Encounters with Power: Adventures and Misadventures on the Shamanic Path of Healing - José Luis Stevens 2017

An Encounter with the Dolphin Brujos
Action—Chief-Warrior

The cool reddish-brown water swirled all around me as I looked up at a peerless blue sky, white billowy storm clouds rising in the heat of the Amazon basin. A spectacular double rainbow arched across the sky, brilliant in its palette of exquisite colors, and I wondered if anything could quite match this outrageous display. I looked around for the boat carrying the rest of our party and found it behind me, starkly silhouetted against the reddening sky in the west. It was getting late but this was just too good to pass up: a swim with a pod of the famous pink river dolphins arcing out of the water all around us.

Suddenly I felt a hard bump on my thigh, obviously not one of the little fish skimming over my body and feeding on dead skin, but a more substantial creature. I heard my daughter, Anna, swimming nearby give a little cry as she, too, got a hard bump. There were several other people in the water as well, but only Lena, Anna, and I reported the bumps. It seemed to be a family affair.

Minutes later, I was crawling on board the boat, a difficult task since there was no ladder and it required hauling myself aboard by sheer strength. As I strained to climb on I felt a muscle pull in my back. The boat rocked from the turbulence created at the confluence of the Ucayali and Marañón rivers. Here, these vast rivers in Peru come together to form the Amazon River, the longest river in the world. As the boat headed back upstream along the Ucayali, I glanced at the sky and realized we were probably not going to make it back to our camp before dark. We were with our two-year study group who called themselves the Owls, and true to form we always ended up finishing our excursions in the dark. It became a kind of inside joke. To my knowledge none of us had brought flashlights or headlamps, although we should have. Sunset in the Amazon is a rapid affair because the sun goes straight down and darkness falls fast. Upstream, dark storm clouds revealed a curtain of rain rapidly approaching us. In moments we were inundated, and the boat was forced to pull off to the bank and wait out the deluge, a typical occurrence here in the jungle but one that lost us precious daylight. The rainy season was usually over by now, but this year it was lingering and everything on land was extremely muddy. Darkness soon fell, but someone in our party had brought a headlamp, a stroke of good fortune because it guided us to shore.

With only a wee bit of light, we slid and stumbled back to our camp in Yarapa in our rain boots as clouds of mosquitos found and feasted on us. By this time my lower back was killing me and I realized I had seriously pulled something getting into the boat. I was in an amazing amount of pain. In one hour we planned to begin an intense ceremony with plant medicines, the third of four ceremonies in five nights. We had arrived in this remote area with our two-year shamanic study group to work with Enrique, Herlinda, and their assistant and son-in-law, Davide, whom we had imported to this non-Shipibo area of the jungle. There were twenty-two of us inside a big, beautiful maloka, a round ceremonial hut designed for such use. I rigged up a hammock because my back hurt a lot and I knew I could not sit on the floor all night. We took the medicine and shortly I realized what had happened in the river that afternoon. We’d had an encounter with brujos (sorcerers), the pink river dolphins of lore.

Now, you are probably wondering how a cute pink river dolphin could possibly be a sorcerer and that is what I thought too, something that led me to be very careless. In the Amazon, the pink river dolphins that tourists love to see are both revered and feared by the indigenous people who live along the river and fish its waters. There are many stories about young women having to be careful because the male dolphins occasionally come ashore and have their way with them. The older shamans all say that in the old days their ancestors used to go underwater to visit the dolphins and learn from their vast store of knowledge and power. Sometimes the human shamans would be gone for many days in the watery kingdom, learning to breathe underwater and navigate its vast reaches.

Paintings and artistic renderings of the Amazon region show pink dolphins with the bodies of men and the heads of dolphins conducting ceremonies and offering healings. I always thought this was mythology, the superstition of the jungle. Little did I realize what they were referring to until that day on the river and that night in ceremony.

When we arrived at the confluence of the rivers earlier that day to see the pink dolphins, we spotted a whole pod swimming all around us. I distinctly heard the call in my mind to take my clothes off and jump in the water with them, and I immediately did. However, only a few in our party followed my lead. Enrique, Herlinda, and Davide did not enter the water. They seemed to be concerned rather than lighthearted, as they usually were. But I failed to notice because I was having too much fun and was distracted by the sights and sounds of the river, the rainbows, the clouds, and the dolphins.

That evening as the medicine started taking effect, I began to feel the dolphins’ presence within me and it was quite overwhelming. I felt their power and the depth of their world, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were sorcerers and that I had strayed into their world and their influence. This perception terrified me. I did not feel their cuteness or their friendliness, but their raw power, as if I had just met Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, Don Juan Matus, and failed one of his tests.

During the ceremony that night I crawled over to where Enrique was sitting and spoke to him about my experience. In the dark I could feel him laughing at me and at the same time expressing concern for my difficulty. He told me that I had endangered myself by jumping into the water because the pink dolphins were very powerful and masters of their underwater world. He said he could see that I had not asked permission to enter the water. I explained to him that I had felt their call and responded to it by entering the water. He laughed and said the dolphins were known as tricksters and they just wanted to test me to see if I would ask permission after being called. Since I didn’t, they came up and struck me in the water, as they did Anna and Lena. That blow, Enrique said, was a jolt of energy that would go in the direction I aimed it. Another test! If I had been more prepared, I could have used that jolt for greater power. Instead, I allowed it to create pain in my body, which I then blamed on them. This was foolish and was a good representation of what we all do when we do not take responsibility for our actions.

So as the power of the evening ceremony unfolded, I was first outraged. I felt the dolphins had tricked and then harmed me because I made an innocent mistake. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that they had done nothing harmful to me. They merely tested me and gave me the opportunity to hang myself or not. I saw that if I had any false personality, arrogance, martyrdom, or impatience, they would activate it and throw it in my face. I learned the hard way, but rapidly. I realized the dolphins could be very powerful teachers, though I was not free to work with them because I was working with other teachers, Enrique and Herlinda.

Enrique helped me that evening by singing a long song to the dolphins asking their forgiveness for my foolishness in entering their domain without permission. He then removed all their influence over me, which left me with mixed feelings. I had failed a test, but at the same time I had learned something very valuable. I flirted with power and managed to survive it, but according to Enrique the dolphins’ influence was incompatible with the songs and patterns that the Shipibos had been putting in my energy body all week. He told me the dolphins used water songs and the Shipibos used plant songs and I could not work with them both at the same time. That both relieved me and made me feel a little sad.

Later Herlinda told me that she avoided the dolphins because, while they are very powerful, their trickster teaching style made her feel uncomfortable. I have to admit that I felt the same. The trickster style leads to fast learning, but you have to have a pretty thick skin to tolerate it. I respond better to a respectful, loving style.

Lena said the dolphins showed her their mastery over the water systems of the world. They told her that all water is connected everywhere and because they live so intimately in their watery environment, they know exactly what is going on in all parts of the world. They revealed to her some of their profound and vast domain and showed her a little of what they know. She was duly impressed but not inclined to follow their brujo-style teaching methods. Being an Aquarian, she had a somewhat more benevolent experience with them.

Enrique later told me that the Shipibo see rainbows as extremely powerful, even dangerous at times, and they are quite careful when rainbows are in the sky. Having a double rainbow while we were in the water with the dolphins meant potentially more power and energy than we could deal with. Yet I was distracted by the beauty and my own silly notions of romantically swimming with the dolphins and failed to sense the power I was fooling with. Another shamanic lesson survived and learned.

POSTSCRIPT

Since this experience, I no longer see dolphins as cute entertainers. I see raw power and have great respect for what they know. That said, not all dolphins are sorcerers and many of them may employ another teaching style. The pink Amazon dolphins are brujos, just as there are certain locales on land where humans are brujos.

Regarding the rainbows, although I can still appreciate their great beauty, I now have much more respect for the power they represent and am much more conscious of my thoughts while a rainbow is visible in the sky. It is not just the Shipibo who regard rainbows as powerful. The Huichol also have great respect for them, and if one appears in the sky they immediately stop everything and pray with bowed heads.

At a recent retreat on our land in New Mexico during a power animal exercise with a large group, I was amazed at how many times dolphins came up as messengers. I realized that they are hanging around and making themselves available as information sources. They are powerful and good allies, but one must be careful in interacting with them. An ally is like a power tool. It can be wonderful and supportive, but it can also hurt you if you don’t handle it with care and respect. In the world of shamanism, respect is everything and cuteness is irrelevant, even a distraction.

EXERCISE

Next time you see a rainbow, stop and pay attention. What had you been contemplating just prior to encountering it? What do you need help with at this time? Compliment the great beauty of the rainbow and then put in your request for help. Keep track of what happens.