The Body Knows: What We Forgot About Plant Medicine with Catherine Hunziker

Chapter 1: A Journey Through Midwestern Roots (0:30)
Stephen: Would you share a little bit about your background, for people who are unfamiliar?
Catherine: Well, I grew up in the Midwest.
Stephen: Oh, you did? For some reason, I thought you were from here in Boulder. I'm from the Midwest as well, Chicagoland.
Catherine: Yeah. I was born in Chicago.
Stephen: Okay. Chicago proper, like downtown?
Catherine: It's a town close to downtown.
Stephen: Okay. I grew up about 40 [unclear].
Catherine: Evanston.
Stephen: Oh, Evanston. That's a nice area. Did you go to high school there?
Catherine: No, I was just born there. My dad was working for a company that moved him around from time to time. He was a petroleum engineer, actually. There was a point when I was very, very young where he decided he didn't want to do that anymore. He had originally graduated from the School of Mines. My dad is from Denver and my mom is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they met at CU. He switched to being a civil engineer and took over an engineering service in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Stephen: I was born in Iowa.
Catherine: Okay. So I actually grew up in Council Bluffs.
Stephen: Okay. Cedar Rapids for me.
Catherine: Oh, nice. Yeah. I went to the University of Iowa for college, met a nice man, and we got married and moved to Ames, Iowa, where he was from. That's where my children were born, and we were there for a while.
Stephen: And that's Sam and Anna.
Catherine: Yeah, Sam and Anna. Sam's my oldest, Anna's my youngest, and my son Will is the middle one. Sam and Anna are working at WishGarden. There's a whole story about that, and they're doing a great job.
Stephen: I've connected with Sam a few times. He's been very generous with me with consulting and direction, and so have you. You've been very generous with me over the years, even giving me a private tour of your facility. That really helped me see, "Oh, there's levels." Being able to see and understand the gap between where I'm at and where others are at really inspired me, and that was great support along the way.
Chapter 2: The Hippie Era and Back-to-the-Land (2:36)
Catherine: There's a story about how they got involved in WishGarden. There was a point where we were living right outside of Ames, out in the countryside. That was the beginning of the cultural revolution, the hippie era, and natural living was coming along.
Stephen: Was this around the '70s?
Catherine: Yeah. We would come out to Colorado because on my dad's side, the heritage goes way back to my great-grandparents. We would come out here every summer as a family and visit my cousins. Pardon me, we came out every winter. That's how I learned about Colorado. In fact, my great-grandmother's name was Katherine, and I was named after her. She was a Christian Science healer. They had a property up close to Rollinsville, which is south of Nederland. They called it the Balm of Gilead, and people would take the train up from Denver for weekend workshops.
Stephen: I grew up very conservative Christian, and I'm not familiar with that term, a Christian Science healer.
Catherine: It's basically energetic healing within the Christian matrix, so to speak, just like energetic healing from different cultures and different lineages. That was a bit of the history. At some point when we were in Ames, we decided to move out to Colorado. So we did that, and then our paths separated.
In many ways, you could say I'm an old hippie. [laughter] I remember when the book Silent Spring came out, which was when climate change was first starting to be talked about. There was the civil rights movement when I was very young, then the women's liberation movement, then the Vietnam War. There was one thing after another, and I cared about all of it. Then the natural movement started, coming out of the hippie movement. I don't know if this is appropriate to say or not, but I wasn't involved from a psychedelic or trippy point of view. It was more about the values and getting back closer to nature, baking your own bread, the way we did it for 99% of human existence.
Chapter 3: The Winter Meadow Revelation (5:18)
Catherine: There was a point where I moved to the Ozarks as part of the back-to-the-land movement and the co-ops. It was a very rural place, and there were also a lot of retirees there. It's a unique place, but it was a hot spot for hippies [laughter] to get back to the land. So I moved there for a while. Being a hippie and living out in a rural area, I was very much into plants, but more from a naturalist point of view. Then I had an experience early one morning that changed everything. Should I tell you the story?
Stephen: Please.
Catherine: My kids were pretty young at the time, and they were sleeping one morning, so I went out for a walk. It was the middle of winter. Of course, an Ozark winter is not as extreme as a Colorado winter, but it was January. I went out early in the morning down by the meadow by the creek, just enjoying being in nature.
I came upon the meadow and there were deer and wild turkeys grazing. It was a little after dawn, really early, and it was like being in a painting. Here in Colorado we see wild turkeys from time to time, but in the Ozarks you never see them. You see their footprints, but you never see them. I'm just standing there going, "Whoa, wow," taking it all in, until after a while they started to drift away.
Then I noticed this sound, and I'm going, "What?" So I followed my ear across the meadow, closer to the creek, and oh my gosh, there was this bush in full bloom in the middle of winter with bees all over it. The life force in that plant, I'd never seen anything like it before. And that changed everything.
I didn't know what plant it was. I had to go back to the cabin where we were staying because my kids were waking up, but I looked it up in a field guide. Do you have any idea what it was? It was witch hazel.
Stephen: Witch hazel. Wow.
Catherine: Which is one of the few medicinal wild plants that was still on the shelves, in an ointment, when herbs had gone missing for the 50 or 60 years before that. It was a body care thing, but it's one of the few that actually stayed on the shelf.
Stephen: Oh, interesting. Was there some kind of prohibition against some plants? What was that missing time?
Catherine: I think it was when pharmaceuticals were coming forward, and the money involved in big pharma, and just, "Oh, this is better medicine. This is the new stuff."
Stephen: Yeah. And it sort of got pushed out, not really understood, or seen with a negative viewpoint.
Catherine: It did survive in Appalachian folk herbalism, as well as in the African American diaspora in the South.
Stephen: Oh, wow.
Catherine: Places where people did not have access to standard-practice medicine on a regular basis, and also certain communities like the Amish. But it was gone for 50 or 60 years, as was midwifery. That's part of what started coming back with the natural movement, getting back to nature.
That experience is what took me one big step further into plants, into their medicinal aspects: plants as food and plants as medicine. It turned out there were some early herb growers there that I met, and I got to know some of the plants they were growing. There was a co-op in Ava, Missouri. Everything was at the beginning of a lot of these movements. We were there maybe a year or so, and for family reasons we ended up moving back to Colorado, but it was a very life-changing time.
Chapter 4: Midwifery and the Herbal Renaissance (10:30)
Catherine: We moved back to Colorado. I had been trained as a midwife at the Emma Goldman Clinic, through the University of Iowa, where I graduated from college summa cum laude, by the way.
Stephen: Nice. Big school. Not easy.
Catherine: Yeah. Plus, during the Vietnam War, it was also a hot spot for protests against the war.
Stephen: And I know there's some activism in your past as well, here in Colorado.
Catherine: Yeah, I'll talk about that maybe in a bit. I was trained as a midwife, and this was before the back-to-the-land years and the other things I just mentioned. I ended up not practicing because I had little children, and I couldn't stay out all night long. But coming back to Boulder, I was involved in the midwifery community. I taught childbirth education for a number of years rather than doing midwifery per se.
During that time, there was a local midwife named Barbara Wishengrad. And the thing then is, midwifery had been gone too. There were no natural things. When I was growing up, it was all chemical, industrial foods.
Stephen: Wow. [laughter]
Catherine: So these things that had been missing for a generation or two were starting to come back with these various movements. That's what I cared about: a sustainable future.
Basically, midwives then could not carry pharmaceuticals, because then they would be practicing medicine without a license. Now they've gotten licensed and can do that, but at the time they couldn't. They weren't illegal, but they couldn't carry pharmaceuticals, and you can't attend births without some tools. There was still midwifery folk herbalism, like I said, in Appalachia and in the South. So this midwife started making some formulas for the midwives, for childbearing. It was like a closet in a hallway, but they needed them.
Stephen: Yeah.
Catherine: Then she wanted to sell it, because she was moving to Mexico with her partner. And I said, "Well, I'll buy it," [laughter] and just jumped in with two feet.
Stephen: Beautiful.
Chapter 5: Taking the Reins of WishGarden (14:07)
Catherine: The herbal movement was happening. Boulder's a hot spot for a number of things, and the herbal movement is one of them, along with midwifery, natural living, and climate work. [laughter] So I borrowed some money from my mom and just jumped right in. I think it was only $10,000.
Stephen: Was it already named WishGarden?
Catherine: Yes, because her last name was Wishengrad, which I think is Austrian and means "wish garden." That's where the name came from. So I jumped in and took over. I wanted to keep it going for the midwives. That was in 1987.
Like I mentioned, it was just a closet in a hallway. I started doing it in my kitchen, and I was part of the Boulder herbal community as it was progressing. The naturopathic movement was also moving; naturopaths were getting going. I ended up studying it a little bit, and it turned out I had a knack for formulation. Local naturopaths were asking me to formulate certain things, which I can talk more about.
One of the things coming out of the midwifery movement is that women were using the formulas during their childbearing time, and the formulas worked for them. It was all word of mouth and experiential. So they would call me and say, "Hey, would you do a formula for my sister, or for my husband, or for my child?" The local Waldorf school asked me to do a formula when they were having a whooping cough outbreak. One thing or another. Almost all of the formulas I've done have come from real-life situations, including my own kids. [laughter] There are stories about different formulas and where they came from and why. But that's where WishGarden got going.
Stephen: How would you describe midwifery?
Catherine: It's where women are the birthing attendants. That's the main thing. It's mostly about having babies at home, like women have for almost all of history, and how to do that more naturally and more easily, without a lot of drugs, as opposed to only doctors.
Stephen: Quote unquote, right? What's something you believe to be true about midwifery that others maybe haven't heard of or aren't familiar with? Or maybe some common misconceptions?
Catherine: That might be a tricky question for me, because I was very involved in the '80s, but once the herbal work got going in the late '80s and early '90s, I wasn't as involved. I do know that it progressed to the point where midwives could do their work in hospitals as well. Then doulas came along. A midwife is a practitioner who can deliver babies; a doula is a supportive person. Of course, the most important thing is when a woman is actually having her baby, but there's the whole time before that, during the pregnancy, and how to do that naturally. Then there's the postpartum aspect as well.
To your point, I would say even now midwifery has evolved in several different ways. Some are a lot more like standard practice, and some are more, I'm not quite sure of the adjective, maybe indigenous ways, where it's more natural.
Standard-practice medicine brings some important answers for serious things, to save lives. My understanding is that standard-practice medicine comes from Greek battlefield medicine, wounds and surgeries, which is really important. We need that. But it's important for it not to be all about that. Pharmaceuticals tend to substitute for something in the body that the organs are supposed to be doing. I realize that's a little simplistic, but it's putting something in there instead of the body starting to work like it's supposed to, if that makes sense. And that translates pretty directly to childbearing.
When I was having babies, which was a while ago, in the '70s, women would just go into the hospital, and if any little thing was off, they would give a pharmaceutical rather than having strategies for moving through it in a much more body-friendly way that didn't have consequences later. For example, if you took a bunch of pharmaceuticals during the actual childbearing, and I won't go into specifics, that could inhibit your body from moving into lactation so you'd have breast milk available for your new baby right away.
Stephen: Wow.
Catherine: Yeah. The other side of it is that standard practice did have strategies for serious, life-threatening things, whether for the baby or the mom. Midwives don't function on that level, but they're very well trained to know what's going on, and when it's important to move on to standard practice and when not to.
Chapter 6: Three Life Cycles of a Conscious Business (21:30)
Catherine: I would say WishGarden has had three life cycles. The first was with practitioners, midwifery to begin with, and mail order. This was before the internet. It was word of mouth and mailing, and that's where a lot of the formulas came from, as I was telling you: requests for different things. That ran from the late '80s, when I took over this really small thing, [laughter] into the early '90s.
We were kind of late to the retail shelves because we were mail order and practitioner-focused for a long time. It wasn't until the early 2000s that we first started showing up in natural grocery stores and vitamin departments. So we were late to the shelf, even though we were one of the early herbal renaissance companies.
That took us into the second life cycle: coming out regionally, starting here in the Colorado and Southwest region, with retail in the vitamin departments of various independent stores.
For the third life cycle: I was on the board of Naturally Boulder early on. As you know, Boulder was one of the hot spots for natural products in general, and that was one of the early trade organizations here. One of the things I saw was friends of mine with natural companies on the grocery or food side, where you need capital to grow. They were very mission-driven, very values-driven, but they needed money to build inventory to stock the shelves.
Stephen: Yeah.
Catherine: They would sign contracts with the financial people, thinking that would protect their mission and values, but within a year or two they would lose it. Because we were in vitamin departments, which worked a little differently than grocery, we didn't have to scale as fast. And I was primarily driven by our mission and our values. So we never took big money, or what I might call predatory money, the kind that wants to take over your board and take control. We were more like the tortoise and the hare, keeping our values and our mission.
It had its own cost, but I'm really glad we did, because now we're a nationally recognized conscious business. That's a term that's coming forward: our triple bottom line, where we've kept our values and our mission. It's about more than the money side. And as it turns out, there's research showing that when you come at it from that point of view, you tend to make more money than the other guys. We were slow to scale because we didn't have a ton of money, and it was mostly word of mouth, even through the retailers, and experiential.
Our second phase, coming forward on retail shelves, went on for a long time here in the Southwest. Why that matters is we first came out in Whole Foods and Vitamin Cottage here regionally. Then all of a sudden, we got an order from the Lamar pilot store down in Austin, Texas, where Whole Foods has its national headquarters. They built a whole city-block Lamar store with all these new ideas, and we got an order for a bunch of shelf space in their vitamin department. Nobody down there had ever heard of us. I'm going, "Oh my goodness."
They had a trade show and a training I could do for them, so we went down for the opening. I walk into the department with another woman who was working with me, and we're all excited, and I say, "Oh, we're WishGarden." The vitamin department manager comes forward holding her pen and says, "Tinctures. Do you think I need any more tinctures? No, I don't."
I'm going, "Whoa, what do I say?" All I could think of to say was, "Well, I think if you tried us, you'd like us."
Stephen: [laughter] [gasps]
Catherine: Let me say first, I did end up winning her over in the long run. But that experience really pushed me: okay, what is unique about what we're doing? How is it different from these others? Because she said, "I just discontinued $3,000 worth of tinctures."
Chapter 7: The Art and Science of Formulation (27:18)
Catherine: So what is it? It's two or three things. One, and this is why I'm talking about it, comes out of the whole midwifery thing: working with some of the most vulnerable populations, pregnant women and newborn babies. It has to be very, very body-friendly, but it also has to work. [laughter] At that point in time, even people who were interested in herbs thought of them as something that works over time. One thing we brought to the channel is that people didn't know herbs could provide symptom relief in five minutes, particularly if you know how to take them. So that's another thing we brought: very body-friendly herbs.
Stephen: What does body-friendly mean?
Catherine: Safe. Safe, where you don't have to worry about it being a problem, or whether a baby can have it. [laughter]
Stephen: Yeah.
Catherine: And it turns out my formulation strategy was more sophisticated than almost anybody's. Not that there weren't other good ones and good formulas, but having a team of herbs working together to get the job done. What is the physiology you're working with? What systems are involved?
"It's a lymphatic. Oh, it's an antimicrobial. Oh, it's an anti-inflammatory. Oh, it's a hormone balancer." Those functional terms are not enough. Those are just umbrellas. This might be a little simplistic, but there are seven different ways that lymphatics work. [laughter] You need to know what physiology you're trying to match, what's going on with what you're addressing, on a fairly complicated level, combined with the herbs that can work together.
I often use the metaphor of a basketball team. You've got the center, the forwards and the guards, and they're working together to make it happen. Not that single herbs don't have something to offer, but you put them together in a team based on the physiology, the functionality, and also the personality, and who the demographic is, if that makes sense.
Stephen: It does. In the indigenous cultures I've studied with, they never do single-herb treatments. It's always a blend, I think of at least three different herbs.
Catherine: Yeah, I would agree. And on the other hand, not too many herbs. You wouldn't want 20 people on a basketball team.
Stephen: [laughter] A lot of people compare me to Athletic Greens, and Athletic Greens markets, "Hey, we have a hundred herbs." There are many greens powders out there, and I wonder, are you actually getting an efficacious enough amount of any one of those herbs to actually move the body in the way it's supposed to?
Catherine: Exactly. So, okay, what are we doing here? Why should you want us on the shelf? Very safe and body-friendly, very efficacious, and able to address, support and help with discomforts.
Part of why I'm using that word is because herbs became legal under DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, in the early '90s, under food. There are things we're not supposed to say. We're supposed to say something that means something, but in words that mean nothing.
Stephen: You can't say "inflammation." You can say "recovery support."
Catherine: Yeah.
Stephen: But pharmaceuticals can say whatever they want.
Catherine: And that all comes from the fact that getting a particular herb approved as a pharmaceutical was just not possible, because the whole plant has multiple constituents. Plants are kind of like people in that they have a lot of different sides to their personality.
Stephen: Share what "constituents" means.
Catherine: The constituents are the molecules in the plants that have functionality, like vitamins and minerals.
Stephen: Yeah.
Catherine: And it goes way beyond that.
Stephen: Certain antioxidants?
Catherine: Yeah. They have physiological actions. When I was talking about pharmaceuticals, you have a non-natural molecule that you're putting into the body to do something the body is not doing. Does that make sense?
Stephen: Yeah. Even if it's a tonic over time?
Catherine: Mm-hmm. That's like a fluid moving through the body to make things happen. Whereas with herbs, what's going in there is more about helping the organs work better and do what they're supposed to be doing, rather than substituting something for that.
Stephen: You have a great line: our culture has forgotten, but our body never forgets.
Catherine: Yeah, something like that. The body knows. We've co-evolved with these plants for thousands of years. Our body knows how to work with them, and the plants know how to work with us.
Stephen: Yeah.
Catherine: I started calling that paleo medicine, or paleo health. For 99.99999% of our time on this planet, for all human beings and a lot of animals, that's been our medicine. Yes, we need all these different choices. People are complicated. But this is what I've spent a lot of my career doing: going around reintroducing what whole-plant medicine has to offer. It has this whole big thing.
Stephen: Speak to whole plants versus an isolate or a synthetic.
Catherine: By whole-plant medicine, I'm talking about what is in the plant as it is. It doesn't necessarily mean you're using all of the plant, but the whole leaf or the whole root. It's what constituents, what functional molecules, are in there. There can be hundreds of them, and you want the whole range, and many aren't even discovered yet.
Stephen: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Catherine: Which is part of why, as I was saying, becoming approved as a pharmaceutical, even in the early '90s, was $3 million per molecule, per constituent. With whole-plant medicine, my job as a formulator is just to put them together. I'm not trying to improve on who they are. It's who the plant is and what it naturally has to offer, all of it there, if that makes sense.
A lot of times I'll talk about it this way. There's whole plant. The next level is what I call phytopharmaceuticals, where you take particular constituents, particular molecules, out of the plant and concentrate them.
Stephen: Can you give us an example of a molecule?
Catherine: CBD. [laughter]
Stephen: Great, thank you.
Catherine: And beyond that, currently berberine has gotten a lot of callouts online as an herbal supplement. To my point about pharmaceuticals, those phytopharmaceuticals, those natural molecules that have been singled out and concentrated, can play a role for sure, but it's different. It's a step over. At least the molecules are natural and not manufactured. The next step over from that is pharmaceuticals, which are manufactured molecules, with purpose and meaning, of course, and patentable.
Stephen: Yes.
Catherine: And they all have roles to play. But what people don't know is the immense amount of, I'm going to call it wellness, that whole plants have to offer to begin with. It's both as a symptom and discomfort reliever in the moment, like our Kick-Ass Allergy, for example.
Stephen: Which is one of the best sellers countrywide for natural allergy relief?
Catherine: Yeah. Well, going back to the three life phases of WishGarden. First was practitioners and mail order. The second phase, or life cycle, was coming out into retail, into the vitamin departments, and starting to spread and get the word out.
Then right before COVID hit, we started getting national recognition. This was a longer path than for some other companies, because we were that tortoise, moving step by step. First we went to the West Coast and got pretty solid, then the Midwest, and then the East Coast, right before COVID hit. So we started being recognized as a national company. And now, after COVID, or in some ways because of COVID, we're getting a lot of national recognition, which is surprising, because we're still not some huge company.
Stephen: What's the power of tinctures? Why tinctures for WishGarden?
Chapter 8: The Chemistry and Efficacy of Tinctures (38:29)
Catherine: It's what tinctures have to offer, with their chemistry, how they work, what they do, and efficacy in mind. Over time I've up-leveled the classic tincture-making approach for particular reasons. One is taste, but also how to improve efficacy and have a little less alcohol in there.
What tinctures bring is the full range of those constituent profiles I was talking about. There are water-soluble constituents, water-soluble molecules in the plants. When you soak them in water, the water, with its polarity, attaches to those and pulls them out into solution. Does that make sense?
Stephen: Yeah. So you can extract through water.
Catherine: Yeah. But there are others, and again I'm going to use the word "simplistic" a lot just to make a point. The others tend to be the more complicated, deeper-working constituents that are often not water-soluble. That's where the alcohol comes in, with its OH bonding sites, the polarity to hook onto those and bring them into solution. So when you have a tincture, you have the whole array the plant has to offer, as opposed to, say, a tea, where you get a good number of them, whatever is water-soluble, but not necessarily all of them.
Depending on what you're addressing, there are times when you want that whole constituent profile, everything it has to offer. Plus, over the years I would get these calls saying, "This formula did what?" They'd tell me about different benefits they were experiencing. It was related, but it wasn't what I had formulated for, and I'm going, "Wow, really?"
That goes back to the paleo wellness, paleo medicine side of it: our genealogy, our ancestral history, what's still in our body. It recognizes these natural molecules. Another thing a tincture has to offer over, say, a capsule is that it's already in solution. That's part of how you get fast results. The body goes and pulls out what it wants and what it needs, and it has all these choices. You're not assuming you know what it needs by taking some constituents and concentrating them. You're giving the body the whole choice that its genealogy might recognize and want or need.
Stephen: Like a whole toolbox. The body goes in and pulls out what it wants and needs, versus an isolate. Just CBD, that's one tool, versus the full plant, where there could be a hundred or a thousand tools in there.
Catherine: Yeah, particularly when you're putting different ones together. And because it's a tincture that has pulled out the non-water-solubles, you get the whole range, including some really important ones that might not show up in a tea.
I do want to go back to CBD. When products are called full spectrum, you get the entourage effect. At first I thought that meant whole plant, but it turns out, at least for a number of them, they would do CO2 extraction, pulling out specific constituents and putting them back together. It's more than just one, but it's not all of them.
Stephen: Okay. Your intuition, this superpower you have around formulation, share more about that. Where does that ability come from? How do you think about formulation?
Catherine: That's where I was going to go back to as well. There was that moment down in Austin when I went, "Okay, what is it about us?" I might mention that I also worked with the chemistry of extraction so the tinctures taste better and have less alcohol, but are still as functional or more so. That put us in a pretty unique place with what we were bringing to the shelves, along with funny, catchy names. In merchandising and retail, you have to catch people's attention to begin with, but it has to deliver. It has to work.
Taste was a big thing. The traditional way of making tinctures was pretty much straight alcohol. To begin with, those were made with vodka or some liquor that had a high alcohol content. Certain constituents do need a really high alcohol content, like propolis or waxy, gooey types of things. We make the singles individually, with each plant based on its nature, then put them together in a team. The idea is that the overall team has much less alcohol. My goal is 25 to 35% rather than 65 or 70% or more, because it's not necessarily needed if you pay attention to each herb and what it needs.
But to go back to your question about where this comes from: we're nationally recognized these days for having efficacious formulas and taking that to another level. Not that others aren't good; they are.
Stephen: But it's hard to reach the scale that you're at and maintain the quality and the functional specificity.
Catherine: Like when we're talking about respiratory discomfort, coming at it from different angles. Part of why our formulas are known for being extra special and working, for the most part, is the formula itself. The other half is how you take them to get the results you're looking for. We can talk about that, too.
I would say it comes from a background on the science side. Like I mentioned, I graduated from the University of Iowa summa cum laude with a bachelor of science, and I worked in a lab as part of my postgraduate practice. I was always really good at math and science. [laughter]
That plays into what I was saying earlier: just calling something a hormone balancer isn't enough. When it comes to hormones, whether you're talking about men or women, there are very different physiological aspects depending on what a person needs to address. You have hormonal messaging from the brain to the rest of the body, to the endocrine system. That's happening up here. Another one is the endocrine glands themselves. Are they doing what they're supposed to be doing? That's a whole different set of physiology and functionality.
And the one people don't think about the most: in our culture, with stress levels and everything else going on, the liver very often is not breaking down hormones. Say the messaging works, the endocrine glands put out what they're supposed to, and the job is done, but the hormones are still circulating. When teenagers have mood swings, or women have PMS, or people have raging mood shifts, a lot of that probably has to do with hormones continuing to circulate. The body hasn't broken them down and pushed them out. So you get into the liver and the kidneys getting out what you're done with, so it doesn't keep circulating. You have to pick herbs that match these different things. And that's the science.
Stephen: And I wonder where intuition comes in as well.
Catherine: That's what I was going to address next, because half of it is the science. The other half is knowing the plant. Plants are living beings, in a way. As far as I know, they're the only living things on this earth that can take light and change it into matter.
Stephen: Through the power and magic of photosynthesis, plants eat light. What do you think about that? When we eat plants, are we filling ourselves with light?
Catherine: That would be a good question. I haven't really thought about it that way. I just know that plants have a number of different sides to them, just like people do, and there's a feeling tone to that. A person might say, "I'm an herbalist, but I also like a book club, and I also like to play music." Plants come at things from a number of different sides. Some plants will help you address five or six very different physiological things. So there's a science to that.
But putting that aside, one of the things I think about these days is that if somebody is studying herbalism just from an academic point of view and doesn't get to know the plants themselves, they miss something. Who is this plant? Just like you and I get to know each other, it's the same with plants. What is their nature? Who are they? What's their feeling tone? I'm using the words "feeling tone" because I don't want to sound woo-woo.
Stephen: You mean the energy of it, the vibe, the spirit of it.
Catherine: Yeah, and the tone, which we automatically do with people all the time.
Stephen: Yeah. "Oh gosh, this is nice and fuzzy. Look at this color. Let me just sit with you and start to understand you, and maybe give you a little water, give you an offering, and ask you to communicate with me."
Catherine: They are beings. If you sit down with them and just hang out for a while, just witness and feel, without jumping to conclusions or measurements, what happens is your energy settles. I don't even know the right words. You get senses, information.
Stephen: You attune. And as you start to know it, it starts to know you. I find that when I make an offering to a plant, whether it's water or clearing away some debris, it opens itself up more to me as well.
Catherine: Yeah, the reciprocity.
Stephen: Yeah. And notice how this plant is kind of going, yeah, it's nodding.
Catherine: Yep. [laughter] Of course, I think the fan's helping, but still.
So, I'm formulating for this condition, so to speak. I understand the physiology of it. I have plant candidates that have the specific functionality I'm looking for, the scientific aspect, for lack of a better word. Here they are, various candidates. Who am I working with? What's my demographic? What do I feel with the plant? What role does it need to play?
Then you go to the feeling tone of it. One way to do that is to not think about it intellectually, but to feel. Like, "Okay, of these four plants that have the functionality, this one feels like the best match." Say I'm working with children, whose bodies are more responsive than adults' in general, and you want safer, more body-friendly herbs. I might think, "I think this flower is going to be a better match than this root." I'm just making up an example. You go to who the plant is, what its feeling tone is as an entity. You've probably got better words for this than I do. Which one fits?
Stephen: It's interesting. In indigenous cultures, in the jungle, where there are tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of different plants, how do they know which plants to pair? The stories say the plants tell them: pair this vine with this leaf and that root, and that's the medicine. I wonder if the plants ever speak to you that way. I'm hearing this vibe, this intuition, paired with the science. Maybe it's even louder, like a knowing within you.
Catherine: I would say there is a piece of that. A long time back, during that same period, the '70s, '80s and into the early '90s, I spent a lot of time studying indigenous cosmologies from around the world, and how that goes hand in hand with being in nature.
Stephen: Was this at Naropa?
Catherine: It was through Naropa to begin with. There was a visiting teacher at Naropa, Eliot Cowan.
Stephen: Eliot Cowan? That's my last name.
Catherine: C-O-W? [laughter]
Stephen: Oh, wow.
Catherine: He was an acupuncturist teaching what he called plant spirit medicine. He got that from apprenticing with a Huichol shaman down in Mexico, who shared with him how you get to know the plants, which is part of what I was talking about. I wasn't an acupuncturist, [laughter] but I was very interested in the indigenous practices, dieting with the plants, the dietas. So through Eliot, I was an apprentice to the same Huichol shaman.
For six years, we would prepare ourselves for about a month and then go down to Mexico with him. He was not what you would expect from a shaman, per se. He was more of a guide. We would go to places where the essences of nature were strong: the spirit of wind, the spirit of water, the spirit of fire, the different elements of nature.
Stephen: That's what I'm interested in too.
Catherine: Going way back before a lot of the cultural matrices that filter things and come up with belief structures. What is the energy of nature itself? I was an apprentice to, we'll call it, the spirit of the ocean, the spirit of water, and did that down there. I'm shy about talking about this. [laughter] As part of that, we went to El Picacho, where the essence of wind was. We went to another place where sun and fire were the essence. It was about being in these hot spots, these concentrations of the elements of nature, just being there and living them and experiencing them.
Stephen: And I wonder what's showing up for you now from the essence of the ocean, of water, of these places.
Catherine: It's still underneath. To me, that's what underlies everything. There's matter. Body, mind, spirit might be another way to say it. But there's matter, and there's also energy underneath everything, and you have choices about where you go with that and how you tune into it.
There was a point after I'd studied a lot of these indigenous cosmologies and cultures, the Huichol and very nature-based ones going back before a lot of constructs, but also Buddhist cosmology and African cosmology. I learned a lot from African cosmology as well. But there was a point where I asked, "Okay, what do I really know?" I didn't want to just go with some belief structure.
I think I was down in Mexico at the time, because I remember sitting up on a mountainside asking, "Okay, what do I know?" I know I'm here. I know I have a heart. I know that if I sit and just be present, after a while information and feelings start to flow: awarenesses, aha moments, [laughter] feeling tones about things. I don't know, does that address what you were asking?
Stephen: Yeah. And where do those aha moments come from? Are they coming from within? Are they gifts we're receiving? What are some of your beliefs?
Catherine: I hesitate to go too far with that, because the older I get, the more I realize, "Oh, I never thought about it like that." Like, what's underneath that, and what's underneath that, and where did that come from? All these different levels. So I don't want to jump to, "Oh, it's this or that." I haven't really tried to articulate this before, but if there's one thing I've seen, it's that underneath it there's energy, but there's also something that isn't just energy, like our consciousness. You could call that spirit. I don't know. [laughter] There's no science that addresses that at all, at least as we know it. The energy part, yes, but consciousness, no. There's just so much that is so wide and so deep. We have learned so much, and it's amazing, but the more I look at it and the more I experience, the deeper and wider it gets. So I don't know all the answers.
Stephen: Sure. I'm just wondering what's true for you. Is prayer a part of your life?
Catherine: I don't do that a lot in that way. But I probably do this fairly regularly: I take some time to ground and just let it be. Just be.
Stephen: Would you share on that? How do you like to ground?
Catherine: You know, earth energy is almost like a bass guitar.
Stephen: Oh yeah. Speak on that.
Catherine: There's a very low vibration that comes up from the earth. It's about letting that help you slow down and be present.
Stephen: So is this barefoot, sitting underneath a tree?
Catherine: It could be. I just did it.
Stephen: Okay. Because grounding's quite popular, and people walk barefoot for that connection.
Catherine: Yeah, all of that is part of it. But I would say I've moved away from any particular protocols or practices. It's just part of who I am.
Stephen: You've worked this path for so long, with so much vigor, energy and excitement. What drives you today? Where does your passion come from today?
Chapter 9: Regenerating Soil Through Medicinal Crops (1:04:22)
Catherine: Just wanting to help in whatever ways I can for a positive, loving future.
Stephen: Yeah.
Catherine: A sustainable, healthy future, on multiple levels: body, mind, spirit, whatever. At my age, I should probably just be retired and poking around in an RV. [laughter] But circling back to the plants, like we were talking about earlier, there's so much that was missing for so long.
I would say a next phase in the movement is bringing medicinal plants back as real crops for real farmers: perennialization and soil health. We now know it's not just about the minerals and not putting chemicals in the soil. It's about the life in the soil. As I'm sure you know, films like Kiss the Ground and Common Ground have really helped people see that you have the life in the soil, the nematodes, the mycorrhizae, all of that.
Somebody shared a metaphor with me that I think is a good one. The soil minerals are the house, and the living organisms in the soil are who's living in the house. Without them, you just have an empty house. So you have living soil and dead dirt. Even if it's organic, even if there aren't a bunch of bad chemicals in it, it's still dead dirt. How did that happen? Industrial chemical farming was one of the main things.
Stephen: Yeah. Just pouring herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers on the land, because it was effective for a while, and now we've gone too far with it.
Catherine: Yeah. And that kills the life in there. What's important is for everyone to start realizing it's about that life as well as the minerals. Yes, we need to pull the chemicals and stop using them, but it's more than that. It's about living soil rather than dead dirt.
One of the things about medicinal herbs is that a few are annuals, but the vast majority are short- or long-term perennials, which means you're not having to till, which also kills soil life.
Stephen: Perennials meaning they come back year after year. You don't have to replant.
Catherine: Yeah. And that means the roots go deeper. A lot of the life in the soil is about interaction with the roots of plants, and the deeper the roots, the more good things they can pull up. Look at a degraded piece of land, and there's plenty to see, and you see these weeds. I'm looking at it going, "Oh my god, that plant has a root that's there to help regenerate the soil." What plants are going to pop in to help bring that soil back to life? You call it an invasive weed, but it's trying to save the soil. Plus, that one happens to be one of the top 10 liver herbs.
Stephen: Which one are you talking about? [laughter]
Catherine: Yellow dock, also known as curly dock.
Stephen: Oh, okay. Do we have those in Colorado?
Catherine: Oh, there are tons of them. We could probably walk out the door and find some.
Stephen: Okay. We'll put a picture of it right here.
Catherine: These plants have so much to offer that we've lost. It's a next phase in the movement. How do we bring them back home as real crops for real people? And bring some of these important wild medicinals into sustainable cultivation, right here in Colorado. That's one of my goals.
I started a nonprofit called the Herbiculture Project, because it's not the same as agriculture. When people think of agriculture, they think of corn rows, not this kind of thing. And it's not orcharding. It grows out of all these agricultural approaches, but it's its own thing. [laughter] Like orcharding and permaculture, you get the diversity, and it's more like nature, but you need to plant in a way that's productive so you can make a living. I might call it eco-grown.
The beauty of the medicinals is that there are hundreds of them, from bulkier bases to stockier bushes, to carpeting plants, to vines, to small woody bushes, to big woody bushes, to trees. You have all these kinds of medicinal herbs that are herbs of commerce, if we call them that. That means a farmer or grower could plant them in an eco-friendly way that resembles nature. Here in Colorado, they can get a little bit of shade, which is really important. There's a whole other story there.
Stephen: So you're saying grow these different herbs in a way where they all support each other?
Catherine: Many different herbs growing on the same piece of land, but planted for productivity. You've got the diversity, which is closer to nature, but you're not just putting one here and there. The herbaceous ones could be in alleys between woody swales along a contour, or positioned for shade during part of the day. Not all shade or all sun, but a little shade for part of the day, which is one of the things I've experienced and learned about.
Stephen: I'd love to put in the example of the Three Sisters. You're probably familiar with it. Native Americans would grow squash with corn and beans. The corn acts as a trellis that the beans grow up, the squash spreads out wide and keeps the pests out, and the beans put in the nitrogen the corn really enjoys. There are synergies where these plants all work together.
Catherine: Yeah. What I've seen is the plants in a circle around the corn, and that's a good example of how they work together to do what's needed overall. I'm talking about a bigger version of that.
Stephen: The 30 sisters.
Catherine: Yeah. [laughter] There you go.
Stephen: And you're active on this today. You have a piece of land?
Catherine: Yeah. I wanted a whole farm, but I couldn't afford it. They were too much money in the Boulder area.
Stephen: Yeah, there are fancy farms around here. Millions.
Catherine: But I have an acreage with a diverse ecosystem, and I would call it a hub. We have a demonstration garden there. For the last four years, we've also been partnering with Jack's Solar Garden, planting under solar panels that rotate from east to west during the day. It's called agrivoltaics, where you're planting under solar panels that are higher up than most. That has been very educational, because you get microclimates in that situation.
I've brought in a number of herbs of commerce that I'm familiar with and know are important. Let's say I know one is happy out east, and I know it's not happy in an open field here. What happens if we put it under these panels? It was done in a controlled way, with three beds between each array: three beds with irrigation and three beds without.
Stephen: So you're testing.
Catherine: Yeah. Which plants are happy where? I know it's not happy out there, but would it be happy in one of these microclimates? The microclimates involve a little more humidity under there, and there are several subtle aspects to it. Obviously, one is having a little bit of shade. Do they like morning shade? Afternoon shade? Are they better in the middle?
Stephen: In doing this work, how do you find it strengthens your own intuition?
Catherine: Just getting to know the plants better. It's like a person being in five or six different environments. What's the best fit for them? How do they react and respond to the different environments? Then you get to know the plant better. Gosh, I've never answered that question before.
Stephen: When I'm in conversation with people who are maybe not in touch with their intuition at all, a recommendation I like to give is to start growing plants. You can read all the books you want, but until you're with the plant, you don't really know whether it needs more or less light, water or soil, or a bigger pot. It's the intuition and the experimenting that turns that muscle back on and strengthens it.
Catherine: Yeah. I started calling this approach, figuring out who's happy here and in what way, "AYES!" A is for adaptability. This applies to all plants, but I'm focused on the medicinals that are herbs of commerce, which somebody could grow and sell into a real market that's big, not just something tiny.
Stephen: Do you mind giving us a couple of examples? What's the state of the union on herbs in the US?
Catherine: Let me finish the AYES first, please. A is adaptability: what's happy here, and in what situation or microclimate? Do they need shade or not? Do they need a lot of water or not? What attracts bugs? All the different aspects of adaptability. What's happy here and what's not.
Y is for yield. If you're growing it, is it going to produce enough to be worth your time and energy?
E is for efficacy. Does it have the constituent profile, with the functionality we want, for why we would use that herb in a supplement? Yarrow is a good example. There are plants that have been selectively bred for landscaping, for size and color, just for the visuals. There are versions of yarrow that are big, with beautiful color.
Stephen: Is that also known as bear root?
Catherine: No. Not that I'm familiar with. But plants that have been bred for landscaping, for size and color, could leave the medicine behind. They could be big and beautiful, and then you have this wild, scrawny one, and you're going, "Oh my god, the medicine in there is really strong." That's the efficacy side.
Stephen: You can tell by the smell.
Catherine: That's one way, although that's only one constituent type, the aromatics. There are a number of others.
Stephen: But on a quick test, sometimes you're able to tell potency.
Catherine: Yeah, depending on what it is. If it's supposed to be an antimicrobial, that's a pretty good indicator. I was using yarrow as the example because these are all called Achillea millefolium. They have the same Latin name, not even a different species name, but some are like this and some are like that, and they're very different from one another. So you have species differences, and you have varietal differences, where they have the same Latin name but they're different. That's efficacy, which we care about because it needs to work.
Then S is for soil benefit. How is this going to help regenerate the soil, through perennialization and how you take care of it? We're also working on ways to reduce hand labor for cost efficiency, so it's sellable at a good price and a lot easier on people, and coming up with strategies for that. That's the AYES we're working on, so we can make recommendations for people to grow.
Then to your question about the nature of the market. Contrary to what happened with hemp, where the bottom fell out of the market,
Stephen: Boom and bust. [laughter]
Catherine: And a big part of that was a lack of market access for growers. The herbal supplements market, along with all the other supplements, from tinctures to capsules, has come forward in the last 30 years from nothing to a multibillion-dollar market here in the US.
Stephen: Wow.
Catherine: What's interesting is that the vast majority of medicinal herb ingredients are still coming from overseas, 85 to 90%.
Stephen: Who's doing a good job overseas?
Catherine: We want to respect the countries and farmers that have been doing this and never stopped. On the other hand, there are issues with bad players and with quality: how long has it been sitting around? Growing them here in the US as well doesn't have to compete with that, because the market's continuing to grow. There's room. But it can also push for higher quality coming from overseas.
Stephen: Competition is good. And you speak to sustainability, if we're able to grow our own and rely on ourselves.
Catherine: Yeah. And we want to respect and continue to support the good growers overseas, of course, because a lot comes from there, and a lot of what people are learning comes from there. It's about addition. And what the plants have to offer here, oh my goodness, could help save the planet [laughter] with soil regeneration.
Stephen: Yeah, it's a big issue, much bigger than people realize. Much bigger than I realized. I've heard several people talk very strongly about our soil issue.
Catherine: Yeah. And it could help farmers make more money so they can hold on to their land and keep doing it, independent farmers especially. For example, I learned a couple of years ago that for a bushel of dried alfalfa sold into the commodities market, farmers get $10 for a 50-pound bushel. That's 20 cents a pound.
Stephen: Wow.
Catherine: Nice, well-dried alfalfa sold into the supplements channel would be dollars per pound. And you could still do both.
I'm currently on the board of AHPA, the American Herbal Products Association, which has played a major role, not the only one, in the herbal movement and in trying to get proper legislation in place. Over the last couple of years, and this happens at Expo West too, there's been a lot more talk about the actual farming side of things, how we can support that and bring the herbs domestic as well.
Stephen: I wonder what the state of regenerative organic is in the US today, and whether legislation is moving forward to support it. I've seen only headlines.
Catherine: I haven't been paying particular attention to that. I could talk about it from a supplements point of view. In general, one of the challenges on the growing side is that "regenerative" is the word with meaning and relevance, particularly with farmers who care and want to move forward. There is some tension between that and organic. Organic certification didn't exist in the '80s, when I started. It has come along, and we care about it, but from a legal point of view, and here's me going off on it a bit, organic is primarily about not feeding the plant roots chemicals.
Stephen: That's what organic is to you.
Catherine: Yeah. Of course it's about more than that, but it's about not feeding the roots chemicals. It's not addressing the life in the soil as well, which is what the word "regenerative" brings forward.
Stephen: Yeah. We care about all of the soil, not just the roots in it, plus the people and the animals. We're Regenerative Organic Certified, so we've gone through all of that.
Catherine: Good work.
Stephen: And you have to be USDA Organic certified to qualify for Regenerative Organic.
Catherine: So you're through ROC?
Stephen: Rodale helped create ROC, along with Dr. Bronner's and Patagonia Provisions.
Catherine: Yeah. That's one way to get both. Regenerative has not been codified in the same way organic has, which is why you would need both. Currently within the supplements industry, because of what goes on product labels, a regenerative certification alone is not going to work if you're trying to grow herbs to sell directly to companies or big national buyers. If an herb is historically known as being cultivated, it has to be organic, unless it's wild-harvested, because of what the customer base knows, understands and sees. Regenerative certifications don't qualify yet to go on labels like that, at least with supplements.
Stephen: Oh, yeah.
Catherine: But ROC includes organic too. You have to have the organic to sell to a manufacturer that has organic certification on its products. That's what ROC has brought forward: you can have the regenerative, but you also have the organic that you need to sell into the supplements channel on any scale. With regional apothecaries and farmers markets, it's not a big deal. You don't have to have organic certification. You can be organic, or you can be regenerative.
Stephen: Is there anything else you can demystify for us about the supplement industry? As you speak to a lot of people, they're surprised by some of the facts about it: who's on the team, or who might be pushing against it and trying to overregulate.
Catherine: I think the people who are organized nationally, at least in the world I'm familiar with, like ABC and AHG, still have that caring, that mission and those values. I know there are more organizations than that, particularly when you get into the really big companies with capsules.
One of the biggest issues is regulatory agencies really understanding what it's about, why, and where it's coming from. In the '90s, there were the vitamin wars, when the FDA and big pharma basically wanted to shut down vitamin departments.
Stephen: Wow.
Catherine: Period. They wanted to shut down anything that was supplements, herbs, what have you, and make it illegal.
Stephen: The FDA, with probably some corporate capture there from big pharma.
Catherine: Yeah, and also just a belief structure about pharma. But the FDA got some of the biggest pushback it's ever gotten then. It went to Congress, and they passed DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which I mentioned before. Supplements basically got legalized under food, because there was no way they were going to be regulated as pharmaceuticals. Testing them like they did with one molecule, you might be talking hundreds of molecules. It was just out of reach. We're also talking about thousands of years of history of use. [laughter]
Short of diving into all of that, it has been a very slow, hard path for various regulators, whether we're talking government or an inspector, to really understand it and adapt. There have also been people or companies coming in with things that really aren't natural herbs, saying they are.
Stephen: Maybe synthetic, but marketed as natural.
Catherine: Yeah. So how to help with that is still in progress, and it's coming along inch by inch. Recently, within the last year, a local agency in New Hampshire, and I don't have all the details offhand, said, "Tinctures, you can't have those on the shelf, because they're alcoholic beverages."
Stephen: [laughter] What?
Catherine: Yeah. [gasps] There are all kinds of things with a little bit of alcohol in them. AHPA in particular, and other organizations, got together, went and spoke with them about why that's not what needs to happen, and it worked. It wasn't easy. I would say that's one of the bigger challenges: getting the regulatory side to really understand and do appropriate things. Not only "this is okay," but also, on the other hand, "that's not okay."
Stephen: Are there any bills you're aware of that people should be tracking? Anything moving forward that you're supportive of?
Catherine: I can't think of anything major offhand, but if you're interested in this, you might go to the AHPA website and start following them. There are other organizations doing this, but that's one of AHPA's main focuses. They have lawyers working on that level, and they're even going to Washington, DC, in the next couple of weeks to talk to some people in Congress. They're doing a lot of good work, and it's coming from a good place. It's not biased on the money side or one way or another. It's coming from a very practical, experienced level, wanting to make it right all the way around.
Stephen: AHPA, the American Herbal Products Association, at ahpa.org. Thank you. We'll put it on the screen here. Do you want to go into a lightning round? I'll ask you some quick questions, we can wrap up on that, and then you can share about some of the products you brought. Does that feel good?
Catherine: Sure. And if we left any hangers along the way, I feel like as I was talking, I would go down a rabbit hole about something relevant and maybe never come back to it.
Stephen: That's okay. We're just flowing and having fun. [laughter] I think it was great. Thanks for your patience with me as well, as I'm finding my way as a host and guide. This felt good. Think of these as one- to three-sentence responses. First question: what is your relationship with nature?
Catherine: Lovely.
Stephen: Nice. That is rapid-fire right there. Perfect. What plant do you feel closest to today?
Catherine: There are two of them, but right now, yerba mansa. It used to be native here. I first met it down in New Mexico some years ago. It likes dry, arid ecosystems, but it likes to have moist roots, so it's a riparian-zone type of plant. It's not real big, and the adult plants make a circle, like a family circle, and in the middle the baby plants come up. Plus, it has runners that go out, with nodes that sprout to grow more plants. So it's special in a way.
From an herbal point of view, when somebody is fighting a respiratory something, there's the beginning, the hot phase. It's very active; you're coming down with it. But then you have the stuck, boggy, cold side of it afterward. Does that make sense?
Stephen: Yeah. Hot, and then, "Am I going to get over this?"
Catherine: Yerba mansa is for that cold, stuck phase, whereas something like goldenseal works more on the antimicrobial level. There are a lot of different sides to the physiology of that. But cold, stuck, boggy: one of the main things yerba mansa can do, and it has other sides to it, is help relieve that. The Chinese might call it wind-dispersing.
Stephen: How do you say it again?
Catherine: Yerba mansa. M-A-N-S-A.
Stephen: And what's the soul, the essence, of that plant?
Catherine: Just sweet and beautiful and hearty. It needs its family and community close by. It comes up with really beautiful little white flowers. We want to bring it back, and we started bringing it into sustainable cultivation here this year and last year.
Stephen: Well, [laughter] thank you for doing that work. How do you think of traditional Chinese medicine?
Catherine: I haven't really worked with it a lot. I respect it, because I think it goes beyond on a number of levels in terms of understanding the body, and there's a lot of history with the herbs and what helps and works on multiple levels.
Stephen: What type of teacher is entrepreneurship to you?
Catherine: It's how to do things right, with mission and values and caring, and still make money. You've got to have some income in your life. Being an entrepreneur is a whole other side of things that takes a lot of time, energy and work. But if you just do it step by step... One of the main things I learned is to get a lot of the behind-the-curtain stuff in place before you go out there. Get your accounting set up, your back office, even your marketing. Get a lot of it in place before you open the doors. That would probably make it a little easier. And I can say that because that is not what I did. [laughter]
Stephen: Sounds like a passionate founder to me. I did the same. What does self-care look like for you today?
Catherine: A lot of things. A lot of people are looking into that more deeply, learning about different ways to care for that whole middle piece between nothing and extreme. [laughter] There's this whole area a lot more people are paying attention to, wanting to find answers and things they can do and use, from physical workouts to going for walks in the morning.
Herbs are definitely part of that, because herbs do not have to be about crisis. It's sort of like eating well. We know nutrition builds better tissues, and you want it to be natural because that makes you healthier. Plants as food on one side and plants as medicine on the other make your organs happier. It's what feeds your organs. [laughter]
It can also be, "Oh, I'm allergic to grass pollen." Going back to our allergy conversation...
Stephen: You are?
Catherine: Yeah. But having an allergy, rather than having to go to over-the-counter, non-natural pharmaceuticals, you can go to herbs to deal with discomforts along the way in a very body-friendly way.
Stephen: Do you think allergies are on the rise?
Catherine: I haven't heard one way or the other. I think it does change with climate. Here in Colorado, we're having a very different year than we've had before.
With herbs, I would say half of it is the formula itself and how it's been put together to address what you need. The other half is how you take it to get the results you're looking for. And this is a little simplistic again, but we could divide that into levels. First, a discomfort in the moment that you're suffering from. That's one approach. I'll name the levels and then go to the specifics.
The next level is what I'll call acute. It's something coming on, not just a particular symptom. "Oh, I'm getting a cold. Oh, I'm coming down with this or that." How do you work through that and have the herbs help you feel better, get better faster? I'm trying to be careful about what I say.
Stephen: Of course. It's so interesting working in the world you do, because I have to deal with DSHEA too.
Catherine: Yes. [laughter]
Stephen: You have many filters you have to go through. You can't just speak plainly.
Catherine: Yeah. So there's that middle level, getting through it. Then the third level is deep, chronic, stuck: something down deep that's not going to go away overnight.
Stephen: What's an example of that? IBS?
Catherine: Chronic things that are deep and stuck, yeah. From a tincture point of view, and I'm mostly talking about tinctures, keep in mind I'm coming from a place where I know our formulas are body-friendly and safe. You don't want to drink a quart of anything. You can drink too much water, [laughter] and that would be a problem. But with a tincture, which gives you the whole spectrum of constituent choices, I know what our formulas are like and how you need to take them to do what you want, and I'm not worried about that. It's not going to work for everybody, but okay.
For discomforts in the moment, it's about how much you take in a short amount of time. On one hand, there's body weight. The more pounds a person is, the more herbs they might need to take. What runs across that is constitution, what we inherited, what we were talking about before, our genealogy. You can have a big man, 250 pounds, who's really sensitive to herbs through his heredity, and a tiny woman who's really dense to herbs and has to dose up. Then what runs across that is how intense the discomfort is.
The beauty of tinctures is you can figure out what your body wants. You take a good, strong serving, quote unquote. [laughter] In this case, it's like six to eight pumps, since these have little pumps, or if it's a dropper, maybe three dropperfuls. Whatever the typical serving is, so to speak. I'm saying "serving" because of DSHEA and the fact that supplements are regulated as food.
Stephen: And you have some instructions on the product.
Catherine: Yeah, we try to say as much as we can on there. The FDA rules make it challenging to say what we'd really like to say, but we do our best.
Stephen: Who is Michael Moore to you?
Catherine: He was one of my first teachers. I used to go on his springtime desert field trips, and I did that for a number of years. I didn't study with him weekly down where he was teaching, but I did take a class. Feather Jones, an herbalist here in the area who moved down to Arizona maybe 20 years ago, was one of the first teachers in our area, and she had studied with him too.
His way of coming to herbs, from an ethnobotany point of view, a bioregional point of view, and a physiological and biological point of view, really spoke to me. It matched up with my interests as well. He came at it from a number of sides, not just one. And he was quite a character. There's the filmmaker named Michael Moore, too, and they actually have some similar aspects. [laughter] I really enjoyed learning from him on the field trips.
Stephen: And now all of his information is available for free. I believe he has passed away.
Catherine: He's been gone a while now. But his website still carries a lot of information, and I think it's one of the more reliable places to go. Not for everything, but...
Stephen: What does fun look like for you today?
Catherine: Oh, I'm in a band. I play music. We perform around, and that's really fun. I love to dance.
Stephen: To what kind of music?
Catherine: I play Southern African music with [unclear], Zimbabwean music.
Stephen: Yeah. I've seen you a time or two at [unclear].
Catherine: Okay. Yeah, we have a whole big band called Zimira that plays out and about, and I play the traditional mbira, the thumb piano of Zimbabwe. What I love about that music, besides the whole culture, and the people there are lovely people, is how they come at things. Their ancestral side reminds me a little of the Hopi. But what I love about Southern African music is the polyrhythms. It's not just 4/4. It just makes you want to move. And it's village music. It's not, "I'm a cool performer and you're my audience." It's about going somewhere together and getting into what's called ecstatic physiology.
Stephen: Yeah. What are your thoughts on AI?
Catherine: It's tricky. Oh, that's actually a long answer. [laughter] I get where it's coming from, and it can be really helpful if you're trying to write something, you know what you want to say, and you want help putting your wording together quickly. I think it saves a lot of time. But the piece about making something that's not true, putting it out there, and brainwashing people, getting lies out there that people think are truth, that scares me.
One of the biggest things that's problematic from a company point of view is that everybody's going to AI to learn about things, asking AI questions the way they used Google in the past. For AI to recommend or mention your company or my company, there's a whole new thing you have to do so it will even pick up on what you're doing. It's similar to SEO for Google. I don't know what the term is for AI.
Stephen: Yeah, I know what you mean.
Catherine: But it's even bigger, and it's challenging. Like, "Oh my god, do we have to do that too?" [laughter] The whole marketing side is changing big time in terms of what you have to do to be successful.
Stephen: Anything else you want to share?
Catherine: Yeah. I should look in the camera for a change.
Stephen: Whatever you want. There's no wrong way.
Catherine: We've been talking about adult formulas, but we're also really special with children's formulas, because that's where we came from to begin with. We're uniquely there with both women's health and men's, but women's is more complicated, [laughter] and pregnancy, because WishGarden came from the midwifery movement way, way back. So we have a lot to offer.
Stephen: Where can people go to learn more and do some more research?
Catherine: Our website, wishgardenherbs.com. You could call us. We're on Amazon, and we're in a lot of stores.
Stephen: And social media. You've got great social media, and we'll be linking to it from this video. Thank you for the time.
Catherine: You're welcome. Thank you.
Stephen: Okay. See you, everybody. [laughter]