Why Taking Supplements Leads to Enlightenment

A friend of ours recently took an over-the-counter medication for intestinal gas. The results were amazing, and not in a good way. Although she got minor relief, it was followed by a splitting headache, and that night she had horrible, violent nightmares.

While we were still musing about the power of what we ingest to affect the body-mind, we noticed the cover of the new issue of The Intelligent Optimist. It announcedan article within on “Why taking supplements leads to enlightenment.”

While we’ve noticed being happier and more clear-minded since cleaning up our diet and adopting a program of high-quality supplements, we were especially intrigued that this article’s author is a modern-day shaman. While he has academic credentials, Alberto Villoldo, PhD, reports spending thirty years in the high Andes and the Amazon, training with master shamans. Yet, as we read his article, we found him recommending a similar diet and many of the same supplements Beyond Health recommends.

Although higher consciousness—recognizing and living from a place of realizing our essential oneness with all of life—is the ultimate goal, like all traditional spiritual systems, the shamanic approach requires starting off with a healthy body-mind.

Villoldo recommends a six-month program to “repair the brain” so we can stop “creating psychosomatic disease and begin to create psychosomatic health.”

This involves returning to the diet of our pre-agricultural ancestors: leafy green and cruciferous vegetables, nuts, seeds, avocados, berries, eggs, the good fats, a cup of beans daily, and small amounts of meat and fish. These foods, he says, “will up-regulate the expression of the genes that create health, and down-regulate the genes that create disease.” In his years spent among indigenous people who eat such a diet, he found they were generally quite happy and had no heart disease, no cancer and no dementia.

Like Beyond Health, he forbids certain damaging foods like sugar and artificial sweeteners, dairy (perhaps making an exception for occasional goat cheese or goat yogurt), coffee, gluten and processed grains. Processed grains, he says, turn into sugar as soon as we eat them, and sugar “feeds the lower brain, the primitive, predatory brain that focuses on survival and is tremendously aggressive and competitive, not collaborative.”

Villoldo also believes in supplementing with omega-3 fats, especially EPA and DHA, which he says are essential for repairing the brain. Other supplements he recommends for brain health include vitamin D3, curcumin, trans-resveratrol, probiotics and coconut oil (which he calls “jet fuel for the brain).

Once the body-mind is in a healthy condition, Villoldo uses techniques for clearing the “luminous energy field” (LEF) that surrounds each person of patterns of suffering that hold us back from enjoying perfect health and proceeding unimpeded on our path towards ultimate enlightenment.

It’s interesting to see that many people are coming to similar conclusions about diet and supplements. Although we’d add a good multi and vitamin C along with suggestions for eliminating environmental toxins, Villoldo’s recommendations aren’t far from the Beyond Health lifestyle.

References:

1. Villoldo A. Hacking the human biofield. The Intelligent Optimist. Spring 2015;13(1):29-33.