Herbs for Highly Sensitive People: Weekly Herbal Practices for Wellbeing
Having already explored the daily practices that can help those of us with heightened sensitivity thrive, I wanted to share with you some of my favorite weekly practices. These are practices that might be too much to practice everyday, but are great once a week or a few times a month. An important practice to cultivate as highly sensitive people are ways of tending to our sensory needs little by little instead of finding ourselves fighting against burnout and having to use up even more of our resources to get ourselves upright again.
I see these weekly practices like sensory weekends - they should be something to look forward to and a purposeful break from more challenging sensory experiences we might have to manage on day-to-day basis. While I'll be sharing specific practices that I and my highly sensitive clients and students find useful, I hope you'll hopefully be inspired by the key concept of the practice to develop ones that are a best fit for you if you need something a little different.
image via @limone
Through the Herbs for Highly Sensitive People series we'll be exploring ways of creating these little zones of peace throughout our days, weeks, and months, making space for us to reconnect with our sensitivity in ways that feel empowering. Herbalism is a sensory rich healing tradition, full of sights, scents, tastes, and sensations, that draws us back into the collective wisdom pooled in our body and pulled up by our plant allies. Working with plants is one way that we, as sensitive folks, can honor the sensitive ways of our body by strengthening a resilience that reconnects while alleviating the symptoms of overstimulation.
When I write of the body, I am referring to the body in its most expansive form including the physical, emotional, mental, and mythological body. I'm not trying to describe the emotional body as a separate part from the physical body, but rather that our bodies have emotional experiences intertwined with physical experiences intertwined with mental and mythological experiences. Part of the practice of highly sensitive people is to explore through our bodies what we have been asked or forced to separate rather than create a healthy boundary. Being called "too sensitive" over and over again, for example, asks us to separate from our very real lived experience instead of creating healthy boundaries that help us feel less overwhelmed by our depth of feeling.
And for those who might balk at the term "highly sensitive" but find yourself reflected in a lot of the descriptions of high sensitivity - I feel you on that - and you might want to check out my first post in this series exploring some of the limitations of the "highly sensitive" moniker and how folks like Chris D. Hooten have proposed more culturally expansive and inclusive terms like highly responsive to your environment or HREs. I really like the term HRE and I highly encourage you to give Hooten's article a read.
I hope that these simple practices will fit in alongside any mental health services, community support groups, and the general network of good company in your friends and family. Plant medicine thrives as a stress-reducing, nervous system reparative, and preventative modality while helping us to return to a more earth-centered and affirming way of being in the world - a great path for any highly sensitive person to be on.
Weekly Herbal Practices for Highly Sensitive People
image via @hdhuong233
Sit With Plants
My dream for everyone is to be able to safely and easily find time to be outside with plants on a daily basis. But it can be challenging, especially for folks who live in an urban environment, to be able to sit amongst local flora including trees without attracting unwanted attention or in a place that feels peaceful enough to settle or accessible enough to even get to.
Even if you have easy access to being with plants on a daily basis, I encourage you to set aside time once a week to just be with your plant kin. Not gardening or making remedies or doing a ritual or divination or any thing other kind of doing, but showing up, slowing down, and being with your plant kin. Let yourself get caught up in beyond-human life for a bit.
We are asked to extend our consciousness into spaces that narrow and limit our expansive nature - whether driving through hectic traffic, staring at screens all day, stuck in buildings that cut us off from fresh air and light - so it's important to intentionally stretch our consciousness into spaces that allow for softness, ease, and openness. For highly sensitive or responsive people, we need more sensory breaks often through sensory cocooning where we purposely seek out sensory environments and experiences that are restorative to our overworked nervous systems. Plants are great consciousness-expanders, helping us to climb out of sensory pits of overwhelm and into spaces that feel more inviting, inspiring, comforting, and centering.
Practice Recommendations
Sitting with plants is a simple practice. Let’s say you find a beautiful Calendula (Calendula officinalis) to sit with. Let yourself softly gaze at their form and color - all of their variations of yellow, oranges, and greens. You're not looking for anything but letting yourself perceive the plant (and letting the plant perceive you back). You might want to touch leaves and petals, or not. If the plant is safe to pick a leaf or flower and ingest you might choose to do that, or not. If you feel that feeling of needing to do something or achieve something (such as believing that you must connect with the plant spirit in some profoundly meaningful way), let those thoughts pass through you like clouds across the sky. As you sit with your plant friend, allow yourself to sit with the sky and earth around, beneath, and within you.
Let yourself notice the sky. Notice the earth. Notice colors, textures, sights, scents, and sounds. But noticing all these things with as little attachment as possible.
When done it can be nice to offer the plant a bit of water, a song or other biodegradable and environmentally appropriate offering. But it's also ok to say thank you in your heart and depart, not letting yourself get too attached to the process of "right" or "proper" offering either.
Bonus Practice: Check In With Your Inner Landscape
As we sit with the world around us, we can also learn how to sit with the world within us - our very own inner landscape. Knowing our inner landscape is how we learn to advocate for ourselves, deviate from an unhelpful path, and create more peace in our life. It can be interesting to just notice what our inner landscape looks like (especially if this is your first time attempting such a practice), but there is also a lot of useful information that can be gleaned for observing the land within us and naming what we see.
For example, one person might observe a dullness to their inner landscape, which might mean that it's time to seek out those intensely immersive sensory experiences (going out dancing or to the movies) with their friends to help bring back that energetic spark. For others a dullness might mean still getting together with friends over the weekend, but suggesting heading out for a picnic in a quiet park instead of a noisy brunch spot, so they can feel rejuvenated without feeling further dulled by overextending themselves.
Consciousness-expanding Plant Allies
While I think working with local plants and flower essences can be most helpful and interesting when sitting with your local floral, there are plenty of consciousness-expanding plants from the traditional western herbalism materia medica that are great to work with at most any time and any place. I've listed a few below and they can be great to take (as tinctures, teas, or your favorite type of remedy or topically as body oils or aura sprays).
🌿 Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis): If you're look for a plant ally to work with in your sitting with plants practice, I recommend starting with Lemon Balm. Lemon Balm is the plant I turn to for a sensory reset to help folks reconnect to the world around them after a period of overwhelm. A great nervous system tonic (see my first post in this series for more nervous system tonic recommendations), Lemon Balm carries bee magick and has a beautiful way of helping us find resonance with the collective buzz of the world.
🌿 Rose (Rosa damascena): When in doubt or overwhelmed with all of the options for what type of herb to start working and seeking a connection with, choosing an ancestral plant like Rose can be a good place to start. Rose is an ancient plant, having watched our species evolve on the planet and it's an excellent nervous system soothing, heart opening, and consciousness-expanding plant ally to connect with.
🌿 Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris): Mugwort is a dreamy plant, helping to bring about a calm yet expansive state of being. I find that a little goes a long way and if you find that Mugwort works too strongly on your sensitive system, the flower essence is a great alternative. If you are able to work with a local variety of Mugwort, even better!
image via @lulisosabe
Honor Your Body
Our body is a temple of sensation, of intuition, and beats the marks of our genetic inheritance alongside our lived experiences. Just as we feed our internal body through eating, our external body needs nourishment too - not for beauty standards or out of fear of aging - but in the way that after a long week of sensory input it can be helpful to spend just a little bit of extra time helping our body feel grounded and centered. It is especially important to honor our body after a week of less than desirable sensory experiences, letting ourselves relax into the type of sensory input that we enjoy, signalling to our nervous system that it's ok to take a break and reset.
Topical treatments are abundant in herbalism, from oils to salves, baths teas to shower rinses, face masks and more. I have given simple instructions for some of my favorites below, but take this list as inspiration to find the type of topical technique that works best for you. I would emphasize focusing on simple and short practices - we are not looking to do marathon "wellness" routines featuring a dozen products, but something that is easy to do while being interesting enough to look forward to.
Recommended Practice
What topical remedy you choose to work with, with all its accompanying scents and sensations, is going to be a personal choice, but I've listed a few of my favorite topical treatments for the highly sensitive / highly responsive.
✨ Herbal Baths or Shower Teas: Being able to soak in a bath infused with herbal tea or include a shower tea in your routine (i.e. a tea that you can pour over yourself and massage into your skin during a shower) are fantastic choices to a weekly sensory reset practice. You can also do foot or hand baths infused with herbs of your choosing (see the suggestions below) if a full bath feels like too much or is too not easy to pull off.
✨ Oil Massage: There is something so soothing about using gently warmed herbal oil to massage into the body after a shower or bath. In general, massages can help to rebalance nervous systems and regulate our internal sensory environment. Adding an herbal oil, either made with one or more of the herbs suggested below, or working with a practitioner to develop an oil best for your constitution and skin needs, brings an extra layer of comfort and alleviation symptoms of stress. While a full body oil massage is great, you can also just focus on one part of the body (such as the hands or feet) and still experience a lot of benefits from the practice.
✨ Face Masks: A face mask of clay and powdered herbs mixed with oil, water, and/or honey is simpler than a full body oil massage but still chock-full of sensory benefits. It requires very little in terms of actual physical herbs and clay (about a tablespoon total of powdered herbs and clay is usually more than enough) and I like using a wide fan brush to "paint" the mask on. You can also use a hydrosol or floral water in place of water for even more herbal benefits. Starting with a facial massage before applying the mask can help to stimulate the vagus nerve and bring about a state of relaxation throughout the body.
✨ Aura Baths: For my magickally minded folks or my sensitive folks who have a strong relationship to scent, aura baths can be a fun practice to incorporate into your routine. One version of an aura bath is using your incense of choice (including simple blends of loose herbs) that you can use the smoke of to "bathe" your aura in. Since burning sacred plants is a universal human practice, there are so many opportunities to incorporate ancestral herbs and traditions into an incense practice. The other smokeless option is to mix flower essences and/or essential oils into a spray bottle and use the spray to "bathe" your aura. Using scents is a powerful way of letting our nervous system know that it can settle and center.
Topical Plant Allies for Honoring Your Body
🌿 Rose (Rosa spp.): Calming, anti-inflammatory, heart-opening Rose is a beautiful plant ally to work with for all sorts of topical treatments. It's a great ally to work with when you are prone to irritability, anger, and states of overheating and excitation. I particularly love Rose water or including powdered Rose petals in a face mask. The flower and/or essence can be easily added to baths, too, and the flower essence is a lovely addition to aura sprays.
🌿 Calendula (Calendula officinalis): Another great plant ally of the skin, Calendula is included in a lot of healing salves because it is useful for so many kinds of topical conditions. What I particularly love about Calendula as an oil or addition to an herbal bath is the way that it helps to soothe our bodies after prolonged exposure to the elements as well as environmental pollutants. It's a lovely, energy brightening ally to work with.
🌿 Rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus): If your heightened sensitivity causes pain in your body, Rosemary is a gentle analgesic herb that you to incorporate into your herbal practice. Rosemary oil is particularly lovely for massage, but the herb can also be used in bath and shower teas. I also find it to be a particularly grounding scent to incorporate as an essential oil into an aura spray.
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I hope you found these simple weekly suggestions to take care of yourself useful, and that you're feeling inspired to imagine all the ways that working with plants regularly can cultivate an inner gentleness that is profoundly centering and strengthening.
For those of you looking for a more in-depth approach to herbalism and high sensitivity or if you work with a highly sensitive client base (including family members), I invite you to join me in Solace: Herbs & Essences for Highly Sensitive People.
Be sure to check out the first post in the series, Herbs for Highly Sensitive People: Daily Herbal Practices for Wellbeing, for more suggestions. In the meantime, may it feel increasingly easy for you to honor the ways that you are finely-tuned to experience the world with the beauty of depth and expansiveness.
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