My relationship with Rapé did not begin with love. It began with fear, rejection and a fairly simple question: why would anyone want to go through this again?
Today it has an important place in my story and in Ancestrina’s story. But precisely for that reason, I do not want to tell it as though I knew, from the first application, what it would mean to me.
I did not.
For years, I avoided it.
The first time
My first experience with Rapé happened at my first yagé ceremony, when I was a teenager.
I came from a difficult childhood and a life in which I had learned very early to harden myself. I sought intense experiences, perhaps because feeling something was also a way out of that hardness.
There was something in that ceremony that I did not know well: respect. I particularly remember the presence of the Elder holding the space. I felt an admiration for him that I could not even name at the time.
After explaining the yagé ceremony, he took out a tepi and began blowing a powder into the nostrils of the people lining up before him.
I approached him too.
The application I did not want to repeat
The first application was brutal for me.
I felt intense pressure in my head, nausea, cold, heat and sweat. There was still the other nostril to go, and part of me wanted to run away.
I received the second application, went to sit down and ended up vomiting.
What came up first was anger. Anger at myself for having brought myself there, and anger at the man who had just put me through something I did not understand.
As the minutes passed, that anger began to change. Beneath it were pain, sadness, loneliness and a sense of abandonment that I had carried long before I knew Rapé.
Today I can understand that experience differently. At the time, I could not. At the time, it seemed reason enough to avoid it.
For a long time, I preferred not to receive it
I continued exploring yagé and other medicines, but I felt resistance to Rapé.
Sometimes knowing that a ceremony included Rapé was enough to make me not want to go.
My story is not one in which a medicine appears, I love it, and everything changes immediately.
Mine included rejection, distance and years in which Rapé did not have a central place.
Mexico and Pariká
Years later, after my mother’s death and during another period of searching, I encountered Rapé again in Mexico.
It was a cold night, in the hours before dawn. I received a preparation called Pariká.
This time, the experience was completely different.
I felt my mind becoming quiet. The cold no longer occupied all my attention, and a silent peace emerged, unlike what I remembered from my first encounters with this medicine.
I did not think I had discovered a formula. But I knew that something in my relationship with Rapé had just changed.
I tried to repeat it and could not
When I returned home, I wanted to recreate that experience.
It did not happen.
That was a lesson too.
For a while, I wanted to repeat that moment because I thought that using the same preparation could take me back to the same place. It did not. Over time, I understood that my state, the context, the stage of my life and the preparation were part of a much more complex relationship.
Pariká had mattered. That did not mean I could summon the same experience every time I received it.
Brazil and Peru: the relationship became more than my own
Later, I travelled to Brazil and Peru, where I spent time living with Indigenous communities. That journey also involved other ancestral medicines and seeking permission to facilitate Kambo.
In those settings, Rapé stopped appearing to me only as an experience that made me feel a certain way.
I also began to see it as a practice sustained by people, territories, plants, ways of preparing it and ways of understanding the world.
That distinction became fundamental to Ancestrina.
What changed did not happen in a single application
For years, I myself told this story in a more linear way, as though Rapé had transformed my life almost on its own.
I would not say that today.
Rapé has been an important ally in my journey, but it did not make my decisions, build my relationships or do the work that was mine to do.
It was present in moments of silence, observation, discomfort and questions that later had real consequences in my life.
That feels more truthful than saying Rapé did for me what I had to decide, do and sustain myself.
Presence, decisions and everyday life
Over the years, I began to connect Rapé with something that remains central to me: stepping out of automatic patterns.
That does not mean every application produces awareness, or that a medicine can guarantee that we live in the present.
It means that, in my experience, there were moments when pausing, noticing my body, silence and observation helped me see more clearly what I was doing with my life.
The decisions came afterwards. I began asking how much of what I did came from fear of other people’s judgement, and how much came from what I truly wanted to sustain.
Some decisions involved changing how I worked and how I related to my children, to others and to myself. Those decisions were mine.
With my children, being present stopped being an abstract idea: it meant paying attention to them and enjoying our time together. That does not mean the challenges disappeared or that Rapé automatically made me a better father. There were decisions and ways of relating that I needed to examine.
That process was much larger than Rapé. Rapé was part of it.
From experience to Ancestrina
Ancestrina also grew out of a need to share questions I had asked myself.
What is Rapé? How is it used? What distinguishes one preparation from another? What does receiving it within a tradition mean? Which parts of what we feel belong to our experience, and which can we state as facts?
For a long time, Rapé had a central place in the project because it had a central place in my own journey.
Over the years, Ancestrina became broader. Today therapy, writing and other areas carry a weight they did not have before.
That does not erase the history with Rapé. It gives it its place.
A relationship that has also changed
The way I speak about Rapé is not the same as it was years ago.
Before, I could easily say that a preparation healed, cleansed, transformed or produced a particular effect.
Today I prefer to make distinctions.
I can say what I experienced. I can speak about the spiritual meaning an experience had for me. I can attribute a tradition when I know where it comes from. And I can recognise that all of this is different from demonstrating a clinical or universal effect.
I do not need to diminish the experience to speak more precisely.
El llamado del Rapé
In time, I felt that articles, conversations and scattered answers were no longer enough to tell the story of this relationship.
That is how El llamado del Rapé came into being.
The book tells a much broader story: my first encounter, resistance, the medicines, journeys, Elders, practice and the questions that unfolded over the years.
This article does not attempt to summarise it all. It is simply an introduction to the relationship between Rapé, my story and Ancestrina.
What I think today
I do not believe Rapé is necessary for transformation.
I do not believe receiving it makes someone more aware, more spiritual or more profound.
Nor will I deny the place it has had in my life just because I can now describe it more precisely.
For me, it was and remains an ancestral medicine with which I have built an important relationship.
A relationship that began with rejection, passed through fascination, became a practice and can now also hold questions, limits and changes of perspective.
Perhaps that is what I most want to preserve: a living relationship, rather than a story of blind faith.
Further reading
Frequently asked questions
Was Víctor’s first experience with Rapé positive?
No. It was physically intense and led to rejection. For a time, he avoided Rapé and some ceremonies where he knew it would be present.
What changed the relationship with Rapé?
Encountering Pariká again in Mexico marked a turning point. Later journeys to Brazil and Peru broadened the relationship from personal experience to learning in Indigenous settings.
Does Víctor consider that Rapé transformed his life?
I consider it an important ally within a much broader process. Rapé was present, but I had to make and sustain the decisions and changes myself.
Did Ancestrina begin because of Rapé?
Rapé was one of the project’s important roots and had a central place for years. Today Ancestrina is broader, and Rapé remains an important, but not exclusive, part of its story.
Where is the full story?
In El llamado del Rapé, where Víctor explores his personal journey and relationship with this medicine in greater depth. The book’s Spanish title is retained here.
