Ethnobotany: My Interview with Rocio Alarcon
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 29
The following is a brief excerpt from my documentary book Women Healers of the World to inspire you:
As a teacher, Rocío Alarcon has captured the hearts of thousands of women with her guidance in spiritual bathing, a technique new to western herbalists but familiar to Rocío from her childhood. “I received my first bathing when I was born and later many times, so my first memory about my bathing was in the middle of aromatic waters covered with white petals and my body was massaged with a handful of soft plants. Later when I had fever, I remembered to bathe with fresh aromatic water from wild plants and I felt in my body the process of healing, energy coming into my body, serenity, and my muscles feeling a big relief and no more pain.”
Spiritual bathing, she says, is a normal daily practice in the Andes Mountains. “We prepare different kinds of bathing depending on the situation and the condition of each individual. People with experience in this ritual are in charge of advising and offering this knowledge to the population.”
The process involves determining which plants should be used for a certain condition, gathering the plants, and brushing the plants across the skin in quick successive motions across certain “energy fields” of the body. During an intensive workshop with Rocío in 2007, I learned the differences between sweet and bitter plants, partly in taste but especially in their energy. Bitter plants were to be used to clear away negative energy, and sweet plants were to sustain good energy; she demonstrated her method of using the plant as a broom across the skin. I had half expected her to gently sweep the plant bundles across the skin in a manner similar to pulling a sweater off—nothing too gentle, but a simple rote exercise. Instead, Rocío invigorated the class by demonstrating firm, quick brush strokes that whisked across her arms and down her legs—broad energizing strokes accompanied by her emphatic chants and loud prayers for the energies to be swept along their paths. She was pushing the energy out with the bundle of herbs—taking charge of her body’s energy with a positive force and character. The class sat spellbound, watching and listening to this petite woman as she thundered with power before us. Rocío demonstrated when to use gentler methods for healing for children, when to collect bitter or pungent herbs, and when to collect sweet and fragrant herbs.
Ethnobotany
The most basic precept of ethnobotany—the relationship between people and plants—is central to Rocío’s work. She obtained a diploma as a practitioner of Holistic Therapies and a PhD at the University of London’s School of Pharmacy Centre for Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy, then she researched plants as medicine and food in the Basque Country of Spain, a topic close to her heart. “The history of human health is linked to plants,” she says, “so today it is more important [than ever] to protect nature.
Humans need to find new elements in the plants to improve their quality of life, such as better quality food and medicine. Food is medicine, and probably many plants around the planet have many substances to offer humans. We are all connected in the world, today more than before, so we can share the experiences with plants because they are guiding us to find a healing path.
“The young generation, especially women,” Rocío says, “need to find inspiration in plants for a better future for humanity.”
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