Julia Graves

Julia Graves is a healer with a background in several modalities. Raised by an herbalist mother and orthopedic surgeon father, she also studied anthroposophic massage and healing as well as cupping in the European tradition as a teenager. She then spent four years studying medicine at Kiel university in her native Germany. Thereafter, Julia trained as a Gestalt psychotherapist. While working for Findhorn Flower Essences in their early days, she trained as a flower essence practitioner as well as a flower essence creator. Julia has since developed her own line of flower essences, the Lily Circle, as well as a kit of flower essences for Mayan Abdominal Massage. Her international teaching activities include co-teaching an herbal summer school with renowned Minnesotan herbalist Matthew Wood at her farm in France, as well as teaching at the International Herbal Symposium. In 2010, she founded the Naturopathic Earth Quake Survivor Relief Clinic in response to the devastating earthquake to Haiti, and headed the clinic in its three of its four missions that offered free naturopathic help to 12000 people (for more details see haiti.citronica.com).

"It has been a wonderful experience for me to write this book. I learned a lot of the material from teaching classes on the doctrine of signatures. What I love best is to see the light go on in people's minds as they get the idea and start to "see" plants. Many times since then my students point to a plant and say "well, according to the doctrine of signatures, it should be good for this!" - and yes, it is. On my recent vacation to Italy, a friend who had just leafed through the book pulled a dried carob pod out of the shopping bag and exclaimed "so this should be good for constipation then, shouldn't it?". I confessed not to know the medicinal values of carob, but thought that since it is a botanical relative and shares the same signature of the brown elongated pods dangling from the branches like feces as the well known laxatives senna and cassia, this sounded very probable. Looking into it, I found that giving carob powder not only promotes regularity, but is one of the nicest and safest ways to stop infant diarrhea! We had some chance to try those claims within our group, and it worked. So nice to see the doctrine of signatures at work. To stay with examples from the mediterranean, I also learned that dried olives make a good remedy for gallbladder stones. That makes so much sense for a bitter fruit with a stone inside it! I also had a chance to contemplate just how much figs look like boils, even more so once they split open like a boil coming to a head. The recipe is to warm a fig, cut it in half and apply it to the boil to bring it to a head. We observed how much water the tree holds even in the most ardent heat as we picked the fruit with abundant latex dripping down. I was not surprised to find in an old herbal that figs were used for both, frost bite (the toes splitting open like the fruit) and water retention - the tree retains water, indeed! We laughed as we watched nature teaching us, it was a delight."