Been spending much of the past week working on the icaros – finally figured out how to study them more efficiently: listen to the recording, sing it on my own, listen again to correct mistakes, sing it again, repeat until it sounds more like the recording than not. This means sometimes spending an hour on …
Rays of light at the end of Ceremony 290
Washing out in Ceremony 289
Please help us preserve the knowledge
If you’ve been following along with the blog so far, you have some appreciation of the amount and type of work involved in healing according to traditional Amazonian mestizo shamanism. This is very much an endangered tradition, as the younger generation has little interest in the hard, ill-paid, and underappreciated life of sacrifice that is …
A return to basics in Ceremony 288
Another unusual ceremony, taking place on a Monday night. It looked like it would be just me, GB and my teacher again until pretty much the last minute, when two couples showed up: the ladies who had come for healing in the last entry and their respective partners. Only two of them actually drank in …
Ceremony 287: Halloween Special & Beyond
Ceremony 286 and vicinity
Still here, folks, despite some serious rain in the last couple of days (fallout from Hurricane Sandy? Maybe.) One thing about the rainforest, it’s set up to deal with, well, rain. The heavens opened up on us yesterday afternoon around 1530, it bucketed down for about an hour, so that I was afraid the roof …
Taking things easier round Ceremony 285
No, I haven’t been eaten by a caiman or other Amazon denizens; I’ve just been taking some time to recuperate from the last couple of weeks. Now that we don’t have anyone at the house who’s in a hurry, we’ve scaled back to one ceremony a week. This is helpful, as I’ve been a bit …
Ceremony 284: Not the End of the World
Last Saturday was ST’s last ceremony before he left. It’s certainly not something he or anyone present will forget in a hurry.
Every so often, we get someone who can’t handle the aya and they freak out in ceremony. This was one of those times. The aya was super strong, which we didn’t know at …
Towards a Quieter Ceremony 283
(Please forgive the lack of photo – sometimes the Internet connection here is too slow to deal with pictures.)
I spent most of Monday in town, taking care of business, though I did spend some time singing in the evening to simulate ceremony conditions. This meant I didn’t have to leave the house on Tues, …
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