We are excited to offer the first episode of our podcast!

In this podcast, we invite you to listen to a lecture given by Ralph Miller on the sacred plant medicine Ayahuasca. Making the assumption that listeners know nothing about this ancient plant teacher, Ralph talks about what Ayahuasca is and tells the story of how it is moving out of the jungle and into the Western consciousness, helping humans create a bridge back to our ancient past, a reconnection to the sacred primal force within us all. In the process, he explains the distinction between what we call "drugs" and the Ayahuasca plant medicine. Ralph also touches on some of the biological and chemical aspects of our brain's inherent connection with the active ingredient in the Ayahuascsa brew, dimethytriptamine (DMT), through our pineal gland.

Throughout the podcast, Peter and Chapman pause the lecture to clarify some questions that might come up for the listeners.

We are very happy to offer this new technology to everyone interested in our workshops.

This track was done with a friend in California. It has a lot of floaty synths, which I just can't seem to get enough of. It is very meditatively electronic.

This song, though I had not yet had ayahuasca when I created it, causes me to reconnect with some of the feelings I have had while working with the plant.

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..."

A lecture by Ralph Miller given to a group of new arrivals today, March 20th, 2007! on the morning of the first Ayahuasca ceremony.

"We are all here in a desire to explore a shamanic path, an experience with shamanism. By shamanism, specifically in a shamanic ceremony, we will be ingesting a shamanic plant medicine that has been used for thousands of years in indigenous cultures to bring us to a place of consciousness beyond what our normal daily awake experience is.

The recommendations that many of you have read about or heard about have to do with this concept of "letting go" as you enter into this shamanic ceremony. In many ways, the shamanic path has to do with letting go, it's a relaxing to a potential within yourself that you are not accustomed to, that you have not experienced in your day to day life."