Things I Learned From Poisoning Myself: Part 1
By Belen Maluenda | April 21, 2020
I did my best to breathe deeply and remain calm as I felt the heat of the toxin make its way from the burns in my arm throughout my body. I broke into a cold sweat and began to shake when it reached my torso.
Minutes later, my eyes were bloodshot, face and neck swollen in Frog Face, as they called it. I felt the two liters of water I had just chugged rumble sickeningly in my stomach. I leaned forward over the bucket in front of me, my elbows shaking as my hands supported my weight on the floor.
Before long, the curandera’s melodic singing of the traditional Shipibo ceremonial music contrasted the not-so-harmonious sounds of me vomiting violently into the bucket.
Why am I doing this? I thought. More importantly, why am I willfully doing this for a second time?
Let me say this first. I didn’t work with Kambo out of mere curiosity or to check something off of my travel bucket list. I certainly didn’t subject my body to one of the world’s strongest non-lethal toxins for fun. There was a method to this madness, and I had done my homework.
Kambo: Probably The LEAST Enjoyable Sacred Medicine
Kambo is a toxin that is harmlessly collected from the Amazonian Kambo frog. It’s not the psychedelic stuff thrill-seeking people and monkeys lick off of a very different tree frog species for a trippy good time. Kambo is an excruciatingly uncomfortable, non-psychoactive traditional purgative medicine.
When the body receives the medicine through small burns on the skin, it’s shocked into crisis mode (fun fact: if you take it orally your brain will shut down and you’ll die). Every bodily system freaks out as it scrambles to push the toxin out in any way it can: sweat, tears, vomit, and maybe a trip to the bathroom. The frog’s poison is quickly expelled, along with a flood of other pathogens and toxins. Once the ordeal has finished power-washing the body and brain, the mind is left very, very sharp.
A Scatterbrain Seeks A Cure
Like many people who live in the US, I suffered from difficulty concentrating that I half-jokingly attributed to undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. I was supposed to be the conductor of my train of thought, but I often felt more like a passenger gazing out the window, along for the ride.
Let me be clear that I don’t think attention deficit disorders are made-up ailments. I just think that many people attribute their difficulty concentrating to a mental disorder that requires medication, rather than exploring other factors that could be causing brain fog.
Most people deal with multiple factors that make concentrating difficult, suffering the combined effects of things like insufficient sleep, lack of regular exercise, nutrient-poor diets, frequent alcohol consumption, and overstimulation from the constant consumption of media.
The possible after-effect of a sharpened mind was the reason I had sought out Kambo and subjected myself to the ceremonies. I was in Peru, halfway through my seven-month backpacking trip, and my usual trouble concentrating had worsened. I avoided my travel journal and procrastinated on work, feeling unmotivated by my lack of focus. Writing memories to preserve them and their lessons for my future self has always been a personal priority, so these difficulties really bothered me.
Knowing that the brain’s potential largely depends on the state of the body, I decided to experiment with resetting my body with Kambo to see how it affected my mind.
The last couple of times I purged into the bucket during the ceremonies, I tasted an acrid, chemical flavor, like I was ridding my body of the contents of a chemistry set. From what I had read, this was the concentrated taste of the additives in lengthy ingredient lists on packaged food, harmful substances in my beauty and hygiene products, and every other toxin my immune system had managed to filter to protect my brain and organs.
Beyond The Fog
The medicine wore off after about twenty-five minutes. I washed my mouth out with water and collapsed onto a mattress, still shivering. About half an hour later, I thanked the curandera and headed back to my hostel. I felt tired the rest of the day, but otherwise normal.
The next morning, however, I felt the aftereffects of the Kambo even more intensely than I had after the first ceremony. It was the reason I had gone back for round two. My mind was crystal clear, all mental chatter silent. I had laser focus as I worked on articles for my freelance work. More importantly, my personal journal writing flowed freely.
The analogies of the brain being a computer crossed my mind as I felt exhilarating power and consistent control over my own train of thought. I’ve always believed that the body and brain are the lens through which we perceive the world. I was amazed by how much clearer that lens could be.
Like many things that appear to be magic bullets, I was left with a problem. I couldn’t just pop back to the Peruvian Sacred Valley every time I needed to sharpen my mind. I couldn’t, wouldn’t rely on Kambo or any other external substance to give me this clarity. So how could I sustain this mental state? Clear clues came in the following days. This was the beginning of a transformative process for which the frog medicine had been a mere catalyst.
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