T
his week: Back from Tierra Vida Healing Center, Gringo Nightmare Book Review, Channeling Eric, World Obesity and The End of Times, and more…

“I respect your honesty. But the content of what you say makes me hate you. So there’s a layer of respect, but under that, hate.” Get Him to the Greek’s rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) after record company flunky Aaron (Jonah Hill) criticizes his last single.

Tierra Vida Healing Center. I’m back—and still feeling the after effects of a 9-day Ayahuasca retreat at Tierra Vida Healing Center, based outside of Pucallpa, Peru on 50 acres of lush Amazonian jungle set along beautiful Yarina Cocha Lake. [www.tierravidahealing.com]

I’ve been to many retreats in Peru and Ecuador in the past 10 years, and I will be going back to Tierra Vida Healing next year.

Exceptionally run by angelic co-founders Jill Levers and Casey Honaker, the retreat is very beautiful. Jill and Casey are slowly building their community of skilled curanderos. For our 4 Ayahuasca ceremonies, we worked with Rolando Tangoa, Antonio, and Bima. I loved my cottage which was surrounded by trees. We worked with two types of Ayahuasca: “Boa,” the name given to a type of Ayahuasca cultivated in Peru, and Ayahuasca Colorada (Red caapi). While I had specifically asked Jill to find me “Boa,” I very much favor the red Ayahuasca and intend to continue working with this very strong vine.

Along with me were Dane from Idaho and Kevin from Utah (who had come to Tierra Vida earlier and was returning to spend a month at the retreat). Dane and Kevin opted to do a raw food diet with Casey and Jill. As I had informed Jill earlier, I brought my own food 0 instant oatmeal packs. But I must say the food looked very appealing. Bountiful mango, coconut and banana trees are all over the retreat.

Casey and Jill are building 5 large cottages—Jill likes the cottages roomy—to house 3 or more people. They are very conscious of the environment and are using solar panels, composting, and other nature-first enterprises.

The rainy season comes at the end of November, so if you are interested in attending a retreat at Tierra Vida Healing, there will be retreats at the end of August and throughout the months of September, October and November.

(Photos: Casey, in a T-shirt I brought along for him, and Jill; My fancy cabin!) Jill has made a fabulous, informative YouTude video and you can see the retreat, and meet the curanderos.


Gringo Nightmare: A Young American Framed for Murder in Nicaragua by Eric Volz. One of the many books I brought with me to Peru was “Gringo Nightmare: A Young American Framed for Murder in Nicaragua.” I saw the NBC Dateline show on Eric’s case called “Murder By the Sea.” Eric Volz was 27 years old when he went with a friend to Nicaragua to start a magazine that he hoped might serve as a bridge between that country’s native population and English-speaking readers. The magazine, El Puente, was an instant success.

Volz fell in love with a local beauty, Doris Jiminez, but they broke up when he decided to move his magazine to Nicaragua’s capital city, Managua.

In November 2006, Doris had been brutally murdered on the premises of the fashion boutique she opened. Volz drove to Managua to find out from friends and the girl’s family what had happened. Within days his life turned into a nightmare. Everyone in town—police, the press, people on the street—seemed convinced that he was the murderer, despite the fact that he had been some 70 miles away on the day of the crime—and had multiple witnesses.

“Gringo Nightmare” tells the grim story of his arrest, arraignment, trial, imprisonment and eventual release.

Volz’s book is hard to put down, especially when the nightmare begins and he is arrested. The prison conditions are horrible, but thankfully, at least in my opinion, is that Volz spoke Spanish. The villainess in this story is Doris’s mother who begins a relentless campaign to demonize him constantly in the newspapers and on television. His defense lawyers were largely ineffective. With one exception, officials from the American embassy were little or no help. Two other obvious suspects in the murder were never charged.

Volz had friends and family at home but a Washington DC law firm was virtually useless. He was convicted and given a 30-year sentence. Soon, in prison, Volz’s health deteriorated and he began to reconcile himself to rotting away in a foul Nicaraguan dungeon. He credits the eventual reversal of his conviction to two appeals court judges and one official from the American diplomatic corps.

In circumstances that are unbelievable, Volz was a pawn in an international political impasse between the US and Nicaragua. Washington wanted the country to get rid of a large cache of missiles it was holding supposedly for its own defense. Ortega wanted to keep them and found Volz a useful bargaining chip—so long as he was trapped in that series of miserable prisons.

Sadly, Doris’s killers have never been found, though there are several suspects.

Published by St. Martin’s Press. Memoir. ISBN: 9780312557270.
Gringo Nightmare: A Young American Framed for Murder in Nicaragua

World Obesity. There are no thin people left. Even toddlers are obese. Walmart is Obese People Ground Zero. Is it calorie-loaded foods, dirt cheap sugar-and-salt-saturated meals, or just gluttony? It is a worldwide epidemic! Or is it—in my newest revelation—proof The End of the World is approaching.

Everyone, except me, got the Collective Unconscious Memo (CUM).

How I support my theory: Point A: Carl Jung stated, in his book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

The End of the World is fast approaching, so what would you do if you knew you did not have much time left? Well, the condemned get A Last Meal.

Point B: The Condemned Last Meal on Earth. Although the history of this tradition is difficult to trace, most modern governments that execute prisoners subscribe to it.

The ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Romans all traditionally gave the condemned man a final meal. The Aztecs fed their human sacrifices for up to a year before killing them.

No, it wasn’t sex they got—it was food.

In pre-modern Europe, granting the condemned a last meal has roots in superstition: a meal was a highly symbolic social act. Accepting freely offered food symbolized making peace with the host. The guest agreed tacitly to take an oath of truce and symbolically abjured all vengeance.

Consequentially, in accepting the last meal the condemned was believed to forgive the executioner, the judge, and witnesses. The ritual was supposed to prevent the condemned from returning as a ghost or revenant to haunt those responsible for their killing.

As a superstitious precaution, the better the food and drink, the safer the condemned’s oath of truce. Last meals were often public, and all parties involved in the penal process took part.

There were practical side effects of a peaceful last meal as well. It was crucial for the authorities that a public execution was a successful spectacle. It was important for authorities that the condemned met their fate calmly. The condemned’s solemn last meal symbolized that they accepted the punishment.

Ted Bundy refused a last meal.

Point C: Sure, I know you would like to think you would spend your last days on Earth doing some other—more personal, non-public—activity, but if you knew you had just a few years left, you would start eating and not stop. You would have sex while eating.

The Collective Unconscious Memo (CUM) states that The End of the World is fast approaching so (a) start buying stuff you will never have to pay for, (b) so what if you are facing foreclosure and bankruptcy? and (c) start eating. (Pictured: My last meal.)

Channeling Eric: Conversations with my son in the afterlife. Like my non-verbalized thoughts about Near-Death Experiences (I know better than to voice them—especially multiple NDE’s—I can them über-NDEs—how can one person be so unlucky?), I have serious, judgmental opinions about “Channeling Eric.”

However, Eric’s mother, Elisa Medhus, M.D., strongly feels that Eric’s death has a purpose—he’s helping people from the other side after causing great suffering to his parents.

Elisa Medhus, M.D. is a veteran physician and author of Raising Children Who Think For Themselves and 2 other popular books on parenting, Raising Everyday Heroes, and Hearing is Believing. In my opinion she has found a way, through channeling Eric via a medium, to channel her guilt.

She puts herself out as an authority on raising children and her son commits suicide? Eric found a clever, though destructive way, to get even with his mother. But his mother turned his suicide into being something life-affirming!

Should Elisa Medhus be giving advice on raising children? There, I said it.

Dr. Medhus says: “Erik Rune Medhus, my 20-year-old son, took his own life on October 6, 2009. Since that sad and tragic day, an overwhelming sense of grief and despair propelled me into a search for answers. Answers that would provide me and others with comfort and hope. Some of those answers came from the many books I bought, but many came from an unexpected source...Erik, himself.”

Dr. Medhus writes of “grief” and “despair” but not “guilt.”

Dr. Medhus continues: “Through dreams, visitations and channeling, he describes what happens during the death process, what the afterlife is like, what he does with his time there, what it feels like to be a free soul, the nature of thought and reality, the meaning of life and the human experience, as well as other matters. If you fear your own mortality, if you grieve over the loss of a loved one, or if you yearn to know the answers to these questions and more, please join me in this journey to enlightenment.

“Erik would be the first to admit that he is no Oracle of Delphi. He does not claim to be a Dalai Lama, the Great Messiah, a mountaintop guru, or even a wise sage. No, he is a flawed human being who, like many of us, has battled his own dragons both inward and outward. He has stumbled and failed time and time again. But perhaps because of his foibles, he has a deep understanding of the human experience.

“He knows what it’s like to be neck deep in a foxhole of misery clawing desperately in the mud to pull himself out. He also knows what it’s like to feel hopelessness, to give up, to believe that life is not worth the pain, the trouble and the setbacks. But these attributes, these trials and tribulations offer another type of wisdom. One we can relate to in the shadow of our own hardships. That said, however young, flawed and imperfect, Erik is a voice worth hearing. He is one of us.” [www.huffingtonpost.com and www.channelingerik.com]