Your Body: More Than a Machine
The Plant Path: Herbalism, Medical Astrology & Spagyric Alchemy
Sajah Popham
4.8 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The body can be viewed as an ecosystem or machine, and these varying paradigms significantly impact how you view and treat disease, and certainly how you use herbal medicines. With each offering a unique perspective to healing, it's the combination of both that is stronger than its parts.
In this week's blog post, you'll learn:
- What vitalism is and why it matters
- The biomedical versus vitalist approach to healing
- The language of the six tissue states
- How to combine these two perspectives in your practice
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CONNECT WITH SAJAH AND WHITNEY
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ABOUT THE PLANT PATH
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The Plant Path is a window into the world of herbal medicine. With perspectives gleaned from traditional Western herbalism, Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, Alchemy, Medical Astrology, and traditional cultures from around the world, The Plant Path provides unique insights, skills and strategies for the practice of true holistic herbalism. From clinical to spiritual perspectives, we don't just focus on what herbs are "good for," but rather who they are as intelligent beings, and how we can work with them to heal us physically and consciously evolve.
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ABOUT SAJAH
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Sajah Popham is the author of Evolutionary Herbalism and the founder of the School of Evolutionary Herbalism, where he trains herbalists in a holistic system of plant medicine that encompasses clinical Western herbalism, medical astrology, Ayurveda, and spagyric alchemy.
His mission is to develop a comprehensive approach that balances the science and spirituality of plant medicine, focusing on using plants to heal and rejuvenate the body, clarify the mind, open the heart, and support the development of the soul. This is only achieved through understanding and working with the chemical, energetic, and spiritual properties of the plants. His teachings embody a heartfelt respect, honor and reverence for the vast intelligence of plants in a way that empowers us to look deeper into the nature of our medicines and ourselves.
He lives on a homestead in the foothills of Mt. Baker Washington with his wife Whitney where he teaches, consults clients, and prepares spagyric herbal medicines.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the plant path, your window into the world of herbal medicine, with Saja and Whitney Popham, founders of the School of Evolutionary Herbalism. |
| 0:24.6 | Hey there everybody, Seja here, founder of the School of Evolutionary Herbalism. |
| 0:28.6 | And lately I've been talking a lot about this concept of vitalism and how vitalism is one of the more traditional models and approaches to not just practicing |
| 0:40.4 | herbal medicine, but a perception of the way that we see life, of being able to see that the |
| 0:47.0 | natural world is intelligent, that it has consciousness, that it has purpose and meaning. And I think this is a critically important |
| 0:56.8 | way of learning to see the world kind of on a big picture level because I think some of the |
| 1:03.1 | biggest problems we're facing on the earth at this time are because we don't have this |
| 1:08.7 | vitalist perspective of the natural world, |
| 1:11.6 | we don't see nature as intelligent, |
| 1:14.4 | and that has led to the human being separating ourselves |
| 1:18.2 | from the natural world, which I believe is at the root causes |
| 1:21.8 | of a lot of the major ecological issues that we're facing, |
| 1:25.2 | health issues that we're facing, |
| 1:27.3 | and it goes on and on and on. |
| 1:28.7 | But from a more practical perspective in terms of herbalism, the vitalist view brings us to a very |
| 1:37.6 | different approach to looking at the body, a different way of understanding our anatomy, |
| 1:43.6 | our physiology, and ultimately leading to a very |
| 1:47.8 | different approach in terms of our therapeutic application of plants. And one of the critical |
| 1:54.6 | elements of a vitalist worldview is seeing that the body is intelligent as we are as much a part of nature as anything |
| 2:05.0 | else. And that through following the intelligence of the body, that our healing work with the |
| 2:12.2 | plants is oriented in a way that we're simply supporting the body and doing what it is naturally trying |
| 2:21.1 | to do on its own, that we're supporting the body's innate internal healing mechanisms rather |
... |
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