The Open Center: Your training program includes a session called Seasonal Healing: Herbal Therapeutics and the Cycle of the Year. What is this session about?

Peeka Trenkle: I teach one evening on the cycle of the seasons and how to work with the seasons in your healing process.  Winter is an inward time.  Many people dread winter for this reason. Winter is quiet, dark and cold – very yin – it can also feel isolating.  But winter is also a time for more sleeping, more dreaming.  It is a time for setting the seeds for the next year ahead and reflecting on the year gone by, slowing down.  There are many helpful herbal practices that keep our juices flowing in the depths of winter.

The Open Center: What is your favorite thing about teaching herbalism?

Peeka Trenkle: I began teaching this class at The Open Center in 1996.  I have not grown tired of it in all this time.  I always feel energized by helping to awaken an excitement about the natural world.  Nature is always available to us, no matter where we live.  Even in the most dire inner city situations, if your eyes are open, you will see that the natural world is always at play – in the plants that come up through the concrete, the animals, birds, insects that are present, the cycle of day and night, etc.  The earth is always trying to reclaim a state of balance.  Everything serves a purpose to that end.  Nature itself is a pathway back to living in right relationship with the earth and with each other.  All the lessons are there.  Plants are especially important because they carry the sun’s energy and the earth’s energy and help to connect us back to our own state of balance.

The Open Center: What do you really want people to know about green medicine?

Peeka Trenkle: I feel I am planting seeds for the future.  Those of us who do this work and are alive today are not likely to see a great restoration of wholeness in our lifetime because there is so much that needs to happen – that will have to happen in the pace of nature itself.  I imagine a future 100 or 200 years from now in which things are working in a much more harmonious way.  I hold that vision and I teach about the herbs with that vision in mind.  The changes we make today will affect the future and do affect the earth itself.  Nature wants our participation and wants us to be involved.

The Open Center: What can students expect from your class?

Peeka Trenkle: There have been many people over the years that have told me that Green Medicine changed their lives.  They see things differently now.  Their focus begins to shift from worries about pathology to faith in the process of healing.  During the 4-month training we cover all the body’s systems and ways of working with herbs to increase well being and vitality as well as how to heal the body when something is wrong.  We cover the history of herbal medicine and how we got to the state we are in now.  There are guest teachers who add alternative perspectives but the main focus of the Green Medicine course is to restore confidence in the process of natural healing and how to help it along.