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Most people who have heard of a sound journey expect Tibetan singing bowls, crystal bowls, gongs etc. That particular lineage of healing sound has become very well known in recent decades. It is beautiful work.…

In thirty years of sitting with Ayahuasca, she has shown me things I could not have imagined and things I could not have forgotten. A vision received in ceremony is not like a dream. A…

By the time I was initiated as a Sangoma in Zululand, I had already been sitting with Ayahuasca for several years. Most people see these as two separate worlds. The African ancestral tradition on one…

Over a year of suffering, misdiagnosis, and failed treatments — and then seven days of Yawanawa tobacco paste. A personal account of healing cutaneous leishmaniasis the traditional way.

On the word "shaman," the difference between belief and knowing, and why it is the community's unity and focus, not the shaman alone, that produces healing.

Springs, South Africa  ·  1970s I was born in 1963 and grew up in a Christian household in South Africa during the 1960s and 70s. It wasn’t a particularly religious household in the traditional sense.…

In 2011, after an ayahuasca ceremony in the Maluti Mountains of central Southern Africa, I lay flat on the grass outside Sunmoon Lodge in Rustlers Valley. The sun was just rising over the valley. I…

A week-long ritual of devotion in Florianópolis, Brazil. The harvesting, the hammering, the cooking, the closing ceremony — and what it means to lovingly create something sacred.

He arrived at 4 a.m. on the grass outside the Sweat Lodge, just as Venus, the Morning Star, began to rise in the sky. We never made it back to the birthing pool.

I want to say that at the beginning, because it matters to the story. I am a Sangoma, someone initiated in the Zulu tradition of ancestral communication, and I am using one of the most…

In the late nineties, around 1998, I was living at Rustlers Valley. I had been having health problems, a parasite of some kind, and I was seeking guidance. Not far from where I lived was…

The great Zulu sangoma, storyteller, and guardian of ancient African knowledge. The most powerful person I have ever encountered — and what he taught me about listening.

Three attempts before the vision arrived. In a tipi in the Maluti Mountains, around a fire with 25 people, the Shipibo patterns came — and things were never the same again.

Arriving at Rustlers Valley on December 4, 1994, in a white VW Kombi with a border collie and a parrot. The community that would define 25 years of my life.

A doorway of light in the darkness. The instruments found their way home. After the fire, I was camping in my van. A friend had offered me space on their farmland outside Scarborough, on the…

I had no frame of reference, when Warrick handed me the cards that evening on the slopes of Table Mountain, after we had crawled out of that rough blanket lodge into the cool mountain air.…

The fire took everything. My photographic studio in Oranjezicht was gone, not in the dramatic sense of walls and roof, but in the quieter, more devastating way that a working life disappears. Equipment. Cameras. Archives.…

This story begins at Rustlers Valley, when I turned thirty-one in 1992. Before ayahuasca, before the tipi village, before everything — a photographer loses his studio to fire and finds himself drawn toward a new…