The Philosophy and Art of Healthful Living

What is Natural Hygiene?

Natural Hygiene is the art and philosophical science of living healthfully in accord with our natural heritage. Natural Hygiene, literally the philosophical science of health, embodies those principles which guide us to correct living practices. Our biological nature, i.e., the make-up (structure, function and living essence) of our bodies, determine our needs and how we should meet them. Health is our natural state of being. Disease processes (or illnesses) are perfectly natural responses enacted by the body for the purpose of detoxifying, rebalancing, adapting to harmful influences and healing. The condition of health (or wellness) is only achieved by living healthfully, i.e., satisfying our mental/emotional/physiological/spiritual needs.

Natural Hygiene, or Healthful Living, is about enhancing physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being through education and right living. It provides us with a simple, wholistic, living awareness system for regaining and maintaining superb human health and beauty. Hygiene is personally empowering and liberating. It teaches independence and rational action. It banishes fear and ignorance regarding human health and how to keep it. Ultimately it is about freedom.

Natural Hygiene is the exploration of all the elements and influences upon health we can examine to improve our lives and keep realizing our innate potential. Certain truths and natural laws apply to all humanity. Other aspects may be considered flexible guidelines which should be modified to best suit each individual. Studying and systemizing these natural laws and guidelines, so that we can be intelligently guided by them...this is our aim. That which is in accordance with nature's laws is truly scientific. That which seeks to manipulate or bend natural laws is unscientific.

Natural Hygiene always refers to nature as its mentor and teacher. When wholistic, comprehensive understanding is required, one must refer back to nature in her pristine majesty as the final authority. Because present-day life seems to be losing touch with those conditions which made life possible, Natural Hygiene brings us "back to the garden," so to speak. We should strive to meet life's requirements, and to smoothly balance them in all aspects so that we can easily lead a joyous and fulfilling existence.

Natural Hygiene concerns itself with those principles and truths applicable to human life so that we may wisely apply them to our lives. We are of the firm conviction that only by hygienic living can we realize the loftiest joys, peace of mind and blissful connection with all of creation which is our birthright.

Animals in nature are creatures of instinct. Following the guidance of instinct, they are correctly self-directed to meet their needs. They thrive optimally in accord with their environmental and genetic possibilities. Discovering and attuning to our natural instincts is part and parcel of Natural Hygiene. Our inborn guiding instincts always tend toward healthful and constructive living, when they are unclouded and given proper attention. It is ignorance of our instincts and the laws of life that creates our sickness and suffering.

In presenting the concept that health is normal and natural, Natural Hygienists emphatically refute the idea that disease is inevitable in our lives. We contend that disease will not occur unless there is sufficient cause. Health maintenance is an unceasing process in every organism. When the organism is overwhelmed by toxic substances beyond its ability to eliminate them in normal course, the body institutes emergency action to effect expulsion of the toxic burden. This crisis is called sickness or disease. Toxic materials accumulate in the body from two sources: 1) from unexpelled body wastes that are endogenously generated as a normal part of our metabolism, and 2) from exogenous materials ingested and partially or wholly retained due to inability to cope with the eliminative load.

We must eliminate the dead weight of false knowledge and ideas that we carry with us each moment. Using treatments, drugs, herbs, or anything else abnormal and unnatural to the body can interfere with healthful body functions but, under no circumstances can these agencies heal the body. Because these devitalizing agencies depress and suppress symptoms (or evidences) of body healing efforts, and because the body discontinues vital activities to contend with these agencies, which makes the symptoms disappear, the anti-vital effects of drugs and treatments are mistaken for healing effects. Nothing but the body can heal itself.

Disease is instituted by the body itself as an emergency measure to purify and repair itself. Modalities (treatments or therapies that involve drugs, herbs, manipulations, or other infringements upon the vital domain) cannot possibly assist the body. On the contrary, they interfere with vital body purification and reparative functions and normal body functions as well. Such interference poses additional problems for the body to cope with, thereby further lowering the body vitality. Body vitality may be lowered so much by the greater danger presented by the drugs or modalities that the original disease effort, which is actually an effort to purify the body, is discontinued in favor of devoting available energies to the more virulent enemy, the drugs within. That is why medical physicians are called allopaths. That is why there is so much "iatrogenic disease," meaning disease caused by treatments.

Allopath literally means opposite disease. In theory they strive to displace the original disease by creating a heteropathic or opposite disease. Actually all physicians succeed in doing is to create additional disease. The original problem remains while the body must redirect its energies partly or wholly to removing the more dangerous drugs, herbs, or so-called medicines. Thus symptoms of the original disease disappear (or are suppressed and masked) because the necessary energy and vitality to further conduct the disease is now lacking. Yet the body is in graver danger than before it was treated from both the uneliminated toxic accumulations and the added toxicity of drugs or other substances administered.

The best way to help the body in disease is to "intelligently do nothing" and simultaneously establish conditions of health-conditions that enable the body to devote all its vitality to the healing crisis. A thoroughgoing rest under tranquil circumstances constitutes a healing environment, for it permits full devotion of body energies to the emergency task.

The body is always acting intelligently and correctly. The body is ALWAYS acting appropriately based on the conditions with which it must contend. We can interfere with its operations, but we cannot possibly help it other than by furnishing the normal needs of life consonant with existing body conditions.

The elements for optimal well-being are listed as follows:

1. pure air,
2. pure water,
3. cleanliness-both internal and external
4. sleep
5. temperature maintenance
6. pure wholesome food to which we are biologically adapted
7. exercise and activity
8. sunshine upon our bodies
9. rest and relaxation
10. play and recreation
11. emotional poise
12. security of life and its means
13. pleasant environment
14. creative, useful work
15. self-mastery
16. belonging
17. motivation
18. expression of the natural instincts
19. indulgence of aesthetic senses
20. love
By living hygienically, or healthfully, we are enabled to rejuvenate and reach our full health potential.

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