October 2005

Fourfold Path To Healing Info

Dear Friends,

It’s here! We’re pleased to provide you with a report on the Fourfold Path to Healing Conference in late July. Written by roving reporter Lizette Marx, this article appeared in the October 2005 issue of Nutrition Professionals Quarterly. We thank Lizette for doing such a great job in capturing the essence of that weekend.

On a separate note, because of the burgeoning of interest in the newsletter, our subscriber list has grown to the point where we’ve had to find a more efficient way to deliver the goods. We’ll continue to provide you with bimonthly newsletters electronically. However, rather than have the entire newsletter in an email, we will provide highlights of articles, with links to the full online version. This will save space in your e-mailbox and allow us to be more creative and efficient in delivery to you. Let us know what you think.

Here’s wishing you a warm and healthy October, and we’ll be back in a month with your Fourfold Healing newsletter for Nov/Dec.

Warmly,
Tom Cowan

SPECIAL EDITION: a report on the Fourfold Conference July 29-31, 2005

Special Report by Lizette Marx
Authors Thomas Cowan, MD, Sally Fallon and Jaimen McMillan brought their book, The Fourfold Path to Healing, to life during a three-day conference brimming with lectures and classes about nutrition, therapeutic protocols, and movement and meditation. The event, which took place at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in Oakland, CA from July 29 through July 31, drew a crowd of more than 160 people — ranging from whole food nutritionists, doctors, healing arts practitioners and dedicated Weston A. Price devotees to Waldorf school teachers and families enlightened by the wisdom of the Nourishing Traditions diet and the benefits of lacto-fermenting, brothing and buttering a path toward health.

Speaking of lacto-fermenting and brothing, attendees at the conference were also treated to hearty, delicious, “slow food” meals prepared by Wise Food Ways chef, Jessica Prentice. She will share her wisdom in the kitchen with her first book to be published in March 2006.

The Fourfold Path to Healing is a collaboration of Cowan, Fallon and McMillan’s work that took nearly ten years to produce. In this book, principal author Dr. Cowan, dovetails modern medical research with the wisdom of traditional societies and the healing art philosophies of Rudolf Steiner to explain how to achieve true health.

Putting the content of the book into a conference format was yet another collaborative effort by the authors, who brought in Carol Thompson as conference manager. Thompson wears many hats in her life: Waldorf preschool teacher, parent of two Waldorf school children, public relations writer and graphic designer. “I first met Tom a year and a half ago during a doctor appointment. His whole concept about health rang true to me,” said Thompson during the opening night of the conference. “[This weekend] these three authors will streamline the information in their book into a digestible format that we can all take home with us.”

The conference opened with each of the authors taking a turn to explain his or her role in the book’s development and the connections shared with one another during the process. Each day began with a key lecture in the morning followed by breakout sessions with each of the authors in the afternoon. Participants split off into a track of their choice: Nutrition with Fallon, Therapeutics with Cowan, or Movement with McMillan. As the reporter for this event, I was fortunate to be able to float from track to track, but even with this advantage, the conference was so rich with information it would have taken another three days to make all of the topics available to everyone.

Tom Cowan
Heart of Gold

Thomas Cowan, MD, resembles both academic professor and down-to-earth family doctor. When he first walked on stage during the conference, he immediately asked the audience to please call him Tom, rather than Dr. Cowan. “I never understood that,” he mused. “I don’t know of any other profession where this exists. If I were a plumber, you wouldn’t call me Plumber Cowan, you’d just call me Tom or Mr. Cowan. My wife is a communication specialist but no one introduces her as “Communication Specialist Smith”; she is just Lynda.”

“This book and this conference is about the heart,” Cowan said. “The chapter on the heart is the heart of the book and where you’ll find the most controversy.” Cowan elaborated on this during the second day of the conference where he challenged our thinking about the heart’s true function in our body with his signature lecture, “The Heart is Not a Pump”.

Explaining the role of the heart in our body’s orchestral design is just one myth Cowan wants to dispel. Cowan believes there are many deep myths in our culture and psyche, which reflect the way we live.

Cowan began his medical practice 20 years ago. It was while teaching gardening as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, South Africa that Cowan decided to become a doctor. During this time, he read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price and learned about the principles of biodynamic agriculture developed by philosopher and scholar Rudolf Steiner. These two men inspired him to learn medicine. As a doctor, Cowan uses a variety of alternative therapies, primarily whole foods nutrition, herbs and homeopathic medicine to treat illnesses. However, instead of relying solely on the practice of prescribing remedies to treat different ailments, he is determined to discover how each individual can achieve total health.

“It is the patients who don’t respond to the usual treatments that have the most to teach their doctors,” he writes in the introduction of his book. “Factors we normally don’t associate with illness could be impediments to healing.”

This “mystery”of why some patients get better and some do not led Cowan to develop his own medical philosophy. He uses the anthroposophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner as a foundation for his medical practice and in developing his therapies. According to Steiner, the human body has four “bodies”or spheres of activity. When all of these spheres are in balance, an individual can enjoy good health.

The four spheres are the physical body, life-force body, emotional body, and mental body. Steiner believes that each of these “bodies” represent one aspect of our total being. Each sphere is also governed by a different set of rules that, when followed, can help one achieve balanced health and wellbeing. Cowan takes this philosophy and applies it to his practice by helping his patients look at not only how to treat a specific illness but to discover where their health took a wrong turn.

Cowan describes his approach to therapeutics in this way, “The way I treat everything is to try to understand how nature does it, how the body does it, and then I accentuate it,” he explained during one of intensive breakout sessions.

To illustrate this he described the role of infections in the body. “Infection is the therapy,” said Cowan. “We try to guide it in the right direction to move it out of the body so that it doesn’t have a toxic effect.” With a deep understanding of how each patient presents a matrix of interconnected health issues, Dr. Cowan also keeps the big picture in mind by observing what he refers to as “the Universal Healers”– warmth and rhythm. What makes Cowan an extraordinary physician is that he walks his talk, his is a true commitment to seeing patients as whole people.

Sally Fallon
Everything’s Better with Butter

If there is one thing Sally Fallon wants everyone to come away with during her talks, it is that fat is not the enemy. “If you don’t know the answer to something I talk about here, if you can’t explain it, just remember the answer is always going to be fat,” Fallon says with a wry grin. She isn’t kidding. Fat– that is, quality, organic, unrefined dairy, animal and tropical fats — is the key to health. We were all misled with the low-fat mantra and while more and more people are beginning to embrace dietary fats again, many are still confused about the good, the bad, and the ugly of fat. Fallon is a true believer and she makes no bones about her delight in this misunderstood macronutrient. During one of the breakout sessions in which she detailed the nuts and bolts of a traditional foods diet, she said she puts ½ a stick of butter in her bowl of oatmeal. Someone asked her, “A half of a stick?” And without blinking, Fallon deadpanned, “Well, you can use more if you want.”

Fallon is the founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of Nourishing Traditions, a book that has blossomed into a traditional foods movement. Many often refer to this way of eating as “the Nourishing Traditions diet” and have even started support groups to help each other learn the recipes and share ingredients and cooking techniques. In her book, Fallon describes in well-researched detail the importance of animal fats, fermenting, and cooking homemade bone broths. Unlike cookbooks that merely provide recipes and a few menu suggestions, Fallon has used her book as a platform to “challenge politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats.” Her slow food recipes also challenge our time-sensitive culture with instructions for making foods that often take several days to prepare.

Like Cowan, Fallon’s interest in nutrition grew after reading Weston A. Price’s book. After learning about the superior nutritional benefits of quality animal fats and other dietary principles, Fallon began to feed her own family these foods. When her children became old enough, she applied her skills as a journalist and chef to the subject of nutrition and began working on a cookbook with lipid and human nutrition specialist, Mary Enig, PhD, author of the classic Know Your Fats. Fallon and Enig have recently co-authored another book, Eat Fat, Lose Fat.

During the conference, Fallon provided detailed research and clinical studies to support the benefits of raw milk, healthy fats, and the misconceptions about cholesterol. Fallon focused heavily on the concerns surrounding raw milk. One of the myths she wanted to dispel is that “raw milk is like playing Russian Roulette with your health.”

“Milk is like blood,” she explains, “when you pasteurize, all of its safety factors are inactivated or dramatically reduced.”

“We have the technology to get raw milk to every person in this country, even in the most remote of areas but instead, we are using our technology to destroy milk’s benefits via pasteurization,” Fallon continues, with a hint of sadness as she flips through slides clearly showing raw milk’s immune boosting and health promoting properties.

Not surprisingly, Fallon also bashed the use of soy products. The Weston A. Price Foundation has articles on its website and gives out free pamphlets describing the dangers of soy. “I’ve been accused of being in the pay of the milk industry because of my position against soy,” Fallon says smiling. She is of course not paid to say anything of the sort, but ever the professional journalist, Fallon is armed with more than enough compelling data to back up her claims.

She reinforced other dietary minefields such as white sugar and flour, damaged fats, and processed foods. As an alternative to modern eating habits, Fallon provided many examples of what she calls “Mythic Foods”. We watched slide after slide of pictures of roast leg of lamb with mashed potatoes, pot roast, chicken liver pate, meat stocks and other hearty, comfort foods straight from her own kitchen. Fallon’s presentation, which was conveniently given before snack and lunch, caused many in the audience to stir with hunger. She encouraged everyone to think deeply about what they choose to eat and how they approach cooking.

“Your kitchen is your temple. It is a sacred and spiritual place,” Fallon said.

At one of the breakout sessions, Fallon elaborated on her mythic foods philosophy with more than 10 different rules to follow when cooking and eating. Some of them seemed obvious like avoid refined sugar, eliminate toxic metals and additives, and “be kind to your grains and your grains will be kind to you” (i.e. no white flour, soak your grains, etc). Her final suggestion was one many of us often forget to do and that is to practice forgiveness.

“Practice forgiveness. When you are under stress, you can’t digest. Forgive yourself, forgive your parents, forgive your children, and forgive the system.”

Jaimen McMillan
 Emotion in Motion

“Tom wanted Jaimen McMillan to do the emotional healing part of the book. One of the great ironies of this book was that I was working with the world’s most coordinated man and he was working with the world’s most uncoordinated woman”, says Fallon when first introducing McMillan at the conference.

If Cowan and Fallon are the heart and mind of the Fourfold Path to Healing, McMillan is the spirit. Dressed in white from head to toe, McMillan was truly dynamic in both his gracefulness and his entertaining demonstrations of how many of us inhabit our bodies and move through the world.

McMillan is the founder of Spacial Dynamics, the study of the interplay between the human being and space. According to McMillan space itself is one of the most neglected components in the study of human movement. “With Spacial Dynamics,” McMillan explains, “you choose how you want to embody your space. When you change the space, you change your body.” He relates the quality of a person’s movement to their inner health. In the Fourfold Path to Healing, he writes, “…an integrative approach suggests that when we set out to heal our emotions, the most appropriate starting point is the realm of motion — movement and exercise. This is because the way we move is dictated by how we feel.”

On his website McMillan differentiates Spacial Dynamics into eight different types of space: inner space, body space, personal space, interpersonal space, social space, public space, suprapersonal space, and infinite space. He explains that difficulties in enlivening one or more of these spaces can lead to problems in relating, communicating, integrating, and being consciously active; such difficulties may even lead to a paralysis of the will. And as suggested in the book, they can also lead to illness.

At the conference McMillan demonstrated the connection between emotion and motion with hilarious impressions of different personalities coming on to the stage. His examples showed how a minor change in movement can shift the way a person feels and the way he or she is perceived.

“Motion comes before emotion. Emotion comes from motion,” McMillan explained. “Before you actually ‘feel’ something there is a subtle movement within the body. That movement is the cause of the emotion.”

McMillan urged us not to apologize for having a body, for thinking that we are taking up space. “Your body is not in the way. It is a space. A space, we can learn to live in. Most people do not know how to live in every part of their body.”

He mapped out the different “rooms in the body”. The head is the library, the vocal chords are the music room, the heart is the living room or the hearth, the intestines are the workshop, a little lower is the bedroom, and lower still is the basement and then the ground floor is the feet.

“A person should be able to move around in their own ‘house’, but most of us get caught up in the library,” McMillan says point to his head.

McMillan’s breakout sessions included many different movement exercises from the book. These exercises are designed to help us control our body space and move around in our rooms. The idea is that when we can occupy every “room” at will, we can direct positive healing energies to each space in our body.

When some of the exercises caused many participants to start laughing and “enjoy themselves”, McMillan pointed out the movement and mood connection. When one is suffering from depression they typically don’t “move” very much. Movement and exercise delivers a positive, mood-elevating message to the brain and that creates healing in the emotional body.

Recipe:  Lactofermented Peach Chutney

In case you missed last month’s newsletter, we’re including Jessica Prentice’s nourishing recipe again. This delicious compote was served at the Fourfold Healing Conference in Oakland!

Ingredients:
2 teaspoons fenugreek seeds
1/4 boiling filtered water
8-10 peaches
juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon whole cumin seeds
2 teaspoons black or brown mustard seed
1 teaspoon fennel seed
1 4-inch piece of ginger, peeled
1 teaspoon powdered turmeric or 1 1-inch piece of fresh turmeric, peeled
1 tablespoon sucanat
1/4 cup whey
4 teaspoons sea salt (1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon)
1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)

Directions:

Put the fenugreek seeds in a small bowl and pour the boiling water over them. Allow to soak overnight or for at least 6 hours.
Peel the peaches and cut into a small dice. Put the peach pieces into a large bowl.
Squeeze the juice of the lemon over the peaches.
In a small cast iron skillet, toast the cumin, mustard and fennel over medium heat until they begin to smell fragrant. Add the seeds to the peaches.
Grate or mince the ginger and add to the peaches.
If using powdered turmeric, add it to the peaches. If using fresh, grate or mince as you did with the ginger.
Sprinkle the sucanat and the whey over the peaches
Sprinkle the salt over the peaches, and the 1/4 teaspoon cayenne. Stir thoroughly and taste. The mixture should be salty but delicious.
Transfer to a 2 quart jar. It is a good idea to gently weigh down the top of the chutney so that the liquid rises above the solids. I do this by using a flexible plastic lid (such as the kind that comes on a yogurt or cottage cheese container) that fits inside the jar. Then I fill a small, narrow jar with water and set that on top of the lid. This pushes the chutney down but allows the liquid to come up over the top.
Allow to ferment at room temperature at least overnight. If it is hot, 24 hours may be enough. If it is cool or just warm, allow to ferment for about 48 hours.
Transfer to the fridge and eat within one month.
Variation: Tomato Chutney
Substitute tomatoes for the peaches.

Jessica Prentice is both a professional chef and a passionate home cook. She currently conducts cooking classes, writes a monthly New Moon Newsletter on her Wise Food Ways website, and offers monthly Full Moon Feasts in the Bay Area. She is a Bay Area chapter head for the Weston A. Price Foundation for wise traditions in food, farming, and the healing arts. She is at work on a book about food and culture, due out in Fall 2005 from Chelsea Green Publishing. © 2005 Jessica Prentice

Reminder – Make Plans Now!
The 6th annual Wise Traditions Conference is coming up November 11-13 in Chantilly, VA. Join Sally Fallon, Mary Enig, Tom Cowan, and Mark MacAfee for a full weekend of discussions and workshops, delicious food prepared by Chef John Umlauf and Chef K. Michael Sullivan. Hope to see you there!