Well, this is day 3 of the cleanse for those of us who started on Sunday. Its been fun so far and a lot more work for me than I'm used to doing for my food. Usually.....(I know this is bad) I eat at restaurants often because I'm so busy and I have a lot of meetings. The one thing I keep forgetting when I agree to meet someone at a restaurant is that I can only eat vegetables and protein. Fortunately by the time I get there, I remember.

The other thing is the forgiveness meditation. I've found it to be very healing on a certain level. I haven't really got anyone that I'm still holding a major grudge with anymore, but I have a low grade hurt that causes my attitude to be a certain way. That's healing with this meditation.

I'd love to hear anyone's experiences here if you're having any. Perhaps you just feel a bit better from eating so many vegetables? Or the exercises are feeling good?

The liver is the organ that is most active in spring time. It has to do with the emotions of anger and frustration, so you may notice that you find yourself somewhat more irritable than usual sometimes, especially on a windy day.

The best way to heal anger is to find that place of forgiveness inside of ourselves. In the 5 elements system, the liver leads to the heart, which represents the emotion of joy. To find joy, you need to find forgiveness.

For our cleanse, since we are focussing on the liver, I would like to have everyone do 5 minutes a day of forgiveness meditation. You can do anything you'd like but if you don't have an idea of how to forgive, I would suggest the following. Imagine a situation or person that you still have anger towards. Review the situation in your mind, and let yourself feel all the anger and hurt you have.

Let it grow inside of yourself and think of the person you are angry with. Try to find the positive aspects of the experience you had, how did you grow from it? What did it help you to learn? Then find a way wihin yourself to let go of as much of the anger as you can. Find forgiveness within yourself. You may still find that you don't want to talk to that person or have them in your life, but you can still forgive and find peace within yourslef about this issue.

Do this every day during our cleanse, if you want to use the same event over and over again, that's okay.  Keep at it until you can feel the difference within yourself. 

Have you had a medical problem that you didn't understand, or worse yet, that your doctor didn't seem to understand? In medical school, we called these problems, "idiopathic" meaning the doctor didn't know what the patient had.  Quite often we're willing to accept a level of physical discomfort unsure how to go about solving it or just frustrated because we haven't found a solution within the things we know how to do. If you're willing to step outside of the box of whatever you know, you might find a new way to heal your body.

Allie had a cough for 10 years. She had been to many medical doctors and had tests and many diagnoses. None of them brought her results. One doctor told her she had a disease from smoking even though she had never smoked. He told her that she was just in denial about her smoking. Chinese herbs and acupuncture were able to help her begin to heal her lungs.

I have another man who had symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome for years. He was given all sorts of medical tests without results, and even saw an acupuncturist who told him to change his diet.Everything helped a little but when he came to me, but he was still having discomfort in his intestines. No one had tested him for parasites, which is what he had. When I treated him, he told me that he noticed an emotional change as the parasites disappeared from his body.

We all have times when we feel like we don't understand what our bodies are trying to say to us. Never give up trying, even if you don't find the answer right away, the journey to healing the problem is also an important part of your process.

Hi Everyone:

As promised, the spring cleanse is here.

This is a brief intro to it. I plan to start on March 7th, a Sunday and go through March 15th.

There are 5 main components to this cleanse. I will post an addition on my web page blog at www.hthmc.com for you to read about the details of each component every day. Then on March 7, I'll begin the cleanse and send out recipes and suggestions as we go.

1. Green drinks

2. fiber and intestinal cleansing

3. Lots of vegetables - 50% of your food

4. Yoga or qi gong moves every morning

5. Forgiveness meditation - the emotion of the liver is anger, forgiveness is the way to love and compassion through the liver channel.

While doing this cleanse, I would recommend that you stop dairy, sugar, gluten containing foods, and alcohol.

If you have caffeine, I would suggest tea rather than coffee, with no milk or sugar in it.

Update on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 9:46AM by Shiroko Sokitch, MD

Part I - the green drink

make a green drink every morning, use a blender, vitamixer, or other superblender

take a small apple, 1/2 banana, some blueberries, strawberries, or raspberries

water

3-4 leaves of chard, spinach(a handfull in this case) or kale, and dandelion leaves will help the liver cleanse more

a piece of ginger (depending on your taste

a tablespoon of chia seeds or ground flax seeds

a tablespoon of sunflower seeds or 3 walnuts

1/2 a lemon

pour water over the top, and some ice if you like, blend until everything is broken up completely

pour into mason jar, drink a glass for breakfast and then sip it all day.

Update on Monday, February 22, 2010 at 11:38AM by Shiroko Sokitch, MD

Part II of the cleanse

Fiber and Cleansing

There are several options. The easiest is to buy Yerba Prima all fiber capsules, beginning on the first day of the cleanse, take 2 capsules twice a day, then increase to 3 the next day and 4 the day after that. On the 5th day of the cleanse, begin taking bentonite clay - 1 Tablespoon twice a day, with lots of water. You will only do this for 3 days. Drink plenty of water with all this fiber.

If you want to use liver cleansing herbs, Amazon herbs makes a product I like, Fiberzon, which has herbs for cleansing in it. You can just use 2 doses of that per day instead of the fiber and bentonite clay.

The point of this cleanse is to make it easy for you to do, which will make it more likely that you'll do it.

Update on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:10PM by Shiroko Sokitch, MD

Part III - Diet

Diet should be 50% vegetables, meaning that all day, everything you eat, half of it should be vegetables. You can steam, bake, boil, stir fry, whatever works for you. One way to make it easy is to make a big pot of soup with tons of vegies in it, then reheat small portions throughout the day (hopefully not with a microwave!) You can eat any protein you like, meat, fish, chicken, beans, whatever feels good. You can also eat grains, I'd recommend quinoa as the cleanest, leanest, but you can also eat brown rice. Toasted walnuts are another good source of protein/fat that you could have with your breakfast.

Don't eat any white foods at all - ie bread, sugar, milk, dairy, cheese, even bananas aren't great.

Do not skip meals, have at least 3 meals a day, you can have the green drink for a snack or you can have some vegies and protein for a snack.

Fruits are okay but I would only have them in the green drink for this diet.

 

Update on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 1:41PM by Shiroko Sokitch, MD

Part IV - yoga, pilates, or qi gong

This part involves moving your body in a gentle way. You can take a class, or find a dvd that has some poses, or if you know some yoga, you can do your own thing.You should do some form of movement for 20 minutes a day. If you decide to do some cardio, try to go outside and take walks, be more reflective in your exercising this week.

If you know the sun salutation, you can do it 12 times a day, for the week.

Slow gentle movements that allow all of your muscles and ligaments to be involved are great. Here is a link to an instructional diagram and write up. (the internet is so great!)  http://www.abc-of-yoga.com/yogapractice/sunsalutation.asp  And here's a brief qi gong demo - http://www.everyday-taichi.com/tai-chi-qi-gong.html

Have you ever noticed that when you have a negative feeling or are uncomfortable in some way, you want to "get rid of it?"  For years, whenever I felt jealous or angry or hurt, I would say, that I wanted to get rid of that negative emotion. I spent time trying to move faster through whatever it was I was feeling in order to get it over with. The thing I learned was that those feelings never go away. They stay with us and provide us with opportunities to slow down and learn something from ourselves.

We're that way with our bodies too, always impatient, wanting to get rid of that cold or flu or sore back or cancer. One of my clients told me today that she just wants a pill to fix it now. We live in an instant coffee society. Always thinking that the quick fix will just make it better.

More and more, I think we're all realizing there are no quick fixes. Our medical system is a mess, outrageously expensive, and overburdened much of it trying to find a quick fix.

We are souls inside of bodies. Sometimes our souls speak out through our bodies or emotions, asking us to grow and learn something new. We need to slow down in those moments and allow the process to occur with compassion, patience, and love. Even if you have a flu, there's an emotional connection to it, that needs to allow itself to release through your body.

There's no getting rid of your anger, hurt, or jealousy, there's finding a way to navigate it so that it has space in your life. When you can have compassion for yourself in those moments, you may also suddenly find that there's more room for the fun stuff too.