 In the heart of the Amazon, out of generations of indigenous people, from mysterious origins, birthed from a specific combination of plants, comes a visionary experience, an ancient healing tradition, modern controversy, and massive interest from younger generations all surrounding a sacred brew called ayahuasca, a beverage that contains DMT. DMT is a tryptamine that even our brain produces, but the chakruna leaves contains much more. Left alone, this molecule will be metabolized before having any effect, so the sacred vine is added to protect its entry through the body, into the brain, and into our experience. From scientists to shamans, many theories abound regarding the strange effects of ayahuasca, and yet it still is not fully understood. So ayahuasca is, it's a whole bunch of things, but on the nuts and bolts level, it's a beverage, it's made from two plants, at least one of which contains dimethyl tryptamine. At the cultural level, it's much broader than that. These are essentially shamanic practices, and ayahuasca is at the center of that kind of traditional medicine, which is really a mind-body kind of medicine. This mind-body medicine has been used for so long in a region devoid of literature that the true beginnings of ayahuasca are left to oral traditions and myth. There are only a few cultural artifacts that have survived this hot and wet climate before being completely decomposed and recycled back into nature. And the mystery of how the indigenous discovered these two ingredients, among countless other species, has baffled the world. Why do these few plants, out of a half a million in the world, have these unearthly effects on the mind, and sometimes on the body, that they think can transport him to outer realms of space, and they believe that in these plants, there is a resident spirit. Ayahuasca was the only psychedelic session where I had a sense of a personal therapist, kind of like a spiritual guide of some sort, which I didn't see, but it was a very clear sense of energetic presence and telepathic communication, guiding me in a very specific way through my sessions, what I should look at, what I should work on. And if I didn't do it, it sort of returned and was sort of putting some pressure on me to do it. It had an intention for me, what I should do, what I should become in that session. The indigenous of the Amazon referred to it as Mother Ayahuasca, known by some to be the divine feminine principle and the first woman of creation. The ayahuascaros or healers say it is her that we commune with for guidance before, during, and after drinking ayahuasca. It is she that allows us access to all that we've forgotten, in this life and all others. However, in the initial ceremonies where people are introduced to this resident spirit, it can be painful and quite confrontational because so much of our trauma is unknown to us and therefore we rarely acknowledge our baggage as a part of us. So what Ayahuasca does is she goes through the physical and energetic body, which are emotional bodies that are totally interconnected and she's going through and our traumas are held in the tissues and so she's going and ripping out that stuff and so it hurts, whether it be physical through nauseousness or even actual pain or sometimes we have that stuff in our thought processes, our patterns and so we're holding on to the stuff and ayahuasca is opening, opening, opening and pulling that stuff out. Everyone's experiences are different in personal ways, not everyone experiences pain, some are left in ecstasy, but no two ceremonies are identical. Some describe the evolution of ceremonies as the medicine speaking a story of our blind spots and ailments, although traditionally the main purpose of ayahuasca has been for healing, it's typically the visionary quality that initially attracts newcomers. They come with curiosity, expectation, ambition and a drive to become enlightened, a mystic, a spiritual savant, but if you listen to those who have spent many years with the medicine or even just a few weeks in a traditional setting, you'll learn that the path to heaven often comes through the belly of a personal hell. The wake up call happens when those who want to merge with pure divinity are faced with their fears of death. In ayahuasca culture, facing mortality is a prerequisite to evolving on the path of spirituality. The vine itself is called the vine of souls or the vine of the dead, and even though these difficult encounters are well known, there are still thousands of people journeying to the Amazon with the desire to peek behind the veil to receive the overflowing gifts of life and uncover these painful yet fruitful mysteries of death. Getting into the heart of the Amazon requires much time, money and determination just to get through the hustle and bustle, only to arrive on a long boat ride to your final destination. Once the boat departs and you're finally miles from modern civilization, the jungle begins to speak. The volume of the jungle seems deafening and ominous, overpowering at times. The anticipation of the coming ceremony puts the nerves on alert, and so begins the real work. The curandero or healer will seek the purest leaves, the wisest vines, pound them, pray over them, and add them to the pot, light the fire, and begin the alchemical distillation. The ceremonial maloka is prepared for the evening, beds, blankets, buckets, and the altar. When the night hits, the jungle shifts its song and the ceremony begins. The maestro blows the protective smoke of Mapacho tobacco over those about to drink, and then he pours the brew. Each individual accepts their share, sits, and drinks. The first thing one might notice is the taste, a confusing mix of bitter, sour, sweet, and the unknown fills the taste buds and lingers. Once the medicine becomes noticeable, it can be felt in the stomach and in the tissues, in the bones, and deep down in the psyche. As the minutes pass, the medicine spreads out and tracks a path through every layer of the body, mind, and beyond, until at last, hours later, the peak is upon us. The peak usually lasts roughly for an hour or two, but is also known to come in waves. The pulse of ayahuasca is slightly different for every person and even changes from ceremony to ceremony. Visions begin swirling and pulsing in front, behind, and everywhere around us. Time and space may dissolve, and the visions become the only reality. And it is at this point the creatures of the jungle appear. I have seen and experienced a lot of identification with animals, but there seemed to be preponderance of certain animals, like jaguar and anacondas. They may be entirely animal, they may be entirely human, but sometimes you get these therianthropes. Again and again they crop up in visionary experience. I've had such visions myself under the influence of ayahuasca. So it doesn't surprise me that ancient people had those visions as well. The shamans are drinking ayahuasca to enter a deeply altered state of consciousness, and a great many of those shamans paint their visions today. Are people under these states experiencing the same visions that our ancestors saw in each corner of the globe? How would it be possible that humans are connecting to ancestral visions through a plant combination? Various aspects of the visual cortex are stimulated by the presence of psychedelics. So the fact that we have visions we can easily explain. The content of the visions, what it is we see, presents some much more significant challenges. How is it that the brain gets access to information that people often claim has nothing at all to do with what they've experienced before? Well, perhaps some of this can be understood as a stimulation of what's been called archetypes or archetypal structures. Archetypes are common types of people or forms that seem to emerge from mythology and visionary imagery. From cultures separated by time and space with no known contact or communication. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung wrote extensively about these visions from patients and psych wards, who spoke of seeing imagery that is nearly identical to mythological figures that at the time were not even translated into English yet. If these archetypal forms are not withered by the passing of time, is there a reason for their arrival in our visions? Some believe these are messages for our personal advancement by showing us who and what we truly are. Not the individual body or identity we inhabit, but all the events that have unfolded since the origin of life and beyond. I think what happens with plant medicine is that plant medicines helps you like get yourself out of your own body and look at yourself. You know there's your birth, but then there's your mom's birth. Your grandma's birth, the birth of a nation, the birth of humanity, the birth of the universe. It's like this longer life, you know, kind of very much like quilting, where in the quilt you might be just one stitch, but you're one stitch of this big beautiful quilt that's this big beautiful pattern that for us would be a story or the history if you want to call it that. Whatever the source, these visions are almost always outside the realm of anything we've ever experienced in this waking life. They tell stories, reveal hidden truths, conjure emotions, and even lead the mind into realms unknown. Many who try to explain these visions by conventional means come up short of legitimate answers. Some say that visions are alive. In combination with these visions comes the strange bodily sensations and the physiological effects of the beta-carbolines in the vine. The common result of this is what some call lapurga, the purge. The need to throw up is why there are typically buckets set out next to the beds in the ceremonial maloca, and the belief of many indigenous is that purging is the physical outlet for an energetic release and surrender. With the purging, some people might say, well why are you going to put yourself through that, but it's actually part of the process of not only detoxing but also healing. I think it depends on where you're at with the medicine. I think in the beginning a lot of the purging has to do with physical stuff that's in your body because when you come out of ceremony you really recognize how your diet affects you, be it the water or lack of water you drink or the type of food, how healthy or unhealthy it is. Once the physical part kind of passes, or I don't want to call it the next level but maybe a deeper level, it becomes more of an emotional purge where sometimes you will realize that if you go into this storyline, and if the storyline is a negative storyline, that's when the purging, like the feeling of purging starts. Then after a while you start realizing that your habits kind of recreated again and then the next ceremony comes and you're still getting it out and then you're just kind of repeating that cycle. So it'll get to a point that all of a sudden the purge is the acknowledgement of there's something there that you need to work with. Working with discomfort, the trauma and unknown aspects of the psyche is not a modern western approach where most medicines dull pain, mask symptoms and require no work after being taken. ayahuasca on the other hand is impossible to take and forget about and requires the courage, strength, patience and understanding to face the darkest aspects of us that we've forgotten. We want to develop, we want to know ourselves and it helps to surrender to yourself in fact because what ayahuasca is, it is a jungle medicine that opens up your own subconscious. So if you see a beauty then you deserve to feel that before you can maybe be confronted with your behavior that is not always beautiful. When you see darkness it may indicate that there is some shadow energy in you that needs to be digested. The strange ability for ayahuasca to introduce you to your own shadow in a detached and unique way is why the indigenous have used it as a form of mind-body medicine for millennia. Some of the most profound revelations under the medicine often come once the purging is over, once the difficulty and discomfort subsides and the medicine begins the softer part of the journey in which the shattered pieces of the story we've told ourselves begins to reassemble into a more humbling, more real and holistic narrative. The ceremony concludes, the morning comes, a recommended period of silence to reflect and then the group comes together and the sharing begins. The sharing after a ceremony is integrating the whole experience. After an ayahuasca ceremony you don't just continue in daily life, you're changed. There is this neuroplasticity in the mind that makes you change after every experience and this is a major experience. Part of the ayahuasca in the West as well as when you do these ceremonies together you hear other people's pain, you hear their purging and you hear their connection and you feel interconnected and you come out and you're very bonded. There's been some, one test I know that Dennis McKenna and Charles Grob and others did a few decades ago now with a ayahuasca project looking at one of the ayahuasca churches in South America and it wasn't just that the ayahuasca was increasing the serotonin in the brain which it was on a neurochemical level, they felt more integrated and more connected because their community were all doing ayahuasca together. What ayahuasca can really do, they can say it can be like 10 years worth of therapy in one night because when you're in therapy in the West you're talking and you're engaging the intellect but ayahuasca makes permeable, you're unconscious, it opens the heart more and it becomes very visible, anything you've been holding in your energetic field, anything emotionally or you suppressed can come up and it comes up in a way that you're not attached to it so you can entertain it and go through this psychotherapy sort of experience and then you can let go of it. Another South American ayahuasca study was conducted by Terrence's brother Dennis to evaluate the therapeutic value of this plant mixture in a modern context. And we found in our ayahuasca study in Brazil that long-term users of ayahuasca had an up-regulation of the serotonin transporter. When we got into it, it turns out that deficits in those transporters are linked to all kinds of pathologies, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, intractable depression, all of the things, in fact, that ayahuasca is good for treating. So that can't be coincidence. It looks like ayahuasca can actually reverse these deficits over time and really not just control the symptoms but actually repair the brain at some fundamental level. So that's a remarkable thing. Family physician and ayahuasca researcher Dr. Joe Tufour has been looking at epidemics across the U.S. as having a common origin. Whether it's anxiety or PTSD or addiction or depression or even psychosomatic things like migraine, they have problems in their emotional processing and that the psychedelics and plant medicines are an interesting way to approach such problems. I suffered from pretty severe childhood trauma and carried around this trauma with me for years, not really recognizing, you know, what was going on. It wasn't until I was in my really late 40s that I really recognized this and I had a series of ayahuasca experiences that really took me into it, really made me face the trauma and one of the primary symptoms of the trauma was fear, you know, that I had this kind of, you know, continuous anxiety, this running fear with me for years. The ayahuasca spirit just literally talked to me and said to me, you know, hey, you know, you have a problem with this? Hey, let's work this out. Hey, come on, I'm going to teach you I'm taking you to warrior school. We're going to get rid of those fears and for the next like four hours confronted me with just fear after fear, all my deepest fears. We have evolved out of tune. There's an enzyme problem that is caused us to fail to suppress the ego and then this creates a spectrum of cultural effects that drives us all nuts and so they have a kind of psycholitic therapy to correct that. And isn't it interesting that the fix turns out to be not a drug but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism? The tuning and harmony of neurotransmitters cause for the inner atmosphere of the body to become suitable for physical and psychological relaxation and a rewiring of thought patterns. However, the strongest and most lasting effects neurologically happen in the gut. The enteric nervous system has about 100 million neurons similar to what dogs have in their brain. This neurology is in communication with the microbiome or colonies of bacteria in the gut that are integral to our health and even our impulses. It is believed by ayahuasca shamans that the real medicine is not the brew itself. And in the jungle if you talk to the mithros and they say oh you want to study the medicine, dieta, dieta, dieta. They don't say ayahuasca, ayahuasca, ayahuasca. What they say if you really get down with them is that the diet is everything and that you're a tourist and you're here for a few weeks and yes we'll give you ayahuasca. But what this is really about is controlling diet over a period of months even years and taking a regular regimen of this stuff and transforming yourself into some kind of other person. In the shippeebo tradition a diet, a dieta, is to go through this kind of restrictive phase of with your food. You know no salt, no sugar, no dairy, no hot spicy, no greasy, no oily, no red meat, no pork, you know in some cases no chicken. It's this kind of purification, this period of sacrifice. And then while you're doing that you're taking this other plant that most likely is not psychoactive at all in any measurable form but you take it every day or in some kind of format and so you're connecting to the spirit of that plant through the diet. The indigenous believe that it is this other tea of dieted plants that adds another layer of intelligence and guidance to the ceremonial healing journey. A deeply revealing truth can be seen in the importance of a dieta. Most every health concern in the modern world that is preventable due to lifestyle comes down to what we feed our bodies. Ayahuasca has gained a lot of popularity as a healing medicine which it surely is but only when taken in conjunction with a plant-based diet and listening for the messages that the plants impart. The more one listens, the more it is evident that these plants actually have their own language and are attempting to teach and prepare the body and mind for ayahuasca. But the indigenous as well as westerners who've devoted their lives to this culture and medicine believe these master plants don't speak in a dry language but rather in a way that sings to our higher faculties of perception. The songs that are sung are called ikaro's and have particular meaning to the healers of the amazon. That seems like crazy you know to hard to believe with the ideas that you're dieting these plants these master plants are going to teach you how to do this healing work you know and also facilitate your own personal healing through the process and uh and that that's going to be where you learn how to sing these songs from you know like i said i had hard to believe i wouldn't believe it if somebody told me that but that was my personal experience. Maestro Gume was born and raised in the ayahuasca healing traditions and relates his family's process of introducing him to the plants. You have to be patient so that you can get to have that because if you do it locally there's nothing, there's nothing because he told me that i had the medicinal plants taught me how to do it, they showed me spiritually and they themselves explained to me how how i can do it and in that way my godfather learned what the medicinal plant is and the wounds he had on his legs healed completely. By modern reductionist beliefs it would sound crazy that these plants are wise teachers that gift healing songs to the students or shamans. Several origin myths of ayahuasca claim that these plants are the ones that instructed the humans on how to make the brew and they did so not through human language but through song. The imagery in several ayahuasca cultures actually illustrate the visual appearance of the songs themselves and it is said that the songs of the master plants are sung during ceremony to guide ayahuasca into the psychological root of the illness. Well we know that music entrains the brain in certain ways and so do the psychedelics so music can be used to augment the effects of the psychedelics and this was well recognized by the shamans they often viewed it as the spirits are being called in by the music. These people have some kind of authenticity that you can absolutely feel it's in the voice. I met many ayahuascaros and the good ones all had this voice thing going on that they could cast their voice way back in their throat and they kind of purr. The indigenous of the amazon as well as many other shamanic traditions from around the world believe the only medicine is truth and authenticity. Whether that comes through a shamans particular vocal vibration, a movement of energy through dance, a cleansing of the body through diet or even the mind opening properties of psychedelic plants. Truth and authenticity is a state of being that a human can surrender to or continue to defend against but if one is open to acknowledging their blind spots a new state of being unfolds. It's a flowing with the energy of life and I think that's why people have so much synchronicity after they have experienced ayahuasca or have experienced these kinds of medicines. You start to run into events in your life and it seems like you just surrender to the flow and it takes you exactly where you need to go. And this is why ayahuasca has not simply remained in the jungle but has spread across the world and also why the culture stays traditional in some regions yet evolves and updates in others. The udv and santodime churches have been established for semi-traditional and even syncretic uses of ayahuasca. Even the Native American church that originally protected peyote use has now included ayahuasca. Some say that ayahuasca is growing beyond the jungle first through awareness and now being grown in many different locations causing not only the medicine to spread but the cultural mindset of being one singular species on a turbulent and rapidly changing planet. Very often I'm surprised how common it is for people to you know come to South America for example take ayahuasca and they come back with this really broadened perspective about how we fit into nature. As global culture rediscovers these ancient medicines we're also rediscovering the traditions behind them which is a good thing because they do have traditions and that's something that you know as a society we lacked I think when in the 60s we didn't really understand that now we do so we're adapting shamanism to our own purposes and developing variations of shamanism that you know may not be traditional but they're more appropriate for who we are at this time. Perhaps looking at the world in new ways relating to all nature as if it's an extension of ourselves is the real medicine for the people. Not just through the visionary features of ayahuasca but also through the master plants of the jungle that the shamans diet to teach them the mysteries. Perhaps the jungle really does speak or sing the messages of gaya that must be heard sooner or later and all those singing and living that message are embodying the medicine the truth and authenticity that the world needs most. Stepping aside from dogmas and experiencing real moments of connection real compassion for others lucid reflection upon global issues and inspiration for future endeavors through visions of animal guides spirits and entities this path is not for the tourist not for the curious this path is for those who have accepted and committed themselves to the health of all beings and the whole planet up next we explore the unique enlightening fast phenomena of the DMT experience and the strange inhabited feeling of this space once again thank you to gaya for sharing this powerful and moving episode with us this series psychedelica is a 14 part series with each episode as moving as this one going into psilocybin peyote DMT and how these various substances affect us and support us in deep mental emotional and spiritual healing to watch the full series click the link in the description and please enjoy this groundbreaking original series where experts explore the history and use of entheogenic plants see you soon and plenty more on the way follow your curiosity to gaya.com and unlock the entire library with a special startup offer click the link in the description to get started for only 99 cents