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by Gerald Ochs
Rappahannock News Special Writer
I walk up the hill past a nicely restored farmhouse at the wooded edge of Sunnyside Farm. I’ve not been on the farm before and its quiet orderliness has put me in a contemplative frame. As instructed, I see the wedding tent in which a band of not abnormal people are in rapt attention. Their instructor is describing the autonomic parasynthetic nervous system and how, when one smells turmeric, that system causes the pancreas to produce digestive enzymes. •
I came to talk with herbalists Kathleen Maier and Teresa Boardwine about their Dreamtime Center for Herbal Studies, but it appeared to me last Friday that I wandered in error into some gastrointestinal medical seminar in the woods. I stuck it out.
Maier went on to discuss digestive processes (“taking life in, breaking it down, and using it”), indigestion and its causes, the stimulation of pancreatic processes by high acid foods, the difficulty in adaptation of enzymes to complex and changing diets, the value of essential fatty acids, intestinal inflammation and its causes, leaky gut and preventatives, and microflora and the value of fermented and cultured foods. I began to understand that it was not medicine that she was discussing, but natural systems and processes, and the value of nutrition and natural foods and herbs in maintaining healthy function in our bodies.
This, I believe, is the essence of the herbalist, and what hundreds have come to Dreamtime to learn, to learn human systems and functions, and the impact of good and bad nutrition, and the value of natural medicines and herbs. And moreover, to learn how to educate the client in the principles of holistic herbalism.
The Dreamtime Center’s curricula are not designed for the dilettante. Its courses are intensive and extensive, and appear to require that the student be totally immersed, not only in the subject matter, but in the spirit and the context of the teachings. This is an holistic world in which they practice and study, and everything seems to add to the experience. , Dreamtime’s programs, at present, consist of: the nine month Foundations program that covers topics
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