Herbs and Processing Grief

First, here’s the link to the course Katja mentioned: Working Through Grief

Use code GRIEF to get 50% off! (It’s not very original, but it works.)

This course is full of herbs and holistic strategies to help you navigate grief, as well as a private community where you can talk with people who are going through similar journeys. The course and the community support are yours for life, so you can work at your own pace. We’re here for you when you need us.

Our society doesn’t provide much support for grieving, but here, we can support one another! Whether your grief is based in loss, or trauma; whether it’s recent or in the past or ongoing – we’re here together, and this is a gentle and welcoming space to be held in community.

Grief has many stages, and different herbs are helpful at different points in the journey. Working with herbs and processing grief isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of task. Getting through a dark day, digging in to a deep place within yourself, and setting aside a heavy heart in service of an immediate need – these are all quite different emotional efforts, and they’re each best supported by different herbs.

Today’s episode is in response to a student question – she asked:
“I’m curious about herbs that are beneficial for grief? I lost my husband earlier this year and have played a lot with nervines which have helped turn the emotions “down”, which has been wonderful and much needed in some situations. But I’m wondering if there are any herbs that you love for processing and sitting with the grief?”

And the answer is, YES!

This episode focuses on those two aspects of the journey with grief – both the processing and the sitting with, which are actually interwoven aspects of working through grief. We can’t sit still with something until we do some processing, but we can’t process until we can sit still with it – so this work happens in a spiral kind of action.

Each time you go around a spiral, you work a little deeper in, or stretch a little further out: it’s not repetitive circling. And what starts as a small motion can unfold into a complete evolution and shift in perspective. Time will get you there; herbs will help you along the way.

You might also like to listen to this episode on grief, from six years ago – its focus was a little different than this one. It was HHP episode 141: Herbs and Grief, at the Death of the Year.

Or you might like to keep these reminders of a few helpful grief-support herbs on your phone or computer desktop: hawthorn, rose, elecampane.

If you enjoyed the episode, it helps us a lot if you subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen. This helps others find us more easily. Thank you!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, I'm Katya, and I'm here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts. Um, today we're gonna talk about grief. Uh couple weeks ago I posted on social media and asked people to pick the topic for the podcast. And one of the winners was last week, and that was about boosting your immune system and what about autoimmunity or chronic illness or all those things. And there was one other one that I wanted to talk about, and it was about grief. So before, so that's our topic for today, and before we jump in, I don't want to forget to do the reclaimer. And the important parts of the reclaimer are I'm not a doctor, I'm an herbalist, um, and this is all for educational purposes only. And also everybody's body is different. So whatever we're talking about is not supposed to be one dogmatic right way that you should adhere to and will somehow magically make life better for every single person because everybody is different. But hopefully, these will be great ideas for you to research and experiment with and to see if they fit into your life. Um, and you can always ask us questions. Feel free to do that at info at commonwealthherbs.com or just get yourself enrolled in any of our online courses, including the free courses, and you'll get access to our live QA sessions that happen twice a week, too. You can ask us questions there as well. All right, that's good enough for the reclaimer, right? So, first I wanted to read the original question. Um, the question came from RGC Mama on Instagram, and this post was a contest, and anybody who got their answer selected wins our stress management course for free. But RGC Mama, your account is marked private, so I cannot message you to let you know that you are a winner. So if you are listening to this, please send me an email at infoccommonwealtherbs.com so that I can um get that free course to you. Okay. The question was I'm curious about herbs that are beneficial for grief. I lost my husband earlier this year, and I've played a lot with nerve ents, which have helped to turn the emotions down, and that has been wonderful and much needed in some situations. But I'm wondering if there are any herbs that you love to help with processing and sitting with the grief. So there's a few things that I think are really cool about this question. So you might know that a couple years ago I built a working with grief course, and it has nine segments of the different phases of grief, which don't always happen in the same order for every person. And bonus, they don't only happen once. It's not like you go through one phase of grief and then like you can check it off the list and you're done and you don't have to do that one again. Sometimes they repeat. Thanks, grief. I love that. Um, but but I broke that course up into the different phases so that it would be really easy to um get the information that you need that matches up with where you are in your journey with grief in this moment. I'll put the link to that course in the show notes. And also, I just want you to know I made a coupon code for you. So if you're listening to this podcast and you want to get the whole course, um it's normally $150. And I made a coupon code. The code is grief, not very original, right? Um, if you put grief in as the coupon code, it'll take $50 off, so it'll just be $100. Um, but that the way that that course is structured is really similar to the way that you structured the question and really looking at the different phases of grief and understanding that different herbs match up with different aspects of grief. So, like nervines are wonderful and they're often one of the first things that we think about when we're thinking about managing grief, but they're not the whole story. They're not gonna do the whole job that you need to get done because grief is long and complex and multifaceted, and then um sometimes surprising and change frequently changing. And so more herbs need to get involved as we are working through our journey with grief. I use the I I say journey with grief because it's not like we really can ever make grief go away, like that that loss is permanent, like whatever it is that you're grieving, it's it's gone. Um and that like that doesn't just disappear, it gets easier to live with. But I think that one of the first things to really recognize is that it is a journey, it is part of our life experience. Um, and it it doesn't just go away, it it gets incorporated into who we are, hopefully in a way that is that feels healthy and um maybe it feels sad, but but hopefully helps us move forward as a person and hopefully not in a way that like traps us um or makes us feel stuck in that place of grief. That's what we're trying to avoid. So when we work with herbs to help with grief, we're not trying to make the feelings of grief go away. We are trying to help ourselves integrate that grief into our lives, into who we are as people in a way that allows us to move forward into life and and avoids that getting stuck in that place of like not being able to move forward, like being trapped in the grief. All right, so there were two specific aspects that this person was asking for. One was processing grief, and the other was sitting with grief. And those are those are like two different things, but also like they overlap as well, right? Because processing is pretty active and sitting with is more like acceptance, but also kind of processing and acceptance. There, if you're if you're just listening with your ears, I just keep making like gears with my fingers. It's like you need to do some acceptance in order to do the processing. Like you can do a little bit of processing, but if you haven't done any acceptance, any of that like sitting with, then you can only process so far. And then you kind of need some of that sitting with and some of that acceptance to be able to do the next steps of the processing, right? So, like these are two separate things and they have a little bit of a different tone, and yet they're integrated into each other. So, like your work on one requires the work on the other. And that's part of why I say that like these stages of grief don't, it's not like you do one and check it off. And that's part of why, because that they require each other to help us. You know, you do a little bit of processing, you do a little bit of accepting, maybe you do a little bit of anger, maybe you do a little bit of numbing out and distraction, and then you get back to doing a little bit more processing, but like you started where you left off instead of at the beginning. So, like now you're gonna do some processing and move a little further than you had the last time. Okay. All right. So if we're thinking about processing, now I'm gonna break these into like two separate topics because human brains are linear and I can't talk about two things at the same time. Um, so I'm gonna do this one and then I'm gonna do the the sitting with, but like kind of you kind of maybe listen to them both on like um after each other because you'll you'll have thoughts, and then we'll talk about the next phase, and then you'll have thoughts, but those thoughts also will impact the first part, right? So this is like then maybe one to listen to twice. Okay. When we are thinking about processing, what does that mean? Like, how do humans process things? I find this question really helpful because if we're trying to say, well, how will I help somebody process something? First, I have to understand what mechanisms does a human body have for processing things? How do we process? Okay, well, one of them is digestion. And you might think, well, that's not gonna be relevant because we're talking about emotions right now. But your digestive system is so wrapped up in your emotions, or your emotions are so wrapped up in your digestive system, or both. Um, it's like those old Reese's peanut butter cup commercials, like you got your chocolate in my peanut butter, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate, like two great tastes that go great together, or whatever. Um, it's like that. It's very hard to separate physiological digestion from emotional digestion because it's part of the same process. Like you produce serotonin in your guts, you produce a lot of the things that you normally associate with mental health or brain chemistry, are also produced in your guts, and they are used in the guts. Our emotional health and our mental health is not restricted to the brain, or not restricted isn't the word I want. It's like not contained only in the brain, or like trapped, sequestered. That's my word. It's not sequestered in the brain. Your emotions happen in multiple places. So there's like an axis, right? You've probably heard of like the HPA axis if you're thinking about endocrine function. Um, like it's really common to talk about, oh, these are multiple things that are working together when we're thinking about hormones. Okay, but that's true for emotions as well. And so there's a lot of documentation about the heart and the brain, and the gut and the brain, and the gut and the heart. And it's funny that also these are things that are lined right up. You know, you've got your brain and your heart and your and your guts, and it's all like in a line. All right, well, listen, humans basically are all in a line, so I suppose I could have picked any three things, and they probably would have mostly been in a line because we are fairly vertical creatures. All right, well, whatever. But I'm still I'm still enjoying that, like that kind of alignment of the three like emotional points. It those are not the only places, like your muscular development in impacts your emotions too. Your, you know, like whatever. But these are the three that I want to talk a lot about today. And so when we are thinking about processing grief, digestion has to be a part of it. It is like our biggest physiological processor in our body. Um, now we have a mental processor also, um, and that's your hippocampus. That I mean, we could we could generalize and say it's your whole brain, um, but like inside the brain, the part that is like most associated with processing and especially processing the things that have happened in your day or happened to you or your experiences into like memories, long-term memories, i.e. things that have passed. So, like moving you away from like, yes, this happened today to that happened in my past. Um, that is a form of processing, right? And so that happens in the hippocampus. So that's two centers that if we're thinking about how do we process grief and how do we select herbs that are gonna help us with that, those are two areas that we're gonna need to support because they are the biggest things that are involved with it. Obviously, we're already supporting like the grieving heart, we're thinking about Hawthorne and Linden and maybe some violet or something, but like you probably already have thought of those. So, okay. Um, so if we're thinking about the guts and emotional digestion, okay. Well, part of what I'm thinking is like a gut heal tea, except tailoring it specifically to emotional processing. So we've talked about the concept of a gut heal tea. It is not one formula or one recipe, it is a concept that we that we adjust for every body and also for every purpose. So often it has like vulneraries to help heal the like endothelial lining of the digestive tract. It often has like something warming to move digestion and and also gas if that's a thing. Often has like some lymphatic herbs to help if there's bloating to move the lymph around the digestion. Um, may have some liver support, may have some whatever, depending on the person, right? So this is not like a specific formula that I'm referring to, but a like a conceptual formula or like an algebra formula that we can then plug in the parts that each individual person needs. So if we're thinking about digestion in terms of grief, then some of the herbs that I'm really thinking about, that also typically we are thinking about when we're thinking about improving digestion in general, are going to be chamomile and catnip. Chamomile for when things are starting to slow down and tense up, and you're like holding on to it. It is the stagnation that happens in the lower body, and then also the tension around that stagnation. Like your digestion has slowed down, but also you're holding it, right? Um, and so just all of your bottom part of your guts feels like it has come to a standstill and it's all full, but like nothing's moving anywhere. That's not just about not moving, it is also about holding. Like, it's not just not moving, it's not releasing, right? Like, that's important. So chamomile is relaxing, it is that releasing, and it does that for the nervous system, but also for the digestive system. In order to get that effect, we do want to make it strong, and that is gonna make it bitter. But as bitter herbs go, it's not that bitter. Um, and it still has that pleasant chamomile flavor along with a little bit of bitterness. You can put a little honey in there, it's completely fine. But really make sure that you steep it for a long time to get that effect. And so now, if we're thinking about grief, do you hear the words that are going to be relevant to the grief, right? It's like the the processing words because the movement has stalled out, it has stagnated, and it is not being released. And we're thinking about that in physiological terms in the gut, but also about that in emotional terms in our digestion of grief. Okay. So then the other herb that I want to think about as like the kind of twin or the pair with chamomile is catnip. Catnip is like the other half, the upper half of digestion. So sometimes when you can't digest things, it just comes to a standstill. That's chamomile. But sometimes when you can't digest things, you just puke them back out again. And that is true physiologically, and it is also true emotionally. And so in instead of being emotions that you cannot release, this is emotions that you continually reject or repeatedly reject. Um and so they are coming up, and you're trying to like remove them from the body, just just like vomit, right? Like, oh, this is bad. Get it out of me. I don't want this. Well, that's understandable. No, you don't want this, you don't want this grief, you don't want these things to be happening. You you don't want this sadness, you don't want any of that stuff that is reasonable. But also, you this is life, you have to find a way to live with it, and you can't just keep puking it out, like eventually you have to be like, okay, I have to find a way to digest this. Um, and so if in the beginning, for a while, whatever that definition is for you, you do reject it and choose distraction instead, or choose numbing instead, um, or choose like nervings that will dial down the emotional intensity instead. There is nothing wrong with that. That is not bad, it is fine, it is protection. But there comes a point where you're ready to take the next step. And so that's when catnip is really going to be helpful. Because whenever you have those feelings physiologically, of the stuff is coming up out of the core of you, right? Whether that is actual nausea, whether that is that feeling of butterflies in your stomach, or that like a little bit more intense feeling of like angry butterflies in your stomach, um, or like wasps in your stomach, maybe, all of that has physiological feelings, but also emotional roots. And those are those feelings that catnip is really helping with. So when we put them together, because right, humans, especially when we're talking about emotions, we rarely, it's rarely just one. Often, very often, there's the total stagnation and inability to release simultaneously with the angry wasps who are trying to come up out of your right. So, like there's the rejection and the inability to release at the same time, and it's very paralyzing. Um, and so that's why I so frequently pair these two herbs together because the emotions often are paired together. All right, and then the other pair that I want to think about here is ginger and fall. Ginger and fennel are both warming, although to very different degrees. Ginger is very, very warming, fennel less so. And both of these herbs are moving. They're stimulating to movement in the body. But they stimulate different types of movement. Ginger stimulates, first and foremost, circulation. So if we're thinking about like that stagnant, unable to release emotional state, and we're moving the blood, moving circulation throughout the body, that's really helpful because if what you can't release is in your head, if what you can't release is in your heart, if what you can't release is in your guts, we're getting to all three with ginger. And ginger is also antispasmodic, which is relaxant to muscles, to nerves, to the heart tissue, right? So all the way around, we are relaxing and moving so that we are able to release. But also warming, comforting. Okay, if you are a person with a lot of heartburn, you might not find ginger very comforting. You might find that ginger is uncomfortable physiologically in your esophagus. If that is the case, then we'll only put just a tiny bit of ginger in there, or we won't put ginger in. If that is the case and you really want to work with ginger, try fresh ginger instead of dried ginger because fresh will be less irritating to the esophagus than dried, in my experience. And you can just put a little bit, just put like one slice. Fennel will not have this problem. But fennel is not so much about moving circulation. Fennel is more about it's more about moving gas, you know. Like if you really need to pass some gas and you really are not doing it, fennel will help with that. Still relaxant, still moving, but we're not moving like everything from everywhere. We're moving the gas in the guts. Okay, well, sometimes emotionally you kind of just need to fart, you know, like you're just holding on to it and you just need to let it pass through you. Oh, I can't believe I said that. But right, it's true. It's true. Sometimes you just need to pass that. So if you don't feel like you can work with ginger because of heartburn, because it's like too active, the heartburn, and you are worried that the heat of the ginger will irritate, first try it, but try just a little bit. And if that is not comfortable, then work with fennel. But you can put both together. Because the more that we release, the more that we allow the processing to complete, the more that we allow it to move forward in the process, you know. Um, and you might, you certainly won't, in fact, get everything processed in one go. Because that's just not how life works, it's not how humans work, unfortunately. But if we can move the processing forward, then that is good. All right. So those four, and then I want to think about the hippocampus. There are two herbs that really help. Okay, there's probably a lot of herbs that really help get the hippocampus going, but there are two herbs really that kind of stand out there in terms of processing emotions, but doing that really in the brain, in the in the mental space. And those two are Tulsi and Ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is really helpful in addition to that action when your cycles are screwed up. If you are having trouble sleeping, and then you're having trouble being awake during the day, and you're having trouble processing emotional stuff, then ashwagandha might be a really good choice. If ashwagandha is too stimulating for you, or if you're not having that, maybe you're having the opposite, like you're sleeping too much. Now listen, it is okay to sleep more when you're grieving. It's not only okay, it's actually part of your body's processing and protection system. So if you are sleeping and it's 10 hours a night, um, if you are finding that you just you come home from work because you had to go to work, but then you just look around and the only thing you want to do is get in bed and be cozy and go to sleep, there's a time for that. That is not automatically, that doesn't mean that something's wrong. There is a time for that. But if you are ready to move past the time for that and it's hard, or if that has become a habit and you're ready to shift that, then Tulsi is a really good choice. Ashwagan Ashwagandha will be a good choice there too, but Tulsi is like a little, a little more in my mind, in that in that area. Um some people find that that ashwagandha is a little too heating and a little too drying. And of course, ashwagandha is a nightshade. So if you have a nightshade sensitivity, then that one won't work for you. But Tulsi will, because that's a mint family plant. You're good there. So I feel like there's there's choices there. If if it appeals to you, go with both. There's no problem with that. Um, but if there's a reason not to have one or the other, then there's two here so that you can pick either one. But really to help you with that the really the brain part of shifting from this is what I am experiencing over into this is what I did experience in the past. It is in memory now, it is part of the story that has passed. It's still with you, it's still part of the story. But it is not the active present anymore. Okay, so those are those are my thoughts on processing. And like I said, there's there's more about that in the working with grief course. So then let's think about sitting with grief. Accepting, like sitting in acceptance, being quiet with, being calm with. When we think about that, like think about your emotional self. I don't every body is different and every brain is different, and we all visualize things differently. But let me tell you how I visualize this and see if it resonates with you. When I am dealing with intense feelings of grief, or some other intense feelings that I don't really want to have or that are overwhelming me, I tend to feel myself as a panicked animal who is like in a panicked way backing itself into a corner, trying to get away from all of the everything. And it never works. And so you're you never stop with that like scramble to that panicked scramble of trying to get away from the thing that you can't get away from because it's part of you. That is like the opposite of sitting with, right? Because even if you are sitting still in your body, your emotional mind is still that panicked animal trying to scramble away from the thing it can't get away from, trying to back itself into a corner for protection that is not in the corner, right? That's not where the protection is. The protection comes from stopping scrambling. The protection comes from not trying to get away from it anymore. I hate that so much. But it's true. All right. So if we're thinking about that, then my first question for someone is can you sit with anything? A lot of people today cannot. That is an outcome of our culture. It is not because you are a failure, it is an outcome of constant stimulation and overstimulation. We are bad at sitting still with anything at all. And now you come into a time of grief and expect yourself to be able to sit still with grief. Like you were never able to sit still with anything else. And so, of course, it is going to be difficult to sit still with grief because grief is a lot bigger than many other things that you weren't able to sit still with. So the very first thing is to give yourself a little bit of grace that this is wicked hard. You may never have been trained to do this. Your life, your the culture, the society has never given you an opportunity to do this, honestly, has never even really valued this. Because we are always supposed to be more productive, always supposed to be doing the next thing, always optimizing, always maximizing. None of those things are sitting with. So that is the first step, is just to recognize that this is hard for everyone, even when it's not about grief. And to recognize that it is hard to sit with uncomfortable things. And so when we're thinking about herbs that can support that, and I'm thinking about that that scramble, that frantic panic scramble, what do you need in order to try to sit still with something? You need to feel safe. You need to feel like you are protected. So the first two herbs that come to mind here are uh mother wart and rose. We could put Hawthorne in this group, we could put Yarrow in this group. Herbs that will give you that feeling of safety. So that you can at least consider sitting still with something that is painful. If you feel like there is no safety, then how? How? How can you sit still with your grief? That's not a reasonable expectation to place on yourself. Like that's not compassionate. Okay, so first herbs that will help you feel safety. And okay, so I listed Mother Wart Rose and then also Hawthorne and Yarrow. And these will be a little different for every person. Listen, you could go with all four. Absolutely, you could go with all four. There is nothing wrong with that. Um, but you also could experiment and just see how each one of them makes you feel. You could experiment with just trying, like have a tincture of each one and just try to do a little meditation. Don't even try to have it be about grief right now. Just a little meditation. Maybe um, maybe you're just gonna listen to some guided meditation in an app, or if you don't have one of those on our YouTube channel, I did a whole series called Tea Time Meditations. You could just grab one of those. But like a little guided meditation to see what it feels like to sit still and just be present and then test it with each of the of those four herbs: motherwort rose, hawthorn, yarrow, and see which one allows you to sit the most calmly. Like do it on different days. But you absolutely could go with all four together. That would be fine. There are reasons for one or the other, um, that we could we could look at constitutionally, we could look at where what you're feeling, like different sorts of things. But the probably the most expedient way to do this is just to try all four and see which one you like best. Otherwise, this podcast will be three hours long. Y'all know I can talk. Okay, so you're gonna you're gonna try with those four. See which one you like best, or just take all four of them. Also great. Or which two you like best, whatever. And then the other herb here that comes to mind and to heart really strongly is calamus. Calamus, um, physiologically, it improves digestion, but also there's a vagus nerve thing going on with calamus, a relaxation, a shift from the sympathetic nervous system, that's the threat perception, the fight or flight place, into the parasympathetic system, which is the rest and digest place. And that shift is what we need to do to be able to sit calmly with things. We have to move ourselves out of that threat space into that relaxation space. We can't really do any processing until we're there. Okay, so I'm talking about all this relaxation, and Elsie, our dog, is on the floor right under the table, and she is totally snoring. I don't know if you can hear it or not, but um, she is very relaxed. Uh, she's demonstrating for you how to how to relax as you sit with these feelings. Um good. So calamus, you know, okay, so now we're back to processing again because we are stimulating the digestive system. But my desire to work with calamus in this regard is much more about that shift in the emotional state, that shift from the sympathetic nervous state, that that threat, that fight or flight state, into the rest and digest state. All right, so that's a handful of herbs to get you started. Obviously, this is an enormous topic. Um, and each person is different and each grief is different, and so there may be other herbs that we would pull in for each individual person to be working with like the specific place that you're in in that moment. But these are going to be a really good starting place for you to be doing this work. And if you want to be working more on this, then look at the working with grief course. There's also a special private community that goes along with that course so that you can have discussions with people who are specifically working on that material and in that headspace as well. And of course, you can always ask me questions anytime. Um, the code to take $50 off that course is grief. Um, yes. Okay, so this is the part of the podcast where Rin would say, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, drink some tea, and be compassionate as you go through this process, these processes, because it's not just one. Be kind to yourself. Let it take time. Try not to pressure yourself to go fast, even though obviously you don't want to be in this place longer than you absolutely have to be, but if you're feeling pressure to move fast through your grief, then that's just that's just putting more pressure on yourself. So be kind. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.