100 per experience? In addition to the 300 a week?

ditto what they said. i never heard of such a thing ($100 per plus $300)

Yeah nick i like that idea of finding the medicine here, i even just started a topic on it, maybe you could be inspired and make some suggestions

Richard-

As always, your words reflect the wisdom of experience and the clarity that can only come from plugging in at the roots. Good medicine brother.

Respect,
Veg

Richard --

You are -- as is so often the case -- absolutely right.

-- Steve
singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/

clearly put Richard! excellent points! as all-ways!

Thanks for making these points, Richard.

I might add there are more ways of working with the medicine, for example Vine only brews, or brews low on the light, can be a very effective healing aid, and have no disaster history record (except for bad MAOI reactions maybe). While they're far from encompassing the full spectrum of what Aya is capable of, IMO it's a great way to get to know the territory before you break the bank to go to South America. This way you can work through some of your minor blockages and pave the road to working on more severe issues with a shaman.

I have also heard of many people who have been to the Amazon and broken through and claim they don't need a shaman anymore.

It's up to the individual to choose the most viable tradeoff between guided and unguided work, and it depends on their circumstances, ranging from the kind of work they need to financial ones.

Nick and Richard, I'm happy to see your perspectives here. Given that to which you were responding, I might have said something similar. But since you've both expressed the important of caution I can feel comfortable stating a somewhat contrary position. Really, I don’t disagree outright . . . what you've said is a good starting point; it allows me to meaningfully disagree.

I'll begin with the point I'd like to make, and then follow it with an explanation:

The degree of 'danger' involved in working with ayahuasca corresponds to the particular position we take in relation to the tea.

To clarify that, here's a quick illustration: What appears to be dangerous at one level of the experience is sometimes revealed as a blessing; indeed, as the doorway between that level of experience and another. To give a specific example--I think that in some instances, the 'bad spirits' act as vultures to dismember the carrion-self, and allow a passage into a different order of experience.

The problem with the issue of 'danger' is the profound ambiguity of its emergence within the ayahuasca experience. It may be that the basic foundation of our relationship to danger is one of the central issues that ayahuasca tends to present.

It appears to me that 'danger' is deeply involved in the formation of selfhood, and so tends to present itself at the boundaries of self-identity, and during reevaluations and redefinitions of personal identity.

I think, then, that a fixed concept of 'danger' can make certain processes more difficult.

I also think that, beyond a certain point, a curandero can't do much to assist the drinker. But that would be especially hard for me to justify.

I will say this: I started drinking ayahuasca before I ever went to south america, I spent six months in Ecuador drinking ayahuasca, and I've continued to drink ayahuasca (occasionally) since I returned. My relationship to the tea is such that in my most difficult experiences, no one can do much to help me--and that's because, as far as I can tell, these experiences are not problematic because of particular, external elements (spirits) that can be controlled, but because they involve a deep reassessment of my basic attitude toward Being, and toward individuality and relationships.

Now, also, I've been strongly influenced by the Ecuadorian tradition that I consider to be a big part of my own foundation for working with ayahuasca. And in this tradition, there was really no talk of danger. The curandero, for all of his remarkable power, rarely interfered overtly with the personal experiences of drinkers. If I wanted to drink by myself, certainly no one would have suggested that it was a bad idea. In fact, they wanted to be sure that I'd be able to continue drinking ayahuasca when I returned home.

Also, I've heard that if a family that's a part of the community where I lived had some problem--a health issue, for instance--they might prepare ayahuasca and attempt to address the problem themselves, without a curandero around. Anyway, that's entirely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.

--

Now, with that said, I'd like to temper my position with a few other points.

First, a good curandero is a healer--a doctor--who can use ayahuasca to perform cures for specific illnesses. In the tradition with which I am familiar, the shaman is not so much a 'guide' as a doctor. It's believed that ayahuasca is always cleansing and always teaches, but that to heal a particular ailment will often, or even usually, require specific treatment. Treatment is performed both through ritual and through the use of other medicinal plants.

And also, only under very exceptional conditions would I actually recommend that someone drink ayahuasca alone. First of all, I would never suggest such a thing to someone who I don't know very well. I have personally known people who would almost certainly flip out, at least temporarily and possibly for an extended amount of time, if they were to take any plant hallucinogen.

We really don't know each other well enough through this medium to make suggestions like that.

I think it would almost always be better for someone without experience to spend time drinking with another person or group that does have experience and some sort of developed ritual framework.

The biggest problem that I see is that most North Americans just don’t have any context into which drinking ayahausca can be integrated. The bedroom of a modern home strikes me as very much less than an ideal location. Most people don’t have a ritual framework.

Ultimately, then, I guess my point is that ayahuasca reveals that ritual and structure is arbitrary; but ritual structure *is* profoundly important. It can become a fixation that we refuse to transcend, and yet the transcendence of ritual is best placed within a ritual framework.