Recover from Trauma – Report from an #AyahuascaCeremony in Peru

Many of you have been asking me about my recent experience at a healing retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon. So in this video I'm going to be sharing about an experience at the healing retreat center, why you would even want to consider going to a retreat center or doing a detox or reset type program, and also why a person might consider using psychedelic plant medicines as a way to support your healing process. Now this video is going to be helpful for any of you who could be dealing with any number of health issues, anything from testing positive or high risk HPV virus and maybe abnormal cells on your cervix, and potential risk of cervical cancer or vaginal cancer or any other kind of cancer for that matter. It also will be helpful for those of you who are working to get a healthy pregnancy and prevent a miscarriage, or those of you who are going through perimenopause and postmenopausal symptoms, weight gain, abnormal blood sugar levels, sleep issues, anxiety, migraines, autoimmune conditions, and simply wanting to prevent other health issues like heart disease and dementia. So really this could be helpful for all of us humans to heal. And I'm so excited about it. This is actually not my first time going to a healing center in Peru. This is my fourth time over the past four or five years that I have been to Peru to experience a healing retreat center as well as taking the psychedelic plant medicine called ayahuasca in Peru. And I'm really impressed with the healing potential of ayahuasca, the plant medicine, as well as the overall approach at a retreat center. Now, some of you may have already been hearing about psychedelic therapy or psychedelic assisted therapy. There's a lot of documentaries that are out, including how to change your mind as well as a TV show on Hulu called nine perfect Strangers. And these are all really good examples to give you a sense of what it's like to go to a healing retreat center and to experience psychedelic medicines. So I encourage you to check out those documentaries and videos as well as you can always ask me more questions. I over the past year have actually completed a complete year long. I think it's hours of training from the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, a training in psychedelic assisted therapy. This is one of a kind in the United States, training first time for providers like me, medical doctors, including emergency room doctors and nurse practitioners and naturopathic doctors, all in a classroom together learning about psychedelic medicines that can be used clinically, safely and effectively to help people with all different health issues. We reviewed all the research. We even learned from the Researchers themselves about the up to date information about how psychedelics can, can be helpful for people's health. Now this is in the United States, something that we're anticipating to become more and more accessible. And still at this moment in time, most states in the United States are not, have not legalized ayahuasca and they have not legalized psilocybin, which is from magic mushrooms, nor have they legalized mdma. Right now, one psychedelic substance that you can get access to is called ketamine. And there are more and more ketamine clinics coming up. And I am now trained as well in the use of ketamine for specific health conditions, especially for anxiety, depression. But it is also in the research. These psychedelic substances are used also for end of life care and as well as PTSD and other traumatic conditions. So I just really want to open your awareness to the really big shift that's happening around psychedelic substances to help us humans heal. And so that's what originally led me to go all the way to Peru where ayahuasca, which is a psychedelic plant medicine. So as an herbalist and naturopathic doctor, as in my original training, I wanted to go to the Amazon and learn about how they're using herbs that have psychedelic properties. And that's what ayahuasca is. It's actually a mix of two different plants, a vine and a leaf from two different plants that together create a psychedelic experience. Now the thing is that there's a lot of misconceptions, more than I'll be able to cover in this one video. And so I'll be covering more about psychedelics in upcoming videos because I want you all to be well informed, to be able to make decisions about your health. So the thing that I find is the most common misconception about psychedelics is that we are thinking that it's all about what's going on in our mind or what's going on in our thoughts. And actually psychedelic substances, including this plant medicine called ayahuasca, I'll spell it down below. A Y A H U A S C A is affecting much more than our mind, Much more than our mind. In fact, one of the things that I feel like is so important about considering a healing retreat and or a psychedelic experience is to understand that it's really a mind, body and spirit experience. Healing experience. And ultimately as humans, that's what we are. We're not just a body and we're not just a mind. We, we are mind, body and spirit. So no matter what health issue you're dealing with whether it's mental like anxiety, depression, or in your body like joint pain or stomach aches. No matter what, every health issue is going to be able to be addressed through mind, body and spirit. And there is no separation of mind and body. So this is one of the key factors to understand in your overall healing process. And definitely when you start to think about is it something you'd like to consider to do a healing retreat and or a psychedelic experience? Because if you start to realize that, oh my gosh, maybe there's some emotional component or trauma related component to the health issues you're experiencing, that's when we need to look toward things that can help us on those other levels, not just on a physical level or maybe not just by suppressing our emotions, maybe not just by suppressing our physical pain or our emotional pain, but actually helping us process our pain or our suffering. Right. As humans, this is the thing is we like to try to think that we can avoid pain and suffering. And yet as humans at some point what we can acknowledge that actually we do experience pain and suffering as humans and it's not something to avoid. That's not going to help us heal. That what's going to help us heal is to acknowledge, accept, embrace, process, forgive and move through the suffering and allow ourselves to be in the suffering, be with these feelings. And that's when we can actually heal from what we've been through, heal from what we experience as humans. Many of you know that my background is in specializing in stress and trauma, understanding how we as humans are exposed to stress and trauma starting from a young, young age, from childhood and even before childhood, in utero. And we experience generational trauma that can affect us today. And I've written about this in all of my books, all five of my books. The Stress Remedy, the Stress Warrior in particular and the Master Stress Reset your health. So if you'd like to learn more about how all of what I've studied and all of that I've helped you to understand related to stress and trauma and how it's related to our physical symptoms, our emotional symptoms and even our connection to ourselves as spiritual beings, right? To understand who really am I, who are you, what is your purpose here and your human experience and how to connect with that and how by connecting with your self as a spiritual being in this human experience can be so healing on many levels. So that's one of the thing reasons why the healing retreat can be so healing, so helpful and healing. So what happens in the healing retreat in the Amazon So one thing is that it's about being away. That's one way to think about it. Literally going a flying from United States. In my case, there were many people who were there also from Europe and Australia, New Zealand. So people flying from halfway around the world to Peru and then getting in a van and driving in to the mountains, driving in to the Andes mountains and the Amazon jungle. So we were literally getting away from our usual daily lives. We were also going to a location where we were going to be staying in individual cabins with no wi fi, no EMFs. So we're away from all that technology and stimulation. I mean, me coming from New York, Manhattan to the Amazon and away from everything, right? All the lights, all the busyness, all of the chaos to a simple small cabin in the jungle. Now that part might remind any of you who've been camping. Now I grew up camping because my father love to be in the outdoors. So I've been camping since a young age. Maybe some of you also enjoy camping. So this would be like camping in the Amazon jungle. And I this time was in a brand new healing retreat center, which mean, meant that the cabins were brand new and beautiful. And now sometimes in the past when I went to a healing retreat center, they did not have running water. So there was no sink, there was no, there was no shower, there was no toilet. We were using outhouses outside. Right. And taking a bath in the creek. That also is a possibility. This new healing retreat center had running water, it wasn't hot water. It did have solar heat to the water, so it wasn't ice cold, but it was not hot water. It was cold water, which actually can be very healing to have cold water. In fact, I got used to taking a cold shower because that's the way it was. And you get used to it when you do it day after day. So we were away from hot water, we were away from electricity. And so when it got dark, which the, with the time zone when I was there was that the sun would come up at about 6am and the sun would go down at about 6pm so we had 12 hours of daylight. And when the sun went down, yes, we had candles, we had flashlights, we even had battery powered light bulbs. But really once I got dark, pretty much it's on the frogs in the jungle making the most beautiful music for me to sleep too. So I was reminding me because actually with about two weeks before I left to go to Peru, I had a week where in my home in New York, my hot water heater went out, my Air conditioner went out and my electric panel went out all in the same week. And sitting in New York in the summer, that was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I need the air conditioner, I need electricity. And then a couple weeks later, I went to Peru where I found myself in a cabin with no hot water, no electricals, no electricity and no air conditioner. However, at this location in the jungle in the mountains, it really wasn't hot. The temperature was actually perfect, perfectly right in the middle between cold and warm. In the evenings, even if the wind was blowing, there was a slight breeze and I would use my blanket. So it was the perfect temperature. I didn't need an air conditioner and I didn't need a heater. It was right in the middle, so it was amazing. It also was a break from processed foods. So we were eating only whole foods and we were avoiding all alcohol, caffeine, sugar, salt, dairy, gluten, as well as chocolate. I'm trying to think. We mostly were eating things like rice, maybe brown rice, sometimes quinoa, potatoes, which there's lots of different kinds of potatoes in Peru. Also avocado. We would get protein from eggs, if you eat egg, corn, sometimes beans, lentils, and let me see what else. I think that was about it. That was about the main things and it was just in a rotation. Occasionally oatmeal, we would get oatmeal. So and essentially they would serve two meals a day. So the calories were also restricted. The calories are calculated to be about.

Between 1500 and 2000 calories per day. So it was a calorie restricted diet and avoiding all carbs and lower fat and lower protein, which is consistent with, with what's referred to as a fasting mimicking diet. A fasting mimicking diet is something that's lower calorie, higher carbs, and it's used for mimicking the effect of fasting in the body without fasting, which means that it can stimulate autophagy and improve longevity and do a lot of other things to help with healing the nervous system and preventing cancer. Was dark, right? Because the cabin didn't have walls. The cabin was open air mesh walls open to the jungle. So it was dark. And so when it, when the sun went down, I wasn't awake very much longer before I was ready to go to sleep, while I listened to the crickets and the frogs in the jungle putting. Making the most beautiful music for me to sleep to. So I was reminding me because actually with about two weeks before I Left to go to Peru. I had a week where in my home in New York. My hot water heater went out, my air conditioner went out, and my electric panel went out all in the same week. And sitting in New York in the summer, that was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I need the air conditioner, I need electricity. And then a couple weeks later, I went to Peru where I found myself in a cabin with no hot water, no electricals, no electricity and no air conditioner. However, at this location in the jungle in the mountains, it really wasn't hot. The temperature was actually perfect, perfectly right in the middle between cold and warm. In the evenings, even if the wind was blowing, there was a slight breeze and I would use my blanket. So it was the perfect temperature. I didn't need an air conditioner and I didn't need a heater. It was right in the middle, so it was amazing. It also was a break from processed foods. So we were eating only whole foods and we were avoiding all alcohol, caffeine, sugar, salt, dairy, gluten as well as chocolate. I'm trying to think. We mostly were eating things like rice, maybe brown rice, sometimes quinoa, potatoes, which there's lots of different kinds of potatoes in Peru. Also avocado. We would get protein from eggs, if you eat eggs. And occasionally like once a week we could have a free range chicken. And then we would have vegetables like broccoli, carrots.

Corn, sometimes beans, lentils, and let me see what else.

I think that was about it. That was about the main things and it was just in a rotation. Occasionally oatmeal, we would get oatmeal. So essentially they would serve two meals a day. So the calories were also restricted. The calories are calculated to be about.

Between 1500 and 2000 calories per day. So it was a calorie restricted diet and avoiding all the sugar. Now it was. Still had carbs, right? We had rice, quinoa, potatoes, so there was carbs. In fact, it was a little bit higher. However, at this location in the jungle in the mountains, it really wasn't hot. The temperature was actually perfect, perfectly right in the middle between cold and warm. In the evenings, even if the wind was blowing, there was a slight breeze out. I would use my blanket, so it was the perfect temperature. I didn't need an air conditioner and I didn't need a heater. It was right in the middle, so it was amazing. It also was a break from processed foods. So we were eating only whole foods and we Were avoiding all alcohol, caffeine, sugar, salt, dairy, gluten, carbs, and lower fat and lower protein, which is consistent with what's referred to as well as chocolate. I'm trying to think we mostly were eating things like rice, maybe brown rice, quinoa, sometimes quinoa potatoes, which there's lots of different kinds of potatoes in Peru. Also avocado. We would get protein from eggs if you eat eggs. And occasionally like once a week, we could have a free range chicken as a fasting mimicking diet. A fasting mimicking diet is something that's lower calorie, higher carbs. And it's used for mimicking the effect of fasting in the body without fasting, which means that it can stimulate autophagy and improve them. And then we would have vegetables like broccoli, carrots.

Corn, sometimes beans, lentils, and let me see what else. I think that was about it. That was about the main things and it was just in a rotation. Occasionally oatmeal, we would get oatmeal. So essentially they would serve two meals a day. So the calories were also restricted. The calories are calculated to be about.

Between 1500 and 2000 calories per day. So it was a calorie restricted diet. And avoiding all the sugar. Now it was still had carbs, right? We had rice, quinoa, potatoes, so there was carbs. In fact, it was a little bit higher longevity and do a lot of other things to help with healing the nervous system and preventing cancer. So this fasting mimicking diet was royally doing a lot of healing work. I never felt hungry, by the way, because the food would be filling. And what I would do is I would spread those two meals usually into four. So I would have a small amount or eat half and then a few hours later eat the other half and a few hours later eat the other half. But we definitely had time periods of fasting, full fasting or intermittent fasting overnight, for example, from like 6 or 7pm until at least 9am the next morning. And sometimes it would even be fasting from 2pm until 9am the next morning. So there was some longer intermittent fasts as well. So this is part of it in the healing retreat center is following a restricted diet. That's avoiding all that processed foods and really allowing your metabolism to reset. So also it was a circadian rhythm reset. As I said, I was exposed to light from nature and the circadian rhythm is completely set by our light exposure. So what happens when we have electricity is like right now I'm Fully exposed to light, even though it's dark outside. So that is going to be making my brain think that it's light even though it's dark and it's nighttime, Right? So in the jungle, that wasn't the case. When I'm living in the jungle, then when it was dark outside, my brain knew it was dark outside. All I had was a candle or a flashlight. And so, and I would go to bed earlier, except for the nights that we had ceremonies. So this is another key aspect of a healing center like this in Peru is the use of ritual and ceremony, which a lot of times we lose track of in our daily lives. We really don't use carbs and lower fat and lower protein, which is consistent with what's referred to as a fasting mimicking diet. A fasting mimicking diet is something that's lower calorie, higher carbs, and it's used for mimicking the effect of fasting in the body without fasting, which means that it can stimulate autophagy and improve, lose ritual and ceremony as much anymore. Sometimes if you're part of a church or other kind of religious experience, you may have some ritual. Even for example, a wedding is a ceremony, right? And sometimes with holidays, we might experience some amount of ceremony in our longevity and do a lot of other things to help with healing the nervous system and preventing cancer. So this fasting mimicking diet was royally doing a lot of healing work. I never felt hungry, by the way, because the food would be filling. And what I would do is I would spread those two meals usually into four. So I would have a small amount or eat half, and then a few hours later eat the other half, and a few hours later eat the other half. But we definitely had time periods of fasting, full fasting or intermittent fasting overnight, for example, from like 6 or 7pm until at least 9am the next morning. And sometimes it would even be fasting from 2pm in life. So what happens in, in the use of ayahuasca is that ayahuasca plant is not just taken, you know, it's not like you just take it by yourself like a. Like if you were going to drink a substance or drink a tea, you take it in a ceremony. So what we would do is everyone who was at the healing retreat center at the same time, there's about 25 or 30 of us there. We get together in a big room which is actually called a maloka, is built into the jungle, open air to the jungle, a big.

Triangular.

Pyramidal like a Cone shaped roof, right? So it has this big ceiling and a round room. And we all sit around the perimeter in a circle and we're all doing our individual process, but we're doing it in a ceremony. And the shaman is the one who leads the ceremony. So we say, okay, we're all going to meet here at let's say 5:30 or 6:00pm and we come and we're wearing clothes for ceremony. So this is clothes that are appropriate for ceremony. Oftentimes they're even clothes that have been sewn by Shipibo community. And so we wear specific clothes and we may wear jewelry that are from the local.

Jewelry makers. And.

Then we do smudging usually with palo santo, which is a, a wood, when you burn it, that has a beautiful smell. And you, when you allow that smoke on your body, it's cleansing of your energy. So we do smudging with palo santo, each other in the room. And then we, the shaman opens a ceremony calling in the.

Mother ayahuasca and calling in the spirit guides and thanking Mother Earth for allowing us to have this ceremony to receive this plant medicine called ayahuasca. The plant medicine. Then we go one by one to receive the plant medicine in a cup. It's like a dark colored brew or liquid, right, that you just drink in one swallow. You take it on an empty stomach and. And then you sit and you wait for it to activate. It takes maybe 4, 30, 45 minutes for it to activate. And the whole ceremony then may last at least six hours, sometimes eight hours. So if you start at 6pm it might even go until 2am and so those nights we're in definitely in the darkness because we're in the dark maloka. And we're in the ceremony where there's music, they're singing the medicine music or Icarus. There's use of drums, rattles, guitar, durango and voice, as I mentioned. And all of this is a way to help people through the use and the experience with ayahuasca. So when ayahuasca starts working, the way I feel it is, you might, I might yawn. I might feel a little like a vibration inside my body. Sometimes people feel it in their stomach like a. Because you just swallowed it and it's in your stomach, it can be activating inside your stomach. And then you might have visions. So you might see visuals, patterns, colors, and that's part of it. You might see different visions. And some of them are classic for ayahuasca. For example, a lot of times with ayahuasca we will see. You'll see an eye or many eyes. So and you think about it, how many cultures and traditions over history have used the have seen the eye, right? Still, a symbol of protection is looking at the eye.

I've done a lot of detoxes over the years and many of them made me feel a lot better, worse. Not only that, but I've had a lot of patients come in and tell me how after doing a detox they have a stomachache and headache and they can't sleep and they're feeling anxious and.

I'm like, I can't just recommend that.

My patients do a program that's gonna make them feel worse. So I finally decided to design my own detox program. It's a 14 day detox program that's not, not like other detox programs out there in several ways. One is that I'm focused on helping you to get the toxins out in a safe and effective way using nutrients, antioxidants and supporting our natural detoxification pathways in the body. Also, I'm helping you to decrease your exposure to toxic toxins by learning the ways that you've been exposed to toxins.

And how to change your day to.

Day lifestyle to decrease your toxins over time. And I'm helping you to look not just at chemical, environmental toxins, but also emotional and energetic toxicity. And yes, it's possible to accomplish all of this in 14 days. I have so many patients who, who have done the 14 day detox and report back to me how much better they feel. And I think it's also because I help you to know what to eat. You are getting adequate food that tastes good, plus protein shakes that I developed that are good for your body, that your body knows how to use these.

Nutrients and take them in and use.

Them to help you safely detoxify with out feeling worse. Also I help you to balance your blood sugar levels, get better sleep and introduce things like meditation, biofeedback and other types of stress recovery into your day to day routine. So I just am so excited about it.

I want to make sure you know.

About this 14 day detox.

I'm going to put the link, you.

Can find it at drdonny com dot.com forward/detox d program.

But I'll also put the link below.

So you can find the 14 day detox program at Dr. Donnie.com I look forward to guiding you through this detox so that you can actually feel better on your way to better health.

So there's different visuals you might see and at the same time as you're having these visions, the medicine is working on again, a physical and emotional and spiritual level. It's considered that the medicine helps bring us into the spiritual realm. So being able to access and see experiences they wouldn't experience in your normal daily life. In science, we call it in a non ordinary state of consciousness, right? An ordinary state of consciousness is like I'm talking to you right now, where we're talking from our mind and our logic. A non ordinary state of consciousness is when we are allowing our, our mind, our body and our spirit to have an experience that's outside of that usual state of logic. And so part of it is even getting practice at allowing the mind to relax and the thoughts to go, to let go and for the medicine then to take you into this experience. And what I noticed right away is that this medicine is very healing to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is really affected by stress. When we go through stress and we go through trauma, it really can affect our vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is the nerve that connects our brain out to all the different areas of our body, communicates with all our hormones, our digestion, our immune system, our nervous system. And so when trauma affects our vagus nerve, it can really affect our health. And so a medicine like ayahuasca that can help heal the vagus nerve can be so healing, even just on that level. I believe that that's why we experience ayahuasca as sometimes even causing you to vomit up the medicine. It's not like you're going to experience food poisoning where you're vomiting for hours. What happens is you're just basically vomiting right up that ounce of the herbal medicine that you just swallowed. And so that can happen, but doesn't always happen. And I see it as part of resetting vagus nerve function. Also. What can happen is we start to experience or come to mind.

Things that happened to us in the past. So that's where there's a lot of emotional processing. And usually I find it something that maybe I haven't even thought about in years and hasn't come up in any other way, hasn't maybe hasn't come up through therapy, or it hasn't come up through meditation, or it hasn't come up through thinking about it or journaling. But it comes up when you take a psychedelic substance because they allow you to set aside your thinking brain and allow your body to reveal to you what it needed to process. And not in a scary way. Most times it's a just showing it to you and allowing you to feel the feelings, Sometimes crying, sometimes feeling that. That through these experiences, one day I just needed to be able to feel anger. And medicine was showing me this is what it feels like to feel anger. Then oftentimes, ayahuasca will then show us how to feel gratitude, how to feel love. And so you feel these feelings with such greatness. It's indescribable, really, how to imagine how to feel gratitude in the greatest degree possible. That's what that's like. And your heart is exploding in gratitude and love. So that's an amazing thing to be able to help us get reconnected to our emotions, get reconnected to processing what we've been through. In this recent retreat, for example, I was doing a lot of processing of my relationship with my father, my father who died about two and a half years ago. And I've processed some of that over the years. But this healing retreat really gave me the opportunity. It's not something I was intending to focus on, but once I took the medicine, that's what revealed itself to me as needing to be processed. And so I processed a lot about my entire life experience with my father and being the person that I am in relation to my father. My father, maybe some of you have heard me say my father was a pharmacist and ran a pharmacy chain his whole career. And I, as his daughter, saw from a young age that the value of pharmaceuticals, but also the risks, and found that I tend to have a lot of sensitivities and reactions to pharmaceutical medications. And I really learned from my father that the whole idea was, while yes, we can turn to pharmaceuticals when we need them, we want to be able to help our bodies heal and prevent the need for pharmaceuticals whenever possible. And we can do that through diet and nutrients and herbs, including plant medicines like ayahuasca. So that's what I really connected with as my father's daughter was how to avoid the need for pharmaceuticals. And that's what led me to become a naturopathic doctor, herbalist, midwife, clinical nutritionist, and have been practicing for over 25 years, helping patients in that way. So it's perfectly fitting that I would find this plant medicine in the Amazon to help me with my health. And I'm so excited to tell patients about it. But I want you to know, like, with anything, it's very important to work with a provider, an ayahuascara, or a shaman who has experience and is being very careful with your case to make sure that there's no contraindications, that you're safe and supported and using this medicine just like any other medicine you would ever use in your life, you want to use it safely and effectively. So that's really important. It's not something you're just going to run out and do on your own or just go run to any person who's offering it. You really want to work with someone with integrity, with experience. And that is so, so important. So.

I.

As someone who many times in my life have felt like, what am I doing in this life? What, you know, we, we often as humans fear death most. And actually in my life it hasn't been so much a fear of death as a wondering, wishing, wishing I could die. Because there's been many times in my life because of the trauma of Isaac I've experienced and the, that I've. In the depression and anxiety that I've had those thoughts of wishing I could die. And of all the days that like that. With ayahuasca, I actually had the beautiful opportunity to celebrate dying. And in fact, one of the common experiences with ayahuasca is to experience as if you're dying but you're not dying. It's the spiritual experience of birth and death and rebirth. T 9am the next morning. So there was some longer intermittent fasts as well. So this is part of it in the healing retreat center is following a restricted diet that's avoiding all that processed foods and really allowing you completely set by our light exposure. So what happens when we have electricity is earth, which is very, very common in spiritual experiences back in history and throughout, throughout time. So actually that was quite a beautiful experience to feel as though it was the day I was dying and to feel the celebration of it and the beauty that can happen with death. In fact, there's another document like right now I'm fully exposed to light even though it's dark outside. So that is going to be making my brain think that it's light even though it's dark and it's nighttime, right? So in the jungle that wasn't the case. When I'm living in the jungle, then when it was dark outside, my brain knew it was dark outside. All I had was a candle or a flash that comes to life called the last ecstatic days. And that reminds me of all the research that shows then psychedelic substances can be so helpful for end of life experiences, for people to reconcile their life experience and understand what their purpose is and be at peace with slight. And so. And I would go to bed earlier, except for the nights that we had ceremonies. So this is another key aspect of a healing center like this in Peru is the use of ritual and ceremony, which a lot of times we lose track of in our daily lives. We really don't use ritual and ceremony as much anymore. Sometimes if you're part of a church or other kind of religion, end of life. So I could completely see that in the experience that I had taking ayahuasca at the healing retreat center. So all of this can seem really hard to describe and even hard to understand. But I'm hoping I'm giving you a just experience. You may have some ritual even for example, a wedding is a ceremony, right? Sense of what's possible with these healing substances and that it can be done. And I. And sometimes with holidays we might experience some amount of ceremony in our life. So what happens in, in the use of ayahuasca is that ayahuasca plant is not just taken, you know, it's not like you just take it by yourself like a, like if you were going to drink a substance or drink a tea, you take it in a ceremony. So what we would do is everyone who very safe and effective way. Okay, so all of that is ceremony. So in for example a 16 day healing retreat and there's a ceremony every other day. So there's eight ceremonies in the 16 day retreat. And so I was at the healing retreat center at the same time. There's about 25 or 30 of us there. We get together at the same time during the daytime. There was such a beautiful opportunity to spend time in nature. Not only in a big room which is actually called a maloka is built into the jungle, open air to the jungle, a big.

Triangular or being living in nature, but also going for hikes in the healing retreat center. A pyramidal like a cone shaped roof, right? So it has this big ceiling. There's amazing beautiful waterfalls. So going on a hike, coming up to this magical waterfall like in paradise with all the green leaning and a round room. And we all sit around the perimeter in a circle. Leaves and trees, butterflies, birds and waterfall. And we're all doing our individual process, but we're doing it in a ceremony. And the shaman is the one who leads the ceremony. So we say, okay, we're all going to meet here at let's say 5:30 or 6:00pm and we come and we're wearing clothes for ceremony, coming straight out of the rock, out of the hill, out of the mountain, falling into the water, into the pool, being able to Swim in the pool and be able to have a ritual of cleansing in the waterfall is amazing, Amazing, undescribable. Out of this world. Like nothing. So this is clothes that are appropriate for ceremony. Oftentimes they're even clothes that have been sewn by their experience anywhere else except for there and that particular place, Shipibo community. And so we wear specific clothes and we may wear jewelry that are from the local.

Jewelry makers. And then we do smudging. So that's some of what that experience is like. And I want to again usually with palo santo, which is a. A wood when you burn it, that has a beautiful and emphasized what I see as a healing potential for those of you who might be feeling like you've tried everything. And you might also be just feeling a call inside of yourself maybe for. For processing trauma if you know you've experienced full smell and you. When you allow that smoke on your body, it's cleansing of your energy. So we do smudging with palo santo each other in the room. And then we. The shaman opens a ceremony calling in the trauma in your childhood. Adverse childhood events or maybe stress and trauma during your adulthood. Whether that's a stressful relationship, narcissistic abuse like what I experienced or could be also from a death of a loved one mother ayahuasca and calling in the spirit guides and dang gore loss again of your home or crisis that you went through King Mother Earth for allowing us to have this ceremony to receive this plant medicine called ayahuasca. The plant medicine. Then we go one by one to receive the plant medicine in a cup. It's like a dark colored brew or liquid, right, that you just drink in one swallow. You take it on an empty stomach and. And then all of that can be reasons to go to a healing retreat center to help you with processing what you've been through. We know very well from the research that when we process what we've been through, it not only heals us in this moment, but it's preventing health issues in the future. All different health issues. And if you already have a health issue presenting itself, like high risk HPV and cancer, bourbon cancer, you sit and you wait for it to activate. It takes maybe for 30, 45 minutes for it to activate. And the whole ceremony then may last at least six hours, sometimes eight hours. So if you potential cancer, then we know we need to do some healing in order to start at 6pm it might even go until 2am and so those help you prevent that virus from causing cancer and heal Your body overall, nights we're in definitely in the darkness because we're in the dark Maloka and we're in. You might also be feeling that you want to or you're kind of being guided into an experience of emotional awareness, expanding your perceptions and your views. And your. This ceremony where there's music, they're singing the medicine music or iaros, there's use of drums, rattles, guitar, turango and voice, as I mentioned. And all of this is a way to help people through the use and the experience with I experience. Maybe you've recently been through a divorce or separation in your life and this mosca. So, um, when ayahuasca starts working, the way I feel it is. You might. I might yawn. I might feel a little like a vibration inside my body. Sometimes people feel it in their stomach like a. Because you just swallowed it and it's in your stomach, it can be activating inside your stomach. And then you might have visions. So you might see visuals, patterns, colors, and that's part of it. You might see different visions. And some of them are classic for ayahuasca. For example, a lot of times with ayahuasca we will see. You'll see, ah, an eye or many eyes. So, and you think about it, how many cultures and traditions over history have used the. Have seen. The eye sometimes stimulates a desire to look inside and say, why am I experiencing this in my life and what are things I could do to change this going forward? You might also be drawn to what might be referred to as a spiritual emergence or expansion of your experience spiritually. And I was while in the healing retreat center reading a book, part of my training, called Spiritual Emergency, which is all about different types of spiritual experiences that humans can have. Sometimes people experience spiritual experiences even from breath work, from meditation, from being in nature. Certainly in religious experiences, people can experience these spiritual.

Episodes or spiritual time may not happen. Right. Still, a symbol of protection is looking at the eye.

I've done a lot of detoxes over the years and many of them made me feel a lot worse.

Not only that, ones that may happen over months and these spiritual experiences really.

But I've had a lot of patients come in and tell me how after doing a detox, they have a stomachache and headache and they can't sleep and they're feeling anxious. And I'm like, I can't just recommend that.

My patients do expand our sense of who we are, our purpose here, and what we value most and what we want to then offer. And as A service to a program.

That'S going to make them feel worse. So I finally decided to design others.

So for example, what you hear from me is a real connection Find my own detox program.

It's a 14 day detox program program.

That'S not to myself as a healer, as a women's health expert like other.

Detox programs out there in several ways. One is that I'm focused on helping you to get the toxins out in a safe and effective way.

As a, as a naturopathic physician, as someone who's here to help way using.

Nutrients, antioxidants and supporting our natural help.

Others to heal from trauma. Based on how I'm healing from trauma I experienced I asked when I was in the ceremony with ayahuasca I asked.

Detoxification pathways in the body also I'm helping you to deep why is it.

That I'm the one who's here to help women to prevent cervical cancer?

Increase your exposure to toxins by learning the ways that you've been exposed to toxins and how to change your day to day lifestyle to decrease your toxins over time. And I'm helping you to look not just at chemical environmental toxins, but also.

And other health issues. And the answer that I found was that I and how am I supposed to know how? The answer is I learned based on my healing experience. As I'm learning to heal myself from trauma, I then can emotional and energetic.

Toxicity and yes, it's possible to accomplish all of this.

Share that with others so they can heal from trauma. And that's a beautiful thing as humans. When we can heal ourselves and with that same wisdom and knowledge and experience help others heal, that is beautiful reciprocity and exchange that we can experience as humans. And I believe that's what we're here to do as humans is to each identify our unique talent, our unique purpose, our uniqueness as a human being and then to offer that to others and exchange and and then receive from each other. Right? We learn how to receive from each other and give to each other. And that's where the sense of gratitude and love comes in when we can find those beautiful opportunities to help each other.

In 14 days I have so many patients who have done the 14 day detox and report back to me how much better they feel. And I think it's also because I help you to know what to eat. You are getting adequate food that tastes good plus protein shakes that I developed that are good for your body, that your body knows how to use these.

Nutrients and Take them in and use.

Them to help you safely detoxify without feeling worse. Also I hope help you to balance your blood sugar levels, get better sleep and introduce things like meditation, biofeedback and other types of stress recovery into your.

Day to day routine.

So I just am so excited about it.

I want to make sure you know.

About this 14 day detox. I'm going to put the link you can find it at Dr. Donnie.com forward/detox-program.

But I'll so I'm so grateful that I have all of the healing that I've experienced throughout my life, all of the wisdom from all that I have, even everything from my childhood, from my training as a nutritionist, as a nature valley doctor, as a midwife, all the women who I learned from and researched in that training, all of the patients. I've also put the link below so.

You can find the 14 day detox program at Dr. Donnie.com I look forward to guiding you through this detox so that you can actually feel better on your way to better health.

So there's different visuals you might see and at the same time as you're having these visions. Worked with thousands of patients for over 25 years in Manhattan. Recovering from 911 recovering from COVID and the pandemic, helping people to navigate these stresses and dramas and figuring out that actually it's in the recovery from the stress and trauma that we can fend off high risk HPV prevent cervical cancer. We can. The medicine is working on again a physical and emotional and spiritual level. It's considered that the medicine helps bring us into the spiritual realm. So being able to access and see experiences they wouldn't experience in your normal daily life. In science we call it in a non ordinary event, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. We can help ourselves heal. I completely healed myself from migraines as well as from arthritis.

Pain. When I take ayahuasca I have zero pain. When otherwise I have most always some pain because of every state of consciousness. Right. An ordinary state of consciousness is like I'm talking to you right now where we're talking from our mind and our logic. A non ordinary state of consciousness is when we are allowing our our mind, our body and our spirit to have an experience that's outside of that Miller's Danlos syndrome and arthritis. So the fact that I can find a substance that has no addictive qualities, no no side effects, I don't even need to take it. Every day I go to the healing retreat center and I don't and then I leave Right. It's not like a medication we have to take every day. This is. It doesn't cause a suppression, it doesn't cause side effects or long term effects. It usual state of logic. And so part of it is even getting practice at allowing the mind to relax and the thoughts to go to let go and for the medicine then to take you into this experience. And what I noticed right away is that this medicine is very healing to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is simply creates healing. And in that healing the emotional pain goes away. The physical pain really affected by stress. When we go through stress and we go through trauma, it really can affect our vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is the nerve that connects our brain out to all the different areas of our body. Communicates with all our hormones, our digestion, our immune system, our nervous system. And so when trauma event goes away and I then find the healing part in me that allows me to support others to heal. So I'm so grateful for that experience and healing retreat center and to be able to come back and share it with all of you and to connect with each and every one of you and your healing products. Our vagus nerve, it can really affect our health. And so a medicine like ayahuasca that can help us as to see where can I use this information to help you, to help you understand yourself, what's happened to you in your life and what are some of the next steps. Even if it's not you don't have Heal the vagus nerve can be so healing even just on that level. I have to go all the way to Peru. You don't necessarily have to take a psychedelic substance if you don't want to believe that. That's why we experience ayahuasca as sometimes even causing you to vomit up the medicine. It's not like you're too. It's just knowing that these possibilities exist and then using different aspects. And experience food poisoning where you're vomiting for hours. What happens is you're just basically vomiting. We can use breath work, we can use time in nature from home. We can do a detox right up that ounce of the herbal medicine that you just swallowed. And so vacation program which I developed based on the experience in the healing retreat center you can find. I'll put a link to my detox program based on the healing retreat center. The fasting, mimicking diet.

That can happen, but doesn't always happen. And I see it as part of resetting vagus nerve function. Also what can happen is they.

Staying away from EMFs and Wi Fi, we start to experience or come to mind.

The.

The healing that you can do from home using a detox program in 14 things that happened to us in the past. So that's where there's a lot of emotional processing and days. So I'll put a link for you there and if you would like to learn more and understand what are the next steps on your journey to really healing yourself. Because usually I find it something that maybe I haven't even thought about in years and it hasn't come up in any other way, hasn't maybe hasn't come up through therapy or it has any of these infections, any of these imbalances are simply messages or signals showing us that trauma is affecting us on a physical level. Hasn't come up through meditation or it hasn't come up through thinking about it or journaling. But it comes up when you take a psychedelic substance because they allow you to set aside your thinking brain. And it's when we can heal from the trauma that these physical symptoms and health issues disappear. So I'm just so glad to be able to share that with you. I hope that's helpful. I look forward to connect and allow your body to reveal to you what it needed to process and not in a scary connecting with each of you. You can comment down below, you can reach out to my office, we can set up a time to meet and I can get to know you, what's going on for you and we can think through the different options. What's the next steps? It's all about there's no race. This is not about rushing or running into anything. It's about understanding where you're starting from, what's the next best step for your case. And we go step by step in the direction really more than anything. Knowing that the human body can heal, knowing that it's possible to heal from trauma, understanding that we sometimes simply need to be able to release and let go and let our bodies and our spirit guide. Most times it's a just showing it to you and allowing you to feel the feelings. Sometimes crying, sometimes feelings that through these experiences, one day I just needed to be able to feel anger. And medicine was showing me this is what it feels like to feel anger. Then oftentimes ayahuasca will then show us how to feel gratitude, how to feel love. And so you feel these feelings with such greatness, it's indescribable really. How to imagine how to feel gratitude in the greatest degree possible. That's what that's like in your heart is exploding in gratitude and love. So that's an amazing thing to be able to help us get reconnected to the healing that we need. Thanks again for joining me here at How Humans Heal. If you haven't already, then I welcome you to subscribe to my newsletter subscribe to the Podcast Join me to our emotions get reconnected to processing what we've been through in this recent for the next episode, I can't wait to share more with you and including my upcoming guests on the podcast. I'm so excited for them to come and share with you. So Thanksgiving retreat, for example, I was doing a lot of processing of my relationship with my father, my father who died about two and a half years ago, and I've processed some of that over the years. But this healing retreat really gave me the opportunity. It's not. Again, for joining me, I hope this gives you new hope and inspiration for your ability, something I was intending to focus on. But once I took the medicine, that's what revealed itself to me as needing to be processed. And so I processed a lot about my entire life experience with my father and being the person that I am and relation to my father. My father. Maybe some of you have heard me say my father was a pharmacist and ran a pharmacy chain his whole career. And I, as his daughter, saw from a young age that the value of pharmaceuticals, but also the risks and found that I tend to have a lot of sensitivities and reactions to pharmaceutical medications. And I really learned from heal, don't give up. Believe me, I've been at the very bottom. I've felt all the edges of human reality. I've been through the suffering. I understand. And it's about being knowing you're not alone and that healing is possible. I look forward to connecting with you very soon.

Thanks for listening to how humans are heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review and for more resources, visit drdani.com.

My father that the whole idea was while yes, we can turn to pharmaceuticals when we need them, we want to be able to help our bodies heal and prevent the need for pharmaceuticals whenever possible. And we can do that through diet and nutrients and herbs, including plant medicines like ayahuasca. So that's what I really connected with as my father's daughter was how to avoid the need for pharmaceuticals. And that's what led me to become a naturopathic doctor, herbalist, midwife, clinical nutritionist, and have been practicing for over 25 years helping patients in that way. So it's perfectly fitting that I would find this plant medicine in the Amazon to help me with my health. And I'm so excited to tell patients about it. But I want you to know, like, with anything, it's very important to work with a provider, an ayahuascara, or a shaman who has experience and is being very careful with your case to make sure that, that there's no contraindications, that you're safe and supported and using this medicine. Just like any other medicine you would ever use in your life, you want to use it safely and effectively. So that's really important. It's not something you're just going to run out and do on your own or just go run to any person who's offering it. You really want to work with someone with integrity, with experience. And that is so, so important. So.

I.

As someone who many times in my life have felt like, what am I doing in this life? What, you know, we, we often as humans fear death most. And actually in my life it hasn't been so much a fear of death that as a wondering, wishing, wishing I could die. Because there's been many times in my life because of the trauma of Isaac I've experienced and the. That I've. And the depression and anxiety that I've had, those thoughts of wishing I could die. And of all the days that like that with ayahuasca, I actually had the beautiful opportunity to celebrate dying. And in fact, one of the common experiences with ayahuasca is to experience as if you're dying, but you're not dying. It's the spiritual experience of birth and death and rebirth, which is very, very common in spiritual experiences back in history and throughout, throughout time. So actually that was quite a beautiful experience. To feel as though it was a day I was dying and to feel the celebration of it and the beauty that can happen with death. In fact, there's another documentary that comes to life called the Last Ecstatic Days. And that reminds me of all the research that shows then psychedelic substances can be so helpful for end of life experiences, for people to reconcile their life experience and understand what their purpose is and be at peace with end of life. So I could completely see that in the experience that I had taking ayahuasca at the healing retreat center. So all of this can seem really hard to describe and even hard to understand, but I'm hoping I'm giving you a sense of what's possible with these healing substances and that it can be done in a very Safe and effective way. Okay, so all of that is ceremony. So in for example, a 16 day healing retreat, and there's a ceremony every other day. So there's eight ceremonies in a 16 day retreat. And so at the same time, during the daytime, there was such a beautiful opportunity to spend time in nature. Not only being living in nature, but also going for hikes in the healing retreat center. And there's amazing, beautiful waterfalls. So going on a hike, coming up to this magical waterfall, like in paradise, with all the green leaves and, and trees, butterflies, birds and waterfall coming straight out of the rock, out of the hill, out of the mountain, falling into the water, into the pool. Being able to swim in the pool and be able to have a ritual of cleansing in the waterfall is amazing, amazing, undescribable, out of this world, like nothing we could experience anywhere else except for there and that particular place. So that's some of what that experience is like. And I want to again emphasize what I see as a healing potential for those of you who might be feeling like you've tried everything. And you might also be just feeling a call inside of yourself, maybe for, for processing trauma. If you know you've experienced trauma in your childhood, adverse childhood events, or maybe stress and trauma during your adulthood, whether that's a stressful relationship, narcissistic abuse like what I experienced, or could be also from a death of a loved one, or loss again of your home or crisis that you went through, all of that can be reasons to go to a healing retreat center to help you with processing what you've been through. We know very well from the research that when we process what we've been through, it not only heals us in this moment, but it's preventing health issues in the future. All different health issues. And if you already have a health issue presenting itself, like high risk HPV and cancer, burn, cancer, potential cancer, then we know we need to do some healing in order to help you prevent that virus from causing cancer and heal your body overall. You might also be feeling that you want to, or you're kind of being guided into an experience of emotional awareness, expanding your perceptions and your views and your experience. Maybe you've recently been through a divorce or separation in your life, and this sometimes stimulates a desire to look inside and say, why am I experiencing this in my life and what are things I could do to change this going forward? You might also be drawn to what might be referred to as a spiritual emergence or expansion of your experience spiritually. And I was, while in the healing Retreat center, reading a book, part of my training called Spiritual Emergency, which is all about different types of spiritual experiences that humans can have. Sometimes people experience spiritual experiences even from breath work, from meditation, from being in nature. Certainly in religious experiences, people can experience these spiritual.

Episodes. Or spiritual time may not happen all at once, it may happen over months. And these spiritual experiences really expand our sense of who we are, our purpose here, and what we value most and what we want to then offer and as a service to others. So, for example, what you hear from me is a real connection to myself as a healer, as a women's health expert, as a. As a naturopathic physician, as someone who's here to help others to heal from trauma. Based on how I'm healing from trauma I experienced. I asked when I was in the ceremony with ayahuasca, I asked, why is it that I'm the one who is here to help women to prevent cervical cancer and other health issues? And. And the answer that I found was that I. And how am I supposed to know how? The answer is I learned based on my healing experience. As I'm learning to heal myself from trauma, I then can share that with others so they can heal from trauma. And that's a beautiful thing as humans. When we can heal ourselves and with that same wisdom and knowledge and experience, help others heal, that is beautiful reciprocity and exchange that we can experience as humans. And I believe that's what we're here to do as humans is to each identify our unique talent, our unique purpose, our uniqueness as a human being, and then to offer that to others and exchange and, and then receive from each other. Right? We learn how to receive from each other and give to each other. And that's where the sense of gratitude and love comes in, when we can find those beautiful opportunities to help each other. So I'm so grateful that I have all of the healing that I've experienced throughout my life, all of the wisdom from all that I have, even everything from my childhood, from my training as a nutritionist, as a nature bathing doctor, as a midwife, all the women who I learned from and researched in that training, all of the patients I've.