Life medicine and Bioregional folk polycrest remedios
As a bioregional folk herbalist, in this tradition we are developing a therapeutic conversation between ourselves and the plant which is the environment. We pick them up and gather them with faith with help and with love.
We are listening and learning at the same time. Plant place person. It's all about being with the plants, and allowing their voices to speak through our mouth. We speak for those whose voice is quiet. We allow their silence to permeate us and we bring it back as a remedio. We bring the medicine home.
As bioregional folk herbalists, we are first of all gathering what was left behind. "OK there it is. Look! There it is. Yes, that's what it is right there!" at this point it doesn't make sense to ask who left them behind, we don't go that far back, we see that they're there, we know that there are left behind.
We bend down and pick them up. We pick them up with love and gratitude. If there was one factor in our practice it would be the cultivation of thankfulness thanksgiving and gratitude. All of our studies have to do with being thankful. We are learning how to say thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for bringing us this ocotillo. Thank you for these rooots and the bark, thank you. Thank you for our teachers who showed us what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We bow our heads, we thought our hands, we say our prayers and leave our offerings.
So we pick up roots or we pick up leaf or stem or some seeds, or we shake the the plant and get some pollen. And we are always praying. Most of what we do is just saying thank you. And we ask our Creator, the great spirit, holy one, Mother Mary, blessings!always & good medicine. We are not doing this alone or for profit. Something much bigger is going on, it's called blessing. Blessings!always & good medicine
Whatever we're doing it's there already. Were not making anything we're just bringing it home. So this is very much bringing-it-home-herbalism. It's an herbalism of listening. We are listening to the sky. We are listening to the plant growing right where it is in the ground. We are listening, listening to these plants.
In bioregional folk herbalism we are looking at the plants exactly as they are, directly in front of us and trusting that arrangement.
It's very important at this time to establish a"relationship. OK, so there's the plant. Now what do you do? Maybe you have a project you want to make a tincture. Fine. That's what you want to do. You have some kind of a plan that you're going to do something,...maybe you'll get a pizza tonight with pepperoni. So maybe you decide you're going to make your own pizza. Or maybe you call on the telephone, your order a pizza. Maybe you'll pick the pizza up. Maybe get it delivered. You have all these questions. You have all these plans. You have all these ideas all these options. So now I break it down for you, you need to get rid of these ideas! Get rid of these plans, these options. This is not pizza herbalism.
You need to listen. You need to make your mind quiet and silent and listen. You are going to find something out, but, you need to listen with the beginners mind. So maybe you've studied herbalism for many years and you have a plan for what you want to do. "OK I'm going to gather plants and make a fresh-plant tincture with alcohol, i'm going to combine these two herbs and make a formula." This is all well and good but right now you need to listen to the plant himself, the plants herself, and remember there is male and female. Don't be confused by all this talk of some sort of ambiguous genderism. When you are looking at the jojoba, you have male and female. It's there in front of you. Sex is what is happening in the process of the plants and it's there with the plants, and you can't erase it or mistake or fabricate it. It's there.
So listen and move with what's happening actually. Learn to see the plants and listen to what they're saying to you.
OK next it's very important that you have a conversation. The conversation is dialogue it is going back-and-forth you're not just listening and you're not just talking it is a conversation it is communication this is where we go with our folk bioregional herbalism. You need to approach the plant and all the plants in the area. All the plants that are there in front of you. You bring to the plant your situation. You tell the plant exactly what you need. "this is what I need right now I need something to help this person with their stomach with this information with this pain that they have, show me what I need! Bring it to me. Drop it right in front of my eyes."
You speak with the plant. And you listen to allow the plant to speak. you bring to the plant to your situation. You tell the plant exactly what you need. You speak with the plant. And you listen, allow this plant to speak in return. Now this is if you want to. You develop rapport, with your eyes, with your mouth, with a sense of taste,with the sense of smell. You take it all in. You go back-and-forth you look around, you taste, you touch, you feel, you spend moments and silence with the plant. You let the plant speak to you once you have made your needs known.
You don't have to do any of this. You can go down to the store and buy herbs in plastic bags. You could buy herbs in gelatin capsules. You could go online and order herbs that you have delivered to your mailbox or PO Box, and this is fine. There's nothing wrong with this. This is herbal medicine too and can be very effective. I am not critiquing anything. I'm not putting anyone down in anyway, shape or form because. Store bought herbalism of commerce is a valid way of healing. Here however, we're going directly to the plant. We're becoming slightly psychotic or schizophrenic maybe. We're seeing things out of the corner of our eyes. Maybe were becoming bipolar with herbalism here, because were seeing the sexuality of plants. We are talking to plants. We are listening to what the plants have to say. And not only the plants were listening to the tarantula, we're listening to the deer, we're listening to the silence of the fallingstar, ripping across the sky, the falling star dancing across the night sky. We are calling upon all of this and listening to it and we're having a conversation with it.
This is a schizophrenic, a psychotic kind of herbalism. An herbalism with porous boundaries. Boundaries that are not firm where the plant herself where the yarrow, the Achillea, is speaking and saying, "I have a remedy for you. Here's what it is." If you told someone what you were doing, you could be filled with self-doubt. If you told someone you were talking to plants and the plants were talking back to you, well, this is a very serious situation. Because it's a dynamic that can't be described in words. it's beyond words. It is an epic, fluid, specific informing from Place conversation. If you did describe it in words, if you did tell someone, that you're speaking with plants. You could be judged to be a little off. You could be judged to be crazy. So often times with herbalism you become a crazy person. You move towards outside the box mentality where speaking with the coyote, listening to a squirrel, becomes commonplace. Of course, you're not becoming a crazy person. You're engaging with the plants. And this engagement is the key point to our folk bioegional herbalism.
This is frequently beyond the paradigm of many. You're stepping out of the comfort zone of the box and experiencing the vitality of this natural world. Can you do this? Of course you can do this. I think that that is the whole purpose of what I'm doing here with this talk, I'm telling you that you can do this. You can harness and utilize the healing power of the plants and approach them directly.
In bioregional folk herbalism, we are bringing things home, that we found. We are waiting listing for a song. We are standing in solidarity with the Juniper and piñon pine. We're experiencing the reality of osha. It's very much a found herbalism.
Person place plant. We facilitate the process of listening by listening to that which came before. We are not naming, and we are not taming. We are listening.
We're here, this is our home. We're already home. There's no special place for us to be. This is it. This is it, we're here. We're not going anywhere and we're not leaving anytime soon, hopefully ha ha ha.
Just an aside here; sometimes sickness is what needs to be. This can be a difficult process to accept. Sickness can also be the space that a person needs to experience, in order to manifest change. You're not trying to change sickness into something else. You are not trying to change sickness into health. The situation in front of you is what is. You're not clobbering or somehow trying to control the situation. There is sickness on the one hand and there are the plants on the other hand in front of us in their natural environment, this is the work of the folk bioregional herbalist. Sometimes what happens is the person needs to be sick. There is a process of change and transformation that can only become through sickness. We are helping the person understand that there is the possibility of growth development and wellness. We are allowing the change to take place. We acknowledge the change. We do not control the change. Maybe they're not going to get better. Maybe being sick is where they need to be. What they need to see. Something like death. You're not going to cure death. When a person is dying that's what they're doing. They are leaving. They are saying goodbye. We help them with that. They're dying, you're not going to change that. The possibility exists that you're going to help them go where they need to go. And the plants that exist in front of you can aid and assist in that process. And you are not outside the process. You are not an outsider looking in. You are as much being changed by the process as the person in the process. This is the situation, help is dynamic, balance is dynamic listen to the flow.
When you look at sickness sometimes it's infirmity. Sometimes sickness is laying down and not doing something, it's laying in bed. The idea that you need to get the person up out of bed may be the wrong idea. Maybe the person needs to lay in bed maybe they need to be sick, maybe they need to think about their life and change something and the only way that they can do that is this time of sickness. You need to understand that and except that the idea that sickness is not defeat, it is not a mistake. Maybe the sickness is what needs to happen so the person can grow.
In bioregional folk herbalism, "There it is right in front of you". Bend down and pick it up, that's what you were looking for. It can be as simple as that. We're looking for things not in the sense of that we forgot something, and we don't know where it is, and now were trying to find it. No, no that's not what it is. We're looking for things that are already there.
We are finders. We are not looking. We find. We're just picking up and using what's there in front of us because it's there. The mandala is right there in front of us. We are not creating a new paradigm. What we are seeking has already been created and left there for us. We claim are bounty in the name of another. We need to recognize. You need to learn to recognize that is our task.
We are picking up things that were left for us. We're not making anything new because what we're doing is just grouping what was here, together maybe making the formula and then bring it to the person. The plants are growing and where they're growing they have an inner form. The inner form of the plant is the harmony that's there in the plant with that situation that you're presenting back to the person who is seeking to attain the harmony to return to that flow or things are going right.
When you see the ground, the rocks and all the plants living together then you should know that this is a place where you can gather the medicine.
Let's talk about medicine, medicine is like a message and what you're doing is calling the form of healing which exists to come into the situation, this is the medicine. When you go to a restaurant the first thing you do is meet the hostess. She says, "hi how are you?". That's all we're trying to do were trying to be nice with the plants. We're saying, "Hello. Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. I'm Paul. How are you doing? I have someone who's very sick right now. There name is Bob. Can you help them?". You ask the medicine to speak. "Comeback into my heart and show me. Why don't you bring me what needs to be done.?" So when you talk about medicine it's not necessarily any component in the plant. It's more like a relation that you are summoning to come down and bring back the harmony which has been lost. You are not really doing anything. You are just like a hostess saying, "Good morning, yes table for two? Come this way."
When you see a plant you should know that it was left for you, it was dropped off by the holy people who used for it healing and now you take it and you bless it and you give it back just as it was meant to be used.
These are called medicine twigs.
"plants for the same family are found and added as combination herbs. Pollen is placed upon one of the same species, from east to west, from south to north, and twice around it clockwise, while praying. The root of the desired specimen is dug up, pollen is placed in the hole, the top of the plant is broken off and pollen placed on the bottom of the stems, the top is replanted in the hole, with pollen placed on the top. Prayers to the plant and for its continued growth are said. If the top is not replanted, pollen is placed in the hole and the earth is carefully smoothed over it so as to leave no trace of disturbance, while praying for more to grow. Sometimes the plant is not uprooted but side roots are broken off, pollen placed on their ends and on the broken stub ("to make it grow"), and the plant left with accompanying prayers. Roots gathered this way are called "life medicine"
- Medicine Between Two Worlds"
by Jolene Smith http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/nationalcurriculum/units/2012/5/12.05.08.x.html
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