As the morning light of March rolls over Old Colorado City, a sacred frog medicine ceremony is being prepared on the second floor of a historic building.

In a serene, beautiful studio, used for yoga classes and plant medicine ceremonies, Andria Mascarenas, co-owner of Edenology Holistic Wellness, lays out the tools she’ll need to offer kambo, the secretions from the skin of the giant leaf frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor). The traditional healing ritual originated with the Indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest.

Arranged alongside two multihued woven mats are a large fan of turkey feathers, chakra-specific tuning forks, a rose spray, sage, a large glass bottle of water, a bucket lined with a plastic trash bag to catch the purge and the wooden stick covered with kambo.

Kambo is a peptide therapy, not a psychedelic like ayahuasca, though it is often used as a precursor to working with psychedelics. It lasts about 20 minutes, making it a less intense experience than ayahuasca, which can last at least four to six hours.

“The first time I sat with kambo it was beautiful,” Mascarenas said. “I couldn’t put into words what shifted, but something finally moved. It was like something had finally gotten out of my way. It’s a great medicine when you’re at a fork in the road, and you don’t know what direction to go.”

Kambo is also beneficial for gut and brain health, she says, and attracts people looking for relief from depression, anxiety and religious trauma.

“Who are feeling lost, craving more answers, craving for the veil to be lifted so they can peek through, because sometimes our ego shuts down things our brain can never access without the help of psychedelic medicine,” Mascarenas said. “When that veil is lifted, all this stuff comes flooding in, and you’re like, oh my god, I forgot about that.”

There are contraindications for kambo: pregnancy, breastfeeding, some heart conditions and some forms of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Those who take kambo also cannot be on antidepressants.

Bianca Rodriguez will receive kambo for the first time today, after taking ayahuasca at Edenology in December.

“It was life-changing,” she said. “If you’ve never done it, there’s no way to prepare for it. I long for healing and understanding and being better. All that is already within you, and I was shown that during the ayahuasca.”

It’s the alkaloids in the plant medicines, like kambo and ayahuasca, that work on the body and shift and clear panema, a term used by Indigenous Amazonian tribes for trapped emotional and spiritual illness, says Mascarenas, who completed a training course to become a kambo practitioner at Tribal Detox, a wellness center in Creede.

The two women sit, facing each other, as Mascarenas begins the ceremony, offering a blessing to Pachamama, a word translated as Mother Earth from the ancient Quechua language.

After dropping sananga — eye drops prepared from the roots and bark of shrubs in the Amazon rainforest — into Rodriguez’s eyes as a way to invite clarity, Mascarenas begins to administer kambo.

Rodriguez hopes the medicine will help her in much the same way ayahuasca did.

“I had such a release of dark energy that I didn’t know I was carrying,” she said. “I‘ve seen since then, I still have darkness in me I would like to release, as in negative ways of thinking we pick up along the way, things we don’t need to be hanging onto.”

To get the frog secretions, which Mascarenas scrapes from a stick into tiny, pale yellowish balls (“they look like little boogers,” she says with a laugh), into Rodriguez’s body, she must burn pinky finger tip-sized holes into her skin. The sensation feels like the start of a tattoo, Mascarenas says. The pinch lasts just a few seconds and removes only the top two layers of skin.

Rodriguez decides to have the burns on the outsides of her shoulders. There is no blood. Eventually, they’ll resemble the faint scars that decorate Mascarenas’ upper arms and around her ankles from the many times she’s taken kambo.

Mascarenas places the frog secretions in each of the holes.

“You then become flushed with heat. You feel fiery. You might feel your heart rate increase,” she said. “Then it takes a turn where you have flu-like symptoms. You’ll see my client purge. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s pretty common. And you can purge from the north end or the south end. The peptides are detoxifying the lymph system.”

Rodriguez sits cross-legged, patiently waiting for the unknown. Sure enough, her face begins to flush and get puffy. And then the medicine kicks in. At any point, if the sensations become too intense, she can ask Mascarenas to remove the secretions from the burns, and the symptoms will quickly subside.

But Rodriguez stays with the experience. It’s easy to see the effects of the medicine, as she begins to get antsy and shift her body, as if trying to get comfortable. She feels a little nauseous, she says, and her hands feel like they’re vibrating.

As she kneels, her head sinks toward the mat, and fat teardrops fall from her eyes. Mascarenas shakes a percussion instrument around her, and Rodriguez pulls over the bucket to get sick in. She doesn’t.

“Lean into your surrender,” Mascarenas says. “Fall into your spiral.”

Before the ceremony, the two women discussed what Rodriguez hoped to address today, much of it the difficulty of parenting her two children, ages 4 and 10.

For the next 15 minutes or so, she alternates between lying down and moaning to kneeling in front of the bucket. Finally, to help her vomit, Mascarenas uses a long wooden pipe shaped like a frog to blow rapé (pronounced rah-pay), a ceremonial tobacco snuff, into her nostrils, one at a time.

“It really moves stuck emotion,” Mascarenas said.

It works immediately, and Rodriguez hovers over the bucket for several minutes, purging the contents of her belly, and, she hopes, the symbolic parts of her she wants to let go of.

Mascarenas then removes the frog secretions from the burns in Rodriguez’s shoulders, and a calmness inhabits her body. She settles and quiets. She cries while Macarenas holds her from behind.

“You did good work,” she tells her. “Lots of releasing.”

Rodriguez is pleased with her experience; it helped her better connect to her children.

“When I was rolling around on the ground, it made me think of my youngest,” she said. “She’s very much like me, which is feisty. She doesn’t always do what she’s told. I saw when she cries and throws a fit, I was embodying that and felt what that was like. I feel really good. In the moment, it was harder than I thought it was going to be.”

Details

Kambo peptide therapy, Edenology Holistic Wellness, 2611 W. Colorado
Ave., Studio B, $120-$333; 719-662-3336, edenologyco.com/kambo-peptide-therapy