MY HEALING WITH AYAHUASCA AND AMAZONIAN HERBS
A personal story by Martin Stevens
I�m lying on my back inside a claustrophobic steel tube while a hundred furious gnomes hammer in unison all around my head, the crashing echoes easily piercing my foam earplugs as I slowly pass through the tunnel doing my utmost not to move as I�ve been instructed by the clinic staff.
It�s August 2007 and I�m in Lima, Peru undergoing an MRI scan to ascertain the cause of a dense knot of pain in my right hip and excruciating sciatica all down my right leg leaving me unable to do the heavy lifting needed to work in my trade as a cabinet-maker and carpenter. My mind is worried by a dwindling bank account balance and the fact that I�m due to begin work in a few weeks back in the US where I�d lived for thirty years prior to my move to live in Peru two years previously.
Soon enough the results of the scan come in indicating a herniated disc in my lower spine. My orthopedic doctor says my condition is not sufficiently advanced to warrant the inherent risks of surgery and puts me on strong pain killers. What to do? Painkillers make sense to me only for the immediate short term. After that it makes absolutely no sense to me to override my body�s natural response to a fundamental problem in my spine. I�ve already tried treatments during my previous visit to California a few months ago by an excellent acupuncturist and a gentle chiropractor, all to no avail.
My intuitively gifted Peruvian wife Lourdes suggests I travel to the Amazon jungle near Pucallpa to work with our new friend, the Shipibo curandero Teobaldo Ochavano Lopez. We had met him and a group of his family members including his wife Marina during the previous September at an all-night intertribal celebration using the visionary entheogen huachuma, also known as San Pedro (you know, the gentleman who holds the keys to heaven). The event was held in a large grass-bermed ceremonial circle just outside the Sacred Valley town of Pisac around a fire that was kept burning all night. By its soft light we were treated to wonderful ancient dances and songs from a wide array of different tribal traditions by the participants who had journeyed here from different communities in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia as well as further afield including a group from Whitehorse in the Yukon. To our immediate right sitting on the elevated grassy ring were a group of Shipibos with men wearing their traditional ceremonial regalia of off-white �cushma� tunics and crown-style headgear elaborately hand painted with stylized renditions of ayahuasca visions. Readers who have watched the peyote journey sequence in the movie �Renegade� will have seen the same clothing worn by the �medicine man� who is not an actor but a real Shipibo shaman. The women of the group wore blouses of iridescent fabric with raised ruffles in contrasting colors over skirts embroidered with multicolored ayahuasca-inspired designs. We shared smiles and I immediately felt an easeful kinship with these forest people far away from their steamy jungle home, now up at nine thousand feet in a chilly Andean night.
One or two cups of the huachuma brew offered from a vessel that was circulating around the gathering all night long was quite sufficient for me. Lourdes refrained from imbibing as entheogens are not part of her spiritual path, but I was amazed and impressed to see my small of stature neighbors drinking cup after cup of the powerful brew all through the night until the sun slowly began to illuminate the craggy outlines of the local Apus (sacred mountain peaks) and the Inca ruins of Pisac. Serious psychonauts these, I thought to myself.
Later the following day we had gotten to know the family group on a social level and Lourdes made an immediate connection with Teo as a colleague, both of them having worked in the field of primary education for many years. We parted with a friendly invitation from them to visit their jungle home in the future.
Now it�s a year later and I�m being met at Pucallpa airport by Teo, his wife Marina and several of their seven children. We board a typical wooden riverboat, about sixty feet long with a closed-in roof, powered by an unsilenced �dragon tail� style motor and loaded down with passengers, boxes of freight, chickens and a pig or two for the five hour upstream journey to Teo and Marina�s rural three hectares of land planted with native medicinal herbs, trees, vines and bushes. In the communal sleeping maloca I�m given a mattress, pillow, sheets and a mosquito net and soon begin my healing �dieta� in which I eat small quantities of very bland food, mainly hard-boiled eggs and cooked plantains, drink a large daily dose of satchaboa infusion, a mouth-puckeringly astringent brew made from a red jungle vine that leaves me weak and nauseous lying in a hammock most of the day. This regime is supplemented by herbal vapor baths in which I stand over a pot of steaming leaves wrapped in a blanket sweating in the forest sunshine. Teo tells me that my nausea is all part of the needed detoxification process.
That night we begin the first of five late-night ayahuasca sessions. It�s my first introduction to the Shipibo style of ceremony and considerably different from the mestizo tradition that I had experienced many times before in the Iquitos area. There are no shacapas or rattles keeping the rhythm going during the chanting of icaros (sacred healing songs) and very little of singing the same icaro in unison. Sometimes it seems that everybody is singing a different song at the same time and under the influence of the medicine this creates a wonderful musical tapestry. In my rather weakened state I lay on a mat the whole night sometimes drifting into sleep. Teo gives me a lot of personal attention doing shamanic extractions with his mouth on my back followed by the spitting out of accumulated energetic foulness into a bucket. To the rhythm of a fast icaro he whacks an ashinga branch on my hip, its leaves have sharp little needles that Teo tells me have antihistamine properties. I grit my teeth with the pain and chant mantra-like �this too shall pass� to myself. Later I feel waves of sadness and it dawns on me this is September 11th. In my sensitized state I acutely feel the grief within the collective consciousness of the USA on this date that will always be remembered with sorrow.
My days pass slowly; I feel the relief incurred by this temporary sojourn in a relative Eden away from the electro-chemical soup that we in the industrial west consider our normal environment. In small but discernable steps I am aware of gradual incremental relaxation in my total being, unwinding in this place far from cell phones and electricity. It�s back to the basics here; water from the well, food cooked over an open fire, eggs from the chickens underfoot, fish from the river and every clear night luminous with the Southern Cross and the Milky Way, miles away from the light pollution of cities. In the nights not spent in ayahuasca ceremonies Teo plays his native flute accompanied by two brothers-in-law on different size drums and I�m asked to dance by the women, a laid-back shuffling dance which is about right for my feeble present energy level.
More ceremonies, more lying weakly groaning on my mat in the corner as the medicine courses pacman-like through my veins, cleansing, purifying, detoxifying. I vomit, I shiver with cold, I heat up, I sweat, my bowels bubble and gurgle and I head to the outhouse seeing benign nature spirits amid the trees.
In the fourth ceremony Teo tells me he has identified a component of my affliction as �envidia�, a negative energy field set up by a few people in the Andean village where I live who feel jealous of Lourdes and I and the happiness we generate together. He sings a very up-tempo martial-sounding icaro over me vigorously waving a huge condor feather. It�s in Spanish and the words are all about marching forward with my drawn sword backed up by ranks of angelic light beings. He blows profuse amounts of mapacho wild tobacco smoke over me and then douses me with shamanic perfume instilling my being with the beginnings of new-found strength.
The next day we take the boat back to Pucallpa to meet Lourdes who has decided to join me for my final few days in the jungle. She has been a teacher in the world-wide Waldorf alternative education for many years and follows the spiritual path of Anthroposophy established by the Austrian clairvoyant and white magician Rudolf Steiner during the first decades of the twentieth century. She enters profound visionary states using meditative techniques and is not drawn to use visionary plant medicines. However she fully supports my own shamanic path and recognizes the central healing role these plants play in my life. She holds my hand all through the last ceremony in which I increasingly feel the tide of my healing process turning towards wholeness. I feel waves of advancing happiness flooding my being and look back in amazement at my progress from a glum, bleak, weak creature at the beginning of my stay here. Growing discomfort in my belly tell me it�s time for another walk to the outhouse and again I�m treated to the luminous forest outside full of spirit forms. I sit and go about my business and all at once my being zooms out through the top of my head up into deep space. For a nanosecond I witness the full power and the glory, the ineffable face of the unveiled divine. I�m somehow aware that anything longer than a nanosecond means immediate obliteration for my puny fragment of consciousness and am relieved as the scene shifts into a stepped-down version of the overwhelmingly intense field of love emanating from the godhead. This takes the form of a radiantly triumphant figure that I recognize as Christ (a figure from my childhood who I�ve rejected for many years as I pursued Eastern and Native American spirituality), his arms are open with his palms towards me like many pictures I have seen and I feel totally loved by this being. Then I have the sensation of moving closer to planet Earth where I see another figure, that of the archangel Michael (another rejected being from long ago). I�m made aware of his status as an intermediary or messenger from the godhead and Christ to all peoples of the world. He has the role of again stepping down the energy of divine love into a practical force that can be utilized in the daily lives of each human at this critical juncture in the evolution of the planet. The scene shifts again. Yet closer in to planet Earth and now it gets very personal. I see my wife Lourdes as my private conduit for this stream of divine love warming my rather cool, reserved British heart with her fiery Latin zest for life and fierce defense of the downtrodden. She�s my daily inspiration to relinquish my tendency to affect a detached, intellectual stance towards the world and get down in the trenches with her feeding the hungry, educating the next generation and fighting corruption.
Suddenly I�m back in my body and stagger off to the bathing maloca to wash my hands. Then waves of nausea grip me and I�m down on the forest floor, the luminous dark alive with spirit faces and I vomit and vomit until quite empty. I rejoin the ceremony for a fabulous crescendo of icaros and then it�s 3am and time to load luggage into 3-wheel mototaxis for a half-hour ride through cool night air, down to catch the early boat to Pucallpa, then Lima, Cusco and home. Gradually leaving the spirit world of the ayahuasca ceremony behind and resuming our lives in ordinary reality we glimpse pink river dolphins and watch the sun come up over a smoky horizon, 2007 setting a record for the amount of hectares of jungle burned in these parts. The smoke in the air results in our plane being delayed three hours due to poor visibility.
All the while I�m feeling a strange ambivalence. On the one hand I know I have undergone a huge healing shift inside my body, but on the other, my original pain is still there. My intuition says not to entertain disappointment and that the process of healing is not yet over. I find that this is indeed the case. Back in Pisac the days go by and I�m aware of the discomfort diminishing until one day I realize that I am no longer in pain. It�s gone. No more needles of pain shooting down my right leg every time I stand up from sitting.
Two weeks later I have traveled to Venice Beach, CA to remodel the kitchen and bathroom of my friends, a sweet couple who also share a passion for Peruvian shamanism. I tear out ceilings and walls with sledgehammer and big crowbar and two young Mexican helpers help me muscle into place new twenty feet long 2x12 roof support beams. I hang, finish and paint 5/8 drywall. My 53 year old body feels fit and strong with not an iota of back pain. Would a new MRI scan show that the disc in my lower back is no longer herniated? I feel sure this is the case, but do not want to endure another round with the hammering gnomes, besides I have daily empirical proof that Teo�s treatment was effective. What more validation do I need?
Now it�s April 2008 and I�m back visiting Teo and his extended family with four visitors from North America for two weeks. With very little effort on my part I have entered the new role of tour guide and I immediately derive a great deal of pleasure from acting as translator between Teo and the visitors from far away. Teo is very happy as well and he confides that many years ago Madre ayahuasca told him the day would come when �extranjeros� (foreigners) would visit his healing center in groups. He has been building, planting and cultivating for just this moment. I feel very honored to be playing a part in this development and I experience a growing family bond between myself and all the Shipibos in this place.
Teo gives a little class in the basics of the Shipibo language and later we embark on a number of conversations in which I start to piece together his story about becoming a shaman. Born August 11, 1969, his father had been steered away from traditional ceremonial life by Christian missionaries and young Teo had been set on the path of education and assimilation into mainstream Peruvian culture. After high school in Pucallpa he entered university there and earned a degree in education after which he became a primary school teacher spending several years away from his Shipibo homeland instructing children of the neighboring Ashininka people. However, in his teenage years he had begun attending ayahuasca ceremonies with his grandfather who was a curandero even though his father did not support this activity, wanting Teo to become a modern Peruvian citizen.
He started receiving an inner summons to himself become a healer which he at first resisted, having invested much in becoming a state-salaried educator, but the internal voice was relentless to the extent that he finally quit his job and entered the difficult path of acquiring the vast body of knowledge and magical skills necessary to become a traditional curandero. He confided that the most difficult part had been the necessity of leaving his first teacher who betrayed the trust Teo put in him by turning out to have more interest in power and sorcery than the genuine impulse of healing through love that was calling out to Teo. He learned the power of discernment through this encounter and subsequently found good teachers who watched over his �dietas� in which he learned to summon and work with the spirits of a wide variety of healing plants. Then came the time in which he was accepted by the spirit of ayahuasca to begin healing human afflictions. He began healing babies and young children and today is happy to see these same youngsters grown up strong and healthy. Slowly he started working on healing adults as well and then came the vision to begin a healing center to which groups of individuals could come and enter into detoxification �dietas�. I met Teo just as this vision was coming to fruition with the first cutting of ayahuasca vine that he had planted years earlier able to be harvested to make the brew that I and my companions drink to each enter into a deep process of healing during our time at the center.
At the time of writing I�m again back in the US working for a while and very much missing my Shipibo family and Maestro Teo. I can hardly wait to get back.
Martin Stevens lives with his wife Lourdes in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru where they together run a program to introduce Waldorf alternative education in the Cusco area.