HUMAN HEALTH ACROSS the Western world is deteriorating at an alarming rate as can be seen in the increased incidences of cancer, heart disease, liver infection, respiratory ailments and nervous disorders. Even degenerative illnesses that a century ago rarely manifested themselves except in the weak and elderly have now become everyday conditions in the adult population, and sometimes even in the young.
Obesity in the West has increased to epidemic proportions, and some babies are now even being born obese. How has this happened? Is obesity the result of ‘poor’ genes or is it the result of how genes have expressed themselves through our modern Western lifestyles, through diet, and through our sedentary office-bound lives?
It’s a sad state of affairs, but most of our calories are derived from ‘food-like’ products, processed sugars, white flours, fried ingredients, saturated animal fats, sweet beverages, soda acid bombs, commercial cereals, added sodium, added chemicals – in fact, very little of what goes into our bodies is actually nutritional.
While part of the problem is commercial advertising and the food industry as a whole, the other part of the problem is the continual on-the-go society that we have created for ourselves – we eat mindlessly, without proper thought and consideration – not because we are hungry, as we did in former times, but out of sheer habit and for a whole raft of other reasons. We may eat because we are stressed, we are tired, we are depressed and if we feel lonely – or just because the clock tells us that it’s dinnertime. For many of us, sadly, food has actually become a substitute for love.
Moreover, we eat while we are doing other things and this is far from healthy: while watching television, while working at the computer, while talking with others, while driving and on the move. We are not fully conscious of what we are eating and we have lost our connection with our food. We have become mindless eaters.
And yet, the food we eat still becomes a part of us, of who we are. This, in turn, affects our long-term health.
The root cause of our human health crisis is a severing of our relationship with the natural order and this has created toxicity in our lives at many different levels. This is driven by our hectic lifestyles, the use of preservatives and additives in food, and also chemically contaminated air and water, damaging electromagnetic fields and the over-use of medical drugs.
Every single person and animal on the planet contains residues of toxic chemicals or metals in their body tissues. It’s a fact that 80,000 new chemicals have been introduced since the turn of the twentieth century but most have never been tested for safety or for synergistic actions. The heavy metals that cause the most ill health are lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, nickel and aluminium. Chemical toxins include volatile organic compounds (VOCs), solvents (cleaning materials), medications, alcohol, pesticides, herbicides and food additives. Infections and mould toxins (evident in ‘sick-building syndrome’) are other common sources of toxins.
In the face of our toxic environment in the twenty-first century, and with the reality that all living species contain increasing levels of environmental toxins with widespread biological effects, it is clear that both new research to elucidate the mechanisms by which toxins affect health and novel strategies for systematic seasonal detoxification are needed.
However, the poisoning that stems from environmental pollution and chronic degenerative disease in itself are not given priority in our healthcare system. This is because our current health paradigm evolved from treating acute disease as the main cause of death at the turn of the twentieth century to treating chronic degenerative disease as we enter the twenty-first. Physicians will eventually have to develop the skills necessary to cope with this trend.
So what does all this mean? And what can we do in our daily lives to mitigate the effects of environmental toxins or external toxins and inner toxins created by poor digestion and poorly chosen foods? On top of this you could easily get lost in the vast array of ‘detoxification’ products in the market place today. It seems that we are being sold a lie.
Exposure to toxins comes from two main sources: firstly from our environment (external toxins) and secondly the gut or the breakdown products of our metabolism. Both of these factors can overload our natural detoxification mechanisms.
Symptoms may occur, such as food allergies and sensitivities, PMS, gut problems, skin problems or headaches and if these are left unchecked, more serious conditions can eventually make their presence felt.
Furthermore, when the intestines provide insufficient relief for the metabolism, other organs of elimination must take their place. The kidneys must increasingly eliminate the predominantly acid waste products in the urine; the skin must secrete more waste; and the lungs have to secrete more toxins with the exhaled breath, often assuming an unhealthy, unpleasant odour.
Our inner state of toxicity is further exacerbated by our modern refined diet because it places an extra burden on detoxification systems and our digestive system, through excessive consumption of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, trans-fatty acids, alcohol, caffeine, aspartame and the various plastics, pathogens, hormones and antibiotics found in our food supply, and excessive quantities of animal protein.
The only way to avoid internal and external toxins might be to live an ascetic lifestyle, eating only wild foods and drinking spring water, complemented by moving our bodies for two or three hours of physical activity daily.
Unfortunately, toxicity cannot be reversed by modern drugs or by Western invasive surgery: the one and only way to counteract self-toxification is by self-detoxification. Fortunately, a systematic cleanse can be done simply, quickly and efficiently using the 12-Day Plan.
‘The only way to avoid internal and external toxins might be to live an ascetic lifestyle.’
YOUR HEALTH IN YOUR HANDS
Many years ago, in my private one-on-one sessions and my yoga classes, I often found myself wishing I had more time to teach all my clients and students what they needed to know to fully embrace optimal health through total body-mind cleansing.
‘After the Cleanse my skin was clearer, I had lost weight and encouragingly people commented on how well I looked.’
So I first started working with the 12-Day Plan, as it became known, in 2004 with my private clients, who were typically time-poor and stressed, habitually overindulged and under-exercised, often suffering from mental fog and struggling to find a natural solution to achieving optimum levels of health and wellness. This led me to developing a 12-day health system: a combination of cleansing, detoxing food and drink, yoga poses, meditation and breathing that they could do at home in their own time. It started its life in a shoebox with a simple A4 print-out of instructions.
The 12-Day Plan was highly effective and successful and I soon started to see my clients lives transform for the better. I saw very unhealthy people become healthy, happy, fulfilled people. My clients told their friends about it and I started to expand the 12-Day Plan into group settings, workshops, master classes and overseas retreats. The feedback was always so positive that I decided to put my discoveries into a book that everybody could use – and what you are reading now is the result.
‘The 12-Day Plan was highly effective and successful and I soon started to see my clients lives transform for the better.’
The 12-Day Plan is appropriate for people who want to enhance their performance in life and in the workplace; or those whose health might need a reset. The objective is for gradual, sustainable change that will endure over time. Once your body is functioning optimally, your system will metabolise more efficiently and you will continue to experience many positive changes for years to come. My hope is that by following the 12-Day Plan, you are able to bring your body back to its optimal health and greatly increase the quality of your life, both now and in the future.
‘Intelligent movement’ is a vital component of Mind Body Cleanse using the 12-Day Plan, and is the style that best describes my approach to the activity parts of the Plan (see here). In Part 2 you will find a sequence of yoga poses and techniques that will help you to stimulate your metabolism and heal your gut. The many poses, when combined correctly with the breath, can be a great way to reduce stress. Physically, the Mind Body Cleanse sequences promote strength and create flexibility in the soft tissue. Internally, the Mind Body Cleanse sequence stimulates detoxification and metabolism. Mentally, it establishes clarity as well as confidence.
As we progress through the 12 days of the Plan, with every fresh phase I will add in more Mind Body Cleanse poses and techniques to vary your practice and help you progress through the Plan towards a brand-new you! My hope is that, by following the 12-Day Plan, you will bring back your body and mind to its optimum state of health and wellness, which, after all, is your birthright.
‘Physically, the Mind Body Cleanse sequences promote strength and create flexibility in the soft tissue. Internally, the Mind Body Cleanse sequence stimulates detoxification and metabolism. Mentally, it establishes clarity as well as confidence.’
IMPOSSIBLE STANDARDS
We are constantly being bombarded with media images of impossibly perfect standards of beauty and flawless perfection. And even more invasively, in recent times, on our smart phones and electronic devices and via the wellness cult to be seen on Instagram and other social media. This focus on society’s perceived beauty causes a preoccupation with the self and an intensely felt need for perfection. However, something sinister lurks beneath the surface – the messages masquerade as wellness, but if you dig a little deeper you will see that they are rotten to their core.
Our culture promotes a standard of beauty that is not only unrealistic, but is potentially harmful, where appearance addiction and damaging body-image issues prevail and become the norm. This message plagues women and, increasingly, men across the globe, especially those in Western cultures. Body-image problems may cause numerous disorders including: depression, eating disorders, self-mutilation, obsessive exercise, anxiety and isolation. It is all totally dehumanising.
We need to redefine what it means to have a healthy relationship with our minds and our bodies.
‘The stomach is the centre of life. A hundred diseases are rooted there. Healing always requires the patient’s cooperation.’
TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE
WESTERN MEDICAL SCIENCE is concerned first and foremost with disease, but rarely with health and healthy people. Billions are spent every year on curing the sick, while very little is spent on preventing illness from occurring in the first place. Without diagnostics for good health in place, many danger signs cannot be recognised early on and people cannot protect themselves from illness in time.
In the human body, the large intestine is the organ that has suffered the most abuse from our contemporary lifestyles because it works best only when the other parts of the digestive system are working well and are in balance. Despite human evolution from ape to space traveller, there has been a serious devolution in terms of our diets. The human body only accepts food that is natural and wholesome because the alimentary canal has not adapted and continues to protect itself from this basic dietary fact, meaning that acidosis, hypoxia and inflammation take root. These conditions of imbalance allow germs to breed, tissues to degenerate and other degenerative conditions to develop. And this is what lies at the root of the human health crisis today.
‘The human body only accepts food that is natural and wholesome.’
So how do we bring ourselves back into alignment with our natural state of optimal health and wellbeing? This can only take place by adopting lifestyle changes and, specifically, focusing on the gut, which is the connective stem that links mind and body. However, it is unrealistic to start a new diet and lifestyle before you have got rid of the years of accumulated and toxic debris from previous dietary habits. The body’s natural cleansing mechanisms are not designed to deal with the unnatural mess that we have created – it requires special methods to eliminate it.
‘The body’s natural cleansing mechanisms are not designed to deal with the unnatural mess that we have created.’
Cleansing the inner body is an important preliminary step in the path to total health and wellness. Whatever pollutes the body pollutes the mind; whatever pollutes the mind pollutes the spirit, and by cleaning the gut and bowels we repair not just the mind and the body but also the spirit.
‘By cleaning the gut and bowels we repair not just the mind and the body but also the spirit.’
Over the years, the number of clients I have seen who have complained about a myriad intestinal conditions has proliferated. They have suffered from general sluggishness, fatigue, brain ‘fog’, distended abdomen, constipation and bloating, among other symptoms. Others have believed that such symptoms are the ‘norm’ and have dismissed them as one-off, isolated events.
However, as a professional I know full well that such symptoms are anything but the norm and are often warning signs in the root system of the body: the digestive system and the alimentary canal. Every malfunction of the gut will eventually impact the entire organism, in the same way that a disease in the roots of a tree will have a negative impact on the tree’s leaves, its branches and its berries and fruit. If left unchecked, symptoms of malfunction will manifest in the body in the form of a more serious illness. Its cause can often be found everywhere else in the body, rather than the gut.
Austrian Dr Franz Xaver Mayr, in the twentieth century, asserted the idea that most people’s digestive systems were far from clean and were therefore unhealthy. And that even healthy guts contained waste products that caused them to be contaminated, often infected, and therefore were a dangerous source of toxicity. Dr Mayr insisted that anyone who was not completely well should thoroughly cleanse their intestines. He treated all of his patients, regardless of whether they came to him with head, throat, lung, heart or abdominal complaints, as though they had digestive problems. Mayr believed that the toxic gut ‘undermined people’s health and made them prematurely ill, old, and unattractive.’
The 12-Day Plan, which you will find set out in Part 2 of this book, requires motivation to actively contribute to your healing process and perhaps to give up some long-loved habits – they may be the ones that are the most harmful to you. However, I appreciate that total wellness is not for everybody: amazingly, some people don’t actually want to be well. However, you can be as well as you can be. Wellness unfolds gradually through the active participation of the person seeking help, so you owe it to yourself and those around you to be as well as you can be – this is within your ability and power and we all have the ability to improve our own wellness.
Since being well or being sick is mainly rooted in the way that we live and eat, basic good health cannot be ‘bought’ in a passive way or achieved by simply taking pills – you instead need to fully engage with your own health state. In fact, the better you understand the link between what is allowed, in terms of food and drink, and what is not, and the more you observe the guidelines for carrying out the 12-Day Plan, the more joy, self-confidence and, especially, therapeutic success you will experience in your life.
When practised three or four times a year, particularly if you coincide with the changes in seasons, the 12-Day Plan serves as a remedy and a natural preventative that is fundamentally based on the most ancient remedy to human kind: fasting, purgative herbs and diet.
‘The Cleanse made me feel a whole lot better, my eyes are sparkling and I feel “empty”. The colonics are a fantastic idea in conjunction with 12 Days … well recommended.’
‘As a medical doctor, I wondered about the rationale of a cleanse. It struck me as simplistic to compare the body to an engine. A simple oil change and everything will be fine. However something profound occurs. Energy and mental clarity are undoubtedly significantly increased. Waking “clear-eyed”, so to speak. The 12-day Plan may sound too simple, however simplicity often conceals deep thought and research. To be understood they require a new way of thinking, a change in one’s attitude towards self and embracing personal responsibility for our own wellbeing.’
A. SAWYER
CLEANING UP THE digestive system is the key to sustainable good health. In the same way that we clean our teeth and wash our hair we should look after our digestive system too. It is part of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which means, like breathing and heartbeat, that it is part of the body that carries on working around the clock. However, as you will see in Part 2, we have a great deal more control than we think we do over the PNS and the gut with the various techniques that are recommended. Many of my clients who come to me with gut issues are prescribed these techniques.
There are no organs or tissues in the body that cannot be damaged by toxins, so it has now been proven that refraining from eating periodically, known as ‘intermittent fasting’, gives the digestive system time to heal and repair itself, as well as providing other long-term benefits. No method of purging or cleansing is more effective than fasting, which is the treatment par excellence for improving overall health and increasing energy.
Fasting, meaning the temporary, voluntary limitation or complete suspension of food intake, has been known about for thousands of years and practised in many cultures. All of the major religions recommend that its followers cleanse their bodies in order to release them from illness and impurities, and to elevate them to the attainment of higher ends.
Knowledge about fasting was once widespread in the West, particularly in the early schools of philosophy with the Stoics and Epicureans. Even the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras used to instruct his students to fast before they received his higher teachings. The great physicians of antiquity, such as Hippocrates, often made use of fasting methods too.
‘Cleaning up the digestive system is the key to sustainable good health.’
Fasting triggers a truly wonderful cleansing process that reaches right down to each and every cell and tissue in the body. Within 24 hours of curtailing eating, enzymes stop entering the stomach and travel instead into the intestines and into the bloodstream, where they circulate and gobble up waste matter, including dead and damaged cells, unwelcome microbes and pollutants. All organs and glands get a much-needed and well-deserved rest, during which time their tissues are purified and rejuvenated and their functions are balanced and regulated. The entire alimentary canal is swept clean and what is eventually eliminated should astonish and disgust first-time fasters in equal measure and encourage them to make fasting and colon-cleansing a life-long habit.
I was personally so impressed with the results of therapeutic fasts when I lived in India that I decided to devote the rest of my life to this method of healing. These experiences encouraged me to develop the 12-Day Plan and make it available for everybody.
When I lived in India, I experimented with many types of fasting. One of my most memorable experiences included living in a cave for ten days with nothing but pure spring water to drink. It was a silent (mouna), rent-a-cave arrangement, where my only neighbours were monkeys. A beautiful view stretched before me from the mountaintop cave down to the plains below. In those ten days I explored every area of my psyche. I experienced feelings of gut-wrenching isolation as well as moments of lightness in the form of insane, ecstatic laughter, rounds of self-cuddles, with every psychic state and emotion in between. Days were spent meditating, practising yoga and deep reflection. At the end of ten days I felt lucid, calm, relaxed, un-hungry, detached and self-sufficient. When I was collected afterwards, I was invited for dinner and to share my experience with friends, who had eagerly gathered to hear about it. To my surprise at the time, I declined the invitation, since I just wanted to be alone to process what I had been through.
Today, I always look forward to periods of intermittent fasting (although with a measure of trepidation in the days leading up to it) because it allows me a focused 12-day period of mindfulness that I relish and value highly.
BENEFITS OF FASTING
Allows the gut to rest andheal
Speeds up sluggish intestines
Detoxifies the organism of toxic waste
Deacidifies the system
Purifies the blood
FASTING CAN HELP THESE AILMENTS
Nervous and mental conditions
Fever
Allergies and skin conditions
Respiratory conditions
Obesity
Circulatory problems
Digestive system issues
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HUNGER AND FASTING
‘Hunger’ is a lack of sufficient nutrition to the point where the body suffers, but fasting is the voluntary limitation of food to improve overall health. The entire organism becomes healthy again and there is a positive feeling of harmony between your inner and outer world. When practised over a number of months, intermittent fasting helps to lower blood pressure as well as damaging low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, re-balance blood sugar levels and create balance in mind and body.
THE SHANKHAPRAKSHALANA KRIYA TECHNIQUE
When I first started practising yoga in India, Shankhaprakshalana (the kriya technique for cleaning the intestines) was my baptism of fire. This is a practice where the entire alimentary canal is swept clean and what was eliminated astonished and disgusted me in equal measure and made me adopt fasting and colon-cleaning as a life-long habit. What came out very much resembled what you might find on the inside of a car exhaust, and what followed afterwards was a state that could only be likened to a religious experience, a spiritual cleansing or complete paradigm shift of thought. Therefore it’s no surprise that cleansing the body is an important preliminary step in certain oriental philosophical systems. Traditionally one of the first-step practices given to a student entering an ashram in India are cleansing exercises because blocks in the free flow of energy impair health and obstruct the development of higher levels of vitality and awareness.
Having said that, Shankhaprakshalana, or washing of the intestine, should not be undertaken without the assistance of a qualified teacher. It involves having two glasses of warm salt water (two litres in total), followed by dynamic asanas and periodic evacuations, repeated six or seven times. A special meal, usually of khicheri, is eaten about an hour after the practice and then again approximately six hours after this meal, in order to reline the intestines and keep the walls of the gut stretched, otherwise they may cramp. After Shankhaprakshalana, a special diet for at least one month has to be followed as the digestive system becomes temporarily very fragile.
Blood acidosis and inflammation have become a major bane of contemporary civilisation and one of the most important benefits of fasting is that it thoroughly cleanses and purifies the bloodstream. Blood is responsible for delivering nutrients and oxygen to every cell in the body, and it must also carry away metabolic wastes from the cells for excretion in kidney and lungs. Dirty blood simply cannot perform these functions properly. As a result malnutrition sets in, resistance plummets and toxaemia becomes a chronic condition, and germs have a field day invading your most vulnerable tissues.
When acid builds up in the blood, the bloodstream deposits crystals in various joints, where they form ‘spurs’ that bind your joints together and supplant the synovial fluid that lubricate joints – the result can be painful and lead to debilitating arthritis. However, fasting permits enzymes to enter the joints and dissolve these crystals, thereby restoring the synovial fluids and recovering joint mobility.
So, unless you live an ascetic life and avoid dietary folly altogether, your blood and other tissues are bound to accumulate toxins and gradually lose their functional vitality. If you do not purge yourself of these toxins on a regular basis, via fasting, toxaemia gets worse, until the body cannot stand it any more, and guess what happens? You get ill.
‘The only way to avoid internal and external toxins might be to live an ascetic lifestyle.’
Therefore, if you want to create excellent health in the body and give your gut an occasional rest, I recommend making intermittent fasting part of your normal lifestyle. In any event, it’s pointless to embark on a major new dietary plan before you have flushed out all the accumulated and impacted debris from your former dietary habits. There is only one way to do this – and that is by fasting and systematic cleansing and in conjunction with colonic hydrotherapy (if you need it).
The gentle, intermittent fast in my 12-Day Plan takes place during the Power Phase (Days 7–9). This part of the Plan is a liquid-only fast and is manageable and energising, since digestion uses up a lot of energy that can be used elsewhere in the body.
‘The first three days were tough. By Day 4 I was feeling good. I’ve lost seven pounds. I have been having refreshing sleep. I will do the Cleanse again!’