Tiffany Garres holds a master’s degree from Texas State University in molecular biology and is a trained, certified and experienced quantum hypnotherapist. She is the author of Your Quantum Power: A Revolutionary Path to Self-Love and Personal Sovereignty, published in 2020. She is passionate about fruit and its amazing healing power. She has championed a cause in Central Texas to create the annual Texas Fruit Festival. Backed by decades of corporate, professional, international, entrepreneurship and diverse business experience, she merges these skills to provide a service and benefit to her community and lands. Visit TexasFruitFestival.com for more information.
My name is Tiffany Garres, and I am the creator and facilitator of Texas Fruit Festival. This year, in 2021, I was inspired and motivated by Divine guidance to create this first-of-its-kind festival here, in the heart of Texas, where I am from.
My goal is to create an annual celebration of fruit that raises awareness to its message and normalizes holistic healing. In fact, the three main areas of focus for Texas Fruit Festival are body, consciousness and Earth. These three focus areas are addressed through self-healing, self-empowerment and self-love. For healing can only start within, with oneself.
Paths to Self-Healing Are Many, But the Fruitarian Path Delivers Powerful and Detoxifying Healing
There are many—probably infinite—paths to self-healing. These paths can be narrowed into core areas such as physical well-being, emotional healing, mental health and spiritual alignment. Among these areas, the physical body is the densest, the slowest to change, whereas emotions, thoughts and our spirit are more changeable and transmuting. This means that our body stores information in the form of thoughts, beliefs, emotions, hormones and molecules (matter). They translate into habits and are integrated into our human experience through the food we consume.
For this reason, when speaking in terms of holistic healing, a main and important focus is the food we eat. The kind of food we eat, as well as where it comes from, how it was treated, processed and how it affects our bodies are all important questions. Of all the foods available to us, the healthiest and most healing are raw, living foods. Among all living, raw foods, fruit takes the prize for its powerful and detoxifying healing properties.
While living, uncooked vegetables and herbs are nutritive and can have potent medicinal properties, fruit is a food that is the most abundant, life-giving and healing to planet Earth and her inhabitants. Nature freely gives us seeded fruits as gifts for our nourishment and vitality. We can have all we need from a fruit-based diet, enjoying meals consisting of fruit alone and enjoying its euphoric effects.
Fruit is hydrating, clarifying and cleansing to our body, full of biophotons (living light-filled enzymes) and harms none. We can detoxify our body of what no longer serves us by eating this diet, which is biologically suitable for our species. For we were always meant to eat living foods in a raw, vegan lifestyle. We know this because it heals us while cooked, dead foods harm us. Fruit is a gift available to us all if we will only rise in our own self-empowerment and believe we can have it for ourselves.
Tiffany Garres Felt Alone While Embarking on Her Raw Vegan Lifestyle Journey
This is very much the narrative of my personal fruit-based raw vegan transition and lifestyle. For a long time, I didn’t believe I could do it. I was also not healing like I knew I could, not growing spiritually, not that happy and unfulfilled with my expression of the human experience. Compounding this self-imposed barrier to my own optimal health was a lack of a fruitarian raw vegan community. I embarked on this journey alone, falling back often to my dependency on cooked, dead foods. When I did so, my body felt sluggish and tired, and I continued to experience suboptimal health.
The truth is that I was embarking on my path to self-healing alone, grasping for the information, inspiration, belief, community and vision for what I could truly experience. What I have found is that we can be and feel better than we could ever imagine. We can enjoy optimal health and well-being while healing ourselves and detoxifying in this regenerative and joyful lifestyle. We can live a pain-free life and address inflammation, malaise and more by eating a fruit-based raw vegan diet.
But the foods we choose to eat is a highly personal choice. It is an exercise of free will to eat what we want to eat. What’s important here, though, is to ask: Are we truly self-empowered in our decision-making? Are we healing ourselves with the foods we eat? Do we feel better in our body by what we eat? Is what we decide to eat an expression of self-love in an act of self-healing? I believe we can measure our self-love, in part, by what we eat. So, is the food we are eating an expression of pure self-love?
Self-Empowerment Can Help Propel Us on Our Lifestyle Journeys
Self-empowerment is an important topic to discuss when breaching the subject of optimal health through diet. We are self-empowered when we become aware of the impact our choices have on our lives. We are empowered when we educate ourselves and make informed decisions, with trust and faith in ourselves and our bodies.
All too often, the convenience of processed, packaged foods, combined with the constant direct and subliminal messaging of brand advertising, can impel us to consistently make decisions that are harmful to our own health and that of our families. For far too many of us are sick, toxic and malnourished from cooked, processed, packaged and fast foods. Everyone, including our children and elders, can experience greater levels of health and healing by eating more fruits. Fruit can be enjoyed by everyone and is essential for our well-being. We need the antioxidants and astringent, clarifying properties fruit offers to live a long, healthy life.
It is also important to note foods are often used as a vehicle for addiction that can destroy our health. The truth is that when we are informed of the healthiest, most-loving choices for ourselves and are able to believe that we are worthy of self-love, we can begin to address our addictions by replacing what harms us, with what will heal us: fruit.
Building Fruit Festivals and Fruit Communities Can Help Transform the Planet
This is why it is so important to celebrate the healing virtues of fruit and to establish the normalization of a fruit-based raw vegan lifestyle. It is essential we create fruit festivals and communities that can share the multilevel and far-reaching message fruit has to offer to save humanity. Just imagine if most of the people on the planet ate a fruit-based raw vegan diet. The world would change as we know it. Planet Earth would look different from how we experience her now. Humans of all ages would be healthier, happier, more fulfilled and more self-empowered. Earth would be full of more-diverse, nutrient-dense, quality organic and wild fruits. We would value life and fruit and protect it. We would live among fruit orchards and experience the bliss of harmony and beauty living in rhythm with Mother Nature while harming none. We would live in joyful, peaceful coexistence with all life. This would be heaven on Earth.
This brings me to another important point that the lack of compassion for ourselves (and others) can be a formidable barrier to surmount on the journey to self-healing. Compassion, like other expressions of love, is a virtue. It is pure, limitless, unconditional and never-ending—it is infinite. Therefore, it is not exclusive or discriminating; it is available to all, including animals. Divine virtues bring us closer to love, to God. Without opening ourselves to virtues such as compassion, trust, peace, joy, healing, forgiveness, gratitude and courage, we suffer, for we reject love. When we reject love, we reject ourselves. Love is a natural human emotion and is an elevated state of being that is our birthright. When we cut ourselves off from love, essentially shutting down our experience of love, we are rejecting love in our human experience.
Rising to virtue, as a self-expressed lifestyle begins to address exactly what we eat, we must ask: How can we be compassionate to ourselves when our actions are harming our body? When our body is sick, we are not experiencing optimal emotional, mental or spiritual health. So, when we eat healthier, we are healthier. When we are healthier, we are naturally happier. This is a natural ascension in our human experience that becomes one of self-empowerment because we begin to look with and take ownership of our feelings. We begin to spiritually mature and take responsibility for the direct impact our actions have on our human experience—and how they affect others and planet Earth.
Tiffany Garres Dreamed up a New Life, Thriving on a Fruitarian Path
Through discovering and tuning in to the message of fruit festivals, I was inspired and encouraged to eat a fruit-based diet. I began to believe I could live a lifestyle of optimal health and transform. I allowed myself the permission to dream of a new experience for myself and what it could feel like to live in my body. I was empowered and supported by a loving and happy fruit-based online community to change for the better through this transition.
Our body naturally has the ability to evolve. Our entire human experience is informed by adaptation on all levels. When we are in optimal health, we adapt easily and even stretch ourselves, transcending what we thought we could accomplish and becoming more than we ever imagined. When our health is thriving, we launch ourselves by quantum leaps, establishing and manifesting new opportunities and realities for ourselves, our families and our communities. For when we become better versions of ourselves, we radiate a template of love and healing for others to imprint upon. We become leaders through the internal process of rising up within ourselves and expressing our healthiest, happiest self.
While each of us has the free will to interpret any lifestyle or diet according to personal perspective, the presence of thriving fruitarian-based raw vegans celebrating the joy of fruit in gratitude and community causes pause and introspection in the observer. The moment, in the experience of the onlooker, is a portal to the normalization of self-healing. We can live our most loving, authentic and healing lives, beginning with our diet, and establish a lifestyle in our community that is seemingly impossible to mainstream thinking. We can supply a vision of the human experience, as a living example, instilling self-empowerment and self-healing by the choices we make when feeding ourselves and ensuring fruit security as a natural self-expression of our healing.
Through the celebration of fruit, we become a beacon of support, healing, detoxification, regeneration and can more easily create a foundation of knowledge and experience that fortifies our purpose on Earth. For we are not here to serve the interests of others in our gains-based economy but can open our minds and hearts to more collaborative and unified existence.
Fruit Festivals Must Serve a Purpose Plus the Community and Earth
Of course, any mission must have a clear, practical and beneficial directive, if it is to be for the good of all. Fruit festivals, like any healing movement, must have purpose. They must serve the community and surrounding lands in which they are established. They must create a sacred circle connecting our bodies, our awareness and our planet. This is why the sacred circle of Texas Fruit Festival is Body, Consciousness and Earth. We not only heal the body through a lifestyle of a celebration of fruit, but we become aware of its healing benefits and are able to connect the healing of planet Earth as well.
So, a central pillar of self-healing becomes a lesson of humility and not attempting to control it. Healing is infinite like all virtues. It is unconditional, profound, miraculous and limitless. As we embark on our fruitarian healing journey, we must honor the role that others as well as planet Earth play in this path. We must seek to master all aspects of a fruit-based lifestyle by honoring fruit and living in harmony with Earth, with Nature. We must raise awareness to the art of fruit tree cultivation, stewardship and farming as well as utilize chemical-free, slow-farming and irrigation-free permaculture techniques as we mature in our self-discovery.
For the healthier and more lush, vibrant, fertile and abundant our land is, the healthier we will be. Nature heals us with far more than her fruit. We co-evolved on a planet where plants and animals co-exist and create a consciousness of cooperation and balance. When we separate ourselves from Nature, where our foods easily grow, we cut ourselves off from a radiant and flowing source of love.
Texas Fruit Festival’s Summer FruitLucks Helped Build the State’s Fruit-Loving Community
Texas Fruit Festival has incorporated the awareness of fruit-tree planting and has committed to donating a percentage of profits toward fruit-tree plantings that benefit the community on private and public lands. Texas Fruit Festival also works in cooperation with local fruit-tree growers to facilitate the transfer of this knowledge. This past summer, during the inception of Texas Fruit Festival leading up to the first annual event at Casa de Luz in Austin, Texas, on September 25, 2021, I partnered with Tim Miller of Millberg Farm to donate and plant a Haupt fig tree. We planted this beautiful and habitat-suitable fig variety in their garden with their blessing as an activity sponsored by Texas Fruit Festival’s weekly Summer FruitLuck, where the community met to enjoy a meal of fruit and fruit-based company.
During the Summer, Texas Fruit Festival also initiated partnership with David Avocado Wolfe’s Fruit Tree Planting Foundation on an important application for the fruit-tree planting of Blue Star Thunder Ranch Native American Sanctuary. Blue Star represents the Lakota Sioux tribe and offers sweat lodge and Sundance ceremonies for the community as well as sober living and spiritual, emotional and recovery rehabilitation.
Texas Fruit Festival Put Speakers, Community and Fruit in the Spotlight
The first annual Texas Fruit Festival experienced an entire evolution during the summer months from the announcement of its launch to the day of the festival. It was hosted at Casa de Luz as a one-day, Featured Speaker Summit and Fruit Extravaganza. I was thrilled to have entertained about 75 attendees who participated in and supported the event.
The day was a 12-hour event and ran from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Many committed attendees came early to listen to the entire featured speaker panel, which featured an opening ceremony with drumming and singing by Chief Richard of Blue Star Thunder Ranch. Next, Aline Habib, raw vegan lifestyler, shared how raw food saved her life.
After a break and whole-fruit bowl snack, Dr. Robert Morse called in by Zoom and gave Texas Fruit Festival a live interaction and celebrated us for gathering over self-healing. Karen Osborne, raw vegan head chef for Texas Fruit Festival, presented on preventing fractures with yoga and nutrition. We also had Sandra Cortinas, a fruitarian raw vegan, discussing how we can eat our way to heaven on Earth.
A fruitarian lunch was served midday, with the summit continuing afterward. Shane Sterling, a raw food mentor and coach, spoke to attendees about the importance of everyone undergoing at least a 40-day juice fast for detoxification and beginning the path to regeneration as well as the importance of fitness. Hyatt Gonser, a fruitarian enthusiast and authentic relating facilitator, spoke about authenticity and addiction. O’skar Madera, a Mayan astrologer, spoke about what the Mayans had to say about time travel.
After an afternoon whole-fruit snack offering, Anand Sahaja spoke about edible landscaping. Cory Nellissen, a mushroom cultivator, shared on his journey and the healing properties of mushrooms. Tim Miller, an organic fruit orchard permaculturist, shared about his certified organic farm and how he manages a high-yield fruit farm with irrigation-free techniques. Lastly, we spoke via Zoom with Dr. Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, about how humanity would heal if we stop the killing of animals and realize the mistreatment of breeding practices also contributes to the unawareness of our treatment of women, motherhood and physical sovereignty.
The festivities continued into the evening with a fun-filled and exciting band performance with David Avocado Wolfe and BEST BAND EVER. After a lot of excitement and fun, the evening was brought down to a low whisper with the tranquil and serene David Rosenblad and Kirsten Rhea Carter and their soothing sacred sound healing and kirtan. Then we closed out the night with ecstatic dance with DJ O’skar Madera and a delicious cacao elixir.
Texas Fruit Festival was honored by the sponsorship of Third Eye Botanicals, Coco Symbiosis (affiliate ID discount code: 171), anonymous sponsors and in collaboration with Y.E.S. Fest Live.
The entire event was a major success, and you can find information on the event and other offerings on TexasFruitFestival.com. If you wish for guidance on creating your fruit festival for your community, do not hesitate to contact me.
Thank you!
Tiffany
