Podcast: Vanessa Chakour, Awakening Artemis and Rewilding Nature
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Herbalist and environmental activist Vanessa Chakour encourages you to rewire your perception of weeds, reclaim your wild nature, and deepen your intimacy with the living earth.
Vanessa Chakour is an herbalist, holistic arts educator, environmental activist, and the founder of Sacred Warrior. Sacred Warrior utilizes experiential learning to explore plant medicine, martial arts, wildlife conservation, meditation, and more.
Chakour’s new book Awakening Artemis: Deepening Intimacy With the Living Earth and Reclaiming Our Wild Nature, a healing guide that blends practical plant-based knowledge and spiritual reconnection for deeper communication with and respect for the natural world, is on-sale now.
In this episode Rabbi Rami and Chakour examine the value of weeds, transforming mythical guardians into real ones, making room for wildness in an industrial western world, “peeling back layers of conditioning,” the importance of remembering your wild nature, and renaturing the world around you.
[Read: “Druidry for Beginners.”]
Chakour discusses how the human perception of weeds and nature so closely aligns with a patriarchal society that often treats women in a similar manner. The weed is a tiny thing that seems so insignificant, Chakour explains, but it can quickly spread and grow and overtake an area. Humans often try to control land, she explains. Rather than taming the land, however, mankind should be working with it. Rewilding is letting the land heal.
Rami and Chakour finish their conversation discussing mindful wildcrafting to ensure that as you build your relationship with plants and nature you are not accidentally causing harm.
“All of our ancestors worked with plant medicine. And we’ve become blind to these plants that are around us that have uses to help us to heal, they’re woven into folklore, history, medicine, food. We’re walking around oblivious to all of this history around us that can also connect us back to our ancestral roots.”
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Want more on earth medicine? Read our interview with curandera Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz: “Embracing Earth Medicine.”
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