14 May 2011 Catalystmagazine.net FEATURE

A yahuasca is changing how

we see our world. Over the past

two or three decades, its use

has spread beyond the confines

of the jungle and has come to

the attention of Western culture.

In the past five years, legacy

media outlets from the New York

Times to Time magazine have run

articles on ayahuasca. Last

October Delta Airlines’ in-flight

Sky magazine included a piece

on ayahuasca tourism. Then, this

January, FoxNews.com ran an

article sympathetic to ayahuasca

practice and use. Something

fundamental is going on.

All artwork by Pablo AmaringoSee page 18 for information on Pablo and his art.

Americans on ayahuascaThe earth speaks to us through the Amazonian tradition.

BY TRISHA MCMILLAN

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Ayahuasca, the shamans say,has a message for us.

A casual description of theayahuasca experience sometimessounds like a thumbnail sketch ofhell. Yet this Amazonian psychedelicmedicinal tea has shown countless

people how to conquer their fearsand embrace love and life, comingaway changed, happier, and more atease with their lives.

Amazonian tribes have been in -gesting the brew ritually for millennia.In recent decades, Shamanic retreatscatering to thousands of spiritualtourists seeking the aya huasca ex -perience have sprung up through outthe Amazon basin and into CentralAmerica. Clearly, the world is begin-ning to pay attention.

Ayahuasca’s heritage is one ofhealing. In the Amazon it is knownas la purga (the purge) for its abilityto swiftly clear the gastrointestinaltract and remove any parasitesdwelling there. It’s also used to treatmany other illnesses and humantroubles.

The curanderos or ayahuasqueros,who guide people on these journeys,are often the principal source of med -ical assistance in Amazonian villagesfar from any city or hospital. Theyalso function as psychologists, dis-pute mediators and spiritual guidesfor their communities.

Ayahuasca is not an easy, instant-gratification karma cleanser. It is nota commodity; it’s a rite of passage.The visionary artist Alex Grey hasdescribed the experience as “a veryhumbling taste of Buddhahoodmixed with swimming in the swill ofmy own vomit!”

One woman’s voyageAyahuasca is idiosyncratic, and

everyone who takes it will experienceit in a different way. Salt Lake-basedpsychic Margaret Ruth agreed to talkwith me about her recent journey toan ayahuasca retreat in the junglearound Iquitos, Peru—her first expe-rience with the tea. “It was a visionquest,” she says. “It was wanting abroader experience with the uni-

verse, and a way to heighten myown senses and my own awareness.”

Margaret Ruth says she was takento a place she had not expected, butit was profound. “I was given anenormous amount of informationabout the nature of mother energy.Being able to touch that—the spiritof creation, touching how deeplythat spirit loves everything—wasamazing. I was aware of all this loveradiating from the earth toward us—I mean, you can think about it andfeel it emotionally, but to ‘get it’ atthe first and second chakra level wasvery calming. I came out of the experi-ence much calmer and more secure.

Not all of her experience was loveand light. “But the Earth mother saidto me to look again—because fromthe point of view of the big picture,she always wins. It was a sure, calm-ing energy, and this definite ideathat wars and aggression and pollu-tion can come through into reality,but that in the end they will neverwin.”

Margaret Ruth describes her expe-rience as full-body, not just visual.” Itwas multidimensional. I had anenergetic experience, and my brainassigned images to that experience—for instance, on the night of thelast ceremony I was feeling nauseousand coughing a lot, having troublegetting to where I could vomit prop-erly. The shaman said to me, ‘let thewizard next to you help you.’ Ilooked up and saw a warrior chief-

Ayahuasca has been described by various sourcesas “10 years of therapy in a single night,” and thereare thousands of written accounts—on the Internetand published in books—that describe the tea’spsychological healing effects.

AYAHUASCAMETABOLISM

The ayahuasca tea is brewedfrom two primary components: thecrushed bark of the ayahuasca vine(Banisteriopsis caapi) and the leavesof a different plant, traditionallychacruna (Psychotria viridis). Thechacruna leaves provide dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT), a naturally-occur-ring psychedelic found in manyplants and animals, which is alsocreated in small quantities in thepineal gland of the human brain.DMT is a very strong hallucinogenic,but it is usually broken down by thedigestive tract before sufficientquantities of it can be absorbed bythe body to create a psychedelictrance state. The ayahuasca vinecomponent of the tea provides amonoamine oxidase inhibitor(MAOI), which inhibits metabolicenzymes and allows the DMT in thetea to enter the bloodstream andbecome active in the brain. Theexperience is intense. Even thoughour brains both make DMT and uti-lize it metabolically in very smallamounts, in larger doses it is one ofthe strongest psychedelic sub-stances known to humanity. It hasbeen theorized that the vivid near-death or out-of-body experiencesundergone spontaneously by somepeople are the result of a DMTrelease cascade occurring naturallyin the brain.Continued on next page...

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tain with a raven’s head standingnext to me, who was ready to helpme let go and release the old, ickyenergy inside. That energy felt likesnakes inside me, and that was whyI was coughing so much. The songsthat the shaman was singing createda ‘puking’ energy that helped me tovomit! The shaman was very clearlycrafting the energy of the situation.”

The last two nights of MargaretRuth’s retreat were intense, and shesays she won the “puke award” forthe number of times she vomited.Vomiting is integral to the spiritualhealing potential of ayahuasca.Purging is a physiological result ofmetabolizing the tea, but it’s not aside effect to be endured—it’sembraced as part of the experience,expected, and planned for. Bringyour own bucket!

“A clean understanding”It can be difficult to understand

how what might look like ritualizedgroup bulimia can help people healtheir spiritual and emotionalwounds, but it makes sense withinthe context of the experience. If youtalk to someone who has taken partin ayahuasca healing ceremonies,you may sometimes hear them referto vomiting up psychic parasites,“entities,” that had been livinginside them and feeding off theirlife force. A Salt Lake City musicianwho chooses to remain anonymousalso talked with me about her expe-rience with the tea, and how itseemed to her that she was literallypuking up her problems.

The visions were coming onstrong and she began to feel nause-ated. “It’s not the straightforwardsick feeling you get from food poi-soning. It was coming from the tipsof my fingers and toes and the rootsof my hair. Everything felt electric,like I was being shocked all over.”

Through the visions she saw hermother, with whom she had been atodds for many years. “I felt howmuch I cared for her and how muchher rejection hurt me. Sud denly herwhole history presented itself in frontof me, and I could see how she got tobe who she was, and how the behav-ior between us had evolved over theyears to become this negative feed-back loop that had its own life.”

That journey also gave her a cleanunderstanding of how she couldbegin to fix things—by dropping herend of that behavioral loop, andthrough simple efforts such astelling her mother she loved her(even—and especially—when she

16 May 2011 Catalystmagazine.net Continued: FEATURE

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felt no such thing), letting herself bevulnerable, reaching out to herwithout grasping at her, and teach-ing herself to react differently to her.“I had known logically what theproblems were, but I’d never beenable to get out from behind thepain. I never had any experience ofcompassion—it was mostly justanger and betrayal. But in ceremo-ny I felt empathy and love for bothMom and myself in a way I’d neverexperienced before. As this aware-ness settled itself in my mind, thesickness in my body reached acrescendo and I vomited —and Imean projectile-style, whole-body-spasm vomiting; there was nothingsubtle or quiet about it!—I vomitedmy whole sickness into the bucket,and the weight of the problem wentwith it.

“The relief you always feel afteryou’ve puked up something that’smaking you sick—that bodily feel-ing of relief—got integrated into myexperience of the situation. I can’texaggerate this—it really feels as ifElvis is leaving the building.”

Metaphorical healingPsychedelic, trance-state visions

are compelling, and people areoften confused or scared by them.The information that you getthrough an ayahuasca ceremonywalks the line between real andimaginary, but does not lose powerthrough being allegorical. Are peo-ple literally puking up demons? Anddoes it matter, if the resultant heal-ing is real?

Thirty years ago, Salt Lake Cityacupuncturist and O.M.D. NatalieClausen attended her first ayahuas-ca ceremony and met a shamanfrom Peru named Augustine, withwhom she later studied. In theintervening years, she has been toPeru many times, attended nearly100 ayahuasca ceremonies, and ledseveral groups to Peru for retreats.

“Ayahuasca is metaphorical,” shesays. “I have done enough and got-ten enough very clear and specificinformation through the ceremoniesthat has not lived itself out. Ayahuas -ca gives you information, but eachperson has the freedom to do whatthey want with that information.

Ayahuasca in its native cultureswas always about survival, Clausensays. “In the Amazon, the hunters inthe tribe would have an ayahuascaritual before the hunt, to help themwork better together as a team. Theshamans would use it to heal peo-ple. We take it now to help usexpand our consciousness.”

Ayahuasca breaks down barriers,whether they are external—to co -

operation between the individualsof a group—or internal, such as theego’s resistance to the overwhelmingabundance of information madeavailable by the universe. It shakesthings up and offers a different per-spective.

“Ayahuasca gives you the gift ofuncovering a part of yourself thatneeded work,” Clausen says. “It’syour own psyche that takes youwhere you need to go. I have seenmany people run away becausethey don’t want to deal with theirfears and the lack of control.Ayahuasca is different for differentpeople, but it always has a way ofshowing us what we are most afraidof. Then we have a choice, whetherwe choose to go back where wewere, or to move on. It’s a mistaketo take it on a literal level—it is asurvival tool for consciousness.”

The science behind the substance

Antidepressant drugs that blockcertain actions in the brain, allowingthe accumulation of “feel good”neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopa -mine, norepinephrine) are calledmonoamine oxidase inhibitors(MAOIs). Anyone who is prescribeda drug from this family is aware ofspecific (and potentially lethal) foodand drug interactions.

Ayahuasca also contains MAOIs.Anyone serious about partaking ofthis plant is advised to apply thesame cautions here. Responsibleonline sites (AYAHUASCA.COM,EROWID.COM) offer details regardingfood, drug and herbal interactions.

The personal preparation for an

The ayahuasca teadoes not “cure” yourphysical ailments inthe mechanical sense.What it does do, however, is to giveyou a far deeperunderstanding of whatis going on in yourbody, and a familiaritywith your illness thatisn’t available to youany other way.

Continued on next page...

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ayahuasca healing ceremony can becasual or painstaking, depending onone’s intentions. Some participantsspend days or weeks following a spe-cial diet that excludes fermentedfoods, stimulants and intoxicants.This cleansing also prepares thebody to effectively metabolize theMAO inhibitors, DMT and otheralkaloids in the tea.

A different approach to depression?

Ayahuasca has been described byvarious sources as “10 years of thera-py in a single night.” Thou sands ofwritten accounts—on the Internetand in books—describe the tea’s psy-chological healing effects. Outsidethe context of traditional shamanis-tic healing, ayahuasca has beenadopted as a sacrament by at leasttwo formally recognized syncreticchurches, the Santo Daime and theUnião do Vegetal (UDV). In 2008, theSupreme Court of the United States

upheld a lower court’s deci-sion, and the UDV won theright to use ayahuasca(“Hoasca tea”) in their cere-monies at their U.S.churches. “A wide array ofreligious groups, includingMormons, Catholic bish-ops, Jews, Seventh-dayAdventists, Hindus andSikhs, filed briefs in favor ofthe UDV and the religiousfreedom law,” according toa November 2005 ReligionNews Service article pub-lished in the Salt LakeTribune.

Dr. Charles Grob, a psy-chiatric researcher at UCLA, con-ducted an in-depth study of UDVmembers that not only was the teanot hurting them physically, butthat the members also universallycredited the tea-taking ceremonieswith helping them conquer depres-sion, addiction and anxiety.

By studying the chemical actionof the ayahuasca brew on the brain,Grob discovered that the tea workedin a different way from traditionalantidepressants, enhancing thebody’s ability to utilize the neuro-transmitter serotonin instead ofsimply stimulating it to producemore. This sensitization appears tobe, as he says, a “more sophisticated”way of approaching the chemicalroot of psychological issues. Undertraditional SSRI antidepressanttherapy, the brain may actually

compensate for artificially highserotonin levels by reducing its sen-sitivity—so ayahuasca sidesteps thisissue altogether.

A path to overcoming addiction?

Overcoming addiction is one of themost promising therapeutic benefitsof the ceremonial use of ayahuasca.A Salt Lake businessman whorequested anonymity agreed to talkwith me about his experiences usingayahuasca as an aid to break hisaddiction to cocaine.

“The first time I went to doayahuasca, I was actually on cocainewhen I arrived at the ceremony. I hadheard that ayahuasca helped withaddiction, but I didn’t understand itat all. I went in and it was so awful.Only after I’d taken the tea and start-ed the ceremony did I realize howdangerous it was. It’s a testament tohow resilient my body and my brainare that I even survived.

He describes his visions as melt-ing celluloid—like when a strip offilm gets caught in the projectorand melts away. “Every image thatcame to me, one frame after anoth-er, all melted away in front of thehot lamp. I could literally see howdamaging the cocaine was, and howit was affecting my brain in thesame way —that melting celluloidwas my brain!

“As the ceremony went on, I real-ized that the spirits around me wereforcing me to talk, to tell someonewhat was going on with me. Weweren’t supposed to talk at all duringthe ceremony, but I understood thatif I did not tell someone about myproblem with cocaine, I wasn’tgoing to make it through the night.”He found a friend in the ceremonyand told her, confessing that heneeded help.

“I’d like to say that this was thelast time I ever used coke, but itwasn’t.” The ceremony was the startof a healing process that tookanother four years to complete. Hehas been clear of cocaine for fouryears and is going on anotherayahuasca retreat soon. “This timemy focus is clearly on physicalalignment and meditation. I want todeepen my spiritual practice. I alsoreally like the feeling that I get fromayahuasca once I’m done. There’sthis intensity, this kind of sparkleand clarity, which everyone at theretreat will have by the end of theirtime there. Everybody’s eyes are soclear and focused—exactly the

opposite of what you see whenyou’ve been out partying with peo-ple who are just numbing out withalcohol or coke.”

A cure forphysical ailments?

Others credit ayahuasca with cur-ing them of serious physical ailmentsincluding cancer. It does not do so ina mechanical sense. What it does,instead, is give a far deeper under-standing of what is going on in thebody, and a familiarity with illnessthat is not commonly available.

To understand how this could bepossible, it might be helpful to lookmore closely at the nature of illness.

The body is a constantly evolvingwaveform moving through materialspace; a symphony played by 50 tril-lion cells over the course of a life-time. For the body to work proper-ly—that is, for one to be healthy—allthose cells need to be reading fromthe same sheet music.

At its foundation, illness is athread of disharmony within thesymphony, a group (or severalgroups) of cells that are not workingcooperatively toward the benefit ofthe body as a whole. Those waywardcells—that is, the sickness—mightbe multiplying irrationally, followinga separate agenda from that of thebody as in cancer; they might beunder attack by viruses or bacteria,or they might have been poisonedby harmful chemicals entering theirmetabolisms.

Dr. Donald M. Topping, professoremeritus of the University ofHawaii, lived with cancer for 15years. He fought the tumors withoutthe aid of chemotherapy, living a fulland largely pain-free life with theaid of naturopathic healing andayahuasca. He described himself asa “friend” of both ayahuasca andcancer—one of the most importantinsights that he gained was tounderstand his illness as a functionof his body, and to put aside his fearof it. Dr. Topping describes the mes-sage he received from ayahuasca:“Take this energy that I’m givingyou, and run with it. Latch on toone of the animals [in the ayahuas-ca vision] and go for a ride. There isnothing preventing you from soar-ing to new heights of consciousnessand life.”

When I read Dr. Topping’s descrip -tion of his experiences getting toknow his illness, it struck home forme because I have also receivedphysical healing through ayahuasca,

P ablo Amaringo’s intricatedepictions of the labyrin -thine dimensions of the

ayahuasca trance state have blessedus with a conceptual map of thatstrange land—and they have beenintegral to the blossoming of ayahuas -ca consciousness far beyond theAmazon basin. Collected now asAyahuasca Visions of PabloAmaringo, 48 of his last works areavailable in full-color plates withaccompanying explanations of theAmazonian mythology they reference.

At age 17, Amar ingo nearly died.While recovering under the care ofa local healer, he taught himself topaint and draw, eventually becominga world-renowned visionary artist.Encouraged in hiswork by ethno -pharmacologistDennis McKennaand anthropolo-gist Luis EduardoLuna, Amaringobegan to paint hisvisions in earnestin the mid 1980sand continueduntil his death in2009. His worksare lushlyintense, oftenpainted in brightcolors against adark background(as one sees inan ayahuasca ceremony, mostoften taken at night) and includediverse imagery. Jaguars, angels,cities, cosmic rainbows and space-ships all jostle for room on the can-vases, and each is accompanied bya written narrative to help the viewerfind a path through the hallucination.

His work reaches beyond theayahuasca experience to touchupon the universality of the humanstate. It’s all here: love, hate, fear,wonder, joy, and confusion.Loneliness and terror rub elbowswith power and wisdom. The teashows us a mirror of ourselves, andAmaringo has painted this reflectionfaithfully.

—Alice BainAyahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo, byHoward Charing, Peter Cloudsley andPablo Amaringo. Publ. April 2010. InnerTraditions/Bear & Co. $40, hardcover.

Continued: FEATURE18 May 2011 Catalystmagazine.net

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and the centerpoint of my experiencewas exactly the same—I learnedhow to love my disease, and tomake friends with it. For me it wasan intractable case of viral neuralgiathat affected my cranial nerves andleft me crippled with pain for manyyears. The ayahuasca showed me avision of a giant blue demon thatliterally was my illness. My immedi-ate reaction was that my heart justmelted open with love for him. Ididn’t think, I just loved. Initially itdidn’t seem to make any logicalsense to love something that’s putyou through so much pain, but Iunderstood then that most of mypain came directly out of my fear ofthe illness—and that the only curefor fear is love.

Composer and Bard Collegemusic professor Margaret De Wys’smemoir (Black Smoke: A Woman’sJourney of Healing, Wild Love, andTransforma tion in the Amazon:2009) documents her successfulrecovery from cancer as she adoptedan ayahuasca lifestyle. Shedescribes it this way: “The roots ofdisease (spiritual, emotional, physi-cal) are fear, repression, the calcifi-cation of love and the life forcewithin a person.” Fear cripples yourability to live. It makes your thoughtssluggish, it makes you reactive, andit drains your creativity.

Freedom from fearMark Felder, a photographer from

Wisconsin, first sought out ayahuascafor spiritual expansion, but what hegot from his first retreat was anunexpected freedom from fear.

“My metabolism is such that Ihave a tendency to get started

late—so the tea didn’t really affectme until after the shaman was donewith the ceremony and we had allgone back to our huts,” he told mein a phone conversation. “I only hadslight effects during the ceremony,but it really began to kick in once Iwas alone!

“Being in the jungle adds to theintensity of the experience. At leastthree times I thought I was dying,but I would do it again in a heart-beat. It was pitch black where I wasin my hut, but I was seeing thingsthat were brightly illuminated infront of me, things that terrified me.For instance, at one point I saw alion—it was leaping and charging atme, and it was huge! It was morereal than real, and I just wasn’texpecting that. So just as this thingwas about to pounce on me, I real-ized that this was a fear of mine,that it wasn’t real, and that it could-n’t harm me. I understood that itwas hollow and that all fears arehollow and have no substance. Thelion suddenly stopped about a footfrom my face, and the front part ofit just broke away and dissolved,poofed apart like a dandelion head.I was stunned. I had no idea, and Ididn’t really know what this wasabout, and I needed to understandhow to stop it.

“Just as I’m relaxing after the lion,I’m confronted again by a differentfear from a different direction—another hollow fear that broke apartjust like the first one when I faced itdown. This went on and on allnight, fears coming at me one afterthe other, so intense and so real.

If you are interested in learning more about ayahuascahealing, here are some resource links to get you started:WWW.MAPS.ORG/NEWSLETTERS/V12N2/12236STU.HTML

WWW.REALITYSANDWICH.COM/AYAHUASCA_HEALING_SELFDELUSION

WWW.CHRON.COM/DISP/STORY.MPL/TRAVEL/FEATURES/5746130.HTML

WWW.BLUEMORPHOTOURS.COM

WWW.BIOPARK.ORG/PERU.HTML

WWW.AYAHUASCA-WASI.COM

WWW.AYAHUASCA.COM

WWW.FOXNEWS.COM/HEALTH/2011/01/05/AYAHUASCA-PLANT-HEALING-SOUL

WWW.AYAHUASCA.COM

WWW.THESPIRITMOLECULE.COM/HTML/WWW.WORLD-MYSTERIES.COM/NEWGW/COS-MICSERPENT.HTM

AYAHUASCA.TRIBE.NET/“The Scientific Investigation of Ayahuasca: A Review of Past and Curent Research,” by

Charles Grob, Dennis McKenna & JC Callaway.WWW.EROWID.ORG/CHEMICALS/AYAHUASCA/AYAHUASCA_JOURNAL3.SHTML

Continued on page 21

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