My Toe and San Pedro - Part I: Dipping My Toe in San Pedro

How a cactus helped me find self-love in the weirdest of places.

*10.14.2023. Update on this story: my toe relapsed several months ago. Breaking in my new hiking in shoes here in Peru damaged my toenail again, causing it to stop growing. I hope to get it fixed once for all, but in the spirit of honesty, I felt I should add this disclaimer. The story below still holds true - thanks for reading!

The other night my girlfriend and I watched the docuseries, How to Change Your Mind, based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same title. It was cool to see various shots of huachuma, also known as San Pedro cactus, hidden in plain sight — a potted cactus in Pollan’s garden, several growing in a therapy room — before Pollan highlights the plant in the mescaline episode. I’m grateful to him and the filmmakers for raising awareness of these remarkable plants and how they’re helping cure various forms of mental illness and addiction.

I do not suffer from alcohol or drug addiction, PTSD, clinical depression or debilitating anxiety, but I would binge drink for years, experienced physical abuse as a child and just some days had trouble getting out of bed or out of my own way. As Richard Rohr writes in Breathing Under Water, most of us have an addiction, the primary one being thinking. This was me — my mind dictated my behavior and emotions, running after desires that don’t fulfill my spirit and away from fears that don’t exist. Rohr points out that some addictions, like ones to alcohol and drugs, are just easier for everyone to see. They’re represented externally for the world to judge. My thinking mind has traditionally run the show, judging me, my body and just about every action and thought I’ve had since I can remember. Only until I started working with huachuma and my huachumero, Chase, did my heart take the wheel and move my mind to riding shotgun.

I’ve selected this story that rose out of my journey with San Pedro because I find it an interesting symbol for the core value I’ve gained from this plant: self-love. I never would have imagined the strides I’ve made in managing ADHD, calming anxiety over financial security, bring awareness to my need to control outcomes, binge drinking, vulnerability (see “self-confidence”) and my sexual energy — all stemming from a lack of love for myself. A few extra words on sexual energy: guys, this cactus has rolled back my libido 10–15 years. Today my sex drive is up and refractory period down, all to the delight of my sexy goddess of a fiancee (a heartfelt “thank you!” to her for being my editor on this article). I’ll share more in the future about the myriad, not-as-talked-about ways huachuma has helped me, but I digress — the story of my toe and San Pedro.

During my last semester of high school in Fort Worth, Texas, I took Advanced Placement Anatomy taught by the late Coach Herb Stephens. Coach was a great teacher when he decided to teach, as classes mainly required us to teach ourselves. More times than not class began with Coach walking up to the chalk board, writing out our reading assignment and then disappearing, leaving us to our own respective levels of self-discipline for a passable grade. I needed at least a B to offset the impending D from Calculus, so I rarely goofed off in class. Except for this one day when I did.

With Coach Stephens absent as usual, I let my desk mate, Eric, lure me into a paper football game — the one where you take a folded piece of paper shaped as a triangle (the football) and flick it between your friend’s fingers (the goal posts). After one of my “kicks” sailed over Eric’s head, we both charged after the football, pushing and pulling to capture it from the other. Eric wore a pair of burgundy lizard skin ropers with a nasty heel. He brought it down on my left toe with full force instead of the paper triangle resting underneath my leather loafer, a shoe that provided zero protection from the force of Eric’s boot. The pain in my toe triggered a burst of nausea as my left leg turned pure Jell-O. I grabbed the table for balance, trying to breathe and let the pain move through me. My eyes watered as I looked up at Eric, now bowled over in laughter as I limped back to my seat.

At home that afternoon I pulled off my sock to check my toe, still sore and cherry red with a dark red semi-circle formed where the end of the nail met skin. An injury for sure, but one I assumed toenails are designed to heal from. Over the next few weeks and months, instead of falling off and a new nail growing, it started mutating into a convex talon-like protuberance one might find on a large land-roaming prehistoric bird. The nail grew on top of itself, creating layers of hard material requiring me to file it down. Ugly, repulsive, gross. I didn’t want to look at it, and I certainly didn’t want anyone else to. I kept a Tough-skin Band-Aid wrapped around it whenever my shoes were off in public. And thanks to my young niece, I learned the Band-Aid may have drawn more attention than if I left it off… for example:

A full 16 years after Eric smashed my toe, I flew to Alabama to visit my sister and her family to celebrate her oldest daughter and my niece turning three. One morning I walked into their kitchen wearing that Band-Aid. My niece was swinging her sippy cup around, blabbing away while stomping the tile floor wearing with her mother’s 2-inch heels. Then she stopped everything at the sight of my toe. I saw her see it and braced as she pointed at the Band-Aid, turned to her mom and said, “Mommy, why does Uncle Jimmy have a Band-Aid on they-ooor? He shouldn’t have a Band-Aid on they-ooor.”

My niece furrowed her brow in confusion — she wanted an explanation for this anatomical anomaly on her uncle’s foot. I wanted her to stop talking. My sister, who knows me as well as anyone, noticed the look of discomfort on my face and jumped in: “It’s ok for him to have a Band-Aid on his toe, sweetie.” Called out by a three-year old, I took a seat at the kitchen table and sat with my insecurity… I needed to fix this nail.

Several podiatrists examined it over the next few years, each one never failing to say “this is as bad a nail as I’ve ever seen.” Fungus was not the problem, just a damaged root that kept growing nail material on top of itself. I clipped at it with needle-nosed pliers to file it down. Once I even bought a Dremel electric filer that was too terrifying to use. I resigned to having it filed down by a doctor every year or so but still, the nail was gnarly.

Yes, I considered having it surgically removed, but I the risk of it not growing back, plus the hassle of surgery, recovery time on crutches…. It was easier to keep it out of sight, out of mind. I literally and figuratively Band-Aided the situation. I avoided flip flops and open-toe shoes when possible, a real feat (feet?) for someone who for 10 years lived right by the beach in Venice, California.

A couple of years before the pandemic hit, I met my now wonderful friend Zein at the Toronto Film Festival. We established an immediate connection over our experiences with ayahuasca, and she invited me to several ayahuasca retreats in Peru. I had communed with ayahuasca several times before in California, but never in Peru. Then a month before the pandemic hit, Zein invited me to a huachuma retreat in the Sacred Valley, Peru. I had never heard of huachuma or San Pedro before, much less that indigenous peoples in Peru have been using it ceremonially for thousands of years. She told me about how grounding it can be, how the medicine focuses more on aligning your mind and body with your heart so they’re all on the same page. That description resonated big time, so I packed up my insecurities, my anxiety, my difficulty establishing personal boundaries, and my strong tendency for self-persecution, and together we all boarded the plane to Peru.

After arriving at the home where our retreat group would be living for a week, we met our huachumero, Chase. A huachumero, or huachumera for the feminine expression, holds huachuma ceremonies with usually no more than 12 people. They work with huachuma for years, doing their own inner work, studying the lineage and deepening their relationship with the plant. As Don Howard Lawler, one of the first huachumeros from the U.S., points out that we can identify, in detail, evidence of huachuma ceremonies in the stone lithographic art from Chavin, Peru dating back some 3,500 years ago. Over time many of the same ceremonial practices have been retained.

Huachumeros are not the same as therapists; they allow that work to unfold between you and the plant. A good huachumero keeps their ego away from the ceremony space. They are there to help clear our bodies of stuck, oftentimes traumatic, energy by holding a safe space for the medicine and being available to talk through any emotions or memories rising to the surface.

Chase reminded me of the actor Sam Rockwell — on the shorter side with a big smile that stretched all over the place. He wore a round straw hat, black-rimmed glasses and jeans with flip flops, constantly smoking mapachos — local cigarettes made from jungle tobacco. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Chase’s drawl moves at the same pace of his body — slow and deliberate.

My first huachuma retreat — 3 ceremonies over 6 days — with Chase merits tens of thousands of written words, all of which would fail to describe the experience. If you’ve taken mushrooms and MDMA, imagine light visuals similar to the former and the heart-felt love brought on by the latter. The deep heart-opening feelings extended from me to everyone at the retreat, to everyone in my life, and to Mother Nature surrounding me.

The retreat also gave me a foundation to build the self-confidence and motivation to write. Before San Pedro, I cared too much about what other people thought of me. This rang especially true with my writing. I still care, but not enough to keep from doing it and putting it out there. I’m writing for me because it’s fun and my heart compels it. When it comes to being creative, I believe what Chase told me that first ceremony, “You have a responsibility to God to bring forth the creativity within you.”

Huachuma operated on me with a slow burn, giving me time and space to feel all the emotions related to illusions my mind creates. I realized that when I’m happy, I’m not thinking about being happy… I just am. Huachuma allowed me to feel love and joy while being aware of it at the same time. Huachuma left me feeling so connected to my heart, filled me with so much love for myself and others… I could not have been more mentally and emotionally prepared for the pandemic three weeks later. But I still had that Band-Aid on my toe.