Where:   Ecuador

Who:  My twin sister Cat and me

What:   Ayahuasca Journey with a Shaman

Why:   Transformative Healing

Cat and I hooked up with a U.S. grassroots organization offering an opportunity to engage with about a dozen shamans, or spiritual healers, in the Amazon and the Andes.  The indigenous hosts advocated “reverse missionary” work, encouraging Westerners to come to their territory not to proselytize our way of life, which they regard as bankrupt, but rather to learn new dreams, as they put it.  The shamans challenge Western visitors to change our vision to one where humans are no more superior than a rock, a leaf, a bird, a star.  To change our vision to understand that a non-material reality shares validity with the material world.   To change our vision to protect and help indigenous communities to preserve their land, the rain forest, their way of life. 

Our small group flew on a six-seater Cessna airplane into Shuar territory in the Amazon basin.  Four rivers in Ecuador flow into the Amazon, and the Shuar live along the most southern one, the Pastazos River.  The Shuar were once deadly feared as “headhunters.”  Although they had forsaken that practice some fifty years ago, a certain macabre reputation lingered.  The Shuar settlement we visited, Marisal, lives outside the monetary system, without phones, television, and infrequent electricity from broken-down generators.  They travel in pirogues (dug-out canoes) rowed with six-foot long poles.  Six months prior to our visit Peru and Ecuador settled a land dispute, resulting in a reunification of Shuar peoples and families who had been separated for half a century by artificial borders.  The Shuar continue to be vulnerable to the avaricious encroachment of Western oil companies. 

Shuar territory is thick jungle.  Tarantulas as big as a fist.  Blinding blue butterflies that whizz by like a dream image.  Four-inch long beetles with glistening metallic green backs.  Toucans, parrots, monkeys, tapirs and trees so wide six people hold hands to encircle them.  Usually the temperature is excruciatingly hot and humid; you sweat just sitting still.  Plus constant rain.  Yet, during our visit the climate befriended us with Palm Springs weather and not a drop of rain.

I came to the Amazon for an ayahuasca healing with a medicine man.  I was introduced to Mariano, a shaman who had never done healings on Westerners.   He spoke some Spanish but mostly his nephew translated from Shuar to Spanish which I speak and understand.  In a private session with him he asked me what healing I needed.  I told him:  I am basically a happy person but I have these nubles oscures around me that I want to be free from.  These “dark clouds” I referred to were the bane of my existence, my addiction to cigarettes, a pack a day for 27 years.  I tried the patch.  I tried bets.  I tried cold turkey (once for a year).  Each effort was an exercise in sheer will power, with one path of self-dialogue (“I can have just one”) eventually trumping all internal dissent. 

Ayahuasca is a very integral part of the Shuar people’s culture and spirituality.  It is one of the most potent natural hallucinogens in existence.  It comes from the vine of a tree and the shaman prepares it in a liquid form.  The Shuar take ayahuasca to journey for information/wisdom from the other world, and to heal.  We visited a Catholic mission run by a Belgium priest with a long white beard who’s lived with the Shuar for almost 40 years.  Respecting the Shuar, he incorporates their beliefs into the Catholic church, but the Catholic part is hardly recognizable.  For example, in the round straw hut which is the church in the spot where the crucifix would normally hang, instead there is a drawing of a Shuar indian getting divine inspiration while on ayahuasca.   

After listening to my case for why I had come to him, Mariano inquired, “Have you ever done ayahuasca with any other shaman to cure this problem?”   “Uh, nope, uh I can’t say I ever have.”  I chuckled to myself — Not many practitioners of this sort in my neck of the woods. 

Mariano instructed our little group to fast the entire day and to hike four hours in the jungle while he prepared the ayahuasca for that evening.  The hike was a marvelous adventure that culminated at the sacred waterfalls.  They are the only hot springs in the Ecuador Amazon.   There’s one spot where you stand under thermal water falls and an arms-length away are regular waterfalls.  You move from hot to cold, hot to cold, hot to cold, a wondrous sensation.   At one point Cat bumped into an oblong nest hanging from a tree and within seconds she was covered with thousands of ants swarming her body.  Fortunately we had just crossed a creek; our Shuar guides grabbed her before she had a chance to panic and flung her into the water.  The ants were not poisonous but could bite.  For hours thereafter Cat picked drowned ants out of her hair and off her clothes. 

That evening the ayahuasca ceremony took place in a round straw hut with a fire in the middle and an opening in the roof for the smoke to escape.  Jungle birds made exotic sounds — oooAH, oooAH.  Some of the shaman’s assistants were snorting liquid tobacco to be able to stay up all night for the journeying and they contributed to the aural strangeness by shouting out cryptic words that I was told meant, “The anaconda is here,” or “The spirit of the jaguar has entered the room.”  Their shouts were the equivalent of a congregation’s enthusiastic Amen for a rousing preacher. 

The ayahuasca that Mariano prepared was a neon orange liquid as bright as a traffic cone.  It tasted utterly vile!  Cat once described ayahuasca as tasting like lizard vomit.  I was given a shot, followed by a slug of firewater, a crude alcohol.  Violent vomiting is the standard response to a dose of ayahuasca, but I didn’t vomit.  I didn’t hallucinate deeply either.   I was disappointed that nothing was going to happen to me.  Little did I know . . .

Mariano wore a pair of skimpy loincloth-like shorts.  Entranced from the ayahuasca, he softly wailed an eerie sing-song.  I can still hear his voice in my head, sort of high pitched the way you would imagine a fairy chanting.  His singing put me in a different mood, different space, even though I wasn’t hallucinating.   I was lying on a bench in front of Mariano, naked from the waist up, as he had instructed.  Mariano did an energy scan on my body and then without warning he began to suck my stomach.  He sucked as if he were a hyena eating fresh kill – he made these primitive guttural noises and then spit on the ground.  Eventually he made his way up to my eyes.  He was standing on a little stool hunched over my face and was ravenously sucking my eyeball.   I envisioned him as a vulture-like bird with both claws perched on my left cheek.  I swear if he had wanted to he could have taken my eye out of its socket and spit it on the ground. 

After about a half hour of sucking and singing, Mariano told me to go to bed, adding these promising words, “When you awake in the morning you will be cured.”  The ayahuasca kept me up all night, but not like some restless tossing and turning state of insomnia.  I lied on the cot in my hut serene with my eyes open.  Although I didn’t sleep the entire night, the next morning I felt rested as if I had slept eight hours.  It was as if sleep were suspended. 

The next morning I met with Mariano and he gave me three orders.   I was not to have sex or eat meat for a month and something to do with wearing a hat outside.  I faithfully followed his instructions.  At our guides’ suggestion, I gave him twelve American dollars. 

2009 marks the tenth anniversary of my ayahuasca healing and I have not once been tempted to smoke.  Whereas I used to have to rally my will power and galvanize an inner discipline to stop smoking, now after that miraculous exorcism the mere smell of tobacco nauseates me.  Shape shifting is how the shamans call it.  My shaman sucked negative cigarette energy from me, spitting it out of my life, and cured me of whatever turbulence had manifested itself through a loathsome addiction.   Blessed be to those healing spirits.   

How did someone with a name so completely Celtic as Colleen McGuire come to possess an Italian passport? 

My mother’s parents immigrated to America from a little village in Italy, in the exact center of the country, in the region known as Abruzzi.  My grandfather did not become a U.S. citizen until after his daughter was born (1924) which in Italy’s eyes made my Chicago-born mother a de facto Italian national from birth.   As if to convey a poetic confirmation of her roots, my grandparents named her Ora Lora Spadafora.  Say it three times and you just might start to levitate. 

Although Mom has never visited Italy, the circumstances of her birth trigger some loophole in Italian law that permits her children to become legal Italians.  My sister and I applied for citizenship through the Italian Consulate in New York City, a process which required the seemingly unattainable production of seemingly extinct documents, such as Grandpa’s 1886 birth certificate and our grandparents’ marriage certificate.  

After two years of de rigeur Italian bureaucracy (lost files, documents confused, mistaken instructions to re-apply at the Boston and Chicago Consulates), I finally received an Italian passport on Valentines Day, 2005.   Italian citizenship means I am also a European citizen and this coveted status allows me to live and work legally in Greece.  It’s been quite useful having a US and European passport, but I’ll save those capers for another story.

Although Mom’s father Oreste was born in Abruzzi, his father immigrated north from a Sicilian town called Spadafora which means “swords out.”   Family lore has it that the Spadaforas were guards of the principality, although I wonder if this is just an Old World euphemism for Mafia connections.   

Sicily was an historically prominent colony of ancient Greece, as evident by the glorious ruins abounding in Siracusa, Taormina and other Greco settlements.  Mighty King Agamemnon who launched the Trojan War had a son named Orestes.  These two factors (Grandpa’s Sicilian origins and his storied first name), although scanty evidence by my lawyerly standards, compel contemporary Greeks to insist that I am Greek, too.  I am content to let that myth float . . .

I was the first to return to Italy, in 1974, to the little village of Corfinio in Abruzzi where Oreste and his wife Francesca Colella were born and married, but died an ocean away.  Grandpa lived to be 100 years old, yet once he settled in the New World he never returned to his homeland.  We still had lots of famiglia in Corfinio, including Grandpa’s nephew, Alfredo Trippitelli.  

My most vivid memories of my first visit surround the meals and eating.  Hand-rolled pasta in a multitude of crazy shapes and colorful names.  Spaghetti sauce, not from a jar, but from hand-squashed shiny red tomatos.  Wine from grapes grown on the backyard vine. My relatives incessantly commanded me to “eat, eat” in their Abruzzesa dialect,“man-yia, man-yia.” (The correct Italian pronounciation is “man-jah”).  Unaccustomed to the volumes of food served, early on I threw up, prompting Fiorangello (“Little Flower”) weighing in at 300 pounds, to heartily remark, “Bene.  Now you can eat more” as if he were a manager at one of those ancient Roman vomitorium. 

Over three decades passed before I returned to Corfinio in the summer of 2006, this time with my sister Cat.   We still seem to be related to half the town.  Villagers approached us detailing the bloodlines that tied us to them.   Everyone seemed to know our business, where we were staying (at Achille Colella’s self-built hotel) and when we were returning to Roma (about 2 hours drive away).   One of the things that intrigued me most this time was the history of the town itself.

During the Roman Empire Corfinio was known as Corfinium.  Tiburtina Road (which still exists in Rome today) passed straight through Corfinium, beginning in Roma and ending at the Adriatic.  It was the east-west version of the Appian Way which runs north-south.   Remnants of the ancient wall lining the Via Tiburtina still tower in Corfinio over 2000 years later. 

A number of tribes in this region united under the name “Italics” to challenge Rome’s authority and domination.   The capital of the Italics was Corfinium and money was minted in Corfinium.  The name on the coins was “Italia.”  Corfinio’s modern residents proudly assert that these coins were the first known reference to the word Italy.  Later in Rome, we asked a professional tour guide, an archaeologist, the origin of the word Italy.   Unconvincingly, she replied, “It’s always been this name.”  

Eventually, the Romans overthrew the Italic peoples and Corfinium’s name was changed to Pentima (accent on first syllable), perhaps standing for repent.   The town’s name remained as Pentima for almost 2000 years until 1928 when Mussolini, enamored with resurrecting Italy’s ancient glory, changed the name to Corfinio.  My sister and I spied a public water tap with “Pentima” written on it which is how our Nana used to refer to her hometown.  

What a lark that I wound up living in Greece instead of Italy.  No matter.  When Greeks and Italians encounter each other, they fondly proclaim, “Una Fatsa Una Ratsa,” (one face, one race) which means they come from the same stock.   Honestly, I feel at home in either land.  

My sister, Cat, and I are twins, born on April Fools Day (unbeknownst until that moment to our mom and her doctor), and we wanted, as usual, to do something special on our birthday on April 1, 2007 when we were, for a change, both in New York City.  

Exuberant Lynette Chiang of Bike Friday had introduced me to an architect, David Holowka, who had created an architecture bike tour of Harlem.  He agreed to host a birthday ride and he graciously extended the invitation to the New York City Bike Friday crowd.  

Seven of us gathered on a Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. at Central Park North under cloudy skies — a perfect day for an urban tour.  Had the weather been sunny, we all might have instead been cruising down River Road.  Also, few drivers had yet ventured outdoors.  

David rode a Brompton and loaned his other folding bike, a Moulton, to Zak.  Riding regular bikes were my sister Cat and me, former Transportation Alternative president Charlie Komanoff and another architect Roger.  We all envied Bennett’s Bike Friday, a shiny red Pocket Tourist.  My neon orange Bike Friday Crusoe was waiting for me in Greece. 

David led us to the Teresa Hotel where Fidel Castro once stayed and Nikita Krushchev visited him.  Across the street we studied the Adam Clayton Powell statue with all the legislation he passed noted on the bottom.   David pointed out Stanford White buildings on Strivers Row, Duke Ellington’s home, Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated, the apartment building where Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. Dubois lived (which had unobstructed views of Yankee Stadium), and Alexander Hamilton’s home,  Hamilton Grange, that was originally located several blocks northward and was delicately moved in the 1800s.    

One apartment building we visited was known for its distinct terra cotta tiles that were also used at Ellis Island.  David said the tiles were made so well (a lost art) that during renovations to the immigration building only 17 tiles out of 26,000 had to be replaced.  (There are only a handful of artisans who can still make terra cotta tiles.) 

David introduced us to Sylvan Place, a charming one-block street that looks more like New Orleans than New York.  Behind it on a hill stands the Morris Jumel mansion, the oldest home in New York City.  George Washington used to stay and hosted many dignitaries.  

Astor Row is another unusual street for New York because the small apartments all have a sitting porch and grassy front yard.  

We capped the morning off with brunch at a delicious soul food restaurant (heart shaped biscuits!) called Miss Maude’s Spoonbread II on 125^th Street.  

It was a terrific two hour tour enhanced by David’s entertaining and illuminating stories.  We could not have covered so much ground in such little time but for the efficiency of our bicycles.  A number of Harlemites took notice to the effect, “Look. They’re all on bikes” as if cycling were a novel form of transport instead of the most effective means of locomotion in an urban environment. 

 Photo, Left to right:  Charlie, Roger, Cat, Colleen, Bennett, David posing in Sylvan Place

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COLLEEN F. McGUIRE  — I was a housing rights lawyer with my own law firm in New York City for 16 years until the gods of Greece called for me.   I now run CycleGreece, a company offering awesome odysseys on ancient terrain.