WEEDEATER
by Nance Klehm for arthurmag.com (“homegrown counterculture”)

Dear Nance:
I’m having trouble sleeping. What do you recommend?

Nance Klehm says:
Waking, dreaming and deep sleep are three states of consciousness that reflect the process of death and rebirth. When you dream, your life-force leaves your body and plays on the astral plane. Impressions gathered in your waking life get revealed and you experience happy/unhappy states. This information is then brought back into your sleeping body to integrate and then hopefully percolate up as intelligence into your conscious wakeful body as intelligence. Simply stated, deep sleep is key in the integration of intelligence gathered while dreaming.

Deep sleep occurs at the origin of the heart, inhibitors to deep sleep are:

– wrongly digested food
– conflicting impressions and associations
– poor diet
– unhealthy use of the senses
– unsupportive relationships

Obvious, right? But well worth the naming.

Start by looking at what you eat, patterns of thought especially in the last few hours before you go to sleep, folks you interact with during the day. In general, what you introduce into your mind-body-spirit is probably what is at the bottom of this. As Hippocrates said: “It’s more important to know what kind of patient has a disease than what kind of disease a patient has.”

In other words, What is the first thought form your mind grabs in the morning when it surfaces from the fluff?

The deeper mind/deeper heart is reflected in the life-force/waking self. You need to help the deeper mind complete its circuits so your life-force is free to flow.

I’m a fan of growing and foraging my own plants, but given that plants are dormant in temperate climates in January, you will probably be supporting an herbal shop instead. However, all of the plants I recommend are easily grown during the growing season without too much effort and January is a good month to plan those guerrilla plantings and fire escape gardens in SPRING!

These plants are naturally relaxing – some quite doping. They are listed in rough order from mild to strong:

lemon balm (tea)
chamomile (tea, flower essence)
rosemary (food, scent, tea)
lavender (food, scent, tea)
catnip (tea)
passion flower (tea, tincture)
skullcap (tincture)
california poppy (tincture)
hops (tincture)
valerian (tincture)

General blood tonics are good to integrate too – oats, nettles, and one of my best friends – dandelion!

But before you run off to mainline a bunch of teas and tinctures, I need you to ask yourself again: What is the nature of your hamster wheeling?

Stressed? Use oats and lavender
Anxious? skullcap and valerian
Depressed? lavender and passion flower
Insomnia? california poppy, hops and valerian
Hyperactivity? red clover, oats and dandelion

So try this for a week: eat well, interact with more supportive people than not, connect to the generous and abundant, and before you lay your head down, set your intention to integrate what you gain from the astral plane, lay back and breathe into your deep play mind.

Questions for Nance:
editor@arthurmag.com

Nance Klehm website:
spontaneousvegetation.net