Plant Spirit Medicine

Healing the Heart of Humanity

The greatest threat to human survival on this planet may be our disconnect from our own hearts and emotions.

This thought has been occupying a lot of space in my mind over the past several months. As I look around at converging crises, and the failure of human innovation to respond intelligently to these challenges, I traveled the winding dirt roads of thought to the common core. What keeps us from banding together, negotiating, cooperating, strategizing, and committing to minimizing harm and suffering to create the most thriving communities Earth has seen in the modern era?

Again and again, these paths of thought lead me to the core of emotional immaturity and disconnection from belonging. I used to think it was greed, desire for power, tribalism, religious fanatacism, but when I look underneath each of these, I find dysregulated and pathological emotional responses. Those who would hurt others and destroy landscapes for resources, money, power, are trying to avoid a vacuous emptiness in themselves.

We don’t know how to be in love. We don’t know how to face the deep tenderness we feel for others, and the need we feel to be cherished and loved by others. We are terrified of our inadequacy, our need, our desire, and our loneliness.

Eliot Cowan, author of Plant Spirit Medicine and founder of the Blue Deer Center, teaches that emotions are the way humans relate to the world. Our emotions are meant to flow and shift and move, as a constant conversation between our inner most selves and our thinking minds, in response to the world around us and within us. In the modern world, we are often out of touch with our emotions and would prefer to avoid them altogether and do something more “productive.”

The heart is always burning with the fire of spirit, love and joy. It is always awake, alive, receptive and communicating its essence to the world around us. It is authentic, honest, trustworthy and seeking connection. The mind is very mechanical and influenced by fear. It is clever, careful, mechanistic, always calculating and maneuvering. Thinking, when not aligned with the heart, is inherently dissociative and creates a disconnect with our emotions and body knowing. The heart seeks relatedness and belonging (secreting hormones like oxytocin), while the mind seeks protection and safety for the individual above all else.

When we are attuned only to our cunning, only to our fearful thinking mind that is devoted to hyper-individual need, we are divorced from the deep knowing of our body and heart. Eliot Cowan, and other teachers and mentors in the Plant Spirit Medicine Program at the Blue Deer Center, teach that the plants are holding the spirit of the land, and that the landscape speaks through the plants in the same way our bodies speak through emotions. It is the wise and tender heart that hears the language of the land through the plants, just as it hears the language of our bodies through our emotions.

When we are emotionally immature, we are afraid to connect to our heart-fire, the place where we know who we are and how we belong within the larger community of Life. Instead, we make our home in the reactive and cunning mind, that promises to keep us safe from harm, loss, and the overwhelming feelings of vulnerability that come from authentic connection. The level of joy that comes from tender, vulnerable, authentic connection is threatening and terrifying to an emotionally immature person. It feels annhilating to the mind that equates vulnerability with failure and loss. It is this distance and dissociation, numbing and avoidance of intimacy and joy, that keeps us lost in the labyrinth of suffering and competition and punishment that we find everywhere around us.

So how do we become emotionally mature? How do we learn to bear the exquisite beauty of our radiant hearts, and begin a life of deep connection and belonging to other humans and the larger community of beings? In my life, I have found healing through psychotherapy, and plants.

The plants cannot flee. They cannot fight. They hold boundaries and call for help, but they are deeply vulnerable. They must stand still while being devoured or burned or trampled. Their relationship with pollinators is deeply intimate. The way their roots grow into the soil of place is in complete devotion and connection to the larger community. The spirits of the plants are generous and willing to help us reconnect to our own tender green hearts. The medicine of the plants can help us overcome the barriers and resistances that we have developed to distract ourselves from the fear that arises when we allow ourselves to listen deeply to our own bodies and the rising tides of our emotions. The plants help us to anchor into our hearts and deeply understand this language, that they also speak, and that connects us to the more-than-human world that we belong to.

When we are able to rest in the wise and knowing heart, the movement of emotions through us is informative and communicative, not threatening and unbearable. We are able to hear the cries of our bodies and spirits, and respond with wisdom and maturity. When we are reacting only from the disconnected mind, we are seeing such a small sliver of the reality of our existence.

The Blue Deer Center has created a course called Plant Spirit Medicine: Growing Awareness of Nature to help people gain an entry point into the world of the Plant Spirits, and begin to access this healing relationship between plants, landscapes, and humans. In this course, we hear from Eliot Cowan along with herbalists and traditional healers like Kat Maier, Tieraona Low Dog, MD, Pat McCabe and so many more. I was especially moved by the teachings of Mayan Tzotzil Healer, Sofia Diaz Hernandez. Her teachings feel so deeply rooted in place and ancestral ways of knowing. My spirit seemed to sigh with memory as I listened to her speak.

I had the great pleasure of talking to the director of the Plant Spirit Medicine program, Sabina Garcia, and she has offered my readers a discount of 10% with the code ERYN132 at checkout. The class has hours and hours of videos along with written assignments and exercises to deepen our experience with the plant spirits.

So many times, as I sit with the Joe Pye or the vervain or amaranth, I am astounded at the tenderness and interconnectedness I sense between the plants, insects, hummingbirds, soil microbes, and myself. I am included in the dance, and they whisper the way back to my own delicate and resilient heart. If you are looking for an access point to get back to this green way of knowing, I hope you will check out the Plant Spirit Medicine program at the Blue Deer Center.