For several years now, I’ve talked to you about the totems for our spiritual growth and healing and I hope that in some small way those explanations have been helpful and will continue to be. Along with making sure that our inner being is healthy we also need to make sure that our physical bodies are strong and well enough to provide the best vessel to house our inner soul. This is something that the First Peoples of North America understood very well. So, for the next several weeks and months I will be introducing different plants that can assist us in keeping our bodies in better shape.

I am not a physician nor a certified herbalist but I can share the information that I have about different plants and herbs that are known to help with stress, colds, wounds and other ailments. I do ask you to use caution whenever you decide to try one of the remedies that I will be describing. It is always best for us to consult our physician before trying many non-prescription products. This is extremely important if you have a heart condition, allergies or are pregnant or are breast feeding an infant. I will let you know if there are known issues with the plants and treatments that I will be sharing with you in each individual post in the coming months and just ask that you use your due diligence in figuring out if it is a good treatment for you to try.

In many cases these treatments and remedies have been backed up, at least in part, by the medical and scientific communities. When we contemplate the centuries that the Native American peoples as a whole knew the different plants that would be “good medicine” not just for the soul but for the body we should stand in awe. Here was a people who were thought to be so primitive and uneducated and yet their knowledge of nature as a whole is remarkable. Obviously this knowledge didn’t occur overnight, it took hundreds of years of trial and error to figure out that a dandelion plant could be so helpful in healing the body for different maladies. With no written books to consult the shamans and medicine people of the different tribal traditions discovered what worked and passed it on to the next generation and even sometimes with other tribes of the own generation.

As the Europeans began making contact with the natives of our continent, they were blown away with how much the people who they looked at as savages understood about medicines and illness. The Indians taught the newcomers much when it came to natural pharmaceuticals that could be used to ease pain, aid in healing and calm the body when under stress and anxiety.

I look forward to sharing this information with you in the coming weeks and hope that if there are plants that you would like to know more about or ones that you have tried that you will share them with us in the comment section.

At least a portion of 2015 will be dedicated to healing our physical bodies while we continue to grow our spiritual bodies.