Two weeks ago I attended the annual conference of herbalists here in Ireland, HerbFeast. This is organised by the Irish Register of Herbalists and is open to practitioners, students and all lovers of plant medicine. Every couple of years the venue is changed ensuring that the HerbFeast visits all corners of the country.
Throughout the weekend we enjoyed each others’ company, fascinating lectures, workshops, demonstrations and a good old social get together on the Saturday evening. I was up dancing until one thirty am and feel much the better for it.
The main theme of the conference was about having the courage of our convictions to really promote herbal medicine. One of the lectures, by Dr. Graeme Tobyn considered the changes we have seen in medicine over the last couple of hundred years. The sad thing his lectured revealed, is how remote the unique, individual human being is from real healing. Once upon a time we had a system he referred to as the bedside manner where the patient was at the very centre of the healing process. Nowadays, it is the doctor or the diagnostic machines that take centre stage and quite possibly, in the future, it will be AI.
Healing is not just the ingesting of a herb or a drug; it is also the interaction between patient and practitioner and the preparation of medicine specifically for that person. Imagine all the energies involved and how positive that mingling of energies, from the practitioner and the plants to the patient, can be for well being.
As far as I am concerned plants can help us to heal providing we use them appropriately and as soon as we fall out of balance, for whatever reason. Too many people wait until they are seriously out of balance before consulting with a doctor and then they are given medication which often just suppresses their symptoms. Some medications cause their own symptoms, known as side-effects.
In the world at the moment, we have mass unemployment approaching due to AI, (the CEO of HSBC for one, has announced that there will be mass lay-offs, not to cut costs but to replace humans with “more effective” machines); we have food shortages likely due to the war - or rather due to the manipulation of events around the war. Now is the time to not only plant that tree, as the saying goes, but to also start growing and making our own medicine.
Here are some links for you if you are interested in this idea of becoming resilient and healthy, autonomous and sovereign.
For medicinal plants - https://www.ivywood.ie/ The Irish Register of Herbalists - https://irh.ie/ If you are in the U.K - https://nimh.org.uk/ If you are in the U.S - https://www.americanherbalistsguild.com/ If you are in Canada - https://canadianherbalists.org/ If you are in Australia - https://nhaa.org.au/ If you are in New Zealand - https://nzamh.org.nz/
If you would like to study online, I offer two herbal medicine courses and you can find out more about them here - https://www.danusirishherbgarden.com/product-category/course-workshops/
The sun is shining here so I am off outside to spend some time with my plants. See you next week xx
