A New Jersey couple's experience
with ayahuasca, the mind-expanding, sacred medicine of the Peruvian
rainforest
Dancing with Death in the
Amazon Jungle
by Robert Scheer
For Jason Martin and
Jyoti Chrystal, the path of self-discovery is an Amazon jungle trail
in Peru. This New Jersey couple has made several excursions with
Miguel Kavlin. and Sacha Runa Productions to the rainforest camp of
Don Agustin Rivas Vazques, a shaman who leads them in ceremonies
using the sacred Amazon “death vine," ayahuasca.
Agustin is the ayahuascaro described by Alberto Villoldo, in
the book Island of the Sun, as an old friend whose “kindness
and charity have become bywords in Pucallpa, where he practices his
shamanic art with a skill and precision that has made him the most
important and respected healer of the town.” Agustin now shares his
knowledge from a jungle camp near the village of Tamshiyacu,
up-river from Iquitos, Peru, during two-week and three-week sessions
organized by Miguel.
Jason and Jyoti met Miguel and the rest of their group of eight in
Miami, before boarding a direct flight to Iquitos. They arrived in
the evening and stayed overnight at a hotel Miguel had booked. The
next morning, they met Agustin at the river for a three-hour ride in
his open boat up the Amazon to his village. Natives from the village
helped carry luggage and supplies on a two-hour trek into the jungle
to Agustin’s camp, where they arrived in mid-afternoon. The camp,
called Yushin Taita, Father Spirit-Owner of the Jungle, is
rustic but comfortable, with accommodation in thatched-roof houses
on stilts. The group stayed here for two nights, participating in
preparatory rituals, before moving to Agustin’s second camp, which
is located even deeper into the jungle.
The
first ritual used ojé, a white, latex-based cleansing
medicine. Over several hours, they slowly sipped ojé, chased
down with about five litres of water to keep the caustic purgative
from burning their digestive tract. Jason says, “Dr. Ojé cleared
and opened our internal organs in order to prepare to receive the
ayahuasca in the ceremonies to follow.”
Later that afternoon the participants spread themselves with juice
from a plant called huito. The liquid is transparent when
they put it on their bodies, but the next morning, when they woke
up, their skin had turned a deep indigo blue. “The effect it has on
your consciousness is quite profound,” Jyoti said. “It puts us right
in the primitive mind, which is a state of preparation to receive
the medicine.”
Everyone’s diet was closely restricted to only very simple foods.
“We eat only rice or barley, and fish if it’s available,” Jason
said. “We were lucky and it was available when we were there. And
plantain and hominy. That’s it, for three meals a day, except we
only have breakfast and then we fast all the rest of the day on the
days when we’re going to be doing the medicine.” Jason added that
the diet “has an extraordinary effect on the consciousness to
fine-tune the body-mind connection. It’s a totally bland diet, with
no salt or spices.
On
the morning of the third day, with their skin dyed blue and their
digestive systems cleansed by ojé, the group made another
hike, to Agustin’s inner camp, two hours deeper into the jungle,
where their work with the medicine would begin.
 This
was not the first ayahuasca experience for Jyoti and Jason. They
have been working with Agustin for ten years. Jyoti was glad there
were only eight people in this session. She feels a larger group is
less cohesive, less intimate. She and Jason, at 53 and 60, were the
oldest people in their group, which also included a young warehouse
worker from Detroit, a woman in her mid 30s who was formerly a Navy
officer, a musician from California was about 40 and a businessman
from Canada who was undergoing his mid-life crisis. Everyone who
goes in these groups with Miguel is not a serious seeker of native
wisdom. Some are simply curious about the Amazon jungle and, for
them, taking ayahuasca is not the most important part of the
experience. Besides Jyoti and Jason, only one other member of their
group had previously taken the medicine.
“Ayahuasca tastes awful,” Jason said. “It’s probably worse than
anything you’ve ever tasted before in your life.” At the first
ceremony, Agustin gave them a strong amount. It was about 30 to 40
minutes before it began to take effect. “Usually the first part is
very visual and hallucinogenic,” Jason said, “but each experience
with ayahuasca is different.”
Not
only is it different from person to person, but also each experience
an individual has is different. “That is the paradoxical mystery
that calls people back,” Jyoti said. “You will never, in taking it
hundreds of times, have an experience that’s even similar to a
previous experience with it. For some people it can be an extremely
physical experience that’s harsh on the body. It symbolizes life in
this way, because life can be harsh. If we learn to work with the
harshness of the medicine, it can help us deal with the harshness of
life.”
Before their first ayahuasca session, the group is told very little
about what to expect, because the more people are prepared, the more
their experience becomes pre-programmed and un-natural. Instead of
trying to influence the experience, Agustin and Miguel believe in
leaving the spirit of the medicine free to do whatever work may be
needed. Nevertheless, Agustin performs an elaborate ceremony
whenever the medicine is used. Jyoti says, “Don Agustin, in his role
of ayahuascaro, is a master of shamanic ceremony, and he uses
traditional icaros, songs that are given to him directly from
the spirit of the medicine. He sings the songs during the ceremony
to open the participants’ consciousness. They’re extraordinary,
there’s nothing else like them in the world. He also uses different
musical instruments which help the participants go deeper into the
experience. His musical talent comes from riding the wave of the
medicine in the ceremony, it’s quite amazing, with drumming and soul
singing as well.”
 Ayahuasca
ceremonies are done every other day for ten days. They start after
darkness has set in, somewhere around 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. Each
“journey” lasts from four to six hours. The next morning there is no
ayahuasca hangover. “It’s such a healing and cleansing thing on a
physical level,” Jason said, “that the next day you feel wonderfully
renewed and energetic, although you may be tired because you didn’t
get much sleep.”
Following each ceremony, after everyone has had a chance to get some
rest, Miguel provides an opportunity for the group to share their
experiences with the medicine. It’s done formally, in a circle,
using a talking stick. Agustin recommends that they refrain from
talking about their experiences until this time. “Don Agustin offers
insights and guidance on the experience, which is very helpful,”
Jyoti says.
One
event common to many ayahuasca sessions is a sensation Jyoti
described as The ‘Voice. “Often what is classically called The Voice
will come through in the experience. It’s the Divine Voice, the
Higher Voice. Different people have different names for it, but it’s
a very clear, true, authentic voice that gives you either insight or
information or knowledge about yourself, your life’s challenges or
your life history in a very personal way. It’s very direct and very
personal. You know that The Voice is meant for you, as opposed to
the delusionary voice or the seductive voice.”
Jyoti says an important benefit she has gained from ayahuasca is
“the release of a pattern of criticism and a really deeply ingrained
defensive pattern coming out of what I had assumed was my critical
nature. The medicine has taught me it was really a defensive posture
in my psyche that allowed me to stay separate from other people,
coming from my fear of intimacy. The medicine very clearly, over the
years, has discharged that and help me see that. something happened
in a ceremony in which my mind started to criticize, and then
instantly the medicine showed me that that was not me, that that was
the pattern that I had learned and had taken on but was not me. It
showed me how close to my nature that pattern had become, and that I
got an opportunity that drove me deep in my heart I started crying
when I realized how sabotaging that pattern was.”
Jason offered, “Going down and doing a series of sessions really put
me into a place where I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d just done one,
and then done another a few months later, etc. There’s something
about doing them in the space of eleven days that really makes a
huge difference. For me it was coming to an understanding that I
have a lot of choice in the direction that the journey goes. In
previous sessions the medicine would just take me over and leave me
really exhausted and depleted. In the course of the five sessions we
did down there, I learned how to maintain the integrity of my own
energy field with the medicine, and to be able to choose what my
experience might be, rather than having the medicine decide
everything. The medicine can choose to be very gentle and even
blissful, or it can take you into a hellish experience. Before I had
never been able to have any kind of say in that at all. This time I
could have a pretty conclusive choice that I could make myself. That
is a lesson I could transfer directly into my life, so that I can
live that way now.”
Experiences with ayahuasca can sometimes be so severe that users may
feel they are witnessing their own death. Jason and Joti said “Every
time one ingests it, one is faced with the actual death of certain
aspects of the persona and beliefs about oneself. Both of us feel
strongly that the conditioned ego, the ego forged on fear, guilt and
shame, must go!”
The
word ayahuasca is Quechua for vine of the dead or vine of the soul.
“You can have some difficult, harsh, horrendous experiences in an
ayahuasca ceremony,” Jyoti said, “but you always come out of them.
One of her recent experiences included an encounter with a jaguar
spirit. “At one point during one of the ceremonies I was confronted
with a jaguar. In the Amazonian mythology, the jaguar is a
traditional carrier of power. As this jaguar stood right in front
of me, I had the experience of being very calm and receptive,
knowing what it was presenting to me, knowing that I had a choice in
how I wanted to relate to this jaguar. I just sat still and opened
my heart and this jaguar came and licked my body all over. In that
moment it was a very - my heart was happy and strong and yet I did
have tears of gratitude. It was quite a beautiful moment. This
jaguar was just licking my body all over from head to toe. Many
years ago when I first started the medicine, that would have been
very scary for me. Traditionally, in shamanic terms, when a power
animal comes to you and you open to it, even if it devours you,
that’s a really healthy thing in terms of absorbing that energy.”
Jyoti revealed that her first ayahuasca experience, ten years ago,
helped her recover from a serious health problem. “At that time I
was bulimic and had been for many years,” she said. “After a couple
of hours into my very first ceremony, when I was throwing up, I
realized that I was throwing up the pattern of bulimia, and that
healed me. That was extraordinary, vomiting my guts out in the
middle of the Amazon jungle, when my head had literally been down a
toilet bowl for the past fifteen years! I suddenly had an incredible
flood of realization that I was vomiting out the pattern itself.
Within approximately eleven months, I was healed of bulimia, after
years and years of struggle.”
Both Jason and Jyoti wanted to emphasize that the benefits of an
ayahuasca ceremony are ongoing. “It’s not over the next day, but it
keeps working through your body on cellular level as long as it
needs to,” Jyoti said. “And you don’t know when that may be. That’s
between you and the universe.”
Jason believes that Agustin and the medicine have given him insights
into his life and his relation with himself that would not have been
obtainable through any other means. He said, “I could have been in
therapy for a thousand years and I wouldn’t have gone one-tenth of
the distance I’ve gotten with this work. It’s a way of really
knowing yourself and testing yourself. It’s not finished. I plan to
continue working with the medicine. When you do this work you’re
really putting all the cards on the table. You can’t hide from the
medicine. You can’t even run from the medicine. If you come there
with a lot of ego or phoniness or self-aggrandizement, the medicine
will search it out, and you’re asking for a very rough time.”
Jyoti describes Don Agustin as a very wise and giving person. “He
says himself, he says ‘I don’t have very much education in the
formal sense and ayahuasca has been my university.’ It’s a real
teacher, with absolutely invaluable knowledge.” His knowledge is not
reserved for western tourists, either. Local people participated in
the ceremonies, taking ayahuasca along with Miguel’s group. “For
them it’s a sacrament,” Jyoti said. “They come to learn. They take
it to learn as we do, to become more fully our authentic selves. To
grow, to progress, to let go of stuff. I’m not aware of any better
way to do that. If you want really rapid growth then I don’t know
how you could do better than to do this.” Jyoti added that ayahuasca
is even given, in minute quantities, to newborn infants within the
local community. “It’s my understanding that when a child is born in
that tradition, a little bit of ayahuasca is dabbed on a finger and
put in the baby’s mouth at the age of maybe one or two months. It’s
very healing, not just in a psychological or spiritual sense but
it’s also physically very healing. In the Amazon it’s not regarded
as something dangerous, but a divine gift from the universe, which
it is.”
After the last session with the medicine, one final ceremony is used
to break their fast. This is done at sunrise on the last day, and it
involves eating salt, lime juice and an extraordinarily hot chili
pepper, after which they immediately jump into the water. Shortly
after that they have a full breakfast with lots of fresh fruit.
After having eaten only bland food for more than a week, the flavors
seem magnified to nearly orgasmic proportions.
Having participated in other Amazon ayahuasca groups besides
Miguel’s has given Jason a deep appreciation for the tour run by
Sacha Runa Productions. “I have complete trust in Miguel.” Jason
said. “He’s a very sincere and genuine person who’s really trying to
accomplish important, beneficial effects for people and for the
planet. He lets people have their own experience. He never
infringes his opinions or his advice, which is important in this
kind of work. He’s very respectful and unintrusive. It’s worthwhile,
as much as you can, to do your homework, and find out in advance who
you’re going to be sharing this important aspect of your life with.
It’s like making sure you’ll trust the person who’s leading you up
Mount Everest. You want to know they know what they’re doing, and
you want that person to be genuine, caring and capable. Miguel is
all of those things and more.
Miguel has produced a 60-minute video about Don Agustin Rivas
Vazques and the ayahuasca experience, Spirits of the Rainforest
(reviewed in the October/November, 1997
Power Trips.) In it Agustin says “ayahuasca has taught me
to have respect for life and for others. I’ve always thought that
world leaders should try this ayahuasca medicine because it will
help change their thoughts and feelings, and will help them create
peace in the world. I recommend it so that their summit meetings
then, will result in positive agreements. Not to conduct wars or
build atomic weapons to destroy the Earth. There are other ways of
solving humanity’s problems. Only shamanism can save us.”
Jyoti Chrystal and Jason Martin,
Ph.D. operate Starseed, an education center for yoga, shamanism and
meditation. You may write to them at Starseed, 211 Glenridge Ave.,
Montclair, NJ, 07042 or email:
info2@starseedyoga.com.
Their website is
www.Starseedyoga.com.
Miguel A. Kavlin's website is
http://www.sacharuna.com.
Robert Scheer is a freelance travel writer. Read
Robert Scheer's
blog.
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