I am going to share with you the secret of the fountain of youth and it does not involve botox , collagen injections or plastic surgery. But first of all, what is youth? If we think about youth, we think of bright, fresh energy, maybe a little explosive, we think about curiosity, and about experimentation.
 
Youth is not encumbered by many concepts, many notions, responsibilities, all the things that weigh us down and take our energy and link us to age. In recent times, the period of youth has been getting less and less. When I was a kid, there was endless time and the word stress did not exist. Today, we see young people with so much homework and responsibility that they are now talking about stress and how there is no time to do anything. At the same time, puberty is getting younger and younger, in some cases even eight or nine years old. So already many young people are really not young in many ways and youth is kind of shrinking or disappearing.
 
Our body renews itself and changes in many ways. The first way is with our blood plasma, the liquid portion of our blood. It renews itself every ten days. Our white blood cells renew themselves every two or three weeks. Then we have our red blood cells and they typically renew themselves every 120 days. Our entire blood renews itself every three to four months. Even our skin renews itself every 28 days. Finally, our entire body renews itself every seven to eight years depending on whether you are a man or woman (seven for women and eight for men). Women have the ability to renew their bodies more quickly than men do.
 
Even though our skin renews itself every 28 days and can only be 28 days old, how come people get dry skin, blemishes, roughness, cracks or wrinkles?  If the skin cannot get proper nourishment, it cannot renew itself efficiently and then we say our skin is aging. The reason that our skin cannot renew itself properly is because it is clogged by fat and then moisture and oils cannot pass through to re-nourished it. Therefore it starts to age.
 
Our skin is your body's largest organ. It is an excretory organ and is really a third kidney. Our skin works together with the kidneys, intestines, lungs and liver to keep the body clean. When you take oil, sweets or fatty foods and your skin is healthy, it gets oily in a matter of minutes. Or if you go out and eat a salad with oil, it goes immediately to your skin. If you eat sugar, it changes to fat in the body and immediately goes to your skin. However, after this process continues for a while, your skin starts to get clogged. As it gets clogged, the circulation is impeded because it is blocked by fat. That is the underlying condition that allows aging. Now there are more and more moisturizers on the market but they only clog your skin further and make circulation worse.
 
If you change to a diet based on grains and vegetables, which is a low in fat, and if you start to take less oil, the oil and fat start to go out internally the way they got there. Little by little, your skin starts to clean and renew itself. Blemishes that have been there for many years start to disappear along with the roughness and your skin starts to get tight again and becomes very resilient, strong, flexible and naturally shiny and moist. You will no longer need moisturizer because your skin returns to its youthful condition.
 
A good example of aging is illustrated with a green plant. When a plant gets proper nourishment and has proper circulation and sunlight, it is bright and fresh, you can say it is youthful. However, if a plant is over or under watered it then starts to turn brown and its leaves fall off and it ages. So one cause of aging is improper nutrition. If our nutrition is imbalanced. It causes us to age. The second factor about a plant is that if we change the circulation, the light, temperature and how everything circulates around the plant, then a plant that was doing very well can all of a sudden start to wither and die. So the second factor to aging is improper circulation.
 
The process of healthy aging means transformation from the physical world towards the spiritual world. So when we were young, we were more interested in physical and sensory things. We liked to be very active and we were interested in stimulating our senses often times with loud music. As we start to grow and mature, then we become more interested first in emotional and then later in social issues. Then as we move more towards old age, we start to become more interested in life issues and the value of our own life. We start to look back at our life and ask whether we did the things we wanted to do or are happy with our lives. Then finally, we start to think about moving on to the next world and this is generally the natural process of aging.  It is a progress of growth and maturation, not getting old, hard and drying out. Healthy aging means we go into each area of our life and we can enjoy it fully and completely. As we are able to comfortably move on to the next level, it does not mean we are abandoning the level before. It just means our central focus is somewhere else. But we are free to move however we like, up or down continually. This is the most natural part of aging.
 
It is natural for our body to stop growing after twenty years. It is recent that people continue to gain weight as they grow older. After the first twenty years we continue to grow our personality, not our body. We decide what type of person we would like to become. What image do we have of ourself. How can we develop the understanding and ability to embrace life. This growing of our personality and consciousness depends on our gratitude or appreciation. So when we have this gratitude and appreciation then that always creates a kind of openness.
 
Openness is what allows us to have good circulation and nourishment. However, if we follow modern society and we start to blame and accuse, it cuts us off and makes us more isolated and narrow and then we automatically start to shrink from that. We start our lives open and full of curiosity then we have different experiences and responsibilities and we gain many concepts. Those concepts make us start to close off unless we break through and become open again. As a result, we can't age in a healthy way and we start to age unnaturally. True aging is a result of being open...the same way a child is open. That is the meaning of growing our personality and our consciousness. How to become more open, but not exactly like a child, because it has greater maturity because of our experience.
 
Let's look at our nourishment. The single thing that interferes with our nourishment most is overeating. With each excessive mouthful you are getting older and older. So you don't have to count the years by your birthdays but each mouthful of excess food. Overeating creates pressure. Food starts out as energy. It is condensed energy from nature and the environment. Most of the food we eat breaks down into energy physical and mental energy and only a small portion goes to our body physically. Food is mainly vibration and energy. The more we eat, the more vibration and energy we have. It is as if you have a room that can hold 50 people. With 40 people it is still comfortable to circulate and move around the room. If you put 60 people in that room, the circulation will become more and more restricted. The more people we have in the room, the more pressure will build up. Not only does our circulation become restricted, but as pressure builds up it creates hardness. Just like a trash compactor. The more you put into it, the more compact and hard it becomes.
 
Another factor to aging is over or under-nutrition. Almost everyone now has over nutrition because of eating animal food, chicken, dairy foods, pizza, ice cream, sugar and chocolate. The food today is so rich with sauces, spices, seasonings, butter and cheese. Almost everyone, even if they think they are eating simply is getting vast over- nutrition. Even if you don't overeat, the food itself contains so much condensed energy that when it breaks down in your body it makes you too full and creates hardness.
 
It is less and less common to have under nutrition. Even though overeating is the most damaging factor, some people think that the more simply they eat, the better their health is going to be. But that only works for a certain period of time. If we eat too simply and we don't take any oil, flour, fish and desserts long enough, then it starts to create hardness. It starts to imbalance our nutrition. So the proper amount of food can only be identified when you are seated. You don't have normal sensation when your stomach is elongated. You only have it when your stomach is bent.
 
Everyone has a point where they feel full but not stuffed. If you've had enough food, you feel satisfied. If you go beyond that point, you can eat endlessly. However, in order to find that point, we have to slow down and take time for a meal and sit quietly and be with our food. That does not mean that you can't have dinner conversation but rather not eating in front of the television or while reading. Then when we are with our food and we get to that point, you stop eating and you don't overeat. It takes time to find our point because often times our digestive system has expanded from our past behavior.
 
The next factor to poor nourishment is if our condition becomes too hard, dry or over contracted. Eating bagels, pretzels, cookies, crackers, pizza, muffins, chips, all hard, dry, baked foods, over time start to harden our body and digestive system more and more resulting in our inability to take nutrition from food.  Almost everything in the modern diet is hard, dry and baked and then on top of that is salted. The proper use of good quality sea salt makes things more soft and tender. However, the excessive use of salt or using poor quality salt makes us hard and rigid.
 
Many foods in the modern diet have too high energy. They create an overactive condition inside. Chicken, tuna, eggs, cheese, chocolate and carbonated soft drinks are all very high- energy foods that are unbalancing people's nutrition. If you recreate some of these high-energy foods into so-called healthy foods such as tofu cheesecake, you might change the quality slightly but not make them a lot better. Energy is energy. These foods combined with either over or under circulation affect our body's ability to be nourished. Under circulation is evidenced by cold hands or feet or always being cold. Over circulation is when people are out in their t-shirts and shorts when it is still chilly and they think it feels great. Anything that is overactive too long becomes exhausted. The process of aging is accelerated by our modern diet and lifestyle. The main dietary factors are too much animal food, too much dairy food, too many hard baked foods, too many high-energy foods including sugars, spices and chocolate combined with cold foods. These are the factors that interfere with our proper nourishment and our proper circulation.