Why you're so tired right now.
I don’t know why I’m so tired.
I’m not DOING anything.
I feel so lazy right now.
Our inner (and outer) voices are constantly making judgements about ourselves based on our energy levels and output.
The last 8 weeks or so, of getting sick with COVID, and recovering from COVID, were such a beautiful gift, because I got to explore the topic of exhaustion and energy levels deeply.
In my Wonderkin group, this week, I posted a poll, because I wanted to hear from YOU, to know how I can best serve you. As you know, I love to write, and feel like it’s a good use of my time and energy, so this newsletter is sticking around. One of the things I asked was whether you’d like this newsletter to stay in its current format, or would like one topic explored over the course of a few weeks, instead of one biiiig long information-dump. There were many votes for the broken-up method, so I’m going to attempt that.
(Aside: please go and vote on my poll. The other question on it is about whether I should start a podcast :D).
But, back to tiredness.
There are many reasons why you could be feeling more tired than usual lately, but here are a few of the main ones:
1. The collective emotional processing happening weighs on all of us. Just because we don’t usually pay attention to it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. We are intricately connected to each other, and we just don’t notice it most of the time. When we start to slow down,
2. When we start to rest, our bodies are like ‘ooh yeh finally I’m going to catch up’
3. What we think of as ‘tired’ might actually be a state of not being on the go constantly. We get used to having our energy levels in putting-out-fires mode feel like that’s the ‘norm’ when in actuality, a slower, more sedate, and more restful pace is biologically more normal for us. So what’s happening for many people is that this slower, more sedate pace feels weird, but if you stick it out you’ll find it is actually normal.
I think it’s one thing to be told ‘yeah there’s a lot going on and of course you’re going to be tired’ and it’s another to understand the pattern underlying this imbalance, to make the connection in your brain, so that you realise in all your cells: ‘oh, there is truly nothing wrong with me’.
It took me a long time to realise that I wasn't doing it wrong, not as a thought that I paid lip service to and told all my clients, but as something that I knew and felt and lived. The more we understand the depths of a pattern, the easier it is to believe it for ourselves. So, in this first email of who-knows-how-many on the topic of tiredness, this is the first aspect of it that we're going to explore: how it's not YOU, it's the society you live in. You are not broken, or bad, or doing it wrong. And you can't push yourself out of this.
Sound exciting? Thought so! Read on!
Rebecca
Contents:
1. The laziness speech
2. Why you might be feeling extra lazy right now.
3. A small but mighty exercise that helps
4. Plants that can help
1. The laziness speech
In Western society, we tend to value the results: the physical structures that emerge from processes, not the processes themselves. Results are good. Processes, on the other hand, are these annoying things that we have to go through to get to what we want: the end goal! The result! If we can eliminate aspects of processes to achieve faster results then we do:
-We pull constituents our of plants, and manufacture those (the rest of it must be useless!).
-We ignore fallow periods for the land, and try to make soil produce constantly, by feeding it the basic nutrients that get results (who needs magnesium anyway!).
-Within ourselves, the personality traits that get stuff done are lauded and appreciated, while our other qualities become things that we say ‘but’ around:
‘But I’m really creative’. ‘
But I’m a good cook’.
‘But I’m nurturing and kind and empathic’.
‘But I’m such a good friend’.
Aspects of ourselves that count towards progress in some way or another are our ‘best’ characteristics, and the other characteristics we have are back-up traits that only count when we aren’t trying to prove our worth.
The best way to explain this is through temperaments.
See that Choleric/ fire, in the top right corner (which is where it should be on a proper temperaments chart)?
Well, fire is the quality in all of us that dictates time. Chronos time: structured time, with equal increments. Chronos time is the fiery sun moving through the sky, and dictating the course of the day from far away, up in the sky, pointing its finger at all of us like the shadow cast by a sundial,
Fire, or choler, is also the quality that is going to step up to take charge first. Not because it has the best ideas, but because it lives to act. So if there is a problem, where the air/ sanguine might say something like ‘well I’ve never experienced THIS problem before’ and laugh, and the phlegmatic/ water might say ‘let’s all sit down and feel this out together to come up with a consensus on what to do’ and the melancholic/ earth might need to withdraw to have a good think, and see all of the different iterations of how this could go in the future before making a decision, the choleric/ fire steps in and says ‘I have a plan and here’s what we need to do’.
Is it the best plan? Probably not.
Does a choleric need to feel as if they are doing something, and would they rather be working towards ANYTHING than sitting still, thinking, or reaching consensus? Yes. A thousand times, yes.
So, over the years, cholerics have stepped in to take charge. Not because they’re the best at being in charge, but because they’re the first to do so, and are often the loudest. Are cholerics bad? Goodness, no. We need them, and the fire of their passion and drive to act is something that can inspire all of us. BUT, nobody ever stepped in to say ‘hey, you need to hold your horses while the rest of the temperaments all catch up. We need to move forwards as a team. We go together, or not at all.’
Here’s the thing about fire/ choler as a trait: it’s the least self-reflective of all the temperaments. Where water can be TOO self-reflective, fire simply moves forwards. Fire doesn’t naturally generate empathy, or question itself, or its perspectives. Which is why debates are choleric, and winning arguments is choleric. This is important: unless it is explained to them in a way that they can understand, fiery cholerics do not even *see* other temperament types. There are no personality traits that are not-choleric to a choleric, and there is no fathomable way of existing in the world that isn’t goal-oriented. This is because, by now, society itself is choleric. The choleric view of the world (progress is best) has been the Western worldview for so many years that it is just the way things are. We swim in the sea of fire/choler, and people who have a lot of choler are perfectly at home here.
The rest of us aren’t.
Because this sea is not a sea that is created by (or that fits) all of us.
I’d like to explain in greater detail that cholerics are not the ‘bad guys’ here. It’s not that they are doing the upholding, and the rest of us are completely blameless. We, too, uphold this system. We all contain varying amounts of fiery choler within us, and we all want to be more choleric, and compare ourselves to our ideal-best-choleric-self who one time five years ago got an entire to-do list done in one day before working out and then cooking dinner. Its not that fire/ choler is bad. It’s that we ALL value it more than we value the other aspects of ourselves. Because we value it more, we tend to hand over the respect/ power to anyone who steps in (cholerically) with answers. Even this isn’t our faults, or necessarily a BAD thing, it’s just what happens when, for generations, our non-fiery traits aren’t developed, encouraged or praised much. We start being ashamed of our non-fiery traits, or wishing they were different, or pretending that we’re more fiery.
Over the course of the years, choleric/ fiery people took charge more, and over the years, the more fiery people made the rules about things, and made our stories, and our movies, and employed people, and praised the rest of us for ‘good behaviour’. Other personality traits stopped being seen as authoritative (picture, for example, a watery person in a presidential debate and how everyone and the media would say that they just don’t seem to have leadership skills). It’s not that other temperaments can’t lead, it’s just that we haven’t had a model for any other kind of leadership for centuries. For that matter, it’s assumed that those of us who aren’t choleric are in need of leadership to begin with. To become more choleric.
To make it worse, we do it to ourselves, too: we praise ourselves for our ‘good behaviour’ when we’re productive and efficient.
We compare our own life stories on fiery choleric heroes journeys: maybe something is only worth it if we have to fight, struggle, or work really hard to earn it. Love. Safety. Security. Worthiness.
It is a massive, massive pattern that has been fed into for generations. If you want, you can call it ‘the man’ or ‘the patriarchy’ or ‘the machine’ or ‘capitalism’, but to be honest, I prefer to use a term like ‘fire imbalance’. This title feels less finger-pointy, and less hopeless to me, because it’s something we all carry within us, and it’s something that we all uphold, value, and feed into. We all sustain this model with our thoughts and our actions:
Every time we beat ourselves up for not being enough, we support it.
Every time we look to someone else for the answers because we’re uncomfortable with uncertainty, we support it.
Every time we don’t trust our own bodies and look to someone else to tell us about ourselves, we support it.
Every time we push through our tiredness to try and get more done, we support it.
When we value ourselves based on what we can do, instead of who we are, we feed into it.
When we look to others to determine our self worth, we hand over our own sovereignty, and support it.
Sound intense? Harsh? Scarily overwhelming?
It is. It’s so much. And its everywhere.
But here’s the good news: it doesn’t need to be!
Finding our way out of this fiery soup is interesting because it means un-learning so much of what we’ve learned. We want to approach it with the hero story: here’s our foe! We must summon our will, come together as a small but mighty army! Defeat the foe!
Fighting, uh… fire, with fire. With the same value system that upholds the imbalance in the first place.
(I think we’ve been trying that for a long time.)
Which brings me to laziness.
We have been taught that the only ‘valid’ actions are those that produce results and progress in the physical world. Hard work. Labour. Getting shit done.
But go back to that temperament chart, and let’s have a look at what ‘doing’ looks like in each of these quadrants:
“Doing” for air, is existing in a state of fun, revelry, excitement. Talking to people, adapting, changing. This takes energy.
“Doing” for a phlegmatic is connecting with other people in a state of empathy. Processing, emotionally. Processing, processing, processing. This takes energy.
“Doing” for a melancholic is mentally processing. Thinking of all the different things that could happen. Existing. BE-ing. This takes energy.
When you say “I’m so lazy”, as a blanket-judgement cast on yourself for not doing enough, I have two things to say:
1. What are you doing that isn’t considered a ‘doing’ by this fiery/choleric society (which is actually at this point just a voice in your head, or a mental thought pattern, not a real person or group of people standing over you telling you what to do).
Dealing with emotional situations counts. Trying to focus on the immediate present and just keep going counts. Processing the emotions of the collective that we’re tapped into without even realising it counts. Meditating counts. On the surface it might look like not much but what is the REST of you doing: is your energy exploring the ethers? Do you dream a lot? Do you connect to the spirit world? Do you think a lot? Do you feel so much? Do you spend your days chatting to friends? All of these, while not great money-earning activities, still take a lot of energy. They are valid ways to expend your energy. It counts. So you aren’t actually lazy, you’re just doing things that aren’t seen as valuable by an imbalanced society.
2. What the hell is wrong with laziness anyway?
Seriously. What is wrong with laziness? I know that many of us were raised with the ‘you don’t want to be lazy, do you?’ hanging over us, and the ‘stop being so lazy whenever we didn’t want to do something’. Our parents and teachers feared us being lazy because they wanted us to be valuable in society. Their parents probably did the same to them. This is a thought pattern that we were handed early in life, and never really got to decide whether we agreed with it or not. So let’s take a second and look at LAZY.
Laziness, by definition, is ‘being able to do something but choosing not to’.
Choosing. Not. To.
In a world where the fear of being lazy drives us to push ourselves so far past our own limits, we have stopped trusting our bodies, that tell us when they’re done by not wanting to do things.
This fear of laziness is one of the things that drives us to betray our own bodies, our own wants, and our own energy levels.
I urge you to reframe lazy for yourself.
Please be more lazy.
Reframe it as this beautiful thing that indicates a connection to your own willpower, your own body’s desires.
Reframe lazy as lounging in the sun with a book and a pile of dishes that haven’t been done yet, sensually, beautifully, with choice because you have priorities.
Reframe it as nourishing your spirit is equally important to ‘getting stuff done’.
Reframe lazy as skipping a workout that’s what your body wants and your body’s wants are important to you.
Reframe lazy as not knowing what you want to do but not having to do anything because blank space is beautiful.
Reframe it as a not-doing that’s a given: a natural expression of your body’s sensual, playful nature that doesn’t need to be earned or fit in around the ‘important’ stuff.
Whatever the image we have for laziness is outdated and wrong. It’s an image that none of us chose for ourselves, but was handed to us by an invisible foreman who had his eye on the clock and wanted to own our time because it got more work out of us. We don't need to take it on for ourselves.
Our time is ours. Our time is sacred. And it doesn’t need to be spent trying to prove our worthiness or earn a few moments of joy or pleasure. We are magnificent beings inhabiting these bodies that are gloriously tuned towards what is best for us. Listen. Allow it. Receive it. Explore it. Be grateful for it. And throw your middle finger up in the direction of anyone who would try to guilt or shame you into doing more than you feel like doing.
Your limit is not when you’ve hit the wall with exhaustion or sickness and simply can’t anymore. Your limit is when you don’t want to.
2. Why you might be feeling extra lazy right now
To go back to what I said above, there are many reasons for why you could be feeling tired or lazy lately, but here are the main ones:
1. Your reserves are rebuilding
2. This is actually a natural pace for us
3. We are doing a lot more than we think we are right now.
1. We have been moving at a fiery pace for a very, very long time, which has depleted our reserves. When we start to rest, our bodies are like ‘ooh yeh finally I’m going to catch up’.
This pace might be the most productive pace for all of us, but it also keeps us in a state of elevated stress, which causes our bodies to be releasing stress hormones, which causes us to be on alert, and feel more awake. All of a sudden, life has slowed down dramatically*, and our bodies are no longer rushing around faster than we can keep up with.
Have you ever had the thought that ‘oh I can’t rest, because if I start resting I’ll never want to stop’? Well, that’s what’s happening here. Except, it’s not that you will never stop wanting to rest, it’s that your body needs a while to rebuild its reserves.
Why can’t it rebuild its reserves faster? At a pace that feels acceptable!
Because bodies work at their own pace, and that pace is a lot slower than choleric society moves at.
Letting our bodies rebuild at their own pace goes hand in hand with trusting that our bodies are good and right and know what’s best: it is the trust that gives us the patience to wait, instead of saying ‘ok you’ve had 2 weeks, that’s enough, get back to it now’.
In between patience and trust lies fear: fear that something’s wrong, fear that somehow your body is broken, fear that your energy levels will never be what they were, fear that YOU aren’t enough.
I say this with kindness, and as someone who experiences this daily: these fears only have power if we spend time dwelling on them. They are thoughts, and we don’t need to believe them. If it arises, and starts to feel real, then close your eyes and sink deeper into the wisdom of your body. Open your eyes and look at the world around you. At the light, at some plants, at the natural world, and how everything has a period of growth, and a period of rest. Winter happens, and we can’t rush it. Each plant takes as much time as it needs to gather its resources before starting to grow. We, as a society, have been on an endless growth cycle for years.
How long does an endless growth cycle take to recover from?
Can it be quantified?
Can we say ‘ok fine, THREE weeks and that’s it’.
How long does it take for the body to start trusting that it can have a say in the pacing of our lives?
If your body was a small child, who you loved with everything you had, would you not say:
take however long you need? I will love you regardless.
If this resonates, and you feel as though your body is building reserves, then how can you support that?
-Rebuilding foods and herbs. (Think nourishing foods and broths and tons of vegetables, and nutrient-dense foods, and also foods that make you feel good and supported, like potatoes and ice cream :) ).
-SO much rest. Nap more. Go to bed early. Sleep and doze and lay about and let your body determine the pace for your life.
-Be more lazy.
(Yes, resistance will happen, and fear thoughts will happen, and you’ll ask yourself if this is forever, or if you need to worry. Old emotions might come up, and you might have to face down some old thought patterns that are no longer healthy. You can do it. It’s uncomfortable, but what emerges is a deep and lasting connection with yourself that is SO worth it.)
Is it shocking how much rest you body needs right now? Shocking how much exhaustion is in there? Shocking how you simply CAN’T operate at the pace you did before?
Well, that brings me to the second reason for this tiredness:
2. The pace we moved at before was unnatural for most of us.
For those of us who just want to get back to it, this might be uncomfortable, but this current pace is actually a natural pace for a large number of people.
The alert level we lived at before was unnatural. The stressors that weighed on us that had to do with timelines and deadlines were false gods that we sacrificed our well being for. This state: slightly dreamy? Hard to focus and get shit done? Easier though, to focus on small beautiful things, or spend time with loved ones?
This is the state that is actually the most natural and healthy for us.
It is a state that uses more of our perceptive capacity, in which our nervous systems aren’t quite so jumpy. To put that in a different way: all the other aspects of our personalities that aren’t FIRE qualities, are finally able to come to the table because we’re not moving too fast for them to kick in. We feel more, are able to connect more deeply with other people, are able to sense more in our environments, simply because life has slowed down.
What we think of as ‘tired’ might actually be a state of not being on the go constantly. We get used to having our energy levels in putting-out-fires mode feel like that’s the ‘norm’ when in actuality, a slower, more sedate, and more restful pace is biologically more normal for us. So what’s happening for many people is that this slower, more sedate pace feels weird, but if you stick it out you’ll find it is actually normal.
For those of us who learn to be in Fire-choleric mode as a means of survival, then this state can even feel a little threatening.
It isn’t actually the state that is threatening, but that we’ve become convinced that the only way to survive is through fiery choleric behaviours. I’m not talking about actual survival in the present: having to work a lot, or rally, to keep food on the table, and your family safe, etc, isn’t something you want to switch off when it’s what you need right now. If, however, the pattern is rooted in the past, and we learned these survival behaviours at a young age, and created a belief structure about the world that goes something like ‘everything will be ok if I can just keep all of this together’, then the choleric behaviours become synonymous with survival in our minds. A stripping of the ability to keep moving forwards with those behaviours is going to feel threatening based on an old story.
This is too complex a pattern to break down and discuss in one small newsletter (that I’m trying to keep short!) but suffice it to say that if this is what’s going on, go easy on yourself. Think of your choleric survival patterns like an outdated but highly efficient mental program that has kept you safe for years, and that’s a wonderful thing. That it is being confronted isn’t terrible, it just might take a looot of self-kindness and self-care to feel that you’re truly safe when not operating in survival mode.
3. Processing. Takes. Energy.
When cholerics instigate change, the ripple effects of these changes affect the other areas/ temperaments like the wake from a boat affects the water it moves through. The greater the change, and the faster it happens, the larger the wake, and the more energy is needed to return to a state of equilibrium.
When we slow down, all the different aspects of ourselves that haven't had space to breathe finally come to the table. If you think back to the temperament chart I showed you, and think of how the other aspects of ourselves that aren’t fire express:
Air/ sanguine: fun-loving connection to other people.
Water/ phlegmatic: deep emotional processing of the world around us.
Earth/ melancholic: deep mental understanding of the world around us.
Usually, there’s no time or space for the other aspects of ourselves. Not only that, but we don’t see them as valid uses of our time and energy. All of these qualities inside us are valid, and important, AND, they use a lot of energy.
But its not enough to simply be told ‘all these parts of you are important and necessary’, it’s something that we have to feel within ourselves: to truly know in our bodies that processing the information we take in is as important as moving forwards. To feel that being wholly embodied and moving through the world as a whole human is a better state of being, because it means we aren’t cutting parts of ourselves off to get stuff done. To know that when we need to step back and be left alone and think things through in great detail, that this isn’t us being ‘slow’ or ‘bad’ or ‘antisocial’ but instead inhabiting a deeply thorough, grounded part of ourselves. These below-ground parts of ourselves have been ignored in the name of progress. And now we have an opportunity to embrace them and give them space to exist.
Our previously-ignored parts are all entwined with each other. We feel each other. We experience collective emotional states, and collective processing, and during a time when the whole world has been dramatically disturbed, the amount of emotional upheaval is going to be huge.
The collective emotional processing happening weighs on all of us. We are intricately connected to each other, and we just don’t notice it most of the time. Just because we don’t usually pay attention to it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Processing this takes TIME. Processing this takes energy. Processing it not just for ourselves, but for each other, and with each other, takes vast amounts of energy that we don’t even know we’re expending.
Why are you so tired right now even though you’re doing nothing?
Because you aren’t actually doing nothing.
You just didn't see what you were doing as useful.
*For those of us who aren’t parents or healthcare workers.
3. A small but mighty exercise that helps
You’ll need about 5 minutes, and a space where you can speak out loud without feeling embarrassed.
I like to go outside, and look at the trees, and say it to the universe.
Put your hand on your heart. Take a few deep breaths and sink your awareness into your body: wiggle your toes, breathe into your belly, allow yourself to take the time you need to settle.
Now say the following. Taking a pause in between each one, to allow the words to filter through your body. Say it like you mean it. Say it like you believe it.
"I love everything that I have.
I can have everything that I want.
I have enough.
I love everything that I do.
I can do anything that I want.
I do enough.
I love everything that I am.
I am everything I want to be.
I am enough."
After each line, stop and feel how your body responds to you saying this. Does it feel like ‘yes that’s true’ or ‘nope’. Does resistance spring up? Does it make you want to cry? Does it make you angry? None of this is bad, simply feel your reaction, and move on. If you want to say a certain line a few times, until it starts to feel different in your body you can do that.
What you’ll find is that over time, the way you react to these words feels different.
At first it might feel like ‘nope’.
At first you might WANT it to be true, but not actually believe it.
Keep going. Say it anyway. Say it over and over again, every day, until it starts to feel possible.
Start looking for proof in your life for these things.
They don’t need to be BIG proof, in fact, it’s the small incidences that make more sense to us, and that start to impact our beliefs about ourselves over time. A plant on your windowsill. A beautiful day. Evidence that something you didn’t over-work on is great. Evidence that you’re loved while not being perfect.
PS. If you want to be EXTRA brave, and post a video of yourself saying this to Wonderkin, or to IG and tag me, please do. It’s brave and weird and wild. I LOVE brave and weird and wild.
4. Plants that can help
I like to think of the soft + rebellious plants for this time. Things that help us sink into slowness, and surrender to the moment, without pressure, or force.
Shatavari.
Rose.
Pedicularis.
Plants that won’t make you more productive, but WILL help soften your resistance to what is: your current energy levels being what they are, and the world being what it is.
Asparagus racemosa // Shatavari root
Juicy. This is the word that comes to mind when thinking about shatavari. Some people might have issues with the word juicy (I'm personally more grossed out by the word 'moist'), so I apologise for using it so many times in one short sentence but it perfectly describes shatavari's action in the body. A classic and quintessential 'yin' tonic, shatavari gets the body in touch with the deep, moist (gak!) forest aspects of our own bodies. For those of us who tend to be fiery and driven, who prefer to 'do' than to 'be', who need to be moving forwards constantly, and who are (and this is key) a bit exhausted by this, try shatavari. Most people who have this 'fire' pattern constitutionally are utterly fine like that, but there are many of us for whom that fire is just a layer and what's underneath that layer is a slow loris dying to be given attention, and the space to soak in the world around it. It's called a 'female' herb, something that grates on my nerves almost in the way a pink bic does, because really, are we not past this idea of gender binaries yet? But, there is a set of principles in the universe that tend to be more moist (GAK!), receptive, slow, passive, reflective. In Chinese medicine the word 'yin' is used but here in the west we don't have a word for it and call it 'feminine'. We all contain it, we all have access to it, and we all use it, it's just that in society it's not really seen as a good thing to be any of these things, so we train ourselves to hide it and find our energy elsewhere. If you're the type of person for whom this 'feminine' energy is your primary fuel source, getting in touch with it and learning to operate from that place is going to be of immense importance to you, lest you burn out horribly and start to hate life. Shatavari does that. Slow, moistening, nutritive, nurturing. It increases milk supply (if you are in need of milk), it increases energy flow to the depths of the body, and in doing so helps digestive processes, and reproductive processes, and all of the stuff that our body doesn't have time to focus on when we shunt all our energy to our nervous systems to 'get more stuff done'. One of the side effects of this balancing is that people feel calmer, more grounded, balanced, happier, and more loving.
It makes the body more juicy, as a whole, and if you're the type of person in need of that juiciness, in need of that 'yin' or 'feminine' then it's utterly magic.
Read more: Asia Suler's article
Rose // Rosa spp.
Wild rose softens the areas that we tense to protect ourselves, unraveling emotional tension patterns that get locked in the body. Rose naturally works in places where 'flow' is impeded. The roses I gather grow along the sides of mountain streams, so I love to picture this: their roots tapping into that which flows steadily, this water which is utterly free flowing. The roses (in my mind) somehow imprint this expression because it's what they're exposed to. Or maybe they grow by the water because that's what they are drawn to in the first place. Who knows how these magics work. Regardless, that's what rose brings to the body: a softness, a flow. And with that softness, the world, held at bay by all that tension and all that protection, can finally flow in-- we can interact with the world around us, experience it through our senses.
Of course, one of the things that often happens when we soften our hard bits is that we start to feel the things that made us want to harden ourselves in the first place. It’s not that wild rose makes people cry, or makes them angry, its that if you’ve been protecting yourself from a deep well of grief, or a deep well of anger, then rose, in softening that protection, will bring to the surface what was there all along. So keep in mind that a person has to WANT to experience this-- its not our place to force feed wild roses to everyone who’s a bit thorny...
Wild rose excels at moving stuck anger. Imagine how you feel if you’re angry about something but don’t express it.Anger as an energy is that of boundaries and of forwards movement: you get angry because something violates your boundaries, and then anger has you moving TOWARDS that which violated you. Except even in situations where we are actually safe to express our anger, we live in a society where very few people are actually raised and taught to do so healthily, so we don’t express it. And then it festers, digs deeper, becomes something different, darker, less mutable. Anger that’s held inside and not expressed becomes a hard lump over time. But it’s the same with anything that’s meant to be moving and can’t: it has to go somewhere, and when locked in the body it turns into a festering stagnation.
Similarly, when you have a stress reaction, your body is flooded with adrenaline, and the purpose of that adrenaline is to give you the energy to MOVE (away from the tiger, away from the source of stress; towards the tiger to fight, because you’re a badass). Except, in modern life, the source of stress is not always something we can run away from or fight. Stuck in traffic, we get stressed because we want to be somewhere: we might be late, we might have ice cream melting in the shopping bag. We are flooded with the adrenaline to make us move and then we have to sit still. This happens at work, when you have a deadline and you’re aware of this ticking clock behind you metering out the time that is running out (in fact, just thinking about time running out at all makes me start to feel this tension rise up, which is one of the reasons I cover the clock on my computer!). This movement energy has nowhere to go and so we hold it in our bodies, and it makes us feel like we’re going to explode.
Rose unwinds the stuck-ness that is often rooted in old grief, old trauma. These are things that get locked in our body when they happen, because we don't know how to process them, or are unable to process them: feeling pain is rotten; why wouldn’t we block it off to hold it at bay? Every time these patterns are triggered, however, we live them out, again and again. I've seen rose help with this so many times: to slowly and gently start to ease the tension holding these traumas in place.
With trauma, we grow up not really able to trust the world around us, and not really able to trust ourselves either. This creates a deep underlying sense of fear that comes out in lots of ways (panic attacks, anxiety, depression being the most common). It doesn’t even need to be the kinds of trauma that most people think of as deep trauma. Losing our favourite teddy bear at just the right age for it to damage you can damage you, and our own traumas are our own. But when we do, you create this low-level underlying tension, like we’re constantly bracing for the next blow. This tension makes us alert, but at a cost, because it uses a LOT of energy and we end up feeling unsafe all the time. And rose, gently, patiently, softens it. At its core, rose is a medicine of deep trust, deep vulnerability and deep softening—allowing us to deeply trust ourselves and our bodies, and to trust the world around us. As a result, we can reach out and touch the world around us, but even more importantly, let it in to touch us back.
Pedicularis // Pedicularis spp.
I first read about pedicularis as yin tonic in Thomas Avery Garran's book 'Western Herbs in Chinese Medicine'. In it he talked about one of my local pedicularis species (p. semibarbata) as a yin tonic, which got me thinking about WHY it'd be a yin tonic. You see pedicularis is a muscle relaxant. It works phenomenally well, and affects the mind too, putting you in a really lovely relaxed, chilled-out, happy, jello-like frame of mind but not stupid or hungry or paranoid (I may have a canna-bias). It's not really available commercially anywhere but ask a wildcrafting western herbalist what their favourite chill-out herb is and they'll likely tell you it's pedicularis (or kava). Because it's not available commercially and is, from what I read, impossible to grow, it's not the kind of thing that any of us herbies really want to become super popular out there, but I do feel it's worth writing about here just in case you do find your own local stand and want to try a little.
So anyway, pedularis as yin tonic is something I hadn't thought about before Thomas' book, but it got me thinking because, in a way, it makes sense. In terms of the systemic yin (as opposed to say, straight up body fluids, or the yin aspects of different organs or systems), pedicularis puts you in a really relaxed, easy frame of mind. If you're the type of person who has a nervous system freak-out every time you have to do something, or need to get into HYPERSTRESS MODE (TM) in order to function, then pedicularis can be a guide to a better (read: more sustainable) way of doing things. A half-dropper of the tincture and you're definitely, definitely feeling more chilled out, but at the same time, still have energy. I think it's the perfect herb to teach us how to function in the world in a 'yin' state. That is, to not have to drive ourselves forward at a hundred miles an hour, but still to move forwards, just at a pace where our bodies are able to regenerate their own reserves at the same time.
When it comes to musculoskeletal pain, pedicularis is second to none at relaxing overly tense skeletal muscles, especially those that tense around weakness or injury. Make a strong cup of pedicularis tea, or put a few droppers of tincture in a bath, or infuse it in oil and rub it on, or all of the above. It relaxes, helps to relieve the pain, and relaxes your mental state, without disassociating you or making you feel like you're going sluggish.
Read more: 7song's article