Reforesting Our Minds & Decolonizing Our Relationship with Plant Medicine with Amanda Michele of Activated Living

Today Amanda Michele, a.k.a. @activatedliving shares with us her worldview as an indigenous Guarani sister, bridging our western world with indigenous thought and perspective. We discuss decolonizing our minds and worldviews, how important it is to decenter humanity as superior & how “earth is dying” rhetoric is a colonial construct. We also unpack the problems with the “permaculture” framework and how it doesn’t acknowledge active & living ancestral/native land care practices, mental/philosophical history of colonization & the importance of reforesting our minds. She gives us a lens on the current craze of pathological application of psychedelic plant medicines outside their historical cultural context, how they’re used in the Guarani culture, and how we can approach both plant medicine and our relationship with the planet in a better way. Amanda's Links:  Guarani-Kaiowa Fund 1:1 Consultations  The Activated Living Podcast  Instagram Tik Tok My links:  Support the podcast on Patreon here  Follow the podcast on Instagram here  Show Notes: Brazilian indigenous activist running for Congress who coined the term "reforesting our minds:" Sonia Guajajara “Earth is dying” is a colonial construct: climate destruction as a natural progression of what’s happening. “Mother earth is dying” rhetoric - that idea and thought is a very colonial construct There is a vast diversity of indigenous views and that they all support the fact that we are part of nature, not separate from it. Permaculture as a framework is creating a bit of a problem - narrative of these ancestral/native land care practices as lost practices. This is completely wrong because they’re still active and still alive, still actively being used re: land connection, farming, harvest. It's erasing the native, indigenous, first nation practices that are still here. Jennings coming to terms with having lived on colonized land her whole life & it barely having been mentioned or spoken about, or referred to. The point of colonization is to forget that there were original peoples of the land that actually had its own systems & in order for us to create something. Decolonizing seeps into all areas of our lives.  Colonizers didn’t have mindset of relationship with land - so seeing lush, beautiful spaces were seen as uninhabited rather than intelligently managed, which created a mindset  for clearing of the land and the people there. Plant medicine now being utilized as a pathological way of healing, vs.  reforesting our minds& decolonizing our minds before diving into plant medicines, native/indigenous gardening practives or things of that nature We got here from how we are thinking and how we view the world. Giving the mic to native/indigenous people, honoring those voices & perspectives is essential. & so much more!