Packing Up the Plant Medicine

I’d just gone downstairs to clean out (for good) my naturopathic and herbal paraphernalia from our home healing space, and suddenly I can’t see what I’m doing — tears everywhere.

The recent changes to my service work means the healer identity is no longer what I lead with. And, as much as I’ve tried to avoid it, I’ve been getting the nudge that to make this a clean severance, I must move on the old herbalist and healer things. 

Which seemed fine… until I actually started to do so.

The emotional outpouring in that moment was unexpected, but it shouldn’t have been. The healing practice evolved many times since 2009. Still, it was always one continuous journey: healing.

But this turn of the wheel feels different. 

I publicly said goodbye to the Naturopath identity a few years ago, but I now see it may have only been on the surface. I suppose I was still a healer, so the fact I kept all my tinctures, tea, books, herbal notes, essential oils, crystals, flower essences and jars didn’t seem too much of a stretch. 

To be surrounded by plant medicine has always felt special — magick, even — which might be why I’ve kept them so long — because in all honesty they haven’t been part of my healing sessions for quite some time. I just kept hoping someone would need them, and I’d be there, at the ready, amber bottle in hand! 

I’ve sold a few herbal teas at markets during this time, but really, I made them for December markets, took them home after the market, and over the next 12 months just gave them away to people. Then, next December, I repeated the whole cycle again. 

I have so much bulk tea still sitting here, sealed away from the world. 

Vitality wise, these products have a limited lifespan, so holding onto them purely because they make me feel good isn’t right — they deserve to be shared and utilised for the gorgeous medicines they are. 

Marking this moment, I’m allowing myself a small dash of self-celebration. You know — for the grief.

I was good as a healer. My clients walked out of a session feeling heard, empowered and hopeful. At the peak of the healing practice my return rate was phenomenal. 

I always ran to the beat of my own drum, which, if I may be so bold as to say, meant I was perhaps a little ahead of my time in the ways I so intuitively stepped my way through it. 

I often went against the advice from the industry of how to run my practice, and ventured into the emotional and energetic layers of healing without having a ton of evidence that it was even a thing. In those early days, very few people were doing what I was doing. I just followed the threads that kept presenting with each client, each session, each stage of growth and understanding. 

I had support (and privilege), but especially in those early years I did a lot of it alone. Just me, anxiety, and my intuition. Pretty good for a girl who embarked on a naturopathic degree when she didn’t even know what a naturopath was! 

Best thing I ever did, btw.

So now, 16 years later (24 if you count the study years), to be facing the task of moving on a lot of that history, it's giving me a moment. 

There’s so much product, so many tools, so much knowledge, so many skills cultivated. So many moments of connection and love. Three beautiful healing spaces, each one different to the others, but all holding sacred moments between myself, clients, and the pure, divine, healing, energetic truth of the universe. 

It was quite the time.

My grief processing (and stay-safe mind) is asking, "We built so many layers into that journey — what if you're throwing it all away for something that’s just shiny and new?"

No matter. If it turns out this move was just a bit of mind fuckery, and I’ve made a terrible mistake, I can build it all back up again. Fresh. And the people, students, or newbie Naturopaths that were given my dispensary items will have deepened their knowledge and relationship to the plants, so the net effect will have been a positive one. 

But, the inner guidance rarely steers me wrong, so deep inside, I know this is an authentic severance.

Writing this out has helped. 

I’ll save it here, take a deep breath, decide where to begin this packing up process, and reach out to a few student/recently graduated Naturopaths to ask if they would like bits of my soul... I mean dispensary… and see where this next ride in the mining cart of life spits me out. 

AB. x 

P.S. I told myself I wasn’t going to express this new direction, or rather, niching of services, with my usual ‘dramatic ending vibe’… but alas, ya can’t change the core of a person! And for some reason you sickos seem to love when I share the messy undone parts, so it gets a public share. Enjoy your hit, you melancholic demons.

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