Plant healing, fire wisdom: New Life Journal interviews author and teacher Eliot Cowan

New Life Journal, June-July, 2003 by Erin Everett

With Plant Spirit Medicine, Eliot Cowan has combined his knowledge and expertise us a Five Element Acupuncturist with indigenous healing methods and wisdom gained from years of intensive study with the Huichol people of Mexico. The Huichols are one of the few remaining living shamanic cultures.

When I connected up with Eliot yesterday, it was by phone to Colorado, where he had just come to test after a long day in an airplane. He spends lots of time traveling nowadays, teaching his Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner Training course all across the country. He was tired but happy, and glad to share his insights with our readers once again.

NLJ: Many modern-day herbalists and scientists address the healing power of plants by looking at their chemical constituents. Can you tell me about the ways traditional cultures work with the healing power of plants?

EC: Traditional cultures, of course, haven't been concerned with chemical constituents. Rather, they have been concerned with making relationship with the plant, and in particular, the traditional cultures tend to relate to plants us brothers and sisters; that is, us beings who have a great deal of wisdom and knowledge to share and that we can learn a lot from. We can certainly learn from them how they can make themselves useful to us for healing purposes. And traditional cultures have always tended to particularly value learning about the uses of herbs through dreams.

Indigenous cultures in general relate to dreams as valid ways of knowing something. They have not been particularly invested in analytical or scientific method, but they have learned a great deal about the world around them through dreams. This is particularly true of learning about plant medicines. The plant people don't have mouths and voice boxes, so they find another way to speak to us and inform us, and that is predominantly through dreams.

NLJ: So how can western people connect with plants through dreams?

EC: Well, western people dream like everybody else does. And there are well-developed methods for learning how to dream in an intentional way, and these ways of dreaming with plants are available to anyone, no matter where they were born or what the color of their skin is. You know, when I talk to people in various places, I like to ask people about their dreams. I find that the majority of people have had spontaneous experiences of what we could think of as extraordinary learning. Many people remember having had a dream that later came true. Some people have had a dream that happened in the distant past, before they were born, which turns out to be historically accurate. Most people have experiences in dream of meaningful interactions with beings that are very unusual, such as talking plants, talking animals, dead people, unborn people ... and of course, everyone dreams. Everyone's dreams take place in places other than the bed in which they're lying. I find that these types of experiences are very, very common, in fact, more common than not. This goes to show that the dream state offers some very unusual and valuable possibilities for learning. And this is something that indigenous peoples have been aware of from the very beginning. And where they are still living in the traditional ways, they still take great advantage of the dream state as a way of learning. As I said before, since everyone dreams, regardless of your cultural background, these kinds of dream learning experiences are available to anybody, with just a very minimum of guidance and instruction.

NLJ: And so, some of the ways that we can learn to connect more deeply in this way is through shamanic journeying?

EC: What you're referring to us shamanic journeying is a form of dreaming, so the answer is yes.

NLJ: When I look at nature, I see how everything works together to benefit the whole. How can plants teach us how to live in community together and in harmony with the earth?

EC: Well, what you just said was beautifully said. And, in a way you sort of answered your own question! Plants can teach us how to live by their example. And teaching by example is always the best teaching anyway, even for human teachers. Simply by taking the time to be with plants, to open yourself to them, to observe them, to see how they are in the world, gives us a beautiful example of how to live in balance and harmony. Now, sometimes plants will offer teachings in a more verbal form, to people in dream. Even so, that's not really necessary always and not always available. Even just being in the presence of a tree, let's say. That's always available and there's always beautiful learning, if one opens oneself to it.

Our people somehow assume that we're superior to plants, that we don't have anything to learn from them, that they're simply there for our exploitation. Really, all it takes is just a small change of attitude to open oneself to the possibility that plants may actually be very wise and knowledgeable and have a lot to teach us. When one spends time around plants with that attitude, one learns.