A lecture by Shaman Warinei Wanare from our March 2007 Ayahuasca workshops in Brazil.

The only way to learn is to be awake in every moment of your life. In every decision that you make, watch to see if you are actively living in that very moment. This will be your guard from the 'sicknesses' that you face as you walk on the shamanic path.

The lecture mentions these sicknesses, and how to avoid being affected by them.

"Everything is a shamanic act. The plants, like the elders say, are the key that allow us to know ourselves a little more. When we are taking this plant into ourselves we are opening this key so we can have access to other dimensions to learn how to act in this one, and to act in this reality to put into practice what we have learned from these plants. It doesn't make any sense to go and visit other realities if we don't put into practice in this dimension what we have learned.

The most important this is to have an impeccable attitude. The heart of the human being is so vulnerable that we need these plants to know how to act. They allow us to be awake. If we are really awake, we are experiencing life in every moment. But if we just get lost in the daily life, a lot of problems start and we start to struggle in our outlook on life and the path we are walking."

A lecture by Ralph Miller from the second week of our March 2007 Ayahuasca workshops in Brazil.

"On some level, many of us may make the choice to come to this plant as a conscious choice that has to do with our own life path, to be awake rather than asleep, to disengage from a repetitious life and come into a fuller expression of who we are. It may be an individual agenda to enhance our own life. There may be others of us who come to a place in our lives where this medicine is a sort of last resort to be of service to ourselves and humans and serve a higher consciousness in the collective.

In the illusionary scheme of things, our decision to come to this plant has much to do with ourselves and little to do with the plant. People think, "I am going to go to Brazil and I am going to take this plant". However, many of you may have also experienced what I am about to say through some sort of strange synchronicities that you may have chalked up to be just "coincidences". But in a way that defies cause and effect, there is an intelligence in this plant that on some level, while we think we are deciding to come and drink the plant, on another level the plant is choosing us to come here so that she can drink of us.

This has to do with the idea of a plant-human intervention..."