You make me feel like I can fly so high, elevation – Bono

Life doesn’t come naturally for me. It has been a survival run so far. My strong desire to live life instead of surviving it led me from Montana, where I had to say goodbye to the Continental Divide Trail, to Sedona, Arizona. Here I met Simon Scott, a master practitioner of Kambô. Kambo is a traditional spiritual medicine used by many tribes of the Amazon rainforest. It is a poison, collected from the Giant Monkey Tree frog and it is said to be a heart’s medicine with the ability to heal on all levels of our being.

Well, hello there buddy!

Kambô was discovered by a medicine man of an Amazon rainforest’ tribe. He dreamed to find a cure to heal his people and during an Ayahuasca ceremony he received a vision of a green frog. He was told how to find this animal, how to collect its secretion and how to work with it to heal his people. The curing of “panema” – what we in the West could call “depression”- is often kambô’s primary use.

As far as I can remember, I wake up every morning with an intense sense of anxiety. It feels like a weight that presses heavily on my chest and heart. I think this is why I’m such a shallow breather. This feeling keeps my heart compressed, prohibited to grow, and expand. The anxiety tells me that my heart should stay ‘small’. Over the years I’ve learned to take full and deep breaths, especially in the mornings, when the anxiety feels the strongest. And every morning I wake up, it is there, ubiquitous, omnipresent, lurking around in the dark corners of my soul. It tells me that I’m not good enough and that I ever won’t be. That I am unworthy of love. That I am an ugly, unlovable person, with too many feelings, who is just too intense and too overwhelming to be around.

When I heard about this unconventional medicine, it resonated so much with me I didn’t hesitate. I borrowed a friends car, drove two straight days and 1300 miles/2100 km to Sedona, Arizona. The ride was nauseating.  Before I left, I read testimonials describing the effects of Kambô, and the words circled inside my mind, “now I know how it feels like to die” and “a wave of electric nausea that takes over any control you have left in your body, some people black out, only to wake up for the next phase of fun.” While cruisin’ through the vast, desolated landscape, I noticed my anxiety levels hitting an unfamiliar new high. 

Utah skyline

That night, I parked at a rest area on the Idaho/Utah border on I-84. Exposed and not feeling entirely safe in the dark parking lot, I folded myself up like a little ball, tucked inside my down sleeping bag, in the back seat of my car. Just before sleep arrived, a last thought came to mind: If some lunatic decides to abduct me tonight, at least I won’t have to experience frog poison in my body...‘ Just sayin’. Of course, that didn’t happen and the next day I continued on my journey; my heart aching through my anxiety in eager anticipation for a remedy.