frizzantik
Bluelight Crew
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined.
Giant blue butterflies flutter clumsily past our canoe. Parrots flee higher into treetops. The deeper we go into the Amazon jungle, the more I realize I can't turn back. It has been a year since my last visit, and I'm here again in Peru traveling down the Río Aucayacu for more shamanistic healing. The truth is, I'm petrified to do it a second time around. But with shamanism—and with the drinking of ayahuasca in particular—I've learned that, for me, the worse the experience, the better the payoff. There is only one requirement for this work: You must be brave. You'll be learning how to save yourself.
And so I am back again. Lord knows I didn't have to come back. I could have been content with the results of my last visit: no more morbid desires to die. Waking up one morning in a hut in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.
Our canoe docks on the banks of the Río Aucayacu near a large hut surrounded by jungle: the healing center. We unload our bags and supplies and a local man leads us to our respective bungalows.
"Ayahuasca," a Quechua word meaning "vine of the soul," is shorthand for a concoction of Amazonian plants that shamans have boiled down for centuries to use for healing purposes. Though some call the mixture a drug, indigenous peoples regard such a description as derogatory. To them it is a medicine that has been used by the tribes of the Amazon Basin for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, demanding respect and right intention. The main chemical in the brew, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), accounts for ayahuasca's illegality in the United States; DMT, though chemically distant from LSD, has hallucinogenic properties. But it is ayahuasca's many plant ingredients cooperating ingeniously to allow DMT to circulate freely in the body that produce the unique ayahuasca experience.
To prepare the brew, apprentices spend years under the tutelage of an elder shaman getting to know the different plant ingredients, passing weeks or months at a time learning their individual healing properties and governing spirits. These beings, they claim, teach them icaros, or spirit songs, which, when sung or whistled, call forth the plants' unique assistance during ceremonies. The training isn't easy; those like Hamilton who earn the title of "master shaman"—highly respected members of Amazonian communities—receive patients from far and wide. Based on the individual needs of their patients, shamans must know which plants are required for a ceremony (there are two primary ingredients, but any of an estimated 100 species have been used in ayahuasca brews), how much of them to harvest, and how to prepare them for ingestion. The plants' spirits are then said to work together to produce the most successful possible healing for each person, regardless of what ails them.
The taking of ayahuasca has been associated with a long list of documented cures: the disappearance of everything from metastasized colorectal cancer to cocaine addiction, even after just a ceremony or two. It's thought to be nonaddictive and safe to ingest. Yet Western scientists have all but ignored it for decades, reluctant to risk their careers by researching a substance containing the outlawed DMT. Only in the past decade, and then only by a handful of researchers, has ayahuasca begun to be studied.
At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA's School of Medicine. In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a native church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin—one of the mood-regulating chemicals produced by the body—by increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.
Unlike most common antidepressants, which Grob says can create such high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that ayahuasca strongly enhances the body's ability to absorb the serotonin that's naturally there.
"Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs]," Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is "a rather crude way" of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.
While it's tantalizing to wonder whether such positive physiological changes took place in me when I was last in Peru, I'm also intrigued by the visions I had, which seemed to have an equally powerful role in alleviating my depression: It was as if I'd been shown my own self-imposed hells and taught how to free myself from them. What was really going on?
According to Grob, ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered consciousness that can lead to temporary "ego disintegration," as he calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms into the depths of their unconscious minds—a unique opportunity, he says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.
"You come back with images, messages, even communications," he explains. "You're learning about yourself, reconceptualizing prior experiences. Having had a profound psycho-spiritual epiphany, you're not the same person you were before."
But the curious should take heed: The unconscious mind holds many things you don't want to look at. All those self-destructive beliefs, suppressed traumatic events, denied emotions. Little wonder that an ayahuasca vision can reveal itself as a kind of hell in which a person is forced—literally—to face his or her demons.
"Ayahuasca is not for everyone," Grob warns. "It's probably not for most people in our world today. You have to be willing to have a very powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary. You have to be willing to withstand that."
---
It's 9 p.m.—time for the first ceremony. We all meet in the main hut. Outside, night has taken over the jungle, which resounds with piercing insect calls. We will have five such ceremonies before going back to civilization. Each takes place at 9 p.m. We've fasted since lunch. One of the apprentices spreads out foam mattresses in a circle for us to lie on. Two shamans, a 87-year old Peruvian and a 27-year-old American sit in front of us, in chairs, lighting their mapachos, with their apprentices seated on either side.
Before we start, the American shaman, Hamilton Souther, takes out a liter of the ayahuasca he'd prepared during the day. This he hands to Don Julio, who blesses it with his mapacho, blowing tobacco smoke inside the bottle and over his body. He clears his throat several times, sounding like a horse whinnying, and hands the bottle to Hamilton to do the same. Hamilton pays homage to the ayahuasca spirits, speaking to them in Spanish and entreating them to help us.
Everyone receives a plastic basin—known ominously as a "vomit bucket"—and a roll of toilet paper for wiping our mouths after puking; this can be expected during most ceremonies, unless, as the shamans say, people are used to suppressing their feelings. Many mistakenly think that holding back emotions is a sign of strength and control; actually, Hamilton says, it's the opposite. Avoidance, a refusal to face painful feelings, is a weakness; unless this suppression stops, a person will never be healed of physical and psychological issues.
Perhaps the worst thing about taking ayahuasca is the taste. It is a thick brown sludge, gritty and triggering an immediate gag reflex. The closest taste comparison I can make is Baileys Irish Cream mixed with prune juice. The shamans say that the spirits tell them how much each of us needs to drink. The more healing a person needs, the more they get. I must need a lot of healing, then, as nearly a full cup is passed to me, versus the baby helpings poured for Lisa and Christy. The good news, I tell myself, is that no one to my knowledge has ever died from ayahuasca.
I drink it as if I were a contestant on Fear Factor, in two big, quick gulps. When everyone in our circle has drunk, including Hamilton, the kerosene lamp is put out and darkness fills the hut. Hamilton and Don Julio start shaking their chakapas, or leaf rattles, and singing their spirit songs. Nothing happens for about 20 minutes. I close my eyes and wait. Soon I start to see a pale green glow; colorful, primordial forms, resembling amoebas or bacteria, float by. Alarmed, I open my eyes. And this is uncanny: I can see the rafters of the hut, the thatch roof, the glow of the stars outside the screened windows—but the same amoeba-like things are passing over that view, as if superimposed.
"You're seeing with your third eye," one of the apprentices explains. Also known in Eastern spiritual traditions as the sixth chakra, the third eye supposedly allows for connection with other dimensions. And what if I am actually seeing two worlds at once? It seems too incredible, and I close my eyes to limit the confusion. Fantastical scenes glide by, composed of ever-shifting geometric forms and textures. Colors seem to be the nature of these views; a dazzling and dizzying display of every conceivable hue blending and parting in kaleidoscopic brilliance. But then the colors vanish all at once as if a curtain has been pulled down. Blackness. Everywhere.
Dark creatures sail by. Tangles of long, hissing serpents. Dragons spitting fire. Screaming humanlike forms. For a bunch of hallucinations, they seem terrifyingly real. An average ayahuasca ceremony lasts about four to five hours. But in ayahuasca space—where time, linear thought, and the rules of three-dimensional reality no longer apply—four to five hours of sheer darkness and terror can feel like a lifetime. My heartbeat soars; it's hard to breathe. But I have done this before. I remind myself that what I'm experiencing now is my fear taking symbolic form through the ayahuasca. Fear that I have lived with my entire life and that needs to be released.
I work on controlling my breathing. But such thick darkness. Clouds of bats and demonlike faces. Black lightning. Black walls materializing before me no matter which way I turn. Closer and closer, the darkness surrounding me, trapping me. I can barely breathe.
"Hamilton!" I belt out. "Help me!"
"On my way, Kira," he says calmly. "Hang in there. Don't give in to the fear."
That's the trick: Don't give in to it. But it's much easier said than done. I must tell it that I'm stronger. I must tell it that it has no effect upon me. But it does. I'm terrified. The darkness presses against me; it wants to annihilate me.
Hamilton is standing over me now, rattling his chakapa, singing his spirit songs. Inexplicably, as he does this, the darkness backs off. But more of it comes in a seemingly endless stream. I see dark, raging faces. My body begins to contort; it feels as if little balls are ripping through my flesh, bursting from my skin. The pain is excruciating. I writhe on the mattress, screaming. Hamilton calls over one of his helpers—a local woman named Rosa—with directions to hold me down.
"Tell the spirits to leave you with ease," Hamilton says to me.
"They won't!" I yell out. And now they appear to be escaping en masse from my throat. I hear myself making otherworldly squealing and hissing sounds. Such high-pitched screeches that surely no human could ever make. All the while there is me, like a kind of witness, watching and listening in horror, feeling utterly helpless to stop it. I've read nothing about this sort of experience happening when taking ayahuasca. And now I see an image of a mountain in Libya, a supposedly haunted mountain that I climbed a year and a half ago, despite strong warnings from locals. A voice tells me that whatever is now leaving my body attached itself to me in that place.
Haunted mountains. Demonic hitchhikers. Who would believe this? Yet on and on it goes. The screaming, the wailing. My body shakes wildly; I see a great serpent emerging from my body, with designs on Hamilton. He shakes his chakapa at it, singing loudly, and after what seems like an infinite battle of wills, the creature leaves me. I grab the vomit bucket and puke for several minutes. Though my stomach has been empty for over eight hours, a flood of solid particles comes out of me.
The visions fade. My body stops shaking. Hamilton takes his seat again and Rosa releases her grip on me. I examine the vomit bucket with a flashlight: Black specks the size of dimes litter orange-colored foam. The shamans believe that what we vomit out during a ceremony is the physical manifestation of dark energy and toxins being purged from the body. The more that comes out, the better.
"Good work, Kira," Hamilton says to me from across the room.
My entire body hurts. My head throbs. I can hear the others in the room, whispering to each other. I had barely been conscious of their experiences, they had seemed so quiet by comparison.
"Is Kira OK?" someone asks.
"She just had a little exorcism," Hamilton explains with relish. "She's fine."
"Is this what you'd consider a normal ceremony, Hamilton?" another asks.
"About one out of a hundred ceremonies is as intense as this one. We kicked some real demon butt tonight."
------------------------------------------------
This is a condensed version of the original article.
Ayahuasca in Peru: Hell and Back
Mar 29/2006
Giant blue butterflies flutter clumsily past our canoe. Parrots flee higher into treetops. The deeper we go into the Amazon jungle, the more I realize I can't turn back. It has been a year since my last visit, and I'm here again in Peru traveling down the Río Aucayacu for more shamanistic healing. The truth is, I'm petrified to do it a second time around. But with shamanism—and with the drinking of ayahuasca in particular—I've learned that, for me, the worse the experience, the better the payoff. There is only one requirement for this work: You must be brave. You'll be learning how to save yourself.
And so I am back again. Lord knows I didn't have to come back. I could have been content with the results of my last visit: no more morbid desires to die. Waking up one morning in a hut in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.
Our canoe docks on the banks of the Río Aucayacu near a large hut surrounded by jungle: the healing center. We unload our bags and supplies and a local man leads us to our respective bungalows.
"Ayahuasca," a Quechua word meaning "vine of the soul," is shorthand for a concoction of Amazonian plants that shamans have boiled down for centuries to use for healing purposes. Though some call the mixture a drug, indigenous peoples regard such a description as derogatory. To them it is a medicine that has been used by the tribes of the Amazon Basin for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, demanding respect and right intention. The main chemical in the brew, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), accounts for ayahuasca's illegality in the United States; DMT, though chemically distant from LSD, has hallucinogenic properties. But it is ayahuasca's many plant ingredients cooperating ingeniously to allow DMT to circulate freely in the body that produce the unique ayahuasca experience.
To prepare the brew, apprentices spend years under the tutelage of an elder shaman getting to know the different plant ingredients, passing weeks or months at a time learning their individual healing properties and governing spirits. These beings, they claim, teach them icaros, or spirit songs, which, when sung or whistled, call forth the plants' unique assistance during ceremonies. The training isn't easy; those like Hamilton who earn the title of "master shaman"—highly respected members of Amazonian communities—receive patients from far and wide. Based on the individual needs of their patients, shamans must know which plants are required for a ceremony (there are two primary ingredients, but any of an estimated 100 species have been used in ayahuasca brews), how much of them to harvest, and how to prepare them for ingestion. The plants' spirits are then said to work together to produce the most successful possible healing for each person, regardless of what ails them.
The taking of ayahuasca has been associated with a long list of documented cures: the disappearance of everything from metastasized colorectal cancer to cocaine addiction, even after just a ceremony or two. It's thought to be nonaddictive and safe to ingest. Yet Western scientists have all but ignored it for decades, reluctant to risk their careers by researching a substance containing the outlawed DMT. Only in the past decade, and then only by a handful of researchers, has ayahuasca begun to be studied.
At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA's School of Medicine. In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a native church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin—one of the mood-regulating chemicals produced by the body—by increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.
Unlike most common antidepressants, which Grob says can create such high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that ayahuasca strongly enhances the body's ability to absorb the serotonin that's naturally there.
"Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs]," Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is "a rather crude way" of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.
While it's tantalizing to wonder whether such positive physiological changes took place in me when I was last in Peru, I'm also intrigued by the visions I had, which seemed to have an equally powerful role in alleviating my depression: It was as if I'd been shown my own self-imposed hells and taught how to free myself from them. What was really going on?
According to Grob, ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered consciousness that can lead to temporary "ego disintegration," as he calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms into the depths of their unconscious minds—a unique opportunity, he says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.
"You come back with images, messages, even communications," he explains. "You're learning about yourself, reconceptualizing prior experiences. Having had a profound psycho-spiritual epiphany, you're not the same person you were before."
But the curious should take heed: The unconscious mind holds many things you don't want to look at. All those self-destructive beliefs, suppressed traumatic events, denied emotions. Little wonder that an ayahuasca vision can reveal itself as a kind of hell in which a person is forced—literally—to face his or her demons.
"Ayahuasca is not for everyone," Grob warns. "It's probably not for most people in our world today. You have to be willing to have a very powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary. You have to be willing to withstand that."
---
It's 9 p.m.—time for the first ceremony. We all meet in the main hut. Outside, night has taken over the jungle, which resounds with piercing insect calls. We will have five such ceremonies before going back to civilization. Each takes place at 9 p.m. We've fasted since lunch. One of the apprentices spreads out foam mattresses in a circle for us to lie on. Two shamans, a 87-year old Peruvian and a 27-year-old American sit in front of us, in chairs, lighting their mapachos, with their apprentices seated on either side.
Before we start, the American shaman, Hamilton Souther, takes out a liter of the ayahuasca he'd prepared during the day. This he hands to Don Julio, who blesses it with his mapacho, blowing tobacco smoke inside the bottle and over his body. He clears his throat several times, sounding like a horse whinnying, and hands the bottle to Hamilton to do the same. Hamilton pays homage to the ayahuasca spirits, speaking to them in Spanish and entreating them to help us.
Everyone receives a plastic basin—known ominously as a "vomit bucket"—and a roll of toilet paper for wiping our mouths after puking; this can be expected during most ceremonies, unless, as the shamans say, people are used to suppressing their feelings. Many mistakenly think that holding back emotions is a sign of strength and control; actually, Hamilton says, it's the opposite. Avoidance, a refusal to face painful feelings, is a weakness; unless this suppression stops, a person will never be healed of physical and psychological issues.
Perhaps the worst thing about taking ayahuasca is the taste. It is a thick brown sludge, gritty and triggering an immediate gag reflex. The closest taste comparison I can make is Baileys Irish Cream mixed with prune juice. The shamans say that the spirits tell them how much each of us needs to drink. The more healing a person needs, the more they get. I must need a lot of healing, then, as nearly a full cup is passed to me, versus the baby helpings poured for Lisa and Christy. The good news, I tell myself, is that no one to my knowledge has ever died from ayahuasca.
I drink it as if I were a contestant on Fear Factor, in two big, quick gulps. When everyone in our circle has drunk, including Hamilton, the kerosene lamp is put out and darkness fills the hut. Hamilton and Don Julio start shaking their chakapas, or leaf rattles, and singing their spirit songs. Nothing happens for about 20 minutes. I close my eyes and wait. Soon I start to see a pale green glow; colorful, primordial forms, resembling amoebas or bacteria, float by. Alarmed, I open my eyes. And this is uncanny: I can see the rafters of the hut, the thatch roof, the glow of the stars outside the screened windows—but the same amoeba-like things are passing over that view, as if superimposed.
"You're seeing with your third eye," one of the apprentices explains. Also known in Eastern spiritual traditions as the sixth chakra, the third eye supposedly allows for connection with other dimensions. And what if I am actually seeing two worlds at once? It seems too incredible, and I close my eyes to limit the confusion. Fantastical scenes glide by, composed of ever-shifting geometric forms and textures. Colors seem to be the nature of these views; a dazzling and dizzying display of every conceivable hue blending and parting in kaleidoscopic brilliance. But then the colors vanish all at once as if a curtain has been pulled down. Blackness. Everywhere.
Dark creatures sail by. Tangles of long, hissing serpents. Dragons spitting fire. Screaming humanlike forms. For a bunch of hallucinations, they seem terrifyingly real. An average ayahuasca ceremony lasts about four to five hours. But in ayahuasca space—where time, linear thought, and the rules of three-dimensional reality no longer apply—four to five hours of sheer darkness and terror can feel like a lifetime. My heartbeat soars; it's hard to breathe. But I have done this before. I remind myself that what I'm experiencing now is my fear taking symbolic form through the ayahuasca. Fear that I have lived with my entire life and that needs to be released.
I work on controlling my breathing. But such thick darkness. Clouds of bats and demonlike faces. Black lightning. Black walls materializing before me no matter which way I turn. Closer and closer, the darkness surrounding me, trapping me. I can barely breathe.
"Hamilton!" I belt out. "Help me!"
"On my way, Kira," he says calmly. "Hang in there. Don't give in to the fear."
That's the trick: Don't give in to it. But it's much easier said than done. I must tell it that I'm stronger. I must tell it that it has no effect upon me. But it does. I'm terrified. The darkness presses against me; it wants to annihilate me.
Hamilton is standing over me now, rattling his chakapa, singing his spirit songs. Inexplicably, as he does this, the darkness backs off. But more of it comes in a seemingly endless stream. I see dark, raging faces. My body begins to contort; it feels as if little balls are ripping through my flesh, bursting from my skin. The pain is excruciating. I writhe on the mattress, screaming. Hamilton calls over one of his helpers—a local woman named Rosa—with directions to hold me down.
"Tell the spirits to leave you with ease," Hamilton says to me.
"They won't!" I yell out. And now they appear to be escaping en masse from my throat. I hear myself making otherworldly squealing and hissing sounds. Such high-pitched screeches that surely no human could ever make. All the while there is me, like a kind of witness, watching and listening in horror, feeling utterly helpless to stop it. I've read nothing about this sort of experience happening when taking ayahuasca. And now I see an image of a mountain in Libya, a supposedly haunted mountain that I climbed a year and a half ago, despite strong warnings from locals. A voice tells me that whatever is now leaving my body attached itself to me in that place.
Haunted mountains. Demonic hitchhikers. Who would believe this? Yet on and on it goes. The screaming, the wailing. My body shakes wildly; I see a great serpent emerging from my body, with designs on Hamilton. He shakes his chakapa at it, singing loudly, and after what seems like an infinite battle of wills, the creature leaves me. I grab the vomit bucket and puke for several minutes. Though my stomach has been empty for over eight hours, a flood of solid particles comes out of me.
The visions fade. My body stops shaking. Hamilton takes his seat again and Rosa releases her grip on me. I examine the vomit bucket with a flashlight: Black specks the size of dimes litter orange-colored foam. The shamans believe that what we vomit out during a ceremony is the physical manifestation of dark energy and toxins being purged from the body. The more that comes out, the better.
"Good work, Kira," Hamilton says to me from across the room.
My entire body hurts. My head throbs. I can hear the others in the room, whispering to each other. I had barely been conscious of their experiences, they had seemed so quiet by comparison.
"Is Kira OK?" someone asks.
"She just had a little exorcism," Hamilton explains with relish. "She's fine."
"Is this what you'd consider a normal ceremony, Hamilton?" another asks.
"About one out of a hundred ceremonies is as intense as this one. We kicked some real demon butt tonight."
------------------------------------------------
This is a condensed version of the original article.
Ayahuasca in Peru: Hell and Back
Mar 29/2006
Last edited:
