Medicine Stories

Often unseen amidst the tales of triumph, defeat, tragedy, and heroism of the 20th century's World Wars is the dramatic reshaping of food culture, family life, and women's work that these astronomically disruptive events wrought upon millions of people. Join nutritionist Kaleigh Mason and I as we explore the rise of industrialized and processed foods during wartime, the marketing that reframed convenience foods as symbols of progress, and the deeper cultural and generational health consequences of the loss of traditional foodways rooted in ancestry, land, and true nourishment. LINKS: Kaleigh's post that inspired this conversation Medicine Stories Patreon- bonus conversation w/ Kaleigh on Zeolite and detox protocols for children St. John's Wort Buy One Get One Half Off sale 6/3-10 w/ code SJWBOGO at Mythic Medicine Nutrition Elements Patreon Kaleigh on Instagram Amber on Instagram Quiz: Find Your Wise Woman Archetype Amber's Healing Waters Nature Immersion Retreat in Costa Rica Nov 3-8 Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes) Kaleigh's Instagram posts on the Highest Rated Supplements & Worst Rated Supplements based on her 20+ years in the natural health industry

Energy loss happens gradually and then suddenly, creating confusion and the fear that you might never recover. My guest and I have both spent time in the depths of overwhelming fatigue, and we have both found our way back to ourselves again. Today we share our stories- the lifetime of inputs that set us up for collapse, the precipitating event that pushed Clara over the edge, what we learned while in the abyss, and how we've recovered our vitality. Clara is a certified nutritionist, mineral balancing practitioner, and mother living in Montana. Not only has she nourished herself back to health, but she has helped many other women to do the same. LINKS: Medicine Stories Patreon- bonus conversation w/ Clara The Mythic Medicine herb shop Clara's Deep Nourishment Course Clara's ReMothering Substack Clara on Instagram Amber on Instagram Quiz: Find Your Wise Woman Archetype Amber's Healing Waters Nature Immersion Retreat in Costa Rica Nov 3-8 Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes) PDF of the Energy book from 1985 The Energy Balance Podcast episode GLP-1 Drugs For Weight Loss

My most beloved herbal elder and I talk about our favorite subject- women throughout time using plants for self care, family healing, and community connection. After nearly 4 decades as a practicing herbalist and teacher, and in an age of informational overabundance, Kami has seen what actually works when it comes to truly embodying herbal knowing. Find Kami's freebies & learn more about Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils (including the peek at what you see when you log in to the course). Two Patreon bonuses for this episode- 1) an extended conversation with Kami where we share our stories of Mothering Without Elders 2) two free videos with Kami entitled Garden Herb Walk- meet 9 favorite garden herbs that can calm the nerves, help with digestion, heal the skin, kick a cold, and more! Let's meet beautiful edible and medicinal flowers, weeds, leaves and seeds and find out which ones are used for what. Kami's book The Herbal Kitchen Amber's website MythicMedicine.love Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy? Amber/Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

GNM is an alt health trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. It is attractive to so many (including me and my guest, once) because it acknowledges the role that emotions and trauma play in physical health and symptom manifestation, something that mainstream medicine still somehow refuses to do. But just because some aspects of an ideology are true and helpful does not mean that the entire framework is valid. Critical thinking and humility are essential tools for navigating information overload and complex frameworks, especially when it comes to health. The allure of certainty and specialized knowledge can lead people to adopt rigid belief systems that don't hold up to critical thinking, and the the zealotry of believing that your group's belief system will save the world only further strengthens unconscious confirmation bias (along with other logical fallacies common in GNM- loading the language, heads you lose tails I win, us v them thinking, bizarre antisemitic conspiracies, etc). But what might be most worrisome about this growing movement is the purity mindset demanded of its more extreme adherents- the belief that nothing outside of us can affect us if only we believe strongly enough in our own omnipotence and prove our righteousness and purity by attaining a total lack of symptoms. What is viewed as radical sovereignty and empowerment is really just outright magical thinking reinforced by an absence of humility, mystery, and the reality that ultimately we are not in control of what happens to us. The body is not a closed system; we are deeply embedded in overlapping ecologies. This episode has been years in the making, and I have been asked time and time again for my take on GNM. When I was sent Demetra's essay on the subject I knew that I had finally found the right person to have this conversation with. Her past cult experience, and my years of deep dives into culty thinking and behavior, provide a lens through which to view this phenomenon. Though we do not claim that GNM is a cult in the traditional sense, cultishness is a spectrum and GNM is definitely on that spectrum. Also its tenets are demonstrably false, and have led to death in some cases. NBD. In our Patreon bonus conversation Demetra shares her cult story- joining what she thought was a good thing, slowly realizing it wasn't, leaving, being attacked by the leader and other members, and the long "deprogramming" and stabilization process that all cult survivors undergo Demetra's essay The Culty Fraud of German New Medicine Dr. Moss's report German New Medicine- Hope or Hoax? Demetra's podcast Impolite Company on Spotify and Apple Amber's website MythicMedicine.love Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy? Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes) Mentioned in this episode: Tension Myositis Syndrome Cell Danger Response A Little Bit Culty podcast (the best!) Cult documentaries (by no means an extensive list)- The Vow (NXIVM), Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, Breath of Fire (Kundalini yoga), The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin Steven Hassan's BITE model Cult expert Robert Jay Lifton

The times are unprecedented and there is no template for the future. We all feel this, and we feel the overwhelm of information, influence, and opinions. Herbalism, as it always has, offers us sanctuary from everything vying to take hold of our attention and life force. Not so that we can check out in an endless fog of self care, but so that we can be truly present and embodied as we navigate this time of rapid and radical change. The plants call us home to ourselves. Kami's Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils course Video Sneak Peak at the Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils Course from Kami McBride (what it looks like when you log in) Mastery by Robert Green Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!) Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy? My website MythicMedicine.love Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

"I pray to the dead to help me remember who I am while I'm still alive." To be in relationship with those who've gone before us is a deeply human way of being. Our ancestors knew that the "departed" never left, and that they answer when called. The way modern Western people conceive of the dead is a deviation that discards millennia of human knowing. Let us pray to the ancestors to help us sober up from civilization, remember what we've always known, and reclaim the long story of the soul. RESOURCES: Perdita's website Take Back the Magic Medicine Stories Patreon (book giveaway & course coupon code) Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand My podcast about my mother's passing What I'd Be Without You: My Mother's Life, Death, and Legacy of Love The Madonna Secret, a novel by Sophie Strand Perdita and her husband Clark Strand's website The Way of the Rose Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy? Our website & herbal medicines MythicMedicine.love Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Healing is communal. Settle in softly for this wide-ranging conversation with my most requested guest. Sophie and I talk chronic illness and trauma, diagnosis as blessing and as hex, the theater of medicine, the aquatic nature of memory, and the entanglements of time. RESOURCES: Sophie on Instagram Sophie's newsletter Make Me Good Soil Sophie's books and more The Lady's Handbook for her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey ACE- Adverse Childhood Experiences quiz The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van den Kolk (giant trigger warning; read the book below instead) Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious by Erik Wargo The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich The Emerald (a podcast beloved by both me & Sophie) Read The Ones That Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics & the Entanglement of Matter & Meaning by Karen Barad Time, As a Symptom by Joanna Newsom (lyrics here) My blog post Ancestral Voices, women's Weariness, and the Illusion of Linear Time What I'd Be Without You: My Mother's Life, Death, and Legacy of Love Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!) Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy? My website MythicMedicine.love Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Suuzi has been one of my best friends for 15 years, and our lives have taken parallel tracks recently- deeply interested in health & natural living for decades, we have nevertheless both found ourselves in total burnout at the edge of collapse in our early 40s. We share what got us here (and the irony that so much of it is doing things we truly believed were making us healthy), the current state of our metabolic/thyroid/mineral health, and our paths going forward. We hope this inspires others feeling stuck and confused- despite tremendous effort to be healthy- to quiet the outside noise, self attune, and more deeply understand your own biochemistry. Dr. Suuzi Hazen is a wife, mother, farmer and founder of Mother's Best Liver Pills. She holds a doctoral degree in TCM, graduating in 2009 from ICTCM Vancouver. Suuzi completed extensive internships in Anhui Hospital of TCM in Hefei, China. She also interned with Dr. Katrine Heigelmann (Victoria), and Dr. David Li Lam (Vancouver). She brings a grounded yet radical, no-nonsense perspective to ancestral health and wellness. Medicine Stories Patreon Dr. Suuzi on Instagram Mother's Best Liver Pills Sena Maria's post on Why Your Healing Work Isn't Moving the Needle Sarah Kleiner Wellness on Instagram Niecia's post of Alison Luterman's poem What Is Mineral Balancing? Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy? Related previous episodes: Returning the Mother to Herself: Our Nourishment Shapes How We Receive Life - Niecia Nelson The Mineral Matrix & the Motherline That Made You - Hamid Jabbar Elemental Interbeing, Food Information Overwhelm, and Cell Deep Nourishment for Women - Kymber Maulden Your Cycle, Your Self: Period Empowerment, Fertility Awareness, & the Risks of Hormonal Birth Control - Dr. Elizabeth Wade My website MythicMedicine.love Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)