Written by: Dr. Caterina Conti
This is Part 3 of “A Diet of Tobacco.” In the final chapter, Dr. Caterina Conti shares teachings on menstruation, synchronicity, and rebirth. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Walking among graves has shown me how cultures give shape to death, but Tobacco was not finished with me. The dieta drew me back from stone and ritual into the most intimate threshold of all—my own body. In the maloka, in visions, in blood, Tobacco began to teach me what comes after death: the hidden cycles of release and renewal, the wisdom carried in flesh, and the power of rebirth.
What Comes After Death
I do not know what happens before life in this physical form, nor what happens after its death. I have read things, received information, listened to points of view. Since I began working with ayahuasca, I have realized not only that I do not know this—I have realized that I know nothing. And this has given me great relief.
My neural connections have loosened from the task of storing information. I can allow myself to listen, to welcome each perception for what it is. To temporarily incorporate what seems like a teaching or a truth, then forget it, trusting the memory of body and spirit. According to what they reveal, I can put theories into question constantly, rebuilding them each time, experience after experience.
So when, recounting my visions to a friend, she asked me what I thought happened after death, I paused to connect.
I do not know what happens after death.
I can say that I have at times perceived—in dreams, in breathwork, in psychedelic experience, in spiritual connection—moments that felt like memories, or relivings, of another incarnation: past, future, contemporary… I don’t know, but in any case, it is different from ordinary consciousness.
Reincarnation seems possible to me, though the way it occurs remains a mystery.
Perhaps—if matter is formed by the union of countless invisible particles of energy which, when arranged in a certain way, generate an organism—then the recognition of oneself as a being depends on how many of those particles meet again, here or elsewhere, in the realm of bodies.
If this is so, then through the relationships and exchanges between one body and another, particles are constantly being shared. Parts of me are scattered: into other people, animals, plants, into the very air I breathe. These fragments are carried on, uncontrollably, through the movement of these other vessels.
One day, at an unpredictable moment, they may gather again in the creation of a new living being. That is how reincarnation might happen. A flower, a tree, an animal, another human being. Or perhaps many, all at once.
And maybe that is why, when we meet someone or something—in this reality or in dreams, in the unconscious, across time and space—we sometimes feel a sudden familiarity, recognizing ourselves in another life. That being is composed, at least in part, of the same original constellation.
This is my answer today. Tomorrow it may be another.
Disembodied Contacts
This openness to uncertainty—the willingness to consider all possibilities—has allowed me to live through certain events, seemingly inexplicable, with deeper listening. Among them is a phenomenon that has been with me for a long time, difficult to define but increasingly clear as the years pass: what I call a synchronicity with death.
For which I make sense through the same lens I watch the incarnation.
For years, I have noticed a peculiar thread in my life—what I call synchronicities with death. At times I have sudden impulses to contact someone, only to discover that in that very moment a death has touched them. I have picked up the phone to reconnect with old friends or former lovers, after years of silence, only to learn that a mother, an uncle, a grandmother had died that day.
One Sunday morning, while on hospital duty, I suddenly blurted out, without intention: “Someone is dying.” The nurses checked the ward and came back saying, “No, doctor, everyone is fine.” Hours later, my partner called: his beloved grandmother had just passed.
Another time, I woke up in a new house, staring at a flipped photo of an Argentine family, and thought of my old chief physician—a man I hadn’t seen in two years, since a cold final conversation after my resignation. We were not friends. He was, in truth, one of those men in power who try to seduce you (or, to put it bluntly, screw you). That morning he hovered in my mind. Later, Facebook showed me news of his conference appearances. I recalled his belief that my generation simply did not want to work. Shortly after, came the news: he had died suddenly, at work, of a vascular accident.
Another day, an ordinary afternoon, I was writing when suddenly my breath shortened. The air wouldn’t come. I had to get up, walk, fight for air. A panic attack? But why? I had no worries. Still, I couldn’t recover. I had never suffered breathing problems, except during colds. I hate breathing through my mouth and stubbornly tried to survive on the little air through my nose.
Then the phone rang. It was Sara—not the first time she had given me such news. A friend’s daughter had died of respiratory failure. I didn’t know the girl… or perhaps I had met her once, without remembering. I collapsed in deep sobbing and entered a trance that lasted three days.
In that disordered mourning I found myself at the shore, singing to the sea and the stars, in what felt like a rite of passage. Premonitions followed: in the days after, what I had sung materialized—a circle of fish, a storm of wind, a third eye opening on the child’s forehead, ritual objects, the colors of her parents’ clothes.
I sought contact with the earth: digging for tree roots to find my own. I asked for help from strong arms, masculine care, to remain anchored. Only so did I avoid drifting too far into what I recognized as a strong disconnection: perhaps the way to a psychotic break.
More than once someone has recognized me, chosen me as a companion for their last carnal breath. In hospital they called me by their granddaughters’ names, to receive one final familiar smile. These were pacts, certain and friendly, between souls.
I also recognize that someone else—powerful, but with questionable intentions—has sought to seduce my soul, inviting me to an early passage, with flattering words.
Consciously I decided to make nothing of it, not to turn this connection into a profession or a path. There are those who choose what is called “the way of the medium,” making it their career. But it is not my wish.
I explain it—as I said—as the consequence of a sensitivity my system shares with some of its scattered particles in the world. When those fragments die, I feel it. More clearly each time, because I have lived through it again and again.
Second Ceremony and Warnings from Tobacco
Since during these days of the dieta, Tobacco spoke to me often of death, I wondered: perhaps it has something to tell me? Perhaps it could reveal whether there is a reason or a purpose behind this heightened sensitivity I carry. So I asked it to teach me.
Its voice came as a warning: keep away from the path of seeking the dead. Contact with the departed is dangerous. The spirits who have not been freed, trapped in the plane of life they left behind, wander like furious parasites: whistling through the trees, diving toward a living body to possess it, trying to steal its energy, pretending still to be alive.
In the Amazon, these spirits are called Tunci, and a trained ear can hear their hiss. Better to move away before they approach, and to cloak oneself in tobacco smoke, a mantle of protection.
Tobacco—its smoke, its taste—is a lens that reveals shadows and at the same time keeps them from seeing you. Mapacho is a fundamental protection. When shamans lead a ceremony, no matter what kind of spirits the patients may attract, they smoke mapacho without pause.
The Purge
Thanks to the connection with smoke and the devotion to its power, it can even offer you foresight. “Concentrate and ask the mapacho you are smoking what you want to know,” the Maestra told me. “At the boundary between paper and ash, where the inhalation lights the circle red, tobacco speaks to you. But you must observe it with extreme attention, allow yourself to be fascinated, and smoke, smoke, smoke with force.”
If something enters your body, tobacco will make it come out. By vomiting.
I vomited a quantity of toxins during those days, and gradually I recognized them in my memory. They were drugs, pollution, reckless choices, contacts with people who wanted to assault my vessel, my availability to their blows, the weakness of obedience. I vomited them and I dreamed them.
During ceremonies, I avoided possession by the dead; in life, I avoided that of the child, and perhaps my presence was useful for her to reach transcendence. I feel warned not to let myself be taken by impure requests.
Encouraged by the work I was doing with tobacco, and as if to affirm its truth, nature revealed itself in a surprising way: not through outer death, but through the cycle of life renewing itself within my body. My menstruation came—powerful, symbolic.
Menstruation and Embodied Knowledge
In the midst of this teaching, without preamble, my attention was drawn to my uterus. It was not the first time in ceremony; by now I had learned that the overheating of my genital organs almost always appears as a request. But this time the feeling was different: deeper, less hot, more slimy, more creeping.
I felt myself personified as something inside the uterus, which from its depths dissolved, let itself go, surrendered, detached and fell. It seemed to form an oil stain on the surface of the sea. Drop after drop, it spread and left the container.
In a relatively short time I was wet. I touched with my hands: blood, endometrium, vascular epithelium, mucus. On my thighs, on my fingers. Menstruation.
And there it was: the natural link between myself and death. My biological, feminine cycle. The power of women. Unique, and yet shared. Nothing unusual at all.
The Sacred Power of Menstruation
In that dark, silent fluid flowing through my fingers was an ancient knowledge, as old as life itself. The menstrual cycle—today reduced to nuisance or weakness—was once revered as the mark of women’s creative and destructive power. In many traditional cultures, menstrual blood was sacred: not impure, but powerful.
During our ayahuasca ceremonies, when a woman is menstruating, this power—potentially able to influence others’ experiences—is contained with a red sash tied around the belly and the use of mapacho. These serve to hold and channel the energy without scattering it.
In matrilineal societies, such as those of pre-Indo-European Europe, the female body was the symbolic center of the cosmos. Lunar rhythms, the phases of blood, the seasons of the womb—living calendars, instruments to measure time and spirituality.
Modern Western culture, on the other hand, has progressively severed woman from her body. What is cyclical, wet, embodied has been made invisible. Cartesian philosophy, with its separation of mind and matter, helped banish the body—and especially the female body—from legitimate knowledge. Menstrual blood became taboo: hidden, silenced, neutralized with products and medicines.
But the menstruating body does not forget. Month after month, it returns, bringing with it the memory of life and death meeting in the womb.
A Feminine Wisdom
The feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva called it abjection: whatever unsettles us because it reminds us of our corporeal nature, our destiny toward change, decay, death. Menstrual blood is one of these “abject” objects: it disturbs because it resists linear stories of progress and control. And precisely for that, it is also a form of resistance. A reminder. A knowledge carried in the body.
In many native cultures, menstruating women were separated not to be excluded, but to enter a sacred space. Menstrual huts—found in North America, in parts of Africa, in Central Asia—were places of retreat and listening, where the transformative power of the body was honored. Not punishments, but temples.
A woman in her fertile years does not only have the power to give life: she can live its potential, and then let it go. Menstruation becomes an inner school, a continuous exercise in release, in fertility that does not cling to results. A death woven into the order of life.
The writer and anthropologist Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls it the “life-death-life cycle”: an inner movement that teaches loss as a condition of creation, renunciation as a necessary passage, oscillation as wisdom.
And in a time that glorifies performance, productivity, irreversibility, this feminine knowledge is quietly revolutionary. Blood, mucus, pain are not signs of weakness but acts of resistance against the sterile linearity of the post-industrial world. The cyclical body refuses to obey efficiency’s logic: it knows the value of rest, of waiting, of loss.
A woman knows, yes. She knows how to accompany the death of her own potential without despair. She knows how to let go of what never came to be. This knowledge is not taught; it is remembered, carried, passed on.
By reconnecting with awareness and respect to the incubator we carry within, we can learn from this life-death-life cycle. We can face the abortion of a creation or a project, temporary failures, changes of course, goodbyes—honoring their mourning. The result? Our ground becomes fertile again, ready soon to bloom.
It opens a space where creativity is no longer cut off from failure, where motherhood is not only biological, where power is not domination but care for the possible.
A woman knows how to give life. She knows how to give death. Without needing it to be a glorious divine act, or a dangerous game with spirits.
The Day After
The morning after the last day of diet was a new dawn. Sun in my eyes, blood on my fingers, and a smile breaking open on lips freed at last from the taste of medicine.
I sat up in bed as if climbing a rock: slowly, with weight, with intention. I shouted my belonging—to life, to the forest, to the body breathing again in its own voice. I had returned.
I went down barefoot and began to dance. Moving as if tearing off old skin, rigidity from bones, thoughts hanging on crooked branches. There was no music, yet every muscle sang. I turned on the stereo, drew others into the dance. I put headphones on and kept moving. All day in motion, all day in expression, as if each gesture could peel the past from me—from diaphragm, neck, thighs—everything closed, repressed, gagged.
By night my muscles were burning, my knees scraped, sweat stinging my eyes—but I laughed.
I laughed like a survivor. Like a wounded creature who has learned it can still scratch.
Inside, something had died: perhaps the voice that said “hold back,” perhaps the one whispering “you are not enough,” “you make no difference.” It doesn’t matter. It was buried and honored.
In its place returned, in full fanfare, something raw, hungry, alert, primitive. As if original. Yet enriched by the experience, by the teachings received.
It was me—not wanting to please, but to be. Not healed, not in the way others mean it. Only… reborn. In pieces, yet whole.
And now I burn, without destroying.