I’ve been teaching herbal medicine for over 30 years and plant communication has been part of it for about 27 years. At the beginning of my herbal studies, I felt incredibly overwhelmed. There was so much to learn, and I even thought that I might not be cut out for herbalism until plant communication came to me. Plant communication is what really saved me.

Now, at this point, I’ve been tracking my students for the last 25+ years and I’ve created a framework that starts at the very beginning. Even if you’re already working with herbs, it’s so powerful to go back to the beginning. I’ve seen people from all walks of life be able to open those doors and remember their capacity to communicate with plants.

Plant Communication Memories

Many of us were not raised in a culture or family where plant communication was nurtured. If it was, then you just want to go back and thank those people for doing that for you. If it wasn’t, like me, nobody caught my downloads from the flowers, the plants, the bees, and the butterflies when I was a young child.
It’s important to go back and remember those first memories. What that does is help us build a container and it reactivates the nervous system in a deeper way.

Recently I remembered that when I was 14, we moved. When I got to the house that we were moving to, there was this incredible pine tree that I completely connected to. I fell in love with it. I sat with it. Nobody taught me how, but I did that.

When we went to move in, my dad had cut the tree down to put in a driveway. Nobody said anything about it. I started crying. Maybe he needed to cut down that tree, but I needed it to be acknowledged. I had a lot of grief.

When I went back, I remembered that tree and the grief that was in my body for the lack of ceremony, the lack of acknowledgment. My family camped a lot, and we enjoyed the earth, but we never expressed it openly. It wasn’t part of our culture to honor and acknowledge how much we love the earth and how much we are enjoying it.

Language

One of the things we do in plant communication is we start bringing these connections, these communications to our culture through our language and through what we talk about.

Not too long ago, if you weren’t in deep communication with the earth, you didn’t survive. If you’re surrounded by skeptics, it’s important for you to get with other people that will start validating you more because if we don’t take this next step as a culture, things are not going to go well. It really is time to bring the voice of the earth to the table. We have to go to bat with the whole idea that plant communication is a weirdo fringe thing. We have to change that and it begins with each one of us.

When you’re constantly around skeptics and you’re constantly belittled and diminished when you openly express your love for the earth, that does something to your soul. We really have to solidify our certainty, our confidence, and our power around that so that we can own it as a people and as a culture.

We Are the Natural World

The earth is a living being. Everything is alive. Our nervous system knows how to be in deep relationship with the living world. We are the natural world.

It’s just that many of us, myself included, were raised in a culture where intellect was king, and humans were top of the food chain. When you think you’re top of the food chain, then those receptors to be able to experience multidimensional communication get dampened down.

But they’re still there. If you just get a little validation and do a little bit of work, your nervous system starts to remember. Feeling called by the plants or the trees or the sticks or the rocks is our basic innate human capacity.

When you were young, it was probably stronger, but nobody recognized it. Nobody caught it, so then you go, “Hmm, I don’t know.” Over a while, you get enough eye rolls and you just think, “Wow! I’m just weird.”

I’m done with the medicine people being called weird or fringe. It is time to bring the voice of the earth back into who we are and how we live our lives.

How the Earth Communicates With You

What’s so beautiful is that plant communication is different for everybody. The earth communicates to us through our senses and our feelings. We are all so different that the messages come in many different ways.

If you can get grounded so that you know what it feels like for you instead of wondering, “Did I make that up in my head?” then you start to realize that the messages come in different ways. The concept of healing is so much bigger than the paradigm we’re stuck in right now.

Over and over again, I’ve seen people go, “Nope. I don’t do plant communication. That’s not for me,” and then once they start jogging the nervous system, the body goes, “Oh, yes, I remember that” and then it pops!

Everybody has their own timing with it. That’s the beautiful thing, it always does pop in one way or another. If it’s not happening for you yet, I know that it’s just right there for you. Maybe you’ve been beaten down with, “You’re weird.” No more.

Medicine of the Earth

There are hundreds of thousands of people onboarding into the herbal world right now. It is incredible the awakening that’s happening of people interested in herbs, plants, and herbal medicines. If we don’t have this deep connection and communication as part of our herbal studies, we’re going to be creating more environmental problems.

There’s what I call “50-50 herbalism.” It’s like 50% intellect and 50% this other realm where you receive direction from the earth. We are at such an important juncture in our awakening of herbs.

This is the beauty of the earth: Being able to bring through the incredible healing, insight, and blessings that the earth has for us, and in turn, as our hearts open more and more, we remember how to give back to the earth and how to take care of her.

It takes all of us that are interested and who are called to do that, and so I’m glad that you’re one of those people.

Ready to deepen your plant communication skills? Check out Plant Wisdom

I’d love to hear from you! How is it that we recreate our covenant with the green world and bring it to our culture? How do we create a culture in which that is the priority and the premise? Please share in the comments below.