Member Spotlight: Heidi Villegas of Healing Harvest Homestead

Why SMI? 'People actually care for you'

Herbalism teacher Heidi Villegas looks at the whole picture

A book about medicinal herbs caught Heidi Villegas’ eye years ago while she and her husband, Joe, were in a store picking up chicken feed.

“I took the book home and thought, ‘What is this?’” Heidi said. “I then made my first tincture for my allergies, and it worked. Then I made another tincture to help me sleep, and it worked.”

Since then, Heidi has created the website Healing Harvest Homestead and its associated online courses for those interested in herbalism. The Medicinal Herbs for Beginners book was just the start of her herbalism education, and now she wants all families to learn about natural healing from plants and food.

Fast results

Heidi saw results after making her first tinctures from the book. A tincture is the result of concentrated herbal extracts made by soaking the bark, berries, leaves, or roots from one or more plants in alcohol or vinegar. After the plants helped solve some of Heidi’s health problems, she concluded that many of the plants God created could offer healing.

“That’s when I started trying to learn,” the northern Idaho resident said. “We all grew up with this allopathic mindset. Basically, I call that the ‘pill mentality.’ We grow up with the idea that if you have a headache or if you have a problem or an ailment of any kind, you go to the doctor or the drug store and you get a pill. The pill usually just masks the symptom or the issue and it provides a little temporary comfort, but that’s all it’s doing.”

Heidi was more interested in healing than masking symptoms. Her body rarely felt great between allergy shots, antibiotics, pain medicine, and more drugs for UTIs, sleep, weight loss, headaches, and anything else that ailed her, she said. Perhaps pharmaceuticals weren’t the best way for her to feel better.

After making the initial tinctures, Heidi continued studying herbalism and took courses via snail mail, before classes could be taken online. She was diagnosed with high blood pressure and was encouraged to use a statin drug and take a high blood pressure medication. The medication made her feel worse, and she drew a final line in the sand.

“Statins are very problematic in the long term for a number of reasons and when I got on the high blood pressure medication, it didn’t really bring my blood pressure down, but it made me gain weight and I started getting edema in my legs and retaining water and then my doctor put me on a diuretic,” she said. “So, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh no, here we go down the path of more drugs for side effects.’”

In 2012, Heidi quit taking all over-the-counter and prescription drugs, with exceptions only for injuries and very serious conditions.

“I turned to my herbs, and my skin issues cleared, no more UTIs, etc.,” she said. “If I ever get a cold or flu, it’s really rare and goes away super fast, and it’s because I know which herbs to take, and for what and for when, and I’ve got my little protocol every day and they work great.”

‘The people’s medicine’

Herbalism is also known as herbal medicine or botanical medicine. It is a holistic approach to medicine that uses plants for medicinal purposes.

“Herbalism, especially for people who don’t have insurance or who don’t have a lot of money, is the people’s medicine,” she said. “It belongs to all of us, and we just need to learn it again.”

Gone are the days when grandma could whip up a cough medicine from onion and honey, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Heidi said if we just take the time to learn about natural, herbal remedies from plants and food we could save money and improve our health.

Herbs can be helpful for acute needs like pain, but they also can be very helpful and gentle long-term for supporting the body in its natural healing, Heidi advised.

Herbalism community

Heidi’s passion and love for herbalism led her to create an online community of others with similar desires.

She said she didn’t mean to launch a school for people interested in learning about herbalism, but with her background in education, it made sense. She taught elementary and middle school and special education in Las Vegas before retiring and moving to Idaho.

“In the last 20 years I started learning about using medicinal herbs for health because I had a lot of health problems, and it seemed like when I’d take a prescription drug for whatever it was, things got worse,” she said. “I turned to herbs and started a product shop while I was still teaching and got too busy.”

Heidi had to shut the shop down because she couldn’t keep up with her children and job with her shop and many customers. Several customers who found the products had helped them were upset the shop had closed down. That’s when she decided to start teaching herbalism and helping others make their own products. Healing Harvest Homestead was born. She started writing articles and formulas for how to make products and created courses.

Heidi also teaches courses on essential oils, soap making, sourdough, herbs in the Bible, cacao, skincare, botanical gifts, and treating animals.

She hopes to see more people learning herbalism in a safe and healthy way so they can take better care of their health and have more health choices.

“Right now, we’re all pretty limited in the modern world to if you get sick, you need to go to the doctor and trust and hope that you have a good doctor and have a good medical experience, which I didn’t for decades,” she said.

Heidi would love to see an herbalist in every extended family, with someone able to make the natural cough syrup when it’s needed.

“My hope and my goal is to show people how amazing natural health can be for us and how amazing these gifts that God has given us are,” she said. “We just need to relearn how to use them in a healthy way.”