An Interview with Stephen Harrod Buhner

This Interview could Change the way you Think, Feel, and Perceive the Natural World!

His books have been some of the most influential of any I have read. In Fact, they have fundamentally changed the way that I experience Herbal Medicine! More than that, they set me on a path of using my heart as an organ of perception and cognition!

More than just a profound Herbalist, Stephen is something more like a Bardic Naturalist. His speech is so eloquent that one cannot help but to be inspired (not to mention have their synapses re-networked)!

Stephen’s knowledge base is humbling, and together we access a variety of subjects throughout these four videos…. We range from Heart Based Cognition, Direct Perception and Communication with Plants, Herbal Medicine for Plague and FLu, and even more taboo subjects like the role of Psychoactive Plants in the Eco-System!

Ultimately he describes the role of the Plant Shaman of the Future…. by the way… That means YOU!

Stephen is Reverently Irreverent in his approach to “Re-Wilding” and shares powerful insights about how we have been changed by domestication. Even more powerful are his strategies to reclaiming ourselves!

You’ve gotta see this interview!!!

I was so privileged to attend what Stephen described as his last workshop for the next few years! If you have ever had a chance to study with him in person, Take Heart! This interview is Stephen speaking from the culmination of all his teachings, writings, travel and professional practice up until now.

This interview was recorded at the end of a five-day immersive retreat hosted by Richard at Nelson’s Mountain Waters Retreat Center. What an amazing place, and what amazing people. The Land, Facilities, Garden and Fresh, Wild, Living Spring Water created the most perfect setting! Thanks Richard!

An Excerpt from one of my favorite books Authored by Stephen,

The Secret Teaching of Plants…

We in the West have been immersed in a particular mode of cognition the past hundred years, a mode defined by its linearity, it tendency to reductionism, and an insistence on the mechanical nature of Nature. This mode of cognition, the verbal/intellectual/ analytical (VIA), is now the dominant one in Western culture.

There is, however, another mode of cognition, one our species has used during the majority of its time on this planet–the holistic/ intuitive/ depth (HID) mode of cognition. Its expression can be seen in howancient and indigenous peoples gathered their knowledge about the world in which they lived and how they gathered knowledge of the uses of plants as medicines.

All ancient and indigenous peoples said that they learned the uses of plants as medicines from the plants themselves. For, they insisted, the plants can speak to human beings if only human beings will listen and respond to them in the proper state of mind. Gathering of knowledge directly from the wildness of the world is called biognosis–meaning “knowledge from life”–and, because it is inherent in our very physical bodies, it is something that everyone has the capacity to develop. It is something, in fact, that all of us use (at least minimally) without awareness in our day-to-day lives. It is a way of being that is concerned with our interconnection to the web of life that surrounds us, with wholeness rather than parts, with the very human journey in which we are all engaged.

~Stephen Harrod Buhner

Parts 3 and 4 of this video series are coming soon! Check back in a couple of days for those and in the meantime post your comments and questions and I’ll be sure to get back with you!

~Daniel