Taking our herbalism classes online exposes you to multiple lenses for understanding human health and herbs through various traditions
The first offering of our herbalism classes online sets the foundations for the entire course. The hope for Foundations of Western Herbal Medicine course online is that people come away with a clear understanding and vision of human health, as well as a lens through which to understand patterns of disharmony. This helps us to understand what human health and human illness looks like. Eventually and ultimately there will be a second part to Foundations of Western Herbal Medicine, so it is being written about here as if it’s the entirety of the course. The same would apply to the upcoming Foundations of Chinese Herbal Medicine class.
This course does not shy away from the spiritual underpinnings that are at the core and basis of whatever healing tradition you’re looking at. These traditions did not separate the spiritual from science, something that modern allopathic medicine does do. A good deal of time is spent speaking about these spiritual underpinnings so students can understand it all the way down the rabbit hole, while trying to help them see it with the eyes that the people of that culture did. Obviously, it is impossible to see it that way 100%, but this is a good way to realize that the human being is not just the physicality, that it is a body-mind-heart-spirit continuum. To ignore this fact or to think that it has nothing to do with health” is ridiculous.
This course does not ignore the spiritual side. Instead, it is one of several skill-sets that the students will take away with them. This deep respect for the spiritual underpinnings of healing traditions is an important part of Clearpath School of herbalism classes online.
Herbalism classes online can help the continued credibility and evolution of this modality
Seeing with different lenses helps with comparisons and develops a deeper understanding of the human body-mind-spirit. It’s essential for veteran herbalists to set a bar of quality for beginning herbalists, a bar of qualities and characteristics that are desired in any health-care practitioner as well as those specific to a skilled herbalist.
We want people to have respect for herbalism as a credible modality, which it is. Obviously it’s been around for a very long time. This course is developed such that students can come away with an understanding of what it takes to be a quality herbalist, that they know what they’re in for, and that they’re willing to dive very deep. We want them to realize that herbalism is not something one becomes proficient at after six months or a year or a single correspondence course. Like any practice, it requires consistent and continual learning.
It’s good for students to come away with that reality check because our understanding of ourselves and the world is always evolving, so we have to keep on learning.
The first part of these herbalism classes online involves helpful tools for practitioners
In this first class there are several sensory awareness exercises and visualization experiences to help people realize what a piece of human technology we are for understanding the world better. We have all of these faculties intrinsically within us and we use them all the time, but it’s important to see them and understand them in this more clarified and attentive way. These faculties become tools by which we can understand ourselves better and other people better, in addition to our relationship with nature. It makes us more aware of the patterns that are everywhere within us and outside of us. These tools essentially become part of the skill-set that students can take away from these foundational classes because it makes them better herbalists and better health-care practitioners.
With these herbalism classes online, students come away with a set of concepts and skills, and a lens through which to look through it. This enables them to see human beings, understand how they are made, how we are put together, and how the processes work for what we would consider to be general health. We take a broad view, not limited to the purely physical. Our classes and courses also engage the psychological, mental, emotional and spirit components through these different lenses. We do not narrow our focus to the degree that we lose sight of the whole picture.
This article continues with additional information on our herbal medicine classes online. The next part of the article addresses additional components that students will learn from our herbalism classes online, that being human humors and temperaments and how they relate to human health and herbalism.