Category Archives: Herbs

Herbs: How We Learn By Direct Experience

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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.

 

 

My First Experiences of Herbs and Healing

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Learning Herbs: Folk Healing

In a previous post entitled “Herbs: We All Have To Start Somewhere,” I discussed a common theme found in the early education of most modern herbal teachers and practitioners. This was marijauna, the “first herb” of a whole generation of young people who helped create the “Herbal Renassiance” in the 1970s. In that post I was talking about my experience in particular, but also what many others who did not become herbalists learned by being exposed to the use of Cannabis sativa. In this blog I am continuing that theme with other common experiences I share with other herbalists who came of age in the late 20th Century.

Many of the original hippies in the San Francisco Bay Area were not baby boomers. They came from the Beat Genertion, commonly called beatniks in the 1950s. Another age wave of hippies, those who were born after 1946, were people a decade older than me when I met them in the Appalachian mountains in my early 20s. This was the mid-1970s. Looking back I would consider myself a neo-hippie. What the older generations of the counterculture taught me and my age group was alternative culture. This included a smattering of herbal remedies.

If you listen to enough stories from herbalists who grew up in that era, at some point the book Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss will be mentioned. Of course we only knew this as a book about natural healing and herbs that had a really cool cover with art representing “getting back to the Garden.” At that time no one had heard of Samuel Thomson and his system of herbal medicine from the early 19th Century which Jethro Kloss was a descendant of. The fellow who shared Back to Eden with me, a wooly-headed hippie who had come from out West, also taught me about goldenseal herb. If there was one herb that represented that time, it was goldenseal, or Hydrastis canadensis. Lore had it that goldenseal was “good for everything.”

Another group of plants available to me were herbal teas in the form of bulk herbs and tea bags. I can't remember the names of the loose teas, but remember quite clearly when Celestial Seasonings became part of my world in about 1977. I don't remember where we bought those teas from, perhaps a health food store or coop. This was a long time before the company was sold to a corporate entity and herbal teas appeared in every grocery store. Morning Thunder, Sleepy Time, and Red Zinger were new teas then and favorites in my crowd. I don't know that anyone prescribed any special healing properties to such teas, although it was becoming clear that if one ate more vegetables, brown rice, ate less meat, and drank herbal teas you felt better.

It required a special event to kick my mind into the concept of “healing.” Due to changing my diet, eating more vegetable-quality foods, and no doubt taking in plant substances through teas and inhalation, I began a process of healing that culminated in a Healing Crisis. Many people believe that the body goes through a process of ridding itself of toxins and inherited tendencies by surfacing buried symptoms, and substances that doen't belong there–a healthy sickness in other words. After such a shedding or elimination, then the body will come back healthier than ever. I believed that then as a core embryonic idea, and still believe something like that today in a more sophisticated, nuanced form. But the event I am referring to was a severe flu that I went through one winter while living in the mountains.

I had never had the flu before, only colds. As I remember, it was a full blown flu with muscle aches, fever, alternating chills and sweating, diarrhea, and vomiting. I was in pain and wondering what was happening to me. I was visiting one of the local hippie elders, who took mercy on me, one of the lowly hippies on the pecking order. She had me sit in a chair and prepared a tea of hot water, apple cider vinegar, honey (and perhaps lemon). As I sipped my drink by the fire in that comfortable chair, I suddenly, almost instantly felf better. Could this really be happening? The more I drank, the better I felt. The hippie woman seemed to have an easy familiarity with the tea and did not seem surprised that I was improving. Was she a white witch, I thought? It almost was as though she expected me to get better.

Ever since then I have always had faith in simple home remedies even though I am a highly educated herbalist. Her secret: experience. She had used it before with success and what I thought witchery was assurance from knowing what worked.

 

 

Herbs: We All Have To Start Somewhere

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Learning Herbs: The “First Herb”

For those who view herbal healing/medicine from the outside, it seems like an esoteric pursuit, with endless amounts of information, organized in in an incomprehensible manner. There is some truth to this. Learning about herbs and their application in the field of healing is a life time endeavor. But one must begin somewhere… My own origin story is similar to many others. In the 1970s, the wave of cultural change that had begun in the 1960s was washing over the North American population, and indeed having implications throughout the world. I was simply one of a generation that had been exposed to recreational marijuana use and the attendant countercultural ideas that came with getting high. Most people who smoked then, whether they do so now or not, can tell you that there are 28 grams in an ounce. They also know the Latin name for marijuana is Cannabis sativa, and that the chemical constituent in marijuana that gets you stoned is THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). Familiarity with latin binomials, understanding weights and measures, and knowing about the chemical constituents of plants is part of the knowledge base of an herbalist. In a sense this was an introduction to plant medicine. So marijuana was my first herb and I like many others considered it a “natural” product.

There were/are always people who aren’t hip who smoke pot and do drugs. It seems to me that there was more access to alternative cultural thinking in the 70s than after that era. As an example, the movie Woodstock featured robed gurus and people practicing yoga, in addition to those listening to music and getting stoned. Marijuana was a gateway herb for many people looking for a different way to live, those who couldn’t accept that all the worldly things they had been offered was all there was to life. Some of the ideas that came along with knowledge of the “first herb” seemed to offer the promise that we could live in in harmony with others and find purpose in life. Oh yeah, and live in harmony with nature. The fact that these ideas still permeate our collective consciousness tells me that that they are not mere naivety, but something we are still reaching towards collectivelly.

In retrospect, marijuana is like any other herb or “botanical medicine,” in that it has certain properties, has certain rules for use, and affects the body (and mind) in certain ways. I’m not sure the cultivation of this plant to dramatically increase the THC content, creating strains of “super pot,” allows it to be considered harmless, or merely “natural.” Like other herbs with strong actions, such as cathartics or poisons, it belongs in a special category that requires knowledge and forebearence for accurate usage.

 

Herbs: Michael Tierra, the Man Who Invented Echinacea

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Michael Tierra, famous herbalist, founder of Planetary Herbology, has had a remarkable career from the beginnings of the herbal revival in the 1970s until well into the 2000s as a “natural healer” (naturopath), “master herbalist,” and herbal educator.

I have listened to uncounted herbal talks and classes by Dr. Tierra and he has been a primary influence in my learning about herbs, herbal medicine, and the concept of integrating holistic modalities.

Some of Michael Tierra's accomplishments include:

• Becoming a Master Herbalist under Dr. John Christopher's system of herbal healing in the 1970s

• The first distance learning program for herbal healers launched in 1981

• One of the first herbalists in the United States to teach the traditional uses of Chinese herbs

• One of the first North American herbalists to classify herbs according to “energetics” such as hot/cold, wet/dry

• Developed the concept of Planetary Herbology, a humoural and energeitc categorization system for unifying Western, Ayurvedic, and Chinese herbal therapeutics

• Helped revive Eclectic herbal medicine, an American school of herbal healing in the 19th Century

• Originated the idea of the American Hebalists Guild, a professional organization for clinical herbalists

• One of my favorites: Tierra found a relatively unknown herb in an Eclectic herbal book and decided anything with such a strange name must be good for something. He began trying it out on his friends. At some point he decided that more is better and told his “patients” to take the herb every hour until their cold or acute situation had passed. This was Echinacea angustifolia, now one of the best selling and most used herbs in the world. This “protocol” of hourly doses of echinacea is now recommended by writers, doctors, natural healers, and lay people, some of who have never heard of Michael Tierrra. That's why I call Michael “the man who invented echinacea.”

 

Distance Learning, Part 2

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(Back on the CAM, Herbal, and Naturopathic trail)

The modern version of the correspondence course is distance learning. No one questions now that colleges or high schools or even post graduate studies can take place through a computer or over long distance without the student setting foot in a classroom.

My observation is that all trainings, even college education, are only preparation to enter a field or profession. Education is not a guarantee of excellence, but simply that the student has met the minimum requirements to practice or work in their chosen field. One acupuncture school graduate I knew said that his education, after four years, was really just enough to begin to understand Chinese Medicine. It would take many years for him to become truly competent and become excellent. In the mean time he and his fellow graduates would start “practicing.” Massage school, not matter how good the school, only prepares you to enter the profession. The first thousand massages, the first thousand bodies you lay your hands on is the apprenticeship.

Competence in practice is gained on the job, through experience, and after learning the theoretical basics, fundamental techniques, and lexicon of a particular field. Many Chiropractors I know believe that the actual practice of Chiropractic can be learned in 2-3 semesters of learning after extracting the extraneous medical knowledge and educational padding that has accrued in their four year educational process. (I also know a few Chiropractors who said what they needed to know to give adjustments in practical terms could be learned in three weeks). Ironically, many Chirorpactors have to graduate before they can learn Chiropractic philosophy and truely understand their profession's history.

I have not taken any distance learning course in Naturopathy. I'm sure there are some exellent courses out there. At some point I would hope that a student of such a course would have a mentor, tutor, and ultimately a practical exam. I have taken and studied herbal courses through distance learning. All the criteria I have have laid out as being important were met. There was a mentor, there were tests, there was a graduatiion exam (which I took closed book), and there were practical classes that had to be attended “on campus.” I found this process as being deeply rewarding and a true educational experience. I spent many hundreds of hours beyond the credit hours awarded studying herbs and herbal healing. Every moment of it has benefited me and my patients.

I would say that there is a necessity for distance learning in alternative medicine. There are very few places to learn quality traditional naturopathy, herbalism, or other forms of natural healing. Unlike the modern medical educational system, you can't go to your local community college to take a course on herbal healing like you can nursing. One day there will be institutions like that in the United States. In the mean time we have to get education where we can.