Loss of meaning in life, apathy, boredom … Depression is a real scourge of modern society. In search of means for returning a person to inner harmony, scientists turned their eyes to one of the most mysterious plants known to mankind – ayahuasca.
We do not know when the first people of the South American continent noticed the unusual properties of one of the many jungle lianas, but for many generations the indigenous people of Peru and Brazil have called it “spirit liana”. In the Quechua language, “aya” means “spirit”, “vaska” means liana.
Locals say that Ayahuasca is the queen of the plant world. But the queen is not in the sense that she commands, but in the fact that she has the greatest wisdom, sees the essence of the processes taking place in the Universe, and, like a mother, takes care of the planet Earth and is ready to take care of every creature that comes to her, – to discover the secrets of the universe, to show the path, walking along which, you are filled with life and energy, to show the connection of all living things on earth and the joy of being.
Since ancient times, they communicated with Ayahuasca both directly – being “face to face”, or rather, “facing the stem”, and through physical contact – they ate leaves and pieces of bark, brewed a drink from the spirit vine. In our time, people have lost touch with the Earth, and the only way of communication in which people can hear and understand the plant is to boil and drink ayahuasca drink.
Scientists don’t believe that plants have a consciousness of their own. But they became interested in the famous spirit vine. Research into the effects of Ayahuasca on the mind and body has been conducted over the past decades, and the results are encouraging.
The Federal University of Brazil (UFRN) conducted a three-year study of 29 people who had previously unsuccessfully taken at least two antidepressants. The study found that 64% of the participants in the ayahuasca group for a week improved their condition. In the placebo group, there was a 27% improvement. Subsequently, stable remission was observed in 36% of the participants in the ayahuasca group and only 7% in the placebo group. Ayahuasca has done what modern antidepressants cannot do.
Barcelona-based Spanish pharmacologist Jordi Riba, who has been researching ayahuasca for nearly 20 years, says: “With traditional antidepressants, symptoms start to improve after three to four weeks. With ayahuasca in our study in Brazil, symptom improvement was observed within hours after a single dose, and the effect persisted for three weeks. ”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 322 million people worldwide are living with depression, up 18% from a decade ago. This accounts for 4.4% of the world’s population.
Nativos Global organizes ayahuasca retreats in the jungle of Peru. We inquired about the motives of people who decide to travel so far from home to experience Ayahuasca.
“People come to us with a variety of questions. Someone needs to heal the body, someone needs to solve family problems or understand themselves, get out of states of depression, boredom, find a new direction in life. Many are interested in self-development, spiritual practices, mindfulness practices and shamanism. There are people who have a purely applied interest – to improve attention and memory, to increase the effectiveness of actions in their business, to find inspiration for creativity.
Despite the fact that the requests are so different, Ayahuasca helps everyone who comes open to new things. A retreat is a deep work on oneself, in the process of which old emotional traumas of the past emerge, habits that prevent one from living efficiently, and internal conflicts. Ayahuasca helps a person to “separate the wheat from the chaff” – to reconsider his life, remove “mental garbage” and start enjoying life just like that. In parallel, ayahuasca works with the body – it cleanses, heals and fills with vital energy. ”
On the Nativos Global blog, people who have completed ayahuasca retreat share their personal experiences and knowledge gained from ayahuasca. The impressions are very different, but almost all of them have one thing in common – a meeting with ayahuasca is described as an event that changed life for the better.
This article was created using the scientific publication Dráulio B Araújo. Rapid antidepressant effects of the psychedelic ayahuasca in treatment-resistant depression: a randomized placebo-controlled trial. Cambridge University Press, 2018, and contributions from the Nativos Global team.
