Hamid sitting cross legged beside a pool, playing an acoustic guitar, with dense green trees behind him

Two Maps Describing the Same Territory

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.

Read where they meet See the whole history

The Body Yoga Talks About Is Not Only the Physical One

Most people meet yoga as a set of shapes to get into. The system it comes from is describing something else entirely.

Koshas, prana and nadi

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.

Chakras

Where those channels cross and bind up, the tradition describes energy centers, 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.

What the Practice Is Actually For

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 itself says this is rare: the process is never easy, and it does not happen for many but the very devoted. That is the part that gets left out whenever this material is sold as achievable in two weeks.

The Same Obstacles, Described by People Who Never Met

The Amazonian traditions do not use the vocabulary of nadi and chakra, and they are describing something a yogi would recognize. They describe 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.

Two traditions this far apart arriving at similar maps is what I keep coming back to. 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.

The Purge, and What It Is Taken to Mean

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 centers, 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 recognize the other quickly.

Why the Vine, in Their Account

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 closely onto the yogic idea of prana.

Years of Practice Are Not a Qualification

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 practicing 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.

Read the risks first

“Yoga and Ayahuasca are merely two different roads leading to the same place.”
Hamid

The Rest of This History

Read Hamid's story

Ayahuasca

What the brew is, how a Shipibo ceremony runs, and the risks anybody should read before anything else.

Read about Ayahuasca

Where This Fits

How I came to these traditions, what these pages are for, and what they deliberately are not.

Read the whole history

Thai Massage

The other half of the history, and the teacher who took my technique apart on the first day.

Read about Thai massage