Maximizing benefits and minimizing harm of Ayahuasca with Jeronimo Mazarrasa

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Jeronimo Mazarrasa.

Jeronimo is a community activist and the Director of Social Innovation at ICEERS (International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service). With over 20 years of experience in the psychedelic field, he has dedicated his life to studying how traditional plant medicine practices, especially Ayahuasca, can be integrated safely and respectfully into the modern world.

We touch upon topics of:

• Jeronimo’s background in film and Ayahuasca activism (00:53)
• The globalization of Ayahuasca and his role at ICEERS (03:41)
• Maximizing the benefits of plant medicine (07:16)
• Why prohibition and secrecy hinder collective learning (09:20)
• Minimizing harm: physical, psychological, and legal risks (11:50)
• Discernment and interpreting Ayahuasca messages (14:51)
• Tools to avoid impulsive decisions after ceremony (22:11)
• Cultural appropriation vs. inspiration in Ayahuasca (30:24)
• How to care for others in ceremony without physical contact (40:12)
• Indigenous wisdom and what the Western psychedelic field can learn (45:00)
• Ayahuasca for prevention, not just treatment (54:05)

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Jeronimo Mazarrasa at http://www.ICEERS.org and http://www.ICEERS.academy

Transcript

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com. If you find yourself in a situation where, for example, ayahuasca has told you to quit your job, sell everything, move to the jungle, I dunno, or stop your relationship, this is what you shouldn’t do, just for safety, just for precaution. You shouldn’t go to your house the next morning and break up with your partner.

You should listen to what ICA told you. You should take it in consideration. And then you should give yourself some time. Give yourself four weeks. Give yourself eight weeks. Give yourself eight months and really think about it like, is it a good baby? You have to break up with this person. What are the consequences?

Are children involved? Just think of the logistics and if three months later this is still a good idea and it seems like an important idea, then okay, so the first test is the test of time. And I would recommend that anybody that gets like a major sort of calling from Ayahuasca always gives it the test of time.

Because if it’s a true calling, it will be true today and it will be true three months from now. But if it was just something that happened to you in Ayahuasca, then it was just because sometimes these things happen. So that’s the first test is the test of time.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast, as always. Really the whole same leaf to them having a conversation with Geronimo Animo. Maa. Geronimo is a community activist focused on Ayahuasca and the director of Social Innovation at I Sears. He has over 20 years of experience in psychedelic field. He has dedicated his work to researching how ceremonial plant practices can be integrated in the societies.

Outside of their cultures of origin. In this episode, we talk about globalization of ayahuasca, maximizing benefits of ayahuasca, minimizing harm. What risks are there distinguishing between? I go talking and real messages from ayahuasca, lessons from indigenous practices, prevention versus treatment. I seers and so much more.

Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you Eroni Mo, welcome to the show.

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: Thanks Sam. Thanks for having me.

Sam Believ: Eroni. Mo, tell us a little bit about yourself and how did your life bring you to work with plant medicines?

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: I was counting the other day and it’s been now 35 years since I’ve been interested in psychedelics and a little bit more than 20 years since I’ve been drinking ayahuasca. I was 35 when I started. It was out of a personal interest. I was also fascinated by the topic, but it had very much to do with my own process and my own search.

And for a number of years, more than 10 years, I was working on a number of documentaries having to do with this, these plants and in general with encounter of traditional, of indigenous knowledge with the rest of the world, which we see also the globalization of the plants. I had done some work, we’d done some previous work for documentaries on mushrooms and on salvia Derum, and we had a plan to make one documentary per plant.

Then when we arrived to Ayahuasca, this was 2003, there was a lot less information. Nikitas was not what it is. There was, most of the information online was about deto dme, basically and the Brazilian churches. And when we went to Brazil, we spent three months there shooting with the different churches.

And I was just astounded because the world that we had been doing in Mexico with, mushrooms SIA as sometimes it felt almost like archeology, you were looking for the last remnants of culture of practices that were in the past much bigger, but are now where, they seem almost to be on its way to disappear.

And they were much smaller than they had once been. So I was astounded when I go to Brazil and just saw ayahuasca that was just a thriving living culture. It was huge in expansion. Very different from the experience we had in Mexico. So I became fascinated with this and we’re trying to make a film that would some somehow be like a family portrait.

I wanted to put like all the different traditional manifestations of traditional practices around ayahuasca in one sort of film. And, it took me a number of years to realize that was impossible. It was too large even if you stuck just to the traditional practices.

But this process was, very interesting personally for myself and also very interesting in my understanding of the of just how broad and how rich traditional Ayahuasca cultures are. From there, I would say it was a slow process to. Basically to come to the conclusion that there was, perhaps there were better things I could do for these plants than spend 10 years of my life making 90 minutes of video.

So I began to collaborate with the different groups and activist groups in Spain, and slowly I began to collaborate more and more with e, which is a foundation that has been exists based in Barcelona. We organize the world, ayahuasca conferences, we do many other things, but ICE e has been existing for 15 years.

I started collaborating with them 10 years ago, and then little by little my collaboration got first as volunteer. Then it got bigger until today. Most of my work, as you said, revolves around the the how to you could say, how to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of deglobalization of these practices.

So I think it’s not a matter of debate that ayahuasca is globalized you. Now you can find ayahuasca ceremonies just about in every country in the world. Other plans are following San Pedro, et cetera, et cetera. And, with these comes great opportunities and also the certain dangers and my work and my commitment is to make, ho hopefully the best out of the opportunities and to minimize the dangers.

And this takes and this takes different shapes, policy work. We do scientific research with the legal defense for people who get arrested working with ayahuasca. And we also do harm reduction. We have free support center where we give people integration sessions for people who have been having troubles.

And we also do policy work at the UN level. We work with indigenous people. Develop, it’s, there’s many actors involved and it’s very multifacet. The expansion of this and also the work that is required to create a home for these practices outside of the country’s of origin.

So we engage with all of these things, and a large part of my work, or my focus these coming months has to do with how do we get the, increase the standards of safety, the minimum standards of safety among medicine plant facilitators. How to, how do we come to an agreement of what would be the ground, not the best practices of the work?

Because I don’t think those can be codified in any meaningful way, but certainly we can agree on what the ground sort of safety should look like. And that’s a lot of the work I do. I I meet with facilitators in many countries we have, we do harm reductions, we do training programs.

We have an academy when we teach about all this. But basically I gather the information and the wisdom and the knowledge about safety that has been developed by many different facilitators in many different places. I learn from their best techniques and all of these gets compiled into a course where we teach, basically, we simply put together the information and we redistribute it.

Sam Believ: Sounds like a very important work to do in this field because Yeah, that’s a, it’s a bit of wild West right now, and a lot of places that try and offer some kind of information is, seems like more of a money grab, just a very expensive courses saying same information over and over again. What you say you focus mostly on maximizing benefits and minimizing the harm.

So let’s start with maximizing the benefits. What are the. What are the main things to maximize the benefits of work with ayahuasca?

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: I think one of the IM, I important things is that basically we get, we, when something new, for example, a new technology enters a culture for example, x-rays.

When x-rays were first invented, people are very excited about it, and then they start using it all the time for everything. So when X-rays were first discovered, they were doing x-rays on pregnant women, they were keeping people inside the x-ray machine for hours because it was so exciting to be able to look inside the body.

And it took a number of years to realize that x-rays are actually really active and they could, they create problems and there’s a safer way to actually manage this very powerful technology. But the early days of anything are usually full of mistakes before things get developed. And this is a natural process of how societies learn.

For example, I’ll give you an example. You’re drinking coffee. I think you know about latte art. Latte art are these drawings that people make on their coffee cups. This started 20 years ago with some people I know their names are known. And they started just drawing very simple flowers.

And then from these other people learn and they other people learn. And in 20 years now they can draw, Mona Lisa. They’re making incredible drawings on your latte, right? You can see a progression from not very good at it, to really good at it. And this happens very fast through the collaboration of many people.

This is how our societies learn, and it’s an organic process, and it happens by itself unless the practice has to be clandestine and people have to hide. And then when that happens, this process is broken and people don’t learn from each other. We are just about, you think of anything that we’ve been doing for 60 years, making cars, driving, skateboarding, surfing, drawing, lattice.

We are better than we were 60 years ago. But you look at our use of psychedelics, you look at the way people take LSD today, and you would be, you could argue that it’s not much better than the way people took LSD in the sixties. And that’s because it is because of this clandestine people are HIV people work in isolation.

People don’t communicate, people don’t share the information flow doesn’t go, and then the practices doesn’t get better. So one big part of maximizing the benefits of these plans have to do with the fact that as long as they’re illegal or underground, as long as people are hiding, as long as there’s not an open flow of communication is very hard to make.

To facilitate for this organic process of learning to take place, basically. You know what a lot of the, work we do around this has to do with, presenting proposals for policy. Trying to imagine what the regulation would look like in a world, 20, 30 years from now in which planned medicine practices can be practiced legally and safely.

What does that even look like? What does the regulation look like? Who gets to decide who’s legitimate and who isn’t? Where do the complaints go? All of these questions we think about and we,

Sam Believ: so very valuable. And it makes a lot of sense because if the communication is not open if nobody’s allowed to talk about anything how are we supposed to grow from each other?

So hopefully this podcast and sort of psychedelic renaissance we’re going through right now where things are opening up, we’ll result in. More learning. ’cause I’ve definitely learned a lot about facilitation from internet and not everything is true, but definitely some of it works. And you assume that I was drinking coffee, which is not safe to assume.

It’s an ayahuasca podcast. Maybe I was drinking ayahuasca, but no I’m drinking a decaf coffee. I cannot, I stopped drinking coffee, caffeinated coffee, and it’s painful because I’m literally surrounded by coffee farms. But I’m trying to take break from coffee occasionally.

So that’s with maximizing benefits. What about minimizing harm? What is the main thing that comes to mind when I say that?

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: There’s, there’s there’s a number of ways in which people can be harmed by working with these plants. And there is a number of people who can be harmed by working on these plants, because, this can hurt the participants, but it can also hurt the facilitators.

And harms can come to them. And there’s basically three types of harms. One are legal harms. People can get into legal trouble for doing this in some places. The, basically everywhere in the world, the arrests are going up and the confiscations by Ayahuasca outside of South America, but even in South America now in Costa Rica, there’s in trouble as well.

So that’s one part of it. One part is physical risks, which harms which, in the case of, ayahuasca, in this case for example, they’re not so large. Most of the physical harms that come to people from working with ayahuasca are not directly. By the ayahuasca, but associated with it.

People fall, people get lost, or they, they fall in the fire, they fall down the stairs, they harm themselves. But somebody it is not directly due to the toxicity of the plants, which is not, it’s slow and asmatic. And then there’s a psychological dangers, or the psychological harms, which are larger in the case of psychedelics that can come to people.

And these affect facilitators and participants in different ways. The ways in which facilit participants can be harmed are, one set and the issues or the dangers that are present for facilitators is a different set of dangers that have to do basically with, with power, money, sex, intercultural relationships, and of course the law.

These are these would be the dangers for facilitators. And, we talk about this in our safety course, and then the dangers for participants basically are an entire subset of what you would call overwhelming experiences. So the overwhelming experiences go from the sort of temporarily overwhelming during the ceremony to overwhelming or disassociative experiences that sort of continue after the ceremony is over.

Sometimes they go away with some time, a few days, sometimes they actually, people go this goes all the way to a psychotic break, which basically is in itself, ally, it’s very rare, but it does happen. And then there is, and then there are the dangers that come not from the, like effects being too intense, the dangers that come basically from less than optimal interpretations.

Of what the experience meant, what the experience was telling them. And then people take action. Sometimes quite sudden action based on what happened in the ceremony and the effects instead of improving their lives it turned out to be harmful for themselves or for those around them.

Sam Believ: Let’s talk about this. How does one distinguish between the voice of the ego, your own voice, or things that Ayahuasca is telling you?

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: Yeah, this is the big question, and it’s not, and it’s not just a question for ayahuasca. This is a question that you can find in many traditions and in many places.

For example, recently I was looking into this and the sort of old Christian perspectives on prophecy. And how, because they also had to develop their own way to discern is the word that they use between what they call true prophecies and false prophecies. And both of them in, in this Christian cosmology are presented by different people.

True prophecies come from God. False proses come from the devil, but they are presented as Christians to the prophet. And the prophet has to be able to tell, to discern. So this, and then this same question is also present in other spiritual traditions and stuff. And it’s the question of, intuition, intuition versus you can also make it in that sense.

When is what? When is your intuition speaking and when is fear or when is your heart speaking? And when is fear, right? So very often people get advice like, you should listen to your heart or you should listen to your intuition. And of course that’s true. The prob the problem is that.

For example, if you have trauma, and because you’ve been beaten by a dog, you will very strongly feel a very strong intuition that the next dog that crosses you, it might be harmful to you. And you will have a very powerful inner voice telling you that this is absolutely true, but actually it isn’t.

So then the main problem to contextualize this is that very often people try to make one size fits all advice for situations that are not one size fits all. One size fits all. When you think in clothes and you get a one size fits all is one t-shirt that doesn’t really fit anybody fully you know it because it’s too big for some people, too small for others.

And then there’s a small percentage of people that, that, that should fit perfectly right? But I think in these issues, in issues of ego of personal development or. You need a sort of custom made one, one side fits all solution is not going to trick you. You’re gonna have to adjust and make it for yourself.

So in Ayahuasca, but also in all the survey fields, you find exactly this problem. People sometimes are told by ayahuasca things that are absolutely true, very important, transformative and meaningful. And then other people, or the same people in other circumstances are told by ayahuasca things that are in fact, harmful for them, just projections, their own desires, their own fears, their own, it’s basically an amplification of their inner turmoil presented with the authority of an outside force or an outside plant.

And both things are happening at the same time, and both things are happening in very similar way. So one needs to develop techniques to basically protect oneself from making wrong assumptions about what happened and to minimize the harm that come comes from this. So I will give, for example, a very classic example that, very often happens very often people drink ayahuasca, and ayahuasca tells them to quit their job or sometimes to break up with their partner.

These are two things that are very common. Of course, our job and our partners are the two most they’re the largest relationships that we have in our lives that take a lot of space, a romantic partner and our job. And very often we have, because they’re very close and very strong, we have, difficulties with these relationships either with job or with partner or with both.

Now, sometimes. This message, you should quit your job. It’s that it’s the right thing that the person needs and it’s a, and it’s a message that will be useful for them and sometimes it isn’t. And the ques, and the question is, and I can give you examples of both, I can give you examples of people who drunk Ayahuasca quit their jobs, found something else, and their lives improved enormously.

And people who drank iowaska quit their jobs and then deeply regretted it. And the same for partners and for partnerships. So I think one way to help there, there’s a number of techniques that can be used to discern on this, but I would say that the, and this, I’m just, again, repeating what I learned from very experienced facilitators that I’ve talked to through the years and just through my own process.

I’m not a facilitator and I didn’t come up to these things by myself. I’m really repeating what I heard from people who know a lot more than me. I’m. The first part is that I think generally speaking you should distrust anything that comes from Ayahuasca that appears as a er instead of as a choice.

And this, again, a very experienced facilitator told me that simply speaking, no messages from the astral world will ever come to you in the form of orders. Those are messages from your subconscious that come in the form of tasks and missions. This is Carl Junk said that when one brings material from the subconscious into the conscious, it usually takes the form of a task or a mission, a duty, something that you must do.

However, the messages that come from the astral world, because of the. This is, I’m repeating what this person told me. Because of the particular nature of the rules of the spiritual world, you cannot make human beings do anything. New human beings have free will. So these messages always are presented as choices.

You could do this or you could do that, and you still have to make a choice. Sometimes these things come as an offering. You are offered something or you’re given something to take. This is still a choice, you still get to say, but when it comes in, to have to, this is already a sign that one should take this thing with a little bit of of careful, of course this.

Again, because nothing knows, no one size fits all. This doesn’t include things like you have to quick heroin. You have to quit drinking alcohol. You have to quit an abusive relationship, okay? There’s some there’s some things that are harmful harming you. And this deal this will come in the shape of an order.

And these orders you should absolutely listen to, right? When you are, when you yourself are in danger. This is this is an exception to this rule, but Raf roughly speaking, if you find yourself in a situation where, for example, ayahuasca has told you to, quit your job, sell everything, move to the jungle, I dunno.

Or just simply, quit your job or stop your relationship. Let’s speak, leave your partner, ayahuasca told you to leave your partner. This is what you shouldn’t do, just for safety, just for precaution. You shouldn’t go to your house the next morning and break up with your partner.

You should listen to what Iowasca told you. You should take it in consideration. And then you should give yourself some time. Give yourself. Four weeks, give yourself eight weeks, give yourself eight month. And do they think about it? Is it a good idea? You have to break up with this person.

What are the consequences? Are children involved? How are we going to do with the, just think of the logistics and, and if three months later this is still a good idea and it seems like an important idea, then Okay. So the first sort of the first test is the test of time.

And I would recommend that anybody that gets like a major sort of calling from Ayahuasca always gives it the test of time. Because if it’s a true calling, it will be true today and it will be true three months from now. But if it was just something that happened to you in Ayahuasca, then it was just because sometimes these things happen.

So that’s the first test is the test of time. The second confirmation is from Ayahuasca itself. So sometimes you get a message from Ayahuasca and then it never comes again. That message is not as important and a message that you get in Ayahuasca and then. Three months later, you get it again, and then you drink again, and you get it again.

So if you get the same message in Ayahuasca several times, those messages have more importance than messages that you only get one. So there’s a confirmation in time. There’s a confirmation by Ayahuasca. And third, and then last but not least, there’s a confirmation from somebody you respect or somebody who knows you very well.

Talk to your friends. And if your friend said, this sounds like something that you should do or that you could do, or knowing you the way I know you, I think this is a good idea for you. Or it can be somebody who knows you, it can be somebody you respect, but you wanna also a third confirmation.

All of these things put together in the cover order can contribute to avoid people making rush, re rush decisions that are, very life changing, that involve a lot of moving pieces that involves other people. That can be affected. And that, again, if it’s important it will still be important a few years, a few months from now.

This also goes, for example, for romantic relationships. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes I was tells you, oh, this person is, your ideal partner. You should marry person. This is the woman of your dreams. You’re thi this is your destiny. You should, the two of you should be together.

Of course, many times it has happened and it’s been true. Other times it hasn’t. Again, just for precaution, one can let some, time pass and if it’s true, and if it’s true love, it is going to be true love three months from now. Absolutely. And if these two people, this also, for example, we recommend this also for like business partnerships, which sometimes people also have, people have like great business during Iowa, and it’s I’m going to work together with this person.

It’s of course, maybe. But how about you just let it settle? Yeah. Because if you’re meant to work with this person and this person, or you are really have a good, there, there really no, it’s a sort of the rush, some people I know they give people this rule when they drink ayahuascan it, they’re not allowed to make any life changing decisions until one month after the ceremony.

And they would, they are required to at least notify the facilitator that they’re planning to do this. This is like in some places they don’t even allow, which I found is very interesting. They don’t even allow a person who comes for a retreat, they come for a retreat for a five day retreat.

They’re not allowed to sign up for a new retreat until one month after that retreat is finished. Because sometimes even this is what people get, oh, I have to drink more. And that’s the rush decision. If you have to drink, okay. Very glad that you read it, that you got this feeling that you want to come back.

We’re not gonna sign you up and you’re not allowed to block, or, we’re not gonna take any money from you. We’re not going to until, again, one month from today and we’ll be happy to, pat over the process and take you back up again. This is just because again, people are, people enter this state of enchantment and they’re really moved, by, and it’s very, one of the most powerful things they could ever do.

They’re moved, they’re wash with gratitude. They’re completely mind blown at what happened. And then how does one care, properly care and respect the space that has been open and does not take for oneself what belongs to the person and to their experience?

Sam Believ: No.

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: See, as you can see, I’ve been talking and thinking about, these issues now for a very long time.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s a really great list of advices. I would add one more thing adding interpretation to messages from ayahuasca. So it’s sometimes it’s not like it’s a yes or it’s a no, but it may, it can be a maybe as well, and you have to analyze it a little bit. So if you I don’t know, see Jesus in your vision, it doesn’t mean you’re Jesus.

Maybe it means you need to like, be more kind to people or embody the values of what a certain thing represents to you or to your subconscious because sometimes people take things too literally as well. And it does not always work out. Like in my case, ayahuasca told me to work with Ayahuasca.

It never told me to start Ayahuasca Retreat. But then. As soon as I came back from the jungle, synchronicity started happening and it happened. So I think synchronicity can also be another sign when something seems to be pushing you in some direction as well. Soon after your experience seems to correlate with what you’ve seen with the medicine, maybe I would pay some extra attention to it.

I know it’s it’s not something you can scientifically measure, but that kind of, I would leave it to people’s interpretation and definitely as long as you give it enough time

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: It realize itself. Yeah. On that topic of interpretation I have an example. It is a true story and this is a woman who drank ayahuasca and she saw babies like human babies.

And then when she came out of the experience, she interpreted that this is a prediction of her future. I’m going to have babies. And it was only, when I met her years later. That she had married the man that she was with, and she had babies with him and then got divorced. That she told me that she now thought that what Ayahuasca was telling her is that she and her partner were behaving like babies.

So ayahuasca just, there is just an image is babies, that image in itself is not, say this, that, or the other. And that’s where people project their desires or their intentions, or they can, again, sometimes you can also see babies and you can absolutely be a message for you to open your heart and for what’s coming.

This is the this is the discernment part that I think is best done with some sort of support with someone who has experience with this and can ask the right questions until you find the answer. Because the, yeah, because as sometimes I ask messages are crystal clear and sometimes.

Sometimes it’s more difficult.

Sam Believ: Yeah, definitely. Talk to us about inspiration versus appropriation. I really like your Michael Jordan shoes analogy.

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: Yeah, this is something that I was very engaged with this topic in the early two thousands. There was, there were there were very few people when I started drinking ayahuasca.

There were very few people talking about this, about cultural appropriation in the ayahuasca world. Then since then, things has changed a lot, and there’s a lot of discussion about this. So it’s not something that I used to give talks about this and a lot more than now. I’m more focused on safety now, but but basically I think it’s easier to always think about these things in terms of analogies.

A lot easier to understand it. Imagine. I know it’s hard, but in my, let’s imagining a place, a country in the world where there’s no Jewish people or there’s very few Jewish people. And in this country, one young, let’s say, a young man becomes fascinated with Jewish spirituality and kabbala and because it is absolutely fascinating.

Jewish Jewish spiritual knowledge is like 3000 years of, collective, it’s just an amazing it’s an amazing cathedral of knowledge to get into and this young man becomes fascinated with it and starts reading all he can about it and seeing more things.

And then at some point he decides to, visit some communities of Orthodox Jews where he spends some time and he gets fascinated and he’s allowed in. And, but again, he’s very much a foreigner. He’s very much a stranger. He doesn’t speak the language. He is entering a culture that is very where, that is not, it’s something that people are born into.

And that it is been it’s not that it’s not that it’s not possible for outsiders to join these communities. It’s that it’s not very easy. It actually certainly takes a lot of work and a lot of, to, it’s a lot, it’s a lot to but this person spend some time with this, and after six months, or one year or two years, I dunno, he goes back to his country where there’s no, nobody has ever seen this, and he puts on a kippah, and he opens a place and he calls it a synagogue right in the country where he is, where nobody has ever seen a synagogue, may know, maybe this is a rabbi, why not?

Nobody knows, right? Obviously in the Orthodox communities that he visited, they probably have a very different opinion about what this person knows and understands. It’s basically the simple, it’s really the simple, even though it’s not seen like that way, there’s, I think a lot of there, there’s people approach indigenous knowledge with very shallow under illusions that they can, go to a place, not learn the language, spend six months or two years, just and then learn, something as complex as, Amazonian, shamanic practices, and then go ahead and of course, back in their countries, as long as they don’t work with indigenous people, nobody’s going to tell, nobody’s gonna be able to tell if they’re very good or very bad, because, that, it’s just, they just, no one’s ever seen that, one part of it is that, yeah, nobody wants to be that guy. Don’t do that. Don’t do it. It’s simple. I’m not even going to go. It’s harmful. It’s harmful to you. It’s harmful to the culture. It’s hard, it’s harmful to other people. Right now. At the same time, there is an absolute pressure of of knowledge and understanding that comes from the experience of en encountering a culture that is deeply foreign to you.

And going into the process of learning and understanding this culture, not just for what you understand of this culture, but because of what this culture makes you understand about your culture, because they do things different. It makes you think about the way that you do things. This is the anthropological experience.

All anthropol, your anthropologists that work with other cultures will talk about this endlessly. Just how, how mind, how it just opens your view, your understanding of who you are, what the world is. Who other people are. It’s one of the richest things that you can experience.

So I’m not at all trying to discourage people from engaging, in intercultural exchanges. I think it’s one of the best things that you can do, there’s certain, there’s certain, basic mistakes that are made. And this is what I call the, or dangers that come with it.

And this is what I call the difference between or, yeah. The difference between inspiration and appropriation. Appropriation is basically taking something that is not yours and copying it and using it usually for profit. So indigenous people, they wear these feathers, I put the feathers, they sing this song, icing this song, they do this.

You’re just aping something. And the mistake in there is mistaking the forms for the for the spiritual power underneath. Michael Jordan, shoots a hoop. It looks very simple gesture. He just goes like this, and the bow sides. You could, if you wanted to play basketball and you’re coming from another planet, you could look at him and you could try to copy that gesture, but of course, the gesture is not the gesture. The gesture is that he has done this gesture 10 million times since he was, six years old. And this gesture is second nature to him. And in the slightest hand, he can calculate the arc of the ball, and he knows the weight of the ball instinctually, and he knows how the football flies through there, so he can make, so anybody can copy.

The gesture is easy enough, anybody can copy it, but chances are you’re not gonna make, you’re not gonna make it to the basket. Similarly, in traditional Amazonian medicine, there’s a number of ritual gestures. For example, blowing tobacco, or blowing awa flo, or, singing certain songs or clearing people with Sasha Cap.

These gestures are relatively simple. They’re seen easy to copy. They are in fact easy to copy. What is not easy to copy is the 40 years that they put into actually getting that part right. It’s all the vitas, that are being manifested in the songs. And the power that comes from their songs are the powers not in the songs, but in the vieta of the person who’s singing in the song.

And the power is not in the map, Apache, but it’s in the, it’s in the, it’s in the strength of the ber of his vieta and the work that is good that the map Apache sort of tobacco smoke is express over. So when now, and again, this doesn’t mean, and I don’t think at all, that people who are not in the unions cannot learn to do a proper ADA and do the proper, and of course they can.

This is not, it’s just. It’s not the same that people who are born into it and who were doing this since they were five years old, same with, flamenco singing in Spain or just many other, pick a cultural tradition. But so when the danger with when white people who are not doing proper, semantics training in the jungle, approach these practices is that they think I can just pick it up, do what they do and eat the same.

That’s appropriation. The interesting that’s appropriation. Appropriation is like you said is like thinking that you can wear Michael Jordan’s shoes and you can play like Michael Jordan. So you know, what is, what does the shaman have the feathers the necklace with the teeth.

That, I take all of these things and I have the same things as the shaman, therefore, but this is just like Michael Jordan shoes. They’re just like, of course they help. The shoes might, they’re better shoes than others, and those shoes help, but they are a small part of, what’s going on.

They’re just and then on the, on, on the other side of this is, what I would call in inspiration? Inspiration is trying to understand what are the universal human needs that and human, universal human solutions that are underneath what right? So you look at a supply, for example.

And when you, as and I know I’ve gotten many wonderful supply that there can be during Iowa Care ceremony before and after you get the supply. That’s how powerful they are. They’re incredibly effective. You go and you get this and it just realigns and brings you back.

It can do all sorts of things. That’s one aspect of it. But the O, the other aspect of it, the aspect that I would say is universal. The aspect where you can be inspired is that what’s happening is sometimes during the ceremony, people are gonna have difficult or very difficult times. And then in those times, as a plan can help, that is there’s going to be times not just with ica in general, with psychedelics in which people are going to need support.

They’re going to need active help from somebody else. And this help takes form of an act. It has to take the form of an act of care. The facilitator has to do something to the participant where the participant knows that they’re being cared for. And you know this, when you’re receiving Aop Plata, it’s obvious that, and that’s how people open their arms.

People open themselves up because they know they’re going to receive, they’re being cared for. But this act of care has to have a language. That is not the language of everyday life. Our act of care are, I’m going to give you a hug, I’m going to hold your hand. I’m going to put my arm around your shoulders.

All of these are act of care in our culture. All of these acts are questionable within the psychedelic experience. Why? Because they can be mistaken for somebody else, depending on the person. Giving them a hug is exactly what they need, or is the most triggering traumatic thing that can happen to them is not in the hug, it’s in the person who receives it, and whether they need it and what’s their particular history.

And there is sorts of things that have gone wrong with this even, in clinical settings. However, the thing about Op Plata is that it is an act of care that uses a different language. So you know you’re being cared for, but this cannot be mistaken for anything romantic or anything else. It doesn’t, it’s just, you.

So the, for me, the deeper issue, the inspiration issue that is being solved in Adas is how do you touch people during psychedelics without touching them? And the answer is you can touch ’em with your breath, you can touch ’em with feathers, you can touch ’em with a leaf and you can touch ’em with may.

There’s ways to actually care for people, and people need it, and people will appreciate it, that are not this language, which are, in, in in clinical psychedelic trials that are stuck with these problems. It’s can I hold your hand? Is it okay if I put my arm around your shoulders?

It’s this is not it. It’s what is the language? What is the language that is needed here so people feel cared for? And it’s not, and it cannot be mistaken for anything else. That insight cannot be half. Without the experience of traditional indigenous knowledge. And at the same time, it doesn’t need to copy, the form in order to benefit from the insight.

This is the difference between inspiration and appropriation.

Sam Believ: Yeah. That’s really important topic to touch and I love your explanation. We have a shaman, right? A Tata here, they call him in Colombia. He, for most people, it just seems like he give, pours you a cup and he gives you a cup, and sometimes he makes some sounds and then he sit in his hammock and it looks like this is really easy, I can do it as well.

But in reality the underlying sort of spiritual work and the training, as you say, starting, you was six years old when you started training. That is the part that’s really difficult to to emulate and it can lead to a lot of issues. And I’ve met people. That, that did this. They come and they drink medicine, then they find a one month course on internet about how to become a shaman.

And then they’re like, I’m a shaman. Now, obviously I have a license, I have a signed document. But it is putting a Santa Claus costume is not, doesn’t make you a Santa Claus. And but the interesting part that’s not often talked about is that the appropriation doesn’t have to be done from a white person to an indigenous person.

It can also be done from one indigenous person to another. Especially now when there’s a lot of money in the medicine, a lot of people that will know what the way they look and they will wear the feathers and the bracelets and the uniform and like all the clothing of a shaman, they will, some of them will look more shaman than my real shaman, and it’s really hard to tell the difference.

However, they have no idea what they’re doing, even. A white blonde facilitator that’s been working with the medicine for a few years will know much more than they do. They do, but they will make it look absolutely believable and then they can hurt people because they have no idea what they’re doing.

So yeah. What, talking about the indigenous topic, what are the, in, in our psychedelic renaissance now, what are the things we can learn? What are the things we should bring from them, from the point of view of this maximizing benefits and minimizing the harms?

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: This is the reason why I work I don’t work in psychedelic medicine, but in planned medicine because I think basically I think that, are, if you are about to start doing something new, if you were an extraterrestrial and you were about to start making wine, maybe you’d be well advised to at least spend some time or at least, take some tips from people in the Mediterranean basin who’ve been drinking or been drinking and making wine for 5,000 years.

It is not that you can you could also start making wine by yourself and find your own way, you absolutely. It’s just, you’re just gonna make a lot more mistakes along the way. And there’s some mistakes that, that, that can be safe. Now, psychedelics in general, the experience that psychedelics bring and how to manage them are extremely new for us.

Culturally. I’m talking about, western people basically, LSD brings this back in the sixties and we’re not very good at doing LSD or, the amount of accumulated sort of knowledge that we have since the sixties about this is not great at all. At the same time, there’s a sort of.

Aog that comes from the medical professions, from bi biomedical professions that say this is brain chemistry and I’m a psychiatrist, or, or this is, psychological process and I’m a psychologist, or this is a medicine and I’m a doctor, and therefore I should be the one doing this.

And then they start inventing by themselves. Ways to do this. These ways usually look, now if you google psychedelic assisted therapy, what you’re going to see is an image of a person laying in a bed. It’s a very spare room. Maybe there’s a, maybe there’s a flower or a base, they’re laying in a bed.

They have a blanket, they have a a face mask, and they have some headphones and they’re listening to a playlist, and there’s usually two therapists with them. This is for example, Kate, I in clinics also look like this, the better ones, in other ones you, you only have a chair, this is this is what people that come from the medical procession have decided this is the way to do it.

Which is basically what it looks, because it looks like what they were doing before. They were doing psychology before and people were la laying, like Freudian, they were laying on in the couch, and the psychologist was sitting next to them. So now we’re just gonna give ’em psychedelics.

And do, very similar about pe of music and, this is what I mean about the arrogance. And I think there’s a treasure of knowledge and I’m for a moment, I’m going to put to aside, the cultural and spiritual knowledge because you know that, that gets enough said. And because for some of these people, medical doctors, the whole cultural and spiritual thing already, they don’t like, so it, even putting this aside.

Which is, this treasure, like I said, this cathedral of knowledge, just the practical insights that you can find in ceremonial plant work about how best to what is the better container for psychedelic, are there already. It’s like you need to re you, you need to retire a little bit from the world, you need together with a group of people, ideally in a place that is, quiet and peaceful, where you’re not gonna get disturbed.

Everybody’s going to bring at the same time, and there’s going to be one person who has more experience than the rest who’s responsible for the group and who’s going to engage in some sort of ritual act, usually involving music that can not just direct the experience of the people, but also reflect it.

This is what a playlist doesn’t do. A playlist goes in the order, it goes, and it doesn’t matter if you’re happy and the playlist is now sad, or if you’re sad and the playlist is now happy. That’s no good. You want to have something around the people that actually reflects in a way that is hard to describe, just, just goes together with their experience.

You want to def dfu, you want to blur the lines between the experience of the person and the work of the facilitator. And you do this and you do this in a group. And when people are having troubles, you need to, you need to engage in some acts of care that will make the person feel better.

I’m being super, you see how, like basic I’m being, like that’s why I say I put away the culture and the spiritual aspects. I’m just being, I’m just talking about, very practical things that psychedelic medicines could learn from the traditions if they just looked with some humility, and then you get something, very different from a person laying in the couch with a with a pair of headphones, the most amazing thing about this is that, I know many psychedelic scientists, people who are doing, the important research in different universities, and these are psychedelic scientists.

When you ask them personally how they like to take their psychedelics, they like to take their psychedelics in ceremonial plant practices. This is what they like. It’s taken plans in plant circles, what got them interested in many cases in the research that they’re doing. And yet in the research, they are proposing something for people that is different from what they themselves prefer for themselves, right?

This is the sort of a contradiction that we’re living in. So a lot of my work has to do with trying to bridge these two worlds and trying to get the scientists and the academics to understand the value. Of these cultures, not as cultural or spiritual things.

Because sometimes, as I say, for many of them, this is hard to swallow, but as essentially practical, pragmatic solutions developed by intelligent human beings over hundreds of years of practice and relationship to certain substances that are actually very new to us. Why don’t just, just take a look.

Take a look because it’s there’s a treasure, there’s a treasure chest of good practices and knowledge and information there that can be helpful. This is it’s this sort of, it’s this sort of work of how to, again, bridge. Between these two very different fields of knowledge, trying to speak the language of the other to the other.

So understanding that most scientific people are not going to be, super open to cultural or spiritual arguments, and that and that again, there’s certain there’s certain types of the ways of speaking when one is dealing with indigenous traditions as well.

But that there is a there is a an opportunity, there’s an opportunity for basically for saving us a lot of mistakes. So if you look at the history of these powerful plants, tobacco, coca, cacao, right? All of these plants, we came in contact over 500 years ago. With the encounter with America, our use of these plants was almost always more toxic and more problematic than the use that the cultures of origin had.

The way we use Coca is, you can argue much more harmful than the way in Indian municipal use it. The way we use tobacco is much more harmful. Every time one of these plants came, it was used in different ways from the regional people that were more harmful. And this and this pattern has repeated itself over 500 years until we get to Ayahuasca and then something happens that is never happened before.

And is that, you look at Ayahuasca ritual in Europe and it looks on the surface level, that sort of top level, very similar to a ritual, an ayahuasca ritual in am a traditional Amazonian ritual. And that’s the first time that this has happened in history.

Sam Believ: Another thing you say is, ayahuasca is not just a medicine and it can also, not everyone who drinks it is sick. So talk, talk, talk to us about the other uses for ayahuasca.

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: I think it’s my personal opinion that that psychedelics might be best better prevention tools than intervention tools.

So that the most benefits that you can get for is not that, psychedelics cannot help people who have severe depression or, post the traumatic post or anxiety or all of these things. It’s that if you had taken this some people and given them ayahuasca a little bit earlier before they begin to develop these symptoms, they probably would’ve never fallen into them in the first place.

I think the most interesting and widely AP applicable field for psychedelics is prevention is what doctors call prevention, not treatment. Also, because psychedelics are very powerful and very delicate, and when you are giving them to people who have very severe conditions, as then the container has to be very tight.

So you use, you give psychedelics to a, normally healthy person regularly. Generally speaking, this is an experience that can more or less be managed with some. But if you’re gonna give psychedelics to people who have serious mental health issues, then you need the container. The amount of attention, the amount of people it multiplies by several fold.

And that’s why usually it’s discouraged. And you say, I think there’s also a lesson there that we are ignoring, people are using psychedelics to treat severe conditions, because that’s the door that was open. Because we don’t have medicines for, treatment resistant depression.

We don’t have medicines for, complex PTSD. So that door was open and we went that way with the psychedelics. But it might be that in the future, we realized that the best application for psychedelics, or at least the easy the easier application for psychedelics has to do more with prevention.

Most people who take psychedelics don’t have a medical diagnosis they’re doing because they have a life crisis or because they want to know themselves better. They have to make a decision. They’re going through some transition, through some grief. You can call it many things, but it’s not a nimbleness.

It’s not a medical condition, it’s just life. It’s just life. And life comes with difficulties. And in those difficulties, these plans can help. But right now what is being developed is the legal pathways for these pharmaceutical compounds to be used in extreme cases for very serious mental health conditions.

And I think my experience in Aries in circles for 20 years is that where these sub, where these plants really shine or where you can see, consistent improvement, that transformation in people, it’s much before, it’s before these problems are developed.

And it’s when people are beginning to face this and they’re there the, this, the, these plans have this amazing ability to change people’s, direction make them step out of the, when they’re about to step into the. Into the poop, just soups on the last minute.

They take their food out.

Sam Believ: Yeah. There is there’s much in this medicine, healing is a big part of it. Very important. But then there’s also spiritual side of things, which is very deep and almost limitless. It was a real interesting conversation. We, it’s time for us to wrap up. So please tell people more about your work. Where can they find you?

How can they support you, et cetera.

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: Yes, same here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yes. I will share some links with you. But I would just close with saying if people are interested in the part of safety and safety of these practices. We have a course that is every year increasing the safety of ayahuasca ceremonies, which is not a course to learn to be a facilitator.

It’s a course for people who are already facilitating and want to make and want to improve their safety. So it’s a it’s a very unique course, and we talk a lot about these things, about for example, data Vasca told me and how to avoid the, the pitfalls and the dangers that come and increase safety.

We are we are an, we are a foundation. So we’re an NGO, we’re a nonprofit. We live off the the tenures donations of people that want to support our work. In our website, you will find how to contribute and we have many different resources and skills available, both for participants, for facilitators, for policy makers, for researchers, for academics, et cetera.

Please visit our website.

Sam Believ: Thank you. Guys check out the silverware. Where can they find your course or where can any links or any,

Jeronimo Mazarrasa: it’s IC academy, but I will send you some links if you want to. You can maybe put it in there, but it’s the, it’s I-C-E-E-R-S Academy.

Sam Believ: Okay, perfect. Thank you guys for listening as always, really the host and believe, and I will see you in the next episode.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening, share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Lara. Heal, grow guys. I’m looking forward to hosting you.