Michelle Lundquist | Holistic Herbal Wisdom & Creating a Healing Home For Our Beloved Animals
The mighty Michelle Lundquist of the Healing Home podcast joins InnerVerse for a heartfelt chat about taking care of cats. In this episode we discuss her initiation on the path of the herbal naturalist because of her cat's special needs, along with advice about veterinary involvement for pets, tea-time for kitties, learning your pet's story and speaking their language, recognizing the six tissue states as categories of bodily communication, flower essences, homeopathy, navigating healing crisis, and much more. These things apply to more than just cats, so tune in for a playful romp with the four legged beings closest to our hearts.
In the Plus+ Extension we contemplate the mirroring between ourselves and our pets, probiotics and digestive aids, the use of comfrey, the rhythm of medicinal administration, natural remedies for fleas and ticks, the do's and don'ts with plants and oils for pets, mushrooms, CBD, and nutritional quality considerations. This extension is packed with timeless wisdom, and it's a lot of fun.
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In this episode
Core themes
Spring Seeds and the Lie of the Future Self
Chance opens on Pi Day with a planting metaphor and returns to it in the outro: the present and the future are not separate, so postponing health, in ourselves or in our animals, only hands the problem to a later self. He ties this to the non-linear time he had been sitting with in the Dune series and in the film Arrival, which Christopher Gardner, Topher, recommended. His closing claim is stated plainly, that your future self will feel a progressed version of whatever you feel right now, which is why he wanted this conversation in early spring rather than later.
Carl, the Cat Who Made Michelle an Herbalist
Michelle Lundquist traces her path back to her cat Carl, who passed the previous May at eighteen and whose photo sits on her desk. She was an herbal apprentice interning at an herb shop, drawn to a book there about herbs for animals, and says the first tincture she ever made was for him, a bottle she named the No More Coughs Meowzer Tincture and still keeps on her altar. She describes Carl as a needs cat whose flare ups tracked seasonal change, and says he taught her about plants, returning again and again to a rosemary bush in the garden that she read as a message.
Learning the Language Pets Already Speak
Both frame attention as the actual practice. Chance argues that a filter put up in one part of life operates everywhere, and that people underestimate pets, who in his view comprehend spoken English about as well as a small child. He recounts animal communicator Catherine O'Shea, a guest on Michelle's show The Healing Home, reading his dog Mango cold and immediately naming water as the dog's priority, with his wife Jenny watching in the chat. Michelle offers what she calls story medicine, learning an animal's history and patterns the way you would your own, pointing to Gandalf still hiding from Chance's mother years after a frightening emergency.
Matthew Wood's Six Tissue States as a Reading Frame
The centerpiece is a model Michelle credits to herbalist Matthew Wood, the six tissue states, drawn as a six pointed star with homeostasis at the center: hot and cold, damp and dry, tense and lax. She places it in the same family as Ayurveda's three doshas and the classical humors of Roman medicine, and mentions a Celtic version as well, calling it a symbolic language for reading a body that cannot describe itself. Her point is that an animal cannot report anything verbally, so posture, behavior and the way it moves through the world become the report, and she urges listeners to research for themselves.
Vibration, Mirroring, and Doing Your Own Homework
In the later stretch Michelle turns to homeopathy and flower essences, which she describes as vibration medicine, subtle and gentle rather than forceful. She says she is a believer that emotion and experience shape what eventually shows up on the physical level, in people and animals alike, and recounts weeping after a rose essence. Chance asks what happens in a multi-pet household sharing one bowl, and both answer intuitively rather than clinically. They close on mirroring, on Kyle Denton's advice to sit with one plant at a time for a whole week, and on Michelle's ebook and the Telegram chat Chance says beats a search engine.
Quotes
“They're such vibratory beings and I feel like they are tuned into the earth and the cycles a little bit on a different, deeper level than we are.”
“You put filters up to one thing. Well, that filter is there for other things too.”
“It was a huge key because I was still an herbal apprentice. I was working as an intern at an herb shop. It was very early on in my journey.”
“I think most people underestimate just how many English words and grammar that the pets understand. I think they have about as good a comprehension as a small child would have.”
“Our story is medicine. And the more we understand our own story, I feel like the better we are in general in life, and it can help us to have pattern recognition about ourselves.”
“I think that they operate on the exact same spectrum of emotional frequencies that we do. And I think story does apply to them just as it applies to us.”
“I am a believer that our emotions and our experience in life dictate a lot of what happens to us on the physical level when it comes to ailments.”
“Your future self is going to feel exactly how your current self feels or is going to feel just a progressed version of the path you're on right now. So there's really no separation.”
Michelle Lundquist describes herself as a folk herbalist, gardener and homemaker with a passion for plants and their ability to heal. She has studied and actively worked with herbs since 2013, drawing most of her knowledge from hands on experience and mentors of the wise woman tradition, and a do it yourself spirit runs through her work as she encourages people to take their wellbeing into their own hands. She hosted more than eighty episodes of The Healing Home podcast as a kitchen witch, homemaker and folk herbalist, and now co-hosts Symbolic Studies with her husband Mario Garza.
See all Michelle 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.
