Sacred plants are wonderful. But our soul is more wonderful still.
I want to begin with a reflection. My wish is that, by the end of this piece, we can bring another perspective into this path of awareness, self-discovery and awakening.
In Ecuador, depending on where you are born, sacred plants and ancestral medicine can be part of life from childhood. As a teenager I had the chance to come close to the world of shamans and medicinal plants, first near where I lived and later in the Amazon.
In my experience, plants can help us open the heart. And when I speak of an open heart, I also mean greater awareness, the ability to look at ourselves honestly, and the development of discernment. Or are these, in fact, expressions of one and the same experience?
Do the plants find us, or do we find them?
On your path of self-discovery, perhaps these forms of consciousness come to you. Or perhaps you are the one who finds them. Maybe the line between one view and the other does not exist, and both belong to the same path.
When your inner practice begins, tools start to appear. We often call them teachers. A conversation, a person, a spiritual practice or a plant can become a mirror that shows us something we could not see before.
But the value of that mirror is not only in what it reveals. It is in what we decide to do with what we see.
The power of plants and the power of discernment
The world of shamanism has many shades. I have met people with deep knowledge of plants, rituals and different traditional practices. I also witnessed situations that seemed to show an extraordinary relationship with nature: shamans who, as far as I could observe, made rain fall only over the place where the ceremony was held, or lines drawn with striking precision around the ceremonial space.
Those experiences led me to ask: does someone with power over the elements necessarily have elevated spiritual power?
Over time I understood that this is not always the case. The ability to influence, manifest or work with certain forces does not, on its own, show a person's level of awareness. True discernment also looks at intention.
- Love, or fear?
- Service, or control?
- Expansion, or the need for power?
- Freedom, or the desire to influence others?
These questions help us tell the difference between an extraordinary experience and a truly transformative one.
What turns an experience "gray"?
For me, what turns an experience gray is rarely the tool itself. It is the intention behind how it is used.
The mind can plant certain seeds in the heart: fear, desire, control, the need for recognition, the pursuit of power. When the heart closes, the ego uses those seeds as protective mechanisms and, without noticing, we drift away from what we perceive as our highest divine power.
That is why it is not enough to ask whether a practice works.
- Where am I using it from?
- What am I really looking for?
- What price am I choosing to pay?
- Does this experience bring me closer to my sovereignty, or make me depend on someone else?
Plants open the heart, but they do not walk the path for you
When the heart opens, what was hidden begins to show. If there are seeds of fear, control, desire, pain or patterns we have not yet integrated, a ceremonial experience can help us see them more clearly.
It can show us. It can teach us. It can guide us. But there is one thing it cannot do for us: walk the path.
We can live a deeply transformative experience and, if there is no real commitment to our process afterward, it stays just that: an experience. Life may never be quite the same again, but transformation asks for more: integration, responsibility and conscious action.
Do you know the seeds that close your heart?
This may be one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves. Which beliefs, fears, desires, contracts or programs make your heart close? Which experiences still shape your decisions, even though you believe you left them behind?
Plants can help us recognize what needs to be looked at: an emotion we had not seen, a dynamic that keeps repeating in our relationships or in the way we react. And once we see it, a choice appears: keep living from those patterns, or start working with them.
Recognizing a pattern does not mean you have transformed it. Transformation begins when we choose to relate differently to what we discover. If you want to go deeper into this process, you can also read how to release trapped emotions.
Are plants part of the path, or are they the path?
Plants are part of the path. Or are they the path? Or something more? That is yours to choose, from the perspective you are operating from.
I do not want to offer you a single perspective or tell you what to believe. I want to invite you to hold several at once. Perhaps then we begin to notice that different paths are looking at the same truth from different points of the spiral.
Every tradition can offer us a tool. Every teacher can become a mirror. But no tool should replace our ability to observe, discern and choose.
Perhaps what keeps the spiral moving is the charge we place on our experiences, feelings, desires and fears. Plants can help us see it when the moment to see it arrives.
When does that moment arrive?
Perhaps it arrives when we begin to attune to the awareness of our heart: the kind that lets us understand not only with the mind, but with the whole Being we are.
The feeling that you know that you know is true and real: something you feel inside your chest, even when your mind refuses it.
Not because someone told us, and not because we want to believe it, but because something within us recognizes it.
Even so, that feeling needs discernment too. Feeling something intensely does not mean understanding it completely. That is why integration asks for time, presence, observation and the ability to check what we perceive against everyday life.
Were the frequencies always there?
Sometimes the tools we integrate let us perceive things we did not recognize before. Or perhaps those frequencies were always there, and now there are fewer layers in the way. Or perhaps we are seeing, once again, a part of the spiral we had already walked.
We do not always understand right away what an experience means. Sometimes the meaning appears over time, through our decisions, relationships and everyday changes. Integration does not always happen in an instant, and that is part of the path too.
Love, fear and the sovereignty of your soul
Loving the path. Desiring from love, toward ourselves and toward everything that exists. Is that what truly attracts and manifests our experience?
And if so, do fear and desire also shape the reality we live? Can we create experiences out of what we fear? Mistake a need of the ego for a genuine call of the heart? Hand over our freedom in exchange for a promise of power, recognition or transformation?
The path can be deeply beautiful, but it can also become confusing if we lose our discernment. That is why seeking elevated experiences is not enough. We also need to look at their effects on our life.
- Is there more freedom in my life?
- More responsibility and more presence?
- More love?
- More ability to make my own decisions?
If you choose to approach master plants, do it with respect, information, responsibility and discernment. And remember something I hold as essential:
The sovereignty of your soul is yours and no one else's.
No teacher, guide, facilitator, tradition or experience should replace your ability to choose. But here another question appears: if the programs of your mind, and the parts of you that react according to their beliefs, are the ones running your life, who is really making the decisions? Those parts, or you?
Who are you when you stop identifying completely with what you think? When you listen to what you feel without letting go of your discernment? When you observe your emotions without letting them decide for you? Perhaps that is a good question to bring into a ceremonial experience.
And one more: if an experience shows you how you have created part of your reality from fear, with patterns and decisions that have caused suffering, could you hold what you see? Seeing does not always mean being able to integrate. An experience can open many questions without offering immediate answers. That is why it matters to process each layer little by little: not to deny what you lived or erase your history, but to take in what emerges from it.
Awareness is not only about seeing more. It is also about learning to hold what we see.
Integration: the real work
If an experience shows us what we need to heal, what comes next? That is where commitment begins.
Make room for the emotions that need to be acknowledged.
Review the beliefs that drive your decisions.
Unlearn, little by little, what no longer belongs to who you are.
Reconnect with the most essential part of yourself, with discernment.
For me, integrating means beginning to live from the heart and from discernment. It means reclaiming a sovereignty we often gave away while building a personality able to fit into this reality, shaped by family, social and cultural beliefs, and by what we call the collective unconscious.
It means acknowledging our emotions without letting them define us, taking responsibility for our decisions, and allowing what we discover to show up in everyday life.
I deeply love everything the plants have taught me about myself. But I say this with complete honesty: integration has been one of the hardest parts. Experiencing something is one thing. Living in line with what you discovered is something else entirely.
So rather than asking whether to keep approaching the plants, perhaps the most important question is: what are you doing with what they already showed you? They do not do the work. You integrate it, you make the decisions, you change your actions. An experience can open a door, but walking through it takes your conscious participation.
From a transpersonal perspective, integration can involve exploring emotions, patterns, beliefs, identity, purpose and our relationship with consciousness. I do not facilitate ceremonies: I accompany people before and after, in preparation and in integration. In my work, that guidance also includes an energetic and spiritual dimension, always respecting each person's process and sovereignty. If you want to understand this approach better, you can read What is transpersonal therapy?
Raising your frequency in this reality
There are many tools to expand perception and deepen self-knowledge. Plants can be one of them for some people; there are also physical, emotional, energetic, spiritual and contemplative tools. There is no single path. It depends on our awareness, our discernment and what we are able to integrate at each moment.
Raising your frequency should not mean escaping this reality. For me it means bringing a different awareness into it and learning to live it here: in our relationships, our decisions, our body, our work, the way we love and the way we choose. True integration is recognized in everyday life.
This article opens the series The Master Plant Path. In the next ones I will write about each plant from my own experience: tobacco, ayahuasca, iboga and other sacred plants of the Amazon, Africa, Mexico and other parts of the world. Not to tell you which path to choose or to replace your discernment, but to offer perspectives that can enrich your process.
Perhaps the real path is not about finding a single truth, but about developing enough awareness to recognize what resonates within you, without handing your sovereignty to anyone else.
Tools can show you the path. The decision to walk it will always be yours.
This article shares personal reflections and a spiritual perspective on master plants and ceremonial experiences. It is not medical or psychological advice, nor a guide to using substances.
Plant practices can carry physical, psychological and legal risks that vary with the substance, the person, the context and applicable law. It is important to inform yourself properly, respect the traditions these practices come from, and seek professional guidance when needed.
Spiritual experiences can be meaningful, but they do not replace medical, psychological or psychiatric care.
A personal reflection based on my own experience. The guidance I offer is complementary and does not replace medical or psychological care.
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