Drinking the Four Winds

A Shamanic Love Story

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

GRACE AND MADNESS

With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile ... astenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty

Scott Westerfield, Pretties

2010. July

Grace and Madness, the 6th International Conference onAmazonian Shamanism, was held in Iquitos, Peru. For six yearsit had been a forum for presentations and workshops onrainforest medicines, mainly centred on Ayahuasca: the vine ofsouls, the gateway to madness or liberation from it. Jungleshamans are brought together – including 'superstars' likeGuillermo Arevalo and Percy Garcia and lesser-known buttalented healers and medicine men such as Ron Wheelock andAdela Navas – to offer stories and insights into their healingswith Ayahuasca and their views on how and why this visionarybrew is able, where Western medicines fail, to cure conditionssuch as addiction, trauma and many other physical andemotional problems.

They are joined on the programme by Western academics,authors and scientists who have studied (and drunk) themedicine themselves and who have their own stories to tell. Thisyear, according to schedule worked out - and often franticallyreworked - by the organisers (since hardly anything goessmoothly or to plan in Peru) they include Peter Gorman, formereditor of High Times and author of a recently published book onAyahuasca, Dennis McKenna (brother of Terence), PabloAmaringo, the world-renowned visionary artist ... and me. Atthis gathering I'm a nobody and I'm not even here to talk aboutAyahuasca so I'm expecting a lukewarm response when I beginspeaking about something which I presume the audience haslittle interest in.

The gathering isn't as big as in previous years – maybe a fewhundred people and they don't attend every presentation sosome speakers, as interesting as they are, get only a handful oflisteners. Eventually it's my turn and I'm not hoping for much.

As I am introduced however there is a murmur in the roomand people start walking over from wherever they have congregatedor vanished to. By the time I reach the stage – a circularplatform surrounded by delegates' tables – almost everyone isthere. There are no seats left so people are standing three deepbehind them in some places, waiting to hear what I have to say.

That's when I get it. I am here to talk about San Pedro – amescaline cactus not a DMT potion of vines and leaves; Andeanmountain rather than Amazonian jungle medicine – and yet, evenat this conference with its traditional focus on rainforest shamansand the vine of souls, people want to hear. The times arechanging it seems, just as the healing needs of people and theculture they belong to change. Maybe San Pedro is the medicinewe most need now.

My theory is supported by other events this week. Theconference runs for eight days and most shamans offerceremonies during this time which delegates can attend. We hearthrough the conference that the shamans have done well andtheir ceremonies attract 20 or so attendees - which is good; undernormal circumstances an Ayahuasca ritual might only have halfthat number. At the jungle retreat Centre I own however we arerunning San Pedro ceremonies and they draw almost 100 people.Interest in the cactus outstrips the call of the vine.

I think I know why. I first visited Peru to drink Ayahuasca in1998 and I've been back many times to do so, my visits eventuallyculminating in my purchase of the healing Centre I now own inIquitos where my business partner Trudy and I offer this plantmedicine to our clients to help with their healing needs. In the 12years that I have worked with the brew I've got to know it welland it seems to me that it opens up new worlds of possibility forpeople, freeing the soul from the body so it can travel theuniverse and they can see their lives from the perspective of theinfinite, aware of all the choices and potential they have. SanPedro, by contrast, is a plant of the Earth which enables the spiritof the universe to enter them and show them all that is possiblein this lifetime, in this body, in this world. Its healing is moredirect and immediate than Ayahuasca and more meaningfulbecause it is rooted in what is real and happening in their livesright now. It is this groundedness, this experience of spirit in theeveryday that our participants have come for. They want toknow how to be, how to act in the world, how to heal themselvesand find meaning.

Over the years, San Pedro has become an important teacherfor me. The reason I am in Peru now in fact is to begin anapprenticeship with the cactus which will involve dieting it (ashamanic process of fasting, meditation and drinking San Pedroat regular intervals) so it can teach me how to heal.

Our first ceremony during the conference is run by La Bruja,a curandera from the Andes who has flown to Iquitos to staywith us and is also speaking at the conference. I first drank herSan Pedro five years ago and since then she has become a friendand a teacher to me. Her medicine is strong and we drink it inbeautiful surroundings, the ritual beginning on the porch at theback of our casa grande, the big house where our clients andparticipants stay, overlooking our lagoon and the forest beyondit. The day was warm and humid, the sky cloud-free and azure-blueand a sense of peace descended as people entered their SanPedro dreams and found quiet places for reflection and healing.Some laughed like children and played in the water; some cried,exploring old wounds. Business as usual for San Pedro, themellow healer who gently coaxes the pain from sorry souls.

Its healing approaches in waves. You feel it gently at first andthen it recedes a little. The next wave is stronger and lasts longer.The next is stronger still. The whole process takes perhaps fourhours until you are fully held by San Pedro, although you feel itsspirit enter you way before that. The journey lasts a further six toeight hours, a ten or twelve hour experience in total, sometimeslonger; sometimes a lifetime.

During the day I reflected on the past – the twists and turns offate that had brought me to this place – and the future: what I wasgoing to make of this strange new environment now I had givenup 'civilisation' for the jungle. Both the past and the future aregoing to be important in this story but it was the present whichsuddenly consumed me because, sitting on that porch, sensesheightened by San Pedro, what I was most aware of was thepresence of two other people. It radiated like an energy fromthem, grabbing my attention.

One was from someone on my right and felt female. I took aglance and saw a woman, mid-30s, a volunteer at our Centrewhose name was Jane. She had long dark hair and was quitepretty but it seemed to me that she was also in some wayunhappy, perhaps even damaged by something from her past. Ihad heard a lot about her, some of which supported my sense ofher now, as she already had a history at our camp, but I had onlyspoken to her briefly and did not know her well. There was abook at her side, The Count of Monte Cristo, a classic story of failedlove and the search for freedom and vengeance.

The other energy came from someone behind me and felt,unsubtly, to be boring into my back and rummaging through mysoul; checking me out. It came from a man, I knew that, but Iwasn't going to turn around and see who. Instead, I startedsending out energy 'vibes' of my own to check on him.

Who and what I discovered in both of these people was goingto change a lot of things around here and be part of someamazing adventures to come. The future was already calling butit was the past which had brought me here. 1998 had been apivotal year.

CHAPTER 2

THE BEGINNING – AND AN END

In the safe island of my mind [I]created an art that amounted tobuffoonery, a brilliant veneer to hide the darkness of thieves likemyself – thieves who pillaged the earth, robbing others of theirhealth, transforming their time into a hard personal shell, dividingothers' space into dog kennels in which these citizens, befuddled bythe walls, accepted their obligatory blindness

Alejandro Jodorowsky, film director and Zen Master

1998. Sometime around September

I am on a plane to Vancouver where I will be doing ... veryimportant things. For the last 14 years since graduating with adegree in psychology and related subjects I have been usingthese disciplines to manipulate the minds of others as an internationalmarketing consultant; inviting them with a winning smileand a subliminal mallet to love my clients as much as I clearlydid (even though I actually had little love for them myself). Inow mainly represent medical and pharmaceutical companiesand my job basically amounts to wearing flashy suits and takingclients to dinner so I can tell them how to run their ownbusinesses – because I, of course, know best. Like I said, I do veryimportant things.

I'm drinking a Bloody Mary on Air Canada, on my way to aconference where I will, of course, have an important role toplay, and I really should be smiling to myself at my close-to-six-figuresalary and the BMW I drive when the national UK wage eventoday - is barely a third of what I earned then and mostpeople have to work for a living. I'm not smiling though. I'mdepressed. Disillusioned might be a better word.

Inevitably, because I know I can (and because she's in lovewith her designer lifestyle and self-importance too) I will sleepwith the woman next to me who works for a 'rival' company andis going to the same conference, even though we've barely met.This will happen after dinner at some oyster bar near the riverand a bottle or two of expense account wine where we will toastour salaries and egos. In the morning we'll say goodbye, nothingmore, and she'll be gone. Then we will both return to the businessof being important and regard each other as competitors. Hername is Claire. I'm amazed I can even remember it.

And that's how it was for me. Empty highs and empty sexwith other Masters of the Universe; all of it on account; all of itamounting to nothing. We were international airborne whorespaid for by someone else. At first I thought it was only thecompanies I represented which were picking up the tab butincreasingly I'd come to realise that the people who were reallypaying were those who could least afford to. I'd had hidden itfrom myself for years but the shabbiness I felt now at my ownsuccess was undeniable and it revealed my deeper feelings.

On this trip I was representing two pharmaceutical clients,both of them in the HIV business, at a conference on HIV andAIDS. They used different technologies to manage theprogression of the disease and its effect on sufferers so they sawno conflict of interest and I was impartial, giving my love anddevotion to both, although, had I known it then (which I didn'tbecause it was never made public, even to Masters of theUniverse) the approach of one of my clients, Roche - or rather, theorigins of its HIV technology - would have grabbed my attentionmore. Roche used a process called polymerase chain reaction orPCR to enable early diagnosis of diseases such as leukaemia andlymphomas, both associated with AIDS. The sensitivity of PCRmeant that the virus could be detected soon after infection andbefore the onset of serious disease, which might give physiciansa head start in treatment.

What interests me now is not the science however, but that theinventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, like his fellow pioneer FrancisCrick, had used what science teachers, politicians and lawmakerswould like us to believe is an unusual approach to comeup with his idea (although in my experience it is far fromunusual in reality): he got high – and it got him a Nobel Prize.

Crick was the first to identify the structure of DNA. To do sohe used LSD, a psychedelic derived from ergot, a fungus thoughtto be the basis of the 'flying ointment' of European witches. In hisautobiography he writes about falling into a dreaming statewhere he saw snakes writhing together in a caduceus form andfrom that Eureka moment he was able to crack the DNA code.Rather self-effacingly he referred to this dream-clad revelation(which led to one of the greatest discoveries of our age) as simply'a not insignificant idea', a phrase I love to this day. Mullis wassimilarly inspired and later said of his own experiences: 'What ifI had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR? ... Idoubt it. I seriously doubt it.' It turns out that shamans andscientists, alchemists and chemists, establishment and anti-establishmentrevolutionaries are not so far removed from oneanother.

I didn't know any of that back in 1998 however. If I had itmight have given me at least a new outlook, something to grabmy attention and interest, but as it was I was bored, sick ofmyself, and had the uncomfortable feeling that I had becomelittle more than a scavenger at the scrap end of science. Perhapsit was worse than that. Perhaps I was a murderer, at least byassociation.

When you join the medical profession – at whatever level:doctor, surgeon, chemist or even someone like me – you are toldit is noble work; that you are aiding the welfare of humanity,helping and caring for people. And you believe it. You want to.But the reality, after a couple of years in the business, becomesapparent as something else.

The first contradiction is that pharmaceutical companies andmedical professionals (physicians, research scientists ... ormarketing consultants) are first and foremost bill-payers and,like any commercial enterprise, they exist to make money anddepend on customer loyalty. That, however, is a phrase whichmeans something different in medicine than in most other professions.If you are Wal-Mart or Burger King, customer loyaltyamounts to giving your client a taste for your product so theykeep coming back. If you're a drug company however, the sameprinciple means keeping your customers sick since there is nomoney to be made from curing a disease. A healthy patient is nota loyal customer. Directors would be out of a job and shareholdersup in arms if AIDS or cancer or the common cold werecured tomorrow, although, most likely, the technology actuallyexists. There are billions of dollars to be made from managingdisease however: never quite curing it but alleviating enough ofthe symptoms so that people feel a little better and come back forrepeat prescriptions. The customer still goes away sick but atleast not dead (there is no money in that either, a cynic mightadd).

Then there are the legalities of drug production which meanthat the raw essence of a pharmaceutical, invariably a plant,cannot be patented. You can't 'own' a natural material. What thismeans for drug companies is that they must typically employanthropologists and ethnobotanists (collectively known as bioprospectors)to visit areas of interest (the rainforest being a primelocation) and develop relationships with shamans and nativehealers who can introduce them to plants with healing propertiesso that their 'active ingredients', which are patentable, can thenbe extracted. Their arrangement with these local experts isusually less than fair and normally falls way short of reciprocity,the shaman receiving a few hundred dollars or products in kind(guns, clothes, Western medicines or even a few beads havehistorically been some of the commodities exchanged) forknowledge which may net the drug company billions.

One of the issues that troubled me ... is what has come to be called"intellectual property rights". Briefly stated, no matter whatdisease an ethnobotanist might find a cure for during the course ofhis research, the indigenous peoples who taught him the cure wouldnot benefit from the sales of the new drug

Mark Plotkin, ethnobotanist and author of Tales of a Shaman'sApprentice

As a consequence of the shaman's co-operation in this 'healingmission' whole areas of rainforest might then be exploited ordestroyed as drug (and other) companies commercialise thejungle and take the plants that interest them, which also meansthat native people have fewer medicines left for themselves.

Around 125,000 species – almost half the plants on Earth - arefound in tropical rainforests, which cover almost eight billion acresof the world's surface. Estimates vary but it is well-known thatseveral thousands of these rainforest acres are destroyed each yearby Western companies or local farmers under Westernsponsorship ... There is no doubt that many of these plants hold thekeys to life-saving new medicines – we know this from the less-than-one-percentthat have been studied - and yet every year thousandsmore are destroyed

Leslie Taylor, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs

Dr Norman Farnsworth (University of Illinois, Chicago) writesthat 'Worldwide, one in three plant-derived drugs come fromtropical rainforest plants [and] only a small fraction has beeninvestigated for medicinal purposes. It is reasonable to believethat further investigation of tropical rainforest plants will yieldimportant drugs to treat diseases for which we still have no satisfactorycures'. With the rainforest destroyed however – sometimes,ironically, at least partly because of the drugcompanies looking for those cures – it is reasonable to expect thatwe may never find them.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Drinking the Four Winds by Ross Heaven. Copyright © 2012 Author Name. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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