Sipping the Sacred Brew: One-On-One With a Taita From The Colombian Amazon
Sipping the Sacred Brew: One-On-One With a Taita From The Colombian Amazon
“We need to regulate who is serving yagé” — Taita Henrri Muchavisoy chats with Colombian correspondent, Magdalena Tanev, about Taita training, charlatan shamans, & global ayahuasca expansion.
Taita Henrri Muchavisoy is a traditional healer from the Inga community of Yunguillo, Putumayo — a rural town in Colombia. He was also previously the governor of Yunguillo in 2022.
Taita Henrri has been serving yagé for 15 years and has been a student of the plant since the age of 18. As well as serving the medicine in his community in the Colombian Amazon, he regularly travels to other Colombian cities to lead ceremonies and support the healing of countless individuals.
Colombian yagé is a traditional preparation of ayahuasca that uses the chaliponga plant (Diplopterys cabrerana) as the source of DMT (dimethyltryptamine). Most ayahuasca is made with chacruna (Psychotria viridis) or jurema (Mimosa japonica) as the source of DMT.
After a week spent drinking yagé in Taita Henrri’s community in Yunguillo in late January, I sat down with him to discuss the rise of charlatan Taitas, the expansion of ayahuasca throughout the world, and what’s needed to best conserve this master plant and its ancient traditions.
“Can you start off by telling me a little bit about you and what you do?”
Here, it’s part of our culture to drink yagé from a very young age. In the community, it’s given to children and adolescents, and it’s very normal. When children need to improve in their studies, improve their behavior, or prevent any kind of difficulty, parents let their children drink yagé.
At the age of 18, I decided to drink yagé. I drank and drank. My father (Taita Hipolito Muchavisoy) was sharing medicine, and I decided to drink with him. As the years went on, friends started coming to me and asking if I could share the medicine with them. So, after receiving the authorization from my father, I started to share the medicine with those closest to me and most trusted, and then gradually, the group started to get bigger. It slowly became part of my life — sharing medicine — and that’s what I do. Share medicine and help in the healing of others.
“What role does yagé play here in Yunguillo?”
Traditionally, it’s highly respected and has many rules. A lot of discipline is required from those who enter into this path of sharing the medicine.
It’s often used in schools, in educational institutions, and with children who are struggling with various issues. Traditional medicine and Taitas are sought out for support in guiding and accompanying these children in improving their behavior.
It’s used not only with children but also with families. According to the community’s internal rules, the authorities may decide that any person who is not behaving well needs a process with yagé. So, the person then goes through a process with the medicine where they heal and are able to get out of whatever difficult situation they’re in.
“What was your process of becoming a Taita like? What was required of you to gain the necessary experience?”
Firstly, you have to drink the medicine. The elders will tell you how to do certain things a certain way — or what not to do — based on the discipline that the medicine itself requires. There are very strict rules — for example, no alcohol. You have to focus on all that is positive — truth, clarity, light… You have to lead a correct life to share medicine and all of its knowledge.
The training process involves drinking medicine. Drinking and drinking for many years. And this doesn’t have a limit — it’s not like when you go to university, and after 5 or 6 years, you’re a professional.
The amount of time it takes depends on the discipline of the individual. Some may take 5 or 10 years to be able to serve, while others may take 20 years and are still not Taitas. So, it’s in accordance with the discipline that the medicine itself demands. With that discipline, you strengthen your knowledge and your powers to be able to share the medicine.
“How many years did you study to be able to serve others?”
8 years. After 8 years I received authorization. My father accompanied me during the whole process.
“Nowadays, there are many people who are serving medicine yet don’t have the necessary training or permission of an elder. What is the current state of this phenomenon?”
With each year it continues to get worse. It’s a very delicate and sad situation because, first of all, the medicine deserves respect. It deserves knowledge. It deserves properly knowing how to treat it and lead ceremonies. One needs to know — and to know, one has to follow a long process of study. Not doing this is a risk. A lot of energy and spirituality are involved, and many things must be prepared before conducting a ceremony.
The elders have told us that leading a ceremony requires a lot of wisdom — to know how to work with the energies and the spirits. If the person leading the ceremony doesn’t know this, it can be a danger to participants.
“What is causing this rise in ‘fake’ Taitas?”
Nowadays, it’s about money. [The fake Taitas] see that many people are not satisfied with the care they get from hospitals, clinics, and psychologists, and are looking for alternatives to be able to feel better. It’s a huge disease that we’re facing.
Because of this, when people hear about yagé, they don’t seek out Taitas but the medicine — asking where can yagé be found.
That’s why there are so many people using this for profit. They realize that they can make money from it, so they buy yagé and sell it, and this is a huge danger. It’s getting out of hand.
“What should be done to address this problem?”
The only thing that can be done is regulation from within the indigenous communities, and in this case, it would need government support, from the government of every country. We need to be able to regulate who is serving yagé and demand documentation that shows the origin and the experience of the person.
This is the only way to control the situation because right now those of us who serve yagé are free. There are no detailed rules that say that one person can serve medicine and another can’t. People are authorized within the indigenous communities, but not outside of them.
“Is this something that is in process at the moment? This kind of regulation?”
I see that in Antioquia, the mayor of Medellín is starting to do this. It’s a pilot that they’re requiring from all healing centers, asking for experience and documentation. They want to know which community the person leading ceremonies comes from, what knowledge they have, and which authority gave them permission.
“How can someone ensure that they’re going to drink medicine with a guide who has the necessary experience?”
It’s good to find out who the person is, their roots, where they come from, what their process was, and what people say about them. Here in the community, you can’t just say “I am a Taita.” The people have to name you “Taita” because they know about your process and what you do, so they give you that title. So it’s good to get to know the person who is serving medicine’s history and what kind of experience others have had with them.
“What kind of questions should we be asking?”
Where did they learn? Who did they learn with? Which community did they train with? How many years did they train for?
Because it’s a fundamental requirement to have 7-10 years of experience before leading a ceremony. This is not about drinking 3-4 times and then thinking you can share yagé. That can be dangerous for participants.
“What’s at risk if someone doesn’t know how to energetically hold the ceremony space?”
People don’t heal. The opposite happens. People leave sicker, less harmonized, and in a worse place than before. Why? Because there is no control over the process. There is no wisdom to be able to heal.
“It’s increasingly difficult to find yagé growing in the wild; the vast majority is cultivated. How are you managing this situation?”
Today, there are a lot of people whose job it is to plant yagé. It’s turned into a business. There is high demand and now there isn’t any yagé in the wild. What we cannot forget is to promote the same disciplines while growing too — how we take care of the plants is also very important.
The plants need to be somewhere well preserved to keep their energy pure, so we can share this purity with people. We have to care for them without using chemicals, but unfortunately, lots of people only see the money side of things and put chemicals on the plants so they grow quickly and can be sold more quickly. But that's how you lose the energy, the spirituality, and the health of the plant. That’s how it becomes contaminated.
There are people who are destined to sell and they don’t care about culture and tradition. Even some indigenous people are involved in that.
“Ayahuasca is expanding all over the world. Is this good? What’s at risk with this expansion?”
It has its pros and its cons. The pro is that many people who can’t go to the Amazon can drink the medicine. They can find healing and peace. That’s the advantage.
The disadvantage is that the cultural traditions that have been conserved for so many years are being lost. The traditions that teach you how to work with the medicine and tell you who is authorized to work with it. So the rules are changing.
Now, people don’t follow the rules that our ancestors discovered, the rules that nature herself asks us to comply with. Now, the Western world and new generations want to implement human-driven rules and their own perspective, which is very personal to them. They want to do things their way and they think they know how to do it better. So they are creating their own norms which are very human-driven. Their rules don’t come from hundreds of years of discovery from nature herself.
So you lose the tradition. You lose the power of the medicine and change what it is capable of.
“What can we do to ensure the medicine doesn’t lose its culture and traditions in this way?”
Indigenous communities need to promote medicine “schools” from our own origins and communities. We also depend on the policies of countries and people like you who can share this information.
We must inform humanity that we need to value the origin of this medicine. When we value this, we’ll be able to better conserve the traditions of the indigenous communities.
Takeaways From Our Conversation
This conversation with Taita Henrri illuminated the importance of our reverence and respect for master plants like yagé, as well as the reality of the global expansion of the medicine.
Sacred medicines reaching far-away shores and new communities means adapting in order to keep the core of the traditions intact.
Here in Colombia, we’re hopeful that the increasing cooperation of indigenous leaders with state-led authorities will help curb the problem of charlatan Taitas.
Anyone who wants to attend an ayahuasca ceremony should do their due diligence on who is serving the medicine and the legitimacy of the center — take a look at some of the links below for guidance on how to choose the right place for you.
As for those hoping to serve ayahuasca in the future, the message from the indigenous communities is clear:
“Honor the tradition, study under an elder, give your time, drink lots of medicine, and if you are capable, you will receive the blessing.”
This path is not one to be taken lightly.
Further Reading:
Who Guides the Guide? The Wild West of Psychedelic Coaching (Tripsitter)
How to Engage in Ethical Ayahuasca Tourism (Mags Tanev)
The Spirits Call: Shamanism, Neo-Shamanism, & Altered States of Consciousness (Tripsitter)
How to Find the Right Ayahuasca Retreat For You (Healing Maps)
Modernized vs. Traditional Ayahuasca Ceremonies (Mags Tanev)
What’s the Difference Between Ayahuasca and Yagé? (Mags Tanev)
List of Plants that Contain DMT (Tripsitter)
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