Ep 15: Learning to Listen: Remembering What Our Bodies Already Know with Emily French

What if some of the deepest wisdom we need isn't something we have to learn.....but something to remember?

In this episode, Lindsay and Scott sit down with herbalist and teacher Emily French of Sweetgrass Herbals for a conversation about herbal medicine, intuition, embodied knowing, and our innate relationship with the Earth.

Emily shares her journey from growing up deeply connected to the land to apprenticing with herbalist Chris Marano and ultimately spending more than two decades practicing and teaching herbal medicine. Together, they explore what becomes possible when we move beyond simply accumulating knowledge and learn to deeply listen- to plants, to our bodies, and to the wisdom already living within us.

They talk about strengthening intuition, the intelligence of the body, plants as teachers, the ways modern life can disconnect us from our senses, and how returning to relationship with the natural world can help us soften the armor we've learned to carry.

Emily also shares the beautiful story of a plant that has been passed through the women in her family for generations, her reflections on supporting young women through rites of passage, and why curiosity, joy, and our body's quiet yes can help guide us toward the life we're meant to live.

In this episode, they explore:

• Emily's path to becoming an herbalist and her early relationship with the Earth
• Why deep listening can be more powerful than simply consuming more information
• Developing intuition and learning to trust the body's wisdom
• Plant attunement and cultivating relationships with medicinal plants
• How modern life can numb our senses and disconnect us from the natural world
• The relationship between our bodies and the Earth
• Herbal medicine as nourishment, nervous system support, and relationship
• What plants can teach us about belonging, boundaries, grief, and becoming ourselves
• Emily's advice for trusting curiosity and following the quiet whispers within

Emily also shares about Coming Home to Ourselves, her six-week online course exploring the intersection of herbal medicine, somatic healing, nervous system regulation, and learning to listen to the signals of the body, heart, and soul.

Connect with Emily: 

Instagram: www.instagram.com/sweetgrass_herbals 

Website: https://www.emily-french.com/

Connect with Lindsay & Scott: 

To learn more about our retreats: www.homesteadandheal.net

Connected with Lindsay: https://www.instagram.com/lindsaycourcelle/

Connect with Scott: https://www.instagram.com/alchemygardens/

If you loved this episode - it would mean so much to leave us a review!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Homestead and Heal. I'm Scott.

SPEAKER_03 0:05

And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont. Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth. And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world. Our bodies are part of it. Our healing comes through it. And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Welcome back to Homestead and Heal. We are so excited to have Emily French of Sweet Grass Herbals on with us today. Emily is my main herbal teacher. So I've been studying herbalism for a number of years, been interested for a really long time, was looking for a teacher for quite a long time, and then Lindsay came across you somehow, probably on Instagram or something like that. I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

And I was like, oh, I think I found a teacher that might be the right fit for you. And so I looked into, I looked at your website, and it was just like the language that Emily was using was just resonated so deeply, so quickly, that I was like, yes, this is the person I want to study with. And so I took three years of courses with you and learned so much and just really hold you as my sort of main herbal teacher mentor. And I'm so grateful for that. And yeah, so Emily, welcome. And we'd love for you to introduce yourself and your work.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Lindsay. It's really good to be here with you. Scott, you've always been one of my very favorite students who's ever gone through my program. So I'm really honored and happy to be here on the podcast with you today. My name is Emily French, and I live in Bristol, Vermont. I've been a practicing herbalist for over 20 years. When I was a teenager, I met my herbal mentor, who's a man named Chris Morano, who runs Clearpath School of Herbal Medicine. He's an excellent herbal teacher. And I was really fortunate to be able to apprentice with him in an old school kind of way, where I just shadowed him and his work for five years and was with him in the apothecary, in the gardens, sitting in the back of client consults, et cetera, et cetera. And I felt like I had the opportunity to learn by osmosis from him so much of the brilliance that he really brings to herbal medicine, which is a braiding together of the worldviews of traditional Chinese medicine, Western herbalism, and indigenous First Nation Nishinaabe herbal medicine from the grandmothers that he and then I studied with as well. So that's been for me has always been very much about being connected to the plants first and foremost. And I find myself very fortunate to be able to be a bridge between plants and people, but the relationship really began on the plant side of things and then moved into supporting people with their health goals through the relationship with the plants. So I teach classes, I see clients one-on-one, I have a three-year apprenticeship program. And I think maybe my favorite part of all is just being out in the garden or the forest quietly on my own with the plants and listening to what it is that they have to teach me. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah. Um, one thing that we always like to ask people it sounds like you are away from home at the moment, but so you could do this. You could answer this in regards to what's outside where you are right now, or you could answer it in regard to your home place in Bristol. Are you near to where you grew up in Massachusetts right now?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

About an hour.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

An hour, okay, so not quite. Because I know that place is very dear to you as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

But yeah, we're just always curious. We're trying to set the place of where you are in the world and what you're excited about in the natural world.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

I love that. If I look out the window here right now, I see big, beautiful maple trees. I see some poison ivy who is really an earth protector plant, telling us where it is we shouldn't go for a while, so that the land can have a chance to heal. I see some beautiful true Solomon seal peeking up amongst the poison ivy with berries forming on the stalks. It's a sunny day. There are birds, and I cannot see, but I know that just to the south of me is the Connecticut River, which is a big, beautiful river.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_03 4:56

And anything in your garden at home that you're really excited about right now?

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Oh, yeah. My corn, flower corn that I have been growing for many years now, and lots of medicinal plants. I tried a new variety of California poppy this year called Mikado California Poppy that has these gorgeous, kind of like burnt orange tones in the yellow flowers, which is really beautiful. And the calendula is popping off, of course. And I'm growing fennel for the first time, bulbing fennel, which is really fun.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Everything in the garden is beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

I got introduced to California Poppy for the first time in your garden in Lincoln or and like I spend my whole life growing stuff and trying to grow stuff, and usually pretty successfully. And California Poppy, which we had another student that was in class with us, paints these beautiful, I don't know how to describe them, but she paints doors and things, these botanical Meg from Meg Reinhold, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:57

Trillium handcrafts, I guess what her business is. She's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Check her out. She painted the barn doors on Emily's old barn. And so we had her, Lindsay surprised me for my birthday one year and had her paint California poppy because it's a very dear plant to me. And I cannot get California poppy to grow yet.

SPEAKER_03 6:17

I didn't actually know that. I didn't know that you can't get it.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

I think I was just starting to try then, and it's been like I grow a bunch of other poppies and they do fantastically for me, and I don't know what it is. I can barely get them to germinate.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

So which is so interesting because it's this, it's like the ubiquitous quote unquote weed all over California and high desert. I don't know. Maybe your soil is too good.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

I've tried it a bunch of places. I have heard that. I have heard specifically that it really doesn't like great soil. It really likes the more forgotten about and bare places.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

Surely we can find some place.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Oh, surely I will get it to grow. Next year, apparently, I thought it was this year. It again is not. I actually I don't think I seeded it this year, so that's problematic.

SPEAKER_03 7:04

Maybe now that maybe now that the door is actually hung up because it lived for years in our barn collecting dust, which was very sad. And now it's hung up in our guest house that we're in right now. And so maybe now that it's hung up.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

That's it. That is it. It was like it was telling me that it was a like shameful to have that in the barn. So next year I'm gonna have the most amazing patch that will reseed itself for the rest of my life. So that's the goal.

SPEAKER_03 7:30

Yeah, I love that. That is, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

So it will be.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

We just wanted to ask, and I know Scott knows more about this than I do, but just a little bit about your path to becoming an herbalist, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about your childhood and maybe even if you have an initial memory, like your youngest memory of connection to the earth, or just the early days of your life and how you feel like that set you on your path to do the work that you do now.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Oh, I love that question. I grew up on a farm part-time. My parents had two different houses. They weren't married when I was growing up, but when I was with my father, I was on our family's farm, which has been in the family for 125 years now.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

And it's an apple orchard specializing in old heirloom apples and a beautiful forest. And so I always grew up really close to the earth in that way. I am really grateful to my father. We grew up without TV or anything like that. And my sister and I say, We're bored. And he would say, Go outside, come back in 10 minutes if you're still bored, and he would have to come looking for us later on to feed us. So I feel like early on I just had a lot of time to just play in nature. And I feel really grateful for that. I feel like the land there on that farm is like another mother to me in a lot of ways. I really feel like her child, the child of that place. And so there's not a specific memory that's popping up to me of the first moment I felt really connected, but I I feel grateful to find in myself know that there isn't a specific memory that I don't remember a time where I ever didn't feel connected to that land at least. And I also loved playing herbalists when I was a kid. I didn't know what it was then, but there was a little old mortar and pestle in the barn, and I would just mash stuff up in it and try to make my sister eat it. And she's she's a a long-term beloved client of mine now in my herbal skills, and it's always poking fun at me that I actually was able to make a living doing doing that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 9:39

And sorry to interrupt, that reminds me of Scott's stories growing up and making potions, which it's just it's like we know these things as children. We know what we're meant to do. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Yeah, we did a homeschool co-op last year with with two other families, and we each of the adults had a a station that we were in charge of that we got to decide what it was, whether it was art or math or whatever. And I made a potion station for the kids, and we just had so many hours of fun, and they did. They intuitively would know I'm making medicine for this or this or what is this plant for?

SPEAKER_03 10:15

So cool. Do you mind me asking? I know you said you grew up in two different houses. Did you have that same sort of experience at your mother's house where you spent a lot of time in nature, or was it just a different?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

I feel really blessed because I grew up on the farm with my dad and then in the village with my mom. So we were right on the common of a New England village in Massachusetts. And there wasn't as there wasn't as much wild land around, but there was a really beautiful backyard that to me as a kid was very magical. Do you did you ever read the Narnia books? It's like I had I found a little sign that said Narnia somewhere at a yard tail, and I hung it up in the trees, and I would go into my alternate world. So I rem I have distinct memories of sitting under a really beautiful blue spruce tree with the branches coming down and feeling like I was in my own little castle and world up there. I think I always have been introverted and feel most comfortable around plants and less comfortable in big groups of people. So that's been true since I was little and I've learned to embrace it.

SPEAKER_03 11:23

Well, that's a beautiful thing to embrace. But probably more people would benefit from embracing that aspect of life. And how about your connection with your body? And I guess I'm just thinking primarily just thinking about health, and obviously you had this plant connection, but what do you see as the little parts of your path that led you to healing sort of work?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yeah, I think as a child, my relationship with my body was joyous. And then as I approached puberty as a young woman in this culture, it became really complicated. And I think I asked a lot of my body without taking very good care of it for a long time and expected it to be almost like a currency for me as part of how I was moving through the world was based on my physical appearance, and that led to all kinds of discord and dis-ease in my system. And I flirted with eating disorders and just had a rocky path as a teenager, and it was, I think, because of that that I turned to the plants more specifically for healing because I was really in need of healing, and I didn't find what I was looking for in the mainstream medical world, even at that age as a teenager. So I turned to the forest and to the plants and to making my own kind of small, just intuitive ceremonies in the forest with plants and candles and whatever it was. I just I look back on that 15-year-old girl with so much love because she was really finding her way. And then when I went to college, I met Chris Murano, who was my herbal teacher, and he really gave language to the holistic worldview and view of the body and health that I had innately felt but struggled to embody without the tools. And then I began working with the plants myself and then with other people and saw what incredible things they could do and how our bodies are so innately intelligent and resilient and able to move towards healing if we give them even the slightest nudges in the right direction. And then I began studying with a man named Martin Prechtel. I was a student of his school, Bullhead's Kitchen, for 13 years, and he taught a lot about how our body is the earth and the earth is our body, and they're not two separate things, and what happens to her happens to us, and what happens to us is happening to her. And that took that cosmology from being individualized into much more of a collective and planetary understanding, and so I feel like there's been concentric circles of relationship with body, and I'm sure they're not over yet.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Yeah, Martin Praktel. I came across his work when I was in college, he was doing these initiation ceremonies. We had talked about this before because Will did war, right? Yeah. I had a friend who was really involved and they wanted me to do that, and I was interested and saw him speak a couple times, and it was just very mind-blowing, just his capacity and the message that he's putting out in the world. He has a bunch of great books if people want to look him up.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Yes, so many good books and audiobooks.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Oh, yeah. Does he read the audiobooks? He does read audiobooks. He does.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Oh, should I highly recommend?

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Yeah, because he's just such an amazing presence and storyteller, and just, I don't know, has so much wisdom for the world that we inhabit right now. I feel like when you're talking about meeting Chris Murano, and I I've heard you tell this story before about by the time you you you just by chance took a class that he was teaching, like introduction to herbalism or something along those lines. And by the end of the first class, you were like, Oh my god, I know what I'm gonna do with my life. This is it, which is pretty amazing. And for me, coming into herbalism was like, I always loved plants. My parents always thought of me as a green thumb. I could grow things that they couldn't. Not that we did a lot of gardening, their parents did, but I was a generation removed. But I and so then when I discovered when we had our community garden, I just fell so deeply in love with gardening and realized that that's what I wanted to spend my life doing. And then we started growing a bunch of medicinal herbs because we were selling plants and we would get the strictly medicinal catalog. And so I just started, I'm like one of those people that seed catalog is a dangerous endeavor. We could uh I end up ordering, I want to order everything, and I order most of what I want to order, which can be a little bit problematic. But I started becoming familiar with plants, with all these medicinal plants. In some ways, the medicinal piece was kind of surface level because we would make tags for the farmer's market and be like, oh, I'm trying to think of some of the we grew all the standard stuff, but we grew some odd stuff too.

SPEAKER_03 16:20

We had space for, I don't know, maybe 20 words, so you can imagine how simplified the descriptions were.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

Helpful for digestion. Can't we be like or like helps ease tension, something like that? And so I was like getting exposed to some of that. But then in another way, I did know the plants quite well because I was growing them from seed and then growing them in the garden. And so I had a relationship with them in a certain sort of real way, but the medicinal uses of them was something that I was just over time learning. And again, I couldn't quite find the right herbal teacher. And then I remember looking at your website and you were just talking about this remembering, this ancestral connection to like when you start making medicine, your hands just know what to do. And that was the sense that I'd always had gardening. It was just like I feel so at home being out in the garden. And there's this thing when I've tried to help people be better gardeners, it all ends up boiling down to this there's this bit of wisdom that we picked up somewhere, which is the farmer's footsteps are the finest fertilizer. And basically just the idea that by being out there observing, by being out there and in relationship with your plants, that's what makes a stellar gardener, someone who's just out there noticing the things in order to act and help them through their path and all this sort of stuff. And I I forgot where I was going. Okay, I have something to add then.

SPEAKER_03 17:51

Yeah. Which is just that I feel so similarly with the body, it's so much, and with the body work I do, it's such a remembering and part of my mission to go against the norm of saying that everyone needs to be such an expert and understand so much anatomy in order to do powerful healing, holding space body work for people because it is that remembering. It's just when you can actually put your hands on a body and listen, it can really tell you anything you need to know. And you don't need to know the exact name of this particular part of the body or whatever it is, because how many of our ancestors knew every single muscle or whatever it is?

SPEAKER_00 18:40

No, that's such a that's a such a good point. The the knowledge, like I'm doing air quotes, the knowledge that older peoples had available to them is to our modern standard. We're like, oh, they didn't understand anything. And it's just yet they developed these really beautiful and sophisticated sort of systems of medicine and discovered all of these things that now you could look at it the other way and say, we know so little because we're like we're crammed into this knowing must have this empirical sort of understanding and answer. And I think you got that message even from your main myofascial teacher, John Barnes, when you went and studied with him. And he was a physical therapist prior to, so he knew the anatomy stuff really well, which again, like these things, it's helpful. It's helpful to have a basis of understanding in what modern science has shown us, but not at the expense of thinking that people from an earlier time were silly in their understanding or something like that. And John Barnes, I think, when you were asking him some of those questions, was like, you don't need that.

SPEAKER_03 19:52

Yeah, I had it as a goal to when I went and worked with him in his clinic to better learn my anatomy. And he just was like, you can just totally let go of that. But for you and Emily, you both and Emily more so in her years of experience, you both know so much of that analytical information as well. But from what you've described about studying with Emily, there is so much to just the energetics and the tuning into the plant itself. And that's the piece that I think same for me with the body. It's like the, and actually, this is yeah, I have this question around intuition, but I don't know if you want to say anything about any of that, Emily.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

I just I love everything you're saying, and I think it's so true. And what I see in my work and a tendency that is being called forward by our culture and myself that I actively resist is that we do a lot of consuming of information, but we don't necessarily do a lot of deep listening. And I think when we're consuming information, we're doing so primarily with our head brain, with our intellect, and we're storing it and categorizing it neatly in places where we might find it helpful. And sometimes that is really helpful, but I find that the deepest knowing and listening that I can do with my body is often not in my head at all. The head can almost be just off out for donuts, doing whatever it wants to be doing. My body itself is what is a profound instrument of listening. And I think that's true when we're working with the plants. I love what you're saying about working with the human body in that way, Lindsay, because there is a, it's like there's a current that runs through us, a deep river of ancestral wisdom that is our birthright as human beings, and we can tap into it when we engage with the world through all of our senses. And I think it reminds me when you're speaking of hearing somewhere an anecdote about a traditional herbalist somewhere in, I believe, in Siberia, who was asked, What are all the herbs that you work with? We need to know about your whole apothecary. And she said she was an old lady, beautiful old lady, and she That I have five plants that I work with and I know them so well that anything I need them to do, I can ask them and they will find a way to do with me. And it gives me shivers even now saying it because it's so true. The more I work as an herbalist, my apothecary went from having 250 different herbs in there as tinctures down to now maybe 120. And I hope with every decade I shed another 60. Because I think it's really true that so much of it is about the relationship between beings and the way that we're able to listen.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm hearing what you're saying, and I'm just thinking about it with the body, but it's an interesting road to walk. And when I decided to start my training program, I was having conversations with Scott of, I don't know if I just need to try to teach more anatomy. And he was like, why don't you just own what you know to be true? And I it's how you feel your apothecary has shrunk. It's for me, I feel like if I can teach people these very basic, more principles, they can use them to listen to the body. And it's a bit counter what other kind of current bodywork schools are teaching. So and herbal schools too. And herbal schools too. So it's I remain it remains to be seen how it all plays out. But I just, it's been amazing for me to witness people that can just listen. And so I guess I have this question around that because I was thinking even about you signing up for that course. Probably you did already have Earth Connection. I have a similar story of signing up for a course that really changed my life. But for me, it was like without that earth connection for a stretch of years and then signing up for this environmental politics course. And I it just opened my eyes to wow, I've been missing so much. But I just wonder, I've been thinking a lot about intuition. And I wonder for you, are there parts of your body that you feel your intuition lives more? Do you feel really heart-led or do you feel your gut or and some of this? It's like we could get into human design or all sorts of things, but I just wonder if you personally have a connection with one part of your body more than other parts of your body when you're thinking about your intuition.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah, for me, it lives in my gut and it's a fast response. I can be asked something or ask myself a question or be faced with a decision to make. And I can will often very quickly have a strong yes or a strong no. And if I don't, I know I need to rephrase the question until I get the answer that is living in my body, and it feels it's not a forceful yes or no, but it's like a it's like a bubbling up from that lower part of my body, from my the gut, that gut knowing, and it comes up and then it's filtered through my heart, and it feels like it's still feeling good there, then I give my brain a little time to chew on it, but I know inside myself that the decision's already been made. And I also feel sometimes that the plants offer decisions for me, which is really interesting, and that's tied in with my intuition. It happens a lot in my work. I'll be sitting with a client and I'm deeply trained. I have 25 years of training in anatomy, physiology, the med the medicinal constituents of plants, all of that. And yet I rarely find myself needing to actively call upon that when I'm with a client. And oftentimes what happens is that I'm trying to hear whatever diagnosis they're coming in with, and then we take that and we set it aside and we look at just what's happening in the body, and there will often be actually images of plants that will layer themselves on top of the person as I'm speaking with them, and I and I receive that, I know that to be the some interface between my intuition and the plants themselves that's coming through. And I often formulate with those plants front and center and see really incredible results thanks to those plants with the people. So I have gone through phases in my work as a practitioner where I felt like I should have more separation between my intuition and my objective understanding of things, and I basically have joyfully given up on that.

SPEAKER_03 26:22

Love that. I guess I'm wondering, do you remember any times where, or maybe the first times that was happening where you were seeing a a plant imprinted on someone and having to choose if you were going to listen to that?

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yeah. Yes, I remember the first times that it happened. It was when I was studying with Chris. And I don't think I ever questioned that I would be following that advice. I just had to talk myself into it a little more. I would have to go to my Materia Medica and say, okay, but is this, does this plant actually have anything to do with high blood pressure or whatever? Now I know the plants well enough that I can corroborate quickly. Oh, yeah, that would be a good one. Thank you for coming through.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

I think that, yeah, that experience of it's like such a curious thing for me because I can be quite in my head and in the garden, like I know a lot about soil science and plant physiology and all this sort of stuff. And then sometimes I'm using that to inform what I'm going to do. But then sometimes I get out there and know that it's not the right thing to do and like definitely have that listening in the garden. I'm trying to develop that with listening to people. There is so much to know. And I think what you guys are describing, you're both really powerful practitioners of the work that you do. And I think it's such an important thing to have folks maybe stepping outside of the norm. We're so steeped in, we're bombarded with if if you can't explain to me why this works, then I don't believe that it works or it isn't true, or it's like whatever fairy tale land. But we know that it's not true. That's just not true, especially if you're doing powerful work and people are having amazing results, and you're not leading out of this Western sort of paradigm of knowing how to explain all of it, then couldn't I I guess what I'm saying is it serves as a good example. The two of you doing your powerful work. I hope to be a powerful practitioner of herbalism. And I know I can help people with there's so many simple things. There's so many supportive things. That's one of the things that I got out of your class, Emily, is there's there's lots of powerful botanicals that do very specific things that can be useful in a given situation. But more than that, there's so many plants that are just so wildly supportive to our system, like supporting the foundational nutrition of our of our bodies and the different systems of our bodies.

SPEAKER_03 28:56

And it just because our society is the way that it is, we have the benefit of people could take, I'm not gonna say any herb, but they are going to be supported by most herbs. The same way that when someone comes to see me for bodywork, them laying flat on the table quietly for an hour is just so supportive. That in itself is a great starting point.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

And holding the space for that person. I think that's as as important as anything. And when I was studying with you, Emily, I did a consultation with you for some health stuff that I was dealing with. And I just left that hour and a half or a couple of hours of feeling so heard, just like so listened to. And that's never the experience that people generally have in the medical system as it exists. So I think just that sitting with someone and knowing that they're listening really intently with the intention of helping you on your healing path is like such a departure from what people experience out there.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Yeah. My teacher Chris always used to say we're as much verbalists as we are herbalists. It has as much to do with hearing what people are saying and mirroring what they already know back to them as it does with any herbs. So that comes to mind. And also when what you're saying, Lindsay, about there being so much overlap between all the people who are showing up on the table and what they need because of those specific ways that our lifestyle and our culture depletes the body and puts us in these binds physically and in our health. And it's true with the herbs too. I think it's very rare that I have a consultation with someone where we're not, we don't boil it down to, okay, we need stress support, we need nervous system support to help buffer the intense stressors that are coming your way all the time. And then deep nourishing, building, strengthening just support to try and refill those deep energy reservoirs of the body that are we're out of, we're out of whack with our natural rhythms and we're living in a at a pace that's unsustainable. And that manifests differently for all different kinds of people, but the the root of it is often very similar.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

Emily, do you teach on listening to your intuition as part of your training? I don't really know enough about it, but it's something I'm trying to teach. And I don't have necessarily all of it figured out yet because I just encourage people to really soften their focus and clear themselves so that they can hear. But I'm curious if you have any tips for how you teach intuition.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Yeah. In my apprenticeship programs, we I do try to find specific ways in which we can do that. One of which we call a plant attunement, which is really an incredible exercise that one can do alone or with a group of people, which is where you find a plant and sit with that particular plant and try and do exactly what you're saying, Lindsay. You clear your mind, you just become an open channel, an empty vessel, and then see what you notice about the plant. And I feel like it's not just about intuitively seeing if there's any language that's coming to you, although that also could be part of it, but it's also where is this plant growing? What does this plant look like? What do the leaves feel like? Like trying to marry intuition and tactile sense because of what we were talking about earlier, where so much wisdom is living in the tissues of our bodies. And if we can bypass the brain, then we can get there. And I've done this with groups where we're sitting with a plant who's alive and growing in the garden. And I've also done it with groups where we're passing around a flower essence or a small bottle of a particular one herb tincture and each taking a couple of drops. And it's a plant that nobody knows anything about, really. And then to go around the circle afterwards and hear people's reflections on what their intuition was telling them about that particular plant is it's mind-blowing because the medicine is coming through to each person in very similar ways that are directly related to the way in which their particular nervous system, mind, heart, body translates that information, but it's all very similar information. And I feel like that's helpful not only in working to strengthen our connection to our own intuition, but in validating the fact that intuition is a truly a remarkable tool that we all have access to and that doesn't exist in a vacuum.

SPEAKER_03 33:24

That totally makes sense. I really appreciate that. Thank you for sharing that.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

I remember sitting with St. John's War and with California Poppy, actually, in your gardens and having a pretty amazing experience.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

This kind of maybe is like a kernel into the other world of science-y knowing or whatever. But I just heard I was listening to this John Kemp's regenerative agriculture podcast, and he had a guest on there. I should know this guy's name. He's written a couple of famous books. Like the Dorito effect was one of them. And it was it's about it's about how these food companies in the modern age have learned a lot about satiation and how to manipulate flavors in just the right way so that once you pop, you can't stop. Just like how there's like a real thing to that. They're really hacking our system to like cause us to open the bag and like, oh, I can't put this down. I'm gonna eat the whole bag of Doritos. No, don't do that. But he was really this brilliant guy who wrote the books, and he was talking about in the human genome, the he described it like the chapters for the taste and smell are the longest chapters of the human genome. Like this, the particular nature of our capacity to discern information from what we're putting in our mouth and what we're smelling is like the genome devoted more pages, if you want to describe it that way, to that than any other part of ourselves, which I just found really fascinating. What does that mean? We have these amazing tools of discernment that maybe help lead into our intuitive knowing of things or whatever. It's an aside.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Yeah, and that and now we live in a our standard American diet where all the flavor's been bred out of our food for the most part. We don't hardly ever taste bitter unless we go looking for it, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like Jim McDonald, who's such a great herbalist, talks about, he says, I think there's actually a bitter deficiency syndrome, by which he means that in the last hundred years, we are starving for lack of information coming in through taste, and that we could extrapolate also to smell that has always just been part of who we are and how we move through the world and how our bodies experience health and the flip the switches that get flipped to move us towards healing, and we just it's like we're suddenly just eating dry Cheerios and expecting to be healthy. Like it's not actually maybe possible if we don't have lots of different plants entering our system, but types of touch, I would say too, Lindsay.

SPEAKER_03 36:10

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think about the smell. I've been thinking about that a lot this summer and spring, just living in the country, and it's fragrant and the air is sweet, and just having the realization that for people living in a city, yes, they're smelling things, but it's a very different experience when you're smelling the sewer and the McDonald's or whatever it is. Diesel, diesel versus obviously the lilacs, but the lilies, just so many scents all the time when you have a lot of plant friends around and just how healing it is to just like how really that I've been thinking a lot too of this stopping and smelling the roses. It's it's such an important medicine, that just that phrase. It is really powerful to stop and smell a beautiful flowering plant.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

And some of us just can't help it. We just live our lives that way. And the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

That's why we're always late wherever we're going.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Why are you so slow? Why are you in the way you are? I passed this patch of roses and I like they were amazing.

SPEAKER_03 37:18

And I feel like it was just so beautiful this spring. Serena, our two-year-old, it was just every single flower. She just had to stop and smell it and talk about how beautiful it smelled. And she was learning the names of so many plants so quickly. And yeah, it's just, I think the kids obviously have it figured out. And then unfortunately, some some kids lose it over time. Yeah. But yeah, it's always strange to me when if we have someone come to visit or something and they just don't even, it's like they just they can't, it's that feeling of they can't listen. And listen meaning also smell, whatever it is, see. It's like they just have shut down so many of their senses, numbed them through whatever being online, what all the things. And and when you sometimes just want someone to appreciate something the way you do, like this monarch chrysalis. Like, how can you not think this is the most extraordinary thing you've ever seen? Every single year I feel that way. The little flecks of gold, and oh my gosh. It's just it's interesting to me. Yeah, the people that I just feel like people that can't see the beauty in the natural world on a very regular daily minute by minute basis, I feel like are just missing so much. And it just makes me sad.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Makes me think of a dear friend of ours who was visiting once, and we were walking out to this. We call it the mother tree. There's this sugar maple that just sits in this little hollow between a few hills. So the trees down there, it's been in like meadow and grazing sort of land for a long time, but it just sits in a way where the wind can't really get at it. And so there's like a handful of trees that are ginormous, and one of them is this massive sugar maple. We're talking like probably seven people or something, six or seven people to wrap your arms around this tree. It's humongous. We haven't been there in so long, I think of this regularly. Like, we need to get over there. But we were walking there with her, and she's like very she actually is really into plants now. She lives in Toronto and like okay.

SPEAKER_03 39:29

I couldn't remember who you might be talking about.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

She's she loves plants and she's an artist and she's just she is so it's a focus of hers. And she's always had that sort of like artistic sort of like view of things. But when we were walking to this tree, this was quite a long time ago, like 15 years ago, maybe, or something like that. And we were walking, and she was just she was living in Brooklyn at the time, and we were walking to this tree, and she was like, it's just amazing. There's like nothing here. There's just like her experience of like being so inundated in the city was that it was like she was speaking of it like in a positive way. To her, it was like some feeling of I don't know exactly what she meant. There wasn't but there was nothing there that was maybe like impeding nature or something. I don't know exactly. But I always I always think of that. And then when we would go to Brooklyn, I would feel that way a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 40:21

There's nothing here.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

There's like just asphalt and concrete. I don't actually feel that way. I don't love spending much time in the city, but like some cities have so much beautiful plant life. Montreal comes to mind. It's just beautiful, and people like care about the plants.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

I think that our bodies are so exquisitely tuned to our environment that when we live in the modern world, we often have to put on a lot of armor in order to be able to survive in the environments in which we find ourselves. And I think that it can be really, and that looks like a numbing out or a being unaware of surroundings, and that may be true, and that may be really brilliantly helpful for our animal body with where we are. But I think what's really hopeful and helpful about working with herbal medicine and the kind of body work that you do, Lindsay, is that it teaches in the moment that the thawing and the taking off of that armor does not leave us in a vacuum, that there's something really beautiful and nourishing directly on the other side of taking off that armor piece by piece. And so we're supported. I'm having a visual in my head of a knight in a suit of armor that's all metal, and then taking that off piece by piece and it being replaced by a suit of flowers and green plants and vines, and that we're constantly being held, but we can we can experience that being held in a way that either feels more or less safe. And I think some of the work that we do as as healers and as bridges between the plant world and people world and all the languages of the body that you do, Lindsay, is to really support people as they begin to explore thawing from a world that's incredibly overwhelming. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:10

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 42:12

I 100% agree with that. I'm curious if you, now that you have been on this herbal path, if you have any stories of ancestors who you know were using herbal medicine or just the way that they connected with the earth.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

Obviously, you have this farm that's been in your family for a long time, but if you chair any stories of your ancestors, I don't know of any ancestors who were herbal medicine witches, but I'm sure they existed. I do have one story of my great-great-great-grandmother, Carrie Kite, who met my great-great-great-grandfather in Golden, Colorado, where she was working with her mom at the boarding house, where he came as part of the crew to build the opera house in Golden, Colorado, and they fell in love and got married. And she he came back to Worcester, Massachusetts, and she came later on the train to meet him, and she carried a cutting of a plant. It's a Hoya plant, like a beautiful succulent that makes these gorgeous bursts of white flowers that drip nectar onto the floor. And she carried this little cutting of a plant that was her mother's. And that plant is currently in my living room, and it's been kept alive by the women in my family for I think it was in 1860 that she brought it. And it's the same plant, and it's a cutting of her mom's plant, which was even older. So for me, that plant is the living link to the botanical love that I shared with that woman ancestor of mine and her mother too, who I don't really know anything about. And that plant is incredibly sentient. It has these long, I'm using my arm and pointing, it has these long kind of tendrils that will come way out from the plant and. Follow you across the room. It's a little bit, it's a little bit creepy, except she's very benign being, but it will if I'm sitting in a chair over on one side of the room, the tendrils will be pointing over there. And then if I move to the other side of the room within a couple of minutes, the tendril has come over there. So I feel like this plant is somehow holding. It just is such a deep witness of my family over all these generations, which is very precious to me.

SPEAKER_00 44:26

That is so cool. Yeah. We've the only thing I have close to that is my great-great-grandparents' farm, it's just a few miles from where we live. The house burned in the late 70s, but their apple trees, there's tons of apple trees right around where their house was, and then there was a pear tree, and we found their rhubarb that we dug up and planted here, their grapes that we dug up and planted here, and now they're naturalizing on my farm. And so having that, I just love that so much. That living link between generations is so beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 44:59

Have you ever been to Golden? And I'm just asking because I went there in June and yeah, I stayed in Golden, Colorado, and I had my own moment with the creek and the cottonwoods, which were very much an aspect of my childhood, just a tree I was really connected with as a child growing up in Kansas, but it was lovely there.

SPEAKER_01 45:20

I've never been. Okay. It actually never even occurred to me.

SPEAKER_03 45:25

I don't know it that much, but it was, yeah, it was pretty, pretty beautiful by the river there. I don't even know the name of the river, but wow. You're planting a seed.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Yeah, it might be worth that.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

Future travel plans.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:42

Go to the opera house, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

I should go to the opera house.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

That would be cool.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:47

So a little bit of a different question. Have there been times in your life when you felt specifically more disconnected from body or from earth?

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Yes. There have. And they are the times when I have been trying the hardest to fit in with the rest of the world. And so the the peak times of that come to mind are definitely the teenage years, which I feel like can be so brutal if we don't have a circle of godmamas or whatever around us to help guide us through. And then in certain relationships in my life that I've been in where I was trying to emulate something that I really admired and realized after some amount of time that I had gotten off-center and was having a hierarchical gaze upon my inner knowing and what I was perceiving in another person, which is not to say that there's not so much we can learn from people, but I think to stay rooted while we do so is a really important skill to have. But I notice each time that I do what I think I should be doing, I feel less connected to my body and the earth, unless it's also in alignment with what I really want to be doing and what is bringing me deep joy, and that deep joy being not necessarily like an exuberant happiness, but a feeling of rightness and alignment with the work that I'm doing and just how I'm choosing to spend this precious lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

I love that. That's such great advice. My friend who was connected with Martin Prechtel used to always say, Don't should on me.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

That was his thing.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

He was just like, No, should is a dangerous word.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

Should is like incredibly incredible, it can be incredibly aggressive, even though it sounds so passive and maybe this, maybe not.

SPEAKER_02 47:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

I can definitely resonate with your I feel like when I was most disconnected from my body and the earth. And as you said, and as we agree, it's just one, was absolutely just trying to fit in during my teenage years too. And I think that's probably a very common story for women. And yeah, it's what's interesting because that, and I know you're a fan of Kimberly Ann Johnson, who we interviewed as well in her book, Call of the Wild, where she speaks about the different nervous system responses beyond fight or flight, and that fitting in is one aspect of that. And so, yeah, it is just interesting. It's interesting to think about, I'm thinking about our daughter who's almost 11, and perhaps what sort of herbal support even she could be having during those teenage years that would, and we're obviously, she and I are having so many conversations about her changing body in a way that I never had with my mother or any aunties or anything. But yeah, I'm thinking about the ways to support that because it is just such a what's like a rite of passage that isn't just even obviously menstruation, but just changing body, changing kind of dynamics of self and how we could, I feel like that's probably hugely missing culturally, right? Because we can just think of all sorts of different topics where this kind of shows up. But I'm yeah, I'm it's bringing to my awareness that this is a pattern for me, this is a pattern for you that happened, and probably so many women. And how can we support those girls with, like you said, a circle of women around them and their connection to their body and herbs? And yeah, I feel inspired thinking about that.

SPEAKER_01 49:29

Yeah, I think that's so important. And I think when I think back into my teenage years, what was really missing for me was a facility with a healthy fight response and holding boundaries in a way that was self-evident, which is a lifelong learning for all of us. And I think what saved me was being able to, and my sweetie talks about this too in his own way when he was a teenager, was being able to go out in the forest and be with the plants and see how even when they were, even though they were all different from one another and e maybe didn't look quote unquote perfect in one way or another, they were all exquisitely beautiful and they all had a role to play. And I feel and that was hugely important for me. I spent a lot of time in the forest when I was a teenager, and I feel like I sourced my sanity from there a lot of the time when the rest of the world felt really insane. And I wish on an herbal front, if I could go back now as an herbalist and give support to that teenage girl, I would give, I would give really heart holders, not so much nervous system support or anything like that, but really just heart strengtheners, the ability to hold that sense of self in the heart and in the solar plexus and and source meaning from that.

SPEAKER_00 50:52

Yeah, that's beautiful. Hawthorne for the Hawthorne, yeah, and rose.

SPEAKER_01 50:59

Yeah. Linden. There's grief in it too. There's grief of letting go of childhood and stepping into something so unknown where suddenly people are looking at you so differently, and so much is expected of you and not expected of you anymore. And there's a lot of grief, and I don't think that grief is really acknowledged enough either.

SPEAKER_03 51:17

So Linden, we call the grief tree, is there's a beautiful Linden right outside my office, which I can't say that I probably even knew it was Lyndon when I started renting that office space. It's only been in recent years that I've really developed any sort of relationship with Linden, but it is my namesake. Um that's not why my parents named me that, but that is where the name Lindsay comes from. And I just I do feel such a resonance with all those heart plants. So this kind of leads us into the next question of just for anyone who's listening, that maybe maybe they're just starting out on their path of figuring out what they want to do with their life. Is there any advice that you wish you would have gotten early on?

SPEAKER_01 52:07

I think to listen internally and to trust your body, even if what you're hearing is whispers and murmurs and is taking you only one step in a direction and you're not sure where it leads, that always to listen to that deep yes within yourself. And I think that curiosity is a very sacred thing, and that our curiosity is often walking hand in hand with our heart's desire and leading us on our path, and so to think to care less about what other people think we should be doing and more to just cultivate that listening ear towards our own joy and curiosity. Beautiful. I love that.

SPEAKER_03 52:49

And you have a class coming up. Would you like to share a little bit about that and or just tell people where they can find you?

SPEAKER_01 52:56

Sure. Thank you. My website is emily-french.com. You can find me there. I'm also on Instagram at sweetgrass underscore herbals. And I do have a class coming up that I'm very excited about. It's called Coming Home to Ourselves. It's a six-week deep dive, immersive journey into a lot of what we've been talking about today, how to understand the myriad of signals that our body is giving us in terms of physical dis-ease, discomfort, imbalances, emotional places where we feel stuck or like we're not fully inhabiting the full range of our emotions, and ways in which we feel like we we wish we were showing up more fully in our lives as our full authentic selves and really working with, learning to listen and understand to all of those signals of all those different kinds that our body and our heart and our soul are giving us, and then work with the medicine plants and with somatic movement and with skills around nervous system regulation to give ourselves the resilience and the courage and the impetus to move in the direction of our dreams and what it is that we think our work is here on this beautiful earth in the time that we've been given. So it's at the intersection of herbal medicine and somatic healing, and it's it's a six-week course with anchor classes with me, and then some truly incredible guest teachers who are joining with their own areas of expertise, all holding a container for deep exploration and support as we are always constantly trying to move toward a life that we feel like we can really deeply and joyfully recognize. And it's online and it starts at the end of August. So it would be wonderful if anyone wanted to join.

SPEAKER_00 54:40

That sounds amazing, and we'll give my full testimonial that Emily is a really powerful and amazing teacher. So if that sounds even like remotely interesting to you, you should join.

SPEAKER_03 54:50

Thanks, Scott. Thank you so much, Emily. This has been a lovely conversation, and I know that our listeners are really gonna love it. So we appreciate you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

Yeah, thanks, Mr. Thanksgiving so much.

SPEAKER_03 55:02

Okay, bye for now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal. If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review. For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.

SPEAKER_00 55:18

We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.