Ayahuasca diaries

Nobody handed me a manual when I started holding space. I learned the way most of us do: from my maestros, from mistakes, and from more than 600 guests who trusted us with their process over six years in the Peruvian Amazon.

Drinking the Serpent is the book I wish had existed then. It's written for practitioners — facilitators, apprentices, and everyone who works with this medicine and carries responsibility for other people's journeys. I wrote it with Dr. Caterina Conti, the physician who runs medical oversight and integration at our center, and Dominic Maccini.

What it offers someone who holds space:

HOW TO PREPARE PEOPLE — not according to the New Age folklore your guests arrive with, but according to the tradition: what the dieta actually does, how to work with intention, and the medical screening that separates a professional container from a reckless one. Undoing your guests' wrong ideas is half the preparation work — the book maps the most common and most dangerous ones.

HOW TO ACCOMPANY THE CEREMONY — what can actually happen in the maloka: the difficult trips, the panic, the accidents, the medical emergencies, and what a competent facilitator does in each case. This chapter exists because we wrote it with a doctor at the table — and because too many people are holding space today without ever having been taught crisis response.

THE WIDER PHARMACOPOEIA — coca, tobacco, toé and the other master plants: what a practitioner should understand about the tradition the vine lives inside, beyond the Western caricatures.

THE INNER POSTURE — from my seventeen years of Daoist practice: how to teach guests (and yourself) to flow instead of fight when the medicine is strong. Letting go isn't a mood — it's technique, and it can be transmitted.

AND ABOVE ALL, INTEGRATION — the phase that decides whether your guest's ceremony becomes a changed life or a fading story. If you work with people, this is the part of your craft with the highest return and the least training available. The book gives it the most weight.

My background: research scientist before the jungle, years of publications, and two studies currently running with two universities on this work.

Now living in the jungle I understand that actually is not a sickness. The cage is the problem not the person: school, 9-5 works, etc

These are not made for people who has the hunter genes...

This article is my revolutionary reflection on it.

We ADHD are not wrong or sick, the system.is.

Boom...

The Tao is not in the sutras.

It’s in the bucket you just filled with vomit,

in the mosquito biting your ass

while you pray for visions.

Spirits don’t arrive on cue.

They’re already squatting in the outhouse,

laughing as you run there for the fifth time.

They whisper in the diarrhea,

they rattle in the leaves,

they don’t need your gratitude journals.

The five senses are useful for trade—

to buy rubber boots,

to smell if the fish is rotten.

But they cannot measure the vastness.

One ayahuasca fart under the maloka roof

carries more truth

than a thousand professors at Harvard.

What hides the Tao?

Not the jungle—she’s naked,

sweating, swarming, stinking, alive.

What blinds you is the idea of being pure,

the mask of “I am holy,”

the stiff face of “I understand.”

Better to shit honestly

than meditate falsely.

To return to the real is simple.

Stop searching for visions.

Open your eyes:

the jaguar has already licked your soul clean,

the vines are already twisting through your veins.

Sit still, puke,

and laugh when the bucket splashes back.

That splash is the Tao.

Healing is not a shiny miracle.

It’s vomiting your father’s voice,

shitting out your mother’s fear,

and then dancing barefoot with the frogs.

Integration is not a certificate.

It’s remembering that the jungle spirits

don’t give a damn about your enlightenment.

They only ask:

can you walk home with humility,

with shit on your sandals

Proud moment: my new essay is live on Reality Sandwich — a field note from years in the Peruvian jungle about mapacho (Nicotiana rustica) as a medicine: protector, organizer, and stern teacher within ayahuasca work.

In ceremony I’ve seen tobacco used as prayer—smoke blown (sopladas) to open and close the space, seal icaros, and bring people back to their bodies. Ambil, rapé, infusions, and dietas each teach different qualities: attention, boundaries, courage. Different plant, different context, different relationship.

Tags:

Forests don’t have a leader.

No single tree decides who grows, who thrives, or who falls.

They communicate underground, share nutrients, warn each other of threats.

The forest is a living network.

What if our medicine communities could work the same way?

In my new article for Reality Sandwich, I explore a vision of plant medicine centers connected across the world — each autonomous, yet united like roots beneath the soil — through a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).

It’s about protecting traditional wisdom, empowering communities, and creating healing systems that grow like nature itself: resilient, interconnected, and free.

Read it here:

https://realitysandwich.com/medicine-dao-decentralized-like-the-forest/

Would love to hear your thoughts — could this be the future of plant medicine?

✨ Quantifying the Sacred ✨

Can you measure transformation?

Can you translate a vision into data, a purge into a graph, a soul shift into a survey?

This is what I asked myself after guiding over 200 people through ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian Amazon. The result wasn’t a theory, it was a dataset made of tears, laughter, silence, and rebirth.

I created a study. I tracked emotions, trauma markers, inner peace, and integration practices.

And yes,patterns emerged.

What I found:

Participants who stayed longer experienced deeper, more lasting peace.

Inner silence, not “insight,” was the real key to transformation.

Integration isn’t optional. It’s the path forward.

I wrote about this dance between the ineffable and the measurable in my new article for Reality Sandwich.

This isn’t about reducing the mystery. It’s about honoring the sacred with every tool we have,ritual and reason, vine and voice, ceremony and spreadsheet.

Because healing isn’t just mystical. It’s trackable, repeatable, and very, very real.

Not cocaine.

Not a stimulant.

Not a drug.

But a sacred leaf, chewed slowly with reverence in the high Andes and the upper Amazon. A plant that feeds the heart, warms the body, and grounds the spirit.

While the Western world criminalized coca, Indigenous peoples have prayed with it, sung to it, made offerings with it for centuries. It’s medicine—not just for the body, but for our disconnection.

I've written about this in my latest article for Reality Sandwich.

I speak from experience—years spent in the jungle, walking between science and spirit. Coca has become one of my greatest teachers. It helps with:

🌱 Physical stamina & altitude

🌱 Digestive balance

🌱 Blood sugar regulation

🌱 Emotional clarity

🌱 A deeper, grounded presence

#CocaLeaf #PlantMedicine #DecolonizeHealing #IndigenousWisdom #SacredPlants #AncestralMedicine #Ayahuasca #RealitySandwich #Healing #Spirituality #JungleMedicine #Ethnobotany #CocaNotCocaine

If we want to decolonize our relationship with sacred plants, we need to start by listening to what coca has always been whispering:

“Slow down. Be here. Give thanks.”

Read it. Sit with it. And let the leaves speak.