What Poisonous Plants Can teach Us About Healing: An Interview with Kathryn Solie (Founder of Persephone’s Path)

Hello and welcome! Today, I'm interviewing the amazing Kathryn Solie. Kathryn does a lot of amazing different work, but primarily she teaches some meditation classes and workshops on poisonous plants and plant medicines.    NEVER WORK WITH POISONOUS PLANTS WITHOUT SUPERVISION FROM A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL.   An Interview with Kathryn Solie: What poisonous plants can teach us about healing.   Kathryn Solie: Thank you for having me here! Ashley: Oh, it is my pleasure and my honor. I have really been getting into this journey with plants and plant medicines and I actually signed up for your Poisonous Plant Medicine, Class 1 and Class 2. And I know that you are going to be starting a new round of that very soon. I was wondering if you could introduce yourself to everyone? Tell them a little bit about your story, and how you got started on this path, and what you are up to now? Kathryn: That is always an interesting question to ask because it is hard to know what exactly brought me here. There has been so many different things, but essentially, I work with plant medicine. If I am just talking to a regular person, I just say, I am an herbalist. Probably, not a lot of regular people are listening, so I can kind of go into a little bit more detail in the way that I work with them. I work a lot with plant consciousness, or what a lot of people call plant spirit medicine. It's really similar to the way that you work with crystals in that they have this energetic medicine. I have been really pulled towards poisonous plants. Or I kind of want to do air quotes as poisonous, because it is the dose that makes the poison. Everything is poisonous, even water can kill you if you have a big enough dose. Those plants have just really called me in the past few years. And their medicine is really needed on the planet at this time. They help bring us into the shadows and to our deeper psyches and to our unconscious into places where we are discouraged from exploring. Our current society only focuses on being happy. Be happy all the time. And it is great if we can be happy all the time, but there is also likely an undercurrent underneath that has all our life stories and moons and fears and that is always going to be there. That is normal and healthy and part of being human. I feel like the poisonous plants can help guide us through those spaces that might be normally kind of uncomfortable.    Ashley: I feel so grateful that you are bringing this up. In my personal journey with these medicines, this is exactly when they showed up in my life. When I really started to consciously dig into that shadow aspect. I found that I needed some support, and this was what came through. For me, this was what my body, my mind, my spirit all needed. To kind of do this work on multiple levels and find that energetic support and that medicine for this, really deep dive inner journey, personal healing, transformative, shadow aspect work. Was it something similar for you personally that drew you in? Or did this just evolve naturally in your exploration of herbalism? Kathryn: I think that it was always kind of just part of my makeup as a person, just even as a little kid I was always kind of, not, I would never use the word morbid, I feel like other people might use that word, but just kind of interested in the aspects of life that people try to keep hidden. Even for many years before I really fully stepped on the plant path, I was really on a path of meditation and non-dua...