Episode 506: A Higher Purpose: The Story of Sisters of the Valley with Sister Kate

Welcome to Cannabis Health Radio, where healing is authenticated by science. Join me, Reverend Dr. Robin Swann, as I visit with patients and experts about cannabis and other sacred plant medicines, sharing trusted information, real experiences, and new possibilities for healing. The views expressed here are those of the individual speakers. This program is for educational purposes only and is not meant to be medical advice. Cannabis Health Radio starts now. Hey kids, how's it going? Here we are again at Cannabis Health Radio, spreading the good word and the gospel of cannabis. Today, I'm very, very excited to have somebody who I am just meeting for the first time, but I have oodles and oodles of respect for, and I am so grateful that she has graced our stage. We have Sister Kate from Sisters of the Valley. If you don't know who she is, she is the founder of Sisters of the Valley, a California-based women-led organization combining plant medicine, spirituality, activism, and community. All my favorite things. She has been doing this since 2014 and has been involved in the medical cannabis industry in California and the rest of the country since then. Sister Kay, so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for showing up today for us. I'm just gonna pass the mic to you and just let you introduce yourself from here.

First, Robin, thank you for having us. We have great respect for the work you and your team do, especially that focus you've had on the stories, the healing stories of the people, the real shit that's happening that before doctors and scientists are proving it, you guys were out on the edge talking about and sharing that message, which I think is a sacred mission. And I just want you to know all the sisters are

Oh, that—

can you hear me okay?

We can hear you great. And that lands deeply in my heart because it is a mission. This is like, I always say I work for the God Squad and, you know, that gives me a certain level of protection, you know? And as long as I stay in my lane and have integrity, it's all good. So how did Sisters of the Valley— I just wanna know how y'all came together.

Well, it started out my putting on the universe, The idea of the Forum first started out as a finger to the establishment. I had lived and raised my children in Europe for 10 years, and I saw functional examples of democracy, functional examples of capitalism, where democracy and capitalism were at ends with each other.

Sister Kate, how did you come to the creation of Sisters of the Valley?

Well, I first put on the veil, Robin, when I— it was an activist move. I was very annoyed in our country. after living abroad for 10 years and coming back and seeing the country look to me through my new eyes like a conquered country. Like, if you travel over Europe, you can see that Ireland is kind of a shabby version of England. It was a conquered people for a long time. And same if you go to the South, you can see the difference between countries that were occupied versus countries that, that had autonomy for many, many hundreds of years. So when I came back to America, I'm like, whoa, this place is trash that looks like a conquered people. Also, there was no safety net for the women. I was going through a divorce. My husband had taken all the money and left me penniless with 3 children. And there was no one that would take up that fight. No safety net. If you don't, in our legal system, you pay to play. That's the only, you only get justice. So all of these things I was seeing and knew, and the Occupy movement was being born. And the first thing I did is look up their principles and missions and everything resonated with me. So it just so happened that I was divorced and had my 3 kids. My brother was divorced. He had his 2 boys, and we had taken a nephew who was a recovering heroin addict, who I recovered from heroin through cannabis. Another story. But basically it was your, mine, his, yours, mine, and ours under this roof. And we, at the same time that the Occupy movement came out, we were running the first cannabis collective in the county of California, Merced County. In California. So I had all these influences at play. The boys that are sitting before they're going to class in the morning, and I announced to them that Congress just declared pizza a vegetable in order to not listen to Michelle Obama speak and in order to make our meals look healthier on paper than they really are. And I said, if pizza is a vegetable, then I'm a nun. One of my nephews disappeared and came down from the attic with a nun costume that must have— his mother must have left for my Halloween party. It wasn't me. It was somebody else's. And he dared me to go to Occupy as a nun and be with a sign that says, if pizza is a vegetable, then I'm a nun. Well, that started it all. Then I got my 15 minutes, what I thought was my 15 minutes of fame as Sister Occupy. Over the next 4 years, I went to protest as Sister Occupy and I got to meet the Boston Occupy priest and the New York Occupy fairy. It's like during the Occupy movement. All of the crazy was let out as people are calling out all the shit that's going on in our country. So it really started out as a finger to the establishment of me saying, if pizza is a vegetable, I'm a nun. That's really where it started. But in my 4 years out going to different protests all over the state of California for different things, it started a 4-year conversation of what would a New Age order of nuns look like? It was riding on the conversation, where are the damn nuns? They, in the '60s and '70s, they were out at every human rights protest. And that led to study. And I'm a scholar at heart. And so I studied and learned that when I was going to school, there were 350,000 nuns in America. There are less than 30,000 now. Wow. And that they quit and quit wearing their uniforms in 1964, at least in this country. And that, um, the average age of a new nun in America is 78 years old. In my opinion, that's not much of a sacrifice to celibacy if you're 78, because most of us are freaking over it by then anyway. But that, those were facts. On top of those facts, I started studying research. What would a New Age order of nuns look like? What would they do? How would they be formed? And we decided that it would be private property, private businesses, but a network of women working together. And that they would be, to the extent that we could, we would try to fix the the problem of small farms going extinct and try to bring back small farming. And so the formulation of the sisterhood happened over 4 years of discussions with women at protests that started out with women saying, oh, sister, oh, Kate, you need to formalize this. You need to formalize this order. And I would say, no, no, no. One person dressing in religion scarf is crazy. It's not the route for a religion. It's crazy. And I'm trying to make a crazy statement. But it led to some very good discussions that 4 years later led to the birth of the sisterhood.

Wow. That's amazing. So like, I've seen you guys on media where you're out in the fields and you're all in your habits and then you're packing up medicine and you're sending it out. How many sisters are there at this point?

It seems like there's more of us than there are. I have like a core group of 6 sisters that I work with that I would say are the backbone of the sisterhood. But each of those sisters may be working with 3 or 4 or 5 novitiates at any one time. So we don't let anybody join us unless they've come to the farm and worked for us. So that's one thing. Number 2, we are limited by housing. We have been limited by housing. We've got women from all over the world that would join us if we had more housing than we have. So about a year ago, the young sisters started working on a solution to that. And they're about to announce a ministry, basically a nonprofit matriarchal ministry where they're able to get grants and foundation money. And their vision is that we build this, we build urban enclaves. It's basically, we take our beliefs and our customs into city centers. We, we get like a, a 15-unit building. And in that 15-unit building, there's 3 or 4 sisters living there who are the stewards of that building, of the peace and the harmony and the responsibility. And the rest of them are tenants and we want mixed tenants. So our, our thing is we would like to have affordable housing for the old couple, for the young gay couple, for anybody who has any, anybody who needs housing, which is a critical problem right now. And a year ago, the sisters sat down and said, how could we solve a problem for society and solve our growth problem at the same time? And they decided to found the ministry, which will probably be in that. We're waiting for our 501 status. And

then are you working with collective farmers or are you guys farming? Like who's grow— where are your plants coming from?

Oh, we, okay. We, uh, for 12 years we've done our own farming. We grow our own hemp. We continue to do that. All the products that we sell in our store that we support this farm by are handmade by the cycles of the moon with organic plants that we grow, uh, and are full spectrum. We have a real problem with science trying to pick the compounds out of the plant and then give people side effects like they do with pharmaceuticals. So we're whole plant medicine women. For 10 to 12 years, about 12 years now, we have supported ourselves through hemp and CBD products grown on our farm, brought to the table, turned into medicine, sold in our store, end to end, from seed to client. Just in the last year, we've broken through the dispensary barrier. It means that we can have high THC plants in products and dispensaries, but we are doing that through partnerships With farms that are already licensed.

Right on. That's exciting. That's so exciting. So is this how you are blending spirituality with plant medicine, basically?

Well, we, uh, we basically developed our rules for what a kosher cannabis is. So—

Oh, oh, please expand on that. Let's hear what your rules are for kosher cannabis. I'm very curious.

It's pretty simple and probably all of your faithful growers do it already, except for maybe the ceremonial parts, but The land has to be blessed before anything is put in it. And we specifically don't want to deal with land where there's been any blood or carnage or slaughter. So we're kind of like, you know, there's not enough prayers in the world. You guys need to get a different part. We care about the purity of the land that the plants are being grown on. We care about blessing that land before the plants go in the ground. These are all part of our kosher tenets. We care that the plants are sun-grown. We care that that crop is subjected to 3 services, 1 sunrise and 2 sunset services. These are things we always did without formalizing it, without writing it down on our farm here. And so when we opened into the dispensary world, we had to go into their operations that bless that land and bless those crops the same way we do here. So that's what makes it kosher. It's gotta be, the land has to be blessed and pure. The plants have to be subjected to 3 services. The plants have to be organically grown. And, and the harvest, the harvest and the touching of the plants we require, it's basically, some people might think this is silly, but it's a grounding and a purifying. We don't let anybody work with our plants or our medicines if they're pissed off, if they're upset. If the world has knocked them off their horse, we believe in that energy transference. And so we're kind of in the business, like we don't sage the plants, we sage ourselves before we go to the plants, cuz the plants are pure. We are the humans who carry gunk and dirt and bias around with us and quirks and warts. And so we are the ones that need to be purified before we handle the plant. And it's the same thing if somebody has something upsetting and they're due to work with the plants or the medicine, they know not to go near the plants or the medicine until Yeah. They balance their aura.

That— I'm with you. My whole entire manufacturing plant is set up on an alchemical grid, and I think it really makes a difference. You know, people don't really understand how minerals and other things like that can really make a big difference. And bringing your intention, like even in my manufacturing plant, there's music that you're allowed to listen to and not allowed to listen To, and everyone has to do it. And I think that makes the vibrational pattern of what you bring to the grow matters exponentially. So that is a concept that most people are not familiar with. How are you just collecting women who are already this conscious, or is there like a level of education that like, you know, just some rando, rando off the street is like, hey, I want to be part of this? Like, is there an indoctrination? To become one, and understanding and education?

Yes. Here's the problem we have. We live in an age of hyper-individualism. And at the same time, we've got a return to fascism, a growing return to fascism, with both of those things like don't go together. And yet they're both happening. So we have a lot of women just see what we curate and let them see. We don't let them see us scrubbing toilets or doing shit work. Like, who wants to look at that? So we curate what they see, right? And then everybody's like, oh, this looks so cool. I want to get stoned and wear long dresses. But it's not like that at all. It's very real. It's very hard work. Everybody knows it's there. The, the growing and manufacturing of the plant is about 20% of the, of the total chore load of running a farm and running a business and the banking and the social media. There's just a lot. Our thing is that, yeah, everybody wants to be a weed then, but They want to bring— they don't want to change their habits at all. Like, they want to— I want to wear that uniform, but I want my hoop earrings to show, or I want my tattoos. I have to let my tattoos show. I spent all that time on my tattoos. You can't cover my tattoos. For me, it's like, do you— it's easy for women to say, I want to join them, I'm going to go join them, and they don't have a frickin bit of understanding. And yes, we have all— we have codes for how we do our laundry. We have codes for how we live together. I wouldn't call them rules and regulations so much as code. We like, we have harmony codes. And before someone can even think about being a sister, they have to live among us practicing those codes and see if they can handle it. Like, we don't, we have rules. Most of our rules are about living together peacefully. So like, if you're passing somebody and your eyes are down, don't talk to them. They're on their way to the other house to get something. And if you talk to them, they're going to forget it and they're going to lose. We have bedroom doors. Bedroom doors are, if they are closed, somebody is in there and somebody is sick. The doors are a code to us. We never knock on doors. I always say we do what our ancient mothers would have done. We text. It's far more polite than banging on someone's door. So the door in our place is sacred. Like you just don't go knocking, banging, or go crossing the portal to anybody's door. On the other hand, the sisters are not allowed to leave their doors shut when they're gone. And there's a Surprisingly amount of them that will just go away for 2 weeks and leave their door shut. So the rest of us are looking at a closed door and people are wondering, is somebody in there? Is somebody not? So everything we do, we have moon water sconces. We have a special crossing that we do to ground ourselves the first time we enter one of our buildings. We have prayer bells and things sent to us by Catholic nuns around the world and have very specific instructions on how we use them. So we have to follow their Instructions on how we use them. So we have just a lot of lit— we have harmony meetings on a regular basis. We just have a lot of rules around teaching people how to live together communally and still feel like you're living alone together. We think privacy and being alone is very important to healing. And so we're trying to make a formula that gives the equal amounts of private time and, or respects the need for private time while living communally.

So how do you deal with people's reflection of like, this sounds like a cult?

I always say we absolutely are. We put the cult in agriculture. We just own it. We just own it.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. You sound like a cult.

I love that. I love that. Are you familiar with Ina Mae Gaskin and her husband, Stephen Gaskin, and the farm in Tennessee that they started way back in the '70s and I think you'd really appreciate it. They bought a bunch of land in Tennessee and they, um, well, they created a soybean farm. They— excuse me— created their own electrical system. They created their own printing press. Uh, Ida Mae Gaskin is a, uh, she's a, a master midwife person. And they, at the farm, they received anybody who was pregnant and didn't— that couldn't keep their baby or wanted their baby. And the farm just received those women and Help those women have birth and then they raise those kids. And they're huge mentors of mine.

These guys are amazing.

They're amazing. Yeah. You would love Ina Mae Gaskin. Ina Mae Gaskin is amazing. And you remind me very much of her. So do people just show up at the farm like, hey, I saw you on the news and I'm really messed up? Like, do you get calls like that? Like, my children are sick, I'm sick. And how do you navigate who you're gonna have? I mean, I know you're not just swimming in wealth and there's only a limited supply of what you're making.

Yeah, there's a process. So when somebody says, I escaped an abusive relationship, I lived in North Carolina, I'm all the way to Iowa, and I'm heading towards your sisters, we're like, because we're not set up for that. We have to get bigger. We want those things. We would like to be a refugee place for women who, from red states who can't get abortions safely. We would like to have housing rescue committees for people who are made homeless, where they, we swoop in and pick up the mom and her kids or whoever, the abused man and whatever, kids, whatever. We would like to do all those things, but we need to be much bigger and much better funded to do a lot of that. So no, we have a whole process we go through. So basically the younger sisters have Sister Camila from Mexico and Sister Esme. They've set up a program through Patreon where you have to, you pay $10, you get an application. We ask them to first download our Book of the New Beginnings, which has all our customs and all our And tell them to just look at the customs and the practices section of the book. It's a big book and there's only certain things you have to look at. You don't have to care about the songs and the chants and the prayers and the readings, but look at our customs, look at our rules, look at our practices. And if you're okay with all of that, then you go back in and you fill out an application, which is very extensive. And then through those applications, we review and invite them to come spend time training on our farm. And then it is through those women that come through and spend time. Maybe they'll come 2, 3 times over 2 years, or maybe they'll just come one time for a month because they're coming from so far. It is through those relationships that we get to know them, and then we decide whether we're going to offer them the opportunity to make it official. And we piss off a lot of women.

I was going to say, how's it going with those haters? How's it— how are your haters? But

the haters are awful because like if they're too steeped in the patriarchy or our most recent example, we don't, we're not setting up weird boundaries. We are not setting up weird hurdles. We're not doing any of that. But you come in here to an organization that has no titles. We've operated 11 years with no titles. We're very happy to be a titleless organization. We're all sister, brother. No one knows who the hell does what. You figure it out. We know who does what. And if you come in here and you're like, oh no, you're going to bring your corporate energy. This is too hippie. I want hierarchy. I want all posts to come through me. I want to be head of corporate communications. I want to be head of strategic development. No, no, no. Nobody can do anything unless I approve it. You've already proved you don't fit here. And no, we're not going to let you take the vows. We're not going to let you be a sister because this is not how we roll. We are not trying to put the patriarchy in pumps. We are trying to revive the matriarchal rule. And so there's a lot of women that just don't understand it and don't get it. And when they come in with a lot of power and control needs, those are red flags. Also red flags, batshit crazy. We get plenty of them, or just too batshit crazy. We are not trained to deal with the kind of batshit crazy that has come through our Our doorway. So we have to be very careful. We're using the Patreon, we're using the questionnaire, we're using the volunteer system as kind of our moat to select those who want to be with us. And growth is long and slow. We are developing sort of a, at the request of the people who would like to be closer to us, would like to follow us, but don't have a call to the veil. We are, and don't wanna walk the veil or live the life, but they like the belief system and they wanna participate in other ways. Mm-hmm. We've sort of developed what we're calling informally the Straw Hat Club, which is those people who may work with us, be part of us, but they're not going to wear the veil. They're not interested in the dedicated spiritual life, but they are like wannabe members of the community we're growing.

I love that. So when you talk about prayers and chants and all, are these things that you've created? Are they Catholic? Are they Buddhist? Are they a combination of everything? Is it just What's been drawn from your heart and how you've just felt what resonates?

Well, in this day and age, you don't have to create much really, because there's so many good songs out there that are Wiccan songs. We, we even have a favorite prayer that came up, came from Game of Thrones season 4. So we'll, we'll co-opt anything. And we have even Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the Edge of Love, I think is in our Book of the New Beginnings. So we are a Build-A-Bear religion. If we're a religion at all, we're a Build-A-Bear religion. Our belief system goes like this. We believe that we, our first one is that we believe in organizing our lives by the cycles of the moon. And we, that is an intentional thing to keep you in touch with the natural cycles of the planet and the Earth and the universe. Our second belief is that our human intelligence, our unique human intelligence to all other life forms on the planet, gives us a unique obligation. Mm-hmm. To all other life forms of the planet. So we've elevated the ecology to second place. Moon cycles first as an element of ecology, ecology second, and we demoted God to third place. Third place is that we believe there's a mystical, magical other side, that there's more to the world here than what our eyes can see, and that there is a mystical, magical other side. But we will not say what's on that other side, and we will not argue about what's on that other side. You put on that other side whatever the hell you want. You'd have to die and come back 100 times for us to believe that is the way things are really happening. And we don't have enough people who die and come back for it to be scientifically provable, in my opinion. So if no one knows what's on the other side, why would we waste our time arguing about invisible babies or invisible gods? We just won't. That also leaves it up to all of the sisters to practice whatever they want. When I'm in crisis, I still do a novena. That's 9 nights of the rosary. That's something I've done since I was very young with Catholic nuns, and it brings comfort to me. When another sister lost her mother, we sat Shiva with her for 3 days. So it's like we have a chance to practice anything the sisters want to practice. We won't fight about it. We won't argue about it. Our base stuff is we have 2 gatherings a month, new moon and full moon. New moons are for the women. Full moons are for the tribe. That means we never know what's going to happen on a new moon, but we always know what's going to happen on a full moon. There's going to be a fire, there's going to be a circle, there's going to be ceremony, there's going to be food and wine after the ceremony. That is a typical full moon ceremony that we have. And that usually has other community and the relatives of employees or sisters or media or whomever. We open those up generally. So yeah, and then I don't know what else to tell you. We have 6 vows that the sisters take, and that's one of service. It spells the word SOLACE, S-O-L-A-C-E. Service, obedience, living simply, activism, chastity, and ecology. And slower service is basically our commitment to each other that we will be good at trouble resolution and that we will lean into solving problems rather than making them worse. And go, and that's our way of serving the enclave. Obedience has to do with organizing our lives by the cycles of the moon. Chastity, I mean, living simply is self-explanatory. Activism, also self-explanatory, but that's a, every sister has to spend some time every week or month holding our accountables, our officials accountable for what they do and don't do. And you can kind of pick your lane if you want to watch local politicians or state politicians or federal politicians, but it's a watchdog obligation. And that's activism. C is chastity, and we don't require celibacy as we believe Intimacy is a healing and necessary part of life, but we do require that the sisters privatize their sexuality in a very secure way. What is that?

What is that? Privatize their sex? Like, no OnlyFans? Like, what does that mean? Privatize your sexuality?

Yeah, that's exactly what it means. Your sexuality cannot be up for public scrutiny. You've decided you're taking the veil. You've decided any sexuality you have or relationships are kept off the grid. quiet, respected as sacred relationships that are private and do not get blasted to the world. So that's our chastity vow and a vow of ecology, which is to every year do something to change the footprint, to make it better for the footprint that we are leaving or minimize the footprint we are making as we live.

Do you remember Father Guido Salducci?

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Buy the Pope in the pizza. Buy the Pope in the pizza.

I'm hoping that he's like the father of all I love you. You know, like, he was so great. I loved him growing up on Saturday Night Live. Are there any men that are in? I mean, I'm sure you have some, but are there like brothers or fathers or, you know, whatever?

No fathers.

Okay.

No fathers and no mothers. It's funny, we had it. We had an ex-Catholic nun and we had an ex-monk join us, and they both wanted to call me mother, and it made my butt pucker. So I'd have to say, stop. You're like, this is so It's— that already is like a hierarchy in its wording. So, but we do have brothers and we do have brothers. We have Brother Simon. We have a brother in Brazil as well who was an ex-monk who's working with our sisters in Brazil that we have a growing enclave in other places. But until they get communal housing, they don't count to me.

Okay. So that's one of the foundational elements is that there's some level of communal housing so they can create a collective consciousness that you guys are able to to your vibe. So I know that you were in Oregon and now you're California. So are you breaching into other states with your message? Is that, are you gonna like just go nationwide eventually, have farms in Massachusetts and New York and North Carolina?

The dream would be that you can get on a plane and go anywhere and be picked up by a Weed Van. If it's Ireland or, or Greece, and be whisked off to a farm where you know there's good organic weed and hopefully a little bit of good wine. But that would be the dream. But for all, but for, we have to have jobs in order. We don't want to repeat the mistakes of patriarchal religions and we don't want to abuse the women. So unless the ability to grow jobs is tied to our ability to put sisters on, and in Oregon, we just made an agreement with like a farm, a sister farm. That's what we're calling it, where it's going to be, that farm is going to be dedicated to making Sisters of the Valley products for dispensaries, completely dedicated. Wow. And we will be, the, the core team will be traveling back and forth to make sure that farm gets all its blessings and all the products are made properly. And we're going to have to go on dispensary tours to introduce ourselves. And in the process, we'll be looking for women in Oregon that want to join us and pick up that job so we don't have to travel in to do this.

So is that job volunteer work or is this actually paid labor?

Like, it's paid work. It's paid work. I mean, there's a certain amount of volunteer time that has to be given in order to understand our belief system. And we have, training classes and stuff that we're lighting up on that. There's a certain amount of, it's like if you're a teacher, they don't always pay you for doing the homework time. They only pay you for the teaching time. Right. So there's a certain amount, but these, and we're actually looking for women who will join and carry out the brand ambassador work at the dispensaries that we would do. We'd have to come into state to do it. And those are paid positions.

Good. I'm glad. That's awesome that you guys are covering all those. I want to circle back to organic farming because as a, I've owned restaurants, I am a farmer, blah, blah, blah. Leveling out at organic farming and really being able to hit it is really a challenge because like you said, the ground has to be clean. And what a lot of people don't know is if you've been farming regularly with compounds and different chemicals, you have to let that land sit for literally 7 years in order for it to be able to turn over and be clear. And then California has all of these crazy rules on what exactly is organic farming. So how do you all manage that conversation?

That I agree with you. It's all over the place. But we have, we, we, what we do is through soil testing and through water testing and plant testing, we're now talking about 3 different testing organizations we're dealing with. The water guys, the soil guys, and the plant medicine guys. And through those, they test for everything. And those lists are always growing. You're right. You don't. They can't test for a compound they don't know exists. So that's part of the problem with organic. As fast as they're making the list of compounds they're testing for, Monsanto, now called Bayer, is working to get more chemicals into our shit. And when, and then there's this—

The wind. Don't forget about the wind. The wind blows chemicals.

Yes. Over into your land. So it's a very frustrating experience where you're going through all the trouble to make sure all of your stuff's organic. But your neighbors are not. And now you test your crop and you've got shit in your crop that you never touched or never would let near your crops. So yeah, it definitely makes a case for doing more farming in domes. And we see more people doing their farming in domes. And it is not about controlling the light at all. It's about keep controlling the shit that comes in.

Controlling the wind and making sure that the, your neighbor's farm chemicals aren't flying on your own. So I have, I have 2 more questions for you. And, and the first one is, what has been the most impactful experience that you've had doing this? And what has been— this is a 2-part question— what has been the greatest challenge that you've had? So like the best thing and the worst thing of the last 17 years that you've been doing this, pretty much.

Okay. I will, I'm gonna leave this totally in the world of healing because you can't get any gratification from any business deal like you get from bringing somebody back who's gonna die. Like, oh, it's Amen. Nothing. So I would say my biggest joy are the things I think about if I'm sad, is the nephew that was at death's door from being a heroin addict. And they had had him on Suboxone and he kept just taking more heroin when he'd fall and he'd go near death. So the fact that he, that I took him and used cannabis to get him off of his fentanyl and Suboxone and whatever the shit he was taking. Heroin. And now 10 years later, 12 years later, he's about to get married. He's been clean all this time. He'll never fall off again. He doesn't— he's become a purist. He doesn't smoke even anymore. It was just a gateway off of the hard shit. And he's healthy and happy. And we thought he was going to die. And then I have other stories like that. So I think about the people. And then my, my horrific stories are like, The guy who, uh, had liver cancer, stage 4 liver cancer, and through juicing cannabis and taking high amounts of pure plant oil, over 4 months, it went to state— back to stage 3, back to stage 2, and into remission. But his liver got cancer because he was a drinker. So when he got it in remission and got his health, he celebrated so hard that he died 4 months later. Like, he went right back to drinking. Right. And he died 4 months later. So I'm just saying that this is a very humbling profession. I already, I had a woman in Wisconsin who had breast cancer and she successfully used pure plant oil to get into remission, but it came back 5 years later and she just chose she didn't want to do it again because she didn't like the loopy feeling it gave her and she died. So I'm just saying we have our wins, but we also have to respect people's choice.

Right. Personal choice.

To not take the medicine. We might know that it helps, but that doesn't necessarily mean they wanna take it. So you really have to be humble. You have to approach it humbly and you have to be, let the plant lead you and you can't be pushing it in anybody. And you have to accept mishandling of people and the citizenry. Respect their choices on when they exit planet Earth.

Amen. I have to say amen to that. So you're doing such great work in the world. How do people find you? Like what, what's the fast track to Sisters of the Valley?

Okay. So on our sistersofthevalley.org, that's our, there's a library in there. It's a store, but I'm, I'm saying it to you because there's a library of articles that kind of keep up with everything that's going on with us. But we have a new website called sotvministry.org. And if you only care about the beliefs and the spiritual side of this, that's loaded with that. The other, the sistersofthevalley.org, that's got a lot of our activism articles. Every fight with Facebook, every fight with the lawmakers, that's in there. The ministry.org is not cannabis related at all. That's the housing mission and the vision for growing the sisterhood while creating affordable housing for people.

And then how about getting some money in your pocket so you can continue to do the good work? How do people who hear this, who are inspired, who are like wanting to open their wallet and throw those dollars your way, how do we get those dollars into your pocket?

There's no, there's no, there's donation links on both of those. sisterthemalley.org takes $50 small donations. sotvministry.org We'll take bigger ones, but yes, they can give a thank you or go buy some products for us. That would be—

Go buy, because you're in dispensaries, so you know, there's nothing but garbage in dispensaries. So if you can find Sister of the Valley in the dispensary, then you automatically know that you've leveled up your product. And you know, I love that for sure. And all of this information will be in our show notes and we're gonna tag everything because you've just been such a great, great source of resource. I personally appreciate that you have made this your life work. I really feel that cannabis is a calling. I have oftentimes been like, why am I still here? Because the plant keeps me here. You know, I am in service of the plant just like you are. And this is how we move this medicine forward and this conversation. And for all of you who are listening, Sisters of the Valley, you can find her at sistersofthevalley.org, Instagram, Facebook, all of the show notes with the tags in it. And remember, the biggest currency that you can pay us. is to like, share, and comment, because that is the way that those who don't know, who are looking for healing, who are a little lost, who want to find out about this, are going to learn. So Sister Kate, is there anything that you'd like to say before we wrap this up?

No, but Robin, you're really good at this. And I want to extend, I want to extend an invitation to you and any of your staff to come visit our farm.

Oh, we're all coming. We're going to have a field trip. We're down in Southern California. We're loading up the van. I'm going to connect with you. We are coming for sure. I appreciate that.

We would love to host you. We would love to host you.

Yeah, that would be amazing. All right, y'all. Thank you, kids. Remember, like, share, comment. Thank you, Sister Kate. I don't have enough words of gratitude for you.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Cannabis Health Radio. We hope today's conversation has reminded you that healing is possible and that you are not alone. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who may benefit.

Every story shared helps bring the good medicine of cannabis to more people. For more episodes, educational resources, and community, visit cannabishealthradio.com and consider joining our Patreon family, where you'll connect with like-minded individuals as well as help support our work. Until next time, stay informed, stay curious, and keep advocating for yourself. I'm Reverend Dr. Robin Swann. Thanks for listening.