Based in rural Spain near the Camino de Santiago, we enjoy the distinct privilege of fully legal access to the most powerful agent of change known to humanity: psychedelic plant medicine. 

We do not take this responsibility lightly. 

We know from both personal experience and scientific research that it is only through careful preparation beforehand and dedicated followthrough afterward that the true potential of these plants can be realized.

This is not a magical solution that will free you from doing the inner work you instinctively know is necessary. In fact, it will likely do the exact opposite; plant medicine is an extremely powerful tool that will deepen, expand, and accelerate your journey inward, if and when you are prepared to harness its power.

Background

Once you are sufficiently prepared in body and mind, the most powerful tool — by far — that most of us will ever encounter for internal exploration, growth, and transformation, is plant medicine. Ayahuasca, amanita muscaria, psilocybin, San Pedro, and many more; throughout the world, and throughout time, human societies have organized themselves around the power of these plants.

Far from the synthetic substances with which they have come to be associated in the modern “war on drugs,” these are time-honored tools that have been an intimate companion, essential to human health and wellbeing, throughout our entire existence as a species.

In fact, there is good reason to believe that human consciousness as we know it only evolved as a consequence of our close relationship to the psychedelic mushrooms of the African savannah.

In traditional hunter-gatherer societies today, plant medicine continues to be an essential tool for maintaining personal and social vitality, stability, and clarity of vision.

In most of the world, our relationship to these plants was severed long ago by the advent of agriculture and its attendant organization of states and hierarchical religions. Our direct connection to higher states of consciousness or the divine was an intolerable affront to others’ pretensions of superiority.

The psychedelic rites that once marked our coming of age — giving us the depth of experience necessary to become a woman or a man, a full-fledged adult capable of living in personal, social, and ecological harmony — were replaced by the pale imitations of bar mitzvahs, confirmations, and fraternity hazing ceremonies.

This is not unique to the west, but commonplace in virtually all agricultural and industrial societies. Even the practice of yoga asanas and pranayama seems to have developed as a replacement for the entheogen soma, which was once employed as a far quicker and more effective path toward the ultimate goal of kaivalya that the original yogis sought.

Authentic experience

We have deep respect for traditional people and their traditional medicine, but in our view the western impulse to seek out personal or spiritual self-realization in a foreign and exotic locale is generally misguided.

The power of these plants lies in their ability to help us experience ourselves more deeply within, and we believe that for this process to be truly effective, we — like the traditional peoples who inspire us — need to develop our our practices and methods, in a context that makes sense for our own lives.

Because of plant medicine’s hallowed place in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, many people in the west have come to think that an “authentic” experience requires them to go to the jungles of Peru for a weeklong retreat where they will participate in ceremonies developed in an alien cultural context, take part in rites conducted in a language they don’t understand, and connect to the power of a natural setting they can’t comprehend.

This, by many metrics, is far from being an authentic experience.

In almost all traditional societies, plant medicine is reserved almost exclusively for shamans, and for very specific purposes, such as healing the ill or divining where to find game during the hunting season. It is made available to other members of the group only at key moments of their lives, most often for coming-of-age ceremonies, where they play an invaluable role in the process of becoming a fully-fledged adult.

The entire advent of “ayahuasca retreats” and other similar concepts is a very recent invention, designed to sell foreign tourists a highly stylized version of what is actually a very different traditional practice. It would be something like going to visit the Notre Dame to get an authentic taste for life as a Catholic monk.

These objections aside, it is obvious that many westerners have had powerful experiences in the Amazon, just as many atheists have had powerful experiences listening to the choir sign latin hymns immersed in the majesty of Notre Dame.

Even though many essentials of the traditional practices have been changed to appeal to the expectations of “spiritual tourists” for whom the bulk of the ceremony is lost in translation, the medicine still finds a way to work its magic.

The more significant problem in our view is that when you fly back to the land of gasoline, fiber optics, and coffee from which you escaped, it is extremely difficult to integrate the lessons from your Amazonian experience into our modern reality with all its pressures and obligations. How do you explain what you felt to your partner, your kids, or your boss? How do you make sense of a brief glimpse of oneness, of spiritual bliss?

It can be quite challenging to translate such powerful experiences into practical reality, and often the sheer difficulty of the task holds us back until the inertia of daily life takes over and we fall back into more or less the same routines as before.

Without proper preparation — specific to your needs, to your reality — and steadfast commitment to integration of the lessons learned afterward, plant medicine may be mind-blowing, but it is unlikely to contribute meaningfully to your personal growth and development.

Unfortunately, it’s almost heretical to point out the obvious fact that the entheogenic tourism industry is driven largely by the false promise of a spiritual bypass. It is sold to us as though it were a magical shortcut to happiness or health or enlightenment, biohacking for the soul that will obviate the need to do the internal work that we all instinctively know is necessary.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Plant medicine will put your problems front and center. It will help you to see them with incredible clarity, and feel them with incredible power. Everything you hoped to escape or erase will suddenly loom up inside you, more real than real. You need to be ready; not just willing, but capable and eager to see and feel more deeply within. When you are properly prepared in both body and mind; when you’ve reached a level of physiological calm and psychological awareness that will allow you to greet this opportunity with open arms, the experience is nothing short of transformational.