Another beautiful day and yet another extraordinary plant attunement at Clearpath Medicine Gardens a couple of Sunday afternoons back. It never ceases to amaze me how well this process works. It has never not worked. If it wasn’t such an eye-opening, doubt-vanquishing experience, I would say that it is beginning to almost feel ordinary. It no longer surprises me that it works, but people’s insights consistently drop my jaw, and it makes me very happy and optimistic knowing that the Language of Plants is alive and well and evolving, and we are intimately part of it and evolving along with it.
Several of us sat encircling a central stately blue vervain snuggled up against a tangled California poppy still in full flower. We were also surrounded by several more of each plant. Chris Sturk led us again with gongs and didgeridoo while we stilled our minds and opened to what may come from these plant elders. I feel blessed that we have this unique vehicle of sound to help transport and guide us on our journeys. I am becoming spoiled.
A couple of people felt like a portal opened when Chris began playing didgeridoo. For almost everyone, blue vervain gave a feeling of upliftment from a solid base, its trident-shaped flower spikes tipped with purple seeming to influence everyone from releasing tightened throats to opening the third eye and helping the crown chakra to feel lighter and more centered. A few of us also felt that the plant helped with fortifying the blood and would have beneficial effect on the female reproductive system. I am going to delve deeper into the possibility that it might build blood, but the rest of the insights are very near to spot on. Blue vervain is an excellent mental-emotional herb that strengthens our will and helps erratically-shifting emotions and moods to stabilize, quieting fluctuations and helping us feel more centered. It is especially useful for such fluctuations during the phases of the menstrual cycle and menopause.
California poppy also affected people in their nervous systems and mental-emotional areas, but in a different way from blue vervain. For most of us, California poppy imparted the message that we could let go of holding patterns much more and easily than we think, releasing without fear not only obvious tension and stress, but also making us aware their background presence, like a buzzing wire. California poppy was confident and matter-of-fact about its influence in this area, and it inspires me to extend the range of its use in my practice. A very powerful and bold flower, with its long flowering season, its tangle of light green leaves looking like a nested cushion of hands supporting what’s above. California poppy is already known to be a serviceable antispasmodic, calmative, sedative, pain relieving medicine, and it may be that its virtues extend wider and deeper than we think.
The weather will likely be changing rapidly, but we are having such an excellent time with these gong-didgeridoo plant attunement sessions that we have decided to hold another Sunday, October 8, from 1-4PM. It is an exceptionally wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Everyone left the gardens the other day with smiles on their faces and a desire to do this more often. Here’s your chance for the same.