In this episode, Nicole (she/her) talks about herbal allies for grief. She shares previous writings on the work of processing grief in social movements, as well as plant medicines that have accompanied her through bereavements.
Content warning – mentions of death, suicide, incarceration
Links & resources from this episode
Find them all at solidarityapothecary.org/podcast/
Music from Sole & DJ Pain – Battle of Humans | Plant illustrations by @amani_writes | In solidarity, please subscribe, rate & review this podcast wherever you listen.
Transcript
Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism podcast with your host Nicole Rose from the Solidarity Apothecary.
Speaker:This is your place for all things plants and liberation.
Speaker:Let's get started.
Speaker:Hello, welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.
Speaker:Today's episode is all about herbal allies for grief.
Speaker:And it's, yeah, it's something I've written as part of the Herbalism and State Violence book.
Speaker:And, yeah, it's a mix of two pieces.
Speaker:One more about herbal support.
Speaker:Excuse me!
Speaker:So tired still from breastfeeding in the middle of the night several times.
Speaker:And And an article I wrote years ago called Composting Grief, which is part of the Overcoming Burnout book.
Speaker:Yeah, and I just want to give a content warning that I do obviously talk about death.
Speaker:I also talk about my friend Taylor and his death which is pretty gory and horrible.
Speaker:I don't go into it in loads of detail, but I mention him So yeah, it's not the, it's not the lightest episode, but I think, I don't know about you, but it just feels like This time of year like is, it's just with us, isn't it like people are moving towards, like it's just been the autumn equinox and people are like thinking about, Halloween and it's just, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker:It's just this kind of like movement into winter.
Speaker:When I see like the Hawthorn berries out, I think I always feel grief.
Speaker:I don't know why.
Speaker:I think they've just accompanied me through so many bereavements.
Speaker:I talk about Hawthorn in the episode.
Speaker:So yeah, this time of year just makes me, just makes me feel sad.
Speaker:But yeah, obviously with, yeah, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and everything else that's happening in the world grief is never far apart from anyone and I think, that's one thing I say in this composting grief episode is like Yeah, there's 1 billion people on the planet and everyone experiences grief at some point but it is just the loneliest place on earth and Yeah, it's just something I feel like we need to have like skills and resources around because death is just such a big part of life and as Herbalists, we're going to be Supporting ourselves and other people through bereavements like over a lifetime and as I talk about in the piece It's we also feel grief for projects ending and relationships ending and it doesn't have to necessarily be someone dying But yeah, there's different stages obviously and I think yeah I just I literally cannot comprehend like how someone must be feeling who loses like their entire family like under the rubble like yeah, I just can't, I just can't it's completely incomprehensible.
Speaker:So I know some people listening to this will be going through that right now and I just, yeah, I want to send my, all my strength and solidarity because it is just mind blowing.
Speaker:I know how life disrupting and destructive it is just to lose one person I love.
Speaker:I cannot imagine it on a a much more massive, like systemic scale, like whole communities, whole generations of family, families.
Speaker:So yeah, I just want to, I just wanted to name that before I share this piece.
Speaker:And also, yeah, I know lots of people who listen are kind of part of queer and trans communities.
Speaker:And yeah, there was like the first kind of admin hearing for Taylor's court case.
Speaker:And yeah, it's been set for three weeks in November next year.
Speaker:Yeah, I don't know what that looks like yet in terms of solidarity at the core or, people accompanying me or like other friends of Taylor or, how the hell I'm going to navigate that with like childcare staff.
Speaker:I just don't know.
Speaker:But, yeah, I guess it's all, yeah it's funny isn't it how timing comes up for different things like it is this kind of moving into autumn winter and then suddenly I'm getting these like flurry of emails and movement from the solicitor after months and months of waiting.
Speaker:So anyway, and yeah, again, shameless plug, the herbalism PTSD and state violence course is still open for enrolment, really happy to have welcomed a bunch of new people in.
Speaker:It really makes me sad when I close it and then people are like, Hey, I missed it.
Speaker:So please just sign up like ASAP because if you've got questions and stuff, it means that like I'm present to it.
Speaker:And yeah, I'm not gonna open it until next year, probably next spring, but potentially next autumn, me and Rob need to have a chat about childcare.
Speaker:And yeah, I just, yeah, it's blown my mind how hard it is.
Speaker:is to do anything else apart from want to look after Lee.
Speaker:And I'm like a massive workaholic and I'm really struggling to, yeah, I want to do anything.
Speaker:I just want to hold him and soothe him and play with him all day and feed him.
Speaker:So yeah.
Speaker:So please, if you want to enroll, please enroll in it soon.
Speaker:A lot of the plants I talk about in this episode are all like big features of that course.
Speaker:I go into depth about several different plants from different kinds of nerving tonics to relaxant nervings and.
Speaker:all the ones in between.
Speaker:So yeah, if you want to have these skills for the rest of your life, like this is a thing like investing in herbalism is literally an investment.
Speaker:Like I have worked with Hawthorn and Rose and St.
Speaker:John's Wort and stuff for so many years, like they've got me through so many difficult times.
Speaker:Like my crazy Saturn return, I had I think it was like six or seven bereavements, like in a row, like one after each month, like each month, And then my granddad who was literally like the main person in my life died and then my ex girlfriend Anna got killed and it was just like, whoa.
Speaker:So yeah, those herbs just helped me so much.
Speaker:And yeah, I think, yeah, just it is worth thinking about what tools do we have in our toolbox to process grief?
Speaker:I know counseling and stuff is amazing and really helps shift things, but plants just, they're just working on different levels.
Speaker:And I don't talk about it really in this episode, there are all these like physiological effects of grief, right?
Speaker:Like literal effects on the heart.
Speaker:Like people literally die of broken heart syndrome, like after losing people they love, grief really takes its toll, whether it's like the physical exhaustion of organizing a funeral and everything, or just like the emotional endurance like it takes to mourn someone.
Speaker:Like it's so much on the nervous system, so much distress.
Speaker:So yeah, I think herbs are like incredible allies for accompanying us in, in those cycles of death and loss.
Speaker:So yeah, I hope you enjoy the episode.
Speaker:I don't mean enjoy it like it's not pleasurable to think about this stuff, but I hope there's value for you in it.
Speaker:And yeah, please check out the link to the herbalism PTSD and traumatic stress course in the show notes.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Thanks a lot.
Speaker:Take care.
Speaker:Bye.
Speaker:Okay, here we go.
Speaker:So yeah, I'm just, Reading this chapter from the Herbalism and State Violence book and kind of ad libbing a little bit, as I go, it is hard, dare I say, impossible to be engaged in supporting people experiencing state violence or experiencing it yourself without feeling grief.
Speaker:If you do prisoner solidarity work long enough, then Losing people you love behind bars is inevitable, because the system is designed to take them from us.
Speaker:I've lost count of how many people I've met in Calais and Dunkirk who've then drowned trying to cross the channel, or have been killed on rail tracks or hit by trucks.
Speaker:Not forgetting an entire family and their baby lost to the sea.
Speaker:The stories I heard from refugees leaving Ukraine of bombings, massacres and rape will haunt me forever.
Speaker:While loss and grief are inevitable parts of human existence, The sheer volume of harm caused by state violence means that we are constantly accompanied by grief.
Speaker:For anyone who has bought this book, because of trying to cope with some ongoing state repression, grief will also be familiar.
Speaker:We mourn the destruction of campaigns, collectives, relationships, and things that gave our life meaning due to the force of the state.
Speaker:Trauma in itself is a creation of grief.
Speaker:It is the rupture of what you once knew, shattered into pieces.
Speaker:We may mourn who we once were before a particular traumatic experience.
Speaker:We may mourn How our loved ones have changed.
Speaker:I will never forget the impact of prison on a previous partner and how their once tender intimacy and joyfulness was replaced with aggression and intolerance.
Speaker:How my life became about hypervigilance of their moods and I clung to memories of who they used to be before being confined to a cage.
Speaker:Trauma shapes us and changes us and all of these changes can generate grief even if we haven't named it as such.
Speaker:My book, Overcoming Burnout, is a collection of writings from an intense period of burnout where I reflected on everything from how patriarchy makes me tired to ableism and grassroots movements.
Speaker:I wrote a piece there called Composting Grief that I have included below because it speaks to this grief in movements that we often fail to articulate and then move on to herbal support for grief.
Speaker:Okay, so this is from the Overcoming Burnout book.
Speaker:I knew it was inevitable that I would be writing about grief soon.
Speaker:I could feel the intensity of feelings build up, my dreams recalling distress and despair, the repeated failure at trying to sleep soundly, the inability to concentrate and feel gratitude for the millions of things that bring meaning to my life.
Speaker:I didn't want to write about grief and focus on the experience of losing my best friend.
Speaker:I've been wanting to write about grief in the context of social struggle.
Speaker:Of course, these two aren't separate for me or many others.
Speaker:Of how we cope with our losses, with repression, with losing comrades, and even the loss of different sides of ourselves as we engage in struggles for social change.
Speaker:And how unresolved grief burns us out.
Speaker:This is my attempt.
Speaker:Grief is probably one of the most universalising of experiences.
Speaker:It is felt by billions.
Speaker:And yet, even knowing how shared it is as an experience and as an emotion, it feels like the loneliest place on earth.
Speaker:This last year, even though I'm surrounded by a beautiful, caring family and incredible circle of friends, I have never, ever felt so completely alone.
Speaker:It feels like basic tasks are 100 times harder.
Speaker:The emotional heaviness rests physically on my body.
Speaker:To feel joy again feels like a mountaineering expedition with no compass and no map.
Speaker:In the books I have been reading to try and help heal from bereavement, authors John W.
Speaker:James and Russell Friedman describe grief as the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or a change in a familiar pattern of behaviour.
Speaker:Interestingly, grief is associated not just with the death of people we love, but with loss and change, the loss of relationships, homes and more.
Speaker:I had never viewed grief in this way and it made me realise how little we honour our grief in anarchists or social movements in the UK, let alone in society in general.
Speaker:We might experience a campaign ending because of state repression.
Speaker:We might have invested years and then lost it all.
Speaker:We might lose friends to burnout or to death at the hands of the state, or simply to poor health as an outcome of poverty and years of struggle.
Speaker:The animals we had to leave behind on an action might haunt our dreams.
Speaker:In a more distant, Yet fully relational way, we might witness things that trigger deep sadness and despair, such as images of refugees drowning or pictures of slaughterhouses.
Speaker:With the relentless nature of the media documenting such tragedies, we are never far away from these feelings.
Speaker:In the Grief Recovery Workbook, the authors encourage you to create a timeline of all your losses, so you can discover which of them are the most self restricting, the most incomplete and painful.
Speaker:I'm starting to wonder whether doing this about a campaign would be really effective too.
Speaker:Making a timeline and looking at different events and losses and how they felt to everyone engaged.
Speaker:When looking with this bird's eye view, you can start to see the patterns.
Speaker:My observation on my graph was that I could begin to see losses, to see how losses accumulate and how each one knocks us out that little bit more.
Speaker:We're so busy focusing on getting through whatever it is we are coping with or working on that we don't often look behind us.
Speaker:We don't often feel the emotions we've repressed silenced or minimized.
Speaker:Likewise, in many struggles we don't do this grief work collectively.
Speaker:We don't sit down and share or process what we've learned or how we're feeling.
Speaker:We're lucky if we reflect at all.
Speaker:I'm sure one to one people engage in reflective conversations.
Speaker:However, there is no collective grieving process.
Speaker:We might at the bare minimum learn from what Tactically or strategically could have been different.
Speaker:There might be theoretical analysis in texts or talks at book fairs, but no one talks about how it feels.
Speaker:So I'm going to start a trend, because no one in the animal liberation movement wants to talk about what happened all those years ago.
Speaker:We are all still frightened of expressing our feelings of fear.
Speaker:of Public Ridicule because we've been socially conditioned, because we've been socially conditioning each other to believe that our feelings don't mean anything because we suffer so little compared to animals.
Speaker:I'm completely over organizing in emotionally illiterate social movements.
Speaker:I'm completely done supporting so many people that experience all these emotions in private, yet the movement silences them in public.
Speaker:How did I feel when the animal liberation movement was battered by repression?
Speaker:It felt terrifying, overwhelming, frightening, rage inducing, degrading, and completely dehumanizing.
Speaker:I felt a deep sadness, a sense of loss and isolation, despair and darkness.
Speaker:An intense loneliness, recurring regret, shame, hate, guilt, and feelings of betrayal.
Speaker:I felt completely unsafe and unsupported.
Speaker:I felt trapped in an emotional earthquake with no steady ground anywhere.
Speaker:These feelings lasted for several years and to be honest they still surface.
Speaker:What I can see now is that these feelings relate to a sense of loss.
Speaker:They are the expressions of my bereavement and the dissolution of my identity rooted in a movement bigger than myself.
Speaker:They are the shattered dream of closing a lab that still tortures thousands of animals every day.
Speaker:Each morning I wake up and feel like a failure.
Speaker:The grief cannot be completed because the goal has not been achieved.
Speaker:The animal liberation movement in England cannot recover because it hasn't processed its grief.
Speaker:James and Friedman write how we need to complete our grief.
Speaker:Incompleteness is the accumulation of undelivered communications, large and small, that have emotional value to us.
Speaker:Politically, it may feel like our work is never complete because the state still stands and the myriad of forms of oppression are still alive and kicking.
Speaker:But I believe movements can process grief better by reflecting on loss and change and acknowledging how it has made us feel and what we have learned, thus delivering these communications.
Speaker:In my most recent speaking tour in Europe, this was like back in 2016, where I unfortunately got sick, I finally acknowledged some of the emotional impacts that the ending of the shack, subhunting to an animal cruelty campaign had meant in my life.
Speaker:Not just the tactical learnings, the need to increase our resilience to repression and so on.
Speaker:But the raw emotion of loss, regret, and despair, most likely because of my physical vulnerability, I opened up a bit more and talked about how it all felt.
Speaker:The regrets and the things I slash we had done differently.
Speaker:I was out of my comfort zone, that wild place where the healing happens.
Speaker:We could process our grief by producing zines, writing articles, making art, doing talks and workshops, even just gathering as friends.
Speaker:We need to document our own history and not let the state tell our story.
Speaker:Organisers that have been going at it for a long time especially need to be called upon to share their stories of change and losses and struggles.
Speaker:It may help newer folk feel more prepared for the inevitable losses and the rich learning we can take from them.
Speaker:And while we need to honour our grief on a movement level, we also need to acknowledge the uniqueness of our experiences as individuals in relationship to loss and share these feelings too, so others don't feel alone in their grief and despair.
Speaker:Mixing this intense personal and movement level work is our role in honouring our fallen comrades, for whom some are heroes and some are not.
Speaker:They have never met and for others, best friends.
Speaker:One such project is a documentary about Barry Horn, a committed animal liberation front activist who lost his life in prison when on hunger strike is a project of transforming the pain of grief into political action.
Speaker:Barry was a huge inspiration to me as a kid.
Speaker:The grief of losing him was felt by the animal liberation movement.
Speaker:So vibrantly and fully, I will never forget it.
Speaker:We have to compost our grief.
Speaker:We have to find the rich learning from it.
Speaker:Otherwise nothing new will grow.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:To really learn we have to feel and to heal we have to share our feelings in public or private.
Speaker:We need to validate them and use them to nourish the soil and grow stronger, more powerful and resilient resistance.
Speaker:Okay, now onto the kind of herbal allies for grief section.
Speaker:This section has felt hard to write because it takes me back to my most recent bereavement and the role that plant medicines played in literally keeping me alive.
Speaker:In July 2022, I lost one of my best friends, Taylor, whom this book is dedicated to, who bled to death in his prison cell after cutting his own throat.
Speaker:The IPP sentence which is like imprisonment for public protection.
Speaker:It's like a type of indeterminate, like ongoing sentence without an end date.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Anyway.
Speaker:And HMP Eastwood Park, that was a prison he was in, stole his life as freedom was constantly taken from the table.
Speaker:His suicide letters were full of despair at no longer being able to survive the unbearable sentence and the abuse in prison, including transphobia from several officers.
Speaker:He expressed the only freedom he had left, to end his own life.
Speaker:For months I was an absolute mess.
Speaker:There are no words for the grief, rage and pain.
Speaker:Thirteen years of friendship, feeling his care and love and enjoying his cheeky laugh.
Speaker:Thirteen years of trying to get him out, of trying to keep him alive.
Speaker:He's come close to death so many times, but somehow I wildly underestimated how it would feel to finally lose him.
Speaker:Despite my whole life being dedicated to resisting the state and supporting people experiencing state violence, the feeling of loneliness was unmatched.
Speaker:The first few weeks were Propelled by rage and all the inevitable demands of organizing the funeral, negotiating with the prison as his next of kin, finding legal representation for the inquest, yet afterwards it was complete exhaustion and sadness.
Speaker:I felt like a vessel of blood and tissues but nothing else, like my spirit had been completely sucked out of me.
Speaker:I dreamt that all the herbs in my herb garden died.
Speaker:I stopped being able to make medicine.
Speaker:I lost all hope in abolition and just lay in bed for weeks.
Speaker:In polyvagal terms, my nervous system was in shutdown mode, like playing dead to survive.
Speaker:The only time I left the house was to visit my friend Sam in prison, Taylor's partner, to keep her from killing herself and joining him.
Speaker:Every time I visited the prison, in the car park, I would see this rambling rose bush.
Speaker:I remember watching its pink white flowers fading and falling over the summer months, and seeing rose hips in the autumn like a marker of time of how long it had been since losing him.
Speaker:Days turned into weeks that turned into months and then finally a year and now 18 months as I write this.
Speaker:I offer here thoughts on herbal support for grief based on the stages of grief we can experience, with a note that they are not necessarily linear but shift like sands.
Speaker:Acute grief, shock, anger and rage.
Speaker:I encourage readers to return to the police on police raids and herbal allies for emotional shock, which describes many herbs relevant for this stage of grief.
Speaker:So you can listen to that as an episode.
Speaker:I'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker:It was the one before this about herbal support for like emotional shock.
Speaker:This includes gentle nirvine relaxants such as lavender, chamomile and lemon balm, hawthorn rose and motherwort for heart palpitations and soothing the emotional heart.
Speaker:Milky Oats for ongoing repression, Passionflower, Valerian, Skullcap, and Wild Lettuce for stronger sedative support and sleep.
Speaker:For me, at this stage, the more gentle Nervines didn't hit the sides.
Speaker:The level of sympathetic activation in my body was so high.
Speaker:I was so pumped with adrenaline and stress hormones, I felt like the Hulk.
Speaker:Felt like I could have literally turned over a car or smashed up a wall with a sledgehammer without any effort at all.
Speaker:The anger and rage were unmatched and it was impossible to sleep, to wind down, to feel any kind of parasympathetic energy.
Speaker:The only herb that helped during this time was wild lettuce, Lactuca virosa.
Speaker:This herb is one of our stronger hypnotic sedatives in our Nervine category.
Speaker:I had the glycerite already to hand and it was only when I took a giant swig of it that I was able to finally collapse and sleep.
Speaker:A similar sedating herb that can offer acute support like this is California poppy, which is a wonderful gentle sedative.
Speaker:Heartache, mourning and helplessness.
Speaker:This is the stage where everything hurts.
Speaker:We feel smashed with heartache.
Speaker:We can feel lost, adrift, amiss.
Speaker:We ache for the people we love.
Speaker:We mourn our lives before they left us.
Speaker:Our days can be dominated by tearfulness or the constant feeling like we're going to cry.
Speaker:We may struggle to access happiness or appreciation for their role in our lives and simply just want them back.
Speaker:Grief can also be extremely complicated.
Speaker:They may have been someone who hurt us or harmed us.
Speaker:like an abusive parent.
Speaker:We may feel a whole bunch of emotions at once, like relief or regret or more on who we needed them to be that they weren't.
Speaker:It's simply a stage of all the feelings.
Speaker:For this stage, I work with herbs that have an affinity for the emotional heart and the physical heart, both of which are feeling the impacts of grief.
Speaker:Herbs for me at this time have commonly been rose, hawthorn and rosemary.
Speaker:I've spoke about rose and hawthorn endlessly in this book.
Speaker:They are incredible nerve ions with an affinity for the emotional heart and cardiovascular system that can be taken during times of shock, stress, emotional pain and grief.
Speaker:Sometimes rose can be too much.
Speaker:I've lost count of the amount of times I've shared samples of rose petal in workshops and people have just randomly burst into tears unexpectedly.
Speaker:It's a mover of emotions.
Speaker:It's like a hug telling you it's okay to cry.
Speaker:It's okay to feel.
Speaker:In this sense, sometimes Rose is too much of an opener in my experience.
Speaker:After losing Taylor, it took me a long time before I was ready for Rose.
Speaker:Rose can be particularly helpful when we are actually denying ourselves the opportunity to move towards this stage of grief.
Speaker:If we can remain angry, we can somehow not surrender to why we are angry, to why we feel so much pain.
Speaker:With Rose comes acceptance of loss and an honouring of how much we love someone.
Speaker:Rose can support us when we feel an absence of love, in my experience.
Speaker:Even if you feel acceptance around someone's death, for example losing my grandad at 94 years old, it felt like an understandable rite of passage.
Speaker:Like it was his time, he'd lived a full and vibrant life.
Speaker:But the grief, despite the acceptance of his death, didn't last.
Speaker:just left a gaping hole of love.
Speaker:I simply missed him.
Speaker:There weren't complicated feelings like anger and regret.
Speaker:There was just the loss of his love and his presence.
Speaker:Here Rose comes into its own.
Speaker:Rose can offer this love when we are really feeling its absence.
Speaker:Hawthorn for me is more of a strengthener.
Speaker:It's like an acknowledgement of the pain and the heartache but brings a, you will get through this energy.
Speaker:With Hawthorn, we soothe our hearts and attend to the physical and emotional impacts of grief, whether that's the stress response or feeling anger and getting into fight or flight, or the impacts of tension and holding it in our muscles.
Speaker:We may be all cried out and tired of sobbing.
Speaker:Hawthorn can soothe and nourish our blood vessels and can act as a gentle relaxant on the whole system.
Speaker:Hawthorn is good when we feel weak hearted or drained of life energy.
Speaker:Herbalist Sage O'Popham describes this as one of the clearest Psychological indications for the usage of Hawthorn is for the individual who feels weak hearted.
Speaker:They do not feel strength in their own hearts, strong within themselves, unclear in their path and connection to their true self.
Speaker:To me, it makes a weak heart strong, a confused heart clear, and a half heart full.
Speaker:Rediscovering meaning, moving towards joy again.
Speaker:After a period of loss, depression, or regular depressive feelings, it can be hard to feel joy again.
Speaker:With time and space and support from loved ones, it is possible for that crack of hope to appear.
Speaker:Sometimes this comes much sooner than expected.
Speaker:Every experience of grief is different and how long it lasts is no testament to how much you love or you miss the person you lost.
Speaker:I've been surprised at how quickly I've felt able to experience joy after losing someone.
Speaker:And often, it's not even one or the other, both joy and sadness are present.
Speaker:For other bereavements, joy felt like something that would never ever come again, and that sadness would never shift.
Speaker:For this stage of grief and sadness, a powerful ally is St.
Speaker:John's Wort.
Speaker:And like many of our other nerve vines, St.
Speaker:John's Wort is gently warming in nature.
Speaker:In polyvagal terms, I see St.
Speaker:John's Wort helpful in supporting people to move out of shutdown or their body's freeze response, which often accompanies depression.
Speaker:St.
Speaker:John's Wort is especially indicated for stagnant depression.
Speaker:Which is delineated by the presence of irritability, frustration and aggravation, which is a lot of activation of fight or flight energy, but commonly immobilized as we see in the freeze response.
Speaker:There are a lot of research studies around St.
Speaker:John's Wort and depression, comparing it to medicines like Prozac is commonly commodified.
Speaker:And sold internationally as a herbal quote unquote antidepressant.
Speaker:However, the specific actions are often not explored, nor the holistic nature of depression and how it takes a broad range of interventions to support someone experiencing depression.
Speaker:Taking a bottle of St.
Speaker:John's wort is not gonna counter the complex psychoemotional consequences of living in a capitalist, racist, and oppressive society.
Speaker:Likewise, there are many intersecting drivers of depression, from poverty to vitamin D deficiency and food allergies.
Speaker:What's beautiful and interesting is that St.
Speaker:John's War is also an amazing wound healing herb In a first aid context, it's especially indicated for puncture wounds.
Speaker:It's antimicrobial and reduces inflammation.
Speaker:I work with St.
Speaker:John's for in bruise ointments for all kinds of soft tissue injuries.
Speaker:Likewise, it can help repair inflamed tissues.
Speaker:internally in combination with other herbs.
Speaker:This wound healing nature and mood enhancing antidepressant action is where I think St.
Speaker:John's Wort comes into its own in recovery from grief and despair.
Speaker:It is known in folk medicine as a sunshine herb because its yellow flowers blossom at the peak of summer.
Speaker:For myself, taking St.
Speaker:John's Wort reminds me energetically that it's okay to feel happiness.
Speaker:It's okay to move towards joy again and I think this is an essential stage in recovering from grief.
Speaker:Just to note that there are important safety considerations to take into account with St.
Speaker:John's Wort because of how it affects drug metabolism in the liver.
Speaker:It is strongly recommended to avoid St.
Speaker:John's Wort when taking other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and monoamine oxidized inhibitors for depression.
Speaker:It is contraindicated for use with sedative or hypnotic drugs, immunosuppressants, non sedating antihistamines, contraceptives.
Speaker:Antieleptic drugs, calcium channel blockers used for high blood pressure, chemotherapy, certain antibiotics and certain antifungals.
Speaker:When experiencing grief, it might be that you don't choose a herb, but a herb chooses you.
Speaker:Any plant can support us with getting through something if we build a relationship with it.
Speaker:Maybe it's a huge linden tree in a local park that you sit under to feel calm.
Speaker:Maybe it's a rose bush that reminds you of your grandmother's garden.
Speaker:Plant medicines come to us in so many different forms.
Speaker:All right, that's just my little contribution to herbal support for grief.
Speaker:I know I don't touch on tons of herbs, but I think, yeah, that kind of depth and intimacy with the ones I mentioned have been big currents in my life.
Speaker:And yeah, I hope this episode has been useful.
Speaker:Let me know what you think about it.
Speaker:And if you're struggling with grief at the moment, I just want to say I'm with you and yeah.
Speaker:I know with everything that's happening worldwide, it's something that is accompanying people, pretty much every second of every day.
Speaker:Anyway, thanks for listening.
Speaker:Take care.
Speaker:Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.
Speaker:You can find the transcripts, the links, all the resources from the show at solidarityapothecary.
Speaker:org forward slash podcast.