Rachel Maree

Her interest in ethnobotany has led her to pockets of Indigenous cultures across the globe to learn from their relationships with plants, including their use of specific styles of music for enhanced communication and integration while in shamanic spaces. She works from Northern Rivers, Australia, as a health practitioner, teacher, and musician.

She has studied Western Herbal Medicine and traditional bodywork and runs the online plant medicine platform EntheoBotanica, as well as being the creator of the herbalist conference Rebel Herbal (https://rebelherbal.com.au).

Workshop/Presentation

Rites of Passage with Plants

Rites of passage have grown alongside humankind as a way of making sense of our growth stages and initiating necessary developmental changes through powerful rituals, ceremonies, and adversity. Throughout history, this sometimes involved powerful entheogenic herbal medicines. Today, cultures around the world still perform rites of passage to initiate children into adulthood, to heal sicknesses, and at birth and death to shepherd life through its most transformative moments.

Western culture is crying out for rites of passage; who is showing the youth how to be a part of a mature family? How are we honoring the wisdom of the elders? How can we process the grief of death? In times of great disconnection and sickness, what allies will help us experience the truth of who we are? Many adults are now turning to plant medicines to initiate change and healing in their lives. I’m going to unpack using psychedelics for initiation rituals in this presentation, through a traditional and modern lens.