Animism
A Living World in Process
At the heart of both Insight Herbalism and Shamanic practice lies an animistic worldview; an understanding that all elements of the natural world—plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and even the land itself—are alive, imbued with consciousness, spirit, and agency. This worldview is not merely symbolic or metaphorical but sees all of nature as a dynamic, interrelated system of beings, each with its own unique intelligence and presence.
In Insight Herbalism, plants are not inert or passive; they are living beings with their own unique form of intelligence. One that responds to us, reflects layers of our being back to us, and that offers the possibility of new thresholds and transformation.
In Shamanism, the spirits of the land, the ancestors, and the elements are equally recognised as vital agents in the world and in our process. These practices honour the animistic principle that all life is interconnected and each part of the whole communicates with and influences the other.
Process Philosophy:
The World as a Web of Interrelated Events
This animistic view is deeply aligned with the more modern conception of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy which offers a scientific and philosophical framework to understand the interconnectedness and agency of all things in the living world.
Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy challenges the traditional mechanistic worldview that separates life into static, independent objects. Instead, Whitehead proposed that reality is not made up of discrete objects but is a dynamic, interconnected process of events and relationships. In this view, everything is in a constant state of becoming, evolving, and interrelating.
In this Healing becomes not the imposition of an external solution on a static system, but rather a process of co-evolution, where the server (practioner), the Pilgrim (client) and the Plant, are engaged in an ongoing dance of becoming, transformation, and growth. Healing occurs when we recognise the interdependence and fluidity of life and invite transformation to happen in relationship,
Morphic Resonance:
The Imprint of Collective Memory
Another useful framework is Rupert Sheldrake’s Theory of Morphic Resonance, which offers another fascinating lens for understanding the processes of the living world, and how the speaks to our own embodied and perceptual experience.
According to Sheldrake, there is a collective memory that all living beings share, and this memory is transmitted through what he calls morphic fields (non-local fields of information that guide the behaviour and form of organisms). Morphic resonance suggests that once a pattern of behaviour or form is established, it becomes easier for that pattern to be repeated, not just in the individual, but across species, ecologies, time, and space
In the context of both Insight Herbalism and Shamanic work, this idea helps explain how ancestral wisdom or people, place, animal and plant is passed down through generations. The spirits of the land, the ancestors, and the natural world are not static or fixed; they are continuously imprinted with the experiences of past generations. When we journey into the imaginal world, or connect deeply with a plant, we are tapping into these morphic fields, drawing on the collective wisdom and knowledge that has been transmitted over vast expanses of time.