The Profile
Name: Carlos
Nationality: US/Peru (born in US)
Lives in: US
Age when taken psychedelics: 28
Job: Founder of the Ayahuasca Foundation
Psychedelic of choice: Ayahuasca
Place of ceremony: Amazon rainforest of Peru
What was your intention?
I had been exploring the use of psychedelics in college - it’s hard to do that and not get introspective. You end up sifting through your own traumas trying to get to the core of who you are.
There were some obvious things that caused troubles and so I knew what I needed to work on, but one was that I was a drug addict. It was pretty obvious to me I had to deal with that first.
Another thing was that I had a digestive issue since I went to Peru for the 1st time in 2000 on a non-Ayahuasca trip. After that, for 2.5 years, I threw up every single morning. My digestion was messed up and no doctor could figure out what was wrong with me. Ayahuasca was said to be really good to treat your stomach as it was a cleanse. That was another powerful intention for me.
I also wanted to return to a place where I felt I was working directly with the environment, the universe or God.
Another thing at that time was that I wanted to heal my relationship with my mother. I could not remember my childhood traumas as I probably buried them. I could see that what happened as a result of them, which was that my mother and I did not have a good relationship, but I didn’t understand why until I drank Ayahuasca.
Why did you take it?
There was a big reason why I decided to take it when I did – I thought I was going to die and I needed to save myself. There is a bit of a backstory to that…
Everyone’s life is a crazy combination of influences that eventually add up to who you are. One of the more important ones for me was the fact that, when I go back to my childhood, I was always interested in plants and I have always had the connection to nature.
In high school, I looked into studying medicinal plants and in college, I ended up experimenting with psychedelics. I also got a job that had me sitting in front of a computer with an internet connection with not much to do (back then it wasn’t a given) and so I used that to study medicinal plants.
I bought a file cabinet and I started compiling information on the various medicinal plants. Psychotropic plants definitely peaked my interest because I had already developed an affinity to psychedelics in college using mushrooms and LSD primarily. But Ayahuasca instantly caught my attention.
I found myself collecting a lot of information about it, reading everything I could – this is before the 21st century (late 90s) and so there really wasn’t a lot of information about it but I did what I could and I talked to my friends about it. It was definitely on my “bucket list”. It was very underground and had an already growing subculture of use but you were never going to be offered to drink it at a festival.
When it comes to my connection to nature, I think that it comes from the fact that I lived on a farm from 3-5 years of age and was outside the entire time. Then, Star Wars happened and in the 3rd movie The Return of the Jedi they had these Ewoks and Ewoks had a shaman – that was my first introduction to shamanism. Not that I knew what that meant but the shaman figurine I had that I played with was my favourite. So, I definitely feel there was an imprint in me that shamanism is something I connected with. And who knows, maybe there is more to that interest connected to past lives too.
A few years on, between high school and college I lived in Cape Cod and I happened to rent a house that used to be a nursery. And so it had greenhouses and all these gardening supplies in the backyard. That was my house! So, every day, I was exploring all of those spaces.
At that time, I got a book on foraging for wild medicinal plants and I got interested in the fact that every plant had a medicinal value. I feel like that’s a universal quality – to be able to look at a plant, to identify it and to know what it is used for. So, that’s what I also found very interesting.
And then, when psychedelics came and I read the books of Carlos Castaneda in college, all the pieces came together with my concept of shamanism. I also happened to be studying Philosophy and I took the Philosophy of Religion as a class where we discussed shamanism and I was even more drawn to it because of the intellectual aspect of a lack of hierarchy and full participation. There was no need to trust the higher authority – you could just experience it yourself. I can’t see how that wouldn’t appeal to anyone except maybe the priest and the pope. All of those pieces started coming together and I ended up getting that job where I started compiling the research.
Why did I get that job that allowed me that time to do that research? They were all seeming coincidences, yet they contributed so much. By recognising the coincidences by not being them, the term “path” started to make sense. And of course, it connects to our interests but it also helps to shape them. You make the decision to take the walk but the path is laid out there for you it seems.
When I got my career job, which in my mind was built up to be the culmination of my life, what I had been working and going to school for, I felt something was not right. It was designed to be a goal. I’d been conditioned to believe this was my measurement of success as a human being. Yet, it turned out to be quite different.
Prior to that, after college, I had a VW bus and travelled all over the country. Sometimes, I would stop and I wouldn’t even get a job. I would think maybe I’d settle down and maybe not. And then I’d go to another place and so on. And there was so much satisfaction and this ability that I was following my path. I was reading certain books at the time as well, e.g. The Alchemist or Celestine’s Prophecy ad they talked about this guidance. I was incorporating that into my perspective and how I viewed the world around me. I felt like there was a connection with my environment and we were working together, moving me forward in my life.
That culminated with me getting my career job. I celebrated it and loved it so much when I first got it and I started making good money – the key part of our conditioning for success. I had a nice house, a car, and so on. But as I went on, I started to say no to the guidance. You just don’t say no to the career job and the comfort it provides…
At a certain point, I accepted the lack of satisfaction in my life in favour of the concept of success in my mind. So, my heart and my mind started to dissociate from one another. I knew that was happening but I couldn’t quite articulate it. What I sought was what so many people do in this case – I tried to numb that voice from my heart so I could just tolerate the success.
And so, I started drinking and doing drugs, heavier drugs, opiates to numb myself so I could deal with being a success. Everyone I met was saying things like “Hey, what a success you are! What a great job you have! What a great house you live in!” They were reinforcing the conditioning yet secretly, I was spiraling downward and ended up with a serious drug addiction that led to me blacking out behind my wheel one night and just driving into a river. I woke up with my car sinking under water and just having to figure out what’s going on quick enough to jump out of the window and swim to the shore to watch my car go all the way under water and wonder how the hell I got here.
At that point, I realised that it didn’t matter how successful I was if I die and that was where I was probably headed. So, I made a declaration back to the universe: “I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to be me again. I’m going to return to the real me again”. I was not going to ignore the signs from the universe anymore…
10 days after, I received an email from a friend who just returned from Iquitos, Peru. She met a couple of Russian guys there called Roman and Eugene and they knew a shaman and if I came down, they could take me to an Ayahuasca ceremony. This was before Ayahuasca tourism – it wasn’t easy to just find a retreat. I viewed that email as the response from the universe that coincidentally said “Come to Peru and drink Ayahuasca”. This was it. I knew this was the way. It was a really important component because my mindset, attitude, my belief, what I now call “inner environment” was so in tune and so optimised that the results I received were beyond my imagination.
But I feel like they were that way because I knew that they would be that way. I had already decided before I flew to Peru, that this was going to be the outcome. I nourished all of that soil so that as soon as I planted that seed, it was going to grow roots and blossom.
What were you most afraid of?
It was 18 years ago, so quite a long time now but I know I was super afraid. I don’t quite remember what exactly I was so afraid of though. I suppose I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I didn’t speak Spanish. Where we went was not like a retreat centre and there was no preparation. I had been taking Valium everyday leading up to that – no one told me not to do that. So, I guess I had a generalised fear but I didn’t know of what specifically.
I did not think I was going to lose my mind though. I probably started to think that later but before I drank, I thought I’d done so many drugs and this was just going to be one of them. That was probably advantageous to some degree.
When my 1st ceremony happened, I could not tell the difference between my visions and reality and that was very worrisome. I definitely thought I was going to lose my mind then.
My 1st ceremony was so unique. The person I was drinking with was Don Juan Tangoa. He had lived with the Achuari tribe in the northern Peru. And you could call it a coincidence (I definitely don’t think it was), the chief of that tribe was at the ceremony too, which was not a normal thing at all. Even Don Juan said that guy never showed up. When you looked at him, you couldn’t help but go “Whoa, you look like you are from a jungle tribe!” – you knew immediately he was indigenous. He did not even speak Spanish.
The effect that had on me was that I believed this was going to be an experience I could trust since the chief of the tribe was there. To me it was a sign this guy was for real. This isn’t some show or something for tourists. I was a foreigner in this country and the possibility of being taken advantage of was a reality for me. Yet, here was this clear evidence that this was not going to be the case. This was a real Ayahuasca ceremony. As real as it could be, at least from my perception.
At some point during the ceremony, I left the space to take my underwear off as I had crapped my pants. I just threw them into the jungle and as I lay there in the foetal position outside in the grass, crying, the chief came out. He bent over, threw up a couple of times (there were no buckets or mattresses there) and as he was about to go back in, he saw me. I looked up at him and there was a moment there where both of us were looking at each other. He just waved me to come back in. He was such a presence. Anyone else, I would have probably said “No, thanks” but he commanded such respect and so I stood up, I dusted myself off and went in. That started the whole investigation as to why my experience was so horrible and why I perceived this other person’s wasn’t. That’s when I came to the conclusion that my own fear was having this terrible effect on my experience.
The ceremony ended quite pleasantly as I started to manage that fear. And then I continued that analysis. Of course, there was a point when I said “I am never doing this again!” but through that analysis I decided it was more on me how the experience went than on the ceremony or Ayahuasca itself.
I went back for the 2nd ceremony with a mantra “I’m not going to be afraid” and that changed everything and the ceremony was absolutely amazing from the beginning to end. I realised that this is for real. It became a new truth of the reality for me that spirits are real. Not like energy or a cloud of dust of something – a person just like me, the table or a tree. There was no difference. I came out with new truths: there’s nothing to fear and spirits are real.
The next ceremony was just beyond what I could imagine. It was in that ceremony that Don Juan said to me that this was my path to be a healer and if I wanted to, I could live with him and he would teach me. I just knew this was exactly what I was supposed to do. So, I accepted that.
I then went into the 4th ceremony knowing of my path to be a healer. That solidified a new truth for me which is that I can heal myself and I did it when I got rid of the parasite from my stomach.
The 5th ceremony was just tying up the loose ends because so much transformation had already happened.
I suppose Don Juan recognised I was catching on real quick as I progressed with my insight quickly from ceremony to ceremony. I think the beginner’s luck had a role in here. I was just figuring things out and within seconds later, I was practicing it (flying to other locations, visiting friends and family). I was allowing my consciousness to be free and not adhering to any rules. That’s why it was my path, my calling.
We have countless experiences influencing who we become. I feel lucky enough I was able to find a great direction and a path all those influences were guiding me towards.
So, I committed I was going to live in the Amazon rainforest with a shaman. I didn’t just stay there though. I flew back home but with the intention of wrapping up different aspects of my life. I couldn’t just abandon it all. I had a girlfriend living in my house and needed to deal with that too.
I did wrap things up a few months later and moved to Peru beginning of 2004 to live with Don Juan. At that time, the idea was that I was going to be a healer and return to the US to do that there. About 3 years in, I began analysing my own educational material. I took notes and used a camera filming ceremonies, recorded icaros, was writing musical notations of the songs on my keyboard, I had the ingredients of all the various plant remedies and how they were administered. I was thinking “What if someone gave this to me when I arrived, how fast I would have been able to learn all this” and that gave me an idea to start a course and to teach people similar to me who felt the calling.
Unfortunately, my teacher was not really into it and 1 year later, I stopped living with him. I basically started searching for the curandero that did want to do that project with me. I met him in 2008 and we started the Ayahuasca Foundation together in 2009. We do offer healing retreats but the educational aspect was a passion of mine. The more you can learn about the process of healing, the more you can activate it yourself.
We teach icaros on courses and at retreats as it will increase the effects if you understand them. We teach various aspects of the tradition: by knowing more about them or even being able to implement them, it helps to further empower you. Obviously, the more powerful you feel, the more you will be able to achieve in your healing process without the dependency on anyone else. That’s why Ayahuasca is so special as a medicine: it creates an environment for you to do the healing rather than giving your health away to a doctor.
Our 4-week course is called “The Healing Empowerment Course” and it’s to become your own healer. Our 8-week course is called “The Initiation Course” and that’s to become a healer for others. We have 1,2 & 3 week healing retreats too and they also include the educational components.
Last year we hosted research in our new centre that opened in 2017. We had a team of researchers who got a grant from the British Medical Research Council and they did phase 1 study last year that was completed and once things reopen, we are hopefully going to do phase 2. The results of phase 1 should be published soon – they were fantastic.
It was the 1st ever epigenetic study on a psychedelic. It’s also the 1st ever government funded Ayahuasca research. It was addressing treatment for childhood trauma as well as depression and anxiety but we’ll be expanding it to include PTSD and chronic pain in phase 2. The epigenetic study looked at 3 markers associated with depression. We will be expanding that to look at 20 because the results showed that with one of the markers, there was a biological change after drinking Ayahuasca, suggesting you can change your genetics drinking it.
What did you most look forward to?
I had done a lot of research and read everything I could read on it like The Yage Letters by William S. Burroughs or Michael Harner in his original book there was a whole section on Ayahuasca (which unfortunately he removed). I was fascinated by the concept of visions. I was totally looking forward to seeing spirits. I couldn’t wrap my head around that but that was the most fascinating part that most people are curious about when they learn about Ayahuasca.
Interestingly enough, I had visions within seconds. I got hot and something started to happen. I could feel it coming on and then in such an incredible short amount of time, an octopus was floating right in front of my face looking at me, flying in the air with its arms extended in all directions and I was like “What?? This is so real”. It then it went to my head and laid eggs there.
I had 100 storied of all the things that happened during the ceremony. But if you have 10 people drinking Ayahuasca, the chances are for 1 of them, it just won’t happen and that’s just how it is. I have looked at that so much and wish I knew how to solve that but the reality is that you can’t fake who you are even if you try all the things I can tell you to do to prepare. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The best we can do is to figure out who we are, what our strengths are and play to them. That’s part of what it means to find your own path: it’s to know who you are and what you are good at.
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
I have been doing it for 17 years, so it’s hard to pinpoint to an experience. The hardest part of the original experience was having to realise the parts of myself I was learning about that I didn’t like anymore. Having to face the truth that some people may not like me for a good reason. This is the result of an untrained ego, my ego misbehaving or feeling like it’s the master in our relationship rather than the pet it’s supposed to be. Nobody likes to realise their ego got the best of them. That was the hardest part.
In my life, the hardest part of my relationship to Ayahuasca was deciding that I wasn’t going to drink it as much because I had a daughter. I made a conscious decision that Ayahuasca was not going to be no. 1 anymore ad I felt so much guilt, thinking I was abandoning my path. It took years to see it from a more accurate perspective.
There is no abandoning of my path, it’s just it sometimes takes you in the directions you don’t think it was going to. Now, I don’t drink it anymore – I am much more committed to being a father but I know I have an incredible connection with Ayahuasca and other plants in general to the point I don’t feel I need a reminder. So, I don’t drink it 100 times a year anymore like I used to. Connecting to my daughter is bringing me new insights that plants were not able to provide. So, the value of that relationship is the most valuable of all to me right now.
Maybe there’ll be a renaissance when she’s older but there was a time I really wondered if I was getting a divorce from Ayahuasca because I had these expectations for so long. It was a struggle for me to accept my life was taking a different turn but I now look at a path like a tree – I just took a different branch and I’m now a husband and a father but growth is still happening.
What was the best bit about the experience?
The visions and the realisations.
The visions were a great component in gaining the insights about fear, the reality of spirits and my personal abilities.
It was much more about the wisdom in the end. It’s not necessary to have these visions to gain insights, especially when it comes to self-love. Many people who come to the retreat say how they now feel self-love and many of them are able to get that without any visions. The visions are just an anecdote, something cool. The lessons became a part of the new me – that’s what I’m grateful for. The mechanism by which they have been taught in the end are insignificant.
What did you get from it?
I healed my digestive issues.
In my 4th ceremony, I got to the point where I could feel I could do it and my spirit left my body, went into my stomach, and found a squid in there. I pried the suction cups of its tentacles off the wall of my intestines and it hurt with a physical pain but the next day and from then on, I never had digestive issues again.
I did talk to a doctor who happened to be sitting next to me on a plane and who was a parasite specialist – I suspected that that was what I may had caught. He said that there actually exists a parasite that looks just like a squid. Putting it all together, I think I got that parasite on my first trip to Peru and it may well have pushed me over the edge to go back to Peru to heal as that physical aspect played a role in me deciding to drink Ayahuasca.
I also managed to heal some of my childhood traumas. When I was relieving them as a child, except from my adult perspective and seeing the misinterpretations of these events and experiences without the maturity (to me that’s what trauma is), I realised it was not my fault. It was like this one core belief had tainted and infected so much of my life, how I viewed myself and my lack of love. I stopped loving myself completely as it was impossible to have self-love and believe what happened was the truth.
The result of this was that I changed my personal truth of what had happened. I corrected it and through that I started the process of healing. Obviously, the infection doesn’t just go away if you clean the wound – it becomes a whole another entity. And so all dynamics of my relationships that had been infected didn’t heal with me but I was now healed as an individual who could go and start to do the work to remove that infection from all the dynamics of my relationships. That took a lot longer but I would have never been able to do it without the beginning of the pulling of roots of that and understanding of the trauma.
Even if you get to the point where you know what the trauma is though, it’s still very difficult to change it. I’ve looked a lot of that, especially with the Ayahuasca Foundation – we’ve had over 1,000 people come through our place, so I could not not look into it. To me the way that I see it is that usually, trauma is formed in a so called “hyper sensitivity state”. Because of an extreme negative emotion or fear or terror, we have an evolutionary response to amplify our sensory perceptive ability. That makes a lot of sense when you are in wilderness and there is a lion there – you need to be hypersensitive so you can see and hear better as you might need it for your own survival. But the same response in the state of fear can result in creating that truth with a faculty that normally wouldn’t be accessed. If you are in therapy, there is no way you can get into that state to heal it because it took this extreme terror to create it.
Ayahuasca is that therapeutic way to do that in a controlled setting of a ceremony. You are in a state of trust and positive emotion and yet you have access to the decisions and beliefs that were made and informed in the depths of that sensitivity. That’s where those truths reside. If you go scuba diving and go really deep and put something on the ground and then you put on a snorkeling gear, you can’t quite get there. You need that scuba gear – that’s what Ayahuasca is – you can go to the depths of your consciousness and make changes according to your will without being skewed by negative emotion. That’s how I have come to describe the healing process.
Another way I look at is when you have a trauma or any personal truth, they are in a solid state. Your beliefs are more like a liquid state – they flow. And then ideas are the gas state. Ayahuasca allows us this mechanism of melting the truth into the beliefs.
How did it impact your life?
It helped me get back on my path.
I look at the world now with micro / macro lens. I know that, biologically speaking, my body is made of trillions of individual cells all interacting with one another and they all have a role doing what they can and that’s what makes me. And at a macro level, the universe is made of trillions of individual entities and they all have a consciousness and a role and are interacting as well. Provided our cells are still connected, still receiving a message, they are going to do what they are supposed to do and the outcome will be the health of all. Everyone will benefit. So, as long as I stay connected, I will do the right thing. To me that’s the essence of faith: knowing that you are well connected, and you will be guided to where you are supposed to go.
What did you struggle with after?
On the plane back from Peru, I started to think about the western reality and I decided that I must have been crazy wanting to stay. Living with a shaman in the rainforest on his dirt floor? So, by the time I landed in New York, I had changed my mind. Even tough my experiences were so profound, I still couldn’t make them not crazy while on the American soil.
I was met at the airport in New York by my friend. The plan was that I would spend the night in his apartment and take the train to Massachusetts the next day. On the way, he told me that my girlfriend had moved out while I was in Peru and that she had got together with my neighbour. Normally that would be bad news but I thought “Oh, that’s interesting!” Then he told me about this girl he had met and that I would really like her and that I should really come out clubbing with them that night and meet her. I just got off a plane after 6 weeks in the Amazon rainforest and was not really up for clubbing in New York City. I was more thinking I was going to watch tv and eat some ice cream. He really wanted me to meet her though and said he was going to wake me up when they get back at 4am then.
At 4am he wakes me up and introduces me to this girl. I apologised I didn’t come out but that I had just got back from Peru. And she says “Oh, you’ve just been to Peru? I have two friends there – maybe you’ve met them”. In my mind I was thinking, well, Peru is not a supermarket – it’s a country but then she says “Roman and Eugene – they are from Russia” and I was dumbfound – I lived in their house! She took my hand and she said: “I don’t know what you are doing but I know it’s important and no matter what anyone else thinks, you must do it”. I looked up and just gave the thumbs up to the universe “Message received!” and changed my plan back. And in fact, I am so thankful I was doubtful because for this to have happened, it was so much more powerful. I don’t care who you are, you would never convince me this was a coincidence. That was another influence that made me know this was my path.
Another difficult thing when I got back to the US was that I mistakenly thought I was going to open everyone’s eyes to the truths I had realised but yet do so by simply talking to them, even when it took profound experiences for me to get there myself. So, I was preaching and very few people were open to that. That started to have a detrimental effect on my perception on those truths. I started to question if I was right about them.
Having been healed myself of the traumas and knowing I was a different person and yet still facing almost identical issues with relationships – that was frustrating too. I could remember specifically with my mother, I had written her emails apologising and setting the stage yet when I met her, the energy was still stale. It was painful to have to come to terms with that. I had to accept it was going to take years to clear up that infection.
What improved?
I didn’t have that parasite and had no digestive issues – I was so loving that. I wanted to eat it all.
On an emotional level, I just had this confidence that it was a revival for me. I felt I was able to do what I wanted to do, to make dreams a reality, to make an idea and make it so. I had a revived passion for life, like a child. The way I saw the world was that it was a place that commanded fascination.
What do you need to work on?
Life goes on and there is always something even after years of drinking Ayahuasca.
The reality is that I’m not in as good a place than I was when I started. I’m married and I have a daughter and it’s a greater challenge for me to feel that everything will be fine for all of us as opposed to just me. There is a person that relies and is dependent upon me and so there is a pressure there that carries a different weight. That is my challenge: not to feel that weight is completely on me. I’m sure every parent understands what that weight feels like. Of course, there is a lot of wisdom in that too that I look forward to learning as well.
What would be your advice if you were to do it again?
I would be too nervous that I would change something because it was such a great experience. I’m very happy with my life and would not want to change anything about it.
That's one story and a half right there and what I find so particularly incredible about it is that it touches on something a lot of us grapple with: finding our own path.
Following that path seems like a simple idea but how does one find it???
Carlos simply followed what he was always interested in. Again, a simple idea, yet so many people across all ages and cultures often struggle with that. As a result, they end up getting to the beginning of their adult life not really knowing what they want to do. Who they want to be or even wat gifts they might have themselves. Instead, it all becomes about what we can have and show to others for validation.
Carlos found his path by paying attention to the voice coming from the depths of his heart, the one that's easily dismissed as not practical. Not that he knows exactly where that path is going but he can see enough in front of him to follow it just for him to feel like he is at the right place.
That attention he paid to what was his and how it made him feel (well, with the exception of the time he got his career job), it eventually paid off with him living a life connected to who he truly is and doing something that matters to him. This is a man who loves his life - that says it all, doesn't it?
Comments