My experience with Soft Master Plant Diets

I invite you to join me in presence and let your attention guide as you read these lines.

The Wisdom Keepers of Amazon have poured their knowledge into the world, allowing us to discover tools that we can use for ourselves, to stay connected or reconnect with Mother Nature.

They have fascinating traditions and while some of us have received the blessings from their lineage to share the message of the medicine, they have also gave left us a choice. If we accept the invitation, we must carry the responsibility of protecting the medicine, and honor the elders, the tradition, while we imbue the process with our own way of doing things.

That’s the thing: all is an invitation from Spirit, Source, God, Goddess to dance with Life and Death. The grandmothers and grandfathers from Amazon have taught us about the union with the Spirit of the Plants, as everything on this Earth has spirit. The chosen ones from the communities would undergo long extensive trainings, mostly in solitude, drinking tea, tinctures, taking baths with the Plant Spirit that chose them. This is how they would strengthen their connection with Great Spirit and have allies when they would travel in different realms, to bring healing, blessings and wisdom to the communities they were part of.

Westerners have reached them and while Ayahuasca and other entheogens, are the main point of their pilgrimages, there is also the part of Master Plant Diets. From my point of you, each Plant is a Master Plant as it has its own energetic, vibration imprint and their own teachings.

What happens in during a Master Plant Diet is that the person sets up the intention of connecting with the Plant Spirit and the Shaman will open the portal of the union. The person lives secluded, eats only one meal per day (fasts), abstains from sexual intercourse and self-pleasure and ingests the tea made by the Shaman. The Plant will enter the person’s body and through visions, dreams and other ways will communicate with the person, bringing what it is needed at that particular time.

Personally, I have not been in such a container, but I have experienced the healing power of plants during soft master plant diet. As we live in cities and being in solitude can be difficult, beside the fasting, sexual restrictions, I tried my best to find what feels good to me in matter of social interactions. For an entire year, the only people that had access to me were my family and people from work. I did have very short interactions with my friends in between diets. I paid attention to who I allow in my space. While social media was a distraction for me, I started using social media as a way of connecting with Spirit and micro-learning. From time to time, I would just laugh at cats and dogs on Instagram, when things were a little bit heavy. Again, I used everything intentionally. Once the intention ran its course, I would go back and spend as much time in silence as possible, so I can hear the plants talking to me.

Everything that is used in excess caused me to lose energy. Spending time in silence, created space for me to feel what I ran from feeling, going back to simplicity and being more comfortable with not knowing, but having faith. I would have my teas in the morning and in the evening, sometimes even during the day. I would not go to crowded places, instead I would spend time doing shamanic journeys, learning about the plants I was dieting and embodying what I was receiving. Each container was a bubble that allowed me to explore my depths – which actually felt like being on top of the mountain.

Rose showed me how much pressure I was putting on myself and my relationship with my boundaries. Her stories were about softness and thorns, about the polarity of the feminine energy, about how I can stay grounded in my values and yet, learn to have boundaries in Spirit realm as well. Dandelion took me on a journey of grieving my grandfathers and I left my inner child cry and felt her pain and abandonment wound, so that later she would embrace the joy and remembering the joy I once felt as a kid. Oak was a steady presence that allowed me to connect at a deeper level with my ancestors, to learn how to have a healthy relationship with them and to explore my in-utero life. Fig showed me how it feels to bask in the yummy, delicious abundance of the Divine Mother. Indricana was my first lover, the plant that opened all doors for me and from her I learned to trust my instinct, my intuition, in ways I could not and how to take care of myself while deep diving into the unknown – being comfortable in the uncomfortable.

I have many stories from the last year. Some of them are so wild, I still can’t believe I lived them. But the Plants were always there for me, taking care of me as I was exploring my shadows and my gifts. I was hidden in plain sight. Each learning from the past 10 years became a piece of a puzzle that I am still working on till today. Most probably I will be able to see the great picture when I close my eyes and I embrace Lady Death.

Has it been easy? Looking back, I’d say yes and no. I’m not going to lie. The things that I rough to surface, some of them were not pretty. I had to face my shadows and come back into union with myself, holding paradoxes, holding parts of me that were at war or at peace, that needed attention. Some days, I just laid in bed and did absolutely nothing on the surface. Other days I would rest so deeply, replenish every cell in my body. I asked myself countless of times: why are you doing this to yourself? The answer was simple: Because I love myself and I love Spirit. The plants have gifted me something I was longing for: to be chosen. On the way I learned that I was the one actually choosing myself over and over again; I wanted to make something out of my life, I wanted to give it meaning and purpose, to feel at home in myself, to feel safe as I practice my discernment.

Being in a Master Plant Diet is like a marriage, a short contract. It is a game of giving and receiving. What other may think as sacrifice, for me it wasn’t. It was a constant negotiation, exploration and evolution. Not having a social life? Easy. Spending time alone? Easy. Being celibate? Easy. Deciding to pour all my love and attention on myself and not other. Well, that was a surprise. To gift myself what I was so easily giving to others. So many connections have ran their course once I realized that I was the only one watering them. Was I upset? Honestly, no. I created so much space in my life to fill it with what was watering me and making me happy:

Talking to Plants, spending time with them, learning their way, being curious: how does it feel to be a Rose? Or a Cactus? I fully embraced my curiosity and I learned how to keep my cup full. I was thirsty and I did not know. Even before these experiences, I would find pleasure in little things, but after… The simple pleasure of eating something so rich in taste, of touching leaves and observing their nerves, feeling the petals of flower, listening to bees, watching insects and birds, making up stories about the shapes of clouds, getting emotional when my cats would just be lazy with me or wink at me.

Once again, I found my joy in simplicity, I reconnected with what was important to me, to my own natural rhythm, to my femininity and my masculinity, I connected with myself at a deeper level. My wants, my needs, my desires, I could dream once again, and I polished my code of conduct. I gifted myself space, time, clarity, simplicity, love, patience, grace, respect, truth, harmony, fun, freedom and responsibility. And confidence. I had to sit and watch myself in the mirror I call Mother Earth.

I saw a meme that said: “I’m not everybody’s cup of tea, cause I’m Ayahuasca tea.” I’ve never felt more seen like in that moment. Aren’t we all, though?

Being in a Master Plant diet requires you to be honest with yourself in ways you have never been before, to love all the parts that reach your awareness, to accept them firstly and see what they need to reach balance. As this is a practice, and a practice requires commitment, focus, dedication, perseverance and a lot of grace, patience, trust, surrender. You deep dive in your essence. To get there, you move layers upon layers that are not you. It is not for the fainted heart. And most of all is for the ones that have respect for the medicine that each plant carries.

We are the medicine. And we are also the ones that can poison ourselves.

I see myself a student of life and death, of Spirit World and at the same time, a sovereign being. You cannot take the humanness from working with plants. We make mistakes, we learn from them and move on. We choose how we make our own journey and how we show up.

What I learned was to show up just as I am, open to learn more, to know my mistakes, to make amends where I can and to take responsibility for my own projections. And that is where I found magic once again, the magic that I would experience as a child. I had all the answers and everything that I needed on my path.

I pray you will also recognize your own magic and remember your essence.

In service to the journey,

Alexandra, Guardian of Ianara