100 Days - What is Life?

What is life exactly?

I’ve come to realize that LIFE is not only what is taking place outside of us, around us, with us and to us – it should be equally (perhaps more so?) inside of us. And for me, for a very long time, if ever at all – there was little life to be lived on the inside.

My gut had ‘dead-spots’, it was leaky, and generally non functioning in the appropriate ways to sustain life. By that I mean – there were not enough beneficial organisms helping me digest food, extract nutrients and make vitamins. 

Over the years I have seen more and more people with these dead areas in their guts mostly as a result of antibiotic medication but another big culprit are birth control pills, chlorinated water, the too numerous to count chemicals in our food and the fact that our guts are not set up from birth in the first place anymore.

Our mothers cannot pass on organisms to us as babies they no longer have, not that many of us were breast fed in the past few generations but these organisms when they are available, find ways to get to and inside of us even without the breast feeding. When they are present, they will be in our environment as well.

It appears as if entire species of gut flora have simply died off inside of our guts and are no longer to be found in the modern human.

For quite some time people have been aware of these facts (antibiotic use is deadly in so many ways) and they have been taking steps to get their probiotic flora back on track and literally regrow  damaged gut biofilm….however I am not convinced we are doing enough nor are these always the right kind of organisms that are needed to colonise our bodies. 

We have been convinced by those who manufacture these bugs that there are a narrow group of 3 or 4 types of bacterial strains and this will do the entire job of keeping us healthy, setting up our immune response, digesting food, healing and sealing the gut and to generally carry out some of the numerous other vital functions of gut flora.

I think this is entirely wrong thinking. 

We are off tract in the gut microbes department and we are paying the price with poorer health, more chronic dis-ease and a complete inability to protect ourselves from ordinary (read necessary) viruses and bugs that have co-evolved alongside humanity for millennium. 

So what to do about all of this?

One place to start is to grow a garden. Get your hands dirty, then eat some real raw foods that you’ve had a hand in producing. Next, take some of those raw foods and create kitchen magic by making sauerkrauts, kimchee, kombucha types of drinks, natural and wild yeasted foods and some of the many other alchemical processes we know can increase the presence of beneficial bacteria in and around us. 

If you want your health, body and soul back – it’s time to take back your life and that begins on the inside.

Vegetables growing in the garden......

Check out my upcoming classes on Wild Fermentation & Food Alchemy 

Using Clay to Heal & Seal the Gut

Some thing I use a lot of here and cannot recommend it enough, is clay. Of course there are so many different types and kinds of clay; French Green Clay, Diatomaceous Earth, Bentonite Clays, Fuller's Earth, Red Clay, Kaolin and so forth….but their basic use is often the same. 

Clays pull, encourage movement and remove toxins, wastes & debris from both your internal and external systems. They tighten up the membranes while gently sloughing off the uppermost layers of cells as they move along on the inside and pull toxins out of your skin allowing detox on the outside.

In fact on the inside, they work much the same way as a clay mask on your face would do. Only this 'mask' is a moving flow of minerals being propelled along your digestive tract along with your food.

The one important point that I have discovered and then have been able to confirm, is how some of these clays work over time to heal and seal the gut. Remember how I have mentioned over these past few years my observation in myself and many others that our guts were never set up properly from birth? 

Well, this has to do with the fact that the biofilm and internal covering containing the living matrix of bacteria (mainly) are either too thin on the ground,  are made up of some non-beneficial types of organisms and in general have been not functioning in a health sustaining way.

Thus, we see far too much of childhood eczema, asthma, allergies, tummy troubles and then later on – far worse conditions, all relating back to this most basic necessity of a functioning gut. In fact, our immune systems never kick into high gear when our internal environment is not fully operational as well. 

What needs to happen for many of us is to heal and seal these gaps, spaces and places in our digestive tract that have never fully functioned from infancy. Only then will we see significant progress in our health and healing.

Clay is an amazing natural part of any healing regimen when it comes to the skin - inside and out.

Bentonite clay being hydrated for use