Sunday, May 06, 2018

Sapo and food

Someone in a kambo page on FB recently noted that they were going to have their first encounter with frog medicine and they said they'd fasted for 12 hours, but wanted to know what else to do to prepare. I couldn't help be a wise guy and suggest two cups of coffee and an egg sandwich. Well, that threw some people off in a big way because in the Brazilian style of doing the medicine, which is called Kambo there, you normally drink a couple of liters of water after fasting, and then do the medicine with a concentration on vomiting and cleaning out the gut. Well, I had to explain myself, so I made an edit to my initial post suggesting that people look at a new post further down the page. Here is that post:
Explanation of gorman comment above: When I first used sapo and watched the Matses use sapo, it was still an epoch when few Matses had fields to speak of. They were serious hunters, aiming at bringing back about a kilo of meat per person per day. If a man had 4 wives and 20 children, that meant 25 kilos of meat, or about 60 kilos of animals hunted. That was not a monkey or a boar. It was 10 monkeys or two or three boars. Every day. So in my experience, the majority of sapo use occurred when a hunter's aim was a bit off. They would not have been able to explain it scientifically, but what they benefited most from in that regard was the combination of turning on the adrenal cortex and opening the arteries. The first allowed them an extra level of calm when hunting; the second provided more blood to their organs, sharpening their senses, including their eyesight, their sense of smell, their hearing,, all vital tools to hunting. Those elements also allowed them to run faster, longer, without tiring, and to stay out hunting longer without being thirsty or hungry. Vomiting when doing sapo was incidental at best. Yes, there was stomach cramping and a bit of bile might get eliminated, but no one in my experience ever did sapo for the purpose of stomach cleansing. That is apparently different among the Brazilian kambo users, where vomiting seems to be vital to the use of the medicine. So while I am being, or trying to be cute when I say to have "two cups of coffee, maybe an egg sandwich," what I really mean is that it never mattered to the Matses I knew. They simply did sapo when they wanted: Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of a meal, sometimes after a meal. At a session in my home yesterday, one fellow had eaten some fruit, one fellow had had several cups of Yerba mate' and I had had two cups of coffee (half decaf) when we decided to do sapo. We did, no one threw up, all was fantastic cleansing, lots of sweating out toxins through the pores of the skin, and then afterwards we did several shots of nü-nü each to 1) finish up sharpening our eyesight to incredible levels, and 2) to eliminate any residual "drag" from the sapo toxin release. That style is just different from the kambo style with a focus on the gut. So sorry I was a wise guy, I guess I just wanted to draw attention to another way of approaching the medicine. And no, to be honest, I do not recommend a huge meal before sapo. That becomes very painful and is utterly pointless.

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