Field Notes from my journey creating Living Ground, Ecuador.
“If I want people to care about the Earth itself, about the land and soil that feed us, about the way our food, medical, political, and religious systems are shaping us, and about how divided and dysfunctional we have become, then I need to plant those concerns inside stories that are wide enough and deeply connective enough that others can recognize themselves within them.” Leisha of the Living Ground Project.
Living Ground Recent Posts
Why Bile Is Essential for Gut Health
Every meal sets in motion a carefully coordinated process involving the liver, gallbladder, pancreas, intestines, microbiome, and the production, storage, release, and transformation of bile. The liver produces much of the cholesterol the body needs by assembling it from nutrients and smaller compounds created during the metabolism of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Cholesterol is not simply something…
Exploring Through Dried Blood
I am now offering Dried Blood Analysis at Living Ground. After completing my new teaching manual, I felt inspired to bring this work forward and begin offering consultations by appointment. I have never really promoted my blood analysis work. I have simply allowed the energy around it to happen. People became curious, someone told someone else, clients…
My New Book: Dried Blood Analysis
I have finished a book that has been growing through my work for a long time. Dried Blood Analysis: A Practical Guide to Understanding Health Through Patterns came from my belief that this is another special tool people can learn to use to understand what is going on within their own body. The body is continually showing…
The Gut-Brain Axis A Conversation That Never Stops
What if I told you that your brain isn’t the only brain making decisions inside your body? It sounds impossible, yet hidden within the walls of your digestive tract is an intricate nervous system that is constantly gathering information, making adjustments, and communicating with your brain. Add trillions of microorganisms, hormones, immune cells, and chemical messengers to…
The Gut-Lung Connection
One of the things I enjoy most about working with clients is that every person teaches me something new. Each case encourages me to ask more questions, read more research, and continue learning. I have never believed that we know everything there is to know about the human body. In fact, I think some of the most…
Matter matters
Just a little muse! Have you used GPS, Google Maps, or even Google Search? AI has been quietly helping us for years. The difference now is that it is no longer only helping us find information or navigate a route. It is beginning to think for us, write for us, remember for us, and even make decisions…
A New Way to Eat at Living Ground – More Than a Menu
After months of thinking, planning, tasting, cooking, and more than a little rearranging, we are excited to finally share our new Living Ground menu. This isn’t simply a new list of meals. It is a completely different way to experience food at Living Ground. Instead of choosing from a list of set meals, you build your own…
What If We’ve Been Looking at Life Backwards?
There has been something on my mind for quite a while now. It isn’t really about resilience, although that is where it began. It is about the way we think and how easily we accept certain ideas as truth simply because we have heard them our entire lives. I have always believed that becoming more self-reliant is…
People who can feed themselves cannot be ruled
I often wonder where my fascination with gardens, herbs, and growing food really began. Looking back, I think it started in my mother’s rose garden. I didn’t realize it then, but perhaps that was also the beginning of learning about self-reliance. As a little girl in England, I decided I was going to make rose water. I…
Why Would the Body Attack Its Own Thyroid?
This is a long article and was inspired because I was working with some workshop participants and friends and I wanted to go deeper into understanding the thyroid and most especially, Hashimotos. Over the years I have worked with many people diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and I did not have a complete understanding myself. Most have been…
What is Living Ground
,The Living Ground Project is a living classroom in southern Ecuador, built from soil, food, plants, microbes, and community.
Here, we grow much of what we serve and teach. The gardens feed the café, the apothecary, the workshops, the books, and the people who come here to learn a different way of living. Everything begins with the soil, because healthy soil grows stronger plants, stronger food, and stronger people.
Living Ground is a place for practical self-reliance. We teach gardening, soil regeneration, fermentation, herbal medicine, food preservation, natural health, and the connection between the human microbiome and the soil food web. Our work is not theory. It is lived every day through the gardens, the kitchen, the store, the café, the animals, the workshops, and the land itself.
The vision is simple. Restore the soil, grow real food, preserve knowledge, create local work, and help people remember that health does not begin in a bottle. It begins in relationship with the land, the microbes, the plants, the food, and each other.
Living Ground’s Online Courses in Self Reliance
