Huautla De Jiménez: A Journey into the Psyche of Self

Life seems short, especially when we begin to grasp the finite nature of our being as human. With all the learning opportunities, pains, victories, and transitions through endings to new beginnings, life always seems to offer what we need, especially when we are open and present to all that is being offered in each moment. When the two of us (Mike and Ash) came together a year and a half ago we found deeply resonate values about our time here on this planet and how we expand into new versions of ourselves in one moment to the next. We deeply agree that direct experience is the greatest teacher, and so we seek that.

Winter tends to begin early in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where we both reside. We decided to give room for our baby, Delics, to grow into itself and become its own entity. After an incredible year dosed with brilliant experiences and some deeply challenging opportunities for growth, we decided to book a one way flight to Mexico and spend time living out of a backpack to enjoy a fresh perspective through a lens which only occurs when we are able to get outside our normal routine and scenes.

Landing in Cancun, Mexico. The start of a month long, unplanned backpacking trip.

The one way ticket was representative of a trip without much of a plan. We loosely planned the route, but left lots of space to discover, and to shift plans as we felt called to sink into certain areas more than others. Ash had an aching desire to visit a small mountain town in Northern Oaxaca, between the borders of Puebla and Vera Cruz, to pay reverence to Maria Sabina and the Mazatec people. With careful considerations on how to arrive in Huautla de Jimènez, a town only talked about amongst very select pockets of culture, we began our trek to the pueblo magico. If you know, you know.

“Pueblo Magico” translates to ‘magical town’. It’s a title given to a town that holds unique mythical and mystical characteristics based on geography, cultural heritage, original architecture, and history. Many villages through Mexico apply every year to tote the title, and only a small handful have been selected. Huautla de Jimènez is a Pueblo Magico with much of its history rooted in indigenous Mazatec traditions. We came to know of this town the same way many people in the western world have, through Maria Sabina, a famed currenduro (healer) made popular in in the late 50s through the 60s because of her traditional Mazatec mushroom ceremony that gave birth to an interest in the psychedelic experience in the United States and Europe.

Mike was feeling resistance to the trek there and suggested that maybe we travel to Mexico City early and skip over the small Mazatec village, but lucky for us, Ash was adamant. None of the Bus routes made sense, and hours were spent getting burned out on details. Eventually, Ash said “screw it, let’s just rent a car and figure out how to get there on our own accord.”

When we left the city, it was just before sunset. The ride was dark, bumpy, and long. The drive itself, without stops, is 10 hours straight. At this rate, we were preparing ourselves to drive straight through the night and rest upon arrival. Traveling after dark in a foreign country comes with potential safety risks. Loose cattle, lack of street lights and other infrastructure, differences in driving customs, poorly maintained local roads, along with crime, tending to spike after dark, are all worth considering.

On the first mountain pass, we ended up parked on the highway for three hours while a freight truck’s cargo got cleared out of the road after an accident, making the drive a now 14 hour trek. We were both exhausted, and somehow simultaneously surrendered to the process of arrival. We traveled as far as we could that night and ended up sleeping in the car just before 3am. We woke up to the sunrise and an incredible view as we pulled out from a gravel mountain road pull off.

The morning view was well worth the slightly sketchy highway-side nap.

With only a few hours left in the drive, we had the light of the morning hours to soak up the incredible scenery as we weaved back and forth between the borders of Puebla and Oaxaca. Around this time, Mike’s phone died, and the charging port in the car would not charge the phone. We had a general direction of where to go but a “wrong” turn just short of Huautla took us to a remote mountain village that rewarded us with stunning cascades of fresh water.

Some time later, we arrived in Huautla de Jimènez, tired and hungry. We began to search for a place that we could charge the phone and come up with a plan for this place we had landed. It became quickly clear that not many tourists make the trek to visit this town in comparison to the other places we had visited in the previous weeks. There was no hotel infrastructure, nor obvious places for us to stay, or electricity in any of the “restaurants”, so we decided to wander by foot until we found something that felt in alignment.

As we slowly made our way over the last hill we thought possible to walk without rest, a man in a cowboy hat approached us with a bag of seeds as an offering. Between the two of us, we were able to assemble our growing Spanish vocabulary to communicate with our new friend. His name was Jorge. Jorge quickly invited us to his sisters home so we could use electricity to power Mike’s phone, a proceeded to take us to a hole in the wall restaurant to drink cacao and share our first meal of the day. The vividness of the mural enshrining the essence of Maria Sabina awakened a deep reverence for exactly where on the planet we were sitting.

The streets of Huautla de Jimènez

Lulu and Jorge invited us to stay with them during our visit to their mountain side town. We spent the next several days getting to know Jorge and his family, the nooks and crannies of Huautla, the building plans of Jorge’s land and his many visions. Many surprises were revealed to us about the lineage we were so blessed to spend time with on this trip.

After the first full nights rest in the families home, we woke to Jorge’s sister Lulu weaving beautiful, colorfully diverse threads through a temezcal dress next to the Christmas tree. She pulled out family photo albums and showed us books of photos of past times.

One of the albums revealed that Jorge and his siblings are surviving relatives of Doña Julia Julieta Casimiro, one of the most distinguished representatives of the millennia old Mazatec culture. Jorge proudly shared that his mother Julieta founded the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, with 12 other strongly rooted indigenous women from around the world. The global alliance of indigenous elders meet and travel with each other to share their practices, wisdom, and bring forth critical conversation on topics of environmental and human rights issues. Before she died, Julieta was known worldwide as the spiritual leader and healer rooted in the spirit of Niños Santos, or as we have come to know them in the west, “magic mushrooms”. There we were, by happenstance, sitting next to the daughter and son of the woman who represented Mazatec culture worldwide. We were in absolute awe.

It was an honor to be spending time with this family. Yet, looking around, there we were; two humans from a completely different culture - one of sheer privilege and astounding comfort, in a place that lacked even basic necessities. It was an emotional journey feeling the gravity of the juxtaposition, and we also realized that letting go of our plans and allowing ourselves to arrive just as we were allowed for this doorway of rare opportunity to open to us. An opportunity that changed both of our lives. The gratitude was coursing through our veins with charge.

Lulu’s rooftop view of the city.

On the second day we were welcomed in and offered to participate in psilocybin ceremony with Julieta Casimiros blood. The days leading up to this point were beyond what we would consider to be comfortable. Food was scarce, we both just wanted to take a shower that was warm, and the howling dogs and school bells outside of the windows left us sleeping an average of 4 hours per night. The day of the ceremony, Ash was so tired that she wanted to leave and just travel to Mexico City. There was a moment of breakdown. Tears were shed on Lulu’s rooftop for this pocket of the world, overlooked within the expanding globalization of our planet. We decided to head outside for a walk and consider if we still wanted to go through with ceremony in the midst of our exhaustion and desires to rest for a full night. As we headed down the winding road towards the center of town and began to converse on how to proceed, we ran into Jorge. We were supposed to be meeting Jorge in an hour, but he just so happened to have had showed up early. At that moment, we both simply accepted that we were moving forward with our participation in the ceremony.

The time had arrived to head to the space. We each carried our own banana leaf, full of fresh picked, psilocybin mushrooms, that Jorge foraged the day prior from the mountains. We made our way to the ceremony space having no idea of how it would look or feel. Is the space going to feel safe? While in an altered state of consciousness, questions like this are often asked. The concept of set and setting developed at Harvard in the 1960s and has become a staple for many people imbibing in plant medicine. When we arrived, the space looked extremely rugged and raw. It was basically an oversized shed with 12 foot tall ceilings made from only corrugated sheet metal pieces, half together by rusty nails. There were several holes in the ceiling and walls that looked like something that had been carved out by bullets. It wasn’t an ideal place setting for a psychedelic journey, to be frank, it was initially terrifying. Yet somehow, Jorge filled the room with an energy that gave us faith. He had built this with his own two hands, and he was very proud of it.

Jorge began to assemble an alter with flowers, fruits, and offerings of cacao and tea that we had added as our own personal ofrenda. He handed us two mugs, made of clay, cracked and worn with the lifetimes before ours. We were guided to drink the warm mug liquid. “Con calma”, Jorge repeated to us as he insisted we drink it in its entirety. Qué es? Ash asked. “Taranja”, Jorge answered. Not knowing if the fire that heated the water was enough to boil off any potential parasites from the water, we drank slowly, but completely. We later discovered that taranja is a fruit similar to grapefruit used as a slight sedative. Within the time that it took us to finish the tea, Jorge had completed the alter space.

We began to eat the mushrooms, one by one; our first solid food after fasting for days. The taste of deep earth and vast intelligence filled the palate. After we finished the entire banana leaf full, Jorge approached us with dried mushrooms as well, asking us to eat even more. It was communicated that we had a good amount, but he persisted, ensuring the journey with added potency.

Within moments, Jorge lit 12 candles, one by one, and began to recite traditional Mazatec prayer. He applied a crushed up plant called San Pedro (different from the cactus) to each of our forearms and top of the head for protection. Soon it was silent, the flame of the candles danced shadows around the room. Before long Mike felt an overwhelming gratitude for his parents and began to weep. Jorge looked at him and raised a closed fist … “fuerte” - strength. The experience began to take hold. We each laid back on the torn up mattress perched above a dirt floor and although we were together, we dove into our own individual psyches. To speak on our own individual experiences is quite lengthy, even after months of integration. If you are a close friend of ours reading this, you may have heard one of us talk about what we experienced during the trip. It was steeped in everything: Vivid visions accompanied by coded messages, feelings in the body that ranged from fear to bliss, deep connection with ourselves, with infinite divine energy… Sometimes words cannot fully capture the ineffable.

When we began to come back into our bodies and back into the space, nothing was quite the same… It’s hard to describe the felt difference, a lightness of being. From the time that we consumed the mushrooms to the moment we came out of the ceremony space and into the world was approximately 5 hours. Jorge suggested that we gather materials from the forest to build a Temazcal (the pre-hispanic indigenous equivalent of the Native American sweat lodge). It didn’t take long before we found ourselves wandering the mountain side gathering plants on a mission to collect what was needed to create a Temazcal from scratch. We gathered some of the materials that were along the mountainside and within the neighborhood, and also traveled far to the top of the mountain for others. We were delighted to witness one the most incredible sunsets of our time in Mexico, the reward for being engaged with what was being presented.

After a lifetime of a journey, we finally sat down to have our first meal in a couple days to share the first moments of a longer integration of a once in a lifetime journey. The cacao had never tasted so sweet. We walked the town for some time, observing the people, taking in the last moments of breath with this beautiful place. We came across a fruit stand and decided to sit and savor the newborn flavor of the mountains gifts. Although it had been a long day, full of emotions and activity, we carried a newfound clarity within us. We returned to Lulus to set a hammock and cozy blankets up on the roof to enjoy our last moments of this sacred town’s cool mountain breeze and hut peppered landscape.

After a restful night, we woke in the morning just before the sunrise. Our bags were already packed, anticipating the long journey to Mexico City. We had plans to see Jorge one last time as he wanted to offer us a Temazcal in the Mazatec tradition. When we arrived at his home, the sunrise was beginning to light the sky. The temporary Temazcal already had a fire burning, heating stones and pieces of broken terracotta. We gracefully accepted our final morning of medicine with Jorge. The following 45 minutes showered us with heat, song and prayer, and the rhythm of the previous nights collected plants pounding on our skin.

Emerging from the heat of the Temazcal into the cool mountain air brought a since of renewal, a true rebirth, and guided by the early morning light, we made our way down the mountain. The both of us were already missing this sweet little town and our newfound family that resided in its crevices.

The spirit of the mountain, the mushroom, and the Mazatec traveled onward within us and will forever reside deep in our bones. We continued on, forever change by the awe of each others courage, spontaneity, resourcefulness, and a profound amount of respect and trust in one another.

To this day we carry gratitude in our blood for this deeply profound experience. A beautiful teacher, a sacred reminder of the magic that exists when we allow the now to guide us.

Thank you Jorge, Lulu, Julieta, Huautla de Jimènez, and el spiritu del niños santos.

This experience will live with us for all of eternity.

te amamos