How Working With Kambo Taught Me the Sympathetic Nervous System, and Made Me a Better Paramedic

As I sit in a warm bathtub post one of the most intense Kambo ceremonies I’ve experienced to date. So intense I felt an entire sympathetic nervous system response that western medical would describe the symptoms as, “symptoms of shock.” These symptoms often mirrored similarly in my full blown panic attacks when my paranoia got the best of me when I was under state repression and social exile for the last 19 months. These symptoms mirror what western emergency medicine would consider someone in compensated shock.

Swear perfusely dripping everywhere. My blood shunting to my core. My heart beating so loud it’s all I can hear. Everything swelling and my entire body panicking. I can hear my brain going off and yelling, “wtf are you doing bro? We haven’t done this in 5 years.” And then there’s a quieter voice, that if I keep listening, reassures me, “you know this medicine. You have the tools. Breathe. You are held.”

As I’m breathing, I’m like oh okay. I can do this but then the full blown frog comes full force. I’m not purging. My throat feels closed. I’m sweating over my bowl that will hold my metabolic purge. I feel the medicine traveling down to my root chakra, my psoas and pelvic region, the source of all my pain and my focus of my iyengar yoga practice.

I feel it tickling at where that stuck “bad luck” was in my belly. I want it out. But I’m so tired.

After 19 months of hyper vigilance, narcissistic individual and community abuse, financial despair and my entire career as a paramedic put on hold, my nervous system is exhausted.

I beg for my dots to come off. I can’t. I’m tired. Please.

They come and then the purge, finally. Relief of this pressure that feels like black coal in the bottom of my belly finally came out.

But afterwards, the shivering and shaking and this unbelievable amount of cold just overtakes me. Makes sense since my practitioner reflected that my blood glucose level dropped significantly, which cold and clammy give them candy is the phrase we use to remember hypo vs hyperglycemia. The spoon of honey and then a spoon of sea moss is delivered and my body is just so grateful for the bees and the ocean for providing this nutrients.

But I can’t shake this cold. I ask my practitioner, can you please fill a tub? This is how I always regulate and come back to a regulated and centered nervous system. Where I’ve learned and taught myself this is safety. Little did I know I made an entire version of a womb for me to just sit in the raw vulnerability I felt after this ceremony.

With sage burning, Icaros and medicine songs playing, as I’m sitting in contemplation, I realize that my medicine work, especially with Kambo, since it is not a hallucinogenic, it is a poison from the frog in the Amazon forest. It intentionally induces a histamine and sympathetic nervous system response when the dots go on your raw skin.

In Sapo of my Soul, they talk about the medicine getting deep on an energetic level. The shamans of Kambo see that we have shelves in our bodies and things can intentionally our unintentional store themselves there and Kambo shakes the “bad luck” storage that is there. In my case the neurocolonization storage of trauma from the state and from community, that effected any sense of stability and my well-being so drastically.

And as I’m sitting here in the tub, I realize, why doesn’t the empire school systems teach anatomy and physiology beyond the snooze fest that was health class in school. Because if we could name what the empire is doing to us, neurocolonization, and how they effected our body processes, we wouldn’t tolerate or be complicit in empire anymore.

And what if A&P also included indigenous practices that teaches you how to attune and listen to these small messages and rhythms your body responds to in any given moment.

As I advanced my emergency medicine practice to be a paramedic, advanced life saving, and deepened my knowledge in the modernity perspective of medicine and the body, where I really understood the anatomy, physiology & pathophysiology, is where my somatic practice deepened even further.

Instead of being absolutely clueless on why the body is reacting in such ways, I can literally get down to the neurotransmitter and the hormones that activate that response. This information, this knowledge, also deepened my belief that we live in an conscious and intelligent world beyond the human being.

That everything we’ve been taught about our bodies and our internal and external experiences, has been a manipulation and a lie to continue to fill the pockets of the pedophile, Nazi billionaire class. We a mere objects and that’s how they teach us our world. We are a commodity. Material. A product.

Not this infinite world of rhythms and beats and energy that create homeostasis and if you can tap in, you can expand your capacity to hold and feel more

and when you hold and feel more, you build understanding and empathy. And when you can finally feel after fighting through a culture and cosmology of dysregulation, you realize that this is home.

but not only is this about my internal understanding of self and how I cope and thrive with cPTSD (not every day is thriving and surviving is good enough) but what was going on for my patients internally when they were in the back of ambulance.

in EMS, there’s 2 types of people: the ones who chose to be cruel, salty and bitter by not processing the trauma work we do and then ones who process our work and can show up with kindness and compassionate care for our patients.

While I’m not always perfect and can be the salty annoyed medic, because I understand trauma and its impact on my our nervous system, I can relate that to my patients and even others in my life. Although the hardest lesson while extending my empathetic factor, is that trauma is never an excuse for abuse or bad behavior.

But the mere fact that I can practice feeling my body react to medicines and ceremony and even trauma and how I come back to self, makes me a better human.

Although I sit in deep grief for the collective and myself that we have to go through such an obscene amount of trauma that is unnatural to remember who we are. To remember what home really means.