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thetinfoilhatlady · 7 years

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The call towards wholeness did not reside in the teaching of the plants: It resided in the deepest parts of my own being.

In September of 2017 I took the trip of a spiritual lifetime. I am curious about human consciousness, a researcher into alternative history, an outspoken performer, a speaker and writer in the arts world. My life has taken me on many adventures, especially since I started traveling internationally in 2013. As a Medical Laboratory Technologist I also have a biological curiosity.

This trip was the cherry on top of my travels so far. The reward for all the hard work I had done and the understanding I had gained regarding who we are and why we are all here.

I follow a teacher named Tobias Lars. He shares his wisdom online with videos as well as in workshops, travel retreats and courses. I have his book ‘Listening to the Sun‘ kindle version available. I also use his Inner Body Awakening Meditation. The company Spiritual Travelers is another one of his exciting endeavors. Through his Ayahuasca retreats I found the perfect place to experience Ayahuasca, the Mother of all ancient plant medicine, at The Source.

Hidden within the mysterious and ancient Sacred Valley in Peru and quite close to famous Machu Picchu, is the fabulous retreat called The Source. They call it the edge of Luxury and indeed it is. Created and constructed by the unnamed ‘owner’ this is a majestic and magical location. Perfect for escaping from the outside world of negativity and stress. Not only beautiful but consciously constructed by the promptings of Ayahuasca herself.

See the beautiful ladies washroom here ! See my room here.

I arrived with 10 others from around the world for 6 days of soul exploration. A couple from Australia, a man from Denmark, two ladies from Sweden, a mother and son from Romania, 3 women from America and myself, the lone Canadian. As these things usually reveal them selves to be, each of us was called to do ceremony at this site, and each of us were perfect for each others learning.

Hear the local music from my balcony wrapped in jasmine here. See my Facebook album here for images.

The one month to two week preparation in diet and lifestyle, was essential for a most enjoyable experience. Though ‘Aya’ is known as The Purge, if one prepares well enough that aspect of the experience is less bothersome. In this regard I had quit coffee, dairy, meat, dried fruit, fermented foods and was very conscious of not taking any medication unless needed. Also using less chemicals in my personal hygiene as well as keeping off the computer and using less media all round. I started to do some yoga, meditate daily, write in my journal and avoid any recreational drugs or alcohol.

It is very important to avoid pork and dried or bruised fruit, as these food create a chemical compound that does not mix well with Aya and can cause serious health problems. Needless to say once one commits to the diet and lifestyle changes, the ceremony has begun.

Because I am a Celiac Sprue my ability to restrict myself was not as hard as it was for others. One person who chose not to quit meat for example was always quite sick during ceremony and could not stop throwing up for hours.

So why even put one’s self through all this ? To me the answer was curiosity. Again my need to research, my need to know, my desire to understand my consciousness set me on this journey. I had known about DMT or dimethyltryptamine for many years. Those who study hallucinogens or partake in their use will be familiar with the substance. This is also known as The Spirit Molecule and is actually produced naturally in our bodies by our pineal gland when we dream and when we die.

Is it safe ?

“The exact toxic profile of DMT is unknown, but studies in rodents suggest that a lethal dose in humans would be extremely high; more than 20 times the typical dose given during an ayahuasca ceremony.”

“A group of experienced DMT users were asked to rate its safety, with 55% reporting it to be “very safe” and 38% “quite safe”.[4] The main risks they reported were a “bad trip” (51%), which is considerably higher than the risk of bad experiences with the other classic psychedelics, LSD and psilocybin.”

The week consisted of four Aya ceremonies one day off and one day of Wachuma or San Pedro Cactus drink and the Andean Sweat Lodge. This drink, which we helped prepare the day prior, was taken in the afternoon. It made us quite chatty and it was wonderful to wander the gardens and sense the natural beauty all around us. The active ingredient in San Pedro cactus is mescaline.

Of course the first night of Ayahuasca, I had no idea what to expect. I knew I would throw up, I knew I would have a bowel purge, but that was about it. Little did I know the wisdom and insights that would be revealed to me by weeks end.

Each morning we had the option of a movement class and an afternoon mandatory debriefing session with our Shaman Aminta. She was the spiritual conductor of the ceremony who guided the music being created and the timing of the night. She also took care to make certain we were all breathing and safe and cared for along with Beth and Ritchie and another local Healer who sang wonderful traditional songs that I seemed to know.

We were told to use our breath to flow, use the music as an anchor and use our gratitude as a rope to guide us through the adventure. We also were asked to remember no matter how weird it got, it would eventually end. All great advice.

The Temple where the Aya ceremonies occur is a beautiful round building. Since electronics were not allowed inside I respectfully did not take any pictures myself. These are shots I found on the website .

The ceiling is glass and it was most wonderful to look up at the southern hemisphere stars towards the end of the ceremonies. Being able to see the milky way while walking back to our rooms afterwards was also quite amazing.

Ceremonies last anywhere from 6 to 8 hours and started at 6:30pm. We each had a nice bed to lay in and a beautiful washroom to visit when needed. There were personal purge buckets that were emptied by staff as soon as we used them.

Everything is well coordinated and thought out to ensure you have a most pleasant, beautiful and safe experience. The staff is top notch and well experienced. The food is high frequency, grown onsite and prepared with your health at heart. If YOU are called, The Source is where you want to go to experience Ayahuasca.

What happens ?

Anecdotal reports suggest that greater self-awareness and spiritual connection to the world can be gained from properly using DMT. Just as ayahuasca ceremonies can provide new perspective on inner emotional realities to people with mental and addictive disorders, DMT can be used to achieve new perspective in one’s spiritual life.

Many report that DMT gives them a connection to unconscious parts of their mind, allowing them to see any issues and mental blocks they’ve been experiencing from a new vantage point. People often report a sense of detachment from their emotions and how they identify with them as well.

So what did I experience ?

After a few Hail Mary’s and an ongoing mantra I use “I love and Approve of Myself, I am Safe.” it was my turn to down the brew. It is made from boiling the Vine containing the active DMT and leaves which allow your body to access the medicine. My impression was that it tasted like black licorice. Others thought it was bad tasting. It is very individual.

The effects start with many colours and I noticed as I lay with my eyes shut that these were the textile patterns seen in South America. Then I was drawn into what I can only call ‘scenes’. They were from my life and they drew me into intellectual dilemmas. Scenes of conversations, arguments or just trying to get ones point across.

I noticed Aya “tagging” words in these scenes and then I was able to stop them and using my breath blow them away. I walked down the middle of these scenes for some time. The words she tagged were words like FAULT, BAD, WRONG, ERROR, MISTAKE. I understood they were not real, not valid. Things just ARE. There can be no judgement on them.

Now it is very hard to explain my experiences to you in words. The profound meaning is very personal and individual. Your ‘trip’ would not be the same as mine. Each time you do it and each person who does it has different experiences.

During the first and second ceremony there were many entities who came to stand beside me with their hands up as if to give me an energy treatments, as well as those who ‘ate’ impurities from my subtle bodies. I was aware of my C-section scar and had help doing more healing needed from that traumatic event 23 years ago, in which I almost bled out.

Aya also showed me a type of butterfly. It seemed odd, like it had sort of bat wings. Maybe it was from another planet ? Anyway it only lived for 5 beats of its own wings. Once it died I saw the consciousness leave it and turn into a sort of angel. A voice said “Look! Even for this life I am curious to experience”.

Later in ceremony 3 and 4, I became a giant cobra and also a long fanged dragon. I found this very fun.

Mother Aya also showed me the word KNOWING. Then it morphed in to NO ING, then to NOW. My understanding at this point is that we can never truly know anything, but we can always be in the NOW. For someone like me whose first words were ‘I’m Curious!’, it was confirmation of my spiritual research. There is only NOW. Time is an artifact of consciousness and does not really exist.

The call towards wholeness did not reside in the teaching of the plants: It resided in the deepest parts of my own being.

There is much more however it is not to be put into words. My understanding is that I am actually doing very well in my life. I have come through some challenges and have done so with grace. Needless to say it was well worth it. I am planning to go back in a few years and do it again. The Source is a true safe space where those who have experience and ability can guide you to dance with this ancient special medicine.

If you are called please consider going. At this time of planetary healing we can all contribute to the general raising of human consciousness.

Ayahuasca and Me The call towards wholeness did not reside in the teaching of the plants: It resided in the deepest parts of my own being.

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clausvonbohlen · 7 years

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Travels with my Shaman.

I wrote my last post in a café in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, back in January. At that time, I was shuttling between Iquitos on the weekends, and the jungle clearing (‘terreno’) where Otilia the shaman lives, during the week. The terreno is an hour by car outside Iquitos, and then a forty minute walk down a muddy trail through the jungle. The trail is hot and humid and the mosquitoes are aggressive, but the annoyance is compensated for by the occasional butterfly with startlingly bright and metallic blue wings.

I had my own little hut (or ‘tambo’) at the terreno – a basic wooden structure without electricity or water, but sufficient. I was drinking ayahuasca twice a week, usually Tuesdays and Fridays, and fasting on those days. For the first few weeks, I would vomit aggressively – mostly a mixture of ayahuasca and stomach acid. On a couple of occasions, this searing gunk went up my nose, and I was unable to shake off the smell, and lingering nausea, for the rest of the night.

I was obeying Otilia’s dietary restrictions: no sugar or salt, and very light, easily digestible food – mostly rice and fruit. Certainly no alcohol or caffeine. By the end of the week I was usually pretty hungry, so I would go to Iquitos to eat in the restaurants there, and also charge my electronic devices and write emails.

When I first arrived at the terreno, I was the only visitor, and the first ayahuasca ceremonies were just for me. The ceremonies always took place in the dark, in the space beneath the wooden stilts that supported one of the larger huts. Otilia and I would both drink a cup of incredibly noxious and viscous ayahuasca, then we would wait for the effects to manifest themselves. After an hour or so, Otilia started to sing ‘ícaros’, beautiful and comforting spiritual songs that are halfway between hymns and lullabies. Towards the end of the ceremony, around midnight, she would sit next to me and conduct a sort of examination, placing her hands on my abdomen and chest. I had the impression that she had X-ray vision, partly mediated by touch. She would then pronounce a diagnosis and a remedy or prescription.

In my case, Otilia diagnosed poor liver function and intestinal parasites. The former corroborated what a Chinese acupuncturist had told me six months previously – a blockage in the energy meridian associated with the liver. Otilia did not phrase it quite like that, but she did point to the same organ. To treat this, she prescribed a daily infusion of ‘matapasto’, a type of Amazonian grass.

I was more surprised by the diagnosis of intestinal parasites. I know that these loom large in the Amazon, where people drink the river water, but I am a child of the hygienic West, why would I have parasites? However, it is certainly true that my digestion is unpredictable at best, and I frequently have a feeling of discomfort in the lower gut. Otilia said that I should go to a pharmacy in Iquitos and request a three day course of anti-parasitic medication.

I was sceptical of Otilia’s diagnoses, but I followed her prescriptions with an open mind. I have to say that, after a few weeks, I felt better than I have done for years, both physically and mentally. Of course, this could be due to any number of reasons – the restfulness of being in the jungle and disconnected from the stressful aspects of the modern world, or the effects of the ayahuasca itself (which contains both DMT and MAOIs), or Otilia’s prescriptions, or a combination of all of these, or even a placebo effect. But the fact is that I did feel better, a lot better, and my inclination is to believe that there is something behind her physical diagnoses.

I asked Otilia to explain to me how she arrived at her diagnoses, and how she knew which medicinal plants to prescribe. She knew that my interest was genuine, and that in fact my trip to the Amazon was partly driven by the urge to learn about these things. She was happy to answer my questions and to teach me, but she was often at her most talkative towards the end of a ceremony, when I was usually feeling exhausted and sick (although the nausea abated after the first couple of weeks). Nevertheless, I always struggled to remember what she had said, and in that state, in the dark, I was not up to writing anything down.

In summary, Otilia told me that she empties her mind of all thoughts, then she concentrates on the body of her patient, and her sense of touch will corroborate what her inner eye can see. She tried to teach me how to do this, but I was never able to empty my mind of thought. Otilia said that the ayahuasca was not in fact necessary for the healing work, and that in the years before she took ayahuasca for the first time (not until her late 20s), she trained her mind by focusing her inner vision on what was happening in closed rooms, or in places she could not physically see. She recommended that I start to train my mind in the same way. You may imagine how much success I have had.

As to her knowledge of medicinal plants and their preparation and use, I was expecting her to say that the spirits of the plants revealed their secrets to her through the medium of song, and through their unique vibrations; that is how Stephen Beyer describes it in his excellent and scholarly book, Singing to the Plants – A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. However, Otilia surprised me by saying that she has gained her knowledge by travelling widely throughout the Amazon in her 20s and 30s (she is now nearly 60) and speaking to other plant healers (‘vegetalistas’). There is no doubt that her knowledge is profound. I have heard her prescribe many different plants to patients, and whenever I spent time with her by day, she would try to teach me the names, uses, and means of preparation of the medicinal plants we happened to pass. I found the amount of information overwhelming, and impossible to remember.

After the first couple of weeks at the terreno, other visitors started to arrive, amongst them an American girl and a Mexican man, both of whom live in Singapore. They were not bad people, but they soon got on my nerves; unhappy people are rarely good company, and as a rule people do not seek healing in the jungle unless they are unhappy. Of course, there can be solace in sharing unhappiness – there is truth in the adage that misery loves company – but it is a bit of a balancing act: the unhappiness must be more or less equally apportioned, and both parties should be similarly honest. I rarely found that to be the case, and though it was never a major problem, it was another reason why I liked to get away to Iquitos on the weekends. There were plenty more unhappy foreigners in Iquitos – mostly American, heavily tattooed, and constantly smoking - but at least in Iquitos I was not obliged to spend time with them.

After a month with Otilia, I felt that I had drunk enough of her ayahuasca. It no longer made me sick, and I felt physically better than I had for a long time, but aside from the old Andean man who turned out to be a tree trunk (as I described in my last post), I never had any significant visions, and the plants were certainly not communicating directly with me in the way that I had hoped. I did feel that I had put certain things in order in my head: I had shaken off the lingering pain of a relationship that had ended a long time ago, and I had a sense that, rather than explore the world of plant hallucinogens, I needed to ground myself more securely in the world of consensual reality. Maybe that was the message that the plants had for me. Or maybe I needed to try a different kind of ayahuasca (since every shaman brews it somewhat differently).

In the summer of 2016, I had drunk ayahuasca with an Argentine shaman in the Scottish Highlands. This was a very positive experience that undermined many of my preconceptions. I have always suspected that decontextualized shamanism would be meaningless, or at best, just a way to escape from the present. It seems to me that the healing power of shamanism stems from its integrative function, the way that it can draw together disparate elements – physical health, spirituality, mythology, cosmology, etiology, nature, remembrance of ancestors, social norms and rituals – and thereby create an integrated matrix of meaning that gives participants a sense of groundedness and connectedness. But taken out of context, would that matrix still be meaningful?

That is a big question and one I do not intend to delve more deeply into right now. However, the week in Scotland was extremely positive owing to a very harmonious group dynamic, and this had a lot to do with the exceptional qualities of the officiating Argentine shaman, whom I shall call Che.

Che is in his early 40s. He drunk ayahuasca for the first time in his late teens. He had a vision in which an indigenous elder summoned him to come and study with him. The call was undeniable and Che set off to find the elder, who was a member of the Shipibo tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. Che spent the next 7 years with the Shipibo. Some of the shamans with whom he studied still had the tall, flat foreheads created by compressing their skulls between rectangles of balsa wood in infancy, as tribal custom used to dictate. Eventually Che was apprenticed to a master shaman in whose company, and beneath whose protection, he visited tribes that had avoided all contact with the modern world.

After seven years, the elders told Che that they had taught him all they could, and that the time had come for him to leave the jungle and to study the learning of the West. Che was resistant at first – he was happy where he was – but the elders insisted.

Eventually Che left the Amazon and made his way to Europe. He studied Ancient Greek in Bologna, then completed his PhD in Barcelona, comparing the pre-Socratic philosophy of Empedocles with the shamanic worldview. Che is reserved, graceful, humorous and inspiring; it is very rare to meet someone with such a deep insight into the phenomenon of shamanism from both a subjective, experiential perspective, and also from an analytical, academic one.

Last summer, Che was living with his sister and a couple of friends on a houseboat near Tower Bridge. Once a week, he would give a talk on an aspect of shamanism or ethnobotany. There were never more than five or six attendees. A warm breeze blew through the boat as the shadows lengthened across the Thames, the hull rocked gently in its moorings, and Tower Bridge opened and closed to allow ships to pass underneath. They were whimsical, enchanted evenings.

At the end of November, I returned to the houseboat in order to pick Che’s brains for my upcoming trip to the Amazon. It was a cold, grey, windy afternoon; the houseboat was empty, damp and forlorn. The rocking made me feel seasick. Che was pale, tired and sick at heart. He had hoped that the houseboat would become a nexus for numerous projects: lectures on shamanism, courses on raw food cooking, projects in ecology and sustainability, and fund raising for reforestation activites. There were tie-ins with research being conducted by psychologists in Cataluña on the therapeutic value of ayahuasca, and also links with the globetrotting research vessel Heraclitus. But a number of backers had pulled out, and others had not honoured their commitments, and now the whole project was no longer viable.

I told Che that I wanted to learn more about Amazonian shamanism, and that I was prepared to go to whatever lengths were necessary in order to do so. He replied that he had not been to the Amazon for over ten years, that he was afraid to go because so much that was once authentic has been lost, or diluted, or corrupted. The elders with whom he studied have all passed away in the last decade, and the last remaining pockets of authentic indigenous culture are far up the Río Negro. There are still tribes that have had minimal contact with the outside world, but that’s usually for a reason: they don’t want it.

However, he did know a Shipibo shaman who lived in San Francisco de Yarinacocha, a small Shipibo-Conibo community on the shores of lake Yarinacocha, near Pucallpa on the Ucayali river, about a week by boat from Iquitos. He told me the shaman’s name, Rodrigo. I should go there, ask for him, tell him that Che had sent me, and insist that I wanted to experience authentic Shipibo shamanism, nothing watered down or Westernized.

I wrote the directions in my notebook: Pucallpa, upriver from Iquitos, across lake Yarinacocha. No emails, no phone numbers… the way travel used to be. My notebook got soaked when a freak rainstorm inundated my tent in Mozambique, while I was out searching for rubies with my friend Winston; but although my handwriting bled into the surrounding paper, I was still able to decipher the directions.

Two months later, at the end of January, I told Otilia that I was planning to leave her terreno in order to take a boat to Pucallpa and seek out a Shipibo shaman called Rodrigo in San Francisco de Yarinacocha. I was afraid she might be offended that I wanted to drink ayahuasca with someone else, but she wasn’t. In fact, the following day she told me that she had had an important dream, and that she wished to accompany me on my journey. In 10 days her other visitors would have left, and she was keen to experience a Shipibo ceremony. It was years since she had tried any ayahuasca other than her own. And although she had lived in Pucallpa in her youth, she had never experienced the Shipibo curanderismo.

I was happy that Otilia wanted to accompany me. It would give me the opportunity to get to know her better and to find out more about her relationship with the spirit world, and I would feel more confident if she was with me. In exchange, I was more than happy to cover her expenses.

We booked our passage on one of the launches that chug their way up and down the Amazon, reminiscent of old Mississippi steam boats. The journey would take between 5 and 7 days, depending on how frequently we stopped to pick up other passengers, and also on the speed of the river. The ticket included 3 meals a day for every day of the trip, and cost 30 US dollars per person.

I knew that I was in for a slow trip, but even so, I was amazed by quite how slow. We went on board at the appointed time and hung up our hammocks in the central hall. Within an hour or two, there was barely room to move: hammocks covered every available inch, and the whole space looked like a hatching ground for human chrysalises. There were children running around everywhere; they travel for free, so the boat is popular with families. In addition, there were peculiar Amazonian pets on board, tied to their owners’ luggage with bits of twine. But though there were many passengers, there was little cargo. We had to wait 24 hours for a number of huge containers to arrive and be loaded onto the deck. Only then were the moorings finally cast off.

peculiar Amazonian pets

Otilia the shaman, and the author

One of the pleasures of this form of travel is that, over 7 days, you get to meet people. I was the only foreigner on board, and most of the Peruvian men looked like the tattooed Mexican convicts in Hollywood prison dramas. Thankfully they were more friendly, although Otilia warned me about the ‘human rats’ on board, and we never left our luggage unguarded.

In the mornings, the children on the boat gathered around the central dining table to sing songs and hymns, taught to them by the wife of a Peruvian missionary. I met her and her husband later; they were both very outgoing, but I was wary of the conversation turning to religion. I am not a Christian (or, rather, not only and not primarily), and it strikes me as farcical that Christian missionaries are still setting out to ‘civilize’ the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon. It is true that there used to be frequent raids and counter-raids among Amazon tribes, but at the same time these communities – at least, those untainted by Western influence - perceive the sacred nature of all of creation. The spirit world is alive for them, and it is part of the fabric of daily life. They possess a sensitivity that Westerners have, for the most part, lost; or, if not entirely lost, then relegated to a dusty church service once a week. In my eyes, the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon are much closer to God than the vast majority of missionaries who have set out to convert them.

Eventually the missionary and his wife did broach this subject with me, and I gave them my honest opinion. To my surprise, they were not at all dismissive, and even tentatively agreed. Then they asked me whether I would be willing to teach English to the children on the boat. For the remaining six days, after the hymn singing, I gave an English lesson to a ragtag group of children aged between 7 and 10. I have not taught this age before, but their immense enthusiasm, and the astonishing quality of their memory, made it pretty easy. Later in the day, when I went walking around the boat, I often found myself being hugged around the legs by affectionate pupils. Their open-heartedness – described by Otilia in more erudite terms as the absence of ‘complejos’ - was deeply touching.

When I wasn’t sleeping, or teaching, or reading in my hammock, I sat on the roof of the helm and watched as the front of the launch divided the sluggish brown water ahead of us. The thickly forested banks of the river slid languidly by. We passed occasional villages, usually with children splashing around in the shallows. When the boat stopped, there was an invasion of women and children selling jungle fruits and vegetables, though thankfully none of the roasted insects, larvae and crocodile meat I had seen in the market in Iquitos. Nevertheless, after a week on the boat, I was happy finally to reach Pucallpa.

The crowded interior.

Bbq’ed larvae.

Other treats.

Otilia had spent her twenties and early thirties in Pucallpa. She left when the political situation in Peru became too hairy - when there was a nightly curfew in the city and running battles in the streets between the military and Abimael Guzmán’s Shining Path guerrillas. But she had been something of a community leader in Pucallpa, and a champion of women’s rights. It had been a small town back then, a hotchpotch of dirt roads and tin-roofed shacks. She hadn’t been back since she fled the violence, almost 30 years ago.

Otilia was excited about this trip down memory lane, but it was a lane she barely recognised. She wanted to show me the house where she first lived, and also the statue of a powerful female revolutionary that she had found deeply inspiring at a time when she lacked confidence. It took us a long time to find either, and although they were both still standing, the surroundings had changed beyond her recognition: there were smart asphalt roads, streetlights, malls, and blocks of swanky apartments. Unlike Iquitos, it is possible to reach Pucallpa by road from Lima, and consequently there has been much more development.

In order to reach the Shipibo community in San Francisco, we had to take a wooden canoe with a small outboard motor over lake Yarinacocha. On the way we saw pink dolphins breaking the water’s surface – they are creatures that loom large in indigenous Amazonian mythology: after dusk, they are thought to have the ability to transform themselves into handsome fishermen and seduce unwary girls by the water’s edge.

Otilia pointed out a large water tower, some distance back from the lake. She told me that when she was living in Pucallpa, some fishermen had found a mermaid trapped in their nets. They carried her up to the water tower and imprisoned her there, thinking that they could keep her alive while they made a deal to sell her to some Western research institute. However, and perhaps unsurprisingly, she did not survive for long in the water tower, though according to local belief, her corpse was eventually sent to Harvard (I have not been able to find any evidence of this).

After an hour or so, the canoe nosed its way onto the mud bank of the village of San Francisco de Yarinacocha. Che had suggested that I go to the village and just ask for Rodrigo the shaman. We stopped at the stall of a talkative fat lady who was selling fruit juice beneath the shade of a large tree. We drank juice, then I asked if she knew Rodrigo. She did, and she pointed us in the direction of his house.

San Francisco is a small village of dirt roads, but not entirely untouched by tourism. There is a tiny museum, and children are constantly coming up to ask if they can sing a Shipibo song in exchange for a peso. As we approached Rodrigo’s house, I felt my shoe slide on the dirt road. Looking down, I saw the sole’s profile neatly smeared across a large and pestilent dog turd.

We were met by a girl who worked for Rodrigo. She told us that he was away in Pucallpa for the day. He had already performed ceremonies the previous two nights, but if we wanted, he would certainly do one with us that night. Otilia and I were both surprised. I said that we had really just come to make a plan with him, we hadn’t intended to spend the night, and we didn’t want to tire him out by making him do ceremonies on consecutive nights. The girl replied that Rodrigo would not be tired, he was ‘un gran maestro’, but we should wait a couple of hours until he returned, and make our arrangements with him.

I cleaned my shoe and we made ourselves comfortable in the hammocks of an open-sided hut. There were other huts on his plot, and a large and new-ish ‘maloca’ (a circular ceremonial building) at the back. His was certainly the most impressive dwelling of those that we had seen on our walk through the village.

A tattooed, chain-smoking foreigner soon appeared, topless, and started dancing around the garden with weights attached to chains – the kind of thing that is impressive when the weights are balls of flame, but rather tiresome otherwise, though possibly quite fun to do. This man came to speak to us later – he was a French Canadian hairdresser, very gothic, with a tattoo of the bones of his neck and throat superimposed on the skin of his neck and throat. But for all that, he was open and likeable, and told me that he was living on Rodrigo’s plot and drinking ayahuasca in order to try to cure the AIDS that was killing him.

It was now getting late and I was beginning to worry that there would not be any more boats going back across the lake. We were just getting ready to leave when Rodrigo arrived. He was powerfully built, probably in his late forties or early fifties. I told him why we had come - that the Argentine shaman Che had spoken very highly of him, and that Otilia and I were both keen to experience the authentic curanderismo of the Shipibo-Conibo. No problem, said Rodrigo, smiling. We could stay and do a ceremony that night. I said that he must be tired, having done two ceremonies on previous nights. Rubbish, he replied. He was un gran maestro and could do a ceremony every night if he needed to. But I said that we had to make arrangements with our hotel in Pucallpa, and we would come back the following afternoon.

It rained heavily during the night and we had to squelch through the mud on our way back to Rodrigo’s plot. We were shown our places in the maloca – the mattresses on which we would sit during the ceremony, and also where we would sleep.

There were a couple of hours to kill until the ceremony was due to begin. I went outside to familiarise myself with the geography, and to make sure that I wouldn’t get lost trying to find a toilet in the dark. I met an Irishman whose bug-eyed stare disconcerted me. He kept telling me what a great shaman Rodrigo was. As soon as I could, I escaped back to the maloca.

One by one, the long-term paying guests began to filter in – mostly white, mostly female. They were chatty and cheerful. Rodrigo came in and started to prepare his altar and ceremonial objects, consisting mostly of hundreds of potent (and revolting) mapacho cigarettes. After a while he came over to speak to me and Otilia. Up until this point, he had not asked us any questions, and neither she nor I had mentioned that she was a curandera. Rodrigo ignored me, not even asking me whether I was taking anti-depressants (in which case, drinking ayahuasca can be dangerous). However, he was very interested in Otilia, and he interviewed her extensively about her own healing and shamanic practice. He went on to tell us, at considerable length, how many plants he had dieted, and how much time he had spent alone in the jungle, learning his craft.

When the exchange was over, Rodrigo returned to his spot and chatted to the other participants. The conversation took place across the maloca; it was mostly about money and exchange rates, and about how much he had earned by speculating on currencies some years back. While he was holding forth about his financial acumen, everyone started preparing their tobacco pipes. When Rodrigo started to smoke his pipe, so did they. Clouds of acrid smoke rose up to the roof and there was almost constant spitting. When the pipes started to go out, people lay back. The chatter died down as, one by one, they appeared to fall asleep.

Eventually Rodrigo poured out the measures of ayahuasca. In some cases, people needed to be woken up to drink their cup. I found it less disgusting than Otilia’s brew, which usually also contains tobacco as an emetic. One girl drank her cup and followed it up with a swig from a wine bottle, though I don’t know for sure that it actually contained wine. Then we lay back in the dark and waited.

After half an hour, Rodrigo started to sing some Shipibo ícaros. They were not nearly as impressive and haunting as those that Che had sung during the ceremonies in the Scottish Highlands; Che’s had been a musical distillation of jungle sounds – croaking frogs, trilling birds, hissing snakes and roaring jaguars. Rodrigo’s ícaros, on the other hand, were meandering and repetitive. He soon appeared to tire, or get bored, and then his son took over.

I felt tired during the ceremony. From time to time, Rodrigo would sing another ícaro; at one point, Otilia sung some of her ícaros, with which I had become very familiar over the past month. I was happy to hear them again. They were different to the Shipibo songs – more melodic and gentler.

I did not feel sick, and the dose was not particularly strong, although there was plenty of vomiting going on around me. Once again, my visions were minimal. The only clear one I had was seeing myself being enfolded in the strong, protective blue tentacles of a huge octopus. That is really all I can remember.

Otilia and I woke early the following morning. The sun was filtering through the wooden slats of the maloca. A few others were still asleep on their mattresses on the floor, but most had returned to their own huts.

Rodrigo came in and asked us how we had liked the ceremony. We made polite, appreciative noises. I paid him for the night, 200 soles per person ($60). He suggested to Otilia that she should work for him, and that he would send some of his clients to her in Iquitos. She thanked him noncommittally.

As Otilia and I walked back through the village, she asked me what I had thought of the ceremony. Not much, I said. The conversation about money was odd. The ícaros were disappointing. Rodrigo appeared tired, or just disinterested.

That was brujería, said Otilia. Witchcraft. Rodrigo is a rich and powerful man in the village. He is using his relationship with the spirit world to manipulate people for his own ends. He has managed to cast his spell over his clients. He uses humour, and some degree of personal charm, to hold them in thrall. But he is exploiting them, not curing them. He is a sorcerer.

Personally, I am not so sure. But it might explain my vision of the octopus’ tentacles. I had perhaps sensed that Otilia was protecting me, and that was how my subconscious had visualized it.

And that, continued Otilia, was why she had started to sing her own ícaros during the ceremony. She had tried to counteract Rodrigo’s malevolent magic. But she didn’t like this kind of work. It has very little to do with the serious work of healing.

We returned to Pucallpa and booked our onward journey to Lima, by bus, for the following day. I suggested a visit to the cinema in the afternoon, a multiscreen complex in the big new mall. Otilia has rarely been to the cinema, although she has referred to ayahuasca as ‘the cinema of the jungle’, because of the lifelike and narrative visions she has.

The cinema was on the first floor of the mall. Otilia hesitated when she saw the escalator. She looked around and spotted a staircase by the emergency exit.

‘I’m going to walk up,’ she said.

‘Ok, I’ll see you at the top.’

I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I stood on the escalator. Less than 24 hours ago, Otilia had been doing battle in another dimension with a black magician, like Gandalf and Saruman fighting each other in the ‘Lord of the Rings’. But confronted with a mechanistic modern invention, she had lost her nerve.

I met her at the top of the fire escape.

‘Are you afraid of escalators?’ I goaded her.

‘Yes,’ she replied, wide-eyed and childlike for a moment.

Again I had to smile.

‘You see,’ she continued, ‘when I was a small girl, my father took us to Lima to see the planes take off and land at the airport. The airport was new then. I saw an escalator for the first time. A very beautiful lady with very long hair stepped onto it. The lace of her shoe got stuck, so she bent down to free it. As she did so, her hair fell forwards, and that got stuck too. Her face was pulled closer and closer to the metal step, and when she got to the top, a large clump of hair was torn out of her head. I will always remember the way she screamed.’

I bought us tickets for ‘A Dog’s Purpose’, a saccharine but charming feel-good film about the successive lives of a pet dog. The shaman enjoyed it a lot, as did I.

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thetinfoilhatlady · 7 years

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The call towards wholeness did not reside in the teaching of the plants: It resided in the deepest parts of my own being.

This trip was the cherry on top of my travels so far. The reward for all the hard work I had done and the understanding I had gained regarding who we are and why we are all here.

I follow a teacher named Tobias Lars. He shares his wisdom online with videos as well as in workshops, travel retreats and courses. I have his book ‘Listening to the Sun‘ kindle version available. I also use his Inner Body Awakening Meditation. The company Spiritual Travelers is another one of his exciting endeavors. Through his Ayahuasca retreats I found the perfect place to experience Ayahuasca,; the Mother of all ancient plant medicine, at The Source.

Hidden within the mysterious and ancient Sacred Valley in Peru and quite close to the famous Machu Picchu, is the fabulous retreat called The Source. They call it the edge of Luxury and indeed it is. Created and constructed by the unnamed ‘owner’ this is a majestic and magical location. Perfect for escaping from the outside world of negativity and stress. Not only beautiful but consciously constructed by the promptings of Ayahuasca herself.

See the beautiful ladies washroom here ! See my room here.

I arrived with 11 others from around the world for 6 days of soul exploration. A couple from Australia, a man from Denmark, two ladies from Sweden, a mother and son from Romania, 3 women from America and myself, the lone Canadian. As these things usually reveal them selves to be, each of us was called to do ceremony at this site, and each of us were perfect for each others learning. Hear the local music from my balcony wrapped in jasmine here.

See my Facebook album here for images.

So why even put one’s self through all this ? To me the answer was curiosity. Again my need to research, my need to know, my desire to understand my consciousness set me on this journey. I had known about DMT or Dimethytriptamine for many years. Those who study hallucinogens or partake in their use will be familiar with the substance. This is also known as The Spirit Molecule and is actually produced naturally in our bodies by our pineal gland when we dream and when we die.

Is it safe ?

We were told to use our breath to flow, use the music as an anchor and use our gratitude as a rope to guide is through the adventure. We also were asked to remember no matter how weird it got, it would eventually end. All great advice.

So what did I experience ?

I was also shown my maternal bloodline and how each member saw each other. The things handed down so to speak could be healed and sent back through time or not. I had the option. I got a strict warning about WI FI and how it hurts me. Later in ceremony 3 and 4, I became a giant cobra and also a long fanged dragon. I found this very fun.

The call towards wholeness did not reside in the teaching of the plants: It resided in the deepest parts of my own being.

If you are called please consider going. At this time of planetary healing we can all contribute to the general raising of human consciousness.

Ayahuasca and Me The call towards wholeness did not reside in the teaching of the plants: It resided in the deepest parts of my own being.

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