It is amazing how many burdens we can agree to carry at any given time. Not just our own but also other people’s burdens:  the plight of our Earth, our depleted environment, our race’s survival, war, and on and on. These burdens are not ours to carry. They often turn out to be real drawbacks for our hearts. We are meant to live life in joy, together with others in community, learning, moving, flowing, like water. Working, observing, assimilating, taking things in. With gratitude for the chance to be alive, to be experiencing, breathing, smelling, singing, touching, moving, feeling.

The interesting thing is that often we take on burdens so that we can project our attention outside of ourselves, delay doing what we need to be doing or tending to in our lives, in ourselves.  It takes courage to realize this, to cut through the illusion of the burdens and to begin finding our purpose and doing whatever it is we are here to do. I am very fortunate. In my Plant Spirit Medicine healing practice I get to witness this kind of courage very often.

Plant Spirit Medicine helps us heal our hearts

Besides offering us their wonderful healing in treatments, the plant spirits and Nature can also help us heal our hearts by encouraging us to let go of these burdens.  Here are 3 healing practices you can do to help heal your heart:

1.  Jot down your burdens, your worries, your concerns, and those situations you can’t control.  Offer them to a body of water, to the trunk of a tree, or to the Fire. Go out in Nature and read them or speak them and leave them there in some ritual form.  Just as the plant spirits are immensely generous, they and all of Nature can receive these things from us so that we can be refreshed, renewed and freed from our

2.  Swim in a body of water (or soak in a bath with gratitude for the gifts of water) and visualize that when you emerge you are in fact renewed and rejuvenated, like a new baby, like a new person.

3.  Sit by a fire, especially out in Nature and speak your heart with others or with the Fire. See It transforming the energy of your words, your dreams, your wishes, your burdens.