S2E6: Plant Intelligence and Ancestral Wisdom

What if plants aren’t silent at all but communicating in ways we’ve simply forgotten how to hear? In this episode, we meet Nina, a non-speaking teen who says she’s been telepathically connected to plants since birth. She offers herbal remedies no one taught her, identifies health issues her family hasn’t shared, and describes plant communication as naturally as breathing. Her accuracy forces everyone around her to rethink what plants know and how they share it. We also hear from indigenous elders, herbalists and experts who say this isn’t new. Mycologist Paul Stamets explains how fungi and trees send messages through the “wood wide web.” Herbalist David Winston shares moments when plants spoke directly to him and indigenous teachers from the Tsimshian, Lakota, and Kuntanawa nations describe plants as relatives, healers, and living intelligences who pass on wisdom across generations. Across all these stories, a simple idea takes root: the natural world may be far more aware, more connected, and more communicative than we’ve been taught. This episode asks us to slow down, pay attention, and consider that the plants around us might have been speaking this whole time. _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  Hi, everyone. This is Kai Dickens and you're listening to the Consciousness Cassettes from TTT Media.

• 0:10Ky Dickens?

  In our first series, The Telepathy Tapes, non-speakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself.

• 0:20Ky Dickens?

  In this series, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going? This is the Consciousness Cassettes, and we're opening up the next channel.

• 0:44Ky Dickens?

  By now, you know we're big fans of energy healing here at The Telepathy Tapes, and in particular, we're big fans of Luminara. We've talked about the science, the stories, the results for a year now. Luminara.care is the best platform for energy work and makes it easy to experience energy healing from your own home. Every practitioner is vetted by Luminara, so you're not guessing about credentials. And Luminara is currently working with researchers at Florida State University to study the science behind energy healing even further. It's exciting to see this practice becoming validated by science and data by the day. I booked a Luminara session, and what surprised me most was how grounded and tangible the experience felt. I noticed a deep sense of calm afterward, better sleep, and a real softening of tension in my body. Luminara is HIPAA compliant, and I appreciate how safe, supported, and approachable they're making this kind of healing.

• 1:26Ky Dickens?

  The sessions are private, personalized, and gives you access to gifted healers from all over the world. Whether you're looking for support with stress, pain, sleep challenges, mood shifts, hormone changes, digestive issues, emotional well-being, or you're simply ready to operate at a higher level, the benefits are real. If you're already a believer like we are, and you're finally ready to try it for yourself, Luminara is offering 10% off your first session for Telepathy Tapes listeners. Just go to luminara.care. That's luminara.care, and use code TAPES10 at checkout for 10% off your first session. Last week, we asked if consciousness truly only belongs to humans, or if it can also belong to animals. This week, we look at the rest of the living world. What if plants aren't silent at all, but communicating in ways we've only just begun to remember? We'll hear from ecologist Paul Stamets, herbal expert.

• 2:10Ky Dickens?

  Experts, indigenous elders from the Lakota Nation, the Simshian Nation, and the Kuntunawa Nation. And possibly most consequentially, we'll meet a non-speaker named Nina, who says she effortlessly communicates with plants via telepathy.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  I'm Natalia. My youngest sister is Nina, and she's a non-speaker who communicates through spelling and is telepathic.

• 2:31Ky Dickens?

  This is Natalia Mihen. We got connected immediately after the first season of the telepathy tapes came out last year.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  My family knew about the telepathy because everyone was experiencing it inside of our home with Nina. But I did not feel like it was something I could talk about. I binged the telepathy tapes in two days. And now I feel like I'm able to finally talk about all of these things with no judgment and total openness and realize that we have not been alone.

• 3:00Ky Dickens?

  Nina is 19 years old and lives with her family in Connecticut. When I hopped on Zoom with Natalia, I met her sister Nina for the first time. And I asked her what she, as a non-speaker, thought about the telepathy tapes. And she spelled that it wasn't that impressive to her because it was old news. And here's a clip from our original Zoom call.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  She ended up saying, "I'm so not impressed. This is so normal for me, but I'm glad that this is getting out into the world."

• 3:28Ky Dickens?

  I love that. I just think the best response from a non-speaker ever is that it's old news. I mean, I love that. Of course, telepathy feels like old news to those who've been utilizing it. And as we'll explore in this episode, a lot of the abilities and connections our society has dismissed as being impossible or magical would be considered old news or even no news at all to our ancestors and many of the indigenous populations who've kept their traditions intact for millennia. And perhaps there's no older or more profound tradition than our relationship with plants and the ways that we've communed with them.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Nina, for the majority of her life, had really no effective way to communicate.

• 4:04Ky Dickens?

  The challenge wasn't Nina's intelligence. It was motor planning. Nina has apraxia, a mind-body disconnect that makes motor planning difficult. And as we explored in season one, speaking relies on fine motor coordination, and that's nearly impossible for those with apraxia. But pointing to letters on a letterboard Or keyboard uses gross motor movement. And with time, guidance and practice with a professional coach, many non-speakers can learn to spell their thoughts. It can take years for the motor pathways to form, but when they do, a non-speaker can be unlocked and they can finally communicate. When Nina was 17, it all clicked for her and she began communicating via spelling on a letterboard.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Once she started to spell, all of our lives changed completely. It was really like getting to know her for the first time. Simple things like knowing her favorite color, what she wanted for dinner that night was huge for us. But then the deeper layers of how intelligent she is and the things she would bring up on her own about her interests were extremely surprising and shocking because she had no formal education when it came to any of these things, whether it was with different languages, with math, or with science and biology and plants.

• 5:12Ky Dickens?

  Nina has two older sisters, Paloma and Natalia, and Natalia has become one of Nina's chief communication partners.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  And so when she was openly spelling, one of the first things she said was, "I'm telepathic." And I remember my family and I, we were like, "What does that even mean?" She definitely made it a point to make it known that she was telepathic. I mean, she brought it up all the time, stating it, but then also showed us in different ways where she would know where people were throughout the day, conversations they had, things that happened in the past, things that even happened and turned out to transpire into the future. It kind of scared us initially. I think we were all really surprised and taken aback. And it wasn't like any of us even knew about telepathy before.

• 6:03Ky Dickens?

  And one of the things that Nina would communicate to her family most about was her relationship with plants.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Nina would share things about plants spontaneously and really bring it up on her own and share about their medicinal properties on a physical level, but also in a spiritual sense. And she knew things about plants that nobody knew. It surprised me right away because she would write about a plant, she would talk about its medicinal properties, how it's traditionally used, why, where it's from. And I wouldn't know anything about it. I would have to look it up online or something, or in a book. And once I was able to verify that, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, something is going on here."

• 6:50Ky Dickens?

  Natalia and the family made sure I understood that they didn't know about the plant information that Nina was discussing. Because as we explored in season one, some non-speakers claimed that they can hear thoughts or read minds. So if Nina's family didn't know any of this plant or herb knowledge, and Nina, because of apraxia, couldn't control her body well enough to type or search for information on her own, then where was all of this information coming from? How did she have such accurate information about plants and herbal remedies?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Everything she's saying is totally accurate. And it became super interesting to me because it was obviously something that was real and happening. When I asked her, Nina, how did you know that? How did you know these things? She would tell me, the plant told me. I speak with the plants. I commune with the plants. She talked about being able to receive information from plants, regardless of distance, regardless of time and space. I mean, most of the plants that she talks about are plants that she's never even physically met.

• 7:50Ky Dickens?

  One of the things that completely changed the family's worldview was this. Nina wasn't just talking about plants. She was offering loved ones and acquaintances extremely specific herbal remedies that turned out to be right. They weren't just vague insights, but precise plant and herbal medicines and uses that nobody had taught her.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  She would want to tell people what to take, like different plants. And she would say that she can connect with the energy of plants and of the earth.

• 8:18Ky Dickens?

  And here's Nina's mom, Raquel, who has witnessed this time and again.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  It was just like, wouldn't you actually know? And how do you know it? She's like, the plants commune with me. I can read the plants. That's how. And I don't know what that means, but I just know that she would go right into so-and-so needs da-da-da-da-da passion flower because they have da-da-da-da-da. And then we would look it up. And then sure enough, there it was. It was like that.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  She could see what was going on with a person and know their issues with their health before they ever said anything. And it was always a surprise and a shock for me.

• 8:53Ky Dickens?

  And so after Nina identifies maybe an ailment or medical condition for someone, does she always offer like a medicinal suggestion?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  She does always offer some suggestions and they're always so fascinating to me because they're very specific.

• 9:08Ky Dickens?

  And the story gets even more personal than this for Natalia.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Part of the story with me coming back home and working with Nina was because I became really sick and I was living in New Orleans and I had to come home. And no one really knew what was going on with my health. I mean, I was in and out of the hospital constantly and there was a lot of scary unanswered questions about what was going on.

• 9:35Ky Dickens?

  But even though the doctors couldn't figure out what was occurring in her body, Nina seemed to. Nina began suggesting specific herbal remedies as a way to address the things that not even Natalia's doctors had identified yet.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  She recommended me this plant initially called astragalus, which I was not familiar with. And she told me that I needed to take it every day, multiple times a day, and that it was going to help me slowly build back up my immune system and become more resilient. And she was like, this is going to be really nourishing to you and helpful to you. So I didn't know if that was how it works or if it was going to be helpful. And I ended up looking into it and astragalus is a herb in traditional Chinese medicine that's used exactly for that purpose. And I ended up taking it and using it

• 10:33Speaker 01

  and it had profound benefits for me and my health. And she knew things that I didn't know that turned out to be true later on, once I was able to actually figure out what the diagnosis was.

• 10:46Ky Dickens?

  And Natalia isn't the only family member who's been touched by Nina's spontaneous suggestions. One day we were together.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  And she started telling us what we need to take for our health according to the issues that we were having.

• 11:00Ky Dickens?

  This is Karida, Nina and Natalia's grandmother, or abuela, and Raquel's mother.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  And she was correct in everyone. She said, "Abuela, you have to take King Gobilova for circulation." And she told my husband to take a ginseng, two friends, all of the organ in his body. How she knew our health situation, all of us, and how she recommended to each one of us what to take. Incredible.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  My uncle was visiting. He hadn't seen Nina in a really long time, not since she was able to spell. And it was a great experience to be together and to see him. And I remember she was really excited to see him. And when we were all together, she spelled, "I'm so happy to see you. So much has happened and I have my new voice now." And after that, she became dysregulated and had tears in her eyes. And I asked her, "What's going on, Nina?" And she said, "He is not doing well. He's at risk for a heart attack and he has high blood pressure and he needs help right away."

• 12:17Speaker 01

  And I remember just not knowing what to do in that moment because I didn't want to make him afraid. None of us knew anything that was going on with his health. He hadn't shared anything with us, no one in my family. So I just told him exactly what Nina said and I asked him, "Does this resonate with you at all? Or is this something that is happening? This is what Nina just shared?" And he turned white as a ghost and was like, "I just went to the doctors a few days ago and they told me the exact same thing. And it's been nerve wracking for me because I'm dealing with these health challenges." My uncle's health challenges that no one else in our family knew about at the time.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And she kind of unearthed. That and from there she gave him some recommendations with herbs and she was like, you need to take Hawthorne berry and drink beet juice and do this type of exercise. And she came up with a protocol for him and was like, it's gonna be okay. And from there, he implemented a lot of the things that Nina suggested and was really working on it. Months later, he went back to the doctor and they're like, oh my goodness, you're looking so much better. Wow, like what's going on?

• 13:39Ky Dickens?

  I wanted to understand how Nina could pick up on someone's medical issues without knowing their medical history or looking at x-rays or blood panels. So I wrote Nina a series of questions that she spent time answering. And here's Nina's answer in the digital voice that she chose to represent herself in this episode.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  I can often see people's atheric fields, which means I can see where there may be blockages or disruptions. Everything has atheric fields, including plants, so I can see where there is a vibratory match.

• 14:05Ky Dickens?

  I looked this up and an atheric field is often referred to by energy healers as the life force that surrounds the physical body. And we're actually going to do an incredible episode on energy healing later this season, which will underscore some of the late breaking research that really proves energy healing works. So to understand what Nina's doing, it helped me to understand her process as two distinct steps. So first she starts by reading the atheric field or that energetic layer closest to the body and then identifies areas that feel blocked or disrupted. And then she tunes into plans for guidance and not poetic generalities about herbs, but specific and targeted insight. And to Nina, this communication sounds like it's as natural as listening. Here she is again.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Their communication feels like gentle sounds, images and emotions wrapped into a hazy plume of smoke. And then through the smoke, I know exactly where the fire came from, who created it, what kind of fuel and starter it's made out of, and the stories or teachings shared around it. Telepathy is not complicated in fact. It's our most natural form of information exchange. The exchange is effortless, like breathing. You can focus on it intentionally, but just as you automatically and naturally exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, you are always breathing. Telepathy is more subtle and powerfully precise than the messy language of words.

• 15:21Ky Dickens?

  Wow. And for Nina, this connection with plants didn't suddenly appear or evolve as she got older. She says she's always been connected to them.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  I've been communing with plant spirits since I was in my mom's womb. I could always feel their frequency and nourishment. Humans wouldn't exist without plant support. We rely on the oxygen they give us. They are original medicine, original food. They work on the energetic and physical bodies that span from microbial measures to the macrobiomes of our planet. They regulate Earth's body. All beings are telepathic, especially plants. Plants tell me information and are my family. Plants are perceptive healers. They are my guides, teachers, allies, and friends. To commune, we spend time in sacred space where we speak the same language.

• 16:05Ky Dickens?

  What strikes me most is this isn't just information exchange. It feels like a relationship. And like any good relationship, it begins with truly seeing, with recognizing another being for who they are and what they carry. And here's Nina again.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  I can't fully capture and tell you with words how loving and nurturing plants are. They give and give. They want to help us, to heal us, to guide and nourish us. They see us for who we really are and accept us, exactly where we're at.

• 16:31Ky Dickens?

  Nina's experience is undeniable to the people around her. She knows things that she should not be able to know. She offers remedies that no one taught her, and they work. But that raised other questions for me, like, is she truly communicating with plants? Or is she tapping into a larger informational field? Or are plants themselves broadcasting what they know? Kind of like the magnetic field is always there. You just need the right instrument, like a compass, to tune into it. But before exploring any of this, I feel like we first have to ask a more fundamental question: Do plants communicate at all? And if they do, does that communication stay within their own kind? Or can it move across species? To answer this, we turn to someone who has spent his life listening to the forest.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  I'm in communication with fungi every day. And you are too. You're just not aware of it.

• 17:14Ky Dickens?

  This is famed mycologist Paul Stamets, featured in the Netflix film Fantastic Fungi, or as he would say, fungi, and author of the bestselling book Mycelium Running.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  I'm a scientist who studies fungi, and I've been a mycologist for, well, ever since I was 14.

• 17:31Ky Dickens?

  Paul is an expert on the mycorrhizal network, the vast underground web where fungi and mushrooms connect trees and plants. Think of it as the forest's internet, often called the wood wide web, a living, operating communication and resource sharing system. And through it, trees send nutrients, exchange information, warn of danger, take care of their kin, and support each other.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Let's first accept a basic premise. Does mushroom mycelium, for instance, or nature have consciousness? And does it have language? Now, we have to accept the fact that we're articulating these concepts within the brain that's evolved that we receive from nature. And so the constructs of our language and our capability of cognition is admittedly a limitation. So by framing the question in that sense, we have an extremely narrow field of view and understanding.

• 18:22Ky Dickens?

  If language shapes what we recognize as conscious and real, then this next discovery widens reality. Scientists are literally recording language patterns coming from mycelium networks, the networks of fungi and mushrooms under the forest floor.

• 18:36Speaker 05

  Just in the past year, they decoded 50 words and word packets that mushroom mycelium is using. So we're starting to decode the language from another kingdom. And they're actually using word packets through electrodes that were placed across the mycelial network so they could see repeated word packets. And the words were a little bit more sophisticated than the words I'm using right now. That was on the, basically, the first attempt that was, this was discovered, was published in a renowned journal. There's probably thousands of words. And moreover, when they start talking, what are the responses from the other organisms? What words are they using? So we have to keep this in context.

• 19:19Speaker 05

  The level of complexity here is so exciting because we're entering into a realm of interspecies communication. And just because they don't have vocal cords, just because they don't have a body like us, doesn't mean that language communication systems have not been developed.

• 19:40Ky Dickens?

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• 20:25Ky Dickens?

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• 22:00Ky Dickens?

  So what if Nina's tapping into something we simply don't yet know how to measure? The same way tree communication sat in the shadows for decades before science finally recognized it.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Suzanne Simard's work actually kind of pierced the envelope and brought us to a new level of understanding that deciduous and conifer trees can actually exchange nutrients.

• 22:18Ky Dickens?

  Dr. Suzanne Simard is a forest ecologist whose research changed how the world understands tree communication. Her groundbreaking book, Finding the Mother Tree, is incredible. And here's Dr. Simard in 2016, talking about one of her experiments.

• 22:31Speaker 06

  So we set about an experiment. We grew mother trees with kin and stranger seedlings. And it turns out, they do recognize their kin. Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They send them more carbon below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages, wisdom, onto the next generation of seedlings. So we've used isotope tracing to trace carbon moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighboring seedlings. Not only carbon, but also defense signals. And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those

• 23:15Speaker 06

  seedlings to future stresses. So trees talk.

• 23:18Ky Dickens?

  Trees talk. A groundbreaking discovery that has now become foundational science.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  It's like a symphony of connections and messaging and delivery of nutrients, all at the same time.

• 23:31Ky Dickens?

  This is Teresa Ryan, from the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry, whose work bridges indigenous knowledge and forest science in the Mother Tree Project. She's a member of the Shimsian Nation, native peoples who are indigenous to the Pacific Northwest in British Columbia.

• 23:46Speaker 07

  My Shimsian name is Simhajetzk. I did my second postdoc with Suzanne Simard. She had read my dissertation, and she was amazed by our indigenous views of connections to place, how our indigenous social institutions were connected to our landscapes.

• 24:08Ky Dickens?

  Social systems mirror the living networks of the forest.

• 24:11Speaker 07

  There is competition in the plants in the forest. From an ecologist's perspective, we understand that competition. But there's cooperation as well. Cedar and maple have a unique relationship.

• 24:23Ky Dickens?

  They take turns sending carbon to the other when they need it most.

• 24:26Speaker 07

  Douglas fir and birch. The birch actually have antibiotic properties with Douglas fir. Birch also provides shade for Douglas fir when they are seedling. So it is a relationship that's on a continuum throughout their life cycle histories. And if something happens to a mother tree that is a threat, then the mother tree, it's been shown that the carbon gets offloaded to its younger generation fairly rapidly. So it's amazing to see this reciprocal exchange with these species that are interconnected in the forest.

• 25:07Ky Dickens?

  A few decades ago, the notion that trees communicate was dismissed as fantasy. Today, it's peer-reviewed science. And if forests exchange information through underground networks between species, sending warnings and nutrients, is it so far-fetched to think that humans might connect with the plant world too? And if Nina can seemingly do it, what about those who work with plants every day? To explore this, we turn to herbalist David Winston. He's a renowned clinical herbalist, ethnobotanist, and author with over 50 years of experience in herbal medicine. He's the founder and director of the Herbal Therapeutics Research Library and co-founder of the American Herbalists Guild. So he felt like a great candidate to weigh in on whether or not he thought it was possible for plants to communicate with people.

• 25:49Speaker 06

  My first experience with plants that I can remember is I'm maybe four or five years old. I'm in the backyard and I'm picking this plant, just one type of plant. I'm picking the leaves and putting some water in a plastic bucket. And I'm to have a rock and I'm mashing them up. And I'm probably covered with this stuff. My mother comes out and she

• 26:12Speaker 05

  Looks at me, she goes, "What are you doing?" And I'm saying, "I'm making medicine. This is good for when you get a boo-boo, you know, when you get a cut or whatever." And my mother just shakes her head and wanders away. At the time, I didn't know the name of that plant, but I do now, and it's plantain. And plantain, of course, is a great vulnerary. It's a great wound plant. It's anti-inflammatory and it's antibacterial. And it is used to treat a wide range of topical inflammation, cuts, scratches, bee stings, ant stings, et cetera. And if you said to me, "How did I know that?" It's because the plant told me I could do that.

• 26:53Ky Dickens?

  David went on to enjoy a five-decade and counting career in herbology and ethnobotany. And incredibly, he continues to receive messages from plants on how he can harvest them and use them for medicinal purposes.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  I had a patient who has glomerulonephritis, which is a chronic autoimmune disease of the kidneys. And at this point, when she came to see me, she had 18% EGFR. That's the estimated glomerular filtration rate. And I had put her on a Chinese formula, which is the Romania Six Formula. And that formula will help keep people from getting worse for a while, for a year, if you're lucky. So she had been on the formula for about a year and three or four months, and she had just come back from her nephrologist, and her EGFR rates had dropped significantly. And when you're down at 18, you don't have a whole long way to go before you need to go on dialysis. And so I knew at this point it had stopped working.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  And I was feeling really bad because as a clinician, your job is to help people, and you want to help people. It wasn't just that I had nothing left to offer her. I couldn't think of anybody who had anything to offer her. And that's just a terrible feeling. And I was sitting out by the barn at my old farm, and it was a typical late August New York.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  New Jersey day and all of a sudden I look up and I have this big patch of nettles and the nettles is shaking. What do I think? I think is there a bird in there? Is there a squirrel? Is there a chipmunk, a rabbit, whatever? And again, it's shaking and I'm looking around, nothing else is moving. There's no wind, nothing. So I get up figuring again, something's gonna either scurry away or fly out of the nettles. Nothing happens and I get over to the nettles and all of a sudden in my head I hear, I can help her. So I'm thinking, all right, but I had to argue, it's the wrong time of year to gather nettle leaf. Nettle leaf, you know, the leaves look terrible, they're all bug eaten and everything and nettle leaf is a great medicine. And it's useful for kidney problems, but minor kidney problems, it's not gonna help

• 28:53Speaker 06

  something really significant like glomerulonephritis. And then I hear, not my leaves, my seeds. So after I managed to kind of pick my jaw off the ground and pop it back into place because I was rather stunned, I'm thinking about nettle seed. I've never used nettle seed, I've never heard of nettle seed being used for anything. I know of no uses for nettle seed. The only thing I know about nettle seed that gives me some measure of comfort is that I know in Europe it was used as an emergency food during famine. So I know it's not toxic, but that's about it. So I go back to the house, I get some tobacco, which is a traditional offering.

• 29:33Ky Dickens?

  Just a touch of context. In many indigenous cultures, tobacco is often offered to plants as a gesture of gratitude and respect, a way to acknowledge the spirit and life force within all living things. So when someone harvests a plant, they might sprinkle a small amount of tobacco on the ground or at the base of the plant to say, hey, you know, thank you for giving your life so that I might have medicine or food or materials.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  So I'm offered to the plant and wearing gloves because it's also known as stinging nettle, I harvest a bunch of the seed. I go to the house, I make a tincture out of it, which is an alcohol and water extract of the plant. I let it, you know, macerate the requisite amount of time and press it out. And then when it's done, I called up my patient and I said, listen, I've got this thing, it's experimental and if you'd like to try it, I'm happy to give it to you. I know it's not toxic, but I can't tell you much more than that. And she said, look, you've helped me as much as anybody's been able to help me and I trust you. So I'll try it. She starts taking the nettle seed and in six to eight weeks,

• 30:35Speaker 06

  her EGFR has gone from about 16 back up to 19, which is higher than it had been. It had been at 18. In four months, her EGFR is at 20. At a year, her EGFR is at 28.

• 30:51Ky Dickens?

  The nettle seed worked.

• 30:52Speaker 06

  She continued to take that nettle seed for 12 years. And that nettle seed kept her EGFR and all the other kidney markers at a much better level. And when she died 12 years later, it had nothing to do with her kidneys. And that was the first person I treated with nettle seed. I've treated, and I don't know an exact number because I've never counted, somewhere between probably 50 and 80 people with degenerative kidney disease.

• 31:20Ky Dickens?

  After David's discovery of this use of nettle seed, acceptance of this medicine has become much more foundational in herbal medicine and helping to treat chronic kidney disease. But I wanted to know more, like, how exactly did David know it was the nettle that was talking to him?

• 31:34Speaker 06

  It sounded like somebody speaking to me. It sounded like a voice, you know, and but it was in my head and I knew it wasn't me. It definitely was not something I was aware of. Whether we are talking about dreaming when you're asleep, whether we are talking about opening yourself into what we'll call a meditative state where you are open to other consciousnesses that communicate differently, quietly, and allowing yourself to be open in hearing those things and then using your judgment and discernment to determine whether this is something that's coming from you or coming externally from you. And again, I think that when it's, you know, a plan is telling you something and you weren't even thinking about it, it's telling you, you can use me for this.

• 32:17Speaker 06

  You know, why would I even be thinking of? Something like that. And so for me, it's not a question of trying to prove it. I know it's all true.

• 32:26Ky Dickens?

  And Nina agrees. Here's what she said about this.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Discernment is the most important thing to remember because it instructs us on how to know what's what. Without discernment, we can get lost in confusion and these realms is scary. So discerning what is of value is essential.

• 32:41Ky Dickens?

  And David isn't the only one who Nettle has communicated with.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  I'm Sophie Strand. I'm a writer at the intersection of ecology, storytelling, science, and myth.

• 32:50Ky Dickens?

  When interviewing author Sophie Strand for research for this episode, she unexpectedly told us a story of when she was visited by Nettle in a dream to help with her own chronic kidney disease.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  I went into pretty severe kidney failure. I've had experiences on and off for many years. My doctors believe it's autoimmune. They've never been able to figure out what triggers it, why it happens. And there was a flurry, like, was I gonna need dialysis? What kind of intervention was I gonna need? And I asked my doctors, I said, give me four days. Like, please, just give me four days. I'm not saying that anyone else should do this, but I was at this time in my life where I was intuitively like, I need four days to just think about this. And I asked for a dream and I dreamed of Nettle. And I drank so much Nettle infusion. Nettle infusion is, you know, I put Nettle in water and then I put it out in a glass jar and let the sun really steep it. And I drank so much Nettle.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And when I went back in and retested, my numbers had all re-corrected. My doctors could not believe it. They had no explanation for it.

• 33:51Ky Dickens?

  If you want to explore something like this, I encourage you to talk to a doctor. This show does not give medical advice and cannot replace care from a qualified physician.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying anyone else with kidney issues should do this. I'm saying that I asked for guidance and a plant showed up for me. And it really did work.

• 34:07Ky Dickens?

  I asked David if he knows what about Nettle seed is so effective in treating the kidneys. And he said, quite frankly, he doesn't, but it also doesn't really matter. What matters is that it works.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  In herbal medicine, people have used, let's say, willow bark, probably for, I don't know,

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Fifty, a hundred thousand years as an analgesic and pain reliever. We've only understood the mechanisms of how willow bark works for 50 years, or maybe 70 years at this point. We have used things for long periods of time without understanding them, but recognized that there was validity to them.

• 34:43Ky Dickens?

  Listening to herbalists like David, I noticed that even in the most clinical settings, many of those who communicate with plants, including Nina, reference indigenous ways of knowing, where plants are not just resources, but relatives, where medicine begins not with analysis, but with gratitude and what feels like communion.

• 35:00Speaker 07

  The spiritualness or the connectedness to spirits throughout the forest is, it's expressed in our indigenous way of life.

• 35:11Ky Dickens?

  Here's Teresa Ryan, who you met earlier in the episode. She's a member of the Shimshian Nation. I asked if, based on her traditions, she believed plants and trees were conscious.

• 35:20Speaker 07

  They have spirit. I would describe them as spirit. And that's partly because I am immersed in a way of life that has a different understanding of the spirits in the world.

• 35:30Ky Dickens?

  In indigenous teachings, community isn't limited to people. It includes the trees, the rivers, and the spirits that move through them. Maybe what we call consciousness is just another name for spirit, the living current that carries ancestral knowledge through all things. And what if the reason some people can hear plants or feel them is because of the ancestors who never stopped listening? Maybe in some cases, they're even the go-betweens. The ways trees use fungi to speak, maybe humans use memory and lineage and even ancestral spirit as our invisible network. And here's Nina to weigh in on this.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  My connection to my ancestors is a major part of my connection to plants. For example, my Cuban roots hold information about plants as spiritual tools that are tried and true.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  She has known things about our ancestors that I did not know about or that other people in my family had no idea about that turned out to be true. I come from Cuba. I came many years ago.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  I've been living here in the United States, but I do remember my ancestry.

• 36:31Ky Dickens?

  This is Kari Dodd, Nina and Natalia's grandmother.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Our ancestry did work with plants. My great-great-grandfather, he do love herbs and write about herbs. And he was famous. He was very intellectual and he was very holy. And he talked about plants and wrote books about it. In our countries, in Latin America, the Caribbean, Cuba and Mexico, part of the culture is healing with herbs. And those people are called curanderos or curanderas. It means healing through plants. And how Nina knows all of that, we don't know.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  My abuela, she is my mom's mom. She's very Catholic. And so it's very taboo to talk about like more spiritual topics that don't fall in line with the traditional religious beliefs. So we never were outwardly talking about any of this kind of thing.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  I'm Catholic. And when Nina started talking about all of those things, it was kind of scary. Where that come from? Where all of this come from?

• 37:44Ky Dickens?

  She's experienced Nina knowing things about Cuba and their ancestors, having never been there and never been taught them. And those things turned out to be true.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Nina was telling us about a place in Cuba. And the city is called Santo Espíritu, which is Holy Spirit. And where the sea meets with the river. And she talked to us about that place. When we look at the map, we saw what Nina was talking about. We never talked to her about that. It was not in my life, in my mind, nothing. I didn't know anything about that. She knows more her roots than I do.

• 38:24Ky Dickens?

  And you've talked about Nina having other gifts too. And so what are some of those?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Telepathy, dream work, going to people in their dreaming, precognition and being able to tell when things happen before they happen, remote viewing, being able to see things from afar that there's no way she would be able to see any other way. So she's gone to people in their dreams and is able to speak to them and give them messages and show them different things.

• 38:52Ky Dickens?

  As Nina's family explains, remote viewing, which is the ability to see a location even though you're not there, might explain how Nina is able to know so much about her ancestry and about plants and herbs that she's never been exposed to.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  After we investigate what Nina says about herbs and ancestors and the map, after we investigate everything she said, it happens that it was true. It is true.

• 39:58Ky Dickens?

  Nina's understanding of plants seems to reach beyond biology into ancestral memory, which of course makes you wonder what our ancestors may have known that we have since forgotten. Across cultures, indigenous people have understood that plants aren't just resources. They're living relatives and teachers and communion with the natural world and that those who came before us wasn't unusual or strange. It was just woven into life itself. To explore this deeper, we turn to the Cuntinawa people, who say they've used telepathy to connect with plants and ancestors for as long as they can remember.

• 40:34Ky Dickens?

  This is Haru Cuntinawa of the Cuntinawa Nation in the Amazon forest in Brazil. So primarily, the people of the forest have their own way of connecting with the forest.

• 40:43Speaker 06

  Technology, which is this connection that they have with nature and with the forest.

• 40:48Ky Dickens?

  And this is Ruda, who will be translating for Haru. Haru is describing what the Kuntanawa nation call their technology, which is how they refer to their telepathic ability to communicate with plants, nature, animals, and each other.

• 40:59Speaker 06

  And this biological connection that we have with nature, with the people with the forest, allows us to also connect with the spiritual realms. It is telepathic connection because when you're connecting with these plants, it allows you to step into a realm where you can be in the present, but you can also be with the ancestors in the past and as well as stepping into the future. There's the energy with everything and that could manifest in what we eat, what we consume, and those energies then transform into frequencies. And through the frequencies, we understand like the more subtle, but the deeper connections with the vibrations of the frequencies that come from the energies that we get from nature.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  And this is something that has been passed on from generation to generation from the ancestors, and it's something that you develop. And when you start to understand that, it starts to become more of a flow.

• 41:54Ky Dickens?

  What Haru describes is not an isolated worldview. From the Amazon to the northern plains, indigenous people have always understood that the natural world is alive and conscious and in conversation with us. The Lakota hold their own teaching about this, and their language itself is shaped by wind, water, animals, and the spirits moving throughout the land.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I believe that some of the oldest words and some of the oldest language does come out of the environment and nature itself. Using the sounds that the nature makes, we developed our language.

• 42:28Ky Dickens?

  This is Ion Quigley. She's an elder of the Lakota tribe, a Native American tribe indigenous to the Great Plains.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  But I believe that nature itself has a language that we Lakota.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Lakota know it's there. We know it's there.

• 42:43Ky Dickens?

  The Lakota have a deep relationship with nature. They believe all things, plants, animals, elements, and the land itself are connected and share a sacred bond.

• 42:51Speaker 05

  We believe that everything has a spirit. There's no such a thing as an inanimate object to us. Everything is alive.

• 42:58Ky Dickens?

  And this is Rick Two Dogs, also a Lakota leader.

• 43:00Speaker 05

  There's some medicines that are passed down through the, what we call the Tio Spay, the extended family. A lot of the traditional healers get their own through fasting, through dreams.

• 43:11Ky Dickens?

  Tio Spay, like Rick said, is the Lakota concept of family that extends beyond blood relations to every member within the tribal clan and community, even those who've passed on. And just like Nina gets information and gifts from her ancestors, this is how knowledge and spirituality is passed down in the Lakota tribe. And the close relationship with their environment also allows them to communicate with and gain wisdom from the plants, animals, and elements of their surroundings. Ione herself had a personal experience of this. She and her brother went with an elder from their tribe to harvest a plant from the forest. But when they found the plant they needed, it was surrounded by poison ivy. Ione and her brother thought their journey was for nothing, until the medicine man said something incredible.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  He told my brother, he said, "Never mind all the poison ivy. They're just here to protect that plant. So they won't hurt you. They won't do anything to you because you're here for that plant." And so he went up with him. They did the prayers. We make an offering to the plant before we harvest it. And then they dug the plant up. And when we got home, my brother, well, there was no poison ivy on him, although he was in the middle of it. But that grandpa had asked the poison ivy to let him make his way to the plant. So he did.

• 44:26Ky Dickens?

  Rick Two Dogs shares a story from Black Elk, a revered medicine man of the Lakota, born in 1863.

• 44:31Speaker 05

  If you read and do research into Black Elk, in his vision, they show Show him this plant that he's supposed to find. So this man goes with him, who is a thunder dreamer, what we call a heoka. So they sat on this hill and they sang heoka songs. And this red-tailed hawk was circling down in the valley there. And so he told his friend, he said, that is where the medicine is growing. So they went down and sure enough, they found the medicine. So he made a prayer before he dug the medicine and offered the tobacco. A lot of these plants even have their own songs. So you sing that song before you harvest the plant.

• 45:13Speaker 05

  And in his prayer, he said, now we're going to go among the weak and the sick, and there will be happy days among them.

• 45:21Ky Dickens?

  As mentioned earlier, making an offering such as singing a song or leaving a gift like tobacco is paramount to the communication between the Lakota and the natural world, especially when they're asking or looking for information about plant medicinal use. Here's Nina explaining her own process when she's communing with plants. Honorable harvest methods are important, like introducing yourself, asking for permission, and giving an offering. Plant stewardship is a sacred art form. Each plant has their own energy and character. Plants are sentient beings. They want to help us, to heal us, to guide and nourish us. They see us for who we really are and accept us, exactly where we're at.

• 45:58Ky Dickens?

  The Lakota call it intuition. Nina calls it telepathy. Whatever the name, the experience seems the same. Communication does not just happen through speech. It happens through sensing and knowing and feeling. And here's herbalist David Winston again.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  There is what we'll call the language of plants. And it seems like most indigenous people, most cultures, have a language of plants. Sometimes it has been forgotten, and sometimes it has been subsumed.

• 46:24Ky Dickens?

  After researching this episode, it was clear that the language of plants was once spoken everywhere, in prayer, in ceremonies, in medicine. But the rise of materialism and colonization and modern technology taught us to value what we could measure and doubt what we could feel.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  Most people who grew up in this culture were not trained from a young age.

• 46:43Ky Dickens?

  To understand intuition and things like that.

• 46:47Ky Dickens?

  And our greatest error may be believing that there's only one right way to know. Science is a way of learning. Intuition is a way of learning. Dreams are a way of learning. Communicating with plants or other parts of nature is a way of learning. Observing patients is a way of learning. Reading books is a way of learning. And none of them are better than the other. And I think they especially work really well when you combine them and you don't shut yourself off to any avenue of learning.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  In modern day, Western medicine, I've never read where the Nargi, the spirit, is really addressed.

• 47:28Ky Dickens?

  Here's Rick Two-Dogs and Naomi Quigley of the Lakota again.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  They compartmentalize everything. They don't see the whole holistic spectrum of things. And that we're just kind of a minute particle of it all.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  And so that they're missing a big part because our belief is that the spirit is the core or the root of our being.

• 47:51Ky Dickens?

  And Nina sees the holistic spectrum as essential to understanding our place in this world.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Humans wouldn't exist without plant support. They regulate Earth's body. They regulate your body and mine. They are not to be seen as dead matter. They are animate, alive, and ever-loving.

• 48:07Ky Dickens?

  Nina has talked about how she gets information and knowledge directly from communing with plants. But she also absorbs energy from plants in nature. And now that Nina can spell, she can often advocate for her own well-being and give her family tools to better support her.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  A big part of her healing process and recovering from not being able to have a voice for so many years has been through nourishing herself with the plants in all types of forms, whether that's through food or through teas or through being outside in nature. Those are things are all really important to her and really regulating for her.

• 48:45Ky Dickens?

  And I witnessed this myself. Nina will be featured in the upcoming Telepathy Tapes documentary. And when we were filming her one day, she became extremely dysregulated and I wasn't sure if we could or should continue. So the crew and I went outside to hold calming space for Nina while we waited for guidance from the family on what to do next.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Asked her what she needed in that moment and she said, I need to go to the forest. And so Kai and all the camera people packed up and we went to the forest. And she said, this is going to help me regulate my nervous system. And she took her shoes off and was walking barefoot through the forest. And it was amazing because she went from this really heightened state to this super relaxed state where she almost fell asleep in the leaves and was looking up at the trees. And so it can be a really beautiful thing to even engage with the plants through our natural environments and being outside and connecting with them that way, too.

• 49:43Ky Dickens?

  And this powerful process of gaining grounding and calming energy isn't specific to Nina. In Japan, doctors still prescribe forest bathing for stress and hypertension and anxiety and immune support. The Japanese government has even designated official therapy forests across the country. And taking in healing from plants by being in nature, absorbing their frequencies, is also, again, a way of life for many indigenous cultures around the world. And for some cultures, it goes even further. They don't just feel plants or forests or heal with them. They consume them ceremonially as a way to link into the greater web of spirit, ancestral knowledge, and consciousness. And that brings us to one of the most powerful plant teachers on the earth, ayahuasca. And the reason we're going to end the episode with ayahuasca is because we'll be turning to psychedelic medicine next week.

• 50:28Ky Dickens?

  It can go out as a memorial. Here's Haru of the Kuntanawa Nation in the Amazon forest in Brazil, being translated by Bruda.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Ayahuasca not only has a spiritual piece, but it also holds a lot of the teachings and the wisdom and the knowledge of the forest, of the plants, of the animals. So it goes much deeper than just the ceremonial aspect of it because it holds this knowledge that is integral.

• 50:52Ky Dickens?

  Haru goes on to explain how ayahuasca enhances the tribe's telepathy, or as they call it, their natural technology.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Ayahuasca, the sacred plant, is much greater and more powerful than the technologies of Today, for example, like the internet, it's sort of like a library of plants. And it's very central to the ancestry and bringing on the teachings.

• 51:15Ky Dickens?

  They say that ayahuasca, a plant that they consume like tea, opens a doorway into a wider field of consciousness, revealing information they could have never known on their own. And next week, we begin with a story that gives real weight to that possibility.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  When you realize that we are a family, we'll be able to connect and be wherever we are on the planet, we'll be connected. The indigenous peoples also have this. And that knowledge and that wisdom goes back to the ancestors, all of those that came before us.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Do we doubt the integrity of indigenous wisdom? Do we say that's just fanciful and it's not based on real world experience? I think the hubris of science just take a backseat to this.

• 51:57Ky Dickens?

  Here's Paul Stamets again.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  I think we're at a time for a paradigm shift in our revolutionary understanding of the universe and the definition of what consciousness is. We want to explore and rejoice our biodiversity, not only culturally, but also the biodiversity of ideas. That which was thought to be preposterous years ago are not preposterous today. There's a lesson here in the evolution of science. I'm pushing the envelope of change and understanding. But at my back, I got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of ancestors of Earth people that are supporting me in this effort.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  It's important that we do not marginalize people who pushes the envelopes of science just because it doesn't conform to your conventional wisdom.

• 52:54Ky Dickens?

  And this is the paradigm shift that Paul points to, the possibility that plants and fungi are not just resources, but partners in our evolution. They may hold ways of knowing what we've forgotten and ways of healing that we are only now rediscovering. So if plants can share their wisdom, what happens when human beings ingest them? What opens in us when we allow these ancient teachers inside our bodies, into our dreams, and into our neural pathways? In our next episode, we follow that question into the world of psychedelics, from indigenous ceremony to modern neuroscience, from centuries of secrecy to decades of stigma to the cutting edge of clinical research. We ask what these substances change in the brain, what they unlock in the mind, and what they might reconnect us to in the larger web of life. Because if consciousness is shared and if nature itself is speaking,

• 53:40Ky Dickens?

  then psychedelics may be one of the oldest ways human beings learn to listen. This podcast shares personal stories, indigenous and historical practices, and interviews with guests. It is not medical advice and does not replace care from a qualified clinician. Do not start or stop any treatment, herb, or supplement because of this show. Statements about herbs and supplements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Nothing in this episode is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. If you have a health concern or medical emergency, contact your doctor or local emergency services. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our Telepathy Tribe Discord,

• 54:25Ky Dickens?

  and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. It takes a village to make this podcast, and I want to thank our producers, Jesse Steed, Jill Pachesnik, and Catherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu. Mix, mastering, and additional music is by Michael Urbino. Our associate producer is Selena Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kandora Design. And I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.