Carolyn Barron is a Physician of East Asian Medicine, herbalist, writer and teacher whose work investigates the human body as an ecological phenomenon. She practices holistic primary care medicine guided by the poetry of nature, drawing upon the five elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water to understand the patterns of transformation that move through the human body and the living world alike.

Her clinical and scholarly work draws from classical Chinese medicine, the Huangdi Neijing, taoist natural philosophy, ecology, mythology and nearly two decades of clinical experience.

Botanarchy grew from a lifelong devotion to nature and a fascination with what ecology can teach us about medicine. Rooted in the taoist understanding that each living thing unfolds according to its own particular nature, Carolyn looks to the wild world as both context and teacher.

Against a culture increasingly intent on standardizing, optimizing and commodifying the body, Botanarchy offers medicine as an act of reclamation: a way of knowing and inhabiting your own singular ecology more deeply, and of returning the body to its rightful context within the living world.

Our bodies are not metaphors for nature, but expressions of the same forces that make sap rise, weather turn, tides swell, seeds germinate and all living things flower, decline and return. Chinese Medicine is a technology for perceiving these relationships, and for understanding the singular ways they come alive in each of us.

Botanarchy brings this ancient natural philosophy into contemporary clinical practice. It is a practice of medicine, a field of inquiry, and an ongoing study of what it means to inhabit a body among the Ten Thousand Things.

My Offerings