Healing Trauma with Ayahuasca
Trauma is not simply what happens to us—it’s a result of our inability or lack of opportunity to move through it. For children to move through a painful experience, they need the presence of a supportive adult. Children become traumatized not necessarily because terrible things have happened to them, but because they had to endure that terror alone, often suppressing their conscious awareness of it just to survive.
When suppressed, deeply ingrained, and sublimated, the trauma becomes the source of addictive patterns and other coping mechanisms that lead to many illnesses of body and mind.
The melding of shamanic wisdom and Western psychology has much to offer. The latter especially has often lacked a deeper sense of the full potential of human beings to realize love and gratitude, clarity and courage, belonging and unity, not as temporary states or actions, but as innate qualities. Too often we’ve been concerned only with changing behaviors or fixing dysfunctional dynamics. Yet if we understand that trauma is not what happens to us but the disconnection that happens within us, we see that the fundamental disconnect is from the very Self that is manifested through those innate qualities.
I have developed deep respect for the collaborative power of shamanic medicine allied with the insights and practice of depth psychology. Respect may be too mild a word—awe hits closer to the mark.
My work with ayahuasca, while a small part of what I do, has become in some ways the most exciting of my various healing activities, the one in which I see the most rapidly transformative potential. In the healing retreats, we have worked with people struggling with drug use and sex addiction, people facing cancer, degenerative neurological illness, depression, PTSD, anxiety, and chronic fatigue, as well as those seeking wholeness, meaning, and an experience of their true selves. In all cases, people have sought liberation from ingrained, habitual, constrictive patterns.
We’ve worked with people looking for their vulnerable and fully alive child selves, for their parents, for love, for God, for truth, for community, for nature. I can’t say that everyone found everything they were looking for, far from it. I can say that most people took major steps forward on their path toward authenticity and found significant liberation from stultifying, limiting mind patterns and behaviors. Some have transformed their lives. Many are no longer addicted, or no longer ill. Even more are no longer content to be other than who they are. I have witnessed healing from suicidal depression and from autoimmune disease.
The plant teaches what we need to learn to heal, but not always in a language immediately accessible to us. Often the visions it brings to people can be magnificent, inspiring, and engendering of the purest joy and gratitude; they can also be threatening, incomprehensible to the mind, and capable of rousing terror.
The emotions it evokes can be gentle, soothing, and suffused with peace and happiness; they can also be excruciatingly painful and frightful, and capable of inducing despair and a sense of profound loss. The felt sense can be of ineffable freedom or of dark imprisonment. People can see and be their divine selves or be identified with the most diabolical elements of their personalities. Without preparation, processing, and integration, the ayahuasca experience can be confusing and, for many, incomplete.
It has long been understood that the transaction between the plant and the human is never just one of a chemical effect. According to the shamans, the plant has a spirit—in fact, is a spirit. I have experienced the truth of this. The ceremony, the setting, the chanting, the relationship of shaman and guide to participant are at least as important as the brew.
That’s why I was so amused to read a well-known Canadian writer relate that he drank the tea in some friend’s living room, without any ceremonial support, and experienced “nothing.” He was fortunate, I think. Similarly, I shook my head in reading a naive and superficial account of a ceremony that took place in a windowless, New York yoga studio, absent of shamans and trained guides, with a pounding techno beat invading from the bar next door and drunken shouting outside.
For many Westerns even the traditional ceremony may not be enough. Frequently, Europeans and North Americans who travel to the Amazon to work with shamans are left feeling incomplete and bewildered. The deep psychological and spiritual dynamics potentially brought to awareness during the ceremony require guidance, both before and after, for their full integration. Even participants who have lovely experiences may not derive the complete benefit without some supported exploration and help with interpretation.
As one who offers such guidance, I’ve learned not to be concerned with whether a person saw beauty or monstrosity, felt relief or intense discomfort, joyousness or horror. What matters is the personal teaching in each person’s journey, a teaching that arises from one’s life, formative influences, present situation, and current needs.
There are only journeys where our task is to learn from whatever we witness. It’s never the painful or frightening visions or emotional states that make an ayahuasca journey confusing or disturbing—only the lack of meaning a person may be left with, for lack of proper guidance and support. Ayahuasca, in the right setting, helps to reveal meaning.
“I went to all the sad places of my childhood,” one participant shared, “but I accompanied myself there with understanding and love.” Different parts of ourselves emerge into daylight, witnessed and cared for by the Self, the deep source of wisdom, compassion, and nonjudgmental acceptance that resides in all of us.
It often takes years of therapy or spiritual seeking to yield this kind of inner opening. The ayahuasca ceremony can rapidly and directly take us beneath the false worldview we have all developed since childhood, allowing us to approach the reality underneath our coping mechanisms, whether they’re addictions or taking on the needs of others while ignoring our own, manipulating our environment, or seeking approval or success. During the ceremony, we may be visited by spirit healers in human, divine, or animal form.
Ayahuasca is not for everyone. Even for the ones it calls, it’s not a panacea. The conditioned self, or egoic personality, supported, threatened, and egged on by the materialistic culture we live in, will seek to assert itself even in the face of new knowledge and insight. Today’s cathartic realization may, by next week, become a vague memory. Unless ongoing work is done to integrate the learning, our “habit energies,” as the Buddha called them, may soon reestablish their dominance. And the world—because it’s largely unconscious—will always seek to invalidate and suppress our consciousness.
No matter how profound our insights, how lovely our connections to our fellow travelers, how fervent our intentions, how deep our sense of transformation, we can continue to generate suffering for ourselves and for others in our lives. We can go back to sleep. But the beauty of it is, we don’t need to: we now have choice—or, at least, more freedom of choice than before. Integration means an ongoing relationship with the truths newly uncovered: continued, nonjudgmental caring for the traumatized parts of ourselves as they may show up in life, continued revisiting the healing that has occurred, and continued acquaintance with the new awareness within—along with practices that support all these pathways.
A lot of us carry a great deal of anxiety that we usually cover up or distract ourselves from, through work, relationships, going to the pub, watching sports, exercising. Some of these are good things to do, but they can also function as a way of binding or diverting our anxieties.
Now that there are fewer of those options for coping, people’s anxieties are rising, and that’s showing up in their behavior.
There is no prescribed form in which the teaching must arrive. We each learn according to our own nature. Whatever shape they may take—a vision, an insight, a deep emotion, a felt sense, or a pure state—the powers of love or guidance are always within us.
What the Ayahuasca ceremony offers is not magic but an effective and often rapid pathway to inner experience and profound awareness. We often hear after the ceremony statements like “This week—or, even, this night—was like 10 years of psychotherapy.” In turn, the insights and modalities of Western psychotherapy can greatly deepen and illuminate the shamanic experience of moving toward the true Self, the most essential and rewarding journey in this life.
A note of caution: ayahuasca has been exploited for financial gain by unethical practitioners, or even for the sexual gratification of healers preying on vulnerable patients, most often young women. Such cases are notorious in the shamanic world. Another sensitive issue I must mention is that of cultural appropriation—the adaptation and exploitation of indigenous practices without respect or support for the people who developed these practices and whose lands and resources are still being colonized.
The ceremonial immersions I offer in Peru are lead by an indigenous Healer who has been a trained Ayahuascaro since he was 6 years old. I, as a female practitioner who has worked with Ayahuasca for over ten years, also act as a guide, confidant, and integration partner along your journey. See the details of the spiritual journey below.
Ceremonial Immersion
Spiritual Journey to Peru
This article is adapted by the author, Gabor Maté, from his postscript for The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca, ed. Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar, Springer, 2014.
More in this series on Shamanic Healing:
The Causes of Depression & Illness | A Shamanic Perspective
The Basics of Ayahuasca | Plant Medicine Ceremony
Shamanic Healing | Methods & Practices
Plant Medicine Can Alleviate Depression, Anxiety, & Addiction
