For decades prior to attending ayahuasca ceremonies, I’d been acutely aware of patterns of ancestral trauma in my family extending back at least 3 generations. But this knowledge became much more viscerally explicit in my very first ceremony. In that harrowing experience, I found myself purging out trauma that so clearly was not mine yet somehow inhabited my body.
My ceremony began with several rounds of intense vomiting accompanied by disturbing, crawling visual patterns. I felt waves of terror and confusion, through which a ceremony helper kindly accompanied me. Here’s part of I wrote in my journal the following day:
… Purging. “Thank you,” I whisper. Purging. “Thank you.” Purge hard, to the bottom. There’s nothing left. Wasted, exhausted.
The voice in my head says, <There’s more.>
I know. I just need a little rest. Please.
After I-don’t-know-how-long (seconds? minutes?), I’m ready. I say aloud, “Bring it on.” I’m shushed by the helper. I get on my hands and knees. I think I’m whispering: “This is really big. It’s big and gross and awful.”
A realization: this isn’t even mine, what’s coming out. Purge. Retch. Retch. Retch. I’m spent. I’m collapsed, weeping, my head at the bottom of my mat next to my purge bucket.
The voice in my head: <There’s a bit more.>
I know.
Helper: “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes.”...
I settle back on my mat… A prolonged review of my parents’ and extended family’s attachment traumas commences. A pattern of emotional and sexual predation of children. A first step into the terrain of deep healing.
From that night forward, a substantial portion of my multi-year ayahuasca odyssey centred on making contact with and healing ancestral trauma.
Healing familial lines
Within Indigenous and Indigenous-informed ayahuasca healing culture, curanderos/as undertake “healing familial lines” and “cleaning trauma from ancestral lines” as central tasks. To achieve this, they work in collaboration with ayahuasca and the other plants they have dieted.
For years, I’d longed to understand more about how the Indigenous and Western curandero/as whose ceremonies I’d attended conceptualized ancestral trauma. I was especially curious about mechanisms of transmission, and their approaches to healing it.
Eventually, I came to appreciate that there is a depth of knowledge about healing that practitioners (particularly Indigenous) carefully safeguard and do not readily share. I understand this to be for several reasons, including misinterpretation, confusion, and ongoing risks of knowledge extraction and cultural piracy.
Then, in late 2025, I encountered the concept of el bulto in Trabajar con las Plantas que Tienen Madres: Diálogos con un Onanya Shipibo, a book co-authored by Shipibo onanya1 José López Sánchez.
After years of attending ayahuasca ceremonies, there was an immediate recognition, a “felt click” within me, that this was the conceptual frame I’d been waiting for. Understanding now how strenuously this knowledge is protected, I find Maestro José’s book to be an act of extraordinary generosity.
Ancestral trauma & el bulto2
José describes el bulto (the “bundle” or “lump”) as something “stuck” that is carried by, or attached to, a person. Unresolved or uncleansed trauma forms a type of bulto that “sickens” and undermines the possibility of a peaceful life3. El bulto is relational and transmissible, developing across generations. It’s “maintained within the negative dynamics that can inhabit a ‘family body’” (p. 115). Interactions with other people and their bultos feed, activate, or re-activate it. As such, el bulto operates simultaneously as an image, diagnosis, cause, and socio-historical theory.
José explains:
These intergenerational traumas make us think that perhaps for many generations there hasn’t been anyone around who knows how to look at this, who knows how to cleanse these traumas. And that’s how they become [bultos] (p. 131).
There are “active” and “inactive” bultos, where the active ones are often defended by “guardians.” If I understand correctly, there is more than one type of guardian, and more than one way a guardian comes to protect a bulto. In some instances, the person themself may serve as the guardian of their own bulto, not allowing it to be cleaned. As José notes:
What you need to understand is the value the person places on that bulto. The attachment one has to the bulto (p. 130)
For me, the idea of el bulto resonated deeply with my experiences in ceremony of encountering trauma-related material that clearly predated my birth. These burdens, these lumps, bundles, or “accumulation[s] of energy that one ‘carries’ in one’s life and body” (p. 102) have felt as though they do not belong in me.
During ceremonies, I’ve experienced curanderos/as removing bultos from me through energetic surgery, cleaning dark material from my body, or engaging in a tug-of-war with dark energy. My body has also simply purged out bultos through yawning, sighing, belching, vomiting, shaking, (and yes, pooping), in response to the icaros4. (I have a story about a Peruvian curandero removing something from me that I can only describe as demonic, but I will save that for another writing.)
El bulto feels alive to me in a way that I’ve not experienced with Western perspectives on intergenerational trauma. It’s helped clarify what curanderos/as mean when they say they are healing familial lines.
How does the curandero/a work with bultos?
[M]y only job is to clean that bulto… The main point here is to cleanse and align the bulto. And it’s not easy ~ José López Sánchez (p. 128)
A primary task of the curandero/a is to cleanse and align bultos by employing icaros. To do this, the healer, in their ayahuasca-induced visionary state, literally enters into the patient’s inner world. Singing an icaro, they discover what the patient is experiencing, immersing themself in the person’s emotions.
Within this process, José describes visibly seeing the person’s difficulties:
[Y]ou go in, and then you start to feel how that person feels… and you enter that person’s body and you see their darkness. That body comes from the lineage traumas of grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents. It’s everything that person is carrying… The bulto is like darkness is gaining ground on the good (p. 120).
In this way, the icaro functions as a tool of discovery and diagnosis. But it’s also a tool of healing. A careful process unfolds in which icaros are used to treat the person by “working without judging” (p. 93). The practitioner avoids conveying aggression towards any guardian protecting the person’s bulto, and does not seek to know details about the bulto’s origin.
Maestro Jose differentiates between treating personal and generational trauma:
[W]hen you know how, healing personal traumas is easy because you simply sing to a person sitting in front of you, but for people who carry the ancestral line, it’s more difficult. The amount of work that comes with opening that up! It’s like fighting against a healer or a witch doctor with great knowledge, against a wise man who has extensive learning that comes from having dieted many trees for a good amount of time. So, you cure one part, and another part appears; you cure that, and another type of knowledge appears. It’s like a malignant cancer that keeps sprouting; that is, you cure one bulto, and another bulto appears (p. 121).
As the process continues, the icaro extracts and releases the bulto. The icaros then open up the possibility of what José describes as “redesign.” Here, the practitioner sees “what doesn’t fit gradually falls into place beautifully,” following the rhythm of the song (p. 93). The curandero cleanses the bulto and then sends light and strength into the patient. They then place arcanas5 over the person for protection.
I can say that, as an ayahuasca ceremony participant/patient, I have subjectively experienced this process many times. The descriptions provided by Maestro José so closely mirror my lived experience in ceremony, which has felt affirming and somehow relieving.
In summary
In this post, I’ve traced how my early encounters with ancestral trauma in ayahuasca ceremonies eventually found conceptual grounding in the notion of el bulto as described by Shipibo onanya José López Sánchez.
What began as an in-ceremony purging of material that did not feel like mine evolved into an ongoing curiosity about how Indigenous and Indigenous-trained ayahuasca practitioners understand and work with intergenerational trauma.
The concept of el bulto has offered me a framework that resonates with my phenomenological experience in ceremony. José’s descriptions of how curanderos/as diagnose and cleanse bultos using icaros have helped me begin to grasp what is meant by “healing familial lines” in ayahuasca healing culture. To discover convergence between José’s teachings and my own ceremony experiences has been immensely helpful to my integration process. I hope it may be helpful to others who encounter ancestral trauma material in their ayahuasca ceremonies.
Sources
López Sánchez, J., Mesturini Cappo, S., & Sanabria, E. (2024). Trabajar con las plantas que tienen madres: Diálogos con un onanya Shipibo. Fineo Editorial, S.L. https://shipiborao.com/wpcontent/uploads/2024/05/0bcd25ebfe.pdf
Nai, R. (2021, 2022). Ronin’s teachings [online course].
- Onanya (which I’ve also seen spelled onaya) is the Shipibo-Conibo word commonly translated as “healer” (“one who knows”: a healer who works with oni, the Shipibo word for ayahuasca). ↩︎
- All Spanish-to-English translations in this blog were completed using Google Translate; therefore, while care has been taken in their review, I cannot guarantee their complete precision. ↩︎
- José indicates that there are also “good” bultos. ↩︎
- A future post will explore the very complex topic of icaros, which are central and vital aspects of the onanya’s work. For now, they can loosely be understood as songs for discovery, diagnosis, and healing that are individualized to each patient and transmitted from the plants the curandero/a has dieted. According to Maestro José, icaros are “a language created by diets and plants that carries psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and all of one’s mental and energetic trajectories. Each icaro is the melody and rhythm that one draws out through one’s diet, and it’s how one sings in that moment in front of the person” (López Sánchez, Mesturini Cappo, & Sanabria, 2024, p. 105). ↩︎
- José and his co-authors dedicate an entire chapter to the concept of arcanas, which are another highly complex topic beyond the scope of this post. Simply stated, arcanas are songs (just as all Shipibo healing work is song), and there are different types, levels, and intensities of arcanas. In singing an arcana, the practitioner puts up a protection and instills an intention that all will go well. ↩︎