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The Green Tongue Academy

dr jimi wollumbin - founder of the green tongue academy

The Lore of The Green Tongue

The living language of Nature herself is what wiser Souls than I have called ‘The Green Tongue’. It is the mother-tongue of Man-kin and God-Kin alike. It is the ambrosial mead of every poet, every mage and every Root-Doctor. It is the country of origin of all great poetry. The Green Tongue is echoed in the language of dreams, of myths, of alchemy and magic – but alas these days it is rarely found in a doctor’s surgery.
 
The process of reading the signs and symptoms of the body – the medical application of the Green Tongue - is actually much like that of a master tracker moving through the forest; everything tells a story: the broken twig, the undisturbed dew, the alarm call of the Robin which announces the presence of a Pygmy Owl, the side of the tree the lichen loves, the plants like Vitex and Willow that only grow when water is close by… everything tells a story because the master tracker has attained a virtuosity in nature’s Green Tongue.

Yes, the Green Tongue is the language of Dame Nature herself, yet when she touches someone deeply – whether they be a Bard or a scientist or a herbalist – that person is transformed: the eloquence of Nature enters them and they finally develop eyes that see and ears that hear. Such a person hears the choir of the mossy realms and reads the script that is writ in dew across the breaking of the day. To behold the laughter of the winds is much more than the mere communication of my mortal words… it is actually a communion. 

To a medical tracker like me, the dark circles under a young child’s eyes suggest food intolerances – ‘allergic shiners’ as they are known, whilst the horizontal crease across their nose shows they have been itching or rubbing their dripping nose for some years now. The distended veins underneath a depressed client’s tongue indicates portal vein congestion and a subsequent depression of liver function. The bulging contraction of popliteus – the muscle behind your knee – shows the pelvis is thrust forward causing local strain here together with a deep contraction just below the sitz bones. In Beijing Hospital, where I did my initial internship, I learnt that such signs are sometimes referred to as Dragon Tracks: the outwardly visible footprints of the invisible inner disease.

The scribbly-gum calligraphy of your veins are thus also written in the syntax of the Green Tongue… and can be similarly tracked. The way the mighty Pine leans into the light – bending and morphing as it seeks to escape the shadows cast by its greater community – is akin to your posture of shortened hamstrings and an anteriorly tilted pelvis as you recoil and rock back from those who hurt and scare you. If I cease to listen to the words of your story of woe for a moment and listen in the same way that I listen to the warbling of the magpies, I hear a deeper message being sung in the lilting cadence of your heart’s cascade. As the master trackers of the Kalahari bushmen know well: “the ultimate tracking is not achieved with the mind, but with the heart”. Although precious indeed, your words are only the tip of the iceberg of meaning with which you communicate your story to me… the vast majority of your tale is spoken in the silent eloquence of the Green Tongue. Ram Dass thus wisely taught that: “The quieter you become the more you can hear”.

Listen deeply when I tell you this: you are the flesh of the world sweet friend, you are its blood and gall, its hopes and sorrows… yet so is Moon-shadow and Winter’s bracing kiss. So too is Possum’s call and the sparkle in Dragonfly’s prismatic eye: dust mote beckons… Lichen city summons… Elk song responds. For the hand can only know its smoothness when caressing the bark of Bunya Pine, only know its roughness when cradling the mewling newborn of this world, its strength by picking up Earthworm’s moist eggs, its weakness when bloodying itself in rage upon implacable grandfather Granite.

Ecological philosopher David Abram argues cogently that it is the alphabetisization of language and hence thought – the shift from being an oral culture to a culture with a phonetic written script - that lays behind the West’s separation from the natural world. 
 
It is a bitter irony indeed that learning to read and write may have been central to the process of rendering us moderns deeply illiterate to Nature’s living language of mist and frond and feather. Yet if I am to teach you how to read the language of Nature – the Green Tongue – then your mode of thinking must become ‘de-literalised’. This process is as unsettling as it is confounding, and you will know that it is taking place when your understanding stands still. In such moments, do not try to grasp the little meaning of my words, but instead allow the cadence and poetry of what I say to bathe your agriculturalized, colonised and down-sized synapses. The meaning I seek to convey is not in the words, but rather, it is in your response to the words.


The Art of the Green Tongue is actually so much deeper than the discipline of differential diagnosis that is taught to all medical students. It is the art of learning to perceive, (not to dissect) constellations of meaning in their raw unbloodied entirety… and only then to trace the song lines that comprise them. Re-membering and re-learning the Green Tongue is itself healing, and is thus necessary for healing the fragmented lens of our global culture. For those handmaidens of Soul who walk the Medicine Path however, it is their life’s work. This is because the language of the body is the language of nature, and it is overwhelmingly non-verbal: it is a language of gesture, like dance. It is our mythos-loving right brain that understands symbolic codes however, and is hence the part of you that is necessary to see the constellations of meaning scattered across the face of the earth.

Traditional Medicine in general is an enquiry into the living heart of nature. The question it repeatedly asks is ‘what is the spirit of the phenomenon before me?’. By ‘spirit’ we mean something like ‘essence’, ‘nature’ or ‘suchness’. Such a perspective is incredibly relevant to the practice of medicine in the 21st century quite simply because diseases are literally very complex things … especially these days.

We must re-learn and remember the shadowy language of gesture, both the inner asana of ease and its counterpose of dis-ease. We must learn to read the native script of biology in its original treatises, not merely our human language of biochemistry; to do this requires the cultivated cognitive synaesthesia that is necessary to hear the Green Tongue as it whispers to us; it sings in sunlight-on-fern-frond and dances in the ocean’s eloquent spume… but it roars within your body sweet friend, it roars.

To learn the Green Tongue, like learning any new language, we must first learn its ABC’s. For the Green Tongue is not only the language of Nature, it is also the language of the body; both the hieroglyphs of health & the dialectic of dis-ease are sung forth upon the Medicine Path within the lilting harmonies of this Sacra Lingua. Thus have I found that in all traditional medicine systems there are a series of foundational principles or cardinal points: the ABCs of Traditional Medicine.

So whether you have walked the medicine path for years, decades, months, or not at all - if you thirst for medical practices & healing lore that are still steeped and dripping in tradition… You have come to the right place.

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