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The Question That Made a Psychiatrist Listen to Shamans
The Shipibo people speak of ayahuasca as a medicine capable of clearing ancestral lines. Traditionally, it was not the person seeking healing who drank the brew, but the onanya, the Shipibo healer or shaman, who entered the visionary state on behalf of the individual, diagnosing illness, communicating with the spirit world and guiding the healing process through sacred songs known as icaros. The aim was to restore balance where suffering had become threaded through generations. Of course, this is only a very simple explanation of a much more complex healing process. Today, particularly in retreat settings, it is far more common for participants themselves to drink ayahuasca, describing experiences that feel as though they are seeing wounds that did not begin with them. They speak of patterns of grief that have travelled through their family for generations until, somehow, they are finally confronted and released. People return from ceremonies talking about family they have never met, and feeling as though they themselves had carried the emotional weight of previous generations without ever actually knowing it. They speak about healing themselves, but they also speak about healing something much older.
Psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Dr Simon Ruffell is discussing this very subject. Modern biology has been slowly uncovering evidence that…
