Love is an action

Intersectionality and the path of plants

Growing our hearts

The plants awaken us. This I know through having had the honour to see many hundreds of people discover insight and wisdom through working with the plants. Each plant will stretch us in a different way and in this stretching, which is wide ranging in its possibilities, the heart is also stretched.

I have come to see that the path of a healer is a path of choosing to keep growing our hearts, keep growing our love and keep expanding our loving actions. Along this path we inevitably discover hidden shadows within us. Some of these shadows are very personal – echoes of our own stories, our childhood, our experiences of the culture we grow up in and our parents. Some of these shadows lie deeper – they are ancestral and system and speak of suffering – and the adaptations to it – beyond anything we personally might have experienced in our lifetime.

It is often easier to recognise the ways in which we ourselves have felt marginalised than it is to recognise the ways in which we have invisible privilege. I’ve created a simple self-reflective tool to help people consider this below.

Where there is privilege, might we have blind spots? Might we take certain things for granted where others may be experiencing distress and suffering? How much have we truly opened our hearts and created space to hear the experiences of others who have different lived experiences from us? Where are our judgements and how do we alchemise these into love and loving action? Where we ourselves have felt othered – have felt the impact of systemic violence within our own beings – how do we meet this? How might we have numbed, masked and adapted to move away from this pain? How might we awaken a fierce love in response to our lived experiences?

The plants, if we allow them, call us to wake up, to be fully alive, to grow our hearts and widen our sphere of compassion. But only if we allow them – we have to do the hard work.

This simple infographic below is a way of reflecting on our lived experiences. Where we feel we have been well supported and have a sense of belonging with each of these, bring the slider closer to the middle. Where we have had an experience of feeling othered or marginalised and not seen (not accepted), bring the slider out to the far edge. Intersectionality is complex because there are multiple compounding factors and they tend to work together to contribute to our lived experience. The idea of this infographic is to get a sense of this graphically. NB This isn’t intended to cover everything! If there’s anything you feel is missing here – relevant particularly to the school and school community, do let us know.