TV and film actress Greta Gerwig plans to attend a psychedelic healing session during an upcoming visit with her shaman healer, and she doesn’t seem to know, or care, if the practice is legal. Gerwig stated: “I’ve only had nice experiences with hallucinogens.”
“I am planning on doing it in a month,” the No Strings Attached actress told Page Six Monday after her first visit to a shaman, who is also her yoga instructor.
Shamans are known throughout the Amazon as medicinal healers who are psychotherapists, advisors, and priests, all in one.
Gerwig’s upcoming healing session will reportedly include an “ayahuasca ceremony,” which is described by Page Six as a shaman-guided ritual in which followers drink a psychedelic Amazonian tea that causes vomiting and hallucinations and which apparently is therapeutic.
Gerwig spoke to the site at a Lexington Brass afterparty for her boyfriend Noah Baumbach’s upcoming film, While We’re Young, which premieres this Friday and includes a scene using ayahuasca.
“Noah’s like, ‘Seriously, you’re really going to go to a shaman? Like, for real?’ But I think it’s great,” Gerwig said of Baumbach’s reaction to the news.
“You have to work up to ayahuasca,” she further explained. “I’m supposed to start with another drug first, which she’ll lead me through, and then two months later I can do ayahuasca.”
She continued: “I’ve only had nice experiences with hallucinogens so I believe it will just continue.”
The actress refused to name her yoga instructor/shaman, stating: “I feel like I shouldn’t say her name… Are those drugs illegal? I’m not even sure.”
The site reports the tea’s plant ingredients are legal. However, the resulting mixtures technically are not, because they contain the psychedelic compound DMT.
Fox News’s Dr. Manny Alvarez recently weighed-in on the practice of taking ayahuasca for the purpose of healing mental, emotional, or physical disorders which do not respond to other treatments on Health Talk.
Guest Chris Killiam, an expert on the practice and author of The Ayahuasca Test Pilot’s Handbook, describes the concoction as a powerfully psychoactive brew made in the Amazon by shamans, which is as powerful as LSD.
While millions worldwide are now reportedly indulging in the practice of ayahuasca healing, it is illegal in the United States, and has been labeled a schedule 1 drug by the federal government.
Watch Dr. Alvarez discuss the topic with Mr. Killiam: