The Truth of Healing
Master Plants are sacred healing tools that require a deep understanding and a rigorous process of preparation on the part of those seeking to integrate into this ancestral tradition. As the popularity of these practices expand beyond the jungle, so do challenges related to their adaptation, and the preservation of respect and purity in the application of these medicines, which are fundamental to their efficacy and cultural significance.
In this article, Sanango speaks of the importance of maintaining the essence and traditional methodologies of working with Master Plants, especially at a time when their use has become commercialized in urban contexts. He examines how the disconnection of “civilized” man from nature implies a greater difficulty to understand and use these plants effectively. Furthermore he emphasizes the need for deep preparation and respect for these traditions, recognizing that the knowledge acquired over centuries by Master Healers/Curanderos is crucial to ensure that these means of healing maintain their integrity and wisdom in an ever-changing world. Also that for real and effective healing we must seek individualized treatments in appropriate contexts depending on the affliction we wish to heal.
Seeking the real path of freedom from pain and afflictions with Master Plants
Until very recently in the jungles of Peru, at the beginning of what they call the Ayahuasca boom, there was still clearly the presence of the Master Healers as wise men and healers of their people, masters who had total mastery of the art of the Master Plants. For whom the jungle was a pharmacy, whose medicines spoke through the plants. They were called Vegetalista Doctors or Curanderos or “simply” Masters (Maestros). With specialties such as Master body-workers (who heal with their hands the joints and muscles); Master perfumers full of essences of flowery waters, perfumes of flowers or barks such as cinnamon that speak to the body with the medicine to heal or purify, through the perfume; Ayahuasca masters, Toé masters and (shamanic) diet masters who have learned the “chant” of the plant and with their invocation bring all the potential of different master plants such as Ajo Sacha, Chiric Sanango or Bobinzana. Specialized in their knowledge and art, developed in shamanic diets and works of understanding and isolation over many years and/or a long disciplic work through their ancestors.
In this reality, the initiate or called to this art, who decided to work with master plants, went through several phases of preparation and understanding. Taking into account that in the communities of the Amazon the experience is linked to the forest, and is alien to the problems, paradigms and circumstances of a life based on productivity, which is our western urban reality. Circumstances of the modern world that derive in slavery of disconnection, with the true human reality, that derive in addiction to substances or emotions, or other forms of compulsions and/or imbalance of dehumanization. Very different from those who already lived or live today in very few and remote places, truly connected to nature. Yet still, to understand the world of plants, they seek much preparation and understanding through the “shamanic diets”, solitude, discipleship work etc… Working with Master Plant medicine is much easier in these realities for the healer and as well as the one suffering seeking healing. However, they are seen with much more seriousness and humility than in our culture. For the millennia old tradition of respect for nature and the Masters and Entities contained therein is fully conscious in the Amazonian psyche. The “white” or “civilized” man needs much more work.
When the Master Plants arrived, far beyond the Amazon, to places totally foreign to the Amazonian cosmovision, the adaptation has resulted in various losses of purity with respect to the methodologies developed for centuries in a “science of consciousness” or technology that allows an efficient and safe work with plants that modify perception. In this contact with the western urban mentality the paradigms and egos derived from a culture of consumption and beliefs that stimulate this has become what we live today with advantages and disadvantages in the face of the work of Master Plants. As we are now in Europe, we have also adapted to this vision with more errors than virtues at the beginning, but we have tried to do serious work. Part of these adaptations is to give “Ayahuasca retreats”. But it is clear to us that master plant medicine needs much more depth, and that the retreats are also an opportunity to become familiar with the plants, to understand the existence of this world that those of us who are immersed in it live in. World or reality that manages to heal through the understanding of a vibratory and subtle universe that encompasses all realities and dimensions. Realities that we can glimpse very faintly through much work and dedication to the world of healing. Retreats then can be a part of working with master plants, a way to familiarize ourselves with them, to seek understanding, but unfortunately they are not strictly for our own benefit.
From this point of view we have understood that our fundamental mission is to return to the root, to the truth of the healer, and to develop an even more serious work, because the opportunity of plants as healing masters of humanity is immense. We need then to live that opportunity with all the work involved, sacrifice and intention to seek healing in the silence of the forest, in a real retreat with the masters embodied in the plants. As we mentioned, it is more difficult for the western psyche to immerse in the “World of Plants”. Therefore, the preparation is more important, the decoding and purification, the unlearning of limits. This was traditionally done with great care in communities that fully lived the tradition approaches of the Curanderos.
One of the great afflictions that the modern world lives in the big cities is so-called “addiction”. It is more than proven that plants, in the context of the healer’s work, can even help to heal this suffering. But it is clear that this is not a kind of “magic”. Plants do not do our personal healing work. And addiction is precisely an affliction that calls us to heal, understanding the roots of our pain that is a call precisely to seek understanding. You can perhaps go to a retreat and familiarize yourself with this vision of medicine, but you need to be the architect of your own miracle. Compulsions or soul wounds, also called trauma, addiction or depression, are pains that often enslave our lives for years or perhaps as long as one can remember. We therefore need a context that is respectful of the mind and body and attached to a science of the soul, to a real working truth. Not the projection of “spiritual” miracles that could happen in the immense compassion of the entities that allow us this work – but the plants are not there to do our work of understanding, they are not a spiritual by-pass based on a concoction. We need to seek understanding and with it healing by giving ourselves the seriousness, the sacrifice and the time that your being is demanding through your affliction.
The work with Master Plants in this context of treatment or immersion, begins with a period of purification, a cleansing with various purges. Depending on the circumstances of the affliction we need this purging to be very deep, a process of preparation of silence and physical and mental detoxification of substances, beliefs, fears and compulsions, frequencies or energies that we could also call “demons”. It is essential process that allows us to really open ourselves to work with plants through the breaking of paradigms, the beginning of the search for self-knowledge and openness to the connection with oneself, with nature, with God, with the earth and the universe. A new beginning of learning to learn in order to initiate the inner rebirth.
That is why a serious work with plants needs the Shamanic Diet which is the greatest opportunity for harmonization and knowledge, digestion of knowledge and reconnection with your inner world and through it the divinity and the universe. The sessions and ceremonies are an incredible opportunity, with healing and wonder, the entrance to a spectacular and incredible world that brings with it the possibility of opening our perception. However, in the West this has created the ‘utopia’ that one can heal great afflictions only through a few sessions in diverse contexts. One comes to believe that Ayahuasca is a magical concoction or can be detached from the healer. It is not so, it is a symbiotic work, and plant and healer are the tools of one-another.
Traditionally, the work of healers is a personalized work, it is a work between the channel of the subtle world which is the Master, the channeling of a plant in a state of understanding of the subtle worlds, of old Masters who sleep in the plants, the gems, the perfumes, the rivers and the mountains or in the elevation of the divine silence, worlds of entities, icaros, mantras. Like any medicine or therapeutic work, it is one-on-one in a healing dance if the affliction requires it. Ayahuasca and other Master Plants are tools of the healer’s work, and the healer is the healer of the plants, entities and chants. But the use of these tools depends a lot on the real context that the healer can create through his understanding and dedication, his vibratory capacity or mastery of mantras or icaros manifesting frequencies that heal, capacity that they have developed in their personal history to be able to turn to the truth of a real Dharma of healing. This capacity demands a development of many years, preparation and absolute surrender to this form of understanding of a technology of consciousness. A Divine Science that is a form of understanding that needs to be opened with humility, respect and compassion. With much respect to our limits but in the search to walk to the understanding of going far beyond our circumstance.
The work within a treatment is totally personalized. Although the Ayahuasca sessions are public or with several participants, the consultations, the design of the treatment, as well as the different diets or plants that the participant is going to take, is a personalized work. It it is a work for which the healer needs time, needs to internalize with the participant. During a process of immersion with plants or treatment at Sinchi Runa we have several stages to be able to initially elucidate what is happening and then repair, harmonize or burn the “bad” with the help of plants. These stages are not fixed and depend on each particular case. But generally we have a stage of purification or cleansing, opening and reconnection, which is the beginning of the work. And then we move on to the part where the healer uses useful tools and plants to infer what is going on. Obviously at all stages he is doing this but it is much more so when we get past the purification work. Finally, there is a closing, a protection of the work accomplished. Giving the person the necessary tools to protect him/herself and also to adapt to his/her functionality in the world from which he/she comes. Returning to his world, but more efficient and integrated to the earth, connected to themselves and with it to the universe.
We want to go back to the real reason of medicine with plants, to really be servants of the Master Plants in their mission of healing and awakening of a new humanity. A humanity with much less fear of itself. Connected to its inner wisdom and truly free of bondage.
Sanango, August 2024
At Sinchi Runa we offer deeply personalised healing work in the traditional manner, for those seeking to overcome difficult afflictions such as Depressions, Traumas, Compulsions and Addictions via Personal Treatments, as well vision quests for those seeking self-knowledge and understanding in Deep Immersions.
We also offer Ayahuasca ceremonies and Shamanic Diets on our Retreats.
