Plant Medicine — Now Available to All Inhabitants of Earth
6 Reasons to embrace shamanic medicine.
Maybe you landed on this article because you’re considering alternative modes of healing. Maybe you have no idea what the hell plant medicines are. Either way — welcome!
Plant medicines or teacher plants are compounds like ayahuasca, rapé, san pedro, psilocybin mushrooms and many others found on indigenous lands. Shamanic cultures have crafted a loving relationship to the land and the sacred plants on them. They passed down ancestral wisdom for healing with these plants through many generations.
Often these plants will shift us into an altered state of consciousness that allows profound insights. These insights — when implemented in everyday life — have tremendous healing powers.
This article will focus on the benefits of embracing shamanic medicine. If you want to dive deeper into altered states of consciousness — pun intended — I wrote an article on them here.
1. Medicine From the Ground Up
Plant medicines are a sacred gift from the earth to it’s inhabitants. They can be found everywhere and are available to everyone. They’re about building a personal relationship to the natural world around you and recognizing your place in that world. The plants have a peculiar way of guiding you how to use them.
We grow up to think that we’re individuals separate from our surroundings. The plants might drastically change that belief for the better.
2. A Non-Profitable Model for Healing
For the time being, these plants are not commercialized. With capitalist lurkers around the corner, this might someday change.
But either way, plant medicine is not heavily profitable.
The Western model for medicine benefits from sick people. Profits are made from people buying pharmaceuticals. The trend has shifted from taking a pill once when ill to being medicated chronically. It’s like a lifetime subscription to medication.
How ethical can health-care be in a profit driven society?
On the contrary, plant medicine is about having one healing experience that keeps on giving.
3. Connection to the Ancestral Ways
Partaking in a traditional ceremony conducted for hundreds of years has a magical feel to it. Our ancestors didn’t have science, but they have developed an experiential wisdom.
Shamanism is experiential science, not a dogmatic belief system. In the shamanic world, what is believed is entirely irrelevant; only experience is of any consequence. Dogma is relevant to rulers and exploiters alone. The shamanic experience can free us from all belief systems, doctrines and structures (Adelaars et al., 2016).¹
No one will tell you how to interpret the experience, it’s your magic!
4. Empowerment to Heal Yourself
In the Western model of medicine, you passively follow the advice of the doctor who’s going to heal you. In the shamanic model, you heal yourself. You are believed to have the inner strength and power to do so.
You are encouraged to call upon your intuition to decide what you need.
5. It’s a holistic approach
Western medicine is mechanical in the sense that illness is seen as a defect of the body. It’s an over-simplified cause and effect model that you would apply to machines. Human beings are way more complex.
A shaman looks at disease from a holistic stance: mind, body and soul are one.
A ‘defect’ in one of these parts affects all of the others. Therefore balance has to be restored in the whole system.
6. Letting Go of the Old to Make Way for the New
Ancient traditions understand the power of ceremony. A shamanic ceremony is often conducted in the form of symbolic death and rebirth. Or a shift from old ways into new ways, marked by a powerful ritual to indicate that the old persona is released and that a new life is born from it’s ashes — free from the burdens of the past.
Ritualizing this transition has a powerful effect on the human psyche. And even if you don’t take anything else from this article, know that rituals can change your life.
Of course, I will visit the emergency room when I have a broken bone. Western medicine includes both, perks and limitations. Therefore, the shamanic ways should be seen as complimentary to mainstream medicine.
But opening your world to incorporate new modes of thinking can positively shift your reality.
In Belgium, we have a saying — translated freely — it goes like this: “What the farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t eat.”
Maybe it’s worth trying a bite.
¹ Adelaars, A., Rätsch, C. & Müller-Ebeling, C. (2016). Ayahuasca: Rituals, Potions, and Visionary Art from the Amazon. Studio City, CA: Divine Arts.
