Audio File Name€¦ · Web viewSo spagyrics is the subset of alchemy that we work with. I can spell it actually too because it's a weird-sounding word. It's S-P-A-G-Y-R-I-C-S

Plant Medicine Summit™Alchemy for the Spirit:

Allying with Plant Spagyrics to Support Your Spiritual JourneyMicah Nilsson

David: Welcome to everyone. This is David Crow, your host of the fourth annual Plant Medicine Summit where we are exploring all the mysteries and the magic of plant medicine in ancient and modern traditions. In our segment today, we're going to be exploring classical alchemical preparations and uses of herbs. Our guest is Micah Nilsson. Micah founded Al-Kemi in 1991 with her partner, Paul. It became a natural outgrowth of their work in herbalism and Western esoterics. Bringing together plant healing, alchemical philosophy, and the wisdom of nature's intelligence, Paul and Micah create spagyric medicines for body, spirit, and soul. Micah, welcome.

Micah: Thank you. Thank you for having me, David.

David: Well, this is a big subject, something I am personally very interested in. I know a lot of people will very much enjoy hearing your perspective and your background and your methods of using herbs in a very classical alchemical way. Let's get started with setting a little context here. Tell us, how did you get started in this work? Then we can go into what exactly this work is.

Micah: Okay. Good enough. I was always really interested in plants, in nature, in healing as a kid. I just was always out there playing with the plants and making herb preparations. As a young adult, I studied herbalism. I was really fascinated with the healing properties of plants. I also very much wanted to integrate that knowledge with herbalism in my spiritual practice and to bring all of that together because I felt like it all came from the same place. So as you said, in 1991, I met my partner, Paul. Paul was studying hermetic and Western esoterics and Kabbalah and, in particular, alchemy. Alchemical practice does work with minerals and metals, but you start with plant work for safety reasons. It's a lot safer to work with. He was very familiar with herbs. He didn't know enough about different ones to know which ones to work on. Of course, I was but I was looking for something more interesting to do with them. That's when we met and started our company, so Al-kemi, as you said. We worked to create extracts from plants and from minerals, following these ancient methods of alchemy and of spagyrics.

David: Oh, nice. Thank you. Good general introduction. But now, let's go back and discover some of those big words that have lots of meanings and lots of ways of being interpreted. Let's talk about alchemy first. What does that mean to you

Micah Nilsson | March 18, 2019 | p. 1

specifically and to your work? But the closely related term which we've already thrown out there is spagyrics. Let's give a general definition to these two really important words so that people can understand what exactly we're talking about.

Micah: Certainly. There is a really big learning curve with this, I know. We kind of joke that it's a system that's so old that it's new. It's so ancient that nobody has heard about it now. Alchemy, historically, I think of it as the ancient science for studying nature and for understanding nature. We don't know a lot about it from pre-Egyptian, but we do know it did exist then as some sort of science and we really see larger currents of it are in ancient Greece. That's where it starts to work its way into the Western philosophical canon and to mix with Kabbalah which is another big word we've thrown out there. This is a really intricate philosophical system. It comes from the Judaic mystery tradition. It's a very intricate system to study, but the ideas are pretty basic. The ideas are that the world is created gradually in these emanations of the divine. This divine energy steps down a little bit at a time, takes on different characteristics as it goes. I think of it as like a light that's going to different colored languages and changing a little bit. So down here on Earth, we think that everything that's created has a little bit of a spark of that divine energy in it. If we look at the leaves of a plant or the body of a human or the crystals of a rock or a gemstone, all those things have that divine quality within and we can access that.

So this is where the practical aspects of alchemy and spagyrics kind of come in. They're a very direct hands-on kind of way of working with those sparks and raising that energy back up so that you can re-enchant the material level of those beings. So spagyrics is the subset of alchemy that we work with. I can spell it actually too because it's a weird-sounding word. It's S-P-A-G-Y-R-I-C-S. That's a system that was created by Paracelsus in the 1500s. He had studied alchemy, but he was also a healer. He was a physician. So it's a combination of those two disciplines. He actually made that word up. He wasn't real shy about making up words if he felt there wasn't one that covered what he wanted to say. So the two root words, spien and agera, actually means separate and recombine. That's the kind of nutshell version of what we're doing in this work.

David: Nice. Thank you. Well, how does this differ from modern extraction methods? You're talking about separating and recombining. There's this principle that what you are separating and recombining is the divine essence or the spark of divinity that is in all of these different elemental forms. How is this different on a practical level in terms of the actual chemical methods of making tinctures or steam distillation of essential oils or something like that?

Micah: Well, it uses a lot of those different process. I think that one of the things that makes it very different is that it's actually drawing on all of those methods.


Separate and recombine, as we've said, we take a part of the different constituents of the plant. We do the alcohol extract because that was certain set of things. We do essential oil extractions. We also extract the minerals of the plant. That's a system that's really unique to this work. We purify each of those constituents, and then we put it back together again as a whole. That's the recombine part of it. Because in this work, all aspects of the plant are considered important. Nothing gets left out. Nothing gets negated. So it's not homeopathy. There are physical aspects to the medicines that you make. In the end, there's a taste, there's a color, and so forth. But everything is purified and recombined and put back together again so that it can be a very concentrated preparation of the chemistry of the plant certainly but also a much more focused vehicle for the intelligence of the plant.

We're working in three different levels. You mentioned this in your intro, the body, the spirit, and the soul. This is the aspect that Paracelsus added in his writings that kind of takes it from an esoteric practice of alchemy to a practical system of healing. He really believed in, and I do too, that each of those three levels -- the body, the spirit, the soul -- can be a source of balance or imbalance, right? A lot of illnesses show up in the physical, but it doesn't mean they originated there. They might have originated somewhere else, and we need to deal with it there. These levels are the same in all natural beings. So the body of a plant can act on the body of a person. The spirit of the plant can act on its spirit, the soul to its soul. So we'll target our processing to the final result to target the medicine and the effect that it's going to have on that person to carry that life force to the proper level. In this processing work, as I said, we're refining and concentrating the physical aspects. We're making the energetic levels a lot more subtle by varying degrees depending on the level that we're kind of aiming at, and there we're getting body, spirit, and soul. Most of the herbs I'm going to talk about today we work with at the spirit level. It's called the mercury level. That has to do with quickness and change and intelligence and kind of that idea of mediation and communication. A lot of the shamanic herbs are really nice at this level because they're communicating different messages between you and the plant itself.

This is a level of communion; that's how I like to think of it. You're having a communion between you and the plants through that spagyric. It's really important, I think, to understand that you need to meet it halfway. We're not going to just swig a bunch of it down, and then sit back and wait for it to do things to us. You have to work with it in the context of a practice. I think most people understand this that you're taking little doses and then you do some meditation or some movement or some sort of practice of spiritual work to add your own context to that. I think it is conversation versus asking a plant to lecture you on what's going on. I have a few of my favorites I would like to actually talk about and share with everyone today.


David: Yes, please. I think those to be very interesting. The context here that you have just set of consciously working with a plant and the kind of communication is very important. I think that a lot of people have a general sense that herbs can just be used in a simple symptomatic allopathic way to replace the allopathic medicines that they're on. I always like to emphasize the same point that you have just made which is that we have to make changes ourselves. We have to meet the plant halfway, and the plant will help us with our transformative effect. I see here in my notes that the herbs that you are going to be telling us about are all classified under the category of herbs for meditation and spiritual practice. I'll just turn it over to you and tell us what are these herbs and how can they help us with our meditation and spiritual practices.

Micah: Thank you. Thank you. The first one I want to talk about is rhodiola. This is a Tibetan herb. There are many different varieties of rhodiola, but the one we use is called Rhodiola sacra. It's the root of a very hardy succulent plant. It looks something like hens and chickens. People might be more familiar with. It grows in really harsh places in Tibet. It's a really tough little plant. It's used by the Tibetan monks as a spiritual food, they consider it. They'll take it to sustain themselves through long cycles of meditation and chanting. It is really supportive on that level. It's a great adaptogen. It's a really nice herb to help your body adapt and just remain well. On a more subtle level, the warrior monks would use it before battle. They would use it because it would help them see the future, see where the arrows were coming from and to fight effectively and also to plan their strategy and to see their victory and their path to that victory.

Now modern research has looked at rhodiola a little bit. It's found that it increases your endorphins. Endorphins are our own painkiller and happiness chemicals. These are chemicals that you get if you eat really spicy food or super vigorous exercise. People might be familiar with that feeling. Rhodiola works with that. So it's a great antidepressant. I found this in my own work with it. Whenever we work with a new plant, before we do any extraction on it, we'll both chew it every day for a couple of weeks and just hang out with it and get to know it. When I was working with rhodiola, I was actually driving somewhere and I missed my turn off by two exits because I was so fascinated by this beautiful spiral pattern in the rust on the back of the dump truck which sounds ridiculous, but it really gives you this really nice uplifted feeling of delight that I really enjoy.

In the works that we do with it, we're going to combine all of these different influences and different levels and different aspects, that chemistry I mentioned and the spiritual attributes. I also find it's really important to think about the intelligence that that plant communicated to all the past users too, all those monks that have worked with this plant and pull it all together. The spagyric we


do with rhodiola is a very strengthening physical tonic certainly. It's a great antidepressant as I said. It works a little faster than things like St. John's wort, so it's a nice one for that. But it's a great herb of vision and of seeing a positive future. That's part of why I wanted to start with that herb here in this list because I like rhodiola for starting any practice. I think it's a great one for setting your goals and your intent for the work. I feel like it helps you focus your will like an arrow to that target. If we think back to those warrior monks who were seeing the future path of that arrow, your mind is like that arrow. It's very bright and clear and focused. You're seeing that arrow hit the target of what you want to achieve as if it's already happened. I think that sort of commitment is really important to magical manifestation work.

It's also a really nice herb for mindfulness too. Observing your thoughts and just watching them go by without attachment, it can be a very helpful herbs for that. Again, we go back to the idea of the mind being like an arrow. Once it's released and let go the path it's set, there's not much point in grasping at it or trying to change it. You just let it flow without clinging, without holding. My silly dump truck story I mentioned, I mean rhodiola really helps you get this quality of just delighted absorption in whatever is happening. So it's a great one for being in that moment where every moment is eternal, but it's kind of fleeting. It's not attached to the moments before or after. It's just perfect in what it is.

Those are some of the things I really rely on this plant for singly. I also like it mixed with other herbs. We put rhodiola into a lot of different other formulas because it adds a really nice positive direction to their effects. It also adds momentum to the other herbs too. It can give them a little bit more push in what they're going to do. It also can ease some of the changes that other herbs make. If I'm working on a formula for somebody that's trying to get help with a difficult transition, rhodiola can make that whole process a little more positive and a little more constructive. It's just a good general harmonizer.

David: Nice. Excellent. Any contraindications or herb-drug interactions to be concerned about or contraindicated before operating heavy equipment?

Micah: Well, only if you don't want to miss your exit. It's a little bit of a stimulant. I wouldn't take it too late in the day. It does affect some of the brain chemicals. If you are on something else that affects your brain chemicals, that would be something to consider the interactions of. But it is considered a pretty generally very safe herb, especially the small activating but meeting them halfway doses that we're talking about here.

David: Nice. Well, you have a specific type of product and a specific type of preparation. When you are using spagyrics, are there any generalized concerns that people should know about in terms of are they more concentrated than typical


tinctures? Should we be taking less? Do you give specific instructions with these types of preparations that are somewhat different or the same as what people will find at the retail level? How about a little orientation to the specific ways of using spagyrics?

Micah: Sure. They are more concentrated. The least concentrated preparation we do, you still only dose at five to ten drops a couple of times a day. I know most tinctures out there, you're looking at 30 and up. They are much more concentrated. Again, depending on the herb, sedative herbs are going to be more sedatives; stimulating herbs are going to be more stimulating. The main guideline I give people, aside from specific herb discussion, is to taste it. Sit down, put it under your tongue. Don't be afraid of that flavor. Sit with it for a few minutes and really connect with it and just really taste it a little bit because that flavor of the herb is an important part of what it's communicating to you and what it has to say to you. I think that's a really important part of herbalism that we miss if we're doing capsules or pills, that sort of thing.

David: Right. Okay. Well, that's a good orientation to give a little perspective because the dosage is significantly reduced with these higher concentrations.

Micah: It is quite a bit. Like the rhodiola and the other herbs I'll be talking about, they're even more concentrated than the level that I mentioned. So these, you're only taking two or three drops, because again you're asking the herb to offer what it has but not do all of the work for you. We are on to one of the next ones that I work with a little bit if we want to hear more about my herb list.

David: Yes, please.

Micah: Okay. The next herb that I want to talk about is calamus. This is a medicinal root that I just adore. I love it. It's really one of my favorite plants insofar as I could have a favorite. It's kind of native to everywhere in a strange way. There are varieties of it in most continent. It's considered sacred to most people who find it. It's used to give strength and to give courage. The Mongols would plant it when they were invading an area. They'd put it in the land around the village they're going to invade. They would only drink water that had calamus steeped in it. The Lakota in this part of the world used it in similar ways to promote fearlessness in battle.

Now, my personal connection to it, it's actually my oldest plant ally. It's a plant that I have chewed on and worked with regularly since I was a teenager. I like to use it particularly when I'm hiking and wild crafting and looking for other plants. I think it's really helpful to help me find other plants. I've also done a lot of dream work with it. It's an excellent herb for helping you meet other plants, learn about them, see what they might be for. That's a very helpful ally for me with that.The


poet Walt Whitman was also a very, very fond of calamus. He called it leaves of joy. He chewed it for poetic inspiration. Interestingly, the Iroquois used it in a similar way. They chew it for strength and for clarity in their ceremonial singing.

Now, in Ayurveda, it's used in the Panchakarma cleansing system. It's considered to clear the Nadis, the subtle channels of the body. It's supposed to clear the mouth from blockages and stagnation and negativity so your vitality can flow. It's also considered the companion or the balancing herb to cannabis. If that's a plant that you work with, you might consider adding calamus to your regime with it. In Ayurveda, calamus is called the vacha which means truth. I think that really sums up its energy very well. It's an excellent herb for seeing and knowing and, in particular, speaking the truth and for having the courage to stand up for that and say it. So our spagyric that we work with that is calamus is very much about speech and communication. It's a great ally with friends that we know that speak at rallies or environmental social actions, things like that, to just fortify their speech, to give you that clarity of mind to see the truth, and then your courage to stand up for it and also articulate it in a moving and inspiring way.

You can also work with calamus with sacred sounds, so chanting or singing, as the Iroquois did, kirtan, any sort of devotional sound. It's really wonderful to facilitate that. As Walt Whitman and the native poets discovered, it really helps your words flow with power and with beauty. One of the good applications for calamus too is that energy clearing property that I mentioned that they rely on in Ayurvedic cleansing. It can be used if you'd practiced Tai Chi or Qigong, energy work like that, any work where you need your subtle energy to just flow unimpeded. It's used sometimes, the patient who is getting acupressure or acupuncture can take it so that those meridians flow a little bit better. Then on the flipside of that, one of the ways I always recommend it to people who do energy work, Reiki being a really good example, calamus can be a great herb for making sure that subtle energy that you're using to heal is coming through you rather than coming from you. It can really help you channel that truth from a higher source rather than from yourself so you're not risking getting tired, getting burned out. It's a really good ally for that. As I said, because it removes those energy blockages and stagnations, it's a good one for yoga too, particularly very flowing yoga where you're moving a lot from one pose into another. It can be very helpful for that.

David: Nice. Well, let's talk for a minute about some of the concerns about calamus because this is one of the herbs that's been flagged by the FDA as not being suitable for internal use even though as herbalists we know that it has a long history of being consumed. What are some of the safety concerns here when people are taking this highly concentrated, the spagyric preparations?


Micah: Calamus is a controversial one, I know. I mean, part of the issue with it is that there are different species of it, some more or less difficult for the liver to process. We work with American calamus. I think energetically, chemically, taste wise, just intuitively, it's a lot gentler. The Ayurvedic version is excellent for external use, but it tastes a little bit harsh. I think it's a little harsher on the liver as well. So I think that's one of those places you can let your senses guide you to what the best use of it. Many of the studies that looked at it and found problems with it, they were giving animals lots and lots of it which, of course, is never a great idea. You want to go with this as little as possible. It was also preexisting liver stuff. But if you do have liver issues, maybe it's an herb to just use externally or just the scent with or just use tiny, tiny drop doses of it, maybe just one drop just to taste it, work with it in a particular practice for a day or two, and then just leave it aside for a while. As I said, I've been working with it on a near daily basis since I was a teenager, which is long ago, more long ago than I care to admit, but I know it is a problematic herb. If it's something that concerns you, best leave it alone because I don't like to bring fear into what you're working with. There's a lot of different options. But I do find it's just the best herb for facilitating that clearness of speech.

David: Good answer. I think what's most important is that there are several distinct species.

Micah: There are.

David: There's quite a bit of toxicity difference actually between the species and then, of course, the dosages. If we have the correct species and we are using it correctly, we're going to get the best results. If we are using species that are more toxic, we have to be extra careful. Thank you for that clarification. What's the next herb on this important list of treatments or supporting meditation and spiritual practice?

Micah: Well, I'd like to just jump in to kind of more of a category of herbs here which is healing trees. These are really important category of herbs that a lot of herbalists and aromatherapists work with, that we play with a little bit too, that I really enjoy connecting with. So here, I'm reminded of a really beautiful quote from the healer Brooke Medicine Eagle. She says, "My elders have said to me that the trees are the teachers of the law. As I grow less ignorant, I begin to understand what they mean." I really like that as an idea of what the trees are. If we think about from an evolutionary standpoint, plants are a lot older than us, obviously. Trees are the oldest beings among the plants. There are many individual trees that are far, far older than any of us will ever be. So we could say they know a lot more about living maybe than we do. Plants, in general, can't really move and so as the environment changes and time cycles pass and animals go through and so forth, they can't pick up and run away from something trying to eat them. They


have to use their biology and they have to use their chemistry to interact with their environment. As the oldest of the plant beings, trees have the most practice at this.

So a lot of sacred trees that humans work with, these very resinous ones, that resin is created as a defense or as a protection. Myrrh, a very famous resin that a lot of people work with as an essential oil and incense, myrrh is exuded by the tree in response to being wounded to prevent infection and seal off the damage. Frankincense, another very famous resin, that's actually a cloud of sunscreen essential oil that the tree emits to protect itself from the harsh desert sun. Then sandalwood, generally, as a lot of herbs do, will increase its oil content all over when it's stressed out. Another more kind of obscure word that I'll talk about in a couple of minutes here, agarwood. That actually will fill the damaged, rotted sections of itself as it grows with this very hard lacquer. All of these responses are the tree having a conversation with its environment and responding to what the environment is saying to it. All of these resins are very sacred substances within all different cultures. Our own word perfume comes from perfumare meaning by the smoke. The idea was that the smoke of something burning carries our prayers and our wishes and our communication up to the heavens where the gods can hear them. It's also a form of sacrifice. We're taking something tangible, little chunk of resin. We're burning it. We're making it into something ethereal in the form of an aromatic smoke. We're sacrificing it from our world into a higher one. Which particular plants are used for this and the terminology and so forth really varies across cultures, but the traditions are very similar in a really beautiful way.

I mentioned earlier that in our spagyric practice, we're working with different aspects of the plant. In spagyric work, the essential oil is considered to carry the soul of the plant. That's where we believe that the most eternal and archetypal and divine level of that plant being resides. Since every aspect of a plant goes into that final spagyric, they're all available for connection. Aromatic plants, of course, are more familiar to people for external use as in the perfumes and the oils and the incense. But they can be really amazing internally as a spagyric too. I do want to say here too, I'm not talking about using essential oils internally. Don't go eat essential oils, not a good idea. But spagyrics, as we prepare them, there's a whole line that we do that do include essential oils as part of that sole component that you can ingest safely. It's a really interesting way of working with them.

Sandalwood is one of my favorites with this. It's sandalwood because it's used for sandals because it's antifungal. There's a great example of the tree creating some effect for some particular purpose, and then we're using it for the same purpose in a different way. It's used as in incense and an oil because it's calming to the mind. The term that's used in Eastern religions, which I love, is monkey


mind. When your mind is just being distracted like a monkey, we burn the sandalwood in the temple, everyone chills, and then we can all meditate without that brain chatter going. Internally, sandalwood has that same effect but magnified. When you take a couple of drops of our sandalwood, there is almost an audible hush that goes across your mind. All of your worries and your cares and that kind of inner monologue just dissolves. You're left with a very clear and calm and empty mind. It reminds me of the Zen concept of what's called original mind. You're not stupefied or sedated, you're not sleepy, but you're also not activated or busy. Your mind is just open, and it's like a mirror. It's just receiving and accepting everything, not holding on to any of it. Sandalwood is a really nice facilitator of that state, again in conjunction with meditation. You'll find that you reach that very open state much more quickly.

The next one in our work with trees is agarwood. You might be familiar with this one as an essential oil person, I imagine.

David: Yes, and the wood itself also.

Micah: Yes. It's gorgeous. It's so beautiful. The agarwood tree is the source of a resin called oud, O-U-D. As I mentioned, the tree grows in very wet, baggy, sort of tropical places. The wood will get damaged and start to rot. The tree replaces that damaged wood with a resin. That resin is really heavy. It actually sinks in water. That leads to its name in Japan which is jinko meaning sinking incense. Agarwood is just revered everywhere that it grows, so Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Saudi Arabia and so forth, to the point where really good agarwood oil can run you tens of thousands of dollars per pound. It is an amazing, amazing heavenly smell.

Every species of it is different. We work with a few different kinds. Some are very sweet and very woody. They almost remind me of like nice barbecue smoke, that kind of sweet quality it has. Some are really resinous and more pine like, more like frankincense type quality. Then some are super funky. The perfumery term for this agrestic. It means barnyard smelling. Some of them are super funky like that. We work with a few different ones. We work with a Malaysian type, a Sumatran type, and also one from Laos. I think this is one of the real gifts of working with plants and considering them individual intelligences rather than saying all the agarwoods. We can work with each one separately and draw the unique gifts of each one. I think of it as like being at a party full of people, right? Everybody came to the same party. So there's probably some commonalities there. But every conversation you have is going to be a little bit different with each of these.

Every culture that's familiar with oud considers it sacred. It really does surround you in this just deep feeling of sacredness. It energizes your prayer, and it brings


the object of your prayer that much closer. It's like that par fuma idea of the smoke. It carries you to that level, and it activates whatever the goals of your prayer might be. It does this in a very balanced sort of way. It's very calming, but it's very clarifying to the mind. It's peaceful. Again, it's not sedating. It's just very peaceful. Some of these different ones energize sound. This is another one you could use if you really like to do chanting or singing. Some are excellent for activating your breath, so if you do pranayama or yoga or again for chanting where your breath needs to be very regular and very flowing. Some are really emptying to the mind like even beyond what sandalwood is. So if you want to go into very, very deep, long Zen meditations, they're great for that. Each one is very different, kind of has its own story. It's a really beautiful substance that way. I think it's worth exploring each one as its own type of being.

David: Nice. Thank you. Well, you obviously have a great wealth of knowledge about individual herbs, and you work with an extensive pharmacy. This is really just barely scratching the surface.

Micah: Barely.

David: Much bigger conversation. But I do want to mention to people that you can get the upgrade package where you can listen to the recording of this audio and get transcripts of the notes since Micah is giving us a lot of information very quickly. You can get that at plantmedicinesummit.com/upgrade.

Micah, I'm curious, in our final minutes here, if you could tell us a bit about your perspective on the relevance and importance of this ancient alchemical tradition that you are keeping alive and refining further and offering to people in a modern culture using very ancient techniques and concepts and philosophies. You have been working. You and Paul have been working intimately with the plants. I don't know your daily work routine. But from what I have gathered over the years, we have interacted a bit and I've experienced your products, I have the impression that the two of you are very deeply immersed in the process of alchemy. You have a lab. You are doing all of these extractions. You have dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of plants in your home that you are working with, the different stages of extracting and recombining into these finished products. I think that the two of you probably are the embodiments of this alchemical process. The two of you are probably made out of alchemical elixirs at this point after decades and decades of doing this.

Micah: Probably so.

David: I'm curious if you could sum up quickly, what is the effect of doing this work for this long with so many different plants? What kind of effect has it had on your body and mind and consciousness to be deeply immersed in alchemy, plant


alchemy and extraction, surrounded by them, smelling them, tasting them, using them, a wide variety of them at a very deep spiritual level? What would you say has come out of all of this, the effect of all of this in your physical wellbeing or mental and spiritual wellbeing that you can tell other people this is the result of doing this for years and years?

Micah: Well, for me, it's about that original connection to nature that I really felt. Paracelsus said that this medicine would come back when we really, really need it. I feel like beyond individual diseases, that loss of connection to nature, I think, is a really dire problem. That's something I have really found in this work. A plant is a plant. It has leaves. It has flowers. But it's also part of a forest, which is part of a valley, which is part of a continent, which is part of the planet and so forth. All of this work is very holographic in a way that every little part of it, however small it might be, is related to the whole that it belongs to. So that thread carried through where the spagyric processing is protecting the life of that plant as an expression of that divine life puts you into that bigger context.

Like the tree resins we were talking about, you're connecting with yourself to your own inner peace and wisdom, but you're also connecting to that tree's millions of years of conversation with its environment, with its kin, with its relations, and seeing everything that needs to be honored and protected just for that tree to exist. So there's an idea of the whole of the world's creation distilled into just that single little drop on your tongue, just that one little point. But then that little point leads out infinitely in all directions to everything that it's connected to. I think that's one of the great gifts of this system is connecting with that larger context and all those little sparks of divine. You said we're probably made of this by now, and it's true. One of the great aspects of this process is to make something. Take it yourself, you improve a bit. The next thing you make is better. You take that, you improve a bit. You're gradually taking those sparks back up to that level with you.

David: Well, nice. You didn't really answer my question on a personal level directly, but your answer also revealed a particular kind of consciousness and a kind of way of looking at the world. That's actually answering it very clearly. Thank you. Well, I know people are going to very interested in learning more about what you do and taking a look at your products possibly. I like to tell everybody your website which is Al-Kemi, but it's not the way you think it's spelled. It is A-L-hyphen-K-E-M-I-dot-com. Micah, what are people going to find if they come to visit your website?

Micah: Well, they will find the few herbs that I talked about today as well as 300 some other ones of singles and formulas. There's a lot of information on our site as well. As I mentioned, there is a big learning curve. There's a lot to read and a lot to learn about. I'm doing a special page for your listeners. It's al-kemi.com/shift. I


will collect a little list of the ones I talked about so you don't have to memorize everything I just said, and some others we think are really good companions to them too and also the top few articles about our art and how to understand what we're doing and what we create.

David: Okay. Wonderful. Some people, I imagine, might be interested in learning more directly from you. Do you take students? Do you have workshops? Can people come see your lab, or is it relatively private and offline?

Micah: It is relatively private just to keep the energy and the work contained. We do have a group of students that we teach. We also occasionally do small lectures and courses and so forth, kind of putting together a new idea of some of those that we might put out. So people can sign up for our newsletter on the website, and that would be probably the best way to find out about that. We do teach courses to a core group of students that we're working with now, but I'm not sure what we have planned for the future new wise. But we will come up with some new courses. We also put out a lot of articles through the website and through events that we do like this one. That's the main way that we're out there.

David: Okay. Great. Well, thank you very much. On behalf of everybody, I just want to say thank you for your wonderful, very informative, intriguing presentation and the kind of insights that you have gained from this work, the kind of worldview that it gives you, and also for making all these medicines for people that alleviate suffering. Thank you for not only your presentation but also to you and Paul for keeping alive this very ancient alchemical, very deeply spiritual aspect of herbal medicine.

Micah: Well, thank you. Thank you for giving me a spot to share that with all of your listeners and followers. I really appreciate that.

David: Well, it's my pleasure. Also, to everybody, thank you for joining us. Join us again on another segment of the Plant Medicine Summit.

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Audio File Name€¦ · Web viewSo spagyrics is the subset of alchemy that we work with. I can spell it actually too because it's a weird-sounding word. It's S-P-A-G-Y-R-I-C-S