What is a Master Plant Dieta?
A master plant dieta, or master plant diet, is the process of receiving healing, learnings and spiritual medicine from a particular master plant. It is akin to continuously administering a medicine, day and night.
As you diet a master plant for a period of time, you slowly connect with the spirits of that plant’s medicine. These spirits heal your body and help you work on your healing goals, and they, alongside Ayahuasca, guide your ceremonies. In a short retreat, a diet can significantly boost your healing.
“There is only one solution to live well in this difficult world: the diet.”
Maestro Ricardo Amaringo
Besides your body, the diet also gets connected to your mind and dreams, so it is able to guide your thinking and even communicate with you in dreams.
Dieting connects you to the root of the spiritual world, effectively making you more spiritual—that is, more aware of your spiritual self.
As you become more and more spiritual by dieting, you experience improvements all across your life: in your physical and mental health, in your work, in your relationships, in your luck, in your projects, and so on. Dieting opens your mind and your heart, and with them, your life’s path. It is the all-in-one solution to living a better life in this world.
Which master plant (or plants) you diet during your retreat will depend on your needs and goals. Some plants are fit for purifying the body and mind of substance abuse. Others are good for removing pains from the body and strengthening it. Others for opening one’s heart and connecting to love.
A plant diet is started by drinking a small dose of a preparation made with that plant, and receiving an ícaro to open the diet, in ceremony. Depending on the plant you’re dieting, subsequent doses of the preparation might be necessary to keep strengthening the connection.
To care for this growing connection as it gets established, a few restrictions are observed while dieting: no physical contact, no sex, no alcohol, no salt and sweets, no condiments, no oil, no red meats, and no milk. In stricter diets, no veggies and no fruits.
A diet is closed with an ícaro as well. This mandatory ícaro protects the diet from food, sex, alcohol and other energies, so that you may now resume your normal life without harming the diet and its medicine. This ícaro also protects you personally, by covering you in light.
Dieting is also the means by which shamans learn their trade, as there are healing diets and learning diets. Though both healing and learning is present in some degree in both kinds of diet, learning diets are geared towards learning shamanism, and they teach the ícaros and how to work with the medicine. They are also stricter and longer, starting at 3 months and going up to a year and more. Nihue Rao is one such master plant diet.
The master plants are also divided in plants and trees, with the latter being stronger and more powerful, but requiring a bit more time than an 11 or 14 day retreat to connect. Trees also generally teach shamanism and have stricter restrictions.
“A person who has a diet has light in their heart. This light guides them and protects them wherever they go.”
Maestro Ricardo Amaringo
To have a diet
Dieting helps you heal and work on your goals while you’re going through your retreat, but that’s not the end of it. In fact, a diet is for life.
Once you have that connection with the medicine spirits, they are with you for the rest of your days, guiding you and taking care of you. The diet now becomes part of your spiritual history; a good energy you now carry in your body.
The diet also brings light in your body, and this light protects you from bad spirits and energies wherever you go, as they don’t like light and will refrain from coming near you.
By making good choices and living better, you will even make this light continue to grow after your retreat.
“To diet, there are three important points: patience, love, and faith.”
Maestro Ricardo Amaringo
Dieting well
The better you diet, the more you will connect to the medicine and the more you will get out of your diet.
The medicine spirits like to see three qualities in us while dieting: patience, love and faith.
To care for your diet, put to the side all anger and doubt, and take care to always act and think with kindness and good words.
If you get angry, or prideful, or mistrusting, you can block your diet. Think of it this way: the medicine spirits are of pure light, so they don’t enjoy being around negative attitudes.
If negative emotions or thoughts come when in diet, reject them. As you refuse to react with anger, or mistrust, the diet itself will little by little clear these things from you, making you kinder, humbler, and more centered, and opening your mind—but you have to reject them.
Have faith that your diet will get you where you need to be by the end, and be patient throughout your diet, however long.
Treat others with love and kindness, but also your medicine, expressing your gratitude and appreciation to the diet and to Ayahuasca for what they do for you, both in ceremony and during the day.
If you make an effort to observe these good behaviors, you will be rewarded with a powerful diet, and your experiences in the medicine will open up more and more.
Aside from this, you can make a diet even stronger by taking further measures on your level of isolation. The minimum is to not touch others (including animals) so as to not get connected to their energies, but you can choose to cut down on conversations altogether. Or you can stay away from social media, or the internet in general, or even books. It is your choice how pure you want to keep your diet, but less influences leads to a stronger diet.
As you put these distractions aside, direct your thoughts instead towards your diet. Spend time with the plant you’re dieting if possible. Converse with the diet often, asking it to help you in your healing goals, and in cleaning what you want to clean from your spiritual weight. The more you think about your diet, the more you connect to it.
One more important aspect in diet is to avoid being in direct intense sunlight. Spiritually, your diet starts as a small sapling of the plant you’re dieting. As time passes, that sapling grows, but if you expose it to intense sun while it is tender it will wilt. So use an umbrella, hat or scarf when walking outside.
Post-diet
When you close your diet, the spiritual medicine you have been dieting begins to «open», connecting better within your body and mind.
To allow this to happen smoothly, continue observing the diet restrictions a little longer, and reintroduce foods, beverages and sex in your life little by little, trying one at a time and seeing how you feel.
For a short 11 to 14 day diet, this will mean eating light foods (salads, fruits, vegetables, fish, white meats, nuts…) and refraining from sex for about 7 days. For longer length diets, this period of temperance should also increase.
If you close your diet and the next day you eat heavy foods, have sexual activities and drink alcohol, you will block the medicine you have worked so hard to obtain, and you can experience digestive issues and general discomfort.
This is an excerpt from “The True Medicine:
The Nihue Rao Guidebook to Ayahuasca and Master Plant Diets.”
You can read the full guidebook here.
