The problem today is 75% to 90% of all doctor's office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints. Cleanses are a great way to reduce the stress on your mind, body, and spirit. The great yoga guru Paramhansa Yogananda said cleansing is “a method for rejuvenating the body cells and awakening the latent powers of the mind and inner forces of the soul.”

As I am getting ready to lead a cleanse this weekend, many people want to choose to participate if the diet interests them. I would like to encourage people that there is much more to cleansing than diet.

Intention is Key

I think many of us have heard of the power of intention and how that sets the stage to clearly direct the performance of our lives. I often have an interesting phenomena with cleanses. Typically the body does not fully detox until day 4 or 5 on a cleanse. Once I started setting intentions, I could feel the symptoms of detoxing before the cleanse even began! Sometimes we forget how...

What if within one day you could feel a greater sense of joy, release all pains in your body, feel the energy of a child, have a calm clear mind to accomplish any task, and open a direct connection with the Divine? And then after nine days you would notice a significant weight loss and bad habits being broken so you can maintain the weight loss and continue to lose weight if needed? The solution is the Nine-Day Diet, a cleanse created by the great yoga guru Paramhansa Yogananda.

For those of you who have never done a cleanse before, do not worry because you can eat as much as you want. The point is to eat high nutrient foods that are easy to digest and promote digestion.

Imagine the roads in New York City. Because the city never sleeps, there are always cars and the roads move slowly. With the influx of people moving at once to Portland, rush hour has bottle necked and is very slow. Yet people sleep in Portland allowing the roads to empty and the first cars in the morning to...

For the past few years I have had a fun game of looking at my face in the mirror to check my inner health after I wake up in the morning or after an event I really love doing. Once I discovered that the coloring of my skin, amount of acne, size of my bags, or how much it glows drastically changes depending on my activities, I developed a science experiment to check the inner condition of my body by looking at the outer condition. Here are four of the most effective tips for taking care of inner beauty that brought about the most beautiful complexion.

1. How You Sleep

People often say one should have an average of 8 hours a night. I find it is not only important to get the right amount of sleep, but how you sleep and when you sleep.

According to Ayurveda, the ancient Indian medical science, after 9-10pm we start moving into the fire and then air time of night when we feel more energetic, thus making it harder to fall asleep. From about 9 or 10pm to 1 or 2am our liver goes...

What I find most inspiring in Paramhansa Yogananda’s book How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality is the understanding of our potential for truly healing ourselves. This book accurately reflects the path I have traveled in facing my own health challenges. We can feel caught – victims of the pain we experience or of the prognoses of doctors.

I was told I would be on medications for the rest of my life, that there was nothing I could do about it. The turning point for me came when an energy healer at Ananda Village in Northern California told me just the opposite.  My initial doubt dissolved when I met someone who  had actually healed herself from the condition that challenged me.

The door opened to my own potential for healing. Yogananda explained, “No disease is incurable. Some diseases are beyond the reach of medicines, which by their nature are limited, The medicine is non-curative – so doctors call the disease incurable! But the power of...

Seven Years to Full Cellular Rejuvenation: A Mother and Daughter's Healing Journey

They say it takes seven years for all the cells in the body to fully regenerate. A year ago both my mother and I completed a seven year cycle. Before those seven years both my mother and I were known to be active energetic people. At the beginning of those seven years we both noticed challenges with our health. At first we went about our normal business and hoped it would go away. Instead the challenges became more debilitating and we started a long quest to discover the source of our health issues.

It was quite strange to have constant headaches, extreme fatigue plus a few other odd bodily symptoms. As a yoga and fitness instructor I needed my physical body in order to teach and felt I was expected to be a role model of good health. I could not hide that my painful knee prevented me from leading all of my fitness classes. I never told anyone my muscles seemed to be getting weaker rather than...