Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul (1080p) FULL DOCUMENTARY - Spiritual, Educational

[Music] me [Music] i was expecting lightning and angels and trumpets in the sky and all i got was a bunch of trees and the geese flying in the air [Music] and i thought how funny is this it just took me to like a really heavy place i struggled with that and i knew i had to either vomit or or cry and so finally i ended up being able to cry and really let it go it was completely overwhelming sense that there was something much bigger and that i was you know a small little ant in this much bigger divine organization of the universe and then i needed to pay attention to that it's gotten me in touch with my spirit which i had like no concept of before it's opened my heart in a way that i never had it open before ever i committed to her that i would she would be a teacher of mine for my life the source of the experience of which these people speak is not a faith a belief in things unseen it is simply this an herbal brew made in the jungles of peru by native shamans they call it ayahuasca which means vine of the soul it's a tea or or what herbalist would call a decoction meaning a strong tea it's always made from two plants one of which contains the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine or dmt dmt is what i call a true psychedelic it's one of the class that includes lsd psilocybin masculine [Music] [Applause] [Music] in the amazon ayahuasca is a legally recognized sacred medicine indigenous people have used it for centuries to heal physical and psychospiritual ills it's an essential part of the culture woven into the fabric of their lives beyond the amazon the legality of ayahuasca is a gray area the globalization of ayahuasca is a challenge for modern drug control authorities the people who are using it outside of its traditional context are not the criminal element that is associated traditionally with illegal drug use these are people like my parents my friends doctors lawyers people in the health field who are passing along knowledge word of mouth and it seems to be spreading [Music] in the last 10 years thousands have tried ayahuasca seeking healing and spiritual growth the notion that there is a spiritual component to healing has been totally excised from biomedicine spirituality and healing what does spirituality have to do with healing we live in a culture that's spiritually very deprived very empty we live in a culture that's very material based in other words we live in a culture that does not give human beings what they really need that leaves a huge hole in people most people in north america and the western world are not as connected as people who live in the jungle and live in nature you know every day 365 days a year shaman guillermo arevalo believes everyone can reclaim this connection through ayahuasca which he calls a plant teacher he says the vine of the soul actually teaches you what you need to know [Music] [Music] [Music] what is there to share about ayahuasca can it really heal our minds and spirits two people are about to journey to the amazon to find out rob works as an accountant for a media company it's a good job and pays the bills it's not something you walk away from on a day-to-day basis feeling satisfied for the most part how long is the plate uh it's around i think it's eight hours into lima and then another three hours to quitos if uh everything goes well i'll be a completely different person next thursday will we be able to still recognize you oh yeah i'll just be glowing i will going down to peru at this point in my life makes a lot of sense to me partially because i'm now entering middle age and there's a lot of reevaluating that i believe should go on i mean if you're uncertain of what you believe in then you have to start questioning all things that are currently in your life and seeing maybe another path to take gerste is a doctor of naturopathic medicine you have a referred pain pattern up on your left side in my neck here yeah i've just started as a healer myself and i think it's a good time for me in my life to go down and experience this because if it's in in any way shape or form going to be a part of my life whether academically or in terms of i'm able to use it with patients i would never do that unless i myself have been through the experience are you ready to go rob let's do it [Music] in a nutshell what is missing in my life is spirituality i could say that with almost complete certainty we had very very slight religious upbringing that just seemed to have no foundation or no basis for me in my life it's not that i don't understand that the best way to live is to be right and be right with others but i don't have a guiding light per se while rob has never been to the amazon the rainforest has already shaped kirsty's life i did a lot of traveling both for work and in a volunteer capacity and i also was a guide in the amazon and was exposed to an enormous amount of plant medicine i've read an awful lot about ayahuasca and i'm just really interested in its implications for a lot of people with severe chronic disease from what i understand it really can open up a lot of energetic barriers that everyone has and if those barriers are opened up you can live more optimally in the past rob has used recreational drugs to search for greater meaning in his life without success i guess my biggest fear is simply just getting high again for two or three days and really not having it come to any fruition it can't be anything remotely similar to recreational use that's what i'm sick of and i certainly don't have to go to peru to experience it are you actually holding the theft if you need me i do feel some trepidation around what i will experience and what i might discover about my own energetic blockages but about ayahuasca i'm not going through this life and not doing ayahuasca there is no way after a long trip rob and kirsty finally arrive at the rustic retreat on the edge of the jungle [Music] guillermo was there to greet them along with an international group of fellow travelers ayahuasca dave a healer from canada began his apprenticeship with guillermo five years ago as soon as i started i thought this is exactly what my whole life was about i knew that this was my life path but i still had doubt whether i could actually accomplish it my first experience with guillermo was extremely extremely profound very very deep i remember him saying to me that i was david and i was gonna have to face goliath and goliath being the fear inside of me jose david espiritu prender [Music] the land guillermo has been a shaman to the shipibo people most of his life but only recently opened a retreat for westerners importante acerlo [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] all organisms on the planet are parasites on plants because plants are the only thing that make their own food and they make their food out of sunlight water and carbon dioxide and because of that they are running the show [Music] i'm extremely excited about tonight we're at the birthplace where the plants are from and just being under an accomplished master like guillermo has to be just a once in a lifetime experience [Music] throughout the day i think i went through a lot of different emotions and thoughts about it you know some of which were sort of anxiety am i a bit too tired to be doing this at the moment but i actually feel as i have since i arrived really pretty peaceful so hopefully that bodes well for me as darkness falls all who wish to partake in the ayahuasca ceremony join guillermo and his assistant corondero francoise when i was asked for my intention i felt i didn't really had one or maybe i hadn't given it enough thought and it kind of concerned me a little bit thinking that here i was in this great center for healing and i didn't come down with a specific problem my intention was it was a hard decision because there are a lot of things that i would like to work on but the thing i elected to sort of work on was difficult for me to [Music] see as yet how i can integrate this on a professional level i spoke to guillermo and just said can you help me to understand because i feel intuitively that there's a reason that i'm here [Music] i was aware of many things happening all the time because all of my senses were so heightened [Music] you sit there and you wonder whether or not it's taking effect and then as soon as you allow the chanting in it pretty much takes you [Music] normally at the beginning the energy is a little heavy so you need to clear that so you start to sing and you bring light doing this it pushes out the negative energies and clears the space it makes people perch purging prepares the mind and body for the inner journey ahead the chanting then carries people into a realm beyond the five senses this person becomes you you become him you know you create that relationship with the chanting there is a link because you are such in a high state of consciousness you become super aware of the other and the author becomes super aware of your energy you can see it it manifests in your own visual state [Music] the chanting was transformational i actually don't even have the words to describe that [Music] i could feel plants quivering and i could feel everything breathing and i could feel the earth groaning and i could hear every single bird and just this blissed out insanely powerful connection with the earth and with plants and with animals i felt a lot of joy [Music] the feeling is just sublime i don't know how to explain it almost every little thing you do with your body a simple head stretch a deep breath just feels so life affirming because you seem to be in complete harmony with everything around you you just know that you're connected to something larger [Music] most religions make a great deal about how you must have faith you must believe in god you must believe in what we tell you even though there's no evidence to support it no evidence for what we're telling you but you must have faith what's interesting about ayahuasca is you don't have to have faith it's the perfect tool for skeptics don't believe me don't believe what anybody tells you take it have the experience evaluate it for yourself make of it what you will [Music] last night because we've been looking forward to it for quite a few weeks now i had a lot of expectations built up and the ceremony itself was very impressive but i think i didn't have a strong reaction to the ayahuasca itself it would be nice if it was a little stronger and i don't mean to be cocky in saying that because it's not for amusement or entertainment but i'm ready to kind of go a little deeper into myself to see what else comes out i think the big difference between the use of ayahuasca today and the use of other substances in the 1960s is a very strong understanding of the importance of ritual and a ceremonial element in fostering a therapeutic or spiritual experience it's not a party drug in the way that other substances have been used the wisdom of learning through plants is a cultural tradition that goes back hundreds if not thousands of years [Music] for me my experience of botanical medicine is very technical and medical and scientific and we do learn about the energetics of plants but it's much more dominated by the science and so i've always reached out to have opportunities to integrate both and so that's that's my goal you see uh the healing aspect of this medicine well what can you relate about it in terms of ayahuasca i need to do it many more times many many more times to be able to speak to that because i'm not i can't integrate that or apply that with other people until i've integrated it with me i just can't i think it's not for everybody you know i think ayahuasca is a very powerful medicine but it has to be placed and used in a proper way but if they don't know how to do that it can create a psychological shock that would leave a trauma at a ceremony 15 years ago francois used ayahuasca to help kick an addiction to heroin i had this particular ceremony where i could see my veins crying and my body expressing the pain that he had received through the use of addiction and needles lots of cleaning you know in my head had to be done addiction comes from a sense of deficient emptiness and trying to complete yourself from the outside is the essence of addiction with ayahuasca one is an opportunity to experience oneself as whole and complete if you can actually get that you're holding complete what is there to be felt from the outside anymore there's just no need for it i ask you can hear people see that in two or three ceremonies if it's the appropriate shame and the leader and if it's the right environment well that is a potential to heal addictions i think ayahuasca has to function with self-discovery and trying to understand better who you are and also it helps you to connect with the invisible world with the spirit world it could be related to nature you know the meaning of god having a clearer sense of what it means for you in your life so it helps you to redefine yourself in relationship to that ayahuasca is used for many reasons for a corondero like dave ayahuasca is a teacher of the healing powers of plants my home please take off your shoes before you come to my home please ayahuasca is in many ways like the key to the door that allows you to plant teacher world ayahuasca allows you to access the other plant teachers in in in a more profound way a planned teacher is i mean the best way to look at it is you look at a plant as a being as you would as a friend each plant has a personality as each human does you take on the traits of a plant you know and plants are very sensitive and very intuitive and you know in healing you need to be very sensitive and very intuitive so we take these plants yeah to learn from them and in a way to become them i came here with the intention of you know gaining more strength in my work so i'm on a diet now with a bunch of different plants and trees to give me more strength more protection it's a mix of 25 30 different plants that i drink it every day you know it really breaks down the body at the beginning to open up i feel a little bit uh my body feels a little bit you know out of balance and a little bit weak but the most important thing is i feel good in my mind [Music] after a day of reflection rob and kirsty returned for their second ceremony [Music] again it was just wanting to experience so much so quickly it was probably overestimating my level what ayahuasca wanted to show me at that time in a way i kind of wanted to take more but in in a way i didn't you have to respect ayahuasca she was she was telling me something [Music] it was totally different from the night prior i was restless and sort of agitated a part of ayahuasca is the purging aspect i you know sort of had always just thought that meant vomiting but it can it's just can be a lot of different bodily things going on in noises and belching and like it was unbelievable i got cagey kind of and i tried to leave the room entirely actually at one point but i sort of got stuck standing there it was just it was frustrating kind of when i did go outside i found rob i left all of that insane cacophony i've always heard the folks i would i would say [Music] in it okay oh my god we saw the sky and it was just staggering it was just astonishing how beautiful it was and i saw a huge shooting star which blew my mind and then we left and when i came back to my cabin i kind of laid down and i closed my eyes and like a lot of times when you close your eyes you see some light imagery and then it began to swirl together and it created this little eddy right in front of my field of vision and then bit by bit little images would appear out of this eddy come out and go back in come out and go back in when i was ready to write off the evening as somewhat of a a rejection or uh a negative she pulled me right back and then put me to sleep [Music] it's really a therapy you have one ceremony it's like going to psychotherapy for two years colin from vancouver attended ayahuasca ceremonies for a year before coming to peru he's hoping to heal a troubled marriage for me i'm just want to be the father that i know i can be and the husband i can be and support my wife as family comes first right we had been on and off and are continuing in kind of a power struggle stage we have done couples therapy counseling but it doesn't quite i mean it works for a little bit but there's a deeper issue when i came here i knew i wanted to go a little deeper for me the one word that came up was acceptance acceptance of myself acceptance of my past and acceptance of my wife was probably the the number one thing to her that was the big blockage in our relationship there is something that's obviously keeping us together but there is some kind of something we keep coming up against i realized that i've had this sense of sadness within me affecting multiple things from past relationships people that have passed in my life to sadness around things around my childhood and being unhappy with my sort of place in the world so i'm sad about it at times after each ceremony guillermo encourages participants to talk about their experiences i feel myself attached with the with a bit of a dark spirit which came to me last night and it's all linked to an ex-girlfriend who has died she's since died but she's still there's lots of there's lots of love there there's a lot of lightness but her dark side is sort of still hanging onto me she was a very manipulative woman and it was almost the first woman in my life i woke up this morning you know very early and very still very high with the ayahuasca and and he had some nightmares a lot of sweating during the night almost like my body's trying to to uh to move it through [Music] jose is m [Music] professionally in terms of work as a naturopathic doctor i sort of feel confused to employ this medicine even in a limited capacity probably takes a lot of personal journeying period for me i need to talk it through with dave how he operates because the ceremony is crucial and the training is crucial ayahuasca and powder ah yeah ayahuasca it's important for people to know that the ayahuasca acts as a teacher and it allows you to discover yourself through your own knowledge through your own experience these are all the plants we use for uh bathing here bring love attract love good luck yeah and all these medicines up here are all for uh for men to get a little extra energy oh yeah it means seven times seven seven times per night the other thing that dave says was that ayahuasca is going to meet you where you're at in terms of what needs to happen and potentially to go very deep into your own fears and challenges and personal growth i think next time i'm ready to go even if it's challenging i'm ready to sort of have a bit more and go deeper and just face what i find what kirstie and rob will face on this their third ceremony is unknown and unknowable the mysterium tremendous is as you can tell from the term a tremendous mystery it is at the core of all true religious or mystical experience the feeling of being at one with the universe and yet it's the experience that most religions are frantic to deny it's not for the ordinary person it's something you know the interpretation has to come through the church through the priesthood through the hierarchy or whatever and we'll tell you what this means and i think that's one of the interesting things about ayahuasca it gives you a tool to actually approach this phenomenon experimentally and some people wait all their lives and spend years in meditation and all sorts of aesthetic experiences and never have a mystical experience you can be just a kind of an ordinary schmuck and under the right circumstances psychedelics can trigger this kind of experience just experiencing everything possible that's in life at any given moment and you're just taking it all in without trying to state how you feel last night was just the culmination of finally being at home down here good medicine and just listening to guillermo and everyone chant it was everything that it could possibly be i think it was just perfect it's my strongest visions at the very beginning were like a multi-level dimension and it's like a door being open to this but it's constantly being opened it's constantly being open and it never goes away because it's new again and so it's nature just showing you at times i feel like she could actually control my head and tilt it different ways and look around and so i would look that guillermo it's just oh i don't know how but it was so nice and it was maternal even when looking at guillermo suddenly i wasn't a younger person in guillermo i was older looking at him like he was a child and you're so proud of this child look at what he's doing she was saying that as she looked at guillermo look at all he can do and it was just a sense of awe and renewed innocence all the time but that was partly from her and it's the most spiritual thing i've ever felt in my whole life well i could tell kirsty wasn't quite having as great a time as i was the ceremony last night was um exceptionally hard i just couldn't get a nice peaceful vision or experience there were just moments where i just couldn't even bear it like it was just unbelievably hard i felt a lot of dark things and it was it's this sounds very dramatic but it was pretty demonic like there were some pretty like terrifying moments where like i thought i was gonna die i thought i was gonna shut like shut down as a self-protection mechanism because it was i was way way beyond dealing with it and then it literally was like a miracle because dave appeared [Music] what happens in a strong experience with ayahuasca like that is that you lose control an ego is about having control you can't control ayahuasca you know you can work with it but if you try to control it and get into a powerful start with ayahuasca that's where she's going to come on stronger to try to have that egoic death or spiritual death [Music] there were emotional sort of components to it to do with my family people would come to me different people in my life whom i love which come to me and try to communicate to me and then would be sucked away and i would try to communicate with them and and then it would be sucked away it was truly truly indescribable the horror [Music] i i was so terrified of losing him because it was like a lifeline and i was like i will i will drag myself i don't care what it takes and he helped me get over there and then he just he did chanting he was doing reiki [Music] she's lost in this like great big vast sea so i'm there to throw her a line in a way because she was getting drowned in her you know her experience i'm there to find her path and find the way that she got there and so i do the chanting find her and then bring her back in her body and back and with her connection and then the healing will start to happen under its own process if that isn't the most humbling thing i have ever done i hope my ego just stays away and leaves me alone i just piss off i won't do that i don't want to deal with it and dave said okay you're going to go to cairo go to guillermo and i was like can i crawl so i dragged myself he addressed my issues at multiple different levels through the ecosystem chanting [Music] oh i just i was so grateful because they didn't let me go until i was able to go like they passed me down the chain and i just cried and cried because i felt its insane level of gratitude like i don't even have words for it i felt this a kind of love that i that i don't think i've ever felt in my life it was not from here [Music] i would turn slightly and just kind of let her know i was there but that's all you can do i mean you can't verbalize that sort of thing i let her know that i was aware of what she was going through [Music] because we were we really sort of bonded he was quite close to me sometimes so his bald head was like so if i didn't know him i would have been like dude go have your party like three feet to the side like what are you doing but i was like i could i was comforted by rob's presence he just was awesome he just was like he was there the whole time we went outside and it was dawn so it was that magic time when everything's blue [Music] and we kind of trotted around because we were we were just sort of used to being together i really am so still so foamal slow motion it takes so much out of you it's crazy oh my god i was so glad rob that you were there that literally broke me open like that literally annihilated me i don't yet know what it means [Music] when you when you think you're gonna die the part of that is part of the healing is that when you when you do come out of the experience you're just happy to be alive and that's the way we need to live every day of our life part of the enjoyment of living life is just be grateful for your life [Music] is there a key insight that you get after you've taken lots of ayahuasca well it sounds trivial but the inside is you don't know we know very little about the way the world is put together about how the universe really is about our role in it and what's really going on you know you monkeys only think you're running the show you know you don't and not only are you not running the show you don't even know what the show is so be humble remember that you don't know much integrating the insights learned from ayahuasca can be a difficult task colin is still working to heal the relationship with his wife nina hi hi my wife is my soul mate and i really do want to see that relationship reaches full potential and it can be a rocky road you know it's got its ups and downs it's not all bliss it's a process and you've been part of that process a big part of that process but i finally accepted things on a level that what he gets from ceremony is he really gets in touch with himself of a place of acceptance of himself acceptance of me just letting go and not needing to control and then it will last a month and then it explodes into of not being happy and unhappy in this relationship and complete opposite i'm trying to just be accepting of it but it's hard to completely accept it i'll call in because i've put a lot of the same kind of stuff before just gonna take some time till i i see some i actually see it as opposed to words i think colin sometimes feels that he just needs to live ayahuasca ayahuasca ceremony ceremony but you can't just live in that world your world is family or job whatever it may be well the most important part of ayahuasca is the actual integration into your life if you're not integrating that there's no point in it this is a spiritual path unless we're doing it we're wasting our time [Music] it was staggering the extent to which i needed to process what happened in peru [Music] it wasn't until halfway through it that i realized with incredible certainty like a lightning bolt that i had almost missed the point entirely which was that i wasn't there for work i mean the true purpose in terms of why i was there had nothing to do with any of those things it was only for me it was really hard for me to articulate what had happened and how i felt about it i became defensive of it because i think the go-to thought for people is oh you're going getting high psychotropic plants in the jungle and it almost is a bit offensive if you have any experience with ayahuasca to think of it that way or refer to it in that way so i would find it frustrating to sort of try to explain it to people [Music] so what do you think the ayahuasca did for you how did it change your perception of the world it just makes you realize that you're part of a much larger hole all the time whether it's nature or the other people in your life you know i'm kind of conflicted because it sounds like it's a shortcut to meditation or to spiritual awakening i'm not sure if if that shortcut then has the long-term effects that say discipline and meditation would have you know i'd have to think about that some more [Music] i live alone everything i do is solitary for the most part when i came back it was on the tip of my tongue that i should be in closer contact with my family hey how's it going excellent i mean you can't pretend to understand the bosom of ayahuasca cradling you unless you realize that you also have friends and family that mean a great deal to you and you have to take the love that she shows you there and spread that around to your family and friends have a safe trip in tomorrow and i'll see you in the morning cheers we'll see you there take care even my brother i mean we're cut from the same cloth we've always been kind of guarded distant people and just to see him almost gushed this morning it was just really nice [Music] over the weeks and months following i realized that i had never in my life felt vulnerable the way that i did in that in that moment because i had never allowed it [Music] and ultimately what i've realized is that to really receive love you have to be able to be vulnerable [Music] ayahuasca gave me a different way of [Music] feeling in my body a different way of being a different way of viewing myself in the world that it is staggering in that it allows you to sort of have a second chance at being yourself there's been a trend i think in western medicine to recognize that alternative healing practices can be a useful adjunct to modern western approaches so i think ayahuasca can be a valuable component of treating such things as psychiatric conditions depression anxiety addictions things that modern western medicine i think hasn't really done a good job of addressing i don't have a whole lot of optimism that within my lifetime some like ayahuasca will be seriously unemployed if it runs counter to people's innate prejudices it's not incorporated heretical it is to say it in a medical context and i don't need decades of research to tell me that something is good but i know that it is [Music] how's it going bro i've seen you how you thank you good to see you this medicine is giving me my life my life path i'll be doing this until i'm old and gray that's that's never been a doubt in my mind it's always been whether or not i could actually accomplish it just thank creator for nourishment and nourish our body our spirit their mind help us be strong and work in a good way with the medicine tonight it's given me a whole community of people it's given me dear friends it's given me a purpose it's given me confidence you know just to be able to acknowledge that like i i can do something you know for people and helping people at dave's northern wilderness retreat rob and kirsty meet for the first time since their trip to peru [Music] i didn't know rob before this but i now know rob and rather an intimate way it was just like some kind of crazy natural wedding where we just a union of our souls and she was a little on the downside i was a little on the up but by the end of the evening we're exactly the same place so we're all going to be drinking ayahuasca tonight trust yourself you've heard the call you felt the call to be here some people talk about you know the chemical it's not a chemical i was a spirit so approach ayahuasca with you know obviously respect with reverence and also with gratitude i'm always checking in with my intention what is my intention for carrying this work has to be to share and to have that experience that you can get in the amazon with traditional healers but have it here [Music] when we drink ayahuasca outside of the amazon we're not surrounded by the plants so it's also a different experience but you can still take the spirit of the plant with you i have the spirit of the plants inside me and the spirit of the jungle and i tried to share that with the people dave and others like him are spreading the gospel of ayahuasca through ceremonies around the world my intention is is to help people in their healing the healing of our communities here the healing of the planet this is why i think ayahuasca has left the amazon [Music] we're impacting the planet in certain areas like the amazon is a good example we're basically raping the amazon but maybe this is sending you know waves of alarm in some sense through the rest of the biosphere and then no sense am i invoking consciousness here but it's a defensive strategy for self-preservation on the heart of not only ayahuasca but in you know in some ways almost on behalf of everything that's living on the planet maybe this is the last desperate ploy of gaia to sort of hit us upside the head and say you know wake up you monkeys you're really screwing things up i mean if ayahuasca was to be described as a religion or a faith it's it's all about the earth and all of the beings all of the beings in it but in an experiential way it's one thing to intellectualize something and it's another thing entirely to touch it and to experience other bigger energies that are intelligent it's very much like being held to uh the bosom of the mother of everything and it's very much about love period [Music] [Music] [Music] on

Channel: Gravitas Documentaries

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Keywords: Ayahuasca, Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul, ayahuasca: vine of the soul film, ayahuasca: vine of the soul movie, ayahuasca documentary, ayahuasca hd, ayahuasca 1080p, ayahuasca 1080p hd, vine of the soul, vine of the soul documentary, spiritual documentary, ayahuasca education, Gravitas, Gravitas DOCUMENTARIES, spiritual, spiritual film, full documentary, free documentary, ayahuasca documentary vice, ayahuasca documentary 2020, ayahuasca documentary youtube, indie film

Id: tY6xLay0sxg

Length: 52min 19sec (3139 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 19 2022