The Toé / Datura Diaries: A Shamanic Apprenticeship in the Heart of the Amazon Jungle - Softcover

Regueiro, Javier

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1950367304 ISBN 13: 9781950367306

Publisher: Krieger Publishing Group, 2023

Synopsis

The First Ever Account of Dieting the Revered Shamanic Plant Brugmansia aka Toé / Datura A personal account of the use of the Brugmansia plant commonly known as “Toé,” is revealed. The plant is native of the Peruvian Amazon and the Andes, where it’s highly revered among shamans. Despite its popularity, the ingestion of this plant is surrounded by many justified taboos due to its toxicity and many dangers.

Javier Regueiro worked and studied intensively with this unique Plant Teacher in 2005 for five months, deep in the Amazon, and again in 2019. These experiences have been essential in his shamanic apprenticeship, as well as a profound personal healing and spiritual process.

In The Toé / Datura Diaries these experiences are shared in great detail through journal entries from both shamanic dietas - or diet regimen in Spanish, - as well as extensive commentary on those experiences. Following his first Toé dieta in 2005, Javier Regueiro began working as a plant medicine person and created the Ayaruna Center in Pisac, Peru. Over the last 10+ years he has been offering healing retreats with Ayahuasca and San Pedro / Huachuma plant medicines, both of which he has published books on.

While this book is not intended as a DIY manual for ingesting either the Toé or any other potentially risky plants, it does provide a very detailed overview and intimate glimpse into both the traditional practice of dieting medicinal plants. The commentary and insights provided are designed to avoid common pitfalls and maximize the time and effort invested in the profound healing process plant medicines provide.

This captivating tale presents an honest and vulnerable journey into the wisdom and medicines of the Amazon jungle. The many challenges faced by the author along the way ultimately led to a profound healing and expansion from engaging with this powerful Plant Teacher.

About this title

About the Author

Javier Regueiro is a Spanish plant medicine person born and raised in Switzerland. He is a certified Massage Therapist, Rebirther and Avatar Master.
In 2004 he moved to study Amazonian plant medicine and shamanism, and has apprenticed with various teachers in the Iquitos and Pucallpa areas. Since 2006 he has been leading healing retreats with Ayahuasca and San Pedro/Huachuma at his own Ayaruna Healing Center in Pisac, Peru, and devotes his life to supporting people in their awakening and healing.
He is the author of two more books on shamanic plant medicines: Ayahuasca: Soul Medicine of the Amazon Jungle and San Pedro/Huachuma: Opening the Pathways of the Heart, which are both published by Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press. Javier lives in Pisac, Peru.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
First of all, I would like to make it clear that this is NOT a handbook for engaging with the Toé plant. People interested in ingesting this medicine on their own will find here little detailed information about this process and would do better to save their time and money if that’s what they’re looking for.

The Angel’s Trumpet plant, henceforth referred to with its most common Amazonian name “Toé,” is a very powerful Plant Teacher but just as toxic and dangerous. This plant has a long history of human use for medicinal, spiritual, and shamanic purposes. Such use has traditionally been closely supervised by someone with a lot of experience with this plant and not left to the casual use of individuals, which is why you won’t find any information here about dosages and specific modes of use. Some Westerners may indeed be ready to engage with this plant medicine on their own, but they are really an infinitesimal minority. For most of us, the recommended way to go about it is with an experienced teacher with a lot of integrity: someone who has only our best interest in mind and not someone who wishes to impress others by serving a medicine that could possibly damage the person ingesting it.

INITIATION

Traditional spirituality and shamanism have always had an important element of thoroughly preparing the individual before the next step is to be taken along the path of learning and awakening. For example, monks with a desire for enlightenment may have to spend years cleaning the bathrooms of the monastery before any teaching is imparted to them. The traditional approach of assessing the level of readiness of the individual is not casual or arbitrary but stems from the awareness that, in order to have a positive healing or spiritual experience, such preparation is deemed essential in order to avoid experiencing something that could be truly detrimental to the person’s psyche. Plant medicine is an organic process and, like all organic processes, offers no shortcuts and no magic pills along the way of healing and liberation. The path is often shrouded with taboos: these are created deliberately to warn people about the dangers of this or that process, and the experiences here related should prove the validity and importance of such taboos.

Modern people talk a lot nowadays about instant enlightenment along the same lines of fast food or any other kind of instant gratification: we do live in extraordinary times where literally anything is possible, and I don’t rule out that someone, karmically and psychologically ready for it, may indeed become suddenly enlightened while riding the subway on their way to work or by ingesting some Toé on their own: exceptions, if anything, confirm the validity and importance of the rules. In our present state of a more-often-than-not inflated ego, we may think that we are exempt from such rules, that we are very special, and in no need to subscribe to any guideline, particularly when those guidelines require of us a lengthy and disciplined process. We may decide to skip the traditional approach and do as we feel inspired to. Even with the support and guidance of an experienced teacher, this medicine can catalyze very detrimental effects on the body and psyche of the individual because most of us are really wandering in the dark, ignorant of our true needs and level of spiritual and psychological maturity, and therefore unaware of what we are really getting ourselves into. For many who have ingested Toé without the due preparation and readiness, the Toé experience has proved to be very unpleasant, sometimes even traumatic, or one that has left long-lasting negative repercussions.

Over the years I have met and heard of people badly bruised and even damaged by their process with this or many other Plant Teachers, so my approach has always been very cautious and humble. I am not in the position to tell people how to approach this Plant Teacher, and I am definitely not sharing my experience as an example to copy or emulate. There are no rules written in stone, but I do believe that sooner or later we all have to deal with the consequences of our choices and actions. There are enough people who have engaged in the past with medicines such as Toé or Ayahuasca who, as a result of their negative or unpleasant experience (including short- and long-term psychotic episodes), spend the rest of their days in psychiatric wards or blaming the medicine or the plant medicine person for their experience, often referring to these powerful medicines as evil and accusing plant medicine people of sorcery and black magic. We will further explore these themes of psychosis and black magic later on.

The bottom line, as far as I am concerned, is that these individuals took a bite into something much bigger than they were ready to chew on and swallow. No one is really to blame, but it is important to take responsibility for one’s own experience.Years ago a client who had some interest in becoming a plant medicine person started complaining about my teacher and his car salesman ways. In answering to his complaints, I mentioned that if anybody wishes to be a shaman, the first thing is to grow up into a responsible adult. For us modern people who live in a world where we stay kind of infantile through most of our lives, expecting to be spoon-fed and complaining when we are not, a mature attitude when entering the realm of plant medicines is one of our best assets. Of course, if we were fully grown-up and integrated beings there would be no need to engage with these medicines, and oftentimes our healing process IS about letting go of our childishness and embracing our responsibilities as adults.

In traditional societies we may be able to voice our interest in participating in a plant medicine ceremony or process, but ultimately it is the plant medicine person who is going to assess whether we are ready for that experience. And we may have to wait some weeks, months, or even years.

In recent times it has become clear to me that traditional plant medicine has a very important initiatory component, and, as with all initiations, it is a matter of being ready to receive what we say we want to experience. In the Amazon jungle as well as in the Andes the word “Cocha,” which is used to refer to a lagoon of freshwater, actually refers to the hollow earth that holds the water of the lagoon. In the same way, particular veneration is given to Keros, ceremonial cups used since pre-Colombian cultures in Peru: an attitude which is still very much alive today when I see my teacher blow smoke and whistle an icaro into the empty vessel used to serve Ayahuasca at the beginning of each ceremony. I understand the principle for such attitude to be that much importance is given to the container and for good reasons: if the container is leaking or broken, whatever we pour into it will go to waste. In the same way, if people’s psyche is not strong and flexible enough, whatever information or experience are poured into it may actually confuse the individual or may eventually fade into oblivion instead of being properly integrated. As you will see reading this book, the shamanic and healing processes are not exclusively about the great insights and healings one receives from them but very much about the cleansing, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, required of us so that we can emerge from such a process renewed and more whole than before.

So, for most of us, an external and skilled assessment of our actual readiness to engage with this or any other plant medicine is a wise approach. I would also like to mention that following without exceptions the guidance of my human teachers instead of becoming creative in a field I hardly knew anything about is what has kept me relatively sane in the years of shamanic exploration and healing.

The initiatory aspect of Sacred Plant Teachers has suffered dramatically since the (re)discovery of such process by Westerners in the recent past. I am the first one to have benefitted from a less than strict “entrance examination” when I first expressed my wish to drink Ayahuasca and later on participate in an Ayahuasca retreat in the Peruvian Amazon jungle. Just like for most other people, all that was required of me was the time, the money, and the interest to engage in this process: no years of waiting under the watchful eye of the community shaman! What has contributed to this change is also the fact that Sacred Plants have increasingly become a major healing modality and are not just used for initiatory and spiritual purposes. This means that most plant medicine persons are first and foremost doctors, and it is a pretty universal rule among doctors of any kind anywhere to offer medical assistance to anyone in need to the best of their abilities: plant medicine people are no exception and they will offer more often than not their support as generously as they can. If we add to the equation the fact that many indigenous and non-indigenous plant medicine people and their families depend financially on this activity, we quickly understand how in many cases even the assessment on the part of the medicine person can become hasty, inaccurate, or even faulty at times.

If I write about this theme of “readiness” is because the Toé experience requires a certain level of maturity both spiritual and psychological, of humility, and of patience on the part of the person interested in working with it. Furthermore, it is important to remember that our chosen guides are not there to spoon-feed us just because we have paid our entrance ticket: this is an unfortunate modern and consumerist attitude that has no place in the pursuit of healing and spirituality.

As I was typing the journal entries from my 2005/2006 dieta, I was repeatedly mildly appalled and amused by my own lack of maturity at the time, but at least I was under the care of my teacher, Don Francisco Montes Shuña, who provided me with plenty of support and enough wisdom to carry me through my first Toé dieta. You will see from these entries and the comments I have written years later how this process unfolded for me then, my own level of unawareness, and how I led myself through my own process fourteen years later but always under the guidance of my teacher and with much water under the bridge since my dieta in 2005/2006.

Edition details

• Publisher: Krieger Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1950367304
• ISBN 13: 9781950367306
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230