<story><title>Could ayahuasca have health benefits?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41333172</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dnc</author><text>While I was on a retreat this year in a Peruvian village, I was told by several natives (Shipibo people) that, by their tradition (some estimations are that Shipibo tribes have been using Ayahuasca for millenias), Ayahuasca is orally taken in healing ceremonies by their shamans only. Traditionally, in the normal course of a healing ceremony, it is not a patient who takes &amp;#x27;the medicine&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;the plant teacher&amp;#x27; (Ayahuasca), but the shaman in order to learn from the plant what his patient illness is and how to go about healing it. Also traditionaly, Ayahuasca is taken during shamanic training (which takes years, if not a whole life) as a part of a special and very strict diet that can last between several weeks to a year or more, depending on a plant that one is dieting. During the diet shaman apprentice is supposed to take Ayahuasca, but only at the beginning and at the end of the diet, if it is a short one, or every once in couple of months if the diet is longer. The diet is a way to become familiar with the plant and learn what it has to teach you and Ayahuasca, the teacher plant, is used as a sort of a learning facilitator. From my understanding, a practice of organizing Ayahuasca ceremonies and giving the brew to foreigners in exchange for money has been relatively recently established with rising popularization of Ayahuasca and demand for it from abroad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Could ayahuasca have health benefits?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41333172</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nowherecat</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>