I just got back from a two week-long retreat in the Peruvian jungle. Was I there for the food? The wildlife? For sightseeing or backpacking? No. I traveled down the Amazon and into the jungle for healing and self-inquiry/spiritual medicine, a realm of exploration with plant medicines, where our allopathic, big pharma systems of symptom-chasing medicines are out of their depth.
How do we in the US typically use medicines? For alleviating disease, [dis-ease or dis-comfort, the state of not being comfortable, or not being at ease]. Medicines developed within Western allopathy are most often designed to treat symptoms. You have pain in your back, take pain-reliever and hope the pain goes away. You have anxiety, take Xanax. You can’t sleep, take a sleeping pill. You have high blood pressure, take Lisinopril to artificially regulate your body’s response to stress. Yes, these medications alleviate symptoms, but they do so in isolation. They are bandaids designed to treat specific symptoms. But do they help discover or resolve underlying causes? No.
As a middle-aged male in middle-class White America, I’ve been exposed to and using medicines like these for most of my life. They are a quick fix: Pop a pill and get on with your life. But is treating symptoms really effective, or does it simply make one dependent on these medications? What about changing lifestyle habits or other underlying behaviors that lead to the symptoms that bother us? Can we go even deeper, to our core, to the root cause of what ails us with a simple pill? There is none that will do that.
Inner Work
I went to the jungle to work on my inner self with the help of ayahuasca. I’m grateful for the expert help of Shipibo shamans whose families have been using plant medicines for thousands of years. Since before big pharma, before the industrial revolution … before Europeans arrived and invaded the Americas. What is this inner work? It’s not easy, and takes time and sacrifice. It’s certainly more of an investment than popping a pill. Yet this is where so many Americans today are finding psychedelics helpful – these are people who are brave enough to embrace discomfort and do the inner work. Why are we drawn to these ancient medicinal practices? Because in America many of us suffer from maladies that popping a pill can’t fix. For many it’s a spiritual disease, or a lifestyle disease that surrounds us, as we are embedded in our culture. For others it’s deep-rooted PTSD from war or other significant trauma. Psychedelics, unlike the pill-a-day regimen, help us take a deep dive to discover, and to begin to heal, the causes of our ailments.
How did I get here? As I entered my early 50s, I had been through the corporate career, had been married and fathered a child, had played the materialistic game of cars and houses, and had suffered from addiction. All very common experiences for a white middle-class male in America. But being on the other side of these rites of passage, I was still not happy or fulfilled. Why? Because mainstream American culture does not exist to make a person truly happy or fulfilled. It functions to distract one from true happiness and fulfillment. Mostly it distracts with money and the allure of possessions. A bigger house, a shinier car, and more and more and more. But these things are superficial and don’t really serve us. They just keep us chasing more money and more possessions. And for so many Americans, they lead us to continue popping pills to deal with the anxiety, the insomnia, the hypertension.
Why did I go to Peru? To better understand myself, to explore and discover my internal world and what’s holding me back, to connect with my heart, to better understand myself in relationship with others. To discover and begin to heal the causes of my existential ailments. Not because it’s a 5-star, first class experience. In fact, most first-world, Western distractions are stripped away. In this way the experience gets one closer to their True Self, by minimizing distractions. This is one of the most beneficial aspects of an ayahuasca retreat. Stimulants like refined sugar, caffeine & alcohol are gone. In this way, the psycho-physical stimulation and resulting mental clutter are minimized, giving space for participants to more completely experience the subtleties of the medicine and get closer to their True Self. Through this process, deeply-buried and habitual ideas about one’s self and the world can surface, allowing one to examine them and ask if they are really helping anymore.
In the middle of the Peruvian jungle I found spiritual medicine – an antidote to the superficial impulse to treat symptoms. I was fortunate to experience firsthand a traditional plant medicine practice that went deep into my being, and gave me space to do the important work of inner healing and self-discovery.
What do you feel called to explore?