Listening to Ayahuasca with Dr. Rachel Harris (Part 2)
Life, Death & The Space Between with Dr. Amy Robbins
Dr. Amy Robbins
4.8 • 585 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Psychologist Rachel Harris, PhD is the author of Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD and Anxiety. She was in private practice for thirty-five years working with people interested in psychospiritual development. During a decade working in research, Rachel received a National Institutes of Health New Investigator’s Award and published more than forty scientific studies in peer-reviewed journals. She has also consulted to Fortune 500 companies and the United Nations.
In 2005 Rachel traveled to a retreat center in Costa Rica and serendipitously found herself with the opportunity to drink ayahuasca with Ecuadorian shamans. The morning after her first ceremony, Rachel began asking questions about the therapeutic potential of this medicine. She conducted a three-year research project with Lee Gurel, PhD that resulted in “A Study of Ayahuasca Use in North America,” published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (Summer, 2012)
In this two part episode we discuss:
What Ayahuasca is and what it means Who is Grandmother Ayahuasca. Who should use Ayahuasca and what are the risks associated with it. What mechanism in the brain allows it to work. In what type of setting Ayahuasca should be used The difference between real vs. helpful? The importance of “integrating spiritual insights into behavioral change” The default mode networks and how Ayahuasca works on those networks How these drugs and others similar help with existential distress?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Dr. Amy Robbins and welcome to life, death, and the Space Between podcast. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and medium. |
| 0:12.3 | And here we discuss life, death, consciousness, and what it all means. |
| 0:18.1 | Today I have Rachel Harris back on the show. And if you missed part one of our |
| 0:23.8 | discussion, tune in to that first. And this is part two of our discussion. And we're talking about |
| 0:31.0 | Rachel's book, Listening to Iowaska, New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, PTSD, and anxiety. So I wanted to sort of continue |
| 0:40.6 | because we were talking last week about where, about how ayahuasca works. But I know that you also |
| 0:49.5 | talk in the book about it being similar, that some of the chemicals that are released during an ayahuasca |
| 0:55.5 | ceremony or maybe the use of ayahuasca are similar to the chemicals that our brain releases |
| 1:00.7 | during the dying process can you explain that no that's been debunked we don't know enough yet |
| 1:07.4 | there was a misinterpretation of some early work that was done with DMT, |
| 1:15.9 | the spirit molecule, the guy who wrote the spirit molecule, whose name escapes me right now, |
| 1:21.4 | and he was hypothesizing that perhaps DMT, DMT is produced by the pineal gland, and he was hypothesizing that maybe it was |
| 1:30.8 | released at birth and or death, but it has not been confirmed. |
| 1:35.5 | So that's been debunked. We just don't know enough. There's a lot of research to be done, |
| 1:40.2 | and we just don't really know enough at this point. |
| 1:43.7 | Are they still exploring that as a possibility or it's not? |
| 1:48.1 | I don't know of any research that's specifically looking at that. |
| 1:51.3 | They'll eventually get around to it. |
| 1:54.8 | Because this is a concoction of two plants, there's a lot in the mixture and we don't really know all the therapeutic |
| 2:06.0 | benefits of it. So there's been some early work on the ayahuasca vine itself that might be |
| 2:12.4 | helpful for Parkinson's disease, for instance. But we don't know and, you know, it hasn't been tested enough. |
... |
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