His name was Pablo Falcon, a Native American healer living in New Mexico. He was on a show called Human Urine-Elixir for Good Health? airing on the National Geographic Channel, showcasing an ancient healing tradition: the practice of drinking one’s own urine.
Yes, he drank his own urine; a cup a day, usually in the morning, catching the first stream in mid discharge.
He drank it straight, like a shot of whiskey, but sometimes sipped it like a hot toddy on a cold moonless night. It was Pablo Falcon’s preventative medicine-urine therapy, or uropathy.
I was young. That’s disgusting, I thought. Years later, I re-discovered Pablo’s delinquency, but until then I remained ignorant of my body’s golden elixir as though it was an enigma, hidden from the alchemy of health within a toxic world.
To others it’s tradition, but among a modernizing world tradition is perceived as primitive.
At The Mercy Of Sickness
Out in the world, I forgot about Pablo. I forgot about the ways of the warrior, the ways of the body, and its own powerful remedies.
I forgot about these things because I was falling apart. I was in India, and my body was aching, my head spinning, my nose divulging a sinewy greenness, my intestines constricting, my sphincter bleeding.
But I did not forget about Gandhi.
I was participating in the 75th anniversary of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Salt March, and here I was falling apart, literally bleeding out of multiple orifices.
And what could I do? Whine? Complain? Go to a hospital because I wasn’t feeling well? The Peace Walk wasn’t about me, or about any of the other walkers from nine different nations. The Peace Walk was for those of India, and a universal Peace for Mother Earth and Her inhabitants.
A young Japanese living in Nepal came up to me. He was Morita and he saw through to my pain. The man I hardly knew handed me a plastic cup as we took lunch. “Take this,” he said in a hush. Around us others slept. “Go pee, and drink as much of it as you can.”
I was stunned. I had forgotten Pablo Falcon. I had forgotten my own body and its power. At that time, I was only cursing it. “What?”
“You want to get better?” Morita asked.
I nodded.
“Then pee and drink.”
The First World Conference
In 1996, a group of urine therapists put on the First World Conference of Urine Therapy.
Held in India, the conference on the art of drinking urine brought together doctors, scientists, practitioners and believers into one room to exalt the benefits, seek out the contradictions, and bring awareness, drive and inspiration to a deepened scientific study of this clandestine cure.
They read testimonials of miraculous recoveries. They reviewed the studies of urine and its components. They compared their own experiences, treatments and applications. They found no contradictions.
Found in the ancient Vedic culture of Hinduism, urine therapy holds another name, Shivambu Kalpa Vidhi, or The Waters of Shiva. In the five thousand year-old Damar Tantra text, the writings recall Shiva as he unleashes his secrets of a healthy mind, body and soul to his wife, Parvati.
The text, or sutra, is one of the oldest known documents on healing, one that directly encompasses one’s own body-the ailment and the cure as one. It claims no association with external remedies, but solely describes the power and wisdom of the body under healthy eating habits.
It was Mahatma Gandhi who spoke:
The human body is the best portrayal of the universe in miniature. Whatever does not exist in the human body cannot be found in the universe, and whatever exists in the universe can be found in the human body.
Not only does the Vedic culture find complete truth within one’s own being, but ancient medical scriptures of the Egyptians, Chinese, Aztecs and Christians hint at this secret. In Proverbs 5:15 of the Old Testament, it is He who lets it be known: Drink water from thy own cistern, and the streams of thy own well.
The Workings Of The Body
What comes to mind is shit and piss, two ways of excreting toxins from the body.
The former-yes.
The latter-no.
When it comes to the process of making urine, there is one large misunderstood nomenclature: Urine is dirty. It picks up all your body’s dirty liquids and whizzes them into a smelly bowl. It’s crap. But what you forgot about is this baroque process.
We eat. We drink. We ingest and we digest. Solid matter is sent into the stomach, churned, macerated and spit out from the intestinal tracks after absorbing the good, the bad and the ugly. With liquids, most, if not all, are absorbed into the bloodstream.
From there they flow around, swimming like Chinese fighting fish. Through the limbs, the core, from the spine into the skull, within the tongue and around-the substances of our blood are everywhere before entering its first cleansing phase. This would be the liver.
With health, all things operate accordingly; on time, in rhythm. As the blood enters the liver it becomes the stone within the refinery. The liver is the detoxifier of our blood, removing poisonous products, secreting them or storing waste in the gall bladder, which ends up as bile.
From here, the blood flows to the kidneys. Coen van der Kroon, in his urine therapy guide Golden Fountain, describes how “they remove all superfluous vital substances from the blood, and filter out a surplus of water.”
These leftovers are the diamonds emerging from the refinement. They are the matter that form urine-simply the leftovers from the body’s water and nutrients. And a healthy diet is key.
A Cure For Life’s Ills?
Despite varying ranges of lifestyles, urine at best is an elixir; it is the water of life.
In J.W. Armstrong’s The Water of Life, homeopath and naturopath Ellis Barker quotes that “our body distills the most wonderful medicines and provides the most perfect serums and antibodies.” In fact, the list of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, amino acids and hormones runs long.
One of these powerful byproducts is urea; an organic compound of carbamide containing carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen.
With this knowledge, pharmaceuticals have discreetly capitalized on urine’s power, incorporating urine in anti-cancer prescriptions as well as blood-clot dissolvers, ointments, hand creams, lotions and soaps.
Your very own urine is known to have a significant effect on the following diseases:
Adrenal failure, AIDS/HIV, allergies, cancer, candida, colds & flu symptoms, colitis, dandruff, diabetes, diarrhea, ear & eye troubles, eczema, gangrene, gout, heart disease, hepatitis, herpes, hyperactivity, jaundice, lupus, mononucleosis, multiple sclerosis, pancreatic insufficiency, psoriasis, rashes, rheumatism, rheumatoid arthritis, sciatica, warts and more.
Research remains limited, and the guesses as to why are as many as urine’s benefits. If humankind began sipping, fasting, massaging, gargling, douching, eye and ear-dropping, sniffing, injecting, compressing, rubbing, bathing, shampooing and giving oneself an enema all with one’s own urine, doctors would become unneccesary.
The pharmaceutical industry would collapse. Chemicals would be cleansed from peoples’ bodies. Man & woman would be healthy, strong and immune. And the billions of dollars going toward the chemical-dependent world could be spent on more worthwhile causes – like education.
A holy temple. An elixir. The cause and effect in one. The ailment and medicament together.
Your body’s urine is anything but wasteful. It is the gift, sanctified through the internal processes and given to you once more for complete health, detoxification and rejuvenation.
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Cameron Karsten writes a weekly spiritual travel column for Brave New Traveler. He left his formal classroom studies to indulge in dreams of travel at 19 years old, and has been wandering ever since. Visit his personal website.What do you think? Curious? Disgusted? Share your thoughts in the comments!