Being a vegan doesn’t have to be a tasteless or dull experience, says author Robin Sharan. Her latest title, “Liver and Gallbladder Super Cleanse: Now Made Simple for You!” serves up the theory and practice of a plant-based diet in her trademark singsong prose.

“You have to have fun and you have to have yum,” said Sharan, who operates the Annapurna Center for Self Healing in Port Townsend. “If you make it fun, then people are charmed by their very existence and what creates their exuberance, their joy, in the face of disaster, in the face of insanity, in the face of what is happening on the planet right now.

Sharan noted that not only is eating vegan healthy and delicious, but that it has the bonus of relieving any guilt associated with consuming animal products.

“You will have only good feelings about everything,” she said. “There will be no guilt anymore. Guilt and anger are worthless emotional states that do nothing but make people flamingly miserable.”

She is an enemy of the jargon-heavy, serious approach taken by many health experts. ”If you do not make it fun and it becomes pedantic and rote, it becomes onerous,” she said. “It becomes burdensome.”

The book, 47 years in the making, invites the reader on a voyage into the inner workings of the human body.

“It is very rare that you will find somebody talking about one’s physiology on this level to make it fun,” said Sharan, who speaks in a hip-hop like stream of internal rhymes. ”It is alarmingly charming to delve into your physiology with a different angle of the mind so that you can be charmed by your intestinal tract, by your nose, by your lungs,” she said. “Know you are a delightful and amazingly created creature.”

Liver love

Sharan reserves special attention for the liver, which she says must be cared for through proper diet and positive thinking.

“Every four minutes all of your blood goes through your liver, and then the liver -- as the brilliant sorcerer, magician, alchemist that it is -- it literally takes the toxins from the blood and then it purifies it so that when it reaches your heart, then you have an easier time of it,” she said. “But, there is a real but to the issue and it is not seated to your seat. It is a reality that you are what you ate and didn’t eliminate.”

Maladies can generally be attributed to a poor functioning liver, Sharan said.

“Our illnesses, our conditions, are caused primarily by the toxic load that goes into our liver and the liver can’t deliver because it does not understand this new level of toxic load,” she said. “We won’t point a finger at anyone, but we are learning. No matter what man manufactures there is a force greater than us all that has made an antidote to all these poisons. Our best friends are what grows outside your backdoor, front door or side door.”

“Start to see you internal organs as your best friends,” she said. “What we are doing is coming back to our neighborhood, back to ourselves. I am talking about the neighborhood inside your skin, with the liver being the alchemist.”

But, the liver must be minded lest it begin craving unhealthy fare, Sharan said.

“The liver is just like a little kid and can be a little brat and can say, ‘No I don’t want that. I want those french fries and those burgers and that soda that is gonna cause me to have 2.5 (ph) acidic level going into my body. I want that battery acid.”

Going raw attracts acolytes

Instead, Sharan encourages people to avoid such cravings, opting instead for healthy raw foods and abstaining from dairy and animal protein.

One miracle food is the common apple, Sharan said.

“Apples have this beautiful outer covering that is some color of red, purple, black, golden color,” she said. “Then there is the inside of the apple which has malic acid that dissolves the toxic load in your liver, and the organic skin you eat is full of pectin that drives it out the body through the back door.

Sharan’s childlike approach to veganism has drawn the attention of alternative healing enthusiasts such as Naushard Cader, who has been studying with Sharan for many years.

“I was interested in eating healthy and taking care of your health, preventive medicine and preventive health,” Cader said. “The body is a temple. How do you protect and nourish the temple?”

Cader said he found Sharan’s approach to food, and to life, greatly illuminating, and encouraged her to write it all down in a book to be shared with others.

“I thought this needs to be brought out so that many people can benefit,” he said. “Our great grandfathers knew what to eat and what not to eat, but I think we have just lost that.”

Modern society emphasizes convenience at the cost of healthy and tasteful foods, Cader said.

“We are quick. We don’t take time to eat. We don’t taste any of the foods. I don’t think we have any kinds of taste buds except for salt and some fat sensation. I think we have to bring back to humanity actually enjoying food. We are just not utilizing it, not taking advantage of it. It can heal everything, almost. I was interested in that.”

Sharan said she hopes her book inspires others to become more intimate with their bodies.

“What this book is really about is exciting insights into your insides, a very mysterious place because we really have been taught that we don’t want to go into the slime and grime and stinky and we don’t get it that we are a whole factory of olfactory reality,” she said.

Getting friendly with internal organs

Moving on in the internal tour of the human body, Sharan next focused on the gallbladder, which she affectionately refers to as the “gal-bladder.”

“She is the one who takes the alchemist’s gold that he moves from the toxic load into a golden stream called bile, and I say we smile all the while the bile is more mobile,” Sharan said.

The whole process of eating, digesting and defecating is essential and enjoyable, Sharan said, even more so with the right diet and lifestyle choices.

“Most people have been conditioned to compete and to eat in a certain way,” she said. “Thinking can be very stinking. What this is all about is having people change the angle of their mind and do things differently. Are you polluting momma earth with what you’ve eaten (and) what you have consumed emotionally, spiritually, physically?”

Sharan encourages others to make what she believes is a better choice.

“I call this the magic theater when you have shifted your perspective and changed the angle of your mind to do things differently because you know you are going to have more fun,” she said.

The whole process of consumption and digestion, as viewed by Sharan, is presented in her book in an approachable way, she said.

“Everyone can read this book, even children. I made it so it would not be so blatant because once you start to laugh at everything, all your fear, anxiety frustration -- your shame and blame -- all get tossed into smithereens and you really see the real light of the situation, (which) is your own highest self interest and preservation. Then we come together because we all have the same vision of our immediate highest and best self-interest to have joy in our hearts.”

Staying relaxed

The idea of enjoying food, and life in general, has the additional quality of leading to relaxation, which Sharan said is exceedingly important.

“Educate people in a very gentle manner through tasting and the yum factor,” she said. ““Then you feel relaxed. When you relax, you start to heal yourself. You just have to have fun. If you have fun, then all of a sudden everything relaxes and then you can start to think, ‘Wow this is a magic theater and this is comedy.”

Sharan refers to this view of the world both outside and inside the body as “all is in wonderland,” a play on Alice in Wonderland, she said.

“When you feel this way all of a sudden you start to feel your blood moving into your toes, into your nose, into your fingertips and you find delight in everything that is going on even though it is absolutely absurd,” she said. “Then you are not affected physically because you are staying in this relaxed mode. The ancient ones knew that if you stayed in this relaxed mode, then all of your tributaries in your body would relax and have a good flow. Coming into the present moment, we are seeing that doctors … say health is flow, disease is congestion. It really doesn't matter what your doctor calls your condition, it is all about level of toxic load.”

Such traditions based on ancient medicine are meant to help understand the beauty of creation, “and your ability to appreciate what you eat and how you eat it,” Sharan said. “It becomes either a pleasure or a poison.”

For more information about the book, or to purchase it, call 360-385-2909