The Body Knows…How to Stay Young: Healthy Aging Secrets from a Medical Intuitive
A CONVERSATION WITH CAROLINE SUTHERLAND
Caroline Sutherland's new book from Hay House, The Body Knows…How to Stay Young: Healthy Aging Secrets from a Medical Intuitive, is the result of many years of working with people and observing the ways that the aging process effects their health and well-being. It is a rich harvest of her experience that is jam-packed with practical approaches to the gamut of issues that face us as we age, focused around the body's amazing capacity for repair and regeneration. Our interviewer David S. Cohen spoke with her as she prepares to return to San Diego's Seaside Center for Spiritual Living in Encinitas on Sept. 18 and for her a healthy-aging conferences in San Diego, September 19-20.
The Light Connection: Could you describe for us the epiphany that led you to become a medical intuitive?
Caroline Sutherland: Like many people when they finally connect to their higher purpose, my work came to me through illness. When I was 39, I had the early warning signs of Multiple Sclerosis. That led me through a referral from my own family doctor to a specialist in Environmental Medicine. Another term for that is Clinical Ecology, which focuses on the human being in relationship to the Environment—everything a person is breathing, eating, coming into contact with. He determined that even though I was displaying MS-like symptoms, I didn't have MS. I had multiple food allergies and something called the Yeast Syndrome and various other imbalances that, miraculously enough, all corrected in four weeks once I began specialized treatment. I've been symptom-free every since. I was surprised and amazed at how quickly my body could rebalance based on the fact that I had myriad undiagnosed symptoms that seemingly did not connect?—until you looked at the whole picture. That was 25 years ago.
In that time, you've been working with thousands of people…
I'm pretty lucky. I do have private clients, but the bulk of the people I see are in the context of my seminars and events. I just tune into them; it takes me just a few seconds to pick up the imbalances in their systems. Not in a diagnostic sense; what I see is more what needs to be supported in the body, where the body seems to be breaking down and what might be useful in terms of correction. I am able to see the body's capacity for repair. I tap into that, give the people the guidelines, set them forth on a plan and check in with them to see how they're doing, which is usually pretty well!
Your latest book is The Body Knows: How to Stay Young. What led you to write it?
Let's face it, I'm 64 years old! I've got to be pretty passionate about entering this chapter of my life. I'm always looking for ways to stay youthful and healthy. I think one of the biggest things is to maintain a very high level of energy, which is often not the case as we grow older. Energy seems to go out the window. How do we recoup it? I'm lucky in that I have a wonderful level of health and a positive attitude—and that all comes from being proactive about the different strategies that are required to maintain that. I wanted to make that available to others. If they could follow those guidelines, they too would have that level of health and energy. That's my main quest, to help everybody stay on track.
I would say the highest motivation for this work is to help people achieve the energy and health to fulfill their own particular higher purpose, their destiny. We all need the energy and health to do that and a lot of people don't, and that's a great sadness.
Would you say that having that sense of one's purpose is the most important underlying factor?
Yes. To tap into purpose as quickly as possible, as early as possible in life, and stay focused on that. There will obviously be rivers and tributaries and little eddies and backwaters that people will be pursuing and finding themselves in. Some people may not find their purpose for quite some time, but it's there. But to stay focused on what it is they are here to do in this world, their life mission, and the things that fulfill them at a soul level. Yet as you look around you see so many people who are unfulfilled, which is a main reason they develop so many health issues.
You speak in the book of four secrets to vibrant aging.
The first one is to stop the body breakdown—to find out what factors are contributing to the breakdown and stop those. That's the first thing. The second thing is build the body back up. Usually that's done with food and specific nutrition, that's the core—including stress relief techniques and exercise—but the bulk of it will come with diet and supplementation. The third part is balanced hormones. As people get into their 50s and 60s, if they want to stay healthy and vibrant and have all their faculties until their 80s and 90s, they have to balance hormones. The fourth part is fulfilling our destiny and living our passion. Put all those pieces together, people will have a wonderful, vibrant and healthy life.
What do you mean by “the Big Three,” the main culprits in the breakdown of the body?
You mean the big agers? Those are Toxins, Allergens and Addictions. First, anything that's toxic to the body. When they think of toxins, people think of some awful exposure to chemicals, but we're exposed to chemicals all the time, in the air that we breathe, in our water, in our food. So stay away as much as possible from conventional packaged food and use organic and hormone-free as often as we can and really evaluate the things we know to be toxic; i.e. cigarettes, alcohol, additives. But you wouldn't believe how toxic for some people a lot of sugar is because it breaks down the cell wall and affects the way the body assimilates nutrition and fats and oils and disturbs how the body actually metabolizes glucose itself. So we want to stop or limit those exposures as much as we can.
Next are the environmental factors, the allergens, things people are exposing themselves to that they don't know are breaking down the body. For example, as we progress in age, wheat can be very inflammatory for people. In my work, it's almost the number one for inflammations, joint stiffness and arthritis. That includes exposure to flour-based products in any form. And coffee. And, as I said, sugar. These products should be kept to a minimum.
The whole objective is to be pain-free and energy-rich. We want to have a full life without unnecessary pain. We don't have that now. You look around and see people with their wheelchairs, walkers and canes, with hunched shoulders and looking tired and gray and miserable. With medical interventions we are able to live until our 80s or 90s. If you are in your 60s now, that's another 30 years. Who needs 30 years of pain? I've made very clear in my book which allergens are the most common.
The final one is addiction. People are addicted to certain behaviors or to foods or to drugs or alcohol. They need to review the causes for what I call “collapsing into addiction.” Are we reaching for certain things to placate our inner pain and sorrow? What would it take to reach for other life-enhancing alternatives that won't wear us down?
You really make it clear in this book that healthy aging requires a real commitment.
Absolutely. You have to be 90% focused. Of course, you'll derail here and there, but a solid focus is mandatory.
I always go back to the higher aspects. We want to fulfill our mission and destiny and leave the planet better than we found it, and to have the health and the energy to do that. This is not just taking some vitamins and eating right and doing all that for no reason. We don't want our lives to run out before our purpose is fulfilled . Since my experience where I actually was shown what the other side is like, the last thing I want to do is go to that next plane of existence and not be complete in terms of what—at a soul level—we were destined to do or to be in this body at this time.
Say more about that incident.
I had a car accident in 1995. I was on a busy country road making a left turn and was hit from behind by a pickup truck. I was propelled right out of my body and I got to see what that other plane of existence is like. There was an incredible amount of light, and I could feel (kind of underscoring the whole scene) what you might call the heartbeat or the heart-mind of God. I could feel that everything was orchestrated, nothing was random, even wars and violence; that everything despite our not being able to see it was interrelated. Even the violent things are all orchestrated because of our thoughts. I was able to communicate with souls that had passed from this plane of existence and were waiting to be reborn again. They communicated with me telepathically: “Caroline, we would give anything to be on this planet at this time in evolution and be part of that process. You are to feel grateful to have a human body. This is a tremendous privilege, no matter that life can be challenging at times.” That was a huge catalyst for me. It showed me this whole business about being healthy has a much much higher reason. It's not just about looking good. It's all linked in to our own particular calling, so to speak.
Getting back to your book: It seems that every page or two, in addition to saying “Stop eating sugar,” says “drink lots of water.”
Yes, I would say, “Keep the water flowing.” That really helps. A lot of people as they progress in age have difficulty with their bladder or their memory and balance and that sort of thing and to keep the body hydrated really helps with that.
As to the sugar: When you think of the pancreas and of the numbers of people with adult onset diabetes, to minimize the intake of sugar—and I don't just mean like a sack of sugar, I mean sugar that's in juice and the bread that converts to sugar—to minimize this really helps our beautiful pancreas, which we need to have through our whole life in a healthy state.
Your other super villain is Candida.
That's probably one of the cornerstones of my work, to identify that. It comes to me via sense; it's a sweet sickly smell that wafts off the body and as soon as I smell that I know that that person's having problems, memory problems, addictions to starches and sugars; they're going to have some kind of fungus, infections somewhere be it psoriasis, dandruff, eczema, toenail fungus; they may have ringing in the ears or deafness. There are many symptoms related to Candida. Once that's cleaned up, they get their energy back. That's what I love about it.
I know you have reser-vations about a purely vegetarian diet.
Yes. Even though there are experts who write books on types of diets—vegetarian or not vegetarian—they often don't have the level of observance and practical experience that I have in working with so many people, not just in a clinical setting but with thousands of people beyond when I left the clinic. And what I see over and over again are problems that arise unless vegetarians are extremely mindful of their need for consistent protein—and protein from a form that they can actually tolerate. As we age, we have difficulties digesting, we don't have the digestive capacity that we had when we were younger. I think we can effectively be full vegetarians when we are younger because we have a very strong digestive capacity. But as we get into our late 40s and 50s, we don't have that same strength and that's where people get into trouble. They say “Well, I haven't eaten any fish or anything for twenty-two years.” Well, I can see that body breakdown. I can see that they need to expand their protein choices, and this may be hard for some people. But they do notice a big difference. So the one thing is digestive capacity and the second is, too many starches, too many fruits, too much sugar and not enough balanced protein. They can often be skittish and light-headed with blood sugar issues and pre-diabetic conditions. Those have been my observations. This is actually a source of great sadness to me.
The progression of your book really moves from the earlier chapters' focus on nutrition and the physical body to the later chapters' focus on psychological and spiritual aspects of aging. What was it like for you to write that?
I loved that! It was so much fun. I was very very lucky to have visited Tibet in the months before I wrote this book, and I could see how everything was so connected. I wanted to make it very clear to people that life is a mystery. While I plan to stay alive and on the planet and be fresh and happy and vibrant and fruitful in all my endeavors, it's a mystery. Who's to know how long we're going to be here? Even following the greatest of health plans, we have no idea what the mystery is and what the Creator or the Divine has in store for us. I wanted to make it very clear that I wasn't standing up as some great authority guaranteed to live till I was 102, but that we should honor the great mystery. That's the note I wanted to close on. We do our best, we have a wonderful life, we live fully open and enjoying life and being fully part of it, and the rest we honor and accept.
For details on the Healthy Aging events with Caroline Sutherland Sept. 18 at Encinitas' Seaside Center for Spiritual Living or her conference in San Diego Set. 19–20 go to www.carolinesutherland .com or call 800-575-6185, or call the Center at (760) 753-5786, ext. 848.
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