Thunderstorm Medicine

On breaking open and finding the light

I woke up to drama the other day—sky drama, to be exact.

Normally our thunderstorms don’t come until late afternoon in the mountains. If you weren’t from here, and you looked at a weather map, you’d probably be dismayed to see rainy weather every day from now until the end of August—but normally the storms only last an hour or so. They crash into the mountains at the peak of the day’s heat, break open water over every limb and leaf, and then whisk themselves away leaving us all ten degrees cooler, and distinctly soul-refreshed.

The other morning, however, I woke up to the sky booming. The house was already shaking with thunder, and our power blinked several times. I ran outside to bring the dog in, and we both curled up on the couch, watching the downpour arrive so soon after the dawn.

We need storms like this, I remind myself. We need their refreshment, we need their bigness, we need their power.

We need what they help us release—and what they help us recover.

Storms are literally how our atmosphere discharges energy. The inner collisions within a thundercloud build up enormous tension and when the energy becomes great enough, lightning strikes. The charge is released.

I remind myself of this as I experience storms in my life. The inner collisions of old stories, worries, and fears that build and build until—finally—there is a strike.

I make a change. I let go of the too muchness I’ve been holding. I stand up for myself. I decide to reclaim my power.

We have a funny idea of what power is in our culture. We often think of power as power over something—people, resources, ideas. But that’s not what true power is at all. True power comes from intactness. It comes from being so fully inhabited in your own self that you are both cloud and strike. Power is a channeling of soul energy, like lightning itself.

Sensitives and empaths have tricky relationships to their power—we often come into this world with a lot of ourselves, which means we come in with a lot of power. But at some point, we’re told our power is threatening in some way, or that we should only be using it to prop others up in life. So, we shrink ourselves, we have difficulty setting boundaries, we say yes when we want to say no, and we wonder where our power has gone.

That’s when thunderstorm medicine comes in. When things fall apart. When the sky opens, and the rain falls down. When there is an impact big enough that it shakes us—we wake up to the power that has been within us all along.

One of the most empowering experiences in my whole life was living through the storm-scape of abuse and chronic illness—and, through that breakdown, refinding my connection to the Earth. Realizing that the Earth is always holding me, that it has held onto me all this time. That the living world wants to help me return to my power, because the solar force of my own inner energy is an illumination in this world.

It’s why, years later, I created my course Herbs for Personal Power—a training ground where other sensitives could step into their authentic power, learn how to hold healing boundaries, and connect with the herbal allies that can help them feel that power again.

And this week, you can access it as a part of the Herbal Academy’s Herbalism Collective Bundle: 50+ herbal classes, e-books, and guides for just $67.

When you sign up, not only will you get access to my course, but you’ll also unlock a whole library of truly empowering classes, like Herbalism for Pleasure, The Yin and Yang of Perimenopause, Protect & Detox from Microplastics and many more. The Herbal Academy consistently gathers together my favorite, powerhouse teachers in the herbal world—which is why I feel honored to be among them in this bundle.

If something is falling apart in your life, if you have the sense that more wholeness is possible, that there is a greater sense of intactness available in this life—you might be being called to learn the medicine of the Earth and remember your true power.

So let the storms come. Let the lightning illuminate what we’ve been missing. And let the world be radiant on the other side.

In the rain and the refreshment,
Asia