
In this fresh and delightful episode of “On Health,” I sit down with Olivia Amitrano, herbalist, host of the popular What’s the Juice podcast, and founder of Organic Olivia, a successful botanical medicines company. Olivia opens up about her transformative journey through herbalism, personal growth, and the essential practice of honest self-reflection on the relationships in our lives and our relationship to ourselves.
We dive deep into Olivia’s:
- First encounters with plants and how this sparked her enduring passion for herbal medicine.
- Insights on the art of noticing and the power of forming deep, meaningful relationships with the natural world.
- Exploration of how our health is intricately influenced by our relationships and environments.
- Personal experiences with codependency, the importance of establishing boundaries, and the journey of self-discovery and the courage it takes to face uncomfortable truths.
- Revelation that deeper personal changes were needed beyond herbs and foods to heal not just her insulin resistance, but her resistance to making changes in her habits.
- Realizations about the effects of substances like caffeine and cannabis on her health and well-being.
- Unique practice of hosting internal funerals to release habits and relationships that no longer serve her.
- Engagement with parts work and internal family systems therapy to understand and heal different facets of herself.
Olivia and I share insights about:
- The use of herbs in dreamwork and their subtle, yet profound, influence on the psyche.
- How slowing down and allowing plants to guide us can lead to profound personal growth.
- The intersection of mindfulness and self-compassion in achieving true well-being beyond herbs and foods.
Thank you for tuning into On Health for Women. Remember, you are not alone on your journey, and a supportive community is here for you. Please connect with me on social media. Your stories matter and can provide comfort and support to others, too. And don't miss an episode! Subscribe to “On Health” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
Make sure to follow me on Instagram @dr.avivaromm to join the conversation. and follow Olivia on Instagram @organic_olivia and visit her at her website organicolivia.com
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The Interview Transcript
Aviva: When I went to my first herbal conference and my first midwifery conference, I was the youngest person there, actually, the midwifery conference. I had my 1-year-old son, so I was the second youngest person there. And now today I feel like Granny Herbalist, interviewing Wise Grasshopper Herbalist, Olivia Amano, who is a clinical herbalist and graduate of Arborvitae School of traditional herbalism, the host of What's the Juice Podcast, and founder of the very successful and really grassroots, but sophisticated herbal company, organic Olivia. Her ongoing commitment is to educate and empower others to find the tools that we need to thrive within our own nervous systems, our cupboards, and our intuition. How can you not love that? Olivia's goal is to help people reestablish their relationship with themselves and the world around them by finding safety in their bodies, medicine in their kitchens, and friends in the plants that heal.
And I'm so thrilled to have you here with me today.
Olivia: Thank you for such a kind intro. You really are the wise blueprint of the herbal world for us all, so it's such an honor.
Aviva: Well, that's a nice way of saying granny.
Olivia: I feel like a granny, you in the health and wellness world with all the young seedlings popping up as well, so the tables keep turning. You've been…
Aviva: …doing it a while. Well, yeah, and of course, I mean, there are so many herbalists I am close with who are 20 and 30 and more years older than me. So it's not even so much age, it's just how long we've been in the space and doing it. It's rich, right? And I love thinking about herbalists. I remember I was at an herbal conference. I was teaching at the Gaia Herbal Symposium, the Medicines from the Earth, and it was kind of this porch full of people. It was Cascade Anderson Geller. She's passed away now. Those of you who don't know her, Chanchal Cabrera, Amanda Crawford, Michael Tierra, Leslie Tierra, Roy Upton, Mark Blumenthal. It was just like a slew of us sitting on the teacher's porch on a summer night. And I remember someone saying we should have a home for older herbalists. The profession where you can go gray and white. It's like midwifery, and you just keep getting more respected the older you get. And we're like, we'll have a retirement space for all of us. And then the really young grasshoppers can come and learn from us and cook for us.
Olivia: Yes. Yeah. Clean our herbs that we harvest in our gardens. Yeah.
Aviva: So, tell me, what was the first herb that you remember ever taking as medicine? Do you remember?
Olivia: I think my first actual herb that I interacted with in a whole holistic relationship sort of way, from harvest to drying to processing to tincturing, was mugwort.
Aviva: Oh, yeah.
Olivia: And this was when I… because I had always taken herbal supplements in capsules. I had interacted with Chinese medicine through tablets, and I was certainly familiar with the results that I had experienced and the relief that these plants had given me, but I never got to meet them. And I remember when I first learned about mugwort in herb school, I felt so enlivened by this description of this spicy, witchy kind of plant that helps us to access our own wisdom and edges.
Aviva: Dreams.
Olivia: Dream medicine really helps us to get in touch with the inner witch and the inner intuition. And I was desperate to meet mugwort. And I remember I took my boyfriend at the time, we got in the car, and I was like, we're going to meet this plant. I'm going to find mugwort. And I was looking everywhere for mugwort and literally couldn't see her, even though this is the most common weed on the East coast. And now I'm like, there's mugwort, there's mugwort, there's mugwort. But for whatever reason, because I was such a baby herbalist, I didn't quite understand what I was looking for, or I was looking for the flowering parts of the plant in the wrong season. And when I finally met her, it was almost like when I had just given up and I was like, fine, I'm just not meant to meet this plant.
And then I looked over and I smelled her almost before I could figure out what she was. And I started to just interact with the leaves and broke them apart and tasted them and had almost that sagey taste that they have. And I was like, there she is. And even in the process of drying the mugwort, this was now when she was flowering when I finally met her, in the process of drying the mugwort and just pulling off the flowering tops where all that aromatic medicine is, my friends and I who were processing it together, we were getting loopy and sleepy and experiencing her medicine just from processing and getting in touch with her aromatics. I was like, wow, you don't even have to take a plant to meet them.
Aviva: Yes. It's so amazing. Okay, so what was the feeling, right? So clearly you had keyed out or looked at pictures of mugwort. When I say keyed out, for those of you who don't know, that means you go to a plant book. Well, it used to be you go to a plant book, now you can go on your iPhone, which is amazing, and look at the plant identifier. But you had some knowledge, you wanted to meet mugwort. And how did you go about learning what she would look like? And then when you found her, what was that feeling?
Olivia: When I first had looked at the reference images, I was looking at mugwort from the East coast but also California mugwort. I didn't… once you meet a person and you see a face, you never forget a face, but sometimes it's hard to find that face in the crowd for the first time or whatever it is. And that's kind of how it felt with the plant, where sure, I knew what she looked like, but because I wasn't used to being in deep witnessing relationship with plants and had only ever interacted with them beforehand, again in supplement form, which was a bit more disconnected and not a true relationship, I kind of just looked at leaves as leaves. I was like, well, it's all green to me. So it was sort of developing my eye and being able to look in a sea of green and see each individual. And I think that's how you get better as an herbalist. That's how you get better in relationships with humans, really seeing people. And it's all a practice. And as you practice that in herbalism, it translates into your life and your relationships.
Aviva: I do happy dances. I mean still when I come, I feel like plants are just my friends. Okay, so here's an experience. I was in Portugal with my husband. We were in Sintra, which is this most…
Olivia: I've been to Sintra, love.
Aviva: It's beautiful, right? It's amazing. So we've been there a couple of times and we were in Sintra the first time, and I was walking along and I said to Tracy, yo, the air feels really familiar here and I can't figure out what it is. And then I'm walking along and I'm like, okay, I feel like I'm in the California redwoods and I can't figure out why. And then I'm walking along and I start seeing eucalyptus leaves all over the place. And the California redwood. Unfortunately, eucalyptus is a bit of an invasive out there, but they're everywhere. And they create… eucalyptus is so aromatic and it really creates that airy feeling of the air. So I'm just breathing in this eucalyptus.
And then I had this other time I went on a walk with my youngest daughter in the middle of Massachusetts. She lives in Pioneer Valley and we're walking and I'm like, I don't know what it is, but I have a feeling we're going to come across some sassafras. And then about 10 minutes later, there was just sassafras everywhere. I don't think it's just the plants calling to me. I mean, I don't think, oh, sassafras was telling me she's here, but I think it's this whole sensory experience where my brain registered. What you're seeing right now visually, what you're feeling temperature-wise, the scents you're having are the type of woods where your memory bank has seen sassafras before. Pretty cool.
Olivia: I think it's just a deeper level of consciousness getting to know plants and getting to develop our awareness of the kind of environment, climate, woods, feeling of the dirt, moisture level in the dirt, getting to know all of those inputs in our environment and being open enough to register that awareness and know the plants. I think it opens us up to this deeper and more conscious way of living in general. Because then, yeah, as you're in these foreign places, you start to make those connections and you have a deeper relationship with everything around you. The same way that when you know that the wind blows a certain way, it means a storm is coming. You're in deeper relationship with the elements and it makes you feel less alone on a rainy day because you are in communication with nature. And you're right, they're friends and they make you feel less alone.
Aviva: I think for me too, I would imagine this is for you, but it makes me more present where I am because I'm looking, I'm scanning, I'm really looking at multiple layers of my environment. And especially, my kids used to say when they were little, like, Mom, do we always have to stop every three minutes on a hike? And I'm like, yes, we do because here's rattlesnake plantain and here's some Pipsissewa. But I'm looking at every level because I'm looking close to the ground. I'm looking at the mid-level for the shrubby, the blue cohosh and the baneberries, and then I'm looking at the trees. So it's like a full sensory immersion.
Olivia: It's the art of noticing. It's a difference between sort of living in black and white where everything is just green leaves and it's just seeing everything as one blob around you to really deeply seeing and deeply witnessing. And that, I think, is being a good steward of the land, a good steward of relationship. It makes life in full color when you stop to take the time and the presence to really identify and get to know each one and say, this plant matters. The fact that this is right here matters and I want to see it. And again, I think that bleeds and translates into every other facet of our life and how we treat people too.
Aviva: I think the name of this podcast has to be The Art of Noticing: Living a Life with Plants. So you've mentioned relationship a few times, and I know we've had a recent longer chat. Relationship has become a really important piece of how you define the inputs to a healthy ecosystem. Tell me more about how you feel relationship affects us, like cell to soul, microbiome to brain health, to nervous system, all the things.
Olivia: Yeah. I think when we look at our health in a silo, we look at one symptom that we're experiencing, digestive distress, indigestion. It can be easy to see that only on a physical level and separate that from the environment of the rest of our lives. And our environment is not just where we live, but it's who we live with, who we are around, the people that make our life so rich. Life really is about other people. It's not about things. And when you separate that symptom and put it in the silo of a physical-only symptom and see that as just SIBO or just low stomach acid, and you treat it on a physical-only level, you are missing the big picture. You're really missing the deeper root cause. You're missing a chance to see that human, if it's someone that you're working with as a practitioner, or you're missing a chance to see yourself if that's your symptom, as a person who is responding to their environment. We are in constant relationship with our environment, and we're in constant relationship with the people around us, and no man is an island. And thus, we have to look at the relationships in our lives.
And when it comes to digestive issues, it could be that instead of needing to add something in, instead of needing to add in a bitter supplement or add in a Betaine HCL (hydrochloric acid) supplement, you may actually need to see where your energy, energy that could be going to your digestion, is being drained by a relationship in your life where you're not setting boundaries, where you're people-pleasing, where you're worried about what does this person think of me? Where you're worried about confrontation and being honest. And so you're sort of suppressing yourself. And I think that that's where I see health moving is that instead of us consuming, consuming, consuming and trying to solve our health problems by adding more, we need to stop, see, observe, look at our relationships especially, and see where we can either not take away in terms of end those relationships, but where we can reduce the energy leaks in those relationships and start there.
Because also the nervous system plays a huge role in our digestive health. It's not just the microbiome or just SIBO. You have to be in a state of rest and digest to secrete stomach acid in the first place. You have to be able to activate and access your parasympathetic arm of your nervous system. So when we are chronically stressed by relationships in our lives, that's not going to happen. We are not entraining ourselves to experience safety in our bodies when we are not allowing ourselves to be honest and experience safety in relationships. And that lack of safety follows us when we sit down to eat a meal.
Aviva: How have you come to this recognition for your own personal life and how have you come to practice being more comfortable setting boundaries or where have you found that you've needed to do that or speak your truth more? What's been your journey with this?
Olivia: Yeah, I think this turned out to be the thing for me and is probably why I'm so passionate about it because I've had a very long journey of just throwing everything at the wall. I've been in the health and wellness world and an herbalist for long enough to have tried and done all the things. And of course, there's a point where utilizing our herbal allies, the plants that we are here to be in relationship with and lean on when we need extra support like nervines when our nervous system is overactivated, those help us to a certain extent. And I think then there came a point for me where a nervine like Skullcap was no longer helping me sleep at night because the herb was asking me to now look deeper into what in my life was preventing me from getting into a calm state at night? What in my life was causing me to overthink and spiral before bed? And where did I have to actually start to take the action to work on the root cause?
And so I kind of evolved my own school of thought from herbs or medications or things outside of ourselves or diet and nutrition. I used to think that those were the answers. Food is medicine, herbs are medicine, medicine is medicine. And all of those things are true. But at the same time, there's also this internal landscape that we can access and we can create so much change by not even having to look outside of ourselves. So for me with my health issues again, I would always kind of have the add more school of thought. And you get so tired of those things either not working or coming to a point where they're no longer effective where you start to just stop and say, what do I need to take away?
And I realized that, for example, I didn't need more nervines for my nervous system. I actually needed to take away my overuse of caffeine and stimulants, and I didn't need hormone balancers. I needed to stop the HPA cascade that came from over-consuming caffeine and stimulants that told my ovaries, hey, do this because our ovaries are just responding to what our brain tells them to do. So it was coming back to that brain level, that how am I responding to my life and my inputs level? And I had a very serious journey the last few years of just exploring what started as sort of looking at codependency in this surface way of what substances am I codependent on? Why am I relying so much on caffeine? What's the deeper issue there that, oh, my worth feels very tied to my productivity and my ability to do, do, do and succeed in my success? Maybe that's something that I need to work on. And that actually led me to far more results than just treating the symptoms of that lack of worth.
I looked at my relationship with cannabis. I used cannabis to soothe my nervous system for a very long time. For 10 years, I would utilize cannabis pretty much every night, and I had a really big wake-up call in 2022. I stopped using it entirely, and I couldn't believe the backlog of grief and emotions that I wasn't feeling because I was again relying on something outside of myself to help me soothe or dissociate or avoid my own pain. But my pathway through was in actually facing and feeling that pain. And once I did, I needed a lot less of those external soothers to numb me. And so it started there, and then I realized, ooh, the way that I'm in relationship with these substances where I'm seeing these substances for what they can do for me or as a way to avoid myself and what I'm feeling,
I think I'm kind of in relationship with other people like that too. I think I'm in relationship with, for example, my boyfriend at the time who's now my husband. I was like, ooh, how much of me leaning on him is me leaning on him and our relationship as a way to avoid feeling my own feelings, or how much am I seeing him for how he makes me feel and what he does for me versus seeing him and his needs? It just was almost this journey of self-awareness and acknowledging my own selfishness. And that selfishness was really just born out of this pain, this kind of lifetime of not understanding or having the tools to be with my own really big emotions. And so I've been diving into those last few years and I realized the greater capacity I had to be with those big painful emotions at times, the greater capacity I have in relationship to see the other person for who they are versus what they're doing for me. I don't need them as much anymore to soothe me. I just love them.
Aviva: That's beautiful. See, Wise Grasshopper.
Okay, so for those of you listening, when I am preparing a podcast, I have this questionnaire that I send to my guests, and most of them fill it out, and Olivia graciously did. And I have questions like, what blows your hair back right now? Or what keeps you awake at night that you just can't stop thinking about how interesting or important it is? You had this beautiful response, and it was why knowing who you are is such a missing piece in being able to make the right decisions for your health and put into action the things that you've learned or know you need to do. So solving the action-knowing gap. And you go on to say, because sometimes the decisions you actually need to make for your health, leaving a job that's draining you, saying no more often, making a huge change are big. And what I really loved here, I'm going to wait for it, when you know who you are, you can easily make that decision and take away the shame because you simply can't do something that's not aligned with who you are. Once you see and feel you and say, it's the confusion of denial of who you are that makes this next step feel unclear and impossible.
Olivia: Yeah. When you are in relationship with reality, when you see who you are, where you are, what you value, the reality of just what it is in that moment, it becomes a lot easier to make the next decision with that sometimes painful reality in mind. So I have a few examples of this. I think one example is I recently had a journey where I reversed insulin resistance and I was in a place where I really needed to build muscle and my body composition was in a really unhealthy place and I knew it was getting there. I knew I was neglecting myself. I knew even though I had all of this health information, I knew that I wasn't putting those things into practice, but I was avoiding that reality because if I avoided the reality of how bad things were getting, then I didn't have to act because once I knew and faced it, I would have to act. It would just be in my field. The truth of it moves things…
Aviva: Once you see it, as my grandkids say, once you see it, you can't not see it.
Olivia: Yeah. You can't unsee it. So I noticed that at that time I was very avoidant of mirrors or avoidant of pictures of myself or videos of myself. I think that's very common for those of us who are in a season of feeling discomfort within our physical bodies. Once I just became in relationship with the truth of my reflection and where I was, I was just like, all right, this is what we're working with. Cool. This is the reality. And I had acceptance for it. It's not looking at like, oh my God, I look terrible, so now I need to change. It's just the radical acceptance of reality, of this is where I am and fully seeing the truth of myself in that moment. Then I was like, all right, I've seen it, now I got to make the changes. I really got to start going to the gym and lifting some weights.
And that was the catalyst for me to really see it and to see my lab work and all things. So that's one example. And then another example is I, like you, I'm at an interesting point in my life and career where I've been on social media and I've shared a lot about my life and I've been very open and it's been very hard for me to do so in many ways, even though it's also kind of come naturally to me. And it's served a beautiful purpose. And I got to the point this year where I was like, it's feeling so difficult to continue moving forward here. Everything about it is feeling hard. And my friend said to me, I don't think you are accepting who you are. I don't think you're accepting that you're a very sensitive, empathetic individual who wants to do right by people and wants to help everybody and doesn't want anybody to have a bad experience or be driven wrong by your advice or your input or your existence. And so being a public figure on social media is actually very hard for you and may not actually be the right job for you. Have you ever thought about that? And I was like, holy crap. By just being like, well, of course it's hard. Of course people are going to say things. Of course I'm going to be sensitive to those things. I just have to build a thicker skin. What if I don't just have to build a thicker skin? What if I just accept? And once I accepted, oh my God, I'm just a sensitive person and being exposed to hundreds of thousands of people each day is the worst thing for my nervous system. It became so easy for me to be like, all right, I'm going to start having my team post and step away from social media and it was the easiest move.
Aviva: I love that. The piece of really looking honestly when people take on something or get in a relationship, so many women stay in relationships that could be new. It could be in a relationship. I had a conversation with Jillian Turecki, and we talked about how people could be in a relationship for a month and feel like they have to stay in it forever because they committed to it. Instead of really saying there's no shame or failure in leaving this, though, I have to really truly, truly be honest with who I am and what I feel…
Olivia: Because I know who I am, and I know what does and doesn't work for me, and I have this self-worth to be able to hold fast to that and to be able to stand in that. And it's much harder to know those things than to put them into practice because my friend S.A. says we have to test our material. We might get the spiritual lesson, but when we test that lesson in relationship is when we find out. And this is so important for people's health journeys because a lot of times what is going back to my point about digestion, someone's chronic digestive issues could be in part or largely fueled by a very stressful relationship in their lives or a terrible work environment that is traumatizing them and they don't realize that they need to get out of it or don't know how to take the steps or don't have the self-worth to take the steps to remove themselves from it. And that is going to be a lot more helpful for them than giving them an herb or a medication at times. And so these huge things that we need to do, these huge shifts that are speaking to us through our symptoms, sometimes these are these messengers of like, hey, the alarm is sounding off. Something has to change. And so often that's what our symptoms are telling us. Our bodies are not against us. They're trying to give us information. And it does take big leaps at times to get to the next level in our health. And if you can just know yourself and if you can really build a relationship with yourself first, then you can start to take the action and leave that job and leave that relationship. But you have to build that relationship with you first.
Aviva: And sometimes it's not an overnight thing. I want to be mindful to people who might be listening, who are in a marriage and they have a couple of kids and they're the stay-at-home parent. And it's like, so even if you can't or you're in a job that you're really economically dependent on, which Olivia and I have the life circumstances that we've created entrepreneurial. So we're like, I say to myself, my husband jokes, I'm my own worst boss. I drive myself harder than any boss every time, but I still get to work for myself. But if you're in a situation where you can't make the change now, sometimes taking steps toward the change, whether it's starting to keep a journal and even just writing down your vision of what it would look like in that next phase. And that sounds, I know, kind of woo woo and I'm actually not against woo woo, but it sounds sort of magical thinking. But we actually do know that there's evidence for how we're telling our stories can actually shape our sense of efficacy and agency.
We also know that when we start to identify more of what we want, there's something called positivity bias. So imagine you're thinking of buying a Honda Civic and then all of a sudden you're driving on the highway and you see Honda Civics everywhere. It's not like there's suddenly more Honda Civics or you're magically conjuring, but your attention was on Honda Civics. So now you start, it's like the art of noticing. So journaling, but also think about you're in a career, you're in a job, you feel really locked in, you're economically dependent on it, but maybe you can start taking some online courses or enroll in your community college. And it's hard. I'm not saying it's not. I mean, I did med school with four kids and it's hard. And then at the same time, sometimes the empowered hard is the kind that you really want than the one where you feel stuck. Hard and stuck is really different.
Olivia: Yeah. It's different to be fighting for yourself versus fighting against somebody else.
Aviva: Yes. That's a really powerful way to put it. Even if you're in that situation, in a work environment, especially if it's a work environment that's not respectful of you, let's say that's the situation. I think even just taking steps to start to speak up for yourself, kind of putting things in writing to your managers, like, hey, this incident happened. And even just starting to set boundaries in small ways can start to create the space for either change within that environment or other opportunities. But like you said, also, if you know that ultimately this is not the job you'd like to stay in, regardless of whether or not things change, even just the knowing of that in your field, you may be more aware. You may see a sign for that community college and a program on a tree because your psyche, your consciousness is now sort of more open to it and looking for it. And so a lot of these decisions start within us and with the knowing of, hey, I'm going to just admit to myself that I'm not happy here. A lot of us will try to convince ourselves that we're happy in situations or that we could be happy or we just have to try harder or will be bad if we can't try hard enough to make it work. And sometimes just the acceptance of this isn't working for me and I can't do anything about it right now, but I'm just going to have a truthful conversation with myself about it and just witness how much this sucks. That can shift so much.
It really can because just that honesty with yourself, again, you're not fighting against yourself. You're in alignment with yourself and you're validating yourself. And that is really powerful. So tell me where your personal growth, your personal insights, your, I would call them mindfulness insights come from. Do you have specific practices, specific therapy work you do, things you read?
Olivia: Yeah, I have a few therapists in different ways. I have a body worker who's very woo woo and intuitive at times, which I also love and support as much as she's very talented physically. And she's taught me some exercises that have really helped me to create certain shifts. So if we're talking about this shift where we know that a relationship or a habit is no longer serving us and we're ready to face the reality of that and even just bring the possibility that that's true into our consciousness, she's taught me this practice of hosting an internal funeral and it really has changed my life and it has expanded my framework and capacity around how I can spend time even engaging with these truths.
Aviva: Okay. Tell us more about this. What does this look like? I've heard the one where you're like 90 and you're getting an award and what would people be saying about you? I have not heard the internal funeral before.
Olivia: I've never heard the 91, but that sounds great too. I think even just thinking about our own death…
Aviva: Yeah. It's like if you're 90 and the people you loved were there and your friends were there and your colleagues were there, what would they say? If in your heart, you could kind of have a sense of what they would say about what you contributed in your life on any level, what would those things be? So kind of a way of tuning into what's truly, truly important to you at the end of the day.
Olivia: Well, that's one excellent tool. And I would call that in my lens of relationship, now that I see everything as being in relationship or not, I would call that being in relationship with the reality of death and being in relationship with death period. And I think that's a very powerful way in because when we accept and are willing to engage with the reality of our own mortality, it does shift things. It does put things into perspective. And even engaging around the reality of the mortality of those we love, I think that puts our relationships into perspective as well. So that's a great tool. But what I'm talking about is mini funerals that you host in your own mind, in your own body through visualization exercises. And so, for example, when I was ready to give up caffeine and I realized this is going against every adaptogen and yin nourishing blood nourishing herb I'm taking, I'm literally depleting myself as I'm trying to build myself. This is crazy. I lay down and I had a funeral for coffee, caffeine, and I invited all of my organs. So you imagine that you're in a church or whatever this looks like, maybe you're in nature and you take stock of your different organs and you ask who wants to speak at the eulogy? And this is where imagination comes in. Whether this is really you having a spiritual conversation with your organs or it's just your imagination, there's valuable information in play and imagination. It's actually just a way to be with yourself.
And so I imagined my adrenals coming up to the stage or the area to give the eulogy and I asked my adrenals to say the good, the bad, the ugly. And my adrenals were like, for us, it's all bad and ugly. There's really not much good that came from this relationship. And then my brain was like, hey, I have something to say. Hold on. I want to come up there. And so my brain was the part of me that was having the most trouble giving up caffeine and making this part of my identity someone who doesn't use caffeine habitually. And when my brain had a chance to say the good, the bad, and the ugly, my brain was like, it really helps us get our work done. It really helps us think more clearly and perform at work. And the brain was willing to admit some of the bad and the ugly, but I just gave all of my organs a chance to speak and air their grievances. And then I just kind of held the funeral. I thanked caffeine. I really honored my relationship with it. And I said, I'm ready to let this go. And then I visualized the person, the next version of me who was no longer dependent on caffeine every morning. And I accepted that in the beginning, she might have a hard time, but then she was going to find this level of peace and she was going to be able to travel and not have to look for the nearest coffee shop as soon as she woke up. And I just really visualized that. And that helped me to usher in that really big shift and change. And I do this for everything. I do this when a relationship in my life is coming to a close, a friendship, anything like that. I give my heart a chance to come up to the stand and say the good, the bad, the ugly. I give my inner child a chance to say what she needs to say. I just try to talk to the parts of myself and parts work internal family systems. That's another psychological framework that's really been helpful to me.
Aviva: Tell me how you've been engaging with that. And for people who aren't familiar with it, please share.
Olivia: So parts work internal family systems is something that I've engaged with with my therapist. And this is a framework where each of us has these different parts within us. And when we are in different life situations, certain parts are dominant and take the stage in order to protect us. And so maybe when we're having a fight with our partner and it feels kind of like the fights that we watched our parents experience and our alarm system starts ringing, maybe the firefighter part comes out and says, hey, I don't like this. I'm going to come and put out the fires. And maybe the firefighter is our fight or flight mode that runs or freezes or does these things that are maybe not exactly productive to the situation, but that part is coming out…
Aviva: Or rescues. It could be the part that rescues or creates the peace.
Olivia: Or people pleases. Yeah. And so by realizing that that's a part of us that's coming out to protect us, it takes away a lot of the shame of in this situation I reacted this way and I screwed up and it's me. It's not necessarily you are a culmination of all these different parts that are trying to protect you.
And then we also have the manager. Let's say for me, my manager comes out when I'm on a podcast or when I'm speaking on a stage and my manager is very cognizant of my words and my eloquence and isn't going to speak the way that I'm speaking to a friend when I'm in Yonkers. And that's protecting other parts of me. And it's important for us to remind ourselves that when we are at work or something like that, it's just one part of us coming out. It doesn't mean that it's our full identity. It doesn't mean that we're sharing all of ourselves and we shouldn't.
And then we have our inner child. We have our inner teenager. And I think we also even have our inner mother. And I think our inner mother can sort of be on the same level as our highest self, like our truest self. I think our inner mother is who we really are. And I believe for myself, I kind of created my own framework through art over the last year as I've gotten deeper into inner child work and relationship work where I realized that in order to come into relationship with my inner mother and parent myself the way that I would feel good being parented, re-parent myself, I needed to come to terms with the relationship that I had with my mother, who she was, who is, and who I am not. Because I think that many times our inner voice, the voice that can beat us up sometimes in our heads or the voice that can body shame us or come out when we're feeling insecure, is not actually our own voice. I think that very often, especially as women, we internalize our mother's voices. And growing up, I heard my mother speak really negatively about her body. I heard my mother look in the mirror and say these terrible things and tell me I don't want to be seen. And as I grew up and adopted maybe her habits and things like that, I also somehow internalized this voice and began to speak to myself that way. And once I was able to really deeply witness her, which I did through art, I spent several months taking pictures of my mother throughout different parts of her life when she was a baby, when she was a young child, when she was a teen, when she was a 20-something with a cigarette in her hand. I took all of these different photos and archetypes of her, and I started to draw them because for me, I don't have a chance to be in relationship with my mom at this point in my life. She's ill, so I am not able to witness her get to know her in that way. And who knows if I would be able to if she was totally cognizant because our parents are on their own journey. Sometimes they can't even see themselves. So I spent the time deeply witnessing her through drawing her and meeting her through art and seeing her for just this flawed human who was on this journey of growth just like I am, who was just trying to get by. And by realizing that that is her and I am me and I don't have to internalize her voice, I was able to create this really healthy boundary of separation between my mother and the true me, which is my inner mother. And then I spent several months drawing my inner child and I took all of these photos of myself from when I was one, two, five, all the things, and I made different drawings and portraits and even abstract paintings of my essence of myself as a child so that I could meet and deeply witness who I was before that voice and that conditioning came in and took me away from who I really am.
Aviva: It sounds like you really built around a real story of compassion for your mom in doing this.
Olivia: Yes. It's just compassion. Compassion dissolves so much. And compassion comes from witnessing, from just seeing without a story. Compassion comes from just seeing someone as they are, from seeing a plant. We look at a plant, we look at a tree, we don't say, oh, that tree could be better if it had another limb over here, or we don't necessarily judge those things. We just see it. We just witness it. And art, I think, is a very valuable tool for presence and creates the space and the presence as we're perfecting every curve and saying, am I seeing that right? Does her cheek actually curve in there? We're witnessing and seeing in such a deep way, and I think it changes our brains. The way that I feel after I create art for eight hours straight is how I feel when I've taken psilocybin. Literally, my brain goes into that same level of peace and presence and happiness.
Aviva: Art is very important for me too. And as long as I can be in the zone where I'm not judging and I'm just doing and experiencing, I really value those things in life, whether it's being in nature or just a quiet bath when the snow is falling out my window and there's a candle or art, those kind of deep, quiet walks with a friend that just get you in the zone. Space to me, that zone is really healing. And I agree. For me, it's very transcendental and embodying at the same time.
Olivia: Yeah, it's a way in and you just have to find your way into presence and to witnessing. I think it's so important to witness those different parts as a way to heal. Because once you identify and integrate your inner mother, she can then parent that inner child from a balanced way where the inner child's not running the show anymore, or the inner teenager's not running the show, or the firefighter isn't. The inner mother can see all these parts and can say, I see you. I see that need. I see that you haven't had enough attention. Cool. Here's how we're going to organize this family, and on the weekend we're going to get ice cream, and on this day we're going to do this, and none of you guys get to run the show. You get to integrate and be balanced. So that's what I'm working on in the future. And I think herbs will have a role to play in that as well. I think we can work with herbs at each phase.
Aviva: Yes, let's talk about that. For those of you who are interested in parts work, you can literally just go online and search for parts work. There are books and courses and therapists around the country who practice it, and it really is just about learning how the different facets of yourself that are both inherently you but then also have become adaptive that may not be helping you anymore can be integrated and also released.
So you mentioned mugwort at the top of the hour, and we talked a bit about dreamwork with botanicals. When you and I were talking, and I know this is an area you shared with me that you're diving deeper into, and I shared with you that back in the early 2000s, I did a little experiment. It was meant to be a year-long experiment, which I, for whatever reason, just didn't do but had a really powerful dream. I was taking yarrow, and I tried tincture one night, I tried tea another night, and had a dream where my grandfather, who had been passed away for a good 15 years at that point and was my person, came to me in the dream and was kind of embracing me almost with wings. And I'm not religious, but it was a very angel-like kind of embrace. And he was just telling me, you're doing great. It's all good. And it was just like I woke up sobbing but in this deep kind of cathartic belly sobbing, and my whole body was so relaxed. And I think that, oh, well, we know, right? We know that herbs like psilocybin and ayahuasca and others can have profound impacts on our psyche, but then there are a lot of other herbs that we know. So how are you exploring herbs and psyche?
Olivia: That's such a good point. It's like, how naive are we to think that only psilocybin and ayahuasca give us messages or sort of change our psyche or maybe change our neurotransmitters? If you want to look at it in a purely scientific Western lens, really what psilocybin is doing is maybe making you fire off a bunch of different brain chemicals in certain large amounts to where you are able to see things differently or have hallucinations or whatever it is. But all plants interact with our physiology, our neurochemistry, our neurotransmitters in some way. And if you look at the spiritual side, the spiritual tradition of herbalism, plants each are said to have a spirit. And when you come into relationship with a plant, especially when I think you're one at a time, like your relationship with yarrow, where again, you're slowing down, you're not consuming plants as a commodity in a multi or formula, which has its place. But when you're looking to do relationship plant work and psyche work, I think it's important to work with one at a time. And I think that each of these plants, as we work with them, impart their wisdom on our psyche and our spirit. And often that wisdom, if we slowed down to meditate, maybe it would come through in our meditation as little pings and thoughts that we're like, never thought of that before. Maybe that's yarrow. But because we often don't slow down, they often speak in our dreams, and we don't understand our dreams. We have no idea what those things are really coming in for. So I choose to kind of see them as this bridge to the psyche and to information. And I think that plants like psilocybin and ayahuasca, which have a more pronounced effect on the spirit, the psyche, and the neurotransmitters, I think they get you to the insights maybe a little bit faster.
Aviva: They're the technicolor journey.
Olivia: Yeah, it's the fast track to the spiritual insights that lead us further away from the ego and more towards the heart. But not all of us can handle that either. There's a pro to that. It's fast and you can maybe develop yourself faster. And there's that, sometimes that can be so jarring and so far away from the reality that we're used to or ready to integrate, that if that person doesn't have support or an integration period or any kind of framework in which to understand the truth bombs that just got dumped on them, it can be so destabilizing and can be quite dangerous. And so I think that while we're seeing this huge push towards psychedelic-assisted therapy and culture towards healing trauma, I really caution people that there are other slower ways in. And that doesn't have to be the answer for you, even if it can help and even if you might be ready for it at some point.
I believe that when you work with herbs in a way where it's, again, that single relationship, you're taking your time, you're getting to know the plant, you're not doing these crazy high doses, you're introducing it into your field, into your spirit, you will get those same messages just at a slower drip rate. And they'll come through, again, your dreams, your random insights throughout the day, the times that you get quiet, you might see that that plant starts to talk to you because it's in you and each one has a different message. So maybe when you're taking yarrow, the message that's coming is something related to the actions of yarrow. Maybe you're going to receive a message on where you need to set boundaries, right? Yarrow flower essence, for example, is a beautiful boundary-setting essence. When I've taken it in the past, I've had a lot of anger come up because anger is our signaler as to where we need to set our boundaries.
Aviva: It's so funny that you're saying this. I had a friend who's a colleague, an herbal colleague, whose wife at the time was going through some hormonal shifts, and she took some botanicals, and one of the botanicals was Bupleurum, which is a Chinese herb for calming the liver, but she got really activated by it. So he came home from work, and there was a sign on the door that said, under the influence of Bupleurum, call you when it's safe to come back.
Olivia: It's like Bupleurum to me is a liver mover. When you want to move liver qi in Chinese medicine quickly, which can often parallel to anger, you only need a little bit.
Aviva: And she was on specifically a liver-moving formula for liver qi stagnation with her hormonal stuff that was going on.
Olivia: This is where plants often get us to the root. They make us see and face the root of why our liver qi is stagnant. If we're suppressing a whole bunch of emotions, suppressing anger, don't want to see certain things, don't want to express ourselves, rock the boat…
Aviva: Yes, as I said, wife at the time…
Olivia: There you go. Perhaps our liver will get stagnant. And in a Western scientific lens, this could look like our phase one and two detox pathways being a little sluggish. And thus, when we start to move things with the help of the plants, they also move things in the psyche and in our lives. And I've told people before, I've worked with clients who had PCOS, for example, but through seeing them as a whole human in the context of their relationships, I saw that really one of the biggest drivers of their stress and hormonal stress was a relationship where they were very sticky and codependent with their partner. And I would give them herbs that were damp-draining and transforming. And I would say, I just want you to know that as you take these herbs, they're not only going to transform dampness in the intestines and in the reproductive system. They also may transform and help you see dampness and stickiness in your relationships. And you might wake up one day and want to up and leave your man or quit your job. And it's part of how the herbs are working in the psyche.
So it's powerful stuff. It's like we can't just use herbs with no regard for the deep spirit that we're choosing to be in relationship with. And sometimes that spirit gives us the strength to set our boundaries or speak up or whatever it is. And I find that that can often come through in our dreams or impulses. And so it's kind of like dreams are these baby psychedelics. Dreams are like little itty-bitty psychedelic experiences each night. And if you care to be in relationship with them, if you care to see them and witness them and respect them enough to be curious, what could that mean? How did I feel in that dream? Not just looking up a dream symbol in a book and having someone else tell you, but saying, how did I feel when that thing happened in the dream? And what might that feeling tell me about the topic of the thing that was happening? And where might I relate that into my own life? It's just another way in, another way to slow down and be with yourself and get curious.
Aviva: And so when I was doing this dream journey, this herbal journey, it was, again, early 2000s, and I just created a dream journal, and I would do a few drops of tincture and then try a tea. So I was having the different formulations, and I would do it for three to five nights in a row, then take a few days off, almost like a palate cleanser for my psyche, and then do another. And yeah, I mean, the yarrow is the one that really stuck with me, and it's always just so interesting to me. So in the I Ching, yarrow sticks are used for divination. So we think of the herb as a wound healer and an astringent, but actually also there's this whole other part. We're not taking it internally, but it's still part of the zeitgeist of the plant. How are you exploring and playing with this piece of herbal medicine in your life?
Olivia: So how I personally interact with these kind of spirit plants, the plants that I take, that I work with individually on a singular basis, that I also often take in spirit doses because I'm really just trying to get the energetics of them or the insights, which I think now I'll try it your way as well, where I do the tea, the tincture, and interact with the plant in its different formats. But I listen to my dreams, and I have this random guy in my dreams, and he comes and visits me. And I've never seen his face, but I've seen his hands, and I've heard his voice. And when I was first exploring my codependent tendencies and the ways in which I was not engaging in right relationship with substances and with people in my life, I had this guy come to me in my dreams, and I saw my family from above. It was like a bird's eye view, saw my family sitting on the couch in our living room where we always sat and watched TV together. We didn't always really connect deeply. We would just kind of watch things together. And we were sitting in a swamp, and there was all of this gunk and goo and dampness, what we say in Chinese medicine, on the floor, and we really couldn't get up. And the man came and said, families like that need bear medicine. And I woke up and I was like, bear medicine. Okay, Angelica, Angelica, there we go. So I looked at Angelica and I realized that Angelica was this teacher plant who could perhaps help me to see areas in which I was furthering my own stickiness and stuckness in relationship and could also perhaps begin to enliven my spirit once again and help me get to know myself and my own passions and desires so that I had a reason to unstick myself. And so I experimented with Angelica as a spirit plant, and I ended up receiving many more dreams slash experiencing a different level of courage kind of. It happened slowly over time. I took Angelica for many, many months, and all of a sudden I had this different sense of courage and was like, maybe I could solo travel, maybe I'll try that. And I just had these different thoughts and impulses, again, come into my psyche. And I started to do these things to create a sense of independence in my life. And that ultimately ended up unsticking myself from my sticky codependent family dynamics that I learned in childhood that are not our fault. And so that's one way in which a plant I've worked with through dream medicine.
And then I think in the future, I mean, my hope is to continue going into this work. I really feel so passionate about the inner child, the inner mother, dream work, and I think even just drawing the symbols in our dreams before we go into drawing our mothers and our inner child, it's a way in to sort of get comfortable and start that relationship with yourself before you do all the big stuff. And so I hope in the future, maybe I team up with a trauma-informed psychologist who can help me actually create this into a program. And maybe for phase one, when we're doing dream work, we'll take mugwort for that week while we're drawing our dreams. Maybe during phase two, with the inner child work, we'll work with flower essences that help us to connect with that inner joy. But I think that there are many ways in which herbs can interface with this kind of spiritual psychological work. And I think that that is the future of where health and wellness is going. I think we're really tired of everyone telling us to watch the sunrise and take vitamin D and do the same things. And we're like, yeah, but there's still something really missing, and I'm still really dysregulated.
Aviva: For those of you listening, there are some really beautiful tools, like there are some plant card decks, or I love the practice of drawing a card. I used to do it every day. I don't do it every day now, but I have a beautiful deck that was given to me by Alex Jameson, who is the nutritionist in the movie Supersize Me. And at some point, she just sent me the gift of this beautiful card deck. So I keep it open and pull a card, and it's almost like a way to pull some inspiration for myself and align myself with something that is just a reminder. It's a reminder that I might not have tuned into that day, and I love doing that.
Olivia: But I love the herbal Oracle decks. There's a deck called Dirt Gems. That's wonderful. And it has some spicy poisonous plants in there too. Those are my plants. I love a little poisonous plant, a little poke root. I think that that's where my witchy medicine really lies.
Aviva: Okay. Do you want to hear a crazy story? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a poke root story. Okay. So back in the day, this was the late nineties, I was running the American Herbalists Guild Conference outside of Santa Cruz at Mount Madonna, and it was September or so, and I lived in Georgia where poke root grows. It just grows like crazy. It's everywhere and it's huge. So one particular herbalist had asked me if I would make some poke root oil that he used topically in some of his clients for specific conditions. And so I made this poke root oil and I brought four four-ounce bottles in a box that was taped up and sealed closed. And this was, you could still bring things on the airplane back then. And so I had it, and I carried it with me, and I had it in my room.
I was sharing a room with Amanda McQuade Crawford, who is a phenomenal herbalist and a psychologist now as well. And the box was completely taped closed, Olivia. I mean, it was like packing taped closed and sitting in a box in the corner on a table. So I came in a little bit later, I'd been hanging out with some friends, and Amanda was asleep, and I wake up the next morning and she said, I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamt that my sister had breast cancer and she was using this poke root oil topically to heal it. And I went over to the box to see if it was completely sealed. It was exactly. I was like, okay. So I opened the box and show her. And then later that morning, I was telling the story to some herbalists, and we had just launched it. I was the founding executive editor of the American Herbalists Guild Journal, and we did print copies back then. And so I hadn't even thought about this, but the cover of the journal was a bear and poke root. So I'm telling the story, the journal is upside down in front of me, and an herbalist named Kerry Bone, he's like, Aviva, and he had a copy of it and he turned it over. And it's just who knows where these messages and things come from, but it was just wild.
Olivia: That's so beautiful and so serendipitous. And I think that's such a good takeaway that people can utilize from that story is that pay attention to those synchronicities. Pay attention even with the bear. It's funny that you mentioned the bear because that's kind of my codependency medicine. When I have dreams of my codependency, there's often bears in the dream.
Aviva: Interesting.
Olivia: So pay attention to animals that come up in your dreams over and over again. What are the plants associated with those animals? Pay attention to plants that call you when you're on your walk. If you stop every time at red clover when red clover is blossoming in the spring and there's something that draws you to that plant, go towards that feeling. Go towards that synchronicity. If someone brings up a plant three times in one day or has a dream of a plant you were thinking about, that's a message. There's so many little messages where the plants are like, hey, see me, work with me. I'm ready for you. And we just have to follow that.
Aviva: And you don't even have to take them internally. There are other ways to bring them into your space. Like mugwort has historically been used in pillows for dreaming.
Olivia: Yeah, just the scent of mugwort alone.
Aviva: I know. It's so aromatic. All right. I have a question for you that I love to ask all my guests, and I want to ask you, if you could tell your younger self anything, how old would she be, and what would you tell her?
Olivia: I think she would be two years old, and I think I'd tell her that she does not have to perform in order to be loved.
Aviva: I think we can let that one land with so many of us. Thank you for that, and thank you for being you and for joining me. I hope we do this again. I want to have this revisit where we're at with the dream medicine in a year.
Olivia: I would love that. Thank you so much, Aviva.
Aviva: Oh, such a pleasure, Olivia. We always include everything in the show notes, but some people hop off the podcast and don't go back to the show notes. So what are a couple of places people can find you best?
Olivia: So you can find me at organicolivia.com. That's my full online apothecary of formulas and all my blogs. You can find my podcast, What's The Juice Podcast, and you can find me on Instagram @organic_olivia and @shoporganicolivia.
Aviva: Amazing. Thank you for being here. Everyone, I hope this has been new, fresh, inspiring, and gives you some creative things that you can do to deepen your connection to yourself and your connection to plants and explore what you're in relationship to. See you next time.