open appointments with Alison: book here
Monday July 27, 1:15 - 5pm

massage with Adela on Thursdays is back!
book here: 60 min or 90 min

*note, I will be travelling from July 31 - August 11

It is beautiful summer. So much light, so much warmth. It has been a moment since I’ve written; my life has transformed so much in the past year. I’m tired and wonderful. Abalone is full of inspiring people who truly believe in themselves, and the power of natural medicine, to heal.

how are you doing?

I’ve been pulsing between Mount Shasta & Point Reyes Station… aromatic waterfalls of clary sage, lavender, yarrow, mullein, hypericum, cedar & sagebrush…. I left my son at the mountain with good people and ancient headwaters. I miss him. As this article arrives in your mailbox, I’ll be picking him up from a wild adventure and one month sans tech, praise be.

While he has been gone, clinic has been full, and in between, I’ve been resting and moving slow, singing Slavic songs, tending my little garden, seeing friends, conspiring to stop this diabolical glyphosate thing, swimming a bit, sharing a beautiful solstice gathering with my friends at InPlace, and falling in love…

I also finally got a handle on a stubborn back injury - my first ever.

I look for words about being aligned with the seasons and soon I’m laughing at the futility of finding tidy answers, plus I’m too tired to think. So I surrender into the unexplainable of feeling, and live by what is real and true and flowering, throwing stagnant quotable wisdom in the bin. Summer is fire, and yang, the time of the Empress heart, for celebration and creativity, and yet this summer I need to retreat. The ultimate law of being aligned with nature, is to follow the wisdom of the living body and heart. To step outside the current and listen.

It took me a while to figure out what the invitation was, with this sharp stabbing back pain that showed up after I moved into my new home in April. At first, I ignored it, trusting it would go away… it got louder. It is just as they say in Chinese medicine, low back stuff is of the kidneys, has to do with rest, with flow, with not holding so much. I always appreciate an injury because it shows me how to help other people. Back injuries are scary; you really need your back! To heal, I had to rest so, so much more than seemed reasonable to my mind. I had to really clack that “why are you sitting still and not doing anything” voice. I had to settle down my compulsion for projects. Take space between tasks, sit down. Say no. Don’t lift heavy shit - ask for help. Move more slowly, which, by the way, is sooo pleasurable.

Lay in the sunshine until I want shade. Sleep more, work through some spirit residue in my dreams. Hydrate. Gather flowers, breathe them in. Lay heart bare and open to offerings of desire and ancestors and the blood red stone at the top of a holy mountain and the white bellies of the owls flashing between the cypress limbs as the fog seeps in.

I was helped along by some healers… a few chiropractic sessions peeled away some frozen layers, and acupuncture released the tension and juiced my kidneys back up. I did castor oil packs on my belly which helped immensely. I used salves. I ate a cleansing diet to reduce inflammation, and hydrated extra, with solé, organ powder and plenty of fat to nourish my fascia and sinews. I got back to my yoga practice, more gently, more slowly, accepting the pain rather than being frustrated by how much it was limiting me. And the other day something started to release, and heal. (Synchronistically, my favorite medical author just published an article on back pain. I highly recommend you follow him and search his Substack for any diagnostic spell you’ve been put under. He’ll pull back the veil.)

When I look at tongues in clinic, I see a lot of scorched earth right now. Bright red, purplish, dry, with cracks, all our good work and activity and do-ing, burning through the yin and blood, causing pain, muscle cramping, fatigue. I’m not the only one who needs rest and a cleansing nourishing diet this summer. To replenish yin and fluids, while keeping things light… my mantra is hydration. I created a guide… I’d like you to have it too.

Also, lots of vegetables, especially green ones. Raw and cooked. Green is chlorophyll, cleansing, protective, healing, nourishing. Other colors give other benefits to the body. Eat what veggies look good at your local farm stand. Blackberries and huckleberries are popping off right now where I live… evidence that we are loved by nature. Dark berries are cooling and nourishing for the blood. Other seasonal fruit is also delicious, but too much can dampen the digestive fire, so go easy on stone fruit, grapes and melons. Keep refined sugar, alcohol, and starch to a minimum.

If you need to replenish deeper stores of blood and yin… try bone broth and sustainably wild-caught seafood… raw kefir (let me know if you want some grains)… and my friend Christian’s “Ancestral Feast” powdered blend of high quality beef blood, bone broth and organs. I will have it back in stock starting next week! for all of you that are hooked, like me, and waiting.

Meanwhile, up near Mt Shasta, my teenage son recently did his first solo sit for 24 hours in a shelter he built, with no food. He told me it was surprisingly easy, and he could have gone for longer. He said he spent three hours watching a bumblebee pollinate a flower. Said that it was the first time he’s ever had a chance to catch up with his thoughts. He turned around and went right back for another session. I am so grateful that at such a young age, he has a chance to experience a rite of passage, a sane contrast to the roadkill pace of our screen-glazed world.

The solstice is a paradox. Summer light & firey fast-moving yang is maxed, yet there is a stillness as we hover at the apex of the season. If we choose, we can stop time for a moment and have a brightly sunlit look at ourselves. Back injury or no, slowing down when things are most dynamic is a radical act of self-love, a good habit and a sweet delight.

I hope you get a few hours to watch a bumblebee today.

Love,
Alison

Embodied Chinese Medicine class series

I teach a class on experiential Chinese medicine where we cultivate ways of listening to our bodies messages, along with learning herbal medicines and Chinese elemental ways of caring for ourselves. It is a small, close group and we always go deep and have fun. I took a break from teaching this spring, but almost certain I’m going to fire it up again this fall. If you are interested let’s talk. More details here.

Abalone website renovation

A new website is under construction, so my current site will be down for a week at the end of July into early August. My booking link will still work fine. I collaborated with a magical local artist, Liv Stout, to commission a gorgeous pen & ink symbol of my medicine offerings. A talented graphic designer, Megan Schiller, is creating a website and labels based on Liv’s visual spell. I might even have a sign hanging outside the Apothecary soon.

CHARMS Tattoo Pop up at Abalone!

Speaking of Liv… she is also a tattoo artist, and she will be offering her medicine of indelible visual beauty on Sundays at Abalone apothecary and clinic space. CHARMS is her by-appointment private tattoo studio, check her out and inquire on IG.

Emily Livingston Stout (she/her) “Liv” is tattoo and interdisciplinary fine artist. She grew up along the upper portion of the Mississippi River in Rock Island, Illinois and received her BFA in Printmaking from The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2006. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from The Memphis College of Art in 2011.  

Her drawing work has been published in New American Paintings and has been funded by Artist Trust’s Grants for Artist Projects.  She has been tattooing professionally since 2022 and has tattooed in many major tattoo shops as a visiting artist in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. 

Reach out to her via the QR code below or Instagram link above, for inquiries.

👐🏽

book your massage before Adela travels

Adela is available for massage this Thursday (tomorrow!) and next week, and then will be traveling, returning back to Abalone in mid-June. Get a slot before she goes! booking 60 minutes here, or 90 minutes here. She is getting rave reviews and has lots of regulars. So happy to have you, Adela.

90 Minute Massage

60 Minute Massage

@abalonemedicine on Instagram.

If you want to stay connected, I share on Instagram Stories pretty much every day, medicine harvests, testimonials, teaching, beach flotsam, cats, friends, music, ramblings. Its quick and dirty but keeps us connected. I’m about to make a few proper posts: about my life-changing habit of making and drinking raw milk Kefir, a profile of my Ukranian shaman sister-witch teacher and mentor Anya Tyutunik, and my recent milky oat harvest. Follow me there!

Abalone on Insta

wild milky oats, black seed oil, bear blood & organs

are some of the latest medicines flowing here at Abalone. The milky oats harvest was sublime, in the mist, covered in dew, with all the rain, the medicine is juicy and beautiful. I have a new supplier of much higher potency black cumin seed oil, for all its infinite healing magic. A new batch of Bear Blood is flowing, I have a few bottles left. Last but not least, I have been slangin’ our local Christian Bates’ Ancestral Feast organ powders to so many people because they are an incredible way to build the blood, bones, teeth and nails, naturally, the way humans did it when we ate the whole buffalo (or cow in this case). Plus the usual blends that you know and love for sleep, skin, lungs, sinus & allergy, joints.. Come get medicine.

renovations, classes, artistic expansions

New website, new logo and label design, new resident artists and practitioners, new local artwork and murals, new modalities of healing, are coming to Abalone… after the roof is fixed!! We’re closed from May 11 - 18th for repairs. I’m thinking of starting to teach one-off herb walks and medicine making classes because I had SO much fun with the group at my son’s middle school on Earth Day, and you green sweethearts at Point Reyes Birding Festival! Stay tuned.

crowd funding a deeper dive into Classical East Asian medicine?

I want to offer the absolute highest level of natural medical care possible, from the earth, independent of the industrial machine. There is no limit to how much we can heal. I’ve found a Chinese medical course of study that is aligned with my earth-based approach - a two year mentorship to study herbal medicine and diagnostic philosophy from the ancient Daoist texts and philosophy. If I can raise the funds from my community, I’ll be able to better support your complex & tricky medical issues with my old-world, nature-based approach. I’m thinking of launching a crowd funding campaign to raise $7,000 for tuition. Would you support this? What perqs would draw you in? Is this a good use of crowd funding?

…okay beauties, that’s all for now. I am so grateful for everyone who steps through these doors, and trusts me to get you trusting nature and your body’s innate healing superpowers. Its real, it works, and its because we show up together for a more empowering, life-affirming way of doing medicine.

all my love,
Alison

open appointments with Alison: book here

new! massage appointments with Adela on Thursdays
book here: 60 min or 90 min

New! Massage Offered at Abalone on Thursdays

Regular incredible, deep, intuitive full-body massage can change your life. People are always asking me if I know of someone out in Point Reyes… yes! Adela Rockwell! is now offering massage on Thursdays at Abalone. She’s been getting rave reviews and already has returning clients… she blends deep tissue work with acupressure, shiatsu, and her own intuition. This is not a “meh spa” massage. She’s got depth, and will get you into your body to the bones, and help you heal what is stuck and sore. She and I have been trading, and I am so excited to share her with you all. Thursdays at Abalone.

Some of you might know Adela. She’s been out in West Marin for decades, raising two amazing children, making art, speaking out for human rights, jumping into wild water, thinking creatively and critically, healing herself & others naturally.

You can book with her through my online system - choose 60 or 90 minutes, and enjoy a massage that relaxes you into a puddle of bliss.

book 60 min with Adela

book 90 min with Adela

acupuncture as sea change 🌊 Δ

For the past three years, not once have I written about acupuncture, though it is one my the core offerings. I am not going to try to explain how acupuncture works… but I will tell you what I witness when it does.

My practice is filled with people who I adore spending quality time with, and a good acupuncture session is definitely quality time - a deep and transformational experience, if the treatment is on point and the person is ready to heal.

Lately I have been perceiving body, health, relationships, nature, everything, as energy. Someone described qi as “esoteric” to me recently, and I was surprised. I was recently helping one of my favorite teens study for physics finals, all about electromagnetism, and the wave qualities of light and sound… and so don’t we socially agree at this point that energy is a real non-woo thing? Why would our bodies be any different? Has this crusty model of body-as-machine really wormed its way so deep into our consciousness, that we forget how energy can shift all of everything in our living, electrical, resonant body & spirit?

After a good acupuncture session, a headache can disappear. Pain can be released from the muscles and joints and ligaments. Bowel movements can be corrected, nausea can dissipate, sinuses can clear, a delayed menstrual flow can kick in. It is never guaranteed - the body has its own timeline, and sometimes the diagnosis is layers deep - but I see these results regularly in my clinic, it always delights me, I never take it for granted. Better even is the wonder and relief of the patient who got real results without having to go through some medieval-type ritual poisoning with legal drugs, or precision flesh-ripping under a sterile florescent light bath. (I know, sometimes it’s unavoidable… but not always)

Lately in clinic I’ve been even more enamored as you dive into healing more than just the physical stuff. You are arriving to your sessions in full vulnerability, strong, capable, frayed, souls bared, in the throes of life passages. Sick children, loss of home or job, single parent marathon, discordant relationships, panic-attack-level anxiety, financial struggles… your body may be clenched, fight-or-flight hyper-vigilance is running the show, your eyes are temporarily dull with shut-down and exhaustion, or a bit wild, like a frightened animal. Your pulses are hidden, fine as a thread, lush tunnels of blood clamped down so you can power through on will and fight and muscle. I’ve been there. We do this. “Civilized” humans override our bodies to make shit happen. It is an endless source of medical malady and psychospiritual distress.

And you who come to clinic know that we can also un-do it. You come in, already healing the first of these modern imperial wounds - the idea that we need to do everything ourselves. These grinding life passages are initiations. We need support, we need to be held. When people get on the treatment table like this, a sea change can happen in just over an hour. The needles can invite a release of seized musculature and inspire flow that was locked up in stiff layers of frozen fascia, holding patterns of resonant chaos. I step in to help you move the energy through, and what is on the other side is your empowerment, your softness, a vitality that reverses age and defies circumstance.

I’ve started bringing more varied tools as I let myself out of the box and use my creativity to sense what is needed. Salt moxa. Cups. Hot stones. Incense. Tuning forks and ancient songs to reorder vibrations. Owl wing to lighten and clear heavy energy. Dense shells to ground and anchor the yin. I am now using medical qigong in almost every session, for diagnosis. A thousand-year-old Chinese healing art that seems fake until you see it working…. a bit like Reiki, a simplified but beautiful version from Japan in the 1920s. I have only basic ability with medical qigong, and still it is incredibly powerful to guide me to what is blocked, and where; whether it is cold, hot, empty, full... I have heard stories of masters who can make someone physically feel their touch from across the room.

All of that said, it is you who heals yourself. We are never a broken machine. Time can flow backwards. Just as we can regenerate a garden, if you are breathing, you can regenerate your ecosystem. Acupuncture leads you out of the default mental realm of scattered attention across past and future, back into the body, where all the best things happen. As you slowly peek out from behind the mind - like my wild little easy-startle bengal kitty - the hair-thin needles gently open the way for your qi to inhabit its natural rhythm and flow, and tend what is needed to heal.

On the table, you might help move the energy with deep breathing, making sounds, shedding tears or laughing. Other times, everything shifts in silence and stillness. When you get up, your eyes are soft and bright. There is color in your cheeks where before there was none. Your pulse is flowing freely, continuously. You’re relaxed, more fully in your body and on the earth. There is excitement, to feel so better so quickly. Or you might feel exhausted as you drop out of fight or flight and connect with your true need for rest. I might hear that the panic attacks did not return all week; there have been peaceful and empowered interactions with a normally troublesome co-worker or ex; sleep was deeper; creativity flowing.

This is not always what happens on the table - it depends on so many things. There has to be an alchemy between us, practitioner and patient. But every week people walk through my door who are resonant and ready for a shift. It is truly a blessing and an honor to support you.

It was just the new moon, the first day of the lunar new year, time to shed that last snake skin as we move into a firey Yang year. My path this year, is to listen deeply to my body, to stay at her pace, no reckless galloping, just wild ecstatic alignment. Feel free to call on me to help you stay on the horse and get where you dream to be. I hope to see you soon.

p.s. for feral women…

my new publication, woodnymph electric⚡∞, is flowing with rough-journal-style posts. I’m trying to overthrow the empire by unlocking the power of our infinite bodies. If the cost is preventative but you want to read, reach out, I’ll add you.

open appointments for early January:
Weds, Jan 7, 2:30 - 4pm
Fri, Jan 9, 1:30 - 5pm
Sat, Jan 10, 11am - 2pm
Mon Jan 12, 11am - 1pm
Weds Jan 14, 1:45 - 5pm

book here..
…reminder, I’m offering discounted acupuncture in January ❤️

also please note: due to skyrocketing prices of the high-quality organic herbs that I source, herbal formula pricing will be increasing. I keep costs as low as possible while providing remedies that work, and sustaining my livelihood! Thank you for understanding.

note - I often go back and make more edits after sending the email… please read online for latest best version!

Dear beautiful… you are not pure, good, or righteous… but you are perfect.

This year, may we ditch the ritualistic fixing-as-escape from our voracious full-body “yes” on who is here, now. That instead of resolutions… we devote ourselves to presence. Fully alive in our bodies, deserving of love, relishing the delicious mundane details of our in-the-moment incarnation… not thinking, but feeling, through our gut and heart and skin and eyes and tastebuds and vibration… unafraid of the vast range of our emotions and sensations. From this place, we always know just what to do - this is where we source our best “resolve”.

Imperial clock time breeds the idea that we should always be improving, progressing, developing… always escaping from the breathed infinity of what *is*. The smell of the balsam candle. Its dim light glowing into the brugmansia I brought inside during the last cold snap. The comfort of this rumpled warm bed where I write. The ecstasy of being free. To curl up and savor what surrounds us.

And yet… we are creative and visionary beings. Healing is an unfurling towards something different, something better, less obstructed, more vitally expressed. I’m obsessed with this, always expanding, seeking, changing, dying and remaking myself. Can we do this as art? Rather than as repair of broken self? Curious, unattached, intoxicated with the mystery… staying in tender love with all the versions that came before? In alignment with the qi of our earth?

Please, don’t try to change, right now, as we are in the most delectable velvety down-under time of deepest yin, retreat, stillness, gathering and integration. It is the wrong time to cleanse, push forward, decide things. It is listening time. If we have to do something… let us get down to loving our darkest most hidden aspects, just as much as we love the part we are willing to show to the world. Embrace the long dark nights within our own being. The myth of purity and goodness is a religious manipulation to keep us judging our neighbor, keep us disconnected from our whole, complex, light and dark and infinite selves. Keep us punishing ourselves, letting others punish us, for being all that we are.

We aren’t fooled, anymore. The darkness is not evil, bad, or scary. Darkness is food, nourishment, medicine. Yin. Cold. Dense. Heavy. Salty. Primordial.

Last month I sat and listened again, in meditation with herbal medicine - a yin tonic. Outside the window, again, redwoods arching skyward, above forests of moss and lichen on stones, mixing with a bruised grey winter sky. The salty, cold, hyper-nourishing medicine landed in the central fire of my belly, needing cacao and honey so it could be metabolized through the soil of my earth element. Yin tonics are famously hard on the stomach, dense and cold as they are.

In Chinese medicine there are certain known qualities of yin and yang written in the old books. All just theory, until I feel it in my own body. Yin is deeper; more elusive, than blood. Cold. Dark. Salty. Softening, dissolving. Like the deep sea.

Chinese philosophy says that even in the deepest, densest yin, there is always a spark of Yang. Yin, as it sinks in and nourishes, has a penetrating force that is Yang… to receive the nourishment of Yin requires release, and surrender . To allow the density to sink actively into the center of ourselves.

First, came as a sense of being incredibly sleepy, and heavy, and wanting to lie down. This was a tussle, gently, in my mind (oh, the sound of the rain pouring on the roof… so divine)… I should sit up, maybe have some tea to wake me up a bit. I turn to her, my body. She said please, can we lie down. Yes. The books say that the best way to replenish the Yin is to rest.

For the rest of the day into night, yin. A dark room, a soft bed; a heavy blanket. Face up, arms open. Supta baddha konasana. A bolster beneath my sacrum, spine, head, and I was able to deeply relax my body, and melt, and rest. From there, the Yin slowly began to fill me in, like a glacial river with fine glittering silt… dense, heavy, a fine softness in its essence. I could feel the white matter of my body softening, reanimating with substance and moisture. My tendons, ligaments, fascia, felt like they were getting younger. The feeling was extraordinary. From brittle, crumbling, stiff… to supple aliveness. Time going backwards. Healing.

It started in my shoulders, arms, scapulae… then, all around my heart. For the first time in my life, I felt my pericardium. Xin Bao, or “envelope of the heart ” in Chinese medicine. The emotional protector, physically, the white, fibrous casing protecting the heart. Until that moment, an anatomical concept. Until I felt the rigid casing soften… saturate, like stiff leather being oiled back to life. Suddenly in a new way my heart could open; flex; breathe, surge. Turns out it is incredibly relaxing, to open the heart, a sweet relief.

The yin sunk into my spine and animated her snake. Curling, twisting, undulating waves. Not stiff brittle snapping joints anymore. a fluidity, fullness. the fluency of the ocean, as O’Donahue says. To flow, we must be liquified.

Yin, nourishment, additive, sinking in like water in wood, like a burning log into coals, like gelatin into bone, like soft rain into parched earth.

Sinking deeper, there is a direct channel from the velvet jungle of the heart, to the womb. There was revelations around this, as well, but they are a secret…

Yin, down in the dark… invites surrender. the dark, with our eyes useless, the fire of yang no longer able to project or reflect their way to knowing… useless.

It’s all feeling, in the dark, letting go, falling back, trusting the body, the universe, the void. will catch us, always, and show us our path, through sensing, impressions, visions, dreams. Subterranean, where creativity is birthed. fertility is darkness, before the spark, the seed not yet unfurling. The source.

Don’t shy away from the darkness… it will always find you, in the end. And it is so soft and quiet… so rich and magnetic…

The tale of the year of the snake taught me that I want to say yes. To life, to all the aspects of myself, the dark and the light. I have spent my lifetime, saying no, not even realizing it, rebelling and resisting against the excruciating pain and delectable gorgeousness of all of it. I don’t know about you, but I am sick of shying away from everything within myself that is not pleasant and unoffensive. There are brilliant shining gems in the darkness. I want them all.

I’m not going to wish you a new year where you have nothing but abundance and ease and everything you think you want. That will set you up for failure. Years are alive, they rise and fall, we get what we need, from the divine orchestration, and the lessons come in all the ways.. I’m going to wish that you have a new year where you say yes, to your ugliest manifestations as well as your most radiant masterful beauty and charm. We cannot have one without the other.

…and I will say goodnight, with sweet blessings of Yin to you all 🖤

Dad! uncles, formal gentlemen, pious women, gentle acquaintances… please stop 🛑 reading now (I’m looking out for you)

this last section is sacred bloody woman stuff 🩸☠️🩸

to you, the pagan edge-dwelling woman (or rare womb-entranced, elk-horned man)

I have been devoted to exploring and teaching women’s practices for decades now, starting with “womb listening” in my late 20s. I’ve been tracking the threads of so many of our buried mysteries… menstruation, birth, psychic abilities, innate matriarchal biology, past lifetimes burned at the stake, sexual healing. The last few years I have been drawn to bring women together to talk about what I have been finding. I teach classes in moon lodges at gatherings, and share individually with women in clinic, but I need a more steady place to connect.

It does not feel appropriate to share these niche, personal stories here in Animist Alchemy. So I finally created a writing space where I don’t have to hold back…

where I will talk about the secret feral ways I am studying, in service to restoring the depth and power of the feminine, personally and collectively.

It will be paid access, because I don’t want just anyone to wander in - I’ll be writing about tender, vulnerable, secret things. Ideally you are more than curious. You are magnetized. You *need* this space in your life. You seek healing here.

Here is the discount to access the Electric for $13 per year:

Subscribe to the Electric

Men, you are welcome to subscribe if you are on the path of humbly worshipping the raw bloody mysteries of the female species. We really do need you, love you.

Women, I’ve got things to tell… things you’ll want to hear, and play with, and talk about. To birth the wild, untamed, self-possessed and ecstatically vital beings that are sparking just under our surface.

Embodied womb practices, obsidian eggs, ceremonial plant medicine, poetics, dream & trip reports, messy & clean relationship alchemy, shadow play, erotica, radical self responsibility. Resources. Guest writings from other felines on the journey. I’m no expert… just a forever-young, dirt-and-vetiver-scented hyper-sensitive feral gypsy explorer of this sacred carnal vessel… fucking around, finding out, and telling the tale. And a lure… I want to draw out your tales, too.

Because I truly believe that as we remember our way out of ancient patriarchal trances and reanimate our nature-connected, body-based feminine hyperpowers - I mean, really *live* them - together - we can conjure playfulness, grace, harmony, wisdom and sanctity (back?) into the human realm.

and feel soooo good as we do 🐾

You can find the complete uncut version of my expedition through Yin, as the first post in Woodnymph Electric. Please let me know if you can’t pay and subscribe - or if you *can* get in without paying (no bueno!!) Still working out the kinks (lol, kink). I have no idea what’s going to happen but it is going to be fun. Can’t wait to see who dives in with me...

subscribe to Woodnymph Electric

I am offering discounted acupuncture and Chinese medicine consultations for the months of December and January. (click on the red text below to book)

• 60 minute acupuncture treatments will be $125 (instead of $145)

• 75 minute acupuncture treatments will be $150 (instead of $175)

• 90 minute treatments will be $175 (instead of $208)

With the 60 minutes, you hop on the table, we check in quickly, do tongue and pulse while you’re lying down, and you drop in to a harmonizing restful reset with needles and hot stones. 90 minutes, we check in a bit longer, and you can do front and back treatments. I am happy to suggest herbs based on what presents itself during these sessions, and you can purchase them for their regular price.

I am also extending a special rate for my most in-depth health support, TwoMoons of transformation, at $2500 (or two installments of $1350) (instead of $2700 or two installments of $1450). This offering is the best way to see real, lasting results with your health, by receiving treatments plus close caring one-on-one support to help you design and implement real change in your habits and rhythms. I’ve witnessed people shed so many layers of stuckness and confusion about what to eat or how to shift their lifestyle in order to enjoy their fullest vitality and health. Read more about Two Moons here »

These are the deepest yin months of long night, when our bodies and souls are drawn to go inward and hibernate, sit with our shadows and witness magic that can only be seen in the dark. But instead, we are on an infinite cultural calendar of yang where work and activity and doing and Mondays never cease. People tend to be stressed and put their self care to the side while we put on the production of the holidays. I love *all* of it - gathering with family and friends, creating beauty, making special food, singing winter songs, and stepping outside the current to go quiet, be in nature, receive healing support. And. I want to invite you to slow down and build a pause to reset and receive into your next few months. and… I would love to see more of your beautiful faces who I haven’t seen in a while, who could use a financial break on some self care. Custom herbal formulas are flowing.

In addition, I invite you to come and stock up your winter medicine cabinet with my suite of self-care off-the shelf herbal support. They make great gifts, too… I am happy to ship for those who are not local, just drop me a note here to order.

fresh batch of Bear Blood

is my most cherished remedy - a nourishing and strengthening honey syrup with strengthening and fortifying roots and berries such as elderberries, fresh angelica & burdock roots, astragalus, dang gui, schizandra, fresh blueberries & hawthorn , plus ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg… it is delicious, kids love it, mamas guzzle it to keep doing all the superhero things we do. In stock for 2025 until it sells out.

Love Your Lungs

is for acute winter illness with chest and lung involvement. It has herbs like mullein, osha, angelica, elecampane, Chinese skullcap, and more, to dredge phlegm, clear infection, open bronchi, strengthen lungs, calm the cough reflex, drain swollen sluggish lymph, soothe a raw throat, and bolster the Wei Qi - roughly translated as the immune protection against outside invasion.

Clear Head

is what it says - as Chinese Medicine says, it opens the “orifices” aka the eyes, ears, nose, mouth. This remedy helps drain mucous from the sinuses and nasal passages, astringe a drippy nose, and breathe, see, and think clearly. It also has herbs that clear infection and drain lung and lymph sludge. Featuring herbs like yerba santa, horseradish, ju hua, ginger, rosemary, fir and redwood tips.

Sleep Sweet

is the star of my shelf. If you can’t sleep, you can’t heal. Sleep Sweet is designed to take just before bedtime and again in the middle of the night if you pop awake. I’ve spent the last four years refining the formula into a broad spectrum of physically calming, emotionally soothing and electrically down-regulating herbs. It doesn’t make you sleepy the next day, and supports nervous system health as a side effect. Featuring herbs like California poppy, wild lettuce, mimosa, hops, passion flower, chamomile, lemon balm and lavender. Swap out melatonin (hormone replacement - eep) for this gentle & powerful alternative.

Release the Grip

helps with the physical and emotional fallout of stress - like a worried anxious mind, a knotted solar plexus, and crunched, sore neck and shoulders. It has herbs like vervain and pedicularis to help relax the mind and release neck and shoulder tension, milky oats to calm the nerves, Saint Johnswort to relax the tummy and ease the spirit, and rose to soothe the heart.

Resilience

strengthens the “wei qi”, which is the protective boundary that keeps illness at bay. With herbs to clear any flirtatious infection out of your field, adaptogens to keep you strong and vital, and plants that help keep your qi moving so that you can detoxify and eliminate what you don’t need.

Choose the one that fits your malady or buy the bundle as a home medicine chest to support your family when you need it - that’s what we do at home, and we never, ever run to the store to get over-the-counter pharmacy items. Many of the herbs in these formula were grown locally and organically, or wild harvested lovingly by yours truly. All the rest are organic and highest possible quality.

PRICES

• 2oz (trial size): $36 ($32 if you come for a clinical visit)

• 4oz (one person, enough to get through an acute illness): $68 (or $60)

• 8oz (best value, enough to have on hand or share): $135 (or $115)

• 4 or more bottles, 5% off

May this offer help you step towards wild, natural wellness and more tender loving support and holding. I hope you have a beautiful winter. Reach out to me with questions…

Open appointments this week: book a session here
Mon, 12:15- 2:15pm (Dec 1)
Weds, 12:45pm (Dec 3)
Fri, 12:15pm (Dec 5)
❤️
note: I’ll be away for the holidays Dec 21 - 29

It has been a moment since I have written you… I have missed you. The autumn has been a long, rich darkening season of rain, heavy chocolate humus on the redwood forest floor, dense mosses shocked to plush emerald life by storms… salmon thrashing in the creek… and so many internal shadows coming out into the light. An initiation. Into… knowing our true essence as Love? living more fully? surrendering to the mystery? Time will tell…

The other day a wise woman guided me to meditate on the truth that I am never alone… to look inside my body and feel the divine cosmic everything that is always there.

I sat. Breathed.

After a spell of silent listening, sitting up on the floor, knees out, palms up, surrendered… I felt how I am a mountain… a solid form of presence and power. I felt the ancient worn granite bodies of the Adirondacks who raised me, where my ancestors roamed for generations, where Haudenosaunee and Abenaki roamed longer. The glacial lakes and salty Atlantic and Pacific have shaped and infused life into my hands, arms, feet, forehead. I felt wells of cool, still water down around my lower back, deep inside my pelvis, holding me down to earth. My skin and bones remember mountains and oceans from other lands, too, much farther back in time… a circle of women on black sands flickers in, gathered on a stormy Northern coast...

I felt too cold. I was in my teacher’s cabin, under the coastal redwoods in a valley misted and anchored by an icy and laughing creek, tucked below the horizontal rays of mid-day November sun. Damp chill almost solstice cold in my bones almost sent me in panic… I am afraid of being cold. I hate being cold.

I looked inward, deeper… and breathed into my lower belly, and felt my womb kindle and glow, an ember, molten lava, radiating gentle, deep heat through my bones… sending up a steady current of flame, feeding a blooming rose of fire at my heart, she bloomed, and kept blooming... an enchanted rose. The heart fire, rising up from her anchor in the lower fire, the ming men.

Then I turned to the forest - and I was shot through with love and longing. The forest is so close-in, it is my beloved, my first friend, ever since I was a little girl with the balsam and birches and cedars and crow-tended pines, and much, much longer than that, the sugar maples that the natives taught my ancestors to tap, maybe ancient Białowieża woods and Celtic groves. The richness and life of the forest arched through my body, the redwood trees surging up the center of my spine, pulling me skyward with dizzy intensity, keeping my head aloft, while sending roots deep through my tail. I felt the growing and reaching of living green, wrapping my ribs around my torso, vines expanding through my vessels and fascia, unfurling their shapes. I am the forest, too.

My belly found earth, alive, slow compost, tangled humus, dense, warm and soft, full of mystery and depth and life, an engine of depletion and abundance, of complexity and feeling and devastation and possibility. The earth in the topsoil of my cozy, ever-changing, hyper-sensitive viscera. Memories in my guts, of drought, wildfires, sowing and tending and nourishment and gentle rains. Home.

My blood was the deepest paradox. My yoga teacher says that the blood is fire… but from Chinese medicine I know it to be rivers, watery, yin. What I felt in my body was how it is both. It is a wet, hot, tumbling river of fire, dynamic, electrical, crystalline… alchemizing, moistening, soothing, softening… flooding my fields of flesh with its nourishing spark of life. Blood is both fire and water at once.

That no one, with all their AI and nano-chips and digital frequencies, can possibly separate us from our source in nature, elements, life. Because we *are* that. After this meditation, the idea of engineering ourselves apart from nature feels absurd. We can forget who and what we are… we can become lost from our mother, and get confused, and malnourished and sick… but that does not change our essence in the slightest. We can only be drawn back to nature, in the end.

And there it was… not alone, never alone. Infinite, timeless. We are the ancient forests and mountains and myriad of warm-blooded relatives. We are the wind, the worms, the snakes, the birds… the oceans, the minerals.

Chinese medicine has an ancient and nuanced teaching about all of this, where we embody the elements and forces of nature, and they move and live inside our vessel in specific, nuanced ways, according to cosmic laws of harmony and balance. The entire system of healing and prescription and diagnosis is based on this. Vedic philosophy describes the microcosm of our bodies mirroring the macrocosm of the universe. Logically and scientifically, we also understand that our bodies are built of the same molecules of carbon and salts and waters of the physical material earth, and that we compost back into earth when we depart.

Anyone can also understand this through inner listening- meditating with close attention on the sensations of our physical body - and by immersing ourselves in nature. Breathe into the embers and sink into the aquifers of your roots, somewhere in the cave of your pelvic bowl. Tend an open fire. Look for the forest in your form, with crows that dive and coast below the canopy. I’ll meet you there.

For the past decade I have been learning to reach out into the ethers to connect to my ancestors. Even as I was able to tune in and feel their belonging, love and guidance… I somehow also feel odd about it… like maybe they shouldn’t be gods, outside myself, remote, on clouds and stars… if everything true and good and ancient and “out there” is also in our bodies… shouldn’t they be closer in?

Of course, our ancestors are in our bodies. This is no revelation - we all know this. Our bloodline… “you have your grandmother’s eyes.” The unique stripes and crystals of our irises and shape of our squint and variation of the curves of bones and microscopic texture of skin are all personally gifted and designed by our ancestors, who made them out of dirt and sea and sky. Our infinite line of creative lovers kept spiraling themselves outward, becoming bigger, more of themselves, beyond death, across space and time, into our own form. They are alive still, looking feeling speaking through us. Try it, if you haven’t before… try to go inside and find your ancestors there… see who speaks, where they live in your body, what they have to say.

Chinese medicine has our ancestors living in our kidneys, through the “Jing”, the most essential life force, endowed by our parents at conception and during gestation… our “ancestral” Qi, perhaps stored in the ming men, or the root chakra, kidney area. It is cold rainy winter here in Northern California, and the damp chill gets into the bones. To steady and conserve these original gifts from those who came before… wrap your Kidneys with me, drink warm liquids, stay relaxed and cozy. I spoke to this, on IG:

And now for apothecary & clinic news among the roots and chrysanthemums.

Our Embody Chinese Medicine class has been sitting at the feet of our ancestor the California bay laurel tree, aka Pepperwood, aka Umbellularia californica… in an old grove in Point Reyes, listening… learning about bay medicine through teachings and books and direct experience… then returning to gather bay nuts, process them together, making edible treats for the holidays, touching back to a traditional indigenous food. We have two classes left, and will part ways just before the darkest night. If you’re interested in the spring round of Embody Chinese Medicine, I’ll be opening registration in January.

I’ve been wild crafting, brewing and bottling lots of medicine here for you at Abalone Apothecary…

• Bear Blood strengthening protective honey syrup

• Love your Lungs & Clear Head for respiratory infections & seasonal malaise…

• desert-wildcrafted Skin Serum for any irritated angry infected skin thing…

• Resilience tincture to keep you healthy while you travel…

• Sleep Sweet drops to drop you into dream…

• Joint & Nerve formula for injury, ache or arthritis…

• tea blends for digestion, uplifting, relaxing, skin, postpartum…

plus some new medicinal creations that are brewing, by moonlight, as I write to you here. I would love to put together a custom and yummy winter wellness bundle for your household, so you’ve got what you need when you need it, to tend yourselves and your loved ones with potent, effective and life-affirming natural medicines. Please reach out if you get winter-sick… I got you, the herbs do too. I can send remedies by post if you’re not local.

Always dreamy to connect with you here. I promise, lightly, not to let so much time go by before the next one… I have so much more to tell you!

but for now, I’m sending love and woodfire blessings for your darkest nights.

Alison

Just Launched: Abalone Apothecary Online Shop!

Introducing our soft-launch of the Abalone Apothecary Online Shop! You can now order your favorite, tried & true handmade herbal remedies through my new web storefront. (shoutout to Zoe Arthur for her gorgeous product photos)

Shop Abalone Medicines !!

These remedies have supported hundreds of people who bless the doors of Abalone medicine, to find natural resolutions for health problems. Each remedy is formulated to have a powerful, full-spectrum response to acute imbalances. They have all been tested within our community and proven effective time and time again! They are designed to address the most common issues that I see in clinic - like upper respiratory, sinus, sleep, anxiety, skin rashes, joint health, immune strength, and more.

Many of my core VIP remedies are available online now, including Sleep Sweet, Clear Head, Skin Serum and Release the Grip. The rest will be added in the coming season! Soon I’ll add a“pickup in store” option for locals, but in the meantime, just keep using my contact form on my website to place orders.

You’d be amazed at what herbs can reliably heal. And they only have positive, health-giving side effects. I wrote a post about these remedies a while back. And if you want science to back up herbal medicine, it exists in abundance. Type the “latin” name of the herbs into this online catalogue and dizzy yourself with data!

effortless fall into balance.

It is my last day on the East coast, in northern New York state where I grew up, in Haudenosaunee territory. I come back every summer to see my extended family. My grandmother is 97, my nephews are little, adorable, changing every season; my sisters and parents have been thousands of miles away for almost two decades now. We are scattered. It is common, but not natural, to all be so far away. Human communities have been fractured, time and time again, with serious consequences for our mental and physical health.

It feels so good to be with everyone here… to rest, to share cooking meals, with so many people around to give and receive love. Bickering and all, it is a trace of the kind of community that we are designed for as wild humans.

As I get older, traveling is harder on my body. I’m more aware of my psychic state, so I am more acutely aware of the impact of total changes in landscape, climate, culture, rhythm, the way they shake up my consciousness. But my body bounces back quickly, and traveling wakes me up. It courts presence to break out of routines, not being surrounded by the same everything all the time. Travel, even to a place we know in our bones, shows us new sides of ourselves.

This time I was surprised and uplifted by how fast I return to wellness when the right conditions are in place - when I am more in my natural habitat. Chinese medicine’s feng shui offers a system for understanding ideal climates, conditions and geographies for each of us, based on our constitution. My son jokes that it will be hard to figure out where we should settle… he loves the Bay area with its cool, marine layered nights. For me, a northeastern heatwave is heaven.

There is deep medicine in living within a rich web of family. Lots of people to cook meals, take the kids on adventures, throw your laundry in with theirs. Sisters, parents, nephews, aunties, uncles… hugging my grandmother, spending hours sitting with her on the garden bench watching the sky, until she remembers who I am again… a climate that suits my constitution, hot humid days, warm nights, water, everywhere… waterfalls, swimming holes, green forest, thunderstorms, fireflies, cicada-thick air… love that you don’t have to question.

With my family taking care of eachother, the pressure off, the first thing I did was catch up on sleep. Within days, my energy was back. My patience was back. My creativity started flowing. I went running with my dad and my sister and the warm rain. Suddenly my legs were stronger, my endurance started returning much faster than it does when I get out on the trails in the midst of my fast-paced rest-deficient California life. I had the energy to play rough in the lake with the kids. I didn’t yell at my son. I missed my West coast friends, the sea, all of you… but in a core, rare way, I had what I needed to be effortlessly well. Community, messy, but solid, blood-deep. It breaks my heart not to be closer to them, and I am blessed that everyone is well and we can gather each year.

In the US, there is a rootlessness woven into our paths and pathologies, rooted in occupation of stolen land, rooted in exile and severance from earlier faraway broken histories. Parenting my son for almost 14 years now, 3,000 miles away from my family of origin, I’ve perfected a refined and graceful dance around homesickness and stress. I’ve had therapists guide me through understandings of my ancestral patterns, the tension and wounded children in my body. Learning, practicing, rituals, prayers, modalities, techniques. Podcast after podcast. An incredible lineage of yoga… acupuncture, nature connection, creativity with hands, plant medicine ceremony… so many tools we cultural orphans have to try with all our might to calm our nervous systems and mitigate the stress of keeping it all together.

If the root of our human need (for rich multigenerational close-knit community; warm humid climate; weeks on end of full deep sleep; nutritious food; a physically safe place to sleep; whatever it is for you) is not there - endless special healing tools are just helping us tread water. An ironic thing to say for someone whose profession it is to help people heal themselves. But in my experience it’s the truth.

When a root-level remedy is suddenly available, everything falls into place, so quickly. Everyone out there single parenting, parenting in a nuclear family, parenting in the age of soul-thieving tech, navigating grief, taxes, inflation, housing difficulties, chronic illness, caretaking your elders, working your ass off in some way or another… you know the marathon of stress, the lean diet of stillness and breath, that I speak of. Remember how close your vitality is, just under the surface.

We can blame colonialism, extractive empire - my mom and I just devoured an incredible book that speaks to what else is possible! but this question of why don’t we have true community, what is this experiment in profound disconnection that humans are doing right now… is a deeper question than politics. It is a koan, there is no complete and true answer that we can pin down with words.

Right now I just want to shine on about the magic of recovery. No matter how strung out… no matter how many years you have hustled… we are octopi. Until it is time to depart our bodies, we regrow our tentacles of strength and vitality and sparkle of eye and juiciness of muscles and skin. So. Fast. As soon as we have the conditions where we can regenerate, we do it. We are self healing miracles.

So while we are collaborating beautifully on healing, learning, soothing and calming our shen, we can also let go, and accept what is in our power to do, and love ourselves, and say yes to messiness and tiredness, and not try so hard. and know that at any moment it could suddenly become very, very easy, with more support than we know… while another moment, a storm, a time to get vulnerable and reach out, to hold on tight to the ropes and focus on survival.

We’re all working with our particular abundance and challenge, by the grace of what gives us our life, creation, god, our divine Mother, whatever that is for you. Somehow, not without consequence, but somehow we can survive, and live soulfully, and remember that when given the right conditions, we can fall into thriving with startling swiftness.

We all have octopus power lying in wait just below the surface.

If you are blessed with choice, move towards what makes it effortless to feel good

open appointments this July (book here)

• Mon July 7, 11am - 12:30pm

• Weds July 9, 2:30 - 4pm

• Fri July 11, 2 - 4pm

• Sat July 12, 11am - 1pm

please refill herbal formulas by July 14th before I leave for the East Coast!
herbs & acupuncture will resume on August 4th.

solstice

“Solstice,” from the Latin for sun stands still. Our ancestors payed attention to how the sun changes every day, bit by bit, swinging from the horizon in winter to high aloft in summer. At the solstices, the mid-day sun hovers in the same place for a few days before changing course. Our ancestors noticed when the sun stands still, stretches to savor the sweetness of summer. What would it be like to rekindle that awareness of the source all warmth and life? How would it change us?

Two days ago I had the pleasure to share about medicinal plants at the In Place solstice gathering, where I connected with sweet friends, new and old, including the inspiring Alliance for Felix Cove who is doing deep work of reanimating what the Coast Miwok ancestors of this place already know.

And two weeks ago, covered in paint from my renovation project, I walked down to the Dance Palace by twilight and fell into the trance of Kitka’s etheric summer solstice songs. The singers told stories of pagan Slavic ancestors, like mine, who leaped over fires at midsummer, wearing crowns of fresh herbs and flowers, casting them into the sea, to bring romance, a good marriage, a fertile life. Sang death songs while they took the lives of medicine plants, harvested in full flower and potency. Saint Johnswort, mugwort, yarrow… these healing plants have been blooming at midsummer for a long, long time. Our ancestors harvested their ancestors. Like Chinese medicine philosophy tells us… time is a circle.

::: upcoming classes :::

With the solstice we have just stepped into the tenth seasonal node in the Chinese calendar - Xia Zhi, “zenith of summer”. In September we’ll tune into circular Daoist time together again in the fall Embody Chinese Medicine field series. We will track the changes in the land and in our own bodies, from late summer into winter. It will transform your sense of time and connect your health to the turning of the sun. Out on the land, you’ll learn about the medicines that grow around us. The small group alchemy is fun and supportive. Early bird registration is open. Schedule a call to learn more.

summer self care rituals

The heart spirit, the shen, is the ruler of this midsummer time. A healthy shen will bring out our most bright-eyed, relaxed and expressive selves. When we’re out of balance or stressed, our shen gets stuck in “fight, flight, fawn or freeze”. Signs include brain fog, anxiety, sleep issues, racing heart, knotted solar plexus, lump in your throat, body aches, headaches, indigestion. Or - maybe you’re fine. Your body doesn’t say much… being busy (distracted?) suits you, feelings aren’t your thing. Sometimes our masks are so exquisitely crafted, our bootstraps pulled up so high, we don’t even know we’re disconnected from ourselves. We don’t realize how much more open hearted we can be.

Summer offers lots of ways to get happy and relaxed. A swim in the bay, a walk out in the forest, a nap in the hammock, tending a flower garden, a barbecue on the back deck, all sweet remedies. But I’ve recently come upon something so simple it almost seems silly to write about. Until you try it - then you’ll see…

a vintage bath date. 🧖‍♀️

After almost two decades being a highly sensitive person living in the frenetic hustle of the SF bay area, I’ve collected a lot of self-care tools to navigate the stress. But until recently, something essential was missing…

I now have three dates with myself per week, written on my calendar, solid as an acupuncture session or dental appointment. These are not times when I catch up on chores, tend the garden, write in my journal, or sing, or hike, or swim, or practice yoga. I simply stop, get slow and present with my body and feelings. Ask myself, how are you? in an undistracted and timeless way - taking an old-fashioned bath with a basin and a pitcher of hot water.

Not a shower; not full submersion in a tub. A basin bath is different. Slower, more intentional, gentler on the nervous system. Bonus if you can do it outdoors in the warm sunshine.

The key is to be literally, sensually connected to your physical self and spirit. It is simple, powerful, feels lovely, and leaves you fresh, clean and smelling of flowers.

old-fashioned basin bath.

ingredients:
• 1 to 3 hours
• a warm, private space
• a basin and pitcher with bath-hot water
• blanket or towel, or both
• aromatic body oil
• hydrating beverage
• optional: mirror, candle light, relaxing music, fresh flowers, incense

Pour yourself a basin of hot water. Get a washcloth for face and one for body. Lay out a mat and a towel on the floor of a warm room or a sunny corner of the garden. (I keep a rolled-up Japanese futon mattress in our potting shed).

Tie your hair back if it is long, and start with the face. Go slow. Breathe deeply. Savor. Check for ticks or splinters or bruises; offer curiosity and love and acceptance to every mole, wrinkle, muscle, scrape, bit of cellulite. Pour the basin water into the garden and repeat with more clean hot water from your pitcher. Relish the cozy feeling of the warm cloth, like a baby getting their bath..

Water offers a powerful energetic refresh. You can use essential oils, although I prefer fresh foliage and blossoms from the garden. Rose, calendula, chamomile, rosemary… whatever you have. Water is so cleansing, flowers are so healing, this simple practice alone can transform you from feeling stuck, bottled up, simmering with a discontent you can’t quite put your finger on, move stuck emotions through.

Abhyanga. The next piece is to massage oil onto your skin with worshipful attention - a new take on the idea of self-love. In Ayurveda, oilenation of the entire body, or abhyanga, is a vital therapy for grounding, calming, and relaxing the mind, from infancy onwards. Some people do abhyanga *before* the bath, so the warm water drives the oil deeper into the skin. I do it after. See what works for you. Ideally you have a personalized oil blend for your constitution. I have a relaxing ayurvedic oil for sale in the apothecary if you want something special, but anything natural that feels good on your skin is fine - olive oil is a nice, neutral choice. Other options are any combination of coconut oil, sesame oil, shea or cocoa butter, ghee, sheep or beef or deer tallow. On the face, rosehip, hemp seed or nigella are light and won’t clog the pores.

As you do the self massage… breathe, and invite any emotions that are lingering about. Don’t forget your feet, ears, hands, bum, breasts, armpits… everyone gets attention. Let tears flow, let yourself sigh or giggle, allow whatever wants to move. Trust your timing and don’t force it. If you have a mirror, meet your own gaze without posing or trying to look “good”. This can feel surprisingly awkward or edgy. Saying hello to ourselves, accepting ourselves as we are in the moment, with love, is a practice, and takes courage.

Chinese medicine knows that a myriad of diseases stem from unfelt feelings. Stagnant emotional energy can cause everything from poor circulation and indigestion to breast cancer and autoimmune disease. Just an hour or two of basin bathing and abhyanga with this intention is like a rebirth. Clearing all that physical and emotional sludge carries you through your day with a sense of vitality, brightness, personal power and creativity. Over time, it becomes natural to catch up with yourself this way.

daily diet of raw, unfiltered sunshine

Maximum skin. No sunscreen.

Lately people have started talking about the profound importance of getting sun on your body - including those demonized yet 100% natural UV rays (gasp) - sans sunscreen (gasp!) One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that it has birthed an exciting new medical philosophy, as more and more medical professionals have begun questioning the institutionalized, ineffective, profit-encrusted medical dogma. Profound shifts are happening - if you haven’t heard of the metabolic theory of disease, the fourth phase of water, animal fat as an essential component of good health, or the idea that the heart is not a pump - stay tuned. I am cucompiling an online resource library with my favorite voices and sources. I want to talk about all of it with you.

My son recently went on a deep dive into circadian health, the dangers of blue light, and the importance of sunlight nutrition. He gave a talk to his school community to raise awareness 🥹. Check it out:

Inspired by his research, we got blue light blocking glasses for home - good ones - and it has been a sea change.

It turns out, sunlight only contains blue light in the morning and mid-day, which is how our bodies know that it is the peak time to be awake and active. So any screen exposure after mid-day is damaging our body’s internal clock, and everything that it depends on. Further, the blue light on our screens does not come with other frequencies, whereas in nature, blue light is only ever just one part of a full spectrum. (This design decision was intentional, originating with the mobsters who designed Vegas - blue light on its own make us more subservient and more open to manipulation.) Think of blue screen light as a soda vs a piece of fruit, or a pharmaceutical drug vs a whole plant medicine. When we diverge from nature, there is always a side effect, a price to pay. It is no different with refined, unnatural light. Looking at our phones or computer screens or TVs from afternoon onwards is scrambling our brain’s internal clock, weakening our metabolism, harming our mental health, screwing with our sleep, and more.

Now, my boy and I always put on our blue light glasses if we are indoors under artificial light, from evening onwards. I never thought I had trouble winding down at night, but I was wrong. I never used to fall asleep while watching a late-night show or a movie. I used to get alert and inspired with late-night writing projects. Now, wearing my blue light blockers, after just a little time in front of a screen, my eyelids will get so heavy that I have to stop what I’m doing and turn to bed. Not great if you rely on burning the midnight oil to get writing done! But really good for healing, metabolism, and mental health. I never thought I had issues falling to sleep, but this is another level. I don’t need time to settle down. I’m already relaxed and a bit groggy. Just from amber blue light blocking glasses.

Use this special Abalone discount code to get your own pair from Block Blue Light - where we got our glasses. It is a small company based in Australia and the founder has an incredible story. I feel great about supporting them, their glasses work beautifully, and they have lots of stylish options. If you wear glasses already, like my son, he’s got these clip-ons and loves them. We went with the “amber” tint, which filters out blue light but still gives you a bit of color, so its great for being on screens or under indoor lighting in the afternoon all the way through until bedtime. If you have serious sleep issues, or think circadian disruption is a major cause of your mood, metabolic or other health issues, get a red pair for after sundown to block all the confusing frequencies and start getting great sleep. Book a consultation with me if you want to get my in-depth perspective on the root causes of your health, focused on your solar hygiene.

Of course, the ultimate solution is not a product - it is a change in our lifeway to be more aligned with nature. It is essential to get sunlight on our skin during the day to let ourselves receive all that information and nourishment. No sunscreen, with maximum skin showing - even 15 minutes per day will make a huge difference. Build up slowly, especially if you have fair skin. Beyond that, truly, try to be outdoors as much as possible - or near an open window or door, with no glass to filter out the rays. Even starlight and moonlight has nutritional value. I sleep outside in a canvas tent during the summer. In addition to the magic glasses, I noticed my dreams become richer and more meaningful the moment I moved my bed outdoors. And the dawn chorus of birdsong is divine.

Our body make the right amount of melatonin and Vitamin D when we have exposure to natural light frequencies throughout the day. Instead of this trend of casually (recklessly) supplementing hormones that our bodies are designed to elegantly and accurately self-regulate - what if we try re-aligning with nature, like our ancestors did? What if we rewild our relationship to sunlight?

All of these principles circle us back around to things our ancestors took the time to do as part of their natural way of living - not as a “biohack”. There are more… walking barefoot on the earth… drinking raw cultured milk… tracking your fertility naturally… eating organs, not just flesh (thank you Nastasha!)

If we stop moving so fast and chill out on all the shiny new techno-bling, we might recognize that everything we need is right here for us, if we’re willing to put our attention into re-establishing nature-connected habits. We are blessed to live in a place where, right now, we get to experience so much peace and freedom. Let’s honor every moment of our time on this beautiful land.

(oh, and if you’re interested in a raw milk share, we have a collective forming with a pickup at Abalone Apothecary - message me to learn more.)

Featured offering: twoMoons healing immersion.

You might now be wondering, how do I go deeper into getting healthy and making rituals of self care? Don’t want to try to figure it all out yourself? If you’re feeling inspired by the idea of bringing in new, simple practices to calm your spirit and feel more vital and well, I have an offering I’d love to tell you about.

TwoMoons is my deepest dive, a healing immersion for two lunar cycles, where we spend time together each week designing a detailed map to wellness, including personalized yoga practice, medicinal diet plan, herbal remedies, acupuncture, regular check-ins, and the myriad of other natural health resources I have to offer (there is a lot - I’m kind of a nerd). I’ve got availability to start new cycles in early August, so you can harness the dynamic yang energy of the summer and dive into the autumn with a well-established self-care program.

Book a call to learn more

It has been an honor to guide people through such in-depth healing, seeing you step into your own practices and rituals at home, creating habits and routines that don’t require a practitioner, once you’re underway. I have been touched to witness your transformations. When someone says ‘yes’ to making their health into a lifestyle and a hobby, and prioritizing yourself, everything in your life can shift and open up in totally new ways. And we always have a really sweet time together, getting you deeper on your path of wellness.

We are not meant to do it alone.

simple morning rituals

I could do an entire post on morning rituals.

but the last thing I’ll mention is one more easy way to honor the circular nature of time. It is one of those things that everyone contends with, but no one talks about…something I used to think was pointless (and my teenage son assures me it still is). Every morning I make my bed. No matter what. I love it. Making the bed sets up an intentional, unhurried rhythm right from the start. Taking the time to make sure all the sheets and blankets are smooth and straight, placing my red flannel patchwork birdie pillow just so. It creates a feeling of closure to the night, brings freshness to the day, and offers a clean slate for the coming night of sleep. I am positive that there is a feng shui law that making the bed will ensure your success in all endeavors. If you don’t do it already - try it… and if you do… tell me what you love about it. And if you’re laughing at me for writing a whole paragraph about such a trivial thing… I’m glad I made you smile.

And now you know everything. All my secrets!

sending midsummer sunshine sweetness…
Alison

open appointments:
Fri 1- 6pm (May 31)
Sat 11 - 6pm (May 31)

Friday Yoga, 9-10am, summer venue change! 🌞

Drop-in hatha yoga class has returned outdoors for summer, to the grass park right outside Abalone Apothecary. Flowing and grounding, designed to develop a home breathing and movement practice. Stay for tea afterwards…

for the Ladies 💃🏻 Womb Literacy 101 with Chanana starting this autumn!

Join me for this 6-week online course taught by my talented colleague & friend, Chanana McGarry. I met Chanana while she was teaching a class in the Moon lodge at a primitive skills gathering. I have done quite a bit of womb work, and I was impressed by her depth of knowledge, her creativity, and her connection to the earth and ancient wisdom. I knew I had to take this class and I am SO excited to finally learn exactly what is happening with my cycle, day to day, guided by a trained expert. Reach out if you want to hear more, or just sign up!

birthed into flowers

We’ve just come into Yang season, warm and kinetic. Can you feel it? Birthed into the solar fire by springtime, who, through contraction and struggle, pushed us out of dark, cold, watery subterranean Yin.

According to classical Daoist medicine, springtime is not just about new life unfurling… it is the act of birth itself. The energy of springtime is contraction. The element is wood, or ‘mu’ 木 which also means “to butt” - as in rams butting heads. As in, our bodies and spirits butting up against our own internal heaviness, against the wet cold earth of winter, to unfurl with great effort, like a seed sprouting out into the light. Spring, despite the cute bunnies and pretty daffodils, is not meant to be easy. If you’ve given birth, or witnessed a birth, you’ll know what I mean. The arrival of new life is a gritty, roaring, volcanic act of defiance against inertia. We’ve just made it through a collective birthing and now - if we are aligned with the qi of the earth’s turning - we may finally be unfurling into expressive action, motivated to create and celebrate all this sun-drenched beauty of life.

In the Chinese earth-based calendar there are 24 qi nodes, and around May 6th we stepped into the 7th node - “Lì Xià” or “summer begins” - midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. It lines up with Beltane, the Celtic earth-based celebration of maypole and flower crowns, of making love upon the earth to summon fertility, of fields, women, the fruits of mother earth.

This first qi node of summer invites us to revel in flowers, but there’s more. Lì Xià comes on the heels of the previous node’s Clear Light festival, an honoring of our dead, letting our ancestors know we made it all the way through winter. Daoist time flows in a circle - a beautiful concept that is not so easy to embody in our linear goal-oriented culture where death is seen as a tragic and terrifying finality, rather than natural offering towards new life. The classics tell us that if we do not align with the seasons, we’re in for a rough ride. The beginning of summer only holds as much promise as our last season’s good work. Have we cleared the sludge of spring to allow new growth and flowering? To allow our intuition to express freely? This is a big project, when most of us have a backlog of decades of living out of harmony with the seasons.

Speaking for myself, I have been in springtime mode… I’ve been pruning and going through all my physical stuff to clear space for some new projects which I’m on fire to bring forward. Hard personal truths have been gestating within me and I have recently given birth to a new vision for radical self-responsibility - a babe that needs constant nourishment to grow. I am tired, from decades of too much work, too little rest… I am grieving a bit… and I am a bit disconnected, too, even as I practice every day to be more seamlessly present and embodied. I am just back from a flu-thing and teaching and soaking up the good humanity at the Buckeye primitive skills gathering. And I’ve been indulging my cravings to garden. Maybe you see yourself in some of this. We express a collective qi, not just our own path.

pain, with love

There is a saying in the Huang Di Nei Jing, the Chinese medicine classic text:

For years I held this as a fundamental truth of healing, but not anymore. Now, I understand that it is only half of the story. If there is no free flow, there are actually two possibilities: there is pain - or we are numb.

What I am about to share is radical, and may be triggering. But it is the path I am walking and the deepest medicine I have to offer. Let me know what you think.

If we have pain, we are in luck. It means we are not dead to ourselves; something is stirring, ready to transform. Something has come up from our depths that is craving attention. Butting against a dense knotted tangle within us, wants to expand, unencumbered, to take up more space, to alchemize into a more enlivened version of ourselves. Perhaps, wants to warn us that we are in trouble if we don’t pivot. Pain is the portal to internal alchemy, a teacher and guide.

Have you ever found yourself more irritated when in pain? Pain wants us to go inward and *feel* - not answer questions or go grocery shopping. If we face our pain with gratitude and love, bit by bit, it leads to our hidden truths. It might not vanish, but it will often transform, and it will always teach us about ourselves.

What does it look like to claim responsibility for our pain, create space for it, allow it to speak. Release the blame and diagnoses and stories; try allowing your pain to be formless, pure sensation. Forget, for just a moment, that “I have inflammation” or “my disc is ruptured”.

Not easy. Sometimes all pain will say is, “you’re stuck.” This is not a life sentence or a quick fix. It is an invitation to walk a path of listening and attuning to self.

We were born into the era of the quick-fix, get something for nothing, ends justify the means. This ethos pervades every system of modern life, enshrined in the unconscious temples of our colonized minds. We were born into a medical philosophy of materialism - the idea that our flesh and the earth are mechanized systems, best manipulated by physical invasion, surgeries, drugs, strip-mining, fences, mono-crop farming - rather than animate, regenerative, infinitely intelligent vessels for the divine.

materialism
/mə-tîr′ē-ə-lĭz″əm/
noun

1. (Philosophy) The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.

2. The theory or attitude that physical well-being and worldly possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life.

3. Concern for possessions or material wealth and physical comfort, especially to the exclusion of spiritual or intellectual pursuits

We can make diamonds of our pain by exploring its underground roots - there is no way out but through. This advice can land as insensitive, offensive, victim-blamey. How dare you trivialize this hell I am living which you do not walk or understand. How dare you minimize what I have been through, gaslight me about the awful things that have happened to me.

Pain is a symptom of being alive, and it can definitely be hell - more so when we resist it, or externalize it as a betrayal of our body, a malfunction, an injustice. What I am proposing is to assume - just for a moment - that we are a victim of nothing - that our pain is our job to tend - like a new baby or an answered calling to arms - not fun, but - worthy. And that is a path for the heart, because the only way I have found to truly alchemize pain is to regard all of ourselves - body & spirit - with courageous love and truth-telling. Welcome the pain with a full and tender “yes”. Ask for support. And be willing to let it dissolve into mist when it is complete; liberating our identity for whatever unfolds in life, and body, next.

This newly arrived summer brings our joy, moves blood warmly through our vessels. It is also time to feed our shen, housed in the heart - the yin organ that rules this time of solar yang. Expression and activity, and spiritual expansion. If we are all balled up in pain, something is getting in the way of our spirit, blocking our child-like free-flowing happiness and exuberance.

For example,

the stress fracture I had in college when I was pounding 8-10 miles a day on pavement as a cross country runner. Started with an ache. I ate a few ibuprofin every day before practice, the pain stopped, I kept running. For months. Until the bone just cracked. And I was out for 8 weeks, left to deal with my stormy emotions, without the outlet of my running, my happiness. When I healed, I learned from my body that if I ran for an hour, I needed to stretch and breathe for an hour afterwards, and I would have zero pain. if I skipped stretching, my ankle would hurt. No expert medical advice needed.... my ankle told me herself.

Or, more complicated… the pain in my shoulders and neck. Speaks to my need to control everything, my over-intellectualization, hyper-vigilance, maybe a wise coping pattern setup when I was a tiny eldest child who cared a lot and felt a need to caretake everyone else so we would all be okay. My belief that I need to carry the whole world on my shoulders alone. Sound familiar? I can get acupuncture and put herbal salves on, and hydrate, and move my qi and nourish my muscle tissue with internal herbs & nutrition. But to truly honor the pain at the root, I also will have to slow down to body-listening pace, work less, let some responsibilities slide, let myself cry sometimes, and learn how to ask for help. Go to bed earlier. Or maybe my neck/shoulder pain is from Lyme co-infections and compromised cervical spinal discs - an invading oppressor and a broken machine, intractable, further outside of my control. Same thing, different languages. Which one empowers you?

Can we fix our body’s symptoms without listening deeply and accepting the invitation to transform? Maybe for a little while, through the colonial mind-trap - our own comfort at the expense of the exploitation of someone outside our view. Except the exploited, in this case, are our precious internal organs, our indigenous souls, who can only stay silent for so long before they speak truth to power in the language of pain.

We are in a cultural moment where discomfort, let alone pain, is avoided at all cost, where convenience is worshipped above integrity. Numbing, pain-masking, symptom-silencing drugs are promoted by our medical system as a boon, the only “scientific” solution (check out my IG highlight reel on that topic here) - when at best they are actually just triage to get out of deep trouble while we figure out what’s really up. Masking symptoms is not the truest answer to our bodies' call.

Chinese medicine and Vedic medicine believe that we are nature, our bodies are the earth, imbued with the same infinite intelligent design. Human intellect is not smarter than nature. Our bodies are radically trustworthy. Follow the wisdom of our bodies, and we can’t help but attune to the wisdom of Pachamama.

We heal, she heals.

Not easy. There are no mainstream modern vision quests, rites of passage, sweat lodges, village circles and wise elders to guide us through crises of the body and soul. Our current culture is so, so broken - but what if we are not victims of the system? We’ve been born into our own complex violent beautiful time like every human as far back as forever. Yogic cosmology says the universe manifests every imaginable horror and beauty in order to experience and know itself. Same inside each of us.

And - according to the Chinese medical classics, our summertime hearts prefer softness. We can, and must, titrate our pain. Physical and emotional pain can be relentless and exhausting. We are trying our best, doing what we need to do to get by. Too much pain can cause us to clench up and retract. We can heal gently…

I am in it with you. While we’re listening to understand what our body is trying with all of her might to tell us - sometimes we need a break, to lighten the mood, get through a day. Take Ibuprofin, binge on Netflix (loved “Mo”!) drink wine, submerge in projects, or hobbies, or caretaking others… take ourselves lightly...

Ideally, we learn to design breaks that are self care - breaks that don’t dig us deeper into trouble, but instead, offer nourishment - getting into wild water; consuming programs/music/poetry that are art, not rubbish; getting acupuncture or massage; dialing a diet that gives us good clean energy; moving our bodies. Allowing ourselves to rest. So we return refreshed, ready to face our shadows again, with self-love, humility, bravery, and new insight.

On the flip side, sometimes we identify with our pain, curling up in it, to keep from facing its excruciating truths and the terrifying changes that they demand of us. We all heal in our own time. But what if the truths aren’t so excruciating once we greet them? When we surrender, open, allow it in, what is on the other side is tender, a softening into flow, of tears, or blood circulation. A decision that needs to be taken for our lives. Anyone who has gotten trigger point acupuncture from me knows what I mean. We reflexively hold on, and when we let go, the embodied ache can feel good, if we can take the space to rest, soak, hydrate, take the rest of the day off. And sometimes its too much to let go all at once, and we need to take smaller steps.

If we cannot alchemize our pain, we can’t access the lighthearted joy that is the signature experience of this season. Alchemizing our pain is the portal to our happiness. Gently, with tenderness, feel it. Breathe… jump in the bay, like we did in our Embody Chinese Medicine class this week. Take naps, take breaks, keep returning. The message is in there somewhere, leading us to unwind a blockage that may have been an inheritance from our ancestors, a childhood fright, a recent injury. We don’t need to know where it comes from. We only need to pull on a thread and unravel. And if it is more than we can bear, reach out for help.

This winter I had the profound blessing of supporting one of my patients, and kindred friends, as she separated from her body (a phrase I learned from her hospice nurse). She was in pain, at times, and I cannot tell you where that pain led her in the end, but I trust that she is exactly where she is meant to be, and expanding ever further into her destiny. I miss her like crazy.

I don’t have answers. These are just my musings as I machete through the jungle my own healing, and have the honor to help midwife yours. I’ll probably keep circling around these themes for a while. The Embody Chinese Medicine: Wild Spring series is already more than halfway through! This group has lit a spark of inspiration about how we alchemize in harmony with the turning of the seasons and the spiraling rhythms of birth, growth, maturation, harvest, death, and compost, again, and again, until that day comes when we, too, will fly on…

Hatha Yoga at Dance Palace every Friday 10-11am
🌿
book a session with me using this link, reply to this email or reach out via email.
more about my offerings >

Early Bird registration for my Embody Chinese Medicine Field Series closes in a week! Come play outside with us.

Do you want to learn a regenerative, permaculture style of wild-tending our health, as laid out in depth by ancient Daoist Chinese medicine? Are you curious about leaving the shores of the mechanistic industrial model which guides our current mainstream medical paradigm, just for a few hours a week?

There is a subtle but powerful alchemy that happens when we immerse ourselves in nature among our wild elemental medicine; when we come together as we are and heal in community. This spring, for the first time, we’re taking the Embody Chinese Medicine circles into the field. Reply to this mail to save your spot, or reach out here to book a free info call. Class starts on Wednesday March 19th and runs each week through mid-June.

I want to share a story with you about my day out in the hills yesterday, to give you a sense of the magic that can happen in the field.

Abalone Field Notes | Sitting at the feet of our medicine, 03.03.25
I came upon this patch of medicine a week ago on a new trail. It was the most pristine, abundant expanse I’ve ever seen, of one of my totem plants, one of the ones I’ve known and courted for years, who, it seems, is also courting me. Otherwise, why would I be guided to such a place.

For a plant medicine person to come upon such a vast assembly of one of our most precious vegetal deities is utter magic, a day to be remembered forever. Like swimming in the sea and suddenly finding yourself surrounded on all sides by dolphins. I cried out when I saw them… it was dusk, all their fuchsia glowed indigo in the shadows. They were just beginning to flower. I did not touch them, so holy was this moment.

Seven days later, with offerings of tobacco and time, I returned to sit, and harvest, if invited. After a week of spring sun the plants were drawn fuller up out of the earth. Paler, less indigo foliage, the blood having blossomed up into the fire of their flowers. They are solar beings, always blooming around March 1st, no matter what kind of winter we’ve had. Even without tasting the bitter flavor - the flavor of the heart in Chinese medicine - it is already clear that this plant is heart medicine. And by this I mean, the Chinese, electromagnetic, shen-housing heart. The empress fire of our bodies that every other thing revolves around. Or nervous system medicine, in western medical parlance - but that doesn’t quite capture it.

There is a reason they drew me to this resonant place and revealed themselves, among so much open meadowed, tender and desolate wind-whipped splendor. I need this medicine, or someone I know needs this medicine, or my community or the world needs this medicine, and I’m their daughter, or sherpa. It has always been this way with this plant. The first patch I ever found was just a few plants, and just as much wonder, 12 years ago. I went home and asked the plants how many I could take: seven. The next year, the patch was larger… and each year since, for 10 years, until now I take all that I need, saying thank you and singing. Wise folks say plants feel us singing, listening, leaving a hair tangled in their petals or some saliva on the earth above their foots. They want to be in loving long-term relationships with us.

I have always felt mixed about latin names, my indigenous soul detesting their arrogant colonial objectification, and my detail-oriented scientific mind adoring their precision. I have my own pet name for these, my little electric-pink muppets (anyone else raised on Jim Henson?)

When I settled in to be with them today, it didn’t feel right to call them muppets *or* to use the scientific name. I have always described them as looking as if they’ve been electrically shocked. Today, I called them lightning flowers as I sat in their midst, opening up to their teachings. When I talk about listening - whether it is to our bodies, or to a plant, or a stone, or to ancestors - I don’t mean there will be words or literal communication of data. It’s the energetic psychic realm that opens up. It may be words, but more than that it is a knowing that arises, an insight, image or a feeling that arrives in the body or our mind’s eye. As a teacher of mine told me once, if you never get a “no” when you request to harvest - you’re not really listening.

I am sure of this without the slightest doubt: our living medicines tell us directly what they are here to help with. I often hear people say, expressing their wonder at plant medicine, “It is amazing that the ancient people figured out what plants were good for what - what a lot of work to test out all the plants! They must have gotten poisoned a lot.” This is Western intellectual silliness, a mark of our modern atrophied faculty of intuition. There’s no ‘trial and error’ needed. We just need to re-learn to speak the language of them, and the language of ourselves. Something that our ancient, earth-connected, pre-industrial ancestors practiced naturally. Although tasting, observing, self-experimentation, getting a bit uncomfortable at times, is also part of the fun of getting to know a medicine, and developing that sixth sense within ourselves.

I am a missionary of this ancient way of knowing our own medicine-selves. I created my Embodied Medicine Circles for exactly this reason. I am passionate about spreading the word, that there is nothing separating us from our medicine, nothing stopping us from knowing of what our bodies need, except our attention, our embodiment, and an earth-based framework to understand what we feel.

When I sat at the edge of the sea of lightning flowers I remembered an image I saw once, of patterns that blossomed upon people’s skin when they got struck by lightning.*1 They looked like the leaves of the Pedicularis densiflora, my lightning plant. And I remembered how the tincture of this flower was literally the only thing who could discharge the electrical short-circuitry that was restless leg syndrome during my pregnancy. I remembered the friend who healed the numbness and twitching in the side of his face from this plant. It helps with nerve pain, especially the spine, and settles the psychoemotional self (shen again).

As I sat with them, I felt like I always feel with pedicularis. Like I am sitting with a master teacher… a bit excited, maybe a tinge of nervous jitters… hyper-attentive, expansive, humbled, grounded. Almost psychedelic level of presence, but relaxed and blissy. A lovely combination. Electric. It grows wild with only two plants, poison oak and manzanita- they are not easy to cultivate, which makes the flowers even more ephemeral. This community was woven among poison oak, which called for fine attention as I stepped among them with my bare feet.

My acupuncturist told me just this morning that I need something to ground my heart into the earth. And here it is. Ground. An electrical concept. We are electrical beings, radiating a measurable field from our hearts. Chinese medicine lays out an anatomical map of our heart fire anchored by the root of the kidneys, who hold our deep stores of nourishment underground. This is not a metaphor - it is a thorough, ancient, complex, high-integrity and medically useful alternative anatomical framework. If we are a plant, our heart fire is the flower… subtle and sublime, expressing the ultimate midsummer yang of a plant before it starts to sink down into its autumn fruit, towards eventual winter dormancy or decay.

I share pedicularis with a lot of people, but coming upon a patch this vast, feeling so powerfully magnetized to this little meadow, was a hot-pink muppet anvil dropped onto my head. I’m starting to get the message. My heart pulse is often a fine thread, its rhythm an untethered sail in a tempest. I am meant to take this medicine myself. I can think of a few other people as well… my partner, with the chronic unsettled buzzing in his body… would lightning flower help him, too?

Traditionally on this land, I have read in books, that native Californians dry the flowers for tea, or smoke them, to relax. I munched on one of my muppets as I walked the trail back, and it was bitter, but surprisingly delicious, with a sweet center, like clover. (the bees love the lightning flowers, bees also have an affinity for the heart… ). According to Chinese medicine, bitter is the flavor of the heart. Bitter drains, tightens, dries, and firms, and eliminates excess fire from the heart.

I look at a lot of tongues, and almost always, the tip is a bit red… almost always, there is fire in the heart area. Is this our lack of grounding, collectively? The way we are all up in our heads, our heart fire flying upwards out of control, without our watery yin to balance it out? without enough cultivation of intuition, or rest, to properly nourish, anchor and settle that fire down? Burning, grinding our gears, holding up the world on our individual shoulders, our hearts throwing sparks in longing for the village we know in our bones that we are meant to have?

This is the type of Chinese medicine we will embody in our Spring Embody Chinese Medicine series, starting in a few weeks. For the first time since I launched the class 2 years ago, we’ll have most of our sessions out on the land. We’ll taste and sit with medicines that grow wild where we live, and explore them, and the qi of the landscape, through the lens of Chinese medicine and what the earth tells us about ourselves.

It is spring, there is medicine coming up everywhere. We might circle back to revisit a few trails to see how things have unfurled and blossomed.

If you can feel in your bones that the key to medicine is in nature, and knowing the wild terrain within ourselves, I would love to have you along. We have the sweetest time, and it will be even better when we’re moving across the land.

I have four spaces left, and the perfect people always find their way into the class, by magic. If you are feeling the call, reach out or book a free call to see if you’re meant to be with us in the wild this spring.

Lets talk

Enjoy these sweet early days of spring!

love,
Alison

Hatha Yoga at Dance Palace every Friday 10-11am
🌿
Open appointments this week:
Saturday, 11am - 3pm (March 1)
🌿
book using this link, reply to this email or reach out via email.
more about my offerings >

Embody Medicine Circles are going Feral

Its long-past time to tell you that my next round of Embody Chinese Medicine circles are starting in a few weeks. Reach out if you are interested in signing up… I have four spaces left.

For almost two years we have been circling up to experience our medicine directly in our bodies, in community, in the garden outside the apothecary when the weather is fine. This offering is close to my heart, as we taste our way through Classical Chinese formulas, create home retreats, cast Yi Jing divinations, and most recently we shared a wild winter herb wander (below).

In this spring circle we are going to spend more time in the wild where the real medicine lies. We will head to the forest or the sea for half of our sessions, finding herbs that grow in our region, brewing them into tea, divining their energetics, and experiencing Chinese medicine through the body of the land- witnessing wild yin, yang, dryness, dampness as the seasonal qi unfolds from spring wood into summer earth. If you are feeling this, book a free exploration call here…

Book a free EMC exploration call

Meeting place will be Abalone Apothecary in Point Reyes Station, and then we’ll carpool to trails and beaches in Point Reyes National Seashore. (I will still hold a restful class on the lawn some weeks, when we need to ground and relax)

Spring Session: 13 Weds, 4-6 in person in Point Reyes Station, CA

• March 19, 26, 25 • April 2, 9, 16, 23* • May 7, 14, 21, 28 • June 4
• final June class - bonfire on Limontour Beach + family & friends, date TBD
*note, no class on Weds April 30th

Early Bird Rate: $1300 before March 5th 🪲 after that, $1500

tell me more

what is primitive?

Abalone Medicine Field Notes: Off-Grid in the Desert, 02.25.2025
In recent years I’ve gotten into a rhythm of winter pilgrimage to the desert, to teach and learn, and live outdoors with a vibrant village of people who swim against the current of modern culture and live in connection with the earth. It is a huge push to get there, and it is always jarring to return. Primitive skills, ancestral arts, whatever you call it, is more returning than going backwards.

In Chinese medicine, acupuncture and herbs (surgery and drugs) are the last resort after all the other things that we don’t often think of as medicine. Food and meditation are obvious ones. What you speak about and listen to, what surrounds you, are others. There are more.

I love my life. And modernity is stressful. When I arrive in the desert, I spend a day shedding the layers of stress to arrive at a calm baseline of spirit, or Shen. I am more relaxed in the kindred sharing and bleeding sunburnt lips of temporary village life, than in the scattered mind-state of digital communication and driving at non-human speeds for work, errands and youth sports. It is all beautiful in its way.

Coming back home is a unique opportunity to watch myself twist back up into a state of tension wiry enough to navigate the pressures of modern life. A few gems from this last round of being old-school human in the desert…

1. Living outdoors is sublime.
   Being outside for 9 days, without electricity, using our tent only for sleep... I awoke with the sunrise. I was surrounded at night by the stars and changing moon. When I peed, I watered the mesquite trees. After dark there were fires, with people gathered around, singing, warming themselves, talking quietly. I was aware of the shifts of wind, warmth, and sunshine throughout the day, and learned to adjust my clothing and shade in flow. My spirit felt settled. My sleep was deep, my existential anxiety faded. Living outdoors places us in direct harmonious connection with the earth. When I got home, I resolved to put my bed out on the back deck as soon as the last hint of rain has passed, and decided to tend more to the details of the land where we live, even if I am “always at work” and there is “no time”. Today I teased 15 aloe plants out of a tangled pot that has been sitting outside my door for two years, made a succulent soil blend, and repotted them all along my patio. They are happy and glowing, food for my spirit. Turns out there was time, after all.

2. Older kids, like my teenager, do not incessantly need their mothers.
   This revelation was incredible medicine for our parent-child relationship. Parenting is one of the most rewarding but also hardest, most nervous-system-ravaging aspects of my life. Last week I learned that it doesn’t have to be that way. Parenting isn’t hard because we have bad alchemy with our children, or because we’re bad parents. It is a lack of humane cultural context.

   
   Last week my son ran wild with his friends through a beautiful safe outdoor village. I barely saw him. He had no phone or computer or school or sports, and never got tired or bored. He zoomed through our basecamp every now and again with a funny story or a snack, and then was off again, playing games, practicing archery, making deals, who knows. He came home after I was asleep each night, crawled into his sleeping bag and passed out. He even put himself to bed early on the night before their teen walkabout. I didn’t worry about him, I didn’t schedule his days for him, I didn’t micromanage him, I didn’t battle him about screen time. This is happened instantly without any effort. He was happier than I’ve ever seen him, so was I. I haven’t figured out how yet, but one of my takeaways is, more of this, please.

3. Being unplugged makes us well.
   My baseline consciousness at home is always a bit scattered, always a bit stressed, and now I’m seeing a main reason why: my constant connection to the digital realm. It creeps in quickly. Mostly, I use my phone and computer for communication. Email, scheduling, paying people, sending messages, sharing inspiration & information, replying. Rows and rows of names and numbers with little messages on little screens that are constantly flowing in at random times, breaking attention from whatever is present in the sensory world. Our new normal.

   
   For nine days I didn’t have a computer. I didn’t look at my phone. If I wanted to connect with someone, I hiked across the land and found them (or maybe I sent a message along with another human). I had unexpected and delightful vignettes with people I passed along the way. I believe that we are meant to communicate in person in all the infinite ancient ways, through body language, eye contact, speech, presence. On my return I have noticed myself feeling scattered and frantic as the communications start to fly from all directions all the time through this little glowing box. My time no longer feels my own. The irritability is creeping back in. The only calm moments are when I am attending to something and my phone is away, silent, out of my field, like my precious hours with my aloe babies. I don’t know exactly how, yet, but I want to free my mind from this digital mob scene, while still being in connection with all the people I want to be in connection with.

4. We can create our dream world (in person) without hating.
   The creators of the camp invited us *not* to discuss politics and divisive affairs that did not relate directly to our moments together. I shared in my classes about how to listen to our medicine and care for ourselves as a living ecosystem rather than a machine. I learned from people around me who were sharing their gifts from dawn until dark. I wove a broom and learned about the history and spirit of this craft from someone who I now call a friend. I learned songs and heard stories from old-timers and practiced friction fire. I traded medicine for treasures people made with their hands. I still navigated challenges - I was tired a lot, and at times had to retreat from all the activity, and my lips were cracked and my digestion was off… but I felt an anciently familiar and pervasive sense of relaxed wellness about life.
   
   When, on the drive home, I opened my email and saw the endless scroll of advertisements and political horror stories, I got to work ‘unsubscribing’ and ‘deleting’ everything I saw about the wrecked state of the world. I was not into party politics before, but my independent anarchist news feeds still scream about how vile the “bad guys” are. I want to offer my spirit to beauty, not war. The world I want looks more like the one I just came from. Where I walk through the village, or the grocery store, with an open heart, ready to connect in warmth, human to human, with anyone that I meet. Sharing our creativity and visions for our sweetest world.

5. Generations are meant to mix together.
   My father, my partner, and my son, all joined me in the desert. We found our rhythms in tandem, starting the day together with coffee near our tent and then circling back up before bed. I heard new stories from elders that I have befriended over the past few years. I taught classes attended by thirteen year olds as well as eighty year olds, and everything in between. My friend and her 11 year old son camped next to us. He would sail through camp to share a treat or treasure he had found and received my auntie-love of salty lemon water for hydration. I got smiles from babies and sang with toddlers - I don’t see babies or toddlers in my daily life here. My son went out with a group of youth on the land, guided by some bright and talented twenty-somethings, in a mixed-age group of 12 - 19 year olds - the younger kids looking up to the older ones and their impressive skills, which suddenly seemed more within reach. My father (who grew up hunting) brain-tanned a buckskin, walked among the boulders by starlight, and made dozens of new friends.

   

   My world here at Abalone is more multigenerational than most, but still, I want more, day to day. I recently said goodbye to one of my most precious elder friends, who I was blessed to have in my daily life for the past four years. Somehow, my son never got to meet her before she passed. My 95 year old grandmother is thousands of miles away. How can we create flow across generations? Please, bring your babies to visit!

6. Making things with our hands is good medicine.
   On the second day my friend asked me do I have a creative practice in my life back home. I paused… medicine making is my craft, but most of my creations are focused on specific people’s therapeutic needs, not my own self expression. I write… less than ever with pen and paper, and even then, writing isn’t quite handwork… too heady and abstract. I love to mend, with patches and embroidery… in theory… when I have time... I love to weave baskets, knit, make things with fiber. But I’m no master, and it is not part of my daily life. Rarely do I stop running around long enough to pull out my mending bag.
   
   Last week, everyone was making things, everywhere. Sharing their crafts. It was empowering. Every time I make something for the first time, it feels like remembering, like I’ve done this before. We can fulfill our needs, beautifully, of our own two hands. There was a marketplace filled with objects that had been crafted by humans, without factories and name brands, every piece unique, with spirit. Again, that sensation of ancient wellness mixed with the dust in the air. Can we slow down and sit for a spell, and weave, and mend? Can we afford not to?

I wrote the beginnings of so many letters to you last autumn… until I finally gave in and abandoned my writing desk, to tend to some life happenings that drew the full attention of my heart. I am re-emerging now, a bit tired, but refreshed with the medicine of self-compassion, self-care, surrender to the great cosmic wisdom, and awe of the raw perfection of life and death.

The turning of a fresh year, the rebirthing of the sun, the end of all the holiday buzz, it feels like a quiet new beginning. A dynamic spark of yang emerging from our deep, dark yin of hibernation… into the Chinese year of the snake…

and into all-out cold and flu season, plus bellies recovering from holiday travel and eat and drink. At Abalone Apothecary, herbs have been flowing, for sore throats, fevers, chest colds. It seems like a good time to share about the remedies I have designed to take care of you and your loved ones, naturally, along with practices to cultivate true health and medical resilience.

Every remedy on my shelves has earned its place. When a pattern show ups in our community, I find myself making the same remedy over and over, handwriting the same ingredients on tiny labels in tiny print. I start to get messages telling me that the remedy helps, asking for refills or a bottle for their friend. When a remedy is “vetted” this way, I design a printed label and the formula earns a permanent spot on the shelf as an Abalone Star.

So - the winter things. You have fever and chills, or your throat is sore, or you have a headache and body aches… you’re coughing or your nose is blocked… phlegm, no energy, no appetite, you’re in bed. Flu, Covid, bronchitis, RSV, strep, or Exterior Wind in Chinese Medicine - can all be spirited away by herbs, in combination with proper diet and rest. The correct herbs at the right dose can replace and out-perform industrial antivirals and antibiotics. I’ve seen it again and again, for over a decade. (Just kidding, FDA - I am helpless without pharmaceuticals and medical institutions. I do not claim to be able to treat anything, ever.)

Add some simple diet and lifestyle practices and you can move through illness with ease and avoid getting stuck in chronic sniffle & cough.

Home remedies for lung, throat & sinus infections

• Steam inhalation with aromatic herbal teas and essential oils, like rosemary, eucalyptus, tea tree, peppermint.

• Neti pot with saline rinse. I have locally-made ceramic ones at Abalone.

• Gargle with thyme or oregano herbal teas, black cumin oil, or salt water.

• Hot tea is so helpful for loosening and warming the chest - try simmering licorice with ginger and jujube dates, or steeping sage, mint and thyme tea. or come get a custom blend from me at the apothecary!

• Soup is your friend. Avoid all refined sugar and starches (including bananas & mangos), and hydrate abundantly with good warm water, adding a bit of salt, the juice of a lemon, and, if your throat is raw, a spoonful of honey. If your sinuses are blocked, avoid *all* fruit except lemons & pomagranate.

  

• Have a hot bath or shower, or sauna to move your lymph, open your chest and help clear sludge. Just be sure you cover up in a cozy robe or towel afterwards, and keep your hair dry. Ask me about the strange ancient Hatha yoga cleansing practice I do when I’m in the shower when you see me again ( :

• Do neck and ankle rolls (come learn joint warm-ups at my Friday yoga class) and slowly move through gentle postures like forward bends, downward dog, squats and spinal twists. This gets blood flowing, which helps unblock stagnant lymph, relieves chest and neck pain, and stokes your body’s healing powers.

• Rest more than you think you need, as much as you can, with naps, eyes closed, no screens. Your body is telling you to retreat and do some deeper healing. Take a “resting day” for 24 hours after symptoms vanish.

• take the appropriate Abalone herbal tinctures…

Love Your Lungs

is for acute winter illness with chest and lung involvement. It has herbs like mullein, osha, angelica, elecampane, Chinese skullcap, and more, to dredge phlegm, clear infection, open bronchi, strengthen lungs, calm the cough reflex, drain swollen sluggish lymph, soothe a raw throat, and bolster the Wei Qi - roughly translated as the immune protection against outside invasion.

Clear Head

is what it says - as Chinese Medicine says, it opens the “orifices” aka the eyes, ears, nose, mouth. This remedy helps drain mucous from the sinuses and nasal passages, astringe a drippy nose, and breathe, see, and think clearly. It also has herbs that clear infection and drain lung and lymph sludge. Featuring herbs like yerba santa, horseradish, ju hua, ginger, rosemary, fir and redwood tips.

Sleep Sweet

is the star of my shelf. If you can’t sleep, you can’t heal. Sleep Sweet is designed to take just before bedtime and again in the middle of the night if you pop awake. I’ve spent the last four years refining the formula into a broad spectrum of physically calming, emotionally soothing and electrically down-regulating herbs. It doesn’t make you sleepy the next day, and supports nervous system health as a side effect. Featuring herbs like California poppy, wild lettuce, mimosa, hops, passion flower, chamomile, lemon balm and lavender. Swap out melatonin (hormone replacement - eep) for this gentle & powerful alternative.

Release the Grip

helps with the physical and emotional fallout of stress - like a worried anxious mind, a knotted solar plexus, and crunched, sore neck and shoulders. It has herbs like vervain and pedicularis to help relax the mind and release neck and shoulder tension, milky oats to calm the nerves, Saint Johnswort to relax the tummy and ease the spirit, and rose to soothe the heart.

Choose the one that fits your malady or buy the bundle as a home medicine chest to support your family when you need it - that’s what we do at home, and we never, ever run to the store to get over-the-counter pharmacy items. Many of the herbs in these formula were grown locally and organically, or wild harvested lovingly by yours truly. All the rest are organic and highest possible quality.

PRICES

• 2oz (trial size): $36

• 4oz (one person, enough to get through an acute illness): $68

• 8oz (best value, enough to have on hand or share): $135

• 4 or more bottles, 5% off

You can order these remedies by messaging me here on my website. We can either arrange a pickup at Abalone Apothecary in Point Reyes, or I can ship.

Order a Star Herbal Formula

Taking the recommended dosage is essential. When herbs don’t work, it is often because folks are taking just a few drops, every now and then. High consistent dosing is essential to move the needle on strong acute issues. Abalone remedies are synergistic, so the only “side effect” of high dosing will be stronger, healthier tissues and organs. That said - no remedy will work as intended for everyone, herbs or otherwise. If a medicine doesn’t do what we hoped, tell me! and we can chat, try to get to the bottom of what’s going on, adjust the formulation.

Why choose herbs instead of, say, Tylenol or Robitussin? It comes down to what you mean by ‘medicine’. Herbs are not “alternative” - they have always been the supreme internal remedies in all cultures throughout time, only shoved under the rug in the last century by tycoons who “standardized” medicine to maximize profits. Most over-the-counter drugstore items are made in industrial factories that spew fossil fuel smoke, torturing animals with lab tests - synthetic chemical substances that our biology did not evolve to ingest. Can we really call that medicine? If there is another, more peaceful, way?

Plant medicines convey the infinite power and wisdom of nature. We feel their rightness in our bones - a root buried in living soil, a leaf stretching towards the sun, a flower kissed by bees. Our bodies have evolved with herbs, and they help us heal, time and again, in more ways than we could ever quantify.

It is lovely to walk this mossy path together - I’ve missed you!

I have openings for in-person or telemedicine.
book using this link, reply to this email or reach out via email 🌿
learn more about my offerings here >

hello, lovey.

It is autumn. the time of the Lungs, of grief, of ancestors, of the sharpened metal precision of cutting away, the delicious ache of harvest and natural death, toward the composting and replenishment of our depths with coming rains and dark…

The Spirit of the Lungs is the “Po”, the Holy Janitor of the spirit-body… maintaining the rhythms of our breath, our spiraling rivers of blood, the misting of warm moisture through our inner terrain.

So, as it is “Po” season, I have some practical but essential things to tell you. Please do read - I promise, It’ll be quick (ish)!

What’s in this post:

Friday Yoga at Dance Palace starting this week!

By-Donation Class Series on Food as Medicine >> Register Here.

PLEASE READ - Session Price & Timing Changes

Abalone is Hiring! a tech-savvy Virtual Assistant

Gratitude & Book Recommendation

Friday Yoga: Weekly from 10-11am at Dance Palace. Drop-in, $20.

My Thursday morning yoga class is moving indoors for winter, to Fridays in the Church space at Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station, CA. I share a traditional Hatha Yoga practice that looks and feels a bit like Qi Gong. Suitable for all levels. Focus on establishing the breath and marrying it with movement, and sharing a small simple practice you can use at home between treatments.

Cost is $20 per class - Payment via Venmo, cash, or else walk with me back to the Apothecary to pay by card and socialize and sip tea. Bring a blanket or mat, and bolster if you need one to sit comfortably cross-legged. See you there!

Food as Medicine 🌿 by-donation Class Series Starts November 3rd

based on Chinese Medicinal nutrition & the work of Dr Natasha Campbell McBride

Those who see me in clinic have heard me buzzing about a philosophy of medicinal eating that I have been researching and practicing for several months now. I am experiencing a paradigm shift in both my body and in my thinking about nourishment and healing. From this rabbit hole, I am offering a three-class series on Medicinal Eating, starting November 3rd! This radical yet traditional approach to medicinal nutrition is a do-able, flavor-rich cornerstone for healing *anything* - from psycho-emotional imbalance to chronic fatigue to leaky gut to cancer.

The class series is by-donation *if* you register and attend live (tell me in advance if you have a conflict). Suggested donation is $25-$75 per class or $75-$225 for the series, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. You will be invited to donate after you register.

Essential Guide to Food as Medicine: GAPS & Chinese Medical Philosophy
three-class Zoom series • every other Sunday from 10-11:30am • starting Nov 3rd
Sunday November 3rd, Nov 17, December 1st. 10-11:30am Pacific Time

Register Now!

This approach to medicinal eating is not a one-size fits all - it flexes based on your body’s signals of what foods work; your constitution, body type and genetic heritage; and what you’re trying to cure. There are levels of engagement so you can get started easily and see if it feels right. Food prep is easy once you are in the rhythm, and so tasty - all three kids in our household devour the GAPS meals I make for myself and my son’s leaky gut.

If you’re serious about healing and ready to put the rubber to the road, I will invite you to imagine a flavor-rich life without - gasp - sugar OR starch - and where - double gasp - fat is no longer the enemy. Like I said in my post last week, you will be invited to buy an ice cream maker (but also invited to mostly eat warm food in winter or if your Spleen / Agni is weak).

and before your mind goes to those “buts” about the horrors of cholesterol - an essential & nourishing hormone made by our bodies - read this paradigm-shifting article. Or check out this book by an MD. Or this one… both books are available in the Marin Free Library system.

Excited? Intrigued? Skeptical? Terrified? Perfect! Each class leaves 30 minutes for Q&A. Bring those burning questions.

Lets change our inner and outer world by not eating sh— that drags us down.

Come to the Class!

Session Price & Timing Changes

In response to the blessing of a full clinic (and parenting!) schedule, I am changing my normal clinical session time to 75 minutes, which more realistically reflects the actual amount of time that my hour-long sessions take! If you come to see me regularly (so I know what is going on with you), you are welcome to hop right on the table without a check-in and continue booking 60 minute treatments.

I have also changed my prices to reflect the degree of detailed care I offer, and the ever-increasing cost of living and operations in our beautiful West Marin. My new prices are listed on my usual booking page. You are welcome to pay for sessions when you book or pay at time of service - cash gets you a 5% discount. Herb prices only change when my suppliers change their prices - at the moment they’re holding steady :)

If you have been getting treatments from me for a while, you will be grandfathered in at your current going rate.

I also love trading, for things that I need - right now I could use raw organic honey, local pastured milk & eggs, certain organic fresh home-grown herbal medicines, organic garden compost, and help with deep-cleaning the clinic, carpentry & tear-down projects, artistic sign-making, & permaculture gardening.

Drop me a line to barter! If you have true financial hardship, you can write & request a scholarship application- I have a few sliding-scale slots.

Note on Timing: I strive to begin appointment times precisely when they are scheduled, but with just one treatment room and one Alison prescribing remedies and managing the front counter - there may be a short wait. Please allow for 10-15 minutes of wait time before your session. You will always receive the full amount of time you have booked. If you are scheduled to start, and it is chilly in the garden waiting area, you are welcome to quietly enter the clinic, sit on the bench, and help yourself to warm water - even if the “Treatment in Session” sign is out.

Thank you for your understanding, and please reach out with any questions.

HIRING NOW! Seeking an Experienced Virtual Assistant

Abalone is growing! To support more class offerings, faster herb turnaround times, more easeful scheduling, more consistent public apothecary hours, and thus, wider reach of all-good-effects medicine, I am expanding Team Abalone.

I am seeking a part-time Virtual Assistant for 10-20 hours of work per month. Could lead to full time work with other colleagues searching for same. Pay rate based on experience and efficiency. Start date, immediately.

The right person is hard working, heart-centered, and has the following skill-sets:

• Meticulously manage email lists in Squarespace and Substack

• Create and edit web pages, online courses and online shop in Squarespace

• Edit and embed videos using Capcut & Vimeo

• Create Flyers for Email, Instagram and Print, using Canva orInDesign

• Correspond about clinic scheduling & announcements

• Manage calendars

This person must also be:

• passionate about natural healing, herbs & Chinese medicine

• detail-oriented & precise

• tech-savvy

• blessed with an eye for visual harmony, typography & graphic design

• able to offer quick turnaround time for tasks & correspondence

• self-responsible, direct communicator with good boundaries

• community-oriented and resonant with my take on medicine

Detailed information on possible tasks here» Abalone Virtual Assistant Task List.

If this sounds like you, get in touch, and please share this announcement with anyone you know who might be a great fit.

Interested folks can reach out to me through my website contact form here. Please title your message “Interested in VA Position”.

Please do not apply unless you have experience and genuinely enjoy this kind of work. Bonus points if you are a wild, body-centered & earth-based free thinker who is on a journey to decolonize mind, health, spirit & community 😉

Thank you, hive! 💛🐝✨

Endless Gratitude for You

I want thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your trust, your referrals, and your continued dedication and support. I am blessed and honored to care for a community which so uniquely lends itself to an old-world “country doctor” style practice like this.

I am inspired by the way you lean into self-healing and trust the wisdom of your body, the living earth, the wise plant beings, and the ancient sage medicine of China and India. I am delighted to witness your transformations. My practice deepens through our time in clinic together, our Embody Chinese Medicine circles and your own journeys and inquiries: you are my teachers.

You know that warm fuzzy feeling and delicious earthy aroma when you step through the doors of Abalone? That sweet imprint was established decades ago by Eden Clearbrook when she opened the doors of Garden of Eden Apothecary, which is still thriving as she makes her medicines from her gorgeous home on a nearby organic farm and ranch. Decades ago, Eden created an oasis that has become a magnetic north in West Marin for truly natural healing. I’m lucky to be able to ride the wave and evolve Abalone’s presence in West Marin.

I’m always touched when yet another delightful you comes down from the hills of Inverness or the mesa of Point Reyes to introduce yourself, seeking a remedy and healing support. Or you swirling in on a cloud of salty Bolinas fog… or rolling through from Novato via the back roads… or popping out to the coast from San Anselmo, Mill Valley, Fairfax or the Valley… or when you drift in - sometimes by chance - from Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Portland, or further afield.

I love it when your siblings, parents, spouses, children, find their way to me after hearing about our work together.

Thank you for coming, thanks for spreading the word. Lets stay connected.

You are my medicine!

And a last “Po” note - I have to share my latest delicious inspiration - an animist love-poem to the desert and all its beings - Leslie Marmon Silko’s memoir, The Turquoise Ledge. It is available via audio or in print… I recommend Hoopla as it is free with a library card, and less evil than Audible.

Listen with Hoopla

Buy it from Point Reyes Books

Her tender attention to all the desert beings, the spirits, her creative process, the history of the Pueblo culture where she grew up… laced with a pure-hearted rejection of colonial greed… I highly recommend it if you love solitude and rattlesnakes and stones and the desert, if you are drawn to stories about living breathing pre-colonial American culture, if wild things are your besties. Oh and her breakthrough novel, Ceremony, is also unmissable.

P.S. Substack sometimes asks you to subscribe, or pay, or offers you a discount on a paid subscription - it does this automatically and I do not know how to turn it off. 

I do not expect or desire you to pay for this Animist Alchemy creative missive slash information & announcement stream. There is nothing available for pay that is not also available with the free subscription.

I am thankful for any gift of a paid subscription as a donation to support my craft of medicine and writing, but I'm not askin'...

Just so you know.

~AW

dear you,

It has been such a long time - I miss you and hope you are thriving into autumn. After a love-laced hurricane of family this summer in the high desert and Atlantic coast, I returned home and immediately launched into clinic. I am grateful for you all of you who fill Abalone with your sweetness. I also appreciate your patience, as it is now taking about 2 weeks to fill herbal prescriptions, and treatments are now best booked 1-2 weeks in advance. Changes will be coming soon to accommodate longer sessions and more in-depth work together. And you will be seeing more of a new herbal assistant named Henny in the apothecary, helping to make the medicinal magic happen. Welcome, Henny!

Thursday Yoga on the Green → Friday Yoga at Dance Palace

Starting October 11th, Thursday morning yoga class will be moving indoors for the winter, to Fridays in the Church space at Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station. You are invited to drop in every Friday morning from 10-11am for a gentle Hatha yoga class. All levels welcome, focus is on establishing the breath and marrying it with our movement, and sharing a small simple practice you can use at home between treatments. Cost is $20 per class. Bring a blanket or mat, and bolster if you need one to sit comfortably cross-legged. See you there!

coming up: Food as Medicine 🌿 series

based on Chinese Medicinal nutrition & the work of Dr Natasha Campbell McBride
My delicate and compromised guts were my lead-in to medicine, as told in my first Substack post detailing my 20 day water fast. Another post will be coming soon about my latest adventures in digestion, because I’m hot on the tail of something I’ve been aware of for years, but haven’t immersed in deeply, until now.

A teaser… since August I have been steeped in the science and philosophy of the “GAPS” diet. My son and I have adopted this approach to eating medicinally since then - so far it is powerful in its results, and shockingly do-able, even for my 14 year old, who, to be fair, is blowing my mind with his dedication. You may have heard of “Gut and Psychology Diet”or “Gut and Physiology Diet” or you may have eaten the delicious, nutrient-dense meals from Three Stone Hearth, the folks who made GAPS locally famous in the Bay Area.

But what most people do not realize is that this approach to medicinal eating is not just a “Yes” or “No” food list that eliminates starch and focuses on ferments and good fat. It is an entire philosophy, traditionally and medically informed, which details a customized, step-by-step approach to using food to heal our bodies through repairing the lining of the gut and reestablishing healthy flora. And now that I’ve dived in, I’m seeing affirmation wherever I turn, like finding a copy of Grain Brain this summer at my favorite used bookstore, Herridge Books.

There are hacks to ease in and get used to this new way of cooking and eating - we started while on vacation with our extended family, and found a way to weave the approach into the many snack-sessions and communal feasts. There are lots of variations, from “liquid fasting GAPS”, “no-plant GAPS”, “ketogenic GAPS” and “mostly-plant gaps” - each different ways to adopt this nutritional medicine, based on constitution, genetic heritage, and what needs curing. It dovetails beautifully with the yogic and Chinese medical way of eating in the way that is healing for you, personally.

The full commitment does make family dinners a challenge - but there is a way to do it and preserve sanity, moderation and satisfaction. As my son’s holistic pediatrician said on the outset of the journey - “don’t skimp on flavor” and “buy an ice cream maker”. Add ‘programmable crock-pot’ to the list and you’re there.

What we eat is at the absolute core of our physical health, and I believe a more consciously healing and deliciously enjoyable approach to food will help us all get the most out of our investment in all those spiritual retreats, exercise regiments, and sessions with your acupuncturist 😊, chiropractor or massage therapist.

It is a modern U.S. cultural phenomenon that is storming the world - to eat toxic chemical laden food, or organic “high vibe” products made in factories with a suspiciously long shelf life. Dr Natasha Campbell McBride, the creator of GAPS, is a neuroscientist who healed her son’s autism with her approach (I’m not claiming all autism is curable but it is among the many psychologically-expressed imbalances - like ADHD, depression, anxiety - that can be supported with GAPS). The approach is based on science and a philosophy of medicine that is aligned with my beliefs about our body as living terrain. I have been immersed in her clinical manual, a 512 page single-spaced gold mine called Gut and Physiology Syndrome. (Dr. Thomas Cowan, Sally Fallon and Dr Stephanie Seneff are among the endorsements behind the front cover.) I’ve also been living it. I’ll be launching a series of Zoom lectures soon to share what I’m learning.

So far my favorite takeaway from the book is, “Get used to the idea that food does not come from the grocery store” which leads me to shout out my favorite CSA, our local-as-f** Little Wing Farm, brought to us by farmer Molly Meyerson, who said it best - “If your food does not sparkle, what is it even doing?”

Ask me more about this approach to food as medicine when I see you in clinic, or stay tuned for more detailed writings and an online class series coming this fall.

the Equinox.

To honor the pivot between light and dark, my partner and I spent an evening with Manari Ushigua, a Sápara elder from the Ecuadorian Amazon, in a group meditation. I always marvel that there is not a line out the door and headlines on the front pages when such an Amazonian elder comes to town. This Equinox ceremony was a gathering of about 40 beautiful souls - intimate and perfect.

Like many of you, I imagine, for the past year I have been witnessing and self-educating about a currently horrific episode of humanity. I ingest as much as I can hold, I get saturated, and then I pivot, like the earth on its axis, seeking a new life-supporting angle, a vaster, broader perspective, so I don’t crumble uselessly under the weight of all the suffering. I find medicine in the perspectives of ancient, earth-based cultures, to help me understand and metabolize the darkness, offer my grief and clear sight, and shine brightly again.

When I have been in the presence of spiritual elders and Earth guardians from the jungle, their deep connection to the root wisdom of nature leaves me with new clarity and a lighter heart. A loving and radically sane wisdom that pulls no punches about the violations happening upon the earth, but offers a path forward of joy and humor - not doom and bitterness. This is the juicy core of what I’m seeking - the superpower to hold the raw truth of our realm, uncompromisingly and without bypass, with love and playfulness. So I’ll share a bit of what we received from Manari, in case you need a dose of this medicine, too…

The gathering was a potent way to honor this turning towards the darkness. We meditated with tobacco tea and fermented cacao while Manari sung his icaros and his friend sang her songs; then we shared our visions out loud and listened to Manari’s guidance on each. Afterwards we got to chat with him more informally, to share more visions, ask questions, and hear about his perspective on our current moment on Earth. My own “vision” was an experience of my heart as a place of darkness - but not in a bad way - rather, a velvety vastness like the depths of the forest, a quiet, bottomless source of life and nourishment drawn directly from the roots and soil at the heart of the Earth.

Such, perhaps, is also the offering of the coming long nights of winter…

The vast dark yin of my heart stretched all the way from the Amazon jungle to the wilderness of Northern New York state, where I first fell in love with the forest, where my recent ancestors have been tending medicine and tapping maples and growing food for generations… displaced long ago as serfs or refugees, perhaps, from Europe, and surely displacing others in their wake.

My inner forest expanded until my body took on the form of a bird and I felt the absolute freedom and bliss that comes from having, and unfolding, my wings. I saw that to love well, I have to create my own happiness in my life.

Manari said my vision was “muy lindo” and then responded to me, as he did to everyone who shared what we experienced in our meditation. I’m not sure why he made this connection, but the first thing he said was, what we eat is very important, because it becomes our words, and our words are a powerful way to communicate with the Earth and offer our medicine. I loved the affirmation of my recent care towards the food that goes into my body… and made the connection between medicinal food and the cultivation of words to transmit good energy and beauty. This is not always easy - especially in the throes of parenting teenagers (maybe a healed gut will help, or an extra prayer at meals). Yogic scripture also describes how our food, in its purest form, becomes our speech.

Then, Manari went to the core and talked about self love - that universal message that can circle for decades as an abstract idea before it lands within as a practice - the truth that we cannot love others well until we love ourselves. May we offer understanding and tenderness towards ourselves as we pivot into longer nights.

And then he panned out and began speaking to our collective moment, and our small group huddled around him, every now and again someone translating a bit.

This error is everywhere, from the old or new testaments of the bible and its creation myths, to the scientific mythology of Darwin’s evolutionary hierarchy, to the Eastern concept that humans are the apex and pinnacle of the wheel of reincarnation, to this modern fallacy that with every new epoch of technology there is only sum-total advancement that is unquestionably worth the cost of whatever is lost and harmed in the process. Everywhere you turn, humans express the idea that we are the ultimate life form and the world was made for us.

And everywhere are the problems this causes - domination, extraction, depletion, spiritual separation from our source of life… bodiless heads calculating monetized “solutions” to cause the next layer of problems… and most hauntingly, a profound blindness to the great intelligence that is just beyond the reach of our logical mind - a blindness to the vast power of our hearts and spiritual senses.

Manari explained that we are going to have problems as long as we fail to recognize that all of the threads of life connect to one another and we are just a part in the weave of nature - not the center of it all.

According to Manari and the cosmology of his people, the earth is spinning faster and faster right now. Thus, everything is extreme and heightened, with so much intensity, division, the wars, the fires and floods. There is a greater force at play than human folly in isolation… it is that same error again, to think we are the sole architects of a chaotic global quickening, after all…

I’m sure there is more depth to this cosmology than what I could catch from a short conversation through my patchwork understanding of Spanish, but this is what I took away. The earth’s acceleration - whether it be philosophical, spiritual, physical, or mythological - is on its own natural course, encompassing our human timescales and influences. Investing financial resources to heal the unfolding chaos is futile. Said Manari, laughing, “who do we give this money to? The sky?”

So then, I asked, what are we to do? Just hold on tight, and go fast, like the Earth? Learn to ride the waves? Manari laughed. No! Do not move fast to keep up with the Earth!

For anyone who thinks this is “airy-fairy stuff”, check out the two-part series “Animism is Normative Consciousness” on the Emerald podcast, which starts,

“for 90 percent of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate, imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with forces with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an -ism. It was felt experience. It was, simply, how things were.”

We are completely and utterly interwoven with Earth and its nature, all its mysterious and known energetic and spiritual patterns, all of its physicality. Our bodies are literally the earth - as you already have heard me go on about in my posts. Other creatures know how to attune to the Earth’s messaging- muskrats sense a powerful winter is coming and build dens with thicker walls; birds somehow know when to migrate. Humans have this ability, as well, to read the messages of the Earth - if only we are taught to do so. We can remember.

In answer to my question Manari said, we need to learn the language of the earth, how to listen to the messages in the winds, the trees, the weather, everything the Earth expresses. And then, when the flood levels are rising in the town, five people have to get together and urinate in the water to ask the Earth to slow down and withdraw her flood. We were laughing - this was not a doom and gloom conversation. And I was reminded of a past teacher, Wohpe, who shared how women can feed their menstrual blood to their garden, and all the infinite information of our blood, the chemicals, the hormones… all logged in our vessels from the past lunar cycle, is conveyed to our medicine, who attunes itself exactly to our community’s particular needs.

From a practical perspective Manari said one of the best ways to do this is to use our dreams to communicate with the Earth (he has a program to teach this) - a rich vault for another time…

For now, I am intrigued, mulling over these teachings and wanting more. I find myself facing the sun in a quickie morning prayer before I dive into phone or parenting; opening up to the songs of the plants and elements and wildlife in the cracks throughout the day; sensing the tone of the juvenile bobcat walking just ahead in our driveway as we return home in the afternoon; putting my skin under moonlight at night, just for a moment. Open up and listen and see how my feelings resonate, without thinking. Just as we can sense and feel and hear the messages of our own bodies to divine what is needed for our healing and thriving. Just as with all divination across all the lands and throughout time.

In Chinese medicine the pivot of this season is a quivering fade-out from the yang of late summer’s harvest, the time of ochre and gold, the time of the digestion, the transformation of food into ourselves, animate… turning towards yin, the autumn time of letting go - the time of the slaughter, the time of grief, the time of metal, the time of the lungs. A hot morning, a cold morning. Cool in the shade, scorching in the mid-day sun. As the winds kick up and the pivot hovers, ready to turn… the blades of leaves dying and dropping from the trees; the knife-edge separating the hide from the flesh, the refinement of the air we breathe at the microscopic boundary waters of the marshes between our great blood-rivers within. Our bodies starting to express a whole different suite of emotions, urges, symptoms and sensations, with the coming of the dark.

I hope this meander of still-digesting experience offers some soul-food to help you weave your summer harmoniously into your autumn… that you find playful ways to respond to your world’s chaos… and I hope to see or hear from you soon.

I have open appointments for telehealth or in-person.
book using this link, reply to this message or reach out via email

upcoming events with Alison / Abalone Medicine

• Embody Chinese Medicine circles: after a season’s break, Autumn 2026 is tentatively ON - details and sign ups will be posted on my website soon.

People have been asking me about my intake process, so here is a detailed breakdown of what it looks like to work with me in clinic.

But to really share what I do, first I need to tell you a story…

the mystery of the Orange Slime

Abalone Medicine Field Notes | January 17, 2021

In our local woods there is a healthy creek where salmon spawn and the water runs cool and crystaline. All along this creek is a delightful diversity of micro-life, stone and fallen redwood brimming with tiny mosses, insects, flowers & lichen.

One day I wandered up a tributary of this creek and noticed that something was not quite right - there was an overgrowth of some globby-looking entity -some kind of algae? (blob-ID is not my wheelhouse.) The verdant life along the water suddenly morphed into a tiny, sad and apocalyptic diorama - where this goop grew, no other life was found. I was certain the orange sludge was an invader, destroying or obstructing all the diversity of flora and fauna in its path.

I hiked a bit further upstream and looked closer. Almost totally buried in the hillside, crumbling and camouflaged by the surrounding earth, was an old, rusty iron water pipe leeching rivulets of golden-copper mineral into the creek. Wherever the orange ribbons of iron streamed out of the corroded pipe, nothing grew except the blob, which thrived in abundance.

I suddenly realized that this uggy-looking thing was a hero - the only creature that seemed to be able to consume and transmute the pipe-stuff that was killing everything else in its path. I daresay the blob was cleaning the creek. I was told later that it was likely benign “iron bacteria”.

How easy it would have been to label this gooey monolithic life form a problem, to try to eradicate it, if I had not looked closely and traced it back to the hidden leeching pipe - its source, or root cause (though really, the root cause had to do with the humans who laid the pipe). Like when we chase down and micro-manage the “villains” in our own bodies and end up overriding the unfathomable intelligence of our own nature and destroying the very thing which heals us. Thus bypassing the deeper more fundamental healing our bodies are begging for.

ecological medicine with Alison

Background. Traditional Chinese Medicine or “TCM” as it is taught in the US, is a product of Mao’s cultural revolution - a spiritually-sanitized skeleton of the ancient roots of the medicine. TCM incorporates 300+ hours of Western medical study leading to a license to practice acupuncture and provide primary medical care. Classical Chinese medicine, by contrast, is thousands of years old, rooted in ancient Taoist ideas about the human body, nature, and life. I learned the skeleton of TCM through 5 years of grad school, and I flesh it out with my clinical experience, 20+ years of yoga practice, a lifetime of immersion in nature, and an undergraduate degree in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences from MIT.

From yoga, I learned to directly feel energy pathways in my body and sense my own qi. My earth science studies taught me the physical and energetic anatomy of our planet: how ocean currents (yin & blood), atmospheric winds (qi) and rainforests (wood, earth) store and move solar energy (yang) around the living planet (our bodies). My deep life-long relationship with the natural world helps me to intuitively understand the Chinese earth-based concepts of fire, wood, water, earth, metal. I dip into passages from classic Chinese medicine texts to more deeply understand this vast tradition. I pay careful attention to what you say, and what you show. All of these together guide me every day in clinic.

Inner Tracking. Chinese medicine treats the whole person. In order to do this, I seek a detailed picture of what you experience physically, mentally, & emotionally - symptoms, but also, the day-to-day details of your experience in your body - like whether you digest quickly, or slowly. Together, we track and map your internal ecology. Through rebalancing your being as a whole, symptoms often resolve.

It is more like tending a garden than fixing a machine. The remedy can be simple - moisten what is dry or fill what is empty - or more complex, like rebalancing energetic organ functions, yin/yang relationships, or healthy qi dynamics.

When people ask me, “do you have anything to balance my hormones?” or “can you give me something for ulcerative colitis?” my answer is “No”. Hormones and ulcerative colitis aren’t a thing in Chinese medicine, so I would never treat them. I treat *you*. Hormones are just messengers, giving us essential information, best not to be silenced. Everyone is different, so the cause for your gut symptoms will be different than someone else with the same issue. I can only suggest a remedy if I take the time to understand your unique inner ecology.

For example, someone might experience gut problems because they are deficient and depleted, like parched soil that lacks moisture and nutrients. Someone else might have digestive issues because they chronically clench their guts and hold their breath; yet another person might be clogged up with sludge. These three people need completely different remedies to balance their underlying ecology. The depleted person needs nourishing; the clenched person needs to breathe, relax, and move their qi; the sludgy person needs to clear dampness and strengthen.

The initial intake. Consultations last between one and two hours; three if you include acupuncture. We sit in my cozy treatment room. I offer you warm filtered spring water to sip on, and I ask lots of questions - about your sleep, diet, emotions, skin, pain, habits, bowel movements, mental health, lifestyle, eyes, thirst, and many more. I I listen, I take notes… I look at your pulse and tongue. I ask you about your medical history, any supplements or pharmaceuticals your taking; I ask about your health struggles, your insights and your goals. People often tell me it is the most in-depth intake they’ve had from any practitioner.

Some folks are looking to treat a specific issue or to learn how to be healthier. Other folks have already gone far down the path of healing themselves; they’ve worked in many modalities and want to take the time to get my nature-based perspective on what’s happening.

Coaching. While I’m getting a sense of your inner ecology, I share what I see from a Chinese medical perspective, and I suggest remedies, eating habits and lifestyle adjustments. I tell folks not to be overwhelmed - I am not suggesting that you should do, or even remember, everything I say!

I summarize all my suggestions in an email or written card, and I encourage you to only do the things that feel exciting, do-able, resonant, and aligned. Once in a while, a specific recommendation is clearly going to be essential if you really want to feel better and tap your deeper vitality and health.

Herbal recommendations. I almost always recommend constitutional herbs, which you either take home after your consult, or pick up in a few days when ready. These herbs come in many forms: powders, syrups, tinctures or “raw” dried herbs. Custom house-ground raw herbs are the most potent, but also the most work to prepare at home. I blend these custom formulas from my Chinese and Western herbal apothecary; I will research to create the most accurate formulation within my power. If it is not practical to cook herbs at home each day, I make custom formulas into tinctures (alcohol extractions) that travel easily and take zero prep, and I offer “granules” as well - just add a few spoons of herbs, hot water, stir, and drink.

These “constitutional remedies” are the workhorses which go deep and shift the baseline situation in your body/mind/spirit. It sometimes takes a few evolutions of a remedy to understand the terrain, peel away the layers and get results. The formulas in Chinese medicine change as you change - you’re not meant to be on a prescription for life. Sometimes the path is direct, and others, a spiraling hunt.

I also recommend symptomatic remedies with organic or carefully wildcrafted herbs. These blends are informed by my training in Western herbalism and are vetted by the people that come through the apothecary doors. They do things like help you sleep, clear a stuffy nose, or calm anxiety. I often prescribe both constitutional and symptomatic herbs - they work well together. For orthopedic issues, I prescribe a combination of internal medicine and topical remedies, along with acupuncture, cups and medical massage.

An effective herbal formula is magic. Herbs can get us out of the first layer of muck and pain and discomfort, and spark the motivation to make bigger lifestyle changes.

Food as medicine. Sustainable healing depends on learning how to use food to support your body’s unique ecology. Food is a daily opportunity to shift things for the better: a few small dietary tweaks can make a huge difference (like starting the day with a warm hydrating beverage or cutting back on raw cold foods). I love it when people transition from following rules imposed by an external “expert” or rigid philosophy (i.e. “keto” or “vegan” or “low-Fodmap”) and start to truly listen to their body’s messaging about what foods work and what don’t. This listening is a practice. As you heal, your medicinal eating will evolve and change.

Acupuncture & all the things. Acupuncture is incredible for releasing physical pain and tightness, including arthritis. Over time, it can resolve menstrual issues, seizures, frequent urination, insomnia, anxiety, constipation, bloating, neuropathy, fevers, cough… and on. Acupuncture is an incredible, gentle way to address health issues through laying down on a warm table, relaxing, and letting yourself receive completely. Read my essay about acupuncture’s benefits here.

That said - I have come to realize that the real secret to radiant health and vitality is in the everyday things we do for free: drinking water, breathing, walking properly, fasting, sleeping, doing nothing.

When you work with me, I offer acupuncture, moxa, cupping, hot stones, personalized yoga practices and diet plans, but I also guide you on how to reframe your everyday life so your habits lead to healing and vitality. Things like hydration, breath work, soaking, sweating, not-doing, water fasting, hammock sleeping, jade yoni egg work, barefoot arch rehabilitation - and many more. In my Embody Chinese Medicine circles we calendar home retreats to relax, observe ourselves, and gain deeper insight on what medicine we need in our lives.

Packages: committing to a course of treatment. Following your initial consultation, I recommend a course of treatment that may include herbs, follow-up consults, acupuncture, and yoga instruction. I strongly encourage a course of focused work together to address anything chronic or complex, because that is where the real magic happens. I offer a healing immersion called two Moons and also create custom packages based on your unique situation. Custom packages range from 3 weeks to three months and are all-inclusive, including herbal remedies, acupuncture and check-ins. Packages are more affordable than booking sessions individually. They invite a mindset of focus, dedication and self-accountability. Committing to a container of work together allows us to track the changes that unfold from your herbs and lifestyle changes, evolve the treatments, and midwife a transformation into a new, more vital and resilient realm of well being.

Inner listening, the holy grail. People sometimes find their way to Abalone feeling betrayed and frustrated by the discomfort or disfunction in their bodies. They might have lots of data - lab tests, etc - and also might have lots of disconnection from their direct embodied experience. It is not uncommon for me to ask, “what are you feeling” and have someone answer, “my hormones are messed up.” It is a paradigm shift to navigate our medicine by tracking the actual felt experience of imbalance in our bodies.

I gently press on - “what do you feel in your body? do your limbs feel heavy? are you tired or wired? how is your memory? any hair loss?” Inner tracking, and then honoring what we hear, is a practice, and a worthy one. Learning to navigate by our ever-changing inner ecological landscape, rather than by external data or “experts”, is the innermost heart of the healing process. Our bodies don’t lie, and don’t lead us astray. We just need to listen, map and track what we find, and then respond with kind and potent remedy.

During consultations and clinical sessions, I guide you to develop this inner listening. In fact, I’ve created an educational offering around exactly this, because after several years in clinic, it feels like the most fundamental way I can help. To cultivate inner tracking skills in community, you can join my Embody Chinese Medicine circles.

a philosophy of medicine

I strive to treat the whole person, not the disease. Imagine ‘healing’ a plant that needs water by painting its brown leaves green every day (symptom suppression) rather than observing its whole state of being and then giving it a good soak (root cause medicine). I consider the human body like a garden or a unique bioregion, rather than a complex machine. The body’s terrain has intelligence, life force, and spirit. We move towards self-healing if we are given the right conditions. We can allow the intelligence of our nature to handle the details.

As a permaculture gardener or an indigenous land tender knows, if you deeply understand a complex living system, you can use the innate wisdom and power in fire, water, metal, earth, and green sprouting plant life to regenerate, vitalize and sustain an ecology’s thriving. Watch Biggest Little Farm or read Tending the Wild for incredible examples of this on an ecological scale. Their methods work with the power of nature, rather than trying to micromanage and dominate a living system through, say, monocrops, tilling, pesticides, & GMOs… or symptom-suppressing pharma and biological nanotech...

Chinese medicine does not treat hormones or diseases - instead, the medicine is designed to treat the ecology of the whole human in our ever-changing aliveness. Our bodies never lie, never ‘betray’ us. If, say, our hormones are off-kilter, they are signaling an imbalance, yes, but does that mean they need a manual over-ride? Perhaps they are altering their normal ranges intelligently in order to regulate our bodies in ways that even the most cutting-edge science does not understand. After all, aren’t they totally interconnected with the infinite dynamics that unfold constantly within us and between us and earth and cosmos?

Remember the orange slime?

Modern science has a reliable legacy of making over-confident claims only to find out later that things aren’t what they seemed - like the current unraveling of the cholesterol myth. Modifying our microbiology to force numbers that we deem “normal” can obstruct our messaging systems and scramble our body’s distress-relief strategies (like with cholesterol, fevers, inflammation or even blood pressure).

With Chinese medicine, we get to put these questions on the shelf - we don’t have to choose. We can work in a different, effective way, focused on direct experience, careful observation, and an elegant alternate system of biology, anatomy, and pathology based on the intricate dynamics of the natural world.

Inner tracking, inner mapping, and ecological rebalancing simply works, whether be the body or the land. It is kind, gentle, and harnesses the natural healing and regenerative powers of life itself. The key is to observe closely and carefully to see what the living system is truly calling for in order to heal. And slowly, in realistic steps that we know how to make, to answer the call.

Share Animist Alchemy

It is the summer solstice! The peak of Yang, the full flowering of sunlight, which after today will slowly ripen towards late summer abundance (earth phase), and then autumn harvest (metal). In Chinese medicine, mid-summer is the season of the heart. The emotion of the heart is elation or joy, and the element is fire, radiating life from our heart center, like our own personal sun.

Most modern Westerners would say without a second thought that the brain is the command center, the VIP organ that controls everything.  Yet in Chinese medicine, the heart is the supreme “emperor,” hidden in the depths of the palace of the body. The heart, like a good leader, inspires all the other organs of our being. In Chinese medicine, each organ has its own spirit. The heart’s “shen” is the ultimate spirit, where all other spirits originate and return.

It is the heart that radiates at the center of our qi field, or the electromagnetic field around our bodies, as modern science now knows. The heart commands the blood’s vital flow and rhythm, it is the emotional center that emanates love, and it is the seat of our soul & conscious mind- the “shen”. This sovereign mind is not our calculating intellect - it is our awareness and knowledge drawn from the true nature of existence.

The shen is the brightness of our eyes, the spark of life itself. When the shen is low, a person looks flat, unanimated, dull. When our shen is strong, our eyes are bright and dynamic, our voice is clear, our cheeks are rosy, and our energy is magnetic.

Summer is fire, and today, solstice day, we are flooded with the pure yang of solar light. Its opposite, the full-dark yin of winter kidneys, sinks its water down deep underground and roots this ascending heart fire. Just as there is always a bit of yin in yang, there is always bit of water in fire - without root, or fuel, fire sublimates quickly.

A healthy heart fire is meant to flower into fruit, bring ideas to manifestation, spiraling our living blood through our limbs to inspire free and natural movement and expression. Healthy heart fire is not pathological or destructive- but if it blazes out of control we get high blood pressure, insomnia, anxiety, manic behavior… a wildfire after a drought… if it is deficient, we are lackluster and withdrawn, unable to make our dreams happen. Healthy heart blood is rich, abundant, free flowing, like a dynamic river full within its banks. Healthy shen is clear and bright. 

Midsummer is the perfect time to get right with our hearts. How do we tend this precious heart fire, our creative emanation, to manifest our dreams and goals?

First, sounds simple, but breathe. A swim or a hike (or however you like to get moving) will inspire deep, rhythmic breathing, and the heart’s spiraling rivers (vessels) will be effused with life down to the smallest tributaries. Yoga and qi gong also steep the body in breath, qi, and thus, blood. (Come to my yoga class on Thursdays from 10-11am in the green outside Abalone and get some of this ;) Qi and blood are two sides of the same coin - like the way light can be understood as a particle (yin, blood) or a wave (yang, Qi). The yin physicality of the blood rides the qi wave of energy. One cannot flow without the other.

Relaxing stuck tension in the body and feeling our feelings are two ways more to keep the qi and blood flowing. And if we don’t get enough rest, all will grind to a halt no matter what we do.

For the heart to flower, we also need hydration and nourishment. Without plentiful water, the blood is scant and will not flow richly enough to allow full-body nourishment. Red fruits and stews made of organic, humanely raised meat with dark leafy greens ensure the blood is abundant and strong. Blood can also be blocked from physical trauma - like an old or new injury - which is why it is so important *not* to ice (hot/cold hydrotherapy, arnica salve & herbal patches are all better alternatives!) and to gently move an injured area when the time is right, as you heal - to keep it flowing.

When our heart blood is nourished and flowing well, we are naturally calmer and wiser in navigating our lives.

To nourish our heart, we also must nourish the shen, the spirit of the heart. Which brings us back to our navigation system. Beyond the Chinese anatomy with heart as mind, many other ancient & earth-based traditions understand that humans are meant to be guided by the heart, with the thinking mind it its rightful place as well-tamed subordinate who is there to execute the logistics. In fact, in Chinese Medicine the brain is not even a major player - it is just a “curious organ”, an offshoot of the kidneys. It is the heart’s mind, not the calculating intellect, who should be steering the ship. This is a fundamental shift in how we modern Western folks go about solving problems and orienting to our lives.

Summer solstice is the perfect time to flip the script and start feeling our way towards our truth with our hearts as our true north. Imagine the societal implications!

An incredibly powerful - and empowering - way to navigate thus, to sense our truth and discover what is out of balance, is to feel inwardly and perceive our body’s symptoms and sensations directly without the chatter of mental interpretation or analysis. Then, we can divine the message in this information. By “listening” from the heart we bypass the need to measure ourselves externally through laboratory experiments, micro-analyses, disease names and mental calisthenics. Turning inward to sense how we feel, or how a remedy works for us, or what we need, can be enough to open the door to wise self-guidance. It amazes me how much my patients already know about what they need. A nuanced and holistic system like Chinese medicine can then connect the dots and understand the emerging pattern in the body’s messages. Different patterns (like blood deficiency vs heart fire) require different herbs, foods, and healing practices to move the whole person towards holistic balance and full flowering of life force.

This practice of “inner tracking” is what we cultivate together in my Embody Chinese Medicine Circles. I will be launching my next series, thirteen weeks over almost four months, this time! to hone this body-centered navigation system, starting in September - stay tuned, and reach out if you’re interested. The transformation I’ve witnessed in the lives of everyone in our current group has been unbelievably inspirational.

Until then, time unplugged outdoors in nature; divination; meditation, dancing, yoga, qi gong, massage, physical exercise, somatic therapy, prayer, good sex, acupuncture, sauna, sweat lodges, healing practices, rituals… anything to be consciously happily in our bodies… can all help us attune to the wisdom of our hearts, allow feelings to flow, and cultivate a disposition of love and peace.  

It takes courage to let go of the shore of the thinking brain and trust the waters of our Empress Shen, but the benefits are endless. It is the perfect season to follow your own sovereign heart.

this Saturday!! *free* class :::

Natural Bathing Practices for Self-Healing & Wellness
Sat June 22, 10 - 11am PT, Virtual/Zoom

Ahhh, bath medicine. One of my very favorite remedies in the whole wide world. Humans across the globe and throughout time have always used bathing practices to cultivate health, embodiment, relaxation, social relationships and spiritual connection.

In this class, I’ll share how to use bathing practices intelligently to suit your unique individual ecology, drawing from the principles of Chinese medicine, yoga and my own experience. I will share how to use hydrotherapy intelligently to promote immune health, circulation and happiness. I’ll talk about cultivating different Qi through immersion in various wild waters; salt baths; hot springs; soaking, sweating and plunging according to your constitution; dry brushing, and why you might *not* want to shower every day! Come play in the water with me and find out what type of bath-healing is best for you.

Register for Free Bathing Class

I have open appointments this month through July 26, for telehealth or in-person.
book using this link, reply to this message or reach out via email
learn more about my offerings here >

🌾

upcoming *free* class :::

Natural Bathing Practices for Self-Healing & Wellness
Sat June 22, 10 - 11am PT, Virtual/Zoom

Ahhh, bath medicine. One of my very favorite remedies in the whole wide world. Humans across the globe and throughout time have always used bathing practices to cultivate health, embodiment, relaxation, social relationships and spiritual connection. In many places they are still an essential part of community self-care - the hamam of the Middle East, the banya of Russia, the Finnish sauna, Japanese onsen, the Korean jimjilbang, the ceremonial and health-giving sweat lodge traditions of native North America… and on. (tell me your favorites!)

Western US culture, so disembodied and hyper-cerebral, is a bit late to the party. There is no mainstream bathing tradition here, although right now in alternative circles cold-plunging is all the rage, promoted as a one-size-fits-all “biohack”.

In this class, I’ll share how to use bathing practices intelligently to suit your unique individual ecology, drawing from the principles of Chinese medicine, yoga and my own experience. I will share why Wim Hoffing is not good for all bodies, and how to use hydrotherapy intelligently to promote immune health, circulation and happiness. I’ll talk about steam baths; sauna therapy; cultivating different Qi through immersion in various wild waters; I’ll cover salt baths; hot springs; soaking, sweating and plunging according to your constitution; dry brushing, and why you might *not* want to shower every day! Come play in the water with me and find out what type of bath-healing is best for you.

Register for Free Bathing Class

P.S. last month’s class on herbal home care was amazing, thank you all for coming 🫰🏽🫰🏽🫰🏽 Part two TBA - there was way too much for one hour.

Thursday yoga on the green :::

10-11am every Thursday @ Third Street green in Point Reyes Station CA

I am teaching a drop-in community yoga class every Thursday from 10-11am outside of Abalone Apothecary while the weather is fair. All are welcome, $15-$20 sliding scale, tell your friends. Bring your own mat or a blanket and a cushion if you need it to comfortably sit cross-legged on the earth.

The class is traditional Hatha yoga, designed to impart a daily home practice. Looks more like qi gong than vinyasa flow. All levels. No sign ups, just come!

our skin will listen :::

Abalone Field Notes | 06.11.24

Last week I hit my limit. It had been a crazy-long streak of *doing*… a pattern I’ve written about here a time or two before. For a few weeks, my days off work were full of chauffeuring teenagers or cooking or cleaning or organizing or gardening or tending the snake 🐍. I actually enjoy all of those things. But when I skimp for too long on time alone in nature, my fuse gets shorter, my heart gets heavier, my mind scatters and my perception gets myopic AF. Until I finally take myself on a wild wander to work it all out with the land. (anyone else have this?)

So I set aside three hours (seriously that is all it took!) and went and got lost on the ridge trails in San Geronimo Valley where I live. It was a hot day, and inspired by a recent share by a friend and colleague, I wore minimal clothing in order to allow my body to more directly convene with the elements. I felt connected with a more wild vintage of humanity where we didn’t smother our skin under all this defensive material. When we didn’t hide from each other or the elements any more than was truly necessary.

I remember being little, like maybe 3 or 4 years old, and going to the Atlantic ocean with my family in the summer (thank you ♡ mom & dad). I can still feel the utter delight of running around completely naked through the sand and surf and tidal pools. I never remembered feeling ashamed, or scared of being exposed, or needing protection from the textures and temperatures of the land and air and water. I was blessed, and safe, and free. Then one year, my parents told me (very reasonably, given cultural norms and the public nature of the beach) that I was too old to run naked. I remember being confused and having this really deep and visceral sense of loss. I don’t remember tons of things from my childhood but I remember that - in fact, I remember resisting, trying to revolt and disobey.

Now, decades later, I’ve been so thoroughly socially conditioned & compulsively over-clothed that it was at first an edgy experience to wander the ridge last week with only the basic coverings that the law requires. It wasn’t that I was worried about how I appeared to others - I barely ever see people up on those trails. It was just a sense of uncertain strangeness. Normally, with leggings or a thin shirt over back & belly, I muffle this endlessly expansive organ of perception - the skin.

It wasn’t long before my vulnerability turned to a deep and delicious sensitivity to the elements and the living land. I was fully available to let down my guard, extend my Qi field, broaden my senses, and gather all the invisible textures in the field through my pelt. I played with a three-dimensional energetic exchange, akin to echolocation, like we cultivate in the practice of medical qi gong - only with the whole body, not just the hands.

The directionality of the sense of our skin is infinite, with us in the center, like a human-shaped sun. Through the boundary of our physical form we gather and express radially in every direction, between our dan tien and the world, wherever we roam. A mastery of this must be how martial artists of ancient lore could know when someone crept up silently behind them.

In Chinese Medicine there is this concept of the “cou li” - the interstices, the tiny spaces between the outer material of our physical structure, sometimes translated as the pores of our skin. Always exchanging, opening or closing more or less, always emanating our essence and gathering from the field. Something different happens when we draw a breath in from the skin instead of the chest or belly. When we exhale from every pore. Our surface comes alive.

Moving first through a narrow deer trail laced with poison oak, I wove so so carefully to avoid the slightest brush with that beautiful trickster and protector of the forest. Still, I may have a dot or two of the oak rash as a memento. Over a few creek crossings, through coolness of air or ohso-slight softness of ground, I sensed the remaining hydration of the skin of the early-summer land. Moving under canopy of redwood, fir and live oak, cutting through a western heartsease patch I know, hair-faint grazes of usnea-wrapped branches and dry leaf litter hinted at, but did not reveal, why the violets were so scant this year. Immediately after the ennui of my depleted flower patch, I found myself slowing ever so slightly to luxuriate in the surprisingly heavier, softer air that hovered over the ground up to thigh level - where the dense large green foliage of angelica had thickened delightfully since seasons past. Scant violets, anbundant angelica, both water loving creatures… I logged the paradox in my limbs. And inhaled a last wilting wild azalea bloom, they were already finished, so long had it been since I had visited that friend of a trail.

Zagging up through open-skied manzanita fields and out onto a big fire road, I could *feel* the path. My skin was picking up new layers of messaging from the warmth, the breeze, the sun, as I went in and out of the canopy, as the earth radiated its long-wave solar heat back up from below. I met with all the plants I could not name, tucking a sprig of tiny-flowering heather-like evergreen into the strap of my tiny backpack. And wished I could drink freely from creeks and not even need to carry that.

My openness to the land was received. A few meters ahead I came across a big beautiful rust-and-black-toned grey fox. It was so healthy and had so much thick red fur that at first I thought it was a different species altogether. Instead of dashing off, it lingered, sensing me. I stayed present & centered, spoke softly, reached out with my skin. It watched me, relaxing its alert stance, and finally sat on the ground and started grooming itself. We were hanging out, sunbathing, doing our own thing together without having to talk, like old friends. It reminds me of the beginning of a book that I love, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, where he is living in some wild area of Bali and starts to be able to communicate with the land and animals. The ability gradually vanished when he returned back to the city. I believe we all have this capacity if we cultivate it. Tell me your stories of wild encounters, I would love to hear!

Layers of detail popped out to eye through sole, because my worn-down holey barefoot trail runners highlighted the subtle contours of the path. The tiny burst of white micro-star-flowers that hover on cat-whisker stems just above the glittering yellow mineral in the center of the trail. I remembered a teacher at Wintercount saying that with barefoot-style shoes you can see with your feet, so you can look up when you walk, and sense the periphery around you with your whole body upright. And yet I wanted more - my feet felt suffocated inside those synthetic slippers. A few days later I finally ordered the barefoot running sandals I’ve been eyeing for years - a tool of the ever evolving trade of inner tracking & embodiment.

And yes, of course, clothes protect us, and allow us to express ourselves, and exist for countless other purposes, and there are essential reasons for most of the time having an ideally soft, ideally natural fiber border-wall to keep us gathered and focused and distinct from our surrounds. I did cut my leg while running on the trail, and its ruby glint in the sun was beautiful and enlivening and it hurt. And my breastbone got sunburned, and these are all messages from the land. To be ever more delicate and precious about where to set foot; to return and expose too-much-indoors flesh bit by bit to sun, titrating a steady dose. To witness the body’s miraculous power of healing is always satisfying to me, and I still have a crescent scab across my lower spleen and kidney channels and now my burned rib-skin is peeling a bit, both reminding me sweetly of that feral roam.

May I carve out the time for another before too long, and may you also relish your own ways of sensing the wild with your radiant breathing skin.

I currently have openings for in-person or telehealth sessions.
book using this link, reply to this message or reach out via email
learn more about my offerings here >

🌾

Free Class *this Saturday* - Home Herbal Medicine Chest

How to Treat your Maladies with Natural Medicine.
Sat May 25th, 10 - 11am PT, Virtual/Zoom

From relieving asthma attacks, flu, Long Cv & bronchitis, from resolving red-streaking cellulitis to healing sinus infection, to clearing black widow poison & preventing Lyme after a deer tick bite, I have done it all - 100% naturally. I’ll show you how to get off the industrial pharma hamster wheel and tap into our birthright of natural medicine to heal common maladies at home. Herbs work. Whole plants, food, movement, rest & nature are the cures, if we have the right knowledge & trust in our bodies.

I have been doing this for 15 years for both my son and myself: healing absolutely everything with herbs and natural remedies and zero trips to the drugstore (well, I do buy band-aides). I will give instructions for what remedies to stock and how to use them. I’ll share epic natural healing stories, and the tale of the one time in 15 years that I needed to take antibiotics… bring questions! This is one of my favorite classes to teach, and an essential skill set for true earth-based resilience. Sign up and share with your friends- it’s free!

Register for Free Herbalism Class

• Sat June 22: Natural Bathing Practices for Self-Healing & Wellness

• July: Women’s Medicine: Tending our Womb

• August: Crash Course in Tongue Diagnosis

Weekly Hatha Yoga on the Green

I am teaching a drop-in community yoga class every Thursday from 10-11am outside of Abalone Apothecary while the weather is fair. All are welcome, $15-$20 sliding scale, tell your friends! Bring your own mat or a blanket, and a cushion or meditation pillow if you need it to comfortably sit cross-legged on the earth.

The class is traditional Hatha yoga style, therapeutic and designed to impart a daily home practice. Looks more like qi gong than Vinyasa flow.

No sign-up necessary, just come! We’ve been having a lovely time. I have to raise my voice to be heard over the starlings, and chubby gophers pop up to munch grass and catch the vibes.

I draw from my 20+ year study and practice of Shadow Yoga. Working with all you beautiful people at Abalone, I sense how much more potent your treatments might be if paired with a small strong home practice. These classes offer a way to take care of your own Qi at home between sessions.

u n t e t h e r . 👣 🌊

Abalone Field Notes 04 | 05.19.24

Last week I spoke about the harvest being the medicine. I shared a few photos of clover and wild oats and I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea.

I do not share many images of the wild places where I wander to find medicine, because I mostly do not take my camera along. For the herbs that are further beyond the veld, the medicine is the wander itself, as in the harvest, as in the draw of the meadow. to go back to being a child, like I spoke of last week.

I ask the plants’ permission first, on the rare occasion that I want to gather images along with medicine. Otherwise - the phone stays home. There are portals that open when there is no temptation to harvest mirages and steal souls. Nothing for the sake of anything but a secret moment of intimacy with the wild.

Leaving the camera behind for our most irresistibly photogenic moments is a practice, one among many (like bushwhacking or using creative punctuation or letting medicine be plants not pills) for breaking down the brutishly-paved lanes in our mind that have told us for too many generations all kinds of misguidance about what is reasonable and what is crass… one of many practices to rewire and rewild our idea of what is ‘healthy’ ‘appropriate’ and ‘free’. Always with deep self compassion and an understanding that the wild does not judge, the living earth is dying to be in deeper relationship with us, will always love us exactly as we are, its little children, always gently nudging us to open our squinted newborn eyes…

and when I practice this, the medicine jumps into my arms, tells me what is needed, goes into the cobwebs of my mind and gently delicately blows them clean, unpaves the indigenous footpaths and deer trails of my psyche, cleans me up, makes me whole again. in return i worship, offer tears love tobacco songs, am happy calm alive

I think everyone needs this.

I think we all need to untether intentionally and regularly before we lose our mind (soul?) completely and become lost forever in the land of forgetting. But what do I know about what you need? you tell me…

I have the following open appointments this week 🌾 in person or telemedicine:
Saturday 6 - 7pm
🌿
book using this link, reply to this message or reach out via email
learn more about my offerings here >

Upcoming Events with Alison / Abalone Medicine

• Every Thursday, 10-11am. Drop-in Yoga on the Green in Point Reyes Station

• 8 Wednesdays in Point Reyes. Embody Chinese Medicine circles: last chance! Track your health in community and learn to sense your medicine.

• Friday May 24th, 7:30 - 10:15pm. Pulse/Tongue Readings & Medicine Pop-up at Temple Step dance event in San Rafael - get tickets here

• Saturday May 25th, 10-11am PT, Free Zoom Class: Home Herbal Medicine Chest: How to Treat Basic Maladies with Natural Medicine. Register here

• Just released: Live interview with Chanana on Natural Fertility Awareness and rewilding our reproductive health. Watch here, tell me what you think!

• Follow me on Instagram for more medicinal musings

Details on all of the above in my recent news post.

Medicinal Sirens.

I’ve had my eye on the milky oats. Last year I missed the harvest, and there has been a lonesome un-fillable hole in my apothecary ever since. I’ve checked my spot every few days since the rains stopped. I have yet to find oat medicine that compares to the brew I make from our local wild fatua. It is strong, and gentle, and delicious; I add just one fresh vanilla bean to my stock bottles after I press.

Some medicines are on pure solar cycles, like pedicularis. It can be an endless winter (like last year) or a warm summery March (like the one before)- doesn’t matter. Those electric-pink muppets of analgesic delight always show up around the same time. Milky oats are different. They get tall when the sun comes out for good, and ripen to their milk stage after a few weeks of solid sunbathing. This year they’re taking their time - it has been a cold wet spring.

Last week, after those few days of intense sunshine, I was optimistic, but they were still not ready - the seed pods were deflated and soft, not yet filled with milk. Instead, I found a small sea of rose clover. They call rose clover “invasive” but I don’t pretend to know the infinite wisdom of nature. Milky oats are “invasive” too, and contain nerve-soothing medicine that modern anxious humans ubiquitously need - have they come to help? I believe our medicine seeks us out in a way that escapes modern domesticated understanding. Anyway - the rose clover is non-toxic and tastes similar to the medicinally-famous red variety (lymph, skin, blood) so I’m going to experiment.

I have to be real with you. I get real overwhelmed with the pace of this modern hustle. On that day I went up for oats, I was spun out, I’d been tending too many things at once for weeks on end with no real pause. I intended to take a hike if the oats weren’t ready because how could I not need a good long roam across the land? When I started to gather that perfect fresh clover, making my offerings of tobacco and songs, the sun was warm. The wind was rippling the barbata in watery green-gold waves across the hills, a la Miyazake. Sublime. I stopped, and watched. and remembered how absurd it is to try to rush a harvest.

The clover drew me down into meadow land outside of time. I didn’t need to hike. I needed to lay down under the open sky. I peeled off a few layers so my feet were bare and my skin was in sun. I nestled myself down on my hoody in a bed of green oatgrass between swaths of pink Trifolium. I went into a daydream trance pulling the flower tops - only the most perfect ones - from their stems, into my baskets, stopping often to watch the bees, their legs heavy with beads of brilliant orange pollen. The bees gathered from each little petal-tube individually - a clover blossom is a bouquet of nectar and pollen - and medicine. I watched the way the inflorescence rippled from bottom to top - I was merely catching a snapshot of the spiral wave each blossom was riding. They would keep blooming after I left; I was just a splash in time. I tried to notice which cups the bees drank from to inform my choice of who to take. Pale or dark petalled, early or late in bloom - they didn’t seem to discriminate as much as I did.

I moved to a few different spots to sprawl and harvest and watch the bees and the wind on the hill… and the white little butterflies… and the raptors gliding below my hilltop, and above… an hour passed, then more… as I got swallowed into the detail of petals, my scattered mental & energetic chaos slowed and finally my mind was restored to a calm, clear deep well of perception and stillness. My body totally relaxed. The natural state of a healthy Shen, or spirit, connected to the elements and natural environment at rest.

The medicine is the act of the harvest.

When I was little, so many days were filled with meadowlike trances, lost in the micro-fauna of decomposing logs, crawling through the ferns under the pines, swimming eyes open in lakes, lying on the dock with sisters late at night, far from city lights, swallowed completely by a star-smeared cosmos. And on, and on

In our natural connected state, human animals spend our waking hours in meadows, forests, rivers, mesas… tending, gathering, pounding, garbling, grinding… touching each seed, flower, and tuber that will become the medicine and food for the people we know. Like those precious moments conjured at the Oak Granary with my witchy sister Lindsay. By our wild design, we are outdoors almost all the time, bathing in wild water, drawn into the unfolding seasons through our necessary and detailed harvest of the rich and subtle messaging of all the non-human life. Gathering as a path, allowing ourselves to be magnetized by the harvest. Like our indigenous ancestors. If we are lucky, we have body memories of this, a true north and a bone-knowing of what it is to be well. To show us how to fly straight with this anthro-electro-magnetic shit-storm endlessly barraging and dulling our senses.

Lets not underestimate the power of this form of our medicine - the accidental pilgrimage, the surrender to the siren call of the plants. The act of the harvest is not a tangent to the final brew, nor is it the weaker version. It is the gold-standard, the very heart of a remedy. The most potent dosing of herbs comes when they compel us to be with them in their element, and to stay a while.

On a good day, we spend time in nature-as-backdrop… earbuds in, on a call or listening to an audiobook… having beers at the beach around a fire, telling stories… walking on a trail with a friend or alone, talking or thinking all the while about the theater of our lives… these are all beautiful things that I love to do, but all the while a wild infinity of medicinal truth is unfolding at the veld of our senses, crowded just out of reach. If I had taken that hike I would have been walking with an internal racket. I might have gone quieter by the end, but I never would have met all those lovely bees. Instead, the clover drew me in.

A week after my recalibration in the clover I went up to harvest oat tops with another witchy kindred of mine, Caroline - she may have helped you behind the counter at the apothecary. This time, they were ready. We chewed oat tops between our teeth to squeeze out the milk and test each stalk for ripeness, dosed and dosed with that calming blissful nerve-food medicine. A sense that everything is okay. A sweetness. A slowing of time. Incredible for the fight-or-flight hypervigilant amp that some bodies get into. Supreme medicine for acute grief. A balm for the intensity of quitting an addiction. Invasive? I think not.

In the liminal space between meadow and the digito-industrial world where I write to you, is the tincture on the shelf. The bridge. Born of bewitchery - of me, by the oats. My senses drawn to the fattest juiciest oats, while a little drunk on that mother’s milk. It is all in the dark little bottle glowing from within, a quiet beacon in a building in a town, ready to slip alimentarily in, transmitting deep and subtle peace, all it knows about the sunshine and the butterflies and the mycelia and the wind and the sky and the memory of the land.

People often come into Abalone saying something just drew them in.

If its not magic, its not medicine.

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Just one day left to join the next round, in person in Point Reyes Station!

Get deeper into your body and heal yourself in community with earth-based medicine.

Eight Wednesdays from 4-6pm, outdoors in a garden, starting May 8th - tomorrow!

sign up here

I have been struggling to find a name for this group offering. I call them “Embody Chinese Medicine Circles” but it is more like an Inner Tracking study group. With your small cohort, you go deep to discover your body’s messages and your own sense of what you need to heal… with support.

The point of these circles, for me, is about helping you get into your body and use that wisdom to inform your health choices and guide your life.

To create a space for you to be held in close-knit community.

To teach practical techniques for listening inwardly and divining what you need.

To get to know some plant medicines.

To taste a completely new anatomical model where your body is a living ecology.

Because I believe healing is always self-healing and always orchestrated by the powers of nature. Our bodies always speak and always heal, as long as we are breathing - we just need to listen and then nurture the righteous flow.

Sometimes this means swimming upstream in the river of our habitual modern (pretty damn toxic) industrial-era lives. Always this means paying attention to what our bodies know - by listening to our hearts, our guts, and our reproductive centers (in Chinese earth-based anatomy, the three fires or “san jiao”).

This is the last time I will be doing these groups - going forward, I’ll be sharing herbal medicine and community health support as separate offerings - and I now offer a drop-in yoga class every Thursday on the Green (10-11am).

So if you are resonating with all of it, now is a great time to clear your schedule and make it happen. It is my favorite offering, where I share all my medicine in one collage of no-mind learning by feeling and being together!

the details.

Early Summer Session: May 8 - June 26
every Weds from 4-6pm, outdoors on the grass in Point Reyes Station

Each session is divided into three parts:

1. learning one ingredient in a classical formula through experience & lecture

2. a yogic breathing and movement practice that builds each week

3. each person sharing about their health and receiving my feedback and guidance from a Chinese medicine perspective, including tongue diagnosis

Each week, you will receive:

• a deep-dive into a plant medicine - learn to feel which herbs are for you by drinking and then meditating with one herb per week, feeling and then learning what the books say about its properties. Past plants include rhodiola, bai shao, licorice… this session we step through a classical Chiense formula.

• a simple yogic self-care practice to tend your own Qi at home so you can use movement and breath to rebalance your body’s energy, any time, for free.

• companionship in sharing health check-ins, gaining comfort, strength and inspiration from knowing you’re not on the journey alone

• personalized expert health guidance from me based on Chinese medicine and whatever is showing up. Each person receives a 15 minute consult + tongue diagnosis, every other week

• Practice listening inwardly to track your subtlest signs and symptoms, so you can know in any moment what you need to feel great and gain fluency in your body’s messages

• a crash-course in Chinese medicine so you can use earth-based wisdom to understand your unique elemental patterns and how to balance them

• In-person meetings to keep your self-care momentum and inspiration alive

Plus:

• PDF and printed herbal monograph of our featured herb of the week

• 20% off herbal remedies while enrolled  in the class

• 10% off acupuncture treatments and consultations while enrolled in the class

• access to remedies, resources and practices that I don’t share anywhere else

Curriculum draws from:

• Herbal traditions - Chinese, Western folk, indigenous, plant spirit, eclectic and modern scientific research - plus my clinical and personal experience

• Qi dynamics of herbs, body systems, seasons & environment

• basic Chinese medical anatomy like organ systems, meridians, Qi, Yin/Yang

• Common “Evils” (Wind, Damp, etc) & how to deal with them

• Chinese medical pulse and tongue diagnosis

• classical Hatha yoga & Qi Gong

• other medicine practices such as ayurveda, ancestor work, divination…

• seasons, environment, and what is alive for everyone each week

Contribution for 8 Week Series

• Extended Early Bird Rate: $640. I offer a 2-installment payment plan

• Alumni, $500 cash ($540 if paying with card)

• save 5% if you pay in cash

How to Register: 

Use the button below, or pay by cash or card at Abalone Clinic in Pt Reyes Station

Register Now

What if I’m on the fence?

• Learn more on the webpage: www.abalonemedicine.org/self-healing-circles

• Book a free 30 minute exploration & consultation call using the button below!

Book my Free Call

I would love to see you there.

Alison 👣 🌾