Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Gardens of Hope welcomes Traditional Healing Practitioner Vee Martinez: Part 1
When traditional Eastern medicine meets therapeutic horticulture, something magical happens. This fascinating conversation between host Joe Grumbine and guest V Martinez explores the rich intersection of healing practices at the beautiful Gardens of Hope—a 2.5-acre sanctuary thoughtfully designed with "zones" that evoke different emotional responses as visitors journey through the landscape.
Martinez shares her winding path to becoming a traditional complementary and integrative healing practitioner. From early vegetarianism influenced by her mother, through studies in business and pre-pharmacy, to field botany work across multiple states, her journey finally led to Chinese medicine after experiencing its remarkable effectiveness firsthand. When acupuncture healed her broken toe after months of conventional care had failed, she knew she'd found her calling.
The heart of their discussion centers on the powerful concept that food truly is medicine. Chinese medicine recognizes how different flavors and temperature qualities in foods can strategically address specific health conditions—a stark contrast to America's processed food landscape. Both practitioners emphasize the profound connection that develops when growing your own food, noting how nurturing plants from seed to harvest naturally encourages healthier eating habits.
Perhaps most exciting is their plan to create a dedicated Chinese herb garden at Gardens of Hope. This collaboration will explore how traditional medicinal plants might adapt to local growing conditions, potentially offering formulations better suited to people living in that environment. As global herb supply chains face challenges with contamination and environmental changes, local cultivation represents both a solution and an opportunity for innovation.
Ready to discover how integrating Eastern medicine principles with therapeutic horticulture could transform your approach to wellness? Listen now and join this journey where ancient wisdom meets modern healing practices in the garden.
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today I've got a very special guest with me. Her name is V Martinez and she's a traditional complementary and integrative healing practitioner. And that's a lot of words, but they're impactful words. And she's come out to the Gardens of Hope Hope and we're talking about working together and integrating these practices using our therapeutic horticulture in our gardens. So be welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Really good. Thank you, Joe, for having me.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, it's been a treat We've been able to come out here and visit and you've been able to see the gardens a little bit. We've been able to sit and talk a little bit about things we do here in our therapeutic horticulture programs, and I'd like to learn a little bit about you and the things that you bring. First of all, tell me just what was your thought about just being out here in the gardens?
Speaker 2:I just felt this relaxed zone as I was walking by and getting all the scents in. It's a beautiful property, lots of lush flora and fauna. I saw a bunch of little lizards. I saw your owl pet. Can you name them?
Speaker 1:You know there's a bunch of them. So there's hims and hers. There's about four different types of owls and you can stick around out here into the sunset and you can see them all flying around it amazing. Yeah, you saw the one up in the in the tree I think that's a male okay I'm not 100% sure, but I could just see the eyes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, maybe a white horn, that's a barn owl barn owl yeah, but we have my wife.
Speaker 1:I don't know if she showed you the picture of that horned owl no that about a month ago, I don't know, six weeks ago, I was in my worst point with this cancer and I was really in a bad spot. She comes out and she goes. Honey, you got to see this and I hobbled myself outside and there's this fledgling great horned owl still had down feathers on him and he was sitting in a tree only about eight or nine feet high so you could just look at her. She got up on a ladder and literally got right up. She was shooting pictures, shooting videos, talking to him. He was there all day, all day. He spent the day with us they're fascinating.
Speaker 1:And then in the evening you heard the parents clicking away talking to him, and then he flew off and we haven't seen him since. Okay, so just beautiful though. And um, yeah, they're, I mean, they're our pest control. They keep all of our rodents down and we don't use any kind of poisons or anything, something about their eyes, just like oh, it makes me feel like they really penetrate my soul.
Speaker 2:That was probably the second time I've seen an owl eye to eye nice the first time was through, uh binoculars binoculars it's not a telescope binoculars yeah that a random person just lent me and they were. They were looking right at them and me and my friend were just hiking and I'm like can we? Borrow them right when I put them on, yeah, it like went from being turned to like.
Speaker 1:I saw the whole tent and the whole head turned nice isn't that, and they could turn their whole head around.
Speaker 2:That's wild and it just hit my soul. Like whoa I couldn't stop and my friend was like, okay, give it up, let her go. Let her go.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that was a great like intro to your garden. Yeah, yeah as we walk around, there's different zones for different modes. Absolutely, I absolutely can feel the vibe of every zone. It's just kind of like this oh, I'm entering this more group space, so I'm entering this more private space there's these different rooms.
Speaker 1:You know we sort of like pathways that go all around and you know it's funny, it's only two and a half acres but you can walk around as much as like a 10 acre property because there's literally just pathways to go here and there, and if you notice when you walk along, you'll stop and you look in a place and you'll notice what it is the zone, the room.
Speaker 1:And then you walk a few steps, 10 or 15 steps, and all of a sudden you look back and you can't even see where you were that's exactly what I did earlier when I went to my car. I was like wait minute, did I?
Speaker 2:just pass the zone or where? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you kind of get lost, even though it's not very big. It's not that big, I think it's the way the landscape is laid out.
Speaker 1:It's three-dimensional too, it is.
Speaker 2:And it's also kind of sloped.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it slopes in and out as you. Lot of dimension to it. There's a lot of yeah, that's more than the two, and plus not being able to see like what's very far. You can see this one little bush and this tree and just maybe a feature or water whatever, but you can't see any farther than that. I like that and it's like, oh, this I got, I, I found this space, you know, and then there's little places to sit. All over the place there's even logs that you can just sit down, and chairs and tables kind of all over, and so it's like Hidden art.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, little pieces Sitting with, like this, mouth open.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's very like bright eyed Yep Just in the corner that blends in.
Speaker 1:Exactly, but it kind of doesn't.
Speaker 2:And you're like oh, this trippy thing and every time like.
Speaker 1:I mean, I walk around this place multiple times a day for 30 years and I've always seen something new, every single time I walk around. Every morning, I get up and I walk around with my dogs and I look for that new thing. There's always a flower that opened up, or an owl feather that landed, or some bird that I hadn't seen before, but it's always something new.
Speaker 2:And you were mentioning that I think it was your wife 30 years ago it was all flat land.
Speaker 1:It was nothing. Well, I mean, the hill was still there, but yeah, there was nothing. The plants weren't here, the driveway wasn't here, the pool wasn't here, the house wasn't here, most of the trees, none of the plants, it was just old, Beautiful space. Yeah, so you know a lot of love and a lot of healing, A lot of people have gained a lot of peace, A lot of grief has been overcome, A lot of anxiety, A lot of, just a lot of everything. So I'd like to hear about you, know your, your practices. You have a pretty wide range of healing arts that you work with. I know you you work with herbs and you do some formulation. I know you deal with some Eastern medicine practices. You deal with a bunch of different things. Why don't you tell me a little bit about your background? What got you into this?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I've been into alternative medicine from a very young age through my mom's influence. I was vegetarian from the age of fourth grade. Around high school I became pescatarian and then in college was the first time I tried bacon. Really, I decided to jump outside of my scope. All right Try some meats I'd never tried in my life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what did bacon do for you?
Speaker 2:Bacon was delicious.
Speaker 1:Wasn't it To this day.
Speaker 2:I still eat bacon.
Speaker 1:I'm a vegan by force right now because of my cancer, but I do. I think people eat way too much meat.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But I think meat has a place.
Speaker 2:I subscribe to eat right for your blood type.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I really think there's a lot of truth to that.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I mean I studied Eastern rooted practices. So, food is medicine.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And eating is definitely what's going to take you further into your disease or into health 100%. And in Eastern, you know, know, in chinese medicine specifically, which is what I studied, there's, uh, there's more than five flavors, but the main five are sour, sweet, bitter, pungent, salty then, there's bland um, so all foods can fall into most of those categories, right. And then there's uh, there's temperature profiles right foods as well. So it's hot, warm, cold, cool. There's more neutral for fruits, for vegetables, for meats even.
Speaker 2:And so, according to what your body is telling you and me as a practitioner, that's how we kind of cater to your diet right. And there's so much truth to that.
Speaker 1:It's such powerful, uh, a pillar. You know so many people like you think about what people eat. You drive around and you see just one fast food place after another. Everything you drove even go on through the grocery store.
Speaker 2:Everything's processed, everything's prepackaged on a road trip, sometimes you have trouble finding something clean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just finding some food Finding food.
Speaker 2:You know you have to go to the grocery store a lot of the time.
Speaker 1:Big time, really the only place. Or find a fruit stand off the side of the road, exactly, yeah, Nobody's really selling soup off the side of the road. No, that's a niche that I feel like could be filled with the word.
Speaker 1:You see bread and it's like you can't even read most of the words If it doesn't have, you know, flour, water and salt and yeast. I mean, that's really all you need, our sourdough starter. You know, and that's it. And everything else is like what do I need that for? Make it soft and spongy, or make it not get moldy? Well, bread gets moldy, so eat it before it goes bad. You know, exactly so yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that that's maybe one of our biggest problems, especially here in America, where everything's so easy and convenient and cheap.
Speaker 2:My journey kind of scaled in and out of that, though, because it wasn't my first interest. My first major was actually business oh really and I went from that to uh, pre-pharmacy. I thought I want to be a pharmacy tech, just because, it was an easy route and I was pretty good at the sciences, and then I realized I was just doing job security.
Speaker 1:There's always going to be that yeah, I believed in it right, I've ever subscribed to.
Speaker 2:So I was like, why am I doing? This right for wrong, and so then I fell into the botany program at Weber State University in Utah, which is where I was living at the time.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:And they did a natural medicine route and I was like cool, well, this is, you know, a 45 minute commute from both me and like my job, but I think I could sacrifice that for two years. So I did that while I was a flight attendant. Oh, wow, and then yeah, I got the degree and then I was like wait, I really like the field side of botany. So even though, I didn't get that degree. You know, I have career.
Speaker 2:Adhd is what I like to call it and so I did a couple of field jobs for about four seasons. I did seasonal botanical work all around, you know, Utah, Colorado, Alaska, and then finally landed in the North Bay area.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:Where there's a Chinese medicine school and I was like you know, it's time for me to tap into that. Prior to that, I tried Chinese medicine for the first time, probably 10, 15 years before that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:When I broke a pinky toe and I went to an acupuncturist okay that did e-stem, just on the pinky toe. Didn't do any other points on my body, just direct e-stem and on that pinky toe he's like within five treatments we should get you back to health.
Speaker 2:And this is after three months of me nursing it right you can't do much for a broken pinky toe and I was a fight at the time like just walking and walking around, icing, yeah, and doing what I could, but it was so painful, yeah, and sure enough, within like the second treatment, I was like, oh, there's something here wow, this feels amazing. Already, and then, within that five fifth treatment, I was back to normal wow and fully like functional that'll catch your attention pretty quick yeah and at that time I was already like I want to go like the naturopathic route, but I don't know what and I thought of like an od degree.
Speaker 2:Um, I don't know, it just didn't hit the right buttons for me. When I had that treatment for acupuncture I was like I think this is it. I want to study chinese medicine yeah, yeah and uh definitely took a lot of commitment on my part and a lot of uh honestly like isolation because I moved so much for just the work for the job and then I stayed for, you know, chasing the career.
Speaker 2:So throughout my life I've always just gotten used to moving and it was fun at the time. And now I'm just like it's not fun anymore. This last move back to los angeles, I'm hoping will be my last all right I'm not hoping.
Speaker 1:You know, we create our yeah, yeah, you decide what you want to stay there for at least five years all right and or longer.
Speaker 1:You know, that's where my family is okay, my parents are growing old and it is very nice to be back right now right and a great time to be here with you absolutely, and our paths have just crossed and I can see a future together, working together and helping people thank you, I do too. Yeah, we have very similar mindsets, exactly viewpoints on life and the cool thing is is you know things. I don't know and I know things you don't know and we can share our experiences and learn from each other.
Speaker 1:And yeah, you know, I think it's chinese medicine has always interested me. I've never really studied. I've been an herbalist for most of my life, but that's you know, such a general term. And and I've studied herbs that grow around me for the most part native american herbs and european herbs for the most part, but I deal with some Chinese stuff.
Speaker 1:But I can remember I've worked with a lot of plant people for many, many years and a long time ago I had a girlfriend up in Oakland and she was a longtime herbalist and we went to this Chinese pharmacy and it was literally bins of plants and animals and all these different things. And it was like she had this prescription for a soup and then the guy came in and he's like here's all your things and you put it together and you make your soup and that's your medicine. And I was like, wow, that's, there was something about that that really struck a chord with me. I go, that's really important and I was in my 20s. It was like I think you know things but you don't. But that really hit me. As to the power of food as medicine, and it really ever since that point I've always looked at what I eat, and in a different way, and you go. What am I really putting in there?
Speaker 1:You know, and and and you know it's a weird thing, Cause it's like, it's almost like counter productive, cause if it tastes good, it's generally not that good for you. And if it tastes, if it generally exactly. And then you learn. You learn to adapt your taste.
Speaker 2:Honestly, what I've found the most interesting about herbs is and somebody told me this before it actually happened to me, and then that's, I think, why I noticed it but one of my favorite herbs professors mentioned that if it's the right formula for you, yeah, it might taste like ass at first. But the more you drink it you actually crave it, because it's your body telling you this is what you need, exactly because it knows what it's getting from it.
Speaker 1:And I've always had an affinity for bitters, and bitters are generally tonic. They usually have if it's bitter, it probably is doing something for you a positive, and I've always had a. I like things that are bitter.
Speaker 2:So I've always. When I make my formulas, a lot of times they're like people are like I don't know.
Speaker 1:It doesn't taste.
Speaker 2:I'm like I did not make it for its taste? Yeah well, chinese medicine, bitter, is associated to the heart or the fire channel, so like heart and small intestine. Um, so it's possible. You know you're deficient in what is that in? Uh, the salty, so like wood fire is metal water. Um, attributes, okay so like you know, it's possible. I haven't looked at your time but like sometimes you do crave, or other times you're craving and it's not necessarily needed in your body right, right and so it's because you're eating so much bitter that it's creating this other pathogen in your body.
Speaker 2:Could very well be, and so it's, yeah, it's not necessarily, if you crave it, you need it, but sometimes it definitely can be that it could be that, yeah, and I know that, like I went down this healing journey of you know, my dad passed away.
Speaker 1:He was overweight, diabetic, sleep apnea, heart disease, all the stuff. And I was looking at myself and I was 50 pounds overweight. And I'm like oh no, that's going to be me. So I'm like I got this wake-up call and I started studying nutrition better and I started what was your wake-up call? My dad passing and realizing that I was going to be him and I had that genetic.
Speaker 2:How old was he when he passed 70. Okay, way too young. Yeah, that is young.
Speaker 1:And he was a surgeon and he knew better. Yeah, and he just had a stressful life and made a lot of bad choices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I started, you know, studying nutrition and changing the way I ate and began this journey, and I don't regret it for a second. You know, and I've learned that I used to love and crave sugar and bread and all the things that do bad things to you if you have too much of them and never ate enough vegetables. I did everything wrong and I just started being a little more careful, started switching my diet and paying attention to the foods and making food and cutting out all the processed stuff, and all of a sudden, I lost 50 pounds in less than a year and I've kept it off for seven years and what happened was I started growing more vegetables and started really eating huge amounts of vegetables as part of my diet and started craving them. I started to really become like oh, I give me a big bowl of broccoli and some olive oil and I'll just eat it as a meal.
Speaker 2:Do you think there's an association to growing your own fruits, vegetables and then actually eating them? Oh, absolutely people grew their own veggies. Oh, it's exciting. Yeah, you take care of it.
Speaker 1:You nurture it. Of course I want to. You can't wait to pick it. It, oh, it's exciting. Yeah, you take care of it. You nurture it. Of course I want to eat it. You can't wait to pick it. It's not ready, it's not. Ooh, it's ready now, yeah, and then you want to go and eat it? Yeah, and there's nothing like that. Pick it up fresh.
Speaker 2:It's going to be almost incorporated to your gardens of hope that's having trouble getting their people to eat the right veggies, come out here and just grow your own lettuce, maybe it was just one, yes. And then you come out here and come back and come back and harvest it. You build and then community with other things that other people not build but grew exactly and you know, that's sort of one of the.
Speaker 1:The secret treasures of this is that I have volunteers come and everybody plants seeds and everybody transplants and I actually mix the soil from scratch. So we have, you know, all of this love and attention put to these things and then everybody gets to harvest and, yeah, sometimes you harvest the one you planted and sometimes you harvest the one the guy next to you planted. But you become part of this community of of and cycle of healing exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:so I I really believe that and eventually, like I got this whole plan that eventually we're you know, it's all organic, it's all um uh, heirlooms. So the seeds from the vegetables grow and so eventually we're going to have our own strains that are grown here for generations and they will ultimately become tailored to this place and eventually we'll have those seeds that we'll have available. People can take, you know, the Gardens of Hope seeds home with them. That's beautiful. So it's all coming.
Speaker 2:Question for you. Yeah, would you be interested in incorporating some chinese medicine?
Speaker 1:oh, absolutely because I've been collecting seeds oh wonderful for the past couple years yeah, and I have yet to put any of them I would be honored because I move so much yeah that's one of my missions being back here and knowing that I'm going to stay for a while yeah I actually had a place where I potentially was going to put them earlier this season and that fell through and so kind of the season's almost almost.
Speaker 2:You know, too late to start by seed, but honestly, about half the seeds that I've um you'd be surprised.
Speaker 1:You can grow things later than you think. I haven't researched even what it takes. So some of them, I'm sure, sure it's still it's still time now, but, yeah, would you be interested in a dedicated? I think that'd be fantastic. We have actually a hillside that we're making our herb garden, yeah, and we can take a corner of that and that can be our little chinese corner cool, I think that would be fantastic.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of these, um, I've, I've learned I wouldn't say a lot because I I don't know enough, but some of the ones I've researched, I've, I've seen grow along the coast of California and Mexico.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, even though it's not that exact genetics that would be in China and you know it would be different cause the environment's different anyway, Different soil and the species might be slightly different, but there's a lack of research there as to what we can grow locally, absolutely. And what that benefits, because, honestly, since we live here, it is possible that we can benefit even more from that local source.
Speaker 2:And it's getting harder and harder to bring herbs in from China that are actually unsulfated or untreated. And it's going to get harder and harder. It's just going to keep getting especially as you know, the environment keeps changing and the temperature's everywhere. So I think, being adaptable and being like okay, this isn't the right, exact species that they used traditionally. But how can we grow from this and where? Where can we still heal?
Speaker 1:I agreed and you know the truth is, herbs are so complex that it's not like a single molecule drug where you can study this one drug and how its systems are what it does. And every single herb is a symphony of compounds and they're complex and generally you don't just take one, you generally combine things, so you have this entourage effect of so many pieces species.
Speaker 1:One grows here, one goes there and it's gonna release different secondary metabolites always notable and it's gonna grow bigger or smaller because it's adapting and in each person it's going to react differently to their own environment, and so so much of holistic healing and natural modalities are intuitive and, you know, based on practice, and it's not such an exact science as a whole science. And you know, you learn techniques and you learn to observe and you learn to notice when things are doing this, that that's what's happening and you can adapt and adjust and you learn. You know the ideas, the concepts, the categories of things. You know you've got these brackets of types of things and types of systems and all of that. But really, when it comes down to, like this, specifics in a molecular level, it's so complicated you really can't honestly put your finger down on this stuff. You can?
Speaker 2:it just costs a lot of money a lot of money research, clinical research, as well as like trials and all of it I mean people want to get paid for this because there's either students or graduates, and it's just not easy to come by without the time and money, and so I don't know. I feel like there is room for potentially like NGO grants in this aspect.
Speaker 1:I think there totally is.
Speaker 2:As far as like funding research to find out these small differences between things that have already been researched.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And things that we can change to make it better because we're growing it locally or because we're using less water, less resources, so many different, all these little things, variables, you can kind of tweak a little bit. That's a big thing of gardens, of hope is, it's a series of experimental gardens and you know, there's all these permaculture techniques and claims and this and that I says well, you know, there's also so many different regions and so many different microclimates and so many different ways that it could be different. So you over in LA, well, you've got a whole different way that the sun and the wind and the moisture and all of the elements affect you.
