What is Plant Spirit Medicine?

Eliot Cowan, author of Plant Spirit Medicine, is the first person in the West to rediscover and reintroduce Plant Spirit Medicine into the West.

Plant Spirit Medicine is a form of herbalism, a form of healing using plants. In Plant Spirit Medicine, plants are approached as a wise, living, fully-aware being that has a great deal of depths and are called upon to create a deeper kind of feeling than perhaps other approaches do.

For thousands for years, humans and plants have lived together. We are family. Our plant relatives are generous and helpful, offering us food and medicine. Like us, plants have spirit, and their spirit can nurture and heal us. Plant Spirit Medicine uses the spirits of plants to bring us into balance and harmony. It is the shaman’s way with plants. A millennial practice known to all peoples, it was rediscovered in the West by Eliot Cowan, and has proved as effective in today’s world as in times past.

Plant Spirit Medicine practitioners 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 practitioner, and the client. With Plant Spirit Medicine, practitioners look at the whole person, seeing all they have to offer, leaving judgments and criticism behind. Only by seeing a person in this way can we see the root of a person’s imbalance and use the appropriate plants to provide them with what they need. The result is a deeply effective and elegant form of healing.

With Plant Spirit Medicine, we return to balance and harmony. 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, restoring to us our birthright.

Recently, Waylon Lewis joined Eliot in a snowy backyard for a little cool conversation about the inner lives of plants. The below is intended to be a fun introduction, not an in-depth exposition!