your body is ecology
Your body is but one thread in the vast web of ecological relations that have and always will, tether us to all life.
Your body is not a problem to be solved.
When you read that, where does it land in your body?
In your belly? Or low, deep in the caverns of your womb?
Do the words lodge like oak galls in your throat, like it’s hard to swallow them completely?
Or perhaps, like a wave, the blood rushes to your heart in a moment of warmth, of resonance, of truth?
We exist in a culture that is designed to dissociate us from our bodies and the land. Under capitalism, the body is capital. The body becomes a means for production. Symptoms are suppressed. Pills are given. You are treated more like a number than a person and the body is the inanimate machine we inhabit.
How does life shift, if we see the body as a partner, a lover, a tender vessel that does not need to be dominated, but simply witnessed?
What becomes possible if we trust that the body is capable of healing?
Let me tell you,
Your body
is a river.
Your body is an intricate
tapestry of mycorrhizal fungi.
Your body is a forest at dawn,
swelling with life and the song
of a hundred disparate parts
becoming one.
What does it mean to take an ecological view on healing the body? First, one must see that your body is not separate from the land you inhabit. Your body does not exist in a vacuum, despite what the facade of modernity may have led you to believe. Your body is but one thread in the vast web of ecological relations that have and always will, tether us to all life.
When a keystone species is removed from the environment, the land takes on a new form. All other species, those with legs and those without, shapeshift in this new terrain.
Our bodies are no different. We are given antibiotics, literally translating to ‘life killing’, and wonder why, after a few seemingly benign pills, our bodies are never again the same. Our ecosystems permanently shifted like a swollen river charting a new course.
What about grief? Grief, too, changes the landscape of our bodies. Loss settles in us in different ways. For some, grief might be a wildfire, leaving the land black with charcoal. For others, grief is a long drought, where to survive, life must learn to adapt. Then there is the grief that emanates from the Land itself; the grief of clear cuts and gouged open mines and lost prairies.
To see the body as ecology is to understand that no symptom exists separate from the whole. Even those that seem discordant are still part of the same web, infinitely rippling and affecting one another below the surface of what we see.
In Vitalist healing, a symptom is merely information, feedback from the ecosystem of the body. My soil is too dry, proclaims our body. My rivers are dammed, the body cries, in the language of lymph nodes and stagnation. Our tissues are inflamed, but no one is asking why?
The key to vitalism is supporting the inherent intelligence of the body. Vitalism does not push or force the body into change or suffocate symptoms. Instead of suppressing, vitalist medicine supports.
Sometimes vitalism doesn’t look like doing anything at all. Sometimes what is needed is to step back and take our hands off the wheel for a moment. If we have been endlessly obsessing, exerting dictator-like control over our body, taking the whole kitchen sink of herbs, supplements, and pills, desperate to force the body to take a new shape, we have to let go. We have to sink in to the rich honey of slow healing.
We heal our bodies when we begin to repair from a place of the compassionate witness. Your body is not a problem to be solved. Your body does not need to be forced, pushed, or prodded into performing better. Your body carries the ancient wisdom of life itself encoded in each cell. Your body can heal.
Our bodies are constantly moving towards homeostasis. We can so easily forget that our bodies are miraculous works of magic and constantly healing. When you get a cut on your finger, you do not have to instruct your body to heal. It simply does. Our hearts beat, our lungs expand and contract without a single thought. The vital force of the body is always seeking to bring us back to the center. As an herbalist, I seek to gently support the innate response already taking place.
If you find that your body is in a state of dis-ease, know that this did not happen overnight. And likewise, healing will take time. It will take more time than you want to give it. Trust me, I know. It will ask you to reckon with the dangerous, extractive timelines capitalism has convinced us are normal, and remember what it is to exist in slow time. To watch moons grow and leaves fall and to remain constant through it all.
One of the greatest gifts illness gave me was the relinquishment of our culture's obsession with productivity. I share sly smiles with my friends who know what it is to be unwell, those who see through the veil, we who stand in stillness before the machine. For most, it was not what we chose off the menu, but it is the education we recieved from bodies that refused to conform.
Is it strange to think of ill health as a gift? Only in a culture that only values the well. If you sit beside me and tell me the story of your body, at some point, I will ask you a question.
How is illness serving you?
I ask myself often what healing looks like through the lens of chronic illness. Chronic care is spiralic and non-linear and tastes like compassion and acceptance. Chronic care teaches us to become willow-boned and raven-eyed. There is no singular path forward towards some static version of ourselves that we deem “healthy”. There is no road backwards either, taking us to a romanticized version of who we once were, before our bodies earned the wisdom and lines they now carry. Healing is messy, unruly, and exists in timelines that defy time. Chronic care is most radically about presence. How alive can you feel in this moment? How deep are you willing to go, into the underworld that is the living memory of your body? Chronic care is chthonic.
I cannot proclaim with any certainty that the plants will perform miracles, although sometimes, they do. So what then? What lies on the otherside?
To that, we must widen our perspective. You must ask yourself, do plants have value outside of what they can “do” for us? Does your best friend, your brother, your neighbor, have inherent value outside of what they do for you?
Can we perceive through a lens of relationality?
Can we explore the Land and plants as Beings who may have wisdom to offer outside of our expectation of how they preform?
We heal with the earth.
If you’re interested in working together, you can find out more here.