Ayahuasca: The Sacred Indigenous Medicine and Its Link to Mental Health

By Cristina Gaviria Beltrán, Creative Lead at myGwork

When I was 13 years old, I went on a trip to the Amazon with my father. We were there for a holiday but also, he wanted to have a Yagé (or Ayahuasca) ceremony. We went on a 3-day excursion into the jungle to meet a tribe with whom my father had contact. Due to external factors, we didn’t manage to have the ceremony. After that, I never had contact with this traditional indigenous medicine until I was around 20, I started looking for it again but didn’t manage to find a situation that gave me enough confidence. Yet, I never forgot the words the Shaman from my earlier experience told me back then: “don’t worry, the medicine will find you when it is time for you to know her wisdom.” For it is truly sacred ancestral medicine, protected and honored by native and indigenous tribes all around the Amazon territory where it grows, holding special protection and laws for the preservation of multicultural ethnicities and their ancient traditions: it has nothing to do with entertainment or recreation. And the wisdom and knowledge she provides us with has to be taken with the uppermost delicacy and respect, for she holds the intact power and understanding of our galaxy herself.

I have survived many episodes of depression in my life. I have truly dived deep in the dusk of existence. However, I have never had a really effective treatment for it. When I was 27, I suffered from the worst episode ever, and still wonder how I even survived it. At that moment, it was my family who supported me fully, and although they didn’t know how to properly deal with it, they asked me to see a psychiatrist regularly. It was the least help they could provide me with, even though they were aware that my past experiences with therapy and anti-depressants were not desirable at all.

I had one therapy a Tuesday at 11am. On Monday at 4pm, I simply called and cancelled it: I didn’t doubt my decision, even though I had been warned that there would be moments in the process where I would want to quit. That next day, at 11.30am, the time when I should have been sitting in therapy, an old friend randomly sent me a video of the Shaman he did ceremonies with, stating all the medical properties Ayahuasca had for mental and physical health. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was her- the grandmother medicine, appearing in my life because it was time. That same Saturday, after having met the Shaman and prepared myself, I was on my way to having my first ceremony.

We arrived at the location, which was in the middle of a temperate forest, around 10am and the ceremony would take place at midnight. Throughout the day we did many healing rituals: receiving Rapé (which is nasal snuff tobacco made from a mixture of pulverized tobacco and other plants), Temazcal (which is a type of low heat sweat lodge with different herbs), having vomitive purgatives so we could receive the Yagé better, herb baths and foot cleansing among others.

We organized our beds inside the Maloca, the ancestral roundhouse (in most ethnic cultures, the maloca represents the womb), around the fire looking towards the North where the altar was standing. And around 11pm we were getting started for the ceremony. Each ceremony is completely different: depending on many factors, like the ethnicity of the Shamans and on their particular signature. The ceremony started with us gathering around the altar where the Shamans (who were brothers and offered the medicine together), the musicians and their helpers blessed the medicine, protected the Maloca by smoking different protecting plants like tobacco and sang shielding prayers for the space and all of us patients.

We then queued to receive it: we would receive two doses, one at midnight and the other one around 3am. I was handed the cup with the sacred Yagé, which was a thick brownish dense liquid, and it had a very strong and bitter taste. After I drank it, I went back to my bed while the medicine took its effect which could take up to an hour.

What happened afterwards, was sheer perfection. While the medicine started acting on me, everything turned red and slowly, many demons started to appear. The more I focused on something else and the more I tried overlooking them, the more they took over. The one that popped up the most was a demoniac jester Jack-in-the-box who laughed cynically in front of me while repeating “there is no way out, there is no escaping”. Soon enough, the whole space was flooded in red while I experienced the worst paranoia possible: wherever I looked, there were demons and underworldly creatures: both the other patients who resembled them to me and spirit-like entities that wandered around. I desperately wanted to get out of that state and tried to disgorge the medicine out of my body. The more I tried to push them away and resist their presence, the more they took over me.

I was going irrational facing those devils and going into a whirlwind of despair when acknowledging the truth that those demons were truly not going anywhere, in fact, those demons were merely my depression and my struggles looking at me. At a certain moment, when I lost complete grip of this world and felt as if the ceremony was an actual ritual for my death, the words “there is no way out, there is no escaping” made sense, and at that exact moment, everything shifted.

Suddenly, I completely conceived the Law of Conservation of Energy which states that energy cannot be destroyed, it only transforms. As soon as I truly apprehended that, the devils started to disappear from the scene and the red turned into pink which turned into white. When all I could see was white, geometrical lines started popping out of the blur and created perfectly designed clouds, which gave way to the construction of the firmament, of the skies, and eventually of the galaxy. In a sudden shift, I went from experiencing utter despair, to being able to thoroughly see physically and mathematically how galaxies and everything in them followed perfect geometrical formulas and patterns that us, humans, are not able to see beyond the matter of appearance.

I then went deeper and was not only seeing this sacred geometry, but my physical sensation was as if I was soaring through the skies, hugged safely by the infinite wisdom of not only Mother Earth, but of the whole system of existence. It was impressive the way I understood myself within the universe: seeing not only how everything which comprises this world is exactly the same consciousness existing through different “pores” or entities, but mostly how we are nothing like what we have been taught humans are thought to be, and the core of what the human experience is. Most of our perception is driven by an ego that limits itself to the material plane and to inhabiting this body, and we forget that we, ourselves, are part of the universe. We are not an isolated species, we are in fact, sole transmitters of information from and back to this perfect machinery. A creation so absolutely perfect, that we cannot truly understand it because it’s too advanced and too intelligent for our capacities: its intelligence is otherworldly not to mention extraterrestrial. Yet, it is in the moments of paroxysmal love, that exact force that moves us, where we can even get to get a hold of the majestical flawlessness and wisdom of the cosmos. We truly are just experiencing in a human form and through humane senses, what it is to be everything of this creation.

There is not a single error in this universe: for it to be created and to evolve the way it does, and it has done, it just keeps on showing us the miraculous happenings of Mother Gaia: how she adapts, re-constructs, re-edits, transforms, disposes of, upgrades, adjusts, experiments and invents different ways of life to blossom into existence. And we humans, are messengers of this same life essence: with our ideas, with the development of our talents, with our systems, with our communities and inventions, with our acknowledgement of failure as a motor for finding solutions and methods for survival: for being both the cure and the medicine. We truly are nature speaking through us, and when we are sensible enough to grasp that voice and that life force, life becomes a mind-blowing experience for us.

It took me a couple more months of ancestral therapy to recover fully from that depressive episode and from any unconformity I have had with existence: from the difficulties of survival, to not completely embracing my sexuality and non-heteronormative identity and sometimes even resisting it and fighting it because of external expectations, to an actual mental disease.

And all that, to bring me back to the start. It is her, the Infinite and Sacred Grandmother Yagé who appears in our lives when we are ready to receive it. Because once we are and once we do, we transform into her and act exactly like her: being the medicine that aids in the healing of the collective human preconception of consciousness. From wounded and injured, to healer and Shamaness.

Please note Ayahuasca is only legal in some countries as part of a spiritual ceremony, it is not supposed to be taken unsupervised. Colombians organise a guild of shamans to ensure good practice.