 hospital.Then a very curious thing happened. After a day or two
on antibiotics, Chitra’s fever went from 104 degree s F. back
down to normal, which puzzled her attending physician. It
is very unusual for a high-grade fever to reverse itself so
rapidly if the underlying cause is an infecti on in a
terminally ill patient. Could there be another cause besides
infection? He decided to take chest X rays, and the next
day Raman called me sounding both exhilarated and
confused. “She doesn’t have cancer anymore!” Raman told me
jubilantly over the telephone. “What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback. “They can’t ﬁnd any cancer cells at all—nothing.” He was
almost unab le to contain himself. “Chitra’s oncologist at
ﬁrst was sure that they had X-rayed the wrong patient and
wanted to take some more pictures, but now he’s
convinced.”
Overjoyed, relieved, and unable to explain this sudden
stroke of salvation, Raman regarded his wife’s recovery as
a miracle. When I called Chitra in her hospital room, she
kept crying into the phone, “You did it, Deepak,” while I
kept insisting, “No, no, Chitra, you did it.” I had never
anticipated that such a rapid cure would result from her
treatments, either conventional or Ayurvedic. In retrospect,
I see that her high fever was a kind of burn-oﬀ from the
dying cancer, a process known as tumor necrosis. But the
exact mecha nism involve d has no explanation. If there is
such a thing as a mirac ulous cure, this was one, I was
certain. Within a few weeks, however, our mutual jubilation began
to change. Chitra’s “miracle” wasn’t holding. It eroded ﬁrst
within herse lf: instead of being able to trust in her
inexplicable recovery, she became conﬂicted, morbidly
afraid that the cancer would return. She called to ask me if
she should resume chemotherapy.“It’s been two months since the cancer disappeared,” I
said. “Does your doctor ﬁnd any new cancer cells?”
“No,” Chitra admitted, “but he thinks that the
chemotherapy cured me and that I should continue with it.”
I bega n to feel frustrated. I knew, as did her atten ding
physician, that the particular chemotherapy Chitra had
received was not known to produce sudden, total
recoveries of this kind, certainly not in advanced cases
where the cancer had begun to spread to other sites in the
body. Also, it was becoming obvious that she was being
worn down past endurance. The chemotherapy had caused
almost const ant nausea, and her hair had fallen out in
frightening amounts, adding to the shame she felt following
her breast surgery. All of this compromised the Ayurvedic
treatments we were trying. If even higher doses of
chemotherapy were given, she would become more
depressed, more prone to infections, and weaker in every
way. Yet, at the same time, I did not have a strong enough
reason to tell her not to proceed. What if she suﬀered a
relapse in six months and died? “Go ahead with your chemotherapy,” I advised, “but stick
with our program, too, okay?” She agreed. For several months more, Chitra remained free of
disease, but she also remained disturbed and mystiﬁed. It
seemed that Chitra’s cancer was easier to defeat than the
sinister doubt that was creeping back into her life, defying
her to be well. Chitra’s agonizing dilemma is the real starting point of
this book. For her to be well again, she needed an
explanation. What had happened to her? Was her cure a
miracle, as she thought at ﬁrst, or only a tempora ry stay of
execution, as she came to dread? By going deeper into the
mind-body connection, I believe an answer can be found.—
Research on spontaneous cures of cancer, cond ucted in
both the United States and Japan, has shown that just
before the cure appears,  almost every patient experiences
a dramatic shift in awar eness. He knows that he will be
healed, and he feels that the force responsible is inside
himself but not limited to him—it extends beyond his
personal boundaries, throughout all of nature. Suddenly he
feels, “I am not limited to my body. All that exists around
me is part of myself.” At that moment, such patients
apparently jump to a new level of consciousness that
prohibits the existence of cancer. Then the cancer cells
either disapp ear, literally  overnight in some cases, or at the
very least stabilize without damaging the body any further. This leap in consciousne ss seems to be the key. It does
not have to come in a ﬂash, however. Chitra was cultivating
it deliberately, through her Ayurvedic techniques. Therefore, her ability to stay at a higher level of awareness
was strikingly correlated with her condition. Somehow she
could motiva te the absence of cancer, but just as easily she
could return to it. (I think of this as being like a violin
string whose  pitch varies as you slide your ﬁnger up and
down it.) The word that comes to mind when a scientist
thinks of such sudden changes is quantum. The word
denotes a discrete jump from one level of functioning to a
higher level—the quantum leap. Quantum is also a technical term, once known only to
physicists but now growing in popular usage. Formally, a
quantum is “the indivisi ble unit in which waves may be
emitted or absorbed,” the deﬁnition given by the eminent
British physicist Stephen Hawking. In laym an’s terms, the
quantum is a building block. Light is built up from photons,
electricity from the charge of one electron, gravity  from the
graviton (a hypothetical quantum, not yet found in nature),and so on for all forms of energy—each of them is based on
a quantum and cannot be broken down into anything
smaller. Both deﬁnitions—the discrete jump to a higher level and
the irreducible level of a force—appear to apply to certain
cases like Chitra’s. Therefore, I would like to introduce the
term quantum healing  to describe what happened to her. Although the term is new, the process itself is not. There
have always been patients who do not follow the normal
course of healing. A tiny minority, for example, do not
waste away from cancer; others have tumors that grow
much more slowly than what the statistics for their
diseases predict. Many cures that share mysterious origins
—faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the eﬀective
use of placebos, or “dummy drugs”—also point toward a
quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the
faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a
drastic jump—a quantum leap—in the healing mechanism. Consciousness is a force that most of us undervalue. Generally we do not focus our inner awareness or use its
real power, even in the most diﬀicult moments of crisis. That may account for why “miracle” cures are greeted with
a mixture of awe, disbel ief, and reverence. Yet, everyone
possesses consciousness. Perhaps these miracles are
extensions of normal abilities. When your body mends a
broken bone, why is that not a miracle? As a healing
process, it is certainly complex, far too complex for
medicine to duplicate; it involves an incredible number of
perfectly synchronized processes, of which medici ne knows
only the major ones and those imperfectly. The reason why curing cancer by yourself is a miracle but
mending a broken arm is not comes down to the mind-body
connection: The broken bone seems to mend itself
physically, without the intervention of your mind; yet, a
spontaneous cure of cancer—so it is widely believed—depends on a special quality of mind, some deep will to live,
a heroically positive outlook, or some other rare capacity. This implies that there are two kinds of healing, one that is
normal, the other abnormal, or at least exceptional. I belie ve that this distinction is false. The broken arm
mends because consciousness makes it mend, and the same
holds true for the miraculous cancer cure, the long-term
survival of AIDS, the healing by faith, and even the ability
to live to a great old age without falling prey to disease. The reason why not everyone manages to take the healing
process as far as it can go is that we diﬀer drastically in our
ability to mobilize it. We can see this in the way that diﬀerent people react to
disease. A minute fraction, far less than 1 percent, of all the
patients who contract an incurable disease manage to cure
themselves. A larger fraction, but still under 5 percent, live
much longer than average—this is conﬁrmed in the 2
percent of AIDS patients who have survived longer than
eight years, while the vast majority do not survive beyond
two. These ﬁnding s are not restricted to incurable dise


diﬀerent relations in space. That would be your experience,
and nothing in the relative world exists outside experience. A bee approaching a ﬂower sees the nectar and blocks
out the petals—as far as the bee’s eye is concerne d, this is
what exists. For us, to see a bar magnet means seeing the
sharp outline of the iron but not the radiating magnetic
ﬁeld around it. Therefore, the iron is what exists, as far as
vision goes. Add in all the other senses, and you have the
world that you are creating. It was built up over 600 million
years by your DNA; ultimately, however, this world
expresses your inner intelligence, with DNA the adroitservant. It serves you in your way, as it serves other
creatures in theirs. DNA turns the vibrations of light into eyes and sound into
ears. It turns time into a matin g song for fruit ﬂies and into
the march of history for man. It gives bats their sonar and
snakes their sensitivity to infrared light. In each  and every
case, however, the DNA is merely the radio. One will never
discover the secret of space-time looking at DNA, or any
other materi al thing. The attempt is just as doomed as
tearing apart a radio’s wiring to ﬁnd where the music is. The rishis found the level of music—it is bliss. Bliss is the vibration that intelligence sends into the
world. In fact, we can map our existence in terms of a
single diagram that compresses mind, body, DNA, and bliss
into one undivided whole:
With good reason one could call this picture the circle of
life. In it we see bliss as a continuous signal, a loop thatconnects mind, body, and DNA in a lifelong conversation. All three participants share equally in what gets said—what
the mind knows is also known by the body and DNA. Your
experiences resonate on all three levels. You cannot be
happy or sad, sick or well, awake or asleep,  without
sending a message everywhere in inner space. You may not think that you can “talk” to your DNA
(another prejudice that comes from seeing DNA as only a
material blueprint), but in fact you do continually. The
ﬂeeting chem icals that race through you at the touch of
thought, the receptors hanging out on the cell wall waiting
for their messages, and every other speck of life are
manufactured by DNA. (I realize that I am truncating a
long process. DNA directly manufactures only genetic
material, but using its active twin, RNA, it gives rise to all
the proteins, cells, and tissues we have.) Thinking happens
at the level of DNA, because without the brain cell sending
out a neuropeptide or other messenger, there can be no
thought. The Ayurvedic technique called primordial sound takes
direct advantage of this. I drew  bliss as a circle to
represent a constant, unbroken signal. However, there can
be breaks in the circle. These occur when the DNA, the
mind, and the body are not perfectly synchronized. Ayurveda would say that many diseases begin where there
is such a break—bliss slips out of its groove, so to speak,
throwing oﬀ the cell’s intelligence. To repair the break, a
speciﬁc signal needs to be inserted back into the circle—a
primordial sound. In this way, a vibration is used to cure a
vibration. —
Treating disease with a mental sound is highly unusual, I
know. To understand it, we need to make a closer
connection between bliss and the quantum ﬁeld. By the1970s, the world’s atom smashers had been busy for forty
years, and now there were hundreds of “hadrons,” a class
of subatomic particles that were proliferating far too
abundantly to be conside red elementary by any standard. Didn’t the universe have simpler building blocks than this? The way out of the dilemma was found by theorizing that
all of these particles were variations not on a smaller
particle but on an underlying wave form. This wave form was dubbed a “superstring,” because it
behaves very much like a violin string. The superstring
theory holds that billions upon billions of unseen strings
pervade the universe, and their diﬀerent frequencies give
rise to all the matter and energy in creation. Certain
vibrations also turn into time and space—the preﬁx super
indicates that these strings actually reside far beyond our
limited four-dimensional reality. No one will ever see them,
no matter how powerful our instruments become. To clarify what a superstring is, physicist Michio Kaku
gives an analogy to music: imagine that a violin is enclosed
out of sight in a box. As its strings vibrate, diﬀerent
pitches, chords, sequences of notes, and timbres are
produced. If you were an alien who did not know what
music is, you would ﬁnd each of these things completely
diﬀerent from one another—the note C might be like a
hydrogen atom, while E-ﬂat was a photon. Only by opening
the box and seeing that indeed every sound came from one
violin would you be convinced that they had a uniﬁed
source. In the same way, nature’s fundamental ﬁeld is constantly
vibrating and producing variations upon the same “notes,”
but our senses are set up so that they turn this sameness
into diﬀerences. We perceive iron as a solid note, hydrogen
as a gaseous note, gravit y as a heavy note, and so on. Only
by exposing the superstrings would the underlying unity be
evident. They are exposed not by opening the box but bymathematical formulas that show that all forms of matter
and energy ﬁt the super-s tring model—as so far they all do. Therefore, quantum physics now has its ﬁrst good
candidate for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory, justifying Einstein’s
faith in the order of the cosmos. Amazingly enough, the Vedic rishis also perceived that
the cosmos was pervaded by strings. These strings were
called sutras,  from which surgeons get the word suture. In
Sanskrit, sutra can mean  a stitch (or suture), but also a
thread or a verbal phrase. If you think of a sutra as a
thread, then the whole universe is woven like gossamer
from threads of intelligence, billions and billions of them. Like notes played on the unseen violin, the fundamental
level of the whole world, according to the Vedic rishis, is
made of sounds. Because they arise before anything else,
they are primordial—hence the term primordial sound. It takes more than one sound to make the universe. However, the rishis did have just one sound to begin with, a
vibration called Om, which appeared at the time we would
call the Big Bang. Om is a meaningless syllable—it simply
stands for the ﬁrst wave that breaks the cosmic silence. As
it breaks up into many tinier waves, Om subdivides into
diﬀerent subfrequencies  that compose the matter and
energy in our universe. Once you open your mind to the possibility, it is no more
surprising that stars, galaxies, and human beings can be
created from Om than from a superstring. Both are
abstract. Going back to the hidden violin, Kaku wrote, “The
tones create d by the vibrating string, such as C or B-ﬂat,
are not in themselves any more fundamental than any other
notes. What is fundamental, however, is the fact that a
single concept, vibrating strings, can explain the laws of
harmony”—or in the case of the universe, the laws of
nature.Om can be pictured as a straight line whose pitch rises
into inﬁnity, like the most super of superstrings. It is no
accident that the syllable Om sounds like the English
“hum”; when the rishis  tuned in to the sound of the
universe, they actually heard it as a cosmic hum. If you
were enlight ened, you would be able to hear the vibration
that is your own signatu re; for instance, you could “hear”
your DNA as a speciﬁc frequency vibrating in your
awareness. Likewise, each neuropeptide would grow out of
a sound, as would every other chemical. Starting with DNA, the whole body unfolds into many
levels, and at each one the sutra, or sequence of sound,
comes ﬁrst. Therefore, putting a primordial sound back into
the body is like remindin g it of what station it should be
tuned in to. On that basis, Ayurveda does not treat the body
as a lump of matter but as a web of sutras. —
Needless to say, it has taken me some time to explain all of
this to myself. When I ﬁrst began to administer the
Ayurvedic programs at the inpatient facility in Lancaster, I
kept one foot ﬁrmly planted in my private endocrinology
practice—although I felt in tune with Ayurvedic theory, I
was still nervous about its results. Every week I shuttled
back and forth from my oﬀ


 do better than  those whodon’ t, a nd a simple monthly phone call from a caring cardiac nurse can
double t he survi val time of a heart patient. Even studies with animals have
found th at tende rness and af fection can reduce their risk for disease. In an
intriguing study from Ohio State University, two groups of rabb its were fed
a high-cholesterol diet. In one group the rabbits were regularly petted and
cuddled by the animal technicians. Rabbits in the other gro up, fed the
identical diet, did not receive any petting. At the completion of the study,
the rabbits that were treated tenderly had only 10 percent as much fat
deposited into their blood vessels as their touch-deficient peers. Love is
metabolized into physiology and can make the dif ference between health
and sickness, life and death. These sc ientific reports do not surprise most of us. W e have a ll known
the e xuberance and vitality that we experience when we feel loved. Most of
us a lso know t he anguish and despair that come from sep aration and
rejection. People  suf fering the lo ss of love have changes in the c hemistry of
their brains that influence ev ery cell in their body. The se changes
substantially inc rease their risk f or a wide range of illnesses, from cancer to
heart disease. Similarly, the exhilaration, enthusiasm, an d comfort
generated by love create life-af firming transformations that enliven both
emotional and physical well-being. Love makes us feel good because it
creates the biology of delight,  joy, and safety. Love is healing, love is
nourishing, love is good for us. Love transforms biology. What Is Love? Knowing that love transforms o ur physiology in the direction o f improved
health and vitality, we are ready to address a fundamental question: What is
love? Poets, philosophers, and songwriters since time immemorial have
waxed e loquent on this perennial subject. No word in any language is
embraced as personally as love. It elicits in each of us a lifetime ofmemories and desires, weaving  together the innocence and pas sion of our
bodies, hearts, and souls. For most people, love is an emotion, a sentiment, a feeling that can
consume your thoughts and molecules. Falling in love is an altered state of
consciousness, in which your perceptions, interpretations, and choices are
transformed. Wh en you are in love you become carefree and open to new
experiences. Y ou become vulnerable and invincible at the same time. Y ou
become renewe d, exhilarated, and joyful. Love detaches you from your
usual mundane and trivial conce rns and opens your awareness to the magic
and mystery of life. Love reminds you that you are alive. Love ins pires you to do great things. Through the power of love you tap
into your primordial ener gies an d become a mythical being. L overs aspire
to epic undertak ings to demonstrate the power of their love. Love connects
you with archetypal lovers. Y ou  relish reenacting the recurrent love stories
that precipitate out of the myth ological realm of the human su bconscious. Every c ulture te lls its love stor ies. From Cupid and Psyche to  Rama and
Sita to Romeo and Juliet to Sp encer T racy and Katharine Hepburn, these
romantic stories reenact the hell of separation and the heaven of reunion
that hum an beings experience through love. These perennial love stories are
the keys that open the door to universal love. Personal Love as Concentrated Universal Love
The great spiritual traditions from every culture inform us that unity is the
ultimate truth of all existence. T he one undivided Spirit partitions itself into
infinite beings. Once having fra gmented, however, the parts are driven by
fundamental forces to reestablish unity. Atoms endeavor to become
molecules. Celestial bodies seek  to join solar systems. Human beings strive
to mer ge with their beloved. Love at its essence is the quest for spirit, and
the longing for communion. The need to fulfill that longing for oneness
resonates deep in our personal and collective memory. Through all the
striving to find fullness outside ourselves, we know at some preconsciouslevel tha t the only true source o f love is the infinite, unbounded ocean of
spirit within our own being. The more in touch with spirit we are, the more
loving we feel and behave. Most people are not directly  in tune with their spiritual essence. Therefore, Natu re, in her compassion for human beings, has p rovided the
opportunity for us to fall in love  with each other. This provides us a glimpse
of th e transformational power o f spirit. Personal love provides us with a
taste of universa l love, but desp ite how grand we feel when we are in love,
it is not enough. W e are eterna lly driven to experience more love, more
intimacy, more wonder because our soul is driven to experience the ultimate
reunion with spirit. When you recognize that love a nd spirit are the same, you will see your
longing for love as a hunger for more awareness, more communion, more
connection with  the universal i ntelligence that underlies the world. Every
act of love is an act of divinity, an expression of spirit. Make a commitm ent to see ever y act of love as an expression of  spirit. A
sweet look from a child, giving money to a homeless person, helping a
stranger change  a flat tire, bringing a spouse flowers, volun teering at a
hospital—each of these acts is b oth personal and spiritual. They bring you
greater j oy by helping expand y our concept of who you are. Every act of
love loo sens the shackle of ego imprisonment. Every act of love  gives you a
taste of spirit and brings you a step closer to integrating the t imeless into
time-bound existence. Love creates the experience of present-moment
eternity, and the more we experience eternity the younger we  grow. The
deeper we tap i nto and express our core, which is spirit, the more loving
and liberated we feel. Think about love. T alk about love. Seek out love. Encourage love. Commit yoursel f to expressing l ove in every interaction of your  life. This is
the way your soul remembers its perfection. All lessons in life are lessons in
love. Liv ing a spiritual life means seeking out love in every situ ation. Make
love the most im portant thing in your life and you will grow y ounger and
live longer.Love at its essence is the quest for spirit. Communicating Love
Love is spirit in motion. Love m oving from one heart to anoth er generates
the biology that reverses aging. Love has to be expressed in order for it to
serve yo u and those you love. Y ou can express your love for another person
in three basic ways:
Y ou listen attentively to what they are saying. Y ou express in words or actions your appreciation for them. Y ou touch them lovingly with af fection. Each of these demonstrations o f love happens spontaneously when you
fall in love. Lo ok at any couple smitten with love. They hang on each
other ’ s every word. They wax poetic about the things they find attractive,
brilliant, and exceptional in ea ch other. They express their a ppreciation
through objects of love, from flowers to jewelry to homemade cookies. Finally, they cannot keep their hands of f each other. Whether you are in the first stages of a new romance, have b een in a
committed relationship for years, or are visiting an old friend from college,
these three faces of love are important. Show your love by being fully
present. Express  your appreciation in words and deeds. Be af fectionate. Consciously practice these principles of love. As a result, you  will grow
younger and live longer. Love, Sex, and SpiritSexual e ner gy is  the primal cre ative ener gy of the universe, an d all things
that are alive arise from sexual ener gy. In animals and other life forms,
sexual ener gy expresses itself exclusively as biological creativity. Animals
beget more animals. In human beings, sexual ener gy can be channeled into
creativity at all levels—physical, emotional, and spiritual. In any situation
that makes you feel attraction, arousal, alertness, passion, interest,
inspiration, excitement, creativity, or enthusiasm, sexual ener gy is at work. All these dif ferent manifestation s of sexual ener gy express themselves in
your phy sical body as sensations. Whenever you are sexually aroused, there
is an accompany ing feeling in y our body. Whenever you feel enthusiastic,
inspired, joyful, ener gized, or passionate, there is also an acc ompanying
feeling—a certa in physical sensation. The common thread in each of these
experiences is a feeling of expansion. At times the expansive feeling may
be so strong tha t you feel you are bursting out of your skin. Y o u are filled
with en er gy. The medical term for this state of fullness is tumescence. Although it is usually applied to states of sexual arousal, it can also
characterize these other expressions of excitement and passion. Learn to get in touch


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UTHOR'S
N
OTE
:
G
OING
B
EYOND
H
ELATHY
A
fter deciding, in 1991, to devote the remainder of my life to helping others
achieve health, I knew I needed to develop an approach that would eliminate all the
confusion and misinformation. I needed to simplify health and disease. Next, I
needed a model easily understood and applied by adults and children alike. My new
theory of health and disease was born—One Disease, Two Causes and Six Pathways. The next need was to identify safe and effective products of all kinds, which would
support health as indicated by the model. In order for my work to benefit the public, I needed effective methods of
presenting both my health model and my research. I needed people to understand the
ineffectiveness of our society’s current health model (medical suppression of
disease symptoms). I also needed to demonstrate the significance of the damage we
commonly suffer from seemingly benign sources (small amounts of toxins capable
of bioaccumulating to dangerous levels in our bodies). Perhaps most important, I
wanted to share what I had learned about the benefits of good nutrition and a
healthful lifestyle. My answer to these needs was to create a new entity called Beyond Health. My
goal in creating Beyond Health was to help people achieve a level of vitality and
performance surpassing anything they had experienced before—to help them go
“beyond health.” Today, Beyond Health is a unique resource for people who care
about their health, providing two major services to the public: It supplies accurate,
cutting-edge health information and makes available the world’s best health-
supporting products. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of conflicting information, particularly with
vitamin supplements and personal care products, and consumers remain confused
about how to make the best choices. It is very difficult to know, merely by reading
the label, if products are healthful and/or toxic. In my own recovery process, I had to
be extremely careful about the products I selected. Even small amounts of impurities
and toxins were enough to make me ill. I ended up with a refrigerator full of vitamin
supplements that I could not take because of toxic contamination. I later realized
that even healthy people were being injured by these same impurities and toxins,
even though it may not be obvious to them. Beyond Health researches and approves
only the safest and most effective choices in supplements, foods and personal
products— discerning between those that claim to be the best and those for which
there is credible evidence that they really are the best. This is a difficult, time-consuming and unique service. Cutting through the contradictions and confusion, Beyond Health translates a
chaotic mountain of medical and scientific data into the critical knowledge that
people must have in order to maintain healthy bodies. This information is made
available in several different ways, including public appearances at health
conferences around the world, through my newsletter,
Beyond Health News,
and
through my radio talk show,
An Ounce of Prevention
. My latest venture is a nonprofit foundation, Health-e-America Foundation
(HeAF). HeAF’s purpose is to end the epidemic of chronic disease in America by
educating our schoolchildren about the basics of good health using the One Disease,
Two Causes, Six Pathways model. For more information on Health-e-America
Foundation see appendix F. For more information on the radio show and newsletter,
see appendix A. Finding the Needle in a Haystack
Perhaps a few examples will best illustrate the difficulty in discerning among the
most healthful products and information. It took eighteen months of study and
analysis to find a single brand of toothpaste that did not contain toxic ingredients
(colors, flavors, fluoride or toxic foaming agents) but still cleaned teeth well. It took
two years to find a safe and effective deodorant. It took eight months to find a pure
and healthful brand of olive oil that contained only fresh, high-quality olives and
was extracted in a manner that would neither damage the nutrients in nor create
toxins in the oil. Recommendations for toothpaste, deodorant, olive oil, and other
products can be found in appendix C.
Vitamin supplements were the biggest challenge. Almost half of all vitamin
brands do not dissolve quickly enough to be of any use to the human body, and many
do not contain all the nutrients listed on the label. Most brands contain cheap
ingredients that have only marginal biological activity. In fact, the vast majority of
vitamin brands on the market are not worth what you pay for them—they are only
marginally useful, and many contain toxins such as solvent residues and artificial
colors. It took me over a year of research to find a superior multivitamin brand and
several additional years to find


 on a tray. Preceded by a back
massage, it comprises a cleanse, exfoliate, tone, facial massage, clay mask and
moisturize. According to A yurvedic texts, the secret to lasting beauty is
ojas  or the subtle qu ality of vigor o r vitality that is the superfine
essence of the se ven  dhatus  or ti ssues of the body. If  ojas  is strong
and healthy, one has a radiant inner self; this, in turn, manif ests
itself in one’ s outer physical  appearance. Of course, a facial
treatment will help also, and it’ s important to note that m any
A yurvedic facial treatments, of fered at numerous spas and salons
throughout India, are designed  for both outer beauty and innerdetoxification. Often called  mukhalepam  (mukha  is “face”,
lepam  translates as “pack”), they condition and nourish the skin,
open blo cked po res, eliminate toxins internally and cleanse the face
to improve skin texture. A Rajasthani miniature painting depicts a maid helping her mistress with her
toilette (Mankot,  circa  1720).T raditionally, A yurvedic skin care recipes were formulated
according to the healing ingredients that women had to hand in t heir
immediate vicinity. They took into account the condition or  vikruti
of a  person’ s skin, and were  made in the kitchen and used
immediately. Cleansing, nourishing and protecting are the three key
components in A yurvedic skin care and a full treatment is composed
of eight steps: A thorough clean se with an  ubtan  paste; an oleation
massage on the reflex points an d ener gy meridians on the face; a
herbal steam or compress to bri ng out impurities; a gentle scru b to
stimulate circula tion and cleanse the pores; a mask or pack to deep
cleanse, tauten and/or nourish the skin; a toning and rejuvena ting
refresher to refine pores and tone the skin; a deep moisturizer to
protect the skin from the eleme nts and bacteria; and a gentle sp ray
mist to assist ab sorption of the moisturizer and bring vitality to the
entire complexion. Although it would be too tedious to outline all the invigorating
facials you may have the luck to come across in India, a few
deserve special mention for the  quality of their products and  the
skill of the ther apists. Aman spas should be sought out in New
Delhi and Rajasthan (see opp osite) as much for their sup erb
surrounds as their specialist treatments and Shahnaz Husain, the
herbal b eauty tour de force, i s another name to watch out for. Another must is the A yurvedic facial at Soukya that works on b oth
the inner and outer levels in order to develop  ojas. It goes  withou t
saying that all s ections are performed with A yurvedic herbs cho sen
according to one’ s constitution and present state of health,
combined with fresh fruits and vegetables selected according to skin
types. Milk, curd, mint, honey, turmeric and sandal form its b asis. The handpicked  ingredients supply much-needed vitamins and
minerals, while packs even out color tone, soothe and moisturize the
skin, an d leave the face soft and supple. Steam ensures that the
ingredients are absorbed into the deepest layer of the s kin,
stimulating it and ensuring healthy new cell growth. The Park Hotels’ line of day spas called Aura also of fer a
number of super -fresh, natural  facial sequences. Harnessing the
power of rare combinations of natural herbs, fruits, flowers and
spices, each is individually designed for dif ferent complexions. Those w ith dry skin would be well advised to try the saf fron and
almond number: a gentle anti-aging treatment, it uses pure  rawa
(semolina) for exfoliation and then gives skin a blast with a saf fronand almond mask. Saf fron is a powerful ingredient for boosting skin
longevity and almonds are high in vitamin  E, a crucial component in
skin sof tening. The result is th e minimizing of fine lines and a
refreshed, clearer complexion. Aman spas’ “Royal Beauty” or  Shahi Nikhar  is a complete facial  treatment fit for a
Maharani. Featuring such Indian exotics as honey, milk and rose, passion flower,
geranium, cassia flower and chamomile, it smells as good as it feels. Designed to
cleanse and soften skin, it also boosts  cell renewal and draws out pollutants from
the complexion.Cucumber traces its roots to northern India, although it is widely available in the
West. It contains natural salts, enzymes and vitamins essential for strong cell
growth and repair; in addition, it has a high mineral content and is a natural source
of antioxid ants. At Aura spas in Kolka ta, Chennai and New Delhi, cucumb er is
used on the skin as a sunburn soother, as well as a facial toner and moisturizer. The fresh apple facial, on the o ther hand, is recommended for
oily to normal skins. Kashmiri women, renowned for their clear, fair
complexions, have applied mashed apple and apricots, mixed with
honey, t o their faces for centuries. At Aura, slices of apple, ric h in
antioxidants and  creamed with humectant honey, are rubbed o n tothe f ace to rehyd rate and revitalize. W ith its fresh, fruity aroma  and
the gen tle nurturing movements of well-trained therapists, this
facial fires skin with an inner glow. The Kumarakom  mukhalepam  is an other one to look out for: it
is excellent for dry, oily and combination skins and for people with
dif ferent  doshas. Made entirely from ingredients fresh from the
market, it is a wonderfully na tural sequence. Utilizing a wheat
powder and juice combo to tig hten skin; an aloe vera massage; a
moisturizing cucumber freshener; a scrub from orange peel, ground
strawberry, guava and apple seeds to exfoliate; a crushed papaya
polish; a  pack of  Multani mitti  powder mixed with lots of fresh
produce and juice, it is good enough to eat!Inexpensive, fast and neat, threading works well to remove facial hair and stray
eyebrow hairs. Using teeth and hands, the practitioner utilizes a loop of cotton totrap a series of unwanted hairs and pull them from the skin. As with twee zers,
results last from two to four weeks. The energ izing facial treatment ingredients at Soukya (see  below ): While the
properties fom Soukya’ s delicate warmed herbal pouches penetrate into the skin
(see  left), a gentle  massage increases periphe ral circulation and oxygenates the
facial cells. Turmeric, a staple in Indian cuisine, doubles up as a beauty product
(see  right). When combined with  rawa  (semolina) and cleansing red sandal
powder, it ef fectively exfoliates dead skin cells.hand care
A yurvedic tex ts emphasize  the importance of self-care,
declaring that the body has the means to heal itself. As su ch,
there are numerous guidelines in the major medical treatises
for maintenance of healthy skin, or gans, digestive sys tem
and more. If  ojas  is strong and the life force is flowing
freely, a person looks dynamic, vigorous and well cared for. A toxin -free internal system is reflected externally w ith
glowing skin, bright eyes and healthy limbs. Similarly, such
a perso n is mentally asse rtive, emotionally caring and
spiritually pure. On t he other hand, if there are internal health problems, these may
be detec table externally. In many cases, they are reflected in the
state of one’ s finger nails. As nails are a by-product ( mala ) of bones
(asthi dhatu ), they often reflect problems within the body tissues
(dhatu ). For example, a liver conditio n called W ilson’ s Disease is
easily spotted by the formation of exaggerated lar ge whitish areas
on the nails. White spots on the nails show a calcium or zinc
deficiency, while brown lines running down the nail indicate
possible inflammatory bowel di sease. Brittle nails can warn of low
iron or V itamin A, kidney malf unction or poor circulation. Ridges
across the nails often accompany acute infections. A yurvedic doctors suggest regular nail inspection, and daily or
weekly hand and nail care. Hands are a vulnerable part of the body
and are subject to premature a ging, so need daily care. A handmassage is an ex cellent way to stimulate  marma  points and ener gy
meridians, thus releasing toxins  and invigorating  ojas. As  wit h the
face, certain points on the hands  are associated with various or g ans
and syst ems wit hin the body, so  a hand massage is not only loc ally
stimulating. For example, pressing gently into the center of the palm
stimulates the kidney area, while a massage


 Tao System’s Ovarian  Kung  Fu trainin g, we
practice  to gain,  increase,  collect and  transfo rm ovarian  (sexual)
energy ; It is i mportant  to remem ber that building  up energy  in your
body  without know ing what to do  with it is dange rous. Som e systems
advocate  releasing  the ener gy from  time to time in so me w ay, like
releasing  a pressur e valve. They  will reco mmend occasional
outw ard-pouring  orgas ms for this  purpose. The Universal  Tao
System, however: stresses  the importance  of learnin g the
Microcosmic Orbit,  the means by which the ener gy can be
circulated  in the body  ultimately  to be stored  in a safe area  (the
navel)  for later  use and transformation  into a higher  form  of energy. If you consider  a computer  analog y, learning  how  to push  a button
will not teach  you how to opera te a computer. Although  pushing  the
- 34 -Chapter  I
button  will give  you a result,  until  you know and underst and the
system, yo u will not be able  to control  that result. To insure  proper
training  in the art of  Healing  Love,  the concepts,  the steps involved,
and an idea  of the  pleasure  that lies ahead  will be explained  in
detail. G. Wo men’s Sexual Energy
1. The  Ovaries  contain Life Force  Energy. As previousl y stated,  the Ching  (principal)  energy  of a w oman
provides  her with life-force  energy. This life- force  energ y is
contained  to a large  extent  in the ovaries. It is here  that the hormones
are produce d that determine  a woman’s  breasts,  voice,  etc. The
ovaries  constantl y produce  sexual energy. The Ovarian  Breathing
Process  to be  taught  in this book  releases  the energy  produced  by
the ovaries,  and makes it possible  to store  this energy, which has
a Yang (active)  qualit y, in the  woman’s  body  After  ovulation  and
before  menstruation  the ener gy is mi lder as  the properti es of the
energy  change  from  Yang to Yin (passive). Also, during  this part  of
the cycle  the energy  is at its highest  stage  of development  for
absorptio n and transfo rmation. Ovarian  Breathing,  if practiced  ever y day, can start  the
absorptio n process  and conserve  the life-force  energ y that other wise
would be lost  through  menstruation. This is the process  by which
the sexual ener gy is transfo rmed to Chi. As a result  of this practice,
wome n often  notice  a distinct  shortening  of the durati on of the
menstrual  flow, or a decre ase of cram ps or other  problems
associated  with their  periods. With continued  practice  menstruatio n
may cease,  because  all the  sexual ener gy is being  transformed
into a higher  life-force  ener gy. Under  ordin ary circum stances  menstruation  can stop  for a
variety  of reaso ns, such  as poor  diet,  depression,  emotional  stress,
childbirth  or menopause. Since a  functioning  body  draws its energ y
from ever y resourc e it has,  a body  requiring  additional  energy
makes co mpensations  to suppl y that energ y where it is neede d. A
nursing  mother for exam ple, will not experie nce menstruation,
because  the blood  normally involved  in the  menstrual  cycle would
be draw n to the  breast  and converted  into milk. Mens truation
resumes only  when nursing  stops. Women athletes,  when under
strict training,  will cease  menstruating  because  all the energy  has
- 35 -Taoist View  of Wom an’s
been  transfe rred into physical fitness. Similarly, it should  be noted
that many wome n, after  menopause,  lead  very active,  health y lives,
and usually  do well in pursuing  their  careers,  because  their  bodies
now have  the benefit  of energ y formerly  require d to maintain their
monthly  cycles. It is beneficial  to unde rstan d that menstruation  is for  the purpose
of the  next  generati on. Energy  not used  for this purpose  but
conserved  through  Ovarian  Breathin g becomes part  of the vital
energy  of the  body  thereb y prolongin g youth and providing  ample
energy  for transfo rmation  into a  higher  form of energ y. The
transformed  energy  is a creative  and healing  energ y which can
raise  a woman’s  life-force  potential  and ultim ately increas e her
spiritual  energ y. Also, the  cessation  of menstruation  can be
reversed  at an y time and  restore d to normal flo w after  a few months
of stopping  the practice. 2. Ovarian  Energy Devel ops a Hi gher Consciousness
    Ovarian  energy  is the  energ y used  for the development of  one’s
higher  conscious ness. These  practices  that transfo rm the sexual
energy  into Chi provide  the foundati on for the  spiritual  exercises
that transform sexual  and Chi energ y into Shen,  a sheer  spiritual
energy. The process  of cleansing  the internal  organs  of negative
emotions  described  previously  is called  “inner  alche my” by the
Taoists, and  it is this  inner  alche my that restor es to the orga ns
their birthright  of love,  joy, gentleness,  kindness,  respect,  honesty
fairness,  and righte ousn ess. Once  the organs  are cleansed  and
healthy, and you have  develop ed the abilit y to transfe r and transfo rm
sexual  energy  into life-force  energ y, the spiritual  development  can
begin. It is at  this level  that the generativ e energ y of the  ovaries  is
used  in what the Taoists  call “giving  birth  to yourself,. which means
developing  the spirit body  from wh ich you will attain  enlightenment. 3. Ovary Energy--the Best Co smetic
   The ovaries  contribute  most of their  energ y during  sexual
arousal. Many  other  organs  are contributo rs--the liver spleen,
kidney s, heart,  lungs,  and brain,  as w ell as glands- the pineal,  pituitary
thymus,  thyroid and adrenal. All of these  energies  blend  togeth er to
form sexual  energ y, a highl y charge d force  that brings  us to the
point  of orgasm. It is at this point  that our  habit  of losing- energ y
- 36 -Chapter  I
pleasure  must be over  come. By  doing  Ovarian  Kung  Fu exercises,
we can transfer  this energ y to a higher  qualit y ener gy by moving it
up the spine  to the brain. Because  the prope rty of sexual  energy
during  arous al is Yang (or active)  in natur e, you can revitalize  the
nervous  system, increase  brain  power and memory, and stay
healthy  and youthful. As a great  secret  taught  by the Taoist  sages
to em presses  and concubines,  these  methods  enabled  the women
in an  emperor’s  court  to maintain  their  sexual  activity, beaut y, and
health  for a long  time. Ma ny Taoist women  consider  the results  of
these  exercises  to be the  best  cosm etic in existence.<|eot_id|><|begin_of_text|>
Q: What are the two types of pleasure identified by the Taoists?,
A: Losing-energ y pleasure and gaining-energy pleasure.
Q: What is the main difference in the way men and women experience orgasm?,
A: The text does not explicitly state this, but it implies that men's orgasm is not the same as women's, as it only focuses on the female perspective.
Q: What is the significance of the Ovarian Kung Fu exercises?,
A: The Ovarian Kung Fu exercises help to recycle and conserve the sexual energy, allowing women to maintain their sexual activity and overall health.
Q: What is the goal of the first level of Taoist meditation?,
A: The goal is to develop self-awareness of the physical body and learn to circulate and control the life-force energy.
Q: What is the


 the million dollars in the
bank, and the respect of other people. Fine, you can have it all. But what if it
creates so much stress and worry that you’re miserable. You’d wish youcould have your old job back. You didn’ t really want the job, the money, or
the acceptance—you wanted what you thought they would give you. You
wanted happiness, joy, and a sense of total well-being. How about a constant
inner state of love, beauty, and inspiration at the highest level you’ve ever
experienced. Why didn’ t you ask for that. What you did was allow your strongest past experiences to define what
you think will make you feel happy. It doesn’ t work that way. There are
plenty of people who have what you wrote down on your list, and they’re
not always happy. There’ s nothing you ever experienced that left you totally
fulfilled for any length of time. You have always needed more. Your entire
life you’ve been saying, “If I get this thing I want, I’ll be okay, and if I don’t
have to get what I don’t want, I’ll be fine. ” For your whole life, there’ s been
a list. When will you realize that doesn’ t work. If you’ve been doing
something every minute of your entire life, and you’re still doing it,
obviously it doesn’ t work. Why not go directly to the root and say, “What I
want is to feel love and joy. What I want is every moment of every day to
feel complete well-being as high as I’ve ever felt before, and to be inspired
by everything I do. ” Now there’ s a list. Let’ s turn that one in. The interesting result of our experiment is that it has led us away from
worldliness and into the essence of spirituality. Not that worldliness is a
negative term— it just means you think the answer is in the world. You think
the answer lies in what’ s unfolding in front of you. It isn’t wrong to go to
the world for what you think you want—it simply doesn’ t work. You’re
trying to find something outside that matches your “samskara of the day. ”
Once you get what you want, or avoid what you don’t want, that will no
longer be your major desire or greatest fear. Once that one’s out of the way,
there will always be the next issue coming to the surface. Eventually, you wake up. You realize that you want to feel love. Not
that you want to love someone or have someone love you—you just want to
feel love all the time. If your love is not dependent on anything or anyone, it
can last forever. We call that unconditional love. The great yoga master,
Meher Baba, taught that love must spring spontaneously from within. It
cannot be coerced, and it cannot be dependent upon anything. That’ s what
pure love is. Otherwise, you have a temporary situation that just happens to
match your stored patterns. Unfortunately, this will not last. You’ve got lots
of samskaras in there. In addition, if you’re in a relationship, the other
person has lots of patterns of their own, quite different from yours. This iswhy relationshi ps are so complicated. Not only are each person’ s past
samskaras different, but both people have different experiences every day to
add to the collection. If somebody yelled at your partner at work, they’re
different when they come home than if somebody was nice to them. You, of
course, had your daily experiences. If your feeling of love is dependent
upon your partner behaving a certain way when they come home, you’re in
trouble and so are they. You have enough difficulty dealing with your own
samskaras; now you have to deal with theirs also. Don’ t get scared. This doesn’ t mean you don’t have meaningful
relationships. There are beautiful relationships, and they can last forever. In
fact, they can get more and more beautiful all the time. But they are not
samskara relationships—they are not based on the world outside matching
your inner patterns. They are based on unconditional love. Once love is
always flowing freely inside of you, you will be pleased to share it with
another person. Such love is not based on needs or expectations—it’ s based
on pure love wishing to express itself, unconditionally. How do you reach such a state of unconditional love and well-being. Instead of trying to get the world to match your blockages, you work on
letting go of the blockages. That’ s the secret of real spiritual growth. That is
the real paradig m shift. If you don’t have the samskaras, nothing will be
blocking your inner energy flow. You will feel love, joy, and inspiration all
the time. If you are willing to experience the moment unfolding in front of
you, you will have the opportunity to be inspired by everything. The simple
fact that things exist will be suf ficient to move you. You only have two choices: either you devot e your life to getting the
world to match your samskaras,  or you devote your life to letting go of your
samskaras. If you choose the latter, you don’t end up with both a worldly
life and a spiritual life—you end up with one life. Work, meditation retreats,
taking out the garbage, sweeping the floor, driving, showering, they’re all
the same. The same thing is going on in all your activities—you are letting
go of your blockages. It’s equally beneficial to be letting go of your
blockages at work, when you’re  driving the kids to soccer, picking up the
groceries, or doing whatever you’re doing. Every single moment of your
life, you are either naturally enjoying what is or letting go of what’ s keeping
you from  enjoying what is. If you let go of the wants and fears that are
limiting you, you’ll always be okay. Letting go of yourself, instead of
serving yourself, is the real paradigm shift. Chapter 28. Working with the Heart
We interact with life every wakin g moment of our time on Earth. If we are
committed to growing spiritually, we must learn to use that interaction to
clear out our blockages. This inevitably returns us to the heart since we store
blockages there. As we’ve discussed, your heart experiences myriad
different emotions and feelin gs based on the sam skaras you have
accumulated. Your inability to handle the breadth of these emotions keeps
you locked in the human predicament of controlling life in order to be okay. If you wish to break free and live unconditionally, you must learn to clear
out your heart. The purification  of your heart begins with being grateful that you have
one. Your heart is like an orches tra. Have you ever watched a movie without
the score. It’ s dead. It doesn’ t have any juice to it. When something happens
in your life, the orchestra of your heart begins to play. It adds richness to
your life by playing high notes and low notes that are generally  appropriate
to the events unfolding before you. Your heart is not an obstacle or a
punishment. Your heart is a beautiful gift. Would you rather not have one
and live your life without feelings. Just as the human mind is something extraordinary that can take you
beyond the limit of your senses, so the human heart is even more
extraordinary. It can play notes  from one end of the spectrum to another. Your heart can go from absolute  ecstasy to deep pain and sorrow in a matter
of secon ds. It can raise you to heights where you feel like angel wings are
carrying you to heaven, and it can bring you down to your darkest hour. Your heart is capable of doing all of that, without any effort of your own. What an amazin g instrument you carry inside of you. The trouble is you’re
not okay with the full range of your heart. You want to control your heart so
it only plays the notes you can handle. Spirituality is about learning to thank your heart for the beautiful
expressions it is creating within you. Unfortunately, you’re going to find out
that you can’t do that all the time. There are vibrations your heart is capable
of making that you’re not willin g to experience. It’s as though you are not
evolved enough to handle the fullness of your heart, so you resist it. Just like
you resist the world when it is not how you want, you resist your heart when
you’re not comfortable with its expressions. As you expand and grow spirit ually, your range of comfort with the
outside world will become wider and wider, allowing you to handle more of
the moments passing before you. The same is true with your heart. As you
grow spiritually, through honoring your day-to-day experiences, you will
learn to become more comfortab le with your heart. As a child, the first time
you experienced fear or jealousy you might have been overwhelmed and
had difficulty holding yourself together. Over time, you became more
accustomed to these emotions and at least tried to deal with them. Perhaps
the best you could do at first was control your emotions and put on the
outward appeara nce of being okay. Though that’s not necessarily so healthy,
it is better than losing yourself completely and letting emotions overcome
you. If you let an unbridled emotion act out externally, it has the power to
change the course


 kind of
binge eater looking for a shortcut or a miracle. I started feeling trapped; I had the same discouraged, sort of
Kafkaesque sensation like I’d gotten back in my 30s. But then, over New Year’s, my husband and I were at our condo
in the desert and I saw Dr. Platt on television. Everything he saidmade so much sense that I made an appointment to see him! I brought my Kaiser folder to Dr. Platt, and he did a battery
of hormone tests. I found him easy to talk to. He also had meconsult with one of his nutritionists. At first I was cynical abouttalking to another nutritionist. I have been through a lot ofnutrition classes sponsored by Kaiser. That’s another insultingthing they do when you are looking for help with weight loss: theymake you take these classes. I’ve been through umpteen nutritionclasses and cholesterol classes and so forth. You name it and Kaiserwants to put you through it. Dr. Platt’s team is welcoming. They really have knowledge
that helps you and a way of sharing it that I understood. Dr. Platt told me that when I lost weight my cholesterol
would go down. My cholesterol was 293 when I went in there.Kaiser had wanted me to take Zocor for my high cholesterol,which is one of about three or four statin drugs on the market. ButI said no. Dr. Platt and I are working on my cholesterol withniacin and thyroid. Within the first two months of starting withDr. Platt, my cholesterol dropped 50 points. When the hormone tests came back, Dr. Platt and I sat down
and went over them. My low thyroid was still there, and Dr. Plattadjusted my thyroid, giving me T3 in addition to T4. Heexplained to me why the Synthroid by itself wasn’t helping me. Itmade me angry to think I had been faithfully taking this stuff for20 years and it had been doing nothing for me. As I lost weight I gained energy. It became easier to do just
about anything. So far I’ve lost 38 pounds. I weigh 202 now. But194 THE MIRACLE OF BIO-IDENTICAL HORMONES  I’m wearing a size 16 and there’s no flab! I used to feel impaired,
but I’m not impaired anymore. I have no problems getting up offof the sofa or in and out of a restaurant booth. I’ve always been an active person even when it was a struggle
to move around. I still work in a gift shop every day, sing in achoir, volunteer at my T emple, teach piano privately at home, andcook with my husband every night. My ideal weight is 141. I amconfident I will get there. NEAR MISSES
Over the years I’ve seen a lot of patients like Margaret—very
smart people who try to approach their weight problemsintelligently but still can’t lose weight. I find their situationsespecially poignant. With all of their reading and detectivework, they’re nonetheless thwarted by our popular culture ofdieting and our uninformed medical system. Margaret madesome good inroads, but she just didn’t take the right path to getto where she wanted to go. She had read Dr. Lee and under-stood the value of natural progesterone. Unfortunately, the typeof progesterone he promotes is not in a high enough strength.He recommends the over-the-counter type of progesterone,which is 20 milligrams, and a woman generally needs about200 milligrams a day. Margaret also suspected that she had a thyroid problem,
and her doctors determined that it was true. But they placedher on the wrong thyroid medication. This is extremelycommon, as you’ve already seen with Brenda J. and Rhonda Y.She was given the T4-only hormone Synthroid when she alsoneeded T3. That’s the most common error made by conven-tional doctors when treating over-weight people with under-active thyroid glands. They don’t realize that people can have195 BATTLING THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT normal levels of T4 and still be hypothyroid. Few doctors look
at a patient’s T3 levels, T3 being the active hormone thatregulates metabolism. The logical question here is: Why don’tdoctors start looking at T3 levels so they can cover all the basesfor their patients suffering from hypothyroidism? YO-YO DIETING AND WEIGHT LOSS
Margaret is the type of person who has the most difficult
time losing weight. Her long history of repeated diets hadturned her body into an extremely efficient, sophisticatedfat-storing machine. The body does not know about weight loss—it only
understands the threat of starvation. Its main concern issurvival. When insufficient quantities of fuel are consumed, itnaturally thinks it may be facing starvation, so it begins tocreate and store fat in a highly efficient manner. This is an important point that bears repeating. People
interested in losing weight need to understand how their bodyoperates. The body likes fat. It likes to create it and hold ontoit and does not like to burn it. When people go on starvation weight loss programs, most
of the weight loss that occurs is muscle loss—the body doesnot want to burn fat when it is starving. Muscle weighs at leastthree times as much as fat, so people lose weight rapidly, whichmakes them happy. This happiness, unfortunately, is short-lived because there is a rapid regaining. Less muscle tissuemeans less room for carbohydrate (sugar) storage (as glycogen),so any excess is apt to be stored in the fat cells. And lessmuscle means less fat is burned, since muscle is the fat-burning tissue of the body.196 THE MIRACLE OF BIO-IDENTICAL HORMONES  Added to this, the body becomes even more efficient at stor-
ing fat. The bottom line is: cutting calories is probably not thebest weight loss approach for long-term weight management. Fat is a very efficient fuel—it burns at nine calories per
gram—and the body wisely reserves its most efficient fuel forlast. A good example of this is Karen Carpenter, the singer whodied of anorexia nervosa. This was a woman who placed herbody in a continuous state of starvation. When they did herautopsy, they discovered she had almost no heart muscle. Herbody had eaten its most vital organ rather than give up its lastounce of fat. A MORE ENLIGHTENED APPROACH
Could anyone have been more proactive, determined, and
methodical in her search for weight management thanMargaret? And yet her search went on, unsuccessfully, for 37years. That’s how difficult it is to get help with obesity in thisculture! It is time to change our assumptions about whypeople’s bodies store fat. And it’s time to offer patients a moreenlightened and helpful approach to weight loss.197 BATTLING THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT WHY WE DON’T HA VE
PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
IN THIS COUNTRY
chapter TWENTY–FOUR
Preventive medicine is almost non-existent in this country. When you talk to some doctors about preventive medicine,they think you’re talking about giving flu shots. However, manypeople assume “preventive medicine” refers to preventing heartattacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, and other serious conditions. If we look at statistics, it becomes clear that over the past
60 years the incidence of these medical conditions has notdiminished. Despite the proliferation of drugs and newmedical technology, nothing much has changed. NO PROFIT MOTIVE
Almost everything doctors learn in medical school about
treating patients is based on research done by drug companies.This is why most doctors have little basic knowledge of naturalhormones—drug companies cannot patent natural products.Even endocrinologists, who specialize in hormones, for themost part only feel comfortable using the synthetic hormonesproduced by drug companies, not natural bio-identical
199hormones that match the hormones produced by the body. Along these same lines, doctors learn little preventive
medicine in medical school because drug companies have nointerest in preventing disease—why should they? There’s noprofit for drug companies in treating the root causes of heartattacks, strokes, diabetes, and cancer. The entire medicalestablishment is geared toward treatment, not prevention. Forthe most part, drug companies develop drugs to treatsymptoms of disease. Antibiotics are the only drugs thatactually address and cure the disease itself. Even insurance companies—which have the most to gain
from doctors practicing effective preventive medicine—playinto this system by discounting the importance of properscreening procedures. By and large, insurance companies areloath to pay for simple screening tests, the kind that could helppatients head off diseases they might be prone to developing.When a doctor or patient requests coverage for a blood test orany other study, the insurance company normally responds byasking for a diagnosis to support the doctor’s reason for doingthe test. Well, if there is a diagnosis, the patient already has the
disease. The whole point of screening is to prevent the diseasefrom coming on in the first place. There is a blood test called CA-125 that allows doctors to
screen for cancer of the ovaries. This condition, found inone out of every 50 women, is 100 percent curable ifdiagnosed early and almost 100 percent fatal after it hasspread. Insurance companies will not cover a CA-125 as ascreening test but will pay for it once you have the condition. This is especially galling in light of how eager the medical
community is to place women on estrogen, a substance thatplaces them at serious risk for cancer of the ovaries. Estrogen isstill one of the largest-selling drugs in the


 die. ”
The guru considered the matter thoughtfully and said, “Why do you think
you were born. ”
“I don’ t understand your question,” the disciple stammered. “Why do you think you were born. ” the guru repeated. “Isn’ t it just
something your parents told you that you took for granted. Did you actually
have the experie nce of being born, of coming into existence from a state of
nonexistence, or didn’ t it happen that one day in childhood you asked where
you came from, and your parent s told you that you were born. Because you
accepted their answer, the idea of death frightens you. But rest assured, you
cannot have birth without death. They are two poles of the same concept. Perhaps you have always been alive and always will be. But in accepting
your parents’ system of belief, you entered into an agreement to fear death,
because you think of it as an ending. Perhaps there is no ending— that is the
possibility most worth exploring. ”
Naturally the disciple was shocked, because, like the rest of us, he didn’ t
see death as a belief he had agreed to. What the guru was pointing out is
that birth and death are space-time events but existence isn’t. If we look
inside us, we find a faint but certain memory that we have always been
around. To put it another way, no one remembers not existing. The fact that
such metaphysic al issues arise shows how unique humans are. For us, death
isn’t just a brute fact but a mystery, and it must be unraveled  before the
mystery of aging—the process that leads to death—can be solve d. The very
deepest questions about who we are and what life means are wrapped up in
the nature of existence. When the spell of mortality is broken, you can release the fear that gives
death its power. Fear of death reaches much further into our lives than our
conscious minds are willing to concede. As David Viscott wrote, “When
you say you fear death you are really saying that you fear you have not
lived your true life. This fear cloaks the world in silent suffering. ” Yet by
seeing through the fear you can turn it into a positive force. “Let your fear
of death motivate you to examine your true worth and to have a dream for
your own life,” Viscott encouraged. “Let it help you value the moment, act
on it, and live in it. ”
I want to go even further and suggest that when you see yourself in terms
of timel ess, deathless Being, every cell awakens to a new existence. True
immortality can be experienced here and now, in this living body. It comes
about when you draw the infusion of Being into everything you think anddo. This is the experience of timeless mind and ageless body that the new
paradigm has been preparing us for.<|eot_id|><|begin_of_text|>
Q: According to the text, what is the primary factor that determines an individual's longevity?,
A: High expectations and a desire to reach for it.
Q: What is the key to maintaining mental function, according to the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging?,
A: Continued use of the organ in question.
Q: What is the relationship between the breath and the body, according to Ayurvedic principles?,
A: The breath is connected to the body, and the quality of the breath reflects the state of the body. The text also mentions that it is possible to experience a state of timeless awareness, which is associated with increased Prana (life energy).
Q: What is the relationship between Prana and the physical body, according to the text?,
A: The text does not explicitly state this, but it does mention that Prana is the life force and that the body's cells are constantly making and unmaking it. It also suggests that Prana can be influenced by the environment, and that it is possible to increase Prana through certain activities.
Q: What is the significance of the concept of "Vata" in the context of aging and health?,
A: The text explains that Vata is a key factor in aging and that it can be balanced and controlled through certain lifestyle choices and practices, such as regular habits, warm and nourishing food, and a peaceful environment.<|eot_id|><|begin_of_text|>Sometimes a person feels compelled to
try to shatter the entire body of experience he or she has creat ed over the
years; people who suddenly change jobs or plunge into divorce without
provocation are often motivated by an inability to revise their inner world.They may project the blame outward, onto an unsuitable job or unloved
wife. What has actually becom e intolerable, however, is their internalized
experience. Toxic memories have accumulated inside the person to the
point where perfectly neutral situations—meeting the boss at the water
cooler, watching the wife brush her teeth in the morning—arouse deep-
seated negative emotions. Running away is an attempt to relieve these
emotions, but the tactic rarely works because what we want to run away
from has become part of ourselves. Time-bound versus Timeless Awareness
Throughout this book I’ve argued that how you age depends on how you
metabolize your experience. And in the final analysis, how you metabolize
time is the most  important aspect of this process, because time is the most
fundamental experience. A key lesson in the spiritual teachings of J.
Krishnamurti was this: “Time is the psychological enemy of man,” meaning
that we are psychologically undermined and deprived of our real selves by
the feeling that time is an absolute over which we have no control. We
somehow forget that we can choose whether to make time our enemy in the
first place. It’s possible to have actual experiences of timelessness, and when that
happens, there is a shift from time-bound awareness to timeless awareness. Time-bound awareness is defined by:
•  Exter nal goals (approval from others; material possessions; salary;
climbing the ladder of professional success)
•  Deadlines and time pressure
•  Self-image built up from past experiences
•  Lessons learned from past hurts and failures
•  Fear of change, fear of death
•  Distraction by past and future (worries, regrets, anticipations,
fantasies)
•  Longing for security (never permanently achieved)•  Selfish ness, limited point of view (typical motivation: “What’ s in it for
me?”)
Timeless awareness is defined by:
•  Internal goals (happiness; self-acceptance; creativity; satisfaction that
one is doing one’ s best at all times)
•  Freedom from time pressure; sense that time is abundant and open-
ended
•  Little thought of self-image; action focused on the present moment
•  Reliance on intuition and leaps of imagination
•  Detachment from change and turmoil; no fear of death
•  Positive experiences of Being
•  Selfle ssness; altruism; sense of shared humanity (typical motivation:
“Can I help?”)
•  Sense of personal immortality
Although I have described them  as opposites, there is in fact a whole
range of experience running from completely time-bound to completely
timeless awaren ess. A person who dreads his mortality, who is consumed
by success and deadlines and depends solely on external motivations, would
be almost pathologically time-bound, yet we can all see some of these traits
in ourselves. On the other hand, the saint who lives only for God, whose
experience of Being is constant and certain, represents the extreme freedom
of timel essness. Most people do not manifest either extreme; and yet in
many ways our deepest traits and attitudes are based on how we relate to
time and metab olize it. To discover where you are on the scale of time-
bound versus timeless awareness, answer the following questionnaire. QUESTIONNAIRE: HOW DO YOU MET ABOLIZE TIME? Read the following sentences and check off each one that applies to
you fairly often or that you generally agree with. Some of thestatements in Part 1 may seem to contradict others in Part 2, but that
doesn’ t matter. Even if you have seemingly opposed traits and
opinions, answer each statement on its own. Part 1
  1. There’s barely enough time in the day to do all the things I have
to. 2. I’m sometimes too exhausted at night to get to sleep. 3. I’ve had to abandon several important goals I set for myself
when I was younger. 4. I’m less idealistic than I used to be. 5. It bothers me to let unpaid bills sit around. 6. I’m more cautious now about making new friends and entering
serious relationships. 7. I’ve learned a lot from the school of hard knocks. 8. I spend more time and attention on my career than on my friends
and family. 9. I could be a lot wiser about how I spend my money. 10. Life is a balance of losses and gains; I just try to have more gains
than losses. 11. In a loving relationship, the other person should be counted  on to
meet my needs. 12. It sometimes hurts to remember the people I have let down. 13. Being loved is one of the most important things I can think of. 14. I don’ t like authority figures. 15. For me, one of the most frightening prospects about old age is
loneliness. Part


. hot:Canth. pale:Sars. red:Canth.,Merc-c,Sep. scanty:Canth.,Merc-c,Merc-s.,Nux-v.,Sep..
Stop.,Sul. smelly:Sep.,Sul. withsediment:Sars.,Sep. withmucus:Sars. Better:
afterurination:Lye
heat:Ars. forsittinginahotbath:Ars. Worse:
colddrinks:Canth. aftergettingupinthemorning:Sul. afterafewdropsofurinehavepassed:
Canth. afterurinating:Canth.,Puis. atthebeginningofurinating:Canth.,Merc-s.
attheendofurination:Sars. beforeurinating:Canth. duringamenstrualperiod:Sars.,Sep. whennoturinating:Merc-s.
whileurinating.Canth.,Caust.,Merc-c,
Nux-v.,Sul. atnight:Sul. Causes:
cold,wetweather:Sars. gettingchilled:Aco.,Sars. gettingcoldandwet:Dulc.,Puis. Dazed(seealsoShock;Stupor)Cocc. Delirious Bell. Denial
Ofillness:Am. Ofsuffering:Am. Depressed(seealsoTearful)Ars.,Calc-c,Carb-a.,
Caust.,Cham.,Chin.,Cimi.,Con.,Eup-p.,
Ferr-m.,Gels.,Ign.,Kali-p.,Lach.,Lye,
Merc-s.,Nat-c,Nat-m.,Nat-s.,Nit-ac,
Pho-ac,Puis.,Rhus-t.,Sep.,Sul.,Zinc. Cannotcry:Gels.,Ign.,Nat-m.
Criesonown:Ign.,Nat-m. Better:
freshair:Puis. Worse:
beforemenstrualperiod:Nat-m.,Puis. stuffyroom:Puis. onwaking:Lach.,Lye
evening:Puis. Causes:
suppressedgrief:Ign.,Nat-m.,Puis.Desires
Company:Arg-n.,Ars.,Kali-c,Lye,Phos. Tobealone:Bar-c,Carb-a.,Cham.,Gels.,Ign.,
Nat-m.,Sep. Tobecarried(infants):Cham.,Puis. DespairArs.,Calc-c,Coff. Ofgettingwell:Ars.,Calc-c.
Despondent (seealsoDepression)Chin. DiarrhoeaAnt-c,Ap.,Arg-n.,Ars.,Bor.,Bry.,
Calc-c,Cham.,Chin.,Colch.,Coloe,Dulc,
Ferr-m.,Gels.,Hep-s.,Ip.,Mag-c,Mag-m.,
Merc-c,Merc-s.,Nat-m.,Nat-s.,Nux-v.,
Petr.,Pho-ac,Phos.,Podo.,Puis.,Rhe.,
Rhus-t.,Sil.,Sul.,Sul-ac,Ver-a. Alternatingwith:
constipation:Podo. constipationinelderlypersons:Ant-c.
headache:Podo. Belly/stomach:
bloated:Nat-m.
gurgling:Nat-s.,Podo. rumbling:Nat-s.,Pho-ac,Podo. Children:lp.,Mag-m.,Merc-s.,Podo.,Puis.,Sul. Daytimeonly:Nat-m.,Petr. Drivespersonoutofbed:Sul. Elderlypersons:y4rs. Exhausting:Ver-a. Involuntary: Ver-a. Morningonly:Sul. Pains:Ars.,Cham.,Colch.,Dulc,Mag-c,Merc-c,
Merc-s.
burning:Ars.,Merc-s.,Sul.,Ver-a. colicky:Mag-c
cramping:Mag-c,Sul. cutting:Ver-a. dull/aching:Ver-a. afterpassingastool:Ars.,Colch. pressing:Petr. severe:Merc-c. Painless:Ap.,Bor.,Chin.,Ferr-m.,Hep-s.,Nat-m.,
Phos.,Podo.,Sul. Stools:
blood-streaked: Phos. bloody:Merc-c,Merc-s.
changeable:Puis. copious:Ver-a. frequent:Merc-c,Phos.,Podo.,Ver-a. frothy:Mag-c
grassgreen:lp. green:Arg-n.,Cham.,Coloc,Mag-c,Mag-m.,
Merc-c,Merc-s.,Ver-a. greenish-yellow: Puis. gushing:Nat-m.,Podo. jelly-like:Colch. hot:Cham. involuntary:Podo. INTERNALREPERTORY Diarrhoea •175
withmucus:Bor.,Colch. mushy:Rhus-t.
painless:Nat-m.,Phos.,Podo. passedwithwind:Ferr-m.
pasty:Coloc,Rhe. profuse:Pho-ac,Phos.,Podo. slimy:Mag-c,Merc-c,Mercs.,Puis.,Sul. small,hardlumps:Ant-c.
smelly:Arg-n.,Ars.,Merc-c,Merc-s.,Nat-m. Nat-s.,Podo., Sul. smellingofrotteneggs:Cham. soft:Sul-ac. soursmelling:Calc-c,Mag-c,Rhe.,Sul. stringy:Sul-ac
sudden:Podo. thin:Nat-s.,Pho-ac. withundigestedfood:Calc-c,Chin.,Ferr-m.
yellow:Dulc,Merc-c,Merc-s.,Sul-ac. watery:Ant-c,Arg-n.,Ars.,Calc-c,Colch.,
Dulc,Nat-m.,Nat-s.,Pho-ac,Phos.,Puis.,
Rhus-t.,Sul.,Ver-a. white:Pho-ac. Strainingfrequent/painful: Merc-c.
Inteethingchildren:Calc-c,Cham.,Dulc,
Ferr-m.,Rhe.,Sil. Violent:Ver-a. With:
belching:Ferr-m.
sourbelching:Sul-ac. colic:Coloc. exhaustion:Ars.,Podo.,Ver-a. flatulence:Arg-n.,Ferr-m.,Nat-s.,Sil.,Sul. icy-coldhandsandfeet:Ars.,Phos.,Ver-a. indigestion:Chin. ravenousappetite:Pctr. sweating:Ars.,Merc-s.,Ver-a. during/afterpassingstool:Ver-a. before/during/after stool:Merc-s.
vomiting:Arg-n.,Ver-a. sour:Sul-ac. wind:
loud:Nat-s.
smelly:Nat-s.,Sil.,Sul. spluttering:Nat-s.
Withoutweakness:Pho-ac. Better:
coldfood:Phos. freshair:Puis. heat:Sil. passingwind:Nat-s.,Sul. warmthofbed:Sil. wrappingupwarmly:Sil. Worse:
onalternatedays:Chin. around4a.m.:Podo. 5a.m.:Sul.afternoon:Chin. beforepassingastool(pains):Mag-c,
Merc-c.
duringpassingastool:Merc-c
afterpassingastool:Merc-c,Merc-s.
cold:Ars.,Merc-s.
gettingchilled:Phos. afterdrinkingcoldfood/drinks:Ars. afterdrinking:Ars.,Arg-n.,Ver-a. afterdrinkingwater:Ferr-m.,Nux-v.,Podo. immediatelyafterdrinking:Arg-n.,Podo. aftereating:Ars.,Chin.,Coloc,Podo.,Puis. whileeating:Ferr-m.
eatingcoldfood:Dulc. eatingstarchyfood:Nat-m.,Nat-s.,Puis. evening:Merc-s.
aftereatingfruit:Ars.,Coloc,Nat-s.
aftergettingupinthemorning:Bry.,Nat-s.
hotweather:Podo. duringamenstrualperiod:Ver-a. aftermidnight:Ars. mid-morning: Podo. morning:Bry.,Mag-c,Nat-s.,Phos.,Sul. movement:Bry.,Ferr-m.,Ver-a. night:Arg-n.,Ars.,Chin.,Dulc,Ferr-m.,
Merc-s.,Podo.,Puis.,Sul. overheated:Ant-c,Puis. richfood:Puis. solid/dryfood:Pho-ac. starchyfood:Nat-s.
standing:Sul. stuffyroom:Puis. sugar/sweets:Arg-n. Causes:
afteranacuteillness:Chin. alcohol:Nux-v.
anger:Coloc. anticipatoryanxiety:Arg-n.,Gels. autumn:Colch. badorexcitingnews:Gels. beer:Sul. gettingchilled:Ver-a. damp,coldweather:Dulc. gettingcoldordamp:Dulc. excitement:Arg-n.
foodpoisoning:Ars. fright/shock: Gels. fruit:Ars.,Bry.,Chin.,Coloc,Nat-s.,Puis.,
Ver-a. hotweather:Bry.,Chin.,Pho-ac. ice-cream:Ars. milk:Calc-c,Mag-m.
over-eating:Ant-c.
richfood:Puis. sourwine:Ant-c.
sugar:Arg-n.
1
176•Discharges INTERNALREPERTORY
summer:Pho-ac. teething:Calc-c,Cham.,Dulc,Ferr-m.,Rhe.,
Sil. weaning:Arg-n.,Chin. gettingwet:Rhus-t.
gettingfeetwet:Rhus-t.
Discharges
Bland(non-irritating): Puis. Blood-streaked: Calc-s.,Merc-s.,Phos.


 if you embrace these thoughts yet fail to act on
them in the daily working of your life, you will feel incongruent
and, consequently, you will not feel that you are deserving of
desires being fulfilled. Addictive behavior will continue in your life if you remain
incongruent. All unhealthy eating habits will continue if you
remain incongruent. All scarcity perceptions will remain if you
remain incongruent. These are strong statements, yet they
reflect a consciousness that you must grasp if you want to change
your status from being unworthy to being worthy. You do not have to adopt any particular spiritual practice or
set of beliefs. You have to, however, create a sense of congruency
within yourself to be able to attain this state of worthiness, which
is a prerequisite for the manifestation process. When you are
being eaten up inside, in your own private corner of awareness
that is not available to anyone else other than God, you will
behave in self-defeating ways that verify your lack of inner con-
gruuity. By being honest with yourself about what you believe, and
then acting on that principle regardless of what others might
think or say, you promote an inner peace that gives you a strong
sense of worthiness. I encourage you to examine your thoughts
carefully in all areas of your life, and identify where you are not
in harmony with your actions. Then work each day to bring
about more of a sense of inner congruence that meets with your
own personal standards, and keep this a private matter. You will find the behaviors that you dislike beginning to disap-
pear and that you are promoting a sense of balance that gives you
peace. There is nothing your highest self wants more than peace. This peace makes you feel worthy of all of God’s richest bless-
ings, and when you radiate this out into the world, it is returned
to you without fail. Manifest Your Destiny
These five attitudes provide you with the tools for creating an
inner atmosphere of worthiness. They all reflect an ability to live
peacefully in the present moment and to discard many of the atti-
tudes of your past that keep you in a constant state of feeling power-
less and unworthy of being able to manifest more blessings and hap-
piness into your life. Often this feeling persists because you are
locked into the story of your earlier wounds. To finalize the path of
worthiness, you must sever your relationship to these old wounds. UNBONDING YOURSELF FROM YOUR PAST WOUNDS
The inclination to bond to our wounds rather than move past
them traps us in a constant state of feeling unworthy. A person who
has experienced traumatic events in life, such as sexual abuse, the
death of loved ones, traumatic illnesses, accidents, family disruption,
drug addictions and the like, can become bonded with the past
painful events and replay them for attention or pity. These wounds of
our lives can seem to give us an enormous amount of power over
others. The more we iell others about our wounds and our suffering, the
more we create an atmosphere of pity for ourselves. Our creative
spirit remains so connected to our memories of woundedness that it
cannot be about the business of transforming and manifesting. A
feeling of being unworthy of receiving all that one desires is the
result. Very often the tale of these woes is told in the first few moments
with a sort of urgency for the listener to know how horrible the
wounding was and still is. After a while the ego uses this energy as a
power play in individual and group situations that encourage discus-
sion of one’s struggle to survive the wounding. This can keep indi-
viduals from advancing spiritually and can reinforce the image of
themselves as unfortunate. 83
WAYNE W. DYER
The tendency to bond with the wounds of our lives reminds us of
how unworthy we are of receiving anything that we really would like
because we remain in a state of suffering. The more these painful sto-
ries are recalled and repeated, the more the person is guaranteed of
not attracting his or her desires. Perhaps the most powerful sentence you can memorize in this
regard is “Your biography becomes your biology. ” And I would add,
“Your biology becomes your lack of spiritual fulfillment. ” By hanging
onto the traumas of your earlier life, you literally have an impact on
the cells of your body. When we examine the biology of an individual,
we find that his or her biography is close to the surface. Thoughts of
anguish, self-pity, fear, hate and the like all take their toll on the body
and the spirit. After a while, the body is unable to heal, largely
because of these thoughts. Attachment to early pain comes from a mythological perception of
“I am entitled to a perfect, pain-free childhood. Anything that inter-
feres with this perception I will use for the rest of my life. Telling my
story will be my power. ” What the perception does is give an injured
child inside you permission to control you for the rest of your life. Moreover, it provides a strong sense of illusory power. The moment anyone stands up to you, or crosses you, or even dis-
agrees with you, the injury is brought forth with accusations of
insensitivity concerning the other’s treatment of you. This power is
empty, however, because it continuously reinforces the idea that you
are not worthy of being free from these events. The unworthiness
then inhibits you from attracting to yourself the love, kindness and
abundance that is the universe. This is not to say that one ought not to deal with traumas and help
them to heal. But it is to say that one must be very careful to avoid
explaining present life in terms of traumatic history. The painful
events in our lives are like a raft you use to cross the river. You must
remember to get off on the other side. 84
Manifest Your Destiny
Notice your body when it is wounded. An open wound actually
closes quite quickly. Just imagine what it would be like if that wound
remained open for a long time. It would become infected and ulti-
mately would kill the entire organism. The closing up of a wound and
allowing it to heal can work the same way in your inner world of
thoughts. So, don’t lead with your injuries. Deal with them and ask family
and friends to be compassionate while you are grieving or recuperat-
ing. Then, ask them to kindly remind you when it has taken on the
form of a predictable response. Perhaps four or five times your
friends and loved ones will say, “You did suffer a tragic experience
and I can truly empathize with you and your need to discuss it. I
care, and I'll listen and offer help if that is what you want. ” Then,
after several such interchanges, ask your friends to gently remind you
to not repeat the story for the purpose of gaining power through pity. When you go backward and continuously relive your pain, includ-
ing describing it in most introductions and labeling yourself (incest
survivor, alcoholic, orphan, abandoned), you do not do so for
strength. You do it because of your inner experience of bitterness. This bitterness shows itself in hatred and anger as you discuss these
events, and you are literally feeding the cell tissue of your life from
this harvest of past events. This continues to infect the body and prevent healing. And so it is
with the spirit. This harvest of bitterness keeps you from feeling
worthy. You begin to cultivate an image of being dirty, unlucky,
unworthy and maligned, and this is what you send out into the uni-
verse, which will inhibit any sense of attracting love and bliss into
your life. The way out of bonding to your wounds is through forgiveness. Forgiveness is the most powerful thing that you can do for your phys-
iology and your spirituality, and it remains one of the least attractive
things to us, largely because our egos rule so unequivocally. To forgive
85
WAYNE W. DYER
is somehow associated with saying that it is all right, that we accept
the evil deed. But this is not forgiveness. Forgiveness means that you fill yourself with love and you radiate
that love outward and refuse to hang onto the venom or hatred that
was engendered by the behaviors that caused the wounds. Forgiveness is a spiritual act of love for yourself and it sends a mes-
sage to everyone, including yourself, that you are an object of love
and that that is what you are going to impart. This is the process of unbonding from those wounds and no |
longer hanging onto them as prized possessions. It means letting go
of the language of blame and self-pity and no longer leading with
one’s wounds and injuries from the past. It means privately forgiving
and not asking anyone else to understand. It means leaving behind
the eye-for-an-eye attitude that only makes for more pain and the
need for more revenge, and replacing it with an attitude of love and
forgiveness. The spiritual literature available to us from all religious
persuasions honors this way. Feeling worthy is essential to being able to attract to yourself what
you desire. It is simply a matter of common sense. If you don’t feel
that you deserve something, why would the divine energy that is in all
things send it your way. Thus, you must shift to knowing that you
and the divine energy are one and the same, and


 conditions and
has a mixed reputation as a treatment for cancer,
including leukemia. Tincture  (to make, p. 292) is
suitable for long-term use. For cfs, take 40 drops with
water 3 times a day.Decoction  (to make,
p. 291) is a traditional
preparation in South
America. For candidiasis,
drink 3/4 cup (150 ml)
3 times a day.Parts Used Key Preparations & Their Uses
Dried inner barkInner bark  is prized for its immunostimulant properties. It is used to treat many inflammatory conditions. Bark has important
antibiotic properties
Ointment  (to make, p. 295). For wounds, apply freely. US_138-139_Symphytum_Tabelula.indd   139 26/02/16   4:00 pm
140Tanace Tum par TheniumKey medicinal plants
Fresh leaves To prevent
migraine, eat 2–3 leaves
daily on a piece of bread.Tincture (to make, p. 292). For
long-term prevention of migraine,
take 10 drops a day.The leaves contain
parthenolide, which
helps prevent migraineTanacetum parthenium (Asteraceae)
FeverfewFeverfew
An herbaceous perennial growing  to 2 ft (60 cm), with numerous daisylike flower heads. Feverfew has daisylike flowers that bloom
all summer. Habitat & Cultivation
Originally from southeastern
Europe, feverfew is now common throughout Europe, Australia, and North America. It can be propagated from seed or cuttings, and prefers well-drained soil and sun. The leaves are picked as required and the aerial parts as a whole are harvested in summer when the plant is in flower. Related Species
Feverfew is a close relative of
tansy (Tanacetum vulgare, p. 274),  and the chrysanthemum and chamomile species. Key Constituents
■ Volatile oil (alpha-pinene)
■ Sesquiterpene lactones
 (parthenolide)
■ Sesquiterpenes (camphor)
Key Actions
■ Anti-inflammatory
■ Analgesic
■ Reduces fever
■ Antirheumatic
■ Promotes menstrual flowResearch
■ Migraine When, in 1973, the wife
of a Welsh doctor ended her 50- year history of migraine with  a course of feverfew, a detailed scientific investigation got underway. In clinical trials in Britain during the 1980s the herb was shown to be an effective remedy for migraine. Further clinical trials across Europe, including one in 2006 that combined feverfew and willow bark (Salix alba, p. 129), attest to feverfew’s ability to treat migraine. The trials indicate feverfew may need to be taken long term (for 6 months or more) for full effect. ■ Rheumatoid arthritis
Feverfew’s effectiveness in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis  is being investigated. Traditional &
Current Uses
■ Fevers  As its name implies,
feverfew may be used to lower
temperature and cool the body. ■ Gynecological uses The herb
has been used since Roman times
to induce menstruation. It is also
given in childbirth to aid expulsion
of the placenta. ■ Migraine & headaches In small
quantities, feverfew is now used as a preventative for migraine. It has to be taken regularly, and at the first signs of an attack. It is useful for migraine associated with menstruation, and  for headaches. ■ Arthritis remedy The herb
can help arthritic and rheumatic
pain, especially with other herbs. Self-help Use
■ Migraine prevention, p. 309. Parts Used
Key Preparations & Their UsesAerial parts
are harvested in summer when the plant is in flower. Fresh aerial partsFeverfew’s main traditional use was as a woman’s
herb. Nicholas Culpeper in The English Physitian
(1652) sings its praises as “a general strengthener of [the] womb... it cleanseth the womb, expelleth the after-birth and doth the woman all the good she can desire of an herb.” Feverfew is now used principally as a treatment for migraine, but has also long been thought of as an herb for arthritis and rheumatism. Cautions Eating fresh leaves may cause mouth ulcers. Do not take feverfew
if taking warfarin or other blood-thinning drugs. Do not take during pregnancy. Can cause allergic reactions in rare cases.Dried
aerial parts
Tablets often contain other herbs. T ake for headaches.Capsules (to make, p. 292). For symptomatic relief of headaches
take a 100 mg capsule daily. US_140-141_Tanacetum_Taraxacum.indd   140 26/02/16   4:00 pm141Taraxacum officinaleKey medicinal plants
Tonic salad  made with dandelion leaves. Eat regularly for its cleansing benefits.Tablets  have a diuretic effect. T ake for fluid retention.Root  is harvested after
2 years and is dried or roasted. Tincture  of root (to make, p. 292). For eczema, take 1⁄2 tsp diluted with
1⁄2 cup (100 ml) water 3 times a day.Leaves contain
high levels of
potassium
Marigold petals Borage flowersTaraxacum officinale (Asteraceae)
Dandelion
Habitat & Cultivation
Dandelion grows wild in most parts
of the world and is cultivated in
Germany and France. It is propagated
from seed in spring. The young leaves
are picked in spring for tonic salads,
and later as a medicine. The root
of 2-year-old plants is unearthed
in autumn. Related Species
Pu gong ying  (T. mongolicum ) is used
in Chinese herbal medicine to “clear
heat” and relieve toxicity, especially
of the liver. Key Constituents
■ Sesquiterpene lactones
■ Triterpenes
■ Polysaccharides
Leaf only:
■ Coumarins
■ Carotenoids
■ Minerals (especially potassium)
Root only:
■ Taraxacoside
■ Phenolic acids
■ Minerals (potassium, calcium) Key Actions
■ Diuretic
■ Detoxifying
■ Bitter
Research
■ Leaves  Research published in
the journal Planta Medica, in 1974,
confirmed that dandelion leaves
are a powerful diuretic, though
their exact mode of action is not
understood. Many other small-scale
studies have confirmed this diuretic,
or more accurately, aquaretic effect
of dandelion leaf. Aquaretic refers
to the fact that many herbal diuretics
stimulate just the elimination of
water and potassium. As dandelion
leaf has very high levels of potassium,
it is thought that no net loss of this
mineral occurs on taking the leaf. ■ Root  A 2004 laboratory study
reported dandelion root had marked
anticancer activity. It significantly
increased tumor necrosis factor and
apoptosis (programmed cell death). Traditional &
Current Uses
■ Diuretic  Dandelion leaf is used
as a diuretic and treats high blood
pressure by reducing the volume
of fluid in the body. ■ Detoxifying remedy  Dandelion
root is a key detoxifying herb that
gently stimulates the liver and gall
bladder’s capacity to clear waste
products from the body. This action
makes it valuable in the many health
conditions that involve chronic toxicity,
whether this toxicity is linked to
inflammation, infection, or dietary or
environmental factors. The root is
typically taken to treat constipation, Dandelion
A perennial growing
to 20 in (50 cm),
with ragged basal
leaves, hollow stalks,
and golden flowers. skin problems, such as eczema, and
arthritic conditions, where improved
clearance of waste products can
reduce local inflammation. ■ Other uses  Dandelion root is a
good prebiotic, supporting the health
of the gut flora. It has traditionally
been used in the early stages of type 2
diabetes, stimulating insulin release Dandelion’s  name, which is a corruption of
the Latin dens leonis,  meaning“lion’s teeth,”
derives from the appearance of its flowers.Parts Used
Key Preparations & Their UsesLeaves are juiced, eaten raw in salads,
or dried for use in herbal preparations. from the pancreas and supporting
stable blood-sugar levels. Self-help Uses
■ Acne & boils, p. 305. ■ Constipation, p. 307. ■ Detoxification for hangover, p. 309. ■ Fluid retention, p. 315. ■ Hives, p. 303.Known principally as a weed, dandelion has an astonishing
range of health benefits. In Western folk medicine, the
leaves, which can be eaten in salads, have long been used
as a diuretic. They were recommended in the works
of Arab physicians in the 11th century, and in an herbal
written by the physicians of Myddfai in Wales in the
13th century. The root, which has a shorter history