Plant Spirit Medicine
Humans and plants have lived together for countless generations. We are family. Our plant relatives are generous and helpful, offering us food, shelter, and medicine. Like us, plants have spirit, and their spirit can nurture and heal us. Their spirits have the unique capacity to touch and heal our spirit, bringing us into balance and harmony, restoring us to our essential nature.
Plant Spirit Medicine is a form of healing that calls upon the plant spirits to heal. Through the opening of their senses, healers learn to listen to the root of a person’s illness, listen to the medicine of the plants, and call upon the healing power of the plants for the benefit of that person. Our ancestors lived in this way, where nature was alive and there was no illusion of separation from nature. They had a relationship with the spirits of nature and would call upon them for healing and wisdom. This ancient practice, long forgotten in the modern world, was remembered, revitalized, and reintroduced by Blue Deer’s Founder, the late teacher and healer, Eliot Cowan, and has proven to be as effective in today’s world as in past times.
Plant Spirit Medicine differs from many forms of herbalism in the importance it places on the relationship with the spirit of the plant. Using the common everyday plants, like the ones you might find outside your home, including the trees, the weeds, the plants growing between the cracks in the cement, or the plants growing in the wild, plants have much to offer us in the form of healing and wisdom. And, luckily for us, they are willing to share with us. Living in this type of relationship with the living nature of the plants gives us a deeper and richer experience of life. Whether we need healing in our bodies, minds, or spirits, the plants can offer help.
Plant Spirit Medicine course content offered by the Blue Deer Center does not include the use of sacred plant medicine (i.e. psychedelic/ psycho-active) plants, such as ayahuasca, peyote, datura, San Pedro, mushrooms, and other mind-altering substances. To learn more about this perspective, click here.
Why is Plant Spirit Medicine important today?
We live in a modern world with many amenities that enable us to live comfortably and with expediency. We move at a fast pace and can arrive anywhere in the world at speed-time. Despite many modern conveniences, many live with a sense of isolation. Without seeing the natural world as sacred or having wisdom, we feel we are separate from nature. In this age of individuality, physical and mental illness has reached unprecedented levels, yet medical science has not been as effective in relieving the despair experienced by many. By far, most afflictions today are rooted in spirit, and we need a spiritual medicine to address this spiritual crisis we are in. Plant Spirit Medicine offers such a medicine, reaching into the deepest recesses of our being to bring healing to our most troubling ailments.
Benefits of Plant Spirit Medicine
Plant Spirit Medicine heals and nourishes the spirit and invites us to connect more deeply with life, the world, and our relationship to it. When we connect to life from the level of spirit, the quality of our lives increases. Our everyday experience of life is richer and more engaged. As our life moves more into balance, our afflictions, whether they be physical, emotional, or spiritual, are addressed and we can begin to approach and affect the world with new awareness and an awakened sense of meaning and belonging. Every person needs something different for their healing and the beauty of the plants is they reach each person where they need it.