Welcome to the first edition of what will be a quarterly newsletter aligned with the seasonal equinoxes and solstices. The birth of this newsletter comes at a time of my own birth-day and I can look back at over 30 years of devotion to supporting the health and well-being of Self, Others and Earth. My love and passion for Life inspires all that I offer—herbal remedies, consultations and classes—and I thought that it is time to share a little more of what is behind the medicine that moves through me.

Healing is in Relationship

a conversation between Constance Lynn and Tessa Barkan

Where do you believe the medicine of the plants comes from?

In my experience, the healing plants offer is in relationship. What this looks like in my work as an herbalist is that I first give an offering to the plants, usually of cornmeal or tobacco, and connect with their spirit in the unseen realm. Then, I collect with intention, having every aspect of how I interact with the plants be about relationship and care. Where I get really excited is preparing herbal remedies and sharing this medicine with someone I have a relationship with.

It’s possible to take an allopathic view of herbal medicine and make it about the chemical constituents of the herb, rather than an intrinsic vital force in the plant, but in my experience, that is not where the deeper medicine is.

So it’s important to you to also have a relationship with the person you offer the medicine to?

Yes- I keep what I do very personal because, again, I believe that the healing is in relationship. So if someone comes to my table at the community market, some of the healing that they are going to experience from the tea or salve I hand them starts with the interaction between us, and is infused in the remedy that they then get to take home and experience. The love and the intention is there from the very first offering in relationship with the plant, and then is brought through in the relationship I have with the person who takes the remedy.

It sounds like you’re almost acting as a bridge then, between relationship with the plants and relationship to the people that you are offering them to, do you see it that way?

Yes, that’s a good analogy for it. Twelve years ago, upon arriving on the land where I currently live, I sat with the plants and asked them what they wanted from me and the response I heard from them was “We want you to make remedies and share our medicine with others, so that people remember that the plants are here to heal.” And so in that moment I hoped I was worthy, I hoped that I could be that bridge for these plants. I felt such loneliness from them, because people have forgotten them. It was a very intimate moment of feeling this responsibility coming through to help people remember that the plants are here to heal, and they always have been.

***Late winter, silver leaf buffalo berry and ephedra veridis***

Earlier, you mentioned that it’s possible to take an allopathic view of herbal medicine, instead of finding the medicine in remembering the vital force and healing abilities through relationship with the plants. I’m curious how you relate this to most herbal products you can buy on shelves these days.

I feel like there’s a very big difference between herbal remedies, and herbal products... Ok, so a personal story: I used to work at food co-ops, which had shelves full of different teas in boxes and different herbal products, and I would take them to work with ailments I had. But they didn’t work. And so my early impression was that herbs don’t work, and I even shared this idea with people who came in.

The transition for me came when I worked on my first farm, and I was working with plants where they grew. I had some health issues and the farmer there started talking to me about collecting nettles and red raspberry leaf, and taking these plants for healing. That was my first realization that you can have a relationship with plants; you can collect them and dry them and ingest them, and feel their vital force coming through, and that is where the healing is. It just blew my mind, but it also was so natural; it was like coming home, and that is what started the healing for me.

Is there a way that you hope that your medicine, in addition to healing through the relationship you infuse with them, also encourages the people who take them to go out and be with the plants? Is there another bridge there too, in the medicine you are offering?

Definitely. I have people all the time who, after taking or talking to me about my remedies, will say “Oh, I grew up with this plant in my field,” or “Oh, I remember this plant,” or they sign up for my herbal apprenticeship or a class, and that gets so exciting for me because I feel like the plants themselves are waking people up and that’s the healing. We think that healing is about making the symptoms go away, but the deeper healing is in re-establishing our connections with Life.

What is it like to work with you one-on-one?

I really love doing consultations, I love how personal they are and how supportive the process is for people. One of the reasons why I started doing them is that I had a concern, based on something that would happen sometimes when people came to my table at the market. Typically, people will ask for a remedy for a symptom they are having, and I had a fear that if I was giving my remedy in the same way that people use allopathic medicine, that my remedies wouldn’t work. I felt very protective of the plants because I didn’t want people to carry on the message that herbs don’t work.

I started offering holistic health consultations so that I could frame the use of the remedy within the broader context of dietary and lifestyle changes, and whatever else was there, but it very much came out of this place of not wanting to perpetuate the idea that the plants don’t heal.

***Wild medicinal plants in community.***

We can’t use plants the same way that we use conventional Western/allopathic medicine. We have to work with them as our relatives, and in a way that takes responsibility for our own personal change as well. And in that context, the vital force in the plants meets our own vital force and supports our own deep healing on a very profound level.