Gabor Maté: My Ayahuasca Breakthrough

Thanks now, Gabor, in the myth of normality, you write about how you yourself had a profound

breakthrough

not long ago in a series of Ayahuasca Journeys that resulted in you finding it sounded like a kind of deep flavor touch of your quotes. real me and honestly I understood the circumstances and you can share that here with our audience, but I didn't have a clear idea of ​​what the actual experience was that was the

breakthrough

for you, so I'm wondering if you can share both the context and the context. the experience and at what level of transformational change really emerged from it the context was a retreat I was going to lead in the Amazon rainforest at a particular Ayahuasca facility called the Temple of the Way of Life and medical professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors came . from all over the world through work under the leadership of the well-known Dr.

Robert Mate and they came from four continents, 23 of them and uh, I worked with Ayahuasca for over a decade by then and helped people formulate their intentions for the ceremony and a subsequent ceremony that I do not leave and that is led by

ayahuasca

ra shamans I help people to integrate their experience to understand their experience to interpret it like this and I am good at doing it and that is why people came to pay a lot of money to come from all over the world. to the Amazon jungle and the shamans after a ceremony came to me and said: you cannot participate here because you are too dense there is something dark in you that interferes with our singing that does not matter the medicine penetrates you and your The darkness even affects to the other people, so they essentially sent me away for my own Retreat and you know the rest of the ceremonies were done without me and they assigned a shaman to work with me privately on five ceremonies over the next 10 days, so that's how it went .

It was both a humiliating and liberating experience because I came there very stressed and overworked and they were absolutely right, but they also said that we felt two things about you and you have to understand that they didn't know who I was and what I had done. who I am in the world my achievements nothing they only saw me as the person who was in front of them at that moment and they said there are two things about you that we sense one is that we believe that you worked with a lot of trauma in your life and you have not clarified that and Secondly, we think that when you were very little you had a big scare or early in your life and you still haven't gotten over it, so that's the context, okay?

Then it happened that the shaman worked with me for five ceremonies, I took Ayahuasca, he sang, he prayed for me, he put his hands, he did energetic work and gradually I let go and became a more present, bigger, more grateful corner and when La final ceremony was over at least that was me and I felt very clear and very grateful and very happy for the experience and appreciating both the wisdom of the shamans and also my own willingness to be dismissed and to receive their healing. I thought it was over and I was suddenly thrown onto the map by some force and then for the next two hours or more I just traveled and this is where I am at a loss for words because I don't remember much of the trip. except it was very far gone and I remember the vision at the end that I shared in the book where the Hungarian word now I don't believe, I don't believe it's here and I don't dream in Hungarian, so this came from deep within, I mean, and in a blue sky like in letters like wisps of clouds, the word that hung from the word b-o-l-d-o-g uh, we were written and I saw it in my eyes and I realized that all those things that had happened for me do not need to define my existence , everything that happened to my family, everything that happens in the world, painful, distressing, tragic, traumatizing as it may be, does not have to define who I am or my future or my relationship with life or my relationship with myself or my relationship with anything, so it was a Release from the past, but that's the closest I can come to describing it because it would take a better Port than me to give it words and some of the You know, some of the great poets and teachers Spirituals can figure it out well, although I'm certainly not comparing my experience for sure, I'm just saying that I don't have the words to say much more about it than what I have.

I just shared the book except to say that I wouldn't want anyone to believe that I had that experience and came back a changed man. I mean, I caught a glimpse of something at the opening of something, but believe me two months later. or a week after returning home from that trip I began to write a book and plunged into despair, it was and continues to be an essential experience for me, but again we must emphasize the importance of integration and the constant reintegration of those experiences in our lives and I think the same is true for any spiritual experience with or without psychedelics and the Hungarian word that you saw written in the sky means happy, here you go, which is not a word that would easily come to mind when some I once thought about myself, you know, no, probably not the first word that most people would use, but for you, but there you go, a gift for you, happy in Hungarian, now as someone who knows a lot about neurology and what happens in our hormonal system. was happening during these Ayahuasca ceremonies in terms of creating this type of access and I'm particularly interested in Gabor because most of us aren't going to go to South America and spend X thousands of dollars and have experiences like this, but how can we? understand the template, if you will, of the human journey so that we can access this wisdom.

Of the 33 chapters of the book, precisely one is psychedelic because the last thing I want to find is, sometimes, an evangelist. I don't think they're the answer and I don't put too much emphasis on it, I mean, of the 18 chapters in the book, one is about psychedelics, so I think there's a lot more to it than that, but specifically when it comes to psychedelics there's no magic to it. There is no miracle in this. I describe the experience of a woman with a severe and life-threatening terminal autoimmune disease who, based on her experiences with psychedelics, literally should have been dead years ago based on her prognosis and pre-psychedelic physical condition. but the psychodex opened for her a whole healing process that has her active, vital and creative right now, years later, but and from the point of view of Western medicine or at least not of Western science, but of medical practice.

Westerner, that is inexplicable, but there is nothing to explain it is inexplicable when we understand science, so I said before that the mind and the body cannot be separated and physiology is related to psychology, so Floyd said at one point that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, which means that when the draining process of your unconscious just appears and that's what happens because what happens in the dream state is that the conscious brain is disconnected and the parts of the brain that are loaded with emotional memories from childhood are diffused with blood, so they become very active and then the Mind. makes stories to account for those emotions, so, for example, if you are dreaming that children are chasing you and you are afraid, it is not true that you are afraid because the Nazis are chasing you, it is more true to say that the Nazis are chasing you because the emotion of fear has arisen in your brain because your control system is disconnected, your childhood memories are revived and not the expression of fear that you repressed as a child now comes to life and then your mind makes up the story to explain the fear.

The same thing happens with psychedelics, so if you dream about the royal road to the unconscious, I would say that they are psychedelics or even more about the will to the unconscious, because under a psychedelic experience that membrane between the conscious and the unconscious disappears. The unconscious floods your consciousness in the form of visions in the form of stories in the form of deeply felt emotions and but you are there as an adult to witness it all and to work on it also in a safe environment where you are guided by people who know what they are doing and it is that's why the importance of environmental context, the environment is so important and then if there's someone like me the next day, we can talk about it and then you can interpret and integrate that experience even more.

Psychedelics deeply remove that membrane, and at the same time, a lot of those things that you've been suppressing to flood your consciousness, which can also flood your consciousness, happened to me in that last experience with that image in the sky. What I talked about is that your authentic self can appear, which has been covered under layers of suffering and layers of defenses and adaptations, etc., so you are in an ideal position for both of you to come to terms with the suffering that you had repressed. but also with that self that you had lost touch with, so it's a kind of idealized summary of the psychedelic experience when it works, there are different succulents, of course, you can't put them in one basket, which is Ayahuasca with Evergreen, you will have a different experience with MDMA mushrooms you have a different experience but essentially common to all of them is the lifting of the veil if you know the conscious and the unconscious