There are four basic things we need to do in order to stay healthy and live to a ripe old age:
First, identify imbalances in their early stages and fix them before they progress into a full-blown disease
Second, eat healthy freshly made food cooked at home with wholesome ingredients, avoiding leftover, frozen, canned, prepackaged and fast foods.
Third, follow a good daily routine which means go to bed early, before 10:00 PM, waking up early (as the sun is coming up), get some sunshine on your skin for at least 20-30 minutes a day, depending on your skin type and exercise.
And finally, it is important to learn correct detox to take the load off the liver and kidneys, which are the main detoxifying organs.
Today we are just going to focus on detoxification. I’d like to at least give you the theory behind it so that when you begin your detox programs you have an understanding of what it is you are trying to do and why you need to do it carefully and systematically.
Mainstream medical doctors aren’t focused on detox at all, as it’s not something they learned how to do in medical school. Combine that with the fact that America is only about 250 years old and never had a chance to develop a system of holistic medicine or to study and delve into proper protocols for cleansing. In fact, we don’t even know most of the herbs available to us and how to properly use them.
Ayurveda, however, is a 5,000 year-old tradition of holistic medicine from India which has been instructing their patients in cleanses for thousands of years so it’s good to see what those ancient doctors had to say about it.
One thing they did mention in their textbooks, however, was that they could not foresee what would happen in the future so they would leave it up to the newer doctors of Ayurveda to rewrite the chapters so it could mold itself to the changing times, always following the basic guidelines contained within the scope of Ayurveda.
And that is exactly what my teacher and mentor, Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra did. He came from an extremely long family lineage of Ayurvedic doctors, dating back 5,000 years. I was one of the first doctors he trained when he came to America in the late 1990’s, and once he started taking the pulses of my patients, he quickly realized that we needed to change up the ancient Ayurvedic cleanses to fit what’s happening in this modern era.
For example, nowadays we have very dangerous toxins that we’re all harboring deep in our cells, which our ancestors were never exposed to. Toxins such as pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, environmental toxins, air pollution, and pesticides. These toxins are acidic by nature which is why the whole earth right now is very hot and experiencing global warming on a broader scale as it too is suffering the consequences of environmental and industrial pollutants.
He felt that the ancient Ayurvedic cleanse, known as Panchakarma, was actually a little too potent for dealing with these new types of toxins. The reason is this: once we are exposed to toxins, whether they come through the skin, we swallow them or we breathe them in, they can travel to the deep tissues, such as the bone marrow, brain, fat cells — all over the body. When we pull them out they have to travel through physical channels as they exit through the bowel movement, urine and sweat.
These very hot toxins are so piercing and dangerous, that we must carefully control how much we are pulling out at a time and we must prepare the channels for handling these hot toxins, otherwise they could rupture these very delicate microchannels and then you are in big trouble, because now the toxins can roam all over the body and there’s nothing you can do now that they have escaped. This is why some people actually develop autoimmune diseases such as fibromyalgia, after their panchakarma treatments.
I mention this because what I intend to do in this video is to give you the information and theory behind the art of detoxification, but not the actual cleanses that we administer to our patients. I do this because each person is unique and is harboring various amounts and different types of toxins which have travelled to different parts of the body, depending on the person’s genetic makeup.
For example, one patient might have been on a dangerous acne medicine for the last 6 months, which is famous for traveling deep into the bone marrow. So this type of toxin needs a different protocol for pulling it out than someone who works in a lab with chemicals and has already developed an autoimmune disease from the accumulation of those chemicals disrupting their immune system. Or a farmer who sprays his fields with pesticides and is now suffering from Parkinson’s as these dangerous chemicals have made their way into the part of the brain known as the Substantia Nigra where the dopamine is made.
Also, some people can handle detoxification better than others, so it’s best to walk the patient through the whole cleansing process very carefully and slowly, always cutting back on the detox if they get rashes, digestive upset or any other symptoms along the way.
Vaidya Mishra taught me that it is better to pull the toxins out slowly over a longer period of time rather than pulling them out quickly and risking lots of side effects like rupturing the channels in the process.
So let’s begin our discussion about detox by first stating that it is important to fix your digestion before starting up any cleansing program because if digestion isn’t working correctly then you will just keep making toxins from the food you eat and you won’t get very far. You’ll be cleansing which removes toxins, then making more toxins as you eat, then cleansing, then making more from the improper digestion of the food. So in effect, you’ll just be spinning your wheels and not getting very far.
It is also important to prepare yourself for the cleanses by making sure the liver is cool and the channels are lubricated so they can handle these very hot modern toxins as they exit the body. It is best to work with your Ayurvedic practitioner as they will let you know how these various issues are doing before you start your cleansing programs.
So now, having said all that, let’s take a look at what exactly it is we’re cleansing. I remember when I first sat with Vaidya Mishra and he started teaching me about cleansing I thought that maybe there were some patients who had been exposed to chemicals or had a bad diet who were in need of cleansing, while everyone else was OK. But the truth is, we ALL need to be cleansing.
Let’s take a deeper look at why this is so.
There are four types of toxins: they’re known as: ama, ama visha, gar visha and electromagnetic toxins.
Ama means partially digested food that’s stuck in the intestinal tract. Normally when you swallow the food, it has to be broken down by the digestive system into very small particles that can be absorbed out of the intestines and into the bloodstream. Once that happens we feel very light and buoyant after eating as the nutrients are taken up by the cellular system.
But if either something is wrong with our digestion and/or the food is too heavy, then it only partially breaks down and forms ama, which clogs the channel. An example of ama clogging a channel is a baby who is formula fed who keeps getting ear infections. This is because the formulas are too heavy compared to breastmilk which is very light and easily digested. So these heavy formulas end up sitting in the gut forming ama and end up clogging the various channels around the body. In the process, the little ear canals clog with ama and then start to breed infection, which is why formula fed babies get many more ear infections than breastfed babies.
The second type of toxin is called ama visha. The word visha means poison, so this is ama which has rotted and fermented forming a highly acidic toxin which can now pave the way for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Regular ama is cold and just clogs the channel, which is bad enough because it can breed infection. But ama visha is hot and reactive by nature which is why it can blossom into an autoimmune disease or cancer if allowed to sit in the physiology. People who have these types of diseases have inflammation and the insides of their cells are acidic.
The third type of toxin is known as gar visha. These are toxins from outside the body, such as air pollution, pesticides, industrial toxins, pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals. This type of toxin is also highly reactive and hot, causing cancer and autoimmune diseases if allowed to accumulate within our bodies.
The fourth and final type of toxin is electromagnetic radiation coming from cell phones, computers, smart meters, cell phone towers, and X rays for example. This is actually the most dangerous of the four toxins since this toxin is found in the space element and can mingle in with prana, the life energy coming from nature which is also found in the space element. Prana is the vibration from the sun and the moon which comes in at the top of the head, through the orifices in the face such as the nostrils and ears, and circulates through the body’s vibrational channels, supplying prana to all the organs, glands and the entire cellular system. Since it is the vibration of prana which gives rise to the physical structure of the body, it is important that the prana coming into our body is pure. But when the prana mixes in with electromagnetic radiation it can create confusion in the cellular system, which is why cancer can grow from too much exposure to electromagnetic radiation. Don’t forget, our cells are creating every second of every day and they must remain intelligent in their functions. Once they get confused they can make mistakes, which is what cancer is, where the cells can’t remember what they’re supposed to do and just keep haphazardly growing wildly out of control.
So now that you have a feel for the four types of toxins it is good to understand that each of them needs to be removed in a specific way. Since ama is cold and clogging you have to burn it out with hot herbs and spices, and hot teas.
Ama visha and gar visha, however are already hot and acidic, so there is an art to removing them. The trick is to keep the liver cool during the detox process, while at the same time keeping the channels lubricated and constantly monitoring the patients as they go through their cleanses. For example, if too much ama visha comes out through the pores in the skin you might develop a rash as this very hot toxin exits the body. So during the cleanses cooling teas are given to protect the organs of elimination, which are the skin, the liver, bowel and kidneys. This is how toxins exit the body: through the bowel movement, urine and sweat.
In ancient times, ama was the main toxin which needed to be addressed. This is why there are lots of teas and formulas designed to burn ama out of the channels. And this is also why many of the cleanses were based on hot pepper, such as the master cleanse which uses cayenne pepper and maple syrup. Even the Ayurvedic cleanses use ginger and different types of pepper to cleanse.
This type of cleansing worked in past centuries, but doesn’t work so well now with these modern types of hot toxins. Burning out hot toxins with hot teas and hot herbs will throw you into a detox crisis, giving you digestive upset, rashes and many other symptoms.
So now you can see why I can’t give specific protocols here, first because you have to know exactly which of the four types of toxins you are holding onto and where they went (could they be in the fat cells, in the liver, the brain, the bone marrow). And depending on where they went we would direct the cleanse to those areas specifically, while giving an overall cleanse to the whole body.
But at least now you know some theory behind the cleansing process and that it’s probably not a good idea to just jump into a cleanse without knowing more details about the types of toxins you want to remove and where they need to be removed from.
This why we physicians have to study this topic for many years and be careful when developing our patients’ cleanses.
Having said that, once you learn how to cleanse properly, you will be doing a great service to your body, taking the load off the liver, which is the main filter of toxins and which has a heavy load to bear in this modern age with all the toxins it has to deal with. And always remember, just about any disease you can think of had its origins in a toxic liver. It’s just that the modern doctors don’t trace the diseases back to where they began. They pretty much diagnose and name the disease and then give pharmaceuticals, which are toxic to the liver to suppress the symptoms of that disease.
Now you can see why learning correct Ayurvedic detox is so important. It is the best thing you can do to prevent cancer and other serious diseases. In fact, many people ask me if there is a cure for cancer, and I say yes, the cure is in preventing it.
And it starts with a good diet, an early bedtime, being out in the sun, exercising and cleansing the impurities from the body so they don’t build up and cause the cancer in the first place.
I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you.