The Dirt Cure | Maya Shetreat-Klein | Talks at Google
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Dedication
To Gaia. May we celebrate the miracle of Me and We every single day.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Author’s Note
- Chapter 1: What’s with all this talk of psychedelics these days?
- Chapter 2: Me and We
- Chapter 3: Master Plants Are Returning in Force
- Chapter 4: The Science of Psychedelics
- Chapter 5: Master Plants I Have Known and Loved
- Chapter 6: Plants Are Beings
- Chapter 7: Dosing and Preparation
- Chapter 8: Surrender and Ceremony
- Chapter 9: Initiation and the Mystical Experience
- Chapter 10: Re-enchanting Our Lives
- Chapter 11: What Now? Tending Our Integration
- Chapter 12: This Is Something New
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Thank You
Have you ever imagined how a baby feels as it travels through the birth canal to be born? After a comfortable, protected existence, it must feel terrifying, jarring, even painful to be expelled into the chaos of the unknown.
Then the baby emerges into a world so much more vivid and interesting and beautiful than the muffled darkness of the womb. We call this process birth, and we’re told that it happens only once, at the very start of our lives.
But this process doesn’t happen just once. Many times in your life, you may be expelled from your seemingly comfortable existence, often through pain or loss – of a loved one through death or separation, of a job or career, of a key part of your identity, of your health, by experiencing severe illness in yourself or someone you love. And through that pain, you transform.
As with birth, there is no going back to the old you. It is a kind of death of your prior self. But in dying and being reborn, you emerge into a world in which everything becomes clearer, more acute, and filled with possibilities that your old self could never have fathomed.
Rarely would anyone willingly commence such a journey through the birth canal, even if their prior existence wasn’t particularly pleasant. But you don’t always get to choose the moment of your coming to consciousness. More often, it chooses you.
As you go through the transformation, know that you are reawakening to your life’s purpose. Know with all of your heart that you are being held and guided through this process (even when it doesn’t feel that way). And most importantly, know that you will be okay. You are emerging.
I’ve certainly been there myself.
In the year before flying to the Amazon, I’d been saying to my then-husband: I feel like I’m dying. He reassured me that I was just tired – I had three young children, a dog, a busy medical practice, and an urban farm, and I was traveling and speaking around the country. Outwardly, I was a powerhouse. But as someone who had given birth to three children over the course of grueling medical training, I knew what tired felt like. This new feeling wasn’t physical, though I had no vocabulary to accurately describe it.
Was it emotional? Spiritual? Whatever it was, I knew that something was very wrong.
I was already well-known as an integrative adult and pediatric neurologist, herbalist, and urban farmer who worked with children and adults from all over the world to reverse chronic and refractory illness. I was an expert. And though I knew that focusing on my physical body wasn’t the solution, I had no idea where to start or even whom to ask for help. Though admittedly out-of-the-box, I was trained as a doctor and scientist. What I knew was that the answer was something far more intangible. It was my energy body. It was my spirit. It was my soul. And it was a deep knowing I couldn’t ignore – or rather, by ignoring it, I’d pay an impossibly high cost.
At the time, I felt all alone in this knowing. But eventually I learned I wasn’t. And since then, I’ve helped hundreds of people recognize they’re not alone in this discovery.
But many people still deny this knowing even once it’s revealed to them – at their own peril. In that denial, they feel isolated and alone even when surrounded by friends because they are literally not seen for who they are. For some, these unexpressed parts can get loud and manifest as very real mental, emotional, or physical symptoms: explosive rage, depression, anxiety, addiction, insomnia, chronic pain, and conditions including autoimmunity and neurological disorders, even cancer. We label people who are suffering with what we call “diseases” and offer them pharmaceuticals as though their problems are purely physical or mental. Then we wonder why so many of these people don’t respond to what conventional, integrative, and even mental health professionals offer. The root cause may be something else entirely.
To be fair, conventional and even integrative doctors get no education in what it means to be sick of heart or spirit, though it is as epidemic in medical practitioners as in everyone else. And this understanding is missing not just in healthcare. Since the European witch hunts, our society has systematically stigmatized intuition, sensitivity, spirituality, and the sacred. Even those who feel connected to the intuition or the sacred assiduously avoid referencing them for fear of being laughed at, discredited, or dismissed as being “woo-woo.”
Science – in all its linear, rational certainty – has become the only acceptable lens through which we can understand ourselves. If we can’t see or measure it, it doesn’t exist. Yet our lack of language to describe our invisible terrain makes it no less real. And without this vocabulary, we feel incomplete, limited in our ability to know ourselves, and we hunger for the invisible more than ever. No diagnosis, medication or therapy can address that sense of isolation from ourselves.
What was epidemic before 2020 – depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide – became exponentially worse during the pandemic. When the numbers of overdoses shot up, doctors at first asked if COVID-19 made death to overdose physiologically more likely. The answer (obviously!) was no. It was profound loneliness and separation from community. One of my colleagues discovered that his mother’s rapid downward spiral into deep dementia during her nursing home lockdown miraculously reversed when restrictions were lifted. In truth, we may never know if the true body count of the pandemic was as related to extreme isolation from family and community – including forcing hospitalized patients to be without family to care, caress, or advocate for them – as it was to physical symptoms. We have limited ways to assess deaths of despair in their many forms.
The “unprecedented times” we’ve been living in since have been a period of spiritual initiation. In every great myth and story, the hero faces one or more moments of initiation – an often-harrowing experience that catapults them out of their normal, everyday life – that leads to a powerful spiritual awakening. They reach a new level of sensitivity and awareness that inevitably reveals a more authentic identity and gifts that they can ultimately share so their community can heal and evolve.
Such initiations can be individual and usually are instigated by a personal loss: of a relationship, job, home, or health. They can also be collective.
The pandemic, for example, jolted us from our normal daily existence. Finding our way back to normalcy – or what we imagined was normalcy – has been considerably harder. Quarantine eliminated many of the ways we self-soothe in the midst of discomfort. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, most of us came face to face with our demons. In the process, we have felt displaced from our communities and our sense of identity.
Indeed, ancient mystics would not have seen that as a bad thing. They believed that being thrust out of normalcy held gifts.
They believed we should be periodically forced to evaluate whether the norm is really what we need or even want. So often, we stay in situations that are not best for us and don’t bring out the best in us because they feel safe and certain.
Yet 2020 reminded us that certainty doesn’t exist. Experts don’t always agree. Science is never settled. Medicine is an art. Governments don’t always have our best interest at heart. Even if these concepts are not new to some of us, we’re each forced to relearn these lessons again and again.
We believe ourselves to be more advanced than ever before. We’ve collected data and analyzed, researched, peer reviewed, and published protocols. But we haven’t mastered compassion. We haven’t learned humility. We don’t know how to be in right relationship – with ourselves, with each other, with the land, or with the invisible.
And to indigenous elders, certainty is not even a goal. There is no certainty. Being in a state of humility and not knowing is an achievement, allowing mystery to find us. To be in an ongoing conversation with mystery is in and of itself sacred.
Indeed, true science means letting go of being an expert, unlearning what you think you know, and being unattached to any outcome in order to allow for the unexpected. Science is an ongoing dance with uncertainty and a celebration of our ever-present relationship with mystery. It is no accident that many great scientists – Pythagoras, Maimonides, Tesla, Einstein – were mystics in their way. Science is but one language we use to describe the invisible world.
Master Plants are an indigenous way of referring to powerful, neuroactive flora, fauna, and fungi who instigate transformation within us and who are considered wise (and sometimes demanding) teachers and guides to humans. By connecting us to realms beyond this one, they remind us that we are never alone. Through reverence, humility, wonder, awe, gratitude and kinship, we can truly show up in a good way in our visible and invisible relationships, so that we never need to feel isolated or lonely again. And though Master Plants are by no means limited to psychedelics, this book will mostly explore the science, safety, and sacred ceremony of psychedelics.
Welcome to the Master Plant Experience.
The term “indigenous” does not refer to one monolithic group that corresponds to one cohesive viewpoint, but to diverse people and nations around the world, past and very much present – who possess just an array of unique viewpoints and cosmologies. Here, indigenous refers to those who still fundamentally operate from ancient traditions and a worldview of kinship, connection to place, and interconnectedness of all beings, rather than one hijacked by a modern, reductionist worldview.
Chapter 1: What’s with all this talk of psychedelics these days?
What if you could take one dose of a medicine and it could help you to heal from conditions like major depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, addiction, chronic pain disorders like migraines, eating disorders, dementia, and even sexual trauma? And when I say heal, I mean the effects last.
Amazing, right?
So, I’m talking here about the fascinating and cutting-edge research coming out weekly on medicinal mushrooms and psychedelics.
You’ve probably seen the headlines somewhere, because they’ve been everywhere.
The science of psychedelics is changing the entire landscape of medicine. It’s exciting. And honestly, it’s about time.
For years, I’ve seen profound transformations in so many people who have worked with psychedelic medicines – especially those suffering from the health effects of adult or childhood trauma. Even people who felt stuck – in their physical health or mental health issues or simply like they couldn’t move out of a compromised, unhappy, or less-than-fulfilled place – were able to step into a more healthy, vital, and joyful life.
You may be thinking, Why the heck are doctors so excited to be serving up illegal drugs to the populace?
It’s true – many of us have been told that they’re drugs, that they’re harmful, and that they should be illegal, and a lot of people accepted that.
But now, research is showing us that these indigenous medicines that come from the earth are truly something much more; they serve to show us a connection between our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves – and beyond.
Widespread stories of benefit – and personal experiences by scientists and doctors themselves – have led to an explosion of psychedelic studies.
Extensive research has been underway over the past many years in the most prestigious academic institutions – Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Stanford, NYU – all over the world, with research papers published in the most respected medical journals. In these clinical trials, those suffering from untreatable depression, severe anxiety associated with terminal cancer, crippling PTSD, and drug addiction are reporting mystical experiences that are profoundly life-changing. And for many of these study participants, the benefits even from one dose of mushrooms, for example, can be long-lasting.
In a 2006 trial studying the potential of psilocybin, more than 70 percent of the participants rated the experience as one of the five most important in their lives. Nearly a third rated it the single most important experience. In studies conducted by NYU and Johns Hopkins, results of which were published concurrently in November 2016, about 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in anxiety and depression lasting some eight months after an initial dose. The paper concludes that “discovering how these mystical and altered-consciousness states arise in the brain could have major therapeutic possibilities” and “it would be scientifically shortsighted not to pursue them.”
As with any natural or pharmaceutical medicine, it’s absolutely essential to be educated and intentional in the way we engage with these medicines. And as we’ll see, Master Plants are much, much more than a mere pharmaceutical or natural supplement, so having guidance and support around how to engage with them becomes that much more important.
This book is a journey into considering psychedelics differently than most of us have perhaps ever considered them before.
Given that most pharmaceuticals are taken daily, what’s profound about the current studies on psychedelics is that in some cases, just one dose of these medicines can reverse conditions that are very challenging to treat. And the effects are long term.
One dose of psilocybin-containing mushrooms can transform treatment-resistant depression, anorexia, and PTSD.
With one dose of iboga alone, people have been able to refrain from using heroin, methamphetamine, and other substances that are very difficult to stop otherwise.
With two doses of psilocybin, over 80 percent of people stopped smoking – and almost 70 percent stayed away even after a year. And those same two doses helped heavy drinkers of alcohol cut their drinking by more than half over an eight-month period.
People are discovering that it’s possible to engage with these medicines in micro or even smaller quantum doses over time – with no psychedelic or journeying effect – and still successfully address brain health, mental health, mood, pain syndromes, and more.
Are these for everyone? Probably not.
But can these medicines change the lives of those people who are good candidates?
Trauma Lives within Us
Let’s back up for a moment and consider where we are at this moment in time, and why.
Millions of people around the world are struggling with chronic physical and mental health conditions and have tried different pharmaceuticals, diet changes, nutritional and herbal supplements, and other treatments and therapeutic techniques to address them. These approaches work for a good number of people. Many get better or at least get by, at least for a period of time. But in my practice, a percentage of people still didn’t get better, and I usually saw them at or immediately after the moment when everything fell apart. Something deeper clearly was afoot.
And the question I kept asking myself was this: Why does a similar condition – let’s say strep throat, or Epstein-Barr virus (which causes mononucleosis), or a seemingly benign car accident, or even a divorce – cause one person to get knocked off the horse for weeks or even months or years, while for another person, it barely causes a blip in terms of function for more than a week or two?
When I was in medical school, I was taught the answer to everything that happened to us was likely genetic – diabetes, migraines, mental illness, cancer, all the way down to our level of resilience or shitty coping skills. Who hasn’t heard – or said – “it runs in my family”? Yet while it’s true that all these physical and mental health conditions can have familial and even genetic components, research has shown that genetics likely play a far smaller role than we originally were told. And since genetics are mostly set in stone, I wanted to explore where opportunities existed to change those health and other stories passed down to us. I knew there had to be more to the story, and there was.
As we’ll explore together in these pages, the real answers are both simple and very complex. But what we now know is that a key factor in setting those different responses is trauma. And by that I mean not just current, ongoing, or acute events but even terrible moments or periods of life that could have happened decades ago or sometimes even generations ago. These events imprint upon us down to a cellular and mitochondrial level, and even affect the way our DNA is read. Sometimes trauma can result from an event that didn’t even look very dramatic to someone on the outside. And sometimes there was no “event” that someone could point to – it was simply painfully dysfunctional garden in which they grew every single day of their early childhood.
For a long time, trauma wasn’t a concept even discussed in the mainstream. Then – finally! – mainstream psychology and medicine began to acknowledge that trauma plays an often disempowering or even toxic role in our adult behaviors, responses, and relationship patterns, in ways ranging from overeating to addictions to depression to what we commonly call personality disorders.
Very recently, research has begun to show that adverse childhood events (ACEs) impact even our physical bodies, and can lead to not just mental illness but also some of the most difficult-to-treat physical illnesses we suffer from today – autoimmune disease, metabolic syndromes like diabetes and obesity, ADHD and dementia, and even chronic pain and cancer.
We know much about what happens in the brain and body as a result of individual trauma from studying a variety of childhood events. ACEs include experiences of divorce; addiction; incarceration; physical, mental, or sexual abuse; and loss of a family member, many of which are not uncommon life experiences.
Some people have higher ACE scores (meaning a greater number of difficult childhood experiences) than others, and may suffer more effects as a result. And of course, high or low ACE scores do not always correlate to a particular adult outcome, because every single person’s particular experience of difficult events are uniquely painful to them. Full stop.
How do the physical, mental, and other changes have long-standing impact in our bodies and minds, even causing disease later in life? When these experiences occur, our nervous system structure changes. On an MRI, higher ACE scores correlate with less gray matter in key areas of the brain, including in the prefrontal cortex, which supports decision-making and self-regulation, and the amygdala, which processes fear. If our developing brain was chronically stressed because we were coping with ACEs, the hippocampus, which processes emotion and memory and manages stress, shrinks.
ACEs can affect our resting heart and respiratory rates, eye contact, posture, coping mechanisms, and our emotional responses to situations. And though the events may have taken place in childhood, the effects can last for life, partly because the resulting behaviors tend to become invisible to us. They simply become part of our unconscious behavior.
All of this offers context for why many of us walk around ready to rumble (or crumple!) at the slightest instigation. The imprints of trauma disrupt our decision-making, self-regulation, fear-processing, memory, and stress management. And when we’re triggered, we fall more easily into a dysregulated fear response.
The fear response is designed in such a way that we can’t see subtlety. After all, what good is nuance when we’re running from a lion? The problem is that many of us feel like we’re constantly running from lions, even when we’re not. Every nightly news story or newspaper headline is designed to activate that response. Social media algorithms, too, are designed to act as triggers to the sympathetic nervous system so that we get “fired up” and stay longer on the site. And anyone who reads the comments section of any controversial post on Facebook can vouch for how even triggered strangers can then trigger us, causing a chain reaction of activated trauma.
Trauma mind shows us only directly what’s in front of us, our one and only path to survival, and nothing else. The result of a society in chronic survival mode is that half of the population seems to entirely disagree with the other half on any number of issues. We have seen in real time around the world how easily we can become weaponized against each other when we are triggered. Not surprisingly, black-and-white thinking can be a symptom of trauma response. Yet such thinking actually isolates us and heightens our sense of danger – even, as we’ll see, on a cellular level.
Most of all, trauma is fracturing and stigmatizing. The experiences – and how we internalize them – lead us to feel all alone, victimized, and like we are damaged, broken, and less valuable. Traumatic experiences psychically (and sometimes literally) separate us from what we may perceive to be “respectable” or “normal” society, leading to a sense of victimhood that can cause us to perceive our pain and suffering as unique, different, and something that no one else can really understand. That is the nature of the experience.
While our particular set of experiences are unique to us, pain and suffering are not unique. As a physician, I discovered early on that no matter how wonderful things may look from the outside, people can struggle with crippling issues of all kinds for a variety of reasons.
Years ago, my daughter took a gap year before college and found herself feeling isolated and alone in a relatively small, homogeneous group of people that she felt had more in common with each other than with her. Everyone else seemed to be making friends and having a great time except for her. When she shared her sense of exclusion and loneliness with the guides, they said: You’re not alone. It may not look that way, but a lot of other kids here feel lonely, isolated, and like they don’t have any friends.
That night, they gathered everyone into a circle for an exercise. They gave everyone a handful of pennies, placed a bowl in the middle of the room, and turned out the lights so no one could see anything. Then they asked questions: Do you feel lonely? Do you feel anxious? Do you feel depressed? Do you feel like you have no friends? If the answer was yes, they were instructed to throw a penny into the bowl.
After each question, the room was filled with the sounds of pennies upon pennies landing in the bowl. Inside, everyone felt like they had no friends. Everyone felt lonely, anxious, and depressed. Some just pretended better than others.
When she told me the story afterward, I asked her if she felt better knowing that she wasn’t alone. “No,” she said. “Because I’m really suffering; they just think they are.”
We all think our pennies are worth more.
From there, we live our lives as if in an “us versus them” stance, which becomes our instinctual response.
This automatic response, however, need not remain automatic. Trauma isn’t what happens to us, but what happens within us.
Here’s what I mean.
Like us, our cells exist in one of two major states – growth or protection. Either the cell experiences stimuli that are pleasant, which instigates the cell to open arms wide to accept connection and communication like nutrients and information, or it turns away from overly stressful stimuli, which causes the cell to close off to nutrients, communication, and even releasing waste. In the latter situation, the cell isolates and no longer operates as part of a community. And in extreme periods of protection, the cell becomes stuck in “danger mode” and diverts its function permanently to protection instead of growth.
The cell danger response (CDR) describes the way trauma lives within our bodies on a cellular level as a biological response to physical, mental, or emotional insults. Usually, our cells can activate or deactivate CDR fairly quickly in response to a challenge. But sometimes, the cell continues to live in high alert at all times and siphons resources away from optimal function, with the idea that it is always in danger. This CDR is the underlying physiological mechanism of almost all chronic physical and even mental illness. And as we reenact mental or emotional trauma until we heal it, so too will our cells reenact this response physiologically, and vice versa, again and again, until something shifts.
Our Microbes Run the Trauma Show
Trauma – whether ancestral; mental or physical abuse; a car accident; or countless other sources of physical, mental, or emotional pain –imprints not just on our cells but also, as we’ll see, on our very DNA, and even the microbes that reside within us. This trauma imprinting actually disrupt the composition of our microbiome – the organisms that live in and on our bodies, primarily in our digestive tracts. These three to five pounds of billions of bacteria, viruses, yeast, and fungi are a complex universe within us that supports not just our digestion but also our immunity, sleep, memory, and mood.
These microbes are influenced by what happens to us in our lives, and we, in turn, are exquisitely sensitive to what’s happening in our microbiome. A period of trauma can alter the makeup of microbes that predominate in our gut causing dysbiosis or microbial imbalances. And that alteration translates to persistent negative physical and mental health effects from the stress of that trauma. Our inner microbial community literally holds our traumatic events as their own and invisibly amplifies and propagates and prolongs them in our bodies.
What this means is that something that happens to us when we’re seven years old can imprint on our microbiome, and that shift then facilitates long-term negative impact – just from that single stressor! – for the rest of our lives or until that part of the microbiome is shifted back in balance again.
It turns out that our microbes are fundamental drivers of how we deal with the world around us and how we perceive the world. When trauma imprints on the microbiome, that imprint rewrites how we experience our daily life – literally down to our stress levels, anxiety, depression, brain fog, impaired memory or immunity or autoimmunity, chronic pain, and more – in the context of that trauma.
And it doesn’t even have to be trauma with capital T.
We can be affected in this way by our parents not comforting us when we’re crying or calling us “crybaby.” Or by a caretaker coming late every day to pick us up after school. Or by an abusive first grade teacher who publicly embarrasses us all year in front of our class when we make mistakes.
An important note is that another child in the family or kid in the classroom may not have experienced similar challenges in the same way as we did. For them, insults that flattened us may have rolled right off their backs. Similarly, not everyone demonstrates the same physiological changes as a result of the very same events.
Contrary to what we’ve been taught, “trauma” is not the event itself. It’s how we experience the event or period of our lives and how effectively the changes take up residence with us – whether it ultimately embeds into the makeup of our cells, our microbes, our brains, and beyond. It all depends on how acutely and intensely each of us experiences the particular set of stressors in the context of our particular inner nature, as well as the level of resilience and resource we derive from other parts of our lives.
All of this may sound a little far-fetched. After all, how can a mass of microbes – that aren’t even human – be so affected by our grief, sadness, and anger? And how do they in turn affect our behavior and our health?
At the most basic level, traumatic experiences dramatically shifts our microbial balance away from the beneficial gut organisms that we do need and toward the opportunistic organisms we don’t, all in a very short period of time. And then they really cause problems, because these excessive “opportunistic” organisms begin to create excess inflammation throughout the body. They increase intestinal permeability causing leaky gut and elevated inflammatory cytokines that travel far beyond our intestines – creating a chronically hypersensitive, hyperactivated hypothalamic-adrenal-pituitary (HPA) axis, which leads to chronically increased surges of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Now we are living in an ongoing fight-or-flight response.
When the HPA axis is so sensitive and thus more susceptible to activation, small things that would be seemingly easy to deal with create a much more amplified stress response. Everything feels like a 10 out of 10.
Starting to get the picture?
The constant surges of cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones that activate our fight-or-flight response trigger sympathetic nervous system and immune system in ways that amp our inflammatory pathways.
Welcome to chronic inflammation, which becomes the foundation for chronic disease. This constellation of events sets the stage for developing autoimmune disease, chronic pain syndromes, and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia. They can also act as a fundamental instigator of metabolic disease. So now our risk for developing diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are all dramatically increased because of this fundamental state of elevated inflammation.
In a nutshell, trauma keeps us on high alert, amplified by daily stressors, leading to chronic inflammation, which can cause chronic physical, neurological, and even mental illness down the road.
What does this all mean for us, practically speaking?
Let’s say we experience a common daily stressor – for example, crappy traffic. We’re driving to work, somebody cuts us off, and we get pissed. Totally normal. Our heart rate goes up. Our stress hormones surge. Our flight-or-fight response kicks in.
Sometime in the next twenty to thirty minutes, that stress response should return to baseline.
But if we have a trauma-altered body and gut, that single stressor will perpetuate the flight-or-fight response for hours. Instead of being a minimal, temporary stressor, the day becomes filled with anxiety and inflammation. To add insult to injury, we are now set up for chronic illness. Everything else starts to fall apart because of that embedded stressor within the system.
Of course, the more profoundly the stress persists, the more we try increasingly dramatic approaches to calm the response. Some people enter “freeze” mode and simply go numb or check out. Others develop addictive behaviors or seek substances in desperate attempts to extract themselves or even just cope with the stress response.
Whoa.
When we hold the imprint of trauma in our bodies and our minds, even simple uncertainty of any kind can act as one of many physiological and emotional triggers. The resulting insatiable need for control can look like perfectionism, people pleasing, hypervigilance, always expecting the worst (catastrophizing), and other adaptive behaviors.
But take a minute. Breathe. Because it’s important to know that this response need not be inevitable or permanent.
My Search for Answers in the Unseen World
If we don’t find a way out of these trauma loops, our automatic responses can lead us to repeat familiar childhood dynamics in our adult relationships, even if they were extremely unpleasant. And as a result, we can feel that we’re unsafe, that we cannot trust ourselves or those around us, and that we have to disconnect from ourselves and our needs in order to be accepted or loved. We can walk around dissociated, not noticing physiological cues like hunger, thirst, the need for rest, or even pain, or we can live in a state of chronic brain fog, where we struggle with focus, clear thinking, or memory. We may avoid intimacy, even with our spouses or those very close to us. We may be hypervigilant, our dysregulated nervous system always looking for danger and ready for lights to flash and sirens to blare, or we may catastrophize, expecting the worst of everybody and preparing for the worst possible scenario at all times. We can ruminate, overthink, perseverate, and worry, worry, worry.
These are not inherent responses, but likely result from experiences we had with our families of origin very early in our lives, which in turn can reflect familial and sometimes even ancestral trauma. As long as we are unaware of ways that we automatically live into patterns that may have been in some way modeled for (or inflicted upon) us, we may perpetuate them by repeating them with different sets of actors when we’re adults.
As I mentioned, when I began my own journey into understanding Master Plants, I was already known as an integrative adult and pediatric neurologist, herbalist, and urban farmer who worked with children and adults worldwide to reverse chronic and refractory illness. I was an expert, but even with all of my training, I couldn’t account for the different ways my patients with similar conditions responded to similar treatments. I knew it wasn’t just “genetics.” Something deeper was at play for my patients struggling with treatment-resistant syndromes.
With my detective hat on, I went searching for answers, this time in the unseen world. I took the endeavor as seriously as my prior medical training. I traveled to the Amazon rainforest, the Andes mountains, and the Valley of Longevity to explore different perspectives on how nature heals. In the years that followed, I trained with indigenous elders. I learned about ancient astrology and numerology, read original writings of ancient mystics, and dove deep into my own personal, familial, and ancestral trauma. And I began to grow my own Master Plants, tend to them, learn from them, and listen to them.
In the process, I began to walk the bridge between the ancient, indigenous technologies that modern science has only begun to fathom and my prior training and practice of medicine. I began to make sense of what had previously felt inaccessible. I developed vocabulary for what I had always sensed around me but struggled to describe, which I came to call the invisible terrain within and around us.
Many of us have denied the impacts of our trauma – at our own great peril. We may abandon our own needs and desires for the sake of others, put our effort into trying to make things okay for other people at our own expense, struggle to say no, and do anything to avoid conflict. We may develop addictions to substances or even activities in order to escape from feeling uncomfortable or avoiding unbearable inner pain we have no words to describe and minimal tools to mine. And as we’ve seen, these unexpressed, unseen parts can become loud and manifest as very real mental, emotional, or physical symptoms: explosive rage, depression, anxiety, addiction, insomnia, chronic pain, and conditions including autoimmunity, neurological disorders, and even cancer.
The famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Today, we are discovering how profoundly accurate his words were on every level.
And so we suffer. We can feel persistently isolated and alone even when surrounded by friends, because we literally are not seen for who we are. We can feel chronically fatigued or lack energy partly because we invest so much in pretending we’re fine.
Loneliness itself has the same health risks as smoking almost a pack of cigarettes daily or abusing alcohol. And loneliness doesn’t mean we are literally alone, but simply that we feel alone.
Many people who suffer with these conditions are labeled with what we call “diseases” and are offered pharmaceuticals, as though their problems are purely physical or mental. And while the symptoms are very real indeed, often they don’t fully or even minimally respond to these conventional, integrative, and psychological treatments.
The root cause may be something else entirely.
What does healing look like?
We are capable of change, and we can recalibrate our responses. The first step is to learn to listen to ourselves and trust our transmissions, beginning at the level of our nervous system, heart, body, soul, and beyond. From this place of trust, we can begin to find meaning in our life experiences, and see them as a call to mystery, community, and opportunity. Ultimately, this process allows us to encounter, embody, and continually evolve into our truest selves.
Sounds esoteric or unattainable, I know. But we’re going on this journey together.
When we realize how deeply we really are connected – to the world within us, the world around us, and even the world outside of ordinary space and time – we begin to shift out of the “us versus them” perspective. We can access a new kind of knowing that most of us have never been taught. And we can develop a sense of resonance and alignment rather than fruitlessly pursuing fulfillment through false acceptance. The more authentic we become, the more we recognize and even magnetize our soul family, so we never need to feel lonely again.
With this, our cells shift out of cell danger mode, and our chronic physical and mental health conditions can improve and even reverse. We can feel well, joyful, and more alive. And we can better navigate inevitable hard times as well.
Moving toward healing and connection – on every level – is our natural state. Sometimes our bodies, minds, and spirits just need a reminder that we’re capable of it, and a guide to help us begin the journey back to a state of well-being.
Most of us have been offered few options to address our past experiences and patterns other than recommendations for talk therapy, psychiatric medication, meditation, or keeping a stiff upper lip. Some of these approaches may work for some people, but the vast majority of people are looking for more effective – and faster – relief.
Psychedelic medicines – and Master Plants in particular – have captured the imagination of medical and mental health professionals, largely because they’re blowing up much of what we’ve believed about not just our physical and mental health, but also our emotional, spiritual and even communal and ecological health.
In this book, I am inviting you to consider Master Plants as a profound way to open new portals to healing and connection. However, this is not a push-of-a-button, one-size-fits-all solution. Master Plants require a particular approach that includes the right support before, during, and after. They ask us to think beyond reductionism – breaking ourselves and the world around us into tiny, separate particles – and to embrace interconnectedness in the widest sense of the word.
Chapter 2: Me and We
We know that a certain amount of suffering and challenge are an inevitable and inherent part of the human experience. Much as we may want to eliminate that, the nature of our current reality is that we all encounter difficulties over the course of our lives. The ten-million-dollar question is how do we become resilient in the face of those periods of inevitable hardship? How do we bounce back?
In Chapter 1, we discussed that a common underlying reason we suffer is because we live under the perception that we are separate, isolated, and not able to be seen for who we are. And those same perceptions of separateness are mirrored in our physiology – in how our hearts beat, how we breathe and oxygenate, our stress response, our posture, literally down to the function of our cells.
Yet everything mainstream we are told to do to “heal” perpetuates our sense of separateness – even from ourselves. We’ve come to see our bodies and their many parts as disconnected and divorced from us, to the point that we literally see fit to declare war on them. We wage war on our bodies, on fat, on germs, and on cancer, not to mention on the natural world – declaring war on weeds, bugs, and, of course, “drugs.” Yet as astrophysicist Hubert Reeves said, “We’re in a war with nature. If we win, we’re lost.”
What if we’ve been taking entirely the wrong approach to healing?
Famed humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow’s widely taught hierarchy of needs puts forth a model of society in which our physiological needs and safety are fundamental to our need for connection and self-actualization, which are portrayed as a proverbial cherry on top of higher priority “essentials.” One outcome of this model is the portrayal that survival becomes more primary than connection, which feeds our perpetual “war on” mentality.
It turns out, however, that Maslow’s theory was largely influenced by (some say generously borrowed from) a summer, in 1938, that he spent with one of North America’s largest indigenous nations, the Blackfoot people. There, he was deeply fascinated and moved by a community very different from his own, where self-actualization was the norm, which he defined as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” This approach included wide cooperation, generosity, minimal inequality, restorative justice, met needs, and a sense of satisfaction.
Yet Maslow went on to place self-actualization as the pinnacle for the individual to achieve. In contrast, the Blackfoot way of life assumes we’re each born self-actualized, as inherently sacred beings who deserve to be treated with dignity from our very first breath. Each person’s responsibility is to earn this status through continuous practice – with self-actualization serving not the benefit of the individual or as part of any hierarchy, but always in service to community. In turn, the community’s responsibility is cultural perpetuity – to make decisions informed by the experience of the seven generations before and to consider the consequences for the seven generations to come.
In this paradigm, self-actualization only has meaning in the context of community, lineage, and spirit – all of which ensure access to food, water, shelter, safety, and connection, as well as satisfaction and self-actualization for us and for generations to come.
No hierarchy necessary. Cooperation, kinship, sharing, service. Everybody takes care of everybody. Makes sense, right?
Given that Maslow was a product of the modern scientific paradigm of the times, the version of the Blackfoot worldview represented in his hierarchy of needs is no great surprise.
We’re still very much living in those times.
Modern science breaks complex systems into their parts and studies each in isolation. This approach was innovated in the 1600s largely by influential philosopher, mathematician, and scientist René Descartes, who believed that the human body was essentially a machine made up of various parts, such as organs, muscles, and bones. His concept of “mechanical philosophy” argued that the natural world and all living beings therein could be understood as complex machines made up of various parts that function together to produce the phenomena of life. He separated mind from body and science from religion, and in the process, transformed science into a sort of religion.
Over the ensuing centuries, Western science has taken a zealous approach of reductionism, operating under the belief that just as breaking a car down into the smallest parts possible should allow us to fully understand how the car works, so too should that work in living systems like our bodies or forest ecosystems. Scientists therefore explore the behavior of disembodied cells in isolation and extrapolate from their behavior in petri dishes what the cells might do in complex systems. Environmental influences are taken into account insofar as they’re considered confounding, or interfering with the true function of the cell. Even blood tests, bacterial cultures, and biopsies remove part of a living organism, analyze it in isolation, reduce it to its smallest parts, and then make assumptions about what that could mean in a living organism, according to our expectations. Undoubtedly that can sometimes be tremendously helpful. But what might we be missing?
The trouble is that we are not a collection of independent cells that work neatly side-by-side, but a robust, messy universe, filled with redundancies, in ongoing complex intelligent exchange. And this exchange is not just between parts of ourselves but also with the universe around us. This implies that much of science until now has been looking at and reporting a profoundly simplified – and at best, partially true – version of us.
Also, the modern scientific method operates with the understanding that we can be objective observers, yet by the principles of complex systems, the observer and the observed are unavoidably and irrevocably in relationship. We are inherently part of the experiment; always influencing the outcomes of science.
All of this to say: While the reductionist approach may have some merit, it’s been held up as the only way of knowing for centuries to the exclusion of all other approaches, and that is dangerous.
I Am Because We Are
The robust and rapidly growing science of connection explores the ways living beings – from cells to humans to entire ecosystems – interact with each other and the world around them. From the microbes living in our guts to the connection between our bodies, minds, and spirits, to relationships that we have with our loved ones, we are connected to others in a multitude of ways.
Leading up to and during the pandemic, we clearly saw this. We need each other. We wither without companionship. Just as the invisible relationships within us allow our bodies to survive physically, our relationships to people, place, and even the invisible allows us to find meaning and joy during challenging periods. Connection nourishes our hearts and souls.
All living beings rely on each other in a myriad of ways. Plants rely on soil, sun and mycelium for nutrients; insects and plants jointly survive through pollination; and animals eat insects and plants. In this web of life, all living beings must be connected to survive and thrive. Everyone needs everyone else.
We may think of community as the people we see at the grocery store, or the online friends we’ve made who post the funniest memes, or the neighbors on our block. All of those would be correct. But let’s take it just a little further.
A community is also a group of interdependent organisms growing together in a specified habitat. What if, when we thought of community, we included every cell, microbe, and drop of water within us? And everything around us? Sun, seed, soil, wind, water, and beyond?
What if we considered the terrain within and around us as our kin?
We know that swarms of bees and schools of fish can accomplish what one bee or fish cannot. We now know that forests work as communities both by sharing sunlight with one another, and through mycelial networks underground, sending support in the form of nutrients and phytochemicals. We are even learning that fungi are communicating with one another in a way that looks uncannily like human speech.
In Zulu, the term ubuntu means “I am because we are.” In other words, a person is a person through their interactions.
Human beings are social. We interpret stimuli based on possible social relevance. We spend tremendous amounts of time assessing our own and each other’s social relationships. The social brain hypothesis theorizes that our large brains evolved in response to the demands of our complex social systems.
If only we’d realized how complex our social systems really are.
All the way down to our mitochondria, the energy makers of our cells, we love to be connected and work together. Mitochondria do much more than produce energy; they act as sentinels in the cell, continually sampling the environment to determine safety based on infection, toxins, and other stressors and deciding whether the cell should live or die, a process called apoptosis.
If we were to picture mitochondria, we’d probably imagine that all mitochondria look exactly alike, along the lines of whatever illustrations we memorized from our high school biology textbooks. Turns out that’s wrong. Mitochondria are very individual in their structure, depending on their environment. When they are in what they perceive to be a “safe” environment, they are structured like branched spaghetti, exchanging information and nutrients and functioning at a very high level. When they perceive themselves to be in danger, they roll up like meatballs and don’t share information or nutrients – and thus aren’t able to function nearly as well – all in the name of protection.
Even our mitochondria become alone and isolated when they don’t experience their community (us!) as safe and supportive.
We already know from Chapter 1 that we are utterly dependent on our relationship with the billions of microbes that live in and on our bodies. But where do they come from?
When we come into contact with others – people, animals, plants, soil, water – we share microbes. It may sound a little scary, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Our immune systems are social and thrive on meeting and greeting diverse organisms and compounds. Think of it as just another way we talk to one another.
As a result, we leave every encounter we have with another living being changed, with countless new organisms that speak to our immune and nervous systems and even to our mitochondria. Our mitobiome describes the communication between microbes and mitochondria, seemingly disparate but cooperative beings that reside in the universe of us that we now know evolved from common bacterial ancestry. The ongoing mitobiome conversation literally alters the mitochondrial messages sent to the nucleus – influencing transcription of hormones, cytokines, and neurotransmitters we make –based on their exchange.
We are not the same minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, in part because – depending on who we see and where we go – our microbiome is not the same, and that’s good.
Our shared microbiome is constantly shifting and growing, depending on how we feel, how we care for ourselves, and how we connect with family members, friends, pets and wild animals, as well as the plants we eat and tend, the soil beneath our feet, and the forests that surround us. These microbes support our digestion, immune systems, hormones, bones, and aging and help prevent us from developing disease. More than that, they communicate directly with our mitochondria to instigate cellular changes responsible for cravings, feelings, productivity, a sense of well-being, and even athletic prowess.
We are a series of infinite ongoing conversations made manifest, and our bodies are beautifully built to reflect this.
Our networks of microbes “talk” to our mitochondria, which “talk” to the cells’ nuclei, who then send out neurotransmitters, hormones, and cytokines to “talk” with other cells throughout the body. Our fascial network is now known to be a communication system of connective tissue that surrounds every organ and body structure, and talks by way of molecules, electrical signals and even photons. And researchers have recently discovered that the extracellular “space” surrounding our cells is not empty but comprises a communication network called interstitium, which connects every cell in the body. Some researchers are now calling interstitium an organ in its own right, due to its critical functions in regulating fluid balance, immune responses, and signaling.
We are even connected – cell by cell, organ by organ – through our heart’s powerful electromagnetic field that entrains the brain and other organs in the body to all synchronize as one community. Based on modern understanding, the brain controls the body and serves as the home to our consciousness. But extensive laboratory research comparing EEG and EKG tracings shows that it is in fact our hearts that perceive and anticipate our environment before our brains. Our heart rate variability – the variation of pauses between our heartbeats – predicts our emotional state with impressive accuracy. In this way, our hearts act as organs of perception and communication by emitting a measurable electromagnetic “biofield” that can be detected up to ten feet away.
More and more, we are realizing we’re less one human organism and more like a rainforest, a swarm, or a universe inside a universe inside a universe. We just didn’t realize how robust these many systems were because until recently, we were too busy taking everything apart.
We’re seeing in real time that despite everything we’ve been told, we’re not independent and self-reliant. We are interconnected. We all have to care for and be cared for by each other. We have to create a society that encourages us to show up for each other and check on each other. And we must make decisions not from the top down, but side by side, in ways that benefit individuals and all living beings.
We can cultivate these relationships that nourish us. That begins with our relationship with ourselves. Think of our bodies as a series of nested relationships – microbiome, mitochondria, epigenetics, cells, fascia, heart, brain, and other organ systems.
We Are Made of Relationships
Let’s talk about our terrain. Our terrain is physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and ecological.
Terrain is within us; let’s call that the bio-terrain. It’s our heart, lungs, brain, gut, kidneys, bone, and blood. It’s our microbiome, the three to five pounds of invisible-to-the-naked eye bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites (that’s right!) that live in and on our bodies and keep us regulated and healthy. It also includes our DNA, our epigenetics, our emotions, our spirit, and our soul.
Terrain is all around us, too; our eco-terrain is sun, soil, seeds, wind, water, the food we eat, the people we surround ourselves with, the microbes around us, the art, the music, the toxins, the way we spend our time, even the news we consume.
Invisible conversations between all of these entities and elements influence us in measurable ways. For example, research shows that we are healthier when we spend regular time immersed in nature. “Bathing” in the forest regularly improves focus, executive function, and memory; reduces anxiety; promotes better sleep and feelings of happiness; lowers stress hormones like cortisol; boosts our immune systems; and reduces our risk of cancer. Spending regular time in sunlight (while avoiding sunburn) or getting our hands in the soil are two deeply evidence-based interventions that can help us become healthier and prevent illness. One 2016 study from the Karolinska Institute looked at thirty thousand women over a twenty-year period and found that those who assiduously avoided the sun doubled their risk of dying for any reason. In fact, the risk was considered equal to that of smoking cigarettes. A different study looked at healthy women who spent regular time in the forest and noted that their bodies increased production of natural killer cells and anticancer proteins. These benefits come simply by prioritizing an interaction between ourselves and the forest and sun.
We also rely on plant and animal communities around us in ways that are not immediately obvious. For example, research shows that when trees die, humans that live near those trees die at higher rates. This observation does not clearly reflect anything that we’ve yet been able to directly assess (like cleaner air), but rather what are likely complex relationships that are beyond our ability to currently measure.
And as we’ll soon see, forests themselves are living, intelligent organisms that depend upon all the many different organisms and entities for wellbeing, including miles of mycelium living in the soil beneath them.
When our inner and outer terrains are in alignment, we – and all living beings around us – experience greater health, wellbeing and balance.
Terrain is everything – from our body’s ability to protect itself and stay in balance; our mind’s sense of well-being; and our sense of purpose and joy to the food we eat; the land we stand on; and the quality of our connections to the visible and invisible world within and around us.
When we are facing health hurdles or other unanticipated life challenges, one course of action is always certain: attuning to and tending our terrain. When we are in physical, emotional, spiritual, and ecological balance, we become resilient and less likely to be derailed by any given stressors – personal or collective – from confronting novel organisms to political unrest.
This entanglement is good news. We need not think of ourselves as being entirely responsible for everything. We are intimately embedded in and thus supported by a massive life force. Our inner and outer garden is being tended to and nourished by vast numbers of beings. The task of our individual and collective well-being isn’t a job for each of us alone. It rests in the quality of our infinite visible and invisible relationships.
What this all means is that each of us is not just me but WE.
Everyone is in beautiful conversation with everyone else, and together, this becomes a diverse, complex concert that makes our bodies, minds, and spirits sing.
These conversations even transcend time and space. We think of our ancestors as distant from us, but even the lives of our ancestors are not long gone. They manifest through us every day. This is not a metaphor.
The past experiences of our ancestors are woven into our epigenetics and determine how our DNA expresses itself in tangible and practical ways. For example, significant events of our great-great-grandparents’ lives, such as famine, war, or farm chemical exposure, can affect how our genes express in the present moment. While DNA remains relatively stable over generations, the way it is read does not. Our epigenetics (meaning “on top of” genetics) are the labels that influence where and when proteins begin reading certain parts of DNA and where they stop, based on exposures to food, toxins, exercise, traumatic experiences, time in nature, and more. Think of them as yellow sticky notes all over our DNA that tell translating proteins to START HERE NOW. Or STOP. These labels help explain why we go gray, bald, or enter menopause at particular ages or even why familial conditions manifest in us or not.
What’s fascinating is that though our epigenetics are inherited, they are reversible. This is why it is said that when we heal ourselves, we heal generations both backward and forward. On the one hand, mystics have always maintained that time and space are nonlinear. On the other hand, the science of epigenetics demonstrates this phenomenon in ways even the field of genetics previously never would have imagined.
Our survival – and, more than that, our ability to thrive – begins and ends with this giant web of unseen connection that transcends time and space.
Part of what makes us unique is the invisible world within us. Some aspects can be assessed. Others cannot, at least not with tools we currently have, and some are esoteric and thus simply not measurable. We are each individual, with our own genes, our own microbial community, and our own inner terrain. We are each the result of a vast coevolution, a moment-to-moment outcome of ongoing countless microbial contacts and encounters with diverse beings. Nothing about this process is static. Each day, we are made and remade of complex symbiotic relationships and infinite encounters. We exist because of our relationships – beginning with microbes, food, dirt, plants, animals, water, air, and people. And these systems are self-organized; there is no hierarchy there.
Engaging with our terrain means cultivating intimacy and trust as we lean into all of these nested relationships and the natural cycles of Mother Earth. And as with any defining relationship, these invisible connections both hold us and challenge us. The trust we inhabit by embracing our role as Me and We permits us to stay more resilient, curious, and even playful in the face of mystery, which includes all that we don’t or can’t know. From this place, we can awaken to sense a numinous layer of communication, with opportunities and solutions that present in subtle and unexpected ways – in signs, symbols, synchronicities, and epiphanies. This attunement to our terrain invites us to remember the universal language that has no words, allowing us to rejoin a bigger conversation.
Master Plants Help Us Heal on a Community Level
In Western medicine, any conversation about the body refers only to the physical structure we inhabit. Yet as miraculous as our bodies are, they are not only physical – but also psychological, emotional, and spiritual. In fact, psyche means soul, or spirit. And beyond even that, our bodies are relational. They are part of a family, a community, a village – which means that if a problem arises within us, the community can be present to help. In fact, most cultures consider community intervention mandatory because the problems of one affect all.
As anyone who has dealt with a sick family member knows, no person in the family will function in quite the same way when their loved one is suffering, because everyone’s well-being is inseparable from the well-being of the one. And though we’ve strayed from this fundamental knowing in our “rugged individualist” culture, we’re paying a heartbreaking price in a plethora of ways. The truth of this interconnection remains inescapable for our families, communities, and society at large.
We are only ever as strong as the support we offer our weakest member.
Master Plants help us directly engage with the traumatized or compromised within and around us – be it our cells, our psyches, our souls, people, other living beings, and beyond. They offer us opportunities and guidance to find our way out of derangement and into a more profound experience of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, ecological, and relational balance.
The so-called “psychedelic renaissance” being touted in widespread headlines is really a renaissance of relationship. Because while these sacred plants work within us as individuals, they are considered also to recalibrate us on a community level – and not just the human community or even the greater-than-human community, but the ancestral community, the spirit community, and beyond. In an indigenous paradigm, none of us are mere “individuals” but rather custodians, in service to – and simultaneously part of – something much more. As such, these plants offer healing that includes and also goes far beyond each of us, which is why they can be so effective.
As we’ll see over the course of the coming chapters, Master Plants demonstrate how to shift our paradigm from “Us versus Them” to “Me and We.” The language of modern science is showing us ways that these plants boost our connectivity, empathy, gratitude, wonder and awe, and sense of meaning.
Indigenous people around the world have long engaged with psychedelic Master Plants as a way to contact with divinity that is considered to exist everywhere. That they impart knowledge of the therapeutic virtues of plants and fungi, as well as the sacredness of nature and all life, has earned particular plants the status of Teacher or Master. By offering a window into the depth of our connection – with ourselves, each other, the natural world, and the invisible –they show us how we can begin to cultivate greater compassion and self-compassion, trust, gratitude, and curiosity, so we can heal and grow individually, relationally, and communally.
The Master Plant Experience
Chapter 3: Master Plants Are Returning in Force
When I wrote my first book, The Dirt Cure, people asked me, “What’s the difference between a germ and a microbe?” “We’ve always been told germs are bad, but it turns out microbes are actually good?” The answer: they’re the same. Germ is simply a pejorative term for microbe. The definition rests in the nature of the relationship. The quality of our entanglement makes all the difference.
I now get asked: “What’s the difference between a drug and a psychedelic?” The answer is similar. At a certain point, drugs became a pejorative term for psychedelic Master Plants. And again, the nuance resides in the relationship, in how we and the plants interact with one other. As with any relationship with a powerful Master, we must ask: are we coming with a sense of respect?
Wait. Respect for a plant? What does coming to a plant with respect even mean?
Consider whether we have cultivated reverence in our collective approach to the array of sacred plants long familiar to our culture – coca, cannabis, tobacco, and others. Most people would readily admit our engagement has demonstrated the very opposite of respect.
When I was in Ecuador years ago, I learned that communities who interfaced with Northerners referred to them as “junkies.” They based their view not just on an overall proclivity for substance abuse, though that observation informed their opinion. The term emerged from what they saw as a constant and endless commoditizing and consuming of everything, even the most revered plants, with little to no respect for the sacred relationship or cultural scaffolding inherent to their benefit.
In their eyes, Northerners – seekers, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and the rest – only come greedily for themselves, with no consideration of the well-being of anyone else: the plants, the land, the people who transmit the wisdom of those plants, or even the ancestors and the spirit world associated with the plants.
All me, no we.
Welcome to Indigenous Science
Up until now, many mainstream scientists and academics have not regarded indigenous science as true science, which mostly is a case of “it’s hard to see what you aren’t looking for” (or refuse to see). Yet while the principles underlying indigenous science have endured, our reductionist scientific paradigm is now being challenged to its very core by cutting-edge approaches like systems biology and quantum physics. These new perspectives allow us to explore the nonlinear entanglement of living processes, embracing complexity in ways that linear models simply can’t entertain. And as we’ll see, they emerging models are far more in alignment with longstanding indigenous science. In fact, these principles of interconnection are supported by the methods and measures of modern scientific approaches that are familiar to us.
As discussed, in their indigenous communities of origin, psychedelics are referred to not as drugs but as Master or Teacher Plants. They may also be referred to as Grandmother or Grandfather, Mother or Father. These Master Plants are considered to be very old and powerful kin; they convey an ancient wisdom and lineage that can help us heal as individuals and evolve as a community. In contrast to the way we perceive medicine in modern culture, these plants are not meant to be “taken” or “used”; they are regarded as revered members of the community – honored elders, teachers, and allies – and as such are approached extreme reverence and humility, carefully, with offerings in hand. Any benefits derived are considered to be sacred gifts from the plants.
Skeptical? That’s no surprise. Those from the Global North have long operated under the assumption that certain societies, particularly those of indigenous peoples, are primitive, backward, or “undeveloped.” This view is partly based on the fact that they are preliterate or extra-literate, and thus unschooled in the repertory of European literature, history, and research that comprise an “acceptable” education. By this logic, indigenous communities therefore do not practice any science, technology, or advanced forms of knowledge commensurate with the standards of “modern” society.
This topic is worth unpacking in any conversation about the future of psychedelic medicine, because indigenous knowledge is the past, present, and must remain a fundamental part of the future of the widespread engagement with Master Plants.
For example, this prevailing “primitive” paradigm conveniently ignores that many of our advanced scientific and other “discoveries,” including those of psychedelics, primarily come from long-standing indigenous knowledge. At least 75 percent of pharmaceutical company’s plant-based remedies have come from indigenous societies. Fewer than 2 percent of all plants have been fully explored, with the vast majority of those plants living in tropical forests inhabited by indigenous communities.
Take ayahuasca, for example. Many people may not realize that the ayahuasca vine alone has no significant hallucinogenic activity. In order to become the psychedelic brew called “ayahuasca” that’s been prepared for millennia, two plants must be brewed together for hours. One of the plants – which in the Amazon is often the chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis) – must contain the hallucinogenic substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT). However, that plant alone also has essentially no hallucinogenic effect when consumed orally, because it is broken down by an enzyme in our stomachs called monoamine oxidase. Enter the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) – which contains compounds that render that enzyme inactive, allowing for the DMT to survive digestion and absorption – allowing the combination to penetrate systemic circulation and the brain’s inner sanctum.
Of roughly 100,000 or more plant varieties in the Amazonian jungle alone, many unrelated indigenous communities somehow discovered not just the ayahuasca vine, but also the necessity of combining the vine with just the right second plant, and the hours-long process required to prepare them together to have a psychedelic effect. Oh, and all of this happened without what most of us would consider the necessary scientific knowledge or technology to identify enzymes, alkaloids, and other compounds involved.
What’s more, when they’re asked how they obtained this intricate, detailed, and very specific knowledge, they say the Master Plants showed them.
And yes, they mean this literally.
In fact, they refer to Master Plants – or really, the Spirit or Mother of the Master Plants such as ayahuasca – as a doctor, a teacher, or a force with intelligence and the capacity to create an alliance with humans if the humans come in a good and respectful way. For those who dedicate themselves to the relationship, Master Plants can transmit knowledge and power – not for personal gain, but for the good of all.
Most people’s automatic response when they hear all of this is that it’s clearly some kind of hallucinogenic fantasy. Learning botany and pharmacology…from a plant? Anthropologists have written extensively about this claim, which is widely held by indigenous communities in the Amazon and around the world. With few exceptions, the anthropologists say it simply cannot be taken seriously.
Moreover, most scientists to this day refuse to recognize that indigenous people could have developed ways to use nature’s molecules and compounds by any means other than chance experimentation. And they continue to maintain this stance in the face of extensive evidence that the complexity of remedies used, sometimes for millennia, is as advanced as anything developed by modern science.
Another example is curare, the synthetic medication used universally by anesthesiologists to paralyze patients during surgery. Originally developed by indigenous people to paralyze tree monkeys they hunted that would otherwise remain hanging high up in trees after being shot with arrows, curare ensured that they fell to the ground. In order to create the treated arrows, however, the people had to identify and gather several different plants, boil them together for hours to create a paste (all while avoiding breathing the poisonous fumes), and then determine that the preparation was only effective when administered under the skin rather than ingesting it.
Are we to really assume this all happened by dumb luck?
No matter. We – by way of anthropologists, botanists, the pharmaceutical industry, and many others – have been only too happy to utilize and commoditize all of this advanced knowledge, or intellectual property (as we would call it), even as they disregarded and disrespected wisdom holders, plants, and spirits who have shared them. To add insult to injury, anthropologists pejoratively labeled the ones who often transmitted the information – now universally called “shamans” – as psychiatrically or medically unstable.
This same attitude also has permeated the way we view indigenous myth. These days, myths are mostly set aside for story time. However, once upon a time, myth was fundamental to everyone’s understanding of the world – and not just metaphorically.
Every culture has its own dominant mythology – a story that explains how the world is and provides guidance for living. Most of us, for example, have been indoctrinated with a very particular mythology of our dominion over nature and other beings, the commoditization of living beings and eternal elements – animals, plants, trees, land, minerals, water, people – and our entitlement to build that into a model of unlimited growth and unbridled benefit for ourselves.
There are, however, other mythologies – ones that were once widely held not just as colorful stories but also as transmissions of eternal knowledge – that are far older. What’s more, all of this information and much more has been memorized and recited as a sophisticated memory coding technique as opposed to being written and maintained in volumes of books.
In indigenous cultures around the world, once the knowledge is transmitted from plant or animal or spirit to human, the information then would be embedded and orally conveyed by way of myth.
Myths, accompanied by song, dance, and art, are cataloged knowledge, passed from the ancients to now, generation by generation, initiate to initiate. For Australian Aboriginal people, for example, these dreamings and song lines are guides through the land and historical events, as well as sources of advice on how to live and survive. Some record events going back over 10,000 years.
Indeed, indigenous communities have always conveyed rich and detailed knowledge via stories, symbols, models, and metaphors assisted by art, music, and spiritual practice, all of which guide people in respectfully caring for each other and their human and greater-than-human kin. The stories communicate historical events that transformed the earth over time, and the necessary guiding principles and values for living in harmony within their community and with the world around them, also known as “right relationship.”
Myths metaphorically demonstrate fundamental principles like interdependence; respect for plants, animals, and places; and the ways that each generation must behave in order to maintain a reciprocal relationship with the natural world. But they are not just stories. They have long been used as instruments to encode generations of knowledge, in some cases from ten thousand years or more. The Navajo people, for example, shared the names of seven hundred species of insects with researchers, all from memory – with names, sounds, behaviors, and habitats all remembered through oral transmission of myth accompanied by cues embedded in song and dry sand paintings. For Australian Aboriginals, rituals that describe hunting magic are not just ways to engage with supernatural beings and invite good fortune – the associated songs catalog details of animal behavior, the visible constellations of stars that show the most effective time of year to hunt, and landmarks to find the animals, while the dances imitate the activity and characteristics of the animals, ways to avoid being detected by them, and patterns they might use to disperse.
In indigenous cultures, myths are a matter of survival. And a myth rarely represents only one form of knowledge but includes overlapping categories like history, literature, botany, geology, hunting, safety, ethics, law, or spirituality. An initiated elder might know over a thousand stories that act as maps for landscape features, plants, animals, elements, and other necessary resources, all remembered with no volumes of written words on which to rely.
As with a game of telephone, too many people sharing the information can distort the integrity of the transmission. What this means is that when we hear indigenous myths that sound like children’s stories, it’s probably because they are. At the most basic level, those myths are the simplest and most colorful versions of information to be memorized, meant to introduce children to the much more complicated layers that they’d eventually learn in the process of lifelong initiation into the knowledge of their community.
It’s of the utmost importance that this repository of information be woven together with ethics and maintained only by the initiated, because indigenous elders have long understood that any information – no matter how profound or powerful – can become a weapon when wielded without wisdom.
The same is true for Master Plants.
The Right Intentions and the Right Ceremony
Indigenous communities express a great deal of concern around the use of Master Plants as a means of “sorcery.” While such talk makes many of us uneasy, sorcery, at its core, means to use their exceptional power with evil intent, for example, to attack, cause disease, or even destroy enemies. In many indigenous paradigms of disease, physical and mental illness can be traced to psychic attacks and negative intentions (whether conscious or not). And Master Plants in the right hands, with the right intentions, and with the right ceremony, can allow the healer to see into the suffering person and help them purge the spiritual sickness.
The importance of ritual and ceremony in the use of Master Plants thus centers on this very issue and is considered a fundamental reason to uphold sacred and ceremonial “rules of engagement.” The rules vary by community and Master Plant, but the concern that humans could easily devolve into using their profound power with malefic intent is universal.
As such, while considered sacred by indigenous communities, no one maintains that Master Plants only offer healing benefit. Master Plants are, however, indisputably powerful, and let’s face it, humans who engage with great power don’t always demonstrate their finest behavior. Again, this is where initiated elders play a critical role, holding others accountable by passing down ritual laws, historical events, ethics, and responsibilities encoded into myth, song, dance, and ceremony to select initiates.
Until very recently, it could easily be argued that overall, the Global North’s first interactions with psychedelics in the 1950s demonstrated a less than responsible, less than ethical approach that could be called the opposite of sacred.
For example, it’s thought that humans have likely consumed psychedelic psilocybes, or magic mushrooms, for millennia. It’s also thought that the context for ingestion was likely sacred and ceremonial, which was certainly true for the Mazatec people of Mexico. That changed on June 29, 1955, when a vice-president of J.P. Morgan named R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Mexico with a photographer to the home of the Mazatec curandera (medicine woman) Maria Sabina, and they became, in Wasson’s words, “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.”
Wasson found that many cultures across the world worshipped mushrooms and had constructed religious ceremonies around their consumption. He was especially interested in the Aztecs after learning of early Spanish missionary accounts of the Aztec mushroom ceremony of eating the teonanacatl, or “God’s flesh.”
It wasn’t until 1955 in the Oaxacan village of Huautla de Jiménez that Wasson achieved his goal. He asked a town hall official for help learning the secrets of the divine mushroom, and was taken to a mountainside where the mushrooms abundantly grew and then to the home where Maria Sabina lived.
Maria Sabina was well-respected in the village as a curandera. She’d been consuming psilocybe mushrooms regularly since she was seven years old and had performed the mushroom ceremony for over thirty years before Wasson arrived.
The all-night ceremonies she conducted were always intended to commune with God to heal the sick. The spirits would tell Maria Sabina the nature of the sickness and the way it could be healed. Vomiting by the participants was considered an essential part of the ceremony to purge the sickness. Each participant in the ritual would ingest mushrooms as Maria Sabina chanted invocations to coax forth the divine.
Maria Sabina was reluctant to introduce Wasson to the ceremony because Wasson and his colleague weren’t in need of healing. Wasson and his friends were the first foreigners who had come to town in search of the “Saint Children,” but in contrast to the tradition, they didn’t suffer from any illness. Their reason was simply to find God.
Over time, Wasson witnessed nine ceremonies by Maria Sabina. On one trip, he brought French mycologist Roger Heim, who identified the species of mushrooms and sent samples to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who twenty years earlier had synthesized LSD. Hofmann isolated the chemical structure of psilocybin, created a synthetic version, and began sending doses to research institutions across the world.
The subsequent Life Magazine article written by Wasson in 1957, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” opened a Pandora’s box that led to the emergence of the American psychedelic counterculture, the defilement of the mushroom ritual, and, ultimately, the banning of psilocybin across much of the world. The article also eventually impacted Maria Sabina and her community profoundly as Westerners came to her by the hundreds.
Wasson gained the public eye, at least for a time, as well as a research career, going on to publish a number of volumes in the field of mycology and ethnobotany.
Wasson’s story also attracted the interest of the CIA for its covert program Project MK ULTRA.
Not surprisingly, psychedelics brought about some darker components of US history. Over the 1950s and 1960s, the military and CIA conducted their own experiments through MK Ultra with LSD and psilocybin as part of their broader research on mind-control and behavior modification. This research was conducted at universities like Harvard as well as other academic institutions in partnership with the government or military.
The program involved administering LSD and other psychoactive drugs without consent or warning to both willing and unwilling subjects, including CIA employees, military personnel, and members of the general public. The goal of the program was to investigate their potential use as weapons, as well as to study the effects of these substances on the human mind.
Sorcery is thought to be a superstitious term, far removed from the modern world, but what was this, if not using the power of Master Plants and psychedelics to bring ill effects or destruction on enemies?
To this day, the full extent of the CIA’s experimentation with psychedelics remains unknown. The programs were controversial and eventually said to be terminated.
Yet whether or not he was aware, Wasson became an agent of sorts for the program after the CIA secretly funded Wasson’s trips to Mexico under a shell organization.
After reading Wasson’s article “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” psychologist and Harvard professor Dr. Timothy Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Rather than partake in the sacred mushroom ritual, he purchased mushrooms from a local curandera and ingested them by the pool of his villa – removing the mushrooms from the ceremonial setting.
From that experience, Leary stated that he’d “learned more about my brain and its possibilities and more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding fifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology.” Leary proceeded to return to Harvard and start the Harvard Psilocybin Project with his colleague Dr. Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass).
Leary and Alpert proceeded to develop pioneering concepts in psychedelic therapy, testing whether ingesting psilocybin could reduce recidivism in prison inmates or catalyze religious experiences in divinity students. Though the published results enthusiastically endorsed psilocybin’s mystical and therapeutic potential, they ultimately were judged to lack credibility due to their excessively positive spin – for example, omitting descriptions of the intense anxiety experienced by many of the participants.
Leary and Alpert were doing more than simply testing psychedelics in controlled experimental settings. They were using LSD every weekend and encouraging their students and colleagues to do the same. The academic community became divided over this widespread, indiscriminate use of LSD, all driven by the belief that every researcher should be mandated to have a mind-opening experience. Ultimately, Leary and Alpert were fired. Soon after, Leary began his public campaign to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Alpert traveled to India, studied with a guru, and came back as Ram Dass.
The overemphasis on the positive aspects of psychedelic experiences and downplaying of the negative became more of a problem when psychedelics reached the streets in the early 1960s. As psychedelic researcher and director of MAPS Rick Doblin wrote: “Some of the backlash that swept the psychedelics out of research labs and out of the hands of physicians and therapists can be traced in part to the thousands of cases of people who took psychedelics in non-research settings, were unprepared for the frightening aspects of their psychedelic experiences, and ended up in hospital emergency rooms.”
For these reasons and more, from the mid-1960s onward, LSD research came to a halt, and in 1966, the United States outlawed potential LSD treatments for PTSD and alcoholism. The medication became a Schedule I narcotic, meaning it had “a high potential for misuse” and “no currently recognized medicinal use.”
While public health played a role, this policy had political motivations as well, particularly in light of promising research. And one of Nixon’s top advisors John Ehrlichman admitted in an 1994 interview more than two decades later that the drug war was in part a ploy to undermine Nixon’s political opposition:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
For better or worse, the initiative worked. After President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, the number of people incarcerated in American jails and prisons escalated from 300,000 to 2.3 million. Half of those in federal prisons are incarcerated for a drug offense, and two-thirds of those in prison for drug offenses are people of color. Disproportionate arrest, conviction, and sentencing rates for drug offenses have had devastating effects on communities of color in the United States.
Meanwhile, streams of hippies, scientists, seekers, and celebrities continued to flood Maria Sabina’s village of Huautla de Jiménez.
For her part, Maria Sabina frequently expressed regrets over introducing Wasson to the mushrooms and always emphasized what she saw as the mushroom’s true purpose. Still, she rarely turned seekers away. Yet all the publicity and tourism was disastrous for the Mazatec community, who blamed Maria Sabina for bringing misfortune to her community and defiling the mushroom ritual. Her house was burned down, and federales raided her home many times, accusing her of selling drugs to foreigners. The tourists took over her town and surrounding towns, had bad trips, and behaved in disruptive ways, including running naked through the streets.
In the 1970s, Mexican authorities banned the use of the mushrooms. The influx of tourists receded, but in Maria Sabina’s eyes, the damage had been done.
“From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the Saint Children lost their purity,” she said. “They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on, they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it.”
Wasson himself expressed remorse for his role in popularizing the recreational use of the mushrooms.
Maria Sabina died penniless at the age of ninety-one in 1985. Because she is held up as a sort of sacred figure of the psychedelic movement, her face graces mugs and T-shirts sold to the tourists passing through her hometown, and the site of her former home is now a public museum.
Yet she was held in no small part responsible for the ruin of her people’s traditional way of life. She stuck to her ancient craft as a curandera but ultimately regretted that she’d let the secrets of her people’s tradition escape into the wider world, even for spiritual purposes.
She said: “Before Wasson, nobody took the mushrooms only to find God. They were always taken for the sick to get well.”
The Return to Healing the Sick
Fast-forward to the 2000s, interest in better approaches to addiction as well as major depression began to revitalize the psychedelic clinical research field. In 2008, Dr. Matt Johnson paired high-dose psilocybin administration with a more standard cognitive behavioral therapy for smoking cessation: to help the person quit, identify their reasons for quitting and their motivations for engaging in that pattern of behavior, and untangle that web of addiction. They interspersed within that a high dose of psilocybin to accelerate the process. The initial pilot study was in highly motivated individuals that had been smoking for decades on average, and the results were really exciting. The majority were able to quit smoking immediately after two high doses of psilocybin along with supportive counseling. And the majority of those people were able to maintain biologically-verified smoking abstinence through a six-month and then twelve-month follow-up. Even years later, many were still abstaining.
These results were far better than for any other approach anywhere else in the world. In a typical group of people trying to quit smoking, around 30 percent are usually successful in quitting longer term. But by six months or a year later, they relapse. In contrast, this study had an 80 percent success rate at six-month follow-up of participants who were not smoking. Sixty-seven percent were not smoking at the twelve-month follow-up. These results were unmatched by any other approach attempted for nicotine addiction.
Similarly unprecedented results are emerging from clinical trials to resolve addiction to other substances as well as major depression, PTSD, and eating disorders, with studies on many more conditions in progress.
In 2014, Scientific American called for an end to the ban on psychedelic research.
Reforming laws around the use of psychedelics is a significant development for at least two reasons. First, psychedelics may offer a level of therapeutic benefit that could literally save lives for people suffering from the impacts of trauma and much more. Second, legalizing psilocybin may prompt a radical rethinking of the prohibition on other Schedule I drugs, which might serve as a catalyst for ending the largely racially motivated “war on drugs.”
To date, several American cities and even some states have moved to decriminalize psychedelics, either as a result of ballot initiatives or decisions made by municipal councils. The use and possession of psilocybin-containing mushrooms were made legal in Denver for the first time in May 2019. Since then, Legalize Nature, a decentralized group, has directed grassroots campaigns in more than one hundred American cities to decriminalize psilocybin and other entheogenic plants and increase access to them.
And the initiatives are picking up speed. Psilocybin and other naturally occurring psychedelics will henceforth be treated as the “lowest law enforcement priority” in cities including Oakland; San Francisco; Santa Cruz; Ann Arbor; Washington, DC; Somerville; and Cambridge, among others. All eyes are on Oregon, the first state where Schedule 1 substances in small quantities are legal.
More than forty years after research into their therapeutic effects was all but outlawed, psilocybe mushrooms and other Master Plants are now being studied for use in a manner much closer to what María Sabina considered to be their true purpose: to heal the sick.
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