Ayahuasca - they call this plant Abuela, Grandmother.

She has a spirit...but if you do not yet know that plants are sentient beings, then you are not ready to receive her blessings.

She loves you, but she will not hesitate to bitch slap you across the rainforest.

It's not by coincidence that she appears in your life. I suggest that when she calls to you, go to her for healing. Prepare your body for the journey. Be humble and open that you may receive the miracle. 

I don't know all the Science, and frankly I don't care - that is not my religion, although I am fluent in its teachings.

I believe in experience, and I want to share mine with you:

In 2012, a million different things led me to Peru. 

I didn't know when I got on the plane to South America that ayahuasca was one of them.

After a long journey along the desert coast, over the Andes, past the glacier, through the cloud forest, around the ruins, and up the Amazon River, I found myself in the home of a witch doctor, an Austrian woman who retired many years prior from Western medicine. With a slight build, scarlet fingernails, and rich accent, she retained her European glamour while slapping at mosquitoes and coughing curses at the "thankless locals" she healed. 

She came to the rainforest decades ago, seeking - and finding - the cure for her own cancer amongst the 40,000 native plants. 

It was then that she traded the pharmaceuticals she once prescribed in the sterility of an Australian office for magnetic therapy and cupping in a bamboo cottage surrounded by banana trees in the jungle, but she kept the white coat because she was "a fucking professional!" 

While traditionally hospitable, she was also quite bitter, much like the strange herbs brewing on her kitchen shelves. 

We were there to observe her at work; she was at that time steadily reducing a tumor on the mayor's back. She also shared copious volumes of photos - breast cancers reversed, abdominal growths reverted, facial deformities corrected, countless strange things on the body that disappeared under her treatments.

It was fascinating stuff, and except for her brutal cough and sometimes vicious contempt for the natives who couldn't afford to pay her, she was a captivating storyteller.

She told us about publications, conferences, and panels where she shared her findings. She told us about the resistance she met, the rejection of her evidence, the mockery from the establishment. She told us about the camera crew that once greeted her at an airport and shoved microphones in her face, demanding that she explain her suitcase full of dried plant matter and powders splayed open for customs inspection. She told us how she told them to go to hell. She told us about the death threats from anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night, and the passionate compulsion it spawned in her to expose her Truth. 

"I can cure cancer," she told us, adding that the anonymous, hushed, angry voices from the nighttime phone calls told her to never say that.

And she told us about her shaman friend who lived just up the road, the one who facilitated the 6-months-long treatment that cured her own cancer. "You can visit him if you like and try it for yourself," she coughed out one evening.

The next day, volunteers from his compound dropped in for an unexpected visit, and they invited us to "come on by anytime!"

We packed up post haste, drank some coconuts, and hitchhiked the 40+ kilometers to "just up the road", where we asked to be let off at km marker 62.5 and began the trek through the jungle, over the bridge, and into his maloka. 

His center was named after a lost Incan utopia, and what happened there has taken me 5 years to process... 

Do you want to hear about it? Please join me when I share Part 2 of these ayahuasca diaries.

💛  Sara!