Chanchal Cabrera is a renowned herbalist, author, and educator based at Innisfree Farm & Botanic Garden in Courtenay, British Columbia. With over 40 years of experience in the field of herbal medicine, she is recognized as a leading authority in the practice of botanical medicine, holistic health, and organic gardening. As the co-founder of Innisfree Farm & Botanic Garden, Chanchal has dedicated her life to cultivating a deeper understanding and appreciation of the healing power of plants. Through her work, she has inspired countless individuals to connect with nature and embrace a more sustainable and mindful approach to health and wellbeing. MysticMag has the pleasure of chatting with Chanchal.
Would you say that in all your years of experience with herbs and plants, you are still learning?
One of the greatest gifts of being a herbalist is that one never can, and never will, stop learning. There are new diseases occurring like Lymes, fibromyalgia and of course now covid, that keep us needing to go back to the well and explore a little deeper, to understand our medicines a little better. Of course there are also new plants in the repertoire such as lions mane, rhodiola, and even green tea which were not taught to me in herbal medicine school 35 years ago as no one outside of their native lands was using them. The practice of medicine is endlessly humbling as the more you learn the more you realize how little you know. The body remains a great mystery and the herbs are powerful yet gentle, and effective yet safe.
Following on – are plants our teachers?
If you ask indigenous elders and healers in cultures around the world how they learned their craft, how they know which plants to use without the science that we seem to think is essential to medicine today, they will often answer that the plants told them or at least, told their ancestors in times past.
The oral tradition may have started with a conversation between people and plants, and then became a practice between teacher and pupil. Plants are also now known, through the work of Suzanne Simard among others, to be sharing and mutually supportive, to nurture the young and the weak, to communicate messages of threat and danger through volatiles released in the air and through subterranean mycorrhizal interconnections with the tree root hairs. I like to think there are lessons in that for us too.
What is the mission of Innisfree Farm and how is this being achieved?
Fundamentally, the mission of Innisfree is to connect people to plants, to awaken (reawaken?) the sense of magic and wonder that we instinctively have for the natural world but that we forget in the hustle and bustle of 21st century life, and to support people to be more self-reliant in food and medicine.
We run a not for profit (Gardens without Borders) to provide horticulture therapy opportunities, and we run a registered Botanic Garden to provide herbal, wellness and food education and services through the gardens to the public.
In your experience of helping patients to manage cancer using herbal medicine, what advice do you have for our readers?
That could be a very long winded answer, a whole book in fact, or we can boil it down to a very few very simple principles. Michael Pollan probably said it best : “Eat food, less of it, more vegetables.” What this means is eating whole foods in a natural state, prepared from scratch, real food, home cooking. It means managing portion sizes, not over eating, and filling up on vegetables not carbs. The National Cancer Institute reckons over 30% of all cancer is attributed directly to bad diet so just by making those changes, seven simple words to live by, you are already doing yourself a huge favor. To that I would add that I always encourage people to eat organic as much as you can afford, because the food really is more nutritious. And quit smoking and drinking !
What can you tell us about your book Fibromyalgia – A Journey Toward Healing – the what, the why and the when?
When I wrote that book over 20 years ago fibromyalgia was still a relatively new and controversial diagnosis, and there were no great conventional treatment strategies available. I could honestly say that is probably still the case, excepting that it’s not new anymore, of course. Millions of people still struggle with it and are not taken seriously because it is so hard to see and measure. Certainly it is not the current fad disease in the limelight as it was for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, but there are still only very poor conventional treatment options, and the herbs and nutrition have lots to offer. Herbs can help with symptom management and can support core adrenal resilience and constitutional strength.
Have you seen a shift in the general public over the last couple of decades – showing more interest in herbal medicine and general awareness.
Definitely, more and more, which is a good thing of course, but brings its own set of problems; for example, the supply chain and herbal quality. We are at risk of becoming victims of our own success, where the more people use herbs and want herbs the more demand there is on the plants, some of which are barely hanging on in their ravaged ecosystems. This calls for a significant engagement between herbalists and herbal end users to ensure that sustainability, transparency, and education around best practices are robust and effective.
Chanchal’s new book, Holistic Cancer Care, launches April 23rd. Pre-order here: https://chanchalcabrera.com/product/holistic-cancer-care/ by the end of March to receive a special discount!
If you would like to find out more about Innisfree Farm, visit https://www.innisfreefarm.ca/ or follow on https://www.facebook.com/InnisfreeFarmBC or https://www.instagram.com/innisfreefarmbc/
