two steps, two sachets

I have missed something important.

This knowledge has been working its way to the surface for days, but, as usual, I didn’t know it until I found what it was. Today I picked up a book that’s been sitting on my dresser for weeks, long enough in fact that it was due at the library for the second time and I had to take it in to be renewed. While the girls played and looked for books I took Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s The Green Witch out of the library bag and opened it, flipping through pages and scanning. There was a section on planting a witch’s garden that I wanted to read, but before I found it I was stopped by this passage:

Healing is another form of rebalancing energies that have become disturbed. But healing cannot be rushed. Each step must be experienced in fullness and in time. This goes for healing the earth as well as yourself, other individuals, and the community. You have to learn from the process so that each step is thoroughly felt, understood, and completed. There are two steps to healing:

1. Cleansing and/or purifying of the negative presence

2. Replacing the negative presence with something positive¹

Immediately my mind raced back over the last few days and weeks, all the frustration, all the mental and emotional upheaval. I have been trying to rush the healing, wanting it complete and now, forgoing the process entirely. Patience has never been my strength. A knot, the desperate tangle of what’swrongwithmewhat’swrongwithmewhat’swrongwithme! that’s been running a mad loop in my head for days, came loose in an instant. Ah. What’s wrong with me is I’m exhausting myself in a hopeless fight against the very nature of healing. “Many people,” says Arin Murphy-Hiscock, “focus on the first step and forget about the second.” I was one of them. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” she continues, “and what results from the first step is an empty space where the negative energy was and which new energy will rush to fill. The problem is that we do not always control what kind of energy fills the space.” This, I realized, is exactly what I was experiencing. I cast several things out recently, banishing old voices in my head and renewing the way I think about health and healing and spirituality and freedom and family loyalty, but I failed to mindfully replace the negative with a positive, which invited chaotic uncertainty and second-guessing and anxiety—new negatives to take the place of the old. That won’t do. I continued reading:

To gain control and finish the healing process properly, you can perform a blessing (which asks another entity or spirit to bestow positive energy) or channel positive energy yourself to strengthen the object or person being healed.

The thought came to me, whole and unbidden: I must create a healing sachet. This is not something I have done before, but herbs are the source I reach for when in need of healing, and I have always believed that healing plants have a spiritual connection to us. Since I was already taking a number of herbs and supplements internally, and using as many essential oils externally or diffused, what I desired now was a small packet of healing magic I could keep under my pillow, where I could touch it at night or early in the morning, when the dread and anxiety was at its worst. Turning more pages in the book I found a wonderful list of trees, flowers, and herbs, with their medicinal and magical properties. Pulling out my notebook I began a list of all the healing plants that I had access to at present.