Lady's Slipper

An Excerpt from The Silver Branch and the Otherworld

An excerpt from The Silver Branch and the Otherworld — now available for pre-order at https://www.innertraditions.com/books/the-silver-branch-and-the-otherworld#

Walking in the forest in late spring, the sight of the first Lady’s Slipper in bloom always brings me to my knees. The gasp it brings is in part the awe I feel in the presence of the sacred—but something else as well: an ecstasy tinged with astonishment felt not just by the spirit but by the body as a whole, most markedly at the heart, the diaphragm, and the root of myself. A bliss of the embodied spirit taking pure delight in the sensual pleasure of the gorgeousness of the flower.

   This is the response that the flower evolved to elicit. The beauty of the flower exists for the purpose of seduction—drawing in bees whose wings and bodies are dusted with the pollen of another Lady’s Slipper, which will fertilize the ovum that will become the seed in autumn. Our biology is not that different from that of the bees. We too are seduced by pink blossoms in the forest and fall in wild, unbridled love with the flowers and the forest that gives them life.

Kate Gilday writes that Pink Lady’s Slipper flower essence aids with “releasing shame” and “understanding and delight in one’s sexuality, opening one to deeper levels of intimacy.” This speaks of a return to innocence in its deepest sense—the state of being without guilt, shame, or fear, free to follow the authentic response we feel to the world from the heart and from the root. In this culture, we tend to think of innocence as something that can never be regained once it is lost. But true innocence is always available to us through coming back to our true selves and coming back into relation with our wild kindred. Victor Anderson connected this concept with the word sankofa from the cultures of Central Africa, from which his most important teacher descended. Anderson said that Sankofa, a concept symbolized by a black heart (“the Black Heart of Innocence” he called it) or a bird looking backward and holding an egg in a posture that puts the bird’s body into the shape of a heart, means that “it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” We fail to go back for that which we have forgotten at our own peril. Lady’s Slipper helps us remember how to do this, how to respond to the world with joy and wonder.

Stephen Harrod Buhner describes the medicine of Lady’s Slipper as being like two loving hands cradling the heart. I learned from him that in the wake of the Civil War, the shattered hearts of soldiers cried out for the Lady’s Slipper’s medicine, and she was gathered almost to the point of extinction.

Plant medicines produce a direct and immediate impact in the body to alleviate suffering. At the same time they work to help the body remember the way back to health. This deep and often subtle healing happens best when space is opened for the plant to work deeply inside someone over time, penetrating further into the consciousness and the heart field. These forms of healing are, of course, inextricably linked. But in a culture that has forgotten that the plants are our ancestors and teachers, the living medicine of the plants we use is often forgotten and ignored. Too often, plant medicines are applied in a mechanistic way to create a specific result in the body. The medicine is still the medicine, but when we don’t give it space and time to do its work and we don’t engage the plant, much is lost.

 I imagine the shape of the Lady’s Slipper’s blossom—a heart open in the center shielded by wing-like petals—and I sense the way she could teach a heart forced shut by the brutality of war to begin to allow healing in again. And knowing many veterans who left pieces of themselves on distant battle fields, I also know something of the incredible patience and strength that opening takes.

Did the doctors treating “soldier’s heart” in the wake of the Civil War bring their patients to the woods to be with the plants that would become their medicine? More likelyy the tinctured or powdered root was administered to a patient who was taught little about its source. In the parlance of the day the plant was known as American Valerian, used primarily as a sedative. Plants are generous, using their bodies to create the medicines that will restore the imbalances in the ecosystem they perceive through the chemical and electromagnetic information they take in from the world around them—including the imbalances in the bodies of the humans who share their habitat. But the imbalances created in our culture are too big for the plants to correct through chemistry alone. There weren’t enough Lady’s Slippers in all of North America to heal all the pain and terror and loss the people here experienced as a result of the Civil War. And at the same time a single Lady’s Slipper could have taught the culture all it needed to know about how to reshape itself in ways that would give hearts the space they needed to heal and open again like pink orchids in the understory of a shady forest.

It still can. Lady’s Slipper is a plant whose medicine is best experienced through direct presence and through your senses’ memory of the late spring day when you first come upon her in the forest.