May I Be Frank? Stunning new film documents the food-powered life transformation of a 54-year-old Brooklyn man
July 27, 2011 by Health Blogger
Filed under Organic Foods
(NaturalNews) Meet Frank Ferrante – a boisterous 54-year-old Sicilian from Brooklyn, NY, living in San Francisco. Frank has a love of great food, beautiful women and a good time, but he is also a former drug and alcohol addict, overweight, and fighting Hepatitis C. Estranged from his daughter, Frank is suffering from depression, has been single for many years, is taking a long list of prescription drugs just to manage his sickness symptoms. Frank’s instincts tell him life can get much better than this, but he doesn’t know where to begin. His zest for living has been diminished by his health issues, self-loathing and disconnect from himself and his family. And yet… Frank’s life is about to be profoundly reconstructed by 3 young men from Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco who decide to make his positive metamorphosis their personal quest. “May I Be Frank” is a documentary about the radical transformation of Frank Ferrante’s life. Using a healing plan based on a raw vegan diet, positive affirmations, spiritual practices, holistic health methods, and unconditional support and love, the boys foster Frank’s courageous transformation, helping him reinvent his health, his weight, his relationships, his view of himself and the world, and eventually assist him in learning to love again. The full documentary of Frank’s amazing journey of transformation is now available through NaturalNews.TV. See the video trailer at: http://premium.naturalnews.tv/May_I_Be_Frank__NN.htm Frank’s path to wellness Frank’s journey begins at Cafe Gratitude , a mostly raw, vegan, organic local cafe in San Francisco. At Cafe Gratitude, Frank finds a retreat from his suffering and oppressive personal life, quickly establishing a fast friendship with the compassionate staff who in return takes a compassionate interest in him and his life. One day he is asked the question of the day by Ryland, one of the servers – “what is one thing you want to do before you die?” – and Frank replies “I want to fall in love one more time, but no one will love me looking the way I do.” Drawn to the prospect of helping Frank, Ryland invites him to return to the cafe every day for the next month. Ryland and two other young men from the cafe, his brother Cary and best friend Conor, decide to personally take on Frank’s healing process, establishing a 42-day contract with the goal of his eventual mental, physical, and spiritual renewal. All Frank has to do is put his life into the hands of the 3 young men and trust them to guide his total transformation, the entirety of which is filmed and documented. Frank’s health quest is a testimonial to the power and life-changing abilities of healthy organic food, good community, and true determination. By eating only organic, raw food, visiting local holistic practitioners, getting weekly colonics, practicing gratitude and being loved and encouraged by himself and these 3 compassionate young men committed to his healing, Frank’s life is truly transformed in just 42 days. “May I be Frank” shows the four men going on the ride of a lifetime as Frank is given not only a new body, but a renewed mind, wide open heart and a rejuvenated spirit. It’s one of the most amazing and inspiring life transformations I’ve seen, and yet it’s also readily available to everyone! Because by watching this documentary, you’ll come to the same realization I did: If Frank can do it, so can I. (And so can you!) Watch the amazing video trailer at: http://premium.naturalnews.tv/May_I_Be_Frank__NN.htm
Heal yourself in 15 days with the "Attitude of Gratitude" (part twelve)
March 18, 2010 by Health Blogger
Filed under Organic Foods
(NaturalNews) So far in this 15-day self healing series, we’ve talked about healing yourself through many innovative methods that help protect you from threats to your health while activating the inner healing potential you already possess. Today, in part twelve of this series, we’re going to explore the power of gratitude in accelerating your healing even further. This isn’t some etheric, touchy-feely self-help exercise, by the way: there is a very real healing effect that is initiated in your body when you express gratitude towards people or things outside of yourself. Some of this effect can be measured biochemically, while other aspects of it are currently beyond scientific measurement. But the bottom line is irrefutable: Expressing gratitude initiates a powerful healing effect in your own mind and body. What do you have to be happy about? Getting to this gratitude, however, isn’t always so easy. Being able to genuinely express gratitude requires you to shift your focus away from the things that are negative and toward those things that you feel thankful for. And as you already know, it’s very easy to forget to be thankful for all the amazing things we experience on a daily basis. Many of us living in western society tend to focus on what we don’t have. We think we don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough time, we don’t have the partner we’re looking for and so on. And in that exercise — which can frankly dominate our day-to-day thinking if we’re not careful — we tend to ignore those amazing things we do have. So the more we can step back and examine what we already experience that’s valuable to us, the more we can focus on gratitude and the more we can accelerate our own inner healing as a result. Here’s a list of some of the things for which you may find plenty of gratitude: • Your health. Even if it isn’t perfect, you may be thankful for the health you have. • Your family. • Your freedoms (freedom of speech, etc.) • Your intelligence, consciousness and awareness. • Your memories! (Life without memories would be bizarre…) • Sunshine and nature — the great outdoors. • Food and seeds, some of the many remarkable gifts from Mother Nature. • Your job, business or career which provides the income you need. • Your inquisitiveness and desire to learn new things. • A spiritual awakening, or realization or philosophy that you follow. • Your pets / animal companions. In fact, if you think about, there are probably a great many things for which you can feel great gratitude — the small plants in your window sill, the knowledge about health that you’ve accumulated through reading, and even the fact that the sun will indeed come up tomorrow. Take a few moments and think about what you are thankful for. You may even wish to take a few minutes to jot down some notes for yourself. Set aside just 60 seconds a day With your list of those things you are thankful for, I’d like to invite you to set aside just one minute per day (or more, if you wish) to review that list, to verbalize your gratitude and to really take in your thankfulness for those things that you do have. Literally say it out loud: “I am thankful for the garden in my back yard and the opportunity to grow a small portion of my own food” for example. In just 60 seconds per day, if practiced daily, you will create an attitude of gratitude which will brighten your mood and uplift your day-to-day experience of life because it allows you to refocus your attention on those things you appreciate rather than those things you might despise. And this, as I hinted at earlier, will result in a very real physiological and biochemical healing effect within your own body. How gratitude becomes self-healing Every type of energy that you express to someone else is reflected in your own inner experience. So if you express hatred toward some other person or subject matter, there is an element of that energy that is also expressed internally in that moment. To hate someone else is to subject yourself to some reflection of that own hate, in other words. At the same time, to love something else — or to express thankfulness towards it — causes a reflection of that positive energy to be felt inside yourself, too. So the mere act of expressing gratitude is a form of self-healing. As a person who has written both positive and negative stories for many years, I am acutely aware of this dynamic. When I write negative stories for NaturalNews (critical stories), the energy that is reflected back is often negative in its tone, especially from the parties being criticized. But when I write positive stories, the energy that’s reflected back to me is very positive. You might wonder why, then, I still write some negative stories. The answer is that from time to time there are some injustices that are so extreme that I feel a need to expose them publicly even though I pay a personal price in terms of reflected negative energy. Even then, you’ve probably noticed a shift over the last several months where more stories here on NaturalNews are oriented toward the positive, because that’s what I much prefer to write about. In fact, when there’s an opportunity to write a positive story or do a positive product review, I actually feel a great sense of gratitude simply from the opportunity to do that. And that makes me feel good, too. So I’m practicing the same gratitude dynamics that I’m describing here in this article. What’s interesting about all this is something the Buddhists will tell you: In terms of self healing, it doesn’t really matter what you express gratitude towards — the positive feedback and effects on your own healing are still present. You could find a rock on a dirt path and express gratitude toward the rock and you’d still receive a measurable benefit from it. You can, in fact, express gratitude towards any thing or any person in the world — even if such gratitude is not necessarily justified — and still experience the benefits of that gratitude in your own mental and physical healing. This even works if you express gratitude towards larger concepts like “life” or “God” or “the universe.” Anger cannot coexist with gratitude Anger is a very destructive emotion because it causes stress, adrenal depletion and tension throughout the body. But you can learn to replace anger (or other negative emotions) with gratitude, and anger cannot coexist with gratitude . In this way, gratitude can begin to nudge out the other negative emotions you might be experiencing. This doesn’t mean you have to run around blindly thankful for everything without discerning times when criticism or anger might be called for, but the more you can find the gratitude in everyday things , the more you’ll activate and support your body’s inner healing processes. So start today and rediscover those things you feel gratitude towards. Express that gratitude either silently or verbally and enjoy the experience of that positive energy being reflected back at you. Previous articles in this 15-day “Heal Yourself” series Part One – Remove barriers to healing http://www.naturalnews.com/028053_self_healing_quality_of_life.html Part Two – Unleash your inner healing potential http://www.naturalnews.com/028060_self_healing_immune_system.html Part Three – You are what you absorb http://www.naturalnews.com/028067_self_healing_digestion.html Part Four – Transform your health by making new blood http://www.naturalnews.com/028075_blood_health_transformation.html Part Five – Experience the healing potential of living plant juices http://www.naturalnews.com/028100_self_healing_fresh_juice.html Part Six – Accelerate your healing with a 24-hour fast http://www.naturalnews.com/028117_self_healing_fasting.html Part Seven – Heal yourself by rejecting the mainstream crowd http://www.naturalnews.com/028136_self_healing_crowd_psychology.html Part Eight – Stop making disease http://www.naturalnews.com/028153_self_healing_disease.html Part Nine – Correct your nature deficiency http://www.naturalnews.com/028203_nature_deficiency_self_healing.html Part Ten – Protect your skin exposures http://www.naturalnews.com/028249_skin_health_consumer_products.html Part Eleven – Eat MORE, not less http://www.naturalnews.com/028298_superfoods_self_healing.html