Medicine Stories

My most beloved herbal elder and I talk about our favorite subject- women throughout time using plants for self care, family healing, and community connection. After nearly 4 decades as a practicing herbalist and teacher, and in an age of informational overabundance, Kami has seen what actually works when it comes to truly embodying herbal knowing.

Find Kami’s freebies & learn more abo...

Suuzi and I continue the discussion sparked by my last episode about culty trends in the wellness space by talking about her past with Kundalini yoga- what drew her in and, eventually, how noticing the state of nourishment of those deepest into the cult precipitated her exit. We then catch listeners up on our midlife metabolic meltdown hEaLinG jOuRnEyS and what path we’re taking forward as we cont...

GNM is an alt health trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. It is attractive to so many (including me and my guest, once) because it acknowledges the role that emotions and trauma play in physical health and symptom manifestation, something that mainstream medicine still somehow refuses to do.

But just because some aspects of an ideology are true and helpful does not mean ...

What metabolic patterns did you inherit from your parents, and what may you have passed down to your own children? Many behavioral issues, and even what are usually considered personality traits (like that of high sensitivity), can be linked to mineral imbalances and overall health. 

Heavy metals often accumulate in individuals due to stress, compromised metabolic function, or ancestra...

Fertility is not just the ability to conceive, but is an indicator of overall health and the capacity to nurture life; it is how we extend genetic strength across time and space into generations we will never know. Pregnancy and menopause are transformative states that reveal underlying metabolic and hormonal imbalances, emphasizing the complex interplay between biochemistry, psychology, and lifes...

In which I read a few pieces from my new Substack. Bone, blood, milk, and marrow... Nourishing Motherlines is a collection of memoir-adjacent personal writings exploring my evolving understanding of nourishment (not nutrients), how my mitochondria and minerals were inherited from my motherline (and yours from yours), my hEaLiNg JoUrNeY as I navigate hypothyroid and hypoadrenal exhaustion and a host of related symptoms, what I am fo...

Chinese Medicine holds that women’s bodies are 10x harder to heal than men’s, as our reproductive system is biologically much more precious and metabolically more intensive to maintain. In this conversation my good friend, third time guest, and Doctor of Chinese Medicine Suuzi and I catch up one year after we both underwent severe energy loss to share how we’ve rebuilt and healed.

We t...

The times are unprecedented and there is no template for the future. We all feel this, and we feel the overwhelm of information, influence, and opinions.

Herbalism, as it always has, offers us sanctuary from everything vying to take hold of our attention and life force.

Not so that we can check out in an endless fog of self care...

Nothing exemplifies the magic of nature more than honeybees. They are insects yet their colonies are akin to a mammalian being, they produce numerous healing substances from their bodies and within their hives, and they have been revered and mythologized since time immemorial by countless cultures. Beekeepers live longer than folks in any other profession, and being in relationship with bees is de...

“I pray to the dead to help me remember who I am while I’m still alive.”

To be in relationship with those who’ve gone before us is a deeply human way of being. Our ancestors knew that the “departed” never left, and that they answer when called. The way modern Western people conceive of the dead is a deviation that discards millennia of human knowing. Let us pray to the ancestors to hel...

It is estimated that half of all Americans have chronic health issues, and yet these conditions are new to the human species. What has happened? And how does an afflicted individual navigate a medical system that dismisses them and offers little help, embedded within a culture obsessed with self improvement and the hero’s journey of triumph? Sarah and I talk about the multifactorial nature of chro...

Healing is communal. Settle in softly for this wide-ranging conversation with my most requested guest. Sophie and I talk chronic illness and trauma, diagnosis as blessing and as hex, the theater of medicine, the aquatic nature of memory, and the entanglements of time.

RESOURCES:

Sophie on Instagram

Sophie’s newsletter Make Me Good Soil

Sophie’s books...

The sun rules the rhythms and the well-being of all life on Earth, and humans are no exception to this rule. With the very recent (evolutionarily speaking) advent of indoor living and the even more recent advent of indoor lighting, we have inadvertently shut down the vital communication between sunlight and our cells. This is as upstream as it gets when it comes to health, and when we come back in...

Suuzi has been one of my best friends for 15 years, and our lives have taken parallel tracks recently- deeply interested in health & natural living for decades, we have nevertheless both found ourselves in total burnout at the edge of collapse in our early 40s. We share what got us here (and the irony that so much of it is doing things we truly believed were making us healthy), the current state o...

We can’t talk about fascia, the connective tissue that touches every single cell in the body, without talking about water, memory, and the quantum information that travels along this network at speeds 1000x faster than biochemical/neuronal signaling. When we bring tactile witnessing to our fascia through presence and touch, mountains move. Get ready to have your mind blown and, if you’re anything ...

Our modern disconnection from land and lineage mirrors the culturally normal- but biologically abnormal- separation between mother and baby, parents and children. The consequences of these intertwined attachment wounds are vast. But many of us are dreaming into a different way forward. Let us speak truthfully about what isn’t working, divest from the systems that break our sacred bonds to the Eart...

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How we eat (not just *what* we eat) is how we receive life, and our state of nourishment determines everything from our fertility to how we perceive the passage of time. Disembodiment and dietary confusion run amok, but beneath the noise is the quiet wisdom of our biology. When we create safety...

Many of us yearn for the lifeways of our ancient ancestors, and evolutionary mismatch can account for the majority of today’s health issues, yet we cannot go back in time nor fully recreate their lifestyles in our modern world. Let us find well-being, nourishment, and the richness of community in the here & now, and stop buying into the false dichotomy between Earth connection and technology.

Kids today face more challenges- and are showing more signs of distress- than ever before. Parents must learn to effectively co-regulate, repair when things go awry, and create the right environments for our children (be they dandelions, orchids, or somewhere in between). When trending cultural ideologies come to replace ancient biological reality, we must refuse to check our brains at the door an...