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What is it?
The leaves and flowers are the parts used in herbal medicine from Motherwort, a long-lived herb that grows upright to over a meter with striking ‘toothy’ leaves and whorls of white to pink flowers.
A saying from the Middle Ages goes “Drink Motherwort tea and live to be a source of continuous astonishment and frustration to wanting heirs!”. Motherwort has an interesting range of historical indications. The name shows how It has obviously been used to help with women’s problems, perhaps most notably for pain in the womb from menstrual disorders. Motherwort has also been used when the period is out of balance, either not coming regularly or coming too often. There is another clue to what Motherwort is for in its Latin name: Leonurus cardiaca. Motherwort has been used to help with heart problems since ancient times. It was traditionally used to treat angina on effort, high blood pressure and an overactive, racing heart rate.
To describe some of my personal experience of using Motherwort I am going to copy a true story here (with the patient’s name and a few other potentially identifying features changed) that was first published in 2011 in the natural medicine Journal ‘Integria’. Anxiety : the First Step. My dog introduced me to David. He was a human barometer that dog (now chasing celestial rabbits) the tenser the passer-by the more agitated he would become. A few years ago we were coming back from a long walk on a weekend morning when he started barking his head off at a strange man coming out of his own garage. I restrained the mad beast, apologised and was about to move on when the person involved actually came closer to me and said “you’re Richard Whelan, the herbalist, aren’t you! I’ve made two appointments to see you and then I’ve cancelled them both at the last minute, I’m sorry about that too!” Well of course I couldn’t just walk off then, I asked him why he had wanted to see me and as he began to tell me the beginnings of his story from many years ago I could see in his face the torment of just how badly things were still going for him to this day. On the spur of the moment, without thinking about it, I invited him to come to my clinic with me then and there. Equally without any hesitation, he agreed. I don’t think he stopped talking the whole time but when we came into my dispensary area I asked if I could quietly feel his pulse. It was extremely agitated, hard and edgy. It was the full, bounding pulse of someone literally sitting on the volcano of their own anxiety. These kinds of people do not suffer the same kind of innervated fatigue of depression’s bedfellow; low grade anxiety, (where the pulse can be tense but so small as to sometimes be nearly impossible to find). Rather this kind of tension drives their body to physical distraction. They always have somatic symptoms and, not unusually in David’s case, those symptoms are in turn one of the leading sources of their continued anxiety. David was convinced that he had a serious heart problem and that it was going to kill him a lot sooner than later. I have found that whenever I see a patient who is suffering from such acute symptoms that it is essential to find a way to noticeably alleviate the worst aspects before any significant progress can be made with treating the deeper causes. Allopathic pharmaceutical medicine excels at this but then becomes the architect of its own misfortune when the patient sees no reason to change anything so long as they can take the drugs that made their symptoms all go away! This is good news for the pharmacy companies, but a sad quandary for the doctor who still believes in making a difference… In my experience, a patient may seem open and receptive to everything you have to say but if their symptoms are compelling and disturbing enough, and they do not experience some significant relief in a timely fashion then all the fine concepts and holistic ideals that have been discussed remain naught but thoughts; soon forgotten. If, on the other hand, a way is found to show them that you have in your ability, in your toolkit, a way to help them feel better now then you often have, from that moment on, a person who is receptive to the point of actually taking those hard steps, those changes, which bring lasting healing. It often means doing very little at first, just the first step, but that step is nearly always the hardest one to get right. In David’s case, listening to his bounding heart beat and hearing how convinced he was that he had a heart condition (when something hurts that badly, it doesn’t matter how many specialists tell you that you are ok, you just know you are going to die from it eventually!) I felt that the most immediate way to help him could surely be Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca). This is written up in some of the old texts as being specific for the phenomena described as ‘cardiac anxiety’ and I had found this to be true for others. If I had just sent David away with some Motherwort there might be a remote chance it would help him sufficiently to take the first step of trust in the therapeutic relationship. Given the history that I found out later I would actually say the likelihood of that would have been extremely slim. David had tried everything and been to everyone to no avail; understandably, given that none of it had made any real difference, he was fuller of doubts about everything than he had been before he started. What I did instead was to get David to sit down with me and to feel his own pulse, not jumping to any dire conclusions about what any of it meant, just to feel his pulse exactly as it was. David didn’t need any training or special ability in order to do this, nobody does, all I had to do was show him how to hold his fingers and his own body, his senses, did the rest. People know what they feel; they know it at least as much as how they can believe what they see. I quietly observed David, asked him how he felt the flavours in his mouth, whether he felt it moving into his body, his throat, his chest. I was getting him to naturally go into his bodily awareness by following the taste and sensations of the herbal extract. I believe that there is an extraordinary level of intelligence at sub-conscious levels of our being, something that can read and respond to a herb in moments. What happened next is that I took his pulse to check it and then invited him to do the same. I am perfectly willing to accept that this reaction was entirely psychosomatic, that the suggestion of benefit, the ritual of taking the herbs, in fact the entire process, led him to believe the herb would work and so therefore it did. I have no problem with that, in fact if that is all it boils down to then that is just super; go the power of the mind! Extensive similar experiences with a wide range of people, especially very small children, even animals, makes me think there is a lot more to it than that, that in fact there is this unfathomable but profoundly real ‘intelligence’ that permeates every cell of our bodies and brains… Regardless, it is what happened next that serves to illustrate the point of the story. David visibly relaxed. His whole demeanour and expression changed profoundly. As he felt his own pulse and confirmed to himself what he already felt happening in his body his broad face began to smile for the first time. I don’t think he had ever formed a therapeutic relationship in a positive way with any of the many medications that he had used in the past. I doubt he realised it at the time but now, for the first time, he could begin to have faith in something that was not based on what ‘should’ happen, but what did happen, what he himself experienced.
I saw those patients ‘pro bono’, without charge, in those aftershock weeks, and with each one I took their pulse, (and got them to feel it too). Gave them a dropperfull (or two) of a relaxing herbal formula, and listened and watched, as one after another, their faces took back their colour, their shoulders dropped, their breathing deepened, and their pulses softened, opened, and relaxed. And to watch that little moment when they feel that gentle letting go, and confirm it in the palpable change at their wrist, when their eyes open wide, not with fear, but with a sense that there still is some magic in the world, and that nature can be kind as well as cruel, it was wonderful.
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