Ayahuasca in My Blood

A friend of mine was going to Peru to take Ayahuasca and was reading this book to help her understand the experience. I decided it might be fun to read about. Boy! and Wow! I just loved this book. I had no idea about all the ins and outs of this drug and the experiences that people might have had with it. FASCINATING. I won't ever want to take this drug, but reading this book was the closest thing to experiencing it. I am glad I read this book. I felt as if I were on a very sacred journey, the way this book is written. Who doesn't want that? The Author, Peter Gorman explains and takes you on a very detailed and spiritually deep exploration of what it is like to do the real thing over 25 years. He uncovers ever aspect of what you could, and probably will, experience taking Ayahuasca. And Ayahuasca is not for wimps. This is not a social drug... this is a complete and utterly deep, mind and body altering experience. I have heard some tales about it, but nothing like the experiences in this book. If you are thinking of taking it, please, please read this book. It is an invaluable resource of one mans, (and a very sensitive and amazing mans) experience of a very misunderstood and complex plant... Ayahuasca. This is a very complete and very deeply personal book. If you want to understand this plant in its complete and complex layers of experience, this is the book for you. I felt like I was on a journey while reading this book. It felt like a very sacred and very spiritual place to look behind the curtain into this fascinating world of ceremony and sacred teachings.

Having been through a number of ayahuasca ceremonies, I read this book with real interest. He does a very good job of relating his experiences and I appreciated his matter of fact and direct delivery. Ayahuasca itself is a topic that doesn't need drama or hyperbole and Gorman maintains a level of skepticism that might not serve him when drinking ayahuasca, but it makes him an excellent narrator. The narrative thread is strong and keeps you interested in his life but I didn't feel like it got bogged down in unnecessary detail. Gorman seems like an anti-hero in his duality of being both afraid of and attracted to ayahuasca. He's not trying to be or portray himself as a saint and he comes across as objective and almost dispassionate at times. And he leads a very interesting life! What an intrepid guy! This book was successful in providing a sense of ayahuasca's potential. Not that reading this will prepare you for what to expect during a ceremony. There is no way to put that in words. But Gorman's book gives really good and detailed accounts of his experiences, visions, meetings with spirits and travel to other dimensions.

Gorman is a good writer who compellingly spins a biography detailing his experiences in Amazonian Peru while he takes a powerful hallucinogenic under the guidance of a funny, likable and very cosmic shaman named Julio. A reporter by trade, he writes investigative stories that piss off powerful people, he goes through a rocky marriage, he goes broke, makes money again, almost gets killed a few times while he bounces back and forth between Iquitos, Peru, New York and San Antonio. His descriptions of hallucinations mirror the turmoil in his waking life, and help him work his way through the many crises he endures over the course of many years. I liked this book a lot.

This is the plot of a lifetime (Hollywood, hello!), a true story glistening with spiritual promise, healing and adventure, with extraordinary visions and interventions, and well written too. Peter Gorman already enjoys some success as a journalist when he first travels to the Amazon; he has taken a few drugs, and he has a budding personal problem qualifying him for a transformative journey. Yet he has never heard of the "vine of the little death" and begins his journey into health and healing as an abstract experiment, "to see the Amazon before capitalism destroyed it". Travelling on water and through the forest, guided by former military man Moises Torres Vienna, Peter hears of ayahuasca and drinks it for the first time with Alphonse, a bull of a man who lives in the jungle outside of Requena, a town south of Iquitos located on an arm of the Ucayali River. In his first vision, the author experiences the realm of the spirit and flies on the white-tipped wings of a big brown bird. The following year, he travels further into the Amazonian hinterland, to the border town of Jenaro Herrera and down the Rio Aucayacu to meet his teacher of many years to come, the honorable Julio Jerena. Peter also befriends Pablo, a man with the face of a jaguar, member of the tribe of the Matses. Over the next few years, jungle immersion turns into the main reason for Peter's visits. He thrives on the rivers and in the Peruvian rainforest, is fascinated by the animals and the plants he encounters there and has fallen in love with the people living along the banks of the Amazon and its tributaries. Ayahuasca helps him ease into this greater reality. The teachings take place at irregular intervals, preferable with Julio but also with various other healers. Meanwhile, Peter has gone from being single to having a family, being married to Chepa from Iquitos. He gets a first inkling of his healing capabilities when he intercedes on behalf of his mother-in-law who suffers from cancer of the cervix, and, again, going through a traumatic period with his son, when the boy falls seriously ill. By now Peter is spending four or five months out of the year in the Amazon and the rest of the year in New York. Six years have passed. Since writing is not enough, and he needs to find a way to finance his family when in Peru, Peter begins to organize healing journeys for American tourists, taking them to different curanderos and into the jungle. And he opens the Cold Beer Blues Bar and Restaurant Madeleina in Iquitos, a hangout where ex-pats and people on expeditions meet with local folk. It is during this time that his alcohol problem becomes acute and his family starts to fall apart. During the next ceremony, in come the master teachers, the doctors who to show him that suffering cannot be avoided. In order to heal this heart, he must relive each and every bad moment of his life. Helped by red magic, he fights his demons until he learns unconditional love. This process takes a number of years. When the doctors finally leave, so does Peter's wife, taking their young daughter with her. There is nothing left for our author but to continue his life with his two adopted sons, his wife's from an earlier marriage, and to keep on going, writing and taking tourists to the Amazon and the healing ceremonies they have come for. During one of these sessions, Peter is magically attacked by two of his enemies, but he fights them off and is rewarded by a stream of unconditional love from his entire clan. He finally realizes what has been missing in his marriage, what he has not been able to give. Half a year later, he quits drinking and comes to terms with his family's new life. Though the outcome of Peter's adventures and life changes remains uncertain, its empathy and racy style make this book a real potboiler with the best - and wildest - descriptions I have read of the state of mind produced by the sacred vine. Susanne G. Seiler

I love this book, at first i bought it as an ibook and i read it all with fascination, i later decided to buy the hardcover edition so it would have permanent place in my library. I think this is THE best book ive ever read. His visions are astonishing. If you get an "internal television" in your head while you read, you will love this book! cant praise it enough!

My favorite book about Ayahuasca so far. lots of knowledge from (in my opinion) a real master which transports the knowledge also understandable for the western non traditional mind.

I very much enjoyed this book

Livro maravilhoso. Fácil de ler e claro. GOSTEI!!!

Anybody interested in Ayahuasca must read this book. Even for somebody with a fair knowledge on the subject (having not actually experienced it myself), this book has a LOT to teach. Buy it now.