S2 EP285 – The Three Pillars of Health and Longevity

Hi everyone, Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m talking about what creates health and longevity. As many of you know, I was a sickly child and I really, really didn’t like being sick at all. I hated missing out on things. So by the time I was 22, I was very motivated to do whatever I could do to get healthy, and I read two books that really actually changed my life. One of them was called The Poisons in Your Foods by Longgood, and the other was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. 

And I realized in reading those books, what was happening with our food. And so what I did is that I threw everything out of my kitchen. And at that time in Los Angeles, there was one little tiny health food store and I started shopping there. And I’ve been doing that now for, oh, let’s see, 65 years, something like that. And ’cause this next month I’m gonna be 86 years old and I’m in very, very good health. I don’t have any of the problems that most of the people my age have, and that’s what I wanna talk about today. I wanna talk about what I call The Three Pillars of Health and longevity. 

At that time, I was very addicted to sugar and junk food, so it wasn’t easy. I had to use a lot of willpower to not eat the sugar. And my weight was a constant issue. In fact, it was one of the biggest issues I thought I had. I was always going on diets and taking meds and trying to lose weight because of the various food addictions that I had. Now, I always did exercise. I was always, I was an athletic kid and I always like to exercise. But you know, when you get older, the kinds of exercise that you do change, and what’s important is to find something that you really, really love to do that you don’t do just because you have to, but that you do because you love to do. 

And for me, this is walking in nature. I love to walk in nature. I love the energy, the frequency of nature. I find that, as I’ve often said, I can talk to my spiritual guidance much easier when I’m in nature. So I do walk every morning. I have for probably 50 years every morning or almost every morning with my dog, and I do my Inner Bonding work out in nature. But even with all that I was doing, as I previously shared before Inner Bonding, I was getting sicker and sicker, and I just didn’t know why. 

I was doing the first two pillars, eating organic food, eating like people of my background ate 400 years ago and exercising. But I didn’t know about the third and most important pillar, which is managing stress, managing all of your feelings. I didn’t learn this until I was 45 years old and met Dr. Erika Chopich, and we created Inner Bonding in 1985. It’s amazing what this did for me, because even though I had had a ton of therapy for years and years, nobody told me that I was responsible for my feelings. 

So one of the things that I learned in practicing Inner Bonding was how to take responsibility for my own feelings so that I wasn’t a victim, so that I wasn’t blaming anybody else and feeling like a victim of what other people were doing. That’s a huge change in terms of the amount of stress that one has. Once I started to take responsibility for my own feelings instead of feeling like a victim, my stress level went way down. The other thing that Inner Bonding did for me, one of the biggest life changing things, one of the main things was that I learned how to access my higher guidance by accessing my guidance. 

I could tune into what was loving to me. ’cause before that, I wasn’t being loving to me at all. I was very self abandoning. And so learning to access my guidance, which Erika was a huge help in that, was very life changing for me in terms of having a role model of what it’s like to take loving care of yourself. And then the other thing that happened was that because of having that access to my guidance, I had the courage to take loving action. It’s not always easy to take loving action because you don’t know what other people are gonna do, how they’re gonna treat you, when you stop doing what you’ve been doing, which for me was caretaking and starting to take care of myself. 

So practicing Inner Bonding gave me the courage to start to take loving care of myself. And by doing that, by taking care of myself and by connecting with my higher guidance, I no longer felt alone. I rarely felt lonely. I didn’t feel that anxiety or depression that I used to feel. I didn’t feel the guilt and the shame. At one point in my life, I felt like, oh my God, how can I get rid of this shame? But with practicing Inner Bonding and learning to stop judging myself and learning to love myself, all those painful feelings went away, which of course goes a long way in dealing with stress. 

So now at my age when I’m tested, I test way younger than my actual age. I don’t have degenerative disease, I don’t have cognitive decline, I have a lot of energy, I’m still learning and growing every day, I’m still working as much as I always did, I do a lot. And so I know that these three pillars, eating organic food, getting daily exercise, and practicing Inner Bonding throughout the day is a secret of health and longevity. But it’s not always easy to change your lifestyle. 

So I wanna talk a little bit about how to go about changing your lifestyle when you first go into a health food store. If you’ve never been in one, it can be kind of overwhelming because things are quite different in a health food store than they are in a regular market. So if you know anybody who is eating organic, get somebody to go with you. It’s a lot easier if you have a mentor who can take you through a health food store and show you around, show you what’s available. So if you have a friend who can go with you, that would be great.

Get to know what’s there, slowly, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. I’ve often had people tell me, “Oh, I walked in there, I got so overwhelmed that I just walked out.” You don’t want that to happen. You wanna get to know what’s in that health food store. And you don’t want to think like you have to change your lifestyle like today, all of a sudden. Start slowly to move away from fast junk food and processed foods and into good foods. You don’t have to do it in a day. You don’t have to do it all at once. 

One of the things that’s so important for health and wellbeing is to have fermented foods with every meal. Before there were refrigerators, people fermented foods so that they wouldn’t spoil, and they ended up having these fermented foods with every meal. And what that does is it continues to plant the seeds for the good bacteria in your gut. As many of you know, the gut is the seed of the immune system. It’s at least 80% of the immune system. And you wanna keep your gut healthy by eating the foods that plant the good bacteria and feed the good bacteria. 

So fermented foods plant the good bacteria. And then if you eat fruits and vegetables, particularly vegetables, that feeds the good bacteria. So what I do is I’ve learned to make my own sauerkraut and a bunch of other fermented foods, and particularly I make yogurt and keefer and that I’ve been doing for years and years. And I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m so healthy. I can get raw milk at a farm near here, but it’s just as good to go to a health food store and buy a milk such as Supernatural, which is pasteurized at a low temperature so that it doesn’t destroy the good bacteria that’s in the milk. 

If you want to learn how to make yogurt and keefer, go to one of my favorite sites. It’s called culturesforhealth.com. I have learned so much from that website. They have many, many videos to teach you how to make cultured food. That’s where I learned how to make my delicious sourdough bread made with sprouted grains. Ancient grains, not the current wheat has too much gluten in it for anybody. So you don’t wanna be making bread out of the current wheat. If you wanna make bread, there are ancient grains available such as einkorn, or even grains such as sprouted rye. 

I always buy the flowers that have been sprouted, and you may have to look around the internet for the sprouted flowers, but bread is actually quite easy to make. And the the sprouted sourdough is absolutely delicious. So I encourage you to go to culturesforhealth.com and learn how to ferment foods. So often when people come to our house and they eat our foods that we make, they say, “Oh my God, this food is so good. Why is this food so good?” And they don’t realize that doing a little bit of cooking, I don’t take a lot of time to do it. 

But doing a little bit of cooking and learning how to make good, healthy food tastes so good. You don’t actually have to give up what you love, but you have to change it in a way that you’re eating organic, grass fed. If you’re not a vegetarian, grass fed meats and poultry, organically grown fruits and vegetables because the foods that you buy in the market are just completely devitalized, foods that are made on factory farms are completely devitalized. So I wanna talk about exercise a little bit more because it’s so important for you to find something you love to do that you can do forever, that you can do your whole life, and that you don’t have to force yourself to do things like walking or biking or hiking or yoga or dance or swimming.

It needs to be something you really, really want to do, not something you have to do. If you get up in the morning and you tell yourself, oh, I have to get up and I have to go out and exercise, there’s gonna be a resistance to that. Maybe you’ll do it for a while, but if it’s not something you really love to do after a while, you’re probably not gonna do that anymore. ’cause whenever you tell yourself what you have to do, there might be a resistance to that. And so find what you really love to do. Maybe it’s just putting on music and dancing around wherever it is you live. 

Maybe it’s going to a gym, maybe it’s going to a local swimming pool and swimming there. Maybe it’s going online and taking a yoga class. But whatever it is, let it be something that you look forward to. Like, even though I’ve been walking every day or almost every day for probably over 50 years, I look forward to it. I look forward ’cause I walk in nature, fortunately. I live rurally and there’s beauty all around and I love it. And I love the energy of nature. So it’s easy for me to go out and walk every morning, even if it’s hot outside or even if it’s really cold, I just bundle up and I go, even if it’s snowing, I generally go. 

So let me talk more about the third pillar. Inner Bonding. When you’re practicing Inner Bonding, it means that you have your inner baby monitor on all the time. And by that I mean that if you had a baby and you put the baby to sleep, you have a baby monitor so you can hear the baby cry. What we need to learn to do in step one of Inner Bonding is to have that inner baby monitor on so that you’re aware of what you’re feeling. This is one of the big keys, is being aware of what’s happening in your body both physically and emotionally, so that if you’re feeling anything other than peaceful and full inside, you go inside and do an Inner Bonding process. 

Now, different people have different challenges with Inner Bonding. If you’re a particularly empathic person, you need to learn to pay as much attention to your feelings and needs as you do to others. Empathic people are naturally tuned into others’ feelings, and it’s very easy for you to just forget about your own feelings. I’ve had that challenge my whole life that I’m an empathic person, a very empathic person. I easily tune into other people’s feelings. It’s easy for me to forget about my own. So I really wanna encourage you to practice being aware of your own feelings. 

Now, if you learn to be a needy person, where you look to other people to fill you up when you feel empty, you need to learn to be a loving adult for your own feelings and needs. You need to be practicing Inner Bonding, developing the neural pathways in your brain for the loving adult so that you can learn to be the loving mom and dad for your own inner child and not be needy of somebody else taking care of you in the ways that you need to be taking care of yourself right now, which is physically, emotionally, spiritually, organizationally in your relationships and perhaps financially. 

The more you learn to take care of yourself, the less needy you’re going to be with other people and the better your relationships will be. Now, if you tend to be an angry person, anger is often a projection of some way that your inner child is angry at you for self abandonment, for abandoning yourself in various ways. So instead of dumping your anger out on others, give your inner child permission to be angry at you. Do the three part Inner Bonding anger process where you let your inner child get angry at someone in the present, then angry at someone in the past who reminded you of the person in the present. 

And then letting your inner child get angry at you for any ways you are abandoning yourself that will bring the issue home to personal responsibility. One of the most important things in practicing Inner Bonding is being aware of your intention. Because this governs so much of health and longevity, hopefully you will be willing to be on the lifetime path of learning about loving yourself and others to stay vital and alive for your whole life. 

You might live long, and do you want to live long, healthy? I do. I wanna live long, healthy, and then just drop dead of old age. I don’t want to linger in illness, and I doubt you want to linger in illness. And so I really encourage you to be practicing these three pillars, which is eating organic food, getting daily exercise, and practicing Inner Bonding throughout a day. Now, there also are other pillars of longevity that are very important. 

Other aspects of health that are part of loving yourself, such as being a part of community research has shown that being a part of a community is vitally important for our health and longevity. So if you tend to isolate, realize that’s not very good for your health and longevity, you need to reach out and find a way. There’s different ways of creating community. And the other thing that’s so important for health and longevity is to be aware of what you’re passionate about. You might be passionate about your work and that’s great, but if you’re not, maybe there are hobbies that you can be passionate about. 

But being passionate, being excited about something, is also vitally important for health and longevity, especially if you retire. So many people retire and then they just go downhill because there’s nothing that they’re really interested in. So before you get to that retirement age, it’s really important for you to be tuning into what you’re excited about, what would be fun for you, what’s passionate for you. It may be something creative, it may be some kind of volunteer work, some way of helping the planet, but it’s up to you to tune into what you’re passionate about, to both create community and discover your passion. 

So I’d like you to take a moment to visualize what you want and keep this visual in your mind to motivate yourself, to learn, to be loving to yourself. It’s learning to be loving to yourself. That is really the secret of longevity because if you learn to define your own beautiful inner child, your own true soul essence, then hopefully you wanna take care of that inner child in ways that create health and longevity. You want to stay tuned into your feelings. 

You want to create a healthy home for your soul to live in by eating good, clean, organic food. You wanna keep this house of the soul running well so you’re motivated to exercise. The more your intention is to learn to love yourself, the easier it is for you to learn to take loving care of yourself. And this is why I encourage you to learn about and join my bimonthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

What happens in my bimonthly masterclass Master Circle is that you will learn so much about loving yourself. You will learn so much about practicing Inner Bonding because I will bring you through an Inner Bonding process. I will talk on a topic that a participant has asked me to talk on, and then I will be working with those of you who wanna work with me for 15, 20 minute sessions, what I call laser sessions. And these sessions, even though they’re short, they go very deep. And what happens is that not only can you learn from other people’s experience, but you can see the power of Inner Bonding. 

You can see how quickly you can move through something that may be very upsetting or painful for you in 15 or 20 minutes with my doing these laser sessions. And so being a part of this Master Circle is extremely helpful in learning and practicing Inner Bonding, in learning to truly be there as a loving adult to love who you truly are. I’m sending you my love and my blessings.