Introduction to Ayahuasca

In today's episode we look at one of the main psychedelic medicines, Ayahuasca. 
An ancient psychedelic brew originating from the deep amazonian jungle.  Utilized in medicine/healing ceremonies for centuries and becoming popular in modern medicine circles as well.
But where did Ayahuasca come from?  What exactly is Ayahuasca? How is it utilized?
We look to answer all of these questions and more.  Hope you enjoy!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello, and welcome to the psychedelic psychiatrist podcast, a podcast dedicated to the discussion around all aspects of psychedelic medicine. This is also a space that hosts conversations about impactful personal journeys and a way to decrease stigma around these molecules and share our experiences with one another. So get ready for some deep dives and fun times. I'm your host, Juan Bob. Good morning, or good evening, wherever you may be in the day. Welcome back to the podcast today. We're gonna talk about the famous Ika just made that up.<laugh> so when talking about psychedelics or, or be hearing a conversation about psychedelics the name Ika always seems to appear like, oh, I went down to Peru and did Ika or, oh, I was in the parking lot of Arby's and did iowaska last night.<laugh> uh, hopefully that, uh, doesn't happen, but I'm sure it probably has, uh, somewhere in the world, but, um, what is iowaska? So Ayaka is actually, uh, Hispanicized term from the Kwan language KWA, the language of the indigenous people of the Amazon. Uh, they speak Kwan in the Indian states of Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru colo. So in the Kwan language, IA means spirits. So corpse or dead body in Nooka means rope or Woody vine. So the word Ika translates to vine of the soul or vine of the dead. And what exactly is Ika. So Ika is a hallucinogenic drink or brew that's made from two different plants. One of those is a vine called best and the other is a shrub called psychotria. And each of these plays an integral role in creating the Ika brew and one cannot be without the other. So let's look at psycho three ADI. So this shrub contains the primary psychoactive ingredient, DMT the methymine. And this is the actual psychedelic molecule that exists in the Ika. The Ben is kept by the vine contains molecules known as mono oxidase inhibitors, M AO eyes. And so why is this so important? So if you just took the psychotria beauty, this plant also known as una, and you mashed that up and brewed and drink that that has the DMT in it. But if you just took that on its own, nothing would happen. Cuz what happens is when the DMT enters into your stomach, it's immediately broken down by mono oxidase, which is enzyme, uh, in the stomach. And so what do we need in order to protect the DMT from being broken down, we need a mono oxidase inhibitor, which shuts down the enzyme, allowing for the DMT to not be broken down and to be absorbed, uh, into the body. So again, one cannot be without the other, in terms of creating this hallucinogenic brew. And the most amazing thing about this to me is how the ancient tribes in the Amazon figured this out. How do they know that they needed to take the stem and bark from this one vine and combine it with this shrub totally different plant. And then they had to, you know, brew it and boil it and then test it and see what happens. So I nerded out and busted out my old calculator ti 86 used to play a lot of snake on this back in the day for you, young kids too young to know about the amazing snake game in the, in the calculator ti 86<laugh> okay. Yeah. So taking a step back, there are 16,000 different species of trees in the Amazon. There are 80,000 different plant species in the Amazon. So that's a total of 96,000, uh, species of like plant tree combination that are in Amazon. And so what are the probabilities of picking two of these that would match up in the exact way to create, uh, the IASA brew? So it would be if you had 96,000 black marbles and this huge bag and two of those were white and you mix that bag up all random and you, uh, randomly stick your hand in, you pull out a marble and then you randomly stick your other hand in and pull out another marble or the chances that those two marbles are white or the chances that those two marbles are Ben stereo CAPI and psycho three a. So the odds of this happening is one in 4.6 billion to kind of put that in perspective, the odds of wording, the mega millions is one in 300 million. So one in 4.6 billion compared to one in 300, 2 million. So the chances of, of this happening are just incredible to me and there's theories out there that animals guided humans, um, to the mysteries of these plants and the folklore of peyote hallucinogenic cactus, uh, found in the deserts, the us and Mexico, the legend says that a deer was the one that showed people, guided them to this plant or to this cactus to show them that there was magic and wisdom within. And so there's also a theory that animals showed people what the plants would be in the brew fry at Waka there's, other theories that, uh, outer aliens civilization came and showed humans as a gift to increase their, uh, consciousness of what these plants would be or gave them the seeds to these plants. So these are like far out their ideas, but, um,<laugh> most likely ideas. There was these early, uh, psycho knots out there just trying every single plant combination. There was just this human curiosity to mix and see what happens.<laugh> these, uh, chemists, ancient chemists and ancient psycho knots, just testing things out, you know, back in the day they were like, Hey man, what if I, you know, lick the back of this frog and then, uh, smoke this leaf while sitting in, uh, the Creek bed. And I don't know something, you know, by the way the lick in the back of the frog is legit. We'll talk about that one another time, but yeah, just like crazy to me, how they're able to pair these two plants to create Ayaka. So Ayaka has a long history of ritual among the indigenous groups of the upper Amazon it's associated with healing in collective group ceremonies or in more intimate context. And the Iowa school is always overseen by a specialist, an Iowa Skile. So this is someone that helps integrate the emotion, the conscious pre conscious unconscious process of the whole Iowa school journey. I say that iowaska was used in times of warfare, uh, artistic inspiration. It's part of the deep cultural narrative in these indigenous, uh, tribes in healing. It's used to identify the origin of illness and the so journey is there this idea of, to restore one soul that has been lost or to extract an evil spirit that's causing illness in the person. So in a way that Jman is able to access and fight these agents of illness to bring healing to the person indigenous indigenous cultures have said that AKA allows them to gain access to information, to contact unseen realms, uh, to be in contact with their ancestors to receive wisdom. One of the sad things about the history of IASA is once the Spanish came and the missionaries, there was a, basically an all out war on drugs<laugh> that was created by them cuz they saw AASA as this use of indigenous spirituality. And so for them, that was going against, uh, Christianity. And so they wanted to stomp out all aspects of IASA ritual use. And so a lot of groups had to protect this from, from the outside forces. And unfortunately the IASA tradition disappeared altogether in a lot of these tribes and a lot of these traditions due to the outside forces coming in from Europe, um, on the other important aspects that shaman uses is something called, uh, ECOS, which is a magic song. That's able to invoke spirit invoke healing. And sometimes the Chaman channel is the spirit of various animals or elements of the natural world in order to embark on this journey of healing, somebody, um, using this spirit ally of an animal to diagnose or heal a certain ailment. So there are a lot of core elements of shamanism that are present in the iowaska tradition, including initiation procedures, which is kind of like preparation for a psychedelic journey. And there's also certain dietary prescriptions, dietary restrictions, um, that need to happen before the IO ceremony. It is very common for people to purge during iowaska ceremony. Um, and in some cases this is seen as very helpful as you're purging, uh, toxicity and getting rid of, uh, bad energy, bad spirits. Um, so having the correct diet going into the IO ceremony to the iowaska ceremony can be a very important aspect with this recent, uh, Renaissance and psychedelic. There's been an emergence of a tourist, uh, industry in terms of iowaska in the Amazon. So people, uh, allowing tourists to come from the United States or other parts of the world to experience, uh, iowaska ceremony. And this has positives and has had negatives. Um, the people in the Amazon have seen influx of financial support in terms of being able to be a lot more financially independent than they've ever been in their entire lives because of this, uh, tourism. The negative part is that it is being exploited in some way. And there are people claiming to be Iowa skis. People claiming to be from a long lineage OFS, which is not true and leading the ceremonies that have been dangerous and causing injury to, to people. And so there's a lot of controversy around this. And even in Columbia, some, uh, practitioners came together and formed an article, which says there are those who take our seeds to patent them, to own them. Others want to declare Yagi in narcotic plants and prohibit its use for the good of humanity. We also denounced those anthropologists bondness business, people, doctors, and other scientists who are experimenting with Yagi and other medicinal and sacred plants without taking into account our ancestral wisdom and our collective intellectual property rights. So during my training for psychedelic therapy, this was a big, um, how are we going to respect and honor the traditions of the Chapmans of the people that have paid the path for this type of work. And that's a, a complex answer, but I think it's always good to, uh, when you're educating people about psychedelics to ex, to, to accurately portray like where a lot of these, uh, psychedelic traditions came from and they, a lot of them came froms and so honoring them and being able to pay respect to them and finding a way for them to receive financial compensation would be, uh, wonderful, cuz they've offered so much wisdom and knowledge, uh, to us. And so it's only fair to be able to pay back that honor in some way, other demands and Amazon believe that they're no longer isolated to being in the tribe that the world is now a tribe and that it would be a disservice to humanity to not share IASA with those outside of the Amazon in order to promote elevating consciousness of humans and creating healing. So I can see both sides of the story of people wanting to protect IASA from the outside and others saying that iowaska needs to be, uh, shared in a way to, to help the collective consciousness of humanity and, and healing in a way. So I respect both of those views. So what does the Ika journey actually feel like? Like what do people actually see? So hopefully I'll have a special guest on the show that has gone through an IASA ceremony to share their experience and what they saw and what it was like. Um, but a quick summary is that there's a lot of sacred geometry. That one sees during the experience. It's very common for people to see animals from the Amazon, such as Jaguars or snakes and a condos, um, these sort of things. And it's very interesting that people from all over the world, despite their upbringings and despite their cultural backgrounds will all have very similar visions, very similar imagery, very similar, um, animals that come into their iowaska, uh, journey. There's also the idea that iowaska can connect one, uh, to their ancestors or connect one to, uh, spirits that are outside of this physical realm. Iowaska is also known as, uh, mother medicine or grandmother medicine. Some people have been able to contact this grandmotherly spirit, um, which in some ways can be very, uh, nice and comforting and, and beautiful and loving and other ways it can be grandma kind of smacking you around and showing you<laugh> what you're doing wrong in the world and how to improve your life in ways you need to change in order to not hurt people or help yourself. Um, so Iowa as a teacher, in some ways in that respect and usually the iowaska ceremonies are done in a group where you travel somewhere and you meet with the shaman before even doing the ceremony. There's a lot of preparation that goes into the ceremony in terms of meditations, uh, talks, getting to know their fellow partners that will be in the group with you and Iwas is usually led in a circle. And so the Chapman sometimes sits in the middle of a circle. Everyone else, uh, is around or sometimes the Chapman is also part of the circle and kind of depends. Um, and music is an integral part of a Ika journey. And, uh, as I was talking about before, there's these songs called the Carlos, which are ancient songs that I passed down generation to generation. These are songs that, that shaman sings during the Ayaka ceremony to invoke spirits, to invoke protection, um, to provide a current underneath the psychedelic experience that comes with the DMT in iowaska. So I hope that provides little background on Ika and its origins and its uses and how it's used. Um, and hopefully in one of the future podcasts, I'll have someone that's been through an iowaska journey so they can share what their experience was like. And if you're curious about what the visuals may be in iowaska journey, what it may look like in terms of what's going on inside one's mind or what they're seeing during the journey, there's an artist called Balo AO a Peruvian artist, and he was also an Iowa ski at Chapman. And he was able to portray the iowaska landscape in his paintings in such a beautiful and amazing way. And I'll probably post one of those to the social media, Instagram. So you can see what those paintings are like and the beauty that he was able to portray. Awesome. Well, thanks for being here with me again. Hope you enjoyed this little podcast and I'll see you on the other side, take care.