“Our sense of ‘the individual’, which really began with the rise of capitalism and the forceful severing of people from land and community, led to the concept that there are categories of being that do and do not have consciousness, that are and are not alive, that do and do not have their own right to existence…and when we actually drop into our senses and allow ourselves to experience the living world, we discover that so many of the things that were not supposed to be intelligent, or sentient, are speaking to us and with us. And that changes everything.”

Seán Pádraig O’Donoghue is an herbalist, writer, and teacher, and an initiated Priest in two traditions. He lives in the mountains of western Maine. Seán’s approach to healing weaves together the insights of traditional western herbalism, animism, and contemporary science. He regards physical, spiritual, and emotional healing as deeply intertwined. He is the author of The Forest Reminds Us Who We Are.

In this episode…

• Early influences and experiences working with plant and animal consciousnesses
• How becoming more fully embodied opens awareness and the capacity to connect with nature
• The aromatic scents of plants are recognized as kinship signals within our bodies; when we can direct our attention to a specific plant, tension is released within our bodies so that we can connect more openly
• The near-constant barrage and sensory overload of modern living and its effect on our ability to deeply listen to subtle information in our natural surroundings
• Some simple practices that can help us open our awareness and refine our senses
• What’s most permanent about us is our threefold nature…the “Talking” or “Human” self that interacts with abstractions and language (our persona and ego), our “Animal” self that experiences sensation and emotions, responding to rhythm and ritual and love, and our “God” self or “Infinite” self that knows our divinity and infinity
• Examining our own programming and conditioning and reclaiming our body’s innate wisdom, through the senses, to convey information about the world around us
• Indigenous vs. colonizers, and the worldview of “we” vs. “I”
• “To die healed is to die while being in right relation with all things in your inner world and your outer worlds. That can happen only in the context where we recognize and experience the world as alive. We cannot come into this full expression of who we are without letting our consciousness to fully enter and fill our bodies.”
• “6,000 years of patriarchal civilization has created rigid patterns within humans where we are armoring ourselves against our own eros, our own nature, our own desire for life, as well as armoring ourselves against the feelings and experiences of those around us. When we are in that place of being cut off from ourselves and each other, we can more easily become the instruments of ideologies that try to tell us what’s right and wrong, and who does and doesn’t have a right to exist.”

Resources

• The Forest Reminds Us Who We Are: Connecting to the Living Medicine of Wild Plants

  by Seán Pádraig O’Donoghue

• https://otherworldwell.com/

• Victor H. Anderson: An American Shaman by Cornelia Benavidez

• Invoking Ireland by John Moriarty

• The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations by Gary Snyder

• The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov