You Are the Medicine
Wise Woman María Sabina (1894-1985) and the evolution of the psychedelic revolution
Cure yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.
Heal yourself with mint, with neem and eucalyptus.
Sweeten yourself with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile.
Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.
Put love in tea instead of sugar, and take it looking at the stars.
Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain.
Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it.
Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.
Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.
Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember: you are the medicine
– María Sabina inspired words, author unknown
I came of age in the 1960s, at the height of the psychedelic revolution. Still, I didn’t learn about shaman and poet María Sabina, who introduced psilocybin mushrooms to the Western world, until I met anthropologist Joan Halifax at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in August 1990.
María Sabina is the Mazatec wise woman responsible for sharing her sacred mushrooms, her niños santos, and the associated songs and ceremonies with Westerners for the first time. Joan Halifax is the author of Shaman: the Wounded Healer and Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives. She was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University and has worked with dying cancer patients using LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy. In the sixties, she visited María’s village in Huautla de Jiménez in the Sierra Mazateca, where she experienced ritual healing ceremonies and songs called veladas. I am excited to share in this post the unreleased recordings from my archive of Joan Halifax, backed by the Alchemy Rhythm Band at the Telluride Mushroom Festival that summer, telling María Sabina’s story.
Held each August in Telluride, Colorado, the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival is a psychedelic event with a colorful history. The oldest mushroom fest in the U.S., it fuses science and culture while celebrating all things mycological. In the summer of 1990, I was invited to perform at the festival with the Alchemy Rhythm Band as part of a lineup that featured Joan Halifax and Andrew Weil as its keynote speakers.
The Alchemy Rhythm Band (ARB), based in Tucson, AZ, and led by drummer-percussionist Cliff Berrien, marched in the mushroom parade down Main Street past colorful Victorian-era homes wearing mycelial costumes and playing samba music. I played the surdo, a large Brazilian bass drum that is the heartbeat of samba. I wore it strapped around my body as we marched through a joyful, paisley, tie-dyed crowd dressed in mushroom apparel with soft-sculptured toadstools popping out and up from various body parts. Onlookers got to their feet and joined the procession as our Carnaval-like street parade drums called them to the dance.
That evening, ARB performed at the historic Sheridan Opera House, opening with an African drumming call-and-response song that invited audience participation (listen to Happy Melody below). I played electric guitar for this performance and added my voice to the other band members. When the time came, Joan stepped onto a dimly lit stage and told María Sabina’s story with ARB adding ambient percussion. In a moving spoken word performance, Joan channeled hypnotic chants like the ones you might hear during a velada. Joan also shared about María’s relationship with Gordon Wasson, a New York banker who came to Maria’s village to study mushrooms in 1953. Wasson’s investigations into fungi led him to the trail of the sacred mushrooms of Mesoamerica and to María’s hut. The use of visionary mushrooms by María, the mushroom priestess, ignited and inspired the consciousness revolution in the 1960s.
Dreaming the Future Awake
Mr. Wasson told Joan in 1976, “I want you to go south. I hear that my friend María Sabina is not well.” Listen as Joan Halifax takes us up the ridge from the village to see the abuelita, the “Little Grandmother,” sitting outside her hut, which hovers on the ridge above Huautla de Jimenez in Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a re-membering of the ancestor, the Little Grandmother, María Sabina.
A medium for the voice of the mushrooms
I suspect the recent resurgence of interest in María Sabina on social media may have as much to do with the growing interest in the ritual and therapeutic uses of entheogenic mushrooms as it does the question, What is cultural appropriation?” Teonanácatl, meaning “Flesh of the Gods” in the Nahuatl language, was the name the Aztecs gave to the visionary mushrooms of Indigenous Mesoamerica. From an Indigenous perspective, María Sabina’s interactions with the Western world have been described as “a story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization.”
Encouraged by Robert Graves of the “White Goddess,” Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina, ingested the teonanácatl in the mountainous region of the Sierra Mazateca, in the state of Oaxaca, among isolated peasant peoples who used the plant to divine the future and seek a cure for illness. LIFE Magazine published his account of the experience in 1957. The article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom, went viral. Readers came looking for María, whose name had been changed in the article, but Wasson loosely protected her. The story opened the mountains of Oaxaca to the world, and the world trampled all over them. People wanted the high of the mushrooms more than they cared about how they got it. Before Wasson had come to María, the mushrooms were taken to heal the sick. After he came, they took them to find God. Today, we are still lost and searching. We continue on our path of spiritual bankruptcy, sick and in need of spiritual transformation.
Allowing Wasson to “discover” the power of sacred mushrooms, a narrative mimicking the colonist’s language of “discovery,” María’s life became even more difficult. Her community became offended by the commercialization of its rituals. They ostracized her, burned down her house, murdered her son, and she was briefly jailed. Still, she loved Wasson. Wasson contended that his only intention was to contribute to the sum of human knowledge despite being funded by the CIA’s mind control project MKUltra.
A Mexican botanist phoned the CIA within days of the LIFE Magazine article, confirming Wasson’s find. An agent was dispatched as a mole on Wasson’s return trip. The CIA, hoping the mushroom could be a powerful tool in chemical warfare to aid interrogation, sent an undercover agent to Huautla de Jiménez to collect specimens. Those specimens were taken into the lab, the active compound psilocybin was isolated, and LSD was synthesized. Although María’s faith and conviction may have never faded as she preserved the ancient Mazatec ceremonies and rituals rooted in Pre-Columbian Mexico, she could feel her curing powers fading with every desecration of the sacred mushrooms.
For many decades she had practiced her art with the hallucinogenic mushrooms, and many hundreds of sick and suffering people came to her wretched hut to ingest the sacrament as she chants through the night in the darkness before her alter. – Joan Halifax
Considered by some to be the most renowned curandera in all of history, María Sabina did not consider herself in that manner. María believed herself to be una mujer sabia, a “wise woman.” She says that wisdom can’t be taught and that it is brought with one from birth, that whoever isn’t born to be wise cannot attain “the language” of the teonanácatl. “Not everyone is born with that destiny,” she says. María Sabina did not take credit for her oral poetry spoken in trance. The sacred mushrooms, her “niños Santos,” or “holy children,” spoke through her.
She Says
Listen to Joan Halifax performing “She Says” at the Telluride Mushroom Festival with ambient percussion by the Alchemy Rhythm Band.
María Sabina is the story of a woman who married twice, who was abused, who lived in poverty, who became a widow like her mother at age 20 when her first husband died, and who paid the price for introducing her culture to outsiders. She gave birth to six children with her second husband. Only a daughter, Aurora, survived.
María died in 1985 as the Age of Pisces slowly ended. Pisces is the age of the Bodhisattva. It became the age of the guru, Pisces shadow side. We are seeing that shadow come to the forefront as it dies. Gurus are being exposed for who they are and what they came to serve. The best of Pisces is compassion and forgiveness without attachment to the outcome. Maria embodied that archetype. Joan has spent her life as a Zen Buddhist studying, practicing, and teaching compassion. That is the consciousness we have been allowed to embrace as we continue to move into the New Age, where we are our own healer in connection with others who are also their own healer.
The way of the shaman is the way of suffering. You cannot become a shaman without suffering. That is the path. — Joan Halifax quoting María Sabina
In Translation
During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I experimented with psychedelics. I felt grateful for the other worlds that were opened to me. The idea of being one with the universe, an experience that psychedelics induce, is based on a philosophy of “oneness” that has pervaded the human race and religion separated by centuries, millennia, and physical distance. The only culture to ignore and devaluate this perennial philosophy is our own modern culture of secular materialism and brutish scientism.
Where has this spiritual awakening ignited by a psychedelic revolution brought us? Are we more conscious due to its perceived ability to expand consciousness? And if it helped to enlighten us, why are we still searching? The use of LSD among US adults has increased almost 60% from 2015 to 2018.
As an Elder woman, I have now come of another age. My experience with psychedelics led me to conclude that visions are best sought intentionally through a sober landscape. Perhaps Qigong, vibrational healing, meditation, breathwork, and contemplative practices can better connect us with ourselves and the divine with less residual side effects. As Joan Halifax continues her work and service as a Zen Buddhist teacher who currently serves as abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a community she founded in 1990, I think she would agree.
Chemically induced trips, whether through a natural substance or lab-created drug, are stressful to the physical body, especially the liver. In Chinese Medicine, the Wood Element alchemically corresponds to the Liver. It also corresponds to the ethereal soul, which is the source of our inspirational dreams and visions and from which we derive a sense of purpose and direction. When there is a free flow of life force energy, we are capable of vision. A Wood Element imbalance, however, compromises our Liver and the ability to seek and hold a vision (Learn more in Love Your Liver: Spring & the Wood Elememt). It may be the most out-of-balance of the Chinese Five Elements in our modern culture. We are crying for a vision.
While physically ingesting an herb is grounding, once we become spiritually grounded in relationship with the essence of an herb, physically ingesting it becomes secondary and, in some cases, not even necessary. —Thea Summer Deer, Wisdom of the Plant Devas: Herbal Medicine for a New Earth
Healing becomes possible by coming into communion with a plant and taking it as a sacrament. When ingested recreationally by the uninitiated and outside of cultural context, much is lost in the translation. Do we need out-of-body experiences to become more embodied? Drug-induced hallucinations do not necessarily translate into images we can bring back with us, decipher, and receive insight from. The ability to decode symbolic language and imbue it with meaning is a function of the nervous system, corresponding to the Fire Element (Learn more in Heal Your Heart: Nervous System Health & the Fire Element). Substances that induce altered states of consciousness impact sensory perception and distort the senses, disrupting the Fire Element. The use of psychedelic substances in clinical settings and to expand consciousness should be approached with reverence and caution. Are these tools even necessary when those chemicals already exist within us naturally? You are the Medicine, says María Sabina. We are living portals to the divine.
May it continue…
Joan recites a life chant and poem in memory of Beat Poet Diane di Prima
Continuum of the Paleolithic
“Continuity of shamanism is something that ignites within us a fire of initiation.” Joan shares from the Mushroom Festival stage.
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Additional unreleased recordings of Joan Halifax backed by the Alchemy Rhythm Band: Fast Speaking Woman, and I Have Looked For You.
Happy Melody will have you dancing and singing! Performed live at the Mushroom Festival by the Alchemy Rhythm Band and led by Cliff Berrien. Other band members include Danielle Isabelle Berrien, Steve Granek, Amy Brauer (Welsh), Tim Lewis, Patricia Hursch, Deborah Palmieri, Charles, and Juanita.
Note: A graduate of UA and student of African diaspora music, Cliff Berrien has had 30 years of experience as a musician and professional DJ specializing in world music. He has also served seven years as artistic director of Batucaxé, a Tucson drum and dance ensemble and school inspired by the music and dance of Brazil.
Much has been written and recorded about María Sabina. Alvaro Estrada made dozens of recordings of María’s ceremonies between 1955 and 1970. I am pleased to share with you these recordings of Joan Halifax from 1990, in which she shares her stories and experiences of connection with Maria Sabina. All the recordings in this post were made available by Cliff Berrien. Edited, mastered, and archived by Thea Summer Deer for StarPony Productions.
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