My Plant Medicine Experience in Brazil

Ceremony Begins The Moment You Commit

You may have heard this phrase before, but it’s true. Anyone who’s engaged in intentional psychedelic work may tell you that you start to notice patterns, themes, certain emotions or memories emerge long before you even ingest a psychedelic substance, but as soon as you commit to it. Not only do themes start to emerge, but as Jimmy puts it, the “pot gets stirred.”

This is exemplified early on in Jimmy’s journey, not with the backdrop of a jungle or a vision of a goddess, but in a crammed Boeing 737 with a negativity in the air that seemed to infect every passenger, one by one. What should’ve been 17 hours of travel turned into 30 hours, including a missed layover and prolonged anticipatory anxieties over what was to come.

It wasn’t engine problems or personal misgivings, no. Just another human being on the plane, having an arguably worse day than he, but bringing with them a theme of patience and compassion within Jimmy, as he bore witness to the chaos while being in a grounded state.

Witnessing someone getting removed from the plane by police, and the consequent effects, reminded him of the butterfly effect: how one tiny incident can impact more than we could ever know.

How many people missed their flights, missed a cruise, missed a loved one’s wedding? How many people had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars because they needed to find a last-minute hotel? What about the pilots and their schedules? The impact is inconceivable.

Of course, these things happen every day, but that’s the point. We’re all interconnected, whether we like it, chose to be, or not. And in Jimmy’s story, I think you’ll see truly how powerful a force “community” is. 

Background on Jimmy’s Healing Journey

Trigger Warning: Suicidal Idealation

Jimmy was coming into this experience after taking a long break from ayahuasca— a little over 3 years. He had been actively supporting ayahuasca ceremonies for a few years, but in December of 2022, his personal experience drinking ayahuasca led him to become deeply destabilized.

He described this time as a “potent suicidal episode” but has since healed from that and is doing much better mentally. He attributes this episode to the psychedelic “non-specific amplifier” effect, which causes subconscious feelings, or feelings that we’ve pushed down and ignored, to come to the surface.

When Jimmy reflects on his own healing journey, he’s honest with himself, and recognizes this little black box of content within him that he refused to touch in medicine work. 95% of his psyche was ready to be explored, but that other 5%? No way, no how. Off limits.

Through his harrowing experience in December of 2022, he realized that that little black box, that 5%, was actually what he needed to work on the most. Through that realization, he grew the confidence and made the commitment to say that he was willing to work on every part of himself, even the darkest corners and most painful parts of his being.

It wasn’t just the realization either, it was finding a therapist that fit his needs and could meet him where he was at. Through that, he has spent the past 3 years leaving no stone unturned, exploring every facet of himself (with the proper support).

Relationships were tested, and some didn’t survive, but what did happen was a blossoming of a new love, Jimmy’s current partner, which he recognizes he wouldn’t have been ready for had he not done that internal work.

With all of this trepidation in mind, deciding to visit Dr. Glauber Assis at his community in Brazil wasn’t easy, but he felt a clear distinction between his first ayahuasca experience and this opportunity.

He sensed a chapter reaching an end in his individual healing process, and sensed that he was going to show up to this experience differently. He wasn’t there for his own work, he was there for something greater than himself. 

“I felt in my soul that I would deeply regret not being here.”

His intentions for this journey to Brazil weren’t about his own internal work, it was about where his service goes from here: How can he better serve society and humanity? How can he show up greater as a community leader, especially in a time with so much divisiveness and upheaval.

He found that his life experiences were affirming this decision, everything was pointing to this experience bookmarking this chapter of growth in his life, and before he knew it, he was watching a woman get kicked off a plane on his way to Brazil. 

A Warm Welcome from the Jornadas De Kura Community

Not a Retreat, a Return

When Jimmy talks about Jordanas De Kura, the plant medicine center in Brazil, which literally translates to “healing journey” in Brazilian Portuguese, I can’t help but think of The Kingdom of Heaven, yup, the 2005 movie about the endless fight for Jerusalem.

The leper king, King Baldwin IV, envisions the Holy Land as a place for everyone to practice their own religions without persecution, or separation, but as he succumbs to leprosy, a dim reality sets in, and the movie ends with an eerie epilogue, noting, “nearly a thousand years later, peace in the Kingdom of Heaven still remains elusive.”

Jordanas De Kura, to me, is the Kingdom of Heaven that King Baldwin IV fought and prayed for, but never saw come to fruition. Through Jimmy’s storytelling, you get a glimpse into a community of wholehearted acceptance.

Glauber Assis describes it as a “cultural clash,” meant to be a positive meeting, not combative. In this clashing, it illuminates both the dissonance and alignment in the act of bringing cultures together, and in seeing and accepting the differences, we come together in a common thread of alignment.

Glauber Assis and his wife, Jacqueline, began their stewardship a decade ago, when they asked an elder of Santo Daime how they could help, and were given 11 liters of ayahuasca and told to open their own church in Brazil.

You can learn more about Glauber’s own healing journey and what led him to open his own center in our two-part podcast interview: Bridging Ancient and Modern Wisdom

“Not only are they almost like cultural ambassadors, but they built so much trust and reciprocity with a lot of different indigenous peoples and medicine cultures that all of those folks felt safe in coming here and providing an offering.”

Now they’ve found a rhythm, and a community staff that’s more like family than coworkers. Each person has a role in the community, creating something larger than themselves, accomplishing bigger things than just one person could. Maybe that’s the true magic of community.

Aside from the community that lived there, there were people who came to seek healing from all walks of life, the music industry, tech valley, and lawyers alike—all coming to learn from different cultures.

The Ayahuasca Ceremonies & Cultures Within

The Huni Kuin: Guardians of the Forest

Arriving on a Sunday, Jimmy would stay a week and experience four very different Ayahuasca ceremonies, each led by leaders of different traditions.

First, were two leaders of the Huni Kuin tradition, indigenous to the Amazon rainforest generally bordering Peru and Brazil, named Txana Ixe Sabino and Txana Tene who were brothers with more than 3 decades of age between them.

Seeing and chanting is their “modality” when communing with a higher power, which originates from the name of the bird, the Yellow-rumped Cacique (Cacicus cela) or “Txana,” which flies around the Amazon Rain forest mimicking other species of birds flawlessly.

Seen as a sort of master of all, with an inclination towards vocalization, the word “Txana” not only represents this sacred bird, but it’s also a designation for the leaders of this tradition, both political and spiritual.

Interestingly, they partake in Hampaya, the initiation ceremony to open up one’s vocal cords to channel the spirit of the Yellow-rumped Cacique or “Txana.” In this ceremony, the healer puts a fire pepper paste on your tongue to activate your singing voice.

It’s no wonder that they draw the names of their spiritual leaders from the forest itself, as they believe that the forest is a living entity in which they are its protectors.

In the first ayahuasca experience, led by the Huni Kuin, Jimmy recalls the leaders singing and chanting for 6 hours straight, something you can only do or witness to fully grasp. During this ceremony, he also came to learn the phrase “só alegria,” meaning “only joy.”

The Huni Kuin are often called the “Masters of Joy,” the concept behind it being that they believe all feelings can be transmuted into joy, not to ignore all other feelings, but to work through them until they become joy.

How did they become the masters of joy? Through centuries of abuse at the hands of others, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Colonizers brought slavery and disease while robbing them of their lands, either killing them or forcing them into labor in their own homeland, a story played out a thousand times, yet it never gets easier to hear (Huni Kuin [Kaxinawá] — Indigenous Peoples in Brazil).

After being decimated by the rubber boom in the 19th and 20th centuries, they could have been lost to history forever, but their perseverance is almost as powerful as their stewardship of the forest.

Between the 1970s-1980s, they led a powerful movement to regain their land rights and reclaim their land rights, winning the battle with the Brazilian government, and are actively recovering their traditions (About The Huni Kuin — Hunitribe).

Unlike many Amazonian tribes, the Huni Kuin will drink ayahuasca together as a community, going on night-long collective vision quests while singing together.

They also partake in Rapé, a sacramental “snuff” made out of tobacco and other medicinal plants. The Rapé is blown into the nostrils using a pipe called a “Tepi” and its effects are used as a tool for spiritual growth and healing.

As one article put it, “sharing Rapé with others is a deeply ingrained tradition in Huni Kuin culture, symbolizing generosity, hospitality, and mutual support” (Huni Kuin | Kaxinawa | Rapé | Maya Ethnobotanicals).

Kambó is another tool that they use for physical and spiritual cleansing: the poisonous secretions of the Amazonian tree frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor, also known as the Giant Monkey Tree Frog, a species of leaf frog.

The word “Kambó” has two meanings. It stands for the frog and its secretion, as well as the ceremony itself, which starts with making small burns on the surface of the skin.

Once the small burns are made, the secretion is applied to the burns, meant to offer pain relief, detoxification and immunity, through its bioactive peptides, as well as spiritual relief and protection.

Jimmy describes it as a deeply intense purging process while also providing a really great nervous system reset for him.

Omágua Kambeba: The People of the Water

The second ceremony was led by Adana Omágua Kambeba, representing the Omágua Kambeba people of the middle and upper regions of the Amazon River, known as “river dwelling people.”

Legend has it, the Omágua Kambeba were the first to make contact with Spanish conquistadors. In this tribe, the women were the warriors, and as these female protectors appeared from the forest, the conquistadors saw them and yelled “Amazonas.”

This first sighting in the 16th century led to how the Amazon river and rainforest got their names from the western world, the Spanish explorer Franscisco de Orellana deriving “Amazon” from the “Amazons” or female warriors in Greek Mythology.

Adana, as Jimmy puts it, is a “very powerful woman… having this fierceness to her again, yet this gentleness.” She personifies the “clash” of indigenous and western cultures in the psychedelic space by bringing together the power of modern medical practices with the power of ancestral knowledge and tradition.

Learn more about Adana’s life and mission in her feature in The Guardian

Not only is she the first medical doctor of the Omágua Kambeba people, but she’s stepping into a vacuum that desperately needs a voice like hers. For many of us, going to the doctors or hospital is the only option we have when we need medical care.

Many westerners may not realize the struggle that many indigenous people face when deciding to go to a medical doctor, or their shaman instead. Western medicine focuses on symptoms, diagnoses and medications, while indigenous practices allow for matters of the mind and spirit, as well the body.

This discrepancy causes indigenous people to refuse medical intervention, or not go at all, but Adana has begun to tackle this problem, mediating literal ER standoffs to get life-saving treatment to indigenous people while honoring their own beliefs.

As an MD, Adana was there as a precaution, but she’s also a shaman, chosen by her grandmother as tradition followed, because she showed strong signs that she was born to be a healer. There was a true backdrop of safety in the air as she supported journeyers with her medical, as well as her spiritual expertise.

So, not only did she serve as the doctor on hand, she also led the second ceremony, which was focused on recovery, song, and the healing nature of music (like the Huni Kuin).

The Kambiwa: The People of the Earth

Like Adana, Avelin Kambiwá was involved in the first and second ceremonies. Alevin is a powerful healer of the Kambiwa people of Northeast Brazil, a dry region in the backlands of Pernambuco. Other than this, they’re a small tribe of around 1,100 people, without much of a digital footprint.

Despite suffering from physical injury, Avelin offered songs of resilience, like a living embodiment of her practice.

When she isn’t in ceremony, she’s fighting the good fight. When thousands of Brazilian women marched for their rights in 2023, she spoke out to say “Indigenous women were the first target of attack since the invasion of Brazil. Our bodies, like Mother Earth, were seen by the Portuguese invader as an object to be subjugated, hunted, violated. With the Indigenous women’s movement, we make the leap from body-object to body-territory, and place ourselves on the front line of the fight to defend our rights.” (Thousands of Indigenous Women March for Their Rights in Brazil – Truthdig)

Like the female warriors of the Omágua Kambeba, it’s clear that the indigenous women of Brazil will continue to fight for their culture and will continue to make an impact.

Recommended Reading: Indigenous Health Equity and Psychedelic Practices Ft. Sutton King

Santo Daime & Umbandaime: 

The next ceremony was rooted in Umbandaime tradition, a syncretic blend of Umbanda, which is a Brazilian religion that merges African traditions and Roman Catholicism, with an added flair of channeling spirits or “orixás,” and Santo Daime, a religion that regards ayahuasca as a sacrament, and promotes a lifestyle of “harmony, love, truth and justice.”

This ceremony was more structured than the others, and included a blend of folk mysticism, Catholicism, and Afro-Brazilian culture.

Santo Daime was founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra who later became known as Mestre Irineu. The grandson of black slaves in Brazil, Irineu, travelled closer to the rubber industry in the 1920s to find work.

However, stolen seeds sent to Southeast Asia collapsed the rubber industry in Brazil, and the rubber industry was consequently one of the major factors in the Vietnam War of the 20th century (does it remind you of the butterfly effect perhaps?).

Once the rubber industry collapsed, Irineu began connecting with certain Brazilian indigenous groups, and decidedly went into the woods and drank ayahuasca for 8 days.

As legend has it, one of the entities he met during these visions was the Mother or Queen of the Forest, who gave him the recipe to grow “diame” which is the ayahuasca brew used in the Santo Daime religion.

The orixás mentioned earlier are gods and goddesses, or deities in the Umbanda religion, brought over to Brazil from Western Africa during the transatlantic Slave Trade.

Through drinking this brew, Jimmy came into connection with the orixá Yemanjá— Mother of all Beings, patron spirit of all rivers, and protector of women and children. Her legend states that from her tears, all rivers on Earth were created, and it was along these rivers that humanity grew and flourished. It’s interesting to note that Mary, Mother of Jesus is also very prevalent in Santo Daime work.

 Jimmy wouldn’t lie to us, and he admits that this was one of the most challenging experiences he’s had, however, he felt well cared for, well protected, and could feel the strength of the community around him. Through his own tenacity and with the support of the community, he was able to navigate this experience.

Jimmy also participated in the “feitio” (making of the medicine), including the manual smashing of the vines, or the “bateção”. He even planted his own Ayahuasca vine or “Jagube” (Banisteriopsis caapi).

Yepá Mahsã: Tukano People of the Northwestern Amazon Rainforest

As the week came to a close there was one more ceremony that Jimmy was able to partake in, lead by Buu Kennedy of the Tukano People, or Yepá Mahsã, which is their self designation.

The Tukano people live in the territory of Yuruparí, and share a common creation story with other people of the area, centering on the ancestral anaconda. This anaconda penetrated the Universe, travelled up the Rio Negro and Vaupés rivers with all of humanity’s ancestors inside its body, and distributed them along the river banks.

In the Yuruparí region, shamans are represented by the jaguar—a powerful, respected icon amongst these communities. The connection between the jaguar and shamanism is one that has permeated through many religions in Brazil for a very long time (The Jaguars of Yuruparí: Shamans of the Amazon Rainforest).

Buu’s approach to ceremony involved a lot of storytelling, and instrumentation (like chimes and drums), and Jimmy describes it as the deepest ayahuasca experience he had. 

Jimmy’s Key Takeaways

As Jimmy reflects on this experience as a whole, he’s reminded of a conversation he had with his therapist when he was trying to determine whether or not to go to Brazil.

His therapist asked him if he had any fears going into it, and he had two. First, he didn’t want this experience to inflate his ego, he had a very direct goal for this experience to be about his role in serving others, not himself. To this, his therapist responded, “Don’t let it go to your head, but let it get to your heart.”

Drawing on his own indigenous lineage, his therapist shared this phrase with him, and it stuck with him throughout the week in Brazil. He learned that there’s a way to be in service to others through the heartspace, and not just by using your brain.

The second fear was a fear of running away from our societal troubles. To make matters worse, Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE on the day he arrived in Brazil, giving Jimmy a sense of guilt for going to an all-inclusive retreat. Being in a seat of service, Jimmy didn’t want to treat this time as a vacation.

As any good therapist can do, Jimmy’s reminded him that medicine work has historically been an act of resistance by preserving indigenous culture in the face of colonialism, but also used in America in the 1960s as an act of counterculture. Given these tools, Jimmy found a way to use this experience to improve how he helps society.

Another takeaway that Jimmy had is the importance of physical health. At Jornadas de Kura, healthy vegetarian meals made with food from the earth around them were available every day, and rest was a priority after these intense ceremonies, and it highlighted the importance of the balance between mental health and physical health.

His last takeaway is a topic we just explored at length in: How Discomfort Helps You Heal

Jimmy learned in real-time that the mindful act of leaning into discomfort, and instead of having the intention of “feeling better,” perhaps it’s more fulfilling to reframe that intention to “how do I navigate the discomfort and suffering and challenges of being human?”

In this case, it’s not about tolerating discomfort, it’s about composting it. Think of discomfort as the potato and orange peels that end up in a landfill, but instead turning them into food for the earth. Now take that discomfort, and turn it into something that is vital to life, not just your life, but the community around you as well.