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Ayahuasca vs Iboga vs Ibogaine

How to determine if Ayahuasca, Iboga, or Ibogaine is what you need All plant medicines are not created equal. There’s a lot of confusion about each plant’s superhero powers, especially when it comes to Ayahuasca and Iboga. If you’re feeling the calling and need some serious healing but don’t know the difference between Iboga, Ibogaine, and Ayahuasca, or which plant to turn to for the help you need most, this article will give you the info required to make the best decision possible. First, some context, and full disclosure. I have been drinking Ayahuasca for 14 years, and I completed a comprehensive 10 year apprenticeship with several Shipibo Maestros. I have a deep, unbreakable, mad-love relationship with this divine technology, so I can speak with a shred of authority about when and where to use her. Iboga and Ibogaine have been in my field of awareness even longer than Aya, but I have never partaken in either. My amazing powerhouse partner, however, is alive because of Ibogaine, and is an executive at a clinic in …

What It’s Like to be an Ayahuasca Shaman

Succumbing to the intensity of feeling every conceivable emotion throughout the unpredictable expansion of Ayahuasca, every time she is consumed. Letting one’s eyesight transform into portals of a kaleidoscopic landscape, where you decipher the flow and disturbances of each human frame that sits in circle around you. Honoring the epic, insanely sacred responsibility of creating spiritual and physical safety for every being that surrenders themselves into your loving care. Holding court over a tribe of spiritual warriors, expressing the bravery of doing the deep, frightful inner work that allows each being to witness and integrate their shadows and their superheroes. Being the guide, the protector, the tone-setter. Working with the spirit world in sacred partnership. Developing unbreakable bonds with guides, totems, and guardians. Holding space for humans experiencing the horror and glory of an ego death and inevitable rebirth. Bringing them out the other side with grace and love. Managing freak outs, egoic projections, and all manner of outbursts. Knowing that everything is always unequivocally OK. When you lead Ayahuasca ceremonies, this is all just another …

What is Rapé

Tobacco snuff is a sacred shamanic medicine or tool, that has been used by tribes of the Amazon basin for thousands of years and is an essential part of their tribal culture and history. Rapé is the name for one of many of these snuffs, and it’s foundation lies by numerous indiginous tribes in Acre, Brazil.

The globalization of Ayahuasca: Harm reduction or benefit maximization?

This paper explores some of the philosophical and policy implications of contemporary ayahuasca use. It addresses the issue of the social construction of ayahuasca as a medicine, a sacrament and a “plant teacher.” Issues of harm reduction with respect to ayahuasca use are explored, but so too is the corollary notion of “benefit maximization.”

Unraveling the Mystery of the Origin of Ayahuasca

For decades, researchers have puzzled over the mystery of the origin of Ayahuasca, especially the question of how the synergy was discovered between the the two components of the brew: the vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) with a monoamine oxidase inhibiting (MAOI) action and the leaf (Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana), which requires that MAOI action to make their dimethyltryptamine (DMT) orally active.

Food Medicine Life

This is a path of uniting stories. An invitation into deeper relation with the many things that fuel, heal, and energize us; that which is alive all around us, co-creates with us. This a path of dissolving separation. A path of connectivity.

Jan Irvin Talks with Steve Beyer

Steve Beyer is a researcher in ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, shamanism, and hallucinogenic plants and fungi. His interests center on the indigenous ceremonial use of the sacred plants — ayahuasca and other psychoactive and healing plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals, and teonanácatl and other mushrooms and plants in Mesoamerican healing ceremonies — and on the legal status, uses, effects, and therapeutic potential of naturally occurring and synthesized hallucinogens, empathogens, and entheogens.He is the author of Singing to the plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Jan Irvin is an independent researcher, author, and lecturer. He is the author of several books, including The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity, and co-author of Astrotheology & Shamanism: Christianity’s Pagan Roots. He is the curator of the official website for John Marco Allegro, the controversial Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, and in 2009 he republished Allegro’s famous 1970 classic, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in a fortieth anniversary edition. Jan is the editor of …

Ayahuasca: Beyond the Amazon – Risks and Challenges of a Spreading Tradition

By Stephen Trichter, Psy.D.

As the use of ayahuasca shifts to use outside of its original cultural context, we must examine how the spread of this healing practice can not only bring the benefits for which it was originally intended, but how its transfer into a new cultural framework potentially can also cause distress and harm.
(Painting by Augustin Lesage)

Soul, Spirit and Right Relationship: A Conversation with Steve Beyer

Morgan Maher
Steve Beyer’s Singing to the Plants, writes Morgan Maher, is “a wild ride out and across the jungles of mestizo shamanism. The book, and its wonderful cast of characters, curanderos, animals, plants, spirits and stories presents honest, accurate, respectful, levelheaded and, at times, outrageously marvelous descriptions of the environments and climates of mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon.” Morgan interviews the author.

Mestizo Shamanism and Vegetalistas

What is mestizo shamanism? The Loreto province of northeastern Peru (and to a lesser extent to Ucayali province south of it) is virtually unique in Latin America in that indigenous shamanic practices have been adopted and adapted by the mestizo population, and become a part of the mestizo culture. While mestizo curanderismo is not unknown elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, it is almost always found in isolated rural areas. Among most mestizo populations, there is strong social pressure to distance oneself from the scorned indigenous world and embrace the prestigious Spanish/western world, and only in the most isolated rural regions would mestizos continue indigenous practices. And in the modern world, with television and mass communication, such pockets of isolation are fast disappearing. Yet, in the province of Loreto in northeastern Peru, not only does an active mestizo shamanism thrive, but it thrives even in urban centers. Especially in the city of Iquitos – population about 400,000. (Iquitos resident Alan Shoemaker quoted the Iquitos police chief as estimating that on any given Friday, 10% of the …

Ayahuasca and Kabbalah

Jay Michaelson
The ayahuasca trip is not especially unitive: indeed, one of its hallmarks is the sense of communication with other life forms or consciousnesses. And while a sense of “all is One” is sometimes reported in the midst of the ayahuasca experience, it’s more common to read reports of visions of phenomena – manifestation, not essence.

Shamanism primer, from my experience

By Peter Gorman
Among the flora of the world as we know it, several plants are not just allies, they are considered Master Plant Teachers. You might extend that to read: Master Plant Teachers of Man. These plants might be considered gate keepers. These plants are the plants that allow us, we humans, to slow down enough to communicate with the mountains; to speed up enough to communicate with a hummingbird, to visit the other realms past and present and simultaneous that are here but that we don’t ordinarily see or hear within the band widths of our senses.