About San Pedro

San Pedro: Sacred Plant-Medicine

The San Pedro cactus is native to the Andes Mountains and has a long history, more than 3000 years, in Andean traditional medicine. Containing the psychoactive substance mescaline, it is regarded as a healing plant and a profoundly transformative and visionary plant-medicine. Its medicinal use continues into contemporary times here in Peru, where such traditional use is both respected and legal.

San Pedro (Huachuma in Quechua, the native language of the Andean people) is used in traditional healing to address issues of emotional and energetic disturbance, renown for it’s anti-anxiety and anti-depressive qualities, and addressing imbalance between the head and heart spaces.

Anecdotal evidence supports that it has contributed significantly to a wide range of health issues.

From a shamanic perspective San Pedro is regarded as a powerful transformative tool. To drink the medicine is like having a mirror held directly in front of one’s face, and to see reflected therein the energetic status of one’s Self in the minutest detail, like an unraveling of one’s cultural programming. It is regarded as ‘heart-medicine’ and one is encouraged not to spend too much time in the realm of the mind and intellect, trying to figure it out, but rather to ‘feel’ into the experience; to let-go of those points of tension in the body, perhaps remnants of past emotional traumas, and redundant modes of thinking and behaviour – to release the old non-supportive aspects and make space for a new, enlivened and more meaningful relationship; with one’s Self, the persons around us, and indeed with the sentience of the very planet that supports us. Muchas Gracias Pachamama.

As a sacred plant-medicine, San Pedro is said to dissolve the personal ego and to connect one with one’s Self or the Divine Spirit; and as a visionary plant-medicine, to impart information, not so much through the agency of the mind and intellect, but through enhancing the intuitive capacity – and thus heard in the stillness and yet paradoxical dynamism of the silence of one’s heart-space, one’s own inner seat of the consciousness.

I am committed to providing a safe and respectful space for the use of this medicine, and place emphasis on achieving the practical day-to-day benefits that this medicine potentially offers; to heal, transform, and expand our consciousness, to support our personal growth and better enable us to lead our lives in a more meaningful manner and fulfilling lifestyle.