Let's go on a journey about how my brain works. Buckle up.
There I was, crouched in my yard on a Tuesday morning, picking dandelion flowers to make cookies and vinegar — leaving at least 80 percent of the plant behind, making sure the bees that were buzzing around my feet still had what they needed. I pulled some henbit and dandelion leaves for my lunch and looked around for anything else growing that was free food, because that is exactly how my brain works when I am outside.
I’m fairly certain my neighbor Carl was watching me.
Carl is a curious neighbor and extremely aware of everything happening on this block. He also deeply disdains dandelions, henbit, and anything else that threatens his tidy green lawn. He was probably relieved, thinking I had finally come to my senses and started weeding.
He did not realize I was harvesting medicine.
As I separated the dandelion petals from their receptacles — a meditative, repetitive motion that my nervous system was clearly grateful for — I started composing a monologue for Carl in my head. I told him about the calcium, potassium, magnesium, and iron packed into those yellow flowers he wants to eliminate. I told him about vitamins A, C, K, and B6. I told him that gardening without gloves has documented positive effects on gut microbiome. That being in contact with the earth realigns something in the nervous system that we don’t yet have elegant clinical language for. That yes, I speak to the plants — thanking them for what they’re giving me — and that studies have consistently shown gardening increases quality of life and even shifts a person’s perception of hope.
He didn’t hear any of it, of course. It was all in my head.
The dandelion doesn’t offer its gifts all at once. Root. Leaf. Flower. Each one medicine. Each one something the system taught us to destroy.
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But the question that followed me inside stayed loud: Why do we get to decide what’s a weed?
Later that week, I was on a call with a client who is a healthcare leader. She’s sharp, seasoned, and navigating the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from holding a team together inside a system that views people primarily as resources.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, she exhaled and said: “It’s so refreshing to be able to talk to you about leadership issues AND the woo-woo stuff.”
I asked her why this meant so much to her.
She told me that she keeps stones on her desk. That they help her stay grounded, protect her energy, focus on what matters when everything is pulling her in ten directions at once. She told me, with complete sincerity and a little embarrassment, that she could not talk about this at work. That if her colleagues or leadership knew, she wasn’t sure what would happen — but she was certain it would not be good. She would be dismissed. Possibly mocked. Her credibility as a clinical leader, which she had spent years building, would be undermined by a few polished stones and what they mean to her privately.
I didn’t find that sad.
I found it enraging.
I remembered the fear of being my authentic self in a structure that does not really want authenticity. They want normalcy, by their definition of normal.
Here’s what I know: while leaders like her are hiding their amethyst in desk drawers across this industry, hospitals are quietly offering Reiki — hands-on energy healing — to patients recovering from open heart surgery. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was teaching it to patients and their families. Johns Hopkins. Yale. The University of Pennsylvania. Over one thousand hospital-based Reiki programs now exist in the United States.
And when a journalist from STAT News went to ask the leadership of one of those prestigious institutions to defend the practice publicly, the director of the alternative medicine program declined to speak on the record. His reason? He was afraid his comments would be construed as “fake news” and stir a backlash.
Read that again.
The institution was offering the practice. And the person running it was too afraid to say so out loud.
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My client was hiding her healing practices. The institution was hiding its healing practices. The system loudly polices what it calls “woo”, while quietly buying it in bulk and hoping no one asks questions. Here is what the system does not want you to know: this is not a new problem. It is a very, very old one.
Between 1563 and 1736, nearly four thousand people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland alone. Researchers from Edinburgh Napier University recently analyzed that database and found 142 of the accused whose crimes were specifically related to their healing or midwifery practices. Eighty-five percent of them were women. Ninety percent were executed.
What were they doing that was so dangerous?
They were giving out teas. Using herbalism. Attending births. Addressing physical and spiritual wellbeing as a single, unified practice — the way healers had always done, before a new professional class decided that medicine belonged to men with degrees, and that women who healed without those credentials were threats to be eliminated.
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Barbara Ehrenreich called it plainly in Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: “Witch-healers were often the only general medical practitioners for people who had no doctors, no hospitals, and who were bitterly afflicted with poverty and disease.”
They were not frauds. They were not practicing “woo.” They were the healthcare system — the original one — rooted in plant knowledge, touch, spiritual wholeness, and deep attention to the person in front of them. And the profession that replaced them did so not because it produced better outcomes for patients, but because it excluded women from training, used licensing as a weapon, and weaponized accusations of witchcraft against anyone who healed outside the approved channels.
The witch burners won. And their institutional descendants are still running the show.
I used to hang a sign in my office that read: Please be responsible for the energy you bring into this space.
Leadership thought it was charming. What they didn’t realize was that it was also a boundary, a practice, and a belief — that energy is real, that it moves through rooms and teams and organizations, and that a leader who cannot tend to her own energetic integrity cannot effectively tend to anyone else’s.
I can’t control what the system does with that information. I never could. The system has always decided what counts as legitimate — which plants are medicine and which are weeds, which practices are evidence-based, and which are “woo,” which healers are professionals and which are a liability.
But I want to say something directly to the leaders reading this who have stones in their desk drawers: you are not the problem.
The woman who keeps black tourmaline near her computer to manage the psychic weight of leading through a broken system is not confused. She is adaptive. She is doing something ancient and intelligent — creating a small zone of protection and intentionality inside an environment that was designed to strip both of those things away.
The nurse who practices Reiki on her days off, who would never say so at work. The manager who burns sage in his car before a brutal team meeting. The executive who does breathwork in the parking garage because she cannot regulate her nervous system any other way after what the day has already cost her. These are not people who need to be more professional. These are people trying to remain whole inside a structure that profits from their fragmentation.
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That is not a personal failure. It is a rational response to an irrational demand.
The dandelion does not stop being medicine because Carl calls it a weed. It does not lose its iron content, its calcium, its vitamin A because the lawn care industry decided it was inconvenient. It does not stop feeding the bees because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic.
What we call a weed is always a political decision.
What we call “woo-woo” in healthcare is always a power decision — about who gets to define healing, whose knowledge counts, whose practices are legitimate, and whose get them burned.
The system that executed the witch-healers is the same system that quietly buys their practices in bulk while telling your leaders to keep their stones out of sight.
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I’m done being quiet about that.
And I think you might be, too.
If you’ve got something in your desk drawer you’ve never told anyone at work — I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this. The comment section is open. This is a safe place to say what you couldn’t say at the hospital.
I was just feeling a bit disappointed (and maybe a bit mad at those who interfere with nature 🤬) because it has just occurred to me that I haven't seen any bees on our property yet this spring. I pray that we can turn the negative impact of toxic chemicals around before it is too late. Actually, I pray that it is not too late. 🙏
Beautiful. 💛
I love my yard and field full of dandelions, although I'm sure my neighbors aren't very fond. They may even have a fear of the seeds blowing into their "perfectly" manicured (and heavily sprayed) lawns. I will take my weeds over their solid green turf any day.
I do not have a story to share...I just wanted to comment on how much I appreciate this post. We need to appreciate God's gifts to us more.