RONIN CUSHI

RUSSIA & AOTEAROA

I was born in Russia when it was still Soviet Union some forty-six years ago. As a child, I had allergy to my mother's milk, which seriously set back my immune system development and thus spent long months sick in bed with chronic asthma and bronchitis, eating very little or nothing at all and entering some very interesting transcendental states that I readily recognized later on during rebirth breathing course undertaken on suggestion of my mother at the age of fifteen. You could say, I was dieting from early age without knowing anything about plant dietas or spending days under mosquitero net fasting and drinking tree barks.

My mother took up sannyasa just before perestroika happened, having fallen in love with Osho, and my adolescence was filled with carbon copies of esoteric texts and bearded men of Southern origin crashing in our communal flat between meditation groups that were held in underground cellars and school gymnasiums appropriated for the occasion. The fresh wind of spiritual rebellion and change brought around Zahira, a Sufi Whirling Dervish Master with flowing white hair and sky-blue eyes that magnetized you like a rabbit frozen to a spot, also a disciple of Osho, roaming the world with frequent stops in Afghanistan, Taiwan, Italy, Germany and Russia to spread the teaching of love, freedom and spirit. Some five years later we moved to New Zealand, staking everything we got to make a break as my mother was to join a commune of sannyasin friends orbiting around Zahira like a bunch of satellites caught in gravitational well of a planet or moths drawn to the candlelight. A spiritual master is a flaming torch of consciousness that ignites one's search for truth within oneself. It took me years to see clearly through my ego and feel immensely privileged, as I do now, for having benefited from the master's presence in my life.

On the medicine path one primarily works with the energy. Everything in the universe vibrates and healing is, essentially, alignment of one’s energetic vibrations. In ayahuasca trance, one is likewise centered in meditation. Without centeredness, there is neither icaros nor visions forthcoming. Sufi Whirling is all about centeredness, zikras liberate one's chakras, allowing energy to flow. Dynamic Meditation releases suppressed emotions, Kundalini is essentially the movement of the serpent power for which Ayahuasca is famous for. An opening of Third Eye is a visionary experience whereby one perceives movement of energy that underlies physical reality we inhabit. Qigong routine I start my day with similarly helps to open up the channels and allow for improved sensory perception to facilitate working with master plants.

All of the above practices and meditation techniques cumulatively add to opening up one's energy and clearing dense vibrations out of the way with the final goal of becoming a pure channel for the medicine. Dieting master plants impregnates the body with healing frequencies and becoming a curandero is a matter of reaching a point of saturation with medicine which emanates as white light to those whose vision is enabled to discern subtle vibrations in a manner similar to being able to see a person's aura.

I have come across Carlos Castaneda's books in my late adolescence, which evoke yearning to explore magic worlds of a shaman's apprentice but, due to the impossibility of finding anyone remotely resembling Don Juan in Soviet Russia of the early 90s, my aspirations had to be put on hold for quite a few years while I studied engineering in college. On the fourth and final year of my study, my mom inquired point blank if I saw myself in Russia as far as the future was concerned. I didn't. A notion of going to live in a tropical paradise – that's how I imagined New Zealand – was a most exciting vision and I embraced it with both hands as Russian climate with its long winters of discontent and great depression driving one to seeking refuge in a bottle of vodka was relentless.

After floating around Zahira's meditation camp organized upon our arrival to sunny Aotearoa, propelled to euphoric heights and made buoyant by high energies generated in meditations, I had to come back to Earth and face the fact that my holiday was over. We had no money, no home, next to zero English. This is how, after a year of kicking around the farm in Coromandel, I found myself in a joinery factory breathing fine rimu dust that tasted bitter at the back of my throat for a few years as apprentice joiner. Further down the road I stomped around through tussock and scrub of Waiouru desert outback in the army issue boots as a conscript of New Zealand Royal Infantry, which in my naivete I considered at the time as a noble placement for a fellow to find a spirit of comradeship in a new foreign culture otherwise drowning in blatant self-ingratiating capitalism as opposed to high but notoriously impossible to achieve ideas of the communism.

I was very wrong in my expectations, but the training served me well in the wilderness after I was introduced to magic mushrooms and San Pedro that inspired excursions to places of power. Disillusioned and made renegade twice, expelled by society with the momentum of a cork flying out from an opened wine bottle, the only dimension worthy of exploration that remained lied inside of myself and most conductive environment for such expeditions was nature. In retrospect, it did take much perseverance to get disillusioned good and proper. 

Here is an anecdote. During core training, I once made a bet with my fellow recruits staking a gold coin that I could hold my breath under water for four minutes using bathtub in a shower block for submergence. I could see the metering clock getting close to three minutes after which I must have passed out, because by the time corporal on duty came in to investigate the commotion I was floating peacefully face down for well over designated four-minute mark while the boys kept timing my record. I won my bet, but it cost me a lesson as the rest of the platoon had to join me being drilled on the parade ground for a good wee while by the disgruntled corporal who pulled me out of the bathtub.

Still in training, I got my front teeth knocked out by private Scully in an improvised fight club match after Edward Norton re-enacted Palahniuk's bipolar character of Tyler Durden in his punch-packing performance on a big screen. And some six months later, with my teeth glued back in and a copy of the second-first battalion history almanac titled ‘Second to None’ for topping the intake training under my arm, signed by Captain Wiremu, ended up in East Timor on a peacekeeping mission, so-called, that basically entailed strolling through the

villages during the day with a blue beret and setting up ambushes by the dry riverbeds during the night covered with camo paint and nursing a remote detonating clacker for the anti-personal claymore mine, ‘FACE TOWARDS THE ENEMY’.

Seeing the damage of a firefight is a most sobering sight and this was the tipping point to turn my back on social institutions, both communist and capitalist, and start walking in the opposite direction.

I am going to fast-forward through the jolly times of building hydroponic rooms in the attic of a dilapidated old house next to the motorway whose antique plaster walls were held together by a creeper vine where I flatted with Dr. Apocalypse and his like-minded eccentric young friends wearing bowler hats and trench coats on a sweltering hot summer day, as if ultraviolence was back in fashion, and I ain't gonna delve into Dennis McKenna's and Timothy Leary's trip we embraced wholesale or ride on the magic bus of Ken Kessey (which is what happens when the word ‘hallucinogenic’ becomes an inextricable part of your daily vocabulary) and zoom on high speed past all the crazy gigs and underground dancing venues in town from which I was escorted on multiple occasions for slithering on the floor in universal rapture induced by confluence of senses; I will pause only to mention a girl with flaming red hair cascading down her shoulders who brought me a glass of water outside of Happy Bar in Wellington where I ended up having a particularly crazy night, sweating it out on a dance floor in a tight festive crop top with a Hindu blue elephant god Ganesh to a cacophony of experimental jazz, employed by MeatBix to tour the island as their gogo dancer. The redhead took pity on me, and we invested some four years of work into a block of land bordering on Kahurangi National Park, raising garden beds and nurturing notion of a of a medicine retreat, inspired to a large degree by crash-landed English seaman we befriended down the coast who introduced us to San Pedro brew which cured the man from his habit of whiskey and which he generously shared in exchange for a volunteering stint in one of his cactus-filled greenhouses overtaken by spiky residents.

It wasn't meant to be; our love story crashed into one too many obstacles, and I eventually found myself high up in Andes wishing to get away as far as possible from the ruined love affair thus having impulsively bought a ticket to Peru (as believe it or not, I happened to have a bit of scrap paper with hand-drawn map to find a shaman in Pisac, Sacred Valley which was acquired at the Luminate music festival on top of the Crystal Mountain from a bearded fellow in embroidered Shipibo pants who sat in his teepee blowing a didge one one could hear a good distance away). I was part of the tribal crew at Luminate (now Lunasa) for a number of consecutive years, which made such an encounter possible.

Apart from being a spectacle, Luminate is a massive energy portal blasted open cumulatively by musicians, healers, practitioners, artists and performers to inspire and instigate paradigm-shifting changes in the individual. It is a truly transformative tribal gathering, a University all of its own that I am proud to be a part of and to have credentials with.

MOUNTAINS

Ways of the medicine are mysterious and downright magic; there’s nothing straightforward about it. No curandero is born dressed in golden cushma with a crown on his head. The struggles and difficulties, getting lost and suffering injuries build up one’s strength, resolution and patience to heal oneself. That’s how I found myself in the Andean mountains of Sacred Valley. One day, making my way to a mountain pass and struggling to catch my breath, every step a slow motion progress along the surface of Mars where nothing grows and the rock is red and crumbly, I was thinking about employment, out of all things, for the majority of people are hauling a yoke of some description and there I am, scot-free, exploring wildly beautiful alpine landscape with no one to report to and loving it a great deal, a wad of coca leaves bleeding its juice behind my cheek and a bunch of sun-dried San Pedro strips to munch on when I am at the top. Next thing, I hear a voice inside my head clear as day, offering me a job. I am to get to high places to be impregnated with pure vibrations and share them down in the valley with people through art, writing, and transmission in person. I feel beyond myself, elated to accept the proposal and work for the Spirit. There is no other boss recognized with such joy and authority because Spirit is not an external entity to lord over and command me. It is utmost respectful and pulls one through thick and thin when you think you can't do it, much like a jumpstart for the dead battery in your car. 

Not a week passed since being thus ordained from above, my training has begun without as much as a warning. I found myself wading waist-deep in snow, completely disorientated, having lost the path to Lares-Urubamba Pass which I knew well enough not to bother with maps and compasses en route. The fog came in as I was getting closer to the weather-maker tops, cutting visibility down to two dozen paces, followed by sleet and snow brought in spades by gusts of wind. My feet sank to knee-height with every step, and making slow progress in unknown direction with the mind going around in futile circles was draining me of strength fairly fast. I made a call to go down, regardless where I was going to end up, as long as I had solid ground under my feet.

When one's resources are stretched thin and body is feeling like collapsing into the snow and not getting up for a while because all you had to eat were some coca leaves and a handful of toasted cacao seeds since the break of dawn and the lunch is not being served due to poor weather conditions, one gets a really good insight into managing one's mind and breathing into one's tummy in order to keep moving and not freeze to death. Shallow breath occurs in flight-and-fight mode, which in turn is caused by the mind anticipating worse scenarios instead of being quiet and paying attention to the environment and guidance of spirit. One can run only so far in such a state, hyperventilating away till adrenaline stores are depleted. When one is hopelessly lost, one's survival depends on one's ability to quieten one's mind and tune in. You do that or you exhaust your strength, collapse and die.

To my great joy and surprise, I was back in golden sunshine soon after stumbling on alternative path to a village of Huaran and not even wet to complain about the trials of elements around the tops, delivered by the guiding spirits of mighty Apus, safe and sound and alive to tell the tale. Since then I've been to much more perilous predicaments, hanging from insignificant finger grips and cracks in the stone walls with good couple hundred meter drop-offs on either side, and barely controlling incoming panic, taking a moment to stick a piece of dark chocolate into my mouth to divert attention away from uncontrollable shaking I can't afford to backtrack the crazy ascent made on a premise of a better way down that wasn't provided exclusively to entertain my guestimations for some reason by the mountain.

I should have been dead on that occasion; the experience taught me a lesson in tuning-in with the rocks I would never ask for in my sane mind and made me realize every day in this body is an extra bonus to my lifespan, a free gift and a blessing. Silence is a great medicine one cannot get enough of. Once you start making friends with high places, they call you back again and again for a top-up with timeless vistas and grandeur of landscape permeated by resonant silence. There are, indeed, places of power and unmatched beauty whose spirits I invoke in my ceremonies to accomplish healing work, and purification.

Ayahuasca 

My work with Ayahuasca started with Maestro Artidoro Gardenas, who was an incredibly animated mestizo guy, but also, as I found out, could not keep up the commitment he himself set forth. On suggestion of the same friend who put me in touch with Artidoro, I knocked on Benjamin Mahuas's door in Pucallpa. He had one look at me and said, without any introduction, ‘you want to work with Ayahuasca? No more ganja and no more mushrooms’. I was taken aback by his uncanny ability to see right through me as if I was a transparent vessel and signed up for what turned out to be a most hectic, unpredictable ride in town. Benjamin was hailed by many as the most powerful Shipibo singer, making regular tours of Sacred Valley and raking in hefty wads of cash deposited into his hands as donations by well-off gringos. The money disappeared overnight and I soon got weary of seeing the old man plaster drunk first thing in the morning, unable to get a clear confirmation for upcoming ceremonies. This eventually brought me to the village of Paoyhan and dieting with Gilberto Mahua, Benjamin's brother. 

Paoyhan appeared to be a paradise on Earth on my first visitation. Kids played soccer at dawn, girls and boys swarming around the ball, everyone worked on their chosen tasks, cultivating fields and cutting wood, and no household would refuse hospitality. A child would be fed and looked after likewise in any house as if all children were communally shared and taken care of, which in reality was the unspoken understanding of a true communism Carl Marx has dreamt of and no red revolution could ever implement, regardless of flags waved in the air and oaths taken. Old Gilberto took me fishing in a canoa and across the river to harvest plantain, carrying the  weight I could hardly lift of the ground in his sixties. The ceremonies were exceptional, very informal, as he had no maloca we sat under a huge mosquito net on the veranda of his house with a handful of older maestros and disciples all rocking out at the same time with five or six people singing. On the second year

I brought my mother along for a two-month dieta with Gilberto. She was so week in the first ten days she couldn’t stand up and remained prostrates in her room day in day out. The medicine gave her a thorough cleansing and helped her a great deal in the end; I still have a photo of her smiling radiantly a kind of smile I haven’t seen for years on end that paid for the whole trip wholesale. 

I would probably still be hanging out with Gilberto, was it not that Paoyhan changed for the worse. It sold out to logging and oil companies exploiting the region for all its worth. The diggers hauling huge trunks out the jungle scarred the land and energy changed a great deal; one day I came back to invite Gilberto as a resident maestro curandero to the old Pablo Amaringo’s centre that had two large abandoned malocas but wouldn’t even look at me, let alone talk to me, and my work with him thus finished. It was disheartening at a time but I wouldn’t find myself in Rao Cano Xobo otherwise working with maestro Cesar Soimetsa who is very possibly one of the strongest Shipibo maestros working impeccably with much dedication, heart and integrity at this time.

I am going to save the rest of the medicine tales, in particularly relating to Ayahuasca and working with master plants, for a more private setting of Cachiyacu to encourage you to make the journey. In brief, I dieted renakos, ajosacha, curcuma, chiriksanango, tobacco, manchinga, picocarpintero, renakilla and chuachakicaspi. The best place to do dieta is the pristine jungle where you can absorb vibrations being surrounded by spirits. Dieting on the outskirts of Pucallpa is difficult in this respect, the only saving grace is presence of maestros who align plant energies and offer expert advice and guidance. Not many maestros will take you through dieta as it should be done and even fewer will pass on their knowledge. Older Shipibo maestros like Gilberto Mahua are very spare with their instructions for the simple reason that their Spanish is very limited as well as their understanding of the western world. This is the reason why I study with maestro Cesar Soimetsa. Another reason being that he was the one who helped me a great deal when I most needed it.      

Medicine is not for faint-hearted but works wonders if you have stomach for it. It is not compatible with negative energies on any level. I've been purging for years spitting my guts out to expel not just the remainder of my half-digested lunch but some really nasty entities made visible by ayahuasca vision that made me shudder in revulsion at the time. When it comes to liberating oneself from the body, the man stops eating three days before death if the process takes place in its natural fashion. It gives body a chance to prepare for the decoupling of the spirit, that undetectable by science faculty that goes missing at the instance of death. Ayahuasca, in its full effect, accomplishes similar preparation in a matter of hours, allowing for such things as shamanic flight and retrieval of man’s soul to take place. When my beloved wife passed away some five years ago I was in pieces, unable to function as a human being. After forty days passed since Kat’s death, I tried to find solace in the mountains of Cordillera Blanca and got myself in some bad situation, bad enough to call it quits on alpine wilderness and ask for help from the medicine family in Pucallpa.

After two weeks of ceremonies I found myself purging from both ends simultaneously, seeing all sorts of geometrical patterns and snakes dancing in front of me and being utterly disorientated as my body was packing up, thinking I was going to die. Not for the first, not the last time that it happened, but on that particular occasion I was lucky to have presence of maestro Cesar by my side that made all the difference between entering into a state of sheer panic in the face of losing grip with my body and my mind and being guided safely to the point where I was actually able to consciously release the ties with both the body and the mind and allow myself to melt in the fire that was consuming me, generously stalked by a Caesar's icaro till I found myself adrift with no sense of direction, no weight or form, completely surrounded by brilliant light on all sides and nothing but light. I never experienced such an amount of energy, not in conscious awareness, anyway. This was a cosmic furnace where galaxies were forged and galactic superclasters arranged in fancy garlands to sparkle overhead of earthlings on a clear night, reminding them of Divine Design, a supreme meaning and preciousness of Life, a place of absolute tranquility, power and Love, a place of encounter and reunion with dearly beloved friends and family who passed away from the world of living.

My beloved Kat, who died in my arms, gasping for her last breath, was there in the spirit, present in all her radiance. My dear old grandma, with all her tender affection and resurrected glamour, my step-dad, liberated from his crippled body and extending his homecoming embrace to welcome me to both the source and the final destination of the Spirit. I beheld my entire life laid out on a palm of my hand in front of me, every single experience leading me to this point of illumination, however temporary, which allowed me an outside perspective from the confines of the body and the mind. I realized that was it not for all the painful and unpleasant things I had gone through, cursing and pleading, all the failures, mistakes and accidents I had suffered, if I never took courage to empty my first glass of medicine, which ultimately led me to the maloca in Irapai, a most unlikely temple bordering the swamp and a sawmill factory next door with an incessant noise of reaping saws and clamour of primary school age kids nailing camo-camo boxes together for exporting vitamin-loaded superfoods to the first world countries that ensure Peru remains their slave labor colony for as long as they can exert their political and economic leverage… if I didn't go into a spiralling down trajectory in the wake of Kat’s loss like an amateur World War II pilot shot down by an ace in the ass, flapping my fuselage ass and Morse-coding SOS signal back to base, if none of that happened, I wouldn't be floating euphorically in the ether woven out of strands of infinite light and smiling from ear to ear like a village idiot who made it to the country fair for once in his life.

A place of elevated perspectives fills one with insight and gratitude. It takes, quite literally, going out of one's mind to arrive at existential truth that neither shakes nor wobbles under one's feet every time one is exposed to contradictory notions from PhDs with bachelor degrees in religious studies, psychoanalysis and political sciences. By the time maestro Cesar finished his icaro I was back in my body feeling newly reborn, smiling from ear to ear and unable contend my joy and deep gratitude for truly transcendental experience. I kissed Caesar's hand and asked him to teach me so that I could reach that realm of infinite light myself. That happened five years ago and I've been Caesar's disciple ever since, slowly but surely moving forward on the medicine path with proper guidance in order one day to hopefully become maestro-curandero in my own right. And above all, I'm supremely fortunate to have an amazing human being by my side I am in love with, my Jedi Warrior Princess CuddlePants, who is just as much inspired by healing herself, her friends and family, expanding the Universe one breath at a time and embracing her radiance and the Light ad infinitum.