Stephen Buhner and the Feeling Sense
“As we are schooled, we are trained to think but not to feel; we are, in fact, trained out of our feeling sense as we grow, trained to believe it is useless, an impediment to clear thought."
By chance, I stumbled across Stephen Buhner’s work in the dregs of a Facebook comment about Lyme Disease co-infections. I do not have Lyme (at least I hope not). No, I was reading the Lyme comment in a Long Covid thread, since so many of the symptoms of Long Covid overlap with chronic Lyme.
I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over the past three years in these kinds of comment threads–searching desperately for stories of people who’ve been able to heal whatever peculiar symptom I was experiencing at the moment–blurry vision, sinus tachycardia, burning pain behind my eyes. Without thinking about it much, I clicked on a link to Buhner’s Lyme protocol.
That absent-minded click sent me into what felt like an alternate universe. As I read Buhner’s protocol, then his story, I became more and more fascinated by this self-taught herbalist who managed his own debilitating illness (pulmonary fibrosis) with plant medicine for decades. Fancying himself a polymath, a citizen scientist, and “the kind of healer that American medicine no longer has a place for”, Buhner published over 20 books and built a career and life around his own reading and research. He also crafted an herbal anti-viral Covid protocol that he freely distributed online–something that was brave and dangerous to both his career and legacy.
Without much thought, I ordered some of the recommended herbs from the protocol to address my Long Covid symptoms.
I felt better.
I ordered some of his books.
My fascination with Stephen Buhner grows as the pandemic drags on.
One of my favorite articles I’ve ever read is an interview that Buhner gave to Ross Simonini shortly before his death. Simonini starts out the interview by delving into Buhner’s prolific mention of “the feeling sense” in his work.
Buhner explains:
“While the feeling sense, as I use it, was an integral aspect of the Enlightenment, over time, as the most reductive and conservative members of that movement took over the sciences (and the culture), the feeling component was increasingly viewed with suspicion. A cynical dissociation took its place. What we have lost in consequence is an essential element of our humanity. No one seems to realize that scientists and physicians (and bankers and hedge fund operators) who are trained out of their feeling sense are, in essence, sociopaths.”
In an instant, Buhner has put into words what I’ve been feeling for decades. There’s something missing in how modern science (and law and medicine) addresses problems. When a problem is reduced down to a molecular level, the system gets lost. But the system is everything.
Buhner continues: “As we are schooled, we are trained to think but not to feel; we are, in fact, trained out of our feeling sense as we grow, trained to believe it is useless, an impediment to clear thought. In one very real sense, we have allowed the most psychologically damaged of the reductionists to structure how we approach the world, scientifically and culturally. We literally train our children to lose their capacity to feel the world around them, to have an integrated capacity for feeling. Many of the people we are supposed to most admire in contemporary culture are, in consequence, a kind of sociopath; they lack feeling for the life forms that surround them. This feeling sense, by the way, is root to the empathic sense as well as the aesthetic sense. Over time, in the West, we have lost our capacity even to understand the aesthetics of our jobs, our homes, our relationships, and most art. Many people have also lost their capacity to empathize with other life forms of any sort; this is especially true of people in any position of power.”
How have I not seen this concept discussed before? I’ve got a graduate degree in environmental science and worked as an environmental lawyer and–not once–did I ever discuss the “feeling sense” in a seminar or read about it in a textbook or journal article.
The world is newly awakened as I remember thinking these same thoughts as a child. As I built my third-grade science fair project about the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on Alaskan sea birds. As I joined protests in the Headwaters Forest as a young teenager. As I harvested a corn field on the Navajo reservation and talked with elders about uranium mining. As I refused to eat meat at 11 years old, after watching a news segment about factory farming.
This feeling sense is part of us until it isn’t. And if you still admit to having it as an adult, you’re called a highly sensitive person–which is currently considered a form of neurodivergence. But is it divergent if it is inherent to all of us?
But isn’t this just our intuition? Or our connection to God? Or the universe? Isn’t this the part of us that’s awakened when we bear witness to a lightning storm or the birth of a child? Or the part of us whose heart breaks when a dead humpback whale washes up on the shore?
Why would science, as a field of study, suppress this sense? Buhner mentions that Einstein, Goethe, George Washington Carver, and many other great scientific thinkers alluded to this “feeling sense” but also that, professionally, this came at a great risk. The problem, according to Buhner, is that “it upsets the current belief that the best science is performed in a state of dissociated mentation.”
The further I dive into Buhner’s work, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I start searching the Internet for interviews he’s given. I order out-of-print books that he recommends in comment threads from 2013. I’m in pretty deep.
In one of the out-of-print books, I learn that there was once a strong tradition of herbal medicine in the United States (known as Eclectic Medicine), but that it was essentially outlawed (“greatly suppressed” is a phrase I see thrown around) from about 1950-1975. I read that botanicals that were once part of the standard materia medica in the country were banned and that the entire industry has operated quasi-underground for the past 50 years.
Here’s my basic understanding of how the practice of herbal medicine currently works in the U.S.… You figure out what combination of herbs you need in order to heal a particular ailment and then find an herbalist to order the herbs from, but the herbalist can’t tell you what the herbs actually do to your body or advise you on how to take them, for fear of the FDA. This requires a tremendous amount of research and then, because everyone is operating underground, there are essentially no standards or quality control.
What the actual fuck. Am I in some red-pill vortex? Is this all a scam or a conspiracy?
I open up Amazon on my browser and start reading the reviews of Buhner’s more popular books. In reviewing the 2nd edition of Buhner’s Herbal Antibiotics book, I see a 5-star rating and the following headline “Absolutely essential to anyone who likes being alive....” and hundreds more like it. I also see these reviews in my Long Covid groups, where people have taken to using code names for certain herbs and medications, for fear of getting the whole group shut down by Facebook. There are people in these groups who are doctors and nurses and professors and people who founded prominent tech companies. These are not groups filled with society’s outcasts.
What kind of world are we living in? The feelings of dystopia are dizzying.
I don’t know what to believe, but I know that Stephen Buhner’s work is compelling and it makes sense to me–especially the 12-year-old version of me who I consider my truest self. I also know that his anti-viral protocol helped me feel better at a time when Western medical doctors, for the most part, could not.