John Robbins interviewed Dr. Christiane Northrup during the Food Revolution Summit last week.  Here are some highlights from his conversation with Dr. Northrup.

 

Raising our frequency

 

When asked by John Robbins about how important it is to raise our frequency, Dr. Christiane Northrup told this story about one of her daughters.

“This is very funny that you should bring this up. She got the Good Citizen’s Award twice in middle school, she was the one that everybody wanted to be around. And she’s an extreme extrovert, she wanted to take her girlfriends on her honeymoon, and she realized that there were some unpopular things that she finally needed to say something about.” She realized, “Wait a minute. I cannot let my fear of offending someone keep me from speaking my truth as long as I do it with understanding and love.”

She found this was so strengthening. Her daughter used to say to her, “Why can’t you be like the other mothers? Why can’t we be like the mainstream parents?” The truth is, because that’s not what we were born to do. And here’s what happens when we are true to ourselves, and we are pioneers who have been going against the grain and provide inspiration for others. In her daughter’s case, with her friends, who are 30-something and young mothers, they’ve said to her, “Thank you for having the courage to speak up, because you’ve given me courage now.”
When we stand up for good food, for regenerative farming practices, for organic food, for local farms, and so on, it becomes a positive addiction. The more you do it, the more you want to do it. Because when we are around like-minded people, it’s joyous.

Dr. Christiane shared a story about being at a farmer’s market in Santa Barbara. She discovered that there is something celebratory about meeting the person who creates the amazing mushrooms, beautiful avocados, or strawberries. It’s a celebration of the earth. What happens with this celebration, oxytocin and prolactin are produced in your body. These bonding hormones increase love. And then you get more connected with the earth and with each other.

 

How to Respond to Sabotage

 

When people begin to adopt healthier habits, they’re bound to have friends, co-workers or family members who will sabotage their efforts, or at least try to. A friend of Dr. Christiane was trying to change her diet to a healthier one. Her friend had a medical issue and she was really trying to address it. Her friend’s roommate found this threatening because she would offer her friend pieces of cake repeatedly by saying, “Be a good girl and have some cake. ” She would practically shove the cake into her mouth.

So, what is Dr. Christiane’s advice that she can give to help us deal with confrontations like this?

Dr. Christiane shared a story when she was a young doctor in macrobiotics and she was vegan. She ate fish now and then. People would come over to her at restaurants to see what she was eating. Many of her patients would go home for the holidays and their parents would make a roast. Her patients’ families would ask, “Well, why aren’t you eating what we’re having?” And they would be shamed.

The key is to stay in a high vibration of love, but we first need to understand the sabotage.

What is the sabotage for? What is the purpose of the sabotage? Is the person who’s offering you the cake or the roast, feeling like they should be doing what you’re doing? But they don’t want to do it. And if they could possibly be trying to get you to go back to where they are so they make themselves feel better.
Dr. Mario Martinez points out that all tribes wound their members in very specific ways to keep them in line. It has to do with when we lived in small groups. There would be a fence around the enclosure called a pale. And the tribe would say, “We will protect you only if you stay within the pale – within the fence.”

 

Three Archetypal Wounds

This fence gets internalized in us. We wound our members who step out by three archetypal wounds: betrayal, abandonment, and shaming. So this is what all groups do. If you step outside, they will betray you, they will abandon you, or they will shame you.

 

Dr. Martinez says that there are healing fields for these wounds.

 

1. The healing field for shame is honor.

With shame or when you’ve been shamed, you think about all the things that you’ve done that are honorable.
2. The healing field for abandonment is commitment.

Where have you stayed where you’ve really committed to someone?

 

3. The healing field for betrayal is loyalty.

At the times when someone is betraying you, abandoning you, shaming you, you go into how it feels in your body to be honorable, to be committed, to be loyal. It may be that you’re honoring your own choices, you’re committing to your own healing, and you’re staying loyal to your own path.
When we do this, we set up that high vibration that becomes irresistible. When her daughter was at a self-help meeting, someone mentioned, “Well, you know when God closes a door or window, he opens another door.” And another woman mentioned, “Yeah, but it’s those damn hallways that are hell.”
Per Dr. Northrup, when we’re choosing ourselves, when we’re loyal, committed, and honoring ourselves first, there’s a time when you may be alone. That’s when we must build our faith. Then all of a sudden, other people will come in and support us. And we’ll find that we have a whole new group of people who are supporting us and we’re no longer alone because we’re herd creatures. It is difficult to be a young person and be different. And we need each other to survive. She also mentioned that it is our job to find each other.
John Robbins summarized by saying, “We’re hoping that lots of people will find Kindred Spirits. People who are in alignment with their hearts, reflect their highest potential and in training with their higher frequency, can be clear in themselves. When this happens we can have clear minds and clear hearts. And clear actions, and love each other well.”

 

Body Love Messaging for Women

 

Dr. Christiane Northrup mentioned that Gay Hendricks wrote a book called How to Love Yourself.  It is as relevant today as it was back then. Gay suggests that you look in the mirror and you say, either, “I love you or I love you, I really love you.” looking into your eyes.
When the voice in your head says, “How can you possibly love this fat a@#? There’s cellulite on my thighs. You’re a fat pig,” or any of the messages that have been downloaded in your mind, then what you do is you love yourself for these feelings. Because all feeling wants is to be heard and to be felt.

Spiritual teacher Matt Conn suggests something that’s also fun. When you are berating yourself for saying, “I accept you, I love you.” When you’re berating yourself, then you start cheer leading the part that’s berating yourself. And you say, “Oh my gosh, nobody on Earth has been this good at body trashing.”

Dr. Christiane Northrup mentioned that she got the Olympic Gold Medal for being the body trasher of all time. What happens when you do that, is you start to laugh. Because it’s funny. And then when you can laugh at something, you’ve lightened the energy around it. She mentions that it takes about 30 days of looking in the mirror.
She recommends writing on a note pad the phrase, “I accept myself unconditionally, right now.” Say this out loud once a day. She would tell people to tape the piece of paper on their mirror and say it while looking into your bathroom mirror and looking into your eyes. After 30 days, she mentioned that something  will change in our inner being. Our soul starts to look back at us when we’re looking into our own eyes. Then self love starts appear.

After doing this for a while you then follow a good diet. Not because you’re being good, not because you’re depriving yourself but because something inside says, “Thank you. This is the food that I have been looking for.”

For many women, it’s the number they see on the bathroom scale that completely dictate how they feel about themselves. So, what should we do?  She gave her personal story. Her day was determined by the number on the scale for decades. Until finally, she realized how insane that was. It was like a constant external monitor of her worth. So eventually, she threw out the scale, because she saw that it was a terrorist for her. She don’t intend to step back on the scale until the number on the scale meant nothing to her.

So instead she just went by how her clothes fit. When you’re basically eating well, or you’re doing intermittent fasting, or there is no food from dinner till the next day at, 10 or 11 in the morning. So she has a period where she knows her insulin levels go to zero. Her body started to burn fat. And that worked to maintain her weight, and everything stayed the same.

She no longer lets that scale determine the quality of her day, because she realized that training was just too big for her to overcome. She cannot get on the scale without a lot of judgment.

We have many people who are clinically obese. Her 125 frame in eighth grade was perfectly normal. But that’s not how she was brought up. So, therefore, the tyranny of the scale has not been lost on her. She kept the scale out of her reach.

John Robbins has heard women tell other women that you can never be too thin. He realizes as a man, he is not nearly subjected to nearly as much pressure about his appearance as women are. He sees that women’s bodies and their weights are often the barometers by which society measures how good you are, how attractive you are, even how worthy you are.

John gave an example – look at the Super Bowl performance of 2020. We had Shakira and J-Lo. As Dr. Christiane mentioned there’s no man, no male performer, who needs to come out in a G-string with his entire body revealed, even if it’s in a body stocking, in order to keep his job. The guys in the Super Bowl could wear baggy pants and hoodies and so on and they’re fine. We don’t know whether they have a six-pack or not. The women have to have an almost perfect body. So there’s no question that women are expected to achieve a rate of perfection that’s unbelievable.
What you realize in your life, is that the number on the scale, your weight, whether you’re a size 8 or a size 12, at the end of the day, it doesn’t make you any happier. You know, those 10 pounds either way, really doesn’t make you any happier.
So the deal is, and it’s not easy, is to love your body as much as you possibly can, because that’s the key to getting it to a size and shape that is reasonable, reasonable for you.

Does it make a difference if a woman who is overweight and changes her diet with the goal of creating as much health as possible for herself, rather than with the goal of changing what the scale says?

 

Creating Permanent Change

 

According to Dr. Christiane Northrup mentioned this quote by Louise Hay. “Changes that are loved into being are permanent. Changes that are forced into being, you’ll constantly have to force them into being.”
It’s kind of like being whipped into shape, or wanting to go exercise. For example, if you think of your average family dog. You get the leash out, the dog goes nuts thinking, “Oh my God, we’re going for a walk. We get to go out and exercise. Yay!” Little kids are the same way. They want to stay outside and play.

That’s who we really are. We are the dog who wants to go out and be in the fresh air. And over time, this is like resetting those taste buds. Nothing sweet for two weeks until you reset your taste buds.
The same with movement – Exercise like walking. It might take you a month of just doing it through sheer will every day. But then, the magic happens. Where you want to do it, where you can’t stop yourself from doing it – That’s the ultimate goal.
Sometimes we don’t give enough credit to those men and women who really take care of themselves –  for taking care of their health. We’re taught to put other things ahead of our own well-being and when we take steps to heal ourselves and to create healthy lifestyles, we can feel out of step with society. We can feel guilty about it. Like, it’s not real work. It’s self-indulgent.

 

There’s a phrase that Esther Hicks says, “You can’t get sick enough to help those who are sick and you can’t get poor enough to help those who are poor.” We’re back to the tribes wounding their members with betrayal, abandonment, and shaming.

Years ago, she was asked to do a workshop in Massachusetts,  and walk in there and this woman came up to her and said: “Well, I can tell you’re not from here. You take care of yourself.” She felt like she didn’t look like a ragamuffin and that she didn’t look like she just got dragged out from under a rock. And she takes care of herself and didn’t look like she belonged.
This kind of thing happens in families all the time. People will think, “Who do you think you are?”  It’s “misery loves company”. So again, we need to find the birds of a feather who support us in becoming all that we can be.

 

She recently meeting with a world-renowned poet, and they were talking about the fact that his success is often met with derision from fellow poets who are not as successful. So, we just have to see that part of human nature, accept it, love them, and move on. But there’s no question that it is painful. It’s painful when someone doesn’t love you unless you’re struggling, unless you’re suffering, unless you’re overweight, unless you’re unhappy. You know, that’s how a lot of people socialize these days. She calls it the organ recitals where they’re talking about:  “This is what my doctor said and my liver is this and my kidneys are that and my blood pressure and now I’m on this medication.”  The average 65 year old now is on 6 prescription medications a day. So, this becomes the new normal. It doesn’t take too many of us who are shining the light in a very different way to change everything.

 

One of the things John mentioned that he loves about Dr. Christiane’s work is that she helps us through her transparency and her wisdom. She helps us to see what the next step is so we could reclaim our power, reclaim our wisdom, and reclaim our connections with each other.

 

Imagining What’s Possible

 

Dr. Christiane Northrup recently watched a documentary called, Tomorrow. It is about a group of people who were devastated by climate change and what would happen to their children. They decided to go and see what people were doing that was working. Instead of doom and gloom, one of the things they said is, “Human beings, we’re so good at the movies about doomsday and apocalypse, and the end of the world. We’re terrible at thinking about what could things look like and how cool could that would be.

Dr. Christiane said the average 65 year old is on 6 prescription drugs every day. She shakes her head. She has a friend who is about to celebrate her 99th birthday. When she was 93, she used to give lectures. She’s a physician and she’d start her lectures with “93 and Prescription-Free.” Dr. Christiane’s mother is 94 and just got her driver’s license renewed til 100 and she’s not on any prescription medication. She mentioned that people need to choose role models who are not what everyone believes.

Dr. Christiane mentioned that the number of people over 65 who actually living in nursing homes is only 4%. You would think from all the ads on television, it would be more. Remember the U.S. and New Zealand are the only nations where they allow direct to consumer pharmaceutical ads on television. 70% of the news and mainstream network television is brought to you by Big Pharma. It’s important to know who’s bringing you the news, because basically the news these days is nothing but advertisements for Big Pharma and what they want you to think. Because the news is depressing, they want to get everyone on antidepressants.
According to John and other medical and wellness industry experts, we have a sickness industry which is called healthcare.

If you’re having a difficult relationship with food, it might it be helpful to take a few weeks to write down everything you eat, including where you ate it, what time it was, who you were with, and how you were feeling at the time.

 

Love and Light,

Shaline

 

 

Dr. Christiane Northrup is author of Goddesses Never Age, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing

John Robbins is author of books such as Diet for a New America and Foo.d Revolution