Plant Spirit Shamanism - The Medicinal Plants of the Amazon Rainforest
By: Howard Charing
Working with teacher plants is known as the ‘shaman’s diet’. The purpose of the diet is to prepare the body and nervous system for the powerful knowledge and expansion of consciousness given by teacher plants.
In everyday life, the mind creates the illusion that we are separate from reality, and thus protects us, like a veil, from experiencing the vastness of the universe. Access to the truth without preparation could be a radical shock to the system.
It offers a significant challenge for the rational Western mind to come to terms with the teacher plants, and a leap of imagination is required to incorporate the ‘other’ consciousness of the plant. The magical world to which we are transported by plants is not accessible through the verbal rational mind but through dream language or an expansion of the imagination. Thus dreams & our imaginative powers act like doorways during a plant diet and connect us with the plant spirit.
FACT #2: Nearly 1/2 the medicinal compounds we use on a daily basis come from plants endemic to the Rainforest.
FACT #3: Rainforests act as the world's thermostat by regulating temperatures and weather patterns.
FACT #4: More than 20% of the world's oxygen is provided by the Amazon Rainforest.
FACT #5: 1/5 of the world's fresh water is found in the Amazon Basin. Rainforests are critical in maintaining the Earth's limited supply of drinking and fresh water.
FACT #6: A typical 4 mile square mile patch of rainforest contains as many as 1,500 species of flowering plants, 750 species of trees, 125 mammal species, 400 species of birds, 100 species of reptiles, 60 species of amphibians, and 150 different species of butterflies.
FACT #7: Tropical deforestation results in the loss of 100 species per day.
FACT #8: At the current rate of tropical forest loss, 5-10% of tropical rainforest species will be lost per decade.
FACT #9: Nearly 90% of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide depend on forests for their livelihoods.
FACT #10: 57% of the world's forests, including most tropical forests, are located in developing countries.
FACT #11: Every second, a slice of rainforest the size of a football field is mowed down. That's 86,400 football fields of rainforest per day, or over 31 million football fields of rainforest each year.
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