The Shamanic Diet
The shamanic diet
A shamanic diet is an opportunity to work and learn directly from a master contained in a plant, with the help of a curandero (healer). The plant becomes your guide and “speaks” within you as all that is true. The master plants, as the name says, are genuine spiritual teachers that are contained in a brew or decoction.
We are talking about ancient and sacred Amazonian masters like the Chiric Sanango that belongs to the family of plants called sanangos. Chiric Sanango (healer who heals through cold) opens the heart, teaching us love and trust. He heals the cold in the heart by opening us to the reality of love and the human mission of dharma and compassion. Chiric Sanango is one of the most challenging diets, but the healing accompanies you for the rest of your existence, like all the other dieted master plants. We also have another master in the the family of the “sanangos”, the Uchu Sanango (healer that burns, that cleanses with fire or burning of our limitations). Uchu (meaing “hot/spicy” in Quechua) takes you to the limit of your limitations; lack of peace, the noise of the mind, sensuality, anger, and brings you to observe them, to understand. There is also the beautiful plant Bobinsana, a healer whose archetype is the mermaid, which embodies the old healer or the Amazonian cabocla (warrior). She teaches service, feminine wisdom, and adaptability. Bobinsana is a shrub with beautiful pink inflorescences (pictured above) that grows on the banks of rivers. She travels and adapts with the floods and with the dramatic changes of the Amazon forest that these great floods provoke. Likewise we have other teachers such as the Ajo Sacha, a wonderful healer, a tree whose leaves give off the aroma of garlic, removing impurity, burning our sense of being a victim. He teaches us forgiveness, and shows us the chants or icaros contained in the forest, to begin to listen to the masters.
During a period of 7 or 10 days or more, the voice of these plant masters guide the heart to find solutions to complexes and deep-rooted suffering, emotional or physical pain. They open memories to cleanse the heart of reactions, healing deep scars through self-observation and understanding. The shamanic diet is a delicate work because it demands discipline of silence and isolation. It is for many a definitive step in life towards change, the leaving behind of afflictions that accompany our existence and really open the heart to life.
Plants act at the level of each being. They are not “magic” pills or chemicals that falsely offer healing by numbing the mind or disconnecting feelings. They work at the level of the soul, accompanying and healing each affliction according to the personal universe. Their work is to cleanse, burn or purge wounds, and also to support the being, to strengthen it, and above all to teach us to live our experience by relieving us of burdens we carry from our incarnational experience and closing scars.
Everything that happens to us in this bodily experience is calling us to understanding, to comprehension. The encounter with suffering is a call to meet with the dharma, but for that reason we need to light the way to not get lost in emotion or pain, to let go of that which does not belong to us and focus on the reason for our experience, which is understanding. Therefore it is necessary to search for a spiritual path. We need the help of silence, of the connection with God incarnated in plants (entheogens), of the universe speaking in us and in the forest to reconnect with ourselves, to be guided to our inner master. The diet plants are ancient and wise teachers, serving humanity for millennia, giving us the opportunity to be guided to understand what life calls us to understand, in order to heal. The plant master accompanies you on your journey, strengthening you, opening what needs to be opened, burning and purifying what needs to be cleansed, and also healing you on a physical level, as they are also purifying, anti-carcinogenic, revitalising, and so on.
The Shamanic Diet is an opportunity to understand life on earth, to begin the search for understanding of existence in its totality and karma; an opportunity to build the resilience and strength needed to rise beyond our suffering, and through understanding let go and free ourselves from the circumstances that bind us to suffering.
The diet is an opportunity to listen to yourself and your heart. Everything else is silenced, including the noise of food becoming very simple and silent (mono food), and we isolate ourselves from the world for a few days. It is a search for silence so that we can listen to ourselves and open the heart. To open the heart, we must first find it and feel its voice. We need to pacify the mind and body through isolation and silence. The master plant guides us to listen to that voice, to hear ourselves, to perceive the rhythm of the universe through nature and its essence in ourselves. To feel the wind, the sunrise and sunset, to begin to understand the meaning of existence and our real being.
The diet is a practice to return to the essential, to silence. Therefore, we stay in tents in nature returning to the primordial in our being. Through the diet, we begin to return to our true nature by leaving our comfort zone, leaving behind the beliefs of a culture based on sumptuary and excessive comfort. We begin to realise our body and its functions as well as marvel at the experience of inner perception by understanding our immensity in solitude, which is the first thing that plants show us. It is the beginning of humanising ourselves, by living fully the experience of being here and now.
Plants are a medicine
The Shamanic Diet is an opportunity to go as deep as possible in healing with Master Plants, because they go to the heart of the being, impregnating their wisdom in it. We must remember that plants, and this spiritual work, are a medicine for the body, mind and spirit. This opportunity must be treated with the care and respect that comes with the sacred and ancestral knowledge that is brought to us through millennia of knowledge stored in the Amazon since the beginning of time. Healing with Master Plants is not really about doing many more Ayahuasca ceremonies, to receive more healing or knowledge, but above all to bring to the heart the teachings and understanding that we are able to receive, assimilate and understand. The Diet is also a work of integration of the ceremonies and really bring to the understanding and circumstance of our life the fruits of this inner work.
The whole inner evolution of working with Master Plants is a deep holistic process that encompasses our whole being. Each Ayahuasca ceremony is an invaluable opportunity if prepared and integrated correctly. Silence and nature open that inner space that allows us to settle and integrate what is opened and shown to us in the ceremonies – that is why the opportunity of the diet is incredible. For us, a retreat with a shamanic diet in silence and isolation, is the most correct way to digest and work deeply with the medicine that involves this immense opportunity for humanity that is Ayahuasca and Master Plants.
Sanango
April 17th 2023
If you’d like to participate in one of our retreats with Shamanic diets, then please have a look at our retreat calendar here.
A Deep Immersion with master plants usually includes multiple shamanic diets, depending on the length of your stay. To learn more about the opportunity of the Deep Immersion and a long process with shamanic diets and Ayahuasca, click here or write us via info@sinchiruna.com.
