I am not discounting cultural appropriation of Native American smudging. Please read until the end. The practice of smudging dates back to prehistoric times, and is still very much in use today worldwide for cleansing everything from dwellings to human spirits. However recent research has shed light on the popularity of this activity, revealing that burning certain plant matter actually clears harmful bacteria. The ritual burning of herbs and herbal resins is common in many cultures in the world. From the rich frankincense of the Church and the Middle Eastern bazaar, to the heady incenses of Asia, to the raw energy of brush burning in many native cultures….the purification of space through this modality is a global phenomenon and one you can benefit from highly. Burning sage is one of the oldest and purest methods of cleansing a person, group of people or space. While Native American sage burning is the most commonly recognized form of it today, it has nevertheless been a shared practice in other cultures too. From the ancient Celtic druids who used sage as a sacred herb alongside Oak Moss for burning as well as medicinal purposes, to the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon whose Palo santo is also a common means of cleansing with smoke. Palo Santo (sacred wood) sage burning ceremonies are still practiced to this day. Bursera graveolens, known in Spanish as palo santo, is a wild tree native from the Yucatán Peninsula to Peru and Venezuela. Bursera graveolens is found in the seasonally dry tropical forests of Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and on the Galápagos Islands. Using herbal smoke and incense for the purpose of clearing the air of unwanted impurities, negative energies, or to conjure up spirits, has been practiced across the globe by almost every race, creed, and religion since the very beginning, and many still use herbal smoke today, not just for spiritual practice, but for health. Modern studies have shown that burning herbal smoke (it does not always, and should not always, be white sage) can drastically reduce the amount of pathogens and bacteria in the air, by up to 94%. While many modern practitioners of the art of “smudging” may have taken tips from Indigenous people, to assume its cultural appropriation is to wrongly ignore the practice’s diverse origin and practical uses. The term “smudging” was not popularized until the late 1900s when it also became married to the specific Native North American practice, which often involved the use of sage, sweetgrass, cedar, tobacco, a feather, and a sacred dish, often a shell. Some tribes worry that because of smoke cleansing’s recent spike in popularity, white sage is being over-harvested. But, good news; white sage is only one of the many, many herbs you can use and the practice does not have to be identical to the Native American ritual. If you’re worried about cultural appropriation, you can burn sage in many different ways.
I started using Head and Shoulders ten years ago for itchy scalp and dandruff, and then for ten years I have not had itchy scalp and dandruff, so I thought “why do I still buy shampoo to combat itchy scalp and dandruff when I do not have itchy scalp and dandruff,” so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? It’s alright if you can’t because apparently I fuckin couldn’t either
Cutting something out of your life because you think you don’t need it any more only to realize that it was in fact working as intended and preventing a problem that will return should you stop doing this is a good experiment to run periodically with something small like dandruff shampoo, lest you start to think it would be a good idea to do this with like let’s say public health and the social safety net and vaccines
I had a liver transplant when I was 14 and like six months later I was chatting with my surgeon and he said “there’s gonna come a time, probably when you’re a teenager, where you’re gonna think, ‘I feel great, why am I still taking all this medication? I haven’t needed it in years.’ and you’re gonna want to stop taking all this medication. Guess what’s gonna happen then? You’re gonna go into rejection and your liver is gonna start failing, and you’re gonna be dying again, and we’re gonna have to find you another liver. So don’t do that.” And I said “why the fuck would anyone do that?” and he said “people are stupid.”
every once in a while when I get annoyed by a pharmacy or don’t wanna get out of bed to do my drugs I think “ugh, this is dumb, why do I do this?” and that conversation slams into me like a truck and I remember that I am, in fact, stupid
The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.
To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.
The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.
White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.
So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”
At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.
White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.
TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.
And this is why some times the best thing you can do is just read and reblog.
I teach my 7th graders about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
I bring in a graduated cylinder of it and we talk about how it’s used in nuclear power plants and gmo crops. How inhaling even the small amount I’m holding can lead to suffocation or even death. It’s found in vaccines and cancer cells, but also in infant formula and pet food. It is a huge component of acid rain, can cause severe burns, and has been found in places that were thought to be the most pristine and unpolluted locations on earth.
We talk about how there are little to no regulations on this chemical. No bans, no warning labels, and most manufacturers don’t even have to disclose their use of it in their products.
My students are outraged. We talk about what we can do. Create posters and flyers to spread awareness. Contact our senators with petitions to ban DHMO. Spread this information all over social media.
Then I explain that the real problem with dihydrogen monoxide is that….when I am thirsty…there is just nothing else as refreshing, and then I watch their looks of absolute shock and horror as I drink the entire vial down.
don’t touch people that don’t want to be touched!!! people might not want to be touched due to abuse, people might not want to be touched due to sensory issues, and some people just don’t like it. i don’t care how weird or ‘sad’ it is that you can’t touch them, just don’t fucking do it. their comfort is more important than you poking them or hugging them.
No ones asking you to go outside and make out with a wasp or become the worlds #1 wasp advocate we’re asking you to stop making “death to all wasps” and “wasps are evil” into a personality trait because, for people like me, who do work with and care about these creatures and their importance public perception is so incredibly interlinked with conservation
“Save the bees” for example, is incredibly popular but public is almost entirely applied to the European Honey Bee, a commercial species that is farmed by humans and therefore has the benefit of human protections. The bees actually dying out big time? Native bees. Unsurprisingly the commercially beneficial honey bee often directly competes with native bees, harming their populations, and those native bees (which are often solidary species) don’t get the benefit of human care. But most people aren’t thinking about the native bees when they want to help, because they don’t even realize that the bees really struggling are ones that buried 3 feet in dirt and not the cool honeycomb building ones.
Wasps? Who have an actively harmful, negative stereotype where people hate them because their “big mean bully bugs”? do you think they’re getting researched? Funding for conservation? You think people are looking to donate to campaigns that focus on helping obscure wasp populations? Research for obscure flies? Tracking parasite populations? No. You can’t even make a positive comment on social media without getting a literal hoard of people telling you how much you need to know that they personally hate wasps and will kill on sight. The research done for these species that people hate so much? It’s usually done by a literal handful of people.
People who like bugs and wasps aren’t asking you to be their best friend and invite them over for tea. We’re asking that people remove this public, widespread unfounded hatred for an entire group of species, a species group so diverse some people think it might actually outnumber beetles, so that people who do care about them can.
Oh my god, food extract is not the same as an essential oil.
Food extract is the flavoring of something cooked down into a carrier oil or alcohol that is safe for human ingestion.
Essential oil is the pure extract of the plant refined down and distilled for concentrated medicinal purposes to a significantly higher strength than simply adding ground up mint leaves to your water. The two are not comparable in any way.
Cinnamon extract and cinnamon essential oil are not the same thing.
One is about 100 times the strength of the other and can also cause acute organ failure. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the food extract.
Sweet gods I’m not trying to be mean, I want you to be aware and safe and stop putting yourselves and others at risk. Please.
Like maybe my tone is hard to read, maybe it just comes off as really angry but it’s not, it’s fear and worry. I read posts and clutch my head in alarm going “no! No! That’s how people die!” And then I get exasperated because a bunch of people not formally qualified chime in with “um actually this is a lie” and it’s not, it’s really, really not.
I’m not some big pharma advocate. I’m a crunchy witch hippy just like you with salt rock lamps and rose quartz all over my house. I just happen to have spent the last 15 years of my life studying the actual science of holistic medicines and I’m trying to help you not get hurt (or worse) becuase you trusted a sales person with no idea what the ever loving hell they were talking about beyond a sales pitch designed to maximize profit. Gah.
I see this so often in the Mommy world. There was a lady not long ago in one of the mom groups who was really worried about her toddler. He’d had a persistent cough for weeks and the doctor couldn’t figure out why. Someone asked, well what have to tried to treat it with, so far? She said she was using a humidifier, honey, and eucalyptus EO in the shower every night.
Yeah.
In case you were wondering, eucalyptus can cause respiratory distress in young children.
Sadly I don’t wonder. I have a friend whose daughter died from a home made menthol oil chest rub. She wasn’t even ten yet, but her mom– a qualified aromatherapist– thought she’d be old enough to handle it. She went into respitory distress and died seizing in her mother’s arms on route to the hospital. It was one of the most harrowing stories I had to listen to during my holistic training. She stood up there, on this podium next to a bunch of ponzy scheme essential oil sellers who looked like they wanted the floor to swallow them, and said “I killed my child with good intentions”.
I’ll never forget the look on her face.
So to reiterate, children under the age of ten should not be directly exposed to things like eucalyptus oil, peppermint or wintergreen. If you are using such things in your house and your child starts to complain of headaches, lethargy and general “feel worse”, don’t just assume it’s the cold/flu. Those are all signs of menthol sensitivity and they only get worse with increased exposure. Ventilate the room, take them outside if you can until the air clears. Do not apply again.
Rapid onset wheezing may be a sign of allergic reaction or possible asthma attack triggered by the menthol too. If they tell you their chest is warm or fuzzy when you use it, that’s another sign it’s not going down well with them. Again, ventilate the area or remove anything you applied to them. Administer inhalers if necessary. Watch for any more labored breathing or if they suddenly go limp or you can’t wake them up. If they do call 911.
This can also apply to people with allergies and asthma who are otherwise healthy.
One of the safest, natural ways to alleviate congestion is with just pure good old fashioned warm steam. Keep the air moist, drink plenty of warm fluids. Menthol can help relieve the feeling of congestion, but there’s limited evidence to suggest it actually clears the airways. And for the love of god don’t inhale mustard or horseradish (I’ve seen that suggestion on posts too, though how you’d get those oils I don’t know). That’s literally what tear gas is made of.
I apologize sincerely for bringing this long post back into your lives, fam, but I’m getting inundated with questions about what can the possible harm be if you dab a little neat peppermint oil on your child’s skin to help them with a little head cold, and this is the most succinct way I can put it.
The harm you may do, is in fact death. I am not telling you these things to be a kill joy, I’m telling you so you won’t accidentally kill yours.
This is the most hilarious shit ever to me because this fuck clearly has zero idea how just…… Basic winds currents work.
“I am thankful for my time here with this fern.”
Im confused are they suggesting they’re doing that to the fern through energy and not… the wind?
I… oh god I think so?
Yall it hurts no one for them to believe what they believe is happening, whether you agree or not. Can we not just bully people for things that hurt no one and act with superiority complexes? Let people find magic in things.
It’s one thing to believe differently than someone and it’s another to completely ignore science. This isn’t like a theological debate, it’s someone claiming pseudoscience (if that really is what they’re doing.) In this case, it’s just uneducated, but at worst it’s pushing a VERY common and very false narrative that magic work can break the laws of physics and do fantasy novel stuff. It could be harmless, but young people especially can get seriously manipulated and even injured by that line of thinking. Implying you have supernatural abilities or can talk to plants like this actually CAN do harm.
I wouldn’t call it a superiority complex to value science, nor do I think any criticism counts as bullying. There is PLENTY of magic in the world to be found without having to rely on alternative facts.
what harm does believing in this cause. seriously, what actual harm? this isnt any different then thinking you can manipulate a candle flame with your mind.
also theyre not ignoring science? they just are demonstrating what they, specifically, do with trees and plants for whatever reason. there is no denying science anywhere in this video
I’m sorry it’s very late and I’m not known to be the most coherent of people, but they do showcase what they are doing as some sort of energy work and controlling of the environment around them (they call it “energy mirroring” as if the plant is mirroring what they are doing because of their special abilities and not because of the wind.) Considering that many young people only use tiktok and tumblr to gather their sources - which, sure, isn’t only the person who made the video’s fault but the people watching it as well - it is harmful because it sells an image of magic that just is not true.
If someone sees that and believes that’s how things work and tries to do the same and gets no similar results, that could impact them negatively.
If someone sees that and believes that’s how things work and tries to do the same and because of external circumstances they get the same results then you get someone thinking they can manipulate things with their mind which can and does evolve into more serious issues.
Superficially, there’s nothing wrong with believing whatever, but the way the video is presented is very much framed to be a /this thing I’m doing is energy work and this is my doing it see how this plant reacts to me?/ type of thing, and that’s its problem, in my opinion, at least.
In sum, that’s what makes it “harmful”.
It doesn’t matter the intentions but what it portrays.
It’s fine if you do it on your own and whatnot I suppose but the moment you post it as some sort of enlightening activity, that’s sketchy.
This explains it well. Like, the act of playing with a plant just by itself is obviously harmless, but a lot of the target audience for this is in an extremely suggestable place, both from age and from magic experience level. The message of “look, you can perform magic that creates immediate, clearly visible, supernatural results” can be VERY dangerous.
I’ve legitimately seen younger, vulnerable, very new witches take this kind of info, run with it, then fall for spells where they can lose weight really quickly, change their eye color, learn to levitate, or even give themselves physical wings. And guess what? That gets REALLY DANGEROUS really quickly especially when some of those spells involve self harm or reckless behavior. Not to mention how spirit-dampening it can be when someone goes to try this at home and it doesn’t work.
This video might just be about talking to plants, but it comes from the same mental place as saying there’s a spell out there to turn your eyes purple. And that needs to be called out.
