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Medicine Stories

Planetary Intelligence, Ancestral Resonance, & the Perception of the Heart - Stephen Harrod Buhner

Medicine Stories

Amber Magnolia Hill

Alternative Health, Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2018

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There is a vast intelligence in Nature, which both precedes and envelopes human consciousness. By opening our doors of perception- the heart, the senses, the nervous system- we can engage in communion with this field and come to know the world in which we are embedded as sentient, responsive, and ever-adapting, just as our ancestors did.

Stephen Harrod Buhner is an earth poet and the award-winning author of twenty books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He teaches about the sacredness of plants, the intelligence of Nature, and the states of mind necessary for successful habitation of Earth. 

In the intro:

  • The attentive noticing of the soul
  • An herbalist's perspective on cold & flu
  • Empowerment & herbalism
  • Giveaway!

In the interview:

  • Stephen's memories of his physician great-grandfather, and how DNA carries more than just physical information down through the generations
  • The tendency toward high sensitivity in plant people
  • Sensory gating channels & discerning meaning from the touch of the world upon us
  • The doors of perception & how psychedelics, or "neurognostics", effect them
  • Plant perception and the neural networks in root systems- humans do not have a monopoly on intelligence
  • The function of psychedelics in the ecosystem, apart from and long before human use
  • The birth of James Lovelock's Gaia theory and how real innovation & paradigm shifts can only happen outside of institutions
  • How we can recover the intelligence of the heart in the direct perception of nature
  • Visionary plant encounters & knowing plants through dreaming states
  • Aisthesis- the exchange of soul essence between two life forms 
  • The misunderstood nature, vast intelligence, and ecological necessity of bacterial & viral life forms
  • The age of miracle drugs is over, just as so many people are stepping into the world of herbalism
  • Herbs are much better able to deal with infections and disease than technological medicine is
  • Stephen's opinion on whether or not humans, and the earth, will survive
  • What happened in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918: "The thing we haven't learned is the dangers of our hubris"
  • True self-empowerment v reliance on outside medical knowledge
  • The paradigm shift that happens when you realize that all around you are plants with exceptional medicine that you can learn to use
  • The process of eldering and the point when the inevitability of dying becomes predominant 
  • Herbal lineage, the march of generations, and young folks as the torch-bearers for the future of herbalism

Links:

music-plants_interconnected-1.jpg

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello friends. Welcome to Medicine Stories. This is episode 8. I'm Amber Magnolia Hill and today I'm speaking with Stephen Herrit Buner.

0:16.2

For those in the herbal world, Stephen needs no introduction,

0:21.0

but for newcomers, anyone who has not heard of Stephen, I'm just going to read his bio off his website somewhat shortened.

0:31.0

Stephen Herod Buner is an Earth poet and the award-winning author of 20 books on nature,

0:36.4

indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. Stephen's work has appeared or been profiled in publications throughout North America and Europe,

0:45.6

including common boundary, apotheosis, shamans drum, the New York Times, CNN, and Good Morning America.

0:53.4

Stephen teaches about herbal medicine,

0:55.4

the sacredness of plants, the intelligence of nature,

0:58.7

and the states of mind necessary for successful habitation of Earth. He is a tireless advocate for the

1:04.7

reincorporation of the exploratory artist, independent scholar, amateur

1:09.7

naturalist, and citizen scientist in American society,

1:14.0

especially as a counterweight to the influence

1:16.1

of corporate science and technology.

1:20.0

So aside from Stephen's vast herbal knowledge,

1:23.9

one reason that I've been drawn to his work

1:26.8

over the years is because like what I'm trying

1:32.0

to do with this podcast through his writings and teaching Stephen

1:37.2

encourages us to listen to what calls us. Stephen calls them golden threads. That's what I've called mythic threads on this show.

1:47.0

In his book, Plant Intelligence in the Imaginal Realm, he writes,

1:51.0

For deeper reasons than any of us can ever know. Of all the connections that run through the world,

1:56.8

there are certain ones that touch us more strongly, that call us, that become golden threads that generate in us what James Hillman called Noticia,

2:06.2

the attentive noticing of the soul.

...

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