Hello Friend
my name is manari ushigua.
I am a political and spiritual leader of the Sápara Nation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I am a protector of the forest and also a healer. This page shares my personal story. If you are interested to read my professional bio, click on the button here.
I was born in the Amazon Rainforest.
We never lived in one place, we were always travelling up and down the river by canoe, learning from nature and the energies of different places in our territory. I am the ninth-born of twelve children. When the time came for my mother to give birth, we were travelling on the River Conambo, so they stopped and built a fire and I was born on the beach on a bend in the river. Once my mother had rested for seven days and washed me with tzicta (a protective herb used seven days after childbirth, to cleanse and mark the return to normal life) they continued on their journey.
My father, grandfather and great-grandfather were powerful shamans.
My parents knew that I would continue this lineage soon after my birth. When I was born, my father started to blow on me (how shamans transmit knowledge and healing) and feed me some medicinal plants so that when I was older I would have visions and clearer dreams. He prepared me to become a person who understood the jungle but who could also relate to the world outside. When I was a child, I began special dietas (fasts) and training to connect with the spirits of the forest and our ancestors.
As I was growing I was always learning from my father and the forest.
I would walk long distances with my father to go hunting deep in the forest, and with my mother to collect wood and gather food from the forest and that she had grown in her gardens.
As a child I dreamed of very ancient things, sometimes I dreamed of my grandparents, my great-grandparents. They would teach me things about how we should love our life, to appreciate all that we have and walk a good path. My grandfather would tell me that life could end very quickly so to love each moment.
My father never left our territory in his life. He never went to other countries, but he knew exactly what kinds of people and what kinds of animals lived in each part of the world, and he told us stories. It was a big shock for me when my father used to say: ‘Crossing the sea, where the earth ends, there are sajinos (collared peccaries) as small as huanganas (white-lipped peccaries).’ So when I arrived in South Africa, where I was attending a conference, and I saw those tiny sajinos, that was a huge surprise for me. I said to myself: ‘How did my father know that those animals lived there, who told him that?’ So from where he was he knew about the whole planet. He had the capacity of knowledge, flying, traveling to those places to know them.
Early mornings my father would ask us about our dreams and he would teach us their meanings.
My father taught me the ways of plant medicine.
We used tobacco and chiricaspi. He would tell us about the medicinal plants, what each plant was used for, how it was used, how it was prepared.
When we were older, all the learning that our father left us, each lesson that he left us, we started to put into practice in every space that we moved in. When he died in 1996 it was very hard for me, but then he began to teach me through my dreams.
As a child I would always see spirits.
My father told me that we need to study and do dietas to become accustomed to understanding these different worlds, that there were other beings and we didn’t need to fear them and we could learn from them.
When I was about ten my father taught us how to use a blowpipe and we did an initiation for hunting that involved seven days of fasting, without eating anything or drinking any water – we only ate a little bit of squashed plantain.
After the fast I drank tobacco and I had a vision.
I found myself far, far away when the world didn’t exist – there was just a space. I was with my father, and I went back in time until there was no Earth. I was in the universe and there was a space and there was a force, an energy but with the character of a human being. My father told me: ‘This is a spirit, it is a person but it is invisible.’
I knew about the spiritual world but I didn’t know how real it was until I left for the city. It was very curious to me to see the exact birds from my dreams and visions in the material world, that I had only seen in the spiritual world before.
in our dreams and visions, nature spirits teach us.
When we look at the natural world, we see the trees standing there, the insects flying, the birds, the animals, the rivers.
If we can see that same reality from the spiritual world, we see these things as people like us.
They walk, they move about, we can converse with them, with all the insects, the plants, the water, the air we breathe, it’s a person.
So many people ask about how we connect with nature and this is how we answer: in our dreams and visions, nature spirits teach us.
When many people talk about living well, they think of having a house, a spear, a wife, babies and a jungle with lots of animals.
But it’s not about that, it’s about you as a person being content inside yourself, at one with nature – it’s there you will discover how to live well. Not in the material world, only in the spiritual world, that is living well.
We’re beginning to abandon the spiritual part of our relationship and connection with nature when we become more material. That is what has caused a negative impact on the earth, because we have created a structure of life that is not good for the earth.
Sharing our wisdom with the world
We know how to connect with different worlds, the world of nature, of spirits. We have always hidden and protected this knowledge, but now we have decided to share this with other cultures. Over the last 10 years, we’ve opened our doors to friends from around the world to visit us in our territory and in the last year, I’ve begun sharing this wisdom online through virtual ceremonies and workshops.
