Let me say upfront, I am no stranger to plant medicines. Or a lot of other substances, for that matter. In my late teens and early twenties, I did different drugs, including plants like mushrooms, peyote and mescaline, for all the wrong reasons. Between ages 43 and 58, I reengaged that world strictly as a spiritual pursuit.
To say I learned much and learned deeply would be a vast understatement. I am grateful for every moment and every insight. And I am just as grateful now to have no interest in any such pursuit. For I am no longer pursuing anything. Not even myself. I am at the place of allowing that which I AM to unfold spontaneously.
I am reveling in me exploring me with no intermediaries.
I am no longer pushing the river. But back in 2008 it was a different story.
Shallow shamanism
I spent several months down in Peru living and working with two of the most respected traditional ayahuasceros in the Amazon, Don Augustine Rivas and his daughter Rossana Nasciemento. In the course of working with them at Don Augustine’s jungle camp and subsequently traveling through Peru with Rossa, I participated in many Ayahuasca ceremonies. And Rossa and I became friends.
Being a journalist, I brought my journalistic curiosity into the jungle with me. And in the course of many talks, became aware of the profound alarm most traditional shamans in the Amazon—and traditional shamans elsewhere around the world—were experiencing over the exploding influx of Westerners seeking, not just spiritual insight and healing with plant medicines, but “an experience” or a “trip.”
They were concerned about the growing commercialization around ceremonies and the plant medicines themselves. And they were utterly appalled and frightened at the growing number of “shaman wannabees” flooding into their camps, spending a couple weeks doing a few ceremonies, learning a few things, buying Ayahuasca brews that less scrupulous shamans would sell them to take home, and then flying back to the US and Europe to hang out their “shaman shingle.”
This was 17 years ago.
Today the problem isn’t just a problem, it’s a nightmare social scene of “shallow shamanism.” Just google “ayahuasca” and you’ll see what I mean.
And because of the truly serious dangers involved in dabbling with plant medicines—which can include demonic possession, psychosis etc.—think more than twice about paying some no doubt well meaning but seriously underqualified weekend shaman in LA to take you on an Ayahuasca trip.
Get informed. And please read the following story about Rossa Nasciemento and discover how a real shaman is trained, what they know, what they face, and the energies they deal with.
Rossa is an Amazonian Traditionalist Shaman who has spent more than 40 years researching the Ayahuasca Cosmovision and the interpretation of its deep hidden messages. An expert in Amazonian plant detoxification protocols and Ayahuasca therapy, she is a natural-born intuitive healer. Born into a traditional shamanic family in the Amazon regions of Peru, she began living the shaman’s life in early childhood, spending 23 years in training before she began to work on her own.
Rossa’s story
My personal training started at a very young age, surrounded by women, a group of elders who always asked me to wake up early to go to our jungle parcel to pick the flowers and the aromatherapy plants for my mother to prepare the aromatherapy baths for her patients. Meanwhile, the women prepared the different plant medicines for each patient. They always asked me to pick the flowers or the leaves because when we are children, our energy is pure and strong. So, when we pick them the energy of the plants keep their strong energy to heal. Of course, I had to be very careful because rattle snakes love to sleep at the bottom of the primroses.
After that we would have breakfast and I would go to school. Coming home, the house was always crowded with patients waiting for the important member of the women’s group of healers to arrive so they could start working on healing them. I used to pass by them in my school uniform, saying “Good afternoon.” They smiled because they saw just a normal little child. But then I would go get changed into my white working clothes and come back to the group. They were always so surprised, their faces plainly saying, “Uh, is this little child the important spiritual member we are waiting for to start?”
It was not always a fun life for a strange child who had a special gift. I’d always seen the spirits—something watching me, observing me in the dark like a black shadow sometimes—and I didn’t understand what it was. I used to feel things and I was always scared. My mother tried to explain. But when you’re a child you don’t understand very well. Sometimes my parents would give me a drop or two of Ayahusaca before bed in order to have a good night’s sleep under the protection of the plant spirit.
By age seven or eight I was drinking special teas and learning about the medicines. Shamanism is a very serious path, requiring many years of dedication to spiritual training.
This is a path of life at the service of the community with the first years of training consisting of various chapters of apprenticeship, including isolation in the Amazon Rainforest with an elder shaman (normally a family member), learning to recognize every plant in situ in the forest and connect with their spirits and work with them. When you’re in the jungle working with the plants you just see the plants like a lot of people hanging around, except all of the “people” are the spirits of the plants.
Training includes the drinking of all those plants or using them as aromatherapy baths.
Initiation consists of nine years of learning.
Depending on the plant, every diet runs for nine days to nine weeks to nine months, up to nine years, learning the medicinal benefits of the plants, and also their magical powers. At the end of drinking a particular plant diet, the apprentice must participate in a special Ayahuasca ceremony to center the energy power of the diet plant and especially to connect with the spirit of the plant.
Some plants are very strong so you can only drink them for like nine days or maybe three. Other plants you cook them and make an extract and that extract you need to drink for up to 90 days. Sometimes, when you do a decoction, you go into the jungle and you drink this diet for at least 30 days just having plantain and the plant. Then you come off the diet for one week, take a rest, and then once again you go back to your place in the jungle with another plant.
I remember I was doing aromatherapy baths with Catawa, which is a poisonous plant. A single drop of this plant and you can die. But we use the Catawa bath for protection and I was able to see the spirit of this plant. It was like a monkey, a black monkey with red eyes. It was really scary with this monkey coming for nine days to look at me, alone in my little hut in the jungle, trying to see if I was afraid of him. I had to tell him, “I’m not afraid of you!” But I was practically shitting my pants. I was only 17.
At times I couldn’t help thinking, What am I doing here when all my friends from school are out having fun, going to the disco, drinking tequila, and falling in love while I’m out here alone, shitting and puking plant medicines in the jungle?
But then, as a teenager, I became rebellious and decided to challenge myself and chose the most difficult path possible, the Brave Men Shaman Path—to be an Ayahuasca Death Dancer.
Normally a path only for brave men and some elder women chosen by destiny, people tried to tell me, “Oh, no, you don’t want to do that, not a young girl like you.” But I thought, What is the point of being able to see and work with the spirits and not use the gift in the most powerful way possible to help people?
Dancing with the death
Ayahuasca is a sacred plant. By connecting with her, you take part in the awakening of the third eye to the CosmoVision, the inner and universal Magico-Spiritual world. All that we cannot see with our normal eyes, we can experience with our third eye and intuition.
After I spent the first five years of training with Ayahuasca (this after nine years initial training with plants) then came the open Ayahuasca ceremonies with patients where the shaman elder teaches the apprentices how to heal and treat each patient.
For the next nine years I learned how to perform a ceremony and how to diagnose a sick person on the physical and spiritual planes.
And then there is learning how to dance with the Angels of Death. It is all energetic. It’s not about words. The art of getting connected is more like dancing. You have to know how to approach the angels, how to get close, how to make a connection. You cannot just face them, boom, like that.
Terminally ill people come to the jungle either to die or to live. That’s it. My Yabu Yaba had a technique and I would bring her extreme cases. We’d drink the medicine and she’d say, “Okay, can you realize their Angel of Death? Can you see where it is? Can you see what it is? Is it in front? Is it sitting inside the person?” She worked with me to establish communication, to learn how long a person had left by reading the position and posture and actions of their Angel of Death. And then would come the negotiation process on behalf of the patient. Sometimes it would almost be like a fight, a conflict of power, standing there for the patient saying basically “Gimme a break!”
I recall a Japanese woman the doctors had declared terminal with bone cancer. One shaman had already sent her away because she was so sick he was afraid she would die in his camp and get him in trouble. She had been suffering high fevers every night for six years and was so skinny, bony, and pale. Nothing could stop those fevers.
I took her to the camp of my Yabu Yaba. It was the middle of the night when we got there, but, of course, she was expecting us. The woman was too weak to drink with us in the first Ayahuasca ceremony. My grandmother asked if I could see her death angel and I could. He was a strange looking monk, completely dark, with robes, and he was sitting just behind her. My grandmother was singing as I tried to get closer to him, and I was singing with her. The patient was laying down and the death angel was noninvasive—not inside of her body—he was just taking care of her, watching her, nothing else. When I approached, he moved away a little bit but was able to connect with me. It felt like he was giving me space to work and he was enjoying the singing, feeling it, accepting our presence with her.
“If he is not inside her and she is not inside him and he’s just observing her from the right side it means she’s not dying,” grandmother said. “She still has time.”
The Japanese woman turned out to be a Buddhist, which is why I saw the Buddhist monk Angel of Death. After a week of plant medicines her fever broke. After that we started giving her plants to center her body and to center her spirit in her body. Soon she could join us in the Ayahuasca ceremonies. Over time, she learned the plants and learned how to create her own medicines. When she finally came out of the jungle a year later and called her family, they were so surprised. They’d long ago held a funeral for her and her husband had remarried!
The use of Ayahuasca as a method of therapy has recently become widespread around the world because of the plant’s multiple applications at every level of psychological work—human behavior, group therapy, inspirational work and more. What was once the extremely forbidden and occult Ayahuasca Death Dance—a ritual only practiced in extreme cases of imminent terminal disease—is now an eagerly sought-after experience by people suffering from the many physical, mental, emotional, psychic, and spiritual illnesses brought about by living in modern Western society.
As a traditionally-trained shaman, I see that there are many pitfalls and things that people need to watch out for. When I am asked to read research papers and books by cultural anthropologists and scientists, I find many mistakes.
It is one thing to go into a community and live for three months, taking notes for a book. It is another thing to live in that community for ten years or a lifetime. Not only do the shamans not give the whole story to researchers, they cannot. Working with the plants is not an intellectual thing. That is the smallest part of the medicine.
If you haven’t done at least a minimum of nine years basic training in the jungle, please keep away from doing this type of work. Many diseases can be transmitted energetically or in a spiritual way. Instead of healing your patient you will end up getting sick with the same diseases as your patient. In our Amazonian culture this is well known as the “Law of the Cutipa,” which consists of the exchange or transference of the dark energies from the sick person to the healer.
During my life work, I have seen many healers from all over the world coming into the jungle to receive treatment for the same illnesses they got from their patients. Many psychotherapists come with the same depression as their patients, the same burnout, the same psychotic crisis. Same thing with very young healers who do a fast few months at some healing school learning things like Reiki or massage therapy. Very soon they are told they are ready to work with the energy of other people. So, they start doing it and after a couple of years they start feeling and showing the same symptoms as their former patients.
If you are working with plants, doing therapies, the most important thing is you need to learn how to prepare your own plant medicines. The plants themselves will absorb your energy. When I go visit shamans the first thing I ask is, “Do you cook your medicine or did you buy it from somebody else?” If they say, “No, I’m buying it from some elder shaman,” well, this person is not a shaman at all. No shaman would drink medicine that is from someone else. You have to cook your medicine so it is of your own energy, otherwise it doesn’t work properly. It can’t become your ally. This is so logical and so basic it always shocks me when I find healers who don’t know this.
It is also important to learn how to help patients to interpret their Ayahuasca CosmoVisions. Every CosmoVision is unique, with a deep spiritual message enclosed within every picture or scene that you experience during the ritual. This is a very private and personal experience about your direct connection with the cosmic universe, your reconnection with your God, with the Mother Earth, in a private space nobody can penetrate, not even the shaman.
As you can see, Ayahuasca is a plant with great intelligence that works in a very deep way inside our mind, psyche, and body—but especially our souls—healing every aspect of us. She helps us to clear our minds from all the garbage and psychic attacks we receive every moment of every day into our brains—advertisements, fake news, all the toxic manipulative people sending stuff towards us—all this garbage gets cleared in such a way that we can rebuild ourselves based on our own wishes and goals for the future without any type of influence.
But you cannot do this alone. And you should never work with Ayahuasca with anyone but a truly well-trained traditional shaman who knows the work.
Mic drop.
Much love and aloha ~
