nwabout | SheJumps

MORE ABOUT NATURAL WAY

CALLING ALL WOMEN seekers to begin within. Have you ever felt a feeling of emptiness, helplessness, or anger when leaving a doctors office? Like there is something deeper within you that needs more love and care. Do you believe you can heal yourself, or that your doctor’s orders and medicine heals you? We all have inherent healing powers within us. No one can heal the causes of your disease except you. The more trust you build in the decisions (leaps) you make to support your wellbeing, the greater dreams you can accomplish. It takes risks, like not relying on modern conveniences such as supermarkets and OTC pills to sustain your health. When you become willing to risk putting wellbeing into your own hands, you begin to transform yourself, your bodies, your communities, and your earth.

I hadn’t thought about “jumping” as a metaphor for self-transformation and self-healing until I met SheJumps Executive Director Claire Smallwood last summer. Since then, I have reflected on the many major changes I have made in my life that Claire calls “jumps.” Once I started reflecting on such jumps—or leaps of faith—it was as though there was a force bigger than myself feeding off each of my challenges, making me stronger, and allowing me to accomplish even greater dreams. It is as though every new challenge I face gives me an entirely new sense of strength. The jumping community has provided me a platform enabling me to jump farther with each new problem I face, and I cannot thank you all enough for that.

The Natural Way branch of Shejumps originated from viewing pain and suffering as challenges and jumps that need to be taken for self-transformation and empowerment. It is not a different way from Shejumps; it is a supplement; it is a backbone; it is a way of relearning how to build a strong foundation of ourselves, inspired by nature. It is a way of using nature’s rhythms and cycles to reconnect with our own cyclical and raw nature. The traditional health care system in this country has taught us to depend on rapid results, instant pain relief, and treating physical symptoms. Physical symptoms are reflections of our inner disease, and often our deeper root causes of pain are ignored. Natural healing is a whole new way of viewing our health, our bodies, and our pain.

There are many rivers of healing to choose from. No one is higher than the other. They all have equal power to heal. One plant may work wonders for you but not work for your best friend. We have to be open to the unlimited possibilities nature’s gifts offer us. Choosing this path requires patience. The natural process of healing is gradual, it fluctuates, and it can at times run very deep. We have to be ready to slow down and let nature take its course. Something will speak to you. You just have to be willing.

The Natural Way mission is to:
• Provide a safe and sacred place for healing to take place with heart-felt and informative blogs, and by leading outdoor trips into the wilderness to teach self-reliance through using wild medicine and food.
• Empower jumpers to begin within, take control of their health-care system, and trust their inner wisdom and intuition.
• Educate women on how to play a more active role in their health, self-healing abilities, and relationships with nature.
• Restore faith in alternative healing and in our own abilities to heal ourselves.

The intention of the Natural Way blog is to teach jumpers how to utilize multiple natural therapies to help heal problems they may face when dealing with their challenges as athletes, musicians, artists, teachers, etc. The general structure of each entry will include dialogue centered around healing and current inspirations, as well as an herb of the week detailed profile, seasonal food recipe, and a topic related to holistic healing. Therapies and topics I will be focusing on include but are not limited to: herbal medicine, whole food nutrition, yoga and meditation, chakra energy healing, women’s health and fertility awareness, and seasonal living. Another major focus of this blog is to educate jumpers on how to live a more sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle. Certain skills I wish to teach all those seeking include but are not limited to: gardening, edible plant and mushroom identification, wilderness medicine, and herbal medicine making.

I will continually update a list of plants that are easily found either in the wild or at farmers markets or grocery stores in the section Accessible Medicine. Here, the fine line between food and medicine will be crossed…and crossed. It is shocking to many people when they realize the healing benefits of common foods they eat everyday. In this section, I will provide you with information regarding the healing properties of many easy-to-find foods, as well as the nourishing qualities of many weeds or abundant native plants. I want to keep this list consolidated to plants that are grown within a “sustainable” distance to my audience. This will most likely start with plants natively or easily grown in the United States, but I am very open to expanding on plants that grow all over the world if in fact my audience expands to all over the world!

For any questions you may have regarding the topics discussed on this website, or any personal questions or suggestions you might have, please feel free to contact me at evan@shejumps.org. Eventually, I will begin to post Q&A’s on the Ask Evan page that I believe would be of benefit to our community. I would like to see this section grow to a forum in the future.