Chris James - Mind Body Cleanse The 12 Day Plan to Heal Your Body and Re-Energise Your Mind

The perfect antidote for stressed and busy lives, Chris Jamess unique holistic plan will restore energy, acuity and cleanse your whole body, starting with the seat of all health the gut.

Featuring:

• Vegan menu plans, delicious cleansing recipes and juices
• How to use mindfulness to help you focus on your bodys specific needs
• Simple yoga poses targeted to improve digestion and stimulate your lymphatic system

In just 12 days youll feel lighter, brighter and glowing with health.

CHRIS JAMES is a world-renowned wellness expert, and the celebrities go-to man for a rejuvenated body and mind. Chris is a British Wheel of Yoga-certified teacher and has trained, lived and practised across India. His 12 Day Cleanse range is stocked in Harrods, EF Medispa, Wholefoods and Naturisimo. Mind Body Cleanse is Chriss first book.

Any references to writing in this book refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.

I dedicate this book to my late father, Phillip, and my mother, Vivian.

For the spiritual warrior
The act of surrender
Consummates a victory
And nothing important is lost

K. BRADFORD BROWN

I WAS TOLD not to move. Men encircled me in white coats. I could hear my sisters voice. She was crying beside me. My head had been masking-taped to the hospital bed and I was unable to move my body.

My neck was broken at C2 and C3, dislocated at C3 and C4. One of the men in white coats informed me that if I moved my head and neck I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. My spinal column was resting on an open fracture, the equivalent of a piece of string on a razor blade; one false move and that could have been it. In this moment I came face to face with my own entombment.

Then, in the morphine-induced din, the events of the previous evening began to piece themselves back together. In A&E I was watching myself watch reality. I was back in the grocers shop, before the first blow had been struck. I was inside the shop, admiring the incredible array of colours from the confectionery counter. A muffled laughter. Then I was walking up to the grocers shop with my sister, linking arms, busily chatting before it all happened. And then silence. I couldnt see anything for the film of blood that separated me from reality.

I pleaded. I was in a vice-like grip. I was terribly confused. What had I done? Why was this man so furious with me? What had I done to him? Why was he beating me?

Please no more, I said.

And then something beautiful happened, unexpectedly. As I started to slip away, everything went quiet.

The beating had come to a premature end. And before that tap on the shoulder, I remember thinking how sorry I felt for my unmoving, juiceless body that I saw lying on the floor from above.

Suddenly, I was able to run out of the shop. I bolted outside into a sea of noise, police sirens and ambulance lights. I held my head above my shoulders in the palms of my hand and ran.

Can you hear me, Mr James? somebody asked.

In the years leading up to the assault, I had been living and practising yoga and meditation in India, enjoying a lifestyle that some might think quite unorthodox. I bought antique textiles in Gujarat and Rajasthan and other parts of India. I also designed simple block-print and screen-print sarongs and blankets. In the summer months I sold my wares on the Portobello Road. The stall told a story of adventure and people loved it.

I lived in an old green miners bus, which I had rescued from an embankment along the Thames in south-west London. I spent the next month making her roadworthy, while my mechanic, Fabrice, taught me how to bypass the fuel line while smoking Gitanes.

The axles were not quite straight so the minibus drove at a slight angle. And from the minibus roof, a chimney protruded out of a wood-burning stove. This was my dream, a real gypsy wagon. I will never forget the look on my fathers face when I drove the minibus home. As if all of the thousands of pounds spent on my education had gone up in a cloud of gypsy smoke.

Like this I followed the sun for a few years.

I came into contact with yoga and meditation mainly through curiosity. In India, I was amazed at the enthusiasm with which other Western travellers spoke about yoga. This new world sounded so wonderfully exotic, this was exactly what I was looking for! On a textiles-buying mission in the Himalaya, as I passed through Rishikesh, I went to find a course and a teacher to help guide me.

In the years that followed, I practised yoga and meditation diligently, sometimes for as long as nine hours each day. In retrospect, the time that I spent devoted to the practice of yoga and meditation had been time well spent. The senior orthopedic surgeon later asked me if my spinal column was made of concrete!

In intensive care, I allowed myself to feel my own pain, the full weight of the assault weighing down upon my shoulders; I was powerless, finally. And thats where it happened. I surrendered, but in a way that I had never really surrendered before.

From that day forward I was completely present, in a way that I had never been present in my life before. I felt enriched from my experience.

My neck was rebuilt with bone from my hip, screws and titanium plates. From the moment I was told my prognosis, I knew that I had to win my life back. So, I used all of the breathing, visualisation and meditation techniques that I had learned, and I successfully brought the intelligence back into my body. It was a marathon, of sorts, but when you are determined to win, nothing can stop you.

The medical staff could not believe how quickly I recovered from the assault. And I walked out of the Whittington Hospital in six weeks with a blue-and-white neck-brace collar.

While I cannot be 100 per cent sure whether my recovery can be exclusively attributed the yoga and meditation, I am quite certain that they played a significant part. I was amazed at the power of this humble teaching and I was placed in a unique position to practise it. As I regained movement, I realised that this simple practice worked, so I decided that this is what I wanted to do with my life: to teach yoga and meditation and share this gift with others.

My whole approach to wellness is based on the fundamental aspects of the practice that I discovered in India. I discovered a link between gut health, the practice of cleansing and nutrition, which together with yoga, breathing and meditation created a path for healing and an enlightened approach to being.

THIS BOOK EXPLAINS how the human machine (comprising body, mind and spirit) works in harmony and how you can use my unique detoxifying 12-Day Plan, which forms of this book, as a tool to transform your whole self. Working from our knowledge of how the gut operates in the context of the mind, body and spirit combined and how it is the lynchpin for good health, my easy-to-follow, transforming 12-Day Plan includes a challenging, enjoyable and highly rewarding combination of fasting diet, yogic exercise and breathing, meditation and a wealth of healing and health-care tips to do at home. Combined, these will help you to cleanse toxins from your gut, mitigate the effects of stress, become strong, fit and well and heal your Self, creating peak wholeness and happiness, which can have life-long effects.