What’s The Secret To Accessing The Fountain Of Youth?
About 20 years ago, I was still living in Ottawa, Canada, and I had decided to go to a lecture about walking The Camino de Santiago, a thirty day pilgrimage following the ley lines of the Milky Way over northern Spain. I loved watching the slide presentation by the young woman who’d photographed the Pyrenees Mountains, fields of wildflowers, small pensiones where she’d stayed, mile after mile of stone fences, and of course the longest chained incense holder, swinging bodaciously in a church in Santiago, welcoming the pilgrims after the long journey, averaging 15-20 miles a day all on foot.
As we got up to leave, I noticed a magnificent, more aged woman with a long, white braid, a brilliant smile, and a face full of lines. She was beautiful and radiant! I crept up closer so that I could overhear her conversation with the organizer of the talk, “I plan to walk The Camino in August after a month of dragon boat racing in Australia.” The organizer asked politely if she might know her age. The white haired woman answered with the fanned embers of a fire in her belly, “Certainly, I’m eighty two years of age.” I was floored.
That day, I made a pact with myself. I was going to fashion my life so that I too could live a fulfilled life and see this whole wide world that the Creator fashioned for our absolute viewing pleasure. I also decided to do it in a body that lived out of levity, love, and lability. I wasn’t going to feel restricted any longer by obligations or unnecessary weight.
That meant that I had to lose sixty pounds, stop living out of expectation, and find a better quality of life where I felt more lit up. I had to unhook from a state of mind that kept me trauma-bonded to life that felt stale, restricting, and rife with gaslighting to false authority.
In the last nine years, I’ve moved to central Mexico, lost sixty pounds, and gained an unprecedented level of fitness while hiking the mountains here. I lift weights on my patio and use my foam roller to release knots in my back and shoulders. I don’t want my workouts to end, they feel so good. I do this routine a few times a week with the sun pouring down on my bikini clad body, every week of the year, without fail.
I love my life! I go to the world-class symphony for $7 every Friday night, meet friends for matcha lattes on Fridays, do pottery weekly at a beloved friend’s studio, eat a carnivore diet, avoid sugar and seed oils like the plague, and hike weekly with my best friend up in the mountains. My husband and I talk about anthroposophical, orgonomic, and Heilkunst philosophy. We walk for over an hour to buy organic, locally sourced olive oil — and our dog seems to enjoy the walk, too!
This past week, I hiked with new friends here, who ranged in age from fifty-five to eighty-two. One couple has been married for fifty years! They write for a number of publications about things they care deeply about, and bike the circular route around this mountainous Mexican city every Sunday. I had to stop and rest a few times, while our friend, twenty years my senior, led us up an incline so steep, I had to use my hands to help me scramble up the side. He reluctantly stopped to let the rest of us catch our breaths. We went from 6,400 feet above sea level in town to 8,000 feet in about ninety minutes.
In mid-August, I will join a group of women therapists, mostly birth workers, at the head of The Camino in France, for the thirty day trek across northern Spain. As a photographer and former photojournalist, I can’t wait to chronicle the fields of wild flowers, towns of aged church spires, and carry my scallop shell on my backpack across the whole of this European country. I’m going to do it all in my barefoot shoes, while keeping a journal of my innermost thoughts and impressions. Perhaps it will become the foundation for my twenty-sixth book.
So what’s the secret to accessing the fountain of youth? Well, I will list here what I’ve observed in those stunning mentors that have appeared in my life over my sixty bodacious years on this earth:
- Only do what you love.
- Minimize obligation.
- Respect your body as the highest instrument for your spirit, like the temple it is.
- Be sure your thoughts are labile and motile, as life is full of plot twists and turns.
- Eat only what you need to live and don’t live to eat.
- Cut out all refined sugars, grains, and seed oils from your diet.
- Load heavy on healthy fats, like tallow, pork fat, butter, and ghee.
- Eat meat, fish, and organ meat primarily.
- Eat primarily fermented vegetables and drinks, in low quantities.
- Drink at least ½ a gallon of water per day.
- Expose your body to the sun regularly.
- Take magnesium for proper elimination.
- Pump your endocrine system with hot and cold exposure.
- Don’t hold onto unresolved traumas.
- Express rage and anger in a healthy way without transferring it onto others.
- Use the law of cure, like cures like, when ills come up.
- Meditate regularly.
- Keep a journal.
- Don’t drink alcohol.
- Do regular detoxes of an emotional/physical nature.
- Use allopathy or prescription drugs in emergency situations only.
- Be open-minded, but adhere to your own code of ethics situation by situation.
- Become wholly self-reliant and accountable to yourself.
- Be a conduit for financial abundance and ease of receipt of passive sources of income.
- Go where you’re treated best.
- Unhook from all toxic relationships; family, friends, and country if need be.
- Only cultivate and invest in resonant relationships that give you more energy than they take.
- Fulfill your deepest calling for the work you feel ordained to do out of love.
- Develop your own ethical center.
- Pray and practice self-kept rituals daily.
- Be intentional.
- Engage in tantric/spiritual sex with a resonant partner.
- Laugh often and from your belly.
- Practice conscious creation.
- Create your home to be a restful sanctuary.
- Travel as much as you can.
- Find your life inspiring mentors until you feel you wholly have the reigns, and then become one yourself.
What I’m learning from inside my own body and through observation is that aging is a choice. We’re biologically designed to live about one hundred and twenty five years of age. Anything else is a shortfall to disease (genetic miasms), state of mind, and faulty lifestyle. You have a remarkable renewable asset and your body will serve you in the most stunning and reverential ways without restriction, pain, or suffering of any kind if you pursue health and abundance in all things. You’re a vehicle for love and acts of generosity, but only give to others from your overflowing saucer and not from the cup. The cup is solely for you.
Are you crafting a life that loads heavily on being youthful, or are you feeling like you’re aging before your time? Perhaps one day you’ll also be that eighty or hundred year old who inspires other individuals to make their life a testament to health, lability, and love too. I’ll meet you there.
Love,
Ally