[00:00:28] Speaker A: Welcome to the mushrooms, apprentice. I'm your host, Shona home, and I am so honored and excited because you get to listen to Sean Padre O'Donoghue again. And he's going to talk about his latest book, which is called the Silver Branch and the otherworld. And I'm just going to read you his bio and we will get right into it. Sean, Padre O'Donoghue is an herbalist teacher and earth poet living in western Maine. He is an initiated priest of the fairy and crossroads traditions. Prior to becoming an herbalist, Sean was a political organizer in movements for peace, human rights, and global economic justice, and a freelance journalist documenting the human and ecological impacts of us policies in Latin America. Sean grew up near Boston, a short distance from where his grandparents first landed when they arrived from Ireland. Since childhood, he has been an avid student of irish history and folklore. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 with a degree in english literature and creative writing. And so I have invited Sean to come back and talk about his latest book because I was saying, you know, with all the insanity going on in our world today, it's not just in the US, it's absolutely everywhere. I just think it's very interesting timing that Sean would bring this absolutely exquisite, beautiful, and, I think, highly relevant book forward. So first, welcome, Sean.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Thank you. I'm so, so grateful to be here. And just a small correction so that I'm not claiming a closer connection than I actually have. It was my great grandparents came from Ireland.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Oh, my apologies.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Oh, quite all right. No, you're fine. I just. I just didn't want. I didn't want myself to be claiming closer descent than I actually have.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Okay. Devil's in the details. Well, okay. I want to have you first talk to our listeners about what this book, what, first of all, what was your impetus in writing this book? And what is, what is the treasure contained in this book? There's quite a treasure in here.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Ooh. There's so many answers to the impetus, but at the deepest level, it really is about the way in which the other than human world, both the living world and the other world, are in constant relation, in constant conversation with us. And we, as this culture, have forgotten that.
Stephen Jenkinson, wonderful canadian death worker, speaks about the fact that ideally we should be resting on a three legged stool of the community of the living, the community of the dead, and the community of the other than human.
And here we are in this culture. We're not really resting on even two legs of that stool most of the time. We're hopping around on a pogo stick and wondering why everything's bouncing up and down and wondering why we feel so unsteady.
And so for me, the human community aspect leg of that stool has always been the hardest for me to lean into. And so having trusted those other two legs of the stool so deeply for such a long time, in many ways this is my leaning forward into that human leg, letting myself rest on all three legs of the stool and hoping that in doing that, I can be a bit of a bridge between these communities, between these worlds. That's so essential because, yeah, whatever your political analysis may be, I don't know anybody who thinks that things right now are working very well. I think back to a song that Billy Bragg put out during the previous economic crisis in 2008 or so when he said, let's stop pretending we can manage our way out of here.
Let's stop accepting the unacceptable. And I think that's the point that we're at, that everything that we have thought is the realistic and practical is actually showing itself to be unrealistic and impractical. And all these things that we dismissed as either imaginary or unimportant are actually where so much of the healing, so much of the support, so much of the possibility of transformation lies.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Now, you explore in this book mythology, plant allies and tree allies and fungal allies, and you go into the three cauldrons, which I just remember because, of course, I was so honored you sent me your book to read before it went to print. And I just couldn't believe. I was like, wait a minute, I just wrote about the three calls, and you go into such great detail.
And so how is all of that? It's so interesting, Sean, because, of course, you kind of look at what's going on in the world right now and you think, what place does this book have in the mess that we're in? And of course, you and I both know it has a very important place. And so could you talk about the relevance of the contents of this book at this. At this point in time for people?
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think one of the places to begin is probably with our misconceptions about what the mythic means.
So in our rationalist culture, we tend to think that myths are made up stories that people who didn't have our ability to understand the world used to try to explain things when in reality, our ancestors were every bit as intelligent and sophisticated as we are and simply tuned in to different levels and layers of understanding than we are. We wouldn't say that physics is more correct than biology, or biology is more correct than physics.
And those are two different frameworks for looking at the world within our rationalist paradigm.
And the mythic way of relating to the world also is just another one of those disciplines of understanding and engagement. I say it's just that, but it's also something else, because it is a layer of reality. And the analogy that I make is we walk on the surface of the earth, and we assume that the world that we're inhabiting on a daily basis is the primary world.
Above us, there are all the layers of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, where the dancing particles of the aurora are dancing is not any less real than the ground level that we walk on.
Nor are the bedrock and the deep waters and the mantle and the magma and the core of the earth any less real than the reality we walk through. There are simply different layers that we don't normally have access to.
But we have people who have been trained to go to the depths of the sea, to go deep into caves, to go high up into the atmosphere and even into outer space.
And we rely on them to come back to us with information about what exists on those other levels of reality. And that informs choices we make at this level of reality.
The same is true of the technologies of understanding that ancient people had of the mythic realm of the dream realm of these places, of the other world that our culture very often calls the spirit realm. That there was the understanding, and I share that understanding, that these are places that are equally real. And what's happening there has influenced on us here. What's happening here has influence on us there. And so that level of understanding is really, really important.
And then when we get to the realm of the plants and the fungi and also the animals, although I don't speak of them as much, and the waters and the stones and the clouds and the stars, but with the plants and the animals and the fungi, these are all beings whose biology is actually remarkably similar to ours.
They live in the same world that we live in at the same moment.
So they understand what it is to be embodied in this world.
But their understandings of embodiment are entirely outside our cultural conditioning, with the exception of the domesticated animals. And maybe some of our garden plants might be more like domesticated animals in terms of their understanding as well. But nonetheless, it's still different than our understanding. And when we think about the dead, they are people who know what it is to be human.
They know it in a different time and in a different context.
And so these are all valuable sources of information for us. And when nothing in our world is making sense, it makes sense to me to turn to these other intelligences that will have really different perspectives, because, yeah, nothing we've tried in recent history seems to be working terribly well.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: No, for sure.
How would you suggest we approach these other intelligences, shall we say, for their help?
[00:11:54] Speaker B: In the same way we would approach a person.
It's about making those. It's about making relationships. And so curiosity and respect are at the core of that, and trying to understand as much as we can of who they are, but also to understand that there are things we don't understand about who they are, and that some of the things we might be told about who they are might not be the same as their own understanding of themselves. And so entering into that, with that curiosity and being in direct relationship and, you know, except with the dead and with some of the beings of the other world, language as we know it isn't necessarily the most relevant way of connecting. It's not entirely irrelevant. Um, we have learned more and more about animal and plant and fungal communication, and that actually their methods of communication do have deeply embedded structure that's similar to the structure of our language. And we know that the sounds that we make echo through the air, and so it are felt by these other beings, and so those matter.
And the way that we speak also changes the way that we are showing up in the particular moment. And so that matters. But for the most part, we engage by dropping below language, going into the realm of engaging directly with our senses.
And we aren't very used to that. In this culture. We have a little bit of training in physically seeing. In this culture, the visual sense is definitely privileged over most, and still it's very conditioned by what we expect to see.
So to the auditory sense of scent and taste and touch are a little bit less culturally conditioned. But we also tend to dissociate from them more than we do from sight and sound. So it takes them more practice to develop them.
And then the deepest sense that in some ways, they are most profound, and in many ways we are most alienated from, is the role of the heart as a sensory organ, as an organ of perception, which my late friend Stephen Buhner delved deeply and beautifully into in his book secret teachings of plants. And he and his beloved Julie McIntyre taught me a really simple and profound method for working with this perception. And essentially what this perception is, is the feeling sense.
When you walk into a room and you can tell the emotional tenor of what's happening there.
If you were taken with your eyes closed into a forest, you would be able to feel the difference between old growth forest and a clear cut forest without the visual cues.
These are examples of how we just innately have this sense, which at a physiological level comes because our heart has a very large and very sensitive electromagnetic field.
All electromagnetic fields pull on all other fields, and having that larger surface area, that field is more sensitive.
And we send information from our hearts into our amygdalas and then up into our brains via the ventral branch of the vagus nerve, about the quality of the electromagnetic environment that we're in in that moment, this, this moment. And those are the signals we translate as the aesthetic and emotional sense of the world around us and of what's happening with other beings.
And the method that Stephen and Julie taught me, that's so simple that so many people learned it from them, and then just thought, oh, this is really cool, and might not necessarily have ever done it again. But when you make it a daily practice, which I need to remember to start going back to, like, it was a daily practice for me for years, and then I was like, oh, okay, I got that.
But I need to remember to go back into that daily practice now, because, no, I don't have it. I certainly don't have it. To the degree that, uh, twelve year old in Neolithic Ireland, or even in an indigenous community in North America 100 years ago would have had it, is to simply bring your attention to the feeling of your heart beating.
Not to the thought of a heartbeat, but to the feeling of your heart beating. And as you feel your heart beating, remembering that your heart beats for you always and plays out the rhythms of your life, and then letting yourself bring gratitude to your heart and staying centered with that heartbeat. And when you've learned to stay centered with that heartbeat for a while, then you can begin to go into the place where I from that center in the heartbeat, you can reach your attention out elsewhere and begin to perceive and engage with what's around you. And this is the way that the world directly speaks to us. And if you ask people in traditional cultures around the world, how did you learn these things from about the plants, as Stephen would often point out, they would say, they will say, the planets told us, how did the plants tell you?
They told us through, by speaking to our hearts. And that's simple and honest and direct.
And nevertheless, we go to all these great lengths to try to explain it away. And like, I always get a little bit annoyed by those memes that show up periodically on Facebook. But here's the ancient people, tasted all the mushrooms and found out which ones are poison.
No, that's not what happened.
Here's the ancient people who tried out all the plants to find out which ones were medicine. No, that's not what happened. Do you really think somebody had just been attacked by a saber toothed tiger and was bleeding out somewhere and tried the plantain, and tried the dandelion and tried to 17 other different plants, and then just while they had enough blood in their body left, reached for the arrow and happened to survive to tell the tale? No, they were listening. And the Yaharo said, reach for me. I can help you now.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So we would call that, I think, in modern times, animisthenne, in that they understood everything had a spirit. It was absolutely everywhere. Everything had a spirit, intelligence, and it was a given that you could communicate with it.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
And we're in an interesting cultural moment, because what I would call philosophical animism is having a moment in the sun right now, which I'm really grateful for, because I think any introduction to this way of perceiving the world is a really good one and talking with friends about it.
So very much of the philosophical animism that's being brought forward is divorced from direct experience and divorced from direct relationship. It's like, okay, yes, good job. I really like where you've gone intellectually.
And let's go further. Let's make those actual relationships, because this is a metaphor, and I say that not dismissively. I'm somebody who believed in animist philosophy for a long, long time before I let myself really feel the reality of it. Again. I say again, because every young child feels and knows it.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: Yes, well, I would like you to get into the three cauldrons.
It's interesting because when I sort of poke around a bit on social media, I'm starting to see other people speak about this, which I find fascinating because I think this knowledge is coming back into the people's awareness. And the three cauldrons in particular. Well, have you speak about. I mean, that is a system within the body, and it's a really helpful, important, and profound system to understand. And what I love about your book so much, Sean, is how you go into explaining what each cauldron is, what its function is, and how to support it with herbs and other practices. So if you could talk about what are the three cauldrons to those who've never even heard of such a thing.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. So this understanding comes to us from one of the oldest written poems we have in old Irish.
And, of course, it's funny to speak of this as old, because, like, the oldest written things we have in old Irish are pretty new as far as irish language and irish culture goes, because it was an oral culture until the coming of european Christianity.
I say european Christianity because there was probably some egyptian Christianity that came to Ireland ahead of the european Christianity that was of a very, very different worldview than the european worldview.
But so everything we have that we think of as really old in Ireland, as far as language goes, except parts of the oral tradition that we can't really prove the age of. But everything we can prove the age of comes from the early medieval period on.
And one of those really early texts was attributed to the poet Amrgan, who was the. So the original amorgan was the poet of the malaysian people, the people from Galatia and Spain, who came up and became the ancestors of the modern irish people.
And, you know, the person who wrote this poem was probably not the same amorgan as that person.
However, there is this interesting, like, when we break out of our modern worldview and we look at the repetition of names in ancient irish tradition, there's a way in which a name was a mantle of taking on certain aspects and possibly a direct transmission of certain ways of being and certain ways of knowing. And in some ways, we can even hear this in the modern irish dialect in Connemara, where instead of saying, shahna sanam dum Shan is my name, I might say Shaun ata. Shaun is upon me. And so we can say that Amarigan was upon the man who wrote these words down.
And it was a treatise called the cauldron of poetry, about the nature of poetry and wisdom. But it spoke also about the nature of the structure of a human being. And as my teacher's teacher, Victor Anderson, pointed out, we can look cross culturally and see over and over again there are all these concepts of threefold structures of the self.
So within this structure, there's the understanding that all of us are born with three cauldrons within us.
And the first of those cauldrons, which is upright within everyone, is the cauldron of incubation.
And most modern readers interpret this as residing in the gut or the solar plexus, which is possible to me, I actually think more likely it resides in the pelvic bowl, which is a lot more like a cauldron, but which people in official christian circles would have been a bit squeamish about referring to as such. So easier to speak about something being in the belly. Than to speak about something being in the pelvis. So, to me, it feels like the pelvic bowl.
And it's not just because of that bowl shape of the pelvis. It's also because the cauldron of incubation.
Is where the gods reach into the ocean of infinity.
And take some of the essence of life.
And pour it into you.
And that, to me, sounds very much like it's speaking about our sexual centers. And certainly, if we go to analogous ideas in chinese medicine. We would go to that same idea of going down to that root area. Although they would speak of the kidneys as well in that regard.
And so this is sort of where our original spark of life is contained.
And the upright cauldron means all of us were able to receive the spark of life. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here and be alive.
Then our next cauldron is the cauldron of motion.
Which I associate with the heart. It, again, often gets associated with the belly. But to me, it feels very much associated with the heart. And then again, I feel like we have more of this cauldron structure in our chest. Than we do in our abdomen.
And the cauldron of motion in all of us is born sideways.
And this is interesting because this means that we'll get to the cauldron that's above.
This means that whatever is pouring down.
Most of it's going to spill out. If the cauldron stays on its side or if it tips further over.
But the way that we proceed in this world. Determines what way the cauldron tips.
And so if the cauldron begins to tip upright. The more upright it becomes, the more it can receive what's pouring down.
And so what turns the cauldron of motion.
Is the joys and the sorrows of life.
It is not so much the events themselves.
As the way we approach and engage those events. I mean, the text simply lays out what those joys and sorrows are.
But my deep sense from engaging with it. Is that it's how we engage those joys and sorrows. And it's even how we engage things. That determines whether their joys or sorrows are simply chaos.
But if we engage those joys and sorrows fully.
And then that cauldron of motion begins to be turned upright.
And when the cauldron of motion is turned upright.
Then what comes to us from the third cauldron comes into play.
So the cauldron of wisdom. Or the cauldron of poetry that resides in the head.
Is pouring down.
Wisdom is pouring down. The raw stuff of vision that comes into our cauldron of motion.
And the text speaks of how that rises like fire and pours out from the mouth is poetry.
And there are two things that are essential in being able to engage that poetry.
One is, having turned your cauldron upwards, you can receive what's pouring down.
But the second is the ability to let it simmer properly.
So that you're not just breathing fire out at everybody who comes to you. You instead are able to shape the stream by which that flows forth with the precision that will allow it to be received.
And we also have to move beyond our modern conception of poetry when we're speaking of this.
Because by poetry, we don't just mean pretty speech.
Poetry and prophecy are synonymous in the old irish understanding. And even still, there are echoes of that in modern irish idiom.
When you say something is fated, you say ta non. It is in a poem.
Because the role of the poet was to go out and engage with all these other intelligences, engage with the other world, engage with the dead, engage with the living spirits of the land through visionary practices, and then come back and tell the people what needed, the truth that needed to be spoken.
Truth that was so powerful that it could.
That would mean the rise and fall of kings.
Truth that would reshape everything about their reality. At the highest forms of mastery, you could actually change fate by making subtle changes to the poem.
But there's a beautiful paradox in that, that in order to do so, you would have had to have listened so deeply to the song that everything was singing, that you would be so deeply influenced by the way the world was seeing itself into existence, that you would not be inclined to make such changes lightly or selfishly or capriciously.
There would be the precise change where, just like placing a rock in the exact right part of a stream to deter. To change how the currents are going to flow, you would shift a syllable here in order to change what was going to flow downstream. And so that was a really, really precise and profound art. And that is, I won't say it's an art that's lost in this world.
Certainly I've encountered people who have that capacity.
And I think there are many lineages that hold that capacity. I think about the unofficial lineage that includes people like my late friend Stephen Buhner, and my living friend Caroline Casey, who both knew Robert Bly. And Robert Bly spent time learned from William Stafford. And William Stafford was carrying forward the traditions laid out by William Blake and by many in between.
And within that comes a transmission of a particular way of speaking that can shift things profoundly, which is so essential to our times.
[00:35:29] Speaker A: Indeed, your book goes into great detail, but could you talk a little bit about just an overview of how best to support each cauldron, to cultivate some modicum of this for the average person who is genuinely interested in this?
[00:35:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, it begins with a cauldron of incubation, which requires our deep nourishment.
And so water is essential in all of its forms. And coming to understand that more and more, including moistening herbs that can help to bring some nourishment, and herbs that have a sweet taste and a moist quality, tend to be very nourishing in building.
Bone broth is one of the oldest forms of nourishment that humans work with. We can go all the way back to the paleolithic and see those cracked open deer bones that were boiled up in a cauldron, and that was a way that people received deep, deep nourishment.
Nettles and those, and oats, traw, and those other really mineral returns can be really, really building of that deepest rooted nourishment.
And I happen to think that most of us are in need of a lot more protein than we tend to consume in this culture as well, in terms of the cauldron of motion.
Part of it has to do with how we engage the world. So the ways we move our bodies, and not just the outward motion of them, but the connection we make of conscious movement.
I was so surprised late in life to become somebody who fell in love with weightlifting. And one of the reasons why is because as somebody who spent a lot of my life really, really disembodied, I found that the precise focus of understanding, okay, I need to set the intention of engaging this muscle in this way and then releasing it in this way, at this rate, was a really, really profound, moving meditation. But I feel like yoga, qigong, all of the martial arts, really dance, are all other wonderful ways of engaging this. Moving through water or over water, whether swimming or kayaking or canoeing, can be really, really wonderful ways of getting that kind of fluid responsiveness as well.
Definitely meditative practices of many kinds.
And I will say in this, most people think that needs to be a sitting meditation of counting breaths or repeating a mantra. Those are great for some people. Those can actually make things a lot worse for other people. And so understand what it is that helps you to find that ground and center, and don't hold on to somebody else's idea of what it should be. Find what actually works for you in that regard. So this becomes really important.
Ways we engage language and sound are really important. Music is tremendously important.
Singing is so profound for people. And even if you think you can't sing, you know, okay, so wait until nobody else is around if you're too self conscious about it, but let yourself sing. Also, let yourself read poetry out loud.
Stop with pauses for the punctuation and pauses for the line breaks in order to understand the way that it's shaped. And I recently learned from the wonderful podcaster blind boy, that spaces between words were actually an irish invention during the time of monks transcribing things in Ireland. Because Irish is a language where rhythm and cadence are so important, and they couldn't abide not having a way to mark that.
And then in terms of herbs, we learning how to feel into the flow of circulation in your body.
And when things are flowing too hot and too fast, going towards cooling things like the herbs of the rose family, and herbs, the mint family, when things are moving, are too stagnant, going towards warming aromatic things like ginger and cinnamon, and actually, pretty much all of our kitchen herbs, basil and thyme and oregano, are warming our ometic herbs. And so these can be really, really profound.
Rosemary is really profound in this way, especially when you're in a really foggy place. Actually, Basil is too.
And there are infinite other possibilities, but these are things that most people will have some familiarity with already.
And in terms of engaging the cauldron of poetry, the cauldron of wisdom, I would say there are a little bit, there are a few too many people talking too much about that right now.
It's absolutely essential for us to do it, but it's really essential that you have your cauldron of motion turned upward, and you understand how to let things simmer in your cauldron of motion before you begin to actually think a lot more about that engagement with the cauldron of wisdom. And so, yeah, it's like, when I was out on the west coast, I was working with people who were going to ayahuasca ceremonies every week. It's like, how do you possibly have time to metabolize what's coming through? How do you possibly have time to engage it? And I'm sure there are people in the world who could drink ayahuasca every week and engage it, metabolize it, but that would be all they would be doing with their lives.
And so there is a big rush to get quickly to the big vision. And there are times for jumping or being pushed into the deep end in order to get. In order to get that transformational vision, because everything just needs to be remade. I'm not against that. I'm actually a strong advocate for that. But I think in terms of practices with the three cauldrons working most of the time, we're working with those first two cauldrons.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Do you think working with an ally like psilocybin would assist with that cauldron of wisdom?
[00:43:27] Speaker B: If you allow it to?
And so there are two aspects of allowing it to.
The first is the degree of surrender, the degree of openness.
You know, it's interesting. We can look at the scientific literature coming out right now. One of the things that really cracks me up about it is like, in the psychedelic world that I came up in, people talked about ego death, which sounds like really badass and scary, which it can be.
But I actually love that the scientists are speaking more poetically about it. They are calling it oceanic boundlessness. And they find that the greatest predictor of lasting healing benefit from an experience with psilocybin or with any of those other deeply transformational serotonergic medicines is the degree of openness to oceanic boundlessness.
And I would also say within this, that experiences that seem negative in the moment can be just as healing, if not more so than the experiences that seem positive in the moment.
Some of the most important things I learned, I learned from what would conventionally be called bad trips. But with that degree of openness to, okay, here I am. Here's where the current's going.
I can maneuver somewhat, but here we go.
So that openness to that, which also includes that openness, letting go of all of your stories of who you think you are and what you think is true provisionally for a certain period of time, which then tends to result in them being permanently rewritten.
And then here's the other place where I start saying things that make people angry, because, like, we have a whole lot of conversation right now about creating the proper context, the proper guidance for psychedelic experiences, and absolutely the SAT and the setting, as doctor Leary spoke of them, these core intention and mindset and the surroundings, both the physical surroundings and who and what is around you, are tremendously important in trying to talk about how to best engage those.
We are culturally leaning really heavily in this direction of control right now of saying, well, we're going to have these licensed centers and licensed professionals who are in charge of this.
And I'm more than skeptical about this. I actually feel like this is potentially very, very dangerous.
And I talk about this in the book that doctor theory, whose work and contributions are hugely misunderstood and underappreciated, um, looked at, when you're in this state of being blown wide open, in many ways you are like a newborn. And so you are imprinting onto something in your outside world in the same way that a newborn imprints on who's my mother.
And it happens at these exponential levels. And so, like, okay, at some point, you're imprinting on who's my mother. It can go to this forest as my mother, or it can go to this person holding the ceremony as my mother, or it can go to this culture as my mother.
And even with the best of intentions, when that is too controlled by humans, that can really go awry.
Now, Doctor Leary talked about what happens when it's definitely not with the best intentions, because he was initially super optimistic about, oh, everybody who engages these medicine is going to have these grand openings.
And then he saw what happened with the medicine family, where there was somebody who very precisely controlled set and setting re infanted people and changed their entire realities.
Now, I don't think that the doctors who want to open clinics, or the people who want to hold themselves out as guides, or even the new churches that are arising to hold these medicines as their sacraments have the kind of malicious intent that Charles Manson had.
However, these are all humans working within human institutions who have been shaped by this culture. And if we want to get out of the framework of this culture, we need to look outside the framework of this culture. And we also, it's like all, there's all this talk about how to make things safe. And it's like, yes, to a certain extent, absolutely.
Probably we want a person to have some degree of stability in their life before they're engaging in these medicines and some degree of support.
I'll also say there are points in my life when I didn't have a lot of stability or a lot of support, and I found support and stability through these medicines. But, yeah, yes, absolutely. It's probably, that's, I was lucky. That's not always going to be the outcome.
And yes, absolutely, we want to make sure people are in a physically safe environment.
However, the inherent nature of these medicines is transformation.
Transformation is not safe. And one of the things that Steven said to me in, when he, in an email he sent during the last year of his life was, there are a whole lot of people who are going to be really disappointed when they find out that Gaia makes no guarantee of safety.
And in fact, our attempts at creating what we think is safety actually make things a little bit less authentically safe, I think.
And so I'm not saying there's no role for human guidance in working with these medicines. I think it is good to have a trusted, experienced person nearby. But I think the lightest human touch is the very best human touch. And when I talk with people who I know who done really deep work with these medicines in other places, like in Peru and Ecuador, they talk about, yeah, like, you can go to these retreat centers that are geared towards westerners and they'll be told you're having an authentic ceremony, and there'll be all the whistles and bells and all the preparation and all the integration and all the follow up. When you go to the really traditional people, they're not asking, they're not having a long conversation with you about what you're doing before or after. They're creating the space for you and the medicine to work together.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: I will say when I have worked with people in that capacity as holding that space, I always say I'm just holding the space. I'm not going to be asking you all kinds of questions and constantly checking in which I think it's really important to be as unobtrusive as possible. Because ultimately, I think every time you take the mushroom or one of nature's psychedelic offerings, you're initiating yourself. It's an initiation. You have no idea what's going to happen, and no one can go in there with you. I just see this as incredibly initiatory. And that mushroom, I often wonder, I mean, you just open yourself up in such a way to that master intelligence, and it floods you and it just seems to know exactly what you need, even if it's the last thing that you would want.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:04] Speaker A: Do you advocate doing ritual before? How would you suggest? There are many approaches, of course, but entering that experience.
[00:53:17] Speaker B: I would say the first thing is enter with questions that can't be answered in any other way.
Like exhaust your ordinary means of exploring the questions before you go to that threshold.
And then if the question around a bit.
So there's no longer about what you personally want for yourself, but about what you want to be able to give and also about being.
About honoring that being.
It's like that being doesn't exist for you, that being exists for itself and for the world. You're approaching another being and asking that being to be in relation with you. And so having that respect is tremendously important.
And so another person who I really respect greatly, Robin, artisan sorcerer and spiritual ecologist, and writer on history and folklore and magic, speaks about the fact that in traditional cultures, people never went into these encounters for themselves. They went into them on behalf of their community to understand what they could bring back for the community.
And it also was an understanding there was something that was owed to the world and the community. You were engaging the community of those other beings, but through your having entered into that relationship. So getting out of that place of this is what I want in my own individual story, to have the individual life that I want to have, and into that deeper seeking of relation and spending some time approaching that in every way.
Spend some time learning about the organism you're going to be engaging.
Maybe sit if you can. Like you can go sit with some, some living, growing mushrooms. Go sit with some living, growing mushrooms before you take any at all into your body, of course, assuming you're in a jurisdiction where it's legal to be in the presence of living, growing mushrooms.
But the, as far as ritual goes, I'm of multiple minds about it.
Ritual is useful in shaping setting.
And just as we don't want another human to be too involved in shaping our setting, I think we have to be light with our own hands in doing that.
That said, we want to create a situation where there could be minimal outside interference, and that includes both being somewhere where other people aren't going to be interrupting us, but also unless we're choosing to be with other people on purpose for a community engagement, which, you know, I include the grateful, a grateful Dead show as a ritual that's entirely respectful, inappropriate in that regard.
So.
But it also means being really aware of what we're bringing into the space.
Take good care of your body, be well hydrated, well nourished, well rested, have had some good movement of your body in the days before, have had make sure you've had good sleep.
And then. But also what we're carrying in energetically. And yeah, someone very close to me has been reminding me more and more of the beauty and importance of burning aromatic plants in order to clear the air on a regular basis. And it's like I would definitely be burning my bioregionally available aromatic plants. This is some cedar.
While I was going into that engagement, while also making sure I was in a fire safe container I wasn't going to knock over later on.
But also, you know, I've begun and yep, I slipped into a few week or two of forgetting again, but I'm stepping back into it anytime I go in and go in or out of my home, every time I wake up every time I go to sleep, every time I get on or off a phone or a Zoom conversation, burn aromatic plants in order to clear that space. There are other things you can work with in that way as well. Seawater is a wonderful one, but having those kinds of practices, really, really good music can be wonderful.
But I feel like ultimately doing as much as you can to make sure that you don't have the unwanted influences on your situation and that you do have your focus directed in the place you want it directed.
And then letting go and allowing the experience to unfold is really important.
One thing I've been recommending to people more and more as a practice is what I recommend to everybody. Making an intimate relationship with a single tree in your world by visiting that tree daily, spending time in that heart centered space, bringing that tree offerings, being with that tree through the season.
One extension of that is that if you are working with these visionary medicines, that tree can be your primary anchor and primary companion. That tree can be your world tree when you're entering into these spaces, the being that you've built trust with.
So those are the places I, I tend to go. And, yeah, so often less is more. Anitra in the future.
Yeah.
[01:01:07] Speaker A: Beautiful. We're at the end of the first hour, Sean, but we're in early August, and I did see you post that you're going to be teaching a course on the three cauldrons. Is that still going to happen?
[01:01:21] Speaker B: It's actually going to be on the whole book. And it will be beginning in, I can't remember the date. It's beginning sometime in September. And we'll be going through each week the book, chapter by chapter, theme by theme.
[01:01:35] Speaker A: That's fantastic. And so your website is otherworldwell.com. okay. Otherworldwell.com. so they can go. Is it on the website now?
Oh, fantastic. Oh, great. All right, so, listeners, this man is an amazing teacher. I every week listen to something you are teaching on, and it's just so. You're such a wealth of knowledge, Sean. We're so lucky to have you. Yeah.
Well, all right. We will complete. I will invite listeners to join
[email protected]. subscribe and we're going to get into the second hour then. And there are so much more to talk about with this book. So come on over and we will take it from here.
