Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s got a plan to mix shamanic ceremony with Western medicine

What can the Western model take – sorry, learn – from a tradition of psychedelic medicine that’s many millennia on from our own?

After all our boffins recently confirmed that the mystic elements of a psychedelic experience can be especially restorative, although that aspect of healthcare was dismissed as ‘miracle work’ centuries ago. Despite their shared basis of a healing process using psychoactive plants, what we understand as psychedelic therapy is still very different to a traditional shamanic ceremony.

That doesn’t stop regular guys like Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rogers crediting ayahuasca for the two seasons in a row he just won the American football team’s ‘most valuable player’ award, and telling sports reporters ‘The greatest gift I can give my teammates, in my opinion, is to be able to show up and to be someone who can model unconditional love to them’ in the pages of USA Today. Those unable to travel can give virtual reality shamanic ayahuasca a try.

Dr Luis Eduardo Luna is considered one of the foremost experts in the Amazonian shamanic custom. In his Vital lecture closing the course’s therapy-themed module, he rattled off a bluet-point list of what western therapy can do to make it as effective as its Amerindian inspiration. And as popular – given the choice it’s difficult to opt for a K-clinic treatment room on the high street over Dr Luna’s Wasiwaska retreat. Even halfway houses like luxury ayahuasca resort Rythmia or the growing number of on-trend local circles offer much more of that all-important mystical allure.

“I think the doctors would be happy, as they participate in this separation, this depression”

Dr Luna believes that group therapy over a period of days with eight to ten participants: “Intensive collective retreats are potentially more efficient and less expensive than individual treatments at medical institutions,” says Dr Luna demonstrating that he’s meeting the Western mindset halfway.

Moreover, in a group session over several days a patient’s “Sense of community is created too” says Dr Luna. He also suggests the presence of a medical doctor, “Nearby in case help is needed, but not as part of the ceremonial aspect.” 

From then on Dr Luna’s tips on how western psychedelic therapists can learn from the ancient ways diverge from our current model. His number one tip is for the therapist to trip too, like a traditional shaman does. “The therapist will go part of the route of taking the medicine him or herself, ready to give assistance if needed,” he says, “Only persons thoroughly familiar with modify the state of consciousness can understand and therefore assist persons on the going the experiences. Besides the therapist’s theoretical knowledge, he or she needs to have first hand experience in training with at least one or several sacred plants, fungi or other substances.”

Which may put the puma amongst the guinea pigs, so to speak. “Ideally a well-trained indigenous practitioner, or [facilitators] trained within indigenous communities would be present too.” You can read more about the controversial trend of ‘co-sitting’ over in this issue’s Space Holding section.

“Illnesses of civilisation are often related to a state of separation from the natural world”

Dr Luna also frowns on western use of isolated chemicals instead of the whole plant or fungus they’re derived from and we’ll go further into that in this issue’s Medical section. He’s also got some superb suggestions for your retreat centre’s design based on his experiences tending the exquisite gardens at his Wasiwaska Rereat Centre in Florencia, Brazil that I detail in this week’s Integration slot.

Here’s Dr Luna’s other suggestions specifically relevant to therapy. 

Echoing the styles of pioneering MDMA therapists Dr Ben Sessa and The Mithoefers, Dr Luna urges level communication between therapist and patient where possible. “There are no shared myths,” he says, “despite a complex socio-economic provenance.” The codified language used instead is psychology, “which the patient has little knowledge of” and is very unlikely to lead the conversation in. Read Dr Ben Sessa’s own tips for negotiating the transcendental with alcoholics at his Awakn clinic in Bristol in Vital Student Zine issue #14.  

Preparation for both therapists and patients should take the form of traditional dieta, “Minimising the use of salt, sugar or fat and consumption of alcohol. The food should be produced on site as much as possible so participants have direct access to the plants.” Also verboten, or kept to essential use only, is the use of personal electronic devices and social media.

“Pharmacology does not take into account social or ecological concerns”

Furthermore Western healers could benefit their own knowledge and reciprocate by establishing “Transnational networks involving conservation in educational ecological projects, involving whenever possible traditional societies, cross cultural recognition and integration of knowledge derived from indigenous sources.”

Instead of chugging beer at the bar and doom scrolling during downtime on retreat, patients can enjoy face to face interaction, educational lectures and plentiful nature worship, “spending time in silence with the forest or gardens encircling the body, feeling the presence of the nonhuman persons.”

Dr Luna expands: “Illnesses of civilisation are often related to a state of separation from the natural world. We would be learning about the habitat, disease tuition, cultivation, preparation, and cultural uses of sacred plants and fungi by traditional societies.” Our pharmacological model “Does not take into account social or ecological concerns,” he adds, instead putting emphasis on legal, economic, bureaucratic and moral factors, presented for the benefit of the patient when they are only really in place to protect and feed the managerial machine.

Shamanic healing views discomfort very differently, considering it part of a restitution cycle. Affliction is something we consider anathema to medical treatment, and life outside hospital too. But it is the body exhuming disease that causes the unpleasant symptoms of illness, not the malaise itself. The close monitoring western psychedelic therapy adheres to may consider ‘disturbing’ outbursts – somatic, verbal, or ‘humorous’ in either the amusing or purgatorial sense – to be unacceptable in a treatment situation. Clinical staff and patients without the knowledge of their importance may not feel able to embrace the process, and may even consider encouragement of it to be inappropriate and even abusive. 

A combined model of Western and Amerindian spiritual healing seems like a dream for now. Albeit a very worthwhile one that’s being mirrored to an extent in ‘underground’ ceremonies. Dr Luna though is optimistic for his vision being taken on board by the medical establishment: “I think the doctors would be more happy, as they participate in this separation, this depression.”