On Being Authentic.
From the Blog Cauldrons and Crockpots
by: Rebecca Altman, Herbalist
How to be authentic in the world, with the things you create and share, and with who you are:
1. Strive for integrity.
Know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you are unsure of your identity or place in the world, then it’s really easy to get bummed out by what others are doing. If what someone else is doing bums you out, makes you jealous, or makes you want to copy them, there are two good courses of action to take: The first is to stop following their work (why subject yourself to feeling bad?). The second, and the one that I think is more productive, is to take a good look at yourself and why it is that they are bumming you out in the first place. Is it because they’re doing something you want to do? Is it because they do something better than you? Is it because they are enacting ideas that you’ve had that you haven’t acted on yet? These feelings don’t arise in a vacuum— we very rarely feel unhappy with ourselves by looking at someone doing something cool that we have absolutely no personal interest in. But I think that the more content we are with our own actions, our own integrity, and what we are doing, the less we feel the need to compare ourselves to others. These feelings are an opportunity to self-analyse and maybe make some changes, but in the long-run, comparison does us no good. Because the thing is, when you have a strong self-identity, regardless of whether its in your products, formulations, teachings, writings, marketing, or clinical work, then it’s almost impossible to compare yourself to others, because there truly is no comparison. It’s not that one is better or worse, but that they are different and each have their own merits. Another way of putting this is the example of plants I gave earlier: a wild rose is simply a wild rose, and a dandelion a dandelion. Knowing who you are and what you have to offer the world means that you can focus on the path you’ve chosen for yourself, knowing that you have something unique to offer. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be popular, universally adored, or start earning a fortune, but what you’ll find is that that stuff matters a whole lot less when you’re doing something that comes from your heart.
If you have an underlying goal or purpose to your work, then you are setting the groundwork for integrity. Integrity is defined in many ways, but the one I like the best is ‘a state of being whole and undivided’. The most important thing that this does is carve out your boundaries— where you end and other herbalists begin— so that you know what is yours and what isn’t. Think of things that we want to have integrity: joints, mucous membranes, barriers, and yes, our selves. Having integrity means inhabiting, fully, what you know yourself to be. With integrity, you both know who you are and who you are not. The great thing about this is that seeing someone teach a brilliant class will fill you with ideas and inspiration, but you’ll also be able to truly appreciate work that others’ do that you would most likely not do on your own.
2. Show your work
Some ideas come to us in a flash of inspiration. You’ll be reading a book about something completely off topic, and then all of a sudden it appears as from out of nowhere, and you have to jump up and find a pen and write it all down before it disappears from your life forever. I love these moments, and the things that come from them are usually inspired, and different and ground-breaking. But, there are also ideas that creep up slowly, or that are solidified after a toss back and forth with someone, or that come from seeing something someone else has done and having an idea of a variation of it, or a refinement. When it comes to product making, I think the fastest way to hurt someone’s feelings, or piss them off, is to make a product that’s almost identical to and based on theirs, without crediting them in some way or another. I’ve got a few products in my own store that were inspired by others, and I like to tell the story of it in the product listing. Not only does this acknowledge the person who had the original idea (who would be well aware that I got the idea from them) but it acknowledges a sense of context. I have a completely non-herbal example to illustrate. Remember maths exams? It wasn’t enough to simply write the answer in the space provided, you had to show your work. Showing your work, at its most basic, shows the people reading the test that you know your s**t, that you’re not copying the answers from the dude next to you, and that if you had to do it again, you could. It shows that you have enough of an understanding of a topic that you can explain how you got from A to B, and that shows an intimacy with it that makes your knowledge credible. When it comes to our work as herbalists, be it as a product maker, a teacher, a clinician, or a writer, showing what your starting point was, and explaining the path you took to get out of the maze of confusion to get there, makes your work yours.
3. Acknowledge your context.
There’s no western herbal canon, so we all learn from different people.
The simplest thing is to acknowledge your context. How to do this? It’s simple: In writing, cite your sources. In product making, if something you’ve made is directly inspired by someone else, mention that. In teaching, if you got information from somebody else, credit them in the class. Jim mcdonald is really good at this— if you’ve seen him teach you’ll see that he talks about the people he’s learned things from all the time. Someone who does this really well in writing is Matthew Wood, who mentions in his books the different people he gathers snippets of information from in conversation. Herbalist Alanna Whitney, uses a Spiritual Heart Protector formula that she learned from Paul Bergner and Sheri Kupfer years ago, and loves the formula so much that she kept it as is. She’s been using it for so many years now that it’s a part of her repertoire and feels like her own, and yet every time she uses it she mentions who she learned the formula from. Similar to showing the work, above, in crediting sources, instead of taking away from one’s credibility as an ‘original thinker’, it actually reinforces one’s credibility. If you have the strength to show what ideas have contributed to your product/ class/ article, then you also have the strength of conviction that it is truly separate from what you are offering.
4. Be honest.
I think this for many of us, is a difficult thing to do. We all want to be knowledgeable, and we don’t want to seem like idiots. But the quickest way to lose credibility in your authenticity is to bluster. It’s ok to now know, it’s ok to be wrong, and its ok to not have fully worked something out yet. It’s also ok to repeat information that you get from someone else, and your credibility is reinforced if, in the repeating, you mention who you got it from. Ask yourself ‘is this mine yet?’. If its not, then that’s ok. We don’t all need to be new content generators constantly, and often the best things need mulling over for a good long time. An example: Christopher Hedley and jim mcdonald both teach the humoral temperaments. Jim learned about them from Christopher and spent years mulling it over, before he had his own take on it, and then he started teaching it. In his classes he’ll use direct descriptions from Christopher, and say something to the effect of ‘Christopher Hedley says X’, and will at some point in his class mention that he learned a lot from Christopher. But because his take on the four humors is so different to Christopher’s now, it is authentically jim’s: it’s been through the process of being melted down and remade into something that incorporates jim’s own take on herbal energetics. We all learn from different people, and are inspired by different sources, and how these things all fit together in our unconscious, to come out as a solid and new *thing* is going to be different for each of us. If you’ve got a piece of information and are repeating it, or have a formula that you love from someone else that you’d like to replicate, first and foremost, be honest with yourself. If it isn’t yours, then say that: nobody will think any less of you. In fact, most will think more highly of you, because it establishes your credibility, makes your insides match your outsides, and has the ring of authenticity that people instinctively seek out.
I think one of the keys here is to recognise that the things we produce are a part of a body of work that has extended into time long before us, and extends out in front of us too. We’re not just isolated beings trying to connect people with plants, and with the earth; or trying to educate and empower people about their own healing, we are ALL striving for some variation of these things. To broaden the perspective even more, we’re plant people, and we have something unique to offer the world, that builds on our collective work. Individually, we have our work cut out for us, but as a group, despite often disagreeing with each other, we’re still all working towards the same things. It’s one of the most beautiful things, I think, about Western herbalism: it’s a living thing, a mutable field of a tapestry that we’re all contributing to together, and it is still evolving. The more we seek out what it is that we uniquely have to offer the world, the more beautiful, diverse and nuanced our tapestry becomes.
In a world of regurgitated content, the world needs true authenticity more than ever. Not in the ‘make a meme about it’ sense, or the ‘craft a self-image and use it as a marketing tool’ sense, but in a way that has nothing at all to do with image and other peoples’ reactions. When it comes down to it, authenticity in our work and our selves has to do with an internal calibration of factors: integrity; acknowledging that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves; being honest with ourselves; and showing the work it takes for us to get there. It’s a life’s work, not a switch that you flick on, or a heavy blanket that you throw off, but a daily check-in with yourself and your internal compass. Authentic work speaks to us all on a deep and profound level. We respond to it with trust, and we respond to it with a flicker of hope: each time one person stands up and says ‘this is who I am and this is what I have to offer the world even if nobody likes it’ it inspires those around them to do the same, to stand up against the odds and be fueled in their own work and purpose. It’s a bravery and an honesty that, I truly believe, has the power to change the course of humanity, over time. And it all starts with a simple little nod to our context.
1. Strive for integrity.
Know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you are unsure of your identity or place in the world, then it’s really easy to get bummed out by what others are doing. If what someone else is doing bums you out, makes you jealous, or makes you want to copy them, there are two good courses of action to take: The first is to stop following their work (why subject yourself to feeling bad?). The second, and the one that I think is more productive, is to take a good look at yourself and why it is that they are bumming you out in the first place. Is it because they’re doing something you want to do? Is it because they do something better than you? Is it because they are enacting ideas that you’ve had that you haven’t acted on yet? These feelings don’t arise in a vacuum— we very rarely feel unhappy with ourselves by looking at someone doing something cool that we have absolutely no personal interest in. But I think that the more content we are with our own actions, our own integrity, and what we are doing, the less we feel the need to compare ourselves to others. These feelings are an opportunity to self-analyse and maybe make some changes, but in the long-run, comparison does us no good. Because the thing is, when you have a strong self-identity, regardless of whether its in your products, formulations, teachings, writings, marketing, or clinical work, then it’s almost impossible to compare yourself to others, because there truly is no comparison. It’s not that one is better or worse, but that they are different and each have their own merits. Another way of putting this is the example of plants I gave earlier: a wild rose is simply a wild rose, and a dandelion a dandelion. Knowing who you are and what you have to offer the world means that you can focus on the path you’ve chosen for yourself, knowing that you have something unique to offer. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be popular, universally adored, or start earning a fortune, but what you’ll find is that that stuff matters a whole lot less when you’re doing something that comes from your heart.
If you have an underlying goal or purpose to your work, then you are setting the groundwork for integrity. Integrity is defined in many ways, but the one I like the best is ‘a state of being whole and undivided’. The most important thing that this does is carve out your boundaries— where you end and other herbalists begin— so that you know what is yours and what isn’t. Think of things that we want to have integrity: joints, mucous membranes, barriers, and yes, our selves. Having integrity means inhabiting, fully, what you know yourself to be. With integrity, you both know who you are and who you are not. The great thing about this is that seeing someone teach a brilliant class will fill you with ideas and inspiration, but you’ll also be able to truly appreciate work that others’ do that you would most likely not do on your own.
2. Show your work
Some ideas come to us in a flash of inspiration. You’ll be reading a book about something completely off topic, and then all of a sudden it appears as from out of nowhere, and you have to jump up and find a pen and write it all down before it disappears from your life forever. I love these moments, and the things that come from them are usually inspired, and different and ground-breaking. But, there are also ideas that creep up slowly, or that are solidified after a toss back and forth with someone, or that come from seeing something someone else has done and having an idea of a variation of it, or a refinement. When it comes to product making, I think the fastest way to hurt someone’s feelings, or piss them off, is to make a product that’s almost identical to and based on theirs, without crediting them in some way or another. I’ve got a few products in my own store that were inspired by others, and I like to tell the story of it in the product listing. Not only does this acknowledge the person who had the original idea (who would be well aware that I got the idea from them) but it acknowledges a sense of context. I have a completely non-herbal example to illustrate. Remember maths exams? It wasn’t enough to simply write the answer in the space provided, you had to show your work. Showing your work, at its most basic, shows the people reading the test that you know your s**t, that you’re not copying the answers from the dude next to you, and that if you had to do it again, you could. It shows that you have enough of an understanding of a topic that you can explain how you got from A to B, and that shows an intimacy with it that makes your knowledge credible. When it comes to our work as herbalists, be it as a product maker, a teacher, a clinician, or a writer, showing what your starting point was, and explaining the path you took to get out of the maze of confusion to get there, makes your work yours.
3. Acknowledge your context.
There’s no western herbal canon, so we all learn from different people.
The simplest thing is to acknowledge your context. How to do this? It’s simple: In writing, cite your sources. In product making, if something you’ve made is directly inspired by someone else, mention that. In teaching, if you got information from somebody else, credit them in the class. Jim mcdonald is really good at this— if you’ve seen him teach you’ll see that he talks about the people he’s learned things from all the time. Someone who does this really well in writing is Matthew Wood, who mentions in his books the different people he gathers snippets of information from in conversation. Herbalist Alanna Whitney, uses a Spiritual Heart Protector formula that she learned from Paul Bergner and Sheri Kupfer years ago, and loves the formula so much that she kept it as is. She’s been using it for so many years now that it’s a part of her repertoire and feels like her own, and yet every time she uses it she mentions who she learned the formula from. Similar to showing the work, above, in crediting sources, instead of taking away from one’s credibility as an ‘original thinker’, it actually reinforces one’s credibility. If you have the strength to show what ideas have contributed to your product/ class/ article, then you also have the strength of conviction that it is truly separate from what you are offering.
4. Be honest.
I think this for many of us, is a difficult thing to do. We all want to be knowledgeable, and we don’t want to seem like idiots. But the quickest way to lose credibility in your authenticity is to bluster. It’s ok to now know, it’s ok to be wrong, and its ok to not have fully worked something out yet. It’s also ok to repeat information that you get from someone else, and your credibility is reinforced if, in the repeating, you mention who you got it from. Ask yourself ‘is this mine yet?’. If its not, then that’s ok. We don’t all need to be new content generators constantly, and often the best things need mulling over for a good long time. An example: Christopher Hedley and jim mcdonald both teach the humoral temperaments. Jim learned about them from Christopher and spent years mulling it over, before he had his own take on it, and then he started teaching it. In his classes he’ll use direct descriptions from Christopher, and say something to the effect of ‘Christopher Hedley says X’, and will at some point in his class mention that he learned a lot from Christopher. But because his take on the four humors is so different to Christopher’s now, it is authentically jim’s: it’s been through the process of being melted down and remade into something that incorporates jim’s own take on herbal energetics. We all learn from different people, and are inspired by different sources, and how these things all fit together in our unconscious, to come out as a solid and new *thing* is going to be different for each of us. If you’ve got a piece of information and are repeating it, or have a formula that you love from someone else that you’d like to replicate, first and foremost, be honest with yourself. If it isn’t yours, then say that: nobody will think any less of you. In fact, most will think more highly of you, because it establishes your credibility, makes your insides match your outsides, and has the ring of authenticity that people instinctively seek out.
I think one of the keys here is to recognise that the things we produce are a part of a body of work that has extended into time long before us, and extends out in front of us too. We’re not just isolated beings trying to connect people with plants, and with the earth; or trying to educate and empower people about their own healing, we are ALL striving for some variation of these things. To broaden the perspective even more, we’re plant people, and we have something unique to offer the world, that builds on our collective work. Individually, we have our work cut out for us, but as a group, despite often disagreeing with each other, we’re still all working towards the same things. It’s one of the most beautiful things, I think, about Western herbalism: it’s a living thing, a mutable field of a tapestry that we’re all contributing to together, and it is still evolving. The more we seek out what it is that we uniquely have to offer the world, the more beautiful, diverse and nuanced our tapestry becomes.
In a world of regurgitated content, the world needs true authenticity more than ever. Not in the ‘make a meme about it’ sense, or the ‘craft a self-image and use it as a marketing tool’ sense, but in a way that has nothing at all to do with image and other peoples’ reactions. When it comes down to it, authenticity in our work and our selves has to do with an internal calibration of factors: integrity; acknowledging that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves; being honest with ourselves; and showing the work it takes for us to get there. It’s a life’s work, not a switch that you flick on, or a heavy blanket that you throw off, but a daily check-in with yourself and your internal compass. Authentic work speaks to us all on a deep and profound level. We respond to it with trust, and we respond to it with a flicker of hope: each time one person stands up and says ‘this is who I am and this is what I have to offer the world even if nobody likes it’ it inspires those around them to do the same, to stand up against the odds and be fueled in their own work and purpose. It’s a bravery and an honesty that, I truly believe, has the power to change the course of humanity, over time. And it all starts with a simple little nod to our context.