Questions and Answers About Ayahuasca and San Pedro
by Peter Gorman

Is it better to drink ayahuasca or San Pedro or any of the Master Plant Teachers with a curandero, a healer, than just drinking them by yourself?
I think it's better to drink with a curandero, as the plants (if you believe all life is sentient, as I do) must give up their basic chemicals to whomever cooks them, but only give the rest of themselves, their spirit, if they choose to, and they're more likely to do that with a curandero who has had long an intimate contact with them than they are with a stranger.

Are these plants really healing tools on the physical and spiritual level or are they just something that allows you to catch a high?
They are healing tools, period. What most people don't understand about Peru and its neighboring countries is that physical illness is considered a symptom of a disturbance on a psychic or spiritual level. To eliminate the symptom one can go to the pharmacy and buy medicine; to cure the illness a person goes to a curandero who uses a Master Plant Teacher to access other levels of reality to see what is causing the disturbance and how to bring things back into balance. The curandero may "see" a plant medicine cure, or "see" something the patient or someone else is doing to the patient to cause the disturbance and then try to come up with a remedy to cure that.

Nearly 20 years ago I watched my friend, the curandero Julio Jerena, invent "the stair" while under the influence of ayahuasca for a man who'd been bitten by a bushmaster (the hospital was going to amputate before the man fled to Julio's) as part of the man's curing therapy. Poor guy had to walk up and down this three-step staircase for hours daily. But he saved his leg.

That was a very physical problem that required a physical solution. But I've seen Julio work on psychic levels as well. And frequently, my friend Victor, a San Pedro curandero, dredges painful memories—buried so deeply the patient didn't know they even had them—from people that are causing physical illness. On a recent trip one woman being treated by Victor sobbed uncontrollably for hours during his work, but in the morning—and since—related that her stomach, which had hurt her chronically since childhood, no longer hurt. What Victor took out that night from that woman's memory was a monster causing her constant pain. Eliminated, she lost the pain as well.

I read that the vomiting with ayahuasca is horrible and I hate to vomit. How bad is it?
Don't sweat the purge. It is the most awful/wonderful puke you will ever have. You can handle it. You're not even vomiting anything physical. People who drink with me don't eat for at least 10 hours prior to drinking the medicine so there is nothing in their stomach to physically vomit. What they will feel coming up and what they even later swear was solid food is actually the bile of their lives: their hatreds, their sorrows, their pain, their remorse. It feels solid coming out but is only as solid as they've made those things. And those things are not worth carrying around with us. It's good to be cleansed of them.
Those who cheat and eat, on the other hand, only dilute the medicine. You can throw-up Chinese food or hamburgers anytime, but you've only got a couple of chances to rid yourself, you soul, of emotional waste.

Will these medicines hurt me?
No. I will be in charge of your diet for several days prior to ingestion and your fast on the day of the experience. I will put you in the hands of the finest healers I know, and they will heal you, not hurt you. You may well come out of the experience a little different than when you went in, and change is something we all tend to fear. But if in a session or two you could examine and eliminate some of your fear, or resentments, or the pain you've needlessly carried, that would be a healing, not a hurt, despite its being temporarily painful.

What has ayahuasca done for you after all these years?
The first time I experienced a cup of the foul-tasting tea I had no idea of what it was, how important it was to the people of Amazonia, or how my life would change because it passed my lips. That first time it was just something to try. But an extraordinary and unexpected out-of body experience, happened. That experience drew me back for a second cup the following year. Then a third; with each, the vine exposed a little more of her spirit, and with it I was pushed to plumb deeper and deeper into my unconscious. I had no idea that what lay ahead of me would take me over the edge of bearable fear, teach me to heal, heal me through the bitter and painful breakup of my family, and finally put me back together again, just as I was, but completely different. During those 20 years I have visited countless worlds and spent time, often in awe, with unimaginable entities. I have been tickled by invisible hands from other worlds until I was rendered immobile from joy. I have been attacked by forces I did not know existed and once even was given the gift of a moment of absolute unconditional love.
The best part, of course, is that my schooling has just begun.

© by Peter Gorman, 1983-2007
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