Elemental Herbalism
All traditional forms of medicine have viewed the body, plants, and the seasons through an elemental lens. The Elements are the foundations of life. Everything seen or unseen has its origins within a unique composition of elements, water, air, fire, and earth, and when we intentionally work with them, we are moving into the very foundational blueprint of nature.
The Elements are a form of natural language, one that is born out of the heart of the Earth. This language teaches us about the rhythms and patterns of all of Nature, and how these are merely external reflections of our own inner pattern and rhythm. Fire is hot and drying, water is cool and moistening, earth is stable and dense, air is light and changeable. When we witness these qualities within the human body or within a plant, we can attribute them to the elements, and through this understanding we are enabled to find our own unique state of balance with the external environment. When the inner environment and the outer environment become one, we see our true nature.
Recognising the Elements in a Person
A person who is very light in frame, moves quickly, has an erratic personality, and dry skin could be said to have a lot of air in their physical and mental makeup. Of course, we are all made up of all the elements, and are also influenced by the seasons, the climate we live in, and what food we have been eating, so we are never one element, and that can change over time. It is important not to get stuck in stereotyping, but understanding the qualities of the elements can be a tool to help us see the patterns in illness and physicality on a deeper level than a doctor who is taught to treat the disease, and often will not go below the symptoms to discover the pattern and the person underneath a sore throat or urinary tract infection.
Each symptom can also correspond to an elemental imbalance at its core. Heat on the skin and rashes are indicative of a fire imbalance, while water retention could be seen as an excess or slow moving water imbalance. Seeing the elemental correspondence in a person, just as in a plant, is the beginning towards understanding their unique constitution and composition of energetic forces.
Herbal Energetics
Learning how to sense the elements within plants can help us understand how to balance and harmonise elemental disturbances within the body. Some plants have a high water content, such as aloe vera or slippery elm. These embody the qualities of being cooling and moistening, and when applied topically or internally, they can help soothe fire imbalances.
In herbalism, this understanding of the qualities of plants is known as herbal energetics, the felt qualities of a plant and how it interacts with the body. Instead of just asking what does this herb do, we ask, is it warming or cooling? Drying or moistening? Does it stimulate or relax? Where do I feel it in the body? This gives us vital information around its elemental architecture, and a natural language that adequately expresses and bridges the scientific world of matter and the energetic world of spirit.
For humans, energetics are considered the pattern in which a body functions and responds to the world around it, including temperature, energy levels, emotional tendencies, and tissue state. Someone with excess fire might show up as agitation, redness, or irritation. Working with energetics in herbalism means learning to read these patterns in people and match them to appropriate herbs, using antipathy, opposites to balance, or sympathy, using similars to balance.
Herbal energetics isn't often a focus of conventional herbal medicine training, and that's a shame, because so much of the nuance and subtlety of plants lives here. Take chamomile and damiana. Both are known to be relaxing for the nervous system and to reduce anxiety, yet on an elemental level they are completely different. Chamomile is bitter tasting and aromatic with a small measure of soothing, moistening quality, giving it an overall cooling, calming effect on the body, especially good for cramping and bloating in the digestive tract. Damiana, by contrast, is pungent, aromatic, warming, and mildly stimulating to circulation. It has more of an affinity with the fire element, warming and gently stimulating to the nervous system rather than sedating, a herb well suited to taking before a social occasion, so you can arrive relaxed and warm rather than withdrawn.
Developing Sensory Awareness
How do you learn to recognise the elements and herbal energetics within plants and people? The first step is developing your senses, touch, smell, sight, and sound. In herbalism, our senses are known as our organoleptic tools, and they are how people throughout human history have worked out the medicinal uses and actions of plants. Before there was Google or even books, people were far more connected to and knowledgeable about the plants around them, how to incorporate them into food and medicine. In today's ultra connected, technology driven world, we have forgotten how to listen and feel plants. We need to recultivate that awareness, and start to practice tasting and smelling different herbs again.
This art requires us to see each person and plant with fresh eyes, really listening and observing with presence. If we are running our mind's dialogue and diagnosing from a textbook, we are not really meeting their unique pattern in that moment, only masking symptoms. As Sajah Popham puts it, “the work of the herbalist is to understand the intricate patterns of Nature and how they are woven into the architecture of people and plants, to see them as mirror images of the Earth and cosmos, parts that contain the whole.”
Can you embody the elements and observe what you are sensing, rather than relying only on what you have been told? Herbalism, in its essence, connects us back to our intuition and power. A real teacher of herbalism will empower their student to never need a book again, but to feel free in the forest and garden, to trust their instincts and their handmade creations, connected to the elements & the heart of Nature.
