When I was living in Mexico, it was at the behest of my mother to go and take care of the woman who is responsible for my birth. I was just out of undergraduate study, and instead of work I was to live with a woman who made her living selling truffles( P.Mexicana among them )and making pig food. She took me in as her apprentice for four years, until she passed away in her 70s on the exact day she had promised me when I first arrived there. I cannot call myself a mushroom shaman, for as she said the title of Shaman or healer is not given until after I have a son who finds a wife(normally it would be that if I have a son myself, but I am not a woman).
The Spiritual World:
To Alejandra, the world WAS spiritual. But the human mind is numb to the world that had purpose. She described the human body as an anchor, responsible for providing intellect and mastery over the physical world. Stones(mushroom sclerotia) are the means by which even a stupid young man can connect to the vision of ancestors, angels or energies(they are best described as genies, or the elves DMT visions allow for).
I learned that there were many kinds of spirits that inhabit the world at large, and many of the kinds that interact with human spirits are more common than popular Western belief would allow for. The role of a Shaman is to prepare themselves to act as a mediator between sickness, spirit and body.
Every shaman must find a guide, or a power that is their own. A manifest purpose given to them by the spirit their birth, birthright and deeds call down upon this. For Alejandra, this spirit was the grasshopper and for me it was the faces in the rocks. The power a loving human shaman gains is not in commanding spirits, as many Southern shaman practice(think Icaros, and also don't think I disrespect any Southern Shaman. In many ways I admire them.), but in attaining the vision and cooperation of similar souls through patient work and an open heart. Communion and blamelessness were the greatest virtues a shaman could have, and that communion is with every body from the bodies of children and ants, to the bodies of Christ and the sun.
The rituals:
There were a few different rituals I learned or witnessed, and they all did different things. There were the mundane rituals, for healing coughs or discovering cheating husbands. They often consisted of consulting oracles in the roots of corn, or flipping dominoes until one 'shouted' out the truth.
There were also the spiritual rituals that resemble aya ceremonies in some ways. Truffles would be prepared with tender care for months, or fruits would be imbued as they pin for weeks before harvest. One would endow the fungi with prayers or spirits of the land.
For instance I once imbued the a crop with the spirit of neighboring soil. When ingested, I saw the ground as an endless network of sleeping spirits. I could see great distances, and whisper to other shamans and my mother through dreams. Which leads me to my next topic.
Dreams and Mushroom spirit:
The major aspect of shamanism for Alejandra, and as she told me all other healers of her trade, was to unite the waking world with that of dreams in a communicative way so as to bridge the gap between spirit and human-spirit. One did this by seeking the desire-body of the Mushroom spirit. For me, he appeared as a friendly naked man with no eyes and no hair. His legs were rooted in the ground, attached to the network. He told me that he had hair, and that was what connected him to the dreams of others. So, in my case, I had to find the mushroom man's hair and follow the hair into the dreams of others.
For Alejandra, she would find the mushroom child's shoes and wash them off. As she washed the shoes, she would follow the dirty water into the ground and into the dreams of whoever shoe's the mushroom child had been wearing that day.
It requires upwards of 6g of mushrooms for me to enter this dreamstate trance and this process took me two years to learn. Alejandra had been doing it for at least thirty years.
Cultivation of Vision:
By far, the most important lesson Alejandra had taught me was the production and maintenance of spiritual vision. The vision that allows for one to see the natures of men and animals, the birthdays of plants and the presences of other spirits even without the help of the mushroom. This was cultivated through meditation, and shameless enthusiasm. It was not uncommon for us to wake up in the morning as the sun rises to tend the shed and shout our feelings to the dirt and the pigs as we walked. We would say things like, "MY SPIRIT IS A MYSTERY!" or "ONLY GOD REMEMBERED MY BIRTHDAY THIS YEAR!", literally anything our spirit spoke to us. This was an effort to treat our spirits as a true part of our intellect, and thus allow for us to approach spiritual matters as though they were intellect. This practice among others that would be a whole book's worth to write helped me manifest what I use English words to call, "spirit eyes".
During sleep, we would dream lucidly and use this time to actively and literally sew our dream tethers to our physical body, no matter the form they took in the dream. We would recite these processes in our mind all day, and then bring recite the processes to each other before sleep.
To conclude, I was given the task of carrying on her work and one day her title. But right now, I am still trying to earn a family. Until then, I practice in dreams and consult the mushroom spirit a few times a year. During those times, the mushroom spirit and all the spiritual teachers Alejandra had befriended preside over my progress and discuss things about being dead with me. Those are trip reports for another time, though.
Your love, our duty!