Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Meditation for Beautiful Skin Combining Meditation and Nutritional Supplements to Create a Porcelain Fine, Blemish Free Complexion by William Bodri ...
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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Combining Meditation and Nutritional Supplements to Create a Porcelain Fine, Blemish Free Complexion

by William Bodri

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Copyright Copyright © 2004, William Bodri All rights reserved in all media First edition 2004. Top Shape Publishing, LLC 1135 Terminal Way Suite 209 Reno, Nevada 89502 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, including but not limited to electronic, mechanical, digital copying, printing, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission from the author. www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Health Disclaimer This information should not be construed as medical advice or instruction, and is not intended to replace the attention or advice of a physician or other health care professional. This information has not been reviewed or approved by the FDA. It is provided under First Amendment rights for educational and communication purposes only, and should not be construed as personal medical advice. No actions should be taken based solely on the contents of this book. The information within should not be interpreted as a recommendation for a specific treatment plan, nor should this information be used in place of the medical opinion of a qualified health care professional. It is not intended to replace, supplant, or augment a consultation with a doctor or other health care professional regarding the reader’s own medical care. Anyone who wishes to embark on any dietary, drug, exercise, or other lifestyle change intended to treat or prevent a specific condition should first consult with and seek clearance from their doctor and eye car professional; readers who fail to consult appropriate health authorities assume the full risk of any injuries. The author and publisher disclaim and all liability for injury or damages that could result from the use of information obtained from this book or its website. The author and publisher are not responsible for any errors or omissions in this book. Please call a health professional immediately if you think you may be ill.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 6 Meditations for Beautiful Skin Come From All Spiritual Traditions ................. 9 Pranayama, The Duck Egg So Cream Meditation, The White Skeleton Visualization and Nattokinase to Help Your Skin “Breathe”............................ 28 9-Bottled Wind Practice............................................................................................. 30 The So Cream Meditation ......................................................................................... 32 The White Skeleton Visualization Method.............................................................. 34 Nattokinase to Increase the Blood Circulation for Your Complexion................. 37 Vitalzym, The Enzyme Cocktail that Softens Your Skin from Within............. 41 The “Right Diet” for Natural Weight Loss, Personal Health and Maximum Beauty ............................................................................................................................. 53 Eat as Many Different Colors as Possible.............................................................. 57 The Five Deviant Perspectives ................................................................................ 59 The Getoff Diet for Eating Well ................................................................................ 61 The Immuno Labs ELISA Test ................................................................................. 65 The Metabolic Typing Diet ........................................................................................ 71 A Multivitamin-Multimineral Supplement ................................................................ 76 Omega-3 Oils to End Dry and Flaky Skin Forever............................................... 80 Juicing and the Nucleotide Rich “Miracle Foods” That Will Shed 10-20 Years Off Your Appearance ...................................................................................... 86 Natural Progesterone Cream for Skin Moisturizing............................................ 89 Internally Generated Hormones............................................................................... 92 Bird’s Nest Soup for a Transparent Glow and Shine ......................................... 96 Detoxifying Your Body and Blood for Clear Skin and Anti-Aging.................. 98 The Liver - Gall Bladder Flush ............................................................................... 101 The Kidney Flush ..................................................................................................... 104 Nature’s Pure Body.................................................................................................. 105 Sweat Them Out With the Far Infrared Sauna .................................................... 107 Homeopathics To Give That Extra Little “Push”.................................................. 108 Glutamine Powder for Angry Red Skin ................................................................. 111 A Detoxification Review .......................................................................................... 112 Getting Rid of Acne to End Embarrassing Blemishes Forever..................... 117 Immune 26 for Older Skin ........................................................................................ 120 Meditation Will Transmute All These Substances and Win You Karmic Beauty ........................................................................................................................... 124 The Amazing Colloidal Copper Spray for Age Spots, Scars and Blemishes ......................................................................................................................................... 129 The Best Natural Skin Creams that Us Naturopaths Have Discovered....... 136 Exercise for Meditative “Flow” That Has You Simply Oozing Magnetic Energy ........................................................................................................................... 140 Rebounders............................................................................................................... 143 Powerplates .............................................................................................................. 145 www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Strength Training...................................................................................................... 146 Bodywork Massage or Neurocranial Restructuring Will Have Friends Swearing You Had An Overnight Facelift............................................................ 151 Meditative Sex for the Highest Vibrational Energy, Looks and Appearance You Ever Dreamed Possible ................................................................................... 157 The Shortest and Quickest Path to Beautiful Skin ........................................... 170

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Introduction Meditation for beautiful skin. An impossibility? No, not at all. Countless times I have taught someone meditation, and almost instantly you could see a change in their complexion just from the practice of dropping thoughts for a half-hour or so. In the vernacular of Chinese medicine, we say that “their chi comes up” and “their vitality expresses itself” because during meditation it can flow freely and doesn’t have to battle all sorts of errant, polluting energy flows caused by excessive worries and thinking. That, in brief, is how the results of meditation become instantly reflected in the complexion. Don’t cheat yourself, however, for the benefits of meditation go much deeper than that. I know plenty of young models that may look pretty on the outside but are absolutely sick inside, and their energy shows it. Some of them are as thin as toothpicks and look terrible in person because of a “chi deficiency” that is the sign of illness rather than health. It’s like an apple that looks crispy on the outside but when you bite into it, it’s all mushy because it’s rotten. And that’s what people admire as beauty … a state of chi deficiency? That’s actually what I call the pornography of beauty in mistaking something that’s negative for something that’s positive. As Shakyamuni Buddha said, we live in a topsy-turvy world where we take falsehood as truth and neglect true reality. Nevertheless, part of living in this world is learning how to master it and one of the things you can learn to master is bringing out your personal beauty. You’re not going to be able to change your genes, but you can certainly transform your appearance through natural methods, especially through meditation, so that you rejuvenate yourself and look the best that your genes can possibly allow given what you’ve got.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin That’s because meditation enables you to tap into the fundamental energies of the universe, and those energies will in turn transform your body into an vehicle that’s more fit for tapping into those energies . That “optimal state” is also a state of maximum beauty. You are a unique individual in terms of so many factors, and appearance is just one of them. More important is your virtue and “chi” ( life force energy) because those are what people really notice. Your physical body will one day die, but these live on. Furthermore, they can be noticed even if people view you from behind and they are the reason some movie stars rise to great heights while others are neglected … it’s all because certain popular people reach a state where they exude a natural energy everyone senses. That’s what makes them beautiful and attractive. Meditation will help you cultivate your internal energies so that you can develop this state and then the results cannot fail to become reflected in your appearance. Through meditation a 50-year old can look like they are thirtytwo or at least the best they can be. It all depends on their natural gifts and their efforts. Inside this book you won’t just learn meditation methods that will help transform your appearance into one of maximum beauty, but also naturopathic and nutritional methods that will assist you in the effort. That’s part of the whole equation for learning how to master reality. You’ll get the best that I’ve ever found for beautifying the skin and your appearance. All along you’ll also get bits and pieces of spiritual teachings related to this matter, because simply meditating for beautiful skin is a little vain in itself. Experience has taught me that if you meditate for higher objectives, you’ll get beautiful appearance, health, long life and good fortune all as natural side-products without asking. Beautiful skin is a natural result that falls out of meditation, but it’s those higher benefits that I want to emphasize as well because if you shoot for the stars you’ll certainly reach the moon, yet if you just shoot for the moon you might not leave the atmosphere. I want you to achieve everything you possibly want – both beauty and cultivation attainment – so you’ll find a mixture of both teachings within this work along with the best that nutrition and naturopathy have to offer in terms of bone structure and the complexion. I can honestly say that I have helped numerous women achieve beautiful complexions in a few short weeks just by changing their diet and detoxifying

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin them with a few natural supplements, so the goal is not unreasonable. The best results were always achieved when they not only changed their diet and underwent detoxification to remove poisons from their skin, but also started to practice meditation. Certainly over the long haul you’ll find the steps I’m revealing much more effective (and cheaper!) than depending on cosmetics, which will actually harm your skin or turn it into a plasticized veneer that men shrink from. Everyone wants natural beautiful skin shining with vitality, and that’s what this book is about. Want beautiful skin? No problem! Put these methods into place and you’ll have beautiful skin for a lifetime!

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Meditations for Beautiful Skin Come From All Spiritual Traditions One of the best kept secrets of the Hollywood and modeling crowd is that meditation will help anyone look their absolute best. In letting go of your thoughts, which is the practice of meditation, you enable your natural living vitality to arise and permeate all the cells of your body and from that permeation, a brand new person is born – in terms of body, mind and spirit. It shows! Ancient books from a variety of cultures, as well as practical modern experience, show that meditation will slowly perfect a person’s body shape and features so that they become the most perfect form possible given the genes they’re based on … and it all happens naturally just from resting your mind. Done properly, meditation is even more effective than vegetarianism in helping you look great and “project glow.” It’s even more effective than cosmetics or taking supplements to bring out the true beauty of your body and personality. Why? Because it activates your “yang chi” or “positive life force energies” and when those energies start coursing through your body, everyone will be able to see it, feel it, and it will energize your cells to make them the healthiest they can possibly be. That’s when your body starts to exude the energy that people notice. That’s the type of energy that even shows up on film! When you rest your mind through thought-free meditation, essentially you are temporarily giving up the habit of clinging to the wandering thoughts and internal dialogue that typically runs around in your head. Meditation doesn’t mean you “stop thinking” by suppressing thoughts and pushing them away so they don’t arise. Rather, it means you stop clinging to those thoughts as they arise and can immediately freely liberate them as they pass into emptiness on leaving. Once thoughts depart they are gone, so in not clinging to them you always retain a 100% open pristine clarity of quiet awareness.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin When you stop clinging to thoughts … and therefore stop giving them energy by acting as a “third person observer” who sees them without getting involved with them … your mental state will eventually become free and clear. Initially your mind is like a glass of dirty water but when you practice the mental introspection of just watching your thoughts without involvement, in time the dirt in the water will settle and your mind will become limitless in open clarity. It all happens due to the practice of non-clinging. If you just let your thoughts be born whenever they arise (due to circumstances) and allow them to freely depart without holding onto them after they have appeared, you will still be able to do everything you can do now with one exception. The exception is that your capabilities will become larger … your mind will always be peaceful, calm, clear and bright … and you’ll be able to handle a million-and-one activities without ever becoming ruffled. Without effort you’ll be able to handle numerous things and always remain in a mental state of mental joy. Because of that state, your body will start to experience a state called “physical bliss” and this will actually transform your body to the most beautified structure it can be. Meditation is like taking a mental vacation because through meditation you stop pursuing thoughts for awhile. You take a break from the incorrect habit of holding onto them, and through that effortlessness obtain a state of profound joy and clarity. When you stop pursuing thoughts and stop giving them energy, they’ll eventually die down and reveal an underlying substrate that you can only describe as calm, clear and pregnant with an infinite awareness that functions without need of discriminative thinking. That underlying mental state is always there -- never bored nor distracted – as peaceful, calm, content and as expansive as an open sky without clouds as far as the eye can see. That’s a classy state of comfort, bliss and real contentment. Now here’s how that mental state will transform your physical features to their utmost in perfection. When you practice accessing that effortless mental state that’s always there -- by giving your thoughts away and giving your normally clinging mind a needed rest - that mental emptiness will cause your natural vital energies to start rotating in your body. Your natural vitality (which the Chinese call “chi”) will start arising because you are no longer playing with thoughts that suppress it. Your life force and consciousness are linked, so when you relax one you can relax the other. By relaxing your thoughts, you relax any artificial demands you

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin make on your life force vital energies because of their interconnection, and those chi energies are finally freed to be able to circulate as they are meant to in a perfect body. In so circulating, they actually create your perfect body which becomes reflected in your complexion. Don’t just believe me, but listen to what the sages have to say. Due to the peaceful, empty mental state you cultivate through meditation, even the Chinese, Indian and a variety of other medical systems say that these vital energies will begin to circulate. Try it a little bit and you’ll see for yourself. It’s true even though it’s something that science has not yet learned to measure. With just a little bit of mental relaxation, these vital energies will rise to the head and wash your complexion … and that’s the immediate result people see when someone meditates. That’s why people always comment, “you look cleaner” as you meditate, and if you keep up the meditation practice, over time this transformation becomes deeper and even more profound in producing “beauty.” Your chi, or vital force, is responsible for good fortune when it arises. It will open up all your acupuncture meridians -- the internal energy channels that run throughout your body -- to rid you of sickness and the factors of aging. Here’s the best part … in emptying your mind and thereby putting yourself in tune with the Infinite All, the energy that starts arising within will actually transform your entire body so that it is a more perfect vehicle for realizing that oneness with perfection. Let me say it again. The more you meditate, the more your body will transform into a perfected or beautified state that is more in tune with being able to commune with the divine. It’s all a function of devoted meditation practice. The end result of meditation practice is that not only with your vital energies arise, but your physical shape and features will transform in line with those energies and you will naturally become an irresistible magnet for attention as well as the attractive companion everyone want to be with. You will look your best, feel your best, and be your best simply from the practice of relaxing your mind and not clinging to thoughts. So how do you make this happen? When you meditate you are basically emptying your mind of thoughts. Naturally that goal isn’t instantly achieved the first time you start to sit down and meditate,

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin but with time and continued meditation practice you can learn how to mentally let go of your thoughts, worries and troubles while maintaining a wordless awareness of that carefree, empty mental state. When you give your wandering mindset a vacation break, you can think of it as creating a vacuum of thought energy in your head. We all know that “nature abhors a vacuum,” and so the spiritual cultivation schools of the world (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Tantra, Alchemy) explain that the vital energies from below will be drawn upwards to the head to fill that void. Another way of saying it is that now that you are no longer interfering with the correct circulation of your vital energies … because you are no longer forcefully pushing around thoughts or clinging to thinking (and thus creating unnecessary chi flows since thoughts and chi are linked) … those chi energies can complete their natural circulation in the body that they are meant to traverse, but which has been prevented in the past by this thunderstorm of excessive mental thoughts. When you meditate and let go of your thinking, your chi energies will be drawn upwards through your acupuncture meridians (“chi channels”), which get cleaned by the process, and your physical body gets cleaned as well. Over time, it looks it, too, especially once those vital energies reach the head. Not only will your personal vital energies change your skin color, texture, tone and the shape of your face to its more beautiful underlying structure of perfection, but they will then start running down the front of the body to complete a circular energy orbit. Naturally you have to keep meditating for this full circuit to be completed. That flow of energy is the underlying process that produces true beauty, true personality, true vitality, and perfect health. Young children look so beautiful and lovely and full of energy because their minds are innocent and free of thoughts, and so that natural vitality arises without obstructions. Because innocent children don’t suppress it or interfere with it from too much thinking, they are healthy and full of the vital energy we all desire as adults. Meditation can help you regain that state and go past it. Meditation is the process that helps you ignite your natural inherent life force vitality that will shine as a blessing for others. On the other hand, if your vital chi energy doesn’t circulate but simply stagnates because you hold your thoughts too tightly out of habit (a habit which gets stronger as you get older) … which thereby prevents this natural process from

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin flowering in full measure … then you can slap all sorts of creams and cosmetics on your face and undergo all sorts of cosmetic surgery … … but you will look terrible, and people will know it. You will get old, your energy will wane and your body will start to break down as well. But not if you practice meditation! People know it and sense it when you just try to cover things over, which defeats the whole purpose of these artificial cover-ups anyway. Wouldn’t it be better just to attack the root of the problem by practicing a form of mental resting? Remember that people can sense when your underlying natural vitality is vibrant because that’s what they are actually attracted to. It shows through your skin, your complexion, your voice, the way you walk … even your personality and way you deal with situations. Everyone admires or even lusts after this form of chi! Smoothing cosmetics on the face, on the other hand, is like plastering new paint on dirty old walls or putting putty on termite holes in rotting wood. That process will never produce the true beauty of which you are capable and which you are seeking. It only hides imperfections and the more you hide them through the practice of plastering and cover-up, the more imperfections you produce. You might already be using lots of cosmetics, and along these lines you also already know that the health of your skin will decline with continued use. With every passing day, month, and year along this route it will get harder and harder to look younger and “fresh” so that you can mix in with a crowd where no one can tell your age. Meditation can do that, however. Meditation is the only real, true, rejuvenating and anti-aging remedy in existence because it’s the only thing that empowers your life force. When you use cosmetics and plastic surgery, however, bags will still continue to form under your eyes, wrinkles will still accumulate, your skin will continue to darken and fill with poisons and most of all … people will feel you are getting old no matter how many things you try. If you are a woman, try getting a movie role if you solely depend on your external beauty rather than cultivating the inner sort of energy that is unleashed through meditation and felt on the big screen. That’s what people are after. You will attract attention by following this route of thicker layers of cosmetics or plastic surgery, but the end result will be to attract the exact sort of attention you don’t want. I’m sure Michael Jackson wished he knew that before he started

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin down that dangerous road. People can always tell what’s artificial and what’s natural, and they always prefer the natural beautification of the natural. Consider this. Did you ever see someone come back from a vacation and notice how great they looked from having rested a while and done nothing at all? Why? Because they rested their mind. They rested their mind, which gave their vital energies a chance to circulate throughout their bodies and rejuvenate them somewhat. The more they rested, the more rejuvenation they experienced. So here’s the key point … that rejuvenating effect can be spread throughout your whole body if you make meditation a daily practice. The more you meditate, in fact, the deeper will be that rejuvenating transformation. That’s all meditation is – giving your mind a rest from a frantic, worrying indulgence in following all sorts of thoughts and sensations. You simply give your mind a rest, a break, a vacation. You close your eyes and watch your thoughts so that you’re aware of them, but you never touch them or hold onto them and just observe them as they flit in and out of existence, birthing from emptiness and returning to emptiness. If you practice this form of meditation, in time your thoughts will naturally settle without any mental effort at all except for the non-effort of “watching.” With continued practice – because it takes time to break our ingrained habit of mental clinging -- the gradual appearance of a quiet peaceful silence and mental clarity will dawn, just as a glass of muddy water eventually settles if you don’t keep shaking it. Because of that state of naturally silent but expansive awareness, your chi will start to arise and then circulate with vibrant abundance, and that arising of your chi will clean out your body and change your appearance to match its most perfect underlying matrix. Through meditation you become the best you can possibly become ... the true ideal of womanhood or manhood people admire. It doesn’t matter what school of meditation you follow as long as the meditation practice you use teaches you to abandon thoughts. That means not pushing them away or suppressing them but to just watching them without clinging. You can say “stilling thoughts,” “pacifying thoughts,” “not attaching to thoughts” and describe meditation in a million different ways but you are trying to cultivate an aware but open, effortless mental state of clarity and non-discrimination. Just do that, and in time your wandering thoughts will die down all by themselves.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

This means you don’t use any energy to push thoughts away or suppress them in meditation, which is a mistake people often make. You just let your thoughts come and go while observing them without adding any energy to their mission and in time, your mind will tire of producing thoughts and an underlying clarity – that’s always there – will begin to appear. That clarity that arises is your true mind. It’s always there underneath your thoughts, but you keep focusing on the thoughts and think they are the mind rather than the underlying picture screen of empty clarity within which they appear. That emptiness is your true nature … rather than the thoughts themselves. The meditative practice of watching thoughts is like a hotel manager who just stands there watching the guests come and go without himself participating in all the hustle and bustle and chatter. After a while, all the guests eventually leave the hotel and it becomes quiet without any effort on his part. All the manager does is stand there and watch without saying a word. It’s also like a mother who watches her children use up all their energy playing and running here and there, but who remains unruffled and unconcerned while the children eventually tire, lie down and fall asleep. The mental state of clarity she then achieves is a quiet field of open mental peace and awareness. Those are the explanations, so what do you do to practice meditation. Here are the basic instructions: Sit in a relaxed and upright posture, with straight spine, open chest, hands resting naturally on the thighs. To take such a posture already expresses the genuine dignity of being human. To remain in that posture during the ups and downs of our thought and emotional processes expresses the fundamental confidence of trusting in unconditional goodness. The eyes are open [or closed] with soft gaze, slightly down, and we take the same attitude to the other senses—open but not fixed or harshly staring to experience something. As we sit there, we allow our minds to identify with the outgoing breath, to go out with it, and then to return to be attentive to the posture as the breath comes in. As thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations begin to pop up, we note them and let them be as they are, not trying to push them away, or holding onto them and indulging them. We begin to become mindful of the precise details of our thought and perceptual processes and also aware of the relationship between them. A thought or feeling arises, and then it goes away. Where it arises from and whence it goes, who can say?

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin But occasionally we might catch a glimpse of non-thought, of open mind. A glimpse can be tremendously refreshing. It is such a relief to realize that we can afford to let go of our conceptualizing process altogether.1 When your mind empties through this practice of watching, your chi will begin to rise into your head and that stream of refreshing chi energy will silently pour into your brain to quiet your thoughts just as a stream of clear water that enters a muddy pond will soon clarify it as well. That clear energy that also arises … due to the detachment from thoughts that frees or unleashes your vital energies from suppressed restraint … will also begin to clean the connective tissues of your skin and face. It will do all sorts of wonderful things that the sages of various religions have mentioned. There are all sorts of meditation methods you can practice, but they are all built around these principles of watching (observation) thoughts and producing a mental realm of quiet called “stopping” (cessation). You watch your thoughts – you “contemplate them” by observing them without pushing them or getting involved with them – and in time they will die down and your mind will remain clear but empty of thoughts. Here’s the process again from my book, Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation: [1] First, sit comfortably to relax your body and your respiration. We call this first step the "preparatory practices", or physiological adjustments, for tuning the physical nature. Basically, you want to situate yourself so as to lessen any physical disturbances or distractions. Then after your body is calmed, you start quietly observing your inner thoughts and emotions. In other words, you simply watch your internal psychological functions like a third person observer. This third person doesn't interfere with what's going on, or participate in the activities they're observing. He just stays there watching, neither rejecting or clinging to anything; he simply sits there silently observing. [2] You continue watching your internal process of mentation until you reach the point where you can clearly observe every thought and idea which appears in the mind without any vagueness or ambiguity. Naturally, you are not tightening your body nor mentally straining during this practice. Rather, you always remain relaxed while clearly observing your internal mental processes. After a while, you will eventually be able to distinguish that the process of mentation has three parts: a preceding thought which has gone, a thought which has not yet arisen, and the 1

The Craft of the Warrior, Robert Spencer, (Frog, Berkeley: California, 1993), pp.146-147.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin immediate clear radiance, or mental state of present mind. With continued watching, the separation of these three states becomes quite clear. [3] With continued observation, you progress a bit further and next realize that the past, present and future thoughts never stay. Since they don't stay they can never be grasped, hence we say that "fundamentally, they have no base to rely upon". Observing the appearance and disappearance of thoughts is called "observing birth and death", for the coming and going of thoughts is a ceaseless, never-ending process of arising and then disappearance, or decay. This is the realm of birth and death. By observing this stream of birth and death, you will gradually learn how to detach from the mental processes, and you will become more familiar with the false mind of consciousness. In other words, you will be able to drop the illusion that our mental process is a fundamental reality. Rather, you will gradually see that all mental states are ungraspable, transient phenomena which come and go without end, and they're more like insubstantial bubbles of foam or particles of dust which have no fixity of nature. Because of their ceaseless birth and death and the gap in-between, what we normally imagine as a continuous continuity of thoughts is actually an illusion, like the unbroken wheel of light we see when a stick of fire is spun in the air. Thus through this process of inner watching, you will begin to realize that our mental state is an ongoing process separate from our true self. The true self is what's watching this play scene, so it's like an internal knower who never moves. If you go from here to the North Pole and back, the scenery always changes, but that inner knower never changes--it never moves. In fact, it never leaves, and has never come either. It just is. That's what we're seeking, though on a more profound level than we can explain here. Now in watching thoughts without adding any energy to the process, you'll begin to understand how dreamlike our consciousness actually is because the reality it gives birth to seems to be there and yet the concreteness of this reality isn't real. Phenomena are empty, and yet they are conventionally real, but this conventional reality is also empty. So eventually, through observation with detachment, you'll reach the stage where you can mentally relax while "giving birth to the mind without abiding anywhere". Through continued observation you will notice that thoughts or phenomena ("existence") are born from emptiness (mental silence), and the existence of emptiness relies on phenomena. Existence and emptiness are both manifestations of one nature--its single source, our true self--so on the road of cultivation you don't cling to either side. Both sides are phenomenal constructions, or false relativities, so both sides are not real.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Hence in shamatha-vipashyana practice, you start to contemplate the mean between stillness and activity. In practicing this inner watching, you'll get progressively better at becoming mentally free because you'll stop clinging to or rejecting your thoughts, emotions and sensations. Thus your mental awareness will increasingly "open" and your ability to function in the world will increase as well, so you'll actually be expanding your awareness while saving a lot of energy that you'd normally waste in useless clinging. Furthermore, your internal state of peace and calm will progressively develop with every increase in clarity. Thus if you keep observing the origin and destruction of thoughts while paying particular attention to where they come from and go to, you'll eventually obstruct the stream of consciousness. [4] With the stream of consciousness disrupted, you will then notice a momentary gap of stillness, or silence, between all your thoughts. In other words, if you practice this method of inner observation for a long time--by wordlessly watching thoughts without injecting energy into the thought stream--the process of silent observation will itself disrupt the stream of mentation. The state of mind in the immediate present will gradually open up to reveal a tiny gap of mental quiet, or emptiness; when a previous thought has disappeared and a subsequent thought has not yet arisen, the mind will seem quiet. This mental silence is not a gap of dullness nor stupor, nor should it be a forced silence or blankness you create through suppressing thoughts. Rather, it will be a lucid, clear and open awareness, and these characteristics will gradually unfold as more time is spent in this state. In other words, after quietly observing our mental processes for quite some while, one will notice a tiny gap of silent pausation between thoughts which we refer to as "cessation". If we continue observing this state without effort and shine awareness on it, it will gradually expand further and further. Looking into this gap of silence is the process of "contemplation" or vipashyana. It's a quiet realm similar to emptiness, but it still isn't the genuine emptiness of Tao. Nevertheless, this is what we're initially after because we can use this state to begin cultivating prajna wisdom. [5] If you continue to carry over this state of watching the mind (the process of silent detachment and immediate awareness) during all your normal activities--whether walking, talking, sitting or sleeping--you'll be able to reach the point where thoughts no longer bind you. Gradually their volume will die down, your radiant awareness will expand and you will be able to seamlessly enter into the real emptiness of samadhi.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin In other words, if you keep observing the state of cessation by shining awareness on this state, you will eventually arrive at dhyana. Thus the practice of shining awareness on the silence within is commonly referred to as "contemplating mind". If you continue progressing in this manner by reaching further levels of emptiness and shining wisdom awareness on any state of cessation you reach, you will eventually acquire prajna wisdom, or transcendental wisdom. Then you'll climb the various ranks of samadhi and enter into the Tao.2 That state of mental emptiness that occurs when watching thoughts is alternatively called cessation, stopping, “samadhi” or extinction because all your discriminative thinking has cleared out. You will still be able to know and do things when thoughts clear away to reveal this mental state – in fact you’ll be able to do things a thousand times better – because your mind will still function with awareness and pristine clarity. Furthermore, your vital energies will be circulating throughout your body healing disease and giving you tremendous energy, too. If you are always tired, meditation is one of the premier ways to unleash your vital force and supply you with energy. All the different meditation methods in the world use different techniques but they all rely on these same principles of cessation and contemplation, stopping and watching. For instance there are “adding meditation methods” that tie up your thoughts through excessive demands of concentration. The purpose of these meditation practices is that you eventually get so tired from the mental efforts demanded that you let go of all your thoughts and realize that state of emptiness. It’s like loading up a computer with so many programming running simultaneously that the machine slows to a virtual halt, or overloading a bridge with excess weight until it finally collapses. There are also methods where you continually listen to the same sounds over and over again, such as prayers or mantra, until the repetitive rhythm tires your mind of wandering thoughts and you can let go of the sounds to access that underlying mental realm of quiet. There are methods that involve cultivating your breathing because your breath is linked with your chi, or vital force, and because chi and consciousness are linked. You can let go of thoughts (consciousness) and your breathing will calm, or you

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Twenty-five Doors to Meditation: A Handbook for Entering Samadhi, William Bodri and Lee Shu-Mei (Samuel Weiser, York Beach: Maine, 1998), pp. 14-17.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin can go at it the opposite way and cultivate your breath to a point of cessation so that your thoughts stop. That’s the purpose of Indian pranayama breathing exercises you find in yoga texts. The best pranayama techniques don’t actually feature conscious control of the breath but a controlling of the mind, through meditation, so that your breath and thoughts both subside and your internal vital energies, or “kundalini,” are ignited and begin to transform your body. It doesn’t matter what type of meditation you follow as long as you realize they all involve cultivating a state of mental emptiness and having you remain mindful of that state. Cessation and contemplation are the two principles of practice which simply allow you to access deeper and deeper levels of meditation. The whole point of meditation, regardless of whatever practice you follow (and you can find twenty-five different meditation practices in my book Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation and twenty-five others mentioned in the Surangama Sutra) is to realize a state of mental emptiness by detaching from your senses and freeing yourself from discriminative thinking. You can use breath control, prayer, mantra practice, visualization, yoga techniques and all sorts of ways to accomplish this objective, but despite whatever method you use the end target or goal is the same nonetheless. Don’t believe me? Here’s a sample description of correct meditation, or “spiritual practice,” taken from Christian sources: Exercise yourself unceasingly in mystical contemplation [meditation]; abandon feelings; renounce intellectual activities; reject all that belongs to the perceptible and the intelligible; strip yourself totally of non-being and being and lift yourself as far as you are able to the point of being united in unknowing with him who is beyond all being and all knowledge. For it is by passing beyond everything, yourself included, irresistibly and completely, that you will be exalted in pure ecstasy right up to the dark splendour of the divine Superessence, after having abandoned all, and stripped yourself of everything.3 The Dominican friar Meister Eckhart also explained, (T)he more completely you are able to draw in your powers to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you have 3

The Roots of Christian Mysticism, Oliver Clement, (New City Press, Hyde Park: New York, 1993), p. 246.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin absorbed, and the further you can get from creatures and their images, the nearer you are to this and the readier to receive it. If only you could suddenly be unaware of all things, then you could pass into an oblivion of your own body as St Paul did, … In this case … memory no longer functioned, nor understanding, nor the senses, nor the powers that should function so as to govern and grace the body … In this way a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all things and himself.4 The Syrian Pseudo-Dionysius, who perhaps exerted more influence on Christian spiritual practices than any other individual, wrote: There is yet a higher way of knowing God. Besides the knowledge of God obtained by processes of philosophy and theology, these are processes of speculation, there is that most divine knowledge of God which takes place through ignorance. In this knowledge, the intellectual is illumined by the unsearchable depths of wisdom. … Do thou, then, in the inner practice of mystic contemplation [meditation practice], leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive and all things which are not and things which are and strain upward to unknowing as far as may be toward the union with Him who is above all things and above all knowledge.5 Judaism also says that true spiritual practice is to achieve emptiness, which is called “ayin”: One must think of oneself as ayin and forget oneself totally. … Then one can transcend time, rising to the world of thought, where all is equal: life and death, ocean and dry land. … Such is not the case when one is attached to the material nature of this world. … If one thinks of oneself as something (yesh) … then God cannot clothe Himself in him, for He is infinite, and no vessel can contain him, unless one thinks of oneself as ayin [emptiness].6 In the following quote, Hasidic Judaism explains that the path of spiritual practice is cultivating to attain a mental state of “ayin,” or emptiness, which we call the state of true humility since in being free of thoughts you don’t hold to any conception of being an ego:

4 5

Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, Robert K.C. Forman, (SUNY Press, Albany: New York, 1999), p. 14.

6

Maggid Devarav le-Ya’agov, Dov Baer, ed. Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, (Magnes Press, Jerusalem: Israel, 1976), p. 186.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin The essence of the worship of God and of all the mizvot is to attain the state of humility [emptiness], namely, … to understand that all one’s physical and mental powers and one’s essential being are dependent on the divine elements within. One is simply a channel for the divine attributes. One attains such humility through the awe of God’s vastness, through realizing that “there is no place empty of Him” (Tiqqunei Zohar 57), Then one comes to the state of ayin [emptiness], which is the state of humility. … One has no independent self and is contained, as it were, in the Creator, blessed be He. … This is the meaning of the verse (Exod. 3:6): “Moses hid his face, for he was in awe. …” Through his experience of awe, Moses attained the hiding of his face, that is, he perceived no independent self. Everything was part of divinity.7 Here’s a cultivation method of spiritual practice from Islam that reaches the transforming state of emptiness through mantra practice that’s matched with the breathing: Let the worshipper reduce his heart to a state in which the existence of anything and its non-existence are the same to him [emptiness]. Then let him sit alone in some corner, limiting his religious duties to what is absolutely necessary, and not occupying himself either with reciting the Koran or considering its meaning or with books of religious traditions or with anything of the sort. And let him see to it that nothing save God most High enters his mind. Then, as he sits in solitude, let him not cease saying continuously with his tongue, “Allah, Allah,” keeping his thought on it. At last he will reach a state when the motion of his tongue will cease, and it will seem as though the word flowed from it. Let him persevere in this until all trace of motion is removed from his tongue, and he finds his heart persevering in the thought. Let him still persevere until the form of the word, its letters and shape, is removed from his heart, and there remains the idea alone, as though clinging to his heart, inseparable from it. So far, all is dependent on his will and choice; but to bring the mercy of God does not stand in his will or choice. He has now laid himself bare to the breathings of that mercy, and nothing remains but to wait what God will open to him, as God has done after this manner to prophets and saints. If he follows the above course, he may be sure that the light of the Real will shine out in his heart.8 John Climacus, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, also instructs the following cultivation practice: “Let your calling to mind of Jesus be continually combined with your breathing and you will know the meaning of silence.” The Christian 7 8

Mevasser Zedek, Issachar Ber of Zlotshov, (Berditchev, USSR, 1817), p. 9a-b. The Relaxation Response, Herbert Benson, (Avon Books, New York, 1976), pp. 131-132.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin work, the Philokalia, also contains similar “mantra recitation” instructions for reciting the Prayer of the Heart as follows: You know, brother, how we breathe, we breathe the air in and out. On this is based the life of the body and on this depends its warmth. So, sitting down in your cell, collect your mind, lead it into the path of the breath along which the air enters in, constrain it to enter the heart altogether with inhaled air, and keep it there. Keep it there, but do not leave it silent and idle, instead give it the following prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.” Let this be its constant occupation, never to be abandoned. For this work, by keeping the mind free from dreaming, renders it unassailable to suggestions of the enemy and leads it to Divine desire and love.9 Perhaps Zen master Huang-po described it best when he instructed us that spiritual practice was basically attaining a state of emptiness by mastering the meditative practice of mindfulness. Huang-po stated: Mind is Buddha and unmindfulness is Tao (the path). Just refrain from stirring the thinking process and from setting the mind on what is and is not, long and short, the self and others, and subject and object. Mind is fundamentally Buddha, and Buddha is basically mind. Mind is like empty space; hence it is said that the Buddha's true Dharmakaya [fundamental self-nature] is like empty space. There is no need to seek it elsewhere, for all longing results in suffering. Even if you pass aeons as countless as the sand grains in the Ganges to practice the six perfections (paramita) and a myriad lines of Bodhisattva conduct to realize the Buddha-bodhi, it will not be the ultimate one. Why? Because it is casually produced and when its cause comes to an end, it will return to the condition of impermanence. Hence it is said, "The Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya are not real Buddhas and are not the preachers of the Dharma." Just recognize the self-mind, free from selfness and otherness, as fundamentally Buddha. ... Now you should learn only unmindfulness to wipe out all causality and refrain from giving rise to discriminatory thoughts in order to eliminate (all concepts of) selfness, otherness, desire, anger, like, gain, loss, etc. to recover the self-nature which is fundamentally pure and clean; this is the practice of Bodhi, Dharma and Buddhahood. If you do not understand this, although you may widen your knowledge, practice austerities, live on wild fruit and nuts and cover your body with grass and leaves, you will fail to realize your mind; this is just heterodoxy practiced by heavenly 9

The Relaxation Response, Herbert Benson, (Avon Books, New York, 1976), p. 123.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin demons and heretics, and by ghosts and spirits in water and on land. What advantage can you expect from such practice.10 The common principle behind all these techniques is that they use different angles or approaches to help you to free yourself of being tied to thoughts so that you can access the underlying quiet state of your mind. It’s not that you produce quiet through force, but that you let go of excessive chatter through special mental tricks we call meditations in order to reveal this underlying empty substrate. When your mind quiets, the wandering energy flows you generate due to thinking will no longer impede or block the natural energy currents of the body. These are the energy currents that are supposed to run free and which create the perfect human being, or the human being we all admire and envy. When your mind is empty these energy flows, which are connected with personality traits, can begin to circulate the way they are naturally meant to run and this freedom to run their proper course is guaranteed to produce physical rejuvenation. That’s why meditation helps you look better, but here are the reasons in detail. When you are busy forcefully spinning thoughts in your head without end, they interrupt the smooth flow of your natural vital energies. They create obstruction, which is why resting your mind produces renewal. That’s why sleep refreshes you every night. If you are overly worried or concentrate too much on trivia or nonsense, then because consciousness and those energy flows are linked … and because you thereby send disturbing energy in aberrant directions so that your natural energy flow is disrupted and cannot run the way it should, you are not healthy and never look your best. I know you may not believe this, but just think about how you look and feel after a full body massage that was good enough to smoothen all the chi flow throughout your body. That should give you a small idea of what I am talking about. When you give up those interferences to your natural energy flows through meditation, then your natural energies will eventually reassert their natural circulations that have been interrupted and you’ll end up looking the best you possibly can. They’ll wash through your face and skin and complexion and create all sorts of wonderful, beautifying, perfecting transformations.

10

Twenty-five Doors to Meditation: A Handbook for Entering Samadhi, William Bodri and Lee Shu-Mei (Samuel Weiser, York Beach: Maine, 1998), pp. 181-182.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Those natural energies, when they run free, are also responsible for physical healing, anti-aging and rejuvenation! You don’t have to believe me. Just go take a look at what Chinese Medicine and Indian medicine have proved about this through thousands of years of research and observation. Don’t wait for science to catch up to this sort of conclusion, but rest on the words of the saints and sages to at least give meditation a try and then see what will happen. The truth that all the New Age schools and science fail to openly recognize is that your chi and consciousness are linked. If you give your consciousness a rest by letting go of thoughts so that they calm down, then your chi connected with those thoughts will be able to full freely, become full and finally rest while permeating every cell of your body with rejuvenating life force. Even Buddha said this will bring about a rejuvenating transformation of your body, and it will certainly harmonize all the elements of your physical structure. Because of the mental resting of meditation, your positive life-giving energies (called “yang chi”) will arise, traverse throughout your body cleansing your organs, acupuncture channels and connective tissues (skin and bones) … and you’ll start looking the best you possibly can be given what you’ve got. Isn’t that the purpose of cosmetics? In actual fact, practicing meditation perfects the physical body so you will perfect your appearance. Think of “letting go of thoughts” in meditation as way to relax the muscles of your face and let the energy currents within your face blossom with anti-aging vitality. Whenever your chi rises … and you let go of or detach from your thoughts and your sensations that arise with it … it will definitely open your chi channels (acupuncture meridians) in the body. This opening will push out sickness, disease and stagnating chi that is detrimental to your appearance, and transform the body so that it shines with living, vibrant beauty. Chi energy shines with a hidden light, and people can feel this light projected through the complexion. That’s why some people seem to “glow.” It’s because their chi flows smoothly. One of my best friends, at 60-years old, is the envy of 20-year olds who meet her because her beautiful skin literally shines due to her meditation practice, which is the mental practice of doing nothing at all except letting go of mental efforts of clinging. She was not naturally gifted with “model looks” but because of

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin meditation, she could be a cover girl model for cosmetic companies and beauty magazines. In fact, the more she meditates and the older she gets, the better she looks because the transformative power of meditation is actually cumulative. The more you meditate the better you will look because the more your vital energies will arise and be replenished. She literally stands out in a crowd with her skin tone and complexion and looks like one of those marvelous statues of female Buddhas or “ideal women.” Her body has become transformed into one of beauty just as the ancient meditation texts say will happen. I ask you … what cream or cosmetic can do that? Only meditation can do that, so meditation is the first and best way to create beautiful skin. Nevertheless, we’re going to go over a few natural things you should eat to help produce beautiful skin. We’ll go over things you should stop eating to regain beautiful skin, and we’ll go over products which you can apply to your skin to help rejuvenate it. We’re going to talk about internal and external substances you can use, as well as some practices you should follow and not follow to become more beautiful. There is no “beauty book” like this in the market. The approach is entirely different because while we’ll talk of internal and external products, the key is to have you cultivate your life force through meditation, and that provides the transformative beautifying experience. All together I hope to reveal many of the hidden keys that younger, middle-age and older women … or men … should know to look FANTASTIC! Does meditation really work as the key method? Don’t take my word for it. Try it. Start meditating now. Meditation is so powerful that studies show it even has a positive effect on healing psoriasis. If meditation can help heal a terrible skin condition like psoriasis where nothing seems to work, just think of what it can do for a relatively clear skin tone and complexion. The truth is not in some scientific study that may or may not ever be undertaken, but in the personal efforts you make at personal meditation practice. You can try mantra recitations or prayer recitation to quiet the mind. You can try the cessation-contemplation practice of following your thoughts. You can simply try to liberate your mind by letting go of thoughts and accessing emptiness. You can try breathing methods to quiet your thoughts and unleash your vital energies as well.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Whatever route you choose, remember that the ultimate unfailing guideline is to cultivate emptiness, for the rule is emptiness at every stage of the physical and spiritual path.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Pranayama, The Duck Egg So Cream Meditation, The White Skeleton Visualization and Nattokinase to Help Your Skin “Breathe” The second greatest beauty secret besides meditation – and other than cosmetics, facial creams, diet or cosmetic surgery -- is the practice of breathing exercises to cultivate your chi and open up all the tiny capillaries in your skin and body. Breathing exercises? Yes, breathing exercises … practices for holding your breath so that your capillaries become dilated and open up to allow more oxygenated blood flow to wash through the connective tissues. An increase in blood flow is always beneficial to your tissues because more blood brings more nutrients to the skin and carts away more cellular wastes. In India these breathing techniques are called “pranayama” whereas Buddhism calls them “anapana” methods. Some spiritual schools in the world just use mantra methods, which are also breath-related cultivation techniques, to quiet the mind and initiate vitality flows that can purify your body and rejuvenate your vitality and appearance. You keep reciting a mantra or prayer in the mind until it tires. As the quotations we previously cited explained, you listen within to the mantra or constant prayer repetitions until your other thoughts die away, and that underlying state of emptiness will finally be revealed that is characterized by no-thought and no breathing. Christianity recognizes the importance of reciting prayers to attain this outcome and various Church Fathers have even correctly stated that your breathing will stop after the practice of fervent prayer – which means giving away your thoughts to become one with God. Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism all mention the very same practice and outcome. This is the same effect that happens when your chi “becomes full” due to other forms of meditation, and many spiritual schools, such as Taoism, talk about this state of respiratory pausing or cessation. Why is this state important? When your external breathing stops, your internal breathing of vital energies (chi) will arise and start to open up your chi channels

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin and transform your body. In the terminology of meditation, we say that your vital energy, or kundalini, becomes “ignited.” People have even reported losing weight when they start doing breathing practices. Breathing practices help them fill their bodies with chi and because they are filled with life force energy, they end up eating less. In addition, breathing practices (or mantra practices) warm the lower belly, called the “hara” in Japanese martial arts or “dan-tian” in China, and that warmth helps you lose weight as well. Just try it for a while – either holding your breath several times in turn or reciting mantras out loud -- and see how the belly warms up after awhile. With everything I say, don’t just take my word for it but prove the results of these practices yourself. That’s the only way you’re going to get beautiful skin. You have to learn how to meditate, but which meditation you choose is up to you. The important thing is to find some way to free yourself of thoughts so that your vital energies can arise and “become initiated.” That’s what essentially beautifies the physical body because those energies initiate all sorts of transformative experiences. Our normal thinking suppresses these energies, along with the maximum state of beauty and perfection that they are designed to produce as our birth right. This warmth from breathing exercises or mantra practices has been know to burn off some fat just by itself as well as reactivate your rejuvenating life force energies which are always connected with warmth. Men have told me that after they started breathing exercises they would lose five, ten, even fifteen pounds in a month without changing anything else at all! People who start breathing practices tend to fill up with chi, and so they usually eat less while having more energy and developing a more peaceful countenance and personality. Losing weight contributes to a better appearance, so with these practices you can hit several birds with one stone. When you start doing breath retention practices, after awhile your skin will start to shine with a certain luster because your chi will be forced to go through all the tiny chi channels in your skin, which is especially noticeable in the face. But the results are not just limited to your face because your skin will transform everywhere. That’s the beauty of these meditation, or “cultivation techniques,” in that they produce full body transformations. Your body develops perfection EVERYWHERE.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Even your eyes will become shinier and brighter just as you see in cheerful young children. It’s all a function of clearing your chi channels and forcing your chi to start circulating. The purpose behind various breathing practices, known as “pranayama” in Hatha yoga, is to first open up your chi channels so that your chi can eventually flow smoothly throughout your body. When there are no obstructions in your chi channels … because you’ve cleaned them of obstructions through breath retention techniques … your chi can flow smoothly. That’s when you’ll start to look your best and attract positive attention no matter how bad you think are the genes you’ve karmically inherited. The most important thing in breath retention practices is to learn how to hold your breath for as long as possible without overly stressing your “hold it in” muscles. Everyone should learn how to do breath retention exercises (called “kumbhaka” in yoga), for even teenagers can benefit from them. What type of breathing practice should you personally follow? There are all sorts of various techniques found in a book called the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, but the following practice is my favorite and it’s the one I recommend for you. Tradition says it was first taught by a female enlightened Buddha, the Diamond Vajrasattva, who once appeared in Tibet.

9-Bottled Wind Practice Here are the steps to the actual practice technique, which is called the “9-bottled wind practice.” In the nine-step bottled wind practice, there are four phases performed for each of the nine rounds of practice. These four phases are: • • • •

Slowly drawing wind (air) into the lungs Fully filling the lungs as much as possible with air as if they were a bottle or vase Holding the air inside the lungs for as long as possible while remaining relaxed (not tensing the muscles to restrain the air, but keeping them as relaxed and non-stressed as possible) Quickly expelling the air from the lungs when you can hold it no longer, shooting it out like an arrow

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin In the nine-step bottled wind practice, you hold your breath three times while holding the left nostril shut, three times while holding the right nostril shut, and three times while holding both nostrils open. This makes a total of nine rounds of breath retention, hence the name "nine-step" vase breathing or “bottled wind” practice. The exact steps of this breathing practice are as follows: 1. Sit in an upright position. 2. Visualize your body becoming as clear as crystal. 3. Close your mouth and using the index finger of your left hand to close your left nostril, press your finger against the left nostril and inhale the air into your lungs slowly through your right nostril. The inhalation should consist of a long, gentle, deep breath--as long and deep as possible. During your inhalation, contemplate that your body becomes filled with light and that this light dispels any internal poisons, darkness and obstructions. Continue inhaling as slowly and deeply as possible until you are "full" of breath and can inhale no longer. 4. When your lungs become full, relax the body as much as possible while holding your trapped breath within. The breath must be compressed, or held inside for as long as possible without being allowed to leave the body, and yet you must use as few muscles as possible to retain it without leaking. It is important while restraining your breath to maintain an upright position without tightening your body or any muscles so that your chi activates from the retention and starts opening up all the tiny channels in the body that might be compressed during muscular straining; if you tighten your body rather than relax it, then even if there is force behind your chi it will not be able to pass through certain chi channel pathways that are obstructed. Experienced breath retention (kumbhaka) practitioners can hold the breath for several minutes, even as the face turns red, which indicates that the wind element is opening up the body's tiny chi channels everywhere. 5. When you can hold your breath no longer, exhale it as forcefully and as quickly as possible through the other open nostril. You forcefully shoot your breath out of your body with the speed of an arrow and that exhalation completes one cycle or round of this exercise. You must repeat this exercise of slow inhalation, long retention, and forceful exhalation two more times, for a total of three times per nostril. All the while the left nostril is kept closed while the active nostril is the right nostril. 6. Switch hands, so that the right hand now pinches the right nostril closed, and the left nostril is left open. Inhale through the left nostril following the equivalent instructions as before. Repeat this www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin exercise three times for the new nostril. Thus, six repetitions of this exercise will now have been completed. 7. When the left and right nostril breathings are both done, extend both arms to push on your lap and lift your chest. Using neither of your hands since they are both pushing on your lap, inhale slowly through both open nostrils, hold your breath within for as long as possible, and then exhale quickly by shooting the stale air out through your open nostrils when you can’t hold it any longer. Do this for a total of three times. Altogether nine inhalations and retentions are performed, which gives rise to the name of nine-step bottled wind practice. The important point to this technique is to hold your breath, after drawing it in, for as long as possible, during which time you don't tighten your muscles. You should never employ too much force in restraining your body but simply hold your breath, with one nostril shut, using as few muscles and as little energy as possible. You don't have to guide your breath or chi or do anything at all except RELAX while in the state of breath retention. After some period of practice, people are generally surprised to discover how few muscles are needed to retain their breath under pressure. If you are straining your muscles to hold your breath, you are definitely practicing incorrectly. Suck in the breath, hold it as deeply as possible for as long as possible with as little force as possible, and then exhale like an arrow as quickly as possible. That’s the essence of this practice for opening up your chi channels, igniting your vital energies, and cleaning your physical body. This practice will help any sort of meditation you choose to practice. Those are the rules for practicing breath retention to open up all the energy channels in the body, force the poisons out of your system, widen the tiny blood capillaries that supply oxygen to your skin and brain, and to start the process of physical rejuvenation. Is there any other meditation method that can help along with this? Yes, there is a famous meditation method called the So Cream meditation.

The So Cream Meditation The full story of the So Cream meditation can be found in my book, How to Measure and Deepen Your Spiritual Realization, which is found at www.MeditationExpert.com. Here’s the story and the meditation in brief. www.MeditationExpert.com

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There was once a young Zen student, named Hakuin, who was just starting out upon his Zen career in Japan. Hakuin really put a lot of effort into his meditation and later became a famous Zen master. In fact, in his meditation practice he pushed the chi around in his body, as chi-gong and Tao school people mistakenly do trying to guide it, so that he totally screwed up all of his body’s chi channels and energy flows. As Hakuin said, he felt hotness in the lungs, icy coldness in his feet, and a constant roaring in his ears from having strenuously pushed his chi into his head. To try and cure his condition, he went from doctor to doctor without any results. No one could help him. Hakuin was finally directed to a Taoist sage in the mountains, Master Hakuyu, who scolded Hakuin for his wrong efforts in trying to manipulate his chi and move it with thoughts. Master Hakuyu then taught young master Hakuin the following meditation method to harmonize his body: If the student finds in his meditation that the four great elements are out of harmony, and body and mind are fatigued, he should rouse himself and make this meditation. Let him visualize placed on the crown of his head that celestial So ointment, about as much as a duck's egg, pure in color and fragrance. Let him feel its exquisite essence and flavor melting and filtering down through his head, its flow permeating downwards, slowly laving the shoulders and elbows, the sides of the breast and within the chest, the lungs, liver, stomach and internal organs, the back and spine and hip bones. All the old ailments and adhesions and pains in the five organs and six auxiliaries follow the mind downwards. There is a sound as of the trickling of water. Percolating through the whole body, the flow goes gently down the legs, stopping at the soles of the feet. Then let him make this meditation: that the elixir having permeated and filtered down through him, its abundance fills up the lower half of his body. It becomes warm, and he is saturated in it. Just as a skillful physician collects herbs of rare fragrance and puts them in a pan to boil, so the student feels that from the navel down he is simmering in the So elixir. When this meditation is being done there will be psychological experiences, of a sudden indescribable fragrance at the nose-tip, of a gentle and exquisite sensation in the body. Mind and body become harmonized and far surpass their condition at the peak of youth. Adhesions and obstructions are cleared away, the organs are tranquilized and insensibly the skin begins to glow. If the practice is carried on without relapse, what illness will not be healed, what power will not be acquired, what

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin perfection will not be attained, what Way will not be fulfilled? The arrival of the result depends only on how the student performs the practices.11 Zen master Hakuin used this meditation for the rest of his life to help harmonize the vital energies of his physical body and attributed his youthful vitality, even at a very advanced age, to its daily use. Remember that this is not the highest method of meditation where you are resting your mind because the objective is different. The objective is to help balance the five elements of your physical nature. When you are first starting upon the road of cultivating your chi and vital energies, this meditation that proceeds from the top and goes downward is an excellent way to start cultivating the chi, hormones and energies of your body that will eventually be reflected in your skin.

The White Skeleton Visualization Method There’s another you can practice which cultivates your vital energies from your feet going upwards. This is the meditation method called the “White Skeleton Contemplation,” and is a visualization practice designed to help you let go of your thoughts, access that mental state of emptiness and initiate your vital energies. The meditation is performed as follows: 1. First assume a comfortable sitting meditation posture, and in front of you place a small model of a human skeleton, or a picture of a skeleton from a book for reference purposes. 2. Next close your eyes, and joyfully imagine that you are giving away your flesh and organs to other sentient beings that might want them. You visualize stripping them off your body and offering them away so as to repay any debt you may owe to them. This offering of all your flesh should not take minutes, but can be mentally imagined as happening instantly. It depends upon your needs whether you want to envision your flesh or dirty chi in particular regions being stripped away or not. After all your flesh is offered away and gone, imagine that you’re just a skeleton of white bones sitting there in your meditation posture. 11

The Tiger’s Cave and Translations of Other Zen Writings, Trevor Leggett, (Charles E. Tuttle, Rutland: Vermont, 1988), pp. 153-154.

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3. Starting with your left big toe, imagine that you can see the toe bone clearly and that it’s shining brightly with a dazzling white light. When you do this meditation many times, that’s eventually what actually does happen because your chi will go to that point and the concentration will cause this light to shine. Next imagine the rest of your toes on your left foot shining with a white light as well. After visualizing all your left toes, visualize all your right toes. Next finish visualizing the rest of the bones of your left foot (referring to a picture or model when necessary), and then finish visualizing them in your right foot. Next the bones of your left leg, then right leg, then left calf and right calf, and slowly proceed upwards visualizing all your bones until you can visualize all the bones in the body clearly up to the top of your skull. 4. All these bones should be shining brightly with a white light. You can even do many tricks to help visualize the bones such as trying to feel them, rotating bright lights inside them, or caressing their external shapes with visualized light as well, but don’t concentrate on these tricks as you never play with your energies in any correct forms of meditation. The number of tricks available to help your visualization efforts are innumerable, but don’t fall into the trap of focusing on the tricks or becoming attached to them, otherwise you’ll fall into the common mistakes of qi-gong and the esoteric schools. You’re trying to generate a stable field of concentration, and smoothen the chi flows in the body by internally concentrating on your skeleton; where your mind goes your chi will follow, so this practice will help to even-out or “harmonize” the chi flows of your body because the whole body is visualized at the same time. Whatever tricks you need to use to accomplish this should just be used as assists rather than the main part of the practice. Once you achieve that state of full body harmony, you let go of these tricks and throw them away. 5. Once the skeleton visualization is entirely (or even partially) completed, remain with that visualization, opening your eyes to glance at the skeleton model (or picture) in front of you every now and then when necessary, until the visualization is firm and secure. In time your body may actually become warm around certain bones that you visualize properly, and this can actually be used for self-healing purposes. When the whole body becomes full of chi, this actually helps all your tissues and skin.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin 6. When you can visualize your whole body in this way, and your chi will have become balanced and harmonized throughout your body, so you then imagine that the visualized bones that you are turn to dust, and then blow away leaving empty space. All that’s left is emptiness – no body whatsoever to cling to on hold onto. 7. Stay in that resulting mental realm of emptiness without opening your eyes, and try to forget any sensations or attachments to your physical body. Remain with that state for as long as possible—forgetting both your mind and body--and in time you’ll enter a deeply profound mental state of meditation called “Samadhi.” This meditation will help you achieve a stable mental state that’s empty of thoughts, and will help smoothen your chi flows throughout your physical nature. If done correctly, in time you’ll develop the deep spiritual state of samadhi through this practice and the transformative results will be reflected in a more perfect body. Once you attain this state of deep emptiness and freedom from thoughts, you must forget that you have any body at all, and let go of any attachments to body or mind to realize an even deeper true emptiness.12 All right, you now have a pranayama breathing method to help open up your chi channels and tiny capillaries. You have a So cream or duck egg visualization method to help harmonize your chi energies, especially the energies in the head and face as they descend down the body. You have a white skeleton visualization technique to help cultivate your vital energies from below going upwards, and which also helps you achieve that state of mental emptiness which is real spiritual practice and which leads to true physical transformation of your flesh. Is there any herb, nutrient or product you can take that can also help you open up all your tiny capillaries in the body? Yes there is – nattokinase from Japan.

12

How to Practice the White Skeleton Meditation for Curing Illness, Getting Rid of Pain, Developing Your Psychic Abilities, Purifying Your Chi Channels and Achieving Spiritual Awakening, by William Bodri, www.MeditationExpert.com.

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Nattokinase to Increase the Blood Circulation for Your Complexion Maybe at one time or another you’ve watched the popular Japanese cooking show on TV called Iron Chef. In this show the Japanese host unveils a secret ingredient to two chefs, who are then given about one hour of cooking time to come up with a series of dishes containing that ingredient which accent its presentation and flavor. The inventive dishes are then judged after the cooking time is up. Iron Chef is an absolutely wonderful show to get your mouth watering, and there’s one particular cooking battle that for some reason has always stuck in my mind. That was the cooking battle involving a special Japanese ingredient called “natto.” Natto is one of the first product keys I’ll introduce that can help with our objective of cleaning the skin by opening up the tiny capillaries and arteries in the body. Natto is a traditional Japanese food made from soybeans that is often referred to as “vegetable cheese” because it actually tastes like cheese. It’s been used for over 1,000 years in Japan (maybe even 2,000 years) and is made from boiling soybeans and fermenting them with special bacteria—Bacillus natto. Natto is important to us because it contains a natural blood clot busting agent. Japanese and Western researchers have found that natto contains a proven fibrinolytic clot busting enzyme, called nattokinase, that not only prevents blood clots from forming inside our veins and arteries, but actually dissolves fibrous clots that have already formed. Whereas the breathing exercises of pranayama breath retention actually cause the tiny capillaries in your body to dilate, nattokinase eats away at any obstructions in these tiny blood vessels so that more nutrients, oxygen and blood make their way to the skin. That, in effect, spells cleaner skin and physical rejuvenation! Only one substance in our bodies dissolves blood clots in the veins and arteries – plasmin – but nattokinase works even better than plasmin and it turns out we can actually eat it to reverse big diseases like atherosclerosis. We’re looking for a positive effect for the skin, but the studies show that nattokinase can successfully dissolve blood clots associated with heart attack and stroke as well, so it promises a benefits on all sorts of levels. Nattokinase also enhances the body’s production of both plasmin and other clot dissolving agents in addition to directly dissolving blood clots and fibrin accumulations on arterial walls. Therefore it works in two ways: (1) by dissolving clots directly and (2) enhancing the body’s own clot-dissolving capabilities. www.MeditationExpert.com

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This makes nattokinase one of the few possible natural agents for countering aging, memory loss, senility and dementia caused by poor blood flow to the brain. It also addresses the causal factor of poor blood flow to the extremities that can cause pain and related difficulties. When you take it for several weeks, you always experience greater blood flow to the face and this blood flow is always reflected in healthier skin! By clearing the fibrin accumulation that collects on the endothelial cells of arterial and capillary walls due to aging, nattokinase helps restore normal oxygen and nutrient transfer to our body’s cells and can help in the removal of cellular waste products. That makes it one heck of a potential antiaging substance. Maybe nattokinase even plays a role in helping the Japanese to live so long, though I think that has more to do with their diet and lifestyle in general. Now remember that when the blood flow to our tissues becomes blocked, the oxygen supply to that region gets cut off and the tissues die, which is what happens in a heart attack, stroke, dementia and senility. In terms of the skin, as the blood flow chokes off the skin ages and hardens with fibrosis. By working to reopen the large and small arterial blockages that inhibit blood flow to certain body tissues – which you do through breathing exercises and by taking nattokinase – the nattokinase holds the exciting promise of possibly restoring brain function, increasing energy levels, and even lowering blood pressure. That’s how it works. That’s why I recommend it for your skin and for all sorts of other benefits as well. For instance, one study that administered nattokinase to high blood pressure patients -- for only 4 days – found that 80% of the volunteers experienced approximately a 10% drop in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. That’s such a great result that this natural food product is going to scare the heck out of the drug companies that make high blood pressure medication. Remember that if you dissolve the clots inside your veins and arteries, you’re getting rid of the problem for good whereas with blood pressure medication, you usually have to keep taking it forever because you never address the root of the problem. Cleaning out all the tiny capillaries that supply nutrients to the skin is like cleaning the streets of garbage so that you create a more beautiful neighborhood. Is nattokinase safe? Well, natto itself has been eaten in Japan for well over a thousand years and there are no studies showing it harmful in any way. As to the nattokinase, you can buy Allergy Research Group Nattokinase capsules and, with your

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin doctor’s permission, give the product a go to clean all your arteries and capillaries everywhere. You only need about 4 capsules a day to start cleaning your arteries of clots, and most people report that they can feel the results in less than one month through to see the result sin your face you want to kep taking the product for at least 3 months. I’ve tried nattokinase myself and could actually feel my fingers and toes get slightly warmer due to new blood flow in less than a week’s time, so I know from personal experience that it works. After a few weeks my face became flush with new blood, and this reddening then went away as my body got used to it. Many others have reported this very same facial flushing to me, so I know that the nattokinase is increasing the blood supply to the skin. I also felt my legs get sore inside after the second or third day of use, and the soreness went away after a few more days. I believe this soreness happened because clots in my legs were dissolving (this is where most everyone has clots without knowing it), and the arteries and veins weren’t yet used to the extra blood flow. Therefore they needed a few days to adjust to the new rush of blood volume, at which point the soreness went away. Trying nattokinase is your first possible step to increasing the blood flow to your skin and the side effects are the ones you would hope for in any type of physical rejuvenation protocol. Namely, it helps you open up the arteries and capillaries to the brain (which increases memory, concentration, and combats senility and dementia), reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke, gets rid of leg pains, and increases the general blood flow throughout your body. So with nattokinase you now have a safe way to increase the blood flow throughout your body because you’ve opened up all sorts of small capillaries and arteries. The nine-bottled wind exercise does the same thing, and helps with your meditation. To help ignite or harmonize the chi energy flows throughout your body you have the skeleton visualization method and the So Cream method and to top it off you have the simple practice of thought-free meditation itself, which we introduced in our first chapter through a variety of different meditation approaches. Now don’t think you need all these methods to produce beautiful skin. Just the meditation alone will help you achieve that result, but I know that people are impatient so I’m giving you all sorts of other methods that will hasten the process. I know you want results in days rather than years, and you want simple things rather than complications. You will get that.

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Do not think that these other methods are necessary, however, for the primary method is meditation. Nevertheless there are a variety of substances that can help you clean your body or foods you can eat (and shouldn’t eat) for beautiful skin, so we’re now going to enter into this realm of discussion and then finally finish up again with various sorts of physical cultivation that can also spark your chi flows and bring about the physical transformations that constitute beauty and a purified form.

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Vitalzym, The Enzyme Cocktail that Softens Your Skin from Within There’s a story behind this next nutritional product that can also help produce beautiful skin. I sent an email off to one of my naturopathic colleagues, who uses hundreds of nutritional products like me, and asked him what he’s found works best in creating beautiful skin for men or women who want it. An email shot back, “2-3 capsules of Vitalzym, taken 1-3 times a day on an empty stomach, noticeably improves appearance for all my patients in a few weeks.” “Vitalzym? What’s that?” I wondered. I had never heard of the product before. It turns out that Vitalzym is an “enzyme cocktail” very much related to a product I know extremely well – Wobenzyme, which has been used for several decades by athletes and has hundreds of scientific studies proving its effectiveness in cleaning the blood and promoting healing from within. Wobenzyme, just like Vitalzym, contains a cocktail of enzymes that have been proven to reduce inflammation, speed wound healing (including fractures and bruises), bruising and stiffness. To understand either Wobenzyme or Vitalzym, and how they lead to greater health and beauty, we have to go over a short refresher course in biology. Trust me, this will be worthwhile because of the benefits this knowledge can bring you. As you well know from high school biology, our blood circulates throughout our body via a complex system of blood vessels called veins, arteries and capillaries. In our last chapter, we tried to open these channels using breathing exercises, nattokinase and meditation in order to help the skin. The meditations, which started from the top and went down or from the bottom and went up, were designed to help open up your chi channels whereas the nattokinase and the 9-bottled wind breath retention exercise were designed to open up blood channels, namely capillaries, veins and arteries.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Red blood cells in the blood, called erythrocytes, carry and deliver oxygen to all the body tissues and cells through arteries, while our veins collect and return the oxygen-depleted blood back to our heart. Circulatory problems in our body can appear as we age because our veins or our arteries somehow become blocked or overly constricted. Tiny capillaries get blocked off if they get filled with cholesterol, plaque, blood clots, fibrotic tissue and other junk such as floating immune complexes. It happens from the wear and tear of damage, poor diet and just from getting older. There are lots of possible causes behind these obstructions and restrictions, but the point that is key to health and rejuvenation is better blood flow circulation along with “cleaner,” less toxic blood free of all sorts of garbage. Anything we do that increases blood flow, breaks up lympathic and tissue congestion and helps eliminate poisons from our organs will eventually help the skin and complexion. That’s why people often look better when they take a product such as nattokinase, a natural blood clot buster enzyme made from soybeans, that dissolves all the blood clots in the body that accumulate over time and interfere with macro and microcirculation. As I mentioned, people who take it for 2-3 months get lots of color in their face because of the increase in blood flow. That natural ruddiness of youth returns because of better blood flow. When your fingers, toes or other body parts feel especially cold or numb, often this is the result of poor blood circulation. Poor blood circulation can also be the cause of scaling, itchy dry skin and it can be the culprit responsible for the slow healing of sores and cuts. “Dirty blood,” as the Chinese call it, can be the cause of poor skin, too. That’s when so many toxins and other things keep floating around in your bloodstream because your liver is so overloaded with detoxification demands that it cannot handle the job of getting rid of all these substances. With no place else to go, these poisons then end up being excreted through your skin, and this darkens or destroys your complexion. All these things can happen as a result of poor blood circulation, and if our circulation is poor in one area then it’s probably poor in a lot of other areas as well. If the blood is dirty here, it’s also dirty there … and the skin often becomes affected. Logical, right? If we’re therefore looking for some means to help the blood flow to our skin, which we targeted through nattokinase and pranayama breathing practices, we

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin might as well look for something that helps the entire body in general because that’s what’s going to produce all sorts of other benefits. Cosmetics supposedly just work on the outside of the skin, but here we’re going to look for substances that help the blood circulation penetrate every nook and cranny in our body. We also want substances that “clean” the blood, and therefore improve the skin while improving everything else as well. What cosmetic can do that? When these other substances are available and produce these results we want, why spend so much money on cosmetics? These are the products that will produce good looks and real physical rejuvenation. Now, if a single substance can be found that does all that, would you rather spend hundreds of dollars per month on an external cosmetic that doesn’t do anything … or on that inexpensive substance that will systemically help you in all sorts of ways, and whose results you’ll be able to “measure” by how great you end up looking and feeling? That’s real beauty. In short, we are looking for products, substances or natural procedures that will produce systemic results and improve your skin. First, we want better blood flow everywhere, not just to our skin but to all our tissues because then the results will show in our skin. Second, we want to clear a path for toxic eliminations and get rid of poisons in the body if we can. Remember to think systemically rather than just locally when it comes to beauty products … because that’s where we’re going to get the best response for beautifying the skin and overall health improvement in general. “Hit two or three birds with one stone,” is always my preferred approach, especially when the benefits of these products aren’t just for your complexion. By addressing a systemic problem, it’s possible that we might not just beautify the skin but start addressing all sorts of other physical problems that seem to have an unknown origin. That’s smart. So what we should be looking for is a substance or combination of substances that can scrub all our arterial walls clean from the inside, sort of like the popular drain cleaner, “Roto-Rooter,” in order to help improve our blood circulation … and substances that can break apart all the dirty junk floating around in our blood so

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin that the liver and kidneys can more easily capture it, detoxify it, process it and excrete. Clean pipes and clean water is what we’re asking for. Nattokinase is one natural substance you can try (an enzyme made from soybeans) that helps get rid of internal blood clots in the veins and arteries, as previously mentioned, but what about various other complexes that are contaminating your artery walls and floating around in your blood? For that we move onto the topic of enzymes.

Enzymes are biocatalysts. They are compounds within our bodies that help other chemical reactions take place. In our bodies there are roughly about 3,000 known enzymes involved in over 7,000 biochemical reactions that regulate our physiology, including those involved with digestion. Vitamins and minerals are co-enzymes, which means they help enzymes to do their work. You need magnesium to activate 2,600 enzyme reactions in your body, and zinc to make 600 of them work. We all know that enzymes play a role in digestion, but that’s just one of their functions. There are many different types of enzymes in our bodies but probably the most important category of enzymes are the protein eating, or “proteolytic” enzymes that cleave proteins apart. A few major proteolytic enzymes get turned into the 3,000 other enzymes through reactions in the body, so the proteolytic enzymes are the important “mother” enzymes at the top of the enzyme production chain. When various proteolytic enzymes get into the bloodstream, they can actually help clean your blood by cleaving apart foreign proteins that don’t belong there that they come into contact with. Afterwards those residues, when they reach the liver, are much more easily excreted by the body. If those foreign proteins keep floating around, however, that produces “dirty blood” that is reflected in “dirty looking” skin, especially when your body starts storing those poisons in your tissues because it’s overwhelmed and has no other place to put them. In basic research from dozens of clinical studies carried out over the years, products that supply a cocktail of mixed proteolytic enzymes to the bloodstream have been found to degrade these foreign proteins and harmful, abnormal immune complexes circulating in the blood that actually precipitate autoimmune diseases.

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In other words, they have been positively proven to help clean your blood, and that often clears up autoimmune problems like arthritis, psoriasis or scleroderma. Enzymes are part of the body’s defense mechanism against inflammation, which often erupts through the skin, because the enzymes eat away at circulating immune complexes (CIC) in the blood called prostaglandins. The body produces these circulating immune complexes in response to harm or injury, and they are the things actually physically responsible for producing inflammation. Some of these CIC’s are necessary for life, such as those involved in maintaining your kidneys, liver and lining of your intestines, but enzymes are smart enough to eat away at the ones that don’t belong in your blood and leave alone those supposed to be there. Here’s where we now get the benefits for your skin. Enzymes also eat away at fibrosis, which is internal scar tissue your body forms as it ages as part of its protective repair mechanism. Your body gets rid of these internal scars using enzymes to cleave them apart but as you get older, it stops making the quantity of enzymes you had when you were younger. In fact, somewhere between 27-35 your body’s enzyme levels start dropping precipitously, and that’s the age bracket I’ve always seen health crises first appear in people. Some of the reasons for which they appear include toxic buildup, a lack of nutrients, and because hormone production drops and enzyme levels fall. All these things are linked together, but the end result is that people see you age and it becomes reflected in your skin. Remember a time when you were young, cut yourself and the scar healed almost invisibly? As you get older, however, the scars that form are thicker, harder, much less pliable, much more visible and unsightly than those formed in our youth. Aren’t they? When your body gets damaged it starts packing any wounds with fibrin in order to heal by giving the tissues something to grow on. Enzymes then come and eat or chip away at any excess fibrin that forms and tissue subsequently grows on what’s remaining. As we get older, because we have less enzymes in the system, the second step in this process of chipping away excess fibrin deposits is not as efficient so scar tissue tends to builds up. This is especially true after any form of surgery. In fact, you can even literally strangle organs with surgical scars that build up after operations.

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While massage and bodywork helps break up these fibrotic scars and accumulations, enzymes are the body’s primary way of eating away fibrotic tissue. As you get older, it’s a well known fact that some of your internal organs, such as the thymus gland, also tend to shrink and even harden. This happens due to a decrease in blood flow and the build up of fibrotic tissue. As they shrink and “dry up” like raisins, their ability to function decreases dramatically. Women see the results of this through a buildup of fibrous tissue in fibrocystic breast disease, fibroids and endometriosis. It also happens in our blood vessels, which build up atherosclerotic plaque, and in the appearance of our skin. The good news is that this fibrotic tissue can be eaten away by enzymes even years after it first forms – whether those fibrotic accumulations are in your tissues or skin. Doctors in Europe and Asia have known this for years and commonly use enzymes in their healing protocols. One of the reasons that raw food diets and juicing works to rejuvenate people is because they supply abundant measures of these enzymes for a hungry body. Do you see where we are going? Here’s another benefit of enzymes. Enzymes help render inert viruses in your body, which bolsters your immune system. When your body is relieved of viral load, the immune system can devote its energies into all sorts of other avenues that help with healing, and can experience rejuvenation. Here’s how it works. Viruses replicate in our cells by latching onto them through a protein-coated cell wall. If you don’t stop the virus replication process, soon all your blood and cells will be filled with viruses and that’s what eventually kills you. For instance, imagine that viruses are particles of sand which replicate and create more and more sand in your body, filling up everything with sand until nothing else will work. That’s how viruses kill you. Here’s how to stop a virus. You simply destroy the exterior protein coating of the virus that lets it attach itself to cell walls and you thereby render it inert. Proteolytic, fibrinolytic enzymes will do that and because they can tell which substances are supposed to be in your body and which are not, an abundance of enzymes in the bloodstream will help destroy these invaders.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin When you consume a lot of these enzymes, you lower your viral load and don’t get sick as often because what’s left of your immune system can then deal with most foreign invaders. Our basic science lesson on enzymes is now over, but how is that going to help us with the skin and complexion? It’s time to talk about some specific enzymes and link things together.

One of the other natural substances that can produce systemic results by helping to clean all our arteries and veins from the inside is Bromelain, which is an enzyme extracted from pineapples. Pineapples have been used for centuries as a digestive aid, for improving the texture of the skin and for promoting the healing of wounds. Bromelain itself is used in exactly the same ways—it is commercially used as a component of many cosmetics, it’s used as a meat tenderizer, and it’s used as a dietary supplement to help with digestion. Bromelain has strong anti-inflammatory properties, which is why my dentist in Hong Kong prescribed it for me to treat the swelling he caused when he removed my wisdom teeth. Because of these anti-inflammatory properties, it’s very helpful in healing minor injuries, in particular muscle sprains and the pain, swelling and tenderness that accompanies injuries. Here’s the neat thing that’s helpful to us … Bromelain is a natural blood thinner that counteracts excessive platelet stickiness, which in effect means it’s a kind of natural blood thinner. In addition to keeping blood platelets from sticking, it has also been found to break down arterial clots and plaque and to help clots from forming in the first place! Chinese researchers at the University of Iowa have found that bromelain mobilizes deposits in our blood vessels and carries them off. This means that any intensive, long-term therapy with bromelain can help "clean out" our coronary arteries from the inside, which certainly seems like a much more intelligent approach than undergoing a bypass operation. Why fix just one artery if you have a chance to naturally clean them all? Continuous large doses of bromelain can help dissolve obstructive deposits in the aorta and in leg arteries, which tend to cause pain, as well as blood clot residues, thus saving many a leg from amputation and even restoring them to normal functioning.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Bromelain works in much the same way as the pharmaceutical drugs streptokinase and urokinase which dissolve clots in heart patients by breaking down fibrin protein. Bromelain stimulates the production of more of the body’s plasmin, which in turn helps break down clots. It’s also such a great help with inflammation that arthritis sufferers tend to use it instead of aspirin and NSAID medications. In Europe it’s readily used to decrease symptoms of angina and thrombophlebitis. Does all this information mean I want you to run out and start consuming bromelain? No! My rule for health and beautification is avoid taking a single substance when helpful combinations of synergestic substances are available. If you’re going to spend your money and take anything for your health or beauty, you should consider taking a mixture of similar substances that act in the same way bromelain does in cleansing your arteries. Bromelain is just the start.

Another powerful enzyme is serrapeptase, which also has a story behind it. Everyone knows about silkworms in that the caterpillar spins a cocoon of silk that is harvested, washed and turned into silk. I lived in Asia for awhile and visited China extensively. On one trip I got to see parades of thousands of silkworm growing women who would travel to certain shrines in China offering their thanks for a good silkworm harvest. It’s an amazing site to see thousands -- yes, thousands -- of women lined up for miles marching to a temple, having traveled from all over China. That’s fine and dandy, but what does the silkworm have to do with your skin? It has to do with the fact that silk is incredible tough substance. It’s hard to break silk, so how does the silkworm eat through its cocoon to emerge as a moth? It does it by secreting an enzyme from it’s intestine called “serrapeptase.” Silk is stronger than any scar tissue or mammalian tissue so anything that dissolves away silk is a super strong fibrinolytic agent that can eat away fibrotic tissue. That’s why we have interest with it for your skin. Serrapeptase can be produced via a bacterial organism (Serratia E15), and clinical studies have found that it is fibrinolytic, anti-edemic and anti-inflammatory properties. In Germany (Anaflazyme) it’s used to remove arterial plaque and in www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Japan (Danzen) it’s used as an anti-inflammatory. In Europe, it’s a common treatment for inflammatory and traumatic swellings, and for post-operative pain it is an anti-inflammatory pain-killer. People who use serrapeptase after operations tend to be more rapidly pain-free. Cosmetic surgeons prescribe it to help ensure you don’t build up any scar tissue after their operations. Various tests have shown that serrrapeptase can help dissolve blood clots, scars and fibrin accumulations, and even cause varicose veins to shrink. Testimonials of people using various serrapeptase formulations talk of amazing results, even for things such as cystic breast disease, sinusitis, cosmetic scars, and infections. Serrapeptase is a component of Vitalzym, which is the product my colleague said helps the skin! Heralding its praises even more, serrapeptase has been used to successfully treat fibrocystic breast disease. In one double-blind study published in the Singapore Medical Journal, 70 patients were divided into two groups, one of which was given serrapeptase. Over 85% of those receiving the enzyme reported a moderate or marked improvement in their condition. Dr. Hans Nieper, MD a famous internist and medical research from Germany, studied the effects of serrapeptase on plaque accumulations in the arteries, and found that over time it will break down atherosclerotic plaque. If it can dissolve away silk, which is an incredibly tough substance that’s promising. The enzyme digests non-living tissue, clots, cysts, arterial plaque and inflammation. In the health field it pays to always think systemically, and to always think about taking a combination of cooperative substances for problems instead of single ingredients … that is, whenever you can find those combinations. Here’s the rule: Always look for combinations of substances that work together. For this task, we’re in luck because Vitalzym is a readily available nutritional supplement containing an enzyme cocktail that includes bromelain and serrapeptase. The package of enzymes work together to clean our arteries and blood of debris … and ultimately help the skin. The enzymes within Vitalyzm include: •

Bromelain – an enzyme that digest protein that helps reduce harmful prostaglandins that cause pain and inflammation and block the absorption of nutrient through body tissues strengthens the human immune system, supports anti-inflammatory activity, reduces joint swelling and inhibits excessive blood clotting

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• • • • • •

Rutin – a bioflavonoid (nature’s super anti-oxidant) that strengthens and improves blood vessel permeability, used to treat hemorrhoids and varicose veins scavenges free radicals and acts as an anti-inflammatory by inhibiting the enzymes that produce inflammation Papain – an enzyme made from papayas that has a soothing effect on the stomach, speeds wound healing, and reduces swelling and scarring exhibits strong anti-inflammatory activity Protease – an enzyme that digests proteins, helps reduce pain, inflammation and the symptoms of food allergies or autoimmune diseases Amylase – an enzyme that ensures carbohydrates are broken down before absorbed as fat Lipase – an enzyme that helps break down fat and controls cholesterol and triglyceride levels Amla – a rich source of vitamin C found naturally in the gooseberry that’s useful for stomach problems, anemia, gynecological problems, and nose bleeds Serrapeptase – a protein digesting enzyme that helps reduce pain and inflammation, digests dead tissues, blood clots, cysts, and arterial plaque; used to treat fibrocytic breast disease, bronchitis, arterial blockage and is used as an alternative to aspirin and ibuprofen. It’s a peptidase antiinflammatory agent that replaces trypsin and chymotrypsin derived from bovine sources

Basically, the combination of enzymes within Vitalzym is just the sort of natural cocktail that we’re seeking -- a collection of “broad-spectrum biological response modifiers” -- that act in large number of beneficial ways, one of which is to eventually (and I say “eventually” because it’s not going to happen over night) improve your skin’s appearance. Vitalzyme works so well at cleaning your skin because it’s cleaning the blood that supplies your skin and the arteries that deliver blood to those tissues. It contains these various proteolytic enzymes which cleave other harmful proteins apart. It cleans the blood in that manner, breaking down the necrotic matter that accumulates in the blood and blood vessels and skin because it’s necrotic debris your liver hasn’t been able to get rid of. The results of this blood cleansing through enzymes can be so striking that you’ll slowly see these results reflected in a more beautiful complexion. Remember, the ingredients within Vitalzym also degrade harmful abnormal immune complexes circulating in the blood that actually precipitate autoimmune diseases, as well as fibrotic tissue that’s reflected in poor skin health. What this means is that if you are suffering from aches and pains or other autoimmune conditions (like diabetes), don’t just put cosmetics on your face and

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin hope to look pretty but get something like this that works on improving your complexion from the inside-out … and use it. I don’t want you just prettier, but prettier and healthy! It doesn’t make sense to waste your money on beautifying substances that don’t even target the cause of the problem! No one ever teaches you to go at it in this way because cosmetic companies promise hope and the magic cure, yet it’s impossible to create beautiful, healthy skin if all the crap in the blood uses the skin as its primary organ of elimination. That’s one reason that when you cure people of constipation, their skin complexion improves, too, because they are no longer recirculating all those intestinal poisons in their blood stream. The enzymes within Vitalzym are extremely safe, especially compared to other anti-inflammatory medical drugs. They even mobilize the immune system and speed up the body’s recovery and repair process. Don’t forget that they reduce inflammation in the body and eat away at fribosis, or excess scar tissue, which is part of the true process of physical rejuvenation

The recommended dosage for Vitalzym is 3 capsules, 1-3 times daily on an empty stomach, 30 to 45 minutes before a meal or 60 minutes after a meal, taken with water. You can take it safely with other nutritional supplements, but not with blood thinning drugs like Warfarin or Coumadin. Always check with your doctor before taking it or any of the other products I’ll mention. If you are pregnant, always ask your doctor. If you are pregnant, by the way, and you want to avoid miscarriage, ask your doctor about taking natural progesterone cream in the first tri-mester because it prevents spontaneous abortion. Natural progesterone creams are sometimes wonderful for moisturizing women’s skin, but we’re going to skip that discussion for another chapter. What we’ve just done, however, is introduce a particular product (Vitalzym) that helps improve your skin – noticeably – from the inside out because it eats away at fibrotic tissue. Like nattokinase, it, too, is an enzyme. Both of these products are going to increase the blood flow to your skin and without that increase in life-giving blood, oxygen and nutrients, there’s no way you’re going to create a better complexion no matter what you put on it. So while we’ve focused initially on meditation for beautifying the skin, we’ve now started introducing important products that will help with the objective.

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Now it’s time to turn to the diet.

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The “Right Diet” for Natural Weight Loss, Personal Health and Maximum Beauty I love the cooking show, Iron Chef, on television. This is the second time I’ve mentioned it. In one of the Iron Chef shows I saw a quote from Brillat-Savarin, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are.” Let me expand upon that notion … tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you how you’ll look and feel, or even better, just from looking at you we’ll all know if you are eating the right things. All of us have seen someone whose looks and appearance seemed to have improved dramatically since we last saw them. When asked, sometimes the response we hear (other than exercise or a great change in circumstances that involves less stress) is that they had changed their diet. Alright, we know that your diet can do that for you, but what diet is best for you in particular? There are hundreds of diets out there … so the best one for you is what YOU need to know. Which one is best for your health and your looks … for everything? Your appearance is just one of the things your diet affects and your diet can also alter your energy levels, mental acuity, and even the feeling of being light or heavy. It affects so many factors of your life, even your moods and emotions. Plenty of women, and especially actresses, have turned to vegetarianism as a dietary way of life because of all the good it will do in these categories. They often say it makes them “feel lighter” and “look cleaner.” Well, those are indeed great possibilities. Actually, it’s an open secret in the nutritional field that most people who practice vegetarianism do so incorrectly by eating too many wheat and gluten products as well as too many simple sugars. They then set themselves up for major health problems down the road, especially if they are not getting enough nutrients through their diet. If you are going to become a vegetarian, do it right and supplement yourself with a good multi-mineral, multivitamin like Supernutrition’s Perfect Blend or Super Blend. Go buy Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions, to learn how to do it right. www.MeditationExpert.com

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The “best diet” for you is the one right for your biochemical individuality, which takes into account your genes, heredity, stress, age, environment, and health conditions … and the one “right for you” includes eliminating from your diet particular foods your body dislikes and cannot process without a bad reaction. That sort of reaction will usually show in your skin! If pizza or chocolate or something else bothers you after you eat it, that means don’t eat it. It doesn’t mean “eat less” so that you don’t feel the reaction … it means don’t eat it at all. Otherwise, the damage produced in your system will still be going on even if you don’t feel it or notice it. When you find out that some food is “poison” for your system and produces a bad reaction, no amount is small enough or safe enough to consume. Stay Away! Let’s put it this way. Your body -- because of your genes and biochemical individuality or health condition – has certain foods that are not good for it. Because of your particular biochemistry or “chemical individuality,” you are different than everyone else on your street, in your neighborhood, … even in your family. The genes, looks , behavior patterns, habits and appearance can vary dramatically in a family – it’s all a function of your karma -- but you can work to make those things better. That takes a lot of effort whereas just bringing out the best that’s already naturally there usually takes much less effort. In terms of appearance, you can help look your best by managing your diet because what you eat builds the cells of your appearance If you want to look your best, you should stay away from foods that poison you. That’s rule number one. You should also get rid of (detox yourself of) excess poisons and toxins that get imbedded in your skin and connective tissues or in your body organs. That’s rule number two. If you don’t help your detoxification systems, any excess load that your detoxification mechanisms must bear will cause you to never appear as beautiful or handsome as you are designed to be. If you help detoxify your body, you’ll also be healthier as well. So if you want to stay away from the foods that poison you and produce toxins that are discharged through your skin and complexion, how do you find out what ails you and is producing the trouble?

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin There are two ways: (1) Use general dietary rules that are proven to help maximize your beauty and (2) Perform one specific blood test I’ll recommend to find out your own particular “food offenders.” If you use this blood test to find your personal food offenders, not only will you look better in avoiding those foods but you will also end up eliminating the source of many diseases. Promise! Food can be a medicine or poison, just as Hippocrates said that. As a medicine it supplies the right nutrients to rebuild your body, and as a poison it destroys your body. Plenty of people have had their arthritis or even psoriasis disappear due to eliminating foods they were found to be allergic to. There are even reports of people stopping epileptic fits by avoiding toxic triggers that originated with food. Now if I was a young actress or model, I might turn to vegetarianism thinking that’s going to protect me from bad foods, and think that all I need to know is avoid meats and eat fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. Sure the rule is to “eat clean and green” for beautiful skin, and to eat to nourish the organs that keep your skin healthy. But the rules aren’t so simple if you want blemish-free skin. The right diet is certainly to eat less meat (or range fed organic meat when you choose to do so) but also eliminating all the foods that specifically cause trouble to your system because of biochemical individuality, which usually includes certain vegetables and grains! You also want to make sure you’re getting the right oils, proteins and vitamins and minerals in your diet because they’re just not found in our foods anymore at the adequate levels we need to fight off disease and stay healthy. Get this. You are not so much a product of your genes as you are a product of your diet -your genes are not your destiny but rather the foods you eat – and therefore the nutrients you wash over your cellular receptors that cause your genes to be expressed – are what control your destiny. You can have lousy genes susceptible to cancer or heart disease or whatever and never see those conditions appear. Why? Because it’s the chemicals that

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin you wash over the genes through your diet that will activate your genes to express themselves for better or worse. If you change your diet to something that suppresses or avoids the expression of negative genes then you will likely avoid the problem without having to take any drugs as a “preventative measure,” which is the way the pharmaceutical firms are now going. It is ultimately diet, in most cases, that determines your destiny including the condition of your skin. Look how a change in diet can make you gain or lose weight to prove whether or not it has a definite effect on your appearance. Sickness is usually affected by the factor of diet because the components of your diet are what you wash over the receptors of your cells that cause your genes to activate one way or another. If you flood your bloodstream with trash, your cells will pick that up and express themselves in negative ways, but if you wash your receptors with wonderful lifegiving nutrients, you can stem off disease and decline. It’s all a matter of what you wash over your cellular receptors, and those nutrients – for better or worse – come from your diet. To beat the genetics of potential illness, you should therefore make sure your genes are exposed to good supplements and good foods that are broken down by your digestive system and delivered throughout your body to all your cells via the blood. Please don’t fall for this new scientific notion that medicine will invent some “miracle gene therapy” that tinkers with the genes themselves and then cures disease. So many things can go wrong with this approach, just as a zillion things can go wrong on a complicated spacecraft headed for a two-year journey to Mars. I guarantee that you will never see a “gene therapy” approach successful in your lifetime, if ever at all. Instead, we should be going after the problem in a simple way -- like using sunshine to melt ice -- by researching how to modulate the expression of your genes through food and natural supplements rather than through medicines and medical procedures. Isn’t that more logical and wise? Of course it is but there’s no money in it for the pharmaceutical firms, who incidentally control what professors teach in medical school. Therefore don’t expect that approach to become the norm except with educated people, like you, who bother to read up and think about these things. If you wait for this sort of wisdom to appear on public TV, in newspapers and magazines when money interests are against it – the idea that you have to take

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin responsibility for your appearance through what you eat instead of popping a pill or getting instant results with a cream – then you might as well just settle for plastic surgery and look exactly like that … “plastic.” Let me say it again … your food can be a cure or a poison. If you manage your food you can mange your complexion and can, in effect, produce beautiful skin. I’m going to tell you how to do it. If you eat the right stuff it’ll be a blessing to your health whereas eating the wrong stuff will be a curse, so the big task is to identify what you should and shouldn’t be eating. Everyone is biochemically different, so you can personally eat things others cannot and must stay away from some things that others can enjoy if they are bad for you To determine the good foods and bad foods, tradition and folk wisdom has provided us with general rules of thumb, but there are scientific ways now to determine EXACTLY what you should and shouldn’t eat with some certainty. Knowing that you might not have a way to get these tests done, let me tell you about some standard rules of thumb that will at least help in that direction and prove a blessing to your skin. The first general rule for a good diet that I want you to remember comes from my best friend’s Chinese grandfather, who taught this to me before passing away in his late nineties. Since that time, I’ve often encountered this same rule from other nutritionists, for it’s a very easy to remember principle that’s quite popular. You can and should teach it to children so they can know how to eat properly at the table.

Eat as Many Different Colors as Possible Here’s the rule: choose your foods by maximizing the number of different colors you consume and you’ll always be getting a variety of different nutrients and antioxidants that your body needs. In other words, eat as many different colors with each meal as possible, because the different colors indicate different nutrients. Of those foods, don’t focus on white and brown colors too much because they usually represent starchy things like bread and potatoes. You should also eat as many fresh, organic foods as possible, which is common sense logic that doesn’t even need to be mentioned, and you shouldn’t eat the same foods all the time. You need variety in your diet, and non-variety (a

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin repetitive diet) is a common mistake many people make. Instead, you should eat as many different colored vegetables with each meal as possible, and different fruits when they’re in season. By the way, though I highly recommend organic vegetables (free of herbicides and pesticides) that does not mean you should avoid vegetables when you cannot find veggies that are organic. Don’t make up any such silly excuses like that. Eating any vegetables, organic or not, is always much better than not eating any vegetables at all. If you teach yourself and your children to eat by colors — trying to have as many colors on your plate with each meal as possible (excluding the white of bread and brown of meat and potatoes) -- that will tend to keep you away from consuming excessive sugars and maximize your chances of maintaining good weight control and good health. Some further rules: eat foods when they are ripe, and eat foods that will spoil. As to becoming a vegetarian? Actually I don’t recommend it although I do recommend eating less meat instead of more and that you should consume organic and range fed meat when you are not a vegetarian since it is far better and tastier for you than the factory stuff they’re now growing. Like many nutritionists, however, I don’t think most people should become 100% vegetarians because fish, eggs and some lean meats in moderation can help you. Most of the vegetarians my colleagues and I deal with are actually of poor health because they don’t know how to practice vegetarianism properly, which is another reason I don’t recommend it. Vegetarians are supposed to be the enlightened ones but in many cases they get the eating rules all wrong. In many cases, after years of practicing vegetarianism poorly, a nutritionist can do very little to help these people regain their full health when they get sick … unless they start consuming a little fish, eggs, beef soup or other meat. If vegetarians are not willing to make changes that will help their health, many of my colleagues refuse to even deal with these people because they know they won’t be able to help them. It’s a lost cause, so quite a few of my nutritionist and naturopathic friends refuse to treat vegetarians who won’t eat eggs or fish or beef soup to get healthy. It’s not because they disagree with vegetarianism, but because they know they’d be wasting that person’s time and money. Remember that I’m not telling you to eat meat but am simply stressing wisdom, and I want to tell you that Shakyamuni Buddha said it was a breach of discipline if a sick monk refused to eat the medicine that would cure him, even if it was non-

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin vegetarian. Similarly, rabbis say that it is also wrong not to insist on kosher rules for eating if you need to consume some non-kosher medicine or food to get well. It’s all a function of wisdom, but people who cling to rules and regulations thinking that is “the way” lack wisdom. Yes, they indeed accumulate merit from their principles, but also they lack wisdom. Shakyamuni Buddha said that they cling to erroneous, deviant or deviant views that are called “errant perspectives,” which is why they cannot make true meditation and spiritual progress.

The Five Deviant Perspectives Since we’re talking about meditation and spiritual cultivation for beautiful skin, I’ll tell you briefly what those five errant perspectives are that interfere with meditation progress. Buddha said they include (1) holding onto the view of being the body and taking it as the self, (2) holding one-sided extreme views, (3) holding wrong or false views (such as insisting that a stick is a snake), (4) holding subjective views (being opinionated, which is holding your own views as being supreme), and (5) holding the improper view of clinging to disciplinary rules as the spiritual path. The insistence on holding to a special type of “religion specified diet” without regards to circumstances is succumbing to the fifth deviant perspective of what is the true spiritual path. It’s succumbing to the errant perspective of grasping onto rituals and rules as supreme, meaning that you mistakenly cling to rules of morality, conduct or discipline and taking them as the spiritual path when they are just expedient constructions without any absolutist universal standing. Most dietary rules were simply invented because of someone’s wisdom and because of skillful means, but if we erroneously take those rules as absolutes then we have succumbed to the errant view of holding conduct based on them as supreme. Common people often mistakenly hold onto religious rules and codes of conduct, such as dietary rules, as being holy or ultimate when they have no standing in the ultimate reality. They are not actually the spiritual path, for the cultivation path ultimately rests in the mind. The errant perspective of taking your body (or any of the aggregates of experience) as the real self is another big problem with people who try to

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin meditate correctly. You should never consider your physical body as the real you, and whenever you meditate you should let go of your body. The perspective of possessing a body is the incorrect notion of holding onto the perspective of form. If you cling to your body – its shape or even its beauty – as the “real you” then you will never succeed in meditation and if you don’t succeed in meditation, you’ll never bring about the transformations that will really beautify your physical nature. The transformative experiences of the meditative path, which are initiated through meditation, all come about when you stop identifying not only with your thoughts but with your body sensations. You must stop identifying with your body in any type of spiritual training to succeed on the spiritual path. Yes, it is proper to ornament and beautify your physical nature, and beauty itself is the displayed result of merit you have accumulated from the past, but you should never identify with your physical nature because it is just a transient existence rather than your true existence, or real nature. That’s why an excessive emphasis on the physical can turn into something superficial rather than something that will motivate others to increase their own level of cultivation. This is one reason why Shakyamuni Buddha often told people to offer their body to others through doing charity work, for in so doing one can learn how to be selfless and empty, and thereby can make real progress in getting rid of this mental entanglement. Also, by doing charity work for others such as always smiling, saying pleasant words, making people feel happy, staying away from anger and ill will, beautifying temples and social places, planting flowers for others and keeping neat, clean and orderly, one can also earn the merit of being reborn with natural beauty. If you cultivate meditation, however, so that bad thoughts go away and only good thoughts arise, that’s the way to earn the highest form of karmic beauty. All five of these erroneous perspectives represent entanglements, barriers and byword paths on the road of spiritual cultivation. They represent adhesive entanglements that must be abandoned as you climb the spiritual ladder. We’ve simply encountered one of the perspectives in terms of insisting on a certain diet when it isn’t good for you or isn’t providing you with what you need. If that’s the case and you keep clinging to the diet, your lack of ultimate spiritual wisdom shows that you’ve succumbed to an errant, deviant perspective. As to the topic of organic or free-range meat, the last time I was in Nepal I had free-range chicken that made me remember what real chicken tasted like. On the other hand, the last time I was in Las Vegas I went to one of those inexpensive

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin buffets and had prime rib, which actually tasted like honest-to-goodness cardboard. I couldn’t figure out why prime rib could taste this bad (I had the same experience in London) until I realized they go through so much of it that it must have come from one of those factory produced beef feedlots in the West. This is artificial meat, as far as I’m concerned, and the taste proves it. How can this low cost production possibly be the route to health and happiness? That’s one of the reasons why I state that organic and free-range meats are better than the alternative. The general rule for meat consumption is that you should eat some form of quality animal protein with breakfast and lunch (a smaller amount with dinner if desired) and you should never over cook meat or you denature the protein. That means stop ordering “well done” in restaurants. The rule is that fish, red meats, and eggs (of high quality) should be eaten less cooked rather than more cooked for better digestion and to prevent denaturing of their amino acid content. If you’re a non-vegetarian, it’s also best to try to consume meats from animals that have eaten their traditional diets. Cattle do not know how to farm and would never eat corn, soy, or wheat except that we feed it to them, so you can rest assured that grass fed beef is best. Fortunately, you can buy lots of this stuff through www.mercola.com.

The Getoff Diet for Eating Well Now on top of everything I’ve just told you, I want you to be aware of what I call the “Getoff diet,” which is a very simple set of principles to follow that will cause you to stay healthy, lose weight, look great and keep off the pounds. The diet was formulated by master naturopath David Getoff, and we’ll probably come out with a book on it sooner or later. The Getoff diet actually contains the gist of most all the diets out there – the Atkins, Protein Power, Pritikin, Carbohydrate Addicts diet, etc. As David Getoff reminded me, “If a diet is so complicated that people cannot remember the rules, they won’t stay on it regardless of how good it is.” David therefore teaches people three main eating rules for good nutrition, which are so much easier to remember than the list supplied by Dr. Mercola or someone like Gary Null.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin In fact, these three simple rules encompass most of the recommendations you’ll find among top nutritionists, and you cannot go wrong following them: (1) Dramatically reduce your consumption of sugar and sweet tasting foods (sodas, sugar, ketchup, milk … anything that tastes sweet except for fresh fruits and stevia) and (2) Dramatically reduce your consumption of processed grain products, especially, but not limited to, those made of wheat flour (pasta, bread, crackers, bagels, etc.) because these are foods that quickly turn into sugar in your body (they’re “high glycemic” foods). Even better … go on a “No Grain” diet like Dr. Mercola stresses. (3) Substitute good fats for bad fats in your diet (like butter for margarine and olive oil or coconut oil for soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower and other oils). If you follow these first two rules, you’ll lose weight very fast and probably lower your cholesterol, blood sugar and cholesterol without trying. It’s all about eating less sugar and fewer grains, which are foods that quickly turn into sugar inside our bodies (high “glycemic” foods) and which then become stored as fat. Get rid of those foods and you remove a big source of fat production, not to mention helping to control your blood sugar and receiving all sorts of health benefits from non-allergic reactions. What sort of health problems? If you are experiencing any of the following symptoms, chances are very good that the grains and sugars in your diet are to blame: • • • • • • •

Excess weight or bloating Fatigue and frequent sleepiness or loss of energy Depression Brain fogginess or mental unclarity Low blood sugar High blood pressure High triglycerides

The reason for a big health improvement from the “get off” regime is that sugars, and foods that quickly turn into sugars inside our bodies (flours and grains), depress our immune systems, increase cholesterol levels, screw up our hormone systems and make it that much more likely that we’ll get cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. As to the glutens and wheat flour, many of us are actually allergic to them as well.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin As to the fats, we’re all screwed up because of misinformation fostered on us for over two decades, so I’m going to leave the rule at that and tell you to pick up a copy of Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig and read that for a better explanation. By the way, this is probably one of the top ten cookbooks of all time, so it’s a great gift to give! I cannot tell you the number of people I’ve counseled, who were already in pretty good shape but wanted to lose some weight, who lost 15 pounds in one or two months just by drastically reducing their consumption of bread, rice or some other grain product — especially products made of wheat flour. The problem with modern diets is that we consume too much of the wrong types of carbohydrates, namely simple sugars and starches that quickly turn into sugars. These are the foods that are stored as fats, and that’s what causes a lot of weight gain. It’s not that you’re eating excess carbohydrates … it’s that you’re eating the wrong types of carbohydrates. If you look at the Atkins diet, the Pritikin diet, the Zone diet and any diet, whether or not they want you to consume lots of protein or lots of complex carbohydrates, they never tell you to consume a lot of simple carbohydrates such as sugars and foods that quickly turn into sugars. That’s a big key. Look at the Atkin’s diet, for instance. A Duke University study just showed that the Atkin’s Diet, in which 60% of calories come from fat, is far superior to the American Heart Association’s low-fat diet. On the Atkin’s low-carb diet, people lost an average of 31 pounds over 6 weeks while the AHA group lost on average 20 pounds. For both groups, LDL cholesterol levels stayed about the same but the Atkin’s group showed a 11% increase in the “good” HDL cholesterol whereas the AHA group showed no improvement at all. Lastly, the AHA group showed a 22% drop in triglycerides while the Atkin’s group showed a 50% drop! Three other studies last year showed exactly the same results! Do you know why these people really got great results? It’s not from “low carbs” but from eliminating sugars and grains, that’s why. You have to lower your consumption of a specific type of carbohydrates you’re eating. The same results appear from the Zone diet, the high protein diet, and so forth all because they reduce the consumption of simple sugars and foods that quickly turn into sugars. Most people eat the wrong type of carbs (simple sugars and

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin grain products) and if you eliminate those carbs, you usually see substantial (and speedy) weight loss. Gigantic weight loss, in fact! There’s nothing wrong with broccoli, lettuce, carrots, squash, cabbage, cauliflower, mushrooms, cucumbers and all sorts of other carbohydrates but there’s a big problem with white sugar, flour, bread, muffins, pastries, bagels, pizza and other things made of grains, wheat flour or just filled with sugar (like milk, orange juice, jelly, coke, etc.) which are classified as “carbohydrates.” In fact, that would be the fourth Getoff Diet rule – eat a good quantity of nonstarchy vegetables every day, organic if possible. Forget about eating excessive amounts of meat and protein. Just switch the type of carbohydrates you eat from the bad ones to good ones. There’s nothing wrong with consuming lots of broccoli, peas, cauliflower and all these other vegetables, even if they are carbohydrates. Just approach it with wisdom. As to meats and protein, I already told you the basic rules: eat some form of animal protein at breakfast and lunch (a smaller amount with dinner if required) and don’t over cook it. Fish, red meats and eggs (of the highest quality) should be eaten less cooked rather than more cooked for better digestion and to prevent denaturing of their amino acid contents. Try to eat organic meats and meats that have eaten their traditional diets, as cows, for instance, do not know how to farm and would never eat corn, wheat, or soy except that we feed it to them. If you are not a vegetarian and eat meat, range fed is best. See www.Mercola.com as a supplier of some of the best organic meats available. Anyway, the no-secret secret key to dietary weight loss is just what I have mentioned – to reduce your consumption of grains and get rid of sweet tasting foods that have sugar added because sugar, when consumed, is stored as fat. You are not going to get fat on fat as much as you are going to get fat on sugar. One hundred years ago the average person ate about 4 pounds of sugar a year, and now it’s about 170-180 pounds per year. That’s why we have obese America! Excess sugar is stored as fat in the body so increase the consumption of sugar and grains and “wah lah” … obesity galore. Also, sugar ages you and your skin quickly. Through a process called glycosylation, sugar will age your skin like you wouldn’t believe so if you want to live longer and look younger, stop consuming sugar

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It’s just that simple. Not only that, but an incredibly large number of people are also allergic to, or intolerant of processed grains such as wheat flour, which produces its own set of health problems. Studies are showing that grain sensitivity is about 1 in 100 people but to tell you the truth, it’s definitely higher than that! I always wonder if there’s some connection between the fact that the most genetically engineered or hybridized foods seem to be the ones producing the most allergies in people. That includes wheat, corn, soybeans, peanuts and some other staples. But let’s put that aside and get back to our main story. Consider that heart disease and cancer were virtually nonexistent less than one hundred years ago. That in itself is evidence that fats cannot escalate cancer and heart disease because at that time animal fat consumption was very high and yet cancer and heart disease were virtually nonexistent. If you’re my age you can remember your mom using Crisco and lard for cooking, so you know how things have changed over these last several decades. What’s changed since that time has not been a gradual improvement in our diets, but a gradual degradation of our diet. That’s what is producing obesity, heart problems and cancer!

The Immuno Labs ELISA Test Those are the general rules to help you out with your diet, but here’s the one secret rule I mentioned that will probably do the most for your skin and solve a bundle of seemingly unrelated health conditions as well. But before I explain it, let me ask you a quick question. In fact TWO questions. Do you know of someone who is allergic to alcohol or shellfish or some other food to the extent that eating just one bite … one tiny bite … can send them to the hospital? Or, is there any food that you loved when you were younger but which you cannot eat now because it gives you perhaps a stomach ache, headache, makes you itch, causes pimples or hives or produces some other type of reaction?

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin If so, that’s because you probably suffer from some sort of food intolerance -perhaps because of your genetics or a weakened immune system and digestion – and you’re probably slightly allergic to that food or something it contains. In fact, you might have been sensitive to that food when you were younger … without knowing it … because you were young and healthy and that overflow of robustness and vitality helped mask the reaction. Or maybe it’s just that your internal biochemistry has indeed weakened with age, because that is what happens. Regardless of the reasons, now that you’re older and your immune system and vitality are declining, your body is broadcasting a highly recognizable lesson that can no longer be masked … “Stay away!” it’s saying. “That food is no good for you!” I mentioned before that once you know of this food offender, does that mean you should eat less of that particular food … until you reach the point where it seems like you no longer experience the reaction and can still enjoy it? No! It means you should avoid that food entirely, and not eat it at all! What this scenario tells us is that some foods are bad for you and if they are bad for you, then no amount of those foods are good. Furthermore, if you can identify the particular foods that cause unfavorable reactions in your body due to your unique biochemistry, then avoiding them … by eliminating those foods from your diet … will produce a tremendous improvement in your health condition. You might even turnaround a health condition of illness that no doctor has been able to help you with so far. Whether it’s a food allergy, food intolerance or food sensitivity … the rule is to just avoid that particular food, so enough of that reminder. The existence of food offenders may sound like science fiction and certain doctors may snicker at this, but this is perhaps the biggest single thing you can ever do to adjust your diet to get healthy and stay healthy. You must identify and then stop eating those foods to which you are innately sensitive. If you follow this rule, you’ll usually start to lose weight almost instantly since most people are actually intolerant of the very foods which cause them to gain

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin weight. Weight gain is often a reaction to eating the wrong foods, and though eliminating food offenders often causes quick weight loss, at times it can take six months or more for the changes to kick in. Those results are part of looking better, which is the target of this book. Eliminating these foods, once they are identified, has also been known to totally eliminate high blood pressure, depression, arthritis, headaches, depression, even epileptic fits … and none of this is science fiction. The results are often miraculous, but they are real and true and existent. Just ask anyone who has a food allergy and then eliminated the offender from his or her diet. Let them tell you it was all in their head! What are some of the most common food offenders? Dairy, wheat, corn, yeast, sugar, soy, peanuts, eggs and nightshades head the list. But this is such a long list to test that there should be a better way to determine what you’re allergic to. In fact there are lots more foods to test than this, so how are you going to know? When people normally follow an elimination diet that eliminates true food sensitivities, they usually report effortless weight loss, tremendous energy gain and an increase in mental acuity without any special efforts … except the act of eliminating the food offenders from the diet. So how do you find these foods you should avoid? Through a lab test that checks your blood for an immune response, not through skin testing. There’s only one blood test I recommend in America for finding your food allergies, and there’s only one laboratory I recommend you do it through to test for food intolerances. As an expert in the nutrition field, I recommend only this one particular lab because it’s the only one in the entire Untied States whose quality control measures insure consistent lab results from test to test. No other lab in America has such high quality standards and documented reproducibility like this one, so you can really trust the results it produces. In addition, the test is so effective in over 95% of cases that they even offer a guarantee!

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin If you want to find out the foods you should be avoiding, I strongly recommend you have your doctor order a special ELISA IgG antibodies blood test from Immuno Laboratories (contact Immuno Labs at 1-954-486-4500 or search www.betterhealthusa.com for information), and they will arrange to test your reaction to 115 different foods and scientifically identify the food intolerances you may have. And we all have them! Eliminate those allergies and over time you’ll look and feel better, and others will see it through your skin. That’s the BIG SECRET METHOD! As long as you avoid eating your own personal food allergens, then you won’t be taxing your body as much and excess poundage will tend to fall off even if you eat more calories than usual. This is the one dietary investigation you should really perform in your life, especially if you have some sort of chronic condition, because eliminating identifiable food offenders will relieve a big burden on your immune system, and once that burden is lifted it will produce dramatic changes in your health. No matter what diet you follow, you have to avoid the food allergens that cause trouble for your immune system. Bad reactions to the food you eat are almost always reflected in the skin, and the continued consumption of offending foods (without your notice) creates lousy skin cells and weight gain. Food can be a medicine or a toxin, a poison or a cure, and the Immuno Labs test is the one sure way to discover which foods are toxins to your system that you must avoid. The beauty of discovering what foods aren’t good for you is that it doesn’t just help you with arthritis and joint pain, but with all sorts of other conditions such as unexplainable headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, skin problems, hyperactivity, depression, tiredness, sinus problems, problems with focus and attention, and being overweight. Improving those conditions all come from this target of improving your complexion. Once people discover the foods they should avoid and then avoid them, time and again these and other unexplainable conditions disappear. That’s right. Disappear … gone … forever. Think of the healing outcome in this way.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin If you stop taxing your body with immunological responses to foods it doesn’t like, your immune system will finally be freed up enough to go after and then repair a whole host of other long standing health conditions. But if your immune system is constantly engaged in producing reactions to foods it doesn’t like, it’ll get stretched thin and you’ll experience a whole host of conditions that just shouldn’t appear. The second great benefit of this approach is that after you receive your Immuno Laboratories test results, you won’t have to remember so many different dietary rules, but just (1) the three primary Getoff rules and (2) the foods you should avoid because they’re not good for your body. Remember: • • • •

Fewer sweet tasting foods and sugars Fewer grain products and flours Good fats rather than bad fats, and Avoid your personal food allergens.

Simple, isn’t it? I just saved you a bundle of diet books because this is what they’re all about. Yes, they also talk about the necessity for exercise and eating discipline, but now you have the food component down pat. I’ve also saved you a bundle in buying nutritional supplements, too, that you might have to take to correct all sorts of conditions that are being prompted into manifestation because of your diet … namely the wrong diet. If you really want to do something great about your health, then have your doctor order the Immuno Laboratories test so you can discover and then eliminate those foods that are provoking unhealthy reactions. It’s another powerful thing that you’ll be glad you did for your beauty and overall health in general. Did you think I would just settle for telling you the things to eat that will make you beautiful? No, I want to tell you the things that will make you beautiful because they solve all sorts of health problems and make you healthy. Beauty comes from health, and health comes from a good diet and good chi, which comes from meditation. So if you want beautiful skin, you have to pay attention to the diet! Honestly, the power of the Immuno Labs test is hard to believe – for all sorts of things other than just your skin and weight loss and complexion. The Immuno Lab test is such a powerful factor for your overall health that I begged and pleaded with the owners of this famous lab to do something to help encourage you to get tested, and what a deal they are going to give you.

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Honest to God, I had to chase these guys for months to get them to agree to something … that’s how much I like this test as a nutritionist and believe it will help you. It can do miracles for you if you indeed have a hidden food sensitivity that you’re not aware of. Unfortunately, a food tolerance test like this can cost six, seven, eight or even nine hundred dollars in a doctor’s office. However, if you use the coupon provided at the back of this book when you call in, the firm will test you for their absolute rock bottom physician’s price of $546 (which is what physicians are charged before they add on their own fees), they will provide you with * FREE * nutritional counseling support for an entire year. It’s not unusual for a visit to a nutritionist to easily cost $75-150 for a consultation. Even if you just avail yourself of 3 consults – the initial test results and two followups -- you’d have spent $200-300 quite easily. Here’s the cool part. They will even send someone to your own home or office to draw your blood for the test and they’ve agreed to waive the normal $55 fee for this service. For something like this that can radically raise your health and good looks, this is a great deal. In fact, it’s a fantastic deal and I encourage you to take advantage of it for yourself and your family because food is your best medicine … or a poison … and finding out which is which and acting accordingly is the best thing you can do to avoid or eliminate all sorts of illnesses. This test is the equivalent of a miracle drug, and you should think of the test and the counseling as an investment that’s going to keep paying you back over a 20, 30, or even 40-year period! Honestly, it’s the thing to do. Rarely will you find something more powerful than this for the potential good it can do for your health. I’ve tried to haggle manufacturers and others into providing coupons for other supplements and services for you, but this is the best deal by far that I’ve been able to pull off for you and your health. Do it for your whole family if you can afford it, especially for kids. You’d be surprised how much hyperactivity or ADHD is really just a function of the diet and how many illnesses or strange conditions just disappear when the food offender is removed from the diet.

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Why wouldn’t you want to know which foods are secretly making you sick and contributing to low immunity, unexplainable aches and pains, and embarrassing weight gain that requires a whole new wardrobe and keeps you from the beach? If you’ve ever wondered about what diet is right for you, please take my advice, do this one test and save yourself years of secret tears, grief and hassle. Just decide for yourself you’re going to do something about this. If your kids are having problems with acne or headaches or weight gain or study habits in school, try it as well. Remember that the results will last for a number of years, and that’s what you’re after. With so many parents not knowing what to feed their kids nowadays, at least this tells you what you shouldn’t be feeding them because it will make them sick and decrease their performance. Any type of performance activity – whether it’s playing sports, doing academics, or playing an instrument – requires a healthy body and mental state that you can steady through the avoidance of food sensitivities. This could be the one solution you’ve been looking for that none of the traditional doctors is going to tell you about, so I cannot keep recommending it enough. Go ahead and check the website out to find out more.

The Metabolic Typing Diet There’s yet another thing you can do to determine the right type of diet for yourself, other than to avoid sweet tasting foods and grains that quickly turn into sugars, and replace bad fats with good fats. It’s called “Metabolic Typing” and the Bible on the topic is the book The Metabolic Typing Diet, by William Wolcott. Many people have heard of Peter D’Adamo’s book, Eat Right for Your Type, which suggests a link between blood types and the foods you should eat. The premise sounds attractive, but it’s far too simplistic. There’s really no proof for it either, though it does have people eliminating a number of their food allergies or just adding discipline to their diet. Nevertheless, that attractiveness has swayed people to really fall for D’Adamo’s conclusions without investigating them too closely and looking for the hard evidence that supports them, which really isn’t there. What you end up doing by following the set of instructions in Eat Right for Your Type is eliminate a large proportion of foods likely to be food allergens, and the weight promoting foods I just mentioned. For instance, several blood types are told to cut out grains and wheat.

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After what I just told you, you already know this is probably going to help your health regardless of your blood type. So telling people to reduce their grain consumption is right no matter what blood type you have. Most people are also slightly allergic to milk because it produces mucus, and milk is also a simple sugar, so once again it doesn’t matter what blood type you pick … eliminating milk consumption will usually help with one’s health as well. As to whether blood type O, AB, A or B should really avoid milk, no one has done any studies on the matter. The Metabolic Typing Diet is different than a blood typing diet, but follows the same underlying idea that you should differentiate your diet according to some underlying biochemical principles. In this case the underlying factor is your metabolism or metabolic type. The idea of metabolic typing is that everyone has a different metabolism because we are all biochemically unique, and so the foods you eat should be geared to that metabolism. Nutrients optimal for one person of one metabolic type can therefore be undesirable for those of another metabolic type; one man’s food can indeed be another man’s poison. Let me explain. In general, you can classify people as being one of three metabolic types: “protein,” “carbohydrate,” or “mixed.” Let’s say your biochemistry does not classify you as a carbohydrate type diet person and yet you consume a vegetarian diet heavy on grains. The end result is that you will probably get sick or always feel unwell because you need to focus on consuming more protein. Everyone is genetically and biochemically unique. Therefore the same diet does not work for everyone. For some people a low-fat, vegetarian Pritikin-type diet might clear up all of their health problems and yet for other people that very same diet might end up destroying their health. They might instead do better on an Atkins-type or Protein-power type diet. You see, it’s all based on your own particular metabolism. The whole premise of metabolic typing is that if you eat the right type of food for your body, determined according to your metabolic type, it should produce a

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin noticeable and lasting improvement in your energy and well being and keep you satisfied without hunger for hours. The underlying concept of metabolic typing is based on the premise of a balanced blood pH, which is the acidity or alkalinity of your blood. The normal pH of blood is around 7.46 (a higher number is more alkaline and a lower number is more acidic). The further one’s blood pH deviates from this ideal – which is where the optimal absorption and utilization of nutrients is designed to take place in the body – the less efficient will be the absorption and utilization of food and its constituent nutrients. Therefore sickness tends to result when you eat a diet that causes internal pH imbalances and a set of cascading effects from those imbalances. Those imbalances, because of an abnormally high or low pH, set the stage for fatigue, headaches, allergies, digestive problems, … all sorts of conditions including cancer. So how do you avoid these imbalances? By eating the foods best for your metabolic type that help balance your pH. Metabolic typing categorizes individuals according to their dominant metabolic category. First there are the oxidative metabolic types, where the term “oxidation” refers to the rate at which nutrients are converted into energy: • • •

fast oxidizers (who have an acidic blood pH) slow oxidizers (who have an alkaline blood pH) balanced oxidizers (who have a balanced blood pH)

Next we have the autonomic metabolic types, where autonomic types are defined by the relative prominence of the autonomic nervous system and its function as the master regulator of metabolism: • • •

sympathetic (who have an acid blood) parasympathetic (who have an alkaline blood) balanced types (who have a balanced blood pH)

Without going into the specifics, the goal of metabolic typing is to discover which type you are, and then select your nutrition according to the foods most favorable to that type in order to restore your body’s pH levels to a more normal condition. That restoration will set the background for normal health. After you discover your metabolic type, you might be prescribed a high protein, high carbohydrate or balanced diet. For instance, you have protein types that do better on a low-carb (10-30%), highfat (30-50%), high-protein diet (about 40% protein). www.MeditationExpert.com

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You also have carbohydrate types that do better on a high protein (about 65%), low-protein (about 25%) and low-fat diet (15%). The recommendation that ultimately comes your way is based on your own particular biochemistry. When you know your Metabolic Type then you can know what proportions of vegetables and protein you should consume. For instance, if you are a strong protein type then you really don’t need as many vegetables – and you probably don’t need to be juicing that much -- but if you are a carb type you may benefit from consuming far more vegetables, and the best varieties would include the collard greens, kale, Swiss chard, and so on which are not ideal for protein types because they contain too much potassium. Protein type folks should be oriented to eating more lower potassium type vegetables like cauliflower, green beans, spinach, asparagus, mushrooms, celery and avocados. Lettuces and vegetables like collard greens, kale and Swiss chard have too much potassium for protein types and will tend to cause biochemical imbalances. What you need all depends upon your genetics, which health professionals discover through testing, and you should not get too particular about the percentages I’ve just mentioned as these are just the general indications for how you should slant your diet one way or another. Even then, you should still follow the injunction to avoid sugars, grain products, and food allergens. If you follow those rules, you’ll eliminate most of your problems anyway. Whether you have slightly acidic or alkaline blood, I want you to know that the premise of metabolic typing is that the underlying cause of imbalance is due to your body’s energy conversion system or its autonomic nervous system. The idea is that you have to adjust your standard diet of proteins, fats and carbs according to these systems and your individual biochemistry. A certain food can have different effects on people depending upon which control system is more dominant in the individual. Actually, that’s also the idea behind eliminating food allergens in that you might be reactive to a food while others are not, so you also have to adjust your diet according to your own specific biochemistry. You can investigate a bit more about metabolic typing by going to www.bloodph.com or reading about it at www.Mercola.com .

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin I don’t personally recommend that you immediately run out and find a metabolic typing practitioner, but that you become aware of this approach because I want you to be well informed, and it will probably become better developed as more time goes by. If you really don’t need weight loss or more energy, I don’t see the need for this approach as being imperative. In the meantime, the more powerful, useful, easier and your primary approach to follow should be to combine the principles of Getoff eating plan with eliminating food allergies. And one more thing about your blood pH before we leave this topic. Your blood pH is kept in a very tight range (7.35-7.45) through a number of buffering systems. This is a slightly alkaline pH, but most people have diets that produce a slightly acidic pH. When you have a disease condition, your pH usually shifts to the acidic side. A lot of foods can help shift your pH back to the alkaline side. Citrus fruits do that even though they are acidic … they seem acidic in taste but their effect on the body is actually alkalinizing. Then again, if you eat them with starches they become acid forming. Big deal … so what’s the point? The point is that I’ve come across a recipe that helps flush your kidneys and tends to restore an alkaline pH which tends to keep you free of colds and flu. Don’t keep taking this every day and over-alkalinize your system, but if you eat too much meat, dairy products, grains and sugars which are all acidifying, then try this blender recipe for Tangy lemonade. The ingredients are: Juice of 2 lemons ½ cup of water 1 carrot a pinch of sea salt a pinch of cayenne pepper liquid (try Dr. Schulze for a source) 1 tablespoon of flax seed oil 1 tablespoon maple syrup or raw honey This little cocktail will help you lower your body’s blood pH but if you want to make sure your effort isn’t countermanded by the other activities you do, then try to also eliminate coffee, nicotine, and stress.

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A Multivitamin-Multimineral Supplement Okay, so you’ve eliminated from your diet those foods that produce a toxic reaction whether you’ve identified them by Immuno Labs testing, blood typing, metabolic typing or our simple David Getoff rules. Bingo, your health and complexion improves. Anything else to be done along the lines of diet? Because of the depleted nature of our soils today, it’s absolutely imperative that you consume a multivitamin and mineral supplement. I’ll repeat: everyone – absolutely everyone -- needs to take a multivitaminmultimineral supplement today. I don’t care who you are or how well you eat, our food no longer provides even the minimum RDA (recommended daily allowance) for most vitamins and minerals, and there are countless people walking around with one vitamin deficiency or mineral deficiency or another. Most health professionals, myself included, believe we actually need more vitamins and minerals than we ever did before because of higher levels of stress and higher levels of chemical exposure that require a larger degree of detoxification. All these things burn nutrients, so we definitely need more nutrients than before, and even the minimal amounts are no longer in our diets. It is a sad state of affairs but countless government studies, medical research studies, blood work studies and autopsies, diet histories and other research methods unanimously show that nearly every one of us is deficient in various vitamins and minerals. They are simply absent from our diets. For instance, even if you eat right, our soils are depleted of minerals because of extensive over farming. So you’re not going to get all the minerals you need from American grown food. As another example, the crops we grow are also devoid of nutrients because through hybridization we’ve bred out the genes that make nutrient-heavy crops. It turns out that insects like those healthy nutrient-laden crops, but don’t like sickly ones, so we’ve bred out the factors that make crops enticing to the insects. Can you believe it … we’ve purposefully destroyed the nutritional value of our crops in order to make them less attractive to the bugs!

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Of course that’s different than what we’ve done to genetically alter our soybeans. We haven’t made them healthier through genetic engineering. We’ve only made them hardier so that they can now stand lots more pesticide sprayings without dying, so farmers now spray on ten times the amount of pesticides they previously used without killing the plants. Guess who ends up eating all the extra pesticides? Case after case of genetic engineering hasn’t made healthier foods, just foods easier to process. Check it out if you don’t believe me. Quite a few websites will fill you in on the details. Furthermore, we no longer get even the minimum amounts of vitamins and minerals in these foods because they’re grown on depleted soils. The net result is that we need to supplement our diet with a variety of essential vitamins and minerals. Otherwise, how are you ever going to grow beautiful skin? We just don’t eat nutrient dense foods anymore because they’re over-processed and grown in poor quality soils. Nutritional supplements are therefore a necessity so that our cells can obtain the factors they need to grow and repair themselves. Furthermore, consider this. For many disease conditions, you need higher doses of vitamins and minerals than the RDA to obtain a protective, curative or modulating effect that helps moderate the condition. That in itself necessitates consumption of a multivitaminmineral supplement. Remember that study I told you about where I asked the top health practitioners across the nation about the best multivitamin/multimineral they ever found? One of the consistent answers was Super Nutrition “Perfect Blend” or “Super Blend,” which is the multivitamin-multimineral supplement I most often recommend. No, I don’t make any money out of them … I’m just reporting what I’ve found and it’s really a fantastic multi. You can find the Supernutrition brand in stores or reach them on the web at www.supernutritionusa.com . This is a top brand, and the one I take, so if you want to take a multivitamin/multimineral, this is the one I recommend. Dr. Whitaker and Dr. Williams also offer good multivitamin/multimineral supplements on their websites. You’ll also find Thorne and other high quality manufacturers make good ones as well. In fact, the big names tend to make good ones and that’s the topic I want to talk to you about.

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Buy a good one if you’re going to buy one at all. Buy a good multivitamin/multimineral from a store rather than through an offer in the mail because many times those mail offers you get are usually from low quality manufacturers who don’t have any reputation to risk, and are out to make a quick buck. The markup on vitamins can be tremendous – it’s normally several hundred percent -- so they’re out to use your desire to become healthy to make a lot of money for themselves. In this field, like all others, you tend to get what you pay for, so protect yourself from buying “slop” by buying from reputable manufacturers. And one more bit of advice along these lines. While that major brand advertised on TV for seniors is quite popular (you know the one I’m talking about ... “Century,” “Centrix” or whatever), there are far, far better brands available. Yes, it’s true that almost any vitamin is better than no vitamin, but nearly every quality brand out there puts that popular one to shame. Spend a little bit more cash and get more value for your dollar, because you get what you pay for. What companies pay in advertising costs for TV commercials means less money for quality ingredients, so consider what that means in terms of your purchasing dollar. Remember that you’re wasting your money if you don’t get the results you are after, and you won’t get good results if you consume products containing the lowest cost ingredients. You can buy a pair of shoes for cheap but I can guarantee they’ll wear out quickly. If you similarly spend very little money on vitamins, I can also guarantee you’ll be getting very little results at all because the quality of the ingredients will be lousy. Therefore you shouldn’t buy a vitamin unless it’s a good brand. Otherwise it’s the same as throwing your money away. I hate having you spend your money at all but I need to tell you that if you’re going to spend your money, spend it on a good multivitamin/multimineral! That’s the last thing I wanted to tell you but because I’ve told you so much, and so it’s time to summarize.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin For a better complexion and healthy skin, you have to watch the foods you eat and in particular, the foods you should avoid. That’s what this chapter is all about – what you should avoid eating. There are the Getoff rules, the allergic foods to avoid that you can identify through the Immuno Lab test, and the Metabolic typing diet which also tells you what to avoid and what you need more of. In terms of “more of,” you need a good multivitamin/multimineral and you also need good fats, which are the next topic of conversation.

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Omega-3 Oils to End Dry and Flaky Skin Forever “What goes in must show itself” is more true of oils than almost any other food you eat. Frankly, if you want your skin to glow and shine, it’s the quality of the oils that you eat – which form the membranes of your skin -- that will produce this effect rather than the quality of the makeup you use. Remember, you want to get to the point where you don’t need any makeup at all and eating the right oils, which end up showing through your skin, is the right way to do it. Don’t avoid fats and oils because you think they’ll raise your cholesterol level or make you fat (in fact you need them for hormone production and you will likely suffer from mental and emotional problems if you try to exclude them from your diet), but simply switch from eating the “bad” ones to the “good” ones to improve your skin and complexion. Now the general rule for eating oils is the following – replace the “bad” oils in your diet with “good” oils and eat raw, non-rancid, cold pressed fresh oils. Follow those rules and you’re way ahead of the game. In terms of brands, Omega is the only company that produces true cold-pressed oils. First the bad oils to start excluding from your diet, most of which are partially hydrogenated vegetable oils: • • • • •

Margarine Corn oil Soybean oil Safflower oil Canola oil

Now the good oils to consume: • • • • • •

Butter Olive oil – best non-heated Coconut oil – great for cooking Cod liver oil, salmon oil and other fresh (non rancid) fish oil Flaxseed and black currant oil Evening primrose and borage oil

People always think they will get fat from oils, but usually it’s sugars and grains that produce the weight gain instead of the oils. So don’t be afraid of them. Don’t

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin listen to the “avoid saturated fats” nonsense either, because these oils are not really dangerous to the heart. One hundred years ago practically all the fats we ate (ex. lard) were saturated fats and yet heart disease was virtually non-existent. The research on which that claim is based is pretty much faulty and has been discredited, but it’s going to take years to correct this misconception because of all the politics and monies involved. The most prolific proponent of the right view on oils are Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, and you can search them out on the web for more information. When women have dry, flaky skin, I simply add the good oils into their diet and in weeks the turn around is obvious to everyone. Your skin cells require healthy cell membranes to stay waterproof and to repel toxins, and fatty acids (from fats) are required for their construction. Eat the right oils and you get all the right fatty acids you need but eat the wrong oils and your skin becomes dry and brittle. Remember that – you cannot avoid fats because fats supply the fatty acids necessary for cell membranes and if you aren’t eating enough of the right fats, chances are that your skin will be dry as a result. You’ll also be producing weaker cells and setting yourself up later for cancer. In the majority of cases today, most of us are suffering from a fatty acid imbalance in our diets because we’re eating far too many omega-6 fats -- which are found in products such as corn, soybean, canola, and sunflower oil -- and not enough omega-3 fats which come from such sources as flaxseed, walnuts, black currants and fish. The human body needs to consume these two types of fat -- omega-3 and omega-6 (there’s another type called omega-9, but we won’t discuss it) -- and the ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fat consumption should be equal (around 1:1). Unfortunately, our modern day ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 consumption, because of all the fired foods and processed foods we eat, ranges all the way from 20:1 to 50:1 and even worse! That’s terrible. No, it’s a catastrophe! It’s one of the reasons cancer and heart disease are rampant and still rising … we’re all consuming the wrong fats! This imbalanced consumption ratio means health troubles … and dry skin or brittle hair are just one or two of the problems associated with an omega-3 oil deficiency. Others include depression, memory problems, weight gain, cancer, heart disease, eczema, allergies, violence, arthritis and diabetes. Here’s how to remedy the problem.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin You need to not only reduce the amount of omega-6 oils in your diet (a good start is to avoid hydrogenated vegetable oils) but increase the amount of omega-3 oils you consume. Stop eating the bad fats, “in” with the good fats. Consuming more good fats such as olive oil, coconut oil, butter and cod liver oil will help build strong cells, prevent disease and prolong your life. You need to eat these good oil sources because without good building blocks, it’s impossible for your body to build strong cells. The best type of omega-3 oil is that which is found in fish because fish oil has a high content of two fatty acids crucial to human health, DHA and EPA. Of course you can also get omega-3 oil from vegetable sources like flaxseed or walnuts, but a high quality fish oil has lots of other benefits, too. The problem with eating fish itself is that it often contains high levels of mercury and other toxins, so while it should become part of your diet, taking fish oil capsules is probably your better option because you can buy pure brands that are free from mercury. However, many manufacturers will sell you fish oil capsules that are actually rancid, so that’s another problem to avoid. As with most foods or nutritional products in general, the brand of fish oil you consume makes all the difference when it comes to your health. If you buy an inferior brand you'll be throwing your money away because it won’t offer any of the benefits you’re expecting and due to the low quality, might actually cause you harm over time. There is a wide variance in the purity and quality of oils out there in the market, so the only two brands I recommend are Nordic Naturals and Carlson’s fish oil capsules. You have to be worried about freshness (rancidity and heavy metals or low quality fish) when you buy fish oil capsules or bottles, but these guys do it right. With both of them you should also be taking a full spectrum vitamin E, like AC Grace’s Unique E, to make sure your body can process the oils without rancidity. One type of fish oil that I recommend in particular over most others is cod liver oil, which does amazing things for your skin and because of its vitamin D content, helps your bones and health conditions like arthritis. Most of all, it is the “beautifying fish oil” you eat for the skin. If you want to rub oils into your skin, I suggest virgin coconut oil and olive/almond oil combinations from the Heritage store, which will help to keep the skin from developing liver spots and other blemishes caused by aging and overexposure to sunlight. But if you want to eat an oil that will absolutely glorify the skin – and if you’re a mother with daughters just blossoming and you want them to have beautiful skin for life – then eat high quality cod liver oil, and give it to everyone in your family.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Several years ago, my then girlfriend and I were performing some therapeutic massage on the leg of an Indian woman who had been crippled with polio. In the midst of the session, I remarked to her that she had some of the most beautiful skin I had ever seen and that most women could only get such pretty skin if they consumed the right types of oils over time, and in particular, cod liver oil. Her mouth dropped open and in shock she said that every day, when she was a child on into her teenage years, her mother would feed her 1-2 teaspoons of cod liver oil. “That’s must what have done it,” she said. Cod liver oil, taken over time, is absolutely fabulous for the skin. It’s also great for helping your bones grow and for molding the shape of your skull. When I see young girls where the skull bones seem “too tight” or there’s a problem with skeletal development I always know it’s from a lack of vitamin D and that cod liver oil is the remedy … if it’s not too late. I always emphasize this oil during a girl’s formative years and it lays a good skeletal and skin foundation for the rest of her life. If you have daughters (or sons) who want beautiful skin, I would educate them while they’re young and have them start taking the cod liver oil as soon as possible. Usually it takes only a few weeks to notice a tremendous change in your skin from taking good oils. I do suggest cod liver oil and also fresh salmon oil, but also suggest switching every now and then to pure flax seed, evening primrose and borage oils to see the results. Always give your body a choice and provide it with a rotational diet. I remember one woman I saw who walked into the room and looked fabulous compared to the last time we all saw her. In this case, all her “yang chi” had come up and was shining through her skin. Everyone pressed her on what she had done to look so glowing and she finally admitted that she had started taking evening primrose oil in her diet, which had allowed the results of her meditation to show. Everyone noticed! The moral is, buy good oils and consume them … and meditate as well. If you don’t meditate then your energy won’t come up and shine through skin as if it is transparent, so the key is to build a healthy body with the right oils and then make it shine it through meditation. In putting women on healthy fats, such as cod liver oil or evening primrose oils, in weeks I’ve seen tremendous improvements that absolutely everyone notices. Especially when you supply the omega-3 fats that have been severely lacking in the diet.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin A full discussion on the benefits of oils would require an entire book, and if you are interested to learn more about fats there are books such as Smart Fats by Michael Schmidt and Know Your Fats by Mary Enig. What you need to especially know is to avoid the common corn, soy, cottonseed, canola oils we typically use along with margarine. Coconut oil, olive oil and butter are good oils, too. You should be particularly worried to avoid margarine and trans fatty acids in processed foods because those fatty acid molecules have been twisted out of shape due to their production processes. Trans fats, when incorporated into skin cells, leave holes in the cell walls because of their misshapen structures and therefore they cannot be linked or joined to the other fatty acid molecules correctly. When cells incorporate all these misshaped trans fatty acids into their membranes as components, the cells become weaker and more susceptible to cancer and disease. It takes time but consuming omega-3 oils does work in building stronger cells and in improving your skin and complexion. If you replace the bad fats in your diet with good fats, rather than eliminate fats entirely, then you’ll eventually see a definite improvement in your skin’s shine and complexion. The most beautiful woman in the world is a healthy woman, full of vibrant energy (clean chi that has been transformed because of meditation) that shows through her skin and complexion. One of the ways to that beautiful skin is by consuming the right oils, namely more of the Omega-3 oils and fish oils we’ve mentioned. When young models ask me about what oils to take I also often tell them to take a tablespoon of UDO’s Choice oil every day, rather than these other alternatives, simply because it’s very convenient and available. The big worry in buying cheaper other oil products, when they are not the Omega brand, is that many are usually rancid. You may think you’re saving money and getting results when you buy cheap oils with the right things printed on the labels, but you’re often just throwing your money away and getting no results at all, especially if those oils haven’t been refrigerated to keep fresh and are not stored in dark colored bottles. My suggestion is to first buy the more expensive brands of oils to improve your skin and complexion, prove to yourself they work by seeing what they do for your skin, and only after you’ve seen the results and are convinced should you experiment with cheaper brands. That’s the right way to approach the oil situation.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Also remember to cut down on sugars in your diet, because sugars destroy the complexion. You’ll also lose weight by cutting down on sugars and processed starches, eliminate brain fog, help cut Candida growth, your immune system will get stronger, and it will help you in all sorts of ways and areas. Sounds like a broken record? You have to hear the same message over and over again, and from all sorts of angles so it sinks in. One more thing … Oils aren’t the only thing that can cause dry skin because it can also be the result of an underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism). The way to rule out thyroid problems causing dry skin is to have a thyroid stimulating (TSH) blood test. The optimal ranges for TSH readings on a blood exam are between 2.0 and 4.4 and you want T-3 uptake between 27 and 37 and T-4 between 6.0 and 12. Those are optimal ranges for spotting subclinical problems and they don’t appear as the ranges you see on blood tests, but are more accurate. If your thyroid is found to be out of balance, your doctor will probably want to treat you with synthetic thyroid hormones but that could condemn you to taking thyroid hormone for the rest of your life. So do some research before you take any such step.

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Juicing and the Nucleotide Rich “Miracle Foods” That Will Shed 10-20 Years Off Your Appearance I always recommend that people subscribe to a free health newsletter written by the alternative health care physician, Dr. Joseph Mercola, which can be found at www.Mercola.com. It’s free, it’s useful, it’s interesting and timely. It will help you maintain your health. One of the comments Dr. Mercola made in his newsletter struck me because I had also reached the same conclusions from my own observations. His comment was: “Vegetables are also extremely important. One of the reasons I started vegetable juicing is that I would see 75-year-old women in my practice who looked like they were 40 years old and had virtually no facial wrinkles. Most of them were doing large amounts of juicing and led healthy lifestyles.” There’s no doubt that those individuals who juice fruits and vegetables … and replace a solid meal with juicing instead … often look fabulous. Here’s why. As we get older our digestive system starts weakening. In fact, at age 45 our bodies begin to have trouble absorbing the nutrients we need to maintain our tissues …and so they tend to break down and malfunction. When you feed your stomach and intestine all these ground up fruits and vegetables in the form of juice particles, however, you have no problem in both digesting and absorbing these nutrients because you’ve already done most of the hard work of reducing them to tiny particles. Through juicing, you can now supply your body with all sorts of nutrients that would normally go to waste. The result? Beautiful skin! The big key to juicing is that it physically breaks up valuable nutrients into such tiny pieces that your body has an easier time digesting and absorbing them. In fact, juicing works at rejuvenating your body for the same reason that wheat flour causes you to get fat.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Think about it this way. When you grind up wheat into flour, you are grinding it up into extremely tiny particles. Those particles, when they hit your stomach, are rapidly digested and become sugar quite quickly simply because the particles have already been pre-ground. Since they are already broken into such small pieces, the digestive enzymes have an easier time attacking them and turning them into sugars. The resulting sugar influx is then quickly stored as fat. In terms of juicing, juicing food particles are immediately turned into needed nutrients and that larger supply of readily available nutrients – at a time when your digestive processes are normally weakening with age -- readily assists in rejuvenating your body. Traditionally there are several foods that have been praised by health advocates for their special health, anti-aging, and repair characteristics. When I thought about it, I realized that most of them are related to juicing because of the fact that they are easily digestible, nutrient-dense and highly absorbable, too. These “miracle” foods include spirulina, chlorella, brewer’s yeast, lentils and most beans, oysters, animal liver, sardines, anchovies and mackerel. As you can note, chlorella, spirulina, and yeast are highly digestable whereas the other foods are particularly nutrient dense. That’s what makes them the foods that stem off aging, and in scientific terms, we say it’s due to the presence of a high concentration of nucleotides. What are they? Nucleotides are the building blocks or sub-unit molecules that make up RNA and DNA, which carry your genetic code. Nucleotides also carry out several essential functions needed for cell replication and perform the following functions in your body: • • • • • •

Neutralize toxins Increase cellular metabolism Increase the production of cellular energy Improve the response and efficiency of the immune system Enhance the effects of antioxidants Increase the body’s ability to heal and repair itself

These “miracle” foods are so useful in treating cancer, anti-aging and cellular repair -- and have achieved fantastic reputations over the years as cures in themselves (especially chlorella, spirulina, Brewer’s yeast, and liver) – precisely because they supply highly absorbable amounts of nucleotides for cellular repair. Juicing does the same thing, which is why it eventually produces beautiful skin (and just think what it’s doing for the insides of your body as well).

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Therefore, in addition to juicing, you should consider eating more of these foods in the diet because they will also contribute to creating healthy cells and a beautiful complexion. If you want to encourage RNA/DNA repair that makes you fit and trim, include foods in your diet that contain abundant levels -- and I mean really abundant levels -- of nucleotides since they are the building blocks from which your body builds DNA and RNA. The more you juice your foods, the easier it becomes for your body to digest them and break them down into nucleic acids of RNA and DNA that help with physical rejuvenation. That, in short, is why juicing is great for your skin … and why for beautiful skin, health and longevity, you should consume more of the nucleotide rich foods as well.

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Natural Progesterone Cream for Skin Moisturizing This chapter on natural progesterone will be especially useful to menopausal women or women with PMS, and for further information you are encouraged to read What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause and What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause, both by Dr. John Lee. If you are a woman, you should get these books and read them. I cannot stress that enough. If you are a man, you should buy them and give them to your female friends as gifts. That’s how important these books are. Progesterone and estrogen are the two major female hormones produced by the woman’s ovaries. Both play a major role in ovulation and pregnancy. When a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle functions correctly, estrogen is the dominant hormone during the first two weeks of the cycle and then progesterone assumes dominance during the final two weeks of the cycle. Upon menopause, the ovaries stop producing the same amounts of estrogen and progesterone. Most women continue to produce estrogen, whose production drops by 40-60% whereas progesterone production drops radically to near zero in some women! So guess what the doctors then do? They prescribe synthetic estrogen for women, rather than progesterone, because it’s readily available as a pharmaceutical drug and the pharmaceutical firms push it. They supplement the hormone that least needs it rather than the one that needs it the most, and which is a precursor hormone from which most of the other hormones in the body are developed. When our bodies stop producing insulin due to diabetes, doctors prescribe insulin but in this case, the doctors only give women estrogen instead of both hormones … and they’re picking the wrong hormone to concentrate on! This supplementation of estrogen, together with an xenoestrogen rich diet (xenoestrogens include plastics, PCBs, insecticides and herbicides that look like estrogen are rich in our diet and “mimic” the effects of estrogen once in the body) and the radical loss of progesterone levels in the body, often produces a condition called “estrogen dominance.”

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin If you are undergoing hormone replacement therapy, take estrogen rich birth control pills, have had a hysterectomy or are post-menopausal, you might be experiencing estrogen dominance if you experience a number of the following symptoms: fatigue, fat gain, depression, headaches, memory loss, irritability, infertility, foggy thinking, uterine cancer, uterine fibroids, allergies, endometriosis, breast tenderness, breast cancer, decreased sex drive (libido), osteoporosis, PMS, gallbladder disease, miscarriage, accelerated signs of aging, and fibrocystic breasts. Estrogen causes cancer, doesn’t help prevent heart attacks, interferes with the thyroid, doesn’t help osteoporosis (except around menopause, and then 5-6 years later the bone loss declines at the same rate). Estrogen dominant women tend to store fat and retain fluid, feel terrible and look terrible. That’s where natural progesterone comes in. Many women find that by supplementing their hormone production with natural progesterone they will reduce many or most of their menopausal and/or estrogen dominance symptoms. Progesterone is well known to protect against breast cysts, helps your body burn fat to create energy and keeps it off the hips, prevents endometrial and breast cancer, increases bone thickness and helps moisturize the skin. The skin effects, after even one or two weeks of usage, are quite noticeable. In brief, progesterone: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Reduce hot flashes and night sweats Increases energy and improves memory Increase immunity against infections and allergies Reduces PMS Reduces menopause-related sleep disturbances Calms, relaxes and gives relief from irritability Regulates irregular periods and heavy bleeding Eases cramps and migraine headaches Restores sex drive (libido) May help overcome vaginal dryness Normalizes blood sugar, zinc and copper levels in the blood Slow and reverses the advance of osteoporosis by stimulating osteoblast cells to rebuild bone Protects against breast and endometrial cancer, heart disease and shrinks fibroids (protects against fibrotic breasts) Prevents water retention and bloating because it’s a natural diuretic www.MeditationExpert.com

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Increases the burning of fat for energy so that you lose weight Delivers anti-aging skin properties by reducing wrinkles and fine lines for a more youthful appearance

Topically applied natural progesterone cream also reverses facial hair growth and hair thinning, acts as a natural diuretic to help you shed extra water poundage, and can remove fine lines and provide underlying firmness to aging skin. You can definitely use natural progesterone cream, when it’s warranted, to enhance your appearance but the big reason I’m mentioning it is also because it helps with osteoporosis. Doctors always stress estrogen supplementation for osteoporosis but estrogen replacement only reduces bone breakdown for a short while, and only progesterone supplementation increases new bone growth or deposition! Bet your doctor never told you that because he’s most likely been brain-washed by the pharmaceutical companies. As just one example of proof, in a 3-year study of 63 post-menopausal women with osteoporosis, women using transdermal progesterone cream experienced an average 7- 8% increase in bone mass density in the first year of usage, 4 -5% the second year, and 3 -4% in the third year. Untreated post-menopausal women typically lose about 1.5% of their bone mass density per year. Basically, natural progesterone supplementation reverses osteoporosis -- by as much as 29% in three years in some studies -- and the best improvements come from women who are initially in the worst conditions. Natural progesterone supplementation, along with some dietary and lifestyle changes, can actually reverse osteoporosis even in women in their 70’s and 80’s! Should you decide to take it for that effect, I would also recommend • • • •

Taking Cod liver oil for its vitamin D content as well (since it helps you absorb calcium from food), Taking the calcium supplement Advacal, which is a highly absorbable form of calcium, juicing vegetables to provide another highly absorbable form of calcium, and To start strength training with weights.

Together those will increase your bone mass in the shortest possible time. Researchers have found that natural progesterone in pill or tablet form is almost completely broken down by the liver before it can enter the blood stream so the

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin most effective way to absorb natural progesterone is through a transdermal (absorbed through the skin) cream that allows it to bypass the liver, thus improving its overall efficacy. Progesterone itself is fat-soluble and absorbed at first by the fat layers just under the skin, after which it diffuses throughout the body through the blood circulation. Since much of the progesterone absorbed by progesterone deficient individuals is first absorbed by the body fat, in time the fat levels reach saturation levels and continued doses after that time result in increased blood levels of progesterone … and a stronger physiological effect. Thus, some women notice the results of natural progesterone supplementation right away, while for others it may take 8-12 weeks to show noticeable results. Since every woman's body is different, the correct amount of natural progesterone cream will vary and you should follow the instructions which come with the cream you purchase. To use the cream, you smooth a bit onto the relatively thinner skin on the tummy, breasts, inner thighs, or inner forearms, avoiding the thicker skin on other parts of your body, such as your hands, and you rotate the location daily. Many women have found natural progesterone to be one of the most important products they have ever used for their skin and overall well-being. I usually don’t like any form of hormone modulation but with estrogen dominance abounding today due to dietary and environmental reasons, simply because xenoestrogens are everywhere in our food chain, this is something you may want to consider. Most of all I want women to avoid blindly following doctor’s recommendations for estrogen supplementation since it is rarely truly warranted except in cases of hysterectomy or the removal of the ovaries. Progesterone cream can improve the skin dramatically in a matter of weeks, so it’s something to consider if you satisfy the conditions indicated.

Internally Generated Hormones There’s yet another reason I wanted to mention the use of progesterone cream to help your skin, and that’s because modern medicine is rapidly turning to the concept of hormone modulation as an anti-aging measure, and progesterone is a hormone. Actually, meditation harmonizes all the hormone systems in your body and

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin produces exactly the effect that modern man wishes to attain through pharmaceutical hormones. When you meditate correctly … and if you engage in sex the correct way so that your chi enters into your head … it’s common for your pituitary gland to secrete a sweet tasting hormone that appears in your saliva, and which you should readily swallow. This sweet secretion is not an imaginary phenomenon because it can be objectively tasted by any third party who kisses you, and all the cultivation schools of the world are consistent in insisting that this sweet nectar secretion helps to banish internal illness and extend your longevity. It’s the key to physical rejuvenation, including changes in your skin and appearance. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika from India accordingly says, “The yogi who drinks the pure stream of nectar is freed from disease, has longevity, and attains a body that becomes as soft and as beautiful as a lotus stem.” It also comments that this sweet hormone substance, “is like milk, ghee, or honey. Fatal diseases, old age and weapons are warded off upon drinking it. From drinking this nectar, immortality and the perfections will manifest.” Taoism, through the Taoist alchemical primer Tsan-tung-chi (Triplex Unity), also comments, The sweet nectar [sweet pituitary hormone] moistened their skin and flesh, Their tendons and bones were soft and strong. They expelled all the internal toxins from the body, And constantly preserved their true energy [jing and chi]. Having accumulated these effects over a long time, Their bodies were transformed, and they became immortals [sages]. These are just a few minor references to this pituitary hormone that’s activated through meditation, and there are many more extensive references to this process in almost every meditation tradition. This sweet salivary hormone is actually the famous "soma" of the Hindu Vedas, "ambrosia" of the Greeks,” madya" (divine wine) of the Tantras, "sweet wine" of the Sufis, and "amrita" nectar of the Gods. It is also the "grail wine" of the Medieval Christian mystics and the “fountain of youth” of European legends. Even the Bible (Judges 15:19) says, “God clave a hollow place that was in the jaw, and there came water thereout; and when he had drunk, his spirit came again, and he revived.”

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Over and over again you’ll find this sweet salivary hormone secretion mentioned as regards the very earliest stages of meditation progress, and if you are a biochemist or doctor seeking to unlock the secrets of anti-aging and longevity, this is the premier substance you should be working to isolate. In fact, its existence should be a starting point of anti-aging research. As another Taoist text, the Wu-jen p’ien (Understanding Reality), mentions, Everyone originally has the medicine of immortality within. However, they have lost their understanding and thrown it away. When the sweet dew [the hormone] descends, sky and earth will be joined. The place where the yellow sprouts grow is where k’an and li interact. A frog in a well will say there is no dragon’s cave. How can a quail know about a phoenix’s nest? When the elixir is mature, gold will naturally fill the room, Why need to look for plants [special longevity herbs] or burn reeds [pray to Heaven for longevity]? Essentially there are two major types of medicine for the body’s health and longevity: internal medicines you create yourself because of meditation, and external medicines you ingest such as plants and minerals. However, the only two true foods of the body are chi and hormones. This sweet salivary hormone, which you can activate through deep meditation practice or sex conducted in the right way, is an internal medicine that will bring about all sorts of beneficial physical transformations including the rejuvenation of your skin. Why am I telling you this? To give you confidence in the fact that meditation does produce physical transformations in the body and to encourage you to attain this rejuvenating stage of the sweet dew. Also, I wanted to comment on the fact that modern medicine wants to modulate the hormones to achieve the goal of anti-aging, but they’ll probably end up doing more harm than good. … Only through the practice of meditation can you safely rejuvenate your body and harmonize its hormones. Along these lines, I also wanted to introduce for your benefit the latest findings in anti-aging research.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Typically I tell people that the amino acid carnosine is a true anti-aging supplement if there is one, but the science is now also showing that the way to health, beauty and longevity is by keeping insulin levels low by avoiding sugar and high glycemic foods in the diet. That’s something we already encountered. By eliminating sugars and refined carbohydrates from your diet, you not only will look better, feel better and live longer, but probably avoid heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other problems. There’s one other supplement that provides great anti-aging benefits to your health. This supplement is resveratrol, which is a strong antioxidant, reduces abnormal blood clotting and blockages (like nattokinase), is effective against Alzheimer’s, inhibits and protects against the growth of various cancers, helps maintain normal estrogen activity, and on it goes. Resveratrol comes from many sources such as pine tree bark, but its most famous source is red wine and grape juice, and is probably the reason that people who drink a glass of red wine per day seem to escape many health problems and live well on into old age. The best way to stay young is to eat right, meditate, and activate your rejuvenating hormones through meditation. Failing that I would not go down the medical route of hormone injections the doctors are currently pushing in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies, which can be dangerous, but suggest taking a supplement like resveratrol along with nattokinase and a regular multivitamin so that you have all the ingredients necessary to maintain your health. Beautiful skin is not just about but staying young but staying alive and healthy, and part of that is through hormone balancing, as we’ve just covered, and which is also achieved through meditation.

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Bird’s Nest Soup for a Transparent Glow and Shine There is another particular food, famous in Asia, that women (who can afford it) traditionally consume when they also want to dramatically improve their complexion and create beautiful, creamy smooth skin. Pregnant women also consume it to insure that their babies have a fair and beautiful complexion. Of course, you already know you increase the chances for this by eating Cod Liver oil and feeding it to young children during their growing years so that they have a good, clean, rich source of raw oils to build healthy skin cells. But this food is something else entirely. This rare specialty food is the nest of a bird – the sea swallow or swiftlet swallow – found in bat-filled caves or on precipitous cliffs along the sea shores of many soft sea countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Small colonies of swiflets can also be found in some remote areas of India and Sri Lanka. The bird nests are made from seaweed glued together by the swallow’s saliva and the spawn of small fish. The benefits of taking edible bird's nest are still not scientifically proven, although it is rich in protein, calcium and phosphorus. One study showed that it contains elements which can stimulate cell growth and are beneficial to elderly people recovering from illness. Bird’s nest is also reputed to help balance your yin and yang chi energies. The predigested components and the presence of the small fish in the bird nests reminds us of the finding to eat nucleotide rich foods for beautification purposes and rejuvenation. That’s what you accomplish through juicing, or by eating readily digestible algae such as spirulina and chlorella, nutritional yeast, or anchovies! The bird’s nest delicacy is usually made into a soup and is an extremely expensive (up to $250 an ounce), which explains why people often risk their lives to climb high cliffs and caves to fetch these nests. Most of the nests sold in the marketplace, despite claims of purity, have additives like white tremella mushrooms and seaweed … whole pure nests are rare and as expensive as gold. Here’s how the nests are refined, cooked and then eaten.

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First the nests are cleaned and soaked in luke-warm water so that they expand and swell. They are softened this way for 2-3 hours. Most of the debris and twigs can be easily removed from the nests at this time, but many small feathers will still usually intermingle with the nests so a few drops of oil are added to the water to adhere to the feathers and float them to the water’s surface for removal. A few feathers often still remain after this process and so the water must be changed many times before the bird's nests are finally ready for consumption. After they are cleaned, the bird nests are usually double boiled with rock sugar to produce a sweet nectar soup, or prepared together with fragrant rice and steamed to make congee. Similarly, they can be prepared as a salty soup by cooking them with an herb such as ginseng together with Cornish hens or chicken. In fact, the classic method of consuming birds’ nest is to double-boil it with chicken. The birds’ nest is stuffed into a whole chicken, which is then double boiled into a soup. Alternatively, the birds’ nest is double-boiled with two chicken thighs. Traditionally it is believed that bird's nest can help prolong life and slow down the aging process. While women value it for its “reported properties” of making the skin delicate and glowing, I can testify through many personal observations that eating bird’s nest soup over the course of many weeks does tend to create a more creamy, porcelain complexion. It even works for men in the same way, though women insist it tends to feminize them. The benefit of eating birds’ nest soup is definitely seen in the skin, and this isn’t a matter of imagination. However, if you haven’t done any detoxification of your liver and intestines, this is really a fruitless course of action to invest so much money in bird nests when the real cleaning has to be done to reap the effects. Nevertheless, I do want you to know of a special food from Asia that is traditionally known for producing beautiful skin. It is rather expensive and difficult to prepare, but it’s another item in your arsenal for creating a porcelain fine complexion.

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Detoxifying Your Body and Blood for Clear Skin and Anti-Aging The older you get, the more important the following advice becomes and the more potential it offers for improving your skin’s appearance. The following advice is key to eliminating many outward signs of aging because it eliminates the accumulated poisons and toxins that have been stuffed inside your connective tissues over the years. When you empty these tissues of the boxed in poisons, you will look cleaner, feel lighter and project an aura of freshness, cleanliness and vitality. I’m talking about the process of “detoxification” to do this.

The religions of Buddhism and Taoism often refer to this body of ours as “a stinking bag of filth” because as you get older it accumulates all sorts of strange chemicals, heavy metals, toxins, pesticides, viruses, funguses and other things that destroy its purity and interfere with its functions. They age the body and when people don’t meditate to keep the vitality routes open, the body ends up showing it. You normally attack these things via your immune system and get rid of them through your body’s normal channels of elimination – through your urine, feces, breath and through your sweat. However, sometimes these elimination systems actually get overloaded and backed-up, and toxic substances then accumulate and build up in your body. That’s part of the reason people usually get cancer, with diet usually being the other contributing reason. It’s one of the reasons their skin gets dark or feels “dirty” or itchy. The internal filtering systems inside our bodies, which partition the good stuff from the bad, can become overwhelmed as well and start getting clogged. When that happens you have to flush clean all these organs of elimination through the process of “detoxification.” Over the years, hundreds of different types of chemicals have passed through your system and become locked up in your body because your liver, kidneys and intestines were not able to get rid of them. Whenever your liver, kidneys and intestines become overloaded with detoxification demands and cannot excrete the poisons in your system, they try to normally expel them through the skin or shove them into fat cells and connective tissues.

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People can sometimes feel these toxins coming off of others, and the more you meditate the more you’ll become sensitive to these sort of toxic fumes and negative energies. Even if you don’t meditate, when someone is highly toxic you can just tell despite how good they may look on the outside. You just won’t want to sit next to those people because of the smell or energies they’re giving off, and it’s not due to lack of underarm deodorant! You’ll readily see a young model everyone thinks is pretty and yet feel all the dirty chi she gives off if she hasn’t been eating correctly or done any detoxification. In fact, this comes off on the camera screen as well, which is why some models and actresses just never make it to the big time. Sure, they may have talent and look pretty enough, but this dirty energy inside will project through the skin, as clean-looking as the skin may seem, and people will unconsciously shun it. The solution is both meditation and detoxification. I want you to imagine an old house whose walls had been painted over, and whose pipes had become rusted and clogged with all sorts of debris. The first task of rejuvenation is to clean these pipes of major internal obstructions and blockages, which we’ve already addressed a bit by using enzymes. Now we’re going to proceed further and do something different. Do you remember those older style washing machines that had filters for trapping all the lint and dirt that collected from the washing cycle? Every now and then these filters would get clogged with gunk and you’d have to clean them out and get rid of all the gook that they had trapped inside. I can fondly remember in college many instances where I had to clean out these filters and throw away all the wet mush they collected when the wash cycle was over. The dryer, too, had its own filter for catching lint that had to be emptied. The reason I mention this is because this build-up of gunk inside actually happens to the liver, gall bladder and kidneys in an analogous manner, so what we’re going to do is flush out as much of this accumulation as possible. Then those organs can get back to cleaning things as if they were new. If we flush out these two organ systems, whose purposes include making proteins and filtering our blood, we’re going to end up doing what Chinese medicine calls “cleaning the blood” and the results of cleaning the blood will naturally show through the skin.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Naturally this isn’t any sort of accurate technical description, but this is one of the ways in which the naturopathic community describes matters to simplify things. The field of “complementary medicine” also explains that part of the liver’s and kidney’s job is to filter and clean the blood as well, and this is common terminology for Traditional Chinese Medicine. Before we talk about how to clean your detoxification organs of accumulated filth, I want you to have in your mind a clearer picture of what we’re doing.

Many kitchens have a filtration system above the stove that sucks away the smoke and fumes from cooking, and every now and then these filters have to be washed or replaced because they get so encrusted with gunk that they stop doing their job. That’s when the fumes back up into the house. Car filters start out spotless but also get so dirty over time that they have to be replaced, too, and yet if you could clean them they’d last a lot longer. These images of clogging are what happens to your physical body over time as it ages and your detoxification systems can no longer keep up with the load of poisons and debris they have to filter from your blood. What happens is that your body eventually ends up storing poisons that it cannot eliminate to deal with this toxic overload … they’re sealed off by being shoved into your fat cells and connective tissues wherever possible. Bingo, your skin darkens and ages. You can actually see it in some people’s complexion which becomes darker, “spicy” and “hot” with these fiery toxins. This “toxin stuffing” not only interferes with the filtering of your blood but also can lead to disease and accelerated aging all by itself. The liver is a primary organ that suffers from this toxic overload, but even your kidneys can get clogged over time. In particular, your kidneys can get coated with mineral deposits that interfere with its filtering mechanisms while your liver and gall bladder can become filled with gallstones.

If you want beautiful skin you need to digest fats, and to digest fats you need the bile salts excreted by your gall bladder but if your bile ducts are all clogged up, you are not going to get all these benefits. Okay, so what do you do? What you have to do to get rid of this mess is perform a very simple kidney and liver flush routine, and take some supplements that will help your cells to empty themselves of all this accumulated poisonous debris.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin There are entire books written on the topic of liver, gall bladder and kidney flushes, but I’m going to make this very simple because I don’t want you to have to do too much with any detoxification protocol. Frankly, having worked with people for years I know that if any protocol involves a lot of work that people have to do themselves (rather than have done to them) or if it requires that people have to think too much, most people won’t do it. Therefore I’m going to be simplifying things to an extreme, yet you will still get the “meat” that summarizes 85-90% of what you need to know and do to detoxify your body so that it shows through the skin. While there are all sorts of therapies that can pull a large portion of the accumulated stock of poisons and toxins out from your body, I like the approach of first dredging out as much of the gross heavy stuff as possible before working on the lighter duty stuff. Otherwise you’d be wasting your hard earned dollars trying to coax out the light weight “etheric” stuff that will just come sliding out anyway with the heavy-duty detoxification. That’s why I encourage a liver-gall bladder and kidney flush once a year because in less than two week’s time they can both be completed and they clear the way for a lot of the fine tuning detox programs you might later consider. They’re great at cleaning the blood which will end up showing in a new complexion. Therefore the only detox routines I commonly advise people to do are the liver flush and kidney flushes and to take a few supplements. Web sites are filled with descriptions of the products you can use for detoxification, particularly for the skin, but I think the best way to do liver and kidney flushes is to buy kits from a company called American Botanical Pharmacies. My recommendation does not mean they are the best in the business (they’re certainly at the top though), but they seem the easiest for most people to follow through with due to the instructions.

The Liver - Gall Bladder Flush Here’s how you first approach the task of detoxifying the liver and gall bladder, and freeing them of congestion through a liver and gall bladder flush. Once you do that, you’ll improve the flow of bile salts for digestion and in turn fat digestion will improve that will slowly aid in beautifying the skin. There’s lots of protocols out there on liver-gall bladder flushes.

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There’s the Hulda Clark liver flush protocol, the William Donald Kelley protocol, Claude Lewis cleanse, John Christopher protocol, “Classic Coke” liver/gall bladder flush, apple or orange juice flush, and the Richard Schulze protocol among others. I’m not going to go into a lot of explanations on all these flushes because they all follow the same basic principles, and the details can be found on the web such as at www.curezone.com/cleanse/liver/default.asp. The basic idea behind a liver/gall bladder flush is that your liver and gall bladder get congested after awhile, and you can force the gall bladder and liver to dump liver/gallstones and bile salt plugs that have formed over time by drinking a large quantity of olive oil. The presence of a large quantity of olive oil in the stomach and intestines will force the bile ducts to open and empty out their contents to digest all this fat, and that flush out of bile salts will help digest the oil. What you first want to do before undertaking any flush, however, is soften any stones that have already formed inside your liver and gall bladder so that you have a chance of expelling them when you do the flush. You do this either by drinking a large quantity of apple juice for several days ahead of time (since it contains malic acid which softens the stones), by taking high quantities of American Lecithin PhosChol for several weeks (which softens the stones), or by taking orthophosphoric acid (Phosfood from Standard Process, Orthophos from Nutra-Dyn, or Ultra Phos from Western Herbal Supply) for a short period of time. If you take high doses of lecithin, PhosChol and pancreatic enzymes (remember Wobenzyme and Vitalzym?) for several months, this protocol has been know to dissolve the stones entirely for some people just by itself. Now on the day of the flush -- after having softened the stones ahead of time -you simply drink a large glass of olive oil mixed with some orange juice or apple juice to mask the taste, and wait until you have to go to the bathroom to flush out the stones. That’s the simple procedure. Some protocols want the glass half filled with oil, and some prefer it is two-thirds filled with oil. Some protocols have you drink it all at once, and others have you sip it over the course of an hour. Some people advise you to drink this at night, and others in the morning. Some advise you to do this several days in a row, and some advise you to drink some herbal teas after the olive oil drink.

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In any case, the oil will put pressure on your liver and bile ducts to empty themselves of their contents -- essentially flushing them out -- and you will eventually defecate a smaller or larger collection of green colored stones, which people call the liver and gall stones. Most of the green stones that come out from the liver-gall bladder flush are really just soft complexes of the olive oil, minerals and whatever else you drink for the flush, but the flush does help to get rid of gall stones and get the bile ducts working. Is this entire process really useful? Yes, it’s effective.

Some people hate it, mind you, and some people love it. Some say you should do it once a year in the Spring time, and others say twice a year. Like most naturopaths, I personally recommend it at least once every several years, so if you’ve never done it this is a good time to try. As for myself, I try to do it once a year religiously. Mark Konlee (Keep Hope Alive, PO Box 27041, West Allis, WI 53227), who wrote How to Reverse Immune Dysfunction for people who are HIV+, also created a similar detox drink made of lemon juice, ginger root, orange juice, and olive oil. Many people drink this other olive oil detox cocktail on a daily basis and swear that it’s what’s keeping them together. Quite a few people have created detox drinks using olive oil, and I always encourage people to try them.

All in all, I’ve seen very good things with the liver-gall bladder flush, and encourage people to try it at least once. Many people claim it makes them feel so comfortable and clear ups internal congestion which immediately shows in the face. But that particular instant result is uncommon. Some doctors claim they have supervised liver/gall bladder flushes for several thousand patients without any trouble, while others who have never done it at all usually warn people that there’s a danger of being rushed to the hospital for a trapped gall stone that’s released into the ducts due to the process. I’ve never ever heard of even one instance where this has happened, just as I’ve never ever encountered even one case of vitamin C causing kidney stones, yet www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin some doctors seem to fixate on these “theoretical possibilities” while gall bladder operations and pharmaceutical prescriptions are proliferating beyond count. Doctors don’t seem to worry about all the documented side effects of drug reactions that send you screaming to the hospital, but these undocumented theoretical things seem to scare the blazes out of them. As stated, I’ve done the liver flush quite a few times myself – sometimes the junk comes out and sometimes it doesn’t – and one time I was surprised that my own doctor (who also holds a PhD in biochemistry) advised me that I should do the flush to help eliminate a skin condition I had developed. I didn’t even know he knew about such things, and here was a prestigious doctor advocating this home remedy that has been used for decades, if not centuries when we consider European traditions, for helping to clear the skin of rashes. In any case, the flush does seem to remove liver and gall bladder congestion and help clear your bile ducts of gunk … that is what flushing does. This is especially the case for the Richard Schulze protocol which includes a set of detoxification herbs you boil up and drink afterwards to help detoxify the liver and eliminate various poisons.

My philosophy is pretty simple: I like health protocols that are as simple and complete as possible, so I usually tell people to buy the liver-gall bladder flush package, developed by herbalist Richard Schulze and sold by the American Botanical pharmacy, which can be reached at 800-437-2362. You simply buy the special teas and formulas, follow their instructions, and do the liver/gall bladder flush as described. That makes it simple. Because his protocol is so simple and he packages everything for you, I highly recommend his liver and kidney flush packages which run less than $50. Of course you can always do the same thing at home, without the herbal drinks, for dirt-cheap. Just do a little internet research on the link recommended, and you’ll learn more about how to do it. As with everything, I’m not dispensing medical advice so check out all the things we mention to first clear them with your doctor.

The Kidney Flush

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin To cleanse and detoxify the kidneys and help restore kidney function, I also advise doing the Richard Schulze kidney flush protocol as well. Why this one? Once again, it’s simple to do it using the package his company provides. You just buy the special teas, follow the directions for making the drink, drink it for five days in a row and then it’s over. The American Botanical people use very high quality herbs in their formulas and I like the fact that you have to boil some herbs in a pot, as the Chinese do, to make your own herbal formula which you then drink. That’s what we used to do as medicine in America, and it’s nice to experience some continuity with our old American cultural traditions. That’s the info on the flushes, but there’s an even easier way to lighten your skin and get rid of all these fiery, toxic poisons.

Nature’s Pure Body When I first got my Master’s degree in human clinical nutrition school years ago, I interviewed a number of top practitioners in the field and one of the things I kept asking everyone was: “Who produced the best full body detox program in easy to take tablet form?” I consistently received over and over again the same name of one particular product in answer to this question. It was even rated #1 in an independent analysis by Natural Health magazine which found that even after only 30 days use, it helped to improve digestion, rebalance the pH of the colon, and re-establish the overall balance of colon microflora. The best overall detox for the skin in tablet form, is Nature’s Pure Body produced by the Pure Body Institute. I am convinced—without specific research—that this is one of those products that, because it helps pulls toxins out of the body, will help you lower your toxic load. It does wonders. I’m not talking about using the company’s other kidney and liver detox products …just it’s “Whole Body Program.” Whenever you buy from companies you have to know what is best and this is it.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin What we’re really interested in is the fact that in test results, this particular full body detox product definitely reduced the body's levels of toxic chemicals and having personally tried it on lots of people, you can actually see the results in their skin complexion as it gets lighter. Urine test measurements showed that this product reduced, from counts of 57 to 36, compounds formed in response to the presence of toxic chemicals. It also reduced, from 61 to 46, counts measuring the liver's neutralization of toxic substances. The best thing of all is that this detox formula did this without requiring other changes in the diet or exercise! Bingo … another easy to use supplement that only requires you to swallow something to get some results. Of course if you change your diet and exercise that’s even better, but I want to recommend something to you that will give you results even if you don’t change your diet or exercise. That’s what I’m after … the best, the cheapest, the easiest to use -- the one that works! The fact that you get results without changes in diet or exercise is what you want to hear because it means you can take these herbal tablets according to the instructions without having to do anything else and you will still get great results, whereas other detox programs tell you to undertake fasts and vegetarian diets and all sorts of other inconveniences that people just really don’t want to do ... and won’t do. As you can tell so far, I’m trying to make everything as easy as possible. I’m in your corner to help beautify your skin (and make you healthy) so I want your detox routine as simple as possible, as powerful as possible, and as inexpensive as possible. This product is therefore a big winner because it scores on all three counts, and more! You simply take a couple of herbal tablets with a glass of water before breakfast, and then again before dinner, and you are detoxing!

The name of this product is the Nature’s Pure Body Cleansing Program available through The Pure Body Institute of Ventura, California (800-952-7873; 805-653-5448) or Beachwood Canyon (888-803-5333). It’s a broad spectrum two-part herbal cleansing program of herbal tablets designed to help clean and restore your intestinal tract as well as your liver, circulatory system and bloodstream.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Ever since I first discovered this product and seen the results and ease of use, I’ve enthusiastically recommended it to others especially when they want just one detox product to take, and when the liver and kidney flushes seem too messy or much trouble and bother. You can’t see what this herbal product is doing on the inside of your body, but in many people you can actually see their skin getting appreciably lighter as the formula starts pulling toxins out of the body’s skin and connective tissues.

Sweat Them Out With the Far Infrared Sauna While we can get rid of some of these toxins in your body by detoxification supplements and flushes, sometimes that just isn’t enough. Sometimes we have to sweat them out. Heat therapy, especially the use of the new Far Infrared Sauna (High Tech Health 800-794-5355 and the “Sauna Hothouse” by Evergain), is another way to get rid of these chemicals by sweating them out of the body. Various companies sell far infrared saunas, too, and they are fast becoming a method of choice to get rid of toxins that have been stuffed into fat cells and fatty tissues. Far Infrared is a form of energy that penetrates deeply into the body to improve blood circulation, promote metabolism, and sweat out body toxins. Since it increases blood circulation to the extremities, it helps bring oxygen to the joints and skin to speed the healing of strains, bruises and pain. Regular saunas cannot produce heat that penetrates into the body as deeply as the far infrared saunas. Cellular activities are instantly invigorated by the energies, so metabolic processes are speeded up through the far infrared sauna that can result in weight loss. Most important to us, however, is the fact that metabolic and toxic wastes can be quickly purged from the body through the skin via the perspiration caused by the heat. Here’s why sauna therapy can be so valuable: your body does not have the chemistry to get rid of many of the cancer causing chemicals it’s storing inside, so sauna heat therapy is sometimes the only way to coax them out of the body, especially the fat cells that use the heat to warm up, “dissolve” so-to-speak and discharge the toxins. Even the Mayo clinic uses sauna therapy because it’s a scientifically verified way of detoxifying the body.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Be careful about saunas if you are pregnant or have heart disease … clear them with your doctor first like all these other routines. If he or she says okay, then a sauna once or twice a week can do wonders to sweat out toxins, as can taking 3 fifteen-twenty minute saunas in a row interrupted by cold showers to get your blood circulation really going. Dr. Sherry Rogers is a big proponent of these saunas and though I’ve never used this particular type myself, I know it works. You should undertake sauna therapy along with a detox cocktail to help detoxify the poisons that start coming out of the fat molecules once you use it. If you have chemical sensitivities, this is an absolute necessity.

Homeopathics To Give That Extra Little “Push” To really start pushing all the poisons out of your connective tissue, you can also encourage them to start moving by giving them an “energetic push” or “nudge” with some homeopathic medicines. Most people don’t think homeopathics work, but they honestly do if you use the right formulations. The ones I’d employ for a general detox program are all manufactured by Pekana GmbH, and can be ordered from www.DrNatura.com (800-877-0414) and various other web merchants. The particular Pekana substances I would take for a full detox program, by putting a few drops of each together in a small glass of water taken two or three times a day, are the following: • • • •

Apo-hepat, to help drain the liver and gallbladder of toxins Renelix, which is probably the best kidney drainage formula in the world Itires, to help clear the lymph system Toxex, to help start flushing out various types of toxins and heavy metals

This isn’t the place to make a case for whether or not homeopathic medicines work, although I must admit they do when you use the right products and right brands. They aren’t even necessary for what we’re doing, so I’ve made this step optional in your cleansing program. Nevertheless, the use of these four homeopathics for 2 months will help the Nature’s Pure Body Program work that much better.

Pharmaceutical firms and conventional doctors typically maintain that homeopathic medicines are nonsense and sham “hocus pocus” formulations, but

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin they cannot discredit the double-blind studies that show they do work, or explain why entire hospitals in India using homeopathic remedies keep getting curative results far beyond what’s expected of placebos. Plus, they cannot explain the reactions people often have to these medications. The fact is that they work, but science still doesn’t understand why. That’s the problem ... they shouldn’t work according to current medical theories, and yet they do, but because we cannot explain their effectiveness, they are commonly dismissed. I’ll tell you the truth ... while they do work, it’s very hard to find a good homeopathic doctor to select the right formula you might need, and many companies make ineffective formulations despite their best efforts. So the results are based on the skill of the doctor and like anything else, you can get subquality formulations. Just for the record, here are four of the best homeopathic manufacturers out there that I really trust and use in protocols to help cleanse and then rebuild various organ systems. Keep these in mind if you ever do any homeopathic shopping: • • • •

Apex Energetics 800-736-4381 Professional Complementary Health Formulas 800-952-2219 Pekana GmbH 800-334-4043 Herbalist and Alchemist 800-611-8235

As I said, the four Pekana detoxification remedies will help your body start discharging all the toxins out of its systems, and this will give you various antiaging benefits you might be looking for in addition to cleaning your skin. Most people who use homeopathic cleaning protocols tend to look and feel lighter after awhile.

Since many researchers think that cancer is a product of toxic overload, the excess toxic load of the body will go a long way to lowering your risk of cancer, but of course at present there’s no direct evidence to prove this. That type of study would take at least twenty to forty years to do, and who’s going to spend the money to do it, especially when there is no money to be made? Nevertheless, toxic buildup in the body is a very serious problem. The World Health Organization has estimated that environmental factors constitute 25-33% of global disease burden. The CDC has conducted a variety of studies investigating the presence of toxins in the human body, and now the studies of human fat biopsies reveal that nearly everyone shows buildups of cancer causing styrene, dioxins, xylene, 1,4-dichlorobenzene and ethyl phenol in their bodies. www.MeditationExpert.com

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This is incredible … and people are wondering why we are coming down with cancer, chronic fatigue and mental illness at alarming rates, why our kids are sicker than before, and why we look so bad. Al those things are being jammed into our tissues because we just can’t get rid of them. And you want to look your best with this happening? Here’s what I would add to the Nature’s Pure Body protocol if I really wanted to accomplish some real heavy duty chemical detoxification at the same time. I’d add some formula to the mix that contains glutathione and alpha lipoic acid, which are the body’s most important and strongest antioxidants with a multitude of detoxification benefits. Two formulas, in particular, come to mind.

Detoxification programs typically target our livers because of the chemical overburden they have to deal with, and therefore involve other detoxification substances such as alpha lipoic acid, NAC, glutathione, MSM and various liver cleansing herbs (such as dandelion root or milk thistle). Two of the best formulations I typically for heavy duty chemical detox include the following: • •

GSH 250 from Douglas Labs Recancostat from Tyler Encapsulations

These formulas all contain the detox helpers selenium, NAC, and alpha lipoic acid used to help detoxify chemicals in the body. The way I choose between these two formulations is the following: if you usually take a multivitamin already, use the GSH250. If you never take vitamins, use the Recancostat. It’s incredible how good women will look after a few days when they take one or the other of these supplements. Everyone notices! Men who take these supplements also see a lightening and improvement in their skin as well, and it usually takes days. Why? Because this is heavy duty detoxification of the liver and all sorts of chemicals actively running around in your blood stream. A more intensive body detox program will usually involve an entire host of extra supplements, such as the following: •

Alpha lipoic acid (100-300 mg/day) – found in GSH250 or Recancostat www.MeditationExpert.com

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N-acetylcysteine (600 mg/day) – found in GSH250 or Recancostat L-carnitine (250-1000 mg/day) CoQ10 (30-100 mg/day) Lecithin (1-2 tbsp/day) Probiotics (for the intestines)

That’s an extensive list – and an expensive list if you’re not careful. We could go into all the details about why each of these substances work, and how to detox your intestines and other organs, too, but this isn’t a book on detoxification. In mentioning the liver and kidney flushes, far infrared saunas, GSH250 and Recancostat, and the Nature’s Pure Body Program, that’s actually more than enough to get really good results.

Glutamine Powder for Angry Red Skin When your skin darkens over time because it collects these poisons, there are also some other substances you can use to get rid of them besides GSH250 or Recancostat. One of those products is simple glutamine powder, which is basically an amino acid that does wonders for the skin. An amino acid is one of the building blocks of protein, so glutamine is a harmless food. You just take a spoonful a day, mix it with clear water and then drink it. Don’t worry, it’s tasteless. Glutamine works great for detoxification because it builds protein and tissue. Therefore, most people who take it end up seeing their body fill out “in all the right places” just after a few 1-2 weeks of 1-2 scoops twice daily. Glutamine, dissolved in water, has no taste, is a food substance and will help detoxify your skin and intestines. It’s particularly important if you have constipation because it will feed the lining of your gut lining and sometimes it help the plumbing get going again. Glutamine helps heal the stomach if it becomes damaged through stress or ulcers, it cools the body (particularly important if you tend to run “hot”) and as stated helps with constipation. If you suffer from reddish looking skin, run a bit “too hot,” or have stomach troubles or constipation then glutamine is a good thing to try. Otherwise save your money because you don’t need to try it. However, I have seen more www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin lightening changes in complexion due to glutamine after 1-2 bottles but always when it is used in conjunction with other detoxifiers, especially GSH250. Over time your ability to digest food declines with age, when you give seniors pure glutamine, the powder somewhat surmounts this hurdle and they end up building muscle mass that they’ve lost through the years. You can buy any brand of glutamine and feel safe because it’s a commodity product. You only need to try one bottle to see if it’s going to be helpful but when you try it, don’t be stingy to try to make the bottle last otherwise you won’t see any possible benefits at all. People always try to do that and then see no therapeutic effects, and then wonder why others recommend things. Initially consume a heaping 1-2 teaspoons of glutamine in water and drink it twice a day to see if it will help detoxify and lighten your skin. Some people who are “hot” see changes within one to two weeks or sooner. The bigger thing than glutamine is to detoxify your liver and kidney and intestines, which end up purifying your blood. Anything that cleans your intestines, liver and kidneys will do much for detoxifying your skin. For instance, one of Princess Diana’s secrets was to use colonics, which is a high enema that passes water through the intestines, to clean the intestines of filth that would end up crusting the intestinal wall. I don’t recommend that as a long term strategy, but as a short term burst it can do wonders for the intestines and your skin. I’ve had many colonics done myself and taken friends for colonic treatments and watched their skin become flush with fresh blood after the intestines had been washed clean. However, it’s not something you continually do but only try it a few times at the beginning of a detox protocol. Otherwise you tend to loose too much energy. Cleaning your intestines is important, but I don’t ever want anyone to become dependent on colonics like Princess Diana was. Your body is healthy as it is and only needs the right foods to clean up the system to work miracles. At advanced stages of meditation, the meditation will even cause your body to push out a poisonous coating from your intestines so while I can recommend its use at the beginning of your quest, it’s not something to be doing forever.

A Detoxification Review The topic of detoxification for the skin and physical body deserves an entire book in itself, nevertheless I’ve actually told you 85% or more of what you need to do

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin to really make inroads into cleaning your body through these very few supplements … and looking good in the process. So let’s review what we’ve covered to make sure it’s clear. First we’ve targeted cleaning the body’s major filtration systems—the kidneys and liver and gall bladder – for flush cleansing. We’ve focused on performing a coarse level of drainage using the liver/gall bladder and kidney flushes. Then we’ve turned to a whole body detoxification formula, and turned to formulations containing glutathione and alpha lipoic acid such as GSH250 and Recancostat. Optionally the whole process was powered a bit by homeopathics. We could turn to lots more liver and kidney detoxing formulas, and talk about intestinal detoxification (involving Candida, healing the gut wall, probiotics and so on) and juicing and colonics, but this is the best basic detoxification regime to start with that doesn’t involve a lot of oversight. If you want to detox, I would definitely take the Nature’s Whole Body Program for at least 2-3 months with a 1-2 month simultaneous consumption of GSH250 or Recancostat. The liver and kidney flushes require a little more work than just taking pills, but you can throw them into this period as well … but at the beginning of your protocol. Later you can do even more detoxification with a far infrared sauna, but that requires even more money and more work which isn’t worthwhile unless you first take care of the basics and do this coarse drainage first. When your body starts cleaning itself of many of the toxins it has accumulated over the years, big changes … good changes … great changes … will begin to occur and you want your body to get used to them. Your body has been holding onto these poisonous materials for years, and needs a chance to adjust to their absence when you dump them. Yes, you’ll look great, but you might feel like you lost a tiny bit of energy for a few days after you do all this coarse dredging. If you’re going to undertake a detoxification regime, know that it takes time and that you cannot do everything in one day. With the GSH250/Recancostat and Nature’s Pure Body, along with the flushes and glutamine, you’ll go a long way to lowering your risk of cancer, cleansing your blood, and accomplishing physical rejuvenation. When meditators ask me what they should do for a whole body detoxification program to help them clean their bodies and look good, I tell them exactly the same thing I just told you.

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First I have them go on the Nature’s Pure Body program for a minimum of three months, which is three bottles worth of herbs that will lighten the skin by pulling out toxins everywhere. During the first and second months, I also have them take the GSH250 or Recancostat, perhaps a bottle of each to mix things up or just two bottles of just one. If they tend to “run hot” and have an underlying red coloration to the skin, I add glutamine powder into the mix as well. Together, these supplements (the Nature’s Pure Body and GSH250/Recancostat with glutamine) will take care of a lot of the coarse dredging involved in preliminary physical detoxification. They take care of the “low hanging fruit” that will show the quickest results in impacting your appearance. After about the first month into this program, I then have meditators do a kidney flush and liver/gall bladder flush using the Richard Schulze kits that you can buy through the American Botanical Pharmacy … there’s even enough herbs in the kits to do the flushes one more time about a week later. So, you’ll usually do them twice during this period although they’ll be spaced apart by one or two weeks or more. That’s all people really need to do to get started with detoxification. Detoxification takes a long time, but this is the quickest way to make inroads into detoxing. Think of all the disease states you’ll be heading off if you do just this one little routine from this book. If you also do breathing exercises, as we’ve explained, and added in nattokinase, then you’ll do more than most Americans will ever do in their lifetime … and you’ll be better off for it. Believe me, the results will show. I cannot prove this will lower your cancer risks, but I sincerely believe it is so.

The overall idea is to first get rid of the coarse poisons in the body that have accumulated over time in your organs and tissues, and then the ones harder to dislodge. Homeopathics are therefore something I do later rather than earlier, especially since I can sometimes get all the results I want just from the herbal formulations themselves, which therefore saves people a lot of money.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin You cannot hurry through any detoxification routine but have to take things slowly. Real detoxification requires almost two years of work including diet changes, meditation, stretching exercises, special supplements and cleansing the intestines, which we didn’t even get into. Cleansing your intestines of yeast, and getting rid of leaky gut, curing constipation and correcting intestinal dysbiosis require more work than I can describe in this book. Getting rid of heavy metals, like mercury and aluminum, is a specialized topic as well. Nevertheless if you generally follow this little protocol, you’ll do an awful lot in terms of reducing your toxic load and flushing your body free of all sorts of nasty materials that just haven’t had a chance to be expunged, and which gum up the complexion. People’s skin starts to color and harden as they get older, and this is part of the process of making sure you don’t need any cosmetics. Most people will see results in the first month of detoxification, and certainly by the end of the second month, but I encourage you to keep it up for a full three months the first time you do it.

I’ve found over the years that the time we want to stop doing some practice is usually just about the time it’s ready to “take off” and show results (just like when you throw something away you haven’t use in years right before it’s desperately needed), or the practice that we most hate is the one that’s best for you. Don’t ask me why this is so … it’s just something I’ve noticed but can’t prove. Whether true or not, it’s certainly reemphasizing my point that you should stick with a three month commitment to go through a whole detox routine and should hold to it when the going gets rough, because that’s probably the time it’s starting (or just about ready) to show results that are prompting you to say “STOP!” in the first place. So keep that in mind when you need to tell yourself something to stay on track, as every little bit of motivation helps when we’re out to change our bodies, our mental habits and behaviors. Once again, the whole gist of this routine is to push poisons out of your body. If not, they will lodge in your skin, fats cells and organs almost forever, accumulate, and then erupt into sickness and a terrible appearance.

Think of the logic behind this overall approach to beauty – stop eating the foods that cause those poisons, empty the trash inside that has already collected, clean the trash containers, make sure the streets are clean so the garbage trucks can

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin get through, and then eat the right foods to rebuild and supply the skin with both internal and external ingredients to stay healthy. That’s a whole body approach. That’s why it works. Expensive? Not compared to buying hundred or thousands of dollars of cosmetics and creams over the years that will destroy appearance and make you a slave to continued purchases. Now you can regain your natural beauty by putting some effort in now, and then forgetting about it later. The results of this program will definitely be reflected in your complexion. Therefore, here are some of the things to consider: • • • • • •

Nature’s Pure Body GSH250 or Recancostat Glutamine powder The liver/gall bladder and kidney flushes Homeopathics The far infrared sauna

My big goal for you is to help you easily look great quickly. If you do most of these routines, you’ll cleanup your skin, blood and filtration and excretion systems so that circulating toxins, cellular wastes and debris are not redeposited anywhere in your system, and you’ll look better as a result. That’s a promise to you, and it’s much better than covering over dirty skin with a new coating of cosmetics. You’ll also go a long way to lowering your toxic load and clearing your channels of elimination if you follow the previous steps outlined. You’ll immediately start to get healthier and experience a reversal in aging conditions when you follow these recommendations. That’s the side benefit about the naturopathic and meditative approach to beauty, and if you want some encouragement you can check everything with your doctor.

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Getting Rid of Acne to End Embarrassing Blemishes Forever I’m not an expert on the topic of acne. I wish I was, but I am not so this chapter will be short with what I do know. Acne is a dreaded condition for both men and women. Despite what dermatologists tell you, many, many, many times it is diet and detoxification related. I can remember sitting down with Dr. Tom Bolte, at the Atkins Center in New York City, and listening to him explain how crazy, how absolutely CRAZY it is that many dermatologists see no connection whatsoever between diet and the skin. I’m not knocking dermatologists but it is true that you’ll find many who absolutely will refuse to believe that foods can cause acne or other skin conditions. From practical experience you know this yourself, but all they have been taught to do is prescribe creams and pharmaceutical products. Indeed, what you eat builds your skin so it will be reflected in your skin, and if you are allergic or sensitive to certain foods that produce inflammatory, immunological responses, those reactions can produce acne. It’s clear, plain and simple to me. To really clean acne up you must (1) find out what foods are bad for you and avoid them (so that the allergic reactions, such as to wheat, don’t end up showing in your skin), (2) clean out your organs of elimination in case they’ve been overwhelmed and the toxins are spilling out into the skin (detoxing the intestines and organs of elimination, such as the kidneys and especially the liver), and (3) clean the blood of floating gunk through enzyme formulations that will make the detoxification job that much easier. Most naturopathic anti-acne formulations have to do with clearing the liver and gall bladder but if you have stubborn acne, the situation is usually more complicated than that.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Of course there’s also the problem of infections on the skin that cause the eruption of pustules and acne. With Vitalzym we’ve helped with scarring and blood complexes, with nattokinase we’ve helped open up the capillaries to the skin, with food allergy detection we’ve helped find out which foods to avoid, with a better diet we’re supplying all the right materials to build new healthy cells, so what do we do about painfully deep acne conditions like cystic acne caused by infections? What do you do besides taking the antibiotics dermatologists offer?

For cystic acne, you can try colloidal silver spray from Purest Colloids, which we’ll get to in another chapter. In some cases it has been reported to clear cystic acne infections in days. Another product to consider that’s getting very good press is ProActiv for bad cases of acne. I cannot personally speak for the product, but can only let you know about it. Check it out – it’s sold through direct marketing company Guthy Renker which usually backs only dependable products. You can check them out at www.proactiv.com . In general, I want you to know that the fundamental basics behind getting rid of acne are (1) changing the diet to avoid food allergens and (2) detoxing the body and organs of elimination so that the poisons floating in the bloodstream don’t express through the skin and so you don’t produce reactions that throw off poisons in the first place. As to eliminating infections on the skin itself, anti-acne therapy involves using products like ProActiv that will have you washing the skin and disinfecting bacteria that can cause acne. So here’s what you do if you are really trying to help someone get rid of their acne for good. First, get an Immuno Labs tests to see what foods to eliminate through the diet. Usually they’ll be things like milk, wheat, tomatoes, corn, soybeans, oregano, and other big food offenders—the nightshades and the big allergens. The Immuno Labs test is expensive but the indications last for years and will clear up all sorts of health conditions in your body. If you can afford it, do it. Second, clean out your overburdened organs of elimination through detoxing. We’ve changed the diet by avoiding allergens so that you’re not continually

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin pouring poisons into your system, and detoxing helps you increase your capacity to detox what’s there. Those two steps alone will do more good than anything else I can mention. As to better hygiene, washing the face and keeping it clean can help cut down on bacterial infections though for that you might also have to use specialty products like ProActiv. Acne often reduces in days from either of the first two approaches but eliminating it entirely usually involves a very personalized, tailored solution for each individual, so that’s about all I can say. As to the localized infections on the skin, try ProActiv and with very serious cystic acne, colloidal silver (from Purest Colloids) as well. Just giving this advice to someone who suffers in this way may really really help them and is accumulating a lot of merit, so print out this section of the book and give it to friends who suffer from acne or even BUY them the stuff so they can try it.

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Immune 26 for Older Skin Immune26, or hyperimmunized egg powder, is a specialty product I’ve discovered that is designed to boost your immune system, yet I’ve seen it dramatically improve the appearance of the skin for seniors over fifty years old. When I was in Asia working in the field of nutrition and naturopathic medicine, no one wanted to buy this product to help their health even though we saw it produce “miracle” cures in days. As quick examples, a dear friend had shingles and with one scoop of the product she knocked them out overnight even though drugs had failed for weeks. Her rheumatoid arthritis improved so much in three days time using Immune26 that she could start walking again instead of being bed-ridden. Amazing!!! That’s just one story of many in terms of the effectiveness this product has on boosting the immune system. But like I said, the product wouldn’t even sell until something strange happened … several women noticed that their skin started to noticeably shine like porcelain after using the product for awhile. They got comments from everyone about their beautiful skin, which was traced back to the Immune26,and then BAM! … The stuff started flying off the shelves. I couldn’t get people to use Immune26 to honestly improve their health but something as trivial as “better looks,” when compared to serious health conditions, made it a best seller. This is human behavior. I don’t know if this appearance rejuvenating effect only happens to Asians, or whether it was due to the humidity of those countries as I have not heard the same results reported in America. It doesn’t do a darn thing for me at all in terms of looks or health, probably because I’m young and healthy. Therefore I don’t even use it. If I had a suppressed immune system I would certainly be using it but since I’m young and in pretty good shape, there’s no need. If you fit that condition, the same holds for you—save your money and don’t bother trying it. You, too, are probably not going to get any beauty results from this product unless you are over 50, in which case its immune stimulating properties will help you healthwise and with another possible side effect being an improvement in the appearance of the skin.

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When my teacher, who is near 90, started using it, his skin became porcelain clean as well and everyone noticed, so I’ve seen this result for meditators in Asia – both men and women. It only took a few days to show. I can’t promise you the same results with this product that my friends experienced. I cannot understand why those results have not been reported in America either, unless it has to do with the weather or the fact I was dealing with meditators. I can only say those results were dramatically obvious, even remarkable, for what I saw with individuals over 50 in humid Asia. I suspect that the humid weather in Asia, which opens up the pores of the skin, might have had something to do with the great results, but I cannot say for sure. Even my Zen master attests to the power of Immune26 and has used it during cold and flu season to boost a weakened immune system and provide more energy. That’s what it’s designed to do. Here’s the background on the product in general. As you get older, your immune system starts to decline, which is a known scientific fact. Immune26, at 1-3 scoops a day, therefore boosts your immune system via the following mechanism. To produce Immune26, what the manufacturers have done is inject mother hens (chickens) with 26 attenuated bacteria and viruses. The hens produce antibodies to those inoculations -- just as we humans do when we are injected -- and then they pass those antibodies and other immune factors into their eggs when they lay them. Mother mammals pass antibodies to their babies through their milk. They secrete a substance rich with immune factors called “colostrum” which their babies consume in mother’s milk. Egg laying creatures don’t have milk, so they have to transmit all their antibodies to their children in one shot. Chickens do it by placing the antibodies in the eggs and that’s where immune26 comes in. Once these immune-rich eggs are laid they are washed, harvested, and turned into powder. Basically, that’s Immune26. This powder stimulates our own immune system which then starts concentrating on all sorts of immunocompromised conditions such arthritis, cancer, aging.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin I’ve found that anyone (in Asia at least) who took 1-2 full scoops a day for about a month gets porcelain looking skin, perhaps as a result of its immune enhancing effects, so it’s another item to try that has all sorts of other positive benefits. Unlike cosmetics which don’t help your health at all, you can see that I’m only recommending beautifying products – nattokinase, Vitalzym, and so forth – that help you in many ways other than just one, and which are not a waste of money if they don’t end up improving your complexion.

I would not order more than one can to try Immune26 and would not buy it unless I was over 50, since the immune system is pretty well into decline at that age, or if I was suffering from some sort of depressed immune condition. Like anything else you have to try it to see if there are any positive results, and then go from there. If Immune26 works for you, you can order it cheaper on a monthly autoship basis. Call 800-557-8477 and mention my distributor number #512372 if you want to give it a go. If interested, I would only try one can of Immune 26 for health reasons and then see if in boosting your immune responses it helps your appearance as a side effect. Remember that all the products I recommend are double-whammies in the sense that if they don’t help your appearance, they will still help you in some other way also so you are not wasting your money. Why I like Immune26 is that it can help with arthritis and all sorts of health problems even if the good results don’t make it all the way to the skin. One of my colleagues even used massive doses (4 scoops a day) to help someone actually eliminate Parkinson’s disease. To understand my mentality, I want you to know that there are many expensive supplements a nutritionist could recommend for arthritis but if you take them and they don’t help your arthritis at all, you have just wasted your money. When you take Immune 26, however, it might not help your appearance, but it will certainly be helping your health even if you don’t notice it. Many times people taking Immune26 feel their aches and pains disappear and go away. The products I’m mentioning won’t hurt you but will also help whether you notice it or not, AND improve your appearance at the same time. That’s a big difference Here’s the scoop. If you are over 50 … or have a condition which has compromised our immune system such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes … then try a can of Immne26 and see what happens. If you are young and healthy, forget the product as there is no

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin reason to try it. You should be bolstering your immune system another way instead. The key is that only by trying a product will you know if it works for you. Immune26 is one of those products that will not hurt you (unless you are allergic to eggs) and will help you in various ways even if one of them is not appearance. Those multi-use, multi-beneficial products are the ones I like to recommend.

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Meditation Will Transmute All These Substances and Win You Karmic Beauty There’s an issue we haven’t covered yet that has a great impact on the strategy of using nutritional supplements to help attain beautiful skin, and we’re going to get to this issue through the topic of anti-aging. The principle is the following: masters in the Eastern religions (such as Chinese Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism) have found that to achieve anti-aging with security, you have to combine all sorts of techniques with meditation, otherwise just ingesting chemicals alone to live forever is a worthless pursuit that can never get you there. In other words, you can take all sorts of herbs, minerals and diets to (either beautify yourself) extend your lifespan, but it is only the practice of meditation that allows you to transmute these substances and your life force so that together they can enable you to extend your lifespan seemingly forever. For instance, did you know that Shakyamuni Buddha spoke about ten methods you could cultivate for anti-aging? Over two thousand years ago, Shakyamuni Buddha talked about ten ways you could cultivate your body so that you could live in the world for hundreds or even thousands of years without dying, and most all the anti-aging research today is simply following one or more of these avenues. Chinese Taoism also came up with all sorts of anti-aging techniques as well, and once again modern science is simply following its leads with its current research directions. What I want you to realize, however, is that almost all the long lived people of historical note (ex. Methuselah in the Bible) were strongly connected with a spiritual tradition. For instance, India and China found ways for people to extend their lifespans but the really successful adepts were all connected with some sort of spiritual practice, and that usually meant meditation. That’s really what actually enabled the ancients to achieve youth, health and longevity. The longevity of these ancient “immortals” wasn’t just achieved because they found and ate some “secret herb” but because they used various techniques, in conjunction with meditation, to transform their bodies to a stage of youthfulness. Without the practice of meditation, they could never have achieved the requisite transformations.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin That’s why you always find mention of long-lived immortals only when connected with spiritual traditions. This very same lesson also holds for the objective of beautifying your skin. You can eat all the special foods or nutritional products you like, but without the practice of meditation to help you transform your chi, push the poisons out of your body, and transmute their substances to their highest octave for the physical nature, you’ll never be able to reach and go past your genetic potential and achieve a stage of physical beauty that literally “shines” because of your chi flow. Once again, it all becomes possible through the practice of meditation, which is why we have this book. In short, meditation is the key to anti-aging … and it’s the key to being able to transmute all those nutritional substances you just read about for the purposes of gaining a beautiful complexion. That’s the differentiating factor between those who take all the right steps and it does something for them, and those for whom it’s a waste of time and effort. It’s the man or woman who takes all those steps AND who learns how to meditate and let their mind go free who finally achieves the physical transformations of beauty that everyone notices. That’s what I want you to achieve. In the Surangama Sutra, I mentioned that Shakyamuni Buddha discussed ten ways people could cultivate their bodies, in conjunction with meditation, to extend their lifespan, and it’s interesting to note that many of these techniques are the same ones people must follow to cultivate physical beauty: Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution cultivate through eating special foods and perfecting the diet of what they eat. When they have perfected this method of cultivation, they are known as earth-bound immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution ingest special grasses and medicinal herbs to preserve their bodies and live a long life. When they have perfected this method of cultivation, they are known as flying immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution ingest special minerals and stones to preserve their bodies and live long lives. When they have perfected this method of alchemy, they are known as roaming immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution cultivate themselves by mastering their breath [they cultivate certain pranayama breathing techniques]. When they have

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin perfected their chi and jing, they are known as immaterial [space] immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution cultivate their saliva [the amrita “sweet dew” pituitary hormones which descend from the brain] and perfect the way of internal lubrication. When they have perfected this method, they are known as heavenly immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution make themselves strong by absorbing the essence of the sun and moon. When they have perfected the inhalation of this purity, they are known as [unimpeded] penetrating immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution use mantras and special dharma techniques to preserve their bodies. When they have perfected this means of cultivation, they are known as immortals of the lesser way. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution master mental concentration and perfect the way of meditation to preserve their bodies. When they have perfected their method of mental concentration, they are known as illuminating immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution cultivate through sexual union to preserve their bodies and live a long life. When they have perfected this method of cultivation to achieve harmonization, they are known as jing [sexual energy] immortals. Some of these practitioners with unflagging resolution cultivate the understanding of heavenly and earthly transformations which they apply to their bodies. When they have perfected their spiritual cultivation, they are known as immortals of the highest order [absolute immortals]. Because it’s of related interest to our topic of meditation and health, we should ask ourselves what did these people do to become able to live extremely long lives? Chinese Taoism explains that they cultivated so as to open all their chi energy channels, especially the energy channels (acupuncture meridians) leading to the bottom of the feet. If you don’t open the chi channels leading to the bottom of the feet – which you do through meditation -- then Taoism maintains it is impossible to extend your life span by much at all. Furthermore, Chinese Taoism says you can’t live a long life unless you cleanse your intestines, and so it’s absolutely essential that you keep them clean and free of putrefying wastes. An intestinal cleanse is a natural result that falls out of meditation when you reach a certain stage of practice, for when you really activate your chi it will end

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin up pushing all sorts of sticky, dirty poisons out of your intestines. Beauty seekers, such as Princess Diana, often undertake high enemas and colonics to try to initially empty the intestines of these poisons but after you really get good at meditation or your chi is ignited, you never want to use these techniques because they will cause you to lose too much energy. Lastly, Taoism says you need to cultivate merit and samadhi, without which this task of extending the life to such a great extent would be impossible. Not only must you cultivate samadhi, but you also have to perform lots of good deeds and acts of kindness to accumulate the merit to deserve the results of living a very long life. If you want to be reborn in the next life with natural beauty, you must also plant the seeds of requisite merit in this life as well. What are the deeds you must cultivate to win natural beauty as a karmic reward? If you beautify the environment, religious sites or public places, are always smiling and bring happiness to others, you are already a source of beauty that will win beauty as a reward. Specifically, Shakyamuni Buddha explained that a person who displays a great deal of anger, irritation and ill-will and who is given to hatred and anger and responds badly to criticism, is likely be reborn ugly. On the other hand, a person who does not become angry easily, sports no anger towards others, who cultivates thoughts of loving-kindness and who is always smiling and soft spoken … is always reborn with beautiful features. Buddha explained, “All beings are owners of their deed, heirs of their deeds, have deeds as their parents, their kin, their refuge. Deeds divide beings in lowness and excellence.” What this means is that your state of beauty that you have inherited through your genes, is a function of your past life merits. Nevertheless, since meditation is one of the best merit-making processes, you can bring out the best your genes possibly have to offer by practicing meditation, which will tap into your life source energies and cause them to blossom. Buddha also explained you can change any situation you have in this very life. All you have to do is change your mental state, which you achieve through the practice of meditation, and change your outer behavior to win those rewards. In this case, to become more beautiful and create the magnetic energy that attracts people, you have to let go of anger, irritation or revenge and cultivate

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin loving-kindness. Those are certainly virtues that, all by themselves, will attract people to you, which is the whole point of beauty. All these things you cultivate through meditation, which helps you cut off past errors of behavior (such as getting angry easily) and replace them with the positive virtues mentioned. It may take some time, but it’s worth the practice of introspection. In short, you can achieve beautiful skin by ingesting all sorts of herbs and supplements, but you only maximize your results if you meditate at the same time. Meditation is key to both beauty and anti-aging because it directly cultivates the life force (chi) of your body. Furthermore, it helps you cultivate those very virtues which make you beautiful to others in the first place, and which will win you the karmic reward of natural handsomeness or beauty. Anyway, the major result I want you to realize is that meditation awakens the natural vitality or life force of your body, and you can use that vitality to nourish your physical nature. Even if you manage to reap only small benefits from your efforts at meditation, you will still be able to live a healthy and long life, become younger and maintain your youth. It’s all possible through the practice of meditation. Yes, do indeed ingest these other substances but remember that they are only transmuted through the practice of meditation.

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The Amazing Colloidal Copper Spray for Age Spots, Scars and Blemishes When women use cosmetics over a long period of time, it tends to damage the quality of the skin. There’s no doubt about this fact because you are clogging up your pores with gunk, and many cosmetics – because of their production processes -- contain compounds you really don’t want anywhere near your body, let alone on your skin where they are readily absorbed. Does this ring true? When you use harmful cosmetics over a long period of time, after awhile you might discover you are forced to use them forever because of all the damage they’ve done. You then need them to cover over the bad skin you’ve produced from the damaging over usage. That’s why I’m going into all these methods, from both the inside and outside, to repair that damage and rejuvenate your skin. Generally, most of us admire others whose skin is so healthy that they don’t even have to use cosmetics. That’s what this book is about, and yes, you can reclaim that type of healthy skin – the skin of your youth -- and produce even better skin if you end up eating right and start to meditate. Remember that the quality of the food you eat and what you eat ends up showing through your skin. Apologies to the cosmetics industry, which sells “hope” more than result, but what every woman should aspire for is such beautiful skin that cosmetics are not needed at all. Thus the question naturally arises, is there anything you can put on your skin -- other than cosmetics -- to truly help rejuvenate it? That’s where another unknown product comes in. Copper, specifically “colloidal copper spray” made by Purest Colloids, will do the trick. This spray of what feels like water contains copper particles so tiny – just a few atoms wide -- that they slide right into skin cells without any need of active transport. When a copper particle is only one or two atoms wide they can do this, and only one company in the world makes a product with this capability – Purest Colloids of New Jersey. Let me explain.

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Search the internet for articles on copper and you’ll see how important copper is to the skin. Copper, plus vitamin C and proline, help form the collagen base that keeps your skin firm. Many cosmetics use copper for just this reason but the type of copper they use is very inefficient at entering your skin cells and being used by those cells to build new, healthy collagen. From studies and experience, topical copper application seems to help smooth fine lines and wrinkles on the face and can be used on dry, oily or normal skin – it doesn’t matter. Repeated topical application will help even out skin pigmentation and help age spots to fade. I’ve even seen it soften scars where nothing else has worked at all! Basically, the topical application of colloidal copper helps to stimulate growth of the underlying collagen layer of the skin which produces smoother, firmer, and younger looking skin. In correspondence with Loren Pickart PhD -- skin, scar, copper peptide and collagen expert -- I received the response that, In our studies, we found that GHK-Cu [human copper peptide complex, the complex being glycyl-l-histidyl-l-lysine:copper(II)] both stimulated collagen synthesis and breakdown at the same time. This may be the way that remodeling works - kind of a sloppy system that is removing protein and adding protein simultaneously. Generally, the system seems to end up adding new protein and skin but it may be possible to switch the balance to more breakdown. If you’re interested, the latest thinking on copper’s role in this can be found in an article, “Skin remodeling with copper peptides,” found at http://www.skinbiology.com/2004RussiaSkinRemodeling.html (see the English version below the Russian literature). Perhaps that’s why the colloidal copper spray helps smoothen wrinkles, discolorations and soften scars … because it remodels the tissues as the studies with GHK-Cu, a more complicated molecule, showed. This other copper compound, when simply applied to the skin’s surface, removed scar and damaged tissue, stimulated the degradation of existing collagen and creation of new collagen, and acted as a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. Those are all the things we want, so for more information, see www.scarreduction.com. www.MeditationExpert.com

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Copper has all sorts of other uses in the body, such as softening your arteries, but we’re just interested in its effects on your appearance. Skinwise you should know that lysyl oxidase, which contains copper, is required for the cross-linking of collagen and elastin, which are essential for the formation of strong and flexible connective tissues. A number of reactions essential to normal function of the brain and nervous system are also catalyzed by copper containing enzymes. Copper is involved in respiration and the synthesis of hemoglobin. It is essential in the production of collagen and the neurotransmitter noradrenalin. It is an important blood antioxidant and prevents the rancidity of polyunsaturated fats. In short, don’t be afraid of copper on your skin – your body needs it. Copper is also involved in numerous enzyme systems that break down or build up body tissues. It plays a role in the production of the skin pigment melanin by converting the amino acid tyrosine. Copper is also essential for the synthesis of phospholipids, which are a component of the myelin sheath that surrounds nerves. Copper may provide benefit against pollution exposure and possibly protects against carcinogenesis and tumor growth. While this action is unproven in humans, animal studies have shown that copper may protect against chemically induced cancers and some RNA viruses. There’s a RDA (recommended daily allowance) of 2 mg per day for ingested copper, and that one day’s requirement of 2 mg is more than you’ll find in an entire bottle of Purest Colloids copper spray for the skin. In short, copper is safe, you need it, you’d have to use several bottles of copper spray just to get the one day RDA minimum requirement of copper. So don’t worry about overdoing it as it’s safe.

As part of my research, I’ve seen the actual top secret (it’s forbidden to outsiders) production facility where this high tech colloidal solution is manufactured and the technology is simply amazing. You can trust this stuff – it’s worth a try for your skin tone, texture and appearance. Testimonials speak louder than words for skin products, and the following feedback explain the benefits better than I can: I just wanted to let you know that I love the Mesocopper skin conditioner spray. I just got it in the mail today, and sprayed it on my hands and face. The instant soft, smooth texture of my skin really took me by surprise! I'm 24 and I get very

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin dry in the winter, so my hands especially start looking sick and aged. After a few spritzes with the Mesocopper, my hands felt like they'd been when I was a teenager. My face, too, took on this immediate softness and glow. I'm going to keep using this until the bottle is empty and order more. I'd love to see how I look after ten years of using this! I'm so glad I found your site. Joanna Capello Rockville, Maryland

I've been using Mesocopper for about two and a half weeks and my skin feels fabulous! I know this sounds like a cliché, but my skin actually feels as soft as a rose petal and as smooth as silk. It's unbelievable. It has also given my skin a wonderful glow and evened out my skin tone. Even other people are noticing; the other day, my mother said to me, "Your skin looks like it's glowing!" The Mesocopper is just plain fabulous. It's like the fountain of youth in a bottle! I've been telling everyone about it and I've got my mom, my sister and a bunch of my friends using it. I'm so sold on how great this stuff is, I'm thinking I should start selling it! I'm really into health and fitness and I've read everything there is to know about skin care. I eat really healthy and I work out at the gym every day. I'm very into taking care of my skin and have always used a special cleanser and moisturizers. Now I can use just plain soap and I don't even need moisturizer. In fact, I haven't even been using my base make-up for the past week, because I don't need it. I use the Mesocopper in the morning after my shower and again at night after I wash my face. My skin no longer feels taut and dry after I wash it; it's just soft and smooth and glowing. Great stuff! Lisa Picciotti, Age 39 Cherry Hill, New Jersey

I spray Mesocopper on my face every morning after my shower and I swear it makes a difference in my appearance within minutes. It definitely minimizes fine lines, especially around the eyes and mouth, but it's also helpful for those mornings when I wake up really looking my age (mid 40's) either sort of drawn and draggy looking, or a little puffy around the eyes. I spray the Mesocopper, and voila, it's like some life has come back into my skin and face. It's gotten so I don't even use eye cream at night anymore . . . because I have the Mesocopper to work its magic in the morning. Maury Cohen, Age 46 Denver, CO

A few years ago, I started to notice that I'd get brown spots and blotchiness on my face from being in the sun, so I basically stopped tanning my face. Since I started using Mesocopper, the brown spots have cleared up. I can also tan my face this year without getting the discoloration and brown spots like I was getting last year. I spray the Mesocopper on once a day after washing my face.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Jackie Wright, Age 40 Marlton, New Jersey

I've been using Mesocopper on my skin with good results. I spray it on once a day after my morning shower and then sometimes again at night. It's helping with the discoloration and scarring from acne, and seems to really be evening out my overall skin tone. I've been using it for about two months now and am beginning to notice increased firmness as well. I also have eczema on my upper lip that gets irritated and turns red and the Mesocopper is helping with that also. Kathy Geary New Jersey

I've been using Mesocopper spray on my skin and have noticed a real difference. There is no question that it makes the skin clearer and gives it a smoother texture and a healthy glow. I even tested the Mesocopper by alternating it with Neutrogena and L'Oreal products to see if the results were really from the Mesocopper, and found that there is definitely a difference in skin clarity and smoothness with the Mesocopper. I use the spray twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. It's a really good product and I will continue to buy it and use it. Diane Kuroczka Southhampton, New Jersey

Mesocopper has made a noticeable difference in my appearance. My face is clear and smooth and beautiful. The other day, our delivery lady came to the door, and I answered it with no make-up on - I don't even think I had brushed my hair -and she said to me, "You look gorgeous; what have you been doing?" Everyone is telling me lately how good I look! April Gower Rhodes, Age 51 Florence Alabama

I've been using the Mesocopper spray for about 5 or 6 months. I spray it on my face after a hot shower and let it dry before applying moisturizer. The difference is very noticeable both in the glow that it brings to my skin and the diminishment of wrinkles and fine lines. Not only is my skin a nice, fresh, healthy color, but it also feels very nice. The most astonishing story I have about the Mesocopper is that, before I mentioned to anyone that I was trying a new skin product, my 17 year old son looked at me one day and said, "Wow, Mom, your skin looks so different." What better testament to the product could there be than a 17-year-old boy noticing! If you can find something to improve your skin this much, why wouldn't you use it? I'm completely sold on this product and wouldn't want to be without it. Christine Arena, age 56 Brick, New Jersey

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I use Mesocopper on my face after shaving. Not only does it soothe any irritation, but there is a noticeable softening of aging and wrinkling. You can really see a difference. Joe Berti, age 47 Browns Mills, New Jersey

I use Mesocopper spray a couple of times a day. It smoothes out the skin and the fine lines around the eyes and face. Lines and wrinkles are definitely reduced. It's very noticeable and you see the difference in about 5 or 10 minutes. It also conditions and smoothes out skin that is dried out from the environment. Carol Berti, 45 Browns Mills, New Jersey

I would like to thank the makers of Mesocopper. My house has very dry hot air heat, therefore I had very dry skin. Since using Mesocopper I no longer use any other moisturizer. I take 1 teaspoon orally twice a day. I put Mesocopper on my face and neck area and as soon as it dries on my skin the wrinkles diminish. Once I had not used Mesocopper for a week and I started noticing my wrinkles returning. I love Mesocopper on my lips also, it does wonders! Jackie Mitchell

I have personally witnessed freckles and age spots fade away in a matter of days for some people using this Purest Colloids copper spray. Yes, I personally saw it fade age spots! I’ve seen people use laser surgery to make the age spots go away but sure enough, in a few months they’re back and their skin is as dirty looking as it was before. That’s why I always say to clean things from the inside and increase the blood circulation to the skin if you want real skin rejuvenation. Copper is one of those things you can actually spray on the skin and see a dramatic change in its color and complexion and this stuff is dynamite. I have seen hard, angry red scars nearly 3/8ths of an inch thick due to surgery lose all their fire in just two to three applications of this colloidal copper spray – an unbelievable result for my own eyes … and over time I‘ve seen those same tough and fibrous scars -- even several years old -- actually become as soft as the surrounding tissue. As soft as the surrounding tissue! So now we have Vitalzym to do its job from the inside, and colloidal copper spray to do its job from the outside. The Purest Colloids copper spray rejuvenates the skin for everyone I’ve seen. In some cases it gets rid of blemishes, fades age spots, and helps get rid of rashes. www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin So a big secret of skin care, if you want to try, is a daily spritz of copper on the skin. With copper being delivered to the skin cells, the only task left is to deliver vitamin C and other major antioxidants to the skin through a variety of face creams, so that’s our topic next.

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The Best Natural Skin Creams that Us Naturopaths Have Discovered The search for the world’s best face cream will go on and on and on. After all, there’s lots of money to be made here! Multibillion dollar fortunes are made from this sort of thing. New ingredients and new skin formulations will always arise because of all the research being done, but the idea behind it all is to provide nourishing oils and antioxidants to the skin to protect and rejuvenate it. Despite all this research, I have to tell you the dirty nasty truth … When you buy a skin cream from a big cosmetic company, what you usually buy is junk. You get all sorts of solvents and other gunk in many cosmetic formulations and while they may say they “contain vitamin C” or “vitamin E” or “alpha lipoic acid,” many companies purchase the lowest quality ingredients they can possibly find to fulfill their package claims on the labels. In many cases they throw extra ingredients in there just so they can show they have them. Another problem with skin creams that I notice is that many skin creams turn the texture of women’s skin into a thick, rubbery plastic. In other words, it seems they “seal” the skin and plasticize it. Sure your skin may “look” smooth, but it also looks like plastic that no one wants to touch and what’s the point of that? You want skin that everyone loves to touch and wants to touch! That’s why I’m always pointing you towards cultivating. Once again, what you really want is fresh skin that breathes, skin that exudes vitality, skin that shines with youthfulness because it has chi and blood flow. Nattokinase, Vitalzym and meditation are ways to help achieve this because nattokinase will open up all the tiny capillaries to the skin, Vitalzym will reduce the fibrotic tissue of the skin, and meditation will flood your skin with life giving chi, or vital force. With that as a basis, you can then eat all sorts of wholesome foods that will make their way to your skin and rejuvenate it from the inside. Now if you purchased a skin cream that really contained high quality ingredients like it should, I want you to know it would cost ten, twenty maybe even thirty

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin times more than you are used to paying if it was priced with the same margins … and then because of that hefty price hardly anyone would buy it. But that’s the type of product that would really help you … You want a skin cream product rich with high quality antioxidant ingredients. Having talked to manufacturers and formulators over the years, I can tell you that there are quite a few little companies out there that formulate skin products that are a hundred times more superior to what you can buy from the big name companies, but you’ll rarely hear about them because those small firms lack a large advertising budget. You’re never going to see them on TV, so I’m going to introduce you to several in just a moment. If you want to protect your skin with facial creams that contain substances that will protect the skin and nourish it from the outside-going-in, instead of from the inside-going-out, here’s what you need to know.

First, understand the big picture. When we are talking about substances or products you can use to help your skin, basically there are two categories of products to consider: (1) Items you eat because they will produce glowing new vibrant skin from the inside-going-out (2) Items you apply to the skin externally that transform the skin from the outside-going-in. Facial creams fall into the outside-in category, but they only work to transform things if they supply the skin with high quality antioxidants and other substances that have been proven to help the skin. Vitamin E is one such substance. Alpha lipoic acid is one such substance. DMAE is one such substance. The Wrinkle Cure, a book on using nutritional supplements for the skin by Dr. Nicholas Perricone, lists substances such as alpha lipoic acid, DMAE, vitamin C, and alpha hydroxyl acids, and COQ10 as helping the skin. The book made the New York Times bestseller list but the top nutritionists simply said, “Big deal. We’ve always known that. It’s just that people don’t listen. They want to buy those expensive fancy brands instead.”

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin So I’m not going to go into what all these ingredients do for you. What’s the point? Just know that they are antioxidants or nutrients or substances great for wrinkles and the skin. That’s all you really need to know. Like most everything, you have to try them to see if they’ll do something for you. It’s impossible to go into all the good face creams out there, so I once again asked around to find the “best skin cream” that various nutritionists have discovered and I received several nominations. The foremost skin cream cited was Earth Science’s Beta Ginseng Moisturizing Cream, which is extremely effective because it, too, is chocked full of antioxidants. Were any other creams mentioned? I polled a variety of top nutritionists who test products continually and have worked in the field for many years. Many perform electro-dermal screening and anti-aging therapies that are based on finding the particular product that will work for a specific patient. From those discussions, here’s a list of other skin products you can try: • • • • •

Collagen Hydroderm by Life Extension Foundation VRP Phyto Skin Science Hydrasoy SG-10 Mannatech brand Firm lotion NOW brand Wrinkle Rescue cream Thione brand glutathione skin creams

To be honest, skin creams are not my top expertise. I usually help modify a woman’s skin tone, texture, feel and touch simply by changing her diet and recommending the correct supplement or routine based on her individual condition. The skin usually improves so much that she usually doesn’t need skin creams. Sometime a woman’s intestines don’t work because of constipation, so the big thing that will improve the skin is not cosmetic or facial creams but getting the intestines to move again. Otherwise the poisons encrusting the villi of the intestines (microscopic finger-like projections off the lining of the small intestine) tend to get re-circulated in the bloodstream, which shows through the skin. Sometimes her liver is all clogged up, so we need to do a liver/gall bladder flush and start her on a product like GSH250 to help clean the liver and neutralize toxins. If her skin has darkened over the years or has a reddish tint, I have to calm the fire toxins down, which necessitates the use of Nature’s Pure Body, GSH250, glutamine powder and whatever else seems appropriate. www.MeditationExpert.com

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You see, if you don’t address the issue that’s causing the problem, all the creams in the world won’t work because the poisons within the body are expressed themselves, or being eliminated through the skin. The first job is one of detoxification, which is to empty out all these backed up poisons. It’s not that skin creams do not supply nutrients to keep the skin healthy, but that one should “weed the garden before putting on the fertilizer.”

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Exercise for Meditative “Flow” That Has You Simply Oozing Magnetic Energy Moderate exercise is great for your overall appearance. No one has to tell you that because you already know that exercise will help you become toned, fit, and flexible. Exercise increases your heart rate, which really gets your blood flowing through all your veins and arteries. The net result of exercise is that more life giving oxygen and nutrients are passed on through the blood to all your internal organs … and this increase in blood flow helps also carts away more cellular wastes and debris. If you exercise long enough, you’ll tend to get healthier and feel better simply because it increases your stamina and energy. Exercise increases the blood circulation to your internal organs and skin, just as massage does as well. We all know that so there’s no lesson there. Better blood flow delivers yet more life giving oxygen and nutrients to feed your cells and helps your tissues get rid of metabolic wastes that tend to build up in your tissues. We know that, too. The net result is that better circulation will naturally make your skin healthier in tone and appearance … and that’s the connection we’ve been seeking.

Massage is wonderful for many of the same reasons, in addition to the fact that it feels wonderful, so having bodywork done to you is like having exercise performed for you. Nevertheless, it’s better to exercise yourself and use bodywork to help stretch those muscles and places that really are difficult to reach. Okay, so exercise is good for you, but which type of exercise is best for beauty? That’s what we want to know. There is no such thing as the “best” exercise … the one you bother to do is “best” compared to doing nothing at all. That is the key, as long as you don’t hurt yourself. The big hurdle is to get started on a beneficial exercise routine that’s going to help your health, increase blood circulation and that in turn will improve your looks.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin But there are some secrets … some exercises you’ve never heard of that help you do this in an optimal way. I’m about to recommend to you some exercises you have never ever considered before because of how they help all the cells of your body. What are they? • • • •

Rebounders Powerplates Yoga (Pilates, too) Strength training

You don’t need me to tell you how important exercise is, but you do need someone to tell you that when you can sometimes activate your chi through exercise and when that vitality oozes out or starts moving, it tends to fascinate other people. Just get your energy moving and people will start to notice you. Attractiveness is not a matter of just being slim. It’s a matter of getting your yang chi to move, which is rare to see except in people who meditate or are extremely healthy. Those are the people of whom we say, ”I like their energy.” If your chi, or life force, just stagnates inside your body and doesn’t move through lack of exercise, meditation, sex or breathing techniques, your body can develop a terrible smell like rotting leaves that turns people off. This smell has nothing to do with diet or body odor but is simply a reflection of internally stagnant chi. In many cases you can find this bad smell with older folks and with young girls with relatively open/innocent minds who have not yet had sexual relations and who don’t exercise or meditate. Their chi is loose, but since it doesn’t circulate the body energies stagnate. Exercise, breathing methods, sex and meditation are all ways to start this chi rotating. Now it’s dangerous to make a blanket statement, but I’m sure you’ll excerpt the correct meaning out of the following: Any type of exercise you bother to do, without excess, is usually good exercise as long as it’s not harmful. Many people engage in exercise that causes them to lose their chi because they simply over-do it. They overwork or strain their muscles or lose so much energy that the exercise isn’t doing them any good.

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Professional female and male bodybuilders are an example of this principle as are marathon and “Iron man” trainers. Their bodies are packed hard with tight muscle but lack any sort of chi because it has all gone into building those muscles rather than open up the body’s chi channels. In cultivation, you certainly want to have muscles but you want your muscles to be soft when they are relaxed rather than hard as steel cables or concrete. The best martial artists in the world have strong muscles, but they are soft when not in use yet can instantly become tense when needed. Furthermore, these martial artists always appear calm because the chi throughout their bodies flows evenly and smoothly from all the stretching they’ve done to develop their bodies. When you exercise, the best outcome that can ever happen is to get to a point where your chi flows smoothly and you experience a state athletes call “getting into the zone” or “flow.” It’s a very rare type of sports high marked by super clean concentration, mental openness, a blissful body and the disappearance of normal perceptions of space and time. You can get into this state of flow when your muscles have been stretched, your breathing becomes harmonized with your chi, and the chi flow to your head is so smooth that you drop all thoughts. If you can reach that state and stay relaxed so that you remain in it, your body will experience a state of heavenly greatness. Only meditation and sex or breathing exercises, when done in the right way to activate internal chi flows in the body, can cause the same sort of transformation, though of course they achieve it at a much higher level. Yes, at a much higher level! Attaining “flow” and having it reflected in your appearance is all a matter of stretching all your muscles so they are flexible and limber, clearing your chi channels through various meditations, and then engaging in some activity that activates your chi harmoniously so that all your prenatal energy starts circulating. Yoga is a great form of exercise to satisfy this requirement of muscle stretching because yoga postures and positions train your muscles to become open and flexible. Pilates, which is sort of an assisted yoga, does the same thing. Yoga eliminates back pain, stretches the muscles, keeps you limber and is a type of spiritual training in itself. Even if you meditate extensively, the yoga of stretching can help you open up and release pockets of bad chi that are trapped within your body. The stretching releases these pockets so that this sickness chi can leave, which is one of the ways you get rid of the causes of disease that slowly fester within the physical nature.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Unfortunately, I’ve encountered many people who think yoga itself is enough to keep them young and healthy. Yoga only stretches the muscles. If you really want to stay young you have to rejuvenate your life force and the only way to do that is through the practice of meditation. So wile I always encourage everyone o do yoga … and while people appreciate the benefits of yoga because they can feel its effects on their chi energies and muscles … it’s not enough by itself. To keep young you still need meditation.

Rebounders On to mini-trampolines as a form of exercise, and what’s the scoop here You’ve probably seen these portable mini-trampolines that people have in their houses or carry on vacation that are called “rebounders.” I recommend rebounders, but only one -- the U.S. made Needak Rebounder, either the ½ fold or non-fold, which you can find on the web. If you just bounce up and down on an indoor rebounder it’s a great way to get a cardiovascular workout, and it’s great for your lymphatic system, too. Bouncing up and down will stimulate the detoxification of all your cells, which is something very few other forms of exercise can do. Yes, you take herbs to detoxify your body but that’s a chemical detoxification process whereas now we’re into actual physical detoxification – shaking free the poisons – because of shaking. Yoga accomplishes this through stretching, but now we’re into some fun shaking routines. Buying an indoor trampoline is much less expensive than a treadmill which will probably tire you out if you bothered to religiously use it. Most people I see using the treadmill at the gym don’t even use it correctly, and yet mistakenly believe it’s providing them with sufficient exercise when all they are doing is walking. I’m not going to go into this further other than to say that to me, the rebounder is a better form of exercise. Of course, you have to be careful bouncing up and down on it so that you don’t jump off and hurt yourself. A rebounder is also small enough that you can set it up and stick it in front of the TV and just bounce on it for a couple minutes a day to reap the benefits of shaking all the cells of your body. That will energize them and loosen your muscles as well. The benefits are amazing. You can even buy videos with exercise routines for rebounders so that you can watch them while jumping up and down and it doesn’t seem so boring. Everyone

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin remembers the time they were kids and wanted to bounce up and down, so here’s your chance to do it for fun and with purpose. Since it’s small enough, you can even take a rebounder with you on trips in a car or plane. With a rebounder you also don’t need to exercise for twenty minutes three times a week at your target heart rate to get great benefits, because just a few minutes a couple times a week will do it. Here’s why. All forms of exercise have a specific purpose. Maybe the purpose of some specific exercise might be to increase your heart rate (cardiovascular routines), or build specific muscles (as in weight training), but the rebounder has the ability to work on all the muscles and cells in your body. No other exercise can do that. Using a mini-trampoline is only considered a low level of trauma to the musculoskeletal system as well, unlike running, so it’s not likely to hurt you at all. At least that’s the word from research done by NASA. Yep … NASA! When you are bouncing up and down on a rebounder, that mini-trampoline exercise lets you exercise every cell of your body through the factor of whole body vibration … so it gets you activating and jostling muscle groups that would never get exercised otherwise. That’s great exercise! Swimming cannot even do that. In fact, NASA has determined that “the magnitude of the biomechanical stimuli is greater with jumping on a trampoline than with running.” NASA also reported that oxygen intake while trampolining was about 68% greater than with running, too. Remember, you want your cells bathed in oxygen for healing, rejuvenation and anti-aging. Some people even sit inside oxygen chambers to get that refreshing feeling. I don’t know if you are keen on trying something as non-traditional as the minitrampoline (all this stuff is “unorthodox” until everyone starts doing it), but you should know that it’s one of the easiest and best ways to stay in shape that offers the most benefits for the least efforts or dollars, and this is one of the secrets to beauty and great health.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin You simply bounce up and down and look better! Like I said, if you want to get one, the only rebounder I recommend is the U.S. made Needak Rebounder, either the ½ fold or non-fold.

Powerplates There’s another piece of expensive equipment you’ve probably never heard of that can exercise all the cells of your body … a Powerplate. Powerplates are mechanical vibrating plates you stand on (they look like a scale with a pole you hold onto) that vibrate your whole body extremely fast. They cause your body’s postural muscles to undergo a stretching reflex about 30-50 times per second, depending on the frequency setting. That’s even more powerful than trampolines or yoga! Basically you stand on the plates, hold a bar and do nothing except let the machine shake all the cells of your body. The vibration will then affect all your cells and connective tissues … and many people lose water weight just from this alone! With power plates, muscle strength has been shown to increases 20-30% more than conventional strength training in much less time – a 85% shorter time period in fact. Using power plates improves blood circulation and lymph drainage, increases bone density (that’s right ladies), strengthens joints, speeds healing, alleviates acute and chronic pain ... and even helps with weight loss without causing you to break a sweat. But that’s not all … If you stand on a powerplate for 8-10 minutes just three times per week, this “passive, low impact exercise” will decrease your cortisol levels (the stress hormone that contributes to cellular aging) while increasing your body’s production of human growth hormone and testosterone that are used for cellular regeneration and repair process. The “happy hormones,” serotonin and neurotrophine will also increase, too. People who use the plates feel that their circulation has improved and generally feel more energetic. One of my friends stood on one for just a few minutes and reported that he felt orgasmically fabulous … it was almost intoxicating. Those are big benefits and the results are not hearsay but proven facts. That’s why athletes use these machines.

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In a way, the Powerplate works like a rebounder only it vibrates your entire body rather than you jumping up and down to shake your body. Every cell undergoes vibration, which will really free up toxins and obstructions if you’re doing a detoxification routine, and It is a low impact option for exercise. The vibrational stretching loosens your tendons, fascia restrictions, and connective tissues so it even produces healing for arthritics. Think of stepping on a powerplate as performing passive exercise, but you’re never going to obtain the full benefits unless you first clean out your arteries and blood so that while you’re shaking out toxic poisons from cells and stimulating hormone production, you have pathways opened up to carry these nutrients everywhere and cart away the cellular wastes. That’s why I stress the nattokinase first. Clean out the old cells and build new cells is how you get great looking skin, but first you have to make sure the arteries and capillaries that feed your skin are clean and open to transport what must go in and out. Imagine, just imagine how great you will look if you used nattokinase and Vitalzym to get rid of countless tiny blood clots and fibrin accumulations in the body so that your blood circulation increases everywhere. Then use yoga and massage to stretch your muscles … and rebounding or Powerplates to shake out the poisons and lose weight while using detox mixtures like Nature’s Pure Body and GSH250 grab those poisons and escort them out the body. At the same time, stay away from the foods that hurt you and eat the ones that will help you build healthy cells, and beautiful cells they will be! … That’s the physical way to beautiful skin, but don’t forget meditation because if the outside looks good but the inside starts turning rotten, there’s nothing that even extreme measures such as cosmetics and plastic surgery will do for you. Now I mentioned yoga as a form of exercise that I also highly recommend. If you cannot get a rebounder or Powerplate, turn to yoga to stretch your muscles and help smooth your chi flow by combining it with meditation. All these methods are useless unless you combine them with meditation because that’s where the real results of anti-aging come from. All these physical assists just work on the physical nature, but for real beauty you have to be working on the life force beneath it all and give it a chance to show through the body.

Strength Training

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Now some people want to lift weights to strengthen their muscles and produce tone, and I’m not against it but recommend you don’t go overboard and become one of those body builders. There’s a huge difference between strength training and body building, and it’s the strength training I’m recommending. Bodybuilders typically have bodies that are hard rather than soft … and they barely have any chi at all. Most of them smell, too, because of all the supplements they’re taking. While hard muscles may fascinate many people it is NOT really healthy; only cultivating your chi is really healthy whereas this is just cultivating blood and muscle, which decline quite readily. Power to the people who like that, but it’s not the beauty I’m interested in you obtaining. I’m teaching you how to cultivate the beauty that is involved with better food, better blood circulation and poison elimination, fewer poisons in the first place, better chi … true health, spiritual progress and longevity. Perhaps the best program to get you started on strength training is the Body for Life program although it’s even easier to get started if you ask any of the trainers at a gym. In most every gym I’ve ever been in, the trainers are usually quite friendly and always ready to help. As to the quality of the simple Body for Life routine for do-it-yourselfers, I’ve got one word for you about it … “great.” Enroll, follow the exercise program to the letter, stick with it, and you’ll be in pretty good shape soon. In less than two months the results really start to show and people will start to comment that you’ve become a new person. Here’s why moderate strength training is important, especially if you are older. I’m not going to recount all the studies except for the fact that from age fifty to sixty we start to lose about 10% of our muscle mass per year, so that by the time we are sixty we have minimal muscle mass to move us around. When people lose muscle mass I put them on glutamine or some other protein powder, but glutamine is great because it also helps with detoxification, healing the stomach and constipation. Beautiful skin doesn’t look so good on a skeleton, but with strength training (and eating glutamine) you can regain that muscle mass AND fight off osteoporosis. That’s right … strength training increases your bone mass. There is a physiological law called Wolfe’s law that tells us that bone mineralization occurs along axial lines of stress, and that’s the key to fighting osteoporosis because it’s not as simple as just eating more calcium. What Wolfe’s law means is that unless you yank, pull, tug or stress a bone through strength training or weight lifting, you’re not going to increase your bone density. Yes, you have to eat calcium (Advacal is the brand I recommend though

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin juicing green vegetables is an even better way to absorb calcium and other minerals) along with vitamin D for calcium absorption (that’s where Cod Liver oil comes in), but if you don’t put stress on your bones through strength training they’re not going to get stronger and reverse the effects of osteoporosis. Strength training produces strong muscles, keeps your bones strong and actually increases your energy, rather than tire you out, because it increases the number of mitochondria in your muscle cells. Whereas the medical emphasis for the last 20 years has focused on aerobic exercises such as walking, jogging or running, in my opinion strength training actually does more for you than aerobics. As we get older we lose strength so the emphasis should be on strength anyway, which should therefore take precedence over pulmonary training. The remedy for losing strength is “progressive resistance exercise” (strength training) with a touch of aerobics, and that’s where lifting weights comes in.

Here’s what I personally found out from doing strength training for awhile, and which confirmed everything I had heard about or read about from the health community. When you go to the gym you’re usually going to find two groups of people. There will be those with slim or muscular physiques – let’s just call this the category of those in “pretty good shape” – usually do strength training by lifting weights. There will also be a second group of people doing cardiovascular work who are generally the ones most overweight and out of shape. I’m not even going to go into the fact that these folks usually die of heart disease anyway, and wreck their immune systems and joints by running when they really go at it. While doctors usually recommend “cardiovascular work, cardiovascular work … go running, biking or run on a treadmill,” the cardio group usually stays overweight whereas the strength trainers tend to lose the poundage and become fit, toned and lean. Even when they’re initially overweight, the strength trainers rather than the aerobic folks are the ones who seem to make the most progress in their overall level of fitness. Part of the reason for this is because you can go through all the motions of doing cardio work every day without really pushing yourself to make progress, whereas that’s less likely to happen on the road of weight training. Whatever really gets your heart pumping and chi moving will likely help you out, so aerobics can indeed work but only if you push yourself.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Furthermore, simple walking exercises only a mere 13 degrees of range of motion at your hip and knee whereas the hip has a 160 degree range and the knee has a 135 degree range of motion. With the proper strength training exercises, you’ll test those ranges of motion whereas with aerobics you likely won’t, so it’s the strength training that will help with the osteoporosis. In strength training, which uses weight lifting, you must practice routines which cause you to exercise the large muscles of your body, and you are taught to do cardio work in a special manner that makes all the difference in the world. Just walking on the treadmills does provide exercise, but what you really have to do is vary the walking rate to get the most benefit out of it, otherwise you’ll tend to get little benefit. When I went through the Body for Life program, for three times a week I did my cardiovascular training in the gym on bikes and the treadmill, and my weight training on opposite days. Over time I confirmed these exact same findings which others had forewarned me about. For weeks I would stick to my routines and any bystander could see that progress was being made. I was slowly getting in shape and improving in strength, stamina and appearance every week. Muscles were forming, the skin was getting tighter and complexion a bit rosier. It was really about the seventh or eighth week when the changes became extremely noticeable, and that’s also the time frame that others had indicated would be the “tipping point.” Just as I had been informed, indeed those others in the gym religiously doing their weight training seemed to be making progress with their health and appearance, too. On the other hand, the same crowd of cardiovascular folks whom we saw everyday and who also religiously followed their cardio routines, never seemed to improve one iota. Week after week they stayed at the same weight, and they never seemed to improve. Why? Because they never pushed themselves, and cheated themselves that they were really doing cardio training. Yes, they ran or biked religiously, but they would never put in any effort to raise their heart rate significantly or even vary their speed during their training. They’d simply walk their 20 or 30 minutes on a treadmill or slowly pedal their bike, and that’s about it. To get the maximum benefit from these machines, you have to pace yourself for several minutes at one speed and then increase it. After a few minutes adjusting yourself to the new higher speed level, you must increase your speed again. Then you must repeat this upward ratcheting again. After a few minutes at that new speed, you must run (or pedal) all out until you can no longer do so, and

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin then drop all the way back down to a steady state pace you started out with (or a bit higher). You can find a detailed explanation of the process, with diagrams, in the Body for Life book. You only need to spend about twenty minutes on a treadmill to gain all its benefits, and putting in the time is how you’re going to get great cardio improvement. That’s all … cardio training for as little as 20 minutes a day has been known to reduce risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol, and recent data has shown that it helps buffer the heart against “acute triggers” like sex or sudden exertion.

About one million people join health clubs every month, and in two months time about 75% of this number won’t return to use their memberships anymore. So remember that the most important exercise is not any of the ones I’ve mentioned but the ones you bother to do … or should we say, “the ones you continue to do.” I don’t care if it’s yoga, strength training, rebounding, powerplating or whatever. What I really want to stress is that exercise won’t help anyone get fit and look better if it doesn’t get done, so don’t try to choose the “perfect exercise” to do. Rather, select the one you’ll continue with. There’s running, biking, weight training, yoga, powerplating and the rebounder as well as tennis, volleyball, skiing, tennis, golf and the other “normal ones” you’d normally consider. What you must do is avoid hard activities like bodybuilding in favor of routines that mix openness with stretching, flexibility, strength training and increased chi flow. It’s not about building muscles of steel but about keeping muscles so that you remain strong and flexible into old age. Even into your nineties you want to be able to perform all the activities of daily living and strength training is one of those methods that helps you maintain this capability. Having beautiful skin is part of an anti-aging routine which involves (1) meditation, (2) detoxification, (3) proper diet and (4) exercise. Now you’ve got the exercise part down pat.

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Bodywork Massage or Neurocranial Restructuring Will Have Friends Swearing You Had An Overnight Facelift There’s no doubt about it … bodywork and massage stretch and exercise your muscles and tissues. They increase the blood flow to your internal organs and skin which helps rejuvenate them, breaks up internal congestion and physical restrictions, and that makes you look great! I’ve been in bodywork massage training sessions where 10-20 people were being worked on at the same time, and saw cases where the right type of bodywork massage on the face dropped years off someone’s apparent age in just minutes. It’s better than a face-lift. If you were to go on TV and wanted to look your best, right before that I’d get a massage so that all your chi and blood circulation became normalized and you looked and felt peaceful, relaxed and in tip-top condition! Now there are all sorts of types of bodywork such as Swedish massage, Rolfing, reflexology, deep tissue, neuromuscular therapy, and IMT work among others. They all have pros and cons but for beautiful skin, I like methods that stretch the fascial tissues of the skin because that improves blood flow for long into the future. To find a qualified bodyworker or massage therapist, I suggest you buy the IAHP International Association of Healthcare Practitioners Directory, which contains the addresses of over 50,000 qualified bodywork therapists along with their qualifications. This inexpensive directory can be ordered online for just $7 at www.iahp.com/pages/order/index.php, and you should use the directory to look for bodywork therapists in your area who have the most number of training certifications after their name.

Chiropractic adjustments, to align the bones of your spine, are also another form of bodywork and if you want to look great then get one at least once a year as a tune up. I’ve seen countless people look better immediately after their bones are reset back into proper position through a painless chiropractic adjustment. A chiropractic adjustment every now and then can also be helpful to your meditation.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin But, here’s a warning: there are some chiropractors out there who are only focused on money (the same goes for doctors, mind you) so if you don’t have a noticeable back problem then you don’t need to go on a weekly basis to a chiropractor, despite what he or she may tell you! Just as in all fields, finding a good chiropractor or masseuse/masseur is as difficult as is finding a good doctor, lawyer or accountant. The rule of 80/20 holds in that 80% of the people you meet in any profession just aren’t that great while only 20% are truly worthwhile. Finding that 20%, or the top 2-3% who are truly excellent, is a difficult task indeed. If you find a good one, then share that information with others because that’s how you’ll earn the karma of always being able to find good professionals when you need them.

I also strongly believe that women should have a session of lymph drainage bodywork every year to help prevent breast cancer. It only takes about an hour for a skilled practitioner to open up all the lymph channels in your arms and chest, including the lymph channels leading to the breast, that tend to get clogged over the years. Lymph drainage has the following proven results: • • • • • •

Reduces edemas (swelling) and lymphedemas of various origins Detoxifies the body Helps the regeneration of tissue, including burns, wounds and wrinkles Anti-aging effects Reduction in the symptoms of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia Alleviation of adiposis and cellulite tissue

Without going into it, the reason I strongly recommend women have a lymph drainage session once a year is that I firmly believe that a congested lymph system plays a major role in the development of breast cancer, and since lymph drainage is so easy and quick, prevention is better than cure.

There’s also a facial restructuring practice I want you to know about called neurocranial restructuring (NCR), invented by Dean Howell, which can actually do the impossible. NCR can re-form the shape of a person’s head and face even though the bones have matured. When I first learned of NCR years ago through a publication by Sam Biser, I saw pictures of individuals whose faces all developed a more symmetrical, handsome/beautiful look with just a few treatments of the technique. www.MeditationExpert.com

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Symmetry of facial features in one of the classic signs of beauty, so I think you should know about this technique. In fact, scientists have found that for both men and women, humans show a strong preference for individuals whose left and right sides match. Greater symmetry predicts an earlier sex life and a greater number of past sexual partners. Highly symmetrical people, which is basically a sign of good karmic fortune, are healthier, grow faster and better able to survive. They also have fewer complaints than non-symmetrical people. Almost all plastic surgery is actually an attempt to correct asymmetry in the features or to exaggerate traits that are considered beautiful because they are subconscious indicators of youth, health and fertility. If you don’t like the look of your face, NCR is something to consider. When I first learned about NCR, there was only one individual on the East coast who could do neurocranial restructuring, so I took the train for four hours each way, from Manhattan to Connecticut, to experience the technique and sure enough, it corrected a crooked nose and gave me a more symmetrical look in just a few sessions. The whole basis of NCR is that your skull bones rest on the sphenoid bone, which is an internal bone of the head. Through the years your head bones can get pushed out of shape just micro-bits, or even crushed through accidents, and those “not in the slot” dislocations actually affect your appearance in a dramatic way. What they do in NCR is enter your nasal cavity with a small inflatable balloon that is inflated from 2-5 seconds. The inflated balloon lifts the cranial bones for a short moment so that the other bones in the head are temporarily relieved of pressure and can immediately adjust themselves to their proper original positions. In other words, given a chance your bones move outward from inside the head! By inflating the balloon, the pressure on the bones that line the inside of the nose makes one or more of the jammed skull bones become unlocked and they spring back to their proper position taking the connective tissues on with it. The changes may seem minor, but minor changes are all the difference when it comes to perceptions of beauty. The net result is instant facial restructuring to the way you were supposed to look – the beauty that nature designed -- by correcting the position of bones that have become slightly dislocated over the years. Those who have experienced car

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin accidents or any accidents to the skull benefit most from this process, which can be even more valuable than plastic surgery. NCR also relieves head pain in some instances and you can have it performed as an alternative to sinus surgery for allergies. It can work wonders for some people who don’t have symmetrical faces, so check it out or tell friends. The site is at http://www.ncrdoctors.com and you can click on the links to see before and after pictures. Look carefully and see for yourself. While this particular technique doesn’t have to do with improved skin texture and tone except as a side-benefit to the process, it does have to do with your facial bone structure and appearance.

As an aside, researchers have studied facial features for women and come to some very interesting conclusions. For instance, they’ve found that the “ideal woman” has a higher forehead than an average one, fuller lips, a shorter jaw and a smaller chin and nose. The ideal woman is about 24.8 years old, has a 14-year old’s abundant lips and a 11-year old’s delicate jaw. She also has prominent eyes and cheekbones. Researchers have recorded perceptions that suggest the “ideal woman” has a waist-to-hip ratio of around .70. For instance, in 1993 one researcher compiled the measurements of Playboy centerfolds and Miss America winners from 1923 to 1990 and found that while their bodies got leaner over the years, the waist-tohip ratio stayed within the narrow range of .68 to .72. For males, another study found a waist-to-hip ratio of .9 to be the most attractive. Naturally, the ideals for beauty or handsomeness differed by culture. Now don’t go getting all riled up that I relayed these bits of research. I always like to add interesting things into my books whenever possible, and I like the fact that someone had set out to empirically measure the concept of beauty. Frankly, I could care less about these measurements because what’s important to another party is actually whether you have karma with them, and what really makes you attractive is your personality and chi. If your chi is dirty or lousy or your personality is rotten, no amount of good looks are going to make you attractive at all. No one will want to spend time with you. Your body structure is a function of the merit you’ve inherited from past lives, your skin tone can easily be changed through diet and your chi and personality easily improved because of meditation.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin To some extent, meditation can change your body shape as well.

Did you ever see those beautiful pictures or statues of female Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (a Bodhisattva is a male or female who has almost reached complete enlightenment like a Buddha) from Tibet? You’ve probably seen them – beautiful statues of Male and female enlightened ones with thin waists and strong figures? I always thought those were artistic idealizations but prolonged meditation actually produces that hour glass figure! In terms of the female breasts, when the chi channels open in that region the breasts tend to turn upwards with “perkiness” or firmness. In terms of the waist, for both men and women it tends to become thinner while the flanks of the upper body become a bit thicker. Don’t think this happens over night. My teacher has a body like this which took a decade of meditation to produce, and one of my best friends has also slowly developed this type of body – and beautiful skin to boot (the envious comments abound) – because of her meditation. You can read the story of Yeshe Tsogyel in the book, Sky Dancer, to read more of these transformations and how one can eventually achieve a “golden bell body” through spiritual cultivation practice. In brief, it takes many years to completely transform the body through meditation. The Tao school tells us that it takes at least nine years of devoted effort to effect the possible perfecting transformations, though the actual number is more like twelve years when we add in the preliminary work necessary to get to the stage where you are even cultivating your chi: • • • • • • • • •

It takes one year of practice for your chi to be transformed It takes two years of practice for your blood to be transformed It takes three years of practice for your chi channels to be transformed It takes four years of practice for your muscles and flesh to be transformed It takes five years of practice for your bone marrow to be transformed It takes six years of practice for your tendons and sinews to be transformed It takes seven years of practice for your bones to be transformed It takes eight years of practice for your hair to be transformed It takes nine years of practice for your body’s shape to be transformed

Don’t think this is too long a time frame because I’ve seen sixty and seventy year olds who look twenty to thirty years younger due to meditation, and it’s never too later to start.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin The point is to be meditating for spiritual progress anyway and the physical beautifying results just fall out of this as a natural result. The point is that once again, meditation can help you create not only beautiful skin but a beautiful figure, too! It helps you produce a golden bell body wherein your skin shines with chi and everyone notices your energy. This is actually what makes you attractive to other parties, and beauty is all about attractiveness … the physical ideal of beauty changes over time whereas the attractiveness of the life force (of chi) stays constant. In fact, as society progresses and we eat worse foods, the presence of “good chi energies” will become even more important over time, so meditation will be one of the premier ways for women to retain their beauty.

That’s all I wanted to tell you about bodywork for beauty. In brief, deep tissue massage will increase the blood circulation to your skin to deliver rejuvenating nutrients and cart out wastes. It will stretch the fascia of the skin and keep your skin soft and flexible. If your skin hardens with fibrotic tissue, all the cosmetics in the world won’t help and while meditation produces a softening effect, you can cut the time it takes to produce that effect by massage … and by taking supplements like nattokinase and Vitalzym. Nevertheless, meditation is key to producing the most beautiful skin possible. Don’t forget a yearly chiropractic and lymphatic drainage tune-up, too. A chiropractic adjustment will insure that your spine stays aligned, that your posture stays straight, that back pain is non-existent and that the nerves and blood flow throughout your body are not impeded, especially to the brain. It will affect how you stand and walk whereas lymphatic drainage can help rejuvenate your skin and in my personal opinion, cut the risks of contracting breast cancer. If I was a woman, I would have a lymph drainage treatment by a skilled practitioner, whom you can find in the contact book mentioned, once a year. Together, these would insure that I keep all my body parts in shape and retain an enviable figure.

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Meditative Sex for the Highest Vibrational Energy, Looks and Appearance You Ever Dreamed Possible One overlooked area that contributes to shining beauty is having a great sex life. That’s right … a great sex life can help you look better … but you probably don’t honestly know what “great sex is” according to the principles of meditation and spiritual cultivation. You can often tell when someone has had sex the night before just by looking at them in the morning. It’s the energy coming off a person the next day … or the energy drained from them that’s noticeable. That should get you to wondering, “What does sex do for you that people notice the very next day?” The right result is a higher state of energy, happiness and blissful vitality that literally exudes through the skin the morning after, and that does wonders for the appearance … especially if it is repeated again and again and again. If you can get that state over and over again, it can help open up all your chi channels. Unfortunately, most people can rarely get it to happen at all but simply end up losing energy through sex, and this does nothing for your skin and vitality. How can you achieve the positive outcome just stated? It only happens when sexual activities ignite your chi and it starts to move, without leakage, and the chi circulation you’ve ignited is so profound that its momentum carries on through to the next day. If people have sex in the best possible way – which isn’t what you see in the movies -- their chi can still continue moving for hours afterwards. That blissful yang chi flow will be carried over into “regular life” for anyone to feel just as people naturally notice the natural exuberance of a blushing bride. People will look clean and refreshed after great sex and will feel relaxed, joyous, quiet inside and energized all at the same time … That is, if they do it right! Done properly (yes, there is a “right” and “wrong” way to have sexual intercourse that no one ever teaches you), sex harmonizes your spirit as well as your hormone levels and blood circulation. It gets everything to start circulating internally as long as there is sex “without leakage.” www.MeditationExpert.com

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Actually, people who engage in sex usually do so out of sexual desire but that blissful joyous state they are looking for through sex is the first dhyana (samadhi) and they don’t know it. With sexual relations performed the right way, a woman or man will literally glow with chi energy. That you already know. The happiness, joy and bliss one experiences during sex can activate a particular flow of full body chi that can wash one’s facial complexion clean and soften the rest of the body. That’s something you probably know from experience as well. But what you don’t know is that sexual relations can lead to the outskirts of samadhi achievement if the two partners both have clean chi, have cultivated their chi channels, have enough karma and merit and know how to practice together in the right way. Consider this. They say sex is a way to lose oneself. It’s a way to experience – for just a moment at least -- a state where there are no boundaries of space and time. It’s a state where you can experience a “small death” and lose oneself in the safe arms of your loved one. That’s true, but you can only achieve that experience when it’s done correctly according to cultivation principles and with the right partner … because no matter what they tell you, some people will never experience this type of selflessness if they or their partner’s chi channels haven’t been opened. That’s one of the secret keys to sexual cultivation for spiritual purposes. What you see in sexual movies, home videos or even read about in “sexual yoga” or “sexual cultivation” texts will never reach this state because the partners haven’t cultivated their chi or chi channels. All you ever see are sexual acrobatics and animalistic sexual frenzy but nothing that ever approaches the realms of true sexual cultivation for spiritual purposes. However, the closer you approach the realm of sexual cultivation, the more beneficial sex will be for you and the more it will do for your skin and complexion. Actually, a number of friends and I saw the Paris Hilton video and felt sorry for the reasons just mentioned. Namely, here is a beautiful, young girl with so much merit that she (1) has wealth (2) a famous, high standing family (3) a good education (4) great looks and (5) a good looking boyfriend for sexual relations and yet, despite all this tremendous merit she doesn’t have enough merit to have great sex – sex that will actually help her body and spiritual cultivation.

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Too bad, but that’s the state of most human beings simply because they lack the merit for the teachings. My teacher always tells me it’s easy to accumulate the merit to be reborn with great wealth like a Paris Hilton, but extremely difficult to have enough merit to experience the highest forms of sex, which is why all you ever see in the movies is just sexual yoga at best rather than real sexual cultivation. I’m not privy to tell you the details of true sexual cultivation for spiritual cultivation, but what I’m about to tell you contains some of the true tantric teachings on sex that you need to know – simply as a human being -- that can help you in your health, appearance and yes, your spiritual cultivation. You should consider this information on sex part of “Being a Mature Human Being 101.” Typically there are four major ways to initiate chi circulations in your body that might be helpful in cleaning your chi channels. They are: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Meditation Breathing exercises Great sex Moderate exercise

You already know about meditation, breathing exercises, and exercises … so now it’s time to discuss sex as a way to ignite chi flows that transform and beautify the body. Sex is one of those ways that can help open up your chi channels (if you have the right partner and do it in the right way) and get your chi moving. It’s a way to activate your chi energies from within because the chi channels in a suitable man’s penis can touch the termination point of the chi channels in a suitable girl’s vagina to activate a semi-kundalini chi flow. The problem is that most people don’t know how to actually do this, which is why they are not “suitable” or “qualified” for sexual meditation. Instead they simply engage in animal type sexual frenzy, sexual acrobatics, rough sexual massage and all sorts of other things that cause both partners to lose energy and have nothing to do with the highest type of chi spiritual communication between partners that’s possible through sex. To practice sexual cultivation correctly, the man has to have “clean chi” and have opened up the chi channels in his penis. That’s hard to do and if the man isn’t a meditator, it’s impossible for that to happen. Sorry, but you’re never going to find

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin that situation in some bodybuilder, athlete, handsome model or “pretty boy” if they don’t meditate. The woman also has to have cultivated meditation otherwise the termination point of her chi channels in the vagina will lie deeper inside the tissue rather than come closer to the surface … where the penis can touch them. Although a partner of a higher stage of cultivation can help the other, in truth both partners need to be meditators to succeed at sexual cultivation to change their bodies and arrive at the first dhyana. If woman is not a meditator, all the man will ever be able to do is just “jiggle her jing”13 rather than activate her chi through sex, and will have a hard time contacting the end of her chi channels in the vagina. It’s very hard for any noncultivation male to touch the termination point of the chi channels in any woman’s vagina because most men are “dead” to their own bodies. How can they feel the chi in another person when they can’t even feel the chi in their own bodies? Frankly, most men don’t know where this critical spot is inside a women, and it takes lots of time initially for the roof of the vagina to relax and “come down” for this termination spot to be made available for contact. Normally you’d need at least 30-45 minutes of sexual activity, after at least 20-40 minutes of foreplay, before you could even begin to cultivate sexual tantra. That’s how long it takes for the blood flow, hormones and chi to descend to the sexual regions. Only then could you even begin to have the type of sex that’s going to help transform your body. What you typically see in the movies – whether X-rated or just the general things you see on TV – is sexual massage or animal sexual frenzy. In those cases, you cannot see any chi communication between the partners whatsoever, which is especially the case if the man is using a condom. “Great sex” involves harmonizing sexual relations wherein the two partners become as one, are able to forget their bodies and their minds, their chi becomes balanced and their chi channels actually open because of the joining. There is no sucking of energies involved between the partners. There is no mental spinning of chi. There is nothing except emptiness, non-ego, joy, physical bliss and detachment … and with that state, the chi channels rubbing against each other can ignite chi flows up the central channel. Let’s put it frankly – most men and women are lousy in bed because they don’t know these facts at all. They don’t know the techniques, they don’t have good 13

There are two terms all meditators need to learn: jing and chi. Chi, also known as “prana” or “qi,” is the life force of your body. Jing refers to the body’s hormones, sexual fluids, and watery elements. Through meditation, Taoism explains that “jing transforms into chi,” meaning that your body’s generative energies, of a physical nature, are transformed into living rejuvenating forces and spiritual energies.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin bodies, they don’t have good partners, they don’t have good chi energies. Most bodies, as they age, become like cesspools which is why you really need to meditate and detoxify the body if you truly wish to transform it and make spiritual progress. However, if you learn just a few of the following things, your sex life can be used to attain much higher benefits not just in terms of improvements in physical appearance, but in terms of emotional balance, health and spiritual progress as well. But remember that what you think is “great sex” is already a polluted notion. It might be a popular notion because of ignorance and lack of merit, but what you see in the movies is usually just sexual exercise, massage or just “raw animal sex” rather than the highest sex possible of chi communion and sexual cultivation. There’s no higher aspect to what you see on TV or in the movies because there’s no chi communication between the parties whatsoever, who are usually drained of vitality anyway or have terribly dirty chi to begin with. None of these men or women have good chi to start, they certainly don’t know how to contact the chi channels of their partner, and they all think that the conclusion of sex is an energy draining orgasm rather than a full body achieved through sexual communion. What you usually see in the movies just a forceful, frictional massage between the sexual organs of both partners. That can certainly stimulate the blood, muscles and chi, but rarely will you see any type of chi communication. Now, using a condom during sex will certainly prevent pregnancy and disease, but it also prevents any possibility for chi communication between partners due to the fact that it blocks any energy exchange between them. After all, the condom is a rubber insulator that blocks chi flow, so chi communion can never occur between insulated partners no matter how vigorous the sex is or how close they may feel. Don’t make any mistakes about this because chi does not communicate through plastic or rubber. To accomplish any type of chi activation that’s worthwhile, the two organs must touch each other in specific locations that involve physical contact between the chi channels. Actually the more a couple uses condoms, the more irritated they will get after awhile because of the lack of physical contact. That’s why even lesbians leave their partners every now and then and go searching for a male partner. Frankly I cannot see how any lesbian can ever achieve fullness without a male partner, because that is the only way to compliment her chi. She certainly can have an orgasm with another female or just by herself, and may even feel closer to

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin another woman than to a man, but just as it is impossible for gay men to ignite their chi through ejaculation into a male partner, it will be impossible for a lesbian female to achieve completeness of her chi or initiate kundalini through sex without a male union. The chi channels in the man’s penis are designed to contact the chi channel endings in a woman’s vagina, and when that happens in a certain location inside the vagina, there is chi flow between the parties and a chi activation initiates similar to the “kundalini awakening” you read about in Indian yoga. But few people can accomplish this high stage of sexual activity, named tantra, for a number of reasons. My teacher always says that it takes just one or two lives of doing meritorious deeds (practicing charity on a grand scale) to be born rich, but many lives to be born with wisdom skills. While it also takes several lives to be born pretty or handsome, it takes many more lives to be born with sexual organs perfectly shaped such that they can engage in and succeed in real sexual tantra, which is true sexual cultivation. The location and shape of the termination point of the chi channels ending in a woman’s vagina will be different – in easily reachable or hard-to-reach locations that require some prompting -- based on past lives of cultivation and meditation efforts in this life. While this location can be somewhat altered through meditation practice in this life, without a good partner to help transform them through contact it’s practically impossible. You need lots of merit to practice the technique because even if you understand it, to find an understanding partner is practically impossible. Even with well formed sexual organs most people probably still don’t have the merit to encounter a great sexual partner because that karma takes many lives of cultivating virtue and merit … and spiritual cultivation. Most people just don’t have the merit to engage in true sexual tantra, so there’s little we can say on the topic. Speaking about it is useless. Nevertheless, there are some basic rules for sex that everyone needs to know and some basic tantric rules to follow that will help with your sex life, your vitality and appearance.

Plain and simple, if you think that “anything goes” applies to sex and that you cannot get into trouble, you are grossly mistaken. You might not get sick now, but eventually you’ll succumb to illness without realizing it can be traced back to foolish sexual antics.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Here are some essential rules derived from thousands of years of Chinese and Indian medicine, and which were developed through the assistance of spiritual masters and their observations whose practical experience is worth far more than theory. The rules are … •

Never have sex under an air conditioner or in front of a draft of wind of any type. During sexual relations, the body is most exposed and vulnerable to an “external invasion” of wind that can enter the body to cause sickness and disease. Most often, if you feel “lousy” or get a cold or headache the day after sexual relations, Chinese medicine explains that you probably caught a cold from a wind invasion. Saridon (a form of aspirin) works best to eliminate this type of headache and to get rid of the cold before it makes its way deeper into the body and takes hold. There are also certain herbal teas that will chase the wind out of your physical body, such as ginger tea, and various herbal combinations as well. If you ever feel like you caught a cold after sex, try taking these combinations immediately with a glass of warm – not cold – water.



Never drink cold drinks after sex. If you do, once again it’s easy to catch a cold without realizing it because drinking the cold fluids into a hot stomach when your body is weak and unprotected will allow external wind to enter the body. When your body is in a relaxed state its pores tend to open exposing them to external wind invasions, and when unprotected from external wind that puts the body in a vulnerable position for a wind invasion.



If you are looking to conceive a baby, never have sex during a thunderstorm, tornado, after an earthquake, during an eclipse, riot or during or immediately after all sorts of other situations where bad chi in the environment is stirred up. Otherwise, you risk the mixing of that turbulent environmental yin chi with the chi involved in conception.



Men should learn how to engage in sex without ejaculation, yet without trying to hold back their ejaculation or suck energy from their partner. When men are young they can experience multiple orgasms and lose their ejaculate without feeling it too much, but as they get older they start feeling a definite loss of vitality with each orgasm, especially if they are sensitive meditators. Westerners may po-pooh this well-known Asian principle, but it’s just plain true. Cultivators (meditators) all recognize this fact sooner than others, because when they lose their chi through ejaculation they feel the truth of the situation. This is one of the basic teachings from both Chinese and Indian medicine. With ejaculation you lose both your jing and chi, and many athletes feel this, which is why they store up their energies and refrain from sex right

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin before their important matches. In a man’s body, semen (jing) is the basis of chi production. If a man loses one (jing) through sexual leakage then he loses the other as well (his chi) including the stamina, energy, staying power and appearance that are linked with it. Men who ejaculate a lot because of sexual excess become pale, cannot concentrate, hurt their knees and develop a sickly appearance. They lose their vitality and it shows. In old China, any minor wife of the king who wanted her own son to assume the throne … rather than the son born to another of the king’s wives … would gift the appointed heir lots of pretty concubines knowing that he would dissipate and weaken himself through sexual excess. If that “poison arrow” disguised as kindness didn’t result in sickness or death, the gift would be appreciated nonetheless and advance her interests even though it was “a dagger hidden in a smile.” •

Women should have no fear of orgasm like a man because they are yin, and as the I-Ching explains, “yang offers while yin receives.” Women will tend to absorb a man’s energies when he ejaculates as well as reabsorb 70% of the personal energies lost through orgasm. Women can actually use sex – if they meditate and have a skillful partner – to help them cultivate to a definite stage on the spiritual path where the chi channels are opened. It’s not a high stage of spiritual progress, mind you, but just a very low stage for entering the path if they cultivate correctly and have the appropriate merit.

For the real tantra that you’ll never read about -- from a woman’s point of view -here are the things you need to know about sex. Tantra is all about chi communication. It’s all about using the help or assistance of another through sex to ignite your own chi and once that circulation is nudged into getting going … that is, once it is ignited … tantric practice means to let your chi flow do its own thing while you ignore it by resting in mental emptiness. If you are successful, you chi can c\actually go up your central sushumna chi channel and you’ll experience a state wherein it seems as if you cannot find your body even though it’s there. With tantric sex you don’t rest in stupor or blankness, you don’t cling on to the feelings of physical bliss or mental peace that arise, you don’t try to hold the situation since you can’t, you don’t give into sexual desire and try to prolong what cannot be prolonged but simply rest in a stage of mental emptiness and non-ego without clinging or attaching to any thoughts, feeling, or physical sensations. You know the feelings of warmth and bliss and chi flow are there, but you remain detached from them rather than succumb to them.

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That’s real sexual tantra. Sexual activities with the right partner in the right way can activate your chi channels, which can activate the initiation of minor stages of emptiness and bliss, and you can use them to transform your body. That’s why sex can be great for one’s appearance … if you can do it in the right way without losing any energy! All the techniques of meditation in general – at the very initial, lowest stages of the spiritual path -- are basically aimed at helping you to clean your chi channels, purify your chi, and thereby help you achieve the mental purity of emptiness, or absence of thoughts. Igniting your kundalini, which is the real chi of the body that comes along with life, is one way to ignite your chi flows so that those chi flow circulations clean out your chi channels and with that, rejuvenate your body and beautify your appearance. When your chi starts rotating or revolving through those circulations, in time your chi becomes refined. When chi becomes pacified and refined to a higher level, consciousness becomes pacified and refined so as to be able to realize the real emptiness we talked about in chapter one. Remember, these principles only hold in regards to the lowest stages of the spiritual path. At the higher stages, meditation has nothing to do with the body or chi or charkas or chi channels or hormones whatsoever, and chi and consciousness are not linked at the realms nearer to enlightenment. To succeed in spiritual cultivation, you have to follow certain rules of discipline and you have to cultivate virtuous deeds, virtuous living and virtuous mind. Virtue is a prerequisite to succeeding on the spiritual path … you simply cannot be a greedy and selfish jerk, meditate and hope to succeed at accomplishing the Tao. All the general disciplinary rules that hold for regular spiritual cultivation hold for tantric practice as well, but are even stricter! Why? Because if you say you are going to cultivate using sex you are usually just cheating yourself or cheating another and setting things up to hurt people and create all sorts of other problems. Therefore, in truth, sexual cultivation should only be attempted between devoted marriage partners. If you do not meditate and have never cleaned or opened your chi channels at all by practicing meditation, you’ll never succeed at any degree of true tantra. Sex

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin will just be physical sex – a form of fun, relaxation, exercise, expression and excitement. Only the person with great merit, who has already cultivated some stage of emptiness realization and whose chi channels are already somewhat open, can experience a stage of physical bliss and mental clarity generated through sex that is somewhat near the border of the spiritual realms. Those people are rare.

In short, if you want to have sex then have sex but don’t say it’s for spiritual cultivation. Don’t try to cheat yourself thinking you can spiritualize lust and desire. However, do indeed follow these rules for having better sex ... a higher type of sex … and try to use them in a more spiritual way. Even if you don’t have the wisdom and a good partner and merit to succeed at sexual cultivation, if you just follow the rules laid out then you’re well ahead of the game. Just from hearing these principles you’re well ahead of 99.999999999+ % of the human beings on this planet, most of which just engage in animal sex for relief that the celestial beings just look down upon with disgust. If you find the right partner and follow these rules, however, the next day your chi will continue flowing because it has been activated and that positive chi flow will change your appearance for the better. That’s what you want from a book about beauty that discusses sexual relations. Of course you can also change your body using sex – physically transform it as Lady Yeshe Tsogyel did (her story is found in the book, Sky Dancer), using sexual cultivation if you are good enough. If your partner’s chi is dirty and they have not opened their chi channels, you’re going to get nowhere with tantric practices, however. Even then, if both you meditate and have somewhat opened chi channels, if you don’t have cultivation virtue and merit you won’t make progress on this road either. Some people try to suck energy from their partners during sex or try to push their chi or their partner’s chi around trying to circulate it one way or another. That’s all wrong. Your chi just has to match naturally in communion to create that ignition of kundalini energies, so trying to push things just isn’t going to do it. That’s simply adding garbage to the system and is based on incorrect and sometimes perverted Taoist and yoga teachings.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Two partners attempting real tantra have to start and stop, start and stop their sexual activities – always without ejaculation on the man’s part -- to finally fill both regions with blood, have the chi come down to those areas, and then perhaps there can be some initial chi communication and connection for them to begin. Chi communication is not a matter of frenzied sexual activity (crazy massage) but harmonization of the two organs and chi flows until the chi matches. Once the chi between two parties matches, they both have to stay in that state with relaxed, open, peaceful minds of non-clinging. This is a way to harmonize the energy within the bodies and get rid of sexual desire, too, and the key element is to cultivate emptiness without clinging. Some types of chi between potential partners will not connect, just like some types of sexual organs do not fit as well as they should. As a protection mechanism, that’s why some men will not be able to have an erection around certain types of female partners, and I’m not talking about impotence. In those cases the girl’s chi is just too dirty or doesn’t match and the karmic connection is lacking. Even men who meditate cannot practice or succeed at tantra because they are too selfish or not skillful enough, and they aren’t skillful because they don’t know anything about chi. If a man cannot feel anything in his own physical body, how can he tell where to touch a woman to activate her chi? In that case, sex is just a matter of massage or personal gratification. Men who don’t meditate don’t have open chi channels and cannot succeed in tantra. Anyone with open chi channels is usually a bit psychic or at least sensitive to chi energies. These are the ones who have some chance to succeed on the path rather than simply muscle prone athletes or good looking statues of flesh. Without chi, those bodies are worthless for sexual cultivation but they are good for forceful massage that moves the blood or exciting the senses. So technique-wise, what do you have to do in sexual practice that will transform your body?

First, here’s what you don’t do. You never try to swap, circulate, borrow or steal energy from your partner during sexual relations. If you’ve been taught that to do that, it’s nonsense. Once out of your body, you should regard your sexual fluids as you do shit, piss, phlegm and puss. You don’t try to hold on to them, rotate them, circulate them or understand them. The goal is to simply use sex to activate the chi moving within your body and to achieve a full body harmonization of the chi; you want to harmonize the chi

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin throughout your body. Meditation does that, such as the skeleton meditation, and when you engage in sexual activities properly you can accomplish that as well. In the best type of sex, you STOP when you feel that the chi throughout your body has become harmonized and FULL. You DO NOT push past that balance point which will then initiate hunger for more sex or orgasm. In becoming full through sexual play without ejaculation, and then stopping at peaceful fullness, you can slowly change your chi channels by soaking in that state of fullness without clinging. In time, with continued practice having sex in this way, you can attain deeper and deeper levels of physical bliss and mental joy from detaching from the chi flows you initiate and letting them run their course without clinging. You’ll eventually become able to activate a full body bliss where all your chi channels become open, all your cells become energized and your mind attains a realm of peace, lightness and fulfillment that approaches the outskirts of the spiritual state called samadhi. You can forget your body and your mind in that state – so that you cannot find either – and then enter into the first dhyana. When your body feels peaceful and semi-blissful because the chi has become normalized everywhere, you can finally relax the chi channels into opening. Once you become harmonized because of opened chi channels, more energetic sex can possibly ignite the bliss of kundalini. As stated, the man’s penis has to touch the terminal point of the woman’s chi channels in the vagina for this to happen. Unfortunately most men don’t know how to find the spot. On top of that, if their chi is dirty because they don’t meditate, or if their chi channels are not opened, a positive chi communication via this point is just not possible. That’s why it’s so hard for a man or woman to find the right type of partner for sexual tantra. As my teacher said, even for a Buddha it’s nearly impossible. In brief, you need merit, your partner needs merit and you both have to be cultivators with purified chi and partially opened chi channels to get the highest benefits of sex that produce the greatest results in terms of physical looks and appearance. Without that, forget it … but keep practicing anyway. Yes, you can sometimes use sex as a way to activate your chi if you don’t lose it and cultivate a state of bliss, like the dhyana, that when you relax within it, will transform your body just as meditation does. Once again, you have to cultivate an empty mind and mind free of desire to achieve this. Sex becomes a form of innocent play and relaxation with this mentality.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin So yes, great sex can help improve the appearance by activating the transforming chi flows of physical vitality that improve everything. We could phase it in different ways, but now you know the highest possible achievements with sex are to realize a spiritual state, called samadhi or dhyana, that will not only impact your looks in a great way, but constitute a high degree of spiritual accomplishment as well. It all happens because of chi communication but you want clean chi, opened chi channels, clean minds, virtuous partners, detachment and no ejaculation. Sex can be a form of spiritual cultivation between two people if they use the rules mentioned, and they’ll look great if they have sex correctly and avoid wind invasions, drinking cold things, or straining themselves and losing energy during the process. The movies may show that, but if you wake up the next day and feel depleted rather than energized, that was incorrect sexual practice. It was just a way to lose your chi rather than freeing it to get it moving. If you wake up the next day and feel congested in the head, you also probably caught a wind invasion or cold! If you want sex then have sex but don’t cheat yourself saying you are cultivating or use that as a line or excuse to procure a sexual partner. Within the relationships between husbands and wives or boyfriends and girlfriends you are free to do whatever you want but don’t cheat yourself and call it sexual cultivation when it’s usually just sexual relations, especially if you are not meditating. That would just be a colossal way of cheating yourselves. Also once again, you mustn’t confuse sexual cultivation with sexual stealing, sexual acrobatics, sexual desire or sexual yoga. Sex between consenting adults is for fun, play, relaxation, health and healing, peace, communication, expression of deep feelings, connection. It can also be used for meditation and spiritual cultivation – it’s highest possible calling -- but that is so rare that you mustn’t use it as an excuse. To find a partner that truly complements you for sexual fulfillment is a rare find indeed, and you can use that resultant chi communication as a means to beautify, heal and transform the body. I wish I could direct you to some good books in English on this topic, but the best I can do is direct women to the story of the female adept Yeshe Tsogyel as a role model, and send men to Jolan Chang’s books to learn non-ejaculatory yoga.

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The Shortest and Quickest Path to Beautiful Skin Let’s review all that we’ve learned. Are there things you can eat that will positively impact the tone, texture, and appearance of your skin? Absolutely. There are oils, vitamins and minerals, juicing and high nucleotide foods that provide the right ingredients to build strong cells and perfect skin. Over the last few decades, our food sources have degraded and our diets are now lacking these necessary nutrients. By supplying them, you enable your body to become the best it can be in terms of both health and appearance.

There are products that will help you to detoxify and purify your body, especially your liver which filters your blood. When you get rid of the poisons and toxins that have been jammed into your connective tissues over the years … because your detoxification and elimination systems have become overloaded … you’ll look better and feel better over time. Anti-aging is all about detoxification, and one of the roles of detoxification is to clean out your organs and channels of detoxification and elimination – such as your liver, kidneys and intestines – so that they are not overwhelmed anymore and can get back to doing their job at peak efficiency. Detoxification is like emptying out the lint drawer in a clothes dryer or replacing a car filter that is so dirty it doesn’t work anymore. When the filter is clean, then the clothes or engine will be clean as well and similarly, your blood will become clean which will be reflected in your complexion.

There are also special products you can eat that specifically and precisely, because of their biochemistry, target the production of more beautiful skin. Bird’s nest soup is one such example.

There are also things you should NOT eat because they will harm your health and appearance. When you eat items for which you are allergic or have a sensitivity, it is not uncommon to break out in pimples or rashes. Continuous

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin consumption of those items even at a greatly decreased level, does not contribute to the building of strong, healthy cells, including those of the skin. Like weeding a garden, if you stop doing what makes a situation worse then what you leave alone will blossom of itself without any need of help.

Here are activities you should stop doing – holding onto thoughts in general (which is why you must learn meditation) and holding onto bad mental habits, such as pessimism and negativity. That’s why cultivating a positive outlook is important to your beauty. Let’s put it this way … the highest mental state is absent of mental states since that is the highest state of virtue closes to our original nature. That’s why you learn meditation, which is to realize your absolute nature. If we are talking about the realm of ordinary thoughts then a clean, joyful, positive, wholesome mental state is better than negative, pessimistic, dark, dirty thought habits because one of these alternatives initiates life-changing yang (positive) energies and one cultivates yin (negative) energies. Which do you think will be more beneficial for your personality and appearance? Your chi and consciousness are interlinked, and if you have a negative personality you’ll be holding onto or generating negative (“yin”) chi. This will take away from your attractiveness no matter how pretty or handsome you may look on the outside. People will know this, so make no mistake about it. Cultivating better mental states will definitely be reflected in your appearance. Negativity will appear on your face and in your features (ever notice that “worried” or “harassed” look on some people and a calm look on others?), joy can readily be recognized, and the natural beauty of purity, chastity or emptiness is something that has captured the imagination for centuries. Why? Because there is a healthy natural chi flow and joyousness that goes with it. Cultivating your consciousness so that it becomes clean, purified and refined is what meditation is all about, and that pure consciousness will produce purified chi that leads to all sorts of beautifying, perfecting physical transformations. That’s a fact.

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Now there are certain things you can do to activate your chi so that your vital energies will be initiated or ignited from within and start naturally clearing your chi channels so as to beautify your physical form. You should learn meditation so that internal mental peace will cause your chi to arise and you can use breathing practices to quicken the process. First, however, you must detoxify your body to get rid of as many poisons as possible to make this transformation that much easier. You must also stop consuming dirty food and start consuming clean healthy food to build the perfect body you desire. Eating pesticide-laden nutrient-poor food cannot build any beauty you desire. Poisons will actually interfere with the growth and beauty of your body. Consider that you are an outgrowth of your genes to understand this. What you eat helps your genes express themselves or not, and can poison you or build you up. That’s why Japanese who grow up in the United States, eating the US diet, are usually several inches taller than the same Japanese who grow up on a Japanese diet in Japan. It’s a function of the foods they wash over their genes because of the diet. What I’m saying is that whatever you wash over your genes because of your diet and nutritional products will play a big role in how you look, so watch what you eat if you want to maintain your looks and eliminate wrinkles. Genes give you the basic foundation to work with in terms of your appearance. What you eat modifies that basic underlying matrix and can accent it or amplify it for better or worse. One thing you might notice on this point is that when people move to a new country and start eating the native foods, after a while they even start looking a bit like the natives because of the diet, so food definitely affects the appearance.

As I mentioned, what you spend the most time thinking about will shape your features as well, which is why facial fortune reading is often accurate, for what you think and do can affect the lines on your face. Once again meditation is the best way to cultivate positive mental states and to abandon those states which end up putting lines on the face. However, physical therapies, such as bodywork and massage, can get rid of those lines and alter things for the better, too. The big lesson is to recognize underneath all this is that you are unique in terms of your personality, passion, energy and appearance, and to become beautiful you should cultivate these characteristics to the fullest possible perfection. The actual way to do this is through meditation because you can lose an arm, leg or www.MeditationExpert.com

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin ear in an accident, and your flesh is destined to decline with age no matter what you do (unless you fill it with chi). But your personality and energy are what shine through the physical nature, so the highest beauty is to cultivate these to the ultimate. That’s the difference between many famous actors and actresses or popular people and the regular ones who never make it into the big time.

We’ve discussed a lot about how to cultivate beauty, but I would like to leave you with something to think about from Chinese culture regarding the definition for the “most attractive” men and women – the “perfect male or female.” To understand this quote from Chinese culture, you have to remember that “yang” stands for the male, activity, and has positive connotations while “yin” stands for the female, quietness, and has passive connotations. The saying runs: Perfect yang is brilliant Perfect yin is reverent Here’s how to begin to understand this. A woman -- being female -- is yin. When yin is reverent it is still, quiet, nurturing, yielding and follows rather than leads because that's the nature of yin. Calmness, nurturing and stillness are the natural qualities of women according to Chinese culture, and biology, sociology and history suggest there’s some truth to this in general. When yin becomes still and quiet out of reverence (think of that as practicing meditation), this stillness is a state of purity. The maximum purity of yin is the maximum exhibition of its loveliness. The stillness of yin achieved through reverence also means the cultivation of mental emptiness, and by cultivating emptiness one's yang nature is sure to arise. From mental stillness, you know that yang chi is born and when yang chi arises, your chi channels will open. Your purified vital energies that arise will then be reflected everywhere – in your appearance, in your voice, everywhere. They are what beautify the body and perfect the individual. In short, meditation is the way for women (yin) to become perfect, have their yang chi arise, bring about all sorts of positive transformations including transforming a woman’s beauty into the best it can possibly be.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin A woman (or man) will look her best when her yang chi comes up, but it doesn’t come up due to force or competitiveness. It comes up when you cultivate the inner stillness of the mind, which the Chinese called “reverence” for women when it is actually just spiritual cultivation (meditation). When a woman cultivates meditation by freeing herself of her thoughts and worries, then by cultivating that quiet her yang chi will arise and so will her fortune. It is truly a transformative experience. On the other hand, women (and men) who run on emotions without knowing it must learn to develop calmness and detach from this habit if they want to cultivate a state of perfection. In the old days the term “reverence” here also meant being supportive and longsuffering. Today it simply means practicing meditation so that a woman gets in touch with her true nature and doesn’t lose that connection with her true inner essence. That inner essence is free of thoughts and emotions, and doesn’t jostle her here or there. It’s pure, clean, still and “reverent.” When a woman cultivates meditation and comes into contact with her formless inner nature, her yang chi will arise which is the very definition of great good fortune. Yang chi arising will open up all the chi channels in a woman's body, which will make any woman look the very best she can possibly look regardless of her age or appearance. That’s what you want. You don’t want miracles but THAT and THAT is actually miraculous. This result, achieved through meditation, will make a woman the most youthful and lovely she can be, which also represents the most attractive state possible to the yang (male nature). That's why “reverent yin” can reach perfection. Yin becomes yang through stillness, and that yang transforms yin into wondrous being. Of course this happens only with the spiritual cultivation practice of mental stilling – reverence or meditation -- rather than through facial creams or exercise or whatever else people market today. Sure all those things help, but meditation will not only free you from destructive mental patterns and personality habits that contribute to aging, but will transform your energies and your physical features as well. Everything good and great is accomplished from one thing – simple mental resting. Through cultivation of the way of yin -- in the nature of bringing forth the yang -- a woman's personality, behavior and appearance will become the best they

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin possibly can. Yin becomes perfected through cultivation, and the cultivation of yin is the way of mental quietude. That is meditation. What this is saying is that a woman only becomes her best through meditation. Here's a big secret: a woman only appears "elegant" to others when her chi becomes smooth, and that only happens due to the practice of meditation. If she "looks elegant" but her chi isn't smooth, no one will consider her elegant even if she is quite beautiful. In fact, if she is quite beautiful but her personality is "crabby" or "cranky" because her chi doesn't flow smoothly, then it'll be hard for anyone to get along with her and it's quite possible she won't find a mate or be able to keep one. So what’s the purpose of “skin deep” beauty if it doesn’t help her achieve her goals? Meditation is the only remedy for this type of situation because it's the only thing that can help someone smoothen their energy flows and their rough edges in personality. On the other hand, if a woman is not very pretty and yet she cultivates her mind so that her chi becomes smooth and comfortable … which will make her personality and energy smooth and comfortable as well … then everyone will like her and want to be with her. She'll get married in an instant despite any "deficiencies" she may imagine in the realm of personal beauty. Getting married or staying unwed will have a lot to do with a woman’s personal cultivation and whether or not she cultivates an attractive personality. Since meditation will make her chi flow better and bring up her yang chi, it's the one thing that will improve her chances of finding a match since it will help make her the best she can possibly be. I’m not kidding you, I’m not trying to twist things. Even in the realm of changing your fortune (see White Fat Cow at www.meditationexpert.com), you can only alter your fate when one of the factors involve meditation. Let’s put it this way. Looks and appearance are the result only of karmic good fortune – genes inherited because of acts of merit in past lives. They fade away in time but substance and personality, which take some effort to achieve, can and do last. They are something you cultivate in this life due to your own efforts regardless of what you have been given or inherited through karma (genes), so the way to overwrite the dictates of fortune and make yourself even more attractive are to

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin cultivate meditation. Meditation will purify and rejuvenate your chi, or life force, and when your life force is always young it will be reflected in your outer body. That’s why meditation can produce beautiful skin. It does, it will, I’ve seen it. I could go on discussing the various aspects of this short Chinese stanza for hours and enter into all sorts of ramifications, but I'll just summarize by saying you should forget about money, status or appearance in describing the perfect or ideal man or woman. Rather, as regards the perfect man and woman ... "perfect yang is brilliant, perfect yin is reverent." You need no plastic surgery – just be yourself but eat well, detoxify your body, and cultivate meditation. The perfection of you – whether in terms of personality, energy or appearance -- comes from cultivation and is a form of merit you have to work to achieve. It all has to do with meditation, which we also call “spiritual cultivation” or just “cultivation” for short.

If you are concerned about your skin, aging and even worried about a declining libido. If you want to increase your inner vitality, meditation doesn’t just increase your looks but is the world’s best natural Viagra in existence because it will cause all your natural chi, or life force, to once again begin arising fully. With the rising of your chi comes energy and stamina that’s natural rather than artificially induced, which means your body is ready for it. If you want to start healing your body of internal hurts and harms and latent illnesses, meditation is also the world’s best inner healer because it causes your vital energies, or life force, to circulate to where it needs to go and start effecting repairs where necessary. Meditation never causes any illness or sickness in the human body. It just heals it. When your vital energies start to flow because of meditation practice, meditation functions like an X-ray in provoking your latent illnesses to reveal themselves so that you can intervene and take some appropriate actions. It also does a fair job of helping to harmonize those imbalances itself, but you should always try to assist the process with herbs and nutritional substances whenever possible. Otherwise, don’t think meditation is going to get you over a virus!

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The older you get the more you tend to realize that prevention (or early action) for health problems is tons better than cure. Knowing and acting are also far better than not knowing and not acting, too. That’s why I’m always emphasizing prevention in this book (steps that cost you pennies rather than thousands) and knowledge about what you can do to maximize your health and longevity. If you want to look good, you have to address these two factors, especially the knowing of what to do.

Meditation helps you with both the knowing and healing because it gives you the ability to spot any problems with your health, and thereby provides the opportunity to intervene immediately. If you want to learn how to calm your mind and get rid of anxiety or stress, then I can recommend no other better practice than meditation. If you want to transform your body to get healthier, it’s even better since it involves cultivating your chi. As a review again, the way meditation works is that it helps you calm our mind as well as harmonize the rejuvenating “chi” life force of your body. If your mind calms then your chi calms, and if your chi calms then your mind calms because the two are interlinked. Calming your means purifying consciousness, which means purifying your chi, which means purifying your physical body since chi is what powers it. Thoughts and chi are interlinked, which is why you can calm your consciousness (by cultivating an empty mental state) to cultivate your chi or cultivate breathing practices (through the connection of breath with your life force) to affect consciousness. Using herbs or drugs will not cultivate your chi, so if you want a complete picture of physical rejuvenation you have to practice meditation. That’s why I’ve taught you many approaches in this book – of meditation and certain substances together -- as the benefits of both will be reflected in your appearance. Meditation – the practice of detaching from your discriminative thoughts – will help with anger, depression, anxiety and all sorts of other mental bothers. Destressing always has a positive rejuvenating effect on the mind and body, and meditation is the de-stressing method par excellence. All these mental problems aren’t just the product of thoughts, but are usually involved with habitual energy streams that are running errant within your body. If you can pacify those streams through meditation, then you will go a long way to pacifying the mental and emotional aspect of those conditions.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin If you want to increase your life span then meditation is the way to lengthen it as well. Once again, meditation initiates the rise of vital energies within your body. The rising of your vital energy, or chi, will start to open the energy channels (acupuncture meridians) that run everywhere in your physical nature – just as do your nerves, veins and arteries -- so that the life force which circulates through these channels can now do so without friction and obstruction. When you reduce friction you reduce the wear and tear of any mechanism, so clearing your body’s energy channels of obstructions through meditation will help your body to last longer, run better and look better. Meditation is thus the true way to health and longevity. That’s why meditation improves your appearance.

Anyway, this is how the Eastern medical schools of Chinese TCM and Indian Ayurveda describe the process, and they are as empirical in their own right as we are in our ours. Modern western science has started to confirm that meditation helps lower your blood pressure, reduces stress and anxiety, can bolster your immune system, and produces all sorts of other health benefits. It seems that every month a new study comes out proving that meditation can do this or that to help you, so modern science is simply reproving the findings of the ancients. It really is beneficial … you should take it up as a daily practice just as you do brushing your teeth. How much more do I need to say to convince you? I worry that the objective of beautiful skin isn’t enough so I’m out to present a case in spades, so-to-speak. There’s no actual need to go citing all these modern studies on meditation or go into all the books on this matter. It’s enough to know they simply reconfirm what the Eastern sages have been saying for centuries … meditation is a great thing to do. You don’t need countless studies in psychoneuroimmunology to teach you that. Whatever you do, don’t go talking to an acupuncturist, martial artist or Chinese medical doctor and say that chi or the “chi channels” cited by meditators and various spiritual traditions don’t exist. These folks know from lots of personal experience that they do exist because they work with them on a daily basis, and will just laugh at you if they hear this. If you simply start meditating then in time you will start to feel your own chi and acupuncture meridians (chi channels) yourself, and that’s all the proof you’ll ever

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin need. The proof is in the personal experience rather than in books or government reports, just as it is with the actualities of spiritual attainment. I remember the very first time my own father came to visit me in Asia and experienced acupuncture for the first time. He had no preconceptions of acupuncture because he didn’t know anything about it, but with only one needle inserted in his hand he was able to feel the entire acupuncture meridian running up and down his arm. That’s rare, but the doctor explained it does happen to people who are really healthy, and through that one experience he verified for himself that these meridians (called “chi channels”) actually do exist. But not all people accept their existence. Some people are still vehemently opposed to acupuncture. It’s interesting that when the Western world was first introduced to videotapes of acupuncturists treating surgery patients without pain, which came back from Richard Nixon’s trip to China, some doctors even walked out of the presentation rooms claiming that what they were seeing was all 100% fabrication. Their minds were so closed they just couldn’t accept it. Anger was flying in the air because people would not open up their closed-knit worldviews to admit that here was something new they didn’t know about and they had to accept the two thousandyear-old findings of another culture. Doctors, incidentally, have a tendency to adopt this “I know it all attitude,” which illustrates how little open-mindedness often plays a role in the progress of modern science. Most new discoveries or theories have to struggle themselves into existence. Even today acupuncture is still only slowly being accepted. Of course I’ve experienced acupuncture loads of times myself, have talked with and been treated by some of the best Chinese acupuncture doctors, and have seen “miracle cures” such as cripples being cured with a single needle. None of this is “miracle stuff,” however. It’s just that the common man doesn’t know the principles of this sort of science and therefore calls it a “miracle.” Not knowing the principles behind why something works doesn’t mean the practice isn’t effective. It just means it’s not understood well. After all, we saw the same thing for aspirin, and you could go so far as to say that lots in this ebook is “unproven” from the same vantage point, so while these beautifying methods have been safely used for decades, for legal purposes I always ask you to run them past your doctor. Yes, you should do that. Always run these various protocols past your personal physician.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin On the other hand, what does it mean if something is “unproven” by today’s standards? That certainly doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, does it? If I’m in a position of need and something offers promise for my condition but we don’t understand why it works, and yet it’s safe and effective, then I’m personally going to use it. That’s how practical I am … I’m not going to wait a hundred years for science to catch up. For instance in the naturopathic field of healing, where we use all sorts of “unproven remedies,” there’s a saying that runs, “a wise healer uses what works regardless of what other authorities may say to the contrary.” The same logic holds for the expected results of meditation that have been claimed for thousands of years … consistently … yet still remain unproven by modern science. If I don’t try something safe and effective because I’m scared, then Buddhism says it’s because “I lack sufficient wisdom and merit” for the cure. If that’s the case, then there’s probably nothing anyone can do to help me through natural means because I probably wouldn’t listen to them either. You always have to consider that there might be some validity to processes and procedures that have lasted several thousand years because if they weren’t effective, they would not have lasted so long. That’s what I always think to myself when I encounter something strange or unusual or unorthodox. That’s what I want people to think when I say meditation can help the complexion.

Why this unusual dialogue on meditation for illness and the inadequacies of science in proving things that are true … all in a book about Meditation for Beautiful Skin? Because I want you to understand and truly believe meditation can help you improve your health, longevity and your appearance. It does transform your skin for the better. I’ve just gone over a wide variety of techniques you can use to produce the end goal of prettier skin, but the underpinning of it all is beauty achieved through meditation. Science, however, cannot even confirm a fraction of the meditation claims by sages on how it changes the body and makes it a more fit vehicle to access the supreme, and here I am presenting you with the idea that you can meditate to help your skin and complexion. Do you see my worry and do you know what the doctors and scientists will say? Gosh, they don’t even recognize that juicing is good for you.

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin

The big question is, does meditation work in doing what I’ve said? It sure does, and I’ve explained why through discussions of chi and chi channels and physical transformations and all sorts of other things. You can find out more through the articles at www.MeditationExpert.com and delve into some of the other books on the website, such as the White Fat Cow book on changing your fate and fortune. If meditation isn’t enough for you I’ve also told you of best substances I’ve found over the years which you can eat for more beautiful skin, and products you can put on your skin that can help beautify it. I’ve taught you all sorts of things you did not think were directly related to your skin’s health, but now I hope you see the connection. In Asia I’ve guided quite a few women to beautiful skin in weeks, and here’s my short list of recommendations that will do the most for you with the least cost and effort: • •



First, take up meditation, which will get your chi to start moving and kick off all sorts of beautifying transformations. People will not only see the results in your skin, but in your personality, your energy and outlook. Second, detoxify your body using the Nature’s Pure Body Whole Body Formula (800-952-7873), GSH250 and the liver/gall bladder flush at minimum. A key to better skin is to flush the toxins out of your system and detoxification is the way to do it. Third, change your diet by removing food offenders, such as wheat, and add in a good oil product that you should consume on a daily basis. The idea here – whether you start juicing or eating spirulina, chlorella and nucleotide foods – is to stop eating the things that harm you and start eating the things that will help you build a more beautiful body.

That trio alone will do wonders for your skin in a very short time … you’re meditating, detoxifying poisons out of the body, and adding in the oils and foods that build you a beautiful complexion. If someone has a reddish complexion or is past fifty years of age, I also tell them to consume one bottle of glutamine powder (a heaping spoonful per day mixed with water—it’s tasteless), which also helps with constipation and fills out the muscles. Pretty simple, no? If you want to do more and can afford it, next I’d add the nattokinase and Vitalzym for about 3 months each. Take them at different times otherwise the

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Meditation for Beautiful Skin Vitalzym will “digest” the nattokinase. Also, don’t even bother taking these products if you’re not going to detoxify the body. Detoxification always comes first. The colloidal copper skin spray becomes something you can use forever and as to facial creams, that’s up to you but the Earth Science Beta Ginseng Moisturizing Cream gets top billing when you want to use one. Usually I don’t even recommend skin creams because after a short while the face fills out and the women usually don’t need them. All total, we’re probably talking about less than $300 here! Lastly, take up some stretching exercises and breathing practices, though they aren’t necessary, and you have the tips on how to turn your sex life into something that helps with your health and appearance or various bodywork protocols that can help with specific problems. All these techniques are aimed at causing your natural chi to arise and start flooding your body because that’s the transformative function of meditation. You just have to get it started by cultivating the mental resting we call “emptiness,” and then all the beautifying transformations will get started by themselves. As to the foods and supplements and exercises, that’s just an assist to the process. All told, that’s the method of meditation for beautiful skin. Within this book, I’ve also tried to even teach you a bit about the higher spiritual realms, such as samadhi, because the purpose of meditation isn’t for something as trivial as appearance but to enable you to attain the highest states of spiritual achievement. But guess what? You get a more perfect body anyway when you meditate, so a more beautiful body naturally falls out of the process. Lucky you. I do hope you get started with meditation and achieve your objectives, but I also hope you consider shooting for the larger objective of spiritual realization. That’s really why I wrote this book because if beauty can motivate you to get started at meditation, then you’ve adopted the tool that can take you even farther. Your entry way may be for physical perfection, but meditation leads to spiritual perfection as well.

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