Book review: The Clarity Cleanse: 12 Steps to Finding Renewed Energy, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Emotional Healing

Emotional clutter and old traumas affect us in the here and now. Your biography dictates your biology and health, and you can heal yourself. These are the conerstones of The Clarity Cleanse: 12 Steps to Finding Renewed Energy, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Emotional Healing which explores the mind-body connection and offers tools to heal both.

The premise of The Clarity Cleanse by physician Habib Sadeghi is based on the idea we develop our body and create a state of health or illness from unseen energy. Much of that invisible energy is inside us and the product of traumatic incidents, and often-buried emotions such as fear, anger, guilt and shame. Such negative emotions do damage at the cellular level, and can make us sick, and keep us from fully experiencing our best life.

Exploring the mind-body connection

You can heal your emotions (mind) and your body and in your own unique way, Sadeghi asserts in the book’s preface, given that every person’s “energetic frequency is unique and manifests in their body in its own way based on their history, relationships, and emotional state.”  He encourages the reader to take both a dietary cleanse and a mental detox—an emotional cleanse around shedding the built-up emotions that hinder us and can make us sick.

First by recognizing and identifying our past traumas, we can begin to heal emotionally. In the process, we gain clarity, and physical illnesses often clear up. We become stronger, happier and self-empowered. It’s a tall order but the book lays out a roadmap to get there with blueprints for both types of cleanses.

The Intentional Unsaturation Diet, outlined in detail in the book, requires going off alcohol, tapering off and stopping caffeine, and eating a limited, temporary diet of “clean” foods such as sardines, apples and brown rice. Whether or not a reader takes on the dietary cleanse, they will find plenty of insights in the book. And the recipes at the end from the Goop.com kitchens for simple, “clean” dishes like Fried Brown Rice and Eggplant Parmesan are a culinary bonus.

Holistic focus of The Clarity Cleanse

Sadeghi is uniquely qualified to write this book from the mind-body (psychosomatic) as well as psychological and spiritual (psycho-spiritual) perspectives because of his own healing story in overcoming childhood sexual abuse and stage-three testicular cancer, and as a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), a medical practice which focuses on the whole person and not just their medical symptoms.

In the book, the author’s own patients’ stories from his holistic healing practice as co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Be Hive of Healing Integrative Medical Center, make this celebrity-endorsed book an undeniably juicy and relatable read. He gives vivid real-life summaries of his patient’s past traumas and unresolved emotional issues on their journey to healing. These are the stories that give us vision into our own particular plights, and can spark change within us.

Heal thyself in therapeutic terms

Sadeghi provides the reader with the tools to reach their own state of clarity with many how-tos and exercises, such as setting an intention and purging your emotions with speed writing drills. He illustrates his points with wonderful metaphors and stories as he guides the reader into dietary-physical and emotional cleanses. Just like a healthy septic system requires adequate air and chemical processes to break down their waste and release energy to remain healthy, so too do our emotional and physical bodies.

For those wanting the deeper dive, The Clarity Cleanse offers a great primer on terms used in psychotherapy. For instance, Sadeghi defines the three mechanisms of repression: emotional armoring (wearing a mask), emotional posturing (such as believing our emotions aren’t important), and emotional shutdown, which provide the casual reader with enough fodder to help themselves in this “self-help” book.

In conclusion, it’s an ambitious proposition that we can heal ourselves but this book achieves its dual purposes of emotional and physical wellness by addressing both. The book has wide appeal for those wanting to heal, whether they are starting their spiritual journey after diagnosis of a major illness, or for anyone seeking to gain more enlightenment.