User talk:Ocaasi/Cousens

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 * Cousens wrote in his book Depression-Free for Life, "We don't suffer a deficiency of Prozac, but we do suffer a deficiency of God."


 * Cousens provides natural therapies for treating depression. He claimed a 90% success rate, but he acknowledged that rigorous studies had not been conducted due to lack of funding: "We’re not at this stage yet...I have no money to conduct such trials."


 * As a licensed psychiatrist, Cousens does not advocate the use of many common psychiatric medications, especially in youth.


 * Cousens' approach was criticized in the book Health Food Junkies as a type of dietary extremism with orthorexic symptoms, an obsessive approach to eating healthy in which concern over diet takes over the lives of practitioners.


 * In his book Conscious Eating advocates a mindful approach to dietCousens suggests exercises like eating with your eyes closed, as a form of meditation, to slow down one's eating habits.
 * Cousens' book, Spiritual Nutrition looks diet as a spiritual journey. Cousens believes that what bringing awareness to what one eats will benefit them emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Cousens encourages "spiritual fasting" to aid in "awakening people to the spirit of God".


 * Cousens believes that vegeterianism is, "The only way to create peace in the human and animal world, with the earth, with our own bodies and with all starving people in the world."


 * Cousens' nutritional views are informed by his reading of the primary Jewish text, the Torah, which he reads as as supporting a vegetarian diet. He think that the Torah's commandment to take care of the environment also requires a vegetarian lifestyle, citing the resource demands and waste he associates with a meat-based diet. Ultimately, Cousens believes that vegeterians live a longer life, and he emulates the ancient ascetic Jewish group the Essenes, who were vegetarians and reported in the Torah to have lifespans of 120 years. At the Tree of Life Rejuvenation center Cousens celebrates traditional Jewish holidays such as Shabbat and Passover. His Passover seder includes an all raw, vegetarian meal.
 * The teachings offered at Cousens' Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, the location for which he partly selected because it's located at the same latitude as Jerusalem, are called "the Essene Way". Cousens offers training and education for ordaining priests and priestesses in the Essene Order of Light, a faith recognized in the Encyclopedia of American religions; as of 2004 he had ordained 30 members. Cousens grew up in a Jewish family and is a rabbi; his teaching are influenced by the Jewish spiritual mysticism Kabbalah, and he sees a direct link between physical habits and spirituality.