Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. 15 murders in the last five years. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CBC's Uncover and the 5th Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. The Milesio murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Lou, the host of Love Me, a CBC Podcast about the messiness of human connection. Our brand new season is available now, featuring deeply personal stories, like a man who learns all about love while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Two brothers stuck sharing a room again as adults. And a note slipped into the back pocket of someone's jeans that leads to a surprising late-night encounter. Subscribe at cbc.ca/loveme or wherever you get your podcasts. And listen to season 3, available now. Hello, I'm Jeff Turner and this is an on-drugs extra. Earlier this week, we launched season 2 of on-drugs with an episode about how people are using psychedelics and search of spiritual enlightenment. One of the people we met was Tanya Kaminin. Tanya and I spoke at length about her experience with psychedelics, Ayahuasca in particular. And if you've listened to the episode already, you'll have heard some of that conversation. But I thought you might be interested in hearing what didn't make it to air. So here's a special extended version of my chat with Tanya Kaminin. I began by asking her about her title, "Intergration Director at the Temple of the Way of the Light." It's a Shopeebo Ayahuasca Healing Center in Peru. So it works with people from the Shopeebo tribe, which is one tradition of many traditions that work with Ayahuasca. And the center's been around for 11 years now and about two years ago I went down there for the first time. But they had been working toward integration, which is one of these hot topics in the whole world of psychedelics right now, recognizing the need for it particularly when people come to the jungle and then go home to western cultures. And I came with a skill set that they hadn't seen before and we started talking and we fell in love with each other right away. And so they created this job for me. So it's self-defined, self-created. But my job is to investigate and continually discover what is integration and how to help people do that in the best way possible. Okay. Well, I guess that leads to the next obvious question. What is integration in this context? Yeah. And sometimes I define it as a plant-assisted process of self-mastery. So it's basically anything that happens after you drink Ayahuasca or work with other psychedelics and there's kind of an acute phase window, which is the time immediately following the ceremony. So in this case we're talking about Ayahuasca, it's a ceremony. And then there's a longer term integration process where you get to bring the things that you learned in your ceremony and your retreat into your day-to-day life. So it often involves making changes to your environment, relationships, work, this kind of thing. And then also ongoing practices of self-inquiry, self-discovery so that you can continue the healing, the learning, the spiritual growth that you started with the Ayahuasca ceremony. I feel like we need to know a little bit more about you to understand how that could be a full-time position for anyone, let alone you. So what is that skill set that you mentioned that makes it an appropriate job for you and how does that connect with Ayahuasca and psychedelics? So I am trained as a naturopathic doctor. So I have medical training, medical background and kind of a clinical lens that I can look through the world at. And then I also was in an apprenticeship, Emmy in an apprenticeship, training with Dr. Gawarmate, who has developed a style of psychospiritual processing and inquiry in conjunction with Ayahuasca, recognizing that especially for Westerners who come to this jungle medicine, the way that the medicine works and teaches the kinds of experiences that people have in ceremonies can be difficult to understand and interpret and difficult to really maximize their healing. And with some very simple questioning, looking at things through a trauma lens and non-dual spiritual lens, looking at the way that the brain develops in early childhood and bringing all of that together into this group processing approach, you can really help people re-contextualize what it is that they experience in ceremonies in a way that actually makes sense for their life. And then there's everything that happens afterwards. So people, with Ayahuasca, especially in the Shippewa tradition, there's a few things that happen. One of them is cleaning and clearing of trauma, of repressed emotions, of emotions, emotional backlog, so say there's been 30 years of sadness that needs to get cleaned out. So there's a certain amount of just cleaning and clearing of the past that happened. And then there also is aligning your energies and connecting you to or opening your path for your life, your spiritual path for your life. And bringing in, I guess it's ontological inquiry basically, but bringing in questioning methods, conversation-based methods to help people understand what it is that they're cleaning and clearing and to help them distinguish and identify where it is they want to go in their life really, I think, helps to honor the medicine and honor what's happening in the ceremonies, but also gives people tools to function in their life. So I've trained with Gabor and I've trained with a couple other people that look at the future-based side of things. So in combination with the medical training and combination with my own experience with ceremony and with plant dietas, which is a way of learning within the Shippewa tradition itself, and the people that I've studied with, I have this skill set that's still very, very much in development. It's never been put together like this before to help people move forward in their life. A lot of people are just coming looking for purpose. Why is ayahuasca? What was the initial attraction for you? I had experimented with psychedelics for a long time and then I had read about ayahuasca in the Yahe letters with William Burrow's and Alan Gimberg and had been interested in Gimberg and didn't pronounce that properly. Interested in beat literature and interested in healing. I was already in naturopathic school when I first drank ayahuasca, but I had heard about Gabor and his work and still I'm not sure how I got on the mailing list, but ayahuasca was the first thing that I was like, I'm not going to just do that on my own. I want to do this properly. I want to do this in the right way, which is not generally how I had approached my life previous to that. It was a nice first step. But I had heard about Gabor's work. Got on the mailing list somehow and right around that time was when they put out the documentary, the CBC Nature of Things documentary and Health Canada called him and said, you have to stop doing this because he was doing retreats in Canada at that time. And they moved them to a different country and I went on one of those retreats. And I think like a lot of people report there was just this kind of call to this particular medicine. It worked with a lot of psychedelics, but there's something about ayahuasca that just felt like home to me. And then something also about this style of group processing and bringing in western styles of psychospiritual inquiry that just felt like home to me in a way that nothing else had. I wanted to dig into that a little bit, but I since you dropped the crumbs there about previous psychedelic experience. What prior to ayahuasca, what was your experience with psychedelics? Yeah, I had experimented with mostly mushrooms and acid just experimented, never very intentionally, never in any kind of therapeutic setting since I was young. I was working as a fish researcher. I had a degree in molecular biology. I was working government jobs studying fish genetics. And like it was fine. I traveled a lot. It was interesting in some ways. And one night I took mushrooms and went to a party and we were backstage of the party. It was on Hastings Street. And I was in the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I was like, I want to help people. Is this great? Don't you know to never look in the mirror? Didn't they tell you that? This was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. I don't know. But then I was like, okay, how can I help people? And I started looking into it and I found naturopathic medicine. And that was this perfect blend of art and science and philosophy that I had been trying to create. And then that led me to one of the naturopathic medicine has a set of six guiding principles. And one of them is treat the root cause and another one of them is use the healing power of nature. And over and over and over again looking at people with chronic health conditions. The root cause has this psychospiritual psychomotional component to it that is just impossible to reach without bigger help. And ayahuasca is natural. It's a plant spirit medicine that fits to me totally into naturopathic medicine in a way that most naturopathic medicine doesn't even work. Even though it sounds like you were using it unintentionally, it may be more recreationally, it sounds like even that path, the mushrooms led you to some kind of insight. Absolutely. It's had a major impact on my life. The first time I did mushrooms I was 13, sorry mom, we were in the woods. And from that point, there was just a kind of sense that my life had some purpose or there was something bigger than me. It was, they talk about peering beyond the veil or whatever. But there was some sense that my life was guided. Something way bigger than me was actually in charge. And I didn't have the language or the understanding to know that that's what I was experiencing at the time. But I can look back and say there was definitely a sense.
of trust or faith or whatever, even at the moments when I was profoundly atheist. Still, I had this sense that something was happening. Now, you've described yourself as an atheist, and I'm not sure that's still the case since Iawaska. What role did Iawaska play in that? I can't say for sure that it was just Iawaska because it's definitely been a transition from atheists to agnostic to women of profound faith in no particular tradition or religion or lineage or way that I can still explain. But yeah, Iawaska and the whole Shri Pippo system of working has had a profound impact on my spirituality. How much of a break was that for you? Because of course, people are going to be thinking, "Here's somebody with a degree in molecular biology who must be very rooted on the science side of the spiritual divide." How much of a break was that for you to shift over to somebody with some kind of faith? I don't think it was too difficult. Part of my interest in science was just that I could do it. My main interest in science, particularly genetics, was discovering something that had never been discovered before. It was pretty easy to do that in genetics. In genetics, especially, there were these moments of flashes of insight that revolutionized the whole field. I thought that was totally fascinating and inspiring. My mind is pretty smart and it's always been pretty smart and it's always been difficult to outsmart me. Some of the people that, like my genetics teacher in university, he was smarter than me and he challenged me. That was one of the reasons that I pursued genetics because there was this pull toward something, pulling me to grow. With ayahuasca, psychedelics, with spirituality, encountering things that my mind has no chance of even beginning to understand or explain is profoundly refreshing. How does it manifest in your life now? How does it shape the way you view science, for example, or anything else in your life? Well, I look at science as one way of talking about things. And to be able, for me, to be able to speak in science language, to be able to speak in medical language, to be able to speak in trauma language, to be able to speak in spirit language, I think it's helpful to be able to speak in all of these different languages because to me, they're all just different ways of taking our best guess at understanding what's going on, but we actually have no idea. And science is great. It's a whole system and it's supposed to be a system of inquiry and curiosity, but not the absolute truth. It's supposed to be the pursuit of truth. And spirituality is the same. It's the pursuit of truth. It's the pursuit of absolute knowing. And to me, these are just different ways of talking about the same things that we actually have no idea about. Now, you describe what you do with the integration as a kind of spirit-based healthcare. What do you mean by that? With the integration, it's definitely spirit-based, but the ceremonies themselves are the more spirit-based healthcare. In the ceremonies, the Maestro's, the shamans, the people who are trained to work with ayahuasca work with plant spirits. So they sing songs. They sing the songs of plant spirits and guide that energy into people's bodies to heal them. They're looking for places where your energy is not aligned, but they're working with conscious plant spirits that tell them what to do and teach them songs and tell them what notes to sing. I have to say that hearing that, I have to really withhold my skeptical, cynical instincts. Please don't. How do you get to that place where what you're describing, learning songs from plants actually makes sense, or is compatible with anything like a rational view of the world? Yeah, I think you have it like a lot of faith-based things, you have to see it to believe it, but it's a, this whole system of medicine has been passed down through generations and generations and generations and generations and the number of times I've seen people heal from seemingly impossible things. That alone is enough to make me question, is there something more happening here? The place where you can actually start to hear these plant songs and work with them, like that's a very committed path, the people that learn how to be these shamans, these Maestro's, they spend decades in periods of extended fasting, isolation, abstinence from many things to be able to do what it is that they do. The medical training that they undergo is, at the very least, similar in length of time to a medical doctor, it's just the way that they go about it is totally different. It's working very closely with a Maestro, usually someone in their family, and they'll start relationships with these plants. They'll go into an extended period of fasting or isolation and work with a plant, so they'll either drink it or bathe in it. Mostly in isolation, not talking to other people, abstaining from anything exciting and just working with this plant. Over time, the plants will start to teach them songs. It sounds totally crazy, and you don't need to understand or even believe in that part of it to come to a Nihahuasca ceremony and see the inexperience, the kind of healing that happens. This is where looking at it at just like a basic psychological or neurochemical level. For a lot of people, it's an easier entry point. Because again, this whole spirit side of things, maybe that's what's really happening. Maybe what's really happening is there's a huge serotonin flood in your brain and you're able to make new connections. There's up and down regulation of various networks in your brain that allow you to access memories that otherwise you aren't able to access. That coupled with the serotonin flood in your brain allows for new, neuronal connections to get made where before you could only ever do this one thing. Now there's a chance to do something else and you can recontextualize the whole memory process. When you talk to people, Charmin's working in the jungle is very much plant, spirit, assisted. I believe that based on my experiences, but you don't need to believe that because there's enough scientific evidence to show that something's really happening too. That was going to be my next question. How much of that do you believe and how much of it are you able to take as say a metaphor for something that's going on, which is actually a chemical function of the brain, of the sort that you're describing? Yeah, I can't say for sure. Everything could be a chemical reaction in my brain and I would have no way of actually knowing that. My experiences have been increasingly spiritual in that. And spiritual, I just mean beyond what my mind can actually account for, beyond what science can even explain. So working with the more subtle levels of other plants, working with plants at subphysiological doses and experiencing profound effects and shifts in my life and my way of being, it goes beyond science. It still feels like a leap though to go from here are the limits of my knowledge or ability to understand too. There are plant spirits teaching me songs. Yeah, I wonder where the, it's been a process for me. And I'm trying to connect with the person that first came to ayahuasca to think how open I would be to this kind of thing. You definitely, most people that come to ayahuasca aren't looking to pursue training in how to become an ayahuasca or a curandero or a shaman. Most people are coming for healing or for personal growth or for spiritual development. And there are more and more people who have this sense that something is missing from their lives. I think it's pretty easy to start to attach to explanations even and maybe saying this is a spiritual explanation of something is a way to just, again, bypass what's actually happening, which is your experience. So my experience has been, I have dieted plants. I've been in isolation in the jungle and I've had experiences and encounters with what I would call plant spirits, but is that the ultimate truth? I don't know. You know, it's my work and my life is to help other people with this. So I think it's really important to stay informed, not even to stay informed, but to study in the traditions. I think, I mean, we're on CBC talking about ayahuasca. It's worldwide popular now. It's mainstream. I can talk to anyone on the street and they're going to know what ayahuasca is a year ago, two years ago, that wasn't even the case. Ten years ago, definitely not the case. So for me, it's important to continue to understand the traditions work directly with indigenous practitioners of that medicine in that tradition so that I can find ways to bridge the two worlds. There's also the risk of going too far with that because already I'm losing the ability to speak about like the gap between what you're asking, this basic skeptical scientific attitude and the spiritual side of things. But ultimately, I don't know, and I think anyone coming to ayahuasca, if you can come with a sense of curiosity and a sense of humility, then you can see for yourself. Right. So for those average people that you're describing, how accessible are these experiences that you're describing, kind of cynical, jaded, old radio host come into an ayahuasca ceremony and expect to derive any of the benefits that you're describing or does it require at least some degree of willingness to accept or embrace some of those spiritual possibilities? It's easier if there's a willingness to at least be open to the possibility that there's something spiritual happening, but you don't need that at all. A lot of people come for healing.
A lot of people come for healing of chronic conditions or they just reach a point where they're stuck in their life and they're looking for something more. And that doesn't require faith at the ultimate level. It does require a little bit of trust in who it is that you're working with and a bit of openness to being surprised. But the most important thing is to have, well not the most important thing, but it's important to have an intention. Why is it that you're coming to ayahuasca? What is it that you're looking to work on in yourself? And more clearly you can identify that the more you can work with it, even if you're just working at a basic psychological level and asking for help from Asakadelic, if that's how you want to look at it. I'm wondering about it for you personally. And this might get me nowhere, but on that idea of spirituality, how concrete is it for you, the stuff beyond what, beyond the limitations of your knowledge and your ability to understand? How concrete is that place for you? Do you believe that there is like a sentience that you're gaining access to, that you're communicating with when we talk about those plans? Maybe it's not the big woolly bearded God in the sky, but is there something that relatable in that sense, that something intelligent that is that place? Absolutely. And which reminds me of what I was going to say about expectations. If you come to ayahuasca expecting to encounter a sentient being from another dimension, it's probably not going to happen. You're probably going to get frustrated. Okay, I'm out. But for me, yeah, there is definitely a sense that I'm communicating with something intelligent. That is communicating with me and teaching me and training me and helping to heal me in exactly the ways that I need. And it works with every person in a very, very individual manner. It's also, it can be really scary. Yes. And there's a lot of vomit involved. As I'm interested. Yeah. How is it worth it? Well, have you read David Foster Wallace? I think one of his really, really, really awkward interviews. They're like painful to watch. How awkward he is as a human. He talks about nobody ever was to jump from a burning building, but at some point, the flames get so uncomfortable, so intolerable that you just take the leap. And you could look at it through maybe an alcoholic or a 12-step-type model, this idea of hitting bottom. Like at some point, living your day-to-day life the way that you're living it becomes so uncomfortable that it's worth it to try something else and to face your own fears and to even maybe vomit in the jungle. The fear is not created by the ayahuasca. The ayahuasca shows you the fear that you already have. And most of us don't learn to have healthy relationships with their own emotions in western culture, especially most of us learn how to repress them or avoid them or rationalize them or find some way to get out of feeling them. And for a lot of people that ends up manifesting his chronic health concerns, whether it's depression or anxiety or physical concerns like autoimmune conditions or cancer or whatever, I got two points. I'm curious already, but I also had a chronic. I had back pain. I also had celiac disease. I had an autoimmune condition and chronic back pain and I don't have either of those things anymore because I got to the psychospiritual roots of them. But yeah, it can be totally scary and it can be the scariest thing ever is to actually look at yourself because it's like we learn how to put up this wall to feeling our feelings. And then ayahuasca comes in and strips away the wall and then you just get to feel them, but the wall doesn't come back. So then you can be back in your life and this is where integration can be important. You come back in your life and there's this fear that's still coming out and you don't have the coping mechanisms that you used to have to not feel it. So you can live day to day in a state of like manageable anxiety, a manageable, low-grade anxiety where most of the time you don't really feel it and then sometimes it'll come out in little bursts. Getting into a healthy relationship with that takes work. It takes stripping away the coping mechanisms and then purging the backlog of fear, which is where the vomiting comes into place. Not everybody vomits, but there's lots of different ways to purge. And getting the backlog of those emotions out of your body is an important part of the healing process so that could happen through vomiting or diarrhea or shaking or laughing or crying or getting really hot or getting really cold or screaming or just feeling it all the way, which can be incredibly uncomfortable and terrifying. From the other side of it, this is what I believe is that the experience is that we have even energetic impact on our body as well. And in order to really heal from that and not just heal but actually maximize on what it is you're here on this planet to do. And then that also may or may not be true. Like every person may or may not have a purpose here, but it's way more fun to believe that we do. It's way more fun. So I choose to believe that I have some kind of a purpose on this planet and I choose to believe that everybody has some kind of a purpose on this planet. And actually going in and taking out the energetic impact of whatever it is that happened, whether it was a war or whether it was sexual abuse or whether your mom yelled at you one time and then you just learn to suppress your anger forever. The maestro's, especially within the Shippewa tradition, singing the songs of the plant spirits, know how to do that kind of surgical work. So they can go in and remove the energetic impact of it and then align your energy so that you can actually be your full self in the world. Do you worry about it being misused in a Western context because as you pointed out, you know, certainly 10 years ago I had never heard of ayahuasca. And now it's a thing. How concerned are you that in becoming a thing, it gets abused and maybe winds up doing harm? It's a concern. I wouldn't say I worry about it, but it is something I think about. And definitely, I mean, the best way that I have to not even fight against that, the best way I have to deal with that is just to continue to work with respect as much as possible and do it in the right way as much as possible and see what that draws. But yeah, there's people, I mean, there's people drinking ayahuasca, there's probably people drinking ayahuasca in their apartments tonight in Vancouver who have no idea what they're doing. I've heard about people that drink ayahuasca and walk around the streets of East Van. I think that's totally insane. At least go to Ketzalana. Exactly. It can be dangerous. You know, there's, I don't know, I look at yoga sometimes because I have more experience with yoga than meditation. But look at yoga and the way that it came to the West and the way that it's been totally bastardized. I don't know if I can say that. And you know, there's all these different kinds of yoga and yoga studios and yoga for exercise and yoga for this and yoga pants and yoga everything. And at the same time, I think that the net benefit on society is probably positive. Even if people are going to yoga just to get in shape, there's still the possibility that they're going to find something beyond themselves that totally happened for me. I started yoga at a Bikram studio in East Van by accident one day. And that was kind of an entry point into spirituality for me. I think it's possible for the same thing to happen with ayahuasca, but the risks of working with a medicine or a substance are way greater than just going to a yoga studio. I got a hamstring injury, but I didn't have a psychotic break. This happens at yoga too. People have re-experiencing of traumatic memories. Like there's stuff that happens, but the chances of it happening at the physiological level, the medical risks that are possible without screening and proper intention and care with ayahuasca are big. There's also the energetic risks where you open yourself up hugely, whether you believe in that or not. There's this possibility for other energies to come in or go out that's just in a totally uncontained way that could leave you feeling way worse. And then there's the question of sustainability. Ayahuasca is a living thing, the vine itself. There's more being consumed than there is being grown. And so the people that live in the jungle, that this is a part of their daily life, if a bunch of unconscious westerners are doing it for kicks, it actually has an impact on the day to day life of the people living in the jungle. Yeah, and then there's just the honoring of traditions, which may or may not be important because new things can get created by breaking from tradition. But for me, I think it's important to at least be informed of what tradition it is that you're breaking before you break it. Speaking of those cultures that you're talking about, how are you received there? This person from a completely other culture, taking up a tradition and pursuing the path of shamanism. How well received is that? Yeah, well, just to, I mean, I am studying these traditions, but I am also pursuing this path of integration and developing something that bridges these cultures. And I get to discover what that is day to day to day. I've never gone to a community where they've never seen a westerner before. So generally, there's quite a lot of people going to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca. And most of the time, I work at an ayahuasca center where we bring in a lot of westerners every month. And the maestro's, the shamans that are working there have experience working with westerners. So for them, it's a good paying job where they get to work with their traditional medicine. And generally, the work is a little bit easier, healing depression, healing trauma, healing these kinds of things. It's a little bit easier than the work that they're normally doing in their communities. I've spent some time in communities as well. And I don't know. There seems to, I don't know what it's like.
like for them, but generally they're so friendly and loving and happy. And of course, there's shit that goes on too. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what it would have been like for the first Westerners that started going there. But I think enough has enough of us have gone there now that it's not that strange. The other way around, I wonder, there are different kinds of spirituality in the world. Do you think it would make sense in a, say, a Christian context? Do you think somebody could experience ayahuasca in particular or psychedelics generally and find some kind of spiritual connection with their own tradition? Yeah. Or do you think that there's something inherent in the nature of it with the plant and its connection to the place it's from? No, absolutely. There are, well, within the Shippeebo tradition, I know people who, so I mentioned this word "Dietta" and I mentioned these plant spirits that people work with. So they do these extended relationships to learn from plant spirits. I also know people who is main, and most people will have a main plant that they work with. I know people who's main spirit that they work with is the Bible. So within even Shippeebo ayahuasca ceremonies, they're working with Christian energy. And then there are religions like the UDV and the Santo Dime, which I think both got religious exemption. UDV for sure in Montreal now, so they can legally drink ayahuasca in Montreal. There are Christian-based traditions that started in Brazil in the 1900s decade, like the 70s or something. So they're community-based ceremonies, and they use a lot of Christian mythology, Christian singing, as part of their sacrament. It's religion. It's not healing-focused. It's religious. And then, yeah, definitely, I think it's possible for people to connect to profound sense of self or spirit or universe or God or whatever you want to call it in an ayahuasca ceremony. I've seen it. I saw one really beautiful person, she was Muslim, and she came to the jungle looking to connect with God. There are a lot of people who are really devout in whatever religion they belong to, but they still don't feel it at the experiential level. And I think it's totally possible. And then once you have that, I think it's generally called a mystical experience. Once you have that level of experience or connection with universal source or God or self or nature, you can't forget it. But until you've had it, it's just an idea. It's something outside of you. Maybe I should ask you that about that. And I know that we're into that realm where people describing trips, or it's just about the worst thing possible on radio. But can you at least give me a sense of what it's like to go from being atheist and not feeling that to having, I don't know if it was a single experience for you that was a breakthrough or a series of experiences. Can you convey that in any way? I think it would have to start with the first one where I think a lot of my identification as an atheist was reactive. My parents had both left Christianity for separate reasons, and I was raised with no religion. And there was a bit of an anti-religious streak in me where I was angry at people who had blind faith. And I can't say exactly why. We can look at that another time. But that first, the first mushroom experience I think would have been huge in connecting to this something beyond myself. And I think for a long time it was not a sense of God or universe or nature or even coherent intelligence, but kind of this more chaotic sense, more in line with the surrealists or the beats where there's just like something, some energy that you can tune into and go. And it can be creative and fun and I think even in a lot of, you know, hang out with a lot of artists and you know when you're creating something, when there's something happening, there's something alive in the room, even that is beyond what you can actually describe. Like that sense of something magic is beyond what you can describe. And then just expanding that beyond just creating things or just making things or just doing things or just finding parties or whatever it is. Creating that flow or finding ways to be in that flow to me has led to spirituality or a sense of God or nature or profound faith or whatever, where it has become more meaningful, more sacred, not irreverent because I still think having a sense of humor in sarcasm is really important like I haven't become a total stick in the mud. But the focus of it has been a shift from like doing cool things with my friends to being of service to the planet. And I think that service aspect is a fundamental component of spirituality. How optimistic are you or I don't know if it is optimistic that this will be consequential in a big way. I was. Yeah, presuming we don't destroy the Amazon in the process of sucking up back I.O.A. Waska for traumatized North American. Do you think that there's potential for it to have because I know speaking to Wade Davis, he believes firmly that the psychedelics of the 60s had big positive social consequences. Do you think that I waska will have far reaching consequences or is it a small thing? I don't think it's a small thing. I think I mean I think it stuck around even longer than I might have thought it would not not that I mean it's been around for millennia, but I mean in terms of its popularity in the last decade, it's increasing and increasing and I don't see signs of that slowing down. In terms of I waska itself changing the world, I don't know about that. I don't know how feasible it is. Like it's definitely doesn't work for the whole world to go to the Amazon. Definitely doesn't work for I waska to go to the whole world. It's doing that slowly, but finding ways to do that that are safe and responsible. I think I waska and other psychedelics play a really important part in especially getting past the tough, tough Western mind that we have developed over the last couple hundred years. But on its own, I don't think it's the answer. I think it has to be a combination of things and it has to be something. It has to include changes that you make in your life in the way that you live your life day to day to day. And I waska I think can really help catalyze that. It can really lay some powerful groundwork for that and give you a place to come from. And I think more so than other psychedelics because it's done in ceremony, it's done in group, it's done connected to a tradition. And so many of us Westerners are totally alienated and lost and have no sense of our roots or where we come from or anything. And we have, you know, it's Christmas right now. And the tradition of Christmas is not a tradition. It's been corrupted in all kinds of ways. So I think working with tradition can show us a little bit of what is possible when people are connected to nature and each other. And the sense of connection is a really important piece of it. So people can have those experiences but then you have to make changes in your life. Absolutely have to. And some of that will involve losing friendships or partnerships or jobs or whatever. But then there are other tools required. It's not just like go drink, I waska in the world has changed. It's not a miracle, it's not a panacea, it's a lot of work, it's really hard and the work doesn't stop when you leave the jungle. The work starts when you get back into your life. Tanya thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this. It's just fascinating. Awesome, when are you going to come to the jungle? I don't know man, the puking is really scary. That was my conversation with Tanya Camminan. I'm Jeff Turner and this has been Andrugg's Extra. If you haven't had a chance to hear our episode on psychedelics and spirituality make sure and check it out. I'm on Twitter by the way, search for CBC Andrugg's Twitter and you'll find me there. If you'd like to share your thoughts on anything you've heard on the program send your email to
[email protected]. Thanks so much for listening. [Music] For more CBC Original Podcasts go to cbc.ca/originalpodcasts
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