Growing up, Gabby was an academic high-achiever and an absolute stickler for the rules. She avoided conflict by blindly listening to authority figures. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, she was only 12 years old—confused, impressionable, and deeply afraid. Like many teenagers, she fell into the trap of believing that total compliance with government mandates was the only way out.
When the vaccines were released, Gabby fully expected to get one. However, she was recovering from a recent heart surgery and was not yet cleared to receive it. During this waiting period, warning bells began ringing for her parents. They observed close family members and friends suffering strokes, partial paralysis, and even a coma following vaccination. They learned of the rising cases of myocarditis (swelling of the heart) in vaccinated teens, including a cousin in his late teens who suffered heart-related strokes.
Realizing that myocarditis could have interacted catastrophically with her existing cardiovascular health and ventricular scar tissue, Gabby’s parents stepped in and guided her away from the vaccine. Waking up to the lies of the mainstream narrative, Gabby realized that her parents’ protective intervention had likely saved her life. It was a defining lesson: children need mature figures to guide them through dangers beyond their level of comprehension, especially when authority figures fail to protect them.
Healing in the Ravine
Physical health was only one part of the battle. Gabby was suffering from severe social anxiety, low self-esteem, and bullying at school for being “too smart”. Recognizing she was in a bad place physically and mentally, her parents made the decision to pull her out of the public school system.
At their new home, isolated from family and friends and barred from many public spaces due to her unvaccinated status, Gabby spent an entire year walking in the forest ravine right behind her house.
Armed with two books gifted to her simultaneously—one on plant identification and another on the medicinal benefits of plants—she began studying her surroundings. She noticed that the forest was filled with an abundance of life, from simple dandelions and wild roses to hundreds of other plants. She started making tea from rose petals, eating wild rose hips rich in vitamin C, and incorporating these wild plants into her daily diet.
The results were transformative. Spending an intimate year among the trees dramatically improved her heart health, reduced her anxiety, and rebuilt her self-esteem. She transformed from an anxious, isolated child into a strong, self-assured young woman. She realized the physical power of these plants firsthand when she used yarrow to instantly stop the bleeding of a cut. The forest ravine didn’t just heal her; it revealed her calling. Today, she is in the first year of a five-year diploma program in herbal medicine to become a certified clinical herbalist in Alberta.
Modern Medicine vs. The Original Apothecary
Modern pharmaceutical medicine is a remarkably young practice. For the vast majority of human existence, humanity relied entirely on the original medicine: plants. Even animals possess this intrinsic knowledge; birds, for instance, line their nests with anthemic (parasite-killing) herbs to deter mites.
The shift away from holistic healing was highly deliberate. The 1910 Flexner Report cracked down on herbalism and traditional medicine, labeling these methods “unscientific” in order to clear the path for the pharmaceutical industry. It is, at its core, a game of profits. You cannot patent a plant that grows naturally in the wild. A pharmaceutical company cannot profit from willow bark, but they can extract and isolate a single compound from it, apply a chemical process, patent it, and sell it as aspirin.
The industry thrives on symptom suppression, not root-cause cures. Consider a standard cold: a pathogen infects the respiratory system, and the body reacts by coughing to expel mucus and bacteria. Modern cough syrup stops the cough reflex. While the symptom disappears, the bacteria remains trapped in the lungs. The body then raises its temperature (a fever) to sweat and burn out the infection. If you suppress the fever, the pathogen travels deeper, potentially leading to more severe systemic illness.
Traditional herbalism takes the opposite approach: symptom encouragement. An herbalist will prescribe an expectorant to thin the mucus and strengthen the cough, assisting the body’s natural intelligence in expelling the infection. Our bodies are beautifully designed, highly sophisticated machines. True healing requires us to trust our own biology and take back the health accountability we have outsourced to a corrupt, profit-driven system.
The Connected Self: Gut, Mind, and Trauma
In the reductionist view of modern physiology, the human body is treated like a collection of separate parts—a kidney is isolated from a stomach, which is isolated from the brain. But the body is a single, integrated system connected by fascia, a vast network of tissue that acts as a highway for physical and emotional energy.
Consider the gut-brain axis. The stomach is the second most highly innervated region in the body, acting as a primitive second brain. When we experience chronic stress or anxiety, our nervous system enters “fight or flight,” redirecting blood flow away from digestion to the muscles. Over time, this actively impairs digestion. Conversely, because 90% of serotonin (the chemical responsible for mood regulation) is produced in the gut, a damaged digestive system directly triggers mood disorders.
This connection goes even deeper. We process our emotions physically. Gabby notes that she personally suffers from urinary tract and kidney infections only after experiencing significant emotional trauma. Her stoic brother physically falls ill whenever he represses feelings of embarrassment, shame, or sadness. When we bottle up our feelings, compartmentalize our pain, or refuse to express our emotions, those unresolved energies manifest as physical illness. To heal the body, we must be brutally honest with ourselves, trace our symptoms back to their emotional or lifestyle roots, and treat ourselves as whole beings.
Reclaiming Autonomy: A Practical Exercise
One of the most rebellious acts you can perform in a world dominated by “Big Pharma,” “Big Tech,” and “Big Government” is learning to take care of yourself.
In clinical herbalism school, students are taught to slow down and connect with plants on an intuitive level. Before reading any assigned literature on a plant, students must sit with it for at least 30 minutes, taste it as a tea, smell it, and map exactly where they feel its energy in their body. They are discouraged from using rigid scientific terms like “astringent”. Instead, they write about the plant as if it were a person, describing its character and its direct, subjective impact on their tissues.
You can practice this form of mindfulness in your own life. Slow down. Whether it is a wild plant, a food you eat, or an emotion you feel, sit with it. Interact with it consciously. Ask your body how it feels instead of immediately rushing on with your day.
Urgent Alert: Health Canada’s Impending Overreach
While the practice of herbalism itself is unregulated in Canada, the production of natural health products (NHPs) is governed by intensive red tape. Practicing herbalists have long relied on a critical distinction between manufacturing (producing products for general public sale) and compounding (crafting a customized, specific remedy for an individual patient within a practitioner-relationship). Compounding does not require expensive site or product licenses, which allows herbalists the clinical flexibility to tailor formulas to each unique individual.
Now, Health Canada’s Natural and Non-prescription Health Products Directorate (NNHPD) has proposed sweeping policy changes that threaten to destroy this freedom:
The Compounding Policy Change: Under the new proposals, Health Canada intends to stop classifying single-herb products (such as a single stinging nettle tincture) as compounded remedies. This means herbalists would be forced to obtain product licenses for simple, single-herb formulas, even though the practitioner must still make complex clinical decisions regarding dosage, extraction liquids (menstruums like alcohol, vinegar, or glycerin), and patient safety. Furthermore, they want to restrict herbalists from compounding remedies if a “comparable” commercial product already exists on the market. This is an attempt to force a highly rigid, “one-size-fits-all” government standard on a practice that depends entirely on individualized care.
The Raw Material Policy Change: Health Canada is also proposing that herbalists must formally declare their “clinical intent” for an herb before they can even purchase or import the raw material into their practice. This is an absurd layer of bureaucratic overreach, given that the government already maintains official monographs outlining the safety and uses of these herbs.
The Deadline to Stop This is July 12th.
The herbalist community is issuing an urgent call to action. If you value health freedom, traditional medicine, and your right to access customized natural care, you must make your voice heard. Send a brief email to Health Canada expressing your disapproval of the proposed changes to the Natural Health Product Compounding Policy and the Natural Health Product Raw Material Policy. The sheer volume of public opposition is our best chance to force them to reconsider this massive federal overreach.
(The official consultation email address for Health Canada Health Canada Email:
nnhpd-dpsnso@hc-sc.gc.ca.)
Zooming Out: Division, Community, and Solving Problems Together
When asked about her thoughts on the rising Alberta independence movement, Gabby offers a characteristically holistic perspective. Rather than seeing separation as a simple political debate, she views it as a symptom of the larger issue: federal overreach.
However, she warns against falling into a classic trap: “divide and conquer”. The federal system profits off of turning neighbors into enemies based on whether they are “pro-independence” or “anti-independence,” distracting us from discussing the root issue of government overreach that affects us all. The more divided we are, the less productive and stable we will be in making crucial decisions. Whether or not Alberta ultimately chooses independence, we must learn to approach those we disagree with from a position of mutual respect and look for common ground.
We can learn how to build this resilience from the simplest of family activities: the road trip. Gabby fondly recalls family road trips through Europe where everything went wrong—getting pulled over in Monaco, being stranded at 2:00 AM in Luxembourg with nowhere to stay, and having car breakdowns in the middle of nowhere.
Rather than spiraling into chaos, her family used these crises as collaborative exercises in resourcefulness, emotional regulation, and problem-solving.
If we learn to greet our obstacles with positivity, see them as opportunities to grow stronger together, and focus on the root causes of our challenges rather than suppressing the symptoms, we can build a community that no system can break. Let’s take a walk in the woods, look at the trees, and start reclaiming our health, our minds, and our autonomy.
