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Healing with Earth Medicine: Part 1 Introduction

Tuesday, July 11, 2017 7:46

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by Anthony S. Burdge

It’s been some time since we updated Green & Growing. Our apologies to our readers. We plan on revamping and designing the site over the next several weeks. If you have any ideas or suggestions about articles, recipes, or sections don’t hesitate to let us know.

In all of our articles, we have taken a multidisciplinary approach to presenting the information contained within each piece. Many of our readers will know that our articles concern our healing journey, our practices, our recipes, and our medicine paths while containing vital information from leaders in various fields. This is the approach we shall continue in this new series we have called “Healing with Earth Medicine.”

In this new series of articles will be a further look into additional healing modalities we incorporate into our practice, focusing on South American and indigenous medicines, the cultures from which they originate, how they’re cultivated and used, and to science and application of these medicines in all our lives. Our broader goal is to document how these medicines have helped heal us specifically and how they continue to do so, physically, mentally, energetically, and spiritually, bringing us to a better understanding of our relationship with the planet. This piece in particular briefly touches on topics that will be highlighted in future articles in this series.

Jessie has written extensively here about her herbalism and work creating medicines to address our own ailments. We find it very important to educate yourself on everything you put into your body, especially when it comes to healing with plants and food. (See Jessie’s series “The Cure is You.”) Our Healing with Earth Medicine series will continue exploring the integrative relationship between personal healing, food, and the environment.

We have always considered plant and animal medicines to be “Earth Medicine.” We first heard the term Earth Medicine in the first episode of Shamans of the Global Village

by Rak Razam. This new documentary “…series examines indigenous entheogenic medicines and the western shamanic resurgence.” Rak Razam is one of the world’s leading ‘experiential’ journalists, and author of the critically acclaimed book Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey , and and writer, producer, and co-director of the documentary Aya: Awakenings . A frequent lecturer on ayahuasca and the shamanic revival sweeping the West, Razam has been called one of the “leading spokespersons for the new paradigm.”

We have been planning this articles series for sometime, and are very grateful to Rak Razam for his highly informative podcast and inspiring correspondence regarding it. Shamans of the Global Village and the work of Rak Razam will be discussed in a forthcoming article

As cited by Razam, Earth Medicine comprises of “indigenous entheogenic medicines”: plant and animal medicines such as, but not limited to, Ayahuasca, Psylocibin Mushrooms, Iboga, San Pedro, Sananga, Rapé (phonetic: Ha-Pay), and secretions from toads and frogs such as the Sonoran Desert Toad and Phyllomedusa Bi-Color (Giant Waxy Tree Frog).

However, Jessie and I tend to add food under the umbrella of Earth Medicine: whole food, local and organic when possible, and above all no factory farmed or factory processed food. To quote Michael Pollan

in his In Defense of Food: “No food like substances.” Pollan’s work highlights a main factor relating health and disease that’s often overlooked in mainstream culture and medicine: food. Pollan says unequivocably: “Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the American diet — roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet.” For those unfamiliar with the work of Michael Pollan, his WordPress bio says it best: “For the past twenty-five years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where nature and culture intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in the built environment.”

Many of our readers may already be familiar with the information we will present in these articles, to others these topics may be entirely new. Therefore, we shall provide an overview and research information, as you should ALWAYS do your homework before introducing anything new to your body. The idea of our diet and medicine is integral our mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and energetic health, and further connections to the planet is not a new one. It is our hope to take the idea behind “The Cure Is You” a step further regarding our own healing journey.

“The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our individual and group existence in the world. What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them.”

~~Terence McKenna, Plan, Plant, Planet.

Unlike my wife’s formative years, during my childhood my parents always had a vegetable garden and instilled in me the importance, and power of, plants for food and health. For my wife, healing through plants and food was a solitary journey, embarked on separately from her family– who while not completely under the sway of “food-like substances” still had a disconnect between food and health, even after her father was diagnosed with diabetes in the 1980s through to his battle with pancreatic cancer over the last several months. Food, whole fresh unadulterated food was a focus in my parents’ home and their love of green and growing things was an inspiration to me. I took this inspiration a step further. I knew there was an even deeper connection, which I sought to discover via my love for Indigenous culture and spirituality. Perhaps this attraction stems from the minute Native American ancestral connection I have or a past life, I’m not sure, but my interest in Earth medicines like Ayahuasca, Psylocibin, and Sapo has grown in recent years.

After brief period of experimentation with LSD, Cannabis, and ‘magic’ mushrooms many years ago, my recent approach to exploring psychoactive plant medicines– Earth Medicine– is much more serious. Some of these medicines, also called sacraments, are broadly classified as “psychedelic,” which means a visionary, mystical experience will be experienced during the ceremony where the sacrament is imbibed.

For many, the term psychedelic may cause alarm bells to go off as it is often coupled with the word “drugs.” Psychedelics to the mainstream modality constitutes tripping out, escaping from the everyday via a recreational drug. It’s rather ironic that our society terms pharmaceutical, prescription medicine as drugs, and in the same breath uses the same term to describe any “illegal substance” –many of which have been the First Medicines of Indigenous peoples the world over. We need to look past the negative connotation of Earth Medicines, particularly psychedelics and see the benefit of plants, illegal or not, ultimately as medicine. For thousands of years healers from Indigenous cultures have made use of psychoactive plants and animals for a variety of healing practices from curing acute physical illnesses to healing what we might now term psychological diseases, or illnesses of the mind or spirit. Our Western culture looks down upon anything that speaks of visionary states, elevating consciousness, or our own subtle energy system. Many in the ethnobotanical field have commented on how mainstream society and mainstream culture try to control anything that allows the individual to embark on altered states of consciousness, which in turn lead to broader awareness and healing.

For more than 20 years I have additionally studied, experimented with, and practiced a wide range of systems of ritualized magick, occult ceremonies, yoga, and meditation, but it was only when I began more serious training, that I came to broader awareness of personal energy, connecting with it through a practice of rhythmic breathwork and Earth medicine. Once this awareness kicked in my own healing went even deeper. The various medicines and healers of South America examine not just the surface ailment, but drive deeper to get to the root cause as part of a unified system of healing. It is for this purpose that we study and work with practitioners so we can understand how to better heal ourselves. Jessie and I make use of herbalism to treat, maintain, and even cure our ailments, and we extend that practice with these sacraments. It is not about :getting high” or “tripping out.”

The process begins by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous. ~~Terence McKenna, Plan, Plant, Planet

Photo by Zoe Helene

via http://www.medicinehunter.com/

“ I personally believe ayahuasca is…the greatest natural healing agent, period.”–Chris Kilham, Psychology Today

What is Ayahuasca? Read about Ayahuasca and the work of Medicine Hunter, Chris Kilham, his book Ayahuasca Test Pilots

by clicking here

“ The ayahuasca journey is a sacred and ceremonial experience. If you are going to engage in such a ceremony, do it right, or do not do it at all.”

– Chris Kilham, Ayahuasca Test Pilots

As Jessie noted in “The Cure is You” series cited above, I’m a diabetic. Additionally, for the last year and a half I have been dealing with cervical spine and nerve damage from a work related injury. What my wife experiences with her entire spine I now have in my neck, neither of us rely on the broken health care system for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which being the complete failure of routine, Western medicine to treat our pain. This isn’t unique to us, as evidenced in the current, global opioid crisis which became the epidemic it is currently because opioids don’t cure pain. They mask it, but only when higher and higher doses are doled out by our broken system. Our mindset, since Jessie and I have been together is not to rely, and in turn become dependent upon, prescription medicine or the circular doctor factories. We do not participate in corporate programs that want to keep you sick. The pharmaceutical and medical industries are not in the business to cure you. They’re there to make profit off of illness and disease and a disconnect with a unified system of healthy living.

In addition to the herbal plant therapies we have utilized to treat my diabetes and our ailments, I have incorporated Kambo/Sapo, a secretion from the Giant Waxy Tree frog and a traditional Earth Medicine from South America. This medicine has helped to reset my pancreas and my vision, to detoxify my liver, and cleanse my cardiovascular systems. We have participated in local ceremonies, but in an effort to learn (and save money) I have since learned the art of self applying.

I owe my understanding of Kambo/Sapo to Peter Gorman who wrote Sapo in My Soul . I first heard Gorman via Rak Razam’s brilliant podcast, In a Perfect World . Gorman has extensively written on Ayahuasca in Ayahusaca in My Blood another personal inspiration.

My brother from another mother and a teacher of mine, Bjorn, is a close friend of Gorman’s and with luminary Alan Shoemaker.

For those unfamiliar with Shoemaker, he is another Ayahuasca touchstone, author of Ayahuasca Medicine (a highly valuable source) and founder of the Ayahuasca Medicine House and the International Amazonian Shamanism Conference .

No doubt you’ve noted my use of quotes from Plan, Plant and Planet by Terence McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000), perhaps the modern father of ethnobotany. McKenna was an American mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human linguistics and consciousness.

Brother to Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna is of great importance in understanding plant medicines and the science behind them. I highly recommend reading up on the presentations and viewing the live stream videos

via facebook from the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 50th Anniversary Symposium organized by a team led by Dennis McKenna, Founder of Symbio Life Sciences, PBC. In 1967, the “ Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs” was the first international and interdisciplinary symposium held so specialists “from ethnobotanists to neuroscientists” could gather “in one place to share their findings on the use of psychoactive plants in indigenous societies.” The intention of the conference was to reconvene every decade to continue the dialogue, “but the War on Drugs intervened.” Earlier this summer, thesecond symposium was held to celebrate the 50th anniversary.

The work of Peter Gorman, Alan Shoemaker, and the McKenna brothers will be further explored in future articles in this series.

Jessie and I have a very large home library that contains whole bookshelves devoted to Indigenous and tribal beliefs, herbalism, research into plant medicine and visionary states, philosophical and theological treatises, music and on. (The only room in the house without at least a few bookshelves is the bathroom.) Yet, as with learning any art– from writing to fine arts to the culinary arts–books can only take you so far. To truly learn an art, you have to practice it. In addition to lectures, my wife and I have attended pow-wows, drumming circles, and ritual working with practitioners, participating in sacred plant ceremonies.
My education and healing regimen also includes working with shamans, Ayahuasca, and Peruvian Ayahuasqueros– apprentices to Shamans of Ayahuasca. About ten years ago my wife and I participated in our first Ayahuasca ceremony. At the time, Jessie had uncontrolled asthma and was on several medications. At the time, even though she had been using herbs to treat other conditions, she hadn’t had sustained success in treating her asthma herbally. To those familiar with Ayahuasca, it’s vital to detoxify the system prior to partaking of the sacrament. I’ll explore the concept, called the dieta, in future articles in this series. Part of the detox requires participants to stop all medications and supplements. Also at the time, Jessie was suffering from a serious bout of depression. Today we laugh about the realization, but during a bout of crankiness about two months after the ceremony, she yelled at me that she thought the Ayahuasca was supposed to help. It was only one ceremony and for many conditions, part of the healing comes through several ceremonies. However, I had to note that not once in the weeks since that one ceremony did she need her inhaler, not once did she take the myriad medications or steroids to treat her asthma. Today, ten years later, her asthma has not resurfaced. Future articles will survey of how Ayahuasca, Kambo and Psylocibin have greatly treated our personal ailments, along with expanding our consciousness and planetary awareness.

Bjorn cooking Ayahuasca

in Peru with Shaman

Regarding Ayahuasca, I’ve taken my healing education a step further by working closely with friends in Peru. A close friend noted above, Bjorn, lives between Peru and the US. In Peru he continues to train and work closely with shamans from various tribes, inviting them to his home to conduct ceremonies for those in need of healing. Since getting to know Bjorn, and working with him in ceremony, I have come to greatly respect and admire his life story and work. After suffering trauma, Bjorn has been able to turn his health and his life around with Ayahuasca, and is now paying it forward by training with local curendaros, shamans, and healers. It is through working with Bjorn that I have begun to see how in-depth Ayahuasca healing can be. In my article on Ayahuasca, I shall be discuss my own healing journey working with Bjorn and explore Bjorn’s story, his personal healing journey, shamanic practice, plant medicine education and his goals to help and heal those in need. For anyone interested in learning more, check out his Ayahuasca/Sapo Center via facebook

However, before you run off to Peru or look for local ceremonies in the U.S., as with any medicne: Do your homework! One of the active compounds in Ayahuasca is DMT, Dimethyltryptamine, which is illegal in the U.S. DMT is a tryptamine molecule which naturally occurs in many plants and animals, which, interestingly enough, is also found in the pineal gland in the human brain. This means everyone, you the reader, me, my wife, and all of humanity are innate carriers of a Schedule I drug which has no medical benefit. So, that basically means your brain, like Cannabis, is illegal under federal law. But that also means that Ayahuasca, the actual brew that comes from a combination of the Banisteriopis Caapivine, and the leaves of the Psychotria Viridis(plants that constitute the brew) are illegal here in the U.S.

“ Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” –Terence McKenna

Regardless of legal status, these plants are not drugs. We can term them as such but to the worldwide indigenous cultures that have made us of them, long before our laws, they are medicine and remain as such to this day.

 “ DMT is, most simply, almost everywhere you choose to look. It is in this flower here, in that tree over there, and in yonder animal… And, it is a relatively short-lived psychedelic compound that has a record of ancient and revered use in many cultures in the world. To some users, it is a connection to a vivid world of magic and mystical beings. To others, it is a dark exposure of the most negative aspects of the psyche. And everything in between.”

~ Alexander and Ann Shulgin. TiHKAL: Tryptamines I have known and loved.(1997)

Gavin Kaiser demonstrates at the New Mexico State Capitol
that after 500 years of prohibition our sacred sacraments
are legal for OMS NAC members to utilize

My journey lead me to become a member of the Oratory of Mystical Sacraments

a branch of the Oklevueha Native American Church. As a member I was provided with an education and coursework on proper ceremonial use of plant sacraments. I am very humbled to have been a part of these blessed courses, however I am extraordinarily blessed to have had correspondence and education via founder Gavin Kaiser. At the beginning of 2016, right when I had begun my training with OMS then suffered the work related injury. After a few weeks of my absence from the course, Gavin wrote asking how things were. In our correspondence via email and snail mail, I received further education and assistance in healing my nerve damage from Gavin. The work Gavin does with ONAC OMS is of great importance to reclaiming our human rights to work with sacred sacraments.

Art by Alex Grey

With all of this said, what does all of this mean? How do we connect our food and plant medicine practices with caring for and connecting with the planet? As I noted earlier, since my childhood, nurtured via my parents’ vegetable garden and long trips to the countryside, I have always nurtured a deep love for Gaia, Mother Earth. My wife and I have long advocated for a broad awareness of issues affecting our planet. As we detoxify ourselves with a clean plant based diet we should concern ourselves at the same time on how those same toxins are affecting our planet. In working with Native Americans, indigenous plant medicine, and a clean diet this love, and connection has grown exponentially.

This practice of working with earth medicine tends to, as Terence McKenna notes in Plan, Plant and Planet, “promote what might be called a sense of Gaian Holism, that is, a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position within the dynamic and evolving balance. It is a plant-based view. This return to a perspective on self and ego that places them within the larger context of planetary life and evolution is the essence of the Archaic Revival.”

  It is our goal to have weekly articles posted in this series regarding the topics cited in this Introduction: Food, Ayahuasca, Sapo, Sananga, and Rapé. We hope you investigate these topics further beyond this Introduction and forthcoming articles via work of leaders in the field we have cited. In writing these articles and discussing our practice with Earth Medicine we realize that we have moved beyond the boundaries of the proverbial psychedelic closet. In doing so, we hope you will continue to join us on this journey whether you have been on the same path or just embarking upon it.

Art by Pablo Amaringo

“Every tree, every plant, has a spirit.
People may say that a plant has no mind.
I tell them that a plant is alive and conscious.
A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious,
that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant,
its essence, what makes it alive.
I feel a great sorrow when trees are burned,
when the forest is destroyed.
I feel sorrow because I know that human beings are
doing something very wrong.
When one takes Ayahuasca one can sometimes hear
how the trees cry when they are going to be cut down.
They know beforehand, and they cry.”

– Pablo Amaringo

Source: http://www.green-and-growing.com/2017/07/healing-with-earth-medicine-part-1_11.html

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