Cranio Sacral rhythm is a natural movement of the body that was first written about in the late 1800s. This knowledge has been used ever since then as a mode of treatment for just about everything. Anyone can do a simple version of the movement on ourselves or on others without fear of harming anything.

What we’re talking about here is a figure eight.

Do one with your wrist, or your ankle, or your elbow. Stand up and do one with your right hip or your shoulders or your head. Sit on an exercise ball and rotate your pelvis in a figure eight motion. Do this gently, don’t jerk, and keep it slow. Try to get a feel for the natural rhythm your body is already doing and assist it. Don’t ever push yourself into a movement your body doesn’t want to do.

It’s an excellent way to encourage flexibility or healing.

A lot of people who work with handicapped children use this method to encourage natural movement and healing. Massage therapists and other people who do body work use this. The way they do it is to get in touch with the body’s natural rhythm, and then gently move parts of you along with that rhythm to encourage complete the figure eights.

CranioSacral means the movement is primarily between the cranium (the skull) and the sacrum (the tail bone). But it happens throughout the body. Many people, when learning to tune into the rhythm on others, find themselves swaying to the other person’s rhythm as if they’re hearing music.

So a good way to encourage your own craniosacral rhythm is to allow your body to sway however it would like to. Gently, slowly, not forcing anything.

Dancing has a lot of figure eights.

Especially belly dancing and the hula.

If a part of your body can’t be moved on its own naturally, such as your toe, use your hand to move the toe in a figure eight. Gently, slowly.

Some people respond immediately, some people take longer. Give it a try –

You’ll see a lot of figure eights if you watch for them…

Watch a horse roll on the grass.

Watch a baby play with his hands.

Watch a dog wag her tail.

Watch a cat stretch.

You’ll find it.

If you don’t have a clue as to what a 4C problem is, please read the Left Lemon System page.

Typical 4C situation:

• Most of your problem areas are on both sides of your body or midline (the red areas on the stickman chart)
• Your body type is plum-shaped — big gut, skinny arms and legs, round face
• You don’t eat enough dark green leafy veggies or bright red natural veggies and fruits
• You crave coffee, chocolate, tea, or other brown things and stimulants
• Your eating isn’t balanced according to  30/30/40
• You have blood pressure issues
• You have anxiety and lethargy — alternating between being really tired and really busy or anxious
• You can’t focus on much of anything
• You’re low in essential minerals and high in toxic metals
• You tend to be swollen a lot
• You tend to get kidney stones

To get out of this trap:

• Get rid of stimulants and tannins (cinnamon, caffeine, coffee, colas, dark brown nuts and seeds, chocolate, tobacco)
• Eat your greens — marinated is easier to digest
• Also eat dark red pigmented foods — red bell peppers, berries, cranberries, cayenne, beets, raw tomatoes, paprika
• Avoid artificial colors and dyes — in candy, chewing gum, drinks, processed foods
• Deal with your emotional issues by forgiving

Conscious Forgiveness

So how do you forgive someone?

You need forgiveness too.

You’ll be amazed how much easier life will be when you get into the habit of forgiving.

Maybe your entire fat and oil intake come from fried foods. Or maybe you use olive oil a lot but you cook it. Or maybe you’re trying to lose weight by not eating fat.

LO problems reveal: your body needs good oils.

If you don’t know what LO means, please read Left Lemon System first.

Typical LO situation:

• Most of your problems of pain, weakness,  or other complaints are in the green section of Stickman
• Your body type is apple-shaped — you have a rounded chest and shoulders with a narrow pelvis
• You don’t digest oils well or you don’t get enough of the good ones
• You crave simple carbs like pasta and baked goods
• Your eating isn’t balanced according to 30/30/40
• You feel the need for an afternoon nap
• You suffer from depression or fatigue
• You’re low in essential minerals and high in toxic metals
• You frequently have swelling and inflammation
• You tend to get gall stones
• You have cholesterol issues

To get out of this trap:

• Add fresh lemon and good oils to your diet
• Don’t cook with olive oil, put it onto your food after it’s cooked
• Eat avocado, olives, and fatty fish for extra good oils
• Avoid fried foods and hydrogenated oils
• Eat marinated greens frequently
• Eat foods high in calcium: nuts and seeds, dark green veggies, sesame seeds
• Avoid calcium supplements
• Don’t depend on dairy products for calcium — they are highly processed, especially “ultra pasteurized”

The solution for LO people is to add good oils to every meal and clean up your diet

I make a small jar of equal amounts of fresh-squeezed lemon juice and olive oil and keep it on my kitchen counter. Just shake it up and pour some over your meal.

Your liver’s ability to make hormones depends on getting oils into your body. If you think you’re aging too quickly, your liver needs help with good oils. If your skin is having problems, you need more oils.

60% of your brain is made of fat. Wonder why a low-fat diet makes you feel bad? That’s why. And most of the fats in your brain are from something called DHA. DHA can be converted in your body from ALA, but if you’re still eating sugar it could have a hard time doing it.

ALA is found in dark leafy greens, nuts and seeds, and other veggies. If you’re eating Balanced meals, and using the Left Lemon System to troubleshoot, you’ll be getting plenty.

DHA and ALA aren’t in olive oil, but they are in fish. Fatty fish — salmon, herring, and sardines. Two servings weekly are enough to keep you in good health, but if you’re deficient, you might want to double up for a few weeks.

Think about this: if 60% of your brain is fat and you haven’t been eating right, maybe some of your brain functioning problems could be solved by opening a tin of sardines once a week. Lack of good oils have been linked to depression, memory loss, psychosis, Alzheimer’s, and bi-polar disorder.

Read The Skinny on Oils for more information on which oils to use.

You could be overeating proteins and not have enough digestive enzymes to digest them.

Or you could be eating junk proteins and overly processed foods that don’t get digested.

The main way to remedy this is to use lemon juice liberally until you get your meals balanced and your body catches up with protein digestion.

If you don’t know what LL means, please read Left Lemon System first.

Typical LL situation:

• Most of your problems of pain, weakness,  or other complaints are in the yellow section of Stickman
• Your body type is pear-shaped — you carry excess weight in the thighs and lower torso, or the lower part of your face
• You don’t digest proteins well so you frequently have food allergies
• You crave milk and cheese (dairy products) or ice cream
• Your eating isn’t balanced according to 30/30/40
• You frequently don’t sleep through the night
• You are irritable and sleepy during the day
• You’re low in essential minerals and high in toxic metals
• You get nose bleeds or other bleeding easily
• You tend to get stomach and intestinal ulcers
• Most of your pain is in your pelvis and legs

To get out of this trap:

• Add lemon to your diet, and to your drinking water
• Don’t drink with meals unless it’s lemon juice
• Avoid tannins — those brown foods that are so enticing: chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, colas
• Eat marinated greens with red veggies added
• Use red vinegar (umeboshi is yummy)
• Eat foods high in zinc: sesame and pumpkin seeds, red muscle meats, garlic
• Avoid copper jewelry or kitchenware
• Don’t use creams on your skin that include zinc

The main problem with LL people is that they crave proteins so they eat more.

But the more they eat, the less they digest, making it all worse. You have to consciously choose to eat less protein at every meal, even decreasing the percentage from 30%, until your body can catch up.

And every time you crave protein, drink lemon juice instead to help you digest the protein you’ve already eaten.

It’s also a good thing to deal with parasites. They are protein (animals) and when you’re trying to digest them as well as what you’re eating it can be a losing battle. They are most active during the full moon phase, so it’s best to treat them during the week surrounding the full moon.

The zinc/copper thing is tricky — many of the same foods that are high in copper (which you need less of) are also high in zinc. Any time you add a non-food version of either, you easily make things worse. Like using a zinc ointment or sunscreen on your skin. Or wearing copper jewelry. Or using a copper cup because ice cold milk tastes fabulous in it! Or taking a multi-vitamin/mineral supplement that has both included but they work against each other so which one is your body going to use and which will it try to eliminate?

You body is trying to tell you there is something wrong.

You can fix it.

Ancient Chinese practitioners of traditional medicine mapped out the subtle energy pathways flowing through our bodies. They found 12 pathways related to 12 organ systems, and they correspond to twelve two-hour periods each day when these systems are most active. Points along these pathways are used as acupuncture or acupressure points.

For two hours in each 24 hour day, one pathway (called a meridian) with its organ system dominates the body physically and emotionally. Using the energy chart can help to explain why certain symptoms get worse at certain times each day.

For instance, lets say it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and you start feeling anxious. There is too much to be done before the end of the work day, none of it is coming together, you are irritable and just want to escape. But you can’t because you have to get all this stuff done!

According to the chart, 3 until 5 in the afternoons is when your bladder does its thing. The emotion you feel when it’s having problems is irritation, and you can do simple tests to see whether you need more lemon or lemon and oil in your diet to fix this.

You can poke your belly to see which quadrant has tightness or pain. Or you can do leg lifts to see which system is in need of help. Instructions for both of these can be found on the Left Lemon System page. Then you can deliberately add more lemon if the results show LL is the problem, or lemon and oil if LO is the culprit.

If you don’t know what LL and LO mean, read about it on the Left Lemon System.

Of course Balance is the key here.

If you balance every meal with 30% protein, 30% good oils, and 40% high quality carbs you won’t run into these problems.

The chart gives basic information about each meridian — the times they are the most active, the organ or systems they are linked to, and the emotions most often associated with them. This information has been used for healing for centuries.

You can also look at the emotion column to see if what you’re feeling is related to the hour of the day. If so, remedy according to the chart.

Knowledge of these cycles can help you determine the best times to eat, sleep, and exercise. You should be hottest between 7:00 and 9:00 each evening. Being too cold or too hot means there’s a problem. Too cold might mean you have low blood sugar, too hot might be high blood sugar.

It’s between 5 and 7 in the evening and my main emotion is fear — fear that if I put the chart inside this post it won’t translate via email, RSS, or onto facebook. So I’ll put it in but still give you the link so you can print a copy for yourself: Energy Cycle Chart

Energy Cycle Chart

* Pain or tightness in neck – left side would mean LL, right side would be LO.

Pain or tightness in back – left side would mean LO, right side would be LL.

Use Left Lemon System to determine any other pain.

“My skin all over is very dry and extremely sensitive,

to the point of being almost painful at times… I sleep with a humidifier to help, wash my face with C*****, use A***** sensitive skin body wash, and moisturize like crazy with either C**** or C****** moisturizer.  I do know that it is related to good fats in my diet, since it gets a little better when my oil and avocado intake are where they should be. ”

“Right now, my face is red and irritated, and broken out here and there all over in patches from eczema.”

I get peeling scaly patches, but also get clear fluid filled bumps that tend to be painful – they will scab over.  Looks terrible…  I try to only wear makeup (C****** for my sensitive skin) when I absolutely have to…. to cover my dark circles under my eyes.”

My first question was about where her skin was the worst. It was fairly balanced side to side except the right side of her forehead.

Going down the Left Lemon System page, the right forehead is LL.

The dark circles are 4C’s, and eczema is LL. Sue is an LL situation with too much stress added. Therefore we can predict her body type to be pear shaped.

Muscle testing has revealed a sensitivity to proteins and a recent class she took revealed just how badly she had been overeating proteins. Keeping a diet diary really helped Sue to see what she was doing wrong. Overeating proteins means they don’t get digested, so they float around causing problems. And the less they’re digested, the more you crave them. She’s been suffering in this cycle for years.

If she were to poke her belly, the area around the heart and appendix would be tender.

Her symptoms seemed to be worse all afternoon, which would give her two time periods for LL and one for 4C’s. I suspect mornings would be the second choice because that’s when the stomach, which is overburdened by excess proteins, would have the hardest time.

 My first suggestion was to go cold turkey…

No soap, no colored towels or washcloths, no makeup, no moisturizer, no shampoo, no conditioner, no body wash. Plain water is allowed. White 100% cotton towels to pat dry. Just let the skin breathe. Help remove the clutter of chemical application with daily masks of food or clay.

Then I went through the ingredients lists with Sue. Everything she was using on her face had harsh chemicals, glycerine, alcohol, or mineral oil. The “sensitive skin” moisturizer she was using had three coloring agents.

I gave Sue a long list of things to do:

The short answer is “no,” you can eat fruit instead, along with some nuts or seeds for oils and protein.

Most people in Europe and North America eat either a protein or a starch breakfast.

In other words, toast, boxed cereal, muffins, oatmeal, pancakes, grits, potatoes, waffles.

Or eggs, sausage, bacon, ham, or other animal protein.

Or worse, mix proteins and starches together: sausage or egg biscuit, toast and eggs, waffles and sausage, grits and eggs, etc.

Mixing proteins with starches breaks a major rule of food combining and can mess up your day. If you’re going to go with starches, have veggies with them. If you’re going to eat protein, have veggies.

So the typical breakfast isn’t something you’d want to start your day with if your goal is to improve your health.

If you keep marinated greens and sauerkraut in your refrigerator, they can be added to starches or proteins to make the meal balanced.

And a balanced meal feeds your body so you don’t have cravings or hunger until it’s time to eat again — usually four or five hours later. In fact the best way to tell you’re not getting enough good oils is if you get hungry 2 – 3 hours after your last meal.

Look at it this way: Everything that goes into your mouth is going to do one of two things:

A) contribute to a slide into worse health or

B) heal your body so you can climb out of that pit.

It’s your choice. Look at every meal as a chance to heal, instead of making things worse.

A lot of people have turned to green smoothies for breakfast.

There are some problems with that:

1. Most recipes make enough for two, and sometimes four servings, encouraging overeating.
2. The smoothie isn’t balanced with real food proteins but relies instead on highly processed protein powders.
3. Oils are not added, so despite overeating, you get hungry again quickly.
4. If you don’t rotate your greens you can build up a resistance and stop digesting them. This is really bad for people with thyroid problems. Using more lemon and vinegar helps predigest them, but also affects the flavor if you drink it right away.

Here are some suggestions for balanced, nourishing breakfasts:

• One grapefruit, segmented, with a small handful of soaked nuts or seeds.
• One apple or other fruit in season, with real yogurt (made with whole milk) with live cultures and not pasteurized.
• A fresh avocado with some dried kale and umeboshi vinegar (cut the avocado in half, remove the pit, put in a spoonful of vinegar, and eat it with a spoon).
• A cooked egg with raw sauerkraut from the fridge, add some olive oil after cooking the egg.
• Half a fresh apple in season cut up, small handful of raspberries, half cup real whole-milk yogurt or milk, a touch of raw honey if needed, 1 tablespoon crunchy seaweed
• Maybe once each week make a smoothie following the recipe below. Please don’t rely on this for breakfast every day.

How about you? What is your favorite balanced breakfast? Put it in the comments section so we can all try it.

LeftLemon Smoothie Recipe

Ingredients

Directions

1. Put everything except the leaves into a blender container and blend thoroughly. Add more cayenne until you can feel a bit of heat but it’s not too hot to eat.
2. Gradually add the greens, stems and all, blending thoroughly after each addition.
3. Eat the egg (or slice of cheese or other protein) with it for a higher protein count to make it a balanced meal.
4. This recipe makes two to three servings. Share with a housemate, or cover and refrigerate some for tomorrow. The oil content not only helps your liver function better, but it works as a preservative to keep your smoothie from going bad too quickly.
5. Also, the oil content helps you not get hungry between meals.
6. Please make sure you rotate your greens — eating the same greens (or reds) all the time can cause problems.

How much of this fluoride gets into people’s mouths? The vast majority of it goes into the ground — we put it on our lawns and veggie gardens and water our fig trees and wash our cars with it. And we flush tons of it down the sewer drains so it contaminates ground water. Groundwater contamination with fluoride is a big contributor to bone loss.

If you look into the research done over the past decades about the benefits of fluoride to your teeth you won’t find much good news. Plenty of people like to say it helps, but the research just doesn’t support that belief. Instead it tells of poisonings and mottled teeth, of thyroid problems and decreasing bone density. If you really want to scare yourself, Google “fluoride side effects.”

To see what little good fluoride does for you teeth, read this research review. Warning, it is not pleasant. It compares the amount of dental problems in countries with and without fluoride added to the water, and it compares dental problems before and after stopping fluoride treatments. It tells you that fluoride does nothing to stop cavities in pits and fissures — the places where most cavities occur. And then it tells you that the largest study ever done in the United States, the one that was supposed to support fluoridation, found no difference between fluoridated and non-fluoridated children’s teeth.

What does this have to do with my thyroid?

There is an entire class of stuff called “goitrogens” that harm the thyroid glands or change the hormones they produce. Goitrogens come from many sources, but the most common one affecting most Americans is fluoride.
Yep, that stuff that is put into your drinking water, many juices on the market, packed into toothpaste tubes, and smeared onto your teeth every time you see a dentist.

If you are having thyroid problems of any kind, you should get far away from any fluoride — and it is sneaky stuff!

Hunt down the fluoride in your life — bottled water from a city has it even if it’s not on the label. Soft drinks have it because they use city water. Check your toothpaste and use baking soda or powdered clay until you can find something else you like. Refuse fluoride treatments at your dentist and tell them if you have thyroid problems. And while you’re at it, demand a thyroid collar to protect you during X-rays. Don’t use mouth wash that has fluoride in it.

If you’re interested in further research — there are many different lists of goitrogens out there and they’re all different. They argue about what affects what. But the research on fluoride is well established. The other major class of them is the coles — broccoli, collards, cabbage, those sort of foods. Unfortunately, there isn’t solid research telling us which one is worse or what to do about it. That’s why it is crucial to eat a varied diet. If you eat collards every day you can affect your thyroid levels. Same for cabbage or broccoli or vitamin pills that are made from real foods.

How do you balance eating dark green veggies with  a healthy thyroid?

You rotate your greens. Don’t eat collards every day for your entire life. Rotate them with kale or broccoli and other dark green veggies. Add seaweed to your diet — both the purple and the green kind. Marinate your coles to help you digest them. And eat more vegetables.

• Balance — how to balance all of your meals to improve your health.
• Left Lemon System — interpreting what your body is trying to tell you to help you balance your meals.

With that in mind, let’s figure out a problem by going through the Left Lemon System page.

John wrote in to say he had finally figured out why his right elbow woke him up every night at 3:00 AM. He had correctly identified the problem as being 4C’s, but let’s go through the page to see how it works.

By using #1, the “Stickman” chart (the yellow and green guy with the red stripes), John saw that his right elbow pain was definitely in the red zone, making this problem 4C’s. If you haven’t been around the website much, 4C’s means your kidneys or adrenals are suffering and you need more Calcium, Chlorophyll, Cayenne, and Cider vinegar.

#2 is body shape. Because this seems to be an ongoing problem, I’d suggest John fits the plum category — meaning he is kind of round in the face and shoulders, with thin arms and legs. If he is overweight, he’ll carry most of the excess weight in his middle.

#3 is muscle testing. If he would have had the presence of mind at 3:00 AM, he could have done a couple of leg lifts to identify which system was causing the problem. Here’s how to do it: lie on your back, lift one leg with the toe pointed to the ceiling. Now rotate the toe in and lift, then rotate the toe out and lift. If 4C’s is the problem, a toe pointed straight toward the ceiling is going to hurt more.

To see if it’s just one kidney or both, raise one leg at a time to see which hurts worse. The right leg relates to the left kidney, which needs more greens. The left leg relates to the right kidney, which needs more reds.

Now we’ll try #4, Poke Your Belly, which might be easier in the middle of the night. On your back again, poke around gently and see where any distress might be — if 4C’s is the only problem, any pain or discomfort will be mid-line — not to the left or right of center, but right down the middle (and usually just above or below the navel). If there is pain elsewhere, that would show other areas you might need to focus on also.

#5 is the Energy Cycle chart. Clicking on that link takes you to a chart that says when things go bump in the night and it’s 3:00 AM, it’s a 4C’s problem.

The next section tells you to balance your meals with 30/30/40, and make sure you’re getting those dark green and red foods. But below that is a link to “Rescue Remedies” where you can print your own copy of a list of special foods you can use to remedy problems like this while you tweak your diet.

So besides balancing every meal (to include more greens and reds, the lemon and the oils, and the vinegar), John could mix up a batch of nasty tasting stuff to drink just before he brushes his teeth at night that might help correct the problem enough so he can sleep through the night. He could do this for a couple of days while the changes in his diet take effect.

Muscle testing would narrow down which kidney is in need, or both. But just to cover all the bases, he could juice a lemon, add a tablespoon of real cranberry juice for the red pigment, a teaspoon of liquid chlorophyll for the greens, and a teaspoon of vinegar. Drink about half of it and refrigerate the rest for the next night.

Now here is the important part:

If you only focus on fixing the 4C’s problem, you’ll have other problems. The point of LeftLemon.com, as John figured out, is to balance your diet so your health improves in every way.

Carbohydrates keep you going for the first two hours after you eat.

After that it’s up to the fats and oils to provide the energy.

If I didn’t get enough oils with my breakfast, despite an adequate calorie intake, I’ll be hungry just a couple of hours later. But if I eat more, I’ll gain weight because I didn’t need more calories, I needed more oils with my breakfast.

When you have enough oils with your meals, you need less other foods. Oils have a lot of calories, but they are needed for health. And you especially need good oils to lose weight safely.

I try to keep 3-4 different high-quality; cold-pressed oils on hand: coconut, olive, sesame, and avocado.
 I don’t cook many of my foods, but when I do I use butter and the coconut and sesame oils because they have higher heat tolerance and don’t turn into life-sucking bad oils when heated to a reasonable cooking temperature.

I make marinades or salad dressing with the olive and avocado oils, or add olive oil to other foods.

All foods have some oils in them already.

Sprouts are already balanced with about 30% oils, 30% protein, and 40% carbohydrates. Avocados and olives are rich sources of good oils. So are many nuts and seeds, and some fish.

However, if you cook your food you are changing good oils to bad oils, so you’ll need more good oils from other sources to compensate. Avocados and olives help.

Lindsay Naturals canned olives are at Publix in my part of the country — I prefer the green ripe ones, my daughter prefers the black ripe ones. Neither of them are “green” in the usual sense, they just have slightly different flavors. Try a can of each and see which ones you like.

Avoid Canola, corn, and “vegetable” oils.

Corn is not an oily food like olives or avocados are. Neither are most vegetables. So how do they make corn oil or vegetable oil? They use solvents: propolene glycol, alcohol, and other solvents that end with “ol” are used to convert the sugars to fats. And how do they get these solvents out of the oils afterwards? They don’t.

Your body doesn’t know what to do with these solvents so they float around like free radicals. Oils that come through corn oil production — hydrolyzing corn to create a fat that doesn’t exist in nature — are not good oils for your body.

The Good Oils

Coconut oil is touted as being far superior to other oils but I haven’t found it to be so and neither has Dr. Max. Olive oil just seems to make our bodies happier. Sometimes a greener olive oil is better, sometimes a yellow olive oil is better. But olive oil is the least expensive good oil out there and very few people have problems with it unless you buy the cheapest of the cheap. Or if it smells bad — oils go rancid and rancid oils are really bad for you!

I used to rotate between several brands of olive oil but finally settled on Pompeian – it consistently works well for me. Publix frequently puts it on the buy-one-get-one-free sale.