The Return of the Ayahumero (Part 1)
Welcome to the deeper you go, the weirder it gets . I'm your host, Garett Renon. So greetings from the jungle. As of 11/11/2023, I am in the jungle for the last two months of my year long summer, and it feels good to be back. And I am excited to see how these final two months will unfold.
Garett:I have a feeling that it'll be a lot of insights and a whole lot of growth. And so this episode is about my return to the jungle. It's also about the myth of and possibly even the return of the Ayhumero . So before we start, I want to thank everyone who is supporting the show. If you are listening, thank you for the support.
Garett:More specifically, I want to thank all the people who have left positive reviews, bought gear, pine pollen, and fermented herbal tonics. And also to all the people who have sent me personal messages, thank you. And so I have a new Instagram page, and that Instagram page is specifically for the podcast. So the link to that is in the show notes. As always, I encourage you to reach out with any questions you may have about my journey or anything I have discussed.
Garett:And if you would like to support the show, one of the easiest ways to get you some podcast gear. I have stickers, hats, mugs, t shirts, and hoodies. The link for the gear is in the show notes. I also have fermented herbal tonics and pine pollen tinctures. Please email for more details.
Garett:The pine pollen tinctures have been extremely popular and for good reason. And this is because testosterone in both men and women is at an all time low thanks to pesticides, microplastics, tap water, a sedentary lifestyle, and even wacky modern ideology. And the result of all of that is that most people now are overweight, unfocused, depressed, have minimal muscle mass, and almost zero sex drive. Not to mention, the low testosterone is a major factor in why the masculine and feminine energies in our society are so out of whack and lacking harmony. So if you want to save yourself, save your relationship, and possibly even save the world, get you some pine pollen.
Garett:My pine pollen is made with the best ingredients possible, raw, uncracked pine pollen harvested in the pristine Canadian wilderness and organic cane alcohol. It doesn't get any cleaner than that. So again, if you're interested in purchasing those, please send me a message. Lastly, at the very least, if you enjoy this podcast, please like it, share it, subscribe to it, and leave a review, specifically if you are listening to this on the Apple Podcast app. It's a simple gesture that will take you no more than five minutes, and it really helps me out.
Garett:And again, as always, my email and Instagram are located in the show notes. Okay. So let's get into the episode. So after a five month hiatus, I am back in the jungle for the final two months of my summer. And like I said, it feels good to be back.
Garett:I've had my ups and downs with this place, but it feels but now it feels special and it feels like home. And getting down here is never fun. All said and done, it takes about twenty six hours of total travel time, and there is always a six or seven hour layover in Lima, which is always miserable. The airport is relatively small considering the amount of volume that goes through there, which results in a very crowded and loud experience. The PA system seems to be turned all the way up to full blast and there and it also seems as if there's only one PA system for the entire airport.
Garett:So it's a nonstop barrage of them yelling at you in both Spanish and English. Then, of course, being on an open diet makes things much more difficult as I can't really eat or drink anything in the airport, and not to mention I'm extra sensitive to energy, so hanging out for seven hours in a loud crowded airport after taking a six hour red eye flight from Atlanta is not exactly a fun experience. But it seems to be part of the adventure of getting down to the jungle. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Anyway, after a really long day of travel, I finally made it to Niue Rou.
Garett:As soon as I stepped out of the moto taxi, was greeted by the new manager, Jacqueline, who said, welcome. Ricardo is ready to see you now. So I set my luggage down and walked into the office where I see Ricardo sitting on one side of the table and the translator sitting on the other side. I can tell he recognizes my face, but at the same time he has a blank stare that says he's not quite sure who I am or why I'm even there. So I tell him I'm dieting Ayuma for a year and that I'm here for the final two months of my diet and that I plan to close my Sama on 01/09/2024.
Garett:After telling him all this, the first words out of his mouth were were to ask the manager if I'm all paid up. So after going through a long list of emails and bank transfer statements, he is finally satisfied that I'm all paid up, and then his demeanor softens a bit. He then says that on Monday night, which will be my first ceremony back, that he's going to center my diet and strengthen the connection to ayahuma. After that, the meeting was over. There was no welcome back, no how are you, no how's the diet going, just have you paid?
Garett:Okay. Thank you. Now it's all good. And at this point, I've dealt with Ricardo enough to expect nothing less. He is a great healer/maestro and does a great job opening up and holding space for diets, but you're not going to get much more out of him.
Garett:Maybe things would be different if I was down here more often, but from talking with other people, that seems unlikely. But like I said, it's all good because at the end of the day, the Sama process is about you and your plant. The teaching, the guidance, the insights all come from the plant, not necessarily the human holding the diet. And I can say the process in connection with Ayahuma is going great. In fact, it has far exceeded my expectations.
Garett:So even though Ricardo seems less than enthused that I'm back, I am extremely happy with how this process has been unfolding and I'm feeling very confident in my medicine. Now after the meeting, I am led to my tombo, which is secluded in the back corner of the property behind the medicine house. It's actually a great location, close to everything but still isolated, which is good because some of the tombos are in some sketchy locations and I'm definitely happy with my accommodations. I then drop my stuff off in my Tombo and head to the dining hall just in time for dinner. In the dining hall, I see Doctor.
Garett:Joe Tafur, who wrote the book, The Fellowship of the River, which is one of the best books about Chupibo style medicine on the market. Joe Tafur does a great job blending the world of spiritual herbalism and western medicine. Seated next to Joe was Martina and Marcus Drossel, both of whom are mentioned in the book and are essentially the pioneers of Niwei Rao. Without them, without Joe, Martina, and Marcus, Nihue Rao would not exist. Joe, Martina, and Marcus were down here this time because they brought a large group down for a two week stay at Niue Rao.
Garett:I said hi to Joe, who I met back in 02/2018. Fun fact, I actually sat in two small ceremonies with him, one in 02/2018 and one in 02/2019. I really enjoyed sitting with him back in the day, so I was excited he was here along with both Martina and Marcus. Then while eating, I see one of my good friends Tristan who was also dieting Haiyama. We had a brief chat then made plans to meet up in about an hour after dinner to catch up on the last five months.
Garett:Talking with Tristan, sharing our Haiyama war stories was a lot of fun. Now Tristan is a really interesting guy, and I would say he is the most grounded, ungrounded person I've ever met. He has these wild stories about lessons, tests, visions, and insights that he receives. His stories are so crazy that it is easy to think he has gone off the deep end and completely lost his mind. But no matter how crazy he sounds, he has a great ability to bring it back home and land the spaceship.
Garett:And by the time he is finished, his stories actually make a lot of sense. And I would say that Tristan is a plant medicine nerd. Now this is not an insult. It's actually a compliment. He dives really deep.
Garett:He dives in really deep and takes the process extremely serious, a true student of the medicine. So after talking for about an hour, the sun was beginning to set, which meant two things. One, that the mosquitoes were starting to come out, and two, I started feeling the fatigue of travel. So we ended our discussion, I headed to bed and proceeded to get one of the best nights sleep I've had in a really long time. I also noticed that they seem to have upgraded the mattresses since the last time I was here from just plain cheap moldy foam to an actual mattress.
Garett:And let me tell you, that was a nice surprise. The next day at lunch, I ran into another one of my good friends, Mario. Mario was the former manager of Niue Rou, who had managed the place for the last year and a half. I had many great conversations with him in the past. I really respect his opinion, and having been the manager here for that amount of time, he has acquired a lot of knowledge about the medicine.
Garett:He is no longer the manager because he just started his year long diet in August. So we started chatting and I asked him what he was dieting, and he said Ayahuma for the entire year. Now this is where our conversation got very interesting. See, we started speaking in a language no one could understand. I mean, not really.
Garett:Right? But we started talking about Ayahuma in a way no one else ever has, at least not in a really long time. See, about six months ago when I made the decision to keep Ayahuma open for the entire year, everything changed. An entirely new level was unlocked. See, when I first started my diet in
Garett:AYOOMA when I first started my diet with Ayahuma back in February, I started to hear whispers, myths, and rumors about people called Ayahumeros.
Garett:And as soon as I heard this, my spidey senses started to tingle, and I knew that this was going to be important. Ayahumeros are practitioners or kuranderos who work exclusively with Ayahumeros. At least that is the myth. They do this because the world of Ayahuma is that vast. And as far as I know, this is the only tree or plant that people work with exclusively.
Garett:This idea of working solely with one tree is the opposite of what most people do. Most people want to dye as many plants and trees as possible because more is always better. Right? Anyway, after hearing about this, I started searching the Internet to find out more information about ayahumeros , but I couldn't find anything. It's like they don't exist anymore, or if they do, they are operating in secret.
Garett:Not being able to find anything on the Internet, I turned to the next best source, which is Ayahuma itself. I asked Ayahuma to tell me about the Ayahumeros What are they? Who are they? How do they work?
Garett:It took a while to get an answer back, but eventually I did, and the message I got was, Keep this diet open for a year and I will show you. So that's what I did. At six months into the diet, I made the commitment to work with Ayahuma exclusively for the entire year. And as soon as I did, the world of the Ayumetto began to open up. What it showed me is that Ayahuma is a brotherhood, a group of elite warriors who live and die by a different code.
Garett:It told me that the path of the Ayumetto is much bigger than plant medicine. It told me that in addition to the spiritual requirements, there will also be physical and mental requirements that go beyond the average requirements of a Curandero. It told me that this path is not for everyone. In fact, most people are not ready or even capable of walking this path. It told me that if I choose to go down this path, that the rules will change and the training will be different.
Garett:The training will go from that of a curandero to that of an Ayahumero. So going back to the conversation with Mario, I was fascinated to hear that he got a very similar message. He got this message much much faster than I did because being just two months in, but this I realized was because he decided to do Ayahuma for the entire year as soon as he started. Ayuma has a reputation for being one of the hardest and most challenging diets out of all the plants and trees available. With that being said, there are many people who have successfully completed diets with Ayahuma, but no one that either Mario or I has talked to about their Ayoolma experience has received the same message as us.
Garett:My theory is that this is because no one diets it for a year. Most people diet Ayahuma anywhere from three to six months. And while they all receive great benefit and hold it in high regard, it seems like the path and world of the Ayumetto is reserved only for the people who commit for the entire year. What Mario and I both discovered was that the path of the Ayahumero is about learning through suffering. It's about pushing the limits mentally and physically.
Garett:It's about teaching you through experience. Now I understand that this might sound obvious, what I call a no shit Sherlock insight, because this is the exact same blueprint for any and all growth. And we know this. Right? I mean, the only way to evolve, the only way to reach your potential is to overcome challenges and resistance.
Garett:You must allow the old and the inessential to burn off so that new growth can emerge. But for whatever reason, many people have forgotten this simple recipe, especially in the Western world. See, we now live in a world of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and participation trophies a world where people expect equal outcomes regardless of the amount of work or sacrifices one puts in. A world that has lost touch with the harsh reality of nature. A world where the ideas of hard work, sacrifice, and dedication are part of the oppressive patriarchy or something like that.
Garett:The point is, the path of the Ayahumero is a callback to older traditional values. It follows the law of the jungle requiring one to take no prisoners and have a kill or be killed mindset. A path where success is not guaranteed, where you don't get an A for effort, where you either succeed or you don't, and the washout rate is extremely high. So despite all this, the message I keep getting is that ayahumeros are needed now more than ever, that it is time for the ayahumero to rise again. And in many ways, I see a lot of similarities between the ayahumero and the story of the Jedi.
Garett:Now I don't consider myself a Star Wars nerd, but I am a big fan of the mythology behind Star Wars. This is because the original Star Wars trilogy was based on the monomyth of the hero's journey, a story blueprint that seems to be ingrained in our DNA. Not to mention Star Wars also pulls a lot of its themes and from many ancient cultures and religions. So when it comes to Star Wars, if you manage to extract the core story and separate it from what you see on the screen, you can see that it contains a lot of wisdom that applies to our everyday lives. So the title of this podcast episode is The Return of the Ayumetto because, like I just mentioned, I see the path that I'm on unfolding along a similar narrative as the return of the Jedi.
Garett:See, according to Star Wars lore, the Jedi have existed for thousands of years. In the early years, long before the timeline of the movies, the Jedi were thought to be an elite group of warriors whose main purpose was that of protectors and peacekeepers. They were known to be strong, powerful, smart, and highly capable. These early Jedi did their job very well, maybe even too well, because what essentially happened to the Jedi is similar to the now famous saying of hard times create strong men. Strong men make good times, good times make weak men, and weak men make hard times.
Garett:And the early Jedi were created from the hard times. Then over the course of several hundred years or so, the Jedi became strong men who made good times. And well, as the saying goes, good times make weak men. So as peace continued to prosper in the Star Wars universe, the Jedi started to get soft. Not only did they begin to get soft, but they slowly changed from being a small elite force to more of a corporate like entity, becoming a highly established organization that started getting involved in government and politics.
Garett:And like all corporate entities, there came a point where the Jedi became too big. See, there is a great book called Bullshit Jobs that talks about this very thing, that there is a tipping point, usually around 200 employees or so, where most successful businesses start to transform from a highly efficient organization into a large corporate machine. And when a business or organization is small, everyone has a purpose and everyone has a direct impact on the bottom line. But after a certain point of growth, all businesses start to become inefficient. And I know this firsthand because I spent the first seven years of my adult life working for the biggest machine of them all, the Department of Defense.
Garett:See, there is a reason the government is known to be inefficient, and that's because it's way too big. There are policies about policies, and numerous boxes need to be checked, and forms need to be filled out, not to make things more efficient, but to justify people's existence. And if you work for a large corporation, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So anyway, this was what was implied in episodes one, two, and three of Star Wars, that the Jedi went from an elite group of highly disciplined warriors whose sole mission and purpose was to protect the innocent from the forces of evil to all of a sudden being required to fill out TPS reports, attending diversity training, meeting their yearly quota of continuing education credits, and contributing to their four zero one k's. And if you're familiar with the story, this Jedi corporate machine is what eventually led to the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, thus resulting in him transforming into Darth Vader.
Garett:This is because the rules and the policies of the corporation blinded the Jedi to Anakin's struggles. Not to mention, this corporate structure also blinded the Jedi to the fact that the Sith were also rising. In fact, the Sith were gaining power right under their noses. The Sith infiltrated the political system and orchestrated a plan called Order 66 to destroy the Jedi in one fell swoop. Just like the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Jedi went from being one of the most powerful organizations in the galaxy to essentially being wiped from existence almost instantly.
Garett:So as the years went on, the Jedi were all but extinct and became something of a myth. There were rumors of a huge Jedi who were who were still alive, but nobody could find them, and they definitely weren't advertising their services. So over the course of the next trilogy, episodes four, five, and six, with the disappearance of the Jedi, the balance of power shifted to the dark side, and darkness began to rule the galaxy, thus creating hard times. And while we know that hard times create strong men, and these hard times forced a new hope to emerge to help bring balance back to the Force, and that new hope was Luke Skywalker, the son of Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader. So in order to bring balance back to the Force, Luke needed to embark on the ultimate hero's journey.
Garett:He had to learn the ways of the Force. He had to learn how to become a Jedi. And well, spoiler alert for a nearly fifty year old movie, Luke, with the help of Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda, became the first Jedi in many years. So after a long period of darkness, the Jedi returned, and the Force was once again brought back into balance. So the question then becomes, are there any similarities between the Jedi and Ayumetos?
Garett:Were the ayahumeros wiped out by the forces of darkness? Were they forced to go into hiding until the time was right? Is that time now? Are Ayum are are Ayumettoes needed now more than ever? Are they the key to helping reestablish harmony and balance back to our world?
Garett:Honestly, have no idea, but it's a fun story to tell myself. But maybe it's not just fantasy because if there is one thing I think we can all agree on is that our world is currently out of balance and lacking harmony. We are definitely in a hard times phase. So if there was ever a time for heroes to rise, that time would be now. And the truth is, I've only scratched the surface when it comes to the IU Meadows.
Garett:This is all a very recent discovery. At this point, all I really have is a feeling that there is something there, that there is something we're searching for. See, when you look at our world, it is easy to see that there are many unexplained mysteries and phenomena that have occurred over the course of human history. It's easy to see that at some point in our past, maybe even many times in our past, our ancestors had access to a type of power and knowledge that far exceeded anything we can imagine today. It's easy to see that there was a time, a golden age, when humanity flourished, when balance and harmony had been achieved.
Garett:And, well, maybe the path of the ayahumero is a step in that right direction. Who knows, right? But at this point, I can say this: based on the experience of my first week of ceremony since being back here, there is something there. There is something about this idea of the Ayumetto that is calling to me. Hopefully, over the next two months, I will receive more answers.
Garett:Until then, see you on the other side.