Hello everyone.
For this guest lecture,
I have the pleasure of having a conversation
with Nicole Burke,
who is the co-founder of the Golden Well Sanctuary
for Spirit and Nature,
which is located near Middlebury, Vermont in New Haven.
And I just wanna share a little bit about Nicole.
I encourage you to read and check them out more
on their website.
So Nicole is a community artist,
an organic vegetable farmer, beekeeper,
shamanic practitioner, ceremonialist, visual artist,
designer, writer, and world adventurer.
She has been working in the healing arts since 2006
and farming since 2012.
For over a decade, she's been deeply immersed in The Lyceum,
formerly the Path of Pollen,
a shamanic honeybee tradition based in England.
She has also trained in Japanese medicine and acupressure,
the classic shamanic and classic shamanic healing.
Nicole honors and nurtures the wilderness of the soul.
She has inspired to help people remember to follow joy,
towards living a more rich, interconnected life.
Her work is guided by and deeply rooted
in loving relationship with the earth,
all of its elements and inhabitants.
And I met Nicole as a local farmer enthusiast.
She also leads women's moon circles in the community
and is a truly gifted healer and practitioner
and love warrior for the earth.
So I'm here with Nicole Burke
and of course you recognize Bayla.
And we're having a conversation
about Nicole's work in nature-based spirituality.
And Nicole is a friend and colleague of mine in community
and I also just enrolled in a training with her
for the next few months and I'm really excited about that.
So I'd love to hear a little bit more about you, Nicole,
and your background
and then we'll speak with you for an hour today.
Awesome, thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, so my background is pretty diverse.
I most passionately follow a practice
that's born out of England,
a European tradition called The Lyceum,
also once known as Path of Pollen
and its roots are indefinitely ancient
and it focuses on working with the honeybee
as the sacred ally.
And let's see.
So I have also a background in studying shamanic practices.
My teacher was,
she worked with Abenaki medicine people
and also shamans from South America.
And I was born in Hong Kong
and I have a Moroccan Algerian mother
and an Irish Polish father.
So I bring a lot of different influences to the table.
And as far as my work goes,
we have Golden Well Sanctuary down in New Haven
and we really seek to be connected to the land here
and hold space for community and connection to spirit
and connection to nature here, so.
Awesome.
And I know that you're also on a working farm.
Would you just share a little bit about that aspect briefly?
Yeah, sure.
It was our passion to homestead
and to be connected to the land
and to have a food sovereignty
and be part of an evolving food system.
And my conversation around that has really evolved
over the years.
So what started as, you know,
a small scale kind of home garden
grew into farmer's market in CSA
and then grew even bigger into, you know,
wholesale and a 50 person CSA at its height.
And now we're kind of back down to just growing food
for our family and immediate community
and retreats and things like that.
Kind of moving away from industrial and commercial farming
back into just farming for food and for community, so.
Nice and I do just wanna mention
since many of the students are,
have connections to Burlington, Vermont,
and they have seen the kombucha that your family produces,
Apis Kombucha which is sold through city market
and other health food stores
and it's a really wonderful honey based kombucha.
Thank you, yeah.
So would you speak a little bit
to what wellness means to you
and what medicine means to you in your worldview?
Sure.
So wellness I think of as right relationship basically.
Things being in balance and in harmony
and when a body is well or nature is well,
there's kind of not much to notice, right?
So if my body is well,
I'm not noticing pains or how my stomach is digesting,
things are just working and there's a seamless relationship
and effortless flow with how things go.
And medicine, I think of medicine as something that
encourages wellness
and there's, yeah,
the medicine that I'm most connected to
is the medicine that allows
a seamless relationship with nature and the body
and spirit in the body I would say too
because I don't think of medicine as something
just that you take or ingest.
It's also acts that you can perform, rituals,
there can be dreaming medicine,
there can be relationship medicine,
anything that really affects
your relationship with wellness.
What are some of your favorite practices or modalities
that you use?
'Cause I know you also have a healing practice
in your community or with your family.
So my practice is mostly shamanic at this point.
I did study for three years apprenticeship style
with a Japanese medicine person.
And so I do also acupressure
and acupuncture and working also with the bees
and the meridian plants.
And so that's kind of more the physical medicine field
that I've been encountered, encountering.
And I also, through working with my acupuncture teacher,
I got really into food as medicine.
And so I started to garden more when I met him
and got really into growing food in my backyard in Brooklyn.
I had a tiny little plot and I just found such joy
in being able to feed myself from the land there,
even though it was just this tiny little pocket.
And then from there, I moved up to Vermont
and got really into herbs at that point too.
So I was gardening, farming,
and then I just started to really wonder,
what were all these things that I was pulling
out of my nicely lined up rows
and I just casting off like they were nothing?
And I started to kind of have more of a relationship
with the herbs in that way.
And when I studied with him,
even though it was this very physical body oriented route,
I started to open up with my ways of seeing
and actually I wanna give credit to mugwort for that.
So Moxibustion is a big part of Japanese medicine
and Chinese medicine as well.
It's used to tonify the points in the body.
So the meridian system that exists on the body,
there are certain aspects that can either be blocked
because there's too much energy there
or they're considered qi or deficient.
And so Moxa has been a really beautiful way
of working with those qi or deficient areas.
So bringing in mugwort moxa as as some herb
that you burn over those points
to kind of bring and tonify the energy of those meridians.
And so if you work in a room all day with mugwort moxa,
another thing you might discover about it
is that it's a very dreamy herb.
And I was, when I was apprenticing in Colorado
with my teacher, I would spend eight hours a day
in this little room full of moxa smoke, you know?
And that's kind of where I ended up
kind of opening my seeing.
So he would have a patient that would walk into the room
and we were, you know,
meant to diagnose by pulse and by tongue
and by listening to the symptoms and by face analysis
and all of those things.
But these people would walk in
and I would just kind of space out and say,
oh, he's gonna take, you know,
stomach 36 in lung four or whatever,
just kind of in my haze of moxa or mugwort.
And so I would tell him and he would say, you know,
but how did you figure that out
according to our very linear system
that was all about charting and all these things?
And I just said, I just saw, I just knew.
And that's really what opened up my path into shamanic work.
And so then the last time that I studied with him,
I came back to Vermont
and I met my teacher in the northeast
and just did a shamanic apprenticeship there.
And so that's how I really started getting
into shamanic practice.
And so now when people come in,
I really use my way of seeing and diagnostics
through my spirit guides
and through kind of connecting
to these other unseen worlds
and getting there by journey or by drum
or by other ways of dropping in which I don't know how much
I should get into that now.
But oftentimes my diagnostics will lead to things
that might be physical or they might be
more on a spiritual realm or they might be a mix of both.
So I kind of have this vast toolkit to work with.
Anything from herbs to touch to, you know,
acupressure and also using the shamanic practices
that I do as well.
Do you have an example or a story of, you know,
could be a anonymous case or just like sharing a little bit
about what that might look like,
especially because many of my students may not be familiar
with shamanic practices or shamanic healing?
Sure.
So do you want me to just walk through what a shamanic
-preview looks like? -Sure, yeah.
Okay.
So yeah, so usually when I have people interested
in shamanic work, I'll first just check in
to make sure that they know what they're getting into
and make sure that it's a mutually good fit
because it's definitely not on a linear way of healing.
It oftentimes requires a real engagement of will
from the person who's coming for a healing.
So it can imply sometimes some big life changes
and some excavation of, you know,
old things, old wounds,
things that might have taken the person out of balance
or out of wellness along the way.
So I'm thinking about one case that was kind of like
both physical and brought in some herbs
and some shamanic practice that I can tell you about.
So I saw this person,
we had a initial discussion
and he was suffering from some in intestinal issues.
And so I worked with him on an energetic level.
So meaning I prepare the space,
I call in the directions, the sacred directions
and create a container that is imbued
with the divine, imbued with spirit
and my allies from the unseen world.
It's a little bit hard to talk about all this
'cause I don't know where people are at
with this kinda thing.
So I call in my guides and I just try to hollow out.
I try to get out of my linear mind
and I drop into what is similar to a dream state.
And from that place, I asked to work with this person's soul
and their spirit and their body.
And at that point, I'm either shown visually,
auditorily or I have a sense in my body
or a combination of all of those things
about what the nature of the imbalance or the illness
or the problem that they've come to me with.
So in this case, I remember that there was a lot to do
with grief and some ancestral work.
And I'm trying to think back,
it was actually a little while ago.
Yeah and I do believe that there was some soul loss
and soul retrieval work that we did.
So on the energetic level, we did that.
And what that looks like,
it can be different with each case,
but oftentimes there's sound and there's movement
and the person is just laying in a receptive way
on my table here,
usually with eyes closed or with a blind fold on
as I rattle, as I drum, as I use my voice,
as I use my body, as I use my breath.
Just all the different ways
that however spirit wants to move through me at that point.
And at that, with the soul retrieval work,
there is a seeking and a going out into
extraordinary reality and collecting these pieces,
these soul fragments that might have gone
during a traumatic time in this person's life.
So it was during a time that the rest of his psyche
couldn't handle the trauma that had occurred.
So what happens is that the soul kind of splinters off
and these pieces of the soul are left in holding.
And so I bring those pieces back
and I deliver them back to the person,
to help with their you know, with their wellness.
And then what came to me was actually purple loosestrife.
And this was an herb that I knew nothing about
and I kind of like that.
I'm not a studied herbalist,
but I just listen to the plants
and I listen to my dreamscape
and I listened to the shamanic journey
and purple loosestrife wanted to come in
and I said it to him during the practice and I said,
"Let's look into that.
I have a trusted herbalist friend
that I can talk to about this."
And it turned out to be the thing that he really needed
and it really helped to heal the physical aspect
of what was going on for him
as well as, you know, the grief and the trauma
that he had experienced,
that coming together with the herbs, I think they were,
they made a beautiful allyship, so yeah.
Awesome, yeah, I'm struck by one of the themes
in this class is to really open up
to multiple ways of knowing
while also acknowledging that certain ways of knowing
are privileged in our society and particularly in academia.
And I can hear you referring to that sometimes and saying,
you know, like I'm not trained in this way as an herbalist
and I'd just love for you to speak a little bit about
your experience, like which ways of knowing
you are really drawn to
and how you've approached that personally,
but as well as sort of navigating the current landscape
of sort of mainstream society.
Yeah, so the knowing of the bones,
I'll just say that.
You know, the knowing that comes through the body,
that's really where I start.
And the more that I can drop out of the chatter mind
and into the stillness of the body,
there's so much more information than what,
you know, our five senses allow us to absorb.
So just opening up to really what's there
in the relational field.
So it's not just I see this thing
because the color is reflecting off of it.
You know, just that kind of linear
physical seeing and knowing.
There's this, the word that I like to describe is gnosis,
the unearthing of the knowledge of the body hypnosis.
And did you want me to get into ways of getting there?
Is that something that you're
-interested in? -No, I mean.
[Nicole] Off topic?
I think some students might be interested in that
or you could give an example,
but I'm also just really interested in this,
you know, sort of the past and current experience
of having this wisdom,
using this wisdom in the world
and how that feels or how it's felt for you
and how you've navigated that.
Yeah, yeah, so it's really a change
in cosmology too, right?
So as soon as we start to really acknowledge
that we have all of these relationships
outside of just the linear and what's seen
and we give attention and gratitude
and just appreciation to those relationships,
they really start to speak more loudly to us.
So even just taking a walk
and knowing that I'm dropping out of my mind and my,
like, you know, my seeing eyes
and the physical relationships that I have
when I take a walk and I can quiet all of that
and be in my body then, you know,
maybe motherwort wants to pop out and say,
hey, you know, you could use a little bit of me
for your heart right now.
Or, you know, what else I'm trying to think of?
Yeah, like clover or something will just kind of give me
a little bit of a whisper.
And even if I don't know anything about a plant
with my linear mind,
it's that my body knows something about our relationship.
So it's constantly this respecting the relationship
of all that we have around us
and that we have this innate ability to really,
to really connect when we give our attention,
when we pay our respects with our attention.
It's that being like a form of love that we put into
a relationship that then speaks more loudly to us,
the more that we, yeah,
that we give to it.
I love these descriptions 'cause they resonate so much
with my experience.
And one of the things I've noticed in the last year or two
is that if a plant wants me to think of it,
I will smell it.
So it's like this, it's like it triggers the you know,
the center in my brain that releases the smell
into like my old factory sensation.
And that's what will cause me to think about,
oh okay, spirits want me to burn some sweet grass right now.
And like, I haven't burned sweet grass for weeks.
So and I also, I had a similar experience with motherwort
earlier this week.
It's like, oh, why do I taste motherwort?
I haven't had any for really long time.
You know, think it's just my body trying to signal me.
Yeah, beautiful.
Bayla, do you have anything to ask or add?
I'm so fascinated by this
that I'm kind of having trouble thinking of questions
'cause all I wanna do is listen.
but I had an experience.
When you were talking about seeing
and getting out of your body
and letting the spirits kind of guide you
into seeing what a person needed,
I was having a health crisis
and like really severe migraines in earlier this year.
And I remember going to see allopathic doctors
and I got reiki done and acupuncture
and the last person I went to see
was this little eastern European woman
and she was an acupuncturist
and I remember walking in just expecting
to get like needles in my neck and she stopped
and she was like, she turned away from me and she said,
"Your gallbladder.
There's something wrong with your gallbladder."
And then she gave me all these reasons
why there was something wrong with my gallbladder.
And I was like,
that seems right.
And I felt so,
and she did acupuncture, but it wasn't in my neck,
it was in my stomach and my gut and my legs and my feet.
And I remember feeling so held
because she was bringing in this aspect of like past trauma
that I had experienced
and how that was influencing my migraines
and how my gut health was influencing it.
And I just,
it's so special to find that type of wholism,
especially in medicine.
And so one of the things that really interested me about her
was like how she came to do this
and what kind of inspired her to get on this path.
And so I wanted to ask you the same thing.
What inspired me to get on this path?
Yeah, freedom I would say.
Just the freedom of knowing
that it's not all linear
and it's opening to that.
I'd say that it real,
that the mugwort story that I told,
that was really a big turning point for me.
But I think always since I was a young child it was,
I was always out of the box.
I mean always.
I wanted to, as you were talking,
I actually am gonna do a little nonlinear thing here
and bring up one of the articles that you shared
with us, Catherine, about the enclosures.
And that's kind of been a theme of my thinking
around all of this type of medicine
and about just our culture at large right now
that there's this colonized mind, right?
Or this like colonized way of thinking about medicine
and wellness that's like, oh, you have a headache.
You're head up here, right?
And it's almost cut off from the rest of your body
the way that they want to deal with it
in some forms of medicine.
But really it's like if we decolonize
the way that we think about that,
of course it's related to the gallbladder,
that's related to the past trauma
that's related to the, you know,
this plant that you find in your garden
and just the relationships that can happen
when we break down breakdown borders in that way.
I think, you know,
my upbringing when people would ask me like,
where are you from?
I have no fucking clue, excuse my language.
That's all right, we're adults.
Liberate the language as well, right?
Where it's like, I was born in Hong Kong,
my mother is from Morocco and Algeria,
but she was raised Jewish, my father, you know,
and just like all of the different backgrounds
that I come with,
there's a certain sense of not belonging
and anywhere but belonging everywhere.
And I have that way of moving through life
that I've had ever since I was a really little kid
where it's just like always really paying attention
to the relationships between things
and where I was and not just like, you know,
sitting inside the box that I'm meant to be in.
And I really feel that that medicine
needs to be like that too.
It's like this, all of this cross-pollination
that's happening and even just in the last five years,
I've seen so much more of, you know,
even reiki happens in hospitals now, you know?
Things like that, like there's this real evolution
outside of boundaries, outside of borders
into this fluid way of thinking and being,
that allows for just more connection, more availability.
To the magical healing properties of things around us
and in us.
Your comments are making me curious about
the different lineages that you draw from.
And they could be actual ancestors,
blood ancestors that you know about
that are related to your ethnicity
or perhaps kind of solar spirit lineages
that you have connected to over your journey.
Would you speak a little bit too
just practices or knowledge you have of your spirit guides
and perhaps some examples
of how you access them for guidance?
Sure, yeah.
Can I just share with you a vision that I have about this?
[Catherine] Sure.
So the way I see it is that there's constantly a weaving
between the earth and the heavens.
And there's this old orthic hymn that talks about
we're the children of the earth
in the starry heavens, right?
So humans on this plain,
we have all types of influence,
not just in the world around us
or the horizontal plain,
but from the above and the below.
And the way that I see it is that
the voice of the earth and the voice of the stars,
if we really listen to them,
they can start to weave through the landscapes.
That's why we have different cultures
and different languages and different imagery
that kind of comes to us from certain landscapes.
At least that's my seeing of it.
It's like the way that the stars and the earth speak
and arise into form in that particular place.
And so I feel so open to all of that
'cause I've traveled the world.
You know, I definitely have Devas that come to me
from India 'cause I spent some time there,
or maybe it's just my soul spirit connection to that place
which felt very familiar the minute that I landed there.
I have, you know, things from Kabbalah show up.
My mother is Jewish,
but I've never studied Kabbalah
and they're suddenly I'm dreaming these symbols
and looking them up and they're part of that lineage.
I have Irish Celtic songs that come through me
as healing songs for my patients and clients.
And then, you know, and then I'll have dreams of the sounds
of the land here and I'll start to play
my buffalo skin drum and sounds come out of me
that are very similar to what I hear
of the native people of this country, of these lands.
So I'm just open.
I don't really hold on to specific lineages in that way.
I definitely have a lot of practices
that are around the European shamanic practices
from The Lyceum and Path of Pollen
and I find those to be really powerful ways in
or through the veil so to speak.
And I do resonate with me on a body level
that feels very much opening.
Whereas I think when I first started
to work with shamanic practice,
I would more drum or sit or meditate.
The practices in Lyceum and Path of Pollen
are much more dynamic
and they work with the nectar of the body
and the movement of those nectar.
So things like breath and sweat and tears and things
which allow for really radical expression.
And that's to me what I really love
to work with right now, so.
I've heard you speak a little bit to what you know of how,
particularly the Path of Pollen,
The Lyceum tradition was preserved through a time
when pagan or earth-based traditions in Europe
were essentially illegal
and there were times when it came with a death penalty
to be practicing those.
Would you share a little bit about what you know
about perhaps how those ancient traditions
were preserved to this time?
Yeah, sure.
So hidden in plain sight is the languaging around that
that we like to use.
So things like the use of a broom,
a household object that just, you know, sits by fireplace
and also has many magical implications
of the masculine and the feminine coming together,
taking magical flight, clearing spaces, things like that.
Also through the musical skill,
working with the layers of energy centers in the body.
Most people know them here as the chakras,
but in the Path of Pollen,
they're considered the stars and the roses
and it's a slightly different map.
We have an extra center that we work with
and that correlates exactly to the scale.
So Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do
and from the perineum all the way up to the crown.
What else is there?
The distaff, ooh, the spinning wheel.
I have one sitting right behind me here.
So the ways of the weavers and the spinners,
the medicine women who know the stories of the lands
and the healing quality of song and of word
and how that really plays into working with the fibers
and the three faiths and things like that.
So yeah, there's just a lot of mythology
that has been
brought into physical form and a lot of the magic
and the practices that are kind of brought
into these tokens or symbols or amulets
of what they mean as just this sort of reminder
of what could have been lost, yeah.
But it was all passed from mouth to ear.
That's another big,
a big part of why the tradition really hung on.
And I will also say that in that way,
it can't be dogmatic
and there's a certain quality expression
of who the information is coming through
that doesn't allow you to kind of hang on
to like one leader or one doctrine or one.
So it's constantly, it's ever ancient,
but evolving with the times depending on what's needed
in that moment.
So it stays alive to the medicine of the times, which yeah.
-That's beautiful. -Changing as we know.
Yeah.
So one of the phrases that has been sort of ringing
in my mind since,
I don't know if you've read any of Resmaa Menakem's work,
he wrote a book called "My Grandmother's Hands"
and he's a Black psychotherapist,
trauma informed specialist
and might be in Minneapolis actually.
And he recently recorded an interview with Krista Tippet
on being and I highly recommend it.
I recently shared it on Facebook.
But one of the phrases he used in talking about
people of color is he called them people of culture,
which was such an interesting phrase
and it was making me think about
the way that conforming to sort of
the mainstream American idea of whiteness
as an attempt to sort of access the, you know,
privilege, whether you believe
that it's a privilege or not, of conforming.
There can be sort of a loss of culture.
And he actually described white culture
as not actually a culture or a way of being,
but actually a strategy that was around
sort of domination and control
and sort of having links back to colonialism.
And as I listen to you speak,
it sounds like you're very connected to your culture
and I just wondered if you had anything
to speak to that idea
of how can white people also be people of culture
and find that richness and their lineage
and in doing so, also feel more whole?
Yeah, that actually is making me feel quite emotional
to think about
that white people were at some point removed
from our cultures and forcibly so
in some cases, you know?
That I don't feel that there are strong
physical ties left.
Not many of them, you know?
Like I just thinking about
the European cultural things that still exist.
You know, for some reason,
my friend's voice is popping into my head.
My Nona who cooks her, you know, beautiful pasta,
whatever and just the culture around food
being one of the things that can still really hang on
and the culture around music and dance.
I'm thinking also, again the Italian,
the Tarantella dance is another one.
And yeah, just it's hard.
Without the framework of thinking about
the shamanic practices that I have,
I don't really have a ton of cultural reference
for my European lineage and there's a certain grief to that.
And I think that with that grief, you know,
I do really feel like in some ways,
like some of the,
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this,
but some of the white supremacist belief and culture I think
is really tied into a sense of loss and grief
and wound around what really belongs and what is belonging.
And so there's this sort of rigidity and grasping at things
that can be quite...
Yeah, that can breed violence.
You know, when people wanna hold onto
this last glimmer of like
something that makes sense or belongs to just them.
There can be this real violence that comes from that.
And I'm kind of in a space of like,
yeah, great, keep cooking the food
that your grandmother and her grandmother
and her grandmother and all that you know, cooked.
And if you still know the music, great,
but also throw it all out the window.
We don't have boundaries anymore.
We don't have this like,
who does live on the same land
that their predecessors from way back, you know,
once lived on?
There are some people in Europe,
but just the broad culture of,
and I mean there are people all over the world,
but there's such a broad cultural shift
towards this age of capitalism
and removal from values
that include earth honoring ways
that a lot of that culture I think
has just been whitewashed,
for lack of a better term.
Colonized is another term.
Yeah, exactly.
So whereas once, you know,
you might be really excited to receive
that hand embroidered shirt
that was passed down through generations,
it's like now we can just go buy that thing from whatever,
Amazon that has not much value to it
because it's more of the value of...
-(child cries) -My kid is crying.
We can pause the recording at any time if you need to.
-Okay. -Children.
It's okay, I think he's alright.
Yeah, but there goes my thought with that interruption.
(Nicole chuckles)
I think there's a couple directions I could take this,
but one comment I wanted to make is,
I think Sherry Mitchell was the first place
that I heard this, but I've heard it a few more times,
particularly from people of color,
but acknowledging that the wound of being colonized,
our ancestors, our white ancestors being colonized in Europe
was never healed.
And then we carried it to the shores of, you know,
North America, we carried it to the shores of Africa
in the way that unhealed wounds and ancestral trauma
get played out and played out and played out
until they get healed.
So I think that's another interesting perspective
on whiteness and I think it resonates with your instinct
about white supremacy and control
coming from a wounded place
and a place of false power.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean it's just been really interesting to watch,
you know, in these last 20 or so years,
like yoga becoming popularized,
like Buddhism being popular,
so many white skinned people really grasping for things
of other culture because of, you know,
the spiritual awakening that wants to happen here
but doesn't really have the cultural context intact
to hold onto.
And so that's, I do really feel passionately
about the path upon the CM work that I do
in that way that it was able to preserve.
But again, it's just like one way in
and we all have bodies and we all have, you know,
breath and we all have the ability to just listen
and come back to this,
to this direct transmission
because all of it came from somewhere.
It all started somewhere
and it can start again.
I've heard of people in some of the tribes,
the first nations people of this country,
they talk about how they've had to remember,
what does this beaded pattern on this belt mean?
Like what does this feather mean?
Like they've had to piece back their language together,
they've had to kind of reconstruct what was lost
and they're way ahead of us on that.
And so as white skin people,
I do think it's important to kind of reconstruct
and really feel what the particular like
flavor and aesthetic and practice
and relationship to food and to plants
and to all of those things.
Like what is it that we can remember and reconstruct.
And not to hold onto it so tightly, not to grasp at it,
but to hold it with reverence and see it in the tapestry
of all of the beautiful influence that we can call upon, so.
Yeah, I think it's been an ongoing important conversation,
but I feel like it's getting new life and new urgency.
But the concern around cultural appropriation
specifically in herbalism and by white herbalist
and white herbal professionals like myself
and the way that because our privilege gives us
different access, different ability to create businesses,
different abilities to teach
in higher education institutions,
but we may not have integrity with the knowledge
that we're sharing.
And I'm just curious what thoughts you have
and some ways that herbalist, healers,
of particularly of white European descent
can be in integrity
while being on stolen land in the United States?
And in this time where there's so much access to information
but we may or may not have permission
or it may not be an integrity to be using it.
Yeah.
The commodification of medicine and food,
it seems like a really far, far stretch to say that
given our current systems.
But that's where my heart is really about it all.
I think that, you know, where we are as a culture,
it's everything is commodified,
including down to water, you know?
I mean since when like we used to be the keepers
of the wells and we used to all as a people
protect the waters from pollution and it's like now,
it's all packaged up in plastic
and then that plastic's ending up in the ocean.
I mean it's just, it's a mess.
And I think that if we can have direct relationship
with the land and know enough
and have enough reverence for the spirits of this place,
it's just, it's our relationship to
and our responsibility.
You know, you could, I thought about this question
'cause you had sent it, right?
But it's, you know, you go to another landscape
and you learn the cultural appropriateness
of what you do when you enter a home.
You know, like in Japan, you take off your shoes.
It would be offensive if you walked in
with your muddy boots on.
You know, that kind of thing.
So there is something beautiful to wanting to seek out
what the culturally appropriate things would be
to gather herbs in lands that are historically not ours
and were taken by brutal force.
There is that and I think that getting into conversations
with the people who were of this land
and just honoring them and asking their ways,
I think that that's one thing
and that's very beautiful and important.
But there's also this other piece that, again,
it's just that, you know,
they ended up here at some point
and we ended up here at some point
and their relationship might look really different
to the land than what ours is.
And the only way that we as individuals know
what our relationship is is just to open up to it.
So yeah and asking
how do you want to be honored, plants?
You know, 'cause even just a little,
a little minor thing, you know,
when I first worked with my shaman teacher
who had worked with the Abenaki,
she was offering tobacco or pieces of hair
or fingernails as an offering
when she was taking something from the land
and asking first of course.
But as I've worked,
I've found other things like cattails wanna be offered
or pollen wants to be offered or things that are just
mean something to me in the relationship that I have
in my token of gratitude that I'm offering, so.
That resonates.
I had a question, I feel like it left.
Oh, one of the things that I've been curious about,
particularly as I dig a little bit back
into the history of medicine,
women, medicine people in Europe
is that there's a very gendered component.
A lot of the records and the history really speaks
to that it was the medicine women
at least that were persecuted.
And I'm just curious what knowledge you have about that
or what your experience of gender,
because in my experience, all bodies carry medicine
and the ability to see.
And I'm just curious what your thoughts
on how gender fits into this
both historically and currently.
Sure.
So the wombic aspect,
the aspect of of having a womb as a place of creation
simply that all things are are born of woman
in the physical sense, right?
I would say that there is something about
having a physical womb and having the cycle
of life and death with working with cycles of the moon
and the moon blood
that really can inform ways of seeing,
particularly ways of seeing in the dark
that in the honeybee tradition it's, you know,
that ability to go into the dark
to kind of work with the alchemical magic of the hive
and also, you know,
likening that to a woman's body.
The ability to drop into the womb as a place
that connects you to the void or to the other world
and a place of nurturing and of healing
and of magic really.
I mean to form an entire human, right?
But that's not to say that that doesn't belong
to all beings.
So if somebody is born in a male sexed body,
it doesn't mean that there isn't the wombic aspect
of each individual and also in nature, you know,
assigning gender to nature.
That's also something.
You know I do sense that there are certain,
more lunar or feminine qualities to certain plants,
mugwort being one of them, right?
But there's, I think that there's,
I personally feel that there's fluidity in gender
and it's pourable, it's malleable,
it's in measure, in all things.
So just as much as I have a physical womb in my body,
I also have the energetic phallus and I have, you know,
the ability to work with form and with structure
just as much as I have capability to go into the chaos
and the unknowing of the dark and the sacred feminine.
And I think that it's a conscious choice
to engage with those aspects
and some people are more inclined towards one or the other.
And as far as historically speaking,
I think that it was probably
more typically physicalized I would think,
I don't really know.
I would be talking from guesses if I were to say why,
why most of the witches that were burned were women.
But there were definitely instances
of men being accused of witchcraft as well.
Yeah, that's my understanding as well.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts on folks
who are reclaiming the title of witch or wizard
and what is the sort of personal choice that you have made
if any, around your title?
So I would say that
titles are something that I don't particularly care for,
for myself, I don't claim them personally.
But if somebody wants to label me as such,
I'm all ears.
I would say label me with what you perceive
that I provide.
That's how I would speak about it.
If somebody were to call me a witch,
I would stand in solidarity
with the millions that lost their lives
to the witch trials.
And that in the broad definition of what a witch is,
I would say that I probably fit
some of those characteristics in terms of being,
you know, connecting to nature
and to unseen realms and whatnot.
But I don't call myself, I don't openly call myself a witch.
I don't openly call myself a shaman.
Have I been called those things? Yes.
And yeah, again,
I'm really not into like dogma and labels and so.
Yeah, I respect that.
Is there anything else that you feel called to share
or Bayla, do you wanna speak something
into this conversation?
I just, I have a lot of friends
and have had a lot of friends for years
that have called me a witch in a very, like loving,
like you're with nature, you're uplifting kind of way.
And as I've gotten older and learned more about
what being a witch has meant
and what it still means, and Catherine,
I saw your article about the witch burning in Guatemala
and I've kind of like shrunken into that a little bit
and I'm a little bit afraid to say that about myself
and I have stepped away a little bit from that label
because it carries a lot of weight
and part of me feels like I'm maybe not ready or not worthy
of carrying that weight.
So that's something that I work with
and turn over in myself a lot.
But it is, on the other hand,
just something to call somebody.
It doesn't necessarily mean a specific thing about a person.
So I like your, not a aversion,
but choice to remove yourself from those labels
'cause that feels powerful to me.
Yeah, yeah and that's not to say that we shy away
from the conversation, you know?
What historically has been called a witch
and what culturally has become the witch,
it looks quite different I would say.
I wrote to my six year old teacher,
my six year old's teacher in first grade.
I had a few things to share with her about,
you know, what was coming home with the stories
around Halloween and the green face of the witch
and that the witches like to drink little kids like blood
or just like, you know,
whatever the storybooks that they were sharing.
And I just wrote and I said, you know,
you know, culturally what kind of genocide this was.
I mean, millions of people were killed for,
you know, earth loving ways
and to kind of like make a caricature
of what a witch is today, like I find that pretty offensive.
Yeah, I could get into to more about that,
but it is a complicated story
because as much as you don't want, you know,
for me I don't necessarily resonate
on a aesthetic,
aesthetic in like cultural level
with like the widespread image of like
what a Wiccan or witch kind of looks like.
You know, I think of like, you know,
more like goth kind of witch thing.
And then also like the caricature of the witch
with like the green skin and the big nose
and all these things.
And it's just like, it maybe there is a call
to kind of stand up, be like, yeah, and I'm a witch too.
So maybe there's like a whole section of things
and actually if I ever call myself a witch,
it is to my daughter just so that she has
like a reference of all the possibilities of witch.
But yeah, I don't know.
It is, it's a big conversation.
I'd need to do some more research I think for,
to feel like I could take on the mantle
of calling myself witch.
It's so interesting that you say that
because it was when my son was in sixth grade
that he and his friends came home talking about,
you know, what witches do,
like eating small children.
And so I also went into the teacher's office
and shared similar thoughts and said,
you know, like there are many people
in my community that Liam interacts with on a regular basis
that would call themselves witches.
And I sometimes use that label for myself as well.
And I think it's really important that you acknowledge
this history and that you acknowledge
the suppression of this and the discrimination.
And I actually brought in,
there's a children's book by Starhawk
called "The Last Wild Witch".
So he agreed to read that in the class
and speak a little bit about it.
He's very receptive.
But I think it is such an important piece
to be advocating around.
And I guess the last question that I'll sort of end on
is I'm just curious for both of you,
given that you're sort of claiming aspects of the identity
of a medicine woman in white skin
and that that has been a very dangerous thing to do
at certain times in our history,
do you ever encounter a certain level of fear
of that persecution and how does that show up for you?
Yeah.
Moving to Middlebury, Vermont, you know,
when I first came here,
I had come from,
I was in Brooklyn for many years
and I feel like anything goes there, right?
And then I was in Taos, New Mexico,
where there's really a strong culture of medicine people
and appreciation for shamanism
and all the weird things I do.
Weird in the good sense of the word.
And then I moved to Middlebury, Vermont,
and I looked around and I was like,
oh, okay, I might need to cloak a little bit.
And I think that that's, you know,
looking back on why we kind of developed
the farming aspect what we did first.
I think that was kind of my bit of disguise.
It took me quite a few years to kind of come out
and put on my website that I do shamanic work.
It was all very like word of mouth
and kind of behind the scenes
until I felt that I had enough
of a wholesome standing in my community.
Because if you, you know,
if somebody knows you and then you're like,
oh yeah, and I consider myself a witch
or I consider myself a shamanic practitioner,
then it's like, oh, okay.
So there's something that they might have been stuck with
that then opens up in their perception
as opposed to if they don't know anything about you
and you introduce yourself as a witch.
It's like there's a wall that comes up
and there's a block to getting to know you.
So I feel like we were quite quiet
about our entry into this part of the world.
It feels quite conservative here.
And more just about judgment.
I've never felt afraid for my physical body
or my life in any way.
And I feel very privileged to not have had that
in response to my beliefs or my background.
Yeah, I recognize that as a privilege, I should say.
But yeah, as far as beliefs,
I've definitely tiptoed in certain arenas for sure.
Bayla, do you wanna share anything with regard to that?
Sure, I mean I've been kind of considering myself
a medicine person for definitely not as long
as both of you have.
And I'll echo what Nicole said.
I have never felt afraid for my physical health
in this belief system,
but I am also kind of subconsciously very careful
who I share my beliefs with.
And I notice that when I'm meeting new people
and they're like, what do you do? What are your hobbies?
I'm like, this is my biggest hobby and do I want to...
Do I want to share this with this person?
How will that affect their reaction towards me?
But in that sense,
I do live in a community that is very accepting
and there are a lot of medicine people here
and a lot of them are really tucked in.
So I think that has instilled a sense of like,
keep it on the low like this.
We do live in a pretty conservative state politically
and I have a very conservative extended family,
although they are very, they're like,
whoa, that's cool that you do that.
Like gimme some elderberry sometime.
So yeah, I think in my head when I get into my head
and imagine like my place
and how I want to express my place,
that's where I feel a little bit more fear
and I feel pretty consistently
that I have to justify what I'm doing to people
instead of just kind of putting it out there and being like,
this is how I communicate with plants and I ask for consent
and I feel like I always have to back that up with like,
because this, this, this and this
instead of just being able to express that as my own truth.
So that's something that becomes a little bit tiring
to keep having to repeat myself all the time.
But otherwise, I find it really empowering within my myself.
Yeah, I just wanna add something to that.
Just how grateful I am to be in this part of history
and how grateful I am to the women
who really held on to these ways
and who weren't afraid to continue to practice,
even if in the face of their super conservative
families and colleagues.
And, you know, the necessity of hiding things
and the fear that still might reside in our DNA
and the cosmological work that we have to continue to do
and continue to have conversations like this and like,
thank you both for inviting me to this call
because you know, maybe some,
when I think of an institution like UVM,
I think, okay, wow, that's really amazing.
Like five years ago even,
there would never have been a conversation
that talked about the energetics of plants
and communicating with them in that way.
And so there's progress and I think we do,
we really need to just like keep finding the language
that bridges and the language that kind of gently opens
as opposed to like penetratively
creating a divide, you know?
So there's yeah, there's hope.
I feel a lot of hope, yeah.
Yeah, I'm really grateful for this conversation.
And one of the things I wanna say
is I'm really grateful to the University of Vermont for,
you know, in the ways that they
relatively semester to semester,
I don't have a whole lot of job security,
but for the past 30 years,
they've been teaching plant medicine
and I've been teaching it for five years
and I was just awarded $1,000 to study with Nicole.
So and it was really vulnerable for me to ask for that
from the academy.
And I didn't get a lot of pushback.
I secretly think it might have been
'cause they were overwhelmed in the pandemic.
But I wanna close with a poem that I actually wrote
at the beginning of the pandemic
because one of the things that came up for me
when we started to go into lockdown
was it was triggering what I would consider
to be ancestral trauma
for being sort of shut down and not being able to move about
with a certain amount of freedom
that I'd become accustomed to.
So this is called "Liberation Dreams and Lockdown".
"I felt you before I saw you.
A tightening in my shoulders and jaw,
dead weight like a stone covering my whole body.
I chose the luxury of avoiding these feelings
with pleasurable distractions,
but now I'm flattened as if by a steam roller
with few places else to go and an obvious choice.
And there you are, chained in the corner,
chest heaving with fierce resistance,
ragged with centuries old rage and desperation,
body dirty and emaciated,
dull with fatigue,
yet eyes a light with the fire of injustice and betrayal
and pure feral power.
You represent an ancient wound of trapped and abused women.
A wound shared by all bodies cut off
from the nurturing feminine,
the sacred container of community,
a distant memory.
You mirror our trapped and abused earth,
restrained and redirected,
chained and exploited and valued only as a resource
stolen or missed potential.
A tragic blind spot, born of greed and fear.
A tense vessel for the deep howl of despair
of countless misdirected lives.
But I hold your gaze and there is recognition,
then solidarity, then hope.
Your body is a pathway to deep healing.
Healing your broken heart,
healing the lineage of broken hearts that proceed you.
Healing is simple.
Shed the shackles that bind you.
There is no one to stop you now.
Witness me as I witness you
in compassionate tender sisterhood.
Allow me to rub healing plants
on your shaved wrists and ankles.
Allow me to wash the dirt and self-pity from your face
and skin with warm rose petal
and calendula blossom infused water.
Allow me to receive your stories of broken hopes and dreams.
Allow us to dream our liberation together.
It is no longer our filth to bear.
There's no one to stop us now."
Thank you for joining in this poking conversation.
Thank you to the students for listening
and remaining open to different ways
of knowing and being in the world
and blessings on the work
and the healing that we're all doing.
Yes, thank you so much.
It's been really an honor.
That was a beautiful sharing that you offered.