Ayahuasca is a psychedelic substance used in entheogenic brews as a traditional spiritual medicine. Indigenous people in the Amazon region of Peru say that the spirits of the plants will guide them in their spiritual practices.
Ayahuasca is inactive if consumed without a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) plant to help it absorb and create the psychedelic experience. The Ayahuasca experience hyperactivates the brain and makes it possible for us to rewrite our old patterns of trauma in order to help us heal issues that are far in our past.
In fact, this plant has also been helpful in recovering old memories and making it easier to understand ourselves and heal from those events.
In the early 1950s Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes was the first to talk about this substance outside of the indigenous communities. These communities were using the plant for both healing and divinatory purposes.
The video below looks into the scientific discoveries about what is going on inside our brain when we are on the shamanic Ayahuasca brew. It also looks at how our brain patterns cling to old traumas causing almost a scar tissue effect in the neurons making it really hard to rewrite our patterns of behavior and healing from trauma.