“The American lifestyle generates an enormous number of sick people, and there’s a huge cost to repair them. We’re constantly looking for high-tech solutions – a new magic pill, a new surgical procedure. But what is we went low tech instead, giving people yoga strategies. It would be the biggest bang for the buck in terms of making an impact on the world.” Dr. Sat Bir Khalsa  (Yoga Journal, May 2010)

I love this idea-  calculating the biggest bang for the buck in terms of making an impact. I’d like to borrow Dr. Khalsa’s computing and apply it to our food and our time as well. I live rurally and this past month I’ve juiced or smoothied dandelion greens every morning. They are free, highly alkalizing chlorophyll-rich, mega nutrient “weeds”. I either gather them in my yard or when I’m mt. biking I stop and harvest a load that lasts 3 days. The dandelions in the woods pack more punch.

I also figure sprouting alfalfa and sunflower seeds (which take 7 days to sprout to reduce inhibiting phytochemicals) give me quite a bang. I buy the seeds buy the pound (ask your local green grocer to special order them for you or buy online) for less than $10. A few ounces of seeds produce a pound of sprouts. For those who don’t know about sprouts – you need them. Daily is best. High in enzymes and anti-oxidants. They seem to help eliminate everything that is bad and assist everything that is good in the body.

The big investment in this whole holistic lifestyle seems to be education. To learn yoga you need to study with someone (or at least start with an $18 month subscription to Yogaglo.com). To learn how to breath you also probably need to study with someone. We’re born to learn, so this shouldn’t seem like much of a hassle, but more of an exciting endeavor.

So what are we currently investing in that actually depletes our life force costing not only our ourselves, our  insurance policies, our water, our earth, and our opportunity cost as agents of positive change? What do our negative attitudes, addictions, and egoic tendencies actually cost the world at large? Or, as Cake put it in the 90’s, “What do you pay for your rock and rock lifestyle? Oh yeah, all right.”

What impact are you making on the world and what bang for the buck methods are behind it? I’d love to hear.