Plant Medicines
“Separation is the disease from which we all suffer — separation from the Beloved.”
Imam Bilal Hyde
The ways in which we don’t experience our connection with the Beloved are the ways in which we don’t experience a living relationship with all that surrounds us. Ultimate Reality reaches out to touch us in a myriad of ways but we may not have access to this touch.
The warm light of the sun, suddenly piercing through days of cloud cover, comes to meet our skin… but do we experience the relief and joy this brings or do we let another opportunity to experience intimacy with this moment pass us by- going through life as in a daze.
Without this felt-sense of connection, we do not experience our integral relationship with nature. The plants and animals and clouds and rivers we find along our journey are not just static, background noise- something to take a picture of while we hike through their woods.
Each has a life, a history, a family, an evolutionary purpose, an energy, a spirit. Each reaches out to us, trying to remind us of our inter-being.
“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Separation is the disease from which we all suffer— we suffer from being out of balance within ourselves, with others, with our environments.
Why do we seek solace in nature? What makes up the peace of the great mountain which replenishes our breath and our spirit? It’s not just the young plants and ancient trees, but the tiny creatures crawling in strange patterns; the flow that the river takes- winding and bending; the full clouds overflowing with rain, waters now pouring down from the ‘heavens’ and replenishing soils with new life; the earth which endlessly generates new abundance and cares for each new lifeform as mother.
It is the relationship each part has to one another, and to the whole, that is the harmony, balance, and peace of the mountain. A peace that is extended as an invitation to us while we walk through the forests: will you come back into relationship with true reality, find your place in the great web of life?
“The dream of nature is a complex web of mutuality in which each part supports the other.”
— Eliot Cowan
The beings who uphold this balance, harmony, and peace are the ones to teach us how return to it. And so, whatever we are suffering from — whatever physical ailments, mental- emotional traumas and spiritual tears — the plants can help us mend the tear and tend the wound.
The plants and their healing nature will meet you at whatever level of consciousness you’re willing to meet them at.
For some, the most approachable way to start is by seeking out herbal medicine to ease physiological-psychological-emotional discomfort. For others, a desire for healing chronic diseases and deeply rooted traumas will lend to a plant spirit healing session. And for others, a walk in the woods will lead to the sitting with a plant as if sitting with a friend, and the plants will speak in a new language, bringing healing to the one who listens.
Whatever your path, you are being invited into an ever-deepening relationship with reality.
Working with plant medicines is a way of connecting with supportive friends who remind you of what it is to be intimately held by all of life.
“As it’s medicine moved deeper inside me, I suddenly felt a very different life form - yet one kin to me - take up residence in my body. It was alive, in just the way a puppy is alive. It was interested in me and began exploring this world new to it. Then, of a sudden, it found that empty place within me, exactly its shape. It circled around, like a puppy its bedding, and lay down, filling that empty place inside me. In the moment that it did, I felt whole in a way I never had before.
As if all unbeknownst to me I had been carrying an emptiness inside me for most of my life. As if I had been born that way and that only living presences from earth itself could fill that hole inside me. A hole I had often confused with some psychological damage or problem when it was not. The moment that Osha settled itself down within me, I changed. Forever afterwards I have carried the wildness of earth - and wild plant medicines - inside me.”
—Stephen Harrod Buhner