bitter lightning flower
electro-magnetic heart medicine & my upcoming field classes
Hatha Yoga at Dance Palace every Friday 10-11am
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Early Bird registration for my Embody Chinese Medicine Field Series closes in a week! Come play outside with us.
Do you want to learn a regenerative, permaculture style of wild-tending our health, as laid out in depth by ancient Daoist Chinese medicine? Are you curious about leaving the shores of the mechanistic industrial model which guides our current mainstream medical paradigm, just for a few hours a week?
There is a subtle but powerful alchemy that happens when we immerse ourselves in nature among our wild elemental medicine; when we come together as we are and heal in community. This spring, for the first time, we’re taking the Embody Chinese Medicine circles into the field. Reply to this mail to save your spot, or reach out here to book a free info call. Class starts on Wednesday March 19th and runs each week through mid-June.
I want to share a story with you about my day out in the hills yesterday, to give you a sense of the magic that can happen in the field.
Abalone Field Notes | Sitting at the feet of our medicine, 03.03.25
I came upon this patch of medicine a week ago on a new trail. It was the most pristine, abundant expanse I’ve ever seen, of one of my totem plants, one of the ones I’ve known and courted for years, who, it seems, is also courting me. Otherwise, why would I be guided to such a place.
For a plant medicine person to come upon such a vast assembly of one of our most precious vegetal deities is utter magic, a day to be remembered forever. Like swimming in the sea and suddenly finding yourself surrounded on all sides by dolphins. I cried out when I saw them… it was dusk, all their fuchsia glowed indigo in the shadows. They were just beginning to flower. I did not touch them, so holy was this moment.
Seven days later, with offerings of tobacco and time, I returned to sit, and harvest, if invited. After a week of spring sun the plants were drawn fuller up out of the earth. Paler, less indigo foliage, the blood having blossomed up into the fire of their flowers. They are solar beings, always blooming around March 1st, no matter what kind of winter we’ve had. Even without tasting the bitter flavor - the flavor of the heart in Chinese medicine - it is already clear that this plant is heart medicine. And by this I mean, the Chinese, electromagnetic, shen-housing heart. The empress fire of our bodies that every other thing revolves around. Or nervous system medicine, in western medical parlance - but that doesn’t quite capture it.
There is a reason they drew me to this resonant place and revealed themselves, among so much open meadowed, tender and desolate wind-whipped splendor. I need this medicine, or someone I know needs this medicine, or my community or the world needs this medicine, and I’m their daughter, or sherpa. It has always been this way with this plant. The first patch I ever found was just a few plants, and just as much wonder, 12 years ago. I went home and asked the plants how many I could take: seven. The next year, the patch was larger… and each year since, for 10 years, until now I take all that I need, saying thank you and singing. Wise folks say plants feel us singing, listening, leaving a hair tangled in their petals or some saliva on the earth above their foots. They want to be in loving long-term relationships with us.
I have always felt mixed about latin names, my indigenous soul detesting their arrogant colonial objectification, and my detail-oriented scientific mind adoring their precision. I have my own pet name for these, my little electric-pink muppets (anyone else raised on Jim Henson?)
When I settled in to be with them today, it didn’t feel right to call them muppets *or* to use the scientific name. I have always described them as looking as if they’ve been electrically shocked. Today, I called them lightning flowers as I sat in their midst, opening up to their teachings. When I talk about listening - whether it is to our bodies, or to a plant, or a stone, or to ancestors - I don’t mean there will be words or literal communication of data. It’s the energetic psychic realm that opens up. It may be words, but more than that it is a knowing that arises, an insight, image or a feeling that arrives in the body or our mind’s eye. As a teacher of mine told me once, if you never get a “no” when you request to harvest - you’re not really listening.
I am sure of this without the slightest doubt: our living medicines tell us directly what they are here to help with. I often hear people say, expressing their wonder at plant medicine, “It is amazing that the ancient people figured out what plants were good for what - what a lot of work to test out all the plants! They must have gotten poisoned a lot.” This is Western intellectual silliness, a mark of our modern atrophied faculty of intuition. There’s no ‘trial and error’ needed. We just need to re-learn to speak the language of them, and the language of ourselves. Something that our ancient, earth-connected, pre-industrial ancestors practiced naturally. Although tasting, observing, self-experimentation, getting a bit uncomfortable at times, is also part of the fun of getting to know a medicine, and developing that sixth sense within ourselves.
I am a missionary of this ancient way of knowing our own medicine-selves. I created my Embodied Medicine Circles for exactly this reason. I am passionate about spreading the word, that there is nothing separating us from our medicine, nothing stopping us from knowing of what our bodies need, except our attention, our embodiment, and an earth-based framework to understand what we feel.
When I sat at the edge of the sea of lightning flowers I remembered an image I saw once, of patterns that blossomed upon people’s skin when they got struck by lightning.*1 They looked like the leaves of the Pedicularis densiflora, my lightning plant. And I remembered how the tincture of this flower was literally the only thing who could discharge the electrical short-circuitry that was restless leg syndrome during my pregnancy. I remembered the friend who healed the numbness and twitching in the side of his face from this plant. It helps with nerve pain, especially the spine, and settles the psychoemotional self (shen again).
As I sat with them, I felt like I always feel with pedicularis. Like I am sitting with a master teacher… a bit excited, maybe a tinge of nervous jitters… hyper-attentive, expansive, humbled, grounded. Almost psychedelic level of presence, but relaxed and blissy. A lovely combination. Electric. It grows wild with only two plants, poison oak and manzanita- they are not easy to cultivate, which makes the flowers even more ephemeral. This community was woven among poison oak, which called for fine attention as I stepped among them with my bare feet.
My acupuncturist told me just this morning that I need something to ground my heart into the earth. And here it is. Ground. An electrical concept. We are electrical beings, radiating a measurable field from our hearts. Chinese medicine lays out an anatomical map of our heart fire anchored by the root of the kidneys, who hold our deep stores of nourishment underground. This is not a metaphor - it is a thorough, ancient, complex, high-integrity and medically useful alternative anatomical framework. If we are a plant, our heart fire is the flower… subtle and sublime, expressing the ultimate midsummer yang of a plant before it starts to sink down into its autumn fruit, towards eventual winter dormancy or decay.
I share pedicularis with a lot of people, but coming upon a patch this vast, feeling so powerfully magnetized to this little meadow, was a hot-pink muppet anvil dropped onto my head. I’m starting to get the message. My heart pulse is often a fine thread, its rhythm an untethered sail in a tempest. I am meant to take this medicine myself. I can think of a few other people as well… my partner, with the chronic unsettled buzzing in his body… would lightning flower help him, too?
Traditionally on this land, I have read in books, that native Californians dry the flowers for tea, or smoke them, to relax. I munched on one of my muppets as I walked the trail back, and it was bitter, but surprisingly delicious, with a sweet center, like clover. (the bees love the lightning flowers, bees also have an affinity for the heart… ). According to Chinese medicine, bitter is the flavor of the heart. Bitter drains, tightens, dries, and firms, and eliminates excess fire from the heart.
I look at a lot of tongues, and almost always, the tip is a bit red… almost always, there is fire in the heart area. Is this our lack of grounding, collectively? The way we are all up in our heads, our heart fire flying upwards out of control, without our watery yin to balance it out? without enough cultivation of intuition, or rest, to properly nourish, anchor and settle that fire down? Burning, grinding our gears, holding up the world on our individual shoulders, our hearts throwing sparks in longing for the village we know in our bones that we are meant to have?
This is the type of Chinese medicine we will embody in our Spring Embody Chinese Medicine series, starting in a few weeks. For the first time since I launched the class 2 years ago, we’ll have most of our sessions out on the land. We’ll taste and sit with medicines that grow wild where we live, and explore them, and the qi of the landscape, through the lens of Chinese medicine and what the earth tells us about ourselves.
It is spring, there is medicine coming up everywhere. We might circle back to revisit a few trails to see how things have unfurled and blossomed.
If you can feel in your bones that the key to medicine is in nature, and knowing the wild terrain within ourselves, I would love to have you along. We have the sweetest time, and it will be even better when we’re moving across the land.
I have four spaces left, and the perfect people always find their way into the class, by magic. If you are feeling the call, reach out or book a free call to see if you’re meant to be with us in the wild this spring.
My work with Alison has been a life changing experience. The support and wisdom to do the things I’ve often known inside I needed to do has been phenomenal. Both the individual sessions and the community of the groups have created and kept me on my path. I’ve changed so much, addressed and overcome life-long problems around diet, allergies, lifestyles and energy management, and continue to work in problem areas towards a healthier life.
Alison had a gentle way of both explaining, exploring and supporting the way each individual needs to go for greater health, ease and happiness.
- K.W.
Enjoy these sweet early days of spring!
love,
Alison
image of lightning struck scars taken from https://twistedsifter.com/2012/03/lichtenberg-figures-lightning-strike-scars/