Elizabeth: You are both a medical herbalist and an Ayurvedic practitioner. How did you become interested in Ayurveda?

Anne: Actually, my interest in Eastern philosophy came first. When I was about 16, I read a book called The Wisdom of India [1] and learnt all about the Vedas and the Upanishads, and such like. I started to practice Buddhist meditation and then, between school and university, I went overland to India. My aim was to become an enlightened being, and I thought that if I meditated enough every day, I would be able to achieve realisation by the time I was 30 – which, at that age, seemed a long way off!

When I came back from India, I went to university to study Oriental philosophy, but I found it boring in comparison with the things I had experienced in the East. I only lasted six months. Instead, I became interested in the concept of self-sufficiency; I read John Seymour’s books [2] and Richard Mabey’s Food for Free [3], all of which were very popular in the 1970s. And this led me to take a house on an island off the coast of Essex where I began experimenting with growing vegetables and foraging for wild herbs and foods.

It was at this point that I had an important realisation about nature and our relationship with the world around us, and also the healing power of plants. I began to see that they are not just food but amazing medicinal resources which have the power to heal us at every level of our being.

Elizabeth: So was this what motivated you originally to train as a herbalist?

Anne: Yes, it took me, eventually, to study herbal medicine and then, once in practice, a whole range of other healing techniques: massage, aromatherapy, homoeopathy and counselling. It was actually much later – in about 1987, when I had been practicing for some time – that I heard about Ayurveda and was interested because it seemed to bring together a lot of other things I had been doing in my practice, including Eastern philosophy.

Working with Energies

Elizabeth: What difference has the knowledge of Ayurveda made to your practice?

Anne: In general, I would say that the main effect has been to make my clinical work much easier. Ayurveda is tailored to treating each patient constitutionally. Using the Western tradition, if I saw a patient with, for example, arthritis, and they didn’t respond to the herbs I prescribed, it could be confusing, especially if other patients with the same problem had responded well with a similar prescription. With Ayurveda, I can choose remedies and recommend lifestyle changes according to the constitutional balance or imbalance of the patient.

All forms of herbal medicine – whether they are Western or Eastern – are holistic, which means that we don’t treat symptoms: we treat people. Somebody may come with a whole range of symptoms; they might have insomnia, migraines, night sweats, colitis and stress. In this instance, there would seem to be five different things going on. In Ayurveda what we look for is the underlying state which causes these different problems, and this means working with what are called the ‘doshas’. These are the subtle energies of the body – the managers of all processes at every level, physical, emotional and mental. There are three of them: vata, pitta and kapha. (See Elizabeth’s article “Ayurveda: A Medical Science Based on Consciousness” in a previous issue.)

Jane: And each person has a different natural balance of these?

Anne: Yes. The first task when we start a course of treatment is to establish the basic constitution of the person – meaning, what is the balance of their vata, pitta and kapha. This is known as their prakruti. It is what they inherit from their parents at the time of conception; it is influenced by the 40 weeks gestation period and established at the time of birth. I call it ‘their gift for life’. You ascertain the prakruti by taking a case history and examining the patient, as in tongue and pulse diagnosis.

Then it is important to understand how a person has moved away from their basic constitution, and what their doshic balance is now; this is known as their vikruti. Finding out which doshas are out of balance will allow me to suggest a protocol, including herbs and changes in diet and lifestyle, which will bring them back to health.

Jane: Can you say more about these doshas? What does it mean, for instance, to say that someone has a predominance of vata?

Anne: Ayurveda is five-element medicine; the understanding is that we are all made up of ether, air, fire, water and earth, and they make up the three doshas. Vata is the principle of movement. It is composed of ether and air, so it is subtle and mobile and it governs every movement in the body: the transmission of nerve impulses; the blinking of the eyes; the movement of food through the digestive system, etc. The quality of the movement could be a gentle breeze or a force eight gale, and this means that those with a predominance of vata in their constitution tend to be erratic and irregular physically, mentally and/or emotionally.

Elizabeth: When you prescribe, how do you know what herbs to use? 

Anne: The Ayurvedic method is not ‘like cures like’, but rather, we choose compensatory, opposite qualities in the herbs we prescribe. There are lots of ways in which you would choose a plant. First of all, we need to know how it works with the doshas. Also, how it works with what we call the ‘attributes’ – gunas – which in Ayurveda are understood as pairs of opposites: light and dark, heavy and light, etc. If you have a lot of vata, then you are likely to be light because you are mainly made of ether and air, whereas water and earth are the heavier qualities of physical bodies. So we would say of a vata person that they are light, dry, subtle, mobile, cold. 

Plants also have attributes, and so for vata, we would think of using something like shatavari (Asparagus racemosus) which is heavy and dense. It is a sweet root and its effect is grounding and stabilising.

Elizabeth: It is fascinating that one of the ways in which we can determine the qualities of plants is by their taste.

Anne: Yes; if a plant is sweet-tasting, we know that it is likely to be heavy. If it is bitter, we know that it is likely to be light. If it is astringent, it is also light. Another consideration is whether something is warming or cooling. Mildly pungent things such as ginger and cardamom are warming, which is also good for vata, because vata people are cold.

Jane: Can you briefly say something about pitta and kapha?

Anne: Pitta is composed of the elements fire and water. It governs transformation – for instance, the process of digestion – and the function of enzymes and hormones in the body. When we eat, our food is broken down by enzymes or the digestive ‘fire’ into tiny molecules so that it can be absorbed by the gut and pass into the bloodstream. Similarly, when we are talking and the sound of the voice is carried through the ether and enters our ears, we need our powers of mental digestion given by pitta to transform it into useful knowledge. If there is not enough, it just goes straight out; as we have just said, it is the nature of vata to move things along.

So the pitta allows things to be digested at all levels. Pitta tends to be hot, and if it goes out of balance, it causes symptoms such as inflammation or indigestion. So cooling herbs such as aloe vera or chamomile tea will help to balance it.

Kapha is composed of water and earth, and it is the dosha which governs the physicality of our bodies. It provides structure and stability, the framework, to house pitta and vata. So kapha people are good at physical things like gardening and working with the earth; they are supportive and nurturing – earth mothers. But when out of balance, they can become lethargic and heavy in mind and body. Pungent herbs like ginger, cinnamon, cardamom and cumin will help to stimulate and energise them as well as clear congestion.

Western Herbs

Elizabeth: Whilst talking to you, we have a view of your beautiful garden in which you grow all sorts of different herbs and flowers. I know that you use many of these in your work, not just herbs brought from India where Ayurveda has traditionally been practiced.

Anne: Yes, I have been very interested in the qualities of Western plants. In my book Dispensing with Tradition, [4] I have classified many of them according to Ayurvedic principles: whether they are light or heavy, heating and cooling, what their taste is, etc. A lot of these herbs had not previously been categorised like this, because they were not known to traditional Ayurvedic doctors.

Jane: Do you think that there is any advantage in taking medicines based on plants which are local to you?

Anne: The main reason I started working with Western herbs is that it seems unnecessary and perhaps unwise to be bringing herbs all the way from India when we have our own here. As long as we understand Ayurvedic principles, and we understand the patients according to the same principles, then we can use any appropriate herbs.

Elizabeth: You also have more control over the quality of the herbs; you can know how they are grown, for instance.

Anne: Exactly. I actually find it hard to trust herbs when I don’t know their source. I grow a lot of the herbs I use myself, or else I obtain them from people that I know. If you order herbs from India, you have no idea how they are produced and how they are treated after harvesting. India and China are probably the most polluted countries in the world; the air and water supplies are contaminated, and this will inevitably have an effect upon the plants.

The Life Force of Plants

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Jane: My understanding is that the purity of the herbs is especially important in Ayurveda, because it is not just a matter of the properties of the plant, but there is also the prana – its living energy – which is transmitted to the patient.

Anne: This is not just in Ayurveda; it is also discussed in Western herbalism as ‘the life force’ of the plant, which is just a different way of talking about prana. All herbal traditions have a similar concept.

Elizabeth: So the big distinction here is not between different herbal traditions, but between the Western system of pharmaceuticals, where the thing that is considered important about a plant is the ‘active ingredient’.

Anne: Yes, the pharmaceutical companies make a plant into a stronger medicine by leaving out what they see as secondary components. But actually, it is these secondary components which help to augment or buffer the effects of the active constituents, helping to make the remedy more effective and prevent side effects.

One of the things we have to be mindful about these days is the effect of the mass production of herbs. In commercial enterprises, herbs are handled numerous times; they are harvested, then dried, then put into packaging in factories before being transported half-way across the world in containers. At every stage of this process prana is lost and by the time they appear on the shelf of a health food shop, there may be little left.

This is why I could not imagine being a herbalist without a garden. It is really important to me that I can grow, pick and prepare my own remedies, as well as forage herbs from the wild.

Jane: What kind of things help to preserve prana?

Anne: We try to handle the plants as little as possible, and also to reduce the time between harvesting and their conversion into medicine, such as tinctures or teas. The same principles apply, of course, to the plants we eat; the less handling and the more quickly they reach the table after picking, the more nourishing they are.

You can look at the whole healing process in terms of prana. All plants have their own particular pranic energy, and we determine what this is by looking at its attributes – heaviness, lightness, etc. as we have already discussed. And each of us, also, has our own pranic energy which can be in harmony or out of balance.

One interesting phenomenon is that because of this correspondence between energies, people can often home in on a plant that they need by themselves. When I teach groups about herbs, I sometimes send people out to find a plant which corresponds to their own doshic imbalance, to find a herb they feel resonates with them, and then to just use their five senses to discern what its qualities are, and to write something down.

Jane: And do they get it right?

Anne: Just about always. And I find this interesting, because we tend to think that people in previous times had a wisdom about nature which we have now lost. But actually, half an hour of contemplation can tell you so much about a plant and its healing potential. The plant is giving out the information and we just need to zone in.