Padre Tabaquito
Sacred offering to the smoky mountains
Tobacco is considered to be the most powerful psycho active plant of the planet. It has been used by different indigenous people to cleanse the body for at least two thousands years, either as a juice or chewed leaves. Navigators brought it from America to Europe. It seems to have its origins in the Altiplano Andino, the region of the Andes mountain, where it was and is often used as an offering to the Pachamama. Rivers and mountains are also considered sacred healing places, as the mist evokes a Shaman blowing the powerful smoke of a mapacho pipe.
Mapacho (Nicotiana Rustica, Solanaceae botanical family) is the designation for the cigarette-type cigar used in ceremonies for cleansing with smoke. However, the tabaquero must have made his acquaintance with the plant by drinking its juice, a tobacco infusion in hot water, following a series of restrictions called Dieta.
The dried plant can be macerated in cane alcohol (trago) as a big roll, for conservation. It is then cut out in round slices and uses to roll with paper as a cigarette, or boiled for detox purposes.
Food for your thoughts, how it works
Mapacho is a pure masculine energy that brings you to the here and now. As Ayahuasca is feminine and brings intuition and information, opening the energetic field, Tobacco helps to structure and organize the work of all the other Master Plants. If you spray tobacco juice on your regular plants sitting in your balcony, parasites disappear and the plants can absorb better nutrients that are useful to their growth. It works in a similar way for humans.
The benefits are many when it is used in a ritualised context by a knowledgeable shaman.
When it is used as a “vomitive” (throwing up), tobacco is drank as tobacco juice in a ritual. It is very sensitive and has to be activated by healers that have dieted tobacco as a master plant and are able to direct this strong energy. Patients should not have undergone heart or brain surgery, suffer from a heart condition, having low blood pressure or during menstruation cycle. The nicotine will induce a tachycardia effect and palpitations, that subside after throwing up.
In general terms, the session carries out a general purification of the body, increases pulmonary capacity, adjusts arterial tension, heart rate and oxygen levels, reduces stress levels and promotes tranquility, reduces self-destructive tendencies, prepares the body for a ceremony of Ayahuasca.
In the shamanic tradition of the Upper Amazon Basin, the body is considered as a whole, as a physical, psycho-emotional and spiritual body. All medicines activated in a ritualised way have an action on this threefold body. A Master Plant is a teaching plant, meaning it teaches you about yourself and has a strong individual spirit, a kind of higher spirit presiding its whole botanical family often called a Mother. Tobacco is called Padre Tabaquito, as a father of plants, as Ayahuasca is called the Madre.
As a Master Plant, and possibly one of the most important ones of the botanical pantheon, tobacco has the four elements (earth, fire, water and air), as Ayahuasca. It cleans on all these levels:
Excess information, in a society where we tend to have too much unnecessary information
Mental confusion
Different blockages coming from a physical level, like secondary and toxic effects of some medicines, pollution from electromagnetic fields (like Wi-fi), nutrition problems
Different psychological blockages, when we have difficulty making decisions and knowing whatever comes from ourselves or what is just carried in our psychological field. It cleans lies, the lies to ourselves and others, flaws and failures.
Different soul ailments, things we carry from our ancestors, traumas, violence and suffering transmitted by other generations before us.
It will give you clarity, strength, will power and rightfulness in your actions.
As a masculine, fire and power plant, tobacco juice gives you structure. It allows you to be grounded as opposed to be disconnected and withdrawn from reality. It works especially well with the Madre, as a tree would support a vine, as a solid framework to ground your intuition. What would be the use of information in general if we weren’t able to structure it? Tobacco provides this framework.
Positive for men and women, it will clean illusions, fantasizing and a tendency to escape reality. It will foster a real incarnation, meaning fully embracing our body, spirit and mind, our ancestry and lineage. It ill reinforce any psychotherapeutic process. Men will feel more masculine, strong and grounded, and women will recover their sensitivity, reducing anxiety, anger and aggressive feelings. Both will find they have a more discerning will, reconnect with their dream world – tobacco fosters dreaming in a more lucid state, where you remember your dreams and make sense of them – and recover information on themselves that they thought completely forgotten.
Poison or medecine
When you do a tobacco ritual regularly it has a cumulative effect, meaning the tobacco juice will clean more profoundly each time, going through layers and layers of clutter.
Tobacco is the most powerful medicinal plant in Amazonia…when it is drank. It is poison when smoked. We are supposed to connect with master plants in a ritualistic way, dieting and drinking them. We come from water, the mother’s womb. Then we grow roots and look for the sun. All movements follows this rule of creation. As we try to turn everything into entertainment, like smoking tobacco – going for the air before grounding -, the plant harms us. Tobacco juice is actually a cure for addictions (video games, pornography, food addictions, alcohol, etc.), whereas smoking cigarettes creates addiction.
Don’t forget that all great spiritual traditions recommend working on your body – or bodies, meaning the physical, psychological and spiritual – before awakening or being enlightened. All prophets, saints and great shamans went through time alone, fasting, cleaning sessions, healing, plant baths and sweating rituals before fulfilling their destinies.
Tobacco as a spirit does not require any specific religion. It can help people in spiritual search, attain higher and new levels of consciousness, and sometimes opens up to mediumnic power.
Recommendations
Before a tobacco ritual, have a light meal – we want you to throw up more than just food.
You may eat 8 hours after the end of the session (light meal).
But no alcohol, no sugar , no cookies/cake (fruits and stevia are ok), no red meats, no pepper or any other spice, no chili.
No smoking tobacco (cigarette) and mostly, no taking any hard or soft drug (marijuana, haschich).
No other plant. No sauna, no sport. Just rest !
No sexual activity in the night after the ritual
These recommendations should be extended for a few days after the ritual.
A link to a conference by Dr. Jacques Mabit about Tobacco (in spanish)
Purges in Portugal twice a month before retreats and also on an individual basis, booking onanyajoni@gmail.com
Purges in France, Lyon, check the webpage of our partner
