This subject is close to my heart with early childhood roots as I would often hear my mother say that if she didn’t take her vitamins she would come down with a cold. And indeed she had a colourful little assortment of pills that she would swallow everyday, back in the seventies when they looked like m&m’s. And even though I was young I often wondered why she took them if not taking them caused her to be ill. And it’s a great question, did they stop her from getting a cold? or did they cause the cold when they stopped?

What I didn’t know at that age was that my mother was a cancer survivor, in fact had had a full hysterectomy which was one of the reasons why I was adopted

1. I also did not have the capacity to understand that taking the vitamins, the pills, was an act of wellness, was my mother looking after herself. How effective they were at keeping her healthy is impossible to know, in any scientific sense, however did they make her feel better? I think so.

I can’t really imagine, and I never got to find out as she died in the 80’s after her cancer returned, what it was like for her, her cancer journey back in the 60’s. I was too young to have those kind of conversations with her. But I do get to recognize two things - that she was dependent on her vitamins and that was how she took care of herself.

Now there’s really quite a lot to unpack here and when we look at healing neither one of those observations should be dismissed or taken lightly.

It’s something that I check with myself, when being with clients, to recognize what they are doing to take care of themselves and not dismiss it out of hand, even when I find some of the choices unusual. I think out of all the doctor patient interactions I have heard about, the memory of when the doctor said you shouldn’t do this but do this instead, sometimes with a certain tone and usually no explanation, is the strongest, the dismissal that your attempts to look after yourself are valid. And it’s not unusual - after all thats why the experts are experts right?

Personally I don’t think so. Not only does it enforce a power dynamic between doctor and patient that can be unhealthy but it is often simply a cover up for the absolute lack of time and compassion it takes to understand why you make the choices you do. To figure it out and to ask the questions. Lucky we are if we can find a doctor who has time for a conversation and I truly hope that you all have one.

And unfortunately this dynamic doesn’t help empower us in our health, this don’t ask questions, do exactly as I tell you and take this pill approach to medicine that we tend to be part of. And not just from too busy doctors but also the plethora of herbs and supplements that are for sale, with guaranties from experts and studies insuring that they will fix xyz without having even met you.

So my aim here with this series of essays on supplements is to underly one of the first and foremost goals that I have in my healing practice which is to help my client listen to their bodies.

How do we know what is good for us, to be confident in what feels right for our selves, in our bodies so that we can know what advice to follow and what protocols work?

Or to put it another way, if we don’t know what feels right in our bodies how can we trust the advice that we have been given? How can we know what to do?

How do we get to a space where our bodies longings become specific? When we can discern between need and craving? This is a place that I find is fertile ground for empowered healing and one that I find using herbs is very compliant with and I don’t just say that because I love herbs. It’s physiological - many functions within ourselves - digestion, immune, circulatory etc are dependent and responsive to sensory information, taste, smells, touch, etc to function effectively. Being able to taste, smell and touch your medicine complements this physiological process. And the more you do it, the more you become familiar with medicine that has taste, a smell, medicine that you can experience, the more insight you have to which herbs (which support certain functions) your body is desiring.

I’m sure we can all share stories about certain medicine - herbal or not - that we just couldn’t get down, and certain medicine that we immediately felt the improvement from. So although this may seem obvious this is actually important information that I find we have forgotten. That the body does know. However, by industry standards to ensure sales, it is far better if we trust the experts rather than ourselves. (And of course everything is contextual, so yes in certain contexts we have to trust people outside our selves for dealing with health issues.) Often though we don’t, we have the main tool right here, our home, our incredible bodies especially when it come to maintaining health.

So let’s look at this thing that was happening to my mother, this cold that she would have if she didn’t take her vitamins. Was it because she was a secret dexys midnight runner? Do our bodies really get dependent on supplements?

Well the short answer is yes. And the long answer is that not only is it good for the supplement industry but it is hand in hand with our farming practices and environmental issues and has a lot to do with money. Which sucks because remember this is also us waking up in the morning and taking our supplements as an act of self care. It is for many people a way we have found to function despite chronic illness. How we avoid inflammation and pain. How we fight off disease.

How do we marry the two? Feeling into what our bodies needs, which means paying more attention to what we are doing and how. There are some tricks to this and the first one I get clients to do is to take all their supplements and put them in an inconvenient place. Then make a note of which ones you really missed or felt you absolutely needed. Make a note of how your energy levels that week, if your digestion changed etc. This is where we start to pay attention and its work and it does take time. It’s an intimate business.

Google web searches will find you articles on why the continued use of supplements may not be the best course of action for you - unless there are specific reasons and if you dig deeper you can find some really interesting studies on how prenatal vitamins effect future generations as well as our selves.

For me personally though I have seen it in my practice, people who have had to detox off their supplements, have decided they want to source minerals and vitamins a different way and not in a routine because of cost or the feelings of dependency and who have felt crappy for a couple of weeks or months while doing so. One of the main culprits is supplements and herbs that help with constipation, training an already lazy peristalsis to become even less functional. There is also a massive debate on calcium and how we absorb supplements to mention a few. It is all very heady and my first ask is that we bring it back to the body. Back to how we feel.

In the following essays on this theme I will talk about how to not become dependent, tricks I use for helping you listen to your body and supplements that I love and ones that I am a little curious about. I will also be talking about herbs that I fold into my diet to help even out the nutritional playing field that supplements are becoming so dominant in. Magnesium being a prime example! This will be a running theme throughout the year and I would love to hear from you about your relationship to your supplements especially the ones that are the bomb and that you couldn’t do with out.

Thankyou Wild Ones

With love, Natasha

 and a brief interlude with a bit of a rant on Supplements 

Greetings wild ones, I hope this finds you well within the downpours and winds and occasional breaks of sunshine. And even though it feels like there is very little to break up the muddiness that’s our end of winter I feel the stirring underneath the ground.

I have just picked up a copy of my friends herbal book - a visual guide to medicinal plants of the Pacific Northwest - and noticed her nifty little harvesting guide that it comes with and reminded myself that soon we will be awash in green…..chickweed, cleavers, bleeding heart, dandelions, fir tips, nettles, usnea, violets and cedar tips as well as all the vibrancy of the spring roots and rhizomes, devils club and Oregon grape and the tree barks….to name a few.

You can get Natelie’s book here www.adiantumschool.com/book.

If you’re fairly new to herbs you might not really recognize many of the names and indeed wonder how they are useful, but dont worry, if all you do is collect dandelion and nettles this year you will be awash in so much medicine. I often write about, and will continue to do so, how relationship is the essential underpinning of how medicine works. This can be for some a very difficult concept, after all we can’t imagine or understand what we dont know and most of us don’t get to experience direct relationship to our food or medicine and trusting what is “good” for us has become quite complex.

These days I am working a day or two a week at my friends health food store so i’m back in that place where the herbalists really shine, just on hand for a friendly chat. People come in to really enjoy this part of the store, the over the counter consult, in it self an art form (because really to do a proper consult hands on, history and eye to eye connection are so much a part of that vital process). However there is something wonderfully old fashioned about it and it’s still a way that a lot of us got into herbs, having access to a human and not just youtube.

Today I managed to confound a customer who was looking for a supplement that combined magnesium and potassium. Which we didn’t have, or if we did it had other things in it as well and finally I said that stinging nettle would cover all the basis - and was also gluten free and vegan to boot (a concern). We even had it in pill form and as im also terribly lazy about making herbal teas (yes i know heal thy self etc) the pill form is a good convenient solution. It doesn’t have the ingredients on it she said staring at the bottle. Well its a plant I said, now sounding like a moron.

I even offered to bring up a list of the constituents from the web and luckily I’m not young because well I have mercury in Aries and it was such hard work for me to not point out that these numbers that we were examining “ohhhh it has 364? potassium” well they’re guidelines but they also pretty useless in this context. I mean they might mean something if she was doing controlled comparisons with daily blood work and absolutely no deviation in her every waking moment so she could then asses what the differences are if she took 2 pills over 1 etc…. not to mention that each nettle leaf is going to be different from its brother, bio region and patch so the numbers banded around are only relevant to that nettle examined at that time and that quantifying it with numbers is as trustworthy and valid as simply saying this makes me feel better.

I ended up self placating my complete lack of words around this concept by guessing correctly that she was an Aquarius, because I knew that no matter what advice I gave she wasn’t going to make up her mind until later about what she needed (I found this out while trying to help an Aquarius friend clothes shop which was great if you only want to try on stuff rather than get anything). I also sincerely hoped that she had her ways of knowing what and how makes her feel better. Because we quite often forget those three simple words, I feel better. Somehow this has become such an untrustworthy state of affairs. I feel better. However we do know. We do know when we feel better and we can trust ourselves to know whats good for us, even if we dont know what it is or where it can be found yet. And along this vein I will be including some meditations around spring, about gratitude and intention and how this can lead to finding relationships that we didn’t know existed and how thats all connected.

Much Love as always and keep the emails and comments coming as they are my virtual store front although its much harder for me to guess your astro since i’m a visual gal.

Natasha

How to move when its too much

brain fog, mistakes, trust and more supplemental advice

For those of you who received a strange early morning post that looked like a shopping list of half baked ideas, my apologies - it was a scheduled post that had yet to be completed as I sank into binge watching C.B strike last night instead of writing. And inconveniently forgot this morning as I dashed off. Oh the horror! But also a great example of what we all experience on the daily, learning skills which involve mistakes that are often in front of an audience or have farther reaching implications than just ourselves.

So here we are, moving on. It is often movement that can be such a sticky point for us, on all the levels, physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally. A great aha for me in my training as a herbalist was when I realised that herbs could not only address the tissue state - hot, cold, damp dry etc but the movement from one to another. And that we have a class of herbs specifically suited for that, promoting and encouraging movement, whether it be releasing tension, moving dampness, pulling/drawing - all these actions that promote flow. Perhaps the most tangible is the release of tension, that release that allows the fever to break, when the skin can release the heat, given permission by the diaphoretic action from the herb, gently guiding us through, holding our hand, caressing our check, in the deepest physiological sense, saying okay its time to let go. Blessed that we can lean on the deep intellegence of our herbs that know how to work with our beautiful complex selves and work with our fevers and immunity so we can orchestrate ourselves back into balance.

And I think we all know that life, on a very basic level, is about a pulse. breath in, breath out, sounds waves pulsing back and forth, photons pulsing through the universe, emotions running cold to hot, thoughts pinging to and fro. The eternal heart beat of the deep earth energy moving through our roots up to the top of the crown connecting us to the sky and then back again, the eternal heartbeat of the earth mirrored in the heartbeat of ourselves. And I think that most of us have practiced that pulse, breathing in and out and explored what it is to let go, hold and be empty and then receive, hold and be full.

So movement in herbalism is very important, because so often our physical issues come when we are stuck in one state or the other, again in mind/body/spirit. We have words for it that not only describe the physical state of our tissues but also mirror nicely the emotionality that comes from it, respecting that we are all one complex dance. Stagnation, atrophy, tension, lax. Depending on whether we are the kind of people who like to be bogged down or stretched thin indicate if it is excess of or lack of, whether we run hot or dry. And of course it gets even more complex, with those of us, damp and stagnant but then overheating and baking in our dampness so that it becomes stuck and dry and bogged down. Thats when we start to see a chronic condition, the more layers the longer it becomes to untangle. Like the little lie that then snowballs into a whole catastrophe that somehow seems impossible to hold and you are just in crisis waiting for the dam to burst or the status quo to collapse so that you can experience some release, some movement, some way to reenter the heart beat of the world, the pulse of your life.

So it is interesting to look at resistance, to see where it is, on the release and the emptying or on the receive and the holding. To check in with a quick breathing meditation - and see what part of it is the least intuitive, has the most resistance as it is such a good indication of where you are. For myself it is, after the last 2 years, on the receiving. I am far more comfortable empty, suspended, off floating in the ethers. I can draw in the breath but when it comes to holding it, it feels uncomfortable, like I want to put my full ness down, its hard to hold and I can’t trust where to do that.

So it was enlivening when I realized that rather than words of wisdom this morning I had sent out an email with a to do list of things to write about today. The dread of having landed incorrectly in front of an audience (albeit as I know not overly concerned and maybe even slightly amused). It was a quick gasp of eros.

Oh its the brain fog I think but really it is just me learning this platform and how to organise my writing schedule and yes maybe it is the brain fog. But more I think its about how to engage, that holding and wondering where to put it, in a world where we hide behind screens and get to so effectively filter ourselves and have less opportunity to practice mistakes with each other. Which is probably a great idea for a workshop - yet another example of what used to be daily life now something that seems like we would pay to do on weekends with experts!

Which brings me round about to supplements. There are a lot of supplements taking up the slack for the horrifying fact that we have a lot less nutritional value in our food. You can do your own google searches but the science says that there is around 20-40% less vitamin and mineral content in our vegetables and fruits and meats compared to the 1970’s. Due to soil diversity loss and also hybridization of our plants, genetically tweaking them to heighten the sweetness and breeding the bitter elements, the “taste” out of our fruits and vegetables plus the cold storage techniques that have developed over the last 50 years means that many of us are feeling the need to supplement with magnesium and other basic nutrients so that we can sleep well and digest well. Maybe this is the evolution of us as a species, to train our bodies to be able to only uptake nutrients in their compound form rather than the complicated array of constituents presented in the sentience that is our whole food. However it has far reaching implications from how we are designed to digest complex and diverse nutritional matter down to the very basis of how we embrace death. How we see death, interact with death and give death to all living things, all the sentient beings that we consume and that consume us. How we are part of this magical and complex pulse of the earth. This heart beat that is life.

Removing death, removing that vital emptiness so that we can then again embrace the inhale, dive in, engage and metabolize life and not being part of that act of profound transformation is one reason that we have so many chronic diseases specifically around how we consume and digest food. I think on some level all of us know that to take away our presence, to reduce the sacred act of giving death to any sentience to anonymity is to create pain and suffering. We can see it in the feed lots and feel it in our guts.

So let’s start to look at some ways that we can become more in the flow, the cycle of in and out, hold and release and that free fall pause in-between that can bring so much trepidation. Let’s see how we can support ourselves in this process, this heartbeat that is life.

Part of my work as a herbalist has been to help people really feel into what their body is longing for and to help folks transition from relying on a subscription based model of health to a more intuitive flow - letting the body tell you what it needs and helping resource the ways to support that. The process is a slow one especially when we encounter the resistance that is inherent in the letting go or embracing, that moment ripe for self sabotage which presents in such a myriad of ways. I like to start small to escape the demand of action which so often leads to over whelm. Tell myself that I’m going to change just 2 things in a year, a trick that led me to feel happy about how I sourced my food. I was looking after small children at the time and even though I knew what felt right and what was right for me to hold, the logistics, school lunches and grab and go breakfast, lack of community, guilt and self shame constituently kept tripping me up. Finally rather than worrying about the myriad of things I wasn’t doing that kept me (un)comfortably frozen in place I decided change just 2 things that year. I decided to source really healthy vibrant almonds as we were all drinking almond milk and to make my own. And not worry about the rest. I found out that all almonds from California have to be preserved by law which meant the organic ones were being pasteurized and the non organic were being treated with minute amounts of some kind of jet fuel that was banned from the race tracks in the 60’s for being dangerous to health (yay for cheap surplus). However the farmers could sell raw almonds direct which meant I got to call up the farmer and talk to them in person which somehow shifted my whole relationship to the almonds and then later incredible walnuts that I would make into milk, which also meant that to cut costs I brought bulk which meant that I talked to neighbors and friends, discovered the delights of a shareable google spread sheet, which meant that I would have to talk to everyone when they came to pick up their almonds enforcing community which meant that me and my kids made friends which meant well the world of support. The result being so much more than the way we embraced, and as a result digested our milk, a wholly different experience. The kids still ate white sugary food, we still ate out, we still ate “crap” but hey we had the almond milk down, the beginnings of a food collective and a movement that slowly crept into my life, which led to me needing to buy my meat from the farmer, my vegetables from the local farm and the undeniable fact that even though the food cost 3x more, I needed 3x less “bulk” to feel full.

And that sense of being involved, in belonging trickled through and eased that trepidation of the free fall, that urgency when feeling overwhelmed by what I was taking in.

Okay, so thanks folks for bearing with me and my mistakes, for perusing a laundry list of things that I didn’t end up writing about and witnessing me in the realisation that prescheduling posts does not in fact keep me on track with what I’m going to write about. And thanks goodness. This flow has been much more interesting. And as I continue to wonder about supplements, the industry, what to take, what not to take I will take delight in recommending a new product, not really a supplement but conveniently in pill form, made by a dear friend and colleague and the quality of which I can vouch for as she is an impeccable medicine maker and which might just be helpful for the brain fog and especially the respiratory illnesses that have been plaguing us this winter.

I ‘m excited to be trying out some of these from lovely Anna Sitkoff, now a naturopath in Port Townsend.

https://www.lucidummedicinals.com/shop