Geoff Oelsner has built a following as a performer both of his own songs and of poems which he sometimes sets to music or chants and recites to the accompaniment of guitar, harmonica, dulcimer, autoharp, harmonium, and the shruti box (a drone instrument from India). He has released 2 CD’s of original songs, Morning Branches and Ordinary Mystery with musician friends, including Kelly Mulhollan and Leslie. Geoff has published a collection of his poetry, Native Joy: poems songs visions dreams (1963-2003) (2003, Trafford) and his work has been featured in several other books, including Writing Poetry from the Inside Out by Sandford Lyne (Sourcebooks Inc., 2007). His new book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature (2012) is now available from Lorian Press.
A Buddhist meditator since 1974, Geoff founded the Buddhist Meditation and Spiritual Support Group in 1995. As a licensed certified social worker in private practice of psychotherapy in Arkansas since 1982, Geoff also utilizes poetry therapy with selected clients in psychotherapy. He is committed to sharing the healing and inspirational power of poetry, music, and story with the community.
A long time environmental activist and researcher, Geoff co-authored a book titled Fighting Radiation and Chemical Pollutants with Foods, Herbs,and Vitamins (1992). He is presently involved in several environmental initiatives, including the Psi-Sci Alliance project, which brings together established climate scientists with highly qualified intuitives to innovate new approaches to addressing and ameliorating climate change.
Geoff Oelsner speaks with Joanna about his deep love and connection with the natural world, transpersonal experiences in Nature, the emergence of a spiritual form of environmental activism…
Music: “The Sacred Hoop” (from Morning Branches) by Geoff Oelsner.
Olivier Clerc is a writer, translator and editorial consultant, specializing in spirituality, shamanism, health, personal development and human relationships. Olivier has crossed paths with many famous authors and teachers whose books he has translated into French, and with whom he often trained. Among them are Stan Grof, Marshall Rosenberg (founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication), Don Miguel Ruiz, and many others. He is the author of 8 books, including Modern Medicine: The New World Religion: How Beliefs Secretly Influence Medical Dogmas and Practices, and Invaluable Lessons from a Frog: Seven Life-Enhancing Metaphors.
Olivier speaks with Joanna about his experiences with don Miguel Ruiz, the “key” to the gift of forgiveness, the obstacles to forgiveness, implications of forgiveness, from don’ts to dos…
Music: “Paseo 1 Primavera” (from Lo Fi) by Bosques de mi Mente
Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. With her husband, writer/healer Michael Ortiz Hill, she has introduced the concept of Daré, meaning Council, to North America.
She is the author of many books, the most recent: La Negra y Blanca (“a novel of the Conquest of the Americas and of hope, where wisdom leaks through misty realms between memory and imagination”).
Deena speaks with Joanna about the characters of her latest book “La Negra y Blanca”, grounded visions, the coming shift, making alliances and restoring a right relationship with the Earth and all beings, “the conquest never ended”, the helping guide of the ancestors, the process of peace-making, “the way of story”…
Music: “No soy de aquí ni soy de allá” (I’m not from here, I’m not from there) by Facundo Cabral
Martin Prechtel is a thinker, writer and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. As a half blood Native American with a Pueblo Indian upbringing, his life took him from New Mexico to the village of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala where he became a full village member of the Tzutujil Mayan population, and eventually served as a principal, responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories through the rituals of adult rights of passage. Once again residing in his native New Mexico, Martín teaches at his international school Bolad’s Kitchen.
Tata Erick González, also known by his Tolteca-Azteca name OmeAkaEhekatl and his Haida tribal name Gaada (supernatural light). Tata Erick is a lineage-holder and Daykeeper of the Cakchikel Maya of Guatemala. He trained in the ceremonial way for 32 years with indigenous healers and medicine people from North, Central, and South America and was ceremonially initiated as a Mayan Aj Qij (staff of light) in 1994. He is founder of Earth Peoples United that is creating two models of spiritual land stewardship: one in Guatemala on the shores of Lake Atitlan, and one north of Mt. Shasta in Northern California.
Erick speaks Joanna about essential aspects of the Mayan culture, the Mayan understanding of 2012 – the ending of the Fifth Sun…and the beginning of a new era.
Dennis McKenna is an American ethnobotanist and ethnopharmacologist. He has authored numerous scientific articles and books, among them - The Invisible Landscape – with his brother Terence McKenna.
Dennis has spent a number of years as a senior lecturer for the Center for Spirituality and Healing, part of the Academic Health Center at the University of Minessota. He is now a senior research scientist for the Natural Health Products Research Group at the British Columbia Istitute of Technology in the Vancouver area. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute and serves on the advisory board of non-profit organizations in the fields of ethnobotany and botanical medicines. He recently completed a project, funded by the Stanley Medical Research Institute, to investigate Amazonian ethnomedicines for the treatment of schizophrenia and cognitive deficits. At the Heffter Research Institute, he continues his focus on the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices.
Dennis speaks with Joanna about the KickStarter project of writing a memoir of his experiences with his brother Terence McKenna as a collective effort, the noetic experiment at La Chorrera, teonanacatl and primordial language, following the call of the Mystery…
Music: “Tejido de sueños (Tissue of dreams)” from Nierika, by Jorge Reyes
Leslie M. Browning is a poet,writer, and longtime student of Religion, Spirituality, Nature, Language and Philosophy as such these themes permeate her work. Raised a Catholic, she studied both the Traditional and Apocrypha doctrine before her spiritual search eventually crossed into the other religions of the world, compelling her to investigate: Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, Druidry and Shamanism.
In 2004, following several years of life-changing events, Browning made one of the defining choices of her life: to move away from world religion as a whole; taking with her what few truths she felt to be absolute as she followed her heart in search of a more intimate spirituality.
Leslie speaks with Joanna about her life-changing experiences,the connection with the ancestors, shamanism and poetry, healing, the sacredness of the Earth…and reads some of her poems…
Music: “Song to the Earth” (fromOfrenda A La Pachamama) byTito La Rosa
Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a psychiatrist with over fifty years experience researching non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Grof is one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a pioneering researcher into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of analysing, healing, and obtaining growth and insight into the human psyche. Being the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association (founded in 1977), he went on to become distinguished adjunct faculty member of the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a position he remains in today.
At the 25th Anniversary Convocation of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP), held in August 1993 at Asilomar, California, Stanislav Grof received an Honorary Award for major contributions to and development of the field of Transpersonal Psychology. Grof received the VISION 97 award granted by the Foundation of Dagmar and Václav Havel in Prague on October 5, 2007.
Stan speaks with Joanna about his relationship with Nature, the unified worldview emerging from the study of holotropic states of consciousness, working with the archetypes, entheogens and holotropic breathwork as powerful means of transformation, personal experiences versus belief systems, the perils and evolutionary potential of humankind…
Music: Galileo, (from En Concert) by Claire Pelletier
The renowned anthropologist Jeremy Narby has explored shamanism and plant medicines for over two decades. In his much-admired books, including The Cosmic Serpant and Shamans Through Time, Jeremy has shared his wisdom and insights. For the first time, in this special video teleseminar series produced by Evolver, he will pursue these questions through two exclusive online lectures, and one-on-one discussions with four of the world’s leading experts on the shamanic use of mind-altering plants: Stanislav Grof, Wade Davis, Kat Harrison, and Luis Eduardo Luna.
Eliot Cowan is the author of Plant Spirit Medicine, and a fully initiated Tsaurirrikame (shaman) in the Huichol (Wixárika) Indian tradition. Eliot is the founder of the the Blue Deer Center and is a member of the Council of Elders for the Temple of Sacred Fire Healing. As a provider at the Blue Deer Center, Eliot Cowan offers Plant Spirit MedicineSM practitioner training courses, continuing education for PSM practitioners, healing camps based on traditional Huichol shamanic healing, and animal totem courses.
Eliot speaks with Joanna about the experience of awe, the aliveness of Nature, retrieving our indigenous soul, our relationship with the ancestors and the appropriate conditions in which to engage with the teacher plants…
Music: “Japeru” (from Piercing The Veil) by William Parker & Hamid Drake
Hella Neumann earned her MA in Art and Education from the University of Berlin. In 1975 she founded and directed (for 18 years) Atelier unterm Dach Art School in Germany. This work included Art Therapy, Bio Energetics and the Biodynamic Massage of Gerda Boyesen, London. In 1994 she began intensive study of Systemic Constellation Work in Germany with the founder, Bert Hellinger. Living and working nearly three years in a German monastery allowed for an intense period of meditation. This time away from the loud sounds of the world helped refine the sensitivity with which she now tunes in to the non-physical realms of the Ancestral Field. During two years in the Australian rainforest and an extended visit to South Africa she connected to indigenous ancestral wisdom and to the power of ritual which is an important part of her work. She began her own constellation work in 1997 under the name “Songs of the Ancestors,” leading Family Constellation workshops, private constellations and training facilitators. She remains in regular touch with Bert Hellinger and his evolving work and attends the national and international conferences in Germany. Hella lives in Germany and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Hella speaks with Joanna about the Systemic Constellation Work: ancestral roots, the family soul, the collective side of healing/change … through fascinating and moving examples.
Music: Troubled Water (from Karadenik [Black Sea]) by Enver Izmailov & Burhan Ocal
Max Dashu is an artist, writer, and teacher . Max founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research and document women’s history from an international perspective. She has photographed some 15,000 slides and created 100 slideshows on female power and heritages transhistorically. (For titles and descriptions, see the online catalog.)
For nearly 40 years, Dashu has presented hundreds of slide talks at universities, community centers, bookstores, schools, libraries, prisons, galleries, festivals and conferences around North America. Her work bridges the gap between academia and grassroots education. It foregrounds indigenous women passed over by standard histories and highlights female spheres of power retained even in patriarchal societies.
Dashu is known for her expertise on ancient female iconography in world archaeology, goddess traditions, and women shamans. She has also done extensive research on mother-right cultures and the origins of domination. The Women’s Power DVD has been screened in the US, Britain, Netherlands, Italy, and Australia.
Visit www.suppressedhistories.net to see her slideshow catalog, articles, and excerpts from The Secret History of the Witches, a forthcoming sourcebook on European folk religion, women’s culture, and the witch hunts.
Max speaks with Joanna about drummers, dreamers, diviners. Oracles, seers, and prophets. Medicine women, healers, curanderas, and herbalists. Women who invoke spirit. Rainmakers. Ecstatic dancers, shapeshifters, sky-goers. A global view of female shamans from the Suppressed Histories Archives…
Music: ”Dunia Djamou” (from The Divas from Mali) by Sali Sidibe
Julieta Casimiro es una sanadora mazateca. Además de su labor como sanadora indígena, Julieta ha ganado reconocimiento internacional como miembro del Concejo Internacional de las Trece Abuelas Indígenas – un grupo de maestras espirituales, mujeres medicinales y guardianas de sabiduria, desde su fundación en 2004.
Dona Julieta y sus hijas Lourdes y Eugenia hablan con Joanna sobre su trabajo como sanadoras con los hongos Teonanacatl. Ellas se refiere a los hongos como “los niños santos.”
Julieta Casimiro is a Mazatec Healer. As well as her work as an indigenous healer, Julieta has gained international recognition as a member of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers – a group of spiritual elders, medicine women and wisdom keepers since its founding in 2004.
Joanna speaks with Doña Julieta (and her daughters Lourdes and Eugenia) about her work as a healer with the Teonanacatl mushrooms. Julieta refers to them as niños santos (little saints).
This is the 2nd part of the interview with Tim: Tim speaks with Joanna about his experience with entheogens, shamans as a primal force of spirituality, the paradox of polarities, the co-evolution of mind and matter…
Jacob Freydont-Attie is a writer, independent filmmaker, and freethinker based in rural northern California. A second generation flower-child, he was raised in the woods without electricity, television, telephone, indoor plumbing, or Hostess products. At fifteen he moved to Los Angeles to attend Beverly Hills High School where he began a tumultuous relationship with theater arts that would one day lead to his film “String Theory”. With a little inspiration from the spirit molecule, Jake and Joshua Milrad – co-directors – set out to turn the script of “String Theory” into a movie. ”String Theory” was filmed on MiniDV over a month in the winter of 2000 with a micro-budget well under a hundred thousand dollars. Most of the cast and crew were unpaid or underpaid professionals thankful to be working on a movie with, “meaning.” In June of 2010, Vanguard Cinema released String Theory nationally on DVD.The focus of Jake’s work remains the intersection of art, science, and spirituality. He believes the true nature of art is always both political and transgressive. He hopes to muster the energy to make another film soon.
Jacob speaks with Joanna about the making of his film “String Theory”, Carlos Castaneda, psychedelics, a life-changing experience with DMT, physics & ethics…
Linda Tucker was educated at the universities of Cape Town and Cambridge, where she specialised in Jungian dream psychology and medieval symbolism. She began her research into the White Lion mysteries after being rescued from lions in the Timbavati region of South Africa in 1991 by a shangaan shaman woman, Maria Khosa. In 2002, Linda Tucker founded the Global White Lion Protection Trust, to ensure the protection of these magnificent creatures. WhiteLions.org
Linda speaks with Joanna about her amazing initiation in Africa and the extraordinary message for our times from these special beings…
Music: “El Medahey” (from ‘Apocalypse Across The Sky’) by Master Musicians of Jajouka
David Cumes, M.D. was born in South Africa and received his medical training at the Witwatersrand Medical School in Johannesburg. Specializing in urology, Dr. Cumes was trained and has previously taught on the staff at Stanford Medical Center. He has published extensively in professional journals and currently has a private practice in Santa Barbara, CA.
Although Dr. Cumes has had classical training in a profession that relies heavily on science and analytical reasoning, he has pursued a personal quest that evokes his intuitive and introspective capabilities. After extensive travel which included time with the San Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, Dr. Cumes explored the role wilderness plays in personal healing and transformation. He founded a company called Inward Bound, and leads groups on healing journeys to remote wilderness areas. As a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School of North America, he has formal training as a wilderness guide.
He has published three books. In the first, “Inner Passages Outer Journeys”, Dr. Cumes explores the restorative power of nature. It discusses practical theories of wilderness psychology and synthesizes relevant aspects of ancient traditions such as yoga and Kabbalah. The second book, “The Spirit of Healing” , discusses the interrelationship between the patient, the healer, and the Divine Force or “Field” as essential components of the healing process. The book is filled with personal anecdotes and insights from his surgical practice, his travels and his studies of ancient healing wisdom, shamans and San trance dancers. More recently Dr. Cumes has been initiated as an inyanga or sangoma (South African shaman.) The third book is about this journey. He has established a healing center in the far north of South Africa (Soutpansberg mountains) where he has built “Tshisimane”.
David Cumes speaks with Joanna about the rol of wilderness in healing transformation, the calling of the ancestors, his own initiation as a Zulu sangoma (shamanic healer), the multiple factors in the healing process…
Matthew Hornback is a Licenced Massage Therapist and Health Care interpreter. He is currently working with Gender Alchemy and more recently with Earth Medicine, a project to restore a healing relationship between humans and the sentient land, and a path to reconcile a disconnected and abusive species. He is also working with Red Lightning, a Gender Alchemy camp at Burning Man, with a focus on the Healing Domes and Earth Medicine. He hopes to, soon, dawn Earth Medicine as a 501(c). http://forloveoflife.wordpress.com
Matthew speaks with Joanna about defending the forest, healing the individual/collective shadow, transmissions from the medicine teacher plants, his experiences with the Forest Being…
Pam Montgomery is the originator of Green Terrestrial Herbal Products of Vermont and was one of the founding members of the Northeast Herbal Association where she served as their president for four years. For a decade, Pam was on the Executive Council of the Board of Directors of United Plant Savers, an organization dedicated to preservation of our native medicinal plants. Pam has been organizing the Green Nations Gathering for nineteen years and has presented the Spirit Healing Conference and the Healing With Flowers Conference. She teaches workshops internationally on herbal medicine, Plant Spirit Healing, and spiritual ecology. Pam is the author of “Plant Spirit Healing; A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness” and “Partner Earth; A Spiritual Ecology”, and a contributing author in “Planting the Future”.
Pam speaks with Joanna about developing an intimate relationship with plants / beyond Gaia theory / the value of stillness / the Great Healing .
Dr. Edward Tick is the author of the groundbreaking book War and the Soul and founder of Soldier’s Heart, a veteran’s return and healing project based in Troy, NY. He is a practicing psychotherapist specializing in veterans with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). His pioneering work with PTSD or, in his words, “loss of the soul”, is the basis for War and the Soul. He continues his healing work with veterans and other trauma survivors with innovative yet time-honored methods. Ed has extensively studied both classical Greek and Native American traditions and successfully integrates their methods into modern clinical work. A widely published writer, he is also the author of The Golden Tortoise: Journeys in Viet Nam, Sacred Mountain: Encounters of the Vietnam Beast, and The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine.
Josie RavenWinghas made the study of multi-cultural healing systems and spiritual paths her life’s work. An internationally known workshop presenter and author The Book of Miracles: The Healing Work of Joao de Deus, The Return of Spirit: A Woman’s Call to Spiritual Action and A Season of Eagles, Josie began working as a pioneer in dance therapy and later as a psychotherapist with an eclectic and holistic approach. She has been teaching workshops in the fields of healing and spirituality since 1984 throughout the US and abroad, combining her background in psychology and her own inner guidance with knowledge and training from many world traditions. In addition to her workshops she offers powerful individual healing work and spiritual training upon request.
Margaret De Wys is a professor at Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts as well as a composer and sound installation artist.
A dramatic shift in her life set her on a pilgrimage to Ecuador and to becoming a world traveler and explorer dedicated to the preservation and transmission of traditional wisdom in the modern world. She has recently been published, her book came out in January 2009: Black Smoke: A Woman’s Journey of Healing, Wild Love and Transformation in the Amazon which chronicles her encounter with a Shuar master of medicina milenaria who guided her into a world of potent visionary plants, harrowing initiations and ritual purification.
Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. She is the author of many books, including most recently, From Grief into Vision: A Council; Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; Tree: Essays and Pieces, A Sabbath Among the Ruins, Looking for the Faces of God and Writing For Your Life.
Rocky Caravelli is the primary facilitator and founder of Awakening in the Dream house, an innovative treatment and rehabilitation center near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, that uses ibogaine, an entheogenic alkaloid of the iboga plant. He worked at the Ibogaine Association for 1 year and has run the Dream House for 2 1/2 years. He also spent 2 years providing treatments in the underground US community.
Martin Prechtel is a thinker, writer and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. As a half blood Native American with a Pueblo Indian upbringing, his life took him from New Mexico to the village of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala where he became a full village member of the Tzutujil Mayan population, and eventually served as a principal, responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories through the rituals of adult rights of passage. Once again residing in his native New Mexico, Martín teaches at his international school Bolad’s Kitchen.
Antero Alli is a writer, performer and filmmaker. In 1977 he began developing a paratheatre medium combining techniques of physical theatre, dance and Zazen meditation for accessing the internal landscape; he is founder/director of ParaTheatrical ReSearch. Since 1993 Antero has been writing and directing his own feature-length art films, several of which have received high critical praise at prestigious filmthreat.com. He is also a practicing astrologer and the author of numerous books some of which serve as textbooks for courses he occasionally teaches online.
Cynthia Jurs is an authorized Buddhist teacher (dharmacharya) who has practiced in the Tibetan Vajrayana and Zen Buddhist traditions for almost 30 years. In 1994 she received formal transmission from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh to teach engaged Buddhism and now directs the Open Way Sangha in Santa Fe, New Mexico, teaching an approach to living in awareness through practice, ceremony, retreat, and pilgrimage. Cynthia also teaches meditation to environmental activists at the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont. In 1990 she met Charok Rinpoche, a 106-year-old lama living in a cave in Nepal, and received a Tibetan practice to bring healing and protection to the Earth. The practice involves filling earth treasure vases and burying them in places of need around the world. As a filmmaker, she recently directed and produced the film, Turning Prayer Into Action: Indigenous Grandmothers Meet the Bioneers. Her next film will document the pilgrimages of the earth treasure vases in order to share the story and practice more widely.
Michael Brownstein is a poet, teacher and the author of three novels: Country Cousins, Self-Reliance, and The Touch. As a result of his involvement in the anti-globalization movement he wrote World on Fire, from which he has read widely at conferences and universities, including at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in South Africa and the World Social Forum in Brazil. His web site, Healing Dick, is dedicated to healing the heart of Dick Cheney, because “Dick is America, America is Dick.”
Bradford Keeney Ph.D. is recognized as an elder shaman and spiritual teacher in cultures throughout the world. He is the author of Profiles of Healing, an eleven-volume encyclopedia of the world’s healing practices and an autobiography entitled Bushman Shaman as well as several classics in the field of psychotherapy and numerous titles for the popular press. With his website Shaking Medicine he invites us to go beyond modernity to the oldest culture on Earth to find true magic and power.
President and co-founder (with wife Lena Stevens) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten year apprenticeship with a Huichol Maracame shaman in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition he is studying intensively with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Pacos shamans in the Andes in Peru. He is a licensed Clinical Social Worker, Life coach, master teacher and author of ten books and numerous articles.
Joanna presents a blessing ceremony by Dave Courchene (Nii Gaani Aki Inini), Elder and spiritual advisor from the Anishnabe Nation, Eagle Clan. Dave is the visionary behind The Turtle Lodge the First Nation’s Center for Learning and Healing in Sagkeeng, Manitoba, Canada. A documentary about his vision and journey The 8th Fire made by Cindy and Andy Pickard premiered October 13, 2007 in Austin, Texas.
Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and advocate of the use of psychedelic substances for enriching people’s intellectual, psychological and spiritual beliefs through the psychedelic experience. John Lash is the author of Not in His Image and Quest for the Zodiac, co-founder and principal author of the Metahistory.org and one of the foremost exponents of the power of myth to direct and shape an individual’s life, as well as history itself.
Jeremy Narby is anthropologist and writer who spent several years living with the Ashaninca in the Peruvian Amazon cataloging indigenous uses of rainforest resources to help combat ecological destruction. Narby has written three books, as well as sponsored an expedition to the rainforest for biologists and other scientists to examine indigenous knowledge systems and the utility of Ayahuasca in gaining knowledge. Since 1989, Narby has been working as the Amazonian projects director for the Swiss NGO, Nouvelle Planete.
Sandra Ingerman is an author and lecturer who teaches workshops internationally on shamanic journeying, healing, and reversing environmental pollution using spiritual methods. She is recognized for bridging ancient cross-cultural healing methods into our modern culture addressing the needs of our times.
The fourth in a series of five talks with John Lash on Entheogens and the Planetary Shift. The fourth talk deals with the Planetary Shift – Society or the Species
Psychotherapist, writer and researcher who has been involved in the study of transformations of consciousness since graduate school when he worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) on the Harvard Psilocybin Projects. He co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience, and was editor of The Psychedelic Review. He is the co-founder and president of the Green Earth Foundation, an educational and research organization dedicated to the healing and harmonizing of the relationships between humanity and the Earth.
Geoff Oelsner has built a following as a performer both of his own songs and of poems which he sometimes sets to music or chants and recites to the accompaniment of guitar, harmonica, dulcimer, autoharp, harmonium, and the shruti box (a drone instrument from India). He has released 2 CD’s of original songs, Morning Branches and Ordinary Mystery with musician friends, including Kelly Mulhollan and Leslie. Geoff has published a collection of his poetry, Native Joy: poems songs visions dreams (1963-2003) (2003, Trafford) and his work has been featured in several other books, including Writing Poetry from the Inside Out by Sandford Lyne (Sourcebooks Inc., 2007). His new book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature (2012) is now available from Lorian Press.
Olivier Clerc is a writer, translator and editorial consultant, specializing in spirituality, shamanism, health, personal development and human relationships. Olivier has crossed paths with many famous authors and teachers whose books he has translated into French, and with whom he often trained. Among them are Stan Grof, Marshall Rosenberg (founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication), Don Miguel Ruiz, and many others. He is the author of 8 books, including Modern Medicine: The New World Religion: How Beliefs Secretly Influence Medical Dogmas and Practices, and Invaluable Lessons from a Frog: Seven Life-Enhancing Metaphors.
Deena Metzger
Tata Erick González, also known by his Tolteca-Azteca name OmeAkaEhekatl and his Haida tribal name Gaada (supernatural light). Tata Erick is a lineage-holder and Daykeeper of the Cakchikel Maya of Guatemala. He trained in the ceremonial way for 32 years with indigenous healers and medicine people from North, Central, and South America and was ceremonially initiated as a Mayan Aj Qij (staff of light) in 1994. He is founder of 
Dennis McKenna is an American ethnobotanist and ethnopharmacologist. He has authored numerous scientific articles and books, among them - The Invisible Landscape – with his brother 
Leslie M. Browning is a poet,writer, and longtime student of Religion, Spirituality, Nature, Language and Philosophy as such these themes permeate her work. Raised a Catholic, she studied both the Traditional and Apocrypha doctrine before her spiritual search eventually crossed into the other religions of the world, compelling her to investigate: Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, Druidry and Shamanism.
Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a psychiatrist with over fifty years experience researching non-ordinary states of consciousness.
, 
The renowned anthropologist 
Eliot Cowan is the author of Plant Spirit Medicine, and a fully initiated Tsaurirrikame (shaman) in the Huichol (Wixárika) Indian tradition. Eliot is the founder of the the Blue Deer Center and is a member of the Council of Elders for the Temple of Sacred Fire Healing. As a provider at the Blue Deer Center, Eliot Cowan offers 
Hella Neumann earned her MA in Art and Education from the University of Berlin. In 1975 she founded and directed (for 18 years) Atelier unterm Dach Art School in Germany. This work included Art Therapy, Bio Energetics and the Biodynamic Massage of Gerda Boyesen, London. In 1994 she began intensive study of Systemic Constellation Work in Germany with the founder, Bert Hellinger. Living and working nearly three years in a German monastery allowed for an intense period of meditation. This time away from the loud sounds of the world helped refine the sensitivity with which she now tunes in to the non-physical realms of the Ancestral Field. During two years in the Australian rainforest and an extended visit to South Africa she connected to indigenous ancestral wisdom and to the power of ritual which is an important part of her work. She began her own constellation work in 1997 under the name “Songs of the Ancestors,” leading Family Constellation workshops, private constellations and training facilitators. She remains in regular touch with Bert Hellinger and his evolving work and attends the national and international conferences in Germany. Hella lives in Germany and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Max Dashu is an artist, writer, and teacher . Max founded the 
Julieta Casimiro es una sanadora mazateca. Además de su labor como sanadora indígena, Julieta ha ganado reconocimiento internacional como miembro del 
This is the 2nd part of the interview with Tim: Tim speaks with Joanna about his experience with entheogens, shamans as a primal force of spirituality, the paradox of polarities, the co-evolution of mind and matter…
Jacob Freydont-Attie is a writer, independent filmmaker, and freethinker based in rural northern California. A second generation flower-child, he was raised in the woods without electricity, television, telephone, indoor plumbing, or Hostess products. At fifteen he moved to Los Angeles to attend Beverly Hills High School where he began a tumultuous relationship with theater arts that would one day lead to his film “String Theory”. With a little inspiration from the spirit molecule, Jake and Joshua Milrad – co-directors – set out to turn the script of “String Theory” into a movie. ”String Theory” was filmed on MiniDV over a month in the winter of 2000 with a micro-budget well under a hundred thousand dollars. Most of the cast and crew were unpaid or underpaid professionals thankful to be working on a movie with, “meaning.” In June of 2010, Vanguard Cinema released String Theory nationally on DVD.The focus of Jake’s work remains the intersection of art, science, and spirituality. He believes the true nature of art is always both political and transgressive. He hopes to muster the energy to make another film soon.
Linda Tucker was educated at the universities of Cape Town and Cambridge, where she specialised in Jungian dream psychology and medieval symbolism. She began her research into the White Lion mysteries after being rescued from lions in the Timbavati region of South Africa in 1991 by a shangaan shaman woman, Maria Khosa. In 2002, Linda Tucker founded the Global White Lion Protection Trust, to ensure the protection of these magnificent creatures.
David Cumes, M.D. was born in South Africa and received his medical training at the Witwatersrand Medical School in Johannesburg. Specializing in urology, Dr. Cumes was trained and has previously taught on the staff at Stanford Medical Center. He has published extensively in professional journals and currently has a private practice in Santa Barbara, CA.
Matthew Hornback is a Licenced Massage Therapist and Health Care interpreter. He is currently working with Gender Alchemy and more recently with Earth Medicine, a project to restore a healing relationship between humans and the sentient land, and a path to reconcile a disconnected and abusive species. He is also working with Red Lightning, a Gender Alchemy camp at Burning Man, with a focus on the Healing Domes and Earth Medicine. He hopes to, soon, dawn Earth Medicine as a 501(c). 
Pam Montgomery is the originator of Green Terrestrial Herbal Products of Vermont and was one of the founding members of the Northeast Herbal Association where she served as their president for four years. For a decade, Pam was on the Executive Council of the Board of Directors of United Plant Savers, an organization dedicated to preservation of our native medicinal plants. Pam has been organizing the Green Nations Gathering for nineteen years and has presented the Spirit Healing Conference and the Healing With Flowers Conference. She teaches workshops internationally on herbal medicine, Plant Spirit Healing, and spiritual ecology. Pam is the author of “Plant Spirit Healing; A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness” and “Partner Earth; A Spiritual Ecology”, and a contributing author in “Planting the Future”.
Dr. Edward Tick is the author of the groundbreaking book War and the Soul and founder of 
Margaret De Wys is a professor at Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts as well as a composer and sound installation artist.
Rocky Caravelli is the primary facilitator and founder of 
