"The Shipibo healer Maestro Juan, wearing a T-shirt with an illustration by Gustave Doré of angels circling heaven, was smoking a thick wad of hand-rolled mapacho tobacco while passionately telling us about tiny, invisible people who protect powerful medicine plants growing deep in the rainforest. When the seeds of those miraculous plants fall into the river, fish quickly eat them and jump into the air, becoming colourful birds."
"For the other international participants beside me - who had arrived from Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and New Zealand - the retreat was a means of turning inward to heal personal trauma, experience shamanic visions, and forge a deeper connection with the natural world. For Juan, and the other Shipibo guides, it could be something quite different. The psychoactive molecules are the same in most ayahuasca recipes."
An anthropologist traveled to Peru in 2019 to study cultural differences in ayahuasca healing at Pachamama Temple, where 12 international strangers gathered. Shipibo healer Maestro Juan described cosmology about invisible beings protecting medicinal plants and recounted seeds becoming colourful birds when eaten by fish. Juan contrasted ayahuasca with the more powerful noya rao, calling ayahuasca drinkable and transformative. Retreat participants from Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and New Zealand sought inward healing, trauma recovery, shamanic visions and nature connection. The tea combines Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis, and identical molecules yield culturally refracted experiences and differing notions of transformation.
Read at Aeon
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]