Exploring your Place in Community with Plants 🕸🌿🕸
Enjoy this sweet seasonal offering designed in collaboration with PMS student, teacher, organizing architect and art therapist, Hannah Taylor-Johnson. An exercise to ground you in connection before completing your inward spiral into the dark times of the year. This offering is a reflection on community, plants, and your place it in all. It is a guided exploration designed to help you connect deeper with plants and with yourself as it relates to your understanding of community.
This offering is also an invitation to join or support our upcoming Community Care Mentorship, We Care For Us. The mentorship is a next step for past and present PMS students looking to build the mycelium of community-based health care by providing deeply nourishing, personalized consultations. For those wishing to support this form of horizontal healthcare monetary donations for BIPOC scholarships to this mentorship are being gratefully accepted here now.
We are excited for you to interact with this offering and hope it brings some insight into how crucial you, the plants and community are to our collective healing! Please share your thoughts, reflections and questions in the comments below!
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Exploring your Place in Community with Plants:
The Process:
This exploration should be done in a comfortable and comforting location and can be done indoors or outside. Find a place that is good for reflection (either internally through meditation, and/or externally somewhere that feels calm to you). You can make this process as simple or complex as you’d like. We recommend lighting a candle and/or burning herbs while setting the intention of deepening your connection to plants and community.
Take a deep breath and focus on the brilliant web that is your community (remember to consider people, plants, ancestors, water, soil, etc. as your community)…see yourself in that web and feel into all of the delicate and incredibly strong strands of the web that are holding you. Feel the security of that web gently supporting you, sit in this feeling for as long as you like.
Once comfortable in this feeling, meditate on a plant partner that also evokes the feeling of being part of community. There is no rush, take the time needed for a plant to arise. When a plant comes to you, trust in it. Welcome the plant in, thank them for coming to you and ask them to spend some time in communion with you. If the plant agrees wonderful, you can move on to the explorations below! If the plant does not agree, wonderful, thank them for coming to you and the time and feelings shared or if no plant comes to you, also wonderful; even without a plant partner you can still ponder the explorations below.
Please know that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way for this process to unfold. It is a journey and not a destination. The only rule is that you will hold yourself gently, compassionately and with grace throughout this process.
Explorations with your Community Plant:
the following are suggestions of ways to explore community with your plant, feel free to free-style and do what feels best.
Ask the plant to share their wisdom with you surrounding community…take the time needed to sit and really listen to the answers in whatever form they arise…thoughts, feelings, visuals, memories, etc
what makes a community?
who/what is essential to community?
what is my place in community?
how do communities collectively heal?
how can herbalism integrate into my community for healing?
any other questions that feel aligned
Once your exploration is complete, thank the plant for sharing this sacred communion with you. Make an offering to the plant in whatever way feels real.
Reflections on your Community Plant Exploration:
In order to integrate what was shared, we highly recommend participating in at least one of the following activities (but feel free to do more!) These exercises can be done immediately after sitting with your plant (highly recommended) or anytime following your exploration:
Journal about your exploration with your community plant. You can describe the experience in detail, fill the page with word associations or anything else you feel called to put down on paper.
Create art about your experience with the plant. What colors and textures feel most aligned? What do those colors/textures mean to you?
Reflect and document what you discovered about your place in community and how plants/herbalism/healing intersect in that place.
Write a story or poem about your plant. Consider including how this plant represents community? How this plant fits into the web of community. After completing the story, consider how this story applies to your understanding of community.
Research your plant for folklore, stories, and clinical monographs - what are some of the connections to community that you find and do you relate to them?
Consider what you feel in your body when you think of this plant, what is the experience of the plant? Question how the plant may have experienced your presence. Were there any overlaps between the plant’s character and your own?
Reflect on your connections to community, were there ways that this plant turned up for you either symbolically or in actual ways? What were those moments? What could they tell you about community.
Closing:
When you have come to a place where you feel the explorations and reflections are complete for this particular session (reflections and insight may continue to come from these explorations for days, weeks or months) it is important to close the experience.
This can be done by giving thanks and blowing out the candle, setting down your pencil with intention, taking several deep, cleansing breaths, closing your eyes while feeling your heartbeat… or any other gesture that offers gratitude to the plant, to your community, to the process and closes out the experience. Move thru the rest of your day/week/year feeling the support of your community and plant…
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