Huachuma, the surgeon of emotions

The psychedelic cactus dubbed "nature's MDMA"

Julia Christina

Dec 22, 2023

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“Woooow”.

I grabbed my boyfriend’s arm. We’d just gotten back from a day at the beach. To celebrate our moving-in together, we’d eaten some mushroom chocolates that also contained the psychedelic cactus San Pedro (natively Huachuma). Now I was standing in the bedroom, staring at myself in the mirror. Awe flooded my system.

“What?”, I’d startled him.

“Oh, nothing, never mind”, I blushed and turned away.

“No, tell me. What is it?”

“I… I look SO BEAUTIFUL!”, I blasted out joyfully, grinning.

He smiled, “Yes, you are.”

It was a sunny fall day in California. At age 31, it was also the first day I saw the full extent of my beauty. In typical psychedelic fashion, it wasn’t a sense of novelty that emerged but a startling shock of recognition. The beauty had always been there. It was only now that I could see it.

All day I’d been rolling around in my bikini, getting into funky shapes, carefree. A few years earlier this would’ve been unimaginable. No matter how far I progressed in my eating disorder recovery, body image issues continued to persist. Always lurking.

By the time the sun went down, the joy that had carried me through the day was slowly overshadowed by a heavy-hearted feeling. I was familiar enough with the cactus to recognize what was happening. Mescaline takes much longer than psilocybin to metabolize, anywhere from 12 to 14 hours. So while the mushrooms had faded, the cactus was still at work. And it was ready to move something.

Clueless, I asked my boyfriend if he could play the piano for a bit. “What do you want me to play?”, he asked. “Something sad”, I crawled under his grand piano and settled into the bed of pillows beneath it. It had quickly become one of my favorite places to meet myself. I added, “I think it’s grief. Play something sad but not too sad, and make sure to end it on a happy note.”

Within five minutes, I was sobbing. I found myself immersed in an emotional reality that was all too familiar. I’d spent countless hours mourning leftover love from different stages of my life, often with the help of the cactus. One time I laid on the grass, face-down, overcome by heavy, dense grief and a grueling stomach ache. The cactus told me to give it to the earth. I was hesitant because I didn’t feel the earth deserved my darkness, but the cactus assured me she could handle it. “She will recycle it for you”, it had said. And so I gave it to her, the grief streamed right from my aching belly into the ground below. As the sadness for younger versions of me dwindled, the tears and pain subsided.

This flavor of grief was a novel one, though.

If only I’d known how beautiful I was all along, I could’ve saved myself so much pain and suffering. For the past decade, my quest for beauty (read: love) had cost me connection, memories, and my sanity.

What was the point of all the suffering? It couldn’t simply be so that I’d get to live happily ever after. Even if the rest of my life was a fairy tale, it wouldn’t justify the madness I went through. There had to be more.

But what if there isn’t? What if suffering inherently has no meaning?

Fear started creeping in. And eventually, clarity.

Perhaps none of it has any meaning, other than the one I create.

The task seemed clear. The next day, I picked up my pen and returned to writing for the first time in months.

The mescaline experience: nausea, euphoria, and emotional wizardry

If Ayahuasca is a general doctor, Huachuma is the surgeon of emotions. The medicine is still largely overlooked — for no good reason. Huachuma has been instrumental in my journey and complements other medicines beautifully. It’s profound for addiction recovery and complex trauma, which are inherently emotion-based disorders.

There are several mescaline-containing cacti such as Huachuma and Peyote, both with rich indigenous history. Peyote has been used by Native Americans for millennia, Huachuma by shamans in the Andres for at least 2,000 years, mostly for spiritual healing ceremonies and the treatment of headaches, fever, and high blood pressure.1

As Peyote is at risk of extinction (it grows substantially slower than Huachuma), it’s inappropriate for anyone outside of the Native American Church or community to harvest or consume it. I will thus focus exclusively on Huachuma (and stick with its indigenous, decolonized name). Because of the plant’s ability to unlock mystical experiences, Spanish conquerors renamed the cactus San Pedro after Saint Peter, the “keeper of heaven's keys”.2 Huachuma can be bought in plant shops across the country, I have one standing on my balcony.

Mescaline belongs to the chemical family of phenethylamines rather than tryptamines, which houses all the classical psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. While the tryptamine experience is mostly cerebral, mescaline generates more sensory and physical effects.3 It’s much more outward-focused and social. Rather than mind-bending, closed-eye introspection, you’ll find yourself embodied in emotions, or wandering around seeking connection with nature and those around you.

In a nutshell, Huachuma will make you feel either wonderful or miserable. It may trigger intense nausea and physical discomfort, which subside only once the medicine has moved that which is the culprit of your (physical) suffering: stuck emotional energy. Most frequently, this happens through crying, sometimes through purging. Once released, you’ll experience the full extent of your open heart. The line between your own emotions and those of others becomes blurry. Some people are taken to states of euphoria, connection, and bliss right off the bat. I certainly wasn’t one of them (but more on that later). It’s always a bit of a gamble, but most times, the Huachuma journey will involve a combination of both, as illustrated by my joy-grief beach day.

Huachuma is a heart opener. Technically, your heart never closes. Rather, it gets obstructed by the walls you (subconsciously) build around it. These walls consist of stuck emotions, which are unprocessed energies from traumatic experiences or prolonged emotional states, often from childhood. Unlike other medicines, the cactus won’t show you visions or memories of your trauma. It will catapult you right back into the core of the experience: the feeling.

That’s why when you drink Huachuma, you may not feel joyous, empathetic, and connected, but the opposite: neglected, disconnected, angry, or ashamed. You’ll feel all that which is in the way of you feeling joyous and empathetic and connected.

Huachuma helps you break down the walls by processing what they’re composed of, so you can liberate your naturally open heart. This process can be deeply confronting. The medicine will put you in raw, vulnerable states. More than any other medicine, it mirrors old emotional experiences into your setting and disguises them as your present-day experience. I projected everything from neglect on retreat facilitators to disconnection on fellow participants. Gaining self-awareness in the moment takes a lot of practice. A qualified guide or peer who can act as a mirror and aid the processing makes all the difference.

The Mescaline experience has affirmed my belief that unprocessed emotional energy is at the root of many (if not most) mental and even physical disorders. As such, the potential therapeutic applications are tremendous. Clinical research is still in its early stages. In a self-reported study with over 450 participants, 86% of those with depression and 80% of those with anxiety noted symptom reduction after the use of mescaline. Journey Collab is one of the few organizations running clinical trials for FDA-approved mescaline-assisted therapy for Alcohol Use Disorder.

How the cactus helped heal my inner child

The first time I drank Huachuma, I spent most of the day curled up in the corner with a painful stomach ache. Eventually, my guide came over. As soon as he hugged me, tears started pouring out. Grief and sadness washed over me. For the past decade, I’d isolated myself. I’d abused my body, lied, and spoken to myself in ways I’d never speak to a friend. As my guide held me, I cried and cried, until the grief felt much more manageable, and I felt lighter. My state shifted towards joy, connection, and bliss. It was the first time I experienced the nature of my open heart.

Over the following year, the medicine would guide me to all those places that had been frozen in time. Isolation, disconnection, fear, anger, neglect. I denied myself my emotions early on, so the walls were tall and thick. Until one day, the cactus showed me the belief adopted in early childhood that was at the foundation of all of it: that it was not safe to feel.

Unburdening my inner child from this belief was a key turning point in my recovery. Huachuma reconnected me with my sensitivity and expanded my capacity to feel the full range of human emotions. Because here’s the thing: when you build walls around your heart, you tune down the volume on everything. Not just the bad, but also all the good. You may mute the pain, but you’re also muting joy.

Now I’m able to access levels of joy that make me feel like I’m five years old again. By working through all the heavy emotions the little girl inside held on to, I also reconnected with her empathy, childlike wonder, and curiosity. I’m now able to naturally tap into the same places of bliss the cactus showed me early on in my healing journey, without any medicine.

This has drastically improved the quality of my life and relationships. But it hasn’t made life easier. Feeling deeply is draining. It’s a rollercoaster.

But never have I felt more human, more alive.

If there’s a part of you that feels numb, or disconnected from the world around you, it may be time to take down some of those walls.

Whether you go through the process with or without the cactus — I promise, it will be worth it.