A shamanic diet is an opportunity to work with and learn directly from a master plant that is your teacher and “speaks” within you. A spiritual teacher that is contained in a brew or decoction of a master plant, such as the Chiric Sanango that belongs to the family of plants called Sanangos. The Chiric Sanango (healer who heals through cold) opens the heart, teaches us love and trust. Also as an example we have the Uchu Sanango (healer who burns, who cleans our limitations with fire or heat), the beautiful plant Bobinzana, healer whose archetype is the mermaid, teaches service, feminine wisdom, adaptability. Likewise we have other teachers such as Ajo Sacha, Tobacco, etc. In the diet the guide, healer or shaman acts as a mediator between the dieter or participant and the spirit or entity of the plant. 

During a period of 7 days or more, the voice of these plant masters guide the heart, to find solutions to complexes and deep-rooted suffering, emotional or physical pain. They open memories to cleanse the heart of reactions, healing deep scars to achieve healing through understanding, self-observation, and understanding. The diet is delicate work, because it demands discipline of silence and isolation. It is for many a definitive step in life towards change, to leaving afflictions that accompany our existence, and truly open the heart to life.

Plants act at the level of each being. They are not “magic” pills or chemicals that falsely offer healing by numbing the mind or disconnecting feelings. They work at the level of the soul accompanying and healing each affliction according to the personal universe. Their work is to cleanse, burn or purge wounds, and also to support the being to strengthen it, and above all to teach us to live our direct experience by alleviating us of the burdens we carry from our experience, sealing our scars.

Everything that happens to us is calling us to understanding, to comprehension. The experience of suffering is a call to meet the Dharma, but we need to light the way to not get lost in emotion or pain, to let go of what does not belong to us and focus on the reason for the experience – the understanding for the search of a spiritual path, for which we need to reconnect with ourselves, to be guided to our inner teacher. The diet plants are ancient and wise teachers that give us the opportunity to be guided to understand what life calls us to understand, in order to heal. The plant master accompanies you on your journey, strengthening you, opening what needs to be opened, burning and purifying what needs to be cleansed, and also healing you on a physical level.

It is an opportunity to understand life, existence and karma; an opportunity to build the resilience and strength necessary to rise beyond our suffering, and through understanding let go and free ourselves from the circumstances that bind us to suffering.

The diet is an opportunity to listen to yourself and your heart. Everything else is silenced, including the noise of food. During the diet we eat very simple and silent food (monothematic), and we isolate ourselves from the world for a few days. It is a search for silence, so we may listen to ourselves and open our hearts. To open the heart, we must first find it and feel its voice. The master plant guides us to listen to that voice, to hear ourselves, to perceive the rhythm of the universe through nature and its essence in ourselves. To feel the wind, the sunrise and sunset, to begin to understand the meaning of existence and our real being.

The diet is a practice to return to the essential, to silence. Therefore, we stay in tents in nature, returning to the primordial in our being. Through the diet, we begin to return to our true nature by leaving our comfort zone, leaving behind the beliefs of a culture based on sumptuary and excessive comfort. We begin to realize our body and its functions, andwe can marvel at the experience of inner perception by understanding in solitude our immensity, which is the first thing that plants show us. It is the beginning of humanising ourselves by living fully the experience of being here and now.