A Belated New Year
Updates, announcements, and inspiration from the cabinet... Plus an exciting new class
Hello,
Welcome back to the Community medicine Cabinet Newsletter. It’s been quite a while! Last year I closed my practice to new clients and hit pause on a lot of teaching projects after I accepted a new job that brought a lot of my herbal work outside the cabinet and got a gnarly concussion shortly following the death of my dad. Yep, it was a big year.
Given all this, it’s unsurprising that you haven’t heard from me in a while.
What job, you might be wondering? I accepted the position of Lead Clinical Herbalist with the Botanical Bus after having volunteered with them since 2020. I’ve had the immense privilege of spending my creative resources building an apprenticeship program for them last year as well as taking on apothecary management and supervision of the rest of our herbalists and acupuncturists offering herbal consultations. If we spoke in the past year, you probably already heard about it because I could not be more proud or filled up by this work.
The Botanical Bus taught me a lot last year:
Yes, I totally can do consults in Spanish and I can unravel some of the second-generation shame that comes with having lost some of my Spanish language skills
Also, not only am I capable of mentoring intermediate herbalists, but I love it.
People are very resilient, our bodies are very skilled at coping, and this brilliance is amplified when we work together.
The rituals we construct to hold space as a team can support all of us to have a broader capacity and also to be able to have good boundaries and not take other people’s stuff home with us.
I really like dropper bottles with graduated droppers because it is so much simpler to make sure clients who are unfamiliar with tinctures are giving themself the correct dose without a bunch of extra education and fuss.
Needless to say, the Bus has been a huge source of inspiration this past year
Other inspiration has come from so many different places:
Last spring I took a class with Janine Antoni and her opening lecture was about the grid- not something I expected from a body-based artist- was a transformative lecture for me. A year later I still I can’t stop thinking about the grid as a textile and how the world is woven together.
Gina Badger of Longspell Herbs and a few other herbalists have been offering group work and I am so inspired by this model. In 2017 I started feeling like this would be an excellent way to incorporate community care into consults and give clients room to learn from each other. I never got it together to do so but maybe some version of group work will emerge this year.
I have been learning about zoopharmacognosy ( the study of how nonhuman animals use plants as medicine) as well as equine guided wellness and considering new ways of both partnering with animals for their healing and for partnering with animals to support human ways of being.
A Few Announcements
My practice reopened to new clients this January. LEARN MORE. BOOK.
Plant of the Year has returned! These short sessions are a great way to get matched with a plant to get to know over long-arc time. LEARN MORE. BOOK.
Last but not least I have posted my first class of the year:
ABOUT THE CLASS:
We’ve all heard of grounding but sometimes it is easier said than done. Grounding is not an exact science. It’s not really about heart rate variability, parasympathetic dominance, or earthing although all those things contribute to a feeling of groundedness. Grounding is an innate skill that arises from a sense of belonging to the world. It’s about recognizing and physically allowing ourselves to be a part of the earth. We are offering this class because we notice that grounding is a much-needed tool for our clients. There are many forces pulling us out of a grounded place these days and sometimes it can feel like we need all the help we can get to keep our feet on the ground and stay embodied.
In this class, we’ll talk about strategies for getting grounded, including physical and spirit doses of plants, breath, movement, meditation, and connection. The class is experiential and conversational; we’ll practice grounding techniques and share our grounding practices.
Grounding is a tool that was taught to me at a young age, one that I’ve been practicing consciously ever since. I’ve worked with horses most of my life and some of my earliest memories of horse lessons as a small child were being taught how to ground. Horses pick up on our emotions, so staying calm and grounded is reassuring for them, which keeps everyone safe. True to the Taurus stereotype, keeping my feet on the ground feels like one of my deepest skills and one that I’d love to share with you.
Thank you for reading. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
Warmly,
Madalyn & the Cabinet