I will be dieting Sacred Healing Plants in the Amazon
Half December I’ll leave again for Peru, this time for three months. To celebrate the Christmas Holidays in my own peculiar way (puking in isolation, hahaha) and to submerge myself more and deeper into the world of the Amazonian Plant Spirits by doing several ‘dietas’ (plant diets) so as to learn a lot more and bring the healing powers of those plants to my Brothers and Sisters at here home.
I’m very much looking forward to my coming journey. And yet… right now time is flying so fast that I feel a bit overwhelmed. I am leaving so soon with so much to be done in the meantime and my energy is still quite low because of all the ceremonies we’ve held over the last year; since doing this work over longer periods of time is quite an intense way of life. But then again, what better cure is there than going for a dieta?
A diet helps to purify your body and stimulate your body’s innate ability to self-heal.
Within indigenous Amazonian traditions, dieting is a primary means by which humans learn to connect, communicate and work with the spirit (intelligence) of certain Master Plants. There are different ways to diet, but the basic idea is that you cut down on sensory and energetic input by eating only a little basic food and drinking a certain quantity of the plant for a certain period of time, putting most of your energy into connecting to the plant. This can involve a lot of things: visiting the actual physical plant, meditating on it, singing to it and looking for it in your (lucid) dreams. And clearing space in yourself for the plant to enter you by isolating yourself in the jungle. Dieting a Master Plant in isolation helps you to ally yourself with this plant in order to allow the plant’s powers to teach you their wisdom, instruct you their way of use for healing and teach you their specific icaros (plant spirit songs). They help you to reach and maintain altered states of consciousness which enable you to see from different angles and perspectives. Furthermore a diet helps to purify your body and stimulate your body’s innate ability to self-heal. So in my case, I am going to diet a little to heal myself and a lot to help more people healing themselves by guiding the plant medicine ceremonies at home together with my beloved and soulmate Zelday.
Plants are like people
Plants are all different. They have different personalities and different abilities. The same plant can generally do more than one thing and it’s a lot easier to work with them if you know their personality.
This coming time in Peru I will mainly devote my time to four different plants: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, Huachuma(San Pedro) and Noya Rao. This last plant (tree) is new for me and I am very much looking forward to work with her. In the Shipibo tradition the Noya Rao is generally considered as the great great grandmother of all the plants. Super powerful, pure good, white light, a little harsh and often life changing. It is a mythical plant of which is said that there are only three left in the entire Amazon Basin. It’s so rare that most shamans don’t even believe it still exists…
I have the privilage to work with an old maestra who was born into one of the most respected and powerful healing lineages of the Shipibo tradition. She has dedicated her life to the sacred healing traditions of her people and has dieted extensively on this mythical master plant Noya Rao. I will start my travels with a Silent Retreat dieting the Noya Rao (so, this is actually what I’ll be doing with Christmas!).
– to be continued –
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