Cleansing is Good for the Body, and Good for the Home

My wife Holly and I are preparing over the next two months to move from a 2500 sq ft house, to an 1160 sq ft apartment, which is all part of our long term plan to eventually move into a 45' Luxury Custom Motor Coach and hit the road.

To accomplish such a lofty goal, we must first pare down the contents of our house to mostly fit in a much smaller apartment, and so we are giving a lot of our furniture and nicknacks to children of ours that already have established homes, which is less than half of the seven children we have raised to adulthood.

The best part is that while we have maintained homes of at least 2000 sq ft for many years now, this will be the first time in decades that we are moving down in size by so much, so not only furniture must go, but so also must we cleanse ourselves of all the toxic buildup of life. This buildup has taken many forms, the most common ones being Tupperware dishes, and plastic cups and bowls galore, books of every kind on several shelves and many boxes, papers in boxes, tubs and bags, of things we thought for sure we would one day need and so we have kept them just in case.

After four years in this most recent home, we have a pretty good idea of how much we needed most of what we thought we would need and how much we have done without and done just fine.  The cleansing process as pertains to our home is as important as any bodily cleanse as it makes us leaner and more agile and of course helps our clarity and focus. When you have more things, than you have places for those things, it creates clutter and mayhem and our lives just don't need that any more, not that they ever did, but here is a great time and opportunity to cleanse ourselves and reduce the friction in our lives.

How often do we get a forced chance to do something like this? Most people have a hard time doing this without some sort of outside pressure to accomplish it.

We are finding the whole endeavor very liberating.  This type of cleansing is not without its emotional impact, such as deciding to move all the way down to only keeping 100 books after having had thousands at one point in my library and in boxes.

Ultimately it will be good for us to part with things that have become, through lack of need of them, useless to us, and yet, it is as difficult as changing the things we eat because we want to clean up our bodies.

Here is another stage in our progression in life and in our marriage, as we celebrate 25 years of marriage this year in October, we will find ourselves in many ways, opening a new chapter in our lives together.

We Are What We Eat

For a while now I have worked with the question of what is more important for our health, diet or exercise.  Some contend exercise, but I will say eating in its proper place, is the basis for all other personal improvement.  Without a proper diet, we do not even feel enough energy to exercise, and with a diet deficient in some of the minerals and vitamins that activate the body's many systems, I would say none of the base systems on which we depend will function the way we need them to.

So I have to say diet is of primary importance to any other efforts to improve oneself.  I would like to address another system today, leaving the muscles for another discussion.  The brain is a complex organ of seemingly infinite capacity, and yet, it is largely comprised of chemical receptors (even the nerves are chemically based) that pass messages to and from the rest of the body and thus is as much dependent upon the food we intake as any other system.

For years I read self help books and books of all kinds, finding great difficulty in retaining information and focus.  One good example is that for years I would find myself in the middle of six different books and at the end of a few months, I still had not finished even one of them.

For me that changed when I started to really change and clean up the foods that were going into my body, and started cleansing more. Not only did my memory capacity increase, but so did my focus and concentration, as well as other faculties our amazing brain provides for us.

Creativity started to increase, as well as the ability to remain at peace and not flare up so much at things that would normally trigger a fight response.

My diet began to incorporate not only a lot more salads, but salads composed of many elements including nuts and fruits to enhance and provide a wide array of minerals. The variety in my salads came from a direct attempt to make them more interesting. Isagenix protein shakes have played a huge part in this process, as has the Isagenix mineral drink, Ionix Supreme.  With over 100 ionic minerals from exotic places of the world, including one of my favorites, Nepali Shilajit, this drink alone I believe has helped me rewire my nerve circuits and pave new paths in my mind.

Positive thinking, proper visualizing, all of the tricks that self help books try to teach are just gimmicks until the brain can truly function properly and we don't have to trick ourselves into success or a hundred other things we seek.

I have found on my journey of self-improvement, that my demeanor, my ability to slow down and respond rather than react, my ability to analyze deeply before acting at all, are all affected by my brain health and it is 100% a function of the foods we take into our bodies.

Chew on that!!

The Changing Face of Love Languages

It is possible for someone to have been married a long time and miss the subtle fact that Love Languages, the ways in which we communicate our love and understand the love of each other, change with time and situations.  What at one time was a wonderful way to express our love to a spouse at some point may have become worn out through abuse or failure to follow through. 

An example may help my point here.  We may start out our marriage being able to use flowers as an expression of our thoughtfulness and love to our spouse.  Later, it becomes possible and even more welcome sometimes to perform more direct acts of thoughtfulness such as filling up her gas tank when she thinks she will have to do it, or doing the dishes, or folding the laundry she fell asleep on because she was exhausted.

These acts also say in much the same way as flowers do, but sometimes more potently, that I love you and am devoted to your happiness. 

Sometimes, we use the token expressions, such as candy or flowers but in other ways fail to show or to follow through with expression of our love, to the extent that the tokens lose their meaning and effectiveness.  Sometimes situations change, money gets tight, she feels more burden than before, he feels more detached, and so the things that we need to feel loved and to feel love for our spouse might take on a different flavor.

In a loving relationship, it may be easy enough to find out what the new love language is that we must learn to express our love in a better more fulfilling way, but like any language, it may be a stretch to learn and may cause us to feel that too much is being expected of us. Sometimes we show our love language to our spouse through our own actions hoping they will mirror those actions without realizing that their language is different and thus we may only be showing them how we want to be communicated to but not doing a very good job of communicating in our partner's love language ourselves.

Sometimes the best thing we can do to feel more loved, is to love more, without any thought of how long it may take for that love to be returned. Obviously forever is too long to wait, I speak only of a relationship where one or the other has for a time, withdrawn their willingness to express what they feel because they are hurting and need to feel safe again. So our best action is to help them feel safe again.

It is not always easy to get to this point, but it can begin a whole new level of wonder if we can push beyond the obstacles that threaten us and open up into a new world of discovery. Sometimes, this can only be done with outside help. If needed, get some.

There is no way to know easily that one has reached such an impasse without decent communications. Some people never get there, some couples never get there, and so they fade away. Don't be that person. There's too much at stake.