I have been working with healing myself as well as others and got to thinking about our biome. The one giant biome and the millions of baby biomes that reside within. Did you know that we have few cells comparative to the critters that dwell within us that are comprised of bacteria, viruses, fungi and the like? Candida Albican or C-diff if you need the names of a few.

These microorganisms within us aren’t all bad. As a comparative think of the ocean that holds many different species. Yes, within us dwells many species, most of which are foreign to us-at least from a conceptual point of view. From our perspective, some of these species are beneficent while others are pathogenic and harmful.

Our goal with health is to move the unhealthy critters out as we invite the lovely ones in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in a second, minute, hour, day or week. This is a slowwwww evolutionary process that starts before we are born, a process that might not be finished (to our liking) during our lifetime or even through multiple generational lifetimes, if at all.

Ultimately this is what we ALL want though on an intrinsic level. Benevolence. Goodness. For others and ourselves. This is human nature turned upright. We might argue that this isn’t true for everybody but it is. We want to invite the happy, sweet, benign critters in and coexist with them. This is where true bliss resides. We just may not realize our power and even our desire to do this.

From a consciousness perspective, we are left with a plight, challenge, and opportunityto change the biome one critter at a time. Our big old biome is passed down through our ancestry with a decision tree of who did what. The decisions we make in our life matters not only for the individual but also for the collective.

For our survival we need to make better choices on:

• Which food we eat
• The soap, detergents that we use
• The people we surround ourselves with and invite into our personal space
• The thoughts that we think
• The words that we say
• The love and hate that we share
• The anger or gratitude that we express
• The light that we let in or don’t let in
• The spaces that we dwell in or the lack thereof because of clutter
• The gardens that we plant
• The spray that we spread
• The people we behold or abuse
• The animals that we bring in or farm out
• The drugs, herbals, alcohol, coffee, juice, birth control, chemo, opioids, benzos, antibiotics and pesticides, and smoke that we inhale, ingest and then excrete out that later gets into the air, soil, and waterways; all of which will factor into the health of the biome
• It is in the way that we birth
• and the rate at which we chew
• and the amount of time we spend at drive thru window that all factors into who we are and who our children are, what we are and how we look from the inside out
• The grass that we walk on and the grass-fed animals we ingest or don’t ingest
• The clothing and shoes that we wear
• It is the exercise we get
• It is the electronics that we spend our time looking at
• It is the books that we read
• The violence that we take in
• and the curse words we send out
• The fears that we harbor
• It is the smiles that come from our heart that goes into the matter housed within and around us
• It is in the breaths that we take in, let out or hold
• It’s in the anger that we feel and feed
• It is in the trash that we dispose of and the trash that we compost and then later garden that will tweak the biome in subtle and not so subtle ways
• The biome represents the essence of us, our mind/body/soul that we carry in dense and energetic ways
• It is in everything! Everything. Everything matters because it is matter!

So this undertaking of changing THE GUT is an important one, a crucial one, a slow, deep and mindful one. One that needs to be done with much care. We cannot sweep our house clean in a day even with a good probiotic. All things matter in the smallest and biggest of ways. All of this goes into which critters we invite in and those which are pushed out. Each time we make a decision we decide on what really matters and what we want to house within and around us, our microbiome and macrobiome.

It all shapes us—the thoughts that we have, the God we pray to and the face that he or she holds. Everything we do shapes our biome. Defines who we uniquely are. So it is with the decisions that our mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and daughters made (and will make) that will ossify us and re-create our genetic code and the inborn errors of metabolism that develop from there and here. It is by our own hands and the hands of our ancestors that the biome is manipulated and mutated. Like a mother, in a brew, it starts as a base and then morphs outward.

We can usher one friendly friend in at a time and when we do the unfriendly ones will be forced to leave. There will be no room for them. They will be squeezed out and forced to be remade, in some creative new way. So with each decision think of which critter you are inviting in and which one you are ushering gently out to be transmuted elsewhere. Think of each action and the probable ensuing result. You decide and then re-member that you (and I) are responsible as we have the ability to respond everyday in every way.