Episode 31 – Hamilton Souther

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human experience is in geosynchronous orbit above the Amazon rainforest as we speak to our guests mr. Hamilton souther Hamilton it’s a pleasure welcome to hxp thank you very much for having me it’s a really you know great day to be here so you’re a master shaman I mean how does how does that happen well basically you go through apprenticeship and if you survive apprenticeship you end up getting the title of master shaman but really it

comes down to finding other master shamans from lineages where you know the the heritage and the knowledge base has been passed down from generation to generation and then if you’re not within those lineages you know you’re lucky if you get accepted from the outside was there was there something that brought you into being interested in shamanism was there a specific thing or key moment that helped you do that yeah definitely when I graduated from the University of

Colorado in 2000 the year after that I started to have spontaneous experiences where I started to have visions and in those visions it was really clear to me that it was direct and sort of typical calling to shamanism and so yeah I’d read I’d study anthropology and so I had read a lot about it and I bred you know about a number of different cultures that practise shamanism and there’s a traditional call and I started to experience it and while that was very

foreign to me and you know something that produced a lot of doubt and fear it was all so exciting and so it was something that I thought deserved at least an exploration hmm yeah what was what was your journey like when as you explored Iquitos and and that area I mean what it was there was there a reason that you chose that specific area for the Blue Morpho Center you know during my apprenticeship it was really a question of first finding it I had to go

on the journey to find the apprenticeship and the journey wound me through Peru ultimately to Iquitos and then from Iquitos really deep into the forest and that really dictated the location once I found Alberto and Julio Alberto Torres Davila and illusion and a Pinedo the two master shamans that trained me we formed a you know lifelong basically familial relationship where they were like you know father and grandfather to me in shamanism and they were from that

general vicinity in the forest you know so that kind of dictated why we were in Iquitos and stayed in Iquitos mm-hmm how did how did that relationship between your teachers emerge was I mean was there something that kind of instantly drew you to them well in the case of Alberto I went to America for healing I had gotten really sick in my first year in the Amazon and I needed healing and so I had heard of this great healer that was about a day’s journey

away from Iquitos and so I I gave it a whirl to see if he could help me and Julio lived further out into the forest which was where I ended up building our very first base camp and you know the relationship with Julio developed over time but ultimately Julio got sick and I performed a healing on him and he felt that it had saved his life it was you know a very kind of archaic story type to live through very Joseph Campbell very hero journey with the grey elder in

need and me being able to provide that need just in that moment and you know in exchange for that he asked what I wanted I just told them that I wanted to learn from him and to to train and so that’s what he agreed to so I’m very very curious about what your first experience with ayahuasca was like I mean how did how did that take place and was it the way that you imagined it would be when I went and participated in my first ayahuasca ceremony there was very little

in the the written world and you know online world about it I had very understanding of what I was getting myself into and I think that was a positive and negative it was two-sided I’d read a couple of accounts from other shamans that had participated and I had thought to myself that it was impossible that it could really be you know that intense I felt like oh no I can’t be that intense it can’t move that fast it can’t be that

colorful it can’t be that deep there’s no way that the cleansing could go you know to such extremes in just one night how would that be possible over four or five hours and I really thought you know in my own ignorance that then they must have overwritten or sensationalized experience and when I got out there and I was sitting with the shaman and it was just the two of us deep in the forest and we were you know good 24 or more our

travel away from any place where we could get support or assistance and we were just deep in the forest and an uninhabited part of the forest of the bottle ayahuasca you know really the experience was was much more intense much faster was much more colorful than anything I could have imagined and also much more healing and and that at the end of that first ceremony I you know received the visions that that was where I was going to apprentice and I would be

you know study ayahuasca shamanism which seemed absurd to me considering how intense that first experience was and how difficult it was for me hmm yeah I mean when when shamans perform this I you ask a ceremony I I know that it grows the the song is very important to the part of the healing process of it do you remember the first time that you kind of heard one yeah EKOS are are the sacred chants that are used inside the ceremony and they really are a system of

communication between the energetic world / spirit world or you know and the shamans and so the very first time I heard Annie Cara was in that first ayahuasca ceremony and when I started to see the really you know traditional Shipibo designs and great neon colors overlaying the entirety of earth-based reality and empirical reality around me and they all started to move to the shamans ikura as I knew that you know that this was gonna be a very different

experience to something that that I had ever had before and then from there you know I became fascinated by them because you have many different kinds of experiences in ceremony but often you can experience senses in multiple forms in multiple ways and so when you can see sound it’s incredible to be in a state of consciousness to actually be able to see with your eyes open the movement and the the effect that sound has on the energetics of a space it’s fascinating

and when you see the the eCos take color take shape take form and these visions you know for those who are not familiar with this are very common to the ayahuasca experience this isn’t you know some like for them really really extreme kind of sensory experience it’s very very common to be able to to smell and hear and see things that you would normally not be aware of and that heightened sense of senses and that heightened psychic ability is something

that’s you know really really amazing and the the eCos are beautiful mix really you know for the the ceremony they for the shamans that sing many of them they’ll be constantly singing hour after hour during the ceremony and they form a melodic and a lyrical guide to the ceremony yeah do you think maybe we can get you to sing one we closed – sure sure whatever you want great ok so just moving on here I mean is there is there something that you

feel like I you asked us meant to teach you ultimately more about life more about you more about your mind more about your psyche more about your body more about what it means to be a human being I think that the modern world has encapsulated and encased a homogenous notion of reality that well very stable for most people you know limits the the exploration of what a human life really is and when you open up to something like an ayahuasca experience you’re

really welcoming the unknown into your life you’re welcoming mysticism and shamanism and spirit and energy into your life and it has a tremendous potential to open somebody to awaken somebody to help somebody transcend different kinds of difficulties blocks and barriers that they’ve experienced and so I think really that entire knowledge base is what ayahuasca is there to be able to share with people and it’s something that that for many

many people many thousands of people tens of thousands of people have experienced tremendous benefit from the ceremonies yeah it really is interesting how how much of a increase there is of people looking for this medicine and traveling to places like Peru and you keep those two to find it yeah I would say you know for the last four I’d say about six seven years there’s been a constant increase you know yeah insistently increasing as word goes out

and the number of people’s positive experiences are being shared you know when you have a miraculous experience there’s a part of you that wants to share it with your confidants and your greatest supporters and you know that piques interest in curiosity and the consistency of positive experiences is vast and amazing from the work that’s being done in Brazil and in Peru and in Ecuador in the case of ayahuasca that you all you also want to always you know say

that it’s not for everybody you know it’s it’s a very extreme experience there are many medications that are contraindicated to it that require you to come off of those medications in a safe way and at our Center you know for many of our guests who require that they receive a doctor’s permission that they’re in fit health for the ceremonies hmm yeah I can see how that would be important I mean so as as a shaman and if we could move into the more shamanic

aspects of what you do I mean what is it that you do are you moving through these other dimensions are you encountering beings how does that work well as shaman is the sacred keeper of knowledge and wisdom for his or her community as well as being really a doctor like a field doctor and so the shamans are plant medicine specialists they know hundreds and hundreds of medicinal plants in the forest they can walk into the forest and

point to almost any plant of which there are thousands of species and know them they know the forest like the back of their hand and so it really starts there and in the Amazon the shamans develop a very close relationship to the plants now for a westerner that may sound you know different or weird or something like that but via the ayahuasca and the experiences the shamans have an ability to emerge consciousness with the plants

and be able to start to communicate with them and so they start to reach the plan on a truly energetic level and they believe that the plants have specific energies unto themselves that represent their spirits and that the spirit of the plant very much like the human spirit can communicate and be shared and so the pantheon of medicine there doesn’t differentiate between energies and spirits and the physical body and the mind it’s all treated at once so if

somebody has a physical ailment their entire being is treated if somebody has a spiritual ailment their entire being is treated if somebody has a mental ailment their entire being is treated and so they really believe in a holistic approach and then from there you know get into a very mystical and very magical outlook on life itself they inherently believe that life is based in spirit that spirit is part and parcel of every experience that every living thing has a

spirit including human and that through the spirit when you become very attuned to your own spirit you gain the capacity to communicate with other spirits and so the shamans identified with themselves as spirit and then begin a long process to learn how to consistently and accurately without delusion or confusion engage in these communications so the shaman is is going into a state of consciousness in which communication on the energetic plane is possible and in

the physical context of that plane there’s a possibility of you know what is called going out-of-body into spiritual realms and dimensions into visionary scenarios that are three-dimensional into landscapes and visionary context that seems very enchanted very beautiful most of those realms or dimensions are filled with beings entities or spirits or really what you would think of as like a 3d visionary shape that can maintain a

two-way communication so you can you know begin to communicate with those beings the beings form guides and you can develop a very strong relationship very trusting relationship with them and in the end especially in the case of Amazonian healing it’s the doctors spirits or the matter the medicine based spirits that are seen as the ones that perform the healing and so the shamans are establishing a relationship between the participants and those beings that

come from the plants or from animals or from you know these other dimensional realms and again the experiences are very very consistent very very consistent between people so many people have common visions many people have common experience many people have common visionary experience all at the same time you know after after my first ayahuasca experience I never had another alcohol alcoholic drink again that was eight months ago so I mean I’m

wondering if if you noticed that there are some sort of like entities or something that are connected in are you detaching those things well you know if you if you look at life from then understanding of spirit and understanding of energy then it would make sense that you as a human being would have an energetic reality and more or less everything that you consume that has consciousness altering or mind altering capacity has a way of opening

you energetically and or engaging with you and so depending on the nature of the relationship people have two different substances very common for them to go through the the ceremonies and then decide that those substances weren’t really serving them and that they have moved on to a plane in their own life where with whatever was enticing about the other substances no longer adds and so lots of people give up alcohol after ceremony even just

after one or two ceremonies which is also why ayahuasca is used in the Amazon and in the traditional world as a way of treating drug addiction you know so there ain’t really any kind of addiction not not only during addiction but any kind of addiction and so you know I watched over the years has become much more renowned for that for the ability to heal people from you know tobacco to alcohol to you know hard hard drugs and as well as behavioral

addictions hmm so you went you went on to thought found your shamanism Center Blue Morpho Center yeah from the seeds of your experiences was there was there an aha moment when you when you decided to do that or Blue Morpho an initial creation of mine based off of where I was living in the forest people were interested in coming out to where I was living it was so remote I lived in a tiny community along a tributary to the Amazon the upper river for me there were

no inhabitants so you know there was unexplored forests awaiting people and tourists were very interested in going out into that area of the forest and so I founded Blue Morpho based out of my own apprenticeship and that and the desire to to have a way to be able to take them out into the forest and have you know really an incredibly mind-expanding and and you know huge adventure and so through that work it turned out that the more we got into the

ayahuasca ceremonies and the shamanic work the less interested our guests were in the jungle adventure side of things and so we started that you know as a way to be able to continue our work with ayahuasca with others and ultimately provide healing at first if we just held ceremonies for the sake of the ceremonies themselves because people were interested curious whatever but then we became quickly known for being able to help people through very

specific illnesses like depression anxiety disorders PTSD addictions and then people you know who are really really sick and looking for a solution started to come to us and then organically little by little by little Blue Morpho grew just to accommodate the number of people that wanted to come yeah it does seem like Blue Morpho kind of took a very organic growth what kind of effect do you think it had on the local economy there well the local

economy in the areas that we worked were very positively affected we’ve always had as positive and balanced business practices as possible and we do a lot of charity work for the area around us and so you know we’ve provided over the years many many jobs that weren’t available in those areas and somebody could say well why would you need to provide jobs in the Amazon and the reality is that the Amazon is part of the proof amazon is part of the the peruvian

social structure and so it’s all money based economies and the locals need to be able to to raise money to be able to survive and so you know it’s very hard in the amazon to survive on your own when you’re just a subsistence agriculture Elliston hunter and/or fisherman and so you know we’ve provided countless jobs over the years as well as a number of charity programs including providing the entire school uniforms for a whole town as well as all of their

books and school supplies so you know for years now we’ve helped an entire town put all of their kids through elementary education taking the economic burden off of them for having to provide the uniforms and school supplies which really adds up for a you know a family of two or three children to being two or three months worth of salary in a year so it’s a significant amount of money to them and it’s something that we’ve always supported and education is always

something that I’ve supported you know from the Western education that I had to the shamanic and indigenous education that I got in the forest and so you know we give back in many different ways and you know consistently tried to aid the fledgling and and you know slowly slowly evolving economy in the Amazon yeah that’s that’s amazing that you’ve been able to do that and have such a positive impact there what kind what kinds of

things do you think sorry what kind of things does Blue Morpho offer to its guests Blue Morpho is a destination based center and so when people come for for a group they are you know coming to participate in ceremonies and either explore ayahuasca or receive the different kinds of healing practices when we go to our Center there are a lot of other activities that are offered to keep the day’s interesting for everybody normally our groups are six days and so

every day there’s two different activities that are really more related to the jungle as well as guided visualizations yoga practices and then the ceremonies themselves and we have a very well-rounded itinerary to make sure that you know everybody is having a really an incredible time from seeing pink river dolphins to you know going out and going on a medicinal plant hike or seeing the Victoria regia giant lily pads or identifying different

species of monkeys and then going into the ceremonies at night and doing you know the really intense spiritual work what’s the size of an average ceremony there Blue Morpho ceremonies now range typically somewhere in the you know 35 to 45 people is that large depends on your perspective I think it’s probably medium sized if you look at the you know ayahuasca based churches in Brazil where they work with hundreds if not thousands

it would be seen as small but there’s also you know smaller ceremonies that are going on in different places where there’s five 10 15 20 people in them hmm yeah and how many how many healers or shamans do you have in house there well four it depends on the group but typically we have two or three master shamans as well as three or four apprentice shamans and another four to six if not eight trained helpers for each their own if we could go back to

your story with Alberto and Julio could you could you tell us more about what it was like working with them working with it was amazing Alberto and Julio were you know a kind of human being that I had never really met before and strong clear impressive you know just really amazing awe-inspiring for me they were so clear they were so decided they knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it they had compassion and love in their hearts and

they had this tremendous wisdom that they could share in a variety of different means when I started to apprentice with them it was shocking to me that education came through visionary experiences you know I was used to a chalkboard or a whiteboard and you know computers and things like that in libraries too earn and all of a sudden I’m with them in the forest you know in a canoe just talking about life or identifying different kinds of medicinal plants or

in ceremony and in ceremony you know all the teaching was done non-verbally it was completely telepathic which right there is amazing in its own right to go through years and years of training via telepathy is something that’s really I mean let me stop you there so the teachings that were handed down to you were done via telepathy correct yeah they’re all done with envision and ayahuasca ceremonies there’s very little verbal interaction or talking during the

day about it you’re expected to already know that almost everything that you’re taught in shamanism if you go to classes in the in the States if you go to like shamanic classes or journey work or anybody that the basics that are taught you’re expected to already know and if you don’t already know those things then you’re not considered of the Creed to be able to be an apprentice and so it’s like being tossed directly into graduate

school there’s no elementary junior high school University no it’s like it’s right in and on the you know the first the very first day that that you start to be trained the shamans in this case I’ll be returned Julio you know took me into a visionary realm that would hold a consistent mind meld where I knew that they were inside my thoughts and could hear all of my thoughts as well as share specific thoughts to me and open up different kinds of visionary experiences

that would through surviving them be educational and when I asked Julio fo a white man could learn he said if you can survive we all bleed red literally putting my you know of my life in danger saying you know you could die in this apprenticeship and so it was very very intense but they consider all of those tests tests of virtue and you get taught entirely through visionary experiences because that’s the realm in which you work you have to be able to navigate

with precision the visionary realms and know exactly where you are and how to guide multiple people simultaneously and so to have that level of clarity they make apprenticeship very very difficult Wow let’s truly profound it was there is there something that was specifically difficult in your learning that you can remember or think of everything was specific I had to learn how to paddle a canoe I had to learn how to make an oar and a fishing pole I had

to learn how to use a machete and an axe I had to learn how to walk through the forest you don’t walk in the same way as you do and even in the wilderness and the stakes the jungle so dense I had to learn how to just to survive out there how to eat how to provide my own food had to you know learn how to withstand the Vigors of apprenticeship which are very very intense you know for well over ten years it was expected that I would

drink ayahuasca over a hundred times a year and so you know for the people who had experience you know how profound one two or three ceremonies is you know imagine being in that situation every few days consistently for over a decade you go through what are called DF does DF does are a period of time of great fasting where you drink different kinds of medicinal plants most of them that are not psychoactive but you’re already in such a transformed state of

consciousness and expanded state of consciousness that you’re communicating directly with the plants literally just from drinking teas made from their barks or roots or leaves and all of that’s difficult there’s extreme periods of different kinds of abstinence s where you know you live a life of deep cleansing and purification for extended periods of time isolated from society and community and so you spend large amounts of time in the forest alone or

just with the master shamans and it’s it’s all intense and it’s all difficult and it’s all amazing if you can survive it for the people that I’ve taught over the years when they start I say to them this is the worst idea you ever had a bishop is the worst idea you ever had unless you complete apprenticeship and then it turns into the best idea you ever had you know there’s a very clear path when you go to the University that’s four

years or high school that’s four years or graduate school that could be you know more years than that but it’s a clear path in this case apprenticeship has no clarity in the thoughts it’s strictly survival and learning to the point that you reach this prophesized endpoint called the title of Master shaman and then once you get that title you find out which is the great shamanic irony that the only thing that changes is that now you have more

responsibilities so you’re you know you’re working so hard to this end point that you don’t even know when it’s gonna come it could be anywhere you know from years to a decade to achieve which just not even knowing you know when when a certain end point of a tremendous journey is makes it much more difficult even if you compared it to like climbing a great peak or a mountain like Everest you know the idea is to get to the top in this case you know you don’t have any

idea what this end point even looks like and it’s just a title it’s just called master shaman or maestro and so you you see other people who have it and you see that they’re certainly not like you and they’re more skilled at you in those arts and you have to you know learn and and continue persevering and forging ahead with tremendous grit tremendous strength and dedication into this great unknown and that constant pursuit you

know makes you a much stronger individual but it’s very difficult yeah I mean healing is the foundation for all this I mean this is why people are traveling to the rainforest to find this in Western medicine isn’t working and what’s your opinion on that well simply that Western medicine has limitations my father was a Western medical practitioner he was a doctor and a surgeon and my mother was a nurse we came from this very scientific very

Western medical background family and during my youth my father was very open with me about the tremendous miracles that Western medicine could produce as well as the his limitations that it had in terms of its knowledgebase and understandings as well as the difficulties that there were in terms of diagnosing and really being able to provide you know healing treatments and I think there’s a there needs to be a tremendous gratitude to

Western medicine because I think the majority of us would have already been a casualty and had a much shorter life span without it I’ve you know needed antibiotics many many times to end infection or two to release parasites or from different injuries that I’ve had where surgery is the only reason that I can still walk and so I have a tremendous gratitude for it but I I do not think that it is the beginning and the end all it’s only breadth of

knowledge and capacity that’s constantly being expanded and in the case of mental health and mental health disorders which most people typically come to eye out for ayahuasca healing you know the abilities that we have within psychology and psychiatry are extremely limited and so it’s it’s very very difficult when somebody receives a diagnosis that he or she’s depressed or has an anxiety disorder or PTSD and will now have to carry that for the rest of his or her

life it’s a tremendous burden and weight and then in the idea of western psychiatry to be able to provide psychiatric treatment with medications that then somebody is expected to be on for the rest of their life has tremendous side-effects and difficulties and so you know through our work many people come to us because they want to they want to go beyond that they don’t want to be labeled for the rest of their life somebody who is depressed or

somebody who has this disorder or somebody with PTSD you know and so I think in many ways innocently people get into different experiences in their life and end up in some extreme trauma you know or completely unrelated to them like children who are abused like they then nothing to do with that they were brought into this world into a family that ended up being abusive or others that ended up being abusive to them and now they have this

problem you know and there’s very little that can be done to create as of net right now to give as a cure for that and so people come to ayahuasca for the for that purpose because western psychiatry psychology has not yet been able to establish cures for these illnesses now that being said not everybody’s cured who drinks ayahuasca you know but but a lot of them are many many people have total remission or gain the capacities and life skills to be able to transcend

the burden of the problem that they have what was what was the most remarkable or profound thing that you’ve seen that someone is healed from the most remarkable really–it borderlands on the miraculous I’ve seen cancer disappear like from one day to the next there it is and then the next day it’s gone I’ve seen a person healed of blindness who was blind because of lines diseased legally blind they were an adult when they became blind from Lyme disease have

you no total remission to the point that they were no longer blind I’ve seen people who’ve suffered from gastrointestinal illnesses problems with their colon and intestines for 30 40 50 years have healing in three or four days just disappearance of the illness that never comes back you know depression imagine if you were if you had psychiatric problems from the age of 2 or 3 and now you’re in your 30s or 40s you know like like yourself who wrote

the article for National Geographic you know that was published about her miraculous healing of depression and other mental health issues that she she she was healed and and it’s fascinating and miraculous and amazing and it’s something that I’m truly grateful for that in my life I got to witness and participate in transformations for people like that it was very rewarding and you know something that was very heart expanding have you ever had

someone have a negative reaction after a ceremony depends on what you call a negative reaction there are people that certainly have had great difficulties emotionally handling their experience you have to be very careful with the plants how much somebody is given and for what duration because it can kick off psychosis you do not want to give somebody who isn’t is not psychologically stable these different kinds of psychoactive plants it’s it’s

not healthy for them you know like I said earlier there are many many many many many people who are not suitable candidates to participate in these ceremonies and so there are people that have adverse reactions I have seen it where it’s it’s overwhelmingly emotional where people have been terrified to the point that you know they’re they’re shaky the next day literally he like they can be trembling at the the fear that they confronted you know but if you

if you go deep into their story you’re gonna find that there’s a reason for that there’s always a reason for all of the different kinds of reactions people have to ceremonies you know people people are they’re not the great collective that we think of they really are individuals you know it’s an individual human body it’s not just human body human bodies are not clones they’re not the same they don’t have the same genetics they don’t have

the same makeup structure size history experience right they’re very very different and so you have to be a candidate a proper candidate to participate in the ceremony I mean how do you think these plants do this like where does this come from I think it was Terence Mckenna who said that these plants were older than humanity and were connected into the consciousness of the planet so what’s your take on it my take is that there are many many theories and

I don’t think that particularly any of the theories are right as a theory they’re meant to be questioned and explored the highest level of understanding that I’ve received is that plants plants have an ability when ingested to merge with what we know of as human consciousness and utilized that capacity to be able to experience right alongside an individual human being and that the plants obviously are older than humanity they’ve been around much longer than

Homo Sapien sapien and the chemicals that they have are designed to be able to create an altered state in which a communication can take place and you thought of a plant that would be a very interesting way to be able to co-create and to communicate with another kind of being on this planet if you were a rooted species in the ground and you’re just sitting there well if you you know evolve capacities that you could communicate with an animal because the

animal not on you or ate you or consumed you it would be a tremendous way to be able to access that animals life and I think the plants do that with human beings just as much they do with any other animals that consume them hmm yeah um you know you’ve founded an education foundation called modern shamanism yeah what what is what is that and what is it offer to a newcomer what’s the difference well modern shamanism is a discipline of shamanism that I created

you have to think of shamanism and different kinds of disciplines like there’s slight different kinds of Siberian disciplines there’s Amazonian disciplines African disciplines northern Canadian disciplines South American disciplines Australian disciplines and when I looked at modern society what I saw was that modern society didn’t have its own kind of shamanism and so I was getting really into the the depths of my shamanic exploration after having

practiced just straight for eight or nine years and I realized that I wanted to create a kind of shamanism for modern society and so I went on a quite a journey of my own exploration of how to be able to do that and I kind of stripped shamanism from its cultural implications and found a kind of consistent core architecture of beliefs and ideologies and understandings throughout all the different kinds of practiced worldwide and I used that as a

framework to be able to start to establish a practice modern shamanism is taught online but you really learn it in your day it’s it’s activities that you do from the the online reading and and audios that you can listen to that explain each of the activities but really then you start to do activities every single day that you’re practicing inside modern society and so when you do that it gives you what would be thought of as like sort of a shamanic frame of

mind which is much more connected it’s a more holistic approach to understanding reality your mind and your brain and your heart and your body and your spirit and your soul all work together you teach them all how to work together and how to be in extended states of consciousness through total sobriety throughout the entirety of your day it’s designed to make you more creative benefit your life up you’ll time management efficiency better work

capacities better relationship and more grounded relationship to the spirit world all the time and so it’s a tremendous practice for the you know now hundreds of people have practiced it with us in people you know learning have performed miracles we had a girl who’s relative went missing and she did remote location and located the the relative to states from where does the person went missing we had another gentleman whose daughter was in an accident and was

going to need surgery to remove an organ from her body she was very very young she was younger than five and the father did a modern shamanism ceremony and the next day she was healthy and no longer needed the surgery and she was released from the hospital she was in ICU there have been miracles that have that have happened that are tremendous but most of the work is and is miraculous is that most of it is a daily educational system

to transform your daily life into one based in the rudiments of shamanism and spirit opening you to having expanded capacity now you know considering people who are interested in learning going to apprenticeship I get asked all the time about people who want to apprentice I highly recommend modern shamanism as a course to take before you go and do that I highly recommend it as a way of getting fully immersed into the shamanic world where you’re in an environment

that you relate to and understand well before you go and relate to a traditional environment that is you know completely foreign or unknown to you and for people who are really interested in shamanic practices and learning as well it transforms you into a shaman by the end of it you are a modern shaman and capable of practicing shamanism for yourself and others yeah yeah so you published a journey of one in 2011 which is a book that documents some

of the insights that you received through your shamanic ceremonies was there was there something that you learned or anything fresh that you learned through writing that journey of one was my attempt at creating a shamanic journey through the medium of a book and so when you read a book it’s very linear in its nature and most shamanism is relatively nonlinear and so I wanted to create a capacity for somebody to have his or her own journey

of awakening exploration and understanding without me detailing what that journey should or shouldn’t look like and so if you if I just read a book with insights I would explain the insights and then you would take from that my explanation but what I wanted to do is provide the insights and then allow somebody to ponder them dismiss them question them go back to them and not have to read a book from cover to cover and literally be able to open it

at any point and start the journey from there flip through wherever you’re called to stop to read that insight and I organize the insights and you know the book has hundreds but I organize the insights from the most abstract to the most concrete so that as you went through them you know you could explore for instance love or dannion ship relationship healing you know all these different themes that are fun within the book and you would be

able to have your own journey the writing of it was important for me too as well in terms of my own experience because as I said you have so many different realizations and understandings through your apprenticeship and you know through your onyx ceremonies but rarely does somebody have an opportunity to coalesce all of that into just one form and so after you know eight nine years of practice or about that long it gave me an opportunity to to really bring all of

that together you know give you an opportunity to coalesce the knowledge base and to be able to say okay up until now these are many not all but many of the realizations that I’ve had yeah you know we’re approaching the end here you’ve you’ve had a couple movements that you know in your own words raise consciousness through love and end global conflict what I mean what is your position on the state of the world and where do you think we’re headed well

first of all you know my my latest creation is the Blue Morpho Foundation and the Blue Morpho Foundation is a charity it’s a 501c3 IRS tax exempt charity and its goal is to research and find cures for mental illness and when I look at the state of the world I think mental health is one of the greatest crisis that the modern world is facing and you know the stats are just incredible over a billion people with mental health difficulty or disorders

every single person I know is life has been touched themselves having difficulty or when or somebody that they know or a relative and so what we’re doing about it is to look at the world and say okay what can we do we need to do something to shift consciousness and when I went through you know shamanism and even beyond shamanism integrator expressions of my own spirituality I realized that consciousness was the next realm to be fully understood and

discovered by science it’s always been known about it’s been really to mysticism and different kinds of spiritual explorations mind/body/spirit the new-age really whatever but it was time to merge a deep understanding with of consciousness to science and so I went my own personal mission to codify and to map what makes human consciousness unique and I was able to do that and so now we’re teaming with allopathic medicine PhDs and psychotherapy and MDS

and psychiatry to come together and really look for cures for these trauma based illnesses so that we could provide not only healing but expansion of consciousness on a much larger level and to have it be fully integrated with Western medical approaches is is Blue Morpho something that you’d like to see kind of centers all over the world I mean is that what you’re looking for no not centers all over the world what I would like to see is that Blue Morpho

ultimately has a tremendous impact on global concerns and global problems and so right now we’re starting focusing on mental health but I think it extends much beyond that once the mind is is freed from the difficulties that it’s having it starts to make very different decisions than the decisions it would make under the the weight of that mental difficulty and you know if we extend that idea of difficulty just to the stress that we experience of the modern

world what I’d like to see is that ultimately we made a tremendously positive impact on a much greater scope than we would be able to do from the Amazon or just through one modality I would like to see that we extend through many many different treatment capacities and and methods and then to be able to share it in a way that can be respected by science as well as mysticism and you know help people ultimately that’s how it all started it started in my own

pursuit to help myself and to learn these incredible arts and then also now to extend that to helping you know thousands and tens of thousands of others and then hopefully more and more and more until we’ve impacted you know hundreds of millions worldwide but the main goal is to to really help people just live better lives to empower them to experience a much better existence while we’re here on earth you know touring outer space going

around the Sun I love it man I I know we’re on a phone call sound quality’s is you know leaves a bit to be desired but I’m gonna hold you to hearing that Icarus if you could just kind of go so grandpa see Tokunaga rebel bear Osito in evening wear potato kunai and then done dddd on dun dun-dun-dun dinging dinging so that’s a cielo ayahuasca ikura that’s typically used at the beginnings of traditional ceremonies in the Amazon it’s used to open up the

visionary space Wow Wow blown away got chills man amazing thank you so much where can people find more about you your work Blue Morpho the website yeah the best thing is to just look for us online you can look for us at Blue Morpho Foundation org for the charity work that we’re doing in the States and we’re just getting ready to launch our PTSD initiative to provide the first-ever worldwide cure for PTSD and we need all the support that we can get

so any people who can help fundraise and volunteers please we’re looking for donors and special benefactors who can help us you know make this a global reality it’s something that I think many people can agree the world needs and then for down in the Amazon Blue Morpho tours so Blue Morpho tours calm and you can always find me on Facebook under my name Hamilton souther well Hamilton I really appreciate time sir thank you so much for being here absolutely thank you

for the time as well and great left with the podcast fantastic I appreciate it