You've described your first encounter with San Pedro as less than spectacular. What was it about the plant and the experience that continued to draw you closer to it?
I first visited Peru about 10 years ago, ostensibly to drink ayahuasca, but an opportunity arose, seemingly by chance, to drink San Pedro too. It certainly wasn't part of my plans.
Ayahuasca was life-changing, as it so often is for those who drink it. In my case it led eventually to me leaving my well-paid job, selling the detached dream home and giving back the keys to the BMW so I could devote time to the needs of my soul and to what was real and important to me: working more closely with the plants and the healers I had met.
By contrast, San Pedro left me cold - physically as well as metaphysically. I drank it as part of an all-night ceremony at a site just outside of Lima with a traditional shaman working with what I have now come to call 'old school' rituals. So I was first given a contrachisa (an emetic to get rid of the spiritual toxins in my body), then a singado: a tobacco and alcohol mixture which is snorted into the nostrils to clean your energy and bring good luck. It is acrid, acidic and drips down your throat like battery acid. So there was plenty of purging (i.e. vomiting) from me that night!
Then there were baths with cold floral waters, sprays with agua florida, gentle beatings with chonta (wooden sticks which are a typical feature of many San Pedro mesas or altars) and calisthenics to perform too, all of it designed to loosen the energy and remove spirit intrusions. Almost as a footnote I was also given San Pedro.
The night was freezing, I was tired and, with all that activity, there was hardly a moment to even engage with San Pedro yet alone feel and experience the effects of the cactus itself - very much in contrast to ayahuasca ceremonies where, in the gentle warmth of the jungle, you are only asked to sit and listen to the beautiful healing songs of the shaman and allow your visions to unfold.
That first experience with San Pedro could have turned me off it forever. I mean, why would you bother with all that drama for so little effect when ayahuasca is profound and its ceremonies so healing and beautiful?
There was something about San Pedro though; some nagging feeling that it contained new answers for me. Perhaps I received more than I thought from that first ceremony but, if so, then it was at a subtle or unconscious level.
It was enough anyway to encourage me to seek out other healers and ceremonies, different approaches and different brews, until I finally found a shaman with a San Pedro that was of a wholly different order to the others I had drunk. That ceremony was an eye-opener. With the curandera (female shaman) La Gringa I realised during the course of a single ceremony what San Pedro had been trying to tell me for years.
There were two keys to this: firstly that while other shamans tend to brew their San Pedro for eight or even four hours, La Gringa cooks hers for 20 so it is much more potent.
More importantly, however, she has dispensed with the ritual dramas of the 'old school' shamans I had been working with, so there are no distractions from the healing and visions the cactus brings. You are totally in the experience for several hours.
Her ceremonies are held in the daytime too so it is warmer, more comfortable and, more than that, you can see the world around you and it is alive with colour, spirit and beauty. You just can't do that in the darkness of all-night ceremonies. What San Pedro had been trying to tell me for years is that the world is beautiful, but I needed to meet its spirit directly and in daylight in order to hear this message and that had been more or less impossible in the other ceremonies I had attended.
Could you describe a particularly profound experience you've had with San Pedro? Where to begin? Well, on that first daylight ceremony, for example, I became San Pedro.
Almost as soon as I drank it I began to experience little jolts of energy which felt like muscle cramps running through my body and, after a while of this, I grew intrigued as to whether I would actually be able to see my muscles moving under my skin so I held my arm up to study it. It was green, with ridges and furrows and its hairs were standing upright like spines. It took me some moments to recognise what it was or what it reminded me of, so I knew I wasn't 'inventing' or imagining it. It was only when I made the connection that I realised I was San Pedro: it had totally taken me over and the jolts of energy I was experiencing were the cactus checking me out muscle-by-muscle cell-by-cell and healing the areas of weakness it found in me.
I was fascinated, awed and alarmed all at the same time - I didn't know whether I'd ever make it back to human form. But my other experiences with entheogens had taught me that at times like these you simply must trust the plant so I relaxed and let it do its work. From then on I felt blessed and honoured to be in the hands of such a powerful healer.
I had a vision then where I saw and experienced myself cowering outside the walls of Paradise in a world which was as empty as a desert, pleading to be let back in but always receiving a gentle but insistent 'no'. Even under the intoxication of San Pedro I knew that this symbolised my relationship to the world: that I felt alone and abandoned by God and that this was the route of all my failures and illnesses.
The message of San Pedro was to face my fears with dignity and to understand that everyone on this planet feels the same aloneness too; it is the cause of all our conflicts and terrors, but actually the world is beautiful and ours, just as we are its. We belong to each other so we are never truly alone and there is no need to feel afraid.
As soon as I realised that a bolt of energy hit me full in the back and in the shock of it I took the deepest breath that I can ever remember taking. I had been suffering from the breathlessness of altitude sickness for a few days (I was in Cusco at the time, which is about 12,000 feet above sea level) but with that single breath I was completely cured. Furthermore, I somehow understood that I had got sick because I expected to - because I always did when I visited Cusco - and the power of my mind had created my current reality of illness while in fact there was nothing physically wrong with me.
The world is as you dream it as the Shuar shamans say. With San Pedro, more so even than with ayahuasca, you see how literally true that is. Since then I have met people who have been cured of all sorts of diseases - cancer, paralysis, pneumonia, grief, paranoia - by drinking San Pedro and arriving at the same conclusion that I did: illness is a state of mind and by changing our minds we can heal ourselves. I talk about some of these people in my book.
That healing with San Pedro lasted for 12 hours and what I have described here so far took maybe two, so there was a lot more to this journey than I have space for. The take-home messages, however, were that the world is a magnificent place where everything is allowed and there is no need to feel afraid or to manifest our fears as illness. We can walk the world with power, pride, dignity and courage instead, because 'We are That' and we always have a choice.
You mentioned San Pedro as being "much better than ayahuasca for getting to grips with the world." Could you elaborate on this? My experiences with ayahuasca give me the sense that it frees the spirit from the body so that figuratively speaking (or perhaps sometimes literally) we can drift among the stars and see the order of the universe and the energy that underlies it, or meet others - plants, animals and people - on a spirit-to-spirit, soul-to-soul level. The healing comes when we realise that everything is energy, that this energy (or its manifestation as blessings, illness or misfortune) can be changed, and that we are all connected. The emphasis, however, is on going out, moving beyond the limitations of the body and the ego-concerns of our minds so we can come to know this.
For several years now I have organised trips for people to work with the ayahuasca shamans of the Amazon and have also run ceremonies of my own in Europe, and my conclusions are consistent with the experiences of others as well as some of the literature on ayahuasca and DMT.
With San Pedro, however, the overriding sensation is of bringing the soul of the universe into the body: a 'drawing inwards' so you understand your place in the world, the creative powers you have to shape and direct it and, above all, the beauty of your soul and the soul of the things around you.
With ayahuasca you may be lost in wonder at the magnificence of your spirit and the universe you are a part of but San Pedro is often more beautifully and gently humbling: you realise that even though you are magnificent you are no more amazing or significant than a house brick (which is incredible and alive in its own way)! But you are no less significant or wonderful either! Everything is equal, in balance, and perfect as it is.
The effect of San Pedro, then, is to teach you how to be "the true human" as one of my teachers puts it, and how to be and act in the world - with dignity, compassion and responsibility. If you like, it provides instruction for us in how to fall in love with the world again and with all that we are and have, instead of voyaging outwards to heal what we are not. As one of my participants expressed it, having drunk San Pedro "I wanted to fuck the Earth!"
For these reasons San Pedro is the perfect complement to ayahuasca and helps to ground our spiritual lessons within our bodies so that a code for living in 'the real world' can begin to inform and empower us. On the trips I run to Peru we first spend time in the jungle with ayahuasca and then in the mountains to work with San Pedro and I think that this order of doing things is important, so we learn from the universe through ayahuasca and, through San Pedro, we can then apply that learning to the world and understand that we, too, are God.
Knowledge and use of Ayahuasca is growing across the planet, do you see a similar thing occurring with San Pedro? Why, or how, do you feel San Pedro has kept a lower profile than Ayahuasca? It's an interesting question. Andean shamans say that San Pedro has a certain "mystery" to it; that you have to in some way "earn" your relationship with it. Maybe that's why it took me so long to develop my own connections to it. I doubt that their view is wholly true however since I've taken many people to Peru to work with La Gringa and myself and they've got San Pedro's message at the first ceremony they attended.
The 'old school' San Pedro shamans do have a protective attitude towards the cactus spirit though and in some ways I think that the rituals they use are a sort of mask they put up to its power so that not everyone is immediately granted the privilege of access to what they regard as its divine essence and teachings.
I'm not sure either that the time is right just yet for people to have full access to San Pedro, although that time will inevitably come. I think that the medicine for our times is probably still ayahuasca, so that we can experience and explore other realities and develop our understanding of oneness. The next evolutionary step may then be to bring this understanding into our relationship to the world and that is the job of San Pedro, but maybe we're not there yet.