Gaining and Maintaining Health Is a Delicate Dance

Our bodies do the best job they can in rejuvenating us and keeping us healthy as long as we do what’s best for them. The short list is to provide adequate love, sleep, raw food, sunshine and water. The thing is, we sometimes or even often get in the way.

I had a reminder over the weekend about this as I got in my own way of my body’s detoxification process. I brought grapes for my meal at the Arnold’s Way monthly buffet on Saturday night, but they weren’t of good quality, lacking in taste and low in sugar. I wound up eating some of the dishes available to the roughly 50 who gathered for a meal and to listen to Cassandra Glynn Kutner tell her story about how she lost 135 pounds on a vegan diet before finding a low-fat raw food diet, which is helping her reverse multiple sclerosis. Kutner is easing into her training for a marathon, a goal of hers.

This marked the first time in four months I ate foods I consider to be “out of bounds” for regular consumption but will, a few days a year, eat: onion, garlic, salt and nama shoyu, the latter two because they’re in many dishes at these potlucks. The following day, I felt tired and irritable, but then something else happened that was unexpected, given my previous experiences with subpar foods, which usually affect me for a few days. My energy level shot up Monday and, especially, Tuesday, with the latter being my most productive day in months.

You see, my body for seven weeks had been in a heavy detoxification mode caused by my ill-fated use of a grounding mat plugged into an electrical outlet. I had taken in electricity for many hours a day—lots of it while sleeping, our opportunity to recharge—and was paying the price during a long recovery period in which I needed about an hour of extra sleep and experienced less energy. I also faced constant breakouts. This experiment in the name of enhanced health had really taken a toll on me.

Because I gave my body a new healing crisis to manage in this irritant-containing food, it was hands off in tinkering away at all that had gone wrong from my use of the Earthing mat (also check out Don Bennett’s article “To Ground or Not to Ground.”) My body will get back to this deep cleansing period in its mission to achieve perfect working order when it is ready. I learned this last last year when I got sick a few weeks after returning to Pennsylvania from Thailand, where I had fallen ill because of water contamination. My body chose its time, signaling to me that rest was the highest priority at this moment.

These recent healing crises and, in particular, Kutner’s riveting story about her quest for health have given me a freshened perspective on the kinds of challenges men and women, boys and girls, young and old face every day in their state of being and, for some, during their transitions to a raw food diet. It really is such a delicate dance to have the knowledge, ambition and discipline to serve ourselves the best way we can. After a few missteps during a transition, many might turn their backs on a raw food diet forever, thinking they don’t have the ankles for all the spins and falls they might’ve been taken for.

I say to all these folks: Get up, stand tall and stay until the music moves you, until you glide naturally and effortlessly. Show yourself and the whole world you have the legs to make it to your destination.

Kutner spent four years bedridden and overweight, suffering from a debilitating disease. One day, this New Jersey mother made a change, stuck to it, and her whole world opened up. She’s shown up for this delicate dance, all right, having been through much rougher circumstances. She could barely get out of bed before 5 p.m. not too long ago. Now, she’s walking as many as 9 miles a day.

You have to see your destination for you to get there. Make it happen.

It’s ecstasy, I promise.