For those of you who want to get an insight into what it's like to be a kambo practitioner and run kambo ceremonies, today in this video I want to give you 5 top tips for running a kambo ceremony
Have enough helpers on hand
Have enough practitioners and helpers on hand for the amount of people you have attending the ceremony. Now with kambo safety always comes first so for every 4 to 5 people that attend the ceremony you need to have 1 practitioner on hand to look after those people. Ideally if you've got a big ceremony, say you’ve got 10 or 12 people attending you’re going to want to have 1 or 2 helpers as well and helpers are people that are not actually applying kambo but they're there to help people to the toilet and to help keep an eye.
So running a kambo circle on your own with 12 people is dangerous and it shouldn’t be done because you're not going to be able to look after everybody, and help people to the toilet, and keep an eye on what's going on, so safety always comes first. So as I said for every 4 to 5 people you need to have one kambo practitioner, so if you’re doing a ceremony with 12 people you need to have three kambo practitioners.
Have plenty of toilets
Make sure you have enough toilets at the space where you hold the ceremony. This is another important one. You cannot run a ceremony with say 12 people and only have one toilet because the problem is, as you know kambo can make you need to go to the toilet, it doesn't do it every time but it can do it sometimes, so you can't have people queuing up for the toilet at a kambo ceremony because when you need the toilet on kambo it can be quite urgent. So I would say for every, it's similar to the practitioner ratio, for every 4 to 5 people that attend the kambo circle you need 1 toilet. So if you're going to be hosting a kambo circle with 10 people you need a minimum of 2 toilets and for more people than that, ideally more. The more toilets you can have the better.
Don't let people walk around
Never let people walk around alone when they've got kambo medicine on them. Now the reason for this is that kambo affects the blood pressure and the heart rate . So even though somebody may feel fine when they're sitting down, when they stand up and take a few steps they might pass out, it has happened, so at Planet kambo we have a rule that anytime somebody needs the toilet they put their hand up and either a practitioner or a helper will come over and help them to the toilet. And the same goes for when they come back. We tell people they must stay in the toilet and then we have practitioners and helpers checking the toilets every 5 or 10 minutes. They stay in the toilet and then when they're ready to come back someone brings them back. So at no point does anybody walk around alone when they’ve got kambo medicine on them.
Check how much water people are drinking
Make sure you keep an eye on water. When people are in the middle of a kambo process, even though at the beginning you may have explained to them about the importance of water and that if they feel like they're dry they need to drink more water, sometimes when somebody's in a kambo process, especially if they're new to it they won't necessarily think to drink more water and when you're in a kambo process drinking water is unpleasant so often you have to tell people to drink water and kind of make them do it. So you need to keep your wits about you, you always need to keep an eye on how much water people are drinking and that's why you can't run big kambo circles on your own you need to have helpers with you, you need to have other facilitators with you to be able to keep an eye on people to keep an eye on the amount of water that people are drinking, to keep an eye and see if people are dry heaving, so that’s tip no.4 - keep an eye on water.
Leave plenty of time at the end of the ceremony
Make sure that you leave ample rest time at the end of the ceremony for people to have time to recover. So when you’re arranging your ceremony and you’re booking your space you need to take into account the fact that at the end of the kambo, at the end of the time when people have received kambo and purged, they're going to need at least an hour to recover after, you can't just give people kambo and then as soon as the process is over turf them out onto the street. People need time to recover, it varies from person to person, some people are fine straight after, some people might want to have a little sleep, have a nap, and that's totally normal and then you need to cater for that. So when you book your space, when you're arranging a ceremony make sure to leave at least one hour after the kambo process so they have time to relax.
So there’s your five top tips for running a kambo ceremony. Now if you'd like to run your own kambo ceremonies and you're thinking that you'd like to know more about kambo and maybe learn to become a practitioner then check out the Planet Kambo practitioners training programme if you click the link below this video you will get all the information. So that's all from me for now and I'll see you in the next video.
See you in the next video
Jon