Plant & Crystal Magic 12: Avena Sativa (Milky Oats) & Lepidolite
This month’s first article, Soul Loss and Retrieval, explored the topics of soul loss, trauma, dissociation, and the principles involved in calling lost aspects of soul home. There is a lot to say about this all too common phenomenon in our current culture, and certainly this is just an introduction. As a continuation, this month’s Plant & Crystal Magic article will take a look into addressing the symptoms of soul loss and supporting the physical and emotional bodies affected by trauma, shock., and ongoing stress, with the help of our plant and mineral relatives. Though there are many choices of allies to work with for this kind of healing, we will focus here on the harmonious medicines found within Avena Sativa, also known as Milky Oats, and Lepidolite.
Avena Sativa/Milky Oats
Yes, this is the same kind of Oats that make your hearty breakfast cereal, though perhaps its Latin name gives it more of the mystique and dignity it deserves. Avena Sativa is a generous and potent medicine, as well as a nourishing food, particularly for cultivating a calm mind, soothed nerves, and a bit of inner nurturing. Oat straw, its tall stalks, can be infused and consumed as a calming, tonic tea, especially because of the high mineral content, but the strongest emotional medicine this plant has to offer comes from the tiny, semi-mature seed heads called Milky Oats. This special medicine can only be cultivated in the liminal time between Spring and Summer, before the heat of the Summer sun dries the green grass-like stalks, turning them to the golden color most often called to mind.
You will recognize the perfect moment to harvest the seed heads by squeezing them each day of this season, until a drop of their white milky sap, which is actually a natural latex, appears at the tip. Creating this kind of intimate relationship with the plant also allows for energetic communication, so take that opportunity to ask for the healing you need, if you are harvesting this medicine in the wild or in your own garden. Once harvested, the Milky Oats should be made into a tincture for best effect. A tincture of Milky Oats can also be readily purchased. Dried Milky Oats can be saved for teas, as a nutritive tonic drink.
Avena Sativa is full of minerals and trace nutrients, including silica, magnesium, chromium, iron, calcium, phosphorus, protein, alkaloids, and vitamins A, B complex, and C. Calcium, vitamin B, and magnesium, in particular are known to calm and strengthen the nervous system, bringing needed nourishment in times of crisis, trauma, stress, and fatigue. This nourishment is key, because what happens in high stress and soul loss is both physical and emotional. The body is depleted by trauma, leading to many physical symptoms, including loss of focus, irritability, sleeplessness and general exhaustion, loss of desire, anxiety, and even heart palpitations, to name a few. Avena Sativa, and Oatstraw in particular as a tea, helps to ease anxiety, calm the mood, and restore the depleted body systems so strongly affected by stress. On an emotional level, we need nurturing in order to heal. If the body and mind are in a state of high activation, it becomes a natural unconscious defense to close down and even to block attempts at soothing and healing. We are not receptive in fight or flight mode. In this state, gentle nurturing and a feeling of safety must be cultivated, so that we have the chance to slow down, return to ourselves, and accept the process of healing. A nutritive and calming medicine, is just what is needed to hold us and help us restore, so that we can begin to unravel and make peace with our experience.
Another aspect of soul loss is a compromised immune system and a tendency towards accidents. When we are in a state of dissociation, our feet are simply not on the ground. We become susceptible to falls, trips, miscalculations while driving, illnesses, and other intrusions. Avena Sativa will help this by strengthening the immune system, soothing nerves, balancing the endocrine system, regulating hormones, and cultivating an overall sense of groundedness, and resilience. There are many herbs that can help one access the deep territory of the unconscious, or cleanse trauma from the system. (Chamomile comes particularly to mind.) However, Avena Sativa will help to carry us, physically and emotionally, gently back to the shore, when we are drowning in overwhelm and imbalance. It is an excellent place to start and to sustain, whenever we don’t know what to do for ourselves, in the face of an agitated mind, a wounded heart, a body with a myriad of symptoms, and a soul that is lost in fear. Nurturing is the key that opens the door to healing.
Some thoughts on working with Avena Sativa/Milky Oats:
A medicinal dosage of milky oats tincture is between 3 and 5 ml, taken three times a day.
If you are harvesting the tops during the seeds’ milky stage, pinch the stem and gently slide up to pull them off. They are best when immediately tinctured, but can be dried and saved for tea as well. Remember to ask the plant’s permission, and to ask for what you need, allowing the spirit of the plant to make a personal relationship with you.
When using Avena Sativa for healing, consider making an herb bundle with the dried or fresh herbs in cloth. Tuck this into your clothes, touching your skin, use it as a tea bag for an herbal bath infusion, or place it under your pillow and ask for a healing dream. Trying all three, with a separate bundle for each, will help to take this medicine deeper into your system.
If you are purchasing Oatstraw or Milky Oats tincture, there is little reason to worry about gluten sensitivities. This association with oats generally comes from how they are processed with wheat, when used as a grain. This should not be the case with medicines.
Avena Sativa also has a history of magical use or spells relating to abundance. This can be considered another area of grounding in one’s life. Consider incorporating a personal spell for safety and security, inside and out.
Lepidolite
What Avena Sativa does for the physical body, Lepidolite does for the mind and heart. High in lithium, and most often found in soothing colors like lavender with pink hues, and it’s most prized lilac, this is a powerful stone for calming an over activated nervous system and countering the effects of trauma, stress, fear, worry, and grief. When overwhelm seems never ending, and we are surrounded by anger, fear, loss, financial instability, and the consistent need for change, as has been the case for many this past year or so, Lepidolite helps sooth and to extend a lifeline that encourages us to stay connected with the best version of ourselves, so that we can handle what comes our way with more grace and integrity. This excellent stone for stressful times can be a lighthouse during the stormiest of emotional sea journeys.
Lepidolite also helps us to release trauma, while offering respite, and in fact gives a gentle push towards doing the inner work needed to truly move through suffering and towards healing. Rather than simply pushing trauma further away from our conscious experience, Lepidolite helps one to enter it with courage, accepting what is present and moving more deeply through the grief so that it can be met, expressed, and ultimately resolved, with new lessons integrated. When we refuse to dive into the true emotions and experiences we are facing, it is easy to get trapped in Depression or in the endless scheming of the Ego, trying to work out every possibility in an anxious manner.
Worse yet, we have the tendency to identify with our trauma and it’s emotional outcomes, like Depression and Anxiety, binding our experiences and symptoms to our sense of who we are. This happens unconsciously, and often makes what should be a passage into a permanent life condition, limiting our capacity for happiness, health, and the potential to create a life in alignment with our highest destiny. The primary reason for suggesting Lepidolite as a stone for soul retrieval, amidst others that can help calm, ground, and protect us when we are not fully with ourselves, is that it has an affinity for stopping this process of identification with trauma experiences and their aftermath. Lepidolite can help us to enter the unconscious levels in order to find past traumas we are still holding and release them. It will help to block the process of identification and even pride in the traumas we have faced or are currently facing. It helps us to truly let go and heal. If we can do that deep work, then we also can stop running the unconscious program that keeps bringing similar traumatic experiences into our lives. We can change the way we think, dream, and unconsciously create our lives, rescuing this aspect of ourselves from experiences that were most likely beyond our control.
Lepidolite encourages us to instead turn our attention towards beauty, even when it can only be found in small ways and unexpected places, towards accepting what is, and towards our higher awareness. This is the gentle, nurturing work of a healer, one that can make us feel calm and safe, and then take us deeply within ourselves so we can find our way to true change.
Suggestion for working with Avena Sativa and Lepidolite:
When overwhelm is present, the capacity for complicated rituals and can be minimal, even when we desire the effects. Creating space for healing, however can be very simple. Try this gentle but effective process just before bed.
Make a cup of Oatstraw tea. This can be blended with other nutritive or calming herbs, such as nettles, red raspberry leaf, lavender, and chamomile.
Take a dropper full of Milky Oats tincture.
Create a small herb bundle of Avena Sativa in a piece of natural fabric and use a piece of cloth to tie it, so it won’t open. Set it aside.
Draw yourself a warm bath.
Hold your Lepidolite crystal in your hands. Gaze into its soft colors. Ask for and visualize the healing you need, even if all you know is the discomfort or numbness you feel. You can blow an intention into the crystal, or simply hold it and allow yourself to commune with its energy.
Place the crystal in the bath, and let it infuse its medicine into the water.
Take a relaxing bath, focusing on opening up to the energies of support and healing, while you sip your tea. Follow where your mind and heart are led and release what you can. Finish by calling your own name, inviting yourself home.
Take your herb bundle to bed, tucking it into your clothes or under your pillow. Ask Avena Sativa to bring you healing dreams and a restorative rest.
Take a moment when first waking to recall and record what you dreamt, what you experienced in the process, and how you feel.
Wear your Lepidolite, and gently try to notice the beauty you encounter throughout the day. Can you find 5 beautiful things?
May you be nourished and whole.
-This blog was written by Melusina Gomez, originally for publication with the eleventh house.