(Un)Well (2020) s01e05 Episode Script
Ayahuasca
1
If it weren't for ayahuasca,
I would have died a long time ago.
If you have anxiety,
drug issues, if you have PTSD,
there's hope.
Ayahuasca has the ability
to dig up deep-rooted trauma.
There's a lot of purging,
people puking.
There were people crying,
they were speaking in tongues.
Breathe. Breathe.
You hallucinate a lot.
I felt something
like I'd never felt before in my life.
I was floating in space,
and I just became, like, this pure soul.
Ayahuasca can be dangerous.
It's a potential inducer
of psychotic outbreaks.
Things can easily go wrong.
They can be catastrophic.
Ayahuasca is here
to save humanity.
It's its last hope.
Wellness.
A global industry
worth trillions of dollars.
Does it bring health and healing?
Or are we falling victim
to false promises?
Are we really getting well?
I think people in the Western world
is lost.
They are dissatisfied.
And they are searching for something
that can help them to find themselves.
This is the reason I think
so many people is coming to the Amazon.
They've heard there is a plant here
with a special power.
A natural psychedelic
that can give life-changing visions,
and heal deep psychic wounds.
They come for the medicine
that will allow them
to have an illumination.
An epiphany.
Finally made it to Iquitos, Peru.
Um, our first
ayahuasca ceremony's tonight,
and I'm extremely pumped.
God, this was the most incredible
experience of my entire life.
Laughing and smiling,
and it was the most fun, happy,
joyous moment I've ever had.
I'm so grateful,
but it was It was really hard.
So much healing.
There is a lot of people who is coming
because they are sick,
and they don't find relief
in the Western medical system.
Other people come out of curiosity.
They want to simply experience.
What is this everyone talks about?
What are those visions?
Nowadays,
around 15 or 20,000 Westerners
come to Iquitos every year,
seeking ayahuasca ceremonies.
We have palisangre pipes,
ayahuasca products.
That means several
million dollars coming in every year,
due to this growing demand.
Ayahuasca is becoming a good business.
Ayahuasca is the mother
of all medicinal plants.
To prepare the ayahuasca brew,
you need just two plants.
You need chacruna,
and the ayahuasca vine.
Those are the basic elements.
Cut it, don't be afraid.
If you fall down,
you'll just hit the ground.
Right now, I have over 5,000 ayahuasca
and chacruna plants.
I used to plant banana trees,
but the earnings weren't even enough
to pay for the cost of planting.
With ayahuasca and chacruna,
I can get more out of it.
Here it comes.
Lots of young people that come here
are interested in ayahuasca.
So, as demand keeps rising,
we need to plant more.
This one's almost done cooking.
I purchase around two tons
of ayahuasca per month.
It usually takes
eight hours to cook the leaves.
And ayahuasca takes another 12.
Every person has their own way to cook it,
and I have mine.
Due to the high influx of tourists here,
my business has grown exponentially
over the last few years.
I'm not just buying, cooking,
and selling to them.
I try to teach them.
That's what I want, for them to learn
about this medicine.
For it to be known on a national,
international scale.
People want to learn
about ayahuasca's benefits.
I have seen how tourists have changed
after trying it.
And I feel like I've played a part
in these positive changes.
With over 70 retreat centers,
Iquitos has become the mecca
of ayahuasca shamanism.
But what are the consequences
of this ayahuasca boom?
You know, that's what I research.
Locally, here in Amazonia
ayahuasca is not a medicine by itself.
It's part of a complex medical system.
In the traditional ceremony,
the patient who is suffering the sickness
goes to visit their shaman
in order to heal.
And so, the shaman is the one
who drinks the ayahuasca
in order to enter in contact with God
or the spirit allies.
He channels these forces to the patients
through special songs or chants
called ikaros.
These songs are the medicine.
In my field work
in the local medical system,
I never saw a single patient
drinking ayahuasca.
However, in the new medical system,
the one that is providing
the service for the foreigners,
ayahuasca is the center.
Everything revolves about
drinking ayahuasca.
People don't come here
paying $2,000
just to lay down in a ceremony
and the shaman is singing to them.
It's not enough.
They need to experience
this ayahuasca hallucinogenic moment,
right?
Because their faith is in the molecules.
The DMT.
The harmala alkaloids.
And local healers are willing
to give foreigners what they want.
So, the indigenous traditions
are changing.
These things are being lost.
Whenever Westerners get to a place,
we take over.
We take it for us, and we transform it.
And now it's happened with ayahuasca.
Here at Soul Quest,
what we believe in is providing
ayahuasca to people that are not able
to travel outside the United States.
Since 2015,
we've had over
9,000 people come here.
These people are desperate,
and they're looking for answers.
And the word has gotten out that there's
something out there that's working.
The truth is, here at Soul Quest,
we are bringing in
a very powerful medicine
to the people in the United States.
But the DEA says ayahuasca
is a Schedule 1 drug.
There are strict laws against it.
To be able to partake in the medicine,
Soul Quest, um, is using
the 2006 Supreme Court ruling,
stating very clearly, that ayahuasca
can be used as a spiritual sacrament.
So, we had the attorney help us write up
a 157-page exemption letter,
stating very clearly
that Soul Quest is a church.
Ayahuasca is essential to our faith.
It is our sacrament.
It is how we connect to our ancestors.
It is how we connect to our self.
We submitted that exemption to the DEA.
Um I'm here to tell you
that we have not received a reply.
But we are going on the pretext that
if the Santo Daime and the UDV,
which are Brazilian churches
right here in the United States,
can partake in the medicine,
then we should be able to as well.
Ayahuasca absolutely saved my life,
and she did it in one weekend.
One weekend.
I was a raging alcoholic for years.
Soul Quest was my last resort.
But from day one, and now it's day 87,
I'm sober.
I definitely got what I came for.
So, I quickly moved on to my other issues,
and that's why I came back
for my second weekend.
My journey's not over.
I'd been using heroin
for about eight years.
I've overdosed, um, at least 13 times.
IOP recovery houses, rehabs,
they weren't helping.
And
finally, I found something that did.
I had been in four different conflicts
in 14 years, and I watched some uh
some pretty horrific things happen.
My best friend,
who I had talked into coming
into pararescue,
passed away on his first mission ever,
so for me, that was rough.
Came home, and I fell into
the deep, deep, deep addiction.
I was taking Adderall, Ambien, Xanax,
trazodone and Zoloft,
Percocet,
cocaine,
and alcohol.
And I took them every day.
In 2017,
I got charged with attempted murder.
I realized at that point, that things
had gotten out of control.
I didn't know how to fix 'em.
I drank the ayahuasca
for the first time
at the end of July in 2018.
I cried for four hours straight
without a break.
I just cried.
Um and uh, I di I I needed to cry.
I mean,
this medicine saved my life.
There is a saying,
"What you see is a mirage.
What's underneath the mirage
is what you are searching for."
In fact, a lot of people report that
when under the influence of ayahuasca,
you gain the ability
to get in contact with the truth
beyond the mirage.
Open your eyes.
Ayahuasca is a psychedelic substance
that's traditionally used
by indigenous people,
and now it's come into the lab.
For decades,
psychedelics are classified
as Schedule 1 drugs,
with no medical value,
and high potential of abuse.
Yet, this classification was based
on politics, not scientific evidence.
And today, this view is changing.
What we have been pursuing right now
is the neuroscience of ayahuasca.
The ayahuasca brew
combines the chacruna leaf,
which contains the natural psychedelic
known as DMT,
with the ayahuasca vine,
which protects the DM
from enzymes in our stomach,
to create a psychedelic experience
that can last for about four hours.
What we observed
was three different phases.
You would have a first phase,
in which you would feel
an increased level of relaxation,
sleepy,
like, a lot of yawning.
Aaah.
And then you might experience
what people call purging,
which could include vomiting a lot.
Nausea is something
that's very frequent.
But that's not because
ayahuasca is acidic or toxic.
It's part of the natural process
of the effects of ayahuasca.
And interestingly, people that participate
in our studies,
they would say that the purging
has a therapeutic effect,
in which you get rid of something
that was harming you somehow.
Ah!
And then what we would call
an altered state of consciousness
would start kicking in.
You could have hallucinations,
both of auditory, or of a visual nature.
There is a revisiting
of memories.
You could see people from your own past.
You could speak with people
that you never met.
It is as if you are
in a lucid dream.
Very strong?
Yes.
A common concern
people have is losing control.
For some reason,
ayahuasca seems to be very promising
for treating patients
with psychiatric conditions
such as depression,
trauma, addiction,
and post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, we recruited a number of patients.
All of them had what we call
treatment-resistant depression.
During the experience,
the most important thing is surrendering.
Most of these patients
were saying before,
"Well, I tried
seven different medications,
I tried 15 different medications,
nothing worked."
Most of the antidepressants that we have
in the market today
take around two weeks to have the first
therapeutic benefits kicking in.
And in our studies with ayahuasca,
we found that just one day
after the session,
there was already a significant decrease
in the symptoms of depression.
And in this case,
it stayed significant for seven days.
So, it's a very interesting phenomena.
Maybe one day, ayahuasca will become
an alternative for these patients.
But it's something that we do not
understand completely.
I was going to kill myself.
That was the goal.
And I tried ayahuasca instead, and it
changed everything,
it changed everything.
Hm.
This is just the little stuff
that she always made sure made it
wherever we moved.
Look, there's the
The candle from her baptism.
She's so cute.
Just normal kid's stuff.
I was only 18 when I had my daughter.
Uh It wasn't what the plan was.
When I was 23, you know,
as a single mother,
I joined the Army and uh,
that's where my husband and I met.
That's Christopher.
God, look how young we were!
Holy moly!
Like, he adopted her.
That was her dad and her heart.
This is a great one.
Yeah, it was just a normal,
happy family.
Until it wasn't.
Come on, baby.
It was so out of the blue.
Chris had came to me, and he told me, uh,
"You know, at work
I'm just so stressed out."
So, he went to a physician's assistant,
not even a doctor,
doctor never oversaw his case.
He came home, said he'd gotten pills,
"They seem to be okay." Okay.
Come on, lovey.
Then on September 24th, 2008,
my daughter called,
and she said that he had
taken my handgun out of the gun safe,
and was waving it around
threatening to kill himself.
And that eventually it had calmed down,
and he said, "Don't tell Mom,"
and he had gone back to work.
I don't know why he took the gun out.
And he never, ever said anything about
ever being suicidal, depressed,
anything, just stressed out at work.
The next morning, I'm at work.
I get a call from the police.
They said, "We have two people
inside who are deceased,
we believe your husband and daughter."
That's what they tell me over the phone.
The police say that
Chris killed Jessica,
and then killed himself.
It was just this wild swing
back and forth,
from my whole fucking world's over,
to this isn't real.
My whole fucking world
This is not my life.
I I kept begging to go in
and hold her hand.
I knew she was dead.
I just wanna hold her hand.
I don't want her to be alone.
The drug that they put him on
had a black box warning.
And um, they doubled his dosage
two weeks before everything happened,
over the phone, without even
seeing him for an appointment.
I'm not sure what happened,
and I don't know why.
As much as I would love
to just get over it,
I can't. The PTSD was omnipresent.
I couldn't control the flashbacks.
It just burned, and it hurt,
all the fucking time.
I was ready to end it.
I was ready to end my own life.
I had the whole thing planned.
And then
I came across this veterans support group
at, on Facebook.
So, people I can relate to.
They were talking
about this thing called ayahuasca.
They were talking to me about
the difference it made in their life.
So, I decided this is
what I'm going to do.
I went back to the veterans group
a month ago,
and I drank ayahuasca with them.
And nothing happened at first.
And then it just
it just slammed into me.
It's really hard to explain.
It's like you're remembering a dream,
almost,
but you know it's not a dream
you've ever had.
It was like a boxing match.
I felt like I had this energy with me.
It was God,
or his designated representative.
And we just grieved it.
We grieved the whole fucking thing.
Every bit of it.
And I I kept fighting it.
And, you know, the message
I kept getting was,
this is a bad, this is a hard path.
But you gotta get up and walk it.
I'm not sure how that transformation
came about, but it
it gave me
hope and the ability
to keep fighting.
Like, it's still a struggle.
It's still hard.
I still miss my daughter.
I still have depression.
It still hurts.
You know,
I've come to the realization that
I'm just ready for more healing, and
a path. Like, what's next?
This weekend is going to be
the full retreat.
And it's at this Soul Quest
ayahuasca place.
I'm a little anxious about, you know,
what's going to happen,
'cause there's always the chance
of a "bad trip," I guess, I assume.
I I just keep thinking,
if everything else has failed,
what do you have to lose?
Psychedelics, in many respects,
are, uh, catalysts.
Catalysts for change.
For some, it can be of great value,
but it's not for everyone.
I've been studying ayahuasca
for 30 years.
During the course of that time,
I've consulted on approximately
a hundred cases
of individuals who've had some serious
negative outcomes.
Taking ayahuasca
is not a frivolous experience.
Things can easily go wrong.
They can go off the rails.
There's all sorts of inherent risks
and dangers.
First of all, you have to be concerned
about drug interactions.
Combining an SSRI, such as Prozac,
and ayahuasca,
might potentially lead to a condition
called a serotonin syndrome.
Clinically, SSRI antidepressants
increase the serotonin level
in the central nervous system.
Whereas ayahuasca impairs serotonin
from being metabolized.
Together, they can flood the system
with serotonin,
provoking symptoms like
severe confusional states,
high levels of distress,
elevated temperatures
It's a pretty, uh, uh, you know,
miserable experience to go through.
Also, if you're taking a stimulant drug,
like Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse,
there's a risk of serious elevation
of blood pressure.
The most dangerous of all risks
is when individuals
come into the experience
with a serious history
of psychiatric illness,
such as bipolar disorder,
or, or schizophrenia.
That could be potentially disastrous
in a number of different respects.
Knowing that it's one
of the most powerful hallucinogenics
known to man,
we need to make sure that
what we're doing is safe.
We have had a situation,
about a year or so ago,
where we've had a young man
that came here.
He, um, had a complication
he had a seizure.
The Orange County Sheriff's Office has
officially closed its death investigation
without making any arrests,
after a young man died following
a weekend retreat at a local church.
The owner, Christopher Young,
told investigators
the man had been given a cleanse
for the ceremony,
which consisted of several ingredients,
including ayahuasca.
The report shows the 22-year-old
was seizing in this backyard,
and by the time he got to the hospital,
he wasn't able to breathe.
We knew, everyone here knew,
that there was nothing we did wrong.
The seizure was caused by hyponatremia.
From drinking too much water.
What happened was, he didn't purge,
and, uh, he was a little upset about that,
and so he started consuming water,
and, uh, he would go into the restroom,
and close the door, and drink more water.
We found out he was doing that,
and then we sat him down.
When he had a seizure, we called 911.
They came here, he was still breathing,
he was still alive.
Uh, we found out shortly thereafter,
he had a history of seizures.
So, um, the state said
no charges were filed.
Um, but, uh, this was a very painful time,
for not only myself, but my team.
Since the death, Soul Quest
has continued its weekend retreats,
and even increased its price to attend
to $600 per person.
Uh, so, we'll take your vital signs.
What happened with his situation
enhanced our safety protocols.
Yeah, textbook perfect. 120/80.
I don't wanna brag, or anything.
We hired, uh, a paramedic and an EMT.
- Any breathing problems?
- No.
- Heart problems?
- No.
- You ever had a stroke?
- If anybody suffers from bipolar,
schizophrenia,
epilepsy, now,
and multiple personality disorder, um,
these individuals, uh, we refrain
from coming here.
We understand you want healing,
but you can't lie to us.
If you lie, you die.
Follow over here
to the tent area of tent one.
This is where you'll be staying
this evening.
[] I'm nervous about it, but
I know we're all here to go on a journey
to work out whatever it is
we needed to work out.
We know it's not gonna be pleasant,
but it's going to be good for us.
So, we're all gonna just do this.
I've never seen so many people
come in one spot to find healing.
Why they keep coming back?
A lot of them say the same thing.
The medicine called me.
I can believe them,
because the medicine called me.
The time has come for us to open
our sacred medicine space.
Together, we call on the great spirit.
We always tell people
that ayahuasca's not a cure for anything,
but it's a tool for everything.
Please stand.
And reach to the sky.
In this medicine space,
let there be no black magic
or anything evil,
as we partake of the sacrament
known as ayahuasca.
Taita's going to bless the medicine
and then he's going to give it to you
to consume your sacrament.
Okay?
It's gonna be good.
Ayahuasca, by taste,
is probably the nastiest thing
you'll ever consume in your life.
Tastes like dirt and mud,
with feet.
It's disgusting.
By design, it's great that way,
'cause you'll never see anybody
abusing ayahuasca.
Blah.
For about maybe 45 minutes,
you're kind of aware,
it's just like normal.
You're waiting for it to hit,
you feel normal.
And then you start noticing
a little visual stuff.
Suzanne, another girl
in the group, is the first to purge.
All of a sudden, everybody's purging.
As soon as I purged, it just like,
it came over me, like a brick wall.
Fuck.
I was working through
some serious stuff in my head.
I'm sitting there watching
a bunch of strangers go on this journey.
And then it just kicked in.
Visually, I was in another dimension.
I couldn't see the world.
I had a presence
that I felt overcome me.
I could see rose petals,
and they were just, like, all over me.
And I remember shutting my eyes
and just enjoying all of that.
But that's what I noticed when Suzanne
went into distress.
Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Sister, can you hear me?
I need you to breathe for me.
Okay.
Unlock.
Breathe.
She's having a seizure
- She's breathing, right?
- Right.
Make sure she's breathing.
- She's not right now.
- She's not breathing?
So, what do you guys want to do?
- You wanna take her?
- Yeah.
We need to keep her breathing.
Let's go.
One, two, three
Keep her up.
People should be really careful
when using ancestral medicine
such as ayahuasca.
I know there are many ways
to use the ayahuasca plant,
yet some of them
lost their traditional sense.
There are indigenous Shipibo-Conibo
shamans and healers
who lead ceremonies
where people drink ayahuasca.
And I know that tourists come here
eager to participate in these ceremonies.
Yet without the necessary preparations,
there will definitely be problems.
On April 19,
Olivia Arevalo, a Shipibo-Conibo healer
was murdered on her doorstep.
The case took an unexpected turn
the morning after.
A Canadian man
has been lynched in the Peruvian Amazon
Sebastian Woodroffe
was lynched by several locals
who then fled into the jungle
the lynching of the 41-year-old father
is believed to be an act of revenge
Villagers accused him
of killing a local medicine woman.
Woodroffe was believed to be
one of her clients.
The Canadian
had taken ayahuasca many times,
but witnesses say he had become unstable.
I don't cover crime stories,
but a video of a public lynching
taking place in an indigenous community
was definitely a matter
of national interest.
I went
with another journalist from the paper
to visit Olivia's village,
Victoria Gracia.
There were police all around here.
The whole street was full of police.
Just entering the community
again feels very tense.
Yes.
The police cordoned off the entire town
with hundreds of officers.
You could cut the tension with a knife.
Media from all over the country
and the world were there.
Hello. Um, my name's Sebastian.
Then, we learned
details about Sebastian Woodroffe.
I'm just, uh
in the midst of a career change,
and I'm looking for some help.
He was a Canadian man
who visited Peru regularly,
both to do business,
and to partake in healing with ayahuasca.
With a local medicine woman dead,
and a Canadian possibly killed in revenge,
Peruvian authorities say they won't rest
until both crimes are solved.
I can't confirm
whether ayahuasca was the cause,
or had anything to do with it.
But some of the reports suggest that
anti-psychotic pills,
clonazepam and other pills,
were found in the room he had rented.
If the police found
anti-psychotic medication
amongst his belongings,
you have a, uh, a situation where
an individual who should have been
screened out from taking ayahuasca,
took ayahuasca,
there's a terrible outcome.
There may have been vulnerability
for psychopathology.
The ayahuasca use, in all likelihood,
intensified his paranoid delusional
system
which could have provoked
a, uh, intense psychotic episode,
and violent acting out.
We had the means to identify
the perpetrator.
We were able to confirm
with 100% certainty
that this was Sebastian Woodroffe.
He was strangled
by a group of local people.
And we identified four of those
who were responsible.
Olivia was
an important person for the community,
but not a single governor
showed up for her burial.
So, a foreigner can come
and kill us day after day
like we are animals, and nothing happens!
And the state does nothing!
The saddest part of this
is that the authorities
only came here to condemn
the people who took justice
into their own hands.
Indigenous people
are clearly not their priority.
One of our healers murdered,
killed in her own community.
It fills you with hate, pain,
rage, sadness.
All of the riches in our region,
our community, and our villages.
Foreigners, they took everything.
Their only goal is to extract and absorb
everything we have.
Now they also want to take
our spirituality,
our wisdom
using ayahuasca incorrectly.
The main problem with Westerners
is in their minds.
Their minds carry
a great deal of anxiety and stress.
These problems begin piling up
in the body,
making it sick.
If it weren't for ayahuasca,
I would have died a long time ago.
I woke up one morning,
and I couldn't move.
It felt like my body
was slowly mummifying.
I was in so much pain.
I knew that something was really wrong
when I couldn't play with my dog.
Any movement hurt.
And when I got the diagnosis,
I was terrified.
It was clear that I was going to die
pretty soon.
The underlying process of scleroderma
is the hardening of the skin,
especially around the face, the hands.
And then all of a sudden, you get internal
hardening of organs, of the lungs,
of the kidneys.
There is no known cure
for this disease.
At its height,
I was taking 32 pills a day,
and nothing helped.
All of a sudden, I realized that I
didn't know how to walk anymore.
I couldn't do anything.
I didn't really want to live.
A good friend of mine said,
"If I were in your position,
I would drink ayahuasca."
I'd been bedridden for over three years,
at that point.
So, I thought, why not?
I have nothing to lose.
I was just alone in my apartment.
So, I drank it,
and, uh, it's really terrifying at first.
I kept blacking out,
but then something happened.
I was floating in space.
And everything that I've been
taught to believe that I am,
sort of broke off of me like a fuselage.
I was without a past, without an identity.
I just got to float.
I think I threw up
maybe like 300 times,
but every time I threw up,
I could feel some of the disease
leaving my body.
And then I heard a voice tell me to stand.
And I pointed to my wheelchair,
and I was just like,
"What are you talking about?"
And then when I did go up to stand,
I was lighter than air.
And I was like, "I'm walking!
I can walk!"
So, when the ayahuasca wore off,
I couldn't walk again.
But I felt sort of like
I'd seen the promised land.
Push. How does that feel?
Uh, it's okay. There's some
tenderness over kind of
near where the pecs connect to the, uh
I will say that I was shocked.
I mean, it appears that her improvement
began around the time
that she started ayahuasca treatments.
One last one. Can you push,
push in this way?
Does that hurt, that hurt?
Nope, that's okay.
She's a totally different person.
After the third time I drank,
I started being able to nod,
and turn my head, and bend my legs.
When people ask me
why the ayahuasca works,
I don't know exactly why,
but definitely on a psychological
and emotional level
the ayahuasca helps me to, kind of, stop,
and just look at all these things
that I never processed.
Oh.
My childhood
it was awful.
I was, uh, sexually abused
for
a long time.
I realized I'd spent my life
really hating myself.
So, a lot of my work with ayahuasca
is going into that trauma,
and processing it in a different way.
And I see the
I feel the results in my body.
The mind and the body
are two different processes,
and we haven't been able, so far,
to understand the interaction
between these two,
so we treat them as separate,
although it's a single system.
We know that trauma can have
a profound impact on our body.
One way of de-traumatizing someone
is to get that person in contact
with the memory
that's probably the origin of that trauma.
From the neuroscience perspective,
we have been seeing that ayahuasca
modulates parts of our brain
that are related with
autobiographical memory.
And that might be an important mechanism
to get better from trauma.
I was finally able to see that
the condition of my body
was a reflection
of my beliefs about myself.
Come here, come here. Good boy!
The first time I drank ayahuasca was
almost six years ago.
And since then
I've been steadily improving.
Good boy!
I can feel the scleroderma.
It's still there.
I just had a feeling though,
that if I, if I kept drinking ayahuasca,
um, that I would just keep getting better.
Last night, um,
we had a very scary situation.
Suzanne, um, had a complication.
I noticed,
probably about 20-30 minutes in,
I saw her hands, kind of, crimp up
a little.
Um, so, I went down there to check on her,
and, um, saw very quickly that she had had
a small seizure, and that she was having
a seizure at the time.
Last thing I remember, I opened my eyes,
I looked at Angela,
and her hair
was covered in fractals.
And I just remember thinking,
I can't do this again.
And that's the last thing I remember.
I woke up in a hospital.
I honestly believe
that every ayahuasca journey,
good, bad, ugly, funny, stupid
is in the right direction.
Looking back at this weekend,
my initial gut reaction is, what a waste.
What's the point?
Why did I cancel my clients,
why did I drive down here,
just to have about 20 minutes of terror,
end up in a hospital,
and probably facing
I don't even know how many
thousands of dollars in hospital bills.
I don't know if I'll do aya again.
And that's very disappointing,
'cause I thought aya was my
life root.
Now I'm not so sure.
I'm pretty terrified.
And together,
let's take a long, slow, deep breath in.
And release.
And just connect
with that indwelling presence.
That sacred part of yourself.
Now think of your experience last night.
And how you're feeling about it today.
All right, let's get started.
The ayahuasca hit me so hard. Um
Even when you were walking me
down the path,
the path disappeared, like, it was just,
I was in an abyss.
I was just love,
I was just enveloped in fucking love.
It was the most amazing thing!
I would see a vision
of a female giving birth.
And it was more like energy, the universe.
What we found is that during
the experience with ayahuasca,
there was an increased blood flow
in three different, um, parts of the brain
that are related
with three different processes.
The first one is the visual cortex.
Which suggests that actually
during the experience with ayahuasca,
you are seeing something.
I, like, warped back, like
to 2001.
Um, Doug is, was my best friend,
and he went on his first mission ever.
The second was parts of the brain
that are involved in episodic memory.
So, the memory of events.
The third part is what we call
the frontal polar cortex,
and it's been related with awareness.
So, with these three regions activated,
you have an increased ability
to observe your own thoughts,
and your own emotions.
And so I just, like, keep pushing it down
and pushing it down
What do I have to be insecure about?
Like abso-fucking-lutely nothing
It just all came out, all the sorrow,
all the sadness.
And this might be
why that person will say,
"Well, that felt like ten years
of psychotherapy."
But in this case,
the therapist is you.
- and I told him I was sorry.
- Sorry for what?
F For having to bury him.
With ayahuasca,
there's no lying.
There's a lot of hard truths
that you just kept under the carpet.
There's no way you're going to prevent
that thought
from coming very vividly to your mind.
And that comes with a lot of power.
Angela.
I had a great time. I
It was just love and healing,
and it was a beautiful thing.
Have you ever felt that before?
No, not like that.
It was, it was, just bliss.
Like, I was hoping for something about
direction and future and all that.
I didn't I haven't gotten that yet.
Maybe I will, but I got, this is gonna
sound weird,
but, like, when I was in there
trying to purge,
I got this, it was super clear, too:
No purge for you. You've lost enough.
I was like And I didn't trust it.
All right.
What is your outlook now,
since this medicine work
that you did last night?
I don't It just healed me.
It just fucking healed something.
I can't articulate it.
It just healed something.
When I heard, "No purge for you.
You've already lost enough,"
I assumed it was the loss of my family.
And honestly, the last 11 years.
You know, it was the last 11 years
have kind of been
Yeah, I've thrown away
a lot of time with this.
And yeah, you've lost enough.
Okay, so, how have you
reinterpreted, or how have you
brought meaning
to all the grief that you suffered
in the loss of your daughter?
There is no new narrative for it.
It just It is what it is.
Come on, baby.
It's hard to explain
the difference in the feelings
before and after the ayahuasca.
Come on, baby. Come on.
I mean, think I just felt guilty
being here without my daughter.
Come on, loves.
I had to come to the realization,
like, you're fighting something
that's already happened, right?
Come here, short-legged boy.
Acceptance was the thing I needed.
And I don't think any human
could have made me accept it.
Ayahuasca, using my subconscious,
helped me heal myself.
I think that's why it worked.
Because it was me healing me.
If it weren't for ayahuasca,
I would have died a long time ago.
If you have anxiety,
drug issues, if you have PTSD,
there's hope.
Ayahuasca has the ability
to dig up deep-rooted trauma.
There's a lot of purging,
people puking.
There were people crying,
they were speaking in tongues.
Breathe. Breathe.
You hallucinate a lot.
I felt something
like I'd never felt before in my life.
I was floating in space,
and I just became, like, this pure soul.
Ayahuasca can be dangerous.
It's a potential inducer
of psychotic outbreaks.
Things can easily go wrong.
They can be catastrophic.
Ayahuasca is here
to save humanity.
It's its last hope.
Wellness.
A global industry
worth trillions of dollars.
Does it bring health and healing?
Or are we falling victim
to false promises?
Are we really getting well?
I think people in the Western world
is lost.
They are dissatisfied.
And they are searching for something
that can help them to find themselves.
This is the reason I think
so many people is coming to the Amazon.
They've heard there is a plant here
with a special power.
A natural psychedelic
that can give life-changing visions,
and heal deep psychic wounds.
They come for the medicine
that will allow them
to have an illumination.
An epiphany.
Finally made it to Iquitos, Peru.
Um, our first
ayahuasca ceremony's tonight,
and I'm extremely pumped.
God, this was the most incredible
experience of my entire life.
Laughing and smiling,
and it was the most fun, happy,
joyous moment I've ever had.
I'm so grateful,
but it was It was really hard.
So much healing.
There is a lot of people who is coming
because they are sick,
and they don't find relief
in the Western medical system.
Other people come out of curiosity.
They want to simply experience.
What is this everyone talks about?
What are those visions?
Nowadays,
around 15 or 20,000 Westerners
come to Iquitos every year,
seeking ayahuasca ceremonies.
We have palisangre pipes,
ayahuasca products.
That means several
million dollars coming in every year,
due to this growing demand.
Ayahuasca is becoming a good business.
Ayahuasca is the mother
of all medicinal plants.
To prepare the ayahuasca brew,
you need just two plants.
You need chacruna,
and the ayahuasca vine.
Those are the basic elements.
Cut it, don't be afraid.
If you fall down,
you'll just hit the ground.
Right now, I have over 5,000 ayahuasca
and chacruna plants.
I used to plant banana trees,
but the earnings weren't even enough
to pay for the cost of planting.
With ayahuasca and chacruna,
I can get more out of it.
Here it comes.
Lots of young people that come here
are interested in ayahuasca.
So, as demand keeps rising,
we need to plant more.
This one's almost done cooking.
I purchase around two tons
of ayahuasca per month.
It usually takes
eight hours to cook the leaves.
And ayahuasca takes another 12.
Every person has their own way to cook it,
and I have mine.
Due to the high influx of tourists here,
my business has grown exponentially
over the last few years.
I'm not just buying, cooking,
and selling to them.
I try to teach them.
That's what I want, for them to learn
about this medicine.
For it to be known on a national,
international scale.
People want to learn
about ayahuasca's benefits.
I have seen how tourists have changed
after trying it.
And I feel like I've played a part
in these positive changes.
With over 70 retreat centers,
Iquitos has become the mecca
of ayahuasca shamanism.
But what are the consequences
of this ayahuasca boom?
You know, that's what I research.
Locally, here in Amazonia
ayahuasca is not a medicine by itself.
It's part of a complex medical system.
In the traditional ceremony,
the patient who is suffering the sickness
goes to visit their shaman
in order to heal.
And so, the shaman is the one
who drinks the ayahuasca
in order to enter in contact with God
or the spirit allies.
He channels these forces to the patients
through special songs or chants
called ikaros.
These songs are the medicine.
In my field work
in the local medical system,
I never saw a single patient
drinking ayahuasca.
However, in the new medical system,
the one that is providing
the service for the foreigners,
ayahuasca is the center.
Everything revolves about
drinking ayahuasca.
People don't come here
paying $2,000
just to lay down in a ceremony
and the shaman is singing to them.
It's not enough.
They need to experience
this ayahuasca hallucinogenic moment,
right?
Because their faith is in the molecules.
The DMT.
The harmala alkaloids.
And local healers are willing
to give foreigners what they want.
So, the indigenous traditions
are changing.
These things are being lost.
Whenever Westerners get to a place,
we take over.
We take it for us, and we transform it.
And now it's happened with ayahuasca.
Here at Soul Quest,
what we believe in is providing
ayahuasca to people that are not able
to travel outside the United States.
Since 2015,
we've had over
9,000 people come here.
These people are desperate,
and they're looking for answers.
And the word has gotten out that there's
something out there that's working.
The truth is, here at Soul Quest,
we are bringing in
a very powerful medicine
to the people in the United States.
But the DEA says ayahuasca
is a Schedule 1 drug.
There are strict laws against it.
To be able to partake in the medicine,
Soul Quest, um, is using
the 2006 Supreme Court ruling,
stating very clearly, that ayahuasca
can be used as a spiritual sacrament.
So, we had the attorney help us write up
a 157-page exemption letter,
stating very clearly
that Soul Quest is a church.
Ayahuasca is essential to our faith.
It is our sacrament.
It is how we connect to our ancestors.
It is how we connect to our self.
We submitted that exemption to the DEA.
Um I'm here to tell you
that we have not received a reply.
But we are going on the pretext that
if the Santo Daime and the UDV,
which are Brazilian churches
right here in the United States,
can partake in the medicine,
then we should be able to as well.
Ayahuasca absolutely saved my life,
and she did it in one weekend.
One weekend.
I was a raging alcoholic for years.
Soul Quest was my last resort.
But from day one, and now it's day 87,
I'm sober.
I definitely got what I came for.
So, I quickly moved on to my other issues,
and that's why I came back
for my second weekend.
My journey's not over.
I'd been using heroin
for about eight years.
I've overdosed, um, at least 13 times.
IOP recovery houses, rehabs,
they weren't helping.
And
finally, I found something that did.
I had been in four different conflicts
in 14 years, and I watched some uh
some pretty horrific things happen.
My best friend,
who I had talked into coming
into pararescue,
passed away on his first mission ever,
so for me, that was rough.
Came home, and I fell into
the deep, deep, deep addiction.
I was taking Adderall, Ambien, Xanax,
trazodone and Zoloft,
Percocet,
cocaine,
and alcohol.
And I took them every day.
In 2017,
I got charged with attempted murder.
I realized at that point, that things
had gotten out of control.
I didn't know how to fix 'em.
I drank the ayahuasca
for the first time
at the end of July in 2018.
I cried for four hours straight
without a break.
I just cried.
Um and uh, I di I I needed to cry.
I mean,
this medicine saved my life.
There is a saying,
"What you see is a mirage.
What's underneath the mirage
is what you are searching for."
In fact, a lot of people report that
when under the influence of ayahuasca,
you gain the ability
to get in contact with the truth
beyond the mirage.
Open your eyes.
Ayahuasca is a psychedelic substance
that's traditionally used
by indigenous people,
and now it's come into the lab.
For decades,
psychedelics are classified
as Schedule 1 drugs,
with no medical value,
and high potential of abuse.
Yet, this classification was based
on politics, not scientific evidence.
And today, this view is changing.
What we have been pursuing right now
is the neuroscience of ayahuasca.
The ayahuasca brew
combines the chacruna leaf,
which contains the natural psychedelic
known as DMT,
with the ayahuasca vine,
which protects the DM
from enzymes in our stomach,
to create a psychedelic experience
that can last for about four hours.
What we observed
was three different phases.
You would have a first phase,
in which you would feel
an increased level of relaxation,
sleepy,
like, a lot of yawning.
Aaah.
And then you might experience
what people call purging,
which could include vomiting a lot.
Nausea is something
that's very frequent.
But that's not because
ayahuasca is acidic or toxic.
It's part of the natural process
of the effects of ayahuasca.
And interestingly, people that participate
in our studies,
they would say that the purging
has a therapeutic effect,
in which you get rid of something
that was harming you somehow.
Ah!
And then what we would call
an altered state of consciousness
would start kicking in.
You could have hallucinations,
both of auditory, or of a visual nature.
There is a revisiting
of memories.
You could see people from your own past.
You could speak with people
that you never met.
It is as if you are
in a lucid dream.
Very strong?
Yes.
A common concern
people have is losing control.
For some reason,
ayahuasca seems to be very promising
for treating patients
with psychiatric conditions
such as depression,
trauma, addiction,
and post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, we recruited a number of patients.
All of them had what we call
treatment-resistant depression.
During the experience,
the most important thing is surrendering.
Most of these patients
were saying before,
"Well, I tried
seven different medications,
I tried 15 different medications,
nothing worked."
Most of the antidepressants that we have
in the market today
take around two weeks to have the first
therapeutic benefits kicking in.
And in our studies with ayahuasca,
we found that just one day
after the session,
there was already a significant decrease
in the symptoms of depression.
And in this case,
it stayed significant for seven days.
So, it's a very interesting phenomena.
Maybe one day, ayahuasca will become
an alternative for these patients.
But it's something that we do not
understand completely.
I was going to kill myself.
That was the goal.
And I tried ayahuasca instead, and it
changed everything,
it changed everything.
Hm.
This is just the little stuff
that she always made sure made it
wherever we moved.
Look, there's the
The candle from her baptism.
She's so cute.
Just normal kid's stuff.
I was only 18 when I had my daughter.
Uh It wasn't what the plan was.
When I was 23, you know,
as a single mother,
I joined the Army and uh,
that's where my husband and I met.
That's Christopher.
God, look how young we were!
Holy moly!
Like, he adopted her.
That was her dad and her heart.
This is a great one.
Yeah, it was just a normal,
happy family.
Until it wasn't.
Come on, baby.
It was so out of the blue.
Chris had came to me, and he told me, uh,
"You know, at work
I'm just so stressed out."
So, he went to a physician's assistant,
not even a doctor,
doctor never oversaw his case.
He came home, said he'd gotten pills,
"They seem to be okay." Okay.
Come on, lovey.
Then on September 24th, 2008,
my daughter called,
and she said that he had
taken my handgun out of the gun safe,
and was waving it around
threatening to kill himself.
And that eventually it had calmed down,
and he said, "Don't tell Mom,"
and he had gone back to work.
I don't know why he took the gun out.
And he never, ever said anything about
ever being suicidal, depressed,
anything, just stressed out at work.
The next morning, I'm at work.
I get a call from the police.
They said, "We have two people
inside who are deceased,
we believe your husband and daughter."
That's what they tell me over the phone.
The police say that
Chris killed Jessica,
and then killed himself.
It was just this wild swing
back and forth,
from my whole fucking world's over,
to this isn't real.
My whole fucking world
This is not my life.
I I kept begging to go in
and hold her hand.
I knew she was dead.
I just wanna hold her hand.
I don't want her to be alone.
The drug that they put him on
had a black box warning.
And um, they doubled his dosage
two weeks before everything happened,
over the phone, without even
seeing him for an appointment.
I'm not sure what happened,
and I don't know why.
As much as I would love
to just get over it,
I can't. The PTSD was omnipresent.
I couldn't control the flashbacks.
It just burned, and it hurt,
all the fucking time.
I was ready to end it.
I was ready to end my own life.
I had the whole thing planned.
And then
I came across this veterans support group
at, on Facebook.
So, people I can relate to.
They were talking
about this thing called ayahuasca.
They were talking to me about
the difference it made in their life.
So, I decided this is
what I'm going to do.
I went back to the veterans group
a month ago,
and I drank ayahuasca with them.
And nothing happened at first.
And then it just
it just slammed into me.
It's really hard to explain.
It's like you're remembering a dream,
almost,
but you know it's not a dream
you've ever had.
It was like a boxing match.
I felt like I had this energy with me.
It was God,
or his designated representative.
And we just grieved it.
We grieved the whole fucking thing.
Every bit of it.
And I I kept fighting it.
And, you know, the message
I kept getting was,
this is a bad, this is a hard path.
But you gotta get up and walk it.
I'm not sure how that transformation
came about, but it
it gave me
hope and the ability
to keep fighting.
Like, it's still a struggle.
It's still hard.
I still miss my daughter.
I still have depression.
It still hurts.
You know,
I've come to the realization that
I'm just ready for more healing, and
a path. Like, what's next?
This weekend is going to be
the full retreat.
And it's at this Soul Quest
ayahuasca place.
I'm a little anxious about, you know,
what's going to happen,
'cause there's always the chance
of a "bad trip," I guess, I assume.
I I just keep thinking,
if everything else has failed,
what do you have to lose?
Psychedelics, in many respects,
are, uh, catalysts.
Catalysts for change.
For some, it can be of great value,
but it's not for everyone.
I've been studying ayahuasca
for 30 years.
During the course of that time,
I've consulted on approximately
a hundred cases
of individuals who've had some serious
negative outcomes.
Taking ayahuasca
is not a frivolous experience.
Things can easily go wrong.
They can go off the rails.
There's all sorts of inherent risks
and dangers.
First of all, you have to be concerned
about drug interactions.
Combining an SSRI, such as Prozac,
and ayahuasca,
might potentially lead to a condition
called a serotonin syndrome.
Clinically, SSRI antidepressants
increase the serotonin level
in the central nervous system.
Whereas ayahuasca impairs serotonin
from being metabolized.
Together, they can flood the system
with serotonin,
provoking symptoms like
severe confusional states,
high levels of distress,
elevated temperatures
It's a pretty, uh, uh, you know,
miserable experience to go through.
Also, if you're taking a stimulant drug,
like Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse,
there's a risk of serious elevation
of blood pressure.
The most dangerous of all risks
is when individuals
come into the experience
with a serious history
of psychiatric illness,
such as bipolar disorder,
or, or schizophrenia.
That could be potentially disastrous
in a number of different respects.
Knowing that it's one
of the most powerful hallucinogenics
known to man,
we need to make sure that
what we're doing is safe.
We have had a situation,
about a year or so ago,
where we've had a young man
that came here.
He, um, had a complication
he had a seizure.
The Orange County Sheriff's Office has
officially closed its death investigation
without making any arrests,
after a young man died following
a weekend retreat at a local church.
The owner, Christopher Young,
told investigators
the man had been given a cleanse
for the ceremony,
which consisted of several ingredients,
including ayahuasca.
The report shows the 22-year-old
was seizing in this backyard,
and by the time he got to the hospital,
he wasn't able to breathe.
We knew, everyone here knew,
that there was nothing we did wrong.
The seizure was caused by hyponatremia.
From drinking too much water.
What happened was, he didn't purge,
and, uh, he was a little upset about that,
and so he started consuming water,
and, uh, he would go into the restroom,
and close the door, and drink more water.
We found out he was doing that,
and then we sat him down.
When he had a seizure, we called 911.
They came here, he was still breathing,
he was still alive.
Uh, we found out shortly thereafter,
he had a history of seizures.
So, um, the state said
no charges were filed.
Um, but, uh, this was a very painful time,
for not only myself, but my team.
Since the death, Soul Quest
has continued its weekend retreats,
and even increased its price to attend
to $600 per person.
Uh, so, we'll take your vital signs.
What happened with his situation
enhanced our safety protocols.
Yeah, textbook perfect. 120/80.
I don't wanna brag, or anything.
We hired, uh, a paramedic and an EMT.
- Any breathing problems?
- No.
- Heart problems?
- No.
- You ever had a stroke?
- If anybody suffers from bipolar,
schizophrenia,
epilepsy, now,
and multiple personality disorder, um,
these individuals, uh, we refrain
from coming here.
We understand you want healing,
but you can't lie to us.
If you lie, you die.
Follow over here
to the tent area of tent one.
This is where you'll be staying
this evening.
[] I'm nervous about it, but
I know we're all here to go on a journey
to work out whatever it is
we needed to work out.
We know it's not gonna be pleasant,
but it's going to be good for us.
So, we're all gonna just do this.
I've never seen so many people
come in one spot to find healing.
Why they keep coming back?
A lot of them say the same thing.
The medicine called me.
I can believe them,
because the medicine called me.
The time has come for us to open
our sacred medicine space.
Together, we call on the great spirit.
We always tell people
that ayahuasca's not a cure for anything,
but it's a tool for everything.
Please stand.
And reach to the sky.
In this medicine space,
let there be no black magic
or anything evil,
as we partake of the sacrament
known as ayahuasca.
Taita's going to bless the medicine
and then he's going to give it to you
to consume your sacrament.
Okay?
It's gonna be good.
Ayahuasca, by taste,
is probably the nastiest thing
you'll ever consume in your life.
Tastes like dirt and mud,
with feet.
It's disgusting.
By design, it's great that way,
'cause you'll never see anybody
abusing ayahuasca.
Blah.
For about maybe 45 minutes,
you're kind of aware,
it's just like normal.
You're waiting for it to hit,
you feel normal.
And then you start noticing
a little visual stuff.
Suzanne, another girl
in the group, is the first to purge.
All of a sudden, everybody's purging.
As soon as I purged, it just like,
it came over me, like a brick wall.
Fuck.
I was working through
some serious stuff in my head.
I'm sitting there watching
a bunch of strangers go on this journey.
And then it just kicked in.
Visually, I was in another dimension.
I couldn't see the world.
I had a presence
that I felt overcome me.
I could see rose petals,
and they were just, like, all over me.
And I remember shutting my eyes
and just enjoying all of that.
But that's what I noticed when Suzanne
went into distress.
Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Sister, can you hear me?
I need you to breathe for me.
Okay.
Unlock.
Breathe.
She's having a seizure
- She's breathing, right?
- Right.
Make sure she's breathing.
- She's not right now.
- She's not breathing?
So, what do you guys want to do?
- You wanna take her?
- Yeah.
We need to keep her breathing.
Let's go.
One, two, three
Keep her up.
People should be really careful
when using ancestral medicine
such as ayahuasca.
I know there are many ways
to use the ayahuasca plant,
yet some of them
lost their traditional sense.
There are indigenous Shipibo-Conibo
shamans and healers
who lead ceremonies
where people drink ayahuasca.
And I know that tourists come here
eager to participate in these ceremonies.
Yet without the necessary preparations,
there will definitely be problems.
On April 19,
Olivia Arevalo, a Shipibo-Conibo healer
was murdered on her doorstep.
The case took an unexpected turn
the morning after.
A Canadian man
has been lynched in the Peruvian Amazon
Sebastian Woodroffe
was lynched by several locals
who then fled into the jungle
the lynching of the 41-year-old father
is believed to be an act of revenge
Villagers accused him
of killing a local medicine woman.
Woodroffe was believed to be
one of her clients.
The Canadian
had taken ayahuasca many times,
but witnesses say he had become unstable.
I don't cover crime stories,
but a video of a public lynching
taking place in an indigenous community
was definitely a matter
of national interest.
I went
with another journalist from the paper
to visit Olivia's village,
Victoria Gracia.
There were police all around here.
The whole street was full of police.
Just entering the community
again feels very tense.
Yes.
The police cordoned off the entire town
with hundreds of officers.
You could cut the tension with a knife.
Media from all over the country
and the world were there.
Hello. Um, my name's Sebastian.
Then, we learned
details about Sebastian Woodroffe.
I'm just, uh
in the midst of a career change,
and I'm looking for some help.
He was a Canadian man
who visited Peru regularly,
both to do business,
and to partake in healing with ayahuasca.
With a local medicine woman dead,
and a Canadian possibly killed in revenge,
Peruvian authorities say they won't rest
until both crimes are solved.
I can't confirm
whether ayahuasca was the cause,
or had anything to do with it.
But some of the reports suggest that
anti-psychotic pills,
clonazepam and other pills,
were found in the room he had rented.
If the police found
anti-psychotic medication
amongst his belongings,
you have a, uh, a situation where
an individual who should have been
screened out from taking ayahuasca,
took ayahuasca,
there's a terrible outcome.
There may have been vulnerability
for psychopathology.
The ayahuasca use, in all likelihood,
intensified his paranoid delusional
system
which could have provoked
a, uh, intense psychotic episode,
and violent acting out.
We had the means to identify
the perpetrator.
We were able to confirm
with 100% certainty
that this was Sebastian Woodroffe.
He was strangled
by a group of local people.
And we identified four of those
who were responsible.
Olivia was
an important person for the community,
but not a single governor
showed up for her burial.
So, a foreigner can come
and kill us day after day
like we are animals, and nothing happens!
And the state does nothing!
The saddest part of this
is that the authorities
only came here to condemn
the people who took justice
into their own hands.
Indigenous people
are clearly not their priority.
One of our healers murdered,
killed in her own community.
It fills you with hate, pain,
rage, sadness.
All of the riches in our region,
our community, and our villages.
Foreigners, they took everything.
Their only goal is to extract and absorb
everything we have.
Now they also want to take
our spirituality,
our wisdom
using ayahuasca incorrectly.
The main problem with Westerners
is in their minds.
Their minds carry
a great deal of anxiety and stress.
These problems begin piling up
in the body,
making it sick.
If it weren't for ayahuasca,
I would have died a long time ago.
I woke up one morning,
and I couldn't move.
It felt like my body
was slowly mummifying.
I was in so much pain.
I knew that something was really wrong
when I couldn't play with my dog.
Any movement hurt.
And when I got the diagnosis,
I was terrified.
It was clear that I was going to die
pretty soon.
The underlying process of scleroderma
is the hardening of the skin,
especially around the face, the hands.
And then all of a sudden, you get internal
hardening of organs, of the lungs,
of the kidneys.
There is no known cure
for this disease.
At its height,
I was taking 32 pills a day,
and nothing helped.
All of a sudden, I realized that I
didn't know how to walk anymore.
I couldn't do anything.
I didn't really want to live.
A good friend of mine said,
"If I were in your position,
I would drink ayahuasca."
I'd been bedridden for over three years,
at that point.
So, I thought, why not?
I have nothing to lose.
I was just alone in my apartment.
So, I drank it,
and, uh, it's really terrifying at first.
I kept blacking out,
but then something happened.
I was floating in space.
And everything that I've been
taught to believe that I am,
sort of broke off of me like a fuselage.
I was without a past, without an identity.
I just got to float.
I think I threw up
maybe like 300 times,
but every time I threw up,
I could feel some of the disease
leaving my body.
And then I heard a voice tell me to stand.
And I pointed to my wheelchair,
and I was just like,
"What are you talking about?"
And then when I did go up to stand,
I was lighter than air.
And I was like, "I'm walking!
I can walk!"
So, when the ayahuasca wore off,
I couldn't walk again.
But I felt sort of like
I'd seen the promised land.
Push. How does that feel?
Uh, it's okay. There's some
tenderness over kind of
near where the pecs connect to the, uh
I will say that I was shocked.
I mean, it appears that her improvement
began around the time
that she started ayahuasca treatments.
One last one. Can you push,
push in this way?
Does that hurt, that hurt?
Nope, that's okay.
She's a totally different person.
After the third time I drank,
I started being able to nod,
and turn my head, and bend my legs.
When people ask me
why the ayahuasca works,
I don't know exactly why,
but definitely on a psychological
and emotional level
the ayahuasca helps me to, kind of, stop,
and just look at all these things
that I never processed.
Oh.
My childhood
it was awful.
I was, uh, sexually abused
for
a long time.
I realized I'd spent my life
really hating myself.
So, a lot of my work with ayahuasca
is going into that trauma,
and processing it in a different way.
And I see the
I feel the results in my body.
The mind and the body
are two different processes,
and we haven't been able, so far,
to understand the interaction
between these two,
so we treat them as separate,
although it's a single system.
We know that trauma can have
a profound impact on our body.
One way of de-traumatizing someone
is to get that person in contact
with the memory
that's probably the origin of that trauma.
From the neuroscience perspective,
we have been seeing that ayahuasca
modulates parts of our brain
that are related with
autobiographical memory.
And that might be an important mechanism
to get better from trauma.
I was finally able to see that
the condition of my body
was a reflection
of my beliefs about myself.
Come here, come here. Good boy!
The first time I drank ayahuasca was
almost six years ago.
And since then
I've been steadily improving.
Good boy!
I can feel the scleroderma.
It's still there.
I just had a feeling though,
that if I, if I kept drinking ayahuasca,
um, that I would just keep getting better.
Last night, um,
we had a very scary situation.
Suzanne, um, had a complication.
I noticed,
probably about 20-30 minutes in,
I saw her hands, kind of, crimp up
a little.
Um, so, I went down there to check on her,
and, um, saw very quickly that she had had
a small seizure, and that she was having
a seizure at the time.
Last thing I remember, I opened my eyes,
I looked at Angela,
and her hair
was covered in fractals.
And I just remember thinking,
I can't do this again.
And that's the last thing I remember.
I woke up in a hospital.
I honestly believe
that every ayahuasca journey,
good, bad, ugly, funny, stupid
is in the right direction.
Looking back at this weekend,
my initial gut reaction is, what a waste.
What's the point?
Why did I cancel my clients,
why did I drive down here,
just to have about 20 minutes of terror,
end up in a hospital,
and probably facing
I don't even know how many
thousands of dollars in hospital bills.
I don't know if I'll do aya again.
And that's very disappointing,
'cause I thought aya was my
life root.
Now I'm not so sure.
I'm pretty terrified.
And together,
let's take a long, slow, deep breath in.
And release.
And just connect
with that indwelling presence.
That sacred part of yourself.
Now think of your experience last night.
And how you're feeling about it today.
All right, let's get started.
The ayahuasca hit me so hard. Um
Even when you were walking me
down the path,
the path disappeared, like, it was just,
I was in an abyss.
I was just love,
I was just enveloped in fucking love.
It was the most amazing thing!
I would see a vision
of a female giving birth.
And it was more like energy, the universe.
What we found is that during
the experience with ayahuasca,
there was an increased blood flow
in three different, um, parts of the brain
that are related
with three different processes.
The first one is the visual cortex.
Which suggests that actually
during the experience with ayahuasca,
you are seeing something.
I, like, warped back, like
to 2001.
Um, Doug is, was my best friend,
and he went on his first mission ever.
The second was parts of the brain
that are involved in episodic memory.
So, the memory of events.
The third part is what we call
the frontal polar cortex,
and it's been related with awareness.
So, with these three regions activated,
you have an increased ability
to observe your own thoughts,
and your own emotions.
And so I just, like, keep pushing it down
and pushing it down
What do I have to be insecure about?
Like abso-fucking-lutely nothing
It just all came out, all the sorrow,
all the sadness.
And this might be
why that person will say,
"Well, that felt like ten years
of psychotherapy."
But in this case,
the therapist is you.
- and I told him I was sorry.
- Sorry for what?
F For having to bury him.
With ayahuasca,
there's no lying.
There's a lot of hard truths
that you just kept under the carpet.
There's no way you're going to prevent
that thought
from coming very vividly to your mind.
And that comes with a lot of power.
Angela.
I had a great time. I
It was just love and healing,
and it was a beautiful thing.
Have you ever felt that before?
No, not like that.
It was, it was, just bliss.
Like, I was hoping for something about
direction and future and all that.
I didn't I haven't gotten that yet.
Maybe I will, but I got, this is gonna
sound weird,
but, like, when I was in there
trying to purge,
I got this, it was super clear, too:
No purge for you. You've lost enough.
I was like And I didn't trust it.
All right.
What is your outlook now,
since this medicine work
that you did last night?
I don't It just healed me.
It just fucking healed something.
I can't articulate it.
It just healed something.
When I heard, "No purge for you.
You've already lost enough,"
I assumed it was the loss of my family.
And honestly, the last 11 years.
You know, it was the last 11 years
have kind of been
Yeah, I've thrown away
a lot of time with this.
And yeah, you've lost enough.
Okay, so, how have you
reinterpreted, or how have you
brought meaning
to all the grief that you suffered
in the loss of your daughter?
There is no new narrative for it.
It just It is what it is.
Come on, baby.
It's hard to explain
the difference in the feelings
before and after the ayahuasca.
Come on, baby. Come on.
I mean, think I just felt guilty
being here without my daughter.
Come on, loves.
I had to come to the realization,
like, you're fighting something
that's already happened, right?
Come here, short-legged boy.
Acceptance was the thing I needed.
And I don't think any human
could have made me accept it.
Ayahuasca, using my subconscious,
helped me heal myself.
I think that's why it worked.
Because it was me healing me.