YOGA AND AYAHUASCA
Two traditions describing the same map
Yoga and the Amazonian medicine traditions came from opposite sides of the world and describe the body in strikingly similar terms. This is an account of where they agree.
Yoga and the Amazonian medicine traditions came from opposite sides of the world and describe the body in strikingly similar terms. This is an account of where they agree.
Most people meet yoga as a set of shapes to get into. The system it comes from is describing something else entirely.
In yoga the physical body is the outermost of several layers, the koshas, and inside it is an energetic body through which prana, life force, is held to move. It moves along channels called nadi, which are not anatomical structures and are described much the way the meridians of Chinese medicine are. Yoga puts the number of them at 72,000, which is a traditional figure rather than a measurement.
Where those channels cross and bind up, the tradition describes energy centres, the chakras. The useful way to think of them is as constrictions rather than as organs: places where movement can get stuck. Three main channels run along the spine and meet at the seven principal ones.
In this account the practice exists to clear those constrictions, so that energy held at the base of the spine, described as a coiled snake and called kundalini, can rise. The tradition holds that when it reaches the brow the practitioner experiences union with the divine.
Yoga is honest that this is rare. It describes the process as long, difficult, and reached by very few even among the devoted. That is worth stating clearly, because it is the part that gets left out whenever this material is sold as achievable in a fortnight.
The Amazonian traditions do not use the vocabulary of nadi and chakra, and they are describing something a yogi would recognise. Blockage, held in the body, cleared through a process that is uncomfortable and not optional. The medicine is understood to find what is stuck and to insist on it, which is a fair description of what a demanding yoga practice does over a much longer stretch of time.
That two traditions this far apart arrived at similar maps is the thing worth sitting with. It does not prove the map is accurate. It does suggest that both are describing something real about being in a body, in the language available to them.
An ayahuasca ceremony almost always involves purging in some form, and to Western eyes that reads as the body rejecting something toxic. The traditions read it differently: as the point at which something held is released, which is why purging is treated as the medicine working rather than as a mishap on the way to the good part.
In yogic terms the equivalent is happening at the lower centres, which is where the tradition holds most people are stuck most of the time. The two accounts line up closely enough that people who have spent years in one tend to recognise the other quickly.
Banisteriopsis caapi grows from the forest floor to the canopy, and the tradition holds that what it gathers up there is light, and that cooking the vine for hours concentrates it. That is why the power is said to be in the vine rather than in the companion plant that carries the chemistry.
I am not putting that forward as botany. It is what the people whose medicine this is say about it, and it maps onto the yogic idea of prana closely enough to be worth setting side by side.
It is often said that experienced yoga practitioners take to this work more easily, and sometimes that is true. Somebody who has spent years watching their own mind has a vocabulary for what happens and is less alarmed by it.
Just as often it is not true at all. A long practice can build a very well defended sense of oneself as somebody who has done the work, and that is harder to put down than having no practice at all. My own teacher in Thailand told me on the first day that I had been practising too much yoga and that my body was worse for it, and he was right, and it took me a while to hear it.
Nothing about arriving experienced makes any of this safer. The risks are the same for everybody and they are set out properly on the ayahuasca page.
What the brew is, how a Shipibo ceremony runs, and the risks anybody should read before anything else.
How I came to these traditions, what these pages are for, and what they deliberately are not.
The other half of the history, and the teacher who took my technique apart on the first day.
