Ten years ago, in my first retreat, I heard these words from the person who gave them to me, which fertilised my heart and reached the depths of my soul, and I knew from that moment on that I would make this mission my own, I also understood that I could not and would not do it alone and that I would raise my voice to the four winds to summon millions of people to this task and to go through with courage and also with cunning whatever was necessary.
They came from the mouth of Alberto, the first facilitator who gave me ayahuasca and with whom I worked with hundreds of people and facilitators for almost eight years. He in turn had heard them in the jungle from the tireless traveller taita Querubín and from taita Domingo, who also had this purpose and panoramic vision. A few months later I went to the jungle for a few days, although I received the most profound training in Spain and working in retreats all over Europe and South America. When I came back from the jungle I went to the first international ayahuasca congress in Ibiza, where I went to a geodesic dome to take ayahuasca and experienced what at that moment felt like an initiation. I was able to experience how the ayahuasca merged with me, took possession of me and at the same time I was myself, it spread throughout my body and at the same time I felt as if my veins were the rivers of planet earth through which the ayahuasca flowed and expanded. I spent the whole night crying and laughing in a liberation that was also a preparation, like the training of a soldier of love, freedom, peace and ecstasy who carries no weapons but his determination, his voice and his heart. This training lasted for years and these capacities are still expanding.
I started working in Barcelona organising retreats there. Being an international city, people from all over the world began to arrive and wanted to bring ayahuasca to their countries, sometimes on their own initiative and sometimes inspired by me or by a colleague. This is how it began to spread at the speed of light to many countries in Europe. One of these people, Paulo Lira, enthusiastic about this expansive impulse and his experiences, gladly accepted my invitation to bring the medicine together to Argentina and a few months later we were there. As it was forbidden there, we started to do retreats in Colonia del Sacramento, a city in Uruguay, which is an hour’s boat ride from Buenos Aires across the Rio de la Plata. From there we started to create a team and also organised bufo alvarius and kambó workshops in Buenos Aires, from where we reached Paraguay, Brazil, Venezuela and many provinces of Argentina; in Chile we had already arrived before.
I went to Venezuela on a mission to meet with yopo, to train and bring it to expand it all over the world, just as we had already started with kambó, trained at that time by Santiago Archilla and later professionalised with Mauricio Albanés.
Two years before all this I smoked the bufo alvarius for the first time on the beach of the Sonora desert in front of Tiburón island with Octavio Rettig, I turned and told him «I am afraid» and he told me, patting me affectionately as a brother in my heart: «Don’t be afraid, everything is freedom, we are in paradise», the second time was in his house and there I lived the most transcendental experience of my life, I freed myself from the infinite anguish and accessed the supreme glory, the intasis of full peace. When I returned I told him: «brother we have to spread this medicine all over the world, all people deserve to live this» and he nodded.
I will never forget that trip to Mexico where I visited the cradle of peyote in Real de Catorce taking the hikuri there, riding through the semi-desert on horseback while it was raining and my experiences with the mushrooms in Huautla de Jimenez together with Maria Sabina’s desencientes and our free shots on the Adoración hill.
When I tried MDMA (ecstasy) in Barcelona I felt that it was the medicine of intimacy and orgasm of the heart, the ideal substance for affective undressing and sexual disinhibition, both so important and necessary for a world without war, since then I long from the depths of my soul for its use to be decriminalised throughout the world and I am deeply grateful for your scientific studies of MAPS in this cause.
In the middle of the pandemic I came out of inner mastery, published my first book and started to collaborate so that ayahuasca and bufo alvarius could reach facilitators all over the world and collaborate with donations and donation campaigns with the decriminalisation movements and with the legal causes of the facilitators who are imprisoned.
I realised that I wanted to found a school, not alone, but as a constant co-creation, to support and transmit all the understanding of facilitation and integration and the skills and abilities and to impose that expansive movement with the training of facilitators and centres all over the planet, for this we joined Flor Soeiro and myself, I am very happy that we have founded the Floresiendo School (Alchemy of Love) together with her and invoke this clamour of convocation and union from the deepest part of us like a wolf howling its song on the cliff in front of the extensive jungle and the cities for all those who want to join us. The spirit of ayahuasca is not the spirit of a particular culture, tribe or region such as the Amazon, it goes far beyond all that and transcends borders and traditions. It is the spirit of freedom as it is the spirit of all entheogens and entactogens, natural or chemical, because ayahuasca is not a separate entity with its own voice, but love itself in liquid form. I feel very sorry for the hundreds of kilos of ayahuasca that are destroyed every year by the customs authorities. If they knew what they are doing, they would realise that it is like burning the equipment and the first aid kit that is on its way to the emergency room of a hospital.
The expansion is not only met with attempts to be stopped from outside the movement but also from within. Many ayahuasqueros argue that ayahuasca is «sacred» and that its use is being profaned and commercialised, but if you look closely, when they use that word they mean that what is sacred is the way they give it. The concept of «sacred» is the origin of much of the religious wars that there are and were in the world, it is the perfect excuse to try to gain immunity and justification for all kinds of attacks and accusations covered in this violent radicalism that is far removed from the love that we can access with ayahuasca.
It is possible to love something without recognising it as sacred, just as one loves a person fully. Besides, we give power to all that is sacred, and ayahuasca should never occupy the place of the centre, because that place belongs only to the Consciousness of Love.
Others say, although there are fewer and fewer of them, that ayahuasca «is jealous», that it does not want to mix with other medicines and that one should only go deeper into a medicine, as if one has to go deeper into a plant and not into oneself, because in the latter way it is good to have as many tools as possible, and I am not saying that one should take many and that this will liberate oneself more and not confuse oneself. They project and personify ayahuasca as if it were a jealous woman, a grandmother who quarrels, a purge for «sins» or an all-knowing mother with which to cover some deficiency created.
Others say that it is not convenient to expand it until there is sufficient scientific evidence and in that case they hand over the power to the external approval of governments and institutions and to get permissions that are gaps in their tyrannical and ignorant conceptions. We don’t have time for such an unhinged and slow process, we have to take advantage of the gap in legality that exists in many countries to give ayahuasca to the greatest number of people until the statistical evidence of testimonies is undeniable, as it is beginning to be in more and more millions of people.
Let’s use social media for this, we have the fourth power in our hands, we are all journalists and potential chroniclers with the power to expand our voice, the founder of Facebook himself, Mark Zuckerberg, donated half a million dollars in 2020 for the legalisation of psilocybin in Oregon and the decriminalisation of entheogens and entactogens, the proposal was approved.
I did three retreats with ayahuasca, bufo alvarius and other entheogens in Ivory Coast with a friend who is now still doing them there as well as in Gabon and Tanzania and they are also done in Morocco. I want it to reach Africa, I want all of us who work in this to earn the money that allows us to hire lawyers, to finance studies and causes and to open solidarity centres in villages and countries without sufficient economic resources. I am in contact with facilitators in Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Dubai, Saudi Arabia…. I want it to reach the whole world, all the islands until we find ourselves dancing in front of the Antarctic penguins in Tierra del Fuego.
We are creating a website in ten languages so that information about these medicines can reach all those who do not yet know about them. So that this text reaches the whole world and they know that they are not alone, I am sad that there is a person serving life imprisonment in Shanghai for trying to share ayahuasca with the people of his country. What is it about ayahuasca that people risk losing their external freedom to bring the possibility of internal freedom to others?
The revolution starts with you
I wish from the bottom of my heart that this liberation reaches the whole world and I am at the service of it, I am not alone, I am with Flor and with all of you. Let’s go together
Sergio Sanz Navarro