Writing about icaros is somewhat challenging because the experience takes place in altered states on the level of feeling and the imaginal. It's an emergent process, spontaneous and unique every time. Admitting that I can't really capture what transpires in words, I feel up for the challenge of trying anyway. I hope it will be useful or at least interesting to those who come along for a ride describing the impossible.
Plant Dieta is the practice found at the heart of Amazonian curanderismo and, without a doubt, one of the most precious and invaluable aspects of my training. How the practice is undertaken varies within each lineage. What I discuss here is based on what I learned during a year of sitting in dieta with various teachers from different traditions, before settling into a x4 year full-time apprenticeship within the Mahua-Lopez lineage of the Shipibo tradition of curanderismo. I have then spent nearly a decade undergoing dieta in a non-traditional context and have adapted my practice as needed. I always strive to keep to the essential tenets of the tradition while also evolving, integrating and transforming parts of it to meet the conditions I find myself in outside of the Peruvian Amazon.
There are many forms of “Curanderismo” (what many of us in the West might call shamanism, a term that actually originates in Siberia about their traditional healers) – the practice of animistic healing arts. What I present here is my own ever-evolving perspective and understanding, formed during the x5 years I lived in the Peruvian Amazon, x1 year spent tradition hopping and x4 of which were in full-time apprenticeship with indigenous Shipibo curanderos of the Mahua-Lopez lineage.
You are my wild heart that cannot help dreaming of open plains and untouched lands that speak in tongues lost to all but the quietest of minds, the subtlest of hearts.
Please teach me to walk unheard in this wild place so I may see what you see, feel what you feel.
Please show me how to dreamwalk this world and enter deeply into its many wounds.
I have been drawn to the magic of flowers for as long as I can remember and recall many sunny afternoons being lost in the perfume of lavender, rosemary, jasmine, and wisteria in my mother’s lush herb gardens that wrapped around my childhood home in South Africa... and I can still feel the deep droning of bees in their thousands on blossoms in our expansive fruit orchard.
Soft green grass grows at its edges and tiny blue wildflowers with yellow centres invite me to take off my clothes and lie in their fragrant carpet. My childlike heart resides here, the one who feels the mystery ever waiting to be discovered.
