01/13/2024
THE ORIGINS OF KAMBO
“There once lived an indigenous shaman named Kampu, and as the legend goes, he was the village healer for the Kaxinawa tribe in Brazil. His people were sick. Instead of the happiness and vibrance they were accustomed to, they were afflicted with the unusual symptoms of lethargy, depression and weakness. Kampu needed to find a remedy to help them, so he drank a psychedelic brew of ayahuasca. He knew this visionary tea would help him access divine guidance, and that in the ceremony, Spirit would teach him which of the many medicines in the Amazon jungle to use, and how to harvest and prepare it.
Ayahuasca showed Kampu that tree frogs held the cure. He was shown how to harvest medicine from the amphibians by scraping the goo off their skin with a stick and then applying it to the human body by first making small, superficial burns in the skin, which would send the frog exudate coursing through the lymphatic system and purifying it, removing toxins via emesis. Ayahuasca showed him that this medicine would restore the vitality of his people, healing their bodies as well as their spirits. It would clear away parasites and remove any negative energies that were weighing on them – including panema, funk that causes bad luck, as well.
Kampu dutifully followed the instructions he was given, and it worked. The frog medicine healed his people, cleansing their bodies and restoring their joie de vivre. Because the remedy worked so well, its use spread to other tribes, and it became known as kambo, in his honor.
Kambo soon became more than just a curative medicine. The indigenous tribes who used it recognized the spiritual potency within it, especially its power for clearing the consciousness and raising your frequency, helping a person to embody the soul, or Higher Self. This, combined with the physical discomfort of the process, is why kambo is now a component of warrior initiations and shamanic activations. And, because kambo reliably heightens both one’s physical and metaphysical capacities, it is incorporated into pre-hunting rituals as well, because endurance and intuition are both highly useful assets worth sharpening ahead of long, difficult, multi-day tracking expeditions to capture animals in the bush.
Though it has been used for centuries in the Amazon, kambo medicine is only now emerging as a natural remedy in the United States and the rest of the world. Though still somewhat underground, kambo is legal. It is gaining esteem for its capacity as a detoxifier for people kicking drug addictions, as well as a treatment for depression and hard-to-treat illnesses such as Lyme disease and autoimmune disorders. And it is occasionally offered as an accompaniment to ayahuasca ceremonies, both as a cleanse to prepare a participant for the plant medicine or afterwards for integration purposes, as it can assist in clearing the physical and emotional baggage uncovered by ayahuasca.
The frog medicine made the leap across continents in large part due to the Matses tribe. The Matses are well-known in the kambo world; they are an indigenous group in Peru that were isolated in the jungle until very recently. They were one of the last tribes to be contacted by Western civilization in the late Twentieth Century, and the first known to provide kambo to a white person, who was the late journalist Peter Gorman, former editor of High Times magazine and author of Sapo In My Soul, among other books. (Kambo is sometimes called "Sapo," even though Sapo actually means toad in Spanish, because of translation hiccups between cultures).
Gorman, during his time in the Amazon, learned how to facilitate kambo treatments and became a mentor to aspiring practitioners in North America. Others followed in his footsteps, venturing to the jungles of Peru and Brazil to learn firsthand from tribal healers themselves.”
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— Excerpted from book “TRUST THE FLOW: Awakening with Kambo, Cannabis and Ayahuasca”.
