Herbalist's Guide to Mental Hygiene
featured In the June issues of Tahoe Cannabis & Vegas Cannabis Magazine, I highlighted some of the best tips and healing hacks for keeping your head in the right space.
The practice of alternative medicine involves a combination of natural methods for balancing the mind, body, and spirit to support health and well being. In reality, therapy hardly ever consists of just one method, therefore herbalists use plant medicine, supplements, dietary adjustments, bodywork, and lifestyle changes to enhance healing. During a stressful event, the brain triggers a series of reactions to different regions of the body. The body then responds by initiating the commonly known fight-or-flight response, where we experience some of the unpleasant effects of stress. Long-term stress can affect the central nervous system by draining vital energy leading to premature aging, exhaustion, deficiencies, and/or poor health.
To combat these effects, it is so very important to integrate healthy coping strategies to maintain a balanced physical and mental state. The belief that all healing is inherently found in nature is at the foundation of herbal medicine. Taking that belief system and applying it to modern-day science, researchers are able to identify naturally occurring plant compounds and observe the physiological reactions on the body, similar to the research on the terpenes found in cannabis. Speaking of, although cannabis is the goddess of all plant medicines, it is just one of the thousands of plants that are part of the nature cure…