The roots of the word therapy are to tend, to attend, to service, to take care of and administer or minister healing. How do we attend our needs? How do we receive or not receive the administration of healing? Not only does the aroma of the plant and tree realms minister healing, but their teachings too, lie in the greater reminders they hold for us about growth and evolution. Studying their growth patterns and how they blossom in the soil they reside in, is a teaching to us, in and of itself. We, as humans have the ability to remove ourselves from a soil that does not serve our highest growth and evolution, but often, we keep moving and moving and moving (from ourselves or from community) when really we just need to stay rooted and do inner soil amendments. Learning from the plant and trees we see there is no right or wrong growth pattern, just APPROPRIATE DIVERSITY.

We are all as humans, evolving beings, spiritual beings having a temporary human experience…as a teacher of mine likes to say. The plants and trees RESPOND to and adapt to the quality of soil and how it either does or does not nourish their needs/requirements and they also RESPOND to and adapt to the environment. Sometimes it is more important for them to reach out and grow at all costs to reach the sun if they find themselves in a suffocating undergrowth. That growth may not be really graceful and may look “leggy” and unstable, but the plant knows with time it will “flesh out” and come back to sturdy. So too with us…..Sometimes the plant or tree knows to grow in integrity and fullness in tiny little measured increments to best protect itself…..So too with us. Sometimes a plant will keep nourishment back intentionally from a branch; The the very branch that seems dead, can still bear fruit. We can all learn about allocation of resources in our own beings. The tree or plant does not judge this process. Let’s let go of any judgements we have about HOW we are evolving and learning and adapting and responding to our inner requirements and to our environment, and honor all paths. So much of growth depends on our soil, our constitution, and our temperaments (choleric, sanguine, melancholic, or phlegmatic). In the diversity and wonder of watching the plant and tree beings grow and evolve and stretch for vitality and the sun, we learn to honor all our our growth patterns equally, in the myriad of diverse ways we each express.