Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
taken the whole project so seriously. I might have assumed that my sense of having been called was merely an artifact of the ayahuasca experience.
But I have no doubts that Grandmother Ayahuasca personally asked me to do this study. I heard her voice repeatedly along the way. I felt that she opened doors for me, making the whole project evolve smoothly without even a minor hassle, which is unusual in research. Something inevitably goes at least a little wonky.
During one ayahuasca ceremony, as I was just beginning to feel the effects of the medicine in my body, I had another conversation with the spirit of ayahuasca.
Involve Lee in the research, she said. Lee Gurel was the mentor of my own former research mentor. He’s a nationally recognized psychologist with a lifelong career in prestigious research positions.
“I’ve already spoken with him,” I replied, with the adolescent tone of having been there, done that. A part of me couldn’t believe that I was talking to Grandmother Ayahuasca like a snotty sixteen-year-old.
Grandmother Ayahuasca was patient. She ignored my tone and simply added, Involve him more.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
A few days later, I called Lee and told him, “Grandmother Ayahuasca told me I should involve you more in the research.”
Slight pause. “Alright,” he said, simply and, no doubt, with an impish grin, never once questioning my source.
Guided in the Research
As I developed the questionnaire for the study, I made an early decision to be totally transparent as a researcher, and I placed a personal statement on the questionnaire’s front page (for the full questionnaire, see appendix A):
I am being guided in this research by my own personal experience of ayahuasca. I’m a psychologist who has worked in research and has had a private psychotherapy practice for over thirty-five years. My intention is to publish the research results. This research is being conducted via personal networks of kindred spirits.
By asking people to participate in the study, I was also asking them to admit to using an illegal substance, and I felt that I had to be willing to be equally vulnerable or more so. Participants could complete the questionnaire anonymously, while my name and personal information were right up front and all over the internet. I also wanted people to know that I understood the ayahuasca experience from the inside. I was not just an observer — I was a participant, a kindred spirit.
By saying I was “guided . . .by my own personal experience of ayahuasca,” I meant to imply my belief in the spirit of ayahuasca as a sentient being with the intention to influence. From a Western point of view, this statement was not only irrational but it could conceivably be seen as tainting the research results. It could be argued that my statement influenced how people answered the question about their own relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca. However, I thought it was important to state publicly that the study was not my idea alone, that I was acting in collaboration with Grandmother Ayahuasca, even following her orders. There were times when I did, indeed, feel like a good foot soldier dedicated to completing my mission.
Then there were other times when I questioned my sanity: What was it about my experiences with ayahuasca that led me to embark on this research project? Did I really believe that I was responding to a personal request from Grandmother Ayahuasca? Was I officially and, quite publicly, going off the deep end?
Let’s just say I had my doubts about the whole project, but what kept me going was that first experience with ayahuasca when I relived my experience of my father’s dying. I’ve talked with many others who also had amazing initial encounters with ayahuasca. It’s almost as if she bonds us to her with that initial intense, deep spiritual experience and profound healing. Even if other ceremonies don’t reach those heights, we remain eternally grateful. So when she asked me to do the research, of course I said, and continue to say, yes.
Research Limitations
Admittedly, my research has some obvious limitations.1 First, it was not a controlled study. There was no random assignment to a control group, no double-blind assessments. The study is the first stage of research exploring a new phenomenon. It is more than a survey, but not an experimental design, which was clearly impossible.
For one thing, there’s no way to control for the potency of the ayahuasca brew, or what researchers would call “the dose.” Shamans cook their own brews in their own idiosyncratic ways, often adding different plants to the mix in a mysterious process. The indigenous perspective is that the potency can be affected by the type of ayahuasca vine cooked into the brew — there are varieties that shamans can distinguish but Western botanists are unable to differentiate. The native names given to the range of ayahuasca vines are poetically evocative — red, yellow, black, or white, along with sky, bright star, or thunder ayahuasca — but no studies have been done to determine if there are chemical differences. As if that’s not complicated enough, the quality of the brew is supposedly influenced by the time of day the vine is cut, the stage of the moon, and what songs are sung during the preparation.
Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), reported that his organization tried to control the potency variable by freeze-drying the ayahuasca and processing it into a capsule similar to the ones used in Spanish research.2 Unfortunately, the shamans he had intended to use for the study refused to work with the pills, saying that the spirit was lost during the processing.
Neither the research participants nor I had any idea what we actually drank in our ayahuasca ceremonies. Brews vary greatly, and the addition of datura, a potentially toxic plant that is sometimes added to the medicine, can change the nature of the experience in dramatic ways. I heard of one traveling shaman who, when he began to run out of tea, added vodka to the mix. Another perspective on the question of potency arose when an experienced shaman tested a number of mixtures used in ceremonies around the San Francisco Bay Area. He reported, “None of these will take you where you want to go,” meaning that the tea was not correct for spiritual journeying.
Not knowing exactly what people were drinking was only half the problem. There was also no way to know how much of the mystery brew people drank. During a ceremony, each participant sits in front of the shaman to receive the cup of dark, mysterious, muddy liquid. Supposedly, the shaman, in that moment, psychically determines the correct amount to give. Some say the shamans have X-ray vision allowing them to see into the subtle body of the person sitting in front of them, so they know how much to pour into the cup. I was grateful not to be researching whether or not this was possible. For my humble purposes, I only had to accept that the potency and dose of the tea couldn’t be controlled or even documented.
The one criterion for entering the study was that the person had drunk ayahuasca in North America at least once. They may also have attended ceremonies in South America, but the research asked only about their experience in North America. I had solid, well-thought-out reasons for focusing the study in this way. I was primarily interested in a psychospiritual framework for understanding why people drank ayahuasca, what they learned from their experience, and how it changed them and their lives. I wanted to explore how this medicine from the Amazon basin was being used in a Western culture.
There were also cultural and language issues I avoided by focusing on North America, but the real truth is that I didn’t want to travel to collect data in places where I would have to shake out my shoe before putting it on to make sure that a tarantula had not wandered into a new home. I didn’t want to go to the jungle. I didn’t want to hear that the gardener had killed a poisonous snake on the path between my cabin and the makeshift bathroom and left the head of the snake on a stick to ward off other poisonous snakes from the area. There are all kinds of subtle ways that researchers might unwittingly influence the outcome of a scientific study. In my case, I was not so subtle.
I also focused the study on what happened in the days and weeks following the ceremony. Having lived at the Esalen Institute during the late sixties and early seventies, first as a residential fellow and then as a staff member, I had had a bird’s-eye