Books and Free Excerpts

The Healthy Living Space: 70 Practical Ways to Detoxify the Body and Home ( Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001).

In our day, with the environment and the body intensely polluted, the need for regular detoxification is acute. The only way to survive and flourish in such an environment is to undertake a comprehensive program of internal and external cleansing. The abiding assumption in this book is that detoxification, the basis of true and lasting health, must address both poles of one's living environment - the body and the home. Body and home are reflections of each other and must be addressed simultaneously.

It is essential that we detoxify both poles of our living space at the same time: our body and our home. If you cleanse your body but live in a toxic living space, your home will eventually sicken you; if you detoxify your home but do nothing to purge your body of its toxic burden, the healthy home will not prevent the health consequences of bodily toxicity. Your internal toxins will gradually sicken you.

A clean (detoxified) house and a clean (detoxified) body complement each other, leading to a state of harmony, balance, and deep health. The goal is a healthy body and home - a healthy living space - and the means to get there are the 70 practical steps presented in this book. The Healthy Living Space provides the instructions on how to regain a healthy body and home based on safe, proven, nontoxic, noninvasive, self-care methods from the field of alternative medicine.

This is a how-to, self-care focussed book on alternative medicine applications for better health through sytematic detoxification, or cleansing, of both our internal and external living environment. The essence of this book is self-care: you can do it yourself. All of the procedures recommended in the book can be done by the average nonmedically-trained person, although in some cases professional consultation is recommended as a complement to one's own informed initiative.

The procedures - I call them Healthy Living Space Detoxifiers - are supported by scientific research and the clinical experience of numerous physicians, health care practitioners, and detoxification experts, seven of whom were interviewed specifically for this book. For each of the 70 Detoxifiers, I explain the reason for doing them - that is, the nature of the toxicity addressed - and the steps to follow to do them….

Toxicity is a broad spectrum of pollution. It affects not only the body and our physical living space, but our emotions, mind, and energy field - all the aspects of being human. Similarly, toxicity in the home can affect it, as a living space, in all aspects of its being - how it feels to be in that space, what its energy is like. You will see that, remarkably, placing your bed in the wrong spot in your bedroom can be just as toxic to you as breathing the outgassed fumes from a new synthetic carpet. It poisons you on a different level.

The 70 Healthy Living Space Detoxifiers work from the more obvious physical pole of our individual being and living environment into the more interior aspects (emotions and thoughts) and beyond this into the energy field in which our body and home reside. Ultimately, the healthy living space is one that is healthy for consciousness, for our life as awake, aware human beings living in a body that lives in an indoor living space set in a living external environment.

We don't know what it feels like to be truly healthy; our great grandparents might have, but we don't. How much of our view of the world and ourselves is conditioned by being filled with toxic substances from our industrialized world? It's a question we can answer only from the inside, after we have detoxified and taken a fresh look around at things, at our body, home, and world - a prospect which might serve as an inducement to start detoxifying.

Detoxification is not merely a medical issue, a route to better health. It isn't something to do only if you're "into" being healthy. Whether we are toxic or nontoxic defines every aspect of our physical existence, our feelings, thoughts, how our body works, how we see the world, how consciousness lives in matter. Toxicity deals with the foundations of our life, with how every cell, molecule, and organ functions, or dysfunctions. With how we think, or don't think; how we feel, or don't feel. With how our thinking and feeling are distorted or compromised or not fully available to us. A great deal is at stake.

The extent of toxicity in our environment today - body, home, and world - is shocking and distressing, but the situation is not hopeless. There is much an individual person can do to reverse this, both at home and in the world. Individual actions and choices count; they have an impact globally. If you start detoxifying and change your consumer habits, this starts to send little shock waves through the marketplace. You start thinking, feeling, and acting differently; you no longer are conditioned or weighed down by toxicity, and you see your responsibility in the world in a new light, or perhaps for the first time. Life after detoxification can be refreshing, even liberating.

Here is a brief survey of the ground we'll be covering in The Healthy Living Space, a roadmap for the way to detoxification. The book is divided into three parts. Part One, The Health Perils of the Toxic Body and Home, discusses the nature of toxicity, defining a wide range of toxins from chemicals to energy influences (Chapter 1). It documents the injurious biological effect of toxins, their prevalence in the world, and how they compromise immunity and produce illness. The biochemical processes of detoxification (through the liver, kidneys, and intestines) are explained in Chapter 2, showing how you can work with your internal detoxification system

The range of toxins discussed, among many others, includes estrogen-mimicking industrial chemicals, irradiated and genetically-modified foods to radon, stagnant life force energy, electromagnetic pollution, and harmful energies from the Earth itself. The book also considers the effect of two levels of toxins not ordinarily considered in this kind of discussion: unresolved emotional toxicity and auric toxicity, which means deleterious energies in the field surrounding the human body known as the aura.

Part Two, Creating the Healthy Body Living Space, addresses the safe, systematic detoxification of the body using natural remedies and alternative medicine practices, and 19 laboratory tests are outlined in Chapter 3, each of which provides essential (and low-cost) information about your specific level of toxicity and biochemical ability to withstand toxicity and disease.

Next, in Chapter 4, we look at practices and lifestyle changes for internal cleansing, such as dietary modifications, the need for pure water, the avoidance of contaminated foods and beverages, and the benefits of short-term fasting, among others. It isn't all avoidance. There are some positive things to do, such as take healing baths to reduce stress, using music to melt your tension, bouncing on a trampoline to move your lymph, or sitting in a sauna, as explained in Chapters 4 and 6. These are the before and after aspects of detoxification, how to prepare it, how to sustain the benefits.

In Chapter 5, you'll get detailed instructions on how to detoxify your liver, kidneys, lymphatic system, and intestines, and why you should regard your teeth (and what dentists have done to them) as potential sources of toxicity that need to be addressed (Chapter 7).

Tramautic emotional experiences act as toxins when left unresolved in the system and have been shown by medical research to significantly contribute to illness. So in Chapter 8, the effective role of flower remedies is discussed in conjunction with a leading practitioner. In a similar manner, unsuspected injurious energies and presences in the energy field, or aura, surrounding the human act as toxins, contributing to states of ill health and numerous physical and mental symptoms. You'll find techniques for diagnosing and removing auric pollution, as well as a fascinating explanation of where it comes from in Chapter 9.

Part Three, Creating the Healthy Home Living Space, looks at the layers of toxicity in the typical indoor living environment, and how to remove them or minimize their negative health effects. Chapter 10 discusses what is called "sick building syndrome," a field of research that documents the numerous ways in which structures and contents of a house or apartment contribute to ill health. The emerging discipline of Baubiologie (the "biological, living house") is detailed, along with its many practical tips on detoxifying the physical aspects of one's home. Some of the tips include the use of pollution-absorbing houseplants, negative ionization, the use of nontoxic cleaning products, air filtration, and full spectrum lighting.

Building on this, the book moves to the next level of household toxicity, the realm described by feng shui (fung-SHOOWAY), the increasingly popular Chinese art of placement. The shapes of rooms, the orientation of a house, the placement of furniture in a room, and many other similar factors effect the flow of energy through the house. This flow, in turn, either supports or hinders the health of the occupants. In Chapter 11, feng shui experts provide numerous practical tips for improving energy flow in a house and for removing the places of stagnation or energy toxicity in the house that contribute to ill health.

In Chapter 12, we look at how harmful energies from the Earth itself or the land around the home can work through your house and make you toxic. Such energies include aberrant electromagnetic fields, deriving from electrical power lines and/or underground water currents.

The Healthy Living Space will show you how your body and home form a living system in constant interaction, feedback, and communication. Lasting health can be had when you consider both in the health equation and when you address the toxic burden of both at the same time. You live in two places: your body and your home. Both can be toxic, both can be healthy, but given the current state of the world, neither are likely to be healthy without your active participation. You already know what a toxic living space feels like; all of us in the Western industrialized part of the world know this today. But what might a detoxified living space feel like?

Buy this book here: