A woman who died in a northern rivers home in a shamanic ceremony involving the secretion of a South American tree frog and Amazonian plants had recently completed a course which merged Indigenous American and traditional Chinese medicinal practices, a New South Wales court has heard.
Natasha Lechner died suddenly and violently in March 2019 at the age of 39 in the “Kambo” ritual in Mullumbimby, weeks after completing a course through the International Association of Kambo Practitioners.
The IAKP practitioner who trained Lechner in the use of Kambo, Sarah Jane Morrison, appeared via video link from a hotel in Western Australia before a three-day inquest into Lechner’s death in Lismore on Wednesday.
Morrison, who now goes by the name Aisha Priya after changing her name in a spiritual initiation, said she had been personally trained by the UK-based IAKP founder, Karen Darke, who has declined an invitation to appear at the inquest.
In her evidence, Priya said that Amazonian tribes only applied Kambo to the arm or leg – though those locations had been expanded in the western world to other parts of the body by an acupuncturist she referred to as Sophia who began “working alongside the tribes utilising meridian points and things like that”.
Lechner had Kambo applied to her chest. The inquest later heard from cardiologist Prof Mark Adams that Lechner likely died after suffering a sudden cardiac event.
Priya could not name which tribes Sophia had worked with, but said she had spoken with acupuncturists who told her that the use of meridian lines, part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), when applying Kambo was similar to the practice of moxibustion, where burning Chinese herbs are placed on or near the skin.
“But not with frog poison?” the counsel assisting the inquest, Peggy Dwyer, asked.
“No, no,” Priya said.
While declining Dwyer’s request to appear via video link before the inquest, Darke did provide written answers to some questions, released by the court, in which she stressed that the woman who applied the Kambo to Lechner’s skin in the last moments of her life was not an IAKP practitioner.
Darke also raised doubts about the training that woman, self-described experienced Kambo practitioner and Northern Irishwoman Victoria Sinclair, claimed to have undertaken and questioned her actions in the vital moments after Lechner collapsed, lost consciousness and as her pulse weakened, lips turned blue and hands began to twitch.
“Sending emails, psychic SOS, downloading from ancestors and working in the etheric are not actions that an IAKP Trained practitioner would recognise as a response to an emergency,” Darke wrote.
Sinclair told the inquest on Tuesday that she did not have a phone, nor did she know to call 000 in the case of an emergency.
In papers submitted as evidence on Wednesday, Darke wrote that she had been practising Kambo for about a decade after living and training in the Amazon from 2011 to 2015 and that she began “offering” Kambo “outside of the jungle” from 2012, training hundreds of practitioners with the aim of prompting “safe, ethical and responsible” Kambo practice.
As well as a background in “mental health care”, Darke claimed formal training as a TCM acupuncturist and yoga/dance therapist.
Both Priya and Darke said they no longer taught Kambo, with Priya now practising sound therapy. Darke said she continued as a trustee of the not-for-profit IAKP Foundation.
Earlier the inquest heard from Lechner’s friend Kelly-Anne Green, who was living with Lechner when she died and called the ambulance moments after coming home to find her friend collapsed and frothing at the mouth.
Green said Lechner was a “beautiful soul” who “loved learning new things” and music and was always with a book or a guitar. She described Lechner as “everyone’s rock”.
“She was probably the go-to friend if you needed support for anything, we used to call her the ‘Mamma Bear’,” Green said. “I’m very grateful to have been friends with her.”
