Even before leaving, when packing the backpack and having to discern what was necessary, eliminating from the list what we considered to be not, there was healing. The healing of eliminating the superfluous, the merely aesthetic, the “just in case” and abandoning the security that the things we so often cling to seem to give Matses.
To be exact, even the fact of deciding to take a trip without a return date is healing. It gives you life because it connects you with what you love and what you are passionate about. With what is worth living this life for you. You let go of many of your fears to achieve your dream.
Already during the trip, the scene of healing was not a doctor’s office or an operating room, but rather it took place on long walks through the Brazilian jungles, or through the Peruvian, Ecuadorian or Bolivian Andes, when silently or out loud, The conversations became deep. What do we want to do with our lives? What are we here for? What will we do when we return? What do we want to dedicate ourselves to? As we delved into the depths of those forests or those mountains we also delved into ourselves.
Healing was realizing great truths. Since it was shocking to see that for a third of what we spent in Madrid just paying expenses, we lived traveling and doing what made us immensely happy. And that inevitably led us to rethink some questions. We realized that traveling enriched us at all levels, often reaching a connection, even spirituality, that we had never experienced. Feeling like we were immensely rich because we had time. In all sincerity, I think that we would not feel as rich and lucky living in a four million euro mansion as we did in many moments of the trip. Maybe because true wealth has little to do with money.
Nature was our first teacher. There it was, almost always present, in all its splendor and accompanying us in our healing. Connecting with it is connecting with yourself. The long days of travel contemplating it from the seat of the means of transport on duty, the aforementioned walks, the sunlight, the sound of the jungle, the waters of rivers, sea or waterfalls, the fruit and cocoa, the wind, the rain or bare feet on the ground. Seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing, tasting everything that nature offered us was also in many cases a subtle medicine.
Until that same nature, now less subtle, got into our body. Contact with sacred plants, with ethnomedicine, was an accelerator of everything that was happening in us during the trip. And we don’t access them until we feel really ready. From sacred plants, also called power plants, we learned a lot, or perhaps little, considering their infinite wisdom. We learned that there are many ways to look at medicine and approach healing. We learned that there are things that are there but we don’t see them. We learned that there are things we don’t understand yet, but they work. We learned that of course we have to applaud and support science, but screw what has not yet been proven or we know how it works!! And to get rid of the sticky mantra of “it is not scientifically proven” as the only dogma of truth.
Today I see sacred plants as a legacy to preserve for the health of the individual, humanity and the planet. Although they will have to overcome the difficulties that they sometimes face: the great risk that their misuse entails, the abusive commercialization of their use, their supply by unsuitable people, the lack of responsibility and respect of those approaches them, the destruction of their territory or the intention of its privatization.
The sacred plants were a gift of the trip, which we approached with great respect but trust. We were very fortunate to find and choose Tangaranas and other teachers who are not in the virtual world, to accompany us. They were part of this healing path that we embarked on before we even knew it, but that today, years later, when we look back, we see that we have traveled.