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Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#31

Post by nowherecat »

Having had frequent ceremonies over the course of several months I stopped drinking the tea, because I find it is not helping being pulled from one extreme into another. Our western way of life makes it very difficult to integrate the profound experiences that one can get through this medicine and it requires major commitments to change..and it requires good helpers and facilitators. We, as westerners, are often times not equipped to integrate this lost wisdom into our lives. I know it is said it is not addictive but I know enough people that at least appear dependent on it and swear by it being the solution.

I personally believe that meditation and journeying inward without drugs brings about insights of a similar magnitude in a pace that we can cope with and integrate what we learn without jojo’ing between bliss and depression.

Ayahuasca has its place. It definitely helped us experience that there is much more to life than the material. But in my opinion I t’s a sledge Hammer that helps crack hard nuts or sets a direction. The work has to be done by oneself and the risk with ayahuasca is that one just keeps drinking the tea, thinking that that is enough.

Apart from that it is quite dangerous nowadays to do ceremonies with traveling “shamans”, because a lot of them don’t even brew the tea themselves and oftentimes facilitate in a way that it is bound to go wrong at some point.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#32

Post by odammit »

andai wrote: post #25
virtualwhys wrote: post #13

> Could psychedelic drug ayahuasca have health benefits? Certainly, anecdotally I kicked a very strong 20 year coffee and sugar habit after doing a 3-day retreat in Latin America this past winter. Just happened naturally, oh, I don't need this daily coffee and sugar fix anymore. On the flip side, as the article mentions, the psychedlic tourism industry as a whole doesn't have formal safe guards in place for when the…

Can confirm, addictions to sugar, caffeine, alcohol and cannabis evaporated during my trip and did not return for many weeks. I had never felt so peaceful and balanced in my life. Whereas previously I was trying to escape chaos with substances, now consuming substances would only serve unbalance me. I felt like, wow, this is what a human being is supposed to feel like! When you face what is within you, and process it…

This is interesting. I only know one person that’s done it and he said the same thing. Kicked all the habits. I didn’t know him before his trip so I assumed he was kind of full of it.

Based on my escalating coffee bill maybe I should give this a swing...

So are the hallucinations ever “fun”? I’ve dabbled in other things and it has generally been very video game like kidjoy. All ayahuasca hallucinations I’ve read about have sounded terrifying.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#34

Post by nicodjimenez »

Psychedelics provide a incredible jolt to the system (at least that's what they tell me) but if they do provide health benefits I believe they are short term, similar to traveling to another country or doing something unusual with your life. On the other hand, people that take psychedelics too often tend to have long term negative consequences such as anxiety or become dysfunctional in other ways. It's very hard to have nuanced opinions these days, but I think society in general needs to come to terms with psychedelics, the dangers they present, the novel experiences they enable, and some mental health benefits they may enable.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#35

Post by hal9000xp »

virtualwhys wrote: post #13

> Could psychedelic drug ayahuasca have health benefits? Certainly, anecdotally I kicked a very strong 20 year coffee and sugar habit after doing a 3-day retreat in Latin America this past winter. Just happened naturally, oh, I don't need this daily coffee and sugar fix anymore. On the flip side, as the article mentions, the psychedlic tourism industry as a whole doesn't have formal safe guards in place for when the…

> I don't need this daily coffee and sugar fix anymore.

In the same way, some people just stop being "addicted" to life in general after strong trip. Some of them decide to commit suicide.

Just yesterday, I've been in party and one guy told story of his friend who committed suicide after such trip.

The big problem with psychedelics is that you can't predict in which way a trip could change you.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#36

Post by afro88 »

A negative anecdote: a friend of a friend of a friend went on a retreat and did actually lose his mind. He needs help and probably will for the rest of his life.

Just putting it out there for some balance. I’ve heard my fair share of positive anecdotes too.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#37

Post by avenoir »

jack_pp wrote: post #5

I don't have any evidence of this but I stronly suspect that doing regular meditation will reduce the chance of bad trips or atleast let you deal with them much better. I'm saying this in case someone decides to experiment with DMT or other halucinogens, you should seriously consider trying meditation as a prerequisite.

Interestingly, I've been reading that traumatic/bad trips are actually the most healing because they often reveal inner, subconscious struggles and repressed feelings that haven't been adequately dealt with.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#38

Post by openfuture »

R_haterade wrote: post #6
jack_pp wrote: post #5

I don't have any evidence of this but I stronly suspect that doing regular meditation will reduce the chance of bad trips or atleast let you deal with them much better. I'm saying this in case someone decides to experiment with DMT or other halucinogens, you should seriously consider trying meditation as a prerequisite.

Anything specific practices you recommend? I'm not interested in ayahuasca, but meditation has been on my list for a while now.

Nadishodana.

My reasoning: The idea of energy in the body is a very general concept that many different traditions have discovered independently (prana and qi are examples). Most people scoff at the concept but if you progress far in yoga or martial arts the metaphor makes sense and from a western perspective cells need energy to do their thing and that energy requires oxygen, nutrition and blood flow or some means of travel. The better your bodily awareness the more you can feel if a part of your body is cut off from the flow of energy.

Anyway to make a long story short nadishodana is a meditation practice designed to clean the "nadis" or energy channels in the body. Any psychadelic will greatly improve your bodily awareness to the point you will hallucinate vision of your energy flow. Ayahuasca especially helps with cleaning your body and breaking blocks in the energy flow, the more it has to clean the more you will need to change and the "trip" will be more hardcore.

I base this line of reasoning on anecdotal experience with using microdoses of psychadelics along with meditation to treat swelling after exercise and from having tried Ayahuasca and DMT before.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#39

Post by ianai »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #34

Psychedelics provide a incredible jolt to the system (at least that's what they tell me) but if they do provide health benefits I believe they are short term, similar to traveling to another country or doing something unusual with your life. On the other hand, people that take psychedelics too often tend to have long term negative consequences such as anxiety or become dysfunctional in other ways. It's very hard to h…

Considering the US still throws people away for going near drugs I’d say the pendulum doesn’t need to swing further the same direction.

Re: Could ayahuasca have health benefits?

#40

Post by b222 »

te_chris wrote: post #8
R_haterade wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything specific practices you recommend? I'm not interested in ayahuasca, but meditation has been on my list for a while now.

Install an app and start - Headspace is popular and easy to get going with. There are lots of different practices, sure, but it's a lot like jogging: you don't need to learn a lot of technique, just need to get up and do it.

Do you need an app to go to the toilet, too?
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