Breath and Power: My Journey With Elecampane

"The same war //continues. /We have breathed the grits of it in,/ all our lives, our lungs are pocked with it,/ the mucous membrane of our dreams/ coated with it, the imagination/ filmed over with the gray filth of it:"

-- Denise Levertov, "Life at War"


Grief is a watery thing, that works its way into the lungs, moving downward.

When the waters become stagnant, infection can set in.

Since early childhood, I have struggled with asthma and frequent bouts of bronchitis, born of grief breathed in and pushed down deep.

My great-grandmother took her own life on Christmas Eve when I was five months old. She had a long history of developing breathing problems when she would become emotional. And she also had a long history of drinking -- perhaps to dull her senses. She was a psychically sensitive, college educated widow living in conservative suburban upstate New York.

I shared a strange bond with her. I was supposed to meet her the day she died, but I had bronchitis so my mother didn't take me to see her. Months later my mother saw her ghost move my crib across the bedroom.

I inherited her patterns of breathing. I stuffed down grief and let it fill my lungs until I couldn't breathe. When it overflowed, I would swallow it, and experience horrible gas and indigestion. When it got bad enough I would throw up, which allowed me to breathe again.

Sensitive to the world, I worried from an early age about endangered species and nuclear war. I was a melancholy, otherworldly child and a depressed teenager. I felt like I lived in a drowning world and could only pull more of its water into my lungs. Catholic theology twisted in my mind to make me believe that by taking that grief into myself I could somehow transmute it. The struggle for breath coupled with that theology to alienate me from my body.

As an adult, I made a profession of being a carrier of other people's stories of suffering.

In December of 2005, a few weeks after returning from gathering stories of torture, displacement, and the loss of land and culture in Oaxaca in the south of Mexico, I developed severe bronchitis that had me bedridden on New Year's Eve.

A chance phone call that day from a very perceptive herbalist I met at a party the night I returned from Oaxaca resulted in my introduction to Elecampane.

Elecampane is a medicine that reaches deep into the lungs and gets things moving again -- releasing and cleansing buried grief just as it brings up old, infected mucus.

In The Earthwise Herbal, Matthew Wood writes:

"Elecampane is a warming, stimulant, pungent, aromatic bitter that permeates the bronchial tree. It resolves bacterial infection, reducing heavy, thick, green mucus down to yellow and eventually to white or clear mucus. It is specific to yellow and green mucus, indicating bacterial infection. The removal of the layer of old, adhesive mucus allows for the secretion of a new layer of thin, clear mucus that is impregnated with immune factors. Meanwhile, the bitters protect the stomach against indigestion caused by mucus that is swallowed. Very typically, the person needing elecampane (often a child) swallows the mucus."

Wood, of course, is describing word for word, the pattern of disease I had developed.

I still remember the warm zing of the first drops of Elecampane tincture on my tongue that winter.

The day after I started taking Elecampane, I was breathing well enough to take my dog on a long hike through the Bangor City Forest -- the very place where six months later, the Usnea lichen would begin to speak to me, claiming me as his own, bringing me deeper into relationship with the wild, and beginning to lead me on the path of becoming an herbalist in my own right.

Elecampane gave my my breath, and my breath brought me into my body, allowing me to begin to move and transform it, coming into the world in a new way.

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"Come away, O human child!/ To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand,/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

-- William Butler Yeats "The Stolen Child"

Elecampane takes both its common name and its Latin name (Inula hellenium) from the legend of Helen of Troy. Wood writes that

"The legend is that when Helen was kidnapped by Paris the plant sprang up from where her tears fell. Afterward the plant was known as 'Heart of the campagna' -- elecampane."

and notes that the plant is indicated for a person who has been "'torn away from one's home', causing grief and suffering."

I believe that the plant is also often indicated for those who have never felt at home in their surroundings to begin with.

Its a familiar archetype: the bookish, asthmatic child whose imagination is captivated by stories of other worlds that sound more like home than this one. At once distant and emotionally sensitive. At times deeply empathetic and perceptive and at other times completely oblivious to social norms and cues. Asthma in these cases is often closely associated with social anxiety. Breath is a tenuous thread barely keeping the child present in this reality.

Sometimes the distance can be associated with an early trauma -- as in the case of Elizabeth Bishop and her mother's mental illness (Marilyn May Lombardi explores this in a fascinating essay called "The Closet of Breath" in Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender -- but just as often there is no obvious external cause.

In another time and place such a child might be called "fey" -- perhaps a changeling, a faery child left in place of a stolen human one. And indeed Elecampane is a plant strongly associated with the faerie realm. In England, it was once commonly known as Elf Dock. And according to Alma Hutchens in her oddly mistitled Indian Herbalogy of North America "

In Russia they call it De-via-sil, or Deviat Sil, which means nine powers. Also Di-vasil which means fair or magic power."

(Hutchen' book is a far better source on Russian folk medicine than on North American ethnobotany.)

Such feelings of being born into the wrong world and the wrong body can linger into adulthood. And by the time such a child has become an adult he or she has often internalized a lifetime of stories about being broken, powerless, and insufficient, eroding confidence.

This can lead to an attempt to deny and suppress the sensitivity and vision that are the core of such a person's identity. More emotion pushed down into the lungs, continuing the pattern of illness.

This may suggest the plant's possible historical use to treat "elfshot" which Wood describes as "wasting and preoccupation caused by being shot by an elfin arrowhead."

At the time that I was introduced to Elecampane, I was emerging from a period of my life where I had tried to suppress my imagination and my spirituality to gain acceptance in relationships and and in the culture around me. This meant denying fundamental aspects of both my childhood and adult experiences. It is the classic experience of the "dysfunctional shaman."

In his book, Fire in the Head, Tom Cowan writes that

"From the vast literature on mysticism and shamanism, it is clear that once the faculties of perception have been expanded, they cannot be restricted without causing mental or even physical illness. The malingering illness that results from denying the initial vision is well documented by reluctant shamans around the world. Most frequently the disease clears up when they commit themselves to shamanizing."

Elecampane can be a powerful ally in bringing gifts from the other side of the veil between worlds into this one, integrating spiritual awareness with physical reality, and bringing the spirit into the body. Breath is powerful too for altering consciousness, and restoring the fluidity of breath can help someone to make the transition between different levels of reality more fluid.

Just as Elecampane works at the physical level to resolve the associated respiratory disease, the plant's flower essence can help such a person bring the gifts gained from a lifetime of gazing into other realms more fully into this world, gaining confidence and stepping into power.

Elecampane brings moisture up from damp soil to feed a bright yellow flower that grows high above the ground.

Christine Tolf of Lichenwood Herbals writes that:

"Elecampane is an essence for the experience of 'initiation'. This essence helps people adjust to new spiritual growth spurts. The process of spiritual emergency is more easily accepted and integrated when Elecampane flower essence is taken. Elecampane gives confidence in the intellectual mastery needed to adjust to spiritual growth, and trust that you will make appropriate choices."

For me that choice involved coming more fully into my body and into this world without denying the reality of the music I heard from the other side of the veil. It meant allowing the pagan concept of a living Earth that I professed to become real and embodied by listening to the forest and working with plants to bring healing to others and to myself.

Elecampane gave me my breath. My breath gave me life and power.

Update on Monotropa Uniflora

A brief note on a few clinical experiences I've had with Monotropa uniflora (Indian Pipe/Ghost Pipe/Fairy Smoke) since my first encounters with the plant this summer:

-- A client had a panic attack while visiting a friend. She found him doubled over and only able to say "The pain! The pain!" She assumed that he was in excruciating physical pain and reached for the Monontropa uniflora tincture she had on the shelf and gave him a moderate dose (I don't know for certain but I suspect 10-20 drops).

He came to see me a few days later and told me that "The Indian Pipe took everything I was worried about and put it outside me, in front of me, where I could work on it." I told him that was almost exactly how people described the plant's effect on physical pain. (Tommy Priester says that it puts you "beside your pain" where you are aware of it without feeling it.)

Over the next two weeks or so, he continued using the tincture for acute panic attacks that were coming almost daily. When I saw him next he told me that one day he began having a panic attack and began thinking about the plant and remembered the way it worked inside him. He said he realized then that he didn't need to take the tincture anymore. Despite dealing with some large setbacks in his life since then, his emotional health has remained excellent.

-- A client had been experiencing severe migraines since sustaining a Traumatic Brain Injury in the first Gulf War. As he described his experiences, I immediately saw Monotropa uniflora, its form resembling the brainstem. I told him to take 3 drops for acute migraine pain. He came back to me the next day and told me it was the first medicine that had ever touched the pain of his headaches. (I also gave him a formula including Ashwagandha, Wood Betony, Oat Milky Seed, and Clematis for daily use but have not heard back about the effectiveness of that formula.)

-- On two occasions, I have used Monotropa uniflora with people experiencing acute psychotic episodes brought on after taking large doses of psychedelics. (As Jim McDonald and others have pointed out, psychedelics don't cause psychosis, but they can bring out an underlying psychosis.)

In the first instance, I gave 30 drops of Monotropa uniflora and 30 drops of Monotropa uniflora to a man who was disoriented and very verbally agressive. After a short time he became much more subdued though still severely disoriented, and a little while later fell asleep. He was lucid when he eventually woke up.

In the second instance, I was part of a team working with a man who had gone into a full scale dissociative state after taking 5 hits of LSD and had become extremely physically and verbally violent. We initially gave him 10 drops of Monotropa uniflora tincture with no response. Over the course of the next hour we gave him two 30 drop doses of the tincture. (In addition to Mimulus to address his panic.) After the second dose his pupils became less dilated and his eyes became more responsive and he began to respond more directly to outside stimuli. Our sense was that the Monotropa uniflora had brought him "down" from the trip at a physical level.

However, it didn't touch the underlying psychosis. He remained physically violent, emotionally agitated, and verbally incoherent for the following four hours. Eventually he became physically exhausted enough for friends to take him to a hospital at which point we lost touch with him.

(We had avoided calling 911 because we knew there was little that an Emergency Room could do in this instance that we couldn't and that an ambulance would have required police assistance. Given the near certainty that he would have assaulted the officers trying to help him, we erred on the side of sparing him from facing felony charges.)