October 8th, 2024
Contributing writer for Wake Up World
“I have never done psychedelics. Can I lose my mind if I use them?”
I was asked this question recently by a 70-year-old woman who wanted to visit Huachuma Wasi to undergo a Huachuma (San Pedro) retreat but stated that she had never taken any psychedelics in her life and was wondering if she could lose her mind by doing it.
This is a legitimate question that deserves an elaborative answer.
Answering this question would require more than simply saying YES or NO. I cover this and other subjects in depth in my books.
First of all, we need to establish what losing your mind means. Suppose you refer to a state of uncontrolled mind activity, inability to maintain focus, a loss of the sense of self, a loss of identity, intense mental distress, an inability to function, or going “crazy,” then yes, this can happen to you if you do it wrong. If you take psychoactive agents, natural or synthetic, without proper guidance, you can undoubtedly experience what some people call a “bad trip.” However, with the correct set and setting guided by experienced people, nothing like that can happen to you if you do it right.
Plant medicine shamanism has been proven safe over millennia. It is still being practiced in Peru, and sacred plant teachers will continue to be used for as long as humans walk on Earth. The shamanic tradition is the oldest religion that connects you to the Source. As history has shown, it is unstoppable and indestructible.
Of course, these potent plants demand respect and proper handling, which, if lacking, can cause unwanted consequences.
It is crucial to work with the right people who know what they are doing, are dedicated to their healing work, and have good records.
If you do this, the answer is NO; you cannot lose your mind in a negative sense.
However, “losing your mind” can be good; it’s all just interpretations. It’s not a contradiction; it’s another angle to view it. While looking at it through the lens of Western psychiatry, which offers its observation in pathological terms, there is another way to see it. Your mind, or your Ego, plays an important role, like putting food in your mouth to keep your body alive. Your Ego is instrumental in the Earthly life. However, its function is limited to the material world, which is only an aspect of a bigger reality. The point is not to destroy it but to educate it and help it fit into a larger scale of existence.
Many of our guests who come to work with Huachuma medicine suffer from being stuck in their minds too much. Engineers, computer programmers, academics, and lawyers, especially, have difficulty stopping the inner dialogue constantly happening in their heads. A temporary “loss of mind” can result in profound, long-lasting relief and freedom from the persisting voice in your head. Huachuma helps you reset your central nervous system similarly to how your computer resets when you reboot it. This spiritual ”unfreezing” is the key to inner peace, sanity, and well-being. Traditional therapy is unable to achieve this simply because words alone do not have the required power to reset you.
They beg to lose their minds and find the greatly desired silence and break from it. This shows you that losing your mind can have different meanings for different people. An often-experienced temporary Ego death in the Ayahuasca ceremony is a painful and frightening process, but only for those who have never experienced their consciousness outside of the Ego, the consciousness of unity that is greater than an individual perception of reality. The consciousness that allows you to comprehend and feel the connection with the whole Creation. The good news is that the same experience can be experienced differently with much more joy when working with Huachuma medicine, allowing you to find clarity without dramatically losing your Ego, which often results in psychological trauma and hesitance to further experience with plant medicine.
Such experience is significant because it expands consciousness, opens the doors of perception, and allows a person to see reality as it is: multi-dimensional, vibrant, and full of possibilities.
This is why I never was a fan of some Eastern spiritual tradition who, in my view, do not understand that there is no life without your Ego, or more precisely, there is no joy in life when your Ego is put under constant pressure with an aim for extinguishing it eventually. Essentially, by removing your Ego, you are removing the experience of life, which is the whole point of being alive. Through this life experience, we learn to be humans. It’s why I kept looking further into the core of spirituality to find a way that allows life to be experienced fully and consciously. Plant-based shamanism was the way that answered all my requests. It is simply a practice that takes you beyond words and concepts, and while others speculate on ethereal subjects, you experience it firsthand. I want to refer you to my latest book, UNPLUGGED, Psychedelics, Farming, and Crypto, the Three Pillars of Freedom.
There is an excellent side to “losing your mind,” which doesn’t mean going crazy. By losing your mind, I mean losing the imaginable control that you think you have over everything, including the shamanic experience. Plant medicine can reveal this to you and teach essential lessons on relinquishing control at will and enjoying life as you enjoy a ceremony, which is valuable, helpful teaching for everyday life. The journey from the ego-based conception of reality into spiritual consciousness is a journey of expansion, discovery, and joy.
We live our lives thinking we have control when there isn’t much we control. Just like we don’t control the weather and our neighbors, we don’t control the things inside us, like thoughts and emotions that sporadically appear and disappear. In reality, we don’t even control our breath, blood flow, and the natural process of bodily elimination, which are an autonomous function of our body. In most cases, people are living their lives on autopilot, both physically and mentally speaking. A profound shift in your consciousness can change this. And while many spiritual traditions claim to have keys to unlock your potential and make this shift, in reality, they don’t. At best, they can only point the way. Plant medicine is a practical way that allows you to do it and learn to live life consciously, allowing for greater involvement in your life events. In other words, they enable you to influence your life to a certain extent and in the most desirable way. It’s achievable with a certain level of commitment and is a matter of spiritual work on yourself fueled by plant medicine if administered in a specific context.
Plant medicine reveals that most of what you think you are in control of is an illusion that becomes quite obvious when you embrace a shamanic experience that is out of control and yet is within a perfect order. A control freak that lives in every head becomes overwhelmed and realizes that the only way to gain control is to surrender to the process. Divine paradox, indeed! This newly learned mental skill can be instrumental in daily life. A temporary “loss of mind’’ can result in long-lasting, profound relief and freedom from the inner chatter.
However, at Huachuma Wasi, deepening into the work of medicine is closely supervised and guided at every step. You have nothing to worry about as long as you follow our guidance.
I want to share a conversation with one of our guests during last week’s Huachuma ceremony. Of course, this would be only the tip of the iceberg, and more were discussed, but one thing stood up with exceptional clarity. As we were talking about the incredible times in which we live, despite all the madness and the danger present, at the same time, all gates are now wide open, and the flow of information flooding the web, allowing people to learn about anything they want, plant-medicine healing included. It wasn’t like this 20 years ago when I searched for shamans to do this work. Everything is out in the open. However, this is true; it seems more challenging to reach it while peeling off the additional layers of societal pressure. In other words, the distance between a shamanic experience and an average person was shortened by the circumstances due to the technological advances and the global reach of the internet, yet still, the ability to contemplate this opportunity has shrunk due to additional stress. It takes more energy for many people to go through the day and make ends meet today than 20 years ago when we barely knew of remote locations where native cultures were practicing plant-medicine shamanism for millennia and had to rely on academic research almost entirely.
A certain equilibrium exists; when one door is opened, another is closed, and vice versa. The wisdom here is to remain vigilant and observe this cosmic mosaic of opportunities and obstacles dancing against one another on the invisible scale. An ancient Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang comes to mind. Ancient philosophers understood peace, abundance, and harmony can only come from the balance of opposite forces. Both the day and the night are equally needed to maintain life on Earth.
Obstacles exist to provide opportunity and growth, but only if viewed in such a way.
Please watch the following film, which I made to take you on a visual tour of Huachuma Wasi and the healing work we do in Peru with the sacred Huachuma cactus.
About the author:
Sergey Baranov founded Huachuma Wasi, a healing center in The Sacred Valley of the Incas, Peru. He is the author of Path: Seeking Truth in a World of Lies, The Mescaline Confession: Breaking Through the Walls of Delusion, The Cactus of Sanity: Huachuma in a Time of Chaos, Dancing in Hell with Eyes Wide Open: How to Survive the New World Order and UNPLUGGED: Psychedelics, Farming, and Crypto the Three Pillars of Freedom. Sergey’s passion for life on Earth and its preservation is the driving force behind his work.
All of Sergey’s books result from a lifelong spiritual search and nearly two decades of ongoing shamanic practice.
To learn more, please visit www.huachumawasi.com
Follow Sergey on Instagram @huachumawasi
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