San Pedro Cactus: Repair Relationships without Therapy

The San Pedro cactus as a sacred medicine is not nearly as famous as Ayahuasca or psilocybin even though its use can be traced back for thousands of years. Mescaline is a powerful and important sacred medicine that has a vital importance in the realm of relationships. It’s the kind of medicine that can change people’s lives forever in a positive way with just one dose. In this article, we discuss the use of San Pedro as well as other sacred medicines to heal relationships. It is particularly useful in situations where people want to be together, but can’t seem to stop themselves from saying the wrongs things in a fight. San Pedro is also extremely valuable as a tool to help two people work out their differences and do pragmatic problem solving on topics that normally erupt into a fight.

San Pedro: Heal a Broken Relationship without Therapy

While taking Ayahuasca is a very emotional and even physical experience, people tend to have a much more mental experience when they work with San Pedro. San Pedro can definitely help people release trauma as individuals, but when we administer the sacred medicines for people with trauma, we usually recommend that they begin the process with a psilocybin dieta (microdosing and macrodosing) unless there are health reasons why this should be avoided. Psilocybin is a heart-healer and trauma-release medicine. San Pedro, in contrast, helps people unfold their true thoughts and put words to what they’re really thinking and feeling. Ayahuasca is sometimes recommended for relationships as well, especially for those with cancer and diabetes in their history. And people with physical manifestations of disease (trauma that has taken root in the physical body) can also benefit from taking Kambo prior to Ayahuasca trips. In our experience though, San Pedro is ideal for situations involving poor dynamics in relationships.

People who are looking for a way to heal a broken relationship might benefit from beginning the process by taking psilocybin to release personal, individual trauma. Psilocybin is a plant teacher and it can teach people how to heal relationships on other planes of reality even when the other party isn’t quite ready to work on the relationship. It doesn’t help out with negative intentions toward other people in a person’s life (e.g., while you can take psilocybin to try to heal a relationship, it doesn’t work to take psilocybin to inflict pain on another person), but magic mushrooms can create space for healing, in a literal sense in terms of relational dynamics, where things that have become “stuck” are released so that they can move forward again. 

San Pedro is one of the most valuable sacred medicines that a person can take with the other party in the relationship to overcome issues that seem unresolveable. This is a sacred medicine that can allow people to experience both their own perspective and feelings and the other person’s perspective and feelings at the same time without conflict. We call this “the split screen” (also known as “empathy”) where you can see your thoughts and feel your feelings as a movie in your mind’s eye, but at the same time you can see the other person’s perspective and feelings too. 

For example, parents who are trying to figure out how to run their families most effectively and work through the challenges that they face in their families can take San Pedro to get past the fighting and the conflict that’s normally a part of their communication with each other. Couples who have serious issues like cheating, alcohol or drug abuse, or physical abuse in their relationship may wish to begin working at first with Ayahuasca, but then transition to work with San Pedro once they’ve released their personal trauma and they’re ready to begin re-connecting with the partner again in a healthy way. San Pedro gives people a very matter-of-fact kind of empathy toward others that allows one person to see another person’s perspective easily. It also changes the experience of time so that people feel like they can talk about their thoughts and feelings without being rushed.

Click here to buy psilocybin online.

How Long Does It Take to Heal a Broken Relationship Using San Pedro Cactus

A relationship that has been wounded by any kind of severe trauma, including trauma that was brought into the relationship from the distant past, takes time to heal. Most people who grew up in cultures that don’t regularly use or administer sacred medicines for healing should assume that it will take about 6 months to one year of regular, weekly or biweekly “trips” (with psilocybin, Ayahuasca, or San Pedro) with microdosing in between trips to heal a broken relationship and get back to baseline with the other party. In cases where couples, family members, or friends have had a serious falling-out with estrangement, it may take just a bit longer than a year to create enough space for the relationship to heal. The other party has to be willing and able to heal themselves enough to take a risk again on the relationship if there has been a period of estrangement. It should also be noted that when people begin to seriously work on themselves for the sake of a relationship, some very interesting things can occur.

In situations where the members of the relationship are all willing to work on repairing the damage that’s been done to the dynamic, it may take a lot less time than 1 year to begin to see and feel the progress. In fact, one psilocybin trip can often open up the airways and make it easier for people to communicate, but the poor dynamics in relationships are often built on various traumas that need to be released. Once the process of trauma release begins, people learn quickly to identify “triggers” and the feeling of being “triggered” and that can lead to a much greater sense of safety and stability in the relationship immediately.

San Pedro is a sacred medicine of empathy. It is an alternative to MDMA for PTSD that can also be used by individuals to help them step back from themselves and have empathy for themselves, but in my opinion, San Pedro really shines as a medicine that helps people work together. Indeed, it is an excellent MDMA alternative for couple’s therapy too. In situations where people can’t access MDMA to heal relationships, San Pedro is much more accessible and arguably a healthier option. 

In Mexico, we offer San Pedro as a medicine that’s safer than MDMA couples therapy. Both members of the couple take the San Pedro at the same time and then, when they’ve passed through the initial part of the trip that has to do with their own material and trauma, they can talk. As with MDMA for couples, San Pedro opens up the lines of communication to make topics less charged and much easier to work through.

MDMA for Couples Therapy vs. San Pedro / Mescaline

It can be hard for people to gain access to MDMA for PTSD, but accessing MDMA for couples therapy is even more difficult. Many couples try to overcome relationship issues with talk therapy but find that the impact of talk therapy is limited. As someone who graduated with a master’s degree in family psychology, I know the limitations of talk therapy first-hand. Without one or more of the sacred medicines, many people are at a loss to resolve deep-seated relationship issues.

My own marriage was no cake-walk. My husband John and I had a stillborn baby in the early part of our marriage. He had been divorced and had a child from a previous relationship. His ex-wife was a drug addict and my step-daughter was partially deaf and she suffered a great deal of trauma. She didn’t speak until she was 5 years old. John and I had severe financial issues. Our extended family members preyed on us emotionally and financially. Within this milieu of problems, I began my master’s degree in family psychology to try to resolve our problems. While completing the degree, I got pregnant again (and later miscarried). At one point, John and I were picked up by police for fighting in the streets with my daughter, Lydian on my hip as a 2 year old as I tried to “get away” from him during one of his violent outbursts.

The thing is, I love John and John loves me. It would have been excruciating for us to split up, but at times, it was excruciating to be together too. Our most basic marital issues had to wait to be resolved until we moved to Mexico when we began working with Ayahuasca, Sananga, Kambo, and Sapito for the first time.

My daughter Lydian grew up and, after we’d moved to Mexico, she met and fell in love with a young man named Naing Naing on a 4 day trip to Myanmar. Naing Naing was from the central part of the country and he belonged to a family that was very poor. He’d often starved and he was often beaten at school and also by his parents at home. But despite all this, he was still an amazing young man and my daughter instantly fell in love with him and knew he was The One. We were very blessed when we met Naing Naing that we’d already started working with the sacred medicines as a family because we had a long road ahead of us in terms of Naing Naing’s trauma and major problems that he’d present to Lydian over the course of the first 6 years of their marriage. Click here to read about Lydian and Naing Naing’s relationship, what trauma looks like as individuals and in relationships.

A lot of the agony and despair that Lydian and I experienced in our relationships with men who were severely broken by issues like sexual abuse, exposure to violence, a lack of safety and protection within the family and more, could have been avoided if we had had access to one or more of the sacred medicines. So many of the major issues that present themselves in relationships develop as a result of trauma exposure. We hold our ground to protect ourselves within relationships, but then, when we lose the person we love, we feel the full impact of what we’ve lost (when we’re sitting quietly in a room alone) and the ground that we’ve held in fights often doesn’t make sense or matter. Yet, presented again with the relationship and the other person in a similar situation, we find ourselves fighting and holding ground again. This kind of pattern has to do with trauma and we can pull from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) vocabulary to better explain and understand what’s happening in this kind of situation. Essentially, the fight is something that’s “triggered” and we go into a state of fight-or-flight where we act out something from the past with the partner. Both partners may be acting out a very different fundamental trauma within a context of a fight which explains why the fight never resolves. In this article, I explain “triggers” as a “bug in the code” of how our bodies are reacting to a present-tense situation by acting out something from the past that is totally unconscious. 

San Pedro offers a much more accessible MDMA couples therapy experience that has a very similar impact on relationships. In tribal societies that regularly work with mescaline, people who take San Pedro and Peyote (the other mescaline-containing cactus), announce the names of all previous lovers before they take the sacred medicine to avoid becoming ill on the trip. This highlights the relationship-orientation of both San Pedro and Peyote. 

Currently, San Pedro is easier to access than Peyote and they have different effects and produce a different experience. They should not be mixed! 

If you’re interested in doing MDMA couples therapy, but can’t access MDMA for one reason or another, contact us to work with San Pedro instead: info@medicinassagradas.com 

How to Repair Broken Relationship with Spouse

In actual practice at our facility near Mexico City, healing a relationship always involves a bit of work on oneself followed by work with the spouse in a sacred medicines context. The sacred medicines are wise so they know what to target when people have limited time to work on their relationships, but most people dedicate at least 5-7 days to their sacred medicines experience. People who can take time to work for a longer period such as a month or more while staying nearby in an AirBnB can get through considerably more material to take the stress-load off a relationship, but again, the sacred medicines are wise. So they give patients what they need in order to continue to move forward and make progress in the relationship.

The ideal is for people to spend 6 months doing full trips weekly or biweekly plus microdosing with psilocybin to release their personal, individual traumas. Doing a dieta with Ayahuasca (weekly or biweekly full doses plus 1-2 microdoses between sessions) for 2-3 months is also an option. Weekly or biweekly San Pedro trips over the course of 4 to 8 weeks can also yield powerful, lasting results for couples.

At the end of this initial period, some people discover that they have a long-form pattern of some kind that’s impeding their process of relationshiphealing. A long-form pattern like this might be something like an attachment disorder, or the experience of severe, ongoing neglect as a child. We call this problem a long-form pattern because it requires a sacred medicine experience that will disrupt the pattern of the long-form problem through the administration of a sacred medicine that can rework the entire pattern from beginning to end. Psilocybin does not work as well to overcome attachment disorders because often, people become resistant to the medicine the closer they get to the root of their problems. Psilocybin wears off within 4 to 6 hours and often, people need a medicine that will involve a trip that’s 12 or more hours long to get rid of an attachment disorder. Taking a medicine like San Pedro or Iboga is a better choice to overcome attachment disorder or other long-form patterns simply because these medicines produce longer trips that can shift the paradigm from beginning to end. We work with a group of people who administer Iboga at a separate facility in Mexico and they administer this medicine two times over the course of 7 days to shift the paradigm in a big way in terms of relationships and attachment. San Pedro is another paradigm-shifter. Set up a health coaching appointment to discuss which of the sacred medicines would be best for your particular situation.

Steps to Repair a Broken Relationship Using the Sacred Medicines

Healing a broken heart using the sacred medicines is the first step toward healing a relationship. You can heal a broken heart without therapy. In fact, talk therapy takes years to heal a broken heart while the sacred medicines can heal a broken heart within hours, days, or sometimes weeks, depending on the situation. 

1. Before you can be in a relationship with another person, you have to find meaning in the trauma that you’ve experienced at the heart-chakra level. In other words, you have to integrate the trauma that’s acting like an obstacle in your relationships. So we always begin the process of healing a broken heart with administration of one of the sacred medicines that is specifically valuable for releasing trauma. Psilocybin is an excellent choice for most people because it produces a short trip of only 4-6 hours. As such, psilocybin offers a good introduction to the sacred medicines and psychedelic states. Some people begin working with psilocybin through microdosing to become comfortable with this medicine and its various effects. The first psilocybin trip is done at a low, introductory dose unless the person taking the psilocybin is only planning to do 1 or 2 trips total. In that case, we start with a higher dose. In those with cancer, diabetes, or another serious health issue, or if the person taking the medicine is looking for someone who is missing or lost, or grieving the death of a spouse, Ayahuasca is often the best choice. Many people opt to buy their own psilocybin and work with it at home at first if they have access to this medicine in their home country.

2. Between trips, we recommend that the people who are trying to heal a relationship do microdosing with one of the sacred medicines to continue to keep thoughts open and feelings flowing.

3. Some people may have attachment disorders that make it hard for them to move forward until the disorder is addressed. Iboga or San Pedro could be used to overcome attachment disorder before moving on to the resolution of relationship issues with the other party.

4. After a person does a certain amount of work to heal a broken heart and overcome an attachment disorder that causes problems in relationships, it’s time to integrate the spouse into the work, if such a thing is possible. In those who have lost a spouse to death, it may be time to work with a sacred medicine to attempt to make a connection on a spiritual level to a Spirit Guide or to the dead spouse themselves. In couples where both parties are still living and both are interested in working on their relationship, San Pedro is the sacred medicine of choice.

5. After the intense work is done using the sacred medicine to heal a broken relationship (without therapy), we recommend that couples continue to do microdosing with psilocybin first and then later San Pedro, if they have access to these medicines in their country of residence. The use of Rapeh / Rápe, a form of tobacco mixed with other herbs, is available in many countries and it is a type of medicine that promotes peaceful communication between two parties. For those who don’t have access to magic mushrooms, Rapeh / Rápe, is another option.

How to Become a Better Partner

If you’re in a relationship where both parties love each other and desperately want to figure out how to be able to resolve problems and be together, then you have the right ingredients for a successful relationship. The sacred medicines can teach a person how to become a better partner without reading any books or taking any courses. These medicines teach us how to be a better spouse through direct personal experience that guides our behavior even after the trip ends.

If you want to make a major change in your own behavior quickly, the sacred medicines are the best place to start. Perhaps you find yourself constantly saying the wrong thing or engaging in addictive behaviors that hurt the family. Maybe you hate your own resistance to certain things or you’re sick of being fearful or sad all the time. Chances are, your partner has problems too, but if you really want to make yourself a better person for the sake of your relationship, the sacred medicines are the most powerful way to do this kind of work quickly. 

How to Fix Sexual Problems in a Marriage / Partnership

Sex is hard for people to discuss. And even when two people are comfortable talking about sex, sometimes talk won’t resolve the sexual issues. So what can you do to solve sexual problems in a relationship? Several of the sacred medicines work with sexual issues specifically. These include:

• Psilocybin
• San Pedro
• Ayahuasca

Sex is often complicated and people usually need more than one trip and sometimes more than one sacred medicine to overcome sexual dysfunction in a marriage / partnership, but the sacred medicines offer a way for people to work outside of their usual “triggers” to talk together or to simply release trauma related to sex. 

In our experience, San Pedro is one of the best sacred medicines for helping couples communicate about their sexual needs without fighting. This sacred medicine improves empathy such that both parties in the couple can be heard by the other.

How to Overcome Sex Addiction Using the Sacred Medicines

Sex addiction and attachment disorders are similar in terms of how they disrupt relationships. Essentially, sex addiction is an addiction to a certain type of attachment in intimate relationships, namely sexual intimacy, at the exclusion (or disruption) of other forms of intimacy. Sex addiction disrupts the normal patterns of intimacy in couples relationships and often, people who wish to get rid of sex addiction behaviors must work with this long-form pattern using one or all of the following (at separate times during separate trips):

• Iboga
• Ayahuasca
• San Pedro

When one partner in a relationship has a sex addiction, it can cause a lot of grief and trauma for both parties. The grief and trauma, in fact, is an extension of grief, trauma, anger, fear, and all of the other awful emotions that the sex addict experienced as a result of the trauma that ultimately caused the sex addiction in the first place. Most of the time, people don’t remember the trauma that caused their sex addiction consciously, though there are exceptions to this rule. In any case though, sex addiction is one of several of the most common causes of relationship issues that leads people to seek out the sacred medicines.

Though psilocybin can be extremely useful as a tool for releasing trauma that initially caused sex addiction, a lot of people need to work with other sacred medicines in addition to just psilocybin in order to overcome this problem.

How to Reconnect with an Estranged Child Using San Pedro and the Sacred Medicines

You can use a sacred medicine like San Pedro, Ayahuasca, or psilocybin to reconnect with an estranged child. Usually, the sacred medicines help to heal a relationship with an estranged child by creating space for healing to take place. The child has to be willing to risk something and try making a connection again with the parent in order for this effort to work, but often, parents begin to find the right words and the right spirit with which to communicate with the estranged child if they work with one or more of the sacred medicines.

The first time I took Ayahuasca, it was because I’d had a fight with Lydian. She was newly married and it was like I couldn’t control myself and what I was saying. I kept saying the wrong things in the wrong ways. Ayahuasca let me feel how it felt to be her. It was so painful! I ended that trip with the right words and the right spirit that allowed me to get back on good terms with her immediately.

In some cases, psilocybin or Ayahuasca might be a better choice rather than San Pedro to reconnect with an estranged child, but it depends on the situation.

How to Find a Lost Child 

Recently, a group of indigenous adults in the Amazon whose children were lost in the jungle after a plane crash, used Ayahuasca to find the missing children. They searched for days without any luck, but then decided to do Ayahuasca to try to find the missing children. Here’s a link to this news story. Estrangement is one thing, but if you’re looking for ways to find a missing child, consider Ayahuasca as a tool that you can use to access information on another plane of reality.

In fact, Lydian and I have used Ayahuasca to find the names of cures for different diseases that have been dubbed “incurable”. This is one of the common usages for Ayahuasca in the indigenous communities that regularly use this medicine. Ayahuasca is a sentient being that can speak to a person directly from their internal reality. It can be used to find out whether a missing child is dead or alive and it is one of the most important ways to find a lost child when police work is not successful.

How to Become a Better Parent

Are you having trouble communicating with an unruly teenager? Does your toddler run circles around you? If you’re really struggling with parenthood, boundaries, and establishing peace in your home, consider working with San Pedro, Ayahuasca, or psilocybin to make a big change quickly and become a better parent.

How to Reconnect with Parents

I once cut my parents and all of my extended family members out of my life for 4 years. At that time, it was the only thing I knew that I could do to protect myself from their toxic behaviors and words. At the end of the 4 year time period, I was beginning to feel like I maybe needed to reconnect, but they were still doing the same things that they’d always done. They were saying the same things they’d always say (though I never responded to any of it). So I wasn’t sure if I was ready. At that time, we were in Peru.

The end of our trip to Peru took shape in February and we decided at the last minute to go to Iquitos, a city where Ayahuasca is administered daily. Lydian was 13 years old and we were going to take Ayahuasca at a small retreat space about 2 hours down the Amazon River. When we arrived at the retreat center, there were some problems with the way things were presented to us and we decided to not do Ayahuasca out of concern for Lydian, who was still so young.

On the trip there, I had become preoccupied with my dad. I felt like our guide looked like my dad and I couldn’t get him off my mind even as we trekked through the forest for a part of the trip with the bugs and the heat and plenty of external stimulation.

The retreat operators let us sit in and watch an Ayahuasca ceremony rather than taking the Ayahuasca ourselves. It was truly amazing even though we didn’t drink any of the brew. The Ayahuascero sang icaros and, in the darkness, we all watched his shadowy shape change into various forms (e.g. old man, young man, animal, etc.). This was just one of the strange experiences we all shared while watching the people involved in the ceremony. At one point, a little pinpoint of light came through the talapa roof above as Lydi and I held hands and the light lit up our hands and nothing else in the room. John, Lydian, and I all experienced a “contact high” for the first time in our lives.

When we returned home, I “friended” all of my extended family members on Facebook. It just felt like it was time and I credit the Ayahuasca for opening me up at the right time. I also “friended” my parents. My mom saw the “friend request” come in because she was searching for me at that exact moment. My dad was going to have open heart surgery and he’d requested that she contact me to let me know. She couldn’t figure out how to contact me through Facebook though and she didn’t have my other contact information to get in touch with me. In the end, a member of the extended family sent me a message and told me about my dad’s surgery.  John and I booked a flight home and I saw my parents again for the first time in four years right after my dad returned home from surgery.

As a child, reconnecting with estranged parents is complicated especially if parents haven’t changed their behaviors. The whole point of disconnecting from parents is usually to break a toxic pattern in the relationship. The sacred medicines though, can help you make personal changes that are durable and lasting despite the fact that your parents haven’t changed. The sacred medicines help you make a paradigm shift that’s hard to undo versus just making rules for yourself like, “I’ll NEVER get into a fight like that with my mom again…” Using the sacred medicines made me feel like not engaging in the same way with my parents so as to avoid fights. I still get angry with them, but I don’t feel like I need for them to hear me in the same way. My needs have changed in a way that makes it possible for me to have a relationship with them again.