Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Psychic Girls Next Door.
Speaker: We are your hosts, Lily Hiberino and Shannon Miller.
Speaker: This podcast is for all spirituality enthusiasts and psychics next door to share tools, experiences and spiritual practices that align with your highest vibrational self.
Speaker: So in today's episode, we are honored to have Laura Ash.
Speaker: So Laura is a wellness entrepreneur and she's also the CEO and founder of Land Overse.
Speaker: clinical herbalist and owner of the Scarlet Sage Herb Company, which is now located on a few more street in San Francisco.
Speaker: Hi, Laura.
Speaker: Hi, good morning.
Speaker: Thank you so much for being here with us.
Speaker: We're so honored to have you and we're so excited to chat with you today.
Speaker: Yeah, so if you could please tell us a little bit about your background, like where you grew up, your educational background, if you feel comfortable sharing about religion or spirituality, astrological sign, whatever you would like to share with our listeners.
Speaker: You want everything.
Speaker: Yeah, I do.
Speaker: Sounds good.
Speaker: I was born in Redding, California.
Speaker: So I was born in Northern California.
Speaker: And I am a, what they would call a triple Scorpio, but I actually have five planets in Scorpio.
Speaker: So my sun, moon, and rising are in Scorpio, Mercury and Uranus, and the rest of it's Libra, four planets in Libra.
Speaker: I don't know my entire chart.
Speaker: And then I think three in Sag.
Speaker: So I'm all in the 11th, 12th, and first house.
Speaker: supposedly, according to astrologers, this is my last life.
Speaker: So I'm stoked.
Speaker: It's been a long journey.
Speaker: You're in your season.
Speaker: I'll be in my season.
Speaker: This is my season.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My dad's
Speaker: a forester so I grew up in the woods in the Sierra Nevadas and I didn't have herbs in my home growing up.
Speaker: A lot of people associate herbalism when someone's doing it as a profession that they grew up with a hippie household or a very bohemian type household but I grew up in a very conservative family.
Speaker: I would say typical like lower middle class white family and
Speaker: In Northern California, very religious.
Speaker: And so me finding herbalism was really on a self-study, self-journey.
Speaker: And so I, like many people that look into herbalism or find it, usually have some sort of healing crisis, some sort of health issue.
Speaker: And I had pneumonia a lot growing up.
Speaker: The first time I had pneumonia, I was six weeks old.
Speaker: And the second time I was two years old and probably some sort of lung infection every year of my life.
Speaker: And antibiotics saved my life.
Speaker: So I love Western medicine for that reason.
Speaker: But I was 19 years old and I had pneumonia and I just didn't want to take antibiotics.
Speaker: I was old enough to make that decision myself.
Speaker: And I explored and walked around and found a used bookstore.
Speaker: This was in Chico, California, where my family had moved when I was 12.
Speaker: And I was 19 at the time.
Speaker: I walked into a used bookstore and I went into the aromatherapy section.
Speaker: I don't know why.
Speaker: I had never read anything about aromatherapy.
Speaker: And I pulled out a book called The Practice of Aromatherapy by Jean Valnet.
Speaker: It's a French medical aromatherapy book, obviously written in English.
Speaker: And I opened it and I looked up pneumonia and it brought me to a page where there was three essential oils, lavender, eucalyptus, I think pine.
Speaker: Actually, I think there was more than that.
Speaker: And I was fascinated by the fact that there were natural remedies for this.
Speaker: Why had I never heard of this before?
Speaker: It was this like aha moment.
Speaker: And so I looked up lavender and I read about it and I was convinced that I should try this.
Speaker: So I bought the book.
Speaker: It was $6.
Speaker: And I went to the very first natural food store I'd ever been to.
Speaker: And I bought a lavender essential oil.
Speaker: It was by Oracacia.
Speaker: It was the only essential oil brand at the time that anyone could really get other than maybe some small brands.
Speaker: And I didn't know how to take it.
Speaker: And that's in quotes.
Speaker: And so I actually put a couple drops in water and drank it for two weeks and it completely cured my pneumonia.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It was such a big deal.
Speaker: And I think the palpable difference for me was really how I felt afterwards.
Speaker: When I was taking antibiotics, even though it got rid of my pneumonia, it didn't necessarily make me feel very strong or
Speaker: well um i felt like i still was healing from this infection but after i took lavender i was i told people i'm like i just feel strong i feel better that is it was very different for me so i dove into the world of essential oils and read every book i could was convinced i was going to have some essential oil distillery someday maybe when i grow up i'll have something like that
Speaker: And I, through that avenue, I started doing self-study into healing with whole foods.
Speaker: And then that naturally goes into herbalism and started doing more self-work on myself.
Speaker: I ended up getting a job.
Speaker: I moved to Seattle to go to art school for professional dancing.
Speaker: I was a professional dancer growing up.
Speaker: And ended up with a job at an herbal apothecary in the Pike Place Market called Tenzing Momo, which is an old Tibetan herbal apothecary.
Speaker: I was 21 years old.
Speaker: And they only take handwritten resumes, which is very witchy of them.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And they're looking at your handwriting, to be honest.
Speaker: It was really cool because you handwrite all of these labels.
Speaker: And I ended up getting a job there.
Speaker: So my very first job in this field was when I was 21 years old.
Speaker: And I'm almost, I'll be 43 in a couple weeks.
Speaker: And so it's been a journey.
Speaker: It's been a 22-year journey.
Speaker: So that was my first job.
Speaker: And I studied under Master Herbalist there for two years.
Speaker: And then I ended up moving back to Northern California and to San Francisco when I was 23.
Speaker: You guys are going to like this because you're psychics.
Speaker: So I had a dream about moving back to San Francisco.
Speaker: So I used to ride motorcycles.
Speaker: And in my dream, I was riding my motorcycle over a hill and I came over this beautiful coastal hill and had all these gorgeous meadows and coastal plants, small little plants and cypress trees.
Speaker: And when I came over the hill, I saw the Golden Gate Bridge and I started crying in my dream.
Speaker: And I woke up and realized I need to move to San Francisco.
Speaker: And I had lived here from 1999, 2000, right around that Y2K time.
Speaker: That was fun.
Speaker: That's a fun time.
Speaker: We were the only city, I think, in the States that actually had a party.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That was fun.
Speaker: So I knew I needed to move back.
Speaker: And so I moved back here and then I ended up going to herbal medicine school at the California School of Herbal Studies in 2005 and 2006 and became a clinical herbalist then and became a Western medical herbalist trained under the teachers there.
Speaker: And then through that time, I have journeyed in a lot of different directions.
Speaker: So actually 2006, and when I was at my clinical year up in Forestville, where the California School of Herbal Studies is located, I actually had a job at Scarlet Sage.
Speaker: So I was working part-time at Scarlet Sage.
Speaker: And then the following year, in 2008, I ended up co-founding an organic spa called Ava Organic Spa with a friend of mine, Tira.
Speaker: And I created all of the products and created the teas and some of the protocols there.
Speaker: And that was me venturing into the world of beauty.
Speaker: I was also running a chai tea company at the time.
Speaker: So as an entrepreneur, which is a disease, there are no herbs that cure it.
Speaker: You guys might know about this.
Speaker: Hello, buddy.
Speaker: I was always trying to find new ways to share my herbal passion with the world because for me, I was like, why is this not everywhere?
Speaker: This is healing people.
Speaker: This is traditional wisdom.
Speaker: Why is this not hip and sexy?
Speaker: It did not make sense to me.
Speaker: And this was, you know, almost 20 years ago.
Speaker: And obviously things have changed since then, but I was really interested in infusing herbalism everywhere I could go and into different communities.
Speaker: I ended up getting married, getting pregnant, moving, and had an experience overseas in Oxford, England, where my now ex-husband and I, my young son, were living.
Speaker: And I ended up going to northern Sweden to find my own ancestral medicine.
Speaker: So I had already been an herbalist for many years.
Speaker: This was in 2010.
Speaker: And I connected with the Sami herbalists there.
Speaker: And the Sami are the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.
Speaker: So northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia.
Speaker: And I met with this woman named Greta Hoover, who is a traditional Sami herbalist.
Speaker: And I connected with her and I was shocked.
Speaker: She only had this small pamphlet of things written down of their traditional medicine.
Speaker: She was the only one practicing traditional medicine in her community in the Arctic Circle near Jokmok, Sweden.
Speaker: And I was so shocked.
Speaker: And this was the first time as...
Speaker: White girl growing up in Northern California had no idea about indigenous medicine loss, no idea about oral tradition, understood colonization in theory.
Speaker: And then seeing it within my own ancestry was, was deeply troubling to me, knowing that this was a bigger problem around the world.
Speaker: We moved to Tanzania the following year and I ended up working with a Maasai herbalist there and he asked me to help him.
Speaker: write down and record his traditional medicine because it has been unwritten.
Speaker: So MA is their traditional language and it's an unwritten language.
Speaker: So most indigenous languages are unwritten.
Speaker: And so I helped him document his traditional medicine because of my experience with Greta and the Sami people.
Speaker: And so when I moved back to the States, I ended up curating and putting together the book of the work that I did with Sayanga in Tanzania and then founded a nonprofit called Herbal Anthropology Project, which preserves and protects traditional medicine around the world with intellectual property protection.
Speaker: I did it with IP protection because I was the one who wrote down the information.
Speaker: It was translated from Ma to Swahili and Swahili to English.
Speaker: Technically, I owned it and I knew that that wasn't okay.
Speaker: So then I went and did research about traditional wisdom and indigenous loss.
Speaker: And what it was, there's a traditional knowledge division in the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is run by the UN, actually.
Speaker: So if you were a nonprofit, you could be accredited with this TK division.
Speaker: So that's why I started the nonprofit.
Speaker: And that's what I was going to do when I grew up.
Speaker: I was settled in Madison, Wisconsin.
Speaker: I had my second child and I became a single mother.
Speaker: And it was a very transformative time for me.
Speaker: So I was going into conservation, running my nonprofit.
Speaker: And that's what I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life.
Speaker: But life happens, as you know.
Speaker: So I needed to move back to San Francisco for my kids to be with their dad.
Speaker: And I ended up approaching Lisa and Dino, the former owners of Scarlet Sage and said, if you're ever interested in selling, I'm interested in buying because I need to move back and I need to move back in three months.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they were like, we just hired a broker.
Speaker: This is the time for us to sell.
Speaker: So divine timing, divine timing.
Speaker: This is where, you know, you're in the flow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When tapping into your authenticity, like the whole journey, you have such a beautiful journey to being able to really be part of that integral experience of holding space for someone who doesn't even write their language.
Speaker: Like that's such a beautiful thing in itself and being able to take your experience and like pay it forward and constantly like give people opportunities for healing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You mentioned that we are psychics.
Speaker: I don't think we're the only ones in this room.
Speaker: I think you're pretty psychic yourself because one, you had a precognitive dream and then you followed your intuition every single step of the way.
Speaker: That's what it sounds to me.
Speaker: It sounds like information came to you and you just kind of ran with it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: I have a lot of friends who say I'm psychic, but this is the thing.
Speaker: I know I'm intuitive.
Speaker: And I know I get downloads, which I believe is clear cognizant.
Speaker: But most of my dearest, closest, bestie friends are very psychic.
Speaker: They can see a movie behind someone, right?
Speaker: They hear things, they see apparitions.
Speaker: They get very clear visions and I don't.
Speaker: So I respect deeply the work that psychics that have these natural gifts that are seeing spirits at a young age, which I never have.
Speaker: And I don't hear things.
Speaker: I don't see things.
Speaker: And I know things.
Speaker: And I think I'm grateful
Speaker: full actually for my Mormon upbringing because one of the things that the Mormons do is actually acknowledge the intuition, which they call the Holy Spirit.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: And so that is an, it's a really fascinating part of the church because it's all about, you can actually have a direct connection with God and with source and spirit.
Speaker: And so I think I was lucky to be brought up in that.
Speaker: And now we call it, I call it intuition.
Speaker: is this deep connection with higher self, deep connection with source.
Speaker: And being able to listen to that, there is a freedom and a liberation of accepting that you can listen to that.
Speaker: I grew up in a feral home.
Speaker: I wasn't, you know, I could do whatever I wanted sort of thing, even though there was very much structured around conservative life and church and religion, which I left around 19 years old.
Speaker: But I think I was always encouraged to do my own thing.
Speaker: I was always encouraged to follow a path that was interesting to me.
Speaker: And so I think that really served me in my career.
Speaker: And after buying Scarlet Sage, I was able to create that home that I needed to in San Francisco.
Speaker: And then my school, Landiverse, grew out of the pandemic.
Speaker: So that's the new venture that I'm working on, which is based on education at this point.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely tell us a little bit more about that.
Speaker: Like what types of services and classes that does Land of Verse provide?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So Land of Verse came from my love for oral tradition preservation, my love for herbal medicine, and my love for fashion.
Speaker: Because this is where that question come in.
Speaker: Why isn't herbs hip and sexy?
Speaker: I think a lot of people associate it with dusty old apothecaries and hippies that live in the woods.
Speaker: I find that sexy.
Speaker: All of that's good.
Speaker: I'm not saying it's not good, but what it does, it hinders people to actually understand the clinical research and the efficaciousness of it all.
Speaker: So I think that niche has been filled.
Speaker: It's been filled well.
Speaker: It's been filled for a long time.
Speaker: What hasn't been filled or what is, I think, being filled at the moment and psychedelics are actually a big part of this transition is how people are connecting to plant medicine and how it's actually being used in integrative medicine with doctors.
Speaker: Also, just what you can use on a daily basis that actually maybe you can start with first.
Speaker: And so verse came with this idea that everyone has ancestry and everyone has an oral tradition and how do you find it?
Speaker: And that as a foundation, reducing cultural appropriation, reducing this need to find other sources of information, you actually have it in yourself.
Speaker: So that's where verse came in.
Speaker: Because verse is this idea that all oral tradition was passed down through story and song and poetry.
Speaker: And so everyone has some stories and songs that they have with their own tradition, whether it's through ceremony or ritual.
Speaker: There's always a plant associated with those, right?
Speaker: We have this in our DNA.
Speaker: All of us are herbalists.
Speaker: All of our ancestors have been.
Speaker: And maybe all of them were witches too.
Speaker: We'll see about that.
Speaker: And so Verse really is an herb school right now.
Speaker: My goal to grow it is in pre-recorded classes that people can find their ancestral traditions all over the world.
Speaker: So that's my hope for Verse.
Speaker: But right now we're just an online herbal medicine school.
Speaker: We have a three-year program that you can become a clinical herbalist.
Speaker: We do have...
Speaker: deep connections with plant spirit medicine.
Speaker: We just did a six week course in plant spirit medicine.
Speaker: We did one in holistic nutrition, which is still going now.
Speaker: And so we're growing and expanding based on what the needs are of our community.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And anyone can take those classes, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Anyone can take the classes.
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: How much of a crossover do you see it bleeding into concepts like shamanism or other forms of healing modalities?
Speaker: Yeah, because shamanism is so specific to specific traditions, we wouldn't teach that for people outside of any tradition that uses that term shamanism.
Speaker: But when we talk about plant spirit medicine, it does have that broader sense of what people can connect to based on their own ancestry.
Speaker: So as a Western European American, I'm...
Speaker: my connection is through maybe the Celts and the witches and all these other traditional names that I might not connect with or I might connect with really strongly.
Speaker: I think the reality is that traditional people didn't necessarily name themselves unless they were the healers of the community.
Speaker: They were just living their life on a daily basis with this medicine available, with these connections to plants and ritual and ceremony.
Speaker: And so whether you name it or not, these deep connections exist.
Speaker: And so shamanism is specific to areas mostly in South America and indigenous folks there.
Speaker: So once again, everyone has a version of that without using that term.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thank you for that education.
Speaker: And, you know, you describe your journey so beautifully, but I'm always curious just to...
Speaker: Learn a little bit more about like the biggest challenges that you have faced during this being an entrepreneur.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Great question.
Speaker: Great question.
Speaker: I think, I mean, at this point, it's financial, it's capitalism.
Speaker: It's all of these frameworks and systems that we're born into.
Speaker: And I have a big passion in supporting other female entrepreneurs, especially healers and creatives that are doing amazing work in their life's work in the business side of their passion.
Speaker: Often I've noticed that my friends who run amazing retreats and maybe a practice or a product line,
Speaker: don't have MBAs and you don't need one to run a company, but you do need a lot of financial acumen and literacy.
Speaker: And that's a hard thing for a lot of people who are in a radical space that they don't want to necessarily engage as much with capitalism.
Speaker: So for me, I find that that's a really empowering piece for me to focus on is
Speaker: is the world of business and the world of what's here on this planet and how we're managing our earthly experiences and our systems in place and it's really hard especially when things like misogyny exist and um you know the people that make the rules keep changing them and so for scarlet sage when we moved to the fillmore street
Speaker: The reason why we moved is because safety issues, high rents and shoplifting.
Speaker: People's cars were getting broken into right in front of the store while they were shopping.
Speaker: There was a shooting in front of the store.
Speaker: It just became an unsafe place.
Speaker: And the challenges that I had with the landlord were very real also.
Speaker: And so looking at different neighborhoods, we decided to move to the Fillmore because of the safety, but also the proximity to Japantown.
Speaker: Lower Fillmore, the historical areas, and then Upper Fillmore, which we know is very wealthy.
Speaker: And so how do we manage running a retail store, which only exists when people spend money, and our community of spiritual people, healers, and then also as practitioners running the store, how are we also serving our community to find the herbs that they need for their physical health, mental health, well-being?
Speaker: And so we moved over here, but it's been really hard.
Speaker: We moved probably at the hardest time of San Francisco.
Speaker: We hear brick and mortar is closing every single day and we're down 50%.
Speaker: We are barely making it.
Speaker: And so hopefully we'll survive through the holidays.
Speaker: And I think we will, but I have to get extremely creative to figure out how to bring in different revenue, new revenue,
Speaker: And just, you know, that's the hardest part.
Speaker: That's definitely the hardest part.
Speaker: And it is the reality of the majority of small businesses.
Speaker: So I know I'm not unique in that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We hear you.
Speaker: So us here as a community, how can we help you?
Speaker: Oh, well, yeah, shop.
Speaker: I mean, at the end of the day, if you love what we do, support it.
Speaker: And if you have ideas of what you think a community needs, share them.
Speaker: You know, our goal is to be here as a community.
Speaker: I bought the store eight years ago, but I really am the steward of this space that has been around for 28 years.
Speaker: So I know that if we're not serving the community for what they need and where they're at, then we're not doing our job.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we'll make sure to leave all the information in our show notes.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: The stores, website, they can also shop online, right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I understand what I've noticed here too, and this might resonate with some of your listeners, is that the biggest competitor is apathy, right?
Speaker: The change, the fact that we moved and became and got rid of old stuff and we brought in new stuff and it looks different.
Speaker: People don't like change.
Speaker: They want us to stay exactly the same, even if it wasn't working.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's this idea of stability.
Speaker: And I know that we're working with people's spiritual lives here.
Speaker: So when they see us changing, it's too much for them to understand why.
Speaker: Because they don't run a business.
Speaker: They don't understand all the ins and outs.
Speaker: And we had people saying they wouldn't shop with us anymore because we were moving.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this is where I think we just know that change is so hard for people.
Speaker: So I've learned a lot.
Speaker: I have plenty of failures to share, which is if you don't need to move, don't.
Speaker: Number one.
Speaker: If you have a brick and mortar out there.
Speaker: Moving is not fun.
Speaker: I would never think about that.
Speaker: Just moving locations.
Speaker: But people don't want to change habits.
Speaker: Especially after 28 years being in the same location.
Speaker: They live down the street.
Speaker: And it's just like a familiar spot.
Speaker: And they don't want the smell to change.
Speaker: They don't want the look to change.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: But what it is goes to show to think about what the lesson is.
Speaker: And that for me, it's the reality of I want to be able to help other people be successful.
Speaker: One.
Speaker: But number two is that
Speaker: It is hard for people to come in and not feel and see the same things.
Speaker: And I acknowledge that.
Speaker: And as a Scorpio, I love change.
Speaker: I'm all about change.
Speaker: Give me something new every year and I'm happy.
Speaker: I have a hard time having the same life, look the same way over and over again.
Speaker: And thankfully I have kids.
Speaker: So I get a lot of fresh...
Speaker: stuff in my home on a daily basis.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that's been, that's been a big aha moment for me.
Speaker: And I would say a lot of entrepreneurs would agree with me on that one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And is there any advice that you will give to, you know, new entrepreneurs or people that are maybe thinking into having like opening their own retail store or diving into the world of whether it be, you know, healing or anything?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Don't use a lot of money to start, start lean.
Speaker: There's this great concept of lean startups where get a concept out there, get people interested, see what people want spending without spending anything.
Speaker: If you're doing ads, test ads, test them cheaply.
Speaker: See if, see if people click on them or not.
Speaker: Like don't put your own money unless you are someone that was born with wealth.
Speaker: You can play with money.
Speaker: I've never had that opportunity to play with money.
Speaker: So learn and do it cheaply and therefore see, am I hitting the mark with the community I want to serve?
Speaker: Are the people that are my customers, are they actually going to buy the thing that I want?
Speaker: Are they interested?
Speaker: And that for nascent and new entrepreneurs is not necessarily talked about enough because it's like, you need this brand, spend $60,000 on this brand before people even...
Speaker: know what it is.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like what's in it for them?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Get an idea, put a concept out there, get people together, find the people in your community that you think would be your customers.
Speaker: Ask them if they're interested in this.
Speaker: Ask them if they know any other brand or product or service that they're already spending money on these types of things.
Speaker: So that's my one advice for brand new entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And two, just make sure you're constantly looking at your numbers and make sure you're constantly seeing what's working and what's not.
Speaker: Get rid of the things that aren't.
Speaker: And this is where that pivot and that change and that flexibility has to come in to be successful.
Speaker: Yeah, the agile thinking.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I work in tech, so.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: I totally understand.
Speaker: But it does come into play even in the spiritual realm, like being able to be flexible and be open to change.
Speaker: I think that's kind of where people are starting to head on a spiritual level.
Speaker: I feel like, you know, everyone talks about this idea of the collective, collective consciousness.
Speaker: I feel like people are becoming a little bit more open to
Speaker: change new ideas and innovation if you look at like you know from open ai's chat gpt that's innovation in the ai space but if you look at like all these different types of healing modalities it's been happening for years for lifetimes so being able to pay attention to where can we go from an innovation stance on the healing side
Speaker: And you're doing it.
Speaker: Trying.
Speaker: Actively doing it every day.
Speaker: But I would like to know, like from a personal stance, like what is in your wellness toolkit?
Speaker: Like what do you, you know, use every day?
Speaker: What are your, you know, rituals?
Speaker: What can you absolutely like?
Speaker: You need these tools to set you up for success.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a question I get asked often.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I love my green tea.
Speaker: Anyone that knows me loves my green tea.
Speaker: I have some right here.
Speaker: And I love my Japanese sencha that I get directly from a farm in Japan.
Speaker: It's actually quite cheap when you go directly to the farm.
Speaker: And I drink that and we know green tea is very high in antioxidants, wonderful anti-carcinogen.
Speaker: And people use it, actually it's traditionally used in Japan for meditation, for clarity.
Speaker: So actually I get often asked when people come in for herbal suggestions about clarity.
Speaker: And if they can drink a little caffeine, green tea is really good for that centering of the mind.
Speaker: There's other herbs also for that.
Speaker: I love chocolate.
Speaker: I love dark chocolate.
Speaker: That's definitely one of my herbs that I use daily.
Speaker: Very grounding.
Speaker: But I don't try to eat them with cane sugar.
Speaker: Sugar is too inflammatory for me and causes a lot of disruption.
Speaker: So I try to do the coconut sugar sweetened.
Speaker: I use a lot of adaptogens, which are herbs that help the body adapt to stress.
Speaker: They help you break down cortisol quickly in the body.
Speaker: And I use some primary and secondary adaptogens.
Speaker: If you're an herbalist, you know what I mean by that.
Speaker: And I use reishi mushroom, which is the secondary adaptogen, helps with my immune system.
Speaker: A lot of these are immune tonics.
Speaker: and stress related herbs and then astragalus, which is also an herb for the immune system.
Speaker: So I rarely get sick and I'm around a lot of sick people.
Speaker: I have kids and then I'm around people coming in all the time for immune stuff.
Speaker: So those I absolutely do every day.
Speaker: And then I take a multivitamin every day because my microbiome is nice and screwed up from all the antibiotics and assimilation.
Speaker: I like this rule.
Speaker: It's not you are what you eat, you are what you assimilate.
Speaker: And if you can't break it down and absorb it, then you generally need a multi.
Speaker: So I take a multivitamin, a food based one.
Speaker: I like the new chapter, the true grace.
Speaker: No, I'm not getting paid for this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then I do take, I like shilajit, which is an Ayurvedic adaptogen, which is a fantastic herb.
Speaker: I say shilajit is the shit because it smells like manure and it tastes like manure, even though I've never actually tasted manure.
Speaker: But I've imagined this is what it would taste like.
Speaker: But it actually is decomposed.
Speaker: Paleolithic plant matter that comes out of the Himalayas and the botanical name is Asphaltum.
Speaker: So it's asphalt.
Speaker: It's this black tar that smells like compost.
Speaker: And you can take it, you can take it in the actual tar form, which you would mix it with water or you can, there's tablets now you can take it.
Speaker: And I take that.
Speaker: And it's very high in fulvic acid and fulvic acid actually helps our detoxification pathways work better.
Speaker: So I'm really involved in the daily detoxification of many people.
Speaker: My clients want to live a healthy life and as they're aging.
Speaker: And so it's really about how our body is biotransforming, what they call biotransformation and detoxification.
Speaker: detoxification on a daily basis.
Speaker: So I focus a lot on liver in my daily health.
Speaker: So I do the Shilajit, which helps with rebuilding the detoxification pathways.
Speaker: And then I do liver detox herbs every night before I go to bed and ashwagandha also to help me sleep really well.
Speaker: The liver rejuvenates while you're sleeping.
Speaker: So it's really good to rejuvenate the liver.
Speaker: So those are my dailies.
Speaker: And it seems like a lot, but it's really not.
Speaker: very intentional with your routine and how you are able to set yourself up so that you can show up for others.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's so important.
Speaker: It's an essential piece of my, I don't want to say daily wellbeing, but my mental wellbeing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm also I've been gluten free for 20 years.
Speaker: I am dairy free because I can't eat dairy.
Speaker: I'm egg free because it causes major disruption.
Speaker: So a lot of my stuff is around managing my gut health.
Speaker: And it's a non-negotiable for me when people like I couldn't do it.
Speaker: I look at them and I go, if you had my symptoms, you would.
Speaker: But I feel like this is the change of mindset that hopefully a lot of people can get into.
Speaker: I deserve to feel good.
Speaker: I deserve health, not deserve a pizza.
Speaker: When people say I deserve this donut or deserve this coffee or deserve this pizza, I'm like, I deserve to feel amazing.
Speaker: I deserve to wake up and feel good in my body.
Speaker: And that mindset shift completely changes the ability to act quickly when you need to act quickly.
Speaker: For me, have that clarity of thought and clarity of what direction to go.
Speaker: And I know when I'm off, I don't have clarity about anything.
Speaker: Right, because your energy is stuck and it's paying attention to different parts of your body.
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: And your body is functioning well.
Speaker: Yeah, and I'm tired.
Speaker: I remember being tired.
Speaker: I was vegan for four years and God, that was the worst diet I could ever imagine.
Speaker: My ancestors grew up, I mean, had to eat reindeer nine months out of the year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So ancestral diets are really important to me and my practice.
Speaker: And when I was vegan, I was tired and hungry all the time.
Speaker: Because your body was craving.
Speaker: I needed protein.
Speaker: I needed fats.
Speaker: I needed, which my ancestors lived on for hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker: And so when I started eating meat again, I ate salmon.
Speaker: My brain started vibrating.
Speaker: That's how I was eating.
Speaker: It was amazing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was vegetarian for a long time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I started eating salmon like six years ago.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I feel so much better.
Speaker: And what's your ancestral background?
Speaker: Norwegian and my mom's family is Irish.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you're like root vegetables, game meats, fish, good, you know, seasonal berries and things.
Speaker: That's probably your jam.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what's your ancestral heritage?
Speaker: Mine is Asia.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you could probably be one of the only true vegetarians.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And that's where I am now.
Speaker: I follow a vegetarian diet.
Speaker: And then some fish thrown in there.
Speaker: And I grew up eating meat because I grew up in South America.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it was very meat heavy.
Speaker: And then as the years, throughout the years, I kind of started eating less and less and then went to being pescatarian, then moved on to being, becoming full on vegetarian.
Speaker: But I also like, I avoid eggs.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And I'm also lactose intolerant.
Speaker: So I know also there are things that do not love my body, you know, and I don't like resonate with certain foods.
Speaker: I also try to pay attention to what makes my body feel good and things that have like good nutrition also.
Speaker: They're very nutritious and nourishing to my body.
Speaker: Yeah, I believe that if you're Asian descent, you're one of the only people that can break down the protein in seaweed as a raw form versus when it's cooked.
Speaker: So it's just, it's fascinating, right?
Speaker: How our ancestors survived, right?
Speaker: The ones that survived the best were the ones that were able to get as much nutrients from the areas that they were living in, right?
Speaker: The ones that did not were obviously died off a long time ago.
Speaker: And just like the lazy people died off forever ago.
Speaker: I was like, why is our community so anxious all the time?
Speaker: And then I realized, oh, if you were anxious and you bound together, you survived.
Speaker: Yeah, you're hypervigilant.
Speaker: So that's why we're all anxious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just going back to you, just ready for anything.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Going back to the roots, right?
Speaker: I mean, which everything in life.
Speaker: I mean, I should look more into it.
Speaker: This is just so interesting.
Speaker: We're going to come back.
Speaker: It's just like, it's fascinating to me, like to learn all of this, but kind of like on that same note, you know, you want to make sure that you're taking care of your health and being, you know, available for your family and work.
Speaker: How do you balance all of it?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I do my best.
Speaker: I do have my kids every other week.
Speaker: So that helps because I focus so much on work and I'm remarried.
Speaker: I have my wife and my dog at home when the kids aren't there.
Speaker: And so we get time together.
Speaker: If I need to travel, I can travel.
Speaker: And so I do a lot of things that I think people with kids full time in their homes would not be able to do.
Speaker: I do my best not to compare myself to anyone because I see people doing 10 times more than me.
Speaker: And that's,
Speaker: a terrible way to live.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: But I do have to say that I balance it all mostly because I'm an amazing team.
Speaker: I don't do this myself.
Speaker: I have...
Speaker: two people that work with me in verse i have eight to ten people working at scarlet sage i have contractors of teachers i have over 30 teachers that work at verse i'm not the one teaching all day long so i have to do it with others and that for me as a leader has been able to delegate and connect with people that work with me is a spiritual journey as a leader and to be able to be a good one i'm not perfect
Speaker: And I've grown a lot and I have so much farther to grow.
Speaker: But I've definitely found that I know one if you have the finances to be able to get someone to support you in your journey, do it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Find the right person.
Speaker: Find the person that, you know, is already hustling in their own life.
Speaker: and already doing really great work that you're impressed by.
Speaker: Maybe might not be your bestie, just to give a little heads up.
Speaker: You guys look like you're doing good, but it's not always the smartest.
Speaker: Oh, good.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So having that working relationship and knowing that you can rely on other people and delegate.
Speaker: I'm a terrible micromanager.
Speaker: I hate micromanaging people.
Speaker: So I like entrepreneurship where other people are really saying, this is what I want to do and I want to do it with you.
Speaker: And I'm going to show you that I can work with you and we're going to work together.
Speaker: That's the type of team that I'm always interested in working with.
Speaker: And that allows me to spend the time with my kids and my wife and spend the time on creating new ideas and new things.
Speaker: It's not a solo journey.
Speaker: Yeah, not at all.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much for just like sharing your story.
Speaker: This was very expensive.
Speaker: But where can we find you, Laura?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So you can find scarlet sage dot com scarlet with one T and then land of verse dot com if you're looking for education and clinical medicine education.
Speaker: And those are the two places that you can those are the two places you can hang out and find me.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Thank you so much for your time and for educating us.
Speaker: I feel like I've learned so many different things and I'm very curious.
Speaker: I'm excited to dive into this space more and I'm hoping that more people will find you and also resonate with everything you said today.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you so much for tuning in.
Speaker: And if you like this episode, please share with your friends, forward and follow us on social media.
Speaker: Follow Laura also on social media as well.
Speaker: We'll leave all this information in the show notes and we'll see you on our next episode.
Speaker: It was so wonderful.
Speaker: Thank you both so much for having me.
Speaker: Thank you, Laura.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Shop at Scarlet Sage.
Speaker: I'm just going to throw that out there.
Speaker: It's beautiful.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Beautiful store.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: And a beautiful mission.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Have a beautiful day.
Speaker: Thank you.
