Berkeley Talks: Consciousness guide on using psychedelics as medicine
"When we take medicine, we are really seeking an internal look to see what is the matter," says author Françoise Bourzat. "The mushroom helps you see the truth."
January 10, 2020
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Françoise Bourzat, a consciousness guide, author and counselor, gave a talk at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology on Nov. 14. (Photo courtesy of Françoise Bourzat)
“The purpose of medicine is to create a bigger, deeper, more thorough experience of our inner functioning, our physical functioning, our emotional functioning, our energetic functioning, our spiritual functioning, our relational functioning, how we are with the land,” said author and consciousness guide Françoise Bourzat. “… Mushrooms bring it to your face, like, ‘This is your illness.’ By knowing your illness, you resolve your illness, you deal with it, you treat it from within yourself. The mushroom helps you see the truth.”
Bourzat, author of Consciousness Medicine, gave a talk on Nov. 14 at UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside an exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which ran from March 15 to Dec. 15. Bourzat, a counselor who is trained in somatic psychology, has been mentored in the Mexican Mazatec tradition of the sacred mushrooms, and has been sharing her approach internationally for 30 years.
“So, you understand yourself, you see your truth,” said Bourzat, “and by seeing that, the light of this consciousness cures you, literally. It’s your inner consciousness and your inner clarity that will actually bring about healing, your flow, and your acceptance and your understanding. And once you get things inside yourself, then you are touching healing, which is not to deal with a pathology. You just holistically hold your inner process in a different way, understanding the intricacy of why, when, how, what it was that was blocked. It’s a deep process of understanding and of clarity and of looking at your functioning from knowing and from compassion.”
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