I am a Shamanic Herbalist

About two weeks ago I was sharing with my coach about my enrollment for Herbal    Wisdom Circle~13 Month Program.  I was surprised I didn’t have anyone signed up yet. I felt like something needed to change to fill the program but I wasn’t sure what it was.

My coach is highly intuitive and can read me, often when I am too hyped up to read    myself.  He suggested I reschedule the program for a couple of months.  He knows me and also suggested I talk to the land, the trees, my natural surroundings to receive     wisdom about what to do.  And then he suggested I do something else.  That I keep a log and let people on my email list in on the messages I am receiving.  This felt a little too vulnerable at first, I would have to divulge things that I don’t usually share with my entire list of contacts. 

Well I did just that.  I kept a log for seven days and reported the messages three times during the week.  Yesterday, I took all the messages out on the land and I read them over and over in a loud voice so my nature helpers could really hear me. 

As I read these messages several times, something subtle started to emerge from underneath the words.  A message for me as an herbalist.  These messages spoke about the kind of herbalism that I teach to my apprentices and students.  They spoke of a deeper wisdom that is available for us outside of what this herb and that herb do. 

I am a shamanic herbalist.  I have been a shamanic herbalist for almost twenty years.  I have studied with many teachers, read many books and spent time outside with the plants in all kinds of weather and seasons.  I have been taught the wise woman way.  I have been given a body of shamanic herbalism practices by my spirit teacher.  I have been encouraged, coaxed and loved deeply by the plants.  I am so thankful. 

But there has been an ever present nagging by my small mind that my training isn’t enough.  That I should take more clinical herbal classes, get a degree, get an AHG certificate etc. etc. to really be an herbalist.  What I heard from these messages given to me over the course of a week, when I called them out to our beautiful valley was that right there in front of me was my work.  Teaching shamanic herbalism, the expansive relationship with the plants, the invisible tradition of herbalism is what is mine to do. 

Even now when writing this so that I may share it, I feel vulnerable and scared about sharing.  What is so potent for me about this right now is that I see that the vulnerability is the openness to share exactly what is mine to share.   It is exciting to me that the land spoke to me in phrases, slowly over a week’s time with the synthesis being a potent    program in shamanic herbalism and also the full reclamation of my path in this lifetime.

Twenty years before becoming an herbalist, I became a school teacher.  That too was a calling for me and prepared me to be a teacher of shamanic herbalism.  There are many possibilities for us when we are wondering what our sacred path is.   There are not so many paths that are true for us though.  It is good to find ours. 

May it be in Beauty.