401 Holly Worton ~ How to Forge a Deeper Connection with Plants and Trees

Transcript

Holly:   Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 401. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about how to deepen your connection, or how to forge a deeper connection with plants and trees.

This is inspired by an upcoming book I have on how to talk to trees, which will hopefully be my last release of the year and it is also inspired by my plant-spirit-healing short reads books which are finally coming out this year! This is an idea that I had probably two years ago and the time has now come to work on these books. I understand now why it has taken me so long to actually get started on these books, there was some work I needed to do previously in terms of my own connection with plants and trees, and I feel that I am ready this year to do that deep dive into connecting with plant and tree spirits. So I am really, really, excited about these books.

Coming up on the podcast

But before we get into today’s episode I wanted to let you now that I have got a few guests lined up, I have got Cynthia Redford coming on talking about leave no trace. Now this was inspired by a conversation that I had with someone on Instagram who recommended Cynthia to me and then I kind of furthered that conversation in my private Facebook group for readers and clients called ‘Holly’s Grove’. So we were talking about leave no trace, and what things are okay and what things are not okay, and some things are really obvious like pack out your trash and your garbage, don’t leave stuff in the woods. But there are other things like rock stacks that some people don’t realise aren’t a good thing and children’s shelters, kids build those little shelters in the woods: are those okay, are they not okay? They are obviously not leave no trace, but are they bad? So I don’t know we are going to talk about this with Cynthia and get her take on things. And hopefully talk about some things that a lot of people don’t necessarily think about when they are going outdoors. So if you have any questions that you would like me to ask Cynthia on the concept of leave no trace, please let me know.

Also, I have got Kerriann Mackenzie coming back on, she is going to be interviewing me, we are going to be talking about trees and other stuff. If you have any questions for me, stuff that you wanted to ask but haven’t again get in touch and let me know.

Finally, I have got Susan Jagganath coming on again and we are going to be talking about the Camino Ingles, which I am super excited about. So if you have any questions for me, for my future interviewees, you can get in touch at [email protected] or you can find me online on social media and get in touch there. I am not always super speedy at getting back to people on social media messages but I will see them, probably within a week, I don’t know what my problem is sometimes I forget to check and then all of a sudden I go into Instagram and I have got three messages from people and I hadn’t noticed. So I am not ignoring you if you don’t hear from me in a few days I will get back to you eventually when I see it. So thank you for letting me know if you have any questions and if you have any ideas for people you would like to hear on this podcast, people that you would like me to interview, please let me know, again: [email protected], that’s the best way to get in touch, or you can get in touch on social media.

Today’s topic

So, what are we going to talk about today? We are going to talk about why you might want to deepen your connection with trees and plants. How to pick a plant or tree to connect with. We are going to talk about ways of connecting physically, kind of spiritually, and ways of exploring your relationship with these trees or plants. So without further ado let’s get into this episode.

So for the last three or so weeks I have been working with the plant spirit mugwort, which is a plant spirit that I love. I originally got to know mugwort in a plant-spirit initiation ceremony with Suneet Kaur who I interviewed back on episode 394 and I will link to that in the show notes. If you want to learn more about plant-spirit healing and kind of work with plant spirits that is a really, great, in-depth episode and again I will link to that in the show notes.

So I originally got to know mugwort through a plant-spirit initiation with Suneet and really felt such a strong connection to the plant and I have just loved mugwort ever since. It is a plant that grows wild here in England and in the summertime you see it all along the side of the trails but it is a plant that I never really noticed before and then it is kind of that thing once I met it, and connection with it, I started seeing it everywhere. And, there is this one particular place just outside the town where I live that has got a track and on the sides of the track it has got really lovely mugwort in the summer and I just can’t wait for it to grow up again this year because I want to harvest some and then dry it and work with it. In the meantime I have been working with just dried mugwort tea that I have purchased and other products.

So I have been working with this plant in various ways, some of which I am going to be talking about today. So I have been doing some shamanic journeys with the plant spirit, I have been working with the mugwort essential oil and I have got a mugwort vibrational essence that I will put into my water and my tea and I have been drinking mugwort tea which you have to be careful with, not consuming too much with too much frequency or with too much a large amount of it because it can be not good for your liver, also it is not good in pregnancy. We will talk more about connecting with the plant physically. Smudging, you can create bundles of dried mugwort and burn it to clear the air, or to clear your own energy. I have been doing that and that’s about that, I haven’t actually been connecting with the live plant because it is a plant that dies down in the winter and it hasn’t started to come back yet.

So as a result of all this work with mugwort I am working towards this book which is a plant-spirit-healing short reads series, where I am going to teach people to connect with mugwort specifically and how to work with mugwort and the spirit of mugwort for healing. And it is super exciting because it is such an easy way to work with plants and to connect with plants and get to know plants and trees and I think a lot of people aren’t aware of this but it is such an easy way.

So if you want to deepen your connection with trees and plants why might you want to do that?

So I think some people might want to deepen their connection with trees and plants just in general because they feel like getting outdoors and connecting with nature or perhaps they feel drawn to gardening, or cultivating certain plants in their garden or trees. Or you might feel a kind of spiritual nudge to form a deeper spiritual connection with trees and plants. So this can go both ways, it can be a mental, emotional, spiritual, physical connection with these plants and pick what works for you, if you don’t consider yourself to be a spiritual person focus on connecting with them in a physical way, and we are definitely going to talk about this in this episode.

So how do you pick a plant or tree to connect with?

First of all decide whether you want to connect with a certain species of tree or plant, or an individual tree or plant. So it might be the oak tree that is down the street from your house or the apple tree in your garden. Or it could be just the general species of yew trees, or mugwort plants, or sunflowers; the entire species or it could be an individual tree or plant. Sometimes the spirit of a tree or plant will call to you, so if you are feeling drawn to speak with either a particular species or individual of a tree or plant, pay attention to that. If a particular tree or plant keeps popping into your head or popping into your awareness or consciousness, listen to that, it might be the spirit of the tree or plant calling to you and saying: hey, let’s connect.

In my book, If Trees Could Talk, I connected to individual trees, I did not connect with the oversoul of a species or tree and I am going to talk about the oversoul in a minute. I connected with very specific trees, I connected with: Windmill Sycamore, I connected with Sacred Spring Beech, I connected with Newlands Corner Yew. So these were very specific trees in a specific place.

And I really enjoyed that way of working with it because it was really enjoyable to feel the different personalities of each tree and these were all trees that reached out to me when I was on my walks and expressed an interest in being in the book – I really enjoyed that way of working with the trees. I have thought about perhaps in the future doing in addition to my plant-spirit-healing short-reads books, doing a tree-spirit-healing short-read book, perhaps doing a short-reads series or a bigger book where I connect with the spirit of particular spirits of trees. We’ll see where this go. I tend to be led by spirit and feel into what feels right and what needs to be done, so we shall see.

In my plant-spirit short books I am connecting with particular species of plants, mugwort for example. So in shamanic healing there is this concept of the oversoul and the oversoul is like the accumulation of all the individual mugwort plant spirits. It is kind of like the overarching spirit of this particular species of plant. It is neither male nor female, a lot of people you will hear refer to mugwort as she because it has a very feminine feel to it and it is also used for female feminine health issues. So a lot of people will refer to mugwort as a she, but the oversoul does not have gender, it does not need gender, it is spirit. And when I talk about going on plant-spirit-healing shamanic journeys, I am journaling with the spirit of Mugwort (with a capital M), so it is kind of this oversoul of all the mugwort plants. And in the same way that if you have ever heard people talk about power animals, we were talking about this also in my Grove, my Facebook group, power animals same thing you are working with the oversoul. So my power animal is raven and raven will also come along on my shamanic journeys and I am not working with one particular raven, it is the oversoul of raven birds. So again, you connect with a species of a plant or tree (or animal) or an individual plant or tree (or animal). And as you are listening to this podcast you may be thinking about plants or trees that come to mind or something may pop up for you.

If not, if you are sitting here and listening to this and thinking, I don’t know! Maybe get out your journal and sit down and write. Write about trees and plants that have been important to you. Write about trees and plants that you just like, like oak trees: oak trees are really beautiful because they have such a wide canopy and they are so old; and pretty or yew trees have such a lovely red bark; or sunflowers are happy, great and yellow (and whatever). Think about your favourite plants and trees. I have lists and lists of all of my favourite plants and trees that I want to plant in my dream garden some day, so this is really easy for me because I have always really enjoyed plants and trees and particularly gardening. So if you are finding this difficult sit down with a journal, write and if that still doesn’t work for you go online and just google: trees and then look at pictures of trees and see which species of trees stand out to you. Google, ‘plants’ or ‘flowers’, and see which stand out to you and write those down. Or get a seed catalogue, I got a seed catalogue the other day in the post and it was just so lovely, I love looking at seed catalogues! I was looking at all the different flowers and vegetables and exciting things in the seed catalogue. Those are really great, especially if they are printed because you can go through them (ah I don’t know I love it when the seed catalogues come in the spring!). So do whatever you need to do to find a plant or tree to connect with. Again, a particular species or an individual tree or plant and it really doesn’t matter, it’s not like you have to find the right plant or tree to connect with, just pick one and get started. And the more you do this the more you will probably find that you have more plants and trees that come to mind that you want to connect with.

Connecting

So once you have picked your plant or tree let’s look at the ways of connecting physically; so, you can just go and sit with the plant. So if it is a tree in your local woodland or a tree in your park or backyard or wherever then go and sit with the tree or sit with the plant and just be with it; you can bring your journal and do some journalling and feel into the energy of the tree. And when you do this bring an offering – and this is something that Suneet talked about in episode 394 and this is something that is really, I think, important and what Suneet said was: you wouldn’t go over to someone’s house to dinner and not bring a bottle of wine or bouquet of flowers. They are cooking dinner for you, they are having you over, so you bring a thing for them. In the same way if you are going to look to connect with this plant, or get healing from this plant, or form a relationship with this plant or tree, you would want to bring in an offering or maybe a nice little thing.

So you could maybe bring some dried herbs from your garden, you could maybe bring it some flowers that you have found along your walk as you are walking towards it or some feathers perhaps that you have found on the ground, or any natural object. Tobacco is often a traditional offering to leave, if you grow tobacco in your garden that is a nice thing to leave, but if you don’t you don’t need to go out and buy it you can use pretty natural things that you have or even just some water would be good. And, as I was reading in a blog post, urine can be good for trees, you don’t want to do this on plants but if you have need to urinate when you are out in the woods and you are in a private place you can do that at the base of a tree and the nitrogen in your urine is good for the tree. So that is kind of an unconventional sounding offering, but it is something that the tree will probably appreciate.

So just sit with the tree or plant and get to know it, get to feel it. If you channel (we are going to talk about that more in a minute) you can talk to it and I have a whole blog post on how to talk to trees and plants. Just sit with it and get to know it. Look at it, look at the leaves, look at the flowers, look at the stems, look at the trunk if it is a tree. Smell it, if if is edible taste it. And of course don’t eat any plants that you aren’t 100% sure are edible! Know what you are eating and don’t just eat green things because some plants are toxic and some plants are deadly. So touch it, smell it, feel it, possibly eat it and just stay with it for a while.

Now another thing you can do is you can grow the plant at home, or you could forage for it. So if it is a plant like mugwort you can find that in nature and if foraging is legal wherever you live you can forage a plant.

What can you do with it? For example, with mugwort, you can cut the stems, dry them and make smudging bundles for burning. You can dry the leaves and drink the leaves in a tea or an infusion. You can create an elixir out of the tea. Again, some plants should not be consumed internally, so know what you are consuming before you consume it. Do your research!

And with mugwort you need to be really careful, it should not be consumed while pregnant because it can stimulate uterine contractions and can actually be used to bring on your period. And again, if you have too much of it, it can be toxic to your kidneys. So use sparingly or consult a medical herbalist and get their advice.

Also essential oils are really good. I have been working a lot with mugwort essential oils and, again, caution, some essential oils should not be used directly on the skin; some are very strong and you can put them on a cotton ball or something or on a piece of fabric and use that to smell and experience the oil. I have been using the oil directly on my skin, I think you are probably not supposed to do that but it has not presented any problems for me. So I have been wearing that every day, I will usually put it on in the morning when I do my Shamanic journey and then I just kind of have it throughout the day on my skin and I really enjoy that way of connecting with the scent of the plant.

So those are the ways of connecting physically, so you can connect with the live plant physically or you can collect with the dried plant through smudging, through infusions, or the oil of the plant. And again caution in using this, read up before you use a plant for infusions or essential oils or whatever, read whether or not it is safe to use, obviously some plants are toxic. So those are some ways of connecting physically with the plant. That’s something that you can do at home or out in the outdoors, in nature.

Ways of connecting spiritually with plants and trees: you can also work with vibrational essences which you might know of as flower essences and flower essences are a way of… they are created with a particular plant spirit. So you will find vibrational essences in little bottles, usually in liquid form, spring water with some type of alcohol like brandy used for preservation and sometimes pieces of the plants are used to create the essence but it can also be used to work with spirit of the plant and ask the spirit of the plant to use the water. In my book I share a bit more about the details of how to create your own essence but you can buy them online. So when I got my mugwort essence, again mugwort is not out now but I knew that I wanted to work with the essence so I contacted Suneet, got an essence from her and I have been working with the vibrational essence that she made. But if you just google: ‘mugwort vibrational essence’, or ‘mugwort flower essence’, or whatever plant you want to work with, you can find that online and they are not very expensive and last a long time. So that is another great way of working with the spirit of the plant and that’s an easy way to work with the spirt of the plant without having to channel the spirit or talk to the plant or feel like you have to have these special skills that you might not believe that you have. And it can be really useful if you are going to be working in this really subtle way, such as using vibrational essences, to journal about it: how do you feel? How have your feelings changed? Has anything shifted for you? That can be really, really, useful to document, because this is a really subtle way of working with the plant.

Next, you can channel the spirit of the plant or tree or you can talk to the plant or tree. I will link to some blog posts I have about talking to trees and plants and how to do that and if you want to learn how to channel I have a link to my friend Cara Wilde’s Channel Your Guides course and you can use the same principles of channeling to channel the tree spirit or plant spirit, and that is basically a telepathic way of talking to the spirits of trees and plants and that is a really lovely way to form a connection with a tree or a plant. And again it would be probably useful to journey on this just so you have a record on what your journey is like and your relationship with this plant or tree. I have been documenting everything that I have been doing with mugwort and I have got pages and pages and pages of shamanic journeys and everything and results and how things have shifted and it has been really, really, interesting and useful to document.

So finally, another way of connecting spiritually is through shamanic journeying and this is something that I learned on my plant-spirit-healing apprenticeship with Suneet, not last year but the year before and it is a really, really, lovely way of connecting with plants.

So what is shamanic journeying? It is a way to work in the spirit realm with plant spirits and other spirits. So basically you have a special drum, that you drum yourself into a trance for the purpose of doing this work and it actually has been proven that listening to this monotonous drum beat can shift your brainwaves to that very deeply relaxed fade out brainwave state that is also the realm of altered state of consciousness. And on a shamanic journey you start at what’s called a power spot and you work with a particular plant spirit for healing or insight or information. And, in the journey we usually go to one of three places: the lower world, the middle world or the upper world. The lower world is the realm of Mother Earth, nature, and I can go with the plant spirit and the plant spirit will either perform healing or teach me things. The middle world is a spiritual carbon copy of our material world. And again, I would work with the spirit of mugwort, or another plant or tree, for healing or insight. The upper world it the angelic realm, it is a really lovely place of wisdom and healing and again I might be accompanied by my plant spirit to that place and there I would receive healing usually from the plant spirit but also from angels.

Again, this is something that happens that you experience in altered state of consciousness that you can put yourself through this monotonous drumming. And you are working with the spirit of the plant either to get healing or to get insight and it is a really lovely way of connecting spiritually with the plant. In the last six weeks, I have done probably 30 shamanic journeys with the spirit of mugwort and it has really helped me to deepen my connection with that plant. Now shamanic journeying is something that you want to learn properly, it is not something that I would learn just from reading a book, but you can – there is a really good shamanic journeying book by Paul Francis and I will link to that in the show notes. Again it is tricky and it is something that you want to undertake with certain caution. So ideally you want to learn this with someone else like Suneet in my apprenticeship. So those are some ways of connecting spiritually with plants and trees.

Now to further your relationship with these trees and plants you can do art journalling, you can keep a written journal, you can keep that record of your experiences either through art or through words, the written word. And you can take your journal out to the plants, out to the trees, and write and create art with them, or that is something that you can do at home on your own, just to keep a record of your experiences. And I think this is really, really, useful because again you are working with really subtle energies here and it can be really useful to kind of document how you are feeling and what was going on for you when you first connected with this plant or tree and how things have changed as a result of this relationship. You can also keep a record of how your relationship with that plant has changed, if it has depended how how has it deepened? Why do you feel like you have a deeper relationship with this plant or tree? What is different? Where are they taking you in the shamanic journeys? Or where are they taking you in your dreams? Because you might even find that you start to dream with these plant spirits, again really, really useful to have that written record or artistic record of your relationship. And art journalling is also a really good way of kind of accessing information that you weren’t consciously aware of so that you can just ask yourself a question, or ask the plant spirit a question and then just draw or paint in your art journal and see what comes out of that and interpret that in the same way you would interpret a dream or shamanic journey or something else.

Contact Me

So that is it.

Please let me know if you have any questions. My Plant Spirit Healing book with mugwort will be coming out at the end of the month, so if it’s not live by the time you listen to this episode it probably will be within the next couple of days. If you are not on my newsletter list you can get on that on my website to find out when books are released.

So thank you so much for listening, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this week’s episode, you can email at [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there. I have been loving my journey with mugwort, my next plant that I am going to be working with is camomile which has such a different energy but I am so excited to be getting working with that. If you have any questions about plants that you might want me to work with, or write about, let me know, I will add it to my list of plants and trees that I want to work with.

So thank you again for listening and remember to visit: HollyWorton.com/401 for the show notes on this episode.