Hachumak - Journeying Through the Invisible: The Craft of Healing With, and Beyond, Sacred Plants, as Told by a Peruvian Medicine Man

I want to dedicate this book to all the children recently born and yet to come to Earth who have been gifted with Medicine force.

Some of these young people will have the chance to grow in the few remaining traditional communities where they will get the chance to develop their talents and receive the proper tutoring. Most of them will be born in parts of the planet where their culture offers no niche for the thriving of their capacities. Most of them will probably struggle and be dragged down by the negative currents of life, their attention diverted away from the world of subtle realities. But a few will stay close to their callings and make wise choices in their lives. They will seek and retrieve the available fragments of the ancient knowledge within their reach and will be able to offer help to the world while fulfilling the Medicine Force as a vehicle of self-expression.

This book is for the unborn, the newborn, and the very young. The ones, better than us, that are coming next.

The key to all of your behaviors is hidden in a box that you cant open using normal tools. Your subconscious needs a different recipe than the one youve been using.

Gerard Armond Powell, founder of the Life Advancement Center

While a majority of shamans are men, a good number of women in Peru also practice shamanism under the name of witch, woman of knowledge, woman of power, sorceress, and others. Though in these chapters we refer to shamans using masculine pronouns, we do so to make the read flow more smoothly without having to repeat he/she, his/her. Please bear with us if our regular use of the masculine is vexing. And while we acknowledge the limitations of addressing the issue in the binarymale or female practitionerswe mean no disrespect to those who identify as nonbinary and who practice as such.

Natural Medicine, the ancient art of healing, has been able to survive through the ages because the practices have floated under the surface of the more formalized culture. Since the oppressing times of the colonial period and the blanketing times of the overrational and industrial-modern culture, the keepers of this knowledge have been forced to protect it in an underground world. Some of the traditional nations that have been able to live relatively undisturbed certainly preserve much of their ancestral wisdom. The rural population around the world that has carried and protected the healing knowledge has never been front actors in our modern history; these are the people that few paid attention to before. This knowledge has always been there, out of view, serving the traditional population needs, the way it always has.

In recent years, predominantly one part of the ancient healing arts has come up to the surfacethe use of plant medicinesand its now in the spotlight of international attention. That is not a negative thing per se, because it can offer so much, and it is probably needed now more than ever before and on a larger scale. But this exposure brings a host of new challenges and dangersnot only for the public but for the knowledge itself.

Now that we are in the twenty-first century, we are once again witnessing a similar clash of cultures that occurred back in the colonial times. When a traditional spiritual knowledge is quickly absorbed without necessary time taken to understand its principles and delicacies, it is transformed into a product of consumption.

The odds that the modern world will need to take in and embrace this traditional knowledge is high, though its essential that the Western world makes an effort to adapt and explore a respectful mindset for embracing and understanding the benefits of the ancient healing arts.

My personal practice has never been on a large scale. After being a student and an apprentice, I spent many years working in rural areas of my home country, Peru. Most of my friends and clients in Peru live a life strongly connected to the land; their lives are not filled with material possessions, but their inner worlds are of great richness and structure. Later, life brought the opportunity to me to help people from other countries. I have always helped them in the same way I have helped my fellow Peruvians while also trying to assist them in understanding the proper mindset for receiving the Medicine Force. During those years I was told many times, especially by people who were quite experienced in plant medicine ceremonies and other practices, that I should one day write a book. In that book I should share my understandings about the healing force and the plant medicine protocolshow plant medicines work, how to understand and navigate the experiences, the codes of the invisible language, and the nuances of this healing art. I have heard several times, I wish I had this knowledge before so that I could have avoided my difficult plant medicine experience, or If I had known this before, I could have understood better my previous plant ceremony experiences. This book has come to fulfill those requests, and its my hope that it will be a positive contribution to the international community.

It is from a deep part of my heart with gratitude and service to the people in need of assistance as well as to the beautiful spirits of nature and the deceased masters of the past that I am now openly sharing some of my understandings and stories. The work with the sacred plants is a very important part of the Natural Medicine Craft, but this book is not only about that. I want to offer a larger picture of the Medicine Craft and to create appreciation for other important aspects that are endangered or still not well-known.

I have learned from my teachers to be prudent, only stepping out to serve when my skills are needed; then I step back and become just another member of the group. I prefer not to be called by any titles; my skills are not of a higher value than any good hunter, good storyteller, or anyone else. To stay discreet in the visible increases your power in the invisible.

One of the big challenges that we all face is what can be called superstition. Superstition is the great enemy of any form of true knowledge, whether scientific or traditional. Superstition bends the perception of reality, and it creates artificial truths driven by the needs of our personal fears and ambitions. Sadly, superstition has corrupted part of the traditional knowledge, and it constitutes one of the wrong doings that the false practitioners use to take power over gullible peoples minds in the name of healing. Its very difficult sometimes for the outside observer to discriminate what comes from a real observation, a real experiential process, in contrast to what is just an artificial construct imposed over the mind. In this book I am writing things that come from direct experience, and I am explaining and denouncing some of the superstitious practices that are out there.

The ancient healing arts are deep and expansiveyou never stop learning, and what you learn in a lifetime will always be a small fraction of what is available to learn. There are many things that I have understood through the years, and there are many things that I am still yet to understand. As a man who has learned from both worldsthe modern, rational, scientific one and the traditional one of multiple realtiesI have decided a long time ago to base the construction of my knowledge on direct observation. I dont buy everything that I hear per se, so this book is basically a sharing of my experiences and observations.

Reality is perceived through the filters of our internal languages, the languages that we learn from our parents and our culture, and the internal languages created in our mind from our good and bad experiences. Those languages, the filters that we see reality through, differ from the language of Nature and the spirits. The closest thing to the spirits language that we have in the human culture is poetry. Metaphors, analogies, and symbols talk to our deepest consciousness. They flow in a more malleable and fluid way than the angled constructions of our conceptualities so they can pass through the different grids of our mind and also cross over to the realities of nonhuman beings. True symbols embrace several things at the same time. They are like the knots of a net that connect the strings of different realities. A symbol is a key to access different spaces, a pathway to other worlds, so dont expect a logical succession of concepts while dialoging with the other worlds.