Desperately or not so desperately seeking health! At The Navhind Times workshop featuring alchemist, acupressure, integrative medicine practioner and author of ‘Become Healthy…Or Extinct’ Darryl D’Souza, updated the audience about what goes into the making of good health.

By Tara Narayan

Eating is Fun / Eating is Yuck! – A variety food column

FUNNY, all around me today I see seniors giving up on life and waiting to die! While there’re a whole lot more desperately seeking health to live longer to enjoy family and friends. Sickness and sadness has overtaken our civilization like nothing else has. It was palpable at the jam-packed workshop addressed by alternate therapy healer Darryl D’Souza at The Navhind Times workshop at Dempo House conference hall on Sunday, November 3, 2019 from 9am to 1pm.
Darryl D’Souza is perhaps the most visible face of alternate medicine schools in Goa and is rapidly being recognized for his insightful presentations on the subject of redressing health problems through alternate therapies and lifestyle dietary changes. Darryl explained the role of diet, acupressure, habits, detox, metaphysics, homeostasis, healing protocol. As also much more about alchemy’s early history, how our central nervous system controls body temperature, how body chemistry which is predominantly alkaline determines wellbeing (even if acidity plays a key role)…it is the third wave of alchemists, he says, “who took life us through crude life processes to evolve into refined, holistic human beings, and that is the alchemy of the spirit.” We shall never be truly healthy societies until we become truly an integral part of our eco-systems…
His take is that more than 70 percent of our illness today are of a chronic nature and can be cured through integrated natural therapies, “Spiritual evolution comes later.” His take is that chronic illnesses are catching us at a younger and younger age, for example, see how our eyes are degenerating so quickly nowadays… “in the next 20 years we may see babies with spectacles!” That raised a disquieting laugh in the audience but the point is increasingly our children are not being born in 100 percent healthy condition…and see how college girls and women in their 30s today are suffering from fibroids and something called PCOD.
Much of the story is we contaminate our environment with our lifestyles and that’s “why city people are running away and coming to Goa!” In search of good air, water, earth…which is not as badly contaminated as in the big cities, but, “Goa will go meet the same fate as that of the big cities like Delhi soon!”
It’s a long, long story of our sins of omission and commission but let me cut it short and say unless more and more enlightened human beings make the required changes in lifestyle, we will continue to walk or run into doomsday…can you swing in the changes? Amongst other things it means giving up milk and milk products, refined oils and processed fats, sugar, fried foods, processed foods coming in expensive vile plastics and yes, using minimal salt is also something which will keep your kidneys working better.
DARRYL spent a lot of time explaining we don’t need milk and milk products and some in the audience wanted answers because Ayurveda recommends cow’s milk and desi A2 cow’s milk ghee as ambrosia for health or something like that. The milk controversy is not new with Maneka Gandhi starting it a long time ago. The fact remains that we’re the only mammals in the mammal kingdom chasing another mammal’s milk (meant for its babies) and in the process we’re really mean to the holy cows and our own wellbeing! After mother’s milk we do not really need milk, milk products, no butter, no cheese, no paneer, no curd – well, most vegetarians seek their protein in milk and milk products so it is hard to give up dairy milk; but Darryl is quoting from several well researched books and yes, the amount of animal milk and milk products we consume today is a serious issue when it comes to diabetes and arthritis – after we’re three years old our body does not make the enzymes to digest and absorb dairy products.
Quit dairy and dairy products and sugar and see how diabetes reverses! Darryl says check it out for six months, he also conducts diabetes II reversal camps and they’ve seen many successful cases of diabetes reversal. Generally speaking we have to change our city mindsets and eat more natural, more organic, more local — think fruit and salad rich with greens, sprouts, nuts, seeds, less grain food, look at millets instead of rice and wheat all the time. Instead of conventional dairy milk think soybean milk, rice milk, oatmeal milk, caju milk, almond milk, groundnut milk and the cheese made out of nut milks. From the sound of it, really, we’ve become a boring industrial society moving further and further away from the good earth which defines us all…there’re so many wonderful ways of living but we prefer to be stuck in our cities and our offices from morning to night, and then complain about being perennially sick!
TO stay with Darryl here if I remember right I was the first or amongst the first to have glowingly reviewed his first book ‘Become Healthy…Or Extinct’. Herein he traces his own journey from engineer to acupressure practioner to alchemist to organic farmer and other definitions, but first he healed himself from the misery of his own health problems ranging from pneumonia to amoebiasis. He writes about how various mainstream medicines made nonsense of his life till he was ready to say goodbye, cruel earth.
He recounted his story from chronic ill health to perennial youth today charmingly at the Navhind Times workshop…sorry, if you missed it. Get a copy of his book and read it, it’s available as free e-book too and I think he is constantly updating and refreshing the contents with every new edition like an ongoing blog or something close. Darryl says what rescued him from his chronic ill-health was when he discovered acupressure with master acupressure practioner Ashwin Dalal in Mumbai. This was in 2005 when he didn’t have much faith but slowly and surely a miracle unfolded before him. Over six months of acupressure he was on the road to recovery more or less but this experience also made him discover more natural ways of healing from the inside out and by giving the innate body a chance. He was soon saying hello anew to a kinder world!
Soon he was pursuing the alternative therapies and practices of more natural medicines, since then he has not looked back and nor has his health – look at him! At his presentation he smiled contagiously, “Look at me, do I look old?” For added value he has no qualms quipping, “I’m going to live to be 120 years old!” Oh yes, there’s lots of evidence now proving that if we take care of our organs and don’t abuse them many of us may make it to 120 years…which made me think after wealth, health, happiness what do we all seek – longevity of course, we all want to live forever or…er…at least till our 120th birthday anyone??
Why not if we can enjoy sweet life till the end, without cracking nasty jokes about what a bitch life is (like I do sometimes). More than anybody else I think Darryl D’Souza has moved from strength to strength in promoting a movement of health consciousness in Goa. In the process he has grown himself into a picture of youthful radiance at 50 years something today. As far as he is concerned today, hey, what’s ill-health? He made the changes of lifestyle demanded and reaps the rewards….we cannot do better than walk in his footsteps — if we can.
NOBODY is saying Darryl D’Souza’s act is an easy act to follow and I always say where is the larger infrastructure to make us wealthy, healthy, happy and generous in the pursuit of life??? But this is really to say it was one of the most enlightening workshops I’ve attended in recent times and to say the least here, afterwards everybody flocked to Darryl to see if he could show them where the acupressure points were on their hands to press…so that various parts of the body could get a boost!
What is acupressure? It is a traditional Chinese therapy along the principals of acupuncture. Based on the concept that life energy flows through meridians in the body and if you press certain points on your hands or soles of your feet you may jolt or clear blockages along these meridians so that circulation improves and healing takes place. Check it out.