by Ross Heaven
It is a discipline, after all, to apply the lessons of these sacred teachers to the world we live in and act accordingly. Only the saints have managed it so far and most of us are not saints! So maybe we need to develop greater spiritual powers before that can happen. Ayahuasca is definitely an aid to that and an immensely valuable teacher. But give it a little time and when a movement has gathered of people who are aware of a deeper truth, then it may be San Pedro’s time. But, of course, that does not preclude anyone who feels themselves ready from exploring San Pedro now.
How do you feel the spirits of San Pedro and ayahuasca differ or relate?
Heaven: The stereotype seems to be that ayahuasca is a female spirit while San Pedro is male. I’ve also heard it said that ayahuasca is serpentine, winding like a snake so we must track its meanings to decode what it is telling us, whereas San Pedro is “straight like an arrow” and takes you directly to the answers you seek.
Those, however, are just projections. La Gringa’s experience is that ayahuasca is a male spirit and San Pedro is the female but, at the end of the day, of course they are neither. They are plant intelligences and energies. We may project on to them whatever we wish since we are the great creators and our minds can shape realities, but it doesn’t change their essential natures.
My perception (or projection) of San Pedro’s spirit is that it takes the form of a matador, sword in hand, drawing a protective line in the desert sand to signify our boundaries and the power contained within them. A proud and Dignified warrior-spirit. Interestingly enough, when I drank San Pedro with another person in the hills above Cusco she saw exactly the same thing. But I can’t say that this is San Pedro’s face. I am reminded of Don Juan’s comment to Castaneda about Mescalito, that our allies take many forms (for Castaneda Mescalito was at different times a moth and a dog), and the form that they take probably depends on our own needs, psychologies, and perceptions, and is not a quality inherent in the plants themselves.
What have you discovered in regard to the cross-cultural use of plants for healing?
Heaven: My earliest experiences of plant spirit shamanism were as a boy on the borders of Wales in the British Isles, when I met and worked with an old sin eater and herbalist (a story told in my book The Sin Eater’s Last Confessions, 2008). Since then I have traveled to different cultures to learn from the plants and shamans and it has always interested me that the techniques and approaches they use are so similar. Why that should be, and how a sin eater in Wales could know the same facts about which plants would heal a particular disease and then employ the same methods for working with them as a shaman in a small town in Haiti or a curandero in the rainforests or mountains of Peru was always a mystery to me. They’d never spoken to each other, after all, or learned each other’s techniques. They didn’t even know of each other’s existence.
It’s a question I’ve put to all of these healers and the answer has always been the same: “Their spirits told us. We asked the plants and they taught us how to heal.”
The biggest challenge in this for the Western mind is to take what they are saying literally. For us it defies rationality that plants have intelligence, can communicate with us, and have a healing intention, so we tend to dismiss the shaman’s words as a metaphor or a quaint misunderstanding of what Western materialist science “knows” to be true. But if we listen to what they say and allow, beyond our own paradigms and egos, that they may actually know what they’re talking about, then our eyes are suddenly opened and we understand that they are gifting us a profound and fundamental truth. In Terence McKenna’s words, that “nature is alive and is talking to us. This is not a metaphor.”
And then of course we have our own San Pedro experience and, to quote the Oracle in The Matrix, we know in our bones and balls that plants are conscious, aware, and intelligent, and much more evolved than us. They were the first citizens of this planet and have a wisdom that is ancient compared to our fleeting time on Earth.
The central cross-cultural instruction for working and healing with plants then is simply this: open your mind and listen and you’ll learn all that you need to know.
The world is changing. The current “global” (by which we really mean Western or capitalist) financial crisis, property crash, and environmental problems we face are evidence for many that our take on reality just isn’t working and people are, I think, inclined to look for new solutions that, paradoxically, they are finding in old ways. It is the shamanic wisdom-keepers who are providing the new (and ancient) truths that have real meaning and application.
Many people have found their answers in ayahuasca and in this sense have become the Earth’s pioneers seeking new worlds of understanding and, like early explorers and navigators, returning home with their strange fruits and wondrous tales of adventure. The next step is for these truths to become more widely accepted as self-evident and employed in this reality so we can all grow from them. This step, I think, is the work of San Pedro and its time is approaching fast.
Considering the transition of the generally accepted name of the cactus, from the traditional huachuma (Andean), achuma (Bolivian), to the Christian influenced San Pedro, in what ways is the cactus already affected, effected, or deepened by cross-culturalization?
Heaven: I’ve been talking about old school shamans—those with lots of ritual as part of their ceremonies and lots of Catholic symbols and artifacts. My teachers believe that this format is directly related to the coming of the Spanish and their imposition of a new cultural identity on Peru and its ceremonies, including concepts of sin and punishment that never existed in the country before.
Before the Spanish, work with San Pedro was more natural and flowing and the plant rather than the shaman was regarded as the healer—very much like the ceremonies we now run in fact. These ceremonies are therefore a “backward evolution” or devolution, back to the first ceremonial form these healings would have taken, where the plant itself is the maestro.
Our ceremonies are less ritualistic, for example, take place in daylight because San Pedro takes power from the sun, and the brew is much stronger so the ceremony becomes an uninterrupted flow of communion with the plant spirit. This, according to those who know the history of Peruvian healing better than I do, is closer to pre-Hispanic rituals.
It is true that San Pedro ceremonies were undoubtedly altered by the beliefs and customs of other cultures, but strip these glosses away and allow the plant to speak for itself and its spirit remains as it ever was.
It is a strange God that San Pedro introduces us to though—at least as far as our Western mind-set goes. I was rereading Jim DeKorne’s book the other day [Psychedelic Shamanism, Loompanics Unlimited 1994] and he says the same thing about other entheogens: that under the influence of teacher plants our quaint ideas about a loving father—God, Blake’s “Nobodaddy,” “old man in the clouds”—who will solve all our problems for us, must inevitably vanish as we become aware of a deeper truth.
What San Pedro shows us, for example, is that there is no great cosmic father outside of us; instead we are responsible for ourselves. That might sound like a heavy burden to some people but in fact there is great freedom and power in this because we are also freed from rules and empowered to find our own ways. I suppose that the intelligence of the universe that San Pedro guides us to is still “parental” in a sense, but in the rather different sense of a father who gives his sons and daughters the liberty—without judgment—to find their own solutions and make their own mistakes.
What San Pedro does, however, at a very personal level, is show us the consequences of our choices. The outcome in most cases is that we naturally choose, without force or coercion, to act more lovingly anyway because when we understand the power of our thoughts, words, choices, and actions, and the connections between us there is simply nothing else we can do. Nothing else would make sense.
So again, while San Pedro has no dogmatic pronouncements to make or any download of rules we must follow, the outcom
e of our work with this plant is personal change so that we do evolve and become more compassionate beings. It is a beautiful process but one that can be very different to those we may have experienced with other plant teachers, and it is certainly a different order of truth to our experience of “normal” daily life.
What are your thoughts on the issue of sustainability regarding these plants?
Heaven: I suppose it is a judgment I choose to make but it bothers me when I see “spiritual tours” being advertised where you can visit Peru for a week and stay in a five-star hotel, go on a Machu Picchu trip, explore a “mystical portal,” do a little yoga, and, as part of the tourist experience, have an ayahuasca or San Pedro ceremony as well.
An itinerary like this belittles the visionary and healing experience and is therefore wasteful of these plants and our human energies and potential. It is not in keeping with the spirit of ayahuasca or San Pedro. On the other hand if—even by chance—a tour like this can reach one person and inspire them to truly heal or to find out more about the truth of their lives and the world around them, then I suppose there may be a deeper purpose to the sacrifice than we know.
On the trips I run we work with healing centers that exist to preserve the rain forest and its traditions. For every drink of San Pedro a new plant is sown and another shaman is allowed to maintain and practice his art.
But that is just my choice. The lesson of San Pedro is that in the widest scheme of things there really is no right or wrong and no rules to follow, only actions and consequences, so we cannot impose our views on others. They must decide for themselves.
My feeling is that we reap what we sow but we should also sow what we reap. If we do not we may deprive ourselves of the very healing we need at an important time in our evolution, since these plants will not be available to us for long.
Has San Pedro, or any other plant, offered you advice regarding the ecological crisis or the so-called planetary crisis?
Heaven: Well of course, there is no “planetary” crisis. There is a human crisis but that is a different matter. My experience with teacher plants tells me that our planet, as a self-sustaining organism, has a liking for but no particular attachment to human life, and as a self-healing and homeostatic system it has ways to cure itself of the downsides of our presence if that becomes necessary and it will, quite rightly, fight for its own survival if need be.
Some of the environmental and economic shifts we are seeing now may be evidence of that correction but while we regard them as problems, to the Earth they may simply be the sore throat and runny nose of a cold that is a healing response to a virus that is screwing up its system. Even if all human beings were, like so much mucus, wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, the Earth would survive and so would its other species.
Another analogy is an ant nest. As human beings we’re not going to go out of our way to destroy a colony of ants, but if they start to become a nuisance in our own backyard or interfere with our quiet enjoyment of our own lives we certainly have that power and probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. To the Earth we are the ants and we must remember that.
Perhaps it is ultimately not in our destiny for the human race to be more than a footnote to the pages of history, but that too is a matter of choice, negotiation, and cooperation between ourselves and the planet we are a part of.
If we intend to survive then we need to really learn the ways of cooperation, consideration, and compassion and not just give lip service to them—and to understand the deeper truths of the world and ourselves.
This is certainly the message of the plants and particularly of San Pedro. But then again, when have human beings ever listened to reason!
My belief—I hope not too pessimistically—is that human beings have a limited time on Earth and I’m relaxed about that. We all came here with the clock ticking after all. No one gets out alive. For our children’s sake though, I would love us to be able to change and I’m sure it’s possible but it relies on us making appropriate new choices about how we see, feel, and act in the world. San Pedro can help with this, but it requires that people with the power to make changes choose to drink and explore its wisdom—and to be all they are capable of being. This of course means all of us.
PART THREE
San Pedro Healing
Remember who you are
Remember where you came from
PUMA*27
WE BEGIN this section with an analysis of some of the themes that tend to emerge during San Pedro healing, a sense, that is, of what participants in ceremony feel, experience, and learn about themselves and the world around them, and the ways in which healing can flow from this. It’s a little bit of number-crunching that serves as an introduction to the process if you’ve never drunk San Pedro before; or if you have, you might recognize some of your own process in the figures.
The numbers alone, however, cannot really give you a true sense of a San Pedro healing, which is by its nature personal, individually meaningful, and intimately connected to the life stories, the past and the present, of those who drink it. The anecdotes, in this respect, usually contain more truth, more “juice,” and more sense than the statistics. For this reason I have also included the accounts of four ceremonial participants, told in their own words, three of whom have drunk San Pedro with me. We hear from the following:
Tracie Thornberry was born in Australia and moved to Peru in early 2009. She is a drug and alcohol counselor and teacher. After recovering, via spiritual and plant shamanic methods, from a history of addiction herself (in her case to heroin and alcohol) she spent several years researching various rehabilitation and recovery methods before deciding to settle in Peru to pursue her studies with plant medicines.
Based on the results of this research, Tracie founded an addictions treatment center in Iquitos where she offers traditional Western counseling alongside the use of ayahuasca and San Pedro, and says that she is able to achieve superior results to those available from Western therapies alone. In her article she discusses her journey into and escape from addiction and the role that teacher plants have played in this, as well as her research and healing work with addicts.
Alexia Gidding is a United Kingdom-based counselor, therapist, and hypnotherapist who drank San Pedro for the first and second times during healing ceremonies with me in October 2009. As she recounts in this report, her first experience was anything but expected, but turned out to be one of the most important and healing (albeit also one of the most painful) of her life. Her story suggests one way in which San Pedro heals: by supporting us in what Alexia calls “a gentle but persistent way” to immerse ourselves fully in the reliving of past traumas that have not so much been dealt with as repressed. With San Pedro they can finally be released so that the poison they contain can also be let go.
Robyn Silvanen is a bodyworker living in the United States who first drank San Pedro with me in 2008. Hers is an interesting story of healing in the sense that not only did she experience the insights and emotional cleansing that is typical of San Pedro, but through the ceremonies she attended she has also, she says, been liberated from a number of physical problems and issues. Her life has changed as a consequence and many of her old, self-limiting, and debilitating patterns have been removed.
Daniel Moler describes himself as a “father, husband, writer, professor, artist, energy healer, dreamer, and friend.” His philosophy, quoting Terence McKenna, is that “we have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.” In his article he describes a healing that he and his wife undertook with San Pedro to cure a “heart condition” and how at the end of it he was able to address his fears and anxiety, some of it resulting from post-traumatic stress disorder, to discover “how to love: without fear, without anticipating return” because “giving oneself to another endlessly and selflessly is the only true to way to heal, to evolv
e.”
Sonna-Ra is a healer from New Zealand who, as she relates, had to make a decision to live instead of incline herself toward death in order to receive the gifts of San Pedro. That in itself led to the possibility of an extraordinary encounter with this plant, and through that to a new and more joyful relationship with life.
All of these accounts are in some ways typical of the San Pedro experience, although every experience is unique and there is often more to it as well, which is far deeper than even the words of these participants can convey.
8
San Pedro Healing
An Overview
Ross Heaven
Simon Ralli Robinson is a onetime student of mine who joined my San Pedro healing journey to Peru in 2008. Depressed and confused at the time, his experiences with San Pedro turned his life around, relieving him of decades-old grief and helping him to see the world in a more earthy and holistic way than his previous beliefs had allowed.
Simon was working as an online business manager for a gaming company prior to his ceremonies, but after drinking San Pedro he knew that he couldn’t, and didn’t want to, return to this job or his old life, so he left his company and moved away from Gibraltar where he had been living and began a master of science degree at Schumacher College in the United Kingdom. He now has a qualification in environmental science after writing his thesis on the healing potentials of teacher plants and spends his time between the United Kingdom and Bolivia.
