Maybe you feel that pull, that spark of yearning deep within you to truly know yourself and what we are embedded in. To find purpose and meaning and a way to connect to yourself and others that is often lacking in the mainstream nine-to-five.
Well, congratulations, you’ve come to the right place. As you will see, my twenty year journey on the fringes of consciousness has been well documented, and I’ve learned a lot of deep lessons on the way that I would love to share with you.
The most important of those is probably to have a sense of connection. And that, I believe, is what the Mystery is all about.
In my decades of interviews for mainstream and alternative media I have found the others, the seekers and the wisdom holders. Collectively we have the pieces to the puzzle of a healthy, sustainable, meaningful new paradigm that unites ancient wisdom with future technology. A thread through the labyrinth of disinformation and division that points towards home.
Yes, there are many paths that lead to knowledge, just as there are different levels of knowing. To truly know, we have to get beyond the rational mind and to feel. To feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, that conversely gives us perspective on ourselves. Has there ever been a more urgent time for these answers?
I hope that with this site, which is a collection of the interviews, lectures, podcasts, videos, books and films I have produced in the last twenty years, you too can find the meaning and connection you are looking for.
Author
I started out as a freelance journalist writing about consciousness and spirituality for magazines and blogs. Many of these articles were collected in an anthology I edited alongside other countercultural writers called The Journeybook. In 2006 I travelled to the Amazon in search of ayahuasca and to understand the role of shaman in the 21st century. The answers became the cult classic memoir, Aya: Awakenings, A Shamanic Odyssey, and the companion volume of interviews, The Ayahuasca Sessions. I also have contributions in other popular anthologies like Graham Hancock’s The Divine Spark.
Podcaster
For ten years I was a leading alternative podcaster with my show, In a Perfect World, which led me to a host of other luminaries and to curate a collective sense of reality beyond the norm. I was also a contributing speaker on dozens of other podcasts sharing my wisdom.
Public Speaker
Touring the world with my books and films, I’ve become a renowned public speaker, hosting events, conferences, retreats, and panel discussions where I have lectured on plant and earth medicines, consciousness and spirituality.
Filmmaker
In 2014 the critically acclaimed documentary adaption of my ayahuasca book, Aya: Awakenings, was released, and toured Australia, the U.K. and the USA. This in turn led to my current documentary series, Shamans of the Global Village, which looks at the resurgence of medicine people around the world working with psychoactive tools for community healing and enlightenment. Episode 1 examined the Bufo Alvarius toad (containing 5-MeO-DMT) and episode 2 looked at the peyote sacrament of the Huichol Indians. I have written, hosted and produced these films, and co-directed along the way. This in turn has gifted me with a deep respect for storytelling in film, and lead me to writing feature film scripts, my current passion.
Books
The world is made of language, we use it not just to make sense of things, but also to create the reality we live in. As a writer I strive to communicate the ineffable – the mysterious, the magical, the true nature of the human condition in an ecology of the soul. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and like an iceberg with 9/10ths of its mass hidden under the water, we are bigger than we suppose.
When I first went down to the Amazon to write about the psychoactive medicine of ayahuasca, I knew I couldn’t do justice to what it was really about without getting in deep, under the skin of things, in true experiential journalism style. My hyper-realistic prose attempts to capture the feeling, the essence of a thing. I write to express how I feel, and to trigger a feeling in you, the reader. The realms of consciousness, psychedelics and spirit demand that emotional anchor, and my words are my medicine to invoke that understanding.
Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey
Your first book is always your baby, and this is my experiential travel memoir that birthed my voice onto the world stage. Three months in Peru sitting and drinking ayahuasca with over two dozen curanderos or shamans of the Amazon, learning about their culture and the way they see the world. Ayahuasca is a visionary medicine, it can heal, astound, and reveal an energetic ecology all around that communicates and calls us to be part of it. It opens up the heart, and the soul.
The ayahuasca starts to come on slow, snaking in and out like a lover, tantalizing me. The spirit in the plant is playing hard to get—or, more likely—she’s finding me hard to get. She’s interfacing, overlapping energy fields as her jungle medicine comes on strong. There’s a flash of vibrant green as something starts to happen, as I fall into this target window of curious circuitry-like patterns, lines of energy that are called “ayahuasca rivers”. Locks deep inside me that I never knew were there are tumbling open and I am spilling into the spaces they reveal.
– Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey
As Razam so aptly demonstrates, a new kind of traveler is emerging—one that embarks into the mysterious and uncharted domain within, where they aim to conquer their own hearts. Written in the tradition of a great adventure narrative, Aya Awakenings is a timely story for a new emerging era.
– Yossi Ghinsberg
author of Lost in the Jungle
An excellent work! This is definitely the best thing I've read on ayahuasca tourism, and beyond that, the whole apparent reemergence of shamanic consciousness as a force for change and evolution on a global scale.
– Ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna
PhD, author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
The best Canterbury Tales of the modern pilgrimage to Iquitos.
– Richard Meech
filmmaker, director of the documentary Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca
The Ayahuasca Sessions: Conversations with Amazonian Curanderos and Western Shamans
This book is an in-depth collection of interviews with the curanderos or shamans, and the western practitioners and spokespeople for the medicine of ayahuasca. A companion to the travel memoir book, I interviewed these experts to craft an overall sense of the ayahuasca milieu, and it can be read as a stand alone introduction to the people who practice the art of shamanism in the modern age, learning how they were initiated, how they work to help heal their patients, and how they connect to the interdimensional ecology plant medicines opens up.
Featuring Guillero Arevalo (from the Hollywood film Renegade), French Filmmaker Jan Kounen, Peruvian curanderos Don Francisco Montes Shuna, Norma Panduro, Percy Garcia, enthnobotanist Dennis McKenna, and a host of others exploring the world of ayahuasca shamanism and the industry that has developed to bring it to the world. Their collective wisdom will help you understand plant medicine and healing, and why ayahausca is so important to the world today.
For those that are already familiar with the subject matter, Rak goes far deeper in The Ayahuasca Sessions than most books I’ve encountered on the subject, as he is not afraid of controversy. For the new comer, it is perhaps the best introduction because of it’s wide scope within the singular focus of the esoteric mysteries. Sessions, like the vine itself, works on a heart-chakra based, conversational level approach, honed in on the lived experience of the medicine path itself—not merely the seemingly detached scholarly explanation of it. From this point of view it is essential reading material, and I highly recommend it.
– Benton Rooks
Reality Sandwich review
Films
I never set out to be a filmmaker, but I said yes to each opportunity to work in the medium of film. There’s a natural progression from the word on the page to the screen, and an ability to immerse yourself in the story that totally fulfills me and is the closest thing we have to these altered states themselves.
Aya: Awakenings was a groundbreaking film in anchoring and visualizing the rich hallucinogenic dimensions of ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT. It pushes the edge of cinema to hold the truth, and it pushes the experience of the viewer INTO that realm. It’s a shamanic artifact. My role as a writer, host and producer really came to the fore with Shamans of the Global Village, organizing small media teams to work with indigenous healers and document the power of their entheogenic medicines and practice.
Aya Awakenings
I started out adapting my book into a film narrative for the documentary Aya: Awakenings, retaining the power of the written memoir by using actual excerpts. In this way the “script” was actually a truncated overview of the central moments of the book, using voice over narration to match the visuals and action presented. It created a unique audio-visual spell for the senses. I produced and helped co-direct that film as well, realizing the power of my network to help crowdsource footage and resources, and make the project come alive. Watching this is as close to the ayahuasca experience you can get without drinking the brew itself.
Without a doubt, this film captures the experiential content of the experience in a powerful, magical way. It conveys some felt, heard, lived experiences vividly and directly - I would even venture to say that it does so better than almost any other film out there! It is a great introduction to the transformative potential of Aya.
– Vimeo review
This is a stunningly beautiful film and concerns such an extremely important subject. Rak Razam is a charming and eloquent host, as this video documents the present day psychedelic revolution of people, many of them from the USA and Europe, visiting the South American Amazon to experience Ayahuasca in a ceremonial manner. The visuals here are compelling, but would not convey the depths of the experience without Razam's enthusiastic and poetic descriptions of how he felt and what it meant to him. The final sequence of a DMT trip is riveting and makes clear that however ecstatic, this is not a party, rather it's a challenging and important growth experience. Highly recommended.
– Amazon film review
Shamans of the Global Village Episode 1 – The Sonoran Desert Toad
The powerful natural psychoactive of 5-MeO-DMT was central to my Aya film, and became the centerpoint for episode one of the ongoing documentary series Shamans of the Global Village. With more and more westerners experiencing earth based shamanic medicines, I realized the role of medicine person was transforming in the 21st century, and this series attempts to document that.
As writer, host and producer, our small team visited the Sonoran desert and worked with a Mexican doctor who had himself been initiated into the world of the Bufo alvarius toad, whose paratoid gland secretions contain 5-MeO-DMT. The episode follows his work and explanation of the toad medicine within the local indian Seri community, and documents an extremely powerful toad ceremony in all its raw beauty and danger. Director Niles Heckman’s cinematography is simply exquisite, bringing alive the beauty of Sonora, the desert, and the Bufo alvarius in ways never before seen on the screen.
The best treatment of the psychedelic world that I’ve ever seen
– Lorenzo Hagerty
The Psychedelic Salon
A masterful and revelatory work of fearless experiential journalism
– Martin W. Ball
author, Being Human
Fascinating, well-filmed and courageous
– Jeremy Narby
author, The Cosmic Serpent
Shamans of the Global Village Episode 2 – The Peyote Cactus
When we were invited to attend the ancient Huichol people of Mexico’s peyote pilgrimage in 2019, we had no idea of the sacred journey ahead. The marakame or shaman was an elder of his tribe who had been collecting and working with the hallucinogenic cactus peyote, or hikory as they call it, since a child. The challenge here was to accompany their three day pilgrimage to Wirikuta, the holy land of the peyote, across the desert and the land, praying, sacrificing, purifying along the way.
This intimate documentary gets to the heart of ancient ways to pray and to cleanse, to give back to mother Earth, and to connect through out tribulations. Sitting in ceremony with the Huichols and eating peyote, the world became a visual symphony, all of us notes in the One song of creation, helping us to remember our place in the web of life.
Speaking
I am often called to lecture and speak at conferences, seminars, podcasts and public events, and it is my joy to do so. There’s an art to engagement that is so natural to me I don’t think about it – I feel it. And I bring my audience with me. It’s a little bit like the ancient role of the shaman as storyteller, painting a world with the magic of words. I can do this because I’ve been to the spaces I describe, and I’ve bought back the jewels of knowledge with me to light the way.
Over the years I’ve also pieced together a topography of the inner worlds, and a deep understanding for how it all hangs together. A map of the world–the living intelligence of Gaia and her web of life and how we fit into it, as well as the energetic ecology of inter-dimensional space we are embedded in. It’s all one thing, one Great Being that unites ancient and modern, inner and outer. It makes sense to me, and I can shift from scientific to shamanic, personal to collective understanding to encompass it. My words are my medicine, and I hope you feel their value and power, too.
Keynote Speaker
I regularly speak at psychedelic, shamanic, and consciousness events worldwide, and am renowned for my commanding speaking ability and presence.
As co-founder of WBAC – the World Bufo Alvarius Congress, I was also the keynote speaker in 2019, closing the congress and bringing together the themes of conservation, entheogenic medicine and community for the physical attendees and almost 10,000 online live streaming viewers to a critical acclaim. I was also a headline keynote speaker at the 2020 NonDuality Global Summit talking about the role of the ego, consciousness and neuroscience. I also hosted the online podcast In a Perfect World for ten years speaking with and interviewing consciousness leaders individually and in group discussions.
Panelist
I’ve been a panelist on probably a hundred panels and also the moderator on many of those as well. I have a unique art of hearing and holding space for each speaker within the narrative of the panel, because what it really is, is a story. Knowing who has what to contribute where while driving the story home to it’s conclusion helps contribute to a robust discussion and a sense of completion and understanding. I’ve led and spoken at panels across the world, including EntheoGenesis Australis (Australia), Rainbow Serpent festival (Australia), WBAC (Mexico), the Amazonian Shamanism Conference (Peru), Awakened Futures (USA), Exploring Psychedelics (USA), Psychedelic Science (USA), Breaking Convention (UK) and many more.
Workshop Leader
Again, the secret to workshops is understanding the narrative. People are the content, and with a guiding theme or intention, my job as workshop leader is to explore deeply. At WBAC in 2018 and 2019 I organized, curated and led workshops that united the community to discuss hard issues around best practices for toad medicine, conservation, and integration. At festivals and events worldwide I have also led groups in workshops exploring shamanism, spirituality and consciousness.
