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I remember the first time someone told me that my depression or anxiety might not be a broken brain chemistry.
That it might be a very unfinished story, One that my body and mind had been trying to tell me for years, and also one that I had spent years trying to silence.
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And now there is some data to back this up.
And this is not from a small study.
We are talking 11,912 people across 50 countries, human beings who carried real clinical diagnosis of depression and anxiety, and people who have tried medication, done therapy, walk the treadmill and then stepped off it and drank an ancient Amazonian plant medicine called ayahuasca.
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And what happened to them is what we're here to talk about today.
Because this research isn't just pointing toward a new treatment for anxiety and depression, it is pointing towards a completely new understanding of what healing actually is, of why we suffer, and actually what it takes to be free.
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So let's dive in.
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If you ever walk through severe anxiety or depression or watch someone you love navigate the space, you know the exhaustion of the traditional treatment cycle.
You start medication, maybe you have to wait six weeks and you measure the side effects against the benefits.
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Maybe you try another dose, you add a therapy, and you keep walking on this treadmill hoping that eventually the chemistry in your brain will mathematically balance itself out.
It's a long journey, and for a lot of people, they are desperately hoping for something different.
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Today we're looking at data from thousands of people who stepped completely off that treadmill.
And what they found on the other side invites us all into a very important conversation about modern medicine and healing.
Because our modern psychiatric framework essentially asks patients to be patient, to sit still while they attempt to chemically reengineer the brain into a more functional state.
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And for a lot of people, this genuinely helps.
It saves so many lives.
And if you are severely depressed and anxious, these medicines, they exist for a reason and they are important to honor because there is no need to suffer endlessly.
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And there are periods in our lives where it might be the most humane thing that we can give ourselves proper psychiatric care.
But for many others, it just doesn't reach the root of the issue.
And those people are who this data is really about.
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And there is a link to the full scientific report in the show notes.
The research we're diving into today is called the Ayahuasca use and reported Effects on Depression and Anxiety symptoms, an international cross-sectional study of 11,912 consumers.
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It's an isolated study drawn from the larger global ayahuasca project, the GAP Study, and it was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
I did a full episode on another element of this study before in episode 2, What happens after Ayahuasca inside the world's largest integration study, which focused more specifically on the integration process of the ceremony.
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So if you haven't listened to that one yet, it's a great companion for today's episode.
Now we're diving into the study of almost 12,000 participants from over 50 countries.
This is the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted around ayahuasca, and historically, psychedelic research has been limited, and usually by tiny sample sizes, clinical trials with maybe 20 or 30 people in a highly controlled, carefully screened group.
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And after the crackdown of the 1970s psychedelic movement, we have had almost no scientific research for decades.
But now we're moving into this new psychedelic renaissance, and studies like these are finally giving us real data to work with.
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The GAP study looked at people using ayahuasca across 3 distinct real world settings.
Traditional indigenous ceremonies in the Amazon, religious churches in South America like the Santodaimi where ayahuasca is a sacrament, and western neo shamanic retreat centers all at the same time in the same study.
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And from that group of almost 12,000 participants, the researchers in this study zeroed in on 2 very specific subgroups, 15171 people who had been diagnosed with depression disorder at the time of their ayahuasca experience, and 1125 people with a diagnosis for anxiety disorder.
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And here is what happened to them after drinking ayahuasca.
Of the 1571 people with depression, 78% reported that their symptoms were either very much improved or completely resolved.
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Let's break that down. 46% of them said their depression was very much improved and 32 percent, nearly one in three people said their depression was completely resolved.
Like Finito.
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For the 1125 people with anxiety, 70% reported significant improvement and 54% said very much improved and 16% said during side it was completely resolved.
The researchers themselves concluded in the study, and I'm quoting this directly from the paper here, that drinkers of ayahuasca in naturalistic settings perceived remarkable benefits for their effective symptoms and that there is no obvious evidence of negative mental health effects associated with long term consumption.
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And he also pointed to that additional randomized control trial evidence is required to establish the potency of ayahuasca in affective disorders.
So this really shows remarkable benefits from the peer reviewed journal.
I remember growing up next to a mental hospital because my mom and my dad, they used to work there.
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And in all of those years, I never heard anyone ever talk about curing any patients.
It was always about managing symptoms, keeping people safe and stable and helping them function well so that they can get through the day or the week.
And this might be what standard psychiatric care offers.
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Doctors will talk about remission, about symptom management, about helping people reach a functional baseline, which is important to keep them safe and to keep the community around them safe.
But a complete resolution, meaning suffering just ended.
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I think it's considered almost impossible to claim.
So when we look at numbers like this in self reported data, which this study is based on, our first instinct is to have some discernment.
And that's also what the researcher in this study did.
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So before any of us books a flight to Peru, Colombia and travels to the closest ayahuasca retreat, let's hold these numbers up with excitement and also discernment because this study is not a prescription, it's not a guarantee.
And anxiety and depression are not just chemical, they are cultural, societal, ancestral, behavioral, relational, structural.
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And we will get back to all of that throughout the episode.
And before we dive deeper into this data, I also want to give you a way to hold everything that we're about to dive into, a way to feel it and not just to understand it.
Imagine your mental, emotional, and spiritual life as a house.
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You were born into this house, and the foundation of this house stands on ancestral structures, genetic, behavioral, cultural.
Much of this foundation you will never even see because it's buried into the ground beneath you.
So you didn't choose it, you inherited it, and you've been living in this house your whole life.
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And for many people, this house works like a charm.
But for some of us, there is just something that feels off in this house.
Like a shitty smell that is coming from somewhere, but you can't locate it.
You can't really name it.
It's just there, almost like a low hum of anxiety sitting somewhere in the chest or in the stomach or in the back of your throat.
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This persistent unease that follows you from room to room regardless of what you do to address it.
So what do you do?
Well, you clean the house, you get some new furniture, you do some yoga, you drink the green smoothies.
Maybe you go to therapy.
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You read all the books.
And sometimes it helps.
Sometimes it helps to get out of the house to distract yourself, because then you don't sense the smell as much.
And sometimes the house generally looks better, functions better, but the smell is still there.
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Because the problem with anxiety is that that smell is usually coming from the pipes in the basement.
And the basement doors for many of us has been closed for a very long time.
And for me, this is how anxiety sometimes work.
It's not a malfunction, it's a signal.
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It's the body's way of telling you that something undigested is stored somewhere beneath the surface, like a clogged pipes where old shit is stored.
An emotion that was never fully possessed.
An experience that arrived but was never allowed to complete its journey.
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And instead it got pushed down into the walls, into the subconscious, into the nervous system.
Because at that time, fully feeling it wasn't safe, or wasn't possible, or wasn't simply allowed.
So it sits there in the basement, quietly generating the smell.
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And since we can't really locate where it's coming from, we get obsessive about changing the furniture, changing ourselves, adding new things to the house, buying a new perfume, hoping something on the surface will finally make the smell go away.
And then when life really gets overwhelming, suddenly the basement floods and all of that old unprocessed material rises up through the basement and floods your home all at once.
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The anxiety spills into the chest, the panic in the body to dread in the stomach, and suddenly it's everywhere and you don't know why.
And then we freak out because now every time we feel a scary emotion, it's like we're standing there in front of the toilet trying to flush it, terrified it will trigger another flood, terrified our pipes won't be able to take the shit for releasing.
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So suddenly.
We don't just have anxiety, we have anxiety about the anxiety.
And for anyone who knows how that feels, it is exhausting.
And this is when modern somatic science is beginning to confirm that emotions are not just psychological events.
They are physiological ones.
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They live in the body and what we don't feel, we store or we don't digest emotionally gets lodged in the nervous system, in the muscles, in the gut, because the body keeps the score and the basement accumulates what the conscious mind refuses to process.
Now I use the word shit, and I know it doesn't sound very spiritual or very aligned with a scientific report, but I use this word intentionally because my first Iowasquero, who was Darwin, I called him the shit guru because he would constantly tell us to release your shit.
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Because the stuff we most don't want to feel often carries the nutrients we need to grow.
It's like the fertilizer and when we finally release it, and with ayahuasca, usually that's true vomiting or through the South, the flower starts popping up very naturally in our life and it stops smelling.
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It turns into a soil for the soul instead of suffocation or block pipes, and what was buried becomes what we can grow from.
Now depression, I want to give a different example because depression can be more structural.
If anxiety is the smell from the basement and the emotions that we're scared of feeling that is stuck in the pipes, then depression is what happens when the house itself starts building walls to protect itself from pain, from loss, from overwhelm, from the unbearable weight of the things that were simply too much to feel.
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The psyche begins constructing barriers, extra walls, additional roofs, layer upon layer of insulation between our inner world and the other one, between the self and other people, between the hard and full expression.
And these walls, they work.
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That's the important thing to understand.
They were never the enemy.
They were a brilliant, loyal act of self preservation.
And maybe they were built by a child or a teenager or a younger version of you who needed that protection and had no other tools available.
But inside those walls, between the layers of protection built over years and decades, our stored memories, our beliefs about ourself.
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Maybe they believe that we are not wordy, not lovable, not enough.
All the stories and all the meanings that formed in the dark.
Conclusions that we have drawn in pain and never resisted, in identities constructed for survival and never updated.
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And the walls kept the danger out, but they also kept the light out.
They also kept the oxygen out.
And over time the house becomes harder to move, harder to breathe, and harder to let anyone else in.
So we clean the kitchen and feel a brief relief, only to find a messy again two hours later because what's actually needed is a deeper structural cleanse to release some of the armor so that love can be felt by us on the inside and received from the outside.
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Depression for me feels like suppressed love.
A fortress still to protect our loving, sacred and innocent heart.
A home on the inside that got cold because the heart is desperately wanting to feel its own love.
I remember one of the indigenous shamans said to me, when we come to ayahuasca, it is like our heart is an artichoke.
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And when we come to work with this monster plant, she helps us remove layer by layer, the hard Shields that are around the flower so we can open up again, receive our own love, receive the sun, receive life again without the armor.
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And this is where ayahuasca enters the picture.
Because what the research suggests and what 11,912 people's experience point towards is that this medicine does something no antidepressant, no matter how refined, has been able to do on its own.
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Ayahuasca helps U.S.
Open up the basement door.
She helps us take down the unnecessary armor.
And scientifically, she does that by creating a profound neurological openness with deep receptivity so that the psyche is finally able to go down into the basement to look at what has been stored and to feel what has never been fully felt, to complete the emotional digestion that was interrupted years or decades ago.
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And spiritually, our grandmother also knows exactly where to take us first.
She knows where we will benefit the most.
She helps us see the lies and the meanings that we made about ourselves, and she helps us feel the emotions that we have been too scared of feeling.
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And in this deeper spiritual awakening, we can release all of this old shit.
And in its place arrives something completely different.
Usually we go into a transcended state of unity and love and self love or humility and openness.
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A clean slate where we can write a new meaning to ourself and our life that are updated, expansive and true.
And for many, the antidepressant is more like a painkiller.
It makes the smell more bearable so you can function.
And for many people it is life saving.
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And I want to say that clearly.
But on its own, without deep therapeutic intervention, it might not be able to take anyone into the basement to release what has been stored.
And ayahuasca, according to this data, hands you a torch and walks you to the door.
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And what you find down there and what you choose to do with it is what this scientific report calls the meaning making.
It's the healing.
And what both sides show us, both science and spirit, is that our house is not broken.
It can heal.
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And for all of us who spent years believing that we were broken, that our anxiety or depression could never be cured, this scientific report shows that there is a path where that is simply not the case if we're safely guided by those who know how to hold the space.
But safety and humility also.
17:20
When we see a study like this and we see how people point to extraordinary transmission, we also have to be honest about who participated and why.
Just think about the last time you left the review for a restaurant.
You usually only bother if the meal was extraordinary or if you got the worst service ever.
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So we usually come in and report at the extremes.
The person who thought the sandwich was fine, They're not going to spend time filling out a detailed review.
They paid a check and they move on.
And that is also one of the challenges that this study faces.
It's called selection bias.
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The people who had the most profound life altering healing are statistically far more motivated to participate in a lengthy academic survey than someone who just had a neutral and forgettable experience.
Those people probably just moved on.
And on top of that, human memory can be unreliable.
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We can view past experiences through rose colored glasses, especially if the experience was an expensive, highly anticipated or emotionally.
If you spend thousands of dollars flying to retreat in Costa Rica, part of you wants to believe that it worked.
Still, the researchers knew that this criticism was coming and they prepared for it.
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So rather than relying only on people's memories, the researchers in this study, they used a tool called Kessler 10, the K10 at the exact moment participants for filling out the survey.
And the K10 is just a short questionnaire asking very specific questions about how you've been feeling over the last four weeks.
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Things like how often did you feel so depressed that nothing could cheer you up?
How often did you feel nervous or on edge?
It generates a hard numerical score, placing you into one of four categories, likely to be well or having a mild mental disorder or moderate or severe mental disorder in that present moment.
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And out of the people who said their depression was completely resolved by ayahuasca in the past, 94.5% scored as likely to be well on the K10 at the time of the survey.
And for the insider group who said it was completely resolved, 95.2% scored also as likely to be.
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And this is important because when these people had last consumed ayahuasca, it was not a few days or weeks before, it was months or several years prior.
So any pharmacological off the glow or the bliss that we feel of the ceremony after dancing and singing together and feeling unity that had long since left their bodies, what remained was their actual present day mental health.
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And it was excellent.
Their historical memory of being healed matched their current measurable reality.
And we have to keep the selection bias on the table still because it's real and it matters.
But even holding that fully in mind.
When we have hard data on thousands of human beings whose clinical diagnosis appear to have been resolved, and it's confirmed by a validated clinical scale years after the fact, that signal is simply too loud to dismiss.
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But it's also worth posting to understand who were actually people participating in the study, because this was not a random cross selection of humanity.
Because the global ayahuasca family that we are all a part of is small, researchers at Iser's estimated around 4 million people worldwide have worked with ayahuasca.
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So the people who ended up in this study or among that group and the average participant was 40 years old, 61% were in a professional or in a manager role, many highly educated, 87% had at least some post high school education and over 1/3 had a postgraduate degree.
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And more than half, 53.5% were married or living with a partner, 27% were single and about 9% partner but not yet living together and 9% were divorced to separate it.
And geographically, 49% were from Brazil, where they have more cultural contacts with ayahuasca, 25% from Europe, 16% from North America, with the rest spread across Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and a small percentage from Asia and the Middle East.
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So the people that were most represented in the study was educated, they were employed, half of them were partnered.
So from a very stable life, they had enough foundation underneath them that when something deep arose, there was probably enough space for them to look at it.
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There was a structure enough to hold the work.
The house that they were living in was intact.
And then the question comes to, well, how often did they drink ayahuasca?
And this is where the answer splits quite dramatically because people with ayahuasca churches like the Santodaimi, they had a median lifetime use of 270 sessions.
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So these are people who have been drinking regularly, once a week, maybe within a dedicated community for years and sometimes decades.
And people outside the church settings from Western retreats and private ceremonies, they had a median lifetime use of 6 sessions.
So this is not a study of people who just tried ayahuasca once.
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A lot of them had a long, deep and community supportive relationship with this practice spanning years of their lives.
And it also point to something that I feel really strongly about working with grandmother.
Ayahuasca is not a one time fix for most of us.
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It's a path and it's a relationship.
It's a path, it's a relationship, and it's a commitment to evolving with a teacher over time.
But then that raises the question, do you have to drink ayahuasca 300 times to heal anxiety and depression?
And this is actually not what the science in this report shows.
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What predicted healing was not the number of sessions.
It was the depth of the mystical experience, the number of personal insights that arose, the new meanings that people found about themselves and their lives.
That is what correlated with the resolution.
23:22
So not the quantity, but the depth of the experience.
For example, the Suntadima church, they might drink on average once a week and over years that accumulates into hundreds of sessions.
But each one is held within living community, a ceremonial structure, a relationship with the medicine the deepest.
23:39
Over time, the number becomes also byproduct of devotion, but not just the cause of the healing.
And any one of us has been on a three day or seven day Oasca journey knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Because the first night you arrive with all your guards up, your defenses are still intact.
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You're scared of surrendering.
You don't know what's going to happen, so you're still holding yourself together in the ways that you always do.
By the second night, something starts to shift.
And by the 3rd, if you are well held and you allow yourself to surrender, you can go so deep.
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You can go somewhere you've never gone before within you.
Not because you drank more, but because you finally let go enough to go deeper.
That depth, that surrender is what science is measuring when it talks about the mystical experience on the inside.
So it's not about accumulation.
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It's about how far down you're willing to go when you get there, if you're able to, and willing to go all the way into the basement.
And you will hear some people talk about I have drunk 100 times, I have drunk 200 times.
But the leaders of ayahuasca or the numbers of nights means nothing on its own.
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I met people who have been living with severe depression for 17 years and completely resolved it after nine nights with aya.
And I met others of had ayahuasca for hundreds of times and are still circling the same patterns because they never integrated and they never fully surrender to the process.
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So the numbers and the nights that you drink ayahuasca cannot give us a strategy.
They cannot give us a timeline because it depends on you.
Wherever you do the D ETA, wherever you let yourself go deep, wherever you trust the plan, then build a real respectful relationship with her over time.
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Wherever you integrate what arises and actually take care of yourself.
Wherever you find proper indigenous wisdom keepers that can guide you through the process.
So what this science actually shows is that a few ceremonies of genuine depth can change and transform your life.
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There, you ask guys, just the vessel.
What heals you is what you're willing to meet inside it.
Now, long before ayahuasca became a trending topic in Wellness circles or a headline in a neuroscience journal, this medicine was already ancient and the sacred.
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The earliest Western accounts around ayahuasca came from missionaries in the 1700s who described it in their notes as a tool for, and I love this phrase, mystification and bewitchment, which honestly tells you more about the missionaries than the medicine.
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But the origins of this brew can trace back far beyond colonial contact, as far back as the earliest inhabitants of the Amazon basin, potentially over 10,000 years of human use.
As long as people have lived in the jungle, this plant has been a part of how they healed.
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And I just want you to imagine that.
What traditions do we have in Western cultures for healing that are thousands of years old?
Imagine how this wisdom has been woven through so many lineages, so many ceremonies and generations, and how many lives have been given in service of its preservation and culture.
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Our indigenous elders, our maestros, have literally lived and died to protect these sacred medicines.
So when someone in the Western world calls themselves a shaman after a six month course, I hope that you also know that it's not the same thing.
That a true shaman, a true Corandero Titan, carries wisdom that has travelled down thousands of years through a living lineage of indigenous healer.
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Each one like an unspoken library of healing, with a depth of sensitivity, respect and understanding of this work that goes beyond the mind into the spiritual and ancestral dimension that most of us are not trained to see or to carry.
So if you ever drink this medicine, please be discerning about who holds the space for you, especially if you suffer with anxiety and depression.
27:45
In traditional Amazonian practice, ayahuasca was always administered under the close care of a shaman and sometimes it was only the shaman who would drink the medicine and speak to the plant and then hear how he could help heal the patient that was in front of him.
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The shaman used this medicine to help correct physical, emotional, spiritual imbalances and restore harmonious relationship within the community.
For example, when warriors returned from the hunt, they would drink ayahuasca to process the aggression of the experience to metabolize it before reintegrating back into village life.
28:20
Ayahuasca is a key to award the language of the Inca that translate roughly into the wine of the soul or the wine of the spirit.
She is also not made from a single plant.
It's a brew, a tea made from 2 distinct plants.
Working together and understanding what each one is tells you something remarkable about why this combination exists at all.
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The 1st is the copy wine, sometimes called yahi, or just a copy.
A giant woody liana vine native to the Amazon and the Orinoco river basins and Evergreen climate.
It can grow up to 30 minutes long, and there's a beautiful piece of Amazon folklore that suggests that shamans first discover the effects of this vine by observing Jaguars who would gnaw on the bark and then move through an unmistakably altered state, the jungle version of a catnip just for very big cats.
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Another story tells how the spirits themselves would appear to the village chamans and show them how to prepare the medicine to help their people heal from deceased.
Wherever we take this, literally or not, both stories point to the same truth, that this knowledge comes from millennia of attentive and a reverent relationship with the natural world.
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The second plant is Chakruna, A flowering with a shrub from the coffee family that can grow up to 5 meters tall.
And the preparation itself is always an act of ritual care.
A shaman begins by washing pieces of the coffee bark, pounding them with a wooden mullet and layering them with washed chakruna leaves in a large pot.
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And then the pot is filled with water and boiled for at least 8 hours, slowly concentrating into a thick dark brew.
And in many indigenous tradition, the community or the shaman or the elders will sing icaros to the medicine as it cooks, sacred icaros, songs that carry generational imprints of healing, installing intentions into the brew itself before a single drop is consumed.
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And when these two plants are built together, something remarkable happens.
Tiny doses of DMT is released into the brew, and the copy wine contains compounds that temporarily block the enzyme in your gut that would normally destroy the DMT the moment it enters your body.
30:38
Think of it as a plant running interference for the other, neutralizing your body's defenses just long enough for something extraordinary to slip through.
So when you drink the brew, the DMT from the chagrona leaves, which would otherwise be completely broken down before it ever reached your bloodstream, is now protected.
30:57
It moves past the gut, enters your blood, crosses into the brain and binds to your serotonin receptors.
So without the vine, the DMT is just destroyed, and without the leaves, the vine has nothing to protect.
And together they form the sacred medicine of ayahuasca.
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And DMT is very interesting because we don't know too much about it.
Some people call it the spirit molecule, others call it the God molecule, and once you understand what it actually is and where it comes from, those names starts to feel less mystical and more like an honest description.
31:33
Because our body naturally makes DMT, and not in a tiny, insignificant trace amounts.
DMT has been found in human blood, urine, and the fluid surrounding your brain and spinal cord and in lung tissue.
So it's not a foreign substance your body needs to be introduced to.
31:50
It is something that is already in your own biology and something you produce already.
Now that raises the question also, if your body already makes this compound, why can't you just access it directly?
Why do you need 2 plants boiled together for 8 hours in the Amazon?
Well it's because your body destroys it just as fast as it makes it.
32:09
The same enzyme, monoamine oxidase, neutralizes the DMT in the gut so effectively that under normal circumstances, it never gets a chance to reach your brain.
So your body produces it and then eliminates it almost simultaneously.
But the door exists, is just locked from the inside.
32:28
So where does the DMT actually come from with the body?
That's a question that is still being pretty actively debated in science.
But the most compelling theory comes from Doctor Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist and researcher at the University of New Mexico who conducted the first government approved clinical research from psychedelics in the United States after decades of prohibition.
32:52
And he wrote about this in his book called TMT, The Spirit Molecule.
And his work is what brought this whole conversation into the mainstream scientific awareness, but also in our spiritual community.
Strassman's theory centers around the pineal gland, a tiny pine cone shaped structure sitting in the center of your brain.
33:11
Most people know it as the gland that regulates melatonin, your sleep and wake cycles, but Strassmann proposed something far more extraordinary.
He theorized that the pineal gland is capable of producing and releasing DMT, and that it does so most powerfully at 2 very specific moments in human life, the moment of birth and the moment of death.
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The idea is, when a soul enters the body and when it leaves, the brain is flooded with DMT produced not by a plant or by a laboratory, but by your own body, your own biology, as if conscious as itself has a built in ceremony for us, for the most profound transitions a human being will ever make.
33:54
Now none of this has been directly proven, and we cannot measure DMT levels in the dying brain or in a newborn in real time, because the technology doesn't exist yet.
So Strassman's theory remains a theory, but it's compelling.
What has been confirmed is the DMT exists in human body, that the pineal gland has the enzymatic machinery required to theoretically synthesize it, and the experience reported under DMT.
34:20
Wherever to ayahuasca and ceremony or in clinical settings, there is a striking consistent resemblance to what people would describe, maybe in a near death experience or in a very vivid emotional landscape of a deep dream state.
And this brings us back to the rainforest, because for thousands of years, indigenous people have been living in one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, containing roughly 80,000 document and plant species and probably millions that are undocumented.
34:51
And somehow they identified these exact 2 plant combinations to make ayahuasca.
They understood that one plant would protect the other, that together they could unlock a compound that the human body already produced but couldn't normally access, and that this unlocking, this medicine could heal the mind, process trauma, and open a door to something that fell to everyone, whoever had walked through it.
35:17
Like the deepest truth that they have ever countered.
And how they did that without laboratories, without a chemistry degree.
Nobody, I think, can give us a clean answers to that, but it speaks to the depth of respect we owe to this wisdom carriers and people who understood something about consciousness and healing that modern science is only now starting to measure.
35:39
And it's also important to say that when we talk about DMT and the chemistry, it is just a small part of a larger picture.
Anyone who has ever worked with ayahuasca knows that one shaman will make one brew and it can taste and feel and be experienced completely different than another indigenous tribe.
35:59
As if in ayahuasca and her multifaceted universe, there are different intensities, different qualities, different energies on different nights.
I remember in one ceremony I called Ayahuasca abuela and a masculine voice responded to me.
36:14
No abuelo and I understood this specific medicine was masculine version of ayahuasca.
And there is such a difference in regards to how she is prepared, how she is respected.
Some medicines are more feminine, some more masculine, some are more tuned to our shadow side.
36:32
Some medicines are used more towards cleansing and vomiting, other towards deeper healing.
And again, it really speaks to the importance of knowing where it's made and the experience of the shaman and the community that created it.
So for us on this part, ayahuasca is not a molecule, she's not DMT.
36:51
She's a sentient being with her own intelligence and her own will.
And This is why DMT is a chemical.
People can even smoke DMT and go straight to the light, straight to a non ego unified reality, bypassing everything, bypassing their shadow, bypassing their house, bypassing their subconscious basement.
37:13
Just go straight to the Galaxy.
And this is probably a valid experience for some people, but it's not this medicine of ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca takes you to your own healing house, through the basement, through the walls, to the memories and the meanings and the things that you've been avoiding.
37:29
And that specific journey, that path, is inseparable from her culture, from her icaros, the rituals, her lineage, and the wisdom of the people who have carried her for thousands of years.
Without all of that, the line between medicine and drug becomes very thin, very fast.
37:50
Now one of the most interesting thing in this research is what they created and called the new meaning making model.
A framework to explain why some ayahuasca experiences produces such profound healing for depression and anxiety, while others produced little change at all.
38:06
And here is what this model says.
When we think about how psychiatric medications work, the equation is very simple.
The drug creates a chemical change in the brain, and that change produces a change in symptoms.
Antidepressant raises serotonin, Depression lifts drug leads to chemical correction leads to symptom change.
38:28
But the data from this study points towards a completely different equation of healing.
The study didn't just measure if people felt better.
It used several validated psychological scales to map the quality of the inner experience itself and what actually was happening inside people during ceremony.
38:49
They use a scale called the Short Index of Mystical Orientation, the Simo, which measures the intensity of perceived mystical experiences like feelings of unity, sacredness, ancestors, the sense of encountering A deeper reality, meeting the spirits.
39:07
They measured the spiritual significance of that experience.
And, more crucially, they measured something they called insights, a list of 15 specific psychological, emotional and philosophical revelations calmly reported during ayahuasca ceremonies.
Things like understanding the patterns in your intimate relationship, feeling a genuine connection to nature, or sudden clarity about the root of a childhood wound.
39:33
A new understanding of your place in the larger story of existence.
And when they mapped these insights against the outcomes, the correlation was undeniable.
The people that reported the greatest improvement for insight and depression, the ones in the completely resolved category, were the exact same people who scored highest on the mystical experiences and reported the most personal insights during the ceremony.
40:03
The people who reported no change?
Entering side and depression reported the least mystical experiences and the fewest insights.
More insights, deeper mystical experience, more healing, fewer insights and lower mystical experience, less healing.
40:23
So the new equation that the researchers proposed is medicine, or they would call it a drug.
But the medicine of ayahuasca leads to an altered state, which leads to meaning making, which leads to symptom change.
And I agree with that, partially because I think the science is pointing to something real but describing it from the outside.
40:44
Someone who has never tasted food trying to explain what people are enjoying it by analyzing the chemical composition of the meal.
It's accurate but doesn't tell the whole story.
So in my experience of what actually is happening from the inside is think of your consciousness like a cup.
41:00
When you arrive at the ceremony, your cup might be full, full of thoughts, your identity, your fears, your stories about who you are, about what you are worth, your old meanings, your defenses.
There is no room, there's no space.
The cup is filled up and everything is pressing against the edges.
41:18
The anxiety and depression they are in overflow.
The cup is too small and too full.
And it has been this way for a long time now, Ayerabaska.
And this is where the science despaired me creates a state of profound neurological openness.
The brain becomes unusually receptive.
41:34
The defense is slower.
The ego loses its grip.
And what happens is that in that state, it's not just that insides arise.
It is that the cup itself begins to expand.
Ayahuasca is an expander.
So suddenly there is more space.
41:50
We might have the same wounds, the same old meanings, the same memories.
They might be there, but they are no longer pressing against the walls.
There is room to look at them.
There is spaciousness.
There is openness.
There's room to feel them without feeling that you're destroyed or cornered by them.
42:06
There is room to ask, is this true?
Does this belief I made-up about myself at 7 years old still fit who I am now?
And in that expanded state, that's where grandmother goes to work because this is where I personally part ways with the scientific model.
42:23
The research says that alter state leads to meaning making, and yes, that is true.
But what the science cannot fully measure is that ayahuasca is not random.
She's not just a chemical producing an altered state.
She doesn't just open up the space and then leave you to wander around in it alone.
42:41
When we get in this spaceship to our subconscious, there is a copilot there that guides us there.
And she is very intelligent.
She's very precise and she knows where you're blocked.
She knows where you need to go.
She knows which door needs to be opened first.
42:58
She knows which wounds is ready to be seen, which belief is ready to be released, which part of your house has been sealed the longest and needs the most air right now.
So when I sit with her, I do not experience an altar state that happens to produce insight.
43:15
I experience something that takes me gently and sometimes not so gently if I fight it to the exact place I have been avoiding.
The emotion that I have not allowed myself to feel.
The ancestral wound that I inherited but never examined, didn't even know it was there.
43:33
The belief that formed in the dark that quietly ran my life from the inside, inside the walls of the house that I'm living in.
She doesn't just show it to you, she helps you release it.
Physically, emotionally, energetically.
Sometimes through tears, sometimes through shaking, sometimes through things that doesn't have a name in English language.
43:55
The body let's go of what it has been holding.
The pipes in the basement finally clears and the walls begins to soften.
And when we do these releases, something comes to fill the space, not just an absence of a wound.
44:12
It might be an experience of unity, of love, of self love, humility, openness, a new sense of who you are, a bigger pot to grow in.
And that is what people leave with.
Not the absence of the depression, but a new story about themselves built on something that was directly experienced, not intellectually construct, only true belief.
44:36
So does the scientific model describe this?
Yes, sort of.
The medicine creates an altar state.
The altar states, creates condition for meaning making, and the new meanings changes the symptoms.
But what it doesn't capture is that ayahuasca is not just a vehicle for neuroplasticity.
She's a guide, she's a maestra.
44:54
She's an intelligence that has been doing this work for thousands of years, carried through lineages of healers who devoted her entire life to understanding how she works and how to hold the space for the people who she's working through.
So the science gives us the framework and we need it.
45:11
We need the world to take this seriously in the language that it can understand.
But the medicine is older than that language, and it was carried forward not in journals but in ceremony, in songs, in the hands of the healers who understood something about the human soul that our scientific instruments are not able to, or maybe just beginning to reach.
45:33
So we need to hold both things here, the data and also the mystery, because the grandmother has been doing this work for so many years and that's never needed our validation to be as profoundly effective and potent as she is now.
45:51
I also want to add my own perspective on the importance of the meaning making that the science keeps pointing to, because the meaning that we have created for ourselves, they are very important.
And I think there is a way to understand it that goes a little bit deeper than the research language.
46:07
So I want you to think of a meaning like a pot, like a plant pot that you can plant a beautiful flower in.
Then imagine you're a tiny little seedling that just came out of your seed, and maybe you're a few years old and someone gives you a pot and it's a small one and it's the right size for who you were right then.
46:27
But you don't know as a child who or what you're going to grow into.
Maybe you're going to be a Magnolia tree full of beautiful white flowers with roots that run deep and branches that stretch wide.
But when you're small and you have a tiny pot, it fits.
46:44
And that little pot is formed by beliefs about yourself, about the world, about what is safe and what isn't, about what love looks like, but wherever you're worthy of it.
So we have a 5 year old's conclusions may be drawn from whatever is happening around them.
47:02
I, for example, believed as a child that I was unlovable.
I was ugly, unworthy.
And those beliefs became the walls of my pots.
And for a while, that part would make me feel safe and it would make complete sense.
It reflected my reality.
47:20
It gave me an identity, a character persona, and it told me where I end and where the world begins.
It protected me.
It also lets us explore who we are within a container that we can recognize, that feels defined.
But when we grow and our roots keeps growing and suddenly there's a tree that keeps reaching.
47:42
If that pod never gets updated, if those beliefs that you formed, that five never was revisited or never questions never replaced with something truer and more expansive, The root starts pressing against the walls and it starts to feel suffocating, like you can't breathe, like something in you is pushing to expand, but everything around it says no, no, this is the limit.
48:03
This is who you are.
This is what you're warned.
You're only going to have this much space in your life.
That's suffocation.
That is often what anxiety and depression can feel like from the inside.
Not a broken tree, not a broken house.
Just the tree that has outgrown its pot and doesn't know it yet.
48:23
And This is why the meaning making is so central to what ayahuasca does.
Because she doesn't just help you feel the old emotion that was never processed, she helps you go back into the belief structure that were written before you were even old enough to question them.
Some suggest that that foundation of beliefs most of us carry were formed before the age of seven.
48:42
So ayahuasca can help us update them.
Replace some of these with something truer.
Give the roots more room, a bigger pot, more soil.
And when I finally released the belief that I was unlovable, it was like my tree of life could breed again.
48:58
The roots could spread.
The flowers had somewhere to go.
And This is why I want to say it's so important in very deep ceremonies to solve this pot that we've been living in entirely so that we can feel this pure essence, unity, wildness, freedom beyond any identity or story.
49:18
And that experience is extraordinary and profound and probably one of the most beautiful things we can feel as human beings.
But we should not chase the dissolution of the pot, because the pot and our ego and our identity in the container of the self is not our enemy.
49:36
It is the structure of the house.
It holds us together in coherence.
It gives us a shape, it lets us function in the world.
It lets us love other people, be of service.
So when the pot breaks too fast or without the right support and integration, it can cause what we call this fragmentation.
49:55
The container that holds us, incoherence is lost and we can feel this in ayahuasca.
Sometimes there are moments in ceremony where the self or the ego feels like it's dissolving or fragmenting and that is also a part of the process of expanding.
But it shouldn't be forced chased.
50:13
There's so many people not talking about the ego death.
You have to experience an ego death.
Maybe not something to chase, like the destruction of the whole house.
For what reason?
Without the proper guidance, without being properly held in a safe space, in a well guided container, I don't think that is very healthy.
50:34
So the goal shouldn't be to destroy the pot or destroy your house.
The ayahuasca journey is more about expanding it, releasing what is stuck within their honouring it, honouring every single nook and cranny of your whole home, of your whole pot.
50:50
And then slowly, with care, and with the support of the people who know how to hold the space, your roots will find their new home.
And This is why working with properly trained experience guides matters so deeply.
It's not just for safety, but because the process of expanding A belief system, of releasing an old identity and growing into a truer version of yourself, into wholeness.
51:13
It's one of the most tender, vulnerable things we can experience as human beings and it deserves to be held with the reverence is requires.
I love so much that this data and this study shows us that the strongest predictors for those that healed during sight and depression was the depth of the mystical experience during ceremony, the number of personal insights that arose, and the spiritual significance the person felt the experience held for their life.
51:44
So it was not about how many times that we had ayahuasca, it was how deep we went when you did.
When it also came to those who benefited the most from healing depression, women showed significantly greater odds of improving specifically for depression.
52:03
And when we think this through the meaning making lens, it might also make sense because many of the 15 insights measured in the study revolved around relationship dynamics, emotional communication, empathy areas where, at least in my experience, women are often socially, culturally encouraged to develop a strong internal processing framework.
52:24
They are literally just more advanced, more mature and more experienced.
When ayahuasca also forces a confrontation with a relational or an interpersonal trauma, women might also already have a richer psychological vocabulary to recognize it, to name it, to integrate but arises.
52:45
But being a woman didn't actually carry over to anxiety group for anxiety.
It was actually older age that was a significant predictor of better outcomes.
So a 50 year old sitting with the medicine who had shattering insight had also decades of lift experience to anchor it into.
53:02
They have context, self knowledge, they have reference points to say yes I can see how this connects to everything where maybe a 20 year old might receive the exact same cosmic revelation, but they simply not have the life foundation to fully integrate it into their daily reality.
53:20
So the inside arrives, but there is not enough lived soil to plant it in.
Now obviously there is nothing powerful like a study like this that can exist without a shadow.
And we also have to look at that.
How many people felt worse but their anxiety and depression after ayahuasca?
53:38
Well, 2.7%.
So less than 3% of those with depression reported feeling worse.
For anxiety, that number was higher, 4.4%.
So it might be a small percentage on paper, but if you are like me and you're one of those people, the impact is not just statistical.
53:58
It's your life, it's your spirit, and it can be devastating.
So what predicted a bad outcome?
The data points directly to one primary factor, acute overwhelming fear during the session of ayahuasca.
Maybe they experienced deep panic.
54:13
They didn't trust the group that they were in.
Maybe they experienced immense panic, terror, or an absolute conviction that they were dying.
And this also fits perfectly into the meaning making model that the scientist was looking at.
The entire healing mechanism depends on a person being able to take that altered state.
54:34
However how intense and translate it into meaning to be able to digest it and then find the insight, find the spiritual mineral that is hiding within it.
But if a person is suffering immensely or in an absolute panic when the amygdala, the fear Center for the brain, is fully hijacked, fully hijacked the system and throws them into pure fight or flight, that translation becomes impossible because they're not reflecting, They're trying to survive.
55:05
They're not receiving insights.
They're desperately trying to just get through the next 10 seconds.
So when the experience ends, they might not be left with any breakthrough.
They're left with a raw, unprocessed, terrifying memory of what felt like a psychological near death experience.
55:22
We who do this work with those that are properly trained.
We prepare ourselves in a way so that we are not entering those processes.
Or for example, one of our Indigenous shamans once said that he will pull us out of the process if he sees that we're suffering too much because it's not necessary to suffer too much for healing.
55:43
And I love that, that it's not always about suffering the most.
That leads us to the other side.
And also for those that are a part of a community like this, especially in a traditional indigenous setting, there are people there to hold you afterwards to community, the elder, they can help you integrate.
56:03
There's a container for what came up.
But in the modern Western retreat model, people might fly to Costa Rica, have a shattering experience on Friday night, fly home Sunday, and then they're back on their desk Monday morning with no support.
56:18
The medicine opened the psyche.
It might have helped dissolve the ego and its defenses.
But there is nothing to catch what came out.
There's no community framework, integration or professional guidance to help turn what happened into something meaningful.
56:34
So this is where the baseline of the anxiety might even get worse.
And that is also what happens when something profound that is open has nowhere to land.
And This is why, and I can never stress this enough, by preparation and integration.
56:50
They are never an optional extra, especially us from the western world that are a little bit like headless chickens when it comes to healing.
These are the foundation for the medicine to do its work.
Now when the researcher were trying to understand who was likely to get worse from anxiety, depression, who would suffer these very dramatic experiences, and also who was most likely to experience complete resolution when anxiety, depression, they needed a way to measure how severe someone's mental illness was before they ever took ayahuasca.
57:25
And since this was a retrospective survey, they couldn't go back and test people before their experience.
So they used the total number of lifetime mental health diagnosis as a proxy for severity.
And that logic is very straightforward.
If you carried 5 distinct diagnosis across your lifetime, maybe anxiety, PTSD, major depressive disorder, maybe a substance use disorder, your overall psychological burden was more and heavier than someone who only had one, for example.
57:56
And this is what they found that the people whose depression was worsened after ayahuasca, and we're speaking under 3%, had the highest average number of lifetime mental health diagnosis.
And the people who depression completely resolved had the lowest.
And this brings us back to our house.
58:13
If our foundation is somehow stable, walls are standing, we have an income and a job, then a renovating force or an intense cleaning, it might bring things up and leave something better behind.
But if the structure, if we're feeling that the house is on fire, if we have years of compounding diagnosis and layer trauma and that foundation has been stressed repeatedly from multiple directions, then the force of this experience might not renovate the house and might bring it down.
58:44
Because our mind and our body, it needs some type of neurological safety and structural stability to endure this work.
And in my experience, ayahuasca knows this so well.
She will very often ask you to clean your house before you go out and play or before she takes you deeper.
For me she was so brilliant because she waited many years before she took me into some of the darkest rooms in my basement, Probably knowing in her multi dimensional brilliance that if she took me into one of those rooms the first years I would never have come back and I would have screamed this is not medicine, this is something dangerous.
59:21
So a way that we can create stability and safety for herself if we are in this category is to find stability, joy, and move slowly with the medicine and the process.
Build the structure of our walls so that you are ready to go deeper.
59:40
And I also want to be honest here because I definitely represent the 3% who got worse with depression and the 4% that got worse with anxiety.
But I knew it was a part of the process.
And then I knew that I had to slow down and do deeper integration and then come back to ayahuasca.
59:58
For example, I had severe panic attacks and it took me 10 years to dissolve them completely.
And I don't think I would.
Be able to be a diagnose with post traumatic stress disorder anymore or depression anxiety.
But I still have a tiny bit of anxiety that I'm working through and this part for me has been slow, non linear and something it has gotten much harder before it got easier.
1:00:22
And what makes me smile after walking the spot myself and seeing over 1000 people that I've shared retreat space with getting so much better and happier and healthier and finding their gifts and finding their calling, is that for a lot of us who had severe trauma, many of us have thought the only thing we can do is just to put the whole house on fire because nothing works.
1:00:46
But what we can see here is that there is some medicine that works.
And for some of us, it will require more discipline and a deep relationship with the plant and integration and the shaman for this to work so that the house renovation is done with the ease and grace and becomes a stable foundation for abundance and joy and life itself to move through.
1:01:06
But it is scientific study shows us that it's possible.
It just makes my heart smile of gratitude that this medicine exists and that she has been with us for such a long time.
So where does this all go from here?
1:01:25
The global Ayahuasca project has a lot of data and there are multiple studies, sub studies coming out of this data.
But we still need randomized control trials.
We need clinical settings, we need proper preparation throughout screening, integration frameworks built to minimize panic and also maximizing the meaning making potential of these altered state.
1:01:48
And I support that.
But I also read something recently from one of the researchers that really got to me, and the statement was something like ayahuasca as a chemical without the culture is not a medicine.
Because what is already happening and will only accelerate as this research grows, is that pharmaceutical companies will begin to isolate the active compounds, synthesizing the benefits in a lab saying we extracted ayahuasca and her healing properties.
1:02:15
Here's ayahuasca without the purge, without the vomiting, without the dissonance, without the visions, without the ceremony, without the singing, without anything, and is more controllable and it's more profitable.
And for me, that is the deepest disrespect to the cultures that has carried this medicine to us.
1:02:33
Ayahuasca is not a chemical in a powder form.
She is not elaborate.
She is our grandmother and she is a sentient being that has been a relationship with human consciousness for thousands of years.
She has been held with living lineages of indigenous wisdom keepers who have given their lives to this works.
1:02:54
So if we strip her down to a molecule and hand her out in a clinical setting, without that culture, without the ceremony, without the ecoros, without the relationship, it's like to take a fruit and throw away the tree.
So wherever you are, if you can in any shape or form protect indigenous cultures, push for their wisdom to be honoured and respected as this medicine grows in this ability.
1:03:17
They should not be observers of this research, they should be leading it.
And the goal should never be to hand out synthesized spirituality like a prescription for meaning making.
The goal should be a better and safer container for ceremonies, so that when the door opens, that person can walk into inside rather than panic.
1:03:37
And if you experience ayahuasca, you will learn very quickly that this is not just a chemical, it's a loving grandmother showing us the way home as she has done for thousands of years.
And even though the medicine can open the door, you still have to walk through it, to integrate it and to do the work.
1:03:57
She is not going to clean the house for you, my friend.
That is your job.
But she will help you see what's there, help you release it, and guide you towards the foundation in your home that is whole and joyful and peaceful.
That's grandmother's gift to us.
And just imagine that she has been offering this loving service to us for so long.
1:04:15
So thank you to Grandmother Ayahuasca, to the researchers in this study, to Isers, and to all the indigenous tribes that has carried this wisdom forward.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
A link to the study can be found in the show notes.
1:04:32
Thank you so much for listening and take care.
