Tippecanoe Tuning Q & A with Chance & Herbalist Kyle Denton
Our most esteemed herbalist and wizard Kyle Denton joins Vibe Rant tonight for a casual Q & A session. We'll talk about his journey of discovery with adding Biofield Tuning to his healing toolkit, his recent research on the symbolic treasure trove of the oak tree, have some fun banter, and field questions from the audience! Guaranteed to be the best VIBES you'll find online tonight!
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In this episode
Core themes
Teaching Yourself to Tune
Kyle Denton describes learning biofield tuning by doing it. Rather than screenshot Chance's slides from Vibe Rant 111, he paused the episode, took notes and drew his own chart of what goes where, then set up a raised table with a six foot piece of cardboard marked with a chalk outline of a body and a rotating cast of stones and crystals. He credits Chance and Eileen Day McKusick as mentors, says his first remote session was over FaceTime with his wife upstairs, and suggests beginning on a best friend, a spouse or a dog. Chance argues the whole method is already public and self teachable.
Clearing the Story, Not Just the Static
Chance explains a shift in his own practice, from sweeping stuck energy to hunting the story behind it. He recounts a client whose back left sacral, solar plexus and heart work ended with a rush of energy in a right knee he never put a fork near, and describes the back left heart as the zone of feeling drained by others, where the useful move is naming the noble motive behind a victim posture before showing the program underneath. Kyle compares it to bodyworkers who ask a knot to release rather than ironing it out, and says he resists calling himself a healer.
Herbal Formulas Built on the Tuning Table
Kyle calls this his own contribution to the art. He keeps roughly 25 working herbs out of the 250 or so at his Tippecanoe Herbs shop, sets a plant on the energy center it matches, and as he sweeps the fork he combs that energy back into the herb: chamomile with its yellow and white at the solar plexus, deep green skullcap at the heart. He usually builds with four herbs, sweeps the piles together, grinds them, runs them through a percolation cone with alcohol, then ships the result or bags it as a tea. Asked to name one plant, he picks yarrow, Achillea millefolium.
Tarot and I Ching as Practitioner Tools
Chance says tarot is how he narrows a general biofield zone down to one person's actual story, walking through a two of discs pulled on a guilt and shame reading, and calls the cards training wheels that became less necessary as the insight started arriving directly. Kyle joins in with his Herb Crafters Tarot, drawing the sun and St. John's wort for a hypothetical client who cannot say no. They then read live for listeners: horsetail and the ten of earth with hexagram 59, dispersion, for Marty, ginger and the eight of fire for Rachel, and yucca with hexagram 36 for Gabe.
The Oak, the Druids and the Acorn
Revisiting his Root Radical herb of the week, Kyle builds a case around the oak: the botanical name Quercus, the Celtic duir for oak that he links to the word door and to druid, and Godfrey Higgins' book Celtic Druids. He describes the oak as a tree said to tempt lightning and to mark reservoirs of water underground, sacred to lightning gods and read as Thor's tree. Chance adds that the Celtic healing god Bellanus echoes the Greek balanos for acorn. Kyle then covers balanophagy, leaching tannins from acorn meal to make flour, and the oak king dethroned by the holly king.
Quotes
“This is something you can learn, you can teach yourself. All of the information you would need to even do it has already been shared in episodes of this podcast.”
“Start by working on your best friend, your wife, your loved one, your dog. So somebody that doesn't mind you coming around them with a fork.”
“I'm removing stories. I don't even think about it as stuck energy as much anymore. I'm like, what's the story behind the stuck energy?”
“Since then it has been like every time I do something there is a very profound synchronicity or some sort of healing achievement on the part of the client.”
“Don't be afraid you're going to get in over your head. You're going to get exactly what you're ready for. And that's a consistent thing, guarantee.”
“I usually like to make my formulas with about four herbs. And so I'll have like four different piles of herbs and I'll sweep them up, grind them up together.”
“And now more and more often the answer just comes in without me having to turn to the card. They were a stepping stone to knowing what it feels like to access that intuitively.”
“One of the signatures of St. John's wort is that it has all these little tiny holes that when you hold it up to the sun, you could see the light coming through.”
“The lesson of horsetail really truly to me is to bend and not break and to keep being able to bend and mold.”
“It's evidence that the wrong thing never happens. So whenever you have an intention and then you do a divination, the wrong thing literally cannot happen.”
“In the summertime, in the summer solstice, it is said that it's the oak tree, the oak king that is like at the height of his power and shortly thereafter is dethroned.”
“Whenever I'm in doubt and somebody's asking me about something and I don't really know where to go, I'll just start with yarrow and then that will find its way into the formula somewhere.”
Kyle Denton is a community herbalist and medicine maker from Wisconsin who founded Tippecanoe Herbs with his wife Serena Marinelli in 2015. From their Milwaukee apothecary they craft small batch remedies from locally harvested and organic herbs, working from a bio terrain philosophy that blends Ayurveda with Western herbalism. He also runs Root Radical Herbal Academy, has taught for over a decade through his annual three season class and his Milwaukee herb walks, and sees clients as the Tuning Herbalist, using tuning forks to read the biofield. His Substack and podcast, Resonature, explore the interval between vital herbalism, biofield tuning and cosmology.
See all Kyle episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
