The SHN #26: Bob Harwood, GNM, and a Ray Peat Food Guide

Welcome back to The Synergetic Health Newsletter! 

In this edition, I’ll show you how a “normal” American found enlightenment.

After that, I’ll review my thoughts on German New Medicine.

Then I’ll include some tidbits and links to things I’ve found particularly interesting recently.

Joe Burt

🧘🏻‍♂️ Bob Harwood and the Present Moment

I enjoy reading stories about different individual’s spiritual journeys, especially ones that have reached a “liberated” state, often called enlightenment or becoming “truth realized.”

Each one’s road is unique.

Some people have hit rock bottom and are close to suicide before spontaneously awakening (Eckhart Tolle, for example). Others engage in a rigid Zen Buddhist approach, amassing thousands of hours of meditation before dropping the sense of self.

When I listened to Bob Harwood’s decades-long spiritual quest on the “Buddha At The Gas Pump” podcast, I benefited from hearing what he found essential and non-essential when it comes to crafting your own inner journey.

Harwood was raised in a middle-class Christian family and didn’t begin meditating until he was 40 years old. The spiritual bug bit him hard and he spent the next 15 years looking for the truth, which included stints as a Zen Buddhism teacher and founder of a spiritual center/church in his native Tennessee.

After listening to him speak, I had to read his book “Pouring Concrete: A Zen Path to the Kingdom of God.” In it, Harwood tells his life story which culminates with him reaching that oft-desired state where the sense of a personal “me” drops away completely.

This enlightened state, glimpsed by many but attained by few, is each of our natural states when we are able to remove the many layers of illusion that currently cloud our true seeing.

Let’s take a closer look at Harwood’s words.

“What must we be doing in this moment? What can we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel right now? Life is a dance that only happens in the present.”

Ah, the present moment. A place where every spiritual and self-help book tells you to be. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Harwood elucidates that a valuable practice is to be totally aware of the sense organs without labeling what they sense. See just to see, hear just to hear, taste just to taste.

“Through the simple activity of shifting attention away from thoughts to what is, we gradually leave thoughts behind and discover our true identity in the simplest things we do, whether shopping for groceries, making love, or brushing our teeth.”

Becoming intimate in our daily life with every activity is necessary to quiet the monkey mind and reconfigure how it interacts with reality. If you’re able to practice being fully present in the act of washing dishes, you are more likely to remain present in all areas of your life as well.

“The process of becoming psychologically unified with life is the process of once again learning to see and interact with the world like a little child.”

Seeing the world detached from all ideas, with the wonder of a young child who hasn’t yet developed a strong self of identity/self, leads to enhanced enjoyment of life. A life free from second-guessing. Psychologically unifying yourself with life opens up spontaneity and mystery that has been driven out of modern humans.

“All that can be said is that certain activities seem to be correlated with awakening. Those activities involve shifting attention away from thoughts to direct sensory perception and attentiveness that leads to psychological unity with whatever is being done.”

This message is very powerful. If you can find moments in your day where you actively move your awareness away from thoughts (conceptual mind) and focus instead only on what your are doing (non-conceptual mind), you are living meditatively.

When directing one's focus entirely on activities like washing dishes, there's a decreased tendency to engage in self-reflective thoughts and a heightened probability of becoming psychologically absorbed in the task at hand.

The more this is done the more “aware” you become, the less power thoughts have over you, the more “self” you uncover.

“As I began attempting to look at the world in silence, thoughts were incessant, but I kept shifting attention, again and again, back to what the eyes could see rather than the thoughts that kept appearing in the mind.

As a result of pursuing this activity, mind talk gradually slowed down to such a degree that there could be awareness of mental silence without the mind commenting on the mental silence.

Learning to look at the world in silence involves breaking the habit of incessantly thinking reflective thoughts and acquiring a new habit of remaining alert but internally silent.”

Admittedly, this is NOT EASY. For many people, sitting down to do 10 minutes of meditation is a chore.

The idea of actively working to shift attention away from our never ending thought stream during everyday life may sound worse to some people or better for others who don’t like structured seated meditation.

In any case, it’s worth spending 5-10 minutes a day to see if this way of “meditating” is more enjoyable than plopping down on the cushion. Take a few minutes of the day to focus solely on one sense gate (seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, touching) and return your focus there each time a thought tries to interrupt the party.

Bob Harwood’s unique journey to self-realization is a prime example of what truths you can uncover by consistently refusing to get caught up in thinking. For Harwood, this ultimately led to him completely losing his sense of a “me” or a personal self that is doing “X”, thinking “Y”, or being aware of “Z”.

The first step is simply to become aware of being aware, as in YOU (or “I”) am washing these dishes. Eventually, as is what happened to Harwood, there no longer is an “I” washing these dishes, there is just washing dishes.

⚕️ Practical Application of German New Medicine

A few weeks ago I wrote about German New Medicine (GNM) and how its founder discovered an alternate way to view diseases.

In my quest to synthesize information into actionable nuggets, I came away with a few ways to think about GNM and how you can use just a simple knowledge of it to improve your health.

Firstly, GNM helps to highlight just how important your emotional well-being and levels of stress really are. More specifically how major, sudden, unexpected shocks are a likely culprit to more serious illnesses. But even how seemingly minor shocks can lead to health problems.

Knowing this, you can put these events into proper context and realize that they must be properly dealt with to heal from*.

*Healing them is part of a much larger discovery I’m undergoing

So it can be beneficial to know that letting a relationship conflict fester, for example, can dramatically upset your health. Or how seeing your parents deal with a major health issue can lead to your own illness. Or any similar example.

Secondly, GNM differs from the traditional medicine approach in how they view symptoms. Where most of us have been conditioned to believe that symptoms mean the beginning of some new problem, something to be dealt with, GNM believes most symptoms occur when you have healed from a biological shock.

You don’t have to take this on faith. You can examine whether this makes sense in your experience. When you get symptoms of any kind (colds, flus, skin issues, gut issues, etc), can you trace them to a specific conflict you have resolved?

You can refer to this website to identify which solved conflict could have led to your specific symptoms.

How wild would it be is this were true? That your body doesn’t need any outside interventions to squash your illness, just give it time and let it do its thing (in most, not all, cases!).

If you don’t believe this to be true and instead would rather continuing to approach your symptoms and illness how you have been, that is totally fine. The mind is powerful and doing what you believe is best for you is a key component of health. You are better served doing what you think works.

For me, I’m enjoying looking at illness in a new light. When I get sick in the future, or deal with some kind of ailment, I will embrace the symptoms as the natural intelligence of my body to handle issues on its own. This positive outlook is antithetical to how I usually approach being sick, where I usually just feel bad for myself.

In also viewing the history of my experiences differently, there is an appreciation for how biological conflicts in the past may have led to chronic health conditions and/or acute illnesses.

I’ve done specific work in forgiving myself for past actions and forgiving others for things where I felt wronged, which has led to one significant healing event already, written about here.

Of course there is more nuance to this approach to health, and working with a trained professional could be an option if you are struggling with an illness and this resonates with you.

This post was meant just to show how I’ve been implementing the knowledge of GNM into my own life.

☀️ Let There Be Light (Sun)

By now you know this newsletter doubles as a weekly reminder that the sun is health-promoting and should NOT be avoided.

Several studies agree that those who avoid the sun have at least double the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other mortality.

Avoiding the sun is dangerous.

🍍 Ray Peat Inspired Food Guide: I continue to experiment with the bioenergetic diet and have enjoyed it so far. It helps that most of the suggested foods are easy to find and cheap down here in Latin America.

Here’s a sample day for me, knowing that I am moving around a lot down here and don’t have access to everything I would back in the US:

Meal 1: ~5 eggs cooked in butter, 12oz orange juice, a piece of fruit, large coffee with milk and sugar

Meal 2: Smoothie with milk, frozen and regular fruit, honey, protein powder if I have it, yogurt if I have it; macadamia nuts if I have them, followed by coffee with milk and sugar

Meal 3: Ground beef and white rice or potatoes

Meal 4: Kitchen sink meal: fruit, honey, milk, juice, yogurt, eggs, ice cream

This is different from how I used to eat and I may well revert back at some point in the future. But I know people find different strategies interesting, so check out this visual on a guide to widely-used foods by people following a bioenergetic diet.

I’ve written plenty more about this in past newsletters.

𝕏 Thread of the Week

💪 Boost Testosterone by 71% by Just Existing in Bright Light: A 2016 study put men in a box with bright light for 30 minutes and found a 71% increase in testosterone and 3x reported increase in libido (subjective) as compared to a group placed in a dimly lit box. This study found that “lack of interest in sex successfully treated by exposure to bright light.” Get your sunlight, especially early in the day!

👅 Tongue Posture: The Overlooked Key To Better Health: With benefits ranging from improved sleep to decreased pain, learning how to properly rest your tongue in your mouth can be a game changer. In this exhaustive post from Zac Cupples, you will learn all about the benefits and how you can use tongue exercises and improved tongue resting posture to improve oral health and general well-being.

🍳 Skip Dinner, Not Breakfast?: This 2013 study found that those who front loaded their calories at breakfast lost 2.5x more weight than those who had a light breakfast and ate most of their calories at dinner – even though they consumed the same number of calories overall. The authors concluded that a “High-calorie breakfast with reduced intake at dinner is beneficial and might be a useful alternative for the management of obesity and metabolic syndrome.”

This also makes some from a circadian health perspective, where the advice would be to eat with the sun and avoid much calorie consumption after dark. If you are interested in intermittent fasting or losing a bit of fat, it could be worth trying to eat a hearty breakfast but cut back on the cals at dinner.

✔️ That will do it for this time! Hopefully you got some value out of it. If you have any questions/comments/things you’d like to learn more about please don’t hesitate to reach out.

🔗 If you know anyone who loves learning about these types of topics, send them this link!

📰 To read all past newsletters, go here.