What is a Dieta?
Dieta is a Spanish word that means - simply enough – diet.
However, when used in Amazonian herbalist traditions that deal with the
more powerful and often reality-altering and visionary varieties of plants
known as plantas maestras or teacher-plants, the word comes to
mean much more than that. It then describes dietary and behavioral regimens
that allow one to move most safely and effectively into working relationships
with such plants. These relationships can bring about profound transformations,
and the dietas are designed to best facilitate them.
The dietas originated as a plant-based practice for developing
attunement to the currents of spirit that underlie the material world.
Traditionally, this has been applied to such skills as hunting, divination,
ancestral consultations, healing, leadership, and so on. The dietas are part of broader systems of human-plant relationships (food taboos,
garden magic, and so on) that characterize many of the indigenous people
of Amazonia. As the Amazon basin is populated by a high concentration
of plants whose chemical behaviors are complex and ‘active’
enough to be used medicinally and sacramentally, and because humans have
been interacting with them for 1000’s of years, the dieta tradition is well developed.
An individual undergoing a dieta retreats into isolation for
a period of time (from days to months or even years) during which s/he
is fed a ritually prepared and symbolically significant diet of foods
such as plantain, manioc (cassava), and certain fish and jungle animals.
In modern times this list often includes rice, quinoa, oatmeal, and chicken.
Sugar, salt, chilies, certain meats (especially pork), acidic fruits,
fermented foods, alcohol, and stimulants are avoided, as well as excessive
exposure to sun, rain, fire, and unpleasant smells. Social interactions
that involve ill individuals, sexual activity, and speaking of outside
concerns, are likewise eschewed. In this way the dietas loosen the hold
of human cultural traits - the understanding being that by doing so humans
are more open to guidance and power from the natural world. In addition,
its ritualized structure values and inspires self-discipline. Such traits
are shared with vision quests, and the dietas can be approached
in this way.
When one undergoes a dieta the focus is often on a particular
plant best suited to the needs of the individual. “The chosen plant
depends upon the personality structure of the patient and the goals of
the therapists: some plants are indicated for connecting with emotions
and childhood memories, others to strengthen a proper attitude, still
others to break some resistances” (Mabit et al 1996). Such plants
can include bobinsana/Calliandra angustifolia; toe/Brugmansia
sp.; chiric sanango/Brunsfelsia sp.; oje/Ficus anthelmintica; tangarana/Triplaris sp., and the “king of brews,” ayahuasca/Banisteriopsis Caapi, along with its usual admixture chacruna/Psychotria viridis.
The simple explanation of the therapeutic value of dietas is
as follows:
1. They modify states of consciousness and purify the body,
2. They allow one to more easily deal with the strong emetic, cathartic,
and visionary effects commonly associated with the plantas maestras.
The resulting changes need to be carefully protected, as rearrangements
in body biochemistries and identity patterns leave the patient or initiate
for a time sensitive and vulnerable. In this way dietas can be
typified as preparation and recovery technologies that attend this sort
of phyto-spiritual “surgery”.
3. They stimulate the body’s innate ability to self-heal.
According to Schultes and Winkelman (1996), “Diet is viewed as
a tool helping to maintain the altered state of consciousness (ASC) which
permits the plant teacher to instruct, provide knowledge, and enable the
initiate to acquire power. The diet is viewed as a means of making the
mind operate differently, providing access to wisdom and lucid dreams.
These regimens provide strength . . . .” In Luna's studies of ayahuasca shamanism in Peru, he likewise says that the “necessity of diet
-- which includes sexual segregation -- to learn from the plants was stressed
by every vegetalista I met" (1991).
It is said that the dietas are prescribed by the plants themselves,
each a little different, depending on the character (species) of the plant.
To understand plants as capable of communicating the conditions by which
we can best relate to them is a . . . leap . . for many of us. However,
in order to grasp the rationales of the dietas and the entire
therapeutic process in which they are involved, it is important to cultivate
a view of the natural world as highly aware, intelligent, infinitely helpful
(if approached with respect) and ultimately ~~ Enchanted.
To this end, it helps to explore what we might call “indigenous
consciousness.” When a person or people actively recognize the nourishment
exchange between themselves and the land, and connect the quality of their
lives to the health and fertility of their environment, then ecological
relations become an intimate experience. Such an awareness is available
to anyone who walks the ways of the earth.
“Indigenous consciousness” therefore defines the word “indigenous”
in a relational sense, not in the sense of whoever arrived at a place
first. Relational indigeneity is a birthright of everyone, and is up to
everyone to claim. To cultivate one’s indigeneity is to root one’s
sense of identity, of belonging, deeply into the earth. One then reaches
into the nourishing groundwaters of Spirit. The deeper one drinks, the
more one perceives the common origin and destiny of the great society
of Nature. All plants, animals, minerals, forces of weather, elements,
and so on are recognized to be a vast interwoven, co-evolving, and mutually
transformative community. Natural ecosystems are then understood to be
the surface manifestations of an underlying culture of spiritual relations.
In this way a rain forest can be understood as a kind of “city,”
a cosmopolitan center of terrestrial life. It is a gathering place of
diverse life forms with high population density and a limited resource
base. Its inhabitants traffic in fertility and vitality, and there exists
a sophisticated culture to work the philosophies of reciprocity, the art
forms of diversity, and the languages of interspecies dialogue, all necessary
to maintain a fine-tuned ecological balance.
As humans have evolved as part of this sylvan cosmos, which in its various
ecological expressions are found all over the planet, and actually ARE
the planet, we have had to internalize this culture within our own to
maintain equilibrium with it. To the degree we have done so, we are indigenous
to our environment, prosper as a species, and flourish. To the degree
we have become unaware of this culture through our own inattention, greed,
separative ideologies, or whatever, and replaced it with the many variations
of human chauvinism, we suffer the ill effects
Of this we are best cured by a thorough re-indigenization, a re-membering
and active practicing of co-creative relationships with the tribes of
creation.
What we call medicinal plants are among the primary agents by which erring
humans are brought back into the ecosystemic fold. They can help bring
our own disordered ecologies of body, mind, will, emotions, and social
relations into entrainment with their own internal ecologies (their constituents
or energetic architecture), which resonate with successively larger and
more organized eco-systems. Plants can thereby pull us into harmonic relations
with the metabolic functionings of the planet. The planet thereby teaches
via the conditions of its healthy functioning. This dharma upwells through
the plants and into the understandings and practices of those who are
“listening.” It has inspired and guided the world’s
great herbalist traditions. Herbalism in its most perennial forms has
internalized this dharma and applied it to the microcosm of the human
body to understand states of well-being and to treat illness.
In this way herbalism is ecological medicine, the blueprint for all “sustainable”
medicines. Its most general prescriptions for health and flourishment
can be understood as follows:
1. The importance of dialogue (responsive communication)
between all beings. This includes cellular communications within a body,
cross-species and cross-dimensional communications between inhabitants
of the “horizontal” world of physical existence and “vertical”
world of spirit.
2. The accommodation and promotion of diversity, essential
to the creative potential of any community.
3. The acknowledgment of the existence of vitality, or life force as fundamental to animate existence.
4. The recognition that reciprocity must be effected
between those accessing this vitality or “fertility circuit,”
in order to equitably share in, manage, and conserve its use.
5. The importance of respect, and taken further, reverence,
in dealing with all members of the natural world. This applies most specifically
to humans and acts as governor to the excesses of self-reflective consciousness
and ego. The development of this trait reveals the presence and well-being
of “others” as self-evident to a healthy existence. It is
the basis of relational indigeneity, fundamental to spiritual ecology,
and the root of perennial herbalism. All these traits promote flow of
energy (change) and balance in this flow (homeostasis). Both are necessary
for any organism to grow and maintain itself.
Ecological medicine is inseparable from spiritual healing. Both describe
a strengthening and clarity of relationships, an opportunity to immerse
oneself in the interconnectedness of all life. A world imbued with spirit
cannot be separated into the sacred and profane, the spirited and the
spiritless.
It is only by creating an indirect dependence on the land (e.g. modern
city life) that nature is easily perceived as “less than”
the humans that manipulate it. The world split into the religious and
secular is a world judged to have constituents of moral and ethical value
(religious) and those of dross (secular), the pure and the impure, the
worthy and the worthless. This world view projected onto plants also sees
them as having constituents of value (active) and those of dross (inactive).
For purposes of utility this can be a useful distinction. But when utilitarianism
is raised to a guiding social ethic, an approach to all of the natural
world, it cuts off spiritual relations with it.
This can be understood as a “great forgetting” – one
of the defining pathologies of highly rationalist cultures. Medicinal
plants are specialists in helping humans re-awaken from this amnesia.
Some “speak” louder than others; vision plants urge a deep
ecological message of change that runs so contrary to the guiding myths
of industrial-growth cultures that they are often made illegal. When the
medicines are outlawed, then the healers become outlaws. It’s a
sign of the times.
However. The wisdoms of human partnership with the tribes of Nature may
have been colonized, missionized, industrialized, and consumerized into
the earth, and may have been bulldozed and burned at the stake and poisoned
and buried under concrete. But to the earth they have gone, and from the
earth they will arise. And they are arising now, like sprouts through
the cracks in the road of progress. Through many people, and the numbers
are growing as world problems brought on by selfish, disassociative cultural
scripts become more critical and the changes necessary for their solution
more obvious.
People are suffering, the world is suffering, and relief is being asked
for, cried for, prayed for. Another human story exists to replace the
self-destructive mythic addictions of modernity. A story of human lifeways
repatterned onto principles of organismic growth and evolution, healthy
ecological relations, and recognition of the worlds of spirit and vitality.
This story comes from an in-place wisdom native to this earth, and it
is breaking like a wave upon this planet. The knowledge that runs this
story is now growing like mycelium through the cultural deadwood of the
colonizers. It is coming out of the forests and deserts and mountains,
out of the many earth-based cultures whose wisdoms are spreading through
the air (and electronic) currents of world. It is working through people
in the West who are returning home to the community of life, who are engaged
in healing themselves and others of the chronic homesickness that manifests
in so many of the ills of modernity. This is what the world-wide renaissance
in the way of the plants is about. This is why herbalist Rosemary Gladstar
calls plants “the umbilical cords to the planet.”
“The earth is calling us to remember” (Buhner 1997).
With all this said, it should be obvious that individual healing is ultimately
inseparable from planetary healing. The plants teach awareness, and one
is commonly faced with heightened realizations of the enormity of the
planetary crisis, along with the obviousness and urgency of the solutions.
These understandings demand action. Mucho trabajo! How one accommodates
these revelations and integrates them into one’s life is never easy.
However, it is integral to healing, to growth into a life of authenticity,
of truthfulness.
A further challenge is that during a dieta ones understandings
become primarily felt. The greater the problems revealed, the more one
must open to feel them. One must thaw the feeling body to feel pain to
its core. Only by feeling pain to its depths does one acknowledge it,
know it, transmute it, and release it, simultaneously freeing oneself.
The more expansive the sense of the self, the more pervasive the feeling,
the more one’s Spirit is enlivened, and the greater the healing.
A visionary perspective on this is that the earth is raising its spiritual
vibration as a way to transition itself out of the current crisis. This
is another way of saying that the earth is sending out strong intentions
to heal, a Gaian version of prayer. As the earth moves through this change
it simultaneously brings along and is brought along by those humans sensitive
to this rising wave, attracted to this swelling invigoration. There are
those who persist in feeding off dwindling energy from a dying era with
contracted vehicles conditioned, i.e. normalized to limited conductivity.
And there are those that are recognizing a higher frequency of “juice,”
of life force, of info-energy, of understandings - and are doing their
best to reconfigure themselves to accommodate it; to run it, work it,
and become it. A new human operating system is forming, and this is what
catalyzes the changes, the “roll-over” effect. This energy
has to maximize and manifest itself through human one at a time, to then
snowball thru the human collective. The biggest blocks to this happening
is the feeling narcosis and culture of fear, denial, and avoidance still
strongly remnant on the planet.
This is the paradox of healing revealed by the plants. Only by facing
fear is one released from its stranglehold. Only by dying is one freed
from the fear of dying, and only then can one be fully alive. It may mean
a head-on collision with oneself, but out of the wreckage will appear
the glimmers of the soul glyph, designs of one’s original incarnational
purposes. The chaos of such a collision could last minutes, hours, or
even years. This path is boot camp for the spirit. Its purification can
take one on a hard, steep, rocky road, but the views are great and the
air is fresh!
This is why dietas are a lot of work and not necessarily “fun”.
Healing can be smooth or messy, a simple reflection of the reality of
what is being addressed. In a dieta, all that is authentic is
redeemed and ultimately appreciated. The benefits in engaging this process
is rooted in spiritual renewal. From spirit comes the deepest source of
well-being, a self-confidence arising from engagement with the actual
and the truthful.
The universe rewards courage. The harder the work, the sweeter the ecstasy.
It is a spiritual law that one gets what one pays for. This is the evolution
Game. The human ego resists the great processes of transformation native
to this Game, the letting go to recieve, the dying to a greater rebirth.
The plants know this Game, and how to play it successfully. Their teachings
are a wisdom of emergence, a greenprint of the heavenly Now materializing
on the earth. Their gift is all around us, and is here for the asking.
Buhner, Stephen
1997 One Spirit, Many Peoples. Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart
Publishers.
Luna, Luis Eduardo, and Pablo Amaringo
1991 ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian
Shaman. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Mabit, Jacques, Rosa Giove, and Joaquin Vega
1996 Takiwasi: the use of Amazonian shamanism to rehabilitate drug addicts.
(In) Yearbook of Cross-Cultural Medicine and Psychotherapy 1995.
Michael Windelman & Walter Andritzky, eds. VWM - Verlag fur Wissenschaft
und Bildung.
Schultes, Richard E., and M. Winkelman
1996 The Principle American Hallucinogenic Plants and their Bioactive
and Therapeutic Properties. (In) Yearbook of Cross-Cultural Medicine
and Psychotherapy 1995. Michael Winkelman & Walter Andritzky,
eds. VWM - Verlag fur Wissenschaft und Bildung
© Morgan Brent 2003
