Western Bleeding Heart

This plant is well-known in English style gardens, loved for its arching branches hung with elegant bleeding heart shaped flowers. Our Spagyric is from a native variety, less showy, gracing the forests of the West each Spring.

Botanically, there is some debate as to Bleeding Heart’s relationship to the poppy family, but many of its constituents have similar actions. Since ancient Native American use, through the Eclectics of the early 1900’s, this herb has been used for pain of many types, nervousness and tension, headache, and neuralgic pain and imbalances. It is a sedative and balancing remedy for insomnia, hypertension, and irregular heartbeat.

Bleeding Heart also carries an obvious signature in its lovely pendant flowers- the wounded heart. Some Eclectics used it for pain of a tangled emotional-gynecological-hormonal type, which we now understand can create a self-reinforcing endocrine loop of increasing distress which can be hard to break out of.

We have seen it work instant wonders on grieving pain and sorrow, opening the heart chakra and easing the emotional pain that can eventually wear on the vitality and lead to physical imbalance and illness.

Using Bleeding Heart in conjunction with Shatavari increases the nurturing and comforting quality that both herbs have.