Working with teacher plants (aka ‘plant medicine’) 🌱

I first began working with plant spirits many years ago, long before I had been trained to do so shamanically (in fact, perhaps before I even knew there was such a thing as doing so shamanically)!

Humans are designed to be endlessly fascinated with and moved by stories… something that this crazy modern world knows and uses to maleficent effect.

Unless we become focused on, even obsessed with, and ultimately devoted to our own story, we will be forever pulled into the stories of a world that is hell bent upon eating itself…

Yesterday, I was thinking of my great uncle George and how unusual interracial marriages were back then in the 40s.

I asked Chris Tyler-Humm if he could find any photos in my mother’s photo albums and bless him, he went rummaging through the albums and sent over some precious photos, as well as an old letter he’d found.

As acclaimed mythologist and author, Michael Meade, said on our recent podcast “Your calling keeps calling.” (Link below.)

I can attest to the truth of that… in two ways:

Firstly, that as much as we might try to dismiss the call to a deeper, more spiritual, more magical, more mythical way of being and working, it will keep calling, for a lifetime if needed, and in ways that are harder and harder to ignore.

It was 6 years ago today that I had the operation that restored enough of my hearing that I can now manage without hearing aids (not that I managed particularly well with them).

It’s easy to take even miracles for granted after a while but I do my best not to

I was with a client this morning supporting her with integrating a deep, difficult plant medicine journey.

I drew a tarot card for her which mirrored symbols that had both shown up in her journey and in a message she’d received when visiting her special tree a few days before.

Hello beautiful soul,

It’s my first day back at work since before Christmas, it’s been a while since I’ve written something like this and there’s been many (many!) changes, within and without, since the last one, and so it felt like it was time to (re-)introduce myself and the work I do.

You’re already doing work that on your best days, you feel fortunate to be doing.

And it’s certainly much better than what you used to do.

But secretly you know… it’s not quite right.

It’s sort of the right direction, it’s sort of the right kind of clients, it’s sort of using your gifts.

As we (Jonathan, the whole team, and I) journey into the evolution of Be Mythical, we have been deep in conversation and contemplation of those words and what we mean by them.

There’s a shadow of both words that we are called to be conscious of, intimate with and responsible for…

When people say things like “just be you”, what’s often missed is what that requires… Which is self awareness, healing, and individuation, not to mention being confronted by and responsible for all the parts of you that you feel are unacceptable, unwelcome and ugly.

That takes many years, more typically decades, and it takes deep devotion.

My own purpose is guiding others to discover their soul’s purpose and to actualise it, whether that’s through founding a business, creating a non-profit venture, or by honouring it in the work they already do, and one of the things I’ve seen is vital is that we need to honour the time that takes, however long that is.

Soul business is usually slow business 🐌

(Or why we won’t promise you’ll make an easy 6 or 7 figures - overnight or at all)

Word of mouth

Ebb and flow

Easy does it

I sat with a man recently who had sat with ayahausca… We were in the work of integration.

You may know that after a ceremony with a teacher plant it’s considered wise to consciously integrate what occurred.

People are often called to work with me and Jonathan as they're called to or are journeying through life initiations such as a plant medicine ceremony, a dark night of the soul, or a huge change or rupture, such as relationship breakdown, childbirth, job change or loss, ill health or bereavement pulling them in down into its alchemical crucible.

Many people who come to work with us are undergoing psychological alchemy, though they often don’t know that - or not fully, even though they are often experienced facilitators of transformational or spiritual work themselves, for example working as coaches, therapists, and spiritual teachers.

You see life in a different way to most, and you’ve learned to hold back from sharing much of what you see and feel because painful experience has shown you that few can understand or relate.

And so when huge world events are taking place - that no-one can agree upon, aside from agreeing that they’re terrible - you are compelled to hide that you are seeing those events through a different lens altogether.

Yesterday, I listened to five precious souls share their journey of discovering their soul purpose and becoming their medicine (a conversation that we'll share on the podcast soon).

There was a question I asked each of them which was something like “What called you to that journey?”

On Friday evening, I broke my foot, though at the time I did and also didn’t know it was broken (the paradoxical Schrödinger's Cat experience of living through a mythical lens.)

My husband was out and I watched a film with my children, afterwards we decided to dance to one of the songs on the film’s sound track (for those of you who, like me, like details it was ‘Ooh Wee’ by Mark Ronson, Ghostface Killah and Nate Dogg)

In modern spiritual circles, the self often gets a bad rap, and yet, all the while it’s being dismissed and denied, it’s busy running the show.

To clarify, when I say modern spiritual circles, I am talking of forms of spirituality that are 30-50 years old and based in non-duality or oneness in some way, rather than Eastern traditions in which students are devoted to a master, happening within a context in which a cosmology, community, concepts of consciousness, and practices have been baked in for aeons.

This post is one I needed 12 years ago, but then maybe if I had I would have dismissed it, and maybe just upon seeing the title…

• Dismissed it as woo woo nonsense… “shamanic”, “spiritual”, please. Why not throw “astrologist” in for good measure?