C. R. Livingston, M.Sc., R.P.P., is a Medical Anthropologist who has spent much of his life enquiring into the health of the human organism, it’s natural systems, and the spiritual cosmos that ultimately affects us all. We are all indelibly linked, for we too are nature. A Polarity Therapist, Certified Permaculture Designer, “Earthing” advocate and mycophile, he has more recently completed a Cornell Wellness Counseling Certification Course.

You may well ask, what is a medical anthropologist? Well, medical anthropology is essentially about how humans in differing cultures and social groups explain the causes of ill-health, the types of treatment in which they believe, and to whom, or what they turn to when they become ill.

In the process of his work Livingston has studied and lived among a spectrum of human cultures, experiencing spiritual rituals, systems of prognosis, and traditional ceremonies across cultures in Europe, the Americas, Central and Southeast Asia and East Africa. He has also led teams of American and Canadian physicians, along with their local counterparts to remote and often inhospitable locations for research into various sicknesses as well as setting up vaccination programs for UNICEF and OXFAM.

Co-founder of three non-profit African Village Projects (AVP 1990) to fund tree nurseries and tree planting in Ethiopia through the agricultural department of Addis Ababa University. Later, the Afar Relief and Development Organization (ARDO 1993) was founded in Ethiopia and sought funding for and coordinated a range of relief and development projects as well as healthcare programs in the Danakil desert for the Afar nomadic people. Later still, he co-founded Ocean Canoe (OC 2012), an environmental education foundation for islands in the Caribbean.

He is now in the process of setting up the Indigo Longhouse Indigenous Initiative (ILII) for the purpose of  assisting in the re-founding of the original systems of health, healthcare, indigenous agriculture, aquaculture and associated food systems on or in proximity to First People’s reservations, particularly in the US and Canada. Fun fact:  Around 60% of foods grown and consumed worldwide originated in the Americas and were developed by the original American farmers over countless generations.

Livingston began traveling in Europe during summer vacations and later traveled to parts of the world before satellites and the internet existed, to regions where fridges, freezers and supermarkets had not yet made inroads into human life worldwide. Mail at that time was forwarded to American Express offices or poste restante to the central postal office.

As a sixteen year old, he hitchhiked through France, Italy, Greece, the then Yugoslavia, and Turkey, learning local food culture from food preparation, to storage and preservation, and some truly divergent culinary methods. He lived on less than a dollar a day, sometimes sleeping where he found himself at dusk. Much later, as a medical anthropologist, he worked, researched and gained knowledge from traditional healers of the Amhara, Afar, Tigre and Oromo of Ethiopia, traditional healers of the Dayak of Borneo, and indigenous healers in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Sumatra, Java, Bali and the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia.

His thoughts, understandings and reports to various organizations come from many thousands of days, evenings, meals around wood fires, treks and journeys through original landscapes, learning inherited knowledge from traditional dwellers of those lands. This wide accumulation of human experience was to be the bedrock for coming to the understandings he now has. You may ask, what’s all this got to do with health, your health? And the answer would be, everything!

All of these indigenous travels have provided Livingston with a wealth of firsthand experiences, augmented by extensive reading and personal conversations with experts in the fields of nutrition, health, healing and spirituality. Re-gaining health is, in any culture, truly priceless and desirable, and there are so many paths to health.  Livingston’s ultimate goal is to refine these varied pathways and methods in the twenty-first century, to integrate them where wise, and to share them with each individual’s needs and state of health.

Thus, from some of my thoughts and readings:

It’s not about treating disease, but simply about creating health.  Disease simply goes away as a side effect by creating health.

Join me on a journey toward health. Human as well as planetary health - for they are one. Whole human and whole planetary health.

Believe in the optimization of the human body and the human spirit.

We must find our way back to true nature. We must set ourselves to the task of revitalizing the earth. Re-greening the earth, sowing seeds in the desert. That is the path society must follow. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, author of One Straw Revolution

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. This, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. ~ Michael Pollan - Author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

The Earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same. Chief Joseph (1840 - 1904) Humanitarian and Peacemaker

With over seventy five times around the sun - I came to realize that food, and lifestyle habits like exercise and sleep IS medicine.

In essence all healing is about creating a relationship with the client/patient that is supportive enough to give you the confidence to heal yourself.

Food isn’t like medicine, it IS medicine, and it’s our number one intermediary for creating the vibrant health we have the right to.

The majority of chronic disease is primarily a food borne illness. We ate ourselves into this problem and we have to eat ourselves out of it. ~ Mark Hyman, M.D. Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine.

We are living in a pandemic of diet-related disease - significantly from ultra-processed food - an industrially produced edible substance.

Fiber, fermented especially, feeds the good bacteria. Sugar feeds the bacteria you don’t want.

According to Dr. Randolph Stone, founder of Polarity Therapy - “There is only one disease: Blocked energy”. Together we’ll explore your “blockage”. 

The beauty is that once you start changing your diet and lifestyle for the better, it gets easier to keep eating well, and living better, than to eat poorly!

Be the CEO of your own health.

Biodiversity. The biodiversity of the environment and the biodiversity of the gut microbiome are of the same magnitude.

The microbiome is the interface between the cosmos and ourselves. Casey Means MD

And we consume approximately 60 metric tons of food in our life time.

The importance is always in addressing the individual parts of the person in relation to the whole. Our approach will be orientated towards personal growth, whether physical, mental or emotional.

We can heal ourselves, our relationships and our environment. The key lies in understanding the very nature of our life.

An autobiographical sketch of C. R. Livingston that you really don’t need to read

I grew up on a family farm on the south coast of England with draft horses, an ancient well, and no electricity for the first few years of my life. I certainly had early thoughts, aged seven or so (1955), about the state of the soil, air and water from my father, from whom I later parted ways, on views on the environment and land sustainability. What a shame! A veteran of WWII, he became a modernist, a chemical and fertilizer adherent, and I viewed the future as not to be messed with unreasonably! Of course I believe that that is exactly what we are involved in now. A regenerative farmer before my time.

Early on, I noticed the differences between the perennial nature-scape where I roamed and played versus the orderly straight-edged spaces where crops grew assisted by their seasonal cycle of planting, tilling, harrowing, fertilizing, pesticiding and harvesting.

Later on while preparing for medical school, I worked as a hospital porter and assisted in its morgue preparing bodies for autopsy for several school vacations and realized how arbitrary Western medicine could be. It was not so much about sustaining health, as managing disease after it had occurred. Okay, it was the1960s, but still, it was cutting edge at the time. I also spent time at my father’s abattoir and easily recognized that we were indeed animals of a similar makeup.

This awareness of the two earths, one adapted by man and one of the natural cycle of seasons and replenishment, stayed with me and drove me to seek understanding  in different cultures and climates of a more natural world beyond the confines of modern agriculture where we have now created this era of chemically dependent agricultural practices that have led to the destruction of our soils, water systems, oceans, and indeed human health. I wanted to see and experience how these cultures reacted and responded to what nature had presented to them, how they had engaged with it, tended to it, and perhaps even regarded it as an entity in its own right. It was often seen as nothing less than the source of not only their everyday health, but the longterm survival of their people and culture.

With my mind full of youthful thoughts and unanswered questions, I set out for India, but then in a strange twist, instead of traversing Northern Africa and sailing across the Arabian Sea to India, I joined with newly minted friends and sailed from Gibraltar on a 40ft trimaran sailboat, with no working engine along the coast of West Africa, to the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands, and across the Atlantic to Antigua and much of the Caribbean. Thence to Miami, the inland waterways to New York, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal with its 83 lift locks, and the Great Lakes to Chicago.

After a summer and fall in Quebec, Canada, I returned to Europe and once again set out for India (I had grown up with stories of India from my maternal grandmother) on my Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, through then still Communist Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Bengal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, where I experienced pristine and extraordinary diving, often diving alone along miles of reef strewn rugged coastlines. I learned to climb coconut trees, living off fish and coconut. I studied, Ayurvedic medicine in Kerala, a very enjoyable 30 days in the Central Jail in Delhi for possession of a firearm that I had carried for defense from animals while camping out at night in the tribal lands of northwestern Pakistan. A wonderful experience. No suffering involved, I even had my own rooms and servant. What a month! I studied Indian naturopathy, yoga and learned to be an elephant mahout during this year in India.

I sailed from Madras to Penang, Malaysia and Singapore. Heading north again to study Theravada Buddhism in Thailand as a neophyte monk begging daily for our food and daily partial fasting as was required of a monk.

Travelled through Cambodia and Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam war, frequently dialoguing into the night with villagers, farmers, street vendors and VC sympathizers as US planes bombed us and dropped Agent Orange to defoliate the area along the Cambodian border. Just to give it a time perspective, we listened to the US moon landing huddled around a farmer’s tiny handheld radio.

And later I stayed at a US marine base on the Mekong River when the area where I was living fell to the VietCong. Nighttime river patrols with the marines on the Mekong, often under nightly fire from VietCong positions.

This certainly gave me a wide perspective on war, this war that immediately seemed un-winnable particularly this first televised war that was presented nightly in our safe and comfortable living rooms.

From there to Hong Kong and  Southern China dialoging with Maoist youths in Canton and Macau. Taiwan, where talk of Maoism was taboo and the unbelievable treasures of their National Palace Museum, and then by small boats through the Kyushu Islands to Japan where I spent two years immersed in Japanese culture, literature, calligraphy, post-war Japanese cinema, from Tea Ceremony to Zen Buddhism to Ikebana flower arrangement to macrobiotics with George Osawa’s widow while working as an advertising copy writer, sometime film actor and English teacher in Tokyo.

There were many more journeys to learn and experience the world. Indeed treks by sail, by train, by ship, by canoe, by outrigger canoe (Philippines and Indonesia), by camper van, motorcycle, bicycle, on foot (four months across the Dyak rainforests of Kalimantan, Southern Borneo, three months across the northern Ethiopian highlands, and six months across Brazil, South and Central America).

I set up and ran a Japanese fashion house in London and showed our collections in London, Paris, Tokyo. Later I set up an Ethiopian restaurant, the Blue Nile, with my then wife, while working as a fashion and advertising photographer and photojournalist among other disparate ventures.

Later as a Medical Anthropologist often in conjunction with either UNICEF, WHO, UNEP, CIDA, WaterAid, WFP, OXFAM, SCF, the Ethiopian Department of Traditional Medicines with whom I worked in conjunction for four years. I worked with, observed and experienced many healing systems and traditional modalities in cultures that retained the characteristic customs and conventions of their communities. I conducted research for implementation of outreach vaccination programs, primarily in Ethiopia and Eritrea, two countries whose medical systems go back beyond the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Indeed, their pharmacopeia is widely extensive and historically documented, much of it held in ancient Christian monasteries across this ancient land spanning much of these East African Rift Valleys.

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