I was 6 years old when I left my body

Up until the following experience I was a lively, expressive & fun little boy.

What sent me out of it was the worst traumas that have ever happened to me, repeated daily for seven months.

I do not write that for sympathy. I write it because in the middle of that darkness, something reached for me. A connection to Spirit, to Supreme Being, formed in me during those months; born, strangely, from the very thing that nearly broke me.

That connection became the foundation of everything I do now. I spent the next several decades learning what it was for.

It kept the record my mind had sealed

I dissociated so completely that I had no conscious memory of what happened; I blacked out, and for decades I did not know it had happened at all. Yet, the body remembers.

For roughly fifteen years it surfaced as rectal spasms so severe I could not walk, each one carrying the deepest, most terrifying fear I had ever known, and nothing except blackness when I tried to remember why. These would only occur during my deepest sleep.

One of the best gastroenterologists in the country found nothing physically wrong. Of course he didn’t. My body was screaming what my mind had sealed. I would learn, much later, that no amount of understanding reaches that layer. It has to be cleared.

I tried everything the modern world offers, None of it reached the root

For eight years I worked through everything I could find: traditional and non-traditional therapy, acting and improv, energy and clairvoyant training, yoga, EFT, NLP, inner-child work, archetype exploration, Watsu, sound, theta, and alpha healing.

Each one gave me something. Therapy in particular helped me understand the dynamics of what had happened to me.

Yet understanding the wound is not the same as healing it. I could name my patterns with clinical precision and still carry them in my tissue, my nervous system, my reflexes. The spasms continued. I had prepared the door, I had not yet found the key.

Then I sat with the Medicine

As helpful as everything else had been, the Medicine was exponentially more powerful than all of it combined: it guided me straight to the root cause of my traumas.

It was around my fourth Ayahuasca Ceremony. The night before, I dreamed I was six years old walking down a hallway. A closet door opened; someone familiar pulled me in, shut the door, and everything went black.

I woke in another spasm, this time with a flash of my tormentor’s face.

The next day in Ceremony, the Medicine revealed the truth in flashes and details, confirming the dream; and as it revealed, it was cleansing the stored trauma out of my body. That was the beginning of a multi-year healing that eventually cured the spasms entirely.

Noya Rao gave me my name

Healing myself was only the beginning. To carry this for others, I had to be trained.

I made many journeys to the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon to learn the indigenous ways. I gave myself to intensive dietas with the Master Plant teachers; extended periods of sacrifice, isolation, and direct communion with the plant spirits. Among them was Marosa, known as the hospital of the jungle, from whom I received the gift of ancestral healing.

I trained primarily in the Shipibo tradition, directly with Doña Wilma Mahua, Papa Gilberto Mahua, and Don Enrique Lopez.

A Dieta is not a diet, it is a sacred contract. When its commitments are honored, the plant spirits become allies and guides for life.

The difference between a facilitator/trip-sitter and a shaman is: A facilitator/trip-sitter watches the room, a shaman navigates the space through living relationships with the plants cultivated through Dietas.

On one of my last journeys to Peru, Noya Rao, the Tree of Light and my most Sacred Plant Teacher, gave me my Shipibo name: Ranko Meraya. The name did not come from a human teacher, it came from the plant Spirit.