Tea as a protest: the overlooked powers of herbs in crisis
Last month I was interviewed in the Entrepreneur’s Herald and, I feel in this time of global crisis, I want to expand on one of the questions.
“Herbal medicine is often associated with remedies for physical ailments like colds or digestive issues. How do you expand that narrative through your work, and what are some overlooked powers of herbs that you wish more people understood?”
Herbal medicine is often viewed through a narrow lens, as a way to treat the sniffles, soothe digestion, or boost the immune system. And yes, herbs are profoundly supportive in those ways. But in my work, herbal medicine is not just about curing the common cold—it’s about fortifying the spirit in a world that’s doing everything it can to keep us overwhelmed, overworked, and out of our bodies.
Right now, we’re in a collective moment of crisis. The president is definitely hiding something. Genocide is unfolding before our eyes while media distracts and gaslights. Innocent people are being bombed, starved, and silenced. Human rights are being disregarded in real time. And while all of that is happening, most of us are still expected to wake up, log in, perform, and hold it all together.
This is why I work with herbs.
Because in the face of global grief and systemic violence, we need care strategies that are accessible, ancestral, and deeply restorative. We need tools that help us stay human. And we need the kind of healing that doesn’t just patch us up so we can go back to capitalism—but instead re-roots us in our bodies, our truth, our communities, and our power.
Herbs, when used beyond just symptom relief, can be nervous system medicine, grief support, spiritual anchors, and community ritual. They can restore the hope that empire tries to extinguish.
Nervines like Skullcap and Milky Oats teach us how to downshift our breath and return to the parasympathetic. Adaptogens like Tulsi and Ashwagandha help us find a steady rhythm inside chaos. And psycho-spiritual herbs like Blue Vervain, Rose, and Mugwort bring us into communion with our emotions, our intuition, and our ancestors, reminding us that healing is never something we do alone.
I often say herbal medicine is care that lives in your kitchen. It’s community care disguised as tea. It’s protest disguised as nourishment. It’s pleasure in a bottle, resilience in a flower, remembrance in a root.
And when we tend to ourselves in this way, we stay in the fight longer. We dream bigger. We resist more skillfully. Because when your nervous system is regulated, when your grief is witnessed, when your body is nourished—you’re not just surviving. You’re strategizing with clarity. You’re able to keep showing up.
This is not a call to disassociate or spiritually bypass. Quite the opposite. This is a call to ground deeper into your body. To resource your nervous system so that you can keep resisting injustice and imagining new worlds.
We are in a moment of mass awakening, and we must remember: peace is a practice. And pleasure is part of that practice. Rest is part of that practice. Herbal medicine, at its best, invites us to imagine liberation not just as something we fight for—but something we feel in our bodies.
Because the vision is still alive. Peace for all people on Earth is not a naïve dream. It is the future if we keep tending to ourselves and each other like it’s possible.
So make the tea. Take the tincture. Lay in the grass. Let the herbs hold you, so you can keep holding the world.
