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hakimnoah · 7 years ago

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The end and the beginning

It’s early April, and I’ve been back in the United States for a month. When I last wrote, I was in the Southeast of Brazil staying with my friend, and visiting many different Daime points around the region. Since then much has changed, but I learned so much in the last portion of my trip that I want to share with you all. I wrote a summary of my final three weeks, and have pasted it below. Thank you all for following this blog and being a part of this journey with me, which has been transformative in so many ways. Grande abraço!

February 19th – March 12th, 2018

*Names changed for anonymity except public figures.

Leaving Acre was difficult, even though I had a week or so to adjust to being in the city after coming out of the jungle. My plane left at 3:30AM, and Rolando picked me up in Rio de Janeiro at 11:00AM. Weary from the journey yet excited to be with my friend, we went directly into the city so that I could buy a synthesizer to be able to play in the Daime works during this final part of the journey. It had been part of my dream for this trip that I would be able to come home with more practice under my belt playing the keyboard in the works. I hadn’t thought about it, but it also changes the way that I am received when traveling to different locations. If one arrives as a visitor (as opposed to a fardado –– initiated “uniformed” person), it is easier to go unnoticed depending on the church than if one arrives as a fardado. One step further, a fardado who is also a musician and knows the hymns well is allowed to enter into the community even easier. I found that when I arrived with my keyboard, often many more people would want to speak to me, and I was perceived as someone of more status in the community. This, of course, was not true everywhere––some communities were rather closed and hardly anyone seemed interested in anything more than an introduction.

When I first arrived in the Southeast, Rolando said that there wouldn’t be that many works in the upcoming weeks. Over the course of the next few days, I asked that he check in with people he knows and we found out that there was quite a lot going on––three different feitios (week-long ceremonies where the sacrament of Daime is made), as well as various other works in local points were set to take place. Over the course of the three weeks that I spent in the Southeast region after leaving Acre, I visited seven different points where Daime is served, each with its own flavor, history, and lineage. I spent the first three days adjusting to being outside of Acre, getting a feel for the culture in the Southeast region of Brazil. Rolando lives with his parents, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of Brazil (his dad worked for a major mining company), so my time here was comfortable yet bizarrely contrasted with life in the jungle. As I knew ahead of time, reverse culture-shock is often harder than culture-shock itself. On the third day, my friend Emily arrived. We had met in Mapiá and found out we were both headed to Rio de Janeiro. She is from L.A. and had just met the Daime in Mapiá (brave soul), and she asked if she could come along with me to get to know some other Daime churches where I was going. When she arrived at Rolando’s house, we went immediately to our first work which took place in Rio dos Ostros, about 1.5 hours North. Rolando had warned me that it wasn’t exactly his “galera” (crew), saying that the people there were kind of crazy and that he was already familiar with their antics. It was a birthday work for a member of their current, and we sang a selection of hymns from various hinarios. I played the keyboard, and was surprised to find that the whole current was overjoyed that we were there––over and over people were expressing gratitude and joy for the music, such that when we were leaving they all yelled out after us, “obrigado!” This experience was a huge a contrast to what Rolando had prepped me for, and I began to realize that I needed to tune into my own guidance about each location rather than relying on what he told me. Rolando has been part of these currents for over ten years, and has his own preconceptions about each group and each person because he has known them for a long time and has history with many individuals. It is true, he has seen many things that are less than ideal in terms of the way the works are conducted or the way people treat each other, but I began to see the way that those prior experiences color his present experience. This set the stage for a very profound healing which has taken place in me, related to non-judgement and being in a place of not-knowing, for I too have participated in this kind of preconception and judgement of the behavior of others in the Daime (and beyond).

This process of letting go of judgements culminated during my time at Rolando’s friends’ house in the mountains near Lumiar. We arrived to help out while they were in the middle of their house feitio, making the Daime that they would use as a household for the next few months. Jorge, Tália, and their one-year old son Leo live simply and close to nature, in a house that was previously owned by Baixinha. Baixinha was the matriarch/madrinha of Flor Da Montanha, a medium-sized Daime church also located near Lumiar. She was responsible for blending the Daime with Umbanda, another spiritual tradition from Brazil which comes from African roots and works with mediumship without the Daime. Umbandaime, as the mix came to be called, has now spread to the United States as well and mediumistic work has been incorporated into several of the ceremonies in the lineage of Padrinho Sebastião (such as the Cura, São Miguel, and Mesa Branca works). This house that Baixinha once lived in, now occupied by Jorge and Tália, holds a powerful energy of nature and freedom. Taking a short walk into the woods, one encounters a powerful cachoeira (waterfall) where Baixinha used to bathe every day. Close by is the terrerio where Umbandaime initiations take place. The house is nestled between two mountain ranges, and the climate there is cool and refreshing, even cold at night. It was here that I encountered the Daime in a completely new and different way than I had ever seen before.

When we arrived, the group of friends was seated around the fire where the Daime was cooking, talking and laughing and smoking a pito. We sat and enjoyed the company for a while, and as I talked to the folks who were there I perceived that while they may be a little bit nuts, they were very wise and in many ways aligned with my own understanding of the universe and the way that I want to be in the Daime. They spoke with ease and much wisdom about some of the difficulties I had been having in the Daime recently throughout my travels––the tendency toward rigidity, the way that the ego gets involved in people’s relationships to spirituality, the pressure to conform and behave in the way that is considered “correct” for that group. I shared from my own experiences and they completely understood because they had many similar experiences in their time in the Daime. Jorge and Tália were very close with Baixinha––Tália was the puxadora (lead singer who helps to start the hymns) for the church for years, and Jorge was one of the lead musicians. They loved Baixinha very much but when she made her passage in 2014, they began to see a lot of things happening in the church that didn’t feel right to them. Baixinha taught with a lot of joy, and she was very “rebellious” against those tendencies which I mentioned earlier especially around conformity and lack of self-expression. She was also very disciplined, but she was a trickster-teacher who would often play with or tease her afilhados in ways that would be hard to understand. Given the changes in the community, Jorge and Tália only go to the church occasionally, and they have begun their own work in their home where they can do things their own way. They call their feitio a “feitiso” to distinguish it from Daime, and they call their sacrament ayahuasca because they use a different ritual than the traditional way of making Daime.

(Above) Cooking ayahuasca at Jorge and Tália’s house.

After a while of sitting around the fire, people began to drink Daime whenever they felt moved to do so. This is common in feitios that take place in normal churches as well, as the Daime is open the whole time for whoever is participating in the feitio. All of a sudden, we had gotten out our instruments and we were beginning to sing some hymns. I wasn’t sure whether to drink Daime as I knew that we had planned to eat dinner soon, and I had bought a fish that was cooking on the fire nearby. After a while it appeared as though we wouldn’t be eating for a while, so I drank Daime. It was the first time that I was drinking the sacrament outside of an official Daime work. Within a little while, everyone was sitting around singing a selection of hymns from Jorge’s hinario, and we were well into the middle of a Cura work. It was very natural, and I felt totally safe and held even though I was in a situation that was very different than what I was used to. Prior to arriving at this point, if someone had told me that I would be at someone's house, everyone talking and joking, laughing and smoking, all while drinking Daime without even stopping beforehand for a prayer or official opening of the Daime work, I would have never believed them.

Even though I felt safe and held, I was aware of what is lost when the Daime is held in such a loose and unstructured way. Occasionally conversation would break out in between hymns, or people would be joking with each other in a teasing manner, to the effect that the profound healing that can come about during a Daime work was more difficult to attain. The next night we decided to hold a “Deita e Mira” (lie down and watch) wherein the participants drink a large amount of Daime, lie down and wait to see what the Daime has to show them. During these ceremonies they play a CD of sounds and songs recorded by an indigenous woman from Brazil who took the music of her tribe and created a type of modern concept album with a full orchestra. The work is beautiful but also very intense, and they put it on during Deita e Mira to push themselves to the limit with the Daime, evoking unpleasant sensations as well as pleasant ones. I was excited to try because I had never had an opportunity to really drink as much Daime as a I wanted, nor had I really ever had a full-on miração (strong vision where one is transported to another realm). We drank our first serving, and I began to have an intuition that the way in which things were being held didn’t feel good to me––the others were joking about trying to get as “pegadão” (essentially the equivalent of “messed up”) as possible. I knew that they all really respect and love the Daime. I knew the way that they hold their works is purposefully lax because they emphasize being able to be oneself and be free of pressure to conform. I knew that I was there to learn something about releasing control and the need to be “right,” yet something still felt wrong about my participation in the ceremony. After the first CD was over, I chose not to drink again because I was feeling bad about the consciousness with which the ceremony was being held. Still feeling the force of the Daime and therefore unable to sleep, I waited for hours while the second CD played on with nearly unbearable persistence, blaring uncomfortable sounds in a small room as we all laid on the floor.

In the wee hours of the morning, my friend Emily began to go through are very profound passage in her own work with the Daime. She was crying and speaking to her father who had passed away just a year earlier. Even though the Daime wasn't very strong anymore, I knew that I was being called to be a guardian for her. I gave her tissues, and she went outside. I put a candle outside with her so she could find her way back. Still unable to sleep, I sat in a chair and prayed. My mind began to wander, and as I was sitting there feeling upset and irritated that I had put myself in this situation, trying to decide why exactly the Deita e Mira wasn’t the “right” way to practice the Daime, I began to feel my heart opening. I began to cry as well, and I found myself letting go of my own self-judgement about doing things “the wrong way." I felt the profundity of what Emily was going through, and I remembered that the Daime is not about the ritual, or the trappings of the religion, but that if I truly believe in the being of this sacred tea then I can trust it to guide each of us on our own journey. I remembered the hymn, “se afrouxar o daime cura” (If you relax, the Daime heals), and I realized I had been holding myself so tightly and full of judgement that I hadn’t allowed the Daime to come into my body and be the force of healing that it wants to be. I didn't fully realize it in the moment, but this was the beginning of a healing that I was being prepared for during this whole trip in Brazil.

All of this occurred despite the fact that I had refused to drink more Daime when everyone else did because I didn't feel that it was being held in a sacred context. This was perhaps the greatest learning of all, that my prayer doesn't depend on those around me. I learned that if I hold myself firm in my own intention, and my own respect for the Daime and for myself, then it doesn't matter what the ritual is or whether we open the work in the traditional way. Being in Jorge and Tália's house, drinking Daime outside its religious context, I remembered how to have fun. I remembered how to laugh, how to allow myself to enjoy life and enjoy my spiritual path without having to deny myself pleasure for the sake of trying to fit into what I thought was the “right” way to go about things. This was exactly the healing that I had been asking for, as I had been struggling with my ego-attachment to knowing how things “should” be done, constantly seeking to understand the “right” way to practice the Daime. As I have written before, I have finally learned on this trip that there really is no “right” way––only that way which feels right to each of us in our own heart. This isn’t to say that there aren’t people and communities that drink the Daime with more or less degrees of sacred consciousness, or that everything is equal and if someone were to drink the Daime with an intention of having a drug experience would be the same as someone holding it as a sacrament. Still, I was letting go of a lot of the concepts I had created about what sacredness looks like, and what ingredients are needed for it to be present. Without even drinking the Daime, I could feel the way it was guiding me toward this profound healing, and how Emily had been placed on my path for this reason. She expressed that I had also been placed on her path because I helped to make her feel safe enough to go through that experience with the Daime and in the presence of others.

When we left Jorge and Tália’s house, they gave me about a liter of Daime as a gift for participating in the feitiso, and I realized that this Daime would continue to teach me throughout my completion of my senior project. The Daime itself has taught me so much, including how to speak Portuguese, how to play multiple musical instruments, and how to unearth more of my true self. I have done most of the work, but the Daime is a great friend who helps me along the way and shows me shortcuts on the path. Healing and self-growth which can otherwise take years can be accomplished sometimes in a single work, but the real growth takes place as we learn to integrate the teachings from the Daime into our daily life. With my newfound trust in the Daime and the embodied experience that my prayer is enough to consecrate without needing to know what the “right” way to do things is, I am leaving Brazil having received exactly the healing that I was praying for.

When I entered the Daime, I didn't know what the “right" way was, nor did I care. I was simply there to learn and go through my own experience and process. Yet as I continued along the path, I realized that not only did I love the Daime, but I was “good” at it. I had a capacity to learn the hymns quickly, my singing developed, I learned to play the maracá, I was firm in the works and was quickly able to dance and sing the whole time without needing to lie down. I felt a voracious thirst for more, to understand more about the history of the Daime, of where it comes from and what it is. I also had a sincere and deep desire to serve and to help my Godparents who were at the time really the only people who were able to hold the space of the works––they didn’t have much support as the group was still very small. Somewhere along the way, this sincere and humble desire to serve transformed into a desire to be “good” at something and to be recognized as such. And recognized I was––many people saw that I was developing in this way and began to see me in a certain light. On top of this, when I began to travel to other churches, I was oftentimes shocked to find certain things which I took for granted to be out of the ordinary at other churches. In many situations I was mistreated or spoken to harshly, or I wasn’t cared for in the same way when I was going through a difficult experience. Because of this, I to judge the way that others behaved and practiced. I began to think that I knew the “right way” that things were supposed to be done in the Daime, and I felt disappointed whenever I experienced something else. I would still travel to many places, as I felt called to do so as part of my mission in the Daime to bring a different energy and to just be who I am.

There was some truth to this feeling that I knew a better way––much of what I had learned at home was very good, about guardianship and making sure that every person there feels welcomed and respected, even needed for the current and for the well being of the group. All of this was and is very good, and I studied well and learned much about the Santo Daime itself––at least as much as can be learned without going to Brazil. But somewhere along the line, I developed an attitude of judgement toward others who were doing things I perceived to be lacking in consciousness or love. Over the course of three years, I moved farther toward wanting to hold a role of power in the community rather than being of service to a divine mission. It was this process that was reversed during the final weeks of my trip in Brazil.

I believe in some ways, the structure of the Daime lends itself to this kind of thinking––there are aspects of the tradition which when practiced as religion without spirit can become twisted into a form that is different than the way I believe it was intended. For example, the form of the Daime ritual is very specific––the salão (room) is set up in a specific way, the ritual is conducted in a certain order, the hymns are supposed to be sung in unison in the way that they were received. At first I tried constantly to learn this specific way of doing things, but I now know that literally every single point or church where Daime is served has their own interpretation and flavor. Within the path there exist lineages and different churches that align with different teachers who have their own way of doing things, but even within these lineages there is great variation in the culture and the way the works manifest. Ultimately, there really is no “correct" way in the Daime, there is only what each of us can do to follow our own guidance and intuition to the best of our ability. The Daime itself is a teacher with whom we commune directly––there is no intermediary between us and the divine. The Daime is the divine energy itself, a part of the divine which exists in all and primarily in each of us. The best saying that I heard while in Brazil was this: “Cada um de nós é uma igreja” (each of us is a church). Just as Jesus did not create Christianity, the Daime itself did not create the religion of the Daime. For me, the rituals and practices that Mestre Irineu received from his visions and communion with the divine feminine are guides, and beautiful guides at that. The works themselves create a potential for deep deep healing of all kinds of illness––spiritual and physical. Yet we must not mistake the map for the terrain, so to speak. Too often we get hung up on the specifics of the “doctrine” losing the spirit of love, joy, humility, and gentleness which was the foundation of Mestre’s teachings.

Leaving Jorge and Tália’s house after three days, we went straight to Flor da Montanha, the church founded by Baixinha and currently led by her husband Marcelo. The work was a Cura, and I was still full of joy, feeling renewed from the healing process that had just begun. The Cura is normally considered one of the more difficult works where we drink stronger Daime and sing hymns that are meant to bring us to more deep healing processes which aren’t always pleasant. My Madrinha calls it the “industrial-strength cleaner” of the doctrine, and it often is! Despite this reputation, I was full of so much joy throughout the work that I didn’t even stop smiling while I was crying from joy and gratitude or throwing up outside! I sang for Mestre Irineu, and I felt him with me the whole time giving me his blessing and encouraging me for I was on the right path. The Daime as he created it is is a path wherein the good student learns humility and trust in the divine, letting go of the need to know or be good at something in an ego-sense. He taught with joy and gentleness, and his discipline was primarily based in love without forcing. Even though I sensed a tiredness in the current during the Cura, I was able to rise above it and I felt my love and joy raising the vibration of the whole room. Those near me in the men’s line responded to it, and I knew that I was helping the current just by going through my process in this way.

(above) After the work at Flor da Montanha.

We stayed a few days in Lumiar at another friend’s house, resting and enjoying the opportunity to be in the mountains in the cool air away from the cities. I received Kambô from Ronaldo, another forest medicine that he is adept at applying which comes from the excretion of a poisonous frog. The patient gets seven small holes burned in their skin (usually on the upper arm for men and lower leg for women) and the poison is applied in small drops into each of the holes. As it rushes through the blood stream, the patient’s immune system responds by flooding itself with white bloods cells to stop the intrusion. It can be an intense experience, but it boosts ones’ immune system for up to a year afterwards. It was a good experience for me, and Ronaldo was the only person I knew who I trusted enough to apply the medicine. We’ll see if I get sick at all during the next few months! Our next stop was a seven-hour drive away in Minas Gerais. We were planning to sing a special hinario which is not normally sung in the Daime currents in our lineage of Padrinho Sebastião called O Ramalho (The Bouquet), and we arrived in the house of Seu Guilherme Grangeiro, the son of Francisco Grangeiro and grandson of Antonio Gomes (closest companion of Mestre Irineu). He is a master accordionist, and is a man of great simplicity and joy. He lives in Belo Horizonte with his wife, Carla. Below is an excerpt from my journal during my time in their house:

I am trying to hold tight to what my heart has learned about being without judgement, but it is hard here because Carla speaks with strong ideas about what the “right” way is in the doctrine. I feel really sensitive right now to this kind of energy, as I am so aware of how I used to participate in it. Carla and Guilherme are part of a church here which follows Centro Livre, which is a lineage which is very close to Alto Santo and the way that Mestre Irineu conducted his works. This lineage practices differently than the way most churches in the U.S. do, and many people who belong to churches in this lineage have a negative view of the changes that took place when the Daime expanded throughout the world and throughout Brazil. Carla speaks often of how she left CEFLURIS (lineage of Pad. Sebastião) and came to this line, which she considers better and more full of joy. This may be true, but the energy of superiority is challenging, makes my head hurt. I am now familiar with this kind of energy, it feels like being batted around in the Doctrine from one place to another, where each one has an idea of what the right way is. Its dogmatic, polemical, highly religious even in its rejection of religiosity. Human tendencies. Carla was trying to tell me that there is only one right way to pray which is the way Mestre taught with Pai Nosso and Ave Maria. Returning to my center, finding my heart again amidst the fray…

Speaking with Carla was difficult in these ways, but she also imparted some invaluable stories about Mestre Irineu and the way things were done in his community. I learned that in the beginning, there was a bar located literally across the street from the church, and many people in Mestre’s community would go there to drink even after the works. Mestre himself did not abstain from alcohol, which was part of the culture. He also smoked tobacco and used Rapé, a tobacco snuff that is still used by many people in the Daime. There came a time in his life, later in the doctrine’s history, where he instructed everyone in the community to begin to abstain from alcohol because people were becoming confused and drinking too much, but Carla said that not that many people listened to him. Mestre loved to enjoy himself and the main form of entertainment there was Forro––a kind of music played most commonly with an accordion. Everyone would dance and play live music, and there would be alcohol and all the trappings of a normal party in the caboclo culture within which the Daime was born. There were even events called Daime Forro, where the participants would drink Daime and dance to forro music! These stories were incredible to hear because they drastically changed my image of who Mestre Irineu was and what the Daime “truly is” at its core. I really took it in that it is ok to enjoy myself on this path, that I don't have to push myself into a box of what I think is the “right” way to be, and instead I can listen to my own intuition and prioritize the joy of being a human being as well as being a spiritual being. For in truth, they are the same thing! This doesn’t mean I am now going to become an alcoholic and smoke tobacco again, but it does mean that I am going to allow myself to do what feels right in the moment, to allow myself to have fun again instead of following rules which come from others and not from my own intuition about what is right for me. Usually my body doesn't agree with alcohol nor tobacco, and I don't think that will change much, but I have finally remembered how to find joy in my life and in the spiritual works of this path!

(above) Learning to play Franscisco’s accordion.

We had initially arrived to sing O Ramalho, but the work was cancelled due to a health issue in the family of the Madrinha. It appeared that we had driven seven hours only to find out there would be no work, but all of a sudden we heard about another work happening nearby through facebook! It was the birthday of Saturnino, son of Luiz Mendes and current leader of Fortaleza––the community that I visited first as soon as I arrived in Brazil. The church was a small point that was a cell of Fortaleza and followed in the lineage of CEFLI (Luiz Mendes). It was a dancing work, Farda Branca, which means it is meant to be more of a celebration than another kind of work like a Cura. I began the work dancing, and built up a really strong current in myself, beaming joy just as I had during the Cura in Flor da Montanha. I had a feeling that it would be better for me if I didn’t play a musical instrument so that I could continue in the healing process that had opened in the past week. When the intervalo arrived (break halfway through the hinario), I was feeling so good that I could have gone straight through without stopping. The hinario is 132 hymns and would go from 9PM until 7AM. During the intervalo, I went to sit down in the men’s changing room where all the men were gathered smoking a pito and conversing. For the first time, I found myself in the midst of a relatively heart-centered conversation where everyone was listening to each other and sharing their own experiences in the Daime. It was very beautiful, and something I hadn't experience in Brazil before especially amongst men. I was very touched and was even able to join complex topics of conversation quite easily as my Portuguese has advanced enormously during this trip. When the hinario began again, I sat down to play the piano and instantly became lost in the music, focusing on learning to play rather than being able to focus on the joy and beauty of what was going on around me. I am still learning how to do both––to hold a position of responsibility in the work such as being Guardian or playing an instrument, while still being in my own process of healing and remaining focused on the main event which is love for my brothers and sisters, myself, and the divine which is All That Is. This will come in time, however, and I know that a big part of it will happen during my every day life as I integrate these profound lessons at my home church and with my spiritual teacher Julie.

One of the final things that Ronaldo and I did during our time together was to go visit the Madrinha of one of the closest churches to where he lives in Saquarema. She lived a long time in Mapiá and is very close to Madrinha Rita and many others that form part of the core community and leadership in Mapiá. As we sat with her I was moved by an energy that I felt in her which I felt was well-aligned with love and truth together, and she spoke much about her own life and her time in the doctrine. I tried to record our conversation but she didn’t want to and said I would remember, which is true that I remember what is important but I forgot most of the specific stories that she told––some of which were very rich. One of the things that I do remember, however, was about mixing lineages in the Daime. I initiated the topic by saying that one of my questions for this trip was to try to understand whether there really is “one” thing called the Daime––or rather, whether there is a “right way” to practice the doctrine. For me, the answer has been a very clear “no,” but Maria answered “yes, absolutely.” As the conversation went on, she told various stories of bad experiences she had with different lineages mixing with the Daime. First she spoke about being in a work led be three indigenous men from Acre where they apparently called in an energy that was very confusing and difficult for her and a few others. The way she told this story appeared to me to be very judgmental and almost racist toward the indigenous practice of Ayahausca, as she imitated the songs they sang by making nonsensical noises that were supposed to sound like indigenous words. As she told the story, I firmed myself and refused to enter into a space of judgement toward her, understanding that I didn’t know where she was coming from or what her own background was like that made her have that experience with the indigenous ceremony. I knew that if it were me, I would not feel the same way or at least tell the story in such language. After telling a few stories about why it’s not ok to mix too much into the Daime, she then began to speak about her own experience with the lineage of Daime which blends Nyabinghi Rastafarianism into the Daime church nearby. She had felt a very strong guidance that it was a sacred path which had a connection to the past, with the story of Jews and Christians, and the first time she was in a ceremony where they drank Daime and sang songs of the Nyabinghi tradition, she was completely convinced that it had a place in the Daime. I noted the apparent irony and let the stories continue.

Finally, I spoke simply: “But Madrinha, where is the line? For do we not, as followers of the lineage of Padrinho Sebastião, also participate in mixing and altering the doctrine that was created by Mestre Irineu?” She could see where I was coming from, but responded by saying “I don't see so much of a difference between the doctrine of Padrinho Sebastião and that of Mestre Irineu.” Now, I even agree with most of what she was saying, for the spirit of it was that the energy of the work is the same, that the essence of the teachings is the same, and that if one holds that essence within the works, the healing can be profound. But if we let in all kinds of different energies and mixtures of other traditions without being conscious of the reason that we are doing so, without holding the discipline as well, the energy dissipates and the healing can’t arrive. I have experienced this firsthand in many different churches where the structure isn’t held properly and the discipline isn’t there. The ultimate goal is to balance love and truth, to find discipline and gentleness in equal parts with great love and humility, as Mestre Irineu taught. The reason I found our conversation so profound was that it clarified the central lesson of my trip here in Brazil––that each of us has our own path, lineage, and “church” to follow when it comes to the Daime. Every single one of us must find that which resonates in our own heart as the right way for us to follow, and it is perhaps even more important that each of us remain in that place without trying to tell others which way is the right way. Very often people arrive at a place where they believe their way is the right way––I know this place well as I arrived there and grabbed hold. It was only on this trip that I learned to let go, by seeing so many different places and beginning to understand that everyone has their own idea of what’s right. In this particular instance, Maria’s vision of what the Daime is meant to be aligns relatively closely with mine, as I could feel in the energy of what she was saying and in her energy as a healer and medium. As such it was perhaps even more interesting to me to hear her speak, as I could hear myself in her words in certain ways, and I could literally see the difference in what I had learned during the past few weeks. It was as if I was conversing with myself as I had arrived in Brazil, for if I had been there in the first few weeks of my trip speaking with her, I could have easily said practically the same words that came out of her mouth. And I still agree with most of them today––it's the way that I understand the Daime itself that has changed. Instead of trying to “understand” the Daime, I am now in a place of simply trying to be myself, within the Daime, within the place where I am wherever that may be. For me, my mission lies with my home church in Massachusetts and with my spiritual teacher Julie, and I know that everything I do comes from that mission. For another it may be different. The most important thing is the love, the gentleness, the joy that comes from being able to express oneself freely as wholly as possible, even within the apparently limiting structure of the church ritual. As one can tell, this lesson has been perhaps the most important thing I have learned throughout this trip, and it appears in almost all the stories that I have chosen to write down. I give thanks in profound humility and great joy that I have been able to go on this journey, to receive this healing, and to continue on my mission with the knowledge that I am on the right path, that I cannot make a mistake because none such mistake exists, and that I don't have to worry because I'm not the one in control!

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