Live Blood Analysis

Live Blood Analysis is about now. It is also one of the reasons I believe Terrain Theory is the way of the future. Instead of looking at one symptom or one part of the body in isolation, we can begin looking at the environment in which everything is happening. With one little drop of living blood under the microscope, an entire inner world becomes visible. Red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, plasma, debris, movement and patterns are all there in front of you. You will see yourself inside.

I will teach you how to prepare a slide properly, use the microscope and camera and, more importantly, understand what you are looking at. You will explore energetic, holographic, nutritional and terrain patterns and how hydration, minerals, digestion, food, circulation, stress and the general condition of the internal terrain may show themselves in the blood. I want you to make connections between what you see on that slide and what may be happening within the body. And then you can look again. Change your food, improve your hydration, work on minerals or make changes in your lifestyle and return to the microscope. This is where Terrain Theory becomes practical.

We can work on changing the conditions and then observe what happens. During the retreat, you will have your own Live Blood Analysis, and I will spend time investigating your blood and preparing a personalized report for you. You will also receive my books and the teaching materials we use together. For practitioners, this can bring another dimension into the work you already do. For personal use, it gives you a skill you can continue developing yourself. I want you to become comfortable with the microscope, know how to prepare and examine blood and leave excited to keep looking.



Dried Blood Analysis – A View of the Terrain

Dried Blood Analysis can give us an extraordinary amount of information from something so simple: a series of blood drops dried on a microscope slide. Patterns develop within the fibrin network, and within those patterns are clues about the terrain of the body. This is Terrain Theory in a very visual form. We are looking at the conditions of the body and asking where those conditions may be taking us. I believe this way of looking at health is part of the future of health care. You will learn to recognize patterns connected with oxidative stress, proteins, minerals, digestion and elimination, circulation, inflammation, stress, endocrine function, tissue integrity and other areas of the terrain. You will learn why the sequence of the drops matters, why location matters and why we don't simply find one marker and decide we have an answer. A blot is a story, and you have to learn how to read the whole thing. This is what I find so powerful about Dried Blood Analysis. It gives us clues about where the terrain may be heading. Patterns may appear before we have connected all the pieces ourselves. They give us somewhere to investigate, questions to ask and information we can use to make changes while continuing to observe the terrain.

You are going to prepare samples, work with the microscope, photograph what you see and develop your own eye for pattern recognition. I want you looking at those drops and asking: What keeps repeating? What is changing? What is this blood trying to tell me? Throughout the week I will investigate your own samples in depth and prepare a personalized Dried Blood Analysis report for you. You will receive my Dried Blood Guide, my other books and the teaching materials we use together. I don't want you leaving with a pile of marker names in your head. I want you leaving with a powerful tool you can actually use, and a very different way of thinking about health.


The Soil Food Web – Learning to Grow Soil

Healthy soil is alive, and in this workshop you are going to get your hands dirty and awesomely infected with great microbes. For me, this is Terrain Theory at its roots. A plant cannot be separated from the soil it grows in any more than we can separate our own health from the terrain in which our cells and microbes live. Change the terrain and you change what can thrive there. Beneath our feet is an extraordinary community of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes and other microorganisms doing the work that makes healthy soil possible. They cycle nutrients, build soil structure, hold water and work directly with plant roots. Once you understand who these microbes are, their character and what they are actually doing, the way you grow food changes. I am a Soil Food Web Consultant and studied with Dr. Elaine Ingham, but what I really want to share with you is what happens when you take that science out of the classroom and put it into the dirt. I have spent years doing exactly that at Living Ground, making compost, growing food, looking through the microscope, experimenting and learning directly from the land. You are going to see the microbes yourself. You will learn to identify them under the microscope and understand what their presence, numbers and diversity can tell you about compost and soil.

We are going to make microbe-rich compost with one very specific intention: I want you to become a microbe farmer. You will learn the art of making microbial extracts and teas, how to apply that biology to a few garden beds, an orchard or a large farm and, importantly, how to create the conditions that allow those organisms to thrive once they are back in the soil. And, yes, we are going to talk about weeds because I love weeds. They are communicators. They give us clues about what is happening beneath the surface if we learn how to read them. This goes beyond organic. Swapping one input for another does not necessarily change how we think about growing. Nature has been building soil and growing plants without us for a very long time. What is nature already doing, and how can we mimic it? That question changes everything. You will receive my book The Soil Microbiome and the supporting course materials. I hope you go home with a completely different relationship with the ground beneath your feet. You are not just learning how to grow plants. You are learning how to grow soil.



Kitchen & Plant Alchemy

Food as medicine begins in the soil. That is where Kitchen & Plant Alchemy begins for me, because I don't think we can talk seriously about the healing qualities of food without asking how that food was grown, what was happening around its roots, when it was harvested and what we did with it afterward. Terrain Theory doesn't stop at the human body. There is a terrain beneath the plant, a microbial world around its roots and another microbial world within us waiting to receive what that plant provides. Then we are going to get our hands into it. We are going into the gardens, out into the wild, into the harvest and back into the kitchen. Plants will be on the tables. Jars will be bubbling. Things will be fermenting, soaking, sprouting, drying and freeze-drying. We are going to make things.

You will learn how to create a medicinal garden, when to harvest different plants and what to do with them once they are in your hands. You will ferment, sprout, dehydrate, freeze-dry, make infusions and extracts, preserve food and learn how to take a harvest and use it well. I have spent years working with herbs, medicinal plants and wild foods, and some of my favorites are ordinary plants people step over every day without knowing what they are. You will forage, identify wild foods and medicinal plants and learn what to actually do with them. You don't need rare herbs, acres of land or an elaborate apothecary. There is useful food and medicine growing all around us. Our current food system has taken a lot of this knowledge out of our hands. I want to put some of it back. What can you grow yourself? What can you gather? What can you ferment, dry or preserve? What can you make into an extract? What can you put away for six months from now? What is growing outside your door that you have never even thought about using? You will receive my books Wild Plants and Kitchen Alchemy, along with the course materials we use together. I want you to go home with dirt under your fingernails, jars in your bag, ideas running through your head and a different relationship with the food and plants around you. I want you to go home and start making things.