Cicadia Depth-Perception in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia | Alternative & holistic health service

Cicadia Depth-Perception

Locality: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Phone: +61 481 180 816

Address: Footscray 3011 Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Website: http://www.cicadiadepthperception.org

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20.01.2022 Maestro Alonso del Rio on sacred songs or icaros during ayahuasca ceremonies: ________ Maestro Alonso del Rio first drank ayahuasca in 1979; spent 13 continuous... years in the Amazon undergoing shamanic plant dietas while apprenticed to Shipibo Onaya (healer) Benito Arevalo; then moved to Lima where he conducted his own ceremonies for the next 10 years. He is now based in the Sacred Valley of Peru and has more than 41 years of full-time experience working with this sacred medicine. ________ "What role do sacred songs icaros play in a [ayahuasca] ceremony? I will speak about them first. They are the traditional songs that ayahuasca healers use in their ceremonies. There are various types." "There are icaros to call the spirits of plants, to call protector spirits; also to invoke the spirit of an animal, vegetal or mineral, or any entity of nature." "Some come just from human inspiration whereas others are truly the sound expression of the spirit they represent. These are without doubt the most powerful ones." "But the true power lies more in the relationship between the healer and his song than in the icaro itself." "Icaros reveal themselves almost always during ‘dietas’ and they demand a high price in effort, austerities or fasts in order for them to have true power or capacity to heal." _______ "Repeating the icaro of any master makes no sense if it was not obtained correctly in the first place with proper permission and second, if the person did not ‘diet’ adequately." "Another very important thing is to understand that even if all the requisites are met, the main thing is the state of consciousness one sings from. This is essential for me." "To sing a sacred song even if it is ‘correctly’ performed will not have the same effect if sang from an ordinary state of consciousness or from another state of expanded consciousness. The where, the when and the why always have to be respected." _______ "Music is essential in the type of ceremonies I do. During the first hour when the first effects of the medicine start, it is mainly the beginners who experience their own inner chaos. Without the help of the music this state would be almost unmanageable." "Music plays a role of ordering, it proposes an equilibrium, a harmony that when it is correctly directed it moves opening a path and giving solution to those very intense moments." "The songs I use in ceremonies are poems that invite us to reflect on life and our path, touching very deep emotions in participants. The distance between each note is not something arbitrary; it also represents the exact distance that exists between different vibratory levels. Even though this is not all, it is very important to sing in tune because tuning represents the respect for the exact distance and this brings harmony." "Out of tune represents chaos. When singing in a ceremony surrounded by people hyper sensitized by the medicine, we are not only transmitting a song but all our life, all our clarity or our confusion, our truth or our lie. Because of the levels of sensitiveness we work with it is a very delicate matter." ___________ Excerpt from Tawantinsuyo 5.0 by Alonso del Rio Photo of Maestro Benito Arevalo from Medicina del Perdon

19.01.2022 I personally believe that one of the most important reasons to engage the plant path and do dietas (besides becoming a curandero) is to heal the fracture of separation in the Western psyche. Healing in the deeper sense, for me anyway, is the return to a reciprocal relationship with a living, sentient world. I believe this longing to return to this embodied perception of living world, is behind many of the outer reasons that people seek out plant medicine. This podcasts speaks powerfully to this loss of animate awareness

14.01.2022 "A powerful photo by Bruno Kelly showing the preserved Amazon Rainforest within the indigenous territory of the Uru-Eu-Wau Wau; and what was once the Amazon that lies beyond the protection of indigenous tribal territory." ~ via Dieta of Teacher Plants & Trees

06.01.2022 We are very excited to announced that John Seed will be coming to Melbourne for the first time in 2years to lead a Deep Ecology workshop with our support at the end of January Spots are very limited due to Covid restrictions but we may open up more tickets closer to the time if restrictions allow. 100% of the proceeds will go to the Melbourne Rainforest Action Group (MRAG) to support their efforts in halting open-pit mining by Australian and multi-national mining companies in the Ecuadorian high jungle and the headwaters of the Amazon River.

03.01.2022 Additional conversational excerpts from a free-ranging discussion with Manuel Villaescusa ranging from psychedelic-based therapy to ethics/abuse in the world of... ayahuasca. _______ Manuel Villaescusa is a curandero and clinical psychologist from Spain. He has been learning from curanderos and healers from Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Colombia since 1998, and has been presiding over his own ceremonies for the past 17+ years. He completed a dedicated 6 year apprenticeship in the Ecuadorian Shuar tradition, and most recently dieted with Maestro Juan Flores of Mayantuyacu. ___________ Me: "Psychedelic-based therapy seems to be moving towards legalization, especially when it comes to mushrooms and LSD, and who knows, maybe all plant medicines in the future." "There is a clear concern though, especially with ayahuasca, that this could take the sacrament out of the tradition, where Western therapists, no matter how well-intentioned, start to do what they think is best in terms of administering an entire menu of medicines." "As someone who has trained in both Western clinical psychology and Amazonian curanderismo, what is your opinion on this?" Manuel: I think we are living in a very interesting moment in time, reminding me of the old saying, "May you live in interesting times." "For most of my life-time, myself and the community I have learned from and worked with, have been dreaming of the day psychedelics could become legal medicines, and all this healing power could be available to everyone." "But now that it is really happening, it is really confronting us with the reality of how this is going to turn out." "There is already one company, Compass, that has patented a way of synthesizing psilocybin that has been legally granted, so the first psilocybin produced for the medical mass market will be from Compass. We are taking billions of dollars if you look at the market for anti-depressant medication. Of course we are not happy that Big Pharma is getting into this and its efforts are led by people who do not have experience with these medicines as sacraments." "On the other hand, there is no way that psilocybin will be used in the way anti-depressants are used now. It involves sessions with a therapist, and up until now, the way things are being done in the United States has been well-conducted. The sessions are usually led by experienced therapists, usually a man and a woman, in a safe place. They have learned the lessons of the 1960s in terms of set and setting." Manuel: "Here in Spain we are trying to anticipate what will happen if the ayahuasquero becomes a legal profession. Who is going to be on the board of examiners for example? (Laugh) There is going to be a lot of conflict there, there are many different traditions. We will see." "One thing that could be a model is psychotherapy. I trained in the United Kingdom in psychotherapy. In the United Kingdom there is no government-imposed set of rules. There is one professional association (the UK Council for Psychotherapy), and they have their code of ethics. It is not mandatory to be a member, but if you are UKCP registered, you have a seal of integrity so that clients can know you have a standard level of training; that you follow the code of ethics; that you are accountable." "It is possible to be a cowboy psychotherapist, but you are not going to get as many clients. So this is something we have tried to do with Plantaforma." "Our members all agree to follow our code of ethics, which is similar to the code of ethics of psychotherapy, which is to defend the patients against abuse. We hope that by creating this professional association, we can show how being an ayahuasquero as a profession can possibly work." _________ Me: "Do you think that if ayahuasca starts entering the mainstream in a much greater way than it is now, that whatever reasonably safe way people can get access to the medicine is okay?" "In other words, at least this allows a lot of people to meet the medicine, and they can choose to go deeper (e.g. within a tradition) if they want to." "Or do you think it is important that only qualified ayahuasqueros, curanderos, or long-standing organizations like Santo Daime, be the ones to administer the medicine?" Manuel: "There is a company based here in Spain, they are applying all the mass marketing techniques to the world of ayahuasca. They organize training seminars that are a few weekends in length, and afterwards, they give their medicines to the people who have gone through these sessions and tell them to go and form their own groups. It is a bit like a pyramid scheme because the new people send part of the money back." Me: "I believe they are also mixing sacraments?" Manuel: "Yes, everything. Bufo, Kambo, ayahuasca, iboga, you name it." "So on the one hand, many people are opening up to this realm of consciousness that everyone has inside of themselves, which is a historic change in our society." "On the other hand, we believe that the actions of companies like this are completely irresponsible. It leads to the possibility of many accidents happening. And this has consequences." "Of course accidents will happen because people like these are not following the hard-earned knowledge and wisdom that tradition is. Tradition is also a way of receiving and learning from all the mistakes curanderos have made in the past, like generations and generations of them, so you do not have to make them yourself. And these people are not respecting that." _____ Me: "I think we can think of several organizations (or organizers) like these that most serious people in the medicine world would recommend staying away from." "But there are also many people who give ayahuasca who are not part of a big organization, but may not be entirely qualified as well." "For example, here where I live, I heard of one dental assistant who gives ayahuasca to people. So she brings people into the dentist's office at night, has them sit in a reclining patient chair, then just watches them silently as they go through some process." "There is another person who I believe gives ayahausca more often than anyone else that I know locally. He sits with curanderos, even organizes for different tribes that come through town, but he also hosts his own ceremonies. Not only is he not a curandero, but he does not sing from what I hear. He plays recorded music, and I heard a funny story where they lost electricity one night, and everyone just sat there not knowing what to do. I am also told he uses his position as a "pseudo-shaman" to have sex with the female participants." "So with situations like these, some people think the medicine will take care of itself. That these people will eventually learn that they have a lot to learn." "But there are others who believe these type of people should somehow be called out and/or educated by the medicine community at large." Manuel: "To become a member of Plantaforma, you need to come from a lineage. You have to come from recognized teachers. It is not open to everyone. It is the same as the association of psychotherapists. You can be Freudian, Jungian, Cognitive Behavioral, but you have to come from some recognized way of working." "I believe this could be the answer to these types of questions, to have a strong professional body that requires its members to come from a recognized lineage in order to become a practictioner. At the same time, like in every profession, there are people who work in a very bad way, even when they are part of a professional organization. But I believe the majority of professionals do good work." ________ Me: "On that point, I remember once drinking with an Ecuadorian Shuar shaman, or uwishin, for around a week. I never sat with him again after that week, because I was completely turned off by his behavior within the mareacion." "In the middle of ceremony, he stood up, took off his shirt, and started to practically pound on his chest while boasting about all his supposed powers. Things like "I can turn into a jaguar and travel through the jungle, then turn into a condor and fly through the air, I can do this, and I can do that, I am so powerful," and so on." "He was speaking very quickly in Spanish so I do not think most of the people really understood what he was saying. But I did, and even back then as a novice in the medicine, I felt something must have gone wrong on his path for him to be so arrogant. Sadly, all of his foreign "apprentices" (or so-called apprentices) seemed to have absorbed this type of energy and were displaying it outside of ceremony as well." [Note: I later learned this Ecuadorian Shuar uwishin was having sex (or trying to have sex) with a lot of female participants; and much later, found out that someone died of "unexplained injuries" in one of his ceremonies and he was eventually convicted of manslaughter.] Manuel: "That type of self-aggrandizement in your example is not an exception. Many of the curanderos I have known are people with strong egos. In their culture, there is a certain type of person who is able to get through all of the years of training and ordeals." "The problem is when they start hurting other people. This is especially with the case of sexual abuse. There are many cases where the curandero sexually abuses the participants. This stems at least partly from ego inflation. They feel powerful and they use this power and charisma to seduce the women that are in a state of strong suggestibility. It is usually not rape, and is technically "consensual," but this is completely not okay. And it happens very often. It is a big problem." "The way I see it is, as soon as a curandero uses power for his self-benefit and to harm others, he automatically becomes a brujo [a dark warlock/witch] in my mind." "In the Amazonian tradition, one of the main things they teach you is how difficult it is to not become a brujo. Because when you start having power, when you start receiving this power from the plants, the temptation to use this power to get personal benefits in detriment of other people, is very strong. It can be for sex or for money." "Everybody in these traditions will tell you it is much easier to become a brujo than it is to become a good curandero. On this path, you learn up to one point, when you can become a brujo. And in order to become a good healer, you have to work much more and for much longer." "And I think this extra work involves being strong enough to keep balanced, to keep your moral center, to remain compassionate and have in mind the well-being of all beings." "With Plantaforma, the main aspect we are dealing with, are unfortunately curanderos from Peru, who come here to Spain and have sex with their ceremony participants. Because in their tradition, there is not this taboo. In their practice in Peru, when a young woman needs to go to the curandero, she never ever goes on her own. She goes with her whole family! With her uncle, her father, her brother, so the curandero knows very clearly that she is not alone. So that is one of the conflicts we have between these two cultures." "In Spain recently, there was one Peruvian curandero who during the mareacion, touched women's vaginas, then told them it was part of the tradition of his tribe and part of the healing where he comes from, which is a complete lie." "So with Plantaforma, we helped the victims to speak out and now this person cannot come back to Spain. It provides at least some level of protection against this type of predatory behavior."

02.01.2022 Love this "Shipibo designs and art, known as Kené, express an energy matrix woven through all of creation. Inspired by nature and observation of the environment it not only is rooted in the shamanistic visions but, more importantly, in the profound connection with the ecosystem the Shipibo-Conibo tribes are settled in. As such, Kené is not just an art style but it does belong to the ecosystem and is present, in the first place, in plants and animals throughout the Amazon ...basin." "Kené is not only seen as art, at least not in the western understanding of art and creativity, but it has a deeper meaning attached, as it is also seen as a universal light matrix, a language of nature that can be translated via art into a physical form and contains a sacred purpose. Kené also is vividly present, literally speaking, in shamanistic visions ignited by ceremonial and medicinal work with plant-based entheogens like Ayahuasca, Noya Rao and Mapacho tobacco. Kené is not only art, it is a representation of organic energy flow and a living form."