The spiritual weight
Everything you experience in your life stays with you—spiritually. Traumas, mishaps and addictions alike all remain recorded in your mind and body, manifesting as pains, cluttering your mind and emotions, and blocking your path to the life you desire. This sum of experiences that is the story of your life forms what we call your spiritual weight.
If you have consumed drugs or alcohol, the contamination of those substances is still with you. If you were bullied, or abandoned as a child, or abused, those traumas and blocks are still with you. If you have had many sexual partners, their own traumas and blocks are still with you. If you tend to act angrily, that is within you. These are all energies within your spiritual weight, affecting you in ways you might not be aware of.
Drinking Ayahuasca, dieting master plants and receiving ícaros or medicinal songs all help you clean portions of this spiritual weight that you carry. They take from you what you no longer want.
As your weight lightens, your body, mind and soul can begin to open and heal, and you start to feel lighter, more centered and overall healthier. And if you go deep enough, you can even feel a spiritual rebirth—a new start.
The medicinal plants
God sowed the medicinal plants on the Earth to help humanity. The Amazonian master plants, of which Ayahuasca is the center of, are a particularly powerful group of them.
What these plants do for most people is heal them physically, mentally and emotionally, helping them live a happier life. Put in other words, what they do for most people is help them clean their spiritual weight and emerge out of it.
Each plant medicine has its own “specialization”, or its own medicine: there is strength medicine (Shihuahuaco), there is love medicine (Marosa), there is detoxing medicine (Ojé), and so on. Each can bring a particular improvement, or healing, to your life. And then there are medicines that can do a vast amount of things—such as Ayahuasca.
What sets plant medicine apart, is that it is spiritual medicine—it works on a spiritual level, acknowledging the fact that, on some level, you are a spirit yourself, and not just your physical body. This allows plant medicine to heal you on every level of your being: physically, but also mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
What’s more, these medicinal plants make you more spiritual; more aware of your spirit self and of the spiritual reality you live in. In other words, they connect you to the root of the spiritual world. In that awareness, you can come to interact with the spirits of the medicinal plants themselves, receiving healing and teachings from them.
The shaman and the ícaros
The Shipibos and other Amazonian tribes have long-known about this ecosystem of medicinal plants, and have had ample time to learn how to work with it. This accumulated learning spanning generations is the healing tradition that we call shamanism.
Shamans diet for many years to receive knowledge, power and tools (including but not limited to the ícaros) from the spirits of the master plants themselves, and use these to work within the spirit world.
This rigorous life-long training makes the shaman exceptionally strong, wise and agile, as it turns them into a spiritual warrior capable of battling the bad energies face to face—and winning.
If they walk their path with integrity, it also makes them caring and kind, moving them to use the powers they receive to do good and work the light—that is, to heal others.
To heal you, the shaman sings ícaros, powerful healing songs that clean your spiritual weight quickly and bring order and healing to your body, mind and soul. These songs are medicine themselves; spiritual medicine that enters your body through the sounds of the shaman’s voice. It is the very spirits of their dieted medicines, male and female alike, that come to sing these songs through them.
Because the ícaros carry medicine on their own, it’s not even necessary to drink Ayahuasca to receive their benefits. They are, however, significantly more powerful you’re in the Ayahuasca effect.
It is worth noting that the word shaman is actually of western origin. The shamans themselves (at least the Shipibos) call themselves onanya, meaning wise or sage.
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.
