Acate

I haven't actually recounted my journey with Kambo on here in any way, aside from how I found the frog, and a brief overview of my first inoculation experience, and how Bufo messed up my head, which were both almost two years ago in Dormiveglia and Entangled, with retreated photos from over a decade ago that seem completely obsolete now. Along with my mind being blasted open by that whole experience, I had the overwhelming drive to go through all of my photos and retreat them, only to realize that there were far too many to go through while still managing to maintain a full-time job, family of four, and also searching for a way to move forward with my work. 20 months and a whopping 7 posts later, I have abandoned my still present drive to retreat everything, and am still searching.

Fast forward 9 months from those posts, or rewind 11 months from now, I drove away from my Kambo practitioner training with a plan to talk about how life changing of an experience it was in a post, but by the time I got home, all of that was put on the shelf for various reasons, and in these times my creative shelves are absolutely stuffed with projects that I may or may not ever get to. To be honest, just about everything that has happened in the last year or more has been written about very little, if at all.  I am a certified Kambo practitioner, but few know it because I just kind of hinted around to what was happening in my life now, and generally just posted what I imagine were confusing photos of folks hugging buckets on social media, amongst my fine art work and random quotes or rants. That was something seriously significant in my life that I simply left for people to figure out, amongst other things in my creative flail and learning to just live in the moment, like the fact that I quit my job and we quit our town and were living in a pop-up camper on the road, which my partner hinted around at on social media, but I just kind of didn't talk about for a couple months.

Aside from the people who existed in our little circle, no one really understood what was happening, and I was dependent on the fact that no one was paying attention. I could also argue that even people inside our circle didn't really even know what was going on, and it wasn't until a month and a half into our journey, almost exactly a year after Entangled, that Familie Zuerst rolled in, kind of explaining what was going on. By that time, the souls who were paying attention to what I wrote had wandered off because it had been so long since any words hit the ether. After I finally did get something written, I did a decent job of updating, in my vague and poetically obscured way, about every week, until there was another gap between August and January, a gap we lovingly call San Diego and caretaking for Gram Cracker. The adventure on pause, but feeling over, as we spent months around Christmas flailing and searching for connection and purpose outside of caretaking, in a city that was not on our list of places to hang out for 6+ months.

Maybe I need to learn to tell better stories? Maybe I tell stories perfectly fine and I need to manifest more readers who appreciate my take on everything? Maybe everything happens the way it's supposed to and I should just write when things come up organically, and not force them because something happened? I think my biggest problem with writing about what's going on, especially the significant stuff, is that I always just put it all out there, and I have been gradually learning to experience life as it happens, instead of how it applies to a potential story to tell. I journal more instead of posting everything to social media or blogs. There have been bouts with the negative self talk of my voice not really mattering, but Ive shifted into how important my voice actually is, so I am learning to direct it better. On this platform my voice is obviously just words, but I have been kicking around getting my actual voice out there, right about the time I lost my ability to form words properly because of some traumatic dental work, which I am also yet to write about.

What I do know is that when you don't regularly remind the world that you exist, you cease to exist on some level. I also know that when you don't let your readers know exactly what's going on, they are left to assume and fill in the gaps of the story how their conditioning allows. I am strangely ok with both of those. I think that's why I had a block on doing our travel blog and youtube channel while we were on the road: I don't think I was ready for the pressure of the constant update because I'm so far removed from that, and creativity in general. 

Back to the point. When I walked away from my first experience with Kambo I had this feeling in my gut that this was something I could do, and it was something tangible. I spent my life trying to help people with my creativity, and that went severely misinterpreted. This was something that came with an immediate physical response, and also fueled creativity on a spiritual level. I have also always been turned completely off by how most of the spiritual practice, that I want to believe in, is presented. This medicine leaves no room for hoo-haw spiritual bypassing or the toxic positivity which taints most spirituality that has been so tragically diluted in the west. This is all very real poison pulsing through your veins, gathering toxins and panema, and purging it out in one way or another.

I sat with that feeling for a while, dealing with so many other things in my life. When I did have a conversation with my Goddess about it, she showed full support, and it didn't take much research to find training, though the universe did help a lot in lining everything up, and the closer we got to my doing this training, the closer we got to knowing we needed to get out of where we were. The training that found me was with Rainforest Healing Center, and it was in Salt Lake City. My very first Kambo experience was on 4/3/21, and the training started a year and one day later. Still floundering in my father's passing, I spent three days driving out there in Sancho, the Ford Hybrid that he left behind, which was ironically also dead, but we were able to bring that one back.  I camped in my car in Ballarat, where I was greeted by a wild donkey as the sun set, Then I camped at a hot springs in northern Nevada. It was amazing to just be on the road and live in my car, but I did have a destination, and was cramming for a presentation that I had to give with my medicine sister, and I was also repeating necessary information in my head that I needed to memorize a little deeper than I would lines for a show. With every mile and quaint little Nevada mining town, things started getting more and more real. 

By the time I got to SLC, I was quick to realize that it was way too cold to car camp, so I got a cheap room and crammed some more. The day of arrival at the strangely themed rental, I ran around from shop to shop trying to finish up finding the items required for training. Then I was in it, surrounded by strangers, and everything felt great, aside from some off vibes I got from one of the trainees, and that played out in a pretty epic way that I don't think I'll ever be comfortable writing about, but I will certainly never look at Salvator Mundi the same. This medicine can bring out some darkness, and when you are sitting with it twice a day for over a week, with no real food but protein shakes and avocado, that dark is pitch black. I purged a lot, on a lot of levels. There was a ton of information to process, and just about every minute between doses was spent in class type talks, flooding us with information, and studying. After day three I called home and said I didn't think I was going to make it, but by my last dose on the left, I finally started to feel like I was getting it.

I could've easily gone another week with the beautiful souls I found there, but after our heart dose initiation, which did not bode well for the wall I almost pushed myself through, a final exam that I am still a little shocked I did so well on, and a beautiful last meal, a la the medicine sister I did my presentation with, we cleaned up the house and everyone dispersed back into the real world. I had a long drive home to really sit with everything that happened.

It was such an amazing and healing experience that I didn't want to go home. I wanted my family to meet me there so we could just disappear, but there was still a lot to do, and I had agreed to work another month at the job I was leaving behind. It was so difficult to take what I had just been through back to that place that I spent my whole life trying to escape, but we did it, and we got out, and the first significant destination we had when we hit the road was to introduce my family to my medicine family. I initially did this training to serve my partner and myself, but when I did start serving others, each sit has been an incredibly rewarding adventure of its own.

Come sit with us!


* All of these photos were taken by Omar, the master practitioner who did the training.