Chulen in Tibetan means “taking the essence.” These pills help to restore prenatal or ancestral jing, which is the energy that allows for the possibility of human conception as well as what determines an individual’s basic constitution. Chulen pills serve to rebuild the most fundamental energy of life, the principal seat of one’s vitality, as well as serving to extend life and generally increase health and wellbeing. While in Chinese medicine this energy is said to be forever gone once it has been used up, these Tibetan pills are capable of restoring this most precious essence of life.

The practice of taking Chulen is a practice of essence extraction – extracting the essence of the elements or “drinking the vast space of Dharmakaya.” Taken with proper care (which involves, in the most basic sense, refraining from the excesses that result in depletion) and in combination with physical yoga practices, chulen can lead one to “recognize the nature of awareness and its relationship to the pure essence of the elements” (Joseph Wagner). One is thus cared for and “fed” by the Dakinis (Khandros in Tibetan), “sky-goers” or “space-dancers”, ethereal awakened beings with a female form who play in the vastness of open space, the field of pure awareness. With their guidance dualistic vision can be overcome.

Namkahi Norbu describes the delusion of karmic vision as a sate of apparent “radical separation between our person – body, speech, and mind – and that which we take for an external world.” When the illusionary misperception of self and world as absolute, self-existing realities is dissolved, as Norbu continues, “the individual experiences his or her own nature as it is and as it has been from the very beginning: as an awareness free from any restriction and as an energy free from any limits or form. To discover this is to discover the Dharmakaya or ‘Body of Truth’, which is better rendered as ‘Body of the True nature of Reality.’”

That chulen can lead one to drink in the vast space of Dharmakaya was revealed to me a few weeks after starting on these pills. I had a dream that I was in the mountains of Tibet with one of my herbal teachers. She was showing me how to subdue the demons and elemental spirits that were appearing before us. This resulted in an initiatory vision of these various malefic beings being transformed into glorious rainbows that extended into infinity – a light of bliss that pervaded the entire universe and reached all sentient beings.

Oneirogens (óneiros meaning “dream” and gen “to create”) are a class of ethnomedicines which are dream inducing. Oneirogens are rarely discussed or studied for, as Jonathan Ott observes, “phytochemical investigation of such oneirogenic plants is hampered by the fact that dreams occur naturally, spontaneously, and unpredictably, rendering difficult the development of suitable psychonautic bioassays to guide fractionation.” With that said, working with onerigenic plants can lead us to deepen our understanding of the purpose, function, and meaning of dreams in our lives. Dreams are not directly intelligible, the way in which ordinary language usually is. Dreams speak to us in a peculiar language, comprised of images and symbols. Carl Jung wrote that “dreams are a spontaneous product of the unconscious soul. They are pure nature and therefore an unadulterated natural truth. They represent a communication or a message of the unconscious of the all one soul of humankind.” Is there a symbiotic intersection of the language of dreams and the language of plants? How and in what ways can oneirogenic plants affect the process of symbol formation that characterizes the activity of dreaming?

One of my favourite onierigens is Albizia julibrissin (Mimosa, He Huan Pi, collective happiness flower, sensitive plant). Albizia is an extraordinary remedy for unshakeable depression, melancholia, severe loss, broken heartedness, anxiety, and chronic grief. Taken before bed, albizia can help us to process difficult emotions that we are resistant or otherwise unable to work through. It can make us aware of the underlying contours of our psychical and emotional landscape and gently show us a way through. It can be used to help calm individuals who fall too quickly and easily into bouts of anger, frustration, and rage as well as those who tend towards excessive worry and fear. Albizia contains Acetylcholine, a vitally important and multifaceted neurotransmitter that is also found in the human nervous system (“every human, like every plant and animal, is one of the infinitely many neurons in the nervous system of Gaia”). While albizia is not as widely utilized as some of the well known mood-elevating and antidepressant herbs (such as St. John’s Wort and Kava Kava), I believe that it is the most effective and widely applicable botanical remedy that is available to us for working into this complex of psycho-emotional issues. In the Chinese Materia Medica albizia is understood as a superior Shen tonic, a calming spirit herb. Both the bark and the flowers are used; the bark is said to ‘anchor’ the spirit, the flowers to ‘lighten’ it. Ron Teeguarden says that a medicine made from the flowers serves to “lift the spirit, calm the emotions, stabilize mood and point our psyche in a positive direction.” The bark has a strong affinity for the heart and liver meridians and can be helpful in some cases of muscular discomfort and swelling. The leaves of the mimosa tree fold and unfold under the influence of the Sun, and are also sensitive to being touched. As Julia Graves elaborates from this: “We will not be surprised to find they are healing plants for nerves and sensitivity, and to know that these leaf movements occur from electrical impulses running through the plant tissue in quasi-nerve-like fashion. The Cherokee call the sensitive plant /bashful/; it is used in formulas for people who are too shy.”