Gabor Maté on Ayahuasca and Healing Addiction
Once that book of mine came out, the calls and emails started arriving, all asking the same thing: what did I know about treating addiction with ayahuasca? Ayahuasca itself is a plant, a woody vine native to the Amazon basin. It grows across Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Peru. The shamans, the medicine men and women, cut up that vine and combine it with another green plant, chacruna, then boil the mixture for something like eight hours. What comes out is a bitter brew, named after the vine that forms its base.
The taste is genuinely awful. I never once looked forward to drinking it. But the brew is psychedelic, and psychedelic means mind-manifesting. It brings the mind into view. Ayahuasca can show you precisely what lives inside you.
For some people it surfaces childhood trauma. For others it opens into love, unity, a sense of oneness, healing. All of those are real possibilities already present in the mind. When it brings up the trauma, it does so to let you see the thing you've spent a lifetime fleeing. And it shows that trauma not through the eyes of a helpless child but through those of a conscious adult. From there you get to choose. Do you want to keep running?
It can also reveal your heart, the deep loving part of you. That was what came to me the first time I drank it. You arrive at a strange realization: if there is that much love in here, why would I need to run anywhere at all? There is nowhere to flee to. The plant shows you what you've been escaping and what stands between you and yourself. It can also uncover pieces of who you truly are, underneath the personality, beneath the persona, under the behaviors and the hard emotions.
This is why it's called an entheogen, a teaching plant. Ayahuasca belongs to that category. Across the Amazon basin the traditions differ by place and by culture. I recently returned from Colombia, where I took part in ceremonies led by a Colombian shaman, and those felt very different from the ones I've mostly worked within, a Shipibo tradition from Peru. The intention behind them is the same, though, and so is where they lead.
For the past six or seven years I've worked with it, mainly on addiction but also on stress, and on physical conditions where stress plays out in the body: cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis. The healing possibility is this. As people reconnect with their true selves and work through the trauma, which under the plant's guidance moves far faster than it tends to in ordinary psychotherapy, they start to gain some measure of influence over their own physiological processes.