{"id":3675,"date":"2021-06-24T17:44:20","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T17:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ancestrina.com\/rape-me-and-ancestrina\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T06:54:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T11:54:15","slug":"transformation-rape-self-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ancestrina.com\/en\/transformation-rape-self-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"Rap\u00e9, Me and Ancestrina"},"content":{"rendered":"

My relationship with Rap\u00e9 did not begin with love. It began with fear, rejection and a fairly simple question: why would anyone want to go through this again?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I did not.<\/p>\n

For years, I avoided it.<\/p>\n

The first time<\/h2>\n

My first experience with Rap\u00e9 happened at my first yag\u00e9 ceremony, when I was a teenager.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

After explaining the yag\u00e9 ceremony, he took out a tepi and began blowing a powder into the nostrils of the people lining up before him.<\/p>\n

I approached him too.<\/p>\n

The application I did not want to repeat<\/h2>\n

The first application was brutal for me.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I received the second application, went to sit down and ended up vomiting.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 Rap\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Today I can understand that experience differently. At the time, I could not. At the time, it seemed reason enough to avoid it.<\/p>\n

For a long time, I preferred not to receive it<\/h2>\n

I continued exploring yag\u00e9 and other medicines, but I felt resistance to Rap\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Sometimes knowing that a ceremony included Rap\u00e9 was enough to make me not want to go.<\/p>\n

My story is not one in which a medicine appears, I love it, and everything changes immediately.<\/p>\n

Mine included rejection, distance and years in which Rap\u00e9 did not have a central place.<\/p>\n

Mexico and Parik\u00e1<\/h2>\n

Years later, after my mother’s death and during another period of searching, I encountered Rap\u00e9 again in Mexico.<\/p>\n

It was a cold night, in the hours before dawn. I received a preparation called Parik\u00e1.<\/p>\n

This time, the experience was completely different.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I did not think I had discovered a formula. But I knew that something in my relationship with Rap\u00e9 had just changed.<\/p>\n

I tried to repeat it and could not<\/h2>\n

When I returned home, I wanted to recreate that experience.<\/p>\n

It did not happen.<\/p>\n

That was a lesson too.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Parik\u00e1 had mattered. That did not mean I could summon the same experience every time I received it.<\/p>\n

Brazil and Peru: the relationship became more than my own<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In those settings, Rap\u00e9 stopped appearing to me only as an experience that made me feel a certain way.<\/p>\n

I also began to see it as a practice sustained by people, territories, plants, ways of preparing it and ways of understanding the world.<\/p>\n

That distinction became fundamental to Ancestrina.<\/p>\n

What changed did not happen in a single application<\/h2>\n

For years, I myself told this story in a more linear way, as though Rap\u00e9 had transformed my life almost on its own.<\/p>\n

I would not say that today.<\/p>\n

Rap\u00e9 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.<\/p>\n

It was present in moments of silence, observation, discomfort and questions that later had real consequences in my life.<\/p>\n

That feels more truthful than saying Rap\u00e9 did for me what I had to decide, do and sustain myself.<\/p>\n

Presence, decisions and everyday life<\/h2>\n

Over the years, I began to connect Rap\u00e9 with something that remains central to me: stepping out of automatic patterns.<\/p>\n

That does not mean every application produces awareness, or that a medicine can guarantee that we live in the present.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some decisions involved changing how I worked and how I related to my children, to others and to myself. Those decisions were mine.<\/p>\n

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 Rap\u00e9 automatically made me a better father. There were decisions and ways of relating that I needed to examine.<\/p>\n

That process was much larger than Rap\u00e9. Rap\u00e9 was part of it.<\/p>\n

From experience to Ancestrina<\/h2>\n

Ancestrina also grew out of a need to share questions I had asked myself.<\/p>\n

What is Rap\u00e9? 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?<\/p>\n

For a long time, Rap\u00e9 had a central place in the project because it had a central place in my own journey.<\/p>\n

Over the years, Ancestrina became broader. Today therapy, writing and other areas carry a weight they did not have before.<\/p>\n

That does not erase the history with Rap\u00e9. It gives it its place.<\/p>\n

A relationship that has also changed<\/h2>\n

The way I speak about Rap\u00e9 is not the same as it was years ago.<\/p>\n

Before, I could easily say that a preparation healed, cleansed, transformed or produced a particular effect.<\/p>\n

Today I prefer to make distinctions.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I do not need to diminish the experience to speak more precisely.<\/p>\n

El llamado del Rap\u00e9<\/h2>\n

In time, I felt that articles, conversations and scattered answers were no longer enough to tell the story of this relationship.<\/p>\n

That is how El llamado del Rap\u00e9<\/em> came into being.<\/p>\n

The book tells a much broader story: my first encounter, resistance, the medicines, journeys, Elders, practice and the questions that unfolded over the years.<\/p>\n

This article does not attempt to summarise it all. It is simply an introduction to the relationship between Rap\u00e9, my story and Ancestrina.<\/p>\n

What I think today<\/h2>\n

I do not believe Rap\u00e9 is necessary for transformation.<\/p>\n

I do not believe receiving it makes someone more aware, more spiritual or more profound.<\/p>\n

Nor will I deny the place it has had in my life just because I can now describe it more precisely.<\/p>\n

For me, it was and remains an ancestral medicine with which I have built an important relationship.<\/p>\n

A relationship that began with rejection, passed through fascination, became a practice and can now also hold questions, limits and changes of perspective.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that is what I most want to preserve: a living relationship, rather than a story of blind faith.<\/p>\n

Further reading<\/h2>\n