Ayahuasca as an Addiction Treatment: Shamanic Visions to Cure Your Addiction?

Traditionally used in shamanistic ceremonies in the Amazon basin, ayahuasca is now also used to help people overcome addictions to drugs and alcohol.

Ayahuasca is concocted from a mixture of boiled banisteriopsis caapi vine and leaves from the chacruna or chaliponga shrubs. Boiling this combination of vines and leaves together produces as brew containing the potent hallucinogenic substance, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) that is able to cross into the blood brain barrier to produce psychoactive effects.¹

What Does Ayahuasca Feel Like?

Ayahuasca induces a visionary state of consciousness. For a few hours after you take ayahuasca you experience rapid thinking and hallucinations which are multi sensory in nature (not just visual). Most people will experience a purging at some stage, either intense vomiting or diarrhea, but this purging is considered to be a spiritual cleansing and a necessary part of the ritual journey.  Although ayahuasca can induce feelings of ecstasy, it can also induce feelings of terror and hopelessness and a genuine fear of imminent death. Ayahuasca unlocks the experience of all emotions, both those we consider to be positive and negative - although in an ayahuasca experience, no emotional experience is value-judged, as they are all teachable and important parts of the experience.

Ayahuasca deadens sensations in the body and some people find it brings a heaviness to their movements. Although the drug induces very potent hallucinations, it does not impair cognition and you are fully alert in the moment.

Because of the intensity of the experience and the physical side effects, ayahuasca is not something that is likely to be abused for recreational purposes.

The Philosophy Behind Ayahuasca as Addiction Treatment

Although traditional cultures had used ayahuasca as a healing agent for thousands of years and had been using it to treat cocaine and alcohol addictions long before the modern world took notice, it wasn’t until a French doctor, Dr. Jacques Mabit, spent years in Peru the early 80s studying plant medicines as an apprentice shaman that the outside world really became aware of this hallucinogen’s potential.

Dr Mabit is the founder of the Takiwasi addiction treatment center in Peru and a trained ayahuasca healer who has participated in the treatment of literally thousands of patients with debilitating addictions to drugs and alcohol. The philosophy of his treatment is based on a study of the traditional uses of ayahuasca, his personal experiences with the drug as a consumer and as a shaman healer and his decades of experience working with addicts at his treatment center in the jungles of Peru.

Dr. Mabit believes that addiction arises as people search for meaning in a modern world that has been stripped of meaningful ritual and sacredness; where many no longer feel a sense of belonging or participation in the spiritual or transcendent realm of life.

Traditional people will often use psychoactive substances like ayahuasca as tools to gain access to the spiritual realm. What they find there during periods of altered consciousness makes sense through the lenses of a shared cultural framework and so what they take away from such experiences is recognized as real and important and lessons learned there can be integrated to good effect in ongoing life.

In modern society, most of us lack this cultural framework that would help us to understand and integrate transcendent experiences of altered consciousness. However, it is part of the human condition for all of us to seek out this transcendence and so we try, through various ways, to achieve states of altered consciousness that will bring us what we want. We search for happiness from without, rather than from within, and hoping to find it we take drugs and alcohol, gamble, have too much sex and eat very poorly among other things.

So, according to Dr. Mabit, it is not the seeking of altered consciousness that is the problem - since this is something all humans are want to do as they explore the spiritual realm - it is that we use the altered consciousness we create for ourselves so poorly that it offers us nothing lasting, and so the only thing we can do is strive to repeat and repeat and repeat again what we hope will bring us happiness. Unfortunately however, in doing so, we most often bring ourselves pain - such as drug or alcohol addiction.

But the answer cannot be total sobriety or abstinence from all psychoactive substances as this closes an avenue of access to ‘the otherworld’ or the spiritual plane. According to Dr. Mabit, then, the answer lies in the controlled and guided use of a substance like ayahuasca, which has little risk of abuse and which helps people find their own personally valid spiritual understanding as it also helps to open up and heal past wounds and roadblocks to growth and recovery²