The Morning After

So it’s the morning after your ceremony. Maybe you’re at a retreat or just had a session with someone. And now the real work begins: integration.

But what is integration?

The word integration comes from the root meaning to make whole.  Essentially all medicine work is a journey into wholeness, a shedding away of what no longer serves, moving closer to the essence of who we truly are.  During ceremonies we can have very profound experiences where a tremendous amount of insight, learning and healing can occur.  These experiences can deeply alter ourselves and our lives, opening us to new ways of seeing and of being.  For many people who go through these ceremonial or initiatory experiences, some of the hardest work comes after the ceremony, once they reemerge back into their lives.  The insights and healing must be practiced and integrated back into their lives, for if they are not, then the ceremonial experience was just a fleeting moment. While change and insight can be seen in oneself, often there is difficulty in feeling that the outside world is still the same.  Also it can be difficult to find people who understand our experiences and are able to listen to and aid us on our journey. This can leave us feeling very alone.

For this reason, integration is also the guidance and support an individual needs after a ceremony or profound experience. Making sense and meaning, changing habits, healing our bodies, tending to our emotions, returning to everyday “ordinary” reality — all of this is integration — and all of this is work that takes time, energy, patience, and trust, and can vary widely, depending on the person.

Taking Time

For that reason, you need time for integration after a profound experience. If before, you were a certain kind of person, and now, you are open to new ways of seeing and being, it can take a while — sometimes many years — to know how will you apply the insights from your experience to become someone new. You may be unsure of which parts of yourself will you keep, and which parts of yourself you will you do away with. Either way, integration is the process of putting the pieces of ourselves we want together, and doing away with what no longer serves us. That’s why this work can make us feel whole again and bring us to a state of health and well-being.

Still, integration is not a one-and-done thing. It’s actually a lifelong process. And the longer you work with plant medicines, the more the context and meaning of your experiences continue to build and shift over time. Ultimately, we are trying to make meaning out of our experiences so we can make meaningful change — lasting change — in our lives. And if you want to make something meaningful that lasts, that’s going to take time.

Interpreting Your Experiences

Interpreting your experiences is also going to unfold as you yourself change. You might have a ceremony experience, thinking it means something in particular at the time, then, two years down the road, it has a totally different or deeper meaning based on who you are then. That may be because plants and fungi are very adaptive beings. In the biological world, they shift their growth and behavior based on changes in their environment. And so when we consume them, we become more like them and that’s what happens to us. Their messages and the healing we receive from the plants tends to adapt and change as we do over time. In my experience, it’s best not to attach absolute meaning, or permanent meaning, right after the experience and say “This is the way it is.” Sometimes an insight is just for that moment and may become totally irrelevant later. Other times, we have no idea how to interpret what’s happened to us and it won’t make sense until much, much later. It’s not a rational process or something you can just think your way through or solve logically. It’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual (however you may define that term).

Deepening Relationships

So integration is a much wider, deeper relationship — with the plant or mushroom — that simultaneously works to deepen the relationship you have with yourself, which is the engine for real, lasting healing. For that reason, it’s wise to make space for those changes after your retreat or experience. You need a good relationship with your environment. If that means alone time, honor that instinct. And just be with yourself. Be kind and love yourself. Or, if that means you need love from others, look for a really loving, positive, joyful group who sees you the way you need to be seen.

Sharing Circles & Support

Ideally, there would be a sharing or integration circle after each ceremony. If the retreat center doesn’t have one, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t legit or professionally run. All it means is that integration circles can bring even more insight and more healing and help us feel more grounded and held. Sometimes, they can be intense. But it’s important that you have a chance to share your own thoughts, memories, and emotions — if you want and feel comfortable — and to listen to whatever else comes to the surface for others. It can also be really healing and insightful to hear what others have gone through. Many describe integration circles as “a ceremony after the ceremony” and I totally agree with that. They can last as long, be as intense, and be just as effective in our healing process.

Integration, therefore, can mean a lot of things, socially speaking. Because it can also involve 1:1 coaching with your facilitator or therapist during the retreat, or with many different people, such as mentors, friends, or medicine family. When people you’ve shared an experience with listen to you or share their story, that can be very validating. We often feel less alone during our integration when we have social support. Because the truth is, most people don’t understand how plant medicine works or even know what it is or does, let alone how to be there for you when you need it most.

The Real World

One of the most shocking and stressful things that can jolt us during the integration period is seeing how much you have changed — the gap or the gulf between who you were before and who you are now — and how little the world has changed. You may meet up with a friend who is stuck in the same old patterns. You may watch society repeating the same mistakes and atrocities time after time. Maybe your partner does not understand what you just went through or has no clue where you’re coming from. You may be all love and light at first, then return to a world full of darkness, full of anger, bitterness, resentment, shame, violence, complaints, lying, cheating, and trauma. You may have a completely different view on reality that the people you used to connect with don’t get at all. Now what? How do you feel, deal, and heal with real world? What do you do when you’re around toxic behavior? Integration can therefore mean a lot of things. It can just mean walking away from a hurtful conversation, or disengaging from a social setting that just feels odd or “off” or not for you anymore.

And so it’s okay if the initial integration period feels hard. That’s where the growth happens. The amount of patience you give yourself and the amount of forgiveness you show to yourself and others is a testament to the medicine you bring back to the world. The plants gave you enormous gifts. And now it’s your turn to enjoy them, use them, and share your own gifts with the world.

Again, this can be really tough, largely because of how modern society is structured. In traditional indigenous communities, integration is part of daily life. Messages and visions are shared openly and group decisions can be based on the outcome of an Ayahuasca session, for example. For modern drinkers, our community may judge plant medicine or not understand them, even though we need “village life” just as much. Unfortunately, many of us lack a close-knit community and context for integration. So it’s vital we connect with people in a safe container — people who value and understand the work and who can give and receive supportive feedback and information.

Best Practices

Integration is also dynamic. There is no universal template for it — each person has his or her own path. But there are best practices, which might mean having a regular, consistent practice. That could be breathwork, therapy, yoga, integration coaching, or all of the above. The key thing is to avoid the dissipation and erosion of the lessons in the face of modern demands to compete, succeed, to go! go! go! and perpetuate social status.

One thing to be aware of is your therapist’s or integration coach’s experience with the medicine. For many Westerners, talking with a therapist was good for them before plant medicine. After, they realize that their therapist doesn’t understand the medicine at all. They’ve never experienced its effects, had to struggle, or integrate. They don’t know how it impacts people living in the modern world with its pressures to acquire and conform. And so talking to someone without experience can actually make us feel worse. Like, “man, the one person I thought I could talk to, I no longer can.”

So personally, I would recommend setting up an individual session with a therapist or psychedelic integration coach who you trust knows the medicine well, has had lots of first-hand experience, and can help you to enhance the rewards of the medicine you’ve worked with, because they’ve done that themselves. This person should be able to allow doubts and questions to arise naturally, and know how to permit exploration of themes that arise for Westerners in particular.

Sensitivity

Another thing to consider with integration is how visionary medicines can make you a lot more sensitive to your environment. Plants like Ayahuasca and San Pedro can open you to emotional, psychological, and spiritual energies you may not want to take on. If, for example, the shaman or facilitator has money issues, sexual interest or unbalanced energy, everyone will be able to feel that in the space. If you’re around other people’s process all the time, holding space for them and not holding space for yourself, then that can be detrimental to your own healing. When you come back home, to the “real world” or the Matrix, you may be surrounded by dense, negative energies like guilt, greed, prejudice, doubt and deception — to name a few.

Pretend you just had a really serious operation. After surgery, you’re going to want to keep the fresh wound as clean as possible, to give the body and mind plenty of rest and relaxation, and to slowly assimilate back into a healthy routine. Many times, people feel so good after plant medicine, they want to take on the world and instead they do the opposite by taking on a lot of things, traveling, seeing or sleeping with people, piling on projects, et cetera. While not necessarily detrimental, overburdening yourself can carry risks, simply because your mind, body, and soul are much more open to other energies than they were before.

Therefore, part of “the work” is how we transmute the energy of the plants into the world, how we bring in the lessons they shared with us to change ourselves, and how we influence our environment and the things that matter around us so that our healing can last in a positive way.

Challenges

This work can be challenging if we return to a structured, logical environment that resembles the life we wanted to leave. We come to the plants in a box, then are taken out of the box. When we come back to the brick walls of the “real world”, whether that’s the same city or the same job or the same people or way of thinking, it can feel like we’re getting put back into the box. Over time, we lose the magic.

Many people who feel called to work with plants often say they’re “called” or there was some series of synchronicities that led them to work with the plant. So we should also try to allow for that same mystical nature when we derive meaning out of powerful experiences. It’s not a logical, rational activity. It’s unique. It’s deeply mysterious. An entirely new worldview bigger than us.

So a big part of integration is really identifying, challenging and revising our outdated belief systems, the things that put us into the boxes and compelled us to come to the plants in the first place. You might spend a lot of time unpacking yourself from those boxes, those beliefs that are detrimental to living a free and open life. Continue to identify those and label those into something that is more beneficial.

To be less abstract, if we’ve been unpacking ourselves from anger, doubt, shame or guilt or whatever it is, even a simple shift like, “I can’t do this” to “I can do this” is a big part of integration. You shift from being disempowered to empowered. It could be a self-care practice where before you treated yourself badly or didn’t give yourself much love, and now you do. It could be trusting your intuition more. During ceremony, the lighthouse might have shone on the worst parts of the storm. Maybe you now know how you tend to blame others. The “work” may then be to recognize when you do that. Or it may be to know when we’re triggered, to recognize the initial response or reaction, look at it deeper and dedicate ourselves to changing that behavior, bit by bit, with lots of compassion. And to remember that progress is anything but linear.

Effort vs. Expectation

We make a lot more progress, for instance, when we focus more on our effort than our expectation that things are going to change the way we want them to, at the rate that we want them to.

If we really want to make meaningful, lasting change, then we need to be willing to put the effort in, no matter what the outcome.

And some of those changes are going to be really difficult and require a lot of effort, and we still might not see the results we want. The important thing is to keep trying. To realize it’s all part of a beautiful process, and that that’s why they call it “the work”. Discomfort can be your guide here. Pay attention to what you’re driving towards or away from. Allow yourself to do whatever your Being is telling you to do. Be aware of it, but don’t judge it. And remind yourself that all challenges are temporary. Only after a flower blooms do the bees come. Don’t wish for bees if the flower isn’t ready. Focus on planting a seed, watering and tending it, growing, flowering and flourishing. Some seeds are going to flower really well. Some aren’t. Have faith. Trust that eventually, the bees will come.

And so to take care of yourself during your integration process, I invite you to ask yourself:

• How can I prioritize more self-care and self-love practices into my life?

• How can I love my body more with my daily choices?

• How can I think more loving thoughts?

• How can I embrace all the parts of me, including the parts that I don't like?

• How can I embrace my emotions, and learn how to resource and regulate myself in healthy ways when I feel overwhelmed?

• How can I surround myself with people who love and accept me for who I am, perfections and imperfections and all, and who support my self-love journey?

Intentions vs. Goals

Sometimes in the West, our intentions become goals. And an intention is not a goal. A goal is to move from an apartment to a house in the country. An intention is to feel more at peace in your environment, being warmly okay with whatever’s going on with a sense of presence. When you’re integrating your experience, it’s okay to have goals, but more important that we don’t confuse them with intentions.

If you need a little help during your integration, whether that’s trying to derive meaning and interpret your experience, or just feel like you need a bit of compassionate support and guidance as you talk through your process, or just want to share the gifts that you’ve received from the medicine so that it doesn’t feel like an isolated experience, but a profound and deep understanding you’ve benefited from, feel free to get in touch with us to book an integration session. Otherwise, I hope this has been helpful and wish you all the best with your integration journey. Infinite blessings.

Preparation

Many people I speak to before ceremony are quite scared and anxious. I want to let you all know that this is completely normal and very natural. In fact, if you weren’t feeling at least a bit nervous, I might think you were being cavalier about the experience, and not giving the medicine the respect it deserves.

For that reason, a few butterflies are actually healthy. If, however, the butterflies turn into panicky monsters, well, then, we have some work to do. This is a clear sign we aren’t feeling grounded in our bodies, stable in our minds, and tapped into our hearts.

Breathwork

Every system in the body relies on oxygen. From cognition to digestion, effective breathing can not only provide you with a greater sense of mental clarity, it can also help you sleep better, digest food more efficiently, improve your body's immune response, and reduce stress levels. All the hormones in the body are controlled by how we breathe. This includes stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, as well as “feel good” hormones like endorphins and serotonin.

This is why I always suggest breathwork before doing any meditation. Even a couple minutes — which we all have — of doing a “4-4-4” breathwork technique (breathing in for four seconds, holding for four seconds, then breathing out for four seconds) can help us relax, feel grounded, to find our center and confidence. And that can also help us to meditate.

When we breathe, it is important to do so through the belly and lower lungs, rather than the upper chest. By doing this, we calm our nervous system. The sympathetic fight-flight-freeze response turns off and our rest-and-digest parasympathetic response turns on. In deep abdominal breathing, we calm the emotions. We are effectively breathing as we did when we were a baby. Only now, as an adult, we are consciously focusing on moving our diaphragm in and out to improve our “vagal tone”, which relaxes the organs, lungs, heart, facial muscles, and other parts of the body.

Breathing is by definition a spiritual practice. The origin of the word spirit comes from Latin, spirare, which means "to breathe". A spiritual person is not someone who talks to beings in other dimensions. It’s someone that breathes properly and is connected to the entire universe.

Other good breathwork practices include singing or humming. By doing this, you are effectively lengthening your exhale and activating the vagus nerve through the throat, chest, and lungs — all of which can have a relaxing effect and help us feel more grounded.

Then there are movement practices: Qi Gong, Yoga, Ecstatic Dance, or a walking meditation in the forest. Spending time in nature is for the mind what detox diets are for the body.

One of my personal favorite breathing exercises is kapalabhati pranayama (the skull cleanser). Here is a video demonstrating that technique.

Of course, there are many other breathing exercises from holotropic breathing to rebirthing and neurodynamic. If you’d like to learn more about good breathing exercises, we can speak more about that together.

Diet

Changing the way you eat can be both the easiest and the hardest thing for us to do. A key thing here is that we acknowledge what our body is actually asking for. Sometimes that may be meat. Other times, it may be fruit, plants, and seeds. If we are on a strict ayahuasca diet, we ought to adhere to the guidelines.

In general, however, we are using plant medicines to become more aware. As Matias de Stefano put it, “To become aware, you need light and the best beings that can manifest light into matter are plants. Animals are also light but distorted — with emotions, their own history, biology, and so on. Plants don’t have that. They just exist, breathe, and harvest light. If you are trying to make your memory clearer, to awaken and enlighten your DNA, you need foods that manifest light.”

When you eat a plant, you are actually ingesting the frequency of the plant. The plant is tuning your frequency into its frequency. That tuning is the key or the gateway into entering the dimension or perspective of the plant. Done over a prolonged period with fasting, this is the essence of a shamanic dieta. Certain plants, like coffee, can have a more distorting effect, making us feel edgy and nervous. Other plants, like cacao, can help us feel warm and open in our heart. Either way, the foods you eat are changing the electromagnetic frequency of your body so that, like a musical instrument, you are being tuned to match whatever other instrument you have consumed.

A detox diet can also relieve your body of its toxic load so it naturally starts to run better. Food therapy, herbal tinctures, and teas help to detoxify the physical body at the deepest level, such as cleaning the lymphatic system or working on the liver and kidneys. If you want to talk about how regenerative foods and herbs can help you to clear blockages and open up new energies, allowing you to be a cleaner vessel for the medicine, feel free to get in touch.

Environment

Do you live in the city? Are you watching TV? Reading news? Scrolling angry internet forums? Listening to fear-mongering friends and family? Around helicopters and firetruck sirens?

To be in a good head space, you need your environment, or setting, to be conducive to that space. That is why the Buddha insisted that monks go to the woods. To be free of our own toxic thoughts and heavy emotions like aggression and anger, we can’t be around the toxic thoughts and heavy emotions of others. I am not saying that you need to neglect all your obligations and check out of life completely. But you do need to slow down to feel clear. You do need to feel safe in order to open up to the psychedelic journey you are preparing for.

In short, spend more time alone, quiet, and preferably, in nature. When you are around other people, make sure these people are light — people who bring you up, encourage and support you and make you laugh and smile.

So if you signed up a while ago for a ceremony, and you’re now having a lot of doubts. Again, that’s okay. You can can always cancel. You have that choice. Just be sure that you are being honest with yourself. Maybe look at it like being a parent. You might not “feel ready”, but then again, you may never be ready. But if you do feel deeply called to be a parent, just as you may feel deeply called to these medicines, and feel afraid about being a parent or partaking in a ceremony, both are totally okay. Just be sure that it’s not fear or your ego holding you back to what you feel deep within your heart is what you want to do. The practices I’ve mentioned here are just a way back to that inner knowing, that inner wisdom, that you always have and have had all along.

On Pain

There is an old French saying — “Pain is the craft entering the apprentice” — which a dear friend of mine shared with me while we were both deep in the Amazon jungle. At the time, he and I had been writhing in exquisite physical, psychological, and emotional pain.

To give you a picture: Neither of us had eaten in days. We were extremely dehydrated, since we had not had any salt for months, and been drinking Ayahuasca every other night for eight weeks in a row. Our skin was raw from mosquito and chigger bites. We hadn’t talked to any of our loved ones. Cockroaches were crawling over my toothbrush. There was a tarantula in the so-called “shower”. My friend was shitting actual blood from a long-damaged G.I. tract. And I was contorted in an origami of nerve pain up my back, neck, and legs — the very reason I’d come to the jungle in the first place: for healing. In all the boiling heat and utter exhaustion, as if to drive the point home, a dead bat fell from the thatched roof of my tambo, or hut, smack dab onto the floor next to my bed.

I looked over at my friend and said:

“It feels like the jungle is praying for us to die.”

“Pain is the craft entering the apprentice,” he repeated, swaying from his hammock.

That line would later remind me of another, by Nietzsche, who said: “The strength of a person's spirit can be measured by how much ‘truth’ he can tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”

Pain — to me at least — is akin to truth. You can’t escape it. You can certainly try to — by diluting it with entertainment, disguising it with fake happiness, sweetening it with food or a new car, muting it through willful ignorance, or falsifying it by way of distractions and wishful thinking. But avoiding the truth only causes more pain. Whether you face pain head on, choosing to tolerate it directly, or whether you choose to resist it, which again causes more pain, either way the truth is going to wake you up, saying, “Look at me. Know me.”

In that way, pain simply is. Hence why it’s pure truth, a master teacher, one who teaches us a lesson about ourselves and our cells — all of which has the potential to help us learn, in an attempt to strengthen our spirit. That is, if we tolerate it, like a good apprentice. As another phrase goes, “Pain is mandatory; suffering is optional.”

Healing Trauma

By teaching us about our bodies, pain also teaches us about our emotions and the thoughts that create them. How do we respond to pain? How can we think and feel differently in order to heal ourselves?

If we endure pain long enough, we also learn how all pain is temporary and that only our inner self is eternal and infinite. That is, we learn the truth about reality.

On my own path of both resisting, managing, and tolerating chronic pain, in working against and with it, I learned that, as Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, once put it:

“Trauma is, fundamentally, a highly-activated, incomplete psycho-physiological response to threat which has been frozen in time. What is significant in the resolution of trauma is the completion of incomplete responses and ensuring the discharge of threat and danger.”

In other words, I learned that the highly activated, incomplete response inherent in chronic pain is our nervous system’s frozen memory of perceived threat. And that, in order to feel safe again, one must learn how to discharge the traumatic imprint and practice, and why. The individual in pain must also learn the discipline of doing it regularly. They must take responsibility for their own health outcome, and no one else. To do so, however, this person will need the right tools and techniques. They will need to invest ample time in themselves, have social support, and know where they can get guidance, whether that guidance be from a plant or from a person.

Trauma-Informed Plant Medicine Facilitation

Trauma-informed plant medicine facilitation is all about completing the incomplete responses observed in conditions such as chronic pain. With the help of plant medicines, the participant may discharge the psycho-physical memory of threat in a safe, responsible way. In the absence of proper training, however, this discharge has the potential to actually be re-traumatizing. That is why at Cinco Medicos we are trained and certified in trauma-informed care techniques, have apprenticed with shamans and tribal elders, have worked in the mental health field, and have significant direct experience discharging our own traumas. All of these components are essential to helping facilitate an intense healing process for people with trauma and working to resolve conditions such as chronic pain.

Case Study

We also have significant experience with these medicines. To use myself as a case study, I have been using psychedelics for almost twenty years now. When I was incredibly sick, I first learned how to discharge my own frozen activated responses to threat and danger, as Dr. Levine described, through the regular and responsible use of plant medicines, including but not limited to, Morning Glory, Psilocybin mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Huachuma (San Pedro), Kava Kava, Kratom, Cannabis, Chiric Sanango, Marusa, Noya Rao, Coca, Passionflower, Cacao, Chuchuhuasi, Tobacco, Sananga, and many more herbs, flowers, and medicinal mushrooms.

Obviously, this was no easy fix. I would be lying to say it was anything but a long and arduous journey, with an unbelievable number of deep layers. But that’s why, unlike everything else I had tried up to that point — from sports medicine and physical therapy to pain killers and pricey MRIs — the plants worked. As one of my teachers, Shipibo Maestro Don Enrique, put it: “The plants are slow but thorough.”

And he was right. I was no longer crying in agony. I wasn’t walked hunched over, hobbling like an old man. I could finally sit again, and even sleep through the night. All my grief and dread were gone. As you can imagine, it was a poignant moment to say goodbye forever to my chronic pain and leave my walking cane behind in the heart of the jungle.

The Origins of Chronic Pain

During my odyssey with pain and plant medicine, I truly understood, better than any doctor or psychologist had or could have, why my chronic pain had arisen — and how chronic pain in works in general. Most importantly, I learned that, although everybody’s story and body are unique, we all have the ability to heal ourselves if we wish and are willing to do the work.

Developmentally speaking, I learned how, for most of us, chronic pain actually begins in childhood, when our nervous system first learns to detect danger. With each experience that feels physically or emotionally unsafe, our developing brain learns to go into protective mode more quickly and its “alarm system” may become increasingly sensitive.

Children who froze as a response to stressful situations have a much higher chance of developing a tendency towards disassociation, anxiety or panic disorders — as I later did — and even post-traumatic stress disorder. As a response to triggering events that resemble childhood trauma, disassociation can be one of the most harmful ways one freezes. We get so familiar with disassociation that substances like alcohol can begin to feel like coming home to what we know best.

Why do children freeze? Because to survive in a stressful situation that they cannot leave, they must adapt and cope however they can. Children may therefore minimize the pain they are in if it means pleasing their caregivers.

Over time, however, a child may learn to ignore and suppress an ongoing state of tension and vigilance in their nervous system, such that this freeze response becomes a deeply ingrained habit, and the tension and hyper-vigilance turn into states they are so familiar with, that the child thinks it’s the only one available and natural to them.

As the child grows up, and their overprotective nervous system meets the everyday stresses of adulthood, physical symptoms will often begin to manifest — maybe first as headaches, stomach issues, muscle tension, back aches, rapid heart rate, and so on. Add a major event — such as a change in relationship, housing, employment, financial standing, acute injury, or other traumatic stress such as a multi-year pandemic or natural disaster like wildfires or floods — and chronic symptoms can truly take off.

This etiology was exactly what happened to me. For years, I grew up in a very anxious household. To cope, I learned to bottle it in to please my caretakers. As I got older, I graduated during an economic crisis, moved across the country, experienced unemployment multiple times, suffered a major back injury, and also absorbed the frozen position of desk work and the chronic stress of our Western culture.

Soon, physical symptoms like IT band pain and panic attacks became all too common. A slipped disc turned into sciatica, a very painful condition whose severity I had learned to minimize. More computer work turned into radiculopathy (pain in the neck and numbness in the shoulder and arm), all of which flared into fibromyalgia, insomnia, and so on until I could no longer walk or, on the really bad days, even stand.

Because the nervous system is exceptionally plastic, it can pick up habits (like pain) very easily. Our nervous system “practices” activating a particular symptom, which makes it easier to activate that symptom again, and again, and again… until pain becomes a learned neural pathway. As the pain becomes chronic, our mind becomes more and more protective. We detect danger everywhere, which can trigger a pain response — even if there is no danger whatsoever. For example, when my wife would try to hug me, I would wince in agony. Or when the 4th of July fireworks went off, or a door slammed down the hall, my entire body would automatically clench into a tight ball.

This is the stage when the individual truly begins to suffer. Their physical activity, social life, relationships, identity, mental health, and daily routine are all adversely affected. Fear and vigilance are the primary substrate for the brain now. The condition has advanced such that, in order to heal, the person must now understand why these things are happening before they can know how to release the memory imprints of pain that have accumulated over time.

Conclusion

Plant medicines can be the very catalysts which help us to understand the roots of our pain more deeply — on an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and energetic level. They appear to work their magic, at least partly, through the subconscious, innate intelligence of the body. Which is why, for many ceremonies, you could find me tremoring, shaking, stretching, breathing, sweating, you name it. I learned how to reset my electric network by putting my heart to the earth and tuning its frequency to the vibrations of nature, how to use my hands on myself and others to install new harmonies of safety, care, and balance. Over time, it felt as if I was updating my nervous system’s software, from some clunky 80’s desktop OS, to the newest, state-of-the-art 21st century technology.

All of this is to say, luckily, we can heal from chronic pain. Recovery is possible. There is hope, because what we learn, we can also un-learn.

Still, it is very important that we, especially as people from the West, dispense with the idea of temporarily relieving pain or treating a list of physical symptoms. This does not work — no matter how sophisticated your science and technology, or how well-researched your psychiatry and psychology. To permanently heal illness, we must begin to really explore the energetic roots and psycho-spiritual traumas underlying the physical illness. This is the way of plant medicine, shamanism, naturopathic medicine, and alternative holistic health approaches.

It’s also the long, hard way. So it’s important for us all to realize that plant medicine is not a “quick fix”. Far from it. If the pain took years to develop, it can take just as long to heal — although this is not necessarily the case. To heal, you must commit. You must dedicate yourself to putting your best, most earnest effort in and courageously participate in the process. The more we indulge in our passive Western ways, the more likely the pain — or the truth — will come back to teach you yet another lesson.

So, if you’re suffering from chronic pain and ready to do the work, feel free to get in touch with us by emailing me at cinco.medicos@protonmail.com or contact us here.

Natural Harmony

One day I went down to the lake just to sit with myself — all day. I called it, “Project Do Nothing.” All I brought was a water bottle, yoga mat, and myself.

For the first few hours by the shore, I was sighing and stretching and getting up to put my feet in the lake. Really, just struggling to stay still. There wasn’t anything to do. Even for a nature lover and one who enjoys rest and relaxation, I was uncomfortable.

After a few hours, I stopped resisting. I lay down on the beach, watched the sky, and listened to the lake. It was cloudy. The birds were singing. A hundred yards ahead of me, a loon dip in and out of the water. The surface was glassy and reflected the low clouds. There was no wind. Minutes later, a bald eagle flew away from its nest. Around midday, I saw a great blue heron glide overhead. I was content. The present moment was all I needed to enjoy myself.

Presence vs. Progress

As morning transitioned to afternoon, the lake woke up. Motorboats, lawnmowers, and airplanes buzzed together like one big engine. A hiker talked on her phone. A jogger ran by with earbuds in, looking almost completely unaware of he was. A kid sat down and played on an iPad. What was enjoyable to me — the lake, for being the lake, the trails for just being the trails — had to be added to, cluttered with toys and chores. There was a palpable feeling of stress, all in the name of progress.

When humans have something, we always seem to want more of it. If we have some money, we want some more. If we have a house, we want a bigger one, perhaps a second vacation home. We worry that, sometime in the future, what we have will not be enough for our needs. In other words, we are anxious and afraid. The prospect of loss, which is inevitable, terrifies us.

Anxiety & Stress

If anxiety is excessive worry, due to our imagination and anticipation of future outcomes, stress is the feeling produced from a perceived lack of control about said outcomes. The solution to our anxiety, then, is not more progress, but less.

Why?

Because progress comes from an active mind. Presence is the result of a still mind. Those who favor progress will always worry about what they don’t or won’t have, and thus will never, ever have enough. Those who are happy with what they do have, we will always have enough, and find more.

Stress, therefore, can best be diminished by becoming more aware, not less, about what is happening now. Ironically, most of us, when we experience stress, tend to want to become less aware. We may seek distractions in the form of news and entertainment, numb out with substances or food, or we may seek out something to do so that we do not have to be with what is.

Alan Watts put it this way: “For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable. But man is hardly satisfied with this at all. He is much more concerned to have enjoyable memories and expectations — especially the latter. With these assured, he can put up with an extremely miserable present. Without this assurance, he can be extremely miserable in the midst of immediate physical pleasure… [For man] the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present.”

Stress & The Need to Control

Most of us know, either through experience or intuitively, that less awareness about what is causing us to feel stressed is not helping us to feel better or calmer or more peaceful, and yet we do it anyway. After all, why would more awareness of a situation that is causing us to feel stressed and anxious make us feel more at ease?

The reason is quite simple: because less awareness decreases our sense of control, and stress is exactly that, a lack of perceived control, and more awareness, more presence, helps us to understand that which can control, and what we cannot. In other words, it all comes down to turning our focus away from external circumstances that lie beyond our control and toward the inner refinement of our own character.

With presence, our awareness grows. And with awareness, our sense of internal control grows as well. We understand, in the words of the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, those things in the world that are “up to us” and those that are not. We see how useless it is to worry about the past or the future, firstly since neither truly exist except in our mind, which we can control as our awareness grows, and secondly because it is a much better use of our time to also understand external nature — those things that are not up to us, that we cannot control — as well.

With a sense of internal control and understanding of external nature, we can then conform our actions and attitudes to whatever is happening around us. It does not matter if there is war and the economy is crashing — those things are out of our control because of their natural causality — and any effort to try and control them is irrational, frustrating, and pointless. What matters most is that we are aware of what is up to us, internally. As our sense of internal control grows, our stress disappears. We realize what Einstein said: “[That] the world we have created is a product of our thinking; it can’t be changed without changing our thinking.”

Harmony with Nature

Safety is thus an inside job. Nothing outside of us can make us feel safe. Rather, it is our mind — our judgement, motivation, and volition — that makes us either feel safe or unsafe.

Fortunately, our mind is entirely up to us. Indeed, it is us, if we focus on our powers of self-determination and do not allow things the world serves up to control our desires and aversions. Keeping our will — our decisions and choices — in harmony with nature — our own nature, human nature, and the universe to which we belong — is therefore the true key to well-being.

How do we achieve harmony with nature then?

First, we must start with our anxiety.

Such anxiety could be over the state of the world, or fear about the future. You could also substitute the “problem” of next month’s rent if you wish. It really doesn’t matter, actually, whether we use the threat of food shortages or the anxiety of being able to save enough for old age — every one of these maladies is in the psyche’s obsession with time travel, with escaping itself, and with trying to control external nature instead. As Ayahuasca showed me once, these exhausting fantasies are just tricks of a fearful, restless mind. I could choose to play the same tricks on myself and be fooled by them again and again, or I could see the tricks for what they are — projections which prevent me from enjoying life now — and liberate myself from them whenever I want.

Either way, it’s a choice. Whether it’s a conscious choice is also up to me. Which is why cultivating presence and growing our awareness are so vital to better mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. The more aware we are, the better we can realize that dreaming about tomorrow is pure escapism from the pain we fear today. We can understand how our ego-self constructs a false future out of empty expectations, or a past out of regretful memories. To free ourselves from the prison whose walls, locks, and keys we have created, we must constantly remind ourselves that reality is a matter of our perception and interpretation of what we can and cannot control. If we succeed in this, we can walk around knowing that life happens now, not later. We can stop being so desperately worried about where we need to be, because we know that once we arrive there, we would arrive with the same worried mind, and be anxious yet again about where we need to be, and so on down the line.

Perception & Response

Perception drives behavior. If we perceive the world as stressful, we may fight it with anger and violence or flee from it through distraction. If we perceive ourselves as not good enough, we may seek to prove we are by posting a selfie, buying, or doing something that makes us look good and important in the eyes of others. If we perceive knowing who we are as terrifying, we may escape ourselves with endless chores, games, errands, and other activities.

The frenetic activity and noise on the lake was a product of frenetic, noisy thinking. Our stressful behavior is a product of our perception of the world as stressful.

I, too, felt stressed by all this doing. As the lake became busier and louder, there was a fizzy carbonation in my nerves, tension in my muscles, and a desire to flee — my sympathetic nervous system’s flight response — due to my perception of threat. Even the chipmunks and birds flew the coop.

Thoughts as Vibration

It may sound “woo woo” to say that emotions and thought patterns like joy, peace, and acceptance create “high frequency vibrations” while other feelings and mindsets such as anger, despair, and fear vibrate at a lower rate. But the simple fact of the matter is, vibrations affect both physiological and energetic responses, whether we are using our voice, singing bowls, tuning forks, mantras, or binaural beats.

Positive vibrations have been shown to:

• Lower stress & blood pressure

• Reduce fatigue, cortisol levels, & pain sensitivity

• Lower your risk of cardiovascular & respiratory diseases

• Help you to live longer, improve your mood, & give us a sense of emotional safety & psychological well-being.

Neuroscience and dream researchers know that the brain constantly produces bursts of electrical activity, whose electrical pulses are known as brain waves, each of which operates at a different speed. From fastest to slowest, the five different types of brain waves include: gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta. One possible way to influence your brain and its production of theta waves is by listening to binaural beats.

Cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration, has demonstrated how sound influences matter and molecular structure. According to Mitchell Gaynor, M.D., “You can look at disease as a form of disharmony. And there’s no organ system in the body that’s not affected by sound and music and vibration.”

In shamanism, which has existed for thousands of years, singing, chanting, drumming, and rattling are essential to healing and connecting with the spirit world. Ayahuasca shamans sing icaros with a vibration and intention which, together, transform illness into health. Huachumeros often use a rattle at ancient sites, because certain rhythms harmonize the energies (heartbeat and other pulses) present in the body of the individual. This harmonizing of bodily rhythms attunes one person with the others in a group. The rhythms of a drum, voice, or rattle may help us fall into a state of receptivity that could be the beginning of a trance. This rhythmic entrainment is the vehicle often used by shamans (psychological and spiritual tribal healers) to move into the spirit world. While this may sound like alchemy to some, sound healing therapists today do very much the same. By sending sound waves throughout your body, whether with a singing bowl or other instruments, the practitioner brings harmony through oscillation and resonance, which helps restore your body's natural balance, and in turn helps you to heal.

Ecotherapy

Let us return to the lake now. Because I had been vibrating with the water, the woods and the birds, in harmony with nature and my own internal nature, I could easily see just how out of harmony other people were. Visitors were so separate from the very thing they appeared to want to engage with and were: nature. They went to the lake and the woods to relax, but filled it with things to do, stuff to say, places to go, and other ways to feel.

It reminded me of how, as a boy, my father would take our family up to a lake in Maine. The aim, supposedly, was to get away, to rest and unwind. But quickly, my father would have all these projects: to put the dock in the water, to weed-whack the path, to set up the hummingbird feeder, to get fuel for the boat, to go water skiing, to clean the grille, and so on. There was no rest or relaxation. Just activity. Unable to still his mind internally, my father reflected this disharmony in his external environment. Inevitably, our family would return home as tired, if not more, as if we had escaped everyday life in order to get exhausted in a new, more beautiful place.

This pattern of internal disharmony is why we see so much external disharmony — outrage on the internet, wars between nations, domestic abuse, emotional neglect, addiction, and a host of other disordered behaviors. Humanity’s need for more resonance and coherence is exactly why on psychedelic plant medicine experiences I always bring people into the heart of nature. Here, a person can be free of distractions, free of clutter, free of obligations, and, if they choose, free from worry. In this setting, the participant can more easily see that it is their mind that is causing them to feel upset or afraid. That is, it isn’t something external, outside of them, that is the problem. Ecotherapy therefore allows guests to more easily harmonize their own frequencies with more natural rhythms. And, by raising their awareness with the medicine, they will begin harmonizing their own internal nature with their peaceful environment. Over time, the sense of separation — which is merely illusion, anyway — disappears. As we become more resonant with our surroundings, more vibrationally coherent within, we become healthier, lighter, happier.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, feel free to get in touch. Email cinco.medicos@protonmail.com or fill out our contact form.

My Story

Although my depression lasted for many years, I actually don’t remember it very well. Mostly, what I can recall is that I either slept all day or couldn’t sleep the whole night. Life either felt like one big bed I couldn’t get into or get out of.

Everyday, I felt weak in body and mind. I would drag myself from one exhausted state to the next. Walks around the block were a plodding shuffle which lasted minutes before I turned around.

Mentally, my intellect had plummeted. I would forget basic facts and have trouble focusing on what people were saying. My affinity for Russian literature and creative writing went out the window, along with my ability to concentrate for sustained periods. My creativity was a dried lake bed of ideas. No longer could I read or write. I could not make the kinds of connections I once had when making jokes. Short emails took forever to send and draft.

Nor could I muster the energy to socialize. When my wife would come home from a long day of work, there was no spark in me to love her — my best friend and confidant — or anybody else for that matter. Because I just couldn’t bring myself to love anything, really. The world was one big blur of apathy, such that I didn’t even care about not caring. People would text me and I couldn’t find the words to text back, until eventually the texts disappeared altogether. One day, my boss pulled me aside and asked if everything was all right. He looked very worried. Still, I was so ashamed of myself that I lied, saying I was fine, just tired, but soon enough would stop going into work altogether. Unsurprisingly, I was kindly “laid off”. Just like I had been several times before, for the same reasons. And so in my free time I drank to forget, smoked to numb out, and thought about death — a lot. I thought about jumping in front of trains, off my apartment roof, and swallowing all the pills in the house.

My therapist, I could see, was concerned yet he tried his best to remain stoic and professional. I had been in such a deep rut, for so long, and felt so alone — despite family, despite friends, despite medications, despite therapy, despite a once-generous job, despite all the yoga and meditation and breath work and attempts at exercise — though it sounds trite, simply put, I had become a hollow shell of what I once was.

Worst of all, nobody could help me. The doctors said depression was treatable, but I didn’t believe them. Millions around the country, around the world, were depressed and suicidal like me. I felt like a failure. Worthless, stressed, and demented. I had no goals or good habits. I was just totally and utterly broken. Dread and anxiety had crescendoed into daily panic attacks, many of which took place in public. I would collapse on a sidewalk, public park, or train, hyperventilating and crying like a little kid as the very real sense of imminent death surrounded me.

Intervention

I am glossing over a lot of details in recounting this dark period of my life. The point is, for years I’d been so depressed that my parents finally drove down to my apartment, broke in the door, then dragged me out of bed and drove me to the local hospital as I sobbed in the car, then emergency room, and only stopped once I was plugged up with drugs like Ativan. A nurse wheel-chaired me up to the psych ward, where I had my “sharps”, phone, and shoelaces confiscated. Quickly I curled into bed. The mattresses and pillows were much worse than at home, which only made me more depressed.

Being diagnosed with major depression, then later bipolar II, taught me a lot about life. For one, it taught me that despite being unemployed; despite failing to respond to Lithium, anti-psychotics, and antidepressants; despite the daily panic attacks and crying spells; despite the chronic pain in my back which had me writhing on the floor and walking with a cane; despite my drinking, self-loathing, confusion, and pain; despite my not eating until I became a skeleton, then over-eating until I became swollen and pudgy; despite wanting to kill myself daily — despite everything — I was creating the hellish reality in which I was wasting away.

Recovery

Now, it’s been a long and winding road to recovery. It took me years of fighting and lots of courage. It took thousands of dollars, support groups, going back to school, clawing back into the job market. It took many, many painful and terrifying ceremonies with morning glory, mushrooms, and Ayahuasca. It took months of excruciating work in the jungle, puking and praying to spirits, singing to trees in an indigenous language. It took months in the Andes apprenticing with a shaman while the world broke apart at every possible stitch and seam.

Once again, I’m really condensing quite a lot for the sake of brevity. The point is, I am grateful to my struggle. I’m stronger because of it. And because of it, I get to help others who have gone or are going through similar crises. So if you’re suffering now, or know someone who is, I understand. Truly. And I can assure that there is hope. As long as you have faith, trust that you can do it, and can believe — at least in the possibility — that life is a wonderful gift that challenges us so that we can learn, grow, and evolve. Today, I look back at my transformation and marvel at who I once was and who I am now. That “me” is now dead, yet gave life to a new and powerful being who can now help others to help themselves heal.

San Pedro for Depression

Throughout my twenty years of working with psychedelics, I have discovered just how magical and infinite the plant and fungi kingdoms are as healing allies. Although I have nothing but the utmost respect for each and every plant I have learned from — whether that be an Amazonian river tree, a so-called “weed”, or local herb — it is an Andean cactus called Huachuma, or San Pedro, to which I feel the most profoundly connected.

San Pedro is a beautiful plant and an amazing medicine. In my opinion, the spirit of this plant — this god — is infinitely wise and benevolent. Like a lot of people, I knew more about mushrooms and Ayahuasca. But for whatever reason, this cactus kept calling to me. And as I began working with it, I realized just how unbelievable it can be for a wide range of disorders and illnesses. Whether you are suffering from P.T.S.D., addiction, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, an eating disorder, or depression, this incredible, therapeutic medicine does it all.

For depression, specifically, Huachuma is a powerful healing companion. When you are depressed, you no longer see things as they really are. Rather, you see them through a distorted lens of fear, uncertainty, confusion, doubt, sadness, irritability, anger, and hopelessness — among other toxic emotions which severely limit our ability to do anything, let alone savor and enjoy life as it was intended to be. For the depressed person, the lens of the mind has clouded everything. With Huachuma, these clouds are burned off like fog under intense sunlight. The mind becomes calm and clear once again. Like a San Pedro flower which blooms at night, the heart slowly opens in the dark.

How San Pedro Heals Depression

Rather than view life through the illusion of fear, with the help of San Pedro, the mind begins to see through a different perspective: that of the heart.

Whereas depressed people are so stricken with fear, such that their body marinates in stress hormones like cortisol, San Pedro helps the depressed person to understand the nature of their mind, the ultimate causes (usually complex traumas) which have led them to lack confidence in their own abilities and inner strength, and how they tend to form their worldview.

Over time, the depressed person begins to feel rejuvenated by this new perspective. They get a new lease on life. Because the stories they once told themselves, once believed and took for granted — stories like “I’m worthless”, “I’m not good enough”, “I’m a burden”, or that “the world is a terrible place” — stories we learned from our parents, teachers at school, from the news and culture, from doctors and politicians and others whom we perceive as having positions of authority, can be rewritten so that we are the authority. Everything isn’t happening to us, but for us. We aren’t victims anymore. We’re in charge now. We’ve become the author, not the reader of someone else’s script. Stories, which once felt so true, we discover are beyond false. And we can now understand — without judgment or self-criticism — how they are damaging us the more we believe in them. If wisdom is not just the ability to see, but to see through things, San Pedro helps the depressed person become wiser, as they can gradually see the illusion for what it really is, then see through it in order to fashion a new narrative, one they’ve written and like, one that empowers them to be who they really are and wish, in their heart of hearts, to become.

Medicine for the Heart

As our mind heals, the future no longer seems like something to dread and feel paralyzed about. It’s more like a beautiful landscape whose horizon we can look forward to walking towards, and with more heartfelt confidence.

If depression is a contraction of the mind’s ability to know what is true, San Pedro is an expansion of the heart, which only knows truth. And it is this expansion which feeds, fertilizes, and nourishes the mind with a calm wisdom about how to both “be here now” and change thoughts and behaviors so that they can be better versions of themselves in the future. Therefore, San Pedro reshapes our worldview so that we can understand our own divine power. We feel so naturally good that we can now do what we love. We can both create and love ourselves at the same time. This is absolutely huge for the depressed person, because depressed people don’t love themselves. They feel as if it’s utterly impossible. And so as their newfound self-love grows, so does self-care.

With more self-love and self-care, San Pedro gives people suffering from depression the true hope and much-needed resilience to make actionable change in their lives. Maybe this is as small as starting to eat once again, take a walk around the block, or call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while.

Action & Change

Either way, this action is the real deal. Before drinking San Pedro, a depressed person lives from such a constricted place that they lack the proper motivation and drive necessary to change their life in ways that matter and have meaning, which is why they present with so much apathy, and feel helpless about how to become “un-stuck”. As one participant who had been suffering from intense, disabling grief after the loss of her father, and had been dealing with depression for many years prior, put it to me: “The feeling is like, ‘Oh! … Right!” We both laughed our asses off. Because she could remember again what it was like to be joyful again. To feel good in the heart. To no longer be confused. Before, she had been listless, too tired to do anything. Now, she was revitalized, energetic, much like a child who sees everything with a sparkling sense of amazement and novelty.

Medicine for the Body

San Pedro also works on the body. In many ways, depression is the body’s “freeze response” to what it perceives as a threat. Plant medicines like San Pedro can help to restore balance by allowing us to safely release this traumatic imprint, oftentimes with tremors or shaking. During my own healing journey with the plant (as well as with morning glory seeds, mushrooms, and Ayahuasca), my legs shook out the freeze response of my chronic pain, which I understood as a painful physical symptom of my depression. I was able to heal my nervous system so that I felt safe in my body, rather than disassociated or like I wanted to get rid of it. Now, I love my body and feel safe and relaxed in it. I am also not alone in this experience. I have seen many, many ceremony participants drink plant medicines like San Pedro release trauma locked in the body. Depression is psychosomatic. And San Pedro medicine helps to alleviate both the psychological and physical symptoms of the illness.

In short, San Pedro can teach a depressed person how to love themselves and their life as they once did before life’s traumas took over. Unlike peyote, a schedule I substance in the United States, San Pedro is perfectly legal to own, grow, buy, or sell in the United States. Very fast to restore itself after being cut for medicine, San Pedro is much more sustainable than peyote. About the cactus, one of my teachers used to say to me, “It likes to be cut”, because when you do — one, two, three, even four “pups” will grow up from the cutting like loving hydra heads of wisdom and medicine.

Doing “The Work”

None of what I’ve said here is easy. It’s a lot of dirty, difficult work.

In the West, we’ve learned to be passive about our own healing. We go the doctor to tell us what to do, what to take, when to come back, and expect the pills or prescriptions to do the work for us.

But this just isn’t how healing works. Healing is a rebellious act of taking responsibility for yourself and your sickness. And so you have to be ready and willing to do the work. Nobody can look at your past for you. Nobody else can remember your childhood or sit with your anger. Nobody else can forgive you for your mistakes the way you can. You have to do it and be serious about doing it.

And so while ceremony can teach us how to love and laugh and have fun, it’s not all about holding hands and feeling happy all the time. It’s not some Shangri-La paradise we escape to. Instead, healing in this way is about discovering the shadow parts of yourself. So you need to be mentally prepared to explore the sides of yourself you have trouble reconciling and accepting. Otherwise you’re just looking for a drug experience and will be sorely disappointed by the outcome.

But if you do feel called “to do the work”, please feel free to get in touch with us and book a free consultation. Thanks for listening, and be well everybody!

Ayahuasca is now a household name in the West. Meanwhile, the San Pedro cactus, or Huachuma, still remains less known. But when it comes to healing with psychedelics, San Pedro can be an excellent alternative to Ayahuasca. Let’s look at some similarities and differences between the two medicines, so you can decide which one is right for you.

Preparation

To start, Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew — the combination of two or more plants — typically the Ayahuasca vine (Banisteropsis caapi) and leaves of the Chacruna bush (Psychotria viridis). Most plant medicines are either consumed raw, like mushrooms, or boiled alone, like San Pedro. However, Ayahuasca is most often mixed with a DMT-containing visionary plant. Shamans and participants may also consume other jungle plants before drinking Ayahuasca and even observe a strict “dieta” before a ceremony.

San Pedro, on the other hand, is made by peeling the cactus of about forearm’s length; removing the non-medicinal core, skin, and spines; cutting the green part of the cactus in pieces; drying it in the sun; then boiling the cactus into a brew for days to several weeks. Alternatively, some people consume San Pedro in powdered form. There is generally no diet with San Pedro. Although fasting before a San Pedro ceremony is best practice in order to allow the medicine to be absorbed through the digestive tract.

Effects

Everyone will respond differently to Ayahuasca and San Pedro. Generally, however, both plants tend to produce visions and altered perceptions. In this non-ordinary state of consciousness, profound insights, emotional shifts, and healing commonly occur.

Ayahuasca is often more physically taxing than San Pedro. The brew can induce nausea, tingling, increased heart rate, shivering, shaking, sweating, diarrhea, and vomiting. These unpleasant effects are normal. They are not side effects but indicators of the medicine’s emotional cleansing and physical purgative effects. In contrast, San Pedro is a bit more gentle. While it can certainly give one nausea, its purgative effects are less common and intense.

Duration

San Pedro and Ayahuasca are processed very differently by the body. San Pedro often takes a couple hours just to take effect, and even longer for the experience to peak. It generally lasts much longer than Ayahuasca — anywhere from 8 - 20 hours as opposed to 4 - 7 hours for Ayahuasca. How long either medicine lasts and its intensity will depend on the individual, the dosage, and potency of the medicine. Some people will require more, others less. Factors like previous experience, physique, mental state, tolerance, and so on will all determine the dose. Many times, people can actually become more sensitive to the medicine with time and require less medicine for equal intensity.

Interestingly, with Ayahuasca it is also possible for a person to feel nothing at all. I have seen this happen many times, usually because the person is new to the medicine, struggling to relax and trust the process, and/or can’t seem to “get out of their own head”, which blocks the medicine from taking effect. This may sound strange to those familiar with allopathic remedies, but in the realm of plant medicine, our thoughts and expectations about what the experience should be can cause us to “think the medicine away”. Luckily, I’ve never seen this happen with San Pedro.

Healing Trauma

When drunk in a ceremonial context, Ayahuasca and San Pedro can both treat a wide variety of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual disorders. If trauma is an acute or chronic disconnection from ourselves, others, and nature, Ayahuasca and San Pedro can help us to connect — or reconnect — to all three. The medicines bring people together, teaching us how to know and love ourselves as well as one another.

The essence of Huachuma or San Pedro medicine, I like to say, is love, truth, clarity, and connection. There is a fearless confidence — a raw honesty and arrow-straight sense of truth — one feels palpably and can gradually come to embody after drinking this medicine consistently. Although there can definitely be scary moments with San Pedro, I find that the medicine helps us to look at our fears with more objectivity and compassion, so that we can consciously overcome these obstacles in our life rather than be unconsciously overrun by them.

Like San Pedro, Ayahuasca is just a mirror of what’s inside us. Although Ayahuasca tends to show you just how much fear you carry within, which can be terrifying, it is not always a ride through hell the way many have come to believe. Both medicines are tools we can use to deepen our awareness, connect to our body physically and energetically, and use to heal in a safe and supportive setting, with an experienced guide or facilitator. As with any psychedelic, the journey depends on the individual, the practitioner, the potency of the medicine, and the environment.

Health Risks

One big difference between these two master plant teachers is that there are, generally speaking, more health risks associated with Ayahuasca than San Pedro. Ayahuasca, for instance, can be very dangerous for individuals with a heart condition, mental illness such as bipolar disorder, psychosis, or schizophrenia. Huachuma, or San Pedro, on the other hand, is a relatively safer — more physically gentle and psychologically tolerant, at least at lower doses. Both medicines have contraindications, however. SSRI’s and other pharmaceuticals are a no-go with these medicines. And with San Pedro, you may need to be physically fit if the ceremony involves hiking at high altitudes. This is why we take safety seriously at Cinco Medicos.

Integration

But how do these medicines help a person to change their life?

Well, in my experience, San Pedro is a very practical medicine. I find the cactus helps people to see their life more clearly and with less judgment and resistance. Whether you wish to heal relationships, navigate job transitions, move, or unlock greater creativity in your art or business, San Pedro is an amazing ally.

In contrast, Ayahuasca — and mushrooms for that matter — can be a bit more cryptic. The visions may be tricky to make sense of and, in certain cases, easier to forget. As a result, I’ve generally seen San Pedro help folks to heal and deal with the “real world” with greater stability. Sometimes after drinking Ayahuasca, “landing the spaceship”, so to speak, can be a destabilizing, if not chaotic process. So it’s always a good idea to have proper social support and a trained integration coach for when you come home. Integration work can be highly beneficial before and after the experience — you get way more out of the ceremony experience and your life improves much more dramatically than without it.

History

Clearly, these medicines work wonders. And it’s no wonder Ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies have existed for thousands of years. These two medicines have been helping humanity evolve for millennia. It’s thought that people have been drinking Huachuma for over 3,000 years — possibly up to 8,000. The San Pedro cactus can be found in pre-Incan iconography. It appears in the art of the Chavin, Nasca, Moche, Chimú, and other ancient societies, most of them located in the Andes. Ayahuasca, too, also spans across many, many cultures in the Amazon basin.

Ceremony

How are ceremonies run?

A San Pedro ritual is also known as a mesa, and is done by restoring energetic balance with the purpose of healing a sick person for whom normal treatment has not worked. The mesa usually consists of a set of objects that the healer’s collected over time and can include things like swords or machetes, tobacco, brandy, candles, shells, and other elements. The purpose of these objects is confer power to the healer, as well as to anchor and balance energies (e.g. masculine-feminine) for protective purposes.

San Pedro ceremonies are almost always done during the day, outdoors. Although you can certainly contemplate your inner world, the experience helps you to connect to nature and your outer environment. The Ayahuasca ceremony, on the other hand, is often done at night, indoors, in a maloca. The icaros, again, are a major part of Ayahuasca. Icaros represent a sophisticated technology of vibration, a kind of “spell-casting” that can open certain worlds, invite spirits, or allow the healer to see into a person’s body, clear energetic imbalances and surgically clean them or remove blockages. Icaros help to modulate the medicine up or down, too. So if someone is going through a difficult time, the icaros can smooth the experience and calm the participant.  

Conclusion

In general, both Ayahuasca and San Pedro are extremely powerful but also very different. They also complement each other very well. I call them “the divine couple” because, just for example, San Pedro can help a person to integrate and make sense of their ayahuasca experiences, give them more stability and courage in the real 3-d world. And Ayahuasca can get very deep by helping you to purge in ways that Huachuma doesn’t often do, but can, if needed.

Ultimately, these two medicines, when done correctly, in the right set and setting, with the right people and right guide, can accomplish the same things. Namely: 

• Healing - So whether that’s on a subtle energetic level, or an emotional, mental, or physical level, Ayahuasca and San Pedro can help an individual heal an extremely wide range of illnesses -- from depression, chronic pain, and addiction to grief over a divorce or the loss of a loved one, sexual abuse trauma, or PTSD. Then there’s…  

• Consciousness Development - Which refers to our awareness and our awareness of our awareness. In this sense, Ayahuasca and San Pedro can both help us to deepen our understanding of ourselves, so that we know who we are more fully. And when our consciousness develops, this is what often promotes the healing of an individual on those various levels we just talked about. Lastly, there’s….

• Spiritual Evolution - This gets at the journey of our spirit or soul, which, according to some Eastern philosophical traditions, can live multiple lifetimes. Because when we heal and become more conscious, our spirit grows and evolves as a result of these experiences, from overcoming challenges and making progress in the various ways we can come to know ourselves.

And these 3 things influence each other. When you heal yourself on all the levels of your being, your consciousness is automatically going to rise as a byproduct. When your consciousness rises, your soul or spirit is going to evolve.

Ultimately, for people wondering whether they should partake in an ayahuasca or huachuma ceremony, it all depends on which medicine resonates with you, or which medicine is calling the strongest at that time, based on your own unique needs. But it is sometimes helpful to know that you can have just as profound an experience with huachuma or San Pedro as with Ayahuasca. The medicines just arrive at these ends or benefits through different means.

Get in Touch

If you’re interested in talking more about Ayahuasca or San Pedro, or a sacred retreat ceremony in Peru or Vermont, get in touch with us at cinco.medicos@protonmail.com or fill out our Contact form.

Morning Glory

"What the world needs," I wrote in my journal, "is a cold glass of these seeds."

Over the years, I have grown a beautiful relationship with the spirit of Morning Glory (Ipomoea violacea), a wonderful master plant that grows prolifically in North, Central, and South America, as well as countries like India and those with tropical to sub-tropical climates for at least part of the year.

As medicine, Morning Glory seeds can heal psychological, emotional, and spiritual or existential issues. These include but are not limited to grief, personal loss, OCD, depression, anxiety, stress/burnout, and C/PTSD. In addition, Morning Glory can treat physical issues such as chronic pain, cluster headaches, digestive disorders, insomnia, and more. Personally, I came to Morning Glory for healing my chronic pain, which had been affecting my nervous system in the form of sciatica and fibromyalgia. As a result, the seeds helped me to sleep better, walk with less pain, and so I ended up using them later for spiritual purposes and self-exploration.

In a ceremonial context, Morning Glory is quite a visionary plant with immense shamanic power. The Aztecs used it to open divine portals and communicate with the gods. Mesoamerican cultures such as the Maya, Aztec, Mixtec and Zapotec considered morning glory seeds (tlitlitzin, ololiqui) to be sacred. With them, they communed with the dead, predicted future events, found lost items, healed injuries, and coped with trauma. After the Spanish conquistadors banned their ritual use, and centuries later the DEA followed suit, the view of the seeds’ magical powers has been supplanted with fear and amnesia.

Like many other sacred plants, the vine can show you images and give you "downloads" or messages from the spirit world. The spirit of Morning Glory, as I have found, is immensely intelligent and has a feminine character, much like a clever aunt or wise counselor who offers lessons at a pace she knows you can understand.

The effects of Morning Glory vary widely depending on the dose and variety of Morning Glory. Potent psychoactive varieties of Ipomoea violacea include Heavenly Blue, Pearly Gates, Flying Saucers, Wedding Bells, Blue Star, and Summer Skies.

Eating 5-15 seeds is in the microdose to slightly perceptual range. At this dose you may feel more relaxed, a bit lighter and less stressed. Your muscles and nervous system will feel slightly less tense as well, as Morning Glory works a lot on the body. Most often, people will eat the seeds as a microdose and make a cold water extract for a macrodose by grinding the seeds (a coffee grinder works well), then leaving them in cold water to soak in the refrigerator for about 24 hours, straining the seeds' outer coating through a cloth or sieve, as this part causes nausea.

Consuming 20-50 seeds will be a low dose leading to introspection and contemplation. A moderate dose, or 50-100 seeds, will lead to a psychedelic experience lasting several hours. Anyone who ventures into the 100-300+ range will be taking a high dose, safe only for those experienced with psychedelics, comfortable with a heavy body load, and mentally prepared for nausea or purging, which does not necessarily happen but is much more likely. In general, never consume Morning Glory while taking psychotropic medications or pharmaceutical drugs.

As for those wishing to take a journey with Morning Glory seeds, remember that they are a Schedule III substance. Moreover, to quote Paracelcus, "What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison." Because the seed pulp can make you nauseous, even if you strain this pulp before drinking the cold water extract, the seeds still may induce vomiting or diarrhea, so be careful.

Chemically speaking, Morning Glory seeds are psychedelic because they contain LSA, or ergine, a cousin of LSD. This psychedelic compound is also found in the seeds of Hawaiin Baby Woodrose (Argyreia nervosa), sleepy grass (Achnatherum robustum), and even certain fungi. Compared to LSD, LSA and its companion alkaloids exert a more sedative effect which can be intensely visionary and dreamy. LSA also induces a powerful body high, tingly sensations, euphoria, enhanced color and pattern perception, time distortion, shifts in perspective, personal insights, and a heightened sense of interconnection and oneness. It is much less visual than LSD, however.

Given that Morning Glory can cause nausea at the higher doses, some might call it a poison, others a purgative which helps to clean the stomach and digestive tract and leaves you feeling much cleaner, much as vomitivos like Sangre de Grado (Dragon's Blood), Ojé, Lemongrass, or Garlic tend to.

Although I do not condone the use of psychedelics, I can state facts. Morning Glory seeds are widely available for purchase in gardens, hardware stores, and online. While you can buy them, it is much more rewarding to pick them in the wild, and even better to cultivate the seeds yourself by growing the vine, which will flower every day (in the morning) after several months. The flowers will close in the evening. If pollinated, they will slowly create seed pods. When ready for harvest, the seed pods will look slightly tannish-brown and feel crispy-dry. Damp or squishy pods signal the seeds inside are not fully formed and ready to pick yet. Each seed pod typically contain about 3-10 seeds depending on the variety, age of the vine, and amount of sunshine, water, and nutrients the plant has received.

Happy harvesting!