By Margaret De Wys
To journey through the Ecuadorian jungle with composer and former Bard College music professor Margaret De Wys is to embark upon a first-rate adventure worthy of Indiana Jones.
At a year 2000 New Year’s gathering of indigenous healers at the Mayan ruins of Tikal, Guatemala, De Wys encountered Carlos, an enigmatic Shuar shaman, or uwishin. Reeling from a recent diagnosis of breast cancer and seeking a cure, she was instinctively drawn to Carlos, who accurately diagnosed her condition during a session that included initiation into la medicina sagrada—the sacred medicine known as ayahuasca.
De Wys then journeyed to the healer’s home in the upper Amazon and immersed herself in the rigors of village life—no small feat considering many of the warlike, primitive Shuar had never before encountered a pale, fair-haired gringa, unaccompanied by a husband or male relative. She undertook a grueling series of detoxifying and healing sessions in the transcendental landscape of ayahuasca, which she describes in vivid and unsentimental detail. Continuous ingestion of psychotropics and purgatives required considerable strength, mental clarity and fortitude—the “path of the warrior”—but she is now cancer free.
Ultimately De Wys apprenticed with Carlos and his son, and brought them to New York and Canada in 2001. Their subsequent arrest and incarceration (and eventual release) for controlled substances added to the complexity of this engrossing, ongoing saga. (Inner Traditions)
This article is a part of the April/May 2015 issue of Whole Life Times.