Can Ayahuasca Heal Grief? An Interview with Dercas Nidra, Part One

In the first part of this two-part interview, we spoke with Dercas Nidra (his name has been changed to protect his identity). He is a licensed social worker and yoga instructor from San Francisco who leads monthly ayahuasca sessions to help people through grief. Ayahuasca is a tea made from plants that originated with indigenous people in South America. People who drink the tea experience intense visions and other effects through its active ingredient DMT (a psychedelic compound). While the tea is illegal for individual use, Dercas Nidra describes its benefits for psychological healing.

Credit: Nobu Nameta

Marissa: When did you first try ayahuasca? 

Dercas: I was invited to a healing ceremony years ago, and I didn’t know much about it. I classified it as, “It’s a drug, it’s a psychedelic, so I’ll trip. I will see things.” That was part of my preconceived notion. The actual experience really allowed an intensive setting around, “Why am I wanting to drink this tea, and what is it that I want to open my heart to?” I just made a very generic “I’m open to the experience,” and what came up for me was a lot of early childhood loss. I thought through talk therapy that I’d really already addressed that. I spent most of my first hours in my ayahuasca meditation just bawling my eyes out. I just laid there and allowed myself to have a connection to the grief on such a deep level. After that experience, I felt very connected to the person that I lost, which was my mother. I felt a wholeness to the experience of losing her at such a young age. I felt a level of forgiveness and acceptance for it. That’s a shift in something that I kinda had felt for a while. I was surprised that it came back up, and realized I could do further work on it that would clear some other intimacy blocks in my adult life.

Marissa: Have you seen any other people you’ve lost during your experiences with ayahuasca? 

Dercas: In these meditations, I’ve definitely had a sense of visiting people. This is where it gets really complicated to put it into just a couple words. Some people actually train to think of it as “I’m visited by the spirit of.” This is my personal take on it. I very much think of it in the way the T.V. series “Six Feet Under” represents dead people. They’re there, the person is talking to them. You could see that as that’s their spirit, or you can see that as that’s how we internalize that person in your life. I’m open to any interpretation.

Marissa: I used to watch that show all the time. The dead characters talk to the living characters like they’re alive too. 

Dercas: This is the image Hollywood always uses. Sometimes I have that experience of connecting with someone that just made me feel something, and I wouldn’t actually see the person. You get the chance to tie up loose ends. For me it was a sense of closure.

Marissa: So did you visit South America to do this? Or did this happen in the Bay Area? 

Credit: Nobu Nameta

Dercas: It was in Northern California. That’s an interesting part though. Ayahuasca is known to be from the Amazon. It definitely for whatever reason is making its way into the Western world. I think there are many meditation circles nowadays. People don’t have to travel to the rainforest. I also think that I, as a Westerner, being introduced to the medicine by another Westerner, may have a very different experience than if I were following rituals of the shaman of the rainforests. Most people say that this plant medicine is traveling for a reason. There’s this belief of, “How do we shift our paradigms so we don’t annihilate ourselves by our own destruction of the planet, our over-consumption of resources?” Some people believe this will shift people’s consciousness enough that we would hope more and more are tending to the planet in a more kind way. I’ve never traveled to South America. I would love to, but I’m also glad that there’s enough access to it here in the States.

Marissa: I know that this wasn’t always the case. You used to have to travel to South America to get it. Is it even legal to have in the United States?

Dercas: Right. There are two churches in the United States that the Supreme Court ruled could use this tea as part of their ceremony. Likewise, Native Americans have certain legal parameters that they can use other plant medicines during their ceremonies. That puts us in an interesting paradigm, right? If an organization is able to do that, why can’t individuals perform a religious ceremony with themselves or with others? While I’m not a church, I consider this part of my spirituality. So it’s not legal for individuals to use it. That seems like quite a conundrum for the legal world to figure out, when that becomes a bigger issue. I ponder if that will change in our lifetime, and I just don’t know.

Marissa: So how do you get the tea? Without going into too much detail, of course (laughs). 

Dercas: I know that there are a few online spaces that will sell it dried. The plants themselves are completely legal, so that’s not a problem to access them. Getting fresh supplies requires a certain amount of networking. So anyone can go online and order from a couple companies. The actual consumption of a prepared tea is illegal.

Marissa: So the plants are legal, but the tea itself isn’t. What exactly is ayahuasca made from? Are there additives besides the plants? 

Dercas: There are many approaches to it. Primarily what it needs to have is a plant that blocks the stomach from breaking down the other parts of the tea. That’s a whole other story that’s really interesting. How did people centuries ago have the knowledge to combine, out of all the other plants in the rainforest, these two to create this? There’s lots of urban legends around that which are interesting stories, but nobody really knows. There are many people who do different mixtures with it. I learned from my teacher that there’s just two plants, and one has an MAO inhibitor, and the other has the active DMT. There’s a pretty wide way to ingest this medicine. If you try to ingest the DMT on its own, it’ll just be inert. If it’s smoked or snorted, it just lasts for such a short time. Doctors of the Amazon figured out a way to keep these deep trance, meditative states for up to four hours.

Credit: Nobu Nameta

Marissa: What are ayahuasca’s effects? What can someone expect to feel when they drink it?

Dercas: It takes sometimes up to an hour for any effect to come on. That’s why it’s very akin to a meditation. Usually the initial effects are a very light, sometimes warm tingling in the body, followed by some forms of seeing colors. Visual perception changes. Then at about one or two hours, that’s when most people drop into a, I’m nicknaming it a “lucid dream-like state.” Someone is experiencing different things coming up from the recesses of their consciousness. They’re able to visualize this, sense it, all of the ideas, much like a lucid dream. They have a little bit of influence with it. I had a feeling of lucidity sitting with my mom for the last time. I actually felt like I was reliving it. I was also able to experience being myself as a child, being my mother, and then seeing it kind of from a third party. It was realer than real. I was back in that moment. The feeling came up with that third party witness that this is how that moment needed to be. There was nothing I could do to change it, or her death.

That’s one example of what people can experience. People can travel back to a specific time. If they’re doing some healing work, they can get a glimpse into the oneness of the universe or a deep appreciation for plants and animals. People come out with a level of shedding or letting go of an emotional burden. You hear on YouTube people’s experiences as always trying to create a narrative. That can be somewhat limiting because it is what people call a non-ordinary reality. It feels completely real, but it’s not ordinary.

Marissa: Is the experience just hard to put into words for someone who hasn’t tried it?

Dercas: Yeah, I think a lot of people have had that experience. There is a long-term staying power for that awareness. If someone visited compassion in that moment, they come out ready to say, “I’m gonna be kinder to the people I’ve been a jerk to” or, “I’m gonna volunteer.” People will come up with these ways of integrating these experiences. It feels really intense in the moment. That’s why I do consider it to be a powerful medicine.

Dercas Nidra’s Suggested Reading:

1. The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar

2. Inner Paths to Outer Space by Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna and Ede Frecka

3. The Spiritual Emergence Network

Stay tuned next week for part two of our interview with Dercas Nidra, where he talks about facing mortality and grief healing in his ceremonies.