When you stop by my table at a craft fair or wellness fair, you may hear me greet you with this, particularly if you’ve just picked up my brochure, or commented on my business title:
“I offer Biblical Natural Health Coaching, with a focus on wholefood as medicine that might grow outside your front door”.
While I have already spelled out what Biblical Natural Health Coaching is, and this page gets regular visits from people I’ve met as well as those I have not yet met, I don’t believe I’ve fully spelled out what my focus means or potentially entails.
For starters, my focus on wholefood as medicine that might grow outside your front door, is a nod to what God has growing in your area that can be utilized for your health and wellbeing. Remember that Biblical Natural Health Coaching maintains or regains your health in a God-honouring way, or put another way, at BNHC, we do natural health, God’s way! This includes recognizing, discovering, and utilizing the various phytochemicals God has placed inside every useful plant. This may mean discovering how a plant can help topically, internally, as a food, a medicine, a hygiene product, a household cleanser, etc. It might mean discovering how the fibers of a plant are better against the skin than synthetic fibers.
Secondly, wholefood isn’t just found in the grocery store. It is found in your garden, your backyard, the walkway to your door, along the school fence, and out in the wild. I understand not everyone has a frontdoor that leads immediately outside (such as an apartment building) or a front door that has any greenery at all, such as a front walk buried in decorated rocks and pavement or concrete. The “front door” is figurative and referring to your area in general.
Thirdly, God has placed plants and animals in each region of the world that benefit the humans living in those regions and that assist them in dealing with health conditions they may encounter in those regions. This has my daughter and I occasionally asking ourselves, “is there a North American equivalent to – fill in the blank, from another country?” The answer is often found in the phytochemical makeup of the herb we are looking to replace, with those of herbs that grow here.
Fourthly, North America is so large, that what may grow in one region, might not grow in another. Many herbs grow across the entire continent, while some are quite localized. Arrowleaf Balsamroot for example, only grows in the Pacific Northwest, Alberta to BC and south to Oregon. Meanwhile, Eastern White Pine only grows on the East Coast. It is important to learn what grows in your area, both wild and domestic, in order to make use of wholefood without breaking the bank or putting needless wear and tear on your vehicle. When you aren’t sure what grows in your area, if you are comfortable telling me where you live, I can research your area to find out. In a time when powers-that-be try to control everything from shipping lanes to border customs, reducing what needs to be purchased from abroad is necessary.
Fifth, Occasionally, microcosms of land containing examples of what grows wild around your larger area will be discovered. This might be your own property, or it might be a swath of publicly-accessible crown land. These areas are rare however, and it needs to be understood that you may find what you require, in several different growing zones around your region. You may have one or more ingredients of a given recipe on your own patch of land, but have to travel further afield to get the rest of it. We forage for over 80 herbs after 10 yrs of going out into the wild, and the barn where our horse stays, has many of those herbs present on it, but not all of them. We still have to visit other zones to get the herbs we want or need.
Sixth, It is a common expectation that one can just run off to the store to buy what they need to get better. Even in the world of natural health, many practitioners will send you to the store to buy supplements, which honestly, are not very natural. They contain ingredients pulled from plant matter, but often separated out from the plant, much like the supplements sold in grocery stores. Their phytochemical balance is lost, adding dosage complexity to avoid side effects. The issue with iron overdosing is apparently becoming a thing according to authors such as Mercola, just as one example. Copper overdosing is another issue and both of these are found in supplemental format in both healthfood and grocery store pharmacy aisles.
When you come to BNHC, rather than stuff you full of expensive supplements, my goal is to have you take in wholefoods that will address the issue you need addressed. Rather than sending you for supplements, I send you for wholefood, whether that’s to your garden, the produce section of a store, your favourite farmer, or the wilds.
Seventh. I’ve used the word “wild” now, several times. What do I mean when I use that word? For many today, “wild” is used to describe “out there”, “cool”, “crazy/strange”, “out of the ordinary”, as in “Man, that’s wild, dude!” But in our household, the word “wild”, literally means the opposite of domesticated! “Wild” to us, is out on crown land, plants showing up outside of neat and tidy manicured gardens and lawns, what grows where you didn’t expect or even perhaps want it to. Forests, meadows, creeks, stream banks, hillsides, all may be referred to as “wild” when they are not looked after in an organized manner by mankind.
Eighth, To ensure you can afford to get well, having you pay with time and effort to obtain your phytochemical assistance is more workable than adding additional hardship upping the price tag to make you go buy supplemental assistance. The added bonus is that once you get used to what is necessary to obtain wild herbs, process them for long term storage and learn how to turn them into various foods and medicines, you can take that knowledge and use it for more than just getting well, but for health maintenance, enjoyable treats, and more.
Ninth, You’ll hear me talk about foraging for wild food and medicine. “Forage/ing/er” refers to the act of going out into the wild to gather wild-grown foods, herbs, spices, seasonings and medicine. A forager goes out to forage for wild herbs. Another term that may be used by others in this space, is wild-harvesting, or re-wilding. Re-wilding in this sense, is the act of coming home with wild herbs, foods and medicines, and slowly replacing your store-bought goods with wild-grown goods instead. This is not to be confused with the globalist idea of re-wilding, which is to turn formerly urban spaces back over to nature, and help nature resume it’s former course before mankind built upon it. This is a noble-sounding goal on the surface until you put it alongside other global initiatives such as 15-min cities, and the forcing of people into cities by designating major swaths of a country’s land as global protected wild zones. Get to know the terms being used, and how they differ from previously established understandings. When I or others in the foraging space speak of re-wilding, we are talking about your pantry, not your neighbourhood. Homesteaders may use the term to refer to getting back to the land and learning how to live off it in a less domesticated manner.
To wrap this all up, telling you that my focus is wholefood as medicine that might grow outside your front door, means that
- The medicine I may recommend for you, may be found nearby or down the road and up a trail or two.
- It means that you will learn how to craft your medicine from whole foods in a manner that maintains the phytochemical balance God placed it in, within the plant.
- It means you’ll get food charts including wild herbs that have been researched to contain phytochemicals useful for whatever it is that you brought to me to address.
Taking advantage of my Biblical Natural Health Coaching services as a result, will invite you to embark on a journey of learning, discovery, and healing that mainstream medicine has tried to suppress. God’s Word gives us examples of using food as medicine, and science has confirmed why those herbs were used as they were both in Biblical times and down through history since.
The textbook I am working on, covering western herbalism from a Christian phytotherapeutic perspective, includes verses from Scripture where a food may have been used, eaten or grown by common folk or as medicine, as well as quotes from written works now in public domain from Sumer to Egypt to Ancient Greece and Rome to Anglo-Saxon days to 1500’s/1600’s England and records of herbal medicine on North American shores from an east coast and a west coast indigenous tribe. Modern scientific research will be referenced to show how we use those same herbs today! I’m roughly one third of the way through the historical quotes for over 200 herbs that will feature in the textbook’s historically modern materia medica. These herbs were chosen partly because they are accessible one or way or another to Western Europeans and North Americans, and also because they are still in use today in a medicinal context, but feature in a historical work in that context as well.
A much smaller materia medica featuring wild herbs found in the Central Okanagan region of BC Canada, is part of a new product on my daughter’s Ashtree Wildcrafting craft fair table. This is a mini apothecary featuring 24 little herb vials, a useable tiny mortar and pestle, a mini materia medica with a recipe section at the back, and a pendant to hang down between the tiny shelves when it’s open and all set up for display. Already, people see it at the craft fairs and muse to each other about Christmas gifts. But it is a tiny example of what grows wild in our region, and it may contain herbs that grow where you live too. See my earlier point about how big North America is.
If you’ve never gone foraging before, feel free to check out two areas of my website. If you don’t live in the Okanagan but wish to learn the basics of foraging, head to my shop, and look for the Introductory Foraging Workshop product link. For just $20, you’ll learn about rules and regulations, gear, benefits of foraging, mindsets around foraging, and more. The video workshop is on-demand, allowing you to watch it whenever/wherever after you’ve downloaded it to your device. Handouts are included as downloads as well.
If you live in the Central Okanagan, feel free to go over to the Events menu item. Clicking on Events will take you to my calendar. Hovering over Events instead, will reveal a dropdown menu where you can choose the Foraging Workshop and Trail Tour form, or the Advanced Foraging Workshop form. These forms let you register for in-person foraging workshops.
It is my hope after reading this today, that you have a clear view of the phrase you may have heard me say around my services, that my focus is wholefood as medicine that might grow outside your front door. Looking forward to working with you!
