![Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety [book review] Book cover](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/q_lossy+ret_img+to_auto/themindfulword.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Listening-to-Ayahuasca-book-cover.jpg "LISTENING TO AYAHUASCA: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety [book review] 14")
LISTENING TO AYAHUASCA: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety
Rachel Harris
[New World Library, 376 pages]
Over the past decade, the psychoactive “plant medicine” Ayahuasca has continued to attract more and more attention worldwide.
This interest has inspired several important books on the subject that have become seminal works in the area of scientific study and personal experience. The book Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety by Rachel Harris is destined to take its place among them.
The author, who has had a psychiatric practice for three decades, has masterfully intertwined her own extensive Ayahuasca experiences with those of her patients. For these patients, she has prescribed that they travel to the South American jungles in search of healing to imbibe the tea from the [Ayahuasca] “vine of death.”
A unique focus on healing aspects
The book, although filled with many accounts of personal experience, is uniquely focused on the reported healing aspects of Ayahuasca. This is what sets it apart from the other scholarly works on the topic that have preceded it.
The author doesn’t shy away from the New Age background surrounding the interest in Ayahuasca, a background that often prompts modern seekers to explore this traditional medicine of the Amazon that dates back thousands of years. She offers up the personal accounts of her patients without judgment, even though she herself hasn’t had the same experiences. After all, the experiences themselves are, by the very nature of the medicine itself, highly personalized.
Harris prefers to clinically report each testimony, no matter what the circumstances of the patient happen to be. She also reports on her own experiences with Ayahuasca, which date back to the years when the McKenna brothers first began to explore and report on their findings. Before reporting on their experience, she asks each of her patients to fill out a questionnaire.
Much of the resulting information is well-compiled and lends great coherence to the descriptions of experiences that would otherwise seem quite fantastical. But again, it’s the nature of the Ayahuasca experience to push the boundaries of the human imagination.
The scope of the book is extensive, drawing on the works of various pioneers such as Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule and Benny Shanon’s The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, but the material is always focused on the healing aspects of the plant medicine and the quest of those who seek healing when Western psychiatry, with its associated pharmacology, has failed. As mentioned, this emphasis on healing is what makes this book so unique. This aspect of the Ayahuasca experience also aligns perfectly with the traditional role of the shaman.
Helpful for practitioners and non-practitioners alike
Listening to Ayahuasca provides material that would be extremely helpful to any psychiatric practitioner who’d like to research Ayahuasca as an alternative when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals have been proven ineffective.
Furthermore, I found the book to be written in such plain language that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone in search of healing, as it may help them discover if the Ayahuasca experience could be exactly what they need.
«RELATED READ» AYAHUASCA: A journey of discovery into my self»
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Michael Jenkins
