On meeting rather than mastering the sacred medicine.
“When we name things wrongly, we add to the world’s unhappiness and confusion.”
C.K. Chesterton
Colonialism doesn’t always arrive with guns and flags. Sometimes it comes with incense, white clothing, and the promise of “authentic spirituality.” Sometimes, it wears white linen and speaks of love and light. Sometimes, it sings Icaros learned from YouTube, calling itself “shamanic.”
It all looks pure, but it smells fake.
In the last decade, as Amazonian medicines have reached some Western circles, the forest’s wisdom has been filtered—through minds shaped by consumerism, guilt, and a need for order—repackaged, purified, and sold back to us through the same logic that once colonized the land itself.
What was once a collective, relational, and living practice has been curated and become a product. Marketed through rules and exotic aesthetics that reassure Western anxieties, fit our neuroses and aesthetics, more than they honor Indigenous realities.
In my previous article, The Diet Before Ayahuasca, I explored how a misunderstood tradition, an invented “purification diet”, became a global standard, reflecting not Amazonian cosmology, but Western projections of guilt, control, and moral superiority. That same dynamic, I believe, extends to many other corners of the modern adaptation of Amazonian medicine: a silent, smiling form of cultural colonialism that hides behind the mask of devotion.
As Indigenous artist and activist Daiara Tukano reminds us:
“To heal, we must embrace a process of decolonization similar to a deep purge, an embodied unlearning of colonizing beliefs.”
Healing requires not more rules, but more honesty.
The Diet as Soft Colonialism
When the “ayahuasca diet” left the jungle, it became a kind of spiritual passport, a way to feel legitimate, disciplined, and pure. But this need for moral preparation says more about Western psychology than Amazonian practice.
As I wrote before, among Indigenous peoples, the diet is used in the dieta, a long retreat with master plants, meant for apprenticeship and deep transformation, not before every ayahuasca ceremony. Turning the diet into a universal rule is not respect, but editing the forest to make it fit our occidental system. It erases the difference between learning and living, like confusing fasting with nourishment.
This phenomenon illustrates how colonial logic operates in subtle forms: through idealization, through purification, through control. It’s not the violent extraction of the past, but a “refined” version of it, what anthropologist Beatriz Labate calls spiritual colonialism, the aesthetic appropriation of other people’s cosmologies without their relational context:
“The excessive sacralization of ayahuasca by Westerners often reflects more their own psychological and cultural needs than the reality of Indigenous practices.”
The Western diet before ayahuasca is therefore not a bridge, but a filter, a well-intentioned distortion. It reduces the complexity of a relational medicine into a checklist of forbidden foods.
Control disguised as reverence is still control. Purity, when detached from relationship, becomes just another form of domination.
Kambo and the Invention of Rituals
We see the same pattern in the global explosion of Kambo.
For the Matsés and Katukina peoples (the Peruvian and Brazilian tribes of the original Kambo wisdom), Kambo has always been a medicine, a pragmatic, functional antidote used for cleansing, hunting strength, and immune defense. There is no “ritual,” no mantra, no feathers or crystals.
Don Gardel, one of my teachers, always says and teaches to his practitioners:
“Kambo is medicine, not ceremony. It doesn’t need decoration. The frog doesn’t ask to be worshipped.”
When he applies Kambo, it is simple: a few small burns, a quiet presence, a deep respect. The frog’s secretion enters the body pure, undramatic, and direct. Only the medicine doing what it has done for centuries: cleanse, fortify, awaken.
But in some circles Western world, Kambô has been turned into yet another stage for performance and identity. Around the globe, self-proclaimed “Kambo shamans” organize expensive ceremonies with dramatic music, candles, and sacred postures. A medical act is forced to fit into the template of a ritual invented to soothe Western expectations and becomes a theatrical one.
This is not integration, it is projection: the Western need to ritualize everything, to aestheticize the functional medicine, even the purge, so that it feels meaningful for the gaze that consumes it.
As Eduardo Galeano once wrote:
“The colonial disease is the inability to see the sacred in what is ordinary.”
The Sound of Appropriation: Neo-Shamanic Rituals
There is another subtle form of this cultural digestion: the rise of “shamanic” sound healing.
Here, the sacred songs, once sung in specific languages, with deep meaning and spiritual lineage, are transformed into marketable soundscapes.
A Shipibo Icaro becomes a Spotify playlist. A drumbeat once tied to the pulse of a tribe becomes a generic “vibration frequency” for self-optimization.
It’s not uncommon that many newcomers, during their first authentic ayahuasca ceremony, hear the Icaros as if they were songs at a concert; clapping, comparing styles, deciding what they “like” and miss the deeper work: the way those murmurs thread through flesh and breath, shaping the energetic body.
It isn’t their fault so much as the habit we’ve learned from the market that turns healing sound into performance.
Sometimes the West consumes the music of the forest like it consumes superfoods: seeking effect, but ignoring origin.
The songs lose their roots, their context, their soul.
And yet, people feel comforted. They say they feel “connected.” But connected to what?
If we remove the people who sing, the land that taught them, and the cosmology that holds those sounds, what remains is a hollow echo dressed in beauty.
As philosopher Walter Mignolo wrote:
“Coloniality survives through the control of meaning, when others’ knowledge is translated into our own categories.”
To steal the form while forgetting the story is to empty a vessel of its spirit.
Between Integration, Imitation and Appropriation
Integration is a delicate art.
True integration begins when we stop imitating and start listening. It is not mimicry, nor blind respect, nor fusion for its own sake.
But also, to integrate is to allow two worlds to meet without domination: the forest and the clinic, the myth and the microscope. It is the dance of difference, a way of letting the forest speak through us without silencing its origin.
Integration requires humility, curiosity and presence. The capacity to not understand everything, to let knowledge remain partly mysterious.
Colonialism, by contrast, asks for control, hierarchy, and ownership. It is an act of arrogance disguised as admiration. It says: “I love your tradition. Let me improve it.”
The line between these two attitudes is subtle but decisive. Integration nourishes dialogue; colonialism imposes translation. Integration is a dance; colonialism is choreography. Integration meets the medicine as a partner; colonialism as a trophy.
To integrate means letting medicine transform us, not transforming medicine to fit our expectations. It means to allow its intelligence to teach us how to live differently, not to confirm what we already believe.
As philosopher Martin Buber said:
“All real living is meeting.”
And that applies equally to the meeting of cultures, not just of people.
The question we should investigate is not how to import Amazonian shamanism into the West, but how to let it transform the Western mind itself.
Toward a culture of relationship
In the forest, nothing exists in isolation, everything has a relationship. The vine climbs the tree; the frog needs his respectful hunter and servant; the shaman needs the listener.
There is no hierarchy, only reciprocity.
That is the logic of Amazonian medicine: not domination, but dialogue. Healing too is relational.
When we impose our structures, our rules, our certifications, we colonize not only the medicine, but our own capacity to relate. The more we turn these ancient practices into products and performances, the more we lose the very medicine we seek.
What we need is not more imitation or extraction, but an exchange of breath and more intimacy to create a conversation. What would be useful to increase our wellbeing is not more diets or invented rituals, but more listening to the people, to the earth, to the stories behind the songs.
Integration, in this sense, is the antidote to colonialism: it transforms consumption into communion.
Integration, true integration, is not the blending of colors into grey, but the art of weaving many threads into a living tapestry. It is what turns appropriation into relationship, and performance into prayer.
And perhaps, as this reflection closes, it opens the next one: How can we practice integration not as an intellectual idea, but as a way of being? How can we truly respect the natural laws of this physiological process and allow it to become the foundation of our well-being, a medicine of relationship rooted in respect and responsibility?