Stephen Harrod Buhner (1952–2022) was an American herbalist and writer who taught that plants, like all living things, are intelligent and communicative, and that people can perceive this directly, through the feeling sense and the heart, and not only through laboratory science. His many books include The Lost Language of Plants, The Secret Teachings of Plants and Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his view of plants as conscious beings with their own kind of intelligence, and meets them chiefly through shamanic journeys.
Who was Stephen Harrod Buhner? #
An American herbalist, teacher and author, born on 15 July 1952, who lived in his later years near Silver City in New Mexico, close to the Gila wilderness, and died on 8 December 2022. He wrote at least twenty-three books, from practical herbals such as Herbal Antibiotics (1999) and Herbal Antivirals (2013) to Sacred Plant Medicine (1996), One Spirit, Many Peoples (1997), The Lost Language of Plants (2002), The Secret Teachings of Plants (2004) and Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (2014). He was a longtime researcher with the Foundation for Gaian Studies and a Fellow of Schumacher College in England, and among herbalists he is especially known for his protocols for Lyme disease.1 He also wrote about the craft of writing in Ensouling Language (2010).
What did he teach about plant intelligence? #
That intelligence is not a human possession. In Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm he set out the view that every life form on Earth is highly intelligent and communicative, that all life has a sense of self and other and can even dream, and that the Earth itself, Gaia, is a complex, living, self-organising being. He held that the capacity for deep connection with the living world is innate in people, as natural as breathing, and that it can be woken through analogical thinking and what he called imaginal perception, sensing the meanings in living things and beginning to communicate with them.2
He also held that the great discoveries in science come from this kind of contact, as intuitive leaps, not from detached objectivity. The most original scientists, in his view, are those for whom what they study stays alive, whether a star, a molecule or an ecosystem, and he pointed to people such as Goethe, George Washington Carver, Barbara McClintock, James Lovelock and Masanobu Fukuoka as examples.1 See Is the living world intelligent? and What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
What did he mean by perceiving plants with the heart? #
That the heart is an organ of perception as well as a pump. In The Secret Teachings of Plants, subtitled The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature, he gathered scientific and less orthodox ideas about the heart’s own sensing, drawing on writers such as Goethe, Henry Corbin, James Hillman and Thoreau, and then turned to the direct experience of plants, people and places through this heart-centred way of perceiving. Of his chapters on the science of the heart he was frank: “Even though the foregoing five chapters are a good metaphor, they are only a metaphor.”3 Not every reviewer was persuaded. Publishers Weekly found the book’s heart-field theory “discordantly scientistic”, whilst granting that he “does produce some evocative passages about real plants”.4
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism meet his work? #
First, in a line of his own. Buhner, “the author and teacher of sacred plant medicine”, is quoted in Rewilding Yourself, in the teaching that grief and anger have to be felt before any real forgiveness can come. Continually looking on the bright side gets in the way of finding “the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness”, and continually striving towards the light means we “never grow downward into our own feet”.5 See What is the forgiveness trap?
Second, in seeing plants as conscious. In Therapeutic Shamanism plants are not less conscious than animals but conscious in a different way. Their consciousness is collective, each plant like a single cell in a far larger being, so that all the grass on the planet shares one consciousness. Plants move at a much slower pace than animals, and some of the scientists now studying plant intelligence make the point that we had missed how intelligent plants are because we had not slowed down enough. To really understand Plant, to grok it from the inside, a person has to slow right down and let go of the animal drive to keep doing.6
Third, in what plants teach. Every Plant has a healing gift and teaching that it gives freely when asked, without any agenda.6 And the great gift of Plant as a whole is to heal the deep wound of “up is good and down is bad”. A plant that put all its energy into growing upwards, with shallow roots, would die, so Plant teaches the balance between Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and Father Sky, and that descent is as valuable and as essential as ascent.7 Buhner’s image of growing downward into our own feet says the same thing from the plant’s side. See What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?
How does the Therapeutic Shamanism approach to plants differ? #
In where the meeting happens. Buhner’s way is mostly in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, with the living plant, through the senses, the feeling sense and the heart, often as part of the herbalist’s craft. Therapeutic Shamanism works chiefly through shamanic journeys, meeting a Plant as a whole species, its Oversoul, and taking care over who is actually being met. Many people talk to elemental beings living in and around plants in the middle-world, thinking they are talking to the plant itself, and such beings have agendas of their own, which no Plant has.6 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Is plant intelligence disputed? #
Yes, amongst scientists. In 2019 the plant biologist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues wrote that plants “neither possess nor require consciousness”.8 Others replied, amongst them the plant scientist Anthony Trewavas and the philosopher Paco Calvo, who defend the study of plant behaviour as a form of intelligence and cognition.8 Buhner himself started from the direct experience of plants, and said of his own chapters on the science of the heart that they were a metaphor.
