Poisonous plants have long been misunderstood and even forbidden, yet they hold a special medicinal power. Let’s do as our ancestors did and carefully, respectfully ally ourselves with this potent family of healing herbs.

IN THE INTRO:

• Poisonous plants, visionary journeys, and Samhain/Halloween witches

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• How trees and plants companioned Kathryn through her dark and disconnected teen years, led to her meditation practice and relationship with wrathful deities, and eventually brought her to the poison plant path
• Safety: we are not talking about ingesting these plants, but working with their spirits
• Making space to integrate traumatic experiences
• My recent experience with belladonna
• What happens when many people all tune in to the same plant spirit
• The effects of deliriant plants
• How (not) to work with datura, a gateway plant into underworld/angelic work
• How the scent of plants can bring us into deeper relationship with them
• Gender, pronouns, and plants
• Reclaiming lost visionary lineages
• Being aware of projecting our desires and our wounds onto plants
• When plant knowledge transmissions get broken through the ages
• When Amanita muscaria came to Kathryn in a dream
• Exploring the myth of Persephone
• The dose makes the medicine/poison- the poisonous plants used in modern medicine, and the different mechanisms of action by which they can harm

LINKS:

• Kathryn’s website

• Ben Vierling art website

• Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!)

• Poisonous Plant Book Recommendations- 

• Pharmako Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path by Dale Pendell

• Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and its Applications by Christian Ratsch and Albert Hoffman

• Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants by Claudia Muller-Ebeling, Christian Ratsch, and Wolf Storl

• Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Evans Schultes, Christian Ratsch, and Albert Hoffman 

• Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart

• Malleus Maleficarum

• Hammer of the Witches on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast

• Witches & Witch-Hunts: A Global History by Wolfgang Behringer

• My website MythicMedicine.love 

• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? Quiz

• Medicine Stories Facebook group

• Mythic Medicine on Instagram

• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" -J. Krishnamurti

"Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left." -Aldous Huxley

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." -Arthur Schopenhauer

IN THE INTRO:

• Remembering that radical literally means “back to the root"- what we consider today to be radical health care is actually just our ancestral human biological inheritance 

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• How Dr. Brogan’s own diagnosis, and sitting with the cognitive dissonance that came with it, turned what she had been taught about health and healing on its head
• Searching for the science that we aren’t given
• It’s not so much information wars as competing paradigms that are causing the divisions in modern medicine
• Embracing complexity and critical thinking
• Psychiatric pharmaceuticals are the most habit-forming substances on the planet (Dr. Brogan hasn’t written a prescription since 2010)
• Walking away from labels and tapering off psych meds
• How a diagnosis can act as a hex, or as an opening into a more authentic connection to self
• The dehumanizing that has to happen when medicine is practiced at scale
• Suffering ends where meaning begins
• How the Evolutionary Mismatch between our ancestral human bodies and our modern lives underlies so many physical and mental disorders
• We have tremendous capacity to change our gene expression
• Precision and bioindividual (the future of!) medicine v vaccine mandates (everyone gets the same 72 highly complex and inherently risky injections, no matter their individual health profiles)
• How two of Dr. Brogan’s patients having 2nd trimester stillbirths after receiving the flu shot sent her down the path of 10,000 hours of vaccine research
• The germ warfare paradigm is the ultimate expression of a control, fear-based paradigm of medicine 
• Creating the conditions that allow people to heal themselves
• Kelly’s personal experience transforming motherline pain and trauma, and raising her daughters to report only to themselves

IN THE OUTRO:

• The conversation they are trying to silence is the very conversation we need to be having; the information they are trying to censor is the exact information you need to know
• The cultural cognitive dissonance wherein we live in a society that censors the hashtag #vaccineinjury while simultaneously paying out $4,182,078,646 through the government run national Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (as of August 2019, link below)
• Google and social media search censorship
• Some great accounts, websites, and one podcast for real vaccine information
• How censorship and vaccine mandates will backfire on the Pharmaceutical industry

LINKS:

• KellyBroganMD website
• Kelly’s Vaccines and Brain Health free eBook
• Medicine Stories Patreon (Own Your Self book giveaway!)
• The Continuum Concept book by Jean Liedloff
• Censorship is the Last Tool of Tyrants article by Dr. Joseph Mercola
• Google is Now a Pharmaceutical Company
• CDC is a Vaccine Company
• Financial report by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
• My website MythicMedicine.love 
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? Quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

SOME VACCINE RESOURCES-

Instagram accounts:

• @pubmed_science_stats
• @TheAulaniProject
• @BelieveMothers
• @EchoUnafraid

Facebook pages:

• The HighWire 
• Hear This Well
• Vaccine Impact
• Ashley Everly

Websites:

• Informed Consent Action Network
• Children’s Health Defense by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
• The Immunity Education Group
• The National Vaccine Information Center
• The HighWire on YouTube if you’re not on FB

And listen to The Vaccine Conversation podcast!

Owen never thought he’d be a dad, neither of us planned on getting married, and we had no idea that our love for plants would play such a big role in sustaining our relationship. Here’s a peek into how we make our lives together work...

IN THE INTRO:

• Elderberry & Motherwort
• Three things that make our marriage work

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• How we met and then, six years later, got together (St. John’s Wort oil played a role)
• Why we pretended we weren’t falling in love even when we clearly were
• What we were doing before we got together, and how we’ve changed and grown together
• How Owen, who never thought he’d have kids, transitioned first into the role of stepdad and then new father
• How we find balance and prioritize our marriage while sharing kids, land, a home, and a business (spoiler alert: we don’t)
• What roles we each take on within the family and the business
• Ramblings on getting married and raising kids in middle age
• Parenting a teenager and a threenager
• Adulting, we hate it but it brings us closer
• Our reaction to our unexpected pregnancy
• How we became homeowners and married people, two things we never envisioned for ourselves
• What’s growing in our gardens, what tending our land looks like
• Sustainable wildcrafting (and pivoting away from wildcrafting)
• Why plant communication has been heavy for Owen lately
• What Owen thinks about my activism around the issue of vaccine mandates
• Civil uprising is the only option left to us on so many fronts, so many issues, as big businesses continue to destroy environmental and human health in the name of profit
• What we’ve learned from our fights
• Envisioning the future of our business and family

LINKS:

• Our website MythicMedicine.love (herbal medicines & more!)
• Medicine Stories Patreon 
• Amber’s/Mythic Medicine’s Instagram
• Owen’s Instagram
• Take our fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Empaths are trending right now; let’s dig beneath the surface into what it really means to be empathic and/or to have a highly sensitive nervous system, and then talk about the plant and fungal allies that can help us to relax, recalibrate, and ground.

IN THE INTRO:

• The difference between empathic and highly sensitive people
• High sensitivity is an evolutionary adaptation
• Ritual is remembering

IN THE INTERVIEW:

Part I, Lola interviews me:

• How I came to walk the plant path
• My experience as a vegan postpartum woman
• What fat does for our bodies- resilience and deep nourishment- and why it’s extra important for Highly Sensitive People
• Remembering the intelligence that is woven throughout every cell in our body (not just the brain)
• Overcoming the empathic tendency to shut everything out
• Healing the legacy of highly sensitive/empathic ancestors making harmful decisions in an endeavor to self medicate
• How psychedelics can help heal and empower HSPs
• Reishi as an ally
• The importance of touching something before ingesting it
• Practicing the felt sense of our food
• Making a game of tuning into and experimenting with changing the aperture of your sensory gating channels
• Knowing your strength as an empathic person 

Part II, I interview Lola:

• How Lola came into relationship with psilocybin mushrooms
• Time is the most persistent illusion
• Knowing that all is well, not as a bypass, but as the deeper reality of nature
• The stark difference between altering your consciousness recreationally and doing so ceremonially
• Tracing the motherline to find the medicine that belongs to you
• Being deep in an ancient cave with the bones of your ancestors
• Psychedelics, neurogenesis, and healing trauma

LINKS:

• Lola’s website
• Empath to Power podcast
• Foundations of Ritual online course with Daniel Foor
• The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron
• How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
• The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia by Paul Devereaux 
• Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!)
• My website MythicMedicine.love 
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? Quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Myth is the power of place speaking, and the story threads that made meaning and held guidance for our ancestors can be found anew and re-woven for our times. When we tap into the mythic imagination, we remember the calling that brought us into the world.

IN THE INTRO:

• Dreaming the ancient ways
• Sisters of rock and root

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• The Loss of the Voices of the Wells: the sacred contract between humans and the land, and how the desecration of women and the destruction of the earth are interwoven
• The loss of lineage results in the loss of our stories
• The sophistication embedded in ancient myths, and how we’ve been raised misunderstanding the old stories
• Stories have an independent existence outside of the human mind and reside in the imaginal realm
• A myth is the power of place speaking
• The Otherworld is an overlay, interwoven with this one
• How the heroic journey is killing the planet
• Archetypes are universal, but expressed in myth through different cultural filters
• The wise old woman of the world, and the Cailleach that informs much of Sharon’s work
• Cultivating the mythic imagination & courting the world soul
• The meaning of “calling”: every one of us came here to do something that matters
• The stories that we loved as children hold meaning for us
• Discerning coincidence from synchronicity
• Grounding the imaginal realm
• Bodyfullness v mindfulness
• The root of the word “enchantment” means “to sing into”- becoming re-enchanted is singing yourself back into the world
• Telling stories to the land, and the sacred responsibility to engage with the earth

LINKS:

• Sharon’s website (books, online courses, and more)
• Medicine Stories Patreon (enter the giveaway!)
• This Mythic Life podcast
• The Boudica book series by Manda Scott
• Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane
• The Cry for Myth by Rollo May
• The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling by James Hillman
• My website MythicMedicine.love 
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Every woman throughout time has taken some kind of plant and some kind of fat, put them together and used it as medicine. Herbal body oils are the One Remedy to Rule Them All. And no one knows more about making and using them than Kami McBride.

IN THE INTRO:

• Ancient sacrament, modern necessity

• Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils online course

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• How herbal oils came into Kami’s life and immediately replaced petroleum based products
• If you wouldn’t put it in your mouth, don’t put it on your skin
• Kami’s favorite herbs for oil making
• Mugwort as a deepening, driving, carrying herb
• St. John’s Wort for bruises, burns, cuts, eczema, growing pains, inflamed skin, muscle pain, nerve pain, neck tension, spasms, back pain, insomnia, anxiety, relaxation, children’s health, smashed fingers and a million other things
• How oiling nourishes and calms the nervous system
• If the skin is dry, then the nerves are dry- this dehydration makes us feel agitated and irritated and anxious (and is exacerbated in summer and fall), “Oil is the antidote to nervousness”
• The skin is an immunological organ- why oiling is so important for supporting optimal lymphatic and immune system health
• Using oils with kids
• Earlobe oiling! Game changer
• Herbal oils for sleep support- goodnight insomnia
• When you study herbalism you’re also learning about the earth and the human body
• No one can tell you how much of an herbal preparation to take- even doctor’s dosage recommendations are guesses (know thyself!)
• How herbal body oiling helps you develop deep listening to and knowledge of your body
• Embedding self care into the culture
• All the places where Kami keeps little bottles of oil for immediate access
• How oils helped revive Kami’s ailing great aunt
• The skin as a reflection of internal health
• How making an herbal oil is different from making an herbal tincture

MAKING OILS:

• Learning to make shelf stable and potent herbal oils 
• How to know which herbs to use fresh and which to use dry
• Preventing spoilage when making fresh plant oils: the 5 things to pay attention to (FLAHM)
• Using alcohol in your oil making for greater potency and preservation
• The most controversial of all oil making questions- should you solar infuse your oils?
• There’s not just one way to make your herbal medicine- herbalism is vast
• If you’re making a blend, should you make separate oils and blend later or just put all the herbs into one jar?
• Should you oil your face? And our skin care practices
• “Every woman throughout time has taken some kind of plant and some kind of fat, put it together and used it as some kind of medicine”
• Why making your own oils will save you SO MUCH MONEY
• Oils are the least amount of effort for the most return home remedy and are such an effective and easy place to start your herbal journey
• All the first aid uses for herbal oils

LINKS:

• Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils online course

• Mythic Medicinals St. John’s Wort Oil
• Dr. Vasant Lad and the Ayurvedic Institute
• Medicine Stories Patreon 
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? Quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Embodying the blessing of being a child of diverse lineages, being rooted first in our ancestral stories and second in our cultural narratives, embracing our inherent worth as we step into the work we came here to do, and so much more...

IN THE INTRO:

• Imaginal remembering
• How primal human posture has greatly diminished my pain
• Gathering the stories of your elders

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• Tamira’s childhood experiences with the unseen, and how that was (not) held in her family
• We are accountable to our ancestors
• The process of remembering and learning to be in daily, direct communication with those who hold the container for our lives
• Being a bridge between our children and the ancestors- incorporating small ritual into our lives and sharing our peoples’ stories
• Our children are the ancestors returning as the new faces of the lineage
• The evolution of Tamira’s ancestral healing journey as a black woman in the south with both African and European ancestors
• Seeing today’s -isms as rituals of disconnection that feed shame and hatred and anger, which further fuel racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.
• Remembering that black and white are not ancestral categories and stepping back to view the larger historical narratives of our people
• The story of the harmonizing of two of Tamira’s lineages, one of West African descent and one of European- what was shown to her during the ceremony and how the healing changed her life (we cry)
• Victimhood, blame, forgiveness, and how our redemption is tied into one another’s
• Claiming first the identity of being a child of your ancestors before being anchored in the (very real and valid) identities the world assigns you
• Ancestral connection banishes imposter syndrome- you belong with and to your people always, they’re holding the container of your life so that you can bring your medicine forward (and when we feel this belonging this we are much less likely to perpetuate cultural and personal harms)
• Holding space for childrens’ grief, and the generations of unmetabolized grief wreaking havoc on our culture

LINKS:

• Tamira’s website (teachings, podcast, ancestral healing sessions)
• Tamira on Instagram: Get Your Chit Together
• Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!)
• My website MythicMedicine.love 
• Christine Kent’s Whole Woman website and her interview on the Honey Talks Podcast
• Ruby Sales TEDtalk: How We Can Begin to Heal the Pain of Racial Division
• Martin Prechtel The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Through untold eons mammals have evolved a beautiful birth-giving physiology based around a complex cascade of hormones that are released during labor. We give both mother and baby the best chance at a peaceful, ecstatic birth and postpartum period when we remember and respect this ancient dance.

IN THE INTRO:

• Complex parenting topics: sleep, immunity, birth

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• Sarah’s mainstream doctor grandfather and how she got interested in natural birth
• The exquisitely designed ancestral/mammalian hormonal blueprint of labor 
• The impact of (unnatural, external) stress on a laboring woman and how it disrupts the optimal hormonal flow
• Creating optimal conditions for birthing and for bonding
• The hormonal consequences of bypassing the natural physiological onset of labor (such as by induction or scheduled C-section)
• How feeling unsafe (at a subconscious, limbic system level) disrupts the flow of birth
• The irony of how we treat animals in labor v how we treat human women in labor
• The ecstatic, altered state of mind we enter into during labor 
• What first time mothers need to know but are often not told
• Fear and mystery in birth
• The body is designed to transcend the (natural, intrinsic) stress and pain of labor and they play a critical role in bonding
• The role of vocalization in labor
• Newborns need placental blood: cord clamping and how our cultural beliefs around that have changed over time
• What “No hatting, no patting, no chatting” means for the postpartum period
• Ancestral family sleep and motherbaby biological regulation: the many reasons that co-sleeping is best for babies and the science that backs it up
• The fascinating phenomenon of some birth attendants being able to smell the moment before the baby is born

LINKS

• Dr. Buckley’s website
• Dr. Buckley on Facebook
• Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!)
• My website MythicMedicine.love 
• Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering book
• Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing report
• Medicine Stories Podcast Episode 30: The Innate Intelligence of the Immune System with Cilla Whatcott
• Medicine Stories Podcast Episode 48: Matriarchy in Action & Ancestor Assisted Birth with Emilee Saldaya
• Jeanine Parvati Baker
• CO-SLEEPING RESEARCH- James McKenna’s Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre-Dame
• Sara Wichkam’s website
• Midwifery Today’s website 
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Soft power, honoring our elders, and banishing imposter syndrome by remembering that we’re in service to the earth.

IN THE INTRO:

• Honoring the lineage of plant healers that led to this podcast
• Intuitive breast care w/ herbs
• What every herbalist should know

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• Kneeling to the earth- herbalism isn’t about you, please don’t be afraid to share your voice
• How Rosemary’s name (which came from her two grandmothers) set her on her path from an early age
• Plants that carry soft power & the medicine of rosemary (the plant)
• What Rosemary learned about plant healing from her Armenian grandmother
• The necessity of recognizing our elders
• How Rosemary came into teaching herbalism to others during the American herbal renaissance of the 1970s
• How herbalists seem to come to the same conclusions as one another over and over again, and realizing that it’s because we aren’t figuring new things out but simply stepping back into the ancient human/plant relationship and the knowledge that comes with that
• The importance of monitoring, conserving, preserving, and cultivating wild plants and how United Plant Savers has changed the face of American herbalism
• How plants that grow in abundance tend to be super nutritive plants that our ancestors used in daily life as food and medicine, and how rarer plants tend to have more specific medicine and were used more sparingly in acute cases
• The ongoing Fire Cider controversy and what happens when folks choose trademarks over traditions
• Life transitions, looking back on Rosemary’s incredible legacy, and looking forward to what’s next

LINKS:

• Rosemary’s websites: www.sagemountain.com and  www.scienceandartofherbalism.com (<-- click the Patreon link below to get a $75 off coupon code for this course by 7/31/19)
• United Plant Savers: Medicinal Plant Conservation
• Free Fire Cider
• Queen of Heaven & Earth Herbal Breast Oil and Episode 33 w/ Anja Robinson Root Cause Medicine & Breasts as an Intuitive Center
• Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!)
• My website MythicMedicine.love
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Mariee Sioux’s music is medicine for the living and medicine for the dead, a direct portal both to and from the ancestors and the land spirits. In this interview she shares profound stories of hurt, healing, and visions gifted from the otherworld.

IN THE INTRO:

• Making grief more beautiful and more bearable
• How to enter the Giveaway of the Grief in Exile album

Songs played during this episode are-

1. Wild Eyes
2. Black Snakes
3. Grief in Exile
4. Two Tongues

IN THE INTERVIEW:

• Mariee never dreamed she’d be a musician & how that ended up happening
• Mariee’s connection with her indigenous Mexican and American maternal ancestors and her Hungarian and Polish paternal ancestors
• Songs pouring through you and the magical process of bringing something into being
• When the ancestors choose one person in their lineage to drop their stories into
• Ethnic stereotypes and what people will say to your face
• Mariee’s work with the Nisenan, the native people of the lands she and I live on, and how growing up here she literally never knew there were remaining tribal members here
• “I experienced so many spirits on the land that hadn’t been grieved”
• Some deep medicine stories- how this podcast has changed Mariee’s life (so much interweaving serendipity, since her music opens and closes every episode)
• How datura embedded into Mariee’s consciousness and how that plant relationship touched her life, even before she’d ever worked with the plant physically
• The amazing ancestral vision Mariee was gifted that supports the music and voice medicine she carries in this lifetime
• The different ways that people who come from lineages with unmetabolized grief and trauma [all of us] carry that ancestral inheritance
• How magic and the synchronicities start showing up once we commit to following our soul calling
• A digression on the Aquarian archetype

LINKS

• Hear Mariee’s music and order Grief in Exile: www.marieesioux.bandcamp.com
• Nisenan Tribe: 1) www.nisenan.org, 2) Ancestral Homeland Reciprocity Program, 3) California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP), 4) Tribal Chairman Richard B. Johnson’s book History Of Us: Nisenan Tribe of the Nevada City Rancheria
• Sophia Rose’s interview with Mariee at Garden Party
• Past episodes mentioned- 19. Reclaiming Kitchen Wisdom & Ancestral Healing w/ Darla Antoine and 3. Becoming the Medicine & Seeing the Wide Arc of Time w/ Sophia Rose
• Medicine Stories Patreon (enter the giveaway!)
• My website MythicMedicine.love
• Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz
• Medicine Stories Facebook group
• Mythic Medicine on Instagram
• Music by Mariee Sioux (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)