rewriting experience

Remarkable! Six years later I now understand a majority of the lessons of my plant medicine experience in April of 2015. Lately, I have written much about knowledge and understanding where the plant medicine experience is overflowing with knowledge. It is one of the major draws of the experience as knowledge is power. Each ceremony reveals so much knowledge of self, others, and your place in it. The caveat is the understanding level of all you take in is pretty poor, often your initial takeaway from ceremony in the following days is filtered through what you want to believe, and thus all good practitioners stress the integration period where you go home and sit with all that has been unveiled. The time away from the immediate experience is when you gain insights into what you directly experienced. Knowledge alchemizes into understanding and when you are ready and want to continue along the plant medicine path you return for more lessons. Every time I have undergone the experience, I have written about it. I can’t stress this enough. It doesn’t have to be the written word - you can record it into your phone, draw an image that captures the essence of the experience, or remain in contact with others where you can continue to discuss what happened, almost like psychotherapy.

The catalyst for my understanding is the tobacco maestro Mapacho. I go off into the forest with him plus my dog and the magic happens. From a visual standpoint, the experience of having consciousness altered by Mapacho reminds me a lot of Huachuma in that there’s a clarity that envelops your senses. With a medicinal dose of Mapacho comes a visual acuity and a sharp increase in my ability to clearly hear sounds as well as noises from a distance. Anecdotally, I'd connect this to all plant species from the nightshade family because of my experience with Toé which caused a sharp increase as well in my senses. That condition lasted for days which for a novice was a challenge. I would guess my sense of smell is also increased however due to years of allergies that sense is very poor and even an increase in its efficacy doesn’t register. Allergies also impact my ability to taste, maybe explaining why the shamanic dieta poses no problem for me! For the most part food is utility for me. Anyway, I have a pretty good idea that the increase in clarity offered by Mapacho also affects my intellectual capacities for understanding because I gain a sharper focus upon what it is I have been lately thinking about. In this instance, the clarity and similarities with Huachuma brought me back to my first experience at SpiritQuest and riding in the boat on the Amazon river while in the midst of the grace of the plant medicine Huachuma. In re-living this initial encounter, I realized how closed my heart was at the time and these feelings that were enveloping me were so alien and strange when in retrospect I was being flooded with love. I remember looking up at the clouds and being engulfed with this cosmic love for all. It was the greatest feeling and experience. I felt connected and one with all of the universe so much so that I recognized it as a deep cosmic love and realized the power within love to change and overcome any obstacle in the way. In the sky this rainbow patch formed letting me know that we can live in harmony if we weave together our differences and embrace our commonality. We don’t have to live in constant strife and separation. When we reached land, I remember feeling such a brotherly and sisterly love for the tribe we were visiting. Since the experience was new to me, Huachuma was intent upon teaching me the introductory lessons of heaven and hell. I remember spiralling from the highest high to the lowest low. It was the lesson on states of mind and my influence on the process. Of course, I had no idea what was going on at the time and initially I was like, "wow Huachuma shows you so much love and then takes you into the dark" not realizing it was all me! On the boat ride back to SpiritQuest, I sat beside the shaman don Rober and was flooded with love however I didn’t know what it was and thought it so strange. When we returned to the sanctuary, I recall being in my room when the sensations of love returned and I was so uncomfortable with it at the time. Imagine being so closed off from love for more than a lifetime that when exposed again to this universal love, you reject it as something so foreign and just wanting the experience to end so you can return to your closed off way of life.

It’s only now I clearly see this. The whole two-week experience with don Howard was a process of ripping my heart open whether I wanted to or not. Ayahuasca, Bobinzana, Mapacho, and Huachuma in conspiracy with the maestro were prying open my rusted-out heart like the proverbial Tin Man from the Wizard of OZ. I don’t think I ever thanked don Howard enough for what he did before he passed.

As an aside, the movie “The Wizard of OZ” really is a great encapsulation of the hero’s journey as seen through the eyes of plant medicines. In order to progress along this path, one does need a brain the Scarecrow seeks for understanding, the heart the Tin Man longs for in order to realize the commonality of us all and integrate the power one unlocks from the experience, and from the Cowardly Lion one must develop courage and bravery or you won’t get very far before packing it in.

I see now don Howard was like a parent to all the human children that came to see him and he would go about being of service to enact change within all, one person at a time. His course was challenging and tough, always with an eye on the big picture. The big picture is the evolution of consciousness and his program revealed within you the power to do so mixed with the love that will sustain the transformation. 

Mapacho was not done with me yet yesterday evening. Instead, he helped me put two and two together. In 2016 I passed the tests of courage, bravery, and perseverance and became a warrior on the spiritual path I walk. I wrote about it at length and called my blog post “I am Jaguar.” This experience that culminated in that trip to Peru was transformational as I discarded my fear of the whole process which in turn opens you up to receive more of the teachings, as you are no longer running scared or wondering what’s around the corner. I did not drink Ayahuasca after that experience for over two and a half years. Once I returned to drink again, the experience was remarkably different and in the eight times I have now participated in ceremony since 2016 every experience starts off with a high-speed experience of some sort. I finally realized the why. In the last few months, I have written about the fundamental makeup of the two powers that create our universe which are the divine feminine and divine masculine powers. She is deceleration that creates form and he is acceleration that causes separation. That’s the condensed version! So, it was just a matter of time that what was ultimately revealed is the Ayahuasca experience of high-speed chases was an omen of the coming of the divine masculine in ceremony and how it courses through me now with the Jaguar. During the second ceremony of the last trip to the Amazon, I was engulfed with an unbelievable amount of this power. My whole being was highly vibrating, no visions, I just sat in a complete highly vibrational form wondering what is going on. Thanks to Mapacho, I now know. When I went to sleep that night, the lessons continued. I was on a hybrid of a motorcycle and snowmobile going down a hill at a high rate of speed. I had smoked so much Mapacho that day that this dream was so unbelievably real. I felt all the sensations of accelerating and going as fast as I could push it. Later, I ended up in my parents’ basement where this exotic woman with tattoos on her arms was waiting for me. The Goddess made her mysterious appearance just like in my plant medicine journeys.

Burning within, is a desire to return and expose myself to more direct experience on this path as I find this is the joie de vivre of life. I give thanks for my life and being able to discover this path. I wouldn’t trade this for anything in the world.