Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today on Supernormalize, I welcome Tina Kat Courtney, an 18 year veteran of Plant medicines and traditionally trained Ayush, Ayo Esquera and Huacha Mera. Kat carries deep indigenous lineages and blends her shamanic wisdom with over two decades of experience guiding people safely through sacred medicines and ceremonies. As the co founder and CEO of Plant Medicine People and the author of Plant Medicine Mystery School volume one, she invites us to meet plants as sentient allies with healing superpowers. Today you'll hear how Cat supports seekers with reverence, integration, coaching, and her unique role as a certified death doula. Listen in for granted insights on ceremony, plant consciousness, spiritual safety, and embracing transformation with compassion. Visit afterlife coach and plantmedicinepeople.com to connect with Kat's work. Kat Courtney, bridger of many worlds and retriever of souls. Welcome to Super Normalized.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: So happy to be here. All that sounds like fun things to talk about, especially with you.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Well, let's get into it now. You've got a big foundation there in a lineage that you work from. How did your traditional training with Shipibo, Kanebo, Kwetya, Lamista, and Chavin lineages shape your approach to plant medicine?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Wow, that's a big question. I think having the privilege of being a westerner that has trained with indigenous traditions, it's normalized, actually. The fact that magic is real because to these people, they've been in relationship with spirit, plant consciousness since most of them birth. It's not this new concept. They're born into a world where that's all accepted. I wasn't. I was born into a world where I was considered mentally unstable to think these things existed, you know, so I've been there.
Right. And still at risk of being labeled as such. And yet I don't care anymore because getting to train with traditions that embrace the magic, it just made me realize I wasn't crazy. It's crazy to think the magic isn't real, actually.
Yeah.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. We're in the paradigm of magic now, according to Charles Fort. And this is the time when people take a step back from all of the societal programming and conditioning that doesn't help us anymore. We're all like getting the wool taken off our eyes and going, wait a minute, wait a minute. You can talk to trees in nature and that's normal.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And actually, I would say it's not only normal, it's part of our birthright.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: This is who we are. And it's so healing and it's all of the things. So yay for normalizing that.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. What does it mean to you to hold the responsibility of these Indigenous traditions today?
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it's a really big deal being a Westerner. Like, you know, that clearly my body doesn't reflect an Indigenous being. And so I have the responsibility of giving credit where credit is due, first of all, but also to bring it to my communities, to reawaken them to this. This, like, opportunity to have relationship with spirit.
Which is why, like, my Indigenous teacher was like, yeah, more Westerners should understand this because we need to bring it to our people because we're suffering. Like, humanity is, like, obviously going through a lot. And part of the awakening from suffering is remembering that we are connected to spirit, we are connected to nature. Like, we've never been disconnected. We just got lost into thinking we were separate.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. The only time I've ever had trouble in my life is when I forget that, you know, and get caught up in my own crazy loops. You know what lessons from your apprenticeship still guide your work most strongly today?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Oh, the first thing that comes in when you ask that is that death is safe. That our experience of being a spirit is the thing that my teachers taught me is tet. We've got it backwards as humans, that it's Earth that's hard.
Coming into the world. That's, like, the original trauma. Yeah. Once I started really embracing and figuring that out, everything else became so much more fun. So that's kind of the heart as a death doula, as a facilitator of plant medicines. All of it is like, hey, don't fall for this, like, idea that, oh, it's so serious here and we only have our 80 years or whatever it is. It's like, yeah, I take life very seriously, but I also know death is safe.
So that's probably the most important thing that I got to remember.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Once you've been through to the other side multiple times, it just becomes like, well, I know that's going to happen. That's totally okay. And, you know, if you look at any of the NDA, NDE videos or anything on YouTube and get a whole raft of those under your belt, you can actually realize pretty quickly that it's not the end. You know, in fact, it's just the beginning of something bigger.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Every ending creates a beginning in our lives in terms of an ended relationship, facilitates a new opportunity for relationships. So why do we think it's not the same for our lives?
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: That's all it is. Yeah.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And then you know, I try to help people to understand that when somebody crossed over, it doesn't mean they're gone.
They just changed, like a way of their frequency and the way they're resonating. And sometimes you can tune into them and, you know, it's nice to make your own little home altar to them, to honor them and the life that you experience with them. And they'll come and visit and they will show up and they'll do little weird things around the house, like, you know, flicker your lights or play a song that you like, you know, that you both shared as a. As a shared loved experience, things like this. And it's normal for this. You know, we live in a. In a soup of spirits so that we can't see unless we tune into it.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah. It reminds me of a teaching I had early on of, you know, sometimes when a loved one has crossed over, we will have an experience or a thought of, like, oh, that's what my dad would say. And my teacher was like, that is your dad. That is the frequency of your dad. It's not just a coincidence of Daddy would say that. It's like, that's literally him conveying that message. And if we don't allow that to be true, everything becomes so much more magical of realizing it's not just in our head. These things are real, but we have to hold them to be real. But once that allowance happens, man, life gets better, just so much richer.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: It does. We actually live a spiritual life, but blind to it most of the time. But these things open us again to that greater connection.
Now, you describe plants as sentient and playful beings in your book.
How do you personally experience their consciousness during ceremonies?
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Well, the consciousness of the plants during ceremonies, to me is so obvious when you actually bring them into your bodies. I've even had the biggest skeptics of, like, plants don't have consciousness. And then they come out of an ayahuasca journey. They're like, oh, my God, she was talking to me. Like, yeah, you know, again, it's. It's. The plants in particular are really good at breaking down the barriers that we have in terms of, like, this isn't real. And they just. Especially the entheogens, the psychedelic plants, they are much more powerful than our egos, thank goodness. And so my job as a facilitator, I really feel like, you know, it's my job to embody the energy of the plants I'm working with and to let it be their show. If I don't drink and consume the medicine, then it's the cat show. And the cat show is interesting, but the ayahuasca show is far more interesting, which is why in my training, we take the medicine that we are serving to others so that we can be in relationship, so we can allow our bodies to be vessels for that medicine to come through, to sing, to work the energies, and that it's coming from that connection with the plant, not just my own limited mind.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Got to get out of the ways because the plants know better now. Can you share how the merging of plant and human consciousness creates healing?
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Well, it's back to what we just named around coming home to the memory that we are nature too. So we're from this same amazing source of endless creativity that nature is. And so when we reconnect with plants, it's like, I don't think the plants heal us. They remind us how to heal ourselves, that we have this capacity, which in my definition, healing is just coming back to wholeness.
It's not necessarily curing the fact that I have headaches or whatever it might be.
It's coming back to like I'm supposed to have these processes. Nothing's wrong coming back into wholeness. So plants, because they're in unity consciousness, they don't forget that we do because we experience separateness in duality. So that's why I think plants are so wildly effective at helping us wake up to these things. Because they don't deal with egos, they don't deal with this experience of separateness. So when we merge with them again, we can remember what is true for us too. We're just doing the hard work of making things that are unconscious, conscious. That's why they help us as humans are doing hard work. But they don't forget that death is safe and that everything is interconnected. So they can help us remember, too.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: What practices help people cultivate respect and reverence for plants beyond seeing them as tools.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: The practices that I think really, actually are most effective, CJ are the most simple ones yet. You can go sit with ayahuasca and ceremony, you can go have a big experience with a master plant, dieta, something like that. But even just a simple practice of saying, I'm going to put my feet in the ground for five minutes every day, just get out and ground and connect, or I'm going to have a cup of tea with intention to talk to the plant, to connect with the plant, Just do simple things. Basically anything where we're treating those beings as sentient, as conscious, where we're curious of like, oh, does my cup of rose tea have anything to teach me?
Yeah, if you ask, you open up. And in shamanism, the core of everything I learned is about intention. It's about what I bring to it. The curiosity, the openness, the willingness to connect, the awe, the spaciousness of knowing I don't know everything.
And in that curiosity, with that intention, when I work with any aspect of nature, amazing things can be reflected. But I think the most powerful practices are the most simple ones in that regard, and they're always available to us. We don't have to wait for a ceremony. Like, even if we don't have a backyard. Talk to your houseplant. There's always an opportunity.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Look, I'm at the point now when I mow the lawn, I actually apologize to the grass and all the plants that are in the grass for what I have to do. So.
So, you know, I've got to ask for forgiveness because it's just something I have to do because of Western. If I didn't have to do that, I wouldn't do it. I can tell you what are the most important elements for creating safe and sacred ceremony spaces.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Oh, safety. We could talk for days about safety. But I mean, some of the things that come up that I think are really essential is, first of all, we can't support anybody in any experience of their shadow that we haven't experienced ourselves in our own way. That's like saying, hey, I'm going to be a tour guide for you in Vietnam, but I haven't been there. But trust me, I'll figure it out. It's like, no, you want to have a commitment to your own depths of shadow, own humanity in order to create safety for other people to do the same thing. And that's like lived experience. It's not something that I can convey through words of what that's like. Right. So we develop safety by learning to guide ourselves through crisis, to navigate our own relationship with shadow. And I think we also develop safety in these spaces with transparency and integrity. For example, I don't have everything figured out. Doesn't matter how many years that I do this work, I still have my humanness in shadow. And the guru syndrome. That happens a lot in these spaces of the facilitator knows everything and has the answers. I think that's really dangerous because we're giving our power away to someone who is just as human as we are. And to allow for that, like the fact that everyone's got a shadow. And so as a facilitator I can't guarantee safety for everyone, but I can guarantee that my intention is that and that if you bring it to me that I haven't created safety for you, I want to hear it. Tell me what happened. Let me hear what I can't see myself, and that that in itself is safe. It's not perfection.
I can't be perfect at creating safety, but I can be genuinely interested in hearing when I haven't done it perfectly and learn from that. And it's safe to just have somebody be honest in that way.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: What do you do to help participants prepare mentally and spiritually before a plant medicine journey?
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Oh, preparation. Well, first of all, depending on which plant they're working with, to give them tools to deal with the intensity. Should it become intense? It may or may not be, but I have lots of simple tools to deal with the intensity. One of my biggest superpowers is the smile. If things get crazy and out of control, grin. Smile instead of crouching down and saying, oh, God, I can't wait for this to be over. We have so many ways to help ourselves through experiences with these medicines. But I give a lot of tools and preparation to people around that. But I think the heart of preparation in regards to beyond doing the homework around what you're about to do is intentional, is back to intentions. And what I help people do is to craft intentions based on solutions instead of problems. So let's say, yeah, I deal with a lot of fear is not to come in going, I don't want to be scared. I don't want to deal with fear. Don't take me to the scary place and instead go, teach me how not to be afraid. How can I feel more empowered, you know, focusing on what we're moving towards rather than what it is that we don't want to duplicate. Because you know how the mind is. Say, don't think of a pink elephant. That's what we do.
So crafting intentions that feel really vulnerable, really meaningful, but are based on solutions instead of problems, that's where I spend a lot of time, is helping people maximize these experiences in the preparation.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I've found that if you. Whatever you carry in gets magnified, so it's good to actually work towards the positive.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: What are some common challenges people face after ceremonies, and how do you support their integration?
[00:14:26] Speaker B: That's a tough question, because every conceivable challenge is available after ceremony. I mean, maybe one of the biggest challenges is accepting that you probably aren't just going to feel amazing, that healing is complicated. And a lot of us, especially in the beginning of our journey in healing, we just want something to make it all go away. The pain, the suffering. And that doesn't exist.
So instead, what the medicines often do is give us homework, give us experiences where we know that states of consciousness, like true, genuine joy, they exist, but it's not like they put us there in a permanent way. So helping people to truly integrate the experiences they have with the medicine, which means make changes most of the time, which means, like, okay, if you've noticed that through an experience with a medicine, you learned more about your relationship to suffering, cool. What do you need to do in your daily life to change so that maybe you suffer less? There's gotta be a proactiveness, and that's hard for us humans. We want to take something and have it just kind of make us feel better and move on with our lives. But typically, the aftermath, the integration involves very strategic, very personal commitments to changing how we're interacting with our loved ones, how we're interacting with ourselves. And so that's the main thing in integration, is helping people figure out what those things are that the experience brought them to and to help them stay accountable.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Let's talk about Plant Medicine People and community. What inspired you to co found Plant Medicine People and what vision drives the company?
[00:16:01] Speaker B: I love that. Nobody ever asked me that. That's actually a very profound question for me because previous to founding Plant Medicine People, I left the medicine space because I was really upset by the abuse of power. And I felt like I'm no different than any of my amazing teachers and that I'm human. Who says I'm not going to abuse my power?
And it just came to me that actually the way to make sure I don't abuse my power is to be in community, to have people that I trust, that are my peers, that do this, work with me, that have full permission to reflect when I'm coming from my ego or my shadow. So I was like, plant Medicine People, that's what I want. Not Plant Medicine person, Plant Medicine People. And I was like, there's no way that's available. Because it felt so just kind of obvious. And it was available. Nobody had created this company yet, so I just kind of of did it from that impulse is this is how I'm going to come back into this space and stay accountable and stay confident that I'm going to stay in my heart. I'm going to use the power the medicine gives me to help facilitate healing. And I do that because I have people around Me that I trust, that keep me in line and I do the same for them.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: That's beautiful. How do you identify and uplift gifted tribe members within the plant medicine community
[00:17:17] Speaker B: to identify an uplift? Yeah, well, that happens organically.
That happens. So people reach out all the time of like, oh, can we volunteer in the space? And how can I apprentice to learn this work? And really what I found is most just potent in the work that I do is to let the medicines bring me these people. And so often with, you know, I do like five retreats a year and it's usually through those retreats I'm like, oh, you're interesting. You seem like you're really committed to this path. You want to come sit next to us and start learning. And just to sort of. It's how I found my teacher as I sat in his space and said, hey, I'd love to learn from you. And he eventually said, yes. And it just kind of organically happens. It's funny, sometimes people send in their CVs, their resumes, and I'm like, it doesn't work that way, but thank you. That's the old way of trying to get a job. We do it organically because obviously really intimate work too, of sharing that altar space, of really trusting each other in that way. So I kind of just let things materialize through the experience of them rather than go seeking people.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The space is pretty littered with people that are a bit, like you said, a bit egomaniac driven. And what advice would you have for people who are seeking trustworthy guides or sacred places for their actual healing journeys?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that's another big question because we really gotta be careful and discerning with who we trust because this space has grown so quickly that there's a lot of even well meaning people that just don't have the maturity that I mentioned earlier to guide people through. And you got to assume it's very possible these plant medicines are going to take people through one of the hardest things they've ever been through in process traumas and whatnot. So you want to do that with somebody that has that maturity. So how do we know? Well, ask a lot of questions of the facilitator that you're sitting with. What is their training? What's the hardest things they've been through, their rites of passage? What do they do in the event of an emergency? What is the protocol to handle something that is a medical crisis, a spiritual crisis, an emotional crisis, and what have they dealt with already? If you get some answers of oh, yeah, we've had all these things happen, and here's our emergency protocol. And there's this sense of confidence of people that have been around the block. Well, that feels really like validating. But if there is a dismissal of, like, oh, those things don't happen, or no sense of what to do if they do occur, I don't feel safe with any of that. You're looking for people that have been around the block enough to know we gotta have this foundation of safety and that are willing to share their stories of some of the things that they've been through, because that's the credibility that makes me personally feel safe.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: How do you deal with people who are doing the medicine for tourism?
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Well, I try not to deal with
[00:20:04] Speaker A: them, but if any, they turn up, right?
[00:20:07] Speaker B: They're like, yeah, definitely turn up. But I interview myself. Everybody that comes through that wants to sit in our ayahuasca space. So either they do make sure that people are coming because they want to heal, not because they saw it on Joe Rogan. And this seems interesting, like, really because they want to do the work right. And it's important for the safety of the whole container that everybody be willing, because if they're just looking for fun times on drugs, it's not going to be that. And that can be really disruptive. And just knowing that that's such a problem with the space as a whole, that a lot of it is based in tourism. That's why I personally interview everybody, is to make sure that we're on the same page. Like, not to shame anybody for whatever is their reason for wanting to do this. But I want to work with people that are willing to get down and dirty and to process some deep traumas and to do the work, not just to get high, because that's not what I'm doing.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: Exactly. So let's talk about your work as an afterlife coach and death doula. How does your work as a certified death doula connect with your plant medicine practice?
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I think it's almost the same in terms of the tools that I need, the way that I.
Which is why I became a certified death doula. As I'm like, I'm kind of doing this anyway. And I've always had a meaningful relationship with death, just a trusting relationship. The word ayahuasca means vine of the dead.
She loves to bring people to this awareness of what death is and what death isn't. So that's where it felt like as I get older and people in the community get to face their mortality through Knowing their terminal or losing loved ones, whatever it is. It's really helpful to have this as a tool in my tools.
And my deepest passion with it, cj, is to help people make death a ceremony. Again, it can be sacred, it is sacred. But to treat it as such, very much the same way that I treat ceremony as sacred. If anything, death is the most sacred ceremony that we get to experience, but we don't often treat it that way. And I think that's a big heartbreak in our culture. So that's part of my mission, is to bring back that sacred reverence to that process.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: What insights about life and death do plant medicines offer that might ease people's fears around mortality?
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Well, you get to have that experience we're talking about of being conscious outside of just your mind or the limits of your body. To really to not have to take even the word of somebody who's had a near death experience that you've seen on YouTube, but to have your own experience of, wait a second, there is more to my consciousness than what just exists between my ears. And not to belittle our beautiful minds in any way, but that's not the totality of who we are. So because plant medicines are experiential, they really get our attention because that's really, I think, how most of us learn in really deep and profound ways so they can help us just see the bigger picture and to know that things aren't what they seem. Our bank accounts don't mean nearly as much as we think they should. Aging is actually a beautiful privilege, not something to fight and deny and fear. Like all these things our culture tries to brainwash into thinking is the truth of our existence. Plant medicines are amazing at unraveling that and going, absolutely. Not that. You don't have to suffer around that.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of the cultural norms are just ways to make money at the expense of our happiness, really.
So it's good to turn that on its head and realize this is not the full truth of us.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Well, ask anybody that's extremely wealthy if that is the key to being happy. I pour medicine for a lot of those people that are like, I'm miserable and yet I have everything. I'm like, you don't have everything, you don't have everything. You just think you do on paper. And that's not what is meaningful. So the plant medicines help us to get back into touch with what really is meaningful, what really does matter about our lives.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Can you describe how addressing death and transformation can deepen spiritual growth during psychedelic work?
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Yummy. Well, relationship with death across the board deepens our experience as conscious beings in regular life and in portals with plant medicines. Because that is the number one primal fear down deep is the unknown of death. But if we explore what we feel is true about death with and without plant medicines, even just looking out my window at my garden, my garden is showing me the truth about death all the time. All the time.
Nature is so in flow with birth and death constantly just showing us these examples. I saw a dead bird in my yard yesterday. It was like circle of life.
If we just pay attention to all these beautiful cues, what I think starts to become apparent is that while something is dying, something is also being born.
And that's the question that I always ask my death doula clients is, okay, I really honor the just pain of the body shutting down, but what's being born? What do you feel?
The clients I have normally love this question because their loved ones aren't going to ask that, and the hospital staff isn't going to ask that. But that's the best question of all of like, well, yeah, okay, my body's shutting down, but my spirit feels stronger. I am connecting with my loved ones that died years ago. Like, there's usually some amazing stuff to explore. We don't have to wait until we know we're terminal for us to go, all right, what is being born when I go through death? And I think exploring that makes life so much richer too. Then we can enjoy the ride here because we're not in this primal fear of what's coming. If anything, we can welcome it. Welcome it all. I mean, that's what the plants teach me is like, all of it is a privilege to be conscious.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Treating life as an adventure for sure.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: The biggest adventure of all. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: So what motivated you to write Plant Medicine Mystery School, Volume one?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: My love of the plants. And that book is really about celebrating the entheogens as conscious beings.
Because I saw a lot of literature. I think it came out about five years ago, and at that point, there was a lot of interesting books coming out about the science and the neurochemistry that happens when we take ibogaine, ayahuasca, all of it. But there weren't a lot of, especially from a white Westerner, books about celebrating the consciousness, the personalities, the sentience of these plants. And that's how I know them as so colorful and. And playful and just like, they're my friends and I'm so lucky. And I am not the likely person to become the plant whisperer I couldn't keep a house plant alive before I drank ayahuasca. The first time I wasn't out in my garden talking to my plants. This wasn't. This is a shock to me still, how did this happen? But I'm so grateful for it. And so I feel like if I can tap into having these beautiful relationships with these beings, it's available for anyone. Cause I wasn't raised that way. I didn't see that coming. So that book is really all about a celebration of the fact that I discovered these amazing beings are my friends, and they can be yours too.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Wonderful.
How do you balance scientific information with spiritual storytelling in your writing?
[00:27:45] Speaker B: I love the balance of scientific information and spiritual storytelling. I mean, maybe it's because I'm a Gemini and I identify with duality in that way, but I think it is so cool that we live in an age where science can validate what spiritual beings have always known through this sort of tangible storytelling of, oh, look under a microscope, and actually we can see how ayahuasca helps to facilitate the healing of trauma, as an example. So I love being able to cite the research. And I have a dear mentor, Dr. Deborah Mash, who's, like, the foremost authority on ibogaine, who understands medicines in a scientific way better than anyone I've ever met. And I love learning, like, she told me the other day, that there are more neurons in our brain than there are stars in the galaxy.
What?
[00:28:38] Speaker A: No.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: I mean, I have goosebumps every time I think about that.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: Of, whoa.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: You know, so things like that woven into the spiritual insights that the plants give me, that makes it feel as though all of us can find our space in believing in the magic.
Because there's plenty of evidence that science is now presenting that this isn't crazy, that they can actually show us. And not that I need that validation, but it's wonderful when it comes in, and it's especially helpful for people who are skeptics.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say that's a good bridge. Good bridge for the people that are normal still.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Yeah. A lot of people need that. I respect that, and I don't need it, but I love it. I love that it's available more and more. It's one of the cool things about the movement of the plant medicine space is that more studies are being done, and they're coming through going, oh, wow, it cracks me up when you see the headline of ayahuasca helps with trauma. I'm like, well, yes, we've been saying that literally for thousands of years. But thank you for jumping on the bandwagon.
At the same time, it's neat to see the tangible explanation for these things. I welcome it.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: What key messages do you hope readers take away from your book?
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Well, the availability of this relationship with nature. And I want people to feel in awe of the natural world that we're part of. Again, to not look at a tree as this inanimate object, but a conscious, intelligent being that we can communicate with, connect with, learn from, heal with, even be friends with. Like, just really to get people to open up more to the natural world. Because I feel like it's a wound of our western world that we're disconnected from nature.
I feel like that's a deep pain point. All these people that live in cities, and they very rarely even put their feet, bare feet, on the earth, they think that causes illness and pain over time. It's not our natural way of being. That's not to say you can't be healthy and have a wonderful life in the city, but prioritize that connection with the natural world. And again, you can do it with a houseplant. Like, it's available to all of us. So that's kind of my mission in general is reconnecting humans and plants and putting those relationships back in a conscious way. Because it's just. It's so ridiculously rewarding.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Let's talk about practical tools in daily life. How can someone integrate the lessons from plant medicine journeys into everyday life without losing connection to that expanded state?
[00:31:06] Speaker B: Great question. That lies in, I think, a commitment to a daily practice that I call a spiritual practice. But you can even just be showing up for yourselves every day. And mine involves, in the morning, at the bare minimum, a very simple but very important question. How you doing today, kiddo? Like, really, what's going on? How crazy is it that we don't ask ourselves that? And then, you know, I go get a sandwich and somebody puts too much mayonnaise on it, and I lose my mind of like and right. And then there's obviously a lot of rage and emotion that was waiting to be felt and processed, and I wasn't paying attention.
So to integrate means to me to show up first and foremost and be like, okay, how am I feeling? What's different after this experience?
What's the same?
What do I want to shift and change over time? And it takes being curious about our current state and what the experience with the plants brought us in order for the roadmap to sort of materialize. But I don't know how to help anybody integrate if they're not showing up for themselves and checking in and prioritizing some level of self care.
Because without that effort, nothing's going to change. And that's the heart of integration. We got to show up for ourselves.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Exactly what grounding practices do you recommend to people after intense psychedelic experiences?
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Well, you said the magic word that we've got to ground ourselves again. Yeah. Because that can be such a cosmic experience.
I have the expression that sometimes I still have space dust in my mouth. I'm like, ah, I need to come back in.
So anything that creates that tangible reconnection with the physical body, for me it's a warm bath after a big retreat. I need a warm salt bath to just like. And some breathing exercises to just come back home to my body. Also, of course, anything to do with the earth, going for a walk, laying under a tree, just letting ourselves ground in that way.
But it's somatic practices. It's not about making meaning. It's not about dissecting. What did it all symbolize? We have to come home and get grounded in. And I would also say it's a prioritization around our nervous systems slowing things down. Because those experiences with the plants can be really intense and overwhelmed. So then we also have to slow it down, not make decisions from that place of urgency if we don't have to, and just find ways to kind of like slow down the energies and then we can figure out what we're integrating and what we want to change. But not when we're still out in the galaxy somewhere.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One of the things I've learned is to just take your time. It's like you get all these ideas about change, but you don't have to make them all immediately. Just take your time about it. Because that's all part of the integration too.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: It is, it is. And ayahuasca has an expression. She said to me once around trauma or sorry, urgency being a trauma response that most of us from. Urgency, that's trauma. Unless you're standing in traffic or you're in like an actual life threatening situation, urgency isn't needed. And that urgency itself is a reflection of the trauma. And the only way to combat that is to slow down.
Slow down. And that can be the hardest thing for the nervous system that's used to being sped up. But it is the most important thing is.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Whoa.
Yeah. Now we're all forced into this idea of productivity as a life path.
Go fast. Go fast as possible. Okay, so how do dream analysis and Subconscious work fit into your coaching and healing approach.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Dream analysis. Subconscious work is directly related to plant medicine work because the plant medicines access our subconscious. So when people ask me, what can I do to continue this, like, journey I've had with the plants of like, oh, pay attention to your dreams, because that is the rich place where this information is available. And for people that are like, oh, I can't remember my dreams, it's like, all right, well then start making a mission to create a relationship with that space.
Have a mantra at night, is my will and intention to remember my dreams. Make sure you're not doing the things that inhibit that, like eating right before going to bed. You're like, there's all kinds of things we can do to support creating more of a conscious relationship with what's happening in the dream space. But that is the continuation of what the plants unearth anyway, so might as well have a committed relationship. And I also caution people to use things like ChatGPT and whatnot to decipher what it is that their dream world, the symbolism means because it's a generalization and sometimes it's accurate. But it really, we kind of got to do the work of defining it ourselves more based on how we feel in those experiences and less on what, you know, Google says it means. But. But it is work to decipher the language of the subconscious. But it's, it's unbelievably rewarding. I think that's the heart of self discovery because that's most of what. What we are programmed by is what lives in the subconscious. So dream work just goes hand in hand with plant medicine work.
[00:36:15] Speaker A: Yeah, Dream journaling is absolutely key. And then you get to learn your own Alphabet of the meanings.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: Exactly. That's a beautiful way to put it. Yes. If you pay attention, document and start learning that language, your personal language of the dream space, which, by the way, then makes deciphering what happens with plant medicine so much easier because you've been speaking the language of your own subconscious for some time, wanting to understand that exactly.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: What are your thoughts on the growing corporate interest in psychedelics and its impact on indigenous rights and plant medicine culture?
[00:36:49] Speaker B: Wow. You are asking questions we could spend all day talking about. So that one is complicated because it's kind of. It speaks to the heart of the colonization of the plant medicine space, which many people engage in without even realizing. Because the corporate world embodies, of course, capitalism in all its glory and shadow. And that world tends to use things as products rather than sacraments to look at Things as transactional instead of sacred, deep healing work. And so those are challenging spaces when I've been brought into pour for Silicon Valley people because they're just, they often can't help but to take the world that they live in and bring it into an ayahuasca space and it doesn't fit right, and yet they don't know better. And sometimes it's sitting with plant medicines that makes them realize, oh my gosh, like I am not treating my life in a sacred way. Everything's about money, money, money and identity.
But they also can be very difficult in holding space for when that bubble kind of pops, when they recognize maybe they've been placing meaning, colonizing things without knowing it, taking credit for indigenous wisdoms, all of these things.
So on the one hand it's a complicated space to work in. On the other hand, these are the people that have the most access to resources. These are the people, when they do wake up, can make a tremendous impact in treating things, sacraments differently, in being more generous with sharing wealth, you know, all of the things that can create more balance in our world. So it's a double edged sword that question, because some part of me recoils around being in the old capitalism model and the other part knows that if I don't go there and work with these people, nothing's going to change in the greater systems that we're all dealing with.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: How can we care for both the plants and indigenous communities in this shifting landscape?
[00:38:58] Speaker B: Yay. That's a perfect question to ask on the heels of talking about basically the colonizing model. Well, I'm going to go back to first and foremost, we have to prioritize ourselves. We have to truly care for ourselves. Because if we're not coming from a place of prioritizing what is most important, our own bodies, our own energy spaces, we're not really credible to then try to take care of the planet. We are the planet. And if we're not in alignment, if we're not, well, if we're mentally overwhelmed, et cetera, that doesn't help her at all, nor does it help indigenous communities. So when we start to build a foundation of feeling better in ourselves, then I think that's a very personal thing in terms of how we can give back. But you know, in the tradition that I studied, the word sacrament actually embodies not only the thing that we consume, but the thing that we do to give back. It's baked into it. There's a word named ayni in Quechua that means sacred reciprocity so it's this knowledge that, yeah, you're going to go have these experiences and ask for deep healing and the secrets of the universe and all of these things you better intend to give back, because that's the infinite flow of the universe. You receive and then you give. So you asked a bit ago of integration. How do I help people prioritize that? I also make sure that they are prioritizing the commitments to giving back so that all of this beautiful give and take can continue to be like in reciprocity. And so if you sat in a Shipipo tradition, give back to the Shipipo. There's lots of different ways to do that. Or if you're just madly in love with Iboga, make sure you're helping to replant Iboga. Iboga in particular is near extinction. Just like making sure you do something to give back a little bit of what you receive to the people and the plants that are responsible for the fact that we get to have this movement at all.
It's just so important that we not just talk about it, we actually engage in reciprocity.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Yeah. What actions can listeners take to support ethical use and protection of sacred plant medicines today?
[00:41:04] Speaker B: In that list of questions we were talking about a little bit ago of how to be discerning, also ask what the people you sit with do for reciprocity.
Like, find out if they are also prioritizing, replanting, prioritizing, taking care of the tribes. If we don't take care of the indigenous people as Westerners, they're going to be left out of this movement. That's part of what colonization does. It just claims it all for itself. And so we, the ones with the privilege, have to then prioritize making sure that they are not left out.
So that's like the heart of reciprocity is to use our privilege to share it with those that don't necessarily have it. So if you really prioritize that, make sure the circles that you're sitting with can give you tangible evidence of the fact that they are doing that. I don't know very many CJ that are.
Everybody's talking about it right now because it's the PC thing to do. But show me. Show me the evidence that you are contributing to charities, that you are planting plants, that you are supporting the indigenous people, because otherwise talk is cheap. And so I think that's really important, that when we pay a group to provide this service, we're making sure that they are a part of that infinite
[00:42:16] Speaker A: loop of reciprocity so, Kat, is there any questions that. That may have been brewing inside you that I didn't ask?
[00:42:24] Speaker B: Cj, you asked some really big, deep, yummy questions. No. Nothing else comes up that we didn't at least scratch the surface on? Yeah.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: Nice.
How can people find you then and learn more about your services?
[00:42:39] Speaker B: PlantMedicinePeople.com is my website, and then on Instagram is my main social media platform. We're plant medicine people there too. I do content every day on that platform, so that's the best place to engage.
[00:42:52] Speaker A: Excellent. And how can people find your book as well?
[00:42:54] Speaker B: The book is on Amazon. Yeah, the book is on Amazon. Plant Medicine Mystery School. Yeah.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Excellent. So I'll provide links to all those down below.
And thank you so much for your time and your sharing of your wisdom and understanding and obviously ethical methods towards connecting people to the plants.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: Again, thank you for having me.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: All right.
What a great talk with Kat.
The. The deep ethics that she expounds in her understanding and her wisdom, of her experience, lived experience of being an ayahuascaro and what chamera it really came through there with, you know, it. She really brings it back to the understanding that we do need to reconnect to the plants and in doing so, erase the conditioning, which actually stops us from being more integrated and more expansive. Individ. If you've enjoyed today's show, reach out to Kat and say thank you. That'd be really appreciated. And if you're on YouTube, remember to like and subscribe.
And you've got a podcast app, say a nice comment. That'd be really nice too. And if you're on YouTube, say something nice down below too. Thank you so much for listening and also watching. Until next episode. You want to enjoy these ones?
