This morning I found myself contemplating the preparation that healers undergo in order to be able to share their gifts with others. A few weeks back I wrote about right relationship, and certainly this is one of the important things to cultivate with the plant spirits and the entire natural world as we endeavor to alleviate people’s suffering.   Here are other ways in which we become ready as healers:

 

Compassion. Heartache. Illness.

 

 

Very often, healers find their gifts and their teachers after going through a time of illness or trial.  I believe this is because difficult times help us experience pain; they help us realize we are so much more than a body … tough times help us open our hearts. When we realize that we all suffer, and are all doing the best we can, then we can truly extend love and compassion to other beings.

 

Going within in prayer and meditation

 

 

As I prepare to work with my Plant Spirit Medicine clients I go within, into that space beyond physical and even mental reality where as my dear teacher Swamiji used to say “all is well and there are no issues.” As healers we go into the vast space of emptiness that is our soul and the soul of the world. Our ability to access knowing (notice I don’t say ‘information’) is vast once we stand in this stillness and fullness within us. For some healers, meditation is the perfect training for accessing this space. For others, prayer is the doorway.

 

Realizing that the entire universe is One

 

 

When I connect with the spirits of plants in order to ask for their healing gifts, this communication happens in the space of our common dreaming – from that depth within me that recognizes and remembers that within me everything exists. That inside me there is plant energy, animal energy, mineral energy … and in fact many other energies as well. It is precisely this commonality that in many ways allows us to deeply know one another, communicate and help one another.  We are made of the same soul matter. And we definitely speak the same language, especially when that language is Love.

 

The language of love is absolutely the language of plant spirit medicine

 

 

I remember a meeting with one of my plant allies when I, like an innocent playful girl, told the spirit of the plant that Its spirit didn’t look like the beautiful plant I had just met. Rather than being put off, the plant communicated to me that it was wearing what might be understood as “travel gear.” One of the messages of this plant had to do with outward appearances.   As the plant spirits become in my heart more like family members, I am able to speak with them as I would with a grandmother, or a sister, or an older uncle, or a wonderful trusted friend. No matter what the exchange, as long as I approach them with love and respect, right relationship continues to develop, and everyone (the plants, the soil, the animals, myself, my clients) benefits in the process.  Love is the language. Love is the doorway. Love is the stuff true healing’s made of.  As connection with our most sacred commonality, Love is the antidote to our loneliness.