14. Reclaiming Yourself Through Nature & the Ancestors - Vicky Salcido-Cobbe

Our human roots go deep, both into the earth and into the past, and we cannot know ourselves if we don't know our roots. Yet most of us in the modern West feel adrift, cut off from those things which fundamentally belong to us and which have always sustained humanity. This sense of isolation and the loss of meaning causes us to feel lost, bereft, without purpose.

A lived, daily relationship with the natural world and an embodied connection with our ancestors are the birthright of every one of us, and more and more of us are reclaiming ourselves by reclaiming these simple, sacred things.

Vicky Salcido-Cobbe is an herbalist, gardener, teacher, writer, and the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants. After years of feeling lost to herself and engaging in self-destructive habits, her life changed in an instant when a clinician offered her a bottle of herbal extract as medicine. She and her husband Russ now work with the land to create small-scale remedies for their herbal apothecary La Tierra Buena Collective (formerly Grandmother’s Medicine.)

In the Intro:

• The usual, plus my crying toddler
• Herbal Medicine Giveaway from Vicky!
• Sorry not sorry

In the Interview:

• Names as seeds planted by our parents

• The years Vicky was lost to herself (with some drugs and tall cans), and how she found herself again (with the moon and tall trees)

• How having big, mystical experiences without proper integration can cause more confusion and pain 

• How nature and the ancestors have always sustained humanity, why we feel so bereft when we lose connection with them, and how we find ourselves when we rekindle those relationships

• How this suburban SoCal girl stumbled upon the plant path- “herbalism was the way I reclaimed myself”

• The realities of running an herbal products business

• (Random segue into One Weird Use for Breastmilk)

• Dreaming about Wal-Mart (& what it means when you have mostly mundane dreams)

• Vicky gets really really real about the evolution of her sexuality- masturbation, porn, the shameful stuff we don’t like to talk about in our culture- and being extremely candid with her husband now that she's figuring herself out

• 70s v 90s porn

• Why the dominant image and dynamic of women needing to please men and get their approval in order to gain entrance into a sexual relationship is the opposite of reality, the opposite of biology in most animal species, including humans, and is a dangerous paradigm that upends nature and hurts girls, women, boys, men, and everyone else

• Vicky’s recent transition from embodying the maiden to mother archetype (without having physically birthed children)

Show Notes:

• La Tierra Buena Collective
• Grandmother's Medicine
• The Medicine Stories Patreon page
• The Medicine Stories Facebook group
• MythicMedicine.love
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from the song Wild Eyes)