Get Happier and Healthier by Doing This One Thing...

"The best of all medicines is resting and _______."

~ Benjamin Franklin

Hi everyone,

Care to fill in the blank in today's quotation? 

Read on to find the answer...

A recent study has shown that _______ causes you to secrete more of a hormone called GHRELIN, which has a few interesting side effects...

- It gives you energy
- Makes you more action-oriented
- Makes you more sociable
- and better able to overcome obstacles

Okay, I know.  You're saying, "Where can I get me some of this stuff?!" 

Relax - your body makes it.  Your stomach makes most of it and some extra comes from your kidneys, your hypothalamus and pituitary glands. 
Ghrelin has a notable anti-depressive effect and generally makes people much HAPPIER.

Of course, your system makes more of it when you're _______.

That might be part of the reason people practicing authentic ancient spiritual traditions are about the happiest folks you'll ever meet.  At least, that was certainly my experience of the Orthodox Christian monks of Mt. Athos in Greece. 

And they're certainly well known for their _______.


SO WHAT IS _______ ALREADY??!!

It's fasting.  The practice of going without food or sometimes food and drink for a certain defined period.  It's long been known that fasting kick-starts the body's cleansing reaction, causing you to release toxins.

And fasting it SIGNIFICANTLY contributes to longevity.  (If you want to live a long time, try not only eating a BETTER diet, but also eating LESS).  Some recent experiments with mice determined that cutting down the little rodent's food intake contributed to lengthening his lifespan by 30% or more and keeping him healthy at the same time.  For a human, that would mean the difference between a life plagued with health problems and coming to an abrupt end around age 80 versus a longer, disease-free life of closer to 106 years.  Sound good to you?

Fasting is also critically important to any REAL spiritual life.  By the way, that doesn't mean that ALL religious fasting is helpful spiritually, it just means truly spiritual people practice fasting.  There's a difference!  


Now, though, the evidence also suggests that fasting has a very positive, mood-altering side effect as well.  Again, this applies to INTELLIGENT fasting, practiced in MODERATION.  Don't succumb to the silly logic that if a little fasting makes happy, a ton of fasting will make you the happiest person on earth.  Wrong! 

So if you're aiming for personal resilience in your life, fasting will be an indispensable practice for you.  It will improve your mood, giving you the emotional resources to cope with the ups and downs of life.  It will help you detoxify, keeping you healthier.  And it will greatly facilitate your spiritual practices, such as prayer and meditation.  




NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE?

Then the best way to start is to ease yourself into it.

You can try spending a morning with nothing more than pure water, for example.  Then - and this is REALLY important - take note of how you feel physically, mentally and emotionally.



One of the easiest ways to incorporate fasting into your life is to set aside one day per week for it and then do a detoxification cleanse 2-4 times per year.  For your one day per week, you could start off, for example, by something as simple as drinking only pure water in the morning and then having only liquids (nutritious smoothies, for example) for the rest of the day.  

So, why not set aside a day to avoid this...

... in order to enjoy this?

 Believe me, your digestive system will be thanking you big time!

There are lots of varieties of fasting and we can't get into the details here, but you get the general idea.  

When regular fasting becomes part of your life, you'll LOOK FORWARD to it, knowing how great it makes you feel.

Remember to smile when you fast ;-)

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Fasting Part Two: Fasting for Spiritual Purposes

===========================================================

Ageless Beauty – Timeless Health:
Building a Lifestyle that Automatically Creates the
Health, Immunity and Longevity You Want

Toronto, Canada: June 4-5, 2011

http://www.harapower.com/AB/

=========================================

Over the course of human history, fasting for spiritual purposes has been at least as widespread and quite probably much more so, than fasting for better health.  We also need to remember that non-Western and pre-industrial cultures did not tend to divide life into categories of "physical" and "spiritual" as we do out of (bad) habit. 

Goals of Spiritual Fasting

There are many different ones.  As I write this, tens of millions of Eastern Christians are beginning their Holy Week fast leading up to Pascha (Easter).  For them the goal is to become more open to divine influence and to actually participate in the events they're celebrating.  Of course, there are many different spiritual reasons for fasting:

1. To become more open to divine influence
2. To receive divine guidance on a particular issue
3. To receive healing, whether physical, emotional or spiritual
4. To help someone else receive what they need, whether healing, guidance or protection
5. To prepare for a spiritually difficult task

In reality, of course, the majority of people who would say they practice spiritual fasting seem to do so on a semi-conscious level at best.  They often think they're fasting, when they're simply practicing a form of abstinence, or they're not clear on how fasting works or exactly what they wish to achieve.


Is fasting a form of sacrifice that God demands imperiously?  Is it a form of punishment for human sin?  Well, if you read the ancient Christian spiritual sources carefully, such as the various collections of "sayings of the desert fathers" from the fourth and fifth centuries, it's quite clear this isn't the case.


What emerges is a bit more complex.  Because fasting cleanses the body, it also makes the mind more lucid.  If you consider that the desert dwellers who pioneered Christian spiritual fasting were totally dedicated to remaining in an unbroken state of inner "prayer of the heart", this lucidity of mind was very important.  The bottom line from their experience is that abstinence from heavy foods and periodic fasting will enable you to maintain focused inner attention and will cut down on the inner dialogue, swirling emotions and physical symptoms that ensnare your attention.  That's obviously a vital consideration for any sustained program of prayer or meditation, and explains why spiritual fasting has been so widely used worldwide for millennia.  


So if we ask how spiritual fasting works, it's clear the explanation bridges the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual planes of our being, creating a cleansing and unifying effect.  It's not simply a matter of fulfilling an abstract divine commandment; it has to do with how your mind-body organism is intended to function.  This is something that Orthodox Christian ascetics, Kriya Yoga practitioners and many native American medicine people, to name just a few, will tell you.  


Here's a really interesting video on spiritual fasting that also ties in the health aspect in an admirable and well thought out way.  Be sure to pause it to give yourself time to read the text, in addition to listening to the excellent commentary:












A Spiritual Warrior's Explanation


Without contradicting any of the foregoing, the Coptic Orthodox Monk, Matthew the Poor, offered this explanation of fasting. When he uses the word "self", he is using it in the sense of the "ego" or "false self":


"[When we fast] we must reach a state of accepting not the partial, but the complete annihilation of the self, and this can only take place by an act of deliberate volition.  In other words, if we begin by any exercise, such as fasting, which brings us to the partial overcoming of the self, we need to supplement the feeling of satisfaction that comes from accepting this state with an acceptance of the total destruction of the self.  This is obtained by the mental acceptance of death itself, with no dismay or restraint.  'But we received the sentence of death in ourselves' (2 Corinthians 1:19).  


"When our father Abraham offered Isaac his son, he did so partially with his hands, but totally in purpose.  When Abraham proved his willingness to offer Isaac, his only son, God did not leave him to carry out the slaughter; when the offering had been only partially made on the physical level, God considered the sacrifice to have been actually carried out.  This, and only this, is why God redeemed Isaac with a ram - a symbol of Christ - who was to redeem the souls of those whose self was destroyed partially by their actions, but wholly in their intentions."1.


In terms of spiritual fasting, that's certainly "food for thought"!  Think about it.  Better still, try it.  Just remember, though, as with fasting for health, the same advice and warnings apply here, so go back and read the previous post before you start!


Blessings!


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger :-)

Fasting Part One: Fasting to Improve Your Health

===========================================================

Ageless Beauty – Timeless Health:
Building a Lifestyle that Automatically Creates the
Health, Immunity and Longevity You Want

Toronto, Canada: June 4-5, 2011

http://www.harapower.com/AB/

=========================================

This is Holy Week for most Christians and a time when tens of millions of people will be fasting.  So what better time to do a two-part series on the value of fasting?  Why two-part?  Because there are two main reasons people fast...

We fast in search of better health or we fast as a method of spiritual purification.  As we'll see the two are related.  Today, though, we'll focus on fasting to create health, immunity and longevity....

What Exactly is "Fasting"?

That's not as stupid a question as you may think.  That fact is, there are lots of misconceptions out there about fasting.  Some people believe that simply abstaining from certain foods or food groups, either temporarily or permanently, is "fasting".  That's most definitely not fasting.  That's "abstinence".  


Fasting is going without eating solid food, and sometimes liquid nourishment as well, for a defined period of time.  That could be a matter of hours, days or weeks, depending on what you're trying to achieve and how.  

The Health Benefits of Fasting

So why would you bother?  Perhaps because there are few if any other health tools in your arsenal that give you such bang for the buck.  Here are just some of the primary benefits of fasting:

1. Initiates a detoxification / cleansing reaction in the body, enabling you to rid yourself of accumulated toxins.
2. Enables weight loss.
3. Puts the digestive system, and the body as a whole, into "rest mode", allowing the energy usually devoted to digestion to be diverted to healing.
4. Clears up skin problems and the whites of your eyes.
5. Naturally lowers blood pressure without drugs.
6. Makes it easier to overcome bad habits and addictions, and to make a fresh start with a new, healthier diet and lifestyle.
7. Reduces inflammation throughout your body.
8. Reduces water retention throughout your body.
9. Pacifies many allergic reactions and sensitivities.  
10. Historical and biological research strongly suggests proper fasting promotes longevity.

Varieties of Fasting

You may have heard of many types of fasting for health, including water fasts, juice fasts, total fasts and many others.  Natural health pioneers like Dr. Bernard Jensen and Victor Irons used fasting together with colon cleansing to achieve remarkable results for their patients and clients for about half a century each!  More telling is that both of these great pioneers lived healthy lives to nearly age one hundred.  


Here's a video with Dr. Nicholas Tancheff, a chiropractor who has founded a fasting retreat facility in Hawaii.  You can learn a lot by listening to how he went from the typically disastrous North American lifestyle to learning how to self-heal...

Warning: Avoid the Traps!

There are several traps with fasting, so here's my advice on how to get started:

1. Check in with your physician or a licensed health-care provider to help you get started.  This is particularly important if you've never done this before or have a pre-existing medical condition.
2. Be clear on what you would like to achieve with the fast.  This will help you select the proper type.
3. Don't make it up on your own: follow a program based on reliable and tested information.
4. Don't overdo it.  Fasting for just a few days can provide enormous benefit!
5. Don't become addicted to fasting and cleansing!  These are activities you should do periodically, not constantly.  Once your fast is over, start giving your body all the nutritious food it needs to stay healthy!

If you would like to learn a whole lot more about fasting and cleansing directly from people with a lot of experience, you should consider coming to the health workshop I'm doing with Michael Morningstar in Toronto, Canada on June 4-5.


As you've heard from the teleseminar we did last week, Michael really knows his stuff.  And we are confident that you'll leave our event with the knowledge and the confidence to take your health to a whole new level.


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger