So your unhelpful practices or this is a big one suppression of natural urges. So what did I do when I was a kid I had terrible allergies to, to plug the nose all the time, right? If you actually pay attention when you do that you will feel how much pressure you are building up in your head. And why I have part of the reason why I have your hearing loss and your issues is from doing that. Okay, so you can't suppress natural urges like hunger, thirst, sneezing, farting, burping, you got to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom. If you are tired, you need to rest.

Don't keep pushing yourself. Now you may be there's two different tired ways to be tired. There's two Because you're fatigued, or there's tired because you're lethargic, and you need to move, you need to know the difference for yourself. And, and just because you're coughing doesn't mean that you may not need rest. If you're coughing and you're going in towards a disease process, you're going to have to balance out what do I need to do to move to keep from becoming stagnant? And what do I need to do to acknowledge that I need to rest to get better.

So there's going to be both of those. You're going to have to pay attention to laughing and crying. The other thing that I did as a child, I cry easily. The shaky nervous system will tend to cry much more easily. And so I my mother was difficult so when she would be yelling at me, I would look up and count 1020 3040 5060 to keep from crying. It was kind of a brilliant thing to do really to figure out how to do that.

But it caused a big constricted lump in my throat every time I would do that and what happened thyroid issues. So you cannot you cannot constrict flow in the body, something needs to come out. And particularly the way we cry here is very unhealthy. If you watch Indian women wail, oh, they make lots of noise and they do it for days and they get it out of their system. Right? We do this nibbling little thing, you know, and keep it all back in and it's very detrimental to our health and it doesn't release grief like we need to.

When you wail and let sound out. Your eyes aren't all red and you're not all stuffed up afterwards. When you hold it back, you get all these symptoms of inflammation. red eyes, mucus congestion, because you're not allowing it out. So in our culture, we don't have the permission to kind of whale in public. But when you get home, and even if there's other people in the house, you can do it into a pillow.

Right? If you need to do it and do it and get it over with. It should happen like most emotions happen very quickly and should pass very quickly unless we're hanging on to them in our mind and generating them through thought. So anger is a very quick emotions should be up and out, up and out. And then we get past it, we get centered again, and we go from there. We only continue with anger if we're telling ourselves a story about it right?

And some situations are hard and difficult and you know, we do our best and when you know all your VEDA then you can do things to help yourself right If I get angry and a little inflamed, I'm running for the aloe vera gel. And I'm down in it because I can feel there's some burning sensations in my my body and one of the best anti inflammatory practices is meditation. So once we learn to use the breath in meditation, you can do that anywhere, even with eyes open, if you need to calm yourself in any situation. So yeah, excessive emotion. We really want to start to have a sense of equanimity in our lives, right so that we're not being pulled by ruminations about the past, worry about the future. We're in the moment and we're just dealing with what's in front of us as much as possible.

And we don't know how to control our minds here in the West. We don't have a system or an awareness of meditation that Not it's much more on our, on our radar now than it ever has been, thank goodness. But the scientific studies have been done on meditation now say it's not an option if you want to optimal health. And so many of us are tormented by our our noggins, right, because it's a zoom in there for anybody. So you might as well learn to use it. Most of the time when I'm thinking I mean, I'm either given a lecture in my head trying to think about whether I'm going to teach you guys right or I'm working on a project, but I'm not generally not thinking about the past.

And my tendency is to worry. So whenever I catch myself doing that, I get my breath centered again, because it will have shifted a bit and and I get myself busy on something, or I meditate if I need rest. Sometimes I watch Netflix, you know, so, you know, I do what I need to do so I don't stay in these emotions because they're detrimental to our It's not just in your mind, it's in the cells of your body. Eating too much or too little eating poor quality foods. Not enough or too much water combining too many antagonistic foods in one meal. So one fellow, I know sent me this smoothie that he makes every morning and my God, there were like 12 different ingredients in it, including diaphanous Earth and chia seeds and oh my god, it was just like, how are you ever going to digest that it's too much and weird stuff all together, write things that no one on the planet has ever eaten together ever.

I said while you're doing a little science experiment on yourself there. It's just weird and people are doing weird combinations of things because this is healthy. So I Oh, and this is healthy, so put it together. doesn't work that way. Of course, smoking excessively. Aha, coffee stimulants, too much too little physical activity and not enough rest or play.

I'm working a lot these days. And I know I'm not, I'm resting enough but I'm not playing and so I know that I'm gonna have to address that real soon for more balance in my life. And that's going to ebb and flow. So what are healthful practices it's abdominal breathing, food intake and activities that are proper to one's individuality, regular oiling of the body, especially the hands feet body opening, so don't forget your little anal sphincter. Do that at the end not after, don't do the nose afterwards and get your little pinkies up your nose with some oil every day to keep it lubricated, especially in the winter. Put some oil in on your eyes.

And in the mouth is oil pulling. So every morning I get up I put a tablespoon of sesame seed oil in in my mouth. And you swish it back and forth back and forth like that for up to 20 minutes as long as you can. And so while I'm doing that I'm feeding my cat and I'm, you know, I'm down to have a cup of coffee in the morning. And so I'm making my half a cup of coffee and doing some chores and I just keep it in as long as I can. 20 minutes is great, but some some days it's 10 whatever.

You spit it out in ideally into the garbage so it doesn't start clogging the sewer or definitely not down your drain it'll clog your drain. That will keep your face and your sinus cavities moist. It also starts to pull gunk from your saliva ducks that's kind of been sitting in there all night. Some people claim it well. is very helpful with disease, but we don't have any scientific evidence found that yet helps to keep the teeth very healthy. Some people will use coconut oil.

But sesame oil is traditional, it has a lot of calcium that's good for the teeth. It can help regrow gums. So if you have receding gums, very, very helpful and then of course your oiling the whole body keeping everything lubricated, your oil your hair every once in a while, make it nice and soft. Regular exercise rest in play exercise, not to the point of huffing and puffing. If you have to breathe through your mouth, you are now stressing your body exercise you should always be breathing in and out through the nose. soon as you start mouth breathing, you've gone into stress physiology.

So you see lots of people out there running around running around and then they think they're doing something good for their health or not. Hmm And cleansing and strengthening regimens in accordance with your personal needs and seasonal variations. So, again, when we do the cleanse in the spring, maybe some of you won't do it, I think most of you will. But you can do a modified version. So depending on your health and your situation, you're gonna modify it to work for you. And you have to eat in court in accordance with your digestive ability.

So it doesn't matter how healthy thinks something is who recommended it. If it's not sitting well with your body, it's not good for you at that time. And you have to deal with the nature of your imbalance, your constitutional tendencies, your lifestyle activities and climate and the weather. So you know, the winters hard for me because I tend to be cold. I thrive in the summer. I look better in the summer.

I'm happier in the summer. I need to live in a warm climate. Am I doing in Canada? But, but you know, I do my best in the winter and I keep myself very warm, you know, as much as possible. I'm always dressing in layers, you know, sometimes, you know, you need to take something off. So when we look at fasting guidelines and contraindications, we're going to look at the degree of weakness versus toxicity in the person.

And if someone's weak, it's not the time to do fast, that's not the time to fast. If you're very toxic, you're gonna have to be a lot of Mama, which is how all your VEDA describes the gunk that gets deposited in fat cells in joints. That's undigested food that's you're not digesting well, that gets stored in our brain even clogs up our limp. We're gonna If you're very toxic, you also have to be careful with the fast you can't do it too quickly. So, in the West, the people think they the disease falls from the sky. Oh, it's genetic.

Oh, it's just luck of the draw. It's very clear and are your VEDA what causes disease? And so we're going to look at these one by one. So hopefully we start from a place of health, although there's a lot of children being born who are already right because they have parents who are Ellen and, and it's unfortunate sometimes that those parents get are able to procreate. Usually often, if illness gets too far down the road then they become sterile and in fertile, right. And there's a reason for that, because their system isn't strong and healthy enough to procreate and and then there's environmental factors which as Humans we've never had to deal with ever before on the planet, right?

You know, we're with every flu shot, we're shooting Mercury, lead, sometimes arsenic into our bodies, right? So we have people who are doing this every year and then you know, wanting to be healthy. Then we're breathing stuff in that we've never breathed in before and it's in our food, right? So even more important that we do regular detoxing, and that we do take care of ourselves with diet. But say we start from health, the plot, what are the primary fluctuations? What do you think the primary fluctuations would be?

Relate to? Whatever six directions that you can go out of balance and too hot to six pairs of opposites that we're all right. Okay, that's your primary fluctuations, too hot, too cold, too damp. too dry, too light or too heavy. Okay, so that's what you're paying attention to early on early on, oh, I'm too cold, I need to do something about it. I'm too hot I need you do that you take care of those primary fluctuations, and you just move back to health again, right?

You don't take care of that you allow excess heat to continue excess cold excess dryness, then you're going to go into some kind of functional disease. So that's when so and now your Vedic doctor is trying to help you right in here and now your VEDA is is preventative in that way. But if you move into a for functional disease, you're going to get a diagnosis of some kind of itis usually right? And then once we move from itis, we don't do anything about it. We don't change anything. We don't change our and where it's going to end up in the body will will Depends on genetics.

So say your mother had a thyroid problem. Now you have a thyroid problem, that thyroid problem in you, you had a tendency towards that, but it still had to be turned on by environmental factors still had to be turned on by your lifestyle, your diet, what you're surrounding yourself with. Just because you know your mother had breast cancer doesn't mean you're going to get breast cancer, it really depends on what you do in your life around these, taking care of yourself and keeping yourself in balance. Then as disease continues, you're going to get some kind of path pathology, which will, in diagnostic language is going to be some kind of osis. So you might go from arthritis to osteoporosis, and this is structural change. This is when the bone is actually deteriorating right now Can you do anything about that when you're at this stage?

Yes, you can, these arrows go in two directions, right? If the damage has gotten so bad that maybe you need a bone replacement or something like that, thank God, they can do that now. And that's where modern medicine really shines. But you still are going to need to address what got you there in the first place or that process is still continuing, right? You're going to need another hip replacement, and then you're going to fall and you know who the vertebrae are gonna crash, you know, things like that. You still have to start moving yourself back towards health, and what takes us out of health weakness, which you just had a very good experience of doing the vegetarian thing, right?

And stress physiology. So stress physiology, we're going to talk more about that But let's move on. So what are the first things we're going to notice in our bodies in terms of symptoms, we're going to go from health to some kind of gi dysfunction. So something's going to happen in the gut first. So it's either going to be you're not going to be able to digest the food that you used to be able to digest, right? Or you're going to start having some heartburn, some acid reflux, you're going to have gas bloating.

So these are early symptoms of disease. Most people just think this is normal. You know, it early symptoms of disease, you should not be farting all day long. You shouldn't be bloated after eating. There shouldn't be a lot of burping. Then you're going to have some kind of skin dysfunctions.

So acne psoriasis rashes. So that's the body trying to get trying to detox through the skin. Yeah and and so the further we go along here, the the less leeway you have in terms of diet and lifestyle, you really have to start getting yourself on track because then you're going into chronic degenerative disease here, right? Even if you're at this stage of chronic degenerative disease, I your VEDA has so much to offer to make you feel comfortable and to start to move you back towards a balanced system of health. So it's never too late. Even if someone's palliative, there is a lot that can be done to make that person feel better.

And there have been many, many radical recoveries from so called non curable cancers. So we really don't understand enough about how amazing the body that we are in is and how much we can heal if we give it the right. the right things. And so we've gone over this, these are the six directions or primary fluctuations that you can start to move in, move out of health and in to imbalance. So here's our continuum of health to disease. Cancer doesn't just happen cancers, the cells of the body that have been driven crazy.

So we start with health. We have some kind of inflammation or itis, gastritis, arthritis, hepatitis, you name any kind of illness, some kind of all itis means inflammation, and wherever the body part is, that's the name of it. It's a really sad kind of diagnostic, really pathetic kind of diagnosis really. Then from that specific part where the original inflammation started. It's going to move when it overflows. When that part can no longer handle all the information, it will start to overflow to other parts of the body and start to infiltrate other places in the body.

So this is when, if you have, you know, a history of knee arthritis in your family, okay, you start you might not have any arthritis until you have a gut problem, and then it's gonna overflow into the knee. And then you start to have knee problems, right? And deposition, that's when it goes into starting osis and osis diagnosis where it starts to change the structure of, in our example that knee where the bones starting to actually be damaged or that or the discs in between the joints and then we keep going in that direction. And you keep doing the same life. style and diet things that you've been doing that caused these problems, and then you move towards cancer.