The Knowing: Sacred Songs and Near-Death Wisdom with Omar Lopez

Twenty years ago Darcy Kopas invited Robin Flynn on what he called a shamanic adventure in the Amazon. Before they ever reached the jungle, a maestro took them on a fourteen-day journey through the ancient sites of Peru’s north coast, drinking Huachuma among the ruins. One ceremony in the Chavín area cracked them open, and they have spent the two decades since unraveling it. That thread led them to Don Howard Lawler, their first elder in the Huachuma and mesa way, and eight years later to Don Oscar Miro-Quesada and the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition. Last year don Oscar entrusted them with the lineage’s central healing altar, the Altar Mayor. In this conversation Robin and Darcy explain what a mesa actually is: a sacred altar, a sigil, a portal, and a field holding at least 5,000 years of human relationship with Huachuma. They describe how the Andean traditions survived the Spanish conquest by hiding in plain sight, how mesa technology moved from Chavín through the coastal cultures and into the Andes, and how don Oscar learned from don Celso Rojas Palomino on the north coast and don Benito Corihuamán Vargas outside Cusco. The second half turns to ceremony. The nighttime mesada, held in as much darkness as possible, and the daytime walk at a sacred site. Why Huachuma and tobacco together are said to make the healing. Why fixation on vanquishing the dark keeps people stuck, and why every purification needs a florecimiento, a raising and a flowering, or people leave needing integration. Robin offers a teaching worth keeping: look but don’t stare. If you study the dark long enough, the dark begins to study you back. Along the way the conversation covers ayni and the despacho, the three worlds of the Andean cosmovision, the Dunning-Kruger effect in plant medicine circles, Hamid’s question about fire in nighttime ceremony, and the responsibility of every student to carry forward only what feels like pure medicine. Robin and Darcy will join Huachuma Wisdom as guest teachers in 2027. Robin Flynn and Darcy Kopas share the teachings of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, a living lineage of Peruvian shamanism carried by don Oscar Miro-Quesada. Sanctioned as teachers within the tradition, they are the lineage carriers of its central healing altar, the Altar Mayor, entrusted to them by don Oscar and his wife Cindy. Their first elder in the Wachuma and mesa way was don Howard Lawler. They met twenty years ago and went to Peru together the following winter. Robin had been welcomed into the old ceremonial ways at seventeen and has apprenticed with wisdom keepers of the Americas since 1999. Darcy found his path alone on a piece of wilderness land in British Columbia, then in the Amazon and the healing traditions of the Andes, and has walked the path of energy medicine and ceremony for more than three decades. Today they live at Star River Sanctuary, seventeen acres near Nelson, British Columbia, where they raise their family, train apprentices in the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition and Soul Power Medicine apprenticeships and tend the altar. They lead pilgrims to the Sacred Valley and Chavín de Huántar in the Peruvian Andes. Their work brings shamanism, new science and the body into one practice. They developed the Resource and Empowerment Model for people who serve others, host the Visionary Hearts podcast with a new Lightseed Activation each week, and guide the Way of Love, a membership for devoted practitioners who want what they have touched in ceremony to hold in daily life. As they put it, this is a daily practice, not a state you arrive at. CONNECT WITH ROBIN AND DARCY Visionary Hearts: https://www.visionaryhearts.com Way of Love membership: https://wayoflove.ca The Alchemy of Love, a free practice: https://wayoflove.ca/alchemy-of-love/ Star River Sanctuary: https://www.starriversanctuary.com Instagram: @wearevisionaryhearts Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearevisionaryhearts YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@visionary-heart-wisdom Email: visionaryhea

Stuart Preston came to all of this the hard way. Eleven years ago he was politically and personally conservative, the son of a DEA agent, convinced that drugs were bad and the people who used them were bad people. Then he lost his son Ian to suicide. Someone sent him an article saying that psilocybin and LSD can produce something like a dreamlike state, and Stuart thought: I want to dream about Ian. He did the research. He chose mushrooms. And in that first experience he did not find Ian, did not dream about Ian, and did not connect with Ian. He found something else instead, something a hardcore atheist would have laughed at the day before: that everything is connected, and the connection is love. In this conversation Stuart talks about turning that experience into comedy and then discovering that a comedy room cannot absorb the sentence “my son died by suicide,” which is how The Grief Trip became its own show. He talks about mushrooms as his primary medicine, picking them in Oregon with a woman who became a friend through shared loss, and three nights at the Peyote Way Church sipping something awful under the Milky Way thinking nothing was happening. He describes the strange message that arrived in a come down and got scribbled into a journal in a drugged out hand: it’s all sausage and peppers, man. Go with what’s real. The conversation ranges across why Stuart does mushrooms in complete silence and darkness, what it does to memory when music is tied to an experience, why different medicines seem to want different soundtracks, the difference between the Huachuma sold in the States and what grows in Peru, and a long, honest exchange about microdosing and integration where Stuart stakes out positions that not everyone will agree with. His line on integration, borrowed from an author he declines to name in case he gets it wrong, is the one that will start arguments: integration does not require the participation of another human. And he shares the single best piece of ceremony advice he ever received, from a friend who had just come back from weeks of alternating ayahuasca and San Pedro. Stop telling yourself to let go, she said. That carries expectations. Say I don’t know instead. Content note: this episode includes candid discussion of suicide loss, grief, and substance use. If you are struggling, you can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the United States. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists services by country. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention maintains resources specifically for people who have lost someone to suicide. The stories and experiences shared in this podcast should be considered fictional narratives for educational purposes only, not factual accounts or admissions. This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with qualified healthcare professionals before working with plant medicines and respect all local laws and regulations. The Peru retreats mentioned in our show notes are offered by Huachuma Works, a subsidiary of the Huachuma Foundation. Explore them at www.huachumaworks.com. Learn more at huachumafoundation.orgEmail us at [email protected] Wisdom, our six-month online gathering with special guest teachers: https://huachumafoundation.org/projects/wisdom/ GUEST INFORMATION Stuart Preston is a comedian, speaker, and author of The Grief Trip (https://thegrieftrip.com/the-grief-trip/). After losing his son, Ian, to suicide, his psychedelic experiences helped him learn to heal WITH grief. Through candid storytelling and humor, he shares that journey and how he found room for happiness alongside loss. CONNECT WITH STUART Everything in one place: beingstew.artInstagram: @beingstewThe Grief Trip book, available on Amazon and as a free PDF: https://thegrieftrip.com/the-grief-trip/

Our first conversation about Iboga, and it turned out to be a conversation about almost everything. Troy Valencia joins Hamid and Dani from a jungle finca in Costa Rica, where he and his wife Joaly Trinidad run Root and Wisdom and the Sacred Roots Foundation. Troy grew up in the foster system, chose chemistry as a college major specifically because it seemed like the field with the fewest emotions, and went to his first ayahuasca ceremony intending to disprove the whole thing. What happened instead sent him to Iboga, where a vision told him about a paternal lineage he had never known. A genetics test confirmed it. Two months later he sold everything he owned and moved to Costa Rica. Troy explains why he has slowly stopped calling Iboga a medicine, and offers a framing that lands hard: the same way repetition teaches us to drive a car without thinking, most of us have learned to suffer automatically. Iboga, in his experience, is something closer to a technology for the human brain that helps a person unlearn that. He walks through Don Miguel Ruiz’s teaching on the dream of the first, second, and third attention, and describes the work as removing the concrete from a structure of inherited beliefs so a person can build something of their own choosing. Troy talks about the difference between Iboga and ibogaine, why the safety reputation exists and where it comes from, what the hERG channel and the QT interval have to do with any of this, and whether extracting one alkaloid from a plant leaves the spirit behind. The conversation also covers the Bwiti of Gabon, the Sacred Roots Foundation’s work funding dental care, beekeeping, and land for a traditional school, and what Troy found when he sat with Huachuma for the first time two years ago. Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of childhood abuse, addiction, the loss of a parent, and serious illness. The stories and experiences shared in this podcast should be considered fictional narratives for educational purposes only, not factual accounts or admissions. This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with qualified healthcare professionals before working with plant medicines and respect all local laws and regulations. Learn more at huachumafoundation.org Email us at [email protected] retreats with Hamid: https://www.mineralshaman.com/retreat-to-sacred-valley/Huachuma Wisdom, our six-month online gathering with special guest teachers: https://huachumafoundation.org/6-month-course/ GUEST INFORMATION Troy Valencia is a modern-day Indigenous scholar-practitioner and esteemed teacher of Soteriology and Spirituality. Raised in the foster system, he overcame adversity through a collegiate basketball scholarship, which brought him to higher education, where he majored in Biology and Chemistry. He went on to earn a Master of Science in Analytical Chemistry, demonstrating his academic depth and rigor. His profound passion for the human experience then led him to attain a second Master of Arts in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and he is currently in the final year of his doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at California Southern University. Deeply connected to his Central Gabonese African roots, Troy is a two-time initiate of the Bwiti tradition, having been initiated through both the Fang and Misoko lineages, with the Misoko being considered one of the most preserved and disciplined lineages within the tradition. This ancestral connection forms the spiritual and cultural foundation of his work. Alongside his wife, Joaly Trinidad, Troy co-founded Root and Wisdom, one of the most respected Iboga retreat centers serving the Western world, located in Costa Rica, and operates Authentic Empowerment, an online-integration-based coaching platform. He is also a 2x author with his recent book Living Beyond the Mind: The End of Personal Suffering, a license

Dani Reardon and Hamid Jabbar sit down just the two of them to catch up on a full season in Peru: two retreats in the Sacred Valley, a pilgrimage to the ancient temple at Chavín de Huántar, one of the hardest ceremonies either of them has ever done at Laguna Churup, and Dani’s first diet with Huachuma. Dani opens with the story of her diet, which she describes as marrying the medicine and as the most radical act of self-love she has ever given herself. She shares what it was like to make the medicine by hand with Miguel, to drink it alone on the Huachuma garden the Foundation has been building, and to spend her days raking paths, singing to the cactus, and waiting for a sledgehammer that never came. Hamid offers context on the Spanish word dieta, the Shipibo tradition it comes from, and why dieting a master plant like Huachuma is so uncommon that there is almost nothing written about it. From there the conversation moves into cactus consciousness, the moment Dani heard the medicine thank her back, and whether Huachuma is learning the human condition the way an intelligence learns. Hamid and Dani then take listeners to Chavín, where a group of ten opened four altars in the middle of tourists, fireworks, and guard whistles, negotiated their way into an unlit chamber beneath the temple, and discovered what total silence and total darkness were built to do. Hamid shares the breakthrough he had there around fear and authority, rooted in a lifetime of being flagged, questioned, and watched, and what happened when a friend answered a guard’s whistle by singing louder. The episode closes with the origin of these journeys: a 2018 ceremony at Kinsa Cocha that made ayahuasca seem like children playing in a sandbox, a crying moment at the top of Apus Pachatusan, and the prayer that took five years to become the retreats that run today. Along the way there is a visit to Ingred’s extraordinary sanctuary near Chavín, thousands of pristine cactus planted over two decades, and one very undignified meow in a dark chamber that broke an entire group of meditators. This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with qualified healthcare professionals before working with plant medicines and respect all local laws and regulations. Please note: the Peru retreats discussed in this episode are offered by Hamid Jabbar, founder and chairman of the Huachuma Foundation, in partnership with the foundation to benefit its preservation efforts in Peru. Learn more at huachumafoundation.orgEmail us at [email protected] retreats with Hamid: https://www.mineralshaman.com/retreat-to-sacred-valley/Huachuma Wisdom, our six-month online gathering with special guest teachers: https://huachumafoundation.org/6-month-course/

Hamid Jabbar and Dani Reardon welcome Nathan Tinder, ceremonial guide, somatic practitioner, and devoted cultivator of sacred plants, to the Plant More Worry Less podcast for a conversation that winds through the high deserts of Utah, a New Jersey survival school, a “yurpee” by a creek, and a greenhouse full of cacti whispering their instructions. Nathan grew up in Salt Lake City searching for what was real, felt his inner compass pointing away from inherited certainties, and spent decades gathering clear metaphors from the wilderness. His path led him to Tom Brown’s Tracker School, to Earth skills, to the fire-making arts, and eventually to a bean bag at a festival where a foot and a half of raw San Pedro cactus switched something on that has never switched back. He has been growing, studying, and serving the medicine for more than two decades since. In this episode, Nathan walks through the philosophy of seed to ceremony, his sacred fire circles at Hummingbird Hearth, the difference between associative and dissociative plant medicines, the regenerative propagation code the plants gave him, and the quiet revolution of people all over the world who have answered the call to start growing. He also shares his approach to microdosing Huachuma, the practice of living cactus terrarium necklaces, what it means to ask a quantum question, and why he no longer considers himself the one doing the cultivating. Nathan Tinder is a ceremonial guide, somatic practitioner, and devoted cultivator of sacred plants whose path has been shaped by a deep relationship with Huachuma. As the steward of Hummingbird Hearth, Nathan embodies his philosophy of “seed to ceremony,” honoring the full lifecycle of the plant as both teacher and ally. His work bridges ancient traditions with modern integration, offering grounded, heart-centered pathways for transformation. Through ceremony, bodywork, and community fire circles, Nathan supports others in reconnecting with their own inner guidance, following vision, cultivating presence, and walking a path of integrity in right relation with all of life. Find Nathan and his work: Instagram: @cactivation www.nathantinder.com www.hummingbirdhearth.com EDUCATIONAL DISCLAIMER: The stories and experiences shared in this podcast should be considered fictional narratives for educational purposes only, not factual accounts or admissions. This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical or legal advice. Always consult with qualified healthcare professionals before working with plant medicines and respect all local laws and regulations. Insights from Nathan Tinder shared in this episode: * “That feeling in my back, just above my sacrum, is my internal compass. It helps me know which direction to choose and what stories are real to me or not.” * “The sacred quantum question that has driven my life and purpose is: what is real, and how can I gather clear metaphors? That makes it really easy to live because I know what I’m wanting to discover.” * “The fire is a creation story you get to do. There’s creation stories we get to read about, and then there’s creation stories we get to do.” * “I call mushrooms and ayahuasca dissociative psychedelics. They take me out of my body and into other realms. San Pedro is an associative psychedelic. It brings me into myself, into my center. I am choosing my own adventure. I am sovereign.” * “I am not cultivating this plant any longer. I am being grown. I am being cultivated. This plant is cultivating compassion in our community, in my family.” * “The more I sit with this plant and love it and admire its beauty, the more I feel loved and admired back. It is a direct, reciprocal, flowing relationship that I can feel.” * “Seven years from seed to ceremony. Seven years away from freedom, seven years away from the Garden of Eden, seven years away from self-sufficiency. That is what the plant said.” * “This journey started 21 years ago. When we have f