FEP72 Shamanic Plant Teachers and Animal Spirit Medicine with Matthew Wood
Show Notes:
In this episode, we explore herbs, flower essences, and homeopathy through a shamanic lens with celebrated herbalist, author, and teacher Matthew Wood. He’s been a practitioner of these modalities for forty-five years and teaches at the Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism.
Matt shares stories from his life’s journey with the plants and from his most recent book, A Shamanic Herbal – Plant Teachers and Animal Medicine.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we touch on fascinating connections between wild animal archetypes and plants, including some of the flower essence plants that we know and love. Taking it further, we discuss shadow work that may come up for processing during the dark of winter and these broader Plutonian times, and the light-bringing plants that can help us through.
Audio:
Video:
Flower Essences discussed during the show:
- Agrimony – Bach Flower
- Holly – Bach Flower
- Borage – FES
- Vervain – Bach Flower
- St John’s Wort – FES
Resources:
Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism
A Shamanic Herbal: Plant Teachers and Animal Medicines by Matthew Wood
Vitalism: The History of Herbalism, Homeopathy, and Flower Essences by Matthew Wood
Low Dosage Methodology in Herbal Medicine by Rixt Botello
Show Transcript
Rochana Felde: [00:00:35] Welcome to another episode, flower Friends. Our guest today is Matthew Wood, who has been a practitioner of flower essences, herbalism, and homeopathy for 45 years. He’s the author of at least 10 books in the field, and I think I have 8 of them at least, and he’s planning on more.
Matt currently lives in the North Country and teaches online at the Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism. And we’ve been waiting to bring him on the podcast for some time now. And finally, the planets have aligned. Initially, we wanted to explore the intersection of flower essences, homeopathy, and herbalism. However, Matthew has recently published a new book connecting plant medicine to shamanic animal medicine with some fascinating insights that are really pertinent to these times. So we’d like to dig into this connection, which is especially appropriate after our last episode when we talked about connecting to the unseen world with flower essences. And we’d love to explore what animal medicine and related flower essences are showing up for us right now heading into Winter Solstice of 2024. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
Matthew Wood: [00:02:00] Greetings. Glad to be here.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:02:04] We are really delighted to have you. It’s been so many years since I saw you in person. I was lucky enough to attend one of your classes at Gathering Thyme or a couple maybe, and really enjoyed your presence and the way you were able to talk and share on herbal medicine. So I’m really delighted that we can have this moment here. If you would be so kind as to explain how you see and how you started to getting interested in low-dose herbalism and homeopathy and flower essences and the through line between them.
Matthew Wood: [00:02:44] Let’s see. My calling was to be an herbalist from age 13 on, and that was just incontrovertible, although a few things came along. One was that I couldn’t understand the herbal texts of that time. There really were hardly any. There was Joseph Meyer, The Herbalist, there was Maud Grieve, A Modern Herbal, and, what’s his name, Paul– there was the one published by the Seventh-day Adventists, I forgot his name, but they all spoke the lingo of early 20th-century medicine, allopathy really, that ended in the 1950s, like astringent, emmenagogue, diaphoretic, diuretic, stomachic, etc., and I just couldn’t understand that. It wasn’t getting to the essence of the plant. I knew I needed to understand the essence of the plant.
Even at age 17, 18, yeah, I started reading there, 1920. I did take botany classes at the University of Minnesota. I began by studying the plants in the field. I had a good old wise botany professor, Dr. Lawrence. I remember, we had to give a paper, I was 18 then on, it was field botany on a single plant that we chose. And I chose Bur Oak, which is one of the White Oaks. So it’s a lot like Valley Oak or White Oak in the east. And Dr. Lawrence said, well, you’re not a very good speaker because at that time I wasn’t, so you get a B for oral presentation, but you really understand that herb. Or he said, I think you really understand the essence of that herb. I was like, wow, somebody understands what I’m trying to do.
And that was the first plant, very Saturnian. And if you understand Saturn, you understand the Oak in a way, even though it’s attributed to Jupiter just due to tradition, not really due to astrological properties. Some of these things I’ve forgotten what the dateline was. So there I was studying that. And later then, by age 28, 29, I started at the herb store. Fortunately for me, a huge collection of homeopathic books came on the market just as a buzz, 27, 28, 29, and an old homeopath had died. It would have been worth studying with him, but I didn’t know he existed in Minneapolis.
So I had a whole bunch of really good homeopathy books to study from. I also discovered my family had been into homeopathy. My cousin on my mother’s side, Julian Winston, he was a social bigwig in homeopathy. He wasn’t a practitioner so much as just somebody who everybody loved. It was a lubrication of the wheels and homeopathy. And then on my father’s side, we found out that my grandfather was delivered by a Quaker Homeopathic Physician in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900. And I mention this to– actually, a friend of mine in the meeting there, he came from Princeton and Trenton. And his mother was out visiting, and I mentioned, yeah, my grandfather was from Trenton, and he was delivered by a Quaker homeopathic physician in Trenton. And she said, oh, well, my father was a Quaker homeopathic physician in Trenton. Let me look at the records and see where was he born. And it turned, he said, yes, he was your family’s physician, but he was out of town, so his best friend delivered the baby. And actually, my grandfather and that doctor were first cousins, actually it turned out because the Quakers are all intermarried. So it was family heritage too. So I couldn’t really understand herbs right at the start. And I got a job in the herb store, and I did know a lot of herbs by name because I’d taken botany and studied the herb books, but I used homeopathy more, and I especially emphasize the herbs that were used in homeopathy, like St. John’s Wort, Boneset, which would be Eupatorium perfoliatum. Elder is in there, Sambucus. Pulsatilla, I guess you could say, is on the edge of– I still use the homeopathic more, not the herb. I wouldn’t mind using the flower essence there, and there are people who use that flower essence, anemone Pulsatilla. Anemone was Wolfgangiana or something strange, the American one.
So I started out, and then just ones that I– and then Aconite and Belladonna, and Chamomile, one of them, Ignatia, which we don’t use in herbal medicine, but it’s a tree. So I had a preference for the plants over the minerals, but I learned some of the minerals, too. I learned Lycopodium, which I actually do use as an herb nowadays. So that was a start, but then I wanted to get to know the plants. And so there was Dr. Bach’s flower essences. And essences, of course, that rang a bell with me. I believe, and Dr. Bach probably did believe this, but an essence works on the mental-emotional level and also on the physical. Actually, it works on the physical, emotional, mental, I’d say the spiritual, although nobody can cause you to choose right or wrong except you. So maybe an herb could help you deal with your trauma so you can make a better choice, but the ultimate spiritual choices are up to the individual. But we certainly can help people understand themselves better and be in less pain, and that is very important. I mean the amount of improvement to the human race due to the Bach flower essence, not to mention the Flower Essence Society and all the other essences, is tremendous, and to homeopathy and to herbalism.
So, I understood the mental-emotional level, but I knew there was a physical level. So I began to study the Bach flower essences, but as herbs as well. So Agrimony, it’s for mental tension, pain hidden behind a facade. I learned from practice, maybe this was a couple years later, that it was for pain where you hold your breath, that’s a facade, mm, ah. And actually, that is due to a lack– you hold your breath to generate endorphins, which are the body’s natural opioids. And some people, I think, actually have a lack of endorphins somewhat coming into the world, and other people, they’ve just had too much trauma. So Agrimony is a very good herb that way. But Agrimony is for pain. It’s like caught in a bind for the Bach flower essence, but it’s caught in a bind for physical pains too. And if you look at Agrimony, which just if you look at a picture, it looks like a cat with its hair standing on end. I remember I said to one client, it’s like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. “That’s just like my life. My life is just like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.” It’s like, oh my God. Now, as it actually happened, Borage did the most for her. Borage really made massive great changes. Borage is for the frayed, the frayed nervous system and psyche. It was for maternal lineage problems in that family and a few other places, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also for men, and in other ways, too. But that was something she had. She was 70, and her mother was 93, and she still was having trouble with her mother. And as soon as I gave her the Borage and her whole life straightened out, the daughter she was living with and really trampling on her life left. And the other daughter, who was estranged from her, said, Mom, come live with us. And I had her move in, and I mean, everything was changed. So amazing. So, Borage is a flower essence, I think, from Flower Essence Society. Well, Agrimony has physical pain, like passing a gallstone or a kidney stone, but many other pains that are not necessarily passing of stones, and where you hold your breath or just feel a lot of pain, mental-emotional, both. And you see the signature there. It looks like pain, actually, like tension.
I should say, too, it’s probably the only Bach flower essence where I prefer to use the pre-flowering, the leaves rather than the flowers. Well, there are some herbs that we would do like that. Lemon Balm and Sage you collect before they go to flower just because the plant gets rougher. So if you’re using it as an herb, it’s a little better to pick the leaves, and you pick the leaves off the side. You let the leader go because– that was one of my very first animal medicines. I was helping a woman who had the flu so bad that it dislocated her hips, and I knew she was always a facade person. I mean, not a bad person. She was a holistic practitioner, but she was always cheerful even when maybe there wasn’t grounds for being cheerful. So I thought, oh, she’s really an Agrimony person. So, over the phone, I told her, and I knew she had that Remedy. So I said, use some Agrimony, and she felt better right away. And as I hung up, Agrimony said to me, you can tell I’m a wolf medicine because of the leaflets, the leader of the pack. That was the very first animal medicine I learned directly from the animal or the plant, and that does fit very well.
Rochana Felde: [00:13:37] Maybe what we can do is explain what that means to people when we say wolf medicine or when we’re talking about animal medicines in this context because I don’t think I actually mentioned the name of your book in the introduction, but it’s, A Shamanic Herbal. So it’s really looking at the energies of these animal spirit guides, these animal teachers. Is that how you see it and how different plants are associated with different animal teachers basically?
[ppp_patron_only level=”2″]Matthew Wood: [00:14:14] Yeah. So, a native practitioner, Karyn Sanders, who lives in Washington state, she said, oh, you don’t know what the spirit signatures are. And I was like, what? She said, that’s when the plant looks like an animal or is used by an animal, then it has special power. And it was like, whoa, I was waiting for that my whole life because when I was 15 already, before I’d hardly even studied herbs but I was always thinking about them already, I knew I was going to be an herbalist, I thought, oh, the correct way to classify herbs is by animal. Where the heck did I get that? Like, okay, yes, I did grow up– first two years of my life I did learn to speak Muscogee, not speak it, but knew what it was, and English. So we lived on a remote reservation in the Everglades, in the middle of nowhere, 50 miles by dirt road to the nearest town, the Seminole reservation, the Big Cypress Reservation. There’s a freeway cutting through there now. So maybe I actually did get that information from them because I mean, the old people were nearly pre-Columbian is what the anthropologist, who was an Indian himself, said to my father, and they’d only been in treaty relationship with the federal government for 18 years covenant when we arrived in 1954. So they were like wild Indians. I say that in a positive sense out of the bush, and some of them still hadn’t signed with the government until 1963, the Tamiami Trail people.
So, yeah, that idea came to me very early, and then she explained what it was, and I was, oh, the plant looks like an animal or is used by the animal. So we have Agrimony, the leaf looks like that with leaflets on the side with a, bing, leaflet on the end. Didn’t mention anything about tension, but it very definitely is for tension having to do with hierarchical situations. I did mention that plants work on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level, and on the magical. And I know of no plant that acts on the magical more than Agrimony. I’ve seen it again and again and again. I just was reading an herbal of somebody who had used it that way, and it’s just shocking that it will change environments, things– you’re nodding. Maybe you’ve seen this happen. You just put it on some legal papers, or you got to be in the right. If you’re in the wrong, it will rule against you. But it helps with landlord-tenant, it helps with employee-employer, employer-employee, it helps with problems brought home from the workplace. It’s not really for marital or household relationships unless there’s a hierarchical component to it.
Rochana Felde: [00:17:20] Connecting that through line to the wolf energy, in your book you described how the wolf is always about the tension between two opposites. There’s the wild wolf and the domesticated dog. And there were some more examples in there. And that energy is holding that tension between the two. So bringing that to the Agrimony, with the flower essence being used for people who put on a happy face when inside, they are having a lot of challenges, but they’re not showing that to the world, is that why Agrimony falls into the wolf arena?
Matthew Wood: [00:18:03] Well, it said it was a wolf medicine, so I cannot argue with it. They don’t always tell me that directly, but I look at the signatures, sometimes there’s traditions, I mean, sometimes it’s too blatant. Sometimes the traditions conflict like Burdock or Latin name is Arctium of the bear, Arctos. But American-Indians, generally, I’ve noticed they tend to think of it as a deer or elk medicine because it looks like antlers. So you could say it’s both a bear medicine, I think of it more that way, but it’s an elk medicine too, and actually bear and elk meat in the adrenals, that’s stamina. I mean, yeah, the bear is like rah, rah, rah. And the elk is like, hey, I got a harem of five gals here, and I’m fighting anybody, the male elk.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:18:55] And isn’t it a bit like the whole elemental attributions where it’s never just one, right? It could be a primary, but then there’s also secondary elements that are involved. And so maybe the animal medicine is a little bit like that where it’s this, but it’s also a little bit of this.
Matthew Wood: [00:19:13] Yeah. So there’s some plants that are pretty purely elemental. I mean something like Lobelia is so intensely what it is, and it’s fairly mechanical. It doesn’t really like to act on the essence level so much. It acts on a mechanical to get rid of spasms, but it has the blue of which most of the blue flowers are usually antispasmodic, especially that dark blue. And I think you can say it’s an air medicine, air spasm. The little pods are full of air that you can feel them in your hand. It’s like, whoa, there’s air inside the seed pod. And so I don’t know what plant have I thought of an animal for that, I don’t know, but it’s quite a complicated thing, and yet simple.
So Agrimony was really one of my first that I learned, but I ended up preferring to make my own tincture from the leaves because then I knew I was picking off the sides and not picking the top. And even if you’re doing a flower essence, I would do the ones that shoot off to the sides a little bit, but I’d use drop doses, just as I learned from Dr. Bach. So to some extent, I would use the dosage that I learned from whatever book or person I learned it from, but almost always I was cutting down to a few drops. And that’s because I did have the homeopathic training or background– not training really, because I taught myself. I mean, there was one school in the whole country, one-week, two-week program when I was young. And other herbs, say that I picked up from Dr. Bach was Vervain because it’s so bling and it’s like excess bling-ism. So it got a stiff neck and it’s for neck hanging down, it’s for stiff-necked people. It’s for fanatics and people that are too literalistic and whatnot. And so I also would say that Blue Vervain is a good remedy for excess enthusiasm, I would have to say.
Rochana Felde: [00:21:31] I’d love to. One of the more intriguing animal medicines that you talk about in the book, and I’ve also heard you talk about in other trainings, is bat medicine and how that connects to Holly and how that is something that seems to be– Holly seems to be coming up a lot. For me lately, it seems like it’s a really potent remedy for our times, and we’re going into Winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. So love to dive into bat medicine. I’ve read that chapter a few times, and it’s still making its way through me, this information that you have shared about it. So I’d love to hear more.
Matthew Wood: [00:22:27] Okay. But first, I just want to throw in one particular thing, which was that, why do I use small doses? Homeopathy was my training wheels. So I began to understand herbs and use more and more and more and more herbs, and Doctrine Of Signatures was always a leading light. And it didn’t have to look like an animal necessarily, like just the mighty Oak as that Saturnian, dry, astringent strength, and the essence of, okay, well, that’s another Bach flower essence, is the mighty Oak is broken down, so people that try to out integrity the issues of life, and it’s admirable, but not always going to work.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:23:16] You can do that for about 27 years, and then you fall over, right?
Matthew Wood: [00:23:19] Right, yeah. Mostly probably at your first Saturn return or your second. Ha, ha. But it’s not just that I learned my herbalism first through homeopathy and flower essences, but also I almost never make political statements. I just hate politics. I was raised by a political fanatic family and 10th-generation Quakers, so they’re really abolitionists and all that back there, anti-war, World War II, my grandfather was secretary of the War Resisters League. I mean, that’s taking a stand. That’s the most hated job in North America at the time, helping the war resisters.
But the political statement was that I didn’t feel there was a significant difference between– the essence of the plant is where the healing power is, and there’s not that much of a difference between homeopathy, flower essences, and herbs when you’re dealing with that level. That’s true for essence healing. But yeah, you can use herbs as almost drug-like for their material effects, like Mucilages, like Marshmallow Root. I remember I’ve had some cases. There’s better drugs now, but in the ’90s, cases of enteritis and colitis and Crohn’s disease, and oftentimes I could stop it just absolutely, but not always. But I did find Marshmallow Root capsules especially was a good palliative for that type of disease because you swallow it whole. A tablet would be even better, and it breaks down in the stomach, goes down, or breaks down in the small intestine would be even better. And you coat and soothe that area, and you can accomplish a lot. It certainly doesn’t interfere with the drugs if you are on drugs, too. So that’s a case of an herb that you’re using, not the essence very much at all but really the material properties, and that’s okay. And that’s where food and herbs overlap a lot.
But you can also use Mullein. I’ve used Mullein in small doses for drying out of the joints, dry mouth, tongue is dry, powdery exfoliation of the skin around the mouth for the essence, for someone who is drying out and needs more lubrication, not to counter some disease like that, but because that’s their essence. And using low potencies on all these things is kind of a political statement. It’s all the same, homeopathy, flower essences, and herbs are all very similar. Although what I’ve come to realize, I’ll get to the bat medicine a little bit, is that Dr. Bach putting the plants in clean water in the sun, well, now we know since about 2000, the research of Gerald Pollack – you know about him, yes – that water changes in the presence of sunlight hitting a hydrophilic surface, which would be the bowl and the flower, and therefore, that’s really powerful. We don’t know all about that, but the alchemists collected the dew. They felt it had special property. Dr. Cooper, whose son was one of, probably, Dr. Bach’s best friend and Dr. Cooper did arbora,what was it, solar remedies, where he left the plant– he’d put the whole plant in, not just the flower, the whole plant and flowering in the sunlight for one hour, two hours, three hours. He’d go, that’d be 1x, 2x, 3x arboral, whatever. And that is mentioned in my book because I felt that Dr. Bach had predecessors, and Le Hunte Cooper, Dr. Cooper’s son was one of them.
And so, there were people, I almost say, unconsciously aware of the difference between regular water and sunlight-infused water until Gerald Pollack showed up and proved that there was a significant difference. And I remember a friend at a conference, she got sick, and there was a Vietnamese doctor there, and she went to him for advice. It was an International Herb Symposium in Wheaton, Massachusetts. And he said, throw water on roof, drink. It was like, get it in the sunshine, drink the water. Well, so we don’t know. The Bach flower essences may be a portion more absorbable appropriated because they are fixed in the sunlight in water like that. And all the water in our body is, he called it easy water just for short, and it is all that, except what the cells release is H2O, which is like wastewater, which probably is a lot. What comes out on it is absorbed by the veins, goes back to the lungs, comes out on our breath. At any rate, that’s my use of the low potencies and the various different– and sometimes the homeopathic at 3x, 6x– it’s hard to get this 3x anymore, but I would really like those low potencies sometimes.
On to your question, yes, there’s herbs for our time. As I was learning the animal medicines, there’s some animal medicines that are universal that are stuck in our language like the snake medicines. Everybody around the world, when the plant looks like a snake, it’s used for the venom of the snake, usually. And I mean, you could find 100 examples probably just in this hemisphere, another 100 in the next hemisphere over that way. Then, there’s bear medicines. Angelica would be a bear medicine, brown, furry, oily roots, as it was explained to me by some Indian sometime, I can’t even remember anymore. But the bear come out in the spring with their claws, and they dig– so the bear is the totem of the healer and native culture because he or she rips off barks with its claws, digs up roots. So we have the expression, roots and barks for herbs like that is back to the 19th century, when they were learning their herbs from the Indians, the Indians used the roots and barks. The Northern Europeans use the green, and we still have that, oh, a green smoothie. Northern European people think of healing plants as the green, which is because winter kills everything, and then the green comes back. Southern European, they love – who can blame them – the scents, the beautiful air, the aromatherapy. Like, who’d want to dig up a root or rip off a bark when you got Rosemary and Fennel and Sage and Lavender and everything just popping out everywhere. We have that cultural differences there too as well. But what was I saying? So someone told me that bears come out in the spring when they’re hungry and they got to put on weight, and they dig up roots like that, and the fats and oils build up. And probably also our blood purifiers. Actually, fats and oils may fatten you up, but at a certain point, carbohydrates are what fatten you. So brown, furry, oily roots that look like a bear’s paw, the Angelica Root looks like that, the Osha Root looks like that, all the close cousins Lomatium looks like that, it’s called Bear Root. Osha means bear in Spanish. We have Balsamorhiza, it’s in a different family. It looks like a bear coming up, rah, I’m going to grab you, and it’s thrown on the rocks in a sweat lodge. All these thrown on the rocks, that beautiful scent, that spicy scent opens the pores, opens the third eye, actually.
So, Angelica, I should say, again, I use small doses. I feel like I am using flower essence there, although I am using the route, but it opens the imagination. People are stuck too much in a rah, rah, rah, rigid imagination. You can have a lot of fun, burn the Osha Root– no, the Angelica’s better, burn the Angelica Root – anyways, it’s more ecologically balanced – and you can use the California one, Angelica hendersonii, Angelica atropurpurea of North America, Angelica archangelica of Europe, then there’s ones in Tibet and China and Dong quai and Korean Angelica and Angelica dahurica. And they’re all pretty close to interchangeable. Even the Dong quai are Angelicas, can be used as female remedies in the same way for the same indications. So there’s a case where cousins all have the same value to a great extent, but you burn a root of Angelica, and wow, bing, it just opens your imagination. So that’s why it’s used in the sweat lodge, but you can just do it in your home, too. And I think sustained over a week, the flower essence would, bing, do it. So people are too rigid in their views, which that sounds like something we need today.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:33:33] Yeah, I appreciate how that links up a little bit with the Vervain. I’m paraphrasing the way that you talk about Chamomile, but I think about Vervain as being for Border Collies of all species.
Matthew Wood: [00:33:51] Yeah. Right.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:33:53] But I’d love to hear some thoughts on Holly, because I too, having read your chapter in the book on bat medicine, my mind is also blown, and I’m really intrigued about this whole intersection of everything that’s going on right now and how it relates particularly to Holly because it’s such an important remedy.
Matthew Wood: [00:34:16] Yeah. So 30-some years ago, I went out to dinner with this very sophisticated American-Indian woman who would come to the store. She was learning massage therapy from a South African acupuncturist that worked in our store, and she was learning Chinese medicine from him. And we got to know each other, and we went out to dinner. I realized how wise she was. She was still in her late 40s or 50s, so not quite an elder in training, but she really was an elder. And out of nowhere, she said, the Indian people are attacked through their genes by the bat people. I was like, whoa, what does she mean by that? That’s true. I was afraid to ask. Maybe she means white people. She didn’t though. So I asked my friend, Arlo Omaha. He hung out at the store in those days, too, great days at the store when I was in my 30s. He said, oh, I’ll check into it. He knew everything about Indian medicine. And he came back a couple days later, and he said, oh yeah Priscilla’s right. The bat people do attack the Indian people through their genes. And I was like, well, it’s a good idea to ask somebody if you’re afraid to ask, better be rejected. So 30 years went by, and the COVID epidemic started. And I got to say the first time, the very second I heard the word Coronavirus, my mind said, oh, thank God the apocalypse has begun. It’s not as much fun as I thought it would be at the time, and I don’t know, it could be 100 years of Apocalypse, I don’t know, but I’d been waiting for it my whole lifetime, so many people in my generation and down younger generations. My mom and dad, not their generation, they didn’t think about that so much.
The thing about bat medicine was that COVID attacked my brain and my heart within five days, and I felt if that was a human being, they hated me, and therefore I was going to use Holly. And I started using Holly right away, and it was greatly helpful. I had originally used it for Bartonella, the Lyme disease co-infection. That attacked me within five days in the brain and the heart even more. I thought, wow, this really hates me. And it took me a couple of months to say, okay, I’ve tried other herbs. I’ll try the Holly. Man, within five days, it was just like, boom, nailed it, nailed the door shut, it was gone.
So I felt like if it was a human, it would hate me. And I felt like if you got hated by someone you were unaware, I’m a little bit more aware or a little bit more anthropomorphic, or I think of animals and viruses and bacteria as living things that have mental-emotional traits. And if you didn’t know that, you would feel hatred, you would feel like somebody was hating you unfairly. Then you would start hating other people, and then you’d be really angry. And Bartonella is famous for anger. So I saw that as the Holly pattern. So I do go one step beyond Dr. Bach. So it’s for anger where the person was hated, and they didn’t go through it, they didn’t understand it, and they absorbed it, they became it. Somebody else hated them because it’s for irrational hatred where you irrationally hate someone else, or they irrationally hate you.
So I thought, well, this is like bat. And then I began reading bat medicine that– I still haven’t memorized it, January 22nd, 2020, Scientific American on the origins of COVID said that it was the spine of a bat virus. And then somebody even said, oh, the Holly leaf looks like a bat. Online, I was talking with people. Yeah, wow. Plus, I read up that in the darkness, the American Holly is a little darker than the English one, and it’s so dark in there that the bats will live in there if they can’t find a cave, it’s that dark. They must do that with the English one, but I think the English one would not be quite as dark, unless you’re in a good forest– if it was just out in a field, I’m not sure it’d be quite dark enough for the bats, but, wow, it’s a bat medicine. They use it, and it looks like them. Also, it turned out, Maud Grieve said that there was research that the leaf, the spikes, and the curling on it form when it gets attacked by viruses and bacteria. Wow. So I mean, it’s like you’re getting attacked by hatred or whatever.
Rochana Felde: [00:39:06] Well, Matthew, back in the early days of the pandemic, you had started a Facebook group called the Spiritual Implications of Coronavirus. So I was like, right on. I was in there, and it was an interesting discussion, but I didn’t actually get that virus until this year. So, I managed to avoid it until May of this year. And I wouldn’t have been able to maybe relate to what you’ve written and said about it without having experienced it because I remember feeling so much negativity, like it hated me, like there was so much darkness. It was so dark in such a negative way. And I’m no stranger to the underworld and dark nights of the soul and shamanic journeying, but this was different. This was a very–
Matthew Wood: [00:40:04] –evil.
Rochana Felde: [00:40:04] –different evil, dark feeling to it. And what you wrote in the book about how bat medicine operates in darkness, not necessarily drawing us to the dark side, but it functions in the darkness, in the parts of ourselves that we neglect to develop, that we don’t know about, that we reject, including past generations, ancestors that have been ignored and forgotten, lifetimes in history that were forgotten. And so ever since then, interestingly, I have been doing shadow work. I have been just like– stuff has been coming up from my past, from my ancestors, from my reincarnated lines to heal. I’ve just been going through one thing after the other in shadow work that I’ve been working with. And it’s been a very good thing. It was a catalyst to maybe get me to do some of this harder stuff.
Matthew Wood: [00:41:06] Wow. Yeah. Okay. Now, I do have to say that the first Coronavirus Delta, the first thing, actually had a positive effect, although it challenged you. It caused lucid dreaming. I had a friend who had lucid dreams for three years after being sick, and another friend who had nightmares three to four times a week for the next year. So it caused lucid dreaming. I had lucid dreaming. I dreamed about dragons, and they told me all about themselves. I learned about the– I don’t know what to call it, the natural history of dragons from the Garden of Eden to the present, and it caused me to get land in Upper Michigan where they love. They love the copper ore, and they’re established up there. And by golly, I mean, my friend, Phyllis, was talking to a guy from Upper Michigan in the hospital in Arab, Alabama, and she started talking to him, and he brought up on his own the dragons and the copper. It’s like, this is known out there. They love it because copper grounds them because they’re sensitive to EMFs, it turned out. But that could have been nightmares if I wasn’t interested in it and really learning from it.
And then when Omicron came along, it was evil, and it attacked me, and I felt it was conjunct death and the Antichrist, who was a real person. I don’t know who he is, but at any rate– that was just the words, some incarnate, actual evil person and a man, by the way. And that went on for quite a while. It took me a year and a half to completely expel the debris of that attack, I would say. I felt a stake go right through my sternum, and death, Omicron, evil. And it took a long time fighting that. And then finally, I had a dream where, well, this person I didn’t know, it wasn’t addressed as the Antichrist, just a person trying to kill me and chased me down into this muddy river. And then the next day, during the day, all of a sudden, the Antichrist showed up, whoever he is, and he had a book, and he said, well, if you don’t buy into all these things, you’re not on my list, and he checked me off. So, yeah, we got to do our shadow work to avoid being caught and thrown in that river, which is like death, both physical and spiritual. And so we’re working a great deal.
And the bat, as we see so often, our European heritage, animals are evil– that are not for the American-Indians, like the wolf, for instance, but even the wolf, I mean, it’s cultural. We are okay with the owl, but down there on the Seminole res., if the owls came around, they’d shoot the shotguns off all night to keep them away because they didn’t like them, bringers of bad news.
But here, the bat we associate it with vampires, bad things, and they associate it with this scary stuff, changing, attacking the Indian people through their genes. So here is where both cultures– well, that’s shadow, and I mean, they come out at night. They can’t come out in the day because their metabolism is, they’re too hot. They kill germs with heat rather than the normal immune processes. That’s all in that book, actually – I think it is – no, it’s in my next book which I call Gift of the Bat People, although they’d probably rename it, but same publisher. You can watch for it in about a year.
Now, another thing that is just stimulating me here, that I have observed and never thought of a remedy, but talking to you, I realized that I think Holly would be the remedy here, and you guys and your listeners can try this out. But often, when a person– so you have a client and some elder in their family, a parent or grandparent died recently and a whole lot of crap comes down, just a bunch of crap shows up in their life– now, yeah, sometimes there is crap like the estate, they’ve got to manage it, it’s a mess, the family’s fighting over it, but sometimes it’s psychic. And what I’ve concluded is there’s parents and grandparents that hold back bad experiences and won’t talk about them and don’t want that to fall onto the kids. I mean, my mother, she’s 90 and she says, yeah, I didn’t want to tell you I had insomnia because I didn’t want you to have insomnia, too. It’s like, yeah, well, I got terrible insomnia. Yeah, it wouldn’t have mattered, Mom. So parents are doing that, and when they die, that comes out like a tidal wave, a little wave or a big wave, and the people have to deal with that, in addition to maybe family fighting and stuff like that, or it causes family fighting. And how are you going to deal with that?
I do think Holly has a great opportunity here too, when after an older person in the family has died, to help straighten out the lineage and whatnot, take responsibility for what we have to take for and let them have the responsibility for what they have to do. So, thanks.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:46:47] I really appreciate that. That’s very thought-provoking because like you’re saying, there is so much in the ancestral lines that when it’s not healed, and this loops back to this shadow work, it’s like any shadow work that isn’t done within your lifetime, which you don’t actively engage in, it turns into something for your descendants to sort out, and so many of us have have– I know in my experience, generations back of shadow work that didn’t get done. And when you see somebody going through who hasn’t looked there and is going through the death experience, it’s not a peaceful, easy thing. They’re looking at it, and yet, they’re not capable of dealing with it in that moment. And then it imprints and scatters into all the descendants, doesn’t it?
Matthew Wood: [00:47:41] Yeah.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:47:41] So, Holly, wow, thank you for– I mean, it’s so appropriate right now with this plutonic time that we’re in to be working with the shadow material, yeah.
Matthew Wood: [00:47:53] Yeah. Pluto has been up. Of course, it just entered Aquarius two or three weeks ago. And I mean, every day, there’s some new thing. I mean, it’s almost unbelievable. You wake up and it’s like, what? We live in a disruptive time. And so let’s quickly, we don’t have that much time, I’ll go over a few other things. So the pineal gland opens up through the top of the head to the golden cord, up to the creator Heavens, but it goes down through our bodies, down through our feet, into the Earth. And my friend, Susan, before she died almost exactly a year ago now, yeah, it was about the 20th, so it’s really close here, she noticed– she was a seer. She said, oh, everybody, I see people are cut off on their feet and above their head. They can’t connect to the Earth, and they can’t connect to the Heavens. And she saw this quite a bit in a lot of people. So we have to protect our pineal, and I would say Calcite can have an effect, and in fact, yeah, right now for protection I wear– so I never wore a mojo every day all the time. But I got Calcite, a Holly leaf, and just some resin in there, I think, Copal, to try and protect the heart against– the Holly for the heart, to keep the heart open, and the Calcite for the pineal. But we also, me and my friends worked on Pine, White Pine or European Pine, the Scotch Pine, which Dr. Bach used, Pine Teasel, which is really interesting flowers. Oh, David Dalton makes Teasel tinctures in Delta Gardens and Mullein. Mullein’s really, it’s a shamanic herb. I probably didn’t emphasize it enough in the book. It’s a shadow working book. I wouldn’t take Mullein and Holly at the same time probably because it would be a bit too much, but the outer leaves of the Mullein lie on the ground, and they’re flat. And some witches call it graveyard dust, although there’s other graveyard dust, too. And then there’s the center part, nice, healthy, little, furry part. That relaxes the nerves, the plant told me in altered reality, and in fact, I mean, it was like a hallucination because I thought it was like a real thing. When I talked to Jim McDonald, who I thought had told me about it, he said, I never said that to you. But the plant said, the inner part of the plant relaxes the nerves, and the outer plant part, the old leaves gave you nightmares. Well, I was reticent about using it for a long time, but there’s constructive uses for nightmares, too. And it actually helps with insomnia because, like me, I lie down, I get real alert, but it helps and it makes you alert, and then you pass into dream time, but then you’ll have nightmares that help you do shadow work. So I used it recently. This is so amusing, in a way, but it was terrible. I had a nightmare where I was taking a test. It was like a pre-med test or a medical test. And all the questions were like, if you’ve ever read a science paper written by a scientist who doesn’t know how to write, it’s just terrible, just barely logical, all this gobbledygook science lingo, and it was multiple-choice, and it was so messed up I couldn’t even find where the multiple-choice questions were. And I figured, well, at least if I guessed, I’ll get it 25% right, but I couldn’t even find that. I just went on and on trying. And it was like, wow, that was a nightmare. It wasn’t very personal, but it was trying to understand things and maybe your mind being too focused on stuff or something, part of my insomnia. So, yeah.
Rochana Felde: [00:52:05] Yeah. I would also think about St. John’s Wort flower essence for these times, just bringing that light into the darkness. And I love the signature of those leaves, the perforatum with the holes and the light being able to come through. And so I think in the arc of this conversation, I mean, we’ve gone to a few dark places with shadow work, and it’s the dark time of the year, and there’s dark things going on in the world, and just to bring these plants that we’re talking about, I mean, they’re helping us bring in the light, they’re helping us connect to the light, and especially Holly with connecting to anything– fighting as a warrior against things that are not universal love, that are not in the light. I see Holly as a very warrior essence in that sense, and Saint John’s Wort as well. What do you think?
Matthew Wood: [00:53:13] Yes. In fact, over these years of practice, I found the two remedies for seasonal adjustive disorder, which is common in the north, although it can happen elsewhere, but well, in the Pacific Northwest, regions get cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, no light, and you get depression from midwinter, very common. Occasionally– it happens less in Minnesota because it’s not cloudy all the time, but we do get it. I found the two remedies for it over the years are St. John’s Wort, which is for depression, and it is for this kind of depression and maybe for other kind of depression, too. And the other one is Calendula Herbal Sunshine, which totally makes sense. Also over the years, I found that Calendula is a remedy for afraid-of-the-dark in children. So all these things are shadowworking potential plants. I would say, you look at that Mullein leaf, it’s darker, it’s less fluffy, it’s got a darkness to it, too, graveyard dust that it too is a shadow remedy. So we have a bunch here, folks.
Rochana Felde: [00:54:25] I’ve never thought of Holly in that way. So that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting, Matt.
Matthew Wood: [00:54:34] Yeah. Well, we did a plant attunement, and we had five or six people all have that same experience, the effect that we’d have that alert and then that sleepy and then– well, we didn’t have a nightmare because none of us fell asleep, but we could see how that worked out, and it really verified it. And that was from the outer leaf, the inner leaf being different. We did try the root, which one of the people said affected the spinal nerves more than the other two. So that’s interesting. And then the stalks have a separate, and the flowers. And it does have that golden arch through the top of the head type thing anchored into the earth, and gray, like Saturn, very Saturnian, earthly color. So I think it’s a very important remedy. And if you start working with it, and you find you’re getting memories of things that didn’t happen, that’s the way that plant works. So, yeah.
[/ppp_patron_only]Kathleen Aspenns: [00:55:40] Well, thank you so much for this. It’s been a really wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, and really appreciate your perspective and the breadth and depth of your practice. And everyone who hasn’t yet read this wonderful new book, A Shamanic Herbal–
Matthew Wood: [00:55:58] It’s out there.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:55:58] –please go get one and start reading it because it will really open your eyes to seeing these plants that we know as flower essence people in really different ways. And thank you very much for that.
Matthew Wood: [00:56:11] Well, show them. Sure. You got the book right there?
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:56:15] Show the book. Yes, I got the book right here. Lots of flags. There we go. There we go.
Matthew Wood: [00:56:19] Alligator there. Alligator medicine helps with the darkness, too. Alligator helps, like the Lords of Death in Egypt, or the crocodiles or alligators, and they grab you and won’t let go until you’ve dealt with something with your stuff. So Teasel, which is a great alligator medicine, is beneficial for re-establishing the blueprint of health, for remembering what it was like to be healthy. So that could help with shadow work, too. Yeah. Okay.
Rochana Felde: [00:56:48] I also just want to deeply thank you for all your teachings over the years because I’ve been studying herbalism for decades, and I think some of your books might have been some of the first on my shelf. And I always appreciate your advice. I’ve heard you say, if you want to be an herbalist, go work at an herb store. I’ve heard you say that a few times, and I ended up doing that for three years. I worked at Rosemary’s Garden, actually.
Matthew Wood: [00:57:17] Oh, wow, yeah.
Rochana Felde: [00:57:18] Well, way after Rosemary left, but.
Matthew Wood: [00:57:21] Of course.
Rochana Felde: [00:57:21] And I’ve gravitated to the low dose and to the flower essences more than the heroic part of it. And so what I want to also mention is your book, Vitalism, to some of our listeners, if they’re not familiar with it because it brings together herbalism, homeopathy, and flower essences with the historical context of how they all came about and then how they separated with allopathic medicine. And so I found this information really valuable for me during the early part of my flower essence career and learning about flower essences and trying to put it into context with what I had already known about herbs and how it all came together and what I was trying to understand with homeopathy versus flower essences versus herbalism. So it was very helpful to me and just the concept of vitalism in general, it makes these things make so much sense. So I highly recommend that to our listeners as well.
Matthew Wood: [00:58:35] Yeah. A book just arrived in the mail here. I know she’s been working on it a long time, a New Zealand herbalist, flower essence. Well, let’s see. What’s it say? Low Dosing. And look how big this book is, huh? Oh man, Low Dosage Methodology in Herbal Medicine, History, Philosophy, and Application that she goes through. So that’s rather interesting that that just came out. It would probably be available somewhere, Rixt Botello.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:59:05] Can you share with our listeners where to find out more information about you and your work and the books and everything?
Matthew Wood: [00:59:11] That’s matthewwoodinstituteofherbalism.com. Yeah. And we actually have a first-year course, now we’re finishing our second year, it’ll be coming out in January, and then we’ll work on the third-year clinical. So it’ll be a three-year program. And then I’ll be able to rest a little bit or fill in the pieces here and there. But it’s a herb program based on the essence idea. Yeah. There’s not a lot on flower essences, but we’ll wait and we’ll get that. There’s just the kind of things I talked about here, how flower essences influenced me.
Rochana Felde: [00:59:49] Well, the Doctrine Of Signatures class that’s at your school is very helpful, I think, to people studying flower essences. And that’s what we do is we look at the plant signatures very deeply as well. So yeah, but lots of other great herbal courses at that school. I’ve taken a few of them. And you also have astrological tie-ins. So for people interested in that medical herbalism, it’s a lot. There’s so much– you offer so nuch. So, thank you for being you and being in the world for us.
Matthew Wood: [01:00:29] Well, thank you because I’ve had some insights here. It was very interesting to hear about your experience with Omicron or the later. Well, it’s even after Omicron with now COVID is causing shadow working, I guess. Either you get caught in it or you work the shadows. So, yeah. And this idea of Holly and the ancestors and/or immediate family and just, it’s kind of fun, I hadn’t thought of going over the winter-time shadow working remedies, but what a great thing.
Kathleen Aspenns: [01:01:08] Thanks for spending this time with us.
Matthew Wood: [01:01:11] Yeah. Thank you both. Yeah.
Rochana Felde: [01:01:13] Thanks again. Bye now.
Kathleen Aspenns: [01:01:20] This podcast is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. We are not physicians, and do not diagnose, prescribe, or treat medical conditions. Please consult with your own physician or healthcare practitioner regarding the suggestions and recommendations made by the hosts and guests of The Flower Essence Podcast.
