The journey of the microbiome starts with the sinuses. While you may only eat a few times a day, you breathe 10 to 20 times every minute. The breath brings in a vast download of information from the bacteria, fungi, yeast, and protozoa in your environment. As we start to think about gut health, we actually begin here, with each breath.

You have an intimate relationship with everything you put in your mouth, so it’s worth considering how well you chew and taste. Taste exists to give you information about the nutritional value of food and how it will interact with your physiology. The tongue is a magical instrument: Remember the power of flavor, slow down, chew well, and experience food again.

The esophagus is simply a tube that runs from mouth to stomach, moving food from one to the other. And yet, as we dig into its structure, we find an extraordinarily intricate organ that mirrors many aspects of the beauty of the body. This simple tube ends up displaying the sheer miracle of a day in the life of a human being.

In terms of its surface area and musculature, the stomach is designed to listen to your food. What is your stomach listening to? It’s listening to how your food was grown, lived, and died. It’s picking up on the microRNA that was in your food right at the moment you consumed it.

The way the liver communicates with the small intestines via the gallbladder and pancreas is quite exquisite. It is a symphony of cooperation that happens in the first couple inches of the small intestine. This is where the real work of nutrient availability gets going.

The small intestine is at the center of gut health — no other organ is in such close relationship with your food. This is where you prepare to receive all that nature has given you so that you can be a vibrant being living in this reality.

This incredible organ is at ground zero when it comes to detoxification and nutrient preparation. The liver is trying to figure out how to communicate between two radically different microbial populations: those of your gut and those of the internal environment of your cells — i.e. your mitochondria. The human sits in this ethereal zone between these two vast ecosystems of microbes.

The colon is where your quantum relationship with food manifests. All the macro processing of food is completed, and now your body and the microbial environment is relating at the level of water, electrolytes, and trace minerals. The level of complexity of these trace minerals is mirrored in the vast microbial complexity of the colon.

The brain is a central processing unit. It is taking information, organizing it into patterns, and putting it back out. Where does that raw information come from? We look to the gut and its microbiome as a fundamental source of what comes into the brain.

What creates beauty? When you look at the skin of a human being, it is not just an epithelial covering to a body of meat. You're looking at an interface with light. The gut-skin axis is your pathway to show those around you the beauty of the divine.

Many of today's most fatal diseases, including cancer, diabetes, obesity, and dementia, are rooted in a dysfunctional microbiome. This dysfunction is an expression of an even larger problem across society — our disconnection from and exploitation of nature.

Technology drives us towards comfort and convenience, but the result is that we live vastly more sterile, sedentary, and disease-prone lifestyles than our ancestors.

We have cut ourselves off from the very roots necessary to live in a thriving state.

If you want to live a long, healthy life, you must first learn how to repair, heal, and care for your microbiome.

This 45-minute master class will inspire you to build a resilient and biodiverse foundation for your health.