For All the Mamas and Papas Out There: Recipes for Life Force Energy Children
My wonderful intern Laura Hassebroek has helped me compile many of my children’s recipes into an e-booklet called Life Force Energy Children. You can access it free of charge! The recipes take into consideration children’s often finicky tastes and distinct preferences for starches, yogurts, and popular kid foods. Let’s make this a family affair!
Mama Natalia
E = mc. Remember this tenet of quantum physics originated by Albert Einstein? If E equals energy, m equals mass, and c2 is the speed of light squared, this equation suggests that we can understand our bodies in terms of energy and light. Let this insight inform how you carry yourself. I call this “holding your flame.” Yes, your body, that sometimes hard-to-rouse-out-of-bed lump of flesh, is actually living light. And the very essence of light is fire. Therefore, you, my friend, are a living flame. Don’t ever forget it!
The Energy Body
The spinal cord, which is the core of the body, is the fire-rod axis, which conducts your life force. Running through your spine is your spinal fluid, whose essence is pure energy. If this energy were visible, you would see it move as a fluid light current following the donut-like pattern of a torus. Picture the light-energy flowing into you from the head (the crown chakra) while simultaneously flowing from below in the base of your spine (the root chakra). In this way, the current runs up and down the length of the spine until it reaches the opposite pole, then moves outward and around you to recirculate fresh energy.
Everything in the plant and animal kingdoms follows the torus pattern of energetic flow. It is the flow of all living things—from the smallest atom to the largest tree. You can even see this lifeline flowing within a carrot, an apple, or a Brussels sprout! The energy enters from both directions and flows into, through, and around the plant, giving it its life force and fanning its indwelling firelight. Likewise, from the macrocosmic perspective, the Earth, the other planets, and even the solar system follow the torus pattern, sending life through their cosmic pranic tube.
Like the Earth, when your core or inner axis is rightly aligned and moving energy in swift waves, harnessing both the negative and positive poles equally, your being will thrive. This is why physical and energetic blockages (e.g., through unfit foods, environments, relationships, and experiences) are so damaging. Disturbances in the energetic flow manifest in the physical body in the form of compromised energy and illness. Becoming aware of this is the first and best step you can take to revive your inner flame. How do you do this?
Take a moment to try the following exercise.
Exercise: Realign with Your Flame
First, I ask you to envision and sense your body as a living flame whose greatest intensity runs along your vertical axis. Feel its heat running up along your core.
Next, I want you to feel this flame’s power in the chakra centers of your body. Feel the power take hold at the base of your spine at your root, then feel the creative energy in the area halfway between your root and your navel. Then feel the life force energy awaken in that flame at the spot right behind your navel.
Next, feel your heart center surge with the power of this fire; allow the fire to rise into the throat opening so you can express yourself more freely. Feel the heat in your forehead as the flame rises in your brain, between your eyes, and then finally allow it to surge through your crown and upward, where it will connect with the more spiritual dimensions of your energy field. Notice how your posture naturally lifts, opens, and surrenders to the graceful flow of energy.
Instead of merely straightening your posture, note the effortless rise of your body once it embodies the flow of this flame. Notice that it does not cause you to stiffen. Notice how it lifts the middle of your spine and opens your shoulders like wings. Notice how it lifts and draws back your head back ever so slightly, like that of a swan or a giraffe. Hold your flame, feel it rise and emit its powerful energy all around you. Open up to its fullness. This is your natural alignment and your indwelling power.
Remember this as often as you can as you walk to work, shop for groceries, type e-mails, or undertake any other task. Notice how much clearer your communications and how much more centered your emotions are when you hold and embody your flame.
Reclaim Your Power Center
Real power is inner power, and inner power comes from wholeness. Your center is to your body what a nucleus is to a cell: the physical and operational center of your being, or the center of consciousness. Physically, your energy center is about an inch below and behind the belly button. There are several powerful points of consciousness in the body, such as the center of the heart and the center of the brain. When you are aligned with your flame, properly conducting life force energy, these all link up to create a powerful, interconnected center.
Every single person is capable of tapping into and activating this inner power. Once you fully engage it, you’ll be capable of unshakeable strength and confidence, no matter what comes your way. If you want to get the most out of this work, if you want to shape the life of your dreams, you must cultivate a powerful center.
Imagine your power center as a great control tower where all causes and effects of your life are spread out before you like a spider web. From that vantage point, you will recognize with astonishing clarity what is essential to you and what is counterproductive or superfluous; you will be able to observe the outcomes of all the causes you have set into motion, and choose your next steps accordingly. When you are your own pilot—calm, confident, and centered—channeling your own inner fire, you can rise above all the nonsense and navigate smoothly toward wholeness.
When we choose a path of higher living—including alternative choices about our consumption, our social conditioning, and our physical and psychological blockages—we initiate the journey back to wholeness. It all begins with your inner flame, cultivating its power from your center, and feeding its strength with every obstruction you remove and every broken piece of yourself that you put back together. In this way, the journey is ongoing becomes more rewarding over time.
Most people today do just the opposite: instead of cultivating their centers, they focus too much on externalities and burden their bodies with all kinds of obstructions that stifle their energy flow and throw their systems off balance. Their flames suffocate and become weak. They have no core strength—physically or spiritually. Thus, they are at the mercy of passing trends and social pressures that will eventually throw them so off balance that they will topple over. Real power is inner power. Never forget it.
Recharge with Sleep, Rest, and Meditation
There has been much discussion about rest and sleep in cleansing circles. The notion that you won’t need much rest comes from novice detoxers in the early stages of consuming more vital foods and juices. They experience the natural rush of energy from the life force in these substances, and the contrast to their previous levels of energy is remarkable. The burst of energy stimulates much creativity and productivity, sometimes making it hard to sleep. But beginners have initial experiences that dramatically change as they stay the course and their bodies rebalance.
The deepest, most meaningful healing is done when the body is resting and sleeping. Taking care to get lots of sleep (and even take naps or meditation-naps, where you lie down to center yourself and then allow yourself to doze) is essential to your cellular convalescence. You can expect your sleeping patterns to change as much as your body and your perspectives change over the long haul. Some nights you may have intense night sweats as toxins pour out of your body; other nights you may sleep more deeply and longer than you ever have since you were a teenager; and still other nights you will feel high as a kite from the pulsating chi, which may stimulate you to undertake all kinds of creative, productive projects in the midnight hour. Just go with it and observe, always remembering that rest and deep sleep do not betray weakness but support greater strength.
In addition, when you start to expand your consciousness, you may find you need much more sleep and time-outs. Growth is an extremely active process. When you are taking leaps of consciousness and your DNA is literally rewiring it’s programming, you might feel like you need to drop out midday for a deep sleep. This is very typical. If you can afford the time, take it and surrender to your body’s need for rest. It is critical to the process and will enable you to integrate your leaps of consciousness much more harmoniously. You’ll come out of it crisp and clear. Do not judge the need for rest. Just notice the benefits when you allow it.
This concludes our ninth lesson. In next week’s edition of The Rose Program Insider, we will talk about how to exercise freedom of choice in a world of false authorities.
Softness triumphs over hardness, gentleness over strength.
The flexible is superior over the immovable.
This is the principle of controlling things
By going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.
—Lao-Tzu
Pursuing an alternative lifestyle is never easy. It often elicits floods of resistance from family and social circles, and requires great patience and perseverance in the face of obstacles. For me, it took more than twelve years of dedicated practice to reach my current level of self-awareness and self-sovereignty. I also had the help and encouragement of extraordinary teachers.
As for the floods of resistance, in my own case, I found that everyone had an opinion—mostly unsupportive, because my approach challenged their values. The obstacles grew based on how far away I veered from my expected course in terms of religious upbringing, social conditioning, peer pressure, and family expectations. But I knew that I had to face these obstacles and fully own my power in order to revive my authentic self, the one who’d been caged and silenced for far too long.
Take the Time You Need to Heal
Our work at Natalia Rose Institute is all about healing, nurturing, and growing, not quick fixes that have no lasting power and usually turn out to be more harmful than healthful in the long run. We are here to support true healing, in the deepest and most expansive meaning of the word—not to keep some kind of false peace with the body until all hell breaks loose again and another ceasefire is required!
We would get nowhere without patience and perseverance. My personality is naturally impetuous. I had to learn patience the hard way—by slamming into walls in my haste to achieve all my goals at lightning speed. I know for a fact that many of you are similarly wired because I read about it in your letters. Well, here in the Natalia Rose Institute community is one place where we serve ourselves far better with a healthy dose of patience and perseverance.
People tend to have a short memory when it comes to cleansing. They think after a week or so of juicing and eating only salads they should be clean. They forget all the soda, processed foods, hormone- and antibiotic-injected animal products, pasteurized cow dairy, birth control pills, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and/or recreational drugs they’ve consumed over the course of their lives—not to mention the generations of compromised DNA they received through their lineage! The cumulative damage to our cells and DNA is profound, not something that can be shaken off after only a week, month, or even a year of cleansing. It takes years to rectify our deep-rooted imbalances and achieve a truly beautiful, clean-celled body.
Keep in mind that raw foods and juices alone are not going to bring you back into alignment. For example, eating all raw or strictly vegan won’t necessarily ensure that you will live better or longer than your non-raw, non-juicing peers. You will also need to remove internal obstructions consistently over time. Eating a cleaner diet is just one essential component of the larger picture. The removal of obstruction (both physical and mental) is the actual fulcrum of healing.
This is where the patience and persistence comes in! You can juice for a weekend and drop a few pounds, but your body will go right back to its old stats unless you remove the obstruction that the juice fast awakened—and then continue to awaken and release more and more of that obstruction. Those that stay in the game, awakening and releasing for months and years, are the ones that reach the ecstasy of cleansing. The extended journey is what eventually cleans and elevates the blood chemistry and unblocks the internal pathways, enabling Life Force to surge and conduct through your body. As the cleansing reaches those depths, the alchemy happens: the internal organs are revived by the higher-caliber blood, skin tissue reflects the strengthened internal body, and energy soars. This is the true meaning of rejuvenation!
Our work here at Natalia Rose Institute is not about covering up our physical imperfections. Rather, it’s about pulling back the curtain on all the internalized toxicity that you’ve been carrying around with you and spent years of your life trying to hide. If you are still new to this work, you probably have some very deep toxicity that will emerge in waves. Don’t be embarrassed. No one who matters is judging you. In fact, here in the Natalia Rose Institute community, we’re all cheering you on! This work only gets better over time. Don’t give up. Give your body a chance to regenerate itself from the inside out.
Stay the Course of Cleansing
Physical aging and deterioration accompanied by feelings of weakness and fatigue are not factors of how many times you have ridden around the sun, but of what you have accumulated as you have gone around the sun! If you cleanse and maintain an alkaline-rich diet of primarily fresh fruits and veggies, and you are still feeling weak or lacking power for your workouts, it is due to one or more of the following reasons:
• You are awakening waste without releasing it. You have awakened matter that your bowel cannot release on its own. Therefore, your center is blocked and the awakened poisons are flooding your bloodstream, making you feel ill and tired. You need either bowel cleansing or a less than perfect meal to help ease your bowel’s transition to clean foods—one or the other, but preferably the former.
• You are experiencing withdrawal symptoms. You are so addicted to the stimulation of cooked proteins, whey/soy/protein energy bars, coffee, refined sugar, flour, soda, etc. that your body is not coping with the change. The problem is that you’re having withdrawal symptoms—not that the clean diet is failing to deliver energy. You probably need to transition more slowly. People are often deceived into thinking they need meat when, after a week of a meat-free diet, they eat a steak and suddenly feel “energized.”This is a false fire! Acidic, dense substances can never give you real energy, only stimulation. To an unclean body addicted to the stimulation, continuing to consume such substances feels good and familiar. Stopping too suddenly leads to withdrawal symptoms and a feeling of weakness. Hence, people often associate a clean diet with feeling weak. This is why making a gradual transition away from the old foods, rather than going cold turkey, is so crucial. It will help you avoid many pitfalls!
• You are still a slave to the old mental programming. Mental programming is a powerful thing. For years you’ve been absorbing the erroneous propaganda that only calorie-dense substances can sufficiently energize you. You’ve also been conditioned to expect quick, linear results from health regimens. But when the average obstructed body undergoes deep cleansing, it must slow down to conduct internal triage. When this happens, you might grow impatient and lose heart, but I urge you to stay the course. It often takes persistence in the face of a temporary impasse to yield a major breakthrough. But you have to stick with it!
Keep an Eye on the Big Picture
The detox lifestyle is largely a case of mind over matter: work to reverse your thinking and align with the greater truth. Most of all, keep an eye on the big picture of cleansing. A clear body is an energized body. Arnold Ehret said it nearly a hundred years ago: Vitality = Power – Obstruction. However, “Power” may not have been the clearest word choice, so, with all due respect to Ehret, let me rephrase this slightly: Vitality = Electromagnetic Conductivity – Obstruction. In other words, when the electromagnetic conductivity can rush unobstructed through the body, you will experience uncompromised vitality!
Every time you’re feeling impatient or a little less energized than you want to feel, ask yourself how clear your pathways are and how well your cells are conducting the electromagnetic power. Even when you’re blocked, this energy is always lying dormant within you, ready to be unleashed. But you cannot expect your body to release all the obstructions and toxicity that it has accumulated over a lifetime and regenerate clean cells overnight. True healing requires visionary practice, patience, and perseverance. If the duration and requirements get you down, just consider for a moment the alternative—hospitals, medication, countless unsexy symptoms and a steady, disempowerment, and a general decline. Green Lemonade, raw salads, and colonics, please!
Do all you can to remove any blockages—physical and mental—and then feel your body come alive with the blissful vibration of life force conducting through you. Your authentic, revitalized self will begin to emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, and soon you’ll be able to take wing!
This concludes our eleventh lesson. In next week’s final edition of The Rose Program Insider, we will close with a meditation on our highest aspirations and the true meaning of beauty.
We humans cannot truly soar until we’ve first cultivated deep, healthy roots. We all want to enjoy the highs of life-including romantic love, professional success, and other forms of excitement and personal achievement-but unless our highs are equal to our depths, our highs will set us up for terrible falls. Chasing after highs without any grounding knowledge is a hollow pursuit indeed.
Yes, I can understand the temptation to escape and hide from yourself when you are suffering from constant stress, illness, and disappointment. And yes, I know that digging deep to the root causes of your suffering and cultivating a more life-generating perspective requires effort, but the rewards of such work are beyond measure. If you want to radiate true health and beauty in this lifetime, there is no other way.
I encourage you to spread your wings and take flight, but just be sure you are not merely trying to escape from your norms. The greatest highs in life come from both internal and external pursuits. There are thrills of the body, the heart, the spirit, and the mind-and when these all come together in harmony, it’s nirvana! Do not neglect the beauty and richness of your inner life for solely external pursuits.
What Is Beauty, Really?
Our culture is obsessed with beauty. And let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be beautiful and sexy and desirable? Everywhere we turn, there are glossy advertisements for products appealing to this desire to be beautiful, and there are throngs of people who are buying into their promises. We are socially conditioned from a very young age to want the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect skin, and perfect clothes-and all the trappings of vanity that come with them: sex, money, and power. But if we look closer, what is this obsession with beauty all about, really? Is it just superficial, or does it indicate some deeper biological imperative at work in our lives?
Many people come to Natalia Rose Institute seeking weight loss, rejuvenation, clearer skin, and the other hallmarks of surface beauty. But those who undertake the detox lifestyle discover that they really want so much more. The desire to be beautiful, deep down, is the desire to be given a chance to love and be loved. It is a desire to conduct joy and vitality-to be free to be oneself, not to hide behind expensive fashion trends and status symbols. When you cleanse your heart and your body, you naturally begin to shed the commonly held ideals of external beauty and awaken to the only beauty that matters: the kind that shines from within, emitting a fresh, natural, authentic glow. Any good art designer or plastic surgeon can produce a picture-perfect image based on the current marketing and fashion trends. Real beauty, however, makes you feel good through and through. Beauty is synonymous with clarity, love, and light-and no designer clothing or cosmetic product, no matter how ingeniously engineered, can deliver or even simulate these things for you.
When you release old patterns, aggressions, and fears; when you are pure of purpose and of spirit; when you have laid deep, healthy roots that can freely absorb and conduct clean energy from the soil, air, water, sunlight, and the life circulating all around you, you cannot help but radiate beauty-physically and spiritually. When you are beautiful within, you no longer have anything to hide or cover up. You become lighter and freer and more joyful in your own skin. You open yourself up to light and love and naturally connect with the inner beauty of others. You can finally stop obsessing about your looks because you actually embody and radiate beauty with every breath you take. True beauty, therefore, is the not vanity at all, but the natural expression of a deep and expansive love of life!
Plant Flowers, Don’t Cut Them
There’s a popular dermatologist with a new book out, and on the cover he appears standing with a bunch of freshly cut long-stem strawberries. The title of the book promises youth in no uncertain terms. What is the problem with this picture? Here’s a big hint: It’s why I taught my children never to pick flowers, and why those who know me well don’t bring me cut flowers.
Life cut off from its source is unsustainable. Think of it. The whole concept of this cover image is a lie, but the giveaway of the misguided consciousness underpinning the project is the cut fruit. Most people will see the promise of freshness and beauty in the fruit when those strawberries are in fact an example of life cut being tragically short in the service of instant, short-term gratification! Those strawberries, cut away from the vine of life, will be old and moldy in less than two days!
To put it most simply, life that is firmly rooted to its source will flourish-living long and well. Life that is cut off from its source will draw its last breath from its energy reserves, then wilt until all the energy has been drained away and decay takes over. The same is true for our bodies, for our whole beings.
We humans walk around in our bodies, seemingly unconnected to anything, believing all we need are some calories, vitamins, and omega fatty acids. That’s the herd mentality at work. The fact is, despite our lack of visible roots, we get our energy from the same sources that other living creatures do-from the sun and earth, unseen fibers of living energy that connect all life on this planet and reach across the solar system, and from other plant life and organisms that pass along nutrients to us through the food chain. As long as we fail to recognize our true roots, our true sources of life force, and our interconnectedness, we will never summon enough energy to soar, much less stand tall and proud within our own bodies.
So remember, first plant your roots firmly, and then spread your wings wide. There is no greater high-no greater expression of beauty-than growing and evolving as nature intended!
Free will is the most important legacy we have from the Universal Spirit. We are constantly being presented with choices in life, “forks in the road” that lead to different places. Free will lets us choose. That ability to choose gives us the power to take our life in any direction we want . . . and create our future life. —Jon Peniel, from The Children of the Law of One
The fundamental religion of this culture is that of human dominion, and it does not matter so much whether one self-identifies as a Christian, a Capitalist, a Scientist, or just a regular member of this culture, one’s actions will be to promulgate this fundamentalist religion of unbridled entitlement and exploitation. This religion permeates every aspect of this culture. This is a big problem, a problem big enough that it is killing the planet. —Derrick Jensen
Freedom of choice is a concept that most of us in the Western world take for granted. We appear to have countless choices wherever we turn—whether it’s at the supermarket, the department store, the car dealership, a restaurant, or at nearly any other kind of retailer. But there is a difference between the illusion of choice and freedom of choice. How often do we pause to really think about what we’re supporting when we purchase, say, that cartload of groceries, or a new pair of jeans, or a cute new handbag? Does all this choice actually offer us real freedom or is it an illusion of freedom that sneakily enslaves us and harms many others? Well, let’s take a look at one such scenario.
Let’s say you want to buy a trendy new handbag by a big brand name, but you can’t afford it. So you go down to Chinatown, NYC, where everyone knows you can buy cheap designer handbag knockoffs. You figure most people can’t tell the difference between the knockoff and the real thing, anyway, so why not? Well, guess who’s busy making those cute little bags? Little children, particularly little girls, are being forced to manufacture them in terrible conditions. According to certain insiders, these young girls, ranging in age from 6 to 18, frequently get their legs broken so they cannot run and play. Driving this practice are shoppers, who come to the area specifically for this cheap specialty item, keeping it in high demand.
This kind of activity goes on day in and day out around globe, based on common consumer activities, and as members of modern society, we are all complicit. As much as we would like to pretend that we are not to blame for society’s routine injustices (whether wielded against people, wildlife, or the planet), the reality is that every single choice we make contributes either to the destruction of life on the planet or to the healing of it. It does us no good to palm off responsibility to others.
We must always be asking ourselves: Will the next choice I make be healing or destructive? Even if we are not ready yet to eat only local, seasonal foods or give up our cars to rely solely on public transportation, we can still start shopping for our veggies at the local farmer’s market, or decide to take the train to grandma’s house for a change.
We support whatever we spend our money on, and we cannot excuse our purchasing choices just because no activists are posting signs or picketing. It is our responsibility to research and understand where we are spending our money, energy, and resources—not just as a society, but as individuals. In fact, it is in our own best interest to do so, as members of the interconnected whole of life. We cast our vote multiple times a day, whether we know it or not. We, not some phantom authority sitting on high, are the ones with the power to destroy or heal.
Yes, the concept of voting with our wallets is simple enough to grasp, but it’s not always so simple to act upon. Why? Because our world is rife with consumer traps and snares that trip up even the most well-intentioned individuals. Even a pretty basket of fruit might have questionable origins. Still, we can and must continue to educate ourselves, in order to make increasingly informed decisions. Every life-generating step toward authentic health, love, and beauty makes a difference. Indeed, there are a lot of forces and false authorities working against this higher purpose, but that is all the more reason to reclaim our freedom of choice and learn how to wield it! We begin to do this by taking a moment to step back, dial down all the chatter, and start listening to the voice within.
Exercise: Clearing Your Inner-Space for Freedom of Choice
When we’re feeling powerless and inundated by the pressures of modern living—which, in today’s high-speed technocratic world, is the norm for most people—we become extremely vulnerable to all kinds of destructive habits, conditioned thinking, and peer pressure. Often this leads to such behaviors as binge eating and binge shopping, which only bring temporary numbing relief, but leave us feeling even worse and more powerless than before. The next time you feel yourself spiraling out of control in this way, before you completely cave or make another destructive choice, take a moment to try to quiet your mind, find your center, and honestly ask yourself the following questions:
• How many different voices and opinions are ringing in my ears right now, and which, if any, are authentically my own?
• Do I really need or even truly want this product that I’m shopping around for? Why am I agonizing so much over which brand or model to purchase? Are all these “choices” truly empowering me?
• Will eating all this greasy food actually make me feel better, or is it just a mindless habit that supports the food conglomerate and leaves me feeling bloated and ashamed?
• Why am I running myself ragged to attend all these social functions? Which of them are really important to me, and which are just a matter of keeping up appearances?
• Why do I spend so much of my free time e-mailing, IMing, and surfing the Internet? Do they really make me feel more connected to others? What am I sacrificing by choosing to do this?
These are just examples of the kinds of questions you might pause to ask yourself. They will help you to realize just how fragmented and scattered your thinking can be (the natural expression of a fragmented self) and honestly reassess your choices before you make another one you’ll regret. As long as you sign away your power and let the world make your choices for you, you will perpetuate all kinds of suffering—others’ and your own. If you do not call upon your own highest authority, these riptides of consumerism and social conditioning will carry you off, farther and farther away from yourself, into dangerous waters indeed. Worst of all, you probably won’t even know it until it’s too late, because you’ll have fallen for the illusion of choice again and again.
So take the time to pause, breathe, center yourself, and weigh your choices carefully. It does require a vigilance and concentration, but exercising your freedom of choice becomes easier with practice, and is ultimately a lot less work than suffering the consequences of mindless living! Don’t squander your life on false values and aspirations. Take this opportunity to ask yourself the important questions in life—e.g., What kind of person would I really like to be? Which qualities do I want to cultivate? What do I most admire in others, and what do I most deplore? Where do I most want to direct my time, resources, and energies? How would I like to impact the world around me?—and let your answers guide your every choice.
This concludes our tenth lesson. In the next edition of The Rose Program Insider, we will talk about the healing power of patience and perseverance.
“When Dad’s In Charge – Smoothies and Pancakes”
• For more Life Force Families content, click here
