12 Dec If You Were a Plant, What Kind of Plant Would You Be?

Are you a mint person? Cool, kinda sweet. Lifting spirits everywhere you go. Or maybe you’re a cinnamon girl. Warm and spicy, and full of good taste. Or an ancient oak, with sprawling limbs, and roots anchored for centuries.

Maybe it’s silly, but spices and their medicinal sisters, herbs, seem to match well with certain personality types.

In herb school, I learned what’s called the Doctrine of Signatures. It means that plants sometimes have a signature or identifying feature that tells us how to use them. Sometimes I wonder,  “If this client were a plant, what plant would they be?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the personality traits of different types of stressed out people. There’s the guy whose troubles always go to the stomach. The teen who’s pressured by exams and gets headaches several times a week. The woman whose hair is falling out in clumps since her divorce. They’re each experiencing their own kind of stress response, and they each need a separate kind of herb or herbs.

You know those people who are always frazzled and on their last nerve? The ones that are forever tired and undernourished but zoom at 100 miles an hour through life. When my client looks and acts like this, there’s a good chance they’re getting milky oat seed in their formula.

Because oat is rich in calcium and magnesium, it’s like a warm, soothing compress for the nervous system. An oatmeal bath coats your skin with slimy goo, soothing itchy, irritated areas. In a way, milky oat seed, or Avena sativa, does that with your frayed nerves.

High-strung, restless people have their own special herbs and oils and what’s called a ‘Vata dosha imbalance’ – a constitutional tendency to get anxious and frazzled.

Doesn’t it get you thinking, “Hmm, I wonder if there’s a plant out there to help with MY kind of stress?” Probably. Finding just the right match for you is a little piece of what I do as an herbalist.

E-mail me at info@naturalhealingomaha.com, if you’re wondering about herbs for your dosha or personality type. And click here to take a Dosha test.