Learning Herbs: The Simplest Things Teach Us the Most
One of the great ways to learn herbs that I have applied in my own life, is to make a number herbal teas, drink, and record what your feelings are. This allows you to experience the taste and feel the herbs impart in your body. The resulting sensory experience can be a shift of energy that we can call a mind-body interaction with the plant (or for some people: “that's a really weird, bitter taste and I don't want to drink anymore of that.”) There may be some teachers out there like Rosemary Gladstar or some other folk-healing based herbalist that teaches this tea drinking approach but I am not familiar with them and was certainly not taught that in my otherwise excellent classes at the East West School.
By “mind-body,” or “energy,” or “sensory experience” I am not necessarily referring to a psychic experience or spirit journeying or taking hallucinogenic substances, but one of simply being present with what you're feeling when you take an herb, drink a tea, or experience an herbal therapy. Certainly there are those people who use a shamanic model or other mystical path as a context to explore herbs. But here I refer to direct experience in learning herbs much like you'd try out a new cake recipe and see if you like it. I am also not suggesting writing long journal entrys about every herb, but to record a few notes. This can be mental notation, but recording them helps.
A good regemin is to drink an herbal tea for several days in a row to feel out what it is doing, what you are feeling in your body. Another way to do this is to drink a different tea every day to learn about its properties. While this seems very simple, it is an experiential way to learn herbs and their properties. A great deal of herbal healing is knowing what your senses, smell, and taste of a plant tell you. When you absorb the essence of a plant in your body, you are altering your energy field, if you think about it. This is not so mind-boggling as it might seem because we are constantly altering how we feel through intake of food and drink.
I strongly encourage anyone learning herbs with an intention to heal others to combine book work with experiential work to magnify and solidify their learning.
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