TRANSCRIPT
Five different times before this, I have recorded videos about my opinion on ayahuasca, the psychedelic drug, the plant medicine that comes from the Amazon region. People have asked me also, “What do you think about ayahuasca?” A lot of people have recommended that I try ayahuasca, that other people try ayahuasca, that there’s nothing better for healing trauma, that you can do three years of therapy in one night of taking ayahuasca.
Well, I’m gonna try again, and maybe this time will be the video that makes the cut. I think the reason the other videos didn’t make the cut is I didn’t exactly say the most important thing that I want when I think about ayahuasca, what my opinion is. And so this time I want to cut right to it. But let me just do one quick caveat first and say actually that I have tried ayahuasca. I have tried ayahuasca three times, actually, all three times in South America. A little bit about four years ago, I tried it a few different months apart, twice in Peru and once in Colombia. I will talk a bit about my experience, but first I just want to get to my opinion.
Do I recommend ayahuasca? Do I think it’s a good idea to go out and try it? Do I think it is really this panacea that it often gets purported to be? And my answer is no, I really don’t think so. That’s not to say it doesn’t really help some people. I’ve met people who said it really helped them, said it changed their lives. I, on the other hand, I’ve also heard quite a few people who really said it harmed them. I’ve witnessed people who’ve really been harmed by it, who really went kind of crazy afterwards. People who’ve ended up in psychiatric hospitals, people who couldn’t work, couldn’t function afterward, had to go back and live with their parents, people who had to end up on psychiatric drugs, etc., etc. I’ve heard a lot of bad stories. I’ve also heard, yes, good stories. So I want to say that at the outset.
But the reason that I don’t recommend it is actually connected to neither of these, not the good nor the bad. The main reason that viscerally I just don’t recommend it is the same reason that I don’t recommend taking any substances for healing: psychological substances, plant medicines, and hallucinogenic things, psychiatric drugs. The main reason is that they are outside things, and I find such value, and I place such importance on healing being an inside job.
So specifically with ayahuasca, but this could apply to so many different things, what I see is when people take an outside substance to help them on their healing process, to trigger their healing process, to open them up, to give them access to what is on the inside, whether it works or not, the message that they are sending themselves is that they cannot do it by themselves, that they can’t figure it out, that they can’t gain access to what’s on the inside and open it up through their own internal emotional psychological volition. That somehow they are incompetent to figure out how to access what’s on the inside, and to me, it’s a horrible message to send to the self. It’s also, I believe, a horrible message to send to other people.
So I don’t want to tell other people, “Yes, go try ayahuasca,” because you can’t somehow figure out how to do it yourself. And the reason I say this, and I know a lot of people are not going to like this, but the reason I say this is because I believe that everybody has the capacity to figure out how, without any external substances, in their own relationship with their internal self, to figure out how to heal, how to access these traumas that are inside of them.
And why do I say that? Well, the reason I say that is because, first of all, I thought it was impossible that I could ever heal, and yet I have made so much progress on the healing path. And I’ve seen this to be true for so many other people. When people really want to look inside, when they’re really willing to put in the work, the hard work of figuring out how to get strong enough to look inside, when they have the real desire to build a strong enough base in their life, a base of safety, a base of security, maybe a base of friendship, maybe even having a therapist for support, when they really figure out how to get a good night’s sleep every night, have good healthy routines, eat well, but really build that island of social safety, and they really want to look inside, there are all sorts of things that they can do in their personal relationship with themselves that will allow them to access the same stuff that, in an ideal sense, if ayahuasca works well—which sometimes it might and a lot of times it doesn’t—they can figure it out. They can figure it out without taking any drug.
And what I’ve also seen is a lot of people in this modern world. I’ve seen so many, and I’ve met so many, feel like they simply cannot do it. They feel hopeless. Another thing is a lot of people feel desperate. They just want to heal quickly. They want to get it over with, and they’ve tried a few different things. Maybe they’ve even tried a lot of things, and nothing has worked. And what I see is a lot of times people in that position, when they get this sort of desperate feeling, when they know there’s a lot of stuff going on inside of them and they can’t figure out how to access that, they can’t figure out how to resolve it or make sense of it or get a grip on it, they’re willing to try almost anything. They’ll try lots of different things on the outside to basically fix them, to have something else do a lot of the work for them.
And even with ayahuasca, what I’ve seen a lot of times is they say, “Oh, it’s mother ayahuasca. She is a spirit. She’s alive.” There is a real religious element to ayahuasca, and she will do a lot of the fixing for you. She is going to bring you to this—it’s sort of this mother figure, this parental figure, this parental rescue fantasy figure, as I like to think of it. This figure is going to come in and rescue you, do a lot of the work that you cannot figure out how to do for yourself.
And what I’ve seen, I’ve seen it in quite a lot of different cases, is when people are desperate, when people actually have told me—and I remember this when I was a therapist—two people saying, “I cannot do it. I can’t figure it out. I don’t know how. It’s impossible. It’s too painful. I can never do it.” People even look to me that way: “Fix me. Heal me.” I remember hearing that as a therapist: “It’s your job to fix me. I’m paying you money so you can tell me what to do.” Well, sometimes I would say, “Okay, you really want me to tell you what to do? Stop using drugs. Stop drinking alcohol. Start going to bed at a reasonable hour. Start making sure you get a good night of sleep. Stop having sex with lots and lots of different people. Go celibate for a while. Start journaling. Start writing down your feelings. Make a discipline of that. Really practice some discipline in your life.” And a lot of people, I think practicing this discipline is painful. It’s not easy. It takes hard work.
And there’s also something I think that happens when people look within and they feel like they really have to take responsibility for their own healing path, that all sorts of feelings come up. I think a big thing that I’ve seen again and again, and I’ve even felt it in myself, when people really have to take responsibility for their own healing path, massive feelings of betrayal can come up. The split-off, dissociated feelings of betrayal that their parents actually never took care of them in the first place. And I think this is a big part of why so many people want something outside of them to save them, because it’s like if something outside of me can save me and I don’t have to take responsibility for myself, then it’s almost like I never have to deal with how betrayed I really was in my family of origin once upon a time. I can bypass all these horrible feelings of betrayal.
So often, for so many of us, maybe even for the whole human species, we are people who have been betrayed in childhood. We are people who, in so many different ways, some more than others for sure, have been betrayed by our parents, by the limitations of our parents. And part of how we survived in the family system and continued to get love from our parents was that we did not feel those feelings.
I think this lends itself to so many people when they grow up, still not wanting to look inside, still not wanting to look at, much less feel, this primary betrayal, and still wanting something outside to save us. I think this is what really gets kicked up for me when people are saying, “Oh, ayahuasca can save you. Ayahuasca is the thing that’s going to kick-start your healing process. Ayahuasca is going to open you up. Mother ayahuasca can help you. A shaman can help set up a scenario and give you this drug, this medicine that you’re gonna take that’s gonna do for you what you cannot do for yourself.”
And so that’s what I think for me. Also, my healing process did happen largely, largely, largely without any substances at all. Now I’m going to take a leap forward, and I’m gonna talk briefly about my experience taking ayahuasca. Did it open me up to my traumas? Did it really bring me inside myself and bring me in touch with lots of horrible, painful things and things that I could actually work with? In some ways, it really did. In some ways, it was an incredibly introspection-inducing drug. However, it wasn’t that different from what I’d already done in my healing process a thousand times without that drug. But it definitely did bring me back to those places. It brought me back to my relationship with my parents, a lot of things in my history, painful things that had happened to me, painful things that I had done, clumsy, awkward post-traumatic reactions that I had, post-traumatic acting out behaviors.
Yeah, I spent a lot of hours every time I did ayahuasca introspecting on my life, and I’ve heard that’s kind of the goal of what ayahuasca is supposed to do. However, what if I had never had an introspective relationship with myself? What if I’d never really been able to access that on my own? Would ayahuasca have done that for me? I’m really not sure because I did talk to people in the ceremonies that I was with who said, “It didn’t really do that much to me. Yeah, my body felt really weird. I felt really strange. I had visions. I saw things. But I wouldn’t say it brought me into my traumas.” And I’ve talked to a lot of other people who have said the same thing, that it didn’t really bring them into their traumas.
So maybe the fact that I went into my traumas is connected more to the reality that I’ve just spent so many years doing that anyways, that the pathway was already open. However, on the flip side, I saw people, even in the ceremonies that I was in, the second ceremony especially in Peru, people flipping out. I saw a guy who went so clearly into traumas that he was not emotionally able to deal with, did not have the internal capacity to be able to deal with the horror that ayahuasca induced him to enter.
I just remember this guy sitting right next to me. Actually, I was lying down, and he sat up. What he was doing is rocking back and forth for like an hour and crying for his mother, sobbing and shaking. Almost, I mean, I’m doing it quietly. He was like screaming it out, and nobody did anything. No one went and comforted him. I remember I came out of my altered state, I went over to him, and I put my arms around him, and I started saying, “I love you.” I mean, I was in an altered state really, but somehow in me, I’m just like, “I cannot let this guy go through torture without support.” This drug, that’s not good for him. He can really go crazy from this. What happens if he doesn’t come out of this? Or what happens if he can’t in some way integrate it?
I remember he just let me hold him, and he just started whimpering like a baby, like a horribly traumatized baby. I think that is psychologically where he went. That is where the drug brought him to. So yeah, he did access that traumatic stuff in his life, and then he calmed down. It’s like something happened, and he relaxed, and then he lay back down and stopped screaming and crying and saying bad words and calling for his mother and whimpering.
Fast forward a few hours. The next day, I saw the guy, and I went to him, and I decided, you know, I’m gonna be pretty objective and neutral about it. I don’t want to like interpose my own ideas. So I asked him, I said, “Hey, I’m curious. How was your experience last night?” Very neutral, open-ended question. And he said, “It was cool, man. It was really cool.” I said, “Just out of curiosity, what do you remember of it?” And this is the guy who was food and screaming, looked like he might kill himself. And by the way, I have heard of people who have killed themselves as the result of taking ayahuasca and killed other people. All this rage from their unprocessed stuff can come up, and they can become homicidal. Not common, but it has happened. There is evidence for that.
Well, the guy, what he said was, “It was a pretty mellow experience.” I’m like, “Mellow experience? His experience was anything but mellow. I saw it. I had my arms around him. That was not mellow.” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Just kind of mellow. I tripped down a little bit, had some visions and stuff.” I said, “So it wasn’t bad?” He said, “No, no, it wasn’t bad.” And then I realized he had dissociated. He put it all the way back down below the surface. And I’m like, “Hmm, interesting.” So it helped him obviously access something, but at the same time, didn’t process it. Because I know for me, one of the things that’s happened to me in my healing process again and again is when that stuff comes up, I remember it. It stays with me, and as it becomes integrated, it definitely stays a part of my memory. The whole healing process, the grief process becomes part of my memory. I don’t think this guy did any grieving as the result of ayahuasca.
Now what’s going to happen to him two, three months in the future? Will it come up again? Will he have an easier time accessing it? Maybe. However, I want to say this: I have heard no lack of stories from people who have told me directly, from friends of mine who are therapists and from other people I know on the internet, of people who have taken ayahuasca who had brought up all sorts of stuff, and to some degree or other, it stayed up. And maybe they even felt that was a good thing. They had access to it. However, when they went back to their regular life, they couldn’t integrate it, and they couldn’t go back to their regular life, and it was overwhelming.
Basically, the big problem that they have shared with me and that I’ve heard again and again with the people where it doesn’t go well is there is a lack of aftercare. It’s like this stuff comes up, but they don’t have a life that is a strong enough holding environment to be able to handle the intensity of what came up. And that is why I really also prefer a healing process that’s gentle, that’s slow, that a person can guide within themself, that they can regain control of their healing process, regain control of those overwhelming and intense feelings that can come up that are buried inside of us.
And that’s another thing. Trauma, a whole thing about trauma is that we are out of control. When we are traumatized, we cannot control these horrible outside things that are happening to us and the feelings that come up from within us. Our reactions also feel out of control. Therefore, we dissociate from them. We push them down. We bury them. So why would it be helpful for some people to take a drug that kicks up stuff, but again, they cannot control? They cannot control the feelings that come up that can be retraumatizing. And this leads to the question: how do you determine who is it better for and who?
Is it worse for…? Well, that’s the thing. I’m not necessarily sure. I don’t know that I would have any ability to determine: is it good for this person or bad for this person? If someone is having more psychological problems, it might be more dangerous. That probably is a logical thing to say.
However, I’ve seen people, and I’ve heard stories of people who were incredibly stable on the outside. They didn’t seem to have any psychological problems at all, and they were the ones who really bugged out. Whereas I’ve heard stories of people, and I’ve actually seen people who were a little bit more emotionally shaky, but the ayahuasca didn’t actually really screw them up. So, I don’t really know.
However, one other thing I would like to say, especially with ayahuasca compared to pretty much every other of these plant-based drugs or drugs that are created in a laboratory, ayahuasca is actually especially dangerous. I think it’s important if anyone is going to consider taking ayahuasca that they really read about it. All sorts of things interact negatively with ayahuasca more than anything else pretty much that I’ve seen.
Now, what can interact badly with ayahuasca? If you read about it, almost all the different psychiatric drugs that you take—antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers—like, ah, you don’t want to take this with ayahuasca. It can actually kill you.
I remember hearing a story when I was in Colombia when I took ayahuasca that actually, in the exact same place where I took it, there was a woman who had asthma. She went into the ayahuasca ceremony not knowing that the medication she was taking for asthma was really dangerous to take in interaction with ayahuasca. Nobody gave her informed consent. They didn’t give any informed consent at all. They never asked, “Are you taking any medicines? What drugs are you taking? What have you eaten?” They just gave us the ayahuasca. I personally did the research first, but I don’t think anybody else there even had done it.
Well, what happened is it happened about a year or two before in this place. She’d been in the ayahuasca ceremony. It had been an emotionally intense, even overwhelming experience for her, like it is for some people. She started feeling like she couldn’t breathe. Maybe she was having a panic attack. Well, maybe she was having an asthma attack.
Well, she took out her asthma puffer while she was, you know, tripping out in an altered state on ayahuasca, and she wept. She took a puff or two of it, and the albuterol that she was taking interacted with the ayahuasca, and she died. She died right in the middle of the ceremony. This happened outside of Bogota, and I actually heard about it from people, and I read an article about it. What the article said and what people told me was that they arrested the shaman afterward.
One might say the shaman just had bad luck because I think so many shamans don’t tell anybody anything. He just had the bad luck of having someone who died in a ceremony. But it does happen. Also, all sorts of different foods interact negatively with ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and MAO, I kind of liked some of the older antidepressants that they used to give out a lot in the 70s and that people still actually take sometimes, interact negatively with grapefruit, can interact negatively with fermented foods, cheese, certain heavy cheeses, also wine, things like that.
It’s like literally, have these foods, take these things with ayahuasca, you can die. And a lot of times people have no clue about this. I think shamans sometimes don’t even know. So, I think it’s important to know that going into ayahuasca.
But for me, still, in spite of all these different things, the main reason that I still think I just don’t want to recommend it—not that I think one hundred percent do not do it—but just to go and really forewarned that I really think it sends the message to people that at some level you can’t do it yourself. You need this outside thing to do it for you. Whereas I really believe the deepest, truest healing can happen from within us, in our relationship with ourselves, guided by our relationship with ourselves and motivated from within you.