Re: Share A Post About A Herb Or Medicinal Plant - here's my offering via The Herbal Hive Community, around nettles!
Nettles are such a staple, useful medicinal plant in my life, and I took them for granted for many years, despite their having nourished me and given me much enjoyment in cooking over the years.
Since the profound downturn of economy and socialising started a couple of years ago - whilst I was being even-more-expressive-than-usual about Natural Well-Being and as a direct consequence was thrown off mainstream entirely and lost most of my clients - I came back to nettles as my most important plant: as a food, a steaming herb, a tea and a metaphorical magical plant.
Nettles took such a central role mainly because they're free, organic, and grow abundantly in the abandoned gardens below my beautiful Italian home... I'd go down with a huge sack and some rubber gloves, then hang great bushels of the stuff over my wee stove, or spread them out on the warm balcony to dry in the sun.
I started gathering them regularly, and in abundance, because I knew they could bolster my diet with iron and others important strengthening minerals. I used them for many years as the base of a pelvic steaming 'soup', which I'd slow-boil a great pot of first, then ladle a dose of into a smaller pan, for each session.
Steaming is a brilliant way to get medicines and nutriment directly to where it is needed, as the steam and warmth absorb the good stuffs directly into our capilliaries via genitals and vaginal wall; a weak bleeding cycle for example, was improved for myself by steaming at end of my bleeding days, daily until the middle of my cycle (when ovulation occurs).
Among the myriad extremely powerful health benefits of steaming, when we're unwell, the digestive system can be less functional, and so getting the goodies into our body without having to go through a weak digestive system, and directly to where we need them, is brilliantly efficient and helpful.
So anyways; my studies in herbalism (a lifetime) and steaming specifically (starting around 5 years ago), and alongside having no money effectively to buy any herbs with! - led me to begin approaching the plants that I was depending on...more reverently. To really listen to them, feel the quality of them, KNOW them intimately - in order to be in-tune with them, with my environment, and with the Great Gift of it all (which I was now welcoming in, rather than exchanging coin for a watered-down version of).
I'd recognised in my studies that there was no substitute for a woman knowing not just her own body-mind-spirit, cycles, pleasures, needs, but knowing her plants - personally.
I began to look at the nature of the nettle, and see e.g. how it was a great plant symbolically, in relation to boundaries; that it had more and more meaning infact, the more I listened to and spoke to it/ them/ the spirit of the plant. I had had serious issues with boundaries all my life! - and was beginning to get a handle on how to deal with trespassing and intrusiveness...
The nettle seemed to guide me on my path in strengthening my boundaries, in a way that couldn't have been transmitted to me by a book or another person - i.e. via the brain and 'logical' consciousness. I learned through direct contact and a kind of psychic-energetic 'transmission'.
Coupled with the veeeerrrryyyy relaxing regular practise of sitting on my steaming pot, I started really tuning into all the plants - before I picked them, after when I was cooking them, when I felt off and needed something to help me.... I spanned my attention and my loving reverence outwards, and began to develop a more intimate relationship with all the things and beings growing around me.
The nettles led me to that; to a deeper and more complex interdependence with Life near me. They're a plant of such generosity and yet such precise character of limitation; they'll let us know when we're not welcome! Like many plants that seem initially to be 'unfriendly' though, I found with nettles that they simply want to be heard, felt, seen and known. They love to be useful and to heal and strengthen us. Their generosity feeds my heart.
Blessings on us All As One,
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