In Part I of this post, we explored the many ways purging can manifest with ayahuasca, along with some tips for when things seem stuck. Here we continue with further esoteric mysteries of La Purga: In an essay titled “Ayahuasca and the Grotesque Body,” anthropologist Stephen Beyer notes the split that many Westerners seem to…
Navigation
La Purga, “The Purge,” is one of ayahuasca’s names in the Amazon, highlighting a most notorious aspect of its reputation. The ayahuasca vine is strongly purgative—indigenous people sometimes drink it simply to induce a good cleanse. The bucket is thus an essential element in most ayahuasca ceremonies, unless you are free to vomit on the…
Here are some details I might have wanted to know before my first cup of ayahuasca five years ago. (Despite the not-knowing, it’s all worked out perfectly okay.) 1. It can change your life, big time. And for the better, which is why a lot of people are turning to it. But the scale and…
Along with bucket, blanket, red-light flashlight, and something white to leave on your mat so you can find it when you’re coming back from the bathroom in the dark:[…]
Ayahuasca is a potent psychoactive brew made by cooking the ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi) with the leaf of the chacruna shrub (psychotria viridis) (sometimes other plants are used in the admixture.) It’s been spreading with extraordinary rapidity from its indigenous home in the Amazon into global popular culture, becoming what a recent New Yorker article…
