But, here’s an out-of-balance situation that may be new to you.  It’s related to the types of food you eat – contractive and expansive foods.  The terms “contractive” and “expansive” aren’t far-out words, but we don’t often hear them applied to foods.

“Contractive”, as it relates to foods, refers to a drawing in, squeezing, or limiting effect the foods have on the body.  We’re not talking about reducing body size.  We’re talking about an internal tightening or restricting – up-tightness.  “Expansive” relates to opening out, blossoming, or inflating.  Again, not body size – it’s an internal effect. Both expansive and contractive foods can stress your body and affect your mental attitude.

In general, acidifying foods are contractive.  They lead to an up-tight attitude.  Similarly, in general, alkalizing foods are expansive foods that promote a loose, laid-back, possibly spacey outlook.  A few foods, however, are neither highly expansive nor highly contractive; they’re neutral.

Neutral foods are the least-stress foods.  The most neutral of all foods is nature’s absolute best get-this-small-person-off-to-a-good-start food – mother’s milk.  But mother’s milk is a short-term food for infants.  For toddlers through adults, the foods that put the least stress on the body are those closest to neutral.  Least-stress foods on the contractive side are grains, nuts, seeds, and beans.  Least-stress foods on the expansive side are vegetables and fruits.

Fruits and vegetables are slightly expansive.  Increasingly expansive are fruit juice, tea, coffee, chocolate, syrups (honey and molasses), sugar, wine, beer, liquor, and the most expansive of all, prescription, over-the-counter, and recreational (usually illegal) drugs.

On the contractive side, grains, nuts, seeds, and beans are slightly contractive.  Increasingly contractive are butter, chicken, fish, eggs, fowl, red meat, and the top contractor, salt.  Contractive foods are essentially acid-producing foods, and acid-producing foods are essentially contractive foods.

Your body achieves a level of balance, even if the foods you eat are either mostly contractive or mostly expansive.  The balancing results may show up in your personality.  A predominantly contractive personality expresses itself in various forms of quick temper, explosiveness, or aggression.  If not outright physical aggression, it may be masked as constant nervousness, physical over-activity, or verbal over-activity.  Contractive personalities are always busy, always over scheduled, often flying off the handle and foot tapers.

A predominantly expansive personality is casual, laid-back, unable to concentrate, not “grounded” and minimally motivated.  Despite their laid-backness, expansive personality people tend to be worriers.  They don’t fidget.  Some overzealous vegetarians can become so expansive; they appear to be on “cloud nine” – barely in touch with reality.

Drugs, alcohol, chocolate, coffee, tea, and fruit juices are big favorites of the expansive.  The most expansive substances we can put into our bodies are drugs.  But items that appear lower on the expansive list can have “drug-like” effects and also leave their mark on the personality.

Few of us limit our diets exclusively to only contractive or only expansive foods.  Most meals contain some of both.  Consequently, most of us don’t exhibit the dramatic personality types of extreme aggression or extreme spaciness.  We’re more likely to be moderate in our contractive or expansive personality displays.  We may be moderately aggressive – impatient, bossy, negative, overly critical of others, generally at odds with the world, but able to function well enough.  Or we may be moderately spacey – disorganized, easily distracted, have trouble following a project through to completion, worry a lot, generally have an outwardly easy-going outlook, but grounded enough to do those things that ought to be done.

Highly contractive or highly expansive foods mean a highly stressed body.  And we’re not telling you that vegetables and fruits are the answer to all of life’s problems.  We’re telling you that you need to eat plant food in order to give your body the nutrients it needs to keep your internal environment a neat place for your cells to live.  Most Americans eat some fruits and vegetables.  However, all too many of us don’t eat enough.  Your body is geared to handle vegetables and fruits.  And even if they aren’t your favorite foods now, they will climb on your “gee that’s pretty good” list when your body finds out what it has been missing – when your body is able to find the balance between contractive and expansive.

From politics to parenting, from appearances to actions, judgment by an onlooker or outsider is futile and frustrating. Judgments, such as, “The government should intervene in/keep their nose out of the situation in somewhere land,” or, “That mother should discipline/stop abusing her child,” excite and frustrate the judge, yet they have absolutely no effect on the judged.  Judgment does not change those being judged; it merely fosters anxiety and field interference in the self-appointed judge.

Despite the dictionary description of judgment as a process of evaluation, from a health standpoint, judgment and evaluation are not synonymous.  The process of evaluation poses no threat to the body.  Evaluating the pros and cons of a situation in an effort to make an informed decision is based on determining which of two or more courses of action has the greatest potential for the most beneficial outcome.  An element of control over the outcome distinguishes evaluation from judgment.  Evaluations look for the best resolution to achieve a future condition.  Judgment deals with conditions of the present or past.  For example, investment possibilities can be evaluated to determine those that have the greatest potential for the greatest yield in the future.  That’s evaluation.   Judgment is made after you have bought the stock and see whether or not your evaluation and decision were wise.

Evaluation is a rational function of your mind, tinged with beliefs and perhaps a whisper of emotional personal preference.  Judgment is emotional.  Emotions can (and usually do) stimulate and sustain inappropriate defense physiology.  That’s what makes judgment hazardous to your health.  The judgment itself isn’t the problem; it’s the effects on your body (and relationships) that is the problem.  Keep in mind that nothing is good or bad, right or wrong, until you judge it so and then it is merely your perception.  That is all the judgment really is – one’s perception of a given event, person, action or thing. 

One of the greatest ironies of judgment is that, when we are judging we think we are performing positive thinking because we are sure that our judgment is right.  However, we believe the mere act of judging is a negative one.  To judge is to rate something using our opinion as the scale.  Sometimes your opinion is based on certain theologies, philosophies, or doctrines that have been handed down for generations, but that does not change the basis for your judgment, which remains your opinion.  It also doesn’t matter that your opinion may be one that is held by others, perhaps many others.  We judge when we want others to learn our lessons.

We believe that man has been given the power to think freely and that we often abuse this privilege by performing such acts as judgment with our minds.  You cause a conflict, balance, or blockage when you use your free will to perform acts of judgment, hatred and the like.  This conflict within you will manifest itself in illness and as we have said before, the illness, condition or disease will vary from person to person.  However, it is certain that some form of ill health will be created.

There is an immense and calming freedom that comes with loving unconditionally and letting loose of judgment.  When you learn to love unconditionally you will no longer feel the need to judge others or their actions.  You will no longer feel the pangs of jealousy or the fires of hatred burning within you.  You won’t be chained to fear or lost in loneliness.  It is a difficult trait to overcome, a hard habit to break if it has become commonplace in one’s life.  However, we know that when a higher level of consciousness is attained, when you become in tune in soul and spirit, then the need or urge to judge dissipates.  It becomes no longer necessary.  It will no longer be a part of your life or your way of thinking.  Once you can unconditionally love others and the world around you, you are freed of all those negative feelings and of the stress they cause your body.

So, just what is stress? Stress is more than feeling frustrated, anxious or pressed for time. Stress is anything that causes your body to change the way it is functioning right now!

Although we tend to think of stress as purely emotional, life is a never-ending series of three different types of stress: physical stress, emotional stress and nutritional stress. Your body is designed to survive all three kinds of stress. And your body is not only resilient; it’s tenacious. It can survive a lot of stress, but you may not be happy with how you feel during the survival process.

Physical stress comes from an actual threat of injury to your body. It comes as a package deal along with physical activity and physical accidents. Given the opportunity, your body will repair accident-damaged tissue and bone in a matter of days or weeks. Similarly, given the opportunity, exercise injuries heal in a short time. Although a physical accident or trauma may leave a scar of some sort on the surface or structure of your body, physical trauma should not impose long-term stress on your body. The master plan calls for your body to take care of the immediate needs of a physical stress, then return to business as usual. No problem. Physical stress is short-term.

Emotional stress, on the other hand, comes from within. It originates in your conscious mind, your feelings, memories, beliefs, and your attitudes toward events and people in your life. Emotional stress comes from your conscious responses to events around you – events perceived with your five senses. You can suffer emotional stress along with physical stress. Being physically attacked, beaten and robbed by a club-wielding thug is short-term physical stress that can drag with it long-term emotional stress.

You also generate emotional stress by your response to a situation or event. As long as emotional stress continues, your physiology, directed by Innate, must adapt to handle it. One of these adaptations might be chronic high blood pressure. The good news is that you don’t have to respond in ways that put undue stress on your body. You may not have much choice about the situation, but you do have a choice about how you respond to the situation.

Nutritional stress is an ever-present companion of eating and drinking. Your body must react to everything that goes into it – a bite of toast or juicy steak, a vitamin pill or prescription drug, concentrated smog or cigarette smoke. It doesn’t matter. Your body must handle it. It must change the way it was functioning before the substance entered through mouth, lungs, or injection to take care of the new situation. If you ate a banana and your body didn’t switch into a let’s-take-care-of-this-new-substance mode, the banana would sit there and rot, ferment. Not a pretty picture. You would be in trouble.

Your body changes the way it is functioning when you drink a glass of water, a cup of coffee, a soft drink or an alcoholic drink. Anything! Your body MUST change its current function in order to process newly introduced food and drink. Recall our definition of stress: anything that causes your body to change the way it is functioning right now. Your body MUST respond to any substance that enters it.

Stress itself isn’t a problem. Your responses to stress can cause problems. How – and how long – you RESPOND to a particular stress is the key. Your responses are always perfect. How long they last determines how you feel mentally and physically. Responses also determine how healthy you are. Stress responses are key players in the game of health.

All of this may imply that physiological responses to stress are the root cause of physical problems. Not so! Responses are always perfect. They are dictated by Innate. You have absolutely no control over how your body will respond. But you do have a great deal of control over the stimuli that prompt the responses – mainly thoughts and actions.

Thoughts, memories, and emotions override the power of the body’s perfect intelligence by forcing the program to respond to a situation, which is not really life-threatening, even though the survival instinct believes it to be so.  We call it, Subconscious Emotional Memory Override (SEMO) and it often runs our physical bodies.  These stored memory patterns elicit negative responses, leading us to ill health and often, disease.  In order to neutralize a negative subconscious memory or emotion, we teach the following steps of forgiveness.  True forgiveness of negative experiences you have lived through and with, can actually change your state of health.  These forgiveness steps are quite simple in concept, but keep in mind they must be carried out with feeling and emotion.  If you are not sincere, then you are wasting your time and energy.

Self Actualization

Before performing the steps of forgiveness, some self-actualization work must be done.  To become more aware of what is affecting your life, do this memory update:  1) Identify a situation, action or person you feel needs to be forgiven.  Think of something from your past you did not like or you wish had turned out differently.  What you identify may have occurred at any time in your life – yesterday, last week, last year or when you were six years old.  A person held in esteem or great affection is often identified.  This is an experience from the past which comes into your conscious mind often.  2) Acknowledge this incident did, in fact, occur.  Think about the situation, recalling your feelings, thoughts and emotions on the subject.  3) Realize trying to forget such events actually just places them in the subconscious where they fester and will finally cause ill health.

The Forgiveness Process

Having identified and thought about a person, action or situation, you are now ready to begin the steps of forgiveness.  It is important to note here you do not have to agree with the actions of the other person or the event in order to forgive.  You are forgiving for your own sake, not someone else’s.  Until you forgive the past, this other person or event is controlling your life.  This is true even if the other person is now dead!  In addition, when you truly forgive, you give up the urge to “get even”.  You will no longer feel the need for revenge.  You will actually be thankful this event occurred in your life.  You will see the good in it for you.  If you follow the steps, with sincerity of heart, you are on the way to enlightenment as well as to improved health.

5 Step Process

1. Self forgiveness.  You must first forgive yourself for allowing the event to affect your health.  Forgive yourself for any harm you may have caused yourself because of this situation, action, or person.  Literally say, “I forgive myself for any harm I may have caused myself because of (whomever or whatever situation/action).”
2. Forgive the other person.  Next, you must forgive the other person for any harm he or she may have caused you.  Again, literally say these words, “I forgive (whomever) for any harm he/she may have caused me.”
3. Give the other person permission to forgive you.  It is not necessary or even recommended that the other person knows you are taking this step.  It is, in fact, immaterial.  It doesn’t matter whether they know or not, because you are doing this for you, not for him or her.  The other person may even be deceased and that’s okay, too.  The forgiveness takes place within you.  It is not important where the other person is, or even if he is living.  You now say, “I give (whomever) absolute permission to forgive me for any harm I may have caused him or her.”
   
4. Learn the Lesson.  Not only must these situations and people be forgiven, you must actually learn to see the good in it.  You must learn the lesson it brought into your life if you are to be truly disconnected from that person.  Why is it good that this happened to you?  What did you or can you learn from it?  Maybe the best thing you can think of is you would never do this to someone else.  Or quite possibly you learned that you are able to help others who experience similar treatment.  The point is, learn from the situation.  See the good in it for you.  Understand how you are better because of it.  It is in the past.  Nothing ever happens to you, it happens for you to learn a lesson.  Be thankful for the lesson, not the experience.
5. Wish the situation and person(s) involved well. This is the final step in which will set you free and allow health, happiness and success to exist.

The mere act of loving creates a feeling of peace and fulfillment within us.  It is a joyous emotion and one that is necessary and vital to your existence.  History has shown that children raised in environments in which they did not receive love, grew to be cold, angry and often violent adults.  The lack of love can cause extreme loneliness, anger or other negative emotions.  These negative feelings, left to grow internally, will manifest in disease or ill health.

Unconditional love is the ultimate positive feeling.  And feelings are energy generators.  Positive feelings harmonize with your personal field.  Your personal field is perfect and positive, so positive feelings enhance the positivity and take nothing away from it.  Negative feelings, on the other hand, suppress or lower energy from your personal field.  Strong feelings affect both body and field.  And strong positive feelings – love, acceptance, joy, appreciation – are the ideal “field fuel”.

Finding unconditional love in the loss of a cherished family member or life-supporting job isn’t easy.  But it is not only possible, it is necessary for your mental and physical health.  That’s where the “learning” comes in.  We learn by recognizing and appreciating that everything that happens in our life is an opportunity to find an element of good in that experience.    Of course, some lessons are easier to recognize than others.

Unconditional love, given and received, promotes good health and harmony in soul and spirit.  True peace is an all-encompassing experience brought on by unconditional love; peace is made known to you by your mind.  Peace and healing result when there is a harmonious balance between your soul (mind, memory and body) and your spirit (God).  Unconditional love is the source of peace.  It is by loving more and expecting less that you can reach this state of peaceful harmony.  Unconditional love creates peace, harmony, and oneness in soul and spirit.

Here are some tips for reaching a state of peace through…Unconditional Love

• Each time you perform an act of love you feed your spiritual field with positive energy.  This serves to heal the soul. Make it a part of your life to do something loving for yourself and someone else every single day.  This will help to balance your energy and remove blockage within your body.
• Keep in mind that every negative thought or feeling needs to be “canceled” or neutralized.  To do this, replace the negative emotion with a positive feeling of unconditional love.  Your love needs to be as strong as your negative feeling in order for this to work.
• Work to attain oneness in soul and spirit by practicing unconditional love.  Remember, each act of judgment, hate, anger, etc. serves to create separateness.  As long as you feel separated from God, you block the energy that works to allow you to walk as one with God.
• Set aside some quiet time each day to meditate on your life, your intentions, and our thoughts.  Consider each area of your life and draw conclusions, which will help to bring your soul and spirit together as one.  Reflect on how you can change aspects of your life by filling your days with unconditional love.
• Keep in mind that you do not have to love the personality or the actions of everyone.  What you need to love is the spirit within them, even if they have let their egotistical self block the perfect flow or display of that spirit.  Love them as your equal in God’s creation.  Love them because you share the universal consciousness and spirit with them.
• Thinking one way and acting another creates disharmony between your soul and your spirit.  Be true and congruent within yourself.  Your thoughts and actions need to agree.  In other words, practice what you preach – even to yourself.