The Old Ways

Ancient healing ways for Challenging times

“All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind's attic, but it is accessible.”

― John Trudell

The mist rises, and we make our medicines on the land, infusing a spruce resin oil on a portable wood-burning stove. The land here is still winter bare, and the air is cool. Spring is having a hard job reaching this place in the west Pennine moors yet, and we are glad the heat from the stove warms our hands and hearts. We stir the oil and check the water level under the bowl in the pan. It’s not ready yet, we need patience. This is an ancient place fed by a spring that drips into an old well house with a moody atmosphere, and yet it feels good to be here. We pour ourselves another cup of tea whilst we wait and chat about the old ways.

As Medical Herbalists and professional foragers, we like to think we work with the old ways or at least some of them anyway! After all, isn’t herbal medicine and foraging a direct connection to these old ways? Our ancient ancestors certainly would recognise the native medicinal plants and wild foods we use. They would taste the same tastes from the plants and see similar healing effects on the body as we do. The spruce resin is still a great wound healer now as it was then.

Although we have over 30 years combined clinical herbal and foraging skills, our ancient ancestors would have had hundreds of generations of indigenous plant medicine knowledge, passed down to them in an unbroken line from those who came before them. They would also have a whole host of other life skills and deep wisdom now lost, that modern people are trying to reconnect with once more.

We have a tremendous respect for ancestral wisdom and the many skills that we only have frayed threads left of, that will take many lifetimes to develop to the level of accomplishment that they once had. We realise that there would also be a sacred connection to the land and plants that we have forgotten. Indigenous people see plants as sentient beings to be treated with respect, harvesting with gratitude, prayer and ceremony. (‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer). We know our ancestors experienced this connection too and would have had their own sacred ceremonies of relating to the plants.

John Trudell, a Native American activist, said that we were all indigenous once and part of a tribal culture that connected deeply with nature and each other, and because of this, we still have this in our Genetic Memory. His words feel powerful to read, and with them, we feel like something soul deep is stirring in us

Photo by Courtnie Tosana on Unsplash

In our disconnected, discombobulated, TikTok culture, we have a pandemic of mental health issues and soul ill health. The world feels like it has gone absolutely crazy, and with political instability and environmental destruction, that feels too much to cope with. It is during times like those we are living in where we are often drawn towards a distant memory of the ancient past when life seemed better, slower, less complicated and less hectic with clean air, wild land, more freedom and earth wisdom. A time when we could stand whole with both feet rooted in the living earth, held strong by our ancestors and our community. A place where we felt connected to the heartbeat of Gaia.

In these chaotic times, we realise how much we need those deep roots and ancient skills to keep us stable, sovereign and resilient. We are beginning to understand how much we rely on nature and community to keep us sane and healthy. Our body holds the memory of living in a different way, of being earth-connected and tribal. We have been hardwired for the last half a million years to live in tune with the natural world and the seasons. Modern living has tried hard to erase our blueprint for living this way in a very short space of time and replacing it with a technological culture of separation, materialism and disconnection.

For some people, this severing of our relationship has often been brutal, leaving deep scars, and for others, the separation is so subtle and distant we can’t even remember how it happened. We swapped the wild and the natural for comfort and convenience, so that most people would find it very hard to step away from without struggling. We can order what we want at the click of a button, delivered to our home the next day and eat whatever food we want out of season 24/7. Despite modern culture’s best attempts to offer us everything we need at the touch of a button, it is having a detrimental effect on our health and well-being, with mental ill health and suicide being at an all-time high. Never have we felt so unwell, tired and lost.

Many of us yearn for something else, something more meaningful as our soul cries out for help and we desperately try to remember what we should never have forgotten. Something so important that it is essential to our humanity and our belonging to the land. We see it as yearning for the old ways. But what are we yearning for? We can stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, honour their ways and their wisdom, relearn their skills and adopt an earth-based spirituality, but we cannot go back to the times they lived in. We can, however, reconnect and relearn that which is important to our surviving and thriving in these times, skills for navigating this messed-up world as we nurture our deep connection to nature and develop skills that help us to be resilient, a way of being that is life-enhancing and sustainable.

What is it we can bring forward and what do we need to leave in the past? What is so important that we never should have forgotten it, and how can we remember and reconnect with it?

We decided to adapt our year-long Weeds and Wild Medicine course in a way that we could explore with others a different way of being. As well as our usual herbal medicine and wild food foraging, we worked on developing seasonal ceremonies, working in a sacred way, honouring the moon, developing and sharing eco-skills. Most of all, we loved collaborating and learning from others who live and work in an earth-based based connective way.

We spent the year learning ancient crafting skills, how to spin foraged wool using a drop spindle, firelighting skills, making medicine bags, weaving little baskets out of plant sheaths, which would have been composted or even just discarded. We wanted to slow down and step back from the modern, frantic, fraught, pressured times that we are now collectively facing.

Although we will never know what our ancestors really thought and how they felt, by going to ancient places, by using and taking the plants they would have used into our bodies, by trying out old skills and crafts, we hoped to gain some insight and understanding into the ancestral psyche. We have both read ‘The Hunter Gatherer Way’ by Ffyona Campbell, which made us think we’re not really that different. We are just living in a very, very different time and of a different era with a very different world view and understanding, however, our needs are still the same. And it seems that now more than ever before, humanity needs to reconnect with our true self, which is nature, and if we are not going to destroy the Earth and therefore ourselves, nature needs us to find that connection once again.

So what was it we learnt that was so important that we can bring the “Old Ways” into our life today? These are our thoughts and experiences so far and we will be writing more about these in depth in future articles.

• Connection to land, seasons, community and ourselves.

• Collaboration and cooperation.

• Growing deep roots and cultivating belonging to keep us stable and steady in times of challenge, like the roots of a tree

• Creativity and crafting.

• Caring for each other, nature and ourselves.

• Gratitude and reciprocity

• Ceremony, celebration and rites of passage.

• Having fun and not taking ourselves too seriously. Always have a sense of fun and joy.

• Eat the wild! Heal with the wild, allowing the wild into our body, mind and spirit. Feel nourished by the wild.

We are nature. We are inseparable from nature and each other. What we do, whether sustainable or harmful affects the whole. As a culture we have lost that deep nature connection which sustains us, nourishes us and teaches us. Many writers call our culture a trauma culture as we are the result of many generations of wars, land grabs, disconnection and loss, which is often reflected in the way we live and see the world today and the damage we inflict on each other and the natural world.

Some people advocate doing Earth healing, but it is not the Earth we need to heal, it is us and our relationship with the Earth. This is where it all begins.

What we have learned is; just get out on the land. The land knows who you are from the moment you step into nature, she is aware of you. You belong there, you are still connected even if you have forgotten.

Wild Green Blessings

Edwina and Danielle x

If you would like to join us this year for a year of learning about Herbal Medicine. Wild foods, eco crafts, ceremony and deep nature connection you can find out more on Wild Medicine Tribe