Part 4: Planet, plants, people…

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Meet our co-creators Niles Heckman (Director) and Rak Razam (Writer & Host)

View Episode 1 HERE.

NOW onto our article series….

Part 4: Planet, plants, people…

Indigenous children from the Seri tribe play on the beach while a ceremony takes place a ways away. Shamanic ceremonies have typically been an initiation for teenagers passing into adulthood to more understand their place on the earth in the web of life, and to be in balance with nature.

Niles: So Rak, you and I have created this show together. However, you were the one who initially conceptualized it. How did that come about?

Rak: I’ve been working with plant medicines, predominantly, ayahuasca, for 10 years now, since 2006, and basically it was all just one step at a time. I answered the call of the shamanic path. I went down into the Amazon in 2006 as a freelance journalist reporting on what was the role of the shaman in the 21st century and why this was so important. Three months and 30 chapters later, and an entire awakening of my own divinity and my place in the world occurred and I got the message of ayahuasca.

And as part of that, in the last 10 years I wrote the book Aya: Awakenings and that became the documentary film, Aya: Awakenings. And as part of all that, in my outreach to other medicine people around the world and communities, I was seeing these interesting dynamics and vectors and growth spurts where people would go down to Peru and a certain statistical number of them would stay on the medicine path and a certain number of those people would become anchor points or neo-shamans, to work with the medicine. Not because they wanted to, but because the medicine or the spirit in the plants told them to.

It’s like, “you have the capacity, you have the gift and we need your help.” The planet needs your help to step into this role and hold space for this energy which is coming through.

Octavio, Dave, Rak, and Jewelli speak in a cave in the Seri land in the Mexican state of Sonora. Caves like this have been used for millennia for spiritual conenction. Later, Octavio would throw some toad medicine on the fire so we could collectively breath in the smoke and connect to astral realms as tribes may have done long ago…

I was having these conversations a lot. Just organically with the people around the world in their different medicine communities and Westerners essentially. I could see that there was a bridge developing from the plant kingdom to indigenous cultures and from indigenous cultures which had the lineage to connect to certain Westerners who would then take this energy and blossom it back in their communities in the West.

I received the idea that there was a global shamanic resurgence happening. So that evolution of our relationship with medicine communities around the world, both indigenous and western, flourished over many years and I was holding space for this term, the Shamans of the Global Village.

It’s really only been, funnily enough, in the last year or two, when the full completion has happened of Aya Awakenings the book, and Aya Awakenings the film. Touring that around the world and meeting all these people and almost with the last breath of energy of that cycle for those projects, came the realization that it was time to do this next step.

And again, just following the path one step at a time, the opportunity arose to work with a Mexican shaman who was working with the Bufo Alvarius toad medicine. And from that we evolved into the idea of Episode 1 of Shamans of the Global Village.

Richard overcomes his fears on the back end of his toad medicine journey. Done in an ancient ceremonial practice with the shaman guiding the experience through song as well as physical connection, which move energy.

To be continued…

WATCH Episode 1: Dr. Octavio Rettig and the Sonoran Desert Toad

JOIN US next week for Part 5: Awakening to the Dream…

Catch up on the Article Series: Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3

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