Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
I was reading about the latest dietary trend called “fiber maxxing,” where people deliberately try to push their fiber intake higher and higher, sometimes to 50 or 60 grams a day. I am certainly in favor of eating more fiber, especially when modern diets contain so little of it, but …
There is another project quietly taking shape here at Living Ground, and this one has actually been circling around us for about a year. We are creating a small spa area with a sauna, hydrotherapy baths, herbal baths, Epsom salt baths, oils, herbal body treatments, Ayurvedic-inspired treatments, facials, clay treatments …
I have never been one for protocols, which is a little ironic because protocols are part of my work. I understand why people need them. I create recommendations, work with herbs, tinctures, minerals and food, and spend a lot of time looking at the terrain of the body. Personally, though, …
I am 58 years old, coming up to fifteen years of living here in Ecuador, and lately I have been thinking a lot about learning. Not education exactly, and certainly not collecting more information just for the sake of knowing things. And I love learning and never want to give …
Magnesium is a funny mineral. It does not get the attention that calcium gets, and it certainly is not as glamorous as some of the supplements that come and go in popularity, yet quietly behind the scenes magnesium is involved in an extraordinary amount of what keeps us alive and …
Creating something like Living Ground Ecuador is not simply about having ideas. I have lots of ideas, probably far too many, but I can usually see the bigger picture very clearly. I think that is one of my gifts. I can look at a piece of land, a café, a …
Living Ground is opening its doors for small, hands-on workshops in southern Ecuador. Come learn Live and Dried Blood Analysis, Soil Food Web science, fermentation, herbal medicine, food as medicine and practical self-reliance, all within a working project where soil, microbes, plants, food and human health are deeply connected.
I often see what I recognize as uric acid crystals when I am looking at live blood under the microscope. Sometimes there are only a few, and other times there are many scattered throughout the plasma. It is something I have seen often enough over the years that I recognize …
A Lesson from the Magical Forest Experience I was chatting with a friend this morning about the years I lived in the Magical Forest at Chiruisco. That happened after I first moved to Ecuador. As we talked, memories I hadn’t visited in years came flooding back. I could see the …
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, …