You might choose to have objects or photos of those that you are grieving setup somewhere nearby.ĭraw your bath or fill your basin, light your candles, and set the stage for your ritual. Candles and incense will help set the mood for a nice bath. You can also set the stage for this ritual any way you like. Regardless of what setting you use, make sure you will be undisturbed for the duration of the ritual. If you don’t have access to a bathtub, you can use a basin, place the herbs in the basin, and use a sponge to sponge yourself off while sitting in the shower or sitting in a natural setting. Setting: Ideally, this ritual takes place in a large bathtub. You will also need a pair of scissors and a large bowl. On each sheet write the name of one of the three plants. If you have crushed culinary herbs from the supermarket instead of a sachet, you should also prepare three strips of paper. If you have fresh or dried herbs from a garden or farmer’s market, just tie them together with a string before the ritual begins. Materials: For this ritual, you will need a sachet of herbs: sage, rosemary and thyme. Thyme is another powerful plant ally that helps us hold space for our grief, remind us to make time (thyme!) for our grief, work through our feelings, and come to a place of acceptance. You can use any kind of sage you want for this (garden sage, cleary sage, white sage) as all will work equally well. Sage is a plant with enormous spiritual power, for this ritual we are drawing upon sage’s ability to help us with grounding, clearing, and cleansing. Rosemary is also a potent plant spirit ally reminding us to hold in our hearts those things that are no longer with us but to live in the present and look towards the future. Rosemary is a plant tied to remembrance, a plant tied to memory and things of the past. Rosemary from the Plant Spirit Oracle (For this ritual, I’ve drawn upon three longstanding plant allies, plants that nearly everyone has had direct interaction with (even just in the food that they eat) gentle and powerful plants that can provide us healing. Perhaps you are grieving a specific person or thing, or perhaps it is simply time to let go of your grief surrounding the broader challenges we face or some spiritual work you are called to do (such as psychopomp work or palliative care for the land). This ritual, working with rosemary, sage, and thyme, is meant to help ease the spirit and begin or continue the grieving process. Engaging in rituals to help with grief and healing is a powerful tool. If we bury the loss within us and don’t take the necessary time to heal, it becomes like a weight holding us down and back, surfacing again and again until we are ready to deal with our feelings. I think it’s important that, when faced with any kind of serious loss, we take the time to honor that loss, acknowledge our feelings, and work to heal. These losses happened within a few weeks of each other, and they both weighed heavily on me, prompting me to work with the plants for healing and strength. The loss of many trees that I had grown up with and a beautiful ecosystem that we had cultivated into a botanical sanctuary. Perhaps the two most central things that happened to me this summer was the loss of a good friend after a long and difficult battle with cancer and the destruction of a large part of our family’s property to put in a septic line. I have certainly been experiencing many of these things. One of the things that we are faced with right now is grief: grief over lost friends and family who have passed, grief over a previous way of life that seems to be gone for good, grief over lost careers and uncertain futures, grief over continued suffering and uncertainty with regards to our climate and life on this planet. 2020 has been challenging for nearly everyone in a multitude of ways.
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