About Alanna
People tell these stories about what brought them to herbalism and other natural therapeutics.
Like: I talked to plants and they talked back and I found solace that I’d not encountered among humans before. Or: I had a terrible chronic disease and allopathic medicine told me I was crazy and so I spent a decade figuring out how to fix myself. I’ve tried on some of those narratives because of course many things can be true at once, so I could tell a story about my own trauma history or coming from farm folk who loved the land that they worked and did shit for themselves. There’s an alternate tale about growing up in a Pentecostal megachurch and, like, the apocalypse.
But I think the truest version is that I want sovereignty. And maybe being sovereign of my own life is, in fact, the common thread among all those iterations of truth.
I think of herbal medicine as a tool for sovereignty.
The Vitalist tradition in which I was trained is predicated on the idea that there is an animating force to all of life that wants to express itself. We so often find ourselves blocked, stifled, by the stuff of life (read: capitalism white supremacy colonialism patriarchy etc.) and herbalism and the Vitalist tradition offer a set of tools, a systems based approach, for clearing the way.
That’s like the highest form of self governance. And like any set of tools, it’s best learned in partnership and takes practice and maybe there’s a growth edge in there. But ultimately, the purpose of the work I do is to help foster the growth of this agency for my clients, to help people find their own unblocking and make myself obsolete.
I have this one tiny little corner of the world where I get to buck against everything that’s fucked about the way healthcare works on a bigger scale, which asks you to hand over some kind of power for a paternal exchange that dismisses your experience of your body, your knowing, and often, your decision making power.
I have been in clinical practice as an herbalist and nutritionist for over ten years. So much of that practice has been helping to coach people through advocating for themselves with their own primary care practitioners that I decided I should just join up and, as a participant in the broader medical industrial complex, be a professional with whom people don’t have to advocate for their own humanity.
My primary herbal education spanned 1600 classroom hours of instruction in medical and clinical herbalism and clinical nutrition at the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism. Course competencies there included anatomy and physiology, pathology, herbal Materia Medica, therapeutic strategies, phytopharmacology and phyto-pharmacokinetics, nutritional therapeutics, interview and assessment skills, Capstone theses in herbalism and nutrition, and regular shifts in the school’s sliding scale public clinic in Boulder, Colorado.
I continue my herbal education by way of attending myriad conferences, more extended courses with the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine and maybe most valuable, private correspondence with my own rich community of badass, thoughtful, experienced herbalists.
More recently, I completed a Bachelors of Science in Nursing at the University of New Mexico and am a licensed Registered Nurse in the state of New Mexico.