The Medicine Woman's Roots

The following is the some of the new text for the Supporter page of the Animá website, describing the new forms for contributing financially to this place, practice and purpose.  We eliminated the Memberships, as that made it sound like this was an organization rather than a school and sanctuary, and lowered the minimum Supporter contribution so that nearly everyone can afford to participate who really wants to.  There are now 4 clear levels of Support for you to choose from, according to the degree of involvement and gratitude, and your ability to help.  Due to the difficult economic times we have lost the aid of several Supporters, so we have to thank you in advance for even considering becoming a Supporter yourself… any time, at any level.

Become an Animá Supporter

Supporters are the most crucial allies Animá could have, enabling everything that this project does, creates, and ultimately engenders and inspires in others… with vital monthly, annual or even occasional donations.

For a monthly pledge of only $25 or more you can become part of a small purposeful family, counted on and depended upon for consistent support.  And with your permission, you’ll be honored with a photo, brief bio and your URL if you like, acknowledging your important involvement in the Supporter Profiles section of the Animá website Support page.

Support Levels
There are 4 Levels of Support, depending on your ability to contribute, and how strongly you feel drawn to do so:

Leaves
…aiding the spread of lessons and tools, hopes and dreams, like the spreading of new foliage
$25 or more per month, or $300 or more annually

Branches
…the strength to bear the glad load, while reaching out ever further
$50 or more per month, or $600 or more annually

Trunk
…the firm stalk from which all branches out
$100 or more per month, or $1200 or more annually

Roots: Core Supporters
…the most committed level – earth-hugging roots that can be depended upon to keep everything from falling down even through the heaviest storms
$200 or more per month, $2400 or more annually

Plus, for anyone unable to commit to consistent donations, you can consider becoming an
Occasional Supporter
…contributing what you can when you are most able, or else when Animá has a particular or particularly urgent need

To read more about the school and sanctuary, our donation policy and what your donations provide, please go to the:
Support Page

To donate through PayPal, please click on:
Donate Now

Gratitude from us, and from all those we are able to help thanks to you!

I’m guessing that a fair number of my readers are parents, grandparents or caregivers for children, and that almost all of you are interested in herbs. If those two interests overlap at all for you, you’re going to want to check out this new herbal course created through a collaboration between John Gallagher of Learningherbs.com and herbalist Angela Goodloe of The Herbalist’s Path and Authentic Mama!

Simple, straight-forward and hands on, this accessible series of lessons will likely become invaluable for a great many people wanting a natural way to practice first-aid and support wellness in the little ones in their lives.

Here’s a short description of the course from the Kids & Herbs Website:

Kids & Herbs is a conversation between two parents who use herbs daily with their kids. I interview herbalist and mom Angie Goodloe, who shares her wisdom with us. Angie is a self taught herbalist with a Master Herbalist diploma from the American College of Health Sciences.

Kids & Herbs is not a workbook style course. There is no homework for the busy parent other than to try the remedies we suggest.

The casual, webinar format fits into the busiest parents life. I know how busy you are. I’m just as busy. So, with my years of home study training experience behind me, I create a course that works for the modern parent on the go.

It’s kind of like “multi-media home study course meets NPR interview.”

You can even take the audio or video on an iPod or iPhone to listen to in the car or watch on “your breaks” at work.

And if that’s not enough to inspire you, get to know the teacher, wonderful herbalist and mother, Angela Goodloe, who just happens to be an Animá Medicine Woman student as well:

Angie is a mom to two beautiful kids, Wyatt(1) and Ella (2). She is a self taught herbalist with a Master Herbalist diploma from the American College of Health Sciences. Angie is a licensed massage therapist, and has past experience as a nutrition consultant, wellness director, personal trainer and an aerobics instructor.

Angie loves spending time outdoors with family, hiking, wildcrafting and camping. She lives with her husband and kids in Sandy, OR. She is constantly growing and learning more about herbs every day.

Angie teaches courses online. You can find out about them on her Blog as well as her new site, AuthenticMama.com. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Now, head on over to the Kids and Herbs website and check it out in full!

Intro: Recent changes at the Animá School have resulted in a continuing number of queries about both the 8 week Courses and what are now the year or longer Mentorships.  For all students of the earlier year long courses, your lessons and time frame remains unchanged, the only difference is that your special course is now called a Mentorship due to how much teacher-student time is involved.  For those considering applying of a year long program, please understand that I can take only a very few more Lifeways Mentorship students, and that anyone applying for Kiva’s Medicine Woman Mentorship will have to be put on a lengthy waiting list.  For all prospective students, we recommend beginning their work with us with an 8 week course of their choosing, ideally beginning with the Introduction/Orientation course.  The following revised and expanded descriptions should be helpful, and we thank you in advance for forwarding this information to contacts you think might be interested.  -JWH

Announcing the new Animá Correspondence Courses

—–Animá Lifeways & Herbal Courses & Mentorships—–

We live in an age where were we have largely lost touch with our feelings and needs, our knowing bodies and the natural world we remain rooted in and dependent on… unwell, under-effective and dissatisfied.  Animá teachings encourage and make possible our reconnection to our distanced dreams, awakening us to a very intimate way of engaging the world, to our individual most-meaningful purpose and likely neglected calling.

Student Opportunities

Anyone can study and benefit from Animá teachings through available Personal Counsel, free Animá articles found under the Teachings & Practice and Animá Tradition of Herbalism menus as well as on the Animá Blog and Medicine Woman’s Roots Blog, and of course in the Animá Books & Recordings.  However, for those who want to learn all that they can, and actualize what they learn, we suggest committing to an 8 Week Correspondence Course or Mentorship – Studentships open to all ages and genders, regardless of one’s existing existing experience, practices or beliefs.  The online courses of your choice will make it possible for you to study and practice at home where you live… with personalized guidance and support.

Animá Studentship courses provide not only the clarity and insight – but also the practical information, tools and skills needed for more enlivened, proactive and personally fulfilling lives.  And in the case of the Herbal Tradition courses, the ways and means to also become the most effective and responsive healers and herbalists possible.  Whether Lifeways or Herbal, the intent of these courses is increased wholeness and maximized awareness, response-ability, real world manifestation and utilization.  As a result, the course assignments are considered even more important than the questions and readings, requiring that every new insight be acted on and every new skill and tool applied.

Animá 8 Week Correspondence Courses

Correspondence Courses are topic specific, focused on specific areas of interest such as Deepening Awareness, Sense of Place, Constitutional Diagnostics, Medicine Making etc.  We recommend you register for one at a time, preferably beginning with the self-exploratory Introductory course in each field, then over time taking as many courses as you think you can learn from and use.

Like all Animá opportunities, these are offered on a donations basis, with a $150 to $350 sliding scale donation suggested for each course, either sent at the time of registering or in pledged payments as able.

Courses & Fields

Anyone can take any mix of the courses that they like, and all courses contain the core Animá perspectives and principles, but for the sake of organization we will be listing each of the available courses under one of the following 7 Fields.

• Path of Heart

Path of Heart Courses Completed or in Development include: Developing Self-Knowledge & Self-Confidence; Transforming Fear; Valuing Feelings & Trusting Instincts; Employing Empathy, Nurturing the Self, The Power  & Response-ability to Discern & Making Choices; Exploring & Fashioning Healthy Roles that Fit; Finding & Fulfilling Purpose…

• Shaman’s Path

Shaman’s Path Courses Completed or in Development include: Heightening Awareness; Ultra-Presence; Maximizing Intuition & the Senses; Vision Questing; Animal Totems & Plant Helpers; Learning to Use the Animá  Gifting Bones Runic System; Using the Animá Medicine Wheel…

• Herbal Essentials

Herbal Essentials Courses Completed or in Development include:
From the Ground Up: A Foundational Course in Traditional Western Herbalism; Blossom & Dream Herbal Course for Girls ages 8-16; Animá Principles of Healing; Wildflower Remedies Children’s Herbal Course for Ages 5-10; Grandmother’s Stewpot: Food as Medicine and Healing Through Nutrition; Introduction to Botany for Herbalists

• Herbal Advanced

Herbal Advanced Courses Completed or in Development include: Engaging the Anima: Utilizing Vitalism in Clinical Practice; Walking the Medicine Wheel: A Course in Hands-On Herbal Energetics; Wild Allies: A Weedy Materia Medica; A Grassroots Approach to The Practice and Work of the Village Herbalist

• Nature Connection

Nature Connection Courses Completed or in Development include:
Deepening Sense of Place; Getting Intimate with Your Bioregion & Plant & Animal Life; Understanding Wildness & Diversity; Primal Diet & Gathering Wild Foods; Animal Tracking as an Awareness Exercise; Preserving & Restoring Wild Species & Natural Habitat…

• Life Skills

Life Skills Courses Completed or in Development include:
Presence & Grounding; Making Every Moment Decisive; Healthy Sexuality; the Healing & Nourishing Power of Food; Making Home More Magical & Meaningful;  Empowerment Parenting & Animá Insights for Home Education; Discovering Your Most Meaningful Mission or Heeding a Calling…

• Expression

Expression Courses Completed or in Development include:
Writing Essentials for Budding Authors; Nature Writing Intensive; Art Instruction & Inspiration; The Principles of Rhythm & Giving Voice to the Drum; Protest & Activism…

Course Length & Student/Teacher Exchanges:

Each course is intended to take from 8 to 12 weeks to complete, counting a minimum amount of work on the course assignments.  Once your course work is ready to be handed in, there will be one or two exchanges with your teacher clarifying, affirming, and making suggestions particular to your personal quandaries, needs, abilities and direction.

Curricula:

Each 8 Week Course will include:

• Assigned Readings by your Animá teachers
• Self-Exploratory Questions – for you to consider and then respond to
• Useful Techniques & Practices – for you to try, and then to describe the results of
• Assignments – for testing and manifesting what’s learned, for the student to describe and then report back on… requiring our implementation of lessons and insights, and the finding of ways in your daily life to apply what is learned to further your quest, practice, path or purpose
• Plus one or more in-depth teacher/student exchanges, clarifying, affirming, adding to, and furthering… with sometimes additional personalized assignments

Students progress at their own rate of speed. Once satisfactorily completing your first chosen Course, you are then encouraged to choose and another.

Students wishing for a more demanding and possibly rewarding mutual commitment, can put their name on the waiting list for one of the year or more long Mentorships… or even apply for a potentially long-term Apprenticeship after familiarizing themselves with all that Animá is about.

Currently Available Courses

More will be added regularly, including herbal courses with Kiva Rose.

For complete descriptions of the following, go to the 8 Week Courses Section of the Correspondence Courses Page

• Orientation, Principles & Pitfalls: The Journey Begins
(For all Fields including Herbal.  Recommended for all first-time students.)
• Reaping the Blessings of Ultra-Presence: Grounding & Noticing
• Awakeness & Embodiment: Maximizing The Senses
• The Rewarding Art of Expanding & Deepening Awareness
• The Animá Medicine Wheel: Charting Our Paths, Challenges & Advantages
• Sense of Place & the Search for Home
• Rewilding: Reclaiming Freedom & Self-Reliance

To apply for any of the above courses, click on, download, fill out completely stipulating your first Course choice, then return the
Correspondence Course Application:

New Curricula is being written and expanded as you read this, so please keep checking back here often for the latest additions… and be patient waiting for your favorite subjects to be available.

——————————-

Animá Mentorships

Mentorships are intense, highly focused online courses – 12 to 18 months of study and practice with one-on-one online support, counsel and guidance.  Mentorships build on essential elements such as conscious presence, heightened awareness, awakened senses, interconnectedness, nature wisdom, reciprocity, response-ability, healing and wholeness, understanding our needs and gifts, loving ourselves, being honest about our pain, embracing our bliss, and manifesting and fulfilling our most meaningful purpose. In all cases we encourage using our fears as fuel for movement and change.  In a time and culture bent on distraction, abstraction, pretense, denial, avoidance and transcendence, Animá offers practical and perceptual tools for the fullest living of life… engagement and reconnection, creation and response.

Due to the extensive amount of student and teacher exchanges and support, there is a strictly limited number of Mentorships available each year and applicants will often have to be put on a waiting list.

Mentorship Curricula

Mentorships include 12 or more lessons, with each meant to take 1 to 2 months or longer to complete, and with each at least as extensive and in-depth as its counterpart being offered as an 8 Week Correspondence Course.
Each month or longer lesson includes:
• An introduction to the lesson topic/field
• Questions reviewing the previous lesson coursework
• Assigned reading
• Self exploratory questions for you to answer
• Practices and techniques for you to implement and then describe the results of
• Assignments for manifesting and feeding back about: implementation of lessons and insights, finding ways in your daily life to apply what you learn and further your quest, path and purpose
• Two or more in depth exchanges including teacher clarifications, comments and suggestions, and further personalized assignments

There are 3 Different Mentorship Programs:
• An Animá Medicine Woman Mentorship… with Kiva Rose
• An Animá Shaman Path Mentorship… with Jesse Wolf Hardin
• An Animá Lifeways Mentorship… with Jesse Wolf Hardin

For full descriptions of each, including the lesson curricula, please go the Mentorship Section of the Correspondence Courses Page on the website.

To Apply for a Medicine Woman Mentorship and be put on the waiting list, Click on, download, completely fill out and then return the
Mentorship Application Form

www.animacenter.org

—————————

This is just a short post to let all my blog readers, clients, students and other people awaiting emails, know that I am working madly away at the websites and Conference planning, and will be mostly out of touch until the end of this week. Sorry for any inconvenience and many thanks for your support of this vital work, especially the upcoming Tradition in Western Herbalism Conference!

Hope you’re all having beautiful harvest seasons wherever you are. Unless of course, you’re in New Zealand or Australia, in which case I hope you’re having a gorgeous and ever more blooming Spring.

Here we’ve been having our first frosts and the mountains are gold with wildflowers and the air is thick with the honey-sweet scent of Snakeweed and Goldenrod. The kitchen and Medicine Lodge are filling up with freshly blended teas, fragrant salves, row upon row of tincture bottles and of course lots of yummy preserved foods, from Blackberry sauce to Green Chile Relish to Bone Broth.

I’ll be back soon, and look forward to sharing more of the bounty and magic with each of you in the near future!

~Kiva

Numen: The Nature of Plants

A review by Kiva Rose

Anyone who has ever experienced the bliss and connection of gathering Mullein flowers on a warm summer day or the satisfaction of facilitating wellness in another living being, who may have ever known the incredible healing power of the plants – is sure to be touched and inspired by this cinematic exploration of herbal medicine!

The premise of Numen is very much in alignment with our work in the Animá Lifeways and Herbal Tradition.  What they define as Numen in the film, is what we call the anima, the vital lifeforce in the human body as well in plants. The creators of the film also clearly understand that healing is not just about tending our individual wounds but also those of our larger self, this inspirited planet. This movie is rooted in the understanding that healing can only take place in the individual self when the large self is also being tended, and vice versa. There is also an inherent sense of the magic of healing and the plants, a recognition that while science offers us many valuable gifts and ways of understanding the world, there is something akin to spirit and the miraculous in even the best aided results.  Numen inspires its viewers to take their health into their own hands, to empower themselves to reconnect to their needs and to utilize resources close at hand. There is an invaluable sense of alliance with the plants, rather than just an expounding on how we can utilize our “natural resources”. This personalization provides the viewer with a very real connection with the plants and process of healing.

Numen is divided up topically into sections: an Introduction, Plants as Medicine, Mystery, the Decline of Herbal Medicine in America, Disconnection, Just Say Yes, Allopathic Medicine, Whole Plant Medicine, Business of Herbs, Vis Medicatrix Naturae, Numinous Questions and Future Generations. Each section deals with either philosophical or practical aspects of healing with plants. From the opening scene of a woman gathering calendula from the garden to the closing shots of children creating a gorgeous plant mandala, the artistry and intent of Numen is clear.

The bulk of the film is based in conversation with practicing herbalists, ethnobotanists, ecologists, those who have been healed by the herbs as well as authors or speakers who specialize in related topics such as chemical sensitivity, earth-based healing and ecology. I commend their careful yet broad selection of knowledgeable and experienced guests. Each individual was both thoughtful and deeply caring, experienced in their chosen field and impassioned about their message.

Brimming with the enthusiasm, experience and wisdom of many great herbalists, including Phyllis Light, Matthew Wood, Bill Mitchell, Rosemary Gladstar, Deb Soule, David Hoffmann, Guido Mase and many more. I was heartened and inspired by their compassion, insight and commitment to the healing of not only we humans but also this precious earth and everything encompassed within.

I must admit that I expected there to be a bit of the new-agey fluffiness so common to recent documentaries on healing and spirit, but was pleasantly surprised to find the whole feature to be grounded in common sense observations, real life experience and understandings straight from nature. Numen truly stands on its own as an exceptional film and testament to the compassion and wisdom of the herbal community.

Indeed, I found myself completely drawn in to the conversation and close to tears more than once, especially listening to the sage words of the late Bill Mitchell and the passionate grace of Rosemary Gladstar. The filming is both sensitive and evocative, presenting a gorgeous presentation of the natural world through time-lapse photography, exquisite settings and a wonderful emphasis on the microcosmic world of the plants.

Numen is a film imbued with the spirit and every day beauty of the contemporary herbalist. Not to be missed by any student of the plants, whether you are just setting out on your journey or have been traveling your path for many years. No matter if you are a gardener, wildcrafter, herbalist, ecologist or simply someone who deeply feels the connection and gifts of the living earth, Numen has something important and beautiful to offer you.

Information for availability and purchase is included below, please support this wonderful project and give yourself and your family the gift of a deeper look into the profoundly healing world of the plants.

My personal thanks to Ann and Terry for taking years out of their lives to create this precious glimpse into the living tradition of herbal healing and the community committed to its continuance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Numen: The Nature of Plants is a new film on the healing power of PLANTS

Hi Everyone– GREAT news!

The DVD of Numen is Arriving Very Soon!

If you haven’t heard of Numen by now – check out a quick preview here at www.numenfilm.com

The DVD’s are in production right NOW and we are expecting the shipment in the next few weeks…

***But – there is a LIMITED supply, and they will go fast, especially when you see all the extra bonuses from Herbal Companies, Herbalist teachers and authors that come with the DVD.

***Click here www.numenfilm.com to ensure you are in line to receive updates on how buy the DVD!

All the best,
Terry and Ann

***P.S. The release of Numen is a huge event for the herbal community – and for anybody concerned about healthcare… (and who isn’t concerned in the current raging national debate?) ****SO – Click here www.numenfilm.com to join the Numen Grassroots movement to take control of our own health!

Health Insurance: Disempowering for Patients, Harmful for Herbalists & Healers

By Jess Hardin

Yes, I am among the millions of unassured Americans.  Unassured by industry claims, administration promises and congressional intentions when it comes to health legislation.  No, I am not one of the privileged, able to slap down multiple plastic cards and receive the kind of A-1 care reserved for the well insured, looking down my nose at the less fortunate.  While our work and purpose includes healing others, my family and can’t get medical insurance even if we want it.  We don’t qualify for existing state and federal health insurance because our land is considered an asset, and yet not anywhere near enough money comes in to pay the premiums on even the lousiest policy.  It is a stretch for us to make small payments to a private subsidized clinic that serves our backwoods community, a wonderful doctor and staff who nonetheless lack the equipment to conduct many tests, and who have to refer their patients to the big-city hospital whenever the condition is serious or requiring surgery.  I have heard people talk about “catastrophic illness” involving medical bills that lead to bankruptcy and ruin, but in my case there will be no such ruinous bills… I simply will not be getting the treatment when needed.

As a technically impoverished healing school, you might think we would be among the first to champion a new system of universal care.  Not!  The larger and more standardized a system is, the less personal, regional, flexible and adaptable it becomes.  And as poorly managed as private enterprises of any kind can be, it is the official government run systems and programs that have the greatest potential for mismanagement and abuse.  In the hands of bureaucrats, even something as seemingly benign as health care becomes a means for the observation, manipulation and control of a country’s citizens.  Of all the so-called solutions, insurance co-ops make the most sense to me, so that participation is strictly voluntary, and its members get to vote on who directs it.  But frankly, even the very concept of insurance seems largely absurd to me, unnatural and objectionable.

To begin with, the majority of people with health insurance will pay far more in premiums during the course of their lifetimes, than they would have spent direct-paying doctors.  If that weren’t the case, the insurance conglomerates would be losing money instead of making the billions and billions of dollars in profits that they do.  In addition, in an environment where there were no insurance companies, the costs of health care wouldn’t be nearly as high as they are now.   Providers can charge the insurers more than they would individuals, leading to doctors ordering expensive and often unnecessary tests that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

A problem with the very concept of insurance itself, is that it tends to make people more dependent and less responsible.  Kids sent out into the world with the insurance of a financial safety net tend to be more careless and cavalier than those teens and twenty-somethings who know they can’t count on their parents to pay for every mistake or bail them out of every jam.  Similarly, people insured from childhood on have proven to increasingly focus on treatment after the fact, than they do on prevention.  Subconsciously if not consciously, folks may feel less need to concern themselves with the effects of the foods they eat or the exercise they miss, when the believe they can always turn to a doctor to treat the heart disease and adrenal burnout their lifestyle choices may have caused.  For the same reason, the longtime insured are also less likely to ever learn how to treat themselves, even when dealing with simple conditions that are easy to both diagnose and affect.  They’re less likely to pay attention to their own bodily signs, to experiment with changes in the way they eat, to become familiar with herbal and other natural remedies, to seek advice from an experienced relative or midwife, or to visit and support community herbalists and natural healers.

If that weren’t enough, I am at a gut level repulsed by the very way in which insurance works.  All my life I have done what many thought was impossible, doing things differently than others, taking extreme risks, following a dream with little money and little common sense, but also little self doubt and even less restraint.  In essence, I bet on myself again and again, bet my life and belongings, even my future.  I was all the more careful and tried all the harder exactly because there was no backup, no fallback plan and no net, knowing that I had placed everything I am and own on “myself” in the “first”… “to win.”  It galls me even to be forced to pay car insurance we can’t afford every month, on a Jeep we drive less than ten miles to town and back, forced to bet our scarce funds on a game where I only get paid anything if I screw up and have an accident, or fail to notice some other driver screwing up in time to avoid the collision.  There is something seriously wrong about a government threatening us with jail unless we participate in some profit-producing game, especially one in which the only way for us to win is to lose!  And now they want to force me to pay for a health care arrangement where I get fewer benefits the better that I take care of myself, where I have to get sick or do something unaware and hurt myself in order to get any payback, and where I only win the lottery big if I come down with something serious, chronic and largely incurable.

We might better place our bets on our selves, on our driving abilities and the human body’s natural inclination towards health.  That way we’re more likely to pay attention to how aware we are being on the highway, and on how our bodies feel as well as how we are treating them.  It’s said that the worst thing that could happen this year is for the Congress to fail to pass on national health bill.  It would indeed be tragic for some us with no other way to get the high dollar, high-tech help.  On the other hand, doing nothing in the halls of Congress is always better than doing the wrong thing.  And it may prove that those without sanctioned insurance plans may be most conscious, concerned and caring… the response-able, responsive ranks of the growing unassured.

(Jesse Wolf Hardin is codirector of the Animá Lifeways & Herbal School, with Kiva Rose: www.animacenter.org.  Feel free to share and post this piece)

~Snakeweed In Bloom~

The mountains are turning gold with Escoba de la Vibora (Gutierrezia spp), Limoncillo (Pectis angustafolia), Anil de muerto (Verbesina spp), Wild Sunflowers, Coneflowers and Goldenrod. It’s a been a long dry summer but the flowers are still wild and prolific, with purple Asters, white and pink Wild Buckwheat, lavender Beebalm and ivory tinted Datura flowers sprawling across mesa and meadow.

Down by the river the Willowherb and Smartweed are turning a brilliant scarlet and Sunset Hyssop is blooming a deep crimson from the cliff walls. From the beginning of August to the end of September marks my favorite time of year, full of ripe berries, deep purple prickly pear fruits, crisp red and gold apples along with a great many herbs just coming into their prime. In less than a week we’ll be making our annual pilgrimage up into the mountains to gather blackberries, yarrow, motherwort, cleavers, chickweed, violets and many other medicinal plants that can be difficult to find in the middle mountain range the canyon lies in.

~Sticky Aster flower~

A friend just transported a large load of fruit from the city for us, so Loba and I will soon be busy transforming fruit into sauce, pies, syrup, tinctures, elixirs, mead and wine! I have a fancy for hawthorn/cherry/plum mead this year and can’t wait to give it a try. I also have in mind to press some pears and apples to make a spiced hard cider for the cold winter nights to come.

~Wild Buckwheat~

I’m also experimenting with a new Immune Elixir that includes Gooseberry, Raspberry, Rose and Saskatoon and I think has great potential, especially when combined with my standard Elder Mother Elixir. In fact, I’ve been working a great deal with our wild Gooseberry and can’t praise it enough for its mood elevating effects and wonderful boost to the immune system.

I apologize for my recent lack of posts, mostly due to an incredible influx of clients and guests in the last week that has temporarily blown me off schedule. I will be working back up to speed in the near future though and look forward to writing the many future posts I have planned.

~Sacred Datura green seedpod~

In the meantime, check out Wolf’s amazing piece on Awareness. This is an incredibly important subject for any healer and perhaps especially herbalists, we who are so intimately involved in reconnecting humans not only to their awareness of their own bodies but also to the plants, and in turn the earth. For in essence, we are often most truly teachers and facilitators of awareness for our students and clients.

Of special note to the student or practicing healer is the definition and explanation of ego, a much maligned word in recent “new age” thought that desperately needed to be shown in its original and true context, and Wolf does just that. We so often worship some ideal of “selflessness” in the enlightened and caring, and yet, the very term is both frightening and contradictory. Wolf gracefully and meaningfully addresses this from an angle especially valuable for those of us involved in caring for others on a daily basis. Even if you don’t normally read the Animá blog, head over there and check this great post out!

~Velvetweed flowers at dusk~

~~~

All photos (c)2009 Kiva Rose Hardin

The Matter of Prosperity

by Jesse Wolf Hardin
www.animacenter.org
www.animacenter.org/blog

   Yes, the material matters… but we are so much more prosperous than we think.

In the year prior to my writing this, the international economy has contracted and weakened more than at any time since the Great Depression.  The results in personal terms have been difficult and sometimes devastating, with many thousands of people out of work and unable to pay their bills, and even those retaining good jobs are psychologically affected by the uncertainty and panic.  One of the ways we deal with the discomfort and stress is by taking comfort in the belief that it somehow doesn’t matter, buying into the unhealthy claim that the physical world is somehow only an illusion and the consequences of our actions and choices less important.

One such news-bedeviled student of mine pulled me aside to ask a question that was weighing on him.  “Times are terrible,” he prefaced, citing the shorter hours of work he now gets and listing some of the things he’s now afraid to buy, “but that’s only on the physical plane, right?”

What he wanted was for me to affirm what he’d recently been reading, that all that truly matters is ethereal and disembodied, existing on a higher plane unbeholden to the principles of physics, unaffected by the specter of hunger, the needs of the flesh, the limitations of human effort and enterprise.

In reality, the physical plane is more than setting, housing and vehicle, it is a tangible and directed extension and fruiting of spirit – of the connective anima – and not an alternative to it.  It’s where spirit is evident and channeled, manifest and substantial, embodied and actualized.  Matter – substance, body, being – matters.  It has significance and purpose, even if we are sometimes confused or overwhelmed by the requirements of the physical world and the responsibilities of conscious life.  Our lives and bodies are valuable and useful, with any suffering or struggle a price worth paying for the opportunity to not only be consciously aware of but actively participating in the ongoing co-creation of the world we’re an inseparable part of.

It matters then, how healthy our bodies, the exercise we get, the quality of the food we eat.  It matters what we live in, not the size and grandiosity of our houses but the precious materials they are constructed of, the history they hold, the warmth and shelter they provide.  The land matters in the region where we live, our health and the health of other beings dependent on its well being, the undepleted and unpolluted water sources, the relationships between microbe and soil, soil and plant, plant and human.  The wholesale clearcutting of some American forests matters, as does our purchase of electricity produced with coal mined in ways that wounds the earth.  And the garden we plant, the hand we hold, the care we give, the stands we take.  It matters what we do, if we harm, ignore or help.  And while it may be comforting to think otherwise, it does indeed matter that the homes we are buying may have been jeopardized by free wheeling investment strategies, that the cost of food and gasoline generally rises, that not everyone’s career is secure.  These are matters worthy of concern and response… but we have far more to feel blessed by and thankful for.

Odd as it may sound, in real terms this country is just as wealthy today as it was before the drop in stock prices.  For all the panic and scramble, we still woke up to an America blessed with as many fertile farm fields and polished plows as the week before.  With about the same amount of corn rows, accessible minerals, forests, and mechanic’s snap-on wrenches.  The same number of experienced workers and craftsmen, capable musicians and caring nurses, libraries full of knowledge and mothers with their children’s best interests at heart.  While money and especially credit may be harder to come by right now, most of us have running vehicles, food on our table and enough clothes in our closets to keep us warm (if no longer in style) for a lifetime.

Even if the economy were to do the highly unlikely thing and completely collapse, as a few alarmists are predicting, most of us would prove rich enough in the material reality of our lives to survive for a long time without enjoying further factory output.  As the people of post-embargo Cuba have shown, there are sufficient car parts to keep already existing vehicles running, and likely for so long as there is fuel remaining.  The rag-pickers of India or Mexico City prove on a daily basis how much real value there is in even the discards of the better off, scouring dumps for usable metal, seeing old or ripped clothes as sources of valuable material.  And marooned sailors on uninhabited islands have more than once come to realize how lucky they were to have gathered from the shore “junk” plastic containers capable of carrying water in, wire to fashion into an effective fish hook, or frayed cloth from which they could separate and withdraw long handy sections of golden threads.

I actually predict that there will be another long period of economic growth before the next (most likely environmentally determined) challenge to its viability.  But even if I’m wrong and we’re at the brink of awful and irrevocable contraction, we are for the most part each rich in tools as well as potential tools, in object waiting to be recycled for new uses, in raw or separable materials along with the knowhow to utilize them in the innovate new ways our needs and situation dictate.  In this country overall, we are still amazingly rich in soil capable of producing life giving food, in spite of the damage done to it by depletion, herbicides and pesticides.  We’re rich in able bodies, in easily aroused community spirit, in individual vision, strength, resilience and fortitude.  In structures, that if maintained could long keep us out of the rain.  Money may be still owed on the family van, but in total economic collapse we would still have it to at least store our well earned produce in.

My point isn’t to suggest taking comfort in the idea of a primitive, make-do survivalist existence, which few of us may ever have to experience… but to feel secure in who we are and what exists under and around us.  Whatever else happens in the future, the world will not be suddenly pulled out from under us for the reason that we both inhabit and contain it.   We don’t have to suffer the great psychological need for a safety net as much, when we fully take-in how resourceful we humans really are in this physical realm, as well as how much materia we civilized people manage and will dependably retain.  It is an awful illusion to imagine that we are for whatever reasons not up the task, that we don’t have enough of what is most needed, and what we do have is about to be taken away.

And most of all, I wish for you to know how unhelpful it is to imagine that what we are, have, love and live on is anything but real and significant, worthy of our best efforts to embody, actualize and protect.  It would not be right to disavow love, just because one is in danger of losing it.  It is equally foolish and debilitating to devalue or trivialize the physical and material, life or even our homes and base belongings just because these things may be mortal, precarious or under threat.  To my student seeking solace in detachment and transcendence, I pointed out all the ways in which his life and times were anything but “terrible” as he had described, and the wondrous ways in which spirit is manifest on and realized through the – admittedly tenuous and subject to change – physical plane.

My predicted economic upturn may be a while in coming, but that doesn’t mean there is any less reason for hope.  The key to getting past our unease isn’t the likelihood that prosperous times will come again, or even that we and our government will figure out all the right tricks… though we may well.  It’s coming to sense in the very foundations of our being the irrefutable ways that we are prosperous right now in the middle of the worst downturn in decades, rich in who we are and what we need most to go on, prosperous not just in the ways of spirit but in the well measured material reality of our earthen lives.

———-

(You are encouraged to post and share this piece as you like…)

This month’s blogparty is, by far, our biggest yet!  An impressive range of subjects and authors have gifted us with their wisdom, recipes, experience and wonderings.

So here we are, a wonderful array of perspectives on Sweet Medicine! I hope you all enjoy these many sharings and take the time to try and taste some of the delicious and intriguing recipes and ideas.

And to all who participated, a warm thank you! I look forward to many more blogparties with all of you.

Sarah Head of Tales of a Kitchen Herbwife had given us an excellent overview of many sweet medicines, complete with a whole slew of yummy and often ingenious recipes. 

Susan of Farm at Coventry has a gorgeous post on Exploring the Electuary.

My own post on Sweet Medicine covers a wide variety of herbal Elixirs, Cordials, Oxymels, Infused Wines and many other treats.

Karen Vaughan talks about sweet medicine in her excellent monograph of  Turmeric.

The infamous Henriette has posted a summary of her favorite past posts on sweet medicines, including a lovely one on spruce shoot syrup that I’m very fond of.

Cory’s Aquarian Bath blog explores the many benefits of Garlic Honey.

Goddess Garden Healing writes about syrups, and shares a very delicious sounding Elder Rose Syrup recipe.

Darcey Blue has given us a fascinating look at what the sweet taste really means in traditional medicine and what its healing properties are, in addition to a wonderful recipe for her Sweet Melissa Divine honey.

Lady Barbara’s Garden shares a wonderful way of immersing ourselves in the magic of sweet medicine, all night long!

Rosalee of Methow Valley Herbs talks about her delightful journey with the multi-faceted medicine of Chamomile.

Kristine of Dancing in a Field of Tansy gives a great overview of syrups, complete with a recipe and insights into using specific herbs for the syrups.

Green Man Ramblings offers an intuitive look at how glycerin can bring out the traditional divinatory aspects of Yarrow.

Giuli of the rewilding/bioregional blog, Toby’s People, shared her introductory thoughts about and inspirations for working with herbal honeys.

Amanda writes about a non-edible, but still very sweet medicine in her post on herbal creams.

Yael of dirttime.org discusses different ways of preserving the growing season’s bounty.

The lovely Kristena of Dreamseeds generously shares her adventures with Wild Hyssop with us.

Ananda tops it all off with a beautiful post on sensual Sweet Oil, mmmm.

and a last minute addition from Loving Landbase on the wonders of Monarda Honey!

and finally, a wonderful addition from Gail Faith Edwards on the virtues and properties of Honey

 1st Annual Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference
September 17th-19th, 2010
Santa Fe, NM (at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu)

 For those of you who’ve been keeping up with the Anima blog, are friends with me on FB or following me on Twitter, you’ve already read about the beginning stages of the herbal conference Wolf and I are organizing for Sept. 2010. If you haven’t, then this announcement might come as a surprise. Either way, here it is, the official description and initial details for the upcoming 1st (of many, I hope) Annual Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference.

The conference will be held in the amazing high desert landscapes near Santa Fe, New Mexico that have inspired artists, writers and naturalists the world over. Taking place at one of Georgia O’Keefe’s favored painting locations, the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, participants will be immersed in the Southwest’s raw natural beauty and surrounded by the very landscapes that illuminate much of O’Keefe’s most well-loved work.

Above, you’ll see TWHC’s gorgeous new logo, custom-made for the conference by Wolf’s loving (and very talented) hands. Combining a variety of vibrant elements and motifs from Western Herbalism’s many traditions and landscapes, it provides an emblem for the underlying foundations of the energetic healing practices of Europe and the Americas.

I’m so excited for this new adventure in bringing together existing herbal community and inspiring important new voices! While we don’t often travel far from our beloved canyon home, Wolf and I feel strongly that this conference is a worthy investment of our limited time and resources, and are so happy to be able to share this opportunity with you. We hope to see many of you there!

We’ll have a website up with details on how to attend, vendor or sponsor the event very soon! If you’d like to help sponsor the event or volunteer your help in organizing and putting together TWHC, please write me at kiva@traditionsinwesternherbalism.org

~~~~~

Your Invitation to Attend:

The 1st Annual Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference

We invite you to attend an exciting new conference celebrating the diverse traditions that make up Western Herbalism. TWH fulfills the need for a gathering together of many of our time’s most vital voices into a single forum to provide inspiration and knowledge to a growing population of herbal students of all levels. This is a unique event with special emphasis placed on experiential learning and hands-on understanding. Our teachers speak from the voice of experience and practice rather than theory, resulting in powerful instruction and insight based on real life work.

TWH is committed to grassroots herbalism with a strong bioregional and energetic focus. Melding common sense practicality with spiritual and indigenous sensibilities, the practice of our trade with the lessons of the natural world. Today’s plant-based healers are the most recent in a long line of herbwives, root doctors, yerberas, mountain men, curanderos, grannywomen and village herbalists that stretch back through time and across cultures. From the hills of Appalachia to the shores of Cornwall, the rainforests of the Amazon to the mesas and canyons of the Southwest, we are walking in the footsteps of our ancestors to bring together people and plants at a time when such work has never before been so necessary and urgent.

We will be exploring the evolving traditions of Western herbalism through presentations, workshops, classes, panel discussions, intensives, plant walks and much more! Join us for an unforgettable immersion in a compelling blend of traditional wisdom and innovative new approaches.

Perfect for beginning herbal enthusiasts and experienced practitioners alike