season 2, episode 3 - wild sacred space with christa whiteman

our guest for episode 3 is christa whiteman! christa is a clinical herbalist working to help folks with gut issues, hormone imbalances and autoimmune disease find help & health through herbs. with her true home in the forests and fields, she works to connect folks with nature and its healing wisdom. you can find her online at wildwomanherbalist.com and on instagram @wild_woman_herbalist.

each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #snortandcacklebookclub, with a book review by ash and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. this season's #snortandcacklebookclub read is "orishas, goddesses, and voodoo queens" by lilith dorsey.

take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!

seasons 1-3 of snort & cackle are generously supported by the manitoba arts council.

transcript

snort & cackle - season 2, episode 3 - christa whiteman

ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast. I'm your host, Ash Alberg. I'm a queer fibre witch and hedgewitch. And each week I interview a fellow boss witch to discuss how everyday magic helps them make their life and the wider world, a better place.

Expect serious discussions about intersections of privilege and oppression, big C versus small C capitalism, rituals, sustainability, astrology, ancestral work, and a whole lot of snorts and cackles. Each season, we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens by Lilith Dorsey.

Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.

Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]

So, I am here today with Christa Whiteman. Christa is a clinical herbalist working to help folks with gut issues, hormone imbalances, and auto-immune disease find help and health. Through herbs, with her true home and the forests and fields, she works to connect folks with nature and its healing wisdom.

And Christa is a really fucking smart witch, and I'm very excited to have you here with me. Hi Christa!

christa whiteman: Hi, how are you Ash? ash alberg: I'm good. How are you?

christa whiteman: Good.

ash alberg: I'm so excited for this. You are ... Yeah. You're like ridiculously smart. ‘Cause like you are, you're the go-to herbalist in our group, I feel. Even though there's a lot of us that like are herbalists, but like you also have a background and actual like degrees in Western style medicines as well.

You have a chiropractic practice and you do lots of the things. And so I, I really love talking to you about herbs and the way that they work on the body because you're much more scientific than just, “this herb does this.” And obviously I like that side of herbalism too, but I find your knowledge is ... feels very grounded to me which I appreciate.

But that's my own thoughts.

christa whiteman: It's maybe a little bit of a bias there too. [Ash chuckles.] And I have training in functional medicine as well. Which is still very science-based, but is also taking a much more holistic view of the body, instead of that very myopic, system by system approach, where you've got to track down a gastroenterologist for this thing, you've got to see this specialist for this thing.

And, nowadays sometimes you walk into a physician's practice, they'll only let you have one chief complaint. And if your problem is something that is happening across your entire body, one chief complaint doesn't really cover it. So functional medicine has always been this sort of like alternative type thing that sees the body way, and works with the body way more holistically.

The more I got into herbalism the more ... and studying the thought process behind that, the more I'm like, oh, this is like the original functional medicine. This is how people saw folks and worked with folks holistically through time. And some of my favorite things about herbalism is that you're not always just treating a person's physical body, but understanding their psychoemotional, spiritual health was also a super important aspect of working with folks.

And in some traditions, the ... a medicine person didn't even give, may not have even given a remedy or a medicine to the actual person with a sickness. They may have given it to their family members or people into their community, depending on what was going on. And it's, that's a really interesting thing ‘cause we definitely have a much more individualistic idea of sickness and illness, particularly here in Western culture.

And we've really seen some ... to a certain degree, some of that like really come to a head during this pandemic with folks who don't seem to understand that we're all having to address ... we all have to do certain things to address viral illness together, but that's a ...

ash alberg: [Laughs.] You're also in ...
[Both talking at the same time.]
christa whiteman: ... quite tangential. [Laughs.]

ash alberg: It's like even more intense. And you're, you're in the States, which like, there's definitely been a difference in the way that was handled through the first chunk of the pandemic. And, but also you're within a subculture, which I think stereotypically, but also perhaps in practice has been more resistant as well to that.

Which, you are a hunter, you are like in the wild, you fish and the communities ... I grew up fishing and my dad did bow hunting and things. So I have always been around ... and my best friends growing up hunted. Like I've always been around hunters and fishers.

And of course my indigenous friends who are like practicing land-based practices, they're very involved in those practices. And I personally really value them. I think it's actually a much healthier way of eating and consuming, especially when you live in the north where the climates are ... the plants that we can grow and especially growing throughout the year is, it's definitely more limited.

So to make sure that we're getting nutrients we need ... christa whiteman: Yep.

ash alberg: ... in what we eat is frequently part of our diets and then definitely part of our textiles. But there, there is this stereotype of being a more, like anti-authoritarian and anti-government and anti-organized generally ... it's like, there's a lot of survivalists within it and that goes a little bit against what is needed when there is a viral pandemic that is so easily transmissible.

Like I think that's ... talking with my mum throughout the pandemic, who was an epidemiologist as well as a nurse, for her the numbers game of a pandemic is just ... she's really been enjoying it. [Laughs.]

christa whiteman: Yeah.

ash alberg: The problem specifically with COVID-19 because it's a, it's a novel coronavirus, but it's certainly not our first coronavirus. And the issue with it is that it is both extremely viral and also extremely lethal, which is not normally what happens. Normally the viruses that appear are either extremely transmissible but fairly mild in the way that they attack the body, or they're very lethal but have a harder time transmitting across bodies.

And this one is not, and it's very smart and it is evolving and mutating and it's a constant process. But the basic public health rules behind, “how do we prevent virus transmission in general?” are ... they still apply. Yes, it's a novel coronavirus, but it's still a coronavirus. And we do know things that work better, like washing your hands and distancing ...

christa whiteman: Wearing masks. ash alberg: Exactly, wearing masks.

All of these things. The vaccine we hope will help for a chunk of time, but probably we're all going to be needing booster shots on an ongoing basis. Like it'll just become a new ongoing flu shot. So yeah, sorry. I went on a tangent. I'm trying to remember how we come back to it. [Both laugh.]

christa whiteman: We come back to earth. [Both talking/laughing at the same time.]

ash alberg: Yeah! Well actually, yeah, either, because I think the thing that's really cool about your approach to herbalism is the fact that you are ... like, I think when we look at herbalism online, and you and I are part of the same biz coven, so we're regularly talking about marketing and branding and social media and herbalism in particular, especially in Canada and the States, has become this very specific like sub-niche and brand of a very femme person, often white bodies, but not consistently white bodies, but consistently femme bodies in flowy cotton or linen dresses in gigantic fields of perennial and native plants that they planted as well as the extra herbs that they magically can grow in their land.

And they have really green thumbs and they harvest everything and they live in rural but not too rural spaces. And they are, if they are not plant-based, you

wouldn't know it from their feeds. And that's fine. I am ... other than the plant-based bit, like that's a hundred percent my aesthetic.

And so I like, I definitely, with my own herbalism fall into that category, other than the plant-based bit and other than I'm definitely an urban person at the moment. But I also, my dream is to be like rural, but not too rural with enough land to like grow all these giant plants. Realistically, my reasoning for wanting as many perennial herbs as possible is so that I have less maintenance to do ‘cause I don't have that green of a thumb.

christa whiteman: I grow herbs because I suck at vegetable gardening.

ash alberg: Right?!

christa whiteman: Like to me, vegetables are debutant plants. They have to have just the right amount of water. They have to have all the right fertilizer. Like I, my, my herb plants, like they're just “set it and forget it.” And it's about the only thing I can grow.

And it's a little bit embarrassing to admit, but for an herbalist, I do not have a green thumb. My partner says I have a black thumb of death. [Ash chuckles.] I'm working on getting better at it. It's just I'm a Gemini with a Gemini rising so I'm very airy. And sometimes that means like I am in my head in just in this like tunnel vision type thing.

And it's like, how long has it been since I've watered that plant? Oooh.

ash alberg: Yup. A hundred percent. That's why when they can just go outside and be rained on and then they pop up again in the spring, it's great.

christa whiteman: Right! And yeah, the perennial herbs, I think they, for the most part, take care of themselves.

And to a certain extent, the crappier soil you grow them in, the better the medicine is because they develop all this secondary, all of the secondary chemistry to help deal with the pressures of other weeds or being a ... herbivores and things like that.

And so you actually make the plant weaker by ... ash alberg: Babying it.

christa whiteman: Babying it! [Ash laughs.] It's too much. It's too much. So these are my kind of plants to grow. So that's pretty much, most of my space in my garden now has been given over to perennial herbs. And it's just, I put stuff in now and I'm like, if you make it, you get a space here.

If you can't, it's like at the Hunger Games in my ...
ash alberg: [Laughs.] If you can't hack it ...
christa whiteman: It’s like, may the odds be ever in your favour! [Laughs.]

ash alberg: Oh my god. That's so funny. But I think that ... this is totally driving in on like, for you, you are not the antithesis of that kind of like Instagram-ized vision. But it does, it makes it tricky to like ... on the one hand, it makes you really stand out in the herbalism sphere and in the other hand, or on the other hand, it can almost make it trickier break into this sphere because you're presenting a different look and a different approach and a different mindset, which I actually think is ... I was going to say much more valid and that's the wrong way of phrasing it.

But it's perhaps an easier one for people to connect to and see themselves in, right? Where it's a lot about your local plants. You don't know everything about every single herbalist plant under the sun, but the plants that grow in your land and on ... like in the forests that you're hunting in, extremely well.

Like you are the person that I want if we're hiking and we need some emergency first aid sort of thing. [Christa chuckles.] And then also, if we get lost, then you're going to be able to hunt us some food so that we can survive. But it's yeah. I'd love to hear more about how you integrate all of these different sides of you that feel much more, I think grounded is the word that I want, between both the functional medicine and the body work that you do and then the herbalism studies that you do and the way that you integrate that into your client work, and then also, your own life, which is very much like, you're extremely self-reliant, which I think is super fucking cool.

But like how those all feed into each other and then feed into the way that you approach your herbalism.

christa whiteman: I think the orienting thread there is just, I've always had an interest in evolutionary biology, ancestral skills, like where we come from as humans and that the idea that like, we may not have lived long, but we lived as

... for most of our history as human, we lived in harmony with the environment around us.

And I want to be, I do want to be clear, I'm not acknowledging ... I'm not trying to sweep under the rug or overly romanticize that humans have been responsible for mass extinction events in the past, that we have never been all ... that we never alter our environment to our own gains. We do have evidence of people using fire and all kinds of other things to radically alter their environments.

But still we managed to maintain the sustainability that modern humans have seemed to like, just really go off the rails with. We've just moved so far from it. And I think, when I look at that, like our, I think our physical health and our mental health suffers. Like we've gone so far down the line of technology ... and there's a lot of technologies that, they're really great, but we get sold the promise of a technology and only find out about the downsides of it like after we've become dependent on it kind of thing.

And.
ash alberg: Yes. Oh my god, yeah.

christa whiteman: There's a great book called In the Absence of the Sacred by this guy, who's his ... this is his name: Jerry Mander. But it's ...

ash alberg: Wowww. That's unfortunate.

christa whiteman: It was put out by this year at Club Press. And it's just a really wild book because he just talks about this concept, and he actually pulls out articles from when the telephone was being invented and was like basically being sold and put in houses all across America. And one of the things that critics of the telephone back then, and we're talking about like the old school, like you pick up, you have to ask an operator to connect you and they like plug in the little thing like you see in the movies or whatnot, but even back then they were saying - critics of that technology - were saying like, man, that's going to alter the way people perceive time and distance.

Because before that, if you had to write a letter to like your aunt on the other side of the country, it would take maybe a couple of days to a week for that letter to be delivered for them to read it. And then for them to possibly send that back to you. And so your understanding of like “out there” was like, yes, it takes time to get to a place called California.

And by being able to just pick up the phone and call somebody, like now they don't feel that far away. They’re ... like you can talk to them in real time, even though they're miles and miles from you. And like, how does that rewire our brains about how we perceive time and space? And we've also seen in the last century, primarily the 20th century, like people don't grow up and live in the same towns that they, that they have for all of their lives.

And a lot of us might say that's a good thing, depending on where we grew up, but it's not been the way that we've been human-wise. And like how do our family lineages, how do our relationships get changed, altered, possibly disrupted by the fact that like, now you can live on the other side of the country from your family?

And how do our connections to our ancestral roots, the practices, the ritual and things that we engage in every day, like I think here in the U.S. we experience such ... just a lack of continuity to the places that we came from. And it's not necessarily that we need to overly romanticize it, but I think a lot of us want to have some connection, that some understanding of who we are and where we came from and you see that come out in kind of pathologic ways when people try to appropriate other people's cultures and things along the line.

And it's just, I think to a certain extent, we're all just trying to answer, “Who are we and where do we come from?” And it's we live in this melting pot here in North America that it's harder to answer those questions. So for me, trying not to be appropriative of any one culture, I just find interest ... and I'm a student of many different types of proto-cultures and earlier cultures. And what can we as humans, modern humans glean from that about how we can just live healthier in a modern era?

And it all just seems to come back, to me, around having a deep relationship with nature. And this idea that you care ... you can't save something that you don't care about, that you don't have a relationship with. So as I, to me, herbalism, hunting, all these things are really in service of deepening my relationship with nature.

And deer, for instance, my relationship with deer has become so much deeper, so much lusher, so much more nuanced, actually since I've started hunting them. Which a lot of people at first blush would probably find counter-intuitive but before taking up hunting, deer were just like something I saw in the environment and was like, hey, look, that's a deer. And I might see them on the side of the road and be annoyed that they might be trying to jump in front of my car.

But in having to hunt them, they're a prey animal. They have been shaped. Their senses, their bodies, how they move through the world has been shaped by thousands’ millennia of being a prey animal. And despite the fact that in urban and maybe even suburban areas, like you see them very frequently, once you change your energy into starting to hunt them, they know. They're not ... they're not dumb.

They didn't survive this long by looking at a human with a weapon in their hand and being like, let me keep sitting here and tune myself a little bit and figure out that person. So to be, to hunt them has required me to become a student of their biology, of their patterns, of almost like their psychology and their energy. Like I've had to learn how to attract them, how to look at an environment and look at what are the plants growing there? What is the ecology of that environment that would make this a good place that they would want to be, versus this place where they're unlikely to be?

Particularly with the hunting seasons that we have here in the States, it's a lot about ... in most places now, it's based on their reproductive biology. And the reason why we have a hunting season in the fall is all based on their mating cycles and how that changes their behavior. And so understanding their mating cycles and how they're going to go about having the next generation of deer is really integral to understanding how you can actually essentially find a weakness in this prey animal that has been alluding ... it has been trying to stay alive for all of this time.

And it's not just being hunted by humans. It's being hunted by coyotes and wolves and in some cases bear. So it’s very, in a way we have co-evolved with each other. We've had, we have strategies as humans that we've developed to be predatorial, but then, and we shape the prey tendencies of the deer. And to me, we almost like need each other.

ash alberg: Mhmm.
christa whiteman: Like the fact in so much that we hunt them, we make them

better.
ash alberg: Yeah.
christa whiteman: We sharpen their like prey ... their instincts as prey animals. ash alberg: Yes.

christa whiteman: And then we get to ... if you do, I think a common misconception from people who don't hunt is that it's easy, because they see deer in their environments quite frequently. And they think it's like going to the grocery store and just like handing over some cash for meat. And most people I know that hunt spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of their life every fall sitting in the woods, freezing their butt off to try and get a chance at one animal.

That's a lot of time and energy to put into a pack of meat. But the cool thing about it though, is like deer are so ... they're so generous. There's just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of meat. There's a lot of their bodies that is available for sustenance between the muscle meat, the organs, the bones, the hide that can then be made into materials for clothing.

So they're, they ... Yeah. They're very generous. And to hunt them for me has almost been like a spiritual experience, to experience that generosity that they give. And it almost feels like a taking care of humans. And that feeling, to me, connects me with that ancestral lineage, because the stories that I have read are ... that's how a lot of previous humans also experienced it too, that deer were taking care of them by providing them food and clothing and things like that.

So to the extent that I engage that, like I now become, instead of a human moving just through a landscape, I become part of it. That deer is part of me. It's very literally like a communion with the land. And to take that like thing from Christianity, where they do the communion and they actually say, the story goes, the Bible, like this, “take this bread and eat of my body. This is my body” or something along those lines.

I used to know all those words, but you're very literally, the idea with the communion is that you're very literally supposedly eating the body of Christ and taking it into your body, which to me is also a very witchy, transformative type thing. [Laughs.]

ash alberg: Totally. And it's so funny, ‘cause I think of ... there's so many practices around the world and throughout history where you know, consuming a part of whatever your prey was or whatever it was that you like, conquered or won against was very much like an important ritual because you were consuming their life force and taking it into your body and making it part of now your ... like that was how you got stronger was the more things that you conquered.

But I think, we've screwed it over ... [Laughs.]

christa whiteman: Yes.

ash alberg: ... in modern times because so many things have now become so easy to do. And we've also become so detached from it that instead of having these very personal one-on-one interactions with things and there being an honor attached to that, like you ... to stare down a deer in that kind of long-term relationship with it, and also to spend that much time committing to finding it to begin with and tracking it and all of that.

There is ... I feel like you would have to be a sociopath to not then build an emotional relationship and attachment to that creature, whatever it is, so that by the time the end point comes, that there's not a very deep sense of honor and gratitude. Like I think you have to be a sociopath to not feel that, but in our modern time we've basically built it so that we can all just easily be sociopaths, right?

Like you go to the store and you get refrigerated meat that's cold and has had all of the blood and all the everything removed from it. Very few urban folks at least ever see the process of butchering. We don't know how to track things. We're not aware of our ... of what else is happening in our landscape.

And the cycle of life is not necessarily something that we're used to. Like yesterday, I watched ... it was awful and I had a lot of grief in my body yesterday that then got processed. But I was walking Willow in my neighborhood, which is in the middle of the city. And we ran into this cat who is a cat that actually puts up with her.

So we practice our cat manners with this cat because he puts up with her. And he was hunting some squirrels and he'd chase this one squirrel up a tree. And so the squirrel was up the tree chittering and Willow was sitting and we're just practicing watching the cat do his thing without trying to go at him.

And then all of a sudden this squirrel fell out of the tree and splatted, facing at me, on the ground. And I think he had a quick death. I hope he did. And I was like, oh my god. And I looked up and this other squirrel was like leaning down the limb watching and in my mind, ‘cause I realized that I've anthropomorphized the entire situation.

I don't actually know what was the relationship with the two squirrels, I don't know how long had this been happening. I do know the cat is very well cared for and so he did not need to eat the squirrel. If he did eat the squirrel ... I hope that he did so that then the squirrel goes back into the cycle.

But if I'm like, okay, this house cat that doesn't need to eat this thing chased a squirrel up the wrong tree. The squirrel was fighting with the other squirrel, ‘cause he's in the wrong tree and fell off out of the tree ‘cause he got pushed and then he died on the pavement.

And it was just so horrific, and I had so much grief in my heart for the squirrel. And meanwhile, Willow was like, why are we leaving? There's now a squirrel on the ground and the cat's coming towards me ‘cause the squirrel’s in between the two of us. And I'm like, no, like we're not ... if I didn't have a Willow, honestly, probably I would have gone and picked up the squirrel and given him a burial service.

But then I'm like telling a couple of people about it who are significantly more ... like they're less emotional than I am. And both of them were like, yeah, that's a cycle life, poor squirrel, going up to the cat. And I was like, I like ... and I initially I was like, oh, I'm mad. And then I was like, no, actually like the reason I knew that was going to be a response and I asked you, I told you the story because part of me needed to have you put it back into context for me.

But I still grieve for the squirrel. But that's the thing that, you know, my friends whose kids grew up on farms, they're so used to that stuff, right? Like part of the cycle, and you have other creatures around you on an ongoing basis, you become much more used to “this is the full cycle of life.”

And I think that's a healthier way, especially at least as children to start your life, where you're seeing that these are things that happen. Sometimes they suck. But also I feel like it's healthier to observe that and see that within the full context of an ecological system than to grow up in a war zone.

And the reason that you're like “the squirrel doesn't matter” is because you've seen humans killing each other for an extended period of time. There's the, I, for some reason, I feel like the squirrel ... and maybe that's me being too human, but I'm like the squirrel getting pushed out of the tree is part of the cycle of life, but humans killing each other is not.

I don't know. That was a terrible analogy. But ... christa whiteman: It's ... death is sad.
ash alberg: Yeah.

christa whiteman: It is a sad thing. It is something that is ... deserves our grief. But like death has also been a part of life and being on this planet since it came into existence. And I think we, as modern humans, have an unhealthy relationship with death where we're either trying to avoid that it happens and so we get into cycles of thinking that if we do, if we're very rigid and we do things a certain way, we can somehow escape it and it not be a part of our life, which is never going to happen.

That's, to a certain extent, like a wasted effort. But we can also get to a point where if we're not used to death in our ... and how death makes our life possible, we can become overly sad to it, or maybe even overly callous to it.

And to me, to ... for me to get into hunting was actually a choice I made to reshape my relationship with death and to very consciously engage the death that makes my life possible. So instead of outsourcing my ... the death that makes my life possible to somebody else in a slaughterhouse somewhere, I was very conscious and aware and choosing that experience from the get-go, that I need ... it needs to be by my hand. I need to make that happen so that I can engage in this process in a way that truly honors this being for providing for me.

And then I'm very aware of that sacrifice and that's not ... and for anybody who might be listening to this, who might think has anti-hunting kind of sentiments, I just want to be super clear too that I don't relish killing, like that was not a fun thing. And it was very sad and, and it was something that I had a lot of mixed emotions about.

I cry, but it's also, it's also a joyful experience because of the food that it provides. But it is, it's this experience that is not without its sadness. But that, that particular animal, like that buck that I killed last year, has become ... every time, like I remember him. And it's almost like the same as going to the grave site of somebody and like leaving flowers, telling the stories about their life, and remembering them and keeping them alive.

Every time I make a meal with the meat from that buck, like I remember my time in the woods. I remember it so clearly, like where he was, where I was, the whole story is very much now a part of me. And like, I took the skull and had a Euro-mount made, which is the bare bone with the antlers and stuff like that.

And that ... I have it on my wall. And to some people they would say, “Oh, that's so perverse, how could you kill something just to hang it on its wall?” And to me that's honoring it. Every time I look at those antlers, every time I

look at that bone, I reminded of this beautiful animal that existed, that gave its life to sustain me for some time.

I think that's how humans lived for a long period of time and why animals were sacred beings, were like gods to many humans in traditional cultures. And it was ... we've gotten to a point where there's too much ego, I think, in the experience. But I think there was a time when it was very normal for humans to have this much more rich experience and relationship with the animals that they hunted.

And by extension, that deer also taught me some really interesting lessons about the herbs and the plants that I worked with and how, because I didn't have to put as much time and my life energy into harvesting them, like just go out for the afternoon and I'm able to harvest a bunch of them. I didn't, I don't put that same like honor and value and sacredness into some of my relationships with plants because of the different energy exchange.

And that experience with my buck almost like pretty much challenged me. Like, why do you give me, why have you given deer so much of this sacred energy and then turn around and treat plants as if they're like somehow less than because they can't run away from me like the deer does?

ash alberg: Yes. I think that’s like such ... christa whiteman: And it's really ...

ash alberg: Yeah. It's like such a core thing in the argument that like, specifically like militant vegans, and I use militant very specifically. There are some vegans I like ... I love having conversations with my friends who are vegans, who like the reasoning behind their veganism is whatever personal choice they've made.

And they are constantly re-evaluating it and constantly questioning it. And they have a very complex and nuanced relationship with it. When I was vegan, I was not that complex. And the vegans that I find are the most vocal are like the way that I was when I was vegan, which is you're very black and white.

You are not willing to accept any sort of shift on the matter. It's like a very white supremacist, colonial mindset as well.

christa whiteman: Sanctimonious, yeah. ash alberg: Which is super fucked up.

And it's also really fucked up because it's saying, okay we're placing value on these other living things, because we recognize some similarities between us and them because they have eyes, they have whatever.

christa whiteman: Spinal cords.
ash alberg: Yeah, exactly. They have ...
christa whiteman: A centralized nervous system.

ash alberg: Exactly. And often because we anthropomorphize them, like we look them in the eyes and we see something that ... and I do this with Willow all the fucking time, but I'm like, “Oh, you're thinking this right now.” And sometimes a hundred percent she is. But other times, like I am putting something on her that she is not necessarily feeling.

And we don't do that with our plants. And yet plants ... it's because plants speak a different language. And, but they are also can be extremely blunt about their messages. Like I was repotting my nettle babies recently a few days ago. Nettles, those are one of those ones where it's, they are just sturdy little fuckers.

And I was repotting them and I wasn't paying attention. And one of them poked me and I ... and it hurt! I am not one of those people who can just shove my sad hands into some nettle and feel better. That is not a sensation I enjoy. But I was so proud of my little nettle baby for poking me because I was being not .... like I was not paying proper attention while I was handling it.

That was my fault. And it jabbed me to remind me, hey, fucking be present right now. You're handling my root system. And I was so proud of it. And not every plant is going to be that that explicit with us. I think I also have a fairly deep love of the thorny plants for that reason. They're like ... their boundaries are very like, “This is us, fuck right off.”

And I appreciate that about them. But they do speak a language. It's just a language that we as modern humans I think have become very much less attuned to. And yeah, I think that's also where I really appreciate your experience with your herbalism because you also, much of your herbalism does come from walking in the wild with the plants in their space, rather than just being in your very curated garden.

And I am all for curated gardens. That's an ... ideally at some point long term, there will be a garden of many perennial plants that I don't have to deal with,

but I will have initially planted them and then just have an ongoing relationship with them. But there is also something about encountering a plant in its space and it having its own story and it having its own feelings about you now being in its space and having that communion with them. Like there's something really deeply beautiful and necessary about that.

And yeah.
christa whiteman: I have that relationship with poison ivy. ash alberg: [Laughs.] Oh my god.

christa whiteman: Which is really funny because I've never gotten poison ivy in my life. I've never broken out because of it. And I have a dog that runs fairly wild. So it, like I know she goes through poison ivy and has it on her fur, and then comes and probably sleeps on my pillow.

So I'm, I would suspect that if I was susceptible to it, like it would have happened by now, but it has not happened yet. And yet I find myself having this really weird, almost sixth sense about where it is. And I will just, I'll be doing something. And all of a sudden I will just look down and it's like inches from my foot or from something.

And I, one of my herbal teachers was, has told a story about ... they come from a Cherokee medicinal tradition. And there's a story from those folks about how the plants actually had organized themselves into tribes or bands or groups. And there were seven of them and I can only ever remember three of them off the top of my head, but there was the corn group or the corn tribe. And food, sorry, food tribe.

And the corn was the like ruler or the queen of that tribe. There was a medicine tribe or group and saying or American ginseng in this case was like the grandfather of that particular group or tribe. And then the third one I always remember is the warrior class of plants, and poison ivy is leader of that tribe. [Ash chuckles.]

And just is the leader of all these warrior plants. It made so much sense because the places I always see poison ivy are like a long edges of places that are disturbed and are trying to regrow into their next succession. And so now whenever I see poison ivy, I just, I almost have that kind of conversation with it. Like, I understand I will proceed carefully.

‘Cause a lot of times I have to step over or through some to get into a deeper space in the woods or something like that. So I always have this little conversation with poison ivy where I'm like, “I hear you. I will proceed with caution. I promise I will step carefully and try and respect the other plants that you're trying to protect in here.”

And I have to wonder if part of the reason too, that I don't, I haven't ever gotten poison ivy, is that because I have that relationship with it on some energetic level, we have an understanding. I've heard what poison ivy says to me. It says, “Please proceed with caution. I am protecting things here,” and I'm saying, “I hear you. I will do that. I will follow through.”

And Yeah. so there's a part of me that's, “I probably just don't have a IGE reaction to the urushiol oil on poison ivy and dah. But there's also a part of me that's, we have an understanding and I'm okay with that.

If either ... I can hold either of those explanations. [Chuckles.] Part of being a Gemini. [Ash laughs.] I can hold either of those explanations. So yeah.

I really, I, and I've had other experiences too, where I feel like plants do talk to me or I've been ... or I just even have started a relationship and talk to a plant too. And sometimes it feels a little odd to say that because I have this expectation that people think I'm a super grounded, like scientific, clinical herbalist.

And I think to me, that's one of the things I do love about herbalism is I feel like it has the breadth of space for both of those things. Like we can be super based in the science, but we can also be super into the energy and the energetics of dealing with and working with plants. And to me, phytochemistry is magic.

Like ...
ash alberg: Yes!

christa whiteman: The fact that we have co-evolved this relationship with plants for all these years, that the secondary chemicals that they make that ... they're making these compounds for their own purposes. They're making them for self-defence from predators. They're making them for their protection for ... like a lot of the antioxidant compounds in plants are because plants are in the sun all the damn time.

They're having UV radiation on them all the damn time. We would develop skin cancer if we did that. So they have all these things like pro-anthocyanins that when we take them, they protect their bodies. But when we take them into our bodies, they're antioxidants that, these things help protect us from cancer.

They help protect us from allergic reactions and things along the line. And it's not that the plant like sat around and just thought up gee, I wonder how I can make these chemicals to think, to help humans. That would be very generous of them. [Ash laughs.] But they were using them themselves.

But then the fact that we have like receptors and biochemistry that can interact with those plants, that as animals, we didn't go off on a completely different tangent that these things will even work in us is really to me, like just magical and amazing that these things that they use for their own purposes can then become medicinal and help us.

And it just, to me, it's just a beautiful, magical kind of relationship and it takes both the science and also the magic, too.

ash alberg: I love that. How ... because you do a lot of one-on-one work. You also have an online group. So how do you take all of this very like tangible earth-based practice into then the way that you work with your clients?

christa whiteman: [Sighs.] It depends on the client. Because I try to work with everybody. When I'm working one-on-one with somebody it's really about where they're at and what their relationship with nature is in general. And for some people just taking an herb and trusting a plant to be something that can help them and heal them is ... that's a step beyond their comfort zone. I would say a lot of the people that I work with too, herbalism can be complex and there's a time and a place for simple remedies, but it's particularly the folks that I work with have complex problems. And so we often have to use complex formulas.

So I'm using a bunch of different herbs at a time. I'm working on several different systems from different kind of angles with those plants. And it's the level of working with plants that, unless you have been trained as a clinical herbalist, unless you've been trained with this background in, in physiology and anatomy is not really accessible by just reading about how to use a plant on online.

So a lot of my folks are coming to me where they maybe have ... they believe in herbs and plants as being able to help them. But their experiences with that

thus far have been a little “I don't know, like I've tried these things that like somebody at the health food store ... or I read this thing online and I started taking this thing, but I don't know that it really helps, or I haven't seen much benefit from it,” those kinds of things.

And so to trust, to keep putting trust in plants to help them when they haven't really had an experience, like a very visceral experience of, that can be just a big a leap for people to make, especially modern people with that “pill for every ill” kind of culture that we live in that we're just going to like dispense a pharmaceutical thing that will just clear it up like that. And plants have definitely different way of engaging with people. And it's a lot more supportive and it's not this like hard, “This is what is going to happen,” kind of thing that you have with a pharmaceutical drug.

And there's times for both, but if you're used to one, it can be hard to understand how the other is going to work to support you. Yeah. So sometimes with my, that nature-based understanding with a lot of my clients is just being open to having a plant help them versus relying on a more pharmaceutical option that is maybe more familiar to them as a modern type person.

But there are times too, where I will, depending on a person, ask for them to take it deeper, where I have actually sometimes even prescribed a sort of sensory meditation for people. Like, especially my people who are like, “I can't meditate. Like I can't just sit there and not think because all these things will come to my mind and then I got to get up and start doing stuff.” And, so I was taught a type of sensory meditation in developing natural awareness.

And really it's just going out into nature and sitting there and really opening up your senses as much as you possibly can. Seeing as far into the woods as you can. Hearing out as far into the woods as you can. Feeling everything onto your skin, like really sniffing the air like a dog, and what kind of smells come to you?

And when you get into that kind of thing, now all the input that's coming in through your senses, like you're not thinking that monkey mind kind of thing that's happening to a lot of people when they try and sit and do just seated meditation. Your brain is so inundated with all the information that's coming into your senses. There's not a place for all of that stuff. So you could spend 15 - 20 minutes doing that and still feel like you've done that whole meditative experience because you've let that whole conscious monkey mind go.

But you also directed it into something that really helped you engage with your environment around you. And that's actually, to me, that's one of the things I

love so much about hunting is that's what I'm doing when I'm sitting there waiting for a deer to come along. Not all the time, because it gets very heady and I am a human who does sometimes pull out my phone and check my Instagram. [Ash chuckles.]

But like when I'm really trying to be in there, like particularly this year, there was a lot where it's, I just want to go into the woods just to sit there and be in the woods and be in that peace where I'm like listening to everything around me, seeing it as far as I can. Really just like becoming part of it.

Like, I just want to become feral. That's what, to me, the wild woman part of my business is about. And it's like rewilding myself, helping bring other people into that like deeper connection of this is the place we all come from as humans. There's a peace that, and peace being P E A C E, that comes with like re-imagining and reconnecting with that relationship.

ash alberg: I love that so much. Yeah, that's just so good. So tell me, what do you wish somebody had told you when you were younger about magic of ritual or witchcraft or these very earth-based practices that have become so embedded in just everything you do?

christa whiteman: I ... funny that you say that because I grew up a very evangelical Christian. [Ash laughs.] And my parents still identify as that.

ash alberg: Oh, wow. Christmas must be fun. Wait, do you do Christmas?

christa whiteman: I do Christmas for my family's sake, even though they know I'm very ... I'm not thrilled about it. It's basically like a gift giving capitalist holiday in my family. [Ash cackles.]

And it's just everybody like shares their list of, “This is what I want you to buy me this year.” And then people are like, “Okay, I'll go and check these things off the list.” And it's like, why are we doing this? If I don't know what you want, why am I going to give you lists of buying stuff?

ash alberg: Yeah, like if we're not close enough that like I'm aware of like things that you're like loving or needing in life then that's ... and there's not like other rituals that are built in? There's not like food and like song or music ...

christa whiteman: Well there, there is some food type stuff, but that has changed. Like, my family is pretty small. It's just my sister and I. My mom and my dad both had brothers. They had, we, I had an uncle on each side who never

had any kids, so I don't have any cousins. Most of my grandparents ... yeah, I have no grandparents on either side left, they've all passed.

And yeah, the couple of traditions that we had when I was growing up around Christmas were like driving around looking at lights and my sister and I, my dad would always take us to this like one place to get hot chocolate afterwards. And now I just like driving around looking at the lights because it reminds me of that.

But when I was a kid, I was like, [whines] “This is so boring! When are we going to get to the hot chocolate?” And I just, I didn't appreciate that stuff at all when I was a kid. But probably the most, the biggest tradition I remember is that we would be forced to go to a Christmas Eve service at church the night before.

ash alberg: Right.

christa whiteman: And so now that I don't do the church thing, I don't really participate in that. And so how I handle it now at this point is, I will do my personal celebrations for like Yule and then show up to be with my family around the holiday. I have very explicitly asked, please no gifts. I don't want anything. I don't want you to get anything. I'm not planning on getting you anything. I just want to spend some time with you at this seasonally appointed time of the year to do this family thing.

And yeah, so a lot of the traditions that I had growing up I've tried to keep them in some way. They all still were like, tied to the commercialism of Christmas or they're part of something that I just don't participate in anymore, being namely church. Yeah. I'm not out, I guess. [Ash laughs.] I'm not out of the broom closet with my family. Even though I'm comfortable in identifying as a green witch, like I'm not going to go and tell my family, “Hi, I'm a witch!”

ash alberg: Please listen to all these podcasts now.

christa whiteman: They know that I'm different and that I, and I think differently. And I remember having a conversation with my dad a couple of years ago around ... I was home for Christmas and I was talking to him about, I forget exactly how it came up, but I was pointing out ... So there's this idea that there's this species of mushrooms, the amanita muscaria mushroom, that it has the red cap with the little white dots under it.

And it's like a toadstool. And in, particularly in areas of Siberia, this species grows under spruce trees. And there is a shamanistic tradition of using these

mushrooms to have entheogenic like spiritual experiences and talk to ancestors and the gods and things like that. And this is also a place where reindeer are originally from.

And so there's a theory that part of the modern tradition of a person pulling a sleigh of ... by reindeer around the world and delivering red and white gifts underneath a spruce tree maybe comes ... is influenced by this Siberian shamanistic tradition of the ...

ash alberg: This is fascinating!
christa whiteman: ... the fly agaric.
ash alberg: Oh my god. I'm already obsessed. [Cackles and snorts.]

christa whiteman: I think I, if I'm remembering correctly, I think that comes from Gary Lincoff, maybe talks about that in, I think it's called Mushrooming Without Fear. It's in one of my mushrooming in books.

But yeah, I remember telling my dad about that. I was like, “So yeah, dad ...” ‘Cause for my folks, of course, like Christmas is all like, “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

ash alberg: Yyess, it’s not about Santa.

christa whiteman: And like he was this little ... they're the types of people too who are going to get out of their nose out of joint when like Starbucks doesn’t put like “Merry Christmas” on their cup, like, “Oh, they're trying to get Jesus out of it!”

Like when I was a kid signing a card, Merry X-Mas, my parents took offense to that.

ash alberg: Oh wowww.

christa whiteman: Like, “You're taking Christ out of Christmas!” If you noticed, my name is literally spelled Christ with an A. That was purposeful, like they didn't pick K R I S T A, like the most common spelling of Krista.

Like my mom literally named me Christa to be follower of Christ.

ash alberg: That's intense. Holy shit. [Laughs and snorts.]

christa whiteman: Yes. And here I am 40 some years later, I'm like, I'm a witch, I'm an animist witch. I don't even know that I believe in that stuff anymore.

ash alberg: I feel like the actual Christ, based on what I've heard of him, he'd probably be totally into this version.

christa whiteman: And I've read the entire holy Bible. I used to be able to like quote huge parts of it. And to me, I remember having a sticker when I was in college that was like, “If you love the creator, take care of the creation.” And I was just like, yeah, all this that's around us. If you believe that this was created by God, and then you turn around and you worship this God - and by God I'm talking about the very narrow Judeo-Christian version of it - it's like, why wouldn't you work harder to be a good steward of this whole thing that this person you claim to love and care about created and puts you here in?

And yet, like I turn around and would see people who are Christians often being some of the worst climate change and just destroyers of the environment, because they're like, oh we're all just going to get zoomed off this planet in the rapture and God can create a new heaven and a new earth. [Ash laughs.]

And he’s going to raze this one with fire so we can just do whatever we want right now.

ash alberg: Oh my god. Yeah. Fucking wild.

christa whiteman: Yeah, I'm definitely the kind of like black sheep of my family to a certain extent. And I remember telling my dad the mushroom thing at Christmas and he just doesn't know what to say. He's just, “I don't know where you come from.”

ash alberg: [Cackles.] Oh man.

christa whiteman: He’s like, “I think I'm a smart person and I think your mother is a smart person, but you're something else entirely that those two things just don't add up to.” And I'm just like dad, it's just cause I read. It's ... and I'm willing to be open-minded about like the things that I read and experience things from other cultures.

But yeah, I'll never forget that.

ash alberg: That is so funny. Oh my god. Meanwhile I'm like, that story totally makes sense to me. I want to go read some more.

But I also I really enjoy the folklore of Yule season, like around the world. Especially though, primarily in the north, like Northern hemisphere, but like Christmas outside of the Judeo-Christian version of Christmas, Yule season as a whole across the north, I love ‘cause there is some fucked up shit, depending on what countries you're in,

christa whiteman: The Sinterklass mess? [Chuckles.]

ash alberg: Oh my god, yes. And then like, basically all of Iceland, there are like the Yule trolls and they like fuck with your shit. And then there's the old witch lady who like, the trolls are her children and she purposely sends them to fuck with your shit.

And yeah. And then there's like Krampus, like just all of these things. christa whiteman: Yeah.

ash alberg: But then also there's some really beautiful ones. I actually really deeply love the romanticized version of Santa Claus. Not the very Christian version of it ‘cause Santa Claus was, or Saint Nicholas was like, he was a saint at one point.

And then, and not the like super commercialized version. But I do love this idea of the magic and particular ...

christa whiteman: Hey Ash? ash alberg: Yes?

christa whiteman: Can I cut in for a second? I have to go to the bathroom so bad.

ash alberg: Go pee!
christa whiteman: [Laughs.] I’ll be right back! ash alberg: [Laugh-snorts.] Ok! [Giggles.]

[Quiet pause.]
[Sound of door opening.]

christa whiteman: I'm so sorry. I hope that doesn't make like a pain in the butt for you to edit.

ash alberg: Nope, you're good.
christa whiteman: So, folklore traditions of Yule, go!

ash alberg: Yeah. I bet ... like the story of Santa Claus in particular, there's something that I just so deeply love about this idea of like an old man who wanted children who didn't have any access to toys and things that like, make children instead of just make making children like tiny adults, like just wanting them to have access to things.

And especially, like in a time where it was very hard to be a child, wanting to bring them some joy, especially at a time of year that's it's dark, it's cold, it's hard. And then, and I think this is also where I like separate out from the actual story of Saint Nicholas, like basically just, the magic of the world because there's no god that ever actually appears in this particular portion, it's always that the fairies get involved or the woodland creatures get involved.

It's like the universe realizes we need more of this energy. And so even if his human body dies, once a year he comes back and gets to do this thing again and provide all these things.

And I just like every movie I ever see that tells that story, I love so deeply. My friend J.P. wrote this really beautiful song about the love between Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus called Dark of the Night. And it's just ... Dead of the Dark, sorry. And it's just like the, these beautiful ... Maybe that's what it is, is that the feel of the season of coming together and celebrating at a time where it's very dark otherwise, right?

Like, when we live in the north, it's just, it's so cold. It's so dark at that point of the year. And we need something to look forward to. And Yule has its own traditions which overlap quite a bit to be fair, but I think particularly for kids, I think there's something really lovely about creating traditions to make that a period of time that is easier for children and also encourages intergenerational gathering.

Which I realized that in practice ends up being ... yes, exactly. Where it's really all about the kids.

christa whiteman: We forget then up until a century or two ago, most people died before their fifth birthday.

ash alberg: Oh, I didn't even think of that parallel. Oh!

christa whiteman: One of the reasons why the life expectancy for early humans is so low is like the rate of childhood death is so high that it skewed the a whole like adult life expectancy downward.

So if you survived past five, like you actually had a pretty decent chance of surviving in adulthood, but a lot of kids died between birth and five years old. So why wouldn't you want to celebrate children and create traditions around celebrating children, especially children who survive and still bring their magic to ... they were even more prized because somehow they survived when so many of their peers had not.

And so it makes total sense to me that we would want to have holiday around celebrating childhood and the magic of childhood.

ash alberg: Oh man. Now that I'm thinking of it, yeah. It's really the only holiday that is ... we make other holidays now about children, but it's the only holiday that is actually explicitly about celebrating kids. Everything else we just made ... eventually we figured out a way of, we make toys or we make candy or whatever-themed.

So that nowadays it becomes more fun. But it's ... yeah, Christmas is and Yule is really the only season that is explicitly about celebrating children and the youth in our lives. And then encouraging also that intergenerational gathering and coming together to celebrate the family at a time where, yeah it's cold. You are about to head into the later portion of your winter stores. Depending on the season, you may or may not have enough food to get through the winter, like man.

christa whiteman: That would've been a time where children would have succumbed probably more to a lot of the childhood illnesses. So the things, various fevers, scarlet fever, mumps, all those kinds of things were things that children commonly got and would have gotten more in the winter when they were stuck inside.

And you had a woodstove that was heating, so you had drier air and particulate matter in a smaller space and things like that. So I'm, I imagine too, that traditionally a lot of children, if you survived the winter, like you had a good chance of surviving into the next one, but each winter that you made it through would be cause for celebration, especially for young children.

ash alberg: Yep. That's so true. Man! [Laughs.]

christa whiteman: There's a reason to these things! And to me, just to bring it back to witchcraft, like that's one of the things that brought me to, it was the wheel of the year and celebrating the seasons in this very nature-based way, like just made so much more sense. Like I think of the wheel of the year as earth-based time, which a lot ... you know the wheel of the year is the very specific Celtic version of it that a lot of us use, but there's very similar things that are happening with all traditional people who have that idea of earth-based time.

Like they mark time in moon cycles and they mark time based on how the sun moves around and the stars move around, because that's what you had for most of human history. And so part of this, like relearning, rewilding, ancestral practice or remembrance for me, was ... it made, of course it just made more sense to me to celebrate earth-based time, and orient myself to that than to just arbitrary holidays created by humans for whatever kind of reasons of their own.

Yeah, that's ... I guess that's probably the biggest thing to go back to the actual question. Like the things that I wish I had would have known sooner when I was younger was just how much, for lack of a better word, sense to me, like a lot of like witchcraft makes or a lot about modern witchcraft.

It's not, I grew up with like things like The Craft and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

ash alberg: First rounds, we should specify. Not the current ones.

christa whiteman: Yes, I am 41 now. This was the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch. And it was always about these fantastical type things that people could do that make something appear in their world that they wanted or whatever. And it's so over the top that it's like obviously ... we just, most of us don't have the experience of that type of thing happening in our lives, where something we just want like shows up fully formed kind of thing for us, if ...

ash alberg: Fully formed being explicitly the thing. It's ... and also that as soon as you cast a spell that the thing appears immediately. You're like, “I want a sandwich” and then a fully formed sandwich is in your hand. Not like asking for a thing. And then the universe being like, “All right, I'll think about it. Let me chew on it a little bit. Maahhh ... This is ... try this. Tell me what you think.”

christa whiteman: For the record this is how, in my experience, a lot of Christians treated praying. It was like almost like a sort of spell casting, like praying to God. “I want this thing to just show up in my life to make my life easier, to remove a hardship from my life,” and they would ... I guess maybe that's why, in some ways I did find myself coming back to witchcraft is it's like, the more I study like, “What is witchcraft?” the more I'm just like, these Christians were doing this kind of weird occult like manifestation kind of stuff all the time.

It's just somehow that was okay. But this other thing was like, that's wrong and that's witchcraft, and just what is “witch” is, it depends on your perspective.

ash alberg: A hundred percent. You and I have discussed getting people who like send us nasty like very right-wing extremist Christian “blood of Jesus” or whatever where it's, you just cast a Christian hex. Do you realize that's what you just did? You're telling me that you don't like me using certain words or like identifying as a witch but you just tried casting a spell. [Laughs.]

christa whiteman: When I started reading ... my dad's family comes, they're originally from Celtic Ireland and Scotland, and a couple of other places in in Western Europe or Eastern Europe, Western Europe. But by way of Appalachia. Some of his family were like some of the Scots Irish who came like through North Carolina into Western, North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, and then they eventually made their way up to Maryland. Western Maryland.

But so I've started like just started reading a little bit about like Appalachian folk magic and traditions.

ash alberg: So interesting!

christa whiteman: And it just, I was floored that they would actually use Bible verses as spells. And there were certain things that they would call them. There's a certain Bible verse that they would quote when they wanted to do like a location spell, is what we would call it, but something was lost and they were trying to find it and they would quote the specific part of scripture.

ash alberg: Oh, that’s so interesting.

christa whiteman: And I was just like holy, it just blew my mind. I was like, holy shit. All these parts of things that, of Christianity that I grew up with, these Appalachian folk tales and folklore were using all of that same stuff as their witchcraft. And then I was like, so where's the difference? Like where is the line?

It's completely arbitrary. It's really just perspective and how you're using it and intent. And I think another part of the conversation we were talking about too is, I'm a hobby ethnobotanist and I was doing some work and researching on particularly like Iroquois botany traditions.

And I'm using Iroquois because the main book I was reading that is the actual term, even though the term that those folks would choose for themselves is Haudenosaunee. But those are the people who are native to the area and the lands that I live on. And I wanted to explore more of like how they used the plants around here and what they use them for.

And the, of course the book is written by white men ... and a white man. And it's all like aggregated accounts, mostly for white men during colonialism. And so there's definitely like a translation thing happening, whatever word in their language they used, these white people interpreted as “witch.” And whatever it is though, there's shamans and then there's witches.

And shamans and witches essentially do the same thing they use energy and intent to create and change and shift outcomes for people. And often herbs are part of how they accomplish that. But whether or not you were shaman or a witch really just depended on the perspective of people in your community. And if you were somebody who used that power, that ability, that adeptness to serve other people and take care of other people, you were a shaman.

If you use it for selfish purposes to gain status or resources for yourself particularly by injuring somebody else, you were a witch. And so in certain traditional cultures here, traditional here to Turtle Island, witch, and that term is very problematic because that is only associated with people who perpetuate negative and negative effects within their group.

But how they're doing that is the exact same thing. ash alberg: A hundred percent.

christa whiteman: Like same tools and same things that a shaman is using.

ash alberg: Same knowledge base. And it's just, yeah. It's ... and it's so interesting because also as you look around the world and around different timeframes and things, like the folks who are like openly peddling their abilities and become used within the community as “this is the purpose that you serve within this community,” there are certain areas of the world where that one person does ... serves both purposes.

And it's very much like that is just part of it, is that this person has this skillset and it can be used for these reasons or those reasons over there. And, but it's the same person. And then in other parts of the world, it's, there's very much this like line that also is frequently reinforced by the folks who are doing what is considered the better magic or the less harmful magic or practice that they want to be identified as only doing one bit and we don't do those other things.

But the skills are the exact same. And it also then becomes a question of who is the ... who ... what's the lens being looked at? Because reproductive health is a massive example of that, right? Where it's like, you had midwives and doulas who, they knew the plants that would bring on bleeding and sometimes, yeah, you wanted bleeding and other times you didn't want it.

But this skill set is the same. And the question of who is then looking at the end result is maybe, somebody comes and says, “I need to start a bleed. I need to have an abortion.” And for them that, that series of herbs and everything is, then that's a good thing.

But then to the person potentially who they're married to, who was like, “Nope, this is not a thing.” Then it's a negative result. And so it's like the, even the same, not client, but like it's not even so much like a one side versus another viewing it as being a negative. It's literally like the ... yeah, I dunno.

It's just, it's complicated.

christa whiteman: It's just all your perspective and what you happen to value.

ash alberg: Yeah. A hundred percent. And I feel like sometimes it's like very obvious, right? Where we ... or like obvious from us sitting often hundreds of years later looking at it and it's, ah, yeah, this whole let me stop a thief by having their limb fall off magically.

That seems a little bit extreme. Although I guess also at that time, that was a time where often thieves’ hands were cut off and it was just like, that was a, semi-natural ... not natural, but like a normal consequence.

christa whiteman: And resources were harder to come by then too.

ash alberg: Yes, hundred percent, right? Like somebody, somebody injuring your livestock, like a lot of, if you look at Icelandic sigils in particular, then a lot of the sigils are directly dealing with thievery and injury, particularly to livestock and land. And it's oh, this seems really extreme, but it's also no, you're living in an incredibly harsh climate and somebody injuring your livestock can literally mean that your entire family starves at winter.

So the response is probably going to be more heightened than somebody being like, “ya stole my burger.”

christa whiteman: Right. Yes. We definitely have way more access to resources as modern people that makes it difficult for us to appreciate some of those things for like how intimately tied into survival and maintaining your resources and your access to resources certainly was for earlier people. And yeah, we can get food at any corner, any time, almost all of us have enough resources to acquire that food, to buy it.

If anything, in our modern culture, we have too much access to resources, which is a whole other ball of wax. But yeah, I think for a lot of people like using your magic to keep what resources you had was, of course you were going to do that because that was part of your, how you were going to survive, how you were going to keep your family alive, keep them together and have the next generation of humans.

ash alberg: Yeah. It’s so interesting. There's no simple way of looking at it, but I think that's why it's more, the more research that we do and the more also lenses that we get in the more viewpoints ... I think that's a big part of the problem is that written history is fairly regularly written by the victor.

And I put “victor” in quotation marks, which is very frequently, at least in the west white men. [Cackles.] And so we ...

christa whiteman: Cisgender, heterosexual white men.

ash alberg: Yeah, exactly. And so we only get one particular lens as a dominant view, and that is highly problematic because again, the exact same thing can

occur and depending on who's looking at it, then it's, it looks very different, right?

Watching what's been happening in the States over the last year, more than that, but in particular and thinking about it as, okay, you've got like election fraud accusations. You've had an insurrection. There's been widespread police violence in particular against Black men, but Black bodies in general.

And then also just generally not white bodies. And there's a lot of like inequities in access and all of this corruption happening at the top. And if you were to take all of those statements and apply them to a different country in a different portion of the world, it would be like, that is the most corrupt country. Nobody go there. There needs to be all these travel advisories against going there. Dah. This place is so unstable, everything like that.

And yet, because of where we live, even here in Canada, we definitely get to see more of it from, from that stepping outside of it. Yeah. But it is still, I don't think that there is as much acknowledgement of just like how much on the precipice things are.

Then, and then it becomes very easy as well to dismiss other countries calling out those things, right? Like when you hear of countries, a lot of countries in Africa have just straight up put up like travel advisories for citizens to travel to the States. It's just a straight up like, this pre-pandemic. It was like, don't go, it's extremely dangerous. You are very likely to get injured. Please don't go.

And, over here we're like, that seems a bit extreme, but it's no, we absolutely do that when we're far enough for way from another country, we're like, oh, there's lots of unrest there. There's lots of police brutality. There's lots of, like this, the whole election fraud, shitamaroo. All of it.

Those are usually indicators of we, you need to be aware, but it's all a matter of perspective, right? It's who are you sitting closer to at the table? And so then when you see a fight break out, then you know, who started it? And who's continuing it and who's right and who's wrong? And it's ... yeah.

christa whiteman: It's tricky too, because I think for most of our history as humans, we have lived in smaller groups in smaller villages, in smaller countries, where like everybody around you looked like you. They all came from the same, basically a lot of the same ancestry. That's why we have ancestral traditions, cultural traditions to begin with.

And, being modern people who can suddenly fly across the world in a couple of days, we now live cheek budge out with people who are different than us, who come from very different backgrounds, who come from very different perspectives. And I think that is a challenge to humans who have very traditionally lived in a very like tribal kind of perspective.

And so when I see like the stuff that's happening with the astrology and how like all the astrology seems to support where we’re like the precipice of this sort of a new understanding and this new sort of age. To me, I interpret that as, this is what we need as humans is we need to evolve in a different understanding in ... away from this understanding of how that tribalism mentality may have served us in the past as traditional humans, but where it's actually very counterproductive and becomes authoritarianism.

And it becomes a whole bunch of other unhelpful -isms ... ash alberg: Yep.

christa whiteman: In modern culture that like, they just don't need, like, why does it matter? Like we know these things are not ... they're arbitrary things that we create from our own perspectives to say why this person is less than this person. And when you get back down to the science, like we're all humans! Like we're, there is no lesser or ... like that's all things that our perspective causes us to put on to other people and project onto other people because of that old lineage of tribalism.

That's just, yeah. It was helpful in the past or it was helpful in the past when again, you needed to keep and maintain resources. And so as humans, we are trying to maintain all the resources for our kin and the people within our cultural group. But now for the most part, especially if you live in the west ... I don't want to make a blanket statement for people who don't live in the west, but most of us in the west have plenty of access to resources, that we don't need to be holding and clutching them so tightly from other people and creating these like weird hierarchies of who has more value and who should have more access to resources when there's plenty enough to go around.

ash alberg: Yeah. The scarcity mindset.
christa whiteman: It’s just not that way.
ash alberg: Yeah. And it's, and we should also state that like ...

christa whiteman: Like why does one person need a ... [audio distortion.]

ash alberg: Yes, exactly. And I think we should also specify that like, when we're talking about like tribalism mindset, at which point it was helpful, we're talking like over a thousand years ago level. Like ...

christa whiteman: Thousands of years.
ash alberg: Like we're not talking about even like Early Modern period of time.

Like this is so fucking long ago at which point this was useful. christa whiteman: Pre-agriculture, I would say.

ash alberg: Yes. Yeah, I would agree. And I think it's certainly well before any slave trade of any sort was happening, before any major migrations were happening on anything more than like a, multi-generational period of time in between the next migration.

But I think it also is, it's ... it makes me think of like when we go to therapy, and it's like the tools that our body uses, the responses that our body had in order to protect us from trauma, supported us during that period of time. And then now that we are past the trauma, that's called PTSD, sometimes complex PTSD, and it's no longer serving us.

It's like the habit and the rituals and the practices that we held at one time do not ... it doesn't mean that they need to be continued or that they remain helpful. In some cases, they are extremely detrimental for us to hold so tightly onto. So yeah, I think that's ... and it's so interesting too, this idea of the astrology really like holding that and supporting that idea of just fucking let go and let this new shift happen.

Because even when you just think of like race as ... Alok Vaid-Menon, who is just super fucking smart, also has this really fantastic practice on their grid of doing book reports, which I love. And they've talked about a few different books that are ... discuss race as being in particular, a white supremacist tool that is ultimately also just like one of the various, fictions that humans have created, right?

Like it's the ... it plays a massive role in our lives and it is absolutely a factor. And also it is a human creation and the like, fragility of white people in this fear of, particularly in Canada and the States and certain areas of the States in particular, of the data clearly showing that within the next not very many years,

white people will be in the minority, which is fine. And is also very largely it ... part of it is because of just the way that immigration patterns are happening.

And then also a lot of it is because there's a lot more interracial relationships these days. And so kids are being born as multiracial. And so you just, you have brown kids, like that's just a result of it. And it's just, it's normal, right? Like the next batch of kids ... I joke about this with a number of my friends ‘cause I am like, so fucking translucent white. I literally glow in the sun. It's very, non-healthy, it's not ... skin cancer is rampant in my family.

And so I'll like, I joke with ... most of my friends are actually biracial. I don't know how that happens. It just does. And how, it's like actually better for the kids in this next batch of kids because they'll need less sunscreen. [Chuckles.] But it's ... yeah.

christa whiteman: This is probably like a terrible example and I don't want to equate ... oh man. All right. My godmother and growing up bred purebred black labs. And it got interesting to me about genetics and of course, with a lot of purebred animals, because you have to constantly crossbreed them and back breed them in order to keep the features that you want in that species, a lot of times a purebred animal is way more prone to hip problems, eye problems, like etc.

ash alberg: All the problems. [Chuckles.]

christa whiteman: All of the problems.

And I remember my godmother being like, that's why a lot of times your, what we would call a mutt who has, just mixed ancestry or whatnot, could often end up being healthier because the strongest genes are the ones that were allowed to rise to the top.

And it wasn't like what humans were trying to focus. And there's just a lot more opportunity. You get, there's actually a specific concept for this in geneticism where you almost truncate the genome too much that it just becomes full of mutations that are not helpful. And so having people come in, having DNA and genetics coming in from like much more different areas creates a more robust ... in fact, if you want me to get really super nerdy here, if I can have a moment, is I remember reading about a study where they use to scent, like the sense of smell, like the scent of males and put, had them wear like a white t-shirt and they would present the white t-shirt in a Ziploc bag for heterosexually oriented women to, to smell.

And then they were supposed to rate, based on the smell, how attractive they thought that male would be.

ash alberg: I think I know the study you’re talking about.

christa whiteman: So you weren't even able to see the person you're just going off of their smell. And it was crazy because there was no ... there was no societal expectation ‘cause you're not actually seeing the person so there was no like visual to cue you in. It was just the smell.

And of course it was like all over the place and what they were able to elucidate is that what was the linchpin that caused a woman to rate a man is more attractive is that these things, these MHCs, these major histocompatibility complexes within their DNA, the guys that they found the most attractive had the most different major histocompatibility proteins from them.

Whereas the ones that had ones that were close and looked a lot like theirs, they found way less attractive and sometimes almost like repulsive. And so within our pheromones, there's this, there's this thought that our pheromones that we give off through our sweat and stuff like that is one way that as humans, we try and become attracted to people who actually have a much different DNA than what we do so we can actually have like healthier shifts and mixing of DNA and not be like basically inadvertently inbreeding ourselves.

ash alberg: Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs.]

christa whiteman: And it's so to me, like why wouldn't race be just like another thing? Like having purifications in the way a person looks is just going to lead to unhealthiness, just like it would in a purebred animal.

Like it, everything about our biology is all about really having these differences so that we can actually create a more robust genome that is likely to be able to have more resistance to diseases as things come along. So yeah. Why wouldn't we all just end up being somewhere in the middle of brown that is like more helpful for preventing skin cancer or something like that?

ash alberg: I was going to say like my genetics, as far as my skin is concerned, is like really not good as the ozone layer keeps on getting fucked over. Like, we do not want my skin tone to be lasting more than a couple more generations, because pretty much guaranteed the UV rays are going to just be way too intense at that point.

christa whiteman: You're going to have to, your people are going to have to keep moving further and further north.

ash alberg: I know. But even then like the polar ... it's just, it's not gonna work. [Both laugh.]

christa whiteman: Right! Now you have the ice caps melting so there's really nowhere further north for you to go.

ash alberg: I seriously, I remember ...
christa whiteman: You’re already in Canada, where else are you gonna go?

[Joking.]

ash alberg: I know, I remember as a kid walking down the street from the bus, this was when I was like seven years old, and my friend the next day told me, “Oh yeah, I was, I was riding the bus and I looked down your street and I thought I saw a ghost. And then I realized it was just you in the snow white.”

I was like, nah, great. And then the Twilight books came out and they were talking about sparkling vampires. I was like, I'll go with that. We'll just claim it.

christa whiteman: Did they call you powder when you were a kid? ash alberg: No. Oh, no. I think they called me other names. christa whiteman: Oh no!

ash alberg: But yeah, no, I have I like, I ... It's so funny ‘cause I talked to friends who they're like, they've got roots that are much darker than mine and much healthier than mine as far as the sun is concerned, and they'll be like, oh, the summer will come.

And it'll be like, oh, what are you going to do? Do you get a tan? And I'm like, no, I skip the tan portion and I go straight to the burning like a crisp. So I just wear a gallon of sunscreen every day and that is how I roll. [Snort-laughs.] Everyone's like ...

christa whiteman: Like, I have zero melanin.
ash alberg: [Laughs.] Yeah, literally none. Literally negative.

christa whiteman: Some people have some. I have none.

ash alberg: Oh man. It's so funny. But then I do also have to remind my friends who were darker, I'm like, you still need to wear sunscreen. Just because you can't see the burn necessarily as easily as on my skin, that you're not getting skin damage.

christa whiteman: Yeah.
ash alberg: Yeah. So fucking funny.

christa whiteman: Then genetically too, matrilineal DNA studies have shown that all humans have come out of Africa.

ash alberg: Yes.

christa whiteman: So all humans are descended from probably people who had very dark skin from around Tanzania. From that it's just insane to me, like to racism ...

ash alberg: It’s also insane to me though, that then that particular like fact gets used by white supremacy as like, that becomes their, like when people back them into a corner, then they're like “But we're all like this. And so therefore we should be like, there is no race.” And it's, nope, that's not how that works.

christa whiteman: You don't get to use it over here and then disregard it over here.

ash alberg: Exactly. Like you don't get to use this fact from like literally thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. And then pretend that everything else has just not become applied. And that there is no like impact of race nowadays on people's lives, like ...

christa whiteman: And mean like evolutionary theory and evolution in general, when Charles Darwin first put it out there, and from what I understand for certain people of color, like evolution as a theory is very harmful and problematic because it was used at the beginning to underpin eugenics and the idea that yes, we all started out of Africa, but then the white people kept going and that's why they're above that whole phylogenic-type thing.

They've taken us like to the end, that somehow we were like perfected in the process and that's so insane.

ash alberg: That’s not how it works.

christa whiteman: Like we're not ... if that was the case, we would be a different species at that point in time, but we're not. And it's really just this melanin issue that had to do with where your people were from based on the equator. And so it's just ... it's, I do try to be careful with how much I go back to evolution and what, and ancestral type things.

And at what point in time you pick that up because sometimes I can be really injurious and harmful.

ash alberg: Yeah. And especially ‘cause the ... consistently, as we've been talking through this whole conversation, the ancestral stuff we're talking about is like so many thousands of years ago and we're not then ... it's here's what like the human reptile brain, our lizard brain formed in this way, our genetics formed in this way, and then there were thousands of years at which point then humans started becoming an agricultural society.

And at that point ... now everything has shifted. Like the, this is now like the framework and the conversation like they split at that point because the genetics portion of it ... I think the interesting thing is that we like, now, as we look at how rapidly the world is shifting as far as technology, as far as our ability to move around the world so quickly, you know what we were talking about before of like our concept of linear time now with all of this ability to just literally move around the globe within less than 24 hours it ... like at a biology level, it takes the body so long to adapt to things.

How many gen ... we're changing these things so rapidly that our bodies have not had time to actually adapt to them yet. They do in some ways, absolutely. The body is smart. But the way that our bodies shifted initially, and that the genetics actually changed initially, took so many thousands of years. And now we're making changes so rapidly, especially in the last 200 years I would say, that it's like, how are our bodies gonna adjust?

Like that, that I think is also a really interesting thing that I don't know, how do you ... yeah, I don't know how you unpack all of that, but yeah, it is, it's tricky, like discussing, like the human body as a genetic and biological entity without then having the modern context on top of that, of like, that it becomes a more complex conversation and you do have to be very careful and very clear about specifying, in what context are we discussing each of these things?

christa whiteman: Right. There's definitely a difference between physical genetics and evolution that's happening with DNA. And then I think there's also a piece that is evolution of our brains and how we think and about culture. And so to me, I see those as two very different things.

Physical genetics and evolution is yes, like you're saying, something that takes a long time to change. It takes thousands of years for a potential helpful new mutation to come to the fore and then be acted upon by natural selection and all that kind of jazz. But what can change very rapidly is culture, is our brains, is that consciousness kind of evolution.

So to me, like in terms of how we are shifting so rapidly in that conscious place that's why I'm so interested in ancestral health and evolutionary biology, is what can we learn from our origins as humans and how people like lived in a more balanced, healthy relationship and how can we bring that forward into modern times and learn from that and apply that now, so we can stay physically healthy, even while we make these like massive shifts? Or even stay physically healthy so we can enable these massive shifts in consciousness, in energy.

ash alberg: Yep.

christa whiteman: So I work with people a lot of times with that ancestral framework of just coming back to say something as simple as like diet. Like what do humans ancestrally eat?

And yes, there's some contention around that, but I think we can all agree, it's not fast food.

ash alberg: As much as it might be delicious. christa whiteman: Exactly. Exactly.
ash alberg: [Laughs.] Depending on your mood.

christa whiteman: Whether it's more carnivore or whether it's more plant-based, there is a fundamental difference between a whole food-based diet versus a very processed food.

And sometimes even when I'm sitting with clients and I'm working with them, I’m like bread is still a processed food. It is not the wheat berry. And the closer we eat to what is actually on that plant is going to be a healthier thing to us than even if we go through this modern processing thing of making bread.

And then even now the modern bread that if you go and you buy Wonder Bread, it's all this enriched vitamin stuff. It's got high fructose corn syrup in it, all these kinds of things. And that's a fundamental difference from flour, yeast, water, and a little bit of oil, which was the recipe for bread for most of the time.

And so we don't even know ... even if you're somebody who doesn't have celiac disease and doesn't have the genetics to be able to digest gluten and all these kinds of things, if you come from a lineage of people that tolerated gluten and wheat a lot better than others, you still are going to do better with just regular wheat.

And probably like even more organic. [Audio distortion] that’s not doused in glyphosate, and oil, water, yeast, then white Wonder Bread kind of stuff. That's like, what's in it?

ash alberg: I am, I'm laughing so hard right now because I literally like my body recently, I've been eating too much of the processed carbs side of things. I'm like, ah, shit, I gotta eat more veggies so that I feel more full and don't reach for those snack things. But then also that it's, yeah, I'm like, I'm hitting my gluten levels again, too high, but it's not ... like I can consume gluten. I don't have celiac.

It's literally just that the particular processing of wheat is, I'm consuming too much of that as my snack foods these days, rather than making myself some adaptogen balls and if I'm going to have some carbs, have some oatmeal instead, so ...

christa whiteman: Yeah. So two things I'll say to follow up. That's how I ended up hunting too, is I will say my experience from ... from eating venison that I harvested that I ... my life energy was also traded to put that venison on my table. That venison was the most satisfying meat that I had ever eaten.

And I ... we get grass-fed beef, I take pains to try and source high quality meat. I have a freezer full of grass-fed meat from a farm down my, down the street from me. Like they were cows that were practically like pampered the entire, their entire lives and they eat grass. So it's I am eating, a lot of times, like very high quality meats like that. But that venison, I noticed in the weeks after harvesting that, was craving that on a level ... and I felt satiated by that on a level like nothing else I experienced.

And I was like, I wonder how many of us have eating disorders and a tendency towards obesity because we're actually craving that, like that feeling of like

literally trading our life energy for the food that sustains us and we don't have that so much anymore. Not in a direct way.

We have this like thing called work and money in between that like divorce us from those two things. And just for ... we see that like traditional people generally don't struggle with obesity at the level that we do in modern cultures. And there's a bunch of theories and reasons why that is. Also, they exercise a whole lot more than what we do, but part of me from that experience, it's just, I wonder how much of that also has to do with that kind of diet is just way more satiating, when you knew where everything came from, when you had this relationship, when you went and you understood that the earth provided for what you needed, and you could just go out and get that?

Whether that be plant or animal. But that was part of your culture was just like always, eating very seasonally, very close to things. And then regarding adaptogens too, this is another thing I try to get through to folks that I work with herbalism-wise, is like our food, our commercially produced food, especially vegetable matter, has become very truncated.

And it's very limited. And like a lot of ... I was talking with a patient the other day who didn't realize that like Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cabbage are actually all the same plant that has just been genetically engineered to have either more flowers or more leaves or grow the leaves and little balls on the stock.

But it's technically all from the same plant. And here, like they're thinking like, oh, I'm eating this great variety of vegetables.

ash alberg: Right, of course!
christa whiteman: It's no, you're eating the same plant. ash alberg: Yeah.

christa whiteman: And so for much of our history as humans, I think a lot of the ways we used herbs was more in that space of like medicinal foods and something like astragalus which is an adaptogen, it's in the root. And astragalus is in the Fabaceae family, so it's in the legume family, it’s a nitrogen fixer.

And we take that now as ground up capsules or tinctures or whatever, and it's considered medicine, but for much of its history and used particularly in, in Asia and China, you just, you added it to soups. It's not really, it's not woody enough

or it's too, it's a little too woody. It doesn't taste great that you would actually cook it up like a carrot or like some other root that you know of, but you would basically create a decoction of it when you're making your soup or your stew by boiling it for a long time.

ash alberg: Soups are serious magic.
christa whiteman: And so that's how we would have as humans used tonic

foods for a long period of time and adaptogens are these tonics.

And they have, as we've modernized our foods, as we've modernized our diet, we've lost connection to having those things in our, in our food regularly. And it's actually truncated our phytochemistry and it's truncated the phytochemistry that we interact with on a daily basis. And so now we're like coming back to herbs as these like medicinal type things, instead of, these were things that were to some degree we were always interacting with in our foods.

We were using spices to ... a lot of your very culinary spices that have a lot of volatile organic compounds in them, those volatile organic compounds are also really noxious to little critters that like to take up residence in your gut. And so part of the reason that like oregano and thyme and rosemary became used in all kinds of issues, you can also use those for SIBO, and I've used protocols that you use some of those to help deal with like SIBO or certain parasitic infection type things in people.

And it's all because, culinarily, they, they were used ... not only did they give great flavor to food, but they also helped at a time when you didn't have easy access to refrigeration all the time, and there might be, gosh, knows what wee beasties trying to get a toehold in your food and then into your gut. And now we turn around and make these formulas out of them, give people like oil of oregano to fight an infection or something like that. It's like, how did that come to be? We wouldn't have to turn and give these like super high doses of oil of oregano if we were all just like using lots of spices and varied spices ...

ash alberg: Oregano on a regular basis.
[Both talking at the same time.]
christa whiteman: What’s that?
ash alberg: Yeah, using oregano just on a regular basis in our cooking.

christa whiteman: Use lots of it! Use good quality oregano. Grow oregano so you have that, like those volatile organic compounds. Yeah. They degrade very easily.

The dried stuff that you get in the supermarket is ... been sitting on the shelf for gosh knows how long, is a fraction of the activity that like fresh oregano that you could grow in a pot like on your kitchen windows sill if you wanted to would have when you add it to your food.

ash alberg: Yeah. Although we should also say that if you like, don't have a green thumb particularly, that at least like even getting the stuff from the grocery store is better than nothing. I think that's also really interesting how ... And maybe bringing all of this back to full circle, ‘cause also we're almost at time and I know you, you actually have to go ... that also a lot of recent herbalism kind of Instagrammy view is that herbalism is taking powdered forms of plant or tincture even.

And I love my tinctures, but tinctured forms of plant, powdered in capsules or taking a dropper full of a tincture, and you're still divorcing yourself from actually having a relationship with that plant. Like I ... there was a very different process and also a very different visual results when I tinctured some organic skull cap that I had purchased, but it was organic and dried elsewhere and I bought it and had it brought in, versus when I tinctured my own fresh skullcap and the, the way that it reacts in my body, also the color of the liquid. My fresh skullcap is this like very bright, almost lurid green, whereas the other is much more of almost like a brown-y hue, which is more normal for a lot of my tinctures.

And yeah, I think there's ... and obviously, there's, you don't want to tincture fresh things depending on what the plant is. There's a lot of rules and safety things to consider as you're working with different herbs, but ... and dosages and all the rest of it. But I think there's also something that there's, it brings like extra value to clinical herbalists like you where you guys actually know that shit and know it well and understand dosages and understand the integrations and the way that different herbs interact with different diets and bodies and energetics and all of these things.

And then also that as the everyday human who doesn't have that level of knowledge, most of the time the food amounts that we would be consuming of these plants are very healthy for us.

christa whiteman: Mhmm.

ash alberg: And we, if we just started incorporating them more into our own cooking and into our own food and drinking tea and things like that we, we'd be better for it.

christa whiteman: Yeah.

There's, there, there was a time when it was like, for everybody would have chamomile tea after dinner. That's just what you did. And in some cultures, like an herbalist Guido Massey talks about this in one of his books because he comes from an Italian family and heritage, and growing up as a kid, he, they just always had chamomile tea after a meal. It's just what you did.

And it wasn't until he like grew up and became an herbalist that he was like, oh chamomile is really great for supporting the digestion. It's like relaxing. It helps stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our like rest and digest nervous system.

And so it was like, oh, this cultural thing, we lost the why, but we still did it. And it wasn't until he circled back to learn herbalism that he understood the why. And to me, that's a big piece of the puzzle that we struggle with modern herbalism is understanding the why's of the ways why we did ... we've lost that connection with some of our traditional knowledge and the ways that it's been handed down. And modern science is coming in and backfilling a little bit with “Hey we've studied these compounds. We know that this thing is in here.” Or like your experience with skullcap, a lot of it's phytochemistry that is useful, particularly as a nerving is in the fresh, it's in the fresh plant. And it needs a certain amount of alcohol actually to be extracted.

So like skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora, does not work nearly as well as a glycerite because it needs the alcohol part and so the glycerite is not necessarily the same thing as the tincture. And then also dried skullcap in a tea has really got very little to no activity. It needs to be like the fresh skullcap, if you're going to do a tea and even at that, with skullcap, some of that chemistry you're going after actually needs some ethanol.

Now we know that now because of science and chemistry, but I would just, if I had like a time machine, like my little Whovian part of my brain is, “I wish I was a time lord. And I would go back in time.” And like, how did ... I'm sure that got communicated to herbalists in like in some sort of folklore about how they would always use skullcap or not use it, but, we've lost that story.

So luckily we have science to backfill it in, but there's still a lot of people who don't know that story. And even when I first started using herbs, I was like putting skullcap in tea until my teacher like taught me yeah, that's nice, but it's not going to work. [Ash laughs.] Right?

And I had to be taught that too, at some point in time and I, I see that on the internet all as time with people using skullcaps in tea, and I'm just like, okay, good luck with that. Or using it in glycerite. It's, and I'm just like, you can't make everything into a glycerite just ‘cause you don't want to have alcohol.

ash alberg: Yeah. Unfortunately.

christa whiteman: You can but it doesn't work the same way.

ash alberg: Yeah, exactly. And in that case, it’s okay, we need to be willing to, if we can't have one substance, then that means that maybe you have to replace a whole substance. Like you need to use a different kind of a plant.

christa whiteman: And that's the beautiful thing about plants and about, to a certain extent, like our modern time is like we can use and interact with plants from all kinds of cultures and lineages. And I do use a good number of Chinese herbs in my in my clinical practice with folks ‘cause they just, they work really super handy.

And I know there's definitely herbalists out there who are big proponents of like bioregional herbalism and only using herbs that come from their local area. And I understand that. And I think there's definitely like a time and a place for that. But then, I look at it around me and there's forsythia that grows around me.

That's lian qiao in Chinese medicine. There's kudzu growing all over the place in the south. [Audio distortion.] There's a Japanese barberry that is super invasive. There's Japanese knotweed, which is taking over all my favorite fishing spots. That's hu zhang. And the plants don't ... like the plants don't have this idea of borders or bioregionalism, or “I can only grow in this area.”

The plant just knows that when I show up here, I really like this and I'm going to get going. So like coming back to that perspective thing, that's this thing that us as humans have created a value to, and assigned to things. But is it really there? That idea of like an invasive plant, it usually carries a negativity to it, but is it the plant's fault?

Like we brought it here for some reason, it just happened to find a place that it likes and does what it's been doing for millennia as a plant and just, taking over things. If that's how plants are going to interact with that world, then to me, why wouldn't we use their medicine in a similar kind of way?

Okay, you're here now.

ash alberg: And I feel like it's more responsible than if they're that invasive, that they've become classified as like a noxious weed or something like that. And like it's actually a lot more responsible to be harvesting them and using them than it is to be harvesting the native plants that are struggling because now these invasive species are taking over their habitat because they don't have natural predators yet, because evolution is taking a while to create these predators.

christa whiteman: Or it might not even. There's an interesting theory ... Oh gosh. My herbal teacher taught me about it. And I just remember some of the sketches of it, but there's certain parts of the Eastern part of China that have habitat very similar to the Eastern part of the United States.

And the idea is that they're actually contiguous way back when during Pangea. And so like we have certain plants here that there's very similar species in Eastern China, spicebush being one of them. And there's a spicebush that grows here. A lot in the south but we have spicebush here and there's a very similar plant.

And even though it's not necessarily proven a lot of people feel that they're pretty much like biochemically interchangeable in terms of like medicinal kind of qualities. And yeah, and that's also one of the thoughts as to why some of these Chinese herbs plants have just like showed up here in the Eastern United States and are like, “Oh, I’m home!”

ash alberg: [Laughs.] Yeah.

christa whiteman: It reminds me of how the Scots settled in Appalachia, ‘cause they like rolled up on the new world after being like this diaspora from the Highlands of Scotland, like “This looks close enough to like what I remember. I'll just settle here and grow roots here.”

ash alberg: And it's, it's so funny ‘cause like, when I think of like my studies of local dye palettes or local color palettes with dye plants, it's honestly like the

world is almost in like horizontal strips. Like the further or closer you get to the equator shifts then the general color palette.

But across that entire strip, then the color palette ends up being very similar and the plants overlap and in some cases are literally the exact same plant across the whole strip. And in other cases are just very closely related cousins of one another. But yeah. It's ... yeah. It's more about like how far away are they from the equator than it is about, “We're on this particular continent and within these borders, within that continent ...”

christa whiteman: Yeah. You can say the same thing about diets too. Like the closer you are to the equator, the more the traditional diet, that area tends to have a lot of spice versus the closer you go to the Arctic, it tends to be blander and get more white in color in terms of the traditional foods.

And that was probably very specific because a lot of the spicy compound things that gave spice, the heat, 1. helped people adapt to the heat of living in the equator better, and 2. a lot of them have natural microbial abilities. So they're like noxious to bacteria or things like that would end up in the, in people's food. And of course in the equator, you can't have an igloo or some sort of ice house type thing that you can store your food and make like refrigeration, like it has to be eaten right then, or you have to use some sort of spices or something like that to help with the antimicrobial properties of it too.

Yeah. And it’s all, it's like just in that band.

ash alberg: Yeah, exactly. That's literally right. It's, if you slice the world into like horizontal bands that's what the end up ... Yeah. It's so funny. Anyway, I know you have to hop off ‘cause you have things.

christa whiteman: I have another client I have to talk to. ash alberg: But thank you so much.

christa whiteman: We'll probably be talking about microbials for their gut later today. [Ash laughs.] Yeah.

ash alberg: So thank you so much for being here. How can I ... we'll stick links for how people can get in touch with you. But you can help folks both one-on-one as well as in group settings. So if somebody is like, man Krista seems so fucking smart, which they should be thinking by the end of this

conversation anyway ... I really want to get in touch with her, how ... what are the best ways that people can work with you?

christa whiteman: Yeah. I do have one-on-one work that I do with folks, with clients who are wanting to address gut health issues, autoimmune issues, hormone health type things. And if they want to use a smart herbal strategies to help with that I offer one-on-one consultations with folks where I do custom formulas for them. We do a really in-depth review of their case.

I'll even review like their blood work and like their previous case management and then create specific, very specific herbal formulas just for them to help support what they have going on. That, through my website, I have a contact form that people can fill out if they are interested in working with me that way and then schedule a 15-minute consultation call with me to see if we're like a good fit.

So that's at my website which is currently wildwomanapothecary.com. And then also through Instagram, people can reach out to me. Although if you DM me on Instagram about client work, I'll probably tell you, go over to my website and fill out this client form, and you can come work with me there.

And if somebody who is interested in learning herbs yourself, and wants to learn how to use them well for yourself and maybe to help support other people, I do have a membership group. It's called The Practical and Potent Herbalism Guild. And we do a once a month workshop.

I give folks a ... we do an herb of the month where we cover a monograph for a specific herb that month where I'll go through a lot of these things. What are the energetics of this earth? What are the chemical constituents of it? How has it been traditionally used? We go through primary and secondary uses, the dosages there too. So if people have ever had like questions about like, how do I exactly dose this herb? That's all like on the monograph.

And I always include resources, especially to primary source literature. So for folks who are maybe especially coming from like a nursing background or something else that's a little bit more traditional health adjacent that need to have that sort of scientific backing in there, the monographs provide a lot of that too.

And so they can find out about that. That's also linked on my website under services and it says like the Guild and you can join that. And yeah, I also am open to people asking me herbal questions through that. So if you're a member,

when you attend the live workshops, you are welcome to pick my brain about any sort of like herbalism questions that you have as you learn and go forward.

So sometimes those do end up being long workshops ‘xause I'm usually pretty willing to talk about ... my plants are my Achilles heel and in a good way. And I will usually talk to people about using plants medicinally for however long they have questions.

ash alberg: [Laughs.] That's very generous of you. [Snorts] christa whiteman: And we ended on a snort! I love it.

ash alberg: [Cackles.] On that note, thank you Christa, so much. And we'll make sure that your links are in the show notes so that people know where to find you and how to connect with you. Thank you so much for sharing your time, and I really appreciate you hanging out with me this afternoon.

christa whiteman: Thank you so much, Ash. I've totally enjoyed it. And I could talk to you all day long. [Both laugh.]

ash alberg: We'll do that another time when you don't have a client. christa whiteman: All right, bye!

ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] You can find full episode recordings and transcripts at snortandcackle.com. Just click on podcast in the main menu. Follow Snort and Cackle on Instagram @snortandcackle and join our seasonal book club with @SnortandCackleBookClub. Don't forget to subscribe and review the podcast by your favorite podcasting platform.

Editing provided by Noah Gilroy, recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.