Mystery of Energy and Tea
Mystery of Energy and Tea
On Herbal Energetics in Medicine
Health is mystic. From the ancient world to our modern time, one truth remains: healing is at once straightforward and spiritual. Wellness has a tangible, physical nature, yet it also carries an undeniable mystery. Even now, in our age of dissection and analysis, meditation and spiritual cultivation continue to prove their worth. While modern allopathic medicine often seeks to debunk, it instead uncovers new languages to describe what ancient people always knew—that medicine is as much mystery as it is matter.
This duality between the tangible and the tacit becomes especially clear when we speak about herbal medicine and, more specifically, energetics. This concept stretches back far before Hippocrates, though he helped refine its teaching. Energetics ties together all ancient healing philosophies, highlighting the unique “personalities” of plants. Each herb carries a character profile—an energetic signature—that, when understood, allows us to form a union between human consciousness and the plant kingdom.
A simple way to approach this seemingly elusive concept is to think about the earth’s environments. Every ecosystem carries particular energetics. Much like the principle of nature versus nurture, every life form develops its traits through both environment and inherent constitution. Deserts, for example, are hot and dry, and the plants and animals within them not only adapt to this climate but often embody and carry those same qualities. The energetic signature of a place fuses into its life forms.
I myself was born of Caribbean blood but raised in Denver, Colorado. Genetically, my constitution longs for moisture—to nourish my thick hair and open pores. Yet environmentally, I have grown accustomed to dryness, which especially affects my lungs. These are my personal energetics. Beyond this, I naturally run warm and avoid excessive heat—even spicy food feels like too much. Such tendencies reveal the subtle layers of individual constitution, some tied to environment, others born from a deeper, more mysterious source.
When we speak of energetics, we often call it constitution. Just like a nation’s constitution lays its foundation, our personal constitution is the law of our organic existence. It is not chosen but revealed. It influences everything—our food, clothing, activities, relationships, and life pursuits. And it shapes the medicines we will most need in our lifetime.
Ancient medical systems recognized this mystery. Their great masters designed ways to read a person’s constitution by examining what may seem unrelated: birthdate, body shape, hand structure, even the eyebrows or color of the eyes. Every nuance was considered part of a system of human analysis. In this way, a healer could read the energetic expression of a person and determine the support they required.
This was the work of the ancients: to combine subtle diagnostic tools—pulse, vibration, appearance—with energetic principles to uncover both health and illness. Disease itself has energetics. A seasonal cold is damp and cold. Fever is hot and dry. Arthritis often manifests as cold and dry, while inflammation tends to be hot and damp. These four qualities—hot, cold, dry, and damp—intersect with the elemental forces of fire, water, earth, and air, creating a universal language of energetics.
The herbalist’s art is then to weave together a constellation of energetics: the personal constitution, the plant’s nature, and the energetic signature of the illness. This may sound simple, but in practice it is deeply complex.
This is why herbal formulas often blend many plants. A single herb is powerful, but rarely does it perfectly match all the needs of an individual and their illness. One herb may heal in one place but aggravate another. By combining plants, we create balance, a formula that offers the exact energetic support needed—nourishing the person while counteracting the disease.
Plant energetics can be understood on several levels. They may be hot, cold, dry, or moist, each on a spectrum. They may move the body’s energy upward or downward, disperse or contract, drain or invigorate. They also carry emotional resonance, as in the use of flower essences to influence long-term healing. Grief often creates heaviness in the chest. Anxiety and anger rise into the heart and neck, generating heat. Depression chills the body until it manifests outwardly as lethargy or coldness. Plants meet us at these energetic intersections.
Whether working on physical or emotional levels, the true healer must see through the lens of energetics. The masters of old refined this perception so sharply that they could often diagnose without a word from the patient—the body and spirit already told them everything.
This is the kind of practice I dream of: one where medicine is not always poured into bottles or brewed into teas, but where the necessary energetics could be given as simply as a hand laid gently on the shoulder.
What a medical mystery that would be for modern science to dissect.