[HTML1] Susun Weed interviews Steve Beyer, author of Singing to The Plants, explorer, and community builder.
Steve Beyer has a law degree and doctorates in both religious studies and psychology. Having lived for a year and a half in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas, he published three books on Buddhism and Tibetan language and religion, The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet, The Buddhist Experience and The Classical Tibetan Language.
Steve has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the University of California—Berkeley, and Graduate Theological Union and for twenty-five years, he was a lawyer and litigator at a major international law firm in Chicago. and has also been a wilderness guide, a peacemaker and community builder.
Having had a long interest in wilderness survival, Steve has been trained in mountain, desert, and especially jungle survival, skills which took him on a number of trips to the Upper Amazon, both for training and to study indigenous survival techniques.
He helped bring health care to remote Amazon villages with the Rainforest Health Service and was one of a group who made the first descent by raft of the Puyango-Tumbes River. One of these trips, with wilderness survival expert Ron Hood, to study the jungle survival skills of the last of the headhunting Shapra and Candoshi Indians, became an award-winning survival training film.
But, as he learned more and more about the ways in which indigenous people survive — indeed, flourish — in the wilderness, it became increasingly clear to him that wilderness survival included a significant spiritual component — the maintenance of right relationships both with human persons and with the other-than-human persons who fill the indigenous world.
Thus he began to explore wilderness spirituality, to learn ways to live in harmony with the natural world, striving, like indigenous people, to be in right relationship with the plant and animal spirits of the wilderness. Studying this sacred plant medicine with traditional herbalists in North America and curanderos in the Upper Amazon, Steve received coronación by banco ayahuasquero don Roberto Acho Jurama.
Steve has worked with ayahuasca and other sacred plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals; and has undertaken numerous four-day and four-night solo vision fasts in Death Valley, the Pecos Wilderness, and the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico.
Now a member of the Society of Shamanic Practitioners, American Herbalists Guild, Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, Steve has also served as an editor of the Journal of Shamanic Practice and as a contributing editor of Ayahuasca.com.
“Singing to the Plants is a result of my own need to make sense of the mestizo shamanism of the Upper Amazon, to place it in context, to understand why and how it works, to think through what it means, and what it has meant for me.”
Steve’s newest book features Mestizo shamanism, a practice that occupies an exceptional place among the shamanisms of the Upper Amazon, assimilating key features of indigenous shamanisms, and at the same time adapting and transforming them. There is today considerable interest in shamanism in general, and in Upper Amazonian shamanism in particular, especially its use of plant hallucinogens; yet there is currently no readily accessible text giving general consideration to the unique features of Amazonian shamanism and its relationship to shamanisms elsewhere in the world.
Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon emphasizes both the uniqueness of this highly eclectic and absorptive shamanism — plant spirits dressed in surgical scrubs, extraterrestrial doctors speaking computer language — and its deep roots in shamanist beliefs and practices, both healing and sorcery, common to the Upper Amazon. The work seeks to understand this form of shamanism, its relationship to other shamanisms, and its survival in the new global economy, through anthropology, ethnobotany, cognitive psychology, legal history, and my own personal experiences studying wilderness survival and plant healing in the Amazon.
Susun Weed, guest host at WomensRadio.com is the author of the acclaimed best seller Wise Woman Herbal Series. Her health books for women offer Wise Woman approaches to common women’s ailments including menopause, childbearing, fertility, cancer prevention and treatment, breast health, and reproductive health. Susun Weed offers women safe and easy solutions to common problems, visit her at SusunWeed.com for 3000 pages of Wise Woman wisdom and wit.
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