Exploring Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Profound Legacy

I wrote this article a few months ago, knowing that Stephen Harrod Buhner was seriously ill. Today, as I publish it, I realize with sadness that this great and prolific man has left us. His work is far too vast to summarize in one article. Still, I want to share a personal overview of the themes that have shaped me the most.

We can’t always count on chance encounters with books to meet the authors who change our lives. That’s why I speak of Stephen Harrod Buhner with a happiness tinged with sadness. In my home, he acted like a mycelium network, connecting parts of myself that once felt separate and giving them meaning and strength. And he even wrote a quote about this very idea…

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go into a bookstore to find what you weren’t looking for.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

I hope this article will inspire you to explore Buhner’s rich, disturbing, practical, scientific, poetic and funny literary work.

Entering Buhner’s world with openness and sincerity inevitably transforms us. Through anecdotes, poems, and a very particular sense of humor, he breaks our preconceived ideas. He also opens the door to a livelier, more sensitive reality, where cooperation comes before competition.

Buhner is a prolific author whose life has been atypical and full, to say the least. So, for this article, I had to make some choices, focusing on what, for me, has been most meaningful. Since I had to choose, I decided to choose with my heart.

What my favorite herbalists have to say about Stephen Harrod Buhner?

He may not be an academic in the strict sense, but he is undeniably a scholar. With remarkable clarity, he explains how a plant’s active compounds interact. From this understanding emerges its deeper essence, far greater than the sum of its parts.

Despite a decidedly non-conformist style, the author is highly regarded among the pillars of American herbalism.

Buy this book now (talking about “Herbal Antiviral”). Be prepared. Stephen on viruses (and ways to cohabit lovingly with them) is, as always, fascinating, scary, practical, fun, detailed, thorough, clear and thought provoking”.

Susun S. Weed

One of America’s preeminent herbalists, Stephen Buhner articulates the sacred underpinnings of the herbal world and deep ecology as only a real “green man” can.

David Hoffmann

Beautifully written, The Secret Teachings of Plants is a work of art – as much a poetical journey into the essence of plants as it is a guidebook on how to use plant medicine in our healing practices. Stephen Buhner is among the plant geniuses of our time. Like Thoreau and Goethe and Luther Burbank, the master gardeners and “green men” he so liberally quotes throughout, Buhner will be long remembered for his deep and introspective connection with the green world and for his ability to connect us to the heart of the plants through his teachings.

Rosemary Gladstar

In this wonderful book Stephen Buhner shows us that the heart is not a machine but the informed, intelligent core of our emotional, spiritual, and perceptual universe. Through the heart we can perceive the living spirit that diffuses through the green world that is our natural home. Required reading for all owners of a heart.

Mattew Wood

My first encounter with a Buhner book

I originally bought his book on antiviral plants#ref:193# for the following reasons:

• It offers solutions for severe illnesses
• He explores new specialist plants
• It specifically indicates which viruses the plant is effective against
• It is very well referenced

In short, I was confident that the book would help me grow in my herbalism practice. When it was time to pay, the cashier congratulated me on my choice.

From the very beginning, I loved his direct and inspiring writing. His deep understanding of how viruses interact with us drew me in. You can sense his admiration and respect for them right away. He reveals the sophistication of their strategies—organisms that communicate, hibernate, and read their environment to adapt. Not bad for life forms without a nucleus or cell walls.

His book was like oxygen to my passion for herbalism, and I was hooked. So I set off to discover hs other books.

The other part of Buhner’s work, for true nature lovers

I soon realized that his work falls into two main categories. The first includes his practical herbalism books, such as the well‑known Healing Lyme protocol and Herbal Antibiotics.

The second category is entirely different. He placed these books under Gaia, ecology, and plant intelligence. As I write this, I have read Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm and listened to The Secret Teachings of Plants. These two books are the ones that truly “opened my chakras.”

From that moment on, many of my deepest and most authentic experiences began to align. It felt like gaining access to infinity, but in a grounded, compassionate, and loving way.

The reviews

When we read the comments of people who liked Buhner’s books less, we frequently find the criticism that Buhner uses too many poetic quotations, creating repetition and even confusion. Which is quite true.

Buhner is constantly trying to touch our souls, to highlight the incoherence of our filters and enable us to access a more authentic understanding of life. He repeats himself several times with different angles, trying to touch us beyond the intellectual. It’s up to us to sort out what speaks to us as we read the lines.

In fact, at the beginning of all his books, Buhner invites us to skip the passages that don’t speak to us and start wherever we like. To do this, we have to break our schoolboy reflexes and listen to the wisdom of our hearts.

What I retain from the work, simplified in three keys

I don’t claim to have grasped the full depth of his work. But reading his books has a lot of resonance for me. Three keys in particular spoke to me, and enabled me to add a great deal of meaning to various experiences/wisdoms that were already developing in me. On reading, these keys gave meaning, depth and a link between experiences that seemed quite isolated. Suddenly, it was as if 10 years of disparate research had started to make sense.

Buhner certainly speaks much more eloquently about these three aspects, but I’ve never heard him sum up his work in these terms. This is simply what remains most vivid with me, and makes me want to share it with you.

Key No. 1: Science creates superficial models to understand much richer and more complex realities

Nature is by definition infinite; man creates models and simplifications to understand it.

Examples of model VS reality

A musical composition can be written on paper. Reading it gives us a sense of the work, but never its full emotion. We can imagine it and play it inwardly, yet even that is rarely as powerful as hearing the master who brings it to life.

Words work the same way. They help us classify and express concepts, but they remain only models. I am human, but I am not confined to that label. And a tulip cannot be defined by its name alone, even with its precise variety. It meets a unique environment, chooses its own responses, and becomes singular.

“He was just another fox like a hundred thousand others. But I made him my friend, and now he’s one of a kind.”

Saint-Exupéry

In Buhner’s words, science is a reduction of the surface of things. Dissections that allow us to understand certain realities with our heads, but to the detriment of their essence. He is not opposed to science, but warns us not to confuse these models with reality, that they hide fundamental aspects of reality from us.

James Hillman so eloquently put it, “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.

As James Hillman so eloquently put it, “it was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could really begin to perform an autopsy.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

How language can influence our perception

Did you know that the color names available in a given language influence the ability to distinguish colors for which there is no word? For example, people who consider blue to be a shade of green will find it very difficult to spot the blue square in a green series. If you’d like to learn more about this phenomenon, take a look at this short video.

Different scientific models, like language, have the capacity to draw our attention to certain points, but at the same time render other aspects of reality invisible.

Key #2: The unconscious filters information based on our interests and beliefs

If reality is infinite, we need our subconscious mind to filter the information we need to communicate to the brain. This system of filtering information is a given. While the newborn baby has virtually no filter, experience and the use of information will build the filtering system. The spectrum of information consciously analyzed by the brain will tend to narrow as we grow, allowing us to respond more effectively.

Our filters are shaped by several factors.

Our interests. A musician perceives more musical information than someone who has no interest in music.

Our nervous system. The more stressed we are, the narrower our field of vision becomes.

Our survival instinct. Anything linked to our protection sends a priority signal to the brain. A new mother hears her baby’s cries more clearly than a stranger.

Our will. If I walk with the intention of enjoying autumn colors, I will notice more hues and fewer signposts.

Our beliefs and cognitive biases. If I believe that a woman cannot be as intelligent as a man, I may fail to recognize intelligent women around me. Some beliefs that place humans at the top of evolution still prevent the scientific community from speaking of “the intelligence of plants, bacteria, and blobs.” This persists despite evidence that they can solve complex problems creatively and have the capacity to learn.

In other words, what you believe – that is, the descriptions of the world around you that you received in childhood – act much like software; they program what is perceivable by your conscious mind.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorially perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

Key No. 3: “You can only see well with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

The heart is a refined tool of perception, a center of intelligence directly linked to the brain. The heart is highly skilled at understanding the real nature beyond form.

For example, you hear someone close to you say they’re fine (in their usual tone of voice), but you sense that they’re not fine at all. You’ve used your heart’s feeling to understand beyond the form, which was misleading.

I once accompanied a loved one in his last moments of life… Between the moment when the body was in a comatose state and the moment when the person had died, the form hadn’t changed much, but the whole atmosphere of the room had. The release was perceptible.

In “Secret Teaching of Plants”, Buhner spends an entire chapter explaining how, physiologically, the heart acts as a transmitter/receiver of highly sensitive electromagnetic waves, to get in touch with the true nature of things. This enables us to communicate with many subtle energies. This would be the foundation of the ^6th sense used in many esoteric techniques, among others, to make contact with the invisible.

The heart has long been telling us what it is capable of.

Today, we can find many techniques to develop this feeling, but in reality, the ancients were well aware of this characteristic of the heart… just look at several expressions that use the word “heart” as the center of feeling in man.

Emotion can also change the heart’s message. Anyone who has bought wine on vacation knows this well. The taste often changes once we are back home.

One way to verify what the heart tells us is to return to the source several times. We can do this by meeting the plant again or simply by recalling its memory. Then we take the time to feel how the message evolves within us.

How the keys contribute to our conception and communication with Gaia

The heart perceives all the different signals, then our subconscious mind applies filters to limit the information that is transmitted to the brain for analysis. Filters are applied according to what we have learned to consider important. These are our own filters, our “software” as Buhner calls it. They are at our service, and it is always possible to modify them.

“The door to the soul is unlocked; you don’t need to please the door keeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.”

Robert Bly (quoted by Stephen Harrod Buhner)

His books are a call to take the time to feel and consider the signals of the heart. The heart enables us to be in tune with nature, drawing us first to what feels good, what is naturally more accessible to us. Instead of forcing the plant to give us its virtues through laboratory tests, it invites us to be present, sensitive to the often bodily signals we receive during our encounters with Gaia.

I personally find many parallels with the empathetic methods of non-violent communication, where we listen to the other without judgment, with our hearts wide open, keeping a watchful eye on what is alive within us when we hear the other’s speech. Buhner proposes that we have the courage to do the same with plant individuals. It’s not easy to practice openness in front of beings so different from yourself. I personally felt respect, non-judgment and a form of unconditional love.

His books are therefore invitations to let go of the masks of form and appearance, trusting our hearts to open up to authentic communication with the living world around us.

Teaching herbal medicine directly from the plants themselves

For many years now, I’ve been fascinated by the medicine of the world’s First Peoples. Their knowledge of plant use is astonishingly accurate, without laboratories or double-blind tests.

When we ask the shamans or medicine men/women of these peoples where they get their knowledge from, they all say that the most important knowledge they have is obtained from the plants themselves. All of them, no matter where they come from, tell us the same incredible truth. Plants taught them their virtues and uses by communicating directly with them.

I have often dreamed of receiving such messages from the plants I grow. With Buhner’s teaching, a lot of love and contemplation, I now think that this knowledge can develop even at home… After all, I have a heart. I can feel it opening up and tuning in when I’m walking in the forest or in the mountains. A little more trust, a little less control, a lot of respect, love and patience, and I think Buhner is right. This wisdom, this richness, is accessible to all. If you feel like it…

Some inspiring quotes from Buhner’s books

Finally, because Buhner’s writing experience is unique and goes far beyond the keys, there’s the style… I’ll leave you with a few quotes that touched me. Feel free to write in the comments which ones are your favorites.

Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

Consider Norbert Mayer’s poem Just now A rock took fright When it saw me It escaped By playing dead.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

Fifteen years ago I had an odd dream. In it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

The tree does not end at its skin but exists also in the rain that falls downwind, many miles from the forest. In the seed exists the acorn, the oak, and the shade.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

Invasive plants – Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

The titles I mention in the article

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a French translation of Buhner’s books. There is indeed a Leonard Buhner who wrote Herbs and Plants Antibiotics. But this is an original work, not a translation of the Herbal Antibiotics book. My local bookshop only carries books in French. All the books mentioned can be found on the Buhner page, but they are not shipped outside the United States. They can be found in herbal shops, good English-language bookstores and on Amazon.

• Herbal Antivirals (Second Edition)#ref:193#
• Healing Lyme (2nd Ed.)
• Herbal Antibiotics#ref:199#
• Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm
• The Secret Teachings of Plants

If you would like to delve deeper into Buhner’s pearls of wisdom, the master has sadly passed away following a long illness, but several videos are available, notably on his own page: https: //www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/media/

As well as more podcasts: https: //www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/events-calendar/

Have you already read Buhner’s books? Tell me what you think in the comments!