2.15 The use of ayahuasca

The Sacred Voyage: a holotropic perspective on mental health

The role ayahuasca has to play in all this is not unambiguous. Ayahuasca is one of life’s great mysteries. Earlier publications on the subject have all focused on mental or religious experiences. This report aims to emphasize the effects ayahuasca may have on the soma. One of our findings in working with ayahuasca is that when clients focus their loving attention on the somatic self, ayahuasca dramatically enhances the results clients achieve in thawing frozen energies.

It seems as though, through the loving kindness and the right intention of the client, ayahuasca allows itself to be guided to those areas where energies have become frozen as a result of suffered trauma. Ayahuasca seems to work towards restoring universal harmony and -in conjunction with the client’s focused loving kindness- works on the thawing of energies and on the transformation process. Many of our clients report experiencing this and describe the process of thawing in great detail. It is worth noting, though, that ayahuasca works so remarkably, that it can hardly be caught in words. What it seems to do, is accelerate the thawing of traumatized energy, while, simultaneously, representing the associated memories, images, visions, feelings, thoughts and emotions. It shows us the complete picture, the reality in which soma and psyche meet.

To toy with Western standards of credibility even further, ayahuasca awakens the Inner Voice, which has been referred to by mystics for centuries.

Ayahuasca is classified as an entheogenous brew, entheogenous meaning ‘revealing the God within’. The word for therapy is derived from the Greek therapeia, which was originally used in the meaning of ‘tending to the Gods’. From this perspective, using ayahuasca in a therapeutic setting would be both to stir the deity within and to serve this divine being. It thaws the frozen plains of the soul, awakening one’s own essence, which may be seen as divine. It stirs the Inner Voice, that may guide us through life; a voice that goes unheard by so many of us, because it merely whispers and is lost in the busy confusion of day-to-day life.

Shaman Don Juanito:
‘“Because money has become the focus of life in your country, many are not following the path that will make them happy. Rebekita, we all have a guiding voice within that leads us through life. These guiding voices are our dreams, messages, and visions. The need to make money stops people from following their dreams. Then people get sick.”

“Don Juanito, are you saying that illness is directly related to not listening to our guiding voice?” I replied excitedly.

“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Disease is only a lack of balance in the body. Disease comes when a person fails to listen to their calling.”’

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