Ayahuasca Ceremony Video with Shipibo Shaman - Enrique Lopez

Shipibo Shaman Enrique Lopez - Ayahuasca Ceremony at Mishana, Peru November 2007








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Esquire Magazine - Ayahuasca Retreats

The Art of the Shipibo people of the Upper Amazon in Peru

A Gallery of the extraordinary art of the Shipibo people.

Howard G. Charing, is an international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism.




Visit the website for info about our Andean and Amazon Ayahuasca Retreats and work with Shipibo shamans and craft workers

A gallery of my shamanic art

I've posted a gallery of my artwork based on shamanism. Click 'view all images' below.

Jun Labo - amazing healer from the Philippines Part 2

Jun Labo in the Philippines, recorded August 2007.

Jun Labo - amazing healer from the Philippines Part 1

A video clip of Jun Labo. Recorded in the Philippines August 2007

Interview with Shipibo Ayahuasca Shaman Enrique Lopez in the Amazon Rainforest of Peru - Part 2

The second part of an interview with Shipibo Shaman Enrique Lopez. Interviewed at Mishana, Amazon Rainforest Peru, November 2007. Enrique discusses his early years in the indigenous Shipibo community in the Ucayali region of the Amazon Rainforest in Peru. Enrique talks about the Shipibo views on Ayahuasca and medicinal plants.

Tell us about the use of Tobacco?

Tobacco is very necessary for a shaman's work. Smoke protects against enemies and badness crossing your path. Before you light a mapacho you icaro it, then you blow the smoke onto your body before the session begins. You can also cure a child of susto (fright) by blowing smoke over it but babies are very sensitive and if very small, they can be made worse - cutipado - in which case you use agua florida. You can also chant to it and the mother's milk.

What is your state of mind and vision when you go around to each person before the session, blowing tobacco (mapacho) smoke?

I am asking the ayahuasca to give every one a good mareacion, or vision. The tobacco makes a kind of bridge with the ayahuasca. We normally prefer the cashimbo (Shipibo pipe) in a ceremony not mapacho cigarettes. It has a strong effect, and also calms people when the effects are too strong.

Some shamans drink pure juice of tobacco macerated with alcohol instead of ayahusca. First he drinks and goes off into another world and has a green vision. That means patterns only.


Sometimes the animals and things you see, have patterns on their skin. It happens when you sing in Shipibo, how do explain this?


What I do when I chant is to call the animals for protection. Otorongos may come near to us but sometimes they get too near and are ferocious and out of control. This can be caused by an enemy who has found a way to harm me. The thick bark and seeds of the Ayauma tree is good to protect against this. You take a vapor bath in it before the session.

Camalonga (a seed) is good too, it returns the harm from where it came and the wrong doer becomes ill. Lupuna and Catauhua are also good against brujeria (bad magic). Huayruro is not so much used.

Ajo sacha can be used in protective baths, for illnesses like arthritis, and as a powerful teacher. It makes you hard working, turns around a run of bad luck - saladera, helps you in fishing and hunting. You can also pour the ajosacha up the nose of the dog to make a good hunting dog. Also loose women (pishcotas) can be cured with ajosacha.

I left Roaboya in 1998 and went to live in Trujillo to sell healing plants and ointments made from boa, otorongo, bufeo colorado etc. I found many charlatans there selling any old thing. I worked mainly with banos florales and didn't use ayahuasca. I also felt a lot of envy from people there, and once it made me very ill. I couldn't walk, and was urinating blood so I went to Lima by bus and from there to Tingo Maria where it got much worse, and I only just got to Pucullpa to return to my community. I was 24 then. Everyone said it was dano (envy and bad magic). I cured myself with Catahua, Lupuna and Ayahuma. At the bottom of the saucepan we placed crushed green bottles before adding the plants and barks. When I was well I returned to Lima for a few years, and then my wife got a job as a cook at a tourist lodge, so that's how I came to live in Iquitos. My uncle Benjamin (who is from Pauyan) still works there occasionally. Authors note: Benjamin Ochavano a powerful Shipibo shaman.


How does a Shaman help people who have experienced harmful and negative sorcery?


Enemies can come from anywhere. If I heal someone, I undo someone's dano - illness from black magic - and that makes me the enemy of the brujo who tried harm or kill the person.

What is it important for an Ayahuasca shaman to know?

A shaman must know how to do three things;

They should know how to bring about the vision.
Second, how to bring the effects down again when a patient is suffering.
Thirdly, they must know how to close the session.
These are the most important things, but there are shamans who take ayahuasca without knowing them.


Howard G. Charing, is an international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism.

Visit the website for info about our Andean and Amazon Ayahuasca Retreats

Interview with Shipibo Shaman Enrique Lopez in the Amazon Rainforest - Part 1

An interview with Shipibo Shaman Enrique Lopez. Interviewed at Mishana, Amazon Rainforest, Peru, November 2007, by Peter Cloudsley and Howard G Charing.

I was born in a Shipibo community called Roaboya which is on the River Ucayali about 10 hours downstream from Pucallpa. Roaboya means the place where the Koto monkey lives. In Shipibo this kind of monkey is call Ro, but Mestizos tend to lengthen words, so they called the place Roaboya.

The first Mestizos to arrive in the area were loggers – Boya (Buoys in English) refer to the logs which they floated down to their saw mills. Actually there are two places; Roaboya Nativa and Roaboya Mestiza a bit further down river. When I was young, Angel Sanchez Vargas was the local Curaca – who is both a chief as well as shaman – he was my grandfather and he knew all about plants for healing, for giving visions and increasing human intelligence. They later named the school after him there.

Roaboya was the first indigenous community to be officially recognized 114 years ago. Later the river changed its course and the banks crumbled and many Shipibo people moved to form communities elsewhere on the Upper and Lower Ucayali. When the earliest missionaries came in the 1940s, at first the people didn’t want to know about their pharmaceutical medicines or clothes which they tried to give away.

The Shipibo didn’t wear Western clothes at that time and even refused to meet with them. But the missionaries were clever and brought sweets and presents, and impressed them with their water-planes and eventually succeeded in introducing their evangelical religion. The effect was to threaten Shipibo customs and create divisions in the community. Later in the 60s when I was in my infancy, my grandfather put up resistance to Western things and warned that his people should not forget their customs and ancestral knowledge. He forbade the use of Western clothes, and encouraged people to eat together from one central plate as a community.

His four wives were also shamans and helped to revitalize their traditions. Don Angel even learned Spanish through his plants, such was his faith! Nevertheless, today most of the Shipibo in Roaboya are nominally evangelicos. After he died, his cousin took over as shaman and he wanted me, at the age of 10, to help at ayahuasca sessions by smoking mapacho for protection while he chanted.

I told him I wanted to be a womanizer when I was grown up! And he made it happen by chanting a Huarmi Icaro. I also want to be a good fisherman and again he said yes, I could be, and so it was. By the time I was 14 it had come true, and I had women coming after me! However, I didn’t want to marry at that time. At the age of 16 I started taking ayahuasca, but my Mother didn’t want it - a womanizer can’t be a good shaman she said. Only when you learn to follow a proper diet can a person serve.

This is the test that the plants give us. It has happened to me twice, a woman comes just when you are working and wants to make love. You can’t, if you give in just once you will fall ill, go mad, fall into the water, or die - these are the tremendous problems of being a shaman. At the age of 16, I started my first diet for 3 months, without ayahuasca, only plants, no drink, women, salt etc. After that the shaman called me and said I could go further and he chanted for me. Then I did another 3 months’ diet, again no ayahuasca, but the plants made me dream of what I should eat, how I should live, to not to go out etc.

It is important to avoid women who are menstruating, or who have made love the previous night, that is bad with the plants. It clashes, like a mirror smashing; it makes you ill or goes against you.

Howard G. Charing, is an international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism.

Visit the website for info about our Andean & Amazon Ayahuasca Retreats

Pablo Amaringo - at home with the great visionary artist

Clip taken on a recent visit (Dec 2007) to Pablo's home in Pucallpa (Peru).



Pablo is one of the world's greatest visionary artist. There is an interview with Pablo on my website at;

View Original Interview with Pablo Amaringo

The Cactus of Vision - San Pedro and the Shamanic Tradition of northern Peru - Part 2

PART 2

Shamans from different cultures and traditions have been using psychoactive plants since the dawn of human emergence. These plants have been used traditionally for guidance, divination, healing, maintaining a balance with the spirit or consciousness of the living world.

Howard G. Charing and Peter Cloudsley talk with Maestro Juan Navarro

Juan Navarro was born in the highland village of Somate, department of Piura. He is a descendant of a long lineage of healers and shamans working with the magical powers of Las Huaringas.

What is the relationship of the maestro
with San Pedro?
In the north of Peru the power of San Pedro works in combination with tobacco. Also the sacred lakes Las Huaringas are very important. This is where we go to find the most powerful healing herbs which we use to energize our people. For example we use dominio [linking one’s intent with the spirit power of the plants] to give strength and protection from supernatural forces such as sorcery and negative thoughts. It is also put into the seguros - amulet bottles filled with perfume, plants and seeds gathered from Las Huaringas. You keep them in your home for protection and to make your life go well. These plants do not have any secondary effects on the nervous system, nor do they provoke hallucinations. San Pedro has strength and is mildly hallucinatory, but you cannot become addicted. It doesn’t do any harm to your body, rather it helps the maestro to see what the problem is with his patient. Of course some people have this gift born in them - as our ancestors used to say, it is in the blood of a shaman.

Is San Pedro a ‘teacher plant’?
Of course, but it has a certain mystery.You have to be compatible with it because it doesn’t work for everybody.The shaman has a special relationship with it. It circulates in the body of the patient and where it finds abnormality it enables the shaman to detect it. It lets him know the pain they feel and whereabouts it is. So it is the link between patient and maestro. It also purifies the blood of the person who drinks it. It balances the nervous system so people lose their fears, frights and traumas, and it charges people with positive energy. Everyone must drink so that the maestro can connect with them. Only the dose may vary from person to person because not everyone is as strong.

What about the singado? (inhalation of tobacco juice through the nostrils) The tobacco leaf is left for two to three months in contact with honey, and when required for the singado it is macerated with aguardiente, or alcohol. How it functions depends on which nostril is used; when taken in by the left side it is for liberating us of negative energy, including psychosomatic ills, pains in the body, bad influences of other people - or ‘envy’ as we call it here. As you take it in you must concentrate on the situation which is going badly, or the person which is giving out a negative energy.

When taken through the right nostril it is for rehabilitating and energizing, so that your projects go well. It’s not for getting high on. Afterwards you can spit the tobacco out or swallow it, it doesn t matter. It has an interrelation with the san pedro in the body, and intensifies the visionary effects.

Tobacco is an important plant in the ceremonies - can you smoke in the session? No, no, no. It may be the same plant but here another element comes into play, which is fire. As the session is carried out in darkness, the fire in the darkness can perturb, create a negative reflection or vision. It can cause trauma.

You use a chungana (rattle) during the san pedro sessions and I ’see’ the sound as a beam of a light penetrating the darkness. Yes, sound and light are interrelated. Chunganas are used to invoke the spirits of the dead, whether of family or of great healers, so that they may feel comfortable with us. the chunganas are to give us ‘enchantment’ (protection and positive energy) and it has a relaxing effect when taking san pedro.

What is the power of the artes - the objects on the mesa?
They come from Las Huaringas, where a special energy is bestowed on everything, including the healing herbs which grow there and nowhere else. If you bathe in the lakes it takes away all your ills. You bathe with the intention of leaving everything negative behind. People go there to leave their enemies behind, so they can’t do them any harm. After bathing, the maestro cleanses you with these artes, swords, bars, chontas (bamboo staffs), saints, and even huacos (the powers from ancient sacred sites). They ‘flourish’ you - spraying you with agua florida
(perfume) and herb macerations, and giving you sweet things like limes and honey, so your life flourishes. We maestros also need to go to Las Huaringas regularly because we make enemies from healing people, so we need to protect ourselves. The reason for this is that two forces exist: the good and the bad. The bad forces are from the pacts which the brujos (sorcerors with negative
intentions) make with the devil. The brujo is the rival of the curandero or healer. So when the curandero heals, he makes an enemy of the brujo. It’s not so much because he sends the bad magic back, as because he does the opposite thing to him, and they want supremacy in the battle. Not far from Las Huaringas is a place called Sondor, which has its own lakes. This is where evil magic is practiced and where they do harm in a variety of ways. I know because as a curandero I must know how sorcery is practiced, in order to defend myself and my patients.

Do people go there secretly?
Of course no one admits to going there, but they pass through Huancabamba just like the others who are going to Las Huaringas. I know various people who practice bad magic at a distance.They do it using physical means, concentrating, summoning up a person’s soul, knowing their characteristics etc. and can make them suffer an accident, or make an organ ill or whatever, or make their work go badly wrong.They have the power to get to their spirit. And people can even do harm to themselves. For example, if a person has bad intentions towards another and that person is well protected with an encanto, (amulet) then he will do himself harm.

How does the ‘rastreo’ (diagnosis through psychic means) work? Are you in an altered state? No, I’m completely normal and lucid. What allows the reading of a person’s past, present or future, is the strength of the san pedro and tobacco. It is an innate capability -not everybody has the gift, you can’t learn it from someone, it is inherited. The perceptions come through any one of the senses - sound, vision, smell, or a feeling inside of what the person is feeling, a weakness, a pain or whatever. Sometimes, for instance, a bad taste in the mouth may indicate a bad liver. All the things on the mesa are perfectly normal, natural things: chontas, swords, stones etc. They have just received a treatment - like a radio tuned to a certain frequency - so they can heal particular things, weaknesses or whatever. But always it is necessary to concentrate on the sacred lakes, Las Huaringas.

Is it necessary for the maestro to take San Pedro to have vision? Of course, he must take San Pedro and tobacco. But it is to protect himself from the person’s negativity and illness, not because he needs it to have the vision.

In conclusion, we must acknowledge that we, as humans, have realised from earliest times that knowledge goes beyond sensory awareness or the rational way of understanding the world. San pedro can take us directly to a telepathic communion and show us that there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Everything in the universe is alive and has a spirit. This is the gift of the plants which offer us a doorway into the infinite.

Howard G. Charing, is an accomplished international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest at the dedicated centre located in the Mishana nature reserve. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism (Destiny Books USA).

Visit our website for details on our Andean and Ayahuasca Retreats in Peru

The Cactus of Vision - San Pedro and the Shamanic Tradition of northern Peru - Part 1

Shamans from different cultures and traditions have been using psychoactive plants since the dawn of human emergence. These plants have been used traditionally for guidance, divination, healing, maintaining a balance with the spirit or consciousness of the living world.

Howard G. Charing and Peter Cloudsley talk with Maestro Juan Navarro

The hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus has been used since ancient times, and in Peru the tradition has been unbroken for over 3,000 years. The earliest depiction of the cactus is a carving showing a mythological being holding a San Pedro, and dates from about 1300 bc. It comes from the Chavín culture (c.1400-400 bce) and was found in a temple at Chavín de Huantar, in the northern highlands of Peru. Later, the Mochica culture, (c.500 ce) used the cactus in their iconography. Even in present day mythology, it is told that God hid the keys to heaven in a secret place and San Pedro used the magical powers of a cactus to discover this place; later the cactus was named after him.

La Mesa Norteña

Juan Navarro was born in the highland village of Somate, department of Piura. He is a descendant of a long lineage of healers and shamans working with the magical powers of the sacred lakes known as Las Huaringas which stand at 4,000 metres and have been revered since earliest Peruvian civilization. At the age of eight, Juan made his first pilgrimage to Las Huaringas, and took San Pedro for the first time. Every month or two it is necessary to return here to accumulate energy and protection to heal his people. As well as locals and Limeños (people from Lima), pilgrims also come from many parts of South America.

During the sessions Juan works untiringly, assisted by his two sons - as is common in this traditions - in an intricate sequence of processes, including invocation, diagnosis, divination, and healing with natural objects, or artes. The artes are initially placed on the maestro’s altar or mesa, and picked up when required during the ceremony. These artes are an astonishing and beautiful array of shells, swords, magnets, quartzes, objects resembling sexual organs, rocks which spark when struck together, and stones from animals’ stomachs which they have swallowed to aid digestion! The artes are collected from pre-Colombian tombs, and sacred energetic places, particularly Las Huaringas.They bring magical qualities to the ceremony where, under the visionary influence of San Pedro, their invisible powers may be experienced. The maestro’s mesa - a weaving placed on the ground on which all the artes are placed, (mesa also means ‘table’ in Spanish) - is a representation of the forces of nature and the cosmos.Through the mesa the shaman is able to work with and influence these forces to diagnose and heal disease.

The traditional mesa norteña has three areas: on the left is the campo ganadero or ‘field of the dark’; on the right is the campo justiciero or the ‘field of the light’ (justiciero means justice); and in the centre is the campo medio or ‘neutral field’, which is the place of balance between the forces of light and dark. It is important for us not to look at these forces as positive or negative - it is what we human beings do with these forces which is important. Although the contents and form of the artes varies from tradition to tradition, the mesa rituals serve to remind us that the use and power of symbols extends throughout all cultures.

San Pedro Cactus

San Pedro (trichocereus pachanoi) grows on the dry eastern slopes of the Andes, between 2,000 - 3,000 metres above sea level, and commonly reaches six metres or more in height. It is also grown by local shamans in their herb gardens. As can be imagined, early European missionaries held the native practices in considerable contempt, and indeed were very negative when reporting the use of the San Pedro. Yet a Spanish missionary, cited by Christian Rätsch, grudgingly admitted the cactus’ medicinal value in the midst of a tirade reviling it: “It is a plant with whose aid the devil is able to strengthen the Indians in their idolatry; those who drink its juice lose their senses and are as if dead; they are almost carried away by the drink and dream a thousand unusual things and believe that they are true. The juice is good against burning of the kidneys and, in small amounts, is also good against high fever, hepatitis, and burning in the bladder.” A shaman’s account of the cactus is in radical contrast:
“It first … produces … drowsiness or a dreamy state and a feeling of lethargy … a slight dizziness … then a great ‘vision’, a clearing of all the faculties … it produces a light numbness in the body and afterward a tranquillity. And then comes detachment, a type of visual force … inclusive of all the senses … including the sixth sense, the telepathic sense of transmitting oneself across time and matter … like a kind of removal of one’s thought to a distant dimension.”

San Pedro, considered the ‘maestro of the maestros’, enables the shaman to make a bridge between the visible and the invisible world for his people.The Quechua name for it is punku, which means ‘doorway’. The doorway connects the patient’s body to his spirit; to heal the body we must heal the spirit. San Pedro can show us the psychic causes of illness intuitively or in mythical dream language. The effects of San Pedro work through various stages, beginning with an expanded physical awareness in the body. Soon this is followed by euphoric feelings and then, after several hours, psychic and visionary effects become more noticeable.

Howard G. Charing, is an accomplished international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest at the dedicated centre located in the Mishana nature reserve. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism (Destiny Books USA).

Visit our website for details on the Andean and Ayahuasca Retreats in Peru

Ayahuasca - Medicine for the Soul Part 1

‘Whether the plant is to heal the body or the spirit or whether it is part of an apprenticeship, what makes it work is your good intention towards the plant. They are beings, which have their own forms or they can be like human beings with faces and bodies. When the spirit accepts the person, and the person has the will, the spirit grants them energy. The path to knowledge opens, and the healing takes place’

Guillermo Arevalo – Shipibo Maestro

In the Amazonian tradition working with planta maestras (teacher plants) is known as the Shaman’s Diet. The working can be seen as a conscious body of actions to incorporate the plant spirit into one’s own spirit. From this incorporation or union, the plant spirit informs and teaches the maestro or apprentice. They learn the magical chants (icaros) which invoke the power of the plant, how to use the plant for healing purposes, and how to strengthen the dieter both psychologically and physically. The purpose of the diet is to prepare the body and nervous system for the powerful knowledge and expansion of consciousness given by teacher plants.

It offers a significant challenge for the rational Western mind to come to terms with the teacher plants, and a leap of imagination is required to incorporate the ‘other’ consciousness, or spirit of the plant.

We also have a ‘linguistic’ limitation (as an analogue the Inuit have over fifty distinct words for snow), in that the word ‘shaman’ is very recent to the Amazon, coming via the Western world in the last 20 – 30 years. There are many words which denote the plant specialisation of the maestro or Vegetalista. Benjamin Ochavano a 70 year old Shipibo Vegetalista says that his father was known as a moraya or banco (healer), in Spanish it was a curandero. A curandero could then further specialise in a particular plant such as chonta (bamboo) and be a chontero. For example a curandero who specialises in smells and perfumes would be a perfumero.

Another challenge to our rational mind to enter the magical world to which we are transported by plants is that it is mainly accessible through dream language or an expansion of the imagination. Thus dreams & our imaginative powers act like doorways during a plant diet and connect us with the plant spirit.

The rational mind can only struggle, to take as an example the famed ‘love potion’ of the Amazon known as the Pusanga. In rational terms it makes no sense whatsoever, how can a concoction of leaves, roots, and seeds attract a lover, or good luck to you? My experience working with shamans in preparing Pusangas (which normally is prepared away from their clients so it was a privilege to be invited to participate in the preparation) showed me that far from interfering with the freedom of other individuals or putting a ‘number’ on them, we were altering something within ourselves, which was brought out by the ingredients, the magic of the plants. Whatever it was, it felt wholesome and good. It is what is in oneself… one’s own magic. Asking Javier Arevalo (the shaman) what does the Pusanga actually do, is it inside us or outside of us? His response was “When you pour it onto your skin it begins to penetrate your spirit, and the spirit is what gives you the force to pull the people. The spirit is what pulls”.

The anthropological term ‘sympathetic magic’ does not give this justice, to illustrate this, the water used in the preparation of an authentic pusanga (which has been specifically made for you) has been collected from a deep trek in the rainforest, sometimes 40 or 50 miles, where there are no people and where clay pools collect and thousands of the most beautiful coloured parrots and macaws gather to drink from them for the mineral content. Now the great leap of imagination required is to bring into yourself the knowledge, the feeling, the sense that the water in the Pusanga has drawn in or attracted thousands of the most brightly coloured creatures on the planet. If you do this, it can generate a shift in consciousness in you.

You can sample this for yourself, just find a quiet moment and space, close your eyes, and with the power of your imagination as the launch pad, draw in the verdant, abundant forest filled with life, colour, and sound. Sense the rich vibrancy of the rainforest as a single breathing rhythmic totality of life force. When you have this image, expand it to include, the humid warmth, the smell of earth, the scent of plants, hear the sound of insects and bird song, allow all your senses to experience this. Then with a conscious decision draw this sensory experience into your being. Whenever you are ready, open your eyes, and check how you are feeling.

Maestros do not invent diets, they are given by the plant spirits themselves, but there is more to it than simply abstaining from certain foods and activities. It involves a state of purification, retreat, commitment, and respect for our connection with everything around us - above all the rain forest. When we listen to our dreams, they become more real, and equally important as everyday life.

The shamans work with the power of the plants in many ways, the colours of the flowers, the perfume, their shape, form, and associations. To illustrate this, another maestro Artiduro Aro Cardenas remarks;

‘A smell has the power to attract. I can also make smells to attract business, people who buy. You just rub it on your face and it brings in the people to your business, if you are selling, people come to buy. I also make perfumes for love, and others for flourishing. These are the forces of nature, what I do is give it direction with my breath so it has effect. I use my experience of the plants which I have dieted. I have a relation with the plants and with the patient; I can’t make these things on a commercial scale.

When I diet I take in the strength of the plant and it stays with me. Later I find the illness or suffering of the person or what it is they want, and the plant guides me and tells me if it is the right one for that person, and I cure them’

He also (as do many maestros) works with the plants not only to heal illnesses but to resolve domestic and family problems;

‘I get people coming for help to give up drug addiction, people with family problems, supposing the man has gone off and left his family, the Mama is here with me and the Papa is far away. I pull him back so he returns to his home so that the family can consolidate again. In a short time he will be thinking of his children and his wife, and he comes back. I don’t need to have the actual plants in front of me, I call the plant spirits which work for that, Renaco, Huayanche, Lamarosa, Sangapilla, perfumes and I call his spirit back to the family home. I blow smoke to reunite them.’

Another (in a very enjoyable way) the qualities, consciousness or spirit of the plant is used to attract benign forces is “los baños florales” or flower baths. In this the individual is bathed in flowers which have been soaking in water for many hours. The maestro prepares the water by blowing mapacho (jungle tobacco) smoke and at the same time placing his intention into the flower soaked water. Again these flowers and plants have been gathered from sometimes deep and not easily accessible locations in the rainforest and have been selected for their specific qualities which the maestro feels are needed to help that person.

A friend of mine Alonso del Rio, who has lived with the Shipibo people, and is uniquely well equipped to be a bridge between the indigenous wisdom and modern Westerners, tells the following;

‘The mind of the traditional maestro is very different from yours or mine. He has lived in the rainforest without contact with the Western world, so to have access to the same visions, the same codes is difficult. But what I have found is that the expansion of the consciousness and the power that the plant gives you to understand many things is perfectly valid.

The magical space to which we are taken - call it the ‘unconscious’ or any term you want to use depending on your psychological model - is one where all the kingdoms of nature can communicate. That is people can talk to plants, and plants with minerals, minerals to animals and animals with humans… all in the same language. It is a very real communication and one of the greatest mysteries which exists. This is something which an English person or a Peruvian born in Lima can experience just as an Amazonian person. Because you can do it without speaking in a native dialect, it doesn’t go through the mind but between one spirit and another.”

On the edge of the Amazonian town Iquitos is the market river port of Belen, which has the famous street ‘Pasaje Paquito’ where many of the rainforest, herbs, plants, mixtures, tinctures are sold. Chatting to Juanita the owner of the stall where I buy plants from, I remember her describing some of the potions, lotions, plants, tonics, barks, perfumes, roots, oils, aphrodisiacs and leaves, and remarking “when you talk to the plants you will get to know them like friends, they have their own spirits, their own personalities”.


Howard G. Charing, is an accomplished international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. He organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism (Destiny Books USA), and has published numerous articles about plant medicines.


Visit Howard's website