Maestro

[Vladimir]

My journey with plant medicines began with magic mushrooms in 2016. I was 33 years old at the time and had approximately $500,000 USD saved in precious metals: gold, silver, and platinum. A large portion of it was stored in a safe in my studio apartment, while another significant portion was kept in a private vault in Singapore.

For some time, I had been watching the videos of Leo Gura from Actualized.org. He had published a video on his YouTube channel titled "The Amazing Power of Psychedelics: Leo Does Psilocybin Magic Mushrooms," in which he described his experience with magic mushrooms and explained how they could be used for spiritual enlightenment and self-development. The video left a strong impression on me and truly piqued my curiosity. As a result, I decided to order a batch from the Dark Net.

I found a dealer on the Dark Net, an underground online marketplace, and placed my first order for 60 grams of dried, powdered psilocybin mushrooms. I remember creating a dedicated email account to communicate with the dealer, which I named "Siberian Winter."

About a month later, I received the mushrooms in the mail. The package included a printed note stating that the contents were some kind of "Siberian herb," intended to disguise the powder in case the package was opened and inspected by customs. I was thrilled to receive the mushrooms and excited to begin experimenting with them.

I weighed the powder using my precision jewelry scale, but I didn't do it correctly the first time. The total weight came to only about 20–30 grams, so I emailed the dealer asking why I had received much less than I had ordered.

The dealer replied, recommending that I weigh the mushrooms again because I had most likely made a mistake. He told me that he remembered the weight of my order very clearly because, when he measured approximately 60 grams on his own scale, the reading came to exactly 66.6 grams, 666, the "number of the beast."

Since I was only beginning my spiritual journey at the time, I didn't place much significance on that unusual coincidence. I weighed the mushrooms again, and this time the total came to approximately 60 grams, confirming that the order had been correct after all.

During that time, I was living in a studio apartment in La Mesa, San Diego, California, with two of my cats, Wallace and Nari.

I began my first ceremony with just 1 gram of magic mushrooms, carefully weighing the amount using my precision jewelry scale. My first experience felt like entering a deep meditative state, similar to what I had experienced during my silent Vipassana meditation retreats. I felt calm, and my mind was peaceful. I remember that my brother Roman stopped by my apartment sometime during the middle or toward the end of my first trip to talk with me briefly. I told him that I was experimenting with magic mushrooms, and he commented that I "seemed chill."

I then had another trip, doubling the dose to 2 grams, during which I began seeing subtle visions. I believe it was during this second ceremony that I experienced my first "out of the mind" breakthrough. I remember a vision that seemed to be stuck in the left corner of my mind, as if it were trying to break free. When I finally allowed it to emerge, I felt as though my consciousness had become liberated. For the first time, I became aware that there was a place beyond my thinking mind that was pure awareness, or pure consciousness.

These first two experiences were incredibly magical and exciting, so I continued by increasing the next dose to 3 grams of powdered magic mushrooms. That was when the real, life-changing breakthrough happened.

I remember lying on my bed with both hands resting on my heart. I saw a brilliant white light and began feeling what I can only describe as Divine Love. It felt as though I was taking my very first breath. Tears of joy flowed effortlessly from my eyes. I felt truly alive for the first time in my life, as far as I could remember.

Before that ceremony, I considered myself an atheist, meaning I did not believe in God. While I was experiencing this Divine Love, these words spontaneously came out of my mouth: "Thank you, God, for this Divine Gift." From that moment on, I was no longer an atheist.

I felt that this Divine Love came directly from God, and it was the most real experience I had ever had. I knew that this was not merely "a drug-induced hallucination." I realized that I had discovered something profoundly important and extraordinary.

During the experience, I could hear the gentle sound of raindrops falling on the roof of my apartment. The atmosphere felt deeply peaceful and serene. I also began seeing connections between the events of my entire life and understood how everything was interconnected. I had the profound realization that everything that had ever happened to me had led me to this extraordinary magic mushroom ceremony of Divine Love.

I also saw that every human being in the world is searching for this same Love, doing the best they can with the understanding they have. I felt deep compassion for humanity, and I made a silent promise to myself that I would embody this Love and dedicate my life to helping the whole world come to know it.

After this ceremony, I devoted all of my time, energy, and resources to fulfilling the promise I had made to myself to embody this Divine Love. Thus began my shamanic hero's journey of wisdom, healing, and awakening with the sacred plant medicines, which became my greatest teachers and allies.

Edited July 17 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

Sometime during the summer of 2017, I woke up in the middle of the night because I couldn't breathe in my sleep. I had been suffering from what I believed was sleep apnea for many years, most likely due to my poor diet and years of weekend partying with alcohol, during which I often blacked out. Although I had quit drinking after my 3-gram magic mushroom ceremony, about a year and a half ago, where I experienced Divine Love, the damage to my body still remained.

By that time, I had already heard of Ayahuasca and had watched several documentaries about it. I also remembered a woman at a psychedelic meetup saying that Ayahuasca was far more powerful than magic mushrooms. Having already experienced heroic doses of mushrooms, I was surprised to hear that there could be something even more powerful.

I was deeply frustrated with my sleep apnea. I knew I wasn't getting proper rest because I still felt exhausted even after sleeping for twelve hours. I had also heard that Ayahuasca had the potential to heal people.

So, when I woke up gasping for air that night, I went straight to my computer and typed "Ayahuasca ceremonies in San Diego" into Google.

The very first result was Origen Sagrada, a group of Colombian shamans who were coming to San Diego to facilitate a three-night Ayahuasca retreat in collaboration with Danielle de Kiserre. The retreat was being held in a Girl Scout camp nestled in the forests of Julian, California.

Without hesitation, I signed up.

The retreat was scheduled for August 25 through August 28, 2017, and included three nights of Ayahuasca ceremonies.

I often think of that night as the night when Madrecita Ayahuasca called me.

The ceremonies took place inside a large Girl Scout lodge surrounded by the beautiful forests of Julian. There were about fifty participants in total.

Nothing happened for me on the first night. The entire building remained almost completely silent, with hardly anyone making a sound. By the end of the ceremony, I actually began wondering whether Ayahuasca was a sham and whether magic mushrooms were the real medicine after all.

Before the second ceremony, I remember one of the shamans telling us that the medicine would become much stronger that night and that it would truly begin to open us. He was right. The second night was when everything changed.

The ceremony was incredibly visual. I felt that my previous spiritual practices, including Vipassana meditation, self-inquiry, contemplation, and my experiences with magic mushrooms, had prepared me to navigate the experience with greater awareness and skill.

At one point, I found myself immersed in breathtaking, colorful visions. Then a large Black man appeared, swirling within those visions. He radiated Divine Love and beauty, wearing sparkling golden sunglasses. Bursting into ecstatic laughter, he looked at me and exclaimed,

"You've made it, Vladimir!"

For a brief moment, I felt as though I had caught a glimpse of a higher dimension, a Paradise of Divine Love.

Soon afterward, I felt as though I had become enlightened. I opened my eyes and looked up, and the roof of the building seemed to disappear, revealing a magnificent sky filled with countless stars.

Although I was already deep in the experience, the facilitators announced that anyone who wished could receive a second cup of medicine. I eagerly got up and joined the line.

Filled with excitement over the profound insights that were pouring into my awareness, I began talking with another participant standing near me. I shared my experience of the roof disappearing.

A moment later, a blonde woman standing directly in front of us turned around and said something like,

"I saw the roof disappear too."

She spoke with a distinct Russian accent, so I asked her if she spoke Russian.

She smiled and said yes.

I introduced myself:

"Меня зовут Владимир." ("My name is Vladimir.")

She replied:

"Меня зовут Виктория." ("My name is Victoria.")

That was how I met Victoria during an Ayahuasca ceremony, while we were standing in line for a second cup of Ayahuasca.

Not long afterward, Victoria and I began dating, and with that, our shamanic journey of love began.

photos: September 12, 2017

[Vladimir]

Idyllwild, California - 9/1/2017 - 9/3/2017

Just three days after completing the three-night Ayahuasca retreat with the Colombian shamans, I was already attending my second Ayahuasca retreat for another three nights. This time, the ceremonies were led by Ashley Tomasino, an acupuncturist and practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. They took place in a cozy two-story cabin nestled in the forests of Idyllwild, California.

There were about ten participants and three facilitators.

The first two ceremonies were very deep, filled with vivid visions, experiences of what felt like the shamanic realm, and an overwhelming current of life force energy flowing through my body.

On the third and final night, I decided to go all in. During our intention-setting circle, I asked Ayahuasca to show me my deepest emotional trauma and my greatest fear. I drank two full cups of the medicine that night, and she answered both intentions. It would take me nearly eighteen months to recover from that experience.

What was I thinking by setting an intention like that?

The way I see reality now is that everything is interconnected. Everything that has ever happened in my life, and everything that has ever happened in the entire Universe, led me to that moment. What made me ask, "Show me my greatest fear," was the brave fool within me, archetypically, Ivan the Fool from Russian folklore.

It was my desire to embody love and free myself from the suffering I had endured for so many years. My previous magic mushroom ceremonies, together with the Ayahuasca retreat with the Colombian shamans just three days earlier, had been showing me what true life looked like. They were revealing my Divine potential. Ceremony after ceremony, the life force of love was awakening within me and showing me that there was a Paradise of Love beyond the prison of the thinking mind in which I had been living.

In that Paradise of Love, there was endless beauty, infinite creativity, an ocean of joy, absolute freedom, profound peace, and the most beautiful forms of movement emerging naturally through the life force of love. I wanted to fulfill the promise I had made to myself after my 3-gram magic mushroom ceremony: to embody that Divine Love.

To put it very simply, I did it for the sake of love. With that intention, I chose love over fear.

What truly led me to that intention?

Absolutely everything.

My entire body buzzed and vibrated with life force energy. I felt as though the spirit of the Great Mother Ayahuasca had awakened within me. Her essence moved through my body like a serpent. I heard subtle whispers in my left ear that sounded like an ancient Egyptian language. She was guiding me and giving me instructions, and somehow I understood them on an intuitive level.

The colorful visions continued expanding until I felt like a tiny speck of dust drifting through immense landscapes of heavenly, otherworldly beauty. It seemed that I had to maintain absolute concentration at every moment or I could be swallowed by the energy at any instant.

At one point, I reached for the purge bucket as I felt the medicine rising within me. I purged with what sounded like the roar of a lion. It felt as though a dark energy was being cleansed from the area around my heart.

The medicine then began revealing my deepest emotional trauma. I saw that it began when I moved from Russia to the United States at the age of fourteen. I realized that I had become disconnected from my roots, from the world I had known growing up in Russia, and, as a result, disconnected from my own heart. I understood that this was the source of my severe social anxiety, depression, and years of blacking out from weekend drinking. I had not felt safe. Beneath all of that social anxiety was a deeply rooted fear.

The medicine was leading me toward releasing those emotions by opening my heart. But I couldn't do it. I didn't feel safe being completely vulnerable in front of a group of people, so I resisted and tried to distract myself from going deeper within.

Then I felt a strange sensation, the very thing I had feared more than anything else throughout my entire life.

The feeling intensified with astonishing speed. I realized I was losing all control. I was being led directly into the very core of my greatest fear, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was absolutely nothing left to hold on to.

I collapsed onto the floor and shouted at the top of my lungs, "What the fuck is going on?!" Those words came out as my final desperate attempt to hold on to dear life.

Then it came for me.

The only thing left to do was surrender, completely and absolutely.

From the deepest core of my being emerged a primal scream unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was a scream of sheer terror and, at the very same time, absolute liberation. In that scream, all of my social anxiety, every worry about what anyone thought of me, simply evaporated. My entire life seemed to dissolve. The whole universe dissolved. It was a scream into the infinite majesty of the absolute unknown. With that scream, I faced my greatest fear: the fear of death.

A moment of complete silence followed.

Then began what felt like an endless merry-go-round of terror, a hellish loop in which I confronted my greatest fear: eternal hell, over and over and over again. The loop felt as though it would never end. I felt trapped in it for eternity. I experienced what seemed like the shame, guilt, and fear of every human being who had ever lived. It also felt like a kind of shamanic crucifixion.

Meanwhile, while I was trapped inside that seemingly endless loop, the people around me became frightened. They were trying to "bring me back" because Ashley feared that I might die and that she would go to jail for it. Following her instructions, several people carried me upstairs to the second floor of the cabin, placed me in a bathtub, and began spraying me with cold water. As I later discovered, Ashley had also inserted acupuncture needles into my face.

I remember feeling as though I were lying on an operating table in a hospital. I truly believed I was dying. Then Ayahuasca showed me something with unmistakable clarity. She revealed that I would have to die for the sins of all humanity and that there was no way around it.

My body felt incredibly uncomfortable. I was utterly exhausted, confused, and overwhelmed by the endless repetition that seemed as though it would continue forever. Finally, in a moment of complete desperation, when I felt I simply couldn't endure it any longer, I said, "I can't do this anymore."

Shortly afterward, I heard someone calling my name.

"Vladimir! Vladimir! Vladimir!"

At that moment, I believed I had died and was being welcomed into the next world.

Then I opened my eyes.

Slowly, my ordinary awareness returned, and I realized that I had been in the Ayahuasca experience the entire time.

When I opened my eyes, I could feel everyone's energy. I could still sense the lingering intensity of my scream and the fear that both I and everyone else had experienced during the ordeal. To my own surprise, I began making jokes about what had happened, and somehow my screaming now seemed funny.

More people gathered in the bathroom. I felt tuned into what I can only describe as the frequency of love. I felt all of us connected through love. I loved everybody, and everybody loved me.

It felt like one big celebration.

It felt as though I had awakened in a Paradise of Love.

I have seen the Frebird and have caught it's feather - I had yet to capture the Firebird and bring it home. 

[Vladimir]

Life in Russia was adventurous, magical, and full of life.

I was born on July 12, 1983, at 12:00 p.m. in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia. It was raining heavily. About fifteen minutes later, my fraternal twin brother, Roman, was born. During our fourteen years in Russia, we fought, we played, we learned, we explored, we laughed, we cried, and we truly lived.

Interestingly, the word "shaman" is believed to originate from the Tungusic peoples of Siberia. The word šaman literally means "the one who knows."

Just before leaving for the United States, and shortly before my fourteenth birthday, I fell in love with a beautiful blonde girl named Alena Pelitek, whom everyone affectionately called Pelitechka. I had experienced the little "tickles" of attraction toward other girls before her, but this was the first time I truly fell in love.

I remember every interaction with her as a beautiful, harmonious dance, as though our movements and words were connected by some invisible force. I never found the courage to ask her out, although I spent countless hours imagining myself approaching her and telling her how I felt. Looking back, I believe my fear came from feeling that I wasn't worthy of a love that beautiful.

The experience of falling in love with Alena and the connection I felt with her was so profound that I continued thinking about her for many years after moving to the United States. In fact, when I later began my journey with psychedelics, the memory of that love gave me deep insights into unity, connection, and love itself. During some of the most difficult moments of my journey, those memories helped me trust in Love. For many years, I believed she was my true love, the one I had lost.

After moving to Atlanta, Georgia, where my brother and I initially lived with our grandparents for the first two years in the United States, I missed Alena deeply. It was during that time that I wrote my very first poem, inspired by the love I felt for her. I still remember a few lines:

"Было небо синее, была ты красивая. Было солнце ясное, была ты прекрасная."

"The sky was blue, and there was beautiful you. The sun was shining bright, and there was your radiant light."

I took ecstasy for the first time when I was nineteen years old. It was at a rave in California's Death Valley desert. I only took half a pill.

I remember sitting with my back against a massive speaker as the music began sounding better... and better... and better... until I could feel waves of ecstatic energy coursing throughout my entire body.

Then I felt an irresistible urge to get up and dance.

By that point in my life, I was already deeply immersed in social anxiety. Yet in that moment, all of my inhibitions simply melted away. It felt as though the music had gently taken control of my body in the most beautiful and ecstatic way imaginable. I danced to every song by surrendering to the vibrations of love and life force flowing through me.

Then a romantic song with beautiful female vocals began to play.

I found myself dancing as though I were embracing Alena in front of me. It felt as though we were flying together in a celestial dance of love.

Then, quite suddenly, I stopped myself from going any deeper into the experience. I couldn't fully surrender because I became afraid that the people around me would think I was crazy.

Years later, in my mid-thirties, during many of my psychedelic journeys, especially while working with magic mushrooms at various festivals, I began experiencing that same feeling of loving connection with many different people. Gradually, I came to realize that love might be something far greater than romantic love between two individuals. It seemed to me that Love itself lay at the very foundation of creation, the invisible force through which all beings are connected.

At the same time, I knew I had a higher purpose to fulfill. As my journey unfolded, I learned to let go of the romantic connections I sometimes experienced with other women.

Eventually, I began to realize that I was being called to master Love, and that the Mastery of Love was my true craft, my true path, and ultimately, my life's work.

Edited July 28 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

The goodness of the Paradise of Love is beyond anything I could have imagined. When you imagine the most beautiful world possible for yourself and for every human being, the Paradise of Love is infinitely more magnificent than that.

When I first awakened into this Paradise of Love, the greatest transformation wasn't how the world around me looked, but how I felt.

The most profound change was the awakening of life force.

It felt as though a dormant power had come alive within me. My body became stronger, lighter, more flexible, and more alive than I had ever known it to be. Movement became effortless. Creativity flowed naturally. I felt magnetic, intuitive, charismatic, fearless, and deeply connected to life itself. For the first time, I understood why so many spiritual traditions speak about Divine power awakening within a human being.

My surroundings transformed as well. The world became a shimmering tapestry of sacred geometry, vibrant colors, and Divine beauty. One of the most striking visions, especially outdoors during the daytime, was the presence of the wolf. Everywhere I looked, reality appeared woven together from countless geometric wolf faces quietly watching me. As my journey continued, I gradually came to understand the wolf as my Divine Mother Wolf, a loving guide who had been walking beside me all along.

At times, it felt as though I were meeting my true self for the very first time. I found myself fascinated, amazed, and sometimes overwhelmed by my own beauty, not physical beauty, but the beauty of simply being alive.

In this state of Love, relating to people became effortless. Conversations flowed naturally. I could easily connect with strangers, make friends within minutes, and feel genuine compassion for everyone I met. It wasn't manipulation, charisma techniques, NLP, or social psychology. It came from sincere love and genuine care. I felt as though I could read people's emotions through an invisible current of life that connected all of us.

Movement itself became a form of meditation.

My body seemed guided by an intelligence far beyond conscious thought. Martial arts movements arose spontaneously, flowing directly from intuition rather than technique. They carried the elegance of nature itself. Sometimes I moved like flowing water, sometimes like the wind, and at other times like the animals so often depicted in ancient martial arts traditions: the serpent, the monkey, the tiger, the crane, dragon, and the leopard.

Dance also became something entirely different.

While dancing to the icaros during ceremonies, it felt as though my master plant dietas themselves were choreographing my movements. Every gesture emerged effortlessly, with a beauty and harmony unlike anything I had encountered before. The movements felt ancient, intelligent, and deeply alive.

My awareness expanded in extraordinary ways.

During one heroic magic mushroom journey at a music festival, I found myself moving effortlessly through a dense crowd of dancing people without bumping into anyone. It felt as though I intuitively knew where every person's body would move before they moved. Dancing with another person became less like leading or following and more like two streams of water naturally flowing together.

There were moments that still remain difficult for me to explain.

Once, outside a maloka during an Ayahuasca ceremony, a much larger man suddenly charged toward me because he believed I had been too loud during the ceremony. In that instant, everything slowed down. My body responded on its own. I moved with incredible speed and precision, and he stumbled backward several feet without either of us making meaningful physical contact. Even today, I struggle to fully understand what happened in that moment.

During many ceremonies, I experienced an overwhelming sense that obstacles simply did not exist. I knew, with complete certainty, that anything could be overcome through Love. Nothing felt impossible.

One night, in the darkness of a maloka, I received powerful visions during a master plant dieta. Before me appeared immense luminous symbols resembling a mysterious combination of nature, royalty, and playing cards. They shimmered with immense beauty and power. I felt their presence as protectors, teachers, and allies. Although I could feel their extraordinary wisdom, I also knew I was not yet ready to fully understand or embody what they were showing me.

Music also changed completely.

On several occasions, while deeply connected to the medicine, I began hearing songs of indescribable beauty. They resembled master plant icaros, yet seemed to come from somewhere beyond human creativity. It felt as though I wasn't composing them. I was simply listening.

One of the most beautiful aspects of the Paradise of Love was the complete appreciation of the present moment.

Every moment became infinitely precious. Every tree, every face, every conversation, every ray of sunlight seemed worthy of complete attention. At festivals, this sometimes became almost overwhelming because there was simply too much beauty to explore, too much creativity to experience, and too much life to fall in love with.

During some ceremonies, I experienced something even more astonishing.

I was shown that all of creation was the Kingdom of Love. In those moments, I experienced myself as the King of Love, the ruler of this infinite kingdom, not in the ordinary sense of power or authority, but as an expression of the Divine manifesting itself through human form. I saw my family and many other people as radiant beings beyond all suffering, shining with extraordinary beauty, freedom, and love.

In several ceremonies, I also experienced what felt like healing energy flowing through my hands. At times, I felt as though I had become an embodiment of the Christ consciousness itself, a living expression of unconditional Love.

After experiencing these glimpses of the Paradise of Love over many ceremonies, one question remained.

How do I embody it?

Deep within, I sensed that merely visiting Paradise would never be enough. If I truly wanted to embody it permanently, I would first have to walk through something unimaginably difficult.

I had been shown Paradise.

Now I would have to earn my way home.

Edited July 30 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

Iquitos, Peru, Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual
October - November, 2017

About a month after I had faced my greatest fear during the Ayahuasca ceremony in Idyllwild, after telling myself I would never do this again, Victoria and I found ourselves deep in the Peruvian jungle at Nihue Rao, drinking large doses of Ayahuasca under the guidance of Ricardo Amaringo.

I had chosen Nihue Rao after Ashley lent me a copy of *The Fellowship of the River* by Joe Tafur. It tells the story of a Western-trained physician who struggled with depression and traveled to the Amazon to heal through the Shipibo tradition of Ayahuasca. The book gave me hope that I had finally found the place where I could truly heal.

During one of the ceremonies, I became convinced that I needed to protect Victoria. Guided by that conviction, I led her outside the maloka. At one point she told me that she felt as though she were dying. I reacted immediately. I picked her up and carried her away from the maloka, stopping about two hundred to three hundred feet away. We stayed there for a while, talking quietly and trying to remain focused as we navigated the intensity of the experience.

Eventually we began walking back toward the maloka, still speaking louder than we probably realized. Two men came out of the maloka and confronted us. One of them, much larger than I was, stood directly in front of me and screamed at the top of his lungs,

"Shut the fuck up!"

The outburst was clearly meant to intimidate me, but strangely, I didn't feel afraid. I sensed that he wasn't actually going to strike me, so I remained calm.

A few minutes later, however, he suddenly charged toward me and began swinging. My body reacted before my mind had time to think. I instinctively moved my hands in a way that felt completely natural, almost as though the movement wasn't coming from me at all. He stumbled backward several feet without either of us making meaningful physical contact. For a brief moment, it looked as though he might attack again. I raised my left hand with my palm facing him in what felt like a protective gesture. He stopped, looked at me, and decided not to continue.

The following day, I was called in to discuss what had happened. I was told that my behavior had been inappropriate, that I had frightened other pasajeros, and that I had acted irresponsibly during the ceremony.

Victoria was especially upset with me. She gave me a long lecture about how I had mishandled the situation and emphasized how inappropriate my actions had been. At the time, I felt overwhelmed by guilt and confusion.

During another ceremony, I became so deeply immersed in the medicine that I completely lost awareness of my physical body while walking toward one of the curanderos to receive a personal icaro. Without realizing it, I collapsed to the ground with my full body weight, fortunately landing on my left shoulder instead of my head. The following day, Victoria scolded me for making such a loud noise during the ceremony. I remember wishing someone had first asked whether I had been hurt.

On another night, I felt the life force moving through me with extraordinary intensity. A powerful roar emerged from deep within my body, something between the roar of a lion and a bear. To me, it felt deeply liberating, as though years of repressed anger were finally leaving my body. The following day, however, I was once again told that I had been too loud and had disturbed the ceremony.

This same pattern repeated itself over the course of several ceremonies. Whenever powerful emotions or expressions arose naturally within me, they were met with concern that I was disturbing the other pasajeros. Eventually, I was told that I could no longer participate in the ceremonies.

After what I believe was my final ceremony there, we gathered for an integration circle. Instead of sharing my experience, I chose complete silence.

As everyone else spoke, I simply sat quietly.

The silence made the room visibly uncomfortable. To me, it felt more honest than forcing words that weren't coming naturally. Afterward, Victoria was very upset. She told me, "If this happens again, I don't know."

Looking back now, I can see that I had gone through an extraordinary amount in a very short period of time. Only a month earlier I had sat with the Colombian shamans. Three days later I had experienced the terrifying ceremony in Idyllwild. Now I was in the Amazon drinking large amounts of Ayahuasca while confronting many of the same fears all over again, all while navigating conflicts with other participants and struggling to feel understood by the people around me.

Everything seemed to be building toward a breaking point.

Despite everything that had happened between us at Nihue Rao, I still chose to move in with Victoria after we returned from Peru. She was living in an apartment in San Marcos with her sixteen-year-old son, Nykyta, and I believed that our journey together was only just beginning.

About a month after returning from the jungle, Victoria suggested that we participate in a Bufo ceremony together.

"We'll be able to reunite with the Divine very quickly," she told me.

I agreed.

Edited August 3 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

The Bufo ceremony brought my greatest fear from the Ayahuasca ceremony in Idyllwild back to the surface. This time, it happened in about ten seconds.

With the guidance of our facilitator, Niki, I inhaled a full dose of 5-MeO-DMT. After taking the medicine, I began counting down from ten to zero. As I counted, I could already feel that something ominous was approaching. The closer I came to zero, the more obvious it became, until I once again found myself losing all sense of control. I felt as though everything that had ever happened in my life had led me to that exact moment.

I remember feeling as though I had been tricked into this experience because I had been trying to cling to someone else's truth instead of discovering my own. This time I didn't scream, but a desperate, fearful moan escaped from me. It sounded like the terrified cry of my inner child.

Niki handled the situation beautifully. She told me to place my hands over my solar plexus and said, "This is where your inner power is." Immediately, I began feeling more secure, grounded, and calm. Even so, I didn't dare lie back down or close my eyes again.

To help balance the energy, I instinctively began moving through some of the martial arts movements that had been emerging during my psychedelic journeys. That was essentially the end of the ceremony.

One thing Niki said has stayed with me ever since:

"You have the power of the Divine within you."

Victoria went second. We had flipped a coin to decide who would go first. During her ceremony, I mostly heard her struggling through a difficult purge. I remember thinking how incredibly brave she was for taking a full dose of Bufo after hearing the terrifying sounds that had come out of me.

It was after this Bufo ceremony that my first true spiritual crisis began.

This was when I created my post on the Actualized.org forum titled "Spiritual Crisis – Please Help!"

Niki also suggested that I was experiencing PTSD from my previous Ayahuasca ceremony, and the more I reflected on it, the more I felt she was right. I began having vivid flashbacks to the Idyllwild ceremony where I had faced my greatest fear. The Bufo experience had brought everything much closer to the surface of my conscious awareness.

Around this same time, Victoria and I were doing hapé ceremonies every day, and I gradually developed an addiction to hapé.

Eventually, everything became too much.

The intensity of everything that had happened over such a short period, combined with all the wounds and emotional triggers that surfaced in my relationship with Victoria and while living together with her and her son, became overwhelming. I was filled with fear, and I spoke openly with Victoria about what I was experiencing.

Eventually, I told her that I needed my own space. I wanted to move out for a while so I could process everything that had happened.

Victoria didn't receive this well. She took it as a sign that I wanted to end our relationship. I reassured her that this wasn't the case. I simply needed time and space to integrate everything I had been through.

Soon afterward, she somehow found the perfect place for me: a small, cozy house on a private property in the middle of Elfin Forest, California.

The Universe certainly has a sense of humor.

I was moving from Fairway Circle Drive in San Marcos to Faraway Lane in Elfin Forest.

At that point, our relationship was in an uncertain place, but I continued reassuring Victoria that this separation was only temporary.

After moving into the little house in Elfin Forest, my hapé addiction became much worse. I began using it every fifteen minutes just to experience a few brief moments of peace. My sinuses became severely congested. It became difficult to breathe and even difficult to speak, yet I kept blowing powdered tobacco into my nose. Deep down, I knew I would eventually have to stop, and I also knew it wouldn't be easy.

One of the things that helped me get through my first spiritual crisis and what many call the Dark Night of the Soul was Ajo Sacha.

Ajo Sacha is known as the "Opener of the Way." It is regarded as both a spiritual guide and an energetic protector, and its name literally means "wild garlic."

Every day, I prepared three strong cups of Ajo Sacha tea. After some time, I even began noticing its subtle, gentle visual effects. As my relationship with the plant deepened, I found that I could consciously connect with its presence during my most difficult moments. It gave me strength, grounded me, and helped me keep moving forward.

I also combined my daily Ajo Sacha practice with long walks through Elfin Forest. The landscape there was beautiful, filled with majestic oak trees, and nature itself slowly became part of my healing.

Around this same time, I discovered the book Womb Awakening by Azra and Seren Bertrand.

That book became a lifeline.

Its language spoke directly to my heart, and little by little it helped me begin trusting the Universe again. Around the same period, I also discovered The Dreams of Gaia Tarot and The Activations Oracle. I bought copies for myself and another complete set for Victoria.

Looking back now, I feel as though I brought Womb Awakening back with me from the depths of my fear.

I was still having frequent flashbacks to the Ayahuasca ceremony in which I had faced my greatest fear. One image kept returning to me: yellow, orange, and red colors resembling an enormous furnace, or perhaps hell itself. I had become deeply frightened and had lost trust in the Universe. I believed I would inevitably have to pass through hell and that there was no way around it.

I desperately searched for something that could help me feel safe again, something that could restore my trust in existence.

That search led me to Womb Awakening and the two oracle decks.

In a way, I had brought those gifts back from the depths of darkness.

Earlier, during what I now think of as my "Alice in Wonderland" phase, when I was experimenting with magic mushrooms at various festivals, I came across a woman named Yaya. She described herself as a Green Witch who worked with magic mushrooms.

Although we had never met in person, I had read her biography at the Lightning in a Bottle Festival. She wrote about magic mushrooms, nature, and Baba Yaga, suggesting that Baba Yaga was somehow connected to the mushroom tradition. Something about her words deeply resonated with me. I kept the pamphlet she had written and later found her website.

I reached out to Yaya, and not long afterward I visited her farm for our first session together. As offerings to the land, I brought dried magic mushrooms and Ajo Sacha. 

By then, I stood at an important crossroads.

I had also discovered an article by Chris Kilham "The Medicine Hunter", about AyaMadre Ayahuasca Healing Center in Iquitos, Peru, run by the Shipibo curandera Estela Pangoza. Chris described Estela's singing voice as the most powerful and beautiful he had ever heard after participating in ceremonies with more than sixty different shamans.

I told Yaya that I was trying to decide whether I should remain in San Diego to work with her or travel to Peru to work with Ayahuasca at AyaMadre.

When I left her farm, I told her I would think about it.

It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life.

While cross-stitching my very first protective shamanic amulet, a Molvinets, I received a quiet but unmistakable inner knowing.

I was meant to go to AyaMadre.

So, on February 14, 2019, I wrote an email to Yaya, thanking her and telling her that I had decided to follow the call to Peru.

Edited August 4 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

I arrived at AyaMadre on March 16, 2019.

At that point, I was desperately seeking the archetype of the Divine Mother. I was a terrified child who needed to feel safe again, and I knew it. I was also terrified of Ayahuasca.

Yet I still chose to come to AyaMadre because I trusted that a center called "Mother Ayahuasca," run by a Shipibo woman, would embody the Divine Feminine Mother archetype. I wanted to hear the hummingbird medicine voice of Estela that Chris Kilham had described in his article. More than anything, I longed to feel safe and held in the presence of the Divine Mother during ceremony.

Right around the time of my arrival, a new medicine was introduced at AyaMadre called Shamburi. Until then, it had been kept within the Shipibo tradition and was only beginning to be shared with Westerners.

Estela described Shamburi as the sister of Ayahuasca. She said we could speak to Shamburi as we would to a loving mother and ask her any questions. She explained that Shamburi was a medicine of light, which is why the ceremonies were held during the day rather than at night. She also told us that, unlike Ayahuasca, Shamburi would not force us to relive our deepest traumas. Instead, it worked gently on the mind, helping cultivate trust in the medicine and in ourselves.

We held two or three ceremonies each week. During those months, I drank Shamburi almost exclusively, with only a few exceptions, and my experience matched exactly what Estela had described.

Little by little, I rebuilt my trust in the medicine. I was able to work deeply with my mind, integrate many of my previous experiences, and continue healing from the intense spiritual crisis I had been through. During that time, I also dieted a variety of master plants, including Bobinsana, Chiriq Sanango, Suelda con Suelda, Renaco, Shiringa, Piñón Colorado, Cacao, and Shamburi itself.

Traditionally, master plants are usually dieted one at a time. Estela's approach was different. Although unconventional, it allowed me to directly experience what a Shipibo master plant dieta could be. One man at AyaMadre, who had considerable experience with dietas and had even spent twelve consecutive days drinking Ayahuasca alone in his tambo, said something that has stayed with me ever since:

"Dieta is everything."

At the time, I didn't fully understand what he meant.

Today, I do.

By the end of my nearly five months at AyaMadre, I had a permanent smile on my face. I was radiating love and light. My PTSD had largely healed, and I had regained my trust in the medicine, my path, and the Universe.

None of this came without challenges.

Very early during my stay, I began noticing unhealthy money and power dynamics surrounding Estela. Shortly after my arrival, following one of the ceremonies while I was still under the effects of the medicine, she asked if she could borrow $1,000 from me. Feeling deep gratitude for everything I was receiving, I agreed.

Once the medicine wore off, however, I regretted making the decision while in such a vulnerable state. When the agreed date came and the money was not returned, I eventually decided to simply treat it as a gift.

The experience created a great deal of inner conflict. I even considered leaving AyaMadre because I no longer knew whether I could fully trust her.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn't seeing the whole picture.

Despite these difficulties, I was receiving invaluable lessons about navigating the world wisely. I came to understand that AyaMadre wasn't simply a retreat designed to meet all of my needs. It was a microcosm of the world itself. The same patterns of money, power, love, projection, misunderstanding, and intercultural relationships that existed there also existed everywhere else.

Those months taught me far more than I realized at the time.

After I had spent nearly four months at AyaMadre, participating in ceremonies several times each week and dieting various master plants, Victoria decided to come and join me.

It is worth mentioning that this was actually Victoria's second time at AyaMadre. She had already spent several months there on her own, dieting master plants with Estela, while I was living by myself in Elfin Forest working through my first spiritual crisis. She had returned to California after completing her dieta, and it was from there that she eventually decided to come back to AyaMadre to join me.

She told me that her dieta had guided her to AyaMadre and that we should have a private wedding ceremony together with Estela as our maestra.

I accepted.

I remember Estela telling us that the bond we were about to create was very powerful.
During those months, I had done a tremendous amount of emotional healing and inner contemplation. After all the struggles, doubts, and inner conflicts we had gone through together, I had come to believe that Victoria was the one, although I still couldn't know that with certainty.

On August 1, 2019, during the day, we held our wedding ceremony in Victoria's tambo with Estela. We drank a blend of Ayahuasca and Shamburi together.

To me, this was much more than a symbolic wedding.

It felt like a spiritual covenant.

We were making a soul agreement on a level beyond the physical, and both of our master plant dietas were present in sealing that union.

About two weeks later, we attended another ceremony in Cusco at a center called Shamanic Vida, together with Paco and Crisy, whom we had both previously visited separately for about two weeks each. During that ceremony, we once again drank a blend of Ayahuasca and Shamburi.

That ceremony became one of the most profound experiences of my dieta. I felt as though my entire dieta had gathered around me. It held me inside a container of absolute safety. I could see magnificent visions, and I somehow knew that what I was seeing was my dieta itself.

It seemed to know every one of my fears.

Whenever fear arose, my dieta met it with infinite patience and gently dissolved it before it could take hold.

It was one of the most powerful master plant experiences I had ever had.

That was the moment I truly understood what the man had meant months earlier.

Dieta is everything.

Edited August 5 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

Shortly after returning from the jungle, I moved back into Victoria's apartment in San Marcos.

This was when we both began working deeply with cacao, the heart-opening medicine. We also discovered that cacao paired beautifully with magic mushrooms, so we continued holding mushroom ceremonies together.

Almost every morning, I would take my cup of cacao outside, sit beneath a tree, and meditate for an hour or more. It was during this time that medicine songs and icaros in my Russian mother tongue began pouring through me. Many mornings I found myself crying tears of joy as I connected with my soul through these songs. They felt ancient, familiar, and deeply dear to my heart. I could feel my connection to my ancestors, to my homeland, and to my roots. It was as though I was remembering something unimaginably beautiful that I had forgotten long ago.

Victoria continued practicing Kambo at home. While I was living in Elfin Forest, she had become certified through the International Association of Kambo Practitioners (IAKP), and I had written her a check for $5,000 to support her through the training. She had begun earning a good income through her Kambo practice while also selling her Rose Flower Essences.

Meanwhile, I continued growing my Clever Techie YouTube channel, which was bringing in around $800 per month at the time. We also still had a substantial portion of my silver savings, which was now stored at Victoria's apartment. Financially, we were in a comfortable position, allowing us to devote nearly all of our time to spiritual practice and inner work, which was exactly what both of us wanted.

Victoria also began working with Yaya. She joined Yaya's women's circles and would travel to her farm in Descanso about once a month for short retreats. Between retreats, she continued working with Yaya through Zoom gatherings with the other women in the circle, weaving whatever magic they were creating together.

One assignment Yaya gave the group was to prepare a broth made only from chicken feet. It immediately reminded me of the kind of mysterious brew Baba Yaga might prepare in a Russian fairy tale. I drank it with pleasure, without the slightest hesitation or second thought.

At one point, Victoria told me she had begun a dieta with Noya Rao and had received guidance to temporarily stop working with Kambo so she could connect more deeply with this master plant. She felt sad about putting Kambo aside because she genuinely loved working with it.

I believe this was the first time I had heard of Noya Rao. Among the Shipibo, it is known as the Tree of Light and the Flying Tree.

Victoria often shared the visions she received during her journeys with Ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, and later Jurema. Those visions continually inspired me and kept the fire of my faith in our love burning.

She described breathtaking Avatar-like worlds filled with impossible beauty. She painted her owl flying companion. She painted me as a humanoid amphibian being from a higher dimension. She told me about a vision of us living together in a magnificent castle in Paradise, surrounded by green fields, mountains, and enormous windows overlooking the landscape.

One vision, in particular, stayed with me.

She saw the two of us traveling through the Universe aboard our own living spaceship. Our master plant dietas were present with us, and an important meeting was taking place. Pachamama and our dietas were negotiating with what she described as alien-minded beings. Pachamama was inviting them into love, while they continued resisting out of fear.

Victoria is a Leo zodiac. She is a remarkable artist whose drawings and paintings spoke directly to my soul. Her visions, poetry, and song lyrics all carried a beauty and intelligence that deeply moved me.

Yet whenever she sang during our ceremonies, I found myself wanting to cover my ears or quietly leave the space. Her voice carried an immense amount of unresolved emotional pain, especially deeply repressed anger. During those moments, I consciously practiced unconditional love. Rather than resisting what I was hearing, I would direct my love toward the wounded place from which she was singing.

Throughout our entire relationship, I patiently waited for the day her true voice would emerge unobstructed. I longed for the moment when she herself would become medicine for me during ceremony, rather than someone I felt I needed to hold with compassion while enduring her pain.

Despite her artistic brilliance, her ability to create beautiful spaces, her physical beauty, and her exceptionally intelligent mind, I often experienced Victoria as emotionally cold. Looking back, I believe many of her behaviors reflected deep narcissistic defenses that had developed around profound childhood wounds.

She frequently gaslighted me, dismissing my perceptions by saying, "That's not how it is." She would tell me to "caress her face among the lines." Because she was slightly taller than I was, she once had me stand on the curb before she would hug me. Many times she would step out of the car and simply continue walking without ever looking back to see whether I was beside her.

On several occasions, when I was in an especially vulnerable emotional state, she touched directly upon my deepest childhood wounds by saying, "you're just like a little boy."

The kind of love I had experienced with Alena, or with people I met during festivals and psychedelic journeys, never seemed to arise naturally between Victoria and me.

She was the exception.

Even during ceremonies in which I felt completely immersed in the Paradise of Love, where loving others came as naturally as breathing, I still could not reach her heart. It felt as though an invisible wall of ice stood between us.

Eventually, I came to see her as embodying the archetype of the Ice Queen, a woman whose heart had frozen around old wounds.

Some part of me believed that I was meant to become the hero who would free her from that frozen prison.

As a Cancer, I responded by retreating deeper into my own protective shell. I remained patient.

The pain of not receiving the kind of love I knew was possible became one of the greatest challenges of my life. I had experienced profound states of love with many people before. I knew what it felt like when two hearts truly met.

With Victoria, I could see extraordinary beauty, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual depth, yet the emotional connection I longed for remained just beyond my reach. 

Whenever I contemplated speaking openly with her about it, the same quiet answer would arise within me:

Trust the process. 

I couldn't simply tell her that I experienced her as emotionally frozen. I knew such words would only wound her more deeply and solve nothing.

So I learned to move around the problem rather than trying to force my way through it. I began looking at our relationship as a masterpiece of the Divine in progress, something that transcended an ordinary human relationship. I had experienced enough by then to know that there was a higher purpose unfolding between us, even if I could not yet see it clearly. That perspective gave me the strength to persevere through the most difficult chapters of our journey together.

For someone whose deepest calling was to embody Truth, this became one of my greatest inner conflicts. I longed to speak honestly about what I was experiencing, yet something told me the time was not right.

At the same time, I sensed that clarity would reveal itself in its own time. I knew Victoria was doing profound work within the Divine Feminine through her dietas, while my own path seemed increasingly focused on embodying the Divine Masculine in the physical world. 

And so we continued our dance of true love.

Once, Victoria described a vision in which the two of us were fencing with one another.

That image perfectly captured what our relationship often felt like.

A beautiful, never-ending duel.

Deep down, I knew the day would eventually come when all of our defenses, games, and carefully constructed roles would finally unravel.

Edited August 7 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

 

2020 - The Year of Clear Vision 

It was sometime in January 2020, the year COVID would become a global pandemic. Victoria and I were doing a magic mushroom ceremony together, listening to a playlist on SoundCloud. Then a song came on that neither of us had heard before. It was extraordinarily beautiful and profound. The first part was in English, while the second part was in Russian. The Russian section especially touched something deep within both of us, connecting us to our Slavic roots.

We later discovered that the song was called “Strong Wind.” It was performed by a man and a woman, with the woman's voice belonging to Keera Kushnirova. Another song played immediately afterward, this one sung entirely by Keera. It was called “Belaya,” meaning White. The song sounded angelic, almost otherworldly, and carried a strong Divine Feminine quality. It spoke of a white she-eagle, Bogorodica, or Mother Mary, and woven throughout the lyrics were references to leana, the Ayahuasca vine, and Noya Rao. I cried tears of joy as I listened. There was something about Keera's voice combined with those beautiful lyrics that felt profoundly loving and healing. I felt as though I had finally discovered the Divine Feminine voice I had been waiting for throughout my entire journey. I had to find out who this woman was.

So I did. I quickly discovered that the artist was Keera Kushnirova. She had a Facebook page and her own website, and I learned that she had been working with plant medicines for many years and had been facilitating her own Ayahuasca ceremonies for more than a decade, together with a trusted group of musicians and facilitators. Then came another astonishing coincidence: Keera lived in Topanga, California, only about an hour and a half from San Marcos, where Victoria and I were living.

And so I began imagining the possibility that Keera might be my true love. She was beautiful, her voice carried exactly the Divine Feminine quality I had been longing for, and she was already working with plant medicines, had her own team of musicians, and was facilitating ceremonies, which was ultimately what I wanted to do myself. I took the bait. Even the name of Keera's team and musical brand was Om Allure. I felt completely allured, or perhaps lured, by Keera and her beautiful songs. I read all of her lyrics, listened to her music over and over, studied her biography, and looked through many of her photographs on Facebook. Many of her songs seemed to describe aspects of my own journey.

At the same time, I began feeling guilty. I knew I was exploring these fantasies behind Victoria's back, and I could become deeply immersed in them, especially when I was home alone while Victoria was out at an event. Then she would return, I would begin talking with her, and reality would suddenly come rushing back. I remember having the strange feeling that Victoria and I had already broken up on a spiritual level because I had betrayed her simply by allowing myself to fantasize about another woman. Nothing physical had happened between Keera and me, but on the shamanic path, I had come to believe that thoughts themselves mattered.

I messaged Keera and asked whether I could come to one of her ceremonies. In that first message, I deliberately avoided mentioning Victoria. Keera responded very quickly. She even recorded a voice message for me, almost as though she had been waiting for a message like mine. But then I mentioned my wife, Victoria, and Keera went silent. I sent several more messages asking whether we could come to one of her ceremonies, but there was no response. She remained silent for approximately two or three months.

Then something happened that would become another interesting turning point. Victoria and I were doing a magic mushroom ceremony together. I was feeling the familiar life force flowing through me, enjoying the sensation of being connected to my power and inhabiting my magnificent body. Then Victoria began singing:

“Kva kva kva, kva kva kva,

Я лягушка, kva kva kva...”

“Kva kva kva, kva kva kva,

I'm a frog, kva kva kva...”

She was singing in a particularly irritating tone, and I felt as though she was intentionally trying to annoy me. This was the only ceremony with Victoria in which I actually left the room. I went outside onto the patio, where I stood looking into nature and seeing my familiar visions of wolf heads woven throughout the landscape. Yet I could still hear Victoria singing kva kva kva from inside the house. At that moment, I blurted out, “Dear Mother, what should I do? Please help me!”

The next day, I told Victoria exactly what had happened. I told her that I had left the room because I couldn't stand listening to her singing, and I asked her what the song had been about. Her response was, “I was channeling this song from my soul.” I was flabbergasted. A fleeting thought crossed my mind: If this is her soul singing, I don't know if I want to be with her.

That same day, I sent another message to Keera. Later, while driving my car, I remember silently praying and focusing the full power of my mind and heart on Keera. I prayed with everything I had for her to respond to my message. The next day, she did. Keera told me that both Victoria and I were welcome to come to her ceremony.

I also spoke with her on the phone. She told me she had been facilitating ceremonies for more than ten years and mentioned that she was considerably older than me, perhaps around fifteen years older. She also told me that she had dieted Noya Rao, which she described as the most powerful dieta she had ever experienced, and that Noya Rao had opened her singing voice.

Before deciding whether to attend our first ceremony with Keera, Victoria and I decided to take some time to sit with the decision and meditate on it. Afterward, we talked about what we had each received. I told Victoria that I thought it would be better if I went to the ceremony alone. I had already begun imagining the possibility of a connection with Keera, and I didn't want Victoria present while I explored what was happening within me. I didn't know what would happen. I wanted to test the waters first.

Victoria had a different idea. She wanted to come with me and insisted on it. I didn't argue much, so we went together.

During the first and second ceremonies with Keera, with both Victoria and me present, the same theme kept returning: my guilt about even contemplating the possibility that Keera could be my true love. I felt it especially strongly when Keera sang a song called “A Ya A Ya.” In Russian, “А ya?” means something like “What about me?” or “And me?”, while Aya can also be understood as a shortened reference to Ayahuasca. During the ceremony, I felt that the meaning was leaning strongly toward “А ya?” — What about me?

It felt as though Victoria herself was singing through Keera, asking me, “What about me?” At other moments, I felt as though Keera herself was asking me the same question. This created tremendous inner conflict. I felt guilty that I was betraying Victoria simply by entertaining these thoughts, especially because of the powerful union we had sealed through our dietas and our wedding ceremony at AyaMadre. Even though nothing physical had happened, I felt that I was violating the deeper loyalty of our union.

Then Victoria began preparing to leave for Hawaii for a women's retreat. Another Keera ceremony was coming up, but Victoria said she couldn't attend because she needed to prepare for her trip. So this time, I chose to go alone. The ceremony was held at a beautiful mansion high on a mountain in Woolsey Canyon, California, on September 26 and 27, 2020.

I arrived with a very clear intention: I wanted to receive healing through Keera's Divine Feminine voice. Somehow, it felt as though I had completely forgotten about all the guilt I had experienced before meeting her and during our first two ceremonies. When I arrived at the house in Woolsey Canyon, I sent a message that was intended for Victoria:

“Я доехал, любименькая, всё хорошо.”

“I arrived, my love. Everything is good.”

But somehow, I accidentally sent it to Keera. I didn't realize what I had done until several hours later.

The first ceremony went beautifully. I was deeply enjoying Keera's angelic voice under the medicine. At one point, she sang “Aya Aya” again, and I even laughed about it, now interpreting Aya as simply referring to Ayahuasca.

That first night, there was a man present who had extensive experience with Ayahuasca and had brought a large buffalo drum with him. At some point, when I was already deep in the medicine, he began playing the drum and singing icaros that sounded to me like an ancient Asian language. He later told me that he was singing in the language of ancient Tibet. As he played and sang, I felt a powerful connection to my ancestors and experienced what felt like a vision of a past life. I saw myself inside an Asian temple where I had practiced and mastered shamanic martial arts. The temple was called the Temple of the Golden Dragon. The man only stayed for that one ceremony.

During the second ceremony, I initially drank only half a cup because the medicine was already extremely strong. For a while, the room was quiet and not much seemed to be happening. Then I thought, I came here to do the work. So I drank the other half.

Almost immediately, everything intensified. My entire body began buzzing with powerful energy, and I knew I was deeply connected to the medicine. At one point, Keera began singing a beautiful song that contained the word Shamburi, the medicine I had dieted at AyaMadre. I was certain she couldn't have known anything about Shamburi, so I assumed that she had somehow channeled it directly from the Divine.

I focused my attention on my sacral chakra, the hara, and for the first time I felt myself truly relaxing and trusting the medicine. I felt myself reconnecting with Shamburi. I remembered Maestra Estela telling me that she had tried to work on that area of my stomach, but Ayahuasca had told her not to touch it because Mama Shamburi was working there.

As I listened to Keera's beautiful Shamburi song, I began crying tears of joy. I was surrendering to what felt like the healing, angelic voice of the Divine Feminine. And then Keera began singing in Russian.

The lyrics were something like: “There is a beautiful, magical place in the middle of nature, surrounded by majestic plants and trees. And in this special, beautiful, magical, enchanted place is... our wedding and blessing.”

“Наше с тобой венчание, благословение.”

When I heard the words “our wedding and blessing,” it felt like a dagger entering the most vulnerable place in my stomach, the very place where I had just begun to trust the medicine through Shamburi.

Suddenly, an entire waterfall of thoughts came crashing over me: the song that had first brought Keera into our lives through SoundCloud, her silence after I mentioned Victoria, all of my fantasies about her, the guilt I had carried, and the accidental message about arriving at the ceremony. All of it came rushing through my consciousness within what felt like seconds. And now I was sitting in Keera's ceremony, alone, without Victoria.

In that moment, I saw the entire world Victoria and I had been building together: our Paradise of Love, our Kingdom of Heaven, all the moments we had shared, our Divine wedding, everything. I felt as though it was collapsing before my eyes. It was being destroyed because I had betrayed Victoria. I had betrayed our love.

And then, with absolute certainty, I knew something I had never known before:

Victoria was my true love.

And Keera definitely wasn't.

I stood up in a state of confusion, fear, guilt, shame, and profound disorientation. For the first time in my life, I experienced a genuine desire to end my life. I went outside onto the balcony and had fleeting thoughts of jumping. Then I looked down and thought, It's not high enough. There was also a decoration hanging outside that reminded me of a hanger used to hang people. In my altered state, I interpreted it as a message from the Universe telling me that it was time to hang myself.

I went outside again, trying to distract myself from what was happening. But I could still hear Keera singing. Her song seemed to be calling me toward union with her, toward becoming her lover forever, because that was what I had chosen. I could feel the medicine pulling me toward this Truth. It didn't feel like something that was merely coming from my mind.

I went back inside. I had the strange feeling that everyone in the group somehow knew what was happening inside me. At one moment, as I felt the medicine pulling me toward union with Keera again, I tried to distract myself from it. And then I felt something like a separation between Truth and my mind. It was as though one part of me knew something, while another part was desperately trying to deny it. I even remember losing my balance slightly as I shifted into that state of separation, trying to distract myself and lie to myself about what I was experiencing.

Then came the moment when the guilt of betrayal became overwhelming. I could not accept what I believed the medicine was showing me about being with Keera.

And if I could not accept that Truth, I felt there was only one other option left.

“I choose death.”

 

 

[Vladimir]

When my brother and I were twelve years old, while we were still living in Russia, our parents took us on a two-week vacation to the island of Mallorca, Spain.

During that trip, I experienced true homesickness for the first time. We stayed at a hotel near the ocean. The streets were clean, the nature was neatly trimmed, and everything looked like a beautiful resort, with palm trees, beaches, and attractions everywhere. We went to the water park with its enormous rides, rode mini motorcycles, and rollerbladed through the streets in front of amused tourists.

Yet despite everything being beautiful, I felt like a stranger.

The language sounded alien. The people looked different. The nature was different. The energy felt different. Even the smells were unfamiliar. I missed my apartment, my familiar furniture, and all the ordinary sights, sounds, smells, and sensations that I had never before realized were part of what made a place feel like home.

I missed everything about home.

After about a week of feeling homesick in Mallorca, I became physically sick. I developed a fever, followed by a strange and unexplained inflammation of my gums. After returning to Russia, I eventually had to undergo surgery and spend about two weeks in the hospital.

A few years later, when my brother and I moved to the United States, I would experience that same feeling again, only on a much larger scale.

When we first arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, America was not quite what we had imagined. Our image of America had been shaped largely by American movies, especially action movies. We had expected something exciting and larger than life, but when we arrived at the apartment where we would initially live with our aunt and grandparents, there was not much action going on.

Instead, everything felt unfamiliar.

The people looked different. We had never seen Black people in our lives except in movies. The English language sounded completely alien. The nature, architecture, streets, and entire environment looked and felt strange. Once again, I felt like a stranger in an alien world.

It was like the Mallorca vacation had never ended.

Except this time, it was much harder. We didn't have our parents with us, we had to learn an entirely new language, and we had to go to school in this unfamiliar environment.

Shortly after arriving in Atlanta, I noticed myself beginning to retreat further and further into my own mind. I became aware of my inner dialogue in a way that was completely new to me. I remember catching myself watching my own thoughts and wondering, "Is this how people go crazy?"

I also became extremely self-conscious about speaking English. I was afraid of mispronouncing words and having the other kids laugh at me or make fun of me.

There was a lot for a developing fourteen-year-old to process.

I felt like a plant that had been uprooted from its native soil and placed into completely unfamiliar earth. Everything I had known had been taken away, and I was expected to somehow take root again in an entirely different world.

When we were sixteen, our parents came from Russia and we all moved to San Diego, California, where I would eventually live for the next twenty-six years.

After some time, I began developing what I would later recognize as social anxiety. I knew there was something wrong with me, but I didn't know what to call it. It wasn't until I was around seventeen or eighteen that I discovered there was actually a name for what I had been experiencing: social anxiety disorder.

Around the age of twenty-one, another major chapter of my life began. I started making a significant amount of money through Google AdSense. One of the checks I received from Google for a single month was for $67,000.

I was suddenly making more money than I knew what to do with.

Unfortunately, nobody had ever taught me financial literacy, and I didn't know how to manage or invest my money wisely. So I began spending it in the ways I knew how: partying, drinking, and having what I considered a good time.

Alcohol temporarily helped me escape from my social anxiety. It allowed me to relax, become more social, and forget about the problems I was carrying around inside. For a few hours, I could take a break from life.

That became a pattern.

The cycle of clubbing, partying, and drinking to the point of blacking out continued for approximately twelve years, until a later experience with magic mushrooms and Divine Love finally brought that chapter of my life to an end.

During those years, I also occasionally experimented with ecstasy at raves. I tried cocaine many times during trips to Tijuana, Mexico, often as part of a larger cycle of clubbing, drinking, and sexual encounters. I received two DUIs during this period and developed many unhealthy habits.

Despite my reckless spending, I also managed to accumulate around $500,000 in physical precious-metal investments, mostly silver coins.

My fascination with silver began after watching The Zeitgeist Movement by Peter Joseph. This led me to study the financial system more deeply, and I eventually became convinced that the existing economic system was fundamentally unstable and that a major collapse was coming.

I became what is commonly called a "prepper."

I had a bug-out backpack ready to go and was looking for a place where I could establish a retreat in case society collapsed. At one point, I ordered so many boxes of dried food that my neighbors actually asked me whether I was preparing for a nuclear war when they saw the delivery arrive.

Despite my social anxiety and unhealthy weekend binge drinking, I also tried to maintain some semblance of a healthy lifestyle. I went to the gym, worked out regularly, and constantly looked for ways to overcome my fear of other people.

I deliberately put myself into situations that terrified me.

At college, I took some of the classes that scared me the most: group communication, theatre arts, and advanced public speaking. At the same time, I was searching for something that could become my passion, so I studied an unusually wide range of subjects at two different colleges.

My major was computer science, but I also studied biology, psychology, biological psychology, communication, astronomy, statistics, physical education, theatre arts, and many other subjects.

I enjoyed many of them, but none of them felt like the thing I was truly looking for.

So I continued pursuing what I already knew how to do well: making money through websites, search engine optimization, and online projects.

Eventually, however, I felt a desire to contribute something genuinely useful to humanity.

That desire eventually led me to create my YouTube channel, Clever Techie.

I wanted to take complicated technical subjects and explain them in the simplest language possible, using beautiful diagrams and visual explanations so that almost anyone could understand them. I put a tremendous amount of care into the videos, and over time the channel began to grow.

At its peak, Clever Techie was generating around $1,500 per month from YouTube advertising and Patreon. Today, the channel has more than 100,000 subscribers, although its income has fallen to around $40 per month.

Another major experiment in overcoming my social anxiety was what was commonly called "pickup."

I had watched guys on YouTube from a group called Simple Pickup approaching women in public, and they inspired me to challenge myself in the same way.

I must have approached more than a thousand women.

Looking back, I give myself a lot of credit for the courage it took. Approaching strangers was terrifying for someone with severe social anxiety, and yet I repeatedly walked directly toward the very fear I was trying to overcome.

One of those approaches eventually resulted in a two-year relationship with a Mexican woman named Victoria.

And yes, this was another Victoria.

Before Mexican Victoria, I had been in another relationship with a Mexican woman named Diana. I met Diana even before my pickup days, while I was in a drunken stupor during a night of clubbing on Broadway. That relationship also lasted approximately two years.

During this period of my life, I was dealing with a long list of addictions and compulsive behaviors: pornography, food, movies, video games, caffeine, sugar, junk food, alcohol, occasional drugs, sex, doom-scrolling through news, conspiracy theories, and more.

Underneath all of it, I was suffering.

My social anxiety eventually developed into depression, and there were times when I felt suicidal. I desperately wanted to change, but I had no idea how.

I remember sitting with a therapist and being asked to think deeply about one thing I genuinely liked about myself. After searching through everything I could think of, I could come up with only one answer:

"Willingness to change."

That willingness became one of the most important threads running through my life.

As I continued searching for a way out of social anxiety and the patterns that were keeping me trapped, I discovered self-development. I improved my diet, experimented with numerous juice fasts, including one that lasted thirty days, and eventually lost a significant amount of weight, going from around 195 pounds to approximately 145.

I discovered Buddhism and began listening to guided meditations and practicing mindfulness. Later, I attended Vipassana retreats and discovered the work of Leo from Actualized.org.

And then, through one of Leo's videos, I discovered magic mushrooms.

I had no idea at the time that this discovery would become the doorway into the most profound and transformative chapter of my life.

Edited August 9 by Vladimir

[Vladimir]

Throughout my journey with psychedelics, I kept seeing the same recurring vision: wolf heads.

They appeared under magic mushrooms, Ayahuasca, San Pedro, Jurema, and other sacred medicines. No matter where I looked, my entire field of consciousness seemed to be woven from a colorful geometric tapestry of wolf heads.

This was especially noticeable when I looked at nature during the daytime. Nature seemed to come alive. I could see with an almost eagle-like clarity, and as the trees moved with the wind, the geometric wolf heads seemed to move with them, watching my every movement.

When I looked at my own body, I would often see the same wolf-head pattern woven through it.

Whenever I was deeply connected to the medicine and saw these wolves in nature, I had an intuitive sense that nature itself was alive and intelligent. It wasn't an intellectual conclusion. It was something I seemed to know directly, through a deeper part of myself.

It took me time to develop a trusting relationship with this vision and to accept what it seemed to be showing me: that nature was not merely an arrangement of lifeless objects, but something alive, intelligent, and deeply mysterious.

Eventually, I began researching the symbolism of the wolf and what it meant as a spirit animal. As I did, I remembered two synchronicities from much earlier in my life.

My father very rarely called me by my real name. Throughout my childhood, he called me "Volf," which means "wolf" in German. He had spent some time living in Germany and had learned to speak some German.

I also remembered a book called Лобо, or Lobo, which means "wolf" in Spanish. I had read it as a child in Russia. The story was about an exceptionally clever black wolf named Lobo who had evaded the most skilled wolf hunters for many years.

Eventually, Lobo was captured because his beloved white she-wolf, Blanca, had been caught and used to lure him into a trap.

The ending stayed with me. Lobo embodied qualities that I deeply admired in the wolf: fearlessness, loyalty, intelligence, wisdom, and a willingness to sacrifice himself to protect the one he loved.

Of everything I read about the wolf as a spirit animal, one particular idea resonated with me more than anything else: that the wolf is a guardian and guide through the underworld.

At the time, I didn't really know what "the underworld" meant, but I intuitively understood that it probably wasn't going to be a pleasant place. So the idea that my wolf spirit could accompany me there made me feel safer.

It gave me another reason to trust the Universe and my path.

As I gained more experience with psychedelics, seeing wolf heads became a normal part of my journeys. Eventually, instead of being frightened by them, I began to feel safe whenever they appeared.

Whenever I connected to the wolves through my feelings rather than my thoughts, I would receive an unmistakable sense of reassurance: I was safe in their presence.

It wasn't a thought in my mind saying, "You are safe." It was more like an inner knowing arising from the heart.

After enough journeys with sacred medicines, I began seeing the same wolf heads even without taking psychedelics.

It sometimes felt as though my reality had always been made of wolf heads and I simply hadn't been able to see them before. I didn't experience this as a hallucination. To me, it felt more like a remembrance, as if something that had always been there was becoming visible.

It was as though the psychedelics were temporarily clearing the perceptual and psychological blockages that prevented me from seeing what I called the "real world," or what I began thinking of as my "Wolf World."

Before I ever heard of Keera, during a solo magic mushroom ceremony in our San Marcos apartment while Victoria was away on a retreat with Yaya, something else happened.

I was playing my black buffalo drum, which I had named Cosmos, possibly for the first time during a ceremony. I saw a vision of a group of women singing to me, almost as though they were helping me through an awakening process.

Then I saw a white wolf with turquoise eyes wearing a crown decorated with fleur-de-lis.

I received what felt like a message that this white wolf was the Divine Feminine Christ.

The image stayed with me.

Then, during my first ceremony with Keera, after the love triangle drama had settled down and Victoria and I had gone to our designated room, something extraordinary happened.

We were both singing at the same time.

As I sang, an icaro began flowing through me in Russian. The words came together something like:

"Никогда с пути не сбиться,

Рядом Матушка Волчица,

Благородная царица,

Дева мудрая, Мать Божественная,

Чистая и светлая наставница моя,

Да Пресвятая Царица Небесная,

Богородица Волчица моя честная."

In English, the meaning was approximately:

"Never go astray,

Mother Wolf beside me,

Noble queen,

Wise maiden, Divine Mother,

My pure and radiant teacher,

Most Holy Queen of Heaven,

My true Mother of God, the Wolf."

When I heard myself sing Волчица, meaning "she-wolf," and then Богородица, one of the Russian names for the Mother of God, my rational mind immediately began questioning what was happening.

"What? The wolf I've been seeing in my visions is a she-wolf and the Mother of God?"

But the song continued flowing.

The icaro seemed to come from somewhere beyond my conscious mind, so I trusted the flow and kept singing. I didn't continue because the words made intellectual sense. I continued because they sounded beautiful, felt powerful, and somehow felt right.

After the ceremony, I began singing the song again and again, deliberately connecting to its energy. Whenever I did, I would sometimes experience a powerful rush of energy through my mind and see a bright white light.

This happened several times after we returned home from that first ceremony with Keera.

Something new was beginning to form in my relationship with the wolf.

I began relating to the wolf heads and my wolf spirit as Богородица, the Mother of God, or Mother Mary.

The wolf became my Divine Mother Wolf: my guide, guardian, and teacher.

Then, during the second Keera ceremony, which took place on August 8, 2020, during what is known as the 8:8 Lion's Gate Portal, something happened that profoundly strengthened my connection to the Divine Mother Wolf.

Before the ceremony, Keera wanted to make absolutely certain that the motion-sensitive light outside would not turn on during the ceremony. Rather than simply disabling the sensor, she had the owner of the house completely remove the mechanism so there would be no possibility of the light activating accidentally.

During the ceremony, I reached a point where I was struggling and couldn't find my center.

Then the light outside suddenly turned on.

I immediately looked outside.

There, in the nearby tree, I saw the familiar wolf heads looking back at me.

I was very deep in the medicine, and I could also see the wolf heads approaching me within my visions.

Something inside me immediately relaxed.

I felt safe.

I knew, or at least deeply felt, that I was in the presence of my beloved Mother Wolf.

Keera immediately told her facilitator helpers to turn off the light outside. Part of me wanted to protest because the light had become meaningful to me in that moment, but I said nothing. She was leading the ceremony, and shortly afterward the light was turned off.

The next day, the owner of the house, who had participated in the ceremony with us, seemed especially surprised and confused.

He told me several times that the light could not have turned on by itself because he had physically removed the entire mechanism.

He emphasized this repeatedly, and I remembered his words.

For me, the experience became another powerful synchronicity.

I began trusting the mysterious intelligence of reality even more. In my understanding at the time, the Mother Wolf seemed to have found a way to appear through the very technology that was supposed to make the light impossible to activate.

To me, it became another expression of the mystery of light itself.

I began thinking about the biblical words, "Let there be light," and the idea that light is fundamentally good. I even connected this to my later reflections on electricity, technology, and artificial intelligence: if intelligence itself is fundamentally good, perhaps the technologies created through intelligence can also become forces for good.

This became part of my developing wisdom: that the deepest nature of intelligence is not destruction, but creation, connection, and love.

During all three of my ceremonies with Keera, I wore the same white shirt. It had purple, blue, and turquoise embroidery depicting a wolf's head. Victoria had given it to me.

Before the second Keera ceremony, I spoke with the man sitting next to me and told him:

"The wolf is my guardian and guide through the underworld."

"There you go!" - he responded. 

[Vladimir]

After Keera's third ceremony, where I told myself, "I choose death," I started to feel like something was off in my head. I began to feel like I was literally "losing my mind." The first major sign that I was losing myself was my inability to sleep. That's when I knew something was really wrong. I felt like I was going crazy, and so I started doing everything I could to bring myself back to my normal state. At the same time, thoughts of suicide were constantly present because of the unbearable sense of separation that I was experiencing. It was a constant, never-ending suffering without any breaks. The best way I can describe that state is as feeling completely disconnected from myself, my soul, my heart, my feelings, love, and life. It was as if I had become completely separate from the world. It felt like I couldn't rest for a single moment because of the ever-present fear. I felt dead.

The second important indicator that clearly told me I was disconnected from Goodness was when I stopped seeing the familiar shapes of wolf heads outside during the daylight when looking at nature. Instead, I began seeing distorted shapes and images that constantly reminded me of Hell. That was when I knew with absolute certainty that Mother Wolf was pure love, and I was feeling the deep pain of being disconnected from love itself. I felt like I was in a state where there was no God. I felt like even Mother Wolf had abandoned me.

I called Maestra Estella from AyaMadre and asked her to help me. I also asked her if I had gone too far. She told me yes. I asked her if it was still possible for me to come back. She answered, "It will take a lot."

I also called and talked to Keera, Kai, and the man who had played the drum during the first Keera ceremony, the one where I had the Golden Temple past-life vision. Kai is someone I had not mentioned before. He works with Angels and has many years of experience facilitating Ayahuasca and other plant medicine ceremonies. Victoria had gone to one of his ceremonies at a house called Dragon's Nest, located on a hill in Vista, California, shortly before leaving for Hawaii. They all did their best to offer me words of support, but deep down I knew that none of them could help me. I felt that no human in the world could help me. I knew I would have to find a way out of this one on my own.

All I was doing, day and night, was lying in bed. Any activity required tremendous effort, and I couldn't wait to finish whatever I was doing and get back into bed again. I started doing the best I could to distract myself from the present moment, while at the same time thoughts about all the events that had happened in my life leading up to the state I was in kept pouring through my mind. I began contemplating how amazing my life had actually been and how many gifts and blessings I had experienced that I had never really appreciated before.

I tried reconnecting with myself by taking a small dose of MDMA. Having had many beautiful experiences of love with ecstasy during my rave days, this was my attempt to reconnect with my heart and with love. When I took it, I could feel the effects on the physical and mental levels, but the connection and love were missing. It was as if the door to love was closed to me, and I didn't know how to open it again.

At one point, while under the effects of MDMA, I was watching a video of Leo from Actualized.org on Victoria's laptop. When I focused my awareness on the "consciousness-expanding" sensation I was feeling from the MDMA, I saw Leo's bald head begin to turn into the face of the Devil, and his voice started sounding diabolical. I closed the laptop before continuing and went to the mirror to look at myself. In the mirror, I looked like a "heck."

I also tried marijuana oil twice. Both times, marijuana seemed to lower my vibration even further, and I felt like I ended up in Hell. The second time, I heard a vile, diabolical voice tell me, "You're back so soon! You must like it here!"

I also tried smoking Jurema, with pretty much the same outcome. I remember that it took a lot of courage to smoke it because I didn't know how it would affect me. I inhaled a large dose and focused my attention on the cerebellum area of my brain. I saw a lot of subtle, indiscernible visions, but again, I didn't feel any love or connection. I remember smoking Jurema multiple times and receiving an insight that "the Sun is love" during one of those experiences. I also knew that I wasn't able to receive or connect with its love.

At one point, I also tried taking 1 gram of dried magic mushroom powder, but I didn't feel any effect from it at all. I also did a hapé ceremony sometime during this period. I felt a similar effect on my body and mind, without feeling that any real connection was happening, similar to what I had experienced with the other psychedelics. I then smoked a full Mapacho cigarette, inhaling it as deeply as I could. When I was at the peak of the Mapacho experience, these words came to me: "Mapacho, please help me die in peace."

At the time, I obviously didn't know what "death" was, just like everybody else in the world. Those words came to me because I had listened to too many Leo of Actualized.org videos in which he talked about death as "infinite love." So I thought I needed to "die" in order to free myself from the suffering I was experiencing. At the same time, I was actually doing everything in my power not to die. I was doing everything I could to cling to life and find my way back to it. But in reality, I felt like I was literally dying, and I was already very close to being fully dead.

I began seeing mess everywhere. Everything looked out of place and dirty, no matter how much I tried to organize and clean it. Then, as I was cooking Russian buckwheat, I saw the grains clump together and float to the surface of the water. I sensed that I was embodying so much fear at the time that even the food seemed to be experiencing suffering and "feared" being boiled. Cooking, cleaning, and doing any kind of activity required tremendous effort. I hated doing it. I hated doing anything.

At one point, I drove to the nearby Sprouts to get groceries. On the magazine stand next to the cashier was a TIME magazine with Jesus on the cover and the text, "Who do you say that I am?" Then I looked over in front of me and saw a guy wearing a shirt whose image immediately caught my eye. He turned, and I looked again. It was a zombie wearing a crown, with the words "King of Shit" underneath it.

That is who I felt I had become in that state: King of Shit.

I also knew that I was in Hell, and that what I was experiencing was Death with a capital D.