Vital Agency

How recognizing vital forces changes the way we heal (guest post)

Rhyd’s note.

Natasha Clarke, who writes Updates from the Undergrowth, sent me this piece in response to one of the essays in my series, The Mysteria. In that installment, entitled Ghosts In the Machine, I discussed vitalism and its relationship to the pre-modern belief that intermediary spirits (spirits of nature, of natural forces including decomposition and fermentation, and many others) were active agents in all parts of life. In that essay, I wrote:

“This is the root of disenchantment: an entire category of beings, which fifteen centuries’ worth of European Christians (and many more centuries of pagans before them) had believed existed, was suddenly written out of the world.”

There are, of course, still traditions which recognize vital forces. In fact, most non-Western healing traditions work with them. And that’s why Natasha wrote and sent me this essay.

Natasha is both an herbalist and an animist, and I think her essay great expands the crucial point I made. Particularly, her points about the concept of blame and agency are crucial — and also quite liberating.

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I’m a practicing herbalist, and I work with the vital force within my clients. I also connect and work with the vital force present in the herbs whose aid I use to help support and nourish my clients’ vital force.

I’m an animist as well as a herbalist, although this shouldn’t be surprising: even the most “sciency” herbalists out there (and we’re a small community of practitioners in the US) can’t help but be somewhat animistic. That’s because, for the most part, we all have made medicine from the ground up, and in this act of making medicine you communicate with the plant spirit. Upon becoming a clinical herbalist, I immediately saw how my peers not only worked with the vital force of the humans, but also acknowledged and, in some way, worked with the vital force of plant medicine.

Even if you don’t believe in any of that “woo,” even if you completely ignore all the invisible helpers at hand, at a very basic level, you cannot help but feel the enduring, incredible, and holy love emanating from the plant being. And working with the vital force and plant medicine, invisible helpers, guides, and the divine is very rewarding and also extremely practical. It also complements conventional medicine, which excels at the physical manipulation of the body.

The way this works is this: found a bullet in your gut? Let’s first get that removed, and then we heal you with herbs. (Any healer who dismisses function of any kind should be a red flag — no matter which end of the spectrum.)

Understanding and working with the vital force is our first medicine. As an herbalist, working alongside plant spirits and helpers I have remedied sepsis, asthma, phenomena, flu, bone breaks, horrible animal and machine lacerations and wounds of all kinds, addictions, chronic digestive issues, autoimmune conditions and inflammatory conditions, to name a few. I have herbalist colleagues who specalize in cancer and childbirth. I say this not to boast, but because people simply have forgotten that we have effective and incredible plant remedies and healers. What we don’t have, though, is a culture where there is an understanding of how and when to use these modalities, who to trust, and where to access them. Instead, we have a culture of snake oil salesmen — whether it be essential oils or ozempic.

Right now, as we see the downturn on the wheel of our current empire, we are also seeing the darker side of conventional medicine. We are witnessing the truly corrupt side, where the practical has been thoroughly taken over by the profitable. Not just the beginnings of evil — the “say no to breast milk because formula is better” and “circumcision is the only hygienic answer” and countless other post-war health profit policies — but the true evil of drugs and practices that do absolute harm. Many of these cause the illnesses they are pertaining to cure, or an even worse one.

In such a situation, it’s inevitable that there is an upsurge of folks desiring agency in their own health, desiring to know what the body is trying to communicate.

Our body asks us to reach into what is unknown and make it known, to cultivate both curiosity in our own well-being and desire for agency in it. Many of us feel we have no ability to find out what is wrong or even ways of centering ourselves against the great fear of illness. David Whyte sums up this barrier to connection very well:

“Anxiety is the mind refusing to be consoled and nourished either by the body itself, or the world this body inhabits: anxiety is an extended state of denial; the refusal to put right something that needs to be put right, because putting it right means feeling real anguish, a real sense of the unknown and the need to change at a fundamental level.”

It's very difficult to be curious when we are afraid. Generally, it's far easier to focus on getting rid of the sickness without making any great changes, finding a fast solution so we can get back to the lifestyle that caused the illness. We often blindly take whatever is prescribed so we don’t have to deal with the actual reality of the matter: our actual matter.

This is the trickiest part of my work — to help people through the anxiety and into the heart of the conversation the body is initiating. And unfortunately, the for-profit aspect of modern healing often preys mercilessly on this anxiety.

As a healer, I can say with absolute certainty that the concepts of blame or punishment are irrelevant in the matter of illness. No one “deserves” to get ill, not your ex, sociopaths, homeless, tyrants, or our loved ones. And no one is “at fault” for being ill.

But — we are each responsible for our illness. We are all responsible for understanding what we need and how to meet our needs. And often, this responsibility takes far more time and dedication than we feel we have to give, leading us to leave our wellbeing to the very last minute - until there is no other choice.

One of the most damaging aspects of the last 150 years of conventional medicine has been the way it prioritizes listening to analytical mechanisms at the expense of listening to our bodies. We treat machines — and the people who wield them — as superior sources of knowledge, believing that because these machines can “see” things that we cannot see, we must fully distrust our bodily feelings. We discount other sources of knowing — especially what we can know through the body.

Be it on the street, in the office, or in the hospital bed, healing is a miraculous event — no matter its modality. Healing is a transformative process, and it transforms both how we care for ourselves and also how we care for all other life on the planet. Healing is ultimately about how we align ourselves — and then align ourselves in relationship. This is why healing has always been associated with the divine and the sacred: a relationship beyond us and our usual understanding. If life is sacred, then so too is the healing of life.

Working with vital forces means embracing our own part in the miraculous process of healing, and being responsible for our illness allows us to make the choices that align us with those forces and the process of healing. Thus, the modalities and methods are a secondary matter — illness is ultimately a process of transformation, a path to aligning with our truth and place in the world. And this grounds us in the spiritual realm where we learn also to feel with our emotions, not our minds, as truth expresses itself in our body. This is why working with vital forces — recognizing the vital force in ourselves and each other — is a process of not just bodily but also spiritual well-being.

And this is also why, in a world stripped of gods, with science as our dogma, the “West” is plagued by chronic disease despite being cosseted in comfort and abundance.

Luckily, we are not alone, and have endless traditions to draw from — Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Hippocratic and Vendidad comprehensions, as well as countless indigenous modalities — all sharing a common understanding that illness can arise both from an imbalance of the spirit (vital force) or from externalities. For most of us, there is usually some emotional or spiritual (or a combination of the two) stressor that we repeatably push away and ignore, and this then manifests in the physical plane.

As a herbalist, it is my work to understand the root cause of a disease and to look at what the body is asking to be changed. I once had a client come to me for an addiction issue. After talking about the issue, I told them they could take a tea that helped address the physical aspects of addiction, but little would actually change until they quit their job: it was clear he was being constantly bullied by his boss and this was consuming him. Miraculously, the client did, and the addiction issue was remedied.

It can be that simple. Frequently, such issues can be ancestral (what we like to refer to as genetic) and require healing a line of generational abuse. Or they can be deeply unconscious, as with a child who has asthma. Such instances often require treating the asthmatic symptoms, improve lung function (supporting and nourishing the vital force) while also addressing the cause of asthma. Though these causes vary, they are often related to stress linked to digestion: emotionally and physically an inability to metabolize experiences and the grief around that loss. In such conditions, we have to look at how the mind, the body, and the spirit makes us feel and how we feel in place. And of course, asthma could be exasperated from the outside — a moldy environment, for example, which also comes with the question, why are we living like this?

Being responsible for our own illness requires support. The more support there is, the more focus can directed toward building up strength and stamina for the changes required — changes that our illness is asking that we make. This support can definitely come from our loved ones, but it also makes equal sense to have help from the places and sentient beings that we also live with.

It makes a lot of sense to be in deep relationship with the ones who help us. One of the most detrimental aspects to health is lack of community. One of the first things anyone can do to build resiliency — for health and for all else — is to build strong community, both human and non human. With strong community, when we need to make time and space for change, someone or something has our back, and we then can be more flexible in our choices. Community strengthens our agency, too, helping us become more than mere victims of circumstances.

Currently, so many people are becoming sick through their circumstances and feel powerless to change them. Or sick through environments they mistakenly believe are beyond their control and influence, even as we are collectively holding the agreements in place that create those unhealthy environments.

We live in an incredible, miraculous, and beautiful home here on Earth. Our bodies are the same, the micro in the macro, and we are all interconnected in magical and mysterious ways. The vital force, the divinity that is life, runs through us all in infinite expressions, and we get to be part of it as our birthright. Herbalists, acupuncturists, alternative practitioners, and many other healers — human and non-human — can teach us how to nourish and support the easy flow of our vital force. And through this work, we learn how incredible, miraculous, and beautiful our home — Earth — is. So, too, our bodies — likewise incredible, miraculous, and beautiful, interconnected in magical, mysterious, and vital ways

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