For most of 2024, I participated in Life as a Medicine Way - a 9-month course offered by Plant Spirit Talk. With my teacher and peers, I studied the cosmologies of Indigenous tribes of the Andes and Amazon, studied plants and initiated with their medicine spirits, remembered and reconnected with my ancestral lineage, and grew within a community of kind, like-hearted souls.
Here’s a description of the course in the words of the founder of Plant Spirit Talk:
“Life as Medicine Way is a nine month online and in person intensive initiation. It is a guided journey into the sacred teachings of our ancestral inheritances, lived experiences, our relations, plant teachers and our Pachamama. Life as Medicine Way is an alchemy of the mind, heart and soul.Weaving Andean-Amazonian cosmology, plant spirit medicine, folk herbalism, shamanic practice, ancestral healing and other contemporary earth-based wisdom modalities; Life As Medicine Way is a course on embracing lifestyle as the conduit for ceremony and medicine.”
Through this course and experiences adjacent to it that were offered by Plant Spirit Talk apprentices and community members, I gained vital knowledge and developed new skills, practices, and rituals that have become integral to my lifestyle and well-being. Here’s a sampling:
- Plant spirit initiations: Plants have limitless wisdom to share with us - not only those who offer psychedelic experiences but also the sacred medicinal plants that surround us everywhere we walk. By slowing down, quieting ourselves, and reducing the noise and stimuli around us, we can commune with plants, listen to them, and learn from them. I held 3- to 4-week ceremonies with plants like Rosemary, Rose, and Tobacco to connect with them, heal with their medicine, and receive their teachings.
- Dreamwork: For years (decades?) I hadn’t dreamed (or recalled my dreams) due to heavy cannabis consumption. As soon as I stopped using cannabis, I began dreaming vividly and consistently. Thanks to skills and knowledge gleaned from a workshop called Garden Under the Moon, dreams have become a source of insight, understanding, and direction for me.
- Somatics and embodiment: I was reintroduced to somatic work in ways that felt resonant, tangible, and actionable. Thanks to an amazing teacher and her embodiment-based workshops, I was empowered to reconnect to my body, remember what it’s like to be embodied, and reverse the disembodiment I’d grown accustomed to with chronic pain and substance misuse.
- Womb-tending: I took a workshop called Hearth: Herbal Toolkits for Womb Tending. In this, I developed a more holistic perspective on “the womb” — e.g., recognizing that we all come from a womb, the Earth itself is a womb that holds all life, and that even if my body doesn’t carry a womb, I have an important role and responsibility to understand and support the womb-carriers around me (my mother, sister, nieces, partner, friends.) I also learned about plants that offer medicine particularly useful for womb-carrying bodies.
- Card reading: I learned about the history of Tarot, how to approach Tarot “through an animist lens,” developed a deeper relationship and established a regular practice with Tarot and Oracle decks.
- Amazon medicine immersion: In November, I traveled with a small group of peers and our teacher (the founder of Plant Spirit Talk) to Peru. We stayed in the Amazon jungle and received teachings directly from elders and members of the Shipibo Konibo tribe of the Amazon and the Q’eros tribe of the Andes.