#122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman

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Dr Simon Ruffell is a clinical psychiatrist and the CEO of Onaya Science, the research organisation that studies Amazonian ayahuasca healing alongside Shipibo curanderos in the Peruvian rainforest. His team ran the first-ever study on a psychedelic and human epigenetics — finding that ayahuasca methylates the trauma-memory gene SIGMAR1, mapping precisely onto what the Shipibo have called "cleaning ancestral lines" for thousands of years.

Expect to learn why a Maudsley-trained psychiatrist walked away from the NHS to apprentice as a Shipibo shaman, what happens when a curandero performs an exorcism on you mid-ceremony, how 80% of veterans no longer met PTSD criteria six months after a two-week retreat, why the curandero traditionally drinks the ayahuasca and the patient doesn't, what happened when Simon gave a Shipibo curandero a hit of pure crystal DMT, why DMT entities might be real and where Robin Carhart-Harris and Andrew Gallimore disagree about it, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Trailer

03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?

04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon

10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself

15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers

26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism

36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore

49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study

52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different

57:11 Should you try this? Preparation and "gringo wasca"

1:04:52 The first-ever psychedelic epigenetics study (SIGMAR1)

1:12:17 "Cleaning ancestral lines" — when Indigenous science met Western

1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers

1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol

1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action

1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalities

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

FOLLOW SIMON:

Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffell

Onaya Science: https://www.onaya.io

Heroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.org

PAST EPISODES MENTIONED:

Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Andrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA

Grace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw