San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
RE’S A CLASS FOR THAT
when she was an apothecary at the Guerneville Natural Foods Store in 1971 (it evolved into Rosemary’s Garden, still open in Sebastopol) and founded the School of Herbal Studies in Forestville in 1978.
If you come into Scarlet Sage with an ailment today — as the many locals who treat the shop like a walk-in clinic do — you have a good chance being referred to a Gladstar book or treatment she described. Despite the shop’s love of alternative treatments, the highly trained staffers have no qualms about referring customers to a traditional doctor when appropriate. This attitude underscores the essence of holistic wellness today: It’s not about rejecting one form of treatment over another so much as it is
Well, well, well: about exploring multiple modalities to find the best one or combination to achieve physical and spiritual wellbeing.
“The West Coast is less binary,” Shaughnessy says, summarizing this inclusivity phenomenon.“People who are still traditionally active in church are drawn to yoga practices and Buddhist practices, which other parts of the country deem as heretical.”
Likewise, traditional Western medical practitioners are seeking alternative training. Ash has a medical doctor enrolled in her herbalist certification course, and Grisley has taught medical professionals how to tap into their intuitive, receptive mind so they can better tune into patients’ ailments. “I strongly believe that the more people can get in touch with their intuition, the more we can be of service to our world no matter what we do for a living,” Grisley says.
Meanwhile, I sit on my living room floor with my kids, sipping tea and studying my new tarot deck, feeling like my world has expanded just that little bit more now that I’ve started honing my empathic abilities.
Maggie Winterfeldt Clark is a San Francisco freelance writer. Email: style@sfchronicle.com