Merging with Plants

Intimacy with Gaia’s Healing Plants

Through my 25 years of conscious partnering with plants, I have learned that they are eager and waiting for us to listen with open hearts. Plants are available to help us to heal not just ourselves, but to be instruments in the healing of Gaia. We come to them with the desire to serve the healing of the earth, asking the plants to guide us with their intelligence. We ask to be channels for the voices of the plants, sharing their wisdom and medicine with those who need it. We call these elders to gather with us, greeting them with love, and opening to receiving their instructions.

We allow the plants to choose what they share with us, knowing that as conscious beings they are learning each of us as well. We listen to them humbly and without grasping in want or greed. Over many years we build trust together, offering our love and devotion to their well being as well. The plants work with us in partnership for healing, and in merging with them, we gain wisdom needed for personal and collective transformation. We spread their seeds, plant and tend them, feeding other animals, and helping to heal the damage we have done.

In this partnership with the plant guides, we enter into a sacred responsibility to care for them as our elders, and to protect this sacred earth. We acknowledge the ways we harm others through our ignorance, and we ask the spirits for their compassion and guidance. As we journey with the plants, we awaken to the wisdom that our personal healing is greatly intertwined with the healing of the earth. We practice mindfulness, meditation, and prayers for self healing in order to awaken to the ways we are here to serve the healing of the whole. We meet our wounds and suffering with compassion, calling the plant spirits to guide us through these shadow realms with wisdom and courage. As we learn to travel through our own suffering with the spirits guiding us, we gain the ability to navigate with others through their suffering and illness with the plants at our sides.

At The Gaia School we consider plants to be conscious beings who we can learn from directly. We practice merging our consciousness with that of the plants in order to exchange energy encoded with information and intelligence. Students form intimate personal relationships with the plants as their direct teachers, learning through their own experiences. We invite the intelligence of the plants to partner with us, working together for collective and inner transformation. Meditation and consciousness shifting practices help us to receive the energies, spirits, and voices of individual plant allies. Rituals, teas, sacred smoke, and prayer open us more deeply to plant communication and intelligence. These teachers guide us along the medicine path with humbleness and compassion, awakening wisdom that lies within us.

Plant guides help to support us personally, and those we care for on the mysterious path of healing. When I attended school for herbal medicine I had already been in devoted relationship to the spirits of plants for years, communicating with plants during meditative states. Though I had been working with plants as conscious beings with powerful energy since I was young, I knew nothing of their medicinal value. Since I was in partnership with the plants as conscious beings themselves, they were more like friends and elders rather than objects. I did not think of their physical plant matter as what I was seeking – apart from some uses such as incense, oils, or food.

After having trained in Reiki as a teenager, I began practicing giving energy to the plants in my garden while meditating. I discovered to my surprise that plants would send healing energy back to me in a reciprocal exchange. This energy would flow into my hands, spill into my heart, and then spread through my entire being… lingering where I needed the most healing. During the early days of studying plant medicine I would often sit in meditation with the plants at each school’s medicinal gardens. I’d greet the plants as conscious beings, and humbly ask their spirits to speak me. Inviting the plants I already knew well as my elders to teach me of their ability to heal. Continually I asked these honoured teachers to share with me whatever they wanted to (if they wanted to). For many years I practiced exchanging healing energy with them, (energy containing information and intelligence), learning and observing through my whole body, while in altered states of meditation. In merging my consciousness with the consciousness of the plant, the plants were then able to teach me directly.

When I was an herbalism student I tried to listen first to the plant itself through my own body and heart -before I learned about it’s medicine from one of my teachers. It was an incredible confirmation every time I did this, showing how much information I could receive directly from the plants themselves, without knowing anything in my own mind about its particular medicinal uses. (This was a time before the popularity of many plants such as echinacea, st. john’s wort, and kava, where popularised herbal medicine has now become more common knowledge). I’ve also found over the years now that while I may know some things about a plant, it will often tell me what I haven’t learned yet. I have practiced this in countries all over the world, with plants I previously knew nothing of. After receiving from the plant’s directly, I’ll research the information to confirm what I received, (mostly so I’m careful not to poison myself). Often the medicinal plants themselves will call out to me in a particular place, eager and excited to find someone who will listen. I believe they will do this only if we will not use that knowledge to harm them or their communities with our greed or commodification.

From this practice over many years I’ve learned how the plants will not only relay to us their medicinal uses, but their memories through time, their instructions for working with them, how their medicine might be helpful for us personally, and how we can help support their communities. Through merging our consciousness with theirs, we also begin to hear what is happening in the ecosystem they are a part of, and how we might be able to help. I have had plants show me what is happening and needed in places that are far from where I currently am residing in space and time. As we work more deeply with them, the plants become guides for healing wounds we carry as a whole earth.

Through meditation, offerings, energy exchange with live plants, tea meditations, ceremony, and guided journeys with plant spirits, we can open our heart and consciousness to these wise elders directly. In merging with a plant through intimate relationship and communication, we are gifted some of each plant’s energy, intelligence, and medicine. Somehow the plant’s presence and intelligence begins to reside within us, easier to access and communicate with.

When we drink a tea while inviting the spirit of a plant in, the medicine we receive is many, many times greater. We don’t have to brew our teas as strong. The energy impact is amplified, and we are changed by them on many levels including physical. Having witnessed this through thousands of students and clients over decades, I have learned of the power the plant spirits themselves possess for healing. The plants are quite aware that in order for the earth to heal, humans have to heal the damage within themselves. Plants are like the wise bodhisattva – aware, compassionate, giving, and open to helping the healing of the whole where the deepest wounds reside. It is up to us to learn how to listen.

May the spirits speak from within you…

Sage Maurer