When we move into the Fall season, watching the leaves fall from the trees, and our garden plants finish their yearly cycles, we think of the Sagebrush, the flower essence for letting go and emptying out.

In fact, the Sagebrush plant blooms late into the year, from late summer into the early Fall, especially in the higher elevations. It is a plant of the high desert, covering vast empty spaces of the arid intermountain west of North America, known as the Great Basin, from the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges to the Rocky Mountains. Its silvery grey-green foliage gives us a hint why it was named Artemisia, for Artemis, the Greek moon goddess. Yet it is also a member of the Sunflower or Asteraceae plant family, although with very reduced flowers, little tufts of yellow disk florets that appear on slender stalks above the woody stems, and the tough leaves with their three lobes. (Hence the species name Artemisia tridentata – three teeth.)

Sagebrush was known to the Native Americans for its medicinal properties coming from its pungent oils containing camphor, terpenoids, and tannins. It has anti-microbial properties, and was used for coughs, colds, fevers, bleeding, infections and various pains. Most significantly, Sagebrush was used for purification of body and soul, as a smoke during the ritual sweat lodges, and as a smudge to clear the energy of a room or environment.

All Asteraceae flower essences have some relationship to our sense of spiritual identity. With the Sagebrush essence, there is also a moon-like reflective quality, helping us to realize that so much of our attachments and identifications no longer serve our true Self, and it is time for a change. It seems to be a spiritual law that before something new can come into our lives, we need to empty and purify what is old. We must empty our cups before we can fill them with something new.

For example, we received an in-depth case study from a counselor taking our practitioner certification program, in which Sagebrush, along with the Bach essence Walnut, played a key role. It involved a woman who was having difficulty facing loss in her life, the premature death of her father during her childhood and the recent death of her mother. She had chosen to do hospice work, and thus was also confronted with death in her daily work.

Her goal was to free up her creativity to write a book, and she felt held back by emotions still tied to childhood family experiences. Her parents were no longer living, but their influence still lived within her as guilt, fear and anxiety as she approached the latter stage of her life. After taking several combinations of flower essences, containing Sagebrush and Walnut, she felt a new emotional freedom, as well as a willingness to let go of her role of mother for her grown daughter, and to take temporarily leave of her home and work so she could do her writing.

She had a dream about no longer being a young, attractive woman, and wrote the following of her experience, “I feel myself shifting, dissolving, shedding a skin. I am aging; the body will transform and fall away. Already I cannot keep up with the subtle changes…I am moving into another stage of consciousness and everything is realigning. What stays constant is the light within, the burn I feel to strip away all that is not essential, all that is not my authentic self, everything that does not lead me home.” She commented, “This seems a pure Sagebrush description….powerful stuff.”

David Whyte’s poem, “Faith” reminds us how important it is to accept the process of emptying so that something new can emerge, as the new moon arises after the fading of the waning moon. That is the lesson of Sagebrush.
You can read the Faith poem here.

The essential core of the Sagebrush’s message is captured in these powerful affirmations by Patricia Kaminski:

I release all that no longer serves my Highest Good.
I purify my Self of all that is inessential.
I remain True to the inmost core of who I am.