"Absolute happiness means living itself IS happiness."
Above: The Etnikas retreat center in Taray
I am about to embark on one of the most highly anticipated (and expensive) events of my trip: the 5-day, 3-ceremony Ayahuasca retreat.
This morning (Sunday) I took part in the first phase of the treatment, which is drinking several glasses of "purgative Andean medicinal water" from a San Pedro volcano. I did this with the other two members of the retreat group: Shelly (Michelle, but she goes by Shelly) and Raul. The water has a special makeup of minerals and gases that is believed to have healing and cleansing powers. Our guide said that people who have gastrointestinal disorders in particular benefit from drinking this water.
After having a brief health evaluation with a nurse (measuring blood pressure, heart rate, weight, and doing an electrocardiogram reading), we began drinking the water. The first two glasses went down pretty easily. The water was slightly salty, but otherwise didn't taste unusual at all. It was a little foggy and ever so slightly tinted yellowish, but when I took a picture of it, it came out green because of the green canopy above it. I swear, it was nowhere near this color. I still want to share the photo, though, because this blog post needs at least one photo that I didn't swipe from the internet.
I drank eight full glasses before anything was "purged" from my body, which meant my tummy was incredibly bloated with water for about an hour and a half as I waited for things to get moving. I had nine glasses total before I was told to stop. As we were drinking our water and walking around the courtyard, I would "cheers" with Shelly and Raul, and we would joke about how we should have used a beer bong or drinking game to make the process more entertaining. I think we're going to have a really great retreat together; they both seem like good-humored, positive people, and since they are both from the States (Shelly from Jacksonville, WY and Raul from Chicago) we may have a shot at actually seeing each other again if we keep in touch.
I want to put anyone at ease who may be worried about me participating in ayahuasca by mentioning that Etnikas is the only center to have been recognized by the Peruvian Ministry of Health for its method in performing safe Ayahuasca ceremonies, and it received a 2015 TripAdvisor certificate of excellence. I'm inclined to trust the opinion of "Trip Advisor" when it comes to which drug experiences are the best, because of the obvious pun involved.
Before I leave for the Etnikas retreat center for 5 days and I lose access to wifi -- which will be the longest time I've ever gone without internet access -- I want to explain what this is all about in terms of 1) the purpose and cultural context of ayahuasca treatment/ceremonies, 2) how it works neurologically, and 3) my own personal motivation for participating.
Ayahuasca at Etnikas
The following excerpts were taken from the Etnikas website and handouts we received, which provide an overview of the spiritual benefits of ayahuasca as well as Etnikas' specific perspective on the purpose of ayahuasca and their approach to the ceremonies.
We are a clinic of integrative medicine, which aims to help people connect with their essence and manifest absolute happiness. The retreat is dedicated to the healing and wellbeing of your body, mind, and spirit....This ancestral medicine [of ayahuasca] is used by shamans to heal a variety of psychological and spiritual illnesses. It is also used to initiate people, in their process of personal development, as well as show them the means by which to heal physical ailments.
The main objective of life is absolute happiness. Absolute happiness means living itself IS happiness. That is, to be alive, regardless of our circumstances, is to be happy. It describes a condition of life that arises from the depth of our being. This is called absolute because it is not influenced by external circumstances. Relative happiness is happiness resulting from good health, your partner, social status, economic fortune, etc. Far too often in our daily lives we focus our attention on gaining relative happiness, forgetting the natural order of life. So relative happiness is a by-prouct of absolute happiness.
You could look at it this way: 'One's successes and victories will not determine one's happiness and welfare. Rather, one's happiness and welfare will determine one's successes and victories.'
The core values that construct our absolute happiness (love, strength, wisdom, courage, mercy, to name a few) are the very same forces that sustain the universe and Mother Earth herself. It is the promotion and practice of these values that enable the human spirit to overcome suffering and transform life's 'poisons' into 'medicine.'
It can be said that good and evil do not exist, only truth and ignorance. Your growing sense of wisdom will be the art of discerning between truth and ignorance.
There are many techniques, psychologies, therapies, meditations, yoga and shamanic practices that people can use to develop a sense of absolute happiness. However, we at Etnikas believe the most powerful path is through sincere prayer to God through the practice of a holy religion...The most important moment of any religious ceremony, as well as in our daily lives, is prayer. Prayer is a conversation with God whereby we are both speaking and listening in a state of love. This state of prayer is also a form of meditation. Prayer empowers us to make the right decisions and to take the right action in our daily lives. It enables us to approach our lives with an attitude of total gratefulness for both the positive and negative elements of our daily lives. We learn to embrace the negative situations in our lives because it is through this suffering that we find the way to liberation and happiness.
The sacred medicine Ayahuasca in Quechua means "rope of death" This is a reference to the death of negativity as an opportunity for the rebirth of positivity. The plant has been used as part of Inca cultures throughout the Amazonian basin. Our practice here at Etnikas combines Shipibo cultural rituals, including the icaros chanting with other ceremonies derived from the cultures of the high Andean mountains... The purpose of the ceremony is to find an alignment between the individual, Wiracocha (God), and Pachamama (Mother Earth). This alignment allows one to understand the importance of living in harmony with, as opposed to dominance over, nature.
We believe a religion should teach the art of living well, that it must be pragmatic and bring healing to our present lives, spiritually, mentally, and physically.
Our religious basis is the combination of the Inca religion and Christianity brought to Peru by the Spaniards. We believe in a God or father Wiracocha, creator of heaven and earth through the process of evolution. And in a universal king or Jesus Christ, as the manifestation of God, to bring a new world order based on love and forgiveness. We believe in Mother Nature or Pachamama as a manifestation of God and his love in a feminine and material form, and also as represented by the Virgin Mary. A form that gives and sustains all life. We also incorporate many elements of Tibetan buddhist religious practice and have performed sacred Inca-Buddhist ceremonies with the Dalai Lama.
I hope that helps to provide some context for the intent and purpose of ayahuasca treatment and the cultural/spiritual perspective from which it originated. Sounds pretty wonderful, right? But now you may be curious about how exactly, scientifically, ayahuasca helps people achieve these profound spiritual realizations. Well, I anticipated that. Read on.
The Preparation & Science of Ayahuasca
The following has been straight-up copy/pasted from other websites.
(I'm now absolved of any accusations of plagiarism, right?)
Above: Ayahuasca tree in the Amazon rainforest
The primary drug involved in the effects of ayahuasca is N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a natural substance that is in the bodies of all mammals, and one of the most powerful hallucinogens known. DMT is extracted from the plant by brewing it in water that has been made slightly acidic, in effect making tea. It is boiled for several hours with another plant called Chacruna (psychotria viridis), which gives it the psychoactive effect. The preparation of ayahuasca is carried out by shamans, and involves shamanic chants or "iqaros" (prayers or mantras typical of the Amazonian Shipibo culture).
Ayahuasca is unique in that its pharmacological activity is dependent on a synergistic interaction between the active alkaloids in the plants. Normally the DMT in the tea would be destroyed in the digestive system by a chemical called mono amine oxidase, rendering the tea completely inactive. With the addition of the second plant containing a mono amine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), the DMT survives the digestive process and reaches the brain.
The effect of Ayahuasca is very strong. It results in vomiting and intense psychoactive effects for up to four hours. It is therefore important to take it with a shaman who can guide and ensure one's safety throughout the experience. It is non-addictive, non-toxic, and in its classical forms, produces no physical or psychological harm to the users.
Effects on Judgment & Decision-Making
Ayahuasca hyper-activates the highly evolved neocortex, the area of the brain that makes us human. This is where we perceive, reason, and make decisions. Ayahuasca also activates regions like the amygdala, which acts as a storehouse for early emotional memories, specifically the most traumatic or significant ones, like the loss of a parent. Finally, ayahuasca activates the insula [also known as the insular cortex], which is believed to create a bridge between our emotional impulses and our decision-making capacities. According to many neuroscientists, our decision-making process has a powerful emotional component.
The areas of your brain with the most serotonin and dopamine receptors become uninhibited by gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) and their neuroactivity goes up dramatically. Think about the word "uninhibited" for a moment. What do you normally think of when you say that about someone in a psychological sense? It has connotations of being less in control, freer in actions, of not thinking as much before acting. Being uninhibited in this way, and in the neurological sense, is the exact same phenomena. The frontal cortex of the brain is where most of what you think of as "you" is located. That is, the parts of the personality that makes the executive decisions on what to do in the world, both internal and external, with the thoughts, information, and sensation we are presented with. This area of the brain is heavily wired with axons that run directly from cells that produce seratonin in the brain stem. The prefrontal cortex's major GABA inhibitor and modulator is serotonin.
Ayahuasca therefore dis-inhibits this area of the brain responsible for judgment and decisions. A decision about anything is made by inhibiting the neural patterns of all other possibilities until the one neural pattern remains. If that area of the brain is disinhibited and neural activity remains high, judgments and evaluations become more difficult to make. In short, you tend to just accept the information and experience you are having without as much filtration and evaluation. It's a hypnotic state that renders you more open to suggestion and less likely to critically evaluate the experience and information being received by the frontal cortex.
Revisiting and Re-Processing Early Life Memories
In early life, powerful or traumatic events create an imprint on the brain, a pattern. This pattern is like a shortcut, activated every time we face a similar situation. For example, if we were once attacked by a dog, our brain might harbor a set of pathways that associate that dog with all dogs, making us fear them in general. We might even react adversely to a distant bark. Repeated events cause these neural patterns to reinforce their connections, binding them with protein, and building them up like scar tissue.
One theory of trauma and repression states that when the brain cannot assimilate an experience because it is too foreign to its schema, its sense of the way things should be, it represses that experience by sending chemical signals that tell the brain not to use those neural pathways. It stores the experience in pieces all over the brain, but does not complete the integration into memory. This repression of neurological signals is maintained by modulating neurotransmitters. The presence of elevated levels of dopamine during the ayahuasca experience inhibit GABA in the limbic system, increasing activity there and override the neurochemical processes that would limit the processing of experiences. This means that the increase in neural activity in those areas of the brain tends to bring up repressed experiences and start the process of re-integrating them.
As these memories and experiences are being once again brought into current processing memory in the mid brain, they encounter a brain state profoundly different than the previous state they were processed (or not processed) in initially. Ayahuasca hyper-activates the entire brain region where we store and process emotional memory, which enables the conscious part of the new brain to temporarily override previously entrenched patterns, allowing new connections to be made. Dogs, for example, may no longer be feared as these new connections are created and memories reevaluated. In field studies, ayahuasca users typically describe having new perspectives on past experiences, and deeply rooted patterns of behavior.
The Experience of Ayahuasca
Most people report revisiting the most significant events of their lives, like sequences in a chaotic film. The drinker is vaulted from one subconscious vision to the next, and as buried memories rise to the surface, it often leads to acute emotional catharsis. The most common anecdotal reports from use of Ayahuasca tea are of profound psychological and spiritual healing, accompanied by personal insight and integration. It is often reported that the tea breaks even profound depressive episodes in a single use.
It is significant that ayahuasca acts on more than one modulating neurotransmitter, that it increases activity in a more even and coordinated way than other hallucinogens. Because of this, there is far less disturbance of the intricate processing and transfers of information between different areas of the brain. The rising tide of neural activity raises all boats, brain systems, as it were. The result is that all systems continue to function together in much the same way they normally would. The person hallucinates and has a disinhibited thought process, but that process remains internally coherent without serious delusional processes or breakdowns of the personality. Thoughts and cognitions of the internal and external environments remains essentially intact.
My Own Intent & Motivation
I first heard about Ayahuasca on a Netflix show called Chelsea Does, in the episode called "Chelsea Does Drugs." I really didn't think about it much after that, but I remembered that she had done it in Peru. When I was putting together my itinerary for the Bonderman and decided to include Peru, I was reminded of "that one drug Chelsea Handler took with the shaman in the jungle," and the more I looked into it, the more fascinated I became. I have never experimented with psychedelic or hallucinogenic drugs before; tripping on shrooms at a random house party just never appealed to me. I don't like the idea of losing the grip I have on reality, however temporary.
Opening myself up to a spiritually healing experience through the use of an ancient Incan/Andean ritual using plants from the Amazon with the guidance of a shaman in Peru, however, was definitely something I could get on board with.
I have been told that it is important to have a particular intention for the area of your life in which you are seeking healing as you go into the ayahuasca ceremony, so that your subconscious knows what memories and visions to focus on. Otherwise, you might just take a general, chaotic trip, and the experience may not seem to have a meaningful theme or result in meaningful insight.
Figuring out my intention for these healing ceremonies was actually a bit difficult. I am a pretty happy person; I don't struggle with depression or anxiety, and I don't have any addictions (I drink frequently, yes, but I think the fact that I am able to give up alcohol for 3 weeks to participate in this retreat means I don't have a real problem with it). But of course, I do have my issues just like everyone else. There are two main obstacles to "absolute happiness" that I seem to encounter over and over again:
1) Comparing my life to the lives of others in nearly every possible category -- fitness levels, personal style, comedic ability, intelligence, financial stability, romantic relationships, etc. -- a habit that triggers competition, jealousy, pettiness, and vanity. Yuck.
2) An inability to overcome some deeply held negative beliefs about sexuality that, no matter how much I try to rationalize them away or just "power through" with behavior that would suggest I am sexually confident and empowered, I can't seem to shake the self-judgment and guilt. It doesn't happen every time or even close to that, but it happens enough to feel like an issue. For a long time now, I've been wanting to either change my behavior, or change my beliefs, so that I don't end up doing things that I end up feeling bad about later, but I haven't been able to achieve that thought-behavior-belief consistency yet.
To my pleasant surprise, there was a paragraph in one of our Etnikas handouts that specifically addressed sexuality, so I am hopeful that this issue may actually get resolved through the Ayahuasca treatment. I really do believe that sex has the potential to be a deeply spiritual experience. Maybe the self-judgment and guilt I feel is a result of participating in very basic versions of it when I know it could be so much more. In any case, here's what the passage says:
As in other ancient religions, the Inca religion holds sexuality with a high reverence... in the Inca religion, sexuality is considered to be the union of God and Pachamama; in other words, the union of heaven and earth. In order to practice a holy sexuality, it is important that it is engaged in with love, transparency, and awareness of maintenance of one's sexual energy. For that reason, it is suggested that sexual union be engaged in from a religious basis. For the Inca religion, sexuality is considered a form of high quality therapy. If practiced in the correct manner, it can bring happiness as well as physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. When this union is done correctly, it is believed that a couple can enter a trance of holy spirit or dharma. If practiced incorrectly, however, it can bring unhappiness and suffering. It is important to remember that routine in sexuality can be dangerous as it can harm the relation of love and transparency.
I especially like that last sentence -- you gotta mix it up, people!
I apologize to any family members reading this who would rather not hear about my sexual hangups, but that's the truth of my motivations for doing this, or at least a large chunk of it. Perhaps some of you can even relate to this struggle. In any case, those are the intentions I'm bringing into this retreat, and I look forward to posting a blog a week from now letting you know how it all went! Wish me love.