My experience with plant medicine
“What needs to heal, in order to move forward?”
From my diary
In August 2022, I went with to the Sacred Valley in Peru. I went in expecting to just practice yoga day and night. Don’t you love when reality outperforms expectations? This is that story.
As I prepared for my month-long stay, I did my research and quickly learnt that many people travel to the Sacred Valley for transformational experiences with different types of plant medicine. I was definitely not one of those people.
(By the way, one of my friends wrote a wonderful article if you are curious about what plant medicine is. You can find it here)
It was 30 days of listening to plant medicine stories from random (and, oh so interesting!) people that I met. They all seem to preach the same creed: “it’s like 5 years of therapy in one day”. Needless to say that with double digit years of therapy under my belt, I was skeptical. However, a series of events led me to change my mind, and the most important one was that I was constantly triggered by thoughts of my father, with whom I had ended our relationship abruptly and at a young age.
San Pedro is the medicine that I took. Its name comes from being the one that holds the doors to Heaven. I learnt it is a powerful empathogen, that it usually helps you access feelings of love, and that intention, as you go into the ceremony, matters. As I am writing this, I have the journal with which I prepared for the ceremony right next to me. I am touched as I re-read my intentions.
I went in on a gloomy Thursday morning at 8 am to the shaman’s house after journaling the night before about what Heaven meant for me. “Love and peacefulness”, that’s what it means to me. I had a clear intention, I wanted to heal from a rooted pain that I didn’t know where it was stored, but I could see manifest itself daily in various ways. My pain’s preferred costume was fear: fear of doing something wrong, of being wrong, fear of not being liked. I walked through life waiting for permission. I did not feel like a free agent, and the voice in my head was clear about how I was never enough to afford the luxury of spontaneity. When did this self-talk become so negative? Why? But most importantly, what needed to heal for me to move forward?
That day, of course, I was also afraid, and I remember my legs trembling and even tearing a little bit before sipping the San Pedro. I looked at it and thought “please heal me” and at first, I only concentrated in keeping it in, so that it could work its magic.
Soon, the dizziness started. I was feeling cold. And without even realizing, I found myself not being able to control my tears. I sobbed, I covered myself with blankets, I didn’t want the others to see me or listen to me, I wanted to be invisible.
The shaman’s assistant came and offered me to drink cacao. I didn’t know if I wanted it, but I said yes; she brought it and I fearfully asked, “is it ok if I drink it?”. That moment, as simple as it was, was a turning point. After I posed my question, what I saw was that she was looking at me with pity, like feeling sorry for myself that I wasn’t able to even make the smallest of decisions and I needed her approval to drink the cacao. It was the first time in my life I felt pure shame -not the effect of shame, but shame itself. And I could not stop crying.
At one point, the couple I was doing the ceremony with stood up and left the room. I looked at the shaman and told him “I hope they didn’t leave because of me”. He replied: “if they did, it is not about you, it is about them”.
Let me say it again. He replied: “if they did, it is not about you, it is about them”.
Suddenly something unlocked, it was as if he was telling me a revelation, something that opened my eyes to new knowledge.
We used our time together to talk about me, and we talked extensively about my father, which was not planned, but it was what came up. “Maybe he didn’t know how to love you, or maybe he was repeating how they treated him”, said the shaman. He also told me he could see I carried a lot of embarrassment, and so I shared: “I feel shame for not having a relationship with him”.
It was time for the third and final opportunity to sip a little more medicine, and now the shaman started playing frequency with a gong. He played intense, deep, dark frequency. And it flowed. It flowed so much. I was looking straight at the golden gong, and every time he hit it, I could feel the vibration inside my body, especially around my heart. It was moving energy, it felt like streams of water flowing, and that water was carrying the profound shame that had emerged through the ceremony. By the time the gong ended, that shame was drained, it had found its way out of my body.
What happened afterwards was simply beautiful. I remember feeling incredibly happy. I just couldn’t stop smiling. It was the restoration of innocence after experience. I can’t explain it, but I got to know and see how my soul is innately good. All that fear I had about what I was going to find proved inappropriate and a disconnect. It was the purest of feelings; it was child-like curiosity; it was joy; it was permission granted forever. It was the integration between knowledge and feeling.
By the end of the day, I went back to my room and jotted down some thoughts while I was still feeling the medicine. Here they go:
I knew it before I felt it. But today I suffered through the pain. I had the sensorial experience to match what I first learned in my brain.
It was not about me. It was about them. I saw my soul and it’s beautiful. I saw me feeling happy. And there was no more shame. There was joy.
Protect your innocence. Some will take you for granted in your kindness. Set boundaries. People will come back.
We are all acting out of our own trauma.
That night I slept so deep. The next morning, I woke up feeling relaxed, calm, and peaceful. Most of all, I felt deeply grateful for what had happened and for the newfound knowledge I had gained about myself.
That feeling of gratitude has stayed with me throughout these years. This experience was an inflection point in my life. It was certainly not what I wanted going in. But, as with many things in life, it was what I needed.
Thank you for reading,
Julieta
Sacred Valley, Peru, August 2022
