Becoming the Jungle
This is a journey beyond roads and rivers — a crossing into the living memory of the earth, where what you find is not a destination, but a meeting with the part of you that was never lost.
The Long Way Home
You don’t just arrive at the jungle.
You are carried there, slowly, by currents stronger than any road.
Pucallpa, which means “red earth” in Quechua, sits where the land begins to dissolve into river, mist, and endless green — a town at the edge of what maps can’t define.
Founded in the 1840s by Franciscan missionaries and Shipibo-Konibo tribes, it was, for decades, a hidden outpost in Peru’s vast eastern wilderness.
Today, it stands as a threshold: one foot in the known world, one foot already swallowed by the breathing memory of the forest.
From Pucallpa, the journey deepens.
We load into battered 4x4s at dawn, engines snarling against the steamy morning.
Along the way, we pass trucks — monstrous, groaning under the weight of massive logs, each a fallen elder of the jungle.
Trees older than memory, severed, stripped of their crowns, laid out like trophies on metal beds.
My heart aches at the sight — not in rage, but in mourning.
A quiet grief for the slow dismantling of a world that once wove itself together without asking permission.
The road falls apart behind us — first to dust, then to mud, then to the raw muscle of rivers that must be forded by stubborn wheels.
Civilization thins until the only structures left are the trees themselves.
At the riverbank, we find the canoes waiting — long wooden vessels rocking on a current as wide as a freeway, three hundred meters across.
Here in the Amazon, the rivers are the highways, the original veins of connection.
People, goods, stories — all flow along these brown serpents threading the living continent together.
We ride for hours, the motor coughing against the great hush.
And then, almost imperceptibly, we turn south — into a smaller tributary — and the world closes in.
Here, the green walls press closer.
Branches claw the humid air.
The light narrows, and the river becomes a path not outward, but inward — into a deeper remembering.
We land at a hidden beach.
No signs, no maps.
We step barefoot onto sand that welcomes purpose, intention, and the quiet unfolding of dreams.
We are instructed to lace up high rubber boots — a quiet reminder that in this place, serpents move with the same ease as the river.
We unload our backpacks and gear from the canoes, each movement deliberate, as if preparing not for a hike, but for a passage.
Waiting for us is the Taita — a young elder, his years few but his knowing deep, the jungle woven into the way he carries himself.
In the Shipibo tradition, the Taita holds the thread between worlds: a guide, a protector, a bridge.
Without words, he signals the beginning of the real journey.
Not outward, but inward.
We fall in behind him, and the forest folds us deeper into itself with every step. After an hour moving through a trail of thickening green, we arrive at a small river, its waters slow and brown, breathing quietly beneath the trees.
A giant fallen log — heavy, ancient — lays itself across the current, offering a bridge to the other side.
We cross single file, boots gripping the slick wood, breath held in reverence.
On the far bank, the path rises sharply.
A staircase, carved from the earth itself, reinforced by logs driven deep into the soil, climbs up the slope ahead.
Each step feels like a threshold — a human trace, but not an intrusion.
A signal that others have passed this way before us, weaving their lives into the forest.
The Clearing That Breathes
When the clearing appears, it feels less like an opening and more like stepping inside the quiet heart of something ancient and alive.
The maloca rises from the slope like a memory of how humans once lived: open to the wind, stitched with palm and wood, offering no walls to divide inside from outside.
It does not dominate the land. It leans into it, listening.
A maloca is a large, circular, open-sided structure with a tall, conical roof made of palm thatch.
Supported by wooden pillars, it shelters ceremonies while allowing the sounds, winds, and spirits of the forest to flow freely through.
Nearby, scattered along the banks of a narrow river, the tambos perch — each set a hundred to a hundred and fifty meters apart, like lone thoughts whispered into the jungle.
They are not fortresses. They are invitations to vanish, to become permeable to the breathing world.
There are no solid walls — only mesh or mosquito netting draped around a basic bed and a hammock.
Built for solitude, the tambo offers a protected space for fasting, dreaming, and listening to the living world.
This is not a retreat.
This is a return.
And it begins with the dieta.
The Dieta of Listening
In the world we are leaving behind, a diet is something you do to fix yourself.
Here, a dieta is something you do to remember yourself.
You strip away the salt, the sugar, the oils, the distractions.
You eat a handful of rice, a boiled banana, sometimes less.
You surrender the need to speak, to perform, to organize your experience.
You become a listener — to the wind, to the soil, to the quiet voice of the plants themselves.
The dieta is not a deprivation.
It is a homecoming.
And waiting at the center of it all is the Madrecita Ayahuasca — the vine of the soul.
Madrecita’s Invitation
Ayahuasca is not a psychedelic.
It is not an escape.
It is a teacher.
The leaves of Psychotria viridis, known as Chacruna, carry DMT, the molecular key to the inner worlds.
The vine of Banisteriopsis caapi carries the wisdom to unlock it — the MAO inhibitors that hold the doorway open long enough for the soul to walk through.
Together, they weave a path into the architecture of being.
DMT binds strongly to the 5-HT2A receptor, which is involved in higher-order consciousness, sensory processing, and meaning-making. It is a molecule already written into the fabric of the human body.
When it awakens, it loosens the structures that hold the world in place — the boundaries between self and other, dream and waking, body and spirit.
It does not show you something foreign.
It reveals what has always been here, hidden beneath the noise of ordinary perception
The Shipibo say that Ayahuasca is a mother — Madrecita — not because she pampers you, but because she sees you. She takes care of you — severe, yet kind — stripping away illusions with a love fierce enough to make you whole.
Every part of you — the broken pieces you hide, the dreams you abandoned, the longings you dare not name.
Under her gaze, you do not conquer your shadows.
You sit with them until they dissolve.
The Ceremony of Unmaking
At sundown, we gather — not in rows, but in a circle, as the forest itself might gather its children.
A quiet geometry of belonging forms around the maloca’s open heart.
No one calls us to order.
We are drawn together by something older than memory — the shared pulse of breath, of soil, of song still waiting to be sung.
The maloca breathes with us.
The jungle folds closer.
The shaman sits in stillness, cross-legged, wrapped in peruvian poncho, the woven memory of our ancestors, surrounded by his altar — a woven constellation of meaning: a guitar, a charango, several drums, a chapaca of rustling leaves ready to stir the unseen currents.
Beside him, the Taita — the young elder, the inheritor of the lineage — watches with quiet, steady eyes.
Between them, something more than knowledge passes.
A living thread, old as rivers, stitching generations together.
They do not command the space.
They hold it.
They open it.
They listen to what cannot be spoken and weave it into song, into breath, into silence.
Each of us tended a small altar infront of us — simple, personal, woven from the threads of our own journeys: a stone, a piece of quartz, a small sculpture of a jaguar, a pouch of sacred tobacco, a small vessel of rapé.
These were offerings — gestures of devotion, acknowledgments of the sacred — invitations for the unseen to meet us where we truly are.
They were openings — quiet declarations that we were ready to be undone, ready to listen, ready to be remade.
We are asked to manifest — not with explanations, but with the true and pure intentions that called us to this ceremony, to this journey of devotion.
What do we ask of Madrecita?
What do we seek — not to possess, but to understand?
There is a sacred silence around what happens next, and it is right that it remains so.
Some journeys are not meant to be dissected.
But I can say this:
The dieta is not an experience you have.
It is a self you lose.
One by one, in the ancient rhythm of the anticlockwise turning, the shaman calls us forward.
No words are needed.
A gesture of the hand, a meeting of the eyes, and we rise when it is our time, drawn by something older than command.
We walk the circle inward and kneel before the altar — a simple weave of earth, wood, and spirit.
With both hands, the shaman lifts a small bronze cup toward us.
In it, the medicine waits: thick, dark, and alive, the color of forest sap and old rivers, a viscous potion that smells sour, bitter, and deeply green — as if the jungle itself had wept into the cup.
We receive it with both hands, honoring the gift.
Not a drink, but a crossing.
Through the ceremonies, the íkaros rise — not songs sung at you, but songs sung through you.
Íkaros are sacred songs sung by Amazonian healers, weaving sound into medicine.
They guide, protect, and heal — carrying the spirit of the plants into the hearts of those who listen.
The chapaca rustles against the air, sweeping the space clean.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the stories you carried about yourself — your name, your past, your ambitions, your fears — loosen their grip.
You do not become better.
You become less.
And in becoming less, you become whole.
The Work Inside the Circle
There is a code, unspoken but known, that whatever happens inside the circle of the medicine must remain there.
It is not secrecy.
It is respect.
The journey each of us undertook — guided by Madrecita, witnessed by the forest, sung into being by the íkaros — was not just an individual passage.
It was a weaving.
Each vision, each tear, each trembling step into the unknown was a thread added to a fabric greater than any one of us — a collective organism of healing, breathing through the maloca, through the river, through the vines.
My own work during the four ceremonies — the depths I traveled, the thresholds I crossed — belongs not only to me.
It belongs to the circle.
It belongs to the living field we entered together — a field that did not end with the maloca’s edges, but stretched outward into the greater body of the world.
Like the wings of a butterfly stirring the air across an ocean, the healing that stirred here — humble, unseen, incomplete — moved out into the collective body of humanity.
Moved into the dream of civilization itself.
Moved into the dream of remembering we are nature, we are breath, we are life woven into life.
That was my work during these ten days.
Not to achieve something.
But to participate in the quiet reweaving of the whole.
The Memory That Remains
Days and nights blur.
The river hums its slow wisdom beyond the trees.
The insects lift their symphony into the thick dark.
The earth breathes beneath the floorboards of the tambo.
And somewhere between waking and dreaming, between vision and surrender, the forest begins to remember you.
You stop seeing the jungle as scenery.
You stop hearing the jungle as noise.
You remember that you are not separate from the river.
You are not separate from the vines.
You are not separate from the song.
You are sung into being by the same breath that moves the clouds and folds the leaves at dusk.
You belong to them, and they to you — threads in the same breathing tapestry of interbeing.
When the dieta ends, there is no triumphant return.
There is only the slow drift back into a world that no longer fits quite the same.
The river carries us outward again, but something lingers.
A remembering.
A hum in the bones.
The knowledge that we were never truly lost.
That the perfection we sought was never somewhere else.
It is here.
It is now.
It is you. It is us.
The ancient mantra echoes, from another tradition, another forest:
That is whole.
This is whole.
From the whole, the whole becomes manifest.
Taking the whole from the whole, the whole remains.
And the vine — silent now, but alive inside you — whispers once more:
Welcome home.
