plant medicine
Plant medicine is currently having a lot of interest. There has been an emergence and a big wave of psychedelic and psychotropic plant medicines. While these experiences can be healing and illuminating, the experience does not fix the origin of our collective issue of the colonisation and industrialisation of the human psyche.
Our current culture is one where the foundations were built upon dislocation, an incoherence between the human and the family of life around us.
During times of colonisation, we were forced from our lands and into this more industrialised, decontextualised, dehumanised way of living. The absence of that healthy and robust connection to the human family and the wider community of life creates a sense of absence that no substance can fill.
People are feeling more than ever the deep longing of returning. Returning not in a backwards sense, but in a moving forwards, returning once more to the land, to the ground, the Earth, community, moving in connection with life.
The plants of these lands, and of wherever you're reading this from, the plants of your homelands, are incredibly healing and supportive. I'm not talking about mushrooms or psychedelic experiences. I'm talking about Oak, Dandelion, Birch, mugwort, plantain. Many of the plants in our landscape can bring us incredible healing.
When we engage and work with plants, we can enter into a relationship with them. The plants can support us, guide us, show us on the emotional, mental and energetic levels how to bring resolve, find healing and support our process.
When I turned to Oak for healing and guidance this great elder illuminated my insecurities around home and I could see how my wounded child was still influencing my choices. After some months of walking with this medicine I began to unwind the unhelpful narratives and meet my unprocessed emotion, I was then able to step into a deep sense of personal stability and security.
Dandelion helped me to understand what my dreams and my longings were really for, for myself and for the future. It helped me to get clear on that vision, to focus and align. There was so much support, and in the process I underwent a great transformation, just as the dandelion goes from the flower, absorbing all of the rays of the sun, eventually transforming into the seed head, with those seeds then carried on the winds to plant into new soils.
This very much was the process that I went through as dandelion guided me on my journey .These are just small examples of the many plants that have come to support my healing journey.
These allies can help us, in very real and practical ways, to unlock things that are blocked within us. Through receiving vibrational essences, tinctures, or perhaps working with the plant spirit, we can grow and develop in a more healthy way, co-regulate and come into homeostasis with our plant relatives.
In this way, we enter into a long-term interrelational healing process.
That, in itself, becomes a remedy to these fast-paced and highly stimulating times.
As one of the elders shared with me, his elder would say to him, “Slow down. There's a rush.”
So maybe it's time that we turn to the plants in our landscapes, seek guidance and counsel and healing, slow down to the seasonal changes and movements of the Earth, the sky and our own beating heart.
Plant medicine doesn't necessarily have to take us somewhere extraordinary. Sometimes it brings us more deeply into the ordinary, to the land beneath our feet, to the seasons, to our bodies, to our communities and to the living world immediately around us.
Perhaps part of the healing we are seeking is not only found in altered states, but in learning once again how to be in relationship with the plants and places that have always been here.
