Description
A series of ailment centred herbal workshops for the practical application of local herbs
FORAGING, GARDENING, MEDICINE MAKING, FOLK HERBALISM
Taught by Steven Martyn
The systems we are going to look at are:
Sunday, April 27: Guts (complete digestive track)
June 7: Blood and heart
June 28: Nerves and Brain
September 27: Lungs
November 15: Joint and muscles
One day (10am-4pm) in person hands-on workshop at the farm with lunch included
Option to stay the night before and/or after in our dragonfly house or camping. Please inquire for details.
-Learn to identify, harvest and process several common plants that are nature’s balm for these particular ailments and the organs that express them
-Learn how to harvest and prepare tea, tinctures and ointments for medicine by going through the whole experience
In trying to bring back common folk herbalism we released our course, “Seeding a Beautiful Future, herbalism from the ground up”. This was an online herbal course focusing on common herbs, with the option of being sent seeds and or the herbs (some tiers of this course can still be accessed here). In this course series, The Body’s Ailing Systems and Nature’s Herbal Balms I’m going to start from the other end of the healing experience. With the disease. With the body’s systems and imbalances that bring ailments.
While the physical body is very complex and can be studied for years and still not really understood, understanding the basic systems and how they can be ‘treated’ with herbs is within the grasp of any layperson. For hundreds of thousands of years we have known these herbs and been nourished and saved by them countless times.
As an herbalist I think of the body’s systems like an ecosystem. Which is to say when we view parts of our body we recognize that their boundaries are permeable and they are all co-evolved and are connected just like the plants and animals. Our lungs, blood, guts, nervous system and brain are all very connected. So, sometimes disease can be expressed through the imbalance of another unseen system. Coming to understand these expressions is important for diagnosing and treating the imbalance.
Allopathic pharmaceuticals are made from one or two modified organic chemicals that create chemical reactions in the body. These chemicals often block the body’s ability to express the illness through symptoms but don’t treat the underlying deficiency or imbalance. Herbs are living beings that create synergistic reactions throughout the body. Which is to say the trace amount of the living plants, as in tea, tincture or homoeopathy, sends a signal to the body that begins the healing process. In both therapeutic methods the goal of health ultimately comes from the same source, letting the body heal itself. To be an herbalist you don’t need to know about chemistry. And this is not a clinical herbal course. Understanding the chemistry might help one see the healing, but it doesn’t make you a better herbalist or healer. We have done this for a very long time, long before the word was even captured. So how we speak of it is immaterial, it is in the experience and the doing we learn.
