2025 Winter Workshop Series

Hello all!

I don’t quite have the energy for another monster course like Herbal Harm Reduction this winter; so we’re bringing back updated versions of two workshops from last year, plus a really exciting new one!

I’m also trying something slightly new with the registration and recording system. This year there’s just one registration form, and for the first time you can sign up to receive recordings AFTER the live session has concluded–until MARCH 10th for all three workshops in the series. All participants also have the option of a FREE 20-minute check-in session to cover any questions or thoughts they have related to the workshop.

Registration & Donations & Whatnot

All three workshops take place on SUNDAYS from 4:30-6PM EST (That’s 7:30-9PM if you’re on the west coast).

You can register via the form HERE. If you aren’t sure you’d like to commit to multiple workshops at once, you’re welcome to fill out the form again before MARCH 10th.

If you register BEFORE a live session is scheduled, you’ll get the live link via email or text (probably about an hour before the workshop is scheduled) and a link to a google drive where you can access the recordings once the workshop has concluded (probably within three days or less).

If you register AFTER a live session has concluded, you’ll get the google drive link within three days & information about scheduling a FREE 20-minute check-in over text or phone call.

Recordings will be available via google drive as downloadable .7z files (a high-compression zip file format that most computers and phones should be able to open; or free open-source software is available from 7-zip. This should offer a fast download for folks with rural/shitty internet) and streamable .mp4 files.

The suggested donation for each workshop session is $45-$90. That’s:

  • $45-$90 for one session
  • $90-$180 for two sessions
  • $135-$270 for all three

No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Participants with means, especially those employed within the healthcare industry, are encouraged to consider that much of this content is made possible by the hard-won lessons my friends & I have gained through poverty and desperation; and give accordingly to their position within these systems.

The workshops on offer are:

Pain, plants, and peace — Live session January 26th

Updated for 2025! This workshop assumes a basic familiarity with herbal concepts like actions, specific indications, and contraindications; as well as herbal medicine making. Like all my more advanced content, the necessary basics are covered in An Anarchist Free Herbal 3rd edition (access for free here)

Background

I’ve been in pain every day for over half my life, from a varying combination of joint instability, neurological problems, and repetitive injuries. Like many chronically ill and disabled people, my experience of pain is not just a sense of urgency or a signal to stop doing something: It’s brain fog, immobility, dissociation, low empathy, a short temper, mood swings, both an ever-present sensation and something I have to actively remember to address. Naturally, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about and discussing extreme pain. Many friends and accomplices and I have been dissatisfied with pain management options available via western medicine; especially when we’ve been presented with potentially-dangerous long-term NSAID prescriptions or non-indicated medications with unpleasant side effects. Herbalism can offer a wider range of potential management strategies that can be compatible with western medical treatment for underlying conditions or offer relief to those of us who have chosen not to pursue or continue medical treatment for any number of personal reasons.

Course Description

Over the years, I’ve developed a set of specific indications centering around different experiences of pain, which I will now share with you! We’ll talk about ways of conceptualizing and communicating about pain and explore a wide variety of pain management options—Not just analgesic herbs (although don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty!) but strategies and practices for living with chronic and long-term pain like sensory redirection, ritual, nervous system support and more. This workshop intends to develop a rich, multifaceted and adaptable toolkit that focuses on increasing quality of life in difficult situations with strategically-targeted, doable steps.

Herbal Rash Care — Live session February 9th

Designed for complete beginners, but nuanced enough for experienced herbalists as well. This is a new offering that I’m extremely excited about! It has been a breath of fresh air to develop and I’m extremely excited to share some of my favorite herbs, preparations, and formulas that don’t fit into the emotional-neurological-wellness that I often focus on in my practice. We get to talk about EMULSIONS! 😀

I strongly recommend this workshop for mutual aid volunteers & community medics!

This workshop addresses racist & colorist bias in skincare and emphasizes inclusive, responsible, and ethical practices.

Background

Living through homelessness & disability, rashes have been an ever-present part of my friends & I’s daily lives for years. When they’re not “medically significant”, rashes can be an extremely painful detriment to quality-of-life — and one that it can be extremely hard to get care for or have taken seriously. However, well-informed sub-clinical rash care is–in my opinion–one of the easiest & safest forms of herbalism to offer, and a great entry point for anyone who would like to include more holistic health support in their mutual aid or community medic activities.

Course Description

We’ll cover the cardinal rules of herbal skincare; useful plant allies and the logic behind them; and herbal medicine making! As always, this workshop has plenty of “how”s, but focuses heavily on the why: You won’t just walk away armed with plenty of my favorite herbs, techniques, and strategies; but also with an advanced understanding of how to build your own bioregionally appropriate, role-specific toolkit.

We’ll also talk about scope for herbal practice and how to identify when a skin issue might require higher care/medical treatment.

Fight the Hatman & Win — Live session February 23rd

Updated & renamed for 2025! This workshop (and my perpetually unfinished zine of the same name :/) is my answer to common sleep advice that ignores the socioeconomic conditions that keep many of us chronically overstressed and underrested. (Obviously it’s a bandaid on the bullet wound that is capitalism, but yknow. We try with what we have while we work to make something better.)

Background

Who HASN’T struggled with sleep in this world? From highschool, to shift work, to the hypervigilance of trying to sleep while homeless or in unsafe living conditions, I don’t know that I’ve met anyone who hasn’t at some point struggled to get enough rest–and lived with the complications and misery that come with it.

While OTC sleep aids report simple actions, the myriad of factors that can make it difficult to sleep are not so clear-cut–and in reality, neither are the tools we can try to use to overcome them. Over the years, I’ve started every rest consultation with the same question: “What are you doing instead of sleeping?” The answers and outcomes related to this one, all-important piece of information provide the foundation of the toolkit and decision-making framework we’ll be covering in this workshop.

Course Description

Have you ever taken an “extra strength” over-the-counter or herbal sleep aid, and been disappointed it didn’t help–maybe even made you feel more alert than you did before? Or had one work for a few nights and then stop being effective? Standard sleep advice all seem like its written for someone in a socioeconomic position that’s barely existed since 1980? This ones for you!

In this workshop we’ll take a holistic look at the sleep-waking cycle, common barriers to restful sleep, the nuances between the chemical and subjective effects of popular herbal sleep aids, and creative problem solving tips to promote rest and respite.

Curriculum is drug use-informed

I’m alive! Practice updates, announcements, and all that jazz

Hi everybody. It’s been a minute!

Over the summer I became homeless again, had to part with most of my belongings, and landed in a part of the world I’ve never been to and never particularly had any intention to live: small town Oregon. I’m no stranger to being uprooted though, and pretty fast at putting roots down, so it could be a lot worse.

Not being able to practice much herbalism over the past few months has been rough on me to a degree that’s hard to communicate. This is my passion, it’s what I’m good at, it’s how I can impact the world around me in line with my values… Having begun to establish a public facing practice that allowed me to really dig my hands into everything I love about it, allowed me to really help others, and then immediately having to let it fall by the wayside because I was no longer stable enough to afford the time or resources really hurt.

I am ashamed of flaking on people and projects. I am embarrassed that I went too big too fast and was not honest to myself or others about what would be sustainable for me. I don’t want that to happen again, so, I’m focusing more on educational and informal offerings that have historically been a lot easier for me to be consistent with, as well as moving more slowly and deliberately with projects.

Consultation offerings on hiatus

I’m not at a point in my life where I feel able to support people on a one-on-one basis, so I’m putting all individual consultations and services on hiatus. I still welcome people reaching out with questions and I’ll do my best to find answers or point you in the right direction, I just might take a while to reply and I can’t do full workthroughs with people or offer sustained support.

Open study night!

Starting next month, I will be hosting Open Study Night, a public digital meeting (with an accompanying email newsletter!) for herbalists of all stripes to connect, share announcements, and collaborate! Learn more here.

New & more frequent online workshops

In addition to the Herbal Emotional Support workshop, which I plan on announcing a new session of in the near future, I’ve been working on a few other courses that I’m very excited about. Most are much shorter–single sessions over the span of one to three hours–and should be a lot easier for me to put on as I have time and the ability to plan a few weeks ahead. I’m hoping that as I put on these newer, more experimental workshops, I can get feedback, continually improve them, and add them to a more regular rotation.

The first of these will be announced shortly 😉

And no, I haven’t gotten any better at naming workshops lmao.

Sliding scale updates

This is a hard one for me. Previously, I have run my practice on a “pay me or don’t, whatever” kind of model, with more intense fundraising as the need arises, and hiatuses when I need to spend my time making money to survive. This is my ideal.

However, as I’ve mentioned…my life is tenuous. Some of that is by choice, but most of it is unavoidable as a multiply disabled person with no familial support network. I can’t just get a shitty part time job and supplement with gig work because it’s physically impossible. The ways I make money are paid below minimum wage, occasionally dangerous, usually unpleasant, and INCREDIBLY unreliable. I can’t always promise that hiatuses will be short. This one definitely wasn’t.

So here’s the deal: I will not hound or shame people I work with about their ability to pay. I will not means test or ask you to prove yourself. I will not turn people away for not being able to pay. But I am going to start being more transparent about my needs, because even the limited income I get from donations makes a huge difference in how I can afford to spend my time, my ability to do this work, and my physical and emotional wellbeing.

This is reflected on the Fees? page of this site, where I talk a little bit more about donations and have provided a sliding scale self-assessment for anyone who has a bit more flexibility in what they are able to donate for workshops

Writing projects

Finally, I do wanna mention that the herbal harm reduction zine I announced on instagram right before my hiatus is still being worked on. It’s going a lot slower than I would like it to, but it’s a project I’m extremely passionate about and do intend to release in whatever form ends up being manageable.

Thanks for sticking with me!

I’m really excited to be back. Here’s to the future!

NEW OFFERING: Herbal Exploration Activities

I’m extremely excited to be offering a new service: Herbal exploration packages. These kits include a set of customized herbal preparations and related exercises, focused on bodymind exploration, building experience with herbs, and most importantly, FUN!

Example package with preparations wrapped in colorful paper, ready to ship.

I developed this offering at the same time I was writing my manifesto–Actually, the realizations about my practice that led to the manifesto came as a result of me trying to explain why doing things like this is so important to me.

I want to incorporate play more into my practice. Herbalism doesn’t have to be restricted to responding to problems and returning to “normal”. I think that actively practicing interacting with our bodyminds in ways that aren’t focused on making ourselves “better” is extremely important to refusing to pathology–and I’m so, so incredibly excited to be making these packages because it’s play for me too!

In preparation for this announcement, I went through the process of creating a package for a friend of mine, and it was so much fun. I got to make herbal preparations I don’t typically make, do a bunch of design and packaging tasks I deeply enjoy, and share something I love with someone else. I can’t wait to make more.

Like all my offerings, there is no set fee–unfortunately there are minimum donations for physical kits, but if you have the means please consider donating towards the cost of a kit for someone else!

Full description + interest form here!

(admin note: I have also made some updates to my “herbal offerings” page–this page now has an overview of all of my offerings, with herbal consultation & support, herbal exploration packages, and workshops as sub-pages in the menu.)

Mental Health Is A Lawn; Desire Is a Prairie

Note: I would like to say a huge, loving thank-you to my incredible friends for helping me write this piece. I’m incredibly grateful for the time and effort you’ve all put in to helping me express what I want to.

Introduction

A little over a month ago, I began posting about upcoming changes in my practice, which I’ve been working on since. As I said in an instagram story, I realized that I’ve been pretty bad about replacing surface-level words instead of actually challenging underlying concepts; so, I’ve been taking some time to work on learning to better articulate my philosophy.

In the following essay I am going to try to explain my critique of psychiatry and offer a framework to replace it. You don’t have to agree with anything I say to receive herbs, advice or education from me. If I only wanted to work with people that believe the same things as me, I would stick to caring for my network of friends and accomplices. I have a public-facing practice to offer something immediately and materially useful to (broadly speaking) anyone that asks for it. I’m writing this because—while we may or may not be/become friends—my services are a personal gift, and I do not want them to be received as a function of psychiatry.

Most of all, I believe that everyone has an idea about what the future will hold, and everyone is trying to bring that idea to fruition. Ultimately there is nothing in my lifetime that will result in everyone being on the same page about what we all “should” be doing; and we are all relatively powerless on a global scale. What I can do is help the people I can touch, and walk away from those that want to force me to believe things I don’t want to believe in. I can’t make universal healthcare happen, right now or decades in the future; but I can fight tooth and nail to help heal the people around me for free, and I can share, liberate and generate knowledge to help others do the same.

I’m writing with a very limited scope here—if I was having an easier time writing this it would very quickly become an entire book, not a 3,700-some-odd word essay. I’m asking to you believe at face value that this is what I consider to be true; unfortunately I don’t have the capacity to write out an argument containing all the applicable historical evidence and referential sources right now. I hope at some point I do.

Part 1: Groundwork

Lobotomistic violence

I’m going to start by laying out a definition that I think is important to understanding where I’m coming from. I started using this term because I think it marks a useful distinction in how certain people are treated by psychiatry.

Lobotomistic violence is the set of psychiatric “treatments” that intend to make someone “normal” by reducing/inhibiting function in certain parts of their brain. While surgical lobotomies are generally considered outdated and barbaric in mental health culture, the root concept is still very much alive and well. Several antipsychotic drugs have similar effects to surgical lobotomies, and many more otherwise limit brain function in other ways. These drugs can prevent the people they’re prescribed to from thinking abstractly or feeling deeply, and often cut them off from meaningful parts of themselves.

According to the psychiatric framework there are people who need support, understanding, and accommodation; and people who need their bodyminds* to be physically altered and parts of them literally removed/made nonfunctional. Lobotomistic violence is a “last ditch” effort, when less extreme forms of medication or therapy are considered “ineffective”. Sometimes this comes after a long process of trying different treatments—but a lot of people are subjected to lobotomistic violence because they occupy a social position that society sees as a lost cause from the start, like people kidnapped off the street by ambulances in the middle of a psychotic break, or kids in state custody.

*Bodymind is a popular term in mad liberation that refers to the mind and body as a cohesive whole–it invokes the idea that we do not just inhabit our bodies, we ARE our bodies.

Defining mental health

(In this section, I’m using a very charitable interpretation of psychiatry from a scientific standpoint. Even the most advanced neuroscience cannot reliably identify specific mental disorders or their causes—but even if it could, it would still be fundamentally bad, and that’s the point I want to make.)

Civilization is an organism and an ecosystem in its own right, with structures to achieve equilibrium and to perpetuate itself. The choices that we make and options we see as available have been formed by thousands of years of accidents and choices that shape patterns of behavior and create social constructs. It is these structures I’m referring to when I talk about control.

In order for civilization to exist as it currently does, the people and things subjected to it must be easily understood, because things that are understood can be controlled. An example my friend used was a small, early agrarian state—a ruler wants to collect tax, with the goal of collecting as much as possible to enrich his position against neighboring states. He cannot collect too much tax, or else the population will either starve, or get angry and refuse to participate in the state; so to maximize what can be taken he has to know how much is produced, and in turn the farmers have to know how much they produce to know what they owe and what they need to meet immediate needs. Civilization needs to reduce complicated questions to knowable categories in order to respond in ways that benefit itself. This legibility occludes true understanding, pares down the messy, beautiful, difficult-to-communicate nature of life into one-dimensional criteria to be accounted for and processed. To see how these criteria are constructed, let’s look at an oak tree.

The name “oak tree” refers to a thing that exists, pretty indisputably (at least until you get into existentialism but, uh, let’s not go there). However, the name “oak” is something people made up. There are many different perspectives one might understand an oak tree from. Whatever lens you want to use impacts what characteristics you focus on and how you understand them in relation to the whole. You focus on certain attributes to create a story—if you’re using a scientific lens, you might look at DNA and draw connections to other DNA to tell a story about genetic history. Genetic history is also a human construct that only focuses on the pieces that are significant to the stories our culture wants to tell. These stories are what we use to build knowable categories; but a squirrel doesn’t give two nuts about the genetic history of an oak tree, and likely has its own stories that are entirely alien to us—because different attributes are significant to its life.

Mental disorders are real in the same way an oak tree is real—and fake in the same way an oak tree is fake.

The experiences that diagnostic labels describe are real, but the way disorders are defined is 100% a social construct that is entirely dependent on what is significant to our culture, scientifically backed or not.

“Health” is defined as bodymind states that are convenient for cultural perpetuation; and illness is bodymind states that are not. What experiences and attributes are constructed as diagnostic categories is dependent on what is valued and relevant to the dominant culture—and more importantly, what is conducive to the reproduction of that culture.

In our modern society, people who do not fit squarely into the mold of a responsible, reproductive citizen are either validated or marginalized. These are both methods of control, pushing people into legible categories to make them more easily understood and influenced by society. Validation might look like a kid who’s disruptive in class getting diagnosed with ADHD and working more closely with the school to receive accommodation, whereas marginalization might look like a disruptive kid getting diagnosed with ODD and being treated as if any resistance to an authority figure is a symptom of disease for the rest of their life.

In psychiatry, validation is “positivity”. This extends from clinical practice to what I’m going to call “mental health culture”, the expansion of psychiatry from a form of medicine to a fixture of culture. I’m going to talk about this more in a minute, but for now the point is: mental health does not identify a list of “problems” that exist in a vacuum. It constructs sicknesses in order to justify control. Which leads us to…

This wouldn’t work if we didn’t care about each other

Pretty much everything I have said up to this point describes social mechanisms: how individual actions build on each other and create trends and dynamics as a larger organism. This kind of thinking is helpful to understand how and why things happen on a very large, faceless scale, but becomes messy when we try to apply it to every day life. I think that’s part of why conspiracy theories about shadowy puppet masters are so appealing to a lot of people: the world is full of shitty, complicated things and it feels a lot easier to know how to react to them if they were the product of an individual malice we could isolate instead of the chaotic outcome of thousands of years of individual, collective, and environmental actions/events. This is an example of pushing for legibility! 😀 As individuals we are also often guilty of creating legible-yet-false narratives to help us understand things.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple malice to blame here. A lot of the ways psychiatry hurts people are made possible by compassion. I try not to make generalizations about the human condition OR evolution-based arguments, but I do believe very deeply that humans are a fundamentally social species and that we are physically predisposed to caring about each other—evidenced in part by how much of the coerced labor necessary for society to function depends on making it hard to even SEE enslaved and low-class people, let alone extend solidarity and care to each other. The history of modern psychiatry (mostly over the past 200 years) and the birth of mental health is a chaotic mash of capitalistic profiteering, attempts to stifle liberatory movements, and individuals who are genuinely trying to take care of other people, all informed by the underlying assumptions about what “mental illness” is that I just described.

Brief digression: I’m always tempted to put “mental health” into quotes, but “mental health” implies a distinction between what I’m referring to and some other legitimate, non-fucked-up mental health that just doesn’t exist, so assume whenever I say mental health I’m using a slightly sarcastic tone.

Mental illnesses are, by and large, defined and diagnosed based on suffering, and the treatments, by and large, are designed to reduce suffering—or, the assumption that someone is suffering. How that suffering is measured and defined is still dependent on the basic assumption that correctly reproducing culture is good for you and not doing so is bad for you. For example, many diagnostic criteria measure one’s ability to work productively, and our society assumes wage labor is the norm for a healthy life. Sometimes, this is obfuscated by so many layers of reformed language and liberal feel-good-ism that many people who would disagree with that assumption when said so plainly (reproducing culture is good for you and not doing it is bad for you) are still deeply invested in mental health culture.

Diagnostic categories pick out certain experiences and characteristics to name as symptoms of a disease—but human brains are not very easy to put into boxes. Who is pathologized—labeled as diseased—is heavily dependent on their class status, and how well their behaviors contribute to the status quo. A lower-class non-Christian is more likely to be labeled as psychotic for describing their spiritual beliefs and experiences; whereas a richer person who talks about “being spoken to by the Holy Ghost” is simply a religious fanatic. We see consistently demographic-based diagnostic biases for disorders that are supposedly an issue with predetermined brain “hardwiring”, such as autism and ADHD being diagnosed more in white children, whereas Black children receive ODD diagnoses. By associating abnormality with suffering, and enforcing suffering for the abnormal, attempting to make people normal can represent reduction of suffering and a kindness. This dynamic is even more heavily enforced when people actively choose non-normative lifestyles: someone’s body state is not conducive to them living a “normal” life and they don’t even WANT to change, that means they are extra unhealthy. Under this logic, (attempting to/)forcing them to change is doing a good thing for them and thus the kindest course of action.

Everyone who advocates for broader mental health services is contributing to psychiatric and lobotomistic violence through kindness. There are plenty of people who think positively of their interactions with psychiatric institutions or mental health culture, AND there are ways to reduce harm when participating in mental health culture/be more honest about the risks involved; but encouraging people to participate in clinical settings is still encouraging people to put themselves in vulnerable, potentially dangerous positions.

Madness vs. pathology

Anyone can be crazy. I highly recommend trying it. Experiences are individually varied and highly personal—some people see and hear things other people don’t, some think in ways that are strange or confusing to others, and so on—but madness is simply refusal to conform to normative categories of mind-state and behavior. It is not bowing to social norms and the embrace of abnormal experiences that get in the way of a middle-class aspirations.

Pathologizing is the process by which madness is constructed as sickness. Pathology includes all the things that are “unapproved” about madness and it increasingly includes things that are only minorly inconvenient to our legibility and our participation. People re-contextualize experiences they never thought twice about as part of a disease, simply because they were given a label. “I never knew that was a BPD thing!”

Mental health culture encourages and facilitates this creep because even though its participants will often nominally criticizing practitioners who enact psychiatric violence, they continue to rely on the frameworks this violence is based on. Mainstream criticism of psych focuses on the idea that individual doctors (and/or institutions) apply psychiatry poorly, but it caries the implicit assumption that if it was only used correctly it would be a benefit. This can look like social/support groups of people identifying with a common or related diagnoses criticizing the way psychiatrists behave while encouraging people to self-diagnose, seek certain medication or therapy, or otherwise enforcing mainstream assumptions about the ontology of mental disorders.

Pathologizing talk surrounds us: “I think you might have ___”, “I’m like this because I have ___”, etc. It feels very similar to the ways in which certain queer spaces invent and push labels to describe every possible facet of gender or attraction, because well, it is. Both fixations gain traction because we are told that making ourselves legible to the outside world and making those around us legible in the same way will make us feel less lonely or invisible. Unfortunately, only letting people understand us in terms of our categories instead of on our own, unique terms continues to compound this loneliness. In an effort to make the system “work” we expand what experiences are known, create new labels and try to champion “inclusion”, instead of addressing the forces and dynamics surrounding the things that feel lonely, invisible, and difficult to communicate… A list of abbreviations doesn’t tell the world who you are, it tells the world how to react to you.

Many people who ascribe to psychiatric frameworks still live in ways that resist legibility. There are also plenty of people who are both mad and mentally ill, who use diagnostic labels but do not seek to conform to standards of “treatment”. There are also many people who use these labels to pressure conformity from themselves and those around them. It seems to me like the majority of people who, for example, encourage everyone around them to go to therapy, have never had a practitioner make good on the implicit threat of psychiatric violence.

The role of saneism

It would be incomplete for me to talk about the role of kindness without talking about the role of prejudice.

Saneism is a different form of bigotry than say, racism. It is not hatred of an “other” group that the “perpetrator” is not and never will be a part of. It’s more like fatphobia: hatred of a body state that every human being has the potential to experience. It is self-inflicted as much as it is wielded against the other.

Saneism is a tool to select who is and isn’t crazy. It should be clear at this point that there is no “sane” human being; sanity is only the ideal they beat you with. If you can emulate sanity well enough, driven by fear of internal and external hatred of madness, you are sane. If you can’t, you are insane, and either you can be mentally ill, assimilate to the categories and modes of behavior that are deemed acceptable for people like you; or, if you can’t do that, you’re crazy, and your options are either to submit to lobotomistic violence or to refuse to participate in psychiatry.

Part 2: Praxis

As I said at the beginning: The experiences that psychiatry addresses are real. Critique is all well and good in that it helps us name and understand the systems we live in, but it is only part of the process towards doing something better. Here is my attempt at building a model. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

A lawn is an artificially maintained shape, but a prairie is created organically through small and large events, which lines up nicely with the idea that mental health, as a noun is a standard that must be maintained, but desire, as a verb is a process of seeking, experiencing and evaluating that builds and grows in symbiosis.

Mental Health is a Lawn

The process of maintaining mental health through the reduction of suffering is like the process of maintain a lawn. A lawn is a pre-defined shape created through the prescription of behaviors and chemicals (weeding/mowing; herbicides/pesticides); regulated to be non-challenging and “safe” (no spikey plants, bee or wasp nests, etc) in the name people’s comfort and at the cost of native species; and prioritizing a certain socially-imposed aesthetic at great cost to the environment. Lawns have to be nourished (fertilized and watered) to grow, but are not allowed to get taller or more robust than a set value so that they’re easy to trim regularly with minimal effort. Lawns are monocultures with shallow roots that do not stand up to environmental conditions like drought without intervention. Lawns are also a standard everyone knows–and holds each other to, judges each other based on.

Likewise, to maintain “mental health”, people are regulated to a predefined standard that prioritizes “normal” aesthetics and the “safety” and comfort of others through the prescription of chemicals and habits (medication and therapy). Everyone knows the rules enough to police themselves and each other. Peoples’ material and emotional needs are taken into consideration enough for them to survive (and not commit suicide), but no one is well-supported enough to not feel the pressure to work; and people do not have the freedom to self-regulate on their own so when crisis occurs, you either have to keep working or rely on psychiatric intervention such as hospitalization.

Desire is a Prairie

Seeking desire is like how a prairie or grassland maintains itself as an ecosystem. Many types of plants grow deep symbiotic root systems that create resiliency and allow the ecosystem to survive through many environmental changes. Critters and bugs may kill/destroy plants at times, but they also reuse and decompose detritus and allow the ecosystem to recycle material and stored energy, spread seeds, etc. A prairie is too tall to be mowed easily by a conventional lawn mower and must be poisoned or crushed via heavy machinery. It is a complicated, compelling and beautiful organism that takes years of interaction to understand.

Desire cultivates varied experiences that let us practice the flexibility to survive distress emotionally, and shapes our lifestyles to prioritize self-regulation. Pain, whether external, self inflicted, or both, is an inherent part of life; but pain can allow us to grieve, process and grow, to clarify our desires, and maintain our bodyminds. When we live by desire we become unwilling to bend to social rules that don’t suit us, become uncontrollably mad, and are accustomed to freedom such that we can only be recuperated through incarceration and lobotomistic violence.

A prairie takes a long time to grow, and is difficult to support in a society that demands lawns. Switching from a mental health model to a desire model isn’t a simple or quick thing. Most of us will resemble something more like an overgrown lot, which is just as valuable.

Part 3: What this means for me

It’s taken a long-ass time to be able to articulate these concepts, so it feels extremely good to have finally made the pieces click.

Ultimately, what I offer isn’t substantially changing—at least right now, though I do have a new offering I’ll be announcing in the near future that incorporates herbalism into pleasure-seeking activities. I’ll still be here for consultations, workshops, and informal support; but the foundations are different, and I will be more explicitly incorporating these ideas into how I teach and discuss concepts. You might notice that the pages on my website have been rewritten and restructured, hopefully in ways that represent these ideological changes.

Something that comes up fairly frequently in conversation with my friends and accomplices who do similar public-facing non-hierarchical healing work is how to respond when people come to us expecting more standard frameworks: When people talk to us expecting to be told things about their bodies, or for us to diagnose a sickness and tell them what to do about it. To me, figuring out how to deal with these interactions is a matter of building and improving social skills; figuring out what questions to ask to break the script. This is just as much practical as it is ideological: What I do is in no way compatible with Western Medicine or psychiatry—the tools I have work granularly, effecting a few parts of the body at a time in specific ways. I can help you sleep, eat, relax, play, reduce fear, increase focus, cope with grief, ground thoughts and emotions, feel pleasure… but I do not use diagnostic categories, I do not offer “antidepressants” or treat disease. Someone telling me they have PTSD gives me exactly 0 information about what they want me to be doing for them. In some ways what I think what I already do in these interactions does more to ground my practice outside of psychiatry than any long-ass manifesto or theoretical explanation; but if you want to know why I do what I do, well, there you have it I guess.