I dropped my two kids off for their first day of school last week. Tommy and Thandi are in the second and fourth grades, respectively. Parenting is a daunting enterprise and, as any seasoned parent can tell you, it only becomes more challenging as children get older. This is why I want to take some time to discuss the importance of organizing your life so that you do not fall into the same trap that so many parents do—using your kids and busy life as an excuse for not cultivating the most life-generating space possible for yourself.
Parents who aren’t fully committed to doing the work it takes to cleanse and maintain their bodies will often say, “I just don’t have the time” or “I really wish I could—if only I had a team of helpers like the celebrities do!” What separates someone like you, who wants to gain and implement higher knowledge no matter what the obstacles, from someone who can read about it, agree with it, and yet continue to do the very things that keep him/her heavy, lethargic, and stuck in cycles of deterioration?
Of course, there are those at the other extreme, who do nothing but focus on their youthful image and surface beauty as an end in and of itself. That is the old-energy breed of self-care, characterized by non-life-generating practices such as excessive exercising and plastic surgery. What I’m talking about is setting up your life so that vigorous, daily physical activity, high-vibration-quick-exit eating, mediation, colon cleansing, and the other elevating practices are seamlessly integrated into your day as priorities—not sidelined, as they so often are.
Ironically, when we put ourselves first by incorporating these life-generating activities into our daily routine, we become less self-centered, more openhearted and more generous. When we have more to give, what we give is of a much higher quality! By keeping our cells clean and our hearts and minds open and uncluttered, we can’t help but conduct love and light. This allows us to become better leaders in our families and far beyond—inspiring life-enhancing changes and awakenings among our friends, co-workers, and even strangers!
As long as we live in the modern world’s paradigm of untruth, we need to neutralize the disharmony in our environment by using all our life-generating practices and tools, while looking forward to a world that will one day be naturally harmonious and need far less neutralizing! Eventually, as our brothers and sisters become more aware and make the necessary changes in their life choices, our whole world will ring with joy. But until that time comes, we need to bring this song to life in our cells by using these daily measures.
When a parent makes life-generating practices a daily priority, the whole family reaps the rewards. By contrast, typically the mothers who say that they do not have the time for these practices—e.g., shopping for wholesome produce, bouncing for fifteen minutes on a rebounder (or enjoying any other chi-activating, lymph-cleansing activity), meditating, unwinding with a soak in the tub before consuming their evening meal, and so on—are the same ones who will stop for fast food or give their kids school cafeteria food and then spend hours on the phone or flipping through the tabloids! There is always time, energy, and yes, even money for the life-generating practices. But there are just as many life-deteriorating choices that offer instant gratification and temporary distraction that can mire the uncommitted individual in a purgatory of uninspired life experience.
The key is for parents to create a new blueprint for living—a new paradigm filled with the life-generating practices that serve the whole being. When the family leaders follow the socially conditioned blueprints of the modern lifestyle, they not only perpetuate the paradigm of untruth for the next generation, but they also seal the doom of their children’s physical, mental, and emotional imbalances! While parents would never willingly give their child Parkinson’s or other debilitating diseases, all too often they will feed their children packaged junk foods and sodas and place them in front of video games and the TV for hours on end—which will lead to the same result! The longer we avert our eyes from the truth, the longer we will walk around in the dark, banging into walls that we could avoid by switching on the light.
Here’s what parents need to know: diseases will manifest in the modern paradigm of “childcare.” That is a given. How the illness will manifest varies from child to child, but discerning health experts can usually predict the category of disease simply by knowing exactly what the child has been exposed to and how the body reacts to those onslaughts. Will the illness be an autoimmune disease like Hashimoto’s, endometriosis, lupus, lymphoma, cancer, or multiple sclerosis? Will it be a neurological imbalance that will make the child grow into a socially handicapped teen and adult on the autism spectrum, only to culminate in Bell’s palsy or Parkinson’s? (Don’t think for a second that those food and drug chemicals and flashing screens don’t affect the central nervous system—they do, and the more a child is exposed to them, the more quickly and the more acute the illness that surfaces will be.) Or will it manifest as inner distress that leads to substance abuse and/or eating disorders?
The physical manifestations of exposure to pollution and radiation through the consumption of food, drink, and medication are growing more monstrous all the time. Yesterday’s imbalances (with the exception of a few epidemics) affected the few. They have been supplanted by today’s much more vicious illnesses, which affect whole portions of the population. The diseases of tomorrow will be exponentially more disastrous, affecting so many more. If things don’t change soon, they could mutate humankind into beings we don’t even want to imagine—think Shaun of the Dead or 28 Days Later!
Today’s artificial, toxic way of life is making people more unpredictable and dangerous. Consider the fact that virtually all of the recent school shootings, from Columbine to Virginia Tech, have involved mood-altering drugs and antidepressants like Ritalin, Paxil, and Luvox. Yet, the number of children taking Ritalin nationally jumped from 500,000 in 1987 to more than 6 million by 2001! Of course, this makes for a very sad equation for our young people, who suffer the most when parents are asleep at the helm. All of this can be avoided with a generation of conscious parents.
Your children will not love you more because you buy them the Wii or keep a storehouse of candy at home. I’ll tell you, my kids love me plenty and they get NONE OF IT. In fact, they appreciate the way we live because they understand it. Yes, they go to school and learn their arithmetic, but at home they get an education in the things that will ensure the best life experience for them today and always. At home they learn what is life-generating, what is not, and most importantly, WHY. Lids love to know why! At home they learn the Universal Laws of Nature. And they enjoy it—they eat it up! They can discern between quality entertainment and common mind poison. At their tender ages, they know more than most adults do about the basic laws of life. This is what we need to be teaching the young if we want a beautiful, fruitful life experience for them and a healthy planet for them to live on.
It’s time to stop trying to assuage the guilt of being in an office all day or being otherwise distracted by giving them these artificial forms of food and entertainment. They will not love you more for it any more than you love yourself more when you overeat or drink too much! The child’s soul knows that you are providing them with harmful substances, but as their addictions to these things grow, their relationship with their “supplier” grows more complicated. Supplementing junk food and junk entertainment for the real stuff of life, love, and truth will never serve anyone’s highest good. But it will make you poorer – in your pocketbook, in your creativity, in your child’s priceless personality.<br /> It’s never too late to transition the whole family toward a new paradigm of truth! I know there’s someone out there saying, “Well, Natalia, don’t you understand that some of these parents are single working moms and dads, that they might be financially challenged and juggling several jobs?” I once saw a bumper sticker on our handyman’s truck when I was a kid that read: “I’m so poor I can’t even pay attention!” I fully realize that many parents are facing financial challenges, but that does not mean they can relinquish responsibility for precious human life! Living in the “Life-light,” as I like to call it—that wave of Life Force Energy that floods the clean body and illuminates the consequently clear mind and heart—is not a luxury for the rich and idle. It is a necessity for a healthy life.
The more you live in the Life-light, the better your life experience is. It’s the only place from which you can make fruitful choices. To say that there are no resources for life-generating action, only for the rat race and the cheap, crass consumption of dead food and media, is the ultimate in impoverished thinking! You can be poor and live in a richer body, mind, and heart space than any king! I know a homeless man who collects cans to get money that he spends on organic produce at our local health food store. He is robust and glowing. The store manager responds to this man’s dignity and gives him a fresh vegetable juice and other goodies when he comes in. By contrast, the same store is full of well-heeled Upper-East-siders who are lethargic, pale, and fat, loading up on diet bars and organic white flour!
I fully appreciate the challenge of making time for those things that keep us in the Life-light. I am not living in a bubble. I live in the middle of Manhattan with two school-aged children and a household to maintain (it’s very important to keep your space clean and clear if you want a clean, clear body and life experience). I have more e-mails and phone calls and projects than I can ever keep up with; I often work late into the night after I’ve tucked everyone into bed. But I do not compromise on those things that keep my cells ringing with health, my heart open to love my family, and my mind uncluttered and peaceful.
Living each moment of each day surfing the great life-generating wave comes first, as it is the seed for the entire garden of my life. Sure, I fall off my surfboard now and then when I am less than vigilant than usual, but for the most part, practice has afforded me skill, and it will do the same for you! Besides, the falls are never in vain, for they remind me how important it is to remain vigilant and how undesirable the alternative is.
So how do you avoid falling off of the great life-generating wave that makes life so fruitful? By making the life-generating activities non-negotiable and fitting the rest of your life’s demands in and around them, depending on your personal wiring and your exposure to inharmonious substances. Some practices are simply sacred to my day, which I have discovered only after many falls off my surfboard. I have finally smartened up to the sacredness of these activities and made the decision to demand that my other daily activities work around them—NOT the other way around!
It’s not easy at all, and I’m sure I’ve unintentionally offended a lot of people in my community because it means that I must say no to many things that would otherwise compromise my resources. It means that I rarely volunteer for activities at my kids’ school or engage socially with the parents. I don’t, for example, go for coffee with the moms after dropping the kids off at school. Instead, I get on my bike and ride around Central Park or enjoy a run. I don’t make lunch dates, because that’s precious time for developing projects, meditating, or working on other aspects of my “garden.” Nor do I spend a lot of time texting, e-mailing, and chatting on the phone. Modern communication is a major time zap, and most of it is unnecessary and unsatisfying.
Communications can leach hours out of each day. I communicate as necessary (which still requires more of my time than I’d like), but not more. I indulge in the love and connection of my immediate family and my closest friends, but I engage very little with periphery acquaintances. In short, to create the life I want and to maintain the pleasures of a fruitful personal and professional life, I protect my world from those things that will dilute my power. I am not perfect at this—it’s a delicate balance, and there are no hard and fast rules that cannot be broken. It’s just a general setup that serves me well. Flexibility is a key ingredient! I love relating and engaging with others, but I am watchful that a little socializing doesn’t snowball into something that compromises my center. Besides, between business and school, there are already too many demands unrelated to my joy and my family’s joy that need tending to, so why create more of them?
Each of you has your own joy, your own dream, your own way of expressing yourself. Some of you love socializing over tea or veggie juice with the moms at drop-off, and you have enough time and domestic help to prevent this choice from forcing a compromise—you’ll still be able to get the best produce, keep your chi flow strong, and so on. Great, enjoy the social time! But if you spend two hours with the ladies, and then you have a house to clean and work that needs your attention, what have you accomplished in terms of a more life-generating body, mind, and heart that day? When it’s suddenly time to pick up your kids, you are weary and spent. That sets up all the dominos to fall. It may start with you eating the wrong things at the wrong times (like snacking on chips with your kids) and other life-deteriorating choices follow because you have knocked your biochemistry off-center.
So as your kids get back into their new routines as school, I encourage all of you parents out there—and this goes for non-parents, too—to enroll yourselves in the School of Life. Commit yourself to the following life-generating activities (which I further describe on my website and in all of my books):
• Vigorous physical activity (to get the chi flowing and clean the blood with the alkalinity of pure oxygen)
• Sunbathing or infrared sweating
• Colon cleansing like enemas or gravity colonics (frequency varies according to the individual)
• Guided meditation, or any other type of meditation that’s effective for you (please see my recommended meditation audios and scroll down to CDs; or just focus on deep breathing until you fall into a recharging nap)
• Deep stretching and inversions (incline varies person to person)
• Daily raw vegetable juicing and of course consuming the most alkaline, water-rich plant food available to you as the focal point of your dietary intake
Your homework is to develop a new way of implementing as much of these life-generating practices as you can and to enjoy the fruits of this lifestyle in all areas of your life! Ah, school days!
