Healing with nature: reconnection, grounding, gratitude

Auroville Today: Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to this work?

Parvathi: I come from a family of traditional healers going back six generations. Thirty years ago, many village women knew many medicinal plants. Everyone knew how to use edible herbs, how to mix these with their cooking. But in my family, the women had more specific knowledge about treating various chronic issues. My grandmother was a specialist in treating skin problems and wounds. I used to help her collect plants, prepare remedies, and treat people from nearby villages. I learned how to identify many plants, but at that time I didn’t think this was very important work.

I was born and brought up about 40 km away from Auroville in a very small, interior village. I had never heard about Auroville. Then in 1999 I was invited to join Pitchandikulam Forest as a community health worker on a project working with medicinal plants and nature-based remedies.

I thought Auroville might be a big town, like Pondicherry. But when I arrived, I didn’t see any buildings, just trees. It was all very new for me, seeing all these different kinds of people. It took me a month to make sense of the whole thing.

I started a programme for Pitchandikulam to support the government primary health centres and pre-school teachers in the ICDS Department [Integrated Child Development Services, eds] in the bioregion. I developed a very good relationship with the health centers, the doctors and staff nurses, and was able to share with them nature-based solutions for common ailments like fever, cough and cold. The nurses were so happy to learn how to identify local herbs and how to use them in rasam, tea or decoction as simple remedies. We made kitchen gardens with all these medicinal plants.

I was also happy to reconnect with so many plants I knew. I had spent my childhood helping my grandmother collect the herbs, but I had put all of that aside in order to go to school and to support myself and my family financially. After coming to Pitchandikulam, whenever I faced a problem or something stressful, I would go to the garden to see and speak with the plants, and I would feel happy. I started to understand more and more that the plants have all the solutions. I learned so many things from the plants, and then from the insects and the animals - more than from human beings.

I would observe the plants. When I put a seed in the soil and give it a little bit of water, it grows and will fruit continuously for two or three years. The plant gives me so much. Maybe my family and my neighbours will also come and collect the fruits. The human gives a little, and the plant gives back in multiples of that, with no selfishness. We all need food that comes from the plants and the soil. We are very good at knowing how to cut, break, clear plants. Still the plants sprout and reshoot. This is nature’s gift. But what do we give back? Humans aren’t thinking about nature’s living balance. That is missing.

Everybody talks about the problem of economic poverty in the world. But I feel the real poverty is the poverty of empathy, of love and kindness. And I feel that if we can heal this, then we will arrive at the solution of sharing, and economic poverty will go.

I don’t tell people to take medicines. It starts with your constitution. Then you look at where there are imbalances - for example, emotional, mental, physical - that are causing health problems. Then we look at how to rectify these health problems with edible herbs and spices, or with nature-based solutions for daily products like shampoo, soap, cream, lipstick, kajal.

People think their internal and external bodies are very different, like they’re 100 km away from each other. If a product is not safe to eat, then how can you put it on your lips? You have to feel the connection between internal and external.

And this body is not mine. I’m a tenant of my body. It is gifted by the universe. All the elements of the universe function in my body, and all of these bodily organs have amazing functions. So I think about all the things happening in my body, and I feel blessed and loved.

In life, the soul and the body are connected and moving together. The soul needs the body in order to manifest what it needs to do. Mother, Sri Aurobindo, while they were alive in a body, they shared all the things they needed to, and now we continue to follow their message.

Whatever I’m feeling and thinking, I have to share it with the universe during my lifetime. It doesn't matter whether or not the world is ready to accept what you have to share. Whatever good things are there in your soul, you share it, you manifest it, and that creates movement. Life is movement.

We all have worries and challenges. But with grounding, when you connect to who you really are within, then you will pass through all the challenges. That is what I teach. Reconnection, grounding and gratitude.

If people don’t first respect and love themselves, then how will they respect and love other people, animals, or plants? First they have to understand, realise and respect. I plant that seed in the people. When it has germinated, when they are ready, only then I'll show them the plants. We have to touch the plants respectfully, ask permission from the plant to take what is needed. This is what I teach, not just knowledge about how to prepare medicines, but our connections with nature.

Your shop, where we are sitting in Kuilapalayam, is called Sri Siddha Forest Herbals?

Our traditional system is Siddha medicine. This came through the Siddhar saints.

Some years ago, the Indian government created official Siddha colleges. How is that training different from yours?

The government college syllabus for Siddha medicine has been extracted from traditional texts. But the syllabus is only reading. I interact with many Siddha and Ayurvedic doctors who have completed the five year government course, and they say very frankly that they have very limited practical knowledge of plants. They know the formulas in the textbook, but they can’t identify the living plant. Two days ago, an Ayurvedic doctor came from Maharashtra, and he wants to learn from me, as both Ayurveda and Siddha are similarly constitution based.

Our traditional healers also prepared mineral, metal and animal products, but now we no longer have people with that kind of experience and knowledge. A few people may still know some of the methods. As for the Siddha pharmaceutical companies, they follow formulas written in pharmacopoeia books, some 10 to 20 books. But Siddha is really about food and diet, and my focus is about food as medicine.

What are the types of problems you see and are able to treat?

People often come to me with a chronic condition. They have already tried to get their problem treated at so many places and have suffered for a long time. I have also helped people with advanced diabetes, kidney disease, fertility issues. Diagnosis is very important. Once you understand the root of the problem and the person’s constitution, then many issues are easy to treat with the right food.

Each individual or community has different needs, so I have to read the pulse of that group, connect with them, and understand their needs. In one tribal community, the issue was that people were knowledgeable, but they would go and buy outside junk food or toiletries rather than using their indigenous knowledge to make their own products. I was invited to set up a women’s enterprise. So now the women collect their local natural resources and know how to make herbal medicine and food products, both for themselves and for sale. We created many recipes for chutney powder, cosmetics, creams, and hair oil.

Another community had all sorts of health problems - joint pain, back pain, reproductive health disorders, skin problems. They had to walk many kilometres in the sun, and they were weak. So I did cooking classes for them to learn how to make nutritious food from their own local resources. How to use spices differently. How to add cooling vegetables and leaves.

You say you picked up your knowledge about plants and health from your grandmother and then from the plants themselves. But you also have two Master’s degrees. How and why did you decide to do that?

I went to primary school in my village, but when I wanted to continue my education after that, I didn’t get any support. For four or five days, I cried and cried. I started fasting and wouldn’t talk to anyone. But no one even reacted, so I decided I had to wake up. I went to my primary school, met the master, and got my transfer certificate. Then I followed one boy who I knew was going to school. I walked six km to reach the school. Along the way, I had so much time to think and feel depressed about the way girls were treated in the village. There was so much gender discrimination. Girls were considered stupid, useless, and a financial burden. A girl’s family had to bear the expenses for marriage and other functions, and I was the second of four girls in my family.

My elder sister stopped school after fifth standard, but I was not willing to stop. So without informing anyone, I went to this school and stood there for one day in front of the headmaster’s room, waiting for admission. I needed someone to sign as guardian. Finally some unknown person agreed to support me. I was also supposed to pay 14 rupees fees, so I asked the headmaster to give me one week’s time to get it.

Walking back to my village, I was so happy because I had gotten admission. I decided on that day that I didn’t want to depend on my parents’ earnings. I was around 11 years old, and I started working, agricultural labour, any kind of work. I managed to earn the money to go pay my school fees, to buy the books, notebooks and uniform. I had just one dress.

You were an 11-year-old girl, and you went and enrolled yourself in school. How did your family react?

The day I got admission, when I came back, my father beat me. He was very angry and asked how I went without informing my parents. Then somehow he decided to accept it, but with certain conditions. Every day when I got back from school, I had to collect a basket of cow dung and bring it to my father’s field for fertilizer. So after walking all the way to school and back, I would do that.

My father wasn’t encouraging at that time, but he accepted it. And I decided that I didn’t want a single rupee from them for my expenses. Better I manage for myself. I actually earned more money than I needed, so I was able to contribute to my family financially. It was really challenging, but having gone through it, I now feel it was a good experience.

All the movement in my childhood was from my own initiative to keep advancing, step by step by step. I cried many times. But even at that age, I already believed in the energy of the universe. So when I was walking those six km alone in the dark, I would call on that energy for support and security. I would call, ‘Tree, come with me! Birds, come with me!’ I didn’t have any people to depend on, so I depended on the universe. And even now, when I go back to my village, I feel very peaceful and I feel that energy with me. 

And you managed to finish high school.

That school went up to 10th standard, and I completed that, with good marks. For higher secondary school, you had to travel about 25 km to Tindivanam by bus. But a girl couldn’t travel alone by bus. People were very scared of a girl talking to a boy, then running away with that boy. In the village, the word ‘love’ meant a man and woman together, and as a child I understood ‘love’ to be a shameful, scary word.

I decided I wanted to break with all these thoughts. So, again, after I fasted for one week, my father gave in and went to get me admitted. Once the teachers understood my skill, they came out to my village to meet my parents and to explain to them what a good student I was. That’s when my father started supporting and encouraging me.

I used to be badly teased by the boys at the high school. They would write bad things about me on the wall. So I would often be crying when I reached my home. But my father helped me. He told me that with poverty, patience, and skill, I had everything I needed to achieve in life. So many wealthy people in my village were sending their sons to school. But those boys didn’t study, didn’t get good marks. I was the best student. But I had to believe in my own skill.

My father would say, “Whenever you feel you are suffering, when you start believing what others say and put yourself down, think of grass growing in the field. If you step on that grass, it will be flattened. But take your foot off the grass and observe it for a few moments, and you will see the grass come back to life and stand tall.” He would tell me that I was a beautiful human girl, and that he believed in me, believing I had the strength to stand tall like the grass.

After I finished high school, I wanted to go to college, but I didn’t have anyone to guide me, and it seemed too difficult and too expensive. So I did a number of things. I worked at a kindergarten school; I worked in non-formal education with an organisation that offered evening classes to children who had dropped out of school; I conducted a small tuition class at my home. I also worked in community development and women’s empowerment, with the dalit community, with women’s savings groups.

At one of the organisations, there was a girl who had done post-graduate studies, so I started to think that I could go for something like that. But then, after my elder sister’s marriage was completed, my family started looking to arrange a marriage for me. I knew that if I stayed in my village, then definitely I would have to get married, and I really wasn’t ready to yet. I wanted to do something with my life, and I knew I would have to come out from my village in order to do that. But I hadn’t had any exposure, and I didn’t have the courage to choose to just go somewhere.

So I prayed for help. And on the third day, two people from Pitchandikulam Forest came looking for me and invited me to Auroville. I agreed simply because I was ready to leave my village.

How and when did you go on to higher education?

I completed a Master’s in Sociology and a Master’s in Human Rights while I was working at Pitchandikulam. I was working with communities where caste and gender discrimination were very strong, where there was a lot of domestic violence, so these seemed like good topics. After that I concentrated more on women’s empowerment, still using health and natural remedies as the focus. I started many women's groups. Then after many years of awareness and education to these groups, I started three entrepreneurship development groups and helped them create a federation, which became a model enterprise in Tamil Nadu.

Two of these groups are still running successfully, and I continue to support them in terms of connecting them to other NGOs and governments, for training and networking. After leaving Pitchandikulam, I have conducted programmes around Tamil Nadu to support women to develop entrepreneurship-based groups so that they can stand on their own legs. Whatever I learned from my own childhood, I continue to share all these lessons today.