Original subtitles

[Lori] Ayahuasca's just the doorway.

[Dave] Ayahuasca is a tool.

A healer who wants to use Ayahuasca

can do wonderful things with it.

[Gabor] Ayahuasca has got the power

to open up areas inside us that otherwise are inaccessible.

[Lori] Basically, it's a combination of two plants.

There's the Ayahuasca vine itself,

and there's another plant called Chacruna.

When you bring these two plants together,

the spirit of Ayahuasca can come in,

and it's my belief that the spirit

wants to help people.

[Dave] It's been talked about a thousand times before

is how did the indigenous people know

how to combine these two plants.

It's not a far stretch for indigenous people

to communicate with nature.

[Libby] I've lived my entire adult life on antidepressants

and I couldn't live in that state for another hour.

[Lisa] I did a line of heroin.

It was, like, this is the way that life is supposed to feel.

This is what I've been looking for

since I was a little kid.

[Shannan] I was depressed.

I always had suicidal thoughts.

I just knew that I had to get out

of that head space.

[Dave] Our society is sick. Our society is depressed.

And mass parts of the population have huge traumas.

[icaro music playing]

[narrator] Wikipedia defines Ayahuasca

as a brew made from two plants, Chacruna and the Ayahuasca vine.

It is used as a traditional spiritual medicine

in ceremonies among indigenous people

along the Amazon river basin,

but it is currently making its way out of the jungle

and into communities around North America.

In the 16th century, missionaries first encountered

South Americans using Ayahuasca in ceremonies.

They described it as the work of the devil.

Currently, Ayahuasca is classified

as a schedule one drug.

It is in the same class as heroin or cocaine

and is considered to be highly addictive

while containing no medicinal benefits.

[Lori] I had an injury to my spine.

So, I had three discs that were bulging

and one to the point that it had displaced

all the nerve roots and was beginning to leak.

It was really incredibly, difficult to walk.

I spent about eight months

not really doing much more than lying around.

And so I went to this ceremony.

I, you know, didn't really have much of an idea

of what was gonna happen, but there was some part of me

intrinsically that just knew that this was--

that this was gonna be helpful for me.

And so, I sat that night

and it changed the way I looked at myself,

my relationship to what was happening to me in the world.

It changed my relationship to how I related to the world.

It changed my relationship

with how I perceived how the world related to me.

It changed my relationship with... everything.

And that was the first step in, like,

turning things around for me.

[Adele] As soon as I drank the medicine,

I was really excited.

And I was told that I was God.

And I freaked out.

I thought, "No way. That can't be true.

I do not want that to be true."

And it kept showing me, "You're God."

And I thought there's no way.

So many people hate me, you know, if I'm God.

And they're gonna wanna blame me when things go poorly.

And then finally I relented

when I realized there was no turning back.

And I went on this journey of being God.

Until I was shown...

a collection of dead bodies.

And I was told, "You did that."

And I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I would never do that."

And then Ayahuasca said to me,

"Exactly. You're not God.

Stop pretending like you are.

Stop telling yourself you are.

Stop making it your fault

when other people in your life are suffering."

And so it was just like an immediate release

of this sense of responsibility for the pain those around me.

I'm not God.

It's not my fault they're suffering.

And I'm not the only person

who's responsible for helping them.

[Mauro] I think it was my fifth time drinking

that I had a really big, big experience.

And I said, "No way.

I'm not drinking Ayahuasca ever again. I'm done."

A lot of healing happened, but it was more the process

that I had to go through afterwards

that I really struggled with.

And the only message that I kept on getting was,

"If you wanna know what happened,

you need to come back and drink."

It was about me learning about myself

and relationship to my environment

and the process that I needed to go through to-- to heal.

And continue healing.

I would like to say that the medicine has...

revolutionized the way I lived and--

But it's not as easy as that.

It's not a panacea.

What it has done is it's given me moments

where I busted through something inside myself.

And on the other side of it, there was something connected,

which is the opposite of how I live most of my life.

I haven't undone all of that. That's gonna take more work.

But every time I do Ayahuasca,

I'm reminded that that's just

a set of things that I'm attached to,

and that if I'm willing to show up and open myself,

healing is not only possible, but its guaranteed.

I know I'm gonna go back to my life

and I'm gonna repeat some of the old patterns,

but I think I'm gonna repeat them less.

As soon as I drank the Ayahuasca,

a voice came to me and said,

"Whatever you see tonight,

go into your heart."

The heart, it's the spot of loving,

and acceptance, and trust,

and mothering and nurturing.

And if you can stay there

when you're dealing with all your daily affairs,

it's nothing but a loving, nurturing world.

It's when you drop that and you go up to here,

where most of us westerners stay,

where all kinds of fear gets manufactured.

And Ayahuasca said, "Get out of the head,

get down into the heart."

[Matt] Ayahuasca will tell you, "Here's the answer."

It made a big difference just in how I see the world

and how I see who I am in the world

and who I am in relationships with others.

It gave me an understanding of why behavior

that I don't like in myself is manifesting itself.

Ayahuasca is the medicine, and the surgeon is Dave,

and you put the two of them together and it was just bam.

[narrator] Traditionally, an Ayahuasca ceremony

is led by a shaman, a guide for the participant

on their journey with this plant.

I think it should be said first that for me the word "shaman"

is someone who has been practicing for 30 or 40 years.

A priest to their people.

Someone who has really mastered

the art of walking both worlds,

the spiritual world and this world.

Thirteen or fourteen years into this practice,

I'm by no means a master in this work.

I don't bring rain for my people,

so it's hard to call myself a shaman.

Vegetalista is probably the most accurate,

just people don't know what it means.

[narrator] Dave apprenticed with a Shipibo master

for 15 years in a small village in the Peruvian jungle.

The work that I do is going into the spiritual world

and communicating with spirits.

[narrator] During an Ayahuasca ceremony,

the shaman enters the spirit world

and works to move energies that are creating

sickness, imbalance, and disharmony.

In 2001, Dave travelled to Peru in search of his own healing.

I got in a bad car accident, went into a major depression,

and then my doctor put me on antidepressants.

I took one pill

and the next morning, I woke up, I said,

"Whoa, this is not my path."

And I went to Peru.

Travelled around Peru for three weeks.

Never heard anything about Ayahuasca.

And then I met this guy who said,

"I drank Ayahuasca.

Whatever you do, don't ever do it.

I cried in the corner, and I puked,

and I fought for my life."

And I said, "Tell me where to go.

I need to do this."

From that moment on, I was like

a laser-guided missile to find Ayahuasca.

[birds chirping]

[owl screeching]

[birds chirping]

I'll bet that-- I'll bet you we have a hundred dollars

of food bill a month on these horses.

Carrots and apples. Don't we, little guys?

-You get good treats. -You're lucky horses.

Oh, oh. Tsk, tsk.

[Linda] He was due January 12th,

but he came six weeks early,

in a big rush.

And he was pretty tiny.

I mean, when he came home,

he was just like a little skeleton.

Then when he was about a year old,

he started to show

that what he wanted was what he wanted,

and if he didn't get it,

he would have a fit.

[Dave] I grew up in middle-class

Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge.

My dad was a lawyer,

and my mom was kind

of stay-at-home with me for a while.

I have one older brother, one older sister.

Very, you know, run-of-the-mill kind of suburban family.

And I was very involved in athletics, sports.

Soccer from the age of three because my parents are British.

[Linda] I remember one time he didn't wanna come in

and he just flung himself on the pavement,

and was screaming.

And my neighbor was out, and she said to me afterwards,

"Why didn't you just give him a smack?"

And I remember saying, "If I ever smacked him,

I don't think I might be able to stop."

[Linda chuckling] So, I never smacked him.

Like any parents, they had their own thing going on.

My dad was very busy at work,

you know, he had a lot of responsibility.

And you know, there was times I didn't see my dad a whole lot.

You know, he worked from morning till late evening

and then he came home and worked more.

You know, we weren't religious in any way.

My dad used to make us go to Sunday school,

but you know, that didn't last long,

so we weren't, you know, a spiritual family.

[Linda] They went to Sunday school. That was it.

And as soon as they could get out of it,

they didn't go anymore.

[Dave] You know, at that point

I was interested in medicine.

Either become a doctor

or something along those lines.

I guess it was some part of me

that just wanted to help people.

And, you know, in our kind of family,

and especially in our town, doctors were gods.

I didn't even know anything

about energetic work or shamanism.

It wasn't even part of my scope.

[Dave chuckles]

You know, I don't think anyone in my town

of 5000 people in Pitt Meadows

would've heard the word of "Ayahuasca" at that point.

I kind of went around the world, you know, Africa, Asia.

Like I was, like, obsessed.

I had to see the world, you know.

And I think in a lot of ways that was the beginning

of my apprenticeship in a way.

I was, like, almost obsessed with studying religion.

So I read parts of the Torah, the Koran,

and studied the Bible.

I mean, I wasn't religious, but I was just fascinated

with people's belief of spirituality,

and then on top of that,

how people kill each other over it.

So I just wanted to understand people.

I think, at that point, I was starting

to understand my own beliefs.

I did believe there was something higher than me,

I don't think I had a name for it at that point.

After I came back from that, I mean, it was amazing.

I'd just seen a huge part of the world,

but I was full depression.

[Linda] He came back and he wasn't well.

And this is where it all kind of started.

He went to the doctors. He went to specialists.

And they'd all want to put him on pills or whatever,

and then that's when he got

into looking at the Chinese Medicine.

[Dave] I didn't leave my house for six months.

All my friends were buying homes,

and cars, and refrigerators.

And I had just saw the world and all this poverty

and all these people that were happy,

but impoverished.

And then you come home,

and people are on an hourly wage

and they just wanna make money to buy a new car, a new Camaro.

What is the point of all this?

I'm gonna go to my buddy's house and go--

go ride in his Camaro?

Like, I didn't like

the way our culture was living.

You know, I think the higher part of myself

knew that this is what I needed.

I needed some kind of catalyst in my life that changed

my whole perspective on how life is supposed to be lived.

Coming from middle class Canada, this stuff wasn't talked about.

But I knew in my heart I was here

for something else other than that.

And also, I just knew I needed something to shake off

the depression that would come in and out of my life.

[fireworks whistling and bursting]

[Dave] The New Year's millennium, I was, like,

at home in my bed.

And then I went to the doctor,

the doctor prescribed me antidepressants.

I took one pill, woke up the next morning,

threw the bottle away.

And that's when my healing journey started.

Once I started studying Chinese medicine,

I started to understand

that Chinese medicine has its strengths.

I also saw that the way it's being taught now

is that a lot of the spirit or magic was taken out of it.

So that's when I started reading about shamans in the Amazon

that use the natural world to heal.

[icaro music playing]

I was on this surfing beach up in Northern Peru called Máncora

and I met this guy and I told him

about my wish to drink Ayahuasca.

And he said, "I know where to go.

It's a twenty-six-hour bus ride over the Andes,

down in the jungle, in a place called Tarapoto."

Next day, booked my ticket, went there

and I drank Ayahuasca for my first time.

Can you put my shoe back on?

Being married to Dave, yeah, it's--

It's a--

It's a challenge.

It's not like I married an accountant, you know?

I support him 100% 'cause I know

it's his calling and his passion.

And he's very good at what he does.

But when people ask me, "How do you do it?"

And sometimes I don't know.

I honestly, I don't know. 'Cause it's crazy.

People like to romanticize the world of the shaman,

you know, a Hollywood shaman, and put him on a pedestal.

In traditional way of life,

the family would do anything in their power

for them not to be shamans because it was a lonely life.

And if you didn't do your job, the village suffered.

So it wasn't the job that people wanted.

If someone wanted to do this work,

he would say, "No."

It's not conducive to a normal life.

[Dave] As a facilitator in this work,

you're just a garbage man.

You're like the cosmic janitor.

You know, you're just going in there

and you're just cleaning up all the shit.

It's challenging.

We have two kids who want their daddy

and, you know, when he's away, they miss him, and--

Yeah, there's not a lot of people that go down this path

that continue to walk it, but it helped me,

so it was only natural for me to wanna help people.

I try to just keep the home fires burning

so he can go out there and do what he does,

but yeah, it's a lot of times,

yeah, I kind of feel like single mommy.

I had no knowledge of any other ceremonies going on

when I first started doing the work.

[Lori] At the time, I think we were some of the only people

in Canada working with these plants.

I didn't hear about other groups and circles and things.

When I first came into this work,

you know, here was Dave, who'd been down to Peru

and done a handful of ceremonies and then suddenly

was like, organizing everything

and being the helper in the ceremony.

[Dave] Lori and I have had a steady relationship

for 15 years.

Once I started to develop my own practice

and started to lead ceremonies,

she was the one that was by my side

and she was also starting to train herself.

So we worked very closely together

for the last 14, 15 years.

I never really had any idea

that I was gonna work with these plants.

There was a traditional diet with some master plants.

And it was like a seven-day isolation

in your tent in the woods.

And at the beginning of that process,

I couldn't move my head forward more than an inch or two

and then at the end, I could touch my toes.

And I knew, there's something here for me.

I'm gonna give everything I can to--

to really be open to whatever that is.

And I could see how much growth was happening in the people

who were participating in the ceremonies

and I just wanted to, like, be

some kind of support to help them

do that in a good way.

[plane roaring]

[Dave] Well, when I came back from Peru, I was--

I mean, I was excited about the medicine.

I thought it was a life-changing experience for me.

And I knew Ayahuasca was gonna be a part of my life forever,

you know, in the role of being a participant

and going to ceremony and receiving doctoring.

I didn't even know it was possible

for a middle class, white guy to apprentice.

It wasn't even in my consciousness.

I remember I asked him, you know, are you apprenticing?

And he was like, "Are you kidding me?"

I don't want anything to do with that."

He really said that.

[Dave] I was very excited to bring the medicine

and share it with people, and that was basically

what I thought my role would be,

would just be organize ceremonies.

There was a group of about 12 of us.

Just good friends that he had put together.

And he just really wanted the people close to him

and that he really loved to experience it as well.

[Dave] The first person I drank with was an apprentice,

and I brought him up to Canada.

He'd been apprenticing probably six or seven years.

And I started to work with him

over the course of, probably, a year and a half

drinking quite regularly.

But I had no idea that it was going to be

an apprenticeship of any sort.

That didn't come for a good year after.

I organized two ceremonies of 15 people.

Each of those 15 people told five people.

So we did another two ceremonies.

And then those people told another five people

and we did another five ceremonies.

And it exploded.

[icaro music playing]

And then I just started listening to his chanting.

And all of a sudden, I could pick up

what he was saying, so I started singing along.

Next step was like, "Why don't you come down to Peru

and meet his teacher?"

[icaro music playing]

[Dave] But I got stuck.

I was, like, "Do I really wanna go that path?"

You know, I started to read about some of the darker parts

of the work, the witchcraft,

the stuff that, in our culture, we're not really familiar with.

And I was like, "Really, do I wanna go that route?"

But I also just noticed that as my fear,

and it was really clear to me that this was gonna be my path.

And then it just exploded in terms

of the dedication that I had to put into it.

I was taking groups of people down to Peru four times a year.

And then staying on my own in doing isolation

for, you know, weeks afterwards to do my own work.

And then going back and forth.

[plane roaring]

[Dave] So, when people ask me to come to apprentice, I'm open.

But I'm realistic to know that out of ten people

that are gonna ask me, one or two are gonna make it.

So I tell people to just continue on with diets.

[narrator] A diet, traditionally called a dieta,

is a ceremony where the participant goes into nature

and ingests a master plant.

These plants bring knowledge and medicine to the vegetalista.

The medicine only comes through years of dieting,

years of working with other plants

to get the knowledge of those plants.

And the chants that have the most power

are the ones that are given to you

by the plants or by nature.

I have to see the whole picture in the person

and then I just wait for that moment

where a dream comes,

or whether that knowing inside that person

is ready to actually take it on.

And it's not two or three years. It's ten years.

This is a serious field of work.

It's about truly, truly, learning

the medicine of the plants and nature to help people.

You have to sacrifice a way of life,

you know, with the diets.

No sex. No salt. No sugar. No alcohol.

And if people get one thing from watching this film

is that this is not something to take lightly.

[icaro music playing]

[Dave] I have two apprentices right now.

The main apprentice I have is Mauro.

[icaro music playing]

In 2006, I came to the medicine for the first time.

I had no clue what Ayahuasca was and what the medicine entailed.

I've always been fascinated with healing,

you know, I'm a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine

for the last 20 years,

so I drank for the first time

and I was totally blown wide open.

[icaro music playing]

[Dave] I met Mauro ten years ago, I think.

He came to a ceremony I was assisting at.

He had a couple of big experiences

at the beginning and I didn't see him for a few years.

[Mauro] I had no clue what apprenticeship was,

what it meant to be a practitioner or what it takes.

And just started out me sitting beside him,

getting the people,

bringing the people to the washroom,

heat up the drum, get the medicine.

We'd go out on the dietas.

That's where the learning came.

[blowing]

This plant here is called ajo sacha.

We use this plant for, you know, stomach problems,

any kind of intestinal problems.

We use it for headaches.

Anything that we take, anything from nature,

we always offer up a prayer to the plant,

give thanks for allowing us to harvest the medicine

in a good way and use it in a good way.

So, before I pick it, I'm just going to pray to it and--

and offer some tobacco.

When taking elements from nature,

we use tobacco as our currency.

[Lori] In the practice of vegetalismo,

Ayahuasca is just the doorway.

You can access the worlds of all of the different plants

through the ingestion of Ayahuasca.

Basically, it's a combination of two plants.

There's the Ayahuasca vine itself

and there's another plant called Chacruna.

When you bring these two plants together,

the spirit of Ayahuasca can come in.

And it's my belief that this spirit

wants to help people.

They say that the knowledge

actually comes from the vine itself,

and the vision aspect of the medicine

comes from the Chacruna, the leafy plant.

They make layers with the Ayahuasca vine

and then a layer of Chacruna,

and the Ayahuasca vine in a really big pot.

And they fill it with water and it gets cooked down.

It's quite condensed.

And really, it's just a very strong tea of these two plants.

[Dave] It's been talked about a thousand times before,

is how did the indigenous people know

how to combine these two plants.

It's not a far stretch

for indigenous people to communicate with nature.

It's a far stretch for us,

'cause we live in our little boxes

and drive around in little cars on four wheels,

but when you live for 24 hours a day,

for generation after generation with plants and animals

and trees around you, eventually you're gonna understand

that they have spirit and they're gonna talk to you.

[Lori] The people who came in to work with these plants

for the very first time, that's how they did it.

They developed a capacity to listen to the natural world

and really understand it to the point

that they actually got to hear these plants speaking to them,

explaining to them, how to work with them.

It seems so farfetched for many of us

in the cultural world that we live in

which is disconnected, you know?

To most of the world, that's just a given

'cause that's just what they do. They don't even think about it.

It's not something that they

make an effort to connect with nature.

They're just a part of it, and we're a part of it too.

We just lost touch with that.

And it's something that, hopefully, we'll get back to.

[icaro music playing]

[Dave] When you open up the spiritual world,

all energy is capable of coming in.

Each person's trauma is gonna come up.

Each person's spiritual connection

is gonna come up.

So you have to be aware of the space.

The land that you're drinking on,

who you're drinking with.

We have to use protection.

[icaro music playing]

[Lori] Sage is a great plant for clearing out

any energy that is not for the highest good

of whatever situation that you're in.

It's an incredibly strong, clearing, cleaning plant.

The songs have its own defense to protect each person.

Perfumes.

[Lori] Whether its rose water,

or whether its Agua Florida

or whatever, you're putting it--

the energy of your prayer

and your chant into that to either--

Let's just clear this up right now and, like,

put some protection or just let's just change

this person's energetic field a little bit right now.

[Dave] Tobacco.

[Lori] Tobacco is an incredible plant.

I mean, all the indigenous cultures of the world

that I'm aware of, all revere tobacco as a sacred plant.

If you work with these plants in a way that is prayerful

and with intent, tobacco can do a lot of things.

And you know, we work a lot with tobacco in the ceremonies

to help move something that's just not moving.

[Dave] Tobacco is a great cleaner.

We use Mapacho from the Amazon,

but it doesn't have to be Mapacho.

Mapacho is very strong. That's why we use it.

I didn't like tobacco when I first started.

I had a really negative association with it

from my childhood.

Both my parents smoked cigarettes,

so that's the association that I had with it.

And then I started to work

and then I started to see the impact of tobacco,

the job that it does for you.

It does any job that you ask it to do.

Tobacco's like the vehicle carrying the charge

or the chant that you just did and it's a very powerful ally,

a powerful teacher.

It helps me get prepared

for the work I'm about to do on someone.

An intuition about the approach I need to take on the person.

It gives me a feeling of how the night's going to be.

It just opens up that connection.

I don't know if it's possible to do

an Ayahuasca ceremony without tobacco.

You'd be missing

a very important part of the ceremony.

You know, I think when it's used in a respectful way,

an intentful way, and a prayerful way,

then it carries the medicine.

But even said,

you gotta be careful because people still misuse it.

[puffing]

You don't wanna misuse any plant.

[owl screeching]

[mysterious music plays]

[Dave] This work is big work.

I encourage everyone to come to Ayahuasca

with a lot of humility and a lot of respect.

Really, to come from a place in your heart

with the mindset of wanting to learn.

It's gonna test you.

It's gonna take you

to places inside of yourself

that maybe don't feel comfortable, are painful.

This is what the plants do.

The plants take us there

for us to become conscious of it,

to learn from it and transform it,

bring light onto the shadow.

You have already asked, consciously or unconsciously

for healing, so how that healing comes to you

is not up for you to decide.

It's up to spirit. It's up to Ayahuasca.

It's up to Creator.

Sometimes we get into resistance when we ask for healing,

and the Ayahuasca takes us to that exact core issue

that we're going-- we need to transform,

and it's very painful.

We don't like the feeling.

We wanna move away from it.

We wanna distract ourselves

and we do that in our life.

So the more you're in the present moment tonight,

the more you're gonna receive from the medicine.

The mind has a very difficult time

being in the present moment.

It's going to constantly tell you

a bunch of stories that are not true.

It's gonna get you to tried to fidget

and move away from the present moment.

I'm here to work.

I'm here to take you into those places

that-- that need to be looked at.

The first two ceremonies were like a ceremony

of my best friends.

[Dave chuckles]

But my friends were also interested

in looking at their stuff and doing the inner work

so that we started drinking together regularly.

[Rosie] To be honest, there was ambivalence,

'cause I really had no idea what to expect.

Which was probably a good thing.

[man] And so how was your first experience?

Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

It put all my fears right in my face,

and my neurosis and everything was right there.

And after it was finished, everyone else was talking,

and I was still so deep in my stuff

that I was just like, "I need serious counselling after this."

So the next night, I went and it was amazing.

It was beautiful. I really got some deep, yeah, insights,

and it was a different experience.

Kind of a pealing of an onion, and then I was very grateful.

I understood it more.

[Lori] There was a lot of enthusiasm

about the medicine,

a lot of people having transformative experiences

and a lot of hope and inspiration and ideas

and this whole brainstorming of vision started to happen.

Yeah, it was a very powerful time, I think.

I mean, I was young, I was 25 years old

and we were facilitating ceremonies for the people,

but also, we were doing smaller nights,

just a core group of us, working deep,

getting really deep into our process,

but also into our connection with each other.

[Lori] There was so much excitement

and wonderment in this community of people.

We had a group of--

There was about 14 of us that really, like,

were trying to create this bus to drive or something.

[icaro music playing]

And then, sort of, more and more people

getting exposure to these plants,

and what does that mean, and how can we do this work

and then more and more people doing different kinds of work

with these plants and, you know, people work with the plants

in a lot of different ways.

Fractures started to happen.

Differences of opinion.

Egos. Power. Control.

All of that started to happen.

You know, the group got split.

And, you know, it was a tough time

to have such a strong bond with each other

and then to all separate.

We all went different ways,

and it wasn't a bad thing in the end.

I think it was a good thing, for sure.

Yeah, no one really knew what we were in store for, I think.

[Dave] Ayahuasca is misused throughout the world.

You know, it's not all unicorns and butterflies.

Ayahuasca is difficult work.

We were all very naive about the work in a certain way,

in that there was nothing-- nothing bad could come of this.

When we started to sort of see other sides

and other pieces to the work,

it was very shocking and eye-opening for a lot of us.

[Dave] When people ask me about going to Peru,

there's a very, very short list of people

I would recommend, because everyone and their dog

can pour Ayahuasca for someone and claim to be a Shaman,

but very few people can actually walk into the spirit world

and bring people back safely.

In any kind of field of study, there's the good and the bad,

and you're gonna find that with Ayahuasca.

[Lori] The first experiences with Ayahuasca

are kind of like a love affair in a way.

Everything is so wonderful and great,

and then when all the realities of other pieces of it

start to come in, you know, the only way

to not be disillusioned is to go in with an awareness

that that will happen at some point.

I'm suggesting that, you know, if people are gonna

come into this work and be all enthusiastic

about doing this work to, like, take one step at a time

and move slowly so that you really are aware

of where you're putting your feet

before you get them there, you know?

I really don't think many of us understood

the implications of the work we were doing.

Like, there was no processing, no psychotherapy.

I was nowhere near understanding the true impact of trauma

and how that comes out in a ceremony, right?

[icaro music playing]

After that first night, I really felt I need counselling.

I needed-- I felt like I needed someone to help me unpack

all of what I had just seen and what to do with it next.

[Lori] The first ceremonies that I ever went to,

it was kind of like, "Okay, here we are and here's a cup,

and here, a drink."

And then at the end of the ceremony it was like,

"Okay, goodbye."

And a lot of people were like, "Uh..."

They needed more than that.

And I knew that what Gabor had to offer was the--

a missing piece in the work that we had been doing.

I think once I met Gabor, things changed then,

'cause I started to really see the need and the gift

that the processing can be around the ceremony space

and, you know, so I learned a lot myself from that.

[narrator] Gabor Maté is a physician.

He is widely recognized for his work

with childhood trauma and addiction.

His book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,

is a Canadian national best seller.

After the book was published in 2008,

I began to get all these inquiries

from perfect strangers.

"What do you know about Ayahuasca

and the healing of addiction?"

I said, "Nothing."

I'd heard about Ayahuasca

from an acquaintance once,

but really, I just dismissed it as mumbo jumbo.

The inquiries kept increasing in number,

but it began to feel like the universe

was knocking on my door.

So I participated in the ceremony,

and an hour into my first ceremony,

I understood why people were asking me.

Because it has got the power of the plant to open up

areas inside us-- our psyche that otherwise are inaccessible.

I got an email from a guy called Jeff, who said,

"My wife, she used to be a heroin addict,

who is now being maintained on methadone,

which an opiate replacement for heroin.

But she called it her liquid handcuffs."

[Lisa] I was looking at some serious jail time

for trafficking.

And I was able to get out of the charges

by agreeing to go on methadone.

[narrator] For 20 years, Lisa was a sex worker,

struggling with an addiction to heroin

and eventually, crack cocaine.

[Lisa] I od'd so many times.

I was given Narcan so many times.

I don't know how I'm alive.

I tapered methadone for six years

until I got to a point of about 40 mils.

And I was having psychotic breaks

from trying to get off methadone.

And I'm being sent to this doctor,

and that doctor and this--

What I'm hearing from all of them is,

"Lisa, think of it as your insulin.

Just accept."

It just wasn't sitting in my soul.

I still had to wake up every day and take something,

and ingest something.

[narrator] Libby, a small business owner in her thirties,

has been struggling with depression

since she was 16.

[Libby] I looked around at some point,

probably in my twenties, and went--

You know, where I was aligning myself

was with this group of people that--

high achiever, A-type, business people, professionals,

and I was trying to reach the top of that.

How I lived my life and how my life actually was

was totally separated, 'cause nobody could see my struggle.

I felt, like, emotionally I couldn't do it.

Like I couldn't live in that state that I was in

at that point for another hour.

I read Gabor's book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,

and thought, "Okay, I need-- I need to meet Gabor."

By then I trusted Gabor like he was, you know,

"All right. This is my path. I'm following Gabor.

So, if he's going there, I'm going there."

Found him, and just kind of said,

"Do you know anyone you could recommend

that does Ayahuasca?"

And he just gave me his card and said, "Email me."

[narrator] Shannan is a youth worker

also struggling with severe depression.

She believes this depression stems from childhood trauma

buried deep inside her subconscious.

[Shannan] I got really sick

and nobody could tell me why I was sick.

I just felt there's no diagnosis for what's wrong with me

because I just am full on traumatic experiences.

Like I don't have any more space in my body for any more trauma.

And so, you get depressed and you sleep all the time

and you hole yourself up in your house.

I have no sense of what I might uncover.

I hope I'm gonna uncover something,

because that would make sense

why I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling.

All of the research that I've done on Ayahuasca

say it's helpful for trauma, and maybe it will just help me

understand better the trauma that I do remember

or that's a part of my life every day,

which could take the load off a little bit, I feel.

I feel like this was something that I needed to do.

Like being pulled towards the medicine.

And whatever needs to come out

or needs to come up is welcome to do that.

That's the way I'm going into this.

I had just spent four years in social work,

and the week before I went on stress leave,

a little boy that I worked with almost the entire time

I was in social work passed away.

I signed off on the contract saying that I saw them fit

to take care of this little boy, and he went back

and he was there less than a month,

and he choked on his vomit in his sleep.

And that was enough for me.

I blamed myself for that for a long time.

And then I took a ten-day nap in the hospital.

Just my body completely shut off.

Part of what happens when people

are suppressing emotional reality

is that they're spending so much time

on a screen or the phones all the time.

Anything to take the awareness away

from what's actually going on in the body.

You know, I think that I use TV a lot

to disassociate from things.

I don't have really a drug addictive personality.

Um, maybe sex.

Definitely sex. Yeah.

People tend to push further and further away from the body

anything that can take them out

until the body's just gotta scream,

and these are the ways that the body screams.

Cancer's one example.

I went to the doctor, and he did a complete blood count

and found that I had all of the markers for leukemia.

Normally, when your doctor looks at you and says

that you could have cancer, people cry and are, like,

"Oh, my God! This can't be happening to me."

But I was just grateful.

I was, like, I have an out.

I have a legitimate out that's not gonna

hurt anybody's feelings.

I'm not going to make anyone uncomfortable.

"Thank you" was what went through my mind.

I just knew that I had to get out of that head space.

[mysterious music plays]

[Shannan] I have some intentions going into it,

but I have no sense of what I might uncover.

I'm just trying to keep an open mind.

[mysterious music plays]

[Shannan] So, the night started--

As I'm talking about this, I'm getting so scared,

which is what happened last night.

Um, I was clear that I was gonna let her in

and she needed to show me what I needed to see

and she gave me clear memories of past sexual traumas.

One in particular, when I was a small kid,

I was drugged when I was only ten.

[inhales]

The man made me drink hot chocolate,

and then I don't remember anything after that.

And I woke up in the morning, in his bed,

with him rolling over and his head hitting mine.

I had repressed that memory completely.

It seemed as soon as I would give myself

the love that I needed in that moment,

she would take me into the next thing.

And the next thing was so hard.

[exhales]

My dad committed suicide when I was ten.

And I really idolized him.

[sobs]

[whispering] I'm sorry.

[sobbing]

He was so funny,

always the life of the party,

but he had so much trauma in his own life.

The last two times that I saw him...

The one time, he had my mom up against the kitchen counter

with a knife to her throat

and there was me and my sister standing in the kitchen,

and I was just screaming for him to stop.

Just stop. Stop.

And that was the second to last time I saw him.

And the last time I saw him, he came to my youth group

to give me a suicide note to give to my mom.

And then three days, later he died.

[Dave] For everyone working with Ayahuasca,

it's going to bring up

the unintegrated part of ourselves,

or the shadow, the unconsciousness.

So however that looks for each one of us is different,

but at the root of it, it's all the same.

You know, it's lack of love.

Self-love, but even beyond that,

we have this disconnection that happens for us

with our parents from their own unconsciousness

that we're gonna take on.

So the trauma is-- is too severe and too intense

for the child to-- to cope.

So it just finds a way for your body

just to tuck it away somewhere.

Certainly, my work with Gabor

has allowed me to see that.

I'd always wanted to be a physician, a doctor.

I suppose healing people is the natural consequence

of the experiences that I endured

as a very small-- as an infant.

I was also quite conscious, that, um,

it would get me respect in the world,

but what I wasn't aware of is how much I was lacking

in self-respect.

So how much the title of doctor

and the respect that goes with it

were compensations for my own lack of self-respect.

Well, my first job as a physician

after I finished my internship

was actually in the downtown east side.

After 20 years of family practice,

I was really ready to move on when the invitation

came to work down there.

And it was almost like a natural fit

that I should go work in the downtown east side.

Because I was quite aware of how people can be made

to suffer for no fault of their own.

I was also quite aware of what it's like

to be ostracized and an outsider.

As a Jew in Eastern Europe, I knew that.

As an immigrant in Canada, I knew that.

I really resonate with the people

in the downtown east side.

I mean, I just don't feel that different from them.

I mean, I am different in many ways.

[narrator] Vancouver's downtown east side

is infamous across North America for its drug use,

poverty, mental illness, sex work, and homelessness.

[Gabor] There's a kind of a restless, authentic misery

about them that I could completely could resonate with--

identify with.

The intention of the Portland Hotel Society was beautiful,

which is to take the most helpless

and the most downtrodden and to give them a life

that at least is livable.

If you ask, "Did I help them stay healthier

or have less misery as a result of their addiction?

Did I give them some moments of understanding

and listening and empathy?

Did I look after their medical needs?

Did I approach their addiction in a humane manner

that made a difference to them?"

Yes, I did.

Did I help them overcome their addiction?

That would've been very rare.

That would take a whole revisioning

and reorganization of the entire treatment system,

not to mention the laws in this country.

[Lisa] So I started mixing cocktails at age 11.

That's when I began dulling it and saying,

"I can't handle this."

Tried cocaine by the age of about 14.

And I did a line of heroin, and it just, it was like,

this is the way that life is supposed to feel.

This is what I've been looking for

since I was a little kid.

It felt like safety and like I could--

I was okay.

Like the world was a safe place to be.

And I can do this thing called life.

[narrator] To afford her drug habit,

Lisa becomes a call girl.

This begins a spiral down

with her eventually working as a street prostitute.

Once I took methadone,

and couldn't get high on heroin anymore,

I was like, "Well, I need to get high on something."

And somebody at the meth clinic said,

"You know, have you tried crack? It works really well with--"

And I'm like-- Meth clinics are wonderful places

for honing your skills as an addict.

They're just lovely for that.

First of all, you have to break down the crack

with vinegar and water.

And I remember times taking, like, water out of a puddle.

The smallest things were the hardest to find.

Like a piece of cotton to pull the syringe through.

Like, who has that when you're out there?

I was always in stores stealing vinegar.

You put the crack in the spoon.

You break it up. You add some vinegar.

You add some water.

You heat it up. You put the heroin in.

You pull it through the syringe. Then you gotta put it--

The hard part is getting it in your vein.

If you miss the vein,

you get this big, burning bulge and you waste it.

You don't get well.

You don't get high. You've blown your money.

You have to go turn a few more tricks.

You're sicker. You're frustrated.

It's way better to do it, feel better, back to work.

[icaro music playing]

[Lisa] I didn't really understand what Ayahuasca was,

but I had a lot of trust in Gabor.

Really, is what it came down to.

His suggestion was for me to look at my past.

And I was like, "Really?

[chuckling] Like, you want that to be my intention? Like--"

And much to my surprise,

I went through this process of, like, a slide show.

It started with Gabor.

Then it went to the shaman that Gabor works with.

My husband.

It went backwards in my life from Sister June,

the lady in the recovery house,

the woman at my rehab, Sherry,

to nurses,

to doctors,

to crisis care unit workers.

But all the love that I've been shown and all the--

And it went back, back, back, back, back,

and it ended with my mom.

And the slide just stayed on my mom

for a really long time.

So, one thing that I say about Ayahuasca

is like you really, really, get what you need.

[car horn honks]

[Lisa] So for the last two years of my using,

I started doing crack intravenously.

I had very severe pancreatitis, hepatitis C.

My kidneys were shutting down.

I was about 80 pounds.

Missing my two front teeth.

My hair was falling out.

When I came in, I found out that I didn't have AIDS,

but I was pretty sure I did.

And I sure looked like it. That's my point.

I was not the girl

that you wanted to pull over and have sex with.

That's for darn sure. You wanted to run.

I was out on the street trying to get a trick to stop,

and a guy pulled up that knew me from when I was an escort.

And he's like, "Lisa?"

And I'm like, "Oh, who are you?"

So we went and picked up what I needed and we went to...

To me it looked like the Taj Mahal.

And I'm, like, just itching to get in there and use,

'cause now he's given me money

and I've gone and scored and got booze and this and that

and I'm, "Let's go."

He took another look at my physical condition

and said, "I'm gonna go check in,

and I'll come around and open the back door."

And boom. I'm right in the washroom.

I remember trying to get a hit, trying to get a hit,

and I had a crack pipe beside me,

and I was trying to wake up enough,

'cause I kept passing out.

And I tried to wake up enough with the crack pipe

and then do a hit and then, like, pass out again,

wake up, drink some booze.

Then boom, I come to.

And the police are there, and they're kicking me.

And not the first time I've been beaten by police.

I've been sexually abused by police.

I've been--

They put me under cold water

and they put my hands behind my back.

And this time, they didn't take me out the back door.

They paraded me through the lobby,

naked, blood dripping.

And I'd been humiliated so many times.

But something happened in that moment

of walking through that lobby,

where I saw

this ugly, pained, diseased, body

being walked out.

And I was looking at it,

where that was my disease,

and I was something

that was clean

and of divinity,

and there was something separate

from that physical manifestation.

And I never picked up again.

[Dave] We don't love ourselves.

I mean, that's the root of it, you know?

Our society is sick.

Our society is depressed.

And mass parts of the population

have mental disorders and huge traumas.

So what do people do when they're sick?

They're desperate.

Ultimately, it's just about people

just wanting to be fixed.

And I think that the western medicine--

I think it is so far gone. I think it's such a sick system.

They just say, "We can fix you with a pill"

or "We can take this part of your body out

and you're cured."

That's not healing.

Healing is the integration

of every aspect of our self.

Not a denial of a part of ourselves

or avoidance of a part of ourselves,

It's exactly what a pill does.

Or any kind of recreational drug.

It stops us from experiencing the whole of who we are,

which is the part of ourselves that we don't like to feel.

The unconscious. The sadness. The anger. The rage.

All of that.

[Libby] I've lived my entire adult life on antidepressants

and I had no understanding of what needed fixing

I just thought that I was broken.

I'd been thinking about suicide,

all day, every day, for months.

I'd driven into the forest to...

do that.

I had voice memoed a suicide letter.

[sobbing] So I'm not sure exactly what this is

or could quite possibly be

the lowest I've been in my life.

I feel completely alone.

I'm a bad person.

And I mostly just feel like, there's, like,

absolutely no end to this.

If Mexico doesn't work, there's--

I don't even feel like I can make it to Mexico.

I feel like I just need to figure out how to do it

so that no one finds me.

And I don't know why I'm making this

just to explain to people.

Like, explain why.

I can't feel this much pain for this long.

If anyone knew what this feels like.

I just wish I could talk to anyone.

I just-- I don't want anyone to think it's their fault.

It's not. It's me. This is me.

So, when I voice memoed,

I was trying to find a place

to hang myself in the forest.

But I wanted to not affect anyone else's life

with that trauma.

I kept thinking, like, what if it's a family?

It's gonna, like, just impact them so much.

And then I kind of thought, "Well, you can come back here."

Like, "You can come back here. You know where you're gonna go.

You have everything you need."

And I basically, just promised myself

that I would get to end it after Mexico if it didn't work.

I believed that there was just something wrong with me

and that it needed to be fixed.

And that how it had to be fixed had to come from within.

And that I had to be smart enough

and motivated enough to fix it.

My last-ditch effort was to go to this thing with Gabor.

If that didn't fix it, it was okay.

It was okay to kill myself, yeah.

And it wasn't because I hadn't tried.

I felt like I had tried for 20 years.

Going to Gabor's retreat,

somewhere inside me I felt like it would work.

[plane roaring]

[sad music plays]

[icaro music playing]

[Libby] The next day after the first ceremony,

I came in and said,

"Oh, that didn't work, nothing happened."

I just felt really sick and I felt poisoned.

And, "This is kind of ridiculous."

I was joking about the chanting a little bit

'cause I just felt like it was, you know, kind of funny, and--

I wasn't comfortable with that.

I would've preferred to have done Ayahuasca in a hospital.

And I just thought, "This is terrifying.

This is not contained. For me this is not contained.

Like, I don't want-- I want walls."

Gabor said, "Okay, what did you go in to the ceremony wanting?

Show me fear."

[rattling]

He just validated me and he said,

"Well don't you think--" I might cry.

[chuckles]

He said, "Don't you think

that the most, you know, brave thing

that you could do was to come here

when you didn't trust any of it?"

Showing you all the road blocks last night

was a really good way of showing you trust

because there was something you trusted.

And then everything else was fear.

It was true and I think I kind of needed that, like,

"It's okay to feel that. You're not wrong."

That's not funny or sad or bad or whatever.

And then the trust was built

between the relationships between people.

Myself and Dave and-- And that was--

That was the key piece,

'cause I don't think I trusted people.

[Gabor] In all the countries where Ayahuasca is used

as a teaching plant, it's not done

as a one-off ceremony with a bunch of strangers.

There's a communal basis for it.

So people know each other, and there's a shared culture.

Whereas here in North America, people come

to one or two ceremonies, and there'll be no processing.

There'd be discussion.

There'd be no preparation. No intention setting.

So I thought that's not the way it's meant to be.

And I thought, well, I just need to find people to work with.

[Dave] Gabor came to a ceremony that we did,

and I heard he was planning on putting together a retreat

using Ayahuasca and psychotherapy.

And he had gone to ceremony

with these two other practitioners,

and it wasn't his cup of tea.

[Gabor] I was introduced to Dave.

And once I did a ceremony with Dave,

I just knew that this is the guy I wanna work with.

Right after ceremony, I remember we put the candle on

and the two of us started talking

about doing a retreat together in two months' time.

[Gabor] There was just a kind of integrity and a humility,

a desire to serve the plant or the truth of the plant

that I just picked up on, so it just--

It was instantaneous. And that's how it began.

[Lori] Gabor and his work

brings a great deal of compassion

and a deep understanding of the human psyche

and how people get themselves into certain patterns.

Where does it all originate?

And he has a great skill in helping people

find that for themselves.

He has a really compassionate heart,

really, to listen to people.

He's been around a lot of suffering

on the east side of Vancouver.

He really holds that space

for people in an amazing way.

So I would just sit back and listen

to how he was processing and just watch how he would,

with a lot of presence, bring-- bring that out

and help the person.

[Daniel] Building on his many years as a doctor

and kind of a psychotherapist, although, he never trained

as a psychotherapist, he just kind of became one,

'cause he was the kind of doctor who listened to his patients

and who got interested

in their minds and their life stories

and started connecting the dots between the emotional lives

that people have lived

and the way they're experiencing their health now.

What makes me feel qualified is sheer arrogance.

I don't know.

[chuckles]

It's just something in me tells me what I can do and can't do.

I'm called to it,

and when I'm working in that space,

something happens for me

where I can see people

and I see what's in them.

And most of the time, I find the tone

and the language to help them.

And sometimes I don't.

So I need help myself sometimes.

So there are other people that work with me

to make sure that I'm giving people what they need.

[icaro music playing]

[Daniel] People go through all kinds of shit

in these ceremonies and they see things

they do not understand.

My mind is gonna take over

and make up a bunch of stories about it,

and sometimes they're really invalidating.

It's like, "There's something wrong with me, I'm doomed.

This didn't work. It's the Shaman's fault.

It's the medicines fault. There's no hope for me."

And at the heart of it, there's a lot of fear

that I can never really change.

He helps them to understand and accept

that the healing that's being brought by the medicine

when that can be hard to see.

[Gabor] What we conceived of is a retreat

where at least we create a temporary village.

Within 24 hours, people are sharing of themselves

in a deeper way than they ever have

with anybody in their lives.

And people are hearing each other in a deeper way

than they've ever listened to anybody in their lives.

And from that place then, we help people

set their intention for the first ceremony,

which then happens the second night.

And that's when the shamans take over.

[Lori] Our role is to go into the ceremonial aspect

of those retreats and work with the plants

to gain access to the vision to help guide people

deeper inside themselves and take them

as far as they are able to go.

And that can look like chanting

or doing energy work

or helping to bring a kind of energy

into the energetic field

to help move anything that doesn't belong there.

[icaro music playing]

People have lots of different sickness, and that sickness--

I mean, it's an energy.

So the energy is then there in the space,

and can it have an impact on the practitioners?

Can it have an impact on other things?

The first thing that, as practitioners,

we really learn about is how to protect the space.

A lot of times we're working with things

like really serious addictions, or maybe somebody has cancer.

All of these different sicknesses, they have an energy.

So that energy is a palpable, actual, thing.

So we're working to untangle and unwind and move that energy.

And in order to move that, we have to make sure

that it's not just gonna go around the space,

it's going to fill up the room

and the people are gonna be impacted by that.

You have to be able to protect it

and hold that space in a good way.

[icaro music playing]

The visions started out super sexual again.

And I was like, "Oh great, here we are.

We're in this, like, gross, sex-shamey space again.

Why am I here again?

Like, I don't have any issues with this.

What am I not seeing here? Like, show me something."

[icaro music playing]

[Shannan] So, then she opened up,

and in bright, Moulin Rouge style,

neon lights in the background, "You're a sex addict."

She started showing me visions of my parents

and their addiction.

There was no filters really

on what was happening in front of kids

and not in front of kids.

There wasn't a time when sex

wasn't a huge thing in my life ever.

She was like, "This was where it all blew up for you."

And I was working at a children's mental health place

and there was an IT computer guy that was working there.

And so, he was like really sweet and sent me flowers on my desk

all the time and--

Almost too sweet.

And then he took me out for coffee and he was like,

"We can date, sure, that's fine,

but there are other parts to my life

that, you know, you might not agree with."

There was something alluring there for me.

So we had, like, a bit of a bondage relationship for a while

and he's like, "I run an escort agency with my ex-girlfriend.

I want you to be a star. You could go so far."

And I was already in this, like, fucked up space

where he's beating me,

and fast forward three months later

and now he's got my sister involved in it also.

And he's like, "Let's do this porn website."

I have no idea how I let my sister

get wrapped up in that shit also.

Things got super crazy, and I was like, "Fuck it."

Like, "I'm not doing this anymore. I can't do this."

And I went home and I had a bottle

of some antianxiety medication,

and just fucking downed the entire thing.

[somber music plays]

And I don't think--

I don't know if I wanted to die at that moment

or if I was just, like, "Somebody help."

I don't know.

[sobs]

[sobs]

Oh, those images?

I did-- I tried so hard not to think about those things.

[chuckles]

And then fast forward.

I'm still doing that, but in just a different way.

I have a complete disregard

for who they are, how they treat me, anything,

as long as the sex is good, I'll stay.

It doesn't matter.

'Cause I'm getting whatever I need out of that.

[sniffles]

But not what I need here at all.

[sniffles]

She was clear.

That's stopping.

"Don't do that to yourself anymore."

I feel like-- Well, that's gonna be interesting,

because how do you not have sex?

[Shannan chuckling] You know?

It's not like I can be, "Oh, I'm addicted to heroin,

I'm never gonna touch it ever again."

And I just remember saying to her over and over again,

"Okay, I see all of this stuff, I get it,

but I don't know how to fix it."

And she's like, "It's okay. You'll figure it out."

I should have known that this was gonna be

what it was gonna be about,

because it's the one thing that I hate about myself.

I still feel like...

there's more in there.

[Dave] Well, the Gabor style retreat is--

it gives you the structure of the psychotherapy

and helps people to work

with what material has been brought up in ceremony.

So I'm there in the ceremony doing my job, which is to work

on the energetic level spiritually,

work with the physical body.

He really goes in there to the unconscious,

the ego, and the mind

and allows the person to really focus

on the intention that they wanna discover within the ceremony.

[Lori] We won't actually be present

for all of the processing of the people.

So, we're not even fully aware on that level

of what the person is working with

and so the people will come and say, "What did you see?"

And so we can share our perspective on that.

What's very interesting to me,

and this shows up over and over and over again,

is that whatever I find about somebody during the day,

as I'm speaking with them,

the same dynamic will be uncovered or recognized

by the shamans at night

when people aren't speaking at all.

They're just lying there.

The work that I do is going into the spiritual world

and communicating with spirits.

Any illness that someone has exists on this physical level,

but it also exists in the spiritual world.

So, with Ayahuasca and certain plants,

we can see the spiritual world and see the root

of that illness on a spiritual side of things.

[Gabor] We don't live in a very symbolic world,

we live in a very practical, technological world

while the visions that people experience,

or voices they might hear,

or the experiences they might have

are full of symbolism, full of the kind of meaning

that the verbal left brain has difficulty understanding.

So people have sometimes very deep, sometimes scary,

sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful experiences,

but they don't necessarily know how to interpret that

in terms of what that means for their lives.

So again, that's my work.

With each ceremony and with each day,

people go deeper and deeper and deeper.

So, at the end of three ceremonies

and the seven days that surround those three ceremonies,

people have had an experience of themselves

that's in some ways richer and more profound

than any other experience of their lives.

And it's certainly more instructive.

You know, the other thing that I would say

about the Gabor retreats is that we try to also provide

tools for people to help them to carry that into their lives

so that the work that they've done can reflect

in their day to day living.

[car horns honking]

[Dave] Well, the first thing that Ayahuasca does is,

it's a medicine, and it brings up the sickness.

And the sickness appears in the vision.

And as a trained vegetalista,

we're trained to understand the vision,

to work with the energy.

You'll see the spirit of the illnesses that come up,

the spirit of the trauma.

And it's up for you to-- to move this energy,

to work with this energy.

[Gabor] Really, it's an intentional community

with a deep shamanic experience,

around which the seven days are constructed.

There is people out there that they're like,

"If this doesn't work, I don't know what else I'm gonna do."

[birds chirping]

[Libby] I sat down and drank.

Probably within ten minutes I started--

Just the most beautiful visuals.

I looked down, there was

this beautiful, amazing, strong horse.

And I looked, and there were whip marks.

And I thought, "Oh, my God!"

Like, "What happened to this beautiful horse?"

Like, "Look at those whip marks, who's been doing that?"

And then I was told, "Well, that's you."

And I was horrified,

because when I was looking down at the horse,

I felt for the horse,

and then when it was me,

all of a sudden, I felt for me.

You know, I felt bad for me.

And sad for me.

And compassionate for me.

And then I was handed the reins of the horse.

You know, I was given the reins to this beautiful horse

that had gone through so much.

I just, basically, promised it. "I won't do this."

And then the horse disappeared and it was me.

And I was looking at me.

Physically me. Sitting there. On my mat.

I was looking at myself and I started bawling.

Like I just remember I kept trying to touch my own face

and I just said, "She's so beautiful."

[chuckles]

I was like, "Thank you. Thank you."

[birds chirping]

[Dave] Everything that happens to us as an adult

is a by-product about how we're taught

as children how to live.

And we go out and we learn things on our own,

but the choices we're making are largely based

on how we were taught as kids how to respond

and react in different situations.

As we start to work into people's psyche

and we start to see how as young kids,

when mother and father neglected them,

they isolated themselves.

They become adults, and what happens

as soon as challenges happen?

They won't open up.

[Libby] I definitely group up isolated.

We grew up in the middle of...

Yeah, the middle of nowhere.

I was home schooled.

My dad worked twelvish hours away

and would be gone for months.

And my mom took care of my brother and I.

My parents were...

The nice way to put it is homesteaders.

The other way to put it would be, like, survivalists.

I had never connected with the feeling

of being isolated as a child.

I felt like I was a social child,

and I had a brother, and we just did things together,

but it was honestly the first time I recognized

that I was isolated and lonely as a child.

And then I was recreating that for myself again in my life.

And realized as an adult, "Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

This is actually a problem."

And then you get depression,

which is just the suppression of any emotion.

You go to the doctor and say that you're depressed.

The doctor doesn't say, "Well, you know, you should cry more."

They give you a pill to suppress the emotion even more.

So then everyone is just walking around numb.

[Libby] I was on Prozac for 20 years.

When I originally went on it, I was anorexic, depressed.

Had, you know, like, kind of half-assed a suicide attempt.

I was just, not really, connected.

To express emotion is to be alive.

That's why we're here. Sadness is not a bad thing.

Anger is not a bad thing.

It's important that we do express that,

and as young kids, how many times have you seen

a parent shutting down a kid's emotion

because the parent can't hold it for the kid?

Like a child just normally expresses emotion.

That's what they do.

I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't wanna do any of it.

I don't know that I'm strong enough,

or my body is strong enough to keep going.

My heart hurts. Like, it hurts all the time.

Yeah, but it's like, sometimes you can see

all of that healing really clearly,

and then sometimes it's hidden behind all of this dark shit

that you know you still have to do.

Maybe it's just nerves

for getting close to another ceremony

or all of these fears are coming up around.

"Oh, great, if this is what's happening in my dream time,

what's gonna happen at ceremony?"

This is gonna sound weird.

I thought it was gonna be easy street

and I was gonna have to deal with my dad's suicide.

That's easy street for me.

After the last ceremony I thought,

"Great, it really felt like, this is the end.

I can put all of this sexual abuse stuff behind me.

This is gonna be great.

Let's move on to Daddy's suicide stuff.

Let's just, like, plow through all of this stuff really fast.

Look at me, I'm doing all of this work."

And then it's still all about the sexual abuse stuff.

All my dreams are about the sexual abuse stuff.

[Lisa] I ended up meeting with Gabor.

I walked into a hotel room where he was staying,

in, like, stiletto heels and bad make up,

but he saw beyond that.

So then he told me about Ibogaine.

Ibogaine is an extract of an African plant called iboga

and it has the wonderful quality

of actually curtailing withdrawal.

So we have no way in western medicine

of stopping withdrawal

except by giving people more opiates.

I liken the of Ibogaine to like, Pacman

going through my blood and eating up the methadone.

So every night, as the sun went down

and they would start working again,

and it would go all night long till the sun came up

and it would just let me be.

May 23rd, 2011.

Done with methadone.

Whoa, take the methadone out of the picture,

and everything starts to flow, and Gabor says,

"We have a next step, don't worry.

Hang on a month. We're going back to Mexico."

[Gabor] When you stop using the methadone,

you gotta remember there's a reason

why you started using the opiates.

And opiates are painkillers,

and you're using the opiate to kill your pain.

All the pain that you've been suppressing is gonna flood in.

Now you need to work with the Ayahuasca

to get underneath the pain to find out who you really are

and to find out what has been blocking you

from being yourself,

which is always childhood trauma.

[Lisa] So I flew to Vancouver,

and met with him and went to Mexico.

And I drank Ayahuasca

and did group processing around it.

Dave primarily worked with me at the beginning.

And I have a list, like, so long of...

things that have changed in my life

because of working with him.

I was at my second Gabor retreat,

and one of the subjects that came up

was that I had had two abortions in my using days.

He said, "You have to clear those three beings, souls.

Coming between Creator's creation is a big deal,

and if I'm gonna work on helping you clear these three,

you're have to promise me that you're going to spend time

talking to them and asking for their forgiveness

and releasing them."

And I was like, "What are you talking about?

Three? I only had two."

And he said, "No, I think you had three."

And after he did that freeing of those,

I felt some kind of stirring,

something going on that I hadn't felt

in my uterus and my ovaries.

So again, I take the flight home

and I go to the washroom on the flight

and I have my moon cycle.

After 20 years.

My mom picked me up at the airport

and I told her the story.

She said, "Yeah, Lisa, you don't remember the third one.

You were incarcerated,

and I had to come and sign for you.

You were of no sound mind and--"

So there had been a third abortion

that I didn't know about,

that he was able to see, and feel, and release.

[rattling]

[Gabor] She's a wonderful example

of what's potentially possible

with the use of these medicinal plants.

[Shannan] Yesterday was the anniversary of my dad's suicide.

So my intention was to heal whatever is left.

She was like, "Let's explore

this stuff that happened with your dad a little bit."

And she showed me how it happened and when it happened.

And then I was like, "Okay, I can handle this."

His mental health was really deteriorating,

and we were staying in a women's shelter with my mom

and I would sneak away from school

and go and see him in the morning.

And I was trying to take care of him.

And in his mind, it got so messed up.

You know?

And then I was like,

"Did I kill him?

Was that me?

Was he so upset about what was happening

that he did that?"

And I was like, "Oh, God! I don't wanna be in that."

It started showing me one of my childhood best friends.

She had been sexually abused by her dad.

And then she started to go into all these dark places,

and I was like, "Oh, I'm not going there.

I can't. I'm not doing this."

And she was like, "You have to. We gotta go in there.

You wanna heal these parts of you, you have to see this."

[exhales]

She just kind of threw me right into this space

of what happens if you were the reason

why your dad committed suicide?

Can we go in there?

And I'm like, "Oh, my God."

I've never been so uncomfortable in my entire life

and I just knew that the only way through it was in it.

So in we went.

The visions that she sent me

was, like, me and my dad laying on my bed

and kind of playing, and me thinking

that I was taking care of him in some way or shape or form.

And his mental health was completely deteriorated.

And...

She started showing me visions of the sexual things

that happened between me and my dad.

And really went into all of the--

All of it. And just disgusting.

And then to know that that was days before he killed himself.

When I came out of ceremony,

I felt responsible for his suicide.

Yep.

I think even...

how traumatic that was and how I was thinking

that I was responsible for it,

there was this part of me that was like,

"Thank God this is out of me."

And then I tried to spend the rest of the evening

talking myself out of how none of that is true.

"I just made it up. I'm a drama queen."

I was doing everything, everything I could

to talk myself out of how that didn't actually happen.

Yeah. So what you can trust is the feeling

inside of you,

the sadness that was present,

the anger that was present.

All the other stuff that comes in,

the fear, the doubt, the confusion.

All that stuff is coming from the mind.

But, you know, when you're crying there,

there's no doubt in me that that emotion is true.

So I'm not sitting here going,

"I don't think that really happened."

It would be hard to generate that sense of feeling.

Unless it's true.

Thank you.

[Lori] In the end, I just have to trust.

You know, I trust in creation. I trust in nature.

I trust in my own intuitive sense

and I know that this

is what I'm meant to be doing in my life.

I know that this is helping people.

I know that this is good.

I know that this is true.

And I don't really believe

that what I'm doing is not lawful.

[Rosie] I want people to know that we're a regular family,

kind and normal, and not, you know--

There's so much misinformation out there about Ayahuasca.

And it's always linked with drugs

and, you know, it's really sad.

It's such a sacred medicine.

[Dave] Thank you for this day

and thank you for this food on the table.

[Rosie] We don't even use pharmaceutical drugs.

We don't drink. We're in bed by nine every night.

You know, we're pretty simple, natural people,

using plants to heal us if we're sick.

[Dave] Plant and humans have a symbiotic relationship.

We rely on each other to survive.

You know, and plants have been here a lot longer than us.

So, they have a certain knowledge

that they can share with us.

I think there's obviously--

There's a master plan that's happening

around all of these plants.

Terence McKenna called it the Archaic Revival.

You know, it's like, the old ways

are gonna come back and save us.

So, you know, this is only my opinion,

but I think there is obviously something happening

on that level, where plants are coming out and giving us

an opportunity to heal,

because if we don't heal,

they're gonna die the way that we're treating the earth.

[Mauro] Just for the people, you know,

if they're coming to Ayahuasca, you know, to--

Have tremendous amounts of respect for the medicine.

You're not coming to take a drug.

You're coming to work with a sacred medicine

that's been used for who knows how many thousands of years

that has been put here along with all other plants

to help heal us and bring us back to ourselves

and bring us back to the connection with nature.

[Daniel] I'm really grateful to everybody

who makes this work possible.

It astounds me, the stamina, and the fortitude,

and the concentration it must take

to lead these ceremonies.

To chant. To channel this.

To be with people's suffering.

Like, to bring that quality of presence

that these practitioners bring, that Dave brings.

How much work must they have done on themselves?

The work is never done.

The healing is never ever done.

[Daniel chuckles]

It never ends.

I never get to say I'm finished.

But there's all kinds of medicine in the world

and there's all kinds of healing

and this is a really powerful one.

[Dave] Well, the last 15 years

I've learned so many things about myself,

but about the society we live in.

Our society is sick,

and there's a need for medicine and plants to help people

because western medicine is not doing it.

The war on cancer, whenever that was started in the 70's,

the rates of cancer are higher now than they were.

So there's gotta be another way.

Antidepressants and antipsychotics,

all that stuff, truly it's--

I think it does more harm than good.

[Gabor] How society lives has a huge impact

on the emotional outlook and health of its members.

And the plant world, the vegetalismo world,

is very much a non-dualistic perspective on human beings.

They don't make the splits that western medicine makes.

By the time I'd begun to work with the plant,

I'd gone beyond the ideological restrictions

of mainstream medicine.

I already understood that mind and body can't be separated,

that people are creatures of physiology,

but also psychology and they have a spiritual nature as well.

I understood about the relationship of adult illness,

physical or mental, or addiction to childhood trauma.

But it did open me to a whole way of working

and thinking about things.

I've had some deep experiences with the plant.

I have to say...

[chuckles]

...that, personally, those experiences

have not been as transformative as I've seen them be

for the people that I work with.

I've had insights.

One specific insight,

very important one, and I didn't follow it.

Boy, did I create suffering for myself and others.

So it speaks the truth.

[icaro music playing]

The chanting during the ceremony started,

and it was just all male voices.

I had all my guy friends, in the vision,

and I just felt like,

"This is great. They're all here."

And then, sort of, the feeling of the chant or the song changed

and I realized they were there to send me off.

And I realized that they were saying,

"We've had you with us for so long,

but now it's time to move on."

And I got anxious.

I didn't wanna go.

And we were all on the bank of a lake.

And I realized that they were chanting towards the lake.

And I turned around and there was a raft coming forward,

and there was a woman on this raft.

She was the most feminine figure I've ever encountered.

And she was in, head to toe, red.

And her dress was made of roses.

And the guys waved goodbye and they said,

"You need to go forward with her.

You need to go forward with this.

And she's gonna take you."

I was told--

[exhales]

[sighs]

You need to--

You need to go and spend time with your girlfriends,

and you need to spend time with mothers.

You need to learn from them,

because within a year, you're gonna have a baby."

[chuckles]

And I was like, "That's impossible.

I'm going through a divorce."

Um, and they said, "You're gonna have a baby girl."

And, uh...

And so I also said,

"Well, I don't know how." You know?

And they said,

"You have a lot of good friends

that are really great mothers,

and you need to learn from them."

The next April rolled around, I was pregnant

and found out that it was a baby girl.

[woman] Please go ahead and create another memory,

by sharing with us your very first kiss

as husband and wife.

Hey, sweet pie.

I just feel really grateful. I know that sounds--

Yeah, I had no idea.

You know?

I had no idea.

And just to...

step out of my comfort zone

for just a second...

That's all that it took.

Just a second.

And just trust.

Oh. Yeah.

[Shannan] I feel like Ayahuasca made me love myself

in the biggest way possible.

I do everything for me now.

I have a meditation practice. I exercise regularly.

I eat good food because I want to, like, nourish my body.

I wanna keep going.

But it was, like, connection to spirit

that was the big kicker for me, and it's definitely continued.

I'll just be driving in my car to work

and I'll just get this overwhelming feeling

of gratitude, and the tears are falling

and that happens because I have this connection

with-- with the spirit, or Creator, or whatever--

whatever you wanna call it.

I would say I think about my dad every day.

I forgave him after that ceremony,

because I saw where he came from.

I saw what happened to him.

I felt all of that, all of the stuff he was feeling.

And you can't help but have compassion for somebody

who had that amount of trauma.

[Lisa] One thing that I say about Ayahuasca

is, like, you really, really get what you need.

I thought I was diving into darkness,

and instead she showed me the exact--

the exact opposite of how I've been loved

and how I survived.

And I survived by being through this love.

And it's not an easy path.

But I couldn't feel more blessed

by anything in my life than Ayahuasca.

She just allows me to look at myself

with love and compassion.

And she's had me look at some real dark times.

But she's held my hand through them,

as has the community.

[icaro music playing]

Dave is, no doubt,

one of the most experienced people

in North America.

Few would've had the dedication

to be in the jungle all that time that Dave did.

And Lori as well.

And for a long time, they were working

under the guidance of a Shipibo,

native Indian Peruvian teacher.

So, they learned a lot

in a very dedicated, disciplined, fashion.

There is in Dave that kind of integrity

and so he's a very experienced Ayahuascaro.

And I've seen his work deepen immeasurably

over the years that I've been associated with him.

You know, it's impossible for me to say

why I chose the path, other than I wanted to help people

because I was sick when I-- when I came to Ayahuasca myself.

You know, I had the depression and--

I think there's just higher powers

that are helping guide him,

and this is his path.

[Dave] As much as I was pulled towards the path,

I also had to walk towards the path.

But it doesn't take some kind of special person.

[Gabor] I don't know any other place where there's actually

a community in the sense that has coalesced around Dave.

So what's more beautiful

than to see a group of people committed to healing

and to offering that healing to others?

[Dave] Until we learn to respect ourselves,

respect something higher than ourselves,

something greater than ourselves,

something that created us.

its where we need to put our emphasis

with gratitude and reverence

for this amazing place that we live.

[rock music plays]

[Dave] I remember this one example

of being in a retreat with Gabor.

Me and Lori were the practitioners back then.

And we spent the whole day in circle processing the group,

and one of the women said,

"You know, I'm really excited to meet the shamans.

When are they gonna be here?"

[chuckling] And Lori and I were like,

"Yeah, that's us."

You know, I guess people want us to come in there

with an eagle headdress or a staff or something and--

A shaman's path is here.

It's not the color of your skin.

It's not where you come from.

It's the desire to help people

and that ability to navigate both worlds,

that spiritual world and this physical world.

Very early on, I understood

that as long as my heart was clear

on what I wanted to do, it had nothing to do

with what color my skin is.

[rock music continues]