One of the substances covered in How to Change Your Mind is mescaline in the form of peyote. This is a small cactus that grows in North America. It is a scarce, slow growing cactus sacred to many Native Americans and should not be used by people outside of them in my opinion. Fortunately, there is another more plentiful cactus Huachuma, also known as San Pedro, that is readily available in South America. Hilariously, you can sometimes find them at your local Home Depot as a decorative plant. It is not illegal to own, buy, or sell in the US, just illegal to cook it and extract mescaline from it. There is an exception to this made for religious purposes, a bow to the Native Americans who were using it long before the rest of us showed up.
Mescaline is one of the milder psychedelics. The Incan descendants in Peru refer to Huachuma as the grandfather spirit who is kind and gentle and a wise teacher. This sounded to me like something right up my alley. I started looking into availability in the US. There are a few organizations using the religious loophole to offer San Pedro ceremonies in the US, and I’m sure a number of them legitimately want to share the experience with people rather than just make a buck, but none of the ones I found resonated with me. I am fortunate after a lifetime of working to have the means to travel, so I started looking outside of the US.
Through a comment on Reddit I found a reference to a retreat called Huachuma Wasi in Calca, Peru. A small town in Sacred Valley in the Andes Mountains. This is run by a Shaman Huachumero named Sergey Baranov. This is an unlikely name for a shaman in Peru, but I found he had written a book called The Path that is the story of how he got to this place. I bought an ebook copy and read it. The story of his life resonated with me and he has a similar cultural background with my wife. I realized that a man who went through what he did in the real world would much better understand my life and the mess that the current world is in rather than someone who has spent their entire life in a village in the Amazon jungle. I believed this man could be my guide and Huachuma could be my medicine.
It took an entire year to get there due to Covid, political flare-ups, and coordinating vacation time with our jobs, but my wife and I made it to Huachuma Wasi in April of this year, 2024.
Note: This is my journal and I apologize if much of it reads like an advertisement for Sergey and Huachuma Wasi. I get nothing from him for writing this, this is just my journey. Anyone who reads this may choose any other shaman and retreat that resonates with them. But as I write this, I owe more to Sergey and his amazing medicine than I can ever repay.
Overview of Huachuma Wasi
It is located in Calca, Peru. It is nestled in the Sacred Valley between 3 beautiful mountains. It is a small retreat on the edge of town with a main house where Sergey, his wife, and 2 daughters live, and an additional building with dorm-like rooms. Some have a kitchenette and bathroom, and some share a communal kitchen and bathrooms. At this point I will stop referring to it as a retreat. This is Sergey’s home, and my wife and I are guests in it of his loving and amazing family. We have now spent weeks with them and other guests, and many of them have become brothers and sisters to us.
We do 3 ceremonies a week where we drink Huachuma. Doses are individual, of different quantity and strength based on Sergey’s experience and knowledge of each guest. I originally thought that there would be tolerance issues and I would have to drink more and more each day but that is completely untrue. You actually get more sensitive to the medicine with each dose and it gets stronger as you work with it.
Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday all guests gather in a small ceremonial building called a malloka to sit through an opening ceremony and then drink our portion of the medecine. We then travel in a vehicle up the valley to a beautiful place in the eucalyptus forest near a gorgeous river. Each guest is assigned a safe space where they sit and contemplate in the medicine for about 4.5 hours. Sergey is closely available for some guidance and to check on everyone. After this there is an amazing 3’ish mile hike back along the mountain to home. There is a closing ceremony then most guests gather for dinner and light discussion, followed by a fire in the community living room and a sharing of the day. This is the integration part that I was missing from all of my other experiences.
During the sharing, most guests are still feeling the medicine. The medicine can last 12+ hours unless you got a really light dose. I consider the sharing to be equally important to the alone time in the medicine. It not only helps to be able to put your own experience into words, but to receive the support from others who have just spent time with you also in the medicine. I listened to many amazing tales of healing and discovery by others with both similar and very different stories to my own. And in many cases I was able to take their discoveries with me into future ceremonies and make them part of my own journey. I have never before been part of a circle that has such sympathy, empathy, and pure openness and understanding to the one sharing, providing both love and safety. Pure magic on many occasions.
Notes on consuming cactus: The cactus is served as a cool cup of thick muck that is basically cooked down cactus and maybe other things depending on the shaman. It is pretty awful tasting as I consume it in one long drink while not breathing through my nose to minimize the taste. It is immediately chased with a bite of some fruit to kill it and reduce nausea. Comeup, that time while the medicine takes effect (up to 2 hours), can be nauseous. Some people will puke from it but that doesn’t seem to be most. Some it hits at the other end. The effects can last 12-15 hours with higher doses and can cause loss of appetite, and considering you don’t eat before the ceremony it can mean little food consumed on ceremony days. I went from ~210lbs -> 176lbs in 11 weeks.
Disclaimer
I am a computer guy. An IT professional for most of my adult life. I am intensely logical with very little fluff or nonsense. I have never felt a call to spirituality and have no more than a basic religious education as a child which I do not practice as an adult. I am agnostic. In my ceremonies with Huachuma I saw visuals, but I would describe them more as distortions, a filtered lens between me and the world. Rainbow colors, a softening of lines, patterns in the trees and bushes, and the landscape pulsing as if breathing. But I never saw anything that wasn’t there. I also heard audio distortions, a vibrating sound, which is supposed to be the pineal gland and is relatively common, but I never heard voices.
Some people I spent time with did report visions of people, spirits, animals, aliens, etc… And some did have conversations with spirits of the medicine, and of deceased family and friends. Many of these people took the exact same dose of Huachuma from the same bottle as me. I have no idea what the difference is between us, but the results can be extremely different for each individual. I never saw anyone afraid of what they encountered.
What I recount here for each of my ceremonies is unique to me. Anyone else trying this may have extremely different results. Also, years of counseling with an excellent professional have made me examine my life in many ways. I had no fear of what I would learn about myself and my life. I know myself to be a basically good person who just has difficulty feeling positive emotions. Huachuma presents your life to you in a very real and intense way. If you are not prepared to face your own reality, this may not be for you.
I personally describe Huachuma as connecting my brain to my heart. All the things I learned in therapy made sense in my head, but never made it to my heart. In ceremony, when I had a revelation (which was often something that had been explained to me many times before), I could take it into my heart. And I was able to integrate it into my life and truly believe it in my heart, not just my head.