How beautifully the family is growing in Venezuela!

And how expansively traditional medicine is opening up within us!

A great blessing for us drinkers, who want to learn and grow. Drinking medicine is meeting the light of each one's heart, which is always shining.

A great responsibility for whoever, following their path, wishes to hold in their hands the solemn sacredness of a ceremony in which the medicine is raised and honored upon an altar.

We are not just handing little cups into someone else's hand. We are not just being a channel for someone else to heal. It is not just our name showing up on someone else's lips.

When we take on the leading of a ritual, we are committing to put all our strength, all our consciousness, all our mind and all our dedication into making it the best it can be in every sense. We are giving ourselves with our whole soul, knowing that the most important thing in our life is to do things right. We know that a mistake can cost a great deal, not only to our "reputation", but to the health of our companions, to the way they will come to see the medicine, and to our very commitment, which is the most sacred thing of all.

In sharing medicine we are sharing our energy, from the energy we express publicly to the energy we do not yet know. It is vital, then, that we develop impeccability by being undivided in our thoughts, words and deeds. Mastering, with sincerity, purity and humility, our most basic emotions and impulses as well as our deepest. There is no room for giving in to cravings, for disrespect, or for faltering before our own irresponsibility.

Leading a ceremony does not make us superior, does not give us the right to influence anyone's ideas or behavior. It gives us no privileges or advantages. It does not make us healers or masters. What's more, it takes away our right to shelter behind excuses, to manipulate our philosophies and to overstep the principles of healthy living together.

We drinkers who receive the medicine from someone's hands must be fully alert to what we are receiving, in so many respects. We must look at how correct, steady and graceful the one is who holds upon their spine and upon their feet the energy of the ceremony we are taking part in. We must demand, above all things, respect, cleanliness, seriousness and sincerity.

Long live the medicine in our country!

Long live our family, and may it keep on growing!