Herbalism and foraging is the medicine of belonging and of deep healing; we cannot be healthy if our greater earth body is unhealthy.
Although I'd once roll my eyes at the risk of it sounding all a bit too "hippy-ish", my work has taught me that at the core of much of our personal and societal pain is the illusion of separateness and alienation. The more we examine our relationship with the natural world, the more we discover how connected we all really are!
Our collective ecological amnesia and preoccupation with screens in the West has made many of us feel exiles from our environment.
I hope to create a place for people to share and commune with one another, to inspire each other to connect to the land through information sharing, courses and some recipe inspiration.
I want to share with you my herbal knowledge in a way that is both accessible, exciting, uncomplicated, and demystifying. Most of all, I want to celebrate just how marvellous plants and seaweeds are. Herbalism is so much more than simply plant knowledge!
In our quest for scientific and digital progress, we have, at times, overlooked and discarded much of our indigenous knowledge, and plant wisdom in favour of the latest 'wonder drug'.
For me, no amount of manipulating and replicating of life forms can provide the unquestionable intelligence that nature offers us. Whether it's learning how trees communicate with each other, crafty seaweed reproduction or just how resilient 'weeds' are, I'm constantly blown away by nature's intelligence.
As a company, I want to celebrate and pay homage to those healing practices that have been neglected and marginalised. Whether you're attending a foraging course, delving into tasty and medicinal wild foods, or seeing me for a herbal consultation, I like to explore how we can incorporate old healing practices within the framework of our modern lifestyles in a way that's manageable.
As our culture becomes increasingly sanitised and automated, many of us have forgotten our own instinctual capacity. It's my aim through Be Nutriful to encourage people to reconnect with their wild selves, and to shift from seeing the natural world as just something mechanical to something that's mysterious and powerful!
I've had the pleasure of experiencing so many people on my foraging courses completely shift their mindset and awaken their dormant senses and playfulness.
Plants are a source of mystery, inspiration, wonder, miracle and essential education.
It is my quest to encourage people to engage wholeheartedly with the natural world. To not only notice the plants around us but to treat them with reverence and learn skills that our ancestors once had.
Empowerment is a word that I use a great deal but it truly is at the foundation of my work and vision. In my twenties, I experienced a number of health complications that forced me to reassess the way in which I lived.
It was through my own journey of disempowerment, of deferring to medical authorities rather my own, of diminishing my own part in my healing journey that I realised that my life's work is to encourage others to flourish and to thrive.
“The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.”
