Original Medicines | Earth-Based Healing | usual & unusual ways
Long before clinical frameworks, humans healed through earth, breath, story, rest, belonging, and the sacred. These are still the most powerful medicines available.
The original medicines
— Anneke Sips, The Wisdom of Psychosis
What this is
You are not separate from the environment you inhabit. Your nervous system responds moment to moment to the spaces you inhabit, the people around you, the rhythms of your days, and the living world itself.
The Original Medicines are not supplements. They are the conditions for healing — the relational, ecological, embodied, and sacred practices that human beings have used since before medicine had a name.
This hub is where I explore that territory — including the growing research on nutritional psychiatry and the gut-brain connection.
Does this sound familiar?
These are the experiences I hear most often — from clients, from people who find this page, and from myself. If any of these resonate, you’re in the right place.
A short reflection — not a test. Five questions to help you find your next step.
The original pharmacy
From Chapter 20 of Wisdom of Psychosis — a framework for understanding the full spectrum of healing available to us when we look beyond the clinical. Click the red symbol to read more.
Earth — direct contact with ground and natural environments. Breath — pranayama, the bridge between voluntary and involuntary. Movement — dance, yoga, embodied expression. Touch — skilled, consensual, healing.
Connection — to self, others, earth, something larger. Unconditional love — received, offered, or remembered. Story — making meaning, sharing experience, being witnessed. Not being alone.
Art and expression — painting, drawing, sculpting, writing, music. Old crafts — weaving, pottery, basket-making, woodworking, fermentation. Food prepared with care. The intelligence of hands.
Rhythm — daily routines, seasonal cycles, circadian alignment. Rest — genuine rest, not passive consumption. Prayer — conversation with what is larger than yourself. The body of practice.
Story — narrative that makes meaning of suffering. Silence — the container in which the nervous system settles. Unplugging — meeting reality without a screen. Presence — the medicine that costs nothing.
No aspect of human experience exists in isolation. Mind affects body, body affects spirit, individual affects community, humanity affects Earth. These systems are the same system. What heals one, heals all.
The Original Medicines Podcast
Raw, unfiltered conversations about trauma, grounded spirituality, consciousness and the wisdom hidden in our most challenging experiences. A new episode every few weeks.
Explore the articles
From the gut-brain axis to ancient mythology as a healing map — these articles explore the full spectrum of earth-based and original medicine approaches.
The framework from The Wisdom of Psychosis — what the Original Medicines are, and why they matter more than ever.
→The growing evidence for the gut-brain connection and its implications for psychosis, mood, and mental health.
→On grief, letting go, and what the ancient practice of fermentation knows about compassion, acceptance, and transformation.
→How a 4000-year-old Sumerian myth maps the territory of psychological and spiritual crisis more accurately than the DSM.
→How Masanobu Fukuoka's philosophy of natural farming illuminates a different relationship to healing — one of attunement rather than intervention.
→The neuroscience behind the most ancient medicines — and why they work as well as they do.
→Work with Anneke
Earth-based healing, nutritional psychiatry, the Original Medicines framework — I bring these into private sessions as a complement to trauma-informed care and yogic psychology. Online or in The Hague.
Earth-based & integrative approaches · Nutritional psychiatry guidance · Lifestyle medicine & daily rhythm
30 minutes, no obligation, English or Dutch
Direct access, quiet support, your own pace
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