Kambo: The Jungle Vaccine
Kambo Frog in Peru
My journey with Kambo started in 2015 in Mexico on an ayahuasca retreat, before that it started as a seed planted by Teal Swan when I did a training with her in Costa Rica regarding her process of trauma healing, The Completion Process. She mentioned ayahuasca and kambo as very powerful healing modalities. I had some friends leaving her training to go to a kambo retreat so the medicine was already working on me from the time I heard of it. Then in Mexico it was offered on the last morning before a late night ayahuasca journey. I was told the kambo would help remove some layers of armor so that the other jungle medicine could go deeper later that evening.
I was scared to do it as I saw my friends doing it first and starting to purge. I didn’t know what the hell I was getting myself into but I was intrigued and I think that’s how medicine works, it starts healing you once you decide to partake, maybe days or weeks before you even take the medicine. I remember thinking that I was full of regret after doing kambo when it first hit my skin, I felt so bad and thought I would actually die. I think that’s part of the medicine, facing your own death but then surviving the experience.
After that first experience with the frog, I attended another retreat in Peru with the same ayahuasca facilitators and again did kambo on the last day. After these two experiences, I knew kambo was my medicine. Back then I was struggling with addiction, deeper than just chocolate and TV. I was drinking and smoking cigarettes and had a lot of healing to do that I was numbing from. I would take two steps forward and one back regularly. I would get drunk and smoke the night before an ashtanga yoga class. I would feel like crap from doing that and the kambo was helping, slowly. I started getting sessions from a local practitioner after arriving back home in Florida. From there, it led me to train with her teacher in the jungle in Peru. Even though my ayahuasca days were pretty much over, and my involvement with these facilitators of that medicine, kambo had entered my life and I am grateful for that. It is the medicine I took away from those experiences that is still with me today and I am started to share it with others after many years working with it on my own.
My training in kambo was shortly after this time in the jungle outside of Iquitos, Peru. It was a three-week training and I spent an extra week in Peru, a few days before and a few days after the training to acclimate and integrate my experiences. The training was very challenging as we hiked into our jungle location after a long river ride to get there on a traditional boat. We each stayed in screened huts that had holes in them and mosquito nets covering a mattress on the floor. The floor was slatted so at night the hut would fill with thousands of bugs. I would pee in a cup in my hut during the night and there would be hundreds of large carpenter ants floating in my cup in the morning. Snakes would fall from the grass hut. One morning when I got back from a morning training session, a skinned frog was on my porch stairs and then a snake fell from the roof, I’m guessing I interrupted its meal. Bathing in the river involved snakes slithering by and pooping in the outdoor composting toilet involved huge iguanas eating the poop whilst you did your business and rats climbing overhead. It was not for the weak! My teacher, Deyan, of Kambo Naturista said that during one training a guy left because he was missing fruit during the final week, some people couldn’t hack it.
The last week was the strictest diet, including unripe plantains for a meal that I would just chuck into the jungle, they were so tough and bland. The reason for the diet, which they call “dieta”, is so that kambo will be easy on your body while purging. It is also so that the jungle will start to approach you. By the end of the three weeks, monkeys were coming closer to us in camp. We were encouraged to not use any products that had any smell, so no toothpaste or soap or deodorant. I used DR. Bronners to wash my clothes and body in the river. Some people used nothing and it was obvious!
We learned how to self-apply kambo in the three weeks we were there which was the hardest part. It’s easy to let someone else do it for you but when you must burn yourself and then purge from poisoning yourself, it takes a certain bravery for this experience. It taught us to trust the medicine because some days we would go too light on applying it, some days way too strong but we learned that even in those moments, we would be okay. This is the first thing to learn when serving medicine, to know your medicine and to know the limits. The day that we caught the frogs from the high trees and then received fresh medicine was the biggest learning for me. I asked for two dots because fresh medicine is much stronger and I’ve never experienced anything like it. I experienced complete tetany in my hands and shaking body while just drooling from my mouth and trying to breathe. Kambo kicked my ass that day. I was having some interpersonal issues with some people in the group so maybe that is why I got a teaching that day! Kambo taught me to overcome my fears of many things on this trip, I just felt strong enough to deal with anything that came my way after kambo. I had never felt stronger, leaner, free of pain and clear minded as I did at the end of the training.
The Phyllomedusa Bi-Color Tree Frog is also called the Giant Monkey Tree Frog or Kambo. It’s called the Giant Monkey Frog because of the way it grabs the branches in the tall trees, like a monkey. It is also referred to as sapo or acatè. It is known as “the jungle vaccine”. Kambo is what the people call it in Portuguese. It is called the jungle vaccine because it’s believed to be a “cure all” in the jungle, whatever ails you, kambo can help. Many people I know were using kambo during covid instead of the western vaccines, in fact that type of pharmaceutical vaccine was considered a poison. Even though kambo is an actual poison! It’s funny how we see things from the perspective of our beliefs.
The frog is from the amazon jungle and lives in places like Brazil and Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuala and Panama. Scientists have tried to remove the frog from the jungle to keep it in captivity to reproduce the secretions or medicine but they do not make the medicine in captivity. The legend is that the Kaxinawa tribe was ill in the jungle and the shaman of the village, Kampu, took some ayahuasca after trying many things to heal his people and the medicine gave him a vison while bringing the frog to his hands and showed him how to use the medicine. After that he shared it with his tribe and they were healed. The medicine lives on inside the frogs for the people.
Unfortunately, the frogs need to be caught in the jungle, expressed for their medicine and then returned to the trees with minimal harm. They are tied to four sticks in the ground by each leg and then rubbed gently with a stick until they express the poison. It is an invasive process and I am certain the frogs would prefer to be left alone but humans have claimed their medicine as their own so the frogs are not safe from human intervention at this point. Just like cows, we will take what we want or deem necessary for our survival. We are a narcissistic species!
The frogs are green on top and white on the bottom to protect them from predators. The make a sound in the jungle that sounds like “bawk” and the tribe members call out to them with this sound to get them to make their call so they can be located. They don’t scare easily and jump so this is how they are able to be easily caught, except for they live very high up the trees so one must be able to climb very high to grab them. They are brought back to the village and kept until the morning in a cage and then after the secretions are expressed in the most gentle way possible, they are brought back to the spot where they were caught. Some express the medicine at night and leave them in the jungle as it’s believed they shouldn’t be exposed to sunlight during the day but I was trained to let them go the next morning.
The reason people are using the frog for medicine is their secretions or poison. They contain peptides that have many medicinal uses to help cleanse the body. Not only a physical cleanse but emotionally, energetically, mentally and spiritually. In the jungle, the tribe members often use the frog poison to treat what they call “panema”. Panema is a kind of malaise or depression that can take over someone. The community can tell that someone has panema when they don’t want to be social anymore.
Kambo is also used to treat mental illness and addiction, diseases like Lyme or cancer and it is used for strength. I use it often for body pain. When the peptides hit my lymphatic system, immediately my muscles relax. I can feel all of the built-up tension just melt away.
The way kambo is delivered is through a “dot” on the skin, also called “a gate”. This dot is made with an incense stick and is burned into the top two layers of skin. There is no blood. The skin is removed and then the medicine is placed in the open dot. This provides a direct line to the lymphatic system and the purge starts immediately. The neck and face start to get warm and red as the medicine reaches the heart and the heart starts to beat rapidly, as if you’ve been bitten by a poisonous snake. After a few minutes, a purge will come on in the form of sweating, crying, vomiting and maybe diarrhea. It lasts around twenty minutes and then subsides and you can rest now.
Kambo is considered a holistic medicine which treats exactly what the patient needs, the medicine knows energetically and will go to that area. If someone needs a digestive system purge, most certainly they will have a “top and bottom” purge or vomiting with diarrhea. If they need pain relief, that is what they will get, if they need to release emotions and cry then that will happen for them. Kambo will also attract positive energies, so if someone needs strength, it will give them that. Kambo is a natural antibiotic, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and analgesic so it can help treat many ailments and diseases.
One reason I started doing kambo and learned to apply it myself was to treat my own EBV (Epstein Barr Virus) which was a residual virus from having mono as a child. Some people can fight off the viral load but others that can’t, it keeps building in the system and can lead to more serious conditions which are neurological in nature. I was starting to have some neurological symptoms and pain and after my three-week training in kambo, all the symptoms were gone. The thing that interests me the most is the healing of the gut which can heal many brain diseases such as; Parkinson’s, dementia, MS and ALS. This suggests that if we can heal the gut (the second brain), we can heal the brain. This intrigues me!
On a deeper level, not just the physical, kambo can help clear other bodies such as; the mental body, emotional body, spiritual body and the energetic body. In the jungle, they call this Panema, or bad luck o bad energy. I think of depression, addiction or bad habits when I think of Panema. The matses tribe use kambo for hunting to give them strength and to help them with intuition, to find a big animal to hunt. They have been known to give it to their dogs for this same reason and even to their children for the reasons of clearing stomach viruses and illness.
There are some contraindications with kambo and people with certain health conditions cannot take the medicine or it could result in harm or even death. One should always be sure to work with an informed and trained practitioner in order to stay safe when working with this medicine as medications can also be a contraindication or other street drugs like 5meo-dmt, which is a toad medicine, not really a drug but is dangerous when used before kambo.
My time in Iquitos, Peru was very transformational. It was in 2019, before the pandemic and I was spiraling out with fear of different diseases. I was working with a western medical doctor at the time, who diagnosed me with EBV and also said I had other viruses that were affecting my neurological health and causing pain, numbness and brain fog like symptoms. I started to be very scared about dying during this time. I also started to fear that these viruses I had could worsen into diseases such as MS, dementia, etc. I wanted to take my health into my own hands and out of the hands of doctors in western medicine who seemingly only like to prescribe medication but do not look at the holistic view of the person.
Kambo encourages you to keep your vessel clean because after a purge, you realize all the toxins in your body are contributing to your decline or your longevity. Once your mind is clear, you don’t want to gunk up your lenses again. Of course, this soon fades and you get drawn back into your old habits and need another session with the frog, this is normal. We are human and part of being human in modern society is to numb out from the reality of our world. Very few people are 100% clean in what they are taking into their bodies. Maybe if they live in an isolated tribe and even then, they have their addictions, coca leaf comes to mind or mambé. This is because our modern world is not set up for human thriving, it is set up for capitalism, colonization and patriarchy. Many people fall victim to numbing out their emotions about these truths in a myriad of ways. This creates toxins in the gut, which translates to the brain, which translates to Panema and the viscous cycle continues. Kambo can help with this cycle to cleanse the body and bring the person back to wholeness so they can start again. It cleans all the bodies, the spiritual, mental and energetic ones too.