Dennis McKenna: Kat Maier, registered herbalist, PA, has been a practicing herbalist for over 40 years. She is the founder and director of Sacred Plant Traditions LLC in Charlottesville, Virginia. She served as president of the board of United Plant Savers and received their first medicinal plant conservation award. As a clinical herbalist, she has taught at medical schools’ naturopathic symposia and internationally at herbal conferences. As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Chile, coupled with her training as a physician’s assistant, she weaves the language of biomedicine with traditional energetic systems and wisdom. Kat served on the admissions committee for the American Herbalist Guild for professional membership for over 10 years. She is the founder of Botanica Mobile Clinic, which offers support to mental health and at-risk community members at no cost. Kat is the co-author of several books, Bush Medicine of San Salvador Island, Bahamas, and the author of Energetic Herbalism, a guide to sacred plant traditions, integrating elements of vitalism, Ayurveda, and Chinese medicine. This book won the 2022 Gold Medal Nautilus Award. Kat, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to the Brain Forest Cafe.

Kat Maier: Thank you so much, Dennis. What a pleasure. What a pleasure and an honor. Very excited for this.

Dennis McKenna: Well, thank you. I think I got most of it right. Made a few stumbles there, but generally got it right. So, as we were talking before we went on, what I gleaned from reading your bio and knowing a bit about your background, you’ve been in this business a long time, and this has been a very personal journey for you. You’ve worked with a lot of organizations that certainly I recognize and respect, like the American Herbalist Guild and the United Plant Savers, which is very much in sync with our concerns. Our concerns are very holistic, so tell me a bit about your evolution, Kat. How did you get here? What has been your experience professionally and personally that’s got you to this place?

Kat Maier: Thank you, Dennis. I really appreciate you using the word personal, because it has been incredibly personal, and I’m sure the same for you. It’s really important that we separate our worlds, whether it’s home life, family life, and our work world. And yet, it’s really a calling. It’s the plants.

I love telling stories. Storytelling is such an integral part of medicine, traditional medicine, and history. As a clinician, it really is that narrative part. And yet, at the same time, I think one of the greatest inspirations for me was always the sacred. I was raised Catholic, and it was very elusive—where is the sacred? What is the sacred?

When I was 12, I saw a movie on the Peace Corps, and I thought, “Oh, wow. That’s the closest I’ve come to seeing a semblance or a resemblance of something that I wanted to pursue.” And so, as you read, I went to Chile when I was 19. I was in southern Chile, actually in the birthplace of Pablo Neruda [transcribed as Pablo Neguda] in Parral, Chile. He lived in Valparaíso [transcribed as Val Perezo], but Parral was actually his birthplace. That was a fascinating journey. I worked in health and nutrition because that was my love, but Chile at that time was really moving into Allopathic, modern medicine. There was a saying, “no seas bruja”—don’t be a witch. So, there was this whole intimation of, “don’t use herbs, don’t use barks, come into the world of modern medicine.”

And so, after a while, I befriended these elders and these incredible wise women, and they would take me out into the fields. It was the first time, Dennis, I ever experienced plant medicine, and the first time I really ever had an herbal tea. I grew up in suburbia; we were incredibly healthy and blessed with that. In that moment, something just really shifted. I know you know this, and your listeners do too. It’s that visitation, that “inhabitation”—I think I just made that word up—by the plants. Something really spoke to me, and I thought, “this is a whole other place. This is another realm. This is another place to be.”

I tried to pursue that, but we had other programs in education. Pinochet had just been in office, so it was a very challenging time, to say the least. We really had to stay within certain parameters. So, coming home, it was, “how do I pursue that? How do I find these plant medicines?” It was a long, circuitous journey. I had this experience with Rosemary Gladstar out of the California School of Herbal Studies, which is one of the oldest schools.

Then somebody said, “Look, if you’re really serious—because I love science, I love medicine—where you want to go is the Tunbridge Wells School of Medical Herbalism.” So, I went to Britain and applied. But I always wanted to work with low-income and marginalized communities, and I wouldn’t have had a license to practice over here. So, I came back and became a physician assistant because I didn’t want medical school. I didn’t want to put in all the time that medical school requires, and I was blown away. That two-year training was absolutely mind-blowing in how much it equipped us with the tools. The PA program was born after the Vietnam War to utilize all these amazing medics, and I really wanted to work rurally.

I worked in different offices, and I was just thinking about this earlier today: it was a dream. I had a dream to go to this valley in Virginia. I had gone to graduate school in DC for a while, and I studied with this 85-year-old healer. He had worked at NASA, had two PhDs, was a brilliant man, and was a profound healer. I studied with him, and he said, “Look, you want plants. I know this herb farm.” And so, it was a Biodynamic herb farm.

I often say we have dreams, and then there’s a “dreaming us.” The dream that was dreaming me was to have me on this farm learning Biodynamics. If anybody is familiar with that farming, there is such a difference when you plant according to the cosmology. It is Rudolph Steiner’s system: there are root days, leaf days, and flower days. Quite honestly, it is such a pain because it is very intricate. You are working with the cosmology, not just nutrition. When things are aligned for the root, we would see quite a difference, but it’s a hard practice to maintain.

So, I worked on the farm making minimum wage while having this huge medical school debt. That was my entrance to the plants. I never actually made it out to Rosemary’s school, but I would meet Appalachian neighbors who would take me into the woods and teach me the plants. Mark Blumenthal, our dear friend, will often introduce me at conferences and say, “Now, this is the first community-created herbalist that I know.” This is because I worked in my rural community for seven years without calling myself an herbalist, until other people started referring to me that way.

I studied the plants on my own, which was in some ways a torturous journey. After a lot of different training, I opened up a clinical herbal school after practicing for about 15 years, because there really weren’t high-level schools at that time. This was 30 years ago. We opened the school, I had clinics, and I taught clinical programming. What’s so fascinating is the evolution of herbalism. We started out 30 years ago being kind of biomedical and symptomatic. David Hoffman, our brilliant friend, had a great textbook called Medical Herbalism, which was more Allopathically based.

Then we came into energetics. I had teachers who taught Ayurveda, and I did a deep, intensive study of Ayurveda, and then five-element, five-phase theory. The more I learned energetic patterns, the more I realized there’s this whole other framework. Now, this is the way so many of the schools and programs look through the energetic lens. It’s magnificent because it mirrors our nature and our landscape: are we damp, are we dry? It’s that mirroring of our outer landscape.

Dennis McKenna: Well, that’s very interesting. So, you basically started out with a very firm grounding in biomedicine, medicine, and science. You’re familiar in that realm. But what I’m hearing is that you then became aware of the plants, had the chance to interact with and learn from many herbalists, and that opened up a whole new dimension where you became aware of the sacred aspects of working with plants. I think that is something many people in biomedicine lack.

Biomedicine, as you know from your own experience, is often very concerned with not acknowledging the importance of spirit. Medicine has been trying to exorcise spirit for 150 years, and it’s not working, because spirit is an aspect of human experience and human-plant interactions that cannot be denied. It’s something to be celebrated and learned from.

So, your perspective is not just rooted in science; you have that background, but you also have this whole holistic background from your experience with plants. You can invoke and practice healing modalities that biomedicine doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone utilize. And now you’re in this space of energetic herbalism, continuing to do your work.

Kat Maier: Well, you know, in some ways it’s not an either-or; it’s an “and also.” Many people come to me because of my biomedicine background. I’m often the one who says—after they’ve been to their past-life regressionist or their astrologer, or anyone who keeps them in denial—”Look, I can’t go any further unless you get a biopsy. We need blood work. We need to know what this is.” I’m a recovering scientist. I love science.

Jim Duke and I would have long conversations because I think that the “spirit language” actually translates to those chemical constituents. I think the spirit language is represented by those volatile oils and scents; you just don’t separate it. People ask, “Do you do science, or do you do spirit?” There’s no line. You do both of them.

Dennis McKenna: Absolutely. Absolutely. Our scientific traditions do have a history going back to Descartes, the Church, and religion. It is deeply based in a worldview that helped separate anatomy, but it also disintegrated our concept of wholeness and who we are. The result has been this profound estrangement from nature, which is the primary spiritual crisis of our age. There is nothing outside of nature; even biomedicine is within nature, though it doesn’t recognize it.

I find modern medicine quite possessive; there isn’t a generosity to say, “Oh, that is a possibility.” The fabulous thing is that this is changing. We’re seeing it shifting with integrative and functional MDs. They’re understanding the application of these plants and foods.

Yet, when I go to a physician or an Allopath, I want a really good Allopathic practitioner. I don’t want someone who just dabbles in herbs or Vitamin C. And it’s the same thing with a naturopath or an herbalist; I want someone who is deeply steeped in those traditions.

Kat Maier: There is plant spirit medicine, there is energetic, but the phenomenal place always comes back to these plants. What I’ve really come to see is that sometimes you do need “heroic” doses of plants. I’ve been in situations where we used Lobelia [transcribed as Loilia] or Cayenne. Turn-of-the-century eclectic physicians needed heroics because that’s all they had.

But now, we understand the fractal nature and the patterns of these plants. It’s that pattern of Motherwort that you bring into your body, and it literally readjusts and repatterns. This is where I’ve evolved to understanding drop doses and small doses. We are coming to a place where we can’t just be flying in Rhodiola or herbs from across the country.

How are we working with biodiversity and regional herbalism? That’s a main focus of mine now: getting a good toolkit out of the plants we have in our area and using a lot less of them.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, that’s a very good approach because healing should happen at the community level. The more community-based it is, the better. These plant medicine traditions are separate and yet complementary, and many of them come from the same empirical processes. How they are articulated, defined, and talked about may be different, but the process is about the direct interaction between you and the person. I don’t say “doing the healing,” because I believe all healing comes from within us, but you are the person facilitating the healing. You are the partner with the plants.

Kat Maier: That’s it.

Dennis McKenna: And the patient is there to be healed. Would you say that’s accurate?

Kat Maier: Absolutely. It’s about matchmaking. I might be that bridge bridging Allopathy and natural medicine, walking someone with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis through that whole physiological mechanism. At the same time, a good herbalist knows their plants so well that they can match the spirit or pattern of the plant.

This is what we do over 40 years: we build relationships and understand those patterns. We’re matchmakers, doing the best we can to match which plant will have the best pattern for the shift over a period of time.

I teach my students a rule of thumb: expect a month of plant medicine work for every year you’ve had the issue. If you’ve had bronchitis for 10 years, you’re looking at 10 months. I’ve seen change happen much quicker, but we want to help communities understand that this isn’t just a pill. We’re changing the tissue states and patterns, working with the seasons. It takes longer, but that change is permanent.

It’s like bushwhacking. Once you’ve made the path, you have to revisit it and revisit it. That’s what the plants are doing: bringing that pattern of either relaxation or dryness. For example, Mormon tea or Ephedra grows in the desert; it brings that topography and dryness into our internal landscape of dampness or phlegm. So yes, it’s about being a good matchmaker, alongside the stunning and elegant art of formulation.

Dennis McKenna: That is a dimension of healing that biomedicine doesn’t even acknowledge or realize. From what I’m gleaning, biomedicine relies on standard protocols that are directed toward a generic patient or problem. Herbal healing protocols, however, are individually directed. The healer recognizes the individual’s issues and the plants, making a beautiful, synergistic marriage between the plant and the person. They invoke healing modalities that biomedicine is just opaque to. They deny this entire dimension, though that is starting to change.

Kat Maier: It is changing, and we have to acknowledge that evolution and growth, as well as the humility stepping in. I have many physicians and dentists call me saying, “I don’t know what to do, we always give you our last resort.” We go hand-in-hand through the patient protocol.

It is interesting when thinking about dampness. Allopathy has astringents like Benadryl and other drugs, but they suppress the symptom, which often leads to a rebound effect when trying to dry tissue through pharmaceuticals. Our beautiful herbal astringents, whether it’s Witch Hazel or Plantain, work with our tissues and tonify them.

Still, I am on my knees to Allopathy; it is life-saving, and we need all of these systems.

Dennis McKenna: Yes.

Kat Maier: My heart breaks when I see young, healthy people who are stressed being told they need to be on high blood pressure medicine for the rest of their lives. That’s a tragedy, and it’s where natural medicine is misunderstood. We can work with things like high blood pressure, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses.

There’s brilliance and gems in all of these systems. Hopefully, as our structures shift, we will come into a “new world medicine” where we combine technology and imaging with nature. I’ve seen people drink a cup of Nettle tea and they’re completely changed. They drink this huge glass of chlorophyll through a deep infusion of Nettle leaf, and it’s almost like a psychedelic trip for them.

Dennis McKenna: It’s all relative, right? There are levels of psychedelia, and there are many levels of interaction between people and plants. For a person who has never been exposed to the world of plants in a personal way, a cup of Chamomile tea can be transformative.

Personally, I am oriented very much toward the plant chemistry side of things. The language of plants is chemistry; that’s how they deal with their environment and mediate their relations with other plants and organisms. Sometimes they want to be eaten, sometimes they don’t, and they express that through chemistry.

To my mind, this vast chemical biodiversity found in plants and fungi is incredible. Plants mastered photosynthesis, enabling them to sequester carbon dioxide, release oxygen, and open the door to this incredible alchemical laboratory of “secondary” products. There’s nothing secondary about them; these compounds are the language of plants.

This is what Jim Duke understood so well. He had a great appreciation for the chemical complexity of these plants from both a pharmacologist’s and a healer’s standpoint. These are messenger molecules. As a famous botanist once said: “Plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior.” I think that’s a profound observation. We react to our environment through behavior; we flee or we resist. Plants are stuck in one place, so they react through chemistry. Their defenses and worldview are expressed through that lens.

Kat Maier: Yes.

Dennis McKenna: That chemistry is their lived experience. I don’t want to get too far off the main topic, but I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s book [referring to This Is Your Mind on Plants].

Kat Maier: Yes, I have too. It’s a perfect segue because I want to connect that chemical communication back to biomedicine. I believe there’s a multilinguistic capability in the plant kingdom. They communicate through sound, song, and different vibrations.

You can watch the difference in plant growth when there is intention and attention; it has an incredible impact through quantum healing and focus. There is reciprocity and exchange outside of chemistry, and we are just beginning to enter that world of consciousness.

I had little time for “new age” concepts in my clinical training—I was quite rigorous with my students because we didn’t want superficial theories—but these concepts are deeply studied now, and it is incredibly exciting.

Dennis McKenna: Yes, all of this work on plant neurobiology is very interesting. How do you view energetic medicine in a nutshell? How can you shed light on what that term actually means?

Kat Maier: Great question. When I wrote my book, my publisher, Chelsea Green, named it Energetic Herbalism. There is an interesting conversation right now among people like Christopher Hobbs and Michael Tierra and acupuncturists regarding Qi. Simply put, with energetics, we are looking at the life force; we are looking at vitalism. For simplicity’s sake, you can call it Prana or Qi.

Energetic herbalism is about how we work with our internal landscape to allow vitality to flow with greater ease, strength, and focus. In Western energetics, derived from the Eclectics and the Physiomedicalists, they look at six tissue states: temperature (hot/cold), dampness (damp/dry), and tone (tense/relaxed). These states either prevent or enhance our energy flow. It’s the same thing with Chinese Traditional Medicine (TCM) acupuncture; you’re trying to open up the channels to allow Qi to flow.

The whole idea of energetics is to open up those channels to allow our own vitality to nourish and build. My mantra in my teaching clinic is: you treat what you see. You assess color, vitality, tongue, and pulse during an intake. The entire intention is to help the person feel their own vitality.

These traditions describe this through different cultural lenses, whether it’s Unani Tibb, Tibetan medicine, Chinese medicine, or Ayurvedic practices from India that are 6,000 years old. They have been watching patterns of energy, Vata, cosmos, and ether inside our bodies.

One of the things that is so exciting for me, Dennis, is when regular folks read my book and understand it. They say, “Oh, wow, I am dry. I don’t have five separate things wrong with me; my skin is dry, I have constipation, and my joints are cracking because my landscape is dry.” I love the empowerment of teaching folks how to read their own landscape. If you have too much wetness, what foods, herbs, and practices can you use to work with your terrain?

During COVID, terrain theory came out again. Antoine Béchamp [transcribed as Beauchamp] was saying hundreds of years ago that it’s all about the terrain. Florence Nightingale also emphasized the terrain through her focus on hygiene. It means treating your landscape, who you are, and your nature. People understand that easily. “Oh, this herb is moistening, and I’m a little too damp, so maybe I’ll use this.”

Take Echinacea as an example. Everyone knows Echinacea; it’s a popular prairie herb. Energetically, Echinacea clears damp heat and is a cold medicine. The Lancet published a study years ago saying Echinacea doesn’t work for colds and flu. Well, it doesn’t work on its own because we were using it wrong. Early herbalists thought, “Oh, it’s an immune herb, let’s use it for colds and flu.” But because its energetics are cold, you need to warm it up with Ginger to help it move through the system.

We work with copperhead snake bites. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and now even more so because hospitals are sending folks home since antivenom is toxic and hard to get. Echinacea is profound for snake bites and spider bites because it clears toxic heat. Understanding energetics is much more useful than simply looking at it scientifically and saying “it has interferon and mucopolysaccharides.”

Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

Kat Maier: All of that scientific analysis is brilliant, and I love it. But it took me until the end of my career to realize that we need to start with energetics. Is this plant hot or cold? Why do people drink warm chai tea, yet we run around drinking iced chai out of context? Energetics is very accessible because people can use their bodies to evaluate it. They can say, “Wow, this plant makes me sweat; it’s a diaphoretic.” That is the medicine.

Dennis McKenna: You deliver a lot of concepts in a very succinct way. This is an interesting way to look at it. All of these different traditions—Chinese medicine, the Eclectics, Galen’s five humors—have similar, complementary concepts. The idea that herbs have qualities like warming and cooling is found across all of them.

What stands out to me is that modern medicine has mistakenly cut itself off from these subjective qualities. These are things that must be experienced by the person. It is a subjective reaction: “I feel cold, so I need something to warm me.” That is an instantiation of chemical communication. You consume the herb because you know it has the properties needed to rebalance your system at that time.

Biomedicine has sacrificed this holistic, vitalistic dimension. Vitalism has always been controversial in medicine, raising the complex question of whether there is a life force, or if organisms are just beautiful, complex machines made of enzymes, hormones, and neurotransmitters.

But as medicine “rediscovers” psychedelics, biomedicine is finally admitting these substances are good for something. To me, this represents the reintroduction of spirit into medicine. We now have a class of substances that are essentially medicines for the soul. There has to be a soul if you have medicines to treat it. I think that’s why biomedicine has historically been uncomfortable with it.

Kat Maier: Yeah. I will differ for a nanosecond. I think many plants are medicine for the soul, and psychedelics are just a completely amazing, different realm of that.

I’ll tell you a story. I was in an intensive, two-year apprenticeship with a traditional teacher at Mount Shasta. In our final weekend, we were doing deep ancestral work, and we received a “drop dose” of a plant. It was non-psychedelic and native to eastern North America. But because of how she prepared it, with her prayers and sacred songs, having just one drop of this herb felt like taking off on a DMT journey. It was delivering a message to the mitochondria, zeroing through cyberspace.

I went on an intense, personal ancestral journey for an hour, and when I came back, I realized the herb was Black Cohosh. I can’t just take a drop of commercial Black Cohosh and replicate that experience. It was her sacred way of growing and praying. Not everyone had that same psychedelic-like journey, but it was profound for all of us.

I came into your and your brother’s [Terence McKenna’s] reality 30 years ago at a conference in Palenque, which totally opened my world to entheogens and the liminal space. It taught me that other, less dramatic plants like Chickweed or St. John’s Wort also have ways of facilitating ego dissolution and breaking down boundaries. It might require more presence or a different way of administering, but they are all powerful and sacred.

Dennis McKenna: Absolutely all sacred. What you say is true. Classic psychedelics are not subtle; they knock you off your rocker, which is humbling. Other plants are gentler but nonetheless profound.

Kat Maier: Absolutely. I had a teacher, Stephen Harrod Buhner, who wrote many books and taught us how the heart is the organ of perception. Several years ago, he commented on all the herbalists on Instagram and TikTok sharing plant petal mandalas, saying, “This is Gaian’s impulse. It’s time we saw the plants, protected them, and understood they are sacred.”

I feel the same way with psychedelics coming into our materia medica for mental health and depression. Microdosing has its place. If we ever needed a time in history to repattern our thoughts and shift our lens, it’s now.

And how do we separate that from the Gaian impulse? Thank god it’s coming into our vernacular, making conversations safer. The work you, your academy, and guests like Mark Plotkin [transcribed as Mark Pluck] have been doing for 30 years is finally lifting the veil. We are still trying to raise funds and get the word out, but even the coca leaf [transcribed as cocoa leaf] is highly nutritious. Your work on coca is incredible and vital.

Dennis McKenna: I haven’t actually done research on coca; I just organized a conference on it.

Kat Maier: That is still work! It brought together the people who actually know about coca. They can’t organize conferences; they need you.

Dennis McKenna: Well, education is a major aspect of it, and in that sense, I can claim some credit. But there is a growing recognition of what you pointed out: the healing of the woman with Black Cohosh would not have happened without the conceptual context in which the plant was administered. You cannot separate the remedy from the context and the understanding of the healer facilitating it. That person carries the wisdom of generations of plant knowledge.

Science misses a lot by being so constrictive and reductive. Psychedelics and other plants act as a lens; the subjective experience of taking Psilocybin mushrooms or Chamomile is inseparable from the healing process.

I am amused and appalled that there are now medicinal chemists in the commercial psychedelic space trying to reverse-engineer the psychedelic experience out of the molecule, so that you can take it, feel nothing, and suddenly be better. I don’t think that is going to work.

Kat Maier: Thank you for being appalled, because I am as well. It’s important to hold onto that.

Dennis McKenna: This goes back to the idea that we are just complex machines, and if something goes wrong, you just apply the right monkey wrench to fix it.

Kat Maier: And it does not work that way. In some ways, Dennis, it’s hard to compare biomedicine with natural healing. The reason there is such a similarity among energetic systems is that they are all rooted in nature. Whether it’s Shipibo healing, Daoism, Ayurvedic practices, or the Sámi in Sweden, they all observed and watched nature. They had long experiences with plants, heat, and fire.

Because of this, they share similarities, even if they have different cultural contexts or “dressings.” Biomedicine, on the other hand, isn’t based in nature; it is based in a hierarchy of separation that traces back to Descartes.

While biomedicine is widening now, when you are rooted in separation, you stay in that lane. That analysis gives us incredible information, but the biomedical tradition was birthed in separation. It helped separate anatomy, but it disintegrated our concept of wholeness and who we are.

The result has been a profound estrangement from nature, which is the primary spiritual crisis of our age. There is nothing outside of nature, even if biomedicine doesn’t recognize it. We need to rediscover this. We are dealing with centuries of Cartesian delusion and a Judeo-Christian tradition that propagated the idea that we own nature to dominate and extract from it.

I think Gaia is the ultimate superorganism—an intelligent being made up of a collective community of sentient beings.

Going back to the ’90s, a Harvard study showed that Americans were spending millions of dollars out of pocket for natural supplements. That was a turning point. My clients and patients aren’t just “dreadheaded DIY” folks; it’s everyone. So many people are saying, “I don’t want these drugs, they don’t make me feel better.”

Of course, we are grateful for pharmaceuticals when needed, but we must understand how to navigate and safely use plants alongside them. One of the dangers of working with natural medicine is that plants actually work. Your body functions on a higher level, meaning you might overmedicate if you keep taking the same pharmaceutical dosage.

My main caution to anyone listening is to be very mindful if you are mixing medications and herbs. Work with an herbalist or a naturopath. Plants can lower blood pressure and blood sugar quickly, so you don’t want to overdo it.

There is a beginning dialogue occurring between biomedicine and plants. Early on in my career, I used to teach at medical schools, and it was abusive because they would throw all these “dangers and toxins” at me. I’d think, “How many people died of Tylenol poisoning last year compared to the two people who might have accidentally ingested Poke root?” Now, I go back with a thicker skin, better stories, and no attachment.

A teacher of mine once told me, “Kathleen, our role is to reveal, not to convince.” That is powerful. I can’t convince anyone; it’s about timing. I see this a lot with psychedelics—people don’t respect their timing, they rush into it, and they get into dicey situations.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, they have FOMO—the fear of missing out. But what you said is profound: the essence of education is revealing, not convincing. You open the door for people, and if they wish, they can walk through it. You provide them with the tools, but you can’t convince them. I’ve tried, you’ve tried; in our youth, we all tried.

Kat Maier: When I first learned about the miracles of herbal medicine, I was trying to convince my family and everyone I knew. Then you mature, a teacher drops some wisdom on you, and you finally relax. It takes so much pressure off because you honor the medicine of timing.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, and it’s so essential. It really is.

Well, Kat, this has been a wonderful conversation. We’re right at the top of the hour, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Is there anything we omitted that we must discuss before we close? I know we could keep going.

Kat Maier: I can always come back! It’s so fun to speak with you, Dennis. One thing I do want to talk about is our Herbal Mutual Aid Directory. We have a link that you can put in the show notes with the book.

I want to bring attention to this directory because plant people are amazing. When a catastrophe happens—like in Minneapolis—people really want to donate. During Hurricane Helene, I reached out to Lorna Mauney-Brodek, who is my mentor in mutual aid and free clinics. I’ve run a free Botanica clinic for a long time.

During the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, there was so much trauma, and my free clinic received many donations. But they had beautiful, handwritten labels with flowers on them, and I couldn’t legally give them out because they weren’t labeled properly with ingredients and protocols.

So, we started the Herbal Mutual Aid Directory. It’s a work in progress, but we created a mutual aid map and directory to standardize donations. Currently, the majority of the free clinics and herbal distribution centers are on the East Coast. We are working on a main website now.

Dennis McKenna: Okay, I see that.

Kat Maier: It takes a while to navigate, but we have standardized labels, recipes (like elderberry lung syrups for fire relief in LA), instructions on how to package and ship them, and guidelines for herbal donations.

Going forward, climate change is going to cause more events where communities will need mutual aid support. Mutual aid is a powerful community force. We are also providing disaster-specific considerations for floods, tornadoes, and extreme heat. I’ve been dealing with social justice and redlining in urban areas, looking at how ER visits from climate-related heat vary by city and zoning.

This directory is our latest project, and we recently received a wonderful donation to build out the website properly.

Dennis McKenna: That’s an incredible resource you’ve created, Kat. This will be very useful. All of this will be on the episode page for the podcast, so our listeners can circle back and explore it at their leisure. It’s great to see you’ve been doing so much work and networking with other dedicated, like-minded folks. Plant people are so much fun, aren’t they? We have the best friends.

Kat Maier: Yes, we do! Dennis, thank you so much. What an honor and a pleasure. I look forward to our paths crossing soon.

Dennis McKenna: Absolutely, I’m sure they will. Thank you so much, Kat. Have a great day, and we’ll let you know when this episode drops. This was a really excellent, wonderful, and beautiful conversation. You’re a true wisdom keeper, and it’s great to get to know you this way. All the best.

Kat Maier: Oh, thank you. Thank you, Dennis. Be well. You, too. Yes.