12 posts tagged “herbs”
A bit more information on the Ayahusca and Cancer story i posted earlier. One man's experience: a postscript.
http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n2/09222top.html
Here in the UK, I'm just finalising arrangements for our forthcoming group trip to the Amazon rainforest to work with the ayahuasceros, plant spirit shamans, and healers of the jungle.
This trip (The Magical Earth) is an annual event and open to all. I have a free Information Pack if you're interested in joining us this year or next (or the year after that!) - just email me (ross@thefourgates.com) and i'll send you a copy.
Meanwhile, I've uploaded some images from last year's trip here:
http://www.slide.com/r/NkRA94ei3j-C-ZAKp9Jo7V75V7zx-z0L
I'll be updating these when I get back from the jungles in September.
The Magical Earth is an authentic experience of real jungle shamanism, using the methods, plants, and approaches taught to the shamans by spirit and practiced in the Amazon for thousands of years.
Our intention is to provide as many people as possible with this opportunity for spiritual discovery and healing and it is our policy, therefore, to offer the lowest price for an experience of this kind, without sacrificing the quality or the number of healing activities available to you (as our participant comments on page 4 of our Information Pack show).
We offer you seven ayahuasca ceremonies, along with translation services and English-speaking seminars on plant spirit shamanism to deepen your knowledge and add to your ayahuasca insights. Also included is transportation from Iquitos to our retreat centre and return transportation at the end of your programme, as well as accommodation and food at our centre which is healthy, nourishing, and fully in keeping with the requirements of the ayahuasca diet
There is a warm bienvenida welcome on arrival, followed by cleansings with Rainforest herbs, and, at the end of your stay, a despedida farewell ceremony and fiesta with gifts from the Shipibo for you to take home.
Between these welcome and farewell events, your programme also includes:
The ceremonial services of our shamans
Workshops
Group circle meetings
A jungle walk guided by our shamans to explore the Rainforest and unlock the healing secrets of its plants
Healing herbal, floral, and clay baths
An opportunity to get to know the Rainforest people and their spiritual universe through workshops and exhibitions of Shipibo arts and textiles
An excursion to Pasaje Paquito, a treasure trove of plants and shamanic power objects from all over the Amazon region
Individual consultations with our shamans, including translation services (there may be a small additional cost for any herbal treatments, healings, or remedies which are subsequently made for you - though not always - and consultations are always free)
Unique Shipibo-style massages are also available for a small additional charge (in 2007, the cost was $5 for a 30-minute massage)
All of these activities and events are freely available but, of course, entirely optional and you have the freedom, if you prefer, to just chill out in relax in one of the most peaceful and beautiful places on Earth!
Altogether, we think we’ve thought of everything to make your stay as memorable and rewarding as possible. All you really need do is be open to this magical event and the changes it might bring to your life.
Have a look at our slideshow at http://www.slide.com/r/NkRA94ei3j-C-ZAKp9Jo7V75V7zx-z0L and email for a free Information Pack if you’re interested in joining us and experiencing plant spirit shamanism and ayahuasca healing for yourself.
We look forward to welcoming you to the Amazon!
Ross Heaven
The Incas regarded coca as the divine plant, mainly because of its ability to impart endurance, and its use was entwined with every aspect of life, art, mythology, and the economy of the Incan Empire.
Millions have chewed coca on a daily basis and the practice has continued for hundreds of years. It continues as a custom, not because coca (the basis for cocaine) is a ‘habit drug’, but because it is a part of Andean culture. Even today, distances are measured in cocadas - how far a load can be carried under the stimulus of one chew of coca.
Andeans chew coca just as they do everything else: ritually, deliberately, and systematically. A mouthful of leaves is carefully chosen from an exquisitely woven coca bag or chuspa and lliptia is chewed with the leaves to liberate their active ingredients.
But the ceremony which really brings out the spirit in the leaves is coca divination. Doris Rivera Lenz is an Andean curandera (shaman) who is expert in its practice. In the following interview, she offers insights into the nature of healing and illness, and the role of plant spirit medicine in this.
What is coca divination?
It is meeting with the spirit of the element that you are working with, whether it is coca, maize or a mountain. In the case of coca, you meet the mother spirit, soul or power of the plant, which is the sacred part which never dies.
The practitioner must be in total communication: spirit-to-spirit. It is more like listening to the coca leaves than reading them. It is a higher state of consciousness. You have to be prepared to integrate yourself spiritually to help another spirit.
Human beings are sacred cosmic seeds in evolution. The coca is a sacred seed like us, only of the vegetable kingdom. It has been created by the Earth to guide and heal its younger brothers: ourselves. Similarly we have been created to help other people. As we become more open, we discover plants like coca. Not everybody sees the spirit of coca, but it is here to help us.
What is the cause of disease, and how is it cured by the spirit of the plants?
Illnesses do not exist. We create them with our minds according to our attitudes and the things we do. Resentment, for example, causes cancer. A woman whose ovaries are unwell [with cancer] may be resentful and [so] suffers trauma. People who do not have the freedom to express their feelings suffer from throat problems, and so on.
So how do we heal them? First we need to look at them through the coca leaves, to know what has happened. Why are they resentful, fearful, or anxious? What is causing their problems? Difficulties existing outside our bodies, such as a theft, disillusionment, or being lied to, affect us because we are predisposed to have this pain. Such people get ill because they are not in equilibrium with themselves. The coca shows when and how this began; it tells the story of how they got ill.
Human beings are always predisposed by their attitudes. This is why you need to know their story. Someone who has a superiority complex or is aggressive and violent is on a downward spiral. They are weakened in their heart, stomach, and solar plexus: the ñawi or naira [the Andean equivalent of chacras] where emotional attitudes are held. In the Andes, people will frequently consider an aching stomach to have been caused by sorrow.
A person who harbours feeling of hate may feel perfectly well for a time but problems with their children, their husband, or lack of money, intensify their emotions which degenerates their body on a cellular level. So they create their illness because they are already out of equilibrium.
Can you explain the concept of the ñawi and how it relates to illness?
In Quechua it is ñawi, or in Aymara, naira. It means ‘eye’, or energy centre of the body, but chacra is also a very common word in Peru, and is Quechua for a piece of cultivated land or field. I believe it has the same linguistic root as the Hindu ‘chacra’. Just as some fields have lots of stones, and others are very fertile, so our bodies, also part of nature, are similar.
Less than a generation ago, people would make offerings before preparing their fields for sowing. They would chew coca leaves, drink chicha or maize beer, and even play music - a whole ceremony. The ancient healers or shamans would give floral or smoke baths to people, curing them of illnesses, fright and so on – the ‘health’ of the land and the people were treated as interrelated.
People identified themselves with their fields and with nature. So when I remove negative emotions from a person, it is like I am removing weeds from their chacra/field.
When they are feeling desperate, the people of the Andes benefit from going to a wild place or some ruins, to scream and shout so that even the mountains will hear. They align with natural forces; this puts them back into equilibrium.
So, do people come to you for coca divination because they are unwell? Is it more than ‘divination’ as we would understand it in the West?
The majority are unwell in their spirit or mind; there are lots of problems today. They are particularly afflicted in the stomach, the place of emotional pain, and also where we are joined to life.
The first thing is to discover what is going on: the wife had an accident, the husband was unfaithful, they haven’t got a job, the house is falling down… Then I look to see their capacity to accept criticism, to listen to the mother leaf ticking them off saying: ‘You have done this, you are insecure, weak, a drunk, or a prostitute’. What is the story? Is it karmic - or something they are doing?
That sounds like a psychological approach - what people are doing to themselves. How do you make sense of the belief that some problems are caused by sorcery?
I show the person that he is not the victim of sorcery and is creating the problem in his mind. Talking about it brings it out and is the first part of becoming well again.
It is true that some people will take vengeance through black magic when they feel prejudiced or offended in some way, because they are sick. When people think they have power and feel superior, the ego can become very negative. The first thing I do is to wake up the consciousness of the person who has been harmed and tell them that evil does not exist! ‘You are inventing it’, I tell them. I need to use a bit of psychology.
Black magic does not exist then?
Neither good nor bad exists; it is a universe, and we create the good and the bad. But I recognise that the person may feel attacked. When someone falls ill it means they are weak and the curandero [an Andean plant healer] must speak positively and encourage them to shine light on it. Then they can create positive thoughts for themselves. If I agree with them and say they are bewitched it makes them worse.
But do you believe that black magic can exist?
Of course, but the act itself is not so powerful as white magic. It is the negative spirit of the black brujo [sorcerer] which creates the power of the spell. If you get hold of a chicken and take off its feathers, put a toad inside, and hang it in the doorway of a hated neighbour [An Andean form of cursing], you can give them a nasty fright, but without a powerful negative spirit nothing will happen. But if the intentions are very negative and the person is weak, they will pick it up quickly.
The most powerful brujos are found in the jungle where there are powerful plants for healing, just as there are dangerous plants that can paralyse your body and so on. But plants have much more wisdom than people. Do you think that if I go to a floripondio [a shaman who works with flowers] and say ‘I want help to do harm to so and so’, that their plants will automatically be at my disposal? No! You have to make a pact with the spirit.
Do people need to believe that your ceremony has done something in order for it to work?
When people trust that you are a white curandero they open up. You have special permission to go into their soul and work with suggestion. Let’s say you give them a bath in a herb with spines, and you ask permission from the spirit of that plant to heal the person with fright or a bad spell - you bathe them, you put them on a diet, you cleanse them and purify them. You call their soul and give them strength and they get well.
What is different about people from the West? What do they need?
Their heads cutting off! No, its only a joke! Their religion has failed them, the church authorities have kept vested interests and institutions going. Eventually people have thrown the baby out with the bath water. We are Gods and we should believe in ourselves first.
All Gods come through nature. But what has become of Western religion? Materialism, loss of identity, loss of customs. There is so much struggle today. People are no longer thinking about nature, but about money and the help they need. They have become completely insecure. Imagine if we went to live in nature again, surrounded by mountains, or in the rainforest, how much more healing it would be.
Yet the tendency today is for everybody to want to move into the cities, to live like Americans, build motorways. It’s sad. I’ve spent time with people in the Andes. I have seen people leaving their traditional clothes and customs. They say ‘Why do you believe in the Earth, the Sun, the puma and the condor’? They go to the city and see a TV and think, ‘What a beautiful TV!’ They sell their llamas and buy one. I am sad to see their children, who are so pure, being contaminated in this way.
They learn negative habits and are hypnotized, and no longer want to work their land. It really hurts in my soul to see them obsessing about dollars and forgetting their power. This loss of values for material things is happening so fast, its incredible! But it’s the Western influence which has been working over 500 years.
People will get a nasty shock from seeing the increasing changes and natural disasters on the Earth and we will be shocked into changing.
Desperation will show the necessity of love. Who will want to do harm when money and material things have become useless? We will come back to a new kind of community consciousness. We are beginning to anticipate this and becoming more conscious, but we are swerving about. There is so much wisdom in nature, she rears us like her children, teaches us to ask permission, to care for her like ourselves.
Join us for an authentic experience of ayahuasca, San Pedro, and plant spirit shamanism in the beautiful rainforests and mountains of Peru. Email ross@thefourgates.com for details or visit the website http://www.thefourgates.com and look under the Sacred Journeys section.
Plant spirit shamanism, healing, divination, herbs, herbalism, shamanism, coca, the andes, peru, san pedro, ross heaven, inca, coca
Fragrance has long been associated with the arts of love. In Japan, Geisha girls priced their services according to the number of incense sticks consumed during love-making, while in Indian tantric rituals, men were anointed with sandalwood, and women with jasmine, patchouli, amber, musk, and with Saffron crushed and smeared beneath their feet. In Europe in the 17 and 1800s, the use of eau de Cologne became a widespread and fashionable trend, where the morning ritual in many homes began with its application before a suitor of either sex would call upon a lover. This blend of rosemary, neroli, bergamot and lemon was also used internally, mixed with wine, eaten on sugar lumps, even taken as an enema, to refresh the ‘inner self’ and cleanse the spirit so that lovers could meet each other with a ‘pure heart’.
But it is, perhaps, in Peru, that the magic of perfumed love has reached its highest skill, in the formulation of pusanga, which is often referred to as the ‘love medicine of the Amazon’, although it is far more than that.
Specialists in the use of fragrance to change luck and attract good fortune are known as perfumeros. One such specialist is Artidoro. Another is Javier Aravelo, an ayahuasca shaman who also works with fragrance.
Artidoro, how did your involvement with perfumes begin?
The story of my path of medicine began when I saw a brother-in-law who healed and chanted… I used to watch how the curanderos worked. I loved listening to what they talked about, how they prepared their remedies, their canticos [magical chants, similar to icaros]. Then I went off on my own deep into the jungle, to know the plants little by little, to smell the leaves and roots of all the different medicines. I had no maestro to learn from so I dieted plants for a year and a half alone, and then I returned to the city. I used agua florida, timalina, camalonga, and dedicated myself to studying all about smells.
How do you use perfumes to help people now?
I get people coming for help with family problems where the woman has gone away from the man or the man has gone away from his children.
Supposing the woman has gone off, I use pusanga to bring her back so that the family can consolidate again. I call the plant spirits which work for that – pusanga plants such as renaco, huayanche, lamarosa, sangapilla, and I call her spirit back to her home. Or let’s say the mama is here with me and the father is far away. I pull him back so he returns to his home. In a short time he will be thinking of his children and his wife, and he comes back.
I don’t need to have the actual plants in front of me, I call their spirits. I make my own perfumes from plants, no chemicals. They have wonderful smells, and I chant at the same time as I rub them on the children and the woman. Then the man starts thinking or dreaming of them.
How does perfume magic like this work?
A smell has the power to attract. I can make smells to attract business, people who buy. You just rub it on your face and it brings in the people to your business. I also make perfumes for love, and others for flourishing. These plants are forces of nature; they contain spirit. I watch for what that spirit attracts: maybe bright birds or butterflies, maybe many different animals come to feed from it. A plant that draws bright birds will also draw beautiful women; a plant that is popular and has many ‘customers’ will also be good for business. So these are the plants that I use to help my patients.
Javier tells a similar story of humble beginnings. Several generations of his family have been shamans and at the age of 17, Javier knew this would be his future too, but it was not until he was 20, when his father died from a virote [A poisoned dart from the spirit world] sent by a hechicero (sorcerer) who was jealous of his father’s powers that Javier felt compelled to become a shaman.
His first instinct was to learn the shamanic arts so he could avenge his father but his grandfather convinced him that this was not the solution because the only way to defeat evil was to spread more goodness in the world. Javier took the message to heart and found solace in the plants instead.
How did your involvement with healing begin?
My grandfather saw that I was bitter and told me that it would not get me anywhere. My heart was still hard and I wanted to kill! Bit by bit, though, through taking the very plants that I had intended to use for revenge, I learned from the spirits that it was wrong to kill and my heart softened.
A shaman learns everything about the rainforest and uses that knowledge to heal his people since they do not have money for Western doctors. The sprits or plant doctors come to me and say that they will cure a person if he takes a particular plant. Then I go out to look for the plant. It is said that every environment has the plants to heal the people.
As part of his apprenticeship the shaman spends years taking plants and roots, each time remembering which ailment is cured by what. The maestro goes with the apprentice into the wilderness and gives him the different plants and it is like a test or trial to overcome. One plant may cure lots of ailments.
You are respected as an ayahuascero, but you are also a perfumero. How do you use perfume magic?
Through my work with the plants, I have learned how to make pusanga, the Amazonian love potion. Pusanga has the power to attract anyone you wish, for the purposes of love, sex, or marriage.
Take the case of a woman who refuses when you offer her a Coca Cola because she thinks you are lower class and that she is better than you. That makes you feel like rubbish so you go to a shaman and tell him the name of the girl. He prepares the pusanga. Three days go by without seeing her and she begins to think about you, dreaming about you and begins looking for you…
In the West, such magic is often looked down upon as manipulative - it may even be seen as evil because it takes away a person’s choice and freewill, so they have no option but to love you. In the Amazon, however, it is considered normal practice to use pusanga in this way. And, in fact, despite our Western morals around this issue, when it comes right down to it, in America and Europe, people are often willing to use love magic to find or return a lover as well. Once we get past the ‘ethical’ considerations, we can be just as ‘manipulative’ as the people of Peru.
Perhaps the people of the Amazon are more honest and upfront about their needs? Or perhaps they carry less of a Christianised concept of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ so are less afraid to ask for what they want? I asked Javier to comment on the moral question.
Yes, we shamans understand there is an ethical concern, but put it this way: what if it happened to me? Let’s say I found a woman ugly and she did pusanga magic to make me marry her. Of course, if I found out I’d be outraged and it would be awful if I only discovered it after having children and making a home with her!
But the truth is, I would never know! I would be hopelessly in love with her, and because I had seen beneath her physical appearance, into her soul or her personality, my love for her would be genuine and deep! She would be the mother of my children! My wife! So the pusanga has not taken away my freedom; it has given me more: it has freed me from my prejudice and let me find real happiness.
That is also why pusanga is a secret. You should never tell someone you have used it on them. Otherwise its work is undone.
But, I persisted, does anyone have real freedom if everyone is using pusanga?
Does anyone have freedom anyway? We are all taught what to believe, what is right and wrong, from when we are little. Are our minds really free? Pusanga is just a different freedom.
But we all like to think we are free. If people are using pusanga on us, though, surely we become slaves to their will and victims of magic?
(Laughing): You think you are not subject to magic every time you are with a woman or, if you are a woman, with a man? You think the woman you met tonight at the dance wears the same pretty dress every day, the same make-up, the same scent, when she is scrubbing the kitchen or at her factory job? You think that man dresses in a smart suit or wears that expensive aftershave when he is working in the fields? No!
They are doing those things to present themselves in a certain way, a way which is more attractive, but obviously not always true! We all use magic every day in order to make people like us and get what we want. Pusanga is just another way. Underneath everything we are all looking for love.
As if to prove his point, a few days later Javier asked the group of Westerners we had taken with us to the jungle what they wanted from their lives. Many of them at first gave ‘cosmic’ and ‘spiritual’ answers to do with putting the world to rights, resolving planetary issues, saving endangered species, speaking with the flowers and so on, and were quite mute when Javier spoke about pusanga and its ability to meet their personal (rather than planetary) needs.
After time for reflection, Javier asked again what our participants really wanted and this time they admitted that what they wanted, behind their desire to save the world, was love. A personal love in their own lives.
So why had they not said so in the first place? Many replied that it had not felt ok for them to ask for love. This was the message they had heard from their mothers (“Who do you think you are to ask for such things?”; “You’ve had more than enough!”), from teachers, and from the Western church (“Do unto others [but not unto yourself] as you would have them do unto you”) and through this conditioning they now felt their needs to be secondary to those of others. The contradiction or paradox, though, was that they believed themselves able to save a planet without first saving themselves – to give cosmic love when they had never received the love they needed in their own lives, so how would they even know what this love looked or felt like?
Javier’s thoughts on this were simple and enlightening:
If we all had more of the love we need we wouldn’t be worried so much about saving the planet. It’s because people don’t have love that they create the problems of the world and why it has to be saved at all! It would be better if people got what they wanted because then they wouldn’t be so destructive. Thoughts tangle up their lives but love solves problems instantly.
Plant spirit shamanism, perfume, aromatherapy, scent, incense, shamanism, shamans, healing, herbs, herbalism, love, pusanga, relationships, ayahuasca, magic, sorcery, ross heaven, peru, the amazon
