Western medicine tends to fall short when dealing with depression, but what if a solution is through traditional medicines that have been demonized within our culture?
It seems that now more than ever, people are once again setting their sights on ancestral medicines, especially regarding healing. Indigenous wisdom is beginning to penetrate the collective consciousness once again, and a growing number of people are seeking out ceremonies for healing.
First off, depression is a phenomenon that isnโt well understood within the scientific framework. In my view, that’s because the emotional body is often viewed as something mechanical โ that can be fixed, rather than a fluent expression (or manifestation) of the deeper workings of consciousness.
This is why we turn to ancient traditions for guidance. Perhaps these healers know something we donโt. Perhaps there is a lot of wisdom within these lineages, who have such an affection towards these ancestral plants that have been used for millennia.
After working closely with hundreds of guests at shamanic healing centers in Ecuador and Peru, I learned a thing or two about the healing power of plant medicines in the context and how they can help people.
My aim here is not to discourage you from using conventional medicine to treat depression. Western medicine has its place, of course, but it doesnโt come without its issues. Rather, I want to explore an alternative to conventional medicine that has been quite effective in my experiences.
In this article, I’m going to talk about healing depression with plant medicines and shamanic traditions from my own experiences, and you can be the judge on whether you think they may be a good alternative for your depression.
The Deep Healing of Ancestral Medicines
In most cases, modern medicine acts as a Band-Aid fix. SSRIs may provide relief, but theyโre not a long-term remedy. Therapy can be helpful, but it can also miss the mark and take a long time to see any progress.
A big problem I often see is that people, and often Western healthcare too perceive depression as a mechanical problem that needs to be fixed. We live in a fix-it society after all, but depression canโt be fixed, it must be healed. It’s not that something’s broken, it’s that something is out of balance mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.
Using plant medicines to treat depression is a holistic approach to healing, and addresses the root cause of depression rather than deals with the manifestation. They help flush out some of the dense energies trapped in your body and can illuminate why there is an imbalance energetically.
Working in the shamanic healing space for some time, I crossed paths with many people who sought out ancestral medicines for all sorts of reasons. I found that there were three main camps:
- Curiosity: After reading the many stories tucked away in the deep corners of the web, many individuals simply wanted to see what all the commotion was about.
- Spiritual growth: Many individuals on a spiritual path want to further explore their consciousness, address certain roadblocks, and attain guidance or wisdom.
- Deep healing: The most common reason people sought out these medicines was to heal the emotional issues that they were facing.
The emotional issues people had were a mixed bag, and often, they were quite severe. Some of the people I supported throughout their plant medicine journeys involved:
- Substance abuse and addiction
- Lack of self-love, core shame, etc.
- Mourning and loss of loved ones
- PTSD (mostly in veterans)
- Emotional dysregulation from toxic relationships
- Anxiety and panic attacks
- Childhood trauma
- Trauma from sexual abuse, rape, and molestation
However, the common thread was depression.
Many of these individuals were fed up with conventional medicine. Years of SSRIs and therapy didnโt work, so they looked for alternative solutions. After hearing about or perhaps experiencing the healing of plant medicines, many individuals sought to deepen their healing through ancestral medicines, including Ayahuasca and Huachuma.
Plant medicines can certainly act as a powerful remedy for depression. Although Ayahuasca has taken the spotlight in recent years, other plant medicines such as mushrooms and San Pedro are also very effective in this area.
Depression is complex, with many potential factors contributing to it. It would be naive to objectively say that plant medicines heal depression, however, they are a powerful aid.
I have seen cases of retraumatization and psychosis following the use of ancestral medicines. Itโs important to veer on the side of caution when using any psychoactive substance to address serious mental health issues, but with that said, they are medicines for a reason.
How I Treated My Depression With Plant Medicines
I credit plant medicines for facilitating a space to work through my depression, and Iโve witnessed plant medicines facilitate dramatic transformations in people again and again. However, this isnโt to say that plant medicines are a linear solution to depression because theyโre not.
When I was in my late teens, I began self-medicating my depression with plant medicines of all sorts. I was struggling with depression at the time, so going deep into strange and unfamiliar headspaces via plant medicines wasnโt frightening for me because anything was better than reality.
Perhaps my plant medicine journey began as an act of escapism, perhaps I was just curious, but the more regularly I took plant medicines, the more intrigued I became with them.
It wasnโt long until I began to see the bigger picture with plant medicines. They arenโt simply feel-good drugs that theyโre painted as within our society, theyโre gateways into the deepest layers of consciousness. They allow us to access parts of ourselves that we have never been able to see with the naked eye.
My recreational use shifted towardsย use with intentionย โ to explore my consciousness, dredge up harmful but stubborn patterns, and alter my perception of myself and reality. Over the years, many of the unhealthy programs that kept me trapped in a mental prison began to deteriorate.
The trips often werenโt pleasant, but they were eye-opening. They forced me to confront the darkness in myself and take a long hard look at what was wrong with me.
As my general sense of well-being improved, I attributed it to a few things that the plant medicines were doing:
- They were cleaning out a lot of internal junk that was keeping me in the same old painful patterns.
- They were dredging up a lot of trauma and facilitating the space to heal that trauma and feel happier about my life.
- They were changing my attitudes, mindsets, and perceptions, which in turn changed the way I interacted with reality.
- The new ways of interacting with reality were more fulfilling, meaning depression had less ammunition.
One experience transformed my life forever. After experiencing a rebirth following an experience of ego death, I set off the travel the world indefinitely and worked closely with ancestral medicines in Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador, where I worked at a shamanic healing center for some time.
This is where I had the opportunity to meet many people who were seeking to heal their depression, and I noticed that there were some common themes.
How Do Plant Medicines Heal Depression?
Let me make something clear.
Plant medicines donโt heal depression, you heal depression. Plant medicines are an aid, but youโre the one who does the heavy lifting. If you expect ancestral medicines to be a miracle cure or the process of healing to be a smooth ride, youโre missing the point.
Think about it this wayโฆ
Ancestral medicines facilitate deep healing, but youโre the one working through your issues and dropping the emotional baggage. They are the therapists, providing the space to more deeply understand where your depression is coming from and what you can do to make progress with it.
There is a learning curve with plant medicine journeys. They work similarly to therapy sessions with a psychologist or counselor. It takes practice to get deep into your subconscious where the real work can be done. Likewise, it takes experience to learn how your mind works, and how to work with plant medicines to heal deep-rooted issues such as depression.
Keep in mind that therapy isnโt always easy. Through this approach, plant medicines may force some pretty dark stuff out of your unconsciousness, which you very well may not be prepared to confront. Thatโs why itโs important to mentally prepare yourself and acknowledge that the experience could be very unpleasant.
Plant Medicines Facilitate Inner Work
Trauma is well-known to be a contributing factor to depression. If someone has a lot of trauma hidden deep in their psyche, this trauma is going to manifest somehow. Therefore, if depression is dependent on trauma in this context, once the independent variable is removed, the dependent manifestation will likely be resolved.
The difficult thing about trauma is that we often donโt know we have it. Even if we do, we donโt know how to dredge it out or what the process of healing it looks like.ย This is where plant medicines shine.
Plant medicines create a space for you to do the inner work. During a plant medicine journey, you will often revisit emotional wounds, past traumas, and things that hurt you in the past. As long as you work with the medicine instead of fighting against it, the ancestral medicine will flush up a lot of the ugliness in yourself, which gives you space to work through it.
Lie down and be completely present with the experience. Donโt listen to music, donโt stimulate yourself. Allow yourself to be fully there with the experience because healing occurs through experiencing. This is a big part of therapy. Youโre giving yourself an audience, which in turn allows you to acknowledge and discard some of the trauma.
The deeper you go into the trip, the more crap is going to be flushed up. Therefore, itโs important not to dive beyond your limits. If you canโt handle whatโs coming up, and you canโt stop the experience because youโve already committed to it, this is where things can get ugly.
This is where Iโve seen people experience psychotic snaps because they were panicking and resisting the avalanche.
Nonresistanceย plays an essential role here, as via the path of nonresistance, you will embrace the experience rather than cause friction.
Plant Medicines Dismantle the Self
During a plant medicine journey, yourย self, and your identity start unhinging, which is a phenomenon calledย ego-dissolution. Essentially, ego dissolution is when the construct ofย youย begins to fall apart.
This means you can see between the cracks that usually arenโt illuminated and look at yourself from an angle you may have never seen before. This can be very helpful in getting you out of your negative mental space, where you can make some real progress.
For me, a big part of my depression was due to never feeling good enough and not living up to who I wanted to be. It was made worse by the constant loneliness of being shy around people and the desperation to be someone else.
The dismantling of my identity gave me a different vantage point of my life situation. This new perspective allowed me to reshuffle the pieces, and put them together differently. Instead, of being glued to my usual, broken perspective, ancestral medicines allowed me to gain an unbiased view.
During my plant medicine journeys, I began to wonder why I was living like this and why I was not the person I wanted to be. Rather than hovering on the surface, plant medicines allowed me to explore these questions in more depth and illuminated the changes that needed to be made.
As your identity begins to dissolve, youโre left with more room for a narrative. Spaciousness is created, and you finally have an audience with your thoughts and feelings.
Rather than being glued to a biased outlook in which your depression very well might manifest, you start to see life for what it is, and this can be a very refreshing feeling.
During a trip, you may think about different solutions to your problems and paint things in a very different light. You might have originally avoided your problems, while plant medicines push you to confront them and find solutions to them.
Instead of seeing everything as monotonous and dystopic, a different appreciation for life starts to seed in your consciousness.
Plant Medicines Help You Purge Harmful Energies
The reason why plant medicines are such good therapists is because they act as an emotional detox.
We generally have a lot of shit trapped in our energetic bodies which can obstruct the road to clarity and happiness. This junk accumulates throughout your life experience, and unless youโre constantly doing the inner work and learning from these experiences, it gets stuck.
People who are good at processing their emotions regularly detox themselves and prevent this grime from building up. For people who donโt regularly introspect, process, and do theย shadow work, the grime can build to a level of dysfunction.
Therefore, when you take ancestral medicines responsibly, you tend to introspect, confront your issues, and clean out your mental environment. You will tend to pay attention to your emotions, feel them, and process them.
This is why people tend to feel relief after landing back down on Earth after a plant medicine journey because they feel clean. They traveled deep into their subconscious with a broom and put in the hard yards.
Plant Medicines Cleanse You
From the hundreds of sittings with plant medicines I have had in my life, there is no doubt I have experienced some mind-blowing phenomena.
A kundalini awakening, spirits of all sorts, different energies, cosmic states of consciousness, bliss,ย astral projection, gateways into other realms of consciousness,ย spirit guides, you name it.
Anyone who has spent enough time around ancestral medicines will understand that thereโs a whole lot more to healing than what meets the eye.
When involving plant medicines, there is a spiritual component that at first may be understood as simply beliefs and placebos, but it has become apparent, to me at least, that healing is too a spiritual phenomenon and extends beyond our realm of perception.
You may believe that all healing simply stems from fixing the physiology of our brains, and thatโs okay. Still, this belief often prevents people from diving into the deeper levels of consciousness and shoveling out the grime deeply entrenched within it.
Our bodies are more than just sacks of flesh and bone. They are complicated energetic ecosystems with different influences on all levels of reality.
When working with Ayahuasca, a big component of healing comes from the spiritual side of it. The shamans always refer to the plantโs spirit, while the participant often perceives these spirits too.
People may have dark energies or entities attached to them that can cause a host of problems. Plant medicines can ward them off and protect the person who is working with the medicine. Plant medicines can also open you up energetically to nasty things within theseย spiritual dimensions, so itโs important to respect tradition and take plant medicines seriously.
Can Plant Medicines Treat Depression?
The short answer is that it depends. Yes, plant medicines can heal depression, but it isn’t a quick fix. Using plant medicines to heal depression is a process of unpacking all of your emotional baggage, purging dense energies, and resolving the root causes of your depression.
If you do seek out this course of action, it’s important to note that this pathway doesn’t come without its challenges. If you are thinking about using plant medicines to heal depression, you need to go to a reputable shamanic healing center and work with these medicines in a proper setting.
Likewise, you can’t expect to suddenly be healed after a single ceremony. Sometimes it takes people 5 ceremonies, 10 ceremonies, or more to heal from depression. And some people won’t heal because, although plant medicines are an aid, you’re the one who does the healing.
The plants can illuminate what’s wrong and show you a path to take, but if you don’t take that path, chances are you’re not going to see any major changes. Ancestral medicines aren’t magical cures. The plants simply teach us, and it’s our job to listen.
With that said, if you are serious about healing your depression and you’re seeking an alternative to conventional care, then using plant medicines under the care of trained healers could be a good route to take. Just make sure you do the process properly, and realize that it can still be a long road to recovery.