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…
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 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,…
How to Connect with Plants and Know Which Herb is Right for You
With thousands of options out there for herbal medicines, do you ever find yourself wondering which plant to work with? Do you ever get confused about which herb is right for you? Well, watch this video to get the full scoop on some simple tips and tools to help you make those decisions. In this…
My Herbal Mistake
Have you ever been too afraid to start practicing as an herbalist out of fear of making a mistake? Most of us are kind, empathic people who care a lot about the people we serve. We’re into plant medicine and the healing arts because we care so deeply and want to make a positive impact in…
Strategies for a Holistic Respiratory Formula
The art of herbal formulation is… well just that- an art!! The #1 mistake too many herbalists make when it comes to formulating is that they think about what organ system they want to work with and BAM- throw every herb they can think of that does something to that system and hope that it will work.…
Therapeutics for the Respiratory System
I believe the respiratory system is of the most important organ systems to know how to treat with herbs because it’s one of the primary systems consistently and commonly afflicted in modern life- especially during this time of year; the “cough, cold and flu season.” From an allopathic perspective, a cough is typically treated with an…
Prebiotic Herbs and Gut Restoration
So I was drinking my tea the other morning and thinking about my last video I did talking about digestive health and I realized that my tea was a great example of a particular and often overlooked method of gut healing with herbs: prebiotics. With all the overuse of antibiotics and leaky gut syndrome, we all tend…
Gut Health and Clinical Herbalism
When I was studying herbal medicine in university at Bastyr, my teachers taught me that in traditional western herbalism, the human organism is likened to a tree whose roots are the digestive system. In this way, the health of the entire organism is utterly dependent on the health of the digestive apparatus- from the mouth all…
