by Maia Toll
What if you knew without a doubt that you could break and be remade?
What if you could find joy in the breaking?
What possibilities might this open up in you?
When real metamorphosis has begun, we run into a welter of “dissolving” experiences. We may feel that everything is falling apart, that we’re losing everyone and everything. Dissolving feels like death, because it is — it’s the demise of the person you’ve been.
Martha Beck
A Spoonful of Sugar
Marshmallow
Althaea officinalis
There’s nothing Marshmallow would love more than to spend time in your kitchen. She’ll lean over your shoulder offering suggestions for adorning your salads and thickening your soups. There’s no reason for foul-tasting anything, including Medicine! declares the Grande Dame of dessert. She should know, having been at it since around 2000 bce. (Egypt, dear, she’ll tell you, a lovely place. I fed pharaohs and gods.) But Marshmallow’s not one to dwell in the past; she takes too much joy in bringing ease to the present. And there’s much work to do: Digestion these days! she tsks as she sets about creating her latest confection. Call on Marshmallow when you need to soften and rediscover sweetness.
Ritual
Conscious Cookery
Any act can be ritual if done with intention. Marshmallow remembers the days when baking and medicine making weren’t far removed from each other. In honor of her long history in the kitchen, create a dish that’s deliciously nourishing. As you chop and blend, focus on how this food will nurture those who eat it. Allow yourself to picture the vibrancy that will come with each delectable bite.
Creating Confections
There’s a reason Marshmallow confections were the province of pharaohs in ancient times: they were time consuming and difficult to make. Unlike modern Marshmallow revival recipes (which call for only a small amount of Marshmallow’s root added, as a nod to the traditional use of the plant), the oldest recipes call for the sap of the fresh plant, which then underwent a multiday process before being eaten.
Reflection
Soften and Soothe
Marshmallow’s magic is to soften and soothe. When the edges of life are too much, when you feel raw and scraped, picture Marshmallow growing in the moist soil of a wetland, water eddying gently, softening hard earth and loosening what’s been stuck.
What can Marshmallow help you soften? What rough edges are rubbing at your spirit?
Marshmallow is not scared of processes — she knows sometimes there are many steps to a recipe, and that the best flavors are created in layers, step by slow step.
Pocket of Protection
Yarrow
Achillea millefolium
In older times, Yarrow traveled with warriors. While her official job was staunching wounds — keeping the insides in and the outsides out — her presence brought bravery to the soldiers she kissed. Today she has much the same task: Yarrow assists you in keeping your boundaries, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. She creates personal pockets of protection so you can slow down, gather your strength, and find your courage. Yarrow reminds you that boundaries are not just for keeping the outside from coming in but also for keeping yourself from leaking out, letting thought and emotions run rampant in the world. Yarrow will create a bubble of protection — a bit of sacred space — within which you can regroup, regenerate, and re-create yourself.
Ritual
Reestablish Personal Space
In order to ask Yarrow to hold a little space for us, we need to know what space we’re asking her to hold!
Close your eyes and pretend you’re inside a glass bubble (some people would call this glass bubble your aura; you can think of it that way or stick with “glass bubble” if that’s more comfortable for your mind). Run your fingers along the inside of your bubble, feeling the edges of your body’s energy. Willingly suspend your disbelief and trust your fingers!
Is your bubble smooth and whole? Are there areas that feel in need of shoring up?
If you feel a gap in your bubble (your aura), call on Yarrow to help you re-create the boundaries of your personal space.
Reflection
Can You Say No?
Yarrow has enthusiastically adapted to modern times; she helps us all establish personal space and hold boundary lines. Remember, though, that she’s a partner, not a guard dog. In order for Yarrow to do her job, you have to learn to say one magic word: no. These two letters can be tough to spit out! If you’re concerned about being “nice” or cooperative, you may find yourself saying yes (or maybe) when your heart is actually saying no. How does saying no sit with you? Are you able to say no to being overextended and protect the dreamy little bubble Yarrow offers you?
In one healing charm for gathering Yarrow, the healer says the plant is being gathered so their hand will be more brave, their foot more swift, and their speech like the beams of the sun.
Sharon Paice MacLeod, Celtic Myth and Religion
Just Be
Oats
Avena sativa
Shhhhhh, shhhhhh, shhhhh, Oat murmurs as you run your hands over her tops. Shhhhh, shhhhh, she says as the wind picks up, trying to ruffle Oat’s ever-present calm. If the breeze continues she’ll gently chide, Chiii, chiii, chiii, but that’s all the reaction you’ll get as she rubs shoulders with her sisters, laughing quietly and murmuring that all really is well despite what the wind, the radio waves, or the Internet has to say. When you slip into stress, Oat smiles gently and runs her fingers through your hair: Stop grappling endlessly with your thoughts, she whispers. Soften to the wind, be open to the sky, and ground yourself in earth to know the truth of this one precious moment.
Ritual
Oat Bathing
Get to know Oat a bit more intimately with an Oat scrubby or bath! Oat softens your skin, and she’ll do the same for the rough edges of your nerves.
To make a scrubby: Take a handful of rolled oats (the kind you use for cooking) and put them in the center of a washcloth. Pull the sides of the washcloth up over the oats to make a bundle and close the top with a rubber band. Use this scrubby the next time you shower.
To make a bath: Use a blender or coffee grinder to powder 1 cup of rolled oats. If you have dried rose, lavender, or chamomile flowers, powder these as well and add them to the powdered oats. If you’d like to add essential oil, mix 3 to 5 drops of the oil into 1⁄4 cup of mineral or sea salt and add this mixture to the oat mix. If your oats and herbs are fully powdered, add them to warm bathwater. If your blender did not achieve a fine powder, put the mixture in a muslin bag or bundle up in a washcloth (as above) and float this in the tub to avoid clogging the drain. Slip into the bath and relax.
Reflection
Going Silent
Can you just be?
Can you let go of expectations and the need to know?
Can you release the quest for answers to your questions or conclusions to your stories?
This is Oat Medicine. In a way it’s quite like meditation — the floating in a soft space, letting your nerves relax. And it takes practice. Can you gift yourself a minute of this softness? Two? Twenty-five?
See if your mind rebels at the thought of going silent.
Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better, it’s about befriending who we are.
Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape
Light in the Darkness
St. John’s Wort
Hypericum perforatum
Truth? St. John’s Wort is scraggly and scrappy, completely lacking the charisma one would expect from an herb reputed to tame depression in a single bound. But that’s her beauty — she’s a magician and a thief, not the belle of the ball. She knows how to steal the heat from summer’s solstice sun, hold it in her flowers, and make it last all winter long. This is her greatest trick: bringing light and warmth to your darkness by helping to re-create the electric leap of synapses firing and energy moving
along. Call on St. John’s Wort when you need a sip of sunshine so you can find your light in the darkness.
Ritual
Sipping Sunshine
Like St. John’s Wort, you can store sunshine! Stand facing the sun with your eyes closed and your feet planted firmly on the earth. Feel the light coming through your eyelids. Breathe the sunshine in through your nose and taste it on your tongue. Repeat often, allowing the sun’s fire to stoke your inner fires.
A Feast of Radiance
Nicole Cody, who learned from Aboriginal elders in Kimberley, Australia, shares her first experience of “eating the sun” on her blog, Cauldrons and Cupcakes:
It sounded silly. Eating the sun.
I stood there with my eyes closed but I couldn’t understand how to eat energy.
Someone lightly smacked my arm. Little Aunty chastised me in a way that needed no translation. Self-consciously I opened my mouth and found that I literally could eat the sun. I could feel that golden light as I swallowed it down.
Reflection
Winter Medicine
Modern culture demands we be our same selves day in and out, summer and winter. But our bodies know otherwise. Our bodies remember a time when winter was for staying close to the hearth fires. St. John’s Wort is a solstice plant, blooming near the summer solstice and perfect Medicine for the winter.
What Medicine do you need in the winter months?
How do you keep the sun in your spirit when the nights are long?
A Seasonal Note
Many people need to begin tending to their winter selves as early as the autumn equinox, when the balance of dark and light shifts and nights begin to become incrementally longer.
Spirit into Matter
Trillium
Trillium erectum
Trillium is a rare jewel brightening the forest floor, quietly watching the darkness. She’s not waiting for ghouls or ghosts — she fears nothing in these dim-lit woods. No, Trillium is waiting on the first fleeting sparks of new life. Come, she says, drawing you deeper into the consciousness of the trees, let’s see what shall be born!
While she’s been awaiting births for millennia, Trillium’s recently developed her invisibility, quietly blending into leaf mulch and fern patches, the dark places where ideas are incubated. On the edge of the abyss of all and nothing, she’s ready to ease the transition from spirit to matter. Trillium helps with births; she often sees the first spark when other eyes still see darkness.
Ritual
Nurture New Ideas
Daydreams are like seeds — we have so many, but few take root. How do you breathe life into an idea and create a new way of being in the world? From inception, the new seed needs to be nurtured or it will dry up and wither. So when you’re contemplating a fresh idea, give it some love. Envision it fully formed and living in the world. Then create a space for it to grow: a blank canvas, a folder on your desktop, or a cleared side table with an image representing this glorious thing that is to come.
Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
Reflection
Seed Time
Oftentimes we have to cultivate the dark womb of self to foster the evolution of an idea or new self-awareness. This growth needs to be nurtured: buried in peat and fallen leaves, and left for sometimes inconceivably long periods before it’s ready to be born into the world. Sometimes it requires pinching off other ideas and choosing the one we will help grow strong.
What are you nurturing?
Are you willing to sit in the woodsy darkness with Trillium, holding space for inspiration?
Do you expose ideas to air and light too soon, denying them their womb time?
What new ways of being are buried in your psyche, awaiting birth?
The Ways of Water
White Willow
Salix alba
Most people think of Willow as graceful and soft, a beautiful tree with weak wood. She’s happy to let you have your delusions. But underground she sends her expansive roots questing for water, the element of emotion, which feeds her extraordinary flexibility. Willow loves to dunk her feet, sampling the flow of feelings, tasting anger and joy, sorrow and sass. Pliancy allows her to have great empathy without becoming overwhelmed by the emotions of others; instead they flow through her like water. If you find yourself armoring up to handle high emotions, call on Willow to teach you the ways of water.
Ritual
Sending to Water
Working with water can help you handle the many emotions you feel over the course of a day.
In the morning, fill a bowl with water and place it in a special spot — maybe outside in your garden or on a sunny windowsill.
When you encounter strong emotions, instead of holding on to them, envision sending them to your bowl of water.
At the end of the day, offer your water to the earth (or a potted plant), asking that your spent feelings be composted to help something new to grow.
Notice how you feel on the days when you perform this ritual. Notice how water softens and dilutes intense feelings and keeps them from overwhelming you.
Are you an empath? Set the intention to send others’ emotions to your water instead of letting them swamp you.
Reflection
What’s Stagnant?
If you find yourself getting yanked hither and yon by the pull of your feelings, call on Willow to remind you of the importance of letting emotions flow and then go. Emotional waters aren’t meant to be stagnant. Still water breeds disease and blood-sucking mosquitos, and nobody wants that! Call on Willow to remind you to stay open, so that emotions can flow through you with grace.
Do you know the difference between thoughts (which happen in your head) and feelings (which happen in your body)?
Can you have a feeling without putting it into words?
When you give words to a feeling, do you then chew them like cud, masticating and replaying the same words over and over again?
We Are One
Quaking Aspen
Populus tremuloides
Despite the trembling of her leaves, Aspen isn’t really scared. How do I know? Because deep underground, all the Aspens hold hands.
To our eyes Aspen trees are individuals, but in their roots and hearts they’re one. This is not mere metaphor: Aspens grow in what’s called a clonal colony, sending out underground suckers to find a lovely spot to sprout a sister-tree. Aspen groves are among the largest and oldest single organisms on the planet.
When you see Aspen quivering, it’s often with laughter; she giggles gently at the human race, who seem to have forgotten that deep in our roots we too are one. Aspen asks us to root into this sense of connection so we can let go of our fears.
Ritual
Join Your Roots
Aspen always knows she’s part of something greater than herself, a sense we humans often lack. Take a few moments to connect with the comforting awareness that everything is connected.
Stand with your eyes closed and breathe gently. When you feel your shoulders relax and your breath come easily, begin to imagine your feet as roots gently pushing into the earth (it doesn’t matter if the ground is three floors away; your energetic roots know how to find dirt!).
As you sink down, picture the feet of others near you also burrowing into the earth, feet turning to roots and runners. Embrace the crisscross tangling of your feet-roots, traveling along these connections to the place where you know we are all one.
Reflection
Healing the Whole
The Cherokee see our obsessive need for individualism as a sickness. In that culture, when a person is ill, healing is considered requisite not only for the individual but also for the family and community.
How do you bala
nce your individuality with your place in your family? Your community?
Does your drive to be your unique self leave you more alone than you wish?
Or have you lost your sense of self, of personal space, within the collective of your marriage, family, or workspace?
Call on Aspen. She knows how to be cradled by the collective while stretching her very individual limbs up to the stars.
Integration