When I was going through my Yoga Certification back in 2008, one of my instructors shared with me that the awareness point of the planet was moving away from Tibet and into Peru. At the time, I did not fully understand what she meant but as time went on and I learned about teaching plants in 2010 I finally came to see what she was telling me.
For many years, Tibet was a powerhouse that inspired the world in the sense of growing mindfulness as a spiritual practice. It lifted people up in various ways. It helped people out of depression, PTSD, self-defeating patterns, and more and it also helped us all reach higher levels of coherence/awareness. We started seeing a lot of that in the 60s with when the West started embracing Easter spiritual practices.
Now that we have established meditation, yoga, pranayama, and other Eastern practices as staples for human growth, we are seeing a big uprise on Entheogens and these are propelling the growth of awareness and our perspective on life.
We are also seeing a tremendous uprise on mental illnesses and I truly believe that Entheogens will play a very important role in understanding them and even, in some instances, helping people stabilize and cure them.
Ayahuasca was first discovered in the 16th century in South America. It is said that in the western slope of the Amazon basin there are over 700 different forms of preparing the Ayahuasca and that each indigenous culture that inhabits this vast territory has its own way of conceiving the Ayahuasca. This knowledge is rooted in the collective unconscious and is transmitted from generation to generation. According to studies carried out in the Amazon, the use of Ayahuasca has an approximate age of 5000 years.
Shamanism and Ayahuasca are disciplined ways to obtain healing, power and personal growth. It is based on the premise that Ayahuasca is not limited to working in a single reality, but acts in a magical world. In a dimension in which help is received: a reality full of beauty and harmony. We just have to keep our minds free of prejudice. This magical-religious dimension works from a perspective, that the irrational is the rational, and the invisible the visible.
How Ayahuasca is Used
Ayahuasca is used as a medicine, as a purifier and as a teacher. She is called a doctor because she cures; Teacher because she teaches, and Mother because she guides. Gives Power, Knowledge and Vision.
The medicinal properties of Ayahuasca are not only in the spiritual, but also in the physical. There are prerequisites before ingestion, such as mental, physical, emotional and spiritual preparation. The diet is essential: you must remain fasting at least 24 hours before the ceremony, it is important that the stomach is free of food because vomiting is frequent.
It is highly recommended to not consume alcohol, drugs, pickled or spicy foods, or have sex with a minimum of seven days before the ceremony. And it is absolutely important not to take any anti-depressants with a minimum of 30 days but ideally 3 months because these can interfere with the plant medicine and really create the only way you can get damage or death.
Ayahuasca opens the doors of perception and it goes to the deepest, oldest parts of your brain and helps you deal with any traumas you have experienced or any other issues you need to resolve. Ayahuasca is not a mere chemical relationship but a relationship of awareness and love. To be understood first you have to learn to feel its dimension, and as the shamans say, using the heart and not just the head. It is not somewhere out there, or the realm of imagination, but it is all here and now. What happens is the electromagnetic spectrum of light opens wider and you are able to see more than what you can on your normal state of awareness. This is vastly different from pure hallucinations or your imagination at work.
Each experience with ayahuasca is different from the other since many factors will influence the ceremony. For example, the plant medicine itself, the way it was cooked, the environment, your own personal mindframe, company, and more. It is of paramount importance to follow the diet as close as possible to make your end of the variables as clean as you can to have a positive experience with “La Madrecita.”
Have you had any experience with Ayahuasca? Let me know in the comments below!
