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.

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