The Holistic Herbalism Podcast

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Grow Your Own Calendula This Year Mar 06, 2021

Show notes

We’re lucky that nowadays there are a lot of herb suppliers, so it’s convenient to purchase the majority of your herbs – especially if you live in a place where you don’t really have space to grow a garden. But there’s something really special about working with herbs that you’ve grown yourself. And, some herbs are really quite easy to grow – like calendula. So now that spring is on the way, let’s make a plan to grow your own calendula this year!

Calendula is easy to grow from seed, so it’s a great choice for new gardeners. The herb isn’t too picky about growing conditions, though it does want to get a good amount of sunlight every day. A large pot or a bucket of soil on the porch, or a window box, will do just fine for growing calendula.

It’s a very productive plant. You can harvest flower heads every day, and every day the plant will make new ones! So even from a small patch, you can gather enough medicine to be useful.

Once you’ve grown it, you can make some herbal remedies with calendula. It’s an excellent lymphatic herb, a wound-healer, a liver-protector, and a gentle but powerful antimicrobial (especially good for fungal skin infections). Calendula can help with edema and other stagnation patterns, and it’s a key ingredient in our gut-heal tea.

So there you go: plenty of reasons to grow your own calendula this year!

Just this week we wrapped up filming for our Integumentary (Skin) Health course – and calendula is a major star herb in this course! We cover acne, eczema, psoriasis, various infections, and lots more. The course is delivered by video in our interactive learning platform, and you get access to weekly Q&A sessions with Ryn & Katja.

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

This episode was sponsored by Mountain Rose Herbs. We thank them for their support!

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You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

Flexible Formulation for Herbal Cold Sore Remedies Mar 01, 2021

Show notes

This week we’re sharing a formula for an herbal cold sore remedy – a soft salve or balm that can be applied right on the sores. It’s going to serve as a jumping-off point for discussing flexible formulation. That’s the answer to the question “what can I do if I don’t have one – or any! – of the herbs in the formula as written?” If you can answer this question, you’ll be much more adaptable when you run out of herbs or when you’re away from your home apothecary.

We start out with the formula we published in our book Herbal Medicine for Beginners, then we break it down from the perspective of herbal actions. After identifying the herbs that contribute vulnerary, antimicrobial, lymphatic, and nervine actions to the remedy, we can come up with substitutions that would fill similar roles.

Here’s the formula as we presented it in our book, for comparison:
Cold Sore Balm
Makes 5 ounces (about a 3-month supply)This gentle salve is very soothing to irritated cold sores, and helps reduce inflammation while making your body’s environment less hospitable to the virus.

1 fluid ounce calendula-infused oil
1 fluid ounce plantain-infused oil
½ fluid ounce self-heal-infused oil
½ fluid ounce chamomile-infused oil
½ fluid ounce st john’s wort-infused oil
½ fluid ounce thyme-infused oil
1 ounce beeswax, plus more as needed

1. Combine the oils in a pot and warm them over low heat.

2. Add the beeswax and stir continuously until it melts.

3. Spoon some of the melted oil & wax into a shotglass and place it in the freezer for a few minutes; it will set to its finished hardness. Take it out and test it with your finger to see if it is the consistency you want.

4. Add more wax if you want to harden your salve; add more oil if you want to soften it.

5. Pour into a short, wide-mouth jar (or fill lip balm tubes), then cover and allow to cool/set.

6. Apply liberally to the affected area, 3 to 5 times daily.

Herbs discussed include: calendula, plantain, chamomile, thyme, self-heal, st john’s wort, lemon balm, common bugle, red clover, pine, damiana, violet, goldenrod, oregano, rosemary, lavender.

Mentioned in this episode:

Herbal Medicine for Beginners – This is our book! We profile 35 medicinal herbs in detail and offer 104 formulae, all of which can be altered and adjusted to meet your needs, as we demonstrate with the example in this episode.
The Holistic Herbalism Podcast, episode 30: Tulsi & Formulating Absent Friends

We hope you find this flexible formulation approach helpful when you’re making your own herbal cold sore remedies! If you’d like to learn more about resolving skin problems, check out our Integumentary (Skin) Health course – it covers acne, eczema, psoriasis, various infections, and lots more. The course is delivered by video in our interactive learning platform, and you get access to weekly Q&A sessions with Ryn & Katja.

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

This episode was sponsored by Mountain Rose Herbs. We thank them for their support!

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

How Herbs Are Different From Supplements Feb 20, 2021

Show notes

When you go to the store and buy an herbal supplement, what are you getting? It might be a capsule of powdered herb, but this is less and less common nowadays. An herbal supplement is usually some type of extract from the plant – and we herbalists make lots of extracts ourselves, like teas, tinctures, salves, etc. The difference is in the methods and materials used to make the extract, which can be quite enormous.

These extracts may also be concentrated in a variety of ways. Again, this is something herbalists can do at home: cooking down a decoction or evaporating some alcohol off of a tincture are both forms of concentration. Many commercial extracts are also standardized to deliver a defined amount of a particular constituent (or group). And on the far end, some herbal supplements are actually isolated constituents, single chemicals which originated in the plant but are now being taken on their own. This is closer to pharmaceutical medicine than herbalism, if you ask us!

Each of these types of preparation will give us a different finished product, and for many herbs the differences between preparations are quite vast. You need to know more than “what herb is in that supplement” to know what you’re actually taking! And for clinical herbalists, this nuance is also very important to keep in mind if a client says something like “oh, I’ve tried hawthorn for my blood pressure, it didn’t help…”

Bottom line: an herbal supplement is not equivalent to the whole herb, and each of the various types of supplement made from an herb may be very different from one another. We need to train ourselves to treat them as different substances, and assess each for strengths & weaknesses.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Holistic Herbalism Podcast, episode 101: How Herbs Are Different From Drugs

Herbs discussed include: cannabis, milk thistle, butterbur, jiaogulan, eleuthero, st john’s wort, kava, ephedra.

As you may have noticed, chemistry came up quite a bit in this episode! If that subject makes you a little nervous, don’t worry! Our Basic Phytochemistry course for herbalists is a low-pressure introduction to the practical aspects of plant chemistry, the ones which are most relevant to the practice of herbalism.

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

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You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

You Don't Have To Be Perfect Feb 13, 2021

Show notes

The “wellness” space online is saturated with One Weird Tricks and Simple Easy Solutions that promise to make you perfect. Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body fat percentage – all this and more for 5 easy payments of $39.99… it’s a trick. Even when it’s sincere, when people really believe they’ve found the one thing that’ll work for everyone, it’s still misleading.

None of us are perfect, nor can we be. Recognizing this helps us avoid scams and cults, but also helps us be more compassionate with others and offer more helpful advice. There are many ways to be healthy and many ways to get there. Don’t accept someone else’s standards of health, beauty, or fulfillment – explore, experiment, and develop your own.

Does that sound hard, that mental & emotional shift? Don’t worry: it is hard! And that’s ok! It’s hard for everyone. You don’t have to be perfect in your comfort-with-imperfection, either. 🙂

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

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You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

Our Top Topical Herbs for Acne Feb 06, 2021

Show notes

When you’re dealing with a skin problem, it’s good to come at it from both directions: internal and external. Today we’re focusing on the external remedies, highlighting some of our favorite ways to work with topical herbs for acne.

Steam is a great way to deliver aromatic herbal constituents to the whole surface of the face, and as the warmth opens the pores, these can get deeper in to the skin. A simple rosewater toner is great to tighten up the pores afterwards. Clay masks are good on their own, but even better if you mix herbal powders in to contribute anti-inflammatory activity. Echinacea and turmeric aren’t well-known for it, but they’re actually both fantastic herbs for acne – the trick is to apply them topically, not just ingest them.

So even if you already take herbs for acne by tea or tincture, or as supplements – and those can help in a lot of cases – don’t neglect the topicals!

Herbs discussed include: chamomile, yarrow, thyme, lavender, rose, echinacea, turmeric.

Our Integumentary Health course covers acne, naturally, but also a wide range of other skin troubles – whether we call it eczema, psoriasis, or just “that troublesome patch of skin”. Topical applications for common herbs play a big role in this work, and we also dig into the effective herbs you can take orally to see results on the skin. Like all our offerings, this is a self-paced online video course, which comes with free access to twice-weekly live Q&A sessions with Ryn & Katja.

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

5 Herbs We Got At The Grocery Store This Week Jan 31, 2021

Show notes

When you think about where to find excellent herbs, where does your mind go first – the forest? The farmer’s market? Ye Olde Herbe Shoppe, perhaps? Let us make a suggestion: you can find a bunch of great herbs at the supermarket! Grocery store herbs are nothing to sneeze at (but if you can’t stop sneezing, consider a basil steam). You can find herbs in the produce section, the tea aisle, and the spice rack – not just among the supplements.

This week alone, we brought home fresh basil leaves for pesto & cranberry relish; fresh ginger root for meals, tea, and poultices; mandarin oranges to collect and dry the peels for tea and bitters blends; blueberries for syrup and hot cereal; and shiitake mushrooms for broth.

Keep an eye on the seasonal items and you’ll have different herbs to play with in every season. Knowing your grocery store herbs will serve you well, no matter where you travel or how far away you are from your home apothecary!

Mentioned in this episode:

The Holistic Herbalism Podcast, episode 1: I’ll Have What They’re Having + Apples & Oranges – (discussion of orange peel starts around 20:00)
The Holistic Herbalism Podcast, episode 142: 4 Medicinal Mushrooms: Shiitake, Maitake, Reishi, Lion’s Mane
Herbal Community Care Toolkit – Chock-full of grocery store herbs & common “weeds”, this course is about making herbalism accessible for everyone.

Herbs discussed include: basil, ginger, orange peel, blueberry, shiitake.

Not sure what to do with your herbs once you’ve got them home? Our Herbal Medicine-Making course has dozens of methods for you to explore! Learn to make teas, tinctures, poultices, salves, liniments, spice blends, and much more. This self-paced online video course includes access to twice-weekly live Q&A sessions so you can connect with us directly!

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

4 Herbs We Give To Our Dog Jan 24, 2021

Show notes

An herbalist’s dog is going to get some herbs in her dinner every now and then. Our dog Elsie sure does! Choosing herbs for dogs doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult, and there are a lot of them that can help a pup feel her best. In this episode we highlight four herbs we give to our own puppa:

Seaweeds for nourishment, joint support, and immune resilience-building.
Solomon’s seal for protecting joints & connective tissues, and reducing inflammation there.
Pumpkin seed was a quick solution to a tapeworm problem Elsie had when we first adopted her.
Chamomile is a go-to herb when she’s feeling anxious or unsettled.

We also briefly discuss nettle, Japanese knotweed, teasel, and catnip for related intentions.

Working with herbs for dogs effectively depends on knowing the herb’s basic qualities, actions, and affinities – these are all very similar whether it’s a human or a canine taking the herb. In our Holistic Herbalism Materia Medica course, you’ll get the deep-dive info on 90 amazing herbs. Then you’ll be able to work with them confidently and skillfully, for yourself – or for your pets!

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You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

Herbs Help Us Feel Our Way Through Difficult Times Jan 17, 2021

Show notes

It has been a rough few… weeks? Years? Well, a while, anyway! In the last month more than ever, people have been asking us how to get some space, how to find ways to feel grounded, how to find some calm. So we thought, maybe it would be good to share the things that we are doing to get through the days.

Being an herbalist doesn’t mean you never get sick, and it doesn’t mean you never have emotional issues either – emotional exhaustion, despair, uncertainty, panic sometimes – all the things we’re all feeling lately. Herbalists catch colds and turn ankles just like anyone else, and the same is true with emotional health troubles. Sure, we have all these herbs and we work with them every da -, but sometimes we also just want to hide under a giant pile of blankets and pretend the world isn’t out there. So if you’ve been feeling that way, you’re not alone.

In this episode we offer up some of our favorite comforts and soothing strategies – things we turn to again and again when we need them. Whether it’s herbs to protect the heart and give it a safe space to be tender, embodiment medicine to get out of our heads and into our hearts, or relaxants to let the tension go, we’re sure that some of the things that help us will help you, too! And not “just” herbs, either: as you listen you’ll hear that community and social support are also very important during difficult periods, and we’ve got lots of ideas about how to cultivate those for yourself (even during lockdowns).

Mentioned in this episode:

Apotheker’s Kitchen – amazing honey-sweetened chocolates, hot cocoa, & marshmallows!

Herbs discussed include: catnip, yarrow, calamus, pine, juniper, mugwort, dandelion, kava, tulsi, & “any effing herb” 😜

Not sure where to start? We love to organize our thoughts about all things herbal & healthwise into the “four pillars” of good health: food, sleep, movement, and stress management. Our free course, Four Keys to Holistic Herbalism, explains this approach and also shares our best tips for starting your herbal journey. Check it out – for free! – right here:
Four Keys to Holistic Herbalism

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

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You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

An Herbalist's Guide to Successful Self-Experimentation Dec 20, 2020

Show notes

In this episode we explore the skills and disciplines necessary to conduct a successful self-experiment. Self-experimentation in this context might mean making changes to dietary, lifestyle, & movement habits; developing stress management skills; or trying out herbal medicines.

First we address why and how self-experimentation can fall into self-justification, and how to avoid this. Then we highlight the skills of perception, reflection, and connection which are the bones of a good n=1 experiment, and share some key methods for developing them. Finally we talk about the practicalities that make this work go more smoothly, and share a few thoughts on how this all applies to clinical practice work as distinct from individual efforts.

This is at the root of our work as herbalists, so we hope you’ll listen in! Plus, you just might have some intention-setting and some self-experimentation to embark on sometime soon, what with New Year’s resolutions and all. 😉

This is our last episode for 2020, so we’ll see you in 2021!

If you’re dreaming up new ideas for the new year, why not do so literally? Check out our Herbs and Dreaming mini-course and delve deep into the Sandman’s kingdom. The plants know the way…

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

COVID Revisited Dec 11, 2020

Show notes

This week we take another look at COVID-19 and its long-term effects.

First, we check in on what have been our top 5 herbal interventions for COVID:

Herbal steams – with aromatic herbs, to fight infection and stimulate local immune activity in the respiratory tract
Garlic & thyme tea – for a strong immune-stimulating and lung-warming effect
Elecampane decoction – an ounce or two every hour during acute illness, or when lungs are phlegmy
Ginger (& chamomile) tea – for anti-inflammatory and circulatory warming actions
Marshmallow root cold infusion – to maintain hydration and healthy mucous production in the respiratory tract

Those all still hold up! They continue to be important in acute, recovery, and long-haul cases. We go on to discuss those long recovery periods and lingering symptoms, and describe how we approach them as holistic herbalists.

Herbs discussed include: thyme, oregano, monarda, rosemary, sage, lavender, peppermint pine, spruce, garlic, elecampane, ginger, marshmallow, reishi, lobelia, pleurisy root, mullein, codonopsis, nettle, hawthorn.

Want to make sure your immune system is in fighting shape in case you get exposed? Looking for ways to rebuild immunity to make sure you’re back to full power? Our Immune Health course has everything you need to understand, protect, and strengthen your immune system. The course features all our best holistic strategies to boost immune responsiveness, and to corral unhelpful inflammation too. This self-paced online video course includes access to twice-weekly live Q&A sessions so you can connect with us directly!

As always, please subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen, so others can find it more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

You can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

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