Plant Spirit Medicine

Description

Plant Spirit Medicine healers call upon the extraordinary healing power of the plant spirits. Plant Spirit Medicine differs from many forms of herbalism in the importance it places on the relationship between the plants, the healer and the client. PSM healers look at the whole person, seeing all they have to offer, leaving judgment and criticism behind. Only by seeing a person in this way can we come to the root of a person’s imbalance and use the appropriate plants to provide them with what they need for health in their body, mind, and spirit. The result is a deeply effective, deeply elegant form of healing.

With Plant Spirit Medicine, we return the person to balance and harmony, to their greatest sense of themselves. Our ancestors lived this way – an existence in which there is no illusion of separation from nature. Plant Spirit Medicine restores us to this state of grace.

Whether you live in a mountain cabin or a city loft, plant spirits present themselves to us everywhere. Since its first printing in 1995, Plant Spirit Medicine has passed hand-to-hand among countless readers drawn to indigenous spirituality and all things alive and green. In this updated edition, Eliot Cowan invites us to discover the healing power of plants–not merely their physical medicinal properties, but the deeper wisdom and gifts that they offer.

Enriched by many new insights, this guide unfolds as a series of chapters on how plant spirit medicine helped Cowan resolve specific challenges in his own healing journey and in his work with others. In the telling, we learn how plant spirits can directly communicate with and aid all of us, including:

Plant spirit medicine’s five-element view of healingWays to assess our own states of health and balanceReceiving guidance from plants, including those found within herbal preparationsNew passages on community and sacred plants such as peyote, marijuana, and tobaccoAdditional interviews with plant shamans across diverse traditions, and more