RESOURCES
- Visit Megan Edge’s Website meganedge.ca
- Shop Megan Edge’s products on Etsy
- Take a Foraging Tour
- Buy The Heart’s Journey” set direct. This link includes the coupon “HEARTSJOURNEY“
- Buy The Heart’s Journey set On Amazon (no coupon)
- Buy the book “The Expressive Arts – the Ultimate Creative Guide to Transforming Stress” on Amazon
- Buy the book “All That Rain Promises And More” by David Arora on Amazon
- Get the “Audubon Books” on Amazon
- Follow Megan Edge on Facebook
- Follow Megan Edge on LinkedIn
- Subscribe to Megan Edge on YouTube
- Watch this episode on YouTube
- Listen to this episode on iTunes
Since 2007, Megan Edge has been helping people with her counseling services with a focus on empowerment and deep healing of emotional, energetic, and physical trauma. After three decades of study in the metaphysical fields of Astral Projection, Runes Stones, Dream Work, Tarot, Chakras, EFT, Auras, Angel Therapy, and Past Lives, completing various certification programs along with degrees in Social Work, Women’s Studies and Geology, she has been named a Master Healer. She is a generational forager, Megan has ethically harvested from the forest since a child and now, through her shop, Beyond the Garden Gate, she shares Mother Nature’s healing bounty with her teas, salves and tinctures. She is also the creator of The Heart’s Journey: Healing Hearts Oracle Cards & Guidebook.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00:00 Intro Snip
00:00:58 The benefit of today’s discussion
00:02:17 Introduce Megan Edge
00:04:24 What are Megan Edge’s credentials?
00:08:00 Who knows more, the doctor or the patient?
00:09:13 Where does intuition come from and how do we develop and hear it?
00:11:22 How Dr. Haley teaches customers to recognize their intuition and inner knowledge from God
00:14:39 What is in the glass that you are drinking from? Both Megan Edge and Dr. Haley happen to be practicing herbology during the podcast.
00:16:00 What is foraging and what is urban foraging?
00:19:15 when foraging, how do you know what is safe?
00:20:54 What are we learning on the foraging tours?
00:23:05 Did anything ever go wrong where you foraged and ate something you shouldn’t have?
00:25:55 What are the medicinal benefits of mushrooms?
00:28:15 Should we cook mushrooms?
00:29:21 How are tinctures made?
00:31:05 What are some favorite books about foraging?
00:33:48 What is self love?
00:38:23 What is thankfulness?
00:40:27 What does it mean to be in right relationship with our surroundings?
00:43:12 What is Dr. Haley’s understanding of the divine?
00:46:38 What is ethical foraging?
00:49:25 What are some power words that were spoken into your life?
00:50:20 How do you teach people to develop their intuition?
00:51:28 Tell us about your book “Heart’s Journey” with oracle cards
00:56:20 Tell us about your participation in writing “The Expressive Arts – the Ultimate Creative Guide to Transforming Stress”
00:57:59 Do you still have fibromyalgia?
01:00:38 Is bread and gluten bad for you?
01:05:45 Are you for or against pharmaceuticals?
01:08:05 What is the difference between pharmaceuticals and tinctures?
01:11:01 What does it mean to be formed of the dust of the earth?
01:11:55 What does it mean that the earth is a closed system that we must be good stewards of the planet?
TRANSCRIPT
We are part of this planet. We are a part of the infrastructure. You know, however we got here, whatever people believe about that is irrelevant to the fact that we are a part of this natural environment. Yeah. So when I walk
in the woods or when I walk along the beach, I only take what is for me and my family, and I always leave something behind.
You are listening to the Dr. Haley Show, the podcast dedicated to helping you optimize your health. Each episode there will be an interview or a message to help you discover better health. We will be featuring health radicals on the show to bring new ideas to the table, as well as doubling down on key fundamentals to support you living your best life.
Your host is no other than the founder of Haley Nutrition Dr. Michael Haley.
This is the Dr Haley Show podcast. I’m Dr Michael Haley, your show host, and today I am hoping to better understand some energy and healing concepts that might be considered fringe, unconventional, and maybe even conflicting with some of our religious beliefs. I suspect at times this discussion might even get a little awkward, but I’m confident my guest and I can both handle it.
And,
you know,
we all see it as an opportunity to learn and grow. So we’ll be discussing some natural, healthy medicinal and survival techniques like foraging, which I do think most of us would probably fail at miserably if we were thrown into this situation. And I think of that show, survivor, if anyone’s ever watched the reality show survivor, and they’re thrown on an island and in the first week or two, they just lose all kinds of weight.
They’re not eating, they’re not drinking. And the only thing that saves them is competitions where they can win food.
So I’m looking forward to talking about foraging and,
how we can learn how to do that and kind of almost rewild ourselves, to where we can learn how to live in nature and survive in nature.
Since 2007, Megan Edge has been helping people with her counseling services with a focus on empowerment and deep healing of emotional, energetic, and physical trauma.
After three decades of study and metaphysical fields of astral projection, I’m not even sure if I’m saying these words right. Runes, stones, dreamwork, Tarot, chakras, eft I know what that is. Auras, angel therapy and past lives. Completing various
certification programs along with degrees in social work, women’s studies and geology. She has been named a master healer. She is a generational forager.
Megan has ethically harvested from the forest since a child, and now through her shop beyond the garden Gate, she shares Mother Nature’s healing bounty with her teas, salves and tinctures. And I love those words because we should all learn to use those things in our life. She is the creator of the hearts journey, Healing Hearts, Oracle Cards, and guidebook.
Megan, thank you for joining me on the Dr Haley Show podcast. I want to start by asking you something about credentials. And first I’m going to discredit myself in a sense, which you would probably say, don’t do that. But. You know, I’m a doctor of chiropractic, and, I went to school for it, and I kind of feel like almost anyone could go through school and get credentials.
But, to me, real credentials kind of come from life experience. I know that I’ve learned so much more since getting out of chiropractic school, and I would lean more on that than I would what I learned in school. I agree, yeah, yeah. But I want to just so you know, so that my anyone listening can understand what are your credentials, where do they come from and what kind of training do you have?
Well, similar to you, much of what I know is what I have learned through life experience, which I think,
similar to as well, is the most valuable when we learn something and then we are able to,
process what we’ve learned, understand the impact of what we’ve learned, embody it, and then feel the need to share it with others because it’s been so successful for us
that’s the top of
the chart as far as it comes to credentials.
But here’s the thing. I teach other people how to become healers. I teach other people the techniques that I have created in my intuitive Energy Massage program, for example, or how to develop Your intuition, how to connect with your spirituality. These are all things that I can certify other people in. And what it means to be certified is simply that you have taken the time to study something, to embody it, and then to bring it out in to the world.
I’m a Reiki master. I’ve done my energy healing practitioner, I’ve done my herbalism programs, I’ve done my
aromatherapy courses, I completed university, what else? I worked in the bank and
I was certified to be,
an investment manager to help people with their mortgages and that sort of thing.
can tick off all sorts of programs and courses that I have done, and I can show all my pieces of paper that say, look, this is what I’ve done, but that isn’t who I am. Who I am is what I have embodied from all of the learning that I’ve done in my lifetime, through experience and then through mentors and other teachers, and bring that forward to be of service to the world in whatever way the world needs me to be of service.
Yeah, that license that I have that’s like this much of who I am, and I was only in school for a short period of time. But since, you know, living in the environment was nice, I learned a lot at school. I’m not going to completely discredit,
the learning that I got there, but so much more came from life experience working with patients and,
we also experiment on ourselves and we learn things probably so much more than we do from studying science
and research projects and everything, when we actually have real clinical life experience.
Absolutely. But
it’s also relevant that we’ve taken that time to do that training. It is important for our clients or our patients to know that they can trust us, that
we’ve committed ourselves to the process and then whatever else we bring in outside of the structure of the education that we’ve had is what makes us really good practitioners.
It’s not the degree on the wall that makes us good practitioners, it’s how we approach the work that we do. That’s a great point because I did say, you know, I think anyone could get the degree, but the reality is it has to be that kind of person that actually commits to things and it’s going to stay the course.
So yeah, there’s definitely a level of dedication involved. Absolutely, absolutely. And
that transfers to our clients trust
us as the person that they have come to, to help them feel better. And that’s a huge honor. I feel it’s a huge honor when somebody comes to me and trusts me to be the person who holds their hand as they step into their wellness and into their wholeness.
It’s a sacred it’s a sacred relationship between client and practitioner. And we need to honor that as the practitioners. We need to honor that. That trust that our client has put into us, has put with us. Yeah. And I’m kind of laughing because at the same time, I kind of tell them also not to trust me because, oh, wait a second, I think this will make sense to you.
I do feel like my knowledge is like this, and I might have intuition, and I kind of feel like a lot of times I’ll see a patient and I’ll know exactly what’s wrong with them before they tell me, I’ll know where things hurt, and I’ll know what caused it. Even. But I only have so much knowledge, and I have that intuition.
But they have this life that’s in them. That is absolutely brilliant and full of knowledge. And I would rather them learn how to listen and
get information from that. Now, we might have differences in where we think it comes from, but we know and I can see by you nodding your head, yes, there’s something there to that.
And you already mentioned, you know, when we were talking about credentials and learning how to,
have that intuition to develop that. And what is that intuition? What is it? Where does it come from, from your perspective? And how do we develop? I think that’s the most important question. Sure. Well, in my experience, intuition is a full body experience.
Every aspect of ourself,
this physical being that we are, is an antenna. And like you just described, where sometimes
you can see your patient and you know intuitively just by the way that they’re holding their body or how they’re talking to you about what’s happening for them. You get that hit of knowing, oh, this is what it is.
And then when you say to them, is it this? And they go, oh, how did you know that you must be psychic. And you just you say, no, I, I could see it in your in the way that you present yourself. You know, it’s this knowledge. So many people though, are not connected to their body and their body’s own language in the work that I do.
Like you, I want to empower my clients and my students to know just how brilliant and amazing they are. I want them to know how resilient their physical body is, their emotional body, their spiritual body, their energetic body. It’s all about teaching other people to reconnect with their own inner knowing. And that’s all that intuition is. It isn’t some mysterious thing that some people have and some people don’t have.
We are an intuitive species. It’s how we know about each other before we have the words to describe what we know, and it’s every part of our body that gives us that information. So when somebody can be embodied, they recognize what it feels like when their fingers are tingling or their toes are tingling, or they understand when their stomach is gurgling, they have that connection to their physical body.
Then they have that connection to their intuitive body as well. The key piece of it, though, is trust. It always comes back to trusting. So when I’m helping somebody to develop their intuition, really what I’m doing is helping them learn how to trust their body and not be disconnected from their body. Yeah. I’m going to give you an example of how I might help someone develop it.
And then I’d want to know more about how you would help someone develop their intuition and listen. And it comes up very frequently in my business,
I
own a company
that manufactures raw aloe vera, and we freeze it and ship it directly to our customers. And the most common question we get is, how much should I drink?
And I mean, I have a formula that can give you an idea of maybe some guidance, but I’d rather just tell them what you should drink a half gallon a day and then they’d be like, well, that seems like a lot. I was kidding, you should just have a like, dip your finger in it and go like that.
Well, that doesn’t seem like enough. Well, what were you hoping I would say? And they would say, well, I was hoping you would say, like three ounces a day. Well, there’s your answer, you know, so we go through these almost like mental gymnastics to get them to verbalize what they already know. Yes. And, you know, it might seem crazy, but we have so much knowledge we’re just not practicing listening to it and expressing it.
Yes, absolutely. And
this is exactly what I’m sharing, is that most people are unaware of their own wisdom, their own brilliance. They don’t acknowledge it, and instead they search for the answers external to themselves. I think for a lot of people, and there’s no judgment around this, this is just how we walk through the world. Many people want to be told what to do.
They want the answers to be given to them so that they don’t have to think about it, because they’ve got a lot of other things going on. So just tell me how many pills to take, tell me what the prescription is, and I’ll just do that. The thing is, though, each of us is unique. We have a unique blueprint.
We have a unique energy system. We have a unique metabolism. So one size fits all medicine doesn’t work for everybody. It might work for one person for whom that particular prescription is a fit for their body weight and their metabolism and their mental state, and all the other things that go into how our bodies process anything that we put into it.
So there might be somebody out there for whom a half a gallon of aloe vera is the perfect prescription. Right. Yeah. I was hoping you would say that a half gallon a day. I was hoping, yeah, that’s how much aloe vera I want to drink. I have some vera right here in the water that I’m drinking. And I just put a little gulp in.
Oh, I do every few days. Right. So
for me it’s all about empowering the individual to make their own choices because quite frankly, I don’t want my clients dependent and beholden to me. I don’t want that from them. I don’t want to be their guru. I don’t want to sit on a pedestal. I want them to feel empowered, to be able to make wise and intelligent health choices for themselves.
Right? That’s how they’re going to heal. Not by me telling them what to do. Yeah, but sometimes it does help. Like if we are telling them what to do, they might either be in agreement. So now they’re actually learning that they’re on the right path, or they might feel like, you know, yeah, it feels like I’m walking uphill.
Like the wind’s in my face. Something’s not right here.
get a second opinion then because chances are what I’m telling you, if it’s not resonating, it’s probably not right.
what’s in the glass that you’re drinking from? I see it’s pink to it is pink. So this today I’ve got a electrolyte mix that has collagen in it, and it’s flavored with a peach and a strawberry natural flavoring.
There’s a little bit of magnesium in here as well. And then there’s the aloe vera. And I’ve got a dropper of dandelion tincture and a dropper of colloidal silver. And this is one of my morning drinks to set me up for the day. That’s funny. You know, and we’re both practicing some form of, like, herbology here. And for people that are listening, most people are listening to this, not seeing us on video.
And, you know, if I hold up mine. Well, mine’s kind of settled to the bottom. Meghan, I promise you, I’m not practicing Euro therapy on the show. Well, if you were, that’s fine. I’m not going to judge you, but. But I’m not going to drink it. But you go for it. But it’s my mix of, well, water with lemon and ginger and a couple drops of stevia, so
not as, exquisite as what you have there.
I already had my aloe vera and a full glass of it earlier. Just because I can. And I like it. Excellent. I’m. Let’s go into foraging
and some people might even have to look that word up because we’re so disconnected foraging. Let me see that. I think that’s when you go to the produce section at the supermarket. Right.
But what is foraging? What
is foraging and what is urban foraging. Right. So foraging is something that many people might be familiar with that our ancestors did. Right, which is before they were grocery stores. And we would go out into the field, into the forest, onto the lakes and we would get our food. All right.
Nature was our grocery store. And then we would bring that food back in its raw form in the form of berries or fish or mushrooms. And then we would process it so that we could consume it. That’s the essence of foraging in our modern world. Most people, most cultures, don’t need to forage any longer because we have an infrastructure of agriculture that brings us our food literally to our plate.
Why then, would somebody want to forage anymore? Right? Because you get to go out into the world, into the natural world. And
you know, the foods that you can eat, you know, the foods that have nourishment and that have medicine in them, and you bring those foods back and it might just be going out and picking some berries, even if it’s on a farm, that’s still a form of foraging.
Right? So essentially
it’s you going somewhere and harvesting raw foods from the wild. Or if it’s urban foraging, you’re harvesting wild,
foods from your urban setting. So it could be your backyard. It could be your neighbor’s backyard. It could be the park down the street. The thing about it is that plants grow everywhere. They even grow through cracks in the sidewalk in downtown New York.
And that dandelion that’s pushing up through the concrete is something you could forage. I wouldn’t advise it because it’s probably going to be full of car exhaust and people having stepped on it. But the fact of the matter is, at its essence, it is something that you could pick and you could forage. And in fact, with urban foraging, I even teach people that going to the grocery store is a form of foraging.
And when you can connect the act of foraging for your food, even at the grocery store, you’re accessing cellular memories that we all have that go back hundreds of thousands of years in our development. And it adds,
a relationship between you and your food, you and your sustenance that most people don’t even think about anymore. Right. And so it creates a heightened awareness
of you taking care of yourself through that process of collecting your food in all the different ways that you can do it.
And that’s a health benefit right there. Yeah. I’m gonna relate to foraging at the grocery store, because sometimes I’ll find something that I don’t recognize. I’ve never seen that. I’ve certainly never consumed it. But I have the advantage of, you know,
I grabbed this little thing right here. I’m holding up my phone for those that can’t see.
And I might look it up and see what it is and maybe even look up what it tastes like or what other things I might cook it with, or I’m going to learn about it right there on the spot and decide whether or not it’s something new. I want to try. And, you know, I would always try to look for something that I don’t recognize and have never seen before, so I can experience it
know more about it.
But how does that work in the wild? When I’m wondering, is this mushroom safe? Is this flower safe? Is it toxic? Do I have to be concerned? How do you figure those things out?
am I just that disconnected that I’ve lost it? No. And yes the no. Is that,
you’re not so disconnected that you’ve lost it.
You need to teach yourself and educate yourself as to what it is that’s out there in nature that you can eat safely. Right. But what I tell people is this most of nature is not out to get you. Most of nature is not out to get you. That’s not what we’re taught. We’re taught that most of nature is out to get us, that nature isn’t safe, that all these things out there could harm us.
There are far more things that will harm you, potentially in your medicine cabinet than there are out in the forest. Having said that, and you can take your phone out to the forest, and there’s lots of apps where you can take a picture of the plant, the mushroom, and it will give you an idea of what it is.
But don’t eat it until you know for certain, because you don’t want to have a negative reaction. And lots of people have allergies to lots of things, so you could be allergic to something that’s out there like a BlackBerry for example. I’ve never heard of anyone who is, but you could be, and the next person isn’t going to be.
So
you do need to know what you’re picking, what you’re looking at. You need to be able to identify it. Our phones are fabulous resources for that. But always seek a second opinion. Just like if you’re going to see a chiropractor or a doctor and you don’t like what you’re hearing. So that’s where you want to get a really good guidebook, or you want to hire someone, or go out with someone who knows what they’re doing and is able to tell you, this is okay to eat.
This doesn’t taste good. This don’t touch it. Right. And
that’s what you’re doing on the tours. That’s what I’m doing on the tours exactly. It’s a plant identification.
Experience. It’s also learning how to be out in the forest. I grew up going out into the forest. I mean, I didn’t grow up in the forest, particularly.
I grew up in downtown Montreal, downtown Toronto, in downtown Vancouver, big Canadian cities. But I grew up in a family that was very connected to nature, and we were very curious about what we could and could not eat. So we spent the weekends in the summers
harvesting on the beaches, the oysters and the clams
and the crabs and harvesting in the forest.
So
I learned by osmosis and we always had guidebooks. We always had books that we would come back to and look at to make certain. And once we knew what we were doing, then we didn’t need the guidebook any longer. But even the most accomplished forager, even the most accomplished survivalist, is only really good at what they do because they are prepared to seek out information about something they don’t know.
And I can give you an example from yesterday. My daughter and my nephew and I went out mushrooming yesterday, and we picked a bunch of boletus. And I thought that they were a particular kind of slippery jack boletus, and I got them home and I started cleaning them, and as soon as I cut into the stem, the stem turned blue
the inside of the stem turned blue. And I went, Aha, hang on,
that’s not a good boletus, that’s not one that I want to eat. And then I looked it up and I discovered that it was a
blue-staining slippery jack. Looks very much like the regular slippery Jack, but can cause gastrointestinal distress and doesn’t taste very good.
It’s not going to kill me, but why would I eat it if it has an insipid flavor and it might give me an upset stomach? So even though I’ve been doing this for 56 years now, I had that experience yesterday of realizing, oh, in the moment of, oh, it’s a mushroom. I picked it, got it home, and then learned, oh, this is not one that I’m going to want to eat.
So we’re always learning. Did anything ever go wrong where you actually didn’t pick it up and you ate it anyway? Fortunately, no, I can say that unequivocally no. I have had some mushrooms where I wondered why I bothered because they just turned kind of slimy. And when I cooked them and they didn’t have much flavor. But no. Thankfully I have never picked anything and eaten it.
That has then landed me with an upset stomach or in the hospital. Because again, most things that are in nature are not out to get us. Most mushrooms are not going to kill you, but the few that could potentially you want to know for certain. And they usually have names like death Cap or stomach ache causing. Or they’ll say in the guidebook, edible but not very digestible.
We learn from other people’s experiences because they’ve had been unfortunate enough to have a poor experience with it. And we learned from generational
wisdom and guidance about
what is going to work and what’s not going to work. Yes, I admittedly had some mushrooms one time and was afraid to eat mushrooms for a long time after that, and I’m sorry that was your experience.
Do you know what kind of mushrooms they were. Yeah,
the name kind of rhymes with silly. Yes. Okay. Well, that’s a whole other that’s a whole other conversation and healing journey, so. Whoa. That’s a little bit much. Okay. And, you know, true that. You know, I might think my family was serving pizza that Friday with mushrooms on it, and I was terrified.
Okay, well, we could do some healing around that for you to work on. I actually am healed, and I have mushrooms in the refrigerator that are going to go on my salad in just a bit. But I don’t even know what kind they are. Admittedly, you sound like, you know, so many different varieties and, you know, and all I know is there’s brown ones and white ones in the grocery store, and they must be safe.
those are perfectly safe. Those are cremini or agaricus. They’re field mushrooms, basically. That’s what they are. So
if you were to go out in the field and find these mushrooms, they’re also called horse mushrooms.
they get huge like this. They’re massive. But the ones that we get in the grocery stores are called button mushrooms because they’re harvested when they’re little.
Okay. And t what are the big round ones called that are like the size of hamburgers that you can cook like a hamburger? It’s the same species. It’s just a different variety. So some people call them cremini Some people just call them brown mushrooms.
they’re firmer. They tend to have more flavor than the white ones do.
But
It’s the same variety. And what’s interesting, what I find interesting anyways, and I geek out on this all the time, is the medicine that we now recognize scientifically that are in mushrooms and how beneficial eating mushrooms are for us. You know, cultures around the world have known this for hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, we’ve got records dating back to the caveman, if you want to use that terminology of mushrooms painted on walls.
We know that human beings have evolved and developed with mushrooms, both medicinal, nutritional and magical. So
when we start looking at
the medicine research around mushrooms, we’re discovering all kinds of amazing attributes. You know, anti-tumoral, anti-cancer or immune boosting. Really high in vitamin D, mushrooms are one of the only places we can get natural vitamin D besides meat.
And they absorb vitamin D if you leave your mushrooms out in the sun before you dry them or before you cook them, they will increase their vitamin D content. And then when you consume them, you benefit from that vitamin D.
So even those little
white mushrooms that you’re going to put on your salad, there’s medicine there
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why are we supposed to cook them. And I like my mushrooms raw on my salad. I do like them cooked up with, you know, maybe even eggs or something. But why are we supposed to cook them for the increased benefit. What is it that happens when we’re cooking something whether we’re using water or oil.
the whole process helps to extract constituents within the food that then make it bioavailable
for us,
easy for us to digest.
Mushrooms have a lot of cellulose in them. They have a lot of fiber. Raw mushrooms are difficult for our digestive system to handle, and we’re not receiving as much of the benefit from the mushroom if it’s in its raw state, because we just can’t digest it, then if it’s in a cooked state or it’s been made into a tincture, which is an alcohol extraction, or a powdered form that we then use on food.
Yeah. So the process of cooking and this is the same for many foods, the process of lightly cooking something we’ll pull out medicinal benefits in it in terms of chemicals and constituents. That wouldn’t be bioavailable to us if we ate it raw
for some foods. There’s also things that we can get from raw foods that we don’t get once we cook them.
So it’s that balance between, you know, the variety of foods that we put in our diet, cooked in uncooked. And I also heard in their alcohol extraction tincture, I never really thought of a tincture as extracting the nutrients, and I didn’t know
that was a technique or one of the ways they’re made. Or is that the way tinctures are made?
Yes. Tinctures are generally made as an alcohol extraction, but they’re also made as a water extraction. And so that’s where you would basically make a broth. If you’re talking about mushrooms for example, you would simmer your medicinal mushrooms, which are also your edible mushrooms. You simmer them in hot water. 30 minutes to 24 hours. It depends on how much extraction you want from them.
You can then also do an alcohol extraction, and then you
combine the two together, and now you’ve got a really potent tincture because there are things that only water will extract. And there are things that only alcohol will extract. And then once they’re together, there’s a synergy that happens and you’ve got a greater potency when you’re making your tinctures
I’m learning so much. And now I’m realizing that when I was a kid, my friend made a magic mushroom tincture. Oh well, that must have an interesting mushroom tea. Mushroom tea? Water extraction. That’s true. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then if you add lemon, lemon, the acidity in lemon also pulls out different constituents from the mushroom. And you get, more potency.
generally speaking Yeah. We didn’t need that. We need. Oh. Okay. I’m sure you didn’t. Then depending on how much you took. Because again, metabolism right? too much. Yeah. Too much. And if my father’s listening. Sorry dad. You remember that weekend. Okay. Share their stories. Yeah. So you know you’ve done this as a child foraging
and you’ve grown up in this.
But what were some of your favorite books along the way? One of my absolute favorite books that I still use today is called All the Rain Promises and more, and it’s a pocket guide book of, mushrooms for
foraging mushrooms from around the world. And then the author has also written a much bigger compendium that is, I don’t know how many pages, 400 pages, delving into more of the
science and the research around mushrooms.
Beyond that, it was mostly the Audubon book. So you’re familiar with those series of Audubon books that the Audubon Society put out. There’s bird identification, insect identification, bivalves, and mushrooms as well. And those were one of the early full color photographs of books that had full colors in them that would then also speak about the edibility of mushrooms.
So often, if we found a mushroom in the forest that we didn’t recognize, and it still happens today. Just yesterday, I found mushrooms I’d never seen before. We would bring a sample back and look it up and see if we could identify it through the characteristics of the mushroom, the spore print of the mushroom,
and decide if it was something that we wanted to have more of or something we were just going
to leave alone.
and there weren’t as many mushroom identification books as there are today. But now if you go into a
bookstore and you go into their
nature section, there’s going to be at least where I live. There’s going to be dozens and dozens of full color photograph books for,
looking up what things are. And then, of course, we also have the internet, which did not exist.
And I read websites that would do that. Yeah, yeah. And that as you were saying that, that’s what I was actually thinking. You know, I could probably look up some of those mushrooms that are growing in my front yard and see if they’re edible. You could and some of them just well, might be. Yeah. And nice big huge huge like, you know, eight inches across.
And I’m like okay that’s a big mushroom. If it’s edible and I’m just letting it die out there. Yeah. I’m curious what you have in your front yard too. I do a lot of urban mushroom foraging, so that’s where I’m driving down the street, and I suddenly see there’s an Amanita, and I pull over and I jump out and I pick it, or there’s a boletus on the side of the road or in someone’s front yard.
And I have gone up to people’s front doors and knocked on their door to say, do you know what you have in your yard here? And they say, no. I said,
it’s a boletus This is a prized mushroom. Do you mind if I pick it? And mostly they say, sure, go ahead. Yeah. I was just going to run it over with the lawnmower.
Exactly. Well, all right, let’s go in a different direction. And talk about healing a little bit. My favorite subject. What is self-love. Oh that’s a great question. Well it’s I think it’s self-explanatory isn’t it. It’s loving yourself which sounds like it should be a pretty easy thing to do. But for a lot of people it’s not, not at all.
They haven’t been loved up in their lives. They don’t know what it feels like, they don’t know how to embody it. And so they walk around wounded rather than with a healthy self-confidence in themselves. I think the better question is how do we achieve or how do we foster? How do we develop self-love? Right? What are the ways in which we can recognize
our true value, our self-worth, and the way in which we can be of service in the world?
And at that point, we embody self-love.
once we know what it is. Yeah, but one of the reasons I asked what it is to and, you and I will be different in our makeup. And, you know, generally speaking, this isn’t a hard rule, but generally speaking, men are less, you know, feely, less emotional. And, generally speaking, men might think more logically.
So logically
in a love sense, I would think I have to take care of myself, whereas to someone else it might be more of a feeling. And so is self-love. A feeling? Is that physical care that you give to yourself? What is it? Well it’s both
it’s all of it. If you are in a state of self-love, you will automatically take care of yourself.
You won’t even have to think about it. You will do things every day for your body to support your body as it supports you through this journey of life from beginning to end. Right? You will embody that. So what you drink, what I drink, what I do first thing in the morning. What I do at the end of the day are all acts of self-care.
When I put good food in my body, I put nutritious or nourishing liquids in my body. That’s an act of self-care. Self-care is self-love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female. It doesn’t matter if you’re logical or emotional. It’s the same process. The acts are evidence of self-love. Sure, but I think it’s semantics more than anything else.
The walking through life with an expectation that you deserve the best, the best healthy foods, the best healthy relationships, just having that knowing is it’s an intuitive self-love.
it’s your birthright. When you’re doing destructive things to yourself, whether you’re male or female or anything in between, for that matter. Now you’re not loving yourself. You are not demonstrating that you value your life.
If you’re going to McDonald’s every day for breakfast, I’m sorry, but that is an indication that you don’t love yourself. You might love McDonald’s. You might love the greasy, fatty kick that you get, but you’re not loving yourself. Yeah, the last time I went to a McDonald’s, it was more out of love for the people that built it.
And so it was their grand opening, and it was probably, I don’t know, maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Not this and that. Anyone that goes to McDonald’s now and then. No, no I didn’t say now and then I said every morning it’s a different I go every now and again to. And when I have that Big Mac I, I thank it.
You know, I, I thank whoever brought it to me, I thank all those who brought this food to the table. This is something that we say at our table all the time to recognize and acknowledge every single person who was a part of that process, and every single animal that was a part of that process to bring this food to me.
And so in that moment, I have a different relationship, perhaps with that Big Mac that I eat maybe once a year than somebody who’s just chowing it down and not even tasting it or not even acknowledging it. That again, to me, and maybe this sounds harsh to some people, but to me that’s an indication that you’re not loving yourself up when you’re not in right relationship with your environment and your surroundings.
That’s a personal being. Doesn’t have to be anybody else’s view. Well, I also like the when you talked about, thankfulness and everything that went into it. And I think back when I had chickens in the backyard, and I didn’t realize that one of them was a rooster. And, you know, some of them were laying eggs, and I was waiting for that one to lay eggs.
Never did. But one day it started making this noise and I tried to reason with them. I was like, dude, you can’t do that here. You’re going to have to be quiet or we’re going to have to eat you. It was, you know, I mean, that’s what it came down to, and all day long and then just knowing that the city is not going to have this, they’re not going to, you know, people are going to complain.
I’m going to, you know, the houses are all close together. We’re in a little neighborhood. So that night we had chicken for dinner and I don’t think anyone really understands thankfulness until you kill your own food, because we’ve been so far removed from it. You know, a hamburger, that’s just food that you buy in a. And you mean that, that was a cow.
Really?
that red stuff is blood. I thought it was juices. It’s not like fruit juice, beet juice or something like that. But once you kill your own
even if you’re fishing, you know that first realization. Oh, I have to kill this before I eat it. And then you realize the exchange that happened and there’s a thankfulness greater than ever before.
we say grace before we eat, but now it makes more sense. I’m thankful because of the exchange. So, you know, thankful for all of the effort that went into this. Thank you for purchasing my meal. You had to sacrifice your time in exchange for dollars so you could purchase this for me. Thank you. Yes, exactly.
And all the way down the line
as we’re having this conversation, what’s coming up for me, Michael, is how important it is that we are in right relationship with our environment and our surroundings. And what I mean by that is that everything that we do can be intentional. right. So when I make my coffee in the morning and I put all kinds of wonderful things in my coffee, it’s not just coffee beans.
There’s mushrooms in there. is herbology at its finest. Exactly. It’s a hot water extraction of cardamon and cinnamon and turmeric and all the other good things that I put in it, all for their medicinal benefits. I’m in a relationship with that coffee, and I know for some people that might sound a little woo hoo, and that’s fine.
Let it be. Woo hoo! But the point of it is, when we have intention in the things that we do every day, we are in a different kind of relationship with our life, with our creator, with everything that grows, with nature, with medicine, and that thanks to all who brought this food to the table, is an acknowledgment, like we just said, of every single part of the process.
And it it creates a spiritual link between me and the food I’m eating. And every single way in which that food came to me. Now, I don’t have chickens in the backyard, and I’ve never had to kill the chicken, but I have fished, you know, and, when I go out foraging, what am I doing? But being in relationship with the foods that I then put on my plate.
So when I go and pick that mushroom, I say thank you. In my mind, I thank the forest. You know, I go through that process. And when we look at indigenous cultures and the way in which they hunted and the way in which we used to hunt, in addition to that, there was always a sacredness. There was always a ritual, there was always an acknowledgment because food didn’t necessarily come easily or it came in great abundance.
And either way, we still had to say thank you for this food, this nourishment of my body. And that doesn’t happen the same way anymore for most people. I think, and I’m hoping that somebody’s listening to this may they start to appreciate more deeply, even when it is McDonald’s or Wendy’s or the Twinkie that they just picked up from the gas station, that they can have a relationship with that which creates then a relationship with the divine.
And we, I don’t think, can be healthy and whole if we don’t also have that connection as well. Right? Right, right. I completely agree with everything you just said. Our understanding of what that divine is might be different. Might be, but, you know, I’m okay with that. And everyone has their own path. But what are you what are you assuming is different?
I’m curious to know, because you.
met me. You know a little bit about me.
you’ve made an assumption about me. Well, yeah, I like, so I’m curious what that is. Yeah. I mean, that’s an accurate statement. Because I just know that there’s so many differences and no one really agrees 100% on anything. But, some people believe God.
Some people believe the universe, Mother Earth, nature, innate intelligence, quantum energy.
and there’s probably overlap in a lot of those areas. You know, for me, for me, it’s God creator with his amazing wisdom, given us life in our body and we being able to actually.
Use that knowledge. Not that we are God from my perspective. But
his life is in me and that he can work through me and in me to do amazing, wonderful things. And one of the things you had mentioned earlier was, you were talking about belief and yeah, I forget how you worded it, but it was expecting good.
And I would expect myself to be able to do good with the life and the gift that I’ve been given, and have a wonderful, productive, successful, exciting, happy life. But a lot of us do see that, you know, maybe as a different form
Sure, we could there’s lots of different ways that we can see it and experience it, but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing, right?
It I everything you said. Absolutely. I agree what it looks like can be different between people, between races, between cultures. I mean, that’s why we end up having religious wars. Unfortunately. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were each allowed and encouraged to have our experience of the Divine of God, of the Flying Spaghetti, Monster, of Allah, of whomever it is that we feel is external to ourselves, that helps to guide us in our lives?
And if we could have conversations about that that didn’t involve the end of a gun pointed at our face, because we have a difference of opinion about what that experience should be, you know,
you don’t know that I don’t have God in my life. You don’t know that I don’t have a relationship with God. Why would you assume thet
I don’t.
I guess I’m cautious because I know a lot of people, do think differently. And they’re having their own experience and, and thank goodness for if we wouldn’t be able to have these kinds of conversations if we all thought the same thing all the time about everything, what would we talk about now?
Yeah. Foraging. Well, sure. But people have different believes about foraging For example, you know, some people believe foraging, you should just be able to go out into the forest and clear cut every mushroom you see in that moment because it’s yours. You found it. Other people have a different approach to foraging, which is more of an ethical approach, perhaps, which is to say, I’m going to leave some of what I have because I don’t need all of it.
I’m going to leave it for the next person. I’m going to leave it for the forest. I want the mycelium community to flourish underneath my feet. So I’m not going to take absolutely everything. Megan, is that what you meant by ethical foraging
in your, well, in your bio. Yes. That is what I mean by ethical foraging.
There are ways in which we walk through the forest where we show respect for the natural environment. We don’t litter, we don’t take more than what we need.
we tread lightly. We’re not going into the forest covered in perfume, for example.
we want to be a part of that natural world, and we are a part of that natural world.
I mean, this is something that I really believe very strongly. And we were for talking about belief. We are part of this planet. We are a part of the infrastructure. You know, however we got here, whatever people believe about that is irrelevant to the fact that we are a part of this natural environment. Yeah. So when I walk
in the woods or when I walk along the beach, I only take what is for me and my family, and I always leave something behind.
And I’ve watched people go to the beach and just take gunny sacks of clams
out of the beach sand
and leave nothing behind. Why would we do that? Why would we do that? Selfishness. Yeah, yeah, perhaps selfishness or self-centeredness or just a failure to see the bigger picture and the importance of
the infrastructure of the environment.
When you take something out completely, you leave a void, you leave a vacuum and all the things that relied on that thing you’ve taken out now are going to collapse because the infrastructure isn’t there any longer. You know, and we see this all over the place. We see this in human behavior for centuries and centuries, and we certainly see it happening now.
And so ethical, that word ethical is really key. And it’s really important to, again, that relationship that I was talking about earlier, the relationship that we have with our surroundings and the way in which we walk through the world. So ethical is thinking about something or someone other than yourself and how your actions and behaviors may impact someone else, or the environment that you’re walking through Yeah
Megan. One thing I like to ask people is, what are some power words that were spoken into your life that help define who you are today? And I can give some examples, but based on the look on your face, you’re ready. Not my first rodeo.
I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up with an imaginative mother, a very creative mother,
and a father who was an amazing critical thinker. And both my parents have passed on now, but they’ve left me with that legacy of curiosity and questioning and imagination. And so one of my power words is imagination, because without it, nothing that we see around us would exist.
And you asked earlier, way back at the beginning of our conversation,
how do I teach people to develop their intuition? Imagination is how I teach people to develop their intuition. I help people remember how to be imaginative. I remind them that everything around them came from somebody’s imagination, right? The hearts journey, healing hearts, Oracle cards and guidebook.
This is a meditation tool. These are images of parts that I found in nature. As I was going through a difficult transition in my life, leaving a marriage and all that that entails. And I said to the universe, show me a sign. And I started seeing hearts everywhere in nature and in the shapes of rocks and in birds of trees and in clouds, in the sky.
And it was that beautiful reminder
that first of all, I was following my heart above all other voices, but also that nature was reminding me to stay with my heart. You know that self-love and
the love for others, the love of others and my imagination allowed me to create this tool that now helps other people heal their hearts.
So
it’s imagination.
that’s my power word I like it and that’s a good one. And I haven’t heard that before and I like it.
your book. It’s a guidebook with the cards. What kind of cards are they and how do they work. So these are Oracle cards. Are you familiar with the Oracle of Delphi?
I’m not. No. Oh, okay. Ancient Greece, ancient Greece. Oracle of Delphi was a, the priestesses that people would go
to seek guidance and advice, and she would go into a trance. They would ask their question and through her trance, she would give them the knowledge and the information that was hopefully going to help them figure themselves out.
So these are called Oracle cards for that same reason. Instead of going to a cave in Delphi in Greece, you get to just pick up your box of Oracle cards anywhere you are, shuffle through them, find a card that resonates for you. So this one’s called heart root. And if you can see that’s the bottom of a tree whose the roots are shaped like a heart.
Nature did that in and of itself. That’s amazing. I mean, you could just look at the picture
and have insight about what that means for you. But then most Oracle cards have a message and this is the meditation message. So you read the message which says the first love we experience after leaving source is that of our families.
However that dynamic functioned. We learned our love patterns from an early age. If love isn’t working for you, dig deep into your roots to find your true meaning of love. So then you take that message out into your day and
You think about it. You ruminate on it. You wonder about the meaning of that. You start to think about your childhood and how were you loved or not loved as a child?
What did you have to do as a child to get love? If it wasn’t given freely and without expectation from you, and suddenly you go down this rabbit hole of looking at patterns in your life to understand the way in which you’re showing up today in love. And that’s how it works. It’s as simple as that. Do you think it’s helping people tap into their intuition?
100%? Yeah, 100%. And it doesn’t matter whether
you open the Bible to a passage that you read it and it has meaning for you, and you take those words into your day. This is a similar process right now. These were not written by God. These were written by me. But the process is the same.
it’s allowing you to step out of your busy monkey mind and move into a state of receptivity where you’re willing to receive wisdom from someone else’s words that start you thinking about something you may not have thought of before, or in a way you hadn’t thought of it before.
And that shift in perception creates a healing moment. The potential for a healing moment. And so in the boxed set that I’ve created. So this is a hardcover box set. You get the 42 cards. So there’s lots of cards that you can play with. And then the guide book, I share my story in the guidebook, my personal story about these hearts and what was happening for me at the time that I was finding them.
And
that’s a vulnerable part in here, is actually sharing that story. But then I teach you how to work with the cards different ways that you can work with them. And then each card has its own page. So there’s more information, more messages that you can receive from the heart card that you’ve chosen. And then there’s a journal, and then you get a pen and a bookmark.
So you really get everything you need to sit down and meditate on your heart and your relationships and what needs to change and what could be healed. And it gives you a helping hand. You still have to make the choices. It’s not telling you what to do. It’s not predicting your future because only you can do that. It’s stimulating.
Some thoughts.
Exactly, exactly.
I hope you’re enjoying the podcast as a thank you for tuning in to the Dr. Haley show. I have a special coupon code that you can use throughout the month of October 2025. Get $10 off your purchase of $100 or more at haleynutrition.com The coupon code is XXXXXX That’s XXXXXX And as usual, you can even use this coupon with on sale and already discounted bundled items.
Enjoy the rest of this show.
I would imagine there’s a link to,
get that on your website. There is. And in fact, you would have received, an evergreen coupon to share with your audience where they can receive 20% off when they use that coupon. So that can go in the in the show notes.
Okay. I’m sure I have that somewhere. And I’ll make sure it’s in the show notes. And also you’re also a, an author among 22 authors on some kind of collaboration. That’s is that come is that happened yet or is that up and coming. That has happened. This is the book here. It’s called The Expressive Arts The Ultimate Creative Guide to Transforming Stress.
And who doesn’t need that in this day and age?
Yes. Yeah. And my the chapter that I wrote is, The Heart’s Journey to Healing and Wholeness from chronic pain to self-love. And there’s that theme, again, of self-love. And part of this whole process of writing this book, this book, this chapter in as well as creating the Oracle cards, is that reflection of the journey from being in constant pain and in a state of constant self-sabotage by not caring for myself, not honoring
this amazing vessel, this body, and so manifesting chronic pain to the point
of fibromyalgia and, being unable to really function very well at all although
I kept pushing through and pushing through, and
that journey of discovering why I was in pain,
where was it coming from and how was I contributing to its existence, and what was it trying to tell me? Right. And what it was trying to tell me is that I needed healing, that I had
allowed too many things to happen in my life that I hadn’t given myself space and time to heal from.
Yeah. And eventually that shows up in the body. So this book is well, this book is the 22 practitioners who each wrote a chapter share a piece of their story and about a healing modality that they now work with and how that healing modality helped them. And then we share with the reader one of those healing modalities, so that they’ve got something that they can take with them after they after they read the book.
Do you still have fibromyalgia?
I do still have symptoms of fibromyalgia. I like to say I was given a diagnosis. I received a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. I am not fibromyalgia though, right? It’s not a defining characteristics of myself.
I had
an amazing naturopath who said to me, have you ever heard of fibromyalgia?
After I gave her my litany of symptoms and I said, nope, never heard of it. This was 20 years ago, and she said, I’d like you to go and look it up, do some research. So she sent me home to do some research. How many doctors do that give you that permission? Right. So I love research. So I immediately went home and started looking it up.
What then passed as the internet and ticked off every box of symptoms. And so I came back to her and said, wow, this really feels like what I’m dealing with. And she said, yeah, I really think it is. And so here’s what you can do about it. Right? So there was another moment of empowerment. Not yeah, not that fibromyalgia is any kind of entity or anything.
It’s a group of symptoms. Do you have these symptoms. Yes okay. We call it fibromyalgia because it sounds like a what some kind of fibrous muscles myalgia fibro. Well you know maybe there might be some scar tissue or something, but ultimately it’s this group of symptoms. And when you’re living a certain way, those are going to be a lot less.
And when you’re living another way, you’re going to experience those symptoms a lot more. You definitely have a say in the expression of life that you’re living. Yes, 100%. And that experience for me of realizing that now I have something I can work with for me
I guess being given this diagnosis allowed me it empowered me to decide.
Right? I want to understand this. I want to know what I can do about it, because I don’t believe that anything is inevitable in terms of our health. And then how can I change my life, not only physically, but again, spiritually, emotionally, and energetically? What am I holding on to in my body that is expressing itself through this pain?
And that was the journey to moving away from a relationship, a very significant relationship in my life and into a different way of living. And
that is a huge process. It’s not easy necessarily, but it can be done sometimes with ease, some days with ease, some days not. But the end result was that taking control of my life and deciding to live
my life the way I came here to live it was the cure for the host of symptoms that I had.
Now, if I go and foolishly eat gluten, I will have a huge flare up of all of my cluster of symptoms. So when I say yes, I’m still living with fibromyalgia. Yes, it’s there because the markers are still there. Yeah, but if
I put something in my body that’s going to create inflammation, then I’m going to have a flare up, which is the same for anybody who puts things in their body that causes inflammation.
As we now know. But what causes inflammation
for one person might be different than another. Yes. See, the Italian and me could probably snort gluten and be fine, but maybe. But what if you eat it for a while and noticed if you felt better? Yeah, I’m just saying no. If it happened, it could happen. But it happens to be one of those things I get away with, but I don’t consume it a lot.
But
there’s times when breads are involved in my life, so. Absolutely. And so they should be. I mean, bread is an amazing food.
it’s not the bread that’s the issue. It’s the quality of the flour, the quality of the ingredients that goes into the bread. People who have fibromyalgia, who have gluten intolerance or even who have celiac disease can go to Europe, where they’re using a very different kind of flour.
They’re growing it very definitely. It’s more of an ancient grain. It’s not GMO and not have a reaction to eating that bread. Yeah. And it is true that there are some grains that have more gluten, and then bakers will even add gluten to their dough because it makes it so sticky
and rubbery so that
they can fling their pizza dough and it doesn’t go in 100 different directions.
That’s gluten that does that. That is gluten. Yeah. And bakers will tend to,
lean towards the pleasant experience where things aren’t crumbling apart. It’s true. And having had to teach myself how to bake gluten free, I can tell you I’ve had some spectacular disasters. I’m really grateful that there are people out there now who know how to bake with gluten free.
And I can go to the grocery store and I can get myself
a good loaf of gluten free bread. Not have to make it myself. You know what I realized for people that really like bread and cakes and stuff like that, there is an easy way to make something that’s almost like bread without having any bread in it.
You can take anything and mush it together and throw it in a pan and make a pancake. Literally anything that’s true. True. Probably mushrooms and vegetables. You could mush it up, throw it in a pan and eat it like bread. Yes you can. There are always solutions. Oh, boy. Is there anything I should have asked you? I mean, we talked a long time.
I kept you over an hour already. Is there anything I should have asked you that we left out? I don’t think so. All right. Yeah. Be selfish. More questions. All your. What are your best links? They’re going to be in the description. They’re going to be below the video on the podcast blog page everywhere. If you’re consuming it on app, it’ll be in the description.
If you’re consuming it on Spotify, it’ll be in the description. But for those that just want to hear and type on their phones or something like that, where should they go if they want to buy your book, be on a foraging tour. I have a number of different websites. I actually have three websites I think now, but one of them isn’t related to any of this, so we won’t go there.
But I do editing work as well. I help people edit
their books. I help them get their stories out in the world, especially stories of empowerment or stories
of healing. But I’m not going to give out that website. But what I will give out is meganedge.ca that’s my main website. And then you can also find me at beyondthegardengate.ca you can find me on LinkedIn.
“You can find me on YouTube @MeganEdgeHealing
. My Etsy store is MeganEdgeBotanicals and that’s where you can purchase all of these amazing products. I guess that’s what we didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about my line of healing product salves, tinctures, teas and serums and all those good things, right? Do share. Well, not only do I love to go out into the forest and forage for food, I love to go out in the forest and forage for medicine.”
And I believe wholeheartedly. And it’s backed up by tons of research.
how much more effective whole medicine coming from the whole food, the whole fruit, the whole vegetable, the whole mushroom is for us than a derived or extracted synthetic chemical byproduct. It just is because our bodies are natural. We that we better, relate to natural healing.
If we take a mushroom and we put it in our body, it will go to the places that our body needs it to go to. So I’ve created a line of healing salves, infused oils, blends of those infused oils, aromatherapy, teas and tinctures so that as people are on their healing journey,
they can use these products to help them along the way.
And I want to be clear, I’m not, okay, I am anti pharmaceutical. I will say that, but
for reasons I have my reasons and
they’re well-grounded and well-founded and the research is really demonstrating this now I also work with people who are, dealing with the medical system. I advocate for people with their doctors, with the hospital, with the care system to help them move through that.
And so I do a lot of work with pharmaceuticals and the side effects of pharmaceuticals. I worked very closely with some of my clients in that capacity, and I see that it well earlier. I’m sorry you said it well earlier. And it was something like the things in your medicine cabinet can be a lot more dangerous than the things we’re foraging.
Yes.
and the reality is the things you’re foraging is medicine used to be where medicine came from. And it’s still is. I mean, a lot of these big pharmaceutical giants are sending their researchers down into the Amazon and other places like that, searching for
the origin of the medicine, the original plant, and how the indigenous peoples have been using it for thousands of years, and then bringing it back to the laboratory and isolating and extracting the various components that they hope are going to be the moneymaker.
And that’s not I’m not being facetious with that. You just have to follow the money. We see it everywhere. So when that’s the case and then we’ve got this one size fits all medicine, which it’s not working. This is why we have a crisis. This is why we have a health crisis in our countries. I’m in Canada. I’m assuming you’re in the US.
our people are suffering huge epidemics of health crises and the medicines that they’re being given, that they’re being prescribed by their doctors are not working. They are causing more harm and more deaths than they are preventing. And we’ve got the statistics. We know this now. So what the solution was in some cases, maybe you still need to have those medications.
If it’s an emergency or a short term benefit, then yes, if that’s what’s going to work in the short term. But you still have to change your life in order to be healthy. You’re still going to have to make different decisions. You cannot just take a pill and expect that that’s going to solve all your problems, because it isn’t going to it isn’t.
It just isn’t going to. Yeah. What I like about the tinctures, though, is their food, and there’s rarely overdosing or even the possibility of it in most cases. Yes, that is absolutely true. And
it is more bioavailable. I use that word earlier in our conversation. And what does that mean, bioavailable? It means that your body can do more with it because it’s a naturally occurring substance and your body is a naturally occurring entity, right?
It’s a biological entity. So when you put a tincture in, first of all it’s living
this is the thing about herbal medicines. It’s alive. So you’re putting something into your alive body that is alive as opposed to something that is inert. And then your body is able to do more with it. And if there’s parts of it that your body doesn’t need, then
you pee them out.
There’s no harm, no foul as opposed to if you’re taking a pharmaceutical and you pee it out, you’re picking out most of that chemical is going down the drain, and then it’s affecting our waterways. And it’s I mean, it’s a whole big conversation about all of that. And not to catastrophize or, you know, go into apocalyptic thinking. It’s more there are things we can do about this.
We don’t have to participate in that kind of medicine if we have an alternative. That’s why it’s called alternative medicine. Yeah. You know, I actually have consumed a half gallon of aloe vera a day for a week. And it’s of course excessive and inner leaf only, not the outer leaf because, which I would still consider the inner leaf a whole food.
People say no, you have to have the skin with it. Not necessarily. Sometimes, you know, you peel the banana before you eat it. But I have consumed a half gallon a day for five days in a row anyway, and it doesn’t mean I got a half gallon of benefit my body got rid of, what it didn’t need and you know, used what it could and so be it.
But it was a fun little experiment. And that’s the beauty of real food as medicine. BJ Palmer, one of the most controversial and, well, developer of chiropractic, and I think it was in the 50s, you said something like if we took all the drugs. And speaking of the medications, the pharmaceuticals, not the tinctures, and if we took all the drugs and threw them into the ocean, it would be good for mankind, bad for the fish.
But good for mankind. And we’re not going to do that with tinctures and food. It’s not gonna. We’re not going to harm if you put food back in the environment. It turns into more food. It keeps on turning over. And yeah, it’s almost like nature has a cycle. You know, I joked about this on a, previous podcast. Actually, I was in someone else’s and we were talking about being formed of the dust of the earth.
And,
I kind of joked and said, you know, the scriptures say that, but it’s not necessarily a compliment, because if you think about what dust is, dust is dry soil. What is soil? Soil is feces. So the whole earth was at some point, you know, consumed and pooped out by something, whether it was a, bacteria or a lizard or a worm or, horse and elephant.
You know, it just keeps on going around in a circle. Yes. Somehow that’s what we’re made from. And somehow we’ll return to that. We will indeed. We are part of the cycle. And the Earth, as far as we know and understand, is mostly a closed system. I mean, we know
that we get radiation from the sun. We know that there are solar winds.
We know that there are neutrinos. We know that there are things that that bombard us from space. But all of these cycles, all of the processes on the planet, are part of a closed cycle. Our water system, our air system, the way that the rocks move up and out again, everything gets recycled. So it makes sense for us to be good stewards of the planet rather than poisoning it in the same way we’re poisoning ourselves.
Yeah, it’s just going to come back to us. It’s just going to come back to us. So why wouldn’t we want to take care of our planet in the same way that we would want to take care of ourselves? I absolutely agree with you. I would love if we would stop polluting the planet. And it’s not about the temperature, it’s about living, you know?
Oh, why are we arguing about temperature? When yeah, we can all agree we’re polluting the planet. Yeah, that should be a no brainer. Really? Yeah, it should be an absolute no brainer. And honestly, I don’t know how some people sleep at night knowing the choices they’ve made to consciously destroy the ecosystems that we are a part of. We’re not above the ecosystems.
We live within the ecosystems, and we can see what’s happening to ourselves into the planet because I want to breath clean air. I want to drink clean water. Yeah. And I shouldn’t have to filter it. It should just be there. Absolutely, absolutely. And we can have a whole other conversation about the climate and the temperature’s changing. I have a background in geology.
It’s one of my degrees. And what I loved about studying geology was studying deep time and understanding that the planet has constantly been changing. And this actually brings us full circle to what you and I were talking about the very beginning about change and embracing change. Change is the only constant. Yeah. Everything changes. What are we trying to hold on to
when we’re talking about not allowing the planet to warm up or cool down?
That’s not up to us. Except for the fact that we’re contributing at this point. But the fact that the planet has its own cycles, its own systems, it has had this for billions of years or 100,000 years, depending on what you believe in. But nonetheless, it’s. For 8000 years for 8000 years or however long we’ve been here for, the fact of the matter is, there’s always been change.
And if you talk to the old folks, they’ll tell you that although the winter of, you know, 22 was the worst winter ever, and then you get somebody saying, this is the worst winter ever. The planet changes, the planet fluctuates. There are many, many systems that are happening, most of which we don’t even begin to understand the whole butterfly effect.
Right. The butterfly flaps its wings over here,
and the typhoon happens over there. Yeah. Everything we do has a consequence. Everything we do has an action. So we should be thinking about what we want the action to be and what we want the consequence to be. And we should be understanding that we are not the be-all and end-all of the things that happened on this planet.
The planet will do what the planet will do. Yeah, the glaciers have come and gone and
they’ve come again, you know,
I think what it comes down to is a need to control. And I think that as a species, we’d like to be in control and we’d like to be in charge. At least some people do.
And they like to be in charge of everything and everybody. And there’s a fear of losing control, which is fueling at a psychological level, this whole push for nothing is allowed to change. That’s my soapbox. I’ll get down from the soapbox now on another podcast. Okay. To be continued. That’s right. Megan and Michael will speak of this next.
And it’s Megan M E G A N what’s the rest of the
Domain name Edge E D G E as in on the edge What a cool name to Megan Edge Yes. Okay. dot c a, dot c a for Canada,
But you can find me no matter where you are in the world. Yes, yes. But
don’t type in .com people in the United States.
You won’t find me that way. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me.
I hope you enjoyed that episode today on the Dr. Haley Show. Make sure to hit subscribe on whichever platform you are listening to this. If this episode made you think of someone, go ahead, take a screenshot and share this exact episode with them. You can catch the show notes for this episode on drhaley.com. If you want to geek out with Dr. Michael Haley on other radical health topics.
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