Urban Herbalism: A Treatise

Here's the thing. If you go research healthy living on the internet today, you'll find a myriad of advice. Any thing from brushing your teeth with a licorice root to drinking Celestial Seasonings tea is considered "alternative health". The spectrum is broad and wide and with plenty of room for eccentrics, fanatics and fakers.

At some point in my journey of alternative and complementary medicine, I have been all three, sometimes all at once. It's easy. It's easy to find that a little bit of Valerian tea will help you go to bed at night. That a decent multivitamin can really help you feel better each day. That a ginger coin under the tongue can cure nausea. And the more it works, the easier it is to get a self-righteous sense of pity for anyone taking an antacid. The more you feel good, the easier it can be to make grand claims about how you would handle a debilitating disease if it were you. The more you know, the easier it can be to want to do things like wild harvest every herb you use and make everything from hand.

And if you are like me, the more you know, the guiltier you feel for not having the time to do things perfectly. And since my accident, which left me with considerable pain and aggrivating a few other health problems, I have been feeling guilty more and more. Here is an abbreviated list of things I feel guilty or inferior about: using a store bought natural tooth paste, never finding a solid herbal shampoo recipe, taking ibuprofen when my back hurts, not getting reiki/acupuncture/massage more often, not soaking my grains every time, buying bread from the grocery story bakery (instead of baking it), not brewing as much kombucha and keifer these days, eating an organic frozen pizza, ordering a free range but NOT organic pig, eating meat at restaurants, seeing the chiropractor too much, going to physical therapy in general, for drinking unsweetened iced tea from restaurants...etc.

It can be so easy, once we have an concept of what ideal looks like, to bludgeon ourselves emotionally until we live up to this idea. I have never, ever sat down with myself to congratulate myself on my progress. I went from a Centrum multi-vitamin 10 years ago, to brewing my own kombucha and drinking raw cows milk today. Why can't I be proud of this growth?

I have good health care professionals, a confusing list of symptoms and some persistently awful fertility problems. My back hurts at least three days a week. And I have trouble getting anxious about all this.
But my list of medications is piling up, where I used to be able to snarkily declare "NONE!" when asked.

I have struggled with guilt. I have struggled with feeling like a fake, wanting to be able to rely on the alternative more than I have been able. And this has pushed me from my dreams of an apothecary and hand making my own remedies. "If I can't fix myself," I said, "how can I help anyone? Why would anyone trust me?"



We get no where by creating more burdens for ourselves. With all of the awful advertising geared to make us feel inadequate and the puritanical concepts forced upon us from birth, we would already know it if life could be enhanced through guilt. But it's never made me better.

Let's just agree on some things. Shall we? Here is my treatise, what I call "Urban Herbalism":

• Herbal (or any alternative) medicine should enhance your life. It should make it better, you should feel more well. If it doesn't work, you aren't to blame. If it does, thank the Goddess. 
• There will always be more you could do. Measure how far you've come and how much good you do each day, rather than what is yet to be done. 
• If your journey of herbal medicine becomes burdensome, if it feels like physics homework, instead of poetry, pull back. When it isn't beautiful, it may not be working. You deserve beautiful. 
• Do what is accessible to you. In yoga, if something hurts beyond what you can breath through, you are encouraged to pull back, do less, because "effective" and "painful" are not synonymous. Try this as a method. 
• If your herbal medicine journey becomes disconnective for you, if you lose friends or alienate family, maybe you should reconsider how deeply you've gone. When I was a vegetarian, shooting for veganism, I avoided social outings and dreaded holidays. It became destructive. Don't allow this to be true for your healing journey. 

I guess if I could sum it up, I would do so like this: 

It should be beautiful. 

It should be a  blessing. 

It should be like breath. 

Thanks for the chance to share.