanks for reading. I hope this provides some insight and helps you on your journey toward becoming “independently healthy.” Remember, this is about simplicity and getting back to basics so we can actually enjoy life! So have a great day and enjoy your amazing journey. Remember, there is no finish line!

Enjoy!

Peace & love,

Tom DeVito, Colon Therapist
Owner, Release NYC
releasenyc.com

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LIMITED EXCLUSIVE Thanksgiving Recipes from The Membership Communty

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Happy Thanksgiving, Friends!

I was inspired to give you all a sneak peek at our Chef Doris Choi’s Thanksgiving recipes, which were originally exclusively intended for the Natalia Rose Institute Community Members. I will leave this up here until Saturday in hopes that Doris’s brilliant, far more delectable creations will inspire you to serve up some more vital creations this holiday weekend! Please pass the Chunky Monkey Banana Ice Cream!

With our Love,
Natalia Rose & Doris Choi

For more of Doris’s exclusive recipes and to retrieve these after November 29th, please refer to her area on the community: http://www.detoxtheworld.com/community-register.php. We won’t mind if you lick the bowl, utensils, and your fingers, just try to draw the line at your friends’ and family’s bowls, utensils, and fingers!

Sprouts

The Book of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s to a new kind of literacy!

Natalia