SHSG May 2021: An Organoleptic Experience

This month's class has been a long time coming. One of the best ways to improve your skills at reading herbal energetics (damp, dry, tense, etc) is through using the senses to identify smells, tastes, texture, appearance and other ways in which the plants communicate to us how they work and what they do.

Sometimes we are biased in our pursuit of this insight because of what guidebooks, herbal authors or "known" medicinal uses tell us a plant does. But there is inherent value in the type of direct learning we get when we quiet everything else but the plants themselves. Therefore, this month we experience a plant without knowing its name.

We will spend the evening using all five of our senses plus our intuition to identify the qualities of a plant that we don't know. We will use various formulations of the same plant in order to familiarize…