Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
I caught a glimpse of the classic near-death experience — the tunnel, the whoosh sensation of traveling fast out of my body, the emotional intensity filled with personal and spiritual meaning.
I felt unfinished with this experience. I wondered for years what would’ve happened had I not become frightened and returned to my body. Would I actually have died? Would I have been sent back? Would I have seen where my father was going? I always wondered, and now my intention for the ayahuasca ceremony was to continue this journey.
Some would say I was called to that first meeting with Grandmother Ayahuasca. Certainly, the serendipity factor was ridiculously high. But I was the one who had to say yes to the retreat center, yes to the ceremonies, and ultimately, yes to the research. In saying yes, I opened myself to one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
Flash forward to Costa Rica: Like a snake working its way through my intestines, the ayahuasca tea moved deep inside my body. I realized this tea was far more powerful than any psychedelic I’d done before, and here I sat between the Pacific Ocean and the rain forest, no telephone or even internet contact available, no cars, literally no exit. The person in charge was an indigenous shaman, decorated with ritual ochre and feathers, who didn’t speak English. He did, however, clear the ceremonial space to protect us from unwanted spirits, although this was not a great reassurance. It was from his hands that I received the foul-tasting, murky brown liquid — he looked me in the eye through the candlelit shadows and whistled into the tea, a shamanic prescription for my energy. I downed the cup.
After thirty minutes or so of trying to remain calm and confident, I lifted off. Without warning, I zoomed through space, traveling way beyond the speed of light through a tunnel whose walls were lined with multicolored points of light that became streams of color as I flew past. In a cosmic whoosh, I broke through into the blackness of space filled with stars and eternity. I was gone in so many ways — out of my mind, out of my body, and out of this world. No longer an “I.” Only nothingness with unending silence, no fear or perhaps no “I” to be afraid.
In my visionary journey, I was back with my father during his last conscious days. I relived my last words with him, “I love you, Dad.” He responded with the same uncharacteristically emotional words that he had said on his deathbed: “I’ve always loved you.” After floating in space a while longer, I settled back down to earth and into my body. I felt as though a veil had been lifted, that I was bathed in love.
During the ceremony, I was more open than I was at the stressful time of my father’s dying, better able to fully receive my father’s final message. His words reached back into my childhood, subtly changing childhood memories so that my perspective shifted. I felt more loved, better able to recognize and receive the love that was “always” there but not always felt. Tears warmed my cheeks. Gratitude flooded my heart. I was grateful to relive this last moment with my dad, to feel the full impact of his words. I knew this experience had shifted my personal history in an essential way that somehow allowed my heart to be more open.
Questions about Ayahuasca
I began asking research questions the very next morning, when I knew without a doubt that I’d had a profound and deeply personal healing, far beyond anything I’d experienced with other entheogens — the term for psychedelics taken for spiritual purposes to catalyze an inner experience of the Divine. As a psychologist, I couldn’t help but ask: How does ayahuasca, a psychospiritual medicine, work? Who is the spirit of ayahuasca, which indigenous cultures respectfully call “Grandmother”? And, really, what does that mean? Is she a real spirit? Does she help everyone? How could this medicine so precisely fulfill my intentions? Almost as if she knew me, or rather, like the National Security Agency, had access to my operating system?
I prevailed upon the translator to convey my questions to the shamans, two Secoya elders from Ecuador. I wanted to know about the process of drinking ayahuasca: Are there stages people pass through as they become experienced drinkers? Do people see the same visions regardless of cultural beliefs or locations? How do the shamans’ songs affect the visions and healing? How were the shamans trained? Do shamans agree on what they see? Heaven help me — I was asking about what’s called inter-rater reliability, or the degree to which the two shamans saw the same things.
A few years later I learned that this was not such a crazy idea; some shamans are also interested in inter-rater reliability. A Western shaman, who grew up in an indigenous village and was trained by his godfather, a traditional shaman, told me about one of his initiations. He was presented with a variety of patients in front of a panel of three experienced shamans, and they all had to agree on the diagnoses and treatments. Even with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a common reference, Western psychotherapists often disagree about diagnoses, and even more frequently they disagree about treatment plans. This young shaman faced a very high bar to pass, but pass he did.
The most difficult question I asked was: How does the medicine work? It’s almost an unfair question, since we don’t really know how psychotherapy works, although we have plenty of theories. We only recently figured out how aspirin works. In itself, the question is culture bound in a Western psychotherapeutic framework. There was no way the shamans could understand my questions, much less speak to them.
I tried a different approach, a phenomenological one that was less mired in a Western therapeutic context. I asked the shamans, “Can you see what I see during the ceremony?” One shaman smiled and nodded. I hesitated with my next question, not sure it was politically correct, but decided to seize the moment: “Can I see what you see during the ceremony?”
At first the shaman was taken aback by my impertinence, especially coming from a woman, but he recovered quickly with a hearty laugh, explaining that there is a hierarchy. He can see my visions, but I can’t possibly see his. “Thank you,” I replied, grateful that he was not offended.
I learned very early that the linguistic and cultural divide between me and the indigenous healers was way too wide for me to bridge. My psychological questions were meaningless to them. The shamans live in an ayahuasca-saturated world I can never fully understand, a world that is as real, or even more real to them, as this world.
Mission Accepted
In 2008, three years after my first ceremony and long after I’d given up trying to understand how the shamans do whatever it is they do, Grandmother Ayahuasca came to me during a ceremony and, in a no-nonsense way, told me to do a research study. I took her request as a mission — she, in all her wisdom, had chosen me (ME!) to do this work. Ego inflation barely describes my state of mind.
Yes, I heard a voice, and questions about this voice have bounced around in my head ever since. What was this voice? What does it mean that I heard a voice? I had no answers. You might think I would have ignored the voice’s directive: Do this research. Instead, I never doubted. I accepted the mission and congratulated the spirit of ayahuasca for her wise decision to choose me.
I had a rare combination of experience: an academic research background and a psychotherapy practice along with personal experience with ayahuasca. I didn’t question how Grandmother Ayahuasca could possibly have known this, or how she had evaluated my skills, resources, and determination to interview and collect data from people willing to admit to a perfect stranger intimate details of their experiences with an illegal substance. At this point in my career, I was in private psychotherapy practice, outside the academy, my research career abandoned long ago with the birth of my now thirty-something daughter. Given the illegal status of ayahuasca, it’s possible this research could only have been done by someone outside the hallowed and federally funded halls of academia. Did Grandmother Ayahuasca know all this and take it into consideration in choosing me?
Well into the second year of the project, one of my expert consultants, a Western shaman, casually said to me, in reference to something else entirely, “Everyone thinks they’ve received a mission from ayahuasca. I don’t believe two-thirds of what she says to me.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You mean she was just kidding? I didn’t have to do this research study?”
In fact, as I’ve found, the feeling of being assigned a mission by Grandmother Ayahuasca