Nourishing the Heart, Mind and Gut Connection

Nowadays there's a lot of people that talk about finding flow state and I think for me what I've found the best practice is actually just getting into flow by doing something that's kind of challenging. This world is ever changing. Things will never go back to how they used to be. We are in a cycle of evolution but there's one thing that remains constant. One thing that remains the same. And that is our need to find harmony. To find balance. To find flow within ourselves and within the world around us. This can be challenging when our communities have been separated. When we have lost some of that connection. And so this video is about reconnecting that. Because the biggest issues of our time are mental imbalances, emotional stagnation, and digestive health issues. So I want to share with you how to work on these, how to evolve, and how to expand and revitalize these major centers of our body. To start off I want to make sure we're on the same page as far as the holistic landscape goes. Now in our modern world we know of our physical body but we're also starting to understand that there's some nuance to the energetic field of who we are and to the microbiome and to the health of our ecosystem as a whole. Now what we know is that this is fractal in nature. So we are self-similar to those larger energy fields in our universe. And this can give us some keys to how to find the secret code behind the message, behind the manifestation. And so I want to talk to you a little bit in a fractal language. In this understanding of archetypes and in this understanding of energetic fields. So first off I've talked about three major energy centers. The head, the heart, and the gut. These are also correlated to the three major archetypes. The father, the mother, and the child. So we can treat them as such. Our father is our head, our thinking body. Our emotional center is our heart, our feminine side. And our child is the manifestation of our gut, microbiome, and all the digestive things that we process through it. So when we're looking to work with finding balance in these areas, this can be a nice lens to start with. Let's start with looking at how to better cultivate a fractal mind. Now I've painted this picture of the mind being masculine. And as you know, this is not entirely true. But for the sake of our story today, we're going to look at it more as the analytical mind. But we also have obviously a creative mind, we have an imaginative mind. But really the analytical mind needs to be tempered a little bit with some of that creative flow, with some of those other ways of expression. So how do we do that? How do we temper this kind of masculine dominance in the mind to get more flexible with ourselves, with our body, to create a healthy mindscape, literally? So one of the first steps that I want to just really remind you of is that we live in a digital age where screens are in front of us consistently, where we're in cities, urban environments, and most of the angles of the geometry that we look at are right angle reality. This is even when we're looking through a camera or through a phone or a computer at nature. It may look like nature, but it's still tiny little right angle pixels that we're looking at. So the first thing you can do to cultivate a fractal mind to open up this space is to get outside into the natural world. Whenever you're heavily working on a computer, take breaks, shrine around your computer with nice natural substances, with things that are not in this right angle reality. Make sure to take space and give yourself time to decongest this fractal superhighway that is our mind. Another important piece of cultivating a healthy mind is presence. You've probably heard of the saying, be here now. Well, this is really a way of living and being in the moment, of being present, taking time to appreciate the here and now, to be an active listener to the world around you, to your community, to your family, to the needs of the people in your lives, but also the needs of yourself and the needs of the world. One of the things that we often suffer from is we know that this world's out of balance. We know that there's sickness and challenge and disease and poverty and scarcity and all kinds of lower tone challenges that we need to overcome, but those get us into this kind of mental expression, outward facing. The only work we can actually do is being present, being here, being available to be of service to the needs of the now. So to cultivate a healthy mind, we need to be present. We need to find moments of presence. So just like walking in nature, take time to just be in the moment. Part of finding new things is being an explorer and doing this with our childlike mind to start to weave our way through reality and play a little bit to, you know, get out and have a little adventure. Whoa. Find new ways of doing things. One of the most important pieces to help govern our choices and to keep our mental space agile and aligned is to find a code of ethics, a way of living, a set of values that help govern the way we make our decisions. So whenever we're faced with something that's challenging or something we don't align with and don't agree with, we can always draw back on this instead of trying to fit into peer pressure or social norms. We want our code of ethics to be our governance of how we make decisions. Now, there's lots of resources online for this. The most important thing is that it aligns with you, not that it's what somebody else thinks is a good code of ethics, right? How do we find alignment here so that we make decisions for ourselves that empower us, not just make us a slave to this code of ethics? Nowadays, there's a lot of people that talk about finding flow state. And I think for me, what I've found the best practice is actually just getting into flow by doing something that's kind of challenging and playing with the reality, you know, so I can be in flow and intuitively start moving my body and just having fun with it. Life is not as serious as we think it is. And so sometimes just being in flow is the best thing we can do for our mind, for our space, you know, depression, anxiety, tension, fear. These are all things that challenge so many people. And play and embodiment are the cures to get a little bit more excited to do interesting, fun things, to run a little, to jump, to go forward and have fun with life. The last piece I want to mention about cultivating a healthy mind is to find a higher purpose, to find a vision, something that is your 3000 foot level, your North Star that guides you in the direction in life you are headed. For me, this is deepening my connection with the natural world. And you may know what this is for you. But if you don't, I invite you to take some time to really deepen and allow yourself to sink into what is that purpose? What is that mission? What are you here to do? So the second major electromagnetic oscillation center of our body is our heart. And I mentioned this as the mother, as the feminine. A lot of us suffer from emotional stagnation. We don't feel comfortable sharing how we really feel. And sometimes we don't even understand and we can't even digest how we really feel. There are a number of tools to help support this so we can integrate our emotional body and do some of that deeper emotional healing. I believe that this is probably one of the biggest parts of the imbalance in humanity these days is our lack of emotional flow of connection to this, to create that conduit within our hearts, to create what I call the heart cave, a special sacred place where we can always go to reflect and deepen our connection to this world and to ourselves. So the first practice for this is creating what I'll call a sit spot. This is something that another herbalist, Paul Bergner, shared with me, and I think it's just an invaluable tool to create a sit spot. That is a PowerPoint, a place where you can come and sit in nature to really reconnect with yourselves and to tune in with the world around you. So this could be a great sit spot right here. I've got a bit of vision and see flow and movement of the creek below me. And it's just a really calm, beautiful energy to this space. Find a sit spot in your life. Find a few sit spots, if you can, PowerPoints where you can always go back whenever you're feeling out of balance, whenever you're feeling challenged emotionally, go to your sit spot and create a rhythm with this, create a ceremony in this place. Now, this will fit into some form of meditation as well. But for me, what it's really been is just slowing down and again, being present to whatever's coming up for me in that moment. One thing to remember is there is so much ancestral wisdom in your body and in the natural world around you. When we tap into this ancestral wisdom, we can rekindle new ways of showing up. So this idea of rekindling is a mantra that I've been working with, and that is to tap into the old coals, those deep, dark kind of burning coals and grow them back up into a beautiful new flame. That is my moment right now. It's important to remember to forgive ourselves, to let go of judgment. Often we can come across as hypercritical to our own actions, giving other people the benefit of the doubt, but not ourselves. This is a poor practice that will inevitably lead us to fall and feel disillusioned and feel incompetent to really own our stuff. And yet at the same time, give yourselves a bit of appreciation and acceptance that we are not perfect and never will be. This is a big piece of cultivating a healthy heart cave, of cultivating a healthy space within the self, of getting a little more emotionally intelligent with how we show up. It's to know that we're going to make mistakes and through that, continual improvement and growth is inevitable if we have the right attitude. All right, so an attitude of gratitude, appreciation, appreciates, my friends. Something I've been working on a lot over the last couple of years is to develop my intuition, to trust my gut feelings, to listen to my body's language, to the code behind what I'm feeling and allow that to be a governance and a guidance to how I move forward in life. Now, this can be challenging because our analytical mind can get in there and tell us the logical path forward. But when we start to allow our intuition to guide us, it entrains the mind, which will always follow the heart's lead. So a big piece of creating a heart cave, of creating emotional stability in our lives is honoring those feelings and allowing them to help us find the golden threads in life. Sometimes this can seem illogical and intangible, but I assure you from my own experience that in doing this, we will find the best path forward. We may stumble, we may fall, but we'll always pick ourselves back up again. Building relationship with the world around us can be a really useful practice in helping us understand better relationship with ourselves. So something I would invite you to do is to build relationships with non-human friends, with non-human partners. Sometimes this can come across more creative and almost sexual, but not sexual. There's not tension there, but there's a little bit of that creative juice and that, we'll call it flirtation or connection at that level of fun. So one of those for me is this plant here. This is devil's club. And I love this one because it's spiky. These spikes will actually cause a festering wound. But it also speaks to me along these river valleys and these deep, dark places. I have a real strong attunement and relationship with this plant. And over the years, we've been dancing together, literally under the pale moonlight. And this sings to my heart, these kinds of relationships. So find that, whether it's a cat, a dog, a plant, another inanimate object, building relationships with non-human partners is an integral piece to cultivating a healthy heart. One of the last practices I want to share that has been an invaluable tool for me is something called wide angle lenses. This is a way of tuning our vision to expand it to the furthest edges. And I often use my fingers to kind of get this feeling or imagine an electromagnetic pull at the back of my head. And instead of looking directly at things, I bend my vision sideways. And move very slowly. You'll find everything slows down and your hearing gets better. Your feeling gets better. Your nose starts to smell more profoundly. This is moving away from the domination of the eyes being that center. Something throughout this whole video that we're doing is called forest bathing, and that is to connect in to what intuitively fits within where we're curious in the forest, to just zone in and tune in to all the nuances and to take paths that are less traveled to experience new ways of being. So forest bathing is a great way to just start to navigate, unwinding your mind and opening up your heart and being present in a bit of a flow state, active meditation. Let the nature around you guide the direction you choose to go. In this case. In this last section, I want to talk to you a little bit about building up gut intelligence. Now, this is a huge issue in the modern world. Many of us have lost some of the healthy microbiome that we need to thrive and to keep our immune system strong and stable. This is akin to deforestation. So in this sense, what I understand is that our microbiome is our true immune system. So building up good permaculture gut design is the essential tool. So I want to give you a few ideas around this, around diet, around ways to build the best healthy gut ever and to align with the ecosystem inside our bodies the same way our values might align with a healthy ecosystem outside of our body. So just like everything else we've talked about today, flow and balance are the most important piece of creating a healthy microbiome. So that's flow emotionally, flow mentally, but also flow within our digestive tract. Of course, stagnation creates imbalance, creates disease. So are your bowels moving? Of course, that's the first piece. But a big part of that is not just laxative and not that kind of stuff. What I'm really saying is, are you moving in the kind of rhythm of nature? Just like everything else, we're fractal in nature. So we need to cleanse and build. We need to wax on and wax off. I call this the Karate Kid method. Wax on, wax off. Cleanse a little, build a little. Just like the moon, just like the seasons, just like the day and night. There's this cycle. So doing a lifestyle design around our food where we're doing regular intermittent fasts or cleanses. And then we're also doing regular building where we're re-nutrifying the body. We're giving a lot more supplementation or better food in those periods. So stripping away what no longer serves us and then rebuilding back up with the best food ever. This is part of that whole permaculture gut design. But the second piece to this is that we're adding what I would call leaf litter. We're adding all kinds of layering like that permaculture design where you got wood and twigs and leaves. We're adding different types of materials. We're stacking up the digestive process with things that are going to slowly burn, slowly digest, that are going to build up fiber, build up subsoils. Think of yourself as a plant, but just like a house plant where you have a pot of soil, your pot of soil is in your gut. So if you were a farmer, you'd want to make sure that the soil was the best quality ever. And you want to always neutrify the soil in order to grow the best plant. So this is what we got to do with our bodies. There's so many different diets out there. And I'll just tell you one really simple thing to live by. This has been a guiding truth for me, and it's not the amount of calories, the type of calories, sure there's qualities to the food, but it's about the living essence of our food. Is there vitality to our food still? Or is it canned and processed and frozen and lost in some of its vitality? Or is it fermented and regrown into new types of vitality? So always look for living essence in your food. Look for living foods, things that still have vitality to them and or lived a life of vitality. If something was grown in a monoculture crop with a lot of pesticides, it's obviously not got a lot of chi to it, not got a lot of vitality. So don't just go by, oh, I want to eat this much protein and this much vegetable and this much grains. Really look to the underlying vitality of the choices of each ingredient you decide to put in your body. Remember that when you put things in your mouth, they're not actually in your body. They're going through the hole in your donut. They're going through the tube and your body is trying to heal itself and build up its own resilience. So it's taking what is best for it and the rest is moving through. So as long as you flow, you can move through all kinds of stuff that may not be the best for you. If you can keep that moving, your body is trying to heal itself in every moment. And so giving it the best ingredients to begin with is probably the most important key to maintaining vitality into our older age. There's another piece to diet and to healthy gut microbiome that is really about seasonal attunement and bioregional attunement. Are we eating foods from our local environment? Are we eating foods that are seasonally appropriate? That means intuitively eating a salad in the middle of a cold winter in January may not be the best choice. At that point of the year, it might be better to have soups and root vegetables and stews and more food that's been more dense food that is a little more aligned with the season, whereas in the spring is starting to warm up. Those salads are perfect for cleansing the palate. They're the types of greens that would be growing naturally at that time of year. If you ever noticed in the garden, salad sort of dies off around midsummer and we start to get into heartier fruits and we start to get into bigger kind of like broccoli and cabbage and these kinds of things start to grow in. So tuning our diet to be transitional and seasonal consistently is an important piece to creating better healthy gut microbiome. So it's not just like eating avocados is good for us. It's actually more intuitive to flow with the natural cycle. Another piece of this seasonally attuned diet is to make sure we are adding in a wide spectrum of genetic diversity to the foods we choose, that means not eating the same kind of food continuously, allowing ourselves to explore a variety of genetics. Now, the big piece here is that our body reads chemistry and the different degrees and angles and branching of the chemical compounds that we expose it to help teach it, give it an education in how to show up in the world. So it's important for us to strengthen the diversity of types of genetic expressions we connect in with to allow us to be more resilient and to find the best way of showing up from a energetic, from a chemical, from a molecular level. Lastly, when it comes to cultivating a healthy gut intelligence, it's about our intuition and our tuning to our intelligence of our gut. Get those gut feelings, butterflies in our tummies. Are we listening to this when we eat different types of foods and they make us feel in different ways? Are we adapting and changing our decision making around diet? Do we notice when we get highs and lows, blood sugar imbalances, iron deficiencies? Tuning in to how our body is actually receiving the nutrition in our body is an important piece to building up that conversation, that integration of the whole spectrum of our health. So in conclusion, this is just a small sliver of some of the ideas you can start to incorporate when it comes to working with rebalancing and toning our three major oscillators, our three major centers of our body. Remember that we are energy and life is fractal in nature. And if we want to really achieve our best health, we need to look at it from this holistic lens and work on all of these aspects, our father, our mother and our child, our trinity, our mind, our heart and our gut. Let me know in some of the comments around things you like to do to help improve your health and vitality. What are some ideas, some tips, some tricks you've learned? Because I know you are powerful and you've been doing this work already. And I just hope that through this work, we can start to be the change and make the bigger impact in this world, because it's not about what we do out there. It's about what we do in here that makes the real change that we're looking for. All right. Thanks for joining me. And as always, be sure to hit the like, hit that bell so you get more of our content and check out some of the other videos we've done. We've got some great new videos coming this year. We're excited. 2021 feels like a year of unity, of connection, of reconnection, of re-enkindling, rekindle is my word for the year. And I feel like there's a lot to rekindle right now, a lot to bring forward. So thanks again. We'll see you soon.