Family, Friends, Community — Natural Health Conference 2007
People
Another year and another conference have to come to pass, and although we say it each year, this year’s conference really was the best to date. The theme for the 2007 annual natural health conference was Building a Natural Health Community, and that is precisely what happened during the course of the three-night/four day event April 19-22. Clayton College’s natural health community grew in size, knowledge, and spirit.
It was exciting to welcome new attendees and speakers to the conference, and reuniting with returning participants and speakers was a joy. This year we saw a return rate of almost 40 percent of previous years’ conference attendees. Now there are so many familiar faces every year that the annual conference really does have a family reunion feel to it. From year to year we reconnect, catch up on each other’s lives, and grow a little closer. There is a familiarity amongst the staff and numerous conference participants and speakers. Not only do we attend and work sessions together and mingle between classes, but staff, speakers, and participants can also be found sharing meals, sitting together at the conference’s nightly events, or just hanging out, sharing a cup of coffee and a bit of conversation.
The family atmosphere was particularly pronounced this year with people coming from far and wide, bringing their spouses, significant others, siblings, and entire families with them. Presenter Vicki Chelf brought her husband, Jean Renoux, who befriended staff, speakers, and fellow conference attendees. Return presenter Ellen Tart-Jensen and her husband Art Jensen have become members of our extended CCNH family, always traveling together. Also in attendance was speaker Janet Starr Hull and her sister, who were excited to be there and meet the staff — especially Janet as she is also a 1999 CCNH graduate. The always delightful couple Joan and Jan Abernathy also returned for their sixth conference — Joan is a CCNH graduate.
Several people traveled internationally to be at the conference. We greeted new and return participants from West Indies and Canada. But the greatest distance that attendees and their family traveled was from Gauteng, South Africa. Kishnee and Rita Beharie are mother and daughter students at CCNH. The entire Beharie family actually attended the conference and made the trek a family vacation. They flew into Florida where everyone visited Disney World for some theme park fun before heading on to the conference. We hope the conference and sights of the Southeast lived up to their expectations and dreams. It was a pleasure to welcome the Beharies to our sixth annual conference and to be a part of their experience of the United States.
Knowledge
This year each intensive, breakout session, and general session was created with the conference’s theme in mind. The general sessions that brought everyone — students, graduates, presenters, and staff — together as one group, were especially focused on creating and sustaining a greater sense of community at both the personal and global level.
As the conference progressed over the weekend, the general sessions unfolded in a sequence that echoed the nature of creating a community. Charles Eisenstein’s Friday morning general session, Reuniting the Self: Community and the Ecology of Health, addressed the notion of wholeness and health, what wholeness really means, and the social implications of the human race’s movement toward perceiving the self as aseparate entity, right down to separating the body from the mind.
In order to get his audience in the proper frame of mind for his presentation, Eisenstein asked us each to close our eyes and imagine ourselves. “How do you see yourself,” he asked his audience. “Open your eyes. Raise your hand if you imagined yourself alone.”
Nearly everyone in a crowd of 300-plus people had raised his or her hand. Eisenstein contrasted this singular perception of self with ancient shamanic cultures that defined themselves in terms of all their relations. Eisenstein also pointed out that almost every activity that humans once did in a community setting is now a goods or service that can be purchased and enjoyed on one’s own, eliminating the need for interacting with a community. The results of the exercise combined with a discussion about the inherent interdependency of relationships perfectly illustrated Eisenstein’s main point: healing and a return to wholeness must include all dimensions, from the physical and social to the ecological and planetary.
On Friday afternoon, the group gathered for a lunch session with Rosemary Gladstar that was inspiring, grounding, and uplifting. Gladstar presented a slideshow of the elders in the herbal and natural healing communities, many of whom have passed away, and she peppered the session with stories of her experiences with many of these phenomenal people. This session was especially fun because Gladstar had photographs of a few of this year’s and previous years’ conference attendees when they were “babes in the woods,” (literally, as they are herbalists and natural healers after all). It was amazing to see some of these people, who are now world-renowned educators, entrepreneurs, and authors in the herbal and natural health fields when they were just beginning their professional careers.
Gladstar began working on “Teachings of The Elders,” the name of her slideshow presentation, about 15 to 20 years ago. As one of the wise women of the modern herbalist movement, Gladstar is in a unique position of having studied with and learned from the elders of the herbal and natural food movement, and now she passes that knowledge and wisdom on to the next generations of natural health students. “We live in a culture that really doesn’t honor the old very much at all, and we can see that every day in the lives we live and the communities that we are a part of,” said Gladstar.
“In the herbal community you see a lot of honoring of the elders, not only the elders, our two legged friends, but also the plants,” she continued. “The elder plants in your garden deserve tremendous honoring because they hold the stories of the plants and the garden around them.”
“If anyone is yearning to learn, find the older plants. They teach you how to connect with them better than the younger plants, because they hold so much sap, so much life blood in them,” Gladstar concluded. Although there was a lot of laughter in Gladstar’s session, the message was serious: we must honor the elders of our communities because they possess history, wisdom, and experience.
The entire conference group came together on Saturday morning for another general session with Groesbeck Parham, M.D. Now that the group had shared the collective realization that we perceive ourselves as solitary, that we must actively seek community, and that one way we can do this is by honoring our elders, learning their work, and teaching it to others, we were ready to go global with our thinking.
In his session, Recognizing Our Global Community, Parham shared his story of how he came to be a citizen of the world, living more than half the year in Zambia, and establishing cervical cancer screening programs for HIV positive women as well as all women who visit the clinics. Parham presented an image slideshow while he described his work and life in Africa. Seeing where he works, his dedicated students and coworkers, images of the various stages of cervical cancer, and the people who are helped at the clinics, brought the stories closer to home. Regarding a picture of five women, Parham said, “I trained five nurses, then I trained another four, now I am not even in the picture. The nurses are now training other nurses, and they are fabulous. A hell of a lot more scrutinizing than me — they are tough,” he laughed.
As he told his stories, an attentive audience listened and wept openly at the raw data, irrefutable facts, and real-life images. The final image in his slideshow was that of a handmade billboard advertising “Youth Project Coffins,” made by the Rise Christian Gospel Ministry Counselling Centre, to which Parham responded, “That—s the real question. How will history judge our response to the global AIDS pandemic? It is a wonderful prism through which to interact on the global stage.”
Parham closed his talk with a story of how his work has also brought him to Cameroon to train people to do what he is doing in Zambia. Parham found the true meaning of the phrase “global community” by bonding with his new colleague whilst sitting on the Atlantic coast of Cameroon, fishing, eating, and talking about women, children, and the stuff of life. “It starts out that you’re trying to do something and then you get to know the people you’re working with, and you realize that we’re just all the same. We’ve got different languages sure, but if you hurt my heart I’m going to cry, if you cut me, I’m going to bleed. To me that’s just what globalization is — me getting to know you, and you getting to know me. That’s all it is,” says Parham. To learn more about his work, visit www.friendsofafrica.us.
Keeping the conference theme in mind, the Saturday lunch session was a two-hour panel discussion with CCNH adjunct faculty members Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., Elson Haas, M.D., Caroline Walrad, DHom, and herbalist David Hoffman, a 2007 conference presenter. Facilitated by Susie Hale, director of practitioner education, the esteemed group shared their personal experiences and professional opinions and techniques regarding bodily detoxification as part of the path to wholeness and health.
The conference community enjoyed the opportunity to hear four unique perspectives on detoxification. Haas’ take on detoxification focused on alkalinizing an acidic state in the body, and he advocated consuming alkalinizing foods in the diet. “When we talk about detoxification really were looking at alkalinizing an acid-congested inflamed body,” says Haas. “One of the key issues underlying cardiovascular disease and most chronic degenerative diseases is inflammation. It’s not high cholesterol, it’s not high blood pressure, all those things come from inflammation and the body being stagnant and polluted in a sense.”
Detoxification is an ongoing state according to Haas, “If you follow your same program and all of a sudden you start drinking more water or you replace some of your bread and cheese with more fruits and vegetables, you’re going to move along on this continuum towards further detoxification.”
Walrad’s approach to detoxification emphasizes taking the person’s emotions and mental state into account. “Does the toxin come first or does the inability of the organ to function properly come first? Or is it the emotion that creates the problem?” asks Walrad. “I’m starting to believe that it is the emotion that comes first.”
She suggests that we need to pay attention to where the state of health is in a person on both an emotional level and a physical level. “Why can two people go through a building of toxins and come out the other end and one die, and one person in a day gets well? It’s not about the toxins, but about who we are in our level of health,” concludes Walrad.
Hoffman, a medical herbalist, approaches detoxification from a multi-level perspective. “What I mean by toxins is physical toxicity. But we’re not just physical beings. There is emotional toxicity, thought toxicity, behavioral and social toxicity. Unless we can approach all levels of toxicity at one time, we could possibly just be moving toxins around to different areas,” he says.
Hoffman acknowledges that there are many wonderful herbs to assist the detoxification process, but rather than using a purgative or laxative herb, he does not believe “there is any reason to generate physical trauma in the process of cleansing.” He continues, “The key to not triggering trauma is to support all pathways of elimination at the same time.” For Hoffman, detoxification is “an affirmation of the self-healing in people.”
Gittleman’s perspective on detoxification focuses on supporting the body’s systems and organs. Citing the modern diet, petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals as toxic culprits in our bodies, she says, “The reality is that the liver has become so overloaded that it cannot support the concept of detoxification. Your liver, your lungs, your kidneys; they’ve all been programmed to eliminate toxic waste. The problem is that we’re all on overload. So it isn’t a matter of cleansing, it’s a matter of supporting.” Her favored approach to detoxifying and supporting the body is food. “Eliminate those agents in the environment and in your diet that are taxing to the liver,” suggests Gittleman. She advocates “liver-loving” and green foods to support the body nutritionally.
Events
As the annual conference has grown over the past six years, so has the number of opportunities for socializing and networking with fellow attendees, staff, and presenters. In fact, it could appear to those on the outside looking in, that we are just having too much fun for being at an educational event! But it’s that very spirit that makes our conferences special — so many of our repeat attendees consider the event to be a learning vacation.
For this year’s conference, we expanded our networking efforts by offering registrants a specific colored lanyard and name tag that corresponded to a geographic region and one of the elements of traditional naturopathy. Attendees from the South wore yellow lanyards and their nametags featured an image of a full, golden sun. Our Northeastern guests wore royal blue lanyards and name tags with pure water as the image element. The Southwestern states were represented by purple lanyards and movement imagery. The Midwest wore green lanyards, and their name tags featured proper diet imagery — green whole foods. The Western states wore sky blue lanyards, and their name tags emphasized fresh air in the images. Our international guests sported orange lanyards, and their name tags showed images depicting rest. The color coded lanyards seemed to lend themselves to a greater sense of networking, and the corresponding elements seem to stimulate conversation. An e-mail sign up sheet was being passed around the Southeast area on the opening night and was already filled in front and back by the time it made its way back to the list owner.
Finally, this year the weather was nice enough to host the traditional “Meet the Speakers” event outdoors on the courtyard and under the stars. Presenters chatted with students and graduates while singing books in a room that opened onto the courtyard. After meeting their favorite speakers, attendees wandered out into the night and enjoyed coffee, herbal teas, and a dessert bar with fruits, a chocolate fountain, and other treats. A group from the Southwestern area and some of the Arizona student/graduate group members gathered around an outdoor fire pit as a slight chill infused the clear night.
Saturday was an actionpacked day at the conference. In addition to all the sessions and socializing, CCNH was also filming for a television program! Footage was shot for a two to three minute segment on a show called Great Escapes: Mind, Body, Soul, which explores the world of wellness. It was a lot of fun — and hard work — coordinating the filming and then seeing it all come together. We had the opportunity to interview several students and graduates, staff, faculty, and even presenters. Although we never tire of hearing the positive things people have to say about CCNH and their experience with us, the greatest reward of the film shoot was learning more about each student or graduate who offered to give us a few minutes of his or her time to share their stories. Because the segment is a brief few minutes, not all of our footage will be used in the show; however, we are excited because we will be adding the remaining interviews on our Web site after the show airs.
Saturday afternoon rolled on into Saturday night, and the overall conference atmosphere was festive and euphoric. This usually happens by Saturday night as everyone is operating on a combination of excitement and exhaustion. The conference days pass quickly, but they are long and packed full of learning, socializing, dancing and moving, and walking around the spacious conference center grounds. It’s bound to happen that everyone is ready to relax a bit by Saturday night.
So this year, we moved the open mic event to Saturday night. Once again, conference attendees, presenters, and even CCNH staff and faculty demonstrated their talents and laughed, danced, and partied well into the evening. CCNH Assistant Editor Lori Hamilton read one of her original poems, Nothing But Kudzu. Director of Complementary and Holistic Healthcare Wendy Arthur, M.D., played the guitar and sang a few tunes, including a new version of What a Wonderful World with lyrics written by Susie Hale, director of practitioner education. Director of Herbal Studies Phyllis Light played The Hokey Pokey on a boom box and had the entire room dancing. Carl Lowe, Light’s husband and CCNH course writer, offered his talents as a back-up musician for several performers throughout the night.
Wrapping It Up
The last conference community-wide gathering was the Sunday noon closing session with movement enthusiast David Leonard. Wearing an Earth Day t-shirt, Leonard addressed the conference group with a message of peace, love, and wellness for us to take home and share with others. He spoke about the intricate, intimate connection between human life and the earth, and how those intricate and intimate connections are also essential to our personal health, which circled beautifully back to Eisenstein’s Friday opening general session presentation.
Leonard also talked about having passion in life and recalled his father’s words of wisdom, “Find out what you love to do in life, and then figure out how to get paid to do it!” Fatherly advice for anyone, and clearly Leonard’s found his way to apply that advice in his life. Leonard closed his session by inviting everyone to move about the room and silently shake hands with one another. It was a touching way to say thank you and good-bye to everyone who had made the conference a wonderful, uplifting experience.
Tara N. Brown • Editor
