Redefine 'perfect'
Contents:
1. Redefine perfect
2. Herbs that help us be more present
3. Aromatics
4. Bitters
5. Heart-openers
6. Shop updates
1. Redefine perfect.
“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
-Marshall Mcluhan.
Where the fire burned last year, there was nothing but moonscape, rocks standing out like pock-marks against the blackened earth. Where the burn went through, nothing stood afterwards. No trees. No plants. Where there was once old oak grove, ash lay on the ground.
We see ourselves, and the world around us on a linear scale, as a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Before or after trauma. Before or after illness. Before or after physical changes. And because our human lives are, in the grand scheme of things, very short, it’s really hard to get out of our own [little] time scale mentality.
‘Perfect’ is a way to stop time: to press the pause button and say ‘yes everything is as it should be’. If we could just hit pause when we reach the ‘perfect’ weight. Or when we get the ‘perfect’ haircut. Or when we finish a project and its ‘perfect’. Why can’t we remain in this place where the house stays clean! Where whatever it is we’ve been working towards is finished?!
We see damage to nature (and ourselves) as something that mars its perfection- a blip, a bump, something to get over and ‘bounce back’ from. This is in part because we have a very linear view of life: not only does time exist on a linear scale to most of us, but there are states that we want (‘good’ things) and states that we don’t want (BAD THINGS), and in a way our lives are laid out trying to avoid the ‘not-good’ and strive for the good. The good things, the achievements, the raises, the perfect weight, the new house, the new car, the retirement party— these are what we are aiming for. As if somehow when we get there life will be different…
But look back over the earth’s history. Trees are born and die. Species creep into new areas, species leave new areas. Species come into existence, species die out. Rocks grow into mountains, mountains dissolve into sand. There is never a moment when the world around us isn’t in motion. Changing. Moving ever onwards. Humanity itself is a blip on this scale, and granted, we’ve had more impact on this planet than any species before us, long after we’re gone, the earth will still be moving, growing, changing. We will be a blip, visible only in the rearview mirror.
We often think of ‘moving’ as being a way to get us from one point to another, and those goals, like bookends, are the POINT of the whole thing: the motion is just the medium to get us there. But actually, the motion is the point. The bookends of A and B don’t exist. There is no ‘before’ and no ‘after’ but an endless present that stretches in every direction.
To look for perfection in the future, To wish that things were as they were in the past, is to ignore reality.
I picture the yin-yang symbol, and right there, in the middle of the perfect blackness, is a splodge of white. And right there, in middle of the pristine whiteness, a thumb-print of black. That is real perfection: a canvas in progress, a fingerprint on a clean surface. There is no such thing as a pause, no such thing as perfect stillness. That we strive for it anyway is an exercise in futility.
I think we all need to redefine ‘perfect’.
Perfect can be what IS. Perfect can be about settling into the heaviness, beauty and poignance of the present moment, wherever that is. In process, because we're always in process. Perfect can be the ability to accept: to explore the ever-deepening layers of existence, and whatever new landscape we are presented with today. What does my body feel like today? How is my emotional state today? What is the inner landscape expressing? Can I sit with this?
Perfect can be, instead of something out in front of us, a sinking into the richness of what the moment is offering.
**
I went for a walk in the burn area yesterday. The land is covered in lupines. The entire area is green, yellow, purple, white. The blackened elders have green leaves sprouting. After a few months of deep healing, there is SO much beauty in this charred landscape, if you can look at it for what it is, not what it was. The charred, scarred, ‘ugliness’ was so necessary for the land to get to this point, where its covered in flowers. It will never be what it was (‘why can’t it just bounce back?!’), but what it *is* is gorgeous. What if we’d stepped in to try and change the burn, to try and push it to heal faster? What do we do to ourselves when we do the same? Are we missing out on our own gorgeous blooms, because we’re looking in the rear-view mirror, trying to find our way back to something that will never be?
If we can accept that landscapes evolve, change, and need time, can we do the same for ourselves?
Accept our inner and outer landscape as it is, as a part of an evolutionary process, as a part of a journey that isn’t ‘to’ or ‘from’ anything, but here, right here, right now.
And really, isn't that what we all want? To be accepted as we are, not what we strive to be? To have people say 'I love you and think you're perfect when your body is different to how it was a year ago' or 'I love you and you're perfect even when you feel like your life is falling apart' or 'you do not have to have your shit together in order to receive my admiration' or even 'your scars are perfect because they are a part of your story’?
**
What if we drop all that extra effort? Drop it like dropping suitcases that aren’t even yours, that you’ve been carrying around for years. Drop them, right where you are, and feel your body. And breathe. Feel your feet. Feel your legs. Feel the air touch your skin. Feel the present moment, and the flow of life around you.
Here is rich. Here is full of beauty. Here is where your story is. Here: scarred, sad, fearful, worthy, lovable, just as you are. Perfectly imperfect, in every way. Just as you should be.
2. Herbs that help us be more present:
Aromatics
Aromatics stimulate the nervous system, awaken it, enliven it, make you feel more alert. But more alert within your body. So, aromatics help us to be more present by awakening our senses. There's a technique you use for anxiety, or panic attacks, where you start saying aloud the things you can see. Touch. Smell. Hear. Where you ground into your body by focusing on your sensory input. In a way, aromatics do this: you cannot help but be more present when your senses are being nudged upon.
Bitters
Bitters drag our awareness into our bodies, into our bellies, our guts, and return our attention to our gut instincts. There's the sensory aspect of bitters, like with aromatics, where you are dragged into your body awareness through your senses (GAK! BITTER!) but there's also the physical action of it: stress states put more energy into our nervous systems and brains, because we are panicking and looking for solutions to the danger. That energy that's shunted to our nervous systems has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from our digestive processes. You've heard about how we are either in a fight/flight/freeze state or in a rest/digest state? That's what happens here. Stress (and TIME is a stressor) diverts energy away from digestion. We can divert energy BACK to digestion, and in the process, it helps convert our stress state to calm, present and aware.
Heart-openers
The heart is an organ of perception (really: its estimated that 60-65% of heart cells are neural cells, and the oscillating electromagnetic waves of the heart are much, much more powerful than brain waves), and when we are focused on things like time, words, meaning, plans for the future, we are more present in our head-brain than our heart-brain. Drawing ourselves into our heart-brains, our perception of time changes, and so does our perception of the present. When viewing the world from the center of our hearts, without words, without time, it is almost impossible to do anything but accept the beauty and perfection of what is. Not what was. Not what will be. But what is.
Rather than 'forcing' the heart to open (I can't think of anything more invasive the idea of forcing connection with anyone or anything), I prefer to draw attention and awareness into the area of the heart, and allow the heart's perceotion to blossom on its own. Because it does. Beautifully. So while i say 'heart-openers' I think what is more realistic is 'heart-awareness plants'.
Read on below for my favourites of each.
3. Aromatics:
Calamus // Acorus Calamus
Calamus is an aromatic plant that was brought into my awareness by jim mcdonald. It was right before I taught my first class at a conference, and I thought I was going to vomit from the anxiety of it all. He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out brushed off a dusty piece of root, and handed it to me. Calamus. I chewed it and felt much more grounded, much more present-- not spinning of into future scenarios of having eggs thrown at me and being shamed out of town but into my body, where there was lots of fear. Into the present, where there were lots of people. I didn't kick ass at the class (herbs can only do so much :P) but I did feel a lot more grounded in the lead up to it. One of the things I love about Calamus is the connection between heart and voice-- it feels as though calamus connects us with what our hearts have to express into the world, and I have used it repeatedly since then for this very purpose.
Read more: jim's article
Damiana // Turnera diffusa
When we experience something that scares us, our bodies will go into ‘fight or flight’ which is an activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us ready to, well, fight, or run, or deal with the stressor in whatever way we know best. But when the stressor is too overwhelming, far too scary, or, maybe we cannot fight or flee, then our sympathetic response is overridden by an older, more primitive response: we freeze. At the same time as we freeze, we often leave our bodies a bit, hovering somewhere nearby, become outside observers into our own trauma. It’s an amazing mechanism that protects us from psychologically breaking.
It can also keep us from feeling, for years.
And while not all of us experience trauma so deep that we leave our own bodies, many of us do experience feeling like we're somehow a bit frozen, like we cannot feel fully, or like there's a layer of protection between us and the world.
Damiana warms us from the inside out, effectively dismantling, sometimes even shattering that deep freeze. It does this in a beautifully gentle way, reminding us that we were actually always there: we’re always present, always powerful, always empowered… but sometimes we experience powerlessness, and it makes us feel permanently powerless. We cut ourselves off from feeling to save ourselves, but then we believe ourselves still in danger, and stay there. And just as our bodies can be the things we want to escape from, our bodies can be the path back into feeling safe again. Damiana reminds us how beautiful feeling can be, warming us from the inside, melting that deep freeze, bringing us back to the awareness of our sensory selves, and our natural ability to take pleasure in our senses.
Not only that, it teaches us that it is *safe* to feel. Safe to be in our bodies. Safe to experience pleasure. For many of us, it's not that we don't love sensory experiences, but we've often got a low-level stress going on. Damiana relaxes that low-level stress, and in doing so, reminds us of the sheer joy of sensory pleasure. And yes, this can be sexual pleasure, of course, but it can also be the simple sensual pleasures of life: Soft fabric on your skin. A patch of sun on a cold day. Vivid, beautiful colors. Flavor, exploding on your tongue. Being stroked (not like that, you dirty dogs). A beautiful piece of music. Moving your body to music. The smell of the forest. These sensory experiences can bring us so much joy, can wiggle through us and make us feel utterly alive.
I'd be remiss in talking about this without talking about the act of receiving. You see, the way I see damiana is that it relaxes the tension/ stress that we have in the way of receiving the pleasure that the world is already offering us. I mentioned it before, that I think pleasure is the natural state of existence, and I stand by that. I think that we're taught to block it, and that what damiana is doing is reminding us how to be alive by allowing the natural flow of sensual pleasure in our bodies again.
Of course, as a result of this, it's marketed as an 'aphrodisiac' herb, which is a bit funny. Damiana isn't going to magically make you attracted to someone you don't want to sleep with. But, if you're really stressed out to the point where you're no longer able to feel so well, or if you're feeling a bit disconnected from life, or a bit disembodied, damiana will remind you of how good it feels to feel, and to connect with your partner(s).
Because damiana is warming and aromatic, it's also a really good carminative, helping digestion, especially if there's stagnation involved. I think damiana is especially useful where, you guessed it, people are denying themselves the pleasure of delicious food, maybe as a form of self-punishment, and their digestion gets really sluggish as a result.
Read more:
Found in: Sensorium smoke blend, Unfurling + Eros surprise box
St John's wort // Hypericum perforatum
Hypericum is one of those herbs that's known in non-herbal circles as a 'herb for depression'. I remember trying it in the late 1990s because I suffered from severe depression. It made my belly area cramp like crazy, so I stopped taking it, even though I had actually started to feel really good. I didn't think much more about it until years later, when I'd learned a lot more about herbs than 'x treats y', and started thinking about grief, depression and the solar plexus. You see the solar plexus area in our bodies is where our willpower comes from. It's where we interpret information and make decisions and then put the energy out into the world to act on those decisions. A lot of depression that I see comes from a blockage, of sorts, in this area: where there's something getting in the way of a person's being able to act directly in their own life. This makes one feel powerless, and there's little more to make you depressed and hate your life than feeling powerless.
There's another aspect to this, however. Many of us, when facing pain, tend to disassociate. For some its dramatic (ie. diagnosable), for others maybe less so, but the underlying principle is the same: I don't want to feel this so I'm going to leave. Our bellies, our solar plexes, our information processing centers, are the easiest for us to check out of because it's the deep, dark, FEELING place in our bodies, that can't be rationalised away.
St. John's wort directs energy back to the solar plexus. Gently but firmly. It directs energy back to the place where we have gut feelings, and underneath those gut feelings is a place of surrender and trust, where we trust ourselves and our bodies to know, to feel, to guide us. As a result of energy flowing back in a place where it's not been for a while, energy in our belles and trunks start moving more, resulting in less stagnation, and the lessening of that stagnation leads to less teary fits, less frustrated outbursts. But, the real gift is an ability to process feelings directly, and stay with them.
For more staying power, I like to combine with aralia (racemosa or Californica).
Read more: Kiva Rose's article
Found in: Into the deep: Grief support formula
Pinus spp. // Pine
The scent of conifer needles, resin and bark is incredibly uplifting to the spirits, and also incredibly grounding. Think of how the smell of pine is bright (its full of vitamin C) and how that vitamin C brightness that tastes like sunshine feels in the dead of winter. Think of how, on a bad day, a walk through a quiet pine forest can change your perspective entirely. Conifers, due to their age, their size, the fact that they operate on archaeological time as opposed to brief human time, remind us how small it all actually is, how brief, how ephemeral, how sacred.
Found in: Forest + Pine deodorant, Forest soak, Holy basil + Pinon syrup, Tulsi + Pinon bitters
4. Bitters:
Instead of listing some bitter herbs, I'll link a few of my favourite bitters blends:
Mettle & Loam lavender pear bitters (made by Alanna, whos formulations are utterly *brilliant*)
Mettle & Loam Citrus lavender bitters
Mettle & Loam San Ysidro bitters
Desert lavender and white sage bitters (currently steeping; back in 2 weeks)
Orange blossom bitters (currently steeping; back in 2 weeks)
Cacao and burned caramel bitters
Smoked tulsi & Pinon bitters
Silk Road bitters (rose, cardamom, saffron and smoke)
Smoky forest bourbon bitters (white fir, spice, smoke)
5. Heart openers.
Rose // Rosa spp.
I talk about rose a LOT in my newsletters, most likely because it's one of my favourite plants (one of almost everyone's favourites, no?). Not just because it's beautiful and it smells good and gathering it in the summers is a transcendent experience, but because it's such a little [gentle] powerhouse.
Rose, like hawthorn, offers spiritual heart support. Unlike hawthorn, it relaxes and unwinds the tension that we hold in our chests and diaphragms that often prevent us from fully letting go. And in order to grieve, you sorta have to be able to let go. Rose is also sweet medicine. What I mean by that is that it's so soothing and gentle. Have you ever felt so close to tears then thought 'I can't have anyone be nice to me right now because I'll lose it?' it's rose that's nice to you. It's rose that reminds you of self-love and the love of others, and allows that love to blossom in your chest and quite frankly when you're trying to hold it all together, you're not looking at love, you're looking at getting through.
Rose is especially useful where there's fear of the pain, and fear of getting hurt again that causes you to close off even more. Fear of FEELING, really, where you create a hard shell around your heart so that you can carry on as you were. Rose helps to soften those barriers, so that you can feel again.
The thing with both rose and hawthorn is that they don't reduce you to a blubbering wreck all the time. But taking them for support through a grieving process will allow you to live from that place of sadness. This sounds weird, I know-- we're taught that grief has a place and it's behind closed doors-- but the healthiest way to grieve is to let it permeate your being. Let it influence the way you see the world. Not to make the world flat, but to enrich it, deepen the colours, deepen the feelings. There's something infinitely beautiful about what can be uncovered in that darkness.
Read more: The comforts of rose
Found in: Ocotillo + Rose Heart Center Elixir, rose & sandalwood body oil, rose & sandalwood bath soak, wild rose elixir, rose & geranium facial mist, smoky rose anointing oil
Hawthorn // Crataegus spp.
Heart-friend and support for the grief state, hawthorn is like the hug you receive when you've been holding yourself together, feeling alone and unstable, that finally allows you to let yourself fall apart. When you have to go in and delve into the deepest, darkest parts of yourself, hawthorn is a supportive anchor saying 'You've got this; I won't let you fall apart completely'.
How it does this, I have no idea, but I have an analogy that I like. When we fall apart due to grief, it's like most of our entirety gets swept away in a tsunami of it. It swallows us, breaks us into pieces, dashes us against the rocks, and washes us up on the shore, battered and broken. But as we're being pulled to pieces, there's always that constant thrum in the background that's 'you' there. I mean, it's the constant that most of us aren't even aware of because we're so caught up with the surface stuff (I am my job, I am what I wear, I am my reactions, I am my gender, I am my sexuality, I am gay/straight/poly/queer/neurodivergent/cis/trans/alawyer/adoctor/adeskjockey/acashier/ajock/anartist/aniceperson/abadperson/lonely/confident/cool/aplantperson/rich/poor/inarelationship/loved/etcetcetc. Except, if we were to chip away at every single self-identifier we have, we'd still be there, still exist, still be *us*. When our lives fall apart, either in grand explosive fashion or in little pieces, and when WE fall apart as a result, that nugget of 'us' at the center of our being remains constant. And it's that nugget of 'us'ness that hawthorn connects to and strengthens, so that the rest of us can fall to pieces around it. If our entire being was a map and the 'you are here' sign moved around on said map depending on how we feel on any given day, hawthorn points to the land itself so that the lines on the paper can dissolve and rearrange themselves.
Read more: Kate Clearlight's article
Found in: Heart + Happy, Douglas fir, oplopanax, hawthorn mist, Root & Heart