Little Windows into Another Realm: Extended Version

In this video, enthnobotanist, artist, and photographer Kathleen Harrison describes what it was like to experience a harpsichord concert after smoking a joint laced with DMT, as well as her first date with future husband Terrence McKenna, in which he promptly offered her a pipe of the pure substance.

Kathleen is one of the featured guests in Jeremy Narby's Evolver Intensives course, "Awakening the Cosmic Serpent: Shamanism and Plant Teachers in this Transformative Time."  This live, online video course also includes guests Stan Grof, Wade Davis, and Luis Eduardo Luna, and starts on January 23. 

Kathleen teaches at the California School of Herbal Studies, Sonoma State University, University of Minnesota (Hawaii fieldcourse), and at various symposia. She researches the relationship between plants and people, with a particular focus on art, myth, ritual, and spirituality. She has done fieldwork in Latin America for 30 years, and is the director of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit foundation devoted to preserving medicinal and shamanic plant knowledge from the Amazonian rainforest and tropics around the world. Harrison co-founded the organization in 1985 with former husband Terence McKenna. In her work with Botanical Dimensions, she has done fieldwork and supported indigenous projects in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Costa Rica. She continues to document the many faces of ethnobotany with photographs, which she combines with stories in her slide presentations. Kat is a widely-published illustrator, and enjoys teaching people how to see and draw the plant world. She is based in Northern California, where she is active in local watershed restoration. She reports that she is lucky to be the mother of two wonderful grown children, who make her life even richer.

This interview was recorded for my upcoming documentary, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. The film weaves an account of Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking DMT research through a multifaceted approach to this intriguing psychedelic found in the human brain and hundreds of plants, including the sacred Amazonian brew, Ayahuasca.