Plant Spirit Medicine: A Journey into the Healing Wisdom of Plants

introduction

OUR WISEST ELDER

When I began writing this book in 1991, I had been practicing and teaching plant spirit medicine for a number of years, and I had just begun an apprenticeship with a Huichol Indian shaman in Mexico. I felt his medicine and mine were both valuable because they promoted balance, even though most people I knew didn’t find balance very interesting at the time.

Back then it seemed the American way of life would go on forever. There was some lip service being paid to sustainability, but few were really concerned about it, and almost no one saw sustainability as having anything to do with spiritual healing. I was pretty much alone in my work, stubbornly exploring new territory that turned out to be very old. Restoring ancient ways of balance looked interesting to me in 1991. Today it looks necessary, it looks urgent—and I no longer feel alone.

The loneliness is gone largely because this small book brought many extraordinary people to be my students. Some of them became plant spirit medicine healers, some engaged with Huichol shamanism, and some explored and discovered other paths. Many are working today to make life satisfying and sustainable once again. Their good-hearted work is producing important changes. When I wrote the first edition of this book, for example, I pointed out that our young people did not have effective rituals of initiation into adulthood. I mentioned some of the resulting illnesses and sufferings, but I could offer no remedy. Today, thanks to the Sacred Fire Community, authentic initiation is once more available.

At the same time, much has been lost. Violence upon human beings and the natural world has escalated, while the keepers of wisdom have become an endangered species. Only a few years ago indigenous leaders and medicine people in the Peruvian Amazon were slaughtered by heavily armed police while attempting to save their forest homeland from corporate development. Sadly, this is far from an isolated case; the genocide of heart-centered people goes on throughout the undeveloped world, while the developed world becomes more aggressive as it falters and fails.

Where loss of habitat and outright murder are less intense, age and illness are claiming the wise elders. Most of the teachers I write about in this book are now gone. The great Huichol shaman don José Ríos (Matsuwa) died in 1990 at 110 years of age. Don Guadalupe González Ríos, with whom I apprenticed, died in 2003. The preeminent English acupuncturist, Professor J. R. Worsley—my guide to the Five Elements—died the same year. Don José Benítez Sánchez, the Huichol artist and shaman who introduced me to don Guadalupe, passed away in 2008. The warm and funny Ute medicine woman Grandma Bertha Grove left this world in 2009.

Don Lucio Campos Elizalde, the weather shaman and healer, passed away in 2005 at ninety-three years of age. An outline of his life might give some feeling for what the world loses with the death of such an elder and what hope and guidance he leaves behind.

Don Lucio was born, lived, and died in the tiny village of Nepopualco, Morelos, in the central highlands of Mexico. He was a Nahua Indian. As a young man, he used to make long journeys on foot to the city in order to hear Spanish spoken. In this way he taught himself to be fluent in that language. His people were campesinos, or peasants, and don Lucio continued to raise crops and livestock throughout his life. In his early twenties he was struck by lightning. He fell into a coma and was in and out of that state for three years. The first year he spent traveling and learning in the realm of the weather beings: rain, wind, cloud, sun, ocean, and certain mountain beings, as well as their commanding Great Goddess, whom he called Santa Barbarita. The second year he dwelled with the plant spirits, and the third year he spent with the animal spirits. He emerged from those years as a man of knowledge and wisdom, which he shared generously with his people for the rest of his life. He had become an extraordinary healer, and his gifts benefited many people.

Don Lucio was especially devoted to Santa Barbarita, who gave him the task of helping people maintain a good relationship with the sacred weather beings in order to ensure beneficial weather for crops, animals, and humans. He applied himself to the instructions of the Goddess and became an important leader of traditional rituals related to weather. He identified and initiated many people who were themselves called to become weather workers, and he guided and supported them in their work. One result of their efforts was the unusually stable and beneficial weather patterns in that part of Mexico.

Toward the end of his life, don Lucio initiated David Wiley, an American living nearby in Mexico, into weather work. David showed exceptional promise; the older man made him the organizational leader for the group of non-Mexican weather workers who had gathered around don Lucio. This group was well loved by don Lucio, for they were the hardest working and most devoted to their path. In time, there were more foreigners than Mexicans under Lucio’s guidance. After ceremonies in Nepopualco, they would return to their homes and work to restore balance between their communities and the weather beings. In this way, important but long-neglected relationships began to be revived and restored.

Just before his death, don Lucio imparted to David Wiley special knowledge and blessings and made him his successor. Under don David’s care, the weather-work fraternity continues to grow and benefit many communities.

As wisdom keepers like don Lucio die, the cloak of elderhood is passed on to people of my generation—a generation born and raised in a society entranced by youth and uninterested in wisdom. Today our way of life is collapsing under the weight of its own greed; the need for wise elders has never been greater, yet there has perhaps never been a generation less prepared to provide wisdom.

Somehow, miraculously, the cloak is put on and wisdom reappears: A don Lucio sees fertile ground in the soul of a David Wiley. The soil is cultivated, and since the old man’s death, a conventional American business consultant grows into a wise elder himself. In a few years, the younger man tends a flourishing of the tradition such as the older man had not seen in his long lifetime.

One function of an elder is to demonstrate the wisdom of our wisest elder: the natural world itself. I say demonstrate because talk is not enough. I can say, The natural world sustains itself with balanced relationships, and it can also restore balance, healing, and sustainability in human life. This may sound appealing, but as an idea it is soon drowned out in the din of other ideas clamoring for attention. Even if you agree with it, nothing will have changed from thinking about it. An experience, on the other hand, can be denied and even forgotten, but it cannot be unexperienced. Experience changes you forever.

When your heart is touched by the medicine of a plant spirit, you feel the love and wisdom of the natural world. Ideas do not deliver the same touch; therefore, this book is not a theoretical treatise or a how-to manual. Mostly this is a book of stories, because stories aim for the heart, where experience lives.

Plant spirit medicine works partially because it has broad perspective. It does not look only through the eyes of physics and chemistry; it sees human beings as expressions of divine natural forces. It plumbs the human mind and emotions. It gives paramount importance to spirit, the mysterious core of our lives.

My apprenticeship, initiation, and work as a marakame, or shaman in the Huichol tradition, steeped me in a perspective larger than the one I had in 1991. I find myself now with even deeper appreciation for the medicine of the plant spirits, and I’ve tried to share that appreciation with you. While Huichol shamanism is not the subject of this new edition of Plant Spirit Medicine, the shamanic perspective brought forth new chapters and improved the older ones. I trust you will feel enriched by it as I have, seeing how this mysterious healing weaves into our relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, community, ancestors, worldview, and the forces of the divine natural world.

By way of tipping my hat in respect, I will mention that the Huichols are an indigenous people whose once-extensive homelands have been reduced to some rugged areas in the western Sierra Madre in the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Durango, Mexico. Like all indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, the Huichols have been and are being hard pressed by the dominant culture. Unlike most indigenous groups, though, they have never been conquered, they have not converted to foreign religions, they have not lost their language, their communities are functional, and their ancestral spiritual traditions are still robust. This is not to say that life in a Huichol village is idyllic. The people face many problems: they have few possessions, scanty modern education, little money, and no reliable friends in high places to protect them from the predators who circle around their natural resources. Even though their lives are hard, the Huichol know who they are, where they are, and what is important. Their world is not a world of inert things; it is a living world of divine feeling and expression. They live in a mood of restrained joy mostly unknown to Western people.

Like Huichol medicine, plant spirit medicine is low tech; it produces healing purely through good relationship with the natural world. In this way it is not simply a relic of the past; it is also a medicine for the present and the future. Whether you consider high technology a blessing or a curse, we are now confronting this reality: the world cannot support the extraction of resources; production of heat; and contamination of air, water, and soil necessary to build machines and keep them running. High-tech medicine is already too expensive for most of humanity. Like everything unsustainable, it is destined to become more extravagant and rare until there is a collapse of the unbalanced system that props it up.

No doubt collapse will produce hardship and even tragedy, but it will also bring us back to what traditional healers and indigenous elders have always demonstrated: plants, animals, rocks, water, fire, wind, and the entire natural world know us and love us as grandchildren. We don’t have to steal from them because they have what we require, and they are glad to give it to us. We are just asked to follow a simple rule: take only what you need and give back something that satisfies the one you’ve taken from.

These pages open to the medicine dream of the natural world. It is a big dream; all plants live there. You and I live there too.

How do we get to the medicine of the dream? How does it work? What exactly is it anyway? You will find some information here, but explanation is not my task. My hope is that this book may be the medicine. And my prayer is that it may touch you as you read.

chapter 1

PLANT SPIRIT MEDICINE DREAMS

The American adventurer Peter Gorman is walking down a trail in the Amazon jungle. He is on his way back to the village after watching his Matsés Indian friend set a trap for wild boar. The Indian takes advantage of the walk to show Peter some medicinal plants growing along the trail. Within a few minutes, he has pointed out several dozen species and pantomimed their healing virtues.

Arriving at the village, Peter summons his interpreter and returns to the hunter’s hut. He didn’t have his notebook with him on the walk, he explains, and he couldn’t possibly remember all he had been shown. Would the hunter be kind enough to say once again how the herbs were prepared and used?

The hunter-shaman smiles at Peter and then begins to laugh. He invites all his wives and children over to have a good laugh, too. When they have all laughed themselves out, he explains, That was just to introduce you to some of the plants. If you want to actually use a plant yourself, the spirit of the plant must come to you in your dreams. If the spirit of the plant tells you how to prepare it and what it will cure, you can use it. Otherwise, it won’t work for you. That was a good one! I’ve got to remember what you just said! He laughs again.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, a major pharmaceutical firm approaches a shamanic studies institute. The firm wants to contact shamans of the Amazon in order to get information on medicinal plants. The company plans to take samples of the herbs, isolate active molecules, and manufacture them in the laboratory.

I can imagine the scene when the pharmaceutical firm makes it to the Amazon: The shamans laughing uproariously as they collect their meager fees. The field workers rushing specimens back to the laboratory. Skilled technicians spending millions of company dollars researching new compounds, only to come up with one disappointment after another. The shamans will be discredited, but they won’t care. They will still be in the jungle, working cures with the plants they have used for centuries.

The American firm, infatuated with its superior technology, will go to the jungle dreaming of profits from a patentable new drug. No one will think of asking the shamans what the active ingredients are. If they do ask, they won’t like the answer. There is only one active ingredient in plant medicines: friendship. A plant spirit heals a patient as a favor to its friend-in-dreaming, the doctor.

To the people of the Amazon this truth is basic. Any four-year-old understands it. That is why the Matsés hunter-shaman called his children over to have a good laugh at Peter. They couldn’t believe a grown man could be so silly!

The Matsés and many other non-European peoples understand that both nature and humankind are endowed with awareness and spirit. Therefore, humans and nature are of the same family. In all cultures there exist individuals who have especially vivid experiences with the spirits of nature. When properly trained and initiated, these people become shamans. Shamans make friends of the spirits of nature and call upon them for help with everyday affairs.

Plant spirit medicine is the shaman’s way with plants. It recognizes that plants have spirit and that spirit is the strongest medicine. Spirit can heal the deepest reaches of the heart and soul.

There is nothing exotic about all this. Don’t be misled by talk about the Amazon. If you want to meet the most powerful healing plants in the world, just open your door and step outside. They are growing all around you. If you don’t believe me, or if you have a taste for romantic locations, you can try going elsewhere. But if you stay there long enough, it comes down to the same thing: dealing with the local weeds.

In keeping with this homegrown quality, I want to tell you what was happening around my home as I wrote this chapter. At first this may seem to have nothing to do with our subject, but bear with me; in time it will make sense.

I went to visit a Huichol Indian named José Benítez Sánchez. In certain circles, José was famous as a visionary artist. Among his own people he was known as a shaman. José lived part time in a village near Tepic, Mexico. The rest of the time he lived in the resort city of Puerto Vallarta. It was there I went to find him.

As I approached his home in one of the humblest districts in town, I recalled the first time I’d met José, the year before. This was a man who earned a huge income by Indian standards. Yet as he welcomed me into his house, it was apparent that he had but one material possession of any consequence—an electric fan. Our visit was brief, for he was due to leave in a few hours to meet with the president of Mexico.

José cheerfully admitted that he did not have money for bus fare. Looking down at his ragged cutoffs, he allowed that he also did not own a pair of pants to wear to greet the president. Evidently he sensed I was confused about why a successful man should be so destitute, for he told me the following story:

When I was a boy, I admired my grandfather. He was a powerful shaman. One day when he felt I was old enough to understand, he told me, José, there are two types of power that one can acquire. One type is used for your own personal reasons. The other is used for the benefit of your people. You can walk the road to the first type of power or to the second. But let me tell you this: the second road is the road to happiness. Because my grandfather was a very wise man, I took his advice, and I have stayed on the second road. Whenever the gods give me something, I immediately pass it on for the use of my people.

José’s presence radiated contentment. Obviously his grandfather had known what he was talking about. I dug into my suitcase and came up with a pair of pants, which I presented to him, together with his bus fare. He accepted my gifts with sincere thanks and not a trace of surprise. Then he took off on his voyage to see the president, leaving me one small step farther down the road to