Healing Trauma With Ayahuasca, Depth Psychology, and Dzogchen
Episode Summary:
Episode 14 of Redesigning The Dharma by Sahaja Soma features a conversation with writer, psychotherapist, and ayahuasca integration coach, Kerry Moran. Kerry shares her fascinating journey of living in Kathmandu and practicing Dharma, to becoming a psychotherapist with a private practice in Portland, and finally moving to Peru and working closely with ayahuasca for spiritual and therapeutic purposes.
The conversation delves into how her background in Dzogchen and depth psychology enhances her work with psychedelics, the transformative power of ayahuasca, and the importance of integration in psychedelic experiences. Listeners will learn about the feminine archetype of the dakini, the embodied nature of ayahuasca experiences, and the role of compassion and embodiment in spiritual growth.
Episode Highlights:
00:00 Guest Introduction
02:21 Kerry's Journey into Dharma: Living and Practicing in Kathmandu
10:27 Transitioning and Practicing Depth Psychology
18:56 Ayahuasca Through A Tantric Lens
27:16 Integrated and Embodied Healing After An Ayahuasca Ceremony
44:33 How Dharma and Plant Medicine Can Be Synergistic In Inspiring Awakening
Guest Bio:
Kerry Moran is a psychotherapist and writer who brings decades of experience in Vajrayana Buddhism and depth psychology to the integration of ayahuasca. She lives in the Sacred Valley of Peru, where she works, locally and internationally, as an ayahuasca integration therapist. Her approach is both spiritual and practical, working to ground the wisdom of ayahuasca in daily life. Among other things, she's a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, an archetypal astrologer, and an apprentice tabaquera.
Kerry's personal experience with master plants provides the foundation of her integration work with clients. She's worked intensively with ayahuasca for the past 10 years and has completed a lengthy series of plant dietas with a Peruvian tabaquero. Other plants she considers her teachers are iboga and huachuma (San Pedro).
Kerry's therapeutic approach blends depth psychology with the non-dual teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and a profound respect for the wisdom of the plants. You can find much more on her website, ayahuascawisdom.com, including an insightful blog about ayahuasca integration.
INTEGRATING AYAHUASCA: 10 WEEKS OF SKILLS & SUPPORT TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR CEREMONIES
Full Transcript:
Adrian: Welcome to Redesigning the Dharma. I'm your host, Adrian Baker. And today I'm speaking with Kerry Moran.
I was really excited when I came across Kerry's website because she happens to share an incredibly similar approach to psychedelics, specifically ayahuasca. We're basically into the same, sort of spiritual and psychological path. Specifically, she's into, an aspect of Tibetan Buddhism called Dzogchen, which has really informed my own spiritual practice and my own approach to plant medicine.
So she has great background in, Tibetan Buddhism, living in Nepal. And then she also trained in depth psychology, union psychology, and worked as a therapist for many years and now works with plant medicine, spending part of her time in the sacred valley of Peru. So really was excited to come across her website and talk to her.
She has an online course for psychedelic integration, which I have not undertaken myself or look through, but given her background, I'm sure that it's a great resource for folks.
So here is Kerry's bio, and then I'll segue to our conversation.
Kerry Moran is a psychotherapist and writer who brings decades of experience in Vajrayana Buddhism and depth psychology to the integration of Ayahuasca.
She lives in the sacred Valley of Peru, where she works locally and internationally as an Ayahuasca integration therapist. Her approach is both spiritual and practical, working to ground the wisdom of ayahuasca in daily life. Among other things, she's a somatic experiencing practitioner, an archetypal astrologer, and an apprentice tabaquera.
Kerry's personal experience with master plants, provides the foundation of her integration with clients. She's worked intensively with ayahuasca for the past 10 years and has completed a lengthy series of plant dietas with a Peruvian tabacquero. Other plants she considers her teachers are iboga and huachuma san pedro.
Kerry's therapeutic approach blends depth psychology with the non dual teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and a profound respect for the wisdom of the plants. You can find much more on her website ayahuascawisdom. com including an insightful blog about ayahuasca integration.
I hope to hear from some of you in terms of your comments, questions, and thoughts about this conversation. I hope it could provoke a rich dialogue. And with that said, please enjoy my conversation with Kerry Moran.
Well, Kerry, let's just start then by you giving...
I will have read your introduction, you know, your bio briefly, you know, for the audience in the introduction, but if you could just give people a little bit of an overview of your journey, these three very interesting phases where you were studying and practicing Dharma, specifically Dzogchen in Kathmandu, and then you got into depth psychology and then eventually Ayahuasca.
I'm wondering if you can kind of give us an overview of that to start.
Kerry: Yeah, that's a lot of things in a few minutes, so let's see what I can touch on.
Adrian: Yeah, that's okay. We'll have plenty of time to drill down into each of them. Like, how'd you get into dharma just, you know, in the first place?
Kerry: How did I get into Dharma? How did that happen? How did, uh, me coming from Chicago suburbs end up in Tibet the month that it opened up to Western travelers, you know? And then living in Kathmandu for 13 years. I wonder that myself, but clearly there's some karmic connections there, yeah.
So, um, let's see. I was living in China in 1984 with my then husband, and we were, he was teaching English, I was working. He was working too, and we heard that Kathmandu was a cool place to be, so we kind of said, let's go live in Kathmandu. And in the process we got to travel overland through Tibet, just as it had opened up.
And I remember, this was 1985, yeah, May, June, 1985.
And I remember being so touched and so impressed by the Tibetan people, who I hadn't met before, yeah? And their groundedness, and their spirituality, and their deep, deep commitment to the Dalai Lama and the Dharma, and just how that showed up in their lives in so many ways. As being both really earthy, funny, grounded people, and deeply spiritual at the same time, yeah?
So that was my introduction to the Dharma, really, at first. Or kind of the fruits of the dharma. What happens when you grow up in that environment and practice it your whole life, yeah,
Adrian: Yeah.
Kerry: So landed in Kathmandu, ended up living there from 85 to 98. Not that I planned that, just happened. every summer found myself going back to Tibet to travel for months at a time.
Just hitchhiking around remote western Tibet, Ngari province. Went to Kailashh two years in a row. Ended up writing a book about Kailash with a friend who's a photographer. Um, but I was feeling just this deep, deep calling and pull inside of myself to spend time there in the mountains, with the people, with the spirits, with the Dharma.
Even though I was still like, I'm not a Buddhist. It took me, it took me about, yeah,
Adrian: Well, can I ask why'd you feel that resistance?
Kerry: Oh, I had layers of debris to cut through, no doubt, you know. And, and, yeah, I had some purification to do, let's say.
So, so walking around Mount Kailash 11 times will definitely help you purify. Yeah. and I was absolutely feeling the calling in my heart, even though it hadn't formatted directly as Buddhism at the time.
So a few more years of living in Kathmandu and it just became really clear. I need to take refuge. I need to commit to this path. I need to develop relationship with some of these teachers. You know, it was just a huge, huge imperative at some point. Yeah.
Adrian: Nice. And who did you really feel that call to take refuge with? Which teacher?
Kerry: Well, the closest one, because we were living in Boudha at the time, just above Boudha Stupa, yeah? So, uh, the Seto Gompa Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche was a five minute walk from where I was living, and my husband had already connected with him and his father, Tulku Urgyen, and, uh, yeah. It was not, it was not a difficult part of the process at that point, when I finally melted down and took refuge.
Yeah. So, that started this whole phase of study, practice, um, you know, deepening my relationship with Buddhism as a committed spiritual path. And Bouda is one of the, or at least was one of the best places to study Tibetan Buddhism in the world at that time, right? Because it had representatives from all the different schools, and major, major teachers.
So yeah, I entered a period of, like, serious practice and study and because I was working as a journalist at the time and an editor, I also got to edit a number of Buddhist books for Rangjung Yeshe publications. And that was just great, to read everything very carefully and go through it, and really take it to heart.
Yeah, that was an incredible opportunity.
Adrian: That was a great education, I'm sure.
Kerry: Yeah. Yeah, so That was a big part of my life and practice. Um, yeah. Until let's go to 1998 when I'm moving to America after 14 years in Asia with my two kids. My husband and I had split up and I decided it was time for me to reinvent myself as a depth oriented psychotherapist, which is a big change from being a journalist, right?
Adrian: Big and and can, and if I can ask you before, we just sort of make that transition just to get a sense of, of why that happened.
So, um, first of all, if you could share a little bit about, you know, just cause I know that you got into the practices of dzogchen, you know, what that was like for you? How did that changed you?
And then at the same time, what were you feeling after all the years of even dzogchen or Dharma practice that ultimately sparked the need to kind of bring in some other path?
Kerry: Hmm. Yeah.
All right, so I was fortunate enough, or we were fortunate enough to collect, to connect directly with the Dzogchen teachings, yeah? Through Tulku Rinpoche, who was known, at least is known now as one of the great masters of his time. Even though then he just would, he was living up at Nagi Gompa and he'd just say, I'm just a little old man doing the Mani, you know, extremely humble, but I have always found that the greatest masters are the ones who don't say they're the greatest masters.
And that applies to ayahuasqueros, also, and Yeah.
Adrian: For sure.
Kerry: Definitely the, yes, the, people with realization don't go around advertising it. Yeah. So, um, you know, they call it the rapid path, right? It's the quick path. It's the realization in the moment kind of thing. Ngöndro undre was part of it, you know, the preliminary practices. So, working on the Ngöndro, the prostrations, the vajrasattva, that kind of thing.
But really just resting in the nature of mind is what Dzogchen was about. At least how I received it. Just resting in the spaciousness and the clarity of the natural mind. Um, so, yeah. I, I don't know what to say. It's so, so beautiful and I feel so fortunate to have connected with it.
Adrian: Especially through Tulku Urgyen. That's amazing. Um, so were you then sitting lots of retreat or were you also, you had kids. So were you very much doing this within a householder
Kerry: I was having children. I, I took refuge when I was pregnant with my daughter who, that was your path, yeah, yeah, so it was clearly a householder thing. But, um, you know, Tantra and Dzogchen, and Buddhism in general can accommodate that. So, combining, yeah, you know, in the 30,
Adrian: Absolutely.
Kerry: The 30s are quite an intense time of life, I think, for many people.
You're having children, you're trying to make your career go, you're dealing with your relationship. You're practicing Dzogchen. Like, a lot collided. A lot collided at that time. Yeah, to make it particularly intense. Um, I forgot the second part of your question. Tell me again.
Adrian: Wonderful. Yeah. So it was, you know, you were in, in this very much on this Buddhist path while you're in Kathmandu, understandably. And then I know that you went ultimately back to the States to sort one to study depth psychology, and I'm curious, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like, was there something missing about the Dharmapath?
What was it speaking to? What was it not speaking to? Why did you feel this impulse to then go study depth psychology?
Yeah.
Kerry: I don't think it was because I felt something was missing from the Dharma path in itself, but rather that parts of me, different parts of me, were waking up and calling for attention. And part of that happened through a very intense period of a few years, where our second child died suddenly in his sleep.
We woke up and found him dead, basically. Which is extremely profound teaching, in a way. And, you
know, introduced me to the depths of grief and my emotions in a way I'd never contacted before.
And also kind of planted the seed of feeling like, I want to help people who are going through this. You know? In some way, when you're going through a very intense, powerful, painful experience, sometimes the seed of compassion comes out.
Where it's like, I want to make this mean something, not just for me. But for other people, I want to share this, you know. So that was probably the original seed of like, hmm, psychotherapy. Not that I'd ever thought of it before. But different things pointed me in that direction.
Adrian: You had not
Kerry: Not really. No. I would have been the last person in the world that I would have said would have become a therapist.
Adrian: Hmm.
Kerry: life really led me in that direction. And then with my marriage breaking up, it made me see, well, there's no reason to wait. You know, now this is my life and, I can accelerate my plans by 20 years. I used to think, when the children are grown, I'll study this. But then it was like, well, now's the time.
So, I kind of got
Adrian: Yeah.
Kerry: sent back on a mission, on a path. Yeah.
And I was very clear because I'd been reading Carl Jung since I was like 22 or something, right? Really into depth psychology and the unconscious and dreams and symbolism, things like that. I was pretty clear that this is the kind of training that I want to have.
This is a new world that I want to go into. So I was very fortunate in finding Pacifica Graduate Institute which is in, uh, Carpinteria, and, and one of its big specialties is Jung. Carl Jung, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, those kind of people.
Adrian: This in California?
Kerry: It's in California.
Yeah, yeah. And it turned out to be the perfect program for me.
And it allowed me to bring in my Dharma practice and my meditation background and my interest in, uh, Eastern spirituality. I mean, I wrote my thesis on the Dakini as an archetype. There's not many, not many programs would let you do that, you know, so it was, it helped me really integrate,
integrate everything I'd received from the Dharma and also put it in a framework of Western psychotherapy, which, how do I want to say this?
Actually, you know, the Western psychotherapeutic paradigm is and was at the time more digestible for the transmission of certain things, right?
And this is, this is just when that way, first wave of mindfulness was just starting to come in, like right when I hit the States, probably a few years later, right? Now, mindfulness and meditation is all over the place, but then it was just starting to be brought into the mainstream in a way.
So it was a good timing in that sense. Yeah.
Adrian: Yeah. Very much. So one thing I'm, conscious of is as you're sharing this, perhaps defining briefly, a couple of these things for people in the audience who might not be familiar. So like, how would you, what is a simple definition of depth psychology for those who wouldn't be familiar with that term?
Kerry: Depth Psychology, Sometimes I say it and people think I say Death Psychology, but I mean Depth Psychology. It deals It, it, it
Adrian: Glad we're clarifying this.
Kerry: Right. from the start.
It, uh, it accepts as a given, the existence of the unconscious and the subconscious, that there are layers of the psyche that our ordinary minds do not have access to.
And that in those layers are all sorts of incredible, magical, and sometimes scary things. You know, the shadows in there. The parts of ourselves that we don't want to see, the parts that we resist. The archetypes are in there.
Oh, how do I define archetypes? Um, deep psychic imprints of, uh, human experience, yeah? Things like a mother is an archetype, a mountain can be an archetype. Across cultures, across times, it's a part of being human.
Uh, depth psychology deals with dreams. It deals with, the parts of yourself that you don't know. And I love that mystery.
And I think we can already see how psychedelics start to say in a little bit, you know, in a little way, ah, we have something to offer here too, in terms of the unconscious and the subconscious.
Adrian: Definitely. In particular, ayahuasca And in particular Tantra as well with, with all of the archetypes that we find from both Buddhist and hindu tantra.
Kerry: Absolutely, so now we're getting to a very juicy and interesting,
Adrian: You mentioned dakini.
Kerry: Yes, it's a juicy and interesting intersection of cultures and times and approaches, and I just find so much meaning in that, yeah.
Adrian: Yeah. Can you give maybe as a few examples like, um, some of the archetypes or even just starting to explain what a dakini is from Tibetan Buddhism, okay, and, and why the Dakini in particular really grabbed your attention.
Kerry: Yeah, she did, um, so the Dakini in Tibetan Buddhism is a feminine figure. You can see her painted sometimes in thangka or maybe the walls of temples or something. She can, often she's painted, she's rendered in very beautiful form. She's a 16 year old virgin wearing very little or nothing, you know, except some beautiful bone jewelry, maybe.
She's totally naked, sky clad, as they say. But she can appear in many different forms, including ugly old crones or hags or witch like kinds of figures.
So, but basically the Dakini is feminine. She is the epitome, or the embodiment, of non conceptual wisdom, and she assists practitioners in their journey to enlightenment, often in a very ruthless way.
There are so many stories of the Dakini showing up and, like, chopping off somebody's head, metaphorically speaking, or slapping them in the face and saying, Wake up, what are you doing with your head and all these books or these texts? This is the real experience. This is the direct transmission.
So she's all about embodied reality. Embodied experience. And Tibetan Buddhism has plenty of its share of written experience, plenty of sutras teachings, plenty of texts and literatures. It can be very heady. So the Dakini is kind of the, antithesis or the, uh, the wake up call to that, in a way. And, can I go on to the,
Adrian: The direct cutting
Kerry: exactly, exactly,
so, let me go on to, we haven't gotten into plant medicine yet, but I feel compelled to keep on with the Dakini here.
The Dakini spoke to me super strongly, uh, you know, just in Kathmandu as a practitioner, and sometimes I would have dreams, Dakini dreams, stuff like that.
I mean, we were living in Boudha Stupa. There's invisible Dakinis all over the place. Um, and as I said, I wrote my thesis at Pacifica on the Dakini as an archetype that's super important for the Western world because she embodies the feminine and all the repressed qualities of the feminine that, uh, you know, the Western world basically has the Virgin Mary as an archetype and that's it.
But here's the Dakini, strong, powerful, dark, assertive, you know, can be angry at times, all these qualities that need to come back. However, it took me about four or five years of drinking ayahuasca before I was up early one morning after ceremony before I suddenly realized, oh, the Dakini and ayahuasca are like, like that, I'm not saying they're identical, but they share so many qualities, you know,
Adrian: Hmm.
Kerry: in terms of, well, first of all, they're feminine.
And I know in some traditions, ayahuasca is postulated as the masculine energy, but almost everybody I know, and myself in general, says ayahuasca is a feminine energy, yeah? The grandmother, the mother, la madre, whatever, So um,
Adrian: Yeah. can we talk about that actually?
Kerry: Yeah, go ahead.
Adrian: Sorry just to pause you on that, for a moment.
Kerry: Yeah
Adrian: You know, because ayahuasca's two plants, right? Just for people who might not know that.
Kerry: Mm hmm,
And
Adrian: So, what I find very interesting about ayahuasca is that I think it really mirrors non dual tantra teachings. in a very clear, interesting way, which it's union of masculine and feminine. And I've actually found that it's specifically that Chakruna or the DMT plant is that archetypal feminine and that the vine or Paganam Harmala represents that masculine.
And it's the union of, the two, of course, that brings Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya together. But I find specifically, it's that Chakruna or DMT element that's the the feminine aspect.
I'm curious if, if you've sort of dialed into that in a similar way, or if you have a different view of that.
Kerry: I can just say from my own personal experience, when I drink the brew myself, and I'm always drinking
ayahuasca with chacruna, I haven't tried other variations, I'm taking as the totality of the whole. I'm not like, oh, here's the chacruna and here's the ayahuasca. It's like the unity in a way.
Adrian: Cause you haven't separated them.
Kerry: I don't work with them in a separate way.
Adrian: Cause you haven't separated them and taken the beta carbolines by itself. Okay.
Kerry: I'm not a chemist like that.
So I'm taking it as a mixture or brew that is called ayahuasca. One of its components is called ayahuasca and this brew has some certain specific qualities. And for me, when the medicine shows up as an entity, as a spirit or a figure, I don't, first of all, I don't ask it, are you ayahuasca or are you chacruna?
You know, I just, I just receive her. And it's always been in feminine form for me. So that's, what I'm saying about the deeply feminine quality of it, yeah.
Adrian: Yeah, I just wanted to ask about that.
Kerry: Yeah. um, so to go back to ayahuasca and the dakini then, I guess, let's keep going with that.
So it's feminine. So, Ayahuasca has the capacity to show up in both dark and light forms.
Or, nice forms, and then, heh, vicious forms, let's say. Just like the Dakini. She can be really sweet to you, she can be super loving, she can be so gentle, and or, she can like, slap your face, knock you into the pit of vipers, you know, torment you on the interest of teaching you.
But, you know, it's by no means a nice, I would never call ayahuasca nice.
Yeah. So,
Adrian: Do you not experience ayahuasca, as gentle or, or loving in
Kerry: oh, I have had those experiences, yeah, but that is not the totality,
Adrian: Okay. I, I just thought of that as nice
Kerry: Nice is such a simple word, yeah, she has that face, Yeah. but the totality of that medicine is quite complex, and again, reminds me of the dakini.
Adrian: For sure.
Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. And also in the directness and the embodied nature of what ayahuasca brings.
You know, an ayahuasca experience is not cerebral. You're not reading a text. You're not thinking about things. You're being
Adrian: Okay.
Kerry: Revelation is happening in your body and in your heart and in your gut. You know, and it's direct experience of emotions, of sensations, of past memories or traumas that you've pushed away, it's like the direct explosion or release of these things.
So, in that sense, it's very tantric in that it's about embodied experience.
Adrian: Yeah. like release of sort we can think of it as purification, like karmic knots or impressions that are stored in the subtle body and it's helping us to release those.
Absolutely. That's
Kerry: the way
I look at it. Because one of Ayahuasca's areas of expertise, I think, is in bringing up past traumas. Things that are stored in the body and in the subtle body, but we haven't consciously assimilated them. Sometimes we don't even remember that they happened, right? Or sometimes those knots or those are in the past, and that can include past lives or ancestral dimensions, not just this life, this body, you know?
But it seems to be very skillful at, um, bringing those knots up into awareness, to consciousness, to purge, to release, to untie. Yeah. So, uh, I listened to your interview with Ian Baker a few weeks ago, you know, and he was talking a lot about the subtle body and the nadis and the bindus and the chakras.
And I was like, yeah, ayahuasca works with all those for sure.
Very
Adrian: much so. It's a very helpful
Kerry: Yeah. And the Buddhist practices also work with those and, you know, tantric practices work directly with those. I'm not saying that you have to drink medicine to work with the subtle body. But it's it's a big feature, I think, of medicine work, of ayahuasca work, and not a lot of people are so aware of that map, actually, right?
Adrian: Oh, for sure.
Kerry: So it can be, it can be, very helpful to bring it in, in the sense of integration, you know, that this is working with your subtle body, not just your physical body. It can be illuminating. Yeah.
Adrian: Yeah. Because that's not the map unless someone's already into Dharma or the yoga that they're receiving from, from the tradition down there, because it's, it's a different tradition that has those maps.
Kerry: Yeah. Yeah.
Adrian: So one thing that I wanted to ask you, cause you already had this grounding in depth psychology and that you had started working with, ayahuasca then at that point. And how would you describe what ayahuasca really brought to your study of depth psychology?
Kerry: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah,
Let me clarify the sequence here a bit. So I trained in depth psychology. I got a master's degree. I eventually got licensure as an LPC, I worked in private practice for 15 years in Oregon, and at that point I had not met Ayahuasca.
I was a Buddhist oriented psychotherapist bringing together depth psychology and Buddhism basically and working with, I mean all sorts of people, but some of them are Dharma practitioners looking to deal with their human emotions.
So that was interesting in itself. And then, in, uh, 2014, I met Ayahuasca. Unexpectedly. In Hawaii. Didn't plan this.
An opportunity for a ceremony came up in my circle of friends, I said, sure, I'll go. And anyway, that's where it, all started.
Adrian: And what was that first journey like? Obviously it must have made quite an impact. What happened in that, in that journey? Or journeys?
Kerry: Yeah, it was one journey. It was with a guy who, it came from Santo Daime tradition, and I think he'd done like a thousand ceremonies or something. So it was a very small group of people in the daytime. Uh, in the back of a nursery in Hawaii.
It's one of the very few daytime ceremonies I've ever done, and basically I just drank the ayahuasca and laid down and put the pillow over my head and went on a journey for like five hours.
Didn't sit up once, because it was showing me and telling me so many things.
And it was so excited to meet me, you know, it was running around my body like, oh wow, this is cool I was like, whoa Yeah, yeah, it was a lot. It was a lot.
But it began to transform my life from that point on for the better. It showed me things immediately that had happened in my past that I was not aware of. Past traumas, that needed to be cleaned, things like that.
And basically, I like to say, I came to it, you know, I'm, I was a Buddhist practitioner, I still am, yeah, lots of meditation practice, but what meeting ayahuasca did for me was it showed me the pile of stuff I was sitting on, on top of my cushion, unknowingly, there was all this buried in my unconscious that I hadn't been able to access through either dharma practice or depth psychotherapy, that the medicine immediately opened up and started to release. So I view it as very skillful means to use the Buddhist phrase in that sense.
Adrian: Yeah.
Kerry: yeah,
Adrian: That's how I also relate to ayahuasca. We can view it as a, as a tantric practice within a tantric
Kerry: path.
Yeah for sure
and
and that it opened
Adrian: And that, that opened
up
Kerry: Deeper levels of the unconscious, subconscious, unconscious, that despite all my best efforts, I hadn't had access to before. And I think, you know, many psychedelics can do that especially when approached with intention. And I was certainly, I went into that ceremony with intention, you know? It wasn't like going to be a recreational trip. I was like, help me heal my trauma, whatever it might be. So it worked with, it worked with that.
So, uh, yeah, many psychedelics can do this, but I have a special respect and affection for ayahuasca because of its particular qualities, that resonate so much with Tantra for me.
Hmm.
Adrian: And so the way you talked about it right there, one thing that I'm getting from what you said was that, in a way like ayahuasca in and of itself, just the sentient intelligence was doing some really important work in releasing these traumas.
And so what I'm wondering is on this topic of integration, what did ayahuasca in other words, because I think about this too, in some ways, and I feel, especially when talking about this medicine, it's like the medicine itself, the sentient intelligence will really do and release a lot of things in its own right. It's not just up to us.
Like a lot of that sentient intelligence is simply working it by showing up and being present and allowing it to work on us. But what did you then, um, learn about how you had to bring in certain things to, in terms of integration to actually make those changes?
Oh absolutely,
Kerry: yeah. Yeah, and I, like you, I believe, yes, the medicine does a lot of work, and I also believe we get, you know, we meet it 50%, it's like half and half.
We show up. We show up with our intentions, we show up in how we navigate through ceremony, yeah, and knowing that we can communicate with the medicine, asking it, telling it, beseeching it, sometimes, you know, and we show up.
We show up for preparation and we also show up for integration, which is the aftermath, which ended up being what I've worked with for the last, yeah, eight or something years as an integration therapist.
So, for myself personally, I mean, I think I was pretty well situated actually to start working with ayahuasca because of my background as both a practitioner and all the psychotherapeutic tools I'd gathered along the way, you know?
So I wasn't casting around for what do I do. It was more like, oh, I need to do this, this, this, and this, you know.
And the medicine itself was quite specific at times in telling me stop eating this. You know, don't do this anymore. It told me stop swearing. I'm still having trouble with that. But it told me that nine years ago. It gave me very specific instructions. Wear these colors. Grow out your hair. Do this. Do that. You know.
And I often find when people start working with ayahuasca there can be an initial round of like, I call it like raising your vibration in a way. It just like tells you. Mm Explicitly.
Maybe not in words, but you know, you know that certain patterns of behavior have to stop, that maybe you have to give up certain things, that if you're addicted to certain things, you know, gotta let go of that because you're on this path of evolution that suddenly became very, very rapid.
So, I went through bit of that initially. A lot of my, my initial integration work was about really trying to integrate some of the difficult things it was showing me about what had happened in my past. Trying to understand it. Trying to make sense of it. And then trying to figure out what to do with it, how to really integrate it. So, so a lot of journaling there for sure.
But, um, As I said, I think having different depth psychology, psychological ways to work with images, to work with dreams, to work with feelings and emotions in the body, were very helpful for me.
Because ayahuasca can open up a whole, a whole can of worms, sometimes, for people.
It's, It's, like, life is not what you thought it was. And the story that you had, uh huh, there's a few missing chapters. And here's what really happened, you know. And, it's illuminating and disconcerting.
But I could always tell by the feeling of lightness. I could always tell within me by the feeling of lightness I had as I moved towards these things and worked with them in a certain way. It's like my body saying, yes.
Yes, you don't have to carry this anymore. Yes, you can put this down, rather than struggling against it or resisting it or saying, no, no, I don't want to see this, you know, and then still stuck in the same kind of thing.
Adrian: I found what you just said right there to be a very important teaching from ayahuasca. It's taught me a lot about learning discernment in a more embodied way.
So when to, when I'm on the right path, not just being with the story, not that there isn't a place for that, but really letting go of the story, allowing attention to be in the body and just feeling into it. Cultivating that intuition. I find that ayahuasca, uh, has really developed that in a very clear, powerful way.
Kerry: That's really good. Yeah.
That's really good to hear. And I think it's an opportunity that it opens up for many people.
To come down from here down into everything below the neck and really start to inhabit at the cellular and physical, you know, the internal dimensions because there's so much wisdom and knowledge that we, that we possess. We just aren't allowed in a way to enter it in this society, right?
We're just supposed to pay attention to the frontal lobe and our thoughts. And thoughts are great, but they're just a piece of the pie.
Adrian: Yeah. And so you already had this very strong foundation in your own training when you came to ayahuasca to start doing the integration. And so, how do you support people now who come to you for integration work, who might not have that kind of background?
Kerry: Yeah, and I think I was, I was fortunate and blessed in that way too, that when I met Ayahuasca, I was not a stranger to embodiment. I was not a stranger to my feelings. I already knew how to navigate through the subtle body intuitive systems, you know?
Um, so, yes, so now I work with integration, post ceremony for people and I don't work long term with people anymore. I used to do that as a therapist, now I just do one to three sessions.
But basically, we're diving into what people's experiences were in their ceremony, the messages that they received. Helping make sense of those, getting some meaning out of it. And I'm always bringing it back to the body to whatever extent the person is open to it in that session or in that moment.
Like, okay, you just told me something really intense. Let's just sit here for a moment and breathe and pause and let's both feel this in our bodies, you know?
And if they're able to say, yeah, I'm feeling this in my heart or in my stomach or whatever, then we work with it a little more, you know? Because feeling into your own experience with the support of somebody else who's also feeling it can be very, can be very good, right? Sometimes these experiences can be so overwhelming, and that's part of the problem. Ayahuasca can be super intense. It gives you a lot all at once. So that even afterwards, the memory of what happened in ceremony can be like, Ah, I can't go there!
But, sometimes, sometimes people are, have the capacity to slow down and regulate and feel. I mean, everybody's at a different level, right? Some people are very skilled at working with their bodies already. For some people, it's like they never went down below the neck before.
Adrian: Yeah.
Kerry: And then in one session, there's only so much we can do.
But I can at least point the direction and say, hey, I think that this is an important direction for you to head in. In terms of your integration and in processing the material you received in ceremony and also in developing capacities within yourself to meet life in a more full and rich way.
It doesn't always have to include medicine, right? When we learn how to navigate our...
Yeah, when we learn how to navigate our bodies and we learn how to give and take, uh, information and feedback from them. And we learn the sense of when my body says yes, when my body says no, what my body's telling me in the present moment, you know, then life becomes so much richer.
And not just relying on the mind, on the mind to figure everything out, which is a very exhausting thing sometimes. Yeah.
So yes, I believe ayahuasca can introduce us to that. It can accelerate us on that path. And so much of the work then is the work we do, not in ceremony, but afterwards in integration to, um, refine our capacities and our abilities to feel and to know what we're feeling.
Yeah. And then actually, I'm just having this thought right now that that that's a very revolutionary practice in this world, in the modern world.
Adrian: The embodiment practice?
Kerry: Yeah. It's so different from what is normally taught and experienced and expressed. So it's very fundamentally revolutionary in a good way to own one's own body.
And to be able to say, okay, I want to be a soul in the body, fully living in this life, on this planet, at this time. So I can have, so I can do whatever I'm here to do, you know. that is absolutely something that medicines, plants can help us with. Absolutely.
Adrian: Nice. And do you bring in some of the archetype work into the integration process and if so how?
Kerry: Mmm. I mean, I'm familiar with archetypes, right? A lot of different dimensions and just, can feel when something's coming in that is bigger than just the person, you know? But at the same time, it's the person who went through the ceremony. It's the person who's carrying this. Right? It's the individual who's in the session with me going, what do I do with this? You know?
Sometimes it can be helpful to understand that what we're carrying or what we experienced isn't just ours personally, that it has a bigger dimension. And that dimension can be spiritual. It can be ancestral. It can be collective. Those are handy ways of looking at it. Maybe more accessible words than archetypes. Because "archetype" is kind of a weird word.
But sometimes it can be a bit of a relief for a person to feel, oh, this isn't just about me. You know, this is about my family. Or this is about what happened to my relatives in World War II.
Or, you know, um. different specific dimensions of that.
So, I'd say in that sense, yes. That's how I work with archetypes, but honestly, in one to three sessions, there's not a lot of time to go digging deeply. But I'm often, often saying to people,
Adrian: Right.
Kerry: you know, like after a dieta or something, maybe they got some images or some, A spirit came in during their dieta, like the spirit of the owl, or the spirit... you know, once on dieta I was seeing images of ancient Egypt. I have no idea why.
But I will often tell people afterwards, after the dieta, hey, go research that. You know, go look on Wikipedia, gather some images, just gather some things from the internet about the meaning of the owl, for example. You know, and feel into it, and see what resonates. And approach that archetype, I guess in a way that, allows you to gather more information about it. And see what sticks.
Adrian: That seems great. Like a great exercise. Yeah. I, I asked in part because I know sometimes people are wondering how to make sense of the visions, that can be a common question. And a lot of times people can, you know, I've experienced this, can experience sort of these archetypal images, and it can be very helpful to, um, to draw on the traditions and try to make sense of them and also holding it lightly.
Kerry: Exactly.
Adrian: Not making it, really reifying it or making it do a thing, but it can be helpful as an interpretive framework.
Exactly.
Kerry: And also, you know, maybe offering some possibilities, but seeing what resonates for the person. Because it's their image. It's their dream, it's their archetype, so whatever I might think about that is really beside the point. It depends on how it feels in the moment, the resonance of that.
Adrian: And I love what you said there. I think, how it feels underneath, that's the key.
Kerry: Yeah, exactly, not what you think, but how it feels.
So again, turning on the body, uh, sensor, yeah, the embodied sensor.
I was going to go back to visions for a moment and say that, yeah, often it can be perplexing for people, what they saw. And first of all, I hear from many people who say, I didn't have visions like what they showed it would be in YouTube.
And I'm like, never watch YouTube for advice. You know, my visions were all really dark and horrible. They weren't so pretty. And I mean, in some ways, visions can be distracting in that sense, especially when it's like the, the patterns, the ornamental stuff, the energetic stuff, you know.
But, you know, sometimes when people say visions, it means they're shown specific happenings, specific occurrences, specific information. And it doesn't make sense to them based on the current space time that they're in. and that can be kind of a tormenting and puzzling place to be.
So, um, I will spend a fair amount of time in a session, with somebody, having them describe what they experienced, what they felt, what they saw. And also, I always go back to, I always, always ask, what were your intentions going into this ceremony? And always, always, I find, we find at the end, oh, your intentions were met. They just weren't met in the way that you thought. Ha. Which
Adrian: Right.
Kerry: Which is very, yeah, so what you bring as intentions and how you phrase it, I've learned, can be quite important. And if you go into a ceremony and say, I want to get rid of all my trauma, which I did my second ceremony.
That was a big mistake. You know, you're gonna get your ass kicked. Okay, all your trauma. Okay, we're just gonna start ripping it, out of you right now.
Adrian: Maybe space it out a little bit.
Kerry: I've learned to be more humble.
It was an early teaching from ayahuasca, not so gung ho, but like, I'm just a human. Please help me with this. And, uh, yeah. Maybe be gentle.
Adrian: And I'm curious. So when you say you work with people one to three sessions, is that just kind of how it works out in terms of what people are looking for or do you actually put kind of a limit on that and specifically say, I'm just want shorter term
Kerry: I've put a
Adrian: clients for a particular reason?
Kerry: Yeah, I've put a limit
Adrian: And if so,
Kerry: Yeah, I've put a limit on it myself because, uh, when I closed my private practice in early 2015 and ended up coming to Peru and then living here for the last nine years. It's like that was the end of that phase of my life. I loved being a therapist. I loved carrying people for two, three years and working with their stuff very deeply.
And suddenly I just felt like I'm at the end of that road. and so for energetic reasons, I don't do that anymore. And also because I feel like I can best serve the medicine by reaching a number of people. Rather than working with, say, a dozen people over the course of two or three years. Because integration can very easily segue into therapy, in a way.
When does your integration ever stop? It never stops, right? We're always integrating. That's the way I look at it. Yeah. So, um, I could easily continue with integration work for people for six months, two years, whatever. But I feel good about maximizing the different points of contact that I have.
Adrian: And So, I'm just wondering perhaps in our concluding, you know, time together, if you can, even though we touched on this a little bit, just to kind of drive it home and your personal experience, what did you find that Dharma brought to ayahuasca and what did ayahuasca bring to Dharma?
to Yeah. That's a good place to, uh, sum it up at, I guess.
Kerry: Alright, so meeting Ayahuasca as a Dharma practitioner. I was very grateful for my background in meditation practice, and I was very grateful for my capacity, first of all, to just observe, let my experiences arise and fall, without having to control them or freak out-- I'm not saying I wasn't freaking out a little bit, but there was a certain amount of spaciousness and awareness in the experience.
Yeah. Of, okay. You know, just like when you sit on a cushion, okay, here's my mind. This is what's happening to some extent can be similar in an ayahuasca ceremony. So there's just a little bit more spaciousness maybe if you have a meditation practice.
Which is why I'm always suggesting to people, even two weeks before their ceremony, that they start a little bit of meditation practice. Something is, it's always helpful. So the ability to observe, the ability to stay with experience, the sense of compassion and the self compassion that I'd cultivated at that point, which was really necessary in my life, but, at that point, by the time I met ayahuasca it was there.
That was very helpful in bringing into some painful experiences and just being able to say, oh, I'm so sorry that this happened, you know? To my younger self, or to other people involved who I was seeing, or whatever. Just that compassion from the heart.
I think compassion is an underrated and under talked about quality in both Dharma practice and medicine work. Um, let's see. What else did Dharma bring to Ayahuasca? Just that it's, tremendously valuable preparation and staying with one's own experience.
And it, to the extent to which my channels were cleaned out or whatever, I think Ayahuasca was happy about that. That was kind of what I noticed the first time.
And what does Ayahuasca bring to the Dharma?
I think there's the opportunity in that to have glimpses or moments of realization in one's medicine experience, should one direct one's attention towards that. Um, I think it can give us, perhaps more, slightly more lucid or transparent glimpses of the view, as they say in Dzogchen, the view being just the open, spacious nature of reality.
Glimpses of the nature of ourselves, absolutely have felt sense glimpses of our own heart and the depth and the wisdom and compassion in our own hearts. But I also believe that I mean, a glimpse is a glimpse, it's not a practice. And whether or not one glimpses those things with ayahuasca or psychedelics, I mean, often people do.
People who don't have spiritual experiences before, suddenly it just blows the walls down, blows the roof off. And they're like, there's a spiritual reality. So I totally respect psychedelics for that. But I think it's in the embodied, grounded, sober, day to day practice that we work on realizing that. You know, so that it's not just a nyam, a temporary experience, but we're stabilizing it. Yeah.
Adrian: Yeah.
Kerry: But the potential for psychedelics to open up people to spirituality in a rapid way is quite amazing and quite needed, I think, these days. Is there anything else about ayahuasca bringing to the dharma? And you know, it works the subtle body as we discussed before. It clears the channels, for sure.
Purging is a purification. Have you heard of Chris, Chris Bache? Do you know who he is?
Adrian: Yeah, it's I do know that name and I'm not sure why.
Kerry: Yeah, it's B A C H E. And he is a, He was a philosophy professor at the University of Ohio. I think he may be retired now. Who for 20 years did extremely intense, targeted, high dose LSD experiences out to like the edge of the universe, exploring the nature of reality.
Uh
Adrian: Oh Yes.
Kerry: So he has some interesting things to say, but he's also a Dharma practitioner and he was a student of Lama Tsultrims for at least some point in time. And he equated the purification one goes through in psychedelics because he was vomiting a lot with his LSD, with, uh, Ngöndro, you know? You have to, like, slough off these layers of constriction, of, of stuff, you know?
So, ngöndro is purification, or purging is ngöndro. You know, you could take it either way.
Adrian: Yeah, in your answer, I really detected something that I found to be very helpful in terms of what ayahuasca brings to the dharma, into Dzogchen specifically, you know, because some people from an outside perspective, they're into Dzogchen, they haven't done ayahuasca, they might say, well, if you've had that glimpse and you've got the practice, why do you need to keep doing it?
And the thing is we're working on stabilizing recognition of the view. And what is it that pulls us out of the view? It's our deeply imprinted patterns, or some scars or psychological patterns. And the fact that ayahuasca is helping to show us those patterns and to clear those is what helps with stabilization of the view.
Kerry: Exactly, that's a very, that's a very concise summary of basically my own experience of what I found ayahuasca to be most helpful for. It wasn't in glimpsing the view or resting in the view, uh, but it certainly has been in clearing out the emotional and karmic and sanskaric patterns.
Adrian: Yeah, and that's why people, even if they have some stability in the view, they continue to do relative practices. You know, they continue to do deity yoga or chode or these other practices because there's that purification. And so I think we can think of ayahuasca through that lens.
Kerry: skillfully used. Absolutely, yeah, yeah,
Adrian: Yes. Yes. Well, Kerry, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.
It's so great to connect with someone else in this rare intersection of interested in Dzogchen and ayahuasca and also depth psychology, which I'm into. So had so much fun
Kerry: yeah, yeah, I was just thinking what a juicy intersection this is, and I really appreciate talking with you too, so, great.
Adrian: Absolutely. Um, before we close, can I give you an opportunity to let people know where they find you?
Kerry: Oh, sure, uh, my website's ayahuascawisdom.com, there's a lot on there, including a blog with many, many posts on ayahuasca and integration and plant medicine and dieta that people say can be interesting and helpful. So, uh, yeah, basically look at my website to get ahold of me. My email's on there too.
Also I've done, I've put together a 10 week online integration course for people post ceremony, just all sorts of different tools and approaches and practices that I found useful in working with integration. So it's a 10 week online self study kind of program. You can take a look at that too.
Adrian: Wonderful.
And we'll include all that in the show notes. So thank you so much, Kerry. Really enjoyed speaking with you.
Kerry: All right. Great. Thank you. So bye.
Adrian: Take care.