Greetings, Friends – I’m celebrating the phenomenal role that our Inner Gardens offer our overall well-being! After spending time navigating a family member’s journey across multiple health departments without any meaningful focus on the gut as the source for healing inflammation, I’m inspired to speak up.
First, I’ll share an excerpt from The Inner Garden and then highlight some factoids I’m learning about gut health from reading gastroenterologist Will Bulsiewicz’s Plant Powered Plus.
“…the common, highly-processed diet of the US population…(is) starving our gut microbiome which is ultimately starving our bodies of the essential nutrients and minerals we need to sustain proper maintenance and repair of our bodies. The body’s ability to heal itself is severely undermined when its gut microbiome is not properly fed. This, combined with a medical framework of disease-treatment instead of wellness-promotion, creates a negative feedback cycle within the body as it is not given the proper fuel to heal itself and then given chemically-synthesized medicine to try to eliminate the physical issues(s) that has/have arisen. If plant medicine (non-chemically-derived) were used, the body would be more able to access the phytonutrients offered which would enable the gut microbiome to operate more effectively, further enabling the body to repair, maintain, and heal itself.” [taken from p41 of The Inner Garden]
Cue the Jerry McGuire scene… here our gut microbiomes take the role of Tom Cruise and exclaim with exasperation to our Cuba Gooding Jr. selves, “Help Me, Help You!”
In Plant Powered Plus, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz (Dr. B) provides a list of over 130 medical conditions that have been scientifically associated with inflammation and gut dysbiosis within the body [view the list here alongside references]. Some of these might seem surprising… dementia? breast cancer? endometriosis? depression? However, this long list of medical conditions only reinforces what Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine already hold to be true: the digestive tract is at the root of all disease – the gut is the cornerstone of health.
The Inner Garden book encourages us to equate gut health with immune system health and Dr. B reinforces the same thing… celebrating that the lining of our gut is an immune organ that provides 70% of our immune system function! Pathogens/toxins that get by our gut microbiome (1st line of defense) AND find a way through our gut wall (2nd line of defense) set off an immune response, resulting in inflammation somewhere in the body. While there are certainly health issues that have their own unique pathways of expression, the foundational role that gut health plays in our well-being requires more attention.
The more I learn about the phenomenal operations that our Inner Gardens carry out to maintain, repair, and heal our bodies, the more I am absolutely astounded at the intelligence and orchestration of it all. Our digestive tract performs so many jobs and it seems that we, as individuals, need to reclaim our ability to be good managers… offering our bodies the support they need to do what they inherently know how to do instead of under-resourcing them, adding larger workloads…ultimately asking them to keep working harder with less pay. The grind of our external world mirrors the grind that we are our creating for our inner world. Ilarion (Kuuyux) Merculieff reminds us that, “You can’t create anything on the outside until you’ve created it on the inside first.”
Another fascinating factoid that Dr. B shares is that the intestinal epithelium – the single cell layer that lines the small and large intestine – sheds and replaces itself once every 3 to 5 days… the fastest rate of cellular turnover in the body! The implications of this invite us to marvel at how quickly we could potentially influence our overall well-being if we focused our attention on fueling our Inner Gardens with what they need to thrive.
While there are universal suggestions that could benefit everyone [eat organically-grown, whole foods], the Inner Garden book and framework remind us that each and every one of us has a unique constitution and, thus, has specific requirements to keep our Inner Gardens in balance. The free Inner Garden quiz is a quick way to start investigating what your constitution is and the Inner Garden Profile offers an affordable way to identify your constitution and how to best care for it on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels.
Plant Medicine - Mother Earth's Antidotes
The Inner Garden book defines ‘plant medicine’ as plants that are specifically selected for the essences they have, the phytonutrients they provide, and the ability to combine with other plants in a way that enables them to support the body in desired ways. Sometimes ‘plant medicine’ is conflated with psychoactive plant journeys and I want to be clear that the realm of plant medicine is MUCH larger.
And yes, the daily food you choose to eat can also be considered ‘medicine’, however, ‘plant medicine’ is distinguished as the intentional use of plants to address a physical, emotional, and/or spiritual imbalance.
I have been crafting plant medicines, primarily in the form of tinctures, for the past 8 years and my efforts have been guided by my angelic team. The focus for most of my tinctures has been on remedies that help the gut microbiome heal and recover from pharmaceutical and environmental toxins. I have personally tested and benefitted from all of my tinctures that address a personal need…unfortunately, this has been most of my tinctures. Many of us are exposed to the same environmental toxins just by inhabiting the same Earth and those in developed countries get hit even harder where Big Ag & Big Pharma have prevailed.
The pharmaceutical and environmental inflictions to our bodies can be hard to track, yet they are compounding the negative impacts the gut microbiome is managing. Our population health indicators reflect this.
I am very eager to have my tinctures clinically tested so that their safety and efficacy can be scientifically demonstrated, communicated, and thus be accessible to more people. I have made just a few of my tinctures publicly available – one of which supports individuals’ gut microbiomes in healing from mRNA vaccines & boosters. For those who have had Covid, I’ve also shared a gut rebalancing protocol in my last blog post, Post-Covid Gut Microbiome Considerations.
What both humbles and inspires me is that Mother Earth continues to provide solutions to our most pernicious issues (many of which we have brought upon ourselves)… and that even when treated disrespectfully, she continues to offer us pathways for thriving.
May you be curious about your own phenomenal Inner Garden and how best to care for it!
Best,
Megan
P.S. This post brought to you by Aretha Franklin’s, “Think“… some lyrics excerpted here, sung by the gut microbiome to the rational mind… perhaps the heart will be engaged as well.
“You better think
Think about about what you’re tryin’ to do to me…
I ain’t no psychiatrist, I ain’t no doctor with degrees
But it don’t take too much IQ
to see what you’re doing to me…
You need me
And I need you (don’t ya know?)
Without each other
There ain’t nothin’ either can do”