How to Bring Your Awareness Inside and Find Complete Peace

[00:00:00] If you want peace in your life, you have to bring your awareness inside, beyond your thoughts, beyond your emotions, beyond your body, beyond the energy that keeps you alive. And awareness is the container within which everything unfolds. Your life unfolds in it, but the entire universe unfolds in that container, and that container is complete peace.

Mm-hmm. Undisturbing, it is Undisturbing. And always there, even if you’re freaking out, there is peace inside of you that if you have access to, you can go there.

Udo Erasmus was born to a family of six on a confiscated farm during World War II in Europe, where his family lost everything twice. He was a war refugee. Fleeing from the fire power of the [00:01:00] communists and allies alike. Fear, anxiety, and terror were constant companions. He lived without electricity, running water, radio, or tv.

It took six years after the war ended and then finally Udo’s family was able to immigrate to British Columbia, Canada. After arriving in Canada, Udo would go on to combine higher education with his self-taught knowledge and life experience. He took the trauma of his early life and transformed it into a gift, A gift that resulted in his life, work, and purpose.

After a personal health crisis of pesticide poisoning in the eighties and with allopathic medicine, unable to help him, udo began studying medical research journals, Udo’s, background in biological sciences, biochemistry, genetics. Psychology was pivotal in his discovering the benefits and fragile nature of healthy fats and oils, including omega three s.

He made predictions that [00:02:00] later would be proven true. Udo became super inspired and found the solution and the result was udo inventing the machinery to bring flaxseed oil to the market and create the current healthy fats oils industry after a full recovery using healthy oils. He also went on to write several books.

Has an eight step process that takes into consideration all of the elements of whole health, which includes our mental health presence and awareness, our life energy, and being in harmony with nature and humanity. Whatever happened or happens on the outside, you’re always 100% whole on the inside. We talk about all of this in this episode.

Now I recorded this interview with Udo on 14 April, and today is the 22nd of September. I typically wait until I get ready to send the episode to the editor to put together to record my introduction. So in re-listening to this interview, it was just an amazing feeling [00:03:00] to see how far I have come since April.

A lot of the things that Udo and I discussed, I didn’t quite get, like I didn’t know how to quiet my mind, and now I do. And I do it daily and it’s made a huge, huge impact in my life. In this interview, Udo says, if you do do, do all the time, you turn into do, do, and you’ve gotta spend more time being, I don’t think I really got that in April.

I kind of did, but I didn’t know how to do it. Now I get it and I do it. I’m more being than doing. It’s made such a huge difference. If you wanna learn more about my journey and discover the journey for yourself, you should join the Onward Movement. The Onward Movement is a Facebook group. And that’s where we spend a lot of our time.

But you can also join my email list if you, you’re not on Facebook and get updates as well. But we’re a community that is seeking to let go of the fear of judgment and discover our [00:04:00] authentic selves so that we can pursue the life of our dreams starting October 3rd. We’re going on a seven day mindset for personal transformation challenge, or what I’ve started to call it, is an opportunity.

And in those seven days, we’re going to get our minds ready for our journey, our journey to discovering our authentic selves, and it’s a continuous journey. You’re always changing, always learning new things about yourself. It’s fun to be learning these things together in a community, and I’m really excited to launch this mindset for personal transformation opportunity.

It’s seven days, but it’s really only like 15, maybe 30 minutes out of your day for each of those seven days. So why not come over to the onward movement and check it out and invest in yourself? This challenge happens to be free, so what you’re investing in yourself is time, 30 minutes a day for seven [00:05:00] days.

I think you can make the time. You are worth it. Now let’s listen to the interview. Welcome Udo. Thank you for being on the Onward podcast. Glad to be on. When you sent over this information about yourself, cuz when people, uh, sign up to be on my podcast, they typically go to my website and click on the be a podcast guest.

And, and they submit, uh, what it is that they wanna talk about. And when I was reading what you wanted to talk about, I’m like, oh my gosh, this is probably, could be like three episodes. I, your life is so interesting. Easily, your life is so interesting and. I just want you to start talking about like how you grew up because you were a war refugee.

Mm-hmm. Uh, fleeing from the communists. You were two. Yeah. I don’t know how much you remember of that, but I’m sure you have stories of it too. Yeah. My parents came from Latvia and Estonia, and in 1938, I think it was Hitler [00:06:00] and Stalin. Signed a non-aggression packed, and as part of the non-aggression pact, this is like, this is politics, right?

Mm-hmm. As part of this non-aggression pact, Latvia was given to the Soviet Union and part of Poland was given to Germany. There was nobody from Poland and nobody from Latvia at the meeting. They just did it. They just took it. They just took it because they could, right? Mm-hmm. My parents lived in Latvia.

They had German, Swedish background, and they loved R the Russians and hated communism because communists took everything away from everybody. And so they decided to go to this place in Poland that had been taken over by Germany. So I was born on a stolen farm in Poland. That was at that time, Germany.

And when the war ended, we were refugees fleeing from the communists who were chasing us in tanks and trucks. And we were fleeing on roads that were filled with refugees in horse drawn hay wagons, mostly mothers and children, no [00:07:00] men, no soldiers, and the allies were using us as target practice from their planes.

These, these were the good guys. So I don’t remember all of the pictures. I just remember the fear, the anxiety, and the confusion and the chaos. I remember being hungry. And so my mother left four of the six children. She had six and under behind because she couldn’t handle six kids. Cause she decided to go through the fields cuz it was safer to go through the fields.

And it was winter. How old were the children? You were two and six? Yes. Six. Six down le six and under. Two of them were, four of them were hers. And so we were basically, uh, 6, 5, 4, 3. She left you with who? Le left another on a farm along the road. Just gave us to the farmer. He took us back to Berlin, the, to the relatives.

The relatives had fled. Then I ended up in an orphanage and eventually her sister went and found us and brought us back and reunited us. But it was [00:08:00] crazy. So I was very shy and very withdrawn and I didn’t trust anybody cuz it was, I couldn’t even trust my mother. Right. I mean, I, now I look at it and I say, oh my God.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her to have to make that decision. I can’t do, but Yeah. But for the kid, of course, what do you trust? And so we ended up in, in Germany, left there when we were, when I was 10 and came to Canada. And when I was six in Germany, I heard people arguing about things that I thought were really stupid and trivial.

And the thought occurred to me, there must be a way that people can live in harmony. And I’m gonna find out how. Right. Just like, like a six year old will do when he doesn’t know how complicated everything is. Right, right, right, right. Gotta be easier than this. Lemme ask a question though, to you. Was your father alive?

My father was in a prisoner of war camp in Alabama. He was on the German side because he was part of Germany. Right. So he was on a, in a prisoner war camp, and he got [00:09:00] taken prisoner in Normandy. And the reason we ended up in, in Canada was that his tour to his, you know, when they, when they went to Alabama, they went through Quebec and Quebec.

The vegetation’s very similar to Latvia. And he loved that vegetation. He said, if I survive this war, I’m going to Canada. So that’s how, how that began. And then he came back in 1946 and then it took us six years to get through the bureaucracy, get to get the hell outta Germany. That’s amazing. And, and just the way p communication was back then, cuz you know, he didn’t pick up his cell phone and text your mom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So, so, and that’s why my mother was by herself, and that’s why most of those people, most of the men were after war. And so the women were alone with their children and they weren’t driving, uh, Mercedes? No. They were on hay wagons drawn by horses that weren’t eating right, because they just fled with whatever they had.

I, I don’t remember that we took anything [00:10:00] except the clothes we had. And, uh, the silver spoons we owned because we came from a family that silver spoons were, they were in the family and they were, they went down the generations. The oldest spoon I ever saw of that bunch was 1744 or something like that, and they had the dates and names engraved in the back.

So that was like something of value that. Didn’t take up a lot of volume. Right. So that’s, that’s basically what they, what they left with because they were reasonably well off in Latvia. My father owned a farm, my mother was a pharmacist in the days when, when they used, uh, weeds to make medicines, plants to make medicines.

Mm-hmm. And they rolled the pills by hand. Like this. Right? Wow. So she, so she was ver pretty good in on herbal, herbal things. And so I kind of grew up with that. And then in, when we came to Canada, he went to where there was nothing, bought 112 acres for $960 bush land. And then we built a house and built a barn and built a house out outhouse.[00:11:00] 

Didn’t have running water, didn’t have electricity, no radio. And his, his, his view was, I just wanna be left alone. He would see that, understand just outta the blue. He’d say that, or he says, if it doesn’t rain in my bed, I’m happy. Or, or he said, and then he would read a newspaper every weekend, cover to cover.

He’d read everything, and then he’d fold it up very, very nicely. So like a little O c d put it down very. Deliberately and get up and walk into the middle of the room and say to nobody in particular. The world stinks. Well, not much has changed since then because, because they went through the First World War, then the Bolshevik Revolution, then the depression.

Then the second World War and they pretty much followed one another. That was their life in Europe and he couldn’t get, get the hell out of Europe fast enough. And he was so happy and he literally, he lived by himself in, in the woods. We eventually got electricity and all that. Mm-hmm. But he liked his space and he doesn’t like, didn’t like people that much and he didn’t [00:12:00] trust too many people either.

So maybe that’s just a family value. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. So you said at age six you were still over in Europe. Yeah. When you heard some people not getting along and you’re like, yeah, but I can, there’s gotta be a way to get along better. Yeah. That was like a defining moment for you. That’s that’s my driver.

That’s been my driver ever since. So when I, when I grew, as I grew up, I was always looking at, I was always experimenting with things, trying to figure out how it worked. And part of it was because things were chaotic. So I ended up going into science to figure out how things work. Cuz my foundation was, there’s not much you can rely on.

So I went into science for that. Then I went into biological sciences to figure out how creatures work. If you wanna figure out how to live in harmony, these are important things. Right, right. Then I went into psychology to find out how thinking works, cuz most of our disharmony comes from the way we think and then eventually I got into self-knowledge because I actually needed to know how I work.

So that’s my background. And you did that all consciously, or now when you look back on it, you can see that [00:13:00] that’s why you did those things. I wasn’t, I didn’t wake up every morning and say, there must be a way to live in harmony. Right. And I’m gonna find out how. But it was defining just because if I look, when I look back, I, that’s been my track and I did sidetracks and I tried things, but every time something didn’t get me closer to that, I would let it go.

So it was conscious. Sometimes it wasn’t conscious all the time, but it’s been a Dr You know, sometimes your drivers become unconscious, you know, when you’re six years old. Right. You know, at 10 years old you don’t remember that at six year old, you, you decided that you were gonna find out how to live in harmony.

No. Right, right, right. So, but it’s been very consistent and if you, if you know, to make, make sense of my life and the steps I took in the places I went and what I did and what I quit and all of that. It completely makes sense with that as the driver. Yep. Yeah. But I’m just kind of, it seems to me like a lot of times the, the way we make sense of our lives is looking back.

Mm-hmm. And you can see then how things fit together. Yeah. And you can’t all, [00:14:00] sometimes people who are younger might be like, well, I’m not really seeing how things are going to fit together, or how they do fit together. And I’m not sure what I did, should do. And I think the answer is what’s meant to be happens and it starts to right together.

And, but, but it did define the things I was attracted to cuz I coulda, I coulda studied history. Yes. You know, I could have studied literature, I did actually do a lot of literature. English was my second favorite thing. And you know, I did a lot of poetry and read a lot of books. And books were safe. So that was part of.

Part of it too. But when I look at, there are just some, some things I’m not interested in. Yes. So you, you said in what was submitted that like you’ve got to handle your emotional trauma and then you also said trauma is a gift. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, and I, there’s a third thing that I would say. Yeah, trauma is never a gift when you’re in it, right?

Because you’re just trying to get the hell out of there, right? Because you don’t, you, you know, because you don’t know what it is and you don’t know what the outcome’s gonna be and it’s unsafe [00:15:00] and, and all of that. But looking back, I have to say, Not that I wish a war on anybody, but that war for me was a gift because part of harmony and part of living in harmony is that you need to have peace with yourself.

And I got my nose rubbed in the fact that if you don’t cultivate peace with yourself when you can, then you’ll always be drifting towards war. And you can look at the world right now and see it happening. Not this time worldwide. Then it was just Europe. This time worldwide, because people are not cultivating contentment or inner presence or inner strength or wisdom, all of which is actually built into us.

So I’m not talking about a piece that’s a cease fire after war. I’m talking about a piece that makes, makes war unthinkable. That makes war unnecessary, that makes war not because your state of being. Has to be discontent for you to go around and kill people. If your state of being is peace, then killing people is probably not gonna [00:16:00] be very high on your list of priorities.

That’s what I’m hoping. I think a lot of people are talking about maybe this time we’re doing this interview, uh, in April, maybe this time while the world is going through this coronavirus. Yeah. Are able to sit back and think, although not everyone can, I mean, that’s a privilege that I have because I’m getting my retirement income and I’m not too stressed.

But, you know, if you’re at home raising kids, homeschooling them, not getting your money. Yeah. Uh, just wondering what’s gonna happen. It’s how do you find that? No, but, but I have to tell you, even if that’s true, even if you’re broke, even if everything that you have counted on is gone, you’re still alive.

The peace is still within you. You can still be happy and broke because happiness is a state of being. Unless you’ve made your happiness conditional on something, I’ll be happy when, well then, when the when disappears, then your happiness disappears. So I won’t even cut the poor people slack because you can be poor and happy too.[00:17:00] 

The people in sub-Sahara Africa who have much worse than we have, Because the happiness is built into human nature. If you go inward instead of going outward, and you say, let me look at what I have, instead of saying, gee, they have that, but I don’t have that, and they’re doing that, but I can’t do that.

And if you’re not doing that, but you’re just looking at what you have, the fact that you’re breathing. Makes you unbelievably rich. Okay? And my war, I think, was a little more intense than Corona is gonna be, is gonna become, or maybe the next pandemic or whatever it is. So because I’ve been through that and realized that when I was hungry, I still, my heart still ached for something inside that I didn’t have access to at the time.

And just because I’m hungry, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I disagree with it. There are coexisting needs. It’s not like you only become spiritual when your belly is full. Actually some, a lot of [00:18:00] people become lazy when their belly is full, but your belly full is one, is one need. But you, you making sense of your life is another need.

No matter what’s going on with your belly, what’s going on with your heart? Still calls for attention. But going back to the question you asked, cause trauma has two parts to it. One is whatever comes to you comes at you from the outside, you know, whatever it is. It either you got beat up or you got your stuff stolen or somebody raped you, or whatever it is.

Trauma on the outside is one issue and you have to process that. But there’s something on the inside that even in the midst of trauma is not traumatized. And the biggest part of trauma is to find your way back to what was not traumatized and rebuild your life and rededicate your life to living from life instead of living from a memory of trauma.

How do you find that part that wasn’t traumatized? Well, it’s already there. The good news is it’s already there and is not affected by [00:19:00] anything that happens to you ever and is called life energy, or you can call it awareness. Or you can call it inspiration. The three are, they’re inside. They’re deeper than your mind and deeper than your emotion.

So you have to sit still and be with yourself. That’s hard. And first, how do you do that? Well, it’s only hard when you never do it. Just like walking. Walking was hard before you knew how to, yes. And then you practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced, or you were, your job that you had dealing with the small business, small businesses, and how they can get government contracts.

That was probably really hard when you started, by the time you retired from it. It was, you know, you probably, you know, probably don’t need notes. You probably don’t need books. You don’t need to prepare When somebody comes, it’s second nature to you. That’s right. And actually, Paul Petit, who’s a guest that I’ve had on this podcast a few times, he would say, eliminate the word hard from your vocabulary.

Yeah. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. Yeah. You know? And what’s the difference between hard and simple is practice. Now if I say to you, okay, so [00:20:00] now sit down and close your eyes. And become as still as you can. Breathe, as lightly as you can go as deep as you can see how long, how deep you can go. See how long you can stay there.

That may not be that easy. Maybe it might be a little easier because somebody’s guiding you. That’s exactly it. It’s easy. But if you, when someone’s guiding me, yeah, but that’s because you’re leaning on my work. So I’ve been at it for 47 years and even longer. So I’m making it easy for you, and it’s only hard for you because you haven’t done it before.

Or you’ve done very little of it. We’re very good at going out into the world with our senses. We’re not very good at going in with our senses, cuz we go out every day, all the time we go in hardly ever. You’re Exactly. That’s, and so it’s just a matter of practice. So now everybody’s under lockdown because of Corona in April.

Right. Right. And now people have nothing to do. They done, they don’t even get to touch each each other and they’re locked in and they now have time. And for some [00:21:00] people it’s driving them crazy. Right? But you actually have an incredible gift right now because right now you have time that you can spend doing practice, getting better at going to the place in you that is not affected by this trauma.

That’s awesome. And, and you can’t just say, well, You know, I wanna be there, but I want it to be easy. I mean, everybody says that, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, sell it to me for, for a nickel. Yeah. Right. You can’t buy it. This is work. There’s no pill I can take. Yeah. No. And it’s also part of the human condition that when we’re children, our awareness is drawn out into the world through our census to learn how to.

How the world works that we need to live and survive in. We didn’t need to do that when we, we were in mummy’s belly, right? Because everything was taken care of. It was safe. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. All needs were met, so we were hanging out. We were actually in that place. So we’ve already been in that place for nine months.

If we’re a, if it were a term baby, So we’ve [00:22:00] been that in that place. And when we go back to that, so then we go out and we become present outside and absent inside. Before we were present inside and we didn’t even know there was an outside. So now we’re present outside, but our piece is inside, and that’s the disconnect.

And so how do you get the piece back? You gotta bring your, your awareness back. And that requires that you take time not doing where you have to focus on something on the outside, but where you practice being where you do nothing except be present as present as you can be, and practice that until you get really good at it.

And what’s so really cool about it is that everything that’s drives you, that you’ve been looking for on the outside, you were actually born with, and it’s already on the inside and you don’t see it, and it’s like it doesn’t exist. Only because your awareness isn’t going to where it is. It’s like I can have a hundred dollars in my left pocket and then be looking for money in my right pocket and think I’m broke, right?

Yes, yes. If I’m only looking where it isn’t, then I’m obviously not [00:23:00] gonna find it. But if I look where it is, I will find it and I will find more and more of it. The better I get at it, the more I do it. The stiller I sit and I want, I’d like to just say as a point of wisdom being. Is more important than doing now.

We, we all think we gotta do, do, do, do, do. I say when you do, do do, do too much, you turn into do, do. But doing is not as important as being because you can be without doing. But you can’t do without being. You are exactly right and you are the foundation of everything. Why is your foundation not getting any attention?

What kind of a life do you think you can build when your foundation gets no attention? Or when you live as though you had no foundation, and then the wind blows you it every which way? Then, then you freak out When a, when a crisis happens, oh my God, what am I gonna do now? And the whole time something in you is not affected.

The state of being called happiness is still there. Not affected. The state of being called peace is [00:24:00] still there, not affected. The love that life has for your body is unconditional, not affected because you can be freaking out in your head about where’s your next check gonna be coming from, but that molecule of folic acid in your food that a cell next to your left ankle is calling for, is still being delivered to it by life.

And that’s like, that’s how, that’s how it is. And you know, if you haven’t given a thought before then give a thought now. Oh, every, you know, when, when is yesterday a good time to start? It’s today. Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe I’m selfish in doing this long word podcast because I get to interview so many cool people and I, and I learn every time.

Yeah. But it, it’s, it should be selfish. My view is people are not selfish enough. Because if we did what’s really, really good for us, That will also be good for other people because what is best for me, which is to live in the love and the peace that life has for me. But when I live in that state of being, I [00:25:00] actually influence my surroundings in that direction.

You know? And if I’m really angry and I live in that state of state of emotion, then I will affect my surroundings in that direction. That’s we cannot, but we cannot. But put out what we have. And if your state of beings to be selfish enough that you want to interview people, Who have useful things to say about life and you’ve become an amplifier for messages that are worthwhile, that go beyond yourself, then your selfishness is serving the world.

Yeah, true. And how cool is that? It is awesome. And, and Paul Petit, like I said, I’ve talked about him before. He says, Your job is to be you. And that’s exactly what you’re saying too. Yeah. Yeah. What did they say? Uh, be yourself. All others are taken. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we haven’t even gotten to the point where then you’ve got, I mean, we’ve covered your childhood and mm-hmm.

And then, but you, you’ve got, um, poisoned by pesticides. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then also you’ve, you’re into health. [00:26:00] And develops oil. So I’d like to hear Yep. The rest of your story. Okay. Well, you got 78 years. It took me that long to get here. I’ll be, I’ll be 78 in, uh, may. So, well, I, we got, as far as I, my, my studies and all of that and yeah, how I think about.

Certain things. I got married and we had three kids and my marriage broke up and I wanted to kill something and I had gotten a pesticide sprayer license in a gardening job that I had and I decided to get a full-time job as a pesticide sprayer cuz pesticide sprayers kill things. Yeah, and, and I was really stupid and I was really sloppy and I used to walk barefoot over lawns that I had sprayed until the skin peeled off the, the bottom of my feet.

At that point, I thought maybe I should wear some shoes, so I used to spray in a bathing suit and rubber boots cuz it was a summer job and, I’m a white guy and I always wanted to have a tan. Cause I, I always thought tans look cool. So I, that’s how I did the [00:27:00] job. And I had a tractor and a big tank and I’d mixed the pesticides and I’d spray lawns or I’d spray trees or I’d spray gardens as a job.

And because I was careless and somebody, actually, somebody I worked with actually said to me, aren’t you worried you’re gonna get poisoned? I said, nah, I’m immune. And when I was 38, 3 years later, I got poisoned by the pesticides ice spray, and so I went to the doctor and said, uh, what do you have for pesticide poisoning?

She said, nothing. And that day, in that moment, I realized, oh crap. Oh crap. My health is my responsibility and if I’m not taking care of it, maybe nobody is. What were your symptoms? I had nausea, dizziness, cramps, and low energy. That was the longest symptom, like, because the way pesticides kill you is they destroy your energy production system.

That’s how they killed insects too. And the other thing that was really weird is that when I turned my head, it felt like my head turned, but my [00:28:00] brain didn’t. Now obviously my brain turned when my head turned, but that’s what it felt like. It was a really strange symptom. And so I literally, I was 38 years old.

If I walked around a city block in Vancouver, I had to rest. Hmm. And I always had lots of energy. So that was like, for me, that was like, oh my God. And because I had background in biological sciences, biochemistry, genetics is where I ended up in biological sciences. So I could read the journals. I went into Medline, which is the database for the research.

There were like 16 million different studies that were listed there, and it would’ve taken 25,000 pages just to list the titles of the 600,000 studies that were in what I was looking for. And it had to do with health and nutrition. Disease and nutrition, and the reason why is I went in that direction is I said, okay, I’ve been poisoned by pesticides.

The body’s made out of what? Light oxygen. Water and food, and I wasn’t paying attention [00:29:00] to air and water so much. So I said, well, if the body’s made out of food, then if something goes wrong, then what I should do is raise the standard of of my food intake, because I knew that every year, 98% of the atoms that are today in my body will have been removed and replaced If we have another talk.

A year from now, 98%. So the body is a major construction site all the time and it’s so subtle and done so well that you don’t even notice. But it means that if you are, if you are on a lousy diet and you’re sick because of it, cuz out of out of garbage food, you’re gonna make a garbage body. And most of our degenerative conditions are lifestyle related, specifically food related cardio cancer.

Inflammation, diabetes, so huge nutrition issue. And of course nobody talks about it in in. Corona because they just talk about the crisis intervention. They’re not talking about the prevention. But [00:30:00] anyway, so, so I thought, well, if I’ll raise my standard of food, but let me find out what I need to do. So I was reading all in, in the journals, and I got stuck on oils because that was the, the area that was most difficult, most confusing, most misrepresented.

And least well understood. And so I started reading about it and found out that when oils are made, the usual oils that we get in the supermarket or in anywhere they’re before they go in the bottle, before you buy them, they’re treated with draino, then with window washing acid. Then they’re bleached, which turns them rancid, and then they’re heated to frying temperature to clean them up.

So I call them, uh, you know, they’re treated with drain of window washing, acid bleached, and fried before they go on the bottle in a plastic bottle, which they shouldn’t go into either before they go on the shelf, before you buy them, and they’re a half to 1% damaged when that happens. So I, I decided to call the oil chemists, what is it called?

Oil chemists. Anyway, they’re, they’re in Champaign, Illinois. They’re the [00:31:00] umbrella organization for the oil manufacturers. And I, I called them up and I said, I want to talk to a, a researcher. He said, okay, we’ll, we’ll get you one. So they, he gets on the line, he said, hi, how can I help you? I said, so I have a question.

If you know that the way you make oils does damage to the oils, Why do you do that? And he says, well, one of the reasons we do that is because when we treat the oils with these methods, then we can get rid of half of the pesticides in the oil. Well, that was, that was not a good thing to say to me because I’d been poisoned by pesticides.

Mm-hmm. And I say to myself, I said, oh my God, you mean the other 50% of the pesticides stay in the oil? And I didn’t say that and I, but I, what I said to him, I said, so why don’t you start with organically grown seeds and you don’t have pesticides? Total silence at the other line. I’m assuming he’d never heard that question before and had never thought about it and didn’t know what to say.

And then I waited and there was like this long silence on the phone. And then when he got back, he was [00:32:00] really angry. He said, I don’t know what your problem is. The oil is 99% good and only 1% damage, and if you got 99% on an exam, you’d be damn happy, wouldn’t you? So he didn’t know me. I used to get a hundred percent on, on a few of my exams because when I was in really into something, I was really into it.

Mm-hmm. Even my pesticide license, I got 99 and a half. And I thought I had got a hundred because when the guy told me I had 98, 9 and a half, I said, are you sure you didn’t make a mistake marketing it? Yeah. So he said, let me look it up. He said, what? How many instar in a crane fly? I said, four. He said, well, you circled two, so, so anyway, so I wasn’t as impressed, but then I thought, well, maybe I’m overreacting.

Maybe 1% is not so bad. So then I decided to do the math. And figure it out. If you have a tablespoon of oil that is 1% damaged by the process that I just talked about, how many damaged molecules would you have in that tablespoon? And it turns [00:33:00] out to be a humongous number. Most people are like, most people, underestimate the damage.

Done to oils by a billion times or more, you actually get 60 quintillion damaged molecules in a tablespoon, and that’s more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body’s 60 trillion cells. Well, you think that’s not gonna make a difference. The truth is now, the truth is that more health problems come from damaged oils than any other part of nutrition.

And more health benefits will come from oils made with health in mind than any other part of nutrition cuz they’re the most sensitive of our nutrients. They need the most care and we give them the least care. We don’t throw anything else in the frying pan and turn it in smoke. And we do that with the most sensitive of our nutrients.

So on top of the damage done by the processing, then you do damage to it by the application, by the food application. Everybody eats fried, so I tell people, fried oils, fry health, fried foods, fry health. You have a frying pan, get it out, turn it upside down, hit [00:34:00] yourself on the head with it really hard. So it’s associated with pain.

And then throw that stupid thing out. Frying is the worst thing we’ve ever invented to do to our food. And every culture around the world is big on frying now. And of course, how it happened, the oil industry wanted to sell more oil, and if you use oil for cooking instead of water, then they’re gonna make sell a lot more oil.

When I was a kid, most things were cooked in water, you know? And people say, well, well, how do I do my steak? Well, We used to cut the steak into cubes and throw it in the stew with the vegetables and the spices and it tasted great, wasn’t burned. It was really good for us. But the fried on the steak will do you damage.

And so when I learned that, I said, oh my God, I can’t get healthy on oils like this. We should make them with healthy in mine. Or they should be make made with health in mind and nobody was doing it. So I had another one of those moments like, I’m gonna find out how. Right. So I said, I’m gonna do this. And then of course it’s like, well, you know, they must have thought about it and they must have not worked.

And who am I to go against a, a 60 billion [00:35:00] a year industry? And, you know, it, it can’t be that simple. So maybe I, maybe I’m missing something. So I, I, you know, I had to figure all that out. But eventually I did. I wrote a book. I developed a method for making oils with health in mind. And then I learned the year after I got poisoned, while I was already focused on that, that omega three s are essential cuz that was only established in 1981.

Mm-hmm. The year after I got poisoned. And that 99% of the population doesn’t get enough Omega three s for optimum health. And I thought, oh my God, if we could make, and they’re super sensitive, they’re even more sensitive than the other oils, like five times more sensitive. So they need the most gear. So here I am making a method for oils with health in mind, getting the most sensitive, oil established as essential.

And then I had an orgasm. I just got so excited. I said, oh my God, we could help so many people if we could make oils with health and mind. And so what we did is, and then we decided to make flax seed oil. Mm-hmm. [00:36:00] That was the first oil. It’s now a household name. We started that in 1986, and the idea was, here’s a source of omega three s.

We’re making them with health in mind. If we could get a bottle in every fridge, cause they need to be refrigerated and we put ’em in glass, if we could get a bottle in every fridge, unbelievable how many people we could help and we didn’t know then, but we know now that if you increase omega three s in the diet and they’re not damaged and not toxic with pesticides.

You can improve virtually every major degenerative condition of our time. That’s the summary of the Omega-3 research. Now, if they’re damaged, like the fish are, are, are damaged because they’re super, super sensitive and they’re made by the old ways. Not, they don’t take the care. Then you, you’re gonna get damaged molecules with your good molecules and then they start to cancel each other out.

So the research now says fish oils actually don’t work for what they are claimed to work for, although they used to [00:37:00] maybe 20, 30 years ago. Because more and more processing has been done on the oils to get rid of, of the toxins in them, like PCBs and dioxins. And they’re processed more and damaged more by the extra processes.

So what type of oil should we be EEA using? Flax, seeded oil. And it should be all organic, right? Yeah. The, well, it, it should al everything you eat should be fresh, whole, raw, and organic as much as possible. Yes. So wherever you are starting, like if you are eating fried, then cooking water. If you’re cooking in water, then eat more raw.

Mm-hmm. So head in the direction of fresh, whole, raw, organic. And in terms of oils, you need omega-3 and omega six. Both of them need to be made with health in mind. Flaxseed gets you Omega three s should be in glass, not in plastic. And I actually became Omega six deficient on flax oil. I got dry eyes, skipped heartbeats, arthritis like pain and finger joints.

Mm-hmm. And thin paper skin. And I developed a blend that is called Udo’s Oil. [00:38:00] That’s a blend of omega-3 and sixes has nine ingredients in it, all balanced properly so you can’t become deficient. All made with health in mind. And that’s basically what what I’ve gone around the world for 30 odd years to educate people about essential fatty acids and a source of getting them made with health in mind.

Now, if you don’t want to get the oil, then you go to the seeds and the seeds. Flax for omega-3. Sunflower and sesame are good sources of omega six. And if you get two tablespoons of flax to one of the other to seeds, so. Two flas to one sunflower or two flax to one sesame. You get about the right ratio, and then you basically put ’em in a blender and and, and put ’em in shakes and smooths.

I’m convinced that this is why my parents are so healthy now. My mom is 76, she’ll be 77 in June. She’s had three different kinds of cancer. She is, I mean, she can walk like six or seven miles a day. She works out a lot and they eat a very, very healthy diet. [00:39:00] They don’t eat meat. It’s all fruits and vegetables.

It’s all, you know, in beans and you know, like that. And they watch their oils and they, they’re just so healthy. Both of them. Yeah. The research is very clear. If you want the longest life and the healthiest life, you do that on a whole food plant-based diet. But you take a B12 supplement on top of that, cuz that usually comes from animals.

And if you add any kind of meat or any kind of animal product, eggs or milk or meat or fish to it. Fish is now the dirtiest meat on the planet. Yes. Add only. Yeah. And if you add any animal product to it, it will make your life shorter and less healthy if you add a whole bunch of them. And the more of it you eat, the worse it gets.

Mm-hmm. That’s what the researcher said. And the researchers really clear enough and there are still people who argue it, but the research is, is really clear enough and it makes sense. Adding eggs, even eggs you think? Yeah, even eggs. Yeah. And it makes, you know what, it makes sense when before we were hunter gatherers, we were actually mostly gatherers because if you only have rocks to [00:40:00] hunt with, it’s really hard to get animals cuz they run away or they fight or whatever.

Or they hide. Right? So we ate when, when the great hunters came with came home without meat, and they hate vegetables because they don’t run away. They don’t fight back. And then really easy to hunt down and kill. Yeah. And just like the monkeys that are supposed to be our ancestors, most of them are plant-based gorillas.

Eat leaves most, most of the monkeys eat fruits and vegetables. So you have a, an eight pillar process for Whole Health. Yeah. You, that you talked, talked about. Yeah. I, I have a book that’s called The Book on Total Sexy Health, the eight Key Parts Designed by Nature And Why, why Sexy Health? Well, that was not my idea.

Somebody said, what? You know, so I was gonna call it Total Global Health or total something, you know. And he said, oh, that’s so, so come on, make it jazz it up a little. Call it Total Sexy Health. So I said, I can’t call it total Sexy Health. I don’t know anything about sexy. And then, you know, it’s [00:41:00] like, that’s, that’s how crazy I am.

And then I sat back and I started thinking about it and I said, no, I know a lot about sexy. Everybody knows a lot about SEXY because it’s about. Energy presence full on. It’s not about sex positions, it’s about, it’s about being, being fully present. Right. Confidence. Yeah. And or, or natural. And so then I, then I said, okay, sexy is the power word.

Everything is on this planet is sold. Using sexy as the driver. Isn’t it about time somebody used sexy as a driver to sell people on their own magnificence? And I get to do that. That’s why it’s called sexy now. They ate parts. And the idea is that each part confers a part of se the you’re sexy to you.

And if you get out of line, you lose that part. And if you get back in line, you get it back. So it’s a nice, nice simple model that way too. And the eight parts are, Internal awareness. If you want peace in your life, you have to bring your awareness inside out of beyond [00:42:00] your thoughts, beyond your emotions, beyond your body, beyond the energy that keeps you alive.

And awareness is the container within which everything unfolds you. Your life unfolds in it, but the entire universe unfolds in that container, and that container is complete peace. Mm-hmm. Undisturbing. It is undisturbing and always there, even if you’re freaking out. There is peace inside of you that if you have access to, you can go there.

Very good to have access to it. So that’s the first one. And that one, by the way, is, so it’s beyond life and death, and it’s beyond health and illness. So this is like beyond health. Second is life energy. That’s your personal essence. See, if I say to you, if I pointed you and I say, whose body is that?

What’s your answer? Mine. Mine. Everybody. Most everybody will say mine unless they’re kooky, spiritual, and then they come up with some thingy. Mm-hmm. Right. So you say, this is my body, but you know that you’ve just told me that you’re not the body. Yeah. If [00:43:00] that’s your body, then you are the owner of the body.

So then the question, well, who owns the body? Well, life owns the body because the moment you take life out of the body, the body’s finished. And life runs everything, weighs nothing, runs everything, everything. And life is unconditional love. 24 7, 365 takes care of your body no matter what your, whatever you focus on or whatever your head trip is, or even if you hate life.

It takes care of you. Yeah. Never takes a weekend off, never asks for a race. Never goes on strike. Right? Unconditional love. So you have a model of unconditional love within you. When you bring your awareness to that and you feel unconditionally loved, there’s nothing left to do except to help cuz it’s not about you anymore.

That’s a really nice place to find that is. And that one too is beyond trauma. And that one too, if you know how to access it, you can go there whenever you need to. Most of the time, you [00:44:00] know, when we most need to go there is when we least can because. We’re in some traumatic crisis drama situation, so it’s good to learn how to go there before the drama.

Yes. Right? Yes. Yeah. So that’s number two. Number three is inspiration or inspired creativity. That’s the shine of the en of life energy. And you cannot be depressed and inspired at the same time, and you cannot be anxious and inspired at the same time, and you cannot be angry and inspired at the same time.

So there’s, this is like the light part of mental health. So that’s number three. Number four is physical body. That’s what most people talk about when they talk about health, which is food and fitness, but there’s also detox and not eating poisons and rest and sleep and activity. The body is made for activity.

So activity is important. If there’s nothing to do, you don’t need a body. That’s true. So if you do nothing, your body will will leave you. And then number five is survival smarts, and [00:45:00] that’s about one being and calm. So to have presence in the midst of crisis, what is it called? Calmness under fire. But also to learn the skills you need.

For whatever the crisis, to the extent that you can predict them, that you have the skills when the crisis hits. And again, you learn the skills before the crisis whenever possible. Right? What do they say when it’s when you’re up to your ass in alligators? It’s hard to remember. That your original intent was to drain the swamp, right?

Yes. And so that’s number five. Number six is social group. You know that social group affects your health. When we were kids, when somebody really upset us, we used to scream at them, you make me sick. Right? Right. So we know. We know that other people affect their health. Then there’s environment. And you know that what, what we do to the environment we’re gonna do to ourselves.

Yep. And I think that that’s, uh, we’ve been messing it up for 200,000 years. It’s definitely time for a change. And that change [00:46:00] requires an inner transfer form because if we are not different in ourselves, if we’re not in a different state of being, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. So the change begins not in the environment, it begins in us.

So Greta Thunberg, as much as I love her teenage. Rebellious fighting spirit. That’s not what’s gonna change it. What’s gonna change it is people finding their contentment, discovering the beauty of their life, and then letting that become what they bring to expression. And then there are trees with more care and the plants with more care, and the animals with more care and each other with.

More care because they’re treating themselves with more care. So that’s number seven. And then the number eight is the big picture that you are a that here you are in a very tiny terminal condition called the body in an infinite universe, and to be comfortable with both. And the cherished life is a life lived, present, fully present in all of your being [00:47:00] and your surroundings, and not lost.

In trips and ideas in your head, do you think that more and more people are becoming aware of this? Becoming conscious? Of course. We’re partly because of what you’re doing, but also partly because we have a lot of pressure to change. We’re under pressure to change because the kids, especially like the ki I, I say kids cuz I’m 77, right?

Mm-hmm. The kids like in their twenties, thirties, they know, they, they know the world has to change and so they’re looking. They’re at an age when people are looking and, and determining how their life is gonna be. They’re very aware of it, that we can’t go on the way we are with the environment. We can’t go on the way we are with each other, and I’m talking both politically and interpersonally relationships.

We can’t go on with ourselves the way we are. Healthwise. So we’re under pressure to change because it’s affecting everything. Yes. And 200,000, 200,000 years ago, we could get away with messing [00:48:00] up the environment and leaving it lying. But we can’t do that anymore. Our water’s polluted, our airs polluted.

Our food is polluted chemicals. The oceans are polluted, the weather is, is getting messed up. The climate is changing. There’s a lot of things going on that if you have any. Core, any, any grain of responsibility in your body, you have to say, listen, we’re doing this to ourselves. This is not random changes that we’re, you know, and this is not like, oh, let’s just go on.

It’ll just like whatever. Or you know, when, when it all falls apart, we’ll all be raptured to heaven. So we don’t have to pay attention to what we’re doing here. No, no. That’s all delusional. Yeah. That’s delusional. Right? And so, yeah, I think more people are changing. Simply because we’re under pressure to change, and when we don’t change by wisdom, then we change by pain.

I think we’re going, going some pain right now with the coronavirus that I’m of course lead to some change. Yeah, but it’s interesting because on the one hand it’s painful because our [00:49:00] habits have, you know, we’ve had to, we’re taking a break from habits that we’re used to. And that’s painful to us. But on the other hand, getting the time out where we can reexamine, where we can do the things we always said we wanted to do, but never had time for.

We now have the time. And you know what? All the masters of the ages, all the great masters, Buddha and Christ and all of those guys, right? They never were able to do in their lifetime what Corona has done in. In, in a matter of a, of a few months, put the entire planet on hold no matter what. Your race, your color, your nation, your culture, your religion is, put everybody on hold and says, guys, it’s time to reexamine how you live your life.

And out of that can come negative changes. And out of that can come positive changes hopefully, because we have a choice there. We do. Yeah. So, so hopefully. Positive changes come out of drama and trauma. You’re exactly right. Yeah, you’re exactly right. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, thank [00:50:00] you.

Each other. Thank you. And, uh, this is a really good interview now and um, thank you. I know all of the listeners will enjoy it. And you gave the listeners a little, an ability to get something from your website to download some information. Yeah, yeah. There’s, uh, I think there’s a course on. Total Health and the e-version of the book on Total Sexy Health, the eight key parts designed by nature.

That’s awesome. And I’ll put the, uh, links in the show notes for that. Yep. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. That was fun. What’d you think? If you like this interview, please share it with somebody else, somebody else that needs to hear it. And please leave a review. I’d love to hear what you think about the Onward podcast, how it’s impacting your life.

Don’t forget to check out the Onward Movement. Soon I’ll be kicking off the Onward Movement Accelerator program. It’s a coaching program to help you embrace authenticity, release the fear of judgment so that you can pursue the life [00:51:00] of your dreams. And if you’re not sure what your dreams are, we can help you discover those as well.

Hope to see you in the Onward Movement and thanks for listening today. Have a great week.