The Tamamuri Tales.
"The plants look down on us from their position of wisdom and age, 500 million years of evolution and survival, as against 2.4 million for the Homo genus and barely 300,000 years for Homo sapiens, the newcomer. If we show them love, they are prepared to help us, but they test and challenge us, each in their own way.” — Yves Duc, Ayahuasca: From Serpent to Jaguar.
Oh, how my heart wishes I could make this longer. I would write a poetic tome dedicated to Tamamuri. Alas, my free time is limited, and something in me won't publish anything else until this piece goes live. Here we go...
Tamamuri. Gran hermano. Gran maestro. Irake.
Irake (ee-rah-kuh, Shipibo for thank you). Icha bires irake (thank you so much).
What an unbelievable initiation.
A month with a master tree and ancient doctor. Every diet is game-changing. Establishing new, preposterous levels for what is possible and probable in medicine work.
What a strong, gentle, and generous spirit. A big brother in more ways than one. I became a stronger, better man through this process—receiving gifts I can only hope to repay through good deeds in this lifetime.
Tamamuri's Oso (Bear) & Rokotoro (Doctor) forms.
Meeting the Bone Dragon.
In my preview post I shared two images of Tamamuri, his doctor and tree/bear form. I anticipated a meeting with a grizzly, maybe a polar bear, for novelty.
While his overbearing stature was undeniably felt, Tamamuri appeared to me in an unexpected form: The River Dragon.
Aquamarine serpentine form and fluidity. Undulating patterns of hyperfluorescent scales. A strong and fluid force. Mythologically gorgeous.
Meeting and working with Tamamuri felt a lot like this picture of Haku, the river dragon spirit from the Studio Ghibli masterpiece Spirited Away. The size differential is accurate.
With all the gentleness of Haku and all the ferocity of a great dragon, Tamamuri and I got some serious work done. Hard, difficult, but important work.
Surprisingly, there is one other characteristic known to Tamamuri that I didn’t highlight earlier but was ever-present throughout my diet: mercury. Tamamuri is associated with lakes of mercury. Liquid metal. Why? I don’t know. You might notice the grey mercury at the center of the ripples in his doctor photo.
The Great Presence.
The first ceremony indicated what was to come. Without announcement, hugging my knees on a small mat in the blackness of the jungles of Mexico, a shudder ripples down my spine as my hair stands on end... I feel a gigantic presence bearing down on me.
Like a living skyscraper breathing down my neck, the size of the felt presence and the magnitude of its force shook me to my core. Then, the organic building moved. Slowly circling me. Step. Step. Step. Sizing me up, taking a good look at the tiny being curled up on his mat. Making its judgments.
“This is the great tree I’m meant to work with!? How on Earth can I manage this thing? This presence is intimidating, impressive, downright flabbergasting.“
I learned very quickly the difference in scale between a plant diet and a tree diet. Which should be obvious, given the size differential between a plant and the giant trees of the Amazon.
This is going to be a long month…
The Adamantium Infusion.
Tamamuri is the unparalleled plant doctor of all things blood, spine, and bone. To provide another example, a practitioner here at the center right now also loved her Tamamuri diet: because it corrected a slipped disc in her spine. It's truly remarkable what diets are capable of handling.
This next ceremony—with the connection now online—delivered in full.
What I experienced I can only describe as an adamantium infusion. You remember Wolverine was upgraded by having his skeleton infused with adamantium, a super-strong, quasi-liquid, mythical metal.
In a painful and terrifyingly beautiful process, I was strapped to a surgical table as my bones and skeletal structure were infused with Tamamuri’s liquid mercury. I could feel it soak through bone and marrow, repairing cracks, injecting the living liquid lifeforce contained in this Tree-Teachers essence into me.
Afterward, my entire visual field was coated in a living, dynamic quicksilver. A beautiful multi-chromatic metal overlay. An internal suit of armour, protecting and repairing a skeletal structure so desperately in need of it. Unbreakable.
An untold level of strength and stability grew out of me in the days that followed. Posture improved. Breath slowed. Presence anchored. The first of many gifts that I would come to receive from my Big Brother.
Psycho-Physical Chiropractics.
Undoubtedly, the most insane/incredible experience I have ever had. Deep into the second week of ascetic adherences, approaching the halfway point in ceremony, Tamamuri in his doctor form materialized in front of me, clear as day in the dead of night.
I could feel his pressure, see his movements, and could only bear witness as he got to work. Dancing around my chest and shoulders, he embarked on a psycho-physiological chiropractic session that I could never have guessed was physically or metaphysically possible.
Placing one hand along my right jaw, the other pressing up against my right shoulder… “take a deep breath,” he whispered into me—BAM!—pulling and rotating head away from shoulder, popped my snowboarding-injured shoulder into new alignment. Pops of bones adjusting rippled through the maloka like firecrackers. Twisting my head back to look almost directly behind me… 'breathe, child’—BAM!—another gigantic pop. Sat out in the Mexican jungle, rippling like Snap, Crackle, & Pop children’s cereal.
As the physical adjustments were made, psychological restructurings snapped into place. POP! “Ahh, I see how I haven’t been relating to my friend in the right way.” SNAP! “Ah yeah, I need to set a clear boundary here and this is why I feel frustrated.” CRACK! “Oh I’ve been justifying this addiction as something necessary for the work I do.”
Mental patterning pops into place alongside limbs and joints. Another reminder that there is no real separation between mind and body. A painful, beautiful, paradigm-shifting chiropractic session from the Bone Dragon. Not a bad Tuesday night.
My body is limber, my thinking clear, my actions direct, and my spine strong. Irake, Tamamuri.
Resolving the Shakes.
I began this diet with the dream of being able to understand and resolve the hand tremors I have had for god-knows-how-long. I don’t remember a time without them.
This was Tamamuri’s greatest gift, and his most painful teaching.
It took a week of digging down. Painful ceremonies, emotional unsteadiness, lack of sleep and malnutrition set in, psychological resistance flares up, and confusion abounds.
In a particularly challenging ceremony, with Tamamuri drilling down my spine like a dentist’s drill (remember that BZZZ from your childhood? Yeah.), a small voice whispered into my awareness...
“Why does he get the cool dragon but I get the dentists drill?”
…wait a minute.
Who is talking? Is that me, talking to myself, about myself, from the third person? Who is the “he” and who is the “I” in this situation, when they are both me?
Some deep psychological fragmentation was revealing itself. Kind of terrifying to hear a part of yourself talk about yourself that you never knew existed.
Tamamuri's drilling opened up a cave in visionary space, some cave deep inside of me, where a part of me was closed off. Some part of me, deeply disconnected from myself and my everyday psyche… who?
It took a week of rigorous investigation and nervous system decompression (getting closer to this inner self was wildly triggering), I discovered who it was: me in my late teens/early twenties. I had an incredibly difficult stretch for a few years, some of which I’ve alluded to in “On Depression”, but that wasn’t even the half of it.
Eric Brown
What I realized, agonizingly, is that he was terrified.
I spent years slowly losing grip on reality. I was frightened, alone, the ground of intelligibility crumbling beneath me, not understanding what was reality, fantasy, where my life was going or what narrative I could nest it within. Dreams blended into waking life, waking life dancing the fine line between death and madness.
This part of me—the innocent, terrified boy—was locked away. So deeply repressed I had forgotten how challenging that period of life was.
It was this terror, the living terror locked away inside of me, repressed and regressed out of mind, that was manifesting itself in my nervous system as hand tremors.
There it is! The origin—the root cause—of the shakes.
For 14 years, I have wondered why my hands shook. 14 years without an answer. It was Tamamuri’s spinal drilling, digging deep into the forgotten emotional caves of an Eric-long-since-passed, that helped me realize why this was happening.
With Tamamuri’s loving care and some serious IFS-style parts work over the next few days, I was able to reconnect with this part of myself, to process and release the existential terror that was living inside of me, and like clockwork, the shakes reduced.
They are ~90% better now. My hands are steady, for the most part. There’s still some work to do to release the residue of the remaining emotional burden, but at least the path is clear, and it’s already substantially better.
Unbelievable.
Repressed emotional pain manifesting as chronic physiological symptoms, resolved in sacred process with a master tree. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Gap of Thought & Action.
One of the more subtle teachings and gifts from Tamamuri bubbled slowly into consciousness over the course of weeks. It was difficult to track at first, but it became increasingly obvious as the month progressed.
The gap, the fundamental distance between thought and action, was closing.
How often do you think “I should do X…” and how long does it take you to do it? Sometimes minutes, sometimes weeks. Things are put off, delayed, procrastinated, hesitated on, feet-dragged. Rumination kicks in, important things are forgotten, escapes and distractions are found.
How much of life is lost in this tiny, vast chasm: the space between thought and action?
Ideally, as a fully integrated being, your action is your thought. Your thought is your action. What you do is what you think. No resistance, no hesitation, no confusion, no rumination. Think. Act. Act. Think. No difference.
Zen is a very good discipline for this. We'll save that for a future piece.
Although I can’t claim this total integration yet, I notice a dramatic closing of the gap. From difficult conversations to cleaning the room, the gap between “I should/want to do this” and “I am doing this now” has shrunk.
That is a true gift. And in large part, it came because Tamamuri does not accept excuses. There is no bullshitting a master. No sloppy thinking. No sloppy acting. No escape when they live inside you. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Reminds me of my older piece, “Stop Plashing Around.”
Eric Brown
Integration.
So much integration to do, so little time to do it.
On one hand, honouring the lessons learned and seeing the fruit that will be borne from the seeds that were planted here will be the work of my lifetime.
There's a lot to do. Rooting down into my authority, my path, my practice, my Yakudō. Speaking more clearly, moving with intent, simplifying even further. And hopefully, to the best of my meagre ability: channelling the almighty natural force of this giant Amazonian master tree into some incredible and impeccable essays.
On the other hand, I start my month-long Coca diet in 1.5 weeks. No rest for the wicked, eh?
Here's a sneak preview:
Buckle up, cowboy! We're veering into Inca territory and visiting their most sacred plant: the coca leaf. Solar consciousness and mental architecture. Let the games begin.
I love you, Tamamuri.
I had no concept of what we could do together, but I’m glad we did it. Your teachings were firm but wise. Your healing bitter, but necessary. You’ve given me the uprightness, stability, rooting, and readjustments I was hoping for.
May we live and work together in the service of others for years to come.
Irake,
EB. 🐉
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