EP3 – More Preps For My Retreat and Finding Gratitude for All the Lives I’ve Lived
Transforming Mental Well-Being: The Power of GAPS Diet, Detox Baths, and Self-Care Rituals
What other preparations did I make for my At-Home Retreat? From detox baths to, yep, enemas! Today, I’ll share.
Journey with me as I embark on a personal retreat of diet, detoxification and rejuvenation. I’ll share why I’m starting with the GAPS Liquid Fast. Then I’ll share the myriad of detox bath options that offer more than just relaxation—they’re essential for detoxifying, muscle relaxation, mineral replenishment, and soothing irritated skin.
And that’s not all. I’ll chat about why adding cleansing and coffee enemas to a detox protocol is essential to ensure proper and total detoxification.
I’ll also share the benefits of morning sun time, and why meditation, breathwork, and castor oil packs are more than mere rituals; they are vital self-care practices for mental, physical, and spiritual detoxification.
Finally, at 55, looking back, it seems I’ve lived many lives. Lives filled with good times and bad and why I have found gratitude for all of them.
How about you? What times – be them good, bad, or ugly- can you find appreciation in? Appreciation in helping shape the person you are today.
Can’t wait to chat!
Want to reach out? Do so here: contact@shariseparviz.com
Transcript
Sharise Parivz: 0:01
All right, good morning. We are here. I am sitting on my front patio and I thought I would do my daily. I don’t know if it’s going to be daily, but today’s update and aha moment and I thought this would be a good time to do it. It’s early in the morning, my husband is still sound asleep and I am waiting for the sun to rise. And I thought what I would talk about, because in the last episode I talked about the diet and how I was preparing for my liquid fast diet wise, but I really didn’t talk to you about how I’m preparing in other ways, and so I thought I’d do that today. So let me, before I do that, talk to you a little bit about why I’m doing the liquid gaps fast and what my plan is from there.
Sharise Parivz: 0:54
So sometimes the liquid gaps fast is wonderful because it still is. It gives a break to the gut right Gaps, the gut and physiology syndrome or gut or psychology syndrome. And that was the diet that I use and also then became a practitioner in, because I couldn’t believe the results that my husband got, and I think I mentioned this when I decided when I saw how well he was getting, I needed to know, not just what to do but how and why. And that’s why I became certified as a practitioner, mostly because I wanted to understand it for myself and then later I decided to use it in my practice, which to kind of round out my practice, as because I really believe that mental health, which is really what I work on it. I work with leadership, with women, but also I work with anxiety and depression and you know, just like kind of crazy, wonky thinking and beliefs and things that don’t serve us. And and I realized through my own history as well as when working with clients, that honestly, as well as when working with clients, that honestly, what you eat is foundational to your mental health. It really is. And I have seen, just you know, miraculous recovery from severe depression. You know what you know, diagnoses and I’m using quotes because, you know, I don’t know if I even necessarily believe in any kind of diagnosis, even my own diagnosis that I had 20 years ago. But you know, I just kind of feel that diagnosis is a way to medicate. We put people in a box and we medicate them, because I just seen diet for myself help heal me 20 years ago and my clients and other practitioners’ clients, and it’s just shocking what food, the right food, nourishing the brain, will do for your mental state.
Sharise Parivz: 2:53
Okay, let’s get off that soapbox for a second, because I’ll go into that later, but that wasn’t the plan for today, so let’s stick to the plan, cherise. Okay. So the plan is why GAPS liquid fast? Let me go there first.
Sharise Parivz: 3:07
So GAPS liquid fast is highly nutritional because you’re having the meat stock. You’re not eating any solids, but you are having the meat stock which is filled with wonderful amino acids and the building blocks for your body, right? You’re doing green juices, so you’re getting minerals and you’re getting all of the vitamins and of so you’re getting minerals and you’re getting, you know, all of the vitamins. And of course, you’re getting cleansing materials through the juicings, the greens and vegetable juicings and low sugar vegetables. So, like no carrots, mostly greens, like lettuces Hi, sweetheart, my kitty’s out here with me Lettuces, and you know kitties out here with me Lettuces and you know wheatgrass and everything organic and anyway.
Sharise Parivz: 3:51
So just green juices, you know, and I do a variety of them. I never stick to one type of green juice because, just you know, I mean with oxalates and so forth and so on. So if I do spinach. I’ll maybe do spinach once or twice a week. I rotate, I rotate my greens. So if I do broccoli spouts, you know, I may do broccoli sprouts one day and then spirulina the next day, or barley grass another day, and I just kind of rotate through so that I’m not loading my body up with any one type of food.
Sharise Parivz: 4:24
Okay, so that’s the reason for the green juices. And then, of course, the herbal teas are wonderful for cleansing, wonderful for support, liver and kidney support, like I talked to you about the other last episode. But also, of course, ginger is wonderful because it’s what’s called a prokinetic. It gets things moving. That’s what prokinetic right Gets things moving, settles the tummy, anyway. So those are the reasons. So it’s highly nutritious, yet easy on the body, because sometimes the body just needs a break, especially if you have digestive issues like IBS or other things. Sometimes the body, the gut, just needs a break, especially if you have digestive issues like IBS or other things. Sometimes the body, the gut, just needs a break from digestion. So there’s no reason to starve, though, you know, and there’s no reason to not nourish the body and the cells and the organs while also, at the same time, letting them just rest a bit. And that is the purpose of the liquid fast rest a bit. And that is the purpose of the liquid fast.
Sharise Parivz: 5:28
And I usually only, either for myself or for my clients, do a liquid fast, maybe one to three days. Usually your body will let you know when it’s kind of like okay, I’m ready to eat, and it’s not just a hunger pain, because that does happen, but it’s just like you, just know you, just you feel it, you feel like, oh, I’m losing my too much energy, and you know, and I really am hungry and I really want this. You know, and your body will tell you okay, we’re done cleansing, let’s go ahead and move forward and and, uh, let’s do some building now. So once that happens which to me I’ve already pre-planned it I will start on Monday to move into the gaps intro diet and again, if you’re not familiar with the gaps, um, uh, that’s okay, you know I will you further on down the line, but it’s a slowing progression of introducing foods. And now I’ll start with the meat stock, with just the meats and the cooked vegetables that are in the meat stock, and then I’ll start adding in more of the fermented vegetables and not just the brine and so forth and I’ll get into that at a later time, but anyway and then just move through the stages of the GAPS diet into full GAPS, which is the last quote unquote stage, I guess, and then I will move back into eating my regular diet, which is really basically an ancestral diet. It’s not much different than GAPS all the time, except I will allow myself if grains everyone. I’m not a big grain person, I’m just not. I’m not a big grain person anyway. But when I do, then I will, of course, do I follow the nutrition nourishing traditions, okay, so that’s just a little brief thing of going back to why the gaps fast, all right.
Sharise Parivz: 7:06
So what else do I do to prepare for my fast? Oh, not just my, yeah, for my retreat, not just my fast, but for my retreat. So well, I make sure I have all my detox baths because, again, the goal for my retreat is to lose some weight, to detox, to kind of get a mental and spiritual and emotional and physical refresher. So if I’m going to detox and I’m going to start to cleanse the body, I need to make sure whatever is getting cleansed gets out of my body and doesn’t get redeposited in other areas, right? So like in deeper into the organs or deeper in the tissues in the body.
Sharise Parivz: 7:45
So I have my detox baths and I rotate those and some of the detox baths I do. Or like I do a magnesium bath, which is wonderful for supplementing with magnesium, but also for muscles and cramps or just stress. Right, I’ll do sea salt, I’ll do seaweed for minerals and iodine and so forth. I’ll do I’m trying to think off the top of my head what’s all on my shelf, because I have them all on my shelf. I’ll do clay baths, I’ll do apple cider vinegar baths, I’ll even do I’ll do borax baths. I’ll do that and I don’t do those all at once.
Sharise Parivz: 8:27
Again, I also rotate, you know, and depending on what I feel like I need. Like sometimes, if I take a bath at night, I’ll do a magnesium to help me sleep, and so it just depends on what I feel like. I listen to my body and kind of look at all my bags and go what do I want to do today? Right, if I feel like I have some itching, I don’t have a lot of skin breakouts. My husband does, so he’s actually cleansing through his skin and so he’ll do some baking soda baths and the baking soda is very mild on the skin, but also if you have a yeast flare up, eczema, that type of thing, baking soda is wonderful, a baking soda bath, because the skin, like your liver, like your kidneys, like your lungs, right, these are all detox organs and so you want to make sure you’re allowing them to detox as you detox. Or, again, as I said, the things that are getting pulled out of your body. If they have no place to go, they’re just going to redeposit somewhere else and it may go deeper and may be harder to pull them out later. So you want to make sure to do that, to do your detox protocols. So detox bowels are one. The other, of course, is making sure your bowels are moving regularly, and not just making sure they move regularly, but making sure you’re really cleansing your bowels out.
Sharise Parivz: 9:47
So I do enemas. I do two types of enemas. Well, actually, I do three types of enemas, not allas. I do two types of enemas. Well, actually, I do three types of enemas, not all the time, but three types of enemas. But typically I will do a cleansing enema first and that’s just a water enema with baking soda and some salt, and that’s just to cleanse the bowel, right? Because even if we do move every day, if our bowel movements are kind of skinny or they’re not well formed or you know, we may have what’s called impaction and where the bowels are kind of sticking to the walls of the colon and large intestine and so we want to flush all that out. And so cleansing enema, we’ll do that.
Sharise Parivz: 10:25
Then, after I do a cleansing enema, I’ll do a coffee enema, and you may have heard of that. It was pretty much made famous by the Gerson Protocol, which is a cancer protocol. But what’s wonderful about the coffee? Not but, and what’s wonderful about the coffee enema? Like in the Gerson Protocol you do, I think, almost like five enemas a day. In what I do in the GAPS protocol, which is where I learned this from, was you do the cleansing enema and that just cleanses the bowels. And then you do the coffee enema and what the coffee does is it gets up into the bile, it’ll get up into the liver and it will stimulate the bile. So what it does is really helps the liver to flush out, and that is the purpose of the coffee enema.
Sharise Parivz: 11:19
And then if after I want to do that, then I will sometimes do an implant. An implant enema isn’t something that you want to flush out, so you’d use very little, and you, like, you, may want to implant with some, and it’s something you might keep in overnight so you don’t use a lot of water and and so forth. I’m not going to go into all the ratios and measurements and all that, I’m just telling you what they are. But you might do some herbs or you might do some even things that, um, some type of uh and uh, you know garlic or, or you know different kinds of herbs or different kinds of um, if you even a little bit of kefir and you know you want to be uh and that type of thing, so um, and of course it’s very much diluted with, uh, some water, and you just keep that in overnight or, and then you know, and then you let it go the next day as normal. Anyway, so that’s implants and that’s cleansing enemas and coffee enemas, and again, we’re working to keep the body detoxing right. We’re working to get the toxins out of the body and again, these are just things that I’m doing. I’m not necessarily recommending that you do because you know, unless you know how to do it. If you know what I’m talking about, then of course, but if you don’t, just you know, I will share these things as I develop this program, because I think that’s what I’m thinking. That’s what I’m doing here, I don’t know is developing a program, but these are just things that I’m doing. I’m not recommending them for you right now If that’s something you’re used to doing until you know how to do it, and either finding a practitioner to help you learn how to do it, if that’s something that interests you and these are things that I will also cover later in time. Just giving you an idea of what I’m doing, okay, so, all that being said, what else am I adding into my what I it’s called my detox protocol? Right, I have my diet, I have my detox protocol. It’s what I’m doing right now.
Sharise Parivz: 13:18
I’m sitting out in the morning and I’m going to get that morning sun, I’m going to breathe the morning air and I and that is the first part of my day so I get up very early. I get up at 4 am, so it’s still dark, so, unfortunately, the first light in my eyes is not the sun, but I make sure that by the time the sun is ready to rise, I’m outside and I’m getting my eyes into the sky and so it can soak up some of the rays, or early morning rays, which is great, you know, and it helps to balance the circadian system. If you’re having problems sleeping, getting early morning sun, oh, it’s going to help so much because you are balancing out the hormones that you know you’re waking up, I’m going to say waking up, quote, you know, not really waking up, but you’re waking up the serotonin in the morning which helps to produce the melatonin at night, which is what you use, the hormone you use to help you to sleep. And then I will do some evening. I’ll sit out in the evening as well to watch the sun go down, and I don’t spend a lot of time, you know, but at least five, 10 minutes. So that’s another thing I add in. I call that my sun time. And then I’ll do some sunbathing, actually getting out in the sun for like 20 minutes and try to work up a little bit of sweat, again, trying to get toxins out of my body and allowing the sun to. I won’t do it in the heat of the day, but early morning, 10 am or late afternoon, after two like 3, 4 pm, and that’s a wonderful way to get sun into your body and allow the building for vitamin D. Right, because, of course, we have cholesterol and cholesterol, along with the sun, will help the body to produce vitamin D. Okay, so you have to have cholesterol you got to have your cholesterol in your diet in order to create vitamin D for your body to use. So those are some of the things.
Sharise Parivz: 15:25
Of course, I talked about meditation, which is more of a well, it is a physical detoxification. Some of the poses and things like that really do help to eliminate and to cleanse out the organs. Right, twisting motions, things like that, breathing the breath work I do is detoxifying for the lungs and also all of that is very detoxifying for our mental state and our spiritual state as well. Right, getting rid of thoughts and beliefs and thoughts, or at least understanding them. I don’t say getting rid of them. Sometimes we worry about getting rid too much, but maybe bringing them and allowing them and understanding them and giving them a place and awareness is part of the way of healing from whatever it is.Sharise Parivz: 16:12
We don’t always need to stick on a positivity sticker over our emotions. Sometimes our emotions just really just want to be heard and once they’re heard and understood and said, I see you, I hear you, I acknowledge you. Then they can kind of chill out a little bit and go oh, you see me now. Yeah, okay, you know, they’re not like the, you know the little toddler running around saying see me, see me, pay attention, pay attention, knocking over everything so that they get your attention. You know, once your emotions have your attention and you’re going, oh yeah, I see you. Hi, you know how are you today. Or you know what do you have to tell me today? What’s the message you have for me? And when you acknowledge those parts of you, you know sometimes that is a major step in healing is acknowledgement first acceptance. Okay, I see what else.
Sharise Parivz: 17:14
So castor oil packs that’s also something that I will use, both over my castor oil packs. Basically it’s castor oil, organic castor oil, always in a glass bottle, preferably an amber glass bottle is where you want to get your castor oil, and you can place that over your liver, place that over your kidneys, place that if you’ve got menstrual cramps over your lower abdomen. You can place it over your breast. You can place it over any sore area on your body if you have sore muscles or if you banged your elbow or whatever, and castor oil really just helps to circulate and helps circulation and stimulation of the areas of your body. So if you’re wanting to detox, we could put castor oil over the liver, as I said, or the kidneys and so forth, and you can do it overnight. And a castor oil pack, if you’re not aware of that, is castor oil placed over the area that you want to focus on, and then some wool or cotton. I actually use a it’s called from what is it? Queen of Thrones, and it’s a pack that ties and that you can find it on Amazon. Queen of Thrones, and it’s a pack that ties and that you can find it on Amazon. Queen of Thrones. And I put that it’s a pack and it keeps the castor oil warm and then, because it holds in your own body heat as well as, keeps the castor oil off your clothes, and I sleep with that on overnight. And I don’t do it every night sometimes. I mean I may do it more often during this retreat, but typically I’ll do it once a week, couple times a week, or if I need it, and oh, there’s my husband and hi, baby, and I will do that overnight. And that is one other way that I plan for detoxification. And I think let’s see.
Sharise Parivz: 19:02
Last but not least, one of the other things I do are my supplements. I don’t do a lot of supplements. I supplement maybe with herbs that I got like I said, herbal teas but I will do iodine painting and put that on my body. Iodine is Lugol’s iodine, which is a wonderful supplement for iodine because most people are iodine deficient, and so iodine painting is a safe way to supplement with iodine along with your seaweed baths. And I think that is it.
Sharise Parivz: 19:38
Of course, I have my journal. Oh, and I guess the last thing I will say is how to prepare is. I have my wise and wild wellness journal where I keep track of all of this. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what to keep track of, what you did today or what you’re going to do tomorrow, whatever. So my wellness journal is always a daily journal where I mark down what food or, in this case, during the liquid fast, what liquids I’ve taken in, what supplements I’ve taken, what detox protocols I’ve done, and just kind of keeping track of how I feel, how I took care of myself spiritually, how I took care of myself mentally. What were some of the good things that happened, what am I grateful for, what are some not so good things that happened and how can I learn from them. And so those are the ways that I am working through my retreat.
Sharise Parivz: 20:36
Anyway, so, real quickly, I’ll tell you a little bit about an aha moment that I had. So yesterday I was doing my breath work and as I was doing my breath work, a lot of thoughts and emotions came up, as is normal to do. And one of the emotions that came up well, and I allowed them to come, I guess I had a lot of images and visualizations of the past and just kind of went through my life, you know, from even as a childhood to relationships I had to when my children were young, to different stages of my life, and I realized, my goodness, you know, I lived so many lives. You know I’m 55 years old and I lived so many lives, and some of those lives were good. You know, I’m calling them lives because they were different me’s and all they were different me’s at different times in my life that all created, or together helped create, who I am now.
Sharise Parivz: 21:42
And when I think about that, I think about how grateful I am and that was a big aha how grateful I am for all the lives I’ve led, even the not so great times, even the times that I regret, even the times that were painful, even the times that were hurtful, even the sad times, even the lost times, even the times of grief, even those times, because those times also helped me to become who I am today.
Sharise Parivz: 22:15
I learned so many things how to be resilient, how to be capable, how to love, how to know how to have compassion and empathy for others who went through or who are going through things that I went through and how I can help. And so my big aha is saying and understanding and realizing how thankful I am for all the lives that I’ve lived. And so one of the things I did and maybe it’s something you might want to do is I wrote down some of the times of my lives, right, some of the lives that you’ve led, some of the lives that I’ve led, I wrote down and you can do that too and what are the things that you are grateful for in those times? What are the things that maybe were painful, but later, as you look back on them, you realize, wow, I gained something from that and what were the things that you gained from that, and then give gratitude for those times.
Sharise Parivz: 23:19
Give gratitude for those stages in your life, those lives that you led, because they bring you where you are today, and that’s a beautiful place, because if you’re still here, you’ve got a beautiful purpose and you may be living your purpose. You, you may be figuring out your purpose, no matter what stage of life you’re in now. Whatever life you’re living now, it’s a new time, it’s a new life, but all the past, good and bad, helped to get you here. Find gratitude for it, because we’ve all learned and gained something from it. All right, my husband is sitting up at the upper patio, so I’m going to run off and I will catch you later. Bye-bye.