HerbRally

Today's episode is from a webinar that herbalist Amanda Dilday recorded last month as an offering for #MeToo. You can find the original webinar on her website Alchemilla. Amanda also wrote a book called Flowers for a Girl: Plant Medicine and Sexual Trauma. This is not a protocol or a prescription. Rather, it is something of a memoir, a healing memoir, an herbal memoir, a story. "Well, friends. Here it is: last night's class on plant medicine and sexual trauma. Just send it out into the world, and pray for it to be blessed. Pray for protection and for healing. Pray for light and for truth. I know there will be more classes. There was so much more to say--even about these plants, and there were so many more plants! Gentle, powerful support is all around us. It's a simple beginning (and quickly put together), but yesterday, I knew in my very heart that I needed to quickly put some simple tools into people's hands. I had to begin. Some plants from last night's class include violet, ghost pipe, marjoram, and blueberries--to name a few. <3" - Amanda Dilday ABOUT AMANDA: I am a wife, mother, writer, teacher, and student of the plants. My roots are in the Appalachian Mountains. My home rests at the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Mountains are in my heart, and when hearth and home aren't looking, I slip away and get lost in the woods. A lover of burdock and books, tinctures and teas, I am most at home under a blue sky with my bare feet rooted to the earth. Adversity brought me to the plants. A walk through the valley of the shadow of death led me to green pastures, and every green herb. I began my herbal studies at Green Comfort School of Herbal Medicine in Virginia. My healing path has been pleasant and sweet, sprinkled all along the way with generous, green teachers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and He has filled my hands to overflowing with green gifts. Gifts meant to be given to others. Coming to know the plants has changed me profoundly--and blessed me beyond measure. My prayer is that the same will be true for you. May we see Him in all that is. May His life flow through us. Blessings, Amanda Alchemilla HerbRally Podcast

Bevin Clare lets us know what Maryland University of Integrative Health is all about! Maryland University of Integrative Health is the leading academic institution for integrative health in the nation. For nearly 40 years, MUIH has educated practitioners in health and wellness through transformative and relationship-centered programs that draw from traditional wisdom and contemporary science. MUIH offers graduate degrees and certificates in a wide range of wellness fields, as well as programs for professional and personal development. In our on-campus Natural Care Center and community outreach settings, we provide compassionate and affordable healthcare from student interns and professional practitioners, and deliver more than 35,000 clinical treatments and consultations each year. Bevin Clare, M.S., R.H., CNS, Associate Professor Bevin Clareis a clinical herbalist and licensed nutritionist currently appointed as Associate Professor and Program Manager of the Post-Master's Certificate in Clinical Herbalism at the Maryland University of Integrative Health. She holds a MSc in Infectious Disease from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, serves on as an adjunct faculty member of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York Chiropractic College. Bevin has studied herbal medicine around the world and blends her knowledge of traditional uses of plants with modern science and contemporary healthcare strategies. Her clinical practice focuses on wellness, nutrition, infection, and women's health. She is a board member of the United Plant Savers, a group working to protect at-risk medicinal plants in North America. Bevin has been a professional member of the American Herbalists Guild for nearly a decade, on the governing council for 7 years and the vice president since 2010. To find herbalism events in your neck of the woods, head to www.herbrally.com/events

Today's episode is with Dan De Lion. Dan is an Earth Herbalist, Forager, Musician, and Teacher dedicated to working with Nature to facilitate the reunion of the people with our planetary purpose. He teaches through Return to Nature, providing classes, lectures, and seminars on wild food foraging, mushroom identification, herbal medicine making, as well as primitive and survival skills with a focus on wild foods and forest medicines. This workshop is titled: Yoga of Plants: Learn the foundational practices to apply Ayurvedic constitutional principles to intuit and understand herbal properties and their effects on the body through your own ability to taste wild plants! You can find the original recording for this class HERE on Dan's YouTube page. To check out many more foraging and herbalism articles, videos, webinars, and upcoming classes you should head to ReturnToNature.US Dan is also running a GoFundMe campaign for a pretty cool project. It's called the Foraging Herbal Roving Van School. For more info on this you can head to GoFundMe.com/returntonature Join Dan on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/returntonatureskills And Instagram: www.instagram.com/returntonature Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast please let Dan know on the socials, or leave us a comment in whatever podcast app you may be using. Much love. Mason www.herbrally.com

Today's episode is brought to you by the NorthWest Herb Symposium. I had the pleasure of attending this wonderful event a few years ago and I gotta say it's top notch. The location alone is worth the trip. It's located at the Camp Casey Conference Center in beautiful Coupeville Washington. Next year's event, titled "Botanicals at the Beach" will be from August 23 – 26 2018. For more information you can head to NWHerbSymposium.com. Also, you can purchase recordings from last year's event, as well as many other events from the symposium's organizer's website: www.treefarmtapes.com This was recorded at the 2017 NorthWest Herb Symposium. It's with none other than herbalist Natasha Clarke. CLASS DESCRIPTION: Tree medicine is an oft overlooked resource here in the Pacific Northwest but it was only 60 years ago that harvesting bark from the Cascara trees was a job that folks still remember doing to make some extra money. From the mighty Western Red Cedar and Black Cottonwood to the "weedy' Red Alder, Cascara and the lesser known Dogwood and Madrona, the trees in this bio region offer a pillar of support for many ailments. As a practicing herbalist focused on using local herbs, tree medicine compromises about 40% of the medicine I use. Of the trees that lend their medicine well on this land are Western Red Cedar, Red Alder, Black Cottonwood, Pacific Northwest Dogwood, Cascara, Hawthorn and Willow, and Wild Cherry to name just a few. Trees have a long physical history with man and an even longer relationship. We have been bough in arms with these silent sentient beings and I find that the medicine is rooted in this relationship. It leads to a reaching down and anchoring of ourselves in land, an understanding of where we are to grow from on our healing paths with this land that is our home, whether we are new to place or here all our lives. The tree's that I will be discussing are all trees that I use regularly in my practice and we will be talking about their medicine while we make the medicine. Natasha Clarke is a practicing herbalist on Camano Island, WA. She is an herbal educator and creator of the Herb Hunter on KSER. To find out more go to: www.InnerEarthHealing.com

Herbalist 7Song goes in depth on blue vervain in today's episode. He discusses identification, medicine making and medicinal uses of this wonderful plant ally. This audio is from a video on his YouTube page WHICH YOU CAN FIND HERE. For more info on 7Song along with his school's website, the Northeast School of Botanical Medicine, just head to 7Song.com. 7Song is an herbalist, teacher, and naturalist who lives in Ithaca, New York. He is the director and main instructor at the Northeast School of Botanical Medicine and is also a founding member and practitioner at the Ithaca Free Clinic. His focus includes herbal practice, free clinic work, first aid, wildcrafting, and botany. He also spends a lot of time taking photographs of things that run, crawl, fly, or photosynthesize. www.herbrally.com/podcast

On today's episode I narrate Mel Kasting's devil's club monograph. Here's a sampling from her monograph which you can find here: www.herbrally.com/monographs/devils-club If we parse this striking plant's latin name into three segments, we find 'opolo' meaning armored, 'panax' meaning heal-all, and 'horridus' meaning to stand on end, fiercely. So this plant literally means fiercely armored heal-all; an apt description. The first time I saw Devil's club, I was on a field trip with the Columbines School of Botanical Studies. We had been hiking along an incline and down below, in the moist bellows where two hills met, stood a large patch quietly looming over the smaller ground cover plants. I remember feeling awed by its prehistoric appearance. And a little timid, like I was about to meet someone I have looked up to for years. Talk about presence. For more monographs: www.herbrally.com/monographs You can visit Mel online at: eclecticschoolofherbalmedicine.com/mel-kasting Let us know what you thought of the episode! Thanks so much for listening. Mel Kasting is a Clinical Herbalist, Freelance Writer, and Assistant Clinic Director for the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine's student-led free clinic. She has been in practice for 5 years, collaborating with free clinics, and working with private clients all over the country.

NorthWest Herb Symposium organizer, Jay D. Johnson, welcomes the crowd to the 2017 meeting. SAVE THE DATE FOR 2018 "Botanicals at the Beach" August 23-26, 2018 Located on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound at the Camp Casey Conference Center, Coupeville, Washington

Today's episode is brought to you by the NorthWest Herb Symposium. I had the pleasure of attending this wonderful event a few years ago and I gotta say it's top notch. The location alone is worth the trip. It's located at the Camp Casey Conference Center in beautiful Coupeville Washington. Next year's event, titled "Botanicals at the Beach" will be from August 23 – 26 2018. For more information you can head to NWHerbSymposium.com. Also, you can purchase recordings from last year's event, as well as many other events from the symposium's organizer's website: www.treefarmtapes.com Today's episode was recorded at the 2017 NorthWest Herb Symposium. It's with none other than David Hoffmann. What can herbalism do as opposed to the hype? What actions are relevant, what tonics can support the various body systems. We will discuss acetylcholinesterase inhibitors from Sage to Huperzia. How do these herbs actually effect the aging body and mind. David, a Fellow of Britain's National Institute of Medical Herbalists, has been a clinical phytotherapist for more than twenty-five years. He started his herbal practice in Wales, continuing at the Findhorn community in Scotland, and has been practicing in California since 1986. A long time activist in the environmental and peace movements, he ran for parliament in Britain for the Green party in 1983. He is one of the founding members and a past president of the American Herbalists Guild and is on the advisory boards of the American Botanical Council and HerbalGram. The author of seventeen books, including the highly regarded The Complete Illustrated Holistic Herbal, An Elders' Herbal,Medical Herbalism and The Herbal Handbook, Hoffmann teaches phytotherapy throughout the English-speaking world and is currently a faculty member of the California School of Herbal Studies. He is also a visiting faculty member at Bastyr University, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the National College of Phytotherapy, and the Rocky Mountain School of Botanical Studies.

On today's episode I narrate jim mcdonald's wild cherry monograph. Here's a sampling from his monograph which you can find here: www.herbrally.com/monographs/wild-cherry When considering wild cherry, most will immediately think of its use in the address of coughs and colds; indeed, such a staple it was that when plant medicine was being replaced by chemical drugs "wild cherry" was retained as the flavor of cough syrups and drops, because, well... that's just what those things were supposed to taste like. The actual bark, though, does much more than provide flavor. Wild cherry is a respiratory relaxant/antispasmodic and, in varying degrees, an astringent tonic. A cooling sedative to lung tissue, it excels when heat and irritability undermine healthy expectoration. Now, here's where I want to paint a little word picture that really sums up wild cherry's respiratory sphere of influence perfectly; that's really what all herb writers want to do when we write these things. But, darnit, Michael Moore did it so well I can't resist quoting him: "Chokecherry or wild cherry bark is a simple sedative for cardiopulmonary excitability. If your child is lying in bed, glowing a dull infrared and breathing rapidly with a dry cough, give him/her chokecherry. That hot, vibratile pulse of blood through the lungs can be counterproductive, not nourishing the membranes as well as needed and maybe even slowing the defensive responses to a viral infection. The hectic breathing can dry out mucous membranes and harden secretions, making them little more than dried blobs adhering to the bronchial membranes---difficult enough for an adult to expectorate, very difficult for a respiratory-impatient child to handle." Yeah, Moore was awesome. For more monographs: www.herbrally.com/monographs You can visit jim online at HerbCraft.org Let us know what you thought of the episode! Thanks so much for listening. jim mcdonald offers a knowledge of herbalism that blends western folk and indigenous views with the Vitalist traditions of the 19th century, presented through story, humor and common sense. He has taught classes throughout the US, hosts the website www.herbcraft.org and has written for Plant Healer Magazine, the Journal of Ontario Herbalist Association and Llewelyn's Herbal Almanac. He is currently writing a "Great Lakes Herbal" and "Foundational Herbcraft". jim is a manic wildcrafter and medicine maker.

Today's episode is with herbalist and author Ellen Evert Hopman. She's going to teach us all about the Doctrine of Signatures. This class was taught at the 2017 New England Women's Herbal Gathering in New Hampshire. Learn an ancient plant classification system that was developed in a time before most people could read. Did the plant grow in sun or shade? In damp soil or in a dry area? The shape of a leaf, the color of a 9 flower, the taste of an herb were all guides to which body system or organ the plant was appropriate for. Although you'll learn a lot in this episode, you should look into her book: Secret Medicines from Your Garden - Plants for Healing, Spirituality and Magic She covers the Doctrine of Signatures along with a lot of other herbal and magical concepts. To find out more about Ellen, you can visit her online at elleneverthopman.com. Thanks Ellen for sharing this class with us! Hopman is the author of a number of books and has been a teacher of Herbalism since 1983 and of Druidism since 1990. She has presented on Druidism, herbal lore, tree lore, Paganism and magic at conferences, festivals, and events in Northern Ireland, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and in the United States. She has participated in numerous radio and television programs including National Public Radio's "Vox Pop" and the Gary Null show in New York. She presented a weekly "herb report" for WRSI radio out of Greenfield, MA for over a year and was a featured subject in a documentary about Druids on A&E Television's; "The Unexplained" (Secret Societies, February 1999). She is a Master Herbalist and professional member of the American Herbalists Guild (AHG) and lay Homeopath who holds an M.Ed. in Mental Health Counseling. She is a founding member of The Order of the White Oak (Ord Na Darach Gile) and its former Co-Chief, a Bard of the Gorsedd of Caer Abiri, and a Druidess of the Druid Clan of Dana. She is currently ArchDruid of Tribe of the Oak, an international Druid teaching Order based in New England, USA. She was Vice President of The Henge of Keltria, an international Druid Fellowship, for nine years and has been at times a member of The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship (ADF).