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In short: first perceive, then reflect, then connect. In slightly-less-short: first, practice perceptive skills of intuition, interoception, and mindfulness; then, keep a record that accurately reflects your food, feelings, exercise, and experiences; then, identify health patterns at your baseline and after making changes, to see whether and where those changes are having effect.
Humans are very good at pattern recognition. We’re so good at it, in fact, that we “trick ourselves” into seeing familiar patterns in clouds or in Rorschach blots. But we can’t recognize a pattern anywhere if we don’t look for one. Keeping the record isn’t going to do you any good if you don’t go back and analyze it. Conversely, we might feel a sense of accomplishment if we make some change “for our health”, but we can’t have real confidence in it unless we can point to a pattern of cause and effect linked to it. Put those pattern recognition skills to work, and quell any doubts about the value of your adopted habits—whether those doubts are your own, or those of others who look askance at your strange new ideas about food, medicine, and movement.
Reflection is a bending back. It requires some flexibility. Reflecting is intimately bound up with recording. If a recording does not reflect well its original, we say it has low fidelity. We prefer the highest degree of fidelity possible, as this gives us the greatest amount of useful information. Reflection is similarly bound to recollection. Recollection is a reconstitution, and this always involves some adhesive or binding agent, which is an addition to the original component parts and which may keep them from fitting together as closely, or covering the same range of motion, as they once did.
When engaging in self-experimentation, there are certain skills that must be put into play in order to get useful results. First are the sensory skills that form the borders of our interactions with the external world, and can give us insights into our own internal world as well. Diet and lifestyle changes are ideally made with the guidance of an experienced and trusted practitioner, but sometimes that’s impractical or impossible. Sometimes, you don’t have a practitioner like that near you, or you haven’t found one who suits you yet. Sometimes, you hear so many good things about a particular diet, exercise plan, or herbal remedy, you just have to see if it lives up to the hype. So you decide to give it a try for a while and see how it affects you—you set out to conduct an experiment on yourself. Katja’s recent article on the [mis]conception of “cure” in our culture reminded me of a related thought, one that comes to mind whenever I see another “Cancer Cure Found!?” headline. And since everything’s more concise in couplets:
We all have stress. I have very few friends who aren’t working two jobs, or working while raising kids, or scraping by month to month, or even [not-so-]simply trying to figure out where their lives are taking them. And that’s all before we get to the nightly news’ quotidian catastrophe, or the pundits’ panic, or the gouges at the gas pump. Here are two relaxing, calming teas that I’ve found useful to help wind down after a tough day. (Numbers are “parts” — a teaspoon, a handful, whatever your measure is.)
Almost every herbalist I know has a “root beer” tea variation. Here’s mine (numbers are “parts”): 2 sarsaparilla This is a great-tasting, grounding blend that really roots you in your body and gets you ready to use it.
We practice and teach Traditional Western Herbalism in the vitalist tradition. We believe that the strongest factor in healing is the body’s own spirit or vital force, and that if the spirit is well cared for and nourished, all illness and injury can be overcome from within. This means much of our work is focused on the foods people eat, their exercise habits, the quantity and quality of sleep they get, and the physical and psychological stresses they encounter in their daily lives. We use nutrition, primal movement, stress reduction strategies, and gradual lifestyle changes to help them come into a place of balance and whole health. An answer to the question: What is Traditional Western Herbalism? It is sometimes suggested, and often presumed, that the present practice of herbalism in the West is a matter of matching single herbs to individual ailments, in contrast to the better-known systematized forms of traditional medicine—TCM, Unani, Ayurveda, and so on—which emphasize constitutional assessments, individualized recommendations, and complex formulae. The idea is that Western Herbalists have a “take this herb for that symptom” approach which mirrors the model of modern conventionallopathic medicine. This idea is mistaken, and markedly. Traditional Western Herbalism as we find it today is a full, holistic system of healing with a rich history and a diversely livingrowing present. Literature, lore, experience, and experiment are its primary sources; integrative and inventive, this practice is a polyculture, but everywhere it grows from a shared ground.
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