Articles

THE HUMMINGBIRD RETREAT CENTRE, SPAIN

Ross — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:34:32 GMT

When Spanish explorers first encountered hummingbirds in Peru, they called them joyas voladoras: "flying jewels." The hummingbird was revered as a sacred healer, a guardian of plants, the spirit, and those who needed healing or were training as healers themselves. That is why the hummingbird is the symbol for The Hummingbird Retreat Centre. Located in one of the most peaceful and unspoiled parts of rural Spain, it offers a relaxing and invigorating space where you can escape from ‘normal’ life into a more magical one where time slows down and you have the space to breathe, dream, heal, explore and allow your spirit to flourish as you enjoy the breathtaking scenery of its beautifully tranquil mountain setting – and one of the sunniest and most welcoming climates in Europe. The Centre offers a wide range of healing therapies and treatments, including massage, hot stone therapy, reiki, and crystals, and outstanding training in the arts of shamanism, soul retrieval, Thai herbal massage, Indian head massage, plant spirit shamanism, yoga, dance, creative writing - and many others - with courses taught by some of the world’s best-known and respected teachers. . If you are looking for a pleasant escape from the rush of daily life, the Centre offers the perfect holiday, nestled among spectacular mountains in a landscape full of peace and quiet, where things move at a natural pace and the delights of nature surround you. As well as beautiful scenery, a peaceful and private environment, and delicious home-cooked food, there is a pool for your use, a garden and a pool-side bar and, for those who wish to explore the local area, there are several unmissable sights close by which will give you a flavour of the real Spain. The Hummingbird Retreat Centre is close to an unspoiled Natural Park in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada which is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and has many unique and rare species, as well as skies that are rated the cleanest in Europe. This area was once ruled by the Moors, who thought it the Paradise promised to them by Allah, and it is not difficult to see why. It is surrounded by magnificent mountains and olive groves that have grown there for centuries, and ideally placed for those who love nature as you can literally walk out of the grounds and begin your discovery of the Andalucian countryside – or sit by the pool and let nature come to you in the form of the magnificent birds and other gentle and colourful creatures who find the tranquil surroundings irresistible. The area is above sea level so the climate is warm all year round. During the winter, temperatures range from average highs of 54 degrees to lows of 36 degrees - which is warmer than London in spring. Then, when spring comes to Andalucia, temperatures climb to the mid-60s with lows in the upper-40s. Summer brings sunny days and warm evenings where daily highs of 87 degrees are typical: a time for sunbathing, relaxing by the pool and taking things easy. Nights drop to a nice mid-60s and everything feels right with the world. Like spring, autumn is a particularly lovely time to visit. The days are cooler (an average of 70 degrees) and nights are a perfect 50. COURSES COMING UP AT THE HUMMINGBIRD RETREAT CENTRE August 1-14 SHAMANIC PRACTITIONER AND HEALER TRAINING A unique Diploma course which condenses a whole year of normal practitioner training into a two-week residency, saving you time and money. It is ideal for those who wish to learn shamanic skills so they can incorporate them into their lives and/or those who would like to act as guides and healers for others, helping them find their own soul pathways. No prior experience of shamanism or healing is necessary. August 22-26 HEALING ARTS TRAINING More information to come. September 5-9 WRITE IN THE HEART OF SPAIN Do you think you have a book in you? We’re sure you do. Everyone has a story to tell, a unique experience they would like to share, an entertaining or poignant memory, an extraordinary encounter, or a skill that should be passed on to others and which would make the world richer if it was. This relaxing, inspiring and creative workshop is packed with information and ideas to help you discover, develop, and take pleasure from your natural writing abilities and skills - and get your book into print. September 12-16 SHAMANIC HEALING AND SOUL RETRIEVAL TRAINING A training course for people who would like to deepen their understanding and practice of shamanism and bring healing to others. Participants are introduced to the issues of soul loss and the practice of soul retrieval from a shamanic perspective. They learn how soul loss occurs and how to find or track a soul and bring it back to a person who is suffering from its loss. As well as working with practices for soul retrieval, the course focuses on ‘soul anchoring’: providing a safe and powerful space for soul-energy to return to, using methods of energy rebalancing, spirit extraction and power retrieval, as well as ‘life after soul retrieval’: how to create healthier lives for ourselves and others after the healing has taken place. September 19-22 THE RETURN OF THE SERPENT: PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM AND THE VINE OF SOULS On this workshop we explore our connection to nature and the folkways, medicines and wisdom of our ancestors as we restore balance to our souls through the healing and visionary powers of ‘the vine of souls’, one of the world’s greatest teacher plants. Participants learn the fundamental practices of plant spirit shamanism, including methods for connecting to and working with our guides and allies in nature, how to recognise and prepare healing plants, give and receive blessings, and aspects of soul healing and retrieval using plants and flowers. Two teacher plant ceremonies are included, which we prepare for by following the shaman’s diet, just as it has been practiced for thousands of years by plant spirit shamans and healers of the Amazonian ayahuasca traditions. September 26-30 REIKI TRAINING AND INITIATION More information to come. December 29-January 2 2010 NEW YEAR GATHERING, CELEBRATION AND HEALING RETREAT Do something different this New Year: revitalise, energise, relax, cast off the old and find the new energy and focus to make the coming year the best you’ve ever had! Your stay includes delicious celebratory food, three therapies of your choice, entertainment and performances, gentle workshops and traditional Spanish rituals for blessing the year ahead. Most of all it’s about taking it easy! HIRE THE HUMMINGBIRD FOR YOUR OWN COURSES The Hummingbird Retreat Centre is also available to other healers and teachers and is an ideal venue for yoga, tai chi, meditation, dance, holistic therapies and other courses, as well as relaxation, celebration and renewal. For more information on The Hummingbird Retreat Centre, its courses and healing therapies, or to hire the Centre yourself, email gina_holsgrove@hotmail.com

Ayahuasca and San Pedro retreats in Peru and Plant Spirit Shamanism workshops in Spain 2009

Ross — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:05:51 GMT

I'm pleased to announce new workshops and events with the world's most amazing teacher plants! THE RETURN OF THE SERPENT: PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM AND THE VINE OF SOULS SPAIN, SEPTEMBER 19-22 On this workshop we explore our connection to nature and the folkways, medicines and wisdom of our ancestors as we restore balance to our souls through the healing and visionary powers of ayahuasca, one of the world’s greatest teacher plants, which is said to be “born of a snake”. Participants learn the fundamental practices of plant spirit shamanism, including methods for connecting to and working with our guides and allies in the shamanic otherworld, how to recognise and prepare healing plants, give and receive blessings from nature, and aspects of soul healing and retrieval using plants and flowers. Two ayahuasca ceremonies are also provided, which we prepare for by following the shaman’s diet, just as it has been practiced for thousands of years by plant spirit shamans and ayahuasceros. We also purify ourselves with limpia: cleansing baths using flowers and herbs to refresh body and soul, change luck, confer spiritual blessings, and open ourselves to the healing that the vine of souls can bring. Alongside the vine we also diet native plant mixtures for lucid dreaming, so we are better prepared for, and more receptive to, the spirit of the vine. Shamanic practices, exercises, and attunements are used to deepen our connection to our enlightened ancestors and the natural world, and during our ceremonies, icaros - sacred chants of the Amazonian shamans - will guide our journeys and call the spirits of healing and vision. Email ross@thefourgates.com for a free information pack. AYAHUASCA JOURNEYS TO THE AMAZON RAINFOREST PERU, OCTOBER 30 - NOVEMBER 12 The Magical Earth Amazon Adventure is a 14-day ayahuasca and plant spirit shamanism journey to the Amazon Rainforest which could – literally - change your life. Focussed on healing and self-exploration, The Magical Earth Amazon Adventure offers a unique and transformative encounter with the magical powers of nature through the ancient rituals of the Amazonian plant shaman. There are seven ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as jungle walks to meet the spirits of the plants, the opportunity to diet particular plants and absorb their curative powers, workshops on shamanism and plant magic, and the chance to work with expert shamans of the plant spirit tradition and receive one-to-one consultations and healings from them. We provide transportation in Peru to our jungle retreat centre, accommodation, food, translation services, ceremonies, shamans, workshops, and medicines. All you really need do is be open to this magical event and the changes it might bring to your life! Included in your programme are: Traditional ayahuasca ceremonies for cleansing, release, healing, and spiritual realisation Flower, herbal, and clay baths to restore balance to the soul, and for “flourishing”: good luck and success Plant walks and explorations of the Rainforest with our shamans and guides and gain insight into the healing powers of nature Introductions to healing and the wisdom of the plants and shamanic practices in workshops led by Ross Heaven, author of the best-selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism, and seminars with Ross and the shamans The opportunity to diet plants which can help your unique quest to understand life and your spiritual mission A jungle-style sauna for purification A visit to Pasaje Paquito, a treasure trove of medicinal remedies from all over the Amazon Rainforest The chance to work with some of the greatest Amazonian shamans, who are experts on healing and masters of the plants, in authentic rituals and healings to help you on your journey – an experience of total power. Visit www.thefourgates.com for more details or email Ross@thefourgates.com for a free Information Pack. SAN PEDRO JOURNEY TO THE ANDES OF PERU CUSCO, NOVEMBER 14-20 The Cactus of Vision journey to Peru is a magical experience of authentic Andean shamanism, using the methods, plants, and approaches that have been practiced in this region for thousands of years. Our accommodation is close to the heart of Cusco - the “centre of the world” - so you can enjoy Peru and its culture as well as its magic and medicine. Your programme includes: Authentic San Pedro ceremonies with the visionary cactus, led by Andean shamans. Limpia: an Andean healing method for cleansing and rebalancing the spiritual body through the removal of unhelpful energies. Pago: an offering to the spirits of the land and a blessing for those who take part.. Coca Divination: using the leaves of the sacred coca plant to produce a picture of a person’s life – and sometimes past lives. Each divination is unique and sometimes followed by a ‘correctional healing’ to change the future and produce an outcome more favourable to your needs or desires. Seminars and circle meetings with the shamans and Ross Heaven, author of Plant Spirit Shamanism, are also included to discuss your San Pedro insights and provide you with background to Andean shamanism to enhance your understanding of this healing tradition. Email ross@thefourgates.com for a free Information Pack or visit the website www.thefourgates.com and look under the Sacred Journeys section.

AN INTRODUCTION TO PLANT SPIRIT WISDOM AND PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM

Ross — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:10:40 GMT

AN INTRODUCTION TO PLANT SPIRIT WISDOM AND PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM Based on a presentation by Ross Heaven to the Freedomseekers Shamanic Conference, Glastonbury, England, 2008 Archaeology shows that human beings have worked with plants for thousands of years, as medicines – foods, of course - and as consciousness-changing agents. Even today 75% of our planet’s people rely on medicines derived from plants – so do the other 25% actually but they just don’t know it because most of our pills and prescriptions - although packaged and artificially made - are still produced from extracts of plants. Every plant we eat, bathe in, smell, or touch has a consciousness of its own – and changes our consciousness too, no matter how subtly. So we shouldn’t get hung up on just the psychedelic or entheogenic plants as a route to new understanding. Terence McKenna, the great consciousness-explorer wrote, in fact, that all of “nature is alive and talking to us” – a message he hammered home by adding “this is not a metaphor”. If we simply open ourselves to nature, that is, we are on the road to self-discovery and healing – whether or not we work with those plants which we in the West call ‘hallucinogenic’. HALLUCINOGENS Some plants, though, have come to greater prominence because of their entheogenic status. The word entheogen was coined in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists including Gordon Wasson and Richard Evans Schultes. The word ‘hallucinogen’ sounded too much like ‘hallucination’ to them - as if the visions these plants revealed had no real ‘reality’ and could therefore be dismissed as the wild imaginings of an intoxicated mind. As Terence McKenna says, however, there are also “true hallucinations”: visions which reveal profoundly useful information which can be applied to the world. As an example, one of these ‘true hallucinations’ may well have led to the discovery of the structure of DNA and its famous double helix. Francis Crick wrote that he was struggling to understand how DNA worked one day, and entered what he called a dreaming state while he had this on his mind; a state of dreaming possibly aided by a plant… He dreamed of snakes writhing together and winding themselves like the serpents of the caduceus. It was “a not insignificant thought”, as he rather humbly puts it – and from that true hallucination we now know how DNA looks. We’ll come back to DNA a little later. Schultes and the others wanted to differentiate teacher plants and visionary allies from hallucinogenics so they were respected for the gifts they offer, so they arrived at the word entheogen instead. “In a strict sense”, they said, “only those vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites would be designated entheogens”. The key word is probably “rites” because there is always a ritual or ceremony that goes with the use of visionary plants – sometimes one that goes on for days before the plant is even taken. On our trips to the Amazon, for example, we prepare ourselves for three days before we take our first drink of ayahuasca and even then, the ingestion of the plants is within a strict ceremonial setting. Shamanic work with teacher plants is not just “drug-taking”. The literal meaning of the word entheogen is "that which causes God to be within an individual". They reveal the divine within us through their ability to expand consciousness and reconnect us to All-That-Is. A massive expansion in consciousness may, indeed, have resulted from the work of our ancestors with teacher plants – and we may all have entheogens to thank for our ability to think and reason as we do – even if we have never taken one ourselves. 40,000 years ago, for example, there was an unexplained but huge growth in the size of the brain – mainly in the parts responsible for abstract thought, reasoning, and what we might call “visioning” or “seeing the future”. It was a growth so big and so fast that it changed the structure of our skulls and gave us the rounded foreheads we have today compared with our ancestors. No-one knows why this happened – but an expansion in consciousness would do it because we would need new grey matter to store the information downloaded from the universe via teacher plants. McKenna suggests this: that our hunter-gather ancestors came across special mushrooms during their foraging and, eating them, were transported to the gods, bringing back Promethean gifts that changed the nature of our world and gave birth to civilisation – if you can call what we have today “civilisation”. After that these mushrooms became sacred teachers used by shamans and medicine men to heal and enlighten their tribes, and by ordinary people to discover what was extraordinary within and around them. THE MOON MAN There is a similar but slightly different story from the Peruvian Amazon regarding ayahuasca, the vine of souls. It says that thousands of years ago, people lived in harmony with nature and were able to climb a rope to other worlds where they talked with the spirits of ancestors, animals, and plants. Everything was wonderful and we were at peace - until the Moon Man cut the rope and our connection to nature was lost. Why would the Moon Man do such a thing? In the Amazon, the moon is a masculine symbol and associated with rationality, analysis, and logic; the antithesis to intuition, connection, and blending – so what this story really says is that the growth of the rational mind erodes our connection to the real world – the spirit world which exists beyond forms. By using only our rational minds, we are cast adrift and lost. To heal their people and bring them back to balance, the shamans visited the gods on their behalf and were given a new rope – the ayahuasca vine – by which to climb back to the spirit world, so all was well again. AYAHUASCA Mind-altering plants have their fashions like everything else and for Westerners ayahuasca seems to be the plant of the moment, so I’m going to devote some time to exploring this with you. But I also want to give you my prediction for the next teacher plant that will be the most important to our planet. The ayahuasca brew is actually a blend of two plants. The ayahuasca vine – banisteriopsis caapi – and Psychotria viridis – the leaves of the chacruna plant. Mixed together, they form a potent visionary brew which is also called ayahuasca. The word is a compound of two from the Quechua language: aya meaning “spirit or dead person” and huasca meaning “vine” – hence “the vine of souls”. The two plants are taken from the Rainforest in a sacred way and carefully measured together in a cauldron after the vines have been mashed. Water is added and the mixture is slowly boiled for up to 12 hours (sometimes more – I have drunk a 72-hour brew made by a student of Pablo Amaringo), watched over by a shaman who constantly talks to the plants and may also sing sacred songs to them, called icaros. Other plants are sometimes added to the mixture – like toe for spirit-flight, or mucura for balance and vision – but a simple brew would be ayahuasca and chacruna. No-one quite knows how these two plants came to be added together. In the jungle they usually don’t grow near each other and they look dissimilar so it is not as if their appearance might have suggested combining them. Some shamans say that long ago, in fact, the ayahuasca vine was prepared and drunk by itself (as the Achuar people still do) but the visions it produced led them to believe that it was pining for its soul mate – the chacruna. The ayahuasca spirit told the shamans to go out into the jungle and find this soul mate. “Turn two corners”, it said, and they would find the plant to add. The story makes no sense, of course, because there are no ‘corners’ in the jungle! But, then, ‘making sense’ is not necessarily a route to understanding anything because it delivers us into the hands of the Moon Man again and his fixation on logic. Instead, the shaman’s explanation is best regarded as a metaphor for a more fundamental truth: that the spirits of the plants make their wishes clear and that shamans must act on what they are told. This is the true route to knowledge in the jungle and in life more widely. Listen to the spirits. Interestingly, both the vine and the chacruna leaves are more or less inert and have limited effect by themselves in changing consciousness. When added together, though, a potent brew is produced. This in itself reveals an understanding of pharmacology by shamans which modern science is only just catching up with. Basically, one of the plants in the ayahuasca mix activates the most ancient visionary centres in our brains: our routes to the unconscious, to the God within us, and to our connection to everything. It is from this that we may draw supernatural powers. The problem is that there are mechanisms in our bodies which work to inhibit these effects. The other plant in the brew, however, prevents these mechanisms from kicking in. The result of combining them, then, is to inhibit our body’s ‘veto-response’ so we are free to explore the universal mind. The experience is also entirely natural and organic since it works with the visionary centres of our own brains. It can last for 4 hours or more as we spin into the universe and meet with the gods of healing. The shamanic chemists of the rainforest have been mixing ayahuasca like this for literally thousands of years – and yet it was only about 50 years ago that science discovered how ayahuasca works: as I explained it – one plant an inhibitor, one a bringer of visions. If you ask the shamans how they knew, thousands of years ago, what our scientists are only just starting to understand, they will tell you: “Simple. The plants told us”. This is the basis for most plant spirit medicine, in fact, not just work with ayahuasca: You trust the plants; you respect them; then you ask, listen and pay close attention, and the plants, aware of your needs, are delighted to give up their secrets. Respect is an important part of plant spirit work as well and with ayahuasca, for example, there are many rituals which must be observed in its preparation. One of these is to blow your prayers and wishes into the brew before you drink it, so that the ayahuasca knows you. This process is called soplada and alerts the spirits to your needs so they can work for you during the ceremony. [Slide] This is Mandy, one of the participants on our Magical Earth Adventure, doing exactly that on the morning when we made the first brew together. It’s daybreak in this photo and you can already see how light it is – the jungle is not always the dark impenetrable forest you see in films and documentaries! The ayahuasca is cooking in a large pot over a wood fire and Mandy is using the smoke from a mapacho – a special cigarette made from pure jungle tobacco – to carry her prayers into the brew. The smoke also feeds the spirits and, as it is absorbed, the ayahuasca will come to understand her soul and the nature of the healing that Mandy especially requires. Behind her is a sweatlodge, which is used in our purification rituals prior to ayahuasca ceremonies. I’ll talk more about this later. The people around her are shamans and note that they are just wearing jeans and t-shirts like everyone else. Some people – notably journalists for some reason – seem to have the quaint notion that all shamans dress in loincloths and swing through the trees with blow-guns. In fact - out of costume and out of the ritual or healing context – most shamans are just like you and me. It is only in ceremony that things change and they become Men of Power, in Castaneda’s words. [Slide] The Shipibo are considered masters of ayahuasca and the patterns on their tunics – like this one here – suggest waveforms, ladders, serpents, and vines. You might also see some similarity to DNA… In this picture, one of our Shipibo shamans is overseeing participants in Peru as they break up the ayahuasca vines prior to their brewing. You can see Mark and a few others here, breaking the vines into shreds so they can be boiled more easily. This picture was taken at about 5am as well. Ayahuasca preparation is an all-day event and one of the reasons, incidentally, why this teacher plant is never likely to become a recreational drug: it’s just too much hard work for our instant-gratification society! Happily for us, most of this work is done by our shamans, who never seem to sleep or stop working! Some of these shamans are in their 70s but have the vitality of young men, so something in the ayahuasca must obviously work! The patterns on the shaman’s tunic also denote the energy grid that underlies all material things, and the complex relationships between the people of the community and the spirits around them. The same designs often appear to participants during their ayahuasca visions as well, and become a sort of pathway or map to truth as they follow them and receive their deeper meaning. AYAHUASCA CEREMONIES Ayahuasca ceremonies always take place in darkness and, in the Amazon, in a simple, open-sided hut, which is the shaman’s temple for dreaming. With the shaman’s permission it is possible to leave the temple and wander in the jungle to take in the sights, not just of the rainforest, but of the spiritual world opened up by ayahuasca. On our last journey to the Amazon, for example, many participants reported that they were able to see the spirits around them and the energies of the plants and jungle, as well as their own interior world, and many have amazing stories to tell. In fact, the inner and outer worlds become so blended that what you see is in some ways what you are. This is another way in which ayahuasca reveals the truth. The ceremonial space is always protected by the shamans through the use of perfumes and floral waters like agua florida (‘water for flourishing’) as well as tobacco smoke so no unwanted spirits can enter. During the ceremony itself it is also normal for shamans to perform healings on participants using bundles of leaves called chacapa to ‘iron out’ the energy body. They also sing songs called icaros to direct the journey and bring well-being. Sometimes other methods are used too, such as massage or spiritual work. [Slide] This is what ayahuasca looks like before it is drunk. The cup is made from a jungle seed. A lot of shamans call ayahuasca “chocolate” and you can see why – although the taste is not quite as pleasant as chocolate! It is rather bitter and ‘earthy’, in fact – like some Chinese medicines - although some shamans are better than others at giving it a sweet and more palatable taste. This is usually down to the shaman’s intention and his attention to the brewing process. This is quite a large dose, incidentally, and not one I would recommend to a first-timer. The effects take about 30 minutes to come on – though sometimes they are immediate – and usually begin with a feeling of warmth in the stomach, which spreads throughout the body. Then there is a feeling of skin elasticity, as if the atoms of the body are merging with those of the air. After that the visionary effects begin, but I’ll talk more about those in a moment. PREPARATION Before the ceremonies, however, it is necessary to purify the body and soul so we are more open to the ayahuasca spirit. This is accomplished through rituals including sweatlodges and jungle-style saunas where the participant is wrapped in blankets and stands over a steaming cauldron containing cleansing herbs and a little ayahuasca so that the participant and the spirit of the plants can meet each other before the ayahuasca is drunk. Some of you have experienced sweatlodges before, no doubt, but in the jungle they are slightly different. We take two sweats. The first is led by the shamans and is an appeal to the jungle spirits and the soul of the plants, as well as a spiritual cleansing. Inside the lodge, the shaman burns plants such as pinon colorado – a defence against ‘evil sorcerers’ and a means for extracting virote – magical darts or poisonous blasts of energy – they may have infected us with. Evil sorcerers are around us everywhere, by the way! Every time we sit down next to someone radiating negative energy we fall under their spell, and their vibrations can come to infect us so we feel grubby or angry as well - because their energies are now part of ours. Plants like pinon colorado bring us back to purity and remove these energies so we are ‘ourselves’ again and open to the healing of ayahuasca. The second sweatlodge is led by me and is probably more familiar to Westerners. We use plants too and our prayers are to the widest community of spirits to bless us on our journeys ahead. A special practice called the plant diet is also followed as a ritual preparation for ayahuasca. This restricts certain foods as well as behaviours such as sex. Participants eat fresh, healthy food, but it is mostly bland, and spices, oils, meats, salt, and so on are prohibited. These are all foods which do not react well with ayahuasca and which – like salt and lemons – will cut through magic if eaten. The effect of the diet, like the sweatlodges and other practices, is to help us leave the outside world behind and let go of attachments – to routines, habits, addictions and dependences – so we become in a sense more plant-like ourselves and more pure in body and spirit. Healing plants are also added to the diet - such as ajo sacha and chiric sanango. Ajo is the hunter’s plant and is taken to make the tribesman invisible to his prey so he blends in with the forest. It is the plant of stalking but, for our purposes, it also has an interesting psychological effect: of helping us to stalk our ‘inner issues’ so that emotional pains and negative energies can be released or dealt with during the ayahuasca ceremony. Chiric sanango is a plant often prescribed to warm up the body. Hence it may be given to arthritis sufferers or those in professions like fishing, where cold damp conditions are usual. But it also has a psychological effect: that of warming up a cold heart or cooling down a heart too enflamed by jealousy or rage. It is a rebalancer of energies, and opens us to love. Some shamans say it also provides the “boiling energy” necessary to see the spirits and meet our allies. The jungle centre where we stay has so far catalogued about 1,500 plants that grow at the camp, as well as their uses, so ajo and chiric sanango are far from the only ones which might be added to a diet. All of them work together with ayahuasca, so it really depends on what you wish to accomplish, the nature of the questions you bring, or the healing you require. [Slide] This image shows another aspect of plant ritual – soplada – a healing performed by the shaman where tobacco smoke carries prayers and intentions to release blockages from a participant’s energy system. In this picture we are waiting to take floral baths by the river and Ben, who is being healed, was feeling a little unwell, so the shaman performed a healing for him. Within minutes he was dancing his way to the river! Floral and other baths like these are also a part of ritual preparations. They rid the body of toxins by using special flowers and herbs. [Slide] This image shows the “invisible people”! and illustrates one form of bathing – the clay bath or bano de barro – where participants are coated in clay from healing pools where the brightest animals in the jungle come to drink. Many of these animals are natural enemies but at the pools they drink together in peace. Not only are the minerals in the clay good for the skin, therefore, but the spiritual intention of the clay itself is to heal rifts and bring peace and co-operation into the participant’s life. Other baths are also taken, where beautiful perfumes and flowers are poured over the participant. In this picture of Mike and Mark, the flowers of rosa sisa are used: marigolds. These are used for protection against envidia and the evil eye. Envidia is envy – a sort of jealous rage directed against a person by someone who is envious of what they have and wants to take it from them or see them suffer. Marigolds are often planted near the doorways of houses in Peru to catch the negative energies of those who pass by. The flowers are said to turn black when vibrations like these are caught, but return to their bright colour once the energies are discharged to the earth. ICAROS Icaros – the shaman’s songs – are sung throughout most of the activities I’ve mentioned so far, and during ayahuasca ceremonies themselves. These songs are not invented by the shamans but are gifts from the forest and the plants. Michael Harner would probably call them ‘power songs’. They tell of nature’s ability to heal, and they evoke the powers of certain plants or places of strong spirit and intention. The shaman, during his training and initiation, may spend months or years by himself in the jungle, dieting the plants to get to know them, drinking ayahuasca, and seeing no-one except the spirits. One of our shamans, Javier, for example, once undertook a diet alone by himself in the jungle for two solid years. Only three people have successfully completed this diet. But it’s by no means the longest. Other shamans we work with spent ten or even twenty years alone in the jungle dieting the plants. By ingesting these plants and drinking ayahuasca, the shaman becomes familiar with them and learns what they can cure physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually – the four separate bodies that shamans say we have. During his diet, he may be gifted an icaro - a song of power from his plant allies. This is like an audio snapshot of his feeling of healing, wisdom, or strength at that time and carries with it all that is happening within and without him at that moment. It may refer to a nearby waterfall that has a soothing sound, for example, or the powerful call of a particular bird, or to a star shines on him and the mood this invokes in him of confidence and peace. It is these feelings and events – as well as the essence of the plants he is dieting - that the song captures. Using it as a carrier, the shaman is able to transfer these energies and qualities to other people when he sings this icaro in ceremony. So it becomes a gift of power for them too. THE EFFECTS OF AYAHUASCA I said earlier that I would talk about the effects of ayahuasca, but in fact it is difficult to say too much because the experience is quite personal and it’s hard to put enlightenment or healing into words. The experience of expanded consciousness is way beyond words. Comments from a few participants on last year’s Magical Earth trip show the problem. This is from a businesswoman in the UK: “People ask, ‘How was the trip?’ - and what do you answer? No words can do it justice. There are too many experiences to mention and none would give light on my true feelings… The stillness I feel and the lack of rush is incredible. What we experienced was something so special and life just keeps getting better.” This is Annette, a riding school owner in the US: “An experience that changed my life. It is hard to describe something so magical but I have no doubt that I will draw from this for the rest of my life”. There are some things that can be said, however, and some things the experience of individuals may share in common. In fact, one of the early scientific names for ayahuasca was telepathine because it has the power sometimes to allow a group of people to share a common vision. Hence, you will read in some books of whole tribes drinking ayahuasca together when a decision had to be made that affected them all, such as moving camp or how best to face an enemy. From the visions they received, they were able to reach an informed conclusion. It is also important to be clear, though, that when I use the word “vision” I do not just mean images. Sometimes the visionary information is given in words, sounds, emotions, or memories rather than pictures. Normally this information is also accompanied by a sense of the numinous: a closeness to God or to the divine energies of the universe, along with feelings of awe and well-being. A vision might therefore be more akin to a massive upload of understanding or information, and it is this, not the pictures, which is most significant. Images are common, however, and they may also have a symbolic meaning, revealing new information about who we are, how we see the world and our place in it, or about the nature of our illness or dis-ease. Visions of snakes and vines are also common, accompanied by a sense of fundamental wisdom revealed through their presence, and a feeling of affinity with them and all things: a sort of knowledge of God - or of being God. The consistency of this snake imagery led one scientist – Jeremy Narby – to coin the term ‘Cosmic Serpent’ to describe the frequency of such images, and the feelings they evoke. Narby draws an analogy between the appearance of the vine (which is snake-like itself), the snake imagery that emerges, and the structure of DNA, just as Francis Crick saw it. He concludes that ayahuasca enables us to commune with the consciousness of DNA itself. DNA is the fundamental building block of life, so what Narby is really saying is that, through ayahuasca, we can come to understand the nature of reality and the purpose of everything on Earth – including ourselves. He also suggests that it is DNA - or the energy it contains – is what shamans are in contact with when they perform their healings. On some level, they and ayahuasca ‘restructure’ or repattern our DNA, leading us from ill-health to well-being. It’s a bold claim, but I have seen many healings like this in the last 10 years, including cures for long-term physical problems, and it’s clear that something is going on – something that science has no explanation for. Other sensations that typically arise for participants are a sense of being a part of – not apart from – nature, and the knowledge that all things are alive and we are all one. This, in itself, can be empowering. [Slides] This image by the ayahuasca shaman and artist, Pablo Amaringo, gives an idea of this. We see a patient bathing in floral waters while three shamans sit next to him with ayahuasca. Around him the whole jungle comes to life as serpent-like figures wrap themselves around him and the trees. This is another Amaringo, showing images of the angels of the plants and animals, along with UFOs and other celestial and planetary life arriving in the jungle to bring knowledge of other worlds. Quite a few UFOs or otherworldly visitors have been seen in the jungles, by the way, and many shamans say that all human beings come from the stars. This is interesting again, because modern science is also starting to suggest that life on Earth was carried here from the stars in the frozen waters of comets. Apparently, the shamans knew this thousands of years ago, and without the help of scientific equipment or multi-million pound laboratories – because the plants told them! In this picture, the participants sit at the bottom and in the centre there is a golden temple of healing, where they will be taken by ayahuasca so their lives will “flourish” and grow better. It shows the gods of the waters, the protectors of the village, and the cities in the sky. Perhaps it represents some deep memory of what I just said: that life is born – or reborn – from the sky and water. The underwater world, in Western symbolism at least, is also a metaphor for the unconscious, so perhaps another message here is that there are powers within us that we can use to heal ourselves, and that ayahuasca is an aid to unlocking them. These places – the healing temples, cities underwater or in the skies – are all ones that participants may also see or be taken to during ayahuasca ceremonies. The presence of angels, gods, and spirit-helpers and the knowledge that “nature is alive and talking to us” are also common experiences. AYAHUASCA HEALING The healing available from ayahuasca tends to take 5 forms – often all at once: what we might call mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and, finally, “miraculous” – something we have no real words for. Mentally, it can bring feelings of well-being through our new understanding that we are not separate from creation but a part of it all and that the world is not fearful but founded on love. A lack of love and a feeling of isolation are often the most fundamental problems for anyone facing illness, and the ones I see most often in the clients who visit me, not matter how their ill-health manifests. By drinking ayahuasca, we see beyond the illusions of fear and the mind can come back to peace. If we include depression and addiction as ‘mental problems’ as well, then there is a lot of science to suggest that ayahuasca is profoundly able to cure these modern diseases – including at least one study which shows a 70% success rate in curing drug and alcohol addictions. Emotionally, ayahuasca enables us to revisit – in a safe and contained way – the old hurts, wounds, and attachments we are still carrying with us and which can lead to recurring problems in our lives or to the onset of physical disease. In the Amazon this is known as saladera: a run of bad luck which arises from emotional causes. Energy which has been around for a long time tends to congeal and become matter. Thus, for example, if you were told to shut up often enough times or with sufficient force when you were a child, you may find yourself blocked in your throat and this energy blockage can become physical, leading to problems not only of expression, but to throat cancers and other ailments. By releasing this energy, balance is restored and the physical problem also clears up. That might sound remarkable, but let me tell you about one serious physical disease – a brain tumour – that I have also seen ayahuasca heal… This was back in 1998 when, on a jungle trip, a very brave young woman joined us who was in a wheelchair and partly paralysed as a result of her tumour. She had not been given long to live by her doctors and chemotherapy had added to her problems. She took part in ayahuasca ceremonies and, on the first night, the shaman’s visions told him he could help her. That shaman had only intended to be with the group for one ceremony but after his visions he stayed for another four days and worked on his patient tirelessly. By the end of the week she was out of her wheelchair and able to walk with sticks. She felt and looked much better. Even her hair was growing back. When she returned to England her doctors confirmed that her tumour had shrunk in size. Sadly, she is no longer with us, but from a position of being given just a few weeks to live and to be wheelchair-bound, she lived for a further five years in defiance of her doctors, and enjoyed more independence and a much better quality of life. Spiritually, a number of people report that during ayahuasca sessions they have ‘met with God’. They don’t mean this idly either. The encounter – whatever form it takes for them and however their God appears – leads to real life changes. People realise that they are not alone in the universe, that there is a higher power, and there is intention and purpose to everything. As a consequence, they clean up their acts, make new choices, and decide to follow better paths. Some have resigned from unfulfilling jobs and found freedom, some have left unhappy relationships, some have turned away from a life of crime and the exploitation of others and decided to work for good instead. Whatever they see or feel as a result of their communion, it manifests as a sense that there is more to life than the one they are living and they understand that we were not sent here to be unhappy or trap ourselves in the trivial, but to play, adventure, and explore. And so they move on; they reclaim their souls and begin to live again. The miraculous is harder to explain. It is as if ayahuasca has the power in itself to change the nature of physical reality. Two examples: The first was a participant on our Amazon trip last year who wanted to set up a charity to help people in the developing nations and who was selling his flat to fund it. He needed £4,000 fairly immediately, which he hadn’t got. So he set his intention for it to flow effortlessly to him during one of our ayahuasca ceremonies. I think he’d hoped that the vine would help him sell his flat quicker but, in fact, when we left the jungle he emailed his solicitor and found that it hadn’t sold. She did, however, mention that a few days earlier – the night of our ceremony, in fact – she’d discovered a mysterious amount of money in his account that neither of them knew was there. It was exactly £4,000; precisely the amount he needed. The second example is from another participant on the same trip and I’ll let her tell it in her own words. She writes: “I had beautiful sessions with ayahuasca and always felt nurtured and held. One vision that came through strongly involved my eldest daughter. She was diagnosed with polycystic ovaries when she was 15. Her ambition was always to be a mum but the problem with this condition is fertility: she may find it impossible to conceive. “I asked ayahuasca if she would become a mum and had the clearest vision, like watching a film, of me and her boyfriend in a delivery room and her giving birth to my grandchild. I came from that vision crying with joy. “On my return to England two weeks later I got a call from my daughter. She was in shock because she’d just found out she was pregnant - even though she was on the pill and apparently had fertility issues. Ayahuasca was too powerful for those small problems! “My grandchild is due on the 7th of July – I had the vision before my daughter even knew about the pregnancy!” I might add that these are far from the only supernatural or miraculous events I have seen during the time I have worked with ayahuasca. How can a plant do this? Well, who knows what we or the universe are capable of when we free our minds from self-limitations and allow it to empower us? Nothing is impossible to God, after all! Some of you may be inspired to try ayahuasca for yourself after hearing about it today and, if so, that is possible. We run frequent Amazon trips. Email me (ross@thefourgates.com) and I’ll be happy to send you details. SAN PEDRO I said earlier that teacher plants are subject to fashion and that each seems to have its time. Perhaps its spirit is called by the needs of the present moment. For me, San Pedro will be next plant we hear more of. San Pedro is the sacred cactus of Peru, and one of the most ancient, legendary, and magical of teachers, even though it has been largely overlooked so far by the West. Its name refers to Saint Peter, who holds the keys to Heaven, and speaks of its ability to ‘open the gates’ for us into a world where we can heal, discover our divinity, and find our purpose on Earth. Its use as a sacrament and in healing rituals is as old as history itself. The earliest archaeology so far is a stone carving at a sacred site in the Andes, which is almost 3,500 years old. Textiles from the same period how the cactus with jaguars and hummingbirds, two of its guardian spirits, and with stylised spirals representing the visionary experience it produces. This experience can last for 12 hours or more once the juice of the cactus is drunk – in contrast to the four hours or so more typical with ayahuasca - and can catapult you into a world of magic with no limitations. Some of the reasons that a cactus ceremony might be held are to cure illness, to know the future through the divinatory qualities of the plant, to overcome sorcery or saladera, to rekindle love and enthusiasm for life; and to experience the world as divine. According to La Gringa, an Andean healer we work with on our journeys to Peru: “The plant is a master teacher. It helps us to heal, to grow, to learn and awaken, and assists us in reaching higher states of consciousness. I have been very blessed to have experienced many miracles: people being cured of all sorts of illnesses, just by drinking this sacred plant. “We use it to reconnect to the Earth and to realize that there is no separation between you, me, the Earth, and the Sky. We are all one. It’s one thing to hear that, but to actually experience this oneness is the most beautiful gift we can receive. “San Pedro teaches us to live in balance and harmony; it teaches us compassion and understanding; and it shows us how to love, respect, and honour all things. It shows us, too, that we are Children of Light - precious and special – and to see that light within us. “The day you meet San Pedro is one you will never forget - a day filled with love, which can change your life forever… and always for the better”. That is certainly my experience of the plant which, for me, is even more profound than ayahuasca in its healing abilities, though I also sense that an encounter with ayahuasca is probably necessary before San Pedro reveals the full extent of its power. In this way the two plants are complementary – one male and one female - and their impact accumulates. One of our participants who had also taken ayahuasca last year wrote of her experience with San Pedro that: “If everyone experienced it the world would be a very different place. It has become better for me already. “I had the most powerful, profound experience of my life. I have intellectually understood about us coming from, and one day returning to, energy; I had even glimpsed this in the past, but on this occasion I became energy. “I completely dissolved and breathed with the sky. I became the Breath of Life; infinite and eternal Love. “I now dedicate my life to walking with honour and integrity in every action I take, and to accepting life’s path rather than trying to dictate it”. What is interesting is that the experience lingers. Drinking a teacher plant like ayahuasca or San Pedro is not like taking a ‘drug’ to get high or escape from reality; it is the taking in of spirit and a whole other consciousness so it can inform our daily lives. The outcome, as you see, can be life-changing. That is why teacher plants will always be central among the shaman’s allies and a vital part of his education and initiation into the truths of the world. Of course there will always be governments, lawyers, and others who want to take away our freedoms and make such plants illegal. It may strike you as strange that a plant can become a criminal, but it’s possible in the minds of our governments. Making a plant illegal is like a politician (with all that symbolises) telling us that God (with all that symbolises) made a mistake, to quote the comedian Bill Hicks. The real intent of politicians and their lapdog lawyers, of course, is to control minds and make people afraid of the natural world, so we remain compliant to the governments which claim to keep us safe. The ways of the political world have never been of that much interest to shamans, however, because the laws they respond to are natural and universal, not man-made. Shamans seek freedom from compliance and find it in truth not legal arguments, so all the laws in the world will not prevent their continued work with these plants. For my part, I recommend them to you in your own search for freedom and truth. For more information on plant spirit shamanism or to join our Amazon ayahuasca adventures, contact Ross Heaven at ross@thefourgates.com for a free information pack or visit www.thefourgates.com

SAN PEDRO, THE “MIRACLE HEALER” : AN INTERVIEW WITH AN ANDEAN HUACHUMERA (SAN PEDRO HEALER)

Ross — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:32:17 GMT

San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi), the sacred cactus and visionary teacher plant of the South Americas, is especially associated with the shamans and healers (curanderos) of the Peruvian Andes. It has other names among these healers as well; including “El Remedio”: The Remedy, which refers to its healing and visionary powers which, they say, can help us to let go of “the illusions of the world”. Even its post-Hispanic name, San Pedro, embodies these qualities because Saint Peter is the holder of the keys to Heaven and the name of the cactus therefore speaks of its ability to ‘open the gates’ into another world where those who drink it can heal, discover their divinity, and find their purpose on Earth. It is also known as huachuma and this is how it is most often referred to by the shamans who use it, who call themselves huachumeros (male) or huachumeras (female). Its use as a sacrament and in healing rituals is as old as history itself. The earliest archaeological evidence so far discovered is a stone carving of a huachumero found at the Jaguar Temple of Chavín de Huantar in northern Peru, which is almost 3,500 years old. Textiles from the same region and period of history depict the cactus with jaguars and hummingbirds, two of its guardian spirits, and with stylised spirals representing the visionary experience. Another image, of an owl-faced woman holding a cactus, comes from a ceramic pot from the Chimú culture, dating to 1200 AD. According to native beliefs, the owl is a tutelary spirit and guardian of herbalists and shamans, so the woman depicted is most likely a curandera (healer) and huachumera. Cactus ceremonies are held today for the same reasons as ever: to cure illnesses of a spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical nature; to know the future through the prophetic and divinatory qualities of the plant; to overcome sorcery or saladera (an inexplicable run of ‘bad luck’); to ensure success in one’s ventures; to rekindle love and enthusiasm for life; and to experience the world as divine. The ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes, wrote of San Pedro in the book Plants of the Gods that it is “always in tune with the powers of animals and beings that have supernatural powers… Participants [in ceremonies] are ‘set free from matter’ and engage in flight through cosmic regions… transported across time and distance in a rapid and safe fashion”. He quotes one Andean shaman who describes some of the effects of the plant: “First, a dreamy state… then great visions, a clearing of all the faculties… and then detachment, a type of visual force inclusive of the sixth sense, the telepathic state of transmitting oneself across time and matter, like a removal of thoughts to a distant dimension”. Lesley Myburgh (known in the Andes as La Gringa: “the outsider woman”) is another of these shamans. She has led ceremonies with San Pedro for almost 20 years. “It is a master teacher”, she says. “It helps us to heal, to grow, to learn and awaken, and assists us in reaching higher states of consciousness. I have been very blessed to have experienced many miracles: people being cured of all sorts of illnesses just by drinking this sacred plant. We use it to reconnect to the Earth and to realize that there is no separation between you, me, the Earth, and the Sky. We are all One. It’s one thing to read that, but to actually experience this oneness is the most beautiful gift we can receive. “San Pedro teaches us to live in balance and harmony; it teaches us compassion and understanding; and it shows us how to love, respect, and honour all things. It shows us too that we are children of light - precious and special – and to see that light within us. “Each person’s experience will be unique, as we are all unique, and drinking San Pedro is therefore a personal journey of discovery, of the self and the universe. There is one thing in common though: The day that you meet San Pedro is one you will never forget - a day filled with light and love, which can change your life forever… and always for the better”. In 2008, during one of my visits to Peru to work with San Pedro, I interviewed La Gringa about her life and experiences with huachuma, the cactus of vision. Her answers show not only the healing potential of this plant but cast light on the traditions which surround it and their evolution in the modern world. For those who work as shamanic healers, what La Gringa has learned from huachuma is also of interest because it suggests where illness may come from and how, therefore, it may be cured, even by those who do not work with San Pedro themselves. How did you come to be involved in shamanic practice? I first drank San Pedro in the 1990s and that experience overturned everything I thought I knew about reality. During my visions, out in the mountains, I saw a stairway of light on a nearby hill and I called my shaman over to explain it. “There is nothing to explain”, he shrugged. “It is a stairway of light”. “You mean you see it too?” I asked. “Of course”, he said. “Take a photograph if you don’t believe it is there”. I thought he was crazy. How could I photograph a vision: something that was just in my head? But I didn’t want to be disrespectful so I took the picture anyway. Later I got it developed, and there it was: a stairway of light, just as I’d seen it, although I had never seen it there in the mountains before and you will probably not see it now. I called my shaman and he came over to look at the picture, although he didn’t seem that surprised by it, like I was. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” he said. “These things are not just in your mind. They exist. San Pedro opens your eyes to what is already there!” San Pedro had shown me reality as it actually was, but it had also changed what I thought of as real. I now understood the vast power we humans have, and that we can manifest anything we choose; we just have to believe we can. San Pedro teaches us how to believe. It teaches us that we are part of everything, that we are brothers and sisters, and that nature in its true form is beautiful. It wakes us up and shows us how to be conscious of the Earth. Before San Pedro I used to walk through the world and not notice it. Now I notice everything and I have a new respect for it. That wasn’t the only ‘miracle’ I saw that day though. My shaman was a gentle man and I felt peaceful and protected as I lay in the sun. So, when I opened my eyes and saw two children looking down at me, they were so beautiful I thought they were angels. I was in awe of them and it took me some moments to realise they were real and were crying and asking for help. They said their father was sick at home and they had no mother so they didn’t know what to do. They were frightened that he was dying. I went to their house with my shaman and when I saw the man I thought he was dying too. But the shaman walked calmly over to him and started to blow on the top of his head through some coca leaves he had with him. He then used a feather, running it over the sick man’s head and body; then he said a prayer. As soon as that was done the man sat bolt upright and started to vomit like he’d never stop. Immediately he looked better. The shaman said he’d be fine after that and when we left the house he was already out of bed and taking care of his children. That was my first experience of a shamanic healing, and all the shaman had used was a feather and some leaves and, of course, the knowledge given him by San Pedro. After that I knew that I wanted to work more with this plant. You trained with other shamans too. Tell us about your present teacher. His name is Ruben. I met him ten years ago in a church in the Sacred Valley, quite by chance. I learned so much from him right from the start. He is a famous anthropologist who for many years ran the Machu Picchu sacred site, but he is also a shaman so he knows why and how things work from both a historical and a spiritual perspective. His training was very hard. He was not like my first shamanic teachers, who were much gentler. He made me drink San Pedro twice a week for several years. Sometimes I would beg him not to have to drink it! I’d sob and say I was too sick to drink, because I just couldn’t face another session. But he would say, “Good! You’re sick! That - and the fact that you can’t face the healing you need - is exactly why you need to drink it! Get your coat and let’s go!” At the time it was agony, but now I know he was right and drinking all that San Pedro was the best thing that happened to me. I saw all the bad things in my life in a new light and was able to let them go. I cleared whole lifetimes in those years, and I learned so much about San Pedro and healing too. I still work with Ruben and I hope I always will. But he has softened a little now and no longer demands that I drink every week. He is an ‘old school’ shaman, though, isn’t he, with lots of ritual as part of his ceremonies - the singado and contrachisa, etc. Did he teach you that too? Oh yes. But I never felt comfortable with those rituals and Ruben agreed that I should work differently, especially as I was now healing many Westerners who didn’t really understand the rituals anyway. San Pedro guided me and said I should keep things simple. So now I say a prayer to open the ceremony and then as much as possible allow San Pedro to do its work without me getting in its way. I do sometimes use tobacco in ceremonies though, but not the singado [tobacco leaf macerated in honey and alcohol which many shamans ask participants to snort into their nostrils to clear negative energies]; just tobacco smoke. It is good to blow the smoke over people if they are going through a tough time or have stuck energy somewhere within them. The smoke frees it up. I also use agua florida [a plant-based perfume with healing properties] to balance people’s energies. Mostly I ask them to sniff it from the bottle or from their hands and it helps to ground them, but sometimes I spray it over them. And of course I also use a mesa [a cloth altar laid out in a specific ritual way], although mine is much simpler than many others. In Peru, shamans work with many different layouts of mesa, but when you have your own you learn to use it in a way that suits you. It is a living thing so you develop a relationship with it. San Pedro teaches you how to use it too. The objects at the centre of my mesa are shells and stones which have meaning and power for me. I arrange them in a straight line, like a spinal column with the stones as the vertebrae. This follows the notion in Peru that spiritual energy is held in the small of the back and as we advance on our paths and the plants guide us it begins to rise up the spine to the head, where it resides when we become fully conscious. In the Andes we have three sacred animals: the serpent, puma, and condor, and you will sometimes see statues of all three, one on top of the other. The serpent represents the divine energy we hold in our backs; the puma is the body; and the condor is the awakened self: the mind that soars above the world. So these statues are also a representation of energy flowing through us and bringing us into new consciousness. The mesa I use is like that. Some shamans use chonta [wooden staffs sometimes used to beat participants to move their spiritual energies around] and swords on their mesas as well; as protections and to change the energies of patients and heal them. I don’t, because I have always known that San Pedro protects me and my participants anyway, and that there is no greater protection or more powerful healer than the plant! So why would I need to hit participants with sticks - and interrupt their healings by doing so? Ruben is a historian and regards my approach as form of evolution which gives people the healing they need through the correct ceremonies for our times. But it is also a de-evolution because so many rituals and objects have been artificially added to San Pedro mesas and ceremonies through the influence of the Spanish Catholics. Before the Spanish came to Peru, Andeans believed in Inti, the god of the sun, and Pachamama, the Earth, so their rituals were simpler and needed fewer symbols, appeasements to God, or ways to keep evil at bay. The idea of guilt and a God who needed appeasing arrived with the Catholics and it was they who made our ancestors change their rituals or be killed. Before this, they were more natural and flowing. So what I do may be an evolution, as Ruben calls it, but it is also a return to what was always done. It is as if we have evolved backwards rather than forwards in time! Is your decision to hold ceremonies in the day instead of at night part of this ‘backwards evolution’ too? Ruben holds his ceremonies at night and that is how he taught me, but as I grew in my understanding of San Pedro, night ceremonies – for practical as well as spiritual reasons - became another thing that did not really work for me. Perhaps it is to do with the Spanish again and their Catholic notions of guilt and “suffering for our sins” that most San Pedro ceremonies are held at night! I always found it so cold and uncomfortable that I could never really relax enough to receive the healing of San Pedro. I mentioned this to Ruben and he understood exactly what I meant, so he began to hold ceremonies for me during the day. Then I really noticed the difference. In daylight is where all my breakthroughs have come. For one thing, with San Pedro, you can look around you and see the beauty of the world and notice how connected you are to everything: that you are beautiful and part of a beautiful creation. You can’t do that in darkness. What people need to understand is that San Pedro is not a hallucinogenic like ayahuasca, so they will never see images and pictures, and there is no point, therefore, in lying in the dark waiting for something to happen. San Pedro’s teaching is visionary instead, in the revelations it brings about the natural - not the spirit – world, and in daylight you can see that more clearly. That is why we hold our ceremonies in sunlight: because San Pedro wants it that way and that is how it was first done. How do you prepare your San Pedro? Most shamans peel and cut the cactus then boil it for between four and eight hours. They may also add alcohol and sometimes other plants or ingredients. I cook mine for twenty hours, however, so it is much stronger and also means that people are less likely to vomit when they drink it. Other San Pedro brews feel weak to me now and rarely give the same visions. Some shamans say you don’t really need visions for a healing to take place with San Pedro. They have a point, but I still think they are important, because as well as the healing people need to know they have been healed. When the visions come they can feel it, then they understand it is real and pay attention to what they are shown... about how to protect themselves and stay well, or their place in the world and the beauty of their lives. Without the visions they can’t know this. There are some other things to consider when preparing San Pedro. I only work with cactuses that have seven or nine spines because they produce the most gentle and beautiful brews. Those with six or eight spines are not so strong, while elevens and thirteens can be very intense but also sometimes dark. I never use either with patients. Those with four spines are only ever used for exorcisms, and the patient and healer must both drink. You don’t ever want to try a San Pedro like this though. It is horrible and the visions take you straight to Hell. While the cactus is cooking we often sing songs to it or offer our prayers that it will produce good healings. Every time we stir it we offer a new prayer, so maybe twenty prayers go into each bottle. Sometimes the spirit of San Pedro shows up while we are cooking it too, in patterns on the surface of the water which tell us who will be coming to drink it and why. I have seen patterns in the form of ovaries, for example, complete in every detail; or hearts enclosed by circles. Then the next day a woman has arrived for help with a fertility problem and brought with her a man whose heart was closed to her dreams. In this way San Pedro can show us what people need before they even arrive. What healings have you seen from San Pedro ceremonies? One that meant a lot to me was for a woman who had always said she would never drink San Pedro, so her story shows in a way that you don’t even need to believe in the plant for it to heal you – although it is better if you do. This woman’s husband had died a few years ago. He was a strong man but his disease meant he had wasted away to nothing. It took him a year to die while the woman nursed him. Then, just three months after that, her son was killed; murdered in South Africa, stoned to death and left to die. He was just 26. The woman was shattered. She became like the walking dead. Soon afterwards she had a stroke which paralysed her arm and, from the shock of all she had been through, she got diabetes as well. Finally, despite all her reservations before, she asked me if she could drink San Pedro. I gave her the tiniest amount but it was just perfect for her, as San Pedro always is, and then she lay in my arms and cried her heart out for five hours. That is a good expression for what happened actually, because I had drunk San Pedro too and through its eyes I saw strands of energy coming from her heart and circling her chest and arm like a tourniquet. I began pulling them out of her and throwing them away. The next morning was like a miracle. Her arm, which had been totally paralysed, had regained all of its movement. When she got home she saw a specialist who tested her diabetes too and that had gone as well. Now she has no problems at all. I asked her about her San Pedro experience later and she said she had felt a lot of pain in her heart, which is where I had also seen the energy of grief that was binding her. So as well as curing her physical problems, San Pedro showed her why she had them: because of the emotional distress she had been unable to let go of before. What I have learned from San Pedro is that illness is never a “thing” that is in us; it is not “diabetes” or “a stroke”. It is a belief that we carry: that we must mourn for the ones we have lost, for example, or for ourselves, through a pain or disability that makes our suffering visible and “real”. So illness is a thoughtform; a negative pattern we hold on to and reproduce. San Pedro not only heals us but shows us this thoughtform. Then, the next time it arises, we know it and can make a conscious choice to think and act differently. The woman you described sounds like she had a “psychosomatic” problem, a term that has lost much of its power in the West today. Can you elaborate? Every illness we have arises from our minds and souls. Another woman came to me after she was diagnosed with cancer and had been receiving chemotherapy. She looked so ill that I took her in and she spent the next seven days with me, vomiting constantly. At the end of it she realised that her doctors were not helping her and decided to work with the plants instead. She phoned her doctor to cancel her appointments and he was extremely angry. He told her she couldn’t do that; that she was stupid and would die as a result of her decision – which, incidentally, is a curse. Anyway, she stuck to her decision and now, through San Pedro, she is healed. The plant again showed her why she had cancer – which no Western medicine can do – and told her she had a choice: in blunt terms that she could die or change her mind and live the life she wanted. I know that sounds too easy but it really is as simple as that. She decided not to have cancer anymore because her realised that life was just too precious once she had seen it through San Pedro’s eyes. I have also worked with women who have been sexually abused as young girls and are carrying the energy of that in their bodies, and usually a sense of guilt or shame as well, as if it was somehow their fault. This energy is also a thoughtform and it is making them ill and, sometimes, suicidal. They need to drink San Pedro three times. The first is terrible, even for me to watch. They just lie in a foetal position and scream. The second time they are more relaxed but there is still a lot of crying. I usually drink San Pedro with them so I can connect to what they are going through and the plant can teach me what they need to heal. The third time they drink everything changes and it is an experience of total joy. Afterwards they are so different that not even their friends recognise them! San Pedro shows them another way, a new belief about themselves, and helps them reconnect with love and the beauty of life which has been lacking for so long in their own. That sounds like soul retrieval, but instead of the shaman performing it, the intelligence of the plant does it for them. That’s right. It is soul retrieval or, rather, life retrieval. We hold our negative beliefs about ourselves as tensions in our bodies. If we don’t eventually release them, they become hardened and manifest as physical or emotional problems. At the same time, our good energies are blocked so that the fullness of our souls is not expressed and parts of us stay buried. San Pedro removes our negative beliefs so the positive ones shine through. So it is a form of soul retrieval; one where we return ourselves from ourselves. Can you say more about how negative beliefs affect us? In the Andes, shamans talk about “good” and “bad ideas” and these are, in a way, what I mean by thoughtforms. When someone says, for example, that you have “good ideas”, they don’t mean you are a creative genius! They mean you have good or spiritual thoughts or that you are at one with the truth and goodness of the world. Sometimes they talk about a “good” or “bad wind” as well. These “winds” are an accumulation of thoughts or energies which are attracted to each other and share a common affinity. The good energies of many people having positive and uplifting thoughts can create a good wind but, by the same token, negative thoughts can band together to create a bad wind. In both cases, they are a sentient force which circulates in the world. Thoughts like these have physical effects. I recently took a horse ride with a friend, for example, to visit the Q’ero of the high Andes and, some way into our journey, miles from anywhere and from medical help, my friend swooned and fell from her horse. She lay on the ground shaking and not of this world at all. Luckily, we had a shaman with us who knew what had happened and, taking out his coca leaves, he placed them on her and blew through them into her crown. She stopped shaking straightaway and then began to come round. When I asked him what had happened, he just shrugged and said “a bad wind”. She had been hit by a thoughtform which had, in a way, possessed her. He had blown a different energy into her to remove it and fill her with light. But, imagine: if stray thoughts can do this much damage, how much stronger are our own ideas? Our beliefs about ourselves, our sicknesses and our powers or weaknesses are not random, after all; they are personal to us and may have been with us for years. So it is literally true that our thoughts can kill or cure us. We must be careful, then, about what we think. San Pedro helps and heals us by showing us how to do that. Is there anyone you wouldn’t hold a ceremony for? I once thought so. A few years ago some young people who were travelling South America asked for a ceremony. When I told them what it involved, they said not to worry, they’d taken a lot of drugs in the past and had heard about San Pedro and wanted to try “a new drug experience”. I must admit that I judged them in a bad light because they were trivialising San Pedro and saw it as “just another drug” – which it is not. It is a powerful spiritual medicine. It was San Pedro that told me to relax. It reminded me that it can handle things for itself and make its own decisions about who can drink it, and to remember that I was the guide, not the healer! So after that I didn’t judge them and I gave them San Pedro. Afterwards, they came to speak to me about their “drug experience” and told me their encounter with San Pedro had been the most humbling of their lives. San Pedro had told them straight, they said, that: “I am not LSD! I AM SAN PEDRO!” They learned from that and for some it changed their lives. They no longer take drugs at all. So now I am humble too because I know that San Pedro will always give people what they need – even if it is not what they thought they would get. I like the expression you use: that with plant work you should have intentions but not expectations. That seems a good approach. But, in any case, I trust San Pedro and I know it will act with integrity towards everyone, so now I no longer discriminate. There is a diet that goes with San Pedro, just as there is for ayahuasca. But with San Pedro it is easier. Can you say something about it? All teacher plants require some ritual precautions prior to and during the ceremony. This is what we call the diet. It refers not just to restrictions around food and drink, as the name might suggest, but to other behaviours as well so we approach the plant with a pure intent. So when we talk about the “diet”, it is really more like the ancient Greek understanding of “dieta”: a change in lifestyle, not just in what we eat. Ayahuasca demands preparation some days before, including food and behavioural taboos, sexual abstinence, fasting, and meditation, but San Pedro does not ask for such major changes. Nevertheless, for a day before it is drunk, food and drink should be as bland as possible and contain no alcohol, meat, oils or fats, spices, citrus fruits or juices, and there should be no sex. For about twelve hours before the ceremony, there should be no food at all. This means a day of fasting if you are drinking San Pedro at night or no food from about 8pm on the night before if you are drinking it the next day. For a few hours before the ritual I also suggest a period of quiet reflection so you can think about what you would like to heal or learn about yourself. That is really all the diet requires, although there are some specific conditions where a consultation with your shaman and medical doctor is recommended in advance of drinking San Pedro. These include problems with the colon, high blood pressure, heart conditions, diabetes, or mental illness. None of these will necessarily prevent you from drinking since the condition itself may be the very thing that you want San Pedro to cure, but your shaman and doctor must know. A general rule with plant work is: the purer your body and spirit, the more powerful the medicine and its teachings. The diet helps with this. I’ve heard it said that the ‘processes’ (set and setting) involved in ceremonies can contribute to the effects; that the shaman acts as a sort of hypnotherapist, for example, and offers healing suggestions to the patient, while the ritual contains practices like meditation which are relaxing and healing. What do you think of that? I sometimes get asked things like that, mostly by scientists and academics. They want to know what the “make up” of San Pedro is, what its “active ingredients” are, and “how it works”. I tell them I don’t know and don’t care! For me, it is not San Pedro’s “mescaline content” or “properties” that are important; it is a healing spirit which produces miracles that I have seen with my own eyes. So I really don’t know or care how it works. I can’t explain a miracle any more than those who ask me about it can! But I know this: if you needed a miracle because your life was in that much pain, and if - by the grace of God and San Pedro - you got one, you wouldn’t care how it worked either! Part of the disease, it seems to me, is to want to understand the world in terms of its “mechanisms” when its nuts-and-bolts really don’t matter at all. It is the beauty of the world that should attract, engage, and inspire us! When we drink San Pedro that is one of the first things we learn - and then our questions become irrelevant anyway. So the real answer, for those who want to know the hows and whys of San Pedro, is simple: drink it and then you will see! The “what” of San Pedro is that it heals lives. Let us leave the sleepless nights of the whys and hows to the academics for whom such things seem to matter. The Author Ross Heaven is the author of more than 10 books on shamanism and shamanic healing, including Plant Spirit Shamanism, Plant Spirit Wisdom, and The Sin Eater’s Last Confessions. He runs workshops on these subjects too, as well as journeys to Peru to work with the shamans, healers, and plant spirit medicines (ayahuasca and San Pedro) of the Amazon and Andes. For more details of these events and a free Information Pack, visit www.thefourgates.com or email ross@thefourgates.com.

IQUITOS AND CUSCO

Ross — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:00:06 GMT

IQUITOS AND CUSCO TWO VERY BEAUTIFUL BUT VERY DIFFERENT PERUVIAN CITIES Iquitos is the largest city in the Peruvian rainforest, with a population of around 400,000, and is generally regarded as the most populous city in the world that cannot be reached by road. The only way in is by aeroplane or river boat. In the 19th the city century was the centre of the rubber industry, but by the early 20th century the trade had moved to the Far East, and the city had fallen into neglect and disrepair. It is now a place without an apparent purpose, still decked out in post-colonial-rubber-boom splendour, but literally in the middle of nowhere, a true frontier town. When you stand on the Malecon at the edge of the city (and civilisation) you overlook thousands of miles of rainforest: a truly breathtaking and beautiful experience. Iquitos is where participants meet for our plant spirit shamanism and ayahuasca experiences on the Magical Earth Amazon Adventure (see www.thefourgates.com – Sacred Journeys – for details). Cusco, the historic capital of the Inca Empire, is a city in south east Peru, near the Sacred Valley of the Andes mountains. It has a population of about 300,000, living at an altitude of around 3,300m (10,800ft). According to Inca legend, the city was built by Sapa Inca Pachacuti and planned to be shaped like a puma, a sacred animal of the region, although archaeological evidence points to slower, more organic growth beginning before Pachacuti. There was however a plan, and two rivers were diverted and channeled around the city. The Spanish arrived there in 1533 and described it as a "very noble and great city". Buildings constructed after the conquest are of Spanish influence with a mix of Inca architecture. Often, Spanish buildings were built on top of the massive stone walls built by the Inca. The original Inca city, said to have been founded in the 11th century, was sacked by Pizarro in 1535. There are still remains, however, of the Palace of the Incas, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Virgins of the Sun. Other nearby Inca sites of major historical interest and considerable beauty are Pachacuti's presumed winter home, Machu Picchu, which can be reached by foot along the Inca Trail, or by train, and the "fortresses" at Ollantaytambo and Sacsyhuaman. Cusco is where participants meet for our plant spirit shamanism and san pedro experiences on the Cactus of Vision programme (see www.thefourgates.com – Sacred Journeys – for details).

Plant Spirit Shamanism: The Sin Eater's Last Confessions

Ross — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:04:12 GMT

A review of The Sin Eater's Last Confessions (Ross Heaven, Llewellyn, July 2008) by Lauren D'Silva of Bella Online (http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art27080.asp): The Sin Eater's Last Confessions by Ross Heaven I found The Sin Eater's Last Confessions: Lost Traditions of Celtic Shamanism a fascinating book. In it Ross Heaven provides us with a window on Celtic healing techniques of the past. The old Celtic tradition of ‘sin eating’ has been lost now, but once it was customary here in Wales to invite the local sin eater to perform a ritual of eating food from the body of the corpse in order to cleanse the soul of sin and allow it free passage to the afterlife. Ross Heaven was fortunate enough to meet one of the last Welsh sin eaters in the small Herefordshire village where he grew up. This is his account of a remarkable friendship between man and boy and of an informal apprenticeship that put Ross firmly on his path to become one of the UK’s foremost shamanic practitioners. The setting is not far from my home in Mid Wales, just over the English border; there is always extra satisfaction in reading about familiar places and I could easily picture this sleepy village. Even now the pace of many Herefordshire villages feels several decades behind that of modern towns. Adam Dilwyn Vaughan lived on the outskirts of the village, performing his healing services for the community, but somehow shunned by the villagers as if dirty. As he points out if the sin eater is ‘dirty’ it is only by virtue of consuming the sins of others. Despite many warnings to avoid Adam’s little ramshackle cottage it seems Ross and Adam were predestined to meet. Without ever saying so a series of remarkable teachings began which lasted until Ross become a young adult and left the countryside for university. There is a great deal of wisdom in Adam’s methods of healing. He had a wonderful understanding of plant remedies and gardened weeds as others would cultivate flowers and vegetables. “A weed is simply a gift from nature that we don’t care to receive.” Many of his teachings can be recognised as shamanic ways of understanding the world which are found to agree from culture to culture. For example Adam speaks of bad spirits gathering in the corners of the body, elbows, knees and other joints. This reminded me of the old wisdom of living in round spaces, such as tipis to avoid corners where dark spirits can gather. I recognised some of Adam's techniques from my partner’s own instinctive healing methods. Like Adam he experiences dry retching after sucking out energetic debris from places of congestion in the body, a need to 'get it all out of his system'. It used to concern me but now I recognise that it is part and parcel of what he does. Adam teaches Ross that it is important the debris is cleared from the healer’s body, as to hold onto it would make the healer ill. Adam warns that there are some healers who choose to retain the dark energies within themselves as part of their power. “It is a real possibility and an illness among healers that they can grow dependent on their patients for their own well-being, and then they do not serve God but steal from others and work with a darkened heart.” I probably would have dismissed this as unlikely in the past, seeing those who choose healing as motivated to help their fellow humans, but I have had first hand experience of several established and experienced healers who are doing exactly this. It was a great relief to see the warning there in print and to know that others have detected this too. This abuse of power is shocking to think of, but the public should be aware that some healers can become distorted in their purpose, in the same way I suppose any other caring profession contains its 'rotten apples'. If you feel drained after visiting a healer and this sensation happens more often than not you would be well advised to go elsewhere. Ross gives us wonderful insight into many of the lessons he learned from Adam. We join Ross as he writes his sins down in stream of consciousness to be transmuted by fire, follow him into Nature looking for omens and experience a vision quest with him. At the back of the book he provides a guide to some of the exercises Adam put him though, so that the book is partly a guide for those ready to explore the world and themselves in this way. I found a huge amount of synchronicity happening around me as I read; the book seemed to have arrived at the perfect moment for me and confirmed so much of what I have been perceiving and thinking in recent months. For that I must say a big thank you to Ross for setting these experiences down on paper and send my gratitude to Adam Dilwyn Vaughan too, whether he has passed over or is still living. I can heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in healing or Celtic traditions as an engrossing and entertaining read, a moving biography of a powerful, wise and humble man

PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM: THE RETURN OF THE SERPENT WITH ROSS HEAVEN AND GUILLERMO ARAVELO

Ross — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:57:41 GMT

PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM The Return of the Serpent: The Vine of Souls Two unique ceremonial workshops and introductions to ayahuasca, the legendary vine of souls and visionary teacher plant I am delighted to announce a first-of-its-kind event where i will be joined on by Guillermo Aravelo, a Shipibo maestro (master shaman), ayahuascero, and vegetalista, for his first ever visit to England. Guillermo is descended from many generations of healers and is a sought-after speaker and ceremonialist at major international conferences, a consultant to many authorities on Amazonian medicine, and the ‘star’ of several documentaries and feature films, including Jan Kounen's Renegade. Among other ayahuasceros, he is known as “the master’s master”. Together with participants on these unique ceremonial events, Guillermo and I will explore the healing and visionary qualities of ayahuasca, the legendary “vine of souls” - one of nature’s greatest teacher plants, which is said to be born of a serpent. Three ceremonies are held on each workshop, so if you choose to attend both events, you will be able to drink six times with Guillermo and myself. Alongside these rituals, I will be offering workshops on plant spirit shamanism, healing, and connecting to nature and ourselves, opening the way for the deep healing that is possible from the vine. We prepare for our ceremonies by following the shaman’s diet, just as it has been practiced for thousands of years by plant spirit shamans and ayahuasceros. Details of the diet will be sent to you on booking. We purify ourselves with limpia - cleansing baths using special flowers and herbs to refresh body and soul, change luck, confer spiritual blessings, and open ourselves to the healing that ayahuasca can bring. We also diet native plants for lucid dreaming which bring peace and balance so we are better prepared for, and more receptive to, the ayahuasca spirit. Shamanic practices and attunements are also used to deepen your connection to the natural world and its healing powers, and during our ceremonies, icaros - sacred shamanic chants - will guide our journeys and call the spirits of healing and vision. A few comments from previous Return of the Serpent participants I learned so much! I am feeling much more love and openness for everyone and everything as well as having more clarity and strength. Exactly what I need! Ayahuasca is truly an amazing healer. Kirsty The whole weekend was about love and its power and beauty. Ayahuasca works on - it still has that elusive call that draws me. Margaret I got much more than I expected, and all the decisions I made at the weekend are sitting very comfortably with me. I am happy to have met so many fun, open-minded and open-hearted people. Kate Workshop booking and details Dates There are two opportunities to join this event in October 2008 (you can also attend both if you wish): October 22-25 and October 25-28 Venue Norfolk, England (residential) Price £475 per event. Includes accommodation, food, tuition, and ceremonies. No prior experience of shamanism, teacher plants, or plant spirit knowledge is required for these workshops, and no special tools are needed – just an open mind and an adventurous heart! Email ross@thefourgates.com for an Information Pack and booking form. For enquiries, telephone Ross on 07854 459708 or Matt on 01730 262693 or 07881 444770.

Plant Spirit Shamanism - San Pedro in the Andes: A magical journey to Peru to work with San Pedro, the legendary Cactus of Vision

Ross — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:27:11 GMT

I am delighted to offer you this opportunity to experience authentic Andean shamanism, using the methods, plants, and approaches that have been practiced in this region for thousands of years. The programme includes authentic ceremonies with the legendary Cactus of Vision, plus: Limpia: an Andean healing method where the shaman divines areas of unbalanced energy within a patient’s body. These are then rebalanced and any unhelpful energies are removed. Pago: an offering to the spirits of the land and a blessing for those who take part. Coca Divination: using the leaves of the sacred coca plant to produce a picture of a person’s life – and sometimes past lives. Each divination is unique and sometimes followed by a ‘correctional healing’ to change the future and produce an outcome more favourable to your needs or desires. Seminars and circle meetings: are held with Ross, the author of Plant Spirit Shamanism, to discuss your San Pedro insights, and provide you with background to Andean shamanism to enhance your understanding of this healing tradition. If you wish, you can also combine your visit to Cusco with a journey to the Amazon, where we work with ayahuasca, the legendary vine of souls. Email ross@thefourgates.com for a free Information Pack on the San Pedro or Ayahuasca journeys (please specify which you are enquiring about).

Plant Spirit Shamanism: Ayahuasca Journey to the Amazon 2008

Ross — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:23:14 GMT

I’m pleased to announce a new, dedicated programme enabling you to experience authentic Plant Spirit Shamanism and Ayahuasca Ceremonies in the hauntingly beautiful Peruvian Rainforest. This event is focussed on healing and self-exploration, and offers a transformative encounter with the magical powers of Nature through the ancient rituals of the Amazonian plant shaman. There are seven Ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as jungle walks to meet the spirits of the plants, the opportunity to diet particular plants and absorb their curative powers, workshops on shamanism and plant magic, and the chance to work with shamans of the plant spirit tradition. One-to-one consultations and healings can also be arranged for you. We provide transportation in Peru to the Retreat Centre, accommodation, food, translation services, ceremonies, shamans, workshops, and ‘medicines’. All you need do is be open to this magical event and the changes it might bring to your life. Our programme gives you the opportunity to take part in: Traditional Ayahuasca ceremonies for cleansing, release, healing, and spiritual realisation Flower baths (limpia and florecimiento) to restore balance to the soul, and for “flourishing”: good luck and success Explorations of the rainforest with our shamans and guides and gain insight into the healing powers of Nature Learn more about plant spirit shamanism in workshops led by Ross, the author of the book, Plant Spirit Shamanism Diet plants which can help your unique quest to understand life and your spiritual mission Deepen your knowledge of the plants though a visit to Pasaje Paquito, a treasure trove of medicinal remedies from all over the Amazon Rainforest Get to know the rainforest people and their spiritual universe through exhibitions of Shipibo arts and textiles Work with some of the greatest Amazonian shamans, who are experts on healing and masters of the plants, in authentic rituals and healings to help you on your journey We work with a team of expert shamans. Unlike ‘ayahuasca tours’, we have the services of several shamans (not one or two) who work together during ceremonies, singing icaros and conducting healings – an experience of total power. Write to Ross@thefourgates.com for a free information pack on The Magical Earth Adventure, and if San Pedro, the Cactus of Vision, calls to you, also ask for our free information pack on our Andean extension programme.

AYAHUASCA IN THE AMAZON: MAGICAL EARTH IMAGES

Ross — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:38:06 GMT

i have posted a new slideshow of some of the beautiful images from our Magical Earth trip to the Amazon in October/November last year, which you can view at: http://www.slide.com/r/LjWmHbME7D9SH9bdEy_ad5RjYGH4Woho?view=original The next event takes place in August 2008 and is booking now. For more information on this email ross@thefourgates.com or visit the Sacred Journeys section of the website, www.thefourgates.com. i hope you will be able to join us!

The Way of The Lover: The religion of love

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:52:14 GMT

Syed Hamraz Ahsan was born into a Sufi Syed family and is a descendant of the prophet Mohammed. His grandfather was a pir (Sufi saint) and spiritual healer, who belonged to the Sufi Qadiriyyah Order, one of the oldest and most respected in the Indian subcontinent. In 2007, Syed Ahsan provided the introduction to my book, The Way Of The Lover: Rumi and the Spiritual Art of Love. I follow the religion of Love; Whatever way Love’s camels take, That is my religion and my faith Ibn al-‘Arabi Sufis are divine lovers and the great Sufi masters like Ibn al-‘Arabi and Rumi are beacons lighting the way for all travellers on the path of love. This path begins at the heart and ends at the heart. But the ways of God are strange and so are the ways of man (which is only fitting if you consider that Sufis believe man was made in the image of God), and so this pathway to love and the divine may not always be simple or clear. In the old days, for example, in the city of Gangowah, India, there was a Sufi master called Shaikh Mohammad Sadiq. He had a disciple by the name of Sheikh Jamal who could not concentrate when engaged in Sufi practices. His mind always wandered. When he was instructed by his Shaikh to perform a very difficult Sufi practice in complete isolation for forty days, he hesitantly confessed his problem to his spiritual master. The Shaikh asked, “What do you love most in this world?” The disciple’s answer was unusual: “I love my black buffalo with long horns”. The master thought for a while and said, “It is fine; this problem can be solved. When you do this practice and invoke the name of God, concentrate solely on your beloved buffalo.” Sheikh Jamal went into a small room and started his practice. After forty days, the door of that small meditation room was opened and the Shaikh called for his disciple to come out. But Sheikh Jamal cried out from inside, “Oh master, I cannot come out because big horns have grown on my head!” The master then forcefully pulled his disciple out of the small door. When Sheikh Jamal came out of that meditation room, he was no longer an apprentice but had become a perfect lover. So even the love of a buffalo can bring us to an understanding of God and divine! For Sufis, everything is an expression of God, including buffalo, and it is no different with love: in love we meet – and become - God. When the last century was in its sixties, I was in my early twenties; full of energy, enthusiasm, and exuberance. I was also a revolutionary. I fell in love with a married woman, ten years older than me. It was an unrequited love and I suffered much. For my revolutionary friends, it was meaningless suffering. To console me in those days, they would frequently recite what was probably Karl Marx’s only quotation on love: “If you love someone without evoking love in return and your living expression does not convert yourself into a loving being then your love is impotent, a misfortune.” But then, and now, I always believed that Karl Marx was wrong on that point. Even one-sided, unproductive love is not a misfortune. It has the potential to produce the most potent love in the world. Love, in whatever stage, in whatever shape, in whatever disguise, is still love. As Ross Heaven writes, love is energy - the most powerful energy. It has to go forward, upward, downward, and in all four directions. My love guided me to the Sufi path. Love is the only theme, the only objective, the only point, the only centre, and the only core that all of Sufism revolves around. Extended ritual, great sufferings, mortification, and a warrior-like fight against one’s ego are just necessities or inevitabilities on the path to achieve the real goal: true love. The process is itself important as it makes the lover’s soul/spirit pure, reflective, and gracious. The peripheral effects are that those beautiful souls and spirits of the active lovers among us become divine blessings, not only for mankind, but for all organic and non-organic life in this mysterious cosmos. Their blessing is a continuous process that will stay with us even after our physical departure from this world. Our souls, in their long journeys through many planes, will always find solace in the blissful presence of the pure and kind souls of lovers. Their luminosity provides us with nourishment, which is essential for our souls to breath and grow. Without their purity and freshness, their kindness and benevolence, life would be breathless and, to a great extent, worthless. They are a real blessing for us and we all should be grateful for this divine graciousness. Among these beautiful souls are ones such as Rumi, who are known by Sufis as aashiq: the arch lovers. They practised love with such vigour, such intensity, that they were totally absorbed in their beloved. They surrendered themselves completely and asked in awe, “Who am I anyway?” They had forgotten whether they were lovers or beloved. All differences, all dichotomies, disappeared as if they were never there. They found ‘oneness’. The perceived separation disappeared and they became God, the Divine. Then they declared with exuberance that there is nothing but God. Somebody once asked a Sufi his name and the Sufi drowned in his thoughts but could not recall it. All that was there in his memory was his beloved’s name. There was nothing else. Another Sufi used to forget which of his legs was right and which was left. He had to wait at the door of the mosque until somebody could tell him. Then, as is stipulated in Islam, he would put his right foot first in the place of prayer. He had reached the stage where sides do not exist. Whichever side the ardent lover looks, he finds only his beloved. The destiny of every Sufi is merger with the beloved. That state is called fana fi Allah, annihilation in God. But that is not the end of the story. They have to return back to the mundane world. That is the highest stage in Sufism, called baqa bil Allah, subsistence in God. But this time they are not separated from God because there is no lover and no beloved, there is only oneness. Only Love. From the start, Sufis know that God, the beloved, is purest of the pure. And they know that only a pure and truthful heart can reach this beloved. They use their love to purify their hearts. With the power of their love they shun all falseness, all impurities, and their hearts become delightful with truthfulness and light. This is often an arduous process which demands faith, courage, and total commitment to the beloved and, more or less in every case, a master. So most of them have a proper and trained guide in the shape of a shaikh, pir, or murshid (the spiritual master). Their relationship with him requires complete surrender. There were some exceptions, as there always are, and they were called the fools of God. Sufis pass through the unknown, veiled, and mysterious planes and dimensions. Along the way they meet prophets, angels, saintly souls and other highly developed beings who reveal many secrets to them and help them in their journey. This experience is always unique and gives many of them miraculous powers and a different kind of wisdom. They automatically become great healers of mind, body, and spirit. But they never use their amazing powers or wisdom for themselves. They are always used for the well-being of sick, hungry, poor, and needy people. Most of the Sufi masters tried very hard, in fact, to conceal their miraculous powers. After reaching that most gifted state of oneness, they considered showy powers unimportant. These precious abilities are worthless for one who has become unified with his beloved. Sufis believe that everything is a manifestation of the Divine - even nothingness. Even the void they call a subtle manifestation of the Divine. So they accept all the organic and non-organic beings, regarding all things as beautiful and all beauty as an expression of God’s beauty. Without this, one cannot approach the absolute truth. Fakhruddin Iraqi (1213-1289), for example, was a great Sufi master who loved young men openly and was criticised by the orthodox mullahs. In his masterpiece, the Lama’at’, Divine Flashes, he wrote: Although you may not know it, If you love anyone, it is Him you love; If you turn your head in any direction, It is towards Him you turn. I wish you well on your journey into deepening, spiritual love. Let Ross Heaven be your guide on this journey. The exercises and wisdom you will find in The Way of the Lover will help you attain your heart’s desire. Take inspiration from the stories of the Sufis to bring love and unity into your life. You will gain immeasurably from it. The Way Of The Lover: Rumi and the Spiritual Art of Love, by Ross Heaven, is published by Llewellyn (November 1, 2007). ISBN-10: 0738711179

RUMI AND SHAMS: THE WAY OF THE LOVER

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:50:45 GMT

Jalaluddin Rumi, the great Sufi mystic and love poet, was born 800 years ago, in the city of Balkh (now in Afghanistan), Eastern Persia, to surroundings of wealth and power. His well-to-do family, relatives to the king of Khorasan, were scholars, theologians, and statesmen, and it seemed clear that Rumi would follow them into a profession befitting a member of the elite. Rumi, however, was something of a rebel, more motivated by freedom and the quest for love and truth, than by social convention and the rules - and roles - that went with it - to the extent, in fact, that his behaviour was sometimes shocking to his peers. When his family moved to Konya (now Turkey), for example, Rumi made friends among the merchant class - which would at least have raised an eyebrow at the time. Perhaps it would even today. Imagine a child of ‘blue blood’ and ‘good breeding’ preferring the company of tradesmen to those of his own class. Rumi, however, made no distinction between people based on status, wealth, or fame. To him, everyone was an aspect of God and carried the divine spark within. The area of Konya they settled in was called Rum, from which Jalaluddin acquired his name. He also acquired a reputation as an extraordinarily gifted spiritual teacher, even greater in power than his father, Bahauddin Veled, who was himself a revered Sufi scholar and the founder of a successful religious college, which Rumi was to inherit upon his father’s death. The mystic, Ibn Arabi, is said to have met them both and exclaimed in joyful surprise that “The father is a great lake, but the son is a mighty ocean!” It was in Konya that Rumi’s life was to change forever, through a chance encounter with a fakir, a nomadic Holy Man called Shams of Tabriz. In fact, ‘Holy Man’ is a term that some would not have bestowed upon this itinerant eccentric. Deepak Chopra, in A Gift of Love: The Love Poems of Rumi, describes Shams (whose name means ‘Sun’), kindly, as “A sudden, elusive warrior who demanded everything life could give”. Others were less kind, and regarded him as rude, antisocial, rebellious, and even possessed; at best a spiritual madman, but more likely a waster and vagabond. Others, still, believed that Shams, whose origins remain obscure, had been tutored in a highly unorthodox sect of Sufism which was involved with radical plant spirit practices, such as the use of hallucinogens as a means of breaking through spiritual barriers, and that this had affected his mind. Shams would spend days in mystical reveries, lost in flight to God, weeping in the ecstasy of unconditional love. Then he would snap out of his soul-intoxication and work for days as a mason, carrying blocks of stone to ground himself and restore the balance of body and mind. But he would never stay anywhere long. His nickname was Paranda (‘Bird’ -“The flier” or “The winged one”), because birds are always in flight. He would arrive in a new town and a crowd would gather to hear his teachings, alerted by the reputation of this contradictory madman-spiritual genius, whereupon Shams would excuse himself for a moment and vanish into thin air, called back to the wild by the whispers of spirit. He seemed always to be searching for something: a deeper and more intensely-felt connection to – God knows what - the Infinite, the void, the world-beyond-forms; that special state that Sufis know as fana, where the self melts into nothingness and is absorbed by the Beloved’s heart. The first time this strange and love-drunk Holy fool was to notice Rumi, Shams was in his 60s and Rumi his early 20s, with a following of students himself. Shams was looking for a ‘master student’ to whom he could pass on his wisdom and he saw sparks of this in Rumi, although he ultimately judged the young man too raw in his spiritual development. Shams became intimate with the wilderness again and the two men did not meet again for many years. As soon as they met for the second time, however, sparks flew - perhaps literally, since one of the legends surrounding this encounter is that Shams’ very presence in Rumi’s house caused his shelves of sacred texts to burst into flames. True wisdom cannot be contained in books. A deep bond developed instantly between the two men and they immediately went into seclusion for weeks to practice the mystical arts together. A deep mystery surrounds this time and no-one knows, to this day, what techniques of enlightenment or magical practices were exchanged. Rumi, however, later gave hints as to what took place during his seclusion with Shams. “The one you call crazy is not really crazy”, he wrote. “He’s giving birth to his soul. That’s why he keeps his eyes so fixed”. The author Will Johnson, in his book, Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Beholding the Divine (Inner Traditions International, 2003) interprets this as a reference to gazing: a technique where, for prolonged periods, Sufis will stare meditatively into each other’s eyes in order to mirror each other and connect with the soul within. This is now a common practice for spiritual illumination but, at the time, was unheard of. The social rules of the time did not support the association between Rumi and Shams. A member of the elite fraternising with a wandering beggar, even if he was acknowledged by some as the greatest spiritual teacher of his day, was something to be frowned upon, and Shams even received threats that he would be killed if he did not end his friendship with Rumi. Rumi, however – ever the rebel – would have none of this and found an unusual solution to the problem: he invited Shams to marry his stepdaughter, Keemia. Shams did so, and with that, his presence in Rumi’s household was at least partly legitimised. This was not just a marriage of convenience, however; Shams and Keemia loved each other deeply, though, sadly, it was not to last. A few months after their marriage, Keemia became ill and died, and the grieving Shams vanished once again. What happened next is not known. Some say that Shams was murdered by those who were jealous of his friendship with Rumi; others that he became a wanderer, returning to the wilderness. Whatever the truth may be, the two were never to meet again. In spirit, however, Shams was a constant companion to Rumi throughout the rest of his eventful life. During it, Rumi was to establish the Sufi order known as The Path of the Master, which was inspired by the teachings of Shams, and to compose thousands of verses of mystical poetry. Many of these in the Masnavi, Rumi’s epic work, 43 years in the writing and so revered among Muslims that it is known as “The Koran in Persian”, are devoted to, or reflect upon, Shams and his spiritual teachings. One of his other works is called Divani-I Shams-I Tabriz (‘The Works of Shams of Tabriz’). Here, the author gives himself the name of his friend and teacher, suggesting that he is a conduit for Shams’ spirit or, indeed, that he has become the master himself. There are many today who agree that Rumi is the master of love. His poetry has been translated into every major language and these books sell in their millions to devoted followers who regard him not just as heir to Shams’ spiritual philosophy, but to that of the Prophet himself. Simply Googling the name Rumi brings up almost 4 million web pages and an Amazon Books search for Rumi highlights nearly 7,000 texts. The teachings embodied in Rumi’s work concern the notion of tahweed (unity), where the Lover (of life, of good, of God, and of the self) becomes one with the Beloved (the God-energy that all Lovers aspire to). The concept underlying this is that we all carry the divine within us, and if we remember this and find it in ourselves, there is no need to look for other Gods to worship because we become God, capable of boundless love and connection - a "Gathering of Lovers, where there is no high or low, smart or ignorant, no proper schooling required". According to Rumi, to love well may be our most important task as spiritual human beings, because only in this state of grace can we forget our obsessions, addictions, and hang-ups, and reconnect with our true love-energy. And yet, loving well is also one of the hardest things we can do, because there is no formal instruction in the Art of Love. It is not there on any school curriculum, and our parents, having never been taught to love themselves, cannot show us how to do it, be it, or live it either. Each generation must find love for itself – which is why we so often get it wrong, caught up in dramas, misunderstandings, or even conflict; the very opposite of what love demands and what we set out to do – because the path is different for us all and there are no worldly guides to turn to. When we get it right, though, love is one of our greatest teachers, giving us the power to accomplish miracles in our lives and to create our own masterpiece of living. Jalaluddin Rumi died in Konya (Turkey) in 1273. This article is excerpted from The Way of The Lover: Rumi and the Spiritual Art of Love, by Ross Heaven, and published by Llewellyn, November 2007, and also partly based on Love’s Simple Truths: Meditations on Rumi and The Path of The Heart, also by Ross Heaven, and available at www.amazon.com.

Darkness Visible: The ‘powers of darkness’ in shamanism

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:48:42 GMT

Malidoma Somé is a “walker between worlds” as a Western-educated PhD and a shaman of the African Dagara tribe. In 2005, he provided the introduction to my book, Darkness Visible. Here, he explores ‘the powers of darkness’. In an age in the Western world where there is an almost insatiable yearning for “enlightenment,” what could be more timely than an invitation to reestablish a sacred relationship with darkness? Indeed, it is in the redefinition of darkness that we discover an entryway into a potent transformational experience that can assist us in rethinking the nature of both reality and healing. What might we learn about ourselves and the powers of the “other world” by surrendering to the beauty and opportunity for greater vision afforded us in darkness? In all parts of this planet the first nine months of human gestation are spent in the rich, protective darkness of the womb. It is there that the being makes the transition from the spirit world to this one, and it is in the absence of light that the spirits work their greatest magic. It is in the light-absent womb that they do the necessary work to prepare the soul for its journey into life on planet Earth. In the modern world, the newborn is evicted from the peaceful uterine environment into harsh fluorescent brightness, and it seems that the rest of the person’s life is spent trying to sever ties with that nurturing, sensual landscape. In our ever-more-illuminated houses, streets, and cities, we seem to have lost our way; we have become blinded. We have forgotten the benefits of darkness; we have forgotten how to find our way home. Darkness, however, is ultimately inescapable, and at the end of each day, as the soporific seduction of nighttime overtakes us, we are, once again, transported to yet another gestational experience, yet another opportunity to be reborn. From a tribal perspective, it is darkness that is the light of the ancestors. It is only in darkness that certain powerful aspects of indigenous technology can be revealed. It is of little surprise, then, that in the African village nearly all rituals of initiation are carried out after the sun has given way to the deep night. The constant presence of darkness provides a protective umbrella that prevents the intrusion of distraction and delusion. It is there that the psyche is invited to surrender to that which is not available in the daylight. It is there that the eyes learn to see what is hidden by the sun’s light. We often find ourselves ill at ease in modern society, caught in recurring cycles if dis-ease and depression. We might ask ourselves whether our discomfort comes from compromising the sacred and balanced partnership between light and dark. What healing might be available to body and soul if we would turn off the lights and invite the powers of the night into our lives? In the West, there is a largely undiscovered potential that can only become a reality in darkness. What is familiar and sacred in the nighttime to an indigenous person seems, at best, to be an inconvenient irritation to the modern person. The tribal person knows that there are certain types of wounds that can find healing only in the nighttime and only in the hands of the ancestors who show up for work after the last candle has been extinguished. We would do well to learn to appropriate a definition of an elder as one who is the keeper of the gates of darkness. It is the old who have finally become disillusioned with the glittery brightness of the manufactured world and who feel the enticing whisper of the darkness, inviting them to draw closer to their earlier transitional home, to the place where they were held in their first months, in the deep liquid intimacy of the ancestral womb. It is the sweet power of darkness that invites the discerning listener to attend to the whisperings of the spirit world. In darkness true connection occurs and distraction is no more than a distant, indistinct buzz. Darkness Visible invites us to regain our magical vision. Turn out the lights; step into the beauty of darkness. Darkness Visible, by Ross Heaven, is published by Destiny Books. ISBN 1594770611.

Darkness Visible: Ceremonial Darkness in Shamanic Tradition

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:47:06 GMT

My darkness falls suddenly and without warning. One moment I am looking up at the night sky, marveling at the stars, like diamonds scattered on a jeweler’s velvet, the next I am held from behind, with a blindfold across my eyes. Then I am spun three times so I am no longer certain of direction and led into a darkened room, where I will stay for five nights, always in darkness, blindfolded for most of it. This is not a kidnapping. It is a ritual procedure conducted in Haiti as part of the ceremonial process for initiates into the Caribbean tradition born of African shamanism and carried to the New World in the enslaved hearts and souls of shaman-priests and princes. A psychologist by training and a writer by profession, I am in Haiti to study this tradition for a book I am writing on traditional spirituality and why it might be needed and important in the modern world. But this is a secretive tradition – not surprisingly, given the harsh treatment of the slaves, many of whom were murdered by their masters simply for praying to their own Gods - and the only way to know it is to initiate into it and become a priest. This is what I have chosen to do. Initiation involves a number of ceremonies and warrior trials, most of which are conducted publicly before the village community. But some, like this particular ritual, are different, because, once blindfold, I am required to spend the following days in confinement within the sacred space of the djevo, the heart of the temple. During this time, the secret teachings of the religion will be passed on to me and there will be visits by the spirits themselves, felt either as a ‘presence’ or, more directly, through the possession of the priests who oversee this process. Darkness is central to the experience and it is the darkness that fascinates me most. I might have imagined that being alone in the dark would be an isolating experience, perhaps even frightening. In fact, my body finds it deeply comforting, though I am aware of my mind working overtime, chewing itself up over questions which, on inspection, seem quite meaningless; chattering on just to save itself from silence. There seem to be layers and layers of voices in my head, each one with a personality of its own. Psychologists call these sub-personalities. We imagine ourselves to be one consistent person with a stable worldview but, in fact, if we listen, we are all of us legion. I recognize three such voices immediately. The ‘critic’ is the first. She speaks with a woman’s voice and wants to judge me for getting myself into this situation of potential danger and so many unknowns, and not taking my responsibilities seriously. After all, I have children at home who love and need me. The critic delivers a rage of sarcastic comments - “you’ve done it again, you fool, got yourself into another ridiculous mess, lying on a dirt floor, blindfolded, in a jungle hut. It’s always the same with you, you never learn!” – before she is silenced by another voice, that of the ‘kindly parent’, who answers with “leave him alone. The boy has to learn. He has to experience the world – because that is what being alive is all about!” And finally the voice of the ‘scientist’, the impartial observer who walks between both judgments and offers an ‘informed’ and ‘objective’ view of what is ‘actually’ happening and why. The scientist thinks himself superior to the others because of his objectivity, but it is this very thing that stops him from feeling and distances him not only from the experience but, to some extent, from humanity itself. To me (whoever ‘me’ is, now I understand that I am more than one person), this dialogue – these claims and counterclaims over who ‘I’ am - seem fascinating - until I realize I have been hooked once again by the chatter and am following this useless and circular dialogue in my head instead of experiencing what is actually happening to me right here and now. My head has me trapped in theory and bullshit, not what is. And then, ironically, I’m back in the cycle as the critic leaps in with her new judgments - “You’ve done it again, fallen for the game of the rational mind, got involved with the voices in your head” - without realizing that she herself is part of this game. It really is remarkable how easily we slip into mind-stuff and are lured away from simply being, from feeling something, and from experiencing our lives. After a few days of this going round in circles, though, something new and surprising happens. The mind, having exhausted itself perhaps, or having no more visual stimulus to feed and distract it, begins to go quiet. I notice that the chatter has stopped. From that point onwards I feel an ‘opening up’ of myself. The priest calls in the spirits who appear through possession states and offer advice, counsel, divination, and healing secrets, or carry out healings of their own on me and the others present. Whereas my rational mind, just a few days ago, would have questioned all of this, now I accept it. In fact, I more than accept it, I feel the healings as they take place. Something shifts in my emotions as I drift in mythological landscapes and, at a deep, non-rational level, I know that, of course, these healings are real: because I experience them to be. One version of reality tells me that my body is lying on a dirt floor is a squalid hut, but in my mythological mind I am in a great temple, surrounded by Gods and Goddesses, great pillars of gold, wise Elders, visionaries, and master physicians. I no longer know which of these versions of reality is true – if either – or care. What is ‘truth’ anyway? What is ‘reality’? Isn’t it all just what I choose to believe? What I believe right now is that I feel comfortable and comforted here. Held, loved, supported. Blissful. That, then, must be the reality of my experience and what is really happening. I relax even more and drift into dreamscapes. From somewhere I hear the words of Joseph Campbell, advising his students to follow their bliss because this is the only way to truth. “The adventure is its own reward”. Hours pass, days – but perhaps they are years or only seconds. In darkness it is hard to tell. This place, this state of being, is as timeless as it is spaceless, with no exact location except in my dreaming mind. But there comes an event in any case – a moment when time returns – and I am taken from the djevo, where the blindfold is removed and I am presented to the sun. This is the first time for days that I have seen nature: the forest, the sky, the Earth. Perhaps it is the first time I have ever really seen it – because now everything is alive and different, vast, beautiful, breathing, pulsing, glowing with energy, and singing of its own existence in the hum of cicadas and the whisper of breeze through leaves. Then, at this most sublime and magnificent moment, I have a Homer Simpson realization: “Doh! It is alive, you fool!” And suddenly I see it: everything I have forgotten or not noticed before - nature is a living thing and I am part of it too, creating this vision, created by it. The ‘It’ and the ‘I’ are one. That grand and inexplicable landscape of mythology that I have been a part of for days (for my whole life, in fact, though I have not always known it) is right here in front of me, in the world all around me; the greatest dream of all. The adventure is its own reward.

Plant Spirit Shamanism in France

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:42:22 GMT

This French Plant Spirit Shamanism medicine retreat is about discovering who we are, what we want from life, and where we are going - and finding plant allies that can help us in this. There will also be time to explore the beautiful countryside of the Pyrenees. We attune ourselves to and diet the plants each day in order to develop our connection to them and learn how they can assist in our spiritual work. We also undertake meditative practices, quiet time, and time spent in vision (questing) to explore our relationship to the Earth. Through these we slow down to the natural rhythm of life and meet with our allies in dreamspace. We also learn some of the secret herbal approaches from Haiti and Peru, as well as classical and cross-cultural techniques for working with plants shamanically, drawn from a rich variety of sources. One of these is communion with the spirits of Nature through the vine of souls, and there will be vision ceremonies this week. The venue for our work is a beautiful rustic farmhouse in the traditional French style, with extensive gardens and its own stream, where the water flows down from seven mountains. It is situated a little distance from the historic market town of Foix and retains a peaceful ambience in the heart of the countryside - perfect for the work we will do here, as well as for just relaxing. COMMENTS FROM PARTICIPANTS So the magic still continues despite leaving! I have found myself walking around more slowly, gazing at the few trees and plants there are in London, with a smile on my face. Thank you, Bean, 2007 Namaste to you all. I thought it appropriate to write today, a week since we all parted. I left feeling much lighter and happier, thinking of all the possibilities that lie ahead, a week later I am still feeling that way. I have been astonished daily and can honestly say, Ross was right, nature IS alive and is talking to us. I feel much more attached to nature and way more in-tune. So nature was saying here, change the way you see things, focus on what you really want, and everything will come back to you in abundance, doors will open and everything will flourish. Sharon, 2007 Thank you very much for the most wonderful five days. It really felt like the culmination of a lot of work I have been doing over the past two years and the sheer size and scale of my breakthroughs are difficult to exaggerate. Although I had a deep sense of wonder at the new developments when I left (and for a few days when I got back when I felt I was floating through life!), I don't think the impact of the work really hit until I saw people I knew again. I feel different now - very much alive and very much in tune with what I want for myself and the world. Inside I feel great, in my head and my heart. I guess the key difference is how I feel: I know that the world and I fit perfectly into each other - which feels pretty damn cool. Thank you for enabling these changes. Ben, 2007 I am sure the pusanga is working!! - I feel lighter, as though all the stuff I have worked through is behind me. As soon as I got to the bottom of my mountain it came alive and I saw the wonder of it again. The lush greens and the energy from all the trees, I realized then that I learnt way more than I realized. I am determined to have a happy life and have gotten to work on that immediately. So, thank you again for a really beautiful workshop. Sharon, 2007 The group was sincere and supportive. I miss the Pyrenees but will conjure it up when I need strength. Thanks for being patient with me and all my questions. Teri, 2007 I'm feeling a lot more connected to everything around me and content, happy and relaxed! Lots of love and hugs, Kirsty xxx, 2006 Just thought I would put a little note up to express my happiness at meeting you all in France. Something that came from that week that has left a strong impression on me is actually nothing to do with the plants specifically, it¹s to do with the people. I was very touched by the openness, honesty, and trust that was present between not only our (human) teachers, but within the group as a whole and our wonderful hosts for the week. Living in a big bad city (albeit surrounded by some v good loving friends) was starting to erode my faith in people and how they treat each other. Thanks to all of you for helping tip the balance the other way. Love and Light, Ben, 2006 So, how to express what the experience meant to me...well last night I was laying on my bed with my 18 year old daughter, who wanted to know all about what her Mum had been doing. I smiled at her and started to say something about it being a sort of retreat, and then something shifted inside of me, and probably for the first time ever, I really told her what was inside me... I cried and I laughed and I hugged myself with the sheer pleasure of some of the memories, insights and changes I held. She just sat there completely transfixed...it was the most honest conversation I had ever had with her...and to be honest it is probably the best example of what this experience has meant to me. I feel like when I speak with people, in fact in whatever I do, there is a real feeling of communion and honesty that floods through me and I wonder if I will ever be able to bullshit again!!! I feel this is a beginning of something profoundly real in my life and I am so deeply grateful for the experience, and only hope to do it justice. Amanda, 2006 There hasn't been one day where I don¹t feel I want to be back there. I have left a part of me there and I take myself back to the little bench by the stream any time I wish. With love and gratitude, Viola, 2006 Email for information on this programme of self-discovery and Plant Spirit Shamanism

Plant Spirit Shamanism: The seguro

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:40:43 GMT

Andean shaman, Juan Navarro, was born in the highland village of Somate, department of Piura. He is the descendant of a long line of healers working with san pedro and with the magical powers of the sacred lakes known as Las Huaringas, which have been revered for their healing properties since the earliest Peruvian civilization. At the age of eight, Juan made a pilgrimage to Las Huaringas and drank san pedro for the first time. Now in his 50’s, every month or so it is still necessary for him to return there to accumulate the energy he needs to protect and heal his people. Healing sessions with san pedro involve an intricate sequence of processes, including invocation, diagnosis, divination, and healing with natural ‘power objects’, called artes, which are kept, during the ceremony, in a complicated and precise array on the maestro’s altar or mesa. Artes may include shells, swords, magnets, quartz crystals, objects resembling sexual organs, rocks which spark when struck together, and stones from animals' stomachs which they have swallowed to aid digestion. They bring magical qualities to the ceremony where, under the visionary influence of san pedro, their invisible powers may be seen and experienced. The maestro's mesa, on which these artes sit, is a representation of the forces of nature and the cosmos. Through the mesa the shaman is able to work with and influence these forces to diagnose and heal disease. Always on these altars are seguros – magical amulet bottles filled with perfume, plants, and seeds gathered from Las Huaringas. According to Juan Navarro, a seguro is a “friend” or “ally”, someone you can turn to for advice and information, who will listen and share your problems. Less poetically, a seguro is a clear glass bottle which contains perfumes, sacred water and, of course, a selection of plants chosen for their specific healing and spiritual qualities. These bottles are kept on an altar, in sacred space, and regarded as objects of great power. Whenever the person who has a seguro requires help with any practical or spiritual problem, he will take it from the altar and sit with it against his heart, speaking with it as if to a friend. The seguro will absorb and transform the energy of his problems but, more importantly, if he listens carefully, the person who seeks its advice will hear the answers he needs from the spirit of the plants themselves. A seguro can help you maintain and deepen your link to the sacred because, of course, it contains your plant ally. If there are other plants you have journeyed to or would like to learn from, these can be added to the seguro as well and, when you know the language of your ally, this plant spirit will communicate your desire to the other plants, which will also offer their healing and support. You therefore gain access to the natural world and its powers more widely. To create a seguro, you will need a glass bottle, approximately 5” high, which can be sealed. Fill this 1/3rd full with perfume of your choice and top up with water. In Juan Navarro’s seguros, this is water from the sacred lakes of Las Huaringas, but mineral water (as pure as possible) can also be used. Once this base is prepared, meditate for a while on the qualities you would like in your life and which plants might bring you these things. Be informed in this by your work with the doctrine of signatures - heather for luck, honesty for truth, goldenrod for wealth, and so on. Add these plants to your bottle, arranging them as attractively as possible (some seguros are so beautiful they are works of art in themselves), then place your plant allies in the bottle so they can act as mediators for all others. Before you seal the bottle, blow your dominio (intention) into it three times, and then put on the lid. Place the bottle on your altar and reflect on its qualities often. Whenever you are in need of advice, sit with your seguro and speak with it. Then notice how things change for you.

PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM: THE PUSANGA - HOW TO ATTRACT A LOVER WITH MAGICAL PLANT POWER

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:39:14 GMT

The quest for love unites us all. What if you could find it – and a simple perfume could help? That would be magic, wouldn’t it? Read on! In the spiritual traditions of the Amazon in Peru, this magical perfume is called pusanga. It is a made from flowers and plants which have the power to attract to the people who wear it the things they really want. For that reason, pusanga has developed an impressive reputation as “the love medicine of the Amazon”’ because love, of course, is the thing most people do want! HOW PERFUME ATTRACTS AND HEALS Beautiful smells derived from flowers and herbs have always been used for healing and attracting love. Even the word ‘perfume’ comes from per fumer (Latin, ‘through smoke’), and is a reference to its ritual use in ceremonies for the gods who offer love’s blessings. The ancient Greeks, for example, believed that sweet aromas were how the deities made their presence known. The oracle priestesses of Delphi would sit in the smoke of bay leaf incense to allow these gods to speak through them during divinations to help people in their search for love. In India, too, seers called dainyals would surround themselves with smoke – this time of cedarwood - which would send them into trance and give them prophetic visions. Fragrance has also 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, and musk. Saffron was crushed and smeared beneath their feet. The reason for these rituals is that smell is the most powerful of our senses and is able to stimulate desire, longing, and lust, stir our memories, and carry associations of love and happiness. Scientists have found that even a year after we meet a new person, their aroma stays in our minds, whereas visual memory drops to 50% after just three months, so we may not even remember their faces. The sense of smell is handled by the limbic system, which controls our emotions, so perfumes evoke feelings as well as memories, and we experience not just an odour but a mood. This is the secret of pusanga. By mixing plants and flowers to create particular aromas which affect the moods of those who smell them, the shamans of the Amazon say that pusanga can cause anyone to fall hopelessly in love with the wearer. One of these shamans, Javier Aravelo, puts it this way: “When you pour pusanga onto your skin it penetrates your spirit and gives you the power to draw in love”. How you find the right plants to do this is another secret, known as the Doctrine of Signatures. This is the idea that the Creator has left a mark or “signature” on every plant in the world to show what it is used for. The discoverer of this phenomenon was Paracelsus, a 6th century alchemist who noticed how the appearance of plants so often reflects their qualities – that the seeds of skullcap, for example, resemble small skulls and, it turns out, are effective at curing headache, or that willow, which grows in damp places, heals rheumatic conditions, which are caused by damp and the build-up of fluid on the joints. In fact, as Thomas Bartram, a modern herbalist, remarks in his Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine, “Examples are numerous. It is a curiosity that many liver remedies have yellow flowers, those for the nerves (blue), for the spleen (orange), for the bones (white). Serpentaria (Rauwolfia) resembles a snake and is an old traditional remedy for snake-bite. Herbalism confirms the Doctrine of Signatures”. AMAZON PUSANGA Following this Doctrine, the basis for pusanga in the Amazon is agua de colpa. This is water collected from clay pools deep in the rainforest, where there are no people, only thousands of brightly-coloured animals who gather to drink from the water. Some of these animals are natural enemies, but at the clay pools they stand peacefully together to drink from water which is rich in mineral content and needed for their well-being. This water, in other words, has the power to attract some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet to a place where they exist harmoniously together. Added to this magical water are special herbs, plants, barks, roots or leaves, which also have the quality of attraction due to their colours, names, or where and how they grow. In the rainforest, for example, there are vines called sogas, which are recognised as pusanga plants because they wrap themselves around trees and draw close to them so they grow together. Special scented liquids, such as agua florida (which means “water for flourishing”), are also added to the mixture, which is then blessed by the shaman to empower it. This is done by blowing or singing into the pusanga, sometimes with the breath, sometimes with sacred tobacco smoke. The traditional blessing whispered to the pusanga is “salud, dinero y amor” (“health, money and love”). Once it is made, pusanga is used like a perfume, with a few drops rubbed on the pulse points of the wrists and neck, or a capful or two can be added to bath water. MAKING YOUR OWN PUSANGA If you want more love in your life (and who doesn’t!) and would like to make pusanga of your own, just follow these instructions and romance will come your way! The Doctrine of Signatures is your guide to collecting the plants you need. Pusanga plants for love all have certain characteristics. Their names are often significant, such as passionflower or honeysuckle (“honey” for sweetness and “suckle” for nurturing). Their colours are bright and attractive. The way they grow may also be important (ivy, for example, winds itself around other plants so the two intertwine and are drawn closer together). Their archetypal qualities may also call you (rose, for example, is nowadays practically synonymous with love). Where the plants grow can also have meaning (two plants standing together in sunlight within an otherwise dark forest signify a bright future, for example) – and so on. Look for plants that mean something to you and the desires you have. When you locate each plant spend a little time with it, explaining your need and asking it to offer itself to you before you pick it (you don’t need to take the whole plant; a single leaf, a flower, or a piece of bark will do as this contains the energy of the whole. Try to avoid taking roots if you can). Then, when you take a piece, offer your thanks and perhaps a gift of your own, such as corn or tobacco, as they do in the Amazon. All of this is important in helping you connect with nature and develop the right attitude of respect. When you have the plants you want, take them home and put them in a clear bottle. If you intend to use the pusanga over a few days, you can fill the bottle with water taken from ‘power places’, such as Holy water from a church or a place of spiritual power like the Chalice Well at Glastonbury, or you can use spring or mineral water. If you want to keep the pusanga a while, though, it is better to use alcohol instead of water as this will preserve the plants. You can also add aromatherapy oils to your blend, which, in traditional magic, also have helpful qualities. To attract a new lover, for example, add a few drops of rose, jasmine, and bergamot. For a ‘deepening love’ add rose, vanilla, and a sprinkling of gold glitter. For passion during love-making once you have found your mate, add ginger, patchouli, and sandalwood. Finally, add your prayers to the mixture, too, as the shamans do, by blowing three times into the pusanga bottle while you tell the perfume what you want it to do for you. Then wear it as a scent and expect more love in your life!

Plant Spirit Shamanism: The work of the medsen fey

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:35:29 GMT

Loulou Prince is a medsen fey (leaf doctor/herbalist and shaman) in Jacmel, a small Haitian town close to the border with the Dominican Republic. In his daily practice, he deals with a range of health problems typical of the area – from aches and cuts and bruises symptomatic of the hard toil in the fields through which most of his patients make a living, to sufferers of more serious complaints such as HIV and AIDS, a disease as prevalent in Haiti as in other Third World countries. “Ours is a spiritual tradition which traces its lineage to the shamans of primal Africa, which we call Gine”, said Loulou. “It blends together a number of African beliefs with elements from other faiths, such as Catholicism, the religion of the French slave traders who took the shamans and priests of Africa to this new world of the Caribbean. “The lwa are the spirits who travelled with us from Africa. They come to us through a trance where the healer is ‘mounted’ by the lwa – or through their appearances in our dreams”. Both of these ways of working with the spirits are present in the healing practices of the medsen fey, who is at an expert herbalist and a shaman, inspired by the spirits in his choice of healing herbs. “The medsen fey is a person who knows how to talk to the lwa and to use leaves and other plant parts to promote health and cure illness”, says Loulou. “Many of us also have personal or family lwa who also help us in our work”. This latter point is interesting. The ancestors – the family of lwa known as 'zanset yo' - are a powerful healing force and every healer will have developed a close relationship with his own ancestral spirits. It is also possible to ‘inherit’ these spirits from another healer or family member. Having once been human themselves, the ancestors understand the pains and concerns of the living and, through their new status as enlightened beings, can offer direct healing or healing advice to the medsen fey. DREAMS Often, these spirits appear in dreams to advise the healer on the course of treatment to use with a particular client. “If I am treating a sick person, very often I have a dream, and I see the leaves I should give that person”, says Loulou. “In these dreams, the lwa will come to me and tell me what to do, or I see that I am in the woods, and leaves are pushing up in front of me. Once I have this knowledge, I use my training as an herbalist to make tea or infusions in rum for the person who is suffering. ”Once I was treating a man who had body aches all the time, and diarrhoea and congestion. The man had no money to pay a doctor, so he came to me. That night, I had a dream where a lwa came to me with leaves in her hand. She said, 'These leaves, boil them and give them to the sick man.' “When I woke up, I went into the forest to look for those leaves and I found them straightaway. I boiled them as I had been shown and gave them to the sick man. Within a day, he was returned to full health." THE SPIRIT OF THE LEAVES There are very few illnesses, it seems, that cannot be healed – or at least alleviated – with the plants of the rainforest. Loulou treats people with digestive disorders, sexual problems, fevers and colds, and has medicine to clean and purify the blood, and restore balance and order to the physical body. He also treats people who are ailing and children who are not growing well due to persecution by evil spirits. Here, the medicine is of a more magical nature and designed to bring balance to the spirit and the emotions. "There are specific, strong-smelling leaves, which help children who are under spiritual attack”, says Loulou. “I mix these leaves with special magical items which I have been shown by the lwa, and then I take some raw rum and sea water and I make a bath for the child. I soak some of the leaves in rum and set them on fire to heat the bath up. Before I bathe the child I pray, and I bless the leaves. Then, while I am bathing him, I sing songs for the lwa and the ancestors, and ask them to come and help this child. “The rest of the bath that is left over, I put in a green calabash bowl or a bottle, and before the child goes to sleep, I have the parents rub his arms and legs with it. When that is done, no one can curse that child or do evil magic to them”. JUDGEMENTS AND JEALOUSY How this ‘evil magic’ comes to infect the child bears similarities to the almost universal belief in mal d’ojo, the evil eye. The magic comes through the judgements of others and through jealousy. As an example of this, Loulou was once asked to perform magical work for a woman who had four children, two of whom had already died through the actions of evil spirits who would come to her house at night and frighten the children, sucking the energy out of them. The woman concerned was a market trader who had been able to amass a little money (a rare commodity in Haiti), and her neighbours were jealous of her. “One of these neighbours had sent spirits against her to kill her children”, said Loulou. “The lady lost two children that way and another was getting sick and skinny. I gave the child exactly what he needed. I bathed him and broke the bad magic, then I gave him leaves to make his blood bitter, so it would taste and smell bad to the spirits, and they would go away. After that, the child got better; he got fat and he grew. That boy is a young man now. He lives near me and he calls me 'Papa Loulou' because he remembers what I did for him." Loulou also works with people who have chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, hypertension, and AIDS. While he is realistic and honest enough to admit that he cannot always cure these diseases, there is much that he can do to help the sufferer live a longer, healthier life. "If a person has diabetes, there are leaves I boil and give him to drink. The same for high blood pressure. Sometimes he will go back to the doctor, and the doctor asks, 'What have you been doing? Your blood pressure has fallen.' But the doctors never come talk with me because they don't want to admit that they don't know everything and they don't want to lose any chance to make money from their patients. ”If a person has AIDS, there are leaves for that too. They are not always going to save that person's life, but my aim is to make that life as pain-free and tolerable as I can, so they are not held back by the disease and can enjoy the life that is left to them. I stop their diarrhoea, for example or, if they have sores in their mouth, I can make them better. If the person has become skinny, if their blood is very poor, I make a tonic for them, with herbs in red wine. They drink a few spoonfuls every day, and they put on weight, they build back up. But it's not a cure. I pray that I might find a cure, but that is in the hands of God, the saints and the lwa”. CURING THE BLOOD In Haiti, the met tete (‘master of the head’) is the lwa who is your guardian spirit during your lifetime. Every person is born the ‘child’ of a particular lwa, whether they recognise that and formalise the relationship through kanzo (initiation), or not. This lwa lives in the blood and is a guide and protector to his or her child throughout their lives. But the blood also attracts other spirits who may use the fluid to possess or infect that person, as was the case in Loulou’s example of the sick child. A lot of the leaves that Loulou uses therefore have to do with the blood – ‘building up the blood’, cleansing it, or making the patient ‘throw off’ blood. If she is pregnant, for example, with an unwanted child – a situation frequent in Haiti, with low uptake of contraception and sufficient poverty to make large families untenable – Loulou has medicines which can help her to painlessly abort the child by changing the spiritual constituents of the blood which reaches the foetus. "I find the leaves in the woods and in the pastures around where I live. I know them because my mother taught me ever since I was little. There are secrets to how I pick the leaves, secret words I have to say, things I am not going to reveal. Sometimes I dry the leaves and powder them; sometimes I use them fresh. It is not my job to judge, when a patient comes to me; my job only is to make them well again”. PRACTICAL MAGIC Magical healing in Haiti is often very practical. There is no division, in the Western sense, between good health and good ‘luck’ – if you are in control of your own life and the things around you, you are automatically power-full and it is more difficult for the spirits to enter your body and do you harm. “If your wife or husband leaves you, the medsen fey can work a wanga [healing charm] to make them come back. Or if you love someone and want them to be attracted to you, I can do magic for that. “The leaves are part of the magic and there are leaves in the woods that I use, but you will also need other things: a photograph of the person you want, certain types of perfume, a pocket handkerchief, a piece of rope, a little wooden chair, a mirror... various things. I call the person you want, spiritually, and I make them come sit down on the stool where you are. Then I work with the other things to make that person notice you and want to make contact with you. “Of course, I can only do so much! Once they are aware of you in your daily life, it is up to you! If you are kind to them and treat them right, they will love you; if you ignore them or treat them bad, then all the magic in the world will not help you! “Everyone has their own spirits, whether they know it or not, and they can help you as well. So I will also call your spirits and talk to them, right there in front of you. Maybe they will come to you in dreams and tell you things too, which will help you find the person you love. They will tell you how you must behave, the things you must change, and so on. Love is never one-sided, it is always a meeting of souls!”

Plant Spirit Shamanism: San pedro - THE CACTUS OF VISION

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:33:15 GMT

In the shamanic traditions of Northern Peru, the san pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi), or ‘cactus of vision’, opens the doorway to expanded awareness and acts as mediator between man and the gods. San pedro grows on the dry eastern slopes of the Andes, between 2,000 - 3,000 metres above sea level, and commonly reaches six metres or more in height. It is also grown by local shamans in their herb gardens and has been used since ancient times, with a tradition in Peru that has been unbroken for at least 3,000 years. The earliest depiction of the cactus is a carving showing a mythological being holding a san pedro, which dates from about 1,300 BC. It comes from the Chavín culture (c. 1,400-400 BC) and was found in a temple at Chavín de Huantar, in the northern highlands of Peru. The later Mochica culture (c. 500 AD) also depicted the cactus in its iconography, suggesting a continued use throughout this period. Even in the present Christianised mythology of this area, there is a legend told that God hid the keys to Heaven in a secret place and that San Pedro (Saint Peter) used the magical powers of a cactus to find this place so the people of the world could share in paradise. The cactus was named after him out of respect for his Promethean intervention on behalf of mortal men. As can be imagined, early European missionaries held native practices in considerable contempt and were very negative when reporting the use of san pedro. One 16th century Conquistador, for example, described it as a plant by which the natives are able to “speak with the devil, who answers them in certain stones and in other things they venerate”. As you might also imagine, a shaman's account of the cactus is in radical contrast to this. Juan Navarro, a maestro within the san pedro tradition, explains its effects as follows: “It first produces a dreamy state and then a great vision, a clearing of all the faculties, and a sense of tranquillity. Then comes detachment, a sort of visual force inclusive of all the senses, including the sixth sense, the telepathic sense of transmitting oneself across time and matter ... like a kind of removal of one's thought to a distant dimension”. Considered the 'maestro of maestros', san pedro enables the shaman to open a portal between the visible and the invisible world for his people. In fact, its Quechua name is punku, which means 'doorway'. AN INTERVIEW WITH A SAN PEDRO MAESTRO Juan Navarro was born in the highland Andean village of Somate, department of Piura. He is the descendant of a long line of healers working not only with san pedro but with the magical powers of the sacred lakes known as Las Huaringas, which have been revered for their healing properties since the earliest Peruvian civilization. At the age of eight, Juan made a pilgrimage to Las Huaringas and drank san pedro for the first time. Now in his 50’s, every month or so it is still necessary for him to return there to accumulate the energy he needs to protect and heal his people. Healing sessions with san pedro involve an intricate sequence of processes, including invocation, diagnosis, divination, and healing with natural ‘power objects’, called artes, which are kept, during the ceremony, in a complicated and precise array on the maestro’s altar or mesa. Artes may include shells, swords, magnets, quartz crystals, objects resembling sexual organs, rocks which spark when struck together, and stones from animals' stomachs which they have swallowed to aid digestion. They bring magical qualities to the ceremony where, under the visionary influence of san pedro, their invisible powers may be seen and experienced. The maestro's mesa, on which these artes sit, is a representation of the forces of nature and the cosmos. Through the mesa the shaman is able to work with and influence these forces to diagnose and heal disease. What happens during a san pedro ceremony? The power of san pedro works in combination with tobacco [see below]. Also the sacred lakes of Las Huaringas are very important. This is where we go to find the most powerful healing herbs which we use to energize our people. We also use dominio [the linking of intent to the power of the plants] to give strength and protection from supernatural forces such as sorcery and negative thoughts. This dominio is also put into the seguros we make for our patients [amulet bottles filled with perfume, plants, and seeds]. Dominio is introduced to the bottle through the breath. You keep these seguros in your home and your life will go well. How does san pedro help in the healings you do? San pedro helps the maestro to see what the problem is with his patient before any of this healing begins. The cactus is a powerful teacher plant. It has a certain mystery to it and the healer must also be compatible with it. It won’t work for everybody, but the maestro has a special relationship with its spirit. When it is taken by a patient it circulates in his body and where it finds abnormality it enables the shaman to detect it. It lets him know the pain the patient feels and where in his body it is. So it is the link between patient and maestro. It also purifies the blood of the person who drinks it and balances the nervous system so people lose their fears and are charged with positive energy. In the ceremonies I’ve attended a lot seems to happen. Can you explain the process? Patients first take a contrachisa. This is a plant [actually, the outer skin of the san pedro cactus] which causes them to purge [i.e. to vomit - a removal from the body of toxins], so they get rid of the spiritual toxins that are within their systems. This is a healing. It also cleans out the gut to make room for san pedro so the visions will come. They also take a singado. This is a liquid containing [aguardiente and macerated] tobacco which they inhale through their nostrils. The tobacco leaf is left for two to three months in contact with honey, and when required for the singado it is macerated with aguardiente. How it functions depends on which nostril is used. When taken in the left nostril it will liberate the patient from negative energy, including psychosomatic ills, pains in the body, or the bad influences of other people. As he takes it in he must concentrate on the situation which is going badly or the person who is doing him harm. When taken through the right nostril it is for rehabilitating and energizing, so that all of that patient’s projects will go well. Afterwards he can spit the tobacco out or swallow it, it doesn’t matter. The singado also has a relationship with the san pedro in the body, and intensifies the visionary effects. During the ceremony I also use a chungana [rattle] to invoke the spirits of the dead, whether of family or of great shamans, so they can help to heal the patient. The chunganas give me enchantment [i.e. protection and positive energy] and have a relaxing effect when the patient takes san pedro. What is the significance of the artes and of Las Huaringas? The artes that I use come from Las Huaringas, where a special energy is bestowed on everything, including the healing herbs which grow there and nowhere else. If you bathe in the lakes it takes away your ills. You bathe with the intention of leaving everything negative behind. People also go there to leave their enemies behind so they can't do any more harm. After bathing, the maestro cleanses you with the artes, swords, bars, chontas [bamboo staffs used as healing tools to lightly beat or ‘stroke’ a patient and scrape negativity off him], and even huacos [The energetic power of the ancient sites themselves]. They flourish you - spraying you with agua florida [perfume containing healing spirits] and herb macerations, and giving you things like honey, so your life will be sweet and flourish. Not far from Las Huaringas is a place called Sondor, which has its own lakes. This is where evil magic is practiced by brujos [Sorcerers] and where they do harm in a variety of ways. I know this because I am a healer and I must know how sorcery is done so I can defend myself and my patients. As I said, a lot goes on in a healing! So, with all of this, just how important is san pedro? What allows me to read [i.e. diagnose] a patient is the power of san pedro and tobacco. Perceptions come to me through any one of my senses or through an awareness of what the patient is feeling; a weakness, a pain or whatever. Sometimes, for instance, a bad taste in my mouth may indicate that the patient has a bad liver. Of course, I must also take the san pedro and tobacco, to protect myself from the patient’s negativity and illness, and because it brings vision.

Plant Spirit Shamanism: SHINTO AND THE SPIRITS OF NATURE

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:30:24 GMT

Shinto is the folk-religion of Japan. Intrinsic to it is a belief in the spiritual power of nature and the protective energies of plants, trees, mountains, and other forces of the Earth. All of these are known as kami - the “genius” of “divinity” of nature – which may be a particular form like a flower, a place like a forest, or a natural process, like the turning of the seasons, which brings different plants and energies to prominence, or, indeed, the blowing of the wind, which has a spiritual and psychological effect such as the clarity of mind brought about by its refreshing qualities which ‘blow away our cobwebs’ and help us see more clearly. Kami, then, are the guardian spirits of the land, but also of occupations, skills, talents, virtues, deeds or admirable actions, as well as our ancestors and sacred dead, all of which have an ‘essence’ which infuses our lives. In short, they are the divine forces of nature, representing the beauty and power of life in all its forms. Kami traditionally have two souls: one gentle (nigi-mitama) and one aggressive (ara-mitama) and so - as we know - a spirit such as the wind may behave differently according to which soul possesses it at the time. The spirit that manifests may be the gentle breeze of a Summer’s day, bringing us peace and a sense of calm, or a hurricane which carries all before it and brings sudden change and violent breakthroughs. In this, the kami have ‘personalities’ or predispositions which are very human in nature. The word Shinto is a conjunction of two kanji or ‘word-pictures’: shin, meaning ‘spirits’, and tō, meaning a philosophical way or ‘path’. Hence it is known as "The Path of Spirit"; the understanding, that is, that the divine is everywhere around and within us, and that there is a way of connecting with all of these spirits – both interior and exterior - through reverence of nature. The first – and still the most powerful - Shinto ceremonies were performed outside, in forests or before rocks, which formed a naturally sacred space and a natural altar. These ceremonies did not incorporate icons, as, for example, Catholic rituals use bread and wine to stand for the flesh and blood of Christ, or images of the Virigin to represent Mary, because the spirits are formless essences, not the form itself: inhabitants only of the tree (or rock or waterfall) and not the tree itself. In this sense, Shinto is shamanic and regards all things as alive, aware, sentient, and of spirit - just like us. As a consequence, kami are seen as closer to human beings in their nature and temperaments, thoughts and feelings, than ‘gods’, and all of them occupy the same world we do, not distant from us or inhabiting some far-off Heaven. To quote a phrase used by Terence McKenna in a different context: “Nature is alive and talking to us. This is not a metaphor”; within Shinto it is a reality. The most obvious theme in Shinto, therefore, is respect for nature, and its rituals are designed to mediate relationships between the Earth, its spirits, and its human inhabitants. Any twisted branch or unusually-shaped stone might be a kami, as might a waterfall, a cloud, a wildflower, or the moon, or, indeed - more abstract but still nature-related - concepts like growth and fertility, and we must therefore tread lightly on the Earth and make the proper observances so as not to disturb or upset these spirits. Nature rituals ensure that we do so and part of the reason for them is that human beings, upon death, become a part of the kami too, irrespective of their ‘good’ or ‘bad’ deeds on Earth - so that the tree branch you carelessly break could be the spirit of an ancestor or, indeed, could be your own spirit in a few years time! Knowing this, as soon as a child is born in Japan, his or her name is added to a list at a Shinto shrine, which makes that child a "family spirit", or ujigami - which means they are already a ‘kami-in-waiting’ and will become one of the ‘geniuses’ of the place they are born to once they die. Those whose names are not on this list become "water children" (mizuko), who, upon death, are restless and unsatisfied and may cause troubles and plagues. Shinto has no commandments as such, but there are four ‘Affirmations of Spirit’, which have their origin in the natural order: 1. The Shinto adept must love nature because it is sacred and brings us closer to spirit. 2. He or she must recognise the family as sacred because it is the main way in which traditions are preserved and spirit can be felt. 3. He or she must attend festivals dedicated to the Kami, of which there are many each year. 4. And he or she should give attention to cleanliness. Purity of mind, body, and spirit are all important. Certain deeds can create impurity or "dirtiness" (kegare), such as killing, or partaking in the death of, a living being. This should only be done with reverence – even if you are just eating a take-away meal of meat or vegetables - in the knowledge that you are consuming a life to continue your own. Failure to show respect demonstrates a lack of concern for others and can create problems for everyone because animals or plants killed without gratitude for their sacrifice may hold a grudge (urami) and their kami will seek revenge (aragami) on the entire community. One purification ceremony to avoid this is to stand beneath a waterfall or cleanse yourself in the sea if you have not made your thanks before now to nature. Another variant is to wash oneself in water and herbs which have a spiritually cleansing property. In the West, these could be vervain, marigolds, rose, or valerian. Another way of honouring the spirits and gaining their support is to erect an altar in your house, which in Shinto is called a kamidana, or “spirit shelf". This is hung on the North or West wall of one of your family rooms, just above head height. Before it you may pray and make offerings to the spirits of your home and the kami of nature in return for the favours they will then offer you. To make a kamidana, first clean and purify your home, then choose a site that is light and quiet. On each side of the kamidana place evergreen banches for purity and longevity, and hang rope above the shrine as a protection for the spirits who live there, so only good energies may enter. You can also place items on your shrine that mean a lot to you, or for which you seek blessings and protection – such as family photographs and heirlooms that connect you with your ancestors and their love for you. On some shrines, a mirror is also positioned to reflect bad energies and keep your home and family safe. Very often plants, flowers, or small branches are placed on the shrine to represent the purity and power of nature and the spirit it contains. Food offerings, called shinsen, are left to the spirits on this altar, as a mark of respect and to empower them so that they have the energy to help you. These generally include rice, wine (sake), water, and salt. For new beginnings, a rice gruel made with the seven herbs of Spring (parsley, shepherd’s purse, cottonweed, chickweed, henbit, turnips, and radish) are left at the shrine on January 7 during the celebration of Nanakusa-gayu. The food is removed from the altar next day and eaten as part of a family feast. By doing this, you and your loved ones will not suffer illness for a year. After making your offering, face the kamidana and give thanks for the gifts of your life. Then bow twice, clap twice, and bow once again. This ends the ceremony. Shinto teaches that everything is alive and has kami or "spiritual essence". There is a kami for everything and for all groups of things, so every rose has a kami, every species of rose has a kami, and there is a kami for all the roses and then for all the flowers of the Earth. All of these are collectively called Yaoyorozu no Kami, an expression literally meaning "eight million kami", but which actually means ‘an infinite number of spirits’. And this is a good way to look at life: to recognise the spirit in all things, to appreciate that nature is alive and talking to us, and that the richness of the Earth - in all its myriad forms - can be our ally, helping us to reconnect with the planet we live on and to know our place as we expand our horizons and empower our dreams to come true. There is more information on the kami and kamidana in The Spiritual Practices of the Ninja, by Ross Heaven, Destiny Books, 2006 (ISBN 1-59477-107-3).

Plant Spirit Shamanism: THE AYAHUASCA EXPERIENCE

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:28:39 GMT

Ayahuasca is the jungle medicine of the Upper Amazon. It is made from Ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis Caapi) and the leaves of the Chacruna plant (Psychotria Viridis). Both are collected from the rainforest in a sacred way and it is said that a shaman can find plentiful sources by listening for the 'heartbeat' that emanates from them. The mixture is prepared by scraping and cleaning the specially-chosen vines and adding the Chacruna leaves. It is then brewed with water and reduced for several hours, attended by the shaman who sings his sacred songs (icaros) and blows his intention for healing (soplada) into the brew. When drunk in the correct ritual context, this mixture becomes a powerful ally that can help us step into the visionary world. The ceremonial use of Ayahuasca in this way is as ancient as history itself. One of the oldest objects related to it is a specially-engraved stone cup, which was found in the Amazon around 500 BC, and proves that ayahuasca was used as a Holy sacrament from before the birth of Christ - at least 2,500 years ago. The word Ayahuasca comes from two Quechua words: aya meaning spirit or ancestor, and huasca meaning vine or rope - hence it is known as the ‘vine of souls’. It plays a central role in the spiritual and cultural traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Upper Amazon. Integral to Ayahuasca ceremonies are the chants and songs of the shaman. These are known as icaros, and they direct the ceremonial and visionary experience. The shaman has specific songs for each person's needs, the vibrations of which summon healing energies, and the words of which are symbolic, telling of the ability of Nature to heal. For example, an icaro may tell of the power of a sacred stream to wash away illness or uncertainty, or of brightly-coloured flowers to attract hummingbirds whose wings fan healing energies. You might see such things in your visions. What provides the healing, however, is the understanding Ayahuasca brings of what is happening in your life, allowing inner feelings to unblock so that sadness, anger, and other negative energies are transmuted into ecstasy and love. FLOWER BATHS Sacred floral and clay baths to restore balance and harmony to the soul are known of and practiced in many shamanic cultures (though it is an art we have lost in the West) and are integral to the Ayahuasca experience. By cleansing, ‘flourishing’, and bringing a new sense of balance, the spirit and body are able to heal themselves. These baths call in the powers of our allies in Nature and prepare the ground for our healing. They are prepared by Master Shamans, using specially-chosen plants and flowers which create particular energetic and spiritual effects, to which is added cooling river waters. The mixture is then poured over the body (you don’t need to take off your clothes) as a blessing or even a baptism of sorts. DIETING THE PLANTS The ‘Shaman’s Diet’ is a journey of self-exploration and discovery, bringing greater self-awareness and knowledge of the plants. It also enhances the Ayahuasca experience. Through the ritual exclusion of some foodstuffs and activities and work with a particular teacher plant (or plants), the diet enables you to ‘take in’ the spirit or essence of that ‘jungle doctor’ and initiate into its powers. Ajo Sacha, for example, is a plant which tunes you in to the reality of the rainforest, sharpening the senses and making you more ‘plant-like’. Because of this, it is harder for the animals of the forest to detect you and, consequently, it has been used as an aid to hunting for thousands of years. In the West, of course, with our ‘fast food lifestyles’, hunting is less important but, interestingly, Ajo Sacha is able to accommodate for this and to transform its powers. What makes it really useful for Westerners is its ability to help us stalk our ‘inner issues’. It is still the plant of the hunter; but its hunting grounds have changed. As well as its abilities in hunting, this is an important planta maestra (‘Master’ or ‘Teacher Plant’) in the initiation of Amazonian shamans. It brings inner strength, acuity of mind, and the ability to overcome saladera (an inexplicable run of ‘bad luck’), rid yourself of spells and evil magic, and enhance your powers of healing, as well as heightening your ‘stalking’ skills, as mentioned above. Pinon Colorado is a defence against evil sorcerers. ‘Evil sorcerers’ are around us everywhere. Every time we get on the tube and sit next to someone who is radiating hostility because they’ve had a bad day, or argue with our wives, or have to confront our bosses, we expose ourselves to negative vibrations and bad energy. This has a real and physical effect, such as that sick feeling in our stomachs when someone verbally attacks us, and this energy can stay in our systems. Pinon Colorado is a defence against emanations like these, as well as more deliberate attacks by rivals, competitors, and black magicians in all walks of life. Bellaco Caspi is for the extraction of virote (evil magical darts). While Pinon Colorado is a defence against bad energy, Bellaco Caspi helps us remove this energy from our systems when we have already been exposed to it. Shamans see such energy (especially when it is sent with deliberate intent) as magical darts called virote. These stick to our energy bodies and can cause physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual harm unless they are removed. Pinon Colorado loosens these darts so our bodies can return to normal and our health is restored. Diets are not invented by shamans, but are given to them by plant spirits themselves. They involve a state of purification, retreat, commitment, and respect for our connection with everything around us. For more information on the Ayahuasca experience, shamanic diets, floral baths, and other ritual procedures, see Plant Spirit Shamanism: Traditional Techniques for Healing the Soul, by Ross Heaven. Published by Inner Traditions, 2007. Ross also runs also leads sacred Plant Spirit Shamanism journeys to the shamans and healers of the Amazon Rainforest in Peru, and plant medicine workshops in France. For details of these, visit http://www.thefourgates.com

Plant Spirit Shamanism: The Way of The Lover - Sufi healing

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:27:27 GMT

According to Sufi legend, the Prophet Sulaymãn was the first to learn the healing properties of flowers and herbs while he was at prayer one day, and a flower sprang up and greeted him. Sulaymãn returned the greeting and asked the flower what it wanted. It replied that it was a healer. Sulaymãn noted this and, seeing his interest, other flowers grew around him and told him their healing secrets too, until he knew the cure for all diseases. Flowers heal, it is said, because they possess dhat. This is the spirit of God and the essence of every flower that ever was, is, or can be. Shamans say the same: that every plant is all plants, so that lavender is not just a lavender, but all lavenders; and since all lavenders are not just a member of their species, but part of the entire plant kingdom, they are not just one flower either, but carry the potency and spirit of all plants. This shamanic concept also illustrates the magical “Law of Similarity” referred to by Sir James Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, which states that “like attracts like.” Thus, the effect of a plant is not just limited to its species; if it looks like another plant of a different species, it will act in a similar way, and if it looks like a human body part or organ, that is what it will heal. Other shamanic concepts in the story of Sulaymãn are that plants which grow locally will cure local diseases, and they will tell you what ailments they are used for if you ask them directly. The shamanic practice for doing so is called journeying. It is a form of active meditation, where you take your attention into your body and allow it to reveal itself as a form of conscious energy or spirit. You can then ask which herbs or plants it most needs in order to heal itself, and how these should be used—as a tea, the ingredient for an herbal bath, or an aromatherapy oil to be used in a burner, for example. Having identified the herb, you can then look for it in nature or find it at a herbalist’s shop and gather a quantity for yourself. Spend a little time with it when you do, imagining it to be a real spiritual being and entering into dialog with it so you can explore its medicinal qualities. You might then wish to look up this plant in an herbal encyclopaedia to cross-check the information you have received with the guidance provided by others who also know this plant. You may be surprised at how accurate you are. But, then again, why should this be so surprising? At some time in the distant past, before there were “scientists” and “medical procedures,” the spirit of the plant must have communicated its purpose to someone in order to be included in an encyclopaedia at all. Two very good plants to begin with, if you wish to restore your body and build your strength, are echinacea and uña de gato (cat’s claw), both of which are powerful immune system healers. The immune system is what gives the body energy and helps it fight off and prevent disease. These plants should therefore be considered in any regime to empower the body. In aromatherapy, oil of amber, extracted from the resin of the pine tree Picea succinfera, is also recommended as a balancer of the body’s energies, and for this reason it is known to Sufis as the King of Scents. A drop of amber applied to the third eye will be absorbed by the body and stimulate the pineal gland, which activates and harmonizes many of the body’s functions and leads to increased well-being. Harmonizing the Emotional Self The heart sees the Giver of the secret – Rumi Balanced emotions allow our souls to flower. When we are calm and tranquil, we can moderate the “heat” of our passions to achieve emotional equilibrium. We are then able to avoid the sudden traumas that cause us pain and distract us from the path, so that life’s ups and downs have less impact on us. There are particular herbs that help with this. The shamans of the Amazon use a plant called chiric sanango, for example. As well as its physical effects of warming up the body and bringing comfort from the cold, it offers more psychological and emotional healing, also to do with hot and cold, in that it “warms up” a cold heart and “cools” a heart that is inflamed with jealousy or rage. In other words, it helps people open their hearts to love so they discover a more sensitive and compassionate part of themselves. Chiric sanango can sometimes be found in specialist herbal shops or on the Internet, but failing that, mint can be used instead, as it is also a balancer of the body’s physical and emotional heat and promotes the flow of love. For these reasons it is associated with the planet Venus, which was named after the Roman goddess of love. A good plant to combine with mint is lemon balm, which is famous in Arabian herbal magic for creating feelings of love and wholeness. The chronicler Pliny remarked that its powers of healing were so great that, rubbed on a sword that had inflicted a wound, it would staunch the flow of blood in an injured person without even the need for physical contact. Recent research at Northumbria University in the UK has also proven its beneficial effects in increasing feelings of calm and well-being. It is a great relaxant and a perfect aid to exercises in meditation and forgiveness. To make a tea of these herbs, simply boil the fresh ingredients (the amounts you use can be much to your own taste, but three heaped teaspoons is about right) in a pint or so of water for a few minutes and then simmer for a further twenty, allowing the water to reduce. Add honey if you wish, then strain and drink when cool. For a mixture that will last a little longer, add the fresh ingredients to alcohol (rum or vodka is recommended), with honey if you wish, and drink three to five teaspoonfuls a day, morning, noon, and night. These methods of preparation can also be used for the other plants in this section. Frankincense aromatherapy oil can also be used as an aid to relaxation and for settling the emotions. It is a powerful cleanser of the energies and enhances intuition, awareness, empathy, and compassion. It was, of course, one of the gifts brought by the wise men to the infant Jesus, and it is still used today in religious ceremonies to create feelings of love and harmony among congregation members. Another means of harmonizing the emotions is the Sufi practice of toning. The long vowel sound a, as in the word father, will travel from the throat to the heart, where its vibrations can be felt opening our loving consciousness and stimulating our powers of compassion. An alternative, better known today, is the use of the sacred sound om, for the same purpose: to bring calm and connection to others and to the divine within and without ourselves. Harmonizing the Mental Self Intellect deliberates, Intellect reflects And meanwhile Love evaporates into the stratosphere - Rumi Plants that work on the mind to enhance our powers of skilful thought are more concerned with the development of nonrational and intuitive information than in the improvement of intellectual reasoning, since our rational and analytic faculties are often what hold us back in our spiritual development. As Rumi tells us, “nothing happens until you quit contriving with your mind.” Intellectual prowess is symptomatic of the “trained” or conditioned mind, which has been taught to behave itself and act in a certain unthinking way. As the word “prowess” implies, there is often also a sense of unwholesome pride or arrogance associated with it, which is a game in itself. To access the greater domains of real genius within us, meanwhile, new ways of thought are necessary, unimpaired by expectations or our desire to be an intellectual, to prove ourselves, or to achieve. In fact, we don’t need to prove anything, and there is nothing we must achieve. Plants that can free us from the shackles of intellectual thought and help develop our powers of insight, clarity, and truth include bracken, jasmine, marigold, mugwort, and poplar. These plants bring the gift of lucid dreaming, a special state of consciousness where we become aware of our dreaming selves and can direct our dreams, which may also be prophetic in nature. The boundary between sleeping and wakefulness becomes fluid, and our dreams are more colourful, richer, and potent than before. Poplar leaves and buds were a key ingredient in the “flying ointments” of European witches, who used it for astral projection. It (or a combination of poplar and the other plants above) can also be used to make a “dreaming pillow,” which will help you to explore new levels of consciousness. To make one of these, take small handfuls of mugwort and poplar, or some of the other herbs mentioned above, and blend them together. Sprinkle the mix with neroli, orange, or patchouli oils, and bind it together. Then place it in a cloth pouch and put it beneath your pillow. It is said that an intention for dreams based on love is best made on a waxing moon, and dreams about health and well-being are best on a waning moon. Keep a dream journal next to your bed, and as soon as you wake up, note down your dreams and reflections so these messages of your soul are not lost. Another means of developing powers of skilful thought is to work with plants like valerian and vervain that have psycho-spiritual properties for acuity of mind and that help us to overcome negativity and inertia. Valerian has been recorded from the sixteenth century as an aid to a restful mind and, in the two world wars, was used to combat anxiety and depression. It is still used for these purposes. It also brings relief from panic attacks and tension headaches, which often arise from an unresolved issue or stress of some kind, sometimes to do with love or the lack of it that we perceive in our lives. By relaxing the mind, the psyche is able to work on the real problem, aided by the plant itself. One way of taking valerian (which will also aid deep and restful sleep) is by adding equal parts to passionflower leaves and hop flowers and covering them with vodka and honey for a few weeks, after which a few teaspoons of the liqueur are taken at bedtime. Vervain, meanwhile, was well known to the Druids, who used it to protect against “evil spirits” (nowadays, we might say “inner issues” or “worries”). It will help with anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, and depression. Once again, by relaxing the conscious mind, the unconscious is allowed to work on, and release, our more deep-rooted problems and concerns. Another plant that protects and eases the mind is garlic. Nicholas Culpepper noted these qualities and wrote of it as a “cure-all.” It has long been associated with magical uses, protection from witches, vampires, and evil spells, and Roman soldiers ate it to give themselves courage and overcome their fears before battle. There is also a tradition of placing garlic beneath the pillows of children to protect them while they sleep and defend them from nightmares. One way to use this plant is to make garlic honey by adding two cloves of peeled garlic to a little honey and crushing them in a mortar, then adding another tablespoon of honey to the mix. This can be drunk in hot water or simply eaten, two teaspoons at a time, morning, noon, and night. An aromatherapy oil that is good for peace of mind and the expansion of spiritual consciousness is sandalwood, which is especially recommended by Sufis “whenever serious meditation and spiritual practices are being undertaken, because it is quieting to all of the egotisms of the body, especially those relating to sexual energies,”11 which can often play on the mind. Finally, there is a toning practice, too, which helps to develop our intuitive mental capacities. This is the use of the vowel sound i (as in regime), which causes healing vibrations at the third eye, stimulating the pineal gland, strengthening the powers of insight, and relaxing the hold of the conditioned mind. Harmonizing the Spiritual Self In the body of the world, they say there is a soul And you are that – Rumi Perhaps the greatest plant allies we have for soothing the soul and bringing good fortune and harmony are marigold flowers. Aemilius Macer, as long ago as the thirteenth century, wrote that merely gazing at marigolds will draw “wicked humours out of the head,” “comfort the heart,” and make “the sight bright and clean.” Shamans grow marigolds near the front door of their houses to absorb negativity from people who pass by. They say that the flowers turn black when this happens, but go back to their normal bright colour when this negative energy is dispersed through their roots to the earth. Marigold petals are also scattered beneath the bed, where they will ensure restful sleep and enrich the soul, aiding astral travel, during which we may commune with the infinite and learn its loving and healing secrets. They can also be added to bath water to bring calm to body and soul. Another practice you might try is to take a bucket of water containing crushed marigold flowers and thoroughly wash the floors of your meditation room, to create a peaceful sanctuary for your soul. You can also drink marigold tea, or eat the petals fresh in salads, to enhance your spiritual powers. Myrrh is perhaps the most potent aromatic oil to help with spiritual expansion. It is mentioned in the Qur’an for its healing properties and was one of the oils commended by God to Moses. According to Shaykh Hakim, “in ancient times it was used to convey to people a certain internal esoteric teaching, to purify their spiritual environment so that the teachings would have a proper soil in which to be planted,” and it is still used today as one of the most sacred anointing oils. All aromatherapy oils are simple to use, and myrrh is no different. It can be massaged into the skin, used in a burner, rubbed onto bed sheets for blessings while you sleep, or a few drops can be added to your bath. It is also available in incense form as an aid to meditation. The vowel sound u (as in you) can also be used during these meditations. This sound, according to Shaykh Hakim, is “Where our action meets and intermingles with the divine permission, the idhn,” and it will unblock (and unlock) the soul through its vibrations, allowing you to connect with the greater soul of the world. Enhancing Mystical Powers The real truth of existence is sealed, Until after many twists and turns of the road – Rumi When our bodies, emotions, minds, and spirits are harmonious in themselves and in balance with one another, we are better able to find our way to the centre—to remember ourselves again and merge with the Beloved. And again, there are practices to help with this. According to the twelfth-century mystic Abdul-Qadir, who founded the Qadiri Sufi order, the rose is the most magical, potent, and soul-filled of all, and “all dervishes use the rose (ward) as an emblem and symbol of the rhyming word wird (‘concentration-exercises’).” The rose—the Mother of Scents—represents divinity itself. Tradition states that, at the beginning of the world, God created the soul of Prophecy, and that this soul gave birth to the 124,000 Prophets who have since walked the earth. So brightly did the soul of Prophecy shine that it began to perspire, and from the waters of these holy droplets grew the rose. Every rose, therefore, is infused with divine power and carries the essence of the Prophets themselves. It is for this reason that the rose is considered the greatest ally for mystical experience, the most skilful healer, and the most accomplished teacher of the arts of love (which may be why we still give roses to our lovers today). Rose water can be used throughout your soul’s journey to help you balance any aspect of body, mind, emotions, or spirit, but it is of particular use in helping us attain the mystical state, where the sheets are thrown back to welcome our Beloved. To make rose water, gather a few ounces of rose petals and place them in a bowl of spring or rain water to soak for at least a day and a night, then decant the liquid into a glass container. This elixir can be used directly on the skin, in bathing water, or drunk; ingestion will absorb the blessing (baraka) of the Prophets themselves, and the knowledge of God. Fresh rose petals can also be eaten, used as an ingredient in the dreaming pillows mentioned earlier, or sprinkled onto bed sheets so you sleep among the gods.

PLANT SPIRIT SHAMANISM - Making Healing Allies In Nature

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:26:09 GMT

Since the beginning of human experience, plants have played a role in the evolution of our species, not only in the provision of food and medicine but in our deepest spiritual experience and the development of consciousness. Their form, beauty, enchanting scents, their healing and emotional qualities, have all provided a gateway to the Great Mystery of Nature, which our Celtic forebears called “The visible face of Spirit”. Though our lands are no longer forested as they were, we try to recreate a sense of their beauty and tranquillity in our gardens, parks, and the green spaces in our cities, giving us at least a taste of Nature with which we can sustain ourselves against the soulless backdrop of the steel and concrete jungles that are our homes today. For many people, plants are still the messengers of divinity, harmony, and beauty. They are also the source of our health and wellbeing, not just as medicines but in their ability to relax, refresh, or excite us. Some deep part of us knows that the healing power of plants is inherent in what they are as much as what they do. Flowers have a role to play, for example, in all of our most primal celebrations of life and death – birth and birthdays, comings-of-age, marriages, illnesses, funerals and deaths. They are there at the first ‘I love you’, and they are there for our endings too. Even after death our connection to the natural world continues and our spiritual destination in many religious myths is some form of paradise which is often symbolised as the “Heavenly Garden”, or the Garden of Eden. Archaeology shows that plant spirit shamanism has been part of our healing experience for thousands of years, predating other practices by millennia and going back to a time when healers worked in harmony with Nature. Plant shamanism is - and always has been – a person-centred approach and incorporates, in a holistic way, practices such as herbalism, energy work, aromatherapy, and counselling to provide a unique blend of therapies that is most needed by each individual client, based on the healer’s attunement to the state of balance or otherwise of that client’s soul. But it is also fundamentally spirit-centred, and all traditional healers – from the Curanderos of the Amazon to the ‘folk magicians’ of Ireland – regard plants as sentient, aware, intelligent, alive, and as ‘doctors’ in their own right. Plant shamanism involves practices for meeting these spirits, such as shamanic journeying, soul retrieval, rituals using flowers and fragrances, offerings to Nature, floral baths for protection, and the use of visionary plants to find purpose, clarity, and new directions in life. All of these, to the shaman, are implied by the term ‘healing’. WAYS OF HEALING As a young boy, I was apprenticed to a Welsh sin eater – a ‘cunning man’, as they were called in Wales - who used plants and flowers in his healing work. One of his methods was to bury the name of a patient, etched on a piece of bone, in a corner of his garden, next to a patch of ‘sun flowers’. Each day he would say his prayers to the flowers, consulting with them on the condition of his patient, then squeeze a few petals so their aroma was released. As the scent drifted upwards, he said, a little more of his patient’s illness was carried away until he or she was healed. This may seem like a strange approach in our culture today, but when I grew up and went travelling I found the same essential methods used in Haiti, Peru, Africa, Greece, America, Turkey… so it is not an eccentricity or even unique to Wales. The world over, in fact, wherever shamans work with plant spirits rather than extracts and compounds as Western doctors do, it is understood that plants are alive, aware, and willing to teach their healing secrets. Plant spirit shamanism is therefore learned practically - by getting out into the fields and making contact with natural forces, not by reading about plants in some dusty library. The sin eater communicated with plants in this way and knew several magical uses for them that they had told him of. For example, the ‘sun flowers’ he used were actually marigolds, but he called them sun flowers because they are “Bright like the sun” and warmed the soul with protection. It is interesting, then, that we find the same belief in Andean Peru, where rosa sisa (African marigolds) are also used for protection. Here, they are often planted by the door of a house, so if someone should pass by and give the ‘evil eye’, the flowers will catch these negative energies and protect the soul of the house from disease. The petals turn black when this happens, but revert to their bright colour when the energy is discharged through their roots to the soil. The sin eater I knew had never visited Peru and yet the message from the plant was the same: marigolds – “sun flowers” - protect. WORKING WITH PLANTS The key thing with plant spirit shamanism is to establish a connection with the plant. Once that is done, the plant spirits themselves teach you everything you need to know and reveal the many ways of using them in healing, most of which are very unlike the Western medical notion of ingesting them in a tablet or even a herbal form. In Haiti, Peru, Brazil, Indonesia, and in our own Celtic past, there is a practice, for example, of taking floral baths, where flowers and herbs are added to blessed water. The sick person then bathes to wash away his ailments. These baths are not restricted to physical healing, but can be used to draw good fortune and change your luck (which is regarded as a real and tangible force), by making you more ‘open’ to the receipt of money, love, or spiritual power. Other ways of working with plants include the making of pakets, ‘power pouches’ containing herbs that remove negative energies, while returning life force to the patient as the pouch is brushed over his body. The paket has similarities to the Amazonian chacapa, a bundle of dried leaves which has medicine powers to rebalance the patient’s energy field, and is rubbed over the body in the same way. The seguro of the Andes, a bottle which contains a mixture of plants and herbs in Holy water and perfume, uses the same principles of spiritual connection with the plants. Here the shapes, colours, or qualities of the plants invoke various powers that the client wishes to draw in to his life. Round, golden, seeds attract money, for example, while cactus spines embody protection. The seguro, according to Andean shamans, becomes a “Friend”, you can consult with. Every time you speak out your problems to this friend, they are removed, while the powers of the plants draw good energies in. One rule that comes up consistently in this work is that we must treat our plant allies with respect. In Haiti, healers literally pay the plants for their work by dropping coins at the base of the tree they’re collecting leaves from. They are then ‘fed’ and there is a fair exchange: we charge the plants with energy so they have the power to help us. We must also treat plants kindly. Research shows that they have feelings, intelligence, language – even the ability to count and make music! - and they can sense our intentions and respond to our actions. If we treat them with love, they flourish and grow; if not, then their spirits die and we don’t have the healers we need. GETTING OUT OF OUR MINDS One of the biggest challenges for the Western mind in learning how to work with plant spirits is our cultural fascination with science and measurement. This socialisation into ‘scientific thinking’ is hard to overcome because, as part of it, we have been taught to stifle our dreaming and imaginative selves. Luckily, however, there are also plants which have a spiritual intention to re-establish our connection with the spirit-universe and open us up to the true nature of reality. One of these is guayusa. In the Amazon it is known as “The night watchman’s plant” because of its ability to bring lucid dreams and dissolve the boundaries between wakefulness and sleep. Thus, the night watchman can take guayusa and nap, while remaining alert to the sounds and sights around him as he watches over the tribe. The shamans say that in every country we have plants to cater for our own needs; thus, in Europe, it may be difficult to find guayusa, but a tea made of vervain, valerian, and chamomile will achieve similar affects. Another way of getting ‘out of our minds’ is through a special state of trance consciousness known as shamanic journeying. To take any shamanic journey, find a time and a place where you can be alone and undisturbed for 20 minutes or so, then dim the lights or cover your eyes, lie down and make yourself comfortable. Most journeys are taken to the sound of drumming, which encourages ‘dreaming’ patterns to emerge in the brain, taking the shaman deeper into a more holistic experience of the world in its fullness. You can drum for yourself, have a friend drum for you, or use a drumming tape to guide your journey. Expressing your intention and keeping this in focus is again important. Intention is the energy that guides the journey and enables you to engage with the mind of the universe so it can work with you. You can try this yourself by setting your intention to meet with a plant ally – the consciousness of a plant that will guide you into the world of the collective plant mind. You do not need to have a specific plant in mind. Stay open instead to whatever comes. As soon as the drumming begins, imagine yourself entering a place which connects you to the Earth in a way that is meaningful to you, then allow your imagination to take you where it will. All you need do is receive. When your plant ally appears to you, spend some time in conversation with him or her (in the imaginative world, most plants take human form). Enquire about its healing gifts and the way these properties manifest in the plants themselves. Ask how you can work with this ally and the plants that embody him or her. Visit your ally often in this way and you will learn more about the world of the plants, the nature of reality and, indeed, about yourself, as part of this vast and beautiful universe.

Plant Spirit Shamanism: Soul retrieval through Nature

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:24:28 GMT

Shamans believe that the soul can be lost through trauma, abuse, shock – and, fundamentally, by dishonouring nature or ignoring our need to connect with it. In many shamanic countries, there are still roadside shrines where people can rest, pay their respects to the natural world, and receive healing and replenishment from it. In the modern West, we have few such sacred places or ceremonies of connection left. Festivals such as May Day, originally a fertility ritual to welcome the coming of Spring, have lost much of their purpose and meaning, and our connection to nature is weakened. In turn, our souls, individually and collectively, have become weak and, despite our great wealth and ‘power’, many traditional societies regard us as the poorest people on Earth. Healing soul loss, as you might sense from this, often involves the shaman reconnecting his patient to nature, so she is restored to balance and her spirit has a safe, strong, whole, place to return to. In Japan, one method is to accompany the patient (or advise her to go on her own) on a walk into nature to find and make contact with a particular tree that calls to her. She then sits down with her back to it and speaks to the tree of her problems and sorrows. If she listens closely, the spirit of the tree – the great gateway to nature – will counsel her on what to do, while at the same time taking and transforming her pains and giving her power and new spirit in return. In Tuva, the patient is advised to take a similar walk and make an offering to a nature shrine, in return for which the spirits will bring back her soul. In both cases, of course, the patient is deeply immersed in nature, at one with the trees and held in the peace of the forest, which is itself invigorating and restful. In the Andes, soul retrieval is a similar but slightly different practice. Here, the shaman will accompany the patient to the physical location where soul was lost to find and bring back its energy. There is always a physical location where trauma occurred, whether an accident blackspot where a car crash took place or a home at the centre of childhood abuse, and that is where the soul remains locked. The shaman is able to bring back the soul by negotiating for its release with the spirit of this place and by enticing the soul to return by singing to it of the joys that await it back in the patient’s body now that the trauma has ended. In negotiating with the spirit of place, the shaman may also make an offerenda in exchange for the soul, or simply leave flowers. If the spirits of nature are satisfied with the offering and reassured that the soul they are protecting will be treated well on its return - and if the soul itself feels loved and safe - it will be released to the patient straight away. Andean curandera, Doris Rivera Lenz, comments on this practice as follows: When a child falls suddenly, for example, its soul can leave its body and it may get ill. If this happens, an offering is made in the place of the fall, to heal the child. There are many ways to ‘call the soul’. You can get hold of a piece of the child’s clothing and make a little doll and decorate it with flowers or whatever the child likes, and you call his soul in the place where the fright took place. You can also call up and use the energies of herbs, a dove’s nest, feathers, tobacco, coca, or whatever else is needed to help with this healing, but before any session, you must first ask permission from Pachamama, the spirit of the Earth. If there is no fixed place where the problem began, then you go to the highest mountain or closest river and perform the ritual there. There is another approach to soul retrieval, common in countries as diverse as Mexico, Haiti, and Peru, which also works with flowers. In these traditions it is believed that the soul can sometimes be, not lost exactly, but so loosely attached that it is vibrating inside and outside the body at one and the same time. This can happen as a result of shock, where events that shake our worldviews and undermine all that we thought to be true can also set our spirits shaking. It is as if we have nothing left to hold on to and all of our balance is gone. Shocks like these can lead to trauma but if the soul is caught quickly enough it can be healed before deeper wounding occurs, by forcing it back into the body and stabilising it there so that balance is restored. One method is to swaddle the patient tightly in sheets or blankets so that the soul is compressed back into the body and held there. This may also be the origin of the practice of swaddling babies, traditional people recognising that the soul of a baby is less attached to its physical body and needs to be held in place until the child has ‘grown into itself’ and become established in its body. Inside the blanket are placed flower petals and they may also be sprinkled on top of and around patient. As the patient lies in her sweet-smelling cocoon of flowers that soothe the soul, the shaman will sing to her in lullabies and whispers of how beautiful the world is and how she is loved and wanted by her people. Perfumes may also be sprayed over her, their smells anchoring her memory of the sweet words she is hearing, and the prayers offered for her soul and to the spirits of nature. Then she is left there for a while in the gentle heat of a rising sun, before the shaman unwraps her and welcomes her home as an initiation into a new possibility of life: a rebirth through flowers. Another method is that related by the Mexican medicine man, don Abraham, who speaks of the alta miza herb, which is “used to heal traumas, to make a regression”. “Alta miza grasps your spirit and moves you backwards... until you reach the place which hurts. And then she confronts you with the pain. And she will heal the pain”. [Mexican teachings: Plant Spirits in Ceremony]. This is similar to the Amazonian use of the chacapa to remove negative energies and restore spirit to a patient. In both cases, it is the plants, directly, that offer the healing. Interestingly, as well, alta miza is feverfew, which has long been respected for its properties of healing and purification, and was widely planted in old England in the belief that it would purify the air and prevent the spread of plague. Gerard said of it that it “cleanseth, purgeth or scoureth, openeth, and fully performeth all that bitter things can do”. Plant Spirit Shamanism understands that plants have an affinity for human beings, that they know our pain, and that their intention is to love and to heal. Simply being close to them and their energy fields can be enough to call back the soul.

Plant Spirit Shamanism: Shamanic plant healing

Ross — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:23:09 GMT

Shamanic healing with plants is hardly ever – and certainly never solely – about administering ‘medicine’ in a form that a Western doctor might understand the term. Instead, it may include divination, the receipt of spirit blessings, magical potions to change ‘luck’, or the healing of the soul through the energy of the plants, and not their physical attributes at all. The aim of a plant shaman, in fact, is not even to cure a ‘condition’, but to remove its spiritual cause by restoring in his patient a sense of balance, harmony and reconnection to the sacred and the Earth. This balance and at-one-ment is regarded as the natural state of human beings and once the patient experiences it again, the illness (which was a messenger of disconnection rather than a condition in itself) has no need to remain and will magically disappear. The plant is an intermediary in this, playing the role of doctor, counsellor, confessor, therapist, or friend – whatever the patient or the shaman needs it to be, in fact, in order for balance to be restored - rather than a source of medicinal or chemical properties. Ethnobotanist, Frank Lipp PhD, points out that: “plants… play an integral role in ideas of balance and cosmological order that often reflect sophisticated medical theories of the human body, the symptoms it experiences and their underlying causes”. “There is, moreover, no hard and fast distinction between ‘medicinal plants’ and ‘food plants’, since many plants, such as maize, chilli peppers and sage, are utilized both as food and medicine”. It is the shaman’s intention and the co-operation of the plant that decides whether it is a healer or a foodstuff. In Andean Peru, for example, coca leaves are used medicinally to give people energy and help them cope with the high altitudes that can drain the body of strength, but they are also one of the most sacred plants used as offerings to the gods. It is not unusual, therefore, to see an Andean shaman chewing coca as a medicinal foodstuff while at the same time offering the leaves as part of a ceremony. At one and the same time, the plant is a medicine, a food, and a spirit ally. What makes the distinction is the shaman’s intent. Another example, this one offered by Lipp, is that of the healers of Zaire, who must visit the sacred woods where the ancestors are buried and pick certain herbs just as the sun’s rays fade, if they wish to cure a patient of fever. “A plant’s medicinal potency may lie dormant until the requisite incantation has been pronounced which will define its purpose and direct its action”, says Lipp. “The ancestral spirits are petitioned to make the fever’s heat fade in the same way as the light of the sun”. Without this petition – this statement of intent – the herbs would not work at all, no matter how chemically potent they might be. PLANTS AS ‘PLACEBOS’ As Lipp also remarks: “Since the time of Plato it has been recognized that substances with no inherent chemical efficacy are never-the-less useful in eliminating symptoms and pain… It has been estimated that 35-45 percent of all prescriptions are for drugs that by themselves could not affect the conditions for which they are prescribed”. This is known as the ‘placebo effect’ – the use of an inert plant material such as sugar, which is given to a patient with the promise of a successful cure. We are rather dismissive of this effect in the West, but the fact is that it works – better than orthodox medicine in many cases. From Lipp’s estimate, our recovery from illness relies on it in a third to almost half of all cases. If there is no medicinal quality to the drugs we are taking, what else can it be that heals us, but something non-chemical – the spirit of the plant - and the intention of the healer to heal? Perhaps the biggest problem for the Western mind in accepting plant spirit medicine as a bona fide practice is, as we said earlier, that its outcomes are not scientifically measurable. It is not the same as giving someone an aspirin and recording that 30 minutes later the problem is cured (or, at least, the symptom, if not the real problem – the underlying cause of the headache - is cured). How do you measure, for example, the effectiveness of a plant in making someone fall in love with you or increasing your business turnover? Because of the model science uses, there will always be other factors to look for so that ‘supernatural’ causes can be ruled out. That, after all, is its point. Science is tautological in this respect, because whatever we look for we will, of course, find. Whenever a scientist sets out to find an alterative explanation which proves that plant spirits do not exist, that is what he discovers since he was, all along, seeking this proof. The irony is that because we are looking at the world from the viewpoint of this model, even when a ‘placebo’ is shown - scientifically - to work, we deny ourselves its healing by ruling it out as effective in its own right and putting its success down to ‘gullibility’. If we open our minds to how plants really work, though, what we notice is the possibilities not the limitations, the miracles, not the ‘trickery’ involved. PLANTS THAT HEAL CAN HARM It is also a recognised fact that, in most shamanic healing - as in modern science - plants that heal can also harm. In the Amazon, for example, there is a tree – colloquially known as the brujo (sorcerer) tree - which, in other circumstances, can be used for positive magic. If a photograph is nailed to it of someone to be harmed, however, the scorpions, snakes, and poisonous spiders that live in its branches will ensure that s/he suffers. This knowledge that ‘what can heal can harm’ is not confined to the Amazon. The folklorist Zora Neale Hurston writes, during her time in Jamaica, for example, that the God Wood tree (birch gum) – the “first tree that ever was made… the original tree of good and evil” – also has these powers. A shaman wishing to do harm will drive a rusty nail into the tree trunk, while thinking of the person to be injured and that person will grow weak and die. Interestingly, in terms of physical effects, if a small piece of bark from the God Wood tree is applied to the brow of a person who is sweating, it is toxic enough for death to follow swiftly. By the same token, all plants have the power of life and death, depending on the shaman: “Boil five leaves of Horse Bath and drink it with a pinch of salt and your kidneys are cleaned out magnificently”, says Hurston. “Boil six leaves and drink it and you will die. “Marjo Bitter is a vine that grows on rocks. Take a length from your elbow to your wrist and make a tea and it is a most excellent medicine. Boil a length to the palm of your hand and you are violently poisoned”. As Doris Lenz, Andean shaman, comments: “Plants have much more wisdom than people!”