Pam Montgomery - Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness

This story is for you, Cara, daughter of my heart. May its telling be a seed in your heart that sprouts and grows as you tell it to your own daughter, for the world will be shaped by the stories we tell our children.

PLANT SPIRIT HEALING

Pam Montgomery lives the way of life she writes about in Plant Spirit Healing. Her extensive knowledge of plants is conveyed in the context of a wider spiritual path of healing and transformation. It honors and utilizes her direct intuitive experience as well as her rigorous studies as a highly respected herbalist and teacher.

NICKI SCULLY,
AUTHOR OF ALCHEMICAL HEALING ANDPOWER ANIMAL MEDITATIONS

If youve ever found yourself having a conversation with a plant, feeling emotional towards a mountain, or hearing whispers on the wind this book is for you. We are urged to listen very carefully to the primal conversation of plants and join in, widening our community to really include them. Plant Spirit Healing offers practical icebreakers to establish relationships with our green friends, not just those currently used in herbal medicine traditions, but all plants.

JOHN SEED, RAINFOREST ACTIVIST,
FOUNDER OF THE RAINFOREST INFORMATION CENTRE ANDCOAUTHOR OF THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN

Plant Spirit Healing is a book about communicating with the spirits of plants, and enlisting plant spirits to heal. Pam Montgomery presents a portrait of what it is like to live immersed in a living Nature. Plant Spirit Healing is an antidote to the excesses of modern life, stripped of meaning, spirit, and relationship. Words like love, joy, spirit, and life can be abstractions, but here they are real.

MATTHEW WOOD, AHG,
AUTHOR OF THE BOOK OF HERBAL WISDOM

Pams new book, Plant Spirit Healing, gets to the root of a profound way to wholenessfrom modern physics to native traditionthen takes us through a growing process of learning and deepening our trust in connections with the loving power of the green world. She ultimately helps us create a flowering of this wonderful way of healing in our own lives and with our clients. In my mind, it is already a classic.

BROOKE MEDICINE EAGLE,
AUTHOR OF BUFFALO WOMAN COMES SINGING ANDTHE LAST GHOST DANCE

Every soul searching for truth will drink in the words on these pages like a healing potion, whether or not one has any experience using herbs. And for those who love Latin names and chemistry, this door opens a way to the power of plants that goes far beyond the physical.

AMANDA MCQUADE CRAWFORD, MNIMH, RH(AHG),
AUTHOR OF HERBAL REMEDIES FOR WOMEN ANDTHE HERBAL MENOPAUSE BOOK

Pam Montgomery has built a tangible bridge between the spiritual needs of people and the spiritual powers of plants. She shows us how to work with these powerful allies to heal our bodies and nourish our souls. This work presents a whole new arena for plant lovers and herbalists. At this time in our evolution, plant spirits can and will be our partners in a new paradigm of mutual understanding that might just save us all. Pam is a spiritual ambassador for the plant kingdom, urging us to view and sense plants in a profoundly deep way that honors their much overlooked spiritual gifts, and she shows us how to tap into this power for healing of ourselves and the planet.

ROSITA ARVIGO, ND,
AUTHOR OF SASTUN ANDSPIRITUAL BATHING

CONTENTS

Foreword

RECLAIMING THE INVISIBLE

Stephen Harrod Buhner

For the past two decades I have spent much of my time among plant people, vegetalistas, herbalists. At conferences such as Green Nations Gathering (which Pam Montgomery began long ago) or The International Herb Symposium, plant people from every continent on Earth, from many tribes and all traditions, gather. At those conferences and gatherings I experience something I have found no other place. Those who gather there do so because once upon a time a plant saved their life. And once that happens, nothing is ever the same again. Something has entered inside them, something invisible, something that changes their lives and how they, in their lives, perceive and relate to the natural world around them. They have connected the most primal survival part of themselves to the wildness of the world. They have eaten the Wild Redeemer. And in so doing they touch upon a different kind of herbalism than that of medical reductionism. In this book Pam Montgomery explores that different kind of herbalism and the invisible thing that enters inside the people who turn to plants for their healing.

A human body just dead is much like one still alive, yet something invisible has left it. In writing, as in life, Robert Bly observes, it is the invisibles that make all the difference. The importance and power of the invisible, as Robert Bly observes, is not limited to words, it is an essential part of life. Yet there are few fields of human endeavor that understand and embrace it. The conflict between reductionist methodologiesthe Richard Dawkins view of reality and the invisible world is pervasive. Herbalism has not been exempt.

For the past two decades many herbalists have, with all good intent, been trying to prove that their field is real sciencethat it should be taken seriously. In so doing they have, like so many in so many other fields, abandoned the invisible to the mechanical and allowed their field to be shaped by a worldview that is commonly understood, by a great many people, to be fatally flawed. Vaclav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic, has commented succinctly on this fatal flaw:

The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something.... Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.... The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure and biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique self.

The thing that escapes us, that cannot be seen by modern science, does so because it cannot be found in any of the parts that are being studied. It is invisible. And in the West we have a very difficult time with invisibles. So much so that most of us refuse to even talk about it, as if it were something shameful that must be put away, hidden from casual view. This is more than regrettable; it possesses outcomes that degrade not only the richness of our interior lives but the environments in which we live.

Just as the most important interactions between people are invisible (for example, the love and caring that flows between people who deeply care for each other), so too are the most important interactions in the living systems of the Earth invisible. That plant medicines are used throughout ecosystems by insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, and other plants is something long overlooked by reductionist researchers. Overlooked as well is that plants can, and will, determine just what particular chemical an ill member of an ecosystem needs, and further, they will then begin making it for them. This touches deeply on the invisibles at work in Nature. It also confronts deeply held assumptions about plants and their intelligence.