Green blessings, I am Susun Weed an herbalist and the voice of the Wise Woman Tradition. These are uncertain economic times and I believe that the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine is especially important right now for all of us, who are feeling a little uncertainty about money. Why would herbal medicine be important to us? Why would the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine be important to us?
I have identified a lot of reasons and I want to focus on five reasons, while I am talking to you here today. One of the primary reasons, the tough economic times make the Wise Woman Tradition Of Herbal Medicine a real boon to us, is that I find that herbal medicine is extremely cost-effective medicine. I also like the idea that the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine makes me more self-reliant, that feels solid good to me that I have a cost-effective way to take care of myself. Herbal medicine and especially the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine really fill my sense of personal power. And the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine focuses on prevention. As we all know it’s far better to keep ourselves healthy, and less expensive to keep ourselves healthy than it is to get sick and have to go out, and look for remedies to deal with our sickness.
I am going to focus on these five important aspects of the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine. But first let me tell you a little bit of about the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine. Like you I grew up in the scientific tradition of medicine. The scientific tradition of medicine is the most common form of medicine in the United States. Some people even call it Traditional Medicine. Well, I personally think that herbal medicine is traditional medicine and that the scientific tradition is orthodox medicine. In a scientific tradition we are encouraged to do preventative medicine, but the preventative medicine is not actually in pursuit of health. It’s let’s checkup and see if we had a disease, and if we seen to be in the path toward a disease, in other words if our numbers don’t measure up. If our cholesterol is high, or our blood pressure is high, or our weight is high, then we are offered drugs or remedies so that we do measure up. The scientific tradition of medicine is about fixing things that are broken. The definition of health in this tradition is absence of disease.
The scientific tradition works extremely well for many people. And one of its great booms is that it doesn’t require that we think very much about our health. But I am finding nowadays that more and more people want to think about their health. They want to be able to be proactive with their health. They don’t want to wait until something has gone wrong and then go to the doctor for a remedy about that. And I am also finding more and more people who for one reason or another don’t want to be taking one or more drugs on a daily basis.
I know for some people the cost of those drugs especially if their insurance has evaporated really can be difficult. There are a lot of things that the Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine can offer us and we are going to talk about those things in more detail. And most people go out looking for some other way to do medicine. What they generally find is called Alternative Medicine or a more common term for it is Complementary and Alternative Medicine or CAM. You will hear a lot about CAM. What people find is what I call the heroic tradition of medicine.
In the heroic tradition, we are told that we have to clean up our diet; we have to clean up our bodies, we have to clean up our minds. The heroic tradition puts forth the idea that disease occurs because of toxic waste in our bodies and then encourages people to clean, to cleanse, to get rid of these things and then to watch their diet very, very carefully so that they don’t get more toxins in. My experience of this personally and the people that talk to me say, that it makes them feel like there is something wrong with them and that they will be never right that they are somehow like a filthy vacuum cleaner bag, and they just don’t see how they are ever really going to get clean enough, and this kind of obsessive worry about the detail of the diets can take a lot of the fun out of eating. I think what’s often confusing for people about the heroic tradition, is that there are many different ideas in the heroic tradition.
So one person in the heroic tradition might say to you the only way to be pure and to clean is to eat raw food, and you must only eat raw food. And then another person in the heroic tradition will say to you, oh no you should never eat raw food, you should only eat cooked food and the best cooked food for you is brown rice and you should follow a macrobiotic diet. What links these two dissimilar ideas is the idea that you need to follow the rules. In the scientific tradition we measure and fix, in the heroic tradition we follow the rules and cleanse. For me this was also not the best way of healing that I found in my life. And so following echoes, following dreams and ideas, that I have brought from the very far past, back into the present and the future, the Wise Woman Tradition a really different way of looking at health and heeling.
The Wise Woman Tradition tells us that we are already perfect, and we are already hollow and that we can become more perfect and more hollow. One of the things that I think is that each one of us is created in perfection. Most of the religions that I have studied actually say that in so many words that we are the physical manifestation of absolute perfection.
So then I ask myself, if we come absolutely perfect to the earth how is it that we have disease and sickness and cancer and heart attacks and my answer, the answer of the Wise Woman Tradition is, that we need to be better nourished. Then when we are optimally nourished that many of the things that we think of as problems seem to dissolve like the dew in the morning when the sun hits it. I have some specific and definite ways to help you be optimally nourished and you don’t have to change a thing in your diet in order to do it.
Herbal medicine is peoples’ medicine. It’s the medicine of the people, by the people and for the people. The Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine encourages us to nourish ourselves with the food we eat, with the people and surroundings we are in, with the energy that we experience and take into our bodies. With the stories that we tell ourselves, nourishment is very complex and is not just the food that we eat. I am going to be talking too more about how The Wise Woman Tradition of herbal medicine will help you, in these tough economic times, stay tuned.
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