by Maia Toll
Reflection
Move toward Your Truth
Do you compare yourself to those around you, questioning your looks, intelligence, ambition, or wealth? When you’re in competition with others, you’re moving away from your truth and toward some artificial version of success. If no one were looking, who would you be?
Get specific: How would you wear your hair? What would you eat? Where would you sleep? Dive deep into Daisy Medicine and unearth your true self.
Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who we are.
Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
Center and Ground
Red Clover
Trifolium pratense
This commonly cultivated forage crop feeds horses, cows, sheep, goats, and just about anything else humans keep at pasture. She plants your feet on the ground (two or four, it doesn’t matter to her) while encouraging you to run a few miles or dive into that art project you’ve been avoiding. Red Clover wants you to get moving — in body and in spirit! She loves grounded action and will happily bolster your courage (from the Latin word cor, which means “heart”) when you’re acting from a strong center, so you can step out and move forward. Bold but not rash, Red Clover gets your blood up so you can show up fully.
Ritual
Grounded Energy and Flow
“Grounded energy and flow” might seem like an oxymoron, but this exercise will help you feel these two forces working hand in hand.
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, your arms held loosely at your sides, and your gaze focused gently forward.
Imagine a string lifting you from the top of your head and two more pulling your feet toward the center of the earth. This is yoga’s Mountain pose, which will teach you the vitality of stillness.
Now add breath, inhaling all the way down to your belly and exhaling fully. This is flow.
Finally, picture Red Clover, calling her into your heart as you expand your energy.
Storms make trees take deeper roots.
Dolly Parton
Reflection
Counter Reactivity
Often we deplete ourselves with ungrounded bursts of energy — physical, mental, or emotional — instead of cultivating steady flow. Red Clover’s gift is grounded action. She helps us harness our vitality so we can move forward with purpose.
Review your past week: Can you think of any moments when you were overzealous, manic, frenzied, or overreactive? Maybe you overdid it on a hike. Perhaps you promised more than you could comfortably deliver to your boss or a friend. Maybe you felt a burst of impatience or even rage when the driver in the car in front of you slowed to a near stop before a right-hand turn, or perhaps you were fuming behind your smile as the person ahead of you in the checkout line counted out twelve dollars and eighty-seven cents in loose change.
Now, in contrast, think of a time when you acted from a grounded and centered place — that is, when you were present and measured in your action or response.
Compare the feelings from these two opposite situations. Locate them in your physical body. How does it feel within you when you are grounded, centered, and purposeful?
Look for patterns and then make a plan to keep yourself centered. Having a plan offers you an option other than reactivity!
Inner Sanctum
Sweet Violet
Viola odorata
Sweet, sweet Violet sings of sun and springtime, carpeting meadows and lawns with lush purple petals. But this glorious show is mere flirtation. Her true abundance comes in autumn when, quietly and with little fanfare, she shares her seed with the earth, setting the stage for next spring’s performance. Violet has no trouble separating public from private; she knows both have their place and season. She’s the gossip-column socialite who quietly works in a soup kitchen on Wednesdays, knowing life’s most important work isn’t always done in the public eye.
Ritual
Honor Your Inner Sanctum
In Victorian homes, rooms were divided between those that were public and those that were wholly private and used only by family. In modern times, the distinctions between public and private have broken down, leading us to sometimes overshare or overexpose ourselves.
Violet whispers, Each of us has a sacred heart that needs nurturing and protection. This sacred inner sanctum is like a nursery for our deepest, most authentic self. It’s here that new truths are born and, when allowed, grow strong before being armored in rationality and sent out into the world.
Honor the truths being born within you. Create an altar to your inner sanctum. Or honor it with words or breath or song. Make a promise to hold space within to grow into your truest self.
Each of us has a sacred heart that needs nurturing and protection.
Reflection
Unwrapping Your Truth
Violet understands something that most of us have forgotten: it’s okay to have a public face that is different from the one we wear in private. In fact, in order to deeply know ourselves, it’s necessary.
You may think that you are being your true, authentic self by fully expressing each thought and feeling out in the world and sharing, well, everything. But overexposure will send truth scurrying. Befriend your truth in the quiet and dark. Become intimate with its contours and inner dimensions before you carry it out into the light.
You learn yourself one truth at a time.
What lives in your sacred heart that is yours and yours alone, or shared only with those closest to you?
Dig past your first answer and maybe even your second — sometimes we protect our inner sanctums even from ourselves.
What do you show to the world and what do you hold back? Do you overexpose yourself under the pretext of honesty?
It’s okay to wear a mask as long as you know what’s behind it.
Forbidden Fruit
Apple
Malus pumila
Apple has been given grief since “In the beginning . . . ,” when she learned that feeding people and teaching them to know themselves can be a dangerous thing. She became associated with snakes, shame, and fig leaves, and it’s been all dance lessons, curtsies, and domestication from there. Apple is the witch of the wild wood forced to clean up and come in for tea. But a skirt and pumps can’t hide her knowledge of the circling stars and cycling seasons, the deep loam of the earth and the warm weep of a summer rain. We may think that we’ve tamed wild Apple and brought her to heel, but even quasi-domesticated, she still gifts us with the sweetness of understanding ourselves.
Apple asks, What have you forbidden yourself?
Ritual
Step into Sensation
What is self? We tend to define it narrowly as our thoughts, our relationships, or our jobs. But Apple knows that getting to know ourselves is a multidimensional process. The self begins in our physical body and everything it can feel, taste, see, hear, and smell. For this ritual, Apple asks us to focus on sensation.
Start with an apple (or any fruit or vegetable you can eat raw). Use your senses to investigate its taste, scent, feel, the sound made when the skin tears open . . . But here’s the trick: Instead of noting your observations about the apple, note your observations about yourself observing your interactions with the apple. When you hold the apple, how and where do you feel it? Does your body focus on the sensation of the skin on your fingertips or on the weight of the apple in your hand? When you bite into the apple, where specifically on your tongue do you taste its flesh? Does the taste disappear when you swallow? Does your body feel the apple passing down your throat and into your stomach?
When you observe how your physical being interacts with the world — even in something as routine as eating an apple — you can begin to better understand and accept your whole self.
Reflection
Hidden Desires
We try to tame things that scare us. Self-knowledge is no different. We hide our deep wisdom, our intuition, our needs and desires,
under a layer of enculturation, refusing to acknowledge what we consider inappropriate or grandiose. These hidden knowings and longings are snakes in the garden, the susurrus of knowledge trying to wake us up.
Do you stifle your body when it wants to move in certain ways? Do you choke back your voice when it wants to chant or sing? Do you eat what you’re supposed to instead of what your body craves? Do you listen to the quiet voice of your intuition?
Do you have thoughts that feel like snakes in the garden, pointing you toward embarrassing or dark truths?
(If you’re having trouble finding what’s hidden, start by recalling the last time you felt ashamed, insecure, or out of integrity with yourself.)
Knowledge is a knife that cuts both ways. It can be self-conscious and used to beat yourself into submission. Or it can be self-aware, used to rejoice in the incredible creation you are. How can you both know and love yourself?
Clear the Way
White Sage
Salvia apiana
Life can be sticky. Members of the Sage clan have been used in a multitude of cultures for clearing the invisible wisps of energy that cling, barnacle-like, to people and places. Whether you think of those energies as your own spent emotions or the leftover emanations of someone else’s, Sage can help you make your peace and move on. Sage is sacred because it clears the way, creating a blank canvas and an open path, allowing you the opportunity to reach your full potential. Sage’s appearance tells you that a block needs to be cleared (whether you can name it or not) so you can move forward.
Ritual
Smudge
Smudging uses smoke from Sage, Cedar, Palo Santo, Sweetgrass, and other culturally important plants as a blessing or way of clearing negative energy. It does for your energy field what hitting the reset button does for your computer.
The ancients believed that burning released the plant’s spirit so it could assist us in keeping the air clear of emotions and emanations of illness. Modern science shows that Sage smoke contains volatile compounds that kill airborne bacteria . . . and so the ancient and modern align!
Even if you’ve smudged a zillion times before, smudge regularly. You can use White Sage or culinary Sage (Salvia officinalis), which both Celtic and Middle Eastern cultures have used for this purpose.
Smudging is simple to do: Take either a bundle or a loose piece of Sage, light it, and then tamp out the actual flame so the leaves are smoldering and smoking. Move the Sage around your body or home so the smoke touches everything. If you’re smudging a person, be sure to pass smoke over the palms of the hands, because that’s where we make contact with other people.
Reflection
Letting Go
Modern psychology teaches that we need to understand our emotions before we can release them. In contrast, traditional healing and shamanic practices offer release without conscious, cognitive awareness. When you smudge you’re taking advantage of the latter, letting the smoke lift away whatever isn’t serving your path in life. Check in with yourself.
Are you willing to release without analyzing?
The Four Elements
When I smudge, I like to use a seashell to catch the ash and a feather as a fan. This allows me to represent the four elements in my ritual:
Sage = earth
Feather = air
Flame = fire
Shell = water
Ripple Outward
Self-heal
Prunella vulgaris
“Pretty, pretty Prunella,” my teacher used to murmur to this tiny flower with fuzzy leaves and a snapdragon face. Prunella, or Self-heal, is a wee thing, small in the way of butterflies whose flapping wings can stir a hurricane half a world away. Like a pebble dropped in a pond, Self-heal ripples outward, allowing healing to begin. She reminds you that one properly placed shift, no matter how small, creates concentric circles of effect, each amplifying change. Self-heal knows how to find this center from which all else flows. Ripple out from here, she whispers as she helps you discover the secret of your own true healing. If Self-heal appears for you, it’s time to drop your pebble in the pool.
Ritual
Centering
Self-heal reminds you to come to your center because, from that place, a small change can make a significant difference. When your life is out of balance, you’re rarely operating from your core. Sometimes you get so stuck in your head that you forget you have a core at all! Let’s remedy that.
Find a comfortable place to sit.
Take a few deep breaths. With each inhalation, coax your breath lower until you can feel it landing deep down in your lower lungs.
Now imagine each breath is a small pebble of light dropping down into your middle. No one drop is particularly large, but drop by drop they accumulate until your core is filled with light.
Allow the light to ripple outward through your body in a concentric circle, carrying Self-heal’s gentle changes.
Reflection
What Energy Do You Radiate?
Each of us is a pebble dropped into the pond of our family, friends, community, and world. Looking beyond your everyday work in the world, ask yourself:
What ripples emanate from the pebble that is you?
What is your soul’s purpose here?
What do you dream of becoming?
What energy do you radiate as you walk through this life?
What energy would you like to radiate?
Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
Desmond Tutu
Distill Your Self
Thyme
Thymus vulgaris
Mythology teaches that a minotaur haunts the labyrinth of your psyche. As you walk toward your center, this monster prowls and roars, trying to scare you off your path by revealing your fears and inadequacies. But you’re never truly alone; you have allies like Thyme, her scent purifying your thoughts so you can you see what’s true. Thyme kills off what’s “other,” whether that’s germs and microbes or thoughts and feelings. This is Thyme’s special magic: she calls your inner flame to burn the dross, distilling your spirit. Intuitively she knows you from not you, and she sees you clearly when you cannot. Thyme is a powerful plant; do not call on her unless you’re truly ready to be tempered in her flame.
Ritual
Understand Your Journey
The labyrinth is an ancient construct meant to mirror our path through life — the twisting and turnings, the feeling of being so close to our goal, only to be guided away. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has no dead ends or wrong turns. Walking it eases the mind and relaxes the body.
If you have a labyrinth nearby (which you can easily find with an Internet search including your town name and the word labyrinth), go out and walk it — you won’t regret it! If you don’t have one near you, create some quiet for yourself and trace the labyrinth (see illustration here) with your finger, letting your eyes follow your finger as it moves toward the center.
Your movement through a labyrinth is a microcosmic metaphor for the macrocosm of your life’s journey. Reflect on any thoughts or feelings that come up as though they concern not just the micro-moment of being in the labyrinth but the macro-movement of your life path.
Always follow the path all the way to center and then follow the same path back out. Move at your own pace, pause where you want to (especially in the center), and layer in any meditative practices that speak to your soul.
Reflection
Returning to Your Path
Have you seen your true path and turned away? Or have you stepped onto the path only to become unsure or distracted? Thyme is calling you back. If you accept, if you whisper “yes” in the wee hours of the morning, you’ll find Thyme both demanding and true.
So . . . which path will you walk? Which callings will you consciously deny and which will you accept?
Perseverance
Dandelion
Taraxacum officinale
Dandelion
is bold, bright, and sunny. She pushes through cracks in cement and worms her way into the mortar of stone walls. Cheerfully. Dandelion’s Medicine is perseverance. But not the perseverance of the martyr. Instead Dandelion is the eternal optimist: like the Fool in the tarot deck, she’s always happy to set off on a new adventure in hope of learning more and digging deeper. She’s not an airy optimist, though, with no grounding in reality. Her roots are strong. She’s the shaman and the buddha, and her message is this: happiness is an inner landscape that has little to do with where you’re planted. When you’re ready to make your own joy — whatever life throws at you — call on Dandelion.