Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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soon appeared again in my sleep with the following directive, If we are to continue healing your clients, we need some reciprocity from you. Bring people into nature, lecture on the healing power of nature, be the Voice of Nature and its healing powers for us. That’s the deal, and so it is, even today.”10
Again, the question of spirit doctors is beyond the scope of psychological research, but my first interviews brought me face-to-face with the limits of my understanding.
These interviews showed me that people were hungry to talk about their ayahuasca experiences, not just because they were dramatic and sensational, but because they needed a witness, someone who would listen to their extraordinary tales from start to finish. During these interviews, I was often more a therapist than a researcher. Being able to tell their stories gave the interviewees a greater sense of understanding and enabled them to find meaning in their experiences that they could use in their ongoing lives. At the very least, these initial interviews confirmed the importance of focusing my research on integration.
Developing the Questionnaire
The decision to focus the research on integration was totally my own. Grandmother Ayahuasca asked me to conduct the study, but she gave me no guidance on the content of the research. All the details of how to proceed were up to me. My initial interviews only added to the mystery surrounding the medicine — obviously, I wasn’t up to asking about spirit doctors. Instead, I turned to a Western shaman who had been trained by an indigenous shaman. We spoke the same language and shared the same psychospiritual, Western perspective. He also had been conducting ceremonies and observing people for years, so he had the clinical information I had tried and failed to gather from initial interviews.
“What questions should I ask?” I said right away as we sat in an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant. I was ready to take notes in between bites of broccoli chicken.
“Let’s begin with the details of the ceremony. It would be good to know what people are actually doing,” he said.
Nothing was known about how people were doing the ceremonies, so we included questions that asked for concrete details: what kinds of settings, with or without live music, were dietary instructions or medication warnings given, were these followed, and was there any screening or follow-up offered. I also wanted to collect phenomenological data about personal experiences before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. What kinds of intentions did people have initially and then how did their intentions change with subsequent experiences with ayahuasca? Did they do anything special to integrate their experiences afterward? How did they change as a result of their ayahuasca experiences? I asked nineteen open-ended questions about changes in use of alcohol, marijuana, or other psychedelics; changes in health or diet; changes in personal relationships, emotional moods, or dreams; and changes in attitude toward oneself, life, or spiritual beliefs. In other words, I asked about almost everything and the kitchen sink (for the complete questionnaire, see appendix A).
These open-ended questions were what allowed people to express the personal suffering that had brought them to ayahuasca and how the medicine helped them to change. Sometimes the help was immediate, falling into the category of miraculous cures. Other times, healing required patient discipline, learning new ways of dealing with emotional moods and relationships. At the time of developing the questionnaire, I didn’t realize how therapeutic it would be for people simply to describe how they’d changed.
I’d never seen a research protocol with so many open-ended questions. Usually researchers try to keep questionnaires simple and easy to fill out, since it’s usually difficult to get people to cooperate and complete the process. Yet I designed a questionnaire that was sixteen pages long with nine pages of essay questions. It never occurred to me to worry about getting people to answer all these personal questions about their illegal explorations into an Amazonian medicine. This wasn’t optimism about the data-collection process; I just never considered that this might be a potential issue. Looking back, I wonder about this total lack of concern. It’s uncharacteristic of me, as I’m usually quite pessimistic, expecting that what can go wrong will go wrong. In this case, I was totally la-de-da: “Let’s ask this and this and this.”
I met with other indigenous-trained Western shamans who made even more suggestions. One very intuitive shaman said, “You should ask whether people experience a relationship with Grandmother Ayahuasca.”
“Like what?” I asked, completely ignoring my own experience with her.
“Ask whether they have an ongoing relationship with her.”
“Oh.” This question had simply never occurred to me despite the fact that I was doing the project as a result of my own relationship with Grandmother Ayahuasca. My unconscious never ceases to amaze me. I can only say that I must have thought I was one of the select few to be in communication with Grandmother Ayahuasca. This limited perspective set me up for a big surprise when the results came in — my findings led to a personal crisis regarding nothing less than my worldview and the nature of reality.
Measuring Mysticism
The nine pages of open-ended questions would yield a wealth of rich, qualitative information from people using ayahuasca in North America. These first-person reports are essential for ground-level exploratory research into a new phenomenon. However, the scientific preference is for quantitative data, and for this I turned to a well-established lineage in psychedelic research on mystical experience.
During the early sixties, when psychedelic research was still legal, Walter Pahnke was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist completing his PhD at Harvard Divinity School. He’s best known for the infamous Good Friday Experiment held in Marsh Chapel at Boston University in 1962.11 For this, he randomly assigned seminary students either to an experimental group taking psilocybin or to a control group taking a niacin supplement. Despite his hope that the side effects of niacin would pass for a psychedelic drug, both subjects and monitors quickly figured out who actually received the psilocybin. The experiment was held in the basement of the chapel, and the music from the Good Friday services held directly above was clearly heard. This was a serendipitous intervening variable in the study, since the religious music helped to create a sacred atmosphere for the divinity students. Many of them mentioned the importance of the music when they were interviewed twenty-five years later.
In that follow-up study, MAPS founder Rick Doblin tracked down the seminary students, many of whom were now working as ministers, and he asked them to once again complete the same questionnaire that Pahnke had used years ago. The results were startlingly similar. The people who had received psilocybin reported high levels of mystical experience, a conviction that had only grown with the benefit of a long-term perspective. Doblin wrote that they “still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives.”12
An interesting aside is that one anonymous person from the original study refused to be interviewed for the follow-up twenty-five years later. It is assumed that he was the same person who had had a bad experience on psilocybin during the study. This seminary student bolted from the basement of the chapel in a mad dash to get away, and Huston Smith, who also participated in the Good Friday Experiment, later described chasing after him.13 The Boston University Chapel is located on Commonwealth Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Boston, and it is in the center of an urban campus. Even though it was a holiday weekend, lots of people were likely milling around the square outside the chapel. It must have been quite a sight to see Huston Smith, the eminent professor of religion from MIT, who was more of an aesthete than an athlete, tackling an escapee from a research study on mysticism.
Although I’m presenting this as a humorous anecdote, it raises questions about the possibility of a bad trip that have to be considered along with the healing benefits of psychedelic substances. At the time of the Good Friday Experiment, the medical standard was to give the would-be escapee a shot of Thorazine to bring him down. Evidently, this approach didn’t help this person integrate his difficult experience, since he refused to talk about it twenty-five years later. We now know more about how to work therapeutically with people when challenging moments