The basic process is this: detoxification, transformation, healing. The root of understanding detoxification is not in the details but in a holistic approach. Detoxification is a fundamental function in our body, planet, and universe. Our whole body, from organs and tissues all the way down to the cell, is constantly detoxing. We eliminate toxins through bowel movements, liver function, even simple exhaling. To put it simply, detoxing is letting go of something from the past to create space for something new.
Here is the transcript from the video:
What is Detoxing, Does Detoxing Really Happen?
00:00:00
Interviewer- Christine
So Isaac it’s January, obviously. The time of year new years resolutions, detox is really a big topic. And we hear about it. It’s in books, on social media and, really, I think I would love to hear from you, like, what is your perspective on detox and what truly is detox?
00:00:26
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
I know Christine, it’s a great question. There are so many books about detox and you do this kind of cleanse and this kind of colonic, and this kind of herbal product, but you don’t really as often really see a deep discussion. What does detox mean? Does detox really happen?
Detoxing is a Fundamental Function of Our Body
So actually detoxification is one of the most fundamental functions of our body. We detoxify constantly all the time. Our detox is how we come to this world. The first thing we do when we come to this world, when a baby does is they exhale, they cry, they let go. The last thing we do when we die is we exhale. We let our air go out. We are defined by a process of detoxification of letting go. If we look at detoxification and the reason why I want to go deeper into this, because my approach, philosophy, practice, the way I formulate, I try to have a deep, profound understanding the relationship between us, between our cells, and the environment, the planet, the solar system, and the universe.
Detoxing Affects our Cells, Bodies, Communities, and World
00:01:35
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
From there, I take it into the cellular level, the biochemistry level, the organ function, how it affects our emotions, how it affects our physical body. That’s a depth of detox and it gets lost in the details. Do we do detox by ketogenic diet? Do we do a vegetarian diet? These are details, but we lost the roots. So the roots are understanding detoxification.
Detoxification happened at the level of our planet. We need to detoxify carbon dioxide. We’re not able to detoxify enough carbon dioxide. What do we get? We get global warming, which is inflammation on a planetary level. Then we go closer. We can have a detox on a nationwide level. You know, there’s not enough. Detoxification. People get more upset. People get angrier, there’s more divisiveness, we get more problems, and inflammatory issues on a political, geopolitical level. We come more to what this discussion is about.
Detoxing for Health
00:02:40
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
What is detox on our health level. We get detoxification of our whole body in relationship to the outside, we get detoxification of the organs in relationship to the whole system. We’ve got the relationship between the tissue and the circulation, all the way to detox on the level of the cell. Because the smallest independent, you need to know a body is a cell. The cell has a membrane. The cell is a coating and the cell decides what comes in and what goes out.
What goes out from a cell is the detoxification process of the cell. Now that we start looking at detox at this level, we say, okay, now I can see how things are starting to connect. If we look at the body, how’s the body detoxify through the skin, just like a cell has a membrane. You detoxify through the urination. If you toxify through bowel movements, detoxify through the breath.
What we Need to Detox From
00:03:41
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
Every time we exhale, we let go of carbon dioxide. If we look at what affects us, we are affected by physical things, like eating poisonous things or consuming heavy metals or eating unhealthy foods. We are affected by emotions. If we get very upset, if we get very angry to affect our physiology, if we are happy, we are very relaxed. We are affected by our psychology and we are affected by our mental function. All of these factors that will affect the detoxification process affect us all the way to the cellular level.
How Detoxing works in the Body
Now we understand the importance of detoxification. If you ask me, what is the most prevalent process in the body? It is detoxification from a time point of view, how do we know? We look at our breath. We take twice the time to exhale, then it takes to inhale. If we look at our lungs, our main detoxification organ, that lets go all the time, right? If it stops working for a few minutes, we are dead.
00:04:50
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
We can block the skin. We can have no bowel movements for a few days, but if our lungs don’t work, we did. If we look at the lungs and we disconnect the muscles of the lungs, the tendency of the lung is to collapse to let go to detoxify. Once it detoxifies, then with effort, we can take a deep breath and we can all try it.
Right. Now try to take a deep breath. Okay, now relax. Now take out all your air. Now take a deep breath. Much easier can feel the difference because you detoxified before the breath. I call it detoxification, nourishment, and transformation. Now, this is not like new age terms. This is how the cell functions. It lets go of things. It absorbed things. During this process, it creates a transformative process where for example, a sugar, a carbohydrate is transformed into an amino acid and vis versa.
00:05:57
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
Or a new enzyme is created because of a message from the DNA and RNA. This is a transformative quality of our life. The transformation happens on a chemical level, but really transformation is our life journey to grow, to use life consequences, to transform and grow. All of these are the process of detox. So it gives you a taste. It tastes tiny tastes in three, four minutes. What it means to detoxify it like, wow, right? I mean, so there’s so many aspects to it beyond just what to eat and how to do.
Detoxing isn’t a Juice Cleanse
00:06:35
Interviewer
I always look at it. Like you hear people saying, I’m going to do a three-day juice fast or I’m going to do, some detox program and, or a detox kit. It always seems to me like, there’s this idea of detox being an external aspect of us, right. Of we are. We forget that we have this amazing machinery within our bodies that, detox is happening.
From your perspective, we have all these different programs that are out there. There’s this need though for obviously like detox to be a part of our everyday life. Like what you’re saying is this is part of our system. Why do you think there’s this separation or this idea that detox is happening to a person like I’m gonna do a detox as opposed to I am detoxing and I’m going to support that. Can you kind of speak to the differences of maybe the philosophy of detox versus what it should?
00:07:37
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
I think that it’s part of a culture that we move so fast. We are very interested in our culture, in adjectives. For example, people are more interested in how they look then, how they feel inside, right? People will spend a fortune to look better, but when they take the time to really figure out why am I feeling what I’m feeling? Because it’s part of the culture of the pace. We really haven’t taken the time to understand what detox means. What I’m giving here is no is a tip of the iceberg of how profound it is because detox per definition is letting go of something from the past. Because anything that we release per definition if we release something we had it before we released it. Detoxification’s basic movement is letting go of things from the past. This happens all the time and it happens automatically on the cellular level, but there is a value to these special detox programs.
00:08:36
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
Because during this time we bring our awareness to the idea that we are letting go of something. Instead of doing it in blaming, like I am detoxifying my liver, everybody’s detoxifying the liver, poor liver. We throw all our stuff on the liver. It’s actually a common flaw in Chinese medicine. It’s very difficult to understand the liver. Maybe if we live time, we’ll talk about it. You don’t understand something, we get stuck in it and we blame everything on it. The liver is a magical organ and we can talk about it. First, when you start to detox, you want to ask yourself, what do I want to detox? I want to detox a certain trauma? They want to detox a bad relationship. Do I want to detox my tendency to get upset? Do I want to detox the heavy metals that I got when I was somewhere in the world?
Detoxing needs to be Stressfree to Work
00:09:27
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
You kind of become conscious of what you want to let go of because what happens when we have it in our mental level, it’s already penetrating into our cellular level. That’s the beauty of it all. Because our body has mechanisms all the way. Of course, to the cellular level, that function, at a state of survival, or fight, and function at times. We are very relaxed and very open. The detoxification process, you want to do it, not from a sense of crisis, because if we do it from a sense of crisis, we already have oxidative stress in the body. We already have lactic acid. We already have an abnormal cellular function. And then detox will not work with.
00:10:14
Interviewer
What would be an example. You say not to do it from a state of crisis. What would be an example of that? Like somebody who’s sick or already.
00:10:23
Dr Isaac Eliaz
Yeah. That’s actually a very interesting, that’s a very good point that you bring that’s exactly the direction. For example, somebody who cures a patient with going through chemotherapy and needs to get rid of their chemotherapy byproducts and the byproducts of the dying cells. You don’t want to create an extra detox for them and have their cells dump more toxins into the system. They will have enough of a hard time detoxifying. We can talk about it more when we talk about the concept of discharging elimination, which is a big part of detox. I think, stepping back, once we get a sense of the profound city of detox, then we have to look at the relationship between detoxification on the cellular level, on a tissue level, on an organ level, and on the whole body level.
How are we Blocking our Bodies Natural Detoxing Processes
00:11:14
Interviewer
I wanted to just talk about the idea of like nature, abhors, a vacuum, right? And so lately there’s been this whole movement with Marie Kondo. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book, the life-changing magic of tidying up. It’s like releasing of material possessions and all of that. So it’s like kind of similar. In the body, like what, when someone is not detoxing, when they’re not supporting that process and their systems are becoming like, what are they not allowing in? What is that actually locking on an emotional, on a physical level? Like why is it so important that we detox so that we have, what are we missing when we don’t do that?
00:12:00
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
Well, when we deotx, we create space. If you want to clean your closet and it’s full of clothes and you want to reorganize your closet, so it’s more efficient. There’s no way you can put clothes in when all the clothes are inside, you take everything out and then you find out the 30% of the stuff you really don’t need anymore, you just had no time to throw it away. You either throw it away, which is detoxification. You see, I will take it to one of the Goodwill organizations where it will be used when somebody else can use them. Right. It’s a transformative action. When you don’t get rid of it, you have somebody else use it, right? That’s an example. Now you have room in your closet, right? So now you organize everything and Oh my God, you put everything. It was, there’ll before plus another 20%.
Detoxification, Transformation, and then you can Heal
00:12:52
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
And you get 30% empty space. How because it was better organized. So this is what detox does. It reorganizes the space in order to do it, just like I defined it. It’s detoxification, transformation and then you can do the healing. I used my meditation and healing retreat is to call them detoxification. We create this space. We create this space by literally creating space. And transformation, when you have space, you can transform this space. Once you do it, then healing happens because you get more efficiency.
Why do you get more efficiency? Because there is more space when there’s more space from a simple physics. If you put the same stuff in more space, there’s less pressure. There’s less friction. There’s less friction. When there’s less inflammation in the tissues they last for a longer period of time. You can see how very esoteric or big picture principles boil down all the way to physiology.
Detoxing Creates Space in the Body
00:13:59
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
The beauty here is that these principles then follow into the cells. As the cell is taking a pathway, which is more leisurely, which has most space. Or they’re taking a pathway of crisis when there is no space. This is, so this woman, this idea is, yeah, it’s very basic. It’s in, you’ll see it in many cultures, in many religions, in many philosophers, but what is space? Space is a certain distance. And how we do, we define distance. That’s really important for understanding detox and healing. Distance is a result of speed and time. Okay, So when we take a deep breath, when we relax, we feel more spacious, right? I use the term, you use the term, how many, all the time I feel more spacious. What do you mean? You feel more spacious? Your space is still the same.
00:14:58
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
It means that your distance between two thoughts between two feelings between two breaths has gotten bigger. You took more time to move from one place to another because you’re moving slower and you get a sense of any more inner space. This is the first step in detox. This is why the first step in healing is slowing down. In Chinese medicine, one of the common mistakes is that when people are weak, they are deficient as Chinese doctors say they will try to strengthen them. If you ask the patient, it either doesn’t work it where it all, or it works for a very short time. If they took this patient in the slower, their energy down, then the patient gets a sense of having more abundance because whatever they have is moving slower. We slow down things, we create space. Part of the detox process is to slow down by taking in less food, right by being well-hydrated so things can move well.
Using Detoxing Principles in Meditation
00:16:03
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
By exercising and moving and sleeping more. We create more space for the process to happen. For example, when I teach, when I integrated detox into my open heart medicine retreat into meditation and healing, right? The first thing we learn, the first meditation is to slow down, to create a space. We create the space between, so the space can be like throwing away things. There’s a materialistic point of view because we can understand this right, the materialistic. If you think about it, there’s also a space between two thoughts. If we have a bunch of thoughts, touching each other in the circle in a circle, I draw it often. You don’t see what’s, there’s no space between the thoughts. And now you meditate. The basic, like Shamatha calm abiding meditation. We look, let’s say we need support. We look down with our eyes, with our breath, with our focus and just everything slows down.
The Body and Mind Store Things that we may need to Detox
00:17:01
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
The distractions go down and we feel spacious, and then the thoughts become less sticky. We get a space between the thoughts. What happens, stuff comes from a deeper layer, either amazing meditation experiences, or negative thoughts, or traumas. They come to a conscious, wow, where did we get these when they were always in our body. So that’s what you asking, what we are putting in. We are putting our negative feelings or out or different. We are putting other things that are physical now, where do we store things? When we don’t have room for them, and we don’t want them to make noise, we will store them in places where we know we can keep them in the closet for a long time, right? Just like in the imaging of the closet, you realize you had things you didn’t need, but until he opened the closet, you didn’t know.
The Body Likes to Store Toxins in Fatty Tissues
00:17:57
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
Theoretically, they could have stayed in this closet for the rest of your life. So we’ll go in the body will store the things in tissue that we don’t have to use a lot, which are these tissues? Fatty tissues, because they fit. We don’t use fats for metabolism very often. When somebody is losing weight, when they’re on a diet or they go on a ketogenic diet and just start utilizing the fats, they need to know that they’re going to be flushed with toxins.
They have to be able to deal with them. That’s an example. That’s what happens, right? So when you do a detox, right? Like if you’ve been in my clinic, you see, I work, my patients do not get crisis during detox. Do you think about a healing crisis? The detox crisis is just an excuse for not doing it. Right. I don’t see this kind of thing in my clinic. I can see it in an intense retreat when I’m pushing it very quickly, because it’s a closed environment.
00:18:47
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
We look at it and we now go into the cell, because eventually remember we said, it goes all the way to the cell, right? So if everything is spacious, the body’s insulin receptors are working well. The body knows that it’s not in a state of crisis of survival. The genes, for example, that regulate and suppress the possibility of a cell turning into a cancer cell is selling survival mode, P 53. We get stimulation to something called amp K adenosine monophosphate kinase, which produces energy with the use of oxygen. When this happens, this pathway blocks, something called MP1 and also blocks other another compound called AJF protein. Hypoxia inducing factors AJF is a factor that turns on when we feel like we don’t have oxygen. When we don’t have oxygen, either we don’t breathe or we feel that we don’t breathe we’re in a crisis.
00:19:54
Dr. Isaac Eliaz
Right. That’s what I mean. Now into MP1 is blocked the enzyme called PDK pyruvate, dehydrogenase, kinase, that blocks PDH is blocked, and then the mitochondria functions normally.
