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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, this is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to my podcast, You Can't SAY THAT, the Podcast Where You Can on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:14] Tonya Pinkins: This is my first remote recording during the quarantine.

[0:18] Tonya Pinkins: And I am so pleased to have my guest in conversation with me today, Carlos Tanner, who is the founder of the Ayahuasca Foundation, which is located in Iquitos, Peru, a place that I just came back from a couple of months ago.

[0:38] Tonya Pinkins: And I want to talk with Carlos today about his experiences with Aya and other entheogens and other opiates and other kinds of drugs and my own.

[0:51] Tonya Pinkins: So welcome, Carlos.

[0:54] Carlos Tanner: Oh, thanks so much, Tonya. I hope that you're doing as well as can be.

[0:58] Tonya Pinkins: I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good.

[1:01] Tonya Pinkins: So I was saying, Carlos, that I listened to another podcast of yours, so I know a little bit about your background, but something that is a burning question that I personally have about entheogens.

[1:18] Tonya Pinkins: Well, we can call them drugs. Some people call them drugs, some people call them entheogens, some people call them psychedelics. When I was a young child, probably in elementary school, I know that I made a decision about myself that I felt like I had an addictive personality.

[1:36] Tonya Pinkins: And therefore I was never going to do any kind of drugs. No smoking, no alcohol, nothing. And I was an adult before I ever tried marijuana or anything. I remember the first time I got drunk on some wine, I was in my 20s.

[1:55] Tonya Pinkins: And when I encountered the first plant medicine I experienced, which was Kana about two years ago, I have to say that even to go and try it, I was terrified. I thought I would maybe die, that it's possible I could die, because that's also kind of how I felt about even trying marijuana in my 20s.

[2:17] Tonya Pinkins: I think my greater fear was that I was going to go to some other reality, and I'd never be able to come back, or I wouldn't even remember what the reality I had ever been in from was before. More so even than like, you know, I mean, that's definitely how I felt the first time I did pot.

[2:43] Tonya Pinkins: And when I did Kana, the person who introduced me to Kana was like, oh, you're totally not ready for ayahuasca, which of course made me then feel like, well, I want to know what that ayahuasca thing is.

[2:55] Tonya Pinkins: You talked about being, you know, having found Aya from an opioid addiction, and what I want to talk to you about in that is that for me, most of my experience of just being a person is of not wanting to exist, and I feel like that's different than wanting to die, but maybe it's not.

[3:28] Tonya Pinkins: But most of the time that I've been on this planet, I just didn't want to be here. There was nothing that I ever got that the joy of it or the thrill of it lasted long enough to take away the pain of not wanting to be here.

[3:44] Tonya Pinkins: But I never did drugs because my fear of drugs was greater than the fear of, you know, the pain of not wanting to be here. And so I really wanted to understand what, or have you, if you could describe what is the pain that one feels when one turns to opiates.

[4:05] Carlos Tanner: Well, that's a heavy hitter question. And I'm sorry to hear about your situation and the way that you described it. But I do think that over the last 10 years, especially of observing and getting to know and being a part of people's processes that have come down to our center.

[4:26] Carlos Tanner: We've had over a thousand people do our programs, and it's given me such a unique opportunity to be able to not just evaluate my own personal process and experiences, but really get to know and see if like there are commonalities, which I think there are in a multitude of people that are going through all different kinds of things, but could be reduced down to what I feel is the core cause of all of our health issues, which is generally speaking, trauma, childhood trauma or adulthood trauma.

[4:59] Carlos Tanner: What is trauma? To me, trauma is an inaccurate interpretation of particular experiences, and they are interpretations that typically are created during extreme emotional states, usually caused by fear or terror or extreme negative emotions.

[5:23] Carlos Tanner: And for the reason of having those extreme emotions, the interpretation gets sunk into our being as a core truth or a truth that resonates through our personalities and our actions and behaviors and self-perceptions.

[5:40] Carlos Tanner: And it's kind of like a crack in the vessel that holds our own self-love. And that's kind of what I was hearing when you were talking about how you didn't feel like you wanted to exist.

[6:05] Carlos Tanner: But I will say that saying I'm an opiate addict is only like scratching the surface, really. I was a drug addict in the sense that I didn't really say no to drugs. I chose to call myself an opiate addict.

[6:21] Carlos Tanner: I could have called myself a number of addicts, but it seemed like opiates were the one that had the most detrimental effect on me because I was smoking weed for a decade, you know, before I became an opiate addict.

[6:35] Carlos Tanner: And I was, you know, I took a lot of different drugs. Why did I take them? Well, I definitely there was the sense that it was it made me feel better. Like it that was the most simple thing.

[6:50] Carlos Tanner: Like I felt good when I took them. And I was in a similar place as you. Like I referred to it as a deep depression. I was suicidal. And so maybe, you know, I don't know if how whether I would like distinguish between wanting to die or not wanting to exist the way that you did, but there was certainly something not right.

[7:13] Carlos Tanner: And I felt like I didn't really have motivation to continue on to live on. But if I took drugs, then I forgot about all that. And I could just smile and kind of be present in a good feeling, except that it wouldn't last until and so you did it again, you know.

[7:36] Carlos Tanner: And then that usually would be like, well, what if I took something stronger? You know, what if I did something more than just drink or smoke some weed? Or, you know, what if I took something that people said makes you feel even better or numbs your pain even more?

[7:55] Carlos Tanner: And I think that's probably why I kind of settled in on the opiates, because they are like literally painkillers. You know, sometimes I was snorting painkillers. And so, you know, I feel like it was pretty directly because I wanted to numb myself.

[8:16] Carlos Tanner: And I didn't, you know, when you have childhood trauma and you have and you create like a harmful or a detrimental truth in your reality of your identity, of your self-perception, it starts to infect, you know, it's like an in it's like a small cut that gets infected.

[8:16] Carlos Tanner: It starts to infect everything in your life, especially your relationships, which is such a huge part of what how we define our lives is through our relationships. And if you don't love yourself, or if there's a crack in that vessel, then it just totally infects all your relationships.

[8:52] Carlos Tanner: Whether that means that you're trying to become dependent upon other people who love you, you know, where you need them to love you because you can't refill your vessel yourself, or you can't keep it filled yourself.

[9:06] Carlos Tanner: Because you don't love yourself, because that trauma is a statement that become part of your identity where you don't deserve to be loved, or it's your fault, or you know, you're not good enough. These are like the terms that become the truths of our identity when we have traumas.

[9:25] Carlos Tanner: And the trouble with the trauma is that because they're created in those extreme emotional states, usually extreme negative emotional states, they in those extreme negative emotional states, we are in a hypersensitivity state.

[9:40] Carlos Tanner: You know, we're acutely aware, but we're acutely aware in a really negative way. And so we can't reach that depth in a sober state, like in a normal state. We don't have access to that sensitivity, kind of like you can only see so much if you're on the surface of the ocean, if you're snorkeling, you know, you can only see so much, even though you're looking down, you can see what's down there, but you can't get down there unless you put some scuba gear on.

[10:16] Carlos Tanner: Then you can really get down deep. And trauma happens at that scuba gear level, you know, it's at that depth. And however many times you go snorkel and try to fix it, you can't reach it.

[10:29] Carlos Tanner: And that's why ayahuasca is such a wonderful tool, because ayahuasca is that scuba gear, except that you it doesn't require extreme negative emotion to achieve it. And so by allowing you to access that realm, you can come face to face with those traumas and you can replace those misinterpretations that are detrimental to your health with accurate interpretations that are beneficial to your health.

[10:56] Carlos Tanner: And it's the most incredible experience. And that's what my experience was. And that tends to be the experience that I've witnessed and observed in countless other people who have done our programs.

[11:07] Carlos Tanner: So I've done Aya nine times. I've done it three times at one temple, one time with another corindera, and then five times in Iquitos. I am a person, I've also done shrooms and sassafras and kana, and I'm a person who doesn't have visuals.

[11:35] Carlos Tanner: Um, I often describe um entheogens as intense psychotherapy. Like it takes you to the depth of whatever the shit of your life is, and you get an opportunity to work on it without having to involve other people in that process. That's my personal experience of it. Um, I know, you know, from listening to other people in ceremony circles that that's different from other people. Um, and I've heard you say that you have a very different experience. What is it that you experience when you are um using the medicine?

[12:19] Carlos Tanner: Well, I mean everyone's experience is probably different. There are commonalities. My experience, I've always been a very visual person. I have a degree in art. I've always been an artist. I'm still an artist. And the way my memory works is very visual. Like I put information together based on what I can glean from the images I remember. You know, so if someone says like, when was that? And I try to think about when that was, I'll be like, oh, I can see that I'm in this house, and I know that I lived in that house from these years, you know. And so I derive my information through my memories in a very visual way. And so probably because of that, I have a lot of visions when I drink ayahuasca.

And that's why I really followed this path to the degree that I did, because when I first drank ayahuasca, the very first ceremony, I had incredibly intense visions. And the second ceremony also just incredibly powerful, like meaningful visions. And then the third, you know, and it just kept going. And by the third ceremony, the coronero or the shaman, as most people would understand them to be, told me, like, hey, you've this is your path, because I was telling him about my visions after each ceremony. And um, and so he invited me to become his student and live with him, which I did back in 2004. Um, and so my experiences are very, very visual. And sometimes those visions were unbelievably powerful, like unbelievably helpful, in the sense that we have the term seeing is believing, you know.

So when I saw, for example, here's a great example, like the fourth ceremony. I had been suffering with a digestive issue for three years, and I had gone to doctors, but they weren't able to figure out what was wrong with me. And so I came to the determination, the intention of in my fourth ceremony that I was going to figure it out. And in that ceremony, my spirit left my body and I turned around and I looked at my body, and I knew my problem was, you know, digestion. So I tried to like look through my body into my stomach, but I couldn't. And granted, this is my fourth ceremony, so I'm not very experienced. And so then I decided, oh well, I'll just uh I'll go in there through my mouth. So I somehow just shrunk myself down to bite size, I guess you could say, and went into my mouth and down into my stomach.

And then I was inside my own stomach as an outer visitor. And I quickly saw that there was something not right about my stomach. The liquid in the bottom of my stomach was very murky and gross. And when I looked closer, there were two eyes of a creature in my stomach looking back at me. And I realized, well, I thought I’m not sure, but I realized to me that that shouldn't be there. And so I examined it, inspected it, investigated, and it was a squid, and it had its tentacles like wrapped in my di in the exit hole to your stomach. I'm not sure what that's called. And it was clogging up my stomach so that this murky liquid could reside there so it could live in that murky liquid. And I then plucked like pulled each suction cup of its tentacles off of the walls of my stomach and my intestines, which hurt physically, and then I just threw the squid out of my body.

And then I uh no somehow I was able to just throw it out I didn't have to like get it out of my mouth but then shortly after I went outside physically and threw up. So there was like my vision where I was removing this entity and then that kind of coincided with the physical outside of vision I guess maybe you could say the real world and then I did actually like go outside the ceremony and throw up and but most important I looking back I think this was most important was that I I don't know what happened. You know I couldn't tell you what happened I can tell you that it felt like my spirit was outside my body and I you know I described it the way to the best of my ability as I perceived it just now but looking back I'm open to the idea that it was different than that but it didn't matter because the result was the next day and for the rest of my life since then I didn't have the digestive issue and part of that going back to my statement that seeing is believing is that when I saw that happen and I did it, you know I I wasn't just like watching it, I was participating in it.

I knew that I had fixed it. You know, I knew like that was that's the problem. I can see it. And now I'm now I'm gonna intentionally fix this, remove this problem. And then afterward, I was like, I fixed it. And what added to that even was that I still had the pain. Like there was the physical pain of the suction cups, which were like so deep into my into the walls of my stomach and intestines that when I pulled the suction cups, I could see a wound. You know, there was like all these open wounds from where these suction cups had been, and it hurt. Like I felt the pain. And in fact, I remember thinking, maybe I should just put it back because it hurts so much, you know, like, and but luckily uh, you know, an overriding voice, or maybe the voice of reason was like, no, this pain is temporary.

It will, you know, it will pass, but you'll you won't have the problem anymore. And so it's worth it to like endure this pain for the short time that you will have to. And it was a short time, but that pain also added to the belief, you know. And so to me, like, how do I interpret that experience? Exactly as I described it. Like, I literally do think that there was a parasite in my body, and I found it and I removed it. And but to maybe what's more important was my belief. You know, I was so sure that I was healed that you couldn't convince me otherwise. And perhaps I had a true physiological response to my consciousness changing, and that resulted in a real change that could have been measured scientifically, you know.

So I'm not totally sure. I'm open to the idea. I do think I had a parasite, and I do think I removed it that night. But I also don't want to deny the power of my belief because I do recognize that that was a big part of how I was able to achieve it in such a permanent way.

[19:42] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I mean, for me, I think my personal belief is that the power of the medicine is that they speak to you in the language that you need. The way you describe, oh, let me stop. Starting again. Um, the power to me of the medicine is that they speak to you in the language that you need. As I listen to you describe that story, it was terrifying for me. If I had had a vision of something with eyes inside of me, I would have gotten too scared. I would not have had the courage to go physically pull that. That's not that's like you, you that hits my button. So, you know, sometimes when I've done shrooms or if sometimes in the medicine the pain feels like it's going to kill me, I am actually perfectly comfortable with going, okay, if I'm gonna die, let's just die.

But the idea of some parasite or bug, like bugs are my thing. And in fact, when I was in Peru in January, um there was a night I had been sleeping in the maloca because I'm particularly afraid of cockroaches. And um, you know, there are a lot of cockroaches in Peru. And there was a night when everybody, we had no ceremony and everyone went back to their rooms, and I was going to sleep in the maloca alone, and someone offered to sleep with me, but there were so many cockroaches, I couldn't. And I sat in the kitchen on the table and stayed awake all night because there were bats overhead and there were rats in the kitchen and there were cockroaches. And I kept thinking to myself, if I have to get through cockroaches to get enlightened, it's not gonna happen in the flight time.

And um, you know, one of the things that has moved for me since doing medicines is I've actually found a reason to exist. Like it's enough for me to exist to enjoy my children or to be able to create. But when I was in Peru, that feeling of not wanting to exist came up that night with the cockroaches. And it was a feeling of you know, there's just no point in your being alive. You should just die now. Your kids will get a lot of money. There's just you or there's you're just useless. There's nothing more for you to do in life. You should just go. And I was determined that I was leaving. I didn't care what it cost, who I had to pay, I needed to get out of there. Um, and I spoke to our facilitator, and he asked me to for the next ceremony see if I could find the child place in me that um where that was sourced.

So when you talk about a traumatic thing, um what came up for me in the way, and I'm gonna describe the way it came up for me because you know, some people are visual and some people are not. So I don't have a lot of childhood memories. Yes, my childhood most of my life was pretty traumatic. Up until maybe two or three years ago, lots of trauma. Um, so I had to find a photograph, one of the photographs that I could that exists of me as a child, and go and talk to that part of me, and then uh ask it to the question, and it took me back to more of a physical sensation memory of being a child.

[23:11] Carlos Tanner: And my mother used to beat me severely, and there was not a visual, but there was the physical memory of being beaten when I was two or three years old, and the beating was so severe that I felt I was going to die, and I was going, and I had to leave my body to even survive the beating.

[23:30] Carlos Tanner: And the thought feeling that kept going through my mind was my mother was beating me because I existed.

[23:38] Carlos Tanner: My existence had ruined her life.

[23:41] Carlos Tanner: She had me when she was 14 years old, and my existence ruined my life.

[23:46] Carlos Tanner: And so, in having that sensation thought feeling, it suddenly was like, oh, well, of course, you don't want to exist because your existence means you someone wants to hurt you because you've ruined their life.

[23:59] Carlos Tanner: And somehow that experience of that lifted that. Now I can't say that it's not going to come back again, and I certainly have other addictions that I do from my trauma, primarily food, but that's the way in which the IS speaks to me. It's more, more language and bodily feeling.

[24:13] Tonya Pinkins: Totally.

[24:19] Carlos Tanner: Yeah, I mean, like I said, it happens differently, but the commonality, as you can see, is actually quite similar. Like there was you, you what you described, at least the way I heard it, was that you sank a truth that was actually not true, but you thought it was true, and it sank down to the depths of who you are that it infected everything and that was that you are the reason your existence causes suffering and it causes suffering in the person that you love the most but in general it causes suffering and that inaccurate interpretation became a truth for you and there was no way that you could get to that same level of depth because you couldn't you know you wouldn't replicate that in order to reach that level you said like you had to like leave your body just to survive that's the the level of extreme emotion that was involved in it and and so the only way to replace that is to have some sort of matching or overriding state of being that can get you down to that level of depth at least that's the words I'm going to use to describe it.

[25:48] Carlos Tanner: And ayahuasca actually can create such a hypersensitivity state and yeah it's it's not it's not a vacation by any means but but it's not done in the same level of terror or the not done in the same level of negativity as what you what caused the trauma.

[26:11] Carlos Tanner: And so it's like in a safe setting in a way like you you feel safe that you're with people that are not trying to hurt you and that you have everyone is sharing a similar intention to better themselves and and you're with people that you trust and you know all of that package and the way the ceremony the rituals are all done there's this format that gives you the idea and the safety that there's things in control and so that you can go down to those depths and and not freak out I mean to me it's uh it's an absolutely brilliant and incredibly advanced system of accessing a hypersensitivity state in a controlled setting that can match or override the hypersensitivity states that are caused during the formation of traumas but it sounds like for you the whole experience it wasn't just like what happens in a ceremony it was the entirety of the experience that contributed to it and I think that's a big part of it as well like the healing process doesn't just take place inside the Maloka although that was where you were but meaning it doesn't just take place under the influence of the ayahuasca brew itself.

[27:29] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[27:29] Carlos Tanner: Most of the time it's a you know it's a complicated combination of all these different factors and the ayahuasca ceremonies kind of pull the pieces together or they connect the dots to those pieces but they're not but ayahuasca itself is not just the only component.

[27:50] Tonya Pinkins: Now have you done um you know worked medicinally with shrooms?

[27:50] Carlos Tanner: Well mushrooms were definitely my favorite uh thing to do before I found ayahuasca, I do feel like I was working medicinally with them, but without any particular guidance or tradition.

[28:10] Carlos Tanner: Unfortunately there there really isn't the same uh intact tradition of use when it comes to mushrooms.

[28:18] Carlos Tanner: But I do feel like mushrooms are the future of psychedelic therapy, and that mushrooms will most likely be like a huge part of our future generations when they try to deal with similar problems like childhood trauma because they're so readily plentiful and they're also like easier to do than ayahuasca.

[28:38] Carlos Tanner: Um, you know, like you can you can smile, you can enjoy yourself.

[28:44] Carlos Tanner: I mean, not that you know, there are times, of course, when you're smiling and enjoying yourself in ayahuasca ceremonies, but I think that ayahuasca would probably be reserved in therapeutic senses for more extreme cases, whereas mushrooms would be used for the general population and their attempts to deal with their own childhood traumas because we all have them, you know, and there's always a spectrum, and everyone's worse, you know, everyone's worst trauma is still at that same point on their spectrum, even though people's spectrums are going to be very different.

[29:20] Carlos Tanner: My spectrum is nothing like what you just described.

[29:24] Carlos Tanner: I wasn't physically beaten, but yet my worst of my spectrum was still the worst.

[29:30] Carlos Tanner: You know, it was still at the far end of my spectrum, just like yours was at the far end of your spectrum.

[29:36] Carlos Tanner: And the result of that is a similar level of detriment to our self perceptions and our our self love.

[29:46] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[29:47] Carlos Tanner: I often feel like when I read about psychedelics or I um watch videos or things about them, that so much of what people put out there is like they make them sound like party things.

[30:03] Carlos Tanner: And I have not found shrooms or mushrooms to be party experiences.

[30:09] Carlos Tanner: I mean, shrooms, I get nausea, I get the chills.

[30:13] Carlos Tanner: They may take me to a blissful space, but the doorway to get there is kind of hard.

[30:20] Carlos Tanner: And with Aya, though I have had nights of bliss on Aya, you still gotta go through some stuff.

[30:27] Carlos Tanner: There can be a lot of vomiting, a lot of pissing on yourself, a lot of shitting on yourself.

[30:31] Carlos Tanner: I mean, you know, you sit around the room and you're like, I'm paying for this, I'm paying for this.

[30:39] Tonya Pinkins: Why the press is so like is this to seduce people into thinking it's something that it's not?

[30:44] Carlos Tanner: Well, I mean, again, um, I I'm a big fan of metaphors, you know, and I really like the snorkeling to scuba diving metaphor, that's one of my favorites.

[30:56] Carlos Tanner: And and because I kind of feel like it's you can you can understand it.

[31:00] Carlos Tanner: If you go scuba diving and you go deep enough, there are some like crazy creatures down there, you know, like the stuff that you can find when you go down deep um can be really frightening.

[31:11] Carlos Tanner: But that's like for people that have uh deep traumas.

[31:17] Carlos Tanner: But if you don't have that deep of trauma, going down that deep can be really fascinating.

[31:23] Carlos Tanner: You know, for other people, it's like tremendously fascinating.

[31:27] Carlos Tanner: They're exploring, you know, and so it's the same thing, except that what they're finding when they get down there is not the same.

[31:36] Carlos Tanner: You know, they they might have they might have dealt with their traumas, you know, halfway down, and but they keep going further.

[31:44] Carlos Tanner: And now it's now it literally is like uh a fun exploration for them.

[31:49] Carlos Tanner: And there are those elements.

[31:50] Carlos Tanner: I mean, myself included, obviously I've done ayahuasca for a long time, uh, compared to most like Westerners.

[31:58] Carlos Tanner: And some of those times were definitely like fascinating explorations.

[32:04] Carlos Tanner: And some of those times were definitely like really deep struggles and challenges, and you know, really uh not what I would call pleasant, but the results were beneficial.

[32:16] Carlos Tanner: And and so, you know, I don't like who's talking about what, you know, it's so hard to say um what every person's going through, but I can I can relate to people that look at, especially with mushrooms, I would say, that that look at mushrooms because a lot of it is your intention.

[32:35] Carlos Tanner: And so it's very rare to hear someone say, like, hey, I'm going to a party and I'm gonna take ayahuasca.

[32:41] Carlos Tanner: Like that that's just not part of the culture, at least not maybe, maybe it is in Los Angeles or or Hollywood or something.

[32:49] Carlos Tanner: But but for the most part, people know that if you're going to take ayahuasca, you're going to a ceremony, it's for healing.

[32:56] Carlos Tanner: There will be, you know, some unpleasantries, there will be a struggle, there will be work to be done, you know.

[33:03] Carlos Tanner: Whereas mushrooms, because there's not that culture, that it's it's lacking in in any intact uh connection to traditional culture.

[33:11] Carlos Tanner: Um people are taking them like, hey, I'm going to a party, we're gonna eat some shrooms.

[33:16] Carlos Tanner: And, you know, and so your intention is to have fun, and therefore, you're not actually strapping on the scuba gear.

[33:23] Carlos Tanner: You know, you're not, you're not saying, like, I'm gonna go do this and deal with this and face my trauma or face my shadow or look at the stuff that's at the core of my suffering.

[33:33] Carlos Tanner: You're not trying to do that.

[33:34] Carlos Tanner: And so you're not doing that.

[33:36] Carlos Tanner: You're just uh, hey, look at the cool colors and doesn't this music sound good?

[33:41] Carlos Tanner: And and I honestly, I have nothing against that.

[33:44] Carlos Tanner: Like, I think that's fine.

[33:46] Carlos Tanner: Like, people should have fun.

[33:48] Carlos Tanner: You know, I'm not, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

[33:51] Carlos Tanner: Um it would be totally weird, I think, for someone to do that with ayahuasca, but that's because of my background and my path and everything that I've do with my life, you know.

[34:02] Carlos Tanner: So I'm even open to the idea that maybe some people are just having fun partying with ayahuasca.

[34:09] Carlos Tanner: I think the puking and the shitting, like you mentioned, probably would put a damper on how much fun you can have.

[34:18] Tonya Pinkins: This is Tonya Pinkins, and that was part one of my conversation with Carlos Tanner, the founder of the Ayahuasca Foundation in Iquitos, Peru.

[34:29] Tonya Pinkins: Come back and join me for part two on the Broadway Podcast Network.