Chapter 73

Advanced Focusing and Plant Medicine

Have you ever heard of Dr. Edward Bach’s homeopathic flower remedies? Well, when I was studying them, I learned that Dr Back was so sensitive he could tell what energy the flowers held and could use them to help balance a person’s energy and emotions.

I was in awe that someone could sense that about a plant. I wondered how that was even possible. Then, after taking the Medicinal Plants class at Trackerschool, I began to understand how Dr Bach did it.

When Tom first presented the concept of how the energy of plants can affect our emotional and physical state, he told us of the Native Americans who would strap certain plants to their arms in order to boost the gift that plant offered them. Tom related the wearing of the plant to a person wearing a patch, like a nicotine patch or a hormone patch.

Then Tom, in his usual way, sent us out to test the concept ourselves. At Trackerschool, especially after the Standard class, it was all about experimenting and experiencing.

Tom said that first, before trying anything with the plants, you had to get to your own personal baseline. Knowing how you are feeling by going through the focusing exercise gives you the starting point for what follows with the plants.

Once you have the baseline for yourself, you can take a leaf of a plant, set it on the back of your hand and ask, “How does this make me feel?”

Then you surrender to nothingness and see what comes back to you. Pay attention to your dreams, visions, signs, symbols, emotions, and feelings; which is how the unseen world communicates with us. In other words, pay attention to anything that comes to you whether it is in your thoughts or in the activity of the plants and animals around you.

We wrote what we noticed in our notebooks and then with the plant on our hand we asked again, “Aside from that, how does this make me feel?” Again, surrender to nothingness and see what comes back. Write down what you noticed.

This is done at least four times for our exercise with each plant. Tom had us do this with four plants. If I remember correctly, it was wintergreen, pine, oak, and cedar.

Without looking back at my notebooks from almost two decades ago, I can’t claim to remember all the things the plants made me feel, but I do remember some things.

One plant made me feel curious and adventuresome. I think it may have been the wintergreen but I am not sure. One of the physical signs that came with that feeling was seeing a little group of four scout ants moving through the terrain as a team, scouting out the area, almost exactly as Tom described how a scout team would work.

Another plant, I think it was the oak, made me feel solid and sturdy, strong and healthy.

Another plant, I am not sure which one, but if I had to guess, I would guess it was the cedar, made me feel expanded and connected to everything around me.

This exercise is something anyone can try and find out how different plants affect you.

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Another level of this exercise was when Tom had our class go out and gather some leaves of plants from different areas in the Pine Barrens where we were having our class. If memory serves I think we gathered pine needles and wintergreen leaves.

One place we gathered was the swim area, a benign place, not particularly positive or negative. One of the volunteers of the class had containers, one for each of the plants we gathered. All the students added to the two containers based on the particular plant collected.

Next we went to the place Tom called Hell. It’s called Hell because of all the bad things that happened there. We each gathered a leaf of the two plants and put them into the new containers for each of the plants gathered in that particular place.

Lastly, we all went to Spirit Hill, a place of high positive energy where the medicine men of the tribe used to pray and hold ceremony for the people. Of course, we all put the leaves of the different plants into their own specific containers for that particular area.

Then, When we came back to camp, we all took a break. It was probably lunch time.

After break, Tom gathered us in the Taj again to explain the rest of the exercise. Each of the groups of plants had been made into tea. There was a tea made from the wintergreen from the swim area, a tea from Hell, and a tea from Spirit Hill. There was a tea made from pine needles from the swim area, a tea from Hell, and a tea from Spirit Hill.

So there were 6 different teas.

If there were a different number of plants collected it doesn’t matter, what matters is the way the leaves for the teas were gathered and how the different teas affected us based on where they were gathered.

Tom made a big chart with rows and columns. The afternoon was spent trying each of the different teas and writing down in our notebooks how each of the teas made us feel. The containers for the pine needle and wintergreen teas were numbered randomly so we students did not know which area the tea came from. As we journaled about each of the teas, we only knew the number on the container, not where it was gathered.

In my notebook I wrote down how I felt after trying each of the three pine needle teas, and each of the three wintergreen teas. I marked my finding by numbering my notes based on the numbers assigned to each of the pots of tea.

Once this was accomplished by everyone with all the different teas, we were brought in and hands were raised for each of the teas; whether the class thought that particular pot of tea came from the leaves or needles from Hell, the swim area, or Spirit Hill. The raised hands were counted and added to the rows and columns on the board.

The rows were either pine needle tea or wintergreen tea.

The columns were either the swim area, Hell, or Spirit Hill.

As you can guess, this was to see if there was a consensus within the number of students (which were about 60 of us I think) as to how the teas made us feel; and based on that, where we thought he plants from that tea were gathered.

Then, once the tabulation was finished, the identities of the teas were revealed.

Once the identities of the teas were revealed, we saw how the majority of us students were in agreement as to where each tea came from. Then we discussed how the teas made people feel.

Overwhelmingly, the teas from Hell made people feel less than good; usually emotionally. The teas from the swim area just tasted like tea without much effect on emotions. The teas from Spirit Hill made people feel good, happy, and uplifted.

We learned that not only is the plant going to affect us in certain ways, but the place the plant was growing and is gathered from has a distinct impact on the way the plant will affect us.

Chapter 73 Advanced Focusing and Plant Medicine - from my book Changes

Chapter 72 Advanced Focusing and The Places that Scare You - from my book Changes