Happy National Herb Day!!! It has been a few years since a medicinal herb has been the herb of the year for us to celebrate National Herb Day. This year is one of The Dancing Herbalist’s favorite herbs: Ginger, Zingiber officinale. Our winter 2023 newsletter had a great mini monograph on ginger and you can get that through our website but let’s talk about a fun recipe you can make with ginger. There are lots of fun recipes you can make with ginger: add it to your apple sauce, make a salve, use it fresh in fire cider. The options of fun projects with ginger go on and on. My favorite action of g ..read more

For a short time, in the winter of 2023, The Dancing Herbalist will be back! Since the start of Covid, we have pulled back on our manufacturing, product sales, and services. We will be returning with a new business model in 2023 and we look forward to sharing our new products and returning favorites with you once again. What will stay the same? We will continue to provide you the same clinical services through private appointment. You can book these appointments at this time through emailing us at info@thedancingherbalist.com or messaging us on Instagram. We will also continue to offer our fab ..read more

My largest complaint, that my local friends just don’t understand, has always been that it is hard to find a wide variety of fresh foods in Korea. There are many meat options, many options for grains, surprisingly many options for beans, many mystery greens that I still have to explore, but finding a wide variety of colors and textures in food just is challenging to do. You can read from last week how I have approached finding different foods but then how do I make my miscellaneous foods into a proper meal? Throw it all into one pot! Yep that has pretty much been my solution. I have been tryi ..read more

I think you can all agree with me that with the world ending, getting out to find good quality food is a battle in its own. After realizing I had food problems all over again and starting to track what I have been eating to see my patterns, being creative and finding my new food options has been causing anxiety for me. After two weeks of recording what I have been eating and how I have felt after each food the largest thing that I have noticed was that simply observing has improved my symptoms. By being conscious of what I have been eating has meant that I have been making different choices. G ..read more

The first step on any health journey is to know clearly where you are in the present moment. You cannot know where you are going with out knowing where you have come from. For me this means journaling. Years ago when I wrote my book on wellness for beginners I never thought I would be heading back to that book to remind myself of my own journey to start again. Life changes and here we go again! Journaling, with out making any changes is always the place to start. This goes for any kind of behavior change you are trying to make. For myself, I am focusing on food but I have a long way to go to c ..read more

I knew before it started but I didn’t know what was coming. I left and fled to safety. That is how I persevere: I remove myself from the problem. While this is not a healthy option it is one of survival. I left the States in the Sumer of 2019. I had every intention of maintaining my work but survival became a full time job. Personal development and processing of life experiences taking all of my energy and restricting my ability to fulfill my own desires and maintain my health. Why did I need to spend so much of my time and energy on cooking when I had the funds to let others do that for me? W ..read more

Once you have pressed your plants and flowers it is a simple job to get them mounted for display. Some of the items you will need to do this are: Water based glue such Elmer’s Acid free paper or cardstock Frames or lamination machine After about a week of pressing your plants they should be ready to mount. The longer you wait the more fragile they will become. Open up your press and see how your plants turned out. You can gently adjust some of the leaves and petals but they are fragile and should be handled with care and as little as possible. If you plan to press more plants, take notes on ..read more

So often these days when I go for a walk my focus is on exercise. I have my music to pump me up and keep my step rate high and I get going! But a walk does not always need to be for exercise. While it is a great stress relief tool to exercise, taking a walk can also be a meditative practice to help heal the mind. A walking meditation can be used to shift your mood or experience. In general, I do not enjoy doing waking meditations on treadmills. This is primarily because the changing scenery allows the mind to be more creative and shift to new possibilities as the scenery changes. It is easier ..read more

Once you have your herbs harvested what do you do to keep them fresh and usable year round? Drying Herbs Drying your herbs is the first key step to preserving them to use later. You can choose to make a fresh plant tincture but this does need to be done right after harvesting to prevent the plant material from going bad. When drying herbs it is common to think of hanging them up in bunches to dry. This is not the ideal way to dry herbs. They can mold, easily fall and get dirty, or a number of other unfortunate circumstances due to them being hung up. It is best to dry your herbs on a screen ..read more

Excellent! You have grown an herb or found one that you have properly identified in the wild. Now it is time to harvest it. There are many things to consider before harvesting an herb. Do you need the herb? If you do not have a use for the herb its simple! DO NOT HARVEST IT! It is so easy as budding herbalists to go gung-ho and harvest every herb we come across. ‘I will use it some day.’ No, this is irresponsible wildcrafting. It is important for our ecosystem to grow plants and many of the herbs we use for medicine get severely damaged and will die when they are harvested. If you do not have ..read more