I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast
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Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did
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So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the
Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling.
This episode is sponsored by New Calm.
As many of you know, I only bring sponsors onto this show whose products I truly swear
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Now we are an overworked and under slept population, especially those of us that wear uniform for
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield Podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show Herbalist Cameron Strauss.
Now as you will hear, when I went into this podcast, when it comes to the world of herbs,
I was somewhat uneducated.
I've been exposed to CBD, psychedelics, mushrooms, but I am definitely a white belt when it comes
to knowledge of the healing power of some of these elements that she discusses.
So we delve into her early life, the psychological trauma and her physical injuries that modern
medicine didn't seem to be able to help, how she came across herbalism, some powerful
remedies when it comes to down regulating the nervous system, depression, anxiety, sleep
quality, herbs for pain, foraging, the power of carver and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 850 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Cameron Strauss.
Enjoy.
Well Cameron, I want to start by saying thank you to Rex who we were just talking about
a second ago, amazing wildland firefighter in California for connecting us and I want
to say welcome to you to come on Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thanks, I'm great.
I'm really glad to be here.
So where on planet earth are we finding you?
Central Alabama.
Alabama.
I would love to start at the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
Yeah, so born in Arkansas but quickly moved to Alabama afterwards.
Pretty much grew up in Alabama, Central Alabama.
My dad is an engineer, was a forester and then changed careers into engineering and
my mom worked on and off primarily stay at home mom and owned her own tea shop, Miss
Magnolia's Old Time Tea Parties.
So I have a firm love of fancy tea and dressing up in ridiculous costumes.
So that was my parents and then my sisters, I have an older sister and a younger sister.
So a classic middle child in Rome.
And our family dynamics were not great.
There was as with that, you know, kind of what comes with dysfunctional family dynamics
is everyone's hurting and no one's benefiting, everyone's dysregulated, everyone feels alienated,
left out.
And so it was not a great scene.
And I was sexually assaulted by someone that I was close to as a child.
And so kind of the piling on of not great family dynamics and not super, you know, you
hear a lot and I have experienced that when really hard things happen, if you have a good
support network, then you're much just insanely more resilient.
And that is not what was happening in our family unit.
And then as a teenager, I was a dancer and I ended up with a foot injury, basically tarsal
tunnel, and I turned into a very severe injury and I ended up having surgery on both ankles.
My senior year of high school and dance was my primary means of coping and regulating
my nervous system.
And I suddenly no longer had that.
And that is sort of the genesis of the downward spiral of my health and of my nervous system
in general.
And so after my surgery, they had put my cast on too tight and cut my circulation off.
Not all the way, but not great.
It was not great.
And so from that, I ended up with a chronic pain syndrome and chronic venous insufficiency.
And that was the beginning of a couple of other chronic health problems that I ended
up with from the stress.
I ended up with PMDD, which is premenstrual dysmorphic disorder, which is just basically
really awful PMS and very consistent mood disorder and the chronic pain kind of overlapping
that.
And then I have trauma induced complex PTSD and ADD.
Can't separate them, but sort of the combination of the childhood trauma, the poor family dynamics
and this foot surgery that basically rendered me pretty crippled for a while.
I was in a wheelchair for a good portion of my senior year of high school and then was
in chronic pain and didn't know it, which the brain is such an amazing, amazing thing.
I just blocked out all of my pain.
And I was very short tempered and very stressed for many years until a good friend of mine
did a clinic appointment on me and she was like, are you pain?
I was like, yeah, yeah, like six, seven out of 10 every day.
And she was like, what?
And so, yeah, so, you know, it's sort of amazing when you have someone that can sort of sit
you down and pin you down about things that your brain is not wanting to acknowledge.
But yeah, so I take pain management, herbal pain management really consistently.
I don't need it, as in I don't like I can function without it, but I'm very irritable
and short tempered and have less capacity when I don't do pain management, which, you
know, that's a huge like herbal pain management is it's an amazing rabbit hole to dive into.
But yeah, so that's kind of like, maybe in a nutshell how I ended up, but I in college,
I just kept having health problems, my periods were getting worse.
I was throwing up every time I had my cycle.
I was having anxiety and depression and really big mood swings and was hurting all the time.
And I had a lot of joint pain, arthritis in my hips and ankles and knees.
And I just kept going to the doctor and they would be like, your labs are fine, you're
fine.
And I just kept, you know, I'm like 19 years old and I can tell you when it's going to
snow and I can tell you when it's going to rain because I can feel it.
And I just, everyone just sort of kept being like, you know, either you're a hypochondriac
or it's just sort of like, we don't know what to do with you kind of.
So I would go to the doctor, they'd be like, it's in your head and then send me on my way
sort of.
And so I was on a run one day and I saw a plant and I was like, you know what, people
used to know how to take care of themselves.
Like I keep looking for someone else to solve these problems for me.
It's not their body.
It's not their life.
They know it's not deeply impacting them every day.
Like there's just no way somebody else can care about it more than me.
And they're not, I don't think nobody was ever maliciously, you know, care providers
are not actively not wanting to help you.
And I think that that's, you know, a negative thing maybe a lot of times that we see in
the more natural minded like pop culture is that care providers are mean and bad and like
trying to harm you or avoid giving you care or whatever.
They just didn't know.
Like nobody knew about some of the stuff.
There just wasn't research.
There was not a lot of research on women.
There's not, there was not a lot of knowledge or understanding around food sensitivities
causing arthritis or histamine issues causing PMDD or chronic stress and trauma and hormonal
dysfunction.
There just wasn't, there weren't tools in the toolkit for what was going on for me.
And so I was on a run.
I saw a plant.
I was like, I'm going to try to figure that out.
And I changed my degree.
I was in speech path and art and I changed to biology and environmental studies minor
and found an herb teacher and started going to herb school while I was in college and
just started winging it.
I mean, I was just like harvesting plants, trying to figure out how to key out.
And I have a focus in botany.
So learning how to key out plants, learning how to forage, learning about what grows in
my area, what's good for what.
And you just kind of start at the beginning and start winging it.
And I went on a really weird elimination diet.
I mean, just, I just started guinea pigging myself poorly, trying to figure things out
and slowly would gain one little piece at a time.
And so when I graduated, I had gone to herb school and it made me just knowledgeable enough
to be dangerous.
And I really knew that.
And I had parsed together some of what was going on with me and would get a little bit
of a gain here and there.
Graduated, did an internship with Herb Farm, the tincture company.
And what's kind of interesting about how I got into herbalism is I didn't get into herbalism
from like standard, like buying herbs at an herb shop.
I didn't even know that there were herb shops.
I was introduced to herbalism through that herb in my backyard is Boneset and it's used
for fevers.
And it never occurred to me that there was an international herb trade.
It never occurred to me to go buy a tincture.
And so like health food store culture was not how I got into herbal medicine.
And so I went to Herb Farm, which is kind of an international, they grow a lot of herbs
and have an internship program.
So worked at Herb Farm, did an internship with a botanical garden, and then found another
teacher and his name is Thomas Easley and he does functional medicine and clinical herbalism.
So I went to his school and then graduated from his school and started my own clinical
practice.
And I did that clinical practice for seven years and I saw over 700 people in clinical
practice.
And it's really interesting being an unlicensed practitioner and not having really any street
cred at all in the United States.
It's a very interesting paradigm here as far as herbalism as a career in general.
But in Europe, I don't know, you're from England, right?
Yes.
So they have certified herbalists that can act as primary care providers and you have
to have your licensed care provider.
And it's just not like that here.
You can't touch people.
You can't give dietary advice.
You can't diagnose, treat, or prescribe, even though that's what everybody's doing.
We're just like, oh yeah, you should probably ask your doctor these very five very pointed
questions about what I'm pretty sure that you have.
And so, you know, it took all of those years of clinical work and just really being humbled
in the process of recognizing that different people have so many different ways that their
body manages and deals with stress, manifests illness.
And then we have all of the kind of pretzeling that human beings do when things are different
and or change the way we feel about ourselves or things like social inequity.
Like, you know, I can have a client come in and maybe they're a single mom and they have
no family support and they're having to work nights and they, you know, and they just have
this chronic stress and their thyroid gives out and they're having allergic reactions
to the thyroid med.
And so that's why they're here.
And I'm trying to figure out how can I help this person who has very little resources,
very little money to get their thyroid to start working well again when they can barely
cook a meal.
They don't have their, you know, they're eating McDonald's because that's what they've got
money for and that's what they've got time for.
And that's what they're, you know, in.
And like, no matter how many herbs you give somebody, you can't make up for social lack.
You can't make up for chronic trauma.
Like you can't and that's something that I run into in myself and with clients.
And sometimes it's just, you kind of just have to find windows and you go slow.
People's nervous systems don't.
And I really wanted to talk about this.
It's really easy to say when someone's experiencing trauma or hardship or an illness that they
just need to try harder or do more or do better or go to therapy or, you know, no one gets
better from an eating disorder by being harder on themselves.
You know, it, the nature of a lot of stress, illness and disease is overperforming, not
resting enough, not taking care of our needs, not even recognizing we have needs.
I mean, I was in chronic pain for seven years without knowing it.
We can hide a lot of things from ourselves and subconsciously roadblock our path to healing.
And I think this is where kind of herbal medicine really shines in that we can't, we can't create
different nervous system states in ourselves unless we can feel what that actually feels
like.
So if somebody has never felt calm, you can't just tell them to calm down and think that
they're going to know what that is.
It works really well on my wife.
Just calm down.
She's like, Oh, thank you for that advice.
Now my parasympathetic has kicked in and I'm good and I love you again.
It's completely nuts.
It's just bonkers.
And, you know, and if you're, if you're constantly swimming in a soup, either the people around
you don't understand you can't see you or you're don't, you don't have stable housing
or you don't have nervousness.
I mean, we can go to the extreme where we don't have stable housing.
We don't have good employment, we're chronically disabled, whatever it is.
Or it could just be that your brain, you might be chill.
Like you might have a calm life, but you know, like maybe you're, you've just learned through
time that it's a bad idea to sleep because like my, my co-parent, my ex-husband, he works
on a tugboat and he has weird shift work hours and he worked for a company where something
was always exploding in the middle of the night.
Like something was always catching fire or the CO2 alert is going off or like something
crazy.
It's just always happening.
And that's, it's similar for first responders where there's just, you're constantly in a
state of high alert and then you kind of get stuck.
And then if you're not, if you're not able to let the back of your brain really integrate
and know that you're safe, you're no longer in that stressful situation.
Maybe you even have a nutrient deficiency that's preventing you from excreting cortisol
at a reasonable rate.
And you're just, you know, you need B6, you need magnesium, you need B12, you need nutrients
to be able to process out cortisol and get rid of it.
And maybe you have a nutrient deficiency.
Maybe you're using alcohol to cope and it's using up all of your B6 and therefore you
don't have the capacity and ability to excrete your cortisol quickly enough to get you down
regulated and you're just swimming in a soup of cortisol for, you know, and you end up
with an autoimmune disease later or have a heart attack later because of the kind of
neurochemical soup that you're swimming in.
And so, you know, a lot of it, a lot of how I have worked with my own trauma and my own
and trying to teach my nervous system how to be different has been just learning every
tool in the toolkit.
And you know, you have to sort of simultaneously create safe, cozy places for yourself.
You have to create relationships that feel good and safe and you have to work on that.
Sometimes people do not, I did not know what real friendship felt like.
I did not know what a good relationship looked like.
I did not know what feeling calm with another person felt like.
And I had to work on that and learn how to do that and dip my toe in.
And then, you know, being around other people that are calm, I learned how to be calm from
my first relationship out of my marriage.
I was like, man, this guy is chill.
And I had never, I had never been close enough to somebody to see how you could even be in
a situation where something stressful could happen and you felt so at ease in yourself
and at home in yourself and resourced in yourself that you felt like it was like, okay, this
crazy thing happened, we'll deal with it.
It was never, it never felt like that.
I was like single mom, working a business, tending all of these people with these chronic
health problems.
And I was just, I did not have the resources.
Everything that happened always felt like an emergency.
And so a lot of times, like, I think, gently and carefully, and with a lot of compassion
and tenderness, restructuring and recreating our life in a way that is more peaceful and
more cozy and more lovely so that if we do have a job or an event or whatever, we can
leave that.
We come off the clock, we have decompression routine that occurs.
We have like the coziest bathrobe, like as much sensory input as you can give your nervous
system that everything's okay.
Like sometimes I'll just wake up and be in a triggered state for no reason.
And I'll just be like, okay, what do you need?
What do you need?
You want the fuzziest blanket?
You want the warmest bath?
You don't want to do an ice bath this morning?
Okay.
What you want to go, let's put on your favorite song and dance.
Like it's, it can be really difficult when you're in a heightened nervous system state
to switch from push hard, go hard.
Like the more effort you put in, the better it's going to be.
This is how we muscle through, muscling through, calming your nervous system down is not how
you do that.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, it reminds me of, I remember, I think I even made a video about it because
it was, it was interesting, but I used to have the whole philosophy of you come off
shift and 24 hours, no sleep.
And then I'd go to CrossFit and just smash myself to pieces because I would think, and
this was not too long ago either.
I thought this way, you know, you sweat out the stress, you get it out, you burn it off,
all these, these phrases that we use.
And it was actually a Navy SEAL who's one of the elite strength and conditioning coaches
in the tactical space, um, talked about this and he's like, you are in a stress straight
state when you come off shift.
Now you do a red line workout, you're adding stress to stress.
What point does that make sense that you're going to down regulate?
And he was absolutely right and I was doing this, this workout not too long after that.
I think there was, I think it was when there was an issue with my son, um, and his school
and some horrendous freaking mistakes that they'd made.
But uh, it was a kind of a technical workout with snatches and some other stuff.
And I remember just getting so fucking pissed off basically.
And then I remembered what Jeff said and I was like, ah, and I literally middle of the
workout, put the barbell down and just went for a slow one mile run.
And by the time I came back, I felt better.
So you know, exactly like you're saying that would not be an ice bath day.
That might be a warm bath day.
Yeah.
Um, you said the F bomb, so I'm going to say this.
Oh yeah.
This is a open season here.
That's one of my many vocabulary words.
Yeah, me too.
So, you know, it's kind of emotional masturbation.
You can like, you can do more of the thing you're already doing and that's the easy thing.
Um, and that could be ruminating.
That can be, um, and this is when like herbs really help.
Um, because you get into like, and I've been doing this for a long time.
So like, I know when I'm PMS saying, and I have a GABA deficiency, like I know the estrogen
is going to go down, progesterone is going to go down and I'm going to lay in the bed
and make up something to be mad about and lay there on a hamster wheel with, with a
severe lack of a calming neurotransmitter.
And, and you can say all you want to me that I need to just meditate that away.
But when you have really strongly, um, wired neurological pathways that ruminating is what
keeps you safe because it helps you predict when bad shit's going to happen.
Um, like that good for you.
Like you try to meditate.
Um, and like, so I know, okay, I'm on a hamster wheel.
I'm having a repetitive thought pattern.
I am deficient in GABA right now.
I'm going to go take something GABAnergic.
So I have passionflower great, um, as a GABAnergic herb to really help with, uh, up regulating
GABA and guess what?
I fall asleep in 15 minutes and the hamster wheel, I can just feel my brain go, Oh, okay.
Like that's what we needed.
We couldn't, we couldn't find the pathway.
Like we've worked on it, but we've got this highway over here and the stream over here.
And of, and I'm, I really would love to change the channel.
Like I don't want to be on this ruminating highway from hell, but I, but I don't know
how to get there.
And it's hard to get your brain to switch over to this nice, really small new neurological
pathway where I don't lay in the bed and ruminate over pointless things that don't help me rather
than have conversations or journal and then read that journal entry to the person I'm
upset with.
Um, you know, and so herbs are great in that we can use them to play neurological whack-a-mole
when we are having these nervous system states that sure, maybe we could go run and burn
off some of this, but is it the most productive?
Isn't the most helpful?
Does it actually send more stress signals that and make, give us a long range sort of
stress response trigger that like we're constantly in this state and we're going to add to it
and we're going to keep heaping it on, um, rather than being able to play nervous system
whack-a-mole where, you know, eventually I won't need herbs to help my brain choose to
not ruminate help, but that is my, has been my coping mechanism.
My coping strategies are hypervigilance and obsessively thinking about all of these people
and how they think about me and you know, whatever it might be, whatever your programming
is that your brain perceives as the way that you keep safe, even though it's maladaptive.
Um, and so I like, um, there's another herb.
So, kind of one of the things I talk about a lot is part of the reason why we see people
with really stressful jobs have a really difficult time stopping smoking is because they're self-medicating
with something that increases peripheral circulation.
So when we have trauma responses, we lose prefrontal cortex blood flow, we lose peripheral
blood flow.
We get constriction of your respiratory, your diaphragm gets tight, your smooth muscle gets
tight, your blood flow is restricted.
Well guess what nicotine and cigarettes do?
There is a stimulating relaxant.
It brings blood flow to your brain.
It dilates all of your smooth muscles and your capillaries and veins and arteries.
So you're getting peripheral blood flow.
You get this blood perfusion and then you breathe deeper and you're getting diaphragmatic
relaxation and you're breathing.
You're taking a breath break.
You go outside and you breathe.
You're breathing in a bunch of toxic, toxic soup, but, and so, um, you know, when I'm
in a PTSD flare or I'm trying to prevent this from snowballing, um, I will use an herb called
lobelia which has lobulin in it, which it hits nicotinic receptor sites and it is a
stimulating relaxant and it called, it relaxes my smooth muscle, helps with relaxing my diaphragm,
gets me prefrontal cortex back online.
Um, and I, I do that in set and maybe like I create this, I love making mocktails at
night.
One of the things that I do, especially if I'm going through something really stressful,
it's really natural for people to want to self medicate and I'm kind of doing two topics
at once, but self medication is valuable in that it gives us information.
So if you're self medicating with alcohol, then you need to be your dopamine and serotonin
seeking.
If you're prone to cigarettes, you're needing more of like, um, you know, a stimulating
relaxant.
So when people are, uh, maybe in social environments, they get really stressed.
That might be better suited for an herb called name kava.
Maybe they're ruminating at night.
That's passion flowers.
So at night, kind of the five things that I always pretty much do in my mocktails as
I do like a little body inventory and I'm like, am I really physically tense?
Do I have a lot of musculoskeletal tension?
And am I slightly anxious or needing to go into a social environment where there's a
lot of new people?
I'll take kava, which is akin to a benzodiazepine.
It's a musculoskeletal relaxant and it makes you feel sort of just happy and calm.
You say kava?
Kava.
I traveled to Fiji and actually got to drink it with a local Fijian tribe.
It's so fancy.
It's amazing.
What's interesting is there's, there was a military coup that happened when we were there
and my girlfriend at the time and I were obviously, you know, cautious at first.
And when I researched it, it's like, Hey, it doesn't seem to be like a violent coup
at all.
This is what happens.
And what they do is they'll go and invade the government building.
They'll drink kava.
They'll discuss the things that they're disagreeing with and then they'll all leave and then everything's
good again.
So, you know, yeah.
So kava, I gotta say, I have personal experience.
It's like shit, but it's very good.
Yeah.
So, well, I have a recipe I'm more than happy to afford to a way to hide kava in a mocktail.
Please, please.
But yeah, so I'll just like, I don't make, I don't make these mocktails taste good.
That's not the point.
The point is to help my nervous system get regulated in a way that is harm reduction.
I'm doing harm reduction.
I could drink and then the next day I'd be incredibly depressed because you have that
big tank out screws with your blood sugar.
You don't sleep well.
Technically a carcinogen, like, you know, it's just not, um, one of the rules in dialectical
behavioral therapy is don't make things worse.
Um, it's just the tenant.
Like if you're not doing well, don't stack your deck with things that make it worse.
And so a lot of what I do and recommend and help people try to do with herbs is, is play
neurological whack a mole so that you're looking at what your body is craving to help you regulate
your nervous system and to do the healthier version of that.
Um, so kava is a great one that I do at night.
If I'm feeling like, like sometimes I'll smoke.
I've never been a smoker.
Obviously it gives you cancer.
So, um, occasionally that will be the, the tool that I choose to use will be a cigarette.
Um, but preferentially I'm making a mocktail with low Belia so that I'm getting that smooth
muscle relaxation.
I'm getting, um, peripheral blood flow.
I'm getting, um, prefrontal cortex activation.
I'm getting all of that.
The other thing that I do a lot is passion flower in my mocktails at night.
Um, for that repetitive thought thing.
Um, mimosa is fabulous.
Mimosa is serotonergic.
So I'm not talking about like a mimosa cocktail.
I'm talking about, yeah, I'll, I'll be Zia, uh, Jula brisin.
It is an invasive plant.
It's called the happiness tree and it is, it's serotonergic.
So if you're really struggling, like you want to drink less, you can get some mimosa and
it, it makes you happy and Lucy goosey and really helps, um, with that kind of come down.
Um, another tool that I use a lot and lean on a lot.
And I think you may have talked about this on the podcast before, but phosphatidyl serine.
Um, I don't think so.
So please educate me.
Yeah.
So, um, it kind of basically suppresses adrenal output of cortisol.
So if I'm in a hardcore flare and I'm waking up every four hours from a cortisol spike,
um, then phosphatidyl serine, um, is really amazing at just kind of helping to suppress
that excessive cortisol output.
Um, and you can obviously do that with herbs also.
So long range, um, we call them adaptogens.
So and you know, it's a buzzword and, um, a lot of people talk about Ashwagandha is
an adaptogen, but there's a lot more.
Um, and a lot of times people will confuse and conflate adaptogens with stimulants.
There are a lot of adaptogens that are actually just stimulants that help you push through
stress and stimulate you.
So like Shazandra, an adaptogen that is, it's an adaptogen, but it is a stimulant.
Um, uh, Elruthro stimulant, like ginseng stimulant.
They do help you modulate your stress response to a certain degree, but they also will help
you.
Um, if you're in a stressful situation and you need go juice, like you can use those,
but when, but on a daily basis, trying to regulate cortisol output and decrease systemic
stress.
Um, I really like using things like Ashwagandha, milky oats.
I also really like fresh skull cap.
Skull cap is really particular for people who have, that are, have frazzled nerves or,
or describe themselves as being at the end of their rope.
Um, if they jump at loud noises, if they're just like high strung and feeling on edge,
skull cap is a really good one to kind of, um, help calm your nervous system down and
helps to alter your response to stress over time.
And doing those as a daily practice, especially when you have really stressful jobs, um, and
your nervous system is really on high alert a lot.
It's a really good idea to have those in your back pocket as maintenance.
And then I like doing the phosphatidylserine on top of that.
So maybe, uh, you have your stressful job, you kind of feel like you're doing maintenance
and everything's pretty chill, not chill, but as chill as you can be for a first responder.
Um, and then financial stress or illness in the family.
And you're just like, your nervous system is like, well, we were okay, but now we're
not.
Then I like adding phosphatidylserine.
Um, and it, I find that it does wear off.
It's a four hour window.
Um, and that's another thing with herbs.
If you're doing nervous system herbs, um, they tend to work for about and metabolize
out in about four hours.
So pretty much everything, um, you know, there's, I'm, I'm hand waving at a complicated topic,
but, uh, uh, half life and metabolism is very incredibly variable, but as a general rule,
when working with nervous system herbs, um, I, I, it's a four hour window.
Um, and you know, I think doing the mocktail thing at night is a really key, important
part of my routine for helping me to play nervous system whack-a-mole.
Um, but also I think if you're having a hard time in the morning, when you wake up doing
those same herbs in the morning and kind of playing around with, okay, I'm feeling really
tense or I feel just grumpy or, um, you know, and once you give your nervous system these
tools in, so we're going to go for alcohol because we know what that feels like.
We know what that's like, but if you give yourself more resources for other ways of
changing your behavior that are less harmful and more targeted, then you're opening yourself
up to a different, um, like you just have a better toolkit.
Um, and I think that that's important to be able to, to say like, well, I want to drink,
but that is a serotonergic drive and dopaminergic drive.
What are ways that I can get serotonin and dopamine from herbs and or activities?
Like I have a list of, this is what I need to do for serotonin.
This is what I need to do for dopamine.
This is what I do for oxytocin.
This is what I do when I'm feeling this way.
This is what I do when I'm feeling this way, um, and kind of the more diversified your
toolkit is the better you're going to be.
Um, and you know, if you can pull from bilateral stimulation and have y'all, have you talked
about that on the podcast before EMDR EMDR, but also just bilateral STEM in general.
Okay.
Yeah.
It seems like there's a lot of parallels between the theory of EMDR and then people that seem
to have a lot of therapy, hiking, walking, uh, kayaking where there is this left, right,
left, right, kind of left, right, left, right.
And also, um, one of my favorite sleep hacks is actually, um, I don't know when I, I, I'm,
I figured this one out before bilateral STEM was a thing, but if you, if you do, I movement
REM REM sleep is rapid eye movement, your eyes are moving back and forth.
So I was like one night I was just had being an insomniac and laying there like, well,
your eyes move when you're in REM sleep.
So maybe I can trick my brain into going into REM sleep because it's not deep sleep and
maybe I'll fall asleep and it worked like a champ, but it's bilateral STEM.
So it's, I mean, it's counting sheep.
This is when like an old nursery rhyme idea, we count sheep.
We're like looking at the sheep.
So just literally count sheep with your eyes and then I'll do box breathing or four, seven,
eight breathing at the same time and just move my eyes and it's, or if I'm not like,
I don't know, maybe I don't want to do eye movements, but I'll just do tapping bilateral
STEM and do four, seven, eight breathing.
And I'm out in like 10 minutes.
And so, you know, you just like as many tools as you can possibly resource yourself with
in order to get yourself out of a PTSD flare or re-regulate your nervous system, the better
off you're going to be.
And when you do a check-in and you go, Hey, like this crazy thing happened.
What do you need?
It could be that you do need to go punch something.
It could be that you do need a herbal mocktail.
It could be that you want bilateral STEM.
It could be that you want your warmest bathrobe and a hug from your partner.
And you know, it just having conversations with myself in the mirror and telling myself
exactly what I need to hear.
All of these ways to regulate your nervous system are all incredibly valid.
And a lot of times we see there's all these parallels.
If you just listen to your nervous system, it's going to tell you what it needs.
This is Wim Hof naturally stumbled upon that when he was like 13 and was like, I just need
to get cold.
And if you can teach yourself and resource yourself and you have all of these options,
you're going to find what works for you and have a buffet of regulation tools.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, alcohol is where I've reached a lot.
And it's not that I've said this on here many, many times.
I never binge drink.
I never had problems sleeping and drank to sleep.
It was more habitual from partly growing up in a country where it's very, very normal.
There's pubs in every town and wine with Sunday roasts and that kind of thing.
But it was more just the quick fix, but it was subconscious because if I don't drink,
I actually go to sleep a lot quicker.
So it's kind of breaking that.
And I think, like you said, the more tools that you have to down regulate, I mean, I
do nighttime tea now with valerian in it or occasionally I'll do Doc Parsley sleep remedy,
which is again supplements, tryptophan, magnesium, a tiny bit of melatonin.
It's this whole cocktail that he makes, but doing that, it works.
But like you said, if you don't have an option B, C or D, you're always going to go to easy
button A, your sleeping pills and your alcohol.
But the more, it's like we say with the mental health conversation too, it might be a combination
of EMDR and equine therapy or psilocybin and cognitive behavior therapy.
But we've all got to understand that we actually have this beautiful toolbox at our disposal.
The only way though we can really learn is education, like to listen to people from all
these backgrounds, from acupuncture and chiropractic to herbalists with an H and all the tools
in the toolbox.
Yeah, and different, different areas and times in my life, I've needed different skills.
Like I find dialectical behavioral therapy incredibly helpful.
And I imagine it, uh, my like one sin it spiel on dialectical behavioral therapy is that
it's the emotional regulation skills that our parents were never able to teach us.
It's just emotional regulation and interpersonal skills.
How to manage conflict, how to get what you want and not damage relationships.
Um, and you know, cognitive behavioral therapy really helpful until it's not.
And then you need to somatically process things.
And then I do, you know, internal family systems therapy.
I don't know if you've ever talked about that, but I love IFS work.
It's kind of like inner child work.
Other people call it like soul retrieval in the more like hippie woo woo version.
Um, and you know, it's, it's basically that you have a whole bunch of different people
in your head that you need to have a chat with and you can integrate them and internal
family systems therapy is really, um, an amazing practice that gives people, uh, a lot of tools.
And I think it's really important to continue to lean into an internal loci of control where
you are, are driving the ship and, um, your nervous system might be pitching a fit, but
you're in charge still.
And you're going to have a chat with them as if they're an upset child or upset adult
or upset whatever.
And they're spewing at you and you're going to stay calm and be like, I'm really sorry
that you're upset.
What can I do for you?
Um, and having those conversations with yourself, um, is a great tool.
Internal family systems therapy has been something that I've leaned on a lot.
Um, herbs, cold showers, runs, um, you know, a run and a really good cry right in the middle
of it.
So, yeah, I, um, I very much appreciate all of the different phases of learning and different
nervous system, uh, different tools that I've gained through, uh, my own journey to try
to manage my PTSD and manage my own nervous systems, um, dysregulation.
Uh, and you know, I still pull from a lot of different, obviously a lot of different
areas, not just herbs, um, to manage and handle my life and reprogramming my brain.
Well, you mentioned about the plantar fasciitis, you know, stopping you from dancing.
Um, I did a thing called foundation training years ago.
It's funny.
I just got my son doing it recently because he's been getting knee pain.
He's a runner knee and kind of shin pain.
Um, and it's phenomenal and it looks kind of like yoga, but it's literally you, you
do it for 10, 15 minutes and it's just these poses and it's lengthening the, uh, the muscles
that are short, but then you use your body as a cantilever to add weight to it as well.
So you lengthen the strength and simultaneously.
And I, I mean, it, it saved my career.
Um, Kelly Slater swears by Neil, uh, not Neil Armstrong, Lance Armstrong.
Um, God, I mean, so many, so many people that we know that their body is that tool.
And so one of the seminars, Eric, the founder was talking about the tragedy of plants of
fasciitis and, um, Oh my God, what's the ham one that everyone was getting the type of
carpal tunnel couple.
Thank you.
And people are getting sliced and diced and they weren't getting any resolution.
It turned out it was coming from, you know, shoulders, neck, spine, which is why they
couldn't fix it by cutting.
Talk to me about the movement practices of anything.
If you use to address your, your issues.
And then also again, we've talked about some of the herbs and, um, you know, the, the nervous
system now let's talk about pain management and your journey from there.
Ooh, this is juicy too.
Um, okay.
Let's see.
Um, so just for backstory ex dancer, um, and that same sort of push, push, push, go, go,
go mentality translated into, um, trying to repair the damage done to my feet.
Um, I also am hypermobile.
And so, um, you know, up until really recently I have this really unhealthy pattern of I'm
going to go push and work out because I'm young and I'm healthy and I'm fit and I can
pick up this heavy thing.
And then because I'm hypermobile, I would instantaneously hurt myself and then recovery
would take forever.
And then I'd be like, whatever, like, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm just gonna be an
old lady and walk.
Um, and I think up until really recently, I started tapping into, um, some resources
that I had that I was not doing a good job of utilizing.
Um, it's just like not stretching, uh, to the point where, um, to the, to the point
that I can, um, I can put my leg up by my ear, but what good does that do?
And I'm just making myself even more prone to injury.
And, um, I think that simultaneous movement and stretching, but stretching, especially
when people are hypermobile, um, it, because we see with hypermobility, we end up with
musculoskeletal tension trying to combat the hypermobility.
And so those people are incredibly tense.
And so I can take musculoskeletal relaxants all day and give them to hypermobile people.
And they're like, I'm in a little bit less pain, but then their fascia is so loose that
they're even more prone to injury when they're not tense.
And their bowels are loose too.
Maybe, maybe not, you know, I don't know.
They gave it to me for my back and I think I took it for like a day or two and I was
like, nope, this is not going to work.
It did not have, I mean, it's all smooth muscle.
So it made my, you know, my colonic smooth muscle relax as well.
And everything that I put in came straight back out again.
Yeah, that's not a good scene.
Uh, well, and that's, you know, one of the things that's nice about herbs is it's tight.
You can titrate your dose and there are, uh, there's, I was going to be dramatic and say
a hundred musculoskeletal relaxants.
There's a bunch of different varieties.
You can try them all day.
I have 400 herbs in my basement and bottles.
Like if one doesn't work, you just try another one.
Yeah.
So you can use muscle, you can use muscle relaxers like Kava, but it doesn't address
the fact that the muscles guarding the hyper extended tendon and the tendon that's, um,
that's tense.
And then also we have a lot of nervous system guarding.
If you do have injuries, you end up with, uh, you know, like with my feet, I walk and
carry myself completely differently.
Um, and it's the experimentation.
If you're not simultaneously doing nervous system integration to reprogram your body
around your injury and also doing strength training with the injury, then it's really
hard to get your nervous system to be okay with not guarding it anymore.
I mean, you see it all the time, people end up, they have a ankle injury on their right
ankle and then their left knee is all screwed up and their left hip's all screwed up because
they're favoring or maybe it tilts their pelvis or whatever.
So because of my foot surgery, I ended up with a pelvic tilt to the front and then chronic
tension headaches because I was leaning forward, but trying to get my nervous system to integrate
and stop pelvic tilting literally changes how I show up emotionally, physically, how
I'm standing, how I'm moving, how I'm walking.
I'm guarding my ankles and if I stand differently, my brain goes, this is bad.
You're going to get hurt.
You're going to twist your, you're like, you're going to twist your ankle and fall over and
it's going to be bad.
And so if you're not taking into consideration slowly reprogramming your nervous system,
convincing your nervous system that that joint or injury is healed, repaired, helped and
capable of bearing full weight and full range of motion.
And then it's really difficult to get yourself to integrate that you can utilize that body
part again.
And so yeah, so I have really leaned into kind of simultaneous like movement.
So weighted stretching, which basically what you're doing with really specific exercises
on especially for my like chronic tension headache pattern, it's been eye movement and
doing basically like deep eye stretches and a lot of just movement of integrating my eyes
and my neck and my pelvis together.
And it's a lot of slow work and it's really tedious and not very dramatic.
But it's really life changing.
And I think the hard part being that when you're changing your body in a way that is
opposite of what you're used to, your nervous system can pitch a fit.
Like initially when I started doing this work, I started getting really bad vertigo.
And I think I had to call my friend for us and be like, dude, we're pushing my buttons.
Like I've got bad vertigo.
And instead of going, I don't know why that's weird.
Like he was just like, oh, yeah, just dial down what you're doing.
Do your exercises and then tell your body not to keep the change because we have to
dip our toe in, see how it feels, convince our nervous system that it's safe.
It's fine.
We're going to do this every day and then stand up and walk around like you normally
do completely dysfunctional and screwed up and then come back the next day.
Try it on for size.
Try on the new, the new movement, the new way of standing, the new, you know, full weight
bearing and then do the same thing and do it over and over again until your nervous
system finally integrates.
This is actually better.
We feel better like this.
And, and this is a good way to go.
Um, and it's more effective.
Um, coming from a herb perspective, I think some of the really, uh, this is a big, it's
a big thing.
So um, when dealing with injuries, maybe what would be the most helpful?
Oh my God.
I mean, you've everything with us.
I mean, I had, um, horrendous migraines and I don't think it was, the only thing my posture
was that I did have anterior pelvic tilt.
That's how I ended up hurting my back in the first place, lifting someone.
But um, for us it's neck, shoulders, you know, back, knees, ankles, toes, elbow.
So we need to slather y'all in sad every day.
Um, so a couple of things, um, Solomon seal, it grows pretty much anywhere.
It is an amazing herb for connective tissue and connective tissue, rehydration and connective
tissue injury in general.
It's hard to get, but it's easy to grow.
So um, you can pretty much get it from any garden center.
Uh, that's a little bit more niche, like more native, but, um, has more native plants.
That's what I mean.
Uh, so Solomon seal, you can make a salve or you can take it internally.
And I like doing it.
I'll make a salve from the root and I use that topically.
My partner had a shoulder injury that he's like, I've had this for 10 years and I'm like,
okay.
So we did internal Solomon seal and then a topical Solomon seal.
And he was really dedicated three times a day, two droppers full, and then put the salve
on once or twice a day.
And in about three weeks he was fine.
I mean, that wasn't a super severe injury.
Um, and he's pretty active.
Um, one of the biggest problems I see is repetitive use injuries, which I'm imagining is pretty
common in the field where you have one thing that you're doing a lot.
You you're, you know, get injured and then you just have to keep doing it.
Um, and so, uh, Solomon seal internally and topically is really one of my favorites.
Another one that I talk about a lot, that's also kind of hard to get is cross-fine.
It's big Nonia capriolata.
That one also is easy to grow.
Um, but a tincture of cross-fine.
And I think actually this is how we ended up connecting because I was posting about
how I use cross-fine in people that have burnout.
And a lot of, I'll see this a lot in care providers of any kind and first responders
where there's shift work or, um, like just high traffic where you don't eat enough, you
don't pee enough, you don't drink enough, you don't sleep enough and you end up with
burnout and a lot of times this deep fatigue, I think is some of it, some of it comes from
just not getting enough nutrients and not being hydrated enough because in your connective
tissue, the way that your connective tissue communicates is basically just, it's just
fluid.
It's all fluid in there and if your connective tissue ends up hard and crunchy, kind of like
imagine a plant that you get from Walmart and that's on the discount rack and you take
it home and you put water in the top of it and then it just all drips out and you're
not actually actually deeply hydrating the tissue or the, you know, the plant, the soil,
whatever.
When you get to a certain state of dryness, it can be really hard to rehydrate.
And so, um, I use cross vine and rehydration salts, which I think are super important,
um, to help to rehydrate connective tissue.
Um, and I, you know, your whole body is basically connective tissue.
So if you get dehydrated in your soft tissues and they don't get direct blood flow, you
get like, it's just intercellular fluid that's leaking out from your cardiovascular system
into your, into your body to regulate your fluid balance.
So it's, it can be one of the things that like I really lean on cross vine for to help
rehydrate connective tissue, especially if you're seeing a lot of connective tissue issues
where people are popping, popping, creaking and the pop is not like a thud pop.
It's like a crack pop.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Absolutely.
Your knee is like, it doesn't thud when it pops, it cracks.
And that means it's too dry.
Your connective tissue is dry.
And so it, it has a cracky sound.
And so if you're seeing, you know, if you're very cracky and like dry and you feel like
you're drinking, but it's not going in, rehydration salts and cross vine are amazing.
And cross vines really neat adaptogen because it takes three days.
A lot of adaptogens take up to two weeks to start working.
But cross vine works in about three days and you just start to feel like you have more
energy.
And to me, I think it literally is just helping yourselves communicate better.
You're getting better fluid exchange, better exchange of toxins out nutrients in.
If you're not fully hydrated, that can't happen.
So those are two really helpful ones that I lean on.
I like doing topicals.
So we kind of have like, I think a lot of people forget and maybe first responders are
better because they're more medically inclined, but we have pain caused by inflammation and
we have pain that's signals that's telling us to stop.
And so when we have an injury, we want to address both.
And so I like using, and then also we kind of has the simultaneous musculoskeletal tension
that can be causing extra and additional pain.
That's just from guarding.
And so if you're not addressing all three, then you're not going to see, especially if
you're doing like physical therapy and you're helping to rewire your nervous system.
If you're still inflamed, you're not dealing with pain and you've got a guarding musculoskeletal
guarding then, and you're not addressing those, then it can be really hard to recover.
So utilizing the same herbs I talked about earlier at Lobelia and Cava for the musculoskeletal
guarding.
I do like using anti-inflammatories, herbal anti-inflammatories, particularly buswellia
or buswellic acid instead of utilizing an NSAID because it is really hard on your mucosal
membranes.
And so I like using buswellia and buswellic acid and then the long range immune and inflammation
pathways I like really lean on high dose fish oil and then higher dose ginger and higher
dose turmeric with black pepper and doing some type of combination of that to help with,
especially if we've got dysfunctional inflammatory pathways due to chronic stress or chronic
inflammation or chronically poor diet.
Then we want to work on all of that also, but that's kind of my...
And then pain, which you want to talk about pain?
Yeah, let's do it.
Okay.
So it's a whole thing, but so it's...
One of the things that I think is really important is looking at chronic pain and how we can
no longer have a physical injury, but our nervous system due to how a lot of times,
and the research is pretty clear about this, when you experience said traumatic event,
if you don't feel emotionally supported during that event, you're way more likely to have
chronic pain.
There's also a correlation between being a perfectionist and being really hard on yourself
about an injury causing chronic pain.
And then in my own case, I see this happen frequently with my own pain where I can get
in the same nervous system state as I was when I had my foot surgery and the injury
and all of that.
I can feel trapped and I'll have a pain flare.
And your brain has learned to be in pain.
And I really love utilizing...
There's this great app.
I'm going to forget it.
Oh no, what is it called?
I'm going to have to message it to you.
I've forgotten it.
I used it for a long time, but it's basically brain retraining.
It's brain training around pain.
Because a lot of what we struggle with when we're in chronic pain syndromes is a fear
of the pain, the judgment of the pain, the wishing we weren't in pain, the emotional
states connected to the pain.
We've just created another neurological super highway pathway for pain.
And every time we get in this emotional state, we go down it.
Every time it hurts a little bit more, we go down it.
And so we basically have trained our brain to be in pain.
And so a lot of what this particular app does and why I love it so much is it's reprogramming
your ideas, perception, and mindset around pain.
And also it takes a very much a growth mindset approach where it's like, I'm in pain right
now.
It really sucks.
Or even using humor.
One of the tools they give you is instead of saying, I'm in pain, you rename your pain
a funny word.
And you're like, I've got a lot of banana today.
Just something that doesn't make any sense.
So that you're connecting humor.
So I'll have to remember the app.
But it's a great one.
And I've used it a lot right when I was sort of figuring out I was in chronic pain to help.
And then I'm hesitant to talk about pain management because I don't know if people will be able
to resource the herbs that I want to talk about.
So I'm going to talk about herbs that are widely available.
So some of the ones that I use especially for.
OK so when you're dealing with pain, you want to be addressing the same things that I was
talking about where we're talking about.
We want to do anti-inflammatories.
We want to do nerve pain.
And then sometimes we want to do things that help to help us block the pain from a nervous
system standpoint.
So I like doing HAVA and Lobelia for musculoskeletal relaxant to help with the guarding that comes
with pain that causes pain exacerbation and helps with some of that stopping that feedback
loop that happens with the brain where we're like, we're in pain.
We need to guard.
We're hurting more.
We're in pain.
You can sort of insert the musculoskeletal relaxants in there.
And then it kind of helps you to be like, OK, we're hurting but it's manageable and
we're not getting a lot of this guarding.
The other thing that I really love is a plant called Cori Dallas.
You can get it.
It's a Chinese herb.
One of my favorite ways to get it is dehydrated powder.
So it's an extract powdered.
So Cori Dallas is amazing.
Cori Dallas Yonhuso is the Chinese like on the Chinese herb market.
That's what you would look for.
And it just helps turn the volume down on pain.
And I'll use it for menstrual cramping.
I'll use it for chronic physical pain.
There's no reason not to take it every day.
It's really gentle.
I also use a lot.
Jamaican dogwood is really helpful with pain.
And then I like skull cap a lot for pain.
Oddly enough, skull cap is more indicative to the nervous system and calming elevated
nervous system states and over excited nerves.
But chronic pain and pain in general is over excited nervous tissue.
Like your nerve is over firing.
And it's hyper excited and more sensitive.
And so I like using skull cap on a daily basis as an adaptogen nerve tonic because it'll
turn down.
It will help to suppress some of that nerve over excitability.
And then the nerve is not so inclined to be like, oh, like, you know, maybe you have a
shoulder injury and it only comes up when this certain movement happens.
But then you have to do that movement regularly.
And it's an emotional, you know, physiological combination of things that's causing this
pain.
If we can kind of turn down the volume on your reactivity, then we can sort of another.
It's another point where we can reinsert a different way of relating to it by changing
how your brain is assessing the entire situation and it will change how much pain your brain
decides to make you be in.
So yeah, another thing that came up was it seems like nerve pain is a really common one.
And you know, we hear a lot about St. John's wort for depression, but it's hit or miss,
whether it works or not.
But really where St. John's wort shines is nerve pain.
It's amazing for nerve pain.
So if somebody has really and I use it for nerve regrowth also.
So you know, a lot of times like I had nerve damage.
So part of my leg was just numb for years.
And when you start to regrow nerve tissue, it hurts.
It's like prickly, tingly, weird.
And nerve pain in general can be prickly, can feel like you've got a burn, can feel
stabbing, which I have experienced all of those things.
But St. John's wort really, really lovely fresh St. John's wort tincture internally
for nerve pain and for helping to regenerate nervous nerve tissue.
And then also I love it topically.
So you have to be careful with using it internally because it up regulates the cytochrome P450
pathway, which is the pathway that a lot of medications go through.
So you would up regulate how quickly you extract excrete your birth control or, you know, your
thyroid med.
So it's not good to use internally if you're on a bunch of other medications, but you can
also use it in turn topically.
You get fresh St. John's wort oil and I've used it.
I had one particular case that was pretty dramatic.
He had lost feeling in his toes over time from an injury and we started doing Lyons
main and St. John's wort internally and MCT oil and other things that you need to grow
nervous tissue.
And then also did a topical of St. John's wort.
And he was like, called me in a couple of weeks, like a nerve tissue takes a long time.
These are long term protocols that you have to do for like a year to two years.
But he called me in a couple of weeks and was like, it's tingling and feels all weird.
And I was like, well, we're doing it.
It's working.
So I think we didn't really talk about that, but I'm sure you've talked about it with maybe
the use of psilocybin and maybe Lyons main to help regrow nervous tissue quicker and
reprogram your brain more quickly.
But that's another thing that's really neat that you can utilize herbs for in trying to
rewire their brain involving pathways of chronic trauma or coping strategies that were maladaptive
that you're trying to, you know, appear away from.
If you're doing psilocybin microdosing and Lyons main and high dose B vitamins, then
you're really going to be priming your pump for helping to reintegrate change much more
quickly.
And so that's really useful.
And that also goes for regrowing like nerve pain, like nerve pain, nervous tissue or pain
signaling pathways.
Anytime that we're trying to regrow nerves and or change nervous system pathways, which
is growing new nerves, then we want to be utilizing those as as options.
Did that help?
No, it did.
What I was thinking is, I mean, you've gone through so many different things, which is
phenomenal.
Somewhere on my bookshelf, I'm just looking now.
I know I have I bought a book on basically plant medicine.
I don't know where it is at the moment or who wrote it.
But for people listening, what are some of the publications or sites?
I mean, obviously, we'll get to your your site as well.
But what are some of the Bibles in your opinion for people to actually have this at their
fingertips?
One by Kerry, Kerry Boone.
He wrote.
Principles and practice of phytotherapy.
I've got a great one.
Medical herbalism by David Hoffman is a fabulous book.
These are more like.
Basically I'm kind of a science based in case you haven't gathered science based herbalist
with a lot of there's a lot of kind of framing and scaffolding for my training and how I
relate to the body and herbs.
And those are the two books that are the most helpful in getting your bearings on how to
not use herbs like pharmaceuticals and how to think about herbal medicine in a way that
becomes helpful for you rapidly.
I also really like Jill Stansberry wrote a great a great set of books.
It's herbal formularies for health professionals, which honestly just cuts to the chase like
she's great.
So and she has I'm actually looking at right now.
She's got one for there's like five volumes, but there's one for the cardiovascular system,
one for the nervous system, one for pain, one for the digestion.
So like you can kind of focus on whatever you're struggling with and go to that.
And she gives you formulas.
Another really great one that's kind of a deep cut a little bit is the King's American
Dispensatory.
So at the turn of the century, before we had the AMA, the American Medical Association,
we had what were called the eclectic physicians and they were physician pharmacists herbalists.
And they did amazing research and were really great about talking to each other as clinicians
and compiling information.
And so the King's American Dispensatory is kind of their penultimate herbal gelling of
knowledge.
And I use that one a lot.
I also really love Thomas Easley.
He is my second herb teacher.
He runs the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine.
And then, yeah, those are some of the like kingpins of herbalism.
So yeah.
When you look at the history of herbalism, obviously it was something that we were doing
pretty much since the dawn of man and woman.
Yeah.
You know, in every culture around the world, you know, I mean, we're focusing more now
on ayahuasca and some of these ancient ceremonies.
But if you look at herbs and tinctures and, God, what's that, poultices and all these
things, you know, they go back, you know, thousands of years.
What does your community identify as when there was that shift where all of a sudden
you were labeled woo woo and, you know, unresearched and all these things that we've seen so much
opposition for the holistic medicine professions to have to fight against to finally, I think
there's a paradigm shift now, finally get back to where we are again, where, you know,
the thousand years of wisdom is being accepted because there was a real arrogance to some
modern medicine.
And sadly, I think it was deliberate because it was about money.
And there are some great, great modern medicines as a paramedic.
I've used them to save lives.
I would not want to have surgery without anesthetic, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But chronic disease management, whether it's hypertension, diabetes, even cancer, I would
argue that, you know, we don't they don't work.
They don't work very well at all.
And people spend a huge amount of money.
And as you said, a huge disservice is when someone is suffering and they can't afford
the modern medicine version of what they're told is the cure.
Right.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think it's one of those things where you get into it and you're not really
sure what what rabbit hole you should go down.
Like obviously we have the witch hunts, which is the European like basically this idea that
women were witches and and anyone practicing herbalism was talking to and or communing
with the devil and that we should all be looking to God to cure our illnesses and that and
the church and you know, you could look to that.
You could look to, you know, there's a conspiracy theory around like the advent of modern chemistry
and there, you know, it's just a chasing the money.
I don't really know.
There's also a kind of a discussion around land rights.
So you know, you have to have access to land in order to make medicine in order to have
medicine, grow medicine.
And so it can be a, you know, it's thought to possibly be a control tactic that, you
know, we don't want people to know how to take care of themselves.
But I mean, the other thing is it's an odd it's an odd construct to.
And I see this a lot where we have a weird Western construct that herbs will kill you
or they're completely ineffective, which is a thing that I'll run into a lot.
Like I'll be getting really great results with a client and they'll go to their doctor
and their doctor will be like, don't take that.
Like it doesn't work or don't take that.
It's going to hurt you.
Well, I'm not going to tell my client to get off of what you've put them on.
Like you probably shouldn't tell the client to get off of what I put them on.
And it's an odd thing also to be where we're animals.
And we like to think we're not, but it's real odd to think that like outside is is home
and we we're from outside and we get our food from outside and look, we we are supposed
to be living close to the land and eating off of like hunting a squirrel for dinner
and, you know, making tea when I'm sick with the stuff in my yard and a salad from the
weeds.
And so it's kind of an odd.
It's very much a weird Twilight Zone moment for me quite often when people are think that
what I do is very interesting or or they think that I'm just some kitchen witch.
When you know, a lot of pharmaceuticals were phytochemically derived a hundred years ago.
We eat and utilize medicines all the time, like coffee.
You can't argue with me that coffee.
It's not a stimulant and that's pharmacologically active.
Ginger is warming.
It's great for digestion.
We use herbs all the time, but as soon as we, you know, start to think about them in
this context that they are safe, effective, helpful.
I don't do anything different than a pharmacist.
We're both pushing pharmacological buttons inside a human being to help them feel better.
We're doing exactly the same thing.
My toolkits different.
There's a propensity for side effects with my toolkit, just like there's a and there's
a higher propensity for side effects with their toolkit.
I was going to say, does your herbs have, you know, like your herbs for mood have warnings
that may cause suicide ideation?
I mean, that's what blows my mind.
You're taking a pill for some sort of positive mental health outlook.
And they're like, oh, by the way, you might off yourself when you take this med.
That doesn't seem like it's a very effective medication then.
Let's be honest.
Yeah.
I think some of when we're dealing with mental health, I think one piece where herbalism
really shines is it gives you the control.
I don't need an antidepressant every day.
I need an antidepressant when I feel really bad and when I'm having a hard time getting
out of bed and when I need to play neurological whack-a-mole and I can take mimosa as an SSRI
today in the next day.
And maybe I just need it in the morning because once I remind my brain that life is good,
we're happy, everything's okay.
Like we're going to take this other neurological pathway that we've worked, we're working
on that feels good.
We're going to do that, not over there.
And maybe I only need it for a couple of days.
Maybe I only need it for a season when after a loss or a traumatic event, but you can't
do that with a lot of pharmaceuticals.
You can't do it based on the day.
It's not safe.
But the other thing is like mimosa is an SSRI.
And if you take it three times a day, every day for three months, you're going to have
to wean off of it.
But guess who's in charge of that?
You are.
And you're taking it in a liquid form.
So you get to titrate your dosage.
You can decide that, oh, my nervous system is really well acquainted with how this herb
makes me feel.
And it is, but it's, it's the way that I can get to that state.
Maybe I don't need two droppers full anymore.
I don't need a pharmacologically active dose.
I need a neurologically active.
I need a dose that will remind my body, Hey, you remember that taste that we've associated
with this neurological pathway over here in this biochemistry, we're going to take one
drop of that mimosa, taste it.
And then our brain will go, Oh yeah, we know how to do that and do it.
You don't necessarily like when you're dealing with liquid herbs, you can dose them.
You can train your body with them and then dose them by the drop, which is not pharmacologically
active anymore.
It's just, you've trained yourself to know how to get there with the herb and it's helped
you learn how to do that.
So I think, yeah, there are plenty of side effects with herbs.
And one of the things that I do often with clinical appointments is I ended up helping
people who have misinformed, uneducated, accidental mess ups with herbal medicine.
Like it's not, I have a story that I tell quite frequently about a woman who had tanned
her bladder.
She was 70 going to see, she was incontinent, had been going to see her urologist, wasn't
getting results, came to see me.
I did an intake in the first couple of minutes.
I asked her what she was drinking and she was primarily drinking only green and black
tea, which are highly tannic.
And she basically just tanned her bladder.
And I mean, I immediately was like, no more black and green tea.
Here's some really goopy, mucilaginous herbs and healing things to help get the elasticity
back in your bladder.
And within a couple of weeks she was continent and holding urine and like quick and easy.
And so, you know, when, whenever we take a hard line and we try to tell everyone what
they should be doing, all the, you know, every pregnant woman should be taking red clothe,
red raspberry, like all pregnant women.
Well, like I can't do that.
It's too drying.
It makes me uncomfortable.
It makes my skin dry.
It makes my hair dry.
I don't feel good.
I feel itchy and weird.
And like, if you do that with herbs, it's going to do the same thing.
You have to take that herb, feel how it feels, watch for side effects, watch for contraindications,
watch for just constitution, watch for allergies.
You can have an allergic reaction.
I made a formulation for a friend who was having a Crohn's flare and it turns out, and
I would, I put peach in their formula because peach is very cooling and a great, um, it
helps to decrease inflammation locally.
And turns out the person was allergic to peach.
So needless to say, we did not get the therapeutic results we wanted, but the other thing is
like, that's okay.
I have 150 other plants we can play around with and utilize to try to help you and figure
it out.
It's basically an herbalism is, is special is genetically specialized medicine.
It's it's specialized medicine.
Everybody loves to talk about that.
How, how we're going to have AI models and everything's going to be so specialized.
Well, we've, we've had that toolkit for a long time.
Um, and, and really it's just trying things out, being exposed to different herbs and
then know and feeling how they feel and seeing what happens for us.
And if the, if the outcome is therapeutic, awesome.
If the outcome is that that herb is not for you, then now you know.
Um, and so, you know, I think, I think it's a weird, it is kind of a weird paradigm to
be flying under the radar as an unlicensed practitioner and have such a great toolkit,
um, that I wish were given more credibility.
Um, but you know, we're, we're working on it.
It's getting a little better.
We're having conversation at a time.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm sure people listening are intrigued.
I mean, I'm going to dive in because even when you talk about drying, I've always had
dry skin.
Um, and this is an area that I've loved.
I found collagen is a great, great supplement for me as found it somewhat recently.
It works really well, obviously hydration as well, but, uh, you know, that's something
I want to look into myself.
So where, where can people find you, your website and you on social media?
Yeah.
So pretty much all my handles are at deep roots herb school and my website is deep roots
herb school.com.
And primarily I teach, so I try to teach an herb walk once a month for local people.
Um, I teach, uh, a subscription kit where I teach people about one herb per month.
So I send them a package with multiple different types of preparations of the same herb so
that they can feel what it feels like and learn about it in depth.
Because I think that's the best way to do it.
Um, I think somatic integration of knowledge and experiencing them at the same time is
just, it's the way to do it.
So I have that program and then I teach a foraging and medicine making intensive.
Um, and those are kind of my primary projects.
Uh, and so that's, you can find me on all of the, all the socials and, um, and yeah.
Beautiful.
We're just on, on the foraging.
We didn't really get into that.
Yeah.
How many of the, it doesn't even have to be the ones we talked about, but how prevalent
are a lot of these medicines in, for example, Alabama or Florida, if people went into the
woods today.
So all of the plants that I mentioned, uh, except for Kava are very commonly widespread
in the Southeast, uh, U S.
Um, so, you know, up to like pass North Carolina into Virginia and then, um, you know, Tennessee
and above.
Um, and then Kava pretty much exclusively, you can grow Kava in Florida, um, but commonly
grown in more tropical areas that Hawaii has a lot of Kava and Kava farms, but you can
grow Kava in, um, in Florida.
Uh, and then, you know, the internet is a wonderful thing.
So you pretty much can buy, you can access a lot of what I've talked about today.
Crossfine will be harder to access.
Um, but, um, you know, the botanical names, big Nonia, Capri, Aleta, and then passion
flower highly available on the herb market.
If you're interested in Gabon Ergic herbs, um, and some other herbs that are Gabon Ergic
that it might be easier to find or fun to play around with are also motherwort and,
um, blue vervein are also both Gabon Ergic and they just hit different for different
people.
So, um, m-m-motherwort tends to feel like you're getting a hug from your mom.
When she has warts.
And then blue vervein is really specifically indicated for stiff necked overachievers with
facial ticks and twitches and with a lot of tension in their head, neck and shoulders
and tend to be overly cerebral.
So me, me, literally stiff as we're doing this conversation.
Yeah.
So blue vervein is a great one for that.
And it's also Gabon Ergic and then passion flower tends to be, we specifically indicated
for that hamster wheel.
You're on a hamster wheel.
You're thinking the same thought over and over again.
Maybe you revisit any revisiting it every 30 minutes, you know, same thought you're
doing to get on.
But yeah, hamster wheeling thoughts is a really typically a passion flower.
Um, so yeah, fingers crossed.
Everybody can find those and I'll, I can send you some resources on shopping for herbs.
Beautiful.
One more thing before we let you go.
I talked about the teas.
Are there any companies that make teas that have a combination of some of these that you
like the people be able to access in their regular stores?
Yeah.
So most of the, like, I really love traditional medicinals.
It's a tea company.
Um, and, uh, yogi teas are both very well formulated, um, coming from like an herbalist
background as far as taste and, um, and, and therapeutic intervention.
Uh, I really like them.
And the thing with that is they're going to be broad spectrum formulated for lots of people.
So you're probably not going to get symptoms and or energetic.
We try to keep things energetically neutral.
And I don't mean that in a woo woo way, but I mean that in like a, if you're a dry person,
I don't want to give you a dry tea.
And so if, if from an herbalist perspective, if I'm formulating for a large group of people
and I don't know them, I'm going to keep it pretty neutral.
Um, so you're not as inclined to get symptoms and or issues with more large scale formulated
tea blends.
Um, mountain rose herbs has some great tea blends.
Um, and I really liked them and they're pretty affordable and you can get them in larger
amounts so you can get like sample sets and then play around with different herb teas.
Brilliant.
Well, I want to thank you so much.
You probably see me scribbling away.
I've been writing so much.
Usually, you know, when people come on, I've got somewhat of an understanding of what we're
going to talk about, but when it comes to herbalism, I'm, I'm on board a hundred percent
because like I said, I take herbal teas.
I mean, there's, there's things that I do and then I haven't actually tried them yet,
but Del Jolly is supposed to be sending me some umbo, some of the mushroom tinctures
that they have, but CBD, I mean, you know, so many people from the, you know, the plant
medicine side as well with the psychedelics and mental health, but this makes perfect
sense to me, you know, there's another tool that a lot of us aren't using to down regulate,
to positively affect the psych, uh, the physiological elements that are contributing to the psychological.
And even, you know, when you were talking about the pain and the kind of nervous vicious
circle I'm thinking of fibromyalgia and some of these other things that people suffer from,
you know, and I've seen it, you know, when you, when you hurt your back and you heal
it, which I have, there is that guarding.
So if there's an injury and then you've got trauma and you've got this kind of body keeps
the score revolving door, maybe just maybe herbal medicine will be one of the things
that can actually kind of knock that, um, you know, that kind of constant revolution
and actually get you to start, you know, emerging from that.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, thanks so much for having me.
I had so much fun.