# #122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman.md Podcast: [Giants Shoulder](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930) Published: 2026-05-21T16:35:00+00:00 Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/evanmcgloughlin/episodes/122---Meet-the-Psychiatrist-Training-To-Be-An-Ayahuasca-Shaman-e3jmia1 Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO4092468350.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/episodes/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman Duration seconds: 5990 ## Resource 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… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/episodes/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.