Restoring the Nervous System with Herbal Medicines
If you were to ask me what one of the most important herbal actions was, I would likely say the nervines. Why? Because our modern world is incredibly taxing on the health of our nerves!! With stress, fatigue, anxiety, tension, nervousness, insomnia, etc. being some of the most common complaints these days it’s become super clear to…
Osha (Ligusticum grayi) profile
Osha is one of our great remedies from North American herbalism with a potent and powerful influence upon the respiratory system. A lot of people reach for it immediately whenever they come down with type of respiratory tract infection, but it’s important to consider the energetics of the plant and match it to the state…
Alchemy and Medical Astrology in Clinical Herbalism (lecture from 2016 Breitenbush Herb Conference)
This class covers some of the critical components in regards to how incorporating western alchemy and medical astrology can radically enhance your practice of holistic herbalism. When we talk about holistic herbalism, I often see the word holistic spelled “whole-istic”- to be truly holistic we have to think about the wholeness of people and plants.…
The Importance of Nervines (lecture from Breitenbush Herb Conference 2016)
I always tell my students that for the client that is stressed and exhausted to give them herbs for the nervous system before even thinking about touching the adaptogens which are typically administered for these common complaints. Too many herbalists use adaptogens out of their clinical indications and traditional context of usage and overlook the…
Elderberry- Not just an immune stimulant!!
Everyone into herbs knows that Elderberry is one of our best medicinal plants for acute treatment of coughs, colds and flues… but what else is this plant up to? Anytime a plant is pigeonholed into a singular category we oftentimes start overlooking other ways that it can be used. Like all brightly colored berries, Elderberry…
How to use Corn Silk as an Herbal Medicine
Most people merely think of Corn as strictly a food plant, but often fail to realize that there is a medicinal component of it as well! So when you shuck your Corn, don’t forget to save the long threads on the inside of the husk- what we call Corn Silk. It has a pretty simple and straightforward medicinal…
The Herbalism Movement
The other day I was working on my first natural building project. Rather than using fiberglass insulation and drywall to build our new bathroom out on the land, I decided to a less conventional approach and use a natural building technique called “light straw.” This involves using a mix of straw, clay and water that…
The One Herb Formula
Sometimes when I walk through the grocery store, I’ll pick up a bottle off of the many shelves of herbal supplements and check out what their formulas look like. I like to see how people think through, or in many cases, don’t think through how to put an herbal formula together. Most of the time,…
7 Plants, 7 Planets (Renaissance Medicine Conference 2016)
I get asked all the time “how do you determine a relationship between a plant and a planet?” It’s a great question, and one I’ve asked myself and many others over the years- and most of the answers I got were “look it up in a book.” That just didn’t cut it for me. So…
The Importance of Mineral Salts in Herbal Extractions (Renaissance Medicine Conference 2016)
We had a great time at the 2016 Renaissance Medicine Conference a few weeks ago hanging out with medical astrologer Judith Hill, renowned herbalist Matthew Wood, and the spiritual botanist/herbalist Scott Kloos. In this class I taught, I discuss the how crucial the mineral salts of plants are in their extraction, specifically oriented towards the…
