The one principle that guides me is that for every health problem there is an herbal solution remedy.
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| winter witch hazel flowers |
The path of herbalism begins at the beginning, where you are, as best you can, directly face to face, with yourself as a unique person in a specific place. You as a person are the person you are as a unfolding pattern. Therefore your fundamental identity is process, becoming. It is imperative you understand your pattern, strengths and weaknesses and then work to address them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw-EsbogfNU
We understand this as the primal pattern prototype developing according to its innate tendency. Just as Quercus alba, a white oak tree is somehow determined by the acorn from which it grew, to be exactly, unaltered what it is according to its prototype. So an oak acorn planted does not put out maple leaves. The oak is forever limited by its oakness. The oakness of an oak is both its strength and weakness, both its salvation and nemesis. So you too are a living being, whose origins is through your parents and immediate ancestors. In a sense, you are your parents. You can of course react against this, yet even this reaction against who you are, is somehow contained in who you are.
If you travel to study with plants you will notice that the white oak, with its distinctive paired lobed alternate leaves, will take on different aspects of that prototype depending on where it is located. We understand the unique environment within the bioregion where the white oak grows is significant. Yet somehow the white oak will remain true to its pattern regardless of the environment within which it grows. There is some flexibility within the pattern yet the pattern itself is ruthlessly rigid. There is dialog within the pattern but no arguing with the pattern.
In other words the white oak within its pattern of white oakness doesn’t suddenly begin to grow Acer or maple leaves. In herbalism this unfolding pattern is sometimes called the constitution. The unique responses to the environmental challenges, the coping mechanisms, childhood illness, and subsequent recovery from illness are called the pattern tendencies for that specific individual. These pattern tendencies of both renewal/recovery and sickness in some ways might be the medical history of childhood and adolescence. This analogy of white oak to human person has obvious limitations. An oak tree for all its grandeur is obviously enormously stuck in place. If we define intelligence as skill in survival, expertise in living strategies, the white oak, Quercus alba although enormously stuck, limited to place, also has enormous inherent intelligence. The Bedford oak is 500 years old. The Bedford oak continues to live about 50 miles north of Long Island, NY. It began as an acorn sometime around 1500AD. Another white oak Mingus oak, from West Virgina was dated to be 650 years old in 1938. Several white oak groves in North Carolina Pisgah forest have multiple 300 year old trees.
Before we can have herbal cures and remedies, on the most basic level there must be effective nourishment from food, air and water. The person first has to have these needs met with dependability and regularity. You can’t decide to take a breath, then a few hours later decide to take another breath. Choice and volitional control although hallmarks of human will are in short supply and over rated concepts within the functioning of the body. If you break the meta rules of human health whether through ignorance or accident, you suffer the consequence. Obviously if a person is deprived of air, and there is a constriction in the airway then herbal remedies are pointless.
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| cold and dry |
There is a dynamic hierarchy of needs and because a person can only exist within a cultural social community, meeting those needs for optimal health is not only physical interaction but also a social interaction. Within supplying food, air and water there must be in-flow, absorption of nutrients and out-flow, elimination of waste from these things. So these basic concepts: the constitutional pattern, constitutional tendencies, nourishing the body and establishing in-flow and out-flow, understanding specific organ systems, are the essence of understanding the human body within an herbal framework. So the artful interplay and development of herbal remedies between a person’s inherent nature, their tendencies and patterns of illness and the overt presentation of the person in relation to energetics of warm/cool, moist/dry, tonic/relax, tightening/loosening, excess/deficiency, stimulation/suppression, and the corresponding body systems and tissue states is the fundamental stuff of herbalism.
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| sassafras autumn |
Plants, herbs, hands and fingers working together with what is available to maximize health is the foundation of learning the practice of the herbalism art. Herbalism is an art and not a science. Every unique situation of disease has an herbal cure. The work done with herbs is process in the der Geist, the imagination of the hearth. The herbs and plants of your personal materia medica growing in field, forest and garden are held in the gathered leaves, roots, oils and tinctures we brew in the hearth. For this reason, we don’t begin herbalism with the study of plants. We begin with the study of a plant. We begin with a single plant. Begin with the study of your place. Your place with you in it. Remember when you were a child, or exploring the place around you in a childlike way, walking through a forest. Something catches your eye. You are walking up a steep hill, it’s muddy, you reach out and grab a branch. As you grip the stalk, in the fleshiness of the lobed leaves there is a scent, a spicy, sweetness, sassafras albidum. It may be years later, you are drawn to dig the roots. Maybe in the mean time someone told you more about it.
There is frequently recognition instantly on a certain level regarding plants. Something happens within the relationship of plant, person and place. The plant, person and place are already established, the connection is a mystery. If you are an herb gatherer it is a kind of arrogance to view yourself as creating this connection, as a service for someone. Likewise if you are sick and taking herbs, it’s laziness to think your responsibility is limited to gulp down and swallow. The connection is already present. Whether you are the herbalist or the person seeking to get well, the process is similar. So hone the direct face to face connection of person, plant and place.
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| cool and dry |
At the beginning working with a specific plant, whenever possible meet and greet the plant where the plant lives. Work with a few plants at a time local to the place. Where you found the sassafras you’ll see other plants a short distance away, maybe mugwort or boneset. You are going to be drawn to certain plants. Again it’s an art form, a mystery, not a science. Look within that small circle. Gather and process the plant, not only with your hands but within the imagination with attention to detail. Be alert around the plants. The plant as an herb is a self contained other with a capacity to heal, produce change in a positive outcome. How that is is beyond our understanding. The endless speculation on the other leads us away from what we can and do know about the other. It is something we can use. Some things we can know and some things we can’t know. It is something we can use to bring harmony. In herbalism it is the plants that bring a kind of memory of the balanced state.
If you have been around sick people it’s a serious situation. Especially long drawn out debilitating illness. We can word play with diagnosis yet the fundamental issue is withdrawal of energy and redistribution of the energy into a negative energy loop.
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| wet moving |
Things tend to develop in a certain way and keep on developing in that way. There is both inertia in health and inertia in sickness. Whether we recognize or don’t recognize, we are connected. We are members of a team. That team is embedded on a cultural playing field. Whether you recognize or don’t recognize, you are a member of a team. It is like you are a member of a basketball team, the scheduled games can not be postponed. If a member of the basketball team is injured and forced to play with injury, then your team suffers. Then there is the emotional feeling tone of injury. Being laid up. Forced to play games at less than potential, sitting on the bench and watching others play. Or the redundancy of forced idleness. The systemic situation of certain team players disavowed from the playing field. They are capable of playing but the rules don’t allow their participation. So they are disavowed cancelled basketball players unable to take the field. This systemic redundancy leads to resentment, passive aggressive behaviour. Someone sneaks in and damages the back board, another time steals the hoop. This passive aggressive attitude becomes habit, people self sabotage their own health. People become attached in some way to misery and begin to live contagiously miserable lives. The cult of sick infirm people becomes an economic driving engine of the economy.
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| great lobelia warm and dry |
When you work with the plant, see it in your mind's eye, recall the smell, taste, color, texture of the leaves, and context of the plant. See the leaves, flowers and if you gathered the roots, see them too. When i say context of the plant, i mean where it lives, the ecosystem, desert, forest, mountain, riparian, wet/dry, sun/shade, flat or hilly, season, the surrounding plants growing around it. Was it tall, or close to the ground? A creeping vine, shrub with woody stem, a tree towering above our heads? Was it still, moving with the breeze? If you are taking a tisane or tincture that someone gathered or made for you, try to have a picture of the plant, and visualize it in your imagination. What is the taste? Sweet, sour, hot, cool, bitter, acrid, salty? What is the smell, fragrance, aroma, earthy, musky, aromatic, floral, what does it resemble in smell? What does it smell like? What does it remind you of? Is it familiar? This will help you to unify the tissue states of the body and the action of the plant on that tissue state. These insights take a long while to develop. So don’t beat yourself up for not knowing what you haven’t had time to learn. Milk thistle, yellow root, mahonia, hydrastis, chicory root all work on liver in a slightly different way. Lacking a dedicated system of learning within herbalism is a problem and one that won’t be solved within our lifetime. The plants are here, we are here, that is enough.
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| mountain mint warm and dry |
Plants are forms of life with their own sovereignty and nature. We encounter the plant and in our body it’s doing something, creating movement of the body systems. The idea is not necessarily what it should be doing, but what is it actually doing in terms of direct experience. Is it warming? Cooling? Causing sweat? Does it cause us to notice a specific bodily sensation? Saliva in the mouth? A tightening of the throat? Rumbling in the stomach? A desire to rest, or a desire to get up and move about? To close our eyes, or look about?
On the endless road of cold, warm, wet, dry, tightening, loosening, winter towards spring..
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| cold and wet season |
