Five Minutes with Ben Richards of The Seeds of Life!
May 25, 2016
Good day people!
So for our first entry, we would like to take you to Ubud in Bali to get to a little more about Ben. 🙂 He is the founder of The Seeds of Life Cafe, a renown raw foods cafe in Bali. Ben also conducts regular Raw Chef trainings and retreats throughout the year.
What was your first experience with clean eating/raw food diet?
Green smoothies. I used to make from broccoli, avocado, spinach, mango, zucchini & spring water blended in a really dodgy blender. haha! I’d add spiralina sometimes, but the texture was always wrong… The blender never could do the job properly, but it felt good inside..
What made you immerse your lifestyle in clean eating?
Ive been studying and facilitating different healing modalities for 23 years. Living foods was another element that made sense to me in assisting the body to heal itself.
What inspired you to move to Bali to share your knowledge?
Bali has the freshest produce grown virtually on the sides of voclanic rich mountains. For the cafe & the raw chef trainings produce, we literally put an order in one day when it is picked, then the next it is delivered fresh to our door. Living organic high vibe bio-photons… Cant beat that!
What in your opinion, does a raw food diet do for your body and mind?
Simply, living foods deliver to the body the highest level of living bio-photons, nutrient density & these nutrients are our shield & buffers from the stresses of every day life. The water inherent within the produce has profound qualities that inform us with our assignments from mother earth. Cooking food breaks all of this down, dis-integrates the highly structured water from its encasing and really feels to me like gravities own food. Cooked food for me feels heavy & sluggish compared to the enzyme rich highly charge living foods. I have been eating 100% raw for 8 years now. There are the odd times when i’m traveling and I will eat a cooked plant based food, but I can feel it pulling energy out of my body to break it down. I feel heavy, which is not what i’m looking for these days. High vibes is where im at.
What is the biggest misconception of a raw food diet?
That it’s all carrot sticks and hummus. Haha! or that Ayurveda & chinese medicine says “NOT TO EAT RAW FOODS” haha. They actually both say the body needs a little agni or fire to maintain its health & so disease cannot get a foot. Not not to eat raw foods. Eating raw foods can cause the spleen to get damp leading to sinking qi; however this is maintained by using the taoist understanding of tonic herbalism. Drinking teas made from Astragalus, Dang Gui, Peony, Poria, White atractylode & Licorice root are epic ways to bring ultimate health to our spleen system, even if you don’t eat raw foods. We can often take a small amount of information and turn that into their own personal story without understanding the whole picture.
What is the most hilarious thing someone has said to you when they realize you don’t eat meat?
“Where do you get your protein?” Haha! People have no idea what protein is or how it functions in the body.
