Blue Vervain with Thomas Easley

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It was such a joy to have my good friend, Thomas Easley, on the show. For some reason, the herb he chose to discuss – blue vervain – surprised me (perhaps because it hit so close to home?), but his insights about it were both thoughtful and expansive.  He shared about the type of person who tends to really benefit from vervain, the best time of day to take it, some lesser-known ways of working with it, and so much more!

Blue vervain is perhaps best known for its gift of helping wind you down, and so it’s often included in blends for relaxation and sleep.  In this episode, Thomas shared his version of a sleep tincture blend featuring blue vervain, which he calls GTFTS (I’ll let you guess what that acronym stands for!). You can find your beautifully-illustrated recipe card for GTFTS in the section below.

By the end of this episode, you’ll know:

► Specific indications for blue vervain - and whether you’re the type of person who could benefit from keeping a bottle of it on your desk (and actually taking it!)

► Why it’s important to experience an herb (in multiple ways and during different circumstances) to determine whether it’s the right herb for you

► Three little-known uses for blue vervain

► and so many other insights about this lovely relaxing herb….

For those of you who don’t know him, Thomas Easley is a registered herbalist with the American Herbalist Guild, a clinical herbalist, and the founder of the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine. With a passion for herbal medicine ignited in 1996, Thomas has dedicated his life to helping others through unique approaches that integrate traditional western herbalism, clinical nutrition, and modern medical sciences. 

Thomas is co-author of The Modern Herbal Dispensatory: A Medicine-Making Guide and Modern Herbal Medicine. He firmly believes in the power of herbal medicine to transform lives and promote vibrant health. His approach emphasizes the importance of food as medicine and incorporates tailored diets, stress reduction techniques, nutrition supplements, and exercise to help clients achieve their health goals.

I hope this conversation with Thomas brings you as much insight (and maybe a few laughs) as it brought me. I can’t wait to hear what resonates most with you from this conversation—blue vervain might surprise you, too.

-- TIMESTAMPS -- for Blue Vervain Benefits

• 01:16 - Student spotlight
• 3:37 - Introduction to Thomas Easley
• 10:46 - Thomas’ herbal path
• 28:01 - Are you a blue vervain type of person? Specific indications for blue vervain
• 40:49 - Blue vervain dosage
• 47:05 - More blue vervain benefits
• 50:56 - GTFTS recipe
• 56:54 - Different species of blue vervain
• 58:21 - Thomas’ current herbal projects
• 1:13:17 - What Thomas wishes he’d known when he first started working with herbs
• 1:20:39 - Herbal tidbit

Get Your Free Recipe!

When Thomas really needs to sleep, this is the formula he takes.

Ingredients:

• 20 mL passion flower tincture
• 20 mL blue vervain tincture
• 10 mL hops tincture
• 10 mL rauwolfia tincture (optional; omit for regular use)

Directions:

Mix all tinctures together (omitting the rauwolfia if you will be using this regularly). Store in a 60 mL (2 ounce) glass bottle in a cool, dark place.

Connect with Thomas

• Website | EclecticSchoolOfHerbalMedicine.com/
• Instagram | @eclecticschoolofherbalmedicine 
• Facebook | Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine
  

Transcript of the 'Blue Vervain Benefits with Thomas Easley' Video

Rosalee de la Forêt:
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Rosalee de la Forêt:

Okay. Grab your cup of tea and let’s dive in.

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It was such a joy to have my friend, Thomas, on the show. Not only did we have a lot of fun recording this episode, but Thomas also shared some truly fascinating insights about blue vervain, especially ways to work with it for sweating and fevers that were completely new to me. If you’ve ever worked with this plant or even if you haven’t, I think you’ll come away with a fresh perspective. Thomas has one of the most brilliant and curious minds that I know, and every time we talk, I learn something new. I’m really excited to share this conversation with you.

For those of you who don’t already know him, Thomas Easley is a registered herbalist with the American Herbalist Guild, a clinical herbalist, and the founder of the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine. With a passion for herbal medicine ignited in 1996, Thomas has dedicated his life to helping others through unique approaches that integrate traditional western herbalism, clinical nutrition, and modern medical sciences.

Thomas is the co-author of The Modern Herbal Dispensatory: A Medicine-Making Guide and Modern Herbal Medicine. He firmly believes in the power of herbal medicine to transform lives and promote vibrant health. His approach emphasizes the importance of food as medicine and incorporates tailored diets, stress reduction techniques, nutrition supplements, and exercise to help clients achieve their health goals.

Welcome to the show, Thomas!

Thomas Easley:

Hi, Rosalee. Thank you for having me.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Part of me wants to say, “Welcome back to the show,” but this is your first time. I would just like to start this conversation by giving you a hard time, which is how I like to welcome all my guests. Here’s my experience, Thomas. I’d be mentioning you because I like to namedrop you from time to time. I’d be like, “My friend, Thomas. Yeah, Thomas Easley,” and people will be like, “Is he a friend of yours?” I’ll be like, “Yeah. We’re legit friends.” They’d be like, “I want to listen to his episode on your podcast.” I’d be like, “About that, he hasn’t been on the podcast yet,” and then they’d be like, “Oh, you’re friends?” “Yes. We’re legit friends. I text him and he texts me back within five minutes. We’re that kind of friends.” They’re like, “Uh hmm,” and they look at me with pity, like I’m just kidding myself. It’s been rough. It’s been rough because we’ve been doing this four years now, and it’s not for my lack of asking that you haven’t been on before, Thomas, just to point that out.

Thomas Easley:

You know that’s true. I mean, #1, time isn’t real. Four years? That’s wow! So, 2021. It’s been four years, Rosalee. Everybody has been really busy, but 2021, I took a year off of teaching to try to recover from depression. I spent the year woodworking, building things with my hands, and binge-reading philosophy books while mentally preparing for a book that I’m wanting to write. That just took a lot longer than I thought, so I said no to everybody for several years about everything. Sorry about that.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

You’re doing a great job of getting off the hook here. I like that you said “to everybody about everything,” so it’s not like—it wasn’t just me.

Thomas Easley:

I just said no to everybody, I stopped teaching at conferences and doing anything extra because I needed my energy for my own recovery, for the—limited energy is like a sucky thing, and you have to prioritize. I have regrets about withdrawing for a few years, but also, it was needed. I feel like your listeners might understand that.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I guess they will. I do as well. In fact, that’s actually one of the conversations we’ve had a lot about conserving energy from one Type A to another. We’ve talked about that a lot, actually, and that’s something I’ve appreciated from you, both the struggle and seeing your success in it as well. I can appreciate that. I’m glad that you’re here now, Thomas.

Thomas Easley:

So, who have your favorite guests been in the last four years?

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I’m the interviewer is how these work, Thomas! I will say jim mcdonald, mutual friend of ours, other legit friend. Of course, having him on is always fun. Robin Rose Bennett has been a lot of fun. She’s been on several times as well. One of my favorite people is Jesus Garcia. I don’t know if you know Jesus. He’s from – he lives in Texas. He was this unexpected jewel who has become a friend, so it’s been a lot of fun. There are so many. There hasn’t been a bad interview because I interview amazing herbalists. Every single person has been this kind of journey. It’s been really fun.

Thomas Easley:

That’s amazing. I have not gotten super—maybe in the last six or eight months, I’ve started really getting into podcasts more and the audio side of things. You and I have talked about it. I’ve become an avid walker. When you’re spending a couple of hours a day walking, you find time to listen to things more.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Like Tori Amos.

Thomas Easley:

Like Tori Amos, absolutely. I’m starting to get into podcasts. Also, I’m really appreciative for all of the transcription services because I speed read, and so I can transcribe a podcast, read it in a few minutes, pick up some nuts and bolts, and then decide if I’m going to listen to all of it. Anyway-

Rosalee de la Forêt:

That is such a Thomas thing to say--transcript, speed read.

Thomas Easley:

Yes. Time efficiency. There are so many people with so many important things to say. How do you decide not just who you’re going to give surface attention to, but who you really want to go deep with and listen more? I do find myself using transcripts to decide what I want to go deeper into. I don’t know that I get a ton of depth from my initial speed reading, but it is a nice screening tool.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Great tips from Thomas. Before we veer too far off course, you’ve been at this for a while, the whole herbalism thing. I would love to hear about how you got started, when you got started, and steps along the way that brought you to us today.

Thomas Easley:

I think that there are a couple of major pathways into herbal medicine. There’s the people that come to herbal medicine via plants. There’s the people that come to herbal medicine because of sickness. I came from that second path. It wasn’t me. It was my twin sister, got really sick when we were 13. I was good at sciency stuff and interested in science and medicine, and so had tried to help my mom navigate to specialists for the first time. I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere, South Alabama, population of 50 people, 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store. It was like the first major medical thing that she had navigated. I tried to help her out with that and did a pretty good job like going to doctor’s appointments, and being able to say, “Here’s why we’re here, what we have done, and where we’re at in this process.” Long story short, it was a very frustrating six months of my sister going to multiple doctors, and eventually,  specialists at university hospitals in Alabama, and then down to Florida Shands Hospital.

To make a long, complex, fairly boring story short, doctors could not figure out what was wrong with my sister. An herbalist, former hairdresser, not advanced degree, just solid community herbalist said, “Hey, have you thought about this thing? Have you tried this?” We did and six days later, my sister was better. It was very basic things, like somebody should have inquired about and didn’t, and it really flipped my world upside down. It was a paradigm shift for me. I went from being interested in science and medicine to thinking like, “Oh, well, I want to know more about herbal medicine.” Herbal medicine and medicine medicine come from the same place, so I want to know more about the history of that, and everything that has led up to it.

To the herbalist that helped my sister, I said, “Can I study with you?” She said, “I don’t teach classes, but you can sit with me in consults.” Within a year, my mom had opened a little herb store in Florala, Alabama. I would ride the school bus there in the afternoons and open the shop because she still had a job or two at the same time. For the next five years or so, until I graduated high school and had started junior college, I worked at my mom’s herb shop after school and on the weekends. A couple of weekends a month, my teacher would come in and do a day or two of consults. I would sit with her. After five years of doing this, I had started giving my friends herbs in college and helping with the normal cold, flu, college hangover type issues.

At some point, my teacher, I called to see when the next day of consults was. She randomly just said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you you’re an herbalist now. You should probably just start seeing people yourself.” I did not care for my college experience very much. I thought after my brief stint in college that I was going to go into the military and started that process, got to the very last—actually, swore in to the military, trying to get an exemption. It turns out, I’m colorblind. I wanted to do code breaking in foreign languages. They want you to be able to see colors to do that for some reason. So I didn’t go. My girlfriend who was probably only dating me to get out of small town Alabama, broke up with me right after I got rejected from the army. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I had been doing herbalism as a fun hobby type thing.

I was driving around my hometown, and I saw this little storefront that had a “for rent” sign. I thought – my mom had closed her herb shop down, 30 minutes away. I knew a lot of people from that and I thought maybe that’s what I would try. Maybe the herbal thing is more than a hobby. Also, I was like a broke 19-year old and didn’t know how to do any of that, so I just called the number on the door, and it turns out, the guy knew my grandfather and found out that I was 19 and interested in starting my first business, so he gave me six months of free rent, and half price for a year after that. This other herbalist who lived an hour away down in Crestview, decided at 85 years old that she was finally going to retire. I had helped her out, so she gave me boxes of inventory. I went from a harebrained idea to having a community herb shop in a week and a half. The universe conspired to make me an herbalist and I’ve been pretty grateful for that conspiracy working out.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

It’s cool to hear that story. A piece of it I’ve known and maybe other pieces I had forgotten. I remember years ago, at a conference I can’t remember where. You said something. I can’t remember the total context, but you said something like, “I could have been a medical doctor, but I chose to be an herbalist because what we do is so wonderful.” It was like herbalism wasn’t a compensation prize of like, “I couldn’t hack it as a doctor,” you chose to be an herbalist.

Thomas Easley:

I thought about medicine and was moderately serious about medicine when I found herbalism, and then I started practicing herbalism and still was considering medicine, and finally decided that there’s a lot of stuff that herbal medicine can’t do, but man, the stuff that it can do is just freaking magical! There’s a need. There’s a place for that and it doesn’t have to exist in contradiction to modern medicine. It can work alongside it. Since then, I have had medical doctors come through my herbal program. I have a lot of friends in medicine. I’m looking at the current state of medicine and I’m really glad that I didn’t go that route. I guess all branches have their challenges, herbal medicine included. I think herbal medicine is a much needed type of medicine that mainstream medicine just doesn’t come close to filling the need that herbal medicine does.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

One thing I find so fascinating about you, Thomas, as a human is that you had so much clinical experience so early on, like as a teenager, you were getting clinical experience. One of the stories I like is you traveled around for a while too. You went to different places. Will you talk a little bit about that? Because you were pretty young when you were doing that if I remember correctly.

Thomas Easley:

Yes. I ran Andalusia Natural Health for a little less than two years, 2001-ish to 2003-ish. I gave away and went in about $25,000 worth of debt doing that process because it turns out that when I know people need something and they don’t have the money for it, I just give it to them, which is not what you should do if you’re trying to run a retail business. But it works out fine if you’re running a community practice. I realized – I’d been doing weekly educational classes on the basics. I was doing 30 to 45-minute consults out of the back office. I had some bulk foods, herbs, tinctures, and the normal small town herb shop stuff. I decided that I really disliked all of the front of the shop stuff, and I really liked the consultations, so I closed down my shop. I passed out my business cards to everybody. They’ve been coming to classes and said, “Hey, I’m still here as an herbalist. I’m seeing people out of the front room of my house or I can meet you at a coffee shop, but I don’t want to run this business anymore.” I didn’t make enough money shifting from retail clinical split into straight clinical. I didn’t make enough money off of consultations in my hometown. I, also, because I had had a little herb shop, I knew a lot of other herb shop owners, so I started calling folks and saying like, “I decided that herb shopping is not for me. Clinicianing is for me. Any chance you would want me to come in and see your folks? I’ll recommend what I recommend, but if you stock what I recommend, you can make the sale!” So, I started doing that first in rural Alabama, and then in Mississippi, and then in South Alabama, and then in Georgia. I had a three-week circuit where I would be on the road for a little less than three weeks, and then home for a little bit more than a week. I did that from 2003-ish, 2004-ish, until 2007 when I opened a multi-practitioner wellness center down in Pace, Florida. Three or four years of being on the road herbalism. During that time, I also went to massage—I messed my back up really bad. Manual therapy was the only thing that was helping it, so I went to massage therapy school during that time. They were very flexible as long as I got my hours. I would go on the road for a couple of weeks, and then I would take both morning and evening classes for a couple of weeks to make up the hours. I squeezed that into everything. I think learning how to do manual therapy is probably good for a lot of herbalists even if they don’t do it as part of their practice or professionally. Understanding how to physically work with the body I think is great. Traveling herbalism was a thing. This is in early 2000s in the middle of nowhere, Deep South. I don’t know how that would do now, but I spent a lot of time in little mom and pop hotel rooms, kitchens and broom closets of herb stores, seeing anybody that would take my advice.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I just like the go-get-them attitude on that, like you went from being like, “Oh, is herbalism a hobby?” to – you have to really want it. I mean, three weeks on the road at a time continuously – that’s a big deal.

Thomas Easley:

It was fun! I got to spend time in different towns. I’d be done by 5:30 or 6:00. I’d grab dinner, maybe a movie. It was not all work, and the people are great. A lot of times, the owners of the herb shops would host me at their place. They’d have some event. I look back on that time period fondly. It was maybe difficult, but my God, so much better than working for somebody else. I wouldn’t qualify to do anything else. I could have been flipping burgers or being a traveling herbalist. It’s pretty cool. I got to do house calls. I’d meet people and they would say, “Do you give a family discount?” I would say, “What size a family?” and they would say, “Me, my wife, and 18 of our immediate relatives.”  I’d say, “I need a couple of days. Do you have a spare room? Feed me breakfast and spend all day doing family members’ appointments.” I guess looking back, it was quite a lot of hustling, but I didn’t think of it that way because you’re in your early twenties. Getting involved at such a young age with such little life overhead let me do all types of things that I found to be fun.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I have that same experience. Those younger years and very little overhead, so I can appreciate that. My first nine years as an herbalist, I didn’t have running water so rent was very cheap, then it really allowed me to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do, so I can appreciate that.

I’m really excited to talk about the herb you chose, blue vervain. I have like a—I don’t want to say a “love hate” relationship, but it’s kind of a shaky relationship. I’m excited to hear more about blue vervain from you. It’s interesting to me that you chose this herb, actually.

Thomas Easley:

It’s my—I have a complex relationship with blue vervain also. I bet for some of the same reasons that you do. Maybe we just talk about those. Blue vervain is a relaxant. Everybody that takes blue vervain at high enough dose will feel some level of relaxation. It might be mild. Some people take blue vervain and they think, “Meh, chamomile in strength.” I think those people should take more blue vervain. As a relaxant, I think it’s a fairly potent one. In my head, it’s stronger than a cup of chamomile tea or a cup of linden or a cup of passion flower. The stronger in effect an herb is, the more I might think of it as shifting away from gentle towards nudgy or pushy. I think unlike a lot of other nervous system herbs that are gentle in effect for some people, blue vervain can come across pushy. I think that those are maybe the people that need blue vervain the most, which would potentially be us. Blue vervain types like—what are we talking about when we talk types? Do you mind if I get lectury for a second just about-

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Lecture away, Thomas. I’m here for it.

Thomas Easley:

When I think about how herbs work, I think about herbs that affect our qualitative state of being, herbs that make us feel warmer or cooler or moister or drier or tighter or relaxed. I think about the “qualities”—is how I term those. I think about the ways in which herbs might affect our tissue function, like cholagogue or galactagogue. You might not be able to anticipate what the herbal actions are from the qualities that they impart. We have herbal effects which are the end points, disease modifying, disease process modifying, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial. We typically select herbs based on their either general qualities or their desired actions or their desired effects or some combination of those things. Then we add on the nuance of what the eclectic physicians would call the “specific indications.” These are more than their broad qualities. Sometimes they describe their actions or effects, but especially when we talk about the specific indications for nervous system herbs, we’re talking about a super specific qualitative pattern instead of a quality itself that it shifts. There are lots of things that will cool you down. There are lots of things that will warm you up. There are lots of things that will moisten you, but there is only one herb that works specifically above and beyond a general relaxant for stiff necked, overachieving list makers who have a hard time asking for help--and that’s blue vervain. There are other specific indications. If we try to translate specific indications into modern medicine, we might say that in modern medicine, there are a lot of symptoms that we call “depression.” There’s a general class of medication called “antidepressant” that we use for that, but there are a lot of different antidepressants, and how do we narrow down the one for the person? Then we start looking for more subtle things, like is this person’s appetite high or low? Is this person super gloomy depressed or anxious depressed? They use specifiers, and that might be the closest concept to specific indications that we have in modern medicine. The symptom specifiers that would lead you to choosing one particular type of antidepressant over another or one particular type of anxiolytic over another. Even those don’t come close to the specificity of specific indications in eclectic medicine. I think of them as these super specific qualitative patterns, and when I think of qualitative patterns in how we select herbs, what I normally think of are more acquired patterns.

Sometimes you give herbs for a constitutional remedy, like some people remember being hot and dry since childhood, and they just never heard of marshmallow until they were 40 years old. But most people didn’t feel constantly hot and dry when they were a child, whether it came on as part of a broader imbalance in their forties or fifties, whatever time period it came on. I think that in some instances, specific indications point towards remedies that work best not just for things that come on as part of illness or that come on as part of a disease or a change later in life. I think that sometimes specific indications point towards remedies that address deeper, long-standing constitutional type of imbalances.

Blue vervain for everyone is a relaxant, but for a special type of person – that person being Type A is a good way to talk about them, like hard-driven. I think the blue vervainer is probably hard driven at baseline. That’s their positive manifestation of that constitutional trait, but then when out of balance, they veer towards fanaticism. I certainly would have characterized my early herbal career as tipping more towards herbal fanaticism. Starting at such a young age with folk training, nobody told me what herbs couldn’t do, and so I tried a whole lot of things that I would not recommend students try now. I think that it was partially that imbalanced blue vervain type of constitution that drove that. Maybe that’s a fun conversation for another day, but blue vervain does something for those of us who have overachieving, Type A, hard-driving personalities at baseline. A lot of times, folks that have that overachieving, hard-driving personality tend to have a lot of inner perfectionism, and that inner perfectionism, and hard-drivenness will often result in heightened levels of activation that are very difficult to tease out sometimes, whether they are positive eustressors or negative destressors. That heightened level of activation combined with perfectionism and hard-driving nature often creates a lot of physical tension in the body. People that benefit from blue vervain beyond its relaxant qualities—which I want to reiterate everybody should take some blue vervain just because it’s a fun, chill remedy. But if you are also a blue vervainer, welcome. Rosalee and I – I think I speak for Rosalee when I say welcome.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Can we get T-shirts? I think we need T-shirts that say “blue vervainer” on it. That’s like my new goal.

Thomas Easley:

Holding tension in the neck and shoulders, and often face and jaw is common. We often grit our teeth or we have facial tension, neck and shoulder tension, and that hard-driving nature along with that inner perfectionism, tends to make us do a lot of this to get all of our thoughts out, work really hard at our desk, and that probably doesn’t help the neck and shoulder issue. While blue vervain is a relaxant that everybody should take, if you identify as being hard-driven, with some strong perfectionist tendencies, and maybe some cognitive rigidity, but also, you’re probably like a high achiever. You might see that burnout line, and just say, “F*** it. I can handle this a little bit longer.” Maybe that’s your pattern, I would encourage you the first time you take blue vervain, sit down first. The first time I took blue vervain, I went weak in the knees. I have seen multiple people go weak in the knees at blue vervain, and it’s always the blue vervainer personality types that do. My experience was it was like the first time in my life that my brain completely shut up. I was a teenager when I took blue vervain for the first time. I took it once and not having thoughts in my mind was so unsettling that it was probably a year or more before I tried it again. Blue vervain, I keep a bottle on my desk. It is a good friend. Hey, nice!

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Cheers!

Thomas Easley:

I think it does something special in brains that identify with that blue vervain personality type.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Part of my complication with blue vervain is that what I want to take is Rhodiola and cordyceps all the time. That’s what I want to take, but then maybe, what I should be taking is blue vervain. Speaking of it being on our desks, my husband, Xavier, knew I was about to chat with you. He asked what herb and I said blue vervain, he said, “You know what? I noticed the other day that you have blue vervain on your desk. Maybe you should talk to Thomas about dosage? Maybe you aren’t taking the right dosage?” he says. “You always talk about dosage,” says Xavier. “Maybe you need to talk to him because something might not be working.” I was like, “Thank you for the input, handsome French husband.” 

Thomas Easley:

I have to ask. It’s on my desk and it’s one of my dear friends, and also, I don’t take it daily. It is a great remedy for me at the end of the day. But often, by the end of the day, I have my end-of-the-day rituals that help me unwind. If they don’t, then I might take blue vervain. If I take blue vervain in the work day, I’m either going to get relaxed and hyperfocused, and get two weeks of work done in a few hours, or I’m going to have a daydream and not get anything done for the next few hours. I feel like that is where the rub in the relationship is at for me. I also feel like that might be the purpose of the relationship. Maybe the fact that we have to debate with ourselves is it worth feeling relaxed and risking a daydream is the reason why we should take it regardless? I have some thoughts about the lessons of blue vervain that I’m not finished with.

Rosalee de la Forêt: 

The blue vervainers. I’m really into that term.

Thomas Easley:

Dosage--I think that the first time you take blue vervain, ten drops is a reasonable starting place. That can be so bitter. It can nauseate some folks. If you’re prone to nauseous from bitterness, have a warm cup of aromatic tea to go with it. If you’re not, then don’t worry about it.

Rosalee de la Forêt: 

I’ve only worked with it as a tincture, but I’ve heard from my students who tried it as a tea that that is more activating as a tea. The nausea, seems that doesn’t go-

Thomas Easley:

Yes. I think it’s dose-dependent. I think we’re just more likely to get more plant substance in with the tea than we are with the tincture. I find therapeutic dose is somewhere between five drops and 25, 35, 40 drops. If you take 40 drops of blue vervain, if you take a couple of milliliters of blue vervain and you don’t feel anything, it’s not your herb. Also, if you take a couple of milliliters of blue vervain and you don’t feel anything and it’s not your herb, try some milky oats. Sometimes I think we need to do nervine tonics to more gently restore the nervous system’s ability to feel relaxed before we try over-relaxants like blue vervain. In the tea form, I don’t know that the tea offers any advantages to the tincture. It certainly doesn’t taste good and it can totally make you nauseous.

My teaching spot in my full time program was in the afternoons right after materia medica lecture. I was walking over for a lecture in therapeutics of some sort. All of the students were out on the breezeway in front of the classroom, and I could hear them giddily laughing from a distance. I got closer and they were in hysterics, like having a wild laugh. I got closer and I said, “Hey, what’s going on?” and a student turned to me and said, “We all drank too much blue vervain and we’re vomiting.” I said, “Huh?” because they’re all laughing. She says, “Yeah, we’re all just so—” and then she turns and projectile vomits off the breezeway hardcore spews, turns back, starts laughing and says, “We’re all just vomiting and we also can’t stop laughing about it.” So, yes, too much blue vervain infusion can certainly be vomit-inducing, and also, surprisingly, at least in this one group that I saw consume too much blue vervain, not in a way that you’re going to be upset and mad at blue vervain afterwards, which is good. You get nauseous and vomit off of Lobelia, you’re going to be upset and pissed at Lobelia for a while. Apparently not with blue vervain.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I do not feel like testing this, but I really like the story. I’m going to report back to Xavier, my husband, that apparently, I have to take the blue vervain. I can’t just look at it on my desk, that’s the thing I’m learning right now.

Thomas Easley:

I think that’s probably an important part of it is – you have to take it. I wanted to say since we’re down the rabbit trail about blue vervain, I do have a few clinical tidbits that have nothing to do with its personality and relaxant effect. Number one, it is also a diaphoretic so it induces sweating, but the dosage at which it induces sweating and the dosage at which it induces nausea is pretty close. I have used blue vervain on three occasions now, and a student has used it once, in people that could not sweat. Because they couldn’t sweat, had in one case had multiple heat strokes, in another it was like a college or maybe a high school athlete that was being recruited by a college. They got sick and then stopped sweating, and then started passing out on the football field. They were going to lose their scholarship.

Anyway, I’ve seen large doses of blue vervain infusion right to the point of inducing vomiting also cause people to sweat. In one person, they said they had not worn antiperspirant or deodorant in 30 years because they just never after having a heatstroke 30 years ago, had never sweated again. Blue vervain, one big nauseating infusion started their sweating back. They had a really profuse sweat and then kind of normalized sweating after that. So, I’ve got a few cases on that and I think its diaphoretic action is very interesting. You don’t run into cases that often where you can’t induce sweat with cayenne or ginger or elderflower or a combination of those, but if you do, blue vervain infusion is worth trying.

I have a couple of cases of pulmonary hypertension, which is a pretty severe life-threatening type thing. I have a couple of cases of pulmonary hypertension that completely, spontaneously resolved the week after the people started taking blue vervain – two cases there. No clues why. Doesn’t affect the lung function that we know of, but I think that anecdotes are strong enough and well-documented enough that I like putting them out there with conversations about blue vervain because it’s a safe herb and it’s a cheap herb. If it can do more than just its magic in relaxing and having specific indications in a whole cult of  fun personalities that support it—if it can do even more than that, I love other people to potentially test that out.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Thank you for that, Thomas. I really always love your clinical pearls and sharing that. Those are two things I had not previously heard before, so thank you for that. I also just have to say it’s such a pretty plant. I love growing it, and sometimes I feel like that’s part of the medicine really, for me, is that I’ll go out to the garden and spend time in the garden with blue vervain. It can just capture me for such a long time. The bees always love it. It’s so beautiful.

Thomas Easley:

Gorgeous plant! I’m currently in the early stages of potentially redoing my school logo, and blue vervain is the plant for the new logo. If I wind up doing any logo, it’s going to be a blue vervain intertwined.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

You shared a recipe with us, which is the recipe that I get the sense that you personally use to get to sleep. I’d love to hear a little bit about this formula and the recipe, in general.

Thomas Easley:

It is my go-the-f***-to-sleep formula. It’s passion flower, blue vervain, hops, and rauwolfia. I want to throw some immediate caveats out there: 1. I make my passion flower differently than other folks, 2. You probably don’t need rauwolfia in this. I have struggled with insomnia since I was a teenager. I can normally get ahead of it. I have other formulas that I use if I feel a battle of insomnia coming on. I’m also a relatively recent convert to 99% blue blocking glasses and early bright light therapy in the morning, and that’s been the best thing for my insomnia that I probably ever done. In the past when I have had insomnia that didn’t respond to more gentle remedies, this is the formula that I use. Passion flower, the last few years, I’ve been playing around with at the start of the season doing a fresh one to two tincture, and then a month later, pressing that out. Using the fresh one to two tincture to tincture a freshly dried one to five batch of leaves and flowers. So, you get a little bit stronger than a one to five. You get the fresh components and the freshly dried components together. It’s a pretty potent passion flower formula. I do equal parts of that and blue vervain which you don’t need to do as any type of concentrated special preparation. A one to five of blue vervain is more than potent enough for it to work, which is cool. One part of hops—my secret for hops is to go to brew stores that do beer brewing and ask to smell their hops. Hops have wildly different aroma profiles, variety to variety. I dislike all varieties of American hops that I’ve ever tried. I like all but one variety of European hops that I’ve tried. It wasn’t until doing a smell test followed by a taste test that I realized hops is something that in an ideal world is kind of individualized. Maybe we need more variety and specificity in our hops tincture in the marketplace because I would certainly buy craft-formulated hops blends or specific species of hops. Anyway, hops, I think is a pretty reliable sedative for a lot of folks. I just like a nice European hops. Rauvolfia serpentina, Indian snakeroot, is a very popular sedative in Ayurveda used for insomnia, used for insanity, kind of an anti-manic remedy. The Ayurvedic texts translate a lot of the indications from the old work into schizophrenia now. It is a presynaptic inhibitor of your monoamines. It helps suppress the release of epinephrine, norepinephrine. Theoretically, serotonin and dopamine are also suppressed. There is a theoretical contraindication for using Rauwolfia in depression. It’s popularly thought that it induced depression because of the alkaloid, reserpine, in there. There was a good journal article that came out, maybe a decade ago, called, The Myth of Reserpine-induced Depression, and basically said that studies that showed that it caused depression really didn’t show that and were poor quality, and it has this long tradition of being used in folks that were both anxious and depressed. As long as there’s that anxious or insomniac quality there, it’s probably okay even in depression. It is a low dose botanical. It’s one of those that “more is not better.” Little bit is all that you need. Once again, this is like when-you’ve-tried-everything-else formula, not the first formula that you start with.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

The Rauwolfia can be omitted, at least, in the beginning.

Thomas Easley:

Most people don’t need Rauwolfia. Stubborn, like long-term constitutional insomnia, Rauwolfia can be a nice one to add in.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Great! Our listeners can download the recipe for the GTFTS sleep blend at herbswithrosaleepodcast.com or check out the show notes. Thanks for sharing that with us. Before we move on, do you have anything else you’d like to share about blue vervain? 

Thomas Easley:

I think that the blue vervains are all fairly interchangeable. European vervain, the Verbena hastata, which is the most commonly used one. Verbena brasiliensis, which is what I grew up using. “Ditch vervain” is what we called it because it’s just all over the ditches in the Deep South. I think that they’re all fairly interchangeable, all with the same basic specific indications and general relaxant properties. You might play with your dose. You might use Verbena hastata to set your dose response expectations, and then play with your other varieties. With the European, I normally use a little bit more, with the brasiliensis, I normally use a little bit less.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Thanks for that. Thanks for sharing all of that on blue vervain. I’m definitely going to look at it more and probably keep taking Rhodiola, and then I’m going to get to burnout, and then I’m going to think about it some more. That’s kind of my relationship with blue vervain.

Thomas Easley:

Oh, my God. Spoken like a true vervainer.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I’m also going to look into those shirts because that’s awesome. So, we talked about young Thomas, your early clinical experience, herb shop, and then you started your own school. The last time I talked to you, there was a lot of excitement about turning your foundational program into a book. I would love to hear more about that and—when we talked about it last time, it blew my mind the amount of work that was going into this and the breadth of it, so I’d love to hear about it from you. 

Thomas Easley:

I started my herb school in 2010. The curriculum has been a continuously updated thing since then, but I did a major revision in 2015, and I did a half revision in 2019, 2020. In 2021, I decided that I didn’t want to do another full time program. I had been running a year-long 25, 30-hour a week intensive. I decided that I didn’t want to do that, instead, I wanted to rewrite the curriculum, not update it like I did in 2015, 2019, and 2020, a ground up rewrite. I wanted to take our thousands of hours—I think we’re at 10,000 hours of class recordings because we live streamed it, our full time program. One year, I had a student who in class, literally, transcribed the entire program. I had lots and lots of evolutions of classes that they would change and evolve when I teach them live, but they had not gotten written down. They were just whiteboard and recorded. I changed my approach in how I taught things. I wanted to do a different type of curriculum. I wanted to do a more layered curriculum instead of module by module, which is what I had been doing. I wanted to do more scaffolding and better pedagogy. I hired an instructional designer to learn about that whole process, and learned about the learning journey itself and what’s involved. I had taken time to not teach, and to just think, to read other great thinkers, and to think myself about the future of herbal medicine, my experience with herb students from different backgrounds, where they started, where they landed at the end of the program, and what all of this meant. I would say that maybe other herb schools—I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t speak for other herb schools. My first herb program I wrote for me. I wrote what I wanted to teach about and what I found interesting. I then built backwards from there what the students needed to understand what I found interesting. I think that was successful because what I found interesting was a lot of clinical nuts and bolts that other people didn’t talk about a lot. I also—when I decided I didn’t want to do another full time program and I wanted to take some time and think through philosophy and the learning process, and scaffolding learning experiences, I spent a lot of time analyzing our curriculum, thinking about our outcomes, and then starting from the ground up. I’m really happy with how that process is turning out. It’s not done, but last year, I published my Five Realms, which is a practical philosophy of herbal medicine and I laid out what I think is a pretty reasonable modern philosophical understanding of holism, and how that works from a plant-centered perspective. That was the first piece of the new curriculum, and since then more and more has come out. I have gotten very wordy. I am almost done with our foundational curriculum update, and for the first time, I wrote it with the intention of, eventually, also writing a book. I have some beliefs about modern herbal education. I think that a lot of what we see out there is very entertaining, and also very surface level. To really engage deeper requires reading. I don’t know if we have talked about this, but the declining rates of truly functional literacy in our country are getting scary. More and more folks are having a hard time sustaining enough focus to read and to engage really deeply good stuff. I think that reading and underlining and making notes, like the actual study is something that we need more of in herbal medicine. So, in writing this curriculum, we have audio overviews and video components, but it’s very reading heavy because I think people need to read more and to practice more reading to be able to sustain the type of critical analysis that you need to be a good practitioner, a good herbalist. 

Anyway, all of this came together starting—this past year was when I started taking all the pieces that has been a few years previous accumulating, and started putting them together. The foundational program is almost done. The big piece of community we’ve already been working on and we’re turning that foundational program into a textbook also. I’m very excited about it. You know publishing thing, it takes forever. I think that our manuscript will be delivered this fall. It will be probably be spring of 2027 before it actually comes out. Maybe winter of 2027, if I’m lucky. It’s still going to be a while, but it starts with philosophy, like we all have ways that we think about health, disease, and how the world works that we normally don’t think about consciously. We think about these things unconsciously, it’s part of our world perspective, yet it’s these unconscious beliefs that influence what we study in herbal medicine, how much time we spend devoted to the individual subjects, how we put it all together, how we show up in clinic for folks. I wanted to start my foundational program and this foundational textbook with just an exploration of philosophy, in general, and then how I think about the philosophy of herbal medicine, and how all of the pieces and parts fit together, and then it goes into what I think herbalists do exceptionally well, which is building health. It covers everything from clinical nutrition to movement and exercise to connections, sense of coherence – all of the pieces that I think are foundational to health. Materia medica and how do you study that. I teach that, materia medica. There’s a lot of different ways to learn materia medica and to come at it, but the most valuable place to start from is in our own body, like an embodied perspective. When we take herbs into our body, what are they doing? Why are we feeling the things that we’re feeling when we take herbal medicine? How does that—because I’m a science nerd—how does that physiologically work in the body? What receptors are activated that make us feel the warmth from ginger? What does that activation mean? Where does it work? What does it do? What might that imply about how we conceptualize ginger? It goes into all of the foundations that I can think of that you need to apply herbal medicine holistically.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

It sounds like this is going to be at least a couple hundred pages then. Probably paperback, size 14 font, 200 pages?

Thomas Easley:

I was hoping for 50 pages. I don’t actually—I’m still working on the last section so I don’t know what it’s going to clock in at, but I have a general estimate from my publisher that if we choose the standard number of pictures for the word count that I’ve given them, it will clock in at 850 pages, maybe.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

You probably need to call on your good friends to be early readers is also something. I think I established already that we’re good friends, so-

Thomas Easley:

I’ll text you chapters at a time.

Rosalee de la Forêt: 

That would be great. My Whatsapp will “ding, ding, ding!” Thomas again.

Thomas Easley:

That’s what I’ve been working on, is this foundational curriculum textbook. I’m also, at the same time, in parallel—which I question my decision making about—finishing a course on depression, which has been part of my healing journey through depression has been to journal about what I’ve experienced, research, make notes, write and try to understand myself, and my experience. This course I’ve been taking all of that from the last few years and trying to get it all out on paper and organized into a way that makes sense. That has been really fun. Our next module, I get to talk about psychedelics and my experience with them, and that’s been really fun. That’s also probably a big chunk of the community course and eventual series of books. It’s like mental health—community herbalists deal with a lot of mental health stuff.

Text writing--I’ve been very happy writing, Rosalee. I’ve written hundreds of pages this past year or year and a half, that I’m quite excited. By writing, I don’t type all the words. Talking and dictation has changed my life. I get to walk around and lecture into my phone recorder, and it’s a great way for me to get my thoughts out before I actually sit down at a computer and start typing.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

That’s a gift to all of us. I’m really excited to see all of this come to fruition. This is going to be a great contribution to the herbal world, so that’s going to be absolutely wonderful.

Thomas Easley:

Thanks. I think that it will be like when you study TCM, you have a core set of canon, of material that you have to study. But with Western herbalism, there are so many great pieces that you have to cobble together things, and so what I’m hoping is that I can create some large bodies of foundational knowledge that will let you learn from this diverse, amazing group of herbalists, Western herbalists with a shared language and understanding of the different places and perspectives that folks are coming from. I think that it’s going to turn out to be very good.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

I have no doubt. Thomas, before you go, I have one last question for you and I’m excited to hear your response to this question because I think you have opinions on it. That question is: What do you wish you had known when you first started working with herbs?

Thomas Easley:

Man, that’s hard! I wish that I knew more herbalists when I first started working with herbs. I knew my teacher and she introduced me to my second teacher who eventually introduced me to my third teacher. It was like a seven-year process and I didn’t really know other practicing herbalists at the time. Knowing other practicing herbalists early on would have probably been really cool, helpful and fun. Also, because I started at a different place than some folks, like I started pure Western folk herbalism like Utah Mormon herbal revival, Dr. John Christopher, Bernard Jensen style. Because I started there, I did not incorporate modern basic medical sciences, modern clinical nutrition for the first seven years of my practice. Pros and cons, I can look at some scenarios that I certainly would have done differently had I known what I know now, and also they worked out or not, and I learned valuable lessons that I don’t think I would have otherwise learned. If I had to do over again, I would probably do course work in physiology, pathophysiology. I feel like that would have given me—and nutrition. I feel like that would have given me a head start. I graduate students now that when they graduate are where I was after 50 years of practice. A big reason for that is I embraced the modern basic medical sciences which I think provide a really good scaffolding for Western herbalism.

In TCM, the evolution arguably, most of the pieces were in place 600 years ago, and it hasn’t changed a ton, interpretations, little things. But in Western herbalism, the evolution continued through the discovery of randomized controlled trials, bacteria and viruses, and all the way. The Western herbal framework has more roots in early physiology than other systems and I didn’t realize that at the time. I feel like it would have given me a jumpstart had I realized that, so I encourage folks to pick up—anatomy is still, to me, a little boring because I’m not going to be dissecting anybody or doing surgery. Yes, you need to know where things are. Understanding the function, the physiology and the pathophysiology, the biological basis for disease, I think has made me a much more precise herbalist. I feel like I use a lot less of our plant friends now than I did early in my career. That’s also important to me that you can be a conservative herbalist. There’s probably a better phrase for that. You can recommend conservatively and still get great results. If you think you need five formulas, you can probably get it done with two. If you think you need ten supplements, one or three. There’s so much more that the body can do than I think we might inherently give credit for when we’re trying to throw all of the support at it. Learning physiology and pathophysiology I think has let me be more targeted in the type of support that I recommend.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

That’s a wonderful reflection from somebody who’s been in clinical practice for so long. Thank you so much for being here, Thomas. Thanks for your wisdom on blue vervain. Thanks for hanging out with me. Thanks for sharing and really looking forward to seeing your projects come out into the world. Maybe you’ll come back sometime when we have these projects out there.

Thomas Easley:

I was going to say as opposed to a few years ago when I said no to everything, now, I’m going to say yes to everything mode. I would love to come back and thank you for having me.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Always a pleasure.

Thomas Easley:

Okay.

Rosalee de la Forêt:

Thanks for being here. Don’t forget to download your beautifully illustrated recipe card above this transcript. Also sign up for my weekly newsletter, which is the best way to stay in touch with me. You can find more about Thomas on his school website, eclecticschoolofherbalmedicine.com.

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Alright. You’ve lasted to the very end of the show, which means you get your own gold star and this herbal tidbit:

Thomas mentioned some specific indications for blue vervain, so I thought it would be interesting to include some of other specific indications from other herbalists here in our herbal tidbit section.

Eclectic physician, John Scudder in 1870 wrote: “It exerts a marked influence upon the nervous system quieting irritation and strengthening functional activity. It relieves pain, especially when dependent upon nervous irritation.” Herbalist, Matthew Wood, “This is the remedy for the person who has high ideals, overworks in the service of these ideals, and eventually becomes ill from the strain and tension.” jim mcdonald says paraphrasing, “For when you have exceptionally high, perhaps even unrealistic expectations for yourself that then bleed on to others.” Felter and Lloyd in 1909, “A quieting and relaxing remedy influencing the nervous system and promoting perspiration, useful in colds, coughs, and fevers with restlessness.”

Thanks for joining me on this herbal adventure. See you next time. 

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