Dreamwalking to A Healing Home With Mother Mugwort (ft. Michelle Lundquist)
Michelle Lundquist of "Michelle's Healing Home" joins us tonight to talk about her work growing and refining herbal medicines and tinctures! Since Michelle shared Mugwort with us, Slick Dissident and myself have both had profound dream experiences, which we'll also discuss. Joining us tonight is Mario Garza of Symbolic Studies!
Plus+InnerVerse Plus+
InnerVerse Plus+Hear every full episode
Every extended episode, the complete Plus+ archive, premium video and a private podcast feed for your app.
Cancel any time.
Get tuned with Chance
Tuning forks find where energy is stuck in the field around your body and bring it back into flow. Sessions over Zoom, recorded for you to keep.
30 Minute Consultations
Have something to look at, or looking for guidance? We can consult oracular tools, read your chart, or just talk through whatever you choose.
In this episode
Core themes
Plants as Teachers and Allies
Michelle described how a visit to a Portland herb shop led to an unpaid internship, a job, and eventually her own small business in 2013. One of the hosts remarked that the plants themselves were her teachers, and Michelle agreed, adding that she felt certain herbs wanted to go to particular people when she gifted them. Mario said her natural gift for working with plants had grown since she began talking to them and dream working with them. Michelle also explained the doctrine of signatures, using St. John's Wort as her example, and urged listeners to learn identification from a regional book and direct contact with the plants.
Mugwort as Protector and Traveler
Michelle called mugwort a witch's herb and a traveler's herb, and she described it from her own experience as a plant that takes a person into deeper dream space while also protecting them there. She said St. John the Baptist wore it on his chest for protection and that travelers once put leaves in their shoes. She said she personally took it in two-week cycles and trusted intuition about dosing. Michelle also named a herbalist who lays a leaf on the third eye, and the group discussed dream pillows as a traditional use.
Absinthe, Artemisia, and the Temperance Card
Gabe told a long story about his fascination with absinthe, which he said was banned in the early twentieth century as a first step toward wider prohibition. He argued that the wicked witch of Oz encoded the green fairy of absinthe, and that water dissolving her matched the ritual of adding water to the drink. After receiving mugwort, he noticed its Latin name, Artemisia, and argued that the Temperance card, renamed Art in the Thoth deck, shows a goddess making absinthe. Others on the call added Artemis and art nouveau connections.
Dreams, Messages, and Coincidences
Several people shared dream experiences. Gabe described an astral visit to a listener in Dublin who had given permission, and played her voice message relaying an impression of that night, and he said details in it matched his life. Rachel Munoz described an ancestral dream of keys in a museum and a map with family crests, which she said pointed to a Saxon era. Another participant described a dream of terracotta warriors and an ancient being. A Telegram caller joked that Muggles in Harry Potter might need mugwort to wake up.
Crystal Teas, Moon Cycles, and Ordering
Rachel Munoz described her method for crystal teas, which involved choosing stones, pure water, sunlight, and herbs matched to the intention, and she urged being mindful of where the sky actually stood. One of the hosts said knowing correspondences gave a practitioner confidence and might work partly through belief, though he thought there was also a vibrational reason. Another speaker suggested tracking the natal moon as a personal cycle marker. Michelle explained her monthly full moon newsletter and offered a free download of her mugwort class.
Quotes
“So these two are here to talk about Michelle's work with herbalism and healing herbs in general, creating your own medicines right out of your garden, refining and distilling them into tinctures and tonics and topicals of all types. It's gonna be a really interesting conversation. I know I'm stoked to learn a lot.”
“Once she started tapping into the plants and seeing her relationship with them and actually developing like real relationships with these plants and herbs and everything, talking to them, dream working with them, writing about them, all sorts of stuff and she just has a really natural gift in my opinion to like work physically with things.”
“The thing with the plants that the language is so, it's subtle, but it's very potent. And so they will give you very strong identifiers between the two, but you have to just really get down on the ground literally and like touching it and opening up leaves and looking at flowers because it could just be like one little thing about it that the identifier could be.”
“When you make the medicine, you wanna use the fresh herb because the essential oils are then like fresh and they're in their liquid state. And as soon as you add it to alcohol or oil, it becomes this scarlet red color like blood. And it's, yeah, it's beautiful. It's gorgeous.”
“And so we just go out on a hike, like from our front door and you know, it's like a little herbal walk and she's like pointing all these different things out. I'm like, wow, most people when they go on this hike, they don't realize what they're looking at, but they're looking at like a forest full of medicine.”
“I think one of the best things about Mugwort is that it's literally just like, she pulls the wool from your subconscious in my opinion. So I think that it's like, she's pulling that away so that you can get the insights you're needing, whatever, you know, contacting with people, talking with people, seeing things from a different perspective or whatever.”
“I just think it's such a beautiful thing with Mugwort that she's like a package deal that way. She'll take you there, but she'll protect you while you're there. That was when I started learning about that with her, I'm like, man, yep, she's my favorite. I can't deny it because it's just so, so beautiful.”
“So Absinthe was like the canary in the coal mine and it was blazing a trail for alcohol prohibition to come in right behind it. And so you can actually watch the process that they did with just Absinthe, just give us permission to forbid you this one thing. And that blazes the trail for how they're gonna forbid you from all the alcohol.”
“The more I was looking at it, the more I started to realize that Absinthe is encoded in the witch. The wicked witch of Oz is the green fairy of the Absinthe industry. And he was writing that book right at 1900, right at the turn of the century when the Absinthe was about to hit its legal woes.”
“I'm quite convinced now that the 14th tarot card of the Thoth tarot deck, that he changed from temperance, which generally historically means not drinking alcohol. He changed it to art. And now I am quite convinced that this wonderful tarot card is a goddess generating absinthe. I think she's making Artemisia.”
“It's like when you have clear dreams, it's clear manifestation. That's what dreams are for. You know, people are trying to lucid dream, but you also have to bring it out into the material world. So that's why you can do things like visualizing a rune in your water, like really get your mind to see it, really get your eyes to see it. Practice lucid dreaming and lucid life.”
“It goes without saying, but I am just so grateful for the tribe. And everyone in the chat, you were fantastic tonight. Notice that there aren't trolls. There's no like combativeness in the chat. Everybody is just awesome and fired up. And this is the type of thing that I do it for to learn. I'm here to learn.”
Gabriel, known on air as Slick Dissident, co-hosts InnerVerse's Vibe Rant show and is a longtime recurring guest on the podcast. He teaches occult symbolism and tarot on his YouTube channel, ranging across the Major Arcana, the esoteric Enneagram, mythology and archetype, mystic linguistics, and the symbolism hidden in popular film. He is best known for Tarot-tories, his own system mapping the 22 Major Arcana and zodiac archetypes onto the geography of the United States.
See all Gabe episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
