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Jennifer May

Slow Healing


"The natural rhythm of healing is that we would recognize and restore the emotional aspects and all other aspects of self. Pharmaceuticals work so fast that it bypasses the slower process of complete healing in which we could observe and feel all aspects of self where & when they all follow into alignment."


A couple of nights ago, I awoke suddenly from sleep with this jostling around in my noggin, or wherever it really is that things jostle around at. Given how my life flows and the little space I call home tucked behind the graveyard, it could have been any number of things from which it came (and the origin probably doesn't matter much, except when it does.) I stepped out of bed and grabbed my phone and went quickly to the Notes ap, which is my favorite and most used ap, and jotted the messages above down, and drifted back to sleep.


For the next two days I pondered on this and I thought of my own experiences with both pharmaceuticals and with natural medicines made from plants and the differences I felt in the healing process.


Plant medicines work at a different pace than pharmaceuticals do. They work at a natural pace, with the rhythms of the plants in relation to the rhythms of the body. The healing is slower. Because it is slower, we notice more nuances. We notice that when our throat is sore, it hurts to talk too much and so maybe we are quieter and when we are quieter, we might feel more emotions. As our throat heals, we notice that we are able to talk a bit again, but not too much, or it starts to hurt. We might notice that we also feel a little bit less tired than we did the day before. We then might notice that as our throat starts to feel better, so does our back....(and isn't that strange because we hadn't thought that they were connected in that way). We might notice that we SEE our children more, because instead of talking and telling and all the things we command to our children (yes, I used the word command because it's so often what we do), that we observe subtleties that we didn't before. As we slowly heal, we notice when we are still just a little taxed, still a bit low on energy, and we adjust our lives and our choices accordingly.

Plant medicine or slow medicine that works WITH the rhythms of the body allows for us to notice all sorts of things about the body, the connections within, and the process.


Pharmaceutical medicine is powerful, potent, and works incredibly fast. And it skips over all of those more nuanced things, so much so that I don't think we even feel them and when we don't feel them, well sometimes those parts get left behind as the other parts are healing, and there is not the same alignment. When our throat hurts and we take a pill and it's better within the day, or sometimes a few hours as opposed to the 4 or 5 days it might take working with plant medicines, we are up and back at our busy and often fast paced lives in no time. We don't have to feel much of anything. (Most of us are glad for this because no one likes to feel pain........ but surprise! Most of us don't reallly like to - or know how to- feel emotions.)


AND there is a time and a place for this type of fast medicine, of course. Probably many times in the life of a modern busy person. It is life saving and there are times when it should be used.

AND the more I think about it, the more I think about how it leaves parts of us that also need healing, that are part of the bigger constellation of why we are sick in the first place, behind.......and when we do this time after time, more and more parts get left in the wake.


Perhaps this means that there is more work to do during the times that pharmaceuticals are necessary.......extra work to pay attention to the emotions and the spiritual aspects of things. I think there is always more work......that's just life and being human.


This little ramble really isn't much of anything so far as a problem and a solution.........it's more of an observation on the differences. And really seeing and experiencing how working with plants is much more complete in the whole grand process of what they offer us, healing so much more than we might be aware of....and how that is oh so remarkable and magical......and I wish more of the world would slow down enough to experience the richness of healing that plants can bring.

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