Terrain Theory

It's been nearly a year since Ben and Mike sat down for a Wellness Check on the Terrain Theory Podcast, and a lot has happened in that time. A new marriage, a growing family, a milestone birthday, plenty of music, and a few unexpected challenges have given them plenty to reflect on.
Ben shares what life has looked like since welcoming Hazel into the world, blending a family, and marrying Kelly in an intimate ceremony that carried more spiritual significance than he anticipated. He reflects on the difficulties they've navigated together, the strength they've found in one another, and why some of life's most challenging experiences can also be the most transformative, especially if you see life happening for you and not to you.
Mike checks in on life at 50, from touring and playing hockey to recognizing that the habits and expectations that served him at 30 or 40 don't necessarily serve him today. He also recounts a meaningful return to a music festival that had excluded him during COVID, and how choosing connection over confrontation opened the door to something he hadn't expected: forgiveness.
Then Ben and Mike turn their attention to the terrain between our ears.
What stories do we tell ourselves about who we are, what we're capable of, and what success is supposed to look like? How often do our expectations become the source of our own frustration? And what might change if we stopped trying to control other people's journeys and allowed them to hike their own hike?
Along the way, they touch on sleep, movement, sunlight, aging, eyesight, raising children, and the daily practice of taking responsibility for their own well-being. But the conversation keeps returning to a common thread: the beliefs we carry, the relationships we nurture, and the things we're willing to let go of may be just as worthy of our attention as the physical aspects of our terrain.
As always, this conversation is for educational purposes only and reflects personal experience. It is not medical advice.
Remember:
You are light.
You are love.
You are your Primary Healthcare Provider.
Support Terrain Theory on Patreon! Our member platform gives you access to a ton of free & exclusive content. Check it out: https://www.patreon.com/TerrainTheory
Book a FREE 1:1 call with co-host Ben Hardy to discuss terrain, health, life, anything! Find a day & time here: https://www.terraintheory.net/pages/free-1-1-call
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
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Music by Chris Merenda

What really makes us ill?
Once you begin questioning germ theory, another question quickly follows: if germs aren’t the cause of disease, then what is?
For past Terrain Theory guests like Dawn Lester, David Parker, Tom Cowan, et al, The answer comes down to some familiar forces: malnutrition, stress, and toxins.
In this conversation, we focus on one of the most pervasive of those toxins: glyphosate.
Michelle Perro, MD is a conventionally trained pediatric emergency physician whose work gradually moved toward environmental medicine, nutrition, homeopathy, GMOs, pesticides, and the growing toxic burden she was seeing in chronically ill children. That journey eventually led her to GMOScience.org, where she now works to educate families about the relationship between food, environmental exposure, and health.
We start with glyphosate and Roundup, but expand into the bigger picture: pesticide exposure, the gut and microbiome, intestinal permeability, mineral depletion, ultra-processed foods, children’s developing physiology, organic and regenerative agriculture, household exposures, water, personal-care products, and the cumulative load created by modern life.
But this is not an episode about becoming afraid of everything around you.
It’s about what you can actually do about it.
Michelle makes the case that the first step is reducing the toxic load: changing what comes into the home, becoming more conscious about food and water, paying attention to what is being sprayed around us, and supporting the body’s ability to recover. She talks about her work with children and families and how some simple shifts in lifestyle and food choice led to vastly improved health outcomes.
Then onto the activation piece: rebuilding community around food, supporting local farmers, growing some of our own food again, and refusing to outsource responsibility for our health entirely to institutions.
Because awareness is only the first step.
Agency comes next.
And if we want healthier people, healthier children, and healthier communities, tending our own terrain may also require tending the terrain of the communities immediately around us...and the terrains of those with whom we share that community.
Learn more about Michelle Perro, MD and her work at https://gmoscience.org/ and https://makingourchildrenwell.com/.
Support Terrain Theory and get bonus episode content at https://patreon.com/terraintheory.
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda

When Lisa Strbac first joined us in 2023 to talk homeopathy, tissue salts came up almost in passing. Since then, she’s written an entire book about them. So we invited Lisa back, along with her colleague Natasha Andreo, to give the subject the attention it most certainly deserves..
We begin with the twelve tissue salts identified by 19th-century physician Wilhelm Schuessler, how they differ from classical homeopathic remedies, and the notion that all dis-ease can be traced back to mineral salt imbalance in the body. 
Lisa also raises a question that sits right at the heart of homeopathy: are these remedies supplying the body with a substance, or could they be providing information? She shares the story that first convinced her to take tissue salts seriously, and she and Natasha explain how they choose individual salts, what they look for in the face and body, and why taking all twelve isn't necessarily the same as finding the one(s) you need.
There is, however, another piece to this system that Mike and Ben were very keen to explore: each of the twelve tissue salts has also been associated with a sign of the Zodiac.
Natasha, whose work combines homeopathy with medical astrology, explains how she uses birth charts, the Sun, the Moon, and planetary cycles to think about constitutional tendencies and timing. That leads to a fascinating discussion about surgery and lunar cycles, inherited patterns, generational trauma, and a reframe of that notion of "generational" that we hope gets used more.
Somehow Human Design enters the picture too, at which point we learn that Mike is apparently a type reserved for only one percent of people...which immediately made sense.
Join the conversation as we make connections between our cellular health and the cosmos above.
To learn more about Lisa and her work, visit lisastrbac.com, follow her on Instagram at @lisastrbac, and explore her homeopathy courses and practitioner training at the Academy of Integrative Homeopathy.
To learn more about Natasha and her work, visit natashaandreo.com.au and follow her on Instagram at @natasha.andreo, where she is most active.
Support Terrain Theory and get weekly bonus content at patreon.com/terraintheory.
Book a FREE 1:1 call with co-host Ben Hardy to discuss terrain, health, life, anything! Find a day & time here: https://www.terraintheory.net/pages/free-1-1-call
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda

Four years after her first appearance on Terrain Theory, Dr. Suzy Harris returns for a conversation that starts with COVID, adverse events, jab detoxification, and quickly moves into much deeper territory.
Suzy shares what she has been seeing in her chiropractic and natural health practice, how she approaches lymphatic movement, circulation, detoxification, and recovery, and why she remains open to questions that challenge even the frameworks she currently uses. We also talk about the importance of being able to disagree without immediately dismissing one another, especially in a space where skepticism is supposed to be a feature, not a liability.
From there, the conversation turns toward mindset, consciousness, attention, and what Suzy calls "quantum mindset coaching". We ask what “the field” actually means, whether thoughts can influence physical reality, where science ends and interpretation begins, and whether any of this requires a belief in God, spirit, or something beyond the material world.
At the center of the conversation is a simpler question: where are you putting your attention?
Fear, anger, resentment, grief, and uncertainty are all real. The point isn’t to deny them or spiritually bypass them. It’s to notice them, feel them, learn from them...and, as Suzy puts it, not park there.
We also revisit health freedom in Vermont, the lessons of COVID, personal agency, scarcity, manifestation, skepticism, and the possibility that changing our relationship to the world may begin with changing what we continually feed within ourselves.
Learn more about Suzy and her work at https://cedarwoodnaturalhealthcenter.com/ and also follow the work of Vermont Stands Up at https://vermontstandsup.org/
Support Terrain Theory and get weekly bonus content at patreon.com/terraintheory.
Book a FREE 1:1 call with co-host Ben Hardy to discuss terrain, health, life, anything! Find a day & time here: https://www.terraintheory.net/pages/free-1-1-call
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda

Beana Bern is the founder of Rootstock Retreat, a ten-acre retreat and community in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where she works with psilocybin through immersive medicine retreats and seasonal microdosing programs.
In this conversation, we rethink what we mean when we use the word “medicine.” Beana shares her own decades-long relationship with psychedelics and explains why mushrooms can be remarkably efficient at showing us where our pain, patterns, and stories come from...while challenging the idea that the psychedelic experience itself does the work of healing.
We talk about our own early experiences with microdosing, the problems with turning psychedelics into another magic pill, and why Beana structures her microdosing work around the rhythms of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. From there, the conversation widens considerably: the medicine of place, reconnecting with nature, developing internal authority without rejecting the need for guides, and learning to recognize wisdom in the world immediately around us.
We also venture into animism, the sentience of mushrooms, energetic and spiritual hygiene, unseen forces, and whether “hallucinogen” is even the right word for experiences that can sometimes feel more real than ordinary reality.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about much more than psychedelics. It’s about awareness, relationship, and expanding our understanding of medicine beyond something we consume to include the places we inhabit, the seasons we move through, the experiences that challenge us, and the living world (terrain) of which we are a part.
Learn more about Beana and her work at Rootstock Retreat: https://rootstockretreat.com/
Use code TERRAIN333 to take $333 of their next Microdosing Immersion: https://rootstock.mykajabi.com/medicine-of-the-west
Support Terrain Theory on Patreon! Our member platform gives you access to exclusive content. Check it out: https://www.patreon.com/TerrainTheory
Book a FREE 1:1 call with co-host Ben Hardy to discuss terrain, health, life, anything! Find a day & time here: https://www.terraintheory.net/pages/free-1-1-call
Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.
If you have a Terrain Transformation story you would like to share, email us at ben@terraintheory.net.
Learn more at www.terraintheory.net
Follow Terrain Theory:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrain_theory/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Terrain-Theory
X: https://twitter.com/terraintheory1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@terraintheory
Music by Chris Merenda