The Final Lesson
The following is an excerpt from my book Yoga & Plant Medicine
Listen to me read it (5 min)
Heading into the Amazon. Loreto, Peru, 2017. Photo by Tony Hoare.
In 2017 I taught yoga for a few months at the Temple of the Way of Light, an ayahuasca healing centre outside of Iquitos, Peru.
While there, I participated in a number of ceremonies with various Shipibo healers and formed a special bond with a maestro named Damian, a former schoolteacher from the Ucayali region. I stayed in a small thatched-roof hut beside the maestros’ house and would often hang out on their porch, smoking mapachos (jungle tobacco cigarettes), chatting with them in my broken Spanish, and helping Damian dig sand flea eggs out of retreat participants’ feet — typical jungle stuff.
Hanging outside my Tambo. Loreto, Peru, 2017.
Portrait of Maestro Damian by Debbie Stapleton
In our time together I learned that, like many indigenous shaman who have been exposed to Christianity through colonialism, he thought of Jesus Christ as a great teacher and healer. Since my time with the Santo Daime church, which is a syncretic mix of Christianity, spiritism and shamanism, I’d also developed an appreciation for Christ’s teachings. During one ceremony when it came time for him to sing to me, I asked him if he would sing to Jesus. He leaned in, nodded his head and said, “Yaaaah!”
I couldn’t do anything but surrender to the experience and allow a deep energetic cleaning to take place.
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As he sang in a soaring nasal voice, I could hear references to Christ mixed into the Shipibo, and I was soon overwhelmed with a strong energy that forced me to lie down. I was plunged into complete darkness and felt like I was inside a great serpent, its skin undulating as it moved along an infinite path through space. I couldn’t do anything but surrender to the experience and allow a deep energetic cleaning to take place. Electricity pulsed through my whole body and it felt like every cell was being restructured and calibrated. After some time I was able to sit up again, and I was filled with a feeling of great love.
I had the insight that this is what it feels like to love like Christ.
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I had the insight that this is what it feels like to love like Christ — expansive and all inclusive — and that if we could all just love like this, it would be the complete end of our suffering. In that darshan of Christ, I learned that loving someone in spite of their faults is to forgive them completely. When someone says or does something hurtful, it’s coming from their own pain and they’re just showing you what part of them needs to be loved. If we’re able to see that, we can hold their pain with compassion and not take it personally.
In my revelation it was revealed that “Love like Christ” was the final lesson, because to love unconditionally is the most healing thing you can do. So love people just like you love the ocean, the trees, the mountains, the sun. Love it all for how it is, not for how it might be. Love without conditions.
It may seem an impossible aspiration, but that experience showed me what’s possible if we can truly, as Jesus commanded, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Of course, I don’t always live up to this ideal, but my experience has given me something tangible to align to, which feels much more powerful than any spiritual doctrine.
