Seeing God and Burning Plastic (I made a documentary)
The Paradoxical Nature of the Healer
The woman in the photo above is named Estela Pangoza, and she’s a Peruvian ayahuasca shaman. I made a documentary about her that’s coming out in November, and you can get notified of its release here.
I’ve done Ayahuasca several times, each ceremony fundamentally life-changing. In one ceremony, the shaman helped heal years of abuse. One, in roundabout ways, led positively to my divorce. The penultimate ceremony convinced me to make this film, instead of using my savings to buy a big fancy house.
Each experience was utterly transcendent. But a small detail of the ritual always nagged at me: this life-altering psycho-spiritual brew is poured into drinkers’ cups from dirty, plastic coca-cola bottles.
On the first day of filming Estela, who is a widely respected master shaman, I caught her eating potato chips in her bedroom. When my crew and I arrived, she quickly folded the empty bag and placed it under her bed, before donning a more serene expression to ask what we’d like to begin filming first.
This dichotomy more or less became my foundational pursuit throughout the shoot: when the shaman deviates from how we think they’re supposed to behave, does that de-legitimize their ability to commune with God?
Or does the problem lie in even needing to ask that question?
There’s a complicated dynamic when it comes to ayahuasca tourism, which, no matter how you slice it, is essentially what any South American retreat center is facilitating. It’s in any center’s best interest to lean heavily into the mystical. The most successful retreats are those that best cater to Westerner’s needs: luxurious rooms, flower baths, catered meals, and of course; the mysterious, wise and omniscient healer to spearhead the ceremonies.
A truly authentic ayahuasca experience is inaccessible, in large part because it was traditionally consumed only by shamans. So the rituals that are being crafted at these retreats are a modern invention riding upon the legitimacy of the healers themselves. The promise of spiritual enlightenment is the pull, and your impression of the shaman as a miracle-worker is vital to the center’s survival.
I watched dozens of retreat-goers weep, pray, and kneel before Estela in ceremony. When you sit in front of a powerful master shaman, fully immersed in the current of the drink you’ve just consumed - their songs weaving through your heart and flesh and bones - it’s hard to imagine them as anything but unfailingly divine. It’s easy to idolize a person who is holding the fabric of your newfound reality together with their very gaze.
So, I understand why Estela felt the need to stash the potato chips under her mattress. It’s bad for business to deviate from the mystery. And what’s bad for business, is perhaps, what is bad for the world - especially when so many Westerners could stand to gain so much from her teachings and abilities.
When you read stories about celebrities drinking ayahuasca, they’re typically doing it in places like this:
While the shaman is returning home after a long night of chanting to places like this:
The truth is, when a psychedelic tourist completes their mind-shattering initiation into one of the jungle’s most potent brews, they often return to an air-conditioned room, and later, to their relatively affluent life at home - left with a feeling of unadulterated reverence for the person who guided them through their (occasionally) harrowing, but (typically) ethereal journey.
And that person, after changing your life, returns to a room full of buckets, and bug poisons, and plastic bags hanging from the walls used to store their silverware. They watch satellite TV with their husband, cook fish heads on their homemade stove, and wake up the next morning to hand-weave tapestries that they will later sell to future tourists, like you, so that they can pay their cell-phone bill.
It’s nice when Spirituality™ is neat, and clean, and organizable. It’s easy to see God in a brilliant, prismic vision - in a stoic and all-knowing guru, in an open window, a lush tree, a delicious meal. Seeing God in a coca-cola bottle, or a bag of chips - is much harder to do.
On our last day of filming, my crew and I took a long walk through the jungle with Estela. Her knowledge of the flora and fauna around her was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Her wisdom felt deeply true, she seemed primally enmeshed with the land. At the end of the hike, she told me that the best way to deal with the problem of plastic accumulating at her center was to burn it in large, ceremonial heaps. The smell of the smoke, she said, clears her retreat of bad energy.
I made this documentary because I felt that there was a gaping hole in the dialogue surrounding ayahuasca. Lost between a sea of self-healing miracles, and ‘watch-out-you’re-being-scammed-into-taking-a-bad-drug’ exposés, is a whole universe of weird, fascinating gray areas: the lives of the shamans themselves. Who is the person behind the shaman? What is their life actually like? When they’re not in robes and headdresses, what do they… do?
I invite you to find out for yourself.
My documentary ‘She is a Shaman’ will be live on YouTube November 22nd:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lra4c4LwCBw
interesting to learn it was traditionally consumed only by shamans