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Spider Milkweed grows in the Southwest and is food for caterpillars. Like other milkweeds, it contains toxic substances that ultimately make the butterflies poisonous to predators. Its flower essence dissolves our tendency to feel responsible for others’ suffering – and alchemizes anger, rage & internal conflict. Rather than isolating, avoiding or burying emotion, it integrates our fragmented pieces into wholeness. We can see all sides of the complex story without judgment.
If you’re drawn to Spider Milkweed, you may enjoy being a nice person, and therefore, any agitations, negative thoughts, or attitudes that you would deem ‘unsavory’, might gently be shoved to the back of the closet (of your subconscious).
You may also be a person who prefers to bear difficulties alone, with a tendency to isolate – and even repress anger as a result of self-judgment. You may sidestep parts of yourself that you don’t want to see. If there is anything about yourself that you don’t like, you might just avoid it – or delete it altogether from your conscious mind.
Alternatively, it may be from a time (or times) of hardship, things you thought you were ‘over’ already. Buried little bits of stuff you tucked away for later, because maybe in the moment, it was just too much for your system–too intense to deal with it ALL.
And now that you’re in a more stable place, this flower elixir can help you lean in and liberate your old mental anguish. Sometimes we call our inner turmoil our ‘inner demons', because they’re scary, like monsters under the bed. We resist them, and they plague us.
Anger as an energy is benign. Anger expressed in actions of wild destruction or retaliation is certainly scary. If we can find these energies within ourselves, we may repress them – for fear of blowing up the whole village. However, the word ‘demon’ comes from the Greek word ‘daimon’ which means ‘spirit’, which alludes to the fact that it’s just energy. If we don’t act on our wild emotions, they just rise to the surface to be witnessed, compassionately understood, and dissolved.
Another unique aspect of Spider Milkweed is to dissolve the tendency to feel responsible for your loved ones’ happiness, feelings, experiences, or future paths. If there is any remote chance for others to fall in harm’s way or engage in poor decision making, you might find yourself in the trenches, trying to save them. You might feel you know better or want to warn or caution your loved ones who make choices different than your own. At the same time, you may fear leading people down the ‘wrong’ path, leading your loved ones astray, or to their demise.
Spider Milkweed (Asclepias Asperula) stimulates repressed thoughts & emotional patterns to come to the surface to be cleaned out!
If you have a wound and ignore it, it festers and gets worse and worse over time. What started out as a small wound becomes infected and spreads. However, if you have the fortitude to face the wound and clean it out, you create the conditions for healing.
As we allow buried remnants of emotional baggage to rise to the surface–come up, to come out–Spider Milkweed helps us make friends with all parts of ourselves. The bits of ourselves we tucked away during difficult experiences– these last little pieces that got stashed away–can finally be free to see the light of day..
This includes feeling responsible for someone else’s hardship. If we feel responsible for someone else’s past suffering, we have a tendency to either bury it and harden. Or, we may go to the opposite extreme and try to control the choices people make, because we’re afraid of holding that burden once again.
Like other Milkweeds, Spider Milkweed flowers are food for monarch and queen butterfly caterpillars. Milkweeds contain toxic cardiac glycosides, which make the butterflies poisonous to predators. Its white sap is also toxic to animals and humans.
This is NOT the flower to add to your salad! But look at the flower - would you want to? No way. There’s something freaky about it.
MAGNIFIES: Alchemy of repressed or buried emotions; Making friends with inner demons, i.e. the negative thought swirl; Inward vulnerability & fearlessness; Wholeness & integration; Willingness to see what's evil in the world
DISSOLVES: Repressed anger, isolation or self-hatred; Fighting/avoiding inner demons, aka your shadow; Sense of responsibility for others’ suffering; Fragmented parts of yourself; Wanting to remain numb, naive or ‘pollyanna’
Awakened Understanding gives us the courage & stability to face the things inside of us that at one time – we felt were ugly. We awaken a new receptivity to sit with ourselves, to get curious – and watch everything transform. We feel more resilient, accepting, whole – and above all else: understanding.
Love + flower petals,
Katie
