Don Roberto: Ayahuasca and Shamanism

futurethinkers (50)in #spirituality • 6 years ago (edited)

Our guest in the following two episodes is Don Roberto, a medical anthropologist and ayahuasca shaman. He has spent his life learning different healing modalities, with emphasis on plant medicine. He has lived with various native tribes and studied their healing traditions, including Shipibo of Amazon, Zulu of Africa and shamans of Bali. Don Roberto travels the world doing presentations and workshops on shamanism, and holding healing ceremonies.

In this two-part interview, Don Roberto talks about shamanism, medicinal plants, and various healing modalities he has studied.

We participated in an ayahuasca ceremony with Don Roberto, and we discuss some of our experiences with it.

Opening the Mind to Possibilities

Throughout his early life, Don Roberto had a range of formative experiences which opened his mind to different possibilities. The turning point was a discovery of NLP (neuro-linguistic programing) and his studies with the healer David Grove. David developed a protocol of simple questions in order to work with a client’s language and metaphors and allow them to enter and explore their internal landscape where deepest feelings and memories reside. His process revealed a mythopoetic landscape that everyone has, but which is not normally accessible.

David engaged in what shamans call Soul Retrieval, to recover the fragmented parts of the psyche which have split off from the main sense of self during a traumatic experience, and integrate them back into the consciousness. Initially understanding this process as a very powerful healing modality, Don Roberto only later realized that David was actually doing shamanic work.

Soul Retrieval

In each person’s life, there are circumstances that can be a little too overwhelming to process. When our system is overloaded, something needs to shut down in order to protect the main frame of consciousness, which causes a part of an individual to disengage and affects their spiritual wholeness. In psychology, this is called disassociation.

In the Soul Retrieval process, a shaman journeys into an altered state of consciousness, finds the missing parts of the person, and invites them to come back across time and space. This integration of the younger self with the older self has astonishing healing effects.

Other Ways of Knowing

Indigenous cultures tend to be more open to seeing the world as a living dynamic organism. They see all matter as having consciousness.

In the Amazon, there are over 40,000 plant species, and the possibility of finding two specific plants that work together, as is the case with the ayahuasca brew, is 1 in 6 billion. Indigenous people say the jungle itself told their ancestors how to make it. This indicates that there is another way of knowing which is not accessible through the scientific methodology of the West.

Don Roberto wants to recover some of these ways of knowing, and works as a facilitator for each person to do this discovery for themselves.

Becoming a Shaman

For Don Roberto, the path to shamanism was a slow process which involved a range of experiences that opened his eyes to realities that were beyond what he was being taught, from bodywork to shamanic training in the Amazon.

Ever since his first experience with ayahuasca in Taiwan, he has tried to bring that teaching and make it accessible to more people. As he explains, once you know you cannot un-know, and to know is to serve.

In this episode of Future Thinkers:

Open your mind to the realm of possibilities
What is neuro-linguistic programming – NLP
The Soul Retrieval process
The possibility of having memories beyond our lifetime
The difference between indigenous communities and monotheistic traditions
A way of knowing that is different from scientific methodology
Openness as the only way for scientific revolutions
The experience of becoming a shaman
The role and training of a shaman
Ayahuasca and multidimensionality

Mentions & Resources:

To contact Don Roberto, email him at [email protected]
Omni magazine
David Grove‘s work on NLP and psychotherapy

Book Recommendations:

John C. Lilly's books
The Structure of Magic: A Book about Language and Therapy by Richard Bandler and John Grinder
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun
Supernature by Lyall Watson