You Must Respect the Circle of Life to Drink Ayahuasca

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It’s a mistake to believe psychedelics shelter us from the realities of existence, says The Temple of Light’s Deanna Rogers

From ‘Carmézia Emiliano: The Tree of Life’ at MASP till 11 June

“Life in the jungle is hard. So there are different rules.”

Thus speaks Deanna Rogers, facilitator at The Temple of the Way of Light in Peru. It’s a Shipibo tradition retreat centre where Bruce Parry and Jeremy Narby like to settle in for a brew and a therianthrope chit-chat.

Deanna is also trauma-healing hierophant Dr Gabor Maté’s shamanic bat-woman for his own ceremonies. 

“We think of these healers as peaceful, enlightened beings,” says Deanna, who compares this convenient simplification to a Jungian ‘shadow’ interpretation of a more complex reality.

“But they're human and… they view it like a warrior culture,” she continues, “It’s not about peace and love. That element is there. But for some of them, it's very much about, like… ‘We're spiritual warriors. We go in there and go to battle’,” she explains during Vital’s special lecture series on Jungian shadow therapy. 

Deanna has studied with Shipibo curanderos in Peru for over a decade.

“Westerners come here thinking you can heal everything with peace and love”

Including in Iquitos with a tabaquero shaman, specialising in spiritual energy field defence type stuff, which is obviously sweet. “A total character,” she says, “So, I asked him one day, I don't know if it's good for my diet [pre and post-plant medicine fast], but last night I killed someone in my dream’.” 

The tabaquero threw her an animistic curve ball: “He just laughed at me and he's like, ‘Yeah, westerners come here and they think that you can heal everything with peace and love. But sometimes you need to kill things in order to just put them back in their place.’ I was like… ‘Okay…’”

Lecture host, Vital founder Kyle Buller illustrates Deanna’s point with a gory anecdote.

“Sometimes you need that edge. You need to be the killer. To have that really tough, direct, clear energy”

He describes a Peruvian shaman unsheathing his machete to decapitate a snake; despite protests from his Western voyagers. “Apparently he responded, ‘You must respect the circle of life to drink ayahuasca’.”

There’s a ‘piece’ here, as a therapist might say, about perspective. “How it's been shared with me,” explains Deanna, “is sometimes you need that edge. Sometimes, you need to be the killer. Sometimes you need to have that really tough, direct, clear energy.”

Boundaries can be far more complex to establish than those animated CBT videos makes out. And the Sociopath Next Door, to quote the book, ‘thrives in decorum.’ Which takes fortitude to breach.

“My father Timothy Leary was not a pacifist”

Perhaps this is what Ernst Junger, Germany’s greatest First World War hero and coiner of the term ‘psychonaut’, was getting at when he refused to completely condemn militarism. “My father was not a pacifist,” says Zach Leary, son of Dr Timothy and MAPS podcast host, whenever he gets the opportunity. 

More on the arch and impenetrable art of holding Space:

Calling Interdimensional Rescue

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Crisis management is the reality of integration therapy, professionals say

From Transcendent Country of the Mind by Sari Soninen published by The Eriskay Collection

Lisbon-based psychotherapist Marc Aixala says the reality of psychedelic integration is most clients come seeking help, having a bad time of some description.

“So my expertise is more focused on people in difficulties,” Aixala told Vital lecturer Kyle Buller on the Psychedelics Today podcast: “When I talk about integration, that’s what I’m referring to the most.”

Aixala crunched the data on years of psychedelic damage limitation. The most common issues are presented in his book Psychedelic Integration out now.

“Psychedelics teach us that the greatest healer is in ourselves”

Among the top comedown crises: anxiety and insomnia obviously; struggling to process what emerged from the experience; inner conflict with an instruction supposedly delivered from on high; actual flashbacks and HPPD; reality breakdown; plus good old edgy, lingering discomfort.

“Don’t create a need for integration in people that don’t have it”

Apportioning blame, Aixala’s figures cite lack of suitable preparation, exacerbation of existing mental health issues, dodgy healers, and what Aixala calls “Repeated intakes without integration, a new trend in which people go from experience to experience. They for instance care more about transpersonal entities, losing reality in quite a severe way.” 

Of depth work, journaling, downloading-but-never-using meditation apps, and the other trappings of vanilla, middle class ‘integration’ Aixala says: “Most of the time we can do that on our own.”

The former telephone engineer adds, “I’m careful as a therapist not to create an additional need for integration in people that don’t have it. One of the things that psychedelics teaches us, is that greatest healer is in ourselves.”

Don’t Go There

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Dr Lafrance doesn’t insist that patients ‘surrender to the medicine’ when they’re not up for a challenging experience

By Thomas Houseago now showing with… Nick Cave and Brad Pitt at Sarah Hilden Museum, Tampere, Finland till 15 Jan 2023

In her preparatory sessions with clients, Dr Lafrance asks them what level of intensity they’re prepared to face.

“What if a wariness of some feelings is an expression of the inner healer?” the storied clinical psychologist who “aims to be a steward of reality” asks Vital students, in her lecture on frontline applications of psychedelic therapy.

And she doesn’t insist upon ‘surrender to the medicine.’

“Any opportunity for pro-active shame work we will take,” she points out, “but if someone is expressing reluctance about pushing through, we’ll wait. This contrasts with prevailing psychedelic wisdom/gubbins, which practically demands patients stare directly into the eyes of any monsters: “In the past I would’ve said ‘feel into the space with me’ now I’d just say ‘No, let’s not go there if you’re not sure’,” Dr Lafrance reports.

“What if a wariness of some feelings is an expression of the inner healer?”

This ‘self interrupter’ part that forbids examination of traumatic feelings (especially when tripping balls) “was downloaded for a reason,” says Dr Lafrance, “Let’s respect it and go slow because that in itself can be powerful… by helping them be less afraid in the future.”

So she’s fine with patients telling jokes, “which is awesome for people who have problems expressing joy and flexibility.”

Dr Lafrance even gives a pass to ‘spiritual bypassing’ which as far as I can tell means ‘having any sort of trip that isn’t a clinical healing-type one’. 

Those, as Vital students have been repeatedly told by big dogs like Dr Bill Richards, aren’t ever worth banking on anyway. 

“Therapy comes more from process than outcome in the session”

Indeed be wary of any dramatic, sudden, supposed healing advises Dr Lafrance.

“If they realise they’ll feel bad tomorrow for acting out of the ordinary, that’s a sign it might be time to work with the shame. But if they’re throwing all their clothes off and shouting ‘I’m so sick of hating my body!’ it might be worth asking them what ‘Tomorrow You’ is going to think of all this. They realise you’re not trying to shame them. And they’re very grateful.”

Dr Lafrance even assures patients not to feel they have to talk about things they really don’t want to. This is because “therapy comes more from process than outcome in the session,” she explains, “how did they engage with the parts of themselves and the therapist? That creates a different framework for engaging with the world.”

Brain architecture and morality

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Keep those hearts open to differing emotions triggered by corporate psychedelia. And watch our for N-BOMes

By Daniel Amersham

DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency AKA the US military, have funded UNC’s Dr Bryan Roth to the tune of $26 million for development of a non-psychedelic anti-depressant.

This jars with many in the space who prefer their medicines to not only come from plants but look like them too. The ketamine crew were jumping skyclad through bonfires at sunrise when they found out a fungus generated it (to kill worms) earlier this year. 

I don’t entirely blame them. Breaking up nature’s gifts feels hubristic. ‘Pharmahuasca’ contains only the big guns, DMT and MAO-inhibitors, of ayahuasca the jungle brew, which contains as many as 28 different ingredients in total. 

“Is this bullshit thing started by this random company going to replace psilocybin for example? I don’t think so,” Empath Ventures founder Brom Rector told Psychedelics Today recently, “In business you need to make a big improvement, otherwise no one really cares.”

The anecdote that rings true with me the most in this argument is ‘In hospital they could give you morphine that doesn’t make you high, but the proper stuff works best.’ THC in marijuana is thought to increase the efficacy of CBD, while the latter makes the former safer.

Pioneering psychedelic scientists like Vital neuroscience lecturer Dr Charles Nichols’ dad David, Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD, and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin reviver of MDMA are lionised in the space. 

Indeed Charles follows in the footsteps of his father Dr David Nichols: who coined the term ‘entactogen’ for MDMA, first synthesised pharmaceutical DMT for The Strass’ 1990s experiments. He also made the MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for Johns Hopkins. 

Dr David Nichols is still working. Considered a leading expert in research into the neurotransmitter dopamine, his recent discoveries are already being trialled on Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Charles inherited a library of over 100 new chemicals from his father upon beginning his own research.

“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires”

Compass Pathways, not satisfied with supposedly trying to patent psilocybin, have developed 150 new psychedelics with the assistance of committed scientist Professor Jason Wallach. Wired ran a gushing profile of Wallach, who fits its brand image of the passionate inventor in its summer 2022 feature ‘The Race to Develop new Psychedelic Drugs'.

Wired journalist John Semley got less copy from Pathways CEO George Goldsmith and cofounder Lars Wilde: “Ask them what they had for breakfast and they’ll tell you how excited they are to build a new future for mental health,” wrote the frustrated hack.

Modern-day chemists and their backers get a far harder rap than the old guard, let alone more colourful contemporaries like billionaire Tyringham Initiative sponsor Anton Bilton, and Tokyo-based neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore whose book Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds, on how to learn from DMT hyperspace visits lands very soon. 

Humanity’s developed a love-hate relationship with pharmacology. Sometimes we can’t get enough of its magic beans; later we become deeply suspicious of what it’s up to in its windowless labs. 

That’s not just a projection of our own shame. Several high-profile incidents over the decades have stoked the embers of misgiving. It was the Thalidomide scandal, where a generation of noticeably deformed children resulted from  a less than rigorous safety testing program, that put the kibosh on early LSD research. 

The chemical generation’s complex relationship with drug use, and a preference for talk therapy amongst… talk therapists that veers into militancy haven’t helped.

The pharma sector’s also deeply partial to bureaucracy in its many forms, and that rarely goes down well with those seeking caring and compassion. Anecdotally, there’s also the feeling that the corporadelic guys, with their lanyards and anodyne PR-speak are not really one of us.

Corpos drew groans at London’s Psych Symposium when a panel on decriminalisation was told we can’t be trusted to grow and eat our own magic mushrooms, because we can’t rate the dosage accurately enough. 

Besides, where are all these revolutionary new psychedelic-derived medicines? 

“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires,” says Dr Nichols during his Vital lecture that opens the course’s Medical Overview of Psychedelics and Clinical Evaluation core module.

But it’s that level of investigation and learning that often yields major discoveries. In scientific circles LSD is noted for the knowledge about serotonin studying it led to.

Frankly why should everyone with asthma have to take a trip? Not everybody likes metaphysical poetry, ambient music, plus discovering the inner secrets of the universe… maybe the effing Death Door.

Besides space explorers are already enjoying the fruits of next-generation psychedelic research. And citizen scientists in the front line of consciousness exploration make for finer subjects than lab rats. 

Designer drugs combining psychedelic and empathogen (entactogen) effects are not your regular liberty cap and MDMA punch though. ’N-bombs’ or NBOMes to give them their scientific name are described as ‘ultra potent’ by the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

There’s a niche for the ambitious space holder.

Vibing as one

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Research claims voyagers prefer guides to trip with them in the shamanic tradition

Pablo Amargino, ‘‘The Sublimity of the Suminura’ via Dr Luna’s True Amaringos gallery

Down at your local psychedelic clinic, your therapist is certainly not tripping with you like an Amazon shaman would.

‘Therapists should not take any mind-altering substances before or during therapy sessions,’ says a 2021 review of the nascent Western sector. While it’s certainly not new for indegenous people to voyage alongside each other, historically the ceremony leader alone takes the medicine while the community receives mystical healing.

In Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s question and answer session following his Vital lecture on medical anthropology, one student who facilitates jungle ayahuasca ceremonies lamented this state of affairs in the West. “You drink when you assist,” she said, “There is no choice. And so much magic happens.”

Sober sitter or co-consumer? published May 2022 in Addiction Research and Theory concluded that heads out in the space did prefer their guide to be tripping too. Although maybe not as hard as they were. How much? One poster is quoted as recommending “around a quarter to one gramme of cubies [Cubensis mushrooms, the underground’s fungi of choice].” 

Why? The ‘benefits of improved communication and shared experience’ according to the report.

“The relationship is subject-to-subject, not object-to-object”

It went on, ’Psychedelic co-consumption was portrayed as an opportunity for bonding, connection and communication between co-consumers. This seemed related to a perceived mutual understanding of the ineffable that couldn’t be accessed without the influence of psychedelics.’ Given that a strong, open, trusting relationship between voyager and therapist is absolutely key according to modern-day experts wouldn’t a quarter gramme of Cubensis for the therapist contribute to the success of the therapy?

That’s not all. Normals hanging around bring the vibe right down.

‘Consuming psychedelics alongside sober people could increase anxiety,’ suggest researchers, ‘It was also suggested that sober carers could make psychedelic experiences more awkward. Other forum participants simply found being around sober people whilst experiencing the effects of psychedelics to be irritating.’

The Sober Sitter or Co-consumer? paper said recreational requirements for guides did align with many other elements of psychedelic therapy: including not directing the experience, first hand knowledge of the substance, unconditional acceptance of what comes up for the patient, and boundary-setting beforehand. The data also uncovered recommendations that a ‘sober sitter’ be used during difficult emotional times, when out and about… or taking 5-MEO DMT.

“Lived psychedelic experience represents knowing through identification, and transformation… the spirit of the jaguar”

How does the ceremony leader partaking – be they guide, therapist, sitter, shaman or space holder – contribute to a better experience? Dr Luna thinks it’s because “The relationship is subject to subject, not object to object.”

Being ‘on the same level’ is equivalent to a “relational epistemology” where there is “reciprocity” which in this case means a mutually endorsed understanding rather than overdue donations to the indigenous people.

By tripping together “magic happens” because therapist and patient are ‘being’ together rather than ‘doing therapy’. They share a bathtub of their own cosmic love, as opposed to nervously going through the motions set out in a top-down bureaucratic directive. “That is non-particpation, disenchantment,” says Dr Luna, “with objectivity, the world is not of my own making… I do not feel a sense of belonging to it. What I feel is a sickness of the soul.”

Relating instead to a sense of subject promotes agency and mindfulness. Here’s someone who knows about lived experience: ‘I am not a thing, a noun,’ wrote engineering genius Buckminster Fuller, ‘I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. Life is regenerative, and conformity meaningless.’ I pinched this contribution from a Vital school chum, in case they are reading.

“You drink when you assist at the ceremony, and so much magic happens”

Dr Luna says this is part of the ‘lived experience’ of animism. “Ancestral language is 70% verbs compared to 30% in English,” he adds by way of illustration, “the lived psychedelic experience represents knowing through identification, and transformation… the spirit of the jaguar.” Not simply referring to ‘your dried pig skins’ as militant tribesmen call books. 

Sure, the preference for ‘co-consumer’ guides comes from the psychedelic underground rather than clinical patients. Yet as the report points out in its intro, ‘In a similar way that indigenous knowledge about psychedelics can be utilised to inform psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,’ like the lecture from Dr Luna you’re reading about now, ‘we believe that Western people who use psychedelics outside of a clinical environment for healing purposes also have knowledge relevant to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.’ Like Dr David Luke said in his Vital lecture on transpersonal psychology, the underground can teach the medical sector “everything.”

Where are you from and what are you on?

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Therapists can meet anyone half way with a little universal love

Weirdcore, ‘Subconscious’

“Is this is this what love feels like?”

That’s what a trial subject in Dr Ben Sessa’s BIMA project using MDMA to treat alcohol use disorder said to him during a drug session.

What was his answer? “I thought, ‘Well… no, of course this isn't the noble, lofty form of love – it’s a transient artificial drug induced experience’.”

The Bristol, UK-based psychiatrist remembered his MAPS training met his patient halfway though.

“I thought to myself, ‘Hang on… she feels safe, warm and empathic. She feels held, contained. She’s in a trusting relationship with me.’ So I replied, ‘You know what? Yes. This is what love feels like,” he beams at Vital students in his triumphant lecture during our therapy-focussed module.

The rapport held: “That’s amazing,” replied the recovering alcoholic from behind her Awakn-branded blindfold, “My whole life. I've never felt this, I've only ever felt scared, I've only ever felt frightened and threatened. But now I know what love feels like. And I have a platform on which to build.”

‘Loved up’ is raver slang for the narcotic-induced tenderness and sensitivity MDMA generates by increasing the flow of bonding hormone oxytocin.

“Love will be the only religion, a religion of life for the children of the future”

That rush contributes to the healing process by giving PTSD sufferers a glance of what may be. “The positively felt mood from MDMA is very important indeed,” says Sessa.

Sigmund Freud wrote extensively about libido, ‘the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude... of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word… love.’

Opposite this positive, manifesting life energy that Freud dubbed eros though was thanatos – the ‘death drive’ towards addiction, aggression and rumination, derived from a desire to return to the simplicity of the womb. ‘The purpose of life is death’ wrote Freud in 1920. His flying monkey Jacques Lacan postulated that all other drives are ‘partial’ to the death drive. Freudians call it simply ‘the drive.’ 

Freud’s star pupil Wilhelm Reich was pro-science and anti-mystic. He was nonetheless appalled by this one-sided development. “Love will be the only religion, a religion of life for the children of the future,” Reich wrote in his diaries during 1942, “it will transform man in such a way that the questions of passport and race will never arise.”

Reich started well by coining the term ‘Sexual Revolution’ in 1948. But besmirched his reputation for rigour with the invention of implausible Orgone Generators, machines of various sizes and capacity to harness ‘orgasmic energy’ comparable to the eastern concept of chi.

“Compassion has a natural partner in forgiveness”

Beat generation authors JD Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer were all devotees. ‘Mailer kept a small collection of orgone accumulators in his barn in Connecticut; they were beautifully finished, and there was a big one that opened like an Easter egg’ writes Recih’s biographer Christopher Turner, ‘He climbed inside and closed the top.’

This all ended rather horribly with Reich dying in prison and his books burned by the authorities. We certainly haven’t heard the last of Reich; for a start celebs like the Kardashians have been catalysing an Orgone Generator revival for years. No, it’s not a trickster prank. You can buy Reich tat on Etsy.

The empathic compassion and awareness are part of this thing called love too. Reich’s predecessors in the field of bodywork are more careful to stress those elements in their own therapies. “Compassion has a natural partner in forgiveness,” says polyvagal theory icon Deb Dana, “awareness brings choice, the second element necessary for a regulated nervous system.”

Polyvagal theory, endorsed by Dr Sessa, considers not only overactive fight or flight responses but ‘freeze’ too, the stultifying effect occurring when neither fight not freeze is not an option, seen for example in domestic abuse situations. Trauma victims have ‘the handbrake and the accelerator on at the same time’ in polyvagal terms. “With choice it’s possible to be still or move, approach or avoid, connect or protect,” writes Deb Dana.

Forthcoming data reports from Awakn’ BIMA tests will examine compassion and empathy’s detailed role in the process. 

Psychedelic overground

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Rugby lads on ibogaine, reality stars in hyperreality and tarot cards swapped for toys. Turns out the revolution will be fun

Inevitably, models gather in St Tropez for a charity fundraiser hosted by Christian Angermeyer’s Aurora Institute

With celebs like Sharon Osborn extolling the virtues of ketamine therapy get ready for the neighbourhood popping their heads through the door of your clinic.

The psychedelic renaissance has flowed beyond the dinner party circuit on to the high street. Ketamine treatment is even more of a talking point than the toad thing. KAP got a shout out from UK TV’s Loose Women co-host Frankie Bridge (the striking one out of The Saturdays who had short hair) and Hello! mag went large.

Dr Leary’s orbiting urn would spin at an angle that defied conventional physics to see trite psychedelic lifestyle design clichés replaced by… trite lifestyle design clichés.

Sports stars have been hot on their daytime TV counterparts’ heels: gridiron megastar Aaron Rogers puts a late career surge down to ayahuasca and other football players extol psychedelic healing for concussion and stubborn injuries. Combat sports are beloved of thugs but played by gentlemen so being miles ahead doesn’t count.

Even the middle market are getting out there. Gen-X footwear designer Patrick Cox spoke about his new life as an Ibizan 5-MEO DMT facilitator to Hadley Freeman in The Guardian this summer. Ever intrepid, Freeman ‘smoked toad’ [sic] despite her editor’s express instructions.

A Vital study group chum undergoing ketamine therapy recently declared that sock puppets had been added to her clinic’s table of tripping props (with the spirit animal cards and crystals). She spent the session happily playing with them. 

Maybe this doesn’t sound ‘mystical’ enough to those of us with well-thumbed copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 

Chatting away to the guides during the medicine experience, or wanting to go outside, can be a distraction from the work you’re there to do apparently. After you’ve come down you could be disappointed you didn’t get any of that done. I don’t disagree that it could feel like a waste of time for all concerned.

“Wit is the ability to find hidden similarities linking two ideas which are contrasted with each other”

But on psychedelics ‘what comes up, comes up’ to use the platitudinous truism. TV’s Dr Bill Richards, the veteran John Hopkins’ researcher featured in Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind said laughter “May be what’s needed” in his own Vital lecture.

I rubbished Freudian psychoanalysis in issue #11 by ranting about how the only therapeutic system that’s been established as ‘fact’ for 100 years has poisoned our intellectual conversation and our mental healing.

Turns out Freud wrote about the importance of humour in 1905’s The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Before putting pen to paper he took the opportunity to discuss the subject with hilarious cards from his Viennese social whirl.  The many positive conclusions included, ‘Wit is the ability to… find hidden similarities… linking two ideas which in some way are contrasted with each other.’

Laughter is the yang of meditative, non-dual understanding’s yin. The unconscious plays a leading role both in devising clever quips and responding to them in real time, without conscious analysis. On top of healing relational trauma, laughter and play in adults are also ‘positively correlated’ with increased sociability, spontaneity, tension release, innovation, de-stressing, longevity, immunity, energy levels, teamwork and parasympathetic nervous system activation. 

“Whether I was crying or laughing, was not too important”

And never mind the cave paintings, because psychedelics gave us jokes. The 2021 research paper Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution says, ‘In particular, the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion.’ 

LSDExperience.com a compendium of the finest, trip writing includes this anonymous quote: “Whether I was crying or laughing was really not too important, except on the conventional level. The important point was that the tree of my emotions was being vigorously shaken and liberated of some withered leaves which had hung on too long.”

Spiritual emergencies, fearful reactions, and sudden life changes are likely to be of more concern for ketamine entrepreneurs and therapists than the number of mystical versus humorous experiences per week going down in their clinic. But not for nothing does the Bible call humour ‘the best medicine.’ It could be comparable to spirituality, or philosophy for coming to terms with complex and contrasting themes.

At dinner, or on the high street.

It’s legislators who seem out on the fringes now.