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Ayahuasca Medicine
The Shamanic World of Amazonian Sacred Plant Healing
Rating :
rating
Author(s) :
Alan Shoemaker
Pages :
141
Pub Date :
2014
Edition(s) at Erowid :
2014(pb,1st ed,fine)
Publisher :
Park Street Press
ISBN :
9781620551936
BACK COVER #
For more than 20 years American-born Alan Shoemaker has apprenticed and worked with shamans in Ecuador and Peru, learning the traditional methods of ayahuasca preparation, the ceremonial rituals for its use, and how to commune with the healing spirit of this sacred plant as well as the spirit of the San Pedro cactus and other sacred plant allies. Now a recognized and practicing ayahuasquero, or ayahuasca shaman, in Peru, he offers an insider's account of the ayahuasca tradition and of its use for expanding consciousness and achieving healing through access to other dimensions of being.

Shoemaker details his training and his own curandero practice using ayahuasca medicine, tobacco purges, psychedelic mushrooms, and other visionary plants. He discusses the different traditions of his two foremost teachers and mentors, Don Juan in the Peruvian Amazon, an ayahuasquero, and Valentin in Ecuador, a San Pedro shaman. He reveals the indispensable role played by icaros, the healing songs of the plant shaman, and offers firsthand accounts of miraculous healing resulting from ayahuasca's ability to reveal the cause of an illness, including how he healed his mother from liver cancer.

The author also addresses the rising popularity of Northerners traveling to the Amazon to seek healing and mind expansion through ayahuasca and shows how this fascination is triggered by humanity's reawakening need to connect to the universal life force.

BLURBS #
"Ayahuasca Medicine is a highly readable collection of incredible stories about miraculous healings and life with indigenous healers sure to entice anyone with an interest in ayahuasca and other psychoactive plants used in Latin America. Cautionary advice admixes with infectious enthusiasm for the topic, and provides a valuable contribution to the literature on practical applications of psychedelic plants' effects." -- Rick Strassman, MD, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule and coauthor of Inner Paths to Outer Space

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) / EDITOR(S) #
Alan Shoemaker is a formally trained ayahuasquero, curandero, and writer. He is the host of the annual International Amazonian Shamanism conference, administrator of the "Vine of the Soul Intensives," and founder and director of the Soga Del Alma church of ayahuasca. He lives with his two children in Iquitos, Peru.