Medicines and Traditions

The Sacred Medicines We Serve

In our community, plant medicines are not commodities. They are ancestral sacraments, carried through centuries of Indigenous resistance, often persecuted, and now increasingly targeted by commodification and patenting. To serve them is to step into a covenant with the forest, with ancestors who defended it, and with the future that depends on it.

Ayahuasca - The Heart of our Practice

Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi + Psychotria viridis) is the heart of our practice. It has been used for generations by the Tukano, Huni Kuin, Yawanawá, Ashaninka, Shipibo, and many others. In Brazil, it also gave rise to syncretic religions such as União do Vegetal, Santo Daime, and Barquinha, which weave Indigenous, African, and Christian cosmologies.

The vine provides β-carbolines (harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine) that inhibit monoamine oxidase, enabling the dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in chacruna to be orally active. Clinical trials in Brazil demonstrate therapeutic potential in treatment-resistant depression (Palhano-Fontes et al., Psychological Medicine, 2019) and substance dependence (Santos et al., Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 2006). Reviews confirm its safety when used in structured contexts.

Today, ayahuasca is also commodified: packaged for tourists, patented in biotech labs, marketed as a psychedelic “product.” This strips it from the cosmologies that give it meaning. We resist this reduction. Here, the medicine is cooked on site with blessings from Amazonian elders, offered as sacrament and covenant, never as commodity. In Brazil, its ritual use is legally recognized.

Rapé — Sacred Tobacco Snuff

Rapé is a preparation of Nicotiana rustica with medicinal plants, administered nasally. In Indigenous traditions, tobacco is a sacred teacher, a mediator between humans and spirit,  not the addictive commodity that colonialism spread worldwide.

1. rustica contains high concentrations of nicotine and related alkaloids, alongside trace β-carbolines. When served ritually, rapé clears the mind, grounds the body, and aligns prayer.

Colonial capitalism transformed tobacco into an industry of global addiction, divorcing it from its sacred role. Rapé reclaims tobacco’s dignity as medicine, returning it to its purpose: clarity, protection, and spiritual grounding.

Sananga — Eye Drops of the Forest

Sananga is prepared from the roots and bark of Tabernaemontana species. Applied as eye drops, it produces a brief, intense sting, followed by clarity of vision and attention.

These plants contain indole alkaloids with potential antimicrobial and analgesic properties (Cakic et al., Planta Medica, 2019). Research is still limited, but its ritual use is consistent across generations of Indigenous hunters and healers.

In recent years, sananga has been commodified into online “novelty eye drops,” sold without context or care. Such products erase its meaning as a relational medicine of perception. In our community, sananga is offered ceremonially, as light for the eyes and for the spirit.

Jurema — The Northeastern Sacrament

Jurema (Mimosa tenuiflora and related species) is central to the traditions of the Fulni-ô and Afro-Indigenous Juremeiros of Northeastern Brazil. These rituals embody a theology of ancestry, resistance, and spiritual survival that endured centuries of persecution.

The bark of M. tenuiflora contains DMT and related tryptamines. On its own it is not orally active, but combined with other plants it produces visionary states. While biomedical research is sparse, its pharmacological basis is well established.

Jurema has also been reduced by outsiders to “a psychedelic molecule” in academic and commercial contexts. But Jurema is not a compound. It is a living cosmology of chants, philosophies, and rituals. To honor Jurema is to stand with the peoples who have kept it alive through repression into the present.

The Traditions We Work With 

Huni Kuin

For the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawá), nixi pae (ayahuasca) is inseparable from huni meka, vision-songs that make images and knowledge, guiding perception and ethics in ceremony; this musical-visionary technology goes far beyond a psychedelic experience, being also a pedagogy of the forest that has also catalyzed contemporary aesthetic movements like MAHKU, where song, image, and healing circulate together as living knowledge. Huni Kuin practices are a relational epistemology documented ethnographically and artistically.

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Tukano / Yepá-Mahsã

Yepá-Mahsã is the autonym of the people widely known as Tukano, whose ritual use of kahpi (ayahuasca) unfolds within a sophisticated cosmology centered on the Transofmation-Canoe of origin and the transmission of names, words, and adornments across generations; kahpi is not an isolated “substance” but part of a system where language, kinship, and territory are bound together. The scientific name for ayahuasca, Banisteriopsis caapi, was stolen by the ethnobotanist Richard Spruce from the Tukano people, who have one of the most ancient and ancestral traditions of ayahuasca in the Amazon.

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Omágua Kambeba

The Omágua Kambeba (also called Kambeba or Omagua) are riverine peoples of the Solimões/Amazon whose historical populations and complex sociopolitical life were shattered by colonial disease and missionization; many were pressured to abandon their identity in the 18th–20th centuries, with a revival from the 1980s onward. Today, medicine, song, and defense of territory re-articulate identity, seen in leaders who bridge biomedicine and traditional healing, reminding outsiders that “plant medicine” here is inseparable from language, river, and land-rights struggle. The Omágua Kambeba women, Amazonas, inspired the name of the Amazon rainforest.

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Santo Daime

Santo Daime emerged in Acre in the 1920s–30s with Raimundo Irineu Serra (Mestre Irineu), a Black Amazonian leader who shaped a syncretic doctrine weaving Indigenous knowledge, Folk Catholicism, Esotericism, and African matrixes. He is considered to be the first black man to drink ayahausca, an a bridge builder who connected Indigenous practices with African spirituality. The sacrament (Daime/ayahuasca) is received through the collective musical experience of hinários (hymnals), dance-geometry, and inner work, an Amazonian liturgy where song is scripture and healing is communal. Its history, musicality and global spread are extensively documented. Santo Daime are present in more than 50 countries around the world and helped ayahuasca traditions to receive legal recognition in different places, like the state of Oregon in the US. 

The Feitio — Preparing the Sacred Medicine

The feitio is the collective ritual of preparing the sacrament of ayahuasca. More than a process of making, it is an act of communion: a community gathered around the vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the leaves of chacruna (Psychotria viridis), working together with hands, songs, prayers, and discipline. What is cooked in the pots is not only the medicine itself, but also friendship, memory, and the ethical bonds of a community.

The Stages of the Feitio

•   Harvest — The work begins with a respectful harvest of the vine and the leaves. The vine is cut in prayer, never in haste, always with gratitude to the forest. Chacruna leaves are gathered with care, recognizing them as living teachers, not raw material.
•   Maceration of the Vine — The ayahuasca vine is pounded and softened, often accompanied by songs and collective rhythm. Each strike of the mallet is both labor and invocation, breaking open the fibers so that their spirit can release into the brew.
•   Washing and Preparation — The chacruna leaves are cleaned, sorted, and layered with the vine inside the pot. This work is done with precision and reverence, for the balance of ingredients carries spiritual as well as biochemical importance.
•   The Fire and the Cooking — The large pots are set on the fire, and the slow process of cooking begins. For hours and often days, the mixture is tended, stirred, and prayed over. Songs, hymns, and collective silence accompany the boiling, infusing the medicine with intention.
•   Prayers and Songs — Throughout the feitio, hymns and chants are offered — sometimes from Indigenous lineages, sometimes from the Santo Daime hinários — each one aligning the work with protection, guidance, and gratitude.
•   Concentration and Blessing — After repeated boiling and straining, the medicine is concentrated until it carries the essence of vine and leaf. The final moments of the feitio are marked with collective prayer and blessing, before the medicine is stored and later served in ceremony.

The Meaning of the Feitio

Spiritually, the feitio is prayer in motion. Each gesture — cutting, pounding, stirring, singing — is an offering. Before drinking, one learns to serve; before receiving visions, one learns discipline and humility.

Communally, the feitio is a space of education, solidarity and transmission. Elders teach the youth, children watch and grow within the rhythm of the work, and responsibility is shared equally. The medicine becomes a vessel of collective memory, marked by the presence of all who contributed.

Decolonially, the feitio is an act of resistance. In a world that commodifies ayahuasca as a product for markets and patents, the feitio reaffirms that the sacrament only exists fully when rooted in land, community, and spirituality. What emerges from the pot is not a “psychedelic brew,” but a living mystery woven from effort, song, and forest spirit.

The feitio is also an unique form of meditation and contemplative mindfulness practice, rooted in ancestry and shaping our future.

Thus, the feitio is at once labor and prayer, discipline and celebration, sacrifice and blessing. It is the beating heart of our community: the place where the sacrament is not only cooked, but born through fire, water, leaf, vine, and above all, the shared breath of a people in covenant with the forest.