Articles by admin:
Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
Posted by admin • Category: NewsReflecting the beliefs and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, the constitution declares that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” The new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.
Brazilian Ayahuasca Music
Posted by admin • Category: NewsAuthors: Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Institute of Medical Psychology, Heidelberg University, Germany (http://bialabate.net) and Gustavo Pacheco, National Museum/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Publisher: Mercado de Letras, Campinas/SP, Brazil
Year: 2009
Format: 11,5 x 21 cm
Support: German Research Council (DFG) and the Collaborative Research Center “Ritual Dynamics” (http://www.ritualdynamik.de).
120 pp.
ISBN 978-85-7591-125-9
Price: U$ 16,00 (to be confirmed) + shipping fee
Summary:
This [...]
The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo
Posted by admin • Category: Visual ArtThe late Pablo Amaringo trained as a curandero in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at his Usko-Ayar school. Pablo left us this November 2009, and this interview is posted in homage to this great Artist and great Man.
The globalization of ayahuasca: Harm reduction or benefit maximization?
Posted by admin • Category: Law, Syncretic Movements & Ayahuasca ReligionsThis 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.”
Therapeutic caapi tea: a prototype – Material and Method
Posted by admin • Category: Physiology, MedicineMore and more people are using or consider using ayahuasca tea as an alternative medicine for different therapeutic purposes: depression, Parkinson’s disease, ageing-related cognitive decline, etc.
Yet most of these actual or planned uses are relying on the rich pharmacodynamics of the caapi vine and don’t necessitate the preparation and use of a standard mix. Rather what is needed is a caapi tea specifically designed for these purposes.
UDV Church plan brews unease
Posted by admin • Category: NewsThe UDV, whom fought a long legal battle for the right to drink tea in as part of their spiritual practice want to build a temple and greenhouse which has attracted the beady eye of the news media, hungry for cheap controversy.
Blending Traditions – Using Indigenous Medicinal Knowledge to Treat Drug Addiction
Posted by admin • Category: Physiology, Medicine, Psychology, PsychiatryJacques Mabit, M.D.
Ancestral medical practices are based on a highly sophisticated practical knowledge and view the controlled induction of non-ordinary states of consciousness as potentially beneficial, even in the treatment of the modern phenomena of drug addiction. These ancestral practices stand in contrast to the clumsiness with which Western peoples induce altered states of consciousness. Drawing from his clinical experience in the High Peruvian Amazonian forest, the author describes the therapeutic benefits of the wise use of medicinal plants, including non-addictive psychoactive preparations, such as the well-known Ayahuasca tea. Within an institutional structure, a therapeutic system combining indigenous practices with contemporary psychotherapy yields highly encouraging results (positive in 2/3 of the patients). This invites us to reconsider conventional approaches to drug addiction and the role of the individual’s spiritual journey in recovery.
The myth of the chemical cure
Posted by admin • Category: NewsIt is often said the fact that drug treatment “works” proves there’s an underlying biological deficiency. But there is another explanation for how psychiatric drugs affect people with emotional problems.
Kambô, The Spirit of the Shaman
Posted by admin • Category: Primordial Culture, Spirit & HealingMarcelo Bolshaw Gomes
“Kambô circulates in the heart. Our shaman said that when we take Kambô it makes the heart move accurately, so that things flow, bringing good things to the person. It is as if there was a cloud on the person, preventing the good things to come, then, when it takes the Kambô; it comes a ‘green light’ which opens its ways, making things easier.”
Help to suspend laws that open up the Amazon to destructive industries
Posted by admin • Category: NewsThe Peruvian government has pushed through legislation that could allow extractive and large-scale farming companies to rapidly destroy their Amazon rainforest. Indigenous peoples have peacefully protested for two months demanding their lawful say in decrees that will contribute to the devastation of the Amazon’s ecology and peoples, and be disastrous for the global climate. But last weekend President Garcia responded: sending in special forces to suppress protests in violent clashes, and labelling the protesters as terrorists.
Crisis in Peru
Posted by admin • Category: NewsLuien Chauvin, reporting for Time Magazine, says, “Peruvian President Alan Garcia is furious. His plans to open huge parts of the country’s Amazon jungle to foreign investors are crumbling … a casualty of violent protests by indigenous people in the northern jungle last weekend. … The violence was unleashed when police officers received word from Lima, the capital, to remove the protesters who were blocking a highway and the nearby pumping station on the northern pipeline.”
Santo Daime Followers Can Have Their Tea and Drink It Too
Posted by admin • Category: NewsOn Wednesday a federal judge in Oregon ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) allows followers of the Brazil-based Santo Daime sect to consume ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea ontaining the ordinarily illegal drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT), as part of their rituals. Guided by the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2006 ruling in “a very similar case” involving Uniao do Vegetal, another Brazilian religious group that also consumes ayahuasca, U.S. District Court Judge Owen Panner concluded that RFRA “requires that plaintiffs be allowed to import and drink Daime tea for their religious ceremonies, subject to reasonable restrictions.”
Jaques Mabit discusses the law of Justice and the law of love
Posted by admin • Category: OverviewsPreparation for the Ayahuasca Experience
Posted by admin • Category: OverviewsHoward G. Charing
After being virtually ignored by Western civilization for centuries, there has been a huge surge of interest in Ayahuasca recently. There is a growing belief that it is a kind of ‘medicine for our times’, giving hope to people with ‘incurable’ diseases like cancer and HIV, drug addictions and inspiring answers to the big ecological problems of modern civilization.
Communion With The Infinite – The Visual Music of the Shipibo tribe of the Amazon
Posted by admin • Category: Primordial Culture, Visual ArtHoward G. Charing
Underlying the intricate geometric patterns of great complexity displayed in the art of the Shipibo people is a concept of an all pervading magical reality which can challenge the Western linguistic heritage and rational mind. These patterns are more than an expression of the one-ness of creation, the inter-changeability of light and sound, the union or fusion of perceived opposites, it is an ongoing dialogue or communion with the spiritual world and powers of the Rainforest. The visionary art of the Shipibo brings this paradigm into a physical form. The Ethnologist Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, calls this “visual music”.
Shipibo Art and Life Links
Posted by admin • Category: NewsSome links out to the Shipibo and their art and life.
UDV case update
Posted by admin • Category: Law, NewsAn update on the interactions between the União do Vegetal and US Supreme Court by Matthew Meyer.
Our Story as Gaia
Posted by admin • Category: MythosLunaya Shekinah
Taking this opportunity to think about the more-than-human world from a more-than-human perspective : if you are open to a little ego dissolution this will lead you through a shamanistic visualization sequence. The intention is to prime our creative imaginations, and explore a path of evolutionary remembering, mourning, honoring the extinct and taking responsibility as steward-healers of the biosphere.
Voyaging to DMT Space with Dr. Rick Strassman, M.D.
Posted by admin • Category: NewsVoyaging to DMT Space with Dr. Rick Strassman, M.D, interviewed by Martin W. Ball …
Ayahuasca and Kabbalah
Posted by admin • Category: Spirit & HealingJay 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.
