the indigenous healers was way too wide for me to bridge. My psychological questions were meaningless to them. The shamans live in an ayahuasca-saturated world I can never fully understand, a world that is as real, or even more real to them, as this world.
Mission Accepted
In 2008, three years after my first ceremony and long after I’d given up trying to understand how the shamans do whatever it is they do, Grandmother Ayahuasca came to me during a ceremony and, in a no-nonsense way, told me to do a research study. I took her request as a mission — she, in all her wisdom, had chosen me (ME!) to do this work. Ego inflation barely describes my state of mind.
Yes, I heard a voice, and questions about this voice have bounced around in my head ever since. What was this voice? What does it mean that I heard a voice? I had no answers. You might think I would have ignored the voice’s directive: Do this research. Instead, I never doubted. I accepted the mission and congratulated the spirit of ayahuasca for her wise decision to choose me.
I had a rare combination of experience: an academic research background and a psychotherapy practice along with personal experience with ayahuasca. I didn’t question how Grandmother Ayahuasca could possibly have known this, or how she had evaluated my skills, resources, and determination to interview and collect data from people willing to admit to a perfect stranger intimate details of their experiences with an illegal substance. At this point in my career, I was in private psychotherapy practice, outside the academy, my research career abandoned long ago with the birth of my now thirty-something daughter. Given the illegal status of ayahuasca, it’s possible this research could only have been done by someone outside the hallowed and federally funded halls of academia. Did Grandmother Ayahuasca know all this and take it into consideration in choosing me?
Well into the second year of the project, one of my expert consultants, a Western shaman, casually said to me, in reference to something else entirely, “Everyone thinks they’ve received a mission from ayahuasca. I don’t believe two-thirds of what she says to me.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You mean she was just kidding? I didn’t have to do this research study?”
In fact, as I’ve found, the feeling of being assigned a mission by Grandmother Ayahuasca is relatively common. Had I known this from the start, I might not have taken the whole project so seriously. I might have assumed that my sense of having been called was merely an artifact of the ayahuasca experience.
But I have no doubts that Grandmother Ayahuasca personally asked me to do this study. I heard her voice repeatedly along the way. I felt that she opened doors for me, making the whole project evolve smoothly without even a minor hassle, which is unusual in research. Something inevitably goes at least a little wonky.
During one ayahuasca ceremony, as I was just beginning to feel the effects of the medicine in my body, I had another conversation with the spirit of ayahuasca.
Involve Lee in the research, she said. Lee Gurel was the mentor of my own former research mentor. He’s a nationally recognized psychologist with a lifelong career in prestigious research positions.
“I’ve already spoken with him,” I replied, with the adolescent tone of having been there, done that. A part of me couldn’t believe that I was talking to Grandmother Ayahuasca like a snotty sixteen-year-old.
Grandmother Ayahuasca was patient. She ignored my tone and simply added, Involve him more.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
A few days later, I called Lee and told him, “Grandmother Ayahuasca told me I should involve you more in the research.”
Slight pause. “Alright,” he said, simply and, no doubt, with an impish grin, never once questioning my source.
Guided in the Research
As I developed the questionnaire for the study, I made an early decision to be totally transparent as a researcher, and I placed a personal statement on the questionnaire’s front page (for the full questionnaire, see appendix A):
I am being guided in this research by my own personal experience of ayahuasca. I’m a psychologist who has worked in research and has had a private psychotherapy practice for over thirty-five years. My intention is to publish the research results. This research is being conducted via personal networks of kindred spirits.
By asking people to participate in the study, I was also asking them to admit to using an illegal substance, and I felt that I had to be willing to be equally vulnerable or more so. Participants could complete the questionnaire anonymously, while my name and personal information were right up front and all over the internet. I also wanted people to know that I understood the ayahuasca experience from the inside. I was not just an observer — I was a participant, a kindred spirit.
By saying I was “guided . . .by my own personal experience of ayahuasca,” I meant to imply my belief in the spirit of ayahuasca as a sentient being with the intention to influence. From a Western point of view, this statement was not only irrational but it could conceivably be seen as tainting the research results. It could be argued that my statement influenced how people answered the question about their own relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca. However, I thought it was important to state publicly that the study was not my idea alone, that I was acting in collaboration with Grandmother Ayahuasca, even following her orders. There were times when I did, indeed, feel like a good foot soldier dedicated to completing my mission.
Then there were other times when I questioned my sanity: What was it about my experiences with ayahuasca that led me to embark on this research project? Did I really believe that I was responding to a personal request from Grandmother Ayahuasca? Was I officially and, quite publicly, going off the deep end?
Let’s just say I had my doubts about the whole project, but what kept me going was that first experience with ayahuasca when I relived my experience of my father’s dying. I’ve talked with many others who also had amazing initial encounters with ayahuasca. It’s almost as if she bonds us to her with that initial intense, deep spiritual experience and profound healing. Even if other ceremonies don’t reach those heights, we remain eternally grateful. So when she asked me to do the research, of course I said, and continue to say, yes.
Research Limitations
Admittedly, my research has some obvious limitations.1 First, it was not a controlled study. There was no random assignment to a control group, no double-blind assessments. The study is the first stage of research exploring a new phenomenon. It is more than a survey, but not an experimental design, which was clearly impossible.
For one thing, there’s no way to control for the potency of the ayahuasca brew, or what researchers would call “the dose.” Shamans cook their own brews in their own idiosyncratic ways, often adding different plants to the mix in a mysterious process. The indigenous perspective is that the potency can be affected by the type of ayahuasca vine cooked into the brew — there are varieties that shamans can distinguish but Western botanists are unable to differentiate. The native names given to the range of ayahuasca vines are poetically evocative — red, yellow, black, or white, along with sky, bright star, or thunder ayahuasca — but no studies have been done to determine if there are chemical differences. As if that’s not complicated enough, the quality of the brew is supposedly influenced by the time of day the vine is cut, the stage of the moon, and what songs are sung during the preparation.
Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), reported that his organization tried to control the potency variable
