After two weeks at Huachuma Wasi in the Sacred Valley area of Peru I have some serious doubts about the guy who runs that center, Sergey Baranov. I followed his youtube channel for quite a while before I was able to return to Peru a few months ago but my immediate impression of him after meeting in-person was quite different to the sense I'd gotten of him in all the videos. Looking back to our online communication, when I was organising my itinerary, there were warning signs...

Toward the end of my second ceremony day, out by a mountain stream, Sergey was leading the group back to Huachuma Wasi. We stopped along the way to take in the view and one of the others brought up the following story / incident... Another of our group had needed to take a break from Huachuma Wasi to fly somewhere and attend to other things. Very shortly after boarding the plane, but before it had gone anywhere, they'd had a panic attack and called Sergey for advice or support - apparently they'd just been told it was too late to get off the plane, which had only intensified their panic attack. Sergey's advice was to bite someone. As was pointed out by the person who brought this up, that would quite probably have resulted in jail time for the person who'd had the panic attack. Sergey and most of the others were laughing at this - although I must add that we were all still feeling the Huachuma...

There were a number of other comparatively minor incidents while I was there, such as Sergey, in front of the group, berating one of his other guests for flushing toilet paper (a no-no in most of Central and South America due to notoriously weak plumbing...) on the way home from visiting a sacred and quite energetic site the following ceremony day. I'm told that the relationship between Sergey and that person only deteriorated further from there.

Apparently Sergey doesn't consider himself to be a shaman, despite having a very particular way of opening and closing ceremonies, despite his elaborate altar that features a number of human skulls - apparently from former Huachuma shamen gifted to him from his own shamanic teacher(s). A practice I've not encountered anywhere else... And despite being very insistent about a number of other more-or-less ceremonial rules that he only seems to inform his guests about upon transgression, such as not walking in front of him on the way back from ceremony and only using the fireplace on ceremony nights.

Shaman or not, anyone in the habit of hosting ceremonies ought to accept a duty of care to those people. Anyone charging as much for their services as he does can also afford to employ other people to assist in this duty of care if it is too much for them to handle alone.

Beyond what I have shared here I am not actually surprised that Sergey Baranov does not call himself a shaman. My own personal belief is that he is a brujo - and quite a capable and malicious one at that. If anyone reading this intends to go to Peru for Huachuma, please take my advice and do not put yourself in harm's way by visiting Huachuma Wasi.

I have spent over 3 months at Huachuma Wasi. That was not my experience, not one bit. I know at least twenty other people who have spent time there including several people in my family, my wife included.
After close to 50 ceremonies and living with Sergey and his family for over 3 months I must say that Sergey is an amazing healer with some of the best Huachuma medicine in the Andes. I find it extremely disappointing that you decide to come here and bash him. If you actually spent time at huachuma wasi and drank his medicine then you absolutely had some beautiful experiences. I find it interesting that you come on here and only say negative things. That says a lot about you. You go to a beautiful country like Peru and work with beautiful medicine like Huachuma and your post is your description of that experience? That speaks volumes about you!

Cheers!
IH

I'm speaking as a moderator:



Perhaps his personal experience was not like your personal experience.

They are allowed to share their experience and their perspective without being personally attacked by someone who is biased in favor of the topic that they are evaluating and critiquing.

In any incident, one can ask 20 people what happened and one can receive 20 permutations of answers, some of which can very well contradict others.

That said, let's be a little bit more constructive and respectful in sharing our opposing viewpoints.

One love

I think this kind of thing is better dealt privately. I understand you are upset and want to influence other people not to give this man any money. Though it seems you are turning your subjective experience into a weapon that potentially damages a family's income. Public discourse is good for asking other's opinions. Suggesting that others do not go there is another thing.

Obviously his experience wasnt like mine I accept that. I do support his right to share his experience. I dont feel like I personally attacked him. If that's what you think I did, I'm sorry you feel that way. Apologies as well to the original poster bobdobbs if I offended him as well.
I will alway feel free to express my opinion here as long as I am a member.

I'll quote an example of what I viewed as a personal attack.



However, you may not have meant it as such, but that's how it came off in my perspective.

All the same, it's merely about how we express our opinions.

Things are all good

One love

In light of how IH responded to OP, I'd like to offer a kind reminder that people change, quite easily at that. Especially so people that have found increasing levels of success and popularity via what they do. Money and whatever version of power they provide can change folk tremendously. That being said, I haven't been with Sergey but in my 3 months I spent in Peru, I did come across some malicious people that pretended they're shamans while they were little more than small-time scammers that frequently overdosed people to intentionally incapacitate them, which sometimes led to quite gruesome sights and a lot of trauma for the one being administered the medicine.

It is the sad reality. Peru is full of scammers. Sometimes not even word of mouth is enough to find a good place, so I suppose the best way is to just spend some time with the healer before you commit to anything with them.

Love & Light

I mean the biting thing is kinda weird...but it might have just been intended as a funny response to shake them out of their panic (it is afterall one way to definitely get off the plane hahah). Which seems evidenced by the fact that people were laughing.

People are always different in person vs online. We might idealize those working with medicine at such a level but at the end of the day they are all humans with their own quirks and problems too. None of us are perfect.

Not to invalidate your experience but it sounds kind of like you might be riding more on a feeling than anything else. Which could be true, not true, or a bit of both. I don't know. But it doesnt really seem serious enough to be calling him out publically here given how light these issues are. You could just bring it up with the guy and talk to him if it is bothering you. If it doesn't go well maybe they have a review page somewhere that is better suited for this.

I don't mean to discouraged anyone from posting about their issues with facilitators. I think it's important to share those issues when appropriate. But these don't seem like serious issues to me tbh, and it is a rather serious accusation to say he is a Brujo based on such minor incidents

What is a Brujo in the context of shamans? I've never heard that term. Google says it's a witch doctor.

It's a malicious shaman.

Thank you to everyone else for your thoughts - even those who think I'm over-reacting.

Before posting I asked another moderator whether this kind of thing was appropriate for DMT Nexus - they said it was. I feel quite strongly about the misuse of plant medicine by people like this, I've also been to Peru a number of times and have a growing familiarity with the issues around this kind of tourism - for better and worse.

Traditionally.... there are more or less 3 main groups of plant peoples.

Brujos... who use plants, magick, enegry, power, for personal gain often at the exploitation of others, operating on the astral realm to attack others to steal their power, or, to keep away competitors, or, to bring down healers who are taking the brujo's spells/hexes off of individuals.

Shamans... Who basically do whatever you pay them to do. Heal, hex/curse, find lost objects, trained in both the light and dark arts.

Curanderos... those who only use their 'powers' for healing purposes and work only with certain medicine spirits and doctor spirits on the astral realms, spirits that they SAY only work with people of a certain purity of intent, meaning, only those who heal and not abuse their power.

Among the spirits themselves, they say some work only with healers, some work only with brujos, some work with both, and everything in between.

This is just a dip into what their local culture and folklore is and says though... take it all with a grain of salt

Or with a circle of salt cast around you, whatever you want.

And contemporarily there are two additional main groups... facilitators (being called a big variety of things from "shaman" to "mystic" but not the same as what those words originally meant at all) and psychonauts who do away with all the "spiritual superstitions" and are all about drug experiences.

I know these all too well. I like that you put spiritual superstition in quotations because I don't think it's superstitious at all. Hallucinogens (especially entheogenic plants) require the utmost amount of respect. Although YOU are your own facilitator, healer, and guide... the entheogen is the teacher. You submit and you surrender. You don't trifle with it.

Decades ago when I got into psychedelics, my sister and I would improvise some basic invocations. Some people call it praying. We would hold hands and speak our intentions out loud, saying things along the lines of "Dear Mushroom Gods, thank you so much for allowing us to have this experience, and we want to have a good trip!" etc etc etc.

It's something I do even now. Voidmatrix's Invovcation is something I read before every DMT experience.

It's not superstitious, it's gratuitous.



Also thanks CL for the detailed description. I love learning about all of the terminology and lore as much as I love learning about extraction. History truly fascinates me.

A lot of psychonauts would not agree with that definition at all

Commenting as a moderator:




It's okay to believe what one wants, but this seems a little passive aggressive towards those that may not share the same beliefs or perspectives.

No one knows what's "truly" going on. We're all stumbling our way through...



One love

Hey, now I do fully appreciate that this situation was settled perfectly peacefully and also a number of days ago.

But I'd just like to throw out the perspective that Ice House was honourably defending a person who he must consider a friend. Having lived 3 months in the man's house as a guest.

BobDobbs' original post may be completely valid, I cannot say either way. But the OP definitely put more personal attack into Ice House's friend than in the defensive response that followed.

To make it feel like there was some justice and equality in this thread I felt the need to say this.

Perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree. After rereading the OP, I see it as more observational than inflammatory. It seems that the worst said was calling him a brujo and encouraging people not to visit him

The Nexus is in its own dark little corner of the net, so I'm not sure that that many people will be adversely affected in a manner that will greatly impact this facilitator.

This is also anecdotal, and as such, the responsibility is on the reader to assess the strength and arguments of the claims on their own and act accordingly.

One love

I think the word "brujo" is originally a spanish word for witch or warlock (a warlock is a male witch).
Throughout europe, there have always been stories about magic and witchcraft, as well as genuine practices of plant medicine.

Much of this goes back to pagan practices, but ofcourse it has been mixed up with all kind of other things through the ages. Christian practices, scholasticism, alchemy, influences from africa and the middle east, etc.

It seems plausible to me that spanish settlers did not have a genuine interest in and understanding of the spiritual practices of the people they brutally subjected, and simply saw shamans as witches.

The spanish empire was not exactly renowned for it's religious or cultural tolerance.

All good points and very valid... What I had mentioned though is what is taught and described by locals there today... regardless of what the Spain'ish originally meant at the time when Spanish was adopted as a language...

Language and jargon aside, the locals and indigenous I've spoken with are consistently clear about the distinction between a Healer, a Harmer, and the individuals that can and do perform either.

Harmer, brujo, whatever anyone wants to call it... the stories are that they gain personal power at the expense of others. They even go into details how certain astral entities give these people actual power if the person does what they say, which in many cases, can simply be to cause or propagate harm/pain/suffering to others using magic...

It's interesting, kinda what they talk about, reminds me a lot of some of Gurdjieff's works... describing these higher-dimensional beings that literally FEED off the vibrational energy that's generated through intense emotions such as pain, fear, etc... It is described as it charging these entities almost like piezoelectric energy, or, the energy harvesting from vibrational forces.

So the natives, say that certain individuals will use magic to cause pain/fear in others, in service of a higher-dimensional being who feeds off that energy, and in return, gives the individual magic or other forms of power.

This ties into the general belief in spirit allies. They say any practitioners power is derived by the number and type of entities they have formed ally-ship and pacts with. These entities operate on the astral realms and perform tasks for and with the individual, and they develop a type of symbiotic relationship.

Some of these entities as said to be conscious personas of the plants themselves, as intelligent beings that are visualized in various human-oid forms (as they appear to the person in that form as a means of communication)... Others are a variety of entities that emerge from the forest, such as the known Doctoros, or little doctors, that emerge from the forest and perform healings in ceremonies. Or any endless type of astral entities they meet and encounter. One can ally with these beings and ultimately summon them in to assist.

This is such a prevalent belief, that they believe any "brujo" "shmaman" or "curandero" spends s lifetime accumulating allies, pacts and essentially friendships with these high-dimensional beings... And when they die, they can literally pass off these pacts/contracts with these beings to another individual. In most cases this is either their lead shamanic apprentice, or a family member in training for this type of path.

This system of belief and experience with entheogens and astral + spirt + higher dimensional activity, is prevalent all throughout South America, into Mexico, the carribean, and even further North.

I've just studied and trained quite a bit with them... and read anthropological writings on the subjects... So I just present all this as a regurgitation of what they teach... Again, I take it all with some grains of salt... I just enjoy studying magic, mythology, culture and beliefs from all over the world. It's interesting



-CL

I guess it depends on ones perception of these words. But there is a reversal of focus from ritual to drug in a large population.

Widderic, intention is everything! This could be considered the foremost lesson I learned from my entheogenic journey. Our own focussed willpower is the ultimate power, not any psychedelic substance. İn the absence of clear and focussed intention, these experiences have been destructive for me. Also, plain old prayer has the greatest power.