he said, “most of us need to hear things many times before we can change.” This is a more realistic attitude than expecting instant changes in behavior, and it helped me assuage my own guilt and dismay for not following the advice I have received from Grandmother Ayahuasca. In almost every ceremony over the last ten years, she’s given me straightforward advice: Eat lite. I know she means in terms of both quality and quantity. It makes perfect sense. Have I done it? No.
I’ve only recently been able to talk to friends regarding my failure to follow Grandmother Ayahuasca’s advice. I started with my Rolfer, Neal Powers, whom I knew forty years and forty pounds ago. My weight gain is embarrassing enough, but it’s even more so since he’s in better shape now than he was back then. He’s a winter swimmer in San Francisco — yes, he swims in those cold, shark-infested waters for the sheer joy of it, and he has the shoulder girdle to prove it. Perhaps because I was lying in my underwear on his Rolfing table, I decided to unburden myself of my dilemma. As he worked, I admitted, “In every ceremony I’ve done, I’ve gotten the same message — Eat lite. It’s not as if it’s a secret that I’m eating too heavy. I mean, the evidence is all around me. Literally.” Then I gestured to my midsection as if he might not have noticed an extra forty pounds.
The next person I chose to bare my soul to heard Grandmother Ayahuasca’s message in a totally different way. Steeped in a lifelong spiritual quest, my friend thought I said, “Eat light” — just like the women mystics of the Middle Ages who mysteriously survived on air and light rather than food. My friend was so relieved to hear the message was Eat lite that the conversation veered away from the real crux of the matter — that I was not following Grandmother Ayahuasca’s advice.
I’ve recently received a different message from Grandmother. Not long ago, I spent two nights of ceremony confronting my abusive childhood history and the full extent of the resulting damage. I’ve had so much therapy in my life, I didn’t think I could be surprised by anything, but I sobbed through those two nights as though hearing my own story for the first time. With quiet compassion, the voice acknowledged, No wonder you’re not eating lite. Reflecting back on the messages I’ve received about diet, I think this last one shows that Grandmother Ayahuasca has a learning curve of her own. It’s as if she understood me more deeply after these recent ceremonies and changed her message accordingly. Of course, I’m still hoping for the spontaneous breakthrough that’s not about discipline or willpower, but simply wanting a healthier diet, wanting to take better care of myself. I’m still hoping for the spontaneous cure that so many others have reported.
Drug Use
The people who participated in my research study were very experienced with psychedelics. Three-quarters of them had used LSD, psilocybin, or mushrooms. Half had used MDMA, or ecstasy. The overall number of ayahuasca ceremonies represented in this research project was 2,267. At the extremes, twenty-four people reported having twenty or more experiences, and ten people reported having only one. Let’s be frank, that’s a lot of trips. However, as I discuss later, these drugs are not addictive.
The strongest addictive drug I failed to ask about was tobacco. Cigarette smoking is widely considered to be one of the most difficult addictions to break. There’s currently research at Johns Hopkins indicating that psilocybin helps people to quit smoking.11 It’s possible that ayahuasca does also, but this requires further study.
In the indigenous cultures of the Amazon, shamans smoke mapacho cigarettes made with Nicotiana rustica, which is supposed to contain nine to twenty times more nicotine than common tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum). Tobacco is considered a major plant teacher, along with Grandmother Ayahuasca, and the smoke from mapacho cigarettes is often used to clear negative energy. Sometimes the smoke is blown into the brew; other times it’s blown directly onto someone when they’re having difficulty during a ceremony. Some traditions soak the tobacco leaves in water and then snort the water up the nose before drinking ayahuasca in order to open up energy channels for increased receptivity to the medicine.
In one of my early experiences with ayahuasca, I was in Costa Rica in a very large group with two shamans from Ecuador. The shamans sat at one end of the maloca, or longhouse, where they had arranged a makeshift altar. They directed the men in the group to sit closer to the altar, relegating the women to the outside circle. I was having a particularly difficult time and was unable to marshal my energy to summon help. When one of the assistants finally noticed that I appeared disoriented, he brought a shaman over to do a healing. The shaman blew mapacho smoke over me to clear away negative energies. Unfortunately, the smoke only made me more nauseous, which I hadn’t thought was possible. I waved him away, not understanding the respect and faith with which shamans revere the spirit of tobacco, a typical example of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
In the questionnaire, I also neglected to ask about drugs like heroin and methamphetamine. However, I did ask about one of the most problematic addictive drugs in the world: “Any changes in your use of alcohol (since drinking ayahuasca)?” The monetary and human costs associated with problem drinking and alcoholism far exceed that of any drug. In the United States alone, the cost in 2006 was $223.5 billion.12 Some people explained that they rarely drank alcohol and reported “no change” after trying ayahuasca. But almost thirty of the eighty-one people in the study reported that they drank less or stopped drinking altogether after ayahuasca.
A few people reported a shift in their perception of alcohol. A twenty-nine-year-old woman said, “I used to drink four times a week, not too much, but a few glasses of wine. Now I hardly drink. I see the darkness of alcohol now.” In addition to her change in attitude toward alcohol, it’s interesting that she didn’t see eight to twelve glasses of wine a week as problematic. We might assume that “a few glasses of wine” means only two to three a night, but it could easily mean more, since people usually underreport what they drink. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and if this young woman had kept up her rate of consumption, we can only imagine where she’d be fifteen or twenty years down the road.
Others mentioned a similar shift in perspective. One thirty-four-year-old man said, “After doing ayahuasca, I feel that alcohol is a poison.” A forty-four-year-old woman explained that she drinks “less alcohol now. It’s as if my body wants to stay clean.” This spontaneous change in attitude toward alcohol reminds me of the hypnotherapy approach to changing behavior, in which someone imagines something disgusting about the behavior, like fat clogging arteries when eating French fries or filthy ashtrays when reaching for a cigarette. In the case of ayahuasca, some people spontaneously began to view alcohol in a negative light. It’s this effortless change in perception and behavior that’s the unique hallmark of ayahuasca. The changes are not a result of white-knuckle self-control but of an internal shift that seems to happen organically.
People describe this shift in a variety of ways, but the pattern is clear: “I can hardly drink now.” “Alcohol is not appealing anymore.” “I used to drink too much alcohol. I do not enjoy it since meeting Grandmother Ayahuasca.” “I have more awareness around abuse of alcohol, so I drink less.” “No desire for alcohol.”
A client of mine, a forty-six-year-old man, stopped drinking after his first ayahuasca experience. Previously, he’d been on a clear path to alcoholism. After one ceremony he didn’t even have a drink when he went out to dinner. It wasn’t that he insisted on abstinence; he just preferred not drinking. Frankly, I had trouble believing this was real, and I talked about it with my friend, psychiatrist Bob Rosenthal, copresident of the Foundation for Inner Peace, the publisher of A Course in Miracles (www.acim.org). His response was, “With spirit, all things are possible.” For me of little faith, I figured I’d wait and see. Seven years later, as of the writing of this book, the man was still not drinking.
Not everyone enjoys this kind of miraculous turnaround. A thirty-four-year-old businesswoman said, “Alcohol is much reduced, although it is still
