The participants of the ceremony sit in a round. The curandero chants as every breath the jungle takes is magnified thousand-fold. We swallow the tea in halved coconut shells. Our bodies rebel against the brew.

Disorientation. Regurgitation. Dehydration.

We were promised peace and light, but right now only one word describes this dark forest we had strayed into. This is HELL.

The medicine of sacred visions, Ayahuasca is scientifically speaking a psychoactive aqueous solution prepared from Amazonian Vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) mixed with the leaves of dimethyltryptamine-containing species of shrubs Chakruna (Psychotria viridis).

Dimelthyltryptamine or DMT is a very strong psychedelic drug, found not only in plants, but also in trace amounts in our bodies. Its function is undetermined in the human system – unless you ask a shaman.

The word ayahuasca is the combination of Quechuan Indian words Aya and Huasca.

First one means “spirit,” “ancestor” or “dead person” (That’s cool in it’s own right – the actually think of those things as trinity) and the latter “vine”. Common translation is “vine of the soul” or “vine of the dead”.

Small but growing number of people around the world believe that Ayahuasca is a sort of Rosetta Stone of medicine, capable of conquering diseases western science has labeled incurable, such as cancer and HIV. While the shamans remain silent about the secrets of the vine and its true capabilities, Ayahuasca has been known to ease the suffering of people with depression and drug addictions. Its most important aspect seems to be the ability to give patients psychological therapy.

Ayahuasca ceremony is the center of the vine healing. In it you must surrender yourself completely to the divine, admitting your flaws, fears, guilt and culpabilities. Only then you can truly explore the world inside you and the world surrounding you.

The reason to drink the brew is to reach contact with ancestors and free the soul.

Our vegetalista, Don Francisco is over 90 years old. He says he can see into the future, travel in astral form, remove and cast spells.

According to this medicine man, nausea is not just our body’s reaction to the challenge we are putting our consciousness through. He calls this the purga, the cleaning the body from both physical and spiritual waste. Vine is a benevolent presence that can guide you through difficult experiences, but pushing the limits of perception does come with physical price, involving some serious vomiting, dry heaving and projectile diarrhea.

Scientifically speaking it’s just an altered state of mind, for some with strong feelings of paranoia and phobias. According to shamans this terror is something a person undergoing the ritual must overcome in order to attain knowledge and healing. Peace and light are on the other side of horror and darkness.

Filming the Ayahuasca ceremony is a risky proposition in more ways than one. There’s always the chance of a bad trip and the fear your losing your mind for good from the influence of spirit vine. Strangely enough, the closer the actual event came, we felt more and more secure in giving ourselves completely in care of Don Francisco.

Then there’s the professional angle: for the outsider looking in, the initiate undergoing the ceremony is stranded in the world of his own, mostly alternating between extreme nausea and complete detachment from his surroundings. By verbalizing the experience best we could, recounting each step of the trip and combining it with the physical reactions of our bodies was the only authentic way to externalize the experience. We didn’t want to resort to the crutch of cheesy special effects that could never make justice to what went on inside our heads anyway.

The actual impact of the Ayahuasca tea was shockingly strong. When we took it, within 20 minutes my perception was completely altered and I started hallucinating. Weird visitors replaced the darkness of ceremonial hut.

Some see them as snakes, some talk about DNA strands. Whatever they are, when under the influence of the brew, there is no doubt in your mind about the realness of these things. They swirl, writhe and wrap themselves around you, spewing a rollercoaster of revelations you can’t escape from.

Dredging the subconscious, the vine releases millions of visions that envelope you, triggering millions of ideas. Incredibly, you have access to them all. Ayahusca shows you the capacity of mind.

Majority of those visions were both hellish and unexplainable or memories buried so deep into the lower layers of subconscious, we had forgotten about forgetting them. Some of them were foreknowledge.

The time loses meaning. It stretches. Minutes become years.

We were facing our fears and looking them right in the eyes. And only then, it was possible to see somewhere far, far ahead where a beacon of light started to shine and guide my way out of the storm of visions…

R & T

Ayahuasca is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) and as such, can have interactions and contraindications with certain foods and medications. There is no overdose level with Ayahuasca. Increasing the Vine increases the richness and depth and transformative power of the experience.

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v06n1/06158mao.html

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/maois/maois_info2.shtml

http://ayahuasca.tribe.net/thread/dab0ec6d-5d2d-42e2-bc81-25cbf92570f2