By the end of Vaishali's presentation this weekend at the Long Beach Convention Center, audience members will be able to touch their spines by going through their bellies - or they'll at least know why they can't.

Vaishali, author and host of the syndicated radio show "You Are What You Love" (airing from 11 a.m. to noon Sundays on KTLK 1150 AM), will be one of about 90 speakers at the Health Freedom Expo on Friday through Sunday.

HEALTH FREEDOM EXPO

Sixth annual expo featuring speakers and exhibits on natural and alternative health-care options.

11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Long Beach Convention Center

300 E. Ocean Blvd.

Long Beach

$15 per day or $35 for all three days.

888-658-3976; www.healthfreedomexpo.com.

Other guest speakers will include actor Ed Begley Jr.; consumer advocate Kevin Trudeau; actress Mariel Hemingway; Carolyn Dean, author of "Death by Modern Medicine: Seeking Safe Solutions"; and Mike Adams, founder of NaturalNews.com.

Vaishali will discuss "How To Make Your Mind Your Friend By Detoxifying Your Mind, Body and Emotions" from 11 to 11:45 a.m. Saturday as part of the sixth annual alternative and natural health event.

"I'm going to be giving people the tools for understanding the relationship between their physical

body, their emotional body and what I call their psychological - or perceptual - body," Vaishali said.

"In Eastern systems of self-healing, they have a very different take on food and digestion than we do in the West," she said.

"One of the things that I found very valuable is they say our thoughts, our emotions, our perceptions and our experiences are a form of food. They travel through our GI (gastrointestinal) tract. That means the first thing we need to be able to do in our life as we experience it, think about it, emotionally relate to it, is to be able to swallow it, stomach it and pull from it what enhances us - and let go of whatever is not useful for the waste that it is."

That's where touching the spine by way of the navel comes in.

Vaishali will walk guests through the Chinese internal organ self-massage technique known as Chi Nei Tsang.

As they lay flat on their backs, toes pointed slightly inward and head flat on the ground, attendees will be instructed to put their hands around the rim of their navels and start massaging in spiraling circle motions toward the spine.

"You should be able to touch your spine from your front," Vaishali said. "I would imagine if there are 250 people in the room, somewhere around 3 percent of them can do it."

The point of the exercise is to see if there is blockage. There should be nothing impeding the path to the spine, Vaishali said.

"Soft tissue should move out of the way," she said. "If you come to something hard, something constrictive, what is this? It's not the epidermis. It's not something you've eaten - it's liquid at this point. Lymphatic tissue is like oily water. So what is it that's hard and constrictive in there? It's the myofascial (soft) tissue in your body responding to emotions and perceptual stimulus."

These kinds of blockages, Vaishali said, are the result of a cultural "addiction" to worry.

"We have a very poor habit of using worry as a type of management and control," she said. "We think if we worry about things we'll be on top of it, we won't be ambushed by it. The truth of the matter is the constant state of worry puts the body in a nonreleasing fight or flight (mode). It's constantly poised - and it's not designed to do that."

What it is designed to do, she said, is relax and release from that high-alert state to allow energy to flow into the digestive and immune systems.

"What we need to do is get people to understand that digestion is a metaphor for life," Vaishali said. "What's going on in your GI tract is letting you know how you're digesting your life as a whole."

leo.smith@dailybreeze.com

310-543-6617