Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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sounds peculiar at best, ridiculous at worst. No one can address the issues or problems that come up who has not drunk ayahuasca.”
A fifty-four-year-old college professor said, “Therapy? Most professionals wouldn’t have a clue even if it was needed. Most of them would benefit from drinking some ayahuasca.” A forty-six-year-old medical doctor wrote, “No to psychotherapy. The shaman is the only professional I know qualified to assist in this way” — meaning qualified to help integrate an ayahuasca experience. I don’t entirely agree with his perspective. I think an ayahuasca-experienced
therapist could help a person work on the psychological issues that are illuminated during a ceremony. However, I do agree that only a shaman could work on the energetic levels and otherworld dimensions revealed during an ayahuasca ceremony.
Despite my enthusiasm for therapy, most people held the opinion, as one young woman put it, that “mainstream help cannot provide me assistance at this time.” Or as another woman said, “Ayahuasca is my therapist.” One man simply said, “NEVER.” Another wrote, “I go to an energy healer that is much more helpful in overcoming personal blocks than a psychiatrist.”
When I first started the research study in 2008, I would receive inquiries asking for help to connect with a source of the medicine. Around 2012, therapists began to contact me for clinical information because they had a client who had taken ayahuasca, and they had no idea what that meant. Needless to say, these therapists had no idea how to work with the experiences these clients were bringing into therapy. This situation confirms why participants reject “mainstream help,” and it affirms the need for more therapists with personal experience of ayahuasca.
This chapter describes the enormous therapeutic potential in this medicine from the Amazon jungle. But ayahuasca does more — it opens up a rich spiritual world of visions, healing, and love, which is what we’ll explore next.
“I now think we know very little about the universe,” reported a thirty-three-year-old male editor. “There seems to be a much richer tapestry of spiritual dimensions for us to access, explore, and learn from. I now believe that the universe is connected through consciousness, that we are all one and interconnected through a web of love and life. I used to not believe in anything.” A thirty-eight-year-old female graphic designer echoed his thoughts, “I changed from being an atheist to a deeply spiritual person. I live with the sense of awe and knowledge of the great beyond, with feelings of humility and hope. I learned that reality is much larger and more complex than our ordinary state, that the Divine exists and is accessible to us all. This is a major shift in worldview.”
In the study, a noetic awareness of a previously unknown spiritual dimension was one of the most frequently mentioned experiences resulting from ayahuasca ceremonies. A twenty-five-year-old male graduate student wrote, “I appreciate Nature as Divine. The spiritual world is primary; the world of the rational senses is secondary.” A thirty-six-year-old male paralegal said, “It’s made a believer out of me — there’s more to consciousness than waking and dreaming.”
A fifty-seven-year-old male teacher wrote that he felt “a reaffirmation that there is a definite spiritual presence in the universe and that there are many more dimensions than our conventional mainstream one.” He’d had fifteen ayahuasca experiences over an eight-year period. He added, “Also a deeper attunement with other plant and animal life. I appreciate all life more. Time also felt relative.”
“I see light and opportunity to learn and grow in everything. I walk around in perfect awe and wonder at the world. I feel like I’ve found heaven on earth, and it’s a state of being,” said a thirty-three-year-old female graduate student. At the time of the study, this woman’s most recent experience with ayahuasca was six years before, which shows that these ecstatic feelings are not temporary, but long-lasting.
Study participants often mentioned decreased anxiety around death, accompanied by a deeper appreciation of life. “Because of ayahuasca,” a twenty-seven-year-old male graduate student wrote, “I’m impressed by the mystery and feel okay not knowing. I feel safe, even in death. Life is right here, right now, and that’s a gift!” A forty-two-year-old woman said, “I totally trust that there’s a Divine Force working for us, that all is really connected, and that life is a gift.” A fifty-four-year-old male social worker said he now understood that “life and death are two words describing the same process. I trust more in constant transformation.” He further explained that he was “learning to surrender to what is, to love what is. . . . I am part of the cosmos.”
The intensity of these experiences is apparent; many described one of the most important experiences of their lives. “I consider that one time to be a life-changing experience,” wrote a forty-seven-year-old female homemaker. A twenty-four-year-old male teacher said, “Ayahuasca was the first religious experience of my life.”
“I saw my soul,” wrote a forty-five-year-old man. “It was a square rusted piece of metal off to the side. I thought I should clean it.” His comment reminds me of the Sufi concept of polishing the mirror of the heart to allow more Divine Light to be reflected into the world.1
A thirty-five-year-old female bookkeeper, who’d had a total of five ayahuasca experiences, left most of the open-ended questions blank, but she wrote, “My second ceremony has stuck with me because in it I experienced a very prolonged state of pure joy and bliss and understood that that is who I really am.” Others wrote: “I’ve learned how little I know and how big the universe is”; “I’m part of the Cosmos”; and my personal favorite, “I glow light.”
A few people referenced a process of unfolding, in which they were working with the medicine over time. A twenty-nine-year-old graduate student expressed his long-term view of ayahuasca: “I think of my relationship to the medicine as lifelong, that I believe I will continue to use the tea throughout my life to open myself up to nonsecular channels of wisdom and guidance.” A sixty-three-year-old woman said, “I’m learning to keep my heart open, to accept myself and what is.”
“I no longer hate myself. I was able to let my hate go. Mama Ayahuasca filled that black hole with her love and it became my love!” said a thirty-one-year-old male accountant, who continued: “Life is more livable. It has more meaning — I don’t feel so insignificant. I believe in spirits now. I believe I have a spirit.”
A forty-seven-year-old male computer analyst wrote that he now felt “there’s more to life than normal, daily activities. My ayahuasca experiences have opened some profound blockages, emotional knots that I’ve been carrying around for a long time. This plant is a way to discover a whole new level of spirituality.”
The range of personal revelations was extensive and not easily categorized. Some people reported clearly ecstatic, mystical experiences of pure joy, love, and timelessness. Others wrote about an encounter with the Divine. Some mentioned seeing death as an illusion along with a new appreciation for life as a gift. Others experienced an alternate reality in the spirit world.
People continued to mention their personal healing even when the questions were focused on spiritual issues, which makes total sense. Our emotional and spiritual lives are intertwined and inseparable. The last two quotes above move seamlessly between psychological healing and spirituality — from self-hatred to love and from emotional knots to spiritual opening. It’s one of the hallmarks of this medicine that it works on all levels. Just don’t ask me how.
Synchronicity
In the questionnaire, I asked participants to describe any changes in synchronicity after drinking ayahuasca, thinking this would yield a gold mine of great stories, but . . . it didn’t. One person even went so far as to say, “I don’t believe in synchronicity anymore,” without explaining why. Most people left this question blank. A handful