Our Approach / Our Founder / The Story of the Laughing Birch
Can you imagine standing in a meadow, and as you look down you see half a dozen green, leafy friends beaming up at you, ready to make your life better? Plants are our quiet best friends, our ancient herbal allies, ready to nourish and come to our aid—if we only knew…
Here at Laughing Birch Herbals, we are ready to connect you with your herbs. Our formulas are crafted to nourish body, mind and soul at whatever depth you are seeking.
From field to formula, we wish to share our knowledge and deep connection with the plants with you, whether harvesting from our homelands in the Pacific Northwest, or with our affiliate connections in the wilds of Southern Turkey. Laughing Birch Herbals is certainly a full-circle project—as we provide ‘flora-as-friend’, fortifying health and focusing on building you up so you can thrive as the pilot of your life and health. The more you know about the deeper story of the herbs in your formulations, the better you become at calling upon them when life throws you a curve ball and you need some potent allies! 
Reunite with your instincts as you sip our teas and tinctures and feel the sacred reconnection as these “herbal elders” interface with your nervous system and begin to induce deeper attunement and relaxation. Interface—this word, this principle, is often with us like a mantra of our herbal work. Our own hands pick, process, and provide vibrant, high-quality herbs and formulations to people who are looking to realign with the balance of nature’s resplendent healing. It is our calling to be present and offer these most resilient, primal nourishments that serve not only body, but heal the spiritual mind of humanity, as we find our way back to the heart-home of nature’s nestling embrace.
Join us in our herbal escapades, as our blog and photo journal take you along a tactile journey of the senses and envelop you in a “see-through-my-eyes” sensorial experience of our plant world—of the underfoot unknown, of verdant majesty leaping towards the sky, and of our most sublime herbal allies, as we walk in waking wander of the natural world…breath’s reach away.
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We welcome you into our world with the plants, as we lovingly cradle the herbs from forest to formulation. We invite you to join along in the nourishing experience of this process, as a natural and ancient connection most have lost touch with. We feel that the stories we share about these interfaces can be as much of the plant medicine as ingesting them, transforming your health as you gain a deeper understanding of their essence and gifts. Our blog also delves into the deeper uses of our herbs and how you can directly benefit from their myriad offerings. So grab a cup of one of our teas and read along—the blog might just be about the herbs in your cup! 
Enjoy the experience of elegant synthesis as our formulations offer the beautiful, ancient technology of the plant world. We are motivated as continual students exploring the ancient technologies of herbaceous earth: we are merely refining our minds and senses in order to align with natural principles which have existed long before our time. Among these perennial truths, we recognize that plants are indeed our evolutionary elders—they are masterful alchemists of their own constituents, refined adepts of the eons—to which is dedicated a lifetime of reverence as their apprentices. 
Our offerings are the offspring of our quest to re-merge the paradigms of ancient and innovation. Our herbal products employ the most effective herbs and formulation techniques from several traditions, as well as capitalizing on ever-emerging scientific findings on herbs and health. Many of our formulas incorporate synergistic formulation, built upon the elegant technique of building upon modular herbal units which balance and optimize potency. Herbal formulas are more successful in meeting your health goals when the herbs are selected according to their essential properties and energetics—not just a simplified “this herb is good for that” approach. 
Synergistic formulation is so potent—yet so gentle on the body—because it is built on a foundation of optimizing each herb’s desired actions, while minimizing any unwanted effects (such as too drying, too warming/cooling, too stimulating, etc.) This is done by applying a formulation approach that considers the following format:
· Key herbs
· Supporting herbs (optimizing the direction or goal of the key herb or herbs)
· Balancing herbs (for instance, many herbs can be too drying to the body, so adding a moistening herb rebalances that unwanted direction)
· Catalysts (the movers and shakers—e.g., ‘blood movers’ that mobilize stagnation, wake up the system, etc.)
Take in the full-spectrum nourishment of our choice selection of innovative herbal products. Our founder, Mia Baki, has drawn on her 25 years of clinical experience as a health care practitioner, over a decade of herbal study, and lifelong output of intuitive innovation to pour her joy and expertise into the balanced formulation of these potent herbs. During a multi-year development process, each product has proven itself not only in benefitting the original purpose for which it was crafted, but as herbs do best, helping us achieve higher levels of health optimization. The true “medicine” of healing lies not within the model of treating specific disease, but in restoring the upwelling of vitality and unified integrity of purpose in body, mind and soul. Full-spectrum nourishment then, is the manifestation of this purpose, honed through refinement and elegantly designed to deliver a line of unique formulations aligned with people’s natural health goals.
All of us at Laughing Birch Herbals offer ourselves as a heartfelt guide to you as you continue to develop and refine the navigation and piloting of your own health. We hope our herbal formulations help you reach a new level of optimal wellness, while bringing tasty and enjoyable health habits into your daily regime. No one likes taking a handful of pills ‘day in and day out’, whether medications or supplements, and we don’t want to add to that pile of ‘have to’s.’ This is why we have put a lot of thought into easy and enjoyable to take formulas, that will not be a burden, but a pleasure in your routine. Knowing you’re doing something good for yourself can be a wonderful feeling, buoying you throughout your day.
We hope to inspire you to embody your very own flavors of enlivened living, with your Laughing Birch herbal allies by your side.
Herbs have always been a part of Mia’s life-long connection with nature. In her formal training, she has completed the Advanced Herbalism Program and Clinic with Vital Ways Institute in Portland, studied phytochemistry with Lisa Ganora, founder of the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism, and studied traditional Celtic and Turkish herbalism. As well, Mia has spent decades observing and interacting with the herbs themselves in their environments, which has given her insights that no formal schooling could have provided. Thriving on a full-spectrum synthesis of analytical and intuitive approaches, she is as comfortable scouring research papers as she is sampling a fresh herb and learning from it directly, or learning from “auntie herbalists” in the villages of Turkey. It is a synergy of these aspects that Mia brings to the creation of the formulations for our Laughing Birch products.
Sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse, Mia was given exceptionally sensitive senses throughout life. She has therefore dedicated her life to hone and train her natural abilities in the healing arts, through 25 years of massage and advanced bodywork experience, and 15 years of working with herbs in nature and studying preparations and herbal formulas. All the herbs in our formulas pass the highest standards of organoleptic testing (meaning highly-trained sensorial assessment), and many have a harvesting story that we revere as a sacred connection.
For more information about Mia’s clinical experience as an advanced manual therapist, please visit the clinic page. It is Mia’s pleasure and purpose to assist you.
“Reunifying the human being is the mantra of my motivation, the incantation of my formulation, the rumination of my meditation” — Mia
I pass forth into light – I find myself
Beneath a weeping birch (most beautiful
Of forest trees, the Lady of the Woods)
—From ‘The Picture,
or the Lover’s Resolution’
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
My inspiration for the name “Laughing Birch Herbals” came from my life-long connection with trees—as friends, teachers, and gentle spiritual counsel. Ever since I was young, I would climb into them for comfort, like a child lifted into their parents’ arms…
Of all the trees I have spent time with, there is one tree in particular I’ve developed a deep relationship with—a weeping birch with three trunks that lives outside the window of my bodywork therapy clinic of over 20 years. Since I am on the second floor, it feels like being in a treehouse—up in the swaying boughs, day by day, watching my friend morph, season by season. One year, there was even a pair of green herons that nested there, and I was there the day that the young fledged and flew away for the last time.
In winter, the birch tree is strikingly beautiful with its creamy-white bark, topographic patterns and wispy branches whipping gracefully in the rainstorms. And when, in April, the lacy, innocent-green of the leaves burst forth in a week’s time—the birch explodes in joy and laughter, deepening in wisdom in its darkening greens as the months roll on. In autumn, the leaves dance the light in gentle shimmers of yellow-gold until the storms of coming winter loosen their precarious grip, stirring them into swirling eddies of ephemeral gold at my doorstep.
So after all this time, I have never felt the common name “weeping birch” appropriately captured the essence of this tree—for I have instead witnessed year after year a tree whose swaying, tendrilous branches radiate the glowing essence of a laughing, ever-transforming being. For with all their wind-sensitive swaying and legendary capacity for bending, birches will not break…they live the lesson of letting go in order to become one’s strength—growing anew in stability, healing and hope.
Birches are medicine and mentor to the traditional peoples of boreal and temperate climates of the circumpolar North. To the Celtic people, birch is the initiator and the purifier—as it is the first tree of the mystical alphabet of the Ogham. To the Ojibwe, the birch is an ever-giving elder—bestowing its greatest gift even as it decays and dies, infusing the chaga conk-mushroom that grows on its trunk with its medicine.
Birch is the first tree to return after fire, flood or receding glacier. Growing in clusters, they thrive from an underground rhizome network, sharing information and nutrients as well as shading the ground for one another. This cluster habit is so strong, that it is often suggested to plant at least three birches together—as it is said that a single tree will be “lonely” and not do well. Birch teaches us joyfully about the benefits of community care, deep and resilient healing, as well as the wisdom of soft strength and supple, upright truth.
It is with all these qualities that I dedicate my intentional work with plants—as our elders on this beloved planet—to bring their healing wisdom to the aid of humans through our bodies, restoring reconnection with our harmonious place within nature.
—Mia Baki, Founder
