Come explore plants as integration partners! This episode has some music woven in as you discover how plants can anchor you—grounding you and bringing you back to what’s emerging when life pulls you in a hundred directions. (If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, start there to understand why integration matters.)
In Part 2, you’ll learn when herbs fit: for digesting what’s confusing or overwhelming, working with intergenerational patterns, creating pauses and shifts around coping, and more.
What you’ll learn:
- How plants help you work with the tangible and intangible at once
- How plants become anchors in integration work
- Scenarios where herbs support your growth
- Foundational practices for working with plants
Herbs Mentioned:
- Rosemary (essential oil), Rosmarinus officinalis
- Rosemary (tea), Rosmarinus officinalis
- Passion flower, Passiflora incarnata
- Milky oat tops, Avena sativa
- Nettles, Urtica dioica
- Bergamot (essential oil/aromatherapy), Citrus bergamia
- Chamomile, Matricaria chamomilla or Chamaemelum nobile
- Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale
- Lemon balm, Melissa officinalis
- Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare
- Ginger, Zingiber officinale
- Cleavers, Galium aparine
- Burdock, Arctium lappa
- Ashwagandha, Withania somnifera
- Linden, Tilia spp.
- Lavender, Lavandula angustifolia
- Mullein, Verbascum thapsus
- Eucalyptus (aromatherapy), Eucalyptus globulus
- Pine (aromatherapy), Pinus spp.
- Cinnamon, Cinnamomum verum
- White hibiscus (essence), Hibiscus arnottianus
- Vetiver (essential oil), Vetiveria zizanioides
- Catnip, Nepeta cataria
- Eucalyptus (fresh for shower), Eucalyptus globulus
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Full Transcript:
Welcome in From Out of the Rain, I’m Quai and this is In Your Hands. Herbal Self-Care for Emotional Bodies, a podcast about the complexities of building your own wellness blueprint. I’m a psychotherapist and herbalist who brings a critical lens to the systems that both help and harm. I’ll hold that tension with you as we explore plant remedies, trauma work, nervous system support, and building self-care foundations.
And now for that awkward. Disclaimer, I’ve gotta give you. This shows for educational purposes only and is not a replacement for therapy or personalized herbal care. The herbal remedies and practices discussed are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please consult your healthcare provider for medical advice.
Now, let’s begin.
Okay, welcome to part two where we’re talking about plants as integration partners. Um, anchors that bring you back to noticing when life pulls you in like a hundred directions. I’m excited to talk about this because plants help us work with what’s emerging in really tangible ways. While also addressing what’s intangible, our emotions, our patterns, our inner shifts, and I’m gonna talk about leveraging these allies for integration in exploring why staying with these things matters.
Because transformation happens through small shifts, not just big breakthroughs. We looked at how to approach integration. Based on your patterns and finding practices that work for you without overwhelming you. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I strongly encourage you to do so because there’s a lot more nuance in.
And today we build on that as we delve into working with plants specifically for integration. Sometimes you need something that brings you back to the noticing, and plants can be a resource for that. Plants aren’t just remedies. You take and forget when you work with them well, they become touch points that pull you back to paying attention.
They create space for noticing, there’s always an invitation with a plant, and here’s what I mean. Maybe you inhale something like Rosemary Essential oil, and then you notice your focus coming online pretty quickly. Or another subtler version of that is. Drinking rosemary tea and noticing what you can pay attention to in a more sustained way.
Or you work with a remedy that has a muscle relaxing property and you notice what it’s like when your muscles are less tense.
Sometimes plants give us the gift of noticing the absence of something. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve given someone a remedy for gas, and when I ask them how it worked, sometimes they say something like, oh, I don’t know. I forgot I even took it. Then they eat the same meal without the remedy and it becomes apparent that remedy paired.
So well with their system, they barely noticed. Now that might sound like plants don’t matter, but actually it’s the opposite. It means that the remedy matched them so precisely that their body and their digestive system could just work. So no gas pulling their attention away. And that’s one kind of noticing, noticing the absence of a struggle, but then there’s another kind of noticing, Ooh, what’s that?
What happens when you work with plants is that something becomes a little more alive
if you drink a cup of good herbal tea and buy good herbal tea. I mean, plants that have. Vitality that we’re harvested and stored well, there’s always a shift that happens.
If you’re paying attention, your mood slightly shifts. You’re more in touch with a feeling that you’d been pushing away, and maybe there’s parts of us that don’t wanna be in touch. We avoid when there’s. Fear. There’s fear when we don’t feel like we have a gentle way that gets us through and out. We know we need to get to the other side, and sometimes we just try to decide we’re there, but we’ve not done the sorting out that gets us there.
Sorting out is often less burdensome than imagined. When it’s gradual and it’s different than bypassing Plants can be one companion in this. But the biggest companion is you. You are going to find the things you need when you stay with yourself. Once you learn to track yourself well, you’ll have the precision of observation that no one else does.
That doesn’t mean don’t get support. We all need that at times. What it does mean is the biggest resources within ourselves can go unnoticed. And plants help bring us back. If you sit near a plant, it brings you into contact with something beyond your preoccupied self. You might notice something about the leaves or the bark on the tree.
Your breath a lot of times, will deepen without you even trying. And time slows down for a moment. So plants pull us into the present. They invite us to sense.
Plants give us these invitations, and that’s what makes them good partners in integration work. They don’t let you stay disconnected. Today, I’m gonna give you different ways to work with plants in your integration prep. Practice. When we work with plants and integration, they become part of how you’re already paying attention.
You notice how the remedy might fit your day, what shifts when you use it, and how your body responds. Plants become anchors. These remedies can support you in staying attentive.
As we dive in, here’s something to consider. Plants work on multiple levels at once.
A remedy that relaxes your muscles is also likely to be calming. An herb that supports digesting food may help you digest emotions that you’ve been carrying. A scent that grounds you physically might also connect you to something like rooting into new ground. That’s why plants fit integration so well when you contend to what’s emerging across all of you.
Body, mind, emotions, patterns so much as possible. The five ways I’m about to show you demonstrate how plants could meet you on all of these levels. So let’s pull out another integration menu. Okay? Okay. First on this menu is maybe you’ve decided to do something new or challenging work that’s personally meaningful, but also demanding.
Or perhaps you’ve decided it’s time to implement a change, like moving or ending a relationship, and you need to. Show up for the work or for yourself consistently. Plants might help sustain yourself through that work or enhance other things you’re doing to sustain yourself. You might work with remedies that support your sleep, like passion, flour, or plants that nourish like milky oat tops or nettles.
Or you might have remedies for the stress points during a transition time. Bergamot aroma therapy or a strong chamomile tea are two quick examples that come to mind. So the plants here, they’re not doing the work for you, but they’re creating the conditions where you can do the work or better sustain the stress of changes.
Okay, so for the second scenario, maybe you’re working with a bunch of feelings that are confusing. You don’t know why something in your personal growth feels unclear and you wanna support digesting these feelings. This is where plants that support digestion, both emotionally and physically, can help, because often when we can’t process our feelings, we also can’t digest our food well.
They’re connected. It’s good to think about this as. Breaking things down into small, digestible pieces because we can only work with little bits at a time. So things like bitters, chamomile, or dandelion can help your body produce digestive juices. They signal it’s time to break things down, time to process, and carminatives like lemon balm, fennel, or.
Ginger can help ease your digestive system and help move things through. When you work with these plants, you’re not just supporting your gut. You’re working with the metaphor of digestion. What needs to be broken down, what needs to move through, what needs to be eliminated? What are you holding that’s creating discomfort?
It’s kind of wild if you think about that.
Our emotional states are so intertwined with our physical functioning, and this is a quick way to see it. There’s been research that shows psychological stress is a big factor in the development of I irritable bowel disease. Just to give a quick example, research is one way of knowing your lived experience and being in your body is another, and often the more precise one.
Another good way that plants are great for integration is when you recognize that you need to connect or reconnect with your body signals or when you’re making an adjustment to center yourself a bit more, center your needs a bit more in your life. This is when I like to think about nutritive herbs and tonic herbs.
Herbs that support us in strengthening particular body systems and supporting our overall wellbeing. Some examples are cleavers, nettle, burdock, milky oats, ashwagandha, and lemon balm. This might mean working with plants that target places in your body where you carry tension or disconnection. Your neck, your shoulders.
Back or pelvis. Places where stress and trauma often live. Plants like Linden, lavender or chamomile can help muscles relax. Or it might mean working with your lungs. Grief can come up there. And also for literal breath support and for the felt sense of expansion, Mullin as a tea or aromatherapy like eucalyptus or pine might be supportive.
Each time you use a remedy, it becomes a touchpoint, a moment to check in. How am I breathing? Where am I holding? What do I need right now? So you’re looking for plants that help you create these touchpoint as you practice reconnecting with your body signals. Maybe you’ve discovered that some of your difficulties are related to intergenerational patterns, ways of being that got passed down, and not all of it is harm.
Some of it you wanna keep, some of it you wanna release and some aspects you’ve been closed to that you’re ready to open. You might work with plants that support you with what you appreciate. Qualities you feel. Affection for and want to strengthen, and plants that help you release what doesn’t match what you want to be in the world.
If you’re opening up to aspects of yourself that were shut down, maybe parts of your sexuality or ways of expressing emotion or ways of taking up space, you might work with warming and moving plants like cinnamon, ginger plants that help energy flow where it’s been stuck. And then there’s symbolic work with plants.
You select plants that match the themes you’re working with. For example, I think about plant essences. They’re often called flower essences, but I find that term misleading since it are made from various plants, not just flowers. And unlike herbal extracts or teas that work with a plant’s physical constituents, essences capture the energetic influence of a plant.
So they’re made by placing plant material and. Bring water to absorb that influence and then stabilized with either alcohol or glycerin. They work subtly yet profoundly, and they can serve as a symbolic representation of what you’re working with. If what’s emerged is that there’s too much rushing around or urgency in your life, white hibiscus essence might help you slow down if you’re moving from rigidity to flexibility.
The symbol of oats that flow in the wind and are nourishing to overtax systems can be supportive if you’re rooting into something new. Ver essential oil, which is a root or working with burdock root are examples. And the last example I’ll give is noticing patterns on how you cope, reaching for substances, distractions, food, soothing when you’re not hungry, and this is not as a judgment, but as information about what parts of you are seeking comfort or.
Escape and what they’re trying to escape. So you can work with plants in a way that help you pause before the reach when cravings come up, or during heightened anxiety or periods of stress and fear. Formulas can create a moment to notice what you’re actually seeking and also support some of the comfort.
That you need. Sometimes it’s young parts of you that can’t verbalize their needs. Well, catnip can be supportive there and soothing. There’s so much more to say on this topic, but for now I’m keeping it as an overview. The remedy becomes a touch point, a pause point, and depending on what’s driving the craving, it may help ease some of the intensity to.
So we’ve covered five scenarios where plants might support your integration. Let’s look at them at a glance. Building your foundation for new challenges, supporting digestion when things feel confusing or like too much at once. Reconnecting with body signals, working with intergenerational patterns, and creating pauses and shifts around coping.
Just chiming in here to say something. If this is shifting how you think about plants and integration, share it, especially with practitioners or people doing personal growth work. Who could use these frameworks? That’s why I created the show as a community-wide resource. And before I go deeper into how to work with plants, if you’re looking for personalized support, I work with people one-on-one in herbalism consultations and in deeper therapeutic processes, which can work alongside other support.
You’re receiving links and show notes. Now let’s continue to those foundational practices.
Okay. So those five scenarios show you when and why you might wanna work with plants. And I’ve mentioned a few specific plants, but now I wanna talk about some foundational practices and ways of working with plants that can support you in any of those approaches. And I’m gonna share four of them. Okay?
Okay. The first practice is presence, and I really think that there’s good reasons why some people have a very hard time with this. And I see that plants can help settle the system, um, help create an environment that makes that feel more contained. And so I wanna talk a little bit more about this, having plants in your environment.
Or going to theirs, going into spaces where they are, their, their home, and not taking them as re remedies necessarily, but just being in proximity to them. This naturally slows your system down and it creates space for whatever’s emerging. I don’t know how this happens, but every time I work with plants, um, sometimes mixing dried herbs, processing plant material for tinctures, having them in my hands, um, my emotions come to the surface.
Not the same emotion every time, but whatever’s there is there and whatever guards and protective parts might distance me from them, they tend to soften when I’m around them. I’m not saying the same exact thing will happen for you, but I’m curious what might emerge if you spent some more time with plants.
The second ritual is touch points. I’ll start off by talking about tea as a practice. There are several things about it that are sensual. It has a particular smell. There’s a temperature involved. So the warmth, unless you’re doing a cold infusion, um. And dried herbs or fresh herbs. ’cause you can make tea out of fresh herbs if you’re not, um, familiar with doing that.
All of these coming together and alchemizing with temperature, water, and plant material. Then the process of sipping, noticing how it feels in your mouth, how it interacts with your system. This brings you home to yourself. It’s grounding. And if you make a therapeutic strength, t I’ll link to my blog post on this in the show notes.
Something will shift in your system. The time, that time creating and sipping The T invites you to touch down into whatever’s here for you. And then plants interacting with our systems, they. Stir things up, they sometimes level things off, but I don’t think that you can interact with an intentionally prepared cup of tea and not have some type of shift or, um, at least momentary greater awareness of yourself.
Just to give you two more quick examples of working with rituals. Um, one is like having plants around in an aromatic way. So one thing I think is really incredible is if you can find some good eucalyptus, fresh eucalyptus and have it string it into the shower head and. Be able to experience a shower where you’re able to breathe a little bit deeper and interact with that plant as you’re cleansing yourself.
Another example would be working with a massage O oil where you’re, you have some plant material. This could either be an herbal oil or a diluted essential oil. If you want to know the difference between those, I actually cover that in episode four when I’m talking about calming plants.
The third practice is remedies as anchors.
Ones that tend to your heart when you’re sad or grieving ones that support an overactive mind or nervous body. Ones that connect to what you’re cultivating over time. The person you’re becoming, the patterns you’re shifting. Working with remedies in this way are like investments.
You are putting energetic and physical resources into your wellbeing, your growth, your sense of deserving to feel well. You’re committing to what you’ve set out to do, and each time you take a remedy, it becomes a rich moment, respite and ritual that don’t carry the negative impacts of other vices. You are creating space for discovering and noticing.
At some point the anchor needs shift. You finish the bottle or tea blend and you have a choice. Do you return to those herbs to keep tending to this or have your needs shifted? This is what I mean when I say working with herbs are working with the tangible and intangible at the same time.
These herbal moments. Of seeing how you’re doing is right at the heart of integration work. When you see a remedy as an anchor, each time you reach for it, you can ask yourself general questions like, how am I right now? What do I need? Having that tangible check-in helps you with the less tangible things that you can be asking yourself.
And you may ask yourself something specific to what you’re integrating, like if you’re working with opening up, when you tend to close off, you might ask a question like, how open or close do I feel right now? Or if something feels unprocessed. And you’re aware like, oh, this is something that I, um, want to get to, but I wasn’t ready when I was first thinking about it.
You can ask yourself a kind question about where you are or something like, how does carrying this unresolved thing feel in my system right now? How close or far am I from wanting to work with it fit? The fourth plant practice is working with multiplicity. Each plant addresses multiple levels at once.
If you’re curious to learn more about this checkout episode five where I talk about the difference between plants and herbs, and also episode four that I just mentioned about calming herbs and why we need to be really nuance. In our understanding of finding plant allies, and for now our, for our purposes in this episode, what I want you to know is that physical symptoms often connect to emotional patterns.
So you might be working with a remedy where there’s something that is physically uncomfortable and that remedy is also supporting you in addressing emotional experiences that come along with that, um, the physical patterns that you’re addressing.
Let’s bring this all together. We’ve covered five scenarios where plants can support your integration work, building the foundation for new challenges, digesting what feels confusing or needs to be broken down into smaller pieces, reconnecting with your body signals, working with intergenerational patterns, and creating pauses and shifts in how you cope.
And we looked at four foundational practices being in the presence of plants. Personal plant rituals using herbal moments as check-in and scaffolding for small transformation and investments into yourself, and working with plants to address multiple levels at once. Here’s what I want you to remember.
Working with Plants for integration is an energetic and physical investment into your wealth. Your growth, your sense of deserving to feel well. These herbal moments carry respite and ritual without burdens. Other things might carry. Plants are companions in this. They help you work with the tangible and intangible at the same time.
They’re not doing the work for you, but they may support your system with conditions that make your wellbeing more within re. You may wanna work with plants when you need something tangible to anchor into when you want to work with your body and your emotions at the same time. Or when you’re building something new and needs support that fits you.
That’s the possibility here. Plants as partners in staying with what matters. Alright. I hope this leaves you in a better place. If this episode was useful, please share it with someone who might benefit. That’s how the show grows and reaches people who need it. You can also subscribe to my newsletter for monthly insights on Herbal Self-Care and building your wellness blueprint.
Links in the show notes. If today’s episode sparked a question or perspective you’d like to share, reach out, especially if you’re speaking from lived experience or you are a practitioner working with similar themes. Take care however that looks for you today, and I leave you with birds I recorded on my city block to wherever you are.
Hi, I'm Quai - psychotherapist, herbalist, and host of In Your Hands: Herbal Self-Care for Emotional Bodies. This show is for anyone deepening their self-care practice, exploring intergenerational patterns, navigating harm reduction or recovery work, herb-curious folks wanting practical guidance, and practitioners looking for resources to share with clients.
I combine herbalism, trauma work, and a critical lens on the systems that shape wellness. Whether you're piecing together care skills that weren't modeled, working with your relationship to coping strategies, or thinking deeply about how oppression impacts wellbeing, this show offers context, frameworks, and practical tools.
We explore plant remedies, nervous system support, and the often-overlooked infrastructure that makes sustainable self-care actually possible. Join the newsletter at for care tips, episode announcements, and herb recipes.
