ceremony, three spirit doctors in white coats came to me and told me to start a healing practice. They promised they would show up at each session and heal people.” He recounted his magical story without any sense of doubt. “So I became a Reiki practitioner.”
His story made perfect sense to him but not to me. After all, I considered myself a psychologist, and still do, even though I was wandering in unknown territory. I got worried at the mention of “spirit doctors in white coats,” and I wanted to know if this guy was for real, if he was crazy or what.
I questioned him and searched for any other delusional signs but found none. Besides his healing practice, Jonathan was involved in a successful and creative internet venture (see his website, psychonaut-talat.com). He did volunteer work and was well-liked and respected by his community of friends. I didn’t know how to make sense of his spirit doctors who, by the way, appeared to him as promised during every Reiki session to work with each client. He had a good practice. I didn’t know if his clients knew about his helpers or not.
Both then and now, I have no idea how to understand this story of spirit doctors from a psychological point of view — I simply took notes and listened seriously, just as I’ve always done with clients who describe unusual experiences. Spirit doctors are common in ayahuasca iconography, and in a ceremony in North America, Jonathan met the same spirits who visited during ayahuasca ceremonies in the rain forest, thousands of miles away. After just three ceremonies with ayahuasca, Jonathan changed not only his life but his whole cosmological understanding of reality. I was shocked both by his story and by my realization that I was right behind him, not only hearing the voice of ayahuasca but following her advice to dedicate my time and energy to this research project.
Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with that first interview, and subsequent interviews weren’t much more helpful. I must admit that I didn’t take Jonathan’s story seriously, so it never occurred to me to ask, “Who were these spirit doctors?” or “What did they say?”
Since then I’ve read a description of spirit doctors that made at least some sense to me. Pharmacist Connie Grauds traveled to Peru to get continuing education credits for working in an indigenous healer’s garden. When she accidentally cut her foot, she thought she would need to travel two days upriver to receive proper medical care. Instead, the shaman used plants to heal an infection in her foot that normally would’ve required antibiotics. She realized at this point that the shaman’s expertise surpassed her Western training, and she entered into a traditional shamanic apprenticeship with him. After two decades of study, including ayahuasca ceremonies, Grauds had her own spirit doctors and the temerity to ask them, “Who are you?”
In her book Jungle Medicine, Grauds wrote that they appeared “in a dream as a mass of swirling energy. You called for us? they asked, almost like genies summoned from a lamp. . . . We are the shear unbridled healing forces of nature. . . . It is we, the generative forces of nature, who do the healing. Not you.”9
Later, I communicated with Grauds, and she expanded on the nature of her relationship with these spirit doctors. She wrote to me, “They 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.”
