Introducing: LIVING WELL LOCALLY
Great news from the American South and the good, green state of Mississippi
There are many things you can personally do to make the world a better place, your family healthier, your community richer, the climate calmer, your world safer … all by taking care of yourself and those you love.
It’s all a matter of method.
We are three Mississippi women on a mission to help our communities regenerate themselves, and our state and country have better futures. We imagine a better world shaped by intentional lifestyle choices and place-based wellness.
We call our vision “Living Well Locally”.
With this substack series we explore how wellness-focused living in our homes and communities achieves the good things we want for ourselves and our neighbors. Using the emerging methods of lifestyle-based medicine and regenerative farming we believe that much can be changed for the better. We also believe that these methods integrate well at the local level and that by bringing them into our clinics, homes, and fields we can create local wellness economies and cultures of health that make healing easier for everyone.
We want to show you how taking good care of self and home and having access to ‘real food as good medicine’ changes everything.
We believe in all the side benefits that come with living consciously, with medicine that can tell us why we are sick and how we can heal, and with understanding that our health is tied to the health of the soil and the environments in which we live. Reversing chronic disease, taking control of our family’s health, building strong immune systems, raising healthy children who can focus and learn, rebuilding community food webs . . . these benefits are just the beginning of what can come from understanding how to Live Well Locally.
It’s important for humans to live differently if we want to solve chronic disease, if we want our children to live in more peace, if we want wars and mass shootings and poverty to change. If we feel a need to balance the excesses of globalism, control our own futures, and remain sovereign in our communities, we must do more for ourselves. Nothing teaches us how to do this better than helping someone we love reverse a serious disease or by personally taking our own healing journey. And today this is more possible than ever.
Lifestyle-based medicine in its various forms is now capable of telling patients why they are sick and how they can heal. Knowing root causes means that we can work to remove them and that we are learning what undermines human health and what supports it – like real food and clean environments and more caution with the technologies that support modern life.
It's a matter of intention and information - personal and political - to change things.
Please consider subscribing to our substack series.
You can expect regular posts, at least monthly but likely more often. With these first launch posts we hope to convey the basic reasons and ideas around Living Well Locally, but there is much more to come.
We believe in Mississippi, a beautiful and caring state that has lived on the bottom for too long; we believe we can transform ourselves using our own resources and talents. It’s a matter of method and will. Using our strengths of faith, home and family, sociability, farming, diversity, and more, our state can turn its health around. It can build out its own unique models for Living Well Locally. And one day, Mississippi might even lead on wellness.
Thank you for reading our ideas and for supporting us by sharing them.
About Us:
Alison Buehler is an educator, community advocate, podcaster, author of nine books, including Rethinking Women’s Health and Beating Anxiety and Depression for Life. She and her physician husband founded Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of Mississippi and The Homestead Education Center with a focus on health and wellness in home and community. She is our kick-starter, educator, promoter. Alison lives with husband Mike and teenagers Max, Ben, and Cecelia.
Marion Sansing moved to the US from Germany a few decades ago and later married into a Mississippi family. She is a volunteer extraordinaire, executive doer, and designer; caters community events, paints murals, and teaches real foods cooking and fermentation. As a kitchen artist using local, well-grown, and foraged foods, Marion embodies the substance of Living Well Locally.
Nancy Woodruff has used and practiced holistic health for four decades. She has designed and taught community classes in ‘real food as good medicine’, planned ‘saving rural America’ conferences, worked in natural foods co-ops, food policy and research, and economic development. She loves fermenting, thinking, integrating, and writing. Now retired, she lives in a tiny house on a rocky hill.
Alison, Marion, and Nancy met as founding members of Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of Mississippi in 2008. Their eclectic backgrounds bring experience and diverse yet complementary skills to wellness-focused grassroots work from their homes in east-central Mississippi. They have each taken personal healing journeys, they each struggle to get and keep families on board with wellness, and have each assisted family elders with major chronic diseases through the end of life. They are home and family-centered, home cooks, and caregivers, but also researchers, experimenters, and professionals.
I’m much older now, but I still do believe you’re right. Disabled now from the fight for truth . Yet, if I were to leave anything behind it would be to this hope.
All important information and reasons to live by. I use to be a long standing member of the longest running Cooperative in the state of Florida. I loved everything about our little group and learned so much. I miss them terribly, they were like family to me.