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Medicine Stories

59. Herbal Rituals, Rhythms, & Remembrance - Judith Berger

Medicine Stories

Amber M Hill

Herbs, Health & Fitness, Ancestry, Alternativemedicine, Herbalism, Alternative Health, Dreams, Healing, Society & Culture, Psychedelics

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2019

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My favorite herb book has been out of print for decades, but is now available again! In celebration, I had the extreme honor of interviewing the author. We talk about weaving enchantment and changing our inner states through language, the opposing paradigms of holistic, herbal healing and modern, mechanical medicine, how resting and rooting down in the darkness creates space for creativity and wholeness, and so much more.

IN THE INTRO:

  • Slowness Medicine
  • Herbal Rituals

IN THE INTERVIEW:

  • The role of story in our human lives
  • Remembering, rather than learning, ancient herbal knowledge
  • How Judith decided, after a violating experience in a doctor’s office at a very young age, to take her health into her own hands
  • Why the mechanical medicine system is trauma producing to the creatures that we are
  • Growing up in Brooklyn, living in NYC as an adult, and being a city herbalist
  • Widening the lens by learning about the animals is the ecosystems where our plant friends live
  • How our senses and capacities become stunted when we don’t engage in ancestral human practices, and instead spend all our time in the narrowness of digital technology
  • Mycelium as both the neurons and the fascia of the earth
  • Morphic resonance between similar tissue types in the body
  • Anecdotes and subjective experience are data to be trusted
  • How Herbal Rituals came to be
  • Changing states and casting spells of enchantment with words
  • Along with species and ecosystem loss, we are also losing the capacity to retain certain states of consciousness
  • The story of healing told by modern medicine does not actually lend itself to healing
  • Radical, empowered self health care
  • Our bodies and herbs are meant to be together
  • Rooting and slowing down- viewing the dark time of the year (or day) as the beginning of a new cycle
  • Our culture doesn’t support descent into inner realms
  • The magic of mugwort
  • Smoke medicine as an instant nervous system reset, and how burning mugwort helped Judith remember her life path
  • Taking in a plant’s medicine via the skin, just by touching it
  • Growing and deepening through life’s challenges

LINKS:

Transcript

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0:00.0

having the information about disease is useful.

0:06.0

However, it does not give us the full picture of the rapture that a body is capable of that I think is more immediately accessible

0:18.3

when we're working with plants. Hey friends. Welcome back to the Medicine Stories

0:29.1

podcast where we are remembering what it is to be human upon the earth.

0:34.0

I am Amber Magnolia Hill.

0:37.0

Today I'm sharing my interview with my ultimate herbal hero Judith Berger, the author of my far and away favorite herb book.

0:48.6

I'm really excited to get into all of this with you. You're going to love it. But just for a really quick life catch up. I said in the intro to the last episode that I've been going through a thing and would be taking a little

1:04.3

break and I did I'm feeling much better much stronger it's been it's been just a lot. There's been so much that's happened in my life in the last couple

1:16.8

months. And I feel renewed, unrested, and really slowed down, really slowed down and so grateful for that.

1:29.7

And moving forward, I will put this podcast out when it flows, when it aligns with my mothering and running the Mythic Medicinals Herb Shop and sometimes and

1:44.2

sometimes it might be often, sometimes it might be often, sometimes it might not be.

1:48.4

I've got some great guests lined up.

1:50.3

I'm so excited about everything but not holding myself to the every other week release

1:56.8

schedule that I have been for the last six months or more is a really important part of that letting go and slowing down process that's happening

2:07.0

in my life that has really shifted some things for me in a very positive way. I was kind of smiling reflecting that, yeah, six months ago I believe it was in May, definitely in the springtime that I was talking about doing the podcast every week and you

2:25.2

know like made that announcement on the show even and here I am making like the

2:29.6

opposite announcement but both of those were so aligned with the seasons.

2:34.7

In the springtime, I was feeling all that energy and vitality and ability

2:39.4

to really like bust the show out that I love doing and then it quickly became apparent that

2:45.5

I couldn't keep up with it and so I said I'll do it every other week and that's been

2:50.1

working but now you know as the earth slows down and Judith and I

2:54.5

actually talk about this towards the end of this episode that that's what's

...

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