Introduction:
Wholeness and the Ultimate Question—
What Is Healing?
In my twenty-three years as an herbalist dispensing medicines and supporting clients, I’ve been called a healer, though for decades I considered myself more of a facilitator. When customers used my apothecary products and reported back that the first-aid ointment healed their terrible burn, or the sedative tincture gave them their first solid sleep through the night, they claimed I healed them, and I quickly pointed out that it wasn’t me, it was the plants. For a long time I was loath to accept any credit for the good works of my products, but over the years I’ve explored the interconnections between myself, the plants, my products, and the people who come to me sick, injured, or concerned, and I’ve questioned: when they get better, what, exactly, was my role in their recovery?
Is healing a process or an outcome? Is it scientific or personal? Who has the ability and the authority to heal—and who doesn’t? In other words, what does it mean to be a healer? This is one of the deepest and most important questions we can ask ourselves as healing arts professionals, and it’s a difficult and even controversial one to answer. It has become vogue to say that we can create our own health, or even that we can influence or change our reality through positive thinking. I think this is both true and untrue. I believe our thoughts have a direct impact on our lives, and they can even structure the energy that makes up our existence with direct cause-and-effect. But I’ve worked with enough positive people who have faced illness despite their positive mindset. People who eat well, live happily, and promote a positive ideology can still get sick and die. This begs a lot of questions: What causes illness? What causes health? And who, ultimately, is the healer?
For far too long, sick people have relied on the medical establishment to provide healing. It has been assumed that the educated physician heals with every prescription written. But do doctors heal? Does healing come from an educated mind and a prescription pad?
What about other healing arts practitioners? Do those of us who work with plants, teach nutrition, or lead yoga classes heal? True, we facilitate the healing process and guide a sick person toward wellness, but do we heal? Do our herbs and remedies heal? If so, is it the chemical nature of the plant that brings about change in the body, or is it the inherent spiritual energy of a plant that heals? Perhaps it is the connection with Mother Nature or with a divine origin that shifts a person’s health. Does healing come from prayer? Does God make a sick person better? Generations of families have relied on their religious tenets to cure the sick, regarding faith as both the curative agent and the pillar upon which to lean when healing failed. Many of the indigenous women healers I’ve interviewed for my documentary have attributed healing to the Divine and are adamant that we as the healers are the conduit to mysterious and powerful forces beyond our understanding.
There are as many possibilities for the origin of health as there are remedies: W as it the herbs or the hugs or the chicken soup?
We may never know the answers to these questions. But it is our responsibility, as healing arts practitioners, to consider all options and to approach our clients with the open-minded respect they deserve. Personally, I think a combination of all these forces and energies leads to changes that can bring about healing, but your own experience must come into play when you are helping a person get better. Your own attitudes, confidence (or lack thereof), and beliefs will influence the person with whom you are working, regardless of whether you prescribe an antibiotic or a homemade tincture. Evaluate yourself to determine if you are open-minded and fair, and especially if you are a good listener and not a lecturer to your patients. And, importantly, be willing to work with others in a wide range of disciplines to make sure that the person has access to as many healing techniques and providers as he or she feels necessary. Healing is, by its nature, a collaborative process, and part of our job is to facilitate the connections that will best serve the person in need.
We still face enormous mysteries in life, death, and illness; for this reason I want to address one important concept that is seldom discussed in the herbal medicine world: What happens when healing methods fail?
Failure and Success, and Priorities for Care
Unfortunately, many people assume their goal should be perfect health. This is noble and ideal, of course—why work toward anything less? But basing self-worth (or even the worth of an entire healing tradition) on the success or failure of, say, curing cancer is not in line with the philosophies of a healing arts practitioner. No one is perfect, and to strive toward a perfect human body will only result in disappointment. It is a hard lesson: the bitter realization that we can control some things but not everything. That some people will recover and others won’t. A feeling of failure can even make a person sicker than before.
Part of the problem is that many healing arts professionals believe it must mean your gift or skill as a healer is inadequate. But illness is a vastly misunderstood phenomenon, and to pin the integrity of a healing method or tradition on the basis of complete success is misguided and harmful, and it leads to the exclusion of valid healing methods (including both herbal and allopathic). I think certain priorities for healing are important for healing arts practitioners; we must ask, what is the top priority for a healer? Is it to heal? In fact, I think not.
Instead, I propose Priorities for Care, a simple list of important philosophies for the healing arts practitioner to consider that promote wholeness and connection first where the effort to solve the problem is secondary:
Priority #1: Initiate a Relationship of Respect
Too often people express disappointment with their caregivers because they were seen quickly, spoken to hastily, and left to put their clothes back on with more questions than answers. This is a disrespectful way to treat a person seeking treatment. Respect should be the central tenet of a healing philosophy and the number one priority for any herbalist, physician, or other healer—even before “fixing the problem.” Learn the person’s name and go further to discover their past and their interests, diet, and goals, and open up a two-sided dialogue in which the person feels comfortable sharing private information and expressing feelings, questions, disagreements, and possible solutions.
Priority #2: Help the Person Connect with Others
Illness can make people feel isolated and alone. By helping them connect with others, the healing arts practitioner is helping them build the bridges and networks that will sustain them through both illness and health, and this gives them a valuable resource. There are so many others who need to be in this person’s network—not just you! Directly help the person contact and connect with family members, doctors, priests and rabbis, friends, counselors, therapists, other herbalists, and even help them connect with plants. Building this framework for the person who comes to you for help can be even more needed in the long run than providing a list of recommended remedies.
Priority #3: Work to Address the Problem
Only now, after actively respecting the person and helping to establish other connections in his or her life, should the herbalist address the problem at hand. Unless you’re an emergency room doctor, this step should be third on the list. And notice I don’t say “fix the problem,” because healing is as much in the pursuit as in the outcome. Healing arts practitioners understand the multilayered approach to healing, the levels upon which we build trust, ask questions, pursue a line of inquiry, assess a need, recommend tiers of herbs, and adjust according to need as time goes by. “Fixing” the problem is a linear thought process, but we know problems and solutions are circuitous, that life and illness and death are cyclical, and that emotions and mental health are every bit a part of the person’s physical illness and must be included in the whole protocol. Working to address the problem removes this linear framework and creates an opportunity for growth and change.
Working from this priority list fits nicely into herbalism’s holistic nature, and it even gives us a good basis for formulating our medicines. Knowing these priorities, we can approach formulary from the most effective and holistic perspective. Formulary is a way of structuring your thoughts to put certain herbs together, to understand their actions, and to create a healing practice that will affirm the person’s needs and support the healing process. Formulary involves pharmacology, anatomy, and chemistry, as well as intuition and a connection to the person in need. It is a very creative and fulfilling endeavor; there are many ways to do it and many traditions to pull from, and our exploration of formulary will provide a strong foundation upon which the healing arts practitioner can build health.
A Note About This Book
For the healing arts practitioner of any modality—chiropractic, acupuncture, yoga, homeopathy, nursing—herbs are an intriguing medicine. Many complementary and alternative healers as well as allopathic practitioners include, or want to include, herbs in their work, and they want to learn more about how herbs work and how to blend them into their practice. This guidebook will help the practitioner or professional navigate the complexity and depth of herbal heritage and understand how to use herbal medicine for the health of their clients and patients. As a reference, it is a straightforward list with up-to-date information about herbal chemistry and pharmacology seasoned with my personal and professional experience harvesting, processing, formulating, selling, and using herbs as medicine in a community setting.
This book features the tenets of our herbal heritage and the specifics of how to apply plant medicines in a healing capacity gleaned from my years directing an herbal retail and wholesale apothecary and a school of herbal medicine where I train and certify students in community herbalism. More and more, I meet colleagues who specialize in hands-on body healing, or I talk with physicians who are intrigued by the results they see in their patients who use herbs, and they want to learn more. This book is for you—to share what I’ve learned from other herbalists and healers and from my own decades as an herbalist, and especially to offer a structure in which to study the vast number of herbs in a concise and easily organized way. Many of my students have been relieved to learn how to think about formulas using the 4-tier formula I present here because it gives them a practical platform for organizing all those useful herbs. When working with a client or patient, this sensible structure helps narrow down potential remedies to those few that will be of most benefit.
Also consider that within the scope of herbal medicine is our responsibility to focus on both herbs and herbal knowledge that are garnered in a positive manner. For instance, we have the option and responsibility to purchase herbs that are organically grown or free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—which is not only good for the environment, but it is especially useful since many of the tier 1 tonic herbs described here will be used long-term and are meant to nourish the body; thus, acquiring pesticide-free and genetically intact herbs is vitally important. We also have the responsibility to make our voices heard about the animal testing that is, unfortunately and surprisingly, at the foundation of herbal medicine trials. Much of the scientific research being conducted about these botanicals is at the expense of animals, and while I include the results from their studies in this book, I personally and professionally do not condone such research and hope that our herbal traditions can be scientifically and clinically validated without such needless animal experimentation.
What to Expect
While herbalism can lend itself to encyclopedic lists of herbs and their actions, it’s also rich in heritage and the stories of people. This book reflects the more scientific aspects of herbal study while my book Women Healers of the World celebrates the more human aspect of falling in love with herbal medicine—especially through the stories of the extraordinary women throughout history who have influenced plant healing. But these are not mutually exclusive, thus, the discussion on wholeness, health, the many expectations we face as healing arts practitioners, failure or success, and thoughts about the origin of health itself are intriguing and important questions for any healer to explore.
With that discussion as our background, we will explore a brief history of healing traditions and then dive right into what I call a 4-tier formula structure. It’s an easy and commonsense way to integrate a wide range of herbal actions while keeping the formula relatively small and simple—and it’s what makes this book different from other herbal medicine books that may feature the history, cultivation, or use of herbs. By learning to organize herbs into effective remedies using this special formulary technique, the healing arts practitioner can call on this structure for any patient or client and with any illness or need for prevention. Be sure to refer to the five glossaries at the back of this book for detailed information about herbal chemistry, tonics, threatened and at-risk medicinal plants, and more.
Formulary is one of the most interesting and enjoyable parts of herbal medicine; up there with spending time in a sunny garden or hearing from a client that they feel better, using creative formulary is a rewarding and effective skill for the healing arts practitioner.