Hello, welcome to my little podcast world. You’re listening to The Lunar Body, and I’m Kristen Ciccolini, functional nutritionist, period priestess, and the founder of Good Witch Kitchen.
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Today’s episode is about meeting your herbal allies, and by that I simply mean developing a relationship with herbs, building an herbal routine or practice for yourself.
Before we start, just a reminder that this information is for educational purposes only, it is NOT medical advice and it is your responsibility to speak to a qualified health care provider about your unique needs. The final decision when considering any diet or lifestyle changes, whether it’s discussed on the internet, in a podcast, or prescribed by your doctor, is always your own.
I think now is a good time to talk about this because it’s spring, and everything is blossoming all around us. When the pandemic first started, around this time we were only a couple months in and we had no other way to spend our free time really other than going for walks. I found a lot of joy in walking around my neighborhood, getting acquainted with the plants in my area, watching the flowers grow, learning the patterns of what grows first. I even noticed a pattern of colors, first the white and purple flowers started to grow, then yellow flowers bloomed, then pink. It was nice to slow down and start to get to know the flora in my area. I felt much more connected to my neighborhood after that, and especially living in the city, finding that connection can be tough.
The summer before the pandemic—is that how we’re going to refer to everything now? I could just say 2019 but it’s like, BC, before corona— anyway, that summer I had gone on a local herbalism tour where we walked around the town of Salem and our guide pointed out all of the herbs, all of the medicine, that’s growing all around us. It was led by Ryn Laurel through Now Age Travel, which is a super cool company that does educational walking tours of Salem, like actually fun and interesting ones and not like school field trip type tours, highly recommend if you’re visiting the area, but anyway it was so cool to be able to learn about and identify all of the common plants growing all around us that we just walk by and walk on and ignore.
Plant medicine is in our backyards, on the corners of busy streets, coming up through the cracks on the sidewalks — of course, you don’t necessarily want to harvest plants that are close to traffic but it was a great lesson in being more present in the world around us.
At one point we walked through a parking lot on our way to the next destination and the tour guide stopped and pointed out some weeds growing out of the cracks in the asphalt. Those weeds were actually St. John’s Wort, which can be a powerful medicine for depression. I learned that the tall, fluffy plants that are wrapped around the telephone pole near my apartment in the summer is goldenrod, a great plant for seasonal allergies.
Once I learned about the different plants in my area, I started to notice them much more. It makes sense, once you identify something you’re able to see it more and pick it out more. Like a new friend, someone you previously couldn’t pick out of a crowd but now that you know them, you bump into them all over the place.
And over the last few years I’ve developed a stronger, personal relationship with plants that I want to share with you. If you want to learn about the power of plants in general and the plants around you, you might find something you didn’t realize that you were looking for.
So aside from going on a walking tour led by an herbalist, which is probably not something you really have access to, I don’t think that’s very common, I want to share some ways that you can start learning about herbs, and also how you can build your own routine. Building a routine for yourself requires you to learn more about your body and about the herbs themselves — of course you can always consult with an herbalist but this is about developing a relationship with the plants too so some experimentation will be nice for that.
I do recommend what I said earlier and spend some time walking around your neighborhood, if you feel safe to do so, and explore what’s springing up out of your neighbor’s front lawn, peer into the cracks in the pavement to see what’s growing there.
You can search for books about plants that are native to your area. If you’re in New England, there’s one called Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast that comes highly recommended by my teachers. Also look into invasive plants. When I first started I was most comfortable foraging for these because they’re literally everywhere. There is so much medicine to be found in plants that are widely considered weeds.
Like mugwort, for instance. It’s growing right in front of my apartment, but my landlord thinks it’s unsightly so when it gets too tall, he mows it down, which is horrifying, I hate it, so I make sure to cut some before he does it. Garlic mustard grows out there too, and goldenrod grows a lot nearby.
I also recommend watching Alexis Nikole Nelson’s videos on TikTok, she’s known as the Black Forager on Twitter too. When the pandemic first started, she did a series on edible plants that you can probably find in your neighborhood, like garlic mustard, dandelion, violets, and mugwort too. She is great for learning about things that are accessible and using the herbs in simple and creative ways. She makes it super fun to learn.
There’s also an awesome app called PlantSnap that helps you identify plants, I think this is more for iPhones because I think with Androids you can just take a photo of something and google it more easily, but I love this app. You take a photo of the plant and it’ll tell you what it thinks the plant is. It’s not a perfect app because sometimes it’s wrong, but it is really helpful, sometimes you have to take a photo of the plant from a few different angles for it to pull up the right one, but when it works, it works, and it’s so fun to learn about what the plants are, see other photos of it so you can pick out the different variations, and they actually started adding information on how to grow the plant yourself indoors or outdoors, which is really helpful if you’re someone like me who doesn’t have a clue how to garden.
Another thing I like about the app is that you can save your photos and identifications as well, so you have a little library of the plants that are in your neighborhood, with the dates that you saved them, so you can have this log of plants and know exactly when you can start to see them grow.
So that’s one thing you can do, get familiar with the local flora, document it, save it to your library so you can have a little collection of all the plants you find.
Another thing I recommend doing, which is something I learned from my teachers at the Commonwealth Center for Holistic Herbalism, is to do an herb of the week practice, or you can expand it to herb of the month if you want to. This is a really hands-on way to get to know your plants.
It’s simple, you just choose an herb, and experiment with it all week or all month. Whatever herb you want to start with, if there’s any one in particular you’ve been curious about, or you can start with what’s most accessible to you, whether it’s local or storebought. If you are foraging it yourself, do make sure to be safe about it. Don’t forage anything you can’t identify with 100% certainty, and also avoid consuming anything from high-traffic areas. You don’t want to consume dandelion that’s been growing on the sidewalk near a busy intersection and absorbing car pollution. So use common sense and be safe. Just choose an herb that you want to focus on for a certain time period, and consume it.
Consume it in different ways — make a tea with it, eat it fresh if it’s safe to do so, try a tincture with it if you access to one, make a syrup or a vinegar or an elixir, sprinkle it in your meals if it’s also a culinary spice, maybe you experience it topically and make a salve out of it — and see how it all feels. Explore all the different ways you can consume it and how it influences your body.
I recommend not researching the herb while you do this — I mean, obviously, research its safety first if it’s one you’re not familiar with — but try not to look up what it’s supposed to do, at least for the first few days. Just sit with it and see how it feels in your body, without any idea of what you think is going to happen. Because everyone is different.
If you do go further down the herbalism path and start to study it, you will come across herb monographs. This is basically an herbalist’s encyclopedia, but one that each herbalist creates for themselves. It’s a collection of notes about a certain plant, what we learn about it in our training, and also personal notes about our own experimentation with the herb. What you read in one monograph from one herbalist will look different from another, so this is why I recommend not looking at the start of your experimentation because I don’t want you to question your feelings and experiences. If it’s true for you, it’s true for you, and this practice helps you get really in touch with your body. It’s similar to when you’re learning tarot, you want to take note of your initial thoughts and reactions and interpretations before going to the guidebook.
As you experiment, in all the various forms, or if you want to just stick with one form that’s cool too. Notice the flavor, notice how it makes you feel while you drink it (if it makes you pucker up or if it makes you salivate for instance), notice if there are changes quickly or if it takes a few hours to feel anything, or if you don’t feel anything at all, some herbs take a longer period of time to have effects, like adaptogens.
Get familiar with the herb. If you only have access to the loose herb, or tea, try a tea that steeps for 10 minutes vs a tea that steeps overnight. Or a hot infusion vs a cold infusion. There are lots of ways you can experiment even if you only have one form of the herb.
The point of this is that it’s a deeper learning experience. I can tell you every little thing I know about herbs but the innate knowledge that you get from personal experimentation stays with you.
Some generally safe and accessible herbs to consider working with are ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon — you can find those at the grocery store. Chamomile is another good one. Any others, choose what stands out to you — maybe you focus on it because it’s what you can find locally, or you go to an herb shop and pick out rose petals because they’re pretty, whatever you’re drawn to for any reason, just go with it.
Again, I stress that whatever you choose, google some safety information about it first or ask a trained herbalist before you proceed.
If you want to work with herbs that are specific for menstrual health, if you’re able to get your hands on vitex, otherwise known as chaste berry, that’s one that’s beneficial to work with all month long because it’s so supportive of the processes in both the follicular and luteal halves of your cycle. This is most often found as a tincture I believe, but you can also buy loose herb from Mountain Rose Herbs online or your local herb shop. If you’re in Boston where I am, I always get my herbs from Cambridge Naturals, or if I’m on the North Shore then I’ll go to Artemesia Botanicals in Salem.
Raspberry leaf is another good menstrual herb. It’s used as a uterine tonic, which means it helps strengthen the uterine muscles, remember that your uterus is a muscle, not one that you can work on at the gym, so you can use tonic herbs like raspberry leaf to help you out in that department. It can help manage a heavy flow and reduce period pain, so this one might be good to experiment with in your luteal phase.
Chamomile is another, it’s quite a gentle herb and pretty accessible too, and it’s considered very safe. You can find it in teabags at basically any grocery store, you can experiment with the loose herb, or find it as a tincture. That will be a good one to experiment with in the menstrual phase because it’s relaxing and can help ease cramps. Aside from menstrual issues chamomile is nice in topical applications too, don’t forget that’s another way you can experiment with herbs by infusing them in your body care products too.
Back to menstrual concerns, red clover blossom is a good one to experiment with in the follicular phase leading up to ovulation. It helps improve circulation. Proper blood flow is helpful for your ovaries and uterus to function optimally and red clover is said to help promote more fertile cervical mucus — if you want to learn more about cervical mucus you can go back a few episodes to the one titled What’s In My Underwear?. If you’ve been paying attention to that since we talked about it then, this one might be worth exploring. Safety-wise, if you are taking blood-thinning medication you will want to avoid red clover blossom.
Now keep in mind that for longer-term issues, one week of experimentation isn’t likely to be life-changing, but it does help you get familiar with the herb and different preparations. So maybe you want to focus on an herb for two weeks instead of one, or for a whole month. Let your intuition guide you into how you work with it, and feel free to keep me updated if you want to nerd out about it with someone.
So to recap how to get started with your herbal practice, the two things I recommend you focus on are two explore the local plants growing in your area, using the PlantSnap app or other means of identification to help you learn what’s local to you. And then consider starting an herb of the week practice, choosing an herb and working with it in different preparations, taking note of how it feels in your body throughout the week or month.
These practices will help you get in tune with your body, with earth’s natural cycles, you might notice an influence on or similarities to your own cycle. It’s just nice to get acquainted with other living things, isn’t it?
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Once you get familiar with your herbs, you’ll naturally start to develop a routine based on the information you’ve gathered in your experimentation process, how things have felt in your body and how you currently feel in your body. Don’t just start taking random herbs because you heard you should. Really think about what it is that you need.
And make sure what you need is actually what you need. For example, a lot of people gravitate towards herbs because they want a natural solution to their problems, but instead of learning about the plants and developing a relationship with them or studying them, they just use the herbs like medications. Meaning they’re just taking what they’re told without knowing how they work. If a trained herbalist who knows your situation is creating an herbal protocol for you, that’s one thing, but if you just read on the internet that you should take XYZ and then go out and buy a bunch of stuff, that’s really no different than grabbing over-the-counter meds or supplements and just hoping they work.
So first think about what it is that you need. What are the symptoms you’re experiencing? And do you have the basics in place? I’ve talked about this before, we love to buy things and hope that it will solve all our problems, but before spending any money, are you sleeping well? Are you eating balanced meals? Are you moving your body? Are you drinking enough water? Managing your stress?
Start with those. If that doesn’t solve your problems, then we start thinking about adding herbs to the routine. What is the problem, and what’s causing it? Where do you need support? Then you look at the type of herb that will support you in that area. For example, adaptogens offer stress support. Emmenagogues promote menstruation. Nervines soothe the nervous system.
Starting with the category will be helpful because then you can choose the ones accessible to you that fit within there. Also when choosing herbs, I’d consider what your constitution is.
I’ll give an example. My constitution typically runs cold and dry. You may have heard the episode I did where I talked about thinning hair — nettle is really great for that so I started incorporating it into my routine on a daily basis. I was drinking a quart of nettle tea a day.
Nettle is a drying herb. I didn’t think about this when I started on that routine. I’m already dry, so drinking a quart of this a day was making me feel completely dehydrated and my skin super dry. That didn’t mean I had to stop drinking it though.
What I did was balance it out with a moistening herb. I made a cold infusion of marshmallow root, and mixed it with my nettle infusion and kept that in the fridge for the week. I felt much, much better with that blend.
Actually before I settled on that blend I was using linden instead of marshmallow root. Linden is moistening, but what I didn’t realize is that it’s also a bit sedative. So drinking a quart of that a day—I was feeling so tired and so confused why I was so tired! Then I realize, my goodness, I did not do my homework.
So it does take some experimentation, it does require you to do a little homework to build your routine. But this is why we want to spend time with each herb doing herb of the week or herb of the month. You’ll want to learn how these things work in your body, and experiment with different forms. Not just teas, but you can also get herbs in capsule form, as tinctures, as powders. It may feel and act differently in your body in different forms.
If that all feels like too much, you can work with an herbalist who already has all this knowledge and can help you build a protocol that works for your unique needs
I prefer tinctures because it’s easy and it’s what I’ll remember to take. My current herbal routine is to take Wooden Spoon Herbs’ Anxiety Ally tincture, along with droppers of nettle, vitex, and echinacea. I made the echinacea tincture myself, which is another fun thing you can do to experiment with herbs and it’s really easy. You can extract the medicine from the herbs usng alcohol like vodka or brandy, you can extract it in vinegar, in honey, in vegetable glycerin. There are a lot of different ways to do it.
Herbalism is a long journey. It’s not something you can learn overnight. It’s a long process that reminds us to be present and patient.
Some resources that I recommend for learning more:
- Commonwealth Center for Holistic Herbalism — This is where I learn. They’re based in Boston but have an amazing library of courses and programs that are online. They have a really robust, free offering on Herbal Study Tips, which I’ll link to, and there are tons of accessibly priced mini-courses focused on specific areas like holistic pain management, cold and flu remedies, specific herbs like lavender and nettle. Those range from $10-25. I also recommend their Herbal Community Care Toolkit, which covers 56 safe and accessible herbs that are available at your local grocery store or are likely to be growing near you. Aside from online classes they also have a really excellent podcast called the Holistic Herbalism Podcast. If you want to go really in-depth in your studies for as free as possible, this is an incredible resource. I know there are many other herbalism schools out there
- Healing Teas — This is A Practical Guide to the Medicinal Teas of the World and traditional remedies. It goes into the history of sipping teas and healing teas. It explains how they’re used and what they’re used for, basic methods of brewing the tea, information on buying, storing, growing, and measuring tea. It’s a great guide to have on your shelf.
- The Herbal Medicine Maker’s Handbook—someone actually sent me this one as a gift from my book wishlist in my newsletter, it was really kind of them. It’s a big, thick book full of natural home remedies. It goes beyond tea into things like herbal couch syrup and lozenges, herbal jello, oil infusions, topical applications like lotions and creams. That’s a good one.
- Invasive Plant Medicine — This one is good like I mentioned before to find some of the more invasive species in your area. I like to look towards invasive plants for harvesting my own because I feel less bad about it since people usually want them gone anyway.
- Recipes From an Herbalist’s Kitchen—This is obviously about culinary herbs and things that we can easily grow or access and how they can be used in our meals.
- Body into Balance: An Herbal Guide to Holistic Self-Care — Another good one for your herbalist library. It works through foundational topics for beginners like basic medicine-making, teachings on the major body systems, and different ailments.
- The Herb Book — This is basically an herb dictionary, it’s old school, the one I have is like completely yellow and smells like a basement. There are over 500 herbs in here with little illustrations of each one.
- Mountain Rose Herbs — Not a book, but a very popular website where you can buy lots of herbs in their various forms and also check out their educational resources. There is a handpicked listed of herbal schools if you want to dive deeper in your studies more formally, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a really great blog. Definitely one to bookmark.
If you want to try out some different formulations from herbal brands if you’re not ready to make your own blend or create your own protocol, I’m not usually super loyal to any particular brand because I like to try new things out, but I’ll share a few that I do really like.
Wooden Spoon Herbs is one. I’ve tried their Rose-Colored Glasses tincture for daily mood support and Anxiety Ally for more occasional support with mild anxiety. I’m really a sucker for cute branding and they have this retro thing going on that I love. They did also have this amazing Rose Cocoa that I’ve been rationing out for so long because I love it so much, but when I was putting this episode together I wanted to find it on their site to link it for you but it’s not available anymore. I don’t know they discontinued it or what but I really hope they bring it back. It was so good.
However, my friend Sara makes an amazing rose cardamom hot cocoa blend that I’ve also been rationing because I need to buy another one, but that one is available. She runs an online community center called IMBY that you should all know about. And you can find that hot chocolate mix over there, and I’ll link to it. The show notes for this episode are going to have a LOT of links, so be sure to bookmark it.
Gaia Herbs is another good brand. I don’t really have much to say about them, it’s just the one I get when I go to Cambridge Naturals and they’re out of their store-brand. They have a lot of options.
And then I like Rasa, which isn’t like, tinctures or anything but it’s an herbal beverage brand and they make coffee substitutes that aren’t disgusting. They have really good formulations and clinical herbalists on staff that are working on the products, rather than a marketing team just developing shit that will sell.
I honestly don’t have too many recommendations for herbal brands because 1. There are so many, I like to try so many different things and don’t really stick to a brand and 2. I really just work with the loose herbs and make my own stuff. I keep it pretty simple.
So there you have it, a little guide to help build your herbal routine. It can feel overwhelming, because there are just so many herbs to work with, and the amount of time you have to devote to hands-on learning, physically and emotionally experiencing each one, it’s not an overnight thing. It takes time to learn and I think that’s one of the best things about it, it reminds us to slow down and savor the experience.
I’d love to know which herb you’re starting with, so send a message on Instagram at goodwitchkitchen or you can email me at thelunarbody@gmail.com.