Wild Rose Medicine

Contents: 
1. On wild roses and emotional stagnation
2. Rose recipes
3. Rose articles
4. Things that have roses in them that you'll love

1. On wild roses and emotional stagnation: 

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.     

2. Rose recipes

A few of my favourite rose recipes: 

Wild rose infused honey: 

Fill a jar with wild roses and cover with honey. Leave somewhere warm for a month, then strain out the roses (you can re-use them in other things-- try soaking in tequila, below) and keep the honey in a jar. Drizzle on everything :). 


Rose infused aloe-vinegar: 

This makes a phenomenal burn treatment, for sunburns and heat burns alike. It gets the heat out really quickly and helps to heal the tissue super fast. I make a big batch of it every year for the inevitable first-bad-sunburn of the summer, and for every cooking mishap that happens along the way. I had some on hand for a particularly nasty cooking burn a few weeks ago (though that one had a little elderflower too) and the skin that looked like it was going to blister was actually totally healed the next morning! 

1 cup aloe vera gel
1 cup cider vinegar
1 cup dried rose petals (the more fragrant the better)

Combine all ingredients in a big jar, shake thoroughly, and place somewhere warm for up to a week. Strain and bottle. 


Wild rose-infused tequila. 

My friend Rosalee made some of this a few years ago and I tasted it while we were at a dance party (these things happen at the Traditions in Western Herbalism conference) and I was blown away. And it's so easy: 

One jar of wild rose petals (or dried if that's all you can find)
A nice-ish tequila (don't spend a fortune, but go slightly higher quality than the kind of stuff some of us drank in college)
About 1/8 of the jar's worth of honey or agave syrup

Put the roses in the jar and cover with the tequila, leaving about 1/8 jar of space. Add the sweetener, close the jar, and shake it well. Leave somewhere for 6 weeks or so, shaking on occasion, then strain and sip. 


Bourbon-rose pickled rose petals

White chocolate rose cake with strawberries

Pickled rose petals

White peach, rose and basil hand pies

Saffron and rose ice cream

3. Rose articles

Rosalee De La Foret: Bathe yourself in roses (with some awesome recipes)
Henriette's herbal page on rose family astringents

And here are a few articles on rose from Kiva Rose, who has probably written more about it than any other herbalist around :). 

Wild rose monograph
Wild rose conserve
Wild rose as first aid medicine