A shaman’s advice to get on the fast road to enlightenment.

Nature invests in the continuance of the species by programming us to procreate—to have sex. As enjoyable as that may be, many of us are equally interested in our longevity, which is of little use to nature. Once our reproductive years are over, as we enter into our 40s, human growth hormone production and free-radical scavenging systems begin to wind down and we start to decline, with all the consequences that entails.

Shamans of old knew how to hack into nature’s programming to get their health span to equal their life span, and free their consciousness from their biology. Through One Spirit Medicine, they found they could switch off the “death clock” inside each cell and turn on the “immortality genes” hidden deep within DNA.

Diet was key to their good health and longevity. Primarily horticulturalists, they ate nuts, fruit and the occasional animal that had been killed by others. Their diet was calorie poor and nutrient rich, with green plants high in essential phytonutrients. Most important, they knew the sacred plants that switched on those immortality genes.

Today we can get these superfoods and supplements at the local health food store. But while countless people around the world follow a diet somewhat akin to our ancestors’, one crucial aspect of the Paleo lifestyle has been lost in all the hubbub: a belief in the oneness of all life, the communion with nature and spirit, and an understanding of the workings of creation. It’s not a eureka moment; it’s a transcendent awareness that penetrates your whole being.

When you reach the level of enlightenment at which you perceive only oneness instead of separation, you can dedicate 95 percent of your energies to your spiritual evolution. And as you grow spiritually, you maintain exceptional health and can invest your emotional, energetic and spiritual resources in infinity.

In the West, we take care of the body without understanding its relationship with the spirit. We mistakenly think the body was created just to be able to eat, travel, move and inhabit this Earth for a short while. But biology is really the most spiritual thing in the world. So we begin by healing the body, by getting our health span to equal our life span, repairing and priming the brain for enlightenment, and then we can look at how we can upgrade the luminous energy field that surrounds and informs the physical body.

An appalling 99 percent of people living the Western lifestyle have a brain that has been damaged by pollutants and toxins. We are not aware our brain has been compromised until we do the repair protocols and notice how brain fog clears, and we have clarity and lucidity; our mood issues go away and we begin to come back into relationship with all of life. The first thing a shaman does when healing patients is to help them repair their brain so that they can stop creating psychosomatic disease and begin to create psychosomatic health.

It’s not difficult. It can be done in six weeks if you follow the shamanic diet prevalent 10,000 years ago, before the discovery of agriculture. Paleolithic cultures were all shamanic, and their diets were not grain-based. They lived from the land, not from the animals, which were sacred. In fact, the word animal comes from the Latin
anima, which means “spirit.” Animals were the embodiments of spirit, and you did not kill them.

The minute we picked up a shovel to farm and started eating wheat or barley or corn, our life span was reduced by 50 percent. We began to raise animals and feed from the meat of these animals. We began to eat carbs from heavily processed grains, giving rise to a new social class of masters and slaves, and religions that pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

There is no archaeological evidence of large-scale warfare anywhere in the world prior to the invention of agriculture. That’s because land had no value for nomadic gatherers. They didn’t own the land; they were stewards of the land, keepers of the land—they were one with nature.

But when farmers settled the land, they started craving somebody else’s land, and that grew exponentially. If you look at the problems in the Middle East today, they are all about who owns the land. The arrival of agriculture also led to a shift in human temperament, thanks to the consumption of processed grains—carbs that turn into sugars as soon as we eat them. Sugar feeds the lower brain, the primitive, predatory brain that focuses on survival and is tremendously aggressive and competitive, not collaborative.

And so we became disconnected from nature—from our own nature, our own bodies, our instincts. When we upgrade the quality of the brain, we begin to reset our instincts.

To do this, we need to first eliminate certain foods from our diet, starting with sugar. A hundred years ago, the average American ate five pounds of sugar a year. Today the average American eats 200 pounds of sugar a year—and we wonder what’s gone wrong with society? You must also go off artificial sweeteners: no aspartame, no saccharin, no sucralose.

Dairy is likewise off-limits. (If you must, eat goat cheese and goat yogurt.) Also, do not eat more than one cup of beans a day; and quit the coffee habit while you’re at it.

And then there’s gluten, a protein found in grains that actually cleaves to the tight junctions in the gut where we absorb nutrients, allowing flora from your GI tract to enter into your bloodstream and create a huge inflammatory immune response. So get off the pasta and off the bread. I love the scent of fresh-baked bread, but now I just smell it; I don’t eat it anymore.

The many foods we can and should eat are diverse and delicious: fats, proteins, leafy green (phytonutrient-rich) and cruciferous vegetables, nuts, seeds, avocados, berries, eggs, meat (sparingly) and small wild-caught fish. These foods will up-regulate the expression of the genes that create health and down-regulate the genes that create disease.

And that is key, because disease is rampant today. Just as an example, one in every two Americans who get to the age of 85 will have diagnosable Alzheimer’s. You really want to avoid that, because those are the years you will want to be living in bliss and communion with spirit, not wondering who these people are whom you don’t recognize, when they’re your own children.

I spent 20 years in the Amazon working with communities that had seldom seen a white man before. (The kids would run up to me and start rubbing my hands to see if the white “dirt” would come off.) What amazed me was that among these primarily horticulturalist communities, there was no heart disease, no Alzheimer’s, no cancer and no dementia, and they were actually happy.

The people of the Amazon did not take supplements, but those of us in the rest of the world should. Omega-3, especially EPA and DHA, are essential for repairing the brain. Our bodies cannot produce omega-3s naturally, so we have to get these fatty acids from food and supplements. A recommended dose of 3 grams (3,000 mg) a day will repair the hippocampus within six weeks, but making omega-3 a permanent part of your daily regimen will help reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s by more than
50 percent.

Other essential supplements for brain health include vitamin D3; curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric; trans-resveratrol, found in red wine and red grapes; sulforaphane (from broccoli flowers); and coconut oil, which is jet fuel for the brain.

If you want to access the shamanic states of ecstasy and communion with all life, you’ve got to go radical and extreme, because it will take you six months to get there, and ev-ery meal you ordinarily would eat you have to pass on. This means no processed carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no coffee, no eggs (if you are allergic to them), no processed grains and no gluten. The minute you start to eliminate these foods, you will begin to clear toxins from your system. If you complement that with certain supplements, in six months you will have eliminated the past 40 years of toxins you have been exposed to. That includes chemicals, paints, asbestos, lead, pesticides and an incredible amount of other poisons we’ve absorbed because back then our parents believed in better living through chemistry. And although many toxic substances have now been outlawed, we still need to eliminate them from our own bodies.

The next point we need to address is replenishing the flora in our GI tract, because we are a colony organism. More than 90 percent of our DNA belongs to microbes that we have a symbiotic relationship with—an incredible colony of 90 trillion cells that make up who we are. I jokingly like to say, “You know, if some day you wake up and you are not quite feeling yourself, it’s because 90 percent of you is not really you.” On a serious note, if you have taken antibiotics just once in your life, you decimated your intestinal flora.

There are a variety of ways to replenish flora, one of the more interesting being fecal transplant, in which our unhealthy GI tract is infused with the poop of someone who has never had antibiotics and still has the 600-plus varieties of good bacteria that we have lost. Now, I don’t recommend that people go out and get poop from their neighbors, but you can replenish your colony of good bugs with good-quality probiotics. An excellent resource is AscendedHealth.com. This amazing cutting-edge company in the U.S. makes pro-alive probiotics that actually eliminate mercury and yeast from your system.

  Most of us also need to reset our “fight-or-flight” system, which is responsible for the production of stress molecules. The fight-or-flight system is in a very primitive region of the brain that feeds on sugars and cannot tell time or calculate distances. When it hears about Ebola in Africa or terrorist attacks in Australia or France, this part of the brain thinks these things are happening just outside the village gates. It can’t tell the difference between 2,000 miles away and 20 blocks away, so it triggers cells into fight-or-flight, which produce the stress molecules cortisol and adrenaline. For many, the fight-or-flight system is stuck in overdrive and they’ve lived in a constant state of anxiety since they were born.

  The alchemical laboratory in the pineal gland, on the other hand, was designed to flood the brain with endogenous psychedelics, creating states of joy, bliss and commu-nion. When the brain is producing stress molecules, it cannot produce the molecules for bliss. It’s either one or the other.

The minute we are able to calm our fight-or-flight system, relax and breathe deeply throughout the day, the brain will kick-start the lab in the pineal gland to begin producing natural consciousness-expanding bliss molecules. So you don’t need to go to the ayahuasca ceremony down the block. You can produce it yourself, because ayahuasca is a dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is analogous to the neurotransmitter serotonin, which the pineal gland can transform into a powerful bliss molecule.

All the pineal gland needs to start producing this psychoactive is a little tweak—like great sex, a good dream or the act of dying or being born. Dreaming is great, but I want to do it with my eyes open. Dying and being born happen so seldom, and great sex is fantastic whenever you can get it, but the idea is to cultivate these states during your everyday meditative moments. You can live in a state of bliss and communion, and that’s all that’s required to create psychosomatic health at a neurological level.

The ancient shamans, it turns out, were humanity’s first neuroscientists. In addition to the super-plants that feed and repair the various regions of the brain, they discovered psychedelics, iboga, ayahuasca and curare, an anesthetic in common use today.

But their greatest contribution to our understanding of life, death and our place in the cosmos is the luminous energy field (LEF), and that’s where it really gets interesting. This infinite field of incandescent energy that surrounds our physical body is our link to the past, the future and the universe around us. It is an informational field that contains all of the stories of our past. During a healing session, the shaman actually begins by cleansing and clearing the LEF, erasing those imprints of trauma from the field so it doesn’t have to organize the body into disease.

At the Four Winds Society’s Light Body School, we tell students who are training to become energy medicine practitioners that whatever is happening in the body is a reflection of the field, and when you clear the field, you create the conditions for health, and disease goes away.

In the Amazon, the shamans talk about the imprints of violence and fear that
are in our field and how, in certain states of consciousness, you can energetically clear these ancient predispositions toward suffering. You can break that cycle of
repeating incarnations that keep us
being born back into bodies that are suffering and into conditions that create suffering by clearing your luminous energy field.

Clearing your field also allows you to reselect your genetic destiny. For most of us, our genetic destiny was selected in a moment of wild or boring sex that our parents had, in which they merged their chromosomes and, in that very moment, our entire genetic destiny was determined. But we are not slaves to our genetics. Today we know that we are not our genes, that we are our dreams. In a new field called epigenetics, we are discovering how meditation, joy, compassion, forgiveness and a sense of oneness can switch on the genes that create health and switch off the genes that create disease. And when we meditate, the neural networks in our brains can determine how we can age gracefully, how we can heal rapidly and how we can die consciously.

Once we have repaired our brain with neuronutrients and superfoods, we can travel in our imagination back along the timeline to the moment of our conception to select a different genetic destiny, so we don’t have to live out the illnesses and dramas of our families of origin. In the same way a world-class athlete uses her imagination to activate exceptional performance in her sport of choice, we can use epigenetic mechanisms to activate long life and good health in our future, creating psychosomatic health through the use of active imagination.

It’s an exercise worth trying: Meditate on a journey back to the moment of your conception. Then reselect your genetic destiny for one that has a long life, a good brain,
a strong heart and a joyous, healthy life span.