Janet Galipo

How did you first become interested in herbs and what path led you to David’s center for the herbal studies course?

I first met David in the early 1980s. I was at a crossroads in my life where I was looking at changing my career path. I had been doing social work, working in the prison system and working with adolescent girls in a group home. And, while I was enjoying this work, I was interested in helping people in a different way, something bigger and deeper.

I was living in Boston at the time. My friend Katie had heard about David’s herbal studies program and specifically about a course that he was offering on Swann’s Island in Maine. We signed up for the course, which was held on a beautiful, pristine island. It was really a wonderful experience from so many standpoints and, for me, the beginning of a 30 year career in holistic health.

But the best part of the experience was being introduced to David and his way of approaching plants. Of course, I had never experienced anything like this before. As you know, David has intuitive relationships with plants as well as an incredibly knowledgeable mental database of the plant world. So, he has both right brain—deep understanding and left brain—academic knowledge.

I remember the first day of being on Swann’s Island, he convinced us that we—all of us—could communicate with plants telepathically. In order to prove this, he sat each of us down in front of a plant that we had never seen before and he asked us to spend an hour with the plant and said that the plant would talk to us and would tell us what it was used for.

Although we were very skeptical at first, we were there in such a beautiful setting and so we were willing to spend that time outdoors communing with our plant. And, in fact, at the end of the hour when we all came back together, it turned out that everyone had gotten it right. We were all 100% correct about our plant.

How has your training with David influenced you?

During that first trip, we would walk with David through the forest, observing and picking certain plants. David knew everything about every single one—where it was commonly grown, its history, what other plants grew around it, most of its chemical constituents (could run into the 100s), its energetic properties and its common uses. For me, knowing that there was a person living on planet earth who was this knowledgeable about the medicinal qualities of the plant world really came as a shock to me because, before that, I was only familiar with the concept of pharmaceutical drugs. I never really questioned where these drugs came from, the origins of their formulations and all of their different chemical constituents. What’s inside a medicine or what’s inside a plant? I had never asked this question.

And then, suddenly, here’s David, who has both an intuitive relationship and an academic relationship to these plants and really knows, really understands both— their energetic nature as well as their chemical components and what they can be used for. So, this opened up a whole world for me and it became a kind of model for what a holistic practitioner could be.

How do you incorporate herbs into your health care practice?

Well, I’m now and have been for almost 25 years a licensed Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Nationally Certified.

At the beginning was my study of western herbs with David. When I began, some of the western herbalists called it a “kitchen practice” meaning that you had a few herbs in your kitchen and people could come and knock on the kitchen door and say, “Oh, I have a sore throat” or “I have a pain.” And, you would go to your little shelf of herbs, whether it’s herbal teas or tinctures, and you would choose something for them that would help to address the problem.

I started that way and after a while the kitchen practice started growing because more and more people were showing up at the kitchen door to ask me for herbal advice and to buy herbs. At that point I realized that I had to make a choice about whether I was going to go full time into some kind of holistic health career. I had some knowledge of western herbs and I wanted to learn more, in order to have a truly integrated holistic health practice.

So, I decided to go to acupuncture school for three years. This was twenty-five years ago. I learned about Chinese herbs along the way, about homeopathy and, just generally filled in the blanks with a lot of holistic health information.

Now, herbs and botanicals are incorporated into my practice every day. I have a healing center in Miami, Florida. We have about a dozen people who work here; different types of therapists including herbalists, acupuncturists, massage therapists and nutritionists. Each of us integrate western herbs into our therapy. In fact, I’ve designed a holistic training program that introduces 21 single herbs and 21 herbal combinations, all from Herbalist and Alchemist.

We also use Chinese herbs. I would say that we probably spend several thousand dollars a month on western and Chinese herbs.