Unconventional Life – Podcast, Blog, Live Events

Category: Wellness

  • Ep274: Food Paired with Loving Intention, with Food for Life Co-founder Paul Turner

    Ep274: Food Paired with Loving Intention, with Food for Life Co-founder Paul Turner

    Food for Life is one of the largest non-profit organizations in the world and is serving more than 2 million vegan meals daily. One of its founders, Paul Turner, started their mission with the aim to teach people that there is more to food, and more to this world, than what we perceive.

     

    Young Monk

    Other than Food for Life, Paul has also served as a senior consultant at the World Bank, an entrepreneur Holistic Life Coach, and a vegan chef. But before any of that, he was a child.

    Born in one of the poorer areas of Sydney, Australia, Paul was introduced to the bitterness of life at an early age. It’s also at this young phase that he was fascinated with spirituality.

    “My dad was a small-time criminal,” Paul shared, “the friends of the family were also criminals so we grew up in a pretty crazy situation. And at the age of 15, I became interested in astronomy. That sort of planted the seed in my heart that there must be more to life than this.”

    In his teenage years, he joined a group of people that gathered near an abandoned hotel resort. There he stayed for six months. During this time, he realized his calling and began his journey to spiritual development. He joined an ashramat the age of 19 and dedicated 14 years of his life to being a celibate monk.

    A vital part of his learning came to him after his head was shaved and he became a part of the monks. “I looked in the mirror and realized, that vanity,” Paul said, “that person that I thought I was now is on the floor. Now I’m a little different. Who am I really? I’m obviously not this body, this body is just a vehicle. It’s how I’m expressing my consciousness.”

     

    Pure Food

    Learning from a Bengali celibate monk named Swami Prabhupada, Paul discovered Bhakti—Yoga of Devotion. Building upon the concepts in this practice, he began teaching it to others and through the mission of Food for Life.

    “Food, when paired with loving intention, has the ability to nourish mind, body and soul,” Paul said, “Food can shift consciousness.” He believes that the cause for world hunger isn’t the lack of food, but the lack of humanity.

    “Our mission is to unite the world through the sharing of pure food,” Paul stresses, “If we saw ourselves as a united global family, things like hunger would disappear because you wouldn’t tolerate your brother or sister going hungry.”

    Paul also notes that they’re the most cost-effective feeding program in the world, because of their vegan diet. Feeding up to 40 people from a donation of $10. On top of this, they are also educating people about the advantages of shifting to a vegan diet, as well as getting more members to help serve with loving intent.

     

    Cultivating the Self

    Paul shares that in his journeys, a lot of young people describe success as being an influencer or YouTuber. Concerned, he notes that there should be more to what we do. Part of balancing our lives should be taking care of our spirit.

    “We have to be responsible citizens but at the same time, we have to also cultivate our real potential insider,” he shares. “Because eventually at some point in time, this body is gonna stop working, and we’re gonna have to move on.”

    He shares that reincarnation is a fact that is happening now. People change every day. Once we were children and now, we’re adults. As the spiritual being we are, it’s the inner self we should work most to develop.

     

    More from Paul:

  • Ep273: Stripping Down to Your Bare Feet, with You Enjoy Life founder Joshua Greenfield

    Ep273: Stripping Down to Your Bare Feet, with You Enjoy Life founder Joshua Greenfield

    Some of you might recall the name Joshua Greenfield from the renowned entertainment duo Brothers Green. Together with his sibling Mike, the two went viral online for their fun chemistry in the kitchen which made it to the airwaves of MTV, airing internationally.

    This was the picture of success for most entertainers and artists, but Joshua shares with us today his newfound happiness from stepping away from the spotlight.

     

    Leaving Fame

    As Joshua puts it, we’re all creating an image of who we are through some kind of channel. Whether it be YouTube or TV, or any online presence, there is a version of us there that we try to hold up. He shares that it reached a point, where he couldn’t take up the façade any longer.

    “Holding on to this idea of who I am will create suffering for myself,” Joshua shares, “putting meaning to this person who we think we’re supposed to be, created more struggle.”

    In leaving his celebrity image behind, Joshua found himself a path to rediscover his true self.

    “Leaving brothers green was one of the most freeing things that ever happened to me. I was starting to get caught on this character [and] it led me to this journey of who am I really beyond that character.”

     

    Rediscovery

    After leaving Brother Green, Joshua rekindled his love for cooking and found more purpose in his kitchen.

    “What I love about food is the connection,” he shares, “now I teach more about mindful eating and conscious consumption helping people make a healthy relationship with nature and what they’re eating. Instead of making it about the food, it’s about how it makes you feel.”

    Additionally, in this journey to self-discovery, Joshua searched for ways he could connect more to his internal self. He learned from different communities, Buddhist teaching, and on his journey, he even lost his shoes.

     

    Grounding

    Being born in a family of Podiatrists, Joshua was aware of most of the science that surrounds it. He also points out that there is a deep connection between our souls and our soles.

    Using online platforms like TikTok, and YouTube, Joshua connected with like-minded people who now join him in the Free the feet movement. Together they promote reconnecting with nature and walking barefoot.

    “I believe in Free the feet,” Joshua says, “I help people develop a relationship with their feet because our feet ground us to the Earth.”

    Learning from Clint Ober’s story in Earthing, Joshua says that people are like conduits of electricity where energy flows. Having this energy flow through and out to the ground is key because stagnant energy leads to a lot of our pains. Freeing our feet from shoes and the like is a way we can let this energy out.

    Joshua notes that when he hikes with people who don’t walk barefoot, he always talks to them about it in hopes to encourage them.

    “Recognize that your foot is a seedling,” he narrates, “when you take it out of the shoe it’s vulnerable, but if you’re smart and you take care of it, it will grow to this beautiful flower.”

    This year, Joshua and other barefoot advocates will be running a barefoot marathon, and he openly welcomes those who are interested in joining.

     

    More from Joshua:

  • Ep269: Changing the World One Step at a Time, with Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan

    Ep269: Changing the World One Step at a Time, with Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan

    Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare genetic disease that affects roughly 15,000 boys in the US. The word “boys” is used because the illness causes degeneration of the body and is fatal, without a known cure for it, most patients rarely reach adulthood.

    Compared to diseases like the flu, 15,000 is a small number but for Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan these numbers shouldn’t matter, because each of those 15,000 is a life worth saving, especially his younger brother, Terry, being one of them.

    Sharing his story with us, Rich explains that growing up, he would watch other kids play and run around while his brother was growing weaker and weaker, and every doctor they went to would give them the same answer, that there was no treatment.

    “In my eyes, it just didn’t make a lot of sense,” Horgan shares, “how can we do more than just monitor decline? Terry is one of the 30 million who are impacted and there’s a number of rare diseases out there, Duchenne is one of them, there are still over 7000 others.”

     

    Knowing Why

    Like many kids, Rich didn’t know much about other diseases and didn’t quite yet understand why a hospital can’t cure his brother. As he got older and started asking bigger questions, the brutal reality dawned on him.

    “Your mind starts to wonder the question why,” he shares, “and why is a really dangerous question because then you start to understand the answers to why. As you understand as a kid, Duchenne goes from sort of this abstract, theoretical concept to this very real, very practical thing.”

    Duchenne muscular dystrophy was discovered in the 1980s by French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, it’s been more than 40 years since then and comparing it to COVID-19, a fairly new virus, we seem to be closer to cure for it than DMD. Horgan says that the pandemic is a clear example of Pharmacoeconomics.

    To make up for the funds put into research and development, the economy of drugs needs to address illnesses that cover a wider range of buyers; the rarer the disease the less likely it has a cure—or any research into it. “This is going to kill my brother if nothing else changes.”

     

    Learning How

    Growing up around business-minded parents, Horgan took that same fondness and entered Harvard Business School, still carrying that hope that there is a way to save his brother.

    “Let’s make a lot of money so that we can take that money and put it to something that’s going to help Terry,” Rich said sharing his thought, “I got to business school in 2016 and it became very obvious very quickly that that wasn’t going to work, Terry just didn’t have enough time.”

    His brother never left his mind and he considered the disease as something that was going to shake his life and the people he loved, but rather than sit and wait, Rich acted on hope. “I could never forgive myself for not trying,” he said.

     

    What If

    With his Harvard connections, Rich was introduced to MIT’s Jonathan Fleming and later to Dr. Tim Yu, a researcher at the Boston Children’s Hospital, and with that came an even crazier idea that turned Pharmacoeconomics on its head.

    “I realized we could actually take medicine, and instead of doing one-size-fits-all, we could actually take it down to the granular level of one-is-to-one medicine, what we call n = 1”

    It was at this point that Rich rallied a team together, including his brother’s clinician of 15 years, Dr. Brenda Wong from UMass. He founded the nonprofit group Cure Rare Disease that collaborates with the FDA and other researchers, clinicians, geneticists and bioinformaticians, that aims to produce customized therapeutics.

    “It was the question What if that started this,” he said, “we know it’s a journey of a million miles, but what’s that first step? What’s the second? When you look down [at each step] by the time you lift your head up, you can get really far, and that’s exactly what happened.”

    He advises the listeners to never select themselves out of whatever it is they’re pursuing, and hang on to hope as they push forward to the next step. Rich’s younger brother Terry will later this year undergo treatment and be patient 001 for the DMD treatment.

     

    More from Rich and Cure Rare Disease:

  • Ep268: Creating a New Identity, with Holistic Nutritionist and Hypnotherapist Melissa Kathryn

    Ep268: Creating a New Identity, with Holistic Nutritionist and Hypnotherapist Melissa Kathryn

    We know ourselves more than anyone, and often we need to be reminded to take our time to listen to our own thoughts. In our talk with Certified Nutritionist and Hypnotherapist Melissa Kathryn, she takes us for a quick meditation session and guides us to “let the answers in” as our conscious thoughts step back and we ask our bodies about how to solve our fears.

    Melissa shares with us the MK method which she has been following and teaching people in order to change their lives, whether it be an issue with weight, diet, or general emotional and trauma healing. She describes it as a holistic approach that really strikes a problem to its core.

    “MK method is about creating a new identity and understanding what your gaps are,” Melissa said, “something that I teach is where there’s lack, you’ll fill the gaps with x. [For example] where there is lack, you’ll fill the gaps with food. So, wherever we experience lack within ourselves, and within our thinking and within our being, knowing that we’re not enough now, we will end up filling those gaps with whatever it is.”

    For Melissa, change isn’t simply about education and health, it’s also about empowerment; she points out that our actions are dictated by our minds and these decisions affect our body and how we live our lives. Sharing her own story, Melissa notes that even as a nutritionist she still bounces back to unhealthy routines.

    “I got the weight back at the same length of time I took to get it off,” she says “so clearly something’s missing. And I was just on the floor of my New York City apartment, binging on Quest Bars, felt sick to my stomach. I was like why would I do this to myself? This clearly [shows] I don’t love myself because I’m putting myself in pain and I’m not living my best life.

    “I started really looking at my mind and started realizing that all of this had nothing to do with food but my relationship to myself and my mindset.”

    She shares that the beauty of her work is when she gets to empower women through her coaching and her story of surviving cancer but she notes that people also need to realize that they can look within to find their own answers and be their own inspiration.

    “You don’t need an astrological reading to tell you that your desires on your heart are meant for you,” she stresses, “you got to give yourself permission to live your best life now.”

     

    More from Melissa:

  • Ep266: Bars and Brainwaves, with Myndlift CEO and co-founder Aziz Kaddan

    Ep266: Bars and Brainwaves, with Myndlift CEO and co-founder Aziz Kaddan

    Growing up with a pediatric neurologist as the man of the house, it’s no surprise that neuroscience would be a common topic at the dinner table of Aziz Kaddan’s childhood, and why he found himself years later in the same branch of science.

    At an early age, he was exposed to the topic of mental health and conditions particularly ADHD. He witnessed how his two siblings were examined by their father, and how much they rejected the medication that he gave them. As research in neuroscience expanded over the decades and therapy improved, Aziz now finds himself as the CEO of Myndlift, and building on the breakthrough that is Neurofeedback.

    To simplify, Aziz explained that “Neurofeedback is based on something called Operant Conditioning. Whenever you do a certain action, you get a reward or a no reward, and if you get a reward immediately after doing that action, that action or that behaviour is being reinforced, right? So if you’re rewarding a baby, for example, whenever they do a specific behaviour over and over and over again, at some point they’re going to do that behaviour more and more naturally.”

    This was the culmination of the research put into measuring brain activity which allowed for the non-invasive undertaking of sending frequencies to parts of the brain, which paved the way for therapy that improved actions like focus and treat conditions that affect the brain like ADHD and depression.

     

    Starting the Start-up

    Despite its effectiveness, Aziz acknowledges that it is yet to go mainstream, “Other than the high costs associated with it, the need to visit the clinic so often made it something that is sort of a last resort for many people,” he says, “you would prefer to take medication rather than stick to 60-day training regimen with therapy.

    “I tried it myself and it helped me. I know the benefits of research, why is it not accessible? So we worked super hard on making it accessible by using wearable technology and mobile technology and just providing it from home.”

    It was this idea that led Aziz and his co-founders to quit their jobs in 2014 and fly from Tel Aviv to a technology accelerator in Boston. It was a difficult journey educating investors and it took almost 10 months of work to make the first dollar for their start-up, but they persevered.

    Now their compact Myndlift technology and software are being used in hundreds of clinics globally, inching their way closer to making this groundbreaking treatment a mainstream option in the field of mental health.

     

    Rhymes and Relaxation

    Having experienced the difficulties of being a new entrepreneur, Aziz encourages other dreamers, and aspiring CEOs to not forget about themselves in this painstaking process of growth, as their mental health is equally important as their goals.

    “At the end of the day,” Aziz says, entrepreneurs are very prone to suffer from depression or anxiety due to the difficulty of what they’re doing—you’re alone, you’re building something big. Every day is a struggle and you don’t have somebody telling you what to do—you have to figure it out by yourself, all of these factors can be daunting. For example, if you’re funding for a big idea, and you have, you fully believe in that idea, your mom also believes in it [but] when you go to investors and they tell you well this will never work, or you’re getting rejection after rejection after rejection that can take a toll on your mental health.

    Aziz shares that it’s hard to push through with projects when you’re dealing with internal burdens, so he suggests that from time to time, entrepreneurs take a day off to pursue other projects.

    “I really recommend to every single entrepreneur out there that are just starting out, have an artistic project, whether it’s singing, drawing—whatever it is, because when you have such a project where you create something, and you’re not dependent on people—vying for the market or investors and it’s just your creation that you fully control in your own world, on the weekend. It just gives you that break that you desperately need.”

    For Aziz, music and the lyrical world of rap was his part-time project outside Myndlift, and the CEO himself writes his own rhymes from time to time as his way of clearing his head.

     

    Science and Stigma

    Even though they have made treatment for mental health more accessible, Aziz acknowledges that the stigma of mental health treatment is still there. Many countries and parts of our communities are still associating it with disability and jumping to uneducated conclusions on the topic of mental conditions, but there are noticeable signs of acceptance in more areas.

    He says that during this time of COVID-19 where many of us are stuck at home, many are starting to see the importance of mental health.

    “[At times] I’m interviewing candidates who want to work at Myndlift and I’m noticing a lot of openness,” Aziz shares, “people are telling me ‘look I really connect with this company because I’ve suffered from a mental health issue, and I think I’m still suffering’ they know that I’m not gonna pass judgment. And so, that’s the beautiful thing that’s happening right now and I hope that this continues to grow.”

     

    More from Aziz and Myndlift:

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