Dr. Alejandro Junger

G: Can you please teach readers how their toxic thoughts affect their bodies?

I cannot teach that, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.  I can point out, for most people, what they already know and if they don’t already know, they probably shouldn’t be taught.

Have you ever had suspicions that your partner is being unfaithful to you ? and even if you try to distract yourself, you find that these thoughts pop in your mind without permission. obsessively. and when they pop up, you start going into details in your imagination; how they must have met, the inconsistencies in the explanations for being late to the kids baseball final game. imagining the place where they must have met…..and during the times when the thoughts kept repeating, your stomach turned and churned to the point of making you nauseous, or giving you diarrhea, or both, cold sweats, shakiness, insomnia.
Or have you ever had a loved one be told they had a terminal disease and struck with sadness and fear, to the point of paralyzing you ?
Or did you ever experience being let down, humiliated, lied to while being looked in the eyes, by a business partner or a friend ? and then exhaust your waking day concocting in your mind all the possible arguments you will tell this one or that one that will not only let very clear that you were right , but that will even hurt that person as a deserved payment for your suffering.
Or did you ever find yourself going over in your mind a discussion turned into an argument during a meeting with a colleague that you have set up next week for the purpose of settling a sensitive issue ? and even though you know the meeting is in a week, your thoughts are so wound up thinking about what you will answer to the question which you predict is guaranteed to be asked, that you cannot even fake being interested in whatever your kids are trying to tell you, unable to be present for your own family.

If you are reading this with complete attention, genuinely and curiously attempting to understand what I am asking, you probably went into your memory and recalled a situation in your past, similar to one or more of the ones I described as part of my questions. And if you did that, not only you ‘remembered’ the situation in itself, but you also ‘felt’ the feeling that you were feeling at that time, faded to different degrees in different people, but re-living the emotion and even the body discomfort, whatever that is. Some, if the situation recalled was really intense and has not yet been ‘processed’, may re-live the full blown experience, with panic attacks, tachycardia, vomiting, diarrhea, and in extreme cases, a heart attack and death. I have seen this over and over again. ER docs will confirm if you ask them, that heart attacks happen much more on mondays, when people have to return to work and face the madness that for so many is going to work to be able to pay the rent.

If you don’t get it by now, you are either really young, really lucky ( in which case, why would you want to be taught that ? ) or enlightened ( in which case you understood it already ).

Mandela describes how, after 27 years of torture, the day he was walking out, stopped and shook each and every one of his torturers hands and forgave them fully, totally, without reservation, so that he could actually walk out a free man, in body and in thought. Can you relate to that ? I can’t…

G: Can you share how meditation has helped you clear your thoughts and how readers can apply this tool?

I am still watching to see when I will be graced with the clearing of my thoughts. At the moment, thoughts are still popping up like bubbles in a bottle of soda when you uncap it right after it fell and bounced on the ground. What meditation gave me is the ability to avoid my attention from being sucked in by that thought, as if one noticed a cloud passing by. It is there, and then it is gone. This ability was only evident at the beginning, during the actual time of the meditation exercise that I was practicing at that time. With time, I started noticing that ability also available at short moments here and there throughout the day, and these short moments get longer and longer as time goes by, as long as I keep my practice.
Meditation also gave me the understanding that ‘thought’ itself is not toxic. What is toxic is what happens when that thought pulls your attention away from the present and into the thought itself, which now becomes ‘your experience’, since your experience is determined by where your attention is at any given moment. So if your attention is trapped into this thought, and your emotions are triggered according to your ‘perception’ or ‘interpretation’ of that thought, and the result is dys-function, dis-ease, un-ease, suffering in any way, that is  the toxicity. That is how a thought, which in itself is just a vibration of a subtle kind ( not visible or weighable ) , ends up causing sickness at a molecular level, a cellular, tissue and organ level. visible to the naked eye.

G: Please inform readers of how meditation will clear their minds and help heal their bodies.

Meditation is a name that means different things to different people. Some call meditation the time they set apart to lie down, listen to chill music and imagine themselves in a warm beach with a clear blue ocean. others refer to the practice of sitting in a certain position, closing their eyes and repeating a mantra, yet for others, instead of repeating a mantra, attention is directed to the breath. What they all have in common is that what is being exercised is attention. All of the different schools of meditation are basically doing the same, training the meditator to direct attention somewhere or nowhere, but to will your attention somehow.If you are not ‘aware’ of where your attention is flowing, it will tend to flow into thought. It takes work to keep attention in the present.
For example, right now, as you read these words, you are directing your attention to the print, and you are processing what you read, resulting in you understanding what is meant, but if you watch carefully you will notice that other thoughts, noises and smells also pop in your awareness, meaning, you are giving them some attention. Now try this, as you continue to read, put some of your attention in both your feet. you don’t have to stop reading to do it, you can keep on reading and at the same time sense your feet touching your shoe, or the floor, feel the temperature in your feet, the humidity. keep on doing it, keep feeling your feet, keep feeling your feet. I am doing it as I am writing. Keep on feeling your feet. Do you notice ? The experience that you are having now ( keep feeling your feet ) if you’ve kept your attention in your feet all this time, is different than the one you were having prior to start doing that, isn’t it ?
What just happened is that you, following my suggestion, put your attention on your feet, you willed your attention into your feet, and it was hard, because you probably noticed that if for a nanosecond you get distracted, you suddenly find yourself a few minutes later planning your next vacation in your mind’s eye…but you kept it there, and your feet are always in the present. Your thoughts usually are concerned with things past and present or simply, in imagination. You become “lost” in thought, which could be described as not being present. Instead, if your attention is kept in the feet, it is attention kept in the present. This attention, fixed in the present at that time, was not available to be sucked by thought, which is how you fail at being present.

This is a powerful tool to free yourself from the prison of toxic thinking. To put your attention in your feet ( or any body part) at different moments of the day. No matter what you are doing, whatever it is, try putting some attention into your feet, feel them, sense them. It seems counter-intuitive at the start. If you are in the middle of an important meeting, isn’t it more important to give your audience your full attention ?
But if you practice, very soon you will notice that it creates something beneficial for whatever the situation is in which you put this into practice. As you speak to someone and have some of your attention in your feet at all times, between both, there is no attention left for automatic judging, calculating, measuring, classificating, and all the other things our attention is being used for while we are listening to people most of the time. This will give your friend a sense of space, of being allowed to be. It will create a healthier atmosphere and you may notice that you went from demanding respect to commanding respect, your mere ‘presence’ sets the conditions in which respect is the natural response you elicit in others. This is what ‘presence’ means. The ‘quality’ that is so attractive to others, but that most of us cannot define, which we call “presence” or ” i don’t know what”, is at the most basic level, attention directed and anchored in the present. Those who learn to be fully in the present ( actors while they act ), or those who need to learn to be in the present at the risk of killing themselves if they don’t ( car racers), get payed a lot of money to do in front of others whatever it is they do during which time they are fully in the present. That is how much meditation can affect your life.

G: Please tell us about your book Clean.

CLEAN is a book on cleansing and detoxification. We live in a toxic world, the air we breathe, the water we drink and shower with, the cosmetics we use, the buildings we live and work in, but most of all , the foods that we eat, are loaded with chemicals that alone, or in combination, cause dysfunction, disease, suffering and death, ours, and that of the planet that hosts us. The Planet has a fever. Global warming is just a symptom, like fever. The cause of the fever is Global Toxicity. I call it ” Another Inconvenient Truth”.

What are these toxins, where are these toxins, how are we exposed, how do they get absorbed into our system, what are they doing to our health, how does the body deal with them and what we can do to support it, are all questions answered in the book. The book has a program, The CLEAN Program, detailed day by day , with incredibly good tasting recipes by world renowned Live Food Chef, Certified nurse and detox specialist, Jill Pettijohn.

In the book I tell how I came accross this knowledge, while looking for solutions to my own depression, irritable bowel syndrome and severe allergies, other than prescription medications to suppress the symptoms. What I discovered, which was information not only missing, but ridiculized in medicine academic settings, is not only fascinating, but extremely useful for so many ailments that seem of totally independent different origins, yet end up being that they stem from the same root, your gut.

G: Please share with readers how they begin to bring the Clean approach into their lives today?

Right now, sense your feet, CLEAN the quantum toxicity of the monkey mind. Do that all day long, as long as you remember, as long as you possibly can, and when you fall out, the instant you remember, sense your feet again, and again, and again.
Right now, you can start one of the most powerful tools I have in My practice. The elimination diet.
This alone can so dramatically change your life that it may end up seeming impossible to have gotten those results so simply. Without having to buy any supplements, without having to purchase and read a book,. without having to pay me a consultation, I will tell you what NOT to eat. Do this for 3 weeks, and you will thank me for 3 years. Do it seriously, committedly, no cheating, an experiment, a challenge. Do not freak out when you read the list of foods that I am going to ask you to avoid, all at once, cold turkey, 100 %.
Trust me, you can do it.

NO BREAD, NO PASTA, NO COFFEE, NO ALCOHOL, NO DAIRY ( no milk, no cheese, no yogurth, no mayo, no ice cream), no sugar, no red meat, no processed foods, no oranges, no white rice, no eggs, no soy, no corn.
If you want to go deeper but safe, and really effective, visit www.cleanprogram.com and get The Clean Program Kit, all the supplements and meal replacement that will make easy your experience of detoxification, yet none the less powerful. The CLEAN Program is the best supported detox program on the planet. We created a web community site in which thousands of people are doing the program in unison, sharing information, posting their cleanse journals and inspiring each other.
You don’t need to wait another minute, join the clean revolution.
Learn about detox at CLEAN TV www.cleanrevolution.tv

Biography:

Dr. Alejandro Junger was born in Uruguay. He graduated from medical school there in 1990 and moved to New York City for his postgraduate training. He completed three years of training in Internal Medicine at NYU Downtown Hospital and three more years of fellowship in Cardiovascular Diseases at Lenox Hill Hospital.

The long hours, stress, and change in diet soon reflected as Dr. Junger suffered from irritable bowel syndrome and depression. Becoming a patient of the system he was practicing was such a shock, that it started a journey of his own to search for an alternative solution to his health problems.

His findings are the subject of his firstbook, Clean. In it, Dr. Junger describes how he became aware of the toxicity of our planet. Clean is a manual for readers to learn how to turn our detoxification systems on full speed while supporting our bodies to maximize their effectiveness.  Dr. Junger describes both an elimination diet and a specific 21-day detox plan to follow in the book to help rid the gut of toxins and revitalize the body.

Dr. Junger now lives in New York City, where he practices at the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center and is also designing an Integrative Medicine Service at Lenox Hill Hospital, for which he was asked to be the Director of Integrative Medicine.