Help is on the way

Our bodies respond to our emotions, so (I figure) probably the most important thing we can do for our health is to cultivate a conscious sense of well being. After all, the body will do its best to maintain health; well being is its natural state. Best not to undermine that with a conflicting state of mind.

That bears repeating, perhaps?

Well being is the body's natural state.

Medicine Plants and why they're dangerous

Trigger warning - Here is another post that veers into the woo. And it's long. And it's even a little preachy towards the end. Ha!

There's medicine - that which helps us recover, physically, from illness or injury.

Then there's Medicine, that which supports us through life's transitions and stages of growth.

Most people, when ill or injured, simply want to be able to return to their "normal" state of health. But in the Medicine tradition, it is understood that to return to how - and who - we were before the illness or injury is impossible, and to try to is unwise. We are changed by each of these events. They are - or at least should be, from this point of view - opportunities for growth.

the songs of usnea

Trigger alert - this post is about as "woo-woo" as it gets. If this sort of thing isn't your cup of tea .. then really, nothing on this blog will be helpful to you. For you see, this is what the Medicine Plants are all about for me, and stories like this are the background to everything I write.

Once upon a time, it was winter, a sparkling day. We were on a ramble. We'd just crossed the little wooden bridge over the Picanoc river, wondering how far we'd be able to get up the Polish Hills road. As it turned out, we didn't get far at all, but the place we stopped to turn the car around was as nice a place as any to get out and stretch our legs, and so we did.

Paul was taking pictures (I guess, I don't really remember) while I looked up at the big white pines and breathed in the snowy air and let my feet pull me whichever way they wanted, which is always a good way to find something interesting.

Flower essences - where does the information about them come from?

Following up on the last post of a couple days ago ..

Talk about a rabbit hole!

No surprise, this - the descriptions of the attributes of the flower essences are extremely variable between sources.

There's Edward Bach's original work, (here's the official site) and those who adhere to it; that's fairly standardized (not that I believe 'standardized' is a necessarily always a good thing, but the man was a pioneer and his work is valuable ..). There's also a dizzyingly large array of essences 'discovered' since Bach, because let's face it, there are more than the 38 flowers that he had access to in the English countryside; people want to (and should) be able to use what grows near them ..

The well rounded herbal practioner

Whether you're drawn to plant medicine for yourself or a desire to help others, there's far more to it than learning to match plant to the person's needs or identifying and preparing plants from the wild.

You have to be able to think.

It's not a matter of memorizing 'facts' and being able to recall them as needed - that's not thinking, it's what one of my teachers used to call mental regurgitation. What we need is the ability to recognize patterns. Sympathies and antipathies, as Culpeper would say.

We have to be able to visualise and imagine. To conjure up images in our minds, let them grow and explore them.

Apples in the snow

There's a post by this title over on my other blog. It's sort of a wildcrafting post, but it's a little woo, too.

If you don't like woo, don't go there.