by Maia Toll
Ritual
Visit with Dandelion
Most plants need very specific climates to thrive, but Dandelion adapts to a wide range of environments, which means that no matter where you are (and no matter which season you’re in), you’re likely to find Dandelion hanging about. If you’re feeling the pull of Dandelion Medicine, head out for a walk and see if you can spot this golden weed in the wild — urban or rural, it doesn’t matter!
(Don’t feel like walking? Call on Dandelion’s cheerful perseverance to get yourself moving.)
On your walk, see if you can find Dandelion’s sunny face. If you want, smile back at her . . . you might find yourself suddenly a tiny bit happier. Notice where she’s growing and what she has to overcome to thrive there:
Is she standing tall or hugging the ground?
Is she in sun or in shade?
Does she grow through soil or rock or concrete?
What can you learn from your observations?
Finally, notice whether you come home from your visit with Dandelion feeling a bit more able to handle the ups and downs of modern life.
Reflection
Learning to Adapt
Dandelion does this amazing thing: when she grows on a lawn that’s mowed regularly, she stays short, so her flowers pass under the mower’s blades. How can you, like Dandelion, adapt to the world around you? What little change can you make that will allow you to thrive in your current situation? If your mood turns sour and you’re unable to maintain Dandelion’s cheerfulness, ask yourself whether you need a mood adjustment or whether you’re pushing up against an obstacle that’s taking you off your true path. Remember, perseverance isn’t about putting up with untenable situations; it’s about knowing the difference between that which is difficult but doable and that which is simply unhealthy for your soul.
Tap Your Resources
Burdock
Arctium lappa
You know the burrs that get matted into your dog’s coat in autumn? The ones that prick your fingers and refuse to come untangled? That’s Burdock. She’s a tireless companion, and, yes, she sticks with you, cheering you on when you’re running low on steam (or self-esteem!) or recovering from a lingering ailment. Burdock’s a nurturer, building you up with gentle sweetness and asking nothing in return. Her taproot runs deep; once she sets her sights on breaking up crusty soil or shifting old habits, she’s persistently relentless. She’s the friend of your childhood, the one you could always count on to have your back. Trust me, she says, all will be well.
Ritual
Reconnect with Your Inner Flame
Burdock helps you find strength when you think you have none, warming you from the inside and nourishing deeply. In this way she’s a hearth fire: she offers gentle heat, warm light, and the promise of a home-cooked meal.
To reconnect with your inner flame — your own sustenance — start by lighting a candle. Stare into the flame, and imagine a small spark lighting deep in your core. See the candle’s flame mirrored within as a glowing ember.
Breathe gently, letting your inner flame grow with each inhalation and shrink to an ember with each exhalation. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
After you have this visualization down, add a sense of warmth. Feel your innards warming on the inhalation and cooling on the exhalation.
Practice for 1 minute at the start, and work up to 10 minutes of practice. Know that, like Burdock, each breath is nourishing you deep within.
Reflection
Find Your Hearth Fire
We’re not always kind to those who love us best and nurture us deeply. It’s easy to neglect, accidentally or cruelly, the friend or loved one who’s always present and never demanding. Who do you count on when you’re feeling burned out and your soul is malnourished? This person is your hearth fire.
Once a year the ancient Celts would extinguish their individual hearth fires and relight them from a communal flame. Does your hearth fire need to be tended or relit?
One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes
Crack Open
Rose
Rosa species
Yes, that, Rose sighs as she contemplates Rainer Maria Rilke’s take on relationships. Rose adores poetry, but despite popular belief, she simply can’t countenance mushy love. Rose knows that to experience love in full, you need to be a strong vessel while at the same time cracking open. A contradiction? No more a contradiction than flowers and thorns, murmurs Rose. Rose reminds you to embrace dualities and say “both/and” instead of “either/or.”
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Ritual
Wear Your Thorns
Like Rose, we have been cultivated for beauty. Male or female, we tend our appearance, choosing clothing colors that complement our complexion, styling our hair, and adorning ourselves with jewelry or makeup. And, like hybrid roses, as we cultivate ourselves it’s easy to become rather thornless.
Add a layer of thorns to your primping by incorporating a symbol of protection into your attire. Maybe it’s a color that acts as a warning; in nature, bright red and black are warning colors (think: black leather jacket or red scarf). Maybe it’s protective jewelry: Celtic cultures wore amber for protection, and some Native American tribes wore turquoise. If you have long hair, try adding hair sticks — symbolic weaponry — to your updo. (Occasionally you can find hair sticks made from porcupine quills; you’ll feel like Rose, with your very own thorns!) Notice how your awareness of these thorns makes it easier to walk the world with an open heart.
Reflection
See Yourself Whole
Often we’re much better at loving others than we are at loving ourselves. The reason for this, according to Rose? We’re too close to ourselves and so are constantly examining our own minutiae. How to break the habit? Look at the big picture.
What kind of friend are you?
How do you care for, nurture, or protect the people you love?
How do you care for, nurture, or protect yourself?
What are you exceptionally good at?
If your soul had a color, what color would it be?
When we can’t see ourselves whole, we pick and pull at our tiny imperfections, turning them into gaping wounds and fatal flaws. Zoom back! See yourself “whole against the sky.”
Create Space
Raspberry
Rubus species
Raspberry is Rose’s younger sister: sweet and wild, but also steady-handed. She loves the earth and its smallest creatures, so her ebullient branches twist and crawl, creating nests for birds and sanctuaries for snails. She’ll rock wee babes and scurry about with toddlers, rarely giving in to the gravitas that permeates most members of her family. Laughter floats through her leaves as she flexes and twists. You too can be like this! she says, demonstrating pliability earned by drinking deeply of mineral-rich soil. Sit with her and she’ll share with you the secret of weaving space and creating strong containers for the emptiness that new life needs in order to thrive. When Raspberry appears, look to how you are (or aren’t!) nurturing space within.
Ritual
Make Space Without
Nurturing space within yourself often begins with a physical space and a structured experience of it. That structured space allows us to enjoy a regular ritual of reflection and holding space for new energy and ideas. Your structured space needn’t be large or expensive to create; it simply needs to be yours. What might this look like?
A special chair with a side table for tea and reflection
A corner in the garage or
basement turned into an art studio
A bit of garden to plant as you wish
A clear spot on top of the fridge where your altar is out of reach of tiny hands
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Reflection
Hold Space Within
We often don’t make space for ourselves in our daily lives or create a structure that lets us grow and fully express our dreams. Before creating in the world, Raspberry teaches, we must learn to hold space within.
Is there room for you in your mind and heart, or are your thoughts filled with the needs and schedules of others?
Do you have guilt or other toxic thoughts popping up when you contemplate claiming space — mental, physical, or emotional — for yourself?
Are you fearful of taking up too much space, intellectually or physically?
Picture your creative womb as a place of starlight or forest loam, of ocean waves or sunlit meadows. Use whatever metaphor speaks to you. Step into this internal landscape. Notice its natural edges: the place where the trees end or the ocean recedes. Trace these boundaries, affirming that you hold the space within sacred and safe.
Heart’s Home
Hawthorn
Crataegus species
Hawthorn remembers a time when local gods watched over knolls and wells, frolicking and making mischief in her branches. She remembers her limbs hung with strands of beads glittering in the sun and scraps of fabric fluttering in the wind like prayer flags: offerings to the land itself and to the gods who kept alive the vital conduit between spirit and matter. Those days are mostly past, but Hawthorn holds the portals open, knowing these inner connections provide true nourishment to keep the heart whole. If Hawthorn appears for you, strengthen your heart and guard it from homesickness by tending the connections between the spirit realms and material world.
Ritual
Anchoring the Land
Many landscapes around the globe lost their genius loci — spirit of place — when natural landmarks were removed to make way for roads, buildings, and other human endeavors. You can reanimate the genius loci in the landscapes you call home with a simple visualization; do it as often as you feel called.
Begin by either walking or imagining the boundaries of your space, whether you define it as your land, your neighborhood, your house, or the contours of your fifth-floor apartment. When you have a clear idea of the breadth of space you’re anchoring, identify the umbilicus — the physical and energetic center — of that space. From this spot, imagine a golden cord dropping into the earth, sinking until it roots itself in the molten core at the earth’s center. Feel the vibrancy, the “aliveness,” of this connection.
Next, send a silver cord from the same central point up to the heavens, allowing the energies of moonlight and starshine to infuse your space with light and peace.
Your space is now anchored to earth and sky, a part of the larger whole.
Reflection
Connecting to Home
In times past you wouldn’t have wandered terribly far from the place where you were born and raised. The world is different now, and you have the glorious opportunity to call many places home. And yet . . . your heart sometimes longs for a landscape vastly different from the one in which you find yourself. If the answer to the following questions is no, use the ritual above connect.
Are you connected to the place where you live?
Can your heart call it home?
Can you feel the gentle pulses of the earth?
The Faerie Tree
In Ireland Hawthorn is used to create hedgerows that form the boundaries of pastures. These hedgerows create a patchwork of contiguous spaces, each energetically unique and held by Hawthorn’s thorns.
Hawthorn hedgerows are different from the solitary Hawthorn. A singular Hawthorn, or Faerie Tree, is a portal to the spirit realm. It nurtures your connection to the Other World, feeding your soul the food of dreams and stories. It’s bad luck to cut down a Faerie Tree; if you do, you damage this necessary connection with the collective unconscious.
Rewild
Plantain
Plantago major
If you let her, Plantain will share stories of wagon trains and ocean crossings and Alexander’s shenanigans in Egypt. Given a chance, she’ll make a traveler of you, too, drawing you gently out of your comfort zone, moving you from safe to the edge of the wild, pushing the boundaries of “civilized behavior,” and laughing at your scruples. It will start with a small thing — Plantain might offer a leaf to ease a sting or the itch of poison ivy. Just chew it and spit it on the bite, she’ll encourage. “Great Aunt Hilda would have a heart attack,” you think, while your inner wild child smiles gleefully at this baby step away from “civilized.”
Ritual
Remember the Basics
Remember when you were a kid and you’d lie on the ground, feeling the grass tickle your back and the sun warm your face? Remember when rolling, log-like, down a hill was the perfect afternoon activity?
Plantain doesn’t ask you to step away from your true self and into some unknown version of you. She asks instead that you dust off the unruly and slightly wild but deeply connected side of yourself that gets pushed into the background when you’re busy being an adult. She reminds you of your childlike wonder and joy in the basics.
Lie on the ground and let the earth support you. Feel the sun on your face and sense the clouds chasing shadows across your closed eyelids. Remember the joy in this simplicity; this is a place to which you can always return.
Reflection
Drawing Out
Plantain’s special magic is pulling out what’s stuck. She’ll draw out feelings in much the same way that she removes splinters and insect stingers. If you were to sit down with Plantain and let her cradle your soul, what would happen?
What shards would she pluck from your heart?
What poison would she draw from your spirit?
What pain or discomfort would she dig out from your body?
Are you willing to let Plantain draw this suffering from you? If not, why?
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Release Rigidity
Valerian
Valeriana officinalis
Valerian stands tall in the garden, her stem stiff to compensate for a hollow core. But don’t let her upright stance fool you: Valerian dreams of being a cat. In her efforts to become more mammalian, she’s evolved an animal-like oil that acts as perfume to those with feline proclivities (while smelling like sweaty gym socks to the rest of us!).
Why a cat, you ask? Valerian’s been watching felines and has come to the gleeful conclusion that cats are rather shameless and more content because of it. She asks you to aspire to a life free of self-flagellation and daily denigrations. Valerian begs you to relax — your armored body, your stiff thoughts, your rigid emotions — and then join her for a (shameless) afternoon nap.
Ritual
Rest
Valerian wants only one thing from you: an afternoon nap (especially if you have the idea that naps are lazy, languorous, or too luxurious for you to indulge in!). Find a sunny spot and curl up for 10 to 20 minutes, which is the ideal length of time for napping because it allows your body to deeply relax without your mind dropping into REM sleep.
Cat Nap
Research has found that when we are left to our own devices, humans do a big sleep at night and a second shorter sleep in the afternoon. So not napping is actually unnatural; you are hardwired for an afternoon siesta. If you know you’re going to have a late night, preemptive napping (for up to 2 hours) is the way to go. And, as with all things, one size does not fit all: some people are simply not good nappers. Listen to your body!
Reflection
Exploring Shame
&n
bsp; Shame is the feeling you get when you behave in a way that’s antithetical to your ideals. We’ve all experienced big shames, necessary learning moments that allow us to fine-tune our moral compass. But when we allow our thinking to become overly rigid or self-righteous, we create a million corrosive small shames.
Think about when you last felt ashamed:
What ideal did you not quite live up to?
Looking back, was your shame attached to unnecessarily rigid thinking?
Is there a way to be kinder, while still being true, to yourself?