Carolyn Jones is a Holistic Health Educator and Chaplain who teaches the art of self-care and practices a ministry of presence. She is licensed by the New York State Chaplain Task Force and serves the community as an herbalist, a certified aromatherapist and reflexologist.
In this episode Carolyn shares her insights on the power of deepening our relationship with plants beyond culinary uses to medicinal and spirtual applications.
This episode we explore:
☀️How to get started with herbalism
☀️Spiritual uses for plants
☀️Medicinal uses for common herbs and spices
☀️Rootworker belief systems
Episode Resources
Connect with Carolyn
Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified
This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Thank you to our supporting members for helping us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.
Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.
The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.
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Dalia Kinsey: Welcome to the show Carolyn. I'm so glad to have you.
Carolyn Jones: Thank you for having me, Dalia.
Dalia Kinsey: I have been really interested in herbalism for years, but I always felt like I wasn't a plant person. I thought I didn't have a green thumb, and only since 2020 have I realized that I just wasn't slowing down enough to pay attention to when the plants were asking for more water or more light, and just suddenly it feels like being connected to the plants has been a little demystified for me.
But of course, I'm a total. Baby when it comes to understanding herbalism, the spiritual uses of herbs, any of that. So when I saw you recently in a replay of a webinar that you did for another institute that I've been just studying, like their library, I haven't even gotten that deep yet. I was just fascinated that this institute in particular looks at the spiritual aspect of plants in a way that I really had never seen before, but it really resonates with me that the plants are not seen as just something we take things from.
They're not seen as inanimate. They're seen as really powerful and as teachers that are always trying to speak to us. So when I saw your workshop on the African American relationship with herbalism and root work in particular. I was just blown away, and so I'm so glad to have you here to share some of your story with us and maybe how the listeners can get started exploring some of our traditions that maybe feel a little lost to us right now.
Carolyn Jones: Well, I'm so happy that you enjoyed my presentation and I'm even happier that you were interested and curious enough to invite me on so we could talk about this in more depth. I love the subject and we are all babies when it comes to the plant world. We'll never know everything. It's always a learning process.
The interesting thing is, I seemed like I could kill plants to look at them, you know? Oh, wow. I went to a workshop at a Brooklyn Botanic Garden one day, and I said to the gardener, I feel so guilty because it seems like I touch a plant and dies. He said, don't feel guilty. You know how many plants we kill around here?
It becomes like an experiment, but I still feel that sensitivity because for me, the love of plants started early. My mother had a rose garden in the front of the house. We grew up in Bedstuy. I grew up in Bedstuy, born in Harlem. We moved to, uh, Brooklyn when I was six, and in the back she grew corn, tomatoes, college, she had a beautiful garden, you know, a Georgia peach.
So she brought all that knowledge from her sharecropper parents and. Who unfortunately I never got the chance to meet. They died when she was 16, but she certainly took their knowledge seriously and brought it with her as a form of survival. Now, when I was younger, I didn't really pick up on it. Like I loved looking at it, but worms bothered me.
Dalia Kinsey: As much as I love being outside, I really have a thing with spiders. That was another barrier. I thought, if I'm gonna be spending time with plants, I need to be comfortable with everything that's out there. It's good to hear that not necessarily so.
Carolyn Jones: Yes. And I'm gonna tell you, just as of last night, I connected with a neighborhood garden, the Q Garden here in Brooklyn, and I actually sat next to someone who was digging out a pot and centipedes were running all over, and I didn't run screaming into the night.
Dalia Kinsey: How'd you get to that point?
Carolyn Jones: I don't, I don't know how it happened. Okay. When they were talking about a garden bed that had jumping worms, I held a full interview. How do they jump? Where do they jump? Where are they? You know, because I wanted no part of it, but luckily we didn't see any worms. We did see some of, I think it was a Japanese beetle, but that didn't even send me running.
But I was really amazed that I didn't run away from the, well, they didn't get on me. So that's a start. They were on the pot. So being around people, I think who. Are not fearful that way. Mm-hmm. I think some of their courage may rub off. I'm not quite sure. We'll see next week, but you know, for now, so that it kept me from gardening.
It really did. Mm-hmm. So as I began to develop a community of herbalists around me, more experienced herbalists, and they began to explain how medicines are better when you have fresh plants, you know, not always dealing with the dry herbs, then my mind began to open up more and more. So over time, as you expose yourself to people with different levels of knowledge, I guess this transformation takes place that you're really not aware of.
That's the way we grow anyway. You don't think about it unless you really sit down, slow down, as you said. I thought that was very profound. You do have to slow down now. In order to cultivate my love of plants, I started collecting bamboo shoots. I can keep bamboo alive in water. I have like a bamboo garden all the way through the apartment here, the bedroom and living room.
It's in here and they're flourishing. So I feel very happy about that. But I also incorporate that I'm a bereavement chaplain and I incorporate plants into that service as well because I find that plants are very comforting. And I just received a, a picture of someone's memorial garden. She had lost her son.
I was doing some consultation with her and recommended that she use their backyard or the area that they have. Space. They have to designate it as an altar for him and she Oh, that's beautiful. She a picture of him beautiful memorial garden that the family has created in his memory. So plants will bring peace and depending on the type of plant, it will comfort yo…
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