She Is A Shaman | Full Ayahuasca Documentary (2024)
This is Estela Pangoza. She is a shaman. Estela is 51-years-old and runs her own ayahuasca center in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. Ayahuasca is a powerful hallucinogenic drink made from plants native to the jungle and is said to cause life-changing insights by those who consume it. In a shaman's life the borders between the mundane and the extraordinary blur.
People from all over the world come to this small corner of the jungle to drink ayahuasca. Estela is quiet and comes across as steady. She's more comfortable being on camera than speaking to it.
She says she was born without an ego and that she will probably never see this film. This is Roger, Estela's husband. He's 28 years old. She says that one day during an ayahuasca ceremony, she asked the plant to bring her a man who wasn't bad. One week later Roger arrived at the center on foot, looking for a job. Estela has four children and she's had five husbands.
One fell very ill and they separated. One she considered a very bad man, so she left him. One died. And one was abusive. He used to hit her with sticks.
Roger is the fifth. The shamans that Estela employs at her center are Shipibo - part of an indigenous group in the Amazon basin who refer to ayahuasca as "the medicine." Every morning, the shamans prepare something called "the vapor" using roots and leaves found nearby. They believe the steam from these plants clear the guests of bad energy.
Foreigners visit as psychedelic tourists. They can't help but stand out. And yet, the center was built for them. It wasn't made for Peruvians to visit. The shamans are unfazed by the perceived disparity in wealth.
They say that the true difference between their culture and ours is that they are happy. This guest, during a surprise burst of rain, slipped on a wet tree branch and hurt his back. The shamans work with the body, but say their primary focus is in treating the soul. They believe his pain is actually the product of a traumatic event from decades ago left sitting in his mind for too long.
In her early twenties, Estela was studying to become a nurse, but left school to work with "the medicine." Estela is buying carefully-chosen herbs for guests' meals at the nearest shop. Daniel, a shaman at Estela's retreat, lives by the nearest road. In his spare time, he runs a convenience store with his wife.
He used to be a police officer. He called working for the government the equivalent of leading a double life. Daniel says that his children will become shamans one day, too. They don't have a choice. "They must," he says. "Because there are so few Shipibo left."
Estela has luxuries that others in the jungle can only dream about. A rainwater system. Bathrooms. Working showers. A laundromat.
Visitors describe Ayahuasca as a sentient entity. A stern, but benevolent mother weaving snake-like through their bodies. Producing visions, engaging them in dialogue, diagnosing their innermost troubles. They said they felt like Estela could look inside them, too - and pull the pain and sickness out of their bodies as though their trauma were attached to a rope that she held in her hands. For this reason, they look to her with a private, unspoken reverence. Estela is one of the few Shipibo women to run her own ayahuasca center.
And she feels this makes her a target, and causes jealousy amongst neighboring shamans running their own centers nearby. She believes that the ayahuasca itself wants goodness, but that drinking it doesn't guarantee that in the recipient. She warns that everyone who works with the medicine has a choice. As a precaution, each night, the young men patrol the perimeters of her sanctuary with rifles. It's not uncommon for female shamans to drink ayahuasca when pregnant. Estela drank it with two of her children in the womb.
Estela's daughter, Emerita, has been taking it since she was three years old. It's given to certain children in small quantities, though Estela says her son accidentally drank a whole bottle of it when he was eight years old. He thought it was soda. She insists he was fine. Drinking it young, she says, connects them to the medicine early where it lies dormant until they are ready to become shamans. Estela sees the world as energy.
She describes the energy of Mickey Mouse as "rapid." She says, "When you look at him, he makes your mind race." A single tapestry can sell for almost half of the average monthly salary in Peru. A symbiotic relationship emerges. The foreigners carry a fast feeling into the center with relative affluence and a disconnect from nature.
Which, to the shamans, causes sadness and illness. So the foreigners seek healing from a community that needs their money, so that this community can cure them of the sadness that their affluence causes. When plastic at the center accumulates, the shamans gather and burn it. When asked if plastic was bad, Estela said, "No. It just comes." "It has a strong energy and we burn it to turn it into good energy." She says the smell of plastic cleanses the center.
Estela once spent six months in uninterrupted, isolated meditation. She has ingested near-fatal amounts of tobacco and spent years eating high doses of plants and herbs commonly considered poisonous. She has consumed ayahuasca countless times. A master shaman is called a "maestra" or "maestro." The title is given only to those who have mastered the medicines of the rainforest.
It's the morning of an ayahuasca ceremony. Maestra prepares breakfast for the guests. The meal has no salt. A strict condition of the ritual diet, which has been sculpted by shamans through centuries of experimentation. "The Shipibo never had pills to fix things," she says.
"The forest is our pharmacy." There are 80,000 plant species in the Amazon. For ayahuasca to produce its effects, two unrelated plants must be boiled together. When asked how it was discovered, Maestra simply says: "The Shipibo are scientists. We learned to brew it through our dreams." Just outside her house grows a <i>banisteriopsis caapi</i> vine. It's the first half of the mixture that will become ayahuasca.
She gathers <i>chacruna</i> leaves from a nearby shrub. The second half of the recipe. Before it gained popularity in the West drinking ayahuasca was typically reserved only for shamans. Several Peruvians who work at the center have never tried it. They beat the vine with sticks to remove the bark and separate the ropes inside.
These ropes are combined with the <i>chacruna</i> leaves and water and brewed for 12 hours until they're all reduced into an earthy, viscous mixture. Maestra says that the hardest part of her job is the emotional load. She absorbs the energy of every person who visits.
All their aches, their sadness, their traumas. She takes it all in. No one speaks before the ceremony starts.
After each person drinks the brew she wipes the glass for the next participant with carefully-folded toilet paper. The room is filled with the scent of flowers. Wood from a sacred tree is burned for protection. Everyone takes turns bathing in the smoke. Maestra places what she calls "the crown of wisdom" on her head. They smoke tobacco to guard their energy from jealous shamans who might interfere with the power of the ceremony from afar.
She asks you to set an intention before you drink - what you wish to be healed of. "The medicine listens," she says. But often gives you what you need, which can depart from what you want. She gazes at you to determine how much you'll receive.
Her fingernail marks the fill line. The cords tying the ceremony together are the songs, called "<i>icaros.</i>" The maestros say they hear the melodies somewhere in their chests and sing them out, like messengers for the Ayahuasca.
Participants claim to feel the songs viscerally. They wrap around the room like a blanket, and the guests' experiences, weaving together and eventually dissolving the line between the physical and the transcendent.
2024-11-26 13:52
