Plant Spirit Medicine, Part 5: Moving Past Doubt and Into Magic
Welcome to the final post in a five-part series on plant spirit medicine! In Part 1, we defined plant spirit medicine as a shamanic approach to working with plants as teachers and allies. In Part 2, we explored cultivating relationships with plants in an intentional, reciprocal way for healing and personal growth, while in Part 3, we discovered meditation practices for faciliatating communication with plants. In Part 4, we discovered the power of bringing intention and ritual into our work with plants.
Now we’ll wrap up this series by addressing a common stumbling block that crops up often during spiritual and visionary work: self-doubt. We’ll also answer some common questions:
What do plant spirits look like, anyway?
How do we know if our plant spirit experiences are real?
What role does synchronicity play in plant spirit medicine?
Tuning the Dial of Consciousness
Any kind of inner work or spiritual practice is bound to provoke questions from the logical mind. Think of consciousness like a radio; for most of us, most of the time, our awareness is tuned to a single station. We live our lives in a logical, materialist mindset that helps us check things off our to-do list and makes us productive members of corporate society, but does little for our inner world. Meditation is one way to tune the dial of our consciousness to a different station, affording access to realms that usually remain invisible.
Entering into Otherworld realms inevitably invites the logical mind to rationalize our experiences. This can be difficult. It’s like waking from a dream and trying to rationally explain a jumbled narrative that only made sense during the dream state. Dreams and intuitive experiences may fall outside the comfort zone of our usual way of knowing (i.e., most of us weren’t taught how to interpret visionary experiences in school), but nevertheless, they are valid ways of knowing.
Also like dreams, visionary experiences are also easy to forget. A dream that felt so vivid in the moment can wash away in an instant upon waking, like water slipping through our fingertips. Similarly, it can be surprising how a meditation that was rich with feeling and meaning can quickly fade from memory. This is especially true when we have a lot going on in our daily lives (and who doesn’t?).
This is why I suggest keeping a log of your experiences with plant spirits. Write down what happens during plant spirit meditations, any impressions or messages you’ve received, and any synchronicities that come up around the plants. Tracking your experiences and revisiting them from time to time helps to jog your memory and make new connections so that you get the most from your plant spirit medicine practice.
What do Plant Spirits Look Like?
Now, let’s address a common question: what do plant spirits actually look like?
The thing is, there’s no definitive answer to this question. Plants are multidimensional beings who can take different forms depending on what someone expects or needs. Plants are good at reading us, and my feeling is that they are able to sense which form might be most helpful to us. Indeed, the form they take can be part of the message.
It’s common for plants spirits to appear in human form, likely because we can easily relate to them in this way. This may seem anthropocentric, but in my experience, plants tend to be magnanimous beings who are willing to shapeshift into any form that our human minds can accept. I get the sense that plants spirits are so free of ego that the form they take doesn’t matter so much to them; they are willing to meet us where ever we are.
Sometimes, plant spirits simply appear as the plant itself, making them easy to recognize. Some people see plants with eyes, faces, or other anthropomorphic features, like many of the card images in The Herbal Healing Deck. Those images came from visionary experiences of the deck’s illustrator, Ashley Verkamp, who took a shamanic journey with each plant to receive a vision for every card illustration. (Read more about shamanic journeying in Part 3 of this series.)
Plant spirits can take a variety of other forms, as well. They might appear as animals or other living creatures; I’ve seen some appear as faeries or mythical creatures. They can also be more abstract, like an orb of light or a symbol; I often see the image of a sword when I meet with the spirit of St. John’s wort. You might also experience plant spirits with other senses, like hearing a disembodied voice or coming to associate a particular feeling or sensation with a plant personality.
Truth and Skepticism
The wide variety plant spirit forms and experiences can be confusing to the material mind. We crave facts, and we’ve been meticulously trained to accept only a very narrow bandwidth of what we consider to be truth. I once got an email from a blog reader wanting to know how certain I was about the energies of the plants I write about. She said she wanted to learn the truth about plants so that she wouldn’t be “spreading lies.”
This speaks to the self-doubt it’s so easy to feel when doing this type of work—that is, communicating with the invisible. The uncharted waters of consciousness are vast indeed, and navigating them can feel a lot like wandering in the dark.
But here’s the thing: there is no final Truth-with-a-capital-T when it comes to plant spirits. In the same way that two herbalists might use the same plant for completely different purposes and both see good results, two people may get very different impressions of a plant spirit—and that’s okay! It doesn’t mean either person is wrong, only that they perceive something differently. To my mind, both are valid. Reality itself is malleable and open to interpretation; there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to personal experiences.
This brings to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant, a story that comes from ancient India. A group of blind men come across an elephant for the first time. Each man feels a different part of the animal: one holds the elephant’s trunk, another touches its leg, while the third man grabs a tusk. Together, they try to define what an elephant is, but because each man has a completely different experience to report, they end up in an argument.
Plant spirits are archetypal beings so expansive that we humans can only glimpse portions of them. To claim absolute truth based on one person’s limited, subjective experience is missing the bigger picture. Everybody who forges relationships with plant spirits will have their own piece of the puzzle. Everyone’s experiences have value. Conversely, nobody can claim to know the definitive Truth about a plant.
I created The Herbal Healing Deck as a kind of jumping-off point for people to get to know plant spirits for themselves. I shared my own impressions and working knowledge of the plants as I understood them at the time, but I do not consider it to be a work of static, definitive truth by any means. My own understanding of plants is ever-evolving. I like to think of the deck more as a kind of encyclopedia-in-progress, a collection of impressions and messages that are open to interpretation and exploration. (That’s the fun part!) It’s one contribution to an ever-growing body of collective knowledge that expands every time someone has a plant spirit experience of their own.
What’s more, as our understanding of plants shifts and changes over time, so can the forms and meanings they share with us. I’ve seen plant spirits swap genders; for years, a plant may appear to me as a masculine spirit and then suddenly take a feminine form. Likewise, a plant ally may help you with one aspect of your life for many years, only to one day reveal a different direction for your personal work with that plant.
Honoring Your Experiences
One of the quickest ways to shut down our intuitive, visionary experiences is by giving into self-doubt. If we are given a gift from the plants and we disregard the experience, it sends the message (both to the plants and to our own subconscious mind) that we don’t value that experience or connection.
Robert Moss, who teaches Active Dreaming (a remarkable synthesis of dream work and shamanism), suggests honoring our dreams by taking some action in our waking life that relates to the dream experience. This can be as simple as going swimming after a dream about water. Or it can be more involved, like changing a habit based on advice we got in a dream. It’s a way of following through on the messages we receive during the dream state, and this practice can also apply to any vision we glimpse when our consciousness is tuned to intuitive stations.
So, honor your experiences. Trust them. Write them down. Don’t allow naysayers to plant seeds of doubt in the garden of your mind; only share your experiences with those who honor them. Even better, if you can find a spiritual study buddy who is also exploring plant spirits, that can accelerate growth for both people. Compare notes and see if any patterns form—you might be surprised at the level of synchronicity that can happen when you pair up with others doing this work!
Even though plant spirit experiences vary from person to person, it’s common for patterns to crop up. The encyclopedia of plant meanings has been coalescing in our collective human consciousness for millennia. Plant myths and lore, legends and signatures, medicinal properties, and histories of a plant’s uses and abuses can all give us clues about its archetypal nature. All of it can help inform our quest for meaning. Yet ultimately, the experiences we have are our own; never discount your personal encouters As more and more people share their impressions of plants, the web of meaning grows for all of us.
Is it Real or is it Memorex?
It’s all well and good to open our minds to the concepts of truth and reality as subjective and malleable. But at the end of the day, many of us (who still rely on primarily on our logical minds by necessity) have nagging questions about the veracity of our experiences. How do we know if what we saw and felt during meditation is real? We may find ourselves wondering: did I just make it all up? Is this all in my head?
To quote one of my favorite fictional characters of all time:
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
-Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Learning to value intuitive ways of knowing is a balancing act. Valuing the feminine side of our consciousness (regardless of our gender) is sorely needed in a patriarchal world fueled by logic and reductionism. I would love to live in a society where dreams were considered important enough to talk about during board meetings, where planetary transits were consulted before making important choices, and where visionary experiences were valued.
Yet I’m not suggesting that we rely solely on visionary experiences for our understanding of reality. Otherwise, we might disregard common sense and act upon delusions or misinterpretations of experiences we barely understand. It’s better to strike a balance so that our masculine and feminine sides, our left and right brain hemispheres, are working together. Even when we’re exploring other realms, we need to keep our feet on the ground. As an example, I do not suggest taking material doses of herbs based solely on divination or intuition. Instead, it’s best to use intuition as a guidepost, then research the herb to make sure it’s a good fit on the physical level.
In the spirit of finding balance, it can be helpful to seek confirmation of the messages we receive intuitively, especially when we’re first starting out with plant spirit journeys. Sometimes, you get lucky enough to find outside evidence that correlates with your experience. You might be inspired to use a plant in new or different way, only to later learn that this is a traditional use of the plant that you hadn’t learned about yet. As more of these confirmations occur, you learn how to discern accuracy in your own visions and begin to trust your intuitive senses more and more.
If you’d like, you can journey with a plant before you know much about it as a way of testing your intuition. Before cracking open your herb books, sit and commune with a plant; then consult the books to see if the information confirms your impressions.
Just bear in mind that “proving” quantifiable, textbook information can be helpful for addressing doubt, but it’s not necessarily the goal of the practice. Strike a balance between staying grounded in reality and being open enough to hear the messages in the first place. If you’re spending too much time in meditations trying to discover knowledge you could easily look up in a book, you might be missing a deeper connection with a plant. Stay open to the value of personal, healing messages as well—which may not be verifiable in any sort of logical manner.
Another good indicator of authenticity is the element of surprise. Think about our nighttime dreams: most of us don’t control the narrative of our dreams, so it can be easier to see them as authentic messages. Because we’re awake in shamanic journeys, on the other hand, we may have nagging doubts that we made it all up. If you feel surprised by something a plant spirit says or does, or by the form it takes, or if it communicates in a voice that is clearly not your own, those are all good clues that you’re having an authentic experience.
Synchronicity
As plant spirit medicine teacher Eliot Cowan (1995) points out, “Some dreams [his word for shamanic journeys] yield their meaning only after they are illuminated by strange coincidences that take place later. This can take months or even years. Be patient” (p. 27).
In other words, synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) can help us understand our plant spirit experiences, confirming their authenticity in the process. Some shamanic experiences can be mysterious or confusing in the moment, but we discover their meaning later through outside events in our lives.
I’ll share a personal story: I once meditated with the spirit of Goldenseal, who told me that I would soon receive an unexpected healing gift. Shortly thereafter, I was contacted out of the blue by an old flame, someone who had broken my heart. Even years later, I’d been unable to truly let go of him. We had a heart-to-heart exchange that helped me release some of the grief I’d been holding onto. I realized that this had been the healing gift I was promised. Later, I was astonished to learn that Goldenseal flower essence is used for cutting energy cords and “sealing up” old emotional wounds! This became the inspiration for the message of Goldenseal in The Herbal Healing Deck; it heralds an unexpected healing gift for those who draw the card.
Such synchronicities can have the effect of bringing to light our inner experiences, allowing us to verify what we have learned intuitively or, harkening back to the meaning of the word shaman (see Part 1), what we have “seen in the dark.”
Synchronicity can also function as signal that we’re “on”: on track, on target, switched on to the meaning of the moment. Assured that the universe is listening, that we are part of the interconnected whole. One summer, I struggled for months to find a place to harvest mimosa (Albizia julibrissin) flowers. Finally, I spotted a tree in a suitable location, which also happened to be an old cemetery. There I was, picking flowers and musing that a graveyard is a lovely place for a tree used as medicine for grief and heartache, when I turned around and was shocked to see my own name (first and last) on the nearest headstone! Rather than confirming a message or verifying a journey experience, this felt more like a loud and clear “Hello!” from a beloved plant friend. I still smile when I think about it.
Plant Spirit Magic
These types of synchronicities are so uplifting that they are a kind of medicine unto themselves. Plant spirit work is medicine for the spirit, helping us tap into a meaningful, interconnected experience of life. That’s why I like to think of it as plant spirit magic. Connections forged with plants in nonphysical realms do have tangible effects in our everyday lives that we can witness and marvel at. When you start working with plant consciousness, truly magical things happen!
Thank you for joining me on this journey seeking the deepest medicine of the plants. I hope this series has given you the inspiration and tools for developing meaningful, healing relationships with plant allies. Let the magic begin!
References
Cowan, E. (1995). Plant spirit medicine. Swan Raven & Co.