Nourish Your Nerves: Plant Medicine for the Overworked, Overstimulated & Under-Nourished
This class explores the nervous system as the body’s core regulator of sleep, mood, digestion, and hormonal balance through the lens of herbal medicine. You’ll learn how chronic stress shapes the HPA axis, vagus nerve function, gut health, and endocrine balance, and how prolonged activation of the stress response leads to patterns of anxiety, burnout, fatigue, and sleep disruption.
We translate nervous system physiology into practical herbal support, focusing on nine nervine herbs and how they correspond to different states of imbalance ranging from overstimulation and mental looping to depletion, emotional overwhelm, and insomnia. Alongside herbal tools, we explore simple daily practices that support vagal tone, restore rhythm, and help the body shift out of chronic stress states.
This class bridges modern nervous system science with vitalist herbalism, offering grounded, accessible ways to work with plants for regulation, resilience, and long-term well-being.
Led by Ashley McDonell, the session combines clinical insight with practical herbal application for real-world nervous system support.
Together we explore:
The nervous system as the body’s primary safety and regulation system
The HPA axis stress response and effects of chronic activation
The gut-brain axis, cortisol, inflammation, and serotonin production
The vagus nerve and its role in rest, digestion, and emotional regulation
How chronic stress affects hormones, cycles, and thyroid function
Common patterns of nervous system dysregulation in modern life
How to match herbs to nervous system states
Tincture and tea preparations, dosing, and safe use
Simple daily practices for vagal tone and regulation
Lifestyle rhythms that support long-term nervous system health
9 nervine herbs and their applications:
Milky Oats (burnout + rebuilding)
Skullcap (mental tension + looping thoughts)
Passionflower (sleep + anxiety + racing mind)
Lemon Balm (calm digestion + emotional ease)
Holy Basil / Tulsi (adaptation + resilience)
Motherwort (heart anxiety + overwhelm)
Linden (softening + grief + tension release)
Valerian (deep relaxation + sleep)
Hops (restlessness + evening agitation)
The nervous system is the seat of how we experience everything the quality of our sleep, the steadiness of our mood, the depth of our digestion, the way we move through joy and through grief. When it is chronically overwhelmed, life narrows. We lose access to ourselves.
In Nourish Your Nerves, clinical herbalist Ashley McDonell guides you through the truth of what modern life does to the nervous system the overstimulation, the sleeplessness, the low hum of anxiety that has become so familiar we’ve forgotten it isn’t normal and how to find your way back. Not through willpower, but through relationship. Through the plants that have been tending to human nervous systems for as long as we have needed tending.
You’ll leave with a clear understanding of the physiology behind stress and dysregulation, a working knowledge of the nervine herbs and how to use them, and something rarer than a protocol a living framework for nourishing yourself from the inside out.
Teacher Bio:
Ashley McDonell is a clinical herbalist, natural builder, and full-spectrum doula whose work bridges science, spirit, and ecology. As Director of Education at Casa Curativa, she guides a growing network of teachers, practitioners, and students devoted to restoring relationship-based herbalism to its rightful place at the heart of community health.
With over a decade of experience in clinical practice and herbal education, Ashley’s teaching merges physiological precision with ecological literacy, inviting students to understand the body as an ecosystem and the ecosystem as an extension of the body. She weaves rigorous study with story, song, and earth-based ritual—creating spaces where learning becomes an act of remembrance, and medicine becomes relationship.
In her clinical work, Ashley specializes in nervous system and hormonal regulation, digestive health, and women’s reproductive wellness, supporting clients through comprehensive assessment and plant-based protocols that honor the body’s innate capacity for repair and renewal. Her practice is rooted in reciprocity, reverence, and respect for the living world—guided by the belief that each act of healing contributes to the reweaving of our species back into the ecological web of life.
