Animá Lifeways & Herbal School

Talking With Plants
   
by Kiva Rose

Part 2 (of 2): Plant Revelations & Miscommunications

That we take plant words in through our nose or our skin or our eyes or our tongue instead of our ears does not make their language less subtle. or sophisticated, or less filled with meaning.
-Stephen Buhner

The truth is that if we’re only listening for words – for language in human terms – then we’re barely listening at all! The world speaks to us in the ancient tongue of touch and color, texture and fragrance, through taste and breath and every part of our senses. Listening through our whole body teaches to be open to the world and each other in a whole new way and with a depth and subtlety that even the best words cannot begin to approach. All of nature communicates on this level, eternally engaged and intensely aware. We humans have pursued the allure of the linear mind and categorizable information and in the process, often abandoned the instinctual (and primary) intelligence of the body. Certainly both forms of learning are useful, but to underestimate the value of physical, tactile understanding is to undermine our relationship to the greater whole. The mind works best when integrated as a co-operative part of the body rather than designated the dictator of an artificial hierarchy of organs. Remembering and awakening the often submerged senses of the body requires patience and dedication for many of us, but the rewards are great. Knowing ourselves as living, vital parts of the natural world provides a visceral, bone-deep sense of self-knowledge and belonging in a larger family.

For those of us whose work is to facilitate healing with the help of the plants, speaking with them takes on a whole new level of significance and challenge. In the wordless language of the plants is also encoded the particular medicine that herb holds for human being. To discover and understand that language in a practical and thorough way is the work of a lifetime. Still, the common sense basics can be learned by any child. Most of know that bitter greens stimulate the release of gastric juices and encourage efficient action by the liver. In the same manner, many people are familiar with the use of common kitchen spices in food to increase circulation and digestion, or that just the scent of a flowering rose is enough to lift the spirits and invoke a sense of sensuality and relaxation. While these are simplistic examples, they are very much in keeping with the basis of how healers from many cultures speak with the plants every day.

The properties and personality of each herb is discernible through its taste, scent, appearance, fragrance, and even its habitat and relationship with surrounding flora and fauna. Dreams and intuition often play an important part the plant-healer relationship, but the foundation is built on a profoundly physical awareness of self and medicine. Learning when to use what herb for what person and when isn’t simply a process of memorizing information or hit and miss experimentation, but rather a complex and lyrical language revealed to those who cultivate a lifelong intimacy with the green world.

Besides what they may seem to impart about us or itself personally, on another level all plants – and indeed all elements of the natural world – are to one degree or another active transmitters of and conduits to the Anima… to the memories and intentions, knowings and implorings of the inspirited living earth.
-Jesse Wolf Hardin

Plants also speak to us through our intuitive and emotional senses. While we may be expecting or waiting for instruction in English, the plants impart to us through impressions and feelings. Depending on the species, its native ecology and our receptivity, the intensity and complexity of the communications may vary a great deal. Most often, they are subtle in nature and require our focus and attentiveness to be discernible. Understanding the real meaning of these impressions requires practice and discernment as well as an understanding of the contextual whole. We may think that we hear that a plant is good to eat and then find out different from a field guide or another person more familiar with the local flora. It’s imperative then, that we use all our senses and understandings to perceive what we’re really being told rather than risking the possibility of misinterpreting through narrow vision. The stronger our affinity and the more intensely we cultivate intimacy with the plant world, the more clearly we will recognize and make use of their gifts.

Plants tend to relate to each other and the world as tribes of species, and through the plant world as a whole rather than on the highly individuated basis humans are more familiar (and comfortable) with. The great benefit of this is that all plants are integrally connected to the ancient wisdom of their type, and of all flora and of the earth as a whole in an immediate and accessible way. When we’re able to reinstate our own natural connection to them, we also have greater access to the collective consciousness, with its vast store of information and ways of knowing.

Cherokee herbalist David Winston aptly illustrates both the dangers and benefits of listening to the plants on this intuitive level through the teaching stories he uses in his Talking Leaves class. In one case, a man who had just attended a workshop on communicating with plants was convinced that the plant he was sitting with was telling him that it was safe to eat as much of it as he wanted, and he was in the process of eating several leaves when David happened by. He recognized the plant as a strong neurotoxin and attempted to warn the enthusiastic forager, but the man insisted the plant had told him to go ahead, and paramedics had to be called later that night to save the man’s life from severe poisoning. In a contrasting case, David was working with a woman suffering from immanent kidney failure, he had tried many remedies with limited success and the woman continued to decline. One day he felt distinctly called to treat her with Stinging Nettle, not the leaves as he had tried before but a tincture made from the seeds. Remarkably, it appeared to have restored full kidney function to the woman as well as many other similar cases that followed. It is now a primary remedy for renal failure by a growing percentage of herbalists and has also been affirmed by certain scientific studies. What made the difference from one instance to the other was the level of discernment, and it can sometimes require years of practice and measuring the results before we trust our intuition as the primary or sole means of evaluation. What I recommend is listening with all of the senses from touch to instinct and intuition while also weighing in research and the advice of those most experienced with a particular plant.

And whether we are confident about this less tangible level of communication or not, it is important to remember that the plants speak to us from every direction, through the air we breathe, in the taste of the food we eat, on the scent of a spring breeze, through the feel of cotton or linen cloth and from all around us. From forest and desert, garden and field, meadow and river, the flowers and trees sing the song they have known since long before the first human stepped upon the earth and will likely continue long after we have been taken back into the dirt we sprang from. In their wild melody is the wisdom and healing of every age and place. In the soft mutter of seeds and the deep hum of trees is the language we were each born to understand. Run your fingers across the furrows of bark and root, and begin to listen.

————-finis——————-

This essay by Kiva Rose will be appearing along with an Interview with herbalist Susun Weed, in the upcoming issue of Susan Meeker Lowry’s wonderful home-published magazine Gaian Voices.  As a gift to our blog readers, she has offered to send a free copy to anyone requesting.  Please include $2.00 to cover postage.  If you know of a group or church where they could be distributed or sold, please contact Susan for quantities:
Susan Meeker-Lowry
132 Fish Street
Fryeburg, Maine 04037
or e-mail: info@gaianvoices.com

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Talking With Plants
   
by Kiva Rose

Part 1 (of 2): Cultivating Intimacy with the More Than Human World

“In the stillness I looked inside and saw the wound laid down within all of us… The wound that comes from believing we are alone amid dead uncaring nature. And then I took a breath and began to share stories of a time when the world was young, when everyone knew that plants were intelligent and could speak to human beings…  A time when it was different.”
-Stephen Buhner

Down on our bellies on the grass, we take a flower’s view of the world. The huge blue sky, the ancient sheltering trees, the dance of the wind with every being and the rain drizzling down – iridescent drops spilling onto skin and petals and fingers and roots. From this perspective we’re children again, speaking in the primal wordless hum of ancestors and plants, animals and delighted babies. We’re here, in the truest sense of the word, in this moment and place, immersed in the fragrance and feeling, engaged in the timeless exchange of human being and earth.

Perhaps the simplest and most effective way to begin the process of communicating with the plants is simply to spend time with the individuals we feel called to. Seek them out in as natural a setting for them as possible. For a Wild Rose this may mean a green riverbank and for a Dandelion it may mean a sidewalk crack outside a gas station. Meeting it in its chosen habitat helps to provide a context for our experience and the building of the relationship. Remaining in a wordless, completely present state honors allows us to listen intently and to fully experience the gifts of the plant.

Many exercises, suggestions and books have addressed the subject of how best to spend focused time with the plants. What I practice and recommend is that we each find a meaningful way to consistently spend time with the living plant. This could be simply sitting with the plant for some, performing some kind of personally significant ceremony with the plant for others, or even sleeping outdoors with it for a few nights for some. Whatever we find that works for each of us, do it on a consistent basis. Just as with human relationships – while love may spark at first sight, the relationship depends on time invested and commitments made.

“It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.”
-Henry Beston

Close your eyes, and imagine this is your first day alive on earth. You’ve never before seen the brilliant green of the Summer field that rolls across the hills behind your house. Never tasted a flower petal in all its sweet complexity, or leaned so close to smell a blossom that you lifted your face away brushed with a fine dusting of brilliant yellow pollen.

Or, remember that every sensual act of touching, tasting, smelling, listening and feeling can be as intense, overwhelming and remarkable as sex, as life-changing as psychedelics and as heart opening as prayer.

Humans are masters at adaptation, taking in a change, switching gears and going with it. And yet, a pitfall of this valuable evolutionary tool is that we sometimes allow ourselves to take the everyday for granted, we assume that Sunflower will be there tomorrow and that next year the same pretty Sage plant will bloom in our gardens. We tell ourselves that any day – any day at all – we can stop and take a closer look at that tangle of tree roots by the front gate. If not today, tomorrow, or next month, or surely before the first snow obscures it from view.

Or maybe not. Maybe we come home from work and the city has removed the tree, or we die in a car wreck, or we suddenly have to move. Perhaps we just get busy, and forget for a while and suddenly it’s all different. The roots have died and broken off and that amazing tangle of tree, moss and earth is gone. This same ability to defer important things, from children to health to basic happiness, is what allows us to daily walk by profound beauty and integral miracle and say, “oh yeah, I’ve seen that before, I’ll take a closer look tomorrow.”

When we allow ourselves the eyes of children – the newness of the taste of sweet, sun-warmed Clover nectar in our mouthes for the very first time – then we are at last present enough to talk with the plants. A couple of Summers ago we visited a little canyon where Blackberries cover miles of creek bank our then seven year old daughter. Their dark green vines twisted down into every earthen crevice and fat black-purple jewels hung next to just opened white flowers. Rhiannon was so intensely excited that she was instantly on her knees, her hands clasped together and actually shivering with excitement. “Oh Mama, oh my goodness, I never ever thought I’d really get to see a real, amazingly alive Blackberry on the plant.” She gasped for a bit of breath, “Wow!  I can’t believe I’m really here, it’s better than a dream, and I never thought they’d be that FAT and that BIG and that beautiful dear dark color! Mama, I think they sing!” And then, in her bare feet and pink sun-dress, she proceeded to crawl in and out of the maze of canes, carefully picking pints of berries with nary a scratch on her bare little legs.

I try to approach every plant, every day with a similar awe-struck attitude. It reminds me of the feeling I had when I gave birth to Rhiannon, this shock and amazement and throat-tightening gratitude of holding this brilliant, precious being in my arms every day and being allowed to be in her presence every minute, every hour, every day. And no light eating, green growing being is any less a miracle than a human child.

“Plants are exemplary communicants, warning us away from taking parts that might be unduly harmful to either them or us, and sometimes suggesting a specific medicinal use to the sensitized listener.  Still, what it communicates first and foremost is the essence of itself and its immediate kind, its expressive ‘plantness.‘  While we may truly be able to hear what a plant has to offer us, only the fruit says ‘take me, I am yours’.  And it can be enough to hear its song that says ‘I’m here, look at me. Quiet your words and still your fantasies long enough to truly and fully experience me’.”
-Jesse Wolf Hardin

Insulated as we often are within human-centric communities, it can be easy to forget that there is a way of seeing and feeling bigger than our own. This is never more evident than when we attempt to interpret the language of the natural world. Too often we hear exactly what we want to hear, or sometimes, just what we are most afraid to hear. In these cases, our perception is so heavily colored by our own expectations, emotional hangups and personal history that more often than not results in us mostly talking to ourselves rather than with the plants.

Plants are not humans, but they are no less sentient and complex beings for their differences from us. While not human or even animals, they are people in the sense that they are intelligent, adaptable, vibrantly living and deeply feeling. In our attempts to relate to them, we would be wise to acknowledge and respect their profound otherness. Our natural tendency in nature is to attempt to understand through the similarities between them and us, and indeed, we are all connected and related through an amazing variety of traits. And yet, each species has its own special gifts to contribute to the whole. We honor those gifts by noticing and appreciating the ways in which we are different as well as the similarities.

In the knowing of vine and tree, earth and stone we come closer to our selves, our own innate and authentic beings. And the better we know ourselves the less likely we are to project or anthropomorphize upon our fellow beings, and the more we appreciate the uniqueness of the plant as well as the threads that weave us all together. Time spent in communion with our allies allows us to nurture our understandings of both self and plant, teaching us the balance that is so integral and yet so fragile. From the plants and the earth, we remember how to be human beings in relationship with the world that is our larger and more comprehensive self.

(to be continued in part 2)

————————

This essay by Kiva Rose will be appearing along with an Interview with herbalist Susun Weed, in the upcoming issue of Susan Meeker Lowry’s wonderful home-published magazine Gaian Voices.  As a gift to our blog readers, she has offered to send a free copy to anyone requesting.  Please include $2.00 to cover postage.  If you know of a group or church where they could be distributed or sold, please contact Susan for quantities:
Susan Meeker-Lowry
132 Fish Street
Fryeburg, Maine 04037
or e-mail: info@gaianvoices.com

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As large as the universe outside, even so large is the universe within the lotus of the heart.  Within it are heaven and earth, the sun, the moon, the lightening, and all the stars.  What is in the macrocosm is in this microcosm.
-Chandogya Upanishad

A grain of dust contains the whole universe.
When a flower opens, the whole world appears.
-Zen

The weather sways back and forth between balmy and frozen, and changes with every new wind that sweeps through the canyon. The plants love the cooler temperatures though and underneath last season’s dead grasses, new greens are flourishing. Up here on the mesa, magenta bloomed verbena. wild mustards, pink flowered filaree and the tiny silver starts of new mugworts are coming up everywhere. Down by the river, the watercress is spreading and the mountain nettles are a vibrant shade of green.

Even as the cottonwoods shed their last golden leaves, new life unfurls. I love this spiral of seasons that is so obvious here in the mountains of the Southwest. The cycles of nature close together, overlapping and interlocked through the language and lives of the plants and animals of this place. The mating of the Elk has come and gone, but the coyotes still sing like its a midsummer party every morning. Yesterday, a tiny red feathered canyon wren hung from the outside of my den window frame, peering through the glass at me as I gazed back. She stayed there for several minutes, turning her head from side to side in some unspoken question before flying off to glory in the afternoon warmth.

Roused by the little bird’s call to the outdoors, I wandered out to sit in the sun and watch the last butterflies migrating south on a gentle breeze. Down in the dirt, new green leaves were uncurling towards the light and a few bugs rushed this way and that, in a seeming rush to their haul food home. When I laid my head on the ground, I could hear the river in the rocks, vibrating and singing through the rough the timbre of volcanic stone.  It struck me as nothing short of shocking how very easy it is to miss what’s going on around all the time — and what a terrible loss it is to not participate as much as possible in these precious, ever changing moments. Sometimes participation simply means listening, noticing, and being aware of how we are a part of all these tiny, amazing happenings, and sometimes it means becoming an expression of the same source. Of letting the music rush through us until it becomes song, or doing whatever work is required to keep the land healthy and whole.

I’ve always found relief and familiarity in the mandala like perspective of the microcosm. As much as I love and value the view from a high tree or mountaintop, I love the experience of the up close flash of bird wings or the endless worlds within flowers even more. The many shades and textures of dirt and sand delight me, as does every crevice and ravine within the rough ridges of cottonwood bark. I spend an inordinate amount of my time in the forest down on my belly watching the insects and smallest plants, fully immersed in the magical world so often found at our feet. It’s a universe easily forgotten when inundated by a culture fixated on the larger than life, on billboards, breast implants, supersized meals and “20% more for free” beverages. In the unquenchable quest for more, better and bigger we often neglect the perfect grace and depth of the present moment and the details and necessity of of the small.

In nature, small (so much as to be invisible to our limited human vision) equals the importance of all things large. Bacteria, bugs and fungi create the foundation for our existence and slippery skinned amphibians both illustrate and impact the health of our ecosystems. Whole ecologies may collapse or be forever altered by the loss of a single strain of bacteria or pollinator species. Truly, the health of ourselves and our planet depends mightily on the tiny critters we often find so easy to dismiss, medicate away or sterilize into annihilation.

In the same way, it’s too easy to think that we as individuals are too small, too isolated to make any difference in the bigger picture. That our trivial decisions and one person choices can’t really matter. In reality, all things are not equal and the force and intensity of our feelings and actions DO have the ability to shift the very balance of the world. Just as our planet’s health is intimately connected to minute bacteria, frogs and plants, our society and environment is deeply impacted by every small change we make and every voice that stands out from the rest and takes the chance to redirect the flow of energy, and history. The microcosm and the macrocosm are reflections of each other, and a change in one inevitably results in a change to the other. In a world populated by nearly 7 billion people, the individual is a microcosm. And like flowers, we have a universe within us, and the power to ripple out into the rest of humanity, the natural world, the all…

~Kiva

Sacred Datura bloom ready to open.

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Announcing the new full color book for budding healers and daydream believers:

I’m a Medicine Woman, Too! 
Text & Art by Jesse Wolf Hardin

40 pages, 35 Full Color Illustrations

Includes the Name The Herb Game herbal medicine identification game

$18.50 + $5.90 Media Mail Shipping  (Sorry, Lulu.com’s high rate… Please email us to order multiple copies and save on shipping).

~

Shipping Options

Media Mail $24.40 Priority Shipping $28.74

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“I’m a Medicine Woman, Too! is full of wisdom, beauty and encouragement not only for the young, but for all ages. The author’s exquisite illustrations quickly draw the reader in and cleverly teach about healing plants. A high recommend for empowering all medicine women!”

-Lesley Tierra, L. Ac., author Healing with the Herbs of Life and A Kid’s Herb Book

“I’m a Medicine Woman, Too! is a wonderful book to connect children with herbal traditions.  The story role-models an ethic of healing and caring for other people and honoring our elders.  The delightful illustrations touch the reader at an emotional level, compelling us to become healers too.”

-Thomas J. Elpel, author of Botany in a Day and Shanleya’s Quest

“I felt the voice of the Earth Mother Herself speak from the pages of I’m A Medicine Woman, Too! The sense of presence and higher awareness will benefit younger and those with accumulated years as well.

-Margi Flint, AHG HM, author of The Practicing Herbalist 

For children Ages 3-12, but an inspiration and pleasure for adults as well!  A colorful and soulful book of self discovery and personal empowerment for budding healers, as well as every kid heeding a calling or pursuing a dream.  The author’s delightful daughter Rhiannon is the inspiration and model for this tale of realization and growth, as she first resists believing she could ever be a Medicine Woman like the herbalists and healers she’s met… but then realizes the ways in which she is already the woman of power she hopes to be.  Included are 11 frame-worthy illustrations of various Medicine Woman archetypes including an Apache with her mano and metate grinding stones, a Hispanic curendara in her adobe Botanica herb shop, and an Anglo teacher, gardener and herb chef.  Selected excerpts follow:

~~~~~

 I’m A Medicine Woman, Too!

    At eight years of age, Rhiannon’s life seemed to turn page by page like a fairy tale book, and not even she ever knew what was coming next.
Her home was a canyon with orange and purple cliffs studded with shiny bits of rock crystals. Coming there when she was four had truly been a dream come true!  She loved sleeping in her special treehouse, imagining it even larger and more amazing than it was.  It felt great waking up each morning to the sounds of elk singing and splashing in the river below.  Living miles and miles from a town, she learned to follow the tracks of the deer and rabbits in her bare feet and talk to them all like friends. Her totem was the river otter, a very furry and playful animal, and just like the otter Rhiannon was always looking for a chance to play.

Then one day she came to me looking much more thoughtful than usual… and maybe just a little bit sad.

“What’s the matter, my daughter?” I asked.

“I could never be a Medicine Woman like Mama Kiva or Mama Loba,” she answered with the cutest of pouts.

“No,” I told her, “but you could be a Medicine Woman that is the fulfillment of the real, whole you… like nobody else in the world can do.”

    “Whether you know it or not,” I told her, “you are part of a long chain of women and girls throughout history, reaching out hand to hand from mothers to daughters and teachers to students, from the most ancient human tribes right up until our modern day times.

“You can feel their hands in yours.  They whisper sweet hints in the wind in the trees, in the yard or the shadowy far ends of a neighborhood park.  They keep you company like faery friends helping you have wonderful dreams at night.  These generations of Medicine Women want to teach you what you need.  But even more importantly, they want to remind you of the strength and knowledge that you’ve already got.  You’ve helped Mama Kiva dry and weigh chamomile and package bags of calendula for selling or trading, just as the Mexican curandera Doña Rosa does, selling herbs down a certain secret alleyway in her tiny Botanica shop.  And when you dig up fresh dandelion roots for my liver infusion, remember that it’s one of the fun tasks that the wrinkled old Doña was asked to do when she was still a little girl like you.”

    “But what if I decide I don’t want to be a healer?” she asked me with a look. “What if I want to be something else, like a warrior defending the helpless, a great singer or cook?”

“You can be all that and more,” I answered.  “You have a choice in everything you do, and it is your responsibility what you yourself choose.  You might decide to plant trees and restore wild places, change the world with the power of your artwork, grow organic food… or teach eager students at a school…”

    “It’s the way of the Medicine Woman to love climbing into a mulberry tree high, gathering leaves for a lung tonic and berries for a pie.  To work hard and be proud of what you do, while playing until you’re silly, too!  Doing what you can to offer people help, but also remembering to take special care of yourself.  Collecting lots of grapes to preserve for the Winter, before the songbirds fly south… but also taking time to pop a few in your mouth!”

“The job of the Medicine Woman isn’t just to heal sickness,” I added, “but to help make everything healthier and more beautiful.  Each woman works in her own personal ways to both create and improve the world.  Each follows her heart, knows her purpose, and answers her special calling.  And each must be brave enough to live her wildest dreams, no matter how hard that ever seems.”

“In that case, it must be true…” my little girl said.

“I’m a Medicine Woman too!”

A hardcover version will be released by Hops Press for anyone who wishes to wait until March for one.

Please pay with PayPal when possible, write us if not.  Media mail orders will take up to 2 weeks to arrive, so order early.

Thank you for your interest and support, and for forwarding this post by clicking on the “Share this Post” button below.

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Whenever I meet a flower for the first time, I let the world around me disappear, let my vision and experience narrow to just this one incredible expression of life I’m confronted by. My focus tightens to the texture and temperature of leaf, the smell and color of the flower, the sound of the wind singing through it, and the feeling of just being near the plant. Next, I’ll re-broaden my sight so that I can also experience the context of the plant and get to know through its habitat and relationship to other plants and animals. Later will I page through my books or google its name on the internet. The information I learn through research are incredibly valuable but still secondary to my personal relationship to the plant. Aquainting myself  with the plants in this manner allows me experience and understand the plant on many levels, from impression to intuition to bodily experience to the head knowledge of facts and figures.

Many of us have been taught herbalism (and just about everything else) through rote memorization, through long lists of diseases, body parts, plant names and constituents. The unfortunate result of this kind of learning is that it tends to stunt our capacity to truly listen, experience and adapt. Just as we cannot expect to play beautiful music simply because we have learned to read music or memorized the progression of notes that makes up a tune, neither should we expect to understand an herb just because we know their botanical name and “active ingredients”. Yes, knowing what plant family an herb belongs to is very useful, just as knowing what key a song is being played in, but it’s just one tool in the bigger picture of cultivating a relationship with a living plant or playing a personal expression of the song.

I’ve lost track of how often I’m asked how I manage to memorize all the herbs and problems, and how they match up, as if the secret to being an effective herbalist lies in having a computer-like brain. Truth is, beyond those pesky (but very useful) botanical plant names there’s very little I purposely memorize. Over time I have certainly committed certain things to mind through practice and hard learned experience, like not to put oil or salve on burns or to not sedate pain until I know what the pain is trying to communicate.

When it gets right down to it, everything in the healing process is about relationships – to the plants, the land, our food, our bodies and every other integral part of the living whole. Nothing is separate, and everything impacts everything else, just as every musical note exists in relationship with the other notes. It’s the contrast, harmony and resonance that makes it all work, that transforms abstract concepts into a complex and interdependant organism made up of each of us humans, as well as all the critters, bacteria, mushrooms, flowers and other living beings in the world.

For me, the work of getting intimate with the plants, of getting to know each one I work with as a unique expression of medicine, vitality and wholeness has been and continues to be the work of a lifetime. One reason why I choose to primarily work with local herbs, is because it seems difficult to me to really fall in love with one without knowing it as a living being in the context of the larger plant community and the dirt and water it grows from. I also find that experiencing a plant in its habitat teaches me more about its medicine, and often reveals subtleties I might have otherwise missed. I love the simple sweetness of incorporating an herbal ally into my life on every level: from greeting them by the river each day, to reveling in their taste as a food or tea to being amazed by the power of their healing effects. I’ve written extensively on this very subject in my Talking With Plants series over on the Medicine Woman’s Roots blog, with a special emphasis on recognizing the unique, non-human nature of the plant world.

This same principle applies to our relationship with our bodies, and to the bacteria, viruses and other creatures that live with and in us. The more we can understand and get to know the individual nature of each being and how it connects to the rest of life – the more whole, and therefore, the more healthy we will be. Animá and the Medicine Woman Tradition teaches all of life as an unending progression of concentric rings, linked into an eternal spiral that show us how our individual selves connect to each other and the whole planet that is our larger self. Our attempt to sterilize our environment by wiping out microorganisms with anti-bacterial soaps and more and more powerful antibiotics and the impact it has had on our health is a vivid illustration of the incredibly deep relationship that exists between us and even the minute members of the family of life.

In a culture of deconstruction and fragmentation, it can be hard to re-vision the world through eyes that are able to see the essential wholeness of life and the dance that each participant contributes to that whole. It can be difficult indeed to see what connects us in addition to what separates us. And yet, it is the infinitely satisfying purpose of each of one of us to recognize our innate kinship to our larger self and to nourish it, one intimate relationship at a time. The better we know the food we eat, the trees we rest beneath, the birds that sing to us and the land that sustains us the better we will know ourselves. Likewise, the more attention and nourishment we give our bodies and our whole, authentic selves, the deeper we will be able to know the world around us. The impact ripples in every direction, showing us how very important every decision and action really is, how every note and every pause between notes changes and fills the song. Proving once again, how we really do have the power to effect and change, to heal the whole wide world through every flower we fall in love with and each conscious step we take.

~Kiva Rose

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Health & Healing

The Sweet Medicine Sanctuary is a restored riparian wilderness, a river ecosystem made healthy again through the reintroduction of cottonwoods and willows, cattail and clump grass.  Ringtail cats cavort next to splashing muskrats, and fish make love under an expanse of heron wings.  It’s been nearly 3 decades since I first started excluding cattle from the land and replanting native plants.  With each new season, an increasing variety of plant life have made their way back home here, and every Spring comes the sound of yet another bird species I’ve never heard.  With every reintroduction the land becomes more of what it once was, and in this way, more itself.

Like this land, I too have sacrificed parts of myself, only to regain them through practice and prayer, personal insistence and the passage of time.  Things such as the willingness to laugh, and the ability to cry.  The honest depths of agony, and far extremes of joy.  My inner animal, and the reason for being.  The inclination to play, and the patience to stay.  It’s a good thing, because the longer I’m here, the better able I am to hear the will and whisperings of the Earth…. and more myself I am.

Of course, the walk downriver hasn’t always been easy.  Although some seasons I’ve leapt about, moving rocks for soil berms as if work had no weight, when I’ve been ill it hasn’t been so easy.  But in either case, I’ve never been truly healthier since coming here to home and purpose: knowing who I really am, what I most need to be doing, and where I most certainly belong.  Indeed, what is to be healthy, but to be whole: a balanced unity of gifts and needs, heart and mind, vision and action.  Gaia teaches that good health isn’t the absence of trauma or pain, but rather, the most complete embodiment of our authentic selves.  The depth of sensation, emotion and experience.  The fullness of expression and response.  The fulfillment of our passions and our purpose, our destiny and our dreams.   It’s how  we live, more than how long.  “Wellness” means living well: consciously and compassionately, artfully and purposefully.

The Anima Medicine Woman is adept at treating disease.  People come from all over for the healing effects of this place as well as Kiva’s insightful prescriptions and adept ministrations.  At the same time, it isn’t disease that makes us unwhole, for pain makes us more aware of our bodies and feelings, and the way both our lifestyles and our immediate environments are affecting us.  Suffering tempers our skills, tests our resolve, and strengthens our will.  Debility teaches us humility, and infirmity counsels patience.  The loss of one sensory organ leads to a heightening of the others.  At its worst, a deadly virus does nothing but return us to the earth we arose from, extend from, and belong to.  We are made unwhole not by death, but the failure to fully live.  By that which dilutes our focus, weakens our intention, or dishonors our spirit. That which makes us doubt our instincts and intuition, significance or value.  We are made unwhole by the suppression of our feelings, and the repression of our needs.  By the subjugation of our animal beings.  We have to give up certain aspects and components of our selves, in order to fit into society’s mold.  It is the loss or neglect of these parts that contributes to our greatest dis-ease: our imagined separation from the rest of the living world.  And with their re-membering and reclamation, we take the first of many steps towards the necessary cure.

Likewise, the Earth isn’t made any less — or any less healthy — by the eroding of mountain rock into fertile valley soil, or the death of a cottontail in the jaws of a fox.  Or even the shredding of forests by an erupting volcano, which relatively quickly grow back.  Even the natural extinction of species is only a recycling of the parts into the whole, each pruning back resulting in a new burst of growth, an opportunity for new color and form.  To the degree that it is sickened it is not because of the annihilation of individual life forms, so much as the overall reduction of biological, cultural and topographical diversity.  The extincting of species for no reasons other than obliviousness and greed.  The appropriation of habitat, so there’s little place left for the wildlife to spring back.  The monocultures of agribusiness, and the genetic manipulation of life.  And it’s not just the killing off of native songbirds, but the hundreds of indigenous languages being lost to neglect.  The defacing of the planet with asphalt, and the defaming with plastics.  By our failing to notice Gaia’s every miracle and gift, every hint of wind, the opening of a sidewalk blossom, the dance of a floating leaf.  And by our forgetting to give thanks.  We make the world sick with our neglect of self and planet, the dishonoring of Spirit, and the conceptual and physical dismembering of the which was one.

We say the “integrity” of a structure is compromised, and perhaps made unsafe, if any portion is degraded or removed.  It is the same with a person or an ecosystem. The health of people or places increases with the diversity and magnitude of their expression.  Thus any reduction in diversity impinges on the integrity of the whole— and the role of the activist becomes one not only of resistance but restoration and reimmersion.

It all starts with us literally “coming to our senses.”  Our creature senses are organs of reintegration, and when opened and heightened they bring the world we’re integral to even closer.  It is taste that can stir our gratitude, sight that can awaken awe, touch that can mend the imagined separation between body and soul, self and place.  Touch, through which we feel.  Touch that heals.   Our sensory and emotional contact inspires the protection, nourishment and celebration of that which we’ve engaged.  Our future personal, social and ecological health may hinge on our personal integrity, and the surviving integrity of the natural world that we love.  For us, to be reintegrated is to be accepted back within the identity of the earthen whole, to exist and act in harmony with tribal human community and the community of nature.

We commit ourselves to learning how to make medicines and heal with herbs, good food and real magic in our quest to stay physically well and able… but we understand that real health is a state of being at one with the needs, expression and spirit of not only our physical and energetic beings, but with the living breathing Earth as well – engaged in the endless adventure and fulfillment of our awakened lives.  By learning to wholly be aware, wholly serve, we intentionally rejoin the Whole.  And it is through this bringing back together of disparate and damaged parts – of self and planet — that we never have to feel apart again.

-By Jesse Wolf Hardin

(To learn more about whole-istic healing, consider applying for an Anima studentship at www.animacenter.org)

Feel free to copy and share this essay as you like. 

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The Medicine Woman’s Herbal
By Kiva Rose Hardin
Excerpt #3

“Finding a space to belong in, an actual place that I could touch and feel and bring myself to, really made me a person, an entity. It gave me an identity. My surroundings became the path and the path became me.”
-Katie Hennessey

It was as a child that the plants first called to me, crawling through the grasses, stopping to sniff the smallest flowers, then sitting back on my heels in awe at the fragrant, white blossoms of the yarrow growing wild at the edges of our yard. Running through the woods, I learned how to weave through the weeds so as to avoid the sharp sting of the prolific nettles. I gathered wild mulberries from up the hill with my mother, delighting in the sweet burst of juice eaten from purple stained fingers. Even then, I knew that the plants’ language of both sweetness and sting was significant and important, telling of some secret healing power or painful call to pay attention. And though the grownups continually cautioned me to not put plants in my mouth for fear I’d poison myself, I couldn’t help but take a taste of the bitter leaves of the dandelion or the nectar rich sage blossoms. I plucked shepherd’s purse seeds, intrigued by their peculiar shape and peered at them from every angle, carefully breaking them apart and then tasting their peppery goodness, proclaiming them to be wild pepper hearts, and adding another defamed weed to my list of favorite wild nibbles.

I knew I was hooked on herbs, the day an old Mexican woman down the road taught me how to use those pepper hearts and yarrow to stop my knees from bleeding, following a particularly bad bike wreck. I’d already searched out and marked any reference to medicinal plants in my favorite fairy tales and stories, but now I poured through field guides and herbal encyclopedias from the local library, looking for familiar plants and their uses. In my small bedroom, I created strange elixirs with vinegar, kitchen spices and garden weeds, delighting just to open the bottles and smell the mysterious scents within. I drank peppermint tea with a new fascination, turning inwards to observe any noticeable effects upon my body. Pulled by the ancient memories of meaning and need the plants stirred in me, I couldn’t have known the profound part they would play in my life’s calling and work. Through my teen years on the streets and my subsequent journey into the wilderness, the plants remained my closest companions, providing nutriment for my spirit and body when nourishment of any kind was hard to come by, and companionship when I had no where else to go for understanding.

Though initially my focus was trained primarily on the plants, Wolf taught me that medicine is any article or agent that contributes to the greater whole. Medicine can the pungent, peppery roots of Osha, or it can be a caring hand on our shoulder, it can be the car wreck that wakes us up to the beauty and importance of life, or it can be the much needed rest that gives us back our energy and vibrance. I recognized medicine in the loneliness during the time I’d spent on the streets, and how it taught me to choose my friends carefully and to value my solitude, found deep healing in my early struggle to free myself of my family’s destructive cycles, and a cure for nearly every sadness in the embrace of our rushing river. Medicine will be different for each person, and will change for each of us in time. The fast-paced lifestyle that invigorates one person may not serve the slower, more deliberate nature of another. The Medicine Woman Tradition teaches that there is no set dogma, no single way of being… only the bedrock of the earth’s underlying principles, the twisting, flowing current of our deepest needs and the clarion call of our most meaningful purpose, all urging us deeper, further and fuller into our selves, and ever further along the winding path we walk.

As that wonder-filled little girl, I was afraid that the role of healer had been relegated by modern dictates to apply only to medical school graduates. It was with great excitement that I learned of contemporary practicing herbalists and healers, yet I knew even then that I would never be happy just dispensing medicines, knew that working from the illusion of separative body, spirit and mind would be less than satisfying. Back then, I imagined myself the fairy-tale witch at the edge of the woods, with a bubbling soup pot and a pantry filled with the scent of dried, twisty roots and green, fragrant leaves. In my mind, I would treat neighbor children from my woodland cottage and deliver medicinal brews and wise words to the townspeople. The Medicine Woman of my youthful daydreams was, as I sensed on some instinctual level, a vital archetype and role model for our species, providing insight, counsel, and both magical and common sense healing to those she cares for and her surrounding tribe. While she may sometimes seem lost or invisible in our culture’s adoration of ephemeral beauty and tragic tales, she is still very present in our stories and thoughts, helping us re-create our lives.

Leading my students into the wild forests of my southwestern homeland, I find myself still glowing with the sense of enchantment and mystery that the plants first spoke of so many years ago. In my teaching and writing, I strive to pass on my continual wonder and love of the green world and its healing power. When I work with local village people, I remember my healing roots and the wise ways of my ancestral mothers, and at the same time I am excited at the potential for new discoveries and understandings. Practicing my art as teacher, wife, mother, herbalist and writer – as Medicine Woman – my childhood dreams are superimposed over my day to day life, seamless as skin, and more fulfilled with each passing moment.

And now it is time to turn from this solar powered laptop, and to the gorgeous sun as it slips over the red and violet cliffs. As I close, Loba is lighting the oil lamp and candles while Rhiannon sets the table for a dinner of wild meat and greens, glowing acorn bread and mulled cider. A simple prayer speaks our gratitude for the medicine of our abundance and the hands that fashioned it. In the growing dark, we take in the profound healing of stillness and nourishment, of love and fulfillment… and the unique, powerful journey we are each called to as Medicine Women. We applaud your responding to your calling, welcome your embrace of the Tradition, and will do all we can to assist your unique individual expression of the purposeful Medicine Woman Herbal path.

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For more information on our online Medicine Woman Herbal course, go to: http://animacenter.org/correspondenceco.html#MWTherbal

And you haven’t yet you can check out my Medicine Woman’s Roots blog, at: www.bearmedicineherbals.com

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It’s with great pride that I post below a second short excerpt from Kiva Rose’s book in progress, The Medicine Woman Herbal. Drawn from her opening chapter, they help define what the Anima Medicine Woman Tradition is and isn’t – in the context of mixed lineage, modernity, and these especially trying times. While the majority of her book will be focused on energetics, herb profiles and medicine making, she has crafted the first section as a personal and inviting introduction to what can be a life of insight and intuition, meaning and purpose, healing and growth. The illustration seen here is a portrait I just finished of Kiva, representing the Medicine Woman archetype. It’s been a pleasure as well as honor to assist this powerful project.
-J.W. Hardin

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“The neophyte turns… either voluntarily, ritually, or spontaneously through sickness… towards the mysterium. This change of direction can be accomplished only through ‘an obedience to awareness’.”
-Joan Halifax The Wounded Healer

In earliest human memory, a “Granny-Woman” walks the woodlands, carrying home a basket of roots or a bundle of bark and moss. In a riverside village nearly two hundred years ago, the “herbwyfe” tended her hearth, stirring a sweet smelling brew with a lovingly carved cottonwood spoon. Somewhere high in the Carolina hills just yesterday, an herbalist brought a thick, powerful medicine to a child suffering from an antibiotic resistant lung infection. And yet, the Medicine Woman is not just a gentle soul who dispenses cures and comfort, but a powerful woman who pro-actively contributes to the well being of the whole, and commits herself to both an essential personal code of honor, and the foundational principles of the Medicine Woman Tradition. Even now, the spirit and ways of the Medicine Woman live on through the instinct, intuition, insight and insistence of special women who care enough to dig deep into the soil of memory, story and the ever present now. In every culture and time of our species, some among us have been called as healers, as the hands that comfort, clarify, soothe and reveal, and as the representatives of the medicine that springs from woodland and mountain, desert and seaside. To protect and nourish both human and habitat, serving as much needed mediators between two worlds that have sadly grown apart through the ages, and to provide ourselves as living links for conscious re-integration.

While the the term Medicine Woman is in some ways generic, as with “Medicine Man,” it’s not the Anima Medicine Woman Tradition unless its principles and tools are applied and employed. Practical and hands on, the Medicine Woman manifests her healing and service in tangible ways. This result is personal responsibility that avoids victimhood, and that embraces a perspective that sees every moment as decisive, every choice as conscious, and every commitment significant. She takes on the responsibility for her part in the co-creation of her reality, the world around her, and even the future course of events.

The Medicine Woman understands that her relationship is not just with humans but with the whole earth, and that the plants and animals around her are a part of large, complex organism just as she is. As such, she is careful to only take as much of any plant as she needs and that the plant population can easily withstand. She sees the inherent value of each living being, and respects the plants’ intense desire to live and thrive. The Medicine Woman remembers the preciousness of life at all times, and especially when she takes life through harvesting, hunting or other ways. She gratefully gives back to the earth, through generous plant propagation, practiced awareness of her impact and a lifetime guardianship of the land she lives on and gathers from. She primarily uses local, common plants and products in her medicine, rather than exotic or rare goods. She makes a practice of working with what is nearby, and understands that local foods and medicines that grow from the same ground she does, are often more healing and powerful than those from distant lands.

Like the land that she gathers herbs from, the Medicine Woman knows that the human body is also a complex ecology that thrives upon diversity. She strives to support that complexity and diversity through her choices in food, through the use of herbs and other healing techniques, and by not just wiping out the natural microbial communities we are host to. She recognizes that there is more than one valid way of healing, and understand that at times even antibiotics can provide a path to wholeness if they are utilized as one step within a larger approach to nurture the whole person during acute illness. But rather than using antibacterial herbs or drugs on a chronic infection, she may first seek to rebalance bacterial life through fermented foods or herbs like Burdock that feed internal flora. In this way, the Medicine Woman is often able to heal through a process of nourishment rather than confrontation or destruction.

Often immersed in a culture of quick fixes and fast food, the Medicine Woman knows that true healing is not based in suppressing symptoms or relieving discomfort, but in the restoration of wholeness. In every case, the Medicine Woman seeks to restore the integrity of the whole, using whole plants rather than isolated constituents, addressing the whole body and working with the whole person through food, lifestyle, self-love, and herbs…

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The Medicine Woman’s Herbal
By Kiva Rose Hardin
A Brief Excerpt, The Opening Parts Of Chapt. 1:

(Prequel:)
There came a point, or points in their lives when they increasingly recognized something unexpressed inside their selves, a certain power they couldn’t explain to parents afraid of wilderness and scornful of miracles and faeries, an urge to escape the mundane or the expected, a sense of mystery, an inexorable draw towards something as yet unseen, a compulsion to do something special or heroic. Whether clothed in urban fashions or tribal dress, each Medicine Woman to-be saw in the faces of the crowd that they were not the same, were subject to visions of healing or helping the lost and hurting, or dreamed of their hands grinding up communicative herbs in with a hand-carved mortar and pestle. Like a seed, this thing inside them grew with their every watering, a wild gift of foliage too long confined, and not to be denied.
(J. W. Hardin, The Medicine Woman)

“Clothe yourself in your authority. You speak not only as yourself or for yourself. You will speak and act with the courage and endurance that has been yours through the long, beautiful aeons of your life story…”
-Joanna Macy

In our cozy cabin kitchen, my partner Loba opens the ornate oven door of our antique wood stove, checking the progress of four golden loaves of homemade acorn bread while singing a sweet old tune. Nearby, our apprentice Ivy rubs the injured shoulder of fellow student Cara with practiced hands, as our little Rhiannon happily shells the acorns that she gathered. I sit close to the heat-giving stove, stirring crushed elderberries and finely chopped ginger into a bowl of warmed honey and fine brandy, concocting my cold season remedy. Each of us is an evolving Medicine Woman, discovering and refining our skills and talents through practice and improvisation. Through the magic of healing plants and scrumptious foods, touch and sensation, sweet scents and grateful songs, focused intention and artful follow-through, we share our personal medicine with the world… giving to ourselves in the most nourishing and empowering ways, and making heartful contributions to the greater whole. Outside, a great wind howls through the canyon, heralding the onset of late Autumn storms, and bearing yet another wave of migratory birds scouting our warmer environs for the ideal nesting spots. Like them, we are clearly called… simultaneously responding to the pull of home and purpose, and heeding the urge to fly.

I, too, followed instinct or destiny home, to an ancient ceremonial site deep in the Saliz mountains, in the sparsely populated southwest corner of enchanted New Mexico. Home to the insights that Mother Nature and this enchanted canyon in particular afford. Home to my authentic self and real gifts, and to what we call “one’s personal, most meaningful purpose.” And in my case, home to the Medicine Woman Tradition, a nature-based healing and empowerment practice founded and developed by myself and my partner Jesse Wolf Hardin to meet a real need.

Most of us are of mixed lineage, and all of us have to deal with the disempowerment, destruction and distractions of the present times… as well as with the resulting displacement, illness, self-doubt, and self-worth issues. We all suffer to one degree or another from a dangerous “disconnect” from both the natural world and our own natural selves… and from our childhood hopes and dreams. The practice of Anima answers the need for a system of intense reconnection, personal empowerment and action. Anima itself means “breath,” and is essentially the animating essence of all life. Whether we think of it in spiritual, or strictly secular or scientific terms, it is the vital energy that both enlivens and heals the human body. Through the ever adapting dance of the Anima within our bodies, we grow and learn, rest and repair, thrive and eventually die, our bodies returning to and transformed by the earth it was born from. It is this underlying and interconnective source that the Medicine Woman draws from, understanding the earth as a living composite and inspirited organism that we are each an integral part of.

The Anima Medicine Woman Tradition of herbalism is a manifestation of this way of perceiving and acting, specifically designed for those seeking the perceptual and practical skills and tools necessary for global as well as personal and interpersonal healing, and grounded in common sense principles and skills rather than complicated or artificial structures. Healing is hands on and experiential, and medicines are often best made in the kitchen with fresh, vital ingredients by loving hands. The Medicine Woman understands that the most powerful remedies are those that are most personal, defined by her relationship to both the plants and the people she cares for. She also knows that healing comes through both nourishment and challenge, darkness and light, comfort and dis-ease, not as a dichotomy or polarization but as a careful balance of many elements and ingredients. Problems and illnesses are not seen as enemies to be destroyed or battles to be waged but rather as sometimes necessary lessons and helpers on the journey to wholeness.

Though the Tradition draws from ancestral stores of tribal wisdom and ancient ways, it operates outside any particular cultural or ethnic bias or constraint. We each gather knowledge and skills from whatever resources available to us, yet remain rooted in direct experience and place based knowledge. This frees us from holding to historic techniques or philosophies that no longer serve us or the current times, and allows us to grow with continuing experience and fresh understandings. The Medicine Woman Tradition speaks the language of the hills, of old wives and wise women. As ancient as the sea, as familiar as a mother’s hand upon our forehead and as true today as it was 500 years or even millennia ago. The most fundamental healing techniques are both timeless and tirelessly adaptive. For every generation they bloom with new insights and yet remain essentially applicable to current context and need.

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Intention & Purpose
• Every Medicine Woman has an original nature, inherent potentials to be developed, dreams to be realized and a personal, most meaningful purpose to be fulfilled. Such purpose is in inevitably unique to the individual but also connects them to and helps them serve the collective whole.
• The Medicine Woman acts always out of compassion, truth, expression of real self and what matters most… the bettering or beautifying of the world.
• The Medicine Woman not only promotes but embodies integrity to the best of her ability. She practices radical honesty regardless of what it may cost her. Subterfuge, pretense and denial are not the ways of the Medicine Woman.
• A Medicine Woman develops and adheres to a personal code of honor in all matters at all times. Taking on this role begins the moment we commit ourselves to the principles and take on the challenges and doesn’t end until the moment we die. The Medicine Woman obeys nothing and no-one, but attends what matters and heeds what’s right. While she accepts discipline from no-one, it is through her self-discipline that she best realizes, actualizes and benefits.
• The Medicine Woman opens to rewards, savors success and embodies bliss.

Requirements & Creed
• The Medicine Woman is wild (willed), true to her own nature, not subject to the whims of others of the constraints of society. She revels in uninhibited sensual engagement with the world. Expresses her authentic being and fulfills her purpose, with no regard to so-called edicts or the systematic inculturated fears of the healing profession.
• Ability is not defined by age, but by experience, gifts, sensitivities, wisdom and results. The archetype of the wise woman is usually that of the elder, but of course not every elder is wise and even (or especially) children – unhindered by the imagined limitations and the fog of cultural perception – can have the capacity to afford us profound insights or have a pronounced healing effect.
• Authority rests with the individual, and certification of any kind does not guarantee or imply wisdom, ability or skill. The Medicine Woman Tradition is meant to be tested against the individual’s own experience, rather than simply accepted as prescribed dogma. Thus, the Medicine Woman Tradition does not accredit anyone. We impart a set of perceptual and practical tools that you can use to empower yourself, find your unique personal path, gather experience and earn credit when deserved. With any kind of service, real accreditation is bestowed by the people who are helped through our insights and efforts. Credibility accrues with wisdom and results, though the Medicine Woman is not dependent on anyone or anything outside herself to validate her.
• The Medicine Woman Tradition is not just about service to individuals, but to the greater whole that begins with the health of the self and that of the earth. A Medicine Woman can be fully solitary from other humans and yet her medicine is evoked in every moment, in the way her meals are prepared, her food gathered and her home tended. In the love she lavishes on herself and her fellow creatures and the discernment she hones in every decision.
• The Medicine Tradition is a practice rooted in ancient wisdom within the contemporary context. In a hurting world and a destroyed or denatured landscape, reduction in diversity and more confusion about roots, authentic culture and real belonging. The Medicine Woman Tradition reflects both our authentic, ancient nature and the current situation, so that we can better understand and effect ourselves and the world.
• The source of the Medicine Woman Tradition is Anima (the animating spirit of all life), made available through relationship with specific instructive place by the sensorial, intuitive and instinctive self. Rather than excerpting from the established ways of any one ethnicity or culture, the Medicine Woman Tradition is based on personal experience and direct relationship with Anima and earth.
• Eclecticism can be just as dangerous as adherence to exotic and often romanticized cultures. By picking and choosing what we are most comfortable with or find easiest, one can end up with a generic, feel-good system providing permission to do nothing. The Medicine Woman knows that some of her greatest lessons are marked by discomfort and difficulty.
• The Medicine Woman Tradition is in many ways the antithesis of what they call “New Age,” being more about engagement and responsibility than escaping, transcending, or being consoled. Neither is it associated in any way with the sensationalist “Medicine Woman” novel of some years ago.
• The Medicine Woman Tradition is not a religious one, and Anima can be described in secular or scientific as well as spiritual or magical terms.
• The Medicine Woman Tradition is an art form, and each individual will have different degrees of potential. This tradition is distinguished by its emphasis on making truths proactive, and it’s really not the Medicine Woman Tradition unless its principles and tools are applied and employed. Practical and hands on, the Medicine Woman manifests her healing and service in tangible ways. This result is personal responsibility that avoids victimhood, and that embraces a perspective that sees every moment as decisive, every choice as conscious, and every commitment significant. She takes on the responsibility for her part in the co-creation of her reality, the world around her, and the future course of events.
• Despite the title, men are not excluded from the Medicine Woman Tradition. It is available and accessible to any male who feels strongly called to it. The term Medicine Man has been trivialized and commercialized beyond being of any use, and so we invite males – with the sensitivity and penchant to follow the Anima Medicine Way – to fully utilize the Medicine Woman materials and lessons, principles and practices.

Healing Self & Others
• Healing is defined as ever growing wholeness through holistic reintegration of all the parts, and the Medicine Woman understands that the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.
• Medicine is defined as anything that contributes to that wholeness.
• The human body is a complex and diverse ecology to be nourished and supported, not a machine, battlefield or temple to be fixed, won or cleansed.
• We assist the body in regaining equilibrium, by nurturing the vital spirit without suppression. This is done through nourishing unique, individual people rather than eradicating pre-defined diseases.
• The Medicine Woman does not treat healing as a a battle. While she may also be a warrior, she understands that disease is not our enemy, but rather an ally and learning tool. She knows viruses and bacteria as integral parts of the whole, inspirited beings with the innate desire to thrive and proliferate.
• Healing is composed of both nourishment and challenge at all times, as two sides of the same leaf, the Medicine Woman knows that we need both.
• Each wound, problem or illness is a gift, lesson or portal — an opportunity for further growth and wholeness.
• The Medicine Woman works with the whole person in the context of their lives, relationships, home and place. Only through the whole person and picture can full healing occur.
• The Medicine Woman has a conscious response-ability and commitment to use her gifts, skills and healing to contribute the integrity of the larger whole

Relating to the Plant World
• Plants are animate, inspirited parts of the earthen whole, just as we are. Every plant is a medicine plant, and all have some interspecies benefit whether we’re aware of it or not.
• Their effect depends on the person using them individual constitution, their relationship to the plant as well as how the plant has be harvested and prepared. The medicine of the plant will always be stronger when it has been taken and prepared with love, honor and consciousness.
• We are made worthy of their gifts to us when we honor their intrinsic value, apart from what they can do for us. Plant life, like all life, functions according to the principles of reciprocity, which is to say that it is both a willing recipient (nutrients etc) and provider, giving back to the soil even in death.
• Every plant has intrinsic value apart from any benefit to humans. Yet as extensions of Anima, they join us in working together to heal and nourish the whole.
• Plants exist as members of a dynamic and interdependent network that include all life-forms. Plants, and communities of plants, have individually – but especially collectively – an awareness or consciousness different from but not lesser than that of animals and other life forms.
• Plants are sentient, aware beings, but they are not humans. To expect them to behave and communicate as such is to shortchange both ourselves and them, and impose our imaginings on the surprising multi-dimensional relationships that we can have with them.
• Different levels of communication are possible through sensory signals, impressions and feelings. Communication with plants involves not the transmission of words but of qualities, sensibilities and intention – an evocation of essence that we then translate into a known dialect. What is imparted between humans and plants is far more significant than language, deeper and more intense. The plants communicate in ways non-verbal, non-linear, instinct driven, responsive, generally not anticipatory. The seemingly most instructive plants reveal possibilities rather than telling us what to do.
• Healing systems and structures are useful as we are learning, but are less necessary and sometimes even become hinderances once we have developed our intuitive abilities and deepened our personal understanding of and intimate relationship with the individual plants.
• The Medicine Woman works with the whole plant, not isolated constituents… just as she works with the whole person rather than isolated organs or elements.
• The Medicine Woman primarily works with plant allies that are local and sustainable, as a way of becoming intimate with the land and plants as well as respectful to the earthen whole.

For the Medicine Woman intentions evolve into commitments and all worthy commitments are kept.

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