Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today’s lead story is about “The Way of the Rao,” a new YouTube interview series created by Matthew Watherston, the founder of the Temple of The Way of Light, an ayahuasca healing center in the Peruvian Amazon. After almost 20 years working alongside Shipibo healers and staying pointedly in the background, Watherston is finally speaking up about what's being lost as ayahuasca becomes a global commodity. You can find that story immediately below!

PS- we want to hear from you! DoubleBlind and journalist Noah Daly organized an anonymous survey to help us report a story about the increasing frequency of serving 5-MeO-DMT after ibogaine sessions at retreat centers. Feel free to pass along to anyone you know who has experienced this combination.

Enjoy the Brain Food 🌿🧠,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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In a new series, Temple of the Way of Light founder Matthew Watherston and Shipibo healer Maestro José López Sánchez argue that ayahuasca was never just about the brew, and that the booming global market is hollowing out traditions that make it work.

The morning after their first ayahuasca ceremony, a celebrated doctor and her husband were certain they were dying. 

They arrived in the Peruvian Amazon ready for what they thought would be a wellness retreat enlivened by ayahuasca. They were accomplished in their respective fields and confident in their vitality — they climbed mountains, were in excellent shape, and assumed their bodies could handle anything. They didn’t realize they were about to endure three days of nonstop vomiting to the point of believing they’d contracted dengue fever. Facilitators carried them to and from ceremony, as their ability to walk was hindered by the physical weakness brought on by the medicine. By the third day, however, the chronic pain the husband had lived with for 15 years vanished and years of suppressed grief about the parents he lost three years prior had come loose, too.

Matthew Watherston, the founder of the Temple of the Way of Light, a traditional plant medicine and ayahuasca healing center near Iquitos, Peru, shared this story with us in a recent phone call. He was careful not to oversell it, though. "This is an extreme example," he says, noting that this level of reaction happens to maybe "5% of people who come [to the Temple]." The relief the man experienced also wasn’t a cure. "I don't want to talk about panacea," he said, the tone in his voice clearly worn by the years of sensationalist headlines exaggerating the promise of ayahuasca. "It's just not that simple. [The pain] might come back, of course."

The anecdote Watherston shared almost has the shape of a parable because, like any good one, it’s a tale that’s been told many times over. Strip away the extremity of the couple’s reaction to the brew, and a familiar pattern reveals itself: most Westerners approach ayahuasca ceremonies with a blind confidence (dare we say arrogance?) that the vine will deliver bliss. But the moral is that bliss usually doesn’t deliver lasting or transformative healing — discomfort does, and seekers should weigh that out before boarding a plane to the Amazon to commune with the vine.

Watherston founded the Temple back in 2007, and for almost 20 years has chosen to stay in the background, wary of becoming one more white guy positioning himself as an authority on a tradition that was never his. But, now that we’re witnessing the harsh impacts of the globalization of ayahuasca, he has a lot to say — and it might even be his responsibility to say. In his new interview-style video series called “The Way of the Rao,” Watherston talks to Shipibo master healer Maestro José López Sánchez, to get his perspective on what’s getting lost in the commodification of ayahuasca.

But, in order to understand what's being lost, you first have to understand what the medicine actually is. In the Shipibo-Konibo tradition, ayahuasca doesn't heal you on its own. It's a diagnostic tool allowing a healer to see. It’s the ikaros that actually heals. Ikaros are sacred medicine songs that healers channel from the plant spirits, received over years of dieta and training, and they work directly within a person's energetic body. They are, as the Temple puts it, the true keys to deep and lasting healing. The illness a Western doctor would scan for in tissue and bloodwork, the Shipibo locate as energy, often inherited, lodged in the body long before it ever becomes physical. 

"For us, everything is energy. It's through the energies that illness forms," López Sánchez explains in the fourth episode of "The Way of the Rao." "The root, for us, is trauma — above all the bundles that aren't ours, that we carry from our ancestors. The plants and all the work we do help us release them."

The Onanya, the master healers, train for decades through sama, the solitary plant dietas where they receive the ikaros. In traditional community practice, the patient frequently doesn't drink anything at all. The healer drinks, using the brew to diagnose and to cross into the “Rao Nete,” the world of the plant spirits, where energetic cleaning and realignment happen.

Watherston describes the Shipibo-Konibo’s healing tradition as an orchestra, where an entire ecosystem of plants are working in concert, where ayahuasca is one instrument among many rather than the whole composition. "You can't expect a symphony from an oboist or a cellist," Watherston told DoubleBlind. "You need the full orchestra." 

López Sánchez, explains in the fourth episode of “The Way of the Rao,” "It's like cleaning an old house. From the outside it looks beautiful. But you go in and open all the doors, lift the cushions, the floor, the carpet, and inside there are cockroaches, cobwebs, toads, vipers, things that frighten you. This reaches all the way to the root, and it's with that pain, with that force, that it comes out." 

The Temple of the Way of Light has a glistening reputation in the murky world of ayahuasca retreat centers. Aside from preserving Shipibo tradition, a core pillar of its mission is its unwavering dedication to reciprocity. After its considerable operating and development costs, the Temple says it channels 100% of its profits into Indigenous-led initiatives and the work of its sister nonprofit, the Chaikuni Institute. The Temple’s roughly 70 staff members, 15 Shipibo from the Ucayali region of Peru and some 50 people from surrounding villages, are paid above the local standard and receive benefits rare in the Amazon, including health insurance and pensions, and each staff member gets 15 monthly paychecks a year, according to its website. It has also become an economic engine in its area, indirectly supporting more than 500 people. 

This type of structural, tangible reciprocity is what Watherston says many retreat businesses in the space allege to do, but often don’t follow through on in practice. The term “reciprocity” has officially entered the marketing lexicon. 

"The so-called ‘sacred reciprocity’ is greenwashing," Watherston told DoubleBlind. "It's bullshit. It's not the real thing."

The town of Iquitos in Peru is the de facto capital of the sprawling global ayahuasca industry. Ethnographer Carlos Suárez Álvarez, who has studied ayahuasca’s worldwide reach for over a decade, wrote for Chacruna in 2017 that he counted at least 40 ayahuasca lodges there, and noted that in a single year, just 10 of them hosted 4,000 foreign visitors, who each stayed at least a week and paid $100 to $200 per night, generating roughly $5.6 million for those 10 centers alone. As demand has only increased since then, so has the price of a seat in ceremony. 

As is often the case with money, it can be a corrupting force. Watherston has watched it pull gifted curanderos out of their communities and corrode the gift itself. "What once was a really good healer starts to earn more and more money, starts to get more and more praise," he told DoubleBlind. "It does go to the ego. It corrupts their medicine, and their medicine goes dark." 

It raises one of the main questions the series circles: How is anyone brand new to this world supposed to tell an authentic healer from a charlatan, or from someone collecting a paycheck for work they're not equipped to do? A trained healer, Watherston says, walks through a person's interior the way you'd move through a forest, and when he reaches the hornet's nest of compounded trauma, he goes after it slowly, across many nights. 

Describing how a healer works, Watherston said: "[They] gently prod [the hornets’ nest], not hit it with a baseball bat." The work includes what the tradition calls “soul retrieval,” recovering the pieces of a person that fractured off in self-defense, which is a process that cannot be hurried. He likens a finished treatment to a wet oil painting that needs to dry. This is why bouncing between medicines (or using multiple medicines in one retreat) or chasing the next ceremony can ruin it. "The paint is still wet," Watherston told DoubleBlind. "It's got to dry. That's integration."

A surprising share of the people doing this work are clinicians — the psychiatrists and psychologists and GPs who arrive carrying their own unprocessed trauma. A well known example of this happening is when trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté visited the Temple in June 2019 to co-lead a retreat for healthcare workers. It was planned that he would facilitate the medicine, but the healers concluded he was carrying too much to do so safely. They actually sat him out of the ceremonies and worked on him directly, a situation he has spoken about openly since. 

In the Way of the Rao’s fourth episode, José names what he sees in mental health practitioners. "They still need to heal themselves," he said. "Wanting to help another person has this effect of absorbing the negative energy, the traumas, the suffering of others. And over time, without cleaning it, without releasing it, that load accumulates little by little." 

For Watherston, it points to the cracks at the center of Western medicine. "A lot of doctors, psychologists, therapists are called into becoming a healer because of their own trauma," he told DoubleBlind. "There's a kind of compensatory mechanism there. Their own pain gets projected into a career. But it doesn't recognize that they have their own trauma."

It's a similar blind spot the decorated, successful couple arrived at the Temple with before descending into a harrowing pit of healing: sure of their own vitality, certain they had nothing to surrender. Ayahuasca, in the Shipibo tradition, exists to show people what they cannot see in themselves. Whether the West can bear to look is the question Watherston has finally decided to stop staying quiet about.

We're working on a story about a practice that's becoming increasingly common at ibogaine retreat centers: administering 5-MeO-DMT after an ibogaine session. If you've gone through this combination, we want to hear from you.

Our anonymous questionnaire asks about the whole arc of the experience — the preparation and safety information you were given, how staff supported you during and between the two sessions, the experience itself, and the integration afterward.

It also asks about whether the decision to combine the two medicines were clearly explained, how much recovery time you had between them, whether your consent felt genuine and informed, and how the dynamic with your facilitators felt. We want to understand what this treatment actually looks like on the ground — where (and if) care is being done well, and where (and if) people are getting hurt.

Your responses are confidential, and you can decide whether you're open to being contacted for the story.

Take the survey here.

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