In today’s world, there’s so much information available at your fingertips. Anyone can find information about almost anything, in theory. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made it seem even easier to find information. But there are two types of “knowing”: there is the fact-based “logical-knowing” and a “felt-sense / intuitive-knowing”. So while AI can provide data, AI does not possess “intuition” and it never will. AI is a tool that works strictly with logic and facts. One little-known fact in today’s world is that AI “lies” (my husband is a veteran web programmer and an expert on AI). And AI can be programmed to censor data, especially if that data threatens the financial stability of big corporations.
As someone who studied psychology in the United States up to nearly a doctoral level, I can say that something about the logical, left-brain approach to psychology was deeply unsettling to me. The labels and the diagnostic categories seemed (and were) needlessly cryptic and objectifying in regard to the human experience. The more I knew about the diagnoses and the categories of so-called “mental illnesses”, the more alienated I felt from my own self. Studying scripts about how to counsel a patient properly in a therapy session according to insurance rules was one of several things that caused me to abandon my doctoral program to try to find a better way to overcome mental health issues. I’m not a script-based person. I like to work with my “felt-sense” to help people find solutions to their problems.
I moved to Mexico about ten years ago and my daughter and I studied under a curandera here to learn about sacred medicines of all kinds. Early in my studies with this curandera, I worked with Sapito and ended up developing panic attacks shortly thereafter. This whole experience unnerved me and made me rethink my work with the sacred medicines. What was happening? And why was it happening? Wasn’t Sapito supposed to help me feel better and not worse?
I definitely wanted for the sacred medicines to make me into a better person back in those early days of mere experimentation with them, but often, when I tested out a new sacred medicine, I definitely didn’t become a better person. I could see myself more clearly in terms of the good and the bad. And after years of this kind of work, I realized at one point that these medicines will never make me into a better person – but they do make people’s lives better. It wasn’t until about a decade of studying that my first real crisis happened where I needed the sacred medicines. It was this work that I did, where the insight and wisdom that came from these medicines saved me and my family that I began to understand that sometimes the sacred medicines do make you feel worse in order to make you feel better. Often, there’s no way around the valleys except to go through them.
I started my career working with people in the realm of western psychology, but I’ve traveled the entire world to figure out how people heal from their emotional issues so this problem with panic attacks due to Sapito wasn’t totally outside of my realm of consideration when it happened to me early in my career with the sacred medicines. Western psychology has a lot to offer, but believe-it-or-not, there are other better systems for overcoming mental health problems, yet I hesitated to work with any of them because I didn’t want to poke at whatever it was that was causing my panic attacks. In any case, one of the most commonly used ways of overcoming a mental health issue in other areas of the world from Asia and Africa, Australia and Russia, to Central and South America is trance and brainwave entrainment.
In the west, when we talk about trance, most people think of hypnotherapy. My daughter, Lydian and I (she and I work together) both studied hypnotherapy and got certified and we got a lot out of our program, but there are serious limitations in hypnotherapy…fewer limitations than in regular psychology. The limitations definitely complicate how hypnotherapy can be used. One of the complications is that you need a good, skilled hypnotherapist who can pace with you and who really understands and cares about your issues. Also, you have to find a hypnotherapist that you can fully trust. This is hard to find. But trance is something that happens to us naturally all the time. The trick is to access trance states using intentional brain-entrainment like steady drumming, for example, or randomly flickering lights.
For me, panic attacks completely abated when I took Ayahuasca about a year later for an entirely different problem that hijacked my life so completely that I forgot about my fear of panic attacks and did a midnight ceremony involving a 2 hour temazcal and Xananga followed by 2 doses of Ayahuasca. After that, the panic attacks were old news and I didn’t really think much about panic again until a few years later when that new and very serious trauma hit my life like a hurricane. It was this particular full-scale, life-wide issue that caused me to finally dig into trauma-informed therapy, what trauma is, and how the sacred medicines work to release trauma from the body. If you’d like to read the full story on what happened to me and how a major trauma finally pushed me to figure out my own negative effects from Sapito, click here.
In the end, I’m glad that I developed those panic attacks. It took me almost 10 years to follow the trajectory of my own recovery fully to a place where I understood why I developed this anxiety disorder and what I should’ve done to overcome the problem (had I better understood the underlying cause). Without the panic attacks, I wouldn’t have this information now about what to do if you develop negative effects. Ayahuasca, Iboga, psilocybin, Sapito, San pedro, and other sacred medicines can all cause negative effects if you take too little and then fail to follow-up with additional doses of the sacred medicine to “pull the trauma through” (as Lydian and I say) to a place where your left-brain is able to dialogue fluently with your right-brain about the trauma.
Most shaman know exactly how to work with people in their tribe and the surrounding villages, but modern man is a different sort of beast. We are very oriented toward logic and the left-brain almost to a fault. This part of the brain and our thinking is highly developed while our right-brain, felt-sense is atrophied and we literally make fun of it. While people in tribal societies in forests, deserts, tropical rainforests, and other far-off locations rely to a great extent on their intuition and this particular way of “knowing” that involves the body and how the body feels, modern man in the industrialized world won’t commit themselves to a fact without checking their smartphone first to make sure they have the “correct” answer based on consensus knowledge and what we regard as “logic”. So when people go out into the rainforest to work with a sacred medicine, they’re working with people who have a very highly developed somatic / right-brain sense of correct and incorrect, but these people don’t really have the vocabulary or the logical knowledge to explain how they know or what they know to an industrialized person in the modern world. This can be and often is okay and fine. But for people who are very left-brain oriented (most people in the industrialized world), verbal descriptions and detailed explanations about an intuition or “felt-sense” is necessary or else the sacred medicines simply “don’t make sense”.
Trauma is defined as any event that is incomplete and disturbing to the person experiencing it. An incomplete “love movement” (or effort to give love where the final result is that the love is not properly received) is viewed as traumatic in Constellations therapy, for example. In the trauma-informed therapy world though, trauma is anything that ends badly in the subjective sense, no matter how mundane that event seems to another person. If something happens to you and you can’t fully process it for one reason or another (some people have physical or nutritional issues that make it hard for them to process even very mild trauma in the industrialized world), then you’ll end up with trauma that lodges itself in your autonomic nervous system. This can cause both physical and emotional health issues.
Trauma release is a physical process. Every person’s body is endowed with what we refer to as “human-tech” that makes it possible to off-load trauma permanently and intentionally. Intentional and directed eye movements (known as EMDR) during a waking state that mimic the Rapid Eye Movements back-and-forth of REM sleep is just one example of this human-tech. Trauma-informed therapies are therapies that acknowledge the “felt-sense” or physical experience of emotions in their therapeutic methods. The sacred medicines go even another step further by counseling you directly through your own internal experience while simultaneously tweaking and manipulating your spinal column, your eye movements, your internal temperature, facial expressions, and other body movements so as to release and integrate trauma so that this trauma becomes a source of wisdom.
With this in mind, consider the sacred medicines and their negative effects. Ayahuasca negative effects often result from the mere fact that people in the modern world who take this medicine after a buildup of decades of trauma, need more than one or even three doses of this medicine in order to get to a state of okay-ness. Ayahuasca (or psilocybin, or any of the sacred medicines) goes to work on a modern person who comes into the ceremonial setting without a very well-developed container for this type of internal experience. Modern humans ignore most, if not all, of our felt-sense, right-brain abilities. We are often overloaded with trauma to a very high degree and we literally don’t have access to intuition. What would be intuition is clouded by experiences from the past that have not been fully processed which causes us to repeat the same trauma over and over again in our present-tense lives. An 8 hour Ayahuasca trip can only accomplish so much to release trauma that’s been building up for decades in the autonomic nervous system. Psilocybin is an even shorter trip at 4-6 hours so less work gets done with psilocybin than with Ayahuasca if we were just looking at these two medicines in terms of trip-length as a rudimentary measuring stick. Though iboga is a much longer trip that lasts up to 36 hours, most people who take iboga are working on issues related to neglect or attachment – traumas that were repetitive or that a person experienced over the course of a long period of time. Iboga / ibogaine is a necessary sacred medicine for people with severe forms of trauma that impacted them on a nearly daily basis, but most people aren’t willing to take iboga more than a few times in their entire lives. The one-off traumas need to be dealt with using Ayahuasca or psilocybin. People who can’t access Ayahuasca can do two psilocybin trips in a row to get through material that requires a longer “conversation” with the sacred medicine than just one trip.
If you’ve had negative effects from Ayahuasca, psilocybin, or another sacred medicine, then, like me, you probably won’t be willing to give those medicines another try right away to overcome those effects. That’s a natural reflex. If you took Ayahuasca once or perhaps three times and then developed heart palpitations, it might seem like Ayahuasca is the bad guy. But that’s not the case. Heart palpitations after Ayahuasca develop if you don’t finish working through a trauma that involved the fight-or-flight (sympathetic) branch of the autonomic nervous system. If, on an Ayahuasca trip, you began work on a trauma that made you feel like running away or fighting for your life, and you failed to complete this work, you might develop heart palpitations that seem to randomly occur in your present life (though in fact, they are probably set off by a “trigger” to borrow the vocabulary of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / PTSD). You might be able to understand logically what I’m talking about in terms of trauma and negative after-effects from Ayahuasca or psilocybin, but because modern humans lack a container and a model that can easily and succinctly explains how the sacred medicines work, you would likely be better served by working with a tech-based trauma-informed therapy to release trauma (like brain entrainment or EMDR) to address trauma that was not entirely “pulled through” by a sacred medicine trip. You have to pull trauma through from your body / felt-sense / right brain hemisphere into your left-brain and be able to describe this trauma in words to fully integrate your experience as a modern human being with a big and very demanding left-brain.
When Lydian and I talk about “pulling trauma through” to the left brain, we’re talking about putting words to a felt-experience in the body. We used heart palpitations after Ayahuasca as an example, but there are many uncomfortable physical experiences that modern-ers develop as a result of working (too lightly and without a container or model) with the sacred medicines. To the modern man, heart palpitations are physical and not emotional. This is how our experience of the body and mind has been organized for us by institutions like the media, the healthcare system, and the educational system. But in fact, heart palpitations can feel very much like dying or like you’re going to die. And this “felt-experience” of a heart palpitation is what your left-brain needs to know about. You have to square up with the felt-sense of physically and emotionally negative effects after Ayahuasca or psilocybin or any sacred medicine in order to put the felt-sense (in our example, heart palpitations) to rest. Psilocybin is a great teacher for “pulling things through”, but for anyone with a major trauma who has worked with psilocybin on a limited-trip basis (where their relationship with psilocybin was limited by a retreat-experience, for example) with negative effects afterward, “pulling the trauma through” fully if the trip did not last long enough to complete the work load for a given trauma is going to require a trance state, brain entrainment of some kind, and EMDR work. When a client comes to us to try to release trauma that has been “left dangling” like a thread that’s been pulled only halfway through a pillow such that it irritates the face and body when you try to use it, we work with various methods to “pull the trauma through” fully. For some clients, we also do breathwork and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) or even shamanic journeying to pull material through from the right brain to the left brain.
Many of our clients who work with us to do EMDR and brainwave entrainment technologies have had negative effects after Ayahuasca or another sacred medicine, go on to work with the sacred medicines again in the future. Once a person has released a trauma that’s been hanging there as something that’s “half-in and half-out” and not fully “pulled through” their confidence in the sacred medicines is restored and the container they were lacking becomes more defined. The model of the sacred medicines starts to function again in terms of the body’s felt sense. A modern human who works with the sacred medicine in this way can make their lives better using both logic as well as “felt-sense” wisdom.
To schedule EMDR and brain entrainment sessions with us to get rid of negative effects from Ayahuasca, psilocybin, or other sacred medicines, contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com or schedule with us through our health coaching session portal at this link.