Jean-Marie is a 29 year old Frenchman who had just finished an eight month
long treatment for cocaine addiction at the Takiwasi centre in Peru.
He grew up in a wealthy family in Paris, studied French literature at university then worked in his father's cosmetics factory. By the age of twenty he was a regular user of heroin, but returned home clean after a happy year in Brazil. However, soon after his return his father died.
Addiction
"When my father died I suddenly had a lot of responsibility - and a
lot of money. I felt as if didn't have any more time for myself. I had met
my wife and I was convinced I had made a good choice. But I wasn't happy.
I couldn't find myself - with my wife, my job, all the things I was doing.
I started to do heroin again and began to destroy all that I was building.
My addiction was getting stronger and stronger and I began to inject myself.
My wife was Colombian and I decided to try and find a job there, but in
Colombia I found the same kind of job as in France, I was meeting the same
kind of people and so I started to enjoy myself with cocaine and with drink
and going out to discos and meeting women. It was all very superficial.
I couldn't understand what was wrong, why I wasn't happy. I told myself,
I have just married, I have a job, I have lots of money - I have every reason
to be happy. Why am I not happy? So I decided to divorce and give up my
job.
It was painful to accept responsibility for my failure after my cultural upbringing and education had taken me to this point of being in business and having money. It was hard to break with all the rules they taught me so after taking the decision to quit with everything I followed through my destruction until I was almost dying. I was injecting so much cocaine I jumped from my apartment, the second floor window. I couldn't control myself. When I arrived at that point I was so fucked up I told myself "I need to stop, to quit or I will die".
I read about Takiwasi. I knew I needed help, but not the traditional kind, I wanted something special. So when I heard about Takiwasi I left everything I possessed in Colombia and travelled to Peru.
Arriving at Takiwasi
When you arrive you spend the first week alone. This is partly to test your
motivation, but also because the others undergoing the treatment with the
plants are very sensitive to your smell. You have your first plant - yoropaunga
- which makes you vomit as it is very strong. You clean your stomach with
an enema and with hot liquid.
After that, you are with the other patients, you start your plant diet and you have to fulfil the obligations of the centre. You do quite heavy work on the land in the morning from 8.30 to 12.30. It feels like a return to the beginning. You have your lunch and then you work again from 3-5 on artisanal projects, such as making ceramics. Once a week you have the ayahuasca.
The Plant Diet
The plants are chosen for each person. I took three plants. You don't have
any salt at all, and no sugar during one week and you just eat a little
white rice. The plant you are drinking gives you dreams and visions and
it teaches you.
The plant diet is like an intoxication and the effect lasts a long time. Each morning at 7 the curandero comes to your place and gives you a big glass of the drink. Then he leaves you alone in the forest with all the animals and all the birds and all the sounds. You are totally alone. Your body is opening itself and all the plants are actually in yourself. So the intoxication becomes stronger and stronger and then you sleep and you have dreams and you remember incredible things from your childhood. It's a very strong effect. At the end you don't have any smells of your human body. The animals of the forest come to you because they don't feel you any more, they feel the plants in you, nothing more.
The first plant was for dreams, to remember what I had done and to confront myself with my past. It was interesting as during one week I remembered all that I had done when I was drugged, all the problems I had, all the problems with my ex-wife, all the bad things I had done in my life, but the good things also. And at the end of my diet I weighed it all up and said: 'well, what happened happened, and now it's my past. So now I have to concentrate on the future and trying to accept that all that past is part of me and it doesn't mean that I am bad or that I am good, just that it is done and that is all. Now I am starting something new. That's the point I have to see'.
The second plant was a kind of garlic which grows in the mountains. It cleans the blood and gives you luck. It gives you will power.
The third plant was tobacco, and when I did the tobacco diet I was very addicted to cigars. You drink the tobacco from the plant - the big tobacco leaves are dried and put into water and left for ten days. When you drink it, it is so strong it burns you inside. I had visions. I could see the spirit of tobacco come to me and teach me and it was crazy, it was so wonderful, I never had an experience like that before and I understood a lot of things about myself. I understood that I didn't have to smoke any more. After that I gave up smoking without any problems. I didn't feel any resistance from my body.
Ayahuasca
During the plant diet you take ayahuasca once a week. You are in a process
of evolution and when you take ayahuasca after your first diet you see that
your level of perception is stronger, higher. After my first diet I met
a new curandero and I had one of my strongest sessions. Normally the visions
are for all the group, the effects are for all the group, but this curandero
had the power to make special visions with each person, controlling the
effects for each person. For me, he confronted me with my death, because
during my drug sessions I was looking to die. You want to die but you are
just playing, you are playing with your addiction. During this ayahuasca
session the death came to me. It appeared to me. I had heard that it was
a woman, a lot of books talk about woman as the death but I never knew why.
But I could see it was a woman who came to me, a beautiful woman, it was
incredible. She was speaking to me "hello Jean-Marie, here I am - you
were looking for me so many times and now I am here and I am talking to
you. Look at me. I am here. What do you want?" And I was looking and
thinking "wow, it is so wonderful". And she was telling me "you
think I am wonderful but look what you are really looking for" and
her face changed and it was horrible, I couldn't see it any more. It was
like a spectra, it was looking at me with red eyes and trying to enter into
my face and trying to show me what really I was looking for was dangerous.
You can't play with death. You don't have the right to play with death.
That was the lesson of that ayahuasca session. That I have to value my life.
It was the most important thing I learnt. I was confronting my death and
I say "wow, this is strong". Of course, in all the ayahuasca sessions
you see a lot of beautiful things. You have access to all the spirit worlds.
You see... Well, I can feel the whole world, all the beauty of what I have
near. It is quite difficult to explain that kind of feeling.
As the plant diet progressed my feelings in ayahuasca session became very strong. I had a beautiful vision of the centre once. I was sitting in an ayahuasca session in Takiwasi and my mind went out of my body and I saw all of Takiwasi, then I saw a big white light like a tube going up into the sky and going up into a big white cloud. Then I could see all of South America and Takiwasi and the tube of light going up into the cloud. Then I could see Earth and I could see that there were all the points on Earth with that good energy going up into that same cloud. I could see that it was all energy. There were points on the earth, like in Takiwasi, where there was good work going on, helping people to preserve something for the whole cosmos. Something stronger than life, something out of our calculation, out of our control.
Spirituality
You don't respect the rules when you are drugging yourself as the preparation
of the drugs is done without any tradition. It's done by people who want
to make business, not to cure people. You do it to relieve yourself or because
you want to destroy yourself. The worlds you access through heroin are not
the same worlds that you access through ayahuasca. Heroin alters your perception.
It makes you think that everything is okay, it changes your perception of
things. Sometimes you are dreaming or have thoughts and you access certain
kinds of information, but you are not doing anything with that because you
are in a process of drugging and destroying yourself because the drug is
doing violence to you. So you can't use that kind of information. With ayahuasca,
the plants change your perception, show you something which you can use
in your own life to help you grow up and not destroy you.
I have recovered some of my sensitivity, my feelings. I accept more the entirety of life. Before, I thought I was right about everything. Now I've learned to try to achieve a balance, to see the good and the bad and not be so extreme in my ways. To find an equilibrium. I'm always trying to find a good way to integrate all these things. I had lost my spirituality but I have faith now. Ayahuasca taught me not to have any more doubts about spirits, plants, power, magic things. When you do the diet the spirit of the plant comes to you and teaches you. If you respect the spirit, if you prepare yourself, then you will be on your way and you will be strong. If you don't respect it then the spirit will go. At the beginning it seems a little strange, but it is true. Takiwasi has proved that".
©Nicholas Saunders and Anja Dashwood. Interview took place in Terapoto
February 1997.
Council on Spiritual Practices Home Page