Highest Self Podcast 415: How To Heal Your Body Holistically + Spiritually with Dr. Zach Bush

podcast_415

Healing holistically is beyond taking supplements. In this episode, we dive into the relationship our spirituality has with our health. We discuss the anxiety + stress of not doing “enough” for our health, how the patriarchy + colonialism has impacted our view of health, how we can create trust in our bodies when we may have had illness and dis-ease in the past and taking the beauty path to truly connect with the energy of love. This is a beautiful episode that will leave you feeling more connected to our mind, body and spirit and seeing beauty in all things!

Join my Free Discover Your Soul Purpose Masterclass at www.iamsahararose.com/masterclass

Get 20% off all products at animamundiherbals.com/ with coupon code ROSE20

Intro + Outro Music: Silent Ganges by Maneesh de Moor

Connect with me for daily Ayurvedic and modern spiritual wisdom at:
Instagram.com/iamsahararose
Facebook.com/iamsahararose
Twitter.com/iamsahararose

Order My Books: www.iamsahararose.com/books

By accessing this Podcast, I acknowledge that the entire contents are the property of Sahara Rose, or used by Sahara Rose with permission, and are protected under U.S. and international copyright and trademark laws. Except as otherwise provided herein, users of this Podcast may save and use information contained in the Podcast only for personal or other non-commercial, educational purposes. No other use, including, without limitation, reproduction, retransmission or editing, of this Podcast may be made without the prior written permission of the Sahara Rose, which may be requested by contacting [email protected].

This podcast is for educational purposes only. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein.

TRANSCRIPTION

Episode 415: How To Heal Your Body Holistically + Spiritually with Dr. Zach Bush
By Sahara Rose

[00:12] Sahara
Namaste, it’s Sahara Rose and welcome back to The Highest Self Podcast, a place where we discuss what makes You, Your Soul’s Highest Evolvement.

[00:19] Sahara
I just came back from whale watching in the Dominican Republic which was such a beautiful reminder to move slower.

[00:29] Sahara
You know, I was at a waterfall there, just observing the way that the water moves through the rocks and how perfect really everything is in nature, and this download came through – move at the speed of nature, not technology. And it really hit me how we, as human beings, forget that we are earth. We are so hyper-attuned to technology, to our phones, I know for myself, it feels like a part-time job just to respond to my DM and then my comments and then my WhatsApp messages and my text messages and my email and my other email, and it’s like non-stop. And it makes us feel like we’re always falling behind, that we need to be moving at the speed of technology which is the speed of light, lightning, it doesn’t even exist, it’s that Vata, that air energy.
But really, we are nature, we are earth. When we talk about connect to earth, you are a part of earth. So, move at the speed of nature because nature doesn’t make any mistakes. Nature, in fact, far exceeds our intelligence, it knows things that we do not.

[01:48] Sahara
So, if we can move at the nature, which is the speed of our true, natural selves, I’m not saying move at the speed of a snail, because you are not a snail, but I’m also not saying move at the speed of a cheetah, because you are not a cheetah. Move at the speed of nature means move at the speed of that is natural to you and find your unique flow, your unique cycles, your unique seasons, which are going to shift as you do.

[02:17] Sahara
You may have seasons in your life that are more summer, more fire, more Pitta; and others that are more winter, more Kapha, more grounded, taking that sacred pause. And in this technological world, we feel like we need to be on and fast and available and responding and this urgency culture that if something needs to be done, we feel enormous pressure to drop everything that we’re doing to do it right now, and I notice this so deeply in myself.

[02:48] Sahara
So, I am coming back from whale-watching, or should I say whale-waiting because if you’ve ever been whale-watching, you know, you wait 30 minutes and you’re like “Oh, an there’s a tail! Oh, it’s gone, oh! Okay, they’ve gone under, let’s wait! Oh, there’s a hump!”, and it just teaches you patience.

[03:05] Sahara
You know, we watch these National Geographic documentaries and shark week and all these things and they’re all spinning in the air and its full power, all this stuff happening, but that’s not how nature actually is. Nature is slow, nature is pause, nature is deliberate, nature takes its time, nature isn’t about getting your attention for a 10s real, nature’s going to do its own thing and you’ve got to wait for it!

[03:31] Sahara
So, that was such a beautiful reminder for me to just take a breath, pause and trust that all will happen as it’s meant to in divine diving and there really is no rush.

[03:47] Sahara
So, last week, I interviewed the one and only Byron Katie and so many of you have reshared that Episode and said it was one of the most powerful conversations that you’ve heard, and I’m so deeply honored to share her wisdom with you.
Doing her work (Byron Katie’s The Work) has been so transformational in my life and I’m so grateful to have her on and to so many of you who tuned in and shared it. So, that is another great Episode.
We have so many power houses and this Episode, guys, wow, Dr. Zach Bush! He truly is such an inspiration to me! Someone who, at the same time, walks the path of courage, while being such a poet.

[04:35] Sahara
And when I was thinking about him, it’s really rare to see someone who is a truth-teller and a freedom-seeker and really stands their ground and goes against the drumbeat and the mainstream narrative, but does it in such a heart-felt and poetic and soulful way that it’s like you can’t argue with what he’s saying because what he’s saying is let’s reconnect with beauty, and beauty is the path towards love.

[05:06] Sahara
So, Dr. Zach Bush is such a phenomenal thought-leader, beyond a doctor, his wisdom truly is transcendental. And in this conversation, we speak about a lot of things regarding health, but taking health beyond the body.

[05:23] Sahara
So, I ask him questions like “How do we create trust in our body when we may have had illness or disease that caused us to distrust, or even fear, our bodies?”, “What can nature teach us about healing?”, “How has the patriarchy impacted our view of health?”, “How is fear and scarcity holding us back from truly being healthy?”
And he shares with us a message that he received from a deep meditative experience connecting with Christ energy, that truly transformed his life.
So, I am deeply excited to share this really beautiful conversation and at this time where we seem to be at war with our bodies. It’s such a beautiful reminder to listen to them, because our bodies and everything that is showing up in them has a message. And when we create a war with our bodies, we’re creating a war with ourselves and we’re creating a war with earth. And we are all connected to each other and to her.

[06:28] Sahara
So, without further ado, let’s welcome Dr. Zach Bush to The Highest Self Podcast.

__________________________________________________________

[06:34] Advertisement

And before we get started, I’d love to share with you this special offer.

Are you ready to finally discover your Soul’s Purpose, the big reason why you are here? Well, I’ve created a Free Masterclass experience for you where you will discover what your Dharma is and how it may be different from your career; how to navigate having multiple passions; different ways to transition into your Dharma; ways to overcome people-pleasing and caring what people think. My number one tool, whether knowing a decision is right for you and journal prompts on the different types of resistance and how they show up for us.
All of this is available for you, for free, in my Discover Your Soul’s Purpose Masterclass. You can head over to iamsahararose.com/masterclass to join today.
Again, that’s iamsahararose.com/masterclass and you can find that link in the show notes. I’m super-excited to see you in there!

[07:36] End of Advertisement
_________________________________________________________________

[07:37] Interview

[07:37] Sahara
Welcome Zach to The Highest Self Podcast, it’s so great to have you here!

[07:41] Zach
Great to be on with you, Sahara!

[07:43] Sahara
And the first question I’d love to ask you is what makes you your highest self?

[07:47] Zach
It’s interesting, I am kind of in a rebirth process this year. I think this is one of those processes that you keep thinking that you’ve checked the box or that you’ve got to another level, only to find out that there’s lots more layers of the onion skin to peel back. But this year I’ve been able to begin to express myself much differently in human relationship across the spectrum of corporate world to just the education space, not profit space, to large finance, it almost doesn’t matter, the environment. I’ve learned to express myself differently this year through some work I’ve been doing in the Course in Miracles under the tutorage of one of my close colleagues. And she has been channeling and working in the Course in Miracles for 30 years, and so, one of the world experts in that space of content, and she really helped me transition this year to an understanding of, kind of, this vertical relationship between yourself and the divine.
And through some other work I’ve been doing, and the work of Mary Magdalene, and the like, starting to understand how the context of the divine feminine can express itself in me as a male, and what not.
So, it’s been an incredible journey into winding the divine masculine and feminine together within myself and seeing what it is that wants to be expressed through me, as a soul, as a unique entity in the context of this whole field of the knowingness of the Universe; how do each of us show up to express another pixel or fractal of that larger Universal knowingness, that connectedness and it’s been a real joy for me to find new created flow and new personal sense of self, and self-discovery even, in this combination of the divine masculine and feminine within my own person.

[09:48] Sahara
I love that so much! And you, so, rarely hear men working with Mary Magdalene and the Sophia energy, so I love to hear that.
And so much of the medical field is so masculine, really so patriarchal. I have been really researching about just the whole OBGYN space, and the origins of that and the different methods that were, essentially came up with that in the time they believed women, especially black women, didn’t experience pain, and how we haven’t even been updating these different methodologies such as Colposcopies, and even PAP-smears etc. It just really shows you that there has been such little reverence for the feminine, for the feminine body.
And you know, especially with doctors, we want to trust our doctors, and then I think a lot of us are in this tough place that we’re like, we want to do what’s best for us, we want to do what’s best for our health, and we genuinely don’t know if what our doctors are telling us is that.
So, what is your advice for people who are on a more holistic path and also want to genuinely be taking care of themselves and not also going with any dogma that could prevent them from getting the best care?

[10:56] Zach
Yeah. I think that, in general, you want to assemble around yourself a team that sees you as a healthy individual, no matter if you have a list of conditions that you’re dealing with or not. You are inherently a 99.999% healthy individual that may be expressing disorder or disease somewhere in your body but you want a team that’s really capable of embracing the whole you. And if your care team, practitioners, physicians, whatever it is, is focused primarily on that 0.001% of you that is manifesting a disorder or disease, you probably either want to change that team or, at very least, diversify that team, so that the whole of you is being embraced. And what we find through that lens of disease management that you’re chasing the wind in an effort to throw wet blankets on this fire that is burning within you, whether it’s an inflammatory process or what not, you’re never getting at that root cause until you back up far enough to find the 100% of the individual and understand how they’re expressing themselves physiologically as well as spiritually, emotionally and beyond. And when you get into that, 30.000 front view, it becomes very obvious that there’s recurrent patterns in the ways in which diseases manifest within human bodies.
And so, some woman showing up with cervical cancer at a young age, or showing up with an autoimmune disease of the thyroid at a young age, these are manifestations of a disorder of dysfunction within the greater ecosystem around that individual, and it’s not an individual problem, it’s a population expression that’s happening. And until we start to back up far enough to see that, we’re not going to understand why there’s an epidemic about autoimmune disease in women’s lives or an epidemic of cervical cancer, or what not.
It’s not until we start to understand an individual woman in the context of her greater environment, that we really start to stumble upon root cause solutions, root cause opportunities, to change that woman’s trajectory, not just in the disease, but actually her trajectory of life itself. And when you get that team around you, that’s as curious, if not more curious, about your spiritual development on this journey, than what’s score on the Colposcopy or you’re getting on the pathology report. You’re going to have a very rewarding experience as you move higher and higher up that stratosphere of that care where your care team becomes part of the mirror that’s going to help you in the spiritual pursuit of yourself. And once you really reach that state of “I am”, you will see disorder and disease disappear. It has to, because the “I am” state where you are so in resonance with your own soul and your own soul purpose, that coherent resonance is what destroys cancer cells, it erases the memory of autoimmunity, it just clears the whole slate, gives you this new canvas to pave the “I am” on.
And so, I really encourage everybody to begin a daily journey, if it’s in your purview that you’ve had a lot of health problems and disorders, diseases, whatever that they’ve been labelled, to begin the day of burning that list in your head and clearing that table and to say “Look, that’s not me. I’m something much grander and more beautiful and powerful than any list that Western medicine could possibly hand me. I am a divine being and I’m expressing myself in the context of a world, a society, a humanity, that’s unplugged from its natural law, that’s unplugged from its natural state of being”, and therefore, there’s great amounts of disorder and disease. But it’s not a personal problem, it’s not “I’m all but a symptom of this greater organism of humanity until I find that I am moment, and then I can have a direct divine relationship to Source that eliminates the toxicy and the pressure of the epigenetics around you, from your parents and all toxicity they’ve seen and the traumas they’ve seen dating back 40 generations. You can erase all of that, if you can reach that moment of “I am” singularity, vertical relationship with the divine. That’s when all other inputs become irrelevant.

[15:23] Sahara
I’d love for you to share more about this “I am”, and what does that really mean, especially to you and your experience and how do we cultivate more of that energy?

[15:33] Zach
Yeah. It’s a listening in to self, that gets you there. And the discovery in the “I am” state is one of self-acceptance, for sure, but it’s actually, if I was going to put a finer point on it, it feels like coming home. And when you have that experience of “This is my home”, it shifts the whole mentality of effort that you feel like you’ve been putting into getting through the day, or defining yourself in the context of relationships, to find yourself in the context of your job, professional identity; to find yourself in the context of being a young parent or being a child of ageing or whatever it is, all those externalized systems that are seeking to coopt your real identity – when you get into that ‘I am” state, you land in the space of knowingness where you really, truly lose the scarcity mentality and you find yourself in an absolute state of abundance.
And that’s the moment you’re looking for when you’re traveling towards “I am” or “I’m home”. You’re traveling towards this moment of such divine nurture, such divine acceptance of who you are, where you are, how you got there, the path you took, all of those things to being perfect to get you to that “I am” moment. And when you’re in that “I am” moment, you become so much bigger than anything you’ve ever experienced before. You can experience this, in the psychological space, of seeing more things, seeing more opportunities, but you can really more get it that spiritual realm of the invisible space of how big are you, and start to feel into how extraordinarily magnificent it is that you are an energy field that’s hovering between this ethereal quality of the Sun, the soil, the plants, that would feed you, you’re in this thin strip of biology that populates such a tiny percentage of the Universe, and yet, this is where you chose to show up. Showing up in a biological particle state as an expression of this age-old light being, this literal soul that’s emanating life, animating life within this biological matrix of a human body. And so, it’s this lovely experience that the “I am” state is coming into tune and coherence with that original waveform of self, that original emanant light being. And that “I am” state, when you recognize and feel that for the first time, is transformational. You will shift perspective across all specters of relationships, personal identity to your sense of purpose itself will begin to shift.
And the path into that looks a little bit different for each of us, but the mechanisms along the path, I think, are very similar and has almost always to do with how good are you getting at listening and how good are you at being still for a moment. It doesn’t take 3hrs of meditation to reach that space, it can happen in a split second where you remember to come back home, come back into this energetic resonance state where you simply express self; when you simply express “This is who I am” and “My God, I’m alive right now. I have vitality within me! How precious is that, how miraculous is that that I happen to be an ancient light being in a momentary particle state, expressing something of beauty and witnessing the beauty around me!” And that’s, I think, the purpose to become “I am”, is becoming witness to beauty, and that’s why we’re here. And our entire neurologic systems are wired for the reception of the neurologic experience of beauty.
And it’s exciting that you’ve never had to be taught that the unsaid is beautiful, that flower has a beautiful scent to it, or whatever it is, and so, it’s exciting that we are neurologically wired for awareness of beauty in within the Universe that we’re resonating. And within that beauty, we find ourselves and find out that we are exquisite, beautiful light beings that are expressing themselves through these physical shells.

[20:01] Sahara
I love how you share that about beauty! I remember I went to this conference few years ago and she asked us to pick between three qualities – would you want to make the world a place that’s more good, more truthful or more beautiful – and we all had to go around and say it.
And at that point of my journey, I was just an Activist, I’m like “Obviously, good, a better place, isn’t that the whole point?” and I was like “Why would someone pick beauty, that’s not important! We have things that we need to change and things that we need to do”, and now, today, my answer would be beauty, because none of that stuff really matters if we can’t enjoy it. But our Western culture makes us so obsessed with productivity and improvement, especially for those of us on a personal development journey, we’re like “How can I heal the shadows and fix them and get even better?” and sometimes it’s just to revere in the beauty of this moment and who we are, and the magnificence of even being alive.
So, for those who may be struggling with that, who may be looking at the world around them and saying “What’s beautiful about this?” or even disease that’s manifested within them, how do we acknowledge the shadows and the world inside of us while choosing this lens of beauty?

[21:14] Zach
Yeah. One of the big differentiators on the beauty front came for me when friends helped me get past a block that I had had for quite some time, was the concept of love. And I was lecturing widely, studying broadly the intersection between planetary health and human health and how our chemical practices around agriculture, we’re having this extraordinarily negative impact on life within the soil; systems like within the human biology, literally, we’re seeking the energy of life out of the planet through our chemical agriculture.
So, I was already, intensely, in this analytical space of understanding, and what I was more deeply disturbed by was that the way in which humans were interacting. So, just say we were very, very long way from, some sort of, enlightenment that would allow us to stop being destructive and extractive beings. And the focal point for that was the concept of love.
I was seeing so much evidence that humans don’t love each other and humans don’t love the Earth that has given life to them. Humans don’t love any natural system of God or Universe or this universal knowingness. Humans don’t love anything that I can find consistently enough to treat it with reverence. Instead, we tend to treat it as a commodity, as something to be extracted, something to be consumed, something to be owned, this state of dominion and ownership drive in Western cultures, perhaps, in particular. But that was putting me in this crisis state of “My God, how are we ever going to make this leap to some sort of light and love state if we’re this far away from enlightenment, as a species, and we’re speeding towards the sixth extinction of land on planet and we’re going to be caught up in that somewhere in the next 60-100 years, at our current pace, so it’s unacceptable in my mind that we go extinct, not understanding the fabric of everything that I’ve been told is love.”
And my colleague came back from Clairgenic journey that he was doing in meditation, with a message for me, from Christ energy in this context, but came back with a message saying “Zach, the fabric of everything is not love” and I knew that the next sentence would be the most important thing I’d ever heard, and it would put me on a track that was much more close to my purpose and that next sentence was “The fabric of everything is beauty and the experience of seeing beauty is love.” And suddenly, I realized that, as a humanity, we are this close to that enlightenment moment because we all know what beauty looks like, we all have the experience of being able to witness beauty, even when we’re exhausted, even when we have broken relationships, even when we have ____ (fill in the blank) disaster trauma happening, it never supersedes our capacity to see beauty. We can always see the sunset and say that’s beautiful no matter how close we are to this sixth extinction of humanity or what not.
And so, that we’re that close was a huge paradigm shift of hope within me that said “Wow, as humans, we are neurologically, if not even, spiritually attuned to be witness to beauty. And when we experience that beauty, we will have the sensation and experience of love and we will feel into that, to find a new relationship to everything, to the planet, to life within it, to the vitality within our bodies, to our own spirit, to our own sense of identity. These are so close to being realized within each of us, and that’s a relief.

[25:08] Sahara
Can you repeat that sentence again, the message that you received?

[25:11] Zach
“The fabric of everything is not love, the fabric of everything is beauty. And the experience of seeing beauty will give you the experience of love.” And it’s such a relief to find out that all of this leverage to love yourself are actually exhaustive, you know. You have to go love yourself, go fall in love with yourself! That sensation of love lasts for about 7s in the brain, the amygdala, and we can trigger these experiences of love, a dopamine rush, an epinephrine shift. We can feel this pleasure, sort of, happen, and we call it love. But to be in constant pursuit, every 7s, of that love experience, what I was really frustrated with and worried about, honestly, for humanity – Wow, if we have to work that hard to come into love for ourselves, we’ve got a serious problem, we’re not going to make it. But the experience of beauty is passive, you don’t have to do anything to be witness to beauty, you just have to stand still for a moment.
And so, it’s an exciting reality that, to fall in love with the Universe, to fall in love with yourself, is actually an exercise in standing still long enough to find your own beauty, to find the beauty around you, and when you do that, you will experience a state of love rather than the emotion of love, because the beauty is permanent, beauty has a permanence to it that does not waiver in regards to the environment around that beauty. The beauty is beautiful for the soldier who is fallen in the field and shot down by a machine gunfire for another useless war. That soldier will die in the beauty of that sunset, irregardless of the state of affairs that led to brokenness and dysfunction that leads to that situation. Family that is refugeed from war-torn countries right now sees beauty in one another; the stories that came out of the concentration camps (WWII), people found beauty in one another and they cared for each other in such exquisite ways in the most extreme horror that it ever happened, and yet the beauty was still there. And we have these extraordinary stories of lovers or spouses that were separated in concentration camps, assuming the other one is dead, for years, held close to the beauty of that person, despite them believing that they were gone, and then to be reunited decades later. It’s an unbelievable pattern through these most horrific chapters in human history that beauty persists and that beauty is real.
And learning to practice that in your life, you’re going to become very resilient and very regenerative in your capacity to tolerate the trauma and the chaos of the human experience as it’s unfolding.

[28:04] Sahara
I love that so much! And I think, yeah, self-love is so challenging, but really, to look at the beauty within yourself instead of being like “I love my stomach, I swear, I love it!”, but you actually don’t. to see the beauty in your stomach and that it’s your organ and it keeps your womb space alive and all of that.
Now, for people who may be in a health challenge that, they may be angry at their bodies, they feel like their bodies failed them for whatever reason, or they may be angry at themselves for not catching it sooner – how can we let beauty heal that again?
I think sometimes we feel like “If I accept it, then I’ll be okay with it and it will persist”, so it’s like “I need to do whatever I can to change this”, but then that energy is like a warlike energy within itself.

[28:51] Zach
Yeah. I think that’s what we hand you, as doctors. We hand you a battle and say “You’ve got to fight against the cancer”, “You’ve got to fight against the autoimmune disease. We need to suppress your immune system”. It’s this warlike mentality that we practice in our toolbox of Western medicine all the time, and so, we pass that on to individuals, patients, etc., through that warlike mentality that each of us carries because of our own training and education and toolbox of pharmacy that we’re given, which is all battle mode – kill the bacteria, kill the viruses, kill whatever. When you wake up every day, try to decide, as a physician or as a patient “What do I need to kill today?”, you end up losing a lot of life, you end up depleting yourself at a very deep level.
And so, making that shift towards realizing you are a sovereign being that’s expressing disorder and disease, it becomes a lot easier to shift the orientation of your energy and where you’re putting it.
The journey towards self is very often fought with traumas, disorder, disease, exhaustion, dysfunction within relationships or dysfunction within your job or professional identity, all of these levels, it is the friction of all those moments that bring you closer to the knowingness of who you actually are.
And so, learning to embrace, if not, at least giving grace to the disorder that’s seemingly plaguing you right now is a really important shift. And that’s what I focus on every single initial visit to my clinic, I spend that first 2hrs with that patient, helping to reorient them to a state of gratitude for their journey, rather than a state of anger, war, battle, all of that stuff.
And so, I’ve got this opportunity with each patient to be a part of a different journey. And it’s so much more rewarding as a practitioner, a physician, to be alongside a journey of healing that is league with an understanding and in fact an appreciation for the path, for the journey.
And so, we have, the program that we teach online, is called The Journey Into Intrinsic Health, and it’s literally embracing the fact that you aren’t going to feel well every day, that’s part of being human. There’s going to be long periods of time where you feel disconnect within your body, when you feel disconnect between body and spirit. There’s going to be long periods of intense friction between the people around you, maybe it’s your immediate family, maybe it’s an extended family, maybe it’s work environments, you’re going to feel extreme friction over and over again until you are in a flow state. And to get that flow state going faster in your life, it’s not a ‘work harder’ scenario, it’s actually a ‘surrender faster’ scenario.
And so, remembering that you are in a current of energy that is taking you towards your highest path, and the more you cling on to the rocks that you bump into, the more you identify yourself with the hard unmoving objects around you; the more you cling to the roots at the edge of the river, the more you’re trying to resist change, the more you’re trying to work so hard to overcome the current that you’re stuck in, the more wasted energy is been achieved, the more exhausted you’re going to be.
So, it’s learning to let go into the flow of that current of life that is inherently taking you to where you must be at the termination of your contract with the soul-body connection that you currently have. You are going to get there!
And I’ve seen through my hospice work, tens, hundreds, thousands of cases of patients in those last few minutes of life, realizing it was all perfect, realizing the journey of estranged children and broken sense of self or deep insecurities about their role as parents or children, or whatever it is, suddenly resolve themselves in a split second as that veil becomes very thin and they can see that the destination was exactly the destination that was ordained and that they are getting there, and that they arrived there for, largely, the frictions and the dysfunctions and disorders and diseases that happened in their lifetime. Here they are, they’re in the right moment, they’re fully accepted, they’re fully loved by Source, by this divine within them, landing, finding that sense of “I am”, “I am home”.
If you get there in a split second before you let go of this body and go through, what we call death, it is always a rebirth, it is always an expansion, it’s always this beautiful unfolding of something much greater that a human body could ever manifest.
And so, if death itself can be a rebirth to the process of surrender, what a glorious thing a life could be if we would begin the surrender process much earlier than we tend to in these Western cultures. We need to surrender faster, we need to teach our children to surrender into the flow of the Universe and to accept the journey. What came to you today and how did you react to that? What did you decide to manifest in the flow of the energy that you’re in today? What did you expect to see and what did you see? Was there a disconnect between those? Are you letting go of the concept of need and starting to walk into the concept of abundance? These are the tools, these are the lexicon that we can begin to practice together with our children or with our peers, or with our elders, to really ask the right questions in the day, of “Are we getting closer to an acceptance of flow-state of being alive, being enthrived and being witnessed to beauty on all the fractal levels from whatever position we hold that day, whether that be out hiking a trail, 14,000ft mountain (Rocky Mountains) or laying in bed with chronic fatigue, chronic pain syndrome from that bed, having the quietness and the stillness to be able to find the deeper beauty within the human life and the human generative capacity.
So, those are some of the brush strokes that come in for me, as you’re reflecting those questions.

[35:11] Sahara
I love that! And how much do you feel like it’s destiny? Do you think there are certain, even, health ailments and challenges that we are destined to have, that are part of our soul’s contract or Karma, for us to work through, and how much of it is biology or created by our environments etc.?

[35:30] Zach
Those are all inseparable in my mind. The environment that we’ve created as humanity is our path. We had to play out the scenario that were against nature, that we needed to control nature, that we needed to extract the medicine from nature, that we needed to control the food production on the planet, so nobody would starve. The sense of control, dominion, ownership, intellectual property, finding the secret pill, all of these things and traits, that was our journey, we had to do that; we had to walk this path to ask “Are we God? Are we creating everything? Or are we subject to this more universal energy that we would call God.” And we are actually a part of the relationship, the dance between this all-knowing field of energy within the Universe and the biologic manifestations that are coming out of that dance of life between the physics and biology.
And so, we, in this biological dance, are going to manifest disorder, disease, paths that look broke, that look dysfunctional, all that is going to exist, and it’s perfect because in the end, the friction between those two realities of “You are always in flow. You’re always going to your appropriate end point and you’re resisting change and you’re trying to micromanage something that’s so complex and beyond your imagination and its beauty”. And so, it’s the friction between those two realities that create disorder and disease.
So, if you’re finding yourself with a high degree of inflammation, dysfunction, disorder, in your body, I’m quite confident that the world has taught you to cling to things that are not in the flow state that are taking you to your highest path. So, the faster you can let go of those things, the faster you can let go of those beliefs, the quicker you’re going to come in this “I am” state of “I am in the perfect spot. I’m here to manifest life. I’m here as an expression of life and this is how it’s expressing itself in my body right now.” And maybe that seems very limited, maybe I’m limited to my bed for a period of time while I recollect the energy from the flow state now that I’ve let go of all the beliefs and identities, that were keeping me anchored to an old self or a false self. And as I become true, as I become resonant and cohesive and coherent with my true waveform of this life, being that I would call a soul, it’s going to make everything so much more efficient, the use of energy in my body will be so much more vital, and my capacity to shift the way in which other people experience life will manifest through my work as a physician or as an educator, or whatever it is.
And so, it’s an exciting interplay at that, as I become surrendered and I stop trying to micromanage the experience of each patient or their disease, and start to be willing for something more beautiful and something much more mega than my own capacity to express itself in this patient’s life.
My own story, towards that, brings that individual to the faster and more complete capacities to surrender themselves, and when they see no fear in me, as a practitioner, watching them surrender in the context of the story or narrative of cancer, they gain confidence quickly. And it’s that really cool snowball effect where humans being mirrors to other humans become the most powerful modes of transformation, transmutation and all of this.
And so, I believe that that’s where community comes in so interestingly, is that I’ve actually never seen anybody heal in isolation, I’ve only seen people heal in context of relationship, and that’s usually relationship to practitioners, but sometimes it’s relationship to a grandmother or it’s a relationship to a mentor, or something like this in life. And that becomes the mirror that the person can finally see themselves in and they shift their whole mentality, seemingly, in split seconds, and then manifest a different body, and they manifest a different level of vitality within them as they make that change and see themselves for just a moment in a clean mirror.

[39:38] Sahara
I so agree with group and healing; joy-based healing. And there’s a story of this, after the Rwandan genocide, the US Government, I don’t know if you heard this, they sent a group of psychologists and psychiatrists to Rwanda, just to work with the people who just witnessed a genocide and so many of their friends and family killed. And they sent these psychologists to the village and after a few days the village kicked them out, and the Government was like “Why did you just kick them out? These are our top psychiatrists and psychologists”, and the people said “No, no, no, I think you sent the wrong people, because these people wanted to take us away from our tribe, to sit in a dark room and keep talking about what happened. but in Rwanda, the way that we heal is, we go outside and we join hands under the sun and we sing and we dance, and we allow ourselves to be enchanted by stories. That’s how we heal.”
And I feel like that is what’s missing in the Western culture, it’s so about “What happened and what’s wrong? Let me create a new label about that and analyze it and keep going back to it. And if there’s still any resonance to it, it’s not healed and you’re still broken.” And sometimes the best thing we can do is to put it on a shelf for a while and go outside and be enchanted by song, dance and story, and that’s really the true healing that we need.

[41:00] Zach
Yeah. And in a nutshell, you just described that reality of beauty, which is, no matter what horror humans can think up and execute, it never diminishes the beauty. And so, the Rwandans are recognizing the beauty of song, community, storytelling and its capacity for resilience and regeneration within their bodies. And so, it’s a perfect example of what it would look like to have a society that does not dwell in the trauma, that does not dwell in the darkness, but is always paying attention to the sources of beauty around them, and recognizing that beauty cannot be diminished by the human traumatic journey.

_______________________________________________________

[41:39] Advertisement
I know this Episode is good, but so is this sponsor!

If you are in a healthy or not, but you’re obsessed with really high quality, beautiful and spiritual herbal products, then I know the perfect thing for you, and that is Anima Mundi Herbals.
This company is truly game-changing, they take herbology and do it in this really intuitive way where you’re working, not just with the herb but the spirit of the herb.
And some of my favorites are their Golden Milk with Blue Lotus, which is really powerful for lucid dreaming and opening up your intuition. Their Rose, which opens up your divine Feminine Wisdom. Your Mucuna, which actually boots the dopamine, the happiness hormone in your brain, and so many others.
I’ve interviewed the founder, Adriana, on my Podcast twice, she is a master herbalist and someone who I deeply love, respect and resonate with, so I’m so happy to be able to share her products with The Highest Self Podcast audience.
Trust me when I say, one you try them, you are going to be obsessed. And they make for wonderful gifts for others!
So, if you want to get your hands on some, head over to animamundiherbals.com and use code ‘Sahara’ for 20% OFF, and you can find that link in the show notes.

Now back to the Episode!

[43:07] End of Advertisement
_______________________________________________________

[43:08] Sahara
I think too, are, overidentification with our diseases. Let’s say you’ve got a certain autoimmune disease from me, I dealt with Amenorrhea for two years, I didn’t get my period, and I had Perimenopausal symptoms, and I think the first part of it is you want to learn everything about it, you’re obsessed with it, it’s all you talk about, and then you find other people like that and it’s the point of connection, but then it becomes this almost like identification of “I am an autoimmune warrior! That is who I am, nothing else in my life matters” and it’s almost like, then we keep repeating that story which is manifesting “This is the whole of who I am”, when it’s just a momentary experience.
So, what is your advice for people right now who may be currently obsessed with whatever their healing thing is and how can we connect to something larger than that?

[43:55] Zach
I think that what I see in clinic is that the fervor that we put into our disease identities is actually a misplaced fervor for wanting to be seen. And so, if you can acknowledge, within yourself, that your desire to have the label of autoimmune thyroid disease or Hashimoto’s or polycystic ovarian syndrome, or whatever you need to come up with in your list of diagnosis and disorders, when you recognize that you’re clinging to those for a misplaced sense of need, your real need is for you to be seen, for your soul to be seen, and its lifeforce and its purpose. And if you can let go of that list of disorders and diseases that are affecting our body, and allow for space to actually hold on to something bright, the hope within you, your capacity to witness beauty, your capacity to experience love, and through that beauty, that is a lot of space to play in that has a profoundly positive end point, not just for you but for the ecosystem and culture around you, your immediate family, your larger community, etc.
And so, it’s exciting for us to acknowledge how much energy we put into that activist mentality which ends up reinforcing the very thing that we’re hating, and reinforcing our sense of autoimmune disease being a good thing. We feel like our body is against us because antibodies are attacking our own body, therefore, we’re at war with ourself, and we get more and more angry, and, you know, experience more and more animosity towards this thing called autoimmune disease, we are simply reinforcing the entire physiologic discordance that’s leading to that event in the first place. And I think we can fall into that trap when we’re activists in just about anything.
When we move away from being future manifestors, to being angry at current paradigm, we lose our power, we immediately give our power away to the very thing that we dislike about the environment, the current narrative, whatever it is.
And so, as we look at this pandemic, it’s the largest fear and guilt paradigm that’s ever unfolded on our planet; the grand scale of 7.8 billion people directly affected by a narrative about a virus. And so, this is the grandest example of what we are capable of manifesting in our belief with the war against nature. We’ve got to believe that nature is here to attack us, and it is a turning point for us right now. Are we going to embrace the narrative of against nature or are we going to begin to reimagine humanity within the context of nature that’s always been pushing for more adaptation, more biodiversity, more vitality within the life forms, therefore we became real. We had to march through the fifth extinction of the dinosaurs and everything else so that there would be enough intelligence within the viral, within the genetic record of earth within all those viruses to actually manifest deciduous trees, flowering plants, mammals, and ultimately humans. We are the result of the stress of previous extinction of us because nature is inherently always pushing for more adaptation, for more biodiversity, for more intelligent connection to the knowledge field, this connection being something we would call consciousness.
And so, we are manifesting and we have been manifested as part of this natural march of nature to being a better and better witness to her own beauty. We are the highest manifestation of life on earth, in our capacity to witness and communicate beauty. We are here to do this thing, we are here to be witness to this.
If we choose to be separate and we choose a state of scarcity and we choose a state of against nature, against ourselves, we will be short-lived, but we will have still contributed something massive to this planet and that we became capable of art.
And so, every piece of music ever created, every piece of fine art ever created, every poem ever written, I believe is the perfect record of our capacity as a species to create and co-create beauty within the Universe we live. And so, we have done that, we have achieved that, and maybe that was enough, and so, when we march into extinction of end, we won’t have to do it as a sense of failure, we will have showed up and we will have been able to participate in the co-creation of beauty in ways that none of the other animals on the planet have ever been able to. We will have a record, we will have a record of written word, we will have a record of sculptures that date back tens of thousands of years, we will have a record of the exquisite capacity of humans to touch one another with a sense of love and beauty, reverence. And for that, we’re contributed something pretty massive to this field of consciousness to the connection between biology and the field of knowledge in the Universe. We are at that God connection, we are at that “I am” state and that’s enough, and we can give ourselves a huge permission slip to say that we’ve done it to the best of our capacity.
And there’s been a lot of light amidst the darkness that we’ve created and the destruction we’ve raised on the planet, but there will be more beauty to follow. It does not end with humanity. Our own extinction is hardly going to be a blip on a radar of the expression of beauty within the Universe, within even our small planet. And so, there will be more beauty to be seen and there will be more complex biology that will follow humans because of the nature of nature, which is always more adaptation, more capacity, biodiversity, a more robust capacity for knowledge, consciousness and light.
And so, there will be more creativity and more beauty on the planet in the thousands of years, millions of years to come. Whether or not we stay in play is only part of the story.

[50:14] Sahara
And sometimes, yeah, just as you said, the best way to heal from something is to create art. Not to keep reading about it and talking about it and freaking out over it, but to sculpt, to dance, to paint, to come back to the things that we love to do as children that, for some reason, we were made to believe were not worthwhile, those are our greatest healers.
And I truly believe that if everyone was in any type of flow state, whatever medium it was, on a daily basis, I mean, we wouldn’t have, definitely, the pandemic, but many, may pandemics and epidemics that we’re simultaneously in right now, simply by doing things that don’t even need to be that complex, things that, again, we used to do as children, but again, feel like they’re not worthwhile.
So, for people right now are, maybe, fearful. They’re fearful about the way humanity is going. The Metaverse, things getting more technological, are wanting to connect back to nature, but it almost feels like the ship is sailing and there’s nothing we can do.
First of all, what are your thoughts on the Metaverse and VR becoming our main reality, and how can we bring nature and indigenous wisdom along with us?

[51:28] Zach
Yeah. I think technology will always miss the target of the human experience in its fulness because it’s not going to engage us emotionally or spiritually in the same way in which life does.
And so, no matter how, visually or sensory stimulating the VR world becomes, it’s not going to more us towards a spiritual space of awareness of the “I am”. And so, ultimately, there will be a huge counter-culture movement that will be equal and opposite to the technologic march, and we see that already. We see this huge movement towards growing your own food during the pandemic; we see a huge movement towards screen-free time for kids. There’s a growing awareness among parents that having kids on screens all day long is toxic and it’s screws up their capacity for socialization, consciousness itself, self-expression, creativity, all these things get shut down by these technologic co-optation and distraction of the brain. And we can do this with Netflix, whatever it is as adults, we get sucked in by these distractive states of being where we’re simply a receptacle for other people’s narratives and other people’s scheme of word distraction.
Like you said so powerfully, stepping back into a creative role is your path to freedom. So, sit and play that musical instrument that you haven’t been picking up as frequently; sit and do that. Fine art practice, or sit in, and simply be witness to nature for a short or long period time of the day and it will fundamentally change your sense of self, your vitality, your capacity to express yourself in an authentic way where you’re really speaking from, and expressing from, “I am”, there’s going to be a different energy to you and you will start to attract much different things, and people, to you as you make those changes yourself. So, you will begin to manifest a different reality around you as you find your path back to true and authentic creativity and the capacity to create beauty in your life. And that path is inevitable, I’ve seen it too often at the bedside of dying patients, to know that that’s ultimately what’s going to happen. You are going to become a co-creator in the Universe, even if it’s in the last three seconds of your life, that you come to realize that, you will realize it and you will kneel and more beyond the veil, and you will co-create with Universe once again.
And so, if there’s this blip on the radar, VR, Metaverse and all of these things that sound horrific even before they’re created, it’s not hard for us to immediately move past that narrative and vision to a natural law state where humans have learned that nature is inherently abundant and inherently in support of more life, within you, within me, within our communities. The fabric of nature, the fabric of life itself is here to foster more of you, more of your capacity to express self.
And so, when you put yourself in alignment with that, it has to powerfully transform all other narratives that will try to sneak in and distract you so your mind, spirit, hopelessness or sense of disempowered state, move back into that creative state, move back into your space of surrender, say “Hey, there’s a universal flow, I want to be in it, I want to let go of all expectations, I want to let go of all my list of needs. I don’t have needs, I have the desire to see more beauty and I have the desire to participate in that beauty.” That is a much different day than “I need this for my spouse. I need this for my kids. I need this for my work. I need this from the Netflix content tonight”, all those needs of adventure and distraction and productivity, it’s a chasing after the wind, you will not find yourself in that west of needs, you will find yourself in the quiet current below the needs, in a state of abundance and a state of releasing the dominion of ownership, and you start to become the steward of life rather than something, someone trying to fight off death. Become a steward of life within your self, become a steward of life through your co-creative capacity for beauty.

[55:51] Sahara
It’s so true! I hear so many people talking about “How do we increase our lifespan, live to 120 years, 150 years” and it’s like, what’s the point if we’re not enjoying? Spend all of our time to live longer and then what?
And I’d love to hear your take on – you know, sometimes when I speak to people who are more on the mainstream technology and science path, and I speak to them about nature, they say “Well, before science and technology, people were dying at age 30 or age 40; people were dying of diseases all the time, so the reason why we have such long lifespans is because of this.” So, what is your response to that?

[56:28] Zach
Yeah. So, we’ve had long-lived people for thousands of years, right? So, there’s a lot of people that would live deeper in the human record, hundreds of years of age. And so, we have intense longevity at every era. The average age of death in around 1900, for example, was 48 in the United States, but that was because there was so much traumatic death that was associated with child birth and early traumas in manufacturing environments and things like that.
If you lived past the age of 40, your likelihood of living to 80 was about equivalent to day, but there was just a lot of early death due to toxic environments, dangerous environments, manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution that was happening. And the quality and scale over the durability or longevity of live that occurred between 1900 and 1960, had really nothing to do with modern medicine, or anything like that, it had everything to do with the shift in water purity, in the inner-city environments and a reduction of air pollution from coal-burning heating systems throughout New York and other large cities at the turn of the 20th century. So, as we cleaned up air, water and food systems, in that first half of the century, longevity improved dramatically. We made other public health interventions as well, things as simple as heat belts and things like that improved longevity. And so, we made simple decisions and improvements that reduced traumatic death.
What we saw in the latter half of the century was a diminishion of life expectancy, again. And so, we shot from age 48 to 78 and 82 by late 1970s, and then from the late 90s to the year 2000-2005 etc., we see this decrement of age expectancy, again, the United States dipping into the 70s, and now concerns that we may see a whole new revolution in the amount of childhood and early adult loss of life from cancers, autoimmune diseases and all these things that have become epidemic, metabolic diseases, obesity, complications thereof.
So, we’re deep into loss of longevity as a civilization and we will have no choice but to the reap the consequences of that in the next 10-20 years as our children die faster and faster, and our younger people are more and more tragically expressing this intense level of disconnect to their nature because of the amount of antibiotics they see, the amount of herbicides, pesticides that they eat, the amount of disconnect from that natural soil within themselves, the microbes that create a healthy, thriving human body are dying under the toxic pressure from everything, from our food systems to our cosmetics. We are poisoning our bodies at every turn and therefore, putting in an intense epigenetic pattern towards disease and dysfunction.
We have 1 in 3 males in the United States sterile, by sperm count, that’s an unacceptable level of collapse of fertility. And with that collapse of fertility, comes extinction. We cannot engineer ourselves out of this situation, there’s not enough IVF to keep humanity alive.
There’s only a march towards this loss of life within us until we bring ourselves back in this natural law, back into this realization that we are all one. The microbes of the soil are as important as any macroeconomic system we ever created, so we need to make sure our macroeconomics start to align with microbiology of our soil systems. The money of movement at the big billion, trillion-dollar level is not having a positive impact on soil mycology and soil biology, and we’re doing the wrong thing. We’ve disconnected human productivity from natural systems that support life.
And so, that’s a lot of what my companies do, is envision technologies, products, etc., that bring us back to that alignment where microfinance, macro-energy and technologies start to match and align themselves with natural systems of carbon loops, carbon cycles within the soil system, within the microworld digestion, metabolism and the like. So, it’s been a really exciting 10-year journey to go beyond the clinic and start to see how we can heal the planet. And we can certainly heal a culture and a species as we bring coherence of natural law and natural systems into the human behavior, and so that the technologies, the VR that we create in the future could actually bring us closer to an understanding of disorder and disease and dysfunction, if it learns the narrative of natural law, if it learns the narrative of how does life unfold within the human body. So, VR could become an important tool to help people visualize what cancer is and why it’s not scary, and why it’s actually their most important guide to their highest form of self-expression and their own exploration and discovery of self, would be through that cancer journey. And so, VR could take people on an extraordinary journey of freedom and empowerment, but it’s going to have to be based on the change of mindset behind the programmer who would give us the VR in the first place. The mindset of the programmer and the big corporations that are controlling those programmers is “We need to gamify the human experience to make more money”, and that’s the goal, then the Metaverse will take over and accelerate the extinction of men on the planet. It will speed it up and it will complete it.
If, instead, we start to envision an internet, software environment, where all of the AI systems of intelligence are modelled after mycelium networks, so that all curiosity among humans is augmented and supported by an AI system connecting you to the resources, the mycelium would put trees in touch with each other so that they would have the right nutrients and have the right communication network to understand the greater whole. If the internet were to work as mycelium network, we would have nothing to worry about from VR, IR, all of these different AI systems. This is going to be a turning point, can we learn systems of natural law, systems of natural biology, within our technologies where we’ll continue to put all of that ingenuity and productivity against that nature.

[1:03:18] Sahara
So beautifully said! And yeah, it’s really up to us and our level of consciousness is really what will choose this. Everything can be used from technology, even to our food systems in light or shadow ways.
Specifically on the question on fertility and the decrease in fertility – do you feel like a lot of this is related to EMFs? Chem trails? What do you think some of these causes are?

[1:03:43] Zach
I think the vast majority is toxicity of our food systems and the amount of herbicides and pesticides that we get in food residues are just grotesque and they’re killing the mitochondria, which are the bacteria inside of our cells. So, as we lose mitochondrial density, we lose the vitality of life itself. So, that undermines our capacity to resist disease, it undermines our capacity to reproduction.
So, I think the toxicity of the food system is number one. Right behind that would be the toxicity of our consumer products which would be plastics in the form of endocrine disrupters, which would be the 160 chemicals that an average American or Western woman is exposed to through chemical cosmetics every day.
And so, food, followed by plastics, followed by cosmetics, are probably the three biggest offenders of human survival at this point.

[1:04:37] Sahara
Yeah, I think it’s a great reminder for us because, you know – do you feel like just buying organic foods is enough or do you feel like a lot of these organic foods still, the mineral is still not rich, etc.?

[1:04:49] Zach
Unfortunately, the USDA Organic Certification is a list of 30 things not to do – don’t spray this, don’t do that, don’t do this. And at no point in that 30-point checklist does it mention anything about soil health, microbiology, nutrient density, chloric quality. There’s no mention of health anywhere in the checklist of USDA Organic. And so, in a classic, regulatory, governmental solution, we created no solution at all. In fact, we created a label that is has no reflection back towards the actual behavior of the farmer and their soil that they’re managing.
So, when I set out to, you know, make a documentary on the impact of herbicides on the Mississippi River, on cancer, I thought that I was going to tell people to all buy organic and grow organic and all this, only to find out that a lot of the soils on USDA Organic farms are worse in quality than the chemical farms next door. And so, it was this terrifying moment of “My God, I thought all we had to do was organic and now we have to do what? We have to do regenerative agriculture! What the heck is that? Nobody had heard of that term a few years back.”
So, we’ve been part of, you know, with the farmer’s footprint and project biome and all this, that we’ve been involved with, globally now, we’re just a participant in what has been a decades-old effort to just prove that there is importance of soil management food systems that would resolve from that soil management, that will have an incredible impact on human biology and survival.
And so, that revolution is afoot and the only way you’re going to be a part of that revolution right now, because labeling hasn’t been helped or effective in connecting the dots on “Is this food actually nutrient-dense; was the soil actually taken care of or not”, you have to know your farmer, that’s the only solution we have right now.
And so, to do that, you need to get to a farmer’s market, you need to get to a CSA, there’s no city in America that doesn’t have access to those. There are rural towns that don’t have access to that, in which case, you’re going to have to, in these extreme, rural environments, become the grower – grow a backyard garden again and be part of that, even if it’s just seasonal, even if it’s a few plants, you have to start to participate back into soil management of the world that you live in. And the closer you get to the soil, the more community you’re going to find around that soil, the more community you’re going to discover. You’re going to meet farmers, you’re going to meet people who are engaged in urban gardening and backyard gardening, rooftop gardening. You’re going to start to attract this new community to you and be a participant in a regenerative possibility for the future.
So, regenerative agriculture is definitely the path forward; regenerative agriculture describes soil management as the primary purpose of the farmer, which is much different than being a farmer whose purpose is to kill whatever weed they can find that day and to beat back the fungus and to spray all the antimicrobials they can think of.
And so, in a very similar way, the doctor has found himself in the same situation as the farmer, in that we’ve outsourced our education to the chemical industry, and both the doctor and the farmer wake up, trying to kill everything around them with one more vicious chemical. We need to shift that mentality; we need to shake off that education and step back into the possibility of being an advocate for life instead of a practitioner of death and destruction.
So, the doctor and farmer have to make this ultimate umbilical cord cut from the chemical industry to step back into the belief that nature knows how to do life better than any chemical company ever has. Nature knows how to do food systems, nature knows how to do biologic recovery of toxins and all this. So, the path is forward, if we align with that nature, and when we help the farmers become the managers of soil instead of producers of food, we will have an enormous downstream benefit to humanity, perhaps highest among us, being our own survival and avoidance of the extinction event here.

[1:08:57] Sahara
It’s just such a great reminder – you know, I was going to the farmer’s market every week and then the pandemic happened, and then you start to order your food online, on Amazon Wholefoods, which comes in so much plastic, so much waste, but it’s almost like there’s no way to get your greens without the plastic that it’s wrapped in the box. So, it’s such a great reminder, especially to support these farmers.
And what questions should we ask, because I have heard that, also at the farmer’s market, not everything necessarily is even organic, let alone regenerative. So, what are some questions that we should ask when shopping?

[1:09:30] Zach
I think that one of the ones is just simple questions about soil management, which is to use composting as a primary nutrient and delivery for your soil systems, “Do you use cover crops?” Those are two positive questions rather than “Do you spray herbicides?” or “Do you use roundup?”, which are common questions. And those are kind of accusatory questions in enough themselves, and I’d much rather be buying from a farmer that uses a little bit of [inaudible – 1:09:57] once you knock down a cover crop or weeds or whatever it is, but they’re taking care of their soli. They are using compost cycles, they are using all of this other proactive cover crop diversification.
Another question could be “Do you have animals on your farm?”, “Have you reintegrated biologic systems of animal life and cycles of all of the bio-nutrient diversity that they’re capable of bringing in?” And so, cover crops, composting and animal management are three simple questions that will get you close to a regenerative farmer. If all there is yes, yes and yes, you’ve probably got yourself a regenerative farmer there.

[1:10:35] Sahara
Amazing! And what is your take on hydroponics? Do you see this as a great solution in the future or it lacks that soil?

[1:10:42] Zach
Yeah. I think the latter. I think that hydroponics is a great example of food on life support, it’s the ICU version of food production, it does not equate to healthy food and it certainly does not look like a natural system. So, we need to move back into soil systems as our primary, generative environment. And the vast majority of out-of-season foods that are on the shelf right now, the berries, all of your tomatoes, things that you know are not growing locally because it’s snowing in your backyard. It’s that out-of-season supply chain that’s going to be most disconnected from its nature, and that might be a 9000-mile chain from South America or it might be a 500-mile supply chain from a hydroponic farm nearby. But either way, there is no way that that food is connected to your nature, connected to your rhythms of seasonality within your microbiome, there’s no way that that food is reflecting back at you and the natural system that would support your body in December 2021.
We have to start moving back towards seasonal and local eating to get our bodies nutrified with the very things that are capable of giving life in these seasons that we developed within, for billions of years.

[1:12:04] Sahara
Absolutely! And such a huge tenant of Ayurveda, that the foods that grow in this time period are going to give the energy and the qualities that you need, such as root vegetables will give you that grounding during the Fall the time, which is the Vata time, cold, dry, rough air.
And I know for myself, what really attributed to all of my hormonal issues was, I was a raw vegan in Boston, where there were no coconuts and mangos and pineapples growing, but that’s all I was eating, and it was that disconnect with where I was, which was a snowy environment, but me thinking “Oh, well, raw foods must be the best foods for you on earth, and I should just eat them, because I saw a bunch of YouTube videos about it, and it must be the truth!” So, I think that that’s so helpful. And I also see a movement of so many people moving to community, to be able to grow their own food.
So, what do you see in the future? Do you see there to be, maybe, a split between these two different societies, one that’s blue pill – red pill, what are you seeing?

[1:13:06] Zach
I do see a split, and it’s pretty obvious, I think. I think we have a choice to whether or not, if we’re going to choose to see a different future, see a future reintegrated with nature, we’re going have to choose how we spend our energy. And if we all become activists and go attack the other paradigm of the Gates Foundation and everything else that you can think of that represents the dark side to you, throwing your energy at that is probably not going to succeed at the end of the day.
And so, it’s really going to be about how much community can we build around this alternative vision, of a co-creative beauty expressed by humanity as we come into alignment and coherence with our nature. And we can do that right now, we are working on that, just by this single conversation. We are helping, bringing attention to the possibility of what a community can do together.
And so, I get deeply moved by each of these conversations in a sense that it gives me a direct experience of that it feels like to be a connected human and to, right now, in this moment, as you listen to this Podcast, you are a connected human, listening to a long-form dialogue between two other people that have a heart for you and for the planet, and are expressing something beautiful within themselves.
And so, you are being witness to the very condition of being human, by being part of this Podcast. So, it’s an exciting simple way to become part of a greater expression of humanity, as we come into community around a like-minded vision of where we could go. And as long as we continue to put out energy as a community, into that future, the polarity of, you know, all of the destructive, consumptive behaviors that, collectively, we have created as consumers, we have let go of all of that and we’ve become the solution and we go into a flow state while the rest of that recalcitrant system cleans harder and harder with rocks, trying to avoid it, coming out part of the scenes. The empire of the United States is falling apart, actively.
We have a gross instability of the US dollar, therefore we are doing things like creating these pandemics and printing $4 trillion in 12 months, because we have a failing economy, because we have a failing US dollar, because we have a failing empire that was extractive and destructive. And we extracted all the energy out of the planet for the wealth of this one empire and it was a completely insoluble algorithm at its very origin story. And so, we have yet another collapsing empire, and it will collapse and there will be more empire building after it or there will also be the possibility of the first coherent, cooperative, human, international movement that captures natural law and understands the application of natural law and natural systems for ingenuity. And we could go beyond the fiat currencies that dominate the macroeconomics of central banks and all of the systems around us and we can start to envision value at a core level, where value is aligned with life and the value of our monetary system is aligned with metrics of life. Those kinds of simple solutions, aligning value with life, align monetary systems to align themselves with metrics of life, those are simple things that we can do, we have the technology at our fingertips to do that. And if we choose to, we will create something much more powerful than VR currencies and central banks and all the like. We will create a decentralized system of vitality within our macroeconomic and sociopolitical structures, that will allow for a different expression of our humanity.

[1:17:06] Sahara
So beautifully said and holding that vision with holding with you! I think it’s so impactful for all of us to focus on what it is that we do want to create rather than what is already being destroyed, and continue to weave that higher vision because there is such power in all of us joining forces.
And, you know, in Vedic spirituality, this is the time of Kaliyuga, it’s the time, it’s the energy of chaos and destruction, after that comes Sadhyuga, which is the ear of truth. So, after, also, any war, we experience the Renaissance that happens.
So, all of you guys listening right now, we are all part of the solution! And thank you so much Dr. Zach Bush, for being here, for sharing your wisdom with us, and for being so poetic in your delivery of such potent and deep knowledge!
And I just want to really honor you for your courage, as well, for speaking truth in a time where that’s not accepted.
And where can listeners further connect with you and support and join the various initiatives that you have going on?

[1:18:12] Zach
Yeah, The Journey of Intrinsic Health is available, it’s an 8-week program of walking into that “I am” state through understanding, kind of, the eight tenants of human biology and how we can create chaos within our bodies when we’re not in alignment with our own natural law.
So, Journey of Intrinsic Health, you can find that, it’s on URL or you can find it through zachbushmd.com. zachbushmd.com is also my clearing house for a bunch of free education, including the Global Health Education. We have about 14 events that we’ve done over the last 1.5 year that have given a deep dive on the science of the biome, the science of the autoimmune system, the science of death and dying and rebirth, the science of heart disease and we have that backwards.
So, lots and lots of paradigm-shifting information there on Global Health Education site within zachbushmd.com. And when you see that, I think it’ll give you a sense of the scale of the community that’s paying attention to this new possibility of vitality and life there.
Our non-profit work, you can find it farmersfootprint.us, also at projectbiome.au for Australia. So, we’ve got lots of opportunities for you to engage with regenerative farmers around the world. Just in the last 12 months we’ve produced over 105 mini documentaries of farmers that are doing the right thing, of soil management, around this country. So, very inspiring story that covers indigenous farmers from all walks of life, that are among us here in the United States, and practicing, you know, regenerative culture of agriculture that dates back thousands of years.
And so, we don’t have to go figure this now, we need to remember what it looks like to grow real food. We need to remember that we come from an earth that is always in a state of abundance, and when we do that, we find a new hope for our future.
So, get your kids engaged, Farmers Footprint has lots of opportunities for you to get engaged there, we have mighty networks, a group there that meets every week, and there’s a storytelling time, there’s poetry, there’s all kinds of beautiful sharing and creativity among the community of food systems, stake holders there that are participating through Farmers Footprint.
For some of the avenues, for the deep dive on soil biology and how it impacts human health, the website is intelligenceofnature.com and there’s a whole line of dietary supplements that are derived from ancient soil, that we reconnect human cells and their capacity for communication across systems, therefore vitalizes an incredible array of regenerative capacity within that human body. So, if you’re not aware of ION and Intelligence of Nature, that website will get you there.

[1:21:01] Sahara
Well, thank you so much for all these potent resources and we’re so grateful for your wisdom. thank you so much for sharing.

[1:21:07] Zach
Thank you for having me on, thank you for having a dialogue.

[1:21:10] End of Interview
____________________________________________________________

[1:21:11] Sahara
I am glistening and glowing and radiating with love and an even heightened appreciation for beauty. I have been walking the beauty path for about 3 years now, having beauty be one of my core values and recreating beauty everywhere that I go.

[1:21:33] Sahara
Every single day I offer rose petals to the ocean and surround myself by beauty! But what a reminder, and I love what we said that we think everything is love, but aren’t we seeing it? But if we see beauty in everything, then a natural result of that will be love.

[1:21:49] Sahara
So, instead of trying to see “Well, what is this break-up teaching me? This doesn’t feel like love to me! How can I see the beauty in the separation? How can I see beauty in this conflict? How can I see beauty even in what is happening in the collective?” And when you can find that beauty, there really is such freedom and acceptance on the other side. Acceptance that we don’t need to fight against everything, but rather, if we see the beauty in it, we know that even a heartbreak, even something that feels like the world is ending, also has a beauty to it, it also is a renewal.
And then we have this appreciation for it and we realize we’re not the victims of our surroundings, but we’re really creatrixes of them.

[1:22:36] Sahara
So, I absolutely love this conversation! If it shifted something in you, you had an ‘Aha’ moment, you had a takeaway, please share it on your Instagram story. The world deeply needs to hear more doctors who are in their hearts, more conversations like this, that elevate our perspective of health and the Mind-Body connection, because this transition that we’re moving to right now is the invitation for us to finally come back into peace and harmony with our bodies.
So, this conversation may be that reminder that someone needs. So, share it on your Instagram story, tag me @iamsahararose and @zachbushmd. And I’m so excited to see your takeaways.

[1:23:19] Sahara
So, I hope you loved this conversation and I would love for you to leave a review. So, please share a review with me, if you’re listening to this on iTunes and take a screenshot of that review so I can send you a free gift as my thank you.
You can email that free gift over to [email protected], take a screenshot of your review and I will send you a free gift of my unreleased book “Eat Right For Your Mind-Body Type”, which is a deep Ayurveda book, all about eating right for your Dosha.
So, again, take a screenshot of your review and send it over to [email protected] and I will send you over my free E-book!

[1:24:01] Sahara
I hope you loved this conversation, share it with people that you think it may resonate with and I’ll see you in the next one! Namaste!

 

Episode 415: How To Heal Your Body Holistically + Spiritually with Dr. Zach Bush
By Sahara Rose

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll to Top