The Wise Woman Tradition

It was the late 1990s when, at 19 years old, I found myself in a circle of multi-generational teachers who taught me how to heal. The sound of the drum and the lift of the song woke something up in me as we sat in a circle singing and sharing our life stories. It woke an ancient memory; that there is a power and natural magic that arises when women gather.

 I was overcome with a warm, calm feeling that I hadn’t experienced before; it was that of belonging. It came from the edge of my memory and slipped into full view as the scent of the warmed nettle and motherwort tea was placed in my hand. This was home; despite being hundreds of miles from my life back in my hometown.

I was a university student downtown at the University of Toronto, going to school with friends I’d known most of my life.  And yet, here I was sitting in a circle of 20 strangers in Upstate New York, feeling more at home with these wildish women with beautiful streaks of silver in their hair whom I had met just three days ago. It was a homecoming. I was learning about my body and how I too am tied to the ocean, moon cycles and seasons.  This interconnection isn’t just poetry, I was learning; it is literal. There is a magic that wakes up inside us when we remember that we belong to the earth. 

What I learned that weekend, and then for several years thereafter, is that the wise woman's way is simple -  but this does not mean it lacks depth or complexity. It is the oldest tradition of healing on the planet. It is compassionate and earth-centred, thoughtful and expansive enough to hold multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Sometimes it even seems paradoxical. 

Braiding Traditions

I had left university to study herbal medicine, and then right after that, I went to homeopathy school. By the time I was in my early 20s, like many of my peers at the time, I was self-righteous and vigilant in my belief that natural medicine could heal everything, and that medical intervention was never necessary. I held fast to this view until I started working in clinical practice and was faced with having my beliefs re-arranged by real lives. My patients weren’t just ‘cases’, they were whole, real, human beings. My early clinical supervisors, many of whom were MD’s and also Homeopaths and Naturopaths, reminded us never to reduce our patients down to file numbers or their diagnoses. They are whole people with complex histories and are much more than their illness. This wide-angle view, combined with my instructors' profound compassion, made me re-adjust my thinking. They drilled into us that no two people have the same healing path, and it was disrespectful to the patient to insert our own opinions as to whether they choose conventional medicine, natural medicine or combine the two. What matters most is to give the person the dignity to choose the healing path they wanted.

Wholism & Choice

I had witnessed my patients embrace medical interventions and thrive, just as some did not. Some patients solely healed using only natural methods. And many did best when we added in herbal and homeopathic treatments alongside medical care. As tough as it was to admit it to my younger, self-righteous self, it was using a combination of both systems of medicine that was often the most successful. 

 My professional education had echoes of what I had learned through the Wise Woman Tradition, which I had been steeped since those early days in the 1990's at the Wise Woman Center in New York. The Wise Woman Center was founded by herbalist Susun Weed, in the 1980’s. However, this tradition belongs to no one, and yet also belongs to everyone. The Wise Woman Way is about remaining open to change, being flexible in our minds, and always connected to our inner knowing. Sometimes we need to use technical or medical intervention—this too, is part of the wise woman way. We use medical interventions while also practising meditation and receiving herbs, acupuncture, energy medicine, ancestral healing, and shamanic practices. This diverse and colourful worldview embraces all methods of healing. The wise woman tradition is the path of “both/and,” recognizing the profound complexity of life and the countless options there are to heal in the spiralling, ever-changing path of life. 

Those early years of practice were sobering. I had to mature my youthful naivety and accept that rarely is anything black or white, especially when it came to health treatments. I was humbled when one of my first patients was a person who could afford all the fancy, expensive naturopathic therapies at an elite residential clinic. They had a functional medical doctor, their energy healer, and received acupuncture and vibrational medicine daily and yet nothing stopped their very serious disease—until they received chemotherapy. They had seen this intervention as a failure. Thankfully, I remembered what I had learned from the wise woman tradition and shared with them that chemotherapy can be embraced as a slice of the holistic pie, included alongside everything else they were doing. We can use chemotherapy when necessary and acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and vibrational healing. 

The Ecology of Healing

The wise woman's path is not the heroic, linear, black-and-white paradigm that says we have to stick with one side or the other and then pit them against each other. The wise woman tradition rebukes binaries and embraces wholeness. The wise woman tradition begins with love and nurturance.

We nourish the vital force with whole foods, herbs, sleep, and rest. Then, we engage the energy through meditation, prayer, and vibrational healing. After that, we intervene with mild interventions like high-dose vitamins, supplements or high-dose herbal protocols. And it is only after all these steps that we engage with pharmaceuticals and surgeries as necessary. The power and maturity of this path is recognizing this is not a failure. Sometimes we need all of these steps at the same time. We spiral in, we spiral out. There is no dogma. There are no rules to follow. There is no guru or expert. There is no right and wrong. The wise woman tradition is grounded in common sense and simple yet powerful nourishing formulas, emphasizing prevention. This approach strengthens one’s core vitality and deepens our relationship with oneself and the earth. The wise woman's way is ultimately about preserving joy and freedom through the power of choice.