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We are essentially aquatic terrain. From before we were born till the day we die, we are surrounded by and filled with water! Isabel Friend, a water expert and educator, explains why this matters. She goes over the importance of water in ancient cultures and the science behind its many benefits for us (and its amazing properties)!
Isabel also addresses how much and what kind of water to drink, how to filter and re-structure it, and how to reacquaint ourselves with it. We’ve been sold (literally sold) water that is highly industrialized and processed. It’s time to find water that is flowing and free and to integrate it into our bodies for optimal health, inside and out.
Visit Isabel’s website: waterislife.academy
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Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda.
You’ve heard of Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Pharma. I hate to break it to you, but there is also big water. Yes, water has been hijacked and commoditized, but we can reacquaint ourselves and benefit from the best, most free water out there. This is Episode 522, and our guest is Isabel Friend. Isabel is an International Ambassador of Water. She’s a Public Speaker and an Educator who seamlessly blends science and ancient traditions and to a comprehensive understanding of the role of water in and around us.
She points out in our conversation how we have industrialized water, so to speak, treating it as an inanimate object when it is actually much more than that. She explains how ancient cultures revered and related to water and appreciated it, and how science proves it is unlike any substance on the planet. She reminds us that we ourselves are essentially aquatic terrain and she ties together why this all matters, along with practical tips for how to identify the best water around us, how to hydrate properly and more.
Before we get into it, I want to invite you to become a member of the Weston A Price Foundation. We are about food, farming and the healing arts, and this is our 25th anniversary. When you become a member in 2025, you will be eligible to win some prizes. Go to WestonAPrice.org and use the code pod10 to join. It’s only $30 for the year, and this will support our important work of education, research, and activism. Twenty-five years down and many more to go. Thank you for joining hands with us.
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Welcome to the show, Isabel.
Thank you so much for having me.
Water: An Architect And An Antenna
It has been an immersive experience to be with you here in Tulum, and I’m so glad I got context for our conversation about water. One thing that you said during this retreat I attended that stood out to me was this. You said water is an architect and an antenna. Can you explain what that phrase means?
Absolutely. Water is genuinely the architect of all life. She forms the structure and the foundation of all of life. All living beings are made from water. Every single cell, every single embryo, without exception, begins its life in water. Water is the first sign of life that we look for on other planets. When you look at the arc of all of life on this planet, if believe in the scientific creation myth, that version of events as it began in the primordial soup, in the ancient primeval super ocean known as Panthalassa.
According to that creation myth, even for billions of years before vertebrates first walked on land, by learning how to carry the oceans within themselves as their own bloodstream, before that, the entire blueprint of life was oceanic. The oceans contain all of the genetic information, arcing back to the primordial suit.
I think Robert Slovak spoke about this on this podcast. He said, “All of the elements are in the ocean, they’re also in us.” Is that right?
Yes. The entire periodic table of elements is found in marine plasma and in our bodies of water as well. In fact, our blood plasma mirrors the mineral ratios of oceanic marine plasma exactly. Isotonic marine plasma. It mirrors the mineral ratios of marine plasma during the Cambrian period when vertebrates first left the ocean. The only reason we’re able to walk on land is because we carry the oceans within us.
What percentage of our bodies are water?
We often hear around 70% and that’s true by volume. Molecularly speaking, 99.89% to 99.95% of all of the molecules in your body are water. In other words, out of every 1,000 molecules in your body, 999 of them are water. We are drops of water first and foremost.
Why does everybody say 70%? Are they counting only like the external part, like the blood or something?
They’re counting volumetrically. By volume, you’re 70%. Even that is a flexible number. When you’re a baby, it’s closer to 90% and then by the time you’re elderly, it’s closer to 50%. In fact, Dr. Isha said that aging is just a process of drying out. Dr. Carly Nuday said that death of old age is basically death by dehydration. One of the primary markers of biological age is your level of hydration. It’s one of the primary ways to tell how quickly your body is actually aging.
Water is the architect because water is in us and all around us, and obviously, ancient civilizations built their homes when if they weren’t nomadic near bodies of water, right?
All of civilization has basically built itself around the stories of water, the prevalence of water, the flow patterns of water. Getting back to your original question, water is also the antenna because the blueprint for life exists in the etheric field. You could call that the Akashic records, you could call it the morphogenic field. It goes by many different names in many different cultures. Orgone energy, Odic energy, there’s basically this blueprint for the pattern of life’s perfection that exists in a non-local field surrounding everything.
Water is constantly in contact with that non-local field where those blueprints are. The architect as water has access to those blueprints and is able to do so because it is fractal in nature. When you look at the composition, especially of structured water, of crystalline water, which all living beings are not just made of regular bulk water like we find in a bottle, it’s the capacity of water to channel life force energy is directly proportional to its structure.
When we’re saying we’re made of water, that all living beings are made of water, it’s made of this specific allotrope of water that’s highly structured. That structured water does act as an antenna because for every cluster of water molecules, which is usually between 3 to 60 molecules per cluster, there are, at minimum, 440,000 panels per cluster. Each one of these panels is responsible for sensing, storing, transmitting, transducing, and amplifying frequency, vibration, light, and information.
Now that’s only the smallest that we’ve been able to measure, but if we had stronger equipment, we would be able to see that each of those panels is actually further subdivided into smaller panels ad infinitum. Water’s ability to perceive and to encode information is actually infinite. This is why numerous indigenous culture all referred to water as being this storehouse of memory and information.
What we’re finding is that water not only encodes information within her molecular structure, but also is able to interact with this non-local field or even more information and memory is stored. You could call it the Akashic field. It’s the antenna to receive and to transmit. It’s also the architect that puts that information into biological life forms.
If you had to explain this to an eight-year-old, which is me on the inside, how would you explain this concept that water, as you said, is a memory holder and a responder to what’s going on around it?
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it. I think if I were speaking to an eight-year-old, I would say that water is a mirror. You know how when you look at a pool of water, you see your face reflected? Water’s always reflecting everything in its environment. What we do to water, we do to ourselves. She’s constantly mirroring our treatment of her back to us.
When you treat water as something sacred, she shows up in a really sacred way. When you treat water as something that can even be curative or medicinal, there are countless stories from all around the world of water being incredibly curative, specific kinds of water especially. In general, the reason why most people don’t have an experience of water as being particularly special, it’s just this mundane substance, this commodity, this resource in their life rather than the source of their life is because that’s the way we see her and that’s the way we treat her typically. That’s how she shows up.
What we do to water, we do to ourselves. When you treat water as something sacred, she shows up in a sacred way.
How Water Baffles Scientists
It’s like we’ve commoditized her. I want to get to the sacred, but first I want to do a little dive into the scientific because I know you have geeked out on the subject for a number of years. Talk to us about the way in which water baffles scientists
There are over 63 water anomalies, ways that water behaves unlike any other substance on earth. These anomalies defy the laws of physics. They make no sense. For example, water’s incredible pressure. Why is the dandelion, even though it’s this delicate little being, able to push through solid concrete to grow up through the sidewalks? It’s because the water inside that dandelion can reach 400 PSI of pressure.
All of water’s incredible capacities allow it to defy the laws of Newtonian physics in order to support and create life. All of her anomalous properties allow life to happen. For example, water is the only substance that actually becomes more buoyant as it freezes. Everything else, as it freezes, becomes more dense and will sink. However, because water does the opposite, strangely, you’re able to form a layer of ice on the top of a lake so that all of the fish underneath during the winter can survive and still have liquid water to swim in. It forms this insulating layer.
There are so many strange properties of water feats of enormous surface tension. There’s something called the water bridge experiment, where, under certain conditions, water can actually have the tensile strength of steel. Just liquid water. What I find really interesting especially is the research that was done by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They found that in water’s quantum tunneling state, it’s capable of quantum feet, even at room temperature, even under normal conditions. Normally, if you want to see quantum phenomena, you need vacuum conditions. You need absolute zero temperatures.
Water was able to pass through solid walls. A water molecule couldn’t pass through solid walls. It was able to bilocate and even sexto locate. The same water molecule was able to occupy multiple locations in space at the same time. When you think about it, water is the only substance on the planet that is able to be in all phases of matter under normal conditions. It’s the only thing that you’ll be able to encounter as a solid, a liquid and a gas.
Yes. Of course, Gerald Pollock says there’s a fourth phase of water, which is the exclusion zone or the easy water, which is gelatinous. That’s the state in which it’s in our bodies as well.
Technically not a separate phase of water. It’s technically an allotrope. The fourth phase of anything is plasma, but it is an allotrope of water because it’s in a different form. It’s in a different structure. For example, if you have coal and a diamond. They’re both just carbon. The only difference between coal and a diamond is the structure of the carbon, whether it comes together in an organized repeating matrix. A crystalline matrix.
They’re both solid, they’re both the same phase but they’re allotropes of each other. I see. This is what we’re referring to with the fourth phase, so to speak. Technically, this allotrope of water behaves actually just like a crystal because it comes together in this organized repeating matrix. It has all of the same properties that a crystal has.
How We Treat Water Differently
Most of the readers, I think, are interested in how much water we should drink, how we can filter it, like we’re thinking of water, and perhaps still in those utilitarian terms and how it serves us. Talk to me a little bit about why you think we should serve and respect and relate to water differently.
Water ultimately is a conscious sentient entity. I know that might sound like a stretch for some people, but this comes from not only modern research, which I’ll get into, but also ancient indigenous wisdom. It’s only very recently in human history that we’ve begun to think of water as an inanimate object. Pretty much all of our ancestors throughout time and every indigenous culture had great reverence and great respect for water. They interacted with water in reciprocal and communicative ways.
This allowed them to live harmoniously on the planet and be able to care for and tend to their water resources in a way that allowed humanity to thrive for 200,000 years, before we got to this point where we started treating water as a resource instead of the source. She’s begun drying up because we no longer have an understanding of the hydrological cycle as being just like the water cycle within our body.
When we don’t look at water as a living organism, we start to treat it as an inanimate entity that’s just like treating the body as a corpse. Of course, when we do that, our health will suffer. The health of the hydrological cycle is suffering. As a result, the climate is suffering. It’s so important not only individually to treat water with enormous respect and gratitude because she can provide incredible insights into our own lives. An incredible foray into our spiritual life as well.
When we do not look at water as a living organism and treat it as an inanimate entity, it is like treating the body as a corpse. When we do that, our health will suffer.
Collectively, it’s enormously important to start restoring the respect for water because the more we privatize water, the more drought and desertification naturally come from that. All of our indigenous ancestors, even in spiritual and religious traditions as well, holy water is a part of every single religious practice that’s used in various different types of ceremony. Every practice involves holy water in some way.
If there’s a single unifying thread between the way that water is seen in all of these cultures, practices and traditions, even though they have very different specific rituals and specific words and concepts, that one unifying theme between all of them is that water acts as a mediator between the human and the heavenly.
Water acts as this point of communication between the manifest and the non-manifest world. It’s this medium between the scene and the unseen realm. When we start interacting with water in that way as this medium between life force energy and the blueprints of the morphogenic field as we were talking about before, and what is physically manifest in here in the third dimension, she starts to open up all kinds of interesting ways of communicating.
For example, I’m sure you know everyone reading this is probably very familiar with Dr. Masaru Emoto. He brought enormous awareness to the fact that water is responsive and reflective to various stimuli in her environment. It’s not necessarily my favorite method of water crystallography for numerous reasons. He wasn’t particularly rigorous to the scientific method. Some of his results may have been slightly misleading.
Just to interrupt, hold onto your thought to bring people up to speed who don’t know Dr. Masaru Emoto, in simple terms, I believe that he showed that if you said, “Thank you,” or, “You are beautiful,” or spoke positive words over water, when he observed it under a very powerful microscope, he could see the structure was coherent, organized and beautiful.
If he spoke ill words saying, “I hate you,” “You’re ugly,” or negative thoughts or even intentions brought to the water, it would affect it structure. It looked more chaotic, disassembled and disintegrating. I believe his point was that the way we interact with water matters, and that was part of the proof of it being a sentient being, I suppose.
Yes, absolutely. When you’re generating love or gratitude, it’s a coherent field of information that your body water is resonating. Through the principles of epitaxy and transference, anything that is unstructured or incoherent in the field will then rise to a greater degree of coherence. You can see in the molecular structure, there’s a greater degree of symmetry and crystallinity in the water. There have been numerous other water researchers and crystallographers who have shown similar results in other ways.
There’s the Hagalis method by Dr. Andreas Schulz. There’s Professor Berndt Kroplin’s method where he showed that water droplets actually communicate with one another and based on the history of each water droplet, their level of maturity, that Victor Berger referred to water’s level of maturity as being a matter of what information and what kind of energy and environment it’s been exposed to, so the water droplets would communicate differently with one another.
There was Theodore Schwenk, who’s one of my favorite water researchers, and he showed that through his drop picture method, that water exposed to different things will flow very differently. Water is always responding to its environment. Something that we’ve learned from the ancient and that is being revived again now is that not only is water reflective, which is an important part of communication, to be able to hear and then respond in a reflective way that shows that you understand, we know that water can do that, but what we’re beginning to realize is that water also adds to the conversation.
Water is also bringing forth fresh information from the field as well. There were ancient methods called hydromancy, which is a type of water divination. Many different cultures had different forms of that where they would bring their queries to water and ask through different methods and water would bring them answers.
Didn’t Harry Potter do that in the movie? Wasn’t there a memory pool that he tried to dive into?
I remember that, yeah.
Dumbledore took him into this pool of remembrance and he would look in the water. Maybe there was like a little truth drop in that Hollywood movie.
Interesting. I think it was called a pensieve or something. My inner Millennial is coming up. What’s interesting is even the word remember comes from the word for water. The word mem is the Greek word for water. Re means again and ber comes from the Middle English for barren or to carry or bring forth. Remember it’s to carry or to bring forth what is within the waters. It said that all of our memory is actually stored in our bio waters, not necessarily in our brains. They’ve never found specific location for memory storage in the brain. However, the body keeps the score. Even the word memory itself, of course, mem, again means water. Ori comes from the word for light. It is the light encoded within or the light stored within water.
How Water Can Offer Healing
I do want to dive a little bit into the science of how water can help us heal because I feel like this show is lifting up the ancient things, not just so we can know it or remember it like you’re saying, but so we can rediscover it and integrate it into our own lives. Let’s talk about that book that you brought on that retreat. I forget the title, but I think the subtitle was something like, You are Not Thirsty, You’re Dehydrated. What book was that?
Who wrote that?
Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj. He was an incredible doctor who was actually an Iranian prisoner. The guards asked him to start treating the prisoners who were sick and imprisoned there. He wasn’t able to access any type of medicine. The only thing that he had were salt and water. He started treating them with salt and water and they started recovering.
He devoted the rest of his career to discovering why that is. He was able to trace the pathology of pretty much every single disease to a form of dehydration. He said we are bodies of water, first and foremost, and all of what we label as various disease states are all just synonyms for various manifestations of dehydration. The body is fundamentally a sophisticated system of thirst signals.
We are 70% water by volume, but 99.9%, 99.95% water, molecularly speaking, so it’s all comes razor. The simplest solution is usually true. Therefore, in a body of water, when something goes off balance, water metabolism disturbance should be ruled out first. What we’ve found, even since his work, which was very pioneering back in the day, but we didn’t have the same awareness back then that we have now of different aspects like water structure and the duration of the bio water and things like this.
You can trace every single disease back to one of five different forms of dehydration. You can treat them with various strategic rehydration protocols. Where I think we go off base in our culture is that we think hydration is just a matter of how much water that you drink. We think that if you’re dehydrated, the solution is just to drink more water. If that were true, everyone would be hydrated.
A lot of people are drinking water that’s actively dehydrating them. Our entire medical model has this backwards system where we’re not looking at what is the terrain. This is an aquatic terrain. We are, first and foremost, an aquarium. All of our cells are like fish. All of our microbiome, they’re like fish and it’s aquatic terrain. If the bio water is out of balance, it doesn’t matter.
If you have an aquarium and you have the highest quality fish flakes, you know the food that we eat, but the water itself is dirty, it doesn’t matter how high quality the fish flakes are, those fish are not going to do very well. However, if you have really high-quality water in the fish tank and the flakes that you feed the fish are just so-so, the fish are still going to thrive really well.
These are our cells. This is our microbiome. It’s important to address the bio water first and foremost and make sure that it is well structured, that there’s enough of it. Of course, most people are dehydrated from a quantity perspective as well. Dehydration has a lot more to do with the structure of the bio water. The destructuring of intracellular fluid has been linked to every state of disease.
It’s important that the water is able to flow between the various watersheds and hydrological cycles within the body. Can your blood transition back and forth to lymph easily? Can it transition back and forth to cerebral spinal fluid easily? Are you getting pooling like edema or water weight? Are your waters actually flowing or are they stagnating? Most people are stagnating in their own sewage because their lymph isn’t flowing well enough.
This is really important. I want to just bring up this point that a lot of us who are in this Wise Traditions world, we nourish ourselves with such good food. The sustenance is based on organic, local, traditional seasonal foods. It’s amazing. What if, like you say, our bio water isn’t in a good state? That food won’t actually serve us. It’s like our aquarium water is dirty.
Even your ability to absorb nutrients is entirely dependent on your level of hydration because it’s that osmotic flow of water into the cell that draws the nutrients with it. If you’re dehydrated, your body just isn’t able to draw enough water across into the intracellular fluid.
Water: Your ability to absorb nutrients is entirely dependent on your level of hydration.
How Much Water You Should Drink
Let’s start with that question number one that a friend of mine’s like, “How much water should I drink?” I think it’s because she was doing that 75 Hard program where they say like, “Drink a gallon of water a day,” or something like that. What do you think? Is there an easy answer to that question?
Unfortunately, there’s not entirely an easy answer to that question because so much is dependent on the quality of water that you’re drinking. If you’re drinking really high-quality water, it’s incredibly bioavailable, and so you need less of it to sustain you every day. If you’re drinking poor quality water, it could actually be leaching minerals from your body over the long-term because it’s an aggressive solvent and therefore it will actually dehydrate you in the long run. It’s really a matter of quality over quantity.
A good rule of thumb for the people who really need to quantify, it’s not an entirely accurate rule of thumb, but if it helps, Dr. Batmanghelidj‘s water cure protocol was based on adding a quarter teaspoon of high-quality salts to every quart of water that you drink and then taking your weight in pounds and drinking that many ounces per day.
You also need to edit. If you’re taking any dehydrating or diuretic pharmaceuticals, then you need to drink additional water. If you drink a cup of coffee, then you need to drink an additional cup and a half of water. If you drink alcohol, then an additional cup and a half of water. Our hydration doesn’t even have as much to do with the water that we drink as it does the lifestyle that we lead and how we’re moving our body. The kinds of environments that we’re in, if we’re getting enough grounding, if we’re getting enough sunlight, these are all hydrating factors. If you’re spending all day in air conditioning or artificial heating, those are going to dry out the body. Also, it’s a matter of your diet and the food that you eat.
If you’re eating a very hydrating diet, you need to drink less water. It’s almost even more important to focus on the dietary aspects of hydration than on the drinking water a lot of times because the standard American diet is highly dehydrated. I love the Wise Traditions Diet because it’s incredibly hydrating. You’re getting lots of good high-quality fats that helps bolster the cell membranes, which gives you a high phase angle. Phase angle is one of the best measurements of hydration. You’re drawing lots of water across.
Also, the higher quality fats that you eat, your body produces more metabolic water as well. It’s not just the water we drink, it’s optimizing for our body’s ability to produce its own deuterium depleted water from within the cells. For every 100 grams of high-quality fat that you eat, your body produces 110 grams of deuterium depleted metabolic water.
This can be even more hydrating than just drinking schwag water. Of course, if you eat good high quality local seasonal fruits and vegetables, those are made of structured water because they’re living beings. That water is going to be more bioavailable and it’s going to be titrated in a slower release of hydration into your body over time as you digest it versus if you drink a bottle of Dasani or something like that. It’s just going to pass straight through you.
Specifically, intelligent rehydration protocols, I think, are really the way to, to address this versus just saying, “You’re dehydrated. Drink more water.” If somebody hears, “I have a cancer diagnosis,” for example. If you have cancer, you probably have a phase angle of about 4.5 or below, which means from a hydration standpoint, you are so dry that you’re nearly dead. Rehydration protocols have been so effective in cancer treatment and the treatment of almost everything.
For example, deuterium-depleted water is actually approved as a cancer medication in Eastern Europe. We have to look at not just, “You have a low phase angle. Let’s get you drinking more water.” It’s, “Let’s look at all of the factors of hydration and how we can get your cells more plump and juicy. Not just how we can irrigate. Drinking water is just irrigation, but hydration is how much is getting into your cells.
I’ve met older people who drink very little water and they’re doing great. I think it must be because they have that right angle that you were talking about, that they’re getting in enough sufficient fats from the diet and hydration from their diet that they don’t need to drink that much.
Movement as well is such an important part of it because drinking water starts the hydration process, but movement completes it. It’s actually the movement of our fascia that delivers water droplets to each one of our ourselves through this intelligent irrigation network. The fascia is 80% water, 20% protein. As we move, it delivers water to every one of those cells. When we don’t move a certain area of our body for a while, that fascia starts to get dried out and brittle and it can no longer deliver hydration there. We start to get chronic pain in that area. You can be irrigating all day long, but again, if you’re not moving, then the water’s not getting where it needs to be.
Drinking water starts the hydration process. Movement completes it.
How To Structure Water
I know there are so many facets to the water that we ingest and we need to make sure it’s the high-quality water. One aspect of that you’ve alluded to a couple times is the structure of the water. Someone asked me, “How can I structure water when I’m in the city? Do they need those special wands? How do you do it? What helps water have that coherent structure that’s making it more bioavailable to ourselves?
There are a lot of different ways of doing it. Water is enormously responsive to its environment. It’s always responding and shifting its form and its structure based on what it’s picking up in the field. Auditory stimuli, visual stimuli, and incredibly broad spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies. The main things that we want to do is just mimic nature, comprehend and copy nature was my water hero, Viktor Schauberger’s catch phrase, so to speak. That’s typically my guiding philosophy when bringing water back to life.
If we look at what happens at water rising to a spring, it doesn’t just flow to the surface in a straight line. It’s actually drawn in a vortex of lunar gravity. It’s spiraling on the way up. Water and nature’s always spiraling in a river. The water is always spiraling. It doesn’t just flow in a straight line in our bodies. The water’s always spiraling inside of our veins and our cerebral spinal fluid, even your urine comes out in a spiral. Spiraling water is one of the best ways to structure it. As you vortex water, you’re also aerating it as well. You’re allowing the water to breathe, which is also enormously important for dissolved gases like oxygen and carbon acid.
Vortexing or using a flow form, which is a specific type of water structure that allows the water to vortex in multiple directions at the same time as it pours through the flow form, it basically mimics what happens when water flows over rocks in a stream. It opens innumerable inner vortices within it as it curls in on itself. That will structure and aerate the water. We mentioned earlier epitaxy and transference, that the principle whereby something that’s highly coherent will bring more coherence to anything that might be disorganized or disorderly in its field.
You can use something that’s highly coherent, like one of those wands, the analemma wand for example or a Leela quantum block or a Vogel crystal, for example, is excellent for structuring water. There are also different forms of radiant energy. Radiant energy in general can bring more structure to water. For example, the Schumann resonance or near and far infrared frequencies.
Even music, I suppose.
Music will definitely influence the shape of the water, for sure. I wouldn’t consider it to be one of the strongest cohering factors, but it will definitely energize the water by giving it certain information. The more that the molecules are in a formation, the more they can store information. I tend to differentiate between water structure and water energizing, even though there’s a lot of overlap.
Some things that structure the water will energize the water and some things that energize the water will also structure it. I think of the structuring as being the formation, the matrix, and then the energizing as being the information or what’s held within that matrix. Once you structure water, playing music to it is beautiful because it’s going to hold onto that information a lot better.
I think the reason this is an important conversation in the first place for those of us who want to have the best quality water and the happiest water, so to speak, in our lives, is because I think Vita Austin said on the podcast, like, we push water through tubes and processes that confine it and change its shape really, in essence. We need it to do something to help it be restored so that it can be absorbed and be beneficial where it is and also where it is in our bodies.
Absolutely. Most of the water that we drink is highly industrialized. It’s highly processed. It’s highly traumatized. Honestly, it’s been through a lot. It’s been treated, pumped and put through so many processes that are completely unnatural to it. We treat water worse than we would treat any living being, even though it is the very substance of life itself.
We use it as a carrier of chemical weapons, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, sewage and all kinds of things that when it comes into our care, it’s really important to genuinely care for it as though you’re nursing a sick person back to life. Even if you’re dealing with something like well water or bottled water, even in those cases, it’s domesticated. There’s the highly industrialized process water, like tap water, and then there’s even just the domesticated water of these other types.
It’s important to drink wild water as much as possible. If you can go and forage for natural water at a spring, you can go to FindASpring.org, find your local springs. I’ve seen that alone transform not only people’s health, but really just their state of being in the world, their sense of sovereignty, their sense of personal power.
At this point, they’re no longer paying a corporation for their bloodstream when they buy bottled water. They’re no longer paying the government for their bloodstream when they buy municipal water. Water becomes your blood within five minutes of drinking it. There’s a very special communion that happens when you go and harvest water directly from Mother Earth where her bloodstream becomes your bloodstream within just a few minutes.
Water becomes your blood within five minutes of drinking it.
Benefits Of Water Filtration Systems
I’ve never heard of anyone use the term like ultra-processed water or overprocessed water. Of course, we see this in our food. Now we can see it perhaps with our water. This is one reason people are often asking me also about water filtration systems. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Yes. Generally speaking, again, we want to mimic what happens in nature. What happens at a spring is that water rises through many geological layers to the surface. Along the way, actually on the way down to the aquifer, through these geological layers, after it rains, it gets filtered through these many layers. On the way back up, it again gets filtered through these many layers.
My favorite filters are always the mixed media filters with many biomimicry, geologically mimicking layers. My very favorite one is the SpringAqua WET 7, because it basically recreates spring water right under your sink. It’s based on the geology of the spring in Lourdes, France at Bernadette’s Grotto, it’s at WaterIsLife.Shop. It’s my favorite by far because it doesn’t require any electricity whatsoever. It’s just based on this biomimicry.
The steps that I teach to bring water back to life, and you can do them each individually, there are different tools for each one, is forage if you can. Otherwise, filter, structure, balance, and energize. For years, I was teaching these steps with separate tools and then I discovered this that does each of those steps all in one. If you’re looking for like a one-stop shop that’s like an all-in-one solution, very convenient, the SpringAqua is my favorite. It filters, structures, balances, and energizes the water and suffuses the water with therapeutic doses of molecular hydrogen without using electrolysis.
That’s my favorite. There are many others that are good as well. I have a list of all of the ones that I’ve vetted that I can personally endorse and recommend at WaterIsLife.Shop because if an under the sink model like a SpringAqua doesn’t work for someone, there are whole home systems that are really good as well. I definitely always recommend that you don’t stop at just filtration. Do the filtration and the restructuring.
That’s especially important if you’re using something like a reverse osmosis or distillation method, which I don’t typically recommend unless it’s all that you have available. Those both create an aggressive solvent. The water is so highly unstructured at that point in time and it’s been robbed of everything. It’s basically become an empty water. It has no more microbiome, it has no more mineral content, it becomes an empty water.
It can leach from its environment over time. It can leach minerals from your body over time. Just like we want to eat whole food, we don’t want to eat food that’s been stripped of everything. A beneficial, healthy, nutritious wheat plants can become very toxic when it becomes refined white flour. The very healthy, beneficial cocoa plants can become very toxic when it’s refined into pure cocaine.
The same is true with water. As a whole well-rounded being that contains the entire spectrum of minerals, of microorganisms, even of light and sound frequencies in these more subtle elements of water’s wholeness, when it gets stripped down to just a bare H2O, it actually becomes detrimental to the body. We need to expand our understanding of water as being more than just H2O.
The Danger Of Privatizing The Source Of Life
I sense a parallel here between what you’re saying and the Wise Tradition’s Dietary Principle number one, which is Dr. Price observed in the healthiest people around the planet that they ate no refined or denatured foods. You’re suggesting no refined or denatured water. Isabel, what do you say to the skeptic who’s like, “You are taking it too far. Give my Dasani water,” not to call them out, or, “Give me my tap water. This is really one of the cleanest tap waters in all of the US.” What do you say to the person who says, “You’re going way too far with this idea that water is sentient, a keeper of memories and so important for our lives?”
I would really encourage them to do their own research. Don’t take anything I say at face value. Don’t take anything that anyone says at face value, for that matter. Do your own research at this point. It is irrefutable, the level of research that’s been done. We have to recognize that just because something looks like clear liquid, no matter what water it is, doesn’t mean that our body can’t tell the difference.
There are many different kinds of water. They affect us very differently, physiologically and psychologically. When you look at blood, it looks like red liquid. My blood and your blood. They both look like red liquid. If you put them under the microscope, you’ll see that they have very different composition. There’s a lot going on in there. There’s a lot going on vibrationally and in terms of the actual constituents of the blood.
The same is really true with water. When you get in there and look at it, each water has a very different profile that affects us very differently. Each water has a literally a different culture to it, depending on its microbiome, depending on where it comes from, what geomagnetic influences it’s been exposed to. All of this is measurable. If you don’t want to go as far as saying that water is conscious and sentient, that’s okay. It’s not necessary to know that in order to improve your hydration strategy. Start there. Just start with your hydration and notice how much of a difference you really feel and go from there.
It’s a privilege that we can actually improve our hydration strategy because not everyone has access to clean water. Do they tell us that statistic you were mentioning here on the retreat?
Currently, 1 out of every 3 people on earth has no consistent access to clean water. By the year 2050, it’s estimated to be 1 out of every 2 people.
What are the implications of that number that 1 out of 3 don’t have access to clean water right now?
I consider it to be the most pressing issue of our time, and yet the least commonly explored, unfortunately, because water is life. Life itself cannot be owned or controlled, but the source of life can be owned and controlled. If you own and control water, then you control the lives of all of those people who need it as well.
This is something that we don’t experience a lot of firsthand in the Northern Hemisphere, in the first world, although it’s beginning to become a lot more apparent. Places like Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi, they are previews of what’s to come in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, they’ve already been experiencing this for decades. As their water has been increasingly privatized, their access to water has been increasingly limited. There is already a water apartheid between the Global North and the Global South.
There are already water wars being fought around the world over access to water resources, not specifically because it is scarce or because we don’t have equitable means of distributing the water that is available in those regions, but largely because it’s been privatized for profit. In fact, the symbol in Chinese for water is the same as the symbol for control.
Quietly, under the surface, it is being used as a weapon of war. It is being used as one of the primary means of colonization and economic control. The biggest cartels in the world are cartels that most people have never heard of. They’re not arms cartels, they’re not drug cartels. They are Suez, Veolia, Bechtel, RWE Thames. They are the water controllers, basically, of the world and their subsidiaries. Invariably, when they take over a water supply in an area, the water becomes more polluted and exponentially more expensive.
The reason why I consider this to be the most important question of our time is because right now, our generation is at the turning point. We are at the crux of this historical question. The way that this question is answered will determine the fate of all of the generations that will follow us. The question is, is water a right or is it just a necessity?
All throughout human history, water has been a commons. It has been part of the public good. Now the question is being decided in favor of profits instead. Now, when you privatize life for profit, you create a culture of death. You can see in the places where this is being done, increasing drought, increasing desertification, increasing water pollution.
This is the Law of Supply and Demand. This is why liquid life itself should never be under the purview of capitalism because that means that the scarcer fresh water is, the more profitable it is. The people who are privatizing water, they don’t want to see a world of egalitarian access to clean water resources for everyone, because that means that their fresh water holdings become a lot less valuable. Right now, the biggest profits in the world are being made on privatizing water and actually water futures as well. People will short water futures. In other words, they’re becoming enormously profitable by betting that water will get more and more polluted and hard to access.
Isabel’s One Tip To Improve Health
We have seen this happen, of course, with our food supply. Big food, as we call it, and even with medicines, big pharma. I guess there’s big water out there now too. We need to be aware of that so that we can protect this beautiful, sentient, intelligent fluid that is so critical to life. This has been a deep dive. I definitely want to dive further with you, but we’re going to have to wrap up.
I hope we can talk again, but in the meantime, I would love for you to answer the question I like to pose at the end of every show. If the reader could just do one thing to improve their health, it might be related to water, it might not, but if they could just do one thing, what would you recommend that they do?
I recommend cultivating as much coherence in your life as possible and specifically in your body of water. When we’re dealing with our drinking water, we want to create coherence in our drinking water by structuring it. What’s really most important is how coherent is your bio water. That reflects not only in your health, but also your spiritual connectivity and your mental health and your level of focus and presence as well.
To do that, I think the best way is creating heart coherence, creating brain coherence, so synchronizing the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and then getting the heart and brain both into coherence. I think meditation is really the most powerful way of doing that. Get into deep communion with yourself, deep communion with your bio water, and create this coherent field so that you become blessing of a drop of water that ripples out into your family and your community and everywhere else.
Thank you for being a little drop of water in our lives. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it’s been a pleasure, Isabel.
Thank you so much, Hilda. It’s been lovely.
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Our guest was Isabel Friend. Visit her website, WaterIsLife.Academy. Now for a letter to the editor from a recent Wise Traditions Journal. Ellen says this, “I would like to share my experience. I am a 73-year-old woman who has struggled with two autoimmune conditions. I lost my thyroid to Hashimoto’s via conventional medicine. Also, my gut has been constipated and I struggled with H. pylori blocking my nutrition. I learned through functional medicine that health begins in the gut. I did the H. pylori protocol and that got fixed, but I was still struggling with various problems. However, at the end of the h pylori treatment, I tried some raw milk casein.”
“Oh my goodness, my entire microbiome changed. I no longer struggle with these problems. Cultured raw milk did it. I am so surprised and pleased.” This is a letter from Ellen in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Ellen, we are so happy to hear your story. You, too, can write us a letter to the editor. Just email us your story. It could be related to the podcast or your health experience like Ellen’s or anything under the sun. Write us at Info@WestonAPrice.org and put Letter to the Editor and the subject line and we’ll see if we can get in an upcoming journal. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.
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On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, thanks for reading. We have many free resources to support you on your health journey. Visit westonaprice.org to find podcasts, articles, videos, and more. You can also find a local chapter near you for help in finding sources of great food. We invite you to support the foundation’s mission of education, research, and activism by becoming a member. Thanks again and take care.
Wise Traditions is a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation for wise traditions in food, farming and the healing arts. The content on this podcast is provided for informational purposes only, and is not intended to substitute for the advice provided by your doctor or other healthcare professional. It is not intended to be, nor does it constitute healthcare or medical advice.
About Isabel Friend
Isabel Friend is an international ambassador of Water, public speaker, and educator. As a student, servant, and steward of Water, she seamlessly blends science and spirit into a comprehensive cosmology of Water wisdom. Spanning the practical insights of health, hydration and biology, to empowering tactics for Watershed guardianship and ecological activism, to the esoteric and subtle insights of ancient indigenous Water wisdom, to the heady scientific discoveries of cutting edge Water research, Isabel’s offerings are as multifaceted as Water itself. She has taught about Water throughout the US, Canada, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Bali, Mexico and Thailand.
Important Links
- Your Body’s Many Cries for Water: You’re Not Sick; You’re Thirsty. Stop Treating Thirst With Medication
- Find A Spring
- Water Is Life Shop
- Info@WestonAPrice.org
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It would be nice if folks could leave their evolution and new age theories behind when having public discussions. Not all of us buy into that. Think about why we don’t.