The dark sides and dangers of doing Ayahuasca.

You may be curious about plant medicine but your curiosity may be combined with precaution, maybe you’ve heard very positive stories from friends but you also go online and you see that maybe some people die, perhaps some people go crazy and you don’t know what to think about it.

On one hand, it seems like a possible tool that can help you in your journey of better and deeper understanding of the life that you are living.

But on the other hand, the risks are quite big: “What if i go crazy?” “What if i end up feeling worse?” “What if i end up traumatized?” “What if my health is way worse after the ceremonies?” “What if the medications that i’m taking/the people/the space, what if something negative happens and i break something even worse than where i’m at?“

The first thing that is important for us to know is that the these risks and these dangers can be classified in 3 groups;

1. First we have the inner risks; that is the mental health, emotional health…
   
2. Secondly, we have the outer risks which is the risk of being abused by a facilitator, by a shaman, the risk of being tormented or having something cause an injury in the place where you’re doing it,
   
3. Thirdly and finally, we have (what I call) the post risks and it’s when everything went well, but then you’re coming back home and now there’s a few dangers and things that can happen.
   
   

Inner risks:
The Inner risk of doing Ayahuasca is mental and emotional turmoil.

Ayahuasca is a very useful tool, if you wish to understand your mind, your past and your history better, it can bring you to depths of understading, of spirituality and of yourself.

In a way, it’s like getting to the code of a computer, imagine you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem in your laptop or in your cell phone and you try your usual things but it’s not working.

Then you go play with its code or you take your phone apart and now you’re looking at all the wires, how the energy moves, where all the chips and stuff was put into, where the little microchips go.

Now, there may be some problems there and you realize that one part got rusty/wet, maybe you realize that there’s a part where the signal is not being sensed because the connection was broken.

You can fix it but also anything that you do to your phone when it’s pieces are apart can also damage it way, way more.

If you were to cut the wrong wire, touch the wrong thing, remove a connection that you shouldn’t have, you end up with a bigger problem than before.

Let’s say you start playing with the code, you write a line, you delete a comma, a dot, parenthesis and the whole program crashes, this happens a to a lof of people during Ayahuasca.

Maybe the biggest risk, the risk that a person’s mind and emotions are more unsettled than before they came, they went to a place where they started playing with the code, the hardware.

Let’s call it energetic surgery. During Ayahuasca we open ourselves up to the unconscious area inside of us that dictates a lot of our life, but we usually don’t have access to.

What happens when you play with this? You can break it, unless you’re in the company of someone experienced.

The first risk is this, that your mind may end up in a worse mental state, that your emotions may be all over the place, this can happen, I want to recognize that this is quite common in some amazing houses.

People go there and end up more overwhelmed, confused, anxious, depressed, the reason is that they’re opening themselves up without proper guidance around how to put it back together, better than it was, usually they open themselves up but the people around them don’t know how to guide them through the process.

So they just cut or move things that shouldn’t have been toyed with, then the consequences are evident.

The first risk of doing Ayahuasca, your mental and emotional health are going to suffer way more, however, if you do it in a place where people running it, the Shaman and his team are experienced, then the risk is almost non-existent.

They will know, like an experienced surgeon, they know where to cut, how to seal the wound, how to make sure that it heals without infection and that the patient recovers promptly.

Other risks:
A lot of us assume that a Shaman is a good person, a Shaman is the wise elder of a tribe, someone who’s very spiritually aware and it’s not true….

(Continuation on part 2!)