Podcast 287: Take Care of Each Other

We like to sign off our show by saying, “Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and drink some tea.” It’s our favorite little motto and it’s a great reminder that herbalism and self-care go right alongside mutual aid!

In our episode 283: Vetting Your Herbalism Sources: Red Flags & Green Flags, we talked about how it isn’t actually bucking the system to ignore the FDA and FTC laws about “telling & selling”. Neither is it a cool rebellious act to turn away from scientific knowledge, modern medical technologies, or even conventional treatments. They each have their place, and herbalism isn’t an ‘alternative’ to them in the sense of a dichotomous choice – either herbs or science, either herbalism or medicine. We can fit together, and we get better results when we do.

But it’s certainly true that conventional medicine has problems, and that the system needs some bucking! A system reliant on consumerism – buying your way to better health – always leaves people out. A lot of people. They need help, and we can help them.

The best way to do that is a little surprising: take care of each other. Extend our circle of care outside ourselves, outside our family and housemates, and further out into the world. We are all here together, and we can all support one another. And since we’re all herbalists here, let’s do it with herbs!

Three ways to get started:

1. FREE Emergency Preparedness course – Concise and targeted lessons teach you how to prepare for emergencies ranging from hurricanes to wildfires to heatwaves. Learn to construct a modular, no-frills herbal first aid kit, food reserve, and go-bag (or shelter-in-place bag). Understand herbal wound care and all the steps to take for cuts and burns. Anticipate and prepare for the effects of climate disasters in your community, not only to help yourself, but to help others too.
2. SLIDING SCALE Herbal Community Care Toolkit – This 20-hour video course teaches you safe, inexpensive, and accessible herbs which can make a difference in the most common health concerns in our society today. High blood pressure, diabetes, edema, pain, poor sleep – there are herbs to support people facing all of these challenges and more. They don’t need to be expensive, exotic, or risky. They don’t need to be “maximum strength” or “100x concentrated”. Gentle, simple, safe herbs can help people you know and love.
3. SLIDING SCALE Accessible Herbalism course – We consider this essential training for clinical herbalists, but you don’t have to be one to want this information! Providing care to everyone is challenging, and involves a lot of creativity and skill to find the right resources and get them to the right people – and to do it all without burning out. To do it, we teach strategies to work around resource constraints, addressing the realities of time and energy involved in herbal work. We share our methods for finding funding, improving access to care, and building community support networks: mutual aid for herbalists and the communities they serve.

You can go deeper, of course! These are starting points to get you helpful and empowered as soon as possible, while keeping safety first. And don’t forget…

Everything’s on sale in July!

All our offerings are self-paced online video courses. They all come 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!

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Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Episode Transcript

Katja (00:14):
Hi, I’m Katja. And I’m here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts. All right, I have a quick note for you today because a couple of weeks ago on the podcast when we were talking about how to know if you can trust an herbalist on the internet. And we were talking about those laws that say that we can’t use the word treat. We can’t say that we treat a disease. And I was saying about how those laws are actually really aligned with our work as herbalists. And so when people are talking about treating disease on the internet, then that’s a red flag to know maybe don’t trust that person. And that people complain about the laws. And the thing is that breaking them or whatever doesn’t make you a cool rebel bucking the system and blah, blah, blah. So okay, if you didn’t hear it yet, it’s about red flags and green flags so that you understand who you can trust on the internet.

(01:16):
That’s just the setup though, because the thing is that when I said all that, I meant to go back and say what do you do if you do want to be a cool rebel bucking the system? Because I’m all for that. The system is not awesome. Our current system relies on everyone being too busy to help one another. That way we buy more stuff, right, items of convenience, items of comfort instead of communities of support. And if we’re all too busy to help each other, then we’re also all too busy to really affect much change. So, all of that means the people who are making lots of money in the system as it is keep making lots of money. Okay. So that’s our system. And if you’re like but I want to be the cool rebel bucking that system, that is something that you can absolutely do as an herbalist. I highly recommend it. And so that’s what I want to talk to you about today. And really what this is going to come down to is taking care of each other. That’s how to be a cool rebel bucking the system. Let’s take care of each other. All right. So, let’s see. We’ll just do a super quick version of the reclaimer. I’m not a doctor. I’m an herbalist. And so this isn’t medical advice. But maybe it’ll give you something cool to think about and also be responsible. Okay, that’s good enough, right? All right.

Be A Cool Herbal Rebel

(02:57):
So, if you want to be a cool herbal rebel bucking the system by taking care of your community, we have some tools to help you do that. And you don’t have to do it alone. If the whole point here is that we’re going to be cool rebels by taking care of each other, then you can do this taking care of with other people. So, I want to go through some resources that we have available to you that you can get, but then also that you can share in your community or start a club and everybody work on it together. It doesn’t have to be a super formal club. It could be. You could schedule the community room at your local library and actually have a community group really working on this. That’s so legit. Or you could just get together with your neighbor and work on it. Get together with your friend group or whatever. But the key here is get together. And let’s get together on purpose for the purpose of taking care of each other. Intentionally build groups that hang out. Yeah, we’re going to have fun. But also we’re preparing support structures so that when we need them, they will be there for us.

The Emergency Preparedness Course

(04:20):
Okay, let me go through some of these resources for you. So, let me start off with free resources that you can just go and download right now. Maybe the very first one is the Emergency Preparedness course. That is a free mini course. It has all your first aid stuff. It has basic wound care. It has everything that you’ll need for a kit to evacuate. But also a kit to not evacuate, like to stay in place so that you have all the stuff you need to take care of your household and to take care of members of your community. It also has lists of the kinds of paperwork and other sorts of things that you would need to have with you. Especially if there was some kind of disaster that’s like a hurricane or a tornado, something that has destructive power. Wildfires, floods, okay, there’s lots of things with destructive power. Okay. And also it has how to make plans with your friends, or with your family, or with your community for if you have to do evacuations so that your group can stay together, all different stuff like that. It’s really easy. It’s all laid out simple. You can work through it with friends and make sure that everybody’s prepared. You don’t have to be a prepper to be a person who’s prepared for situations that are likely, right? Some kind of emergency situation is going to happen at some point in your life. That’s just very, very likely. So it’s good to be prepared.

The Herbal Community Care Toolkit

(05:54):
All right. So then there is the Herbal Community Care Toolkit. This is a course that’s available by donation or free. You can choose. And this is a course that we built kind of intentionally so that you could start a support club like this. Even if the people who you are hooking up with don’t really know much about health at all, this course is set up to get you started from absolute zero. It includes the most important health concerns – like 13 of the most important health concerns – and the safest, most accessible, least expensive, most effective herbs that are unlikely to have allergic reaction or drug interactions. So it’s like a really safe place to start if you’re a beginner. Or maybe you’re not a beginner, but the community that you’re going to work with is made up of beginners. It’s just a safe and supportive place to start. So, that is the Herbal Community Care Toolkit. All these links I’ll put in the show notes, don’t worry. And that one is either by donation or free, you decide.

The Accessible Herbalism Course

(07:08):
Okay. And then there is the Accessible Herbalism course, which is available on a sliding scale. And this is a course for people who either have some experience as an herbalist or are beginning to build experience as an herbalist, but you know for sure that you want to do work around accessibility. So, that might be affordability. That might be accessibility for people who have chronic illness, or disabilities, or limited mobility. You might be wanting to target accessibility for people just who are super, super busy. And so they’re always maxed out on energy and never getting enough rest. And so you want to be providing things that are accessible to people in that boat. So, there’s more different kinds of accessibility as well, but we go through how to build a practice. Whether that practice is your own clinical practice as a clinical herbalist. Or whether it is a community apothecary or a community mutual aid group that is including herbal support. It could be anywhere on that spectrum. But this just has a lot of resources about how do you get help? How do you get funding so that you’re not burning yourself out either because you’re trying to do all the work by yourself or because you’re trying to fund it by yourself. It has information about different models that you can set up so that you’re able to work in your community for the largest number of people and across multiple kinds of accessibility issues. Also included in there is ways to substitute herbs so that the herbs that you’re working with are effective but lower cost. And how to figure out how to do that effectively so that you’re not sacrificing on potency, but you are able to do work less expensively. All right. And lots of other really great stuff in there too.

The Mutual Aid Toolkit

(09:17):
All of these courses include the mutual aid toolkit, and that is a guide for starting up a mutual aid group in your community. Again, it doesn’t have to be formal, or official, or whatever. There’s lots of different ways to start up a group. But basically mutual aid just means I’m here for you, and you’re here for me. And we know we can depend on each other. Intentionally we are taking care of one another. And so it’s about just being prepared for the things that are necessary in your community. Whether that is you live in a place with a lot of wildfires, or whether it is that your own personal community has lots of kids who are really young. And so the kind of support that you need is how do we all juggle raising children and also doing all the other things that we need to do? That’s another kind of support, right? There are so many different kinds of support. So, I really want everybody to have a broad picture of the ways that we can be taking care of each other because there are so many ways. There are so many ways to be a cool herbal rebel.

(10:30):
All right. So, those are places where you can start, and they will keep you busy for a long time. There’s so much information in these resources. And then also today is July 29th, which means there are still two and a half, three days left in our 20% off sale for July. This is a semi-annual sale. We do this every year so that students can depend on this 20% off discount. It means that you don’t have to prove that you are disabled. You don’t have to prove that you have a financial need. You don’t have to prove anything. You can just depend that every six months there’s going to be 20% off for you. You don’t have to have any kind of documentation about it. You can just get the discount, budget your studies, and get the stuff that you need so that you have the skills and develop yourself as an herbalist so that you can take care of the folks in your community. All right. Well, this is the part of the podcast where Ryn would say take care of yourselves and take care of each other. But I think that this whole episode was about that. So, I think I’m just going to leave it with let’s get out there and be cool herbal rebels bucking the system by taking care of one another. Bye.