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Healing in a Sacred Manner
An Excerpt from Sacred Plant Medicine
B Y S T E P H E N H A R R O D B U H N E R

Chapter Six

All treatment of the sick was in accordance with dreams. No one attempted to treat the sick unless he had received a dream telling him to do so, and no one ever disregarded the obligations of such a dream. Each man treated only the diseases for which his dream had given him the remedies.

Thus Shooter said: "In the old days the Indians had few diseases, and so there was not a demand for a large variety of medicines. A medicine-man usually treated one special disease and treated it successfully. He did this in accordance with his dream. A medicine man would not try to dream of all herbs and treat all diseases, for then he could not expect to succeed in all nor to fulfill properly the dream of any one herb or animal. He would depend on too many and fail in all."(1)

- Frances Densmore

AS MY LEARNING with plant medicines progressed I would occasionally return to my family physician for one thing or another. Increasingly, however, he either did not know what was wrong with me or if he did he had no effective treatment for it. Further, it was becoming increasingly apparent that, as fine a man as he was, he could not go below the surface of the disease to its root cause. He did not know what was wrong, he simply had information about some of its aspects. If the treatment lay outside of easily administered antibiotics, he had few if any tools with which to treat the disease. I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with this approach to healing. Finally, after a particularly unsatisfactory treatment, I spent a few weeks in deep thought about the course I was pursuing in the healing of my body. I rummaged through all the old receipts and records of medical treatment I had undergone over the past six or seven years. The picture that emerged was deeply thought provoking. In all that time there was not one disease for which I had sought treatment that I could not have treated more efficiently, more cheaply, and more satisfactorily with the plant medicines I knew. This insight caused me a great deal of perturbation. It resulted, eventually, in a fairly unorthodox decision. I decided that henceforth I would not go to any physician for the treatment of disease.

As soon as I made this decision, I began experiencing a multitude of ills. I had a severe pain in my side that lasted for months. My vision began to get cloudy and I had headaches. My stomach hurt. I began to lose feeling in my hands. I had a sharp pain that shot from my right side up under my right shoulder blade.

I became extremely afraid. What foolishness was I involved in? Probably I had cancer, a heart condition, or at the least some degenerative liver disease that would cause me to die horribly. Still, I stuck by my decision.

Over the next year I chased these ills around my body from part to part, using herbs and ceremony for each one. Eventually each would subside only to arise somewhere else. I got to know the organ systems of the body extremely well. I learned hundreds of herbs for treating those systems. I began to face my fear.

I sat in meditation month after month, feeling into my fear. I began to trace it to its origins. And eventually I began to lose my fear. I had been taught, from an early age, that only experts knew what was wrong with my body. When I had finally decided to "take back" that power I went through a very long period of self-doubt. How was it, I finally wondered, that we have all been taught that the individual human being cannot know what is wrong with his or her body? How is it that strangers have come to be in charge of our healing, the knowledge of our bodies, the knowledge of what is wrong with our bodies, minds, and spirits? I didn't like the answers I was coming up with. I realized that I had been taught to fear death and that these strangers were the ones who had been self appointed to save me from what I had been taught to fear.

I began to enter the world of death and my fear and eventually I began to lose my fear of it. As my fear lessened I began to see more clearly what was wrong with my body, to know what was wrong. And in those instances the right plant, the right ceremony became apparent to me. I used them. And I began to feel better than I had since I was a boy. I began to understand the difference between the healer and the disease technician.

Healing is an Intimate Act
When you begin treating others with plant medicines you enter a territory that is as ancient and as unique as that of sacred plant medicine. Not all healers use plant medicines to heal but all healers have certain things they possess in common when they do heal. Perhaps most basic to all is that they focus on healing, not merely reducing the symptoms of disease.

It is common among many types of healers to reduce treatment of a disease to palliation of symptoms. The disease or symptoms are reviewed in current texts, a treatment approach is taken from them and followed in treating the disease. I believe that there is an important element of need below this that must be addressed to truly heal. This element is present in many people, felt as an instinctive hunger that sends them from physician to physician for they know not what.

There is a deep-seated need in people who are sick to meet with a healer who can be close and intimate and receive the pain that is being carried. It seems axiomatic among indigenous healers that to heal, one must receive the pain of the sick. When the sick person knows that their pain has been received they can, in turn, receive healing from the healer. I think Theodore Sturgeon touched on this truth when he noted in his short story, Scars, that:

There is a time when a thing is a heavy thing to carry and then it must be put down. But such is its nature that it cannot be set off on a rock or shouldered off onto the fork of a tree like a heavy pack. There is only one thing shaped to receive it, and that is another human mind.(2)

Receiving the pain of the sick means that you truly understand the territory of illness the sick person inhabits. Understanding the territory that is inhabited by the sick person, understanding its implications, understanding what it means for the sick person to be there, understanding what is then necessary for the two of you to do together, seeing the pain and crisis of the sick person without flinching, without running from it - this is receiving their pain.

An integral element of healing with plant medicines is entering the territory of crisis, called illness, and being able to remain there without fear. Within one's own body and self, the essence of the healing crisis is held and solved. Then the understanding of what remedies should be used can come, seemingly of their own accord.

In fact, in order to extract the evil spirits from the patient, the shaman is often obliged to take them into his own body, in doing so, he struggles and suffers more than the patient himself.(3)

The remedies you then apply come out of your true knowledge of the essence of that disease. They do not come out of a book. This is the difference between a technician and a healer.

Each man must bear his own pain or endure his own fasting if he would acquire power over pain in others.(4)

The illness you find when a sick person comes to you can come from many sources besides disease organisms. It can come from violating one's nature. It can come from injury. It can come from a necessary crisis, important because it allows the destructuring of old ways of thought and being. It can come from negative outside influences. It can come from the anger of the Earth. It can come from failure to pay attention and therefore become infected with another's disease. It can come from war. It can come from loss.

As a healer it is necessary to distinguish the different forms of illness. Treatment of one kind of illness does not work well with another. It is often the case that Western forms of healing do not address the underlying causes of illness. The medicine is applied to the body and the cause that resides in the spirit is untouched. Indigenous peoples made a distinction in all diseases. No two diseases or people were presumed to be identical. They were each treated differently. A Cherokee healer has said:

The doctor also sang a song each time he treated a person. There was a different song for each disease and the songs of the doctors themselves differed from each other.(5)

Believing that there is a deeper cause to illness than the physical is at odds with the beliefs about healing and disease commonly accepted in our culture today. Like relationship with plants, it is necessary to learn to think in another manner to see deeper than the form of things.

Mircea Eliade noted, "[To] remake a living integrity menaced by sickness, it is first necessary to go back ad originem, then repeat the cosmogony." In other words, it is necessary to go back to the original sacred time when all things were whole in order to restructure the sick person. Illness performs a crucial and important function: it allows destructuring of a contemporary state, readying the organism for change. "A state cannot be changed without first being annihilated."(6) It was in the process of going back ad originem, and creating original, sacred time that many ceremonies for healing were created.

Balance and Focus are Crucial
To do this, to create original time, to be a healer, one should be able to maintain balance in sacred worlds and in the presence of disease. One must be able to give up fear and know without question the limits and extent of personal power. One cannot become a master herbalist until fear of personal death is transcended. One cannot become a master healer until fear of the death of the patient is transcended.

When working with sacred plant medicines in healing the concept of balance becomes of primary importance. Barbara Meyerhoff wrote a wonderful book, Peyote Hunt, about the Huichol Indians and their spiritual traditions. In this book, and a companion article entitled "Shamanic Equilibrium: Balance and Mediation in Known and Unknown Worlds," she explored the need for balance in sacred healing and shamanic practice.

Shamanic balance is a particular stance. It is not a balance achieved by synthesis; it is not a static condition achieved by resolving opposition. It is not a compromise. Rather it is a state of acute tension, the kind of tension which exists when two unqualified forces encounter each other, meeting headlong, and are not reconciled but held teetering on the verge of chaos, not in reason but in experience. It is a position with which the westerner, schooled in the Aristotelian tradition, is extremely uncomfortable.(7)

She notes that in her early field work, she worked with a Luiseno Indian healer named Domenico. On weekends, when he would see patients, he would climb to the top of his tar-paper-covered shack and stand, one leg tucked up in the crook of the other. It came to Meyerhoff over time that what Domenico was doing was demonstrating his capacity to be balanced in sacred worlds. In her later work with the Huichols, the medicine man, called a mara'akame, Ramon Medina Silva, also demonstrated his capacity for balance.

One afternoon, without explanation, he interrupted our sessions of taping mythology to take a party, Huichol friends and myself, to an area outside his home. It was a region of steep barrancas cut by a rapid waterfall cascading perhaps a thousand feet over jagged, slippery rocks. At the edge of the fall, Ramon removed his sandals and announced that this was a special place for shamans. He proceeded to leap across the waterfall, from rock to rock, frequently pausing, his body bent forward, his arms outspread, head thrown back, entirely birdlike, poised motionlessly on one foot. He disappeared, reemerged, leaped about, and finally achieved the other side. I was frightened and puzzled by his performance, but none of the Huichols there seemed at all worried. The wife of one of the older Huichol men told me that her husband had started to become a mara'akame but had failed because he lacked balance. I assumed that she referred to his social and personal unsteadiness, for he was alcoholic and something of a deviant.

I knew I had witnessed a virtuoso display of balance, but it was not until the next day, when discussing the event with Ramon, that I began to understand more clearly what had occurred. "The mara'akame must have superb equilibrium," he said and demonstrated the point by using his fingers to march up his violin bow. "Otherwise, he will not reach his destination and will fall this way or that," and his fingers plunged into an imaginary abyss. "One crosses over; it is very narrow and, without balance, one is eaten by those animals waiting below."(8)

The importance of balance is not limited to the Huichol. In Korea some shamans, usually women, dance balanced on top of sharp rice-straw chopping blades as a demonstration of communication with spirit powers during possession trances. The sharp blades are placed atop a six-foot tower made by stacking various objects such as barrels, tables, boxes and large jars. This tower represents the vertical axis connecting Heaven and Earth. The shaman, after licking the sharp blades and pressing them into her open mouth, places the blades atop the makeshift tower. There she dances for about an hour, praying to the five cardinal directions and communing with her spirit guides. The proficient shaman does not falter and is not cut. Her ability to maintain literal balance and to transcend usual human limits of physical vulnerability confirm her support by spirit helpers.(9)

The attainment of sacred balance is a necessary and integral part of sacred healing, both with and without the use of sacred plant medicines. It is common to all sacred healers, in all countries and in all traditions. If the healer, in the presence of severe and frightening illness, cannot attain and hold balance, he cannot heal and he and the others present may be subject to infection by disease.

This skill of balance requires an exceptional focus of mind. The emotional impact of the spirit and power of disease, holding to the forefront of the mind the power of the plant medicines, the suffering of the sick person, the requirements of directing the healing ceremony to its successful conclusion, bringing in the power of the Sacred, all these take considerable strength and may have to be maintained over a considerable length of time in the process of healing. One cannot falter or lose balance and the toll it can take is considerable.

The following is an account of the strength of Owl Woman, a Papago medicine woman, and her display of sacred balance in the face of treating disease:

The phonographic recording of Owl Woman's songs occupied an entire day. She did not wish to sing into the phonograph and insisted that Garcia [her apprentice] record the songs. She sang each song softly in order to recall it to his mind, and toward the latter part of the day she sang with him, but not loud enough for her voice to be recorded. At the beginning of the day, when telling of her visits to the spirit world, she had the appearance of a sibyl, with a strange, far seeing look in her eyes. The day was chilly and in addition to the white head covering worn by the Papago women she wore her black shawl wrapped tightly around her, as shown in her portrait.

In the first two hours Garcia's interest did not falter and he sang one song after another at her dictation. But there came a time when he left out two or three words. There was much talking in Papago. The old woman was suddenly full of animation and fire. The interpreter said, "She is telling him that he must not be discouraged because he forgot those few words. She says he must go on as if nothing had happened." Garcia rallied to his task and the work continued, but the old woman gave closer attention to her singer. Even to one who did not understand the language it was evident that she was encouraging him and holding his interest. She was bright, active, and with an occasional witticism at which they laughed heartily. At the close of the afternoon Garcia was singing steadily with little sign of weariness but her face was drawn and tired, as of one who had been under a long strain. How many nights had she held her singers at their task by the force of her personality, while she watched the flickering life of a sick man!(10)

The Territory of Illness
Of necessity, the muscles, powers, and capacities to hold such a personal focus of intention take many years to develop. They are an essential and integral part of holding the force of power needed to heal. In the process, one enters the territory of illness and learns to recognize its land-marks. In the beginning one is often afraid of what is encountered. Illness has a terrifying aspect: death. An important meditation is internally exploring the personal and emotional responses to disease and death that are felt during confrontations with illness. Over time, as one becomes used to it, fear dissipates, the territory becomes more familiar and one comes to walk there with confidence.

For each person this territory appears differently. Its visual and sensory aspects are shaped by cultural and individual idiosyncracies. Each healer interprets that territory as unique sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. Because all healers are different, each description of the territory of disease tends to vary from healer to healer. But one thing remains certain - they know the territory intimately and without doubt.

This is how Sereptie, a Tavgi Samoyed healer of Siberia, describes his travels in the spirit world:

When I am looking for a sick man, the road is narrow, like a thread. I do not know who is leading me, in front I see the sun and moon. On (the lower) part of the narrow road there are conical ramshackle tents; on this (road) you go for the breath of the man. The other part of the road (leading upwards) is quite entangled - I do not understand why. The man who is going to recover has a breath like a white thread, while he who dies has one like a black thread. Going along the road, you look sideways and you proceed. Then you find the man's nil'ti and take it. (The nil'ti is one of the life substances of a human being. It must be brought back by the shaman from the realm of illness.)(11)

For the Huichol it is somewhat different. If a person loses the kupuri (the life essence, spirit or soul) then the healer, the mara'akame, must go looking for it.(12)

A part of the person, a part of the soul or spirit, often becomes lost and wanders far, trying to find its way back. The causes of this separation are many but without the restoration of the soul, illness continues and gets progressively worse. In many instances the healer must journey to the land of the dead to recover the soul and bring it back.(13) The journey to the land of the dead involves travel to a territory that is described in similar ways in many countries and traditions.(14) There is a low wall or demarcation that is present in the land of illness. Should the soul cross it the person usually dies, for few healers can go beyond this barrier and live. Some of the great shamans of many countries were said to be able to cross this line and return. For others, if the soul resides on this side of the wall, the shaman or healer can retrieve it and bring it back to the person's body. Here is an account of a shaman who crossed the point of demarcation to retrieve a lost soul:

Accompanied by his helping spirits, he had followed the road that leads to the Kingdom of Shadows. He came to a little house and found a dog that began to bark. An old woman, who guarded the road, came out of the house and asked him if he had come forever or for a short time. The shaman did not answer her; instead, he addressed his spirits: "Do not listen to the old woman's words, walk on without stopping." Soon they came to a stream. There was a boat, and on the other bank the shaman saw tents and men. Still accompanied by his spirits, he entered the boat and crossed the stream. He met the souls of the patient's dead relatives, and entering their tent, found the patient's soul there too. As the relatives refused to give it to him, he had to take it by force. To carry it safely back to earth, he inhaled the patient's soul and stuffed his ears to prevent it from escaping.(15)

All diseases have their particular territory. To heal, the healer must be able to enter that territory, recognize its landmarks without fear, and be able to lead the spirit of the sick person out of that place.

The Role of the Plants
Within the world of sacred plant medicines, the healer acts as an intermediary between the particular sacred power of a plant and the person who is ill. Through ceremony and the capacity of the healer to understand and focus the dynamics of the process, the power of original sacred time is brought into contemporary secular space and time. The spirit of the sick person is taken into sacred space to a time when disease did not exist. Sacred allies are often used in this process to assist the healing. Some of these are plants. The medicines of the plant bodies help the body of the sick person become strengthened and more powerful so that the disease cannot easily remain there. The power of the ceremonies and the plant medicines bring a reformulation to the spirit of the person so that the underlying cause of the disease can no longer exist in that person.

I remember the first day I introduced a person with borderline personality disorder to plants. The client, a woman, perhaps 28 years old, was extremely fragile and unsettled. She was in the midst of a very painful divorce and was experiencing strong rage. During the many times we met and talked, she expressed her feeling that she was empty inside, hollow. She could describe the hollowness, where it was located in her body, how it felt. In this process I had a strong and visceral response about one particular plant that might be of help. So one day we went for a walk and I took her along a stream, deep in the shadows and intermittent sunlight of old forest. Soon we came upon the children of that angelica plant I had met so long ago. I was watching her carefully and saw the impact that plant made on her. She stopped and drew in a deep breath, her body steadied, the constant trembling ceased. The skin across her forehead softened and relaxed and the tension, so long a part of her physiology, departed. Her eyes lost the somewhat rigid fixed staring that had characterized them and became moist and she turned and looked at me and remarked, a small smile playing on her lips, "It's wonderful!"

As we sat, I spoke with angelica in the ways I had learned, introducing her to this woman I had brought to meet her. I shared with my client what I knew about angelica. The woman's hands were in constant motion, fluttering about the plant, touching its leaves as if it were a lover. I asked her to relax and close her eyes and begin speaking to the plant in her mind. The connection for her, as she afterward reported, was very strong. The plant seemed to her a tall, strong, mature woman. I asked her then, when she had talked with the plant awhile, to ask it to come in to that hollow place within her. At the moment that she did that, her body straightened, the lines of her face filled out, the little girl look vanishing. When she opened her eyes she said, "For the first time I don't feel hollow and alone inside."

In the days that followed I had her practice that exercise many times. She practiced walking and talking and doing her daily work with angelica inside her. I gave her a root to keep with her and some of the tincture of the root to take internally. It helped a great deal. It was not a panacea, many other things were needed, but it did fill this one need. I have used angelica many times with women, often successfully. Many women, I have found, have within themselves a hollow place, like angelica's stem. I give angelica to women who suffer from this or who have an imbalance in their womb (as in reproductive cycles) or in their emotions or in their spirit.

For the healer who works with sacred plant medicine, it is important to be able to recognize the distinct spiritual identities of each plant that is used. This understanding is then matched with the spiritual crisis faced by the person who is ill. The herb, or herbs, are brought into the healing process and their spirit evoked and introduced to the ill person. If done properly the herbs will act as allies for the ill person during the healing crisis. The plants are the friends of human beings and they enjoy helping them.

For the Creek Indians of North America, diseases came into being because humans failed to honor the animals when hunting. The animals, in self defense, created the diseases that now afflict humans. The plants, feeling sorry for the people who were suffering so badly, volunteered the remedies that were to counteract the diseases.(16) For the Cherokee, also, it was similar.

Each tree, shrub, and herb, down even to the grasses and mosses, agreed to furnish a remedy for some one of the diseases named and each said: "I shall appear to help man when he calls upon me in his need."(17)

Within each human being there is the capacity to communicate with all life, to understand the archetype that lives within. The plants will share many of their healing properties, physical and spiritual, to one who listens. First one learns about the plants and their sacred territory, how to relate to them and be honorable. Then one learns how to prepare medicines from them, then how to understand disease and healing. If there is doubt about what course to take or what plant to use, you can pray and ask the plants for guidance.

When the doctor is in doubt what treatment to apply for the relief of a patient, the spirit of the plant suggests to him the proper remedy.(18)

Out of necessity, when one learns to heal, one has to face death and no longer fear it. All human beings die. If one lives beyond one's time, if even an aspect of personality lives beyond its time, one becomes a caricature. Because death is so intimately a part of the human journey one must include it in the process of healing. The healer must have unwavering respect for and belief in sick persons' ability to find resolution to the crises confronting them, even if successful resolution means dying. The territory of illness also includes the territory of death. And death has its own sacred dimensions that must be found and mastered. The healer must have a deep knowledge of the sacred and the plant relations, ceremony, the territory of illness, and the proper relationship of death, and be able to evoke each of these things in their proper time. At the same time, one must know one's place and grow beyond hubris.

There is a power greater than the human that makes all this possible. How many years are necessary for this teaching! It is an ancient archetype of the human expression. Like many things now it has been secularized, split into pieces. But, like the territory of sacred plant medicine, it can be learned. Our ancestors have gone this way before.

(1) Densmore, Frances. Teton Sioux Music. p. 245
(2) Sturgeon, Theodore. "Scars," in E Pluribus Unicorn. New York: Pocket Books, 1977.
(3) Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 229, 1972.
(4) Densmore, Frances. Chippewa Music I. Smithsonian Institution: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 45, p. 119, 1910.
(5) Swanton, John R. Beliefs and Usages of the Chickasaw. Smithsonian Institution: Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report 44, p. 268, 1928.
(6) Dudley, Guilford. Religion on Trial. p. 77.
(7) Meyerhoff, Barbara. "Shamanic Equilibrium: Balance and Meditation in Known and Unknown Worlds," in American Folk Medicine, Wayland Hand, editor. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 103, 1976.
(8) Ibid., p. 101.
(9) Canda, Edward. Personal communication, 1993. See also Edward Canda. "Gripped by the Drum: The Korean Tradition of Nongak," in Shaman's Drum 33, Fall/Winter 1993.
(10) Densmore, Frances. Papago Music. p. 116.
(11) Popov, Andrei. "How Sereptie Djarroskin of the Nganasans (Tavgi Samoyeds) Became a Shaman," in Popular Beliefs and Folklore Traditions in Siberia, Vilmos Dioszegi, editor. Translated by Stephen Dunn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 137-146, 1968.
(12) Furst, Peter. "Huichol Conception of the Soul," in Folklore Americas. vol. 27, No. 2, p. 52-56, June 1967.
(13) Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
(14) Grof, Stanislav, and Joan Halifax. The Human Encounter with Death. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978.
(15) Eliade, Mircea. Shaminism. p. 248.
(16) Swanton, John R. Creek Religion and Medicine. p. 638. See also Joseph Bruchac. The Native American Sweatlodge. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1993.
(17) Mooney, James. Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee. Smithsonian Instutution: Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report 7, p. 322, 1891.
(18) Ibid.

Sacred Plant Medicine: The Wisdom in Native American Herbalism by Stephen Harrod Buhner, Bear & Co, an imprint of Inner Traditions, Bear & Co., Rochester, VT 05767 Copyright © 1996, 2001, 2006 by Stephen Harrod Buhner www.InnerTraditions.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Harrod Buhner is an Earth Poet and senior researcher for the Foundation for Gaian Studies. He lectures throughout the United States on herbal medicine, the sacredness of plants, and the intelligence of nature. He is the author of nine works of nonfiction and one book of poetry, including The Secret Teachings of Plants and the award-winning The Lost Language of Plants. He lives in Braintree, Vermont.