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    Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer's Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally
    Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer's Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally
    Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer's Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally
    Ebook409 pages6 hours

    Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer's Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally

    By Stephen Gray and Julie Holland

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    About this ebook

    A guide to the benefits and challenges of the use of cannabis in spiritual practice

    • Includes chapters by 18 authoritative and influential voices of the modern cannabis movement, including Kathleen Harrison, Joan Bello, Hamilton Souther, Steven Hager, Chris Bennett, Dee Dussault, Jeremy Wolff, and Roger Christie

    • Explores the use of marijuana in a wide range of spiritual practices, including meditation, yoga, chanting, visualization, shamanism, group ceremonies, work with other entheogens, and as a creative aid

    Truly a medicine for body and soul, one of cannabis’s greatest gifts is its remarkable potential for spiritual healing and awakening. In this authoritative guide, editor Stephen Gray and 17 other influential voices of the modern cannabis movement explore the spiritual benefits of cannabis and offer guidance on how to interact with the intelligence of this plant ally, a companion and supporter of humanity for millennia. Exploring cannabis spirituality in practice, Gray’s chapters examine dosage, strains, and methods of intake; the use of cannabis to open the creative channels; how to conduct group ceremonies with cannabis; and cautions and counterindications for cannabis use. We hear from Chris Bennett on the religious and ritual use of cannabis from pre-biblical times to the present, Joan Bello on marijuana and the body-mind connection, Dee Dussault on ganja yoga, Kathleen Harrison on humanity’s co-evolution with cannabis, and cannabis shaman Hamilton Souther on working with the spirit of cannabis. The contributors explore the spiritual future of this plant ally as well as the ritual use of cannabis by the Rastafarians of Jamaica and the Sadhus of India. The chapters from Brazilian ayahuasca shaman Mariano da Silva and ayahuasca apprentice Francisco present wisdom on comingling the sacramental medicines of cannabis and ayahuasca.

    Revealing the potential of “the people’s plant” to enhance a wide range of spiritual practices, such as meditation, yoga, chanting, visualization, shamanism, spirit work, and explorations with other entheogens, this guide shows how cannabis is an effective ally on the awakening journey, unlocking the receptive energy in us all and helping us to feel connected to nature, to each other, and to ourselves.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInner Traditions/Bear & Company
    Release dateDec 9, 2016
    ISBN9781620555842
    Author

    Julie Holland

    Julie Holland, M.D., is a psychiatrist who specializes in psychopharmacology and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine. An expert on street drugs and intoxication states, she was the attending psychiatrist in the Psych ER at Bellevue Hospital from 1996 to 2005 and regularly appears on the Today Show. The editor of The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis and Ecstasy: The Complete Guide and the author of the bestselling Weekends at Bellevue, she lives in the Hudson Valley.

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    • 5/5
      Book covers several ways of practicing patient and reliable ways to practice communion with the sacred herb. I think people should consider using cannabis with acknowledgement of how it affects one's mental and emotional states. It's not for everyone, but those who can benefit from using cannabis as a spiritual ally are in for quite the realization that cannabis can be used to discover the love of the Divine Feminine energy from consumption.

      3 people found this helpful

    Book preview

    Cannabis and Spirituality - Stephen Gray

    1

    Who Is She?

    The Personification of Cannabis in Cultural and Individual Experience

    Kathleen Harrison

    KATHLEEN HARRISON is a wise and deeply experienced sacramental medicine elder and one of the world’s leading figures in that work. She’s an ethnobotanist, artist, teacher, and internationally known speaker on sacred plant knowledge and wisdom. She is the director and cofounder (with Terence McKenna) of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to collect, protect, propagate and understand plants of ethno-medical significance and their lore.

    OUR COEVOLVING RELATIONSHIP WITH CANNABIS

    There is a way of perceiving the world in which everything is alive and conscious. All species of plants, animals, fungi, and even microorganisms are sentient to some extent—we know that from biology. But in this more animated worldview, all the species are aware, interactive, listening, and communicating. Or we might say that the essence of each species is aware, and self-aware too. Some of the plants communicate with their form or their scent or via the uses to which we put them. They communicate via pollen, insects, and companionship with other species. They communicate in an incredible chemical dance of scents, pheromones, alkaloids, terpenes, flavonoids, and other compounds. They communicate too in order to attract, reproduce, repel, protect, and to collaborate symbiotically with other species that live around and even inside of them. It is surely human folly to think that plants originally produced chemicals in order to please us, or to serve our needs.

    Humans are complex latecomers compared to the higher plants. But early on in our human evolution, we discovered that certain plants offered benefits beyond safely satisfying hunger. It is an old discussion between biologists, mythologists, and indigenous scholars, whether our earlier humans discovered these benefits logically, by trial and error, in early accumulation of empirical evidence, or whether the idea to use a certain plant in a certain way came via divine inspiration. A message from the gods is often the explanation that contemporary descendants of original users tell about the profoundly significant species that their ancestors handed down.

    To receive a plant’s message by either of those modes, we may eat it, drink it, smell it, rub it on our skins, make things out of it, smoke it, or meditate beside it. We may cultivate it. A single species may communicate in numerous ways. A plant species may have chosen the human species as its partner in survival, migration, and reproduction, or humans may have selected the plant species based on one or more of its special qualities. Either way, we can explore the mutual utility of a long, cooperative relationship.

    We humans now realize that we are, all together, in one very long story, a story that is populated by all levels of species. Every evolutionary step for an individual species is necessarily collective; that’s how interdependent nature works. We befriend each other, depend on each other, ignore each other, devour each other, and glorify each other. A species may be cherished and relied on by other species, but it may also fall from grace, be exploited or ignored, or fall into scarcity. It may even go extinct, or arise again into another spell in the coevolutionary limelight.

    Think of Homo sapiens, the human species, as merely one of those many hundreds of thousands of characters in this collaborative story of interspecies dependence and communication. We may presume that our species is smarter than all the others, but it may be that we are merely louder, handier, more self-involved, and less reflective. Homo sapiens, and all the Homo species that preceded us or cohabited with us for a part of our history, are in fact far younger than are the plants that we embrace. Cannabaceae is the old family that includes several cannabis species (C. sativa, C. indica, and C. ruderalis) and their cousin, also our dear friend, hops (Humulus lupulus).

    The origins of this plant family date back 90 million years. Our genus, Homo, is currently considered to be a mere 2.8 million years old. So the ancestors of this cannabis plant that we so love much were doing their own thing for a very long time before we two-leggeds showed up to appreciate their leafy descendants. The antecedents of the cannabis that we now know were hanging out with the dinosaurs, and with many stranger life forms that are now long gone. All that accumulated experience is in the cannabis story, written right there in the genes of every bud of our beloved herb.

    Some people have theorized that self-reflection is the purview only of Homo sapiens, believing that other species make their decisions based entirely on instinct and habit. That is not the way our own recent ancestors understood it. All of us, wherever we’re originally from, are descended from untold generations of animists, people who believe that all species are sentient and capable of communication in which humans can participate but do not control. This worldview has also imbued the rocks, flowing water, and certain objects handmade from natural materials with consciousness. Many indigenous people around the world, including in North America, still believe this and behave accordingly, with appropriate respect and reciprocity.

    Yet many modern folk have been transplanted or colonized and lost the thread of their ancestral practices. They have not yet learned nature in their current home, and several generations have forgotten about the collective interspecies’ fabric into which we are inextricably woven. We moderns have adopted a diminished worldview in which most species are not considered to have qualities such as intention, memory, and desire. We don’t think of them as having strategies for survival that might include tagging along with us. We don’t expect them to engage with us as though they too are people. We fail to realize that they may be listening.

    And some of them may be willing to help us.

    With the herbal medicine movement of the twentieth century, its psychedelic renaissance and a deepening ecological awareness, Western culture has rediscovered shamanism as a model, and the concept of plants as a kind of conscious people has been revived. Some call a plant’s elusive essence the plant spirit, plant ally, or plant teacher. This has especially been adopted, or experienced, in the case of powerful psychedelic species. Some refer to the soul of the plant, and others to the persona or personality that the species seems to present. I’ve worked with indigenous Amazonian folks who say that every plant has a mother, which is the original, embedded essence of a plant species. The mother is the conscious, timeless being inside the species that holds the form and transmits the medicine and teachings of the plant. Some plants, they say, have a little mother, such as the everyday healing plants, and others have a very powerful mother. Those species that carry a powerful mother within are the ones that become strong teachers for us humans, and if we’re smart—the old wisdom keepers say—we will listen to what these species are willing to tell us.

    We would be fools not to listen.

    These are great teachers, embodied as plants, here to show us something, and some are here to help take care of us. They also want to help us take care of them and the big picture and everyone in it. If we are so very clever as we like to think, we would be wise to listen. Mere cleverness without wisdom has gotten us into a bit of trouble.

    When humans personify a plant species, what that means is that we sense the persona that the plant presents, the character of the plant. Personification is something that even modern humans do, although mostly unconsciously. We name hurricanes, forest fires, and diseases, then we talk about them in terms of human qualities and motivations. We describe them as voracious, tricky, stubborn, or fierce, and our use of terms implies intention on the part of these huge phenomena. We grant the status of character to grand old trees, or we diagnose a coveted rosebush as not happy in its spot. We put faces or at least motives on all sorts of natural phenomena of Mother Nature . . . and there she is, La Naturaleza herself, as she is called in Spanish—Mother Nature and her generosity, her intelligence, her cycles, and her mysterious ways.

    And then came Gaia, the living Earth, the whole ball of wax understood as one living organism, surely the ultimate collective. To us Westerners, this seemed a radical new idea in the 1970s, but it is really a very old idea that, once it had been suggested to us by beloved renegade scientists, became part of our way of understanding. Now in the twenty-first century, we worry and wonder if Gaia is indeed metastable, ultimately able to retune herself after abuse and neglect. Can she handle, eventually, the cumulative effects of our explosive consumption and toxicity of the past few hundred

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