Grow a New Body Quotes

“As the Lakota Sioux phrase Mitakuye Oyasin—“All my relations”—implies, we’re all connected, all in this together. Recovery is reciprocal: heal yourself, heal the world; heal the world, heal yourself.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“We come to realize that the universe mirrors back to us perfectly our beliefs, our intentions, our sincerity. What is is the product of the map of reality you carry inside you. If you want to change your experience, you need to change the map.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“Unless you eat foods clearly marked “Certified organic by the USDA,” you are taking part in a genetic experiment that is unprecedented in earth’s long history.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“We have to become still in the midst of the turmoil so we can observe clearly how our actions and the actions of others, past and present, fit together in the tapestry of life. In the timeless instant when we stop moving and simply witness the moment, the dust settles and the big picture emerges.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“In the West we have a disease-care system, and medicine recognizes thousands of ailments and myriad remedies. One Spirit Medicine, on the other hand, is a health-care system that identifies only one ailment and one cure. The ailment is alienation from our feelings, from our bodies, from the earth, and from Spirit. The cure is the experience of primeval Oneness with all, which restores inner harmony and facilitates recovery from all maladies, regardless of origin.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“As your brain is upgraded, you will discover that you can let go of your fixation on what you think is absolutely vital to your safety and happiness and essential for your survival. As you release your old, fear-based approach to life, you will find you have more faith in your ability to handle uncertainty. You will gain a sense of living in a world that is safe and welcoming, and a universe that supports your intentions and what you value as truly important.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“It’s in bringing others the healing gifts we’ve received that the benefits of these gifts become truly ours.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“hippocampus damage on a national scale can be measured by the number of guns owned by a country’s citizens. According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world—nearly 90 guns for every 100 people—and the highest rate of gun-related murders in the developed world.4 The hippocampus senses danger lurking behind every tree.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“Spirituality is about exploring the nature of the mind and the fabric of the cosmos through what the ancients called the experience of Oneness.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“Valter Longo, Ph.D., a cellular biologist at the University of Southern California, found that starving a mouse receiving chemotherapy or other targeted therapies will protect normal cells and organs while making the therapy up to 40 percent more toxic to cancer cells. In human clinical trials, Longo found that periods of no food for two to four days at a time during a six-month period killed older and damaged immune cells and triggered the generation of new healthy ones.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“Valter Longo, Ph.D., a cellular biologist at the University of Southern California, found that starving a mouse receiving chemotherapy or other targeted therapies will protect normal cells and organs while making the therapy up to 40 percent more toxic to cancer cells.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“When we stop utilizing carbs as our primary fuel, even for a few hours, we go into ketosis. This allows the body to recycle waste and repair itself. It triggers the production of stem cells in the brain and every organ in the body. It also awakens the higher order neural networks where we can have a spiritual experience, even when we are not looking for one.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“The purpose of intermittent fasting is not for weight loss. That’s a dangerous misuse of the practice. You fast in order to go into ketosis and turn on the body’s fat-burning system and repair mechanisms. Fasting brings about detoxification at a cellular level. Reducing the intake of sugars and processed carbs for more than a few hours triggers a process called autophagy, in which more than 90 percent of the “waste” inside the cells is recycled into amino acid building blocks the cells can reuse for repair, and the remainder is eliminated as garbage.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“One form of intermittent fasting involves not eating any grains, or anything that turns into sugar in your bloodstream between 6 P.M. and noon the next day. This daily 18-hour fast will bring you into ketosis, a metabolic change that happens when your cells exhaust the energy from carbohydrates and sugars, and break down fats into a powerful fuel known as ketones. Then your brain starts burning ketones for fuel.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“The limbic brain, driven by pleasure seeking and emotional drama, does not thrive on spiritual experiences. It settles for religions that turn its biases and prejudices into divine commandments that address its basic survival needs. It does not long for an elegant dance with Oneness. The limbic brain evolved while we were sitting quietly by the river’s edge or watching the sun set lazily over the African savannah, and is not geared to the rhythm of the digital world. Under stress, primitive emotion overtakes us, and we become blind with jealousy or rage, paralyzed with fear, or so riddled with anxiety that we can’t think straight. When it becomes overstimulated, it hijacks the entire neural apparatus, restricting blood flow to the frontal lobes of the brain, so we can no longer come up with creative solutions to problems.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“When the mind is behaving tyrannically, it’s running ancient programs belonging to the limbic brain that focus on survival, and the primary emotion is fear. When we’re in its grip, we see danger everywhere. The programs of the limbic brain are known as the Four Fs—feeding, fighting, fear, and fornicating. The limbic brain craves sweet comfort foods when you are feeling sad or insecure. Feed it sugar and this brain keeps operating at a dull level of awareness that does not lead to an experience of Oneness. This brain helped us to survive the Ice Age and is obsessed with having food and sex; it craves mind-dulling alcohol and drugs, and is biased toward aggression, emotional withdrawal, and self-preservation. When we cut off its supply of sugars, its instincts can be overridden by the neocortex, the “new” brain, which allows us to learn, create, and envision new futures. The neocortex is programmed for beauty, whether it’s found in a Mozart concerto or an elegant mathematical solution. The new brain needs ketones to override the programs of the more ancient limbic brain. On a carbohydrate diet, it sputters along, coughing up the occasional creative revelation but no lasting insights.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“Our LEF is a gateway to the invisible matrix of wisdom where everything is intertwined, where every thought we have impacts every cell in our body and every molecule in the cosmos. Quantum physics offers us an apt metaphor in the phenomenon known as entanglement: two particles can be mysteriously interlinked in such a way that even if they are at opposite ends of the galaxy, if you change the direction in which one particle is spinning, the other immediately reverses its spin. At first scientists thought entanglement might be a demonstration of faster-than-light communication. Later they understood that it was simply the nature of related particles. The sages of the Amazon and Andes that I studied with believe that entanglement is the nature of all of creation, that we are all related. That is why they—and many Native Americans—refer to all living beings as “all my relations.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“The invisible world exists alongside the visible one, ever present and accessible. We can bring its wisdom into our world at any time to provide healing and balance. The way we do this is by activating the circuitry in the brain that allows us to experience our interconnectedness to all things and all beings in the cosmos. These higher-order neural networks, like all neural networks, are made up of brain cells connected to each other, of neurons that fire together and wire together. They are in a region of the brain known as the neocortex, or “new brain,” which thrives on bliss and the experience of Oneness, while other parts of the brain are more concerned with survival and separation of friend from foe. This more recently evolved part of the brain has a favorite food source: ketone bodies, or fats, which are like jet fuel for the brain.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“Nature loves intelligence. The ancients called this wisdom spirituality. Not religion, which is a fixed set of beliefs and dogma about who your enemies are and how the world works. Spirituality is about exploring the nature of the mind and the fabric of the cosmos through what the ancients called the experience of Oneness.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“In the West we do not have a health-care system, we have a disease-care system that recognizes thousands of ailments and myriad remedies. One Spirit Medicine, on the other hand, identifies only one ailment and one cure. The ailment is alienation—from our emotions, from our bodies, from the earth, and from Spirit.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“The sense of inner peace that arises as we start the work of the sage is the direct result of a radical shift in perception. Only when we’ve stopped grasping and yearning, avoiding and worrying, endeavoring and battling can we find equanimity. In stillness, we can access the wisdom of the ancestors.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“We begin to see order at the heart of uncertainty and tranquility in the eye of the storm. Abandoning fixed ideas about how things should be, we instead take delight in watching plans manifest and dissolve in kaleidoscopic fashion, arranged and rearranged by the vagaries of everyday life. It is in the North that we learn to embrace the Yiddish proverb “Man plans, God laughs.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“The sages say that the reason we are born into a body in the physical world is to evolve and grow, to acquire maturity and wisdom. To use a metaphor from physics, when we’re embodied, we’re like a photon in a particle state; while in the invisible world, we’re like a photon in a field state. The particle state is our “local” nature—flesh and blood, sitting on a couch reading. The field state is our “nonlocal” nature, in which we extend to the farthest reaches of the universe and are at one with all things. When we die and leave this body behind, we return to our nonlocal nature, to our field state, to invisible Oneness. But the sages of old learned to experience their field without dying—to taste Oneness while still in the world.”
― Alberto Villoldo, Grow a New Body

“Alzheimer’s is being called type 3 diabetes, linked to a gluten-rich, wheat-based diet and a stressed-out brain.4 And these are just a few of the diseases that are killing us prematurely and compromising our quality of life.”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“Alzheimer’s is being called type 3 diabetes, linked to a gluten-rich, wheat-based diet and a stressed-out brain.4”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“soul retrievals to recover parts of myself I had lost to trauma,”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine

“After morning yoga a luminous being appeared to me in broad daylight. She walked out of the river, and I saw her”
― Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine