Ayahuasca – Medicine for the Soul Part 1
Ayahuasca, is regarded as the "door" for the soul. This article explores this fascinating mix of plants of the Amazon rainforest. Ayahuasca is the medicine of the upper Amazon jungle. It is made of ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and Chacruna plant leaf (Psychotria Viridis). Both are a potent medicine, which takes one into the visionary world. The vine is an inhibitor which contains harmala and harmaline among other alkaloids, and the leaf contains vision-inducing alkaloids. As with all natural medicines, is a mixture of many alkaloids that makes their unique properties.
After being virtually ignored by Western civilization for centuries has been a huge surge of interest in Ayahuasca recently. There is a growing belief that a sort of "medicine for our time ", giving hope to people with 'incurable' diseases like cancer and HIV, drug addictions and inspiring answers major ecological problems of modern civilization.
Spirituality is at the center of the Ayahuasca experience. Purification and cleansing of body, mind and spirit in a shamanic ceremony can be the beginning of a process of profound personal and spiritual discovery and transformation.
We the people Humans have a special relationship and dependence on plants. Since our inception, have been directly and indirectly the source of our food, our refuge, our medicines, our fuel, our clothing, and of course, the oxygen we breathe. This is common knowledge and, in general, if we take for granted. However, we believe that plants in our Western culture as semi-inanimate, lacking the animating force of the tag soul, mind or spirit.
The biggest challenge for a Westerner undertaking this communion with the plants is to accept that there is another order of nonmaterial reality that a person can experience through their entry into the consciousness of the plant, and this requires significant leap of the imagination. We are all born in the social paradigm that surrounds us, with all their beliefs, myths, and institutions that support your worldview, and not within our worldview to accept the immaterial and the irrational. Before embarking on this trip to the plant mind, then, we must first examine some of the most ingrained assumptions, assumptions still fostered by many of our today's religious and social institutions. The point of departure for this trip is to ourselves.
Homosapien-centrism is a strange, but perhaps the appropriate word to describe the concept that many of us, consciously or not, carry within us: that human beings are the most important (and perhaps even the only) conscious and aware of itself, is is, beings endowed with soul in the universe. For the shamans of the world we perceive through our senses is only a description of a vast and mysterious world of invisible, and not an absolute fact. Black Elk, John G. Neihardt 's book, Black Elk Speaks, the Oglala Sioux medicine man said, that beyond our perception is that "the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. It is behind this, and everything we see here is something like a shadow of that world."
About the Author
Howard G. Charing, is an international workshop leader on shamanism. He has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. With Peter Cloudsley he organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest. He is the author of the best selling book, Plant Spirit Shamanism.
Visit the website for info about our Andean & Amazon Ayahuasca Yoga Retreats
Peru 06 Medicine Man in the Andes 5
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