I understand it to mean that the scientific community is acknowledging the practice as being part of cultural spiritual practices. Which, ISTM, how it’s most often marketed and perceived by self treating pharma-tourists.
And I understood it to mean that a medical article acknowledges that aya works on a spiritual level.
Apparently, there are a lot more articles in the medical database that see spirituality as a factor in physical and mental health, a factor that works in tandem with, but is not the same as, psycho/social factors, like the placebo effect, or hope.
Ya’ll are making me want to try this stuff. I don’t think I have the ovaries to since I’m such a goodie-goodie.
Let me put it this way. “I’m skeptical of the long term benefits of faith. Particularly since the effects appear to be transitory, thus people find themselves going back for more, every Sunday, in fact. So perhaps it’s not actual knowledge that’s imparted but an induced set of temporary feelings ?”
“I’m skeptical of the long term benefits of therapy. Particularly since the effects appear to be transitory, thus people find themselves going back for more, once a week for months. . So perhaps it’s not actual knowledge that’s imparted but an induced set of temporary feelings ?”
“I’m skeptical of the long term benefits of marriage. Particularly since the effects appear to be transitory, thus people find themselves going back for more, every night as they go home, in fact. So perhaps it’s not actual knowledge that’s imparted but an induced set of temporary feelings ?”
See what I mean? That you are right, and yet, that speaking of knowledge OR feelings here is too binary?
Okay, that last one about marriage was too much.
I put it in because I wanted to express the idea that emotional connection, to yourself and to your loved ones and friends, is again and again proven to be vital to our health and happiness. And that, sometimes, even though we have the relationships, but we don’t connect enough, for whatever reason. What aya can do, in that regard, is let you feel what connection could and can feel like; and how important it, is, in the most all- encompassing way you can think of.
On a related note, I was reminded today of this TED talk, by Johan Hari. In this Guardian article, he says: “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety: it’s connection.” I thought that might one possible explanation for why aya is seen as a promising ( but not yet proven) way to help fighting addiction.
I don’t know how long the benefits will last. So far, so good, but it’s only been a few weeks. Even if my insights attenuate or disappear entirely over time, just having had them–and thus finding out that I could have them at all–was a gift.
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Particularly since the effects appear to be transitory, thus people find themselves going back for more. So perhaps it’s not actual knowledge that’s imparted but an induced set of temporary feelings?
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Thoughts and feelings often go together. That’s the basis for things like cognitive-behavioral therapy. Your mindset can, indeed, change how you feel about things. How temporary those new feelings are depends, in part, on how stable your new mindset is. Similarly, changes in your feelings about something can alter how you think about that thing. We’ve probably all had that experience at some point or another, when being in love or infatuation changed how you thought about a person.
When I say that there were things I learned in my ceremony, I meant that I got new ways to perceive and understand things. I think that counts as learning, in the same way that, when people see the Earth from space, they might learn new ways of thinking about the Earth and humankind.
Is that on the same level as customer service and bridal registry? 
How did ayahuasca compare to other psychedelics you might have taken?
Can you describe the visuals, perhaps with artwork from other people that approaches what you saw?
If you don’t feel ready to do it, you shouldn’t. It’s not easy, it can be really scary, and it’s not always fun.
It can also be very dangerous if you don’t prepare for it properly. The active ingredients in ayahuasca are DMT and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), which makes sure the psychoactive DMT gets to your brain, instead of being mostly chewed up in your gut. It’s vital to avoid potentially nasty food and drug interactions with the MAOI.
There are a lot of otherwise innocuous substances that interact with MAOIs in very nasty ways. I had to stop taking some of my medication (montelukast sodium, aka “Singulair”, which helps with asthma and inflammation in my inner ear) two weeks before my ceremony. Luckily for me, I can get by without it, but I’m looking forward to going back on it soon. I also had to stop taking cetirizine (Zyrtec) two days before the ceremony.
I’m not sure exactly how long the MAOI from ayahuasca sticks around. Judging from the literature on MAOIs used in treating depression, it could take as long as a month to purge them completely from your body. I’m therefore waiting for a little over a month before I go back to taking Zyrtec and Singulair.
I wish ayahuasca were legal and regulated, so that I could have asked my doctor about this stuff. (Some doctors in the US might be OK with being asked about ayahuasca or other illegal drug interactions. I’m pretty sure my primary care physician wouldn’t, and I don’t want an “illegal drug user” note in my records.) Instead, I had to find and read through the literature myself. I’m so glad I have a background in the sciences, so I knew how to do that. If you don’t think you could do the same, or if you’re on medication that would interact with an MAOI and couldn’t go off of it, think twice about having an ayahuasca ceremony.
But let’s say you’ve got the drug interaction stuff squared away, and you feel ready to participate in a ceremony. It takes some preparation and planning to make the most of the experience. Having a regular meditation practice helps, IME. I’m pretty sure that staying mindful during the early part of the ceremony, and consciously giving up control to the ayahuasca, made my experience much richer than it would have been otherwise.
Yes. It’s right above housewares and kitchen appliances, and right below the Juniors department. Take the escalators on your right. 
I haven’t taken any others. I was always too afraid to mess with my brain that way. My family has a history of bipolar disorder and depression, and I’ve always been a geek. I figured that my brain was my best feature, and I didn’t want to do anything that might damage it.
Twelve years ago, I drank a mildly hallucinogenic beverage called “chicha” several times during the San Juan (Inti Raymi) festival in Latacunga, Ecuador. I don’t recall any major effects, except that I could keep dancing and swirling and feeling kind of ecstatic for about 10 hours. (I don’t know how much of that was the chicha, and how much of that was the dancing and the festival itself. I love to dance. My knees were shot afterwards, but it was worth it.)
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Can you describe the visuals, perhaps with artwork from other people that approaches what you saw?
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Apparently, a lot of people who have visions see snakes, jaguars, vines, and/or dragons. Many people see Mama Ayahuasca, a personified version of ayahuasca who acts as a guide.
This book might be of interest to you.
My visions were different, though. I’m working on an account of my experience with ayahuasca. I’ll post more when I’ve found a way to put my visions into words.
Going from (very nearly) no psychedelic experience to ayahuasca is quite a step. Maastricht’s account and your ayahuasca research got you over that fear? Did you think that ayahuasca was less likely to damage your brain than shrooms, LSD or DMT?
You mention meditating: How did you feel in the days following ayahuasca? Was there some commonality with how you feel in the days following a good meditation session?
Which kind(s) of meditation do you practice? Did you try meditating while on ayahuasca? I suppose meditating while on a psychedelic for the first time is a tall order. If you try it again, you might find their combination interesting.
Well, I thought I was a lot less likely to do genuine harm to myself with an ayahuasca ceremony than with taking LSD. There are reports of damage from overuse of LSD, at the very least. I don’t know much about mushrooms.
Someone who used to be a friend of mine had given me shrooms, but she wouldn’t do them with me. The idea of being on my own, under the influence of drug that would make me hallucinate, didn’t strike me as a good idea.
From what I understand (and, granted, my knowledge is limited), LSD can give you random flashbacks, if you use it too much. Besides–the idea of just getting drugs and taking them on my own, hoping for the best, sounded incredibly risky. People can do real damage to themselves while they’re hallucinating, with no-one to stop them from doing wackball stuff.
And it wasn’t really hallucinations I was after, anyway. I’d been in therapy for a long time when I saw Maastricht’s post. I’d already read about the use of ayahuasca in treating addictions and PTSD, and I was really frustrated by what I felt was a lack of progress on my issues in talk therapy. I’d been seeing a therapist for almost two years, dealing with codependency, depression, and PTSD.
I knew enough about the evolution and physiology of the brain to realize that treating attachment issues with talk therapy alone wasn’t necessarily a great approach for some people, maybe including me. Codependency is a disorder of attachment. Attachment is mostly governed by the limbic system, an area that doesn’t communicate all that much with the cerebral cortex, the part of your brain that, roughly speaking, does language and logic, including the kind of reasoning employed in therapy. Your attachment style is formed by the end of your second year of life. Depending on what that attachment style is, and what other issues you may have, attachment problems can be very difficult to change in adulthood. That’s at least part of why some people keep reliving the same relationship dramas over and over, unable to break their cycles of abuse or abandonment.
The fact that ayahuasca has been used for ages, with a lot of respect and practical care for users, made me less nervous. My research into how ayahuasca works, what its effects are (especially for some psychological issues that I had), and what precautions I could take started to make me think it might be a good idea for me.
I live in NYC. I’d tried to find out how to get in touch with Turey Tekina, but I didn’t run in the right circles to get his contact info.
Until I read Maastricht’s account, I hadn’t realized I could go to the Netherlands for it. And the fact that the dates and the plane ticket lined up so well made me think that this was much more do-able than I’d realized.
Thanks for your other questions. I’ll answer them later.
The way I felt after ayahuasca was worlds apart from the way I feel after meditating. (Or, at least, the way I used to feel after meditating. Now, it’s a little different.) Meditating left me with a sense of peace and focus. Ayahuasca left me feeling transformed.
I found that my senses had become more intense. Especially enhanced were my senses of smell and taste. Oranges, cinnamon, and multigrain bread rolls had rich, complex, entrancing scents and tastes. Cheese, bitter vegetables (cabbage, Persian cucumbers), tobacco smoke, and garbage were simply unbearable. This intensification of my senses lasted for–well, I still have some of it, really. But it was at its peak for about five days. I felt as though I was really seeing everything for the first time, and I felt amazed and grateful that I got to do so. But it could get overwhelming very quickly. I needed a lot of time to myself, somewhere quiet and private.
I could also feel my trusty left-brained self and newly-awaked right-brained self communicating with each other. After I left the place where I had my ceremony, I took a train to the nearest city. (The trip was delightful, packed with sounds, shapes, colors, and textures I hadn’t realized were even there.) When I got off the train, I saw a big free-standing wall drawing. Here’s the dialogue between my right-brained self (RBS) and my left-brained self (LBS) as I looked at the drawing. (The RBS doesn’t use words, but I’ll do my best to translate.)
RBS: Wow! Curved lines with circles and weird shapes between them, all unified into a weird but beautiful whole! The circles are all parts of the whole, and we could center ourselves at any of them, because this is all one thing!
LBS: Um…yes. You’re looking at a map. Specifically, it’s a map of the train system of the Netherlands. We could, in fact, go to any of the stations marked with circles on this map. That’s kind of the point.
RBS: Everything is wide open! We could go anywhere!
LBS: Yeah, we could–but that would be a terrible idea. In our current state, we’d be a sitting duck for every pickpocket around. Let’s get out of the train station, go across the street, and check into the hotel we found earlier. We can be somewhere quiet and alone. Doesn’t that sound good?
I took my LBS’s sage advice. I spent several hours in the hotel room, being quiet, alone, and in the blessedly easy dark. Eventually, though, I had to go outside to get food.
Walking on the street was overwhelming. I stepped into an Italian restaurant and sat down but had to leave quickly. The music, the smell of fatty things frying, the bright colors–I just couldn’t take it. I ended up going to a convenience store and buying the simplest food I could get: an egg salad sandwich, a smoothie, and a simple couscous salad with as little extra stuff in it as possible. I quickly scurried back to the hotel room to eat in peace, quiet, and low light. All-consuming flavors exploded in my mouth–rich, earthy egg; complex whole grain; sharp raspberries; soft, soothing banana.
I managed to make it home the next day. My God, there are some TERRIBLE smells on planes. I’d had the foresight to buy a box of peppermints before I boarded. I found myself sticking my nose into it and leaving it there for much of the flight. Ugh. Smells and jostling on the subway aren’t any better. If I ever do this again, I’m leaving at least a full week to start re-integrating my senses before I have to take the flight back to the US.
Once I was home and had had some time to recover, I got richly scented soaps and incense. I close my eyes and breathe at least something beautiful in at least once a day. I started rearranging my apartment to suit what would really make me comfortable and happy, rather than to force myself to do stuff that I had somehow thought of as “right.”
Now, when I meditate, if I really focus on the breath and let go, I get the same sense of infinite space I got from ayahuasca. I don’t have visions, exactly, but mental images are clearer. Focusing on a single tone and being centered in my body is easier than it used to be. I feel more refreshed, somehow, from meditation now than I was before.
I have no idea what kind of meditation I practice. All I know is, I sit in one place and focus on my breath. It seems to help.
I did just that in the early part of the ceremony, after I drank the ayahuasca. I think it helped me consciously let go, which is the hardest part, especially early on. I suspect it also helped me keep the bitter brew down longer than I would have otherwise.
It would have been impossible for me to continue meditation after that, because there’s no way to meditate and barf at the same time. Once the vomiting was over, I had to cede control of my mind and body to the ayahuasca. That, once gain, made meditation impossible, though I think the practice meditation had given me in letting go helped me follow wherever ayahuasca led me.