The Amazon rain forest is probably one of the last remaining terrestrial places on the earth where areas remain unexplored and new discoveries are constantly being made.  It is estimated that approximately 20% of our modern medicines have been derived from chemical compounds discovered in plants and animals in the Amazon. Before westerners identified and isolated these compounds from plants for medicinal purposes, the Amazonian tribes had long been using them. In a tribe there would be a doctor also called a shaman, who had extensive knowledge of the plants and animals in the area and for thousands of years used them to cure any illnesses in the tribes. The curative properties of the plants used by the shamans were so effective, that when ethnobotanists began traveling into the Amazon to seek potential medicinal plants they would often consult these shamans first (see One River).

The Amazon boasts over 40,000 plant species with more being identified each year, and ethnobotanists marveled at the shaman’s innate knowledge of these plants, with some parts of the same plant being lethal if ingested and other parts of the plant curing infections and diseases like malaria. With the vast number of plant species the question arises, how do these shamans know which plants treat which illness? As a simple trial and error method would be timely and result in death more often than not.

When ethnobotantists asked the shamans how they knew about the curative properties of plants, they responded by saying that they could communicate with the spirits of the plants using an brew concocted from two plants, a vine called Banisteriopsis caapi and usually the leaves of a shrub called Psychotria viridis. These plants taken on their own have little impact, but when brewed together for months creates an intense purgative and hallucinogenic effect. The effects can last anywhere from 3-12 hours (even longer if other plants are added), during which the shaman can enter a state of consciousness where he can communicate not only with plant spirits but also see why a person is suffering from an illness and cure that person through their energetic body.

As more and more chronic mental and physical illnesses are showing up in western culture, with doctors seemingly only able to provide long term treatment plans to alleviate the symptoms but not cure the disease there is a growing interest in these shamans. Books and documentaries are coming out with westerners claiming these shamans to have cured anything from their chronic depression to cancer that western medicine could not (see The Sacred Science, Black Smoke, and Joe Tafur).  Rather than treating just the symptoms of a disease, shamans see that disease as a symptom of an energetic blockage in the person which they work to remove while treating the symptoms with a remedy of plants.

Modern scientists and doctors are quick to discount these testimonials as proper scientific experimental data is lacking, mainly as most first world countries have labeled ayahuasca as a class 1 drug making it extremely hard to get approval to conduct scientifically reputable experiments. World renowned scientists and psychologists like Dr. Gabor Mate (see The Jungle Prescription), find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to getting approval to conduct research involving ayahuasca, though they have seen and experienced firsthand the transformational healing that can occur.”Ayahuasca is not a drug in the western sense, something you take to get rid of something. Properly used, it opens up parts of yourself that you usually have no access to. The parts of the brain that hold emotional memories come together with those parts that modulate insight and awareness, so you can [process] past experiences in a new way” – Dr. Gabor Mate.

Since January 2012, working in the Amazon with these shamans has completely transformed my life. I have found not only physical and emotional healing, but also my demeanor has changed in such a dramatic way that I received comments not only from friends and family but from supervisors at my work who noticed a change in me. Working with these shamans is not for the faint hearted, it has been the most mentally and physically challenging experience of my life. But the long term benefits far out reap the short term pain, and I find myself returning time after time to continue my healing and personal growth.

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