What About Plant Medicine?

Approx 11min read

Let me begin by saying: I am not a shaman. I am not a medicine worker. I am not an expert on the topic of plant medicine. I am not even a religious partaker. I have, however, been travelling on mystical paths of spiritual revelation and emotional reclamation my whole life. And it is from that perspective that I speak. Please let me also explain that, when I speak of “plant medicine” in this article, I am referring to the psychotropic plants that take people on spiritual “journeys” - ayahuasca, peyote, Bufo, psilocybin and the like.

Plant medicine has taken the proverbial “West” by storm. As together we suffer a collective hangover from our delusion that the Western medical model – biological, emotional and psycological - would solve all our problems, we are desperately looking for the new “savior” to rescue us from ourselves. We are looking to be healed. We are looking to be solved. We are looking to be saved.

Many Americans, rejecting the guilt shaming of their Christian upbringings and disillusioned with scientific atheism, are turning to Eastern, tribal and animist traditions (formerly known as “paganism”) in search of transcendence. And, what has come of this is a sudden explosion in the popularity and prevalence of “plant medicine”.

Nature has endowed us with every miracle we know: water, food, procreation, healing… I have no doubt that nature’s medicines are designed to help us along our path. I am deeply, admiringly and respectfully grateful to every shaman and medicine person who carved the way to our human knowledge of unlocking the medicine in plants. And also…I am skeptical of this trend.

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Transcendence has been painstakingly sought by practiced aesthetics, devout monks, dedicated believers and disciplined conscious beings for eons. Some claim to have reached it, some renounce the effort, some realize along the path that transcendence was never the true point of life. I don’t believe that transcendence is only for the zealots, but I do believe that it requires dedication, commitment and faith, all of which…are hard. All of which…are out of fashion. All of which…have been eroded by our quick-hit dopamine devices. So, when a spiritualist tells me that there is a literal “overnight” way to reach transcendence and it can solve your biggest problems, I start sniffing for snake oil.

Transcendence can happen without medicine, as can integration, and trauma processing, and access to our child selves, and memory reclamation, and all these things that people turn to plant medicine for, but we have really done away with most of the transcendent practices that used to be baked into our everyday lives to help us get there…and be able to get back there. As consumerism has swept the modern world, everywhere it blossoms we see transcendent day-to-day practices fall away. Prayer, offerings, sacrifice, shrines, services, ceremonies, traditions, rituals, holidays and celebrations have all been neutered of their transcendent qualities and reduced to rote, material habits or novelties.

Christian mysticism has been all but abandoned in the West in preference for dogmatic Christianity, and the same can be said of almost all world religions, faiths and traditions. There is more assurance in dogmatic religion than mystical faith, because there are more questions that are answered emphatically and absolutely without room for doubt or exploration of the unknown…without room for the mysterious to participate. But in the mystery is where we find the transcendent.

In our sterilized, quick-fix, absolutist culture it seems unsurprising to me that something as powerful, mystical and immediate as plant medicine has blown up. Riddled with mental health struggles, chronic disease and permanent dis-ease, modern people are looking for the new lightening in a bottle despite how badly the previous copious amounts of bottles have failed us. Instead of noticing the repeating pattern of resistance to the hard and the lazy grabs at the easy, we instead like to blame our pill problem on Big Pharma. While those companies do make disease and then sell the solution to it, we like to leave out the part where we are unwilling to face the arduous slog of necessary lifestyle changes. The diabetic chooses insulin shots instead of sugar regulation, the chronically inflamed chooses steroid injections instead of healthier eating, rigorous stretching and exercise, healthy sleep habits and stress reduction. The immune compromised go in for regular vitamin IVs and expensive “biohacking” instead of deep meditation, deep rest and somatic rewiring. And, just as those “solutions” are showing their ugly under-belly and the average Jane is becoming fed-up with her medical bills and pill-popping, plant medicine swoops in with a prayer bead around its neck making all the same promises without the synthetic packaging. Who could say no?

Are the people who are being drawn to plant medicine the type of transcendence seekers of the past? People willing to do the work, to walk the miles, to harness their whole selves to the ends of self-mastery? Are they adding the magical qualities of certain divine plants to bolster their already rigorous practices, healthy lifestyles and determined resolve? Or are the people flocking to the house-mom-turned-yoga-master-turned-ayahuasca-retreat-leader-influencer the same people who flocked to the psychiatrist for Ritalin, their GP for Ozempic and their plastic surgeon for staples? Are we creating the next wave of souls freed from their inner demons or are we creating the next wave of disenchanted addicts?

What does the assessment, preparation, follow-up and training look like surrounding these medicine journeys and what qualifies whom to be the guide? Does a degree in psychology and a two-month course on clinical psilocybin use suddenly make you qualified to sit as a shaman to another person’s spirit quest?

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I have many friends who regularly take medicine journeys. Some, I have faith in their practices and their methods. I know them. Their life is a testament to their commitment to the greater journey we’re all on…medicine or no. Some…some are partiers with a conscience who have been given license to label their escapism spiritual. As with everything in life, there is no quick-fix, no genie in a bottle, no short-cut to paradise. We are all on the road and how we choose to walk it makes all the difference.

So, while I’m not against plant medicine, I am against a few things in the current popularization of it. I am against removing the medicine from the ceremony. If you’ve ever taken shrooms recreationally (which I have) you’ll know that you should never take plant medicine indoors or in an environment that isn’t balanced and harmonious. It can have devastating effects – I have seen it, I have experienced it, I have known people who took years to recover from it. I am also against removing the ceremony from the spirit of the process. What I mean by that is: if you extract medicine from a plant to sell for a price as a transactional activity, you aren’t doing anything different than Big Pharma. Every medicine keeper of all ancient traditions went through arduous rights of passage before they could be let in on the secrets of the forest because Her secrets are sacred and Her gifts are double-edged and dangerous. The moment you lose the reverence for and relationship with the plant you are harvesting and partaking in, you have distorted Her ability, or maybe even desire, to heal you.

Like everything in life, intention matters, relationship matters, faith matters and devotion matters. You can’t put on a pair of Lululemon pants, do some stretches and call yourself a yogi. If you want transcendence, if you want to be lifted out of the mire and experience something beyond the confines of the limited and painful material reality you currently deal in, you can do that in a myriad of ways…most of which have existed since the dawn of humanity. Plant medicine, is just one of them. All of them will either uplift you or drag you further down depending on a complex web of factors all conspiring to bring about some, seemingly mystical, effect.

Don’t look for the quick-fix, instead, fix yourself on the aspiration, be willing to listen for that quiet voice within you that knows, go where Mystery leads you, and be open to what comes of it. Maybe that will involve plant medicine, maybe it won’t. Mystery is a minxy bedmate. God works in mysterious ways. The Universe conspires for you. You never know what medicine is yours, where you’re going to find it or what it will bring you. So, you best be ready for it if you’re going knocking.

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