Savory lentil muffins

If you or your kids have a restricted diet and breads are a thing of the past, you have to try these simple-ingredient muffins!  These are a staple in our home.

Let me start by telling you what is NOT in them before we get to the ingredients.   No gluten, no casein, no eggs, this is a lower oxalate and Failsafe bread!!  

What IS in them?
-1 cup of red lentils (soak overnight, they will be more than one cup once soaked) 
-1 tsp sea salt
-1 tsp baking soda
-1/2 tsp cream of tartar
-spice(s) of choice (I chose chives)

Put all of the ingredients into a blender, add water so that it is at about halfway up to the height of the lentils.   Blend, fill cupcake cups about 3/4 full and bake on 350 degrees for 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Makes 8 muffins. Voila!

Salty Sweet White Chocolate bars

These bad boys are GFCFSF, egg-free, low oxalate and low salicylate!!

We made them on the saltier side, so I reduced the salt by half for this recipe, and if you like sweets, you may even want to increase the xylitol.  It was a unique flavor with the interesting balance of salt and white chocolate, like combining hot and sweet, a combination of flavors that seem to almost contradict each other, but in the end, prove to compliment each other nicely.



I imagine they would be really tasty with nut butter or sunflower seed butter too.

 

The face of pleasure!

Ingredients

• 2 rice cakes - crumbled
• 1 pear - peeled and shredded
• 1/3 C cocoa butter - melted gently
• 2 Tbs ground flaxseed
• 2 Tbs birch derived xylitol
• 1 Tbs sunflower lecithin
• 1 Tbs tapioca flour
• 1/2 tsp sea salt

In a small bowl, mix the crumbled rice cakes, shredded pear, ground flaxseed, xylitol and salt. 

In an even smaller bowl, whisk together the already melted cocoa butter, tapioca flour and lecithin.

Pour this mixture into the ingredients in the larger bowl and blend well so that all of the ingredients mingle evenly.

Press into a small casserole dish, size depending on how thick you want your bars to be.

Refrigerate until firm.  They will still be fairly soft and can fall apart, so I like the smaller square size which are better for kid size hands anyway.  =)

 Voila!

Evolutionary conundrum

Evolution.

 "Biological evolution is defined as any genetic change in a population that is inherited over several generations. These changes may be small or large, noticeable or not so noticeable.  

In order for an event to be considered an instance of evolution, changes have to occur on the genetic level of a population and be passed on from one generation to the next.  

This means that the genes, or more specifically, the alleles in the population change and are passed on. These changes are noticed in the phenotypes (expressed physical traits that can be seen) of the population.  

A change on the genetic level of a population is defined as a small-scale change and is called microevolution.  

Biological evolution also includes the idea that all of life is connected and can be traced back to one common ancestor. This is called macroevolution."   -Regina Bailey

Have you ever thought about autism and autoimmune disease as a form of evolution?

Our external environment, stress hormones, our thought process, whether we exercise or not, what we eat and and inject into ourselves all determines evolutionary changes at a genetic level known as epigenetics.  This is the melting point between those who theorize that genetics are the cause and those who believe that the environment is the reason for this increased generation of autism and the like.  Epigenetics prove that it's both!

Our bodies evolve, they know how to heal, they WANT to heal.  The body is designed to eliminate toxins, but with the increase in toxins, the process isn't quite as simple as it once was and with these drastic changes comes something we refer to as "symptoms".  Symptoms...it's been drilled into our heads by doctors using medications that we don't want symptoms!!  Ick, a symptom?  Eliminate it!!  We don't like the changes we see, rightfully so, but does this mean it's all bad?

I'm not suggesting we should live with autism and autoimmune disease, not at all, in fact quite the contrary....if we can learn why we are seeing these things, perhaps we can find a more effective way of working with the body to heal.  It's easier to paddle with the current, isn't it?  I'm not getting anywhere by paddling against it, are you?

Let me give you a more specific example, one that most likely hits home for most of my readers.

I learned a little bit about the symbiotic relationship between bacteria and yeast long ago, in fact you will find this information in blog entries I have written in the past...how yeast flares to control bacterial overgrowth.  The body has created this balance for a very good reason.  The role of yeast in our body is to elevate in an attempt to manage the bacterial overgrowth. You will notice that, if you try to fight yeast without balancing the bacterial load, you experience the "symptoms" of a bacterial flare. Anyone who has even dealt with the fragile clostridia and yeast balance knows this quite intimately, unfortunately.

Let's bring this full circle.  Why is the bacteria on the rise?  I recently saw a holistic doctor speak of the important role bacteria plays in our body. Bacteria  actually protects our cells from toxins, which explains and validates the association between heavy metals/toxins and pathogen overgrowth. There is a fine-tuned balance, a magical dance between the two.  Light bulb moment!!  The more toxins, the more bacteria there will be, as it tries to manage the toxins. As bacteria increases, so does yeast.  We have SO much still to learn.

Using this simple model of what could be going on with this generation opens my eyes to the many possibilities of healing.

As you dig deeper into any "symptom" you or your child is experiencing, think about the role this symptom may play and rather than trying to find a way to eliminate it, see if you can find a place where it strategically fits into the big picture.  I bet it has a purpose!  Then pose this question to yourself and others, how can you encourage the body to find an easier path to that same place?

Homeopathy is one of many energy healing modalities and while I do plan to write a more specific blog about energy healing in the future, I thought I would lay the groundwork for why we need to begin viewing illness and healing in this light first.  Homeopathy embraces the natural evolution of the body.  We must unlearn our deep rooted allopathic lessons in order to fully respect and trust the abilities homeopathy offers us.  

Homeopathy and Epigenetics

From the link above

"...it is possible that what we are exposed to in our lifetime can affect our genetic expression. This is already well-known in areas such as cancer research, where certain cancer-controlling genes may be activated by specific toxins for example. But not only that, once the epigenetic switch is flipped and the genetic expression is changed it can be passed on in this altered state for many generations, up to 40 in current animal research."

Many cultures have followed the lead of nature, with some retaining these worldly lessons, including current-day nomads.  "We" have chosen to tame nature, to suit our needs.  This comes with a price that we will only learn the consequences of in coming generations, and I believe what we are experiencing now is just the tip of the iceberg.

Resources

• http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/Epigenetic-Influences-and-Disease-895
• http://biology.about.com/od/evolution/a/aa110207a.htm

Turn of events, my new "face"

You may have noticed that my blog has recently taken a dramatic turn from past entries.  I have always spent a lot of time reading and learning, but nothing has made more sense to us until we embraced homeopathy 100%.  Not just taking a remedy here and there, but truly embracing all it has to offer, believing in it, and learning from those who have created this fascinating ancient medicine.

The little-known facts that supplementation renders the body lazy while introducing new and potentially dangerous toxins, and that much of what we have done in the past has literally been aimed at suppressing symptoms, rather than providing true healing, have put me on a new path.  I will never again think in terms of eliminating symptoms, even with herbs.  I will never again consider ignoring the signs of degeneration and/or healing put in front of me by the body.

Our new journey stems from the deep understanding of where homeopathy and healing meet.  There is nothing more natural or more effective.  We have seen it on every level and most recently, our children have come off of EVERY supplement they have ever taken.  They no longer need anti-microbials (even natural) to keep their gut in check.  They no longer require digestive enzymes to digest their food.  Amazingly, homeopathy and SBOs (soil based organisms) have encouraged their own bodies to take over healing.  They are flourishing and they are growing (finally)!

I'm not suggesting my life is peachy every day, because detox is ugly, even when it's happening from a natural place within the body, and emotional detox can be even uglier than physical detox, but man oh man, the progress is permanent and it's complete! 

So as we move forward, my journal will take new shape, one of true healing from within.  If you are a loyal reader, you have probably seen everything we have been through.  If you are a new reader, you are have started in the right place.  Our past is a story, it's our story, but our future is riding on today.  Welcome to our new path.

The dangers of suppression

What is suppression and more importantly, what are the consequences of suppression?  Once you understand, really understand (and respect), the health consequences of symptom suppression, it will change your life.  Well, it should anyway.  It did mine!

Homeopathy has not only changed our lives physically and emotionally, but I am learning things that I have never learned from any other forms of healing in the past 5 years of biomed.  My research has unearthed information that should be shouted from megaphones everywhere, because without these little tidbits of knowledge, we are and will continue to harm our potential to remain healthy!!  We are literally sabotaging our own health!

Suppression.
The Webster Dictionary says to suppress is "to restrain from a usual course or action "

The "usual course of action" in this case would be symptoms, which in actuality, are the natural course of action being taken by our bodies to HEAL!  A symptom is bothersome to many, it prevents them from going to work, hanging with friends, feeling good, so we want it gone, but let's think about this for a brief moment.  Let's use the example of a burn.  When you burn your finger, it turns red and swells up.  What is your instinct...to run cold water over it and STOP the swelling, right?  Is this really the best course of action to take?  And what would happen, if you never ran that cold water over it?  Do you even know?  The swelling is called inflammation and inflammation is actually the way your body attempts to repair the damage that was done.  The human body is designed to heal itself!  By running cold water over it, you are literally stopping the body from doing what it needs to do!  So what should you do instead?  Believe it or not, you want to ENCOURAGE the direction the body is trying to take that damage, run very warm water over the burn!!  Not as hot as the original burn, but warm enough to be uncomfortable.  Guess what happens?  Nothing!  That's right, no blistering, no pain, although if the burn is bad enough (as was in one case when I grabbed a very hot ceramic pot and lifted it) you might have some mild residual signs left over, in my case, my burned skin was left a bit rough. Other than that, I had no blisters and no discoloring, it didn't even hurt!  

Or how about this scenario which I am SURE all of us have experienced.  FEVERS!  Why do we fear fevers so much?  A fever is the RIGHT action taken by the body when a foreign invader has taken hold.  Fever kills pathogens.  So the body knows what to do as soon as it encounters these bugs, it turns up the heat high enough to kill them!  Out of fear, most people immediately run for the fever reducers/pain relievers.  I bet you didn't know that fevers are self-limiting?!  The highest most fevers will go is 105-106 and once your body has reached this temperature, you are no longer at risk of a febrile seizure.  Fevers are misunderstood and the sales and marketing of fever reducers are aimed at fear.  The one piece of good advice I got from our worst pediatrician was to let fevers be, and that they ARE in fact self-limiting to about 105.  When you stop the fever or even just reduce it slightly, you are inhibiting the body from successfully fighting the pathogen.  So guess what happens?  It survives.  Common sense?  And don't even get me started on the topic of doctors who tell patients to use fever reducers in their kids pre-vaccination.  Good God, there is no more destructive advice than this!!  

So let's now think about a simple cold.  What happens, your body begins to purge from every orifice...not a pretty sight or feeling: snots, ear drainage, secretions galore.  Raise your hand, if you were ever guilty of taking something to eliminate this nastiness.  But again, let's think about what the body is trying to do.  It's eliminating the pathogen!!  Colds start in the nasal cavities and ears.  Mucus is designed to purge pathogens.  And common sense would say that when you stop this from happening....need I go on?  I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but really think about how ludicrous this even sounds when you think of it rationally!  Why hasn't anyone ever taught us to think about our health in this fashion?  Well, because it would hurt pharmaceutical sales, of course!

The examples of suppression are endless and we are often partaking in this dangerous act daily.  Putting creams on eczema, treating acne with topical gels, giving anti-inflammatory, pain relievers, DRUGS!!  All of these products are designed to make your life more comfortable, they do not get at the root of the problem, they don't cure anything, they only suppress.  Why do you have chronic inflammation Miss Fibromyialgia, what is causing those skin lesions Mr. Eczema....people, you are not only ignoring how your body communicates and heals, but you are downright fighting it!  Your body reacts and tries to heal itself and then you say, "Oh no you don't, I have work to go to work...I have a date to go on....etc!" and you do/use everything possible in your arsenal to eliminate the "symptoms".  Well you have just effectively eliminated healing too. 

We need to trust the body in doing it's job.  It won't have an overnight fix and you might feel yucky for a while, but when you stop the body from doing it's job, the consequences are great.  And maybe part of mother nature's magnificent design is to SLOW. YOU. DOWN.  You may not even realize that subsequent illnesses or symptoms are related to the act of suppressing other conditions, but I assure you, it is all related.  Your body is a fine tuned machine with all the equipment necessary to run optimally.  Your future health depends heavily on what you choose to do today!  I am not suggesting you shouldn't do anything at all when things run a muck, I am just saying that HOW you choose to deal with these imbalances is critical and either facilitates health progression or degeneration.

I also want to add that just because a product is "natural" doesn't mean it isn't suppressing a symptom and shutting down your body.  Anything that stops a symptom, rather than addressing it's cause directly, is suppressing the body from healing.  It's that simple.  I learned this the hard way and as we use homeopathy, which encourages natural healing, we are witnessing the host of suppression(s) we took part in, as we retrace old symptoms.  How completely and utterly eye opening.

So what are the consequences?  If you aren't addressing the reason the symptom arose in the first place and you are prohibiting the natural healing action designed by mother nature, what do you THINK is happening?  You are not only allowing illness to prevail, you are encouraging it on some level.  Sure, some minor things are superficial, but every time you eliminate the body from doing it's job, you are also reducing it's ability to learn how to respond next time, and the time after that and well, eventually, your body is going to learn to stop responding to illness.  It may take some serious research and experimenting to truly understand the underlying cause of symptoms.  It's typically not simple or cut and dry, but if you want to know more about the stages of natural detox and what they look like when they are suppressed, check out these incredible videos from Mary Coyle:

Video one

Video two

Our body is designed to detox illness, pathogens, and toxins.  When we hinder our innate healing abilities, things begin to shut down and where does this land us?  Cancer anyone?  Autism on the rise much?  Autoimmune disease is a PRIME example of suppression and inability to detoxify naturally.  HELLOOOOOO!!  This, my friends, is suppression at it's finest.  

Next time you have a headache, or inflammation, or a fever, or anything that is uncomfortable for that matter, stop and think, "what is my body trying to do?".  Don't reach for that over the counter toxin to stop your body from working.  If you love your life and your future health, just don't.  Tough it out, learn the signs of your body and do something to support it rather than tearing it down.  Think of what you have to gain from trusting your body!

Let's remember too that suppression doesn't occur only on a physical level.  We can suppress emotions and feelings which will ultimately wreak havoc on our psyche, as well.  If you can't release these emotions through discussion, consider other spiritual forms of emotional detox such as yoga, meditation, quite time for yourself or some other form of spiritual release.  Even kids can be guided to partake in these activities.  =)

Why now?

Why now?  Why didn't I find this path with homeopathy sooner?  Especially when homeopathy was the very FIRST therapy we tried with both myself and Grayson 6 years ago.

My best friend and I have discussed this at great length recently, because we wonder, could we have avoided all of the bumps in the road that lead us here?  Could we have healed ourselves and our children sooner?  Should this have been the first treatment we tried?  We unanimously agree, NO!!

We needed the path we were on.  We are who we are today, because of the path we have traveled.  We saw glimpses of who our children could be, and it drove us harder.  We learned about anatomy and physiology, because of the path we traveled.  Our diets are healthy, our environment is cleaned up, because of the research we did.  We researched and experimented and we came to incredible conclusions due to the roads we visited.  And most importantly, we met the people we needed to meet to find this path.  It wasn't put in front of us sooner for very valid reasons, we just weren't ready for it!  Every single day of our pasts have lead us to this very point in our lives.  I wouldn't change a thing. 

I am a dedicated researcher and a dedicated parent, no...that is an understatement, it might be more appropriate to define myself as anal retentive and controlling, and a little over zealous at times.  ; )  This is why it's even more undeniable that for the first time in our healing journey, we are in the right place.  I am ready and able to let go.  I am ready to hand the torch to someone else and jump on the waves.  I am ready to trust and look inside myself for guidance and confirmation that we are on the right path finally!  I'm ready, and so are they...

360 degrees of homeopathy

There are times in our lives when we have that little voice inside saying something doesn't feel right.  Do you follow that?  Or do you shove it deeper, using your brain rather than your instincts to rationalize your choices?  This little voice isn't far from the suppression of disease states.  Listen to it and you will heal, suppress it and well, you drive the disease in deeper.

We have to learn to trust our instincts more!

We have always felt like homeopathy has the potential to really get to the root of our health, regardless of what ails us.  It's been the one constant on our path, the one source of healing that we never abandoned, even through all of our biomedical choices.  But...we have never relied on it 100%.  Why?  It's clear to me now that we hadn't found the right practitioner for our children.  We had only used classical homeopathy, trusting in it's ability to make subtle changes that would perhaps cause long-term healing.   But the wow-factor was never part of classical homeopathy for us.  I have since learned that for the healthy people, classical homeopathy can be incredible, but our kids are so inundated with layers of toxins and familial illness that we can't reach the core of the person to treat classically.  Autism and autoimmune diseases are the result of an overflowing bucket of toxins and dangerous emotional states.  We need so much more than one classical remedy to heal us.

Ironically, it was our parasite journey that brought us full circle, back to homeopathy.  I had been increasingly disturbed by the recommended meds and found myself reaching for the homeopathic dilutions more and more.  I also felt like the boys' extreme reactions to either die off or the meds themselves encouraged me to seek out methods that would support the organs, remove blockages and detox the body more safely.  A diseased body houses pathogens, all kinds.  If we just keep chasing the bugs and we don't correct the immune system where it was damaged in the first place, we are chasing our tails, round and round.  I don't know about you, but I am ready to get off this merry go round!

We have made the break!!  We left biomed and have fully embraced homeopathy and boy does it feel right!  We researched methods we feel comfortable with and with each day of treatment, we had enough confidence to eventually remove everything other than SBOs (which have been significantly reduced to 2 capsules a day for the boys) and just a few basic minerals.  We couldn't be happier with the progress we are seeing.  I always thought these stories were only for those who wrote books, the rare lucky cases who hit their remedy just right.  I've been proven wrong and couldn't be more happy with our choice.  And this time, treatment isn't reserved just for the kids, I've jumped on board too.

If you have that little voice telling you something, don't ignore it, embrace it!