discreet about even mentioning their illegal activities.
In sharp contrast, compare this situation to how the Navajo treat those who return from a vision quest. One study noted, “For four days after the conclusion of the ceremony, the patient is considered by family and friends as if he or she is a Holy Person and given an opportunity to focus, evaluate, interpret, and experience a new self.”7 The story above of the seriously depressed young woman who discovered improvement but no miraculous recovery through ayahuasca is realistic. Some people enjoy an immediate healing after a ceremony, and those cases garner most of the publicity. Meanwhile, at the other extreme, some people experience no response whatsoever to this powerful medicine. While everyone around them is vomiting profusely, they sit slightly bored, wondering why nothing is happening. We understand so little about this medicine. I once asked the presiding shaman at a ceremony about one person’s seeming immunity to the powerful effects of the tea. The shaman needed no translator. He simply shrugged and said, “Grandmother did not call him.”
Kira Salak, author of the National Geographic Adventure article, is one of the lucky ones who enjoyed a miraculous healing through ayahuasca. Immediately after the ceremony, she wrote, “There were no more morbid, incessant desires to die. Gone was the ‘suicidal ideation’ that had made joy seem impossible for me, and made my life feel like some kind of punishment.”8 Afterward, so many people contacted her about her ayahuasca experiences that she created a special section of her website to summarize her current mental health status.
Nine years later, she wrote on her website: “The depression has never returned. . . . The slate was ‘wiped clean,’ and life has been unbelievably wonderful since that old cloud was taken away. Miraculous? As someone who suffered from depression her whole life, I would say, yes. Absolutely miraculous.”9
However, this doesn’t mean that even if you do exactly what Salak did you will experience a miracle. A psychotherapy client of mine once gave me a promotional DVD from the same retreat center in Peru where Kira Salak experienced her healing, and it showed a ceremony with the same American shaman. I was horrified at this shaman’s behavior. He was yelling like an army drill sergeant — “Drop your ego!” — while the participants were under the full sway of the medicine, which is a time for sensitive and subtle energy. I was so upset by the video that I immediately called my client even though it was ten o’clock Saturday night. I told him not to go to this retreat center. He canceled his plans.
Years later I met a woman who had spent months working with this same American shaman and who was seriously damaged by his ranting and manipulations. It took her years to free herself of the trauma and his energy, yet this was the man who orchestrated the miraculous healing that Salak described.
I hope these examples provide a glimpse into the complexity of ayahuasca and how little we know about this mysterious medicine from the Amazon rain forest. This is not a simple story about healing. The risks are significant, but the opportunity is beyond what Western medicine and psychotherapy can offer.
This book is intended for people considering ayahuasca and for people drinking the medicine. I hope it will help them integrate their insights and visions into their daily lives. There is much work people can do on their own to maximize the healing that ayahuasca offers. I also hope this book will inform psychotherapists about the process of integration after ayahuasca ceremonies, so they can provide a supportive and respectful container for the unfolding of healing.
It was 1970, and I was sitting in the office of Dr. Kurland, the medical director at the Maryland Psychiatric Hospital, the epicenter of leading-edge psychedelic research. I was twenty-four years old, armed with only a bachelor’s degree in psychology and my own psychedelic experiences. My years at the Esalen Institute (www.esalen.org) as a residential fellow and staff member had given me the connection to Stanislav Grof, who arranged the job interview. Dr. Kurland was very kind to see me. Although he had no intention of hiring me, he did give me some fatherly advice: “Go to graduate school.”
I eventually followed his advice, but by then the federal government had passed the Controlled Substances Act, which essentially outlawed research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs, including marijuana. These substances were deemed to be both dangerous and without medical benefit despite hundreds of research articles that explored how psychedelics could facilitate the therapeutic progress of psychiatric patients, alcoholics, and terminal cancer patients. The US government under President Nixon, in a reaction to the cultural revolution of the sixties, declared a “war on drugs” that was not consistent with the available research findings. This decision stopped all further scientific exploration.
I gave up my dream of doing psychedelic research. I completed my PhD and pursued a more conventional research career, receiving a prestigious New Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health. But in 1982 when the NIH called to ask for my next grant application, I had to tell them, “I’m pregnant, and I’m going to stay home with the baby.” The conversation ended immediately. I left my research career a few weeks before my daughter was born and changed the course of my professional life from research to private practice.
I saw clients for thirty-five years, specializing in well-educated, high-functioning people who wanted to clear up unresolved issues from childhood or to work on personal relationships. These people were essentially the same kind of people who went to Esalen workshops. They had some sense of a spiritual path or interest in their psychospiritual development. I also led workshops at both Esalen and the Omega Institute, and as a result, I had the opportunity to see how people integrated psychological insights from intensive workshop experiences into weekly psychotherapy and then how they translated their learnings into daily life.
Although I loved doing psychotherapy and leading workshops, I continued to mourn the loss of my research career. That is, until I heard the voice of Grandmother Ayahuasca: Do the research, she told me.
But I get ahead of myself. How I found ayahuasca, or how the spirit of ayahuasca found me, I will never fully understand. I hadn’t been searching for the medicine; I’d never even heard of it. It was February 2005, and I was living in New Jersey, innocently searching for a tropical beach vacation, which is certainly a very sane endeavor. A friend told me of a retreat center nestled between the rain forest and the Pacific Ocean on the remote coast of Costa Rica. I registered immediately for a retreat with only a glance at the lectures and program offered for that week.
Needless to say, I was surprised when the woman organizing the travel arrangements called to ask me about my intentions. I didn’t know what she was talking about. She explained that the retreat included two ayahuasca ceremonies. I told her I’d get back to her with my intentions, and I immediately turned to a book about ayahuasca that I’d bought years ago but never read: Ayahuasca: Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature, edited by Ralph Metzner. I’d had spiritual experiences with psychedelics when I was in my twenties, and now that my daughter was grown, I felt free to renew my interest, especially with an opportunity like this falling directly into my lap.
I knew immediately what my intentions would be. Six years before, when my father was dying, I brought him to my home with hospice care. The sound of his death rattle filled the house, shaking me to my bones. The slow rhythm of his breathing echoed inside me, hollowing me out as I wondered which breath would be his last.
During one of those moments, as I was waiting for his next inhalation, the universe exploded inside me.
