Episode
#122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman
- Podcast
- Giants Shoulder
- Published
- May 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5990
- Processing state
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Summary
Want to truly understand your own conscious inner experience? I built a tool and its free - https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Dr Simon Ruffell is a clinical psychiatrist and the CEO of Onaya Science, the research organisation that studies Amazonian ayahuasca healing alongside Shipibo curanderos in the Peruvian rainforest. His team ran the first-ever study on a psychedelic and human epigenetics — finding that ayahuasca methylates the trauma-memory gene SIGMAR1, mapping precisely onto what the Shipibo have called "cleaning ancestral lines" for thousands of years. Expect to learn why a Maudsley-trained psychiatrist walked away from the NHS to apprentice as a Shipibo shaman, what happens when a curandero performs an exorcism on you mid-ceremony, how 80% of veterans no longer met PTSD criteria six months after a two-week retreat, why the curandero traditionally drinks the ayahuasca and the patient doesn't, what happened when Simon gave a Shipibo curandero a hit of pure crystal DMT, why DMT entities might be real and where Robin Carhart-Harris and Andrew Gallimore disagree about it, and much more… Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer 03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo? 04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon 10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself 15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers 26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism 36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore 49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study 52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different 57:11 Should you try this? Preparation and "gringo wasca" 1:04:52 The first-ever psychedelic epigenetics study (SIGMAR1) 1:12:17 "Cleaning ancestral lines" — when Indigenous science met Western 1:16:51 80…