In the early 2000 Jurema rituals were held frequently in the Buiksloter church in Amsterdam, celebrating and meditating on the inner lights. The founder and first director of the Friends of the Forest was Yatra da Silveira Barbosa, who also composed a number of songs for the Foundation Friends of the Forrest. We had the possibility recently to capture some of these songs, life sung in the Buiksloter church between 1999 and 2000. Yatra was the first Director of the Foundation, and Jan the first President, in the time period ayahuasca rituals and Jurema rituals were still legal in the Netherlands.

When Jan became president in 2000 Yatra became senior advisor and Almasta Eric Faber became director. Together with the psychologist Kees Klotz, Yatra, Almasta and Kees led many Jurema meditation rituals. As Yatra was the founder it is good to give some background on her person.

Yatra da Silveira Barbosa and the Revitalization of the Jurema Path

In the heart of Amsterdam, beneath the tall ceilings of the Buiksloterkerk, a quiet revolution in sacred plant medicine began to unfold in the 1990s. Guided by Yatra da Silveira Barbosa, a Brazilian visionary with deep roots in ancestral ritual, the Friends of the Forest Foundation emerged as one of Europe’s most unique spaces for entheogenic ceremony, spiritual healing, and luminous exploration. Each Saturday evening, as the church doors opened at 19:00, white-clad participants would gather to drink a dark brew and enter the inner temple of consciousness—guided by chants, silence, and a mysterious light arising from within.

A Journey Rooted in Tradition

Yatra’s path was not merely spiritual—it was also ethnobotanical. In 1997, she journeyed to northeastern Brazil to study the indigenous use of Jurema preta (Mimosa tenuiflora), a traditional visionary plant. What she found was both beautiful and incomplete. The rituals had survived, but the brew no longer induced the profound visions once attributed to it. In dialogue with Truká and Atikum communities, Yatra learned that the ancestral brew had lost its potency because it lacked a crucial synergist: an MAO-inhibiting plant.

Rather than treating this as a deficiency, she saw an opportunity to revive and restore the sacrament. Drawing from her broader knowledge of South American plant medicine and the chemistry of ayahuasca, she experimented with combining Jurema with Peganum harmala—a powerful MAOI used traditionally in other regions. The result was a reawakened visionary drink that resonated with the spiritual potency of the original Jurema rituals while retaining a unique vibrational signature distinct from ayahuasca.

Amsterdam Ceremonies: Between Ritual and Revelation

Back in the Netherlands, this new formulation of Jurema with Peganum harmala became the core of the Friends of the Forest ceremonies. In collaboration with Dr. Jan Keppel Hesselink (then serving as President) and Eric Faber (Director), Yatra co-led weekly gatherings at the Buiksloter Church. These weren’t just drug experiences—they were highly structured rituals involving:

• Fasting and celibacy in the days before and after
• Participants dressed in white, forming a sacred human mandala
• The sharing of a plant sacrament in silence and reverence
• Long hours of meditation, chanting, and inner vision exploration
• Integration and conversation until well past midnight

Yatra’s vision fused the discipline of Santo Daime, the ancestral reverence of Jurema rituals, and the therapeutic intentionality of modern healing work. The ceremonies were not commercial, not spiritual tourism, but sacred gatherings meant to open hearts, reveal inner light, and heal psychological wounds.

A Song for the Inner Journey

One of the hymns that captured the mood and mission of these rituals was written during those Amsterdam nights—a simple devotional song sung in Portuguese:

Entre as estrelas do céu,
Entre as estrelas do mar,
Tu sois minha estrela guia
Para eu poder viajar

Brilha, oh estrela divina,
Brilha para me guiar,
Na estrada do Paraíso
Para eu me iluminar

Olhando este céu estrelando,
Como continhas de luz,
Eu vejo em cada estrela
O brilho do olhar de Jesus

This song, visualized recently through traditional-style illustrations, reflects the gentle power of the ceremony: the longing to be guided by inner light, to recognize the divine in all things, and to walk a path of spiritual illumination. For many, the phosphene lights they encountered with closed eyes during ceremony were more than visual phenomena, they were the seeds of sacred vision.

A Legacy of Luminous Healing

Yatra da Silveira Barbosa’s work is a testament to cultural respect, ritual integrity, and entheogenic innovation. By reuniting Jurema with its visionary strength and creating safe, structured rituals for its expression in the West, she did more than organize ceremonies, she cultivated sacred space. Her ceremonies helped revive a plant tradition, build a spiritual community in Europe, and offer a profound entry into the inner light that mystics across traditions have long described.

In an era where psychedelic experiences are often stripped of context, Yatra’s work reminds us that set and setting aren’t just psychological parameters, they are sacred commitments. Through Jurema, song, silence, and vision, she helped many glimpse the luminous ground of being that lives quietly within us all. It is great that I found this old CD when I was cleaning the house I totally forgot of the songs we sung together at that time during Jurema and ayahuasca rituals.

Actually most of the time we were drinking Jurema and Harmala, teas prepared by Almasta and a friend. Sometimes we drunk ayahuasca when Yatra brought a bottle from Brazil. That was in the time you could still carry bottles of ayahuasca in your lugage as herbal tea for healing….;)

Shunyam Adhibhu