Podcast 271: A Whole New Body

When people start learning herbalism, it’s not unusual for them to begin to feel like there’s a lot “wrong” with their bodies. Some of this comes from a new recognition that symptoms they’ve been tolerating are actually a sign of something deeper, or indicate a need for change. Since it’s the new year, we’re thinking about this feeling of a need for “a whole new body” – what it means, and how to achieve it (or something more realistic, but close).

It’s actually a lucky thing to have this kind of realization! Because it is, in many ways, true for most of us. And not only because ‘modern life’ is difficult and damaging, but because it’s simply a fact of nature that it’s difficult to be and stay healthy. Our culture often imposes a moralistic frame on health, but here’s the truth:

You’re not Good if you’re healthy. You’re not Bad if you’re unhealthy. Health is not a moral quality!

Our world has changed over time, and so have we. What we do to stay healthy, and what we struggle with that harms us, have all shifted through the centuries. New technologies and medicines may be miraculous, and ancient herbal practices may be traditional, but neither is The Answer To Everything For Everyone. Best is if we can take the strengths of each.

Working as an herbalist to make a whole new body starts at the foundations: what’s the current baseline? How are your habits helping or hindering your path to health? Working on the five pillars of good health is where we begin, along with herbs to enhance or support or accelerate that effort. Alongside some herbs to directly address (or even palliate) the most troubling current issues – and a big dose of encouragement, inspiration, and accountability – these interventions can be deeply transformative. Given time.

None of us will ever be perfect, or “young again”. We can’t really make a whole new body – but we can help our body do the best it can, and herbs can help.

If you’d like to start taking care of your body for the long haul, our Community Herbalist program will equip you to do so! This program prepares you to support your family & community with holistic herbal methods.

Like all our offerings, this bundle of self-paced online video courses comes with free access to twice-weekly live Q&A sessions with us, lifetime access to current & future course material, open discussion threads integrated in each lesson, an active student community, study guides, quizzes & capstone assignments, and more!

If you have a moment, it would help us a lot if you could subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen. This helps others find us more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Episode Transcript

Katja (00:00:14):
Hi, I’m Katja.

Ryn (00:00:15):
And I’m Ryn.

Katja (00:00:16):
And we’re here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ryn (00:00:19):
And on the internet everywhere thanks to the power of the podcast.

Katja (00:00:22):
Woo-Hoo.

Ryn (00:00:23):
Happy Herby New Year.

Katja (00:00:24):
Woo-Hoo.

Ryn (00:00:25):
Herby New Year.

Katja (00:00:28):
That’s actually hard to say.

Ryn (00:00:29):
A little bit. A little bit.

Katja (00:00:31):
Yeah. 2026. It’s going to be a very herby year, and I want to kick it off. I got really excited because a student wrote in a question. And then I was like oh, this has to be a podcast. So, I want to kick it off with the question. Are you ready? So the student wrote. So, the more that I look into herbalism for myself to begin with, I realize there’s so much I need to work on. It gets so overwhelming, and I don’t know where to start. Is it my digestion, or my sleep, or my frazzled nervous system? Or am I just a hypochondriac? I know I will slowly get through it all. But is this normal that once you start thinking about what to work on first, you realize you might just need a whole new body? Yes. So, the very short answer is yes, that’s normal. This person is not a hypochondriac.

Ryn (00:01:22):
Nope. A standard experience of a student learning about herbs, learning about health. Learning about all the different ways that things can go wrong and wondering hey, is that happening to me right now?

Katja (00:01:32):
Yeah. So, since this is the New Year’s resolution time of year, and this is sort of a start fresh kind of a topic…

Ryn (00:01:44):
New year, new me kind of thing, you know?

Katja (00:01:46):
Yeah. It seemed like it was really appropriate for right now.

Ryn (00:01:48):
Yeah. So, that’s our topic today. But first we want to remind you that we’re not doctors. We are herbalists and holistic health educators.

Katja (00:01:55):
The ideas discussed in this podcast do not constitute medical advice. No state or federal authority licenses herbalists in the United States. So, these discussions are for educational purposes only.

Ryn (00:02:06):
We want to remind you that good health doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Good health doesn’t exist as an objective standard. It’s influenced by your individual needs, experiences, and goals. So, keep in mind we’re not attempting to present a single, dogmatic right way that you should adhere to.

Katja (00:02:22):
Everyone’s body is different. So, the things that we’re talking about may or may not apply directly to you. But we hope they’ll give you some new information to think about and some ideas to research and experiment with further.

Ryn (00:02:33):
Yeah. Finding your way to better health is both your right and your own personal responsibility. That doesn’t mean you’re alone on the journey, and it doesn’t mean that you’re to blame for your current state of health. But it does mean that the final decision, when you’re considering any course of action discussed on the internet, prescribed by a physician, whatever, that’s always your choice to make. All right.

Katja (00:02:54):
All right. So, this student who asked this question is working on our Community Herbalist program. And that is where you’re starting to think systemically about health. So, each of the body systems individually, and then the whole body as an integrated whole. Like the whole body is a system as well.

Ryn (00:03:17):
A system of systems, yeah.

Taking Care of Your Otter

Katja (00:03:18):
A system of systems. Yeah, exactly. And so there’s the Digestive Health course, the Urinary Health course, the Cardiovascular Health course, the Neurological & Emotional Health course, Immune Health. All the different parts of the body, they’re all in there with anatomy, with physiology, with all of the ways that that system works, all of the ways that it breaks down, and all of the ways to build it back up again and to repair specific problems. So, that’s what she is working on right now. And that’s why she’s like oh my goodness. Where do I even start because a lot of these things seem to apply to me? And I want to just say right from the start that I feel like this is such a lucky realization for anyone to have very early in their herbal educational experience. Because the reality is that yes, you do in fact need a whole new body. And a lot of that is just simply because modern life is not easily compatible with our body’s needs for health. In our house we talk about taking care of the otters because there was a David Attenborough… one of the many things that David Attenborough has made. All of them are wonderful, and this one was about creatures in the sea. And he was talking about sea otters and talking about how many hours a day they spend taking care of their fur. And it’s a lot of hours. It’s like 70% of all of their time they spend taking care of their fur. Because they have to in order to survive. Otherwise they’ll die of hypothermia and all these things.

Ryn (00:05:10):
To float, to stay warm. Yeah, all that stuff.

Katja (00:05:12):
All that stuff, right? And if you are thinking wow, 70% of all of their time spent taking care of their body. I certainly do not spend 70% of my time taking care of all my body, right? But maybe you need to spend a little more time than you are right now. And I think our whole culture needs to spend a little more time than all of us are right now.

Ryn (00:05:35):
Yeah. In a way our culture is kind of oriented towards using a certain resource for everything, right, and that’s money. And so we even have things like time is money. We’ve equated these two resources, but they’re not actually the same thing. And while it’s true that people who are fortunate enough to have a lot of money can buy their way through certain problems, not all of them, not all of them for sure. Sometimes it literally just requires time. So yeah. We’ll sometimes turn around to each other and be like don’t forget the otters.

Katja (00:06:08):
Right, right, right. Now, I said at the beginning of this before we turned the camera on that I wasn’t going to go off script today at all. And I have already done so. So, let get back to the plan here, which is modern life is not easily compatible with our body’s needs for health. So, your whole body does in fact need a reset because you have not been taking care of your otters. And that’s not your fault. It’s just the way that our culture works, what we prioritize other people. Okay. So, it’s completely reasonable to consider your own life, and your habits, and the things that you could change, and also mitigation for things that you can’t change, right? Like maybe you can’t change your work schedule. You can’t change when you go to sleep at night or something like that. So okay, well, if we can’t change it, can we mitigate it? Can we support it in some kind of way?

Ryn (00:06:59):
Yeah. That slips directly into herbal strategies a lot of times, right? Like you’ve maxed out quantity improvements in terms of sleep. Now we’ve got to work on quality. And so hypnotics, and nervines, and sedatives, and things like that, they can make a huge difference there. Yeah.

Katja (00:07:13):
So, you don’t need any kind of specific diagnosis to know that sitting at a desk all day is hard on your body, right? And in our culture we kind of really gravitate toward those diagnoses because there are legitimizing. But I just want to say, you’re already legitimate. You’re not bad if you have a diagnosis. But also you don’t need a diagnosis to start taking action to repair damage that you can already see happening. If you sit all day, and then you’re stiff in your hips. Well, okay, those two things are connected. And you can go ahead and take action towards improving that situation.

Ryn (00:07:53):
Right. And of course, this isn’t only about desk jobs, right? Working in a factory all day, working as a line cook all day, whatever it is, those can also be hard on the body. They might be hard in different ways. There could be repetitive movements, or a lot of stress on certain joints in your body, or things like that. But in either case, if you’re seeing things there that apply to you, that doesn’t make you a hypochondriac. You’re just noticing areas where your body needs some extra support, care, kindness, and otter time.

Finding Answers to Health by Looking to the Past

Katja (00:08:22):
Otter time. All right. So, modern life, the evils of modern life, right, we hear that all the time. And then the response to that, especially in certain circles, and the herbal world is one of those circles. The response is usually the past, right, like all the answers will be found there.

Ryn (00:08:43):
Yes. We must return them to the past.

Katja (00:08:45):
So too long to read, the answer is going to be ha-ha, no. But let’s have a little tangent into the past for just a moment, right? Because sitting is bad, and factory work is bad. But factory work today or coal mining today, like my ancestors were in the coal mines. And coal mining today is a dangerous and hard job. But let me tell you how much more dangerous and harder it was in the past. So, there were not worker protections in the past. There were not weekends in the past. People worked ridiculous hours. They were crammed into industrialized slums. And if you think I’ll just go further back than that. I’ll just go further back before industry and whatever. There is not a perfect time to return to. Life is not perfect. There is no historical place in the past where all people were perfectly healthy. There is no place in the past where all people were free of disease. So, put aside that whole modern life is the evil because you live in modern life. And if modern life is the evil, then you might as well just roll over and die now because there’s nothing you can do about it. This is where you live.

Ryn (00:10:08):
Yeah. In a sense there’s this tendency for people to simply project in any direction away from where they are. And sometimes that is things were perfect in a particular moment, in a particular place in the past in that direction. Sometimes it’s if we just keep doing it, things will become perfect in a utopian future that we’re working toward with our advancements, right? In either case it’s distracting you or taking you away from where you are at the moment.

Katja (00:10:33):
And in this moment you have some control. Maybe not over every single thing, maybe not over all the things that you should have control over, but you have some control. And so we want to stay in that place where there’s control.

Ryn (00:10:46):
Yeah. And the other element too here is to say that it’s not that we can simply point to the past or the future and say that’s where everything’s perfect. But we can acknowledge at the same time that there are good things in the habits, and the ways, and the food ways, and the whatever else of the past in certain areas and for certain people. And that there could be them in the future. And we can imagine that, and we can work toward it. There’s goodness in both directions that we can bring toward us where we are now.

Katja (00:11:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also there’s goodness in the now. Like if we think about the past, and we go back to the challenges that they had. And we think about what would even just my grandparents or my great-grandparents, what would they think about my life? They would think oh my goodness, I have it so easy. And they would think this is some utopian future. And so kind of keeping that perspective of like yes, a lot of things have improved. And so we can look back to the past to whatever we can find there that will be useful for us. We can learn what we have to learn from science and think about okay, there are some useful things here. There are useful advances that we’ve made. And we can notice our own experiences. We can notice the experiences that our communities are having. And with all of that and even thinking forward into where do we want things to be going, we can do all of that to chart a course as best as we can. To make our decisions right now using all of that information, not just some mythical past where things were perfect.

Ryn (00:12:36):
Yeah. Finding all the different elements of good pieces that we can bring forward to try to cultivate health for ourselves, for our friends, for our community. Yeah. Because health is good, but health is not a virtue. And we want to dwell on that for a moment because this is an important piece of what we’re trying to get across here today, right? So, it doesn’t make you good in a moral sense if you are healthy. And it doesn’t make you bad if you’re unhealthy in any way, right? Throughout history and in different places and times people have looked on particular illnesses, or conditions, or whatever as having a moral element to them.

Katja (00:13:18):
Or any illness or condition as having a moral element, right? And this is I think the most famous example of this in recent history is the Nazis. This was a huge part of their platform. They did not invent eugenics. It was really trendy even just at the turn of the 1900s. And even in the late 1800s it was super, super trendy, but they really refined it.

Ryn (00:13:45):
They industrialized it.

Katja (00:13:46):
Industrialized it, right. Exactly.

Ryn (00:13:48):
And made it into a factory process basically, you know?

Katja (00:13:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there have literally always been wellness crazes. Often they have been about money. So snake oil and patent medicines. And listen, when we talk about snake oil, I think it’s really funny because of all the things that would fall into the category of snake oil, the actual snake oil is probably the thing that was actually useful. Because snake oil was really like an omega-3 supplement just like cod liver oil.

Ryn (00:14:21):
Like the original one, right? But then of course what happened right away was knockoff, bad versions made from the wrong snakes. Yeah.

Katja (00:14:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So recognizing that even if we look back through these patent medicines. And then people today when we talk about GMP, and that people who make herbal products are not supposed to talk about what those herbal products can do for you. This is why. Because all of the snake oil salesmen, all the patent medicines, that’s what they were doing. They were coming up with these medicines that nobody even knew all the ingredients to. And then they were just making these ridiculous claims about all the things that these medicines would heal. And they would come into town, and they would sell a hundred bottles of their Dr. Jim’s perfect cure syrup. And then they would leave town, and go to the next town, and do it again. And so today when people are complaining about GMP rules that say you can’t tell and sell, I’m like that is so that people will trust us. It’s actually good. It is to avoid all of that nonsense. Anyway, all of that scamminess, right? So, all of that stuff was in the past too. And today, and also back then, if you had the education, you could see right through it. It’s not like people were naive back then, but today we’re not. No, no. It’s just if you are checked out, some of the scams are pretty sophisticated. And sometimes the scams are operating on hope, or fear, or all these other things. And so whatever, my point here is that scams are not new. Telling people you’re bad for being sick is not new. Finding virtue or purity in health is not new. Just research Kellogg’s. Just read the master cleanse, all of this stuff. And okay, none of my examples went back past 1875 or so. But you could go way past, way earlier than that and find all the same stuff again. But lately I’ve been reading a lot of books about this particular era. And so there’s just a lot of really rich stuff there.

Ryn (00:16:50):
And I mean, in every one of these cases there’s a seed of truth here that then got grown up into a thicket of thorns that will get people to walk into it. And now you’re all tangled in, and you’ve got thorns all over you. And you say this is just where I hang out now, right? So yeah, it’s true that you can enhance your liver function a bit with some lemon juice, right? It is a plant. It is an herb. It has some kind of physiological actions inside of the body. But drinking lemonade for a week will not make you a more moral person. It will not purify your soul.

Katja (00:17:24):
Yeah. It will not clean you out. Yeah, whatever.

Ryn (00:17:28):
Like not inherently. If you’re doing other work alongside, if you’re whatever, okay maybe. But we need to decouple those ideas. Yeah.

Life is Too Fast, Even in the 1800s

Katja (00:17:37):
Okay, so coming back to that idea about modern life does not support our health needs, right? So part of the reason that I’ve been reading so much about the late 1800s is because I’ve been studying tuberculosis for the past year. But in a lot of that you get a lot of other insights. And there are so many. There are newspaper articles. There are all these accounts of people in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s saying the exact same stuff you hear today. Life is too fast. So back then automobiles were really new, they were fairly rare, and they could travel about 25 to 30 miles an hour. Now, I want to put a little asterisk to that, because if you happen to be a car fan, then you know that yes, there were some even before the 1900s that got souped up and could go 60 or even 70 miles per hour. But…

Ryn (00:18:33):
Terrifying.

Katja (00:18:34):
Yeah. Like that’s what they were racing at back then. But no, but an automobile went about 25 to 30 miles an hour. And people were like oh my goodness, this is scandalously fast. Like they literally had psychological responses to being able to move that fast. But if you just try driving 25 miles an hour even on a country road, you’re going to get frustrated. You are, right? And so okay, so back to the late 1800s, people were literally talking about technology is too much. It is ruining our way of life. That is why we are all so nervous. It is why we are all so anxious. That’s why everyone feels like this. In quotes that’s why everyone feels like this. And so they weren’t wrong. But their solutions like ours were sometimes questionable. And in this point in history, this is when also Rudolph Steiner and all these other people were coming up with these back to nature communes. Well, okay, it’s not the only time that we’ve done back to nature communes, but it was one of the times. And if you have heard people talk about grounding by being barefoot and the magnetism, and the pulse of the earth, and all that stuff through your feet, oh, all that stuff was already happening in the late 1800s. And the reason it was already happening was because people felt that progress was moving too fast, and that it was disturbing human health.

Ryn (00:20:08):
Yeah. Now, none of this is us saying oh, those foolish people of the past. They didn’t understand the benefits that these technologies would bring. And now we have a more enlightened and progressed perspective on this. No. And some of the things they were saying there were absolutely correct, right? And even if we want to go back even further and look at the so-called industrial revolution in England when it was mechanizing the weaving industry. And that was where the Luddites came into play. And like Ned Ludd is kind of in the vein of Robinhood, you know, like a semi mythical figure that was used as a rallying point for a lot of different efforts that came together. But like there, the problem was never about the new technology. And the Luddites knew that. That was no question for them. Luddite has become this word that means people who hate new technology, and are afraid of it, and want to just destroy machines out of fear or whatever. But really it was like no, we’re being abused. You are taking this new technology, and you the owners are collecting all the extra profits to yourself and taking away people’s jobs. Instead of just being like hey, look. Suddenly we can make a lot more. Everybody can benefit together, right? So, as is almost always the case with these kind of technological advancements that leave people behind or scare people because their world is changing, it’s like a social problem more than simply a technological one.

Katja (00:21:32):
You were saying about we’re being abused. And some of that you were referring to profiteering on the part of the owners and everything. But also just a lot because of the mechanization adult workers were being fired. And orphanages were being emptied into the factories. Because with the machines children could be trained to do the work. And because they were orphans, there was no one to speak up for them. And so we’re really, really talking about actual physical, intense abuse. Yeah.

Ryn (00:22:08):
Yeah. So, whew. But again, it’s not about the technology. It’s not about those elements. It’s about the way that people are utilizing, and responding, and feeling their culture change as that moves into their lives, right?

Embrace the New & Keep Old Ways That Work

Katja (00:22:23):
Yeah. On one hand, I delight. I’m almost gleeful when I see these parallels. When I see people in the late 1800s saying the exact same words that we say. And then I giggle because ha-ha, your car could only go 25 miles an hour. But I find that very charming. But I also find comradery in that, and it helps me to get more perspective. There is no need to throw all of the tools out the window. But even with these tools, the struggle that we’re having, like how do I set boundaries for myself on my phone? How do I keep work-life balance? All these problems that we’re having are more than a hundred years old. They’re more than 200. They’re old. They’re old problems. And I find that comforting because it means that our health problems today are not uniquely new and unsolvable. It has always been hard to keep humans healthy. You can go all the way back to the oldest human remains that we have, right? Whether we’re talking about Ötzi the iceman, whether we’re talking about the Egyptian mummies, whether we are talking about prehistoric bone remains. And my favorite version of this or my favorite example of this is there was a study done – I’m pretty sure it was in southern France – of a hunter-gatherer group who lived concurrently with an early agricultural group. And looking at the health impacts on their skeletons between the two groups who lived within like a hundred kilometers of each other, had very similar weather, very similar soil, all lots of similar stuff. But there was a divergence in culture between the groups. And my point here is that no matter who you are looking at throughout the oldest history that we’ve got, there are health problems. It was challenging to keep people healthy. It always has been. So, when we think about modern times, hey, a lot of the things that could kill you have been resolved or largely improved.

Ryn (00:24:50):
At least in parte. Like we have cures for tuberculosis, but not everybody has the cures.

Katja (00:24:57):
That’s true. Right?

Ryn (00:24:59):
So, just with that little asterisk on everything here.

Katja (00:25:01):
Right. Or we can do amazing things to repair the body after traumatic burns, and broken bones, and other kinds of traumatic injuries.

Ryn (00:25:10):
Yeah. Those things that would a million percent have killed you a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand.

Katja (00:25:16):
Antibiotics are literally miracle cures. We turn to them far too often. And that alone is not a… This is a setup that happens. Okay, well, antibiotics, but we use them too often and antibiotic resistance. Y’all, it’s important to recognize that antibiotic resistance started in the very first year after antibiotics were invented.

Ryn (00:25:41):
Yeah, the bacteria didn’t like wait.

Katja (00:25:43):
Yeah. It’s not a new problem.

Ryn (00:25:44):
They respond to what they’re exposed to. Yeah.

Katja (00:25:47):
Right. Just like we are always adapting and learning, hey, so are even the smallest organisms on the planet always adapting and learning. So, I think that’s important too, because recognizing that our problems are not new helps a lot. So, okay. But I think it’s also very important to just acknowledge that antibiotics are miracle cures for diseases that absolutely would’ve killed people in the past. And some of those diseases or some places where we use antibiotics today we don’t really need to. But some places where we use antibiotics today, there is no natural alternative. There is literally nothing else that will save you from dying in some cases. And tuberculosis is absolutely one of those cases, right?

Ryn (00:26:41):
And there’s a reason for this, right? There’s a reason that we overuse antibiotics as a habit. And it’s because in this country the trend was, and has been, and continues to be that as we invent something new, we forget the old. We discard it. We scorn it a lot of times, right? And in a lot of cases this definitely has a profit motive, and a competition motive, and things like that. But it’s worth saying that in a lot of cases the new tech, the new drug, the new cure, the new whatever doesn’t do everything that the old stuff or the other approaches did. And that some of that old stuff can still be useful, right? It can be helpful maybe on its own, maybe in combination with the new stuff. Yeah.

Katja (00:27:29):
Lately I’ve been seeing all kinds of articles about car manufacturers giving up on touch screens inside of cars and realizing the buttons were just better. Because with a button there’s a tactile thing that you can reach over and adjust a button without having to look. But with a touch screen there’s nothing tactile, so you have to look to see where the button is that you have to touch. And so that is really appealing to me of realizing it’s not like cars are bad. It’s not like even controls are bad. Just hey, buttons worked better actually than touchscreens did. In this case let’s keep those buttons. And I think that that is a really good way of thinking about health. That there are some amazing things that are possible because of medical technology, and that doesn’t mean that our old tools have no use anymore. Some of our old tools they haven’t found a replacement for yet. And so I’m glad that we have the tools that we have if like heaven forfend that I should ever be in a burning building. I am so grateful that I can go to a trauma center, and they can deal with the awful things that happen to your skin. These are terrible, terrible thoughts, but I’m so grateful that that stuff is available. And I am also so grateful that I know how to support my own body before things are traumatic, before things are catastrophic. I’m grateful that I have tools that are in my own control and that I know how to use them. I’m grateful for both.

Ryn (00:29:13):
Yeah. So, you know, we’re a culture that largely is suffering in terms of health from chronic problems, right? People get sick, people break bones, whatever. But the majority of what’s imposing on people’s health from day-to-day is these chronic issues. And this is a place where traditional strategies and herbs and holistic approaches can really create a ton of improvement. And that’s good. Because there may not be new technological solutions for all of those problems. Or there might be some, but they’re hard or expensive to access, not available to people wherever they are. They might be incomplete in the actions that they do, right? They solve part of the problem, make the symptoms go away, but it’s not really resolved. That’s incomplete. That’s incomplete. And so the point here is just to be really clear that when we’re thinking about health, we’re trying not to be dogmatic about it. We are trying not to align ourself with only one team or to imagine that this is about teams, and that we need to pick one. It’s not a binary issue, right? Health is difficult. Health is complicated. Health changes for one person and for groups of people. And every generation tries new things.

Katja (00:30:28):
And that’s okay. That’s not bad. So, there was a time when herbs were new. And that is new because hey, what’s this plant? I’ve never seen this before. Like new to one person, new to an entire culture, new to a place because they moved. And when people colonized this country, they brought their plants with them. And now there’s this whole debate around colonizer plants, and invasive species, and whatever else. But in the early days when those plants were first being introduced, native populations often looked at those plants and said hey, cool. A new plant, what can I do with this? And, you know, so thinking about the different ways that people come in contact with new ideas, even when those new ideas seem very old.

Ryn (00:31:20):
Yeah. And I mean, that happened through commerce, you know? When China learned about what we now call American ginseng, they were super hyped about it. And they we’re like all right, send me 12,000 ships full of that, which persists to the day. Yeah.

Katja (00:31:34):
Yeah. Good. Okay. So, the point here is that you never need to draw a line somewhere and say that only what’s before it is valid. And you never need to draw a line somewhere and say only what came after it is valid because human health is complicated. And we should look at all the tools that we have available and be like well, could that help me? I mean, let’s make smart choices, and let’s do our best to evaluate the best option and sort of think it through before we… But at some point you are going to just do some experiments. And so it’s important not to put labels of good and bad or virtuous and the other thing on to different types of interventions. Just educate yourself as much as you can. See what’s going to work for you. And then try it and keep trying.

Herbs Don’t Treat Diseases & the Importance of Language

Ryn (00:32:40):
Yeah. So, let’s talk about some herbal and natural strategies oriented towards the student’s original question, right? Do I need a whole new body? How, how do I get that? What is that going to look like?

Katja (00:32:51):
We have now completed our history lesson. So, now we’re ready to move forward.

Ryn (00:32:56):
Because sometimes you do need a whole new body, or you feel like you do, or you need a tuneup, right? Okay, so let’s say, as you’ve probably heard us say before, herbs are not here to treat diseases. And that’s not only because of the laws in the United States that make it illegal for an herbalist to say I will now treat your disease with these herbs because of scope of practice and so on. It’s because this is literally true. There isn’t an herb that’s going to treat MS or that’s going to cure bipolar disorder. That’s just not the way that this works.

Katja (00:33:32):
Diagnoses, when we think about illness states… And all of this is around the part of the question where it was like am I just a hypochondriac, right? Okay. Diagnoses are words in a specialized language. So, I don’t know if you know, but my actual degrees when I went to college are in foreign language and linguistic theory. So, I often look at the world through language. Diagnoses are a specialized language. They are not a fundamental truth. The name of the diagnosis is not what makes it true. The fact that my hair is whatever color it is, that’s a hard question to answer today as it’s gray, but some of it not gray, and some of it purple, and some of it fading, and like ah. Okay, whatever. But even if we came up with a perfect word to describe whatever nonsense color my hair is right now, if we went to a different country and people spoke a different language, they would come up with a different word to describe it. The word does not make it true. It already is true. So, a germ is true. A germ is a real thing. A tumor is a real thing. An accurate diagnosis is real, but the word does not make it real. The word just describes it.

Ryn (00:35:02):
Yeah. It’s real in the sense that it can be helpful, right? And like anything that can be helpful, it can also become harmful if it’s not used in the right way. We can use a knife to cut up our carrots, or we can use our knife to harm ourselves or somebody else. Okay. So, a diagnosis can be helpful if it gives some clarity about what’s going on, and if it points a direction for things to try and see if they solve the problem. It can be harmful if we get too attached to it or begin to treat it as if it exists as some kind of independent thing.

Katja (00:35:34):
Yeah, like that it is a foundational truth. It is only the description of what’s happening for you. The reason that this is so important is because as herbalist, we use different words to describe what we see in people’s bodies. We are not saying that oh, that diagnosis is wrong. Let me give you my assessment. We are not saying that. We simply are all looking at the same thing, and we’re using a different word to describe it. The thing is real. The cause of the thing maybe completely indisputable. Okay, sometimes it is disputable, or sometimes it’s sort of left out of the picture or whatever. But let’s choose a situation that’s kind of simple. So, like it’s you have the flu. And we know it’s the flu because you got tested, and it’s indisputable that it’s the flu. Okay, fine. So, the thing is real. But the words that we use to describe it make a difference because they frame how we think about what tools that we have that could create some improvement. And this is true for both languages: for medicalized language, and for herbal language. So, if we try to use medical language to be herbalists, we immediately are off on the wrong foot. We are looking for the herb for MS, because in medical language there is a drug for MS. There are several drugs, and we’re going to go through a flow chart of which one is going to be right for this particular person or whatever. But that is how they match things up in that language. They have aligned their tools to their diagnostic words. It’s their language. They’re allowed to do that. That’s not wrong or bad. They can do that. But plants don’t work that way. And so when we are looking for something that will help somebody, we have to see the situation in our own language. We have to be able to describe what’s happening in terms of energetics. Energetics is an old word. It sounds kind of funny in modern language use. But it just means when we look at something and say that I see heat in that situation. I see dampness in that situation. If you think about very shortly after you sprain your ankle, it’s red, it’s hot, it’s swollen, right? Okay. So, we are going to assess that situation. If we say oh, this ankle is sprained. Well, you know, you can google herbs for a sprained ankle, and there will be lots of suggestions, but that’s not our system. Our system is to say okay, we see these types of damage, and what herbs can assist with that type of damage.

Ryn (00:38:36):
Yeah. Or for the flu, right? The sort of medical response is well, you’ve got the flu because of this infection. We have to kill the infection, and then you’ll feel better, right? Or in the meantime we can just suppress your symptoms so that you can go back to work and keep on producing profit. So, we’re going to take the nose, and we’re going to dry it up with this drug. And we’re going to take the cough, and we’re going to suppress that with this drug. And so on, right, this is going to be the approach. For the herbalist it’s going to be like well, okay. So, yeah, you’ve got an infection inside you. And maybe we can do some things to direct your immune response. Or if it’s early on, we can stimulate it and try to fight it off early. We can do different things. But most of the work we’re going to do over the course of an illness like that is responsive to what presents. So, in this case of the flu you’re having today, you’ve got tons of phlegm, and mucus, and gunk. And it’s all coming up. And we’ve got to help you cough that out. So, we get you garlic, and fire cider, and stimulant expectorants, and we cough that out of you, right? And so we’re reacting with the right tool to the problem that we observe, right? Okay. So anyway, approaching the same kind of problem, two different perspectives, approaches, languages to do that.

A Whole New Body, Shifting to Herbal Thinking, & Being Bilingual

Katja (00:39:51):
Okay. Now, let’s think about something that’s a little more complicated than just the flu, right? Our modern health landscape is people’s health issues are much more complex. And so in that context, if you want to learn herbal medicine, right, if you want to become an herbalist, the faster that you recognize that you need a whole new body, the faster you can get to work on finding the places where you can create improvements in your health. And that’s why I said that when this person said or do I just need a whole new body, that that was fortunate and good for her that she recognized that so early. Because the sooner that you do that, the sooner that you are shifting your thinking towards the way that herbs work, which is support, rebuild, renew, recover, right? As opposed to a turn off the symptoms, make it go away kind of a situation.

Ryn (00:40:55):
Fix it. Fix it.

Ryn (00:40:57):
Yeah. Now, I do want to put a little asterisk here, because you can’t actually have a whole new body. Your body is you. It is part of your experience of this life. It carries the marks of that experience, and sometimes they cannot be erased. Whether that is stretch marks from a pregnancy, whether that is sometimes a disability, right? Some of that, some of the marks of your life experience cannot be erased naturally and cannot be erased medically. Sometimes they can, but it will take time, and it won’t be perfect. So, we cobble together as many strategies for improvement as possible. And so we’ll get 10% here, and 20% there, and 12% there, and we will keep going until it’s enough for you to have a comfortable experience of life or as comfortable as possible. But it’s really important because if you are looking for the one thing, you will be disappointed. You will get some small unsatisfying percentage because that’s not how herbs work.

Ryn (00:42:05):
Right. And connect that back to language too. Because if your concept of what’s going on for you is there’s this label that I apply to it, and that describes my whole problem. Then you’re put directly into this idea of finding a medicine, an herb, whatever to solve that one problem. But the way that that chronic issue manifests for you can have multiple different expressions, right, fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, upset stomach. To work with those herbally, we’re probably going to work with multiple different plants. Like maybe some herb can do all those things at once. We’ll come up with that in a minute. Sage, maybe, I don’t know. It depends on how your stomach plays, but you see what I mean, right? We need to be saying how can I make some improvement in this aspect of it? How can I make some improvement in that aspect of it? Choose the herbs that get me the 10%, the 20%, the 12% and move forward from there. Rather than saying I’ve got to find the one herb probably from far away that I’ve never heard of, and is hard to get, and expensive that will solve my diagnosis.

Katja (00:43:07):
And the other part that I really just want to kind of home in on is it will not be perfect. Nothing will. Medical science also can’t make it perfect. You are not going to be 21 again. And I am turning 52 in a couple weeks, and I’m not excited about it. I don’t like this part of my life. I want to be young again because wow, I screwed so much stuff up. And if only I still had that body now, wow, I could do so much with it, right? That’s okay, but it’s never going to happen. Never going to happen. There is no herb that will do that for you. There is no amount of clean living. Please don’t say that because now we’re into virtue and morals again, right? There is no amount of whatever that is going to return you to what you were when you were 21 but with all the things that you know now. It’s never going to happen. Your body is you with all of the battle scars that you carry along with it. It is. Yeah.

Ryn (00:44:13):
All right. So, we’re herbalists. What can we do about all of this from our position, from the place where we do our work, right? So, our first thought on this is to be, at least to a functional extent, bilingual, right? So, we live in this medicalized world. This is the way people think about things. This is the way that they’re going to be looking for solutions immediately. They’re often going to walk in. They’re going to expect they name their diagnosis to you, and then you name the herb that solves that, right? So, we need to be educated about the medical world, and the words, and the ways that they work, and where our two systems do come together, and where they diverge away from each other. Yeah.

Katja (00:44:53):
We need to be aware of that for benefit and for risk. Because the medical system does not know very much about herbs, and so they don’t always understand where the points of risk are. And so that burden is going to fall on us to make sure that we understand that, right? Okay. So, we have to be bilingual. But as herbalist we also have to get ourselves out of that system and into our own language as fast as possible, both in terms of when we are working for ourselves in our own bodies and when we’re working with other people. People come to us usually, and also we come to ourselves usually, in the medical language. Oh, my ADHD. Oh, my whatever. Oh, my whatever, right? But we cannot do our work in that language. So, we have to help our clients, and our friends, and our family members, and ourselves make that shift between the systems and understand that yes, sometimes we need both. But when it is time to think about our tools, then we have to speak our language. So, shifting into our language, our system does not mean that that other system is bad. When we need it, we’re going to experts of that system. That’s fine. But when we are working in our system, we need to translate as fast as possible into our own language.

Ryn (00:46:24):
Yeah. And when we’re working as a clinical herbalist, it’s part of our job to teach the client that languages. To help them say hello, how are you? Where is the library? in herbal speak. Yeah. And if they come in with a diagnosis, we still need to figure out what that really means for that specific person as opposed to the textbook definition, or the most common manifestation of diabetes, or whatever the thing is, right?

Katja (00:46:54):
Yeah, we’re not going to be like oh, okay. Well, you say you have diabetes, but you don’t really. Let’s talk about what you really have. That’s not what we’re really doing. But if somebody comes in and says I have fibromyalgia, that’s not enough for us as herbalists. Honestly, it’s not enough for the doctors either, but that’s not my point right now. Because there are so many different ways that people experience fibromyalgia. Different people have different kinds of pain at different times with different triggers, and not everybody has all the symptoms that are on the list. So, you have to find out what is your fibromyalgia, as opposed to what is like the platonic form, or is written in some textbook, or WebMD, or whatever you use to look it up. That’s not this person.

Ryn (00:47:46):
Yeah. And this isn’t just, again, for philosophical purity or so that we stay in our lane or something. This is so that we can figure out where our tools are going to be most likely to make an improvement for that person. It’s going to enable us to verify that what we do to help isn’t going to interfere with what’s going on for them already. Conventional medicines, drug interactions, whatever else it might be.

Katja (00:48:08):
And it’s going to allow us to stack strategies and recognize that one herb is not going to solve their problem. And so it’s going to allow us to select various herbs and other strategies that will each create a percentage improvement and synergistically create a larger percentage improvement. And do that harmoniously with each other and not kind of butting heads within themselves or within the other approaches that the person might be working with.

Building a New Baseline, Documentation, & Four Pillars Work

Ryn (00:48:42):
Yeah. And if you do that successfully, then it feels like a new body. It does. So, practically speaking, how do you accomplish that, right? We have been talking about this on perspective terms and philosophical approaches and stuff. So, what does that look like when we’re on the ground, when we’re doing the work, right? So for us, the fastest way to achieve all of this is to spend the first session or maybe the first few months of work with an individual client on building a new baseline for them.

Katja (00:49:13):
Here’s where you get your whole new body.

Ryn (00:49:15):
Yep. And so we’re going to have several sessions, you know, maybe over two weeks, or a month, or whatever is appropriate for the case, right? And each session is going to have some common features. So, the sort of like step zero is going to be where are we? If it’s your first session, what’s your starting baseline? And that’s like the entire intake form is what establishes that for you. All the different symptoms they’ve got, weak spots, habits, food, movement, hours of sleep they get, all those different elements, right, so what’s that? And then every time they come in for a follow-up it’s going to be what’s the current status? How have things changed? What’s gotten better? Did anything get worse? Anything new happen, right? And so all of this comes from, well, if they keep a health journal, oh yay. That’s good, right? Or just the way they describe how things feel to you. And really a lot of it is about narrative. What’s it like to go through the course of your day? When does your health impose on what you would want to be doing?

Katja (00:50:19):
As clinical herbalists we know that we need to document this stuff. But when you’re working with yourself, you may not know that. So, let me explain this a little, because here’s the thing about human brains. They adapt very quickly, and they are simultaneously extremely habitual. So, your symptoms scene may be changing significantly, but you have the habit of saying about the same, I guess, when people ask how you’re doing. And so maybe the first time that you documented your symptoms, it was I have a severe migraine five nights a week. And my definition of severe migraine is I have to go to bed. And the room has to be completely dark and silent. And a month or two months go by, and you’ve tried a bunch of things. And you say oh, I don’t know, it’s about the same. But then if you really look, you actually are having migraines twice a week now instead of five nights a week. And that is so normal. I feel like this happens for every single client because our brains are bad at noticing shifts. And we normalize everything, and we have habitual responses that we give. So, you’ve got to document this stuff. If you are the clinician, you’re documenting it for your clients so that you can ask. Okay, last time I saw you, you were having migraines five nights a week, but now you’re only having them two nights a week. So, we’re not there yet, but we are in the right direction. Let’s keep going. But if you are not working with a clinician, then you’ve got to keep that documentation for yourself. Because you are not going to notice it because the brain doesn’t work that way. Don’t trust you to be like oh, I’ll see that things are improving. You probably won’t, you know? You might see some things that are improving. But for the most part you will miss a lot of it if you don’t write it down. Okay. So, that’s zero, step zero.

Ryn (00:52:33):
All right. And so that kind leads naturally into what we’ll talk about sometimes is four pillars work, or five pillars work. And so food, stress, sleep, movement, and the fifth pillar is community, right? And we understand their habits. We understand their current state and what’s going on for them right now. And we can say okay, so it looks like you haven’t had a nourishing meal this month. Maybe we can work on that. Let’s give some attention to that. Or you’ve realized that you’re being very, very sedentary, and you’re having back pain, and knee pain, and other things. So, there’s a direct connection, right? So, we might choose to work on one of those at a time, or we might choose to work a little bit in each corner, right? A little bit of change to food, a little to movement, half an hour more sleep each night, something like that. It depends on the client, but this is the place to focus, right? We’re going to go there next.

Katja (00:53:29):
At this point, all of the herbs that we consider in our next step are about supporting that four pillars work. We are not yet choosing herbs for fibromyalgia. First off because there are no herbs for fibromyalgia. But we are resetting the baseline. We don’t actually know which symptoms are because of the fibromyalgia, and which symptoms are because they haven’t had a vegetable in a month, or they haven’t been able to sleep in a month, or they haven’t whatever. A lot of these symptoms could be coming from any of these different places. And so until we fix the baseline boring stuff, we don’t actually know what we’re dealing with. So, all of the herbs that we’re choosing now are your pain is so significant that you are not able to sleep. We’ve got to look at how can we support your sleep? Or whatever, the anxiety is so significant that you’re not able to sleep. Okay, how are we going to support your sleep? Whatever. But we are not trying to remove the anxiety, we are trying to support the sleep. Because we don’t know how much of that anxiety is coming from the fact that you haven’t had a good night of sleep, right? All right. So, that part is really important. We are looking for herbal enhancements to the work we’re trying to do to reset the baseline. We’re looking for herbal support to make it easier to do. Accelerants to make it happen faster so that we can combine the power of whatever the holistic strategy is that we’re trying to implement with an herb that can increase the benefits of that strategy, right?

Ryn (00:55:15):
Right. A simple example is if somebody is doing some food work around eliminating potential food allergens, we can accelerate the benefits of that process by giving them some gut heal tea. That is going to soothe current digestive discomfort and enhance the function of those organs so that they work better. And again, it’s going to accelerate the work that they were doing in the realm of food, right? And so we can always find herbs like that to enhance those activities. The next piece is going to be more specific herbs and in some cases palliative herbs to address the most troubling, ongoing current issues that they’ve got and to do that directly. And this is something that we always want to include in our work for a client.

Katja (00:56:01):
This is not your most troubling current issue is fibromyalgia. So, I’m going to come up with a palliative herb for fibromyalgia, right? This is your current most troubling issue is pain in your joints. I don’t know, pain when you come into contact with this sort of thing. Pain because everything is so dry right now. Okay. What can we do to soothe that pain, which may only be one of the symptoms of all of fibromyalgia? All of the things that come together that is labeled in medical terms, fibromyalgia. But let’s identify the thing that is impeding the most, the thing that is hurting you the most and try to soothe that. Even if we are not fixing it completely, how can we make it easier to live with that as we are building you up a new foundation to push that out of the way, right? It’s not going to happen overnight, so let’s make it more comfortable while you’re doing the work to get there.

Accountability & Collaboration Over the Long Haul

Ryn (00:57:08):
Yeah. All right. So again, just think about the way that your herbs can get incorporated in those two different realms. That first one is enhancing the habit work, the foundational work. And then the other one is okay, specific issue, most troubling problem, let’s address that right now. And then the other thing that we’re going to include in every session with a client when we’re doing this kind of work is encouragement and inspiration. And even better, accountability, everyone’s favorite thing from all of their friends, and family, and their professionals, right? But no, these are indispensable. These are a critical part of the work we do.

Katja (00:57:45):
And you know, I think you can not replace accountability as a word with collaboration, but you certainly can refine it, right? Because accountability is I am not going to leave you hanging to figure this all out on your own. We are going to collaborate on this together. We’re going to walk this path together so that it’s easier for you to succeed, right? So, when we are thinking about accountability as an herbalist, that’s what we mean. That we are going to work together to make it work. And if what we came up with does not work, we are going to try again. And we are going to try until it is successful for you. Maybe the first round of things we come up with was too ambitious because of your current pain state. We’re not going to throw everything out the window. We are going to try again. That is what we mean by accountability. We’re going to keep going till it works.

Ryn (00:58:43):
So, as we go through each of these sessions or these stages, we’re going to be seeing what’s left over. So, you’re doing this work for yourself. You’re like this month I’m going to focus on food. Next month I’m going to focus on sleep. Each time you go through one, you check in and be like all right. Well, where am I? What still remains, right? The situation’s going to change in one way or another. It might be a small change. It might be a huge one. It might be a whole new body. But we need to check in on that and then be trying to identify what did work. What didn’t help that much or couldn’t be sustained for whatever reason it is and why. What does that imply for what I try next?

Katja (00:59:18):
When we evaluate what worked, remember, if we are thinking in medical language, if we didn’t get to a hundred percent, it didn’t work. But that’s not how herbs work. So, when we think about what worked, we’ve got to say I got a 10% improvement here. That worked. It’s not done yet, but that 10% improvement was successful. Where can I get another 10%? Where can I get 20%, right? So really, if you are looking for an herb for fibromyalgia, and after a month of taking that herb, you’re only 10% better. You’re going to be like well that didn’t work. So, breaking everything down into its smaller parts and then assessing what percentage improvement did I get, helps you understand what your next step is, and what the next percentage improvement is that you’re looking for, right?

Ryn (01:00:13):
So, you know, you’ve identified what work remains and hopefully also where can you get an entry point into doing that? What can you grab onto next? What can you hook into to build the next stage of improvement you’re going to do? And you know, this work is like a spiral, we often say. You’re trying to go all the way around. And it’s not a circle because that’s like taking the same path over and over again. But a spiral is widening out or whichever direction you prefer there. But it’s a similar kind of movement, but it’s not the exact same path every time. Yeah.

Katja (01:00:43):
And then as you go around really understanding what is in play here. So, okay. If we have nerve cell damage, then one of the things that we want to work on is how do I support building and repairing nerve cells? And it is easier to find herbs that can do that kind of work than it is to try to find an herb that is going to fix fibromyalgia.

Ryn (01:01:14):
Okay. Now, as we do all of this, there’s a few critical things to keep in mind. Number one, it might take a long time. It might take years. Though, it should be obvious even within the first month that you are seeing some change. You are seeing some movement. But the point is don’t give up too early. Don’t get discouraged.

Katja (01:01:33):
I like to think about how long did it take you to get here. And then okay, well, you can’t unwind all this stuff in no time at all. If it took you 10 years to get here, okay, it’s not going to take 10 years to improve the situation. But you may still be seeing more improvements 10 years from now. That’s definitely true in my body.

Ryn (01:02:01):
Yeah. Another one to keep in mind is that this kind of work rarely, if ever, requires the person to buy a thousand different expensive supplement products. And again, the reason we want to emphasize that is because there’s a tendency to believe that buying a thousand different supplement products is what will solve the issue the way that we’ve been raised to think about health and to think about solving issues here. It’s marketized, right?

Katja (01:02:30):
Yeah. And there are practitioners who will get at you that way. And they are taking a cut of all those supplement sales. And so we’re just right back to the snake oil salesman, right? Like no, no, no. Sometimes one or two targeted supplements are great for a period of time. There are some herbs that you can take in supplement form and have them be effective. Some herbs you can’t. They make them, but they’re not going to do anything for you. So, I’m not saying that never would you take something in a capsule or a tablet, but you don’t need a whole laundry list of them.

Ryn (01:03:09):
Yeah. And that’s often a flag where we’re like okay, we’ve got to do some work on refining this, and figuring out what’s actually most helpful, and what can set aside. A lot of times when we do that with clients, it’s just for financial reasons. Like we can save you about $150 a month, you know?

Katja (01:03:23):
Or more sometimes.

Ryn (01:03:24):
Whatever it is, yeah.

Katja (01:03:25):
Right. And in that case, usually they’re not losing anything because those supplements weren’t actually… Maybe they were helpful the first time they took them, but they weren’t necessary anymore. Or maybe they never really were getting much improvement. But the point is that if somebody is trying to tell you you need a laundry list of supplements, beware of that. Yeah.

Ryn (01:03:48):
All right. Another critical point here. Working this way is going to mean spending more time on your body than you’re probably used to. But remember the otters.

Katja (01:03:58):
Listen, I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I just want to jump out of bed in the morning and do what I want to do in the day. I do not want to do my stupid workout video and whatever else. I don’t want to do it. But otters don’t have a choice, and actually I also don’t have a choice. Yeah.

Ryn (01:04:19):
All right. And then last point, most important point is that not everything is going to be perfect. Your brand-new body, your whole new body isn’t going to be entirely, wholly new. But it’s yours, and you can still love it. So, even if you won’t be 21 again. Even if you won’t be forever young, and it’ll never be effortless to achieve or to maintain that, that’s okay. That’s what life is.

Katja (01:04:44):
Yeah. Human bodies require effort to maintain, even if I don’t like it. Yeah.

Ryn (01:04:51):
So, to wrap it all up here, your body doesn’t actually replace all of its cells every seven years. You’ve probably heard that one before, right? That’s not actually true. But your body does respond to the things that you take in, your capacity to digest, and metabolize, and distribute that throughout you, and the actions and the expressions that you put out. So, you won’t ever be perfect, but you can still be or feel like you have a whole new body. And herbs can help you do that.

Katja (01:05:20):
They can. And also the Community Herbalist program can help you do that. So, head on over to online.commonwealthherbs.com. Check out the Community Herbalist program. It’s a great big bundle of everything that you need to know to fix every part, patch it up again, rebuild it, and be the best you can be.

Ryn (01:05:48):
And to feel good, to feel a little good. Yeah.

Ryn (01:05:50):
Yeah. Be a good otter.

Ryn (01:05:52):
There we go. All right. That’s it for today. We’ll be back soon. Until then, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea and take care of your otter.

Katja (01:06:03):
Aww. Bye-Bye, everyone.

Ryn (01:06:06):
Bye.