As I discussed in my earlier post, I do not believe there is a good reason to drink milk. This is why I think it could be detrimental to your health.

1. Dairy cows are fed the wrong food, which not only changes the nature of the milk but causes health problems for the cows. They are fed soy, corn, cottonseed meal or other commercial feeds, which contain all sorts of things including chicken manure and citrus peel cake, laced with pesticides. These foods are not appropriate for cows, who are ruminants and should be feeding on green grass in the spring, summer and fall and on green feed, silage, hay and root vegetables in the winter. Unfortunately most dairy cows are kept in confinement, given antibiotics and hormones, and never see green grass their entire lives.
2. Then the milk is pasteurized. Pasteurization is the process of heating a liquid to a high enough temperature to kill certain bacteria and disable certain enzymes. It destroys enzymes, vitamins, denatures fragile milk proteins, kills beneficial bacteria and promotes pathogens. Even calves fed pasteurized milk do poorly and many die before maturity. Pasteurization was instituted in the 1920s to combat TB, infant diarrhea, undulant fever and other diseases caused by poor animal nutrition and dirty production methods. But times have changed and modern stainless steel tanks, milking machines, refrigerated trucks and inspection methods make pasteurization absolutely unnecessary for public protection.
3. In some cases, milk is ultra-pasteurized to get rid of heat-resistant bacteria and give it a longer shelf life. Ultra high temperature pasteurization is a process that takes milk from a chilled temperature to above the boiling point in less than two seconds. This process is utilized for the boxed milks that can be kept at room temperature
4. To make matters worse, milk is homogenized. Homogenization is a process that breaks down butterfat globules so they do not rise to the top. Homogenized milk is harder to digest, so proteins that would normally be digested in the stomach are not broken down and instead are absorbed into the bloodstream. Often the body reacts to these “foreign proteins” by triggering the immune system, causing inflammation. It can even trigger auto-immune problems. Homogenized milk has also been linked to heart disease probably because of the fat globules that are dispersed by the process.
5. In addition to being chemically altered into something that hard to digest and causes problems, today’s milk usually contains steroids, antibiotics, pesticides from treated grains, bacteria from infected animals, and genetically engineered growth hormones.

So if you do drink milk, I suggest you look for pure raw milk from grass fed cows (which is hard to get in most states unfortunately), because it may not be the milk per se, but how milk is chemically altered that causes the problems.

Although I believe whey protein, which comes from dairy is a great source of protein, I do not believe dairy is healthy in general. We have all been brainwashed to think that dairy products strengthen bones and stave off osteoporosis. But this is not the case. Walter Willett, M.D., professor of preventive medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues analyzed dietary information gathered from nearly 80,000 women, ages 30 to 55, over a 12-year period. They found no evidence that women who consumed one to three servings daily of milk or other calcium-rich foods–like cheese or yogurt–reduced their risk of hip fractures, the standard measure for osteoporosis. The findings became even more dramatic when the Harvard researchers examined women who consumed three or more servings of dairy a day and found that none had any added protection against bone fractures. The data shows that Vitamin D appears to be much more important than calcium in preventing fractures. And interestingly, countries with lowest rates of dairy and calcium consumption (like those in Africa and Asia) have the lowest rates of osteoporosis.

So, apart from being the source of whey protein, there do not appear to be any other benefits of dairy and to make matters worse, dairy seems to have detrimental effects to your health. Milk should be for calves (baby cows), most humans have a problem digesting it. I cannot tell you how many patients I have seen over the years whose chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, chronic sinusitis and allergies cleared up when they stopped eating dairy. When people come to see me in my practice and I put them on a diet, I almost always remove dairy.

So this what I suggest?

Don’t rely on dairy for calcium. Rather eat lots dark green leafy vegetables, sea vegetables, canned salmon or sardines with bones, sesame seeds and nuts.

And you can always take a Calcium supplement.

For healthy bones, exercise frequently and supplement with at least 2,000 IU’s of vitamin D as well. Get your vitamin D levels checked!!

Try this test and see how you feel. Remove dairy for 2-3 weeks and see how you feel. Then introduce it again and see how you feel. Most people feel better when they remove it and worse when they re-introduce it. If you don’t seem to have a problem with dairy, then I suggest using only small amounts of organic dairy products, preferably fermented products like unsweetened yogurt and kefir, and preferably raw if possible (hard to get in most states).

Higher consciousness objectively exists.

It is one of the primary experiences of living.

Roberto Assagioli, M.D.

Spirituality is a human trait with great health benefits.  The goal of religious and spiritual practices is to awaken this trait in you.

The Experience Itself

When your spirituality wakes up, you have experiences of higher consciousness.  “Higher” may not be the ideal word:  “deeper,” “greater” or “expanded” consciousness could be other terms.  Finding the best term is tricky because the experiences take you beyond your normal self and, at the same time, show you more of yourself.

Such experiences are spiritual because they connect you more fully to the non-visible, non-material spirit element of your nature and of all nature.  If you want to use religious thinking, you can say that this spirit element is an aspect of God inside you.  If you prefer non-religious language, you can say that spirit is the universal energy which ceaselessly animates all of life, including yourself.

Higher consciousness is therefore a moment when you become more fully aware of the spirit element of your nature.  In such a moment, you cannot quite tell inside from outside: is the energy in you – or are you in it?  The answer to this question is a matter of degrees.  When the immersion into the energy is slight, you tend to feel that it’s in you: it’s your energy.  When the immersion into the energy is fuller, you feel that you have entered into something beyond your mind, body and feelings.

The study of this vast force of healing has been explored by many people, and they have left us descriptions.  The 13^th Century Islamic Sufi poet Rumi put it this way:

As salt dissolves in the ocean,

I was swallowed in God’s sea,

Past faith, past unbelieving,

past doubt, past certainty.

The 14^th Century Catholic mystical poet Dante put it this way:

Through the living light there poured a glow bright, so bright

that my poor eyes could not endure the sight.

My guide said to me: “That which overcomes you now

is strength against which nothing has defense.

Within it dwell the wisdom and the power

that opens the road between heaven and earth.”

My mind began to swell until it broke its bounds,

and what became of it,

it does not know.

This universal eternal energy reported by Rumi, Dante and other mystics is not a metaphor or a belief:  it is a verifiable fact.  This fact is of immense benefit.  As you merge into the energy even a little, you feel released from your habitual sense of time, vigilance and separateness, and this release brings peace and bliss: “the peace that surpasses understanding,” as it is says in the Bible.

In those few seconds of higher consciousness, you have the immediate realization that you are participating in something which is far, far greater than yourself.  There is a profound surprise, relief and freedom in this realization.  You have been temporarily freed from the small, nervous self driven by self-preservation and social conditioning.  Your entire perspective on reality is altered, and you feel a renewed sense of hope and purpose.  Among many purposes, you now feel a desire to transmit your realization to others.

Communicating the Experience

The spiritual guide, Beatrice, talking to her student in Dante’s Divine Comedy:

“Note well my words – What I have said to you, you will repeat,

as you teach those who live that life which is merely a race to death.”

An experience marked by timelessness, peace, bliss and realization (referred to as satchitananda in the yogic tradition) is clearly difficult to communicate.  Common, consensual terms do not exist for such experiences.  Mystics and sages from every time and culture, such as Rumi and Dante, write extensively about such experiences, but their language may only make sense to you if you have had similar experiences.  Communicating the experience is also difficult because higher consciousness took you beyond your thinking mind.  That aspect of you – your thinking mind – which is usually providing an ongoing internal commentary on everything you’re experiencing, had also merged into the higher state.

In addition to not having common language nor having the thinking mind fully available, a third difficulty in communicating your experience to others is fear of social disapproval.  What will someone think when you say that you now know deep in your bones that you are, and we all are, participating in a harmonious, eternal, interpenetrating, mysterious and non-visible reality?  Have you gone crazy?  Are you saying you encountered God?  If not, then what are you talking about?

In a culture such as ours, with its divergent trends of increased dogmatism and increased secularism, direct experience is ignored or even treated as suspicious.   Perhaps the only intelligent thing to communicate is any benefit you have received from your experience of higher consciousness.  Others will decide for themselves if it motivates them to know more, or not.

Direct Experience

It is one thing to write about higher consciousness.  It is quite another to point you to methods you can use to experience higher consciousness for yourself.

How do we create the conditions for an illumination, a breakthrough, an opening into higher consciousness?

The first thing to understand is that it can occur spontaneously without any preparation. The writer, C.S. Lewis, wrote Surprised by Joy to describe just such a spontaneous experience.  The very fact that people of all cultures in every period of history have had spontaneous experiences could be taken as proof, in itself, of their objective reality.  Take a moment to think back over your own experiences—have you had such a moment of illumination, a transcendent feeling, a sense of deep soulful connection to the world? 

At the same time, creating the conditions for higher consciousness is definitely worth your time and effort.  Many people associate long period of meditating with the possibility of experiencing higher consciousness, but meditation is only one of many methods. My experience is that many people enter higher consciousness through art, particularly through music and/or architectural space.  

Laurie, a student of mine, gave me these notes from her diary after experiencing just such an art-inspired illumination while traveling in Rome. Her experience was both spontaneous and deliberate:  although the illumination itself happened spontaneously, she had deliberately traveled to a place filled with inspiration:

Entering St. Peter’s Cathedral.  Experiencing its hugeness.  Awesome.  Is this structure designed to humble me?  I experience myself resisting it.  All vertical and overbearing.  I feel like I’m in the land of giants.  There is beauty present, but it feels remote and cold.  Perhaps when it is filled with thousands of worshippers, it will warm up and soften.

I find myself drawn to the side chapel where Michelangelo’s Pieta is displayed.  I can’t approach it—it is behind a glass wall, protected from any threat of attack.  It draws my gaze despite the barrier, and I feel myself pulled towards it.  I’m first drawn to the Virgin Mary’s face.  It is the face of a young girl not older than adolescent.  Soft, delicate, yet serenely sad, wise beyond her years, yet innocent and confused by the situation she is in.

My eyes survey the rest of the sculpture.  The soft, translucent white of the marble, the folds of drapery and the large figure of the dead Christ draped across Mary’s lap.  This lifeless body is much too large to be Mary’s child.  I’ve seen many Pietas—paintings and sculptures—why are there tears in my eyes?  I’m drawn back to Mary’s delicate face.  I can’t turn away.  Why is she so young and innocent?  Certainly Michelangelo knew how to sculpt an older woman.  No, there is a reason she appears like this.  Suddenly I understand.  This image is about a human experience.  Mary is a mother whose child has been killed.  Is a person ever old enough to not be completely vulnerable to this loss?

When I first became a mother, I remember being frightened by the intensity of my protective instincts and the degree to which thoughts of my son being harmed terrified me.  I feel joined to Mary’s face.  I can see myself and all mothers.  My tears continue.  The image expands to connecting with the universal fear of death and loss.  Can my spirituality offer me solace in the face of this?  Isn’t loss one of the primary facts that draws us to a spiritual path?  I think about how angry I get when I hear pat answers to the question, “Why?”  Don’t tell me about karma, or God’s Will, or that it’s part of a lesson.  Those answers bypass the sorrow, my experience of grief.  This sculpture before me honors this. Somehow that look of innocence is even more compelling than if Mary’s face had appeared ravaged and racked with sorrow.  She needs compassion.  She needs me to accompany her, be present with her.  This allows me to gain strength from the shared human experience.  I am not alone.

In this moment, I understand the power of the creative moment to transcend time and space—to draw me through the act of creation to a place of truth.  Michelangelo was only twenty-five when he created this work.  What did he know?  I’ve lived twice as many years as he had—yet the place from which his genius and inspiration comes is timeless and universal.  It emerges from the energetic ground of being and includes me in it.

Anyone who has taken a painkiller certainly knows that there is a big difference between temporary relief and real healing.  Even though a person who takes a painkiller may not consciously feel pain, it is widely understood that this relief does not necessarily mean that a “cure” or a “healing” has occurred.

And yet, it is surprising how many people think that various conventional drugs have performed some type of miracle just because they provided short-term relief of pain or discomfort.  Little do many people know that when a drug “works,” this may be the “bad news.” It may be that the drug works by suppressing the disease, thereby creating a much more serious physical and/or mental disease.

Although antibiotics and select other drugs may be an exception to this general observation, getting rid of an infection will not influence the immune factors that led the person to be susceptible to infection in the first place, and in fact, antibiotics are known to disrupt one’s inner ecology, disturb assimilation of nutrients, and even tend to make the person more susceptible to new infection (a future blog will deal more directly with this issue).

Painkillers, on the other hand, may provide great reduction in pain, but this may result in the person continuing to walk on that injured ankle and cause increased injury.  The person with arthritis, as another example, may continually take one or more painkilling drugs that provide some relief but these drugs also create their own tolerance, addiction, or pathology, usually leading to much more serious health problems.

A smart person might consider taking a conventional drug that provides temporary blessed relief while concurrently seeking some more deep treatment that nourishes, nurtures, or augments the body’s own defenses.  A problem, however, is created when a sick person frequently relies upon a drug to provide temporary relief and does not seek a real, more profound healing.

Differentiating Real Healing from Suppression of Disease

When a person experiences relief from any treatment, conventional or alternative, one should not necessarily assume that a real healing has occurred.  While it is possible that the person may really have been healed, it may also mean:

• the symptoms went away on their own, and the treatment had nothing to do with it.
• the treatment palliated the symptoms, providing short-term relief but resulted in the recurrence of symptoms in the near future.
• the treatment “worked” by suppressed the person’s symptoms or his/her own immune and defense system, thereby pushing the disease deeper into body. Although suppression of symptoms may cause them to disappear, they tend to be replaced, sooner or later, with more serious, deeper symptoms that are more discomforting and potentially dangerous.

Homeopaths and naturopaths both assert that there is a big difference between real healing, palliation of symptoms, and suppression of disease, even though each of these results may initially seem to be the same.

What people don’t usually understand is that there may be a danger in the frequent or recurrent application of treatments that suppress symptoms.  The concept of suppressing symptoms is well accepted and understood in psychology.  It is commonly observed when a person suppresses his or her emotions, such actions tend to push the emotional turmoil deeper, leading the person to explode at some future time, often at people who are not directly related to the origin of the person’s problem.

While people may be familiar with the problems associated with the suppression of emotions, people are generally not familiar with the possibility that many conventional medical treatments can suppress their physical symptoms, driving the disease deeper into the person. And yet, suppression of disease is so commonplace in today’s medical treatment that it is virtually ignored.

Doctors and drug companies tend to minimize the real problems of suppressing the disease process by referring to the “side effects” of a drug.  And yet, pharmacologists commonly note that the determining a drug’s “effects” and its “side effects” are completely arbitrary.  They are both the direct effect of the drug upon the human body.

Ironically, many conventional drugs are touted specifically for their ability to “suppress” symptoms…or even suppress the body’s own immune system.  Ultimately, pushing the disease deeper into the person is the result of using pharmacological agents that are explicitly prescribed for their ability to control or inhibit symptoms that are the natural defensive functions of the body.  Suppression of disease may provide the semblance of benefit (or at least short-term benefit), but ultimately may make the person much sicker.  Such suppression of the disease process may lead to increased chronic disease, immune dysfunction, and mental illness, all of which we are seeing together in epidemic proportions.

Understanding the Healing Process from a Whole Systems Perspective

The father of American homeopathy was a German physician named Constantine Hering, MD (1800-1880).  Hering was a respected conventional physician who was hired by a publisher to write a book critical of homeopathy, and in his research on the topic, he became convinced of its efficacy.  After many years of practicing homeopathy, he observed that people go through a specific healing process after being given the correct homeopathic medicine. He developed guidelines in which to determine when a real healing is taking place. These guidelines have been called “Hering’s laws of cure,” but some homeopaths prefer to call them “Hering’s guidelines of cure.”

To understand these guidelines, it is first useful to know that homeopaths carefully evaluate the evolution of a person’s physical, emotional, and mental/spiritual symptoms.  Homeopaths consider mental/spiritual symptoms to be deepest to the core of a person’s being for they represent the will, the ego, the sense of security that the person feels, and the person’s overall state of consciousness.  Homeopaths today wonder if the immune system’s important ability to identify “self” from “non-self” is dynamically connected to a person’s mental/spiritual state of health, thereby linking mind and body health.  The emotional symptoms are external to the mental/spiritual level of the person because imbalances in the deeper level will create increased propensities to various fears, angers, depressive states, and other emotions. The physical symptoms are the most outer manifestation of the person, though every level can and will influence the other.

Also, each level has certain symptoms that have more or less influence on a person’s overall health.  For instance, a person’s asthma will be deeper than his or her skin rash, a person’s fear of death will be deeper than his or her irritability, and a person’s loss of self esteem will be deeper than a subtle reduction in memory. Likewise, when comparing symptoms on different levels, a person’s heart disease will more profoundly affect his or her health than a difficulty in concentration experienced on the mental/spiritual level.

In light of these levels of the human being and the degrees of intensity to which a symptom impairs a person’s ability to live, Hering found that healing progresses:

· From within to without (from the deepest part of our being to the most external);

· From the most recent disease back in time to previous ones (a reversion of the disease process);

· From the top of the body to the bottom of the body.

Ultimately, basic concepts of survival and evolution are at the heart of this understanding of the defenses of the body.  The human body can and will defend its most vital functions first before defending its more superficial functions.

Homeopaths observe that a truly effective therapy sometimes elicits a temporary exacerbation of certain symptoms, usually in the superficial ones or sometimes ones that the person had many years previously. Homeopaths assert that a true healing is taking place when a person’s present symptoms are more superficial than previous ones.  One of the reasons that homeopaths and their patients have come to believe that homeopathic medicines are not simply placeboes is their observations that some symptoms tend to increase in the process of a curative response (healing from within to without…and the above other guidelines).

This “externalization” of symptoms is commonly observed by homeopaths who witness that approximately 20-30 percent of their patients with a chronic illness tend to experience skin symptoms, nasal or bronchial discharges, diarrhea, early menstruation with clots, profuse perspiration, or some other externalization of the disease process after an effective homeopathic treatment is provided.

On the other hand, if and when a person takes a conventional drug and his or her symptoms disappear but new ones that are more serious develop, this result suggests that the treatment has suppressed the person’s condition and has made them worse. Unknown to most physicians and patients, people undergoing conventional medical treatment are commonly having their disease suppressed. Homeopaths assert that one of the reasons that there is increased mental disease and increased chronic disease at earlier and earlier ages is because of effective suppression of the disease process by conventional medical treatment.

Distinct from methods that suppress disease are those that help disease express and externalize itself.  Homeopathy’s use of the principle of similars (using medicines bases on their ability to CAUSE the similar symptoms that the sick person is experiencing) is one important safeguard against disease suppression because it mimics the wisdom of the body rather than suppresses its symptoms.

I like to call homeopathy a type of “medical biomimicry” because a homeopathic medicine is chosen for its ability to mimic the symptoms that the sick person is experiencing.  Because there is a certain wisdom to the bodymind, mimicking this wisdom is a good way to elicit a real healing.

You may have never even considered the fact that your Birth control pills, allergy medicine, or over the counter antacids could be depleting your nutrients, but they could be. Here’s the scoop on just a few drugs and their nutritional effects.

Birth control pills deplete vitamin B2 (ribofl avin), vitamin B12 (cobalamin), folic acid, vitamin C, and zinc. Estrogen supplementation can lower serum magnesium levels. Acid blockers (Protein Pump Inhibitors and H2 blockers)  are commonly used either in prescription or over the counter medications by people who have heartburn and indigestion. The acid in our stomach is important for absorption of minerals, digestion of protein, and protection from food poisoning. Studies show that acid blockers increase risk of defi ciencies of : vitamin B12, folic acid, iron, and zinc. Animal studies also show lowered calcium levels and altered the way we use vitamin D.

Statin drugs are used commonly to lower cholesterol. It’s been known since 1985 that statin medications can deplete CoEnzyme Q10 levels. Research suggests that some of the muscle aches and weakness and liver toxicity of these medications is caused by CoQ10 depletion. If you are taking a statin medication, take 60-200 mg of CoQ10 daily to insure that you have adequate amounts. (Higher dosages would be for people who have heart disease.)