We can work with plant spirits for our own personal guidance and healing, but when we call upon plant spirits to engage in the healing of another, a particular type of dynamism is added to the healing process. Plants are community beings that are here to serve the community as a whole so that when we step beyond our own personal needs and begin to address the needs of others, we are fulfilling the primary thrust of plant spirits' path as community healers.
When I ask a plant spirit to assist in a healing situation, a three-way line of interaction is opened among me and the plant spirit, the plant spirit and the client, and the client and me. This alignment creates a triangle that is very solid in its patterning. It also incorporates a key ingredient, which is that of asking. Asking helps to clarify intention, which is another important aspect of any healing work. By engaging in this level of asking for help (me of the plant spirits and the client of me), we support one of the basic tenets of nature, which is that of interconnected and interdependent relationships. When we try to do it all ourselves, we often fall short because this is not how nature is designed. Everything in nature is interdependent; nothing stands alone.
The Plant Spirit Does The Healing, Not The Practitioner
One young woman in a class I was teaching said to me that this type of healing seemed heroic. She was referring to the heroic tradition of healing, which emphasizes that a practitioner knows how to heal a person and requires that the rules and regulations put forth by the practitioner are accepted without question. The truth is the plant spirit does the healing, not the practitioner. The practitioner is available to be the vehicle for the transference of the plant spirit's healing gifts. The plant spirit fills the person full of all that is needed to live according to their own true nature, walking the path meant for them.
The practitioner may also be a director, asking the plant spirit to go to a particular place where energy may be blocked, for example, but it is the plant spirit that carries out the work. Plant Spirit Healing is not about achieving perfection or perfect health -- it is about becoming fully you. All that does not serve you as you become you falls away.
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Many years ago, a client who was also a student would come to class and lay in a lawn chair because her Lyme disease was so devastating to her health at that time. After about a year of plant spirit healing treatments she said to me,
"It's not like Lyme disease is miraculously whisked away. It's that I take up more of the space and there's no room for Lyme disease."
The plant spirits were working to bring her back into balance with herself. If we look at this in scientific terms, we might describe this as the photon emissions of the plant spirit resonating coherence to her cells, bringing them back to a state of homeostasis. This particular phenomenon is called "photon sucking" and is described in The Field by Lynne McTaggart:
"Wave resonance wasn't simply being used to communicate inside the body, but between living things. Two healthy beings were engaged in ‘photon sucking' as he [Fritz Popp] called it, by exchanging photons."
Fritz Popp went on to show that people could take in the photons of other living things, including plants, and could use this light to reinform or correct their own light that had gone awry.
This brings us to the distinguishing element of Plant Spirit Healing. When we receive the healing gifts from a plant spirit, one of the things we receive is its resonance. Because plant spirits operate in a nonlocal way, we can call upon this resonance at any time and from any location and then transfer that resonance to the person needing healing. We do not need the physical presence of the plant in any way, what we need is to be engaged in a co-creative partnership in which we experience the very light of the plant itself and can give its felt sense or resonance to another.
Trusting Your Intuition & Letting Your Heart Receive Imprints From The Plants
The biggest stumbling block for my students in becoming confident about practicing Plant Spirit Healing is learning to trust their intuition. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say, "Maybe it's just my imagination." I say to them, "Where does imagination come from?" If we can't imagine, we can't dream, and if we can't dream, we are destined to a mere three-dimensional existence.
When we speak of imagination, we are not referring to fantasy but instead to a creative ability. Our creative ability stems from letting our hearts rule instead of our minds, because it is our heart that can perceive holographically instead of in fragments. When a heart is in a coherent state, it can receive the entire picture of a plant-from its physical qualities all the way to its spiritual nature, including its light, sound, and sensation, all of which may come in the form of a pictorial scene, a story, or feelings or even all three.
This is not a fantasy that we are making up but instead is the heart receiving imprints from the plant across time and space. We are in communication (common union) with the plant; we must trust this experience and realize that it is ours and no one else's -- we are the author of the experience, which makes us an authority. Trusting yourself and the plant spirit is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a practitioner.
How To Give The Healing Gifts of a Plant Spirit To Another Person
There are many ways to give the healing gifts of a plant spirit to another. Perhaps you sing or tone the plant spirit's song, or transfer the light resonance through color, or allow the felt sense resonance of the plant spirit to come through your hands. This way of working with the plant spirit may come when the plant spirit has given you specific instructions on how to bring about balance in another. You also may work within other modalities of healing like Chinese Five Element healing or the Chakra system.
Because plant spirits are so multidimensional they have access to several ways of bringing a person to balance. A plant spirit's healing gifts may be to bring balance to one of the five elements as well as to help clear a chakra, for example. The important thing to remember about working with modalities is that the modality itself is not plant spirit healing but a framework within which to apply plant spirits. Plant Spirit Healing is primarily about the plants, your relationship with them, and your ability to transfer their healing gifts to others.
One of my students, Astaria, describes how she transfers a plant spirit and then how that plant spirit shows up for her client.
"I invited Calendula spirit to help assist in opening the second chakra. The healing gift had appeared to me as the symbol of water or actually a water vessel that Calendula poured from like a waterfall. I envisioned the color of orange water being poured into the energy center of her Hara. As I was doing this, I saw ladybugs and heard a song I couldn't quite make out. I asked my client if ladybugs or a ladybug song meant anything to her. She said there was a child's song she used to sing, ‘ladybug, ladybug fly away home, your house is on fire and your children all gone.' The next day she saw an orange ladybug on her window. She bought ladybug stickers and put them on her second chakra. Ladybug medicine started coming in from all over, people just randomly started giving her ladybug things."
This story shows us how Astaria transferred Calendula, and it also reveals how the spirit of Calendula began to live in her client through the image of a ladybug. Astaria trusted the image she received from Calendula and then shared it with her client, who was able to relate to it. The spirit of Calendula continued to present itself and work with her client even after the treatment was finished.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bear & Company,
an imprint of Inner Traditions International. ©2008. www.innertraditions.com
This article was excerpted with permission from the book:
Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness
by Pam Montgomery.
Indigenous healers and shamans have known since antiquity that plants possess a spirit essence that can communicate through light, sound, and vibration. Now scientific studies are verifying this understanding. Plant Spirit Healing is a hands-on approach to working with the healing powers of plant spirits to join with human intelligence to bring about profound healing.
For More Info or to Order This Book.
About the Author
Pam Montgomery has been investigating plants and their intelligent spiritual nature since 1986. She is a founding member of the Northeast Herbal Association and is on the Advisory Board of United Plant Savers. The author of Partner Earth: A Spiritual Ecology and contributing author in Planting the Future, she is a practicing herbalist and plant spirit healer who offers trainings and treatments from her home in Danby, Vermont. Visit her website at www.partnereartheducationcenter.com.
