TRIPPING WITH THE AMAZON'S HEALING SHAMANS

Dean Jefferys Recounts His Part In A Controversial Trip, Reports Elisabeth
Tarica.

Filmmaker Dean Jefferys first stumbled into the mysterious world of
hallucinogenic shamanic rituals in 1992. He had travelled to the headwaters
of the Amazon in Ecuador to film tribal people defending their ancestral
territory from an American oil company.

He met a shaman - a tribal spiritual guide and medicine man with
encyclopedic knowledge of jungle plants and their uses - and had his first
experience with the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca.

"When I came back to Australia there were some people involved in a similar
ritual using similar plants," he says. "I realised how extraordinary the
whole situation was, surrounding the ritual and how it was coming out to
the west after being locked away in the Amazon for thousands of years."

Nearly seven years later, Jefferys, with heavily pregnant wife Willow and
one-year-old daughter Jasmine, headed back into the wild heart of the
Ecuadorian rainforest.

Jefferys says that even though ayahuasca rituals are banned in every United
Nations country in the world except Brazil and Peru, it is the largest
psychedelic religion in the world.

Millions of people in the Amazon take part in the ancient ritual, which
involves drinking a combination of two hallucinogenic plants in the
presence of a trained shaman.

He also filmed several western groups who use the brew. One practitioner is
a Brazilian woman developing a program with ayahuasca to help heroin
addicts beat their addiction.

It is believed that drinking the ayahuasca brew allows the shaman to enter
other dimensions where complicated healings, shamanic battles,
clairvoyance, initiations, and communication with the plant, animal and
spirit worlds are possible.

Jefferys, who directed and produced the documentary, says the function of
the shaman is to carry information between these worlds.

"It sounds really bizarre and like hocus pocus, and before I experienced it
firsthand I thought that was the case, but when you actually see it and you
see the result, there's quite a science to it," he says.

He stresses that using ayahuasca is not a free-for-all drug-fest.

"It is not a party drug, it's a definite shamanic journey," he says. "The
first time I had it, it really shook me to my bones, it freaked the s--t
out of me. But I wanted to do that because I am putting it out there
through this documentary and I wanted to really see what it was. If you do
it without the proper guidance, it can scare you and you won't do it again
- - in that respect I felt it was OK to put it out there."

Colourful computer graphics simulate the visions the drug created.

One vivid memory for the documentary maker "is laying outside on the ground
after vomiting (from the foul taste) and the shaman came out and he was
rattling his leaves over me and chanting and it felt like I was levitating.
He wrapped me in a silkworm cocoon of purple light and I was just floating
in space."

The same shaman "saw a blocking in my stomach and the interference and a
problem in my spine which flared up completely a couple of weeks after I
got back and I was hospitalised for four days."

Shamans of the Amazon screens tomorrow at 8.30pm on SBS.