Jasmuheen is an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

-based proponent of "pranic

Prana

Prana is the Sanskrit word for "vital life" .It is one of the five organs of vitality or sensation, viz. prana "breath", vac "speech", chakshus "sight", shrotra "hearing", and manas "thought" Prana is the Sanskrit word for "vital life" (from the root "to fill", cognate to Latin plenus...

 nourishment" or breatharianism

Inedia

Inedia is the alleged ability to live without food. The word was first used to describe a fast-based lifestyle within Catholic tradition, which holds that certain saints were able to survive for extended periods of time without food or drink other than the Eucharist.Breatharianism is a related...

, defined as the practice of living without food or fluid of any sort. Jasmuheen makes appearances at New Age

New Age

The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...

 conferences worldwide, has hosted spiritual retreats in Thailand and promotes many self-penned books and audios on her website, all of which are accessible for a fee.

Biography

Ellen Greve was born in 1957 in New South Wales

New South Wales

New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...

, of post-war Norwegian

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 migrant parents. She married and had two children. Thereafter, Ellen developed her financial and business management skills, working full-time in the industry. From 1992, she began to combine her experience in business and finance with meditation, selling access to workshops and seminars on the topic and, by deed poll

Deed poll

A deed poll is a legal document binding only to a single person or several persons acting jointly to express an active intention...

, changed her conventional, two-word name for the more esoteric Jasmuheen.

Breatharianism

When the Australian television programme 60 Minutes challenged her to demonstrate how she could live without food and water, the supervising medical professional Dr. Beres Wenck found that after 48 hours Jasmuheen displayed symptoms of acute dehydration

Dehydration

In physiology and medicine, dehydration is defined as the excessive loss of body fluid. It is literally the removal of water from an object; however, in physiological terms, it entails a deficiency of fluid within an organism...

, stress

Stress (medicine)

Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...

 and high blood pressure. Jasmuheen claimed that this was a result of "polluted air". On day 3, Jasmuheen was moved to a mountainside retreat about 15 miles from the city, where she was filmed enjoying the fresh air she said she could now live on happily. However, as the filming progressed, her speech slowed, her pupil

Pupil

The pupil is a hole located in the center of the iris of the eye that allows light to enter the retina. It appears black because most of the light entering the pupil is absorbed by the tissues inside the eye. In humans the pupil is round, but other species, such as some cats, have slit pupils. In...

s dilated and she lost over a stone

Stone (weight)

The stone is a units of measurement that was used in many North European countries until the advent of metrication. It value, which ranged from 3 kg to 12 kg, varied from city to city and also often from commodity to commodity...

 (6 kg or 14 lb) in weight. After four days, Jasmuheen acknowledged that she had lost weight, but stated that she felt fine. Dr. Wenck stated "You are now quite dehydrated, probably over 10%, getting up to 11%." The doctor also announced, "Her pulse is about double what it was when she started. The risks if she goes any further are kidney failure." Jasmuheen's condition continued to deteriorate rapidly in the clearly demonstrated context of acute dehydration, despite her insistence to the contrary. Dr. Wenck concluded that continuing the experiment would ultimately prove fatal. The film crew concurred with this assessment and ceased filming.

She is quoted by the Correx Archives as saying, regarding how much she eats:

Generally not much at all. Maybe a few cups of tea and a glass of water, but now and then if I feel a bit bored and I want some flavour, then I will have a mouthful of whatever it is I'm wanting the flavour of. So it might be a piece of chocolate or it might be a mouthful of a cheesecake or something like that.

Jasmuheen has stated that she has lived on approximately 300 calorie

Calorie

The calorie is a pre-SI metric unit of energy. It was first defined by Nicolas Clément in 1824 as a unit of heat, entering French and English dictionaries between 1841 and 1867. In most fields its use is archaic, having been replaced by the SI unit of energy, the joule...

s per day for the last fourteen years, maintaining full health through supplementing a fluid intake with 'cosmic particles' or micro-food, which she describes as prana

Prana

Prana is the Sanskrit word for "vital life" .It is one of the five organs of vitality or sensation, viz. prana "breath", vac "speech", chakshus "sight", shrotra "hearing", and manas "thought" Prana is the Sanskrit word for "vital life" (from the root "to fill", cognate to Latin plenus...

. Jasmuheen has also stated that she has not yet mastered the ability to be fluid-free for more than short periods.

She was awarded the Bent Spoon Award

Bent Spoon Award

The Bent Spoon Award is an award given by Australian Skeptics, "presented to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle". The name of the award is a reference to the spoon bending of Uri Geller...

 by Australian Skeptics

Australian Skeptics

The Australian Skeptics is a non-profit organisation based in Australia which investigates paranormal and pseudoscientific claims using scientific methodologies.-History:...

 in 2000 ("presented to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal

Paranormal

Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...

 or pseudoscientific piffle"). She was also awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize

Ig Nobel Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think"...

 for Literature for her book Pranic Nourishment — Living on Light, "which explains that although some people do eat food, they don't ever really need to."

Jasmuheen maintains that some of her beliefs are based on the writings and "more recent channelled

Channelling (mediumistic)

In spirituality, channelling or channeling is the belief that communication of information occurs by or through a person , from a deity, spirit or other paranormal entity outside the mind of the channel...

 material" of the Count of St Germain

Count of St Germain

The Count of St. Germain has been variously described as a courtier, adventurer, charlatan, inventor, alchemist, pianist, violinist and an amateur composer. He achieved great prominence in European high society of the mid-1700s, and since then various scholars have linked him to mysticism,...

. She states that her DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

 expanded from 2 to 12 strands to take up more hydrogen. The extra strands of DNA have not been demonstrated, and when offered $30,000 to prove her claim with a blood test, she stated that "you cannot view spiritual energy under a microscope." She claims that such a challenge is a deliberate attack on her beliefs, and she refuses to act as an example of her claimed paranormal attributes.

In 2005, James Randi

James Randi

James Randi is a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic best known as a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience. Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation...

 offered her the James Randi Educational Foundation

James Randi Educational Foundation

The James Randi Educational Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 by magician and skeptic James Randi. The JREF's mission includes educating the public and the media on the dangers of accepting unproven claims, and to support research into paranormal claims in controlled...

 US$1 million prize to demonstrate her claims.

Deaths

Three deaths have been directly linked to breatharianism and Jasmuheen's publications. Jasmuheen has denied any moral responsibility for this. In reference to the death of Lani Morris, for example, she said that perhaps Morris was "not coming from a place of integrity and did not have the right motivation." Verity Linn starved herself to death and her "diary mentioned the teachings of self-proclaimed prophet Jasmuheen who believes people can draw nourishment from the 'divine life force in the form of liquid light'." After an investigation by the Australian and British police, Jasmuheen was not charged in connection with these deaths.

Jasmuheen (on a superseded but still available website) attempted to distance her writings from the death by dehydration of keen believer Verity Linn, whose body was found in a tent with little but a sleeping bag

Sleeping bag

A sleeping bag is a protective "bag" for a person to sleep in, essentially a blanket that can be closed with a zipper or similar means, and functions as a bed in situations where a bed is unavailable . Its primary purpose is to provide warmth and thermal insulation...

, her clothing, and a single book, one of Jasmuheen's publications. In response to Verity's death, Jasmuheen wrote "If you haven't found the light that will nourish you, you may have the intention to become a breatharian, but in fact you may be putting yourself through food deprivation. There is one known case where a person died when trying to become a breatharian."

Publications

• The Prana Program — Eliminating Global Health & Hunger Challenges
• Harmonious Healing and the Immortal's Way
• The Law of Love & Its Fabulous Frequency Of Freedom
• The Food of Gods
• In Resonance
• Pranic Nourishment — Living on Light
• Ambassadors of Light — World Health & World Hunger Project
• Divine Radiance: On the Road With the Masters Of Magic
• Four Body Fitness: Biofields & Bliss
• Co-creating Paradise
• The Madonna Frequency Planetary Peace Program

External links

• Jasmuheen's personal website
• Jasmuheen's Cosmic Internet Academy
• Jasmuheen on YouTube
  YouTube
  YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
  
   - episode of 60 Minutes (Jasmuheen's aborted experiment)