Age Less / Live More

In episode 76 Lucas speaks with Ike Allen, founder of Avaiya, filmmaker, philosopher and creator of Super Shrink Me, a film where Ike eats junk food for 30 days and he does just fine. In our Q & A we get answers to, yoga and boxing, downward facing dog technique, best time of day for yoga and so much more. The nutritional tip has to do with: reverse vegetarianism. Listen to learn more about all that stuff.

Welcome to the Yoga Talk Show. Your one-stop destination for all things yoga, health and wellness.

Welcome to the Yoga Talk Show. Your one-stop destination for all things yoga, health and wellness.

Lucas: Welcome to the Yoga Talk Show, your one-stop destination for all things yoga, health and wellness. So hello and welcome, everyone. This is Lucas Rockwood, and I'm here today with Nick Polizzi, who is the creator of Sacred Science and he was also heavily involved with Simply Raw, two films that most of you are probably very familiar with. And if you're not familiar with them, you'll be familiar with them very soon. I met Nick about a year ago in New York city at a conference, and it's really interesting. There's kind of frontline people and then behind the scenes people, and it's interesting because the behind the scenes people do a lot of the heavy lifting and a lot of the conceptual work and so it was really interesting and exciting for me to meet Nick, who was involved in the film Simply Raw, which already had a huge impact on me and my life and on a lot of our listeners' lives as well. In any case, Nick's going to be talking to us today about his wild adventures in alternative health, raw food, herbal medicine and medicinal healing. So thanks for joining us, Nick. Nick: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Lucas: So as we're having this chat, you're right in the middle of a big launch of Sacred Silence, which is a film that you shared with me about a year ago. And for people who are listening who have never heard of anything kind of off the wall, medicine man, healers, (01:23) give us an overview of what that whole project was all about. Nick: So just going back to Simply Raw, I've been involved in a couple films before The Sacred Silence, and both of them were about alternative healing strategies. One is the Tapping Solution that's all about meridian points and tapping on different spots on your upper torso while going through traumatic events from your past and releasing pain that way, which is more of a Chinese medicine style. Then Simply Raw came along, and that was more of a nutrition-based, super food-based film. As we made those movies, while we were interviewing the different experts that you saw in each of those, (02:05) it felt like a lot of them, when we asked them about the origins of their teaching, were turning to more indigenous practices, in particular Shamanism. So we kind of took note of it, but when we were making those films you kind of keep your eye on the ball and keep creating the film that you're making. But I was really curious about Shamanism by the time I had finished making those two films, or being involved in those two films. So once those films were out, the next project for me was, hey let's at least take a look at Shamanism, figure out what it's all about. And we sort of scoured the globe for the most Shamanic-rich cultures, and the Amazon has one of the most, if not the most, dense percentage of Shamans per capita on the planet. So we went down to the jungle, started doing some research. Not only is there a really thriving culture of Shamanism, medicine man, I'm not sure if your viewers are familiar with this idea of the indigenous healer. (03:14) The Shaman is somebody who plays the role of both the priest, the healer and the wisdom keeper in any given tribe. If you look into different parts of the world, most indigenous cultures have a Shamanic-type structure, where there isn't really a government, there isn't really a -- what interested us most about the Amazon was that not only does it have a very rich lineage of healing in a lot of the remote cultures that live within the jungle, (03:50) but the jungle itself is home to over 44,000 species of plants, less than 3% of which have been studied by modern medicine for their medicinal value. So we thought to ourselves, okay so on one hand we have what we're looking for. There are amazing medicine men, medicine women in this culture that are doing incredible work, but on top of that they have the benefit of a pharmacopeia of amazing healing plants that haven't been studied by modern medicine yet. That's what led us down to the jungle, and that's what pretty much culminated in the film, The Sacred Science. Lucas: So you're this guy and (04:25) what makes you want to make movies about energy healing, about raw food, about medicine men? Most independent filmmakers are making movies about two disturbed teenagers wandering across the Brooklyn Bridge and things like this. What prompted you to do this? Did you have a health crisis in your life? Is there a health crisis in somebody else's life? Is it just something that's always fascinated you? Nick: I never really knew what it was until at one of the film festivals we were in, during the Q&A it just popped out and I realized that that was probably what it was. I realized what it was. (04:59) I was hit by lightening when I was 16, and it's really interesting how we a lot of times forget or compartmentalize and disregard some of the significant things that have happened to us in our life as just being, 'Oh, that can't possibly be contributing to where I am now.' But once I got hit