Originally published May 8, 2024. Revised.
If you have to ask whether your daily rapé use is appropriate, the answer is probably no.
I hear from more people about this every year. Some take it only in ceremony or on retreat. Some carry a kuripe everywhere and use it several times a day, and there are podcast voices who talk about that habit with pride. I’m not in a position to set anyone’s dose. I do think a lot of people are taking far more than they realize, and because I’ve been open about how complicated it is to bring this medicine into a modern life, people tend to tell me the truth about their use.
I’ve been on that end of it. What I called a daily practice was an addiction, and it took me a while to use the accurate word. If you can hold a daily practice without that happening, I salute you. I couldn’t.
I want to hand this question to someone with far more standing to answer it than I have.
Gesileu Phaspy Ninawa, born Raimundo Gesileu de Lima in 1967 in Seringal Tupã near Xapuri, Acre, was raised in the forest by rubber tapper parents and didn’t see a town until he was seven. He received his rapé initiation with the Huni Kuin of the village of Caucho, who gave him the name Ninawa, and he studied for years with pajé Yawa of the Yawanawa, whom he calls his principal teacher. In December 2021 the researcher Amanda Viana interviewed him at his terreiro in Acre, and the Fondation Alain Daniélou published it the following spring. If you take rapé, read it. It’s long and it is worth every minute.
The first thing worth noticing is what happens when she asks whether he’s a master of this medicine.
He says no. He considers himself a student, someone with a great deal left to learn. He goes further and says that hearing someone call themselves a master or a shaman is itself a reason for suspicion, because those aren’t titles you hand yourself. If someone else offers the word, he’ll accept it with humility, but he won’t claim it.
I’d sit with that before going any further, because our end of this world is full of people who assign themselves titles after a two week course. He is describing the exact thing many Western facilitators do, and he is describing it as a warning sign.
On the question of how much, his position is simple and it doesn’t leave much room to negotiate.
He says rapé is a medicine, and that “if you use it too much, it can become a poison.” He describes seeing people who have lost themselves in it, taking it as reflexively as a heavy smoker lights another cigarette, and he says plainly that those people have it wrong. Using it when you genuinely need to work with it is the path. Using it because it’s what your hands do, the way someone reaches for coffee or turns on a television, is not.
There’s a moment in the interview I keep coming back to. A friend asks him how many times a day he should be taking rapé. Gesileu refuses to answer, and the refusal is the teaching. Why, he asks, would you want me to prescribe your daily use? He turns it around instead: how often do you take pharmaceutical medicine? When I’m sick, the friend says. And what is rapé to you? A medicine. Then why would you take it every day?
That’s the whole argument, and nobody in our scene wants to hear it stated that cleanly. He isn’t saying use less. He’s saying you already know, and that outsourcing the question to a teacher is a way of not looking at your own answer.
He does describe periods of concentrated use. If he sets out to study this medicine deeply for a week or two, he’ll take a great deal of it, with a specific purpose he actually needs. Then he stops until a real reason to return appears. Intensity is not the problem. Intensity without purpose is.
He’s also direct about where rapé comes from in a way that doesn’t get discussed enough here. He says the state of the person preparing it goes into the medicine. Anger, grief, illness, resentment, all of it transfers to whoever receives it, and someone carrying those things has no business making rapé that day. So his advice on sourcing is to find out who made yours and under what conditions, and to ask about their character rather than their credentials. He’s blunt that the marketing expansion of forest medicines has filled the space with people working for money who aren’t much concerned with whether anyone is helped.
One detail I’ll note because it complicates my own story rather than confirming it. Among the conditions Gesileu describes treating with rapé are sinusitis and allergic flu. I came to this medicine for chronic sinusitis and it went badly for me, and I’ve written about why I think that happened. Both things can be true. A medicine that treats a condition in skilled hands, prepared with care and taken at the right moment, is not the same object as a habit I administered to myself several times a day for years.
His closing remark is the one I’d want people to leave with. He says that a conversation like this can only scratch the surface, and that the deep knowledge belongs to the medicines themselves. They are the real teachers.
That is not something a person selling you a workshop tends to say.
Read the full interview at the Fondation Alain Daniélou, in Transcultural Dialogues no. 10, Spring 2022. Interview by Amanda Viana.