Dancing with Death - An Ayahuashca Spiritual Adventure in the Amazon

I´d first read about Ayahuasca from my research into indigenous tribes of South America as a child with a burgeoning interest in archaeology. Of course the intricacies involved in the ceremony and the spiritualism surrounded it were but a far far off concept. A foggy cloud of understanding beyond the reach of a simple child. Hell, even as a much more educated24 year old travelling to South America the notion still felt far of and foggy. But the fact that Ayahuasca had been used throughout South America by indigenous people for thousands and thousands of years and had a deeply rooted history in shamanism, spiritualism and emotional and physical healing had peaked my interest.

I was intrigued, but first some more background:

Ayahuasca is used in deeply religious and shamanistic rituals for the purposes of selfhealing. This is an inward journey that allows one to enter the land of the gods and the drug is nonaddictive and has been shown in studies to have huge healing properties for both emotional and physical health.

Ayahuasca is a psychotropic infusion prepared from the Banisteriopsis vine which is native to the Amazon rainforest. The hallucinogenic properties of the vine are only active when it is mixed with one of several other plants (we used chakruna...well that´s its Quechua name) The plants are ground up and boiled and it takes three days and three nights to properly prepare the mix.

The taste of the drink can best be described as cat urine. Actually one writer phrased it much more adequately than me. The smell and acrid taste was that of the entire jungle ground up and mixed with bile."¨

Also it is vomit and nausea inducing, three days later i am still strongly feeling its effects!

No matter which culture it is associated with (and remember this is found throughout Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and even more SA countries!) ayahuasca is a religious sacrament.

From the March 2006 Edition of National Geographic:

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 has been medically proven 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 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. Unlike most common anti-depressants, 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.

Without going into to much detail Sam and I had an extraordinary of coincidences that led us to the friendly Bolivian Mystica where we encountered none other than Tim, the shaman that led the ceremonies. Quite possibly one of the most beautiful men I have ever encountered with the warmest brown eyes and the quietest air and this deep sense of spirtiuality about him. When I picked my jaw up off the floor and managed to stop drooling, well, everything fell into place perfectly. Tim had spent the last four years training in the jungles of Peru, combining everything from solitude and meditation to extreme diets (two months of white rice and green plantains? can you see le yuck) and experimentation with local barks and plants (each plant and spirit in the forest had something to tell him and something to help further develop his ceremony).

Anyways Saturday morning we packed our bags and said goodbye to George and Christian (only for a few days, we met back up with them yesterday) and went to Bolivian Mystica. The ceremony would take place a short boat ride away in a jungle at the heart of the temple, but Sam and I had opted to spend the afternoon ziplining the canopy! It was GREAT fun and we had a lovely group complete with an Amazonas airline pilot and his son for his 15 birthday. Learned lots about the flora and fauna of the Amazon (the walking tree is one of the coolest things ever!) and I managed of course to crash into the second tree in the zipline (these are 250 metre long slides and steep angles, very easy to go to fast and crash!) and further gash up my poor leg.

Seriously if I have to hear one more Allie i think you should break up with your boyfriend joke while someone knowingly points at my bruised and battered body I am going to smack them.

Regardless it was a lovely afternoon and Sam and I headed back to the temple and Lodge around 6 pm to have a long discussion with Tim and the other guy Rob who was joining us for the ceremony.

All I can really say is that it was irrevocably life altering and different then anything i have ever done in my life. The ceremony took place in the middle of the jungle in a temple built in the complete dark with your eyes closed for 5 hours. The entire time the shaman was playing a multidude of musical instruments, singing different songs, using tobacco smoke, perfumes, touch and other things to guide the trip and to draw everything else out of you as a benevolent spirit entered your body and allowed you to enter the world of the gods.

It sounds hokey but it´s not. I am not the same person I was before this. My own experience is far to personal and primal to go into detail here, and I am still processing all of the insights and aspects of it. However everything about it was perfect. this wasn´t a tourist trap, this was a carefully planned, executed and highly spiritual affair. Words aren´t enough to do it justice.

It took Sam and I all of Sunday to recover. We sat and played cards and ate food and discussed our insights and played the guitar.

We were set to fly out Monday morning for La Paz but for no earthly reason in the world, quel surprise, our flight was cancelled. Grumpy at having risen at 6 am for no reason we were ordered to return at 11 am. We do, and whats this? Another flight cancelled. This happened AGAIN at 330. of the four scheduled flights only one went out at 5 pm and thank goodness we were on it. Amazonas has this strange habit. If they cancel your 6 am flight you get priority on the next one and all the people on the next one are bumped and so on. It wasn´t even raining! We had this odd sense of being trapped in Groundhog Day and that Rurrenburque would never let us leave.

Thankfully it did and we hurried to meet Christian and George for a quick dinner and Spiderman 3. Spiderman 3 was awful. I will speak no more on it.

Sam and I spent today shopping, as we take an overnight bus down to the Salar De Uyuni (the worlds biggest Salt Lake) where we will arive at 7 am and shop around trying to get on one of the 4 day trips leaving that morning at 9 am for a tour of the salt lake, the pink and purple lacoons, to climb a volcanoe and do other such things. So this will be my last entry until after the Salar, pictures coming at some point!

Much love kids

Indiana Allie