Sober Herbalist: Non-Alcoholic Medicine, Wellness, and Spiritual Rebellion | Along the Way
In this Along the Way installment of our interview series, Adam Dietz and Anthony Wright speak with Drea — Sober Herbalist — about recovery, illness, and finding a new path through plants, wellness, and spiritual practice.
Drea shares how she challenged the herbal world’s dismissal of non-alcoholic medicine, developing new ways to prepare remedies without alcohol. We explore her journey through sobriety, chronic illness, and research, and how traditions like Ayurveda, Buddhism, and Taoism shaped her approach to healing.
The conversation also dives into the world of Noah Levine (Dharma Punks, Against the Stream), punk rock Buddhism, the Esalen Institute, and the commercialization of wellness. Drea reflects on two-spirit healers in indigenous traditions and offers a deeply embodied practice: conscious bathing, massage, and even “touching your pain” as ways to reconnect with self and heal trauma.
✨ Topics in this episode:
– Sobriety as spiritual practice and renunciation
– Creating strong, alcohol-free herbal medicine
– Buckminster Fuller’s challenge: building new systems
– Fungi, indigenous wisdom, and plant consciousness
– Noah Levine, Dharma Punks & punk rock spirituality
– The Esalen Institute and the wellness industry
– Two-spirit healers and non-binary traditions
– Embodiment, trauma, and healing through touch
📬 Essays & reflections: https://thewaybetween.substack.com
🌿 Learn more about Drea’s work: https://soberherbalist.com
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.
Speaker B:Welcome.
Speaker B:And our guest is Drea, the sober herbalist.
Speaker B:And Drea, before the break, you were talking about how profound it was for you to be in herb school and have these international and known throughout herbalism.
Speaker B:Talking about how important it was for herbalists not to offer people who had become sober these tinctures that had alcohol in them, but ethanol.
Speaker B:But there wasn't any, anything else that they said.
Speaker B:And I'm so curious to understand about what your journey was from there.
Speaker B:How did you manage them to continue to follow the, the heart connection with these plants and, and how you have experienced their love and what they've been able to do for healing?
Speaker B:What, what have you chosen as the next steps that even the national herbalists didn't do?
Speaker A:Well, it was necessity.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because I wasn't just doing this for fun.
Speaker A:I was trying to make medicine to help myself to chronic illness.
Speaker A:And I don't just have Lyme disease, I actually have the Epstein Barr virus too.
Speaker A:I had two major chronic illnesses coming at me in addition to having the like, hey, I'm an alcoholic.
Speaker A:That's actually, actually in the dsm.
Speaker A:That's a, that's a designated, you know, that's a disease too, you know, so it was just like, here I am, the disease queen.
Speaker B:Well, and I, I want to also emphasis.
Speaker B:Emphasize this idea of dis.
Speaker B:Ease.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Unease.
Speaker B:And that was something that, that it, it really seems like you found the healing of that dis ease through plants, through wellness, through.
Speaker B:Yes, I want to talk to you later about your work with Noah Lavine.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, but continue about how did you make a transition from what the herbalists had been doing with this tincture into a new modality?
Speaker A:Yeah, well, it's just like I said, I was trained.
Speaker A:I, I have a degree, master's degree.
Speaker A:And it reminded me a lot of that experience of the first few times I, you know, started to do research and write material as an academic and become a scholar.
Speaker A:I was taught to find out what's the conversation around this topic.
Speaker A:And so I began research in my field to find out what people were talking about regards in regards to non alcoholic medicine.
Speaker A:And so I poured through all the books, I, you know, I poured through all the web.
Speaker A:You know what we do, we love it too.
Speaker A:I mean, if you're really into research, you're into it and you love it and you just, you want to rabbit hole.
Speaker A:And so I was shocked to find out that Every single book and every single resource.
Speaker A:And I'm not exaggerating when I tell you this.
Speaker A:In fact, I always tell people like, if you own an herb book, please open it up and see about that section where they talk about non alcoholic medicine.
Speaker A:They're gonna just basically say that it's inferior, it doesn't work as well, that alcohol is the best, that you really, you know, that it's just like, oh, that other medicine is for dogs and cats and children and old people and it doesn't work that well, but you can give it to them.
Speaker A:It's, you know.
Speaker A:And so I was like, basically I encountered this environment of like, first of all, that medicine is not taken seriously.
Speaker A:It's not considered strong, it's inferior.
Speaker A:It was like across the board, you know, othered.
Speaker A:And I was just like, of course this just made me more hungry to prove them wrong.
Speaker A:And so that's how it started.
Speaker A:I began to do all this research and, and then also, you know, I have to say that I was really lucky becoming a western herbalist.
Speaker A:I had already been practicing these, you know, other modalities, these traditional medicines with thousands of years of efficacy and practices and, and their own science and their own worldviews.
Speaker A:And spirituality is very much a part of that.
Speaker A:And so I was really coming from my first healing modalities were coming from an ex.
Speaker A:Very expansive, very broad, very beautiful, very spiritual place.
Speaker A:And what I was really coming up against was science.
Speaker A:Simple patriarchal, you know, colonizer empire, chemistry, science.
Speaker A:And it's measure it.
Speaker B:It isn't real.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And they're like what?
Speaker A:You know.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker A:And I just was kind of like, well, and you know, I'm an old Gen Xer and so I like to use the phrase, let me give this the Pepsi Challenge.
Speaker B:Oh no.
Speaker A:I began to just rake through my understanding, my experience of all these other medicines and all these other preparations and all these other quote unquote solvents is the word they use to make preparations of herbal medicine that are strong.
Speaker A:And I began to look and pour through that whole thing and just basically find all the evidence I needed to build an entire methodology for making strong non alcoholic medicine.
Speaker A:And then it was just a matter of doing it because it's like I could theorize all I wanted to, but like, I love.
Speaker A:What's his name?
Speaker A:Buckmeister Fuller.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's just like.
Speaker A:What does he say?
Speaker A:He says if you want to create something, you know, like a new system, you can't use the old one.
Speaker A:You've just got to make your.
Speaker A:A new One.
Speaker A:And I was like, okay, Bucky, I'm gonna take your challenge up and I'm gonna create a new system.
Speaker A:And so it became, you know, and books like Braiding Sweetgrass came out, which began to basically support what I was doing in terms of, like, there being this, like, difficulty with reconciling science and indigenous and spiritual wisdom and this connection with plants that.
Speaker B:That exists a whole different dimension, right?
Speaker A:And so.
Speaker A:And then all this whole mushroom.
Speaker A:The.
Speaker A:The narratives of the mushrooms came out, right?
Speaker A:The whole, like the Milton Melvin Schildrakes and the Paul Stamets mycelium running.
Speaker A:And then the great metaphor of the mushrooms and the.
Speaker A:The.
Speaker A:The consciousness of plants started to come back again.
Speaker A:It was already here in the 60s with the Carlos Castaneda and all the parents, McKenna.
Speaker A:But it's like, really, I.
Speaker A:All I did was just start to pick up some very good, strong threads.
Speaker A:And then the zeitgeist was doing the same thing.
Speaker A:And then it was about the conversation of what is sobriety?
Speaker A:And that has changed.
Speaker A:And so I just luckily stumbled upon something at the right time, at the right moment.
Speaker A:And now I'm like, really hoping, hoping that, like, you know, that just this conversation that I've really been with in myself for most of the time by myself, that now it's just going to get bigger and that we can just have more participation and more clarity and more fun.
Speaker A:Because it's like, can we.
Speaker A:Can we include everybody in the car?
Speaker A:Can we include all the possibilities and all the medicines and all the different ways and make them all valid?
Speaker A:Because they are.
Speaker B:Well, I'm really grateful for our conversation to be able to open this up and to have these.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:These understandings.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:So what say you, Adam?
Speaker B:You have.
Speaker A:I would like to know.
Speaker C:I have a whole list of notes that I'd like to ask you about.
Speaker C:But the main thing I'd want to know is you had quite a journey with first Buddhism and then Ayurveda.
Speaker C:And I would like to know if through this whole process, including what you've described to us as becoming the sober herbalist, if you have any key principles or key takeaways from Buddhism or Ayurveda for our listeners that they can use in.
Speaker C:In their daily life.
Speaker A:Well, sobriety is about abstinence.
Speaker A:And the Buddhist way of abstinence is renunciation.
Speaker A:And so it's like whatever is, you know, looking at your attachments, you know, and it wasn't just looking at my own attachments, right.
Speaker A:I had to look at how herbalism was attached to Alcohol.
Speaker A:And I had to recognize that that's just a relationship.
Speaker A:It's one or the other is not the, it's not bad.
Speaker A:It was just starting to understand this relationship, you know, and so there, there's a, there's a, an aspect of those practices that supports this idea of being detached and not taking things as personally, but also in renouncing.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And it's like, well, it is a spiritual thing to renounce.
Speaker A:It is a spiritual practice to renounce and to understand our relationship to our attachments.
Speaker A:And sometimes it's not just about attachments, it's about our comfor.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:When we do mindful eating, when we do mindful breathing, we do mindful meditation, we're not just examining what it is we're attached to, we're just examining life as it's playing itself out in the sensory and awareness field.
Speaker A:And so those practices have always just completely infused and supported this sort of, like, I want to say, an inquiry or an investigative kind of curiosity with.
Speaker A:Instead of just getting buried and victimized by a situation of saying like, why, why, why?
Speaker A:I need to look at this actually.
Speaker A:I need to explore this.
Speaker A:I need to take a breath and see like what is all filling in this, what's being filled in this space right now and rather being, rather than being overwhelmed by it, try to like sit for a second with it and be curious and learn and grow and then become hopefully inspired and then move into action.
Speaker A:So it's maybe a bunch of different things.
Speaker B:Makes sense.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Thank you.
Speaker B:Well, we're coming up on another break here.
Speaker B:I'm Anthony Wright and my.
Speaker B:You can contact me by my website, which is theonot.com and Adam, yeah, you.
Speaker C:Can reach out to me with any kind of insights or questions or comments you have about all of our work here@deetsatom gmail.com D I E T Z Adam, one word.
Speaker C:Gmail.com of course, like just to get your feedback.
Speaker C:And you could also reach me at the way between at substack and that has all my links and socials there too as well.
Speaker B:Andrea, contact you?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Soberherbalist.com thanks, Anthony.
Speaker A:Thanks, Adam.
Speaker B:All right, well, we're going to take a short break and be right back, so stay tuned.
Speaker A:Foreign.
Speaker B:I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host on the Living Conversation with Adam De and we are talking with Drea Sober Herbalist.
Speaker B:And before the break, Drea, you were talking about moving from one modality into another.
Speaker B:And I want to understand before we begin the recording of our show today, you Were talking about this idea of wellness.
Speaker B:Can you talk to us about that?
Speaker B:And then also you have studied with somebody who I had interviewed named Noah Lavine.
Speaker B:And what a radical guy.
Speaker B:You said you were a punk, a punk rock girl.
Speaker B:And boy, was he a punk rock guy.
Speaker B:He wrote to the book Dharma Punks.
Speaker B:So what's your experience with wellness and with Noah Levine, please.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's actually, I mean, it's funny you think that question would be really difficult to reconcile, but it's not because like for many years Noah used to do workshops, like week long workshops and so forth and sometimes longer ones or shorter ones at a place called the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
Speaker B:Oh, he worked at Esalen.
Speaker B:He didn't work there or I presented at Esalen.
Speaker A:Correct, correct.
Speaker A:And that's actually how I accessed him.
Speaker A:I was already in recovery for a few months when a friend of mine who was curious about sobriety and was a very like, she was very good at like getting a lot of pop culture.
Speaker A:She was kind of my person to like, so what's going on?
Speaker A:What's the latest stuff?
Speaker A:And she hid this book from me at first.
Speaker A:And I was like, what is that?
Speaker A:Give it to me.
Speaker A:Here we are like 34 year old women and we're at the beach and she's hiding her beach read.
Speaker A:And I was like, give me that.
Speaker A:The sober punk rock guy writing the story of the Buddha and the Buddha's enlightenment and journey from the perspective and in the language of like street punk and gangster talk.
Speaker A:I was like, get me that.
Speaker A:That's like my.
Speaker A:Right there.
Speaker A:When he's sober.
Speaker A:So that's how I found out about him.
Speaker A:And then immediately, of course, I went and got that.
Speaker A:And that was his book called, entitled against the Stream.
Speaker A:Dharma Punks had already been written and he wrote this other book called against the Stream, which is about how, you know, doing, doing, following the Buddhist path is going against the stream in the sense that it's easy to just sort of, if you just don't examine anything and you just, just do what everybody else does or just follow along, then you just kind of flow with everything.
Speaker A:And, and then if you kind of look at everything and sort of challenge yourself at this inquiry and this awareness that it's like suddenly you're, you're going against something which is kind of like a punk rock mosh pit where you, you know, there's always one or two people in that pit who decide to go the opposite way and create this like dissonance which is part of the creative Destructive, you know, aspect of being a punker is to say, I'm gonna go the.
Speaker A:I'm gonna rebel.
Speaker A:You know, spirituality is a rebellion, especially in our day and age where it's like everyone kind of on it.
Speaker A:But anyways, wellness and spirit and.
Speaker A:And Noah Levine and.
Speaker A:And all that.
Speaker A:So wellness.
Speaker A:Esalen Institute is a very great institution of quote, unquote, wellness.
Speaker A:And I use the word institution because wellness capital, W E L L N E S S is an institution, you know, and insulin is.
Speaker A:You know, they call himself the Esalen Institute.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:I think called themselves that in order to sort of like, they were.
Speaker A:It is a very, like, masculine, patriarchal.
Speaker A:Like, everyone was scholars and academics, and they were very much within the disciplines.
Speaker A:And so when they called themselves an institute, I think they were trying to say, like, we're of them, but we're not them, which is kind of cool.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker B:Well, they're going to be carrying forward with a certain structure that's.
Speaker B:Yes, but not with the same content, obviously.
Speaker A:Yeah, they went about it in pretty radical way.
Speaker A:I mean, Hunter S. Thompson was like an early man.
Speaker A:Yeah, he was hanging out there and everyone.
Speaker B:Wacky guy, but he was certainly radical.
Speaker A:But it was a place where.
Speaker A:Okay, and this is.
Speaker A:Maybe they're going to connect to wellness, but it was a place that.
Speaker A:Esalen Institute was a place where you could be a scholar and you could be an, like an astronomer, you could be a scientist, you could be a physicist and you could be a psychologist and you could be a body worker and you could be an artist.
Speaker A:Like, I'm thinking of somebody like Moshe Feldenkrais who was like, you know, he was a philosopher, and yet he created this, like, deeply profound bodywork, this whole, like, neuromuscular modality that the.
Speaker A:Using the word like somatics, which is a huge word in wellness now.
Speaker A:So it's very interesting, the interplay.
Speaker A:But anyways, wellness is a.
Speaker A:No, it's just like you were talking about earlier, that you're getting an MBA and you're talking about branding, and it's like wellness, you know, in the context of capitalism in the West.
Speaker A:You know, unfortunately, it's subject to all of that, but it comes from a very long thousands and thousands of year tradition of people's daily healing practice.
Speaker A:Because they didn't have a medical industrial complex surrounding.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker A:Had the plants and the tools and their bodies and maybe some food and some substances like oils and, you know, plants and things like that.
Speaker A:They had very few things.
Speaker A:And they were like, well, how do we Take care of ourselves.
Speaker A:What do we do when we get.
Speaker A:And so that's what wellness originally was, was just like, what do I do when I get sick?
Speaker A:And now it's this like, you know, big industry.
Speaker B:Well, and, and usually the healers were the, the shaman and, and wise women who were on the edge of the community.
Speaker B:And there's a term called beyond the pale.
Speaker B:And the paling was the, the, the fence around the community, but they were out beyond that into the wild and attending and allowing their awareness to be blended with the wild.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And they were often non binary.
Speaker B:I didn't know that.
Speaker A:Which is very important for people to understand is that like the biggest, most respected, you know, community of healers were non binary people.
Speaker A:And, and from the perspective of our Uveda, we call them two spirit because they have this like very pronounced masculine and feminine energy, which is evidenced even on their pulses.
Speaker A:Because we take two.
Speaker A:Two pulses and it's like there's two different spirits residing within a person.
Speaker A:And so they were even like, you know, non binary in the sense that they presented as like masculine, feminine.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:The shape shifting.
Speaker A:So they even stood outside of the order of man, woman.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know, talk about wild.
Speaker B:Oh boy.
Speaker B:And I have a, a question.
Speaker B: Right now In August of: Speaker B:There is a lot of dis.
Speaker B:Ease.
Speaker B:Unease.
Speaker B:Do you have any suggestions for our listeners and viewers?
Speaker B:And Adam, maybe you might have something too about how do we retain a grounded awareness?
Speaker A:Well, there's so many people out there.
Speaker B:Is there something that's really quite straightforward and simple to do?
Speaker A:Actually, yeah.
Speaker A:I'm about to actually go down in September to Eugene, Oregon to do like a video blog for a very famous herbal company called Mountain Rosa Herbs.
Speaker A:And the, the marketing people were like, can you come down and talk about.
Speaker A:Are you.
Speaker A:Can you talk about lymphatic herbs and this Ayurveda, you know, bodywork thing that you used to do and that you teach.
Speaker A:And I was like, sure.
Speaker A:So I think one of the deepest and most profound things that people can actually do right now is to like touch their bodies, to literally like bathe.
Speaker A:Bathe themselves consciously and to touch.
Speaker A:And this has just to do with embodiment disconnection from our.
Speaker A:You know, you were talking about disease.
Speaker A:Disease is also disembodied.
Speaker A:And I share that from the perspective of someone who was an alcoholic who was trying to disembody numb because of this disease.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And it's like anytime we're in A position.
Speaker A:And, like, that's what I did, too, as an herbalist, when I was like, look, I need to make a way here.
Speaker A:And politics and patriarchal structures and power relations are trying to prevent me from accessing healing.
Speaker A:And I knew what stands out of politics.
Speaker A:My body, my senses.
Speaker A:And so embodiment to me is a key place for the individual to reconnect with the whole, but also through the physical self.
Speaker A:And when.
Speaker A:And the Buddha taught that as far as I understand, in my experiences and my teachings, we have this ideas of metta.
Speaker A:Metta, loving kindness, and the practices of the brahma viharas, which have to do with, like, how we love, practicing love in all these different ways.
Speaker A:And, like, it starts with you, and you cannot change and love and embrace the world if you're not changing and embracing and loving yourself.
Speaker A:And so it's like, in my opinion, the first thing you can do is, like, to lovingly care for your body as much as you can.
Speaker A:That's hard for people.
Speaker A:There's a lot of trauma that divides us from that task.
Speaker A:But we won't change if we don't attempt and we don't become aware of that trauma.
Speaker A:And at least you become aware of it if you do touch your body and you realize in the midst of, like, putting an oil on your arm or putting, you know, a salve on your hands or even massaging your scalp, if you suddenly realize that that's.
Speaker A:There's dissonance there, this is hard, or I'm experiencing trauma or whatever, there's all sorts of different possibilities.
Speaker A:But I think that's probably one of the biggest profound things that a person can do.
Speaker A:It's like, you tune pianos, You've got to listen deeply.
Speaker B:Oh, boy.
Speaker A:And you know when something's out of tune because you're in that listening, and it's like the same thing goes for your body.
Speaker A:Like, I know when something's out of tune.
Speaker A:When I'm, like, breathing or scrubbing myself or doing massage or I'm attending to my flesh and my.
Speaker A:And my physical needs and my, you know, my body's processes and my systems, you know, I learn what's out of harmony, but only because I'm listening and I'm spending that moment.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's.
Speaker A:That's maybe what I would say.
Speaker B:No, this is really great.
Speaker A:And I'll say that from an abstract.
Speaker A:You know, I didn't learn that anywhere.
Speaker A:I was desperate and I was scared, and a little village healing collective told me to go home.
Speaker A:And in the midst of my Deep, deep chronic pain and illness.
Speaker A:And you know, just talk about being disembodied in the midst of Lyme disease.
Speaker A:It's a horribly painful, painful experience.
Speaker A:And they were like, touch yourself.
Speaker A:Put oil.
Speaker A:Scrub your body.
Speaker A:Use this tool.
Speaker A:They were like, touch your pain.
Speaker A:They were like, go there.
Speaker A:And I was like, I'm afraid.
Speaker A:And they're like, just try, we'll go with you.
Speaker A:You know, like.
Speaker A:And it was like, wow, yeah, this is painful times, but we gotta go there.
Speaker A:Maybe this is where we start.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:That's how it started for me.
Speaker A:That was the revolution was that I began to touch my pain.
Speaker B:Wow, that's really incredible.
Speaker B:I'm sorry that we're at the end of the show here and we'd like to continue this at another point here.
Speaker B:I would love to have you come back.
Speaker B:I'm Anthony Wright and I've been your co host today with Adam Dietz.
Speaker C:Thanks for stop.
Speaker B:Been talking with the.
Speaker B:With the sober herbalist.
Speaker B:You can contact me at my website, theonot.com T-H-E-O-N-A-U-T.com and Adam, how can people contact you?
Speaker C:Yeah, you guys see right now how awesome it is to expand the conversation, so please do so@deetsadamgmail.com and you can also find me at the way between substack.com deets Adam, D I E T Z and Andrea.
Speaker B:How can people.
Speaker B:Or Drea.
Speaker B:Excuse me, how can people.
Speaker A:Either one works.
Speaker A:I'm@sberherbalist.com and I just really appreciate both of you.
Speaker A:It's a real testimony when you're willing to talk to someone who's just kind of like a real peripheral character.
Speaker A:And so I appreciate your, your questions and your presence.
Speaker B:You're outside the, outside the panel and we're very grateful for that.
Speaker B:All right, thank you so much for, for listening and we will see you next time.
