https://www.patreon.com/artistdecoded
About Sophia: Sophia Rokhlin is an author, speaker, and nonprofit organizer dedicated to supporting the conservation of indigenous wisdom and territory. Through engaged botany and ecology, she bridges the worlds of traditional ecological knowledge and Western science.
She is a Program Coordinator at the Chaikuni Institute, supporting sustainable ayahuasca cultivation and reforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. She is a co-author of When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism, and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance (Watkins, 2019) on the global spread of ayahuasca. She helps coordinate Folk Medicine, a live-stream benefit for communities of the Amazon rainforest impacted by COVID-19. She sits in the Ayahuasca Community Committee for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Her research appears in publications including the New York Times and the BBC.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- The beginning stages of Sophia’s work with indigenous people groups
- How human communities understand and grow in community with each other
- The differences between the “American path” vs the path that indigenous people groups take
- The association of wavelengths and the togetherness of individuals
- How western culture has lost a sense of togetherness
- The concept of reciprocity
- “Sowing seeds for the future, while living in the present”
- Capitalism and the approach to success
- Coronavirus and it’s affect to our larger structures
- Working together in teams
- Happiness
- Technology and social innovations
- How indigenous people groups approach health and wellness
- America viewing health in an allopathic way
- Environmentalism
- The romanticization of interconnectedness
- The traditional and modern uses of Ayahuasca
- Meditation, present-mindedness, and prayer
- The loss of ritual within modern society
- Being honest with yourself
- Living in a world full of tools, but having the lack of community to utilize them
- Human wisdom
- The mindset of jumping from interest to interest, rather than going deeper into a context
- Art being an expression of exploration