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Ayurveda – detoxification

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The first thing I did once I had read up on the subject of Ayurveda (see book recommendations in my last post) was to detoxify my body. I was keen to see if the Ayurvedic principles would work and, if they did, whether I would actually feel physically and mentally healthier. I was convinced by the argument that we are constantly putting toxic substances into our body on a daily basis: animal fats, pesticides and antibiotics, genetically modified produce, alcohol, coffee along with unhealthy bacteria in our water and air. Our bodies are sophisticated enough to adapt to the absorption and partial excretion of all these poisons to the point where we often don’t even notice any obvious effects from them. In reality, however, they all affect every person in different ways, be it in our sleep patterns, digestive disorders, inflammation, infections, mental sluggishness, mood swings and as the nefarious root of diseases such as arthritis, diabetes and cancer.

So I began with an ayurvedan three-stage detoxification process that starts from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep. The three stages build slowly so that you have time to adjust your lifestyle and to incorporate new rituals into your daily routine.

Phase One

So let’s begin by taking a look at the best way to start your day during your first attempt at the first stage of detoxification:

  1. When you wake up, try to recall any significant dreams and begin your day with an attitude of gratitude for your sleep, health and the start of a new day. Stretching a litte is good too.
  2. Then go into the bathroom, evacuate as necessary and splash some cold or lukewarm water on your face. Better still, gently wipe your eyes with some pure rose water.
  3. From there you should go to your kitchen and drink 2-3 glasses of warm water, ideally with some freshly squeezed lemon juice, in order to activate your digestive system and re-hydrate your body after sleeping. You can at this point take any nutritional supplements you require and include the Ayurvedic herb TRIPHALA that can be bought in capsule form.
  4. In addition to TRIPHALA, which really promotes the detoxification process in your body, you should also make some “CCF” tea that you can pour into a thermos flask and drink throughout the day. This tea has a wonderfully detoxifying effect on your system. “CCF” stands for coriander, cumin and fennel. You simply put a small tea spoon of each of these spices into 1 litre of water and allow it to simmer for about 10 minutes. I also add some slices of fresh ginger and a tea spoon of fenugreek because of their additional flavour and health benefits.
  5. You should then pull oil. For me this took some getting used to, since I do not like the consistency of oil on my hands or in my mouth. But it is worth overcoming your issues. Pulling oil involves putting about a tablespoon of either sesame or coconut oil in your mouth and swilling it around, rather like you might do with a mouth wash, for 10 – 30 minutes. While you are doing this, you can be tidying up, preparing your breakfast, making your CCF tea, planning your day or whatever, so there is no time wasted. You should spit the oil out in the bin and not down the sink.
  6. Next, it’s back to your bathroom in order to scrape your tongue with a tongue scraper and then your brush your teeth. Oil pulling, tongue-scraping and brushing your teeth will help to get rid of all the toxins that have built up during the night, leave your breath smelling sweet and your teeth feeling as if you have just had a professional teeth polishing by your dentist. (By the way, as any good dentist will tell you, you should not clean your teeth for at least half an hour after your breakfast or any meal, otherwise you are actually brushing any residual sugars and food stains into the enamel of your teeth!)
  7. In Ayurveda, you get to enjoy two extremely healthy and detoxing breakfasts, if you have time. First, it is great to start with some fruit, for example, banana, kiwi, orange, mango, apple or berries. You should allow your body 20 – 30 minutes to digest these before eating your main breakfast. So this is the perfect time to have a shower and so on. Or you could use this time for meditation or yoga (more on these two subjects in a later blog).
  8. Before you shower, if you have time, spoil your body with a dry brush massage before you shower. This not only feels fantastic, but it also exfoliates dead skin that includes some of the toxins that are being excreted by the largest organ of your body. It can also help against the formation of cellulite and it moves toxins that have gathered in your body by “pushing” them towards your lymph nodes that vitally support your immune system. Concluding your shower with cold water is also medically proven to strengthen your immune system.
  9. After your shower, if you have time, massage your body with an appropriate oil, moisturising cream or body butter in order to feed and hydrate your clean skin.

To begin with, this whole process seems to take way too long, but after a few weeks, you will find ways to speed the process up and, as I said, to do two things at once. Furthermore, you will not only begin to feel so much better that your newfound wellness encourages you to invest the time, but you will also have more energy and be more efficient during your day, easily regaining the time you have invested in the morning.

For me, there were also several other very important consequences of incorporating these ayurvedic routines into my daily life, but more about those in a later blog.

Christianity, Erasmus, Fundamentalism, God, Jesus, Luther, new writer, Newfrontiers, Religion

False fundamentalism

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HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger (b. 1497, Augsburg, d. 1543, London) Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 – 1536) is most probably the man who began the science of historical-biblical criticism that has polarised attitudes to the Bible up until this day. Erasmus himself was highly gifted academic, a Roman Catholic priest and in many ways one of the first ever genuine citizens of Europe. He was the son of a Roman Catholic priest (yes, you read that correctly), born out of wedlock, and both his parents died from the plague when he was a teenager. It is doubtless the challenges of his early life that shaped his life-long belief in synergism, as opposed to the monergism preached by Luther and many influential Protestant preachers since the Reformation.

Erasmus was a pacifist who desperately wanted his Christian faith to be lived out by following Jesus in daily life. One of his biggest issues with Luther was that he knew that Luther’s belligerent provocations and theological argumentation would lead to a division in the church, which is of course exactly what happened during the Reformation. So how can it be that placid Erasmus himself inadvertently kicked off the greatest polarisation in the church today?

Erasmus was not only a Christian, but also a product of his time. He was a humanist. He was concerned to move Christianity away from lofty and often hypocritical scholasticism and place it back with sincerity in the centre of the daily lives of ordinary people. This sincere concern logically led to him wanting to have accurate translations of the Bible based on authentic manuscripts and then to place these translations into the hands of ordinary people.

The main version of the Bible used up until the 15th century was the Vulgate, a 4th century translation of the Bible into Latin. By comparing the Vulgate Bible with the manuscripts in their original languages that Erasmus was able to source, he knew that there were many mistakes in the Vulgate, ranging from shocking mistranslations to outright mistakes and omissions. This fact alone, too disturbing for Luther and anathema to modern fundamentalists, raises the question: if the Bible is the infallible Word of God, why did God allow the followers of Jesus to have a flawed version of it in their hands for the first 1,500 of the history of the church?

This leads us on to the second question: if, according to the fundamentalists, Christians are meant to base their lives on the infallible Word of God, what did they rely upon for the first few thousand years during which they didn’t even have a copy New Testament? Especially a New Testament whose canon was and still is, according to all historical evidence, decided upon by chaotic human preferences and choices.

Third question: what if further, even more accurate manuscripts of the Bible were still to be discovered? Then the fundamentalists would have a similar problem to the Jews, who will never be able to prove the authenticity of their Messiah, when he comes, since all the genealogical records were burnt during the destruction of the temple in AD 70.

This also leads us to the fourth question: given that the most accurate manuscripts of the Bible were only discovered in the 18th century – ironically thanks to the research of historical-biblical scholars – why did God permit believers to have an errant text in their hands for at least 1,700 years after the death of Christ?

It is questions such as these that have polarised the church. At the one end we have more pragmatic Christians such a s Erasmus who take the view that a few mistakes in the manmade transcripts in no way negate the overall message of Jesus and His Word. At the other extreme, we have the fundamentalists who claim that there can be no mistakes, even in the New Testament, and that every word is inspired by God Himself. Accordingly, every sentence of the Bible must be correctly interpreted in synergy with the Holy Spirit and then applied in the daily life of every believer. Hence, the fundamentalists claim to enjoy an arrogant monopoly of correct interpretation of an infallible text, even though God permitted the text to have many mistakes in it for at least 1,700 years. Need I say more?

Erasmus thus also planted the seeds of historical-biblical criticism. If we are open to recognising that the text may have mistakes in it, so-called textual criticism, then it should be no surprise that the other three main elements of historical-biblical criticism, source, form and literary criticism should follow on from there. Once again, for most fundamentalists, such methods are tools of the devil who seeks to undermine the authority of God’s Word, divide the church and promulgate atheism. Given that the devil is a mythical figure invented by humans with wealth and authority in order to keep the plebs in fear and obedience, the fundamentalists are really more concerned with their loss of authority over naive believers’ lives, upholding division in the church via their arrogant and flawless interpretation of Scripture and with protecting their sects from the increasing numbers of atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists and agnostics who will, thanks be to God, all be spending eternity burning in hell.

Sadly, Erasmus annoyed many theologians of his day by holding on to his more pragmatic synergistic beliefs. In retrospect, he was well ahead of his time in his Christian Weltanschauung. For example, let’s ask ourselves another simple question. Which type of Christian most closely resembles Jesus? The one who gets up each day of his/her life in grateful communion with God through prayer, worship, Bible-reading and joyfully applying the main tenets of God’s Word in daily life, or the one who vehemently preaches a fundamentalist gospel while walking past a beggar in the street, ranting against homosexuals and actively collaborating in the destruction of the planet? Not only that, but which type of Christianity most closely reflects the heart of Jesus? Erasmus’ synergistic theology that accepts that humans have the choice to co-operate with God in making His world a better place, or Luther’s monergistic theology that proclaims that human beings can only become believers if God chooses by his grace alone to save them, thus leaving all sinful-to-the-core human beings pre-destined from fertilisation for either heaven or hell? After all, Jesus gave the rich young man in Matthew 19 a choice, didn’t he?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald