Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Creating Heaven on Earth
From a very young age, I have been extremely devoted to choosing food that is healthy, tasteful and brings more life to the body. Because of that, I have recently been re-exploring the benefits of a Live Foods diet, without compromising my commitment to Ayurveda. As I review a past period of my life when my family was eating mostly raw, so do I revisit some challenging times socially because of it. Nevertheless, I am intrigued with the power of commitment and aliveness I maintained, along with the sense of power this program offered.
In my late teens/early 20's I was eating a Natural Hygiene diet, which is a close equivalent to the current Raw foods diet, except for an occasional baked yam, potato or winter squash at my evening meal, especially when it was cold. Along with a mixed fruit juice for breakfast, I made and drank at least two more vegetable juices a half hour before lunch and dinner meal, which almost consumed my day preparing! Meals consisted of a fruit & nut salad at breakfast, and a large salad with nuts at lunch, and again with a starch at dinner.
After weening my second daughter, it became obvious that all raw was impossible for kids. I was pregnant with my third daughter, and we continued on the Natural Hygiene diet with more cooked foods and I began growing and making daily wheatgrass juice for my entire family of 5. I have never seen such healthy children, who never got colds, or received vaccinations, except for one tetanus shot my middle daughter receive after cracking her head open and needing stitches. She was not allowed to leave the hospital without it, or the were going to call Child Services. You can imagine how I felt, taking better care of my children's health than anyone I had ever meet, and being told that I was an unfit parent if I didn't have her shot up with poison!! Needless to say I was more committed to feeding them well, and fortunately she survived the ordeal!
As time went on I started to feel like I was constantly bloated and full of gas by the end of my day of mostly raw food that I maintained for myself. I felt like my intestines were cramping all day long, and I had created a new set of problems by this regime. I had been started attending a yoga studio and was having some very profound spiritual experiences with the sadhana (spiritual practices) I had been performing. They also left me feeling a bit ungrounded and spacey. My weight was lower than normal from breastfeeding or pregnant for a continuous span of 7 years. You probably guessed it, my Vata was off the charts!! Along with that, I was suffering from occasional headaches and a red rash on several parts of my body-- Pitta clearly expressing itself. The doshas were talking but I didn't know how to recognize them as that, let along decipher the symptoms at that point.
It was 1982. I had been praying for some help in this area, and fortunately Dr. Vasant Lad had just come to America and written what is now a classic book on Ayurveda called, "Ayurveda:The Science of Self-Healing". Being so immersed in yoga and health, it was a natural to gravitate to such a new, unknown science. I bought his book, but given my busy lifestyle and fixed-ness in eating, it took me months to actually sit down and read it.
When out of total despair and realizing I couldn't insanely do the same thing and expect to get a different result, I randomly opened the book to check it out, and my answer to the the whole pitta issue was right before my eyes.
I devoured the book, being the Pitta that I am, and when I got to the end of the book, much to my amazement there was not only a picture and bio of Dr. Lad, but his home phone number!!! Yep, you guessed it! I was right on it--calling him and asking for advice and how I could study with him. He invited me to Albuquerque where the Ayurvedic Institute had just opened, but with 3 young children at home that was not an option!! He then suggested I go to Mount Madonna’s summer Ayurvedic Program, but again was not a possibility for me. After about an hour of talking I invited him to Laguna Beach to teach his first of many workshops and consultations. It was a year before he had an open weekend that we could schedule for, even back then being somewhat unknown. But the day I arrived, where at the airport I picked up this beloved man, immediately knowing that I had found my Beloved teacher.
Even after just reading the book, it was only a matter of days before the rash started to disappear, I don’t believe I ever got another headache, and my digestive system started to rapidly heal. I had thought my pregnant looking belly was just the result of having three kids, but to my amazement the more I ate ayurvedically, the flatter and more defined it became. This lead me to eat a completely different diet for the next 25 years, until I recently travelled to Bali last year, ate raw and loved it!! The difference was that I had the principles of ayurveda ingrained in my consciousness, so I continued to choose foods from that awareness. I now continue on about at 70% raw diet, which works perfect for my Pitta/Vata constitution.
I started using herbs following my first private consultation with Dr. Lad in 1984, when he came for his first visit. I would use them for a few weeks, and then lazily forget about them. It wasn't until I was able to get an apartment in Albuquerque and study with him full time at the Institute that I fully recognized the value of taking them for what ever ails a person. Herbs have the intelligence to know where in the body to assist and balance. This is different than food. which nourishes and builds, but doesn't have the cellular resonance of herbs. Prior to herbal medicine being used in western countries, India had classified thousands of herbs based on their taste-either sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter or astringent. Each taste has a specific action on the body, and informs the body through the six types of taste buds on the tongue. These buds, are the nerve ending to the brain through a pathway to the brain, informing it of which organ should respond and fire up. This is true for food or herbs, but where herbs are unique is that the different parts of the plants were correlated to different body parts. This assisted in identifying which tissue the herb would benefit. This was a great boon to all herbalist who later resorted to memorization of thousands of herbs, and now most likely use a computer program to classify.
From a very young age I have be fascinated with the idea of Physical Immortality. This was heightened by my training as a Rebirther, and again while studying the effects of Rasayanas (rejuvenatives and Panchakarma) on the body's ability to YOUTH. Since my original introduction to this topic, I have reviewed and questioned whether this is a desired outcome, given the state of the world. But something happened at the beginning of this year, that has given me hope that maybe we are meant to make this planet our eternal home, and that this would end the unconscious act of polluting, defying and robbing this sacred planet of all of her resources. If we knew that this was our HOME, then there wouldn't be this unconscious death urge, which creates behaviors that are resonate to that outcome.
Imagine how powerful of a program can come out of a live, ayurvedic diet with the assistance of herbs to accelerated the healing process. I have been exploring and writing on this subject for the last year with a raw food nutritionist for an upcoming book, workshop and TV show that is in the works. If you are interested in seeing how you can improve your health and join us in creating Heaven on Earth, please join the conversation...
