Elliot Cowan

Author of Plant Spirit Medicine. A shaman who studied with Huchol Indians. He works with plant spirits and the dream world to help heal people. He holds classes around the country. He has also opened The Blue Deer Center.

The Blue Deer Center offers a beautiful retreat space to the international healing community. The Center, rooted in the living traditions of the Huichol shamans of Mexico, provides opportunities for direct connection with the Divine, the Self, and the natural world. Blue Deer Center offers a location for apprenticeship in deep shamanism, courses in plant spirit medicine, healing camps, group retreats, personal healing, ceremony, and other opportunities for spiritual discovery. The Center assists the Huichol people in supporting themselves by helping to create outlets for their divinely inspired artworks.

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Martin Prechtel

A master of eloquence and innovative language, Martín Prechtel is a leading thinker, writer and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. His life, the well known subject of his previous books Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart, took him from his native New Mexico upbringing as a half-blood, Native American from a Pueblo Indian reservation to the village of Santiago Atitlan where he eventually served the Tzutujil Mayan population as a full village member becoming a principal in the body of village leaders, responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories that took place in the rituals of adult rights of passage.

Martín once again resides in his native New Mexico. Teaching internationally through story, music, ritual and writing, Martín helps people in many lands to retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the Indigenous Soul. Broadly cherished, Martín’s third book, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time, has become a runaway, underground hit. Martín’s fourth book, The Toe Bone and the Tooth, the highly anticipated third in the narrative trilogy of Martín’s autobiographical series, was enthusiastically received in the UK, South Africa and Australia in October 2002 and is due to be released in the United States in February 2003 by Thorsons, an imprint of HarperCollins.

He has opened a school called Bolard's Kitchen.

Teaching forgotten things, endangered excellent knowledges, but above all a grand overview of human history as seen from a particular Martín Prechtel way in the search for a comprehension regarding the survival of unique and unsuspected manifestations of the Indigenous Soul in overlooked pockets of peaceful living during isolated times throughout the world as well as the worldwide historical displacement of indigenous people, plant and animal life-ways and the subsequent survival of core vestiges of these deep life and culture respecting understandings that still live in various everyday life styles among many of today’s mixed peoples and ecosystems. A way of hands-on village-style teaching in hopes of developing a language, consciousness and way of living that feeds and gives life to the Indigenous Soul of the Earth whereby scientific discovery working on behalf of a true spirituality of the Holy in Nature could give humans a real usefulness within the whole, instead of a fearful rationalist synthetic flight away from life into depression and extinction.