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The Clarity Cleanse
12 Steps to Finding Renewed Energy, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Emotional Healing
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Foreword by Gwyneth Paltrow
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Based on the powerful mind-body strategy Dr. Habib Sadegh developed to help himself recover from cancer more than twenty years ago, The Clarity Cleanse will enable you to help your mind clear and your body heal. A regular Goop contributor in health and spirituality, Dr. Sadeghi shows you how to turn obstacles into healing and energizing opportunities.
Because negative emotions actually do damage on the cellular level, The Clarity Cleanse offers guidance for cleansing both your body and your mind. You will learn how to:
Create a clear intention
Purge negative emotions
Practice compassionate self-forgiveness
Refocus negative energy to move beyond doubt and fear
Ask the kind of questions that will help your relationships.
The Clarity Cleanse includes Dr. Sadeghi’s Intentional Unsaturation Diet, which helps support emotional cleansing by removing the residue of repressed negative emotions. The diet is designed to reduce congestion in the liver, gallbladder, lungs, kidneys, and pancreas-the organs most affected by feelings such as resentment and anger. Dr. Sadeghi’s friends at Goop have offered eighteen recipes to help make this cleanse delicious.
Following the twelve steps in this book will help you to achieve a sense of peace and control, raise your self-esteem, and assert yourself in new ways to achieve positive and lasting change. Then, finally, you will be able to express your true, authentic self.
Excerpt
Preface
While modern medicine has many benefits, it’s clear to most of us that it also has its limits. For all the advanced technology and billions of dollars poured into research each year, our approach to illness is mostly ineffective when it comes to curing chronic diseases and neurodegenerative disorders, in fact, many diseases. While diagnostics have greatly improved over the last 60 or so years, how we end up treating the diseases we diagnose has in many ways remained essentially the same.
It’s clear that if healthcare is to avoid stagnation and evolve to meet the challenges of the future, in addition to the diseases we’ve been dealing with for more than a century, we need to think about disease differently. We must reframe our understanding of everything from what disease is and why it occurs to how we interact with it. Given our aging population and the prevalence of chronic illness, we have no choice. We simply must find a way of approaching illness that goes beyond just surgery and drugs, or our children’s children will find themselves facing the same chronic killers their great-great-grandparents faced.
To think in this way requires going against many of the established, institutionalized ideas we have about biology and medicine. It means we must dare to question the unquestionable. There may even be sacred cows that, at risk of being called a nutcase or quack, should be called into question—an approach that, in countless areas of medicine, proved to be the key to major advances. If medicine is to move forward, we must become trailblazers in a profession where stepping even slightly outside the accepted lines can mean the loss of one’s reputation and even one’s career. Still, it’s a path we must tread if humanity and medicine are to progress.
Without question, the catalyst behind every great discovery of human civilization, especially with regard to science and medicine, has proved to be intuition. It’s the internal conviction, the inexplicable knowing, that possesses a researcher and convinces such an individual that the particle, process, energetic principle, or cure they are searching for actually exists, even in the face of no physical evidence or prior research. It’s the ability to see the unseen before it becomes obvious to everyone else, along with resisting the urging of naysayers to be “realistic” and live within the limits of what we can experience with our senses.
Only a person with an all-consuming intuitive drive and a fearless spirit can manifest the possible from the impossible and thereby change the way we experience life. Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century physician, was just such a person. He firmly believed that an invisible factor, which we today commonly refer to as bacteria, was behind the deaths of thousands of expectant mothers. He insisted that the simple act of washing hands before either performing surgery or delivering babies could greatly reduce patient deaths from infection and puerperal fever. Initially he was mercilessly humiliated by the medical establishment, even losing his job for suggesting something that’s now common practice. Today the largest university in Hungary is named after him.
In the 1860s, Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev created the Periodic Table of Elements, which organized all the physical building blocks of the universe into a cohesive logical order. The table included the elements gold, silver, lead, argon, neon, helium, and every other known mineral, metal, and gas at the time. While the table was incredibly helpful to science, it had a problem. Wherever Mendeleev couldn’t find a transitional substance that connected two elements already on the table, he left the space between them blank. While his table worked well for certain kinds of research, his detractors were quick to point out the gaps in the chart. At that time, there were no known elements with the right atomic weights to fill those spaces and complete the chart so that it made sense. When questioned about these gaps, Mendeleev stated that while the holes in the chart did exist, it wasn’t proof the corresponding elements didn’t. He simply said we had to continue searching.
Down to the minutest detail, Mendeleev intuited the presence of elements for which there was no tangible evidence of their existence. Today every one of those elements has indeed been discovered and Mendeleev’s table is complete. He bequeathed to us a perfect example of how staying focused on the bigger picture and not getting hung up on the finer details is what brings a vision into being. Just because we don’t have proof that something exists doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
In 1865, German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé had a dream in which he saw atoms dancing around and linking to each other. Upon awakening, he followed his intuition and immediately sketched the image he had seen in his dream. In a further dream, he saw the atoms dance around, then form circular strings that appeared to simulate a snake eating its own tail. Instead of doubting the dream, he went with his gut instinct. Kekulé was to discover that his nighttime images were a near-perfect match for the chemical composition and cyclic nature of benzene.
Semmelweis, Mendeleev, and Kekulé trusted their intuition, believed in the unseen, and were proven right. Today there’s an equally powerful and invisible force at play in chronic illness that has yet to be recognized and incorporated into treatment. That force is consciousness.
Human consciousness varies from person to person but is made up of the thoughts and feelings, both conscious and unconscious, we experience regarding everything from our job to our relationships and the world around us with respect to how we feel about ourselves. Each one of us lives within our own energetic frequency, which is self-generated by individual thoughts and feelings. It’s this frequency that permeates every cell of the body and plays a major role in its physical expression, whether that be health, disease, or something in between.
At the same time, our personal frequencies are interacting with the energetic frequencies of other people and even the earth itself to create the collective energetic frequency of the planet on which all living things exist. It’s this collective energy, which we all draw from and interact with, that I call the “field.” Like fish in the sea, consciousness moves in, around, and through us, impacting our lives every day. Not only do we interact with it, we simultaneously create it individually and collectively.
It’s by accessing this unseen energy through our thoughts, then charging it in either a positive or negative way based on our feelings, that we influence our cells to develop in either healthy or diseased ways.
The idea that we develop our body and create our state of health or illness from unseen energy might seem strange at first glance—until we realize that creating physical matter from unseen energy happens all around us every day. A seed placed in the earth absorbs water, germinates, and sprouts. The sprout needs nothing but invisible energy from the sun to engage in photosynthesis and the production of carbon dioxide, a gas that’s also invisible, for it to grow its thin and fragile body into a massive tree. In fact the trunk and leaves of a tree contain little of the trace minerals from the soil in which it’s rooted. A tree literally creates its physical body out of thin air, utilizing the unseen energetic forces we know exist and yet cannot experience with our senses. In much the same way, we also create our physical bodies from the invisible energy of the field.
So when someone receives a medical diagnosis that informs them they have disease X, that the survival statistics are Y, and that the best treatment is Z, we’re dealing only in the concrete world of physical matter—the world of effects that arise from the elements of the unseen world, which in the final analysis is the energy of the field. It stands to reason then that if we are to truly heal disease, we must look beyond matter and beyond individual parts to the world of energy where thoughts and emotions created a negative frequency that eventually manifested as a diseased body.
Much of the current medical model is trapped in the concrete world, the world of effects, unaware there’s an entire unseen world of energy from which everything we observe is created. This leaves even the world’s most brilliant researchers sometimes chasing red herrings, while all the while imagining they are going to find the cause of physical diseases in the physical world, when the reality is that the opposite is often the case.
The approach is so reductionist that it continues to break the human body down into its thousands of separate parts, right down to the tiniest physical components such as molecules and atoms. And still we fail to find either the cause of or cure for chronic disease, which of course we never will because it doesn’t lie in our physicality.
With the understanding we have today, we can dissect a bird down to its smallest components, yet we’ll never be able to observe the forces that enable it to fly. The miracle of flight only happens through the synergy of a bird’s parts. Similarly, we can’t discover what makes water wet by tearing the molecules apart. Hydrogen and oxygen are gasses that have entirely different properties from water. It’s only when we examine and experience them together that moisture enters the picture.
Rationalists have a problem with the intuitive aspect of healing and insist on tearing the bird or the human body into ever-smaller parts, while in the process destroying that which they are attempting to heal. In the case of some diseases, it’s understood but unspoken in the medical community that it’s often the “cure” that kills the patient long before the disease. There are many examples where the reductionist approach of treating separate body parts through surgery or medication, instead of regarding the whole patient as a mind-body system, only makes things worse.
It’s been said that if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get the same outcome you’ve always gotten. After more than 100 years of treating chronic illnesses with drugs and surgery with no cure in sight, is it time to consider whether the traditional approach needs to change? Surely it’s incumbent upon every physician who takes healing seriously to consider whether a more integrative understanding of healing that incorporates the patient’s state of consciousness into the process is needed at this time.
Of course, this would mean taking a more intuitive approach to healthcare, which would result in a broader understanding of how the healing process works. It would mean being aware of what we don’t know and being okay with this. Needless to say, admitting we don’t have answers can be difficult for physicians, given our deep commitment to helping patients who are suffering.
While certain physical symptoms and issues must be addressed with physical treatment, lasting healing, not mere symptom management, requires a shift in perspective from being preoccupied with the concrete aspects of disease to recognizing the larger and often abstract forces underlying the whole process.
Instead of only looking for which prescription or procedure can address a physical problem, as a patient you might ask yourself, “What is my body trying to say to me through this experience? What is it in my emotional world that might be contributing to this disease in my physical world? What is there that I can address in my energetic or emotional body to support the intervention my doctor is implementing in my physical body?”
This is what it means to achieve clarity. It requires an understanding of the deeper, unseen, and energetic psycho-spiritual aspects of the disease process as they pertain to your life, then consciously interacting with the energetic field both in and around the body to change the way it manifests physically in terms of your health. Because clarity works at the emotional and spiritual level, more than anything else it’s a mindset, the effects of which eventually appear in the body.
When it comes to healing, the individual who has the disease is far more important than the disease itself, since every person’s energetic frequency is unique and manifests in their body in its own way based on their history, relationships, and emotional state. Eventually everyone’s biography becomes their biology. So it’s not about being diagnosed, getting the same treatment everyone else gets, and expecting it to work differently for you. It’s about discovering why the illness manifested in you, in which particular part of the body it appeared, how your state of consciousness or personal energetic frequency played a role in it, and how doing the work to assist your body in healing by addressing your unresolved and often unconscious emotional issues helps create your personal cure.
This is why intuition is just as important, if not more so, than any procedure you have or medication you may take. It’s the unseen world of energy and emotion that creates the physical, and never the other way around. Because of this we can rebuild our own bodies with the energy of thoughts and emotions by interacting with the larger energy field around us, just as a sprout transforms its body into a tree from nothing more than the unseen energies around it.
Paracelsus, who is revered in modern medicine and considered the Father of Toxicology, himself said, “The spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body the plastic material. The power of the imagination is a great factor in medicine. It may produce diseases in man and in animal, and it may cure them… ills of the body may be cured by physical remedies or by the power of the spirit acting through the soul.”
Can you imagine a doctor saying this to a patient in their examining room? And yet much of modern medical theory is based on the ideas of Paracelsus. Perhaps following our intuition and using imagination, emotion, and energy to facilitate healing, in addition to treating the body, isn’t so crazy after all. In fact, no drug exists that can compete with the healing power of imagination and the energy it produces.
The way I have chosen to simultaneously treat a patient’s mind and body is through a process I created called Integrative Psycho-Synthesis (iPs). Through one-on-one exploration and prescribed exercises, I assist patients in recognizing and resolving emotional issues, many decades old or even long forgotten, that contribute significantly to their dis-ease process. The patient works with the energy within him-or herself, as well as with the larger field, to alter patterns of thought and emotion, thereby generating a new frequency that’s supportive of healing and initiates the anabolic process of rejuvenation.
In a very real sense, iPs is the photosynthesis of human consciousness, where we draw what we need to renew ourselves from the invisible energy within and around us. This involves much more than merely visualizing a healthy body. It’s about recognizing and releasing a way of thinking and being that hasn’t only become detrimental but unconsciously addictive.
Because each person’s circumstances are different, what’s more important than the fact that they became sick is why they became sick. In the future of medicine, the personal life context that precedes a patient’s illness will be just as important, if not more so, in the healing process as treating the physical aspects of the disease. Context is far more important than content when it comes to health.
So while it can be scary to get a serious diagnosis, I do my best to focus my patients on doing the deeper work rather than being preoccupied with the physical details of their illness. How we choose to relate to the issue of disease is the real issue for both doctor and patient, and it’s only by working together in this way that we’ll finally defeat the most serious diseases of our time.
I’ve seen hundreds of patients make miraculous recoveries from illnesses that were considered incurable by doing this kind of work. Some of their stories you’ll read in this book. I owe my own recovery from cancer over 20 years ago to techniques I discovered through following my intuition. These techniques, together with additional interventions I developed while earning my master’s degree in spiritual psychology with an emphasis in consciousness, health and healing at the University of Santa Monica is the program offered here.
There have been times when an incredulous patient has asked me, “How do you know this works? Why should I bother? Where’s the research?”
I know this works because I’m alive more than 20 years later, with no chemotherapy or radiation. I know this works because of the patients I’ve seen transformed before my very eyes over a few short years, and sometimes even months. No evidence can be more convincing than when dramatic healing power touches your life in a personal way.
You may be tempted to dismiss such cases as anecdotal, a fluke, as if to imply that one person is somehow more special than another and has some secret power that everyone else doesn’t possess. This is simply a fear-based reaction that seeks to dismiss anything we can’t fully explain or understand. But as great men and women of science have demonstrated again and again, just because we can’t explain or even see something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
If you’re looking for volumes of research confirming the healing connection between the mind and body, you won’t find it here or likely anywhere, given that nearly all research is funded by pharmaceutical corporations for which, if there’s no financial incentive to develop a treatment for a particular illness and thus make a profit from it, it’s largely ignored. Why focus on a more holistic way of healing when there are billions in profit to be made from managing the symptoms of diseases with lifelong medication, rather than curing those diseases outright?
If you’re the kind of person who needs proof that this or that will work, with a guarantee of a specific outcome, you might consider the fact that even traditional allopathic medicine can’t provide that kind of promise. If, however, you’re the kind of patient who intuitively feels you might possess more healing power than you thought, even though you don’t know how to access it, and are the kind of person who takes a proactive approach to your health instead of expecting the doctor to simply fix what’s wrong the same way a mechanic fixes your car, there is much here that may well change your life.
What’s required at the outset is the suspension of disbelief and being open to the possibilities. When we attend the theater, in order to have an immersive experience we don’t have to understand, and may not care to understand lest they lose their magic, how all the special effects are achieved behind the scenes. In fact, the less we fixate on the finer details and instead focus our attention on the bigger picture and larger action that’s unfolding on the stage in front of us, the richer and more real the experience will be.
I encourage you to follow your intuition and step into the unknown, understanding that you don’t need all the answers. You just need to do your part. You are not alone on this journey, as many have come before you and achieved great success because, like you, they intuitively understood that healing isn’t simply a matter of a prescription or surgical procedure. It involves a way of perceiving yourself through trust, possibility, and most of all clarity.
INTRODUCTION
Awakening to Clarity
In 1955 a massive Buddha encrusted with thousands of bits of colored glass was in the process of being relocated to a new pagoda at the temple of Wat Traimit in Bangkok, Thailand. This was no easy task, considering the 200-year-old statue stood nearly ten feet tall and weighed more than five tons. After several failed attempts to lift the mass from its pedestal, workers tried again, only to watch helplessly as support ropes broke and the statue came crashing to the ground. Rushing to survey the damage, workers and monks were astonished at what they found. The statue was badly damaged, but only on its surface. As they peered through the cracks, they saw gold gleaming beneath.
Further investigation would show that the entire statue was originally made of gold. Its covering of plaster and glass had been added in the 18th century to hide its value and prevent it from being stolen by the invading Burmese. The secret of what lay beneath the Buddha’s surface was so well kept that it had eventually been lost to history. At the time the statue was being moved, no one at the temple knew its true nature until the accident happened to reveal it.
That, in essence, is what this book is about. We all know what it’s like to be lifted up, only to be dropped back down again unexpectedly, leaving us feeling cracked and damaged, possibly beyond repair.
When we’re in pain, we tend to focus on the cause of that pain, which can be any number of things—illness, divorce, loss of a loved one, a difficult relationship, feeling trapped in a dead-end job, feeling depressed, finding ourselves all alone, and so many other challenges. What we often overlook is that the issue itself is never as important as how we relate to it. You see, any ailment, any problem, any negative experience presents us with a choice. We can choose to see our circumstances as unfortunate, ourselves as broken. Or we can choose to look past the surface damage to the gold beneath—gold we previously didn’t know was there.
This life-changing shift in consciousness requires what I call clarity. My path to clarity came in the form of cancer.
My Wake-Up Call
I was in my second year of medical school and had just finished yet another long day of coursework. No sooner had I returned to my room than I felt the strong pull of my bed. All I wanted to do was sleep. Instead of reviewing my notes from the lecture I’d just attended, I tossed my books on the floor and my head hit my pillow. I was out cold in a matter of moments.
At 2:00 a.m., I sat straight up in bed completely awake and aware. I’d heard a voice in my head as clearly as if someone had spoken to me from across the room. It said, “Check yourself.” I can’t explain why, but I immediately went to the bathroom to examine my groin. There it was, on my left testicle, a lump.
For the next four hours I scoured the internet looking for every conceivable explanation for my condition. After scaring myself to death with too much information, I called my brother Mehrdad, a physician in San Diego, who tried to calm me by reminding me that medical students are notorious hypochondriacs. But I knew what was happening to me wasn’t “all in my head.” This was something serious—I was sure of it.
The first thing I did was seek medical insurance, which I didn’t have because as a student I couldn’t afford it. With the help of my brother I obtained coverage and went straight to the doctor. The diagnosis came soon after, stage-three testicular cancer with a 70 percent chance of metastasis (meaning that it would spread throughout my body).
When I heard the news and saw the doctor’s report detailing how bad things already were, and how much worse they could become following treatment, especially if there were complications, my mind latched on to the information like it was the only thing in the world. This was 1997, when Olympic figure skating champion Scott Hamilton and cyclist Lance Armstrong were making headlines because of their battle with the same type of cancer. I remember being panic-stricken as I read an interview with Armstrong in which he detailed how his cancer had spread from his testicles to his lymph nodes, lungs, and brain.
My oncologists gave me only one treatment option—have my testicle removed, along with all the lymph nodes in my gut (a 16-hour procedure), followed by extensive rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, accompanied by prescriptions for anxiety and depression. The plan was so invasive that I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was the best one for me. I knew it didn’t feel right, but I also had no idea what “right” really meant in this extreme situation.
EXCERPTS FROM CITY OF HOPE NATIONAL MEDICAL CENTER AND BECKMAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE, REPORT OF SADEGHI, HABIB, MARCH 1997
This gentleman with embryonal carcinoma and vascular invasion has roughly a 70% chance of having micrometastases to the retroperitoneal lymph nodes…
Risk of infertility…
High chance of recurrence within the next year…
Would necessitate approximately four cycles of platinum-based chemotherapy…
FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS
I recommended to this patient that he undergo a left template nerve sparing retroperitoneal lymph node dissection within the next month.
We went on to talk about potential risks and complications of surgery, including but not limited to blood loss, risk of a reaction to anesthesia, abscess formation, wound infection, deep venous thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism and death.
Taking a Step Back
After the doctor handed me my diagnosis, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I felt aimless, helpless, and hopeless. Somehow I found my way to the anatomy lab at school. I don’t know whether it was the overwhelming emotions or the stench of the formaldehyde that did it, but as soon as I walked in the door my eyes welled up. That was when an angel appeared to me in the form of my anatomy partner, Gary.
Gary took one look at me and said, “You’re not doing well.”
“I was just diagnosed with cancer,” I told him.
He paused for a moment to take in this information. Then without missing a beat he suggested, “Let’s go get lunch.”
Gary is older than I am. At the time he was already married with a son and had a PhD in psychology. Since I looked up to and trusted him, when he proposed we eat lunch I agreed even though food was the last thing on my mind. We crossed the street to a Mexican restaurant.
As we sat across the table from each other, Gary asked me, How are you holding up? What are you feeling? What’s going on in your head?
I was numb. It felt like an elephant-sized weight was crushing my chest and it was hard to breathe. Everything just felt wrong. Since I was so tired I could barely think, I had no idea how to figure out what I should do. Yet although I found it difficult to form the first words, as soon as I started speaking the answers poured out of me.
Genre:
- Dr. Sadeghi simply saved my life. His rigorous honesty and compassion coupled with his tremendous skill makes him the most valuable voice in medicine. He is direct in both his vision and guidance. This book will give you the tools to both simplify and amplify your life for the better. Much like treatment with the man himself, this program will leave you feeling both healed and loved. Oh, and the best part: it's a cleanse with no yucky shakes!—Jenni Konner, director, writer, and producer of Girls
- Dr. Sadeghi has helped me understand a path of clarity in my life. He's supported me in bridging the connection between mind and body work. I hope others will find healing in his compassionate teachings.—Jessica Chastain, actress
- Trust deeper. These two words, the journey to understanding them, and the man who taught them to me have changed my life. Dr. Sadeghi's THE CLARITY CLEANSE is essential reading for anyone who has felt lost or broken (in other words, for everyone) and wanted to heal into a kinder, stronger, and braver person. I cannot recommend it highly enough.—Anne Hathaway, actress
- THE CLARITY CLEANSE-this is a game changer! If you're ready to stop going around in circles you have found your map. THE CLARITY CLEANSE is essential for de-cluttering your emotional and physical body, giving you more conscious control of your life and a taste of what it is to really live healthy, happy, and free!—Demi Moore, actress
- Habib Sadeghi offers a new perspective on illness and disease and the pitfalls and obstacles that lie in the path of healing. THE CLARITY CLEANSE is a fresh and innovative approach to what we can do to live healthier and happier lives.—Tim Robbins, actor
- THE CLARITY CLEANSE offers a profound path to healing. In it, Dr. Sadeghi clearly shows the false duality of mind and body, that indeed the mind and body are one and our internal worlds are constantly and deeply reflected in our physical body. He leads us with a sense of safety and security, optimism and hope, on the journey from illness and disease to thriving and flourishing.—Alane Daugherty, PhD, professor of kinesiology, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and co-director, Mind and Heart Research Lab
- In my professional life, I achieved heights beyond my expectations, but in comparison my personal life was empty. No one should settle for empty! In THE CLARITY CLEANSE, Dr. Sadeghi outlined the steps to lead me to my own miracle of finding purpose, growth, and love.—Jeanie Buss, owner, Los Angeles Lakers
- On Sale
- Dec 31, 2019
- Page Count
- 304 pages
- Publisher
- Grand Central Publishing
- ISBN-13
- 9781455542222
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