Seasonal Plant Medicine - how does your medicine shift with the Seasons?

[Alchemica]

As we shift with the seasons, how is your medicine shifting? What's coming up for use in your plant medicine apothecary? I'm trying to get used to shifting my medicine with the seasons. I already strongly feel the energetics shift, trying to use Nature's abundant gifts seasonally to stay healthy is an interesting challenge.

Seasonal Plant Medicine

 

"It is the natural ebb and flow of relationship, the giving and the taking, and all the emergent properties that develop in response to dynamic interaction. Wild medicine, medicine infused with relationship and interconnection, is the strongest medicine because of its gentle harmony."

 

The decrease in sunlight will signal diametrical changes in the body. The flush of flavonoid rich plants became useful as one enters an elevated inflammatory state during the darkest and coldest part of the year. There is a rhythm and a balancing implicit to our dance with the plant world across the seasons.

 

"It is a relationship that has evolved over impossible expanses of time. It is the opposite of a new, synthetic wonderdrug hastily derived in an isolated lab and quickly delivered to market. It is slow medicine, derived over millennia in concert with all creation, as each season of sun and wind and rain unfolded to inspire a new genetic expression. The therapeutically “active” chemical compounds found in medicinal plants are actually secondary metabolites that are expressed explicitly in plants when they are in relationship with other energetic and physical phenomena. The “stressors” of exposure to sun, heat, cold, herbivores, and microorganisms inspire a new set of chemical expressions by the plant, and these medicinal compounds are considered its immunological defense. Which is another way of saying, the medicine song of a plant is the same tune that resonates and inspires healing within us.

 

We join in sacred relationship with the plant world when we warm up with a cup of tea blended with the right herbs to send blood flowing to our periphery in winter."

 

Of late, that's been upping my olive leaf polyphenols, whereas diversity was really healing, this will be a bit of a background to have going as seasons shift. I use a supplement as well as the leaf as raw medicine. Olive leaf polphenols act as modulators of the human immune response. These have strong neuroprotective, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties. They seem strongly protective in animal models of neurodegenerative disorders, from Alzheimer's to MS. They increased the levels of NGF and BDNF in the serum, maintain healthy redox status and boost neurotrophins which play key roles in learning and memory processes and in the proliferation and migration of endogenous progenitor cells.

[Alchemica]

Rethinking medicinal plants and plant medicines

We need to “engage conversation between different ways of making medicine ‘work’ in-the-world”

 

When medicinal plants become mobile and are studied in laboratories or in different cultures they are conceivably dislocated from the knowledge and rituals of the healers. Hence, medicinal knowledge is seen as not necessarily located within entities such as plants, but rather in the therapeutic transformation/s that emerge from healing “encounters and their traces”. How much therapeutic efficacy are we losing by doing that?

 

What happens if I interact with medicines with the plant as an entity over being a mere source of bioactives? What happens when you include Ritual, Ceremony and the Sacred Element of Art [1]

 

Currently, medicinal plants are increasingly being integrated into economic enterprises and scientific investigations. Medicinal plants are acted on: removed, pressed, catalogued, chopped up, transplanted and exploited. In their biocultural diversity, plants ... act on and within people. Enmeshed with humans, these plants, arguably, encourage their own cultivation. In much anthropological literature, it is argued that the ability of medicinal plants is activated by the knowledge of healers, their rituals, preparation methods and interaction with the spirits.

 

A number of scholars describe the social-cultural power of plants and plant intelligence, as well as their volitionality, vibrancy and communication. In many cultures, medicinal plants have potency and are viewed as “masters,” “teachers” or “doctors,” able to impart strength and wisdom and to aid in learning.

 

"They [healing plants] know [ǂang] how to change/repair what is wrong [the sickness]. Medicinal plants have a good/strong spirit, they are of nature [tci kxao]. I ask the plant for its strength/power to heal, but I must always give something back to the plant."

 

Certain medicinal plants have the power to bring about change and healing. This ability and knowledge comes from nature, the spirit, soul or breath-essence of the plant, apart from the skill of the healer and his respectful relationship with the plant.

 

The chemical potentiality of psychoactive plants arguably becomes enmeshed with healers’ and users’ collective and individual histories, their physiological and psychosocial dispositions, as well as their beliefs, meanings and intentions to relationally become-with in healing and bringing about spiritual, mental and therapeutic effects.

 

Could we, in fact, make sense of plants as actants, entities that can have an effect on their environments and relationships within it?

 

If we see “elements in the environment as persons,” that is they are gifted with “cognitive, moral and social qualities analogous to those of humans.” These approaches assimilate plants and spirits in the category of persons. Plants play a key role in human existence, but are also viewed as “entities that act as humans and thus as social agents — not just in … healing and magic, but also in everyday life.”

 

Many medicinal plants are administered internally and have “mutually inclusive physical, psychological and spiritual therapeutic effects”. These are activated through the interaction between ritual dynamics, the phytochemical synergy of the plants’ therapeutic capacity, the mixtures utilised and the psyche of the user

 

The plant “made/turned it [sickness/sick person] into something else [kuru ka ko tci dore]”: by bringing about transformation, it could heal [dù !kóbó].

"The ability to heal comes from the n/umkxao’s openness to and management of the relationship with the kgwe (power), the breath/essence/good spirit [ma’a cua] of the plant itself, the environment, the air [n|a’àn], the wind [màq], the spirits [//gauwasi]" etc

 

[1] http://creativeawakeningnow.podbean.com/e/ep-5-ritual-cere…/

Full text: http://sci-hub.tw/…/…/doi/full/10.1080/23323256.2017.1415154

Edited March 26, 2018 by Alchemica