With my dieta on Manchinga, I would not only not be drinking ayahuasca for a month but I was also supposed to spend this month in isolation in a small hut in the middle of the rain forest. I’ve been in tambo before at another center, with the tambo having a floor, mosquito net walls, a roof, a bed, and a desk. Apart from the noises at night from being deeper in the jungle, it wasn’t all that challenging and it was enjoyable to get away from the hustle and bustle of the main center area. The tambos at this center were a bit different though, and a tambo consisted of a thatch roof perched on four sticks with a raised platform with a mattress on it. No floor to walk on, no desk to write at, and no reprieve from the mosquitoes other than under the mosquito net over the mattress (even then, the suckers managed to find a way in!). Describing it as basic is an understatement for a westerners imagination.

I balked for a few days, pushing off the day when I had to move out to tambo with a variety of excuses until the shaman pretty much moved my belongings out there for me. He told me that he did not want to see me on this side of the river until he came and got me in a month. Begrudgingly like a child being sent to their room, that afternoon I made my way out to my tambo and what was supposed to be my home for the next month. I had been given a crash course in tambo life before heading out, make sure to put all your belongings in bags or be prepared to be cleaning cockroaches out of your clothes and have a bucket to use to go to the bathroom so you don’t have to go out in the bush and get mosquito bites on parts of you that can be rather uncomfortable, were the two main take-aways from that. Though I would not heed the bucket advice as I figured a few mosquito bites in the ass were a small trade off for what other creepy crawlies might be attracked towards my tambo with a bucket, all in all I felt that I would have not much problem handling tambo life but I would be sorely mistaken.

Now I’ve never been to prision and I fully admit any idea I have of prision has come from movies and TV shows, but if those are anything close to reality, living in tambo would rank similar to the Mexcian border city prisions. Firstly, the bed. Now the mattress was pretty decent as Amazonian mattress standards go it being over 4 inches thick, but it turns out that the peruvians who had constructed the bed platform had little to no concept of what level was. My first night was spent sliding to the right and the bottom of the bed, waking up the next morning with sore muscles from bracing myself all night. Not to be deterred after one night in tambo I set out to remedy the problem, collecting some spare pieces of board from a nearby tambo under construction. Though leveling the matress proved impossible, I did manage to make the matress into a sort of taco shape so that rather than rolling off I would sink into the middle. Not the most comforable, but it was an improvement.

Next was the so called “toliet,” if you can refer to a shallow hole in the ground with wooden slats on either side to perch on as a toilet. Having grown up on a farm, I was no stranger to using the great outdoors as my bathroom when in a pinch, what I never had to deal with at home though was the vast plethora of Amazonian insects that would set up shop in my “toilet”. I started to understand a bit more why it had been reccomended to me to use a bucket, it was not just the mosquitos that attacked ones bare ass but the locality of ones bare ass to the community of beetles and other creepy crawlies taking up residence in the shallow hole. I still couldn’t bring myself to use the bucke, and just came to terms that the bugs in the hole had no interest in me, only what was coming out of me. I still avoided going to the bathroom the best I could during the night, I never fully trusted those bugs and preferred to be able to keep my eye on them in the daylight.

To make tambo life even more fun, the food served became even more restricted than what I previously described in my blog post “Fun and Games.” Meals were delivered only twice a day and consisted of 2L of white rice and 2 potatos. If you were lucky you might get a piece of fish or a boiled plantain instead of potatos! Prior to leaving the main center to go to tambo I had been buttering up the kitchen staff, resulting in the occasional contraband cucumber included in my tambo breakfast box. Never has cucumber tasted so good!

Now maybe you are reading this thinking, “Come on, the bed, bathroom, and food situtation has nothing on prison!” Maybe so, but combine these factors with the intense heat and bugs associated with residing in a hut in the middle of a dense rainforest and it makes for a very, very uncomfortable day to day life. The mosquitos were relentless, and capabable of biting through the mosquito net if one of your body parts strayed too close. If you decided to go for a stroll in the forest or to bathe in the nearby stream, a black cloud would follow and you would just have to resign yourself to the fact that you were going to loose a pound of blood in the process.

From day one, I started counting down the days I had left in tambo. Breaking the month down into weeks, then down into 3 day blocks somehow made me feel like I could make it until the end. After three days I thought, “Hey! I made it half a week and it wasn’t so bad… Another three days and I’ll almost be at a week, and then its only like 3 more weeks!” Turns out my time in tambo would be cut short (thankfully) after only 10 days. I had a couple physical problems that came to a head while in tambo, including a bout of intense menstration cramps and the pain in my stomach from my surgery continued to get worse. This pain turned out to be an abcess coming to the surface, which two days after returning from tambo would finally pop open (to my horror, the shamans and probably a few of the other guests). I had been harboring fears that some type of amazonian insect had laid eggs and the larvae were now coming to the surface, thankfully it was just alot of puss and dead tissue!

The shaman also told me to come back from tambo early as he could see I was not mentally strong enough to handle the process. Rather than finding the isolation and nature to be calming and healing allowing for self reflection, it was actually causing me to regress significantly. My mind was weak he told me, not to worry though, they had plants that would fix that which I would diet with after I finished Manchinga. They also would give me plants to help heal my stomach and by the end of my stay it would be a joke around the center that I had been given every plant in the rainforest! For the rest of my stay the shaman did not reccomend that I go to tambo again, though I know if I go back it will be something that I should do. Some people at the center were staying in tambo for months at a time, finding the experience healing and transformational. It seemed that nothing during my time in the Amazon was going to be straighforward.

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At most reputable healing centers, the Shaman will encourage you to take part in a “dieta” to help with your healing or whatever intentions you came down with. A dieta consists of following the typical ayahuasca diet limitations and during the day drinking a brew of specific Amazonian plants that the Shaman feels will help you through observing your energetic body in the first ayahuasca ceremony. Kind of like when a doctor will give you a blood test, and from those results may prescribe you a supplement. The plants used in a dieta are referred to as “master plants”, with each plant having specific healing properties. These master plants are not psychedelic, and are not mixed into the ayahuasca brew, a distinction that has to be made as with the growing ayahuasca tourism popularity some shamans are mixing more potent psychedelic plants into ayahuasca to give some tourists the big “trip” they are seeking (I touch more on this in my blog “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”), which is something very unsafe (even deadly) and completely different to the master plant dietas.

After my exorcisms of the bad spirits and devils was complete, the shaman told me that I was too weak to take more ayahuasca and should not drink for a month. During that month the shaman recommended that I start a dieta with a tree called Manchinga. The sap from this tree would help build my strength up slowly that had been worn away over the past year from the bad spirits and remove any remaining negative energies that may still be lingering after the exorcism. This was not a typical master plant dieta, as Manchinga was considered a “Palo Fuerte” or strong wood and the shaman rarely gave tourists the option to diet with it due to it being a very powerful energetic plant, which would require more strict food restrictions than the average ayahuasca diet and also time in isolation. At the time I felt special that I was being prescribed this tree, but in a few days time when I started my diet I would get a better understanding of what a dieta with a Palo Fuerte entailed and would no longer feel special.

The day I started my diet I was awoke around 6AM by the shaman to take my very first dose of Manchinga. You may feel some pain in your legs and shoulders he said as he poured a teaspoon of the cream colored sap into a glass and mixed it with water (this teaspoon would later come back to haunt me as a nickname). No big deal I thought as I gulped it down, for once it was something whose taste didn’t make me want to gag. A couple hours later I was feeling good and also a bit cocky, maybe with all the crap ayahuasca had put me through Manchinga was going to be nice to me. Later that morning the shaman took me and the other guests at the center for a hike into the Amazon to see all the healing plants. I was uber-excited to see the Manchinga tree, and I was not disappointed when I did.  Towering over all the other trees in the Amazon, the Manchinga tree resembled that of the sacred tree in the Avatar movie. A large trunk with a hollow big enough to fit three people rose up covered with vines, and way up high you could see its branches spreading out over the canopy. I took some photos, but they didn’t do justice to the enormity of the tree and the power you could feel standing in its presence. Needless to say, as we walked back to the center I was even more excited to be dieting with this tree.

Approximately 2 hours later, I would eat my all my good words/thoughts I had about dieting with Manchinga. It started out subtle enough, I was chilling in a hammock talking to another guest at the center when my shoulder started to feel really sore. Thinking it was just from lying in a funny position in the hammock for too long, I decided to go lie down on my bed for a bit. A few minutes later I started to feel short of breath, like my ribs had contracted and filling my lungs with air was painful. I hobbled slowly down to the main house to check to see if what was going on was normal, because it did definitely not feel normal. I said this morning that you that you would feel pain, he told me and then recommended I go take a cold shower for half an hour, that would help.

Half an hour later, and feeling no better I slowly made my way back to my room. The pain was growing with every breath, all I could do was sit on my bed as lying down made the pain worse. I started to almost hyperventilate in a way as I couldn’t take a full breath, my ribs felt like they were on fire and when my lungs even slightly expanded the pain tripled. The intensity had to start coming down soon I kept telling myself, trying to maintain calmness while unable to take a deep breath. I started talking out loud to try to keep myself calm which after a fifteen minutes or so turned into calling for the shaman to come help as the pain continued to intensify to a level which I hope is 100 time worse than child birth (or I’m not having kids!). By then it felt like all the bones in my torso had fire scorching them from the inside, every movement brought on a fresh wave of torture, and I was starting to loose my head. I was lucky during this time that I never had to cough or sneeze, as I would have blacked out from the pain.

The shaman came to my room with a mixture of some plants in hand and told me to lie down. I looked him in the eye and told him; I can’t lie down or I will die. Though I spoke it in English, I think he got my message. It seems a bit mellow dramatic looking back, but at the time I seriously thought something internally was shutting down and this must be how dying feels. It was different than the times I had thought I was going to die in an ayahuasca ceremony as I never had full cognitive awareness then. Now my brain was fully functioning and was certain that this pain was only going to continue to escalate until my untimely death. Somehow he was able to get me to lie down and started working on me with the plants he had brought as well as using soplaring (energetic cleansing with tobacco smoke) and a basalt rock to draw the pain out. As he was working the pain didn’t immediately reduce in intensity, though I could feel it slowly moving out of my rib cage and shoulders, concentrating into my spine. I kicked and thrashed as the pain continued with no reprieve, the pain from kicking the wall was somewhat soothing as it ever so slightly distracted from the gnawing pain within every bone in my torso.

They kept asking me if I had taken any pills, as taking any chemical substance could explain the almost allergic reaction to Manchinga I was having. No I hadn’t! But now that they had mentioned it, my mind went to the pack of oxycodine I had hidden away in my bag for emergencies and I wished I had thought to down the whole pack. The only anti-dieta thing I had done was use shampoo the previous day, but that one slip up couldn’t be the reason I was in so much pain. After what might have been an hour with the shaman working on me, the pain slowly started to ebb in waves. I had to try to lie completely still as any movement would invoke the intensity to increase to full power again. After a few hours, and a couple more soplars later I was able to slowly hobble around like a 90 year old. Until the next afternoon I would still feel pain if I was not careful and took a slightly deep breath. Manchinga had made its introduction, and the story of this introduction would be a standing joke and told to many for the rest of my stay (and probably is still told now). After a few weeks when the memory of the pain had faded, I was able to laugh and joke about the whole ordeal as well. At least I would not be forgotten anytime soon at the center!

Note: As I was writing this blog in India, I would meet someone who would indirectly explain exactly why I had this experience my first time taking Manchinga. While discussing reiki (an energetic healing technique) and pranayama (breathing techniques to clear and increase ones energetic body), she mentioned how people could often start to feel physically ill, nauseous, and start to hyperventilate. She had read a book by a stem cell biologist named Bruce Lipton, explaining that with these techniques you are working at a cellular level to bring the energetic frequency of each cell to a higher state (I will not cite the book here yet until I have read it which is hard to do whilst traveling the world!). If the frequency is increased to a higher level rapidly, the cells can essentially experience a power surge and short circuit as they have yet to build up their capability to operate at this higher energetic state resulting in physical symptoms. As Manchinga was such a strong plant energetically, the first time I took it was a complete shock to my system. In the subsequent times I would take it I would never have any  more symptoms most likely as my cells were now used to being at that higher frequency state.

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Though I have traveled to Spanish speaking countries five times prior to this trip, I’ll admit my Spanish speaking skills are terrible. On previous trips I had never really pushed myself to learn as there had always been a translator on staff. This time I was either going to have to fend for myself or rely on other bilingual travelers to translate for me, and as there were no other travelers at the center when I first arrived it seemed the universe had decided I would be fending for myself.

I had been learning a little bit of Spanish over the past year through an app on my iPhone, which resulted in me having a solid base of Spanish vocabulary but having no idea how to use these words to form sentences. My first few weeks at the center were spent just pointing at things and saying the word if I knew it or “Como se dice?” (how do you say?) if I didn’t know. I managed to get around OK, but if I wanted to have a conversation beyond asking for mas arroz (more rice), I needed to start speaking beyond one or two word sentences. I had always struggled to learn other languages, in Canada it was a requirement to take a year of French and the only reason I got through it with decent grades was that I somehow got a copy of the final exam the day before I had to write it. There was no reason I shouldn’t be able to pick up a second language, I was naturally above average in the intellect department (or so I like to think!) and had no issues memorizing the Latin names of hundreds of plants during my Environmental Science BSc.

Finally one day at the center, after bumbling my way through trying to explain to the assistant shaman that I had a pain in my stomach that was getting worse and was probably from my low-grade infection flaring up again, I realized what was mentally blocking me from learning a second language beyond just knowing a few words. I had no problem learning words of another language as there was a clear right and wrong answer which suited the perfectionist side of me, but when it came to forming sentences I had to realize that there was no one right or wrong way to do it. I was holding myself back from fully trying to converse in Spanish thinking that I would sound stupid, that I had to know exactly what order to put the conjugations and verbs in before I would even attempt to say something. Which was ridiculous when I realized why I was doing it, in the English language I could convey the same idea in about 1000 different ways, it was absurd that I held onto a belief that the Spanish language would only have one proper way to converse.

As soon as I recognized this belief in myself and how silly and detrimental it was, I began to become more open with just trying to speak in sentences (even if I did sound like a two year old) and my learning rate increased two-fold. I knew I was making progress when one day I held a five minute conversation with the assistant shaman at the center. I’m about 70% sure we were talking about the same thing, he seemed to laugh at the correct time when I made an attempted joke. But when I look back I think there’s a chance we could have easily been talking about two completely different things. Day by day I would continue to chat in Spanish to the shamans and the other staff, and my Spanish got better and better. I would be amazed when I could ask something random, like can you show me this tree and they would actually understand and take me to the tree. By a month and a half into my trip, I was actually helping translate (albeit poorly) for other travelers!

Not that my learning curve was a straight upward slope. I remember once one of the kids had brought their pet rabbit out to show us. As I was holding the rabbit, I made an attempt to ask the girl “What does your rabbit eat?” She gave me an odd look, and quickly took the rabbit away from me. I would later realize that instead of asking her “what does your rabbit eat?” I may have actually asked “do you eat your rabbit?”, which made sense of why she had so quickly removed the rabbit from my possession. If the worst thing to come from my failed attempts at speaking Spanish was a child a bit more wary of handing tourists her pets, I figured I was doing alright.

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A week into my stay, I thought I would make the trek up the hill to an area that was supposed to get cell service to send a message to my mother that I had made it to the center. As I was still un-acclimatized to the heat and humidity of the Amazon, I waited until late afternoon on an overcast day to make the hike. As I was the only guest at the center at the time, and spoke really poor Spanish I didn’t bother to tell anyone where I was off to, I expected to be there and back within the hour.

The hike up went rather uneventfully, and a quick check of my cell phone at the end of the trail revealed that it had no service. Beyond the end of the path from what I could see through the dense flora, the hill seemed to rise a bit more so I decided to go in a bit further to see if I could get service. I walked about 15 m off the path into the forest only to find there still wasn’t any service. I realized that going deeper in a densely treed forest was not going to help with cell service so I turned around to head back to the path. I walked back in what I thought was the direction of the path, only instead of finding the path I found the landscape to begin to head steeply downhill. The path had ended pretty much at the crest of the hill, so I knew that the direction I was going was not going to take me back to the path. So where was the path? I quickly retraced my steps back to where I thought I had turned around and altered my course slightly and tried to find the path again. I couldn’t find it.

A few more minutes of searching and continually coming to a dead end with the landscape steeply dropping off, panic started to set in. The Amazon flora started to all look the same, and I was no longer even certain where I had stopped to turn around. The storm was fast approaching with clouds blotting out the little sunlight that reached through the canopy, the wind was picking up increasing the noise of the jungle with leaves and branches snapping and falling to the ground. During my MSc program the past year I had developed anxiety attacks, but now they paled in comparison to the feeling of terror that was building inside me. I yelled for help though I knew deep down no one would hear me, on a good day noise barely travels through the jungle, with the noise of the storm I would be lucky if someone was 10m away and could hear me. Plus, I had no idea what the Spanish word for help was. I started to push my way through the bush in a more frantic manner in hopes of finding the path, sharp branches grabbed at me and my clothes cutting my face and arms. I saw something that resembled a path, clinging to the hope that it would lead me to some sort of civilization I started to follow it. How uninhabited could the Amazon really be? The “path” came to a sharp decline and I decided to continue to follow it though it was no longer existent, all downhill slopes would lead me to the river I rationalized in my head.

About 20m down the hill following what no longer resembled a path, a logical part of my brain started to come through the fog of anxiety. OK self, lets take a time out and think about this rationally. I sat down and fully let myself feel the terror of my current situation, later the moment would remind me of a scene from the first season of the TV show lost where for five seconds they let the feeling take over and then after are able to do what they need to do. The worst case scenario, I don’t find my way back and end up dying in the jungle. Something about accepting that death was a very real possibility allowed me to think more rationally about the situation. I had a few days before I would actually die if worse came to worse, so I had some time to sit down and come up with a logical plan of attack.

I had a quick pep-talk with myself, “Dear self, you are a complete idiot to get yourself into this mess, and now you have to get yourself out of it. At least you can’t get any stupider.” Then I took stock of my situation, 1. from my initial hike into the center I knew that the terrain was rugged, and going downhill would not necessarily lead me to the river, 2. if I didn’t show up for dinner at the center they may come looking for me, and it was probably best to stay in the general area of the end of the path, and 3. I was near the top of the hill and had been hiking up a north facing slope, that should narrow my search area down. I decided my best route was to continue to search for the original path, rather than run aimlessly down a hill. I couldn’t see the sun to determine a direction, but remembered the fancy compass feature in my iPhone. I wasn’t sure if the compass would work without service, but I figured it was better than nothing. A check of the compass revealed that the direction I thought was north was actually a bit more of a northwest direction, and my search for the path had taken me further and further west when I needed to go east. With more focus and determination rather than panic and frenzy, I resumed my search.

Within 15 minutes, I found the path. The sense of relief I felt was beyond anything I had experienced before. I thanked god, promised to keep my end on the bargains I had made with him while searching for the path, and ran as quickly as I could back to the center. I had only been gone for a total of 3 hours, and apart from the cuts on my face and arms there was little sign of the ordeal I had just been through though mentally the experience had left a mark. In that moment of facing my own impending doom completely due to my own stupidity, the part of my brain that had decided anxiety and panic attacks were a proper way to respond to stressful situations in the past year switched off. That response was completely detrimental when I was actually faced with a physical life or death situation and if I hadn’t overcome it I might not have died, but I very well could have spent an uncomfortable few nights in the rainforest.

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“Malo esperiots y diablos” the Shaman told me after my first rather uneventful ayahuasca ceremony at the center. That was all I understood of the Spanish and what I understood concerned me, though the shaman seemed unfazed and planned to remove these bad spirits and devils from me in the coming ceremonies.  A few days later another traveler arrived with better Spanish speaking skills than me, and I was able to get the full story of these bad spirits and devils that had attached themselves to me.

He said that these spirits we working to pull me to the dark side (kill me), which as I write it seems crazy but it did make some sense with the health problems I had suffered from in the past 6 months.  Since a hernia repair surgery in March, I had suffered from a constant low-grade infection that had slowly been running me into the ground. Before I left for Peru, the doctor had told me re-doing the surgery was my last option to try to get rid of the infection after running me through numerous courses of antibiotics. Even that was not guaranteed to fix the problem, as the scans and tests they had done on me at two different hospitals showed nothing wrong.  As a healthy and active 27 year old, firstly I should not have even had a hernia, and secondly I should have been able to bounce back from the surgery. There was a bit of comfort that came from the shaman telling me he could see something wrong and that he would fix it, more comfort than I had when the doctor told me the scans showed nothing wrong and they would try another surgery to fix me.

Removing bad spirits and devils is easier said than done, well maybe easy for the Shaman but it was most definitely not easy for me. The first preparation began the next day, the shaman prepared a special plant bath for me containing the leaves of three strong trees know as Palos Fuertes, that would help loosen these negative entities. Due to the nature of the energetic strength of the plants in this bath, the female shaman had to bathe me with this mixture and during the process I started to feel queasy. Whether from the smell which was reminiscent of the type of ayahuasca brew I drank in Ecuador my very first time working with shamans, or that it was from loosening the bad spirits from me I can’t say. I was given a tea to drink called Limon Dulce (Sweet Lemon), though it was neither sweet, nor lemony and should actually be called Bitter as ****.  This tea was often prescribed to older people and would help strengthen my physical body that had been significantly weakened overtime by these spirits.

Then it was time for what I like to refer to as “the exorcism.” Which the events took place over two or three ceremonies (I’ve tried to repressed the events in my mind), but I’ll describe them as one. Now the average person’s ayahuasca ceremony is no walk in the park, and will usually involve some vomiting and/or diarrhea (I’ll leave the story of one of my first experiences with ayahuasca where these two things happened simultaneously for another time). This physical purge is usually all but forgotten when the hallucinogenic effects of the dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in the ayahuasca take effect. DMT is considered to be one of, if not the strongest known psychedelic compound known to mankind and visions can range from intense and colorful geometric patterns to transversing dimensions and conversing with aliens. I am not the average person though, and for me my ceremonies usually consist of me feeling really ill, puking or dry heaving, shitting, praying for the effects to wear off, and then seeing the beneficial impacts slowly over the next couple days. Who needs to see shapes and talk with aliens if the healing is the same in the end right?

The exorcism began like every other one of my ceremonies. As the shaman started calling people up one by one to drink, I closed my eyes and tried to build up my courage to drink. The taste of ayahuasca is something hard to describe, it is not enjoyable by any means and after you’ve thrown it up a few times the smell will send shivers down your spine. Having drunk my fair share of ayahuasca, I can barely watch people drink it without feeling nauseous.  All too quickly it was my turn to drink. I closed my eyes as the shaman poured the ayahuasca, held my breath as I took the cup and downed it in two gulps. I continued to hold my breath as I returned to my mat quickly rinsing my mouth out with water to try to remove the taste to no avail. Fighting back the initial urge to vomit, I settled in for what would be a long night. Once you’ve swallowed that cup, it is the same at the point during a leg wax where they’ve put the wax on, now there is only one way out and it’s going to be painful.

The effects of ayahuasca usually take a half hour or so to come into effect. The point at which the shaman will start singing “icaros” which are songs used to help clear out negative energies. As soon as the shaman starting to sing the icaros I began to feel uncomfortable, physically and mentally. I felt nauseous, though all I could manage to do was dry heave into my bucket. The shaman called me up to his mat for a limpieza, an energetic cleansing through the use of icaros, chapuka (a type of fan made from leaves that is shaken over the head), agua de florida (a scented alcoholic liquid that the shaman will pour into their mouth and spray onto the top of someones head), and/or a soplar (smoking tobacco and blowing the smoke on the person). This process did little to make me feel better, and I stumbled back to my mat now with my head feeling scrambled like a static TV channel with the volume turned on loud.

As the ceremony progressed I began to feel more and more uncomfortable, dry heaving, sweating, and having scrambled visions of bulbous and grotesque graphics similar to those you would see in a supermario video game. When the shaman finished the limpiezas of the other participants in the ceremony he came to my mat and really began to work on the removal of the malo esperitos and diablos. His singing intensified the experience and brought on more dry heaving, with occasionally a small amount of bile coming up. I fought off an overwhelming urge to attack him, to make him stop singing, and instead ended up making growling and hissing noises between the retching. Chaos was building in my mind; my thoughts seemed to just be screams adding to the static TV channel feeling.

The shaman continued to work on me, for how long I don’t know, singing, soplaring, using agua de florida, and at some point giving me a volcanic rock to hold onto (I never asked why he gave me this rock, but I would bring it to every ceremony thereafter and ended up gifting it to a good friend). Finally the physical and mental effects of the ayahuasca seemed to ebb, the shaman handed me a glass of malba (a plant to sooth the stomach) which I managed to get down and the retching subsided. A plant bath was prepared with lemon, jungle basil, and a few other plants, and I doused my head in that until the mental pressure was relieved. Too weak to walk back to my room, I fell asleep in the ceremony hut. The exorcism was complete.

The morning after my final exorcism ceremony, which ended with me violently projectile vomiting up more contents than I can remember putting in my stomach, the shaman told me the spirits were gone but I still had work to do to complete the healing I had come for.  As my body and mind was weak from the bad spirits and their subsequent removal, I was told not to drink ayahuasca for a month and instead would diet with a tree called Manchinga, a “Palo Fuerte” literally meaning strong stick in reference to the healing power of this tree.  The shaman was adamant that I must have invoked these spirits somehow, as it was rare that someone had so many and such strong ones attached to them. He didn’t seem to believe me when I said I had never so much as even read a book or made a Google search about evoking spirits (though I had some grade school friends that might have).  In my 2.5 months at the center, only one other person who came through had similar spirits attached to them, and they were suffering from a extreme case of depersonalization/disassociation disorder for the past 3 years with measurable imbalances in their brain activity. Immediately after their exorcism they said that they were 40% better, and by the end of one month they were completely back to normal.

I could only come up with two possibilities of where these spirits had come from. The first theory and the theory that the shaman thought the most probable source of the bad spirits, was from two years ago. I had traveled to Ecuador to work with a shaman and upon arrival I felt really uncomfortable at the center. The shaman was ill from “brujero” attacks, when other shamans send bad energies and spirits to make someone ill, sometimes even resulting in death (see Peter Gorman Ayahuasca in my Blood).  I ended up leaving after two days, and taking two other travelers with me.  Had this shaman sent me bad spirits in revenge? I didn’t want to believe that as I had worked with him on prior occasions and had good results, but I would learn later some uncomfortable truths about him after a recent and suspicious death at his center (I will talk about this more in my blog post “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”).  My second theory was that I had created these bad spirits and devils from negative thought processes, resulting from avoidance of grief after my father passed away by moving halfway around the world and keeping myself too busy to face it by taking an intensive MSc course. Whatever the reason, all that mattered was that they were no longer there.

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When I’ve come home from my trips to the Amazon in the past, a lot of my friends have noticed significant changes in myself and a few express interest in traveling down themselves. I have a terrible habit that once I’m back home I forget how hard and uncomfortable I was in the process, and paint a rather pretty picture of the experience when I talk to someone. The good results that I bring home with me, tend to cloud over the memories of being in the Amazon, and that it was the hardest and most challenging thing I have ever done in my life. Though I’ve never had children, I equate this phenomenon to what happens after childbirth; at the time very painful but the end result (and some hormones) make you forget the bad parts. So here while its fresh in my mind, I’ll share some of the day to day challenges of jungle life. I’ll save talking about the challenges of taking ayahuasca, as that warrants a blog post of its own.

After my arrival at the center, I got settled into my room. Being a veteran traveler to the Amazon, I came well prepared with plastic ziplock bags and deet insect repellent to arm my room and personal belongings from the termite invasions, rats, cockroaches, and inevitable mold growing on everything in the heat and humidity. In my prior trips I had come back to my room to find termites swarming my shoes, pages of my books eaten by rats, and cockroaches nesting in my backpack. The creatures of the amazon rainforest are relentless and savvy. I put everything that would fit into plastic bags, spraying down the rest that wouldn’t fit as well as any cracks in the floorboards, the bed posts, mosquito netting, and desk with deet. I had the upper hand this time around… Or so I thought. The next morning I awoke absolutely covered with bug bites, and my skin resembled that of a dalmatian except instead of white and black, I was tan and purple. Combined with a case of mild heat stroke from the hike in, I was off to a great start.

Bugs and heat aside, working with the shamans and plants brings its own set of unique discomforts. Any reputable center and shaman requires participants follow a very strict diet, with limitations not only on what you eat but also what products you use on your body. A typical diet means no red meat, no dairy, no sugar, no oils, no spices, no salt… It’s probably easier to put what I could eat at the center; cucumber, lettuce, green beans, rice, oatmeal, potatoes, and a certain type of vegetarian river fish. This is the very strict diet the shaman recommended me to follow, usually other people are allowed a bit more variety on the vegetables and can have some fruit, eggs, and occasionally chicken. This diet usually has to be followed 2 weeks before arrival and for a month after you leave as well.

The diet extends past just food, and it is also recommended not to use any type of chemical product on your body including soaps, toothpastes, deodorant, and bug sprays. Luckily beforehand I had gotten into the habit of making my own toothpaste out of natural ingredients, but the no shampoo and soap I struggled (and cheated) with! By the end of a couple weeks though everything just starts to smell like the jungle, and you start to not notice if you smell or not. Oh, and did I mention no sex? Like no sex, not even by yourself. Zip, zero, nada. Sometimes its funny how the moment you are told you can’t do something, you get a strong desire to do it.

If that hasn’t sold you on coming down to the Amazon, the “vomitivo” might! The vomitivo entails exactly what it sounds like. Vomiting, and a lot of it. This is often recommended by the shaman before or just after your first ceremony, to help cleanse the body of  any remaining trace of non-diet food in the digestive system and it also helps loosen energetic blockages. The exact composition of the vomitivo drink varies center to center, with the main plant used usually being tobacco. After drinking, the person will have to drink as much water as possible inducing vomiting, then drink and vomit subsequent times until the shaman decides you have done enough. After vomiting, people may find another purge happening just the opposite direction, and from start to completion the vomitivo effects may last up to 4 hrs. Luckily (or unluckily as next post will describe) for me, the vomitivo was not recommended as I was physically and energetically too weak for the process to be beneficial.

A bit insane right?? And I haven’t even scratched the surface of the insane part. As I said in the beginning, its like childbirth. Indescribably painful during the process, but the results make you forget that it all happened and maybe even willing to do it all over again.

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Arriving into Lima the capital city of Peru is no shock to the system for a foreigner. All the first world necessities of Starbucks, Mcdonalds, and Apple stores are within walking distance in the modern district of Miraflores. Guidebooks will tell you that some of the best dining in the world can be found in Lima, which I fully agree with after having had the best sushi of my life there, and for a measly price compared to North America. When you’re in Lima enjoying the fine dining or maybe catching a movie or strolling through a park (some parks even having free wi-fi to keep you connected), it can hard to fathom that this city is only an hours flight away from what can only be described as the wildest place on earth: the Amazon Rainforest.

Getting to the Amazon is easy enough with three or four different airlines having daily flights into the major cities, but the moment I stepped off the airplane and was met with a gust of air that felt like a steam room I knew I was leaving the first world and its comforts far behind. A bit exhausted from arriving into Lima at 3AM the night before and sleeping on a couch in the hostel common room as my booked room had been flooded I was ready to get to Santuario, the healing center I would be spending the next 2.5 months of my life and sleep. Though I still had a 2hr drive, 20 minutes boat ride, and 45 minute hike before I would be there! I departed the plane, quickly collected my bag in the basic 2 room airport (with no air conditioning), and stepped out into the chaos of the Amazonian city of Pucallpa.

Amazonian cities have an unique atmosphere, with the main land access into these cities being by boat the main form of transportation is modified motorbikes with three wheels and bench seating for 2-3 passengers. With hundreds of these “motortaxis” on the roads, the noise is a bit deafening and the drivers weave in and out of traffic like NASCAR drivers. The heat and constant state of humidity combined with the garbage lined streets and slick red clay roads evokes the feeling of poverty, yet most people you meet will seem more content than the average westerner. Pucallpa is not a huge tourist stop with the main draw being ayahuasca tourism though another city, Iquitos at the headwaters of the true Amazon River a more popular ayahuasca destination. No Starbucks can be found here, and it warrants only brief mention in the guidebook with a small paragraph mentioning the Shipibo art museum and nearby wildlife refuge. Pucallpa is mostly an industrial center with logging, oil and metal mining industries in the surrounding areas, and is devoid of all the bells and whistles in most tourist driven cities.

Though I had been to the Peruvian Amazon on three different occasions before, I still found myself unprepared for the heat and humidity of the jungle. With daily air temperatures exceeding 30 oC, feeling upwards of 45 oC with the 100% humidity, it’s a shock to the system for anyone especially a Canadian. When I was booking the center I would be staying at, the 45 minute hike in seemed like no big deal as I sat on a couch enjoying the mild temperatures of the final days of summer in the UK. Within 5 minutes of getting off the boat and hiking more rugged terrain than I had expected, I was covered in sweat and questioning not only the nessecisity of every item I had packed, but also my resolve. I could just turn around, and do like the majority of people in the world do on their vacations, finding a nice room with air conditioning near a beach drinking fruity alcoholic drinks instead of tromping through the jungle on a goose chase to work in a shaman in hopes of healing myself and figuring out my life. I pushed these thoughts from my mind, remembering how miserable I had felt before embarking on this trip and that sitting on a beach was not going to solve my problems. This was not the first, and I expected it would not be the last time I contemplated going home during this journey. Nothing worthwhile comes easily, or so I will keep telling myself.

40 minutes, a few pit stops, and loosing 5 pounds of sweat later I arrived at the center, thanking God that I had my guide Juan to get me where who had carried the bulk of my baggage on the hike. No reprieve from the intense Amazon heat was to be found, with the center located in a U-bend of a steaming hot river containing water around 80 oC (see Boiling River Project). The one place in South America with unlimited hot water to shower with, though a hot shower is the last thing anyone would want!

The Amazon rain forest is probably one of the last remaining terrestrial places on the earth where areas remain unexplored and new discoveries are constantly being made.  It is estimated that approximately 20% of our modern medicines have been derived from chemical compounds discovered in plants and animals in the Amazon. Before westerners identified and isolated these compounds from plants for medicinal purposes, the Amazonian tribes had long been using them. In a tribe there would be a doctor also called a shaman, who had extensive knowledge of the plants and animals in the area and for thousands of years used them to cure any illnesses in the tribes. The curative properties of the plants used by the shamans were so effective, that when ethnobotanists began traveling into the Amazon to seek potential medicinal plants they would often consult these shamans first (see One River).

The Amazon boasts over 40,000 plant species with more being identified each year, and ethnobotanists marveled at the shaman’s innate knowledge of these plants, with some parts of the same plant being lethal if ingested and other parts of the plant curing infections and diseases like malaria. With the vast number of plant species the question arises, how do these shamans know which plants treat which illness? As a simple trial and error method would be timely and result in death more often than not.

When ethnobotantists asked the shamans how they knew about the curative properties of plants, they responded by saying that they could communicate with the spirits of the plants using an brew concocted from two plants, a vine called Banisteriopsis caapi and usually the leaves of a shrub called Psychotria viridis. These plants taken on their own have little impact, but when brewed together for months creates an intense purgative and hallucinogenic effect. The effects can last anywhere from 3-12 hours (even longer if other plants are added), during which the shaman can enter a state of consciousness where he can communicate not only with plant spirits but also see why a person is suffering from an illness and cure that person through their energetic body.

As more and more chronic mental and physical illnesses are showing up in western culture, with doctors seemingly only able to provide long term treatment plans to alleviate the symptoms but not cure the disease there is a growing interest in these shamans. Books and documentaries are coming out with westerners claiming these shamans to have cured anything from their chronic depression to cancer that western medicine could not (see The Sacred Science, Black Smoke, and Joe Tafur).  Rather than treating just the symptoms of a disease, shamans see that disease as a symptom of an energetic blockage in the person which they work to remove while treating the symptoms with a remedy of plants.

Modern scientists and doctors are quick to discount these testimonials as proper scientific experimental data is lacking, mainly as most first world countries have labeled ayahuasca as a class 1 drug making it extremely hard to get approval to conduct scientifically reputable experiments. World renowned scientists and psychologists like Dr. Gabor Mate (see The Jungle Prescription), find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to getting approval to conduct research involving ayahuasca, though they have seen and experienced firsthand the transformational healing that can occur.”Ayahuasca is not a drug in the western sense, something you take to get rid of something. Properly used, it opens up parts of yourself that you usually have no access to. The parts of the brain that hold emotional memories come together with those parts that modulate insight and awareness, so you can [process] past experiences in a new way” – Dr. Gabor Mate.

Since January 2012, working in the Amazon with these shamans has completely transformed my life. I have found not only physical and emotional healing, but also my demeanor has changed in such a dramatic way that I received comments not only from friends and family but from supervisors at my work who noticed a change in me. Working with these shamans is not for the faint hearted, it has been the most mentally and physically challenging experience of my life. But the long term benefits far out reap the short term pain, and I find myself returning time after time to continue my healing and personal growth.

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