• Explores how to work ethically, skillfully, and responsibly with psychedelics and plant spirits
• Shares the author's transformative psychedelic experiences and how they helped him discover his life's purpose
• Provides shamanic practices to develop your capacity as a Wisdom Warrior, heal personal and collective trauma, and connect with infinite cosmic love
Taking us through his more than 50 years of immersion in psychedelic shamanism, Tom Soloway Pinkson shares profound Indigenous teachings, plant teacher wisdom, and his own transformative experiences on the psychedelic Wisdom Warrior path.
Pinkson shares his journey of awakening through childhood trauma to a revelatory connection with nature. He describes his mentorship with Indigenous medicine peoples around the world, including an eleven-year initiatory apprenticeship with Guadalupe de la Cruz, a renowned Huichol shaman. Through his experiences with death and dying and with LSD, peyote, and ayahuasca, he forged a cosmology based on the interconnectedness of all beings and dedicated to shifting a fear-based world to a love-based one.
Presenting a map for others to follow the Wisdom Warrior path of psychedelic shamanism, the author explores how to work ethically, skillfully, and responsibly with psychedelics and plant spirits. He also shares shamanic practices to develop your capacity to connect with the infinite cosmic love that is the essence of our being as well as shows how to restore the sacred in everyday life and discover your role in helping to heal and transform our world. Tom Soloway "tomás" Pinkson, Ph.D., is a transpersonal psychologist in private practice, ceremonial retreat leader, mentor, sacred storyteller, musician, and shamanic initiate. The founder of Wakan and A New Vision of Living, nonprofit organizations committed to restoring the sacred in daily life, he is the author of The Shamanic Wisdom of the Huichol and creator of the Traveling Cosmic Magic Mojo Medicine Show. He lives in Southern California. CHAPTER 1
THE SHATTERING
We need to change the lens by which we see the world.
Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning
My lens of perception and understanding was shattered two months before my fourth birthday, when my biological dad, Fred Irving Soloway, died at the young age of thirty-six. As a child, he had contracted rheumatic fever, which ravaged his heart. He fell ill again in 1937 while fighting for freedom and democracy against the fascism of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and his heart never recovered. My father's death shattered the expectations about life I had learned from the stories my mother read to me at bedtime: ". . . and they all lived happily ever after."
I did not know it then, but this loss, while a shocking introduction to the teaching of impermanence, initiated a journey that eventually led me to Indigenous spirituality, psychedelics, shamanism, and quantum physics.
As a youngster, I knew my dad was sick. I had carried medicine to him in his bed more than once, careful not to spill. However, I had no idea of the severity of his condition. I never suspected or feared he would die. Instead, I felt loved, safe, and cared for. Then suddenly, he was gone, taken away.
And so was my mother. No one told me where she was. Months later, I learned that just after my dad had died, my mother had entered the hospital for emergency thyroid surgery and was hospitalized for six weeks.
During that time, I was left adrift. My baby sister Ilsa and I were shuttled around New York City, moving from one of our seven aunties to another.
"Your father's gone on a long ocean voyage," an uncle told me.
But I knew this wasn't true. I knew somehow that my dad had died and would not be coming back. I remember feeling clearly yet another loss-loss of my trust in adults for telling me the truth. I felt totally alone. I am in this by myself, I thought. Shell-shocked and f
