If I could sum up for you the top five things I think you can do to be very healthy, here is what I would recommend:
- Juice.
- Meditate.
- Forgive.
- Move for 1 hour every day, no matter what.
- Listen to your soul.
O.K., that was your headline. Now let’s discuss.
1. Juice. I am always trying to get my clients to juice. My first juicer was a Jack Lalanne Juicer. I usually recommend people start with that one because it doesn’t seem like too big of a financial investment. My boyfriend gave me a Breville 800JEXL Juice Fountain Elite. Here is what would convince you. If you took a drop of your blood and looked at it under a microscope, all of a sudden you could see for yourself, at a cellular level, just exactly what is going on with your health. I am always telling people you can only look as good on the outside as your cells are healthy on the inside. Juicing makes you healthy from the inside out, flooding your body with fresh enzymes and natural antioxidants. And by the way, that’s how you can end up looking actually gorgeous without cutting anything off, injecting anything or otherwise surgically altering yourself.
2. Meditate. Just as God gave you just one body in this lifetime, you have one mind. You can either let nature take its course and drive yourself crazy simply by living in modern society or take the higher path and learn to take control of your mind through meditation. I won’t say that meditation is easy. Your mind is best described as a a passel of cats. Have you ever tried to get even one cat to do what you wanted it to do? Of course not! Or more than one cat? Forget about it! The cats are usually in charge and your ego mind will continue running 24/7. However, as we practice meditation, we learn that while the cats – your ego in this case -are still running around the house disobeying all the practical orders – you can still find peace inside yourself. Life won’t need to become perfect in order for you to be happy, peaceful, calm or directed by your own higher self. If you live in Atlanta, you can join our FREE meditation group, which meets every Monday night at 7:30 led by neighbor Steve Hart. Just come about 10 to 15 minutes early so you can settle in. Once we ring the bell, everybody is silent for the next hour.
3. Forgive. Nothing saps your energy like carrying around old, unprocessed judgments and resentments. With each person you don’t forgive, you might as well be carrying around a 100-lb. weight on your back. All this bitterness affects you literally at the cellular level. Nothing is more toxic than holding onto old emotions about things that in your mind could have, should have happened differently. As you realize that in fact there wasn’t anything to forgive in the first place, as you and other people are on their own spiritual path and that your entire life has been set up like an individualized, self-paced course in spiritual growth, you will find that you have a lot more energy to go around.
4. Move for 1 hour every day, no matter what. If exercise were a drug, everybody would be taking it. When you exercise daily, you take care of your human animal. Oh yes – you, that spiritual being I was just talking about – part of you is also a human animal, and you have to recognize that your human animal needs movement. When you find ways of moving you enjoy – walking, gardening, yoga, tai chi, qi gong, lifting weights, dancing, swimming, cycling – you name it – you keep your energy moving. When you keep your energy moving, you are going to naturally process through those old emotions that when dammed up cause exhaustion and lack of forgiveness. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force – that’s Newton’s first law of physics. As you keep your body in motion through regular exercise, you will keep moving forward emotionally, mentally and spiritually – literally moving forward on every level. You won’t stay stuck.
5. Listen to your soul. This is sometimes called learning to be intuitive, although I also like to think of it as literally being in tune with your soul. Some of the biggest health crises I see are in clients who have stopped listening to their own soul. Part of them knows that their job, their marriage, their home environment – something major and in-your-face obvious – is way out of balance, but they have put blinders on themselves and have refused to look at what is really going on. When you listen to your soul, you will know the right time to move to another form of work, to pay better attention to your primary relationship, to clean up the clutter in your home and office so that your energy can naturally flow and you can think clearly. Many health crises are situations your soul has created because you haven’t actually been paying attention to what really matters. Sometimes we need a formal method of listening to our soul. Spending time alone after meditation, after we have quieted our ego mind, is helpful. But no formal method is actually necessary once you recognize the importance of listening to your higher self.
What is healing?
True healing happens when we prioritize what’s really important and make time to take care of what matters.
