Eliot Cowan - Plant Spirit Medicine

DEDICATED TO YOU.

MAY THE MEDICINE IN THESE PAGES
TOUCH YOUR HEART.

I spent a great many days gathering experience and putting words on these pagesdays that might otherwise have been passed with my family. Victoria, Aura, Serena, Omar, and Vicky, I offer you love and thanks. May your patience and generosity be well rewarded.

Alison Gayek, you have worked tirelessly for many years as a magnificent teacher and champion of plant spirit medicine. Should the medicine continue to flourish, it will largely be thanks to you.

Ancestors and spirits of the Blue Deer Center, you favor this work in miraculous ways. You on the board and staff of the center have contributed more devotion, vision, skill, and hard work than anyone could expect. Thank you and thanks to all you generous friends of the center for giving the medicine and myself the perfect home.

Pam Meyer and Brian Crissey, you have my admiration and thanks for your loyalty to this book. You kept it in print for eighteen years and then gracefully sent it on to a new future.

Amy Rost and the other good people at Sounds True, you support Plant Spirit Medicine with taste, skill, and kindness.

Thank you, my brother Ish, for unfailing moral support.

I give astonished gratitude to you plant spirits for your generosity, wisdom, and healing.

To you plant spirit medicine students who give me hope for the future,

To you healers who courageously offer this medicine to a society that had forgotten it,

To you supporters of the Plant Spirit Medicine Association,

To the Temple of Sacred Fire Healing,

To you, Margaret Freier, pillar of the Temple,

May you be richly blessed by the divine natural world you serve so well.

You the God of Teachings and Lessons, God of Heart and Love, Knower of All Beings, Source and Keeper of Traditions, and true Author of this work, my stammering and insufficient thanks.

T he stories of spiritual healing in this book are true, although names have been changed to respect the privacy of those who consulted me. For illustrative effect I have chosen unusually dramatic anecdotes; you should know that time, patience, and recurrence are needed to get the best that plant spirit medicine has to offer.

You should also know that plant spirit medicine does not diagnose, treat, or cure any physical, mental, or emotional symptom, condition, or illness. It provides purely spiritual intervention. No claims are made about changes in the health of those receiving treatment.

W hen I began writing this book in 1991, I had been practicing and teaching plant spirit medicine for a number of years, and I had just begun an apprenticeship with a Huichol Indian shaman in Mexico. I felt his medicine and mine were both valuable because they promoted balance, even though most people I knew didnt find balance very interesting at the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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