Andrew Winter | You Are Nature's Adaptive Resilience

Leaving London and living in the forests of central Portugal for the last 14 years, has been an extraordinary adventure. I've learnt so many new ways of being. Of feeling the beyond human world with more sensitivity and increasing admiration. Illuminating conversations with trees, rocks, rivers and animals are now part of my daily experience. If you’d told me back in 2006 in London, that I’d be self-defining as a tree hugging Portuguese mountain hermit in the future 2021, I would have giggled. Unimaginable. 

Yet we change. We learn. We adapt. We grow. To our surroundings. 

So does everything in nature. Sensitivity at a cellular level, at the microbial level, is the absolute essential and commonly-held characteristic of life in every leaf, root, bug, bird, animal and human. In every water droplet of rain and inhaled breath of air. Every cell, every microbe, feeling, responding, communicating, sharing. Adapting. To the changing environments of sunlight, seasons and epochs. Sensitivity IS the resilience built into the fabric of life on planet earth. Built into us humans too. Reassuringly. 

Nature’s capacity and desire to grow is wondrous. The photo-bionic power of plants and trees and fungi to turn sunlight into matter and create environments that support a myriad of totally integrated ecosystems, collectively resource-sharing as they go, is astoundingly clever.  And beautiful. And egalitarian. The way the mitochondria transform sunlight to feed living organisms, everywhere, depending what those organisms around them require, is miraculous. Alchemic. Divine even. 

Nature heals herself so amazingly well. We’ve seen the forest regrow after fire so quickly. We’ve found out how trees communicate and feed everything around them through the mycelium network of Fantastic Fungi beneath our feet. We now understand that trees know they are parents and how they feed their young saplings via the mycelium. How trees have heartbeats that pulse the life from the sun and from the soil up and down their trunks. And how we too, as humans living at Vale de Moses, by introducing greater biodiversity of planting, and nourishing nutrients from composting and irrigation, have helped the recuperation nature does naturally, happen even faster. (Tune into anything Paul Stamets, the mycologist, is talking about. He’s one of my heroes.)

Our human body is also mind-blowingly good at healing itself. It does so even better when our surrounding ecosystems nourish our own. When the food we eat and liquids we hydrate with, carry the vibrant medicinal power and nutrients it needs to repair and rejuvenate. When our physical movement sets off chain reactions for the microbiome in our guts to work its magic of nourishing all the ecosystems into balance, into harmony, into health.

Our gut is the source of our bodies magical adaptive resilience. Most of our innate immune system protection works on the layer right outside our gut lining. From the latest evidence based medicinal research, it looks like our guts respond really well to good plant-strong food grown or raised in good soil, good air, good water. "Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food." Hippocrates (Father of modern medicine also famous for his "Primum non nocere" oath that all doctors declare. "First, do no harm.") 

So how do we care for our gut health?

Well, not surprisingly, and thankfully, the microbes in our guts love these things:

Sleep. Regular, good, deep sleep positively affects most areas of our physiology including our gut. Investing time encouraging our own sleep is soooo worth it. Sleep is medicine. And between 10pm and 2am, is optimum time for the digestive system to also process our emotional experiences of the day. In Ayurveda, they call it Pitta time! 

What we eat. Our food is the fuel for the trillions of microbes we host, to make the magic of life happen in and as our bodies. I heard them described as pets. Pets inside our tummies we need to care for. We need to feed them what they like to eat. More so than what we might like to eat! And boy do those microbes respond well to the intelligence of herbal medicine! Almost like they were evolved to work with plants. Because they did exactly that over 250000 years of human evolution. It’s in their dna. It’s in ours. 

Good social interactions. Who we dine with can be as important as what we have for dinner. Nutrition is also the experience of eating, the social and relational setting, not just the nutrients contained in the food. We digest better in the soulful company of friends and loved ones. The feeling of being connected to the world around us, the people around us, deeply affects our sense of self and well-being, our own mental health. Disconnection, isolation, they appear to be root causes of much of the suffering of depression, anxiety and addiction we are experiencing. 

Movement. Moving the body is the catalyst for the intelligence of the gut to receive requests for more energy. Without movement, there are hardly any energy orders. So the body stagnates and the gut loses its potency. That's any movement. Walking. Running. Swimming. Gardening. Sports. Dance. Yoga. Just move the body. And then rest. 

Breathing. Oh yes. Just by breathing. We can make more blood, help regulate the endocrine system and both calm and invigorate our nervous systems to do what they do best. This one is my personal go-to when the waves of anxiety begin. Just feeling my breath invites me to the still, calm, joyful and safe nature of my own existence. The neuroscience of meditation is such an exciting new field of science. Though the monks and yogis have known how good it is for millennia. #breatheyourbiome is a nice tag to follow. And even better to actually go outside right now and breathe the biome of your nearest tree. Deeply. And then observe the thoughts that arise. What comes to mind may well be the tree talking to you through the microbes you just inhaled. Maybe. It’s definitely a biological exchange happening to connect you with the tree at the very least. So do say thanks to the tree. All plants grow better when we talk to them. Every gardener knows that. 

There are decades of evidence based clinical research studies that comprehensively illustrate all these correlations. Yet rarely will they be prescribed in our health clinics. Especially not a “talk with the trees” prescription unless you’re in Tokyo where I’ve heard Forest Bathing has become an accepted remedy for reducing high blood pressure! 

The revolution in our understanding of the microbiome means we're not as individual as we might imagine. Nor is our health. 

Our health is dependent on, a product of, our environment. The more biodiverse your environment is, the healthier you are likely to be, whether you're a human or a bee or a whale. Or a fungus or a plant. Healthy, biodiverse, complex, ecosystem-rich environments produce vibrantly healthy beings at every level within them. 

Life on planet earth. It's really rather spectacular how it all happens. Together.  

However, from the global statistical research on human health over the last few decades, it's become concerningly evident that disease itself is also a function of the inequality and adversity found in our societies. Rather than solely a result of genetics or poor lifestyle choices. The root causes of so many of our chronic inflammatory diseases turn out to be pollution and poverty. The video below is a succinct story of what’s been happening for the last 30 years to our soils and to our guts. I found it really clarifying. Cartoon illustrations helped me quickly grasp the interconnectedness of it all.

So if we want to be healthy, if we want to live among healthy communities, it's strikingly obvious we have to properly dismantle the systems of inequality and pollution so pervasive in our capitalist, patriarchal, extractive economies.  The systems that are at the root of so much of our trauma. We will also need to revolutionise our farming methods to help nature regenerate the soils we grow our food in, clean the rivers and oceans that connect it all, and eradicate the pollution and exploitation so prevalent in all our extraction and manufacturing industries.

Simple! 

Our own future individual health, wherever we are on this planet, will be dependent on our collective ability to revolutionise, to reimagine, well, everything, so that all our human and tech processes and actions don’t just “Do No Harm”, but stimulate and nourish biodiversity everywhere so the microbes can get on with the billion year old practice of healing. 

Our health is communal. We're all connected to everything and everyone else via the microbial interface of our biology and the energy fields we create. Nature is a healing modality in, and as, herself. As we spend time in the wilderness, we reconnect, we heal, and we remember that the sensations we feel, like listening to the breeze with our skin, are not just expressions of our human nature, they are in fact, expressions of the intelligence of the planet encapsulated into every cell of our bodies and every microbe we host. We are planet earth. We are her complexity and mystery. We are her adaptive resilience practiced over millions of years. It’s empowering to actually physically, emotionally, spiritually, feel that in one's core.

Our journey to more vibrant health, for ourselves and collectively, I suspect must involve a deeper intimacy with nature. I have no doubt her intelligence will illuminate our adaptive resilience capacity to more empathically find our path through the variety of existential threats we collectively face.

In the despair of the awareness of global ecosystem collapses, ever increasing mineral and resource extraction plans, rising rates of inflammatory disease, social inequality and sea levels, there is also hope. I've found the conversations on these podcasts below immensely encouraging this year. Tune in via your preferred podcast platform and scroll through topics that grab you. I hope they'll inspire you too. 

For the Wild with Ayana Young, fascinating conversations with environmental activists and those who hold deep relationships with the land where they live

The Happy Pear  inspiring chats about gut health, plant-strong food and local community living. 

Esalen Brilliant 10 week series from Jan 2021 listening to those working at the forefront of the clinical research into psychedelic healing. 

Zach Bush Gut Science  evidence based holistic health and regenerative farming transformations enabling food to be our medicine. 

Holistic Healing Project a friend of ours Dr Lauren Mcdonald in conversations with other doctors and authors who inspired her on her recovery from cancer and broken legs

Thanks for reading this blog today. The last blog post I wrote was 5 years ago this week - 3 videos we had just produced in 2016 showcasing the passion of the people behind the food, treatments and yoga on retreats at Vale de Moses. Hope you found today’s blog helpful. Let me know your thoughts. Send me a dm on social @andrewcampbellwinter or leave a comment below. Genuinely, I would love to engage and hear more about how we can collaboratively be part of the planet healing herself.

I do very much hope you are able to join us in the forest next year. For those who have been before, you know how welcome you will be. We've just published dates for Vonetta’s Spaciousness yoga retreats in 2022. A few more teachers and retreats will be added to the calendar over the coming weeks ahead. Best to sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Vale de Moses for latest announcements over this winter.

Vonetta and I are also delighted to be opening Vale de Moses in 2022 and beyond, to a variety of other healing modality practitioners and teachers to run their own events and practices. Held by these powerfully restorative valleys and supported by our lovely team. You can read more and get in touch via our Hire page.  

Wherever you are today, may you and all beings around you, be happy, healthy and free. 

Andrew Winter

Co-owner Vale de Moses

@andrewcampbellwinter