From http://www.erowid.org
People seem to be fascinated by the idea of taking psychedelic drugs as some kind of shortcut to shamanism. They are not. There are no shortcuts.
Years ago in the Houston Shamanism Meetup group, for awhile we had a member who thought shamanism was taking drugs. Period. When he found out differently he was no longer interested.
Not that such drugs have no value as medicine. In the early 1960s psychiatrists discovered that in the right setting, their patients could open up and make phenomenal progress in therapy by taking carefully administered psychedelics such as LSD.
But the drugs were soon outlawed as part of the antidrug mania that became the War on Drugs, and so they were lost to medicine. Instead, they became synonymous with casual, sometimes dangerous recreational drug use, and there they have stayed---illegal and stigmatized.
Even now, for some people use shamanism is a code word for using psychedelic drugs. They seem to equate the two. But real shamans do not have to rely on psychedelic drugs to journey.
Shamans in many cultures do not use such drugs at all. Others require that shaman apprentices learn to journey first without them. Among the Bushmen people of central Africa, for example, the saying is that if you use drugs first, you will never learn to journey.
As I wrote in a previous article, when people live in small bands of gatherers and hunters, each group needs a shaman, but there may not be enough naturally gifted shamans for each group to have one. In that case, drug use may begin as a crutch to help see visions.
The problem is that shamanic work is active. It is not just lying down and passively letting pictures roll through your mind.
The shaman has to control the journey, go to the appropriate place in the spirit world, contact the right spirits, and then get the job done in the spirit world, one way or another. Simply taking a drug will not accomplish that.
In recent years a lot of people have journeyed to the Amazon jungle to drink ayahuasca or yage, psychedelic drinks brewed from banisteriopsis caapi and other jungle plants.
The key to that practice is that a shaman or a curandero (another kind of healer) brews up the drink in a ceremony to administer to people who are not shamans and therefore cannot summon up the healing visions on their own.
There is supposedly a person or group in Austin that administers ayahuasca. There are even web sites where you can order banesteriopsis caapi, even though it is illegal to have it in the U.S. unless you belong to particular Brazilian religion that uses it as a sacrement.
However, I think all these people are missing the point. This weekend I met a man named Frank, who has being going to Peru for years to take ayahuasca for self-healing and spiritual development.
When I mentioned the Austin ayahuasca group, he said, "I would never take ayahuasca here. It is not from here. It is not a local plant."
Frank studied shamanism years ago, and his point was that shamans work with local spirits, not with the spirits of plants from far away. According to Frank, the curandero he works with does drink ayahuasca, too, to commune with the plant. Since the plant does not grow here, there would be no point in our doing that.
The other point about taking psychedelic drugs---or any mood-altering substance---is that it opens you up to spirits without control. You lose your ability to discern and to chose which spirits to open up to. That can be very dangerous.
So the next time you hear someone equate shamanism with drug use, just know that they do not have all the facts.
And if you want to experience something mind-blowing, learn to journey without drugs, and you may never need them at all.
Communing with plant spirits is another issue, but there are ways to do that without ingesting them, leaving you in control of where you go in the spirit world and which spirits you deal with.
Have you used psychedelic or mood-altering plants for the purpose of doing shamanic work? Were you experienced at shamanic journeying before you tried using the plants? What were your experiences?
Important: Please be discreet when commenting. If you have used a plant substance that is not currently legal to use in Houston, either specify where you used it (such as in Peru) or use an email address that cannot be tracked to you. I do not want anyone to get into legal troubles. If you are not sure, it is better to remain safely silent on line.
For more information on classic shamanic practices, see the list of links to shamanism-related web sites near the lower right corner of this page. White Cranes has been studying and teaching shamanic practices for 20 years. Follow her on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/whitecranes and http://www.twitter.com/shamanista. To learn to do shamanic practices in Houston, you are invited to join the Houston Shamanism Meetup group, http://www.meetup.com/houstonshamanism.
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