I had an idea in my head that while I was in India I would find my “Guru”. This idea had been put into my head from recently half finishing a couple books related to spirituality in the area; The Autobiography of a Yogi and Surfing the Himalayas. The authors of these books described the key role that finding their Guru had on their spiritual quests, how it was through divine intervention that they met their Guru, and hence, I decided that to fulfill my spiritual quest I would also need to find my Guru. I failed to remember the part in Steve Job’s biography describing his similar quest to find a Guru, only to end up finding his Guru when he quit looking for him, and his Guru would actually be from California, pretty much in his back yard.

I never did find what I envisioned “my” guru to be in India, but on my quest I met many gurus, delving deeper into knowledge of spirituality and philosophy than I had ever considered doing. I found myself constantly floored upon learning spiritual practices in India that mirrored practices of the Shamans in the Amazon. Even one of the more popular gurus giving satsangs at the time admitted to using ayahuasca in their spiritual development. All mind altering plants and substances aside (see this natgeo article on the use of cannabis by Sadhus in the Himalayas), the Shamans of the Amazon and the Swamis and holy people of India followed some very strange and strikingly similar practices for day to day living.

If you haven’t read any of my blogs from my time in Peru, there is one practice that the Shamans seem to have a great affinity towards; purging. There is one guarantee if you plan to go work with Shamans in the Amazon, you will puke, you will shit, and sometimes you may even uncontrollably do both at the same time. It could be that they just enjoy seeing naive tourists suffer, but they claim that the purge process is important to cleanse the emotional and energetic body, a way to release stuck patterns and thoughts when we are release them with our own willpower. While purging in the remote and wild Amazon didn’t seem out of place, I was surprised to learn that it was also an integral yogic process, right alongside the endless breath control and elegant body postures performed in immaculate studios and $100 outfits. Funny how when yoga was translated to the western world, the purging or shatkriyas practices were conveniently left out. While the Shamans used different plants to induce these purges, in India they were a bit more creative, invoking purging through methods such as swallowing a thin piece of cloth over 3m long and pulling it out, or using a oil, honey, and salt mixture as an enema. In our yoga teacher training course they encouraged us to try all the yogic practices, but having just been in Peru I felt that I had done enough purging for a while.

While in the Amazon I had to follow a strict diet, which is easiest to explain by the few things that are allowed, pretty much anything that dosent have a taste; rice, potatoes, plaintains, and the occasional amazonian bottom feeder fish. Oh, and this strict diet also extends to prohibit other areas of life, aka. no sex. I had never given the diet much thought apart for the scientific reasoning for no red meats (the Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor component of ayahuasca blocks the enzymes that digest red meat), and the common sense that sugars and processed foods just are not good for you. So I found it very interesting when I started learning about the yogic diet and how (apart from milk) it had all of the same restrictions as the diet in the Amazon. These restrictions had nothing to do with any chemical interaction with a plant, but were based on energetic usage in the body. The bland diet and lack of sex minimizes the amount of energetic consumption taking place, allowing for all that energy to be focused upward rather than inward, towards achieving a higher consciousness state.

Beyond the similarities of the physical practices, there were many similarities between the ceremonial and spiritual aspects. In the Amazon, going into Tambo (a isolated hut in the jungle) was a key part of one’s spiritual growth, similar to a type of medidation developed in India called Vipassana involving 10 days of isolation with no talking or contact with others. Icaros were songs used by the Shamans to connect with spirits and cleanse energies, while in India they used Mantras to achieve much of the same. Both had a respect for the masculine and feminine, the solar and lunar, and finding a balance between the two. I was astonished that what I learned in India would bring light to an intense experience I had in Peru, explaining the exact state of consciousness I experienced. A state that was attainable through serious meditation and was not just a “high” feeling from the hallucinogenic aspect of ayahuasca as anyone reading about the experience might think. Was it no coincidence that Buddha achieved enlightenment by sitting under a tree and that plants were such an integral part of spiritual connection in the amazon?

I had to think, how could two cultures on completely different sides of the world have such similar practices? Many people discount spiritual practices as there is no scientific proof or observable cause and effect relationship, but these similarities pointed at some universal truth or language that all spiritual practices derive from regardless of culture or locality on the globe. Were all spiritual and religious paths actually leading to the same place? My year traveling around the world to different spiritual and religious centers had been with the aim of finding healing, but I realized that  I might gain much more than that by the time I was done.