In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Whose advice to follow to live a longer life (it’s neither researchers nor doctors…). ([3:37])
- The 2 steps to creating any change you want to see in your life. This makes even monumental transformations as easy as jumping off of a diving board. ([6:55])
- Why you should never blame hormones for your health problems. ([10:05])
- How to solve health problems by NOT interrupting what your body is doing. ([14:23])
- The 3-step process to heal your body without invasive chemical therapies, pills or expensive medication. ([16:30])
Did you enjoy the podcast? Let me know by leaving a short review and be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any future episodes!
Peter Ragnar is an internationally renowned best-selling author and a health & longevity pioneer. He’s written over thirty books including “How Long Do You Choose to Live?: The Question of a Lifetime” and “The Awesome Science of Luck.” He’s published courses on many aspects of personal development including fitness, health, longevity, conscious living, and so much more. He has also been a martial artist for well over sixty years. Peter has spent a lifetime studying the relationship between body and mind at all levels. He calls himself a senior citizen but refuses to give his age because he doesn’t “believe in it.” He has empowered and transformed the lives of millions people around the world. He currently lives with his wife Katrina, in a little house hidden away in the colorful woods of New England.
Links:
Logan: Welcome back in this episode we continue the amazing discussion with Peter Ragner talking about time is not toxic and much more. Let's dive right in.
Logan: 00:31 Do you have any other stories or any other areas where really you are engaged in a certain health practice recognized there may not be the best thing and possibly just cause you were going too extreme with it and kind of went a different direction over the years?
Peter : 00:44 Oh, I'm not as dogmatic about diet as I have been and I think even some of the books that I've written, I come off as a believer. You know, it tends to divide people and I said, I think we all go through a process of we try this, we try that and we end up finding what works for us and basically if it works for you, great. You know, I'll keep my mouth shut. Whatever you're doing, it's living this life free of judgment free of condemnation, free of contention which basically adds your longevity and health. You know, too many people want to argue about diet. They want to argue about this and that and that contentiousness. It basically poisons the body with stress hormones and it shows. So I've seen that, I've experienced it. Come the other way around. My wife accuses me of, of creating a lot of fanatics and I said, no, no, everybody's got their own VM. But they listened to you and what you've said in the past, which is one of the problems is you said something in the past and you not doing it today and it's in print or in a format, audio format, or we're run on a video and your changed your mind. You know, people don't often understand that you do the most amount of good in the least amount of harm and let the chips fall within a,
Logan: 02:20 Yeah. And I find reading mild books, like I don't agree with myself quite often, which it sounds kind of bad, but I think it's actually a healthy thing because we should be evolving and hopefully yet getting into a less dogmatic place. I think that is probably a natural thing. You get into something you're super excited about it. You want to proselytize to everyone out there just because of how great it's helping you in whatever way and then a little bit later on you realize kind of the shades of gray of what was going on or can just kind of relax and let go of the dogma as you were saying.
Peter: 02:50 Yeah, yeah. It's pretty dangerous when you believe everything you think.
Logan: 02:56 Yeah, and I feel that's especially important in the health because yeah, people do get so radical like it's diet and politics are like right up there and just the controversy about them. But if I think pretty much everyone can agree that just eating real natural food, it's going to work pretty well for most people. Like, that's the basic foundation that everyone can agree on and then we can get into specifics on there and argue over it. But that needs to be that foundation there.
Peter: 03:27 I look around while people are contesting a dietary ideas and I think, who do I listen to? And I thought about that and I said, well, who should I listen to? Well, obviously the people who are doing it well, who's doing it? The world's oldest people. Listen to the people who live the longest, who are the healthiest, and find out what they're doing and see if that works for you. And that's the approach that I've taken. I've looked just like a [inaudible] book on the blue zones and the different areas where people lived along this on this planet and I doing what are they eating? How do they live? And I think this is a big part of it too. It's about lifestyle. What is your lifestyle? How do I live? What do I do each day? Oh, when do I go to sleep? When do I wake up? How do I eat? What's my social interaction like? You know, all of these things come to play and it's not that any one thing. There is no magic bullet, there is no magic or there's no magic. There's no special, unique elixir or somewhere. But it is when you put all the things together, put the pieces back together and we become whole.
Logan: 04:45 I think this idea also speaks to that. Both you and I are constantly experimenting with things, right? So you're in taking new information and then maybe, Oh, you know, see they're eating this food in this blue zone for example. So I'm going to add that to my diet, see what happens from doing that. And I think this is a healthy approach to life because ultimately what science says or what your friend says doesn't necessarily mean something works for you. So you have to try things. And this is diet supplements, lifestyle behaviors, all sorts of different things to really find what works. And once you find what works, you know that doesn't mean that's going to work for the whole rest of your life. Things change over time. So I think that's a useful approach to how you should look at engaging in healthy behaviors.
Peter: 05:31 Yeah, and I tell myself this all the time. I never assume that I have all these answers and because I found out so many times when I did think I had the answers that they were wrong. Yeah. Keeps you humble.
Logan: 05:47 What would you say are some of your, I mean, we've kind of talked through them, I think time is not toxic, would definitely fit as one of these, but what are some of your other foundational principles of health?
Peter: 05:57 Oh, well, one of them is something many, many decades ago I wrote with soap on my mirror in the bathroom. So I would see this every time I walked into the bathroom and what I wrote on there serve the power. What I wrote was if it's to be, it's up to me. I'm responsible. What am I going to do about it? I'm responsible. What am I going to do about it? If it's to be, it's up to me. And I looked at that every morning and that set the tone for my day. And then I realize that every morning when I woke up, I would think, what is the most difficult thing that ACEs me today? I will do that first before anything else. And usually I've found out the thing that I regretted doing the most was the most important thing that benefited my life. And by doing it first, I got it over with.
Peter: 06:51 I faced it. And so getting out of bed and basing what you need to do and do it, and you know, people ask me, how do you do this? Or how do you do that? And I said, that's a stupid question. You ask a kid, how do you jump off a diving board? You go out to the, and then you jump. That's it. You're just jump. Someone once asked me, well, well how do I stop smoking? And I saw I'd give you the foolproof, absolute way not to smoke. Don't put the thing in your mouth.
Logan: 07:21 Yeah, that's great because that applies to health, but also so much more, right? It's really a foundational principle to guide your life by and fits in with the, the name of this podcast. Health sovereignty. Sovereignty is about taking that responsibility for yourself in a day and age when so many people, especially around the topic of health, you know, do not take that responsibility. They want their doctor or the government or someone else to be responsible for the health for them.
Peter: 07:47 Yeah. There's another one of my little sayings, one of my cliches that I repeated over and over again. No one is coming to the rescue. No one's coming to the rescue buddy. And coming to grips with that, even though people that are people, your friends, your family. But if you take that attitude, nobody's coming to the rescue, you're out there. What are you going to do? And it's motivating.
Logan: 08:14 Absolutely. So coming back to the topic of time, one of the, I like to think of it as a myth that hormones fall with age. Now, just because this tends to happen for most people doesn't mean it's causative, right? The age, the time itself is not the factor. So much as what happens during that time. Absolutely.
Peter: 08:35 Logan, not too long ago, both my wife and I, Katrina and I both had our telomeres tested and get a number of blood tests. We found we were half our biological age. Our physical bodies were half of the chronological age. And what does that say? I mean, I see men in the gym, and complaining about erectile dysfunction, prostate problems, lack of energy. And I think, you know, it doesn't have to be that them. The readings from blood tests and things that I've done, I'm just like, I was when I was 30 and I shake my head and I said, sometimes you've said, well, you're lucky. No. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm lucky. I'm lucky that I've done the things I did, the things I did. I'm lucky I made the decisions I made. But luck is noticing. Luck is about noticing. You become very, very lucky when you notice things and if you notice something's going downhill and you don't want it to go down, you know, that's being lucky because now you do something about it. And like we were saying, you know, time isn't toxic. Time doesn't cure. You rip all the pages off for calendar and it doesn't mean a thing. You don't hurt, you throw your clock out, it won't hurt you. You're real. And it's what we do.
Logan: 09:59 Yeah. So regarding the hormones, I think of them as chemical messengers. That's what they're doing in their body. And something I've been thinking about is that the hormones sure that they, cause things are very important for our health, but they're not really the root cause of the issue because they're just messengers. They're passaging messages from one part of your body to another and in turn triggered and triggering kind of the outside environment and how we're like, you know, you lift a heavy weight that is triggering your body in certain way and it can ramp up hormones for example. So the hormones themselves aren't root cause. So trying to fix them by like getting testosterone replacement therapy. It's still really a bandaid approach and like most of Western medicine versus really kind of understanding that if you do the right things, you natural living that we've talked about a healthy diet, the right kind of exercise that largely these chemical messengers will intern take care of themselves.
Peter: 10:55 Exactly, exactly. Provide the proper terrain, the proper environment and the body knows what to do. It knows how to do it. It does it naturally. I heard of an interesting way it was illustrated just the other day and I thought it was really good. They said, you have a Lake that's become stagnant. No water is moving through it and it starts to stink it as a sludge on it and it's covered with mosquitoes and swarms and swarms of mosquitoes. Well one approaches to come in there with DDT or something. How are polite that kill all the mosquitoes and now you have no more than mosquitoes. But soon the mosquitoes appear again because the Lake is filled with their larva. Their eggs are all over the place. It's the terrain that attracted the yanks. And when we change terrain, when we change and clean the water, we don't have the other things.
Peter: 11:59 And so with the body, when we adjust the terrain to it's natural, organic state, all these other things, the tumors, the cysts, the infections, the inflammation, all of these things are absent because they require a different type of terrain. They'd inquire of polluted water and if the water is not polluted, it doesn't happen. The water flows smoothly and none of that stuff is out. And I thought that was beautifully described because like you said, so often we look to the magic bullet and say, well if I have an inflammation, let me take this shot to get rid of victims, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Take this medicine, take this particular thing and it'll all be well, I'll be well. But it's all with changing the condition of the body. Actual state.
Logan: 12:51 I don't know if you heard about this, but the metaphor there of the mosquitoes and brought it to mind how in Brazil they released genetically modified mosquitoes that were supposed to kind of self terminate. The next generation was just supposed to die out and surprise, surprise, it did not work out. Like they plan, they are not dying off and they're now more robust. Everything's like, yeah, I didn't think that was a good idea going in.
Peter: 13:16 Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting. I know what you're saying.
Logan: 13:21 Yeah. So speaking to ecology or the terrain, which yeah, I feel if this is one of the things that it's in any sort of holistic system of medicine, of health, they're looking at the body more as an ecology as that terrain rather than like the body as a machine. And the metaphors we use to think about things really impact so much we're doing, if you think of the body is a machine though, let's just replace a part or let's just add in this thing that's missing. Whereas at ecology is like, okay, what can we do to tweak things so that then the ecology kind of takes care of it itself. So we've talked about many different things here on this call. Is there any other aspects? What really helps a person to take care of that terrain? Well?
Peter: 14:07 Well, what belief helps the fact that we are more powerful than we ever believed we could be. That we realize that there's an intelligence in the body and the way it functions that is hard to mentally grasp the functions of the body operate lawlessly under their own laws. And as long as we don't start to try to manipulate or as you said a moment ago, we replaced the parts. The body knows how to heal itself, it knows how to come back to center. I don't have to do anything for my body to heal itself, to come back to center. All I have to do is find that middle space, that balance point and not too much this way, not too little that way. Just finding center and mentally coming back to center. I never have to worry about I have a cut healing itself.
Peter: 15:01 Why would I worry about anything else? It's a natural process. All I have to do is get out of the way and let it happen and that's a conviction that I hold and I've held for a long, long time. I'm amazed by it. I'm amazed by it. They're just coming back down to mentally settling, finding a sweet spot. And I think we can do that when we learn to deal with our thoughts, settle our thoughts, spend more quiet time. Find that time every day just to sit, to walk, to be in the woods, be in nature, walk along the shore line. You know, watch the waves on the ocean, go out at night, look at the story sky and just stand there. awestruck do that.
Logan: 15:50 Yeah. That brings up a very interesting point. So the body has a natural healing process and you don't have to do anything. So to actually stop this process requires you doing something. It's interesting thing about people that have chronic pain for 20 years or so, you know, every single cell in their body gets turned over, gets changed out in less of a timeframe from that. Even super dense cells like bones get changed out every seven or nine years, something like that. So there must be a belief or something that is blocking that healing process from going on in the first place. Like you said, a cut will just naturally heal. So I think that's fascinating answer, do Nothing come back to center and allow the healing to take place.
Peter: 16:34 Yeah, and it's the same way of dealing with pain. Someone was asking me about pain the other day cause a, how do you handle pain? And I says, I don't, I welcome that. I said, show me what you've got and guess what? Pain gets scared. You away from the, this guy is nuts and said, no, you know I don't resist pain. This is nothing to resist. Pain is simply the fear of the pain. The thought about pain, the thought about suffering. I don't have that. It's a sensation. I have a pain if I stub my toe or break a bone or whatever. Right? I said, okay, it's a sensation my body knows how to. I'm not going to interfere by getting emotional about it. It's just a pain that heaven sakes, that's all. It's just the pain. Let it be. is just not the pain and it will go away
Logan: 17:28 And it goes back to the the noticing, right? I mean pain is a signal and hopefully you can learn from that signal, especially if it's something you did to yourself, then you can avoid doing it in the future.
Peter: 17:41 I talked to myself, I said, Peter, don't do that.
Logan: 17:46 All right. If people have liked what they heard today when the check out more information about you, do you have certain places you'd like them to go?
Peter: 17:54 Well, I've got a huge following on Facebook. Facebook is a nice place to start. And also I do have a, a website. It's a longevitysage.com or simply Peterragner.com and YouTube, by the way. Yah, I have, there must be, I don't know, 75 or 80 a videos on herbs and health on YouTube and you know, so many of the different herbs that you offer Logan. I get to talk about them on YouTube and it's a pretty exciting place to be. Also you can go, go on Amazon and look up Peter Ragnar or see what some of my books are on there. Most of my books are out of print though. A recent one that is on Kindle. It's free on Kindle and it's called finding heart. I live with courage in a confusing world. That's a lot of stuff out there. I don't even know what, what's out there.
Logan: 18:57 Well, that's okay if it's out of print because you disagree with yourself from back then. Right.
Logan: 19:04 Okay. Peter, thank you so much for joining me once again today,
Peter: 19:08 Logan, if the, it's always a pleasure, my friends and I really appreciate you. I appreciate all that you that you do and this is always good. It's always good.
Logan: 19:18 All right, thank you. And everyone listening, you can find the links on the show notes over at www.healthsovereign.com. This was the first interview rather for the health sovereign podcast, but the first of many, and I hope you've enjoyed this, we'd love to hear your feedback on it and as always, reviews on iTunes or wherever else helps to spread this message out to other people. Thanks so much for listening.
