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348 - Entheogens and Plant Medicines

Apr 23, 2013, 71 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Dr. Naughtilee

Today’s program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Naughtilee gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of modern medicine with the wisdom of the natural healing arts. In this engaging talk, and through interaction with her audience, Dr. Naughtilee discusses some of the foods, medicines, and poisons that we obtain from plants and helps us to better realize what a deep connection we humans have to the plant world.

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:25 ►

And once again this week, time seems to have gotten away from me.

00:00:29 ►

I actually began working on this program last Monday, but as you already know,

00:00:35 ►

well, a bomb exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon,

00:00:39 ►

and like many of us, I spent some time watching the news and thinking about

00:00:43 ►

what a strange world we humans have created for ourselves.

00:00:48 ►

Hopefully, none of our fellow slaughters were injured in Boston.

00:00:52 ►

I did have several friends running in the event, but outside of the emotional distress, they’re right now fine.

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I guess what bothered me the most, about myself that is,

00:01:06 ►

most, about myself that is, is that each week it seems that we’re hearing about bombs killing people in Baghdad and Kabul and Damascus and Greece and, well, in just about every corner

00:01:11 ►

of the world. But after a while, those stories just seem to kind of disappear in the background

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until something like that happens closer to home. The fact of the matter is that things

00:01:23 ►

like this are taking place every day

00:01:25 ►

near the homes of one or more of our fellow salonners,

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and we should think about that whenever the news reports one of these tragedies.

00:01:32 ►

You know, maybe we should stop for just a moment

00:01:34 ►

and think about the people who are directly affected by this violence,

00:01:39 ►

because they are our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, co-workers.

00:01:43 ►

No matter where they happen to be living at that moment,

00:01:46 ►

we have some kind of a connection to somebody that’s in trouble.

00:01:50 ►

And I know that you join me in wishing peace to all of our fellow humans

00:01:54 ►

who are, well, just trying their best to overcome some very difficult situations right now.

00:02:01 ►

So, now how do I transition from here into introducing today’s program?

00:02:08 ►

I guess there’s no smooth way other than just to say, well, let’s get on with the show.

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And today’s show is one that you should have already heard had I been a bit more efficient

00:02:19 ►

at podcasting the 2012 Planque Norte lectures that were held at last year’s Burning Man Festival.

00:02:27 ►

The speaker that we’re about to hear today is Dr. Natalie Metz,

00:02:32 ►

and she is a licensed naturopathic doctor, an herbalist, and an educator who currently practices in San Francisco.

00:02:40 ►

And I hope that after listening to Dr. Natalie with me, you follow her suggestion

00:02:44 ►

and become a little more proactive

00:02:46 ►

about consciously bringing plants into your life.

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I say consciously because even if you don’t think about plants directly,

00:02:54 ►

well, without them we wouldn’t even be alive.

00:02:58 ►

So maybe it’s time to begin thinking more about the food, medicine, and poisons

00:03:03 ►

that plants provide to us.

00:03:05 ►

And listening to Dr. Natalie is a great way to begin.

00:03:10 ►

Up next we have Dr. Natalie.

00:03:12 ►

Nautily, excuse me. Dr. Nautily.

00:03:15 ►

And she’s a naturopathic doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

00:03:20 ►

A good friend. I’ve known her for several years.

00:03:23 ►

And had the pleasure of seeing her give a talk this year at the Women’s Visionary Congress called Entheogenic Empowerment, which was kind of a breakdown of different ways to use supplements and other diet to modify your diet to optimize your psychedelic experiences. So it was a fabulous talk and very informative

00:03:48 ►

about what you should be taking before and after different substances

00:03:51 ►

in order to keep your brain feeling good.

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So she’s giving that talk actually tonight at 6 p.m. at Fractal Nation Village.

00:03:59 ►

But today here she’ll be talking about entheogens and plant medicine.

00:04:05 ►

So yeah, with that, here’s Natalie.

00:04:11 ►

Brian did not mention, but he’s also doing another talk this evening at 5 p.m. at Fractal Nation.

00:04:16 ►

We have the Brian and Natalie Tide team going on across the playa this fine day.

00:04:21 ►

So perhaps, thank you.

00:04:24 ►

Will you be talking more about mythology tonight,

00:04:27 ►

potentially? Okay. Thank you, Chris, for the introduction. And thank you all for being here.

00:04:35 ►

I am Dr. Nautili. I go by Dr. Natalie when I’m in San Francisco in my clinical practice. But

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on the playa, Dr. Nautile is a little bit more appropriate.

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So let’s see, where do I want to start?

00:04:53 ►

Really feeling blessed and honored to be here and really excited to share some information with you and some of my passion about plant medicine and entheogens and botanicals.

00:05:00 ►

I met Brian Wallace about three years ago at a little festival in Santa Cruz and started getting tuned on and tuned into the MAPS world and didn’t really know that I had such a deep love of psychedelics and entheogens.

00:05:15 ►

And so through my experience working and volunteering with MAPS, I kind of started seeing the need for more support around harm reduction. There are some wonderful models

00:05:27 ►

out there for harm reduction, but wanting to bring my knowledge as a naturopathic doctor

00:05:31 ►

forward around how people can support themselves and care for themselves if they’re going to be

00:05:35 ►

an entheogenic or psychedelic rock star. So I’ll touch on probably a few of those things today

00:05:41 ►

here, but that’s going to be more of the focus of the talk later on at Fractal Nation at six o’clock after Brian Wallace gives us more chocolate. Yes.

00:05:50 ►

But today I wanted to speak a bit about my passion for plant medicine. And to start it,

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I’m actually going to come around and mist you with some aromatherapy,

00:06:00 ►

and that’s going to be a game change. So how many of you like plants?

00:06:07 ►

Yay!

00:06:08 ►

What do you like about plants?

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They’re green.

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They what?

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They uplift the space.

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Okay.

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I’m going to talk a little bit,

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but I’m also going to encourage you to participate

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and I will ask you questions

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and I encourage you to respond.

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So they make space nice. They’re green.

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What else do we like about plants? Say that again? They talk to us. Okay. What else?

00:06:35 ►

Good for our bodies. Change the way we think and feel, right? They help us breathe, right? So there’s a lot of functions that plants

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do, right? They teach us lots of things, right? So consider for a moment that every living organism,

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pretty much, on this planet, almost, at least us for sure, is reliant completely upon plants.

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What do you think about that?

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Can you see that?

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Am I totally full of it?

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How do we rely upon plants?

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What do we need from them?

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We have an everything over here.

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Can we be a little more specific?

00:07:21 ►

Oxygen, right?

00:07:22 ►

So there’s this magical, magical process

00:07:24 ►

called photosynthesis, right? Where there’s this magical, magical process called photosynthesis, right?

00:07:26 ►

Where plants can take carbon dioxide molecules and merge them with water.

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And does anybody know what the two products are that we get from photosynthesis?

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One of them is pretty obvious, right?

00:07:38 ►

Oxygen.

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We said that.

00:07:39 ►

What’s the other one?

00:07:41 ►

Nope.

00:07:42 ►

They’re taking carbon dioxide in and then they’re putting out what on the other side of

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photosynthesis oxygen and sugar in the form of glucose which is the body’s main metabolic fuel

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your body has evolved and adapted to be extremely efficient at breaking down glucose to produce actually 38 ATP molecules

00:08:06 ►

per glucose molecule. That’s extremely efficient. There’s no other molecule that your body breaks

00:08:11 ►

down more effectively or efficiently to produce energy. So glucose, muy importante, right? And we

00:08:17 ►

get it from plants. And what do they do? They harness carbon dioxide, they harness water,

00:08:23 ►

and then they mix it with what to create sugar and

00:08:26 ►

oxygen? Sunlight, right? So there’s this amazing relationship too between the plant world and

00:08:34 ►

the solar world, okay? So they’re actually harnessing energy from the sun and complexing

00:08:41 ►

it into sugar molecules and also into oxygen for us.

00:08:47 ►

So we need plants because we would like to breathe oxygen, right?

00:08:50 ►

And we’d like for them to deal with our carbon dioxide, right?

00:08:53 ►

How else do we rely upon plants?

00:08:57 ►

For food, right?

00:08:58 ►

So one thing that I’m very blessed to do in my life is to teach herbal medicine workshops at the Esalen Institute.

00:09:08 ►

How many of you know about Esalen or have been to Esalen?

00:09:11 ►

All right. Yay. Lots of hands.

00:09:12 ►

Okay. For those of you that don’t know, Esalen is an intentional community as well as a retreat center and a variety of other things.

00:09:24 ►

But those are the two main things that it would be known for. A retreat center and a variety of other things.

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But those are the two main things that it would be known for.

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It was started in the 1960s by two gentlemen who wanted to have a place where people could come. And they were originally holding peace talks.

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And then they started to evolve their ideas around exploring and expanding the human potential.

00:09:41 ►

So it’s a place where Fritz Perls developed gestalt therapy. Ida Rolf developed

00:09:47 ►

a lot of her therapy. Terrence McKenna, a lot of people spent a lot of time there developing and

00:09:53 ►

exploring psychedelics and body work and yoga and different types of psychotherapy. And it’s a

00:09:59 ►

beautiful place on the coast of California in Big Sur. And a couple times a year, I have the honor

00:10:03 ►

of going down there and teaching a course on how to identify and utilize the plants that are growing there on the land.

00:10:10 ►

And sometimes I refer to this course as stewarding Esalen’s herbal abundance, because I really see

00:10:15 ►

our role as humans as stewards to this planet, and particularly to the plants, because we are

00:10:22 ►

completely reliant on them. Again, if they are gone, there’s no more

00:10:26 ►

oxygen and there’s no more glucose because they’re the only things that are producing energy in this

00:10:31 ►

planet. So even if you are not a rapid plant eater and you eat animal products or something like

00:10:36 ►

that, where are the animals getting their energy? They’re eating plants, right? So there’s this inevitable chain that I think is good to be aware of.

00:10:48 ►

I want to share a little bit about my background quickly in terms of how I got to be Dr. Nautily

00:10:54 ►

here today, which is an evolving process. When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be a medical

00:11:02 ►

doctor. And I went to the first pre-med

00:11:05 ►

meeting that we had. And everyone was so stressed out, talking about the MCAT, and freaking out

00:11:12 ►

about grades that I thought, Oh, my God, I’m like in the wrong place. And I’m not going to do that.

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I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but it’s not gonna be that. So then I kind of surfed around,

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lost a little bit, majoring in biology, fell in love with organic chemistry, which most people run screaming from.

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Ended up switching my major to chemistry because I loved it so much.

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And feeling kind of hopeless about becoming any sort of medical professional

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because I just, I knew I couldn’t go the allopathic route.

00:11:37 ►

So my sophomore year of college, I had an anthropology course,

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during which I got turned on to the presence of a local Native American medicine

00:11:46 ►

man with whom I could do an internship for college credit. That sounds awesome. So I

00:11:51 ►

managed to hook up this amazing internship. And once a week, I would meet with him for about three

00:11:55 ►

hours at his house, or we’d go visit sacred sites. This was in North Carolina. We’d go to powwows,

00:12:03 ►

we’d do a variety of things that really introduced me to Native American spirituality and to plant medicine in a new way. I was always

00:12:09 ►

tuned into nature, but I didn’t know that you could use poke leaves for food as well as for

00:12:15 ►

injuries and whatnot. So there was a lot of things that I learned from this man about plants and

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healing and medicine, and it really expanded my perspective of what healing could

00:12:25 ►

look like. And I was very inspired. And I was both really loving chemistry and really loving

00:12:31 ►

plants and wanting to go into natural product chemistry originally, but having a really hard

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time finding any sort of graduate program that was of any worth that I could see at the time

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to pursue. And so I got more and more turned on to Native American ways

00:12:46 ►

and herbal medicine and crystals and energy and all this stuff. But I thought, well, what the hell

00:12:51 ►

am I going to do with this? Where am I going to go with this? I’ll just keep going on the chemistry

00:12:53 ►

train, because I don’t really know what to do with this. And then finally, somewhere in my last year

00:12:59 ►

of school, I was just this was back when when I got to college, I got my first email account. And I thought, what am I going to do with this email account? I would just walk, back when when I got to college I got my first email account and I thought what am

00:13:06 ►

I going to do with this email account I would just walk why don’t I just walk down the hall

00:13:10 ►

and talk to my friend why would I email them I didn’t it wasn’t you know who knew that email

00:13:14 ►

was going to be what it is today right at our palm so this was in the early days of me getting

00:13:20 ►

familiar with the internet which was still not very developed but I came across this site called naturalhealers.com. And on there was all these lists of all these amazing

00:13:28 ►

things. And there was something called naturopathic medicine. And I thought, well, what the heck is

00:13:31 ►

that? So I clicked on the link and it took me to the school that I ended up going to. And I read

00:13:36 ►

about this program and it had this four year, you know, postgraduate program with a hard core

00:13:44 ►

training in the medical sciences, as well as

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training and things like herbs and physical medicine and acupuncture and nutrition and

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homeopathy. And I thought, Oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I want to do. Because I love science,

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and I want to have that hardcore medical science training. But I also want to have like spirit

00:14:00 ►

and compassion and love and have other modalities besides pharmaceuticals and surgery in

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my back pocket in my toolbox. So I was pretty inspired. And I flew out to Arizona and checked

00:14:12 ►

out this school and loved it and thought, okay, this is great, but not yet. I’m going to use this

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chemistry degree and go work for a little while and save some money and buy a computer and then

00:14:20 ►

I can move across the country. So I’m getting a job in Boston and working as a synthetic chemist for a little while.

00:14:27 ►

Had I known then what I’d be into now,

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things might look a little different

00:14:31 ►

in terms of what I was doing at work.

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But anyways, I…

00:14:36 ►

Brian Wallace can appreciate that.

00:14:39 ►

So I was working on these projects

00:14:42 ►

developing drugs for diabetes

00:14:44 ►

and also for Parkinson’s disease.

00:14:47 ►

And at the end of the day, I was left with a couple hundred milligrams of a little bit of a white or yellow powder.

00:14:53 ►

Hopefully something crystalline at some point in time.

00:14:55 ►

And I thought, God, you know, like, what am I doing with my life?

00:14:58 ►

Like, at the end of the day, I’ve made 100 milligrams of some experimental drug that’s going to go torture some rats.

00:15:04 ►

And I’m

00:15:05 ►

not really feeling this. My heart and my soul were just kind of like sinking. And yet I was still

00:15:11 ►

kind of in this place of like, oh my God, I’m scared to move across the country and go back

00:15:15 ►

to more school and all this and that. And then it just became very clear, as many of you may

00:15:19 ►

have experienced at some point in your life, that like your soul or your spirit, your higher

00:15:23 ►

purpose is just like, I’m going to kick your ass if you don’t like go do this thing or if you don’t give

00:15:27 ►

up that thing or if you don’t, you know, seize this opportunity or let go of this thing that’s

00:15:33 ►

not serving you. So I let go of my cushy little job out of college where I was making a decent

00:15:40 ►

amount of money and, you know, having the luxuries of the corporate America for what

00:15:45 ►

it’s worth. And I just followed my heart and packed what I could into a little Jetta and

00:15:50 ►

drove it across the country to Arizona and started medical school and had no clue what amazing magic

00:15:55 ►

was waiting for me there. And a part of that was falling in love with plants on a whole other level

00:16:00 ►

beyond what I’ve, and that’s still happening. It’s like this rabbit hole that I’m just going down. So during my first year of medical school, I had an herbal pharmacy class

00:16:09 ►

where it was supposed to be once a week. We would hang out with this wonderful herbalist and she

00:16:15 ►

would teach us how to make different preparations of plants. And so we learned how to make different

00:16:20 ►

types of teas and salves and tinctures and bal bombs and all sorts of wonderful things. And so here I was able to bring this like chemist piece of me that loved being in a lab and

00:16:30 ►

mixing things up into this other expression in honoring my connection with the natural world

00:16:36 ►

and my love of nature and this evolving love of plants. And so this was a class that met twice a

00:16:44 ►

week and our class was split into two sections.

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And I loved it so much that I asked if I could go to both sections.

00:16:49 ►

So I would go twice a week to this class and learn how to make all this cool little fun stuff.

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And it really inspired me to bring that into my own life and to go home and start making lotions at home and potions and just start experimenting. And so I kind of started my own apothecary at home that I still

00:17:06 ►

have today in terms of part of what I do with my life and my practice is make herbal potions and

00:17:14 ►

elixirs and topical things that people can use and aromatherapy blends. That’s why I was running

00:17:19 ►

around misting you guys, because that’s just one very simple way that you can bring plant medicine

00:17:24 ►

into your life. And so that’s one of the messages that I want to get across to you today is that

00:17:29 ►

it’s very easy to bring plants into your life in a profound way beyond just maybe how you relate

00:17:34 ►

to them as food. Well, one way that I like to help people think about plants is to bring them

00:17:42 ►

into the concept of looking at them as food, as medicine, or as poison potentially.

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So again, I’m going to ask for your participation.

00:17:51 ►

Who can tell me a few food plants?

00:17:53 ►

Just call out a few food plants.

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Cacao! Oh my goodness.

00:17:57 ►

What else?

00:17:59 ►

What do you guys like to eat?

00:18:00 ►

Who’s eating kale on the playa this week?

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It’s going to save your ass.

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Okay, what else?

00:18:05 ►

Food plants. Just yell them out. Yay, avocados, potatoes, bananas, lettuce, cherries. What else?

00:18:15 ►

Coconuts. Coconuts, life-saving on the playa as well. Aloe leaves, life-saving on the playa as

00:18:20 ►

well. What about plants as medicine? How about some medicine plants? Belladonna. Valerian. What

00:18:32 ►

does Valerian do? Helps you take a nap, right? For some people, it actually wakes them up,

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but a lot of people, they take a nap with it. What other medicine plants come to mind?

00:18:43 ►

Echinacea. What’s Echinacea good for?

00:18:46 ►

Boosting your immune system in an acute situation at the onset. If you’re already like three days

00:18:51 ►

into being sick, don’t waste your time with Echinacea. It’s not going to do it. What else?

00:18:58 ►

Calendula. Yay. One of my favorite plants. What’s Calendula good for? Everything.

00:19:06 ►

Calendula is a wonderful plant. I’m actually going gonna give you a gift that includes calendula it’s sitting in this

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purple box I happen to love purple the fact that cacao beans are purple is

00:19:13 ►

Brian and I have a love affair with purple it’s it’s just what it is

00:19:19 ►

calendula is a wonderful plant it is a wonderful companion plant I’m just gonna

00:19:24 ►

speak a little

00:19:25 ►

bit to a couple plants that come up. It is often found growing along the edges of gardens. It has

00:19:30 ►

wonderful orange and yellow flowers, and it’s one of the best things that you can use for your skin.

00:19:36 ►

It’s one of the most healing plants that you can put topically on your body. It has this action

00:19:41 ►

that we call vulnerary in herbal medicine, where it promotes healing and supports your body. It has this action that we call vulnerary in herbal medicine where it promotes healing and supports your body’s innate ability to repair itself. It also has compounds in it

00:19:50 ►

that would be classified as anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial. I use these words because

00:19:57 ►

they’re easy for a lot of people to grasp, but I hope that at some point we’ll come up with a

00:20:01 ►

new lexicon around herbal medicine and maybe I’ll be a part of that because I don’t like this whole anti this anti that anyways calendula it’s really

00:20:09 ►

awesome on the outside it’s also really good on the inside it’s a plant that I’ve had patients

00:20:14 ►

drink and friends drink in teas when they’ve had some sort of gastritis or irritable bowel syndrome

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or ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease it’s very helpful with its quote-unquote anti-inflammatory properties

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on the inside as well as on the outside.

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So calendula, yay.

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Again, it’s in this gift that you’ll get in a little bit here.

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Calendula is spelled C-A-L-E-N-D-U-L-A.

00:20:40 ►

Calendula.

00:20:41 ►

And its Latin name is calendula officinalis.

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Whenever you hear a binomial nomenclature name of a plant,

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if you hear officinalis as the species name,

00:20:55 ►

it’s an indication that the plant has been used as medicine historically.

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Okay, so Calendula officinalis rosmarinus, which is rosemary.

00:21:03 ►

A lot of people might think of rosemary as a food, but rosemary is also a wonderful medicine as well.

00:21:08 ►

What are some other medicine plants?

00:21:11 ►

Yarrow.

00:21:13 ►

Any other?

00:21:14 ►

Rose hips.

00:21:15 ►

Rose hips are a great example of one that could potentially go into two categories,

00:21:19 ►

where it could be food and also a wonderful medicine,

00:21:21 ►

one of the highest concentrations of vitamin C in rose hips.

00:21:26 ►

How about some poison plants?

00:21:29 ►

Belladonna, right?

00:21:30 ►

So we put belladonna in the medicine category

00:21:32 ►

as well as potentially the poison category, right?

00:21:35 ►

What else?

00:21:36 ►

Poison hemlock.

00:21:37 ►

Datura is another great example of one that could be in both medicine or poison.

00:21:42 ►

Say it again.

00:21:43 ►

Coleus could be poisonous, could also be medicinal.

00:21:46 ►

So hemlock I’d like to speak to for a second.

00:21:50 ►

When I teach this class at Esalen,

00:21:52 ►

we walk around the garden and we look at the plants

00:21:54 ►

or we spend time, or if I’m doing a session that’s indoors,

00:21:58 ►

I’ll bring plants in with me so people can touch them

00:22:00 ►

and feel them and whatnot.

00:22:01 ►

Bringing plants to the desert is kind of an awful thing

00:22:04 ►

to do to them, and they would just be toasted by the time I even got to do this talk on Wednesday. So

00:22:09 ►

not really an option for our learning here. But one wonderful thing to know about hemlock,

00:22:14 ►

there’s a couple different kinds. The kind I’m going to speak to right now is called poison

00:22:17 ►

hemlock. It grows near water. It can often be confused with things like carrots and queen anzalese and osha and

00:22:28 ►

lamation, other medicine plants, because it’s in that family of the umbiliferase.

00:22:32 ►

And there’s this wonderful concept in herbal medicine called the doctrine of signatures.

00:22:37 ►

Has anybody ever heard of the doctrine of signatures? I see a few little hands up here.

00:22:43 ►

The doctrine of signatures is this interesting concept that a plant will often reveal through its morphology or where it’s growing what it’s good for.

00:22:53 ►

So the shape, where it’s growing, how it presents itself, the time of day or year that it blooms can often give clues to how a plant is used or how not to use it in the case of hemlock.

00:23:07 ►

you have clues to how a plant is used or how not to use it in the case of hemlock. So at some point you will find someone that can point out poison hemlock to you. And if you notice at the base of

00:23:12 ►

the stem of the poison hemlock, there are all these kind of reddish purplish splotches. And

00:23:18 ►

in terms of the doctrine of signature, what I’ve heard is that it’s an indication of like splattered blood. So

00:23:26 ►

indicating the mortality of this plant if you were to eat large quantities of it.

00:23:32 ►

You’d have to eat a fair amount of the root to do some damage to yourself, enough that you would

00:23:37 ►

probably feel pretty sick because it number one tastes awful and smells awful, and would probably

00:23:42 ►

start to cause some serious gastrointestinal symptoms before it really poisoned you neurologically. With that said, the very first time I ever went

00:23:50 ►

to Esalen back in 2006 or seven-ish, I met a farmer over on the far end of the farm who was

00:23:59 ►

in the hemlock patch picking it and eating it. And he was just eating little nibbles. And we

00:24:03 ►

had this wonderful conversation about it. And I said, okay, yeah, you know, you’re eating hemlock. And he’s like,

00:24:07 ►

Oh, yeah. He said, I’m doing it as a homeopathic dose. So homeopathic is like a really small,

00:24:13 ►

almost energetic dose that homeopathy is another conversation about we don’t even know how that

00:24:17 ►

works. But it does. He said, when I eat these little pieces of hemlock, pieces of myself die

00:24:23 ►

off, like little pieces of myself are being released and dying off.

00:24:27 ►

So I thought it was a very beautiful way of relating to this plant medicinally,

00:24:32 ►

even though it’s potentially a very poisonous plant.

00:24:35 ►

Is this helpful to help think of plants in this terms of food, medicine, and poison

00:24:40 ►

and to see where some things can overlay and blend between categories.

00:24:46 ►

Awesome.

00:24:47 ►

Some other ways that we use plants for pleasure, right?

00:24:51 ►

Just having them in our environment is really nice.

00:24:54 ►

They clean the air.

00:24:56 ►

You can actually look on, I think it’s NASA’s website,

00:25:01 ►

has a list of like the top 20 plants that are most efficient for cleaning air that you can have in your home.

00:25:08 ►

So if you live in a city or anywhere, really, it’s nice to have plants in your environment

00:25:12 ►

that are helping to clean your air and produce good fresh oxygen for you.

00:25:16 ►

We admire them for beauty, right?

00:25:19 ►

Who doesn’t like to look at a flower, right?

00:25:22 ►

Flowers are kind of the gift of the plants, right?

00:25:28 ►

I want to talk a little bit about some preparations of plants.

00:25:34 ►

One of the most easily accessible preparations

00:25:38 ►

that most of you are probably familiar with is a tea, right?

00:25:41 ►

So there’s two ways to make tea.

00:25:43 ►

We have an infusion process where we use pieces of the plant

00:25:49 ►

that are a little bit more gentle such as flowers or leaves or what we call aerial portions of the

00:25:53 ►

plant that grow above ground and we infuse them into warm water so that’s a simple way to think

00:25:59 ►

that is putting your tea bag into a teacup and pouring water over it that is an infusion

00:26:02 ►

okay you could also do that with

00:26:05 ►

raw plants that you collected and then strain that. But obviously most of us are probably

00:26:09 ►

a little partial to that ease of dipping the teabag in the cup and pouring some water over it.

00:26:15 ►

That’s one way. An infusion, again, for gentle parts of the plant, flowers, leaves, aerial

00:26:20 ►

portions. A decoction. A decoction is where we cook pieces of a plant. So we cook

00:26:26 ►

the roots or the bark or some portion of the plant that needs a bit more time for the medicinal

00:26:30 ►

components to be extracted into the water. So we might boil roots of like, say, licorice,

00:26:37 ►

for example, for about 20 minutes. If you wanted to make a really awesome digestive tea,

00:26:42 ►

you could boil licorice roots for about 20 minutes

00:26:45 ►

strain those roots out pour that liquid over some peppermint leaves and then let

00:26:50 ►

that steep for about five minutes and strain that you’d have an amazing

00:26:54 ►

infusion and decoction that’s been made into your tea that you’ve now harnessed

00:26:59 ►

the most medicinal portions of the plants in the most effective way out of

00:27:04 ►

them so plant preparation is important in terms of acquiring what you want to acquire

00:27:09 ►

as far as the medicinal components out of a plant.

00:27:13 ►

So something like calendula, peppermint leaves, lavender flowers,

00:27:16 ►

those would all work well in an infusion.

00:27:18 ►

Things like white willow bark, licorice roots, astragalus roots,

00:27:23 ►

all of those will work better in a decoction.

00:27:26 ►

Who knows what a tincture is? So a tincture is an extraction of a plant that has been harnessed

00:27:33 ►

into an alcohol and water combination most commonly. And so if we’re using a fresh plant,

00:27:40 ►

that plant is going to have a higher water content in it already. So it’s ideal to use

00:27:45 ►

a higher alcohol component such as Everclear or something really, really strong and it’s alcohol

00:27:51 ►

or some distilled organic grape alcohol, something really like high proof.

00:27:58 ►

And that’s going to help to cut that water and to pull those medicinal properties into

00:28:04 ►

that extraction.

00:28:06 ►

It’s also really helpful if you have a resinous plant,

00:28:08 ►

so something that’s really gummy.

00:28:09 ►

If you were going to extract like myrrh or frankincense,

00:28:12 ►

which have medicinal qualities,

00:28:14 ►

you’d want to use something like a very high alcohol component

00:28:18 ►

because that’s going to allow those more lipophilic or fat-soluble components

00:28:23 ►

to come into this pseudo aqueous solution what

00:28:26 ►

else do i want to say you can also use oil to extract plants right you could use a very simple

00:28:33 ►

thing you could do at home would put some would be to chop up some garlic and steep it in some

00:28:38 ►

olive oil you could just do some raw fresh garlic in a bottle of olive oil for a few days and use

00:28:43 ►

that as a cooking oil and you’d have some really nice medicinal qualities as well as culinary qualities

00:28:48 ►

of your garlic infused into that olive oil you could also use calendula into olive oil and you’d

00:28:55 ►

have a nice topical thing that you could use on your body as far as a nice lotion essentially lotion, essentially. Who knows what a salve is? All right, we got a couple, a couple herb nerds

00:29:08 ►

in front here. I love it. A salve is when you take an oil extraction and mix that in with beeswax

00:29:15 ►

or some other thicker oil, like coconut oil might work or coconut, cocoa butter, coconut

00:29:21 ►

butter could work too. And you make it a little bit thicker so now

00:29:25 ►

you have kind of like this this ointment that you can use and that has some advantages over an oil

00:29:31 ►

in terms of like maybe you want to use it for massage or you want to put it on a wound that

00:29:37 ►

you want it to be able to sit on top of the surface of the skin for a little bit so that’s

00:29:41 ►

one advantage of using a salve this gift that i’m going to give you in a little bit here is kind of the equivalent of what a salve would be. We also have essential oils,

00:29:49 ►

right? These are often the steam distillation products of plants, the aromatic qualities that

00:29:55 ►

go volatile, that we smell, that I was spraying around on you before. We can capture those with

00:30:01 ►

steam distillation and keep them in a little airtight bottle so that they don’t evaporate.

00:30:06 ►

How many of you use essential oils in your lives?

00:30:11 ►

A couple of you.

00:30:13 ►

Awesome.

00:30:15 ►

Some essential oils are solvent extracted.

00:30:18 ►

There are some plants that are very resinous like jasmine, for example, and rose auto are very challenging to extract without the use of solvents.

00:30:25 ►

So it’s important if you are using essential oils

00:30:28 ►

or using atars or absolutes to look and see

00:30:31 ►

what has this been extracted with.

00:30:34 ►

You want, ideally, to get something that was organically crafted

00:30:37 ►

and steam distilled.

00:30:39 ►

There are a few things that you just really can’t get

00:30:42 ►

without a little bit of solvent in them,

00:30:44 ►

but you don’t want to generally be using essential oils that have been solvent extracted when there is a steam distillation option because it’s that much cleaner.

00:30:52 ►

And you do not need to put solvents and weird petrochemicals onto your body or in your body for that matter.

00:30:58 ►

What else do I want to say about preparations?

00:31:01 ►

There’s other ways to use plants and herbs such as taking a datura flower for example and putting

00:31:07 ►

it under your pillow or putting some mugwort leaves under your pillow to help you with dreaming

00:31:12 ►

so there’s lots of different ways to incorporate plant medicine into our lives beyond just food

00:31:19 ►

medicine and hopefully avoiding the poisons are Are there any questions at this time?

00:31:26 ►

Yes, no? Okay. Is calendula good for prostate problems? Yes, because one of its other amazing

00:31:32 ►

actions is that it serves as a pelvic lymphagogue. Has anybody heard of this word lymphagogue?

00:31:38 ►

I don’t expect you to. Whenever you hear gog on the end of a word, it means that it helps to pump on that organ

00:31:46 ►

so that it can move its juices essentially. So when we say the word lymphogog, it’s helping to

00:31:51 ►

move lymphatic fluid in the body. And calendula, in addition to being amazing for soothing

00:31:56 ►

intestinal inflammation or irritation, as well as soothing topically and promoting healing,

00:32:02 ►

is a wonderful herb, whether taken in tincture or

00:32:06 ►

tea form to move the lymphatic fluid in the pelvis so if you have some sort of prostate

00:32:11 ►

problem or reproductive organ challenge or bladder problem or cervical dysplasia you’ve

00:32:18 ►

had an abnormal pap smear it’s a wonderful herb to help move your own immune system’s fluid in that area. So yes, it would be wonderful for,

00:32:28 ►

you’re welcome. Yeah. I love herbs. In naturopathic medical school, we were responsible for

00:32:34 ►

being able to accurately, effectively utilize and answer lots of questions about 250 of them on my board exam so I’ve studied

00:32:49 ►

a lot about plants and I love them and there’s so much more to learn even with the amount of herbs

00:32:55 ►

that I feel very familiar with I will spend the rest of my life and I will know maybe I’ll scratch

00:33:03 ►

the surface is how I feel honestly because there’s

00:33:05 ►

just so many all around the world and you know they’ve been used around the world in every single

00:33:11 ►

culture for medicine and healing since the beginning of time Terence McKenna speaks

00:33:18 ►

in his book I believe food of the gods about the Ur plant, being what was this plant,

00:33:28 ►

the Ur plant, what was the original plant that people ate, granted this is not truly a plant

00:33:33 ►

that he hypothesizes about, but regardless, I like to keep it, they’re cousins. He was looking

00:33:41 ►

through ethnobotanical records and trying to see, you know, what was it that helped people eat their way to consciousness?

00:33:46 ►

And there’s hypotheses about, oh, maybe it’s this plant or that plant.

00:33:50 ►

Terrence McKenna basically comes down to thinking that it was actually fungus.

00:33:55 ►

Mushrooms growing on the African savanna.

00:33:57 ►

So mushrooms are in their own unique kingdom.

00:34:00 ►

But I think of them when I talk about plants because they’re like cousins and they’re

00:34:06 ►

amazing um amazing workers i mean fungus they’re the organisms that decompose matter and transform

00:34:15 ►

it right so they’re another um plants have this plants and fungus have this amazing transformative

00:34:20 ►

capacity right we talked about photosynthesis earlier making oxygen and sugar we have fungus that break down material and create other incredible compounds plants and fungus are

00:34:31 ►

like the best biochemists in the world right they make such complex molecules that we’re only

00:34:37 ►

really scratching the surface of as we study them more and more what else do i want to say

00:34:43 ►

i’d like to think a lot. Actually, I’m going

00:34:46 ►

to share this quote with you now that we’re talking about plants being the best biochemists.

00:34:50 ►

So when I worked as a pharmaceutical chemist, I joined a company that was a small company at the

00:34:57 ►

time. There were only 70 chemists in the med chem department. These are the people that are the innovators of new drugs and work

00:35:06 ►

in concert with x-ray crystallographers and molecular modelers and people that look at

00:35:12 ►

computers all day and figure out what enzyme pockets look like and how we should make a

00:35:16 ►

molecule to fit into that, like a key into a lock and all this. But at the end of the day,

00:35:19 ►

it’s the med chemists that are cooking these things up in their hoods and sending them off to enzyme and

00:35:25 ►

rat assays. And when I joined the company, there were only two female chemists out of 70.

00:35:32 ►

So it was kind of intense to step as a young, like 21 year old out of college into this extremely

00:35:39 ►

younged out male dominated culture, which was fine. And luckily, at the time that I joined the company,

00:35:45 ►

they hired, I think, three women. So there were now five of us in a company of 75 or something.

00:35:51 ►

And needless to say, there was a lot of ego in place. And while I do think it’s completely

00:35:58 ►

amazing and fascinating that we can synthesize chemicals, and this summer I had the opportunity to spend the 4th of July at

00:36:05 ►

the Schulman’s residence and hang out in Sasha’s lab out back and Sasha’s not super active right

00:36:14 ►

now in terms of synthesizing chemicals but he has an amazing team of chemists that hang out back

00:36:19 ►

there from time to time and I got to powwow with a bunch of them and talk about interesting

00:36:24 ►

substitutions on molecules that I’m still starting to understand. But one thing I really noticed in

00:36:30 ►

this pharmaceutical company that I worked at was that, yeah, there’s a lot of room for ego

00:36:33 ►

and this concept of like, I’m making this drug and ha ha ha, it’s going to save the world and

00:36:39 ►

stop diabetes. And as a naturopathic doctor, I really believe that it’s not drugs that are going to

00:36:47 ►

save us. It’s really us. And it’s probably the plants that are going to save us actually,

00:36:52 ►

whether it’s cacao or echinacea or calendula or that little house plant that you once in a while

00:36:59 ►

squirt some water on and say, oh, I’m so sorry. It loves you. It’s happy to be there with you.

00:37:04 ►

Yeah. Listen to it. So I found to be there with you. Yeah, listen to

00:37:05 ►

it. So I found this quote when I was working as a chemist and being a little bit of like a trickster

00:37:11 ►

and a happy maker and a fun lover. I posted it up in my, my cube. And the quote said,

00:37:20 ►

some chemists, having synthesized a few compounds, deem themselves to be better than

00:37:26 ►

Mother Nature, who, in addition to synthesizing compounds to numerous dimension, synthesize

00:37:32 ►

those chemists as well. I really enjoyed having that up for a little bit of a perspective shift,

00:37:39 ►

like, yeah, you might be cool, because you made that thing that we’re now going to patent,

00:37:44 ►

and maybe this company’s gonna make a lot of money on it.

00:37:46 ►

But at the end of the day, like Mother Nature made you.

00:37:50 ►

So the best chemist out there is really Mother Nature.

00:37:53 ►

And really, I think the plants are pretty epic with it.

00:37:58 ►

OK, I want to share a little bit about some of my personal experiences with plants.

00:38:04 ►

about some of my personal experiences with plants.

00:38:08 ►

And before I do that, I’m going to give you a gift.

00:38:11 ►

Because you’ve all just been hanging out here so patiently.

00:38:13 ►

You might want this gift.

00:38:17 ►

So one of the things that I love to do in my little herbal apothecary,

00:38:21 ►

and particularly for Burning Man, is to make lip balm.

00:38:23 ►

Because guess what?

00:38:25 ►

You get a little cracked out out here, huh?

00:38:31 ►

By the end of the week, your stuff’s all cracked and dry and just not fun. So I’m going to hand out, I’m going to hand this little purple box around. And there’s some homemade lip balms in

00:38:37 ►

there. And these were made with plants that were gathered at Esalen, this magical place that I’ve

00:38:42 ►

been fortunate enough to call home in California for on and off for a couple years now. And there’s calendula in there. And there’s

00:38:49 ►

also comfrey in there. And comfrey is one of the best herbs that you can also put topically on your

00:38:52 ►

skin. It actually, it actually promotes your body’s ability to form granulation tissue. And

00:39:00 ►

that’s what comes in when you’ve had a wound and so you know when you gouge yourself

00:39:05 ►

rather deeply what happens first is you get this kind of whitish pinkish tissue that’s called

00:39:09 ►

granulation tissue and it’s a process where it fills in from the periphery to the center and

00:39:14 ►

essentially knits a wound together and comfrey if you would look at one of its leaves has this very

00:39:20 ►

interesting pattern to it that almost looks like this cellular mesh. And so again, this

00:39:26 ►

doctrine of signatures idea that maybe a plant can give us some idea of what it might be useful for

00:39:31 ►

in its appearance or where it lives or whatnot. So comfrey and calendula are the two plants that

00:39:37 ►

I gathered a lot of at Esalen for this batch of lip balm. Thank you. And it’s complexed with some

00:39:44 ►

beeswax. The calendula and comfrey were

00:39:46 ►

extracted in olive oil. And then that olive oil was strained. It was added to some melted beeswax.

00:39:52 ►

And I added some vitamin E in there and some essential oils and made this yummy, yummy lip

00:39:56 ►

balm that is being brought to you in recycled plastic containers with some love put in there

00:40:03 ►

by my campmates. We have a camp called Feel the Love,

00:40:06 ►

which is over at 315 and G. You’re welcome to come by and visit us. But I’m going to pass this

00:40:09 ►

around. I’m also going to pass around a little piece of paper here. And if you care to put your

00:40:16 ►

name, you can use any name, your name, your pie name, and an email address, I’d be happy to

00:40:22 ►

stay in contact with you about some of the things I’m doing in the plant

00:40:26 ►

world. And there’s also an email address on these lip balms if you want to ever write to me.

00:40:32 ►

I’m very passionate about this. When I come back, I’m going to talk about some of my plant

00:40:35 ►

experiences and then we’ll wrap it up. So I have just a few minutes left here, but I want to talk my most profound plant teachers mama ayahuasca feel free

00:40:48 ►

if you care to share if you’ve had an experience with ayahuasca

00:40:53 ►

just a few okay great so san pedro okay much different but same same so three years ago so what’s true is after I got

00:41:09 ►

out of medical school I graduated I worked for a little while I had a practice in Phoenix I went

00:41:15 ►

through a heartbreak I took my little broken heart and moved to Esalen and thought I was going there

00:41:20 ►

for like a month ended up being there for five months never really have left California because why would I? It’s just amazing, especially the Bay Area. But I’ve been slowly

00:41:29 ►

crawling my way up the coast from Big Sur. Then I moved and probably my maybe six months into

00:41:35 ►

living there, one of my patients actually said, you know, I think that you might be really

00:41:39 ►

interested in connecting with this circle that does ayahuasca locally. And I said, yes, I am.

00:41:44 ►

And for years and years and years prior to this, I had heard of ayahuasca.

00:41:47 ►

I had been interested in ayahuasca.

00:41:49 ►

And it never felt quite right.

00:41:51 ►

And that’s one thing that’s just a beautiful thing to listen to in your life

00:41:55 ►

when you get that intuitive knowing that, like, yes, this is the time,

00:41:58 ►

or no, this is not the thing, to really honor that.

00:42:03 ►

So Mama Ayahuasca came to me in 2009 and I was living in Santa Cruz

00:42:10 ►

and I said, okay, I’m just going to like trust this process. And I go to this circle and I don’t

00:42:16 ►

know, really know what I’m getting myself into, but I feel really good about it. And in my first

00:42:22 ►

ayahuasca journey, well, let me say a few things about ayahuasca first ayahuasca

00:42:26 ►

is both a plant and a brew so it is the it is one common name it’s a Quechua name for

00:42:35 ►

a plant called Banisteriopsis capi that grows in the Amazon and throughout

00:42:40 ►

portions of South America and is now being propagated around the world.

00:42:53 ►

And in terms of its medicinal quality, the Banisteriopsis contains MAOIs,

00:42:56 ►

monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which Brian referred to earlier.

00:43:00 ►

These are compounds that can inhibit an enzyme in your body that is designed to break down things like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine.

00:43:05 ►

That’s important, right? It’s important that we have enzymes in our body that can break down

00:43:09 ►

things like serotonin and dopamine and recycle them so that we can keep our biochemistry going.

00:43:17 ►

Banisteriopsis has this ability to inhibit those processes. And when it is mixed with another plant, usually something of the psychotria

00:43:25 ►

variety, which contains DMT, it inhibits the body’s ability to break down DMT. If you were

00:43:33 ►

to take a bunch of DMT orally without an MAOI, it just wouldn’t do anything. It would just pass

00:43:38 ►

through your system and get broken down and you would not have like a visionary experience that

00:43:41 ►

you might be seeking. Smoke it, a different story, but eating it, not going to happen unless if you have an MAOI. So one of the beautiful magical

00:43:49 ►

mysteries of the ayahuasca brew is that it’s actually the synergy of these two plants that

00:43:55 ►

come together to produce the healing mystical visionary entheogenic effects that people

00:44:01 ►

experience when they take ayahuasca. The chemistry is complex, but it’s also

00:44:05 ►

simple in some ways, because there’s just a couple of these basic compounds that have shown this

00:44:11 ►

really strong MAOI activity. And you take one or the other independently, and you don’t have the

00:44:17 ►

same thing. And how did people who are living in the Amazon know to combine these plants?

00:44:24 ►

Right? The Banisteriopsis is a vine. It’s often referred

00:44:27 ►

to as vine of the soul. It could be a thick, it’s a thick woody vine or a liana. And the

00:44:32 ►

Psychotria viridis, also known as chakruna, is a bush, a shrub. Once in a while it can grow up

00:44:38 ►

into a tree and it has these really beautiful shiny leaves. And so how do these people know?

00:44:42 ►

If you ask people there, they will say, well, the plants told us, right? The plants will often let you know what they’re

00:44:48 ►

good for. Again, there’s this doctrine of signatures. But before we even get into that

00:44:52 ►

space, listening with your heart. One of my teachers said one time,

00:44:59 ►

animals communicate with us telepathically and plants communicate with us empathically.

00:45:04 ►

So often when

00:45:05 ►

we’re hanging out with plants or using them as medicine or food, we’ll get impressions on that

00:45:09 ►

emotional heart-centered level. So who knows, maybe some way someone just sang into someone’s

00:45:17 ►

heart at some point in time and said, combine these two together. We want to make brew and

00:45:21 ►

take you on a journey. So that’s a little bit about the magic of ayahuasca

00:45:26 ►

in terms of its preparation and how magical it is that these plants need to come together.

00:45:32 ►

And another magical part of ayahuasca is now it’s becoming widespreadly, it’s widespread use

00:45:38 ►

around the world. So it’s not something that, it’s something that 200 years ago perhaps was really limited to use in South America and in the 1850s started getting exposed by ethnobotanists to other

00:45:52 ►

portions of the world and people got curious and then people started taking ayahuasca and

00:45:56 ►

journeying with it and then I would say probably in the past 30 years or so it’s really exploded

00:46:01 ►

and one of the one of the things I like to think about is like,

00:46:06 ►

what does ayahuasca want? Like what does mama ayahuasca want? And something that’s come to me

00:46:14 ►

in journeys and outside of journeys is that number one, ayahuasca is a very profound healer.

00:46:20 ►

A lot of people use it, um, participate in ayahuasca ceremony for healing, whether that’s their own personal healing on a physical level, an emotional level, a mental, a spiritual level, as well as on the collective level.

00:46:31 ►

It’s often consumed.

00:46:33 ►

It’s pretty much always consumed ceremonially in a group context.

00:46:37 ►

And within that context, there is a group field that’s created.

00:46:40 ►

My teachers call it the gathering spirit that comes and helps to orchestrate what

00:46:46 ►

everybody’s working through, but also what we’re bringing in from the outside and what we’re

00:46:50 ►

sending out in terms of developing the world in a bubble of love. So on my very first ayahuasca

00:46:55 ►

journey, I went into it saying, okay, I really love plants. Now what? Like, what am I supposed to do with this? And the message that I heard was

00:47:05 ►

be our advocate. And so that is a role that I’m still feeling into and finding out how to show up

00:47:13 ►

for and now doing this talk today and handing out a very simple little gift of lip balm is one way

00:47:20 ►

that I’m really trying to advocate for people to raise their consciousness about plant

00:47:25 ►

medicine, about plants as food, about plants as poison, about plants as companions, and to bring

00:47:30 ►

that into their life. Ayahuasca has been a profound healer for me on many, many levels. It’s helped me

00:47:37 ►

to work through deep emotional things as well as physical things. I’ve seen people have incredibly transformative experiences

00:47:45 ►

within ceremonies and sharing afterwards. It’s something that in the past year I’ve been asked

00:47:53 ►

to step up more in an assisting type of role. And so that’s something that I’m kind of taking on now

00:47:58 ►

is learning how to work in that way where I’m having my own process, but I’m also able to really facilitate someone else’s.

00:48:06 ►

I feel really honored about that.

00:48:08 ►

What else do I want to say?

00:48:11 ►

I know I’m over time, so I want to really honor that.

00:48:14 ►

And I want to say in terms of plant medicine,

00:48:18 ►

whether it’s cannabis or wachuma or ayahuasca

00:48:22 ►

or working with los hongitos or um yeah any of the plant medicines

00:48:30 ►

in my experience they really want to help us they really want they are reliant on us plants can’t

00:48:38 ►

walk they rely on us to carry them around the world to carry their seeds around the world

00:48:42 ►

ayahuasca being grown in Hawaii now in

00:48:46 ►

Fiji, who doesn’t want to live in Hawaii or grow in Hawaii, right? Of course she wants to be there.

00:48:51 ►

So I invite you to take some of these things that I’ve talked about home with you and experiment

00:48:58 ►

with these ideas and hang out, spend some time with the plants in your house or in your garden,

00:49:11 ►

Spend some time with the plants in your house or in your garden or make the effort to befriend a plant, whether that’s a rosebush or a simple thing that might look like a weed in your yard. It has consciousness. It has love. It has oxygen and sugar to give you.

00:49:27 ►

just invite you to experiment and make tea and sip tea and bring plant energy and plant consciousness into your life in a different way because they’re really available and they really

00:49:32 ►

want to help us and that’s part of what I’m here to tell you and if you want to learn a little bit

00:49:37 ►

more about being an entheogenic rock star in terms of supplements and herbs and nutritional

00:49:42 ►

things that can support you if you’re taking psychedelics or having entheogenic experiences,

00:49:47 ►

then come to Fractal Nation tonight at 6, and I’ll be talking about that.

00:49:51 ►

And thank you to Pez for inviting me to be here.

00:49:54 ►

And thank you to all of you for being here.

00:49:57 ►

I’m super appreciative.

00:49:59 ►

Blessings.

00:50:00 ►

Love.

00:50:01 ►

And maybe we have a minute or two for questions if anybody has a question.

00:50:04 ►

Do you consider natural products to be better than man-made products as in chemicals like vitamin c

00:50:11 ►

i love this question one of my um plant teachers who was this magical naturopathic doctor who

00:50:20 ►

really got to know plants when he was in a, he had some sort of massive injury that left

00:50:26 ►

him bedridden for like three months. And so he just laid in bed with a bunch of tinctures like

00:50:31 ►

on the headboard behind him. And every day we just like pull one down and meditate with it,

00:50:35 ►

take a few drops and just meditate. He said to me at one point in time, chemicals are natural.

00:50:42 ►

Everything comes from nature. So whether it is made by the hand of man

00:50:46 ►

or woman it’s still natural and the spirit quality of it yes this is an awesome an awesome question

00:50:54 ►

um i would say in my own experience when i’ve used entheogens that are nature-based in terms

00:51:01 ►

of actually a plant versus something that has been cooked up in a pot there is a a different quality for in my personal experience in terms, I don’t think that one is

00:51:09 ►

better than the other. I think that they all have their gift and their teaching to bring,

00:51:13 ►

but there’s a different quality to the experience in that often the nature-based ones facilitate me

00:51:20 ►

feeling more connected to nature on some level. And the chemical ones can also

00:51:26 ►

facilitate that. But there tends to be often more of a mental aspect for me, not always.

00:51:31 ►

But sometimes that those are a couple of things that I noticed. The other thing I will say about

00:51:35 ►

chemicals is that it’s really important to know your chemist or know somebody who knows

00:51:41 ►

your chemist and trust the medicine that’s coming to you and don’t take anything that you don’t feel 150% about

00:51:48 ►

because there’s some shady shit out there.

00:51:50 ►

And having worked in chemical industry

00:51:53 ►

and seen the energy of the chemists that I worked with,

00:51:59 ►

there were times where I would make a batch of XYZ chemical

00:52:04 ►

and then my boss would make a batch of the same chemical.

00:52:08 ►

And we put them into the enzyme assays and they’d have different outcomes.

00:52:13 ►

And I think it was because he was a miserable mother ever and that he was putting really negative energy into his medicine.

00:52:21 ►

And I don’t know that that’s true And I don’t know how to test that.

00:52:25 ►

But when you’re preparing your tea, when you’re preparing your wachuma, your ayahuasca,

00:52:32 ►

when you’re preparing your chocolate, when you’re preparing your food, when you’re about to take an

00:52:38 ►

LSD journey, take a moment and put some intention and love around what you want to manifest.

00:52:42 ►

And that will help. and in terms of like

00:52:45 ►

is vitamin c that’s synthetic better than what’s natural you can’t i can’t necessarily say because

00:52:52 ►

they tend to seem they seem in the research to have the same effect in terms of their efficacy

00:52:57 ►

and potency can you use the mic i i had asked the same question of an ethnobotanist and he said

00:53:02 ►

there was no difference and i really wasn’t satisfied with the with the answer that he gave me he had no explanation he just said no

00:53:07 ►

hi um what do you think I came across this idea I don’t think I can express it very well

00:53:13 ►

where you use more parts of the plants instead of just isolating one part of the plant the active

00:53:19 ►

component they’re using synergistic there’s something synergistically that happens when

00:53:22 ►

you use more parts of the plants can you you speak to that a little bit? Absolutely, yeah.

00:53:25 ►

So the question is about using whole plant versus like an extracted,

00:53:29 ►

like standardized extract is what they’re referred to in herbal medicine.

00:53:31 ►

So often if you pick up something like milk thistle,

00:53:34 ►

you’ll see that it’ll say standardized to 50% silymarin,

00:53:38 ►

or if you pick up St. John’s wort, it’ll say standardized to 50% hypericin.

00:53:43 ►

In the Western materialistic reductionist model that we

00:53:46 ►

are immersed in on some level, it’s very, it’s fascinating and interesting to figure out like,

00:53:52 ►

well, which chemical causes the blah, blah, blah, or interfere, you know, intersects with this

00:53:57 ►

receptor or inhibits this enzyme. So there’s some validity into looking into that question. However, what’s true is that

00:54:06 ►

when you are using a whole plant complex versus just an isolated extract, you’re getting a whole

00:54:12 ►

bunch of other stuff in there with the plant, like vitamins and minerals and other things like

00:54:16 ►

Brian referred to in his talk about. We’ve got polyphenols and antioxidants that are,

00:54:23 ►

and some things that are acting,

00:54:25 ►

the epicatechin that’s acting as an MAOI that’s enhancing the effects of the theobromine.

00:54:30 ►

But if you heat the chocolate too much, it’s cooked out, so you’re not getting that.

00:54:33 ►

So there are other compounds in the plant that will facilitate the plant’s ability to do its job.

00:54:41 ►

And I’ll give you an example of that really quickly.

00:54:43 ►

Dandelion leaf.

00:54:51 ►

Okay. Dandelion is thought of as a common weed by a lot of people, but the dandelion root is used for liver detoxification and stimulation. And dandelion leaf is both a bitter green that you

00:54:58 ►

can eat. And it’s one of nature’s best diuretics. One of the problems with the pharmaceutical

00:55:03 ►

diuretics, such as Lasix or the pharmaceutical diuretics such as Lasix or

00:55:05 ►

hydrochlorothiazide and whatnot is that they tend to deplete potassium from the body.

00:55:11 ►

So often people who have something like congestive heart failure or edema or ascites or some other

00:55:17 ►

problem where they’re retaining water and they are using a diuretic to get rid of that start to get

00:55:22 ►

depleted of potassium in their body and they need to now take another thing to replace that potassium.

00:55:27 ►

What dandelion has, in addition to being an amazing diuretic, the leaf itself,

00:55:32 ►

has one of the highest contents of potassium found in plants.

00:55:36 ►

So nature has this inherent wisdom of providing the things that we need.

00:55:40 ►

And so using them in a whole form is definitely beneficial.

00:55:44 ►

So I hope

00:55:45 ►

that answer your question and gave you a little bit of an example and I don’t

00:55:48 ►

know if there’s any more questions there were one more question you started it

00:55:53 ►

out kind of inviting us to speak to what plants are like food and the

00:56:00 ►

relationship to air you mentioned how terence talked about mushrooms kind of

00:56:06 ►

being us expanding into consciousness and i think that the information quality of plants is super

00:56:13 ►

important and hearing your um your relationship to ayahuasca and how she’s kind of it’s kind of

00:56:20 ►

commissioned you to be a representative of that plant in a sense and

00:56:25 ►

and this message that you’re bringing to us being this like this one of us awakening to our

00:56:32 ►

connection reawakening to our connection to the plants dependence complete interdependence

00:56:38 ►

complete dependence actually right right um i think, one, it was a beautiful sharing that you did with us today.

00:56:49 ►

And I think that thank you again for the lip balm, too. It’s awesome.

00:56:54 ►

If I could if I can invite you to answer one question, it would be like in this grand kind of awakening of us, like waking up to our relationship to the plant kingdom,

00:57:08 ►

where would you encourage newcomers to begin

00:57:12 ►

to establish their relationship to the plants?

00:57:15 ►

I mean, you say go out and have a conversation with the plants

00:57:17 ►

at the Eslan and stuff.

00:57:18 ►

Is that the initiation?

00:57:21 ►

So the question is, where do I suggest that newcomers

00:57:25 ►

a place for them to initiate

00:57:27 ►

forming relationships with plants? Start at home.

00:57:30 ►

Start at home and start with your body

00:57:32 ►

and start with your environment.

00:57:34 ►

Drink tea.

00:57:37 ►

Drink tea.

00:57:38 ►

Just have direct experience

00:57:39 ►

with the plants. Learn how to blend a tea.

00:57:41 ►

Learn something about a tea blend

00:57:44 ►

that you like.

00:57:49 ►

That’s one way to start with just ingestion. Get a plant and put it in your room.

00:57:54 ►

Look at what’s growing outside your door. Even if it’s something that’s coming out of a crack that you’re like, what is this little thing? Just hang out with it. Just start forming relationship

00:57:59 ►

in your immediate environment. And that will enable you to and support you to start expanding your environment

00:58:05 ►

because as you I mean it’s at the point now where like I’ll go visit I’ll go to a friend’s house

00:58:12 ►

and like the plants are screaming at me like I need some water could you turn me I need more

00:58:17 ►

light and I’m like okay your plants are kind of screaming at me I’m gonna water them I hope you

00:58:20 ►

don’t mind that and they’re like oh yeah I haven’t watered them in two weeks or whatever. So they will they want to be engaged. And you will notice if you hang out

00:58:29 ►

with them, they will start to ruffle their leaves, and they’ll start to make little motions. So

00:58:34 ►

tea, your salad, you know, love your romaine when you’re crunching it up here, like

00:58:41 ►

kale does well in the playa, like just be with your food and give thanks to it and

00:58:46 ►

give thanks to the ancestral wisdom that’s coming down. I mean, again, these are like the best

00:58:51 ►

biochemists on the planet. So just start at home. Start with yourself. Start with your lip balm.

00:58:57 ►

Start with, you know, a little bit of essential oil. When you get back to your camp or with a

00:59:03 ►

friend here, come up and get another spritz before you go just invite it in and just open your heart and they’ll come in so tea plants

00:59:11 ►

around your house all of that and you know if you’re interested in things like wachuma ceremony

00:59:16 ►

and ayahuasca and all of that like there’s plenty of people here on the playa that are well versed

00:59:20 ►

in these things and you’re in a safe place here to you know approach some of us

00:59:25 ►

to have private conversations about that but just know that you have resources all around and even

00:59:31 ►

though we’re not seeing a lot of plants out here on the playa you know look at those crazy little

00:59:36 ►

scrubby sagebrushes that are sticking it out here when you’re driving home and driving off the playa

00:59:41 ►

like they have fortitude and will and they are producing the oxygen

00:59:45 ►

that we’re breathing here.

00:59:47 ►

So have gratitude and notice them

00:59:50 ►

and invite them into your immediate environment.

00:59:52 ►

I think that’s probably the best thing I could say.

00:59:54 ►

Thank you guys so much.

00:59:55 ►

I really appreciate it.

00:59:56 ►

Blessings.

01:00:00 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:00:02 ►

where people are changing their lives

01:00:04 ►

one thought at a time.

01:00:07 ►

Well, I hope that if you aren’t already well connected with some plants, that you go out to a plant nursery today and buy at least a small plant for your house or apartment.

01:00:17 ►

Right now, next door to where we’re living, our neighbor has a truly beautiful and somewhat unusual tree in her front yard.

01:00:24 ►

Tabor has a truly beautiful and somewhat unusual tree in her front yard.

01:00:31 ►

When I asked her about it, I learned that this huge tree was once in a small pot on her kitchen table many years ago.

01:00:34 ►

And that’s another thing about plants.

01:00:38 ►

If you know what you’re doing, they’ll live with you for a long time.

01:00:40 ►

Much longer than a dog or a cat, for sure.

01:00:45 ►

In fact, my wife has a lot of plants that she has, well, she’s had them longer than we’ve known each other. One of them she’s had even longer than her children have been alive.

01:00:51 ►

And since we have to move from time to time, as we generally only have a month-to-month lease on

01:00:56 ►

our apartment, well, my wife has very cleverly created what we call her portable garden.

01:01:02 ►

I’m guessing that there are probably over 100 plants in her garden right now,

01:01:06 ►

and, well, some of them are actually the size of small trees.

01:01:10 ►

When we move, it actually takes more time and energy to move the plants

01:01:14 ►

than it does to move our furniture.

01:01:16 ►

And in our portable garden, our backyard garden,

01:01:19 ►

they’re all arranged in a way that, well, at first they seem to be

01:01:22 ►

kind of a permanent part of the little backyard we have, but they’re all in pots, and well, some of them are even bigger than the two

01:01:29 ►

of us can lift. And I have to confess here that helping her move them around during one of the

01:01:36 ►

rearranging times that come around every once in a while, well, that’s about my only involvement

01:01:41 ►

with them from a nurturing standpoint. However, I do talk with

01:01:45 ►

them, and if anyone else is around here, I just do it silently, but when I’m alone, I talk out loud

01:01:51 ►

to them, and I have to admit that when I first began doing this, it did seem a bit strange to me,

01:01:57 ►

but after more than 10 years with some of them now, well, we’ve grown to know each other, and

01:02:02 ►

I’m sure that they can sense my moods. Actually, ever since beginning my ayahuasca well, we’ve grown to know each other, and I’m sure that they can sense my moods.

01:02:06 ►

Actually, ever since beginning my ayahuasca practice, I’ve been growing much closer to

01:02:11 ►

all the plants that I come in contact with. Even on my morning walk, there are now several trees

01:02:16 ►

and shrubs that have become old friends. And you probably do this yourself, but if you don’t,

01:02:22 ►

well, you should give it a try. Particularly if you think that talking to plants sounds a little hokey.

01:02:29 ►

You might just be surprised at how sentient these wonderful friends actually are.

01:02:34 ►

So, I want to again thank Dr. Natalie for reminding me again about how deeply intertwined we all are to the plant world.

01:02:42 ►

And should you want to get in touch with Dr. Natalie,

01:02:49 ►

I’ll put her email address with the program notes for this podcast, which as you know,

01:02:55 ►

you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. I know that last year she spoke at the Women’s Visionary Congress, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s back this year. As you may recall,

01:03:01 ►

the dates for this year’s conference are June 14th to the 16th,

01:03:05 ►

and it’s going to be held at the Ions Retreat Center in Petaluma, California.

01:03:11 ►

And one last thing, while I hadn’t planned it this way,

01:03:15 ►

today happens to be April 20th, or 420 as we like to call it,

01:03:20 ►

which makes it even more special for me due to the fact that

01:03:24 ►

tonight at the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference

01:03:27 ►

that is being held in Oakland right now, there’s going to be a screening, the world premiere in fact,

01:03:33 ►

of Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate, in which I tell a few stories about what it was like in Dallas, Texas

01:03:39 ►

during the period when MDMA, or ecstasy, first hit the streets in a big way.

01:03:46 ►

I’m not going to be able to make it to the conference myself,

01:03:48 ►

but I’ll be there with everyone in spirit for sure.

01:03:51 ►

The spirit of 420, that is.

01:03:55 ►

And I hope you’ll be joining me.

01:03:57 ►

Actually, in one of my next podcasts,

01:03:59 ►

I hope to be able to let you know where you can see this video for yourself.

01:04:03 ►

I think the producers are going to make it available online, and if that does happen, I’ll let you know where you can see this video for yourself. I think the producers are going to make it available online,

01:04:06 ►

and if that does happen, I’ll let you know.

01:04:09 ►

But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:04:13 ►

Be well, my friends.

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