Editor’s Advice: A New Approach to Problems

Posted on by Tammy

When a problem or issue arises for you, do you fly into a panic thinking, “Oh no! Why me! I can’t take one more thing today!” or do you have faith in the universe to help you solve it?

For many of us, the bigger the problem, the bigger the panic — and let’s face it, that approach just doesn’t work that well.

Recently, I was driving to visit a friend, and I often listen to workshops or talks by one of my favorite authors when I’m in the car. This is usually when I review new recordings for Elevated Existence too!

This time it was Louise Hay, and her CD “Embracing Change: Using the Treasures Within You,” which was taped during a live talk a few years back in Italy.

As I was listening to her talk about her life, and how she learned to handle change, she shared her approach to problems that arise in business and her personal life, and when she listed the affirmations she used . . . well as soon as I arrived at my friend’s house I hit the back button on the player and typed them down into the note section of my phone!

Now, I want to share them with you!

Louise Hay said when she is faced with a problem, she says to herself:

“All is well. Everything is working out for my highest good.
Out of this situation, only good will come. I am safe.”

I believe there are NO accidents in life, and the universe always has our back — even when it doesn’t seem like it at the time. But when something pops up suddenly, I still need to take a minute and remind myself it will all be O.K. I need to remember the universe is leading me where I need to go, and that I will end up exactly where I am meant to be. And these affirmations are the perfect tool to use!

I like to close my eyes, take a deep breath and repeat the affirmations. It calms me down, centers me, and affirms to the universe or God that I know I am being guided and that all will work out well.

In this crazy, hectic holiday season, problems often arise, our stress is high, and we often forget to take a minute and remind ourselves it will all be O.K. Take a minute and type this affirmation into your phone, so you always have it available when you need it!

Wishing you all a happy, healthy holiday season, and blessed New Year!

Tammy Mastroberte is a three-time, award-winning writer, founder of Elevated Existence, and publisher and editorial director of the multi-award-winning Elevated Existence Magazine. She started the new age, spiritual and self-improvement publication at age 30 – eight years after the sudden death of her mother from a brain aneurysm only three days after Christmas in 1999. This tragedy led her down a synchronistic path to discover her purpose and the meaning behind many of the events in her life – including her mother’s death. She now shares her guidance, and the wisdom of today’s top authors and spiritual celebrities through Elevated Existence Magazine. Follow her on Twitter: @ElevatedTammy or on Instagram: elevatedtammy. For more information, visit www.tammymastroberte.com.

Melissa Costello: Eating to Create Your Healthiest Body, Mind & Spirit

Posted on by Tammy

We continue to hear the benefits of plant-based eating — touted by well-known doctors such as Dr. Oz, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Joel Furhman — but what exactly IS a plant-based diet, and does it require a lot of time for preparation and cooking?

Certified nutritionist and author of “The Karma Chow Ultimate Cookbook: 125+ Plant Based Vegan Recipes for a Fit, Happy & Healthy You,” Melissa Costello joined Elevated Existence Magazine founder, Tammy Mastroberte, on the Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit to discuss this topic and more!

“Plant based eating is coming more into the mainstream, and often another term for veganism, but it doesn’t mean your vegan,” Costello said on the call. “It’s just that you are eating more foods that are less processed, so you are eating things that grow in the ground or on a tree — things that are more natural. It’s about eating less animal products and more natural foods like vegetables, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds and fruits.”

As the founder of KarmaChow.com, Costello creates recipes that are easy to follow with ingredients easy to acquire at the local grocery store. Her goal is to make eating healthy easy and accessible for everyone, she said.

“I really want people to know this way of eating can taste good, and be accessible and simple because we are busy today, and people are always on the go,” she explained. “I wanted people to know they can eat healthy, and it doesn’t have to take five hours to make one dish. It’s really about using things that are accessible at a grocery store.”

As a child, Costello suffered from asthma, migraine headaches, and often found herself sick with viruses and bacterial infections. At 19 she began investigating food as medicine and changing her diet in order to heal her body.

“I had always loved to cook, so I just started experimenting with how could I eat healthier. I started making healthier versions foods that I loved,” she noted. “I also had a major sugar addiction, and most of our health issues are related to that because sugar wrecks our immune system.”

She found when she started moving to a more plant-based diet, her body began to heal itself. Her asthma went away, along with her headaches and irritable bowel syndrome.

“Between eating super healthy, exercising and stress management, all of those things went away, which was a miracle and phenomenal, but that is the power of eating clean healthy food,” Costello said.

To get a better idea of how our food has a major effect on our bodies, Costello recommended the film “Forks Over Knives,” created by two heart surgeons who began to investigate the connection between food and illness, and who now recommend plant-based diets to their patients.

“They were tired of doing all these triple bypass surgeries and thought, ‘What can we do to start changing this?’” she explained. “They came up with this plant based idea and started putting people through it. People can heal themselves of hear disease, Type 2 Diabetes and more. When we start changing our diet, our bodies have their own natural internal healing processes. When we put the good clean food in, our bodies will start to heal.”

Substitutions & More
On the live call during the Living an Elevated Existence Summit, Costello shared what she uses for substitutions when it comes to sugar, meat and more. When it comes to sugar, her go-to substitutes include raw, unfiltered honey; grade B maple syrup (which has less sugar then grade A through the processing); brown rice syrup (which is a lower glycemic sweetener); coconut palm sugar and stevia.

And when it comes to artificial sweeteners, Costello would prefer people eat actual sugar then use these alternatives, she explained.

“They are just pure chemicals. They have been proven in animal testing to affect the brain, and they cause tumor growth. They are just horrendous,” she said.

Also, for those who are addicted to sugar and find they crave it, she recommends grabbing and apple or making a cup of tea rather then reaching for the candy bar.

“Take a contrary action, and do something that is different then your norm. That is when you are going to start retraining your brain,” she said.

For meat substitutions, rather then buying what she refers to as “fake meat,” she uses healthier options such as tempeh, which is a soy-based, fermented food that is easy to digest.

“My fake tuna is made with chickpeas, so it’s not a processed meat product, and for tempeh I always use organic, non GMO. It gives you live enzymes.”

To substitute dairy, she uses almond milk, and even makes cheese out of cashew nuts. It’s about making small changes that add up in the long run, said Costello.

“You don’t’ have to say, ‘Tomorrow I’m giving up everything,’ because that will set us up for failure. Take one small step a week. Make one recipe each week that is vegan and healthy, or do Meatless Mondays,” she said.

Costello is currently working on a new cookbook due out in April 2014.

Dr. Emmett Miller: The Key to Healing the Body, Mind & Spirit

Posted on by Tammy

Dr. Emmett Miller is acclaimed as one of the father’s of holistic and mind/body medicine, and is a practicing physician, psychotherapist, musician and bestselling author of books including “Deep Healing: The Essence of Mind Body Medicine.” He joined Elevated Existence Magazine founder, Tammy Mastroberte, as part of the “Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit” to discuss the power of the mind and spirit to heal yourself.

“The old paradigm of healing is the thought of our illnesses being caused by something from the outside – caused by germs or bacteria. Western medicine as we know it is about attacking the illness, we have anti-anxiety, and antidepressant and antibiotic and ‘anti’ everything, but in fact, nowadays 90 percent of our illness are not caused by things that attack our bodies or traumas from the inside, but have to do with the imbalances within ourselves,” Dr. Miller explained on the call.

Our poor diets, lack of exercise and sleep deprivation all play a part, but the psychological stress of living in the world today is responsible for 90 percent to 95 percent of our illnesses, he explained.

“What we treat in Western medicine are the symptoms of illness, and what it is that we need to be doing, and what I’ve been fighting for 50 years now, is we need to begin to treat the source of our illnesses, which has to do with how we are thinking, how we are feeling, how we are dealing with the stress in our lives, how we’re relating to other people, and the choices that we make on a daily basis,” said Dr. Miller. “That is at the root of most of our illnesses, from heart disease to diabetes to respiratory problems to digestive difficulties right on up to cancer itself.”

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There are two nervous systems in the body – the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, and the parasympathetic kicks in when we are relaxed. This is the mode in which the body can heal and build up the organs of the body and the brain to a healthy state. But the deeper part of the mind – the one we share with animals – is where the body shifts into the sympathetic mode of fight or flight, anxiety and stress.

“Any time there is a threat, the body shifts into this sympathetic mode, which means you pump out adrenaline and cortisol, and that is only meant for emergencies, like once every week or so when your body is really threatened, then you go into this emergency mode where the bodies chemicals secreted break down all of the tissues of the body and turn them into glucose so that you can escape from whatever the danger is and that is what we call stress,” said Dr. Miller.

However, because of the stress we live under and the emotions it triggers – whether it’s anxiety, anger, resentment or jealousy — we are kept in this constant state of chemicals and stress hormones. This makes the body more susceptible to the illnesses that are out there, he noted.

“We have tens of thousands of controlled experiements now and studies, which demonstrate that this is true. This is no longer a theory. When I began it in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was a theory, but now we know that it’s true,” he said on the call. “Ultimately the stress comes from our belief that we are in the midst of a conflict. That somebody is after us, we’ve got to figure out this, we’ve got to get to work on time, we’ve got to avoid the idiot driving next to us. When you believe that you are in conflict that throws you into a stressful condition and starts the body to breaking down it’s tissues and inhibiting the immune function, and those are some of the reasons that we get ill.”

Part of the problem is many people have learned to suppress their emotions, so they don’t even realize they are under stress. This continued state is what is causing us to not only become ill, but stay ill.

“Whatever your condition, the greater the amount of time you stay in this unbroken cycle of stress, the more quickly you are going to become ill, and the slower that you heal when you become ill,” said Dr. Miller.

Tapping Into Healing
During his clinical work following medical school, Dr. Miller realized that mental, emotional, behavioral, spiritual and social factors all play a crucial role in human health and disease. When these are directly addressed in health care, healing is faster and more complete – and a large portion of illnesses can be prevented. He created self-healing tools including guided imagery, meditation and deep relaxation to activate the body’s inherent ability to heal itself.

“What I found is if a person becomes ill, if you are able to practice these techniques for quieting yourself, for going into the health state, then the organs of your body can heal yourself more quickly,” he explained. “That means even if you are recovering form surgery or a heart attack, you can get better one-quarter to one-third faster, just by going inside and taking care of yourself in this way.”

What keeps us healthy is when the body and mind are in coherence or in harmony with one another. This creates conditions for the body’s inherent healing ability to kick in. It’s stress and anxiety that take us out of our coherent state and begin to break the body down.

Dr. Miller studied meditation, prayer, hypnosis and hypnotherapy, and began to use them in his practice with patients in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and he realized it was possible for people to enter a certain state of mind to relax deeply and activate the body’s power to heal. He created audio cassettes, and today he has CDs and mp3s available, which are in use at the Mayo Clinic and more.

See the Special Offer Dr. Miller put together for 50 percent off his products here!

“Our brain’s are functioning the way they functioned 100,000 years ago, but we live in a very different world because it’s not saber-toothed tigers that are causing our stress. We are dealing with social stresses and the responses we are using make us sick,” he said. “They don’t enable us to deal well with the stresses around us, and they make us very susceptible to the things we become addicted to — alcohol, drugs, food, shopping and gambling — are all behaviors that bodies are using to try to relieve the unremitting stress, which is within.”

Once this stress is gone, and people can find a place of calm and serenity in the present moment – and gain the wisdom to accept what they can’t change, and make decisions on what they can change – then the addictions and the negative behaviors go away, he said.

“Instead we can focus on healing, optimal performance, being happy, and the ultimate of all is to really learn how to love because that is what we came here for. And that is the new software for the mind,” Dr. Miller shared on the call.

Super Shrink ME: New Film Reveals How to Eat Fast Food & Still Be Healthy & Lose Weight

Posted on by Tammy

The Centers for Disease Control said two-thirds of Americans are obese or overweight, and so many people struggle to eat healthy when they are pressed for time and not able to cook every night.

Founders of the film company AVAIYA and creators of films such as “Leap!” “A Course in Miracles The Movie,” “The Gratitude Effect,” and “MPower: Empowering Women in Business and Beyond,” iKE Allen and Ande Anderson decided to tackle this epidemic with their new documentary film, “Super Shrink ME.”

Many people remember the 2004 film “Super Size Me,” where one man decided to eat all his meals at McDonald’s for 30 days to show the negative effects on physical and psychological wellbeing, and how the fast food industry encourages poor nutrition for profit.

So Allen decided to go on a 30-day adventure to prove that by taking personal responsibility for our choices, we can eat at fast casual and fast food restaurants (he had two meals a day there for 30 days), make healthy choices and actually lose weight — and he and Ande, who is a registered dietician, documented the journey in their new film.

“We live in a very busy, hectic world today and most American’s and most people around the world eat out several times a week, and we are gaining weight every year,” Anderson told Elevated Existence Founder, Tammy Mastroberte, in a live call as part of the Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit. “Super Shirnk ME really meets the average person where they are at in their daily lifestyle. You don’t need to give up your favorite foods at your favorite restaurants.”

Anderson pointed out that many fast food and fast casual changes are modifying their menus with healthier options, such as Jack in the Box, who added a whole wheat pita sandwich. Also, Chipotle Mexican Grill now offers brown rice and whole wheat tortillas, and McDonald’s reduced their sodium content across the entire chain by 12 percent.

“On of the big goals of the film was to educate the average person on why one choice on the menu is better then the other, and in the film we call it, ‘Why choose this?’” Anderson said, explaining chains with more than 20 locations will be required by law to list the calorie counts in the menus starting in 2014.

In the film, viewers see Allen at his computer planning out meals each day by viewing a chain’s website to pick out the healthiest options, as many offer nutritional information and ingredients online.

“The reason was to actually know ahead of time — to educate myself and get the difference that between the deep fried sandwich and the grilled chicken sandwich could be 350 calories just because it’s deep fried and breaded,” he said on the call. ”Even if I didn’t get exactly what I thought when I walked in, my awareness was expanding, and I know the fried options are off the menu so maybe I would get the grilled chicken or the grilled fish sandwich. It was shifting the way I thought about food.”

Allen explained the enlightenment or spiritual world is all about awareness, and this film — along with his journey in it — was about the awareness of food. “The more aware I was of healthy choices when I walked in the door, then I wasn’t choosing based on what looked good, I was choosing based on what was going to make me lose weight, and what was going to make me feel better about myself,” she said.

At the end of the 30 days, Allen lost 12 pounds, and said he went on to lose even more after filming was over. He is back in his size 32 jeans, which is the size he was in high school more than 20 years ago.

Lifestyle Changes
In addition to changing his menu options at his favorite fast food and fast casual restaurants, Allen also incorporated physical activity into his day, but he didn’t join a gym or do anything extreme. He almost didn’t know he was exercising!

“I don’t own a gym membership. I do things that are practical and the amazing thing is I just do more of the things that are practical,” he shared. “For example, I’ll park at the back of the parking lot. Ande is a big one for taking he stairs instead of escalators and elevators. It’s adding in all these things. We have created this world of ease and a lot of it takes away exercise. When you push the button to turn the motorized window down, believe it or not when you were cranking the window to take it down in the old days, you were burning calories. Ande showed me how to add a lot of little things that burn calories.”

Those little exercises add up over time, said Anderson. When you add up the calories burned over a year, people are often surprised at how much weight they could lose.

“Take a person who walks for 20 minutes after dinner every day,” Anderson said. “At about 4 miles an hour, they are burning about 120 calories or so. And if they did that every single day for year, they would actually burn enough calories to lose 12 pounds in a year, even if they didn’t change anything else.”

Another tip she shared in the film, and on the call, is the importance of eating breakfast. So many people skip breakfast because they think they don’t have time, or they think that it will help them decrease their overall calories for the day, but this is actually making weight loss harder, according to Anderson.

“What people don’t realize is, you actually wake up in the morning and your body is in starvation mode. They don’t call it ‘break fast’ for nothing. You get up in the morning to ‘break your fast’ so that you are feeding your body as soon as possible to wake your metabolism up for the day,” she said. “If somebody waits to eat their first meal of the day, their body is going to hold on to those calories and turn them into fat much more efficiently then if they had eaten breakfast first thing in the morning.”

We should think of our metabolism as a fire, she said. If you keep adding fuel to it, the fire will burn longer and stronger. Our bodies are the same. The more often we add fuel or food, the stronger the metabolism is going to be. Anderson added smoothies to Allen’s routine everyday, ranging from 150 to 350 calories each day.

She also shared tips on the call for on-the-go snacks, such as Justin’s Nut Butter pouches. They are easy to take on the go and are offered in peanut butter, almond butter and hazelnut butter.

“It’s a great protein and offers healthy fats. You can take a piece of fruit and add the nut butter to it, or take a little container of hummus with carrot sticks, raw vegetables or low-calorie crackers on the go with you,” she said.

Additionally, Allen — who worked in the restaurant industry training companies and employees how to sell more food and drinks — offered some insider tips on how chains get you to actually buy and consume more. For example, at most quick service restaurants, if you ask for a drink, they automatically grab the large or medium size cup, and often keep the small cups in the back of them, while the larger sizes are next to the register, he said.

To watch the film Super Shrink ME for FREE, visit www.SuperShrink.ME.

Ande and Ike also put together an amazing special offer package for those who are looking for practical, easy guidance on weight loss and more. View and purchase that package here.

Elevated Existence Honors Ram Dass with 2013 Spiritual Service Award

Posted on by Tammy

Elevated Existence Magazine is honoring Ram Dass with the 2013 Elevated Existence Spiritual Service Award, presented each year to a person whose actions, intentions and work spread the gift of spirituality, enlighten others with the wisdom and tools to improve the quality of their lives, and contribute to the overall uplifting of the world’s consciousness.

Ram Dass traveled to India in 1967 where he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji. Since then, he has dedicated his life to helping others open their heart, connect with their soul and transform their lives through divine love. He was given the name, Ram Dass, by Maharaj-ji, which means “servant of God,” and he continues to serve others today at the age of 82.

“We are all souls, and what we have to learn in this incarnation is to rid ourselves of separateness,” he said in Elevated Existence’s December 2013 cover story. “Each individual soul has God within it, and all the love, light, joy and peace that comes from melding with God.”

In his newest boo, “Polishing the Mirror,” Ram Dass explains that in order to gain our soul, we must first lose our minds. He says that discovering the soul is similar to peeling away layers of an onion to get to the core within.

“The mind is the ego. It tells us who we are and identifies with this incarnation and our roles in it,” he said in the cover story. “But it’s about going from the role to the soul.”

One of the practices he offers to help with this shift is the Loving Awareness Meditation. This assists a person in moving into his or her heart or spirit and out of the mind or ego self. By meditating on and repeating the phrase “I am loving awareness,” one can begin to make this journey, and move into the energy of love.

“The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself. Rather, you are penetrating deep layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being,” he said.

For more form Ram Dass, see the December 2013 issue of Elevated Existence Magazine.

Dr. Darren Weissman: Uncovering the Emotional Root of Symptoms, Stress & Disease in Order to Heal

Posted on by Tammy

At the root of every symptom, stress and disease is a subconscious emotional pattern of reaction, according to Dr. Darren Weissman, best-selling author of “The Power of Infinite Love & Gratitude,” and “Awakening to the Secret Code of Your Mind.”

Dr. Weissman joined Elevated Existence founder, Tammy Mastroberte, as part of the “Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Spirit Summit,” to talk about uncovering the emotional root of stress, symptoms and disease in order to heal.

He explained the conscious mind is what we perceive with our senses, and only 2 percent to 10 percent of our mind is conscious. The remainder, and what is running the show for many aspects of our life, including physical symptoms in the body, is the subconscious mind. It actually controls all of our bodily functions from heart rate and blood pressure to our immunity, hormone balance, sugar metabolism and more. It is also where emotions, memories and beliefs are stored that have not been processed or integrated.

“Symptoms and stress and the health of our body is really relative to a fish and it’s relationship to water. We are so submerged in our emotional reality, and we don’t even realize that it’s influencing how I am able to digest food, how I’m able to recognize pollen in spring or ragweed in autumn. How my body is able to amp up its immune system under different types of bacteria or viral stresses,” said Dr. Weissman.

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He continued: “Our body is designed to heal, regenerate and be whole. However, there is this whole other world called the subconscious that stores every experience we’ve ever had, whether we know it or not, and the thing about the subconscious is it’s below our awareness so we don’t’ even know it’s in there. But when those emotions or memories get triggered they change us immediately and instantly, and the change is palpable. You can feel it in your body. It’s painful, and it’s stressful.”

These subconscious emotional patterns of reaction are often something from childhood still operating on us today, and they are literally causing the symptoms we are feeling or the diseases we are being diagnosed with.

“The subconscious mind is the driver. In our subconscious mind, there are memories from when we were younger or even in our mother’s womb, still living in us today,” Dr. Weissman said during the call. “Our emotions come to life, and we replay them over and over and over again. So all the sudden somebody says something that is remotely similar to when I was three, and i didn’t even know that it was in me. All the sudden I feel tenseness in my chest, and I’m having a hard time breathing. If it happens long enough, I go to my doctor, and I’m diagnosed with asthma or some type of respiratory challenge, or it creates in another person an acid reflux or a stiffness in the neck.”

Dr. Weissman developed the LifeLine Technique to help people immediately get into the root emotions and memories and create a shift. It raises the energy and consciousness so people can make quick and lasting changes in their body – which is essentially designed to heal itself.

“When you get to the core emotion and memory, and with LifeLine Technique we can process this energy in the subconscious mind, changes occur immediately, and people can learn this as a tool to use on themselves,” he noted. “Everything, including stubbing your toe in the middle of the night, has a subconscious root.”

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Real Life Examples
Dr. Weissman shared a couple examples of clients he worked with in the past, including a woman who was beginning a ski season and tore her ACL in her knee. The MRI showed a complete rupture. Dr. Weissman worked with her using LifeLine sessions, and they uncovered emotions stemming from the discovery her husband had been having an affair.

“There was underlying anger, resentment and depression, and that is always associated with knees and shoulders and eyes because in Chinese medicine has to do with the wood element,” she said. “There is an interconnection to parts of the body and emotions and what was amazing is after we worked together to clear them, she went back and had an MRI and the ACL had reattached itself.”

Another example he shared was a 9-year-old boy who suffered from migraines. The family attempted everything to help him, from over-the-counter medication to heavy medication from a neurologist, and after the second LifeLine session with Dr. Weissman, his migraines were gone.

“After that, the parents invested in the husband learning the LifeLine Technique and he is getting certified next weekend,” said Dr. Weissman.

Pain in our body and stress in our life are actually gifts and messengers, and they are communicating to us areas in our subconscious that need to be healed with what Dr. Weissman calls “infinite love and gratitude.”

“People look at symptoms and taking a pill for it and to make it go away,” he explained in the call. “Inside that pain, fear and stress, there is a gem. It looks like coal because of the way we are looking at it, but there is a diamond in it. The first step in translation is to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is a conversation,’ and follow strategic methodical steps that anyone can learn to shift the patterns of the subconscious mind.”

During the call, Dr. Weissman also walked listeners through his newest technique called the “See Feel Hear Challenge,” which is the basis of his newest book “The Heart of the Matter: A Simple Guide to Discovering Gifts in Strange Wrapping Paper.”

Listen to Dr. Darren Weissman’s interview, along with 25 other mind, body and spirit experts FREE by signing up at www.elevatedexistencesummit.com — and get four free gifts instantly!