Walking the Path with BearLee Essentials: SWIHA Student Blog Series

Come walk with us

Let me tell you a little bit about myself - my name is Aidale, my friends know me as Lee. I am married to my amazing husband called Bear and we both harvest and make some medicines and forage edible wild foods for our family and friends here in the Northwest of CT. After witnessing the healing properties we were gifted from our land, we have created BearLee Essentials to share the magic Mother Earth has gifted us right from our backyard. We feel self-care, wellness, and connecting back to our wilderness souls and Mother Earth is so important especially after experiencing the many changes we have gone through during the Covid-19 pandemic. I feel we found ourselves wondering how we can be more proactive in our self-healing and health for ourselves and our family.

How Bear and Lee embarked on this path as herbalists and stewards of Mother Earth

Both Bear and I come from an indigenous background, Taino Indian and Celtiberian and my husband has Algonquin and Abenaki. I say we bring traditions from the North and South nicely together in our union. I can vividly remember being a small child, sick with a fever, and my great-grandmother that raised me would put these herbs and concoctions she would make out of her garden on me. I had no idea what it was that made me feel better. She instilled in me the importance of plants in our lives and how their medicinal properties can help us. I didn’t realize the gravity or the importance of these teachings till I was much older.

Being a mom in the 21st Century

When I became a mom, and my kids became sick, I would use over the counter medications, I visited doctors, the whole nine yards yet I also wanted to incorporate plants that for me as a mom I felt more confident in using because it was natural, I could understand what was in it, what the plant was used for, and what it can do. I would use lavender and eucalyptus when my kids would get sick in an air diffuser or use lavender rub on their chest to relieve the strain of their coughs. I remember using wintergreen and antiseptic on their chest to open their lungs to breathe a little easier. Because as moms, we do anything to make our little ones feel better and suffer less.

My body was starting to speak to me, and I was forced to listen

After my second pregnancy, things started to change in my body. For the most part, I had a healthy pregnancy, although I was on bed rest for most of it, because I was carrying low and was having severe hip pain. After the pregnancy, I developed an umbilical cord hernia that was keeping me from exercising, so doctors had to go in to repair it with a small mesh. I was able to exercise, lost 60lbs, was eating clean. Watched my calories, fats, carbs, made sure I didn’t eat artificial sugars, was juicing regularly, you name it, I did it. I was feeling great, had energy, was very active. I mean, I was 26 and living my best life. Then reality hit, and I was a young stay-at-home mom. It was hard to keep up making meals and prepping them, eating out was a nightmare. Every place is fast food even restaurant food, it’s All JUNK. Big portions, loaded with sugar and carbs and who knows what else they jam into them. Fast Food chain restaurants with their ridiculously inviting commercials, convenient frozen meals, drive-through delivering food within minutes. I went back to eating poorly and my body started feeling like it was attacking itself. Suddenly, I am lactose intolerant, have IBS, wheat intolerant, and have fibromyalgia. HUH? Seriously, I had gone to doctor after doctor with no answers. Sure, I can say I have all those things, yet deep down inside something is telling me its more, MY INTUITION, the part of you that only you have a relationship with, and if you don't, you should get reacquainted with your intuition because it’s that important! My intuition was telling me to go back to my roots, back to what my Abuelita was trying to teach me, the Importance of Plants in Our Lives!

10 years of chronic pain, society’s norm

After 10 years of living with severe body pains, using a walking stick because I had a hard time walking, of years of me suffering debilitating stomach pains where I would be curled up in a fetal position, severe migraines, after tons of doctors telling me just take this pill and it should get better or help and it hasn’t, I finally decided to take charge of my own body! Yes, that’s right I am taking responsibility for my body and listening to what it needs. Remember about intuition before… well I thought it might be my food. Because I felt great when I was eating healthy and clean and now I am feeling the worst I have ever felt. Ok, sure some would say, “Hello yea you ate healthy before and now you don’t”, yet it’s more than that! What’s inside the foods that I am eating that’s not agreeing with my body anymore and why is the food I am eating attacking my body? I started small - I remember reading this book called “Eat This Not That” by David Zinczenko as I was becoming more mindful of what I was putting into my body. I remember being so surprised reading about some of the ingredients wherein a McDonald’s Burger that I would eat and my kids would eat, contains ingredients to fix a window! Yet we are surprised diseases are on the rise! We are becoming no different than a cow being injected with steroids so that we can fast produce and feed our bellies more than it even needs because we can. It’s only a dollar for a McDonald’s burger after all!

We need to wake up!

We must wake up and take control of what we are putting into our bodies. I ended up an herbalist by necessity; I needed to be my own advocate. Let’s be real, only I know what I am experiencing through my own body, and I must listen to it. It’s the only one I got in this life. I realized the importance of knowing where our food comes from, as well as, knowing what they put into it.

flowers

(Medicinal herbs that grow in our yard that our ancestors used)

Back to our roots, our ancestors knew what they were talking about

Looking back to my roots, my ancestors have used plants; I know that for a fact because my great grandmother did, and I am sure your ancestors did too at one point. They have come before us and have paved the way for us. They have shared their stories, have written books, yet we rather forget about their wisdom and try to take a much easier, quicker more convenient way of getting what we need and want. With doing so comes major consequences and it doesn’t mean it’s better for us.

Seeking my ancestor’s footprints and finding my way back to Mother Earth

In seeking a holistic approach to my health, I have found out how healing Mother Earth’s plants are firsthand. Did you know for every human illness somewhere in the world there exists a plant that is the cure? There is healing potential locked inside plants. It is up to us to tap into these wonderful gifts that nature has for us and learn from them, educate, spread awareness. As well as, protect her because if we keep going in the direction we are heading, these plants won’t be around to heal us and we will have to solely rely on the health care system, that’s a scary thought.

Our Mission at “Walking the path with BearLee Essentials”

We teach about medicinal & edible plants that grow right in your backyard, which we westerns like calling “Useless, Invasive Weeds”. We enjoy growing herbs in our garden, we harvest some amazing medicinal tinctures, teas, and we even grow our honey and maple syrup. Our garden is in Granby, CT where we harvest with intention, love and in return, Mother Earth gifts us all her healing remedies that heal my family, me, and hopefully my community. 50% of all the proceeds we make and sell go to a charity called, “Greater Hartford Herbalist without Borders” Weather permitting, we try to host once-a-month plant walks. This November we will be hosting our first medicinal plant-making class. Where we will be learning how to boost our immune system and protect ourselves from nasty viruses. We will be teaching people how to make an elderberry tonic and a fire cider apple cider vinegar wellness tonic. These are ingredients we have either harvested from our garden or it was harvested from our local CSA that grows everything organically, where my husband volunteers every month. Our goal with Walking the path with BearLee Essentials is to educate and teach our family, friends, and our community what’s right in their backyard that they consider weeds. There is no such thing as a weed; every plant has a purpose and place just like we all do.