We'll talk more about digestion and as it applies to all your VEDA. And since a lot of us don't even know how our bodies work, our education system is fairly deficient in that regard, I would say unless you take biology or something or have an interest like a body worker would. So of course, we've got our venous system and our arterial system. And you can see how it branches out into the body. The red is indicating that it's oxygenated blood being pumped from the heart to everything. Then the blue takes the waste products from the cells back in through the blood into the heart for re oxygenation.

And then again, we have a nervous system that branches out like tree roots all through our body. And that nervous system connects to the spinal cord and the brain so that we get feedback from sensation in their body through the nervous system. And and we have a lot of sensors on our surface of our skin, you know, so that when we were very, very tactile and sensitive, and so part of the lymphatic massage we're gonna talk a fair bit about today and how important it is. And of course, the lymphatic massage is just excellent for that kind of stimulation of your whole nervous system as well as your lymph system. So here's our lymphatic system and this is coming Have a little bit of a. This is a Western view of the lymphatic system.

And this is certainly what it looks like. So probably many of you have had a swollen lymph node at some point, right? When we're kids, our lymph is very active. We're in the stage of life where we're producing a lot of mucus to help us grow. And so if there's any kind of congestion in the system, children will get more easily congested because they are in such a mucousy kind of phase of their life. And then they need that to grow so that the skin can stretch and inter connective tissue can be juicy enough so that they can continue to grow.

So as you can see, there's a lot of lymph nodes in and around the abdomen, in and around the digestive tract. And this the lymph system is on is like our garbage collectors. They also it also is responsible for taking proteins and fats to every other cell in the body. And, but it also will remove wastes from the system. And we've talked before about how one of the first things that you do and now your VEDA in terms of a cleanse, is to clean the lymph system, because if it's congested and clogged, then if you start flushing out a liver into a system that this is clogged up, then you're going to overwhelm your body with toxins. And I've seen this happen with a lot of clients.

And that sometimes can take a couple of years before the person starts to feel well again, unless they know what to do. So I have an elderly client now and he went on Bit of a crazy cleanse in in the fall, which was an okay time and released a lot of stuff into a system, he's still not feeling very well and that's a couple of years. So, and of course he won't do what I tell him so he's gonna continue not to feel very well. So the lymph is pumped through exercise. So when we lay down and sleep at night, that limp system becomes very sluggish. It's really isn't moving much at all.

So if you wake up in the morning and your feet are sore when you get up or you have aches or new stiffness in the joints, that's a classic symptom that your lymph is clogged in needs cleaning out, my lip is 80% of our immune system. So if that's clogged, then you're probably going to get be more and more susceptible to colds, flus Picking up any kind of virus that's that's around. In order for the lymph to be healthy, the intestinal skin of the whole digestive tract has to be healthy. And because the lymph is picking is it goes right along the whole intestinal, a small large intestine and it's picking up through the villa and the lac TEALS. It's picking up the proteins and the fats that it needs to through that system and delivering it to the rest of the body. But if your digestion isn't good, so you've started to wear away the healthy layer of bacteria in the gut.

And, and then So, when that happens, then you don't have a start to have undigested food particles. That should have been Really digested into a nice time in that they call that China that stuff that food becomes after it's digested in the stomach. If you have large particles that you can't digest because you have either low stomach acid, or you don't have the healthy bacteria in the gut, then those particles will seep through, can seep through the gut can also seep through the intestinal tract and get picked up by the loop. So now your live has these foreign in and because the body doesn't know what to do with that, it's like a foreign invader in the system. So then you start to develop things like allergies because you start to react to everything because your system is Kind of chronically reactive and on the verge of inflammation, so digestion starts in the brain.

Digestion starts when we even start to think about food. We all know how we can start thinking about food and start to salivate, right? So long before we even take a bite, our body's starting to prepare to eat and that's why it's important for us to cook for ourselves because we want to be having that time between the thinking about the food to seeing it, touching it and tasting it, right. So we prepare our bodies that way. Here you have your esophagus, the food goes down into the stomach, so on and you body, your stomach is going to be more towards the left side, your livers over here. And then your small intestines are kind of in center and then your large intestines going, going around for elimination.

And we're going to talk a little bit more about some particular spots that I want you to palpate and I'm going to give you a couple tips in terms of helping your digestion. We also have a lot of blood flow into the brain. So there's 13 veins that go into through holes in your skull into the brain. And there's also limp in the brain. So medical science This is just new. They used to think that there was no lymph in the brain is just very fine.

Very fine. And actually there's limped through the whole entire body. So, the intercellular in iron beta, the intercellular liquid fluid, and that kind of surrounds every cell in our body and is as responsible for having nutrients and absorbing into the cells and and also out of the cells that's considered limp as well in our arena. So you have this liquid liquidy fluid that's flowing through those, that whole kind of system and also oozing out into the cellular tissue of your whole body. And I know you know stuff about the limps of chopping pipe up anytime Sherry the statement about 80% of Anything like that's just such an unaware? Mm hmm.

Yeah. You know, like we think of a supplement as supporting immunity, but it's it's the limp. Yeah, yeah, they gotta get it clean there. So at the Olympics, the brain will take several pounds of toxins out of the brain every year. So you can imagine that if your lymph is clogged, all of these symptoms like foggy people talk about foggy brain and not being able to remember things and not feeling sharp, dementia or Alzheimer's. All of those conditions really need to be looked at from the viewpoint of the health of the limp and of course, that's not even on the map in Western medicine.

So we have our internal organs here and I brought this up because I wanted to show you how important the breathing is. So here's the diaphragm and the diaphragm sits directly above the stomach and the liver. So what can happen on getting way off top here? It's okay. What can happen if the breath is up in the chest? Boy, that's an anxiety producing, I take one breath like that, and it's like, I feel anxious.

And people walk around like that all day. This is held especially women, and this is coming up. So over time, what happens is the stomach will actually start to adhere to the diaphragm and the liver as well. So when I'm Working on clients and doing an abdominal massage. Sometimes I can't even get up underneath the ribcage. It's so stuck in hard in there.

And, and especially with the stomach, it's going to really affect your ability to be able to digest well. We process all of our emotion through our intestinal tract. If our diaphragm is being sucked up all day long, then that is fight or flight breathing, right? And that's going to affect our ability to be able to digest any food that we put into our stomachs, right? So eating while you're upset, depressed, angry, stressed out when you eat At that time it's known in AI or VEDA, that that consciousness that level of emotional distress is actually going into the particles of your food. And in all your VEDA they'd even say the people who pick the food, the people who cook the food, all impart an emotional charge to that food that we eat.

So when I'm catering for folks, I'm not going to cater if I'm upset, and there was one time I can't remember what happened. Oh, now I do but you guys don't need to know. And I was I was not in a clear, focused pleasant state of mind. And I started to cook for for my my catering folks and I had to call him and say pickups gonna have to be the next day because there was no way I could focus and and be in a state where I want to serve that kind of food. And so that's also why I usually don't eat during these workshops, right? Because I'm not in a calm as calm receptive state of mind.

I'm kind of in focus, intellectual mode, right? And so I wait until I kind of calm down after everybody leaves because I find this kind of exciting and stimulating too. I love talking about it. So I get, I get a little, I have that kind of excitement, and even excitement. You don't want to eat when you're like that you got to calm down so everything is working optimally in order to digest that food. So when we go out to these loud restaurants and everybody's shouting and you're talking and it's really wrestling For indigestion, and poor assimilation of food.

Yeah, eating fast, people are just shoveling food, they're not even tasting it, you know. So, you know, if you want to lose lose weight, you want your digestion to be better. The enzymes that are in the saliva in the mouth, that's your, before your smell, taste, sight and smell. It's, it's that taste and that you should really be chewing your food to a liquid form before you swallow. But most people are like chunk, tongue, tongue and swallow big chunks, right. So I know people with irritable bowel syndrome that slowing down, chewing the food to a liquid made all the difference in the world in terms of them being able to digest more food that they had taken.

And out of their diet because it was hard to digest. So there's a big correlation between chewing and and digestion. Our, in our digestive tract is also 95% of our serotonin which is our happy, happy molecules that make us feel good and how give us a sense of well being. So if the digestive process process is not working well, then that also isn't being produced in the quantities that we need it to be. And if we're the other thing people will do is watch the news when they eat. I mean, you can have these violent, terrible images coming at you and expect to feel happy and be able to digest your food.

It's going to get those images and and Even the commercials, the fast pace and loudness of the commercials, all of that to someone who's very sensitive, they will feel that other people in our society are so divorced from their, from the neck down pretty much that they don't even have that sensitivity anymore. So it's there, it's there in the body, but they're just so disconnected from it. So the quality of our intestinal skin will determine how we handle stress and it becomes a vicious circle. The more that we are stressed out the the less our intestinal tract will respond and be able to digest and then that lack of being able to digest kills off the microbes in the healthy bacteria and then we're more stressed, so it becomes a vicious circle. So when we talk about your VEDA and we talk about Vata digestion we know that a lot is are your more the most sensitive body type, they're the kind of canaries in the in the mind, they're going to be the ones that collapse under stress before someone with a bigger bone structure because they just don't have as much stamina, right?

So we really need waters really need a fair bit of lubrication in their digestive tract. So that's where the GI becomes really, really crucial for someone who's very fine bone with a tendency to be dry. If there's digestive issues for Vata, of course, the herbs that we want to start with almost always is that tea that we've been taking for the cleanse and the slippery elm marshmallow and licorice root. So that's almost like an all year view. Pepto bismol that's how you can think of it that it's a slimy t that just is going to coat your whole intestinal tract and start to heal it. And, and because what happens in the intestine when it starts to get clogged up is it has a whole bunch of villages that are like this that pick up the proteins and the fats and the toxins that are supposed to be carried to the, into the limp into the rest of the body.

And so when it gets clogged up that village just kind of gets smushed down. And then after a while, won't even get smushed down. it'll, it'll develop holes in the walls or the intestine, and also the stomach. How much stress affects the body. It's a lot. So if you're under we were meant to be under chronic stress.

We were meant to have a Fight or flight response, maybe once a year, twice a year, most people are in that kind of state all day long every day. So we're not our bodies aren't capable of handling that. And so it's going to start to break down in the digestive tract. People who are the Pitzer folks will be the ones who are your competitive type age driven folks. They're going to be the ones who have a really revved up system that needs a lot of calming Vata needs Vata needs a lot of calming as well. It but pitching needs cooling and calming where avato will need warming and calming.

So pitcher will get hot, fiery and they'll go in often they will go into Situations like your stockbrokers, your CEOs, people in really high stress jobs right? And so their digestion will start to break down and they'll start to develop things more quickly than the other two body types like heartburn, hiatal hernia, acid reflux skirts, that kind of thing, which we're going to talk a bit more about. So when we're talking about herbs that we want to use with pitch for clearing out the digestive tract, we're looking more. Definitely the Pepto bismol the elevated Pepto bismol we want to do that clen healing tea, digestive tea, but we're also going to look at some other we want to look at some other herbs like our malarkey bill ma I'm Brahmi. So Have some pictures of those. This is a omma.

Locky are online. And that's a fruit that grows in India and it's the base of chavan Prakash as well. And this is just chock full of vitamin C. And it's in another remedy that's really great called Triphala as well. And this is excellent for healing the gut, it also has a bit of a scrubbing action, it's going to start to cleanse that Villa that's clogged up. And Billa is another one that is going to cool things down a little bit and clean and cleanse things in the in the digestive tract. And Brahmi is an excellent limp cleanser that has a specific effect on the brain.

So if brain fog is something that you experience or you are feeling fairly regular basis then Rami will really help To clean out the limp in the brain, so anyone with mental disorders hmm you could probably grow Brahmi in the summer, but it wouldn't overwinter here. It's gonna be your very warm climates that this is growing in pittsville also 10 vertical tend to dry constipation right pets will tend to loose stools with mucus. So there as soon as you have mucus in your stool, you know that you have an irritated intestinal tract. So that's why we should always be looking at our poop, right because that's going to tell us how healthy we are. So as we've talked before, it should be the size and shape of overripe and color of an overripe banana. That should come out in one go and it shouldn't you shouldn't have any trademarks on toilet paper.

So she should be like a clean, clean release. And if that's not happening, then you know you've you've got some healing that you need to do, and you need to change your diet most likely as well. Okay, so we've got that. And then when we talk about coffee digestion, so coffee, their digestive tract is going to be the most sluggish. their metabolism is slower, and then then Vata or pit, so they're going to be the ones that will need more fiber. More things that create motility through the system.

Sometimes cough a person will only be having a bowel movement every other day. Ideally, you really want to get it happening at least once a day. If you're a pretty serious Whole Foods vegetarian type person, you might have two a day So you might have a bowel movement in the morning you might have one after lunch or later in the day as well. So but generally once a day is considered normal there are places in the world where people will only go like three times a week. They usually their diets are high in meat and dairy. So it's kind of slowing things down.

When we look at coffee digestion, then we want to look more at bill which is also used quite frequently and of course it is also going to be good for for coffee. But the stimulating bitter roots is what you're really looking for, for coffee digestion. So anything that grows in the spring, those bitter greens that come up like dandy lion. That's excellent for coffee, digestion. So if coffee starts to feel lethargic, fatigued, then you know that you need to do some cleaning out of the loop. Golden seal is another one and triple a triple A is a combination of omma or Malachy harbor talkie and vivid talkie.

It's it's three, three herbs that are put together and and that's an excellent cleanser for the large colon in particular. So often Triphala will be used with that digestive tea because that slime Enos coats and heals everything and then the triple lo can go in and it also heals but will start to scrub and move things through the digestive tract. So those that tea and Triphala probably all of us would be very it would be very helpful to all of our systems to do that. on a regular basis now you don't want to take triple ongoing all the time. You don't want to become dependent on something you want. You want your system to start being healthy enough that it will have enough peristaltic action to move the food through and eliminate cleanly you don't want to rely on any ERP, even if it's a natural urge to do that.

So you have to tone defy the gut. So you see people with very big expanded bellies, especially men and they'll be hard hard like a rock. That's that's the intestinal tract is just swollen, the lymph is swollen. When you get that bloat after you eat something that you know you haven't digested well because you've got bloat. That's your limp swelling. That's what that is.

It's it's being it's having a reaction to the undigested food particles. And so whenever you have swelling in your body, you know that your limp. If it's an injury, your lymph will swell around it to start to bring healing properties to the area where the injury injury is right? So often, so now they're saying, you know, don't don't ice after an injury. I think I think sometimes you want to bring down inflammation and ice is good. It will do that quickly.

It will do that around a bug bite. So in an acute injury that ISIS sometimes definitely called for, but then you don't want to keep continuing because you want that lymph and blood flow to come back to the area that has the injury, right or it's not going to heal well. on a regular basis, like what do you need, like once a day, once a week. Oh, you want it Whenever you take any herbs, it builds up in your system, it's not like a one shot deal. So you want to take a course of it. So what I will do is order certain herbs in the spring usually truffula I'll do the digestive tea.

Sometimes I'll do some name and men just demand just as another really capable or one of the best for cleaning out the limp as well. So usually in the spring, I'm going to order in some of those herbs and I'll just take them as directed until they're gone. So it ends up being maybe about a month where I'm doing, you know, religiously taking them because you can't do herbs hit and miss they have to build up in your system and they will become effective over time. So it's not like taking a pencil hill that just shuts this symptom down. You're actually trying to help your body heal with it with these herbs. And of course we have here's Tripoli here.

So we have Mullah Hara talkie and Bibi talkie and it's a mixture of those three, then it's ground into a powder. And of course we have our turmeric which is our anti inflammatory excellent also for healing the gut. And this is name so name is known as a real skin, healer of the skin. So a lot of people have had a great relief from using it topically on skin issues, rashes and things like that. But it also is fabulous for the intestinal skin. So our outer skin is a reflection of how our intestinal skin is is doing and we know Sometimes when we're under stress, especially women with our cycle will have breakouts, things like that.

So you know that when that happens, there's also something going on in the gut at the same time. Let's talk about hurt burn and what we can do about that. Causes of heartburn. So a big cause of heartburn is the stomach being attached to the diaphragm. So if you can imagine every day 26,000 times a day we supposedly breathe, I haven't counted myself but it's a lot. You're sucking your internal organs up into your thoracic cavity basically, by doing this kind of breathing and as that starts to adhere to to the diaphragm, the stomach lining The sphincter That is right, the sphincter, which is right at the diaphragm, the esophageal sphincter and that opens and closes to let food in.

And then it closes to keep the food in the stomach while you're digesting because there's a lot of sloshing going around in there. So what happens over time is that gets that gets weakened, it gets damaged by this upward movement of the breath that we're not supposed to breathe that way. It's it's improper way of breathing. So that will start to get weak. And then when it gets weak, and it gets weak from lack of use, the diaphragm gets weak from lack of use. So some people have a very hard time starting to do this breathing, because their diaphragm has actually become very rigid.

And that's where manual therapy can really, really help. So you have to start to massage and manipulate the diaphragm, start to pull it down and pull the organs away from the diaphragm, so that that sphincter becomes weak and then as you are digesting the food, it's going to start to squirt back up into your esophagus. And that can cause it can cause us off in geo cancer over time, right? And all certain it's gonna eat away like that's hydrochloric acid that's in your stomach. If you put if you had to drop a hydrochloric acid on that floor would eat right through it. So that's how intensely strong our gut lining has to be in order to maintain that acid in there without it eating away at the tissue.

And the gut lining of course is made up of our bacteria and our all the microbes. It's also made up of water we have a layer of protection. fluid that should be in the stomach and this is why it's so important to be hydrated. So so many people are chronically dehydrated, that protective layer isn't there. So, if you tend to dryness that it can be very helpful about half an hour before you eat to down a good glass of water so that you're hydrated. You don't want to do it right before you eat because it's going to interfere with digesting but about half an hour before and you can put some lemon in there if you want.

That's going to help that will actually help digestion if you are have a tendency to be dehydrated and most of us most of us in the West are not drinking enough water. The hot sips that we talked about for cleansing that also over time will permeate the tissue and make it juicy and hydrated. If you think of your intestinal skin as leather and if leather gets dried out you know how brittle it is and it won't absorb water, if you take hot water and and put it on that leather it will seep in and start to hydrate it and same with our tissues. One of the causes of heartburn of course is this upward, what we would call an Ayurveda upward moving Vata food varta in in Ayurvedic medicine, so, you have upward moving Vata because you are in fight or flight with the breathing and then the more that you are in fight or flight with the breathing the more than that your body is going to produce excess hydrochloric acid.

So, it we're also going to produce excess cortisol, right, the stress hormone, we're going to stress our adrenal glands by doing that. And so when we're under stress The stomach's over producing hydrochloric acid. And that can start again to eat away at the lining of the gut. For if your lining of the gut is not healthy, then the spicy acidic foods can also trigger heartburn. And pregnancy. Now when you think about a woman who just got a baby in here, how much pressure that's putting on the internal organs upward to the diaphragm, sometimes, you know, at a late stage pregnancy, oh, it's almost hard to breathe, right?

Especially if you're have been doing this all the time and you don't have that capacity to expand your diaphragm. When a woman is pregnant, and she breathes like this, she's also stressing out the baby, right? That baby's getting cortisol excess cortisol fighter flight molecules you're telling your baby, there's something wrong, it's not safe. So this is really important for the mother's digestion and also the health of the baby. So if you have a nice relaxed Mum, oftentimes the baby comes out is pretty easygoing baby as well, right? If the mums digestion is not good, she's not happy, she's under a lot of stress, then the baby's going to come out being stressed as well.

So in the West, someone has acid reflux and what do we treat it with here? We treat it with antacids, protein pump inhibitors, and H h2 blockers they call it and basically what all of these things do is shut down the digestive fire, right? It's gonna neutralize the hydrochloric acid in your stomach. Well guess what happens when you do that? What do you think would happen to digestion if you shut down? Your hydrochloric acid?

You're not going to digest your food, right? Yeah, constipation. Same problem. Well, they then they become dependent on these you know I have a friend who's who's poppin Nexium all the time, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's gonna destroy yourself. No.

Always just treating a symptom and it's gonna come back and bite you big time. So you have to figure out is it too much acid or too little acid. Generally, when you first start to get a heartburn, it's going to be too much acid But how do you tell you're gonna This is a very good way to tell when you start to feel like you've got a bit of indigestion and you can do have your son do this. You're going to take a bit of like a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar. What am I got? I got the I think it says teaspoon might be a tablespoon.

I'll all correct that and let you guys know any you drink it, okay, if that calms the heartburn, then you know you have too little acid because that's acidic, right? If you drink that apple cider vinegar and water and you have heartburn and it makes it worse, then you know in that you have too much acid. And then you want to be ready for the next remedy because when you have too much acid, if you Take I think it's a teaspoon of baking soda and put it in a glass of water and drink it down. Then that is going to come the acid okay so if you drink that if you take the baking soda and water on a stomach that has too little acid and you have heartburn is going to make it worse because it's actually calmed the acid down even more. So is this making sense and and if you have too much acid and you take the something acidic in there, it's going to make it worse.

So first of all, you have to find out, do I have too much or too little acid? Now why would you have too little acid? Well, what happens? We have our liver and our gallbladder and our pancreas. We have our hydrochloric acid in our stomach and our hydrochloric acid The stomach is happily hopefully digesting our food into this liquid chime material that then is going to go into the small intestine and in the small intestine are the ducts that lead from D to C T Ts not ducks like quack quack are the ducks from the gallbladder and the pancreas and then the gallbladder will holds bile. And the pancreas we have our pancreatic enzymes.

Both of those go into the small intestine right after the food comes out of the stomach to neutralize that hydrochloric acid. So you can't have hydrochloric acid going into your small intestine. Well, water is fluid. Yeah, there's a neural pathway that periods of commands to From the brain, but the water carries and intelligence and a different kind of level. So on a cellular level because the little mini brains and ourselves and so on. And also from, you know, the hydrochloric acid to the, to the lake, it's a transmitter of intelligence.

Yep. Because you can't just have there's got to be a system that that carries the information. And that's one of the qualities of water in the body is that it is able to transport where there's no neuro, perhaps runway or pathway. Water does take see it creates an imprint, right? Like, oh yeah. The quality of the water that we drink in the Western world is extremely poor.

Because we Florida that we've got chlorine in there, we actually have pharmaceutical chemicals are snick lead all of those and and it's being transported in through these pipes and it loses its it loses its intelligence it's not the way to treat water we shouldn't be treating the water that we drink is like the lymph in our body it's like the rivers in our body the lymph is like that. And then we have also the quality of the water is going to affect the quality of our blood tissue and our and our every every cell in the body that intracellular fluid. So a good water filter like the Berkey is our best option here in the West. Unless you are able to have a well and spring you know we used to we would have been drinking from a spring right or fast running River. We're doing We're just killing ourselves.

And when we think about groundwater, that's the loop of the earth, right? And so we're polluting not just our own limp by this crazy diet and lifestyle that we have here in the West, but we're, we're, we're killing the I mean, the earth will will hopefully rejuvenate itself. It's a It's a beautiful ecological system, just gorgeous. We may not be here to see it if we keep going. So in the way that we are, so Okay, so we've got the hydrochloric acid and it's going to go into the small, it's chewing up the food and you have this very acidic chime that's going to go into the small intestine and the bile from the gallbladder and the pancreatic enzymes is going to neutralize that and make it more alkaline and So the body so the body never produces too much or too little acid for no reason.

And what happens is if your lymph is clogged up instead of removing toxins from the body and eliminating them through the digestive tract, the toxins are going to stay in the lymph system and be recirculated through the lymph and also from a an uptake. When I don't have an image of this, there's an uptake from the large intestine that goes back to the liver. So your bile gets recirculated from your large intestine back to the liver, probably about eight times that will happen before you have new bile that kind of comes into the system. Well, you can imagine if your lymph is clogged, it can't do its job to clear away the top toxins, so it's no longer taking clean lymph towards the tissues and your liver, your bile that's recirculating is not clean because the lymph can't do its job. So it's all gunked up, and it's going to go back and start to clog the liver.

So then you end up with things like a fatty liver, because there's big molecules of trans fats that we eat in the modern processed foods that will start to accumulate in the liver. The gallbladder will become in the bile becomes thick, and you know, we can get gall stones. And you can also this valve that goes into the small intestine can get blocked. And so you don't have your pancreatic enzymes getting in there. Because they share that, that duct that goes into the small intestine. So if you've got thick bile and it plugs to this duct, then you're not going to be able to make that acidic chime into something that's okay for your small intestine.

So what will happen? The body's extremely brilliant. It's gonna say whoa, whoa, you can't go down there. No, I'm gonna hold on to this food and wait for for those enzymes and bile to come. But that Biles not coming because it's all clogged up. And the enzymes aren't coming because it's all clogged up.

So the stomach is saying, whoa, whoa, I can't I can't let this food go. And when it does, you're going to have a lot of pain. You're going to get a lovely looking That's the hiatal hernia. So what happens is you start to you know, the, the stomach's holding on to this ass acidic chime because it can't let it go down into the small intestine. So as it sits there longer, longer longer and you feel Oh, I don't feel so good. You're gonna get some upward moving gases because it's in there too long.

And that acidity is going to start eating the freakin hole in your stomach. Right and that's an ulcer. You can heal and also very quickly with cabbage juice, so everybody should know this for anyone that they love or care about. They got an ulcer. They got to start juicing cabbage and drinking it actually is extremely effective. Why is it effective?

Anybody want to hazard a guess? Think about what cabbage has. Yes, we work Eating like sauerkraut, or drinking sauerkraut. So when we ferment when we make fermented cabbage and sauerkraut, it's got a sour taste to it, right. And that's wonderful for stimulating digestion. But it's not great for a stomach that's already real acidic, right?

So this is where you really have to know what's going on in your digestion to know what to take to help you. So if you're going towards an ulcer, you need that digestive slippery tea, Marshmallow, licorice root combination, and, and the cabbage juice is going to really help this out. And you're going to have to help yourself you're going to have to clean out the lymph and the gallbladder and the liver, right, that that's gonna have to happen. So the stomach says, Well, I can't let this go into the intestinal tract it's it's too acidic. And so after a while, if the digestive enzymes and the bile are not coming into the small intestine, and then the stomach's gonna say okay, well I'm just shutting this down, it will stop producing hydrochloric acid, and that's when you have so you're going to start with too much acid and you're going to have heartburn from that.

And then as it continues to get worse, your your your your stomach's going just going to shut the whole party down. And then you're gonna have too little acid but you're still taking these antacids which are making the problem worse, you're still taking the because modern medicine does not understand this, and they don't treat it properly. So the body shuts that down. And so then you try to eat anything. And you're gonna have trouble, right? It's gonna sit in the gut.

So that's when people will go to a naturopath and they'll start taking digestive enzymes. And that will help, you know, it will make them feel better. But it's not, it's still not correcting the problem, right. So digestive enzymes can be really helpful in the short term, but it's not going to fix it. So in order to fix that, you're going to have to take some herbs like men just to clean out the limp, get the whole system functioning again, if it's too little or too much acid, then you know where you are down the line here, right? So this again, is where food has to be very easy to digest.

And that's when you start making things like kittery not too spicy, bland foods, things that are already chewed up mushy mashed foods. Stuff like you would feed a baby. You basically have to eat like a baby until this gets healed. And then and you won't, you may not even be ready for probiotics until you start to heal some of this irritating irritation that's going on in the gut. There are people that that their digestion is so poor that when they take productive probiotics, it makes them sick. So they can't do fermented foods.

Yeah, because the flora the biology in the small and large intestine is two. There's particular bacteria. There's not a whole lot of bacteria as much in the small intestine. I think it's like 100,000 different bacteria that's in the small intestine, as opposed to the large intestine. Which has hundreds of thousands. So several hundred thousand so once you know where you are down this trap and we used to have Candida which was an overgrowth of bacteria in the intestinal tract causing problems with digestion and we all have Candida albicans in our, in our digestive tract, it's one of our bacteria, but when it gets out of balance, that's when it causes a problem.

So then people get a lot of yeast infections and things like that. Then there was epstein barr, right. Then we had chronic fatigue. And now we have C Bo, which is a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So that is when bacteria from your large intestine is moving into the small intestine because the ileocecal valve, which I'm going to have you locate on yourself, so if you feel your hip bone You feel your belly button, right halfway between that if you make a line halfway between that is your ileocecal valve. So if you push in there, sometimes you'll feel a hard lump.

People whose valve is got scar tissue around it. There might be congestion there, it might be tender. So this fellow that I had as a client last night, this was very tender on him, he couldn't do this. This valve can get stuck open. So it loses its ability to open and contract if the bacteria healthy bacteria isn't in in the digestive tract. So and also with with lack of proper breath, breathing.

So again, all day long. If you look how I'm breathing now, this is moving outward, this there's movement here all day long. If you're holding this tight and sucking up, this isn't getting that move that contraction expansion that keeps the muscles healthy, right? So then this, this can get stuck open and so then when you eat the food that's supposed to stay, the time that's supposed to stay in the large intestine will squirt back up, and the bacteria that's in that will squirt back up into the small intestine. So, this is a chiropractic technique that you can manually open and close this valve. So if you have have been diagnosed with CBOE overgrowth of bacteria in your small intestine that's moved up from your large intestine.

Then if you move in a clockwise direction, a circular clockwise direction. I want y'all to do this with me. You can any focus on pulling down. And so when you pull this down, you're going to close that valve. And then if you go the other way counterclockwise, you can open it. So as the food goes down the small intestine into the large intestine, you want that valve to be open, right but as soon as the food just recently changed my diet to pretty much all plant based for the summer.

And my lymph system is cleaning itself out and I get in a little bit of excess mucus which I usually don't have. Because it's obviously being stored, right? So when you start to clean, really clean your diet And so I was having a little bit of dairy, which I've taken out of my diet at this point. So now that the system can kind of clean itself out. So I've been I've been noticing that over the last couple of weeks. So that valve, you want it to close after you eat.

Now, it takes about an hour and a half for food to get through the small intestine and then another couple hours for it to totally get into the large intestine. If you eat it, you need motility action peristalsis and to move the food through the intestinal tract. If you don't allow four to five hours in between eating, if you snack, you're going to shut that down. So you can't digest in here and have the peristaltic action happening at the same time. So I eat a meal, say I eat a meal at noon, and then two hours later, oh, I'm still hungry, and I have another snacky kind of thing. The food that is in the small intestinal tract is going to sit there, it's not going to move the way it should into the large intestinal tract.

So that's another reason why the six meal a day thing is going to destroy your digestion. Because you're never you're not you're gonna weaken your intestinal tract, it's not going to have the tone that it needs, and the food's not going to digest properly. The Triphala is really a great tone of fire as well for the intestinal tract. So people who have that extended kind of have extended belly and men with the hard belly. They need a really good cleaning out and getting things moving through the system a lot better. And usually they're eating a lot of meat, right?

Meat takes a long time to digest and so it will tend to putrefy in the intestinal tract if it's not eliminated quickly. So in most, most of the way we've eaten meat in the past has been small amounts. It's been a luxury item. It's eaten, like the Chinese do with a lot of vegetables and some whole grains, right. So you're going to do a stir fry, and the meat is a seasoning. It's not half your plate, right half your plate should be vegetables, not meat.

So all of these chronic diseases that we're experiencing in the West that's not this is all new. This is in the last couple of Hundred Years, right? We never had cancer like this before. We've never had diabetes like this before. These weren't common diseases. Now we've got it in children, right?

Terrible, terrible. Here's our peptic ulcer and you can see how it starts to eat into the tissue. And again, if you're dehydrated, that's going to happen a lot easier, because you don't even have that water buffer in your, in your stomach. Very painful, very nasty. So here's your ileocecal valve here, right where the small intestine goes into the large intestine. So your hiatal hernia is where a piece of a stomach comes right up through the diaphragm where the esophageal sphincter is so there's a whole In your diaphragm, where the soft the esophagus meets, and there's the sphincter and then the aorta is also coming through there.

If you're breathing up into your chest all day long you're suffering that stomach tissue up through the diaphragm, basically, it's gonna start by getting stuck there. And then it's gonna start just pulling right up and herniating through. This is really, really, really nasty. It's very painful. And there's another end. You know, when you have that you've got a weak diaphragm.

Your diaphragms supposed to flatten and descend right with each inhale. Most people it's held rigid, and they're using their intercostal muscles here and the scalenes up here to suck up and think of those poor women in Victorian times with the course I mean, talk about damaging your system, totally damaging to the system. So there's a technique and this is another one, this is why we're eating later because you didn't want to do this right and after you've eaten, you can actually start to pull the stomach down. So when I'm working on a client, you want to get right up underneath your left ribcage. And first, you're just going to kind of feel in there, it should be soft. It should be hard, and it shouldn't be painful if it's healthy.

And what you're going to do, sometimes I use a thumb but you can also use your fingers as you want to get right up underneath. And as you inhale, you're going to arch your back and then pull down and so you can kind of stay there. As you exhale, you're gonna pull down as well. And you're going to work all the way under your ribcage. So, again as in, you're going to exhale, dig in, inhale and pull down. So you're basically and you want to inhale with a belly breath, right?

Because what we're doing is basically pulling the stomach away from the diaphragm if it's stuck, so someone with a hiatal hernia, this can actually relieve and if it's not gone too far, and the diaphragms not too rigid and the person's hydrated, you can actually start to pull that hernia back out of the esophagus, beside this off, I guess. And so these are two techniques that you want to know about, and especially us as body workers can be very helpful to our clients and teach our clients how to do this. With proper breathing, so one of if I had to teach anything to anybody if they said you can only teach one thing, it would be the breath. Because that is so crucially important to having a healthy functioning, body mind spirit being embodied being grounded on the planet, the only thing you can do is take a bolster.

And I'll just demonstrate this. This will work fine knit so that you're comfortable, however big that's going to be for you. Some people don't have a lot of arch in their back so you might need something lower. But even just laying like this, I'm starting to stretch open the abdominal area, right. And again, I can take my fingers here and start to dig in. And pull the tissue away.

So with someone who's starting to have digestive issues, it's going to be hard and a bit tender there that could be inflamed. So sometimes you have to be very gentle and careful with this and they have to go slowly. You don't want to harm yourself or cause cause any kind of injury to the tissue, right? But these are manual therapies that a lot of chiropractors and body workers will use to help people with these conditions. But you have to heal it, that's for sure. And that's called stomach pulling.

That's what they call it. So proper diet is always at the root of any healing. That's going to happen in the body, proper diet, meditation, those two things, if you've got digestive issues, you need to de stress, you need to de stress your life as much as you can, because good digestion is just not going to happen if that's in place, all of our processed foods are, are damaging to the health of the digestive tract. Our lack of probiotic foods in our diet is also an issue. And we used to just that would be how we would have preserved all of our vegetables from our summer harvest. And we don't do that anymore.

We use acidic acid white vinegar, so a lot of the pickles you see on the shelf, they actually destroy the healthy bacteria in the gut, rather than improvement. So when I make vinegar pickles, of course, I'm using Apple cider vinegar, right, because we know that that's a fermented product that's actually going to help or God if you can handle it. So the more irritated and read the guy Is the less you're going to be able to tolerate spicy foods. And then what people start doing is say, oh, there's a problem with wheat. Or there's a problem with dairy, they stopped eating wheat, they started beginning dairy, then they'll stop eating meat, and then they're on a vegetarian diet or raw food diet, right? And they think the food is the issue.

And sometimes they're doing those things for other reasons. That's fine. But the food isn't the issue. It's the digestion that the issue there is some problems with wheat, the way we make it, we don't sourdough and ferment it the way it's supposed to be done. And so why those proteins become such a problem is because they're, they're too big to be properly digested. Dairy and wheat.

You need a strong digestion, to assimilate that. And that's what's going to leak in through the gut wall through The intestinal tract into the lymph and then there's a reaction because it's a foreign invader in the body basically you shouldn't have any. That lining has to stay sealed and that bacterial lining has to be intact in order for people not to get sick. Yeah, chronic constipation. You know that your intestinal tract the bacteria is not working well. The then you're also again an auto intoxicated right so the longer that something sits in your large intestine and starts putrifying in there, the more the limp and is picking up the gases in bacteria that's being produced by that.

And the more the body's producing things like e coli bacteria, which makes us fart. So all of those are indicators that there's a problem, and we need to address that issue. Especially if you have stinky farts, then you know, you've got putrefaction going on in your intestinal tract. So you have to change the diet. And what that's going to be for each person we know is going to be individual depending how far down the track they are, you know how damaged the intestinal system is. So we first want to start by calming everything down starting to heal it with that of those lovely herbs that are like slime, then we start cleaning out the villa and then we start rebuilding the bacteria of the intestinal tract.

And it's a it's a process that really a lot of people if you changed your diet to Whole Foods properly cooked for your ability to digest A lot of people can get a turn around in their health fairly quickly. It's I just watched a film and I recommend it to everybody. It's called what the health and it's on Netflix. And there's three people in that film that are very, very ill and started the film. And all three of them by the end of the film are either in a treatment center where they're being treated with nutrition and, and healthy Whole Foods, lots of vegetables. And the turnaround in the the conditions and some of them are on like 10 different medications.

One guy's on insulin, right? painkillers up the wazoo. They're off all medications and like two, three weeks, so that's pretty amazing. The body wants to heal, you just have to give it what it needs to do it right. And not continually keep aggravating it with the diet and lifestyle factors that caused the problem in the first place. Food poisoning also is can really destroy your gut flora in your gut health.

So often if someone has had a bout of food poisoning, or also parasite, you get worms and parasites in the intestinal tract. All of those things will also damage over time and harm your ability to be able to digest food. When I came back from India, I did a parasite deworming cleanse and I saw a couple things come out. But I have never been as sick as I was for years as I was in India several times and it was just bacteria that's in the food there that we don't have here. We're not using To write, we don't have that micro Flora in our gut. So that's another eating out of season and eating foods that don't grow local.

We're not getting the micro Flora that's on the are that we need for our environment. So more and more, it's important to be shopping at your farmers, local farmers market, you know, get the food that is being grown in the area that you live in. So we don't want to be eating too much tropical fruit. It's nice once in a while in the summer, you know, I love avocados. I'm gonna do that and Ellie made some fabulous guacamole with cucumber in it, I got it. We got to get that recipe Holly.

So you know, I'm gonna do that every once in a while in the summer and you know, I might buy a pineapple and that kind of thing. But generally, you want most of your diet to be foods that are in season that are around your local area, especially things like honey, getting honey, hot from local that's unpasteurized. If you pasteurize honey don't don't even bother eating it. It's more of a poison than anything else. So you want to get unpasteurized, local honey from a good grower around here. If I can't get something local, okay, I'll pick something up.

It's not, but really, it's not going to be as healing as something that we're going to find in our environment. So when when you have a si Bo, you need particular probiotics. And that's another reason that sometimes probiotics don't work for people, because they're not the right ones at the right time. So the gut has different bacteria than the small intestine and that has different bacteria than the large intestines. So now they're doing fecal implants. Right, taking poop from a healthy person and put it in an up into the colon of an unhealthy person to repopulate their large intestine with proper bacteria.

If you take poop out of a stressed out mouse and give it to a mouse that's not stressed out and put it put it in their track, they're going to get they become stressed. So it's the it really the health of our bacteria will start to determine determines how happy we are. So, the more that you go towards a plant based diet, the happier you can be okay, so, with CBOE it gets tricky, and they almost have to go on a very, very strict diet for a while because everything irritates them. And chlorophyll is a great healer for the psyllium seagull valve. So chlorophyll, of course, is in all of leafy greens, but you can also buy chlorophyll supplements spirulina is good too but chlorophyll in particular will help to heal this file. So if it's tender or painful or there's a not there that can be very helpful and in India name is Nene leaves are harvested in spring and they're going to eat name all summer long to tone and heal their their digestive tract.

Neem oil is another totally different thing. So you want to if you have an irritated gut, you really want to be doing neem leaves, not neem oil. Okay, it's gonna be way too way too concentrated and intense for an irritated gut. Okay, well I think that's it. Oh, here we go. clockwise to close it.

Counterclockwise to open I got it right. And you want to do that if you if you're working with this valve, you want to do it two minutes twice a day to get it to work again. And you want to do that before meals to open it up before a meal. And then a few hours after a meal, you can go in the other direction, right but you want to wait at least about two hours before you close it. Okay, because it's going to take two hours for all the food to get into the large intestine. And if your digestion sluggish you might want to wait even a little longer.

Okay. And the other Yeah, this is important for when we talk about probiotics and fermented foods. When you have where when you're really out of balance You can the even if it's healthy bacteria, and if there's enough holes in the digestive tract that's going to go into the lymph system. And it shouldn't be there, right it should be lining the intestinal tract, it shouldn't be going directly into the lymph system. So that's when people will have histamine allergic type reaction to things even healthy things like kombucha so you know when that happens to that person is pretty far down the road with digestive problems and and damage to the gut lining. So for them fermented foods are a lot further down the line.

They're not going to be doing that for a while. So you have to know when and where right and for that, that's where some medical tests can be quite helpful. But you can also look at the symptoms that you have and take action And then you try things and you'll know right away is this helpful or not helpful, right. And your high histamine foods or alcohol, anything fermented seafood most cheese vinegar processed meats like Bologna selects, salami bacon, those are Class A carcinogens in the same group as a specialist in plutonium and cigarettes. If you're feeding your kids bacon and sausages, you might as well put some cigarettes on their plate to go with it. So you want to get that stuff out of your diet.

For sure. Nuts, the Nightshade vegetables will be problematic spinach, avocados will be problem. spices, any spice all of those spices there have one thing in common cinnamon, a nice chili, nutmeg, Curry, cayenne cloves are all heating So it's going to aggravate your irritate gut that's red and leftover meat. So eating, you know you cook a big steak or maybe eat half of it and you have the rest of next day for for in the morning. The type of bacteria that grows on that is not going to be helpful to your gut either. So you don't want to be doing leftover meat if you can help it.

So that again, you know, it's like we're cooking every day right? And in our VEDA, you want things as fresh. The ideal is that we go out we pick it from what we've grown and bring it in and cook it right then it never even goes into the fridge, right? But most of us don't have that luxury these days.