Dreaming the cure: Diagnostic and Healing Practices in Folk Traditions

We hear much talk of healing and healers, in both indigenous and transplanted traditions. However, inner, intuitive methods of diagnosis and prescribed actions are often not handed down like the powerful medicines or larger rituals are. They arise from the worldview, and skills, of the healer and the sufferer, augmented by the setting and, sometimes, the chosen medicine.

Kat will describe an array of techniques and ways of thinking about what ails us. Folk illnesses such as susto are often described as 'culture-bound' conditions, having to do with trauma, depression, indecision, and buried memories. How does worldview affect wellbeing? Folk techniques of diagnosis and treatment are surprisingly relevant to many conditions we experience these days.

Kat will share, with stories and suggestions, some of the ways we currently perceive illness, balance, and luck, and how embracing some somatic or so-called ‘magical’ techniques can be helpful. Some of these approaches have entered this subculture through ritual healing practices, including psychedelic traditions, while others bridge generations and cultural boundaries. Particular focus will be on supporting perception, intuition, and visualization.

Tickets are sliding scale $35 - $60. If cost is prohibitive, please email [email protected] for volunteer and scholarship opportunities.

This event will be in-person and livestreamed!

Kathleen Harrison, M.A., is an ethnobotanist who has studied the uses of plants in Indigenous cultures in Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Hawaii and her home state of California. She specializes in nature-related beliefs, mythologies, and ritual healing practices; in their adaptations to colonization, language loss, and cultural blending. Her work with psychedelic plants and fungi is rooted in having come of age in the Bay Area in the 1960s, when her studies caught that wave of cultural transformation. She in an independent scholar who has taught for 35 years for various institutes and universities. Kat is currently a guest teacher in the guide-training program that is part of the Berkeley Center for Psychedelic Studies, and at the Berkeley Alembic. Kat continues her three decades of fieldwork and friendship with an extended family in the Mazatec diaspora in Mexico. With that indigenous family, and her own daughter (the artist and filmmaker Klea McKenna), she is making “Almost Visible,” a film about their intergenerational, cross-cultural relationship. She manages the ethnobotany resources of Botanical Dimensions, an organization she co-founded in 1985, dedicated to plant knowledge conservation.

Host or Publisher The Berkeley Alembic Foundation