Joe Wicks plans trip to the Amazon for mind-bending drug session

The fitness guru has revealed he wants to take the plant brew ayahuasca. Steve Boggan has personal experience of the drug and advises Wicks to proceed with caution 

Wednesday 16 December 2020 13:38 EST
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Joe’s jungle juice: Wicks faces a journey into his own mind 
Joe’s jungle juice: Wicks faces a journey into his own mind  (AP)

I am deep in the Amazon rainforest, anxiously losing my mind as the world begins to disintegrate. Around me, all sense of distance is wrapping itself up like spatial origami, slowly shrinking until an entire dimension has disappeared. A moment ago, I was surrounded by 200 people dressed in white and singing like angels, but now they occupy the same space as me… if that makes any sense.”

This is what I wrote in my diary after taking ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic South American brew beloved of shamans and spiritualists. In some cultures and religions, ayahuasca is regarded as a sacrament, to some backpackers it provides a trippy drug experience and to curious New Agers it is considered a window into the soul.

It is the latter of these that the fitness guru Joe Wicks, 34, is hoping to experience after announcing this week that he would like to travel to the Amazon rainforest to try it for himself. During an interview on The Diary of a CEO podcast by fellow entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, Mr Wicks discussed his difficult childhood with a heroin-addicted father and said he would consider therapy as “personal training for the mind” but would prefer to try ayahuasca.

“I really like the idea of doing an ayahuasca session,” he said. “I am drawn to it because of that gateway and opening up even more love and more connection. We are all so interconnected, and you can meditate for 10 years or you can go and do an ayahuasca ceremony and it is like a fast-track to that feeling.

“I was once in Tulum in Mexico and they were doing peyote [hallucinogenic cactus] ceremonies and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. But I would love to do ayahuasca one day, go into the Amazon, do it properly with a shaman and feel that Mother Nature that they talk about, that feeling of the Earth being connected to the human race. It must be a wonderful feeling.”

Well, yes, Mr Wicks, it is… and it isn’t.

I experienced the drug in 2008 while writing an article about the Santo Daime, a real, Brazilian government-sanctioned religion that uses ayahuasca as a sacrament, again with the blessing of the government. The church, based on Christianity and the worship of animals and nature, was making small inroads into the UK but ayahuasca is regarded here as a class A drug. I saw a clash of cultures on the horizon.

The religion has a Shangri-la type community deep inside the Amazon rainforest and so, with a photographer, I spent four days travelling from the UK to Sao Paulo, then on to Rio Branco via Brasilia. Next came a seven-hour bus ride along a 200km mud track to the frontier town of Boca do Acre. Finally, after a day’s ride in a motorised canoe down the river Purus and a web of tiny tributaries off it, we arrived at the community – just as its members were about to attend a ceremony and take the sacrament.  

Taking ayahuasca can be terrifying. But if you think it might help you deal with your childhood, it might be right for you. Only you, and the ayahuasca, can ever know

They welcomed us into a vast, open, star-shaped wooden church. All the men wore brilliant white suits; the women white dresses and shining tiaras. We were led to positions marked with lines on the floor of the church and told to sway, three steps to the left, three to the right, while the first of 129 hymns were sung; the ceremonies can take as long as 12 hours.

After a few minutes, hatches opened at one end of the church and the ayahuasca – a tea made from the vine of one Amazonian plant, bannisteriosis caapi, and the leaf of another, psychotria viridis – was handed out. It tasted vile, horribly bitter and sour – and, as ayahuasca is an emetic, it was not long before the sounds of people retching could be heard from male and female toilets outside.

Within 20 minutes, feeling nauseous and rocking back and forth in my allotted space, I began to notice that straight lines were becoming curved. The shrieking of monkeys and a growling sound from behind my head suddenly made me feel paranoid. I turned and behind me was a red door, bulging off its hinges as if in a children’s cartoon.

At once completely out of my mind and yet oddly lucid, I immediately knew what this represented. My father had died recently and behind that door was a world of unresolved grief. I leant forward with all my might to stop it opening in front of these 200 strangers.

At once completely out of my mind and yet oddly lucid, I immediately knew what this represented. My father had died recently and behind that door was a world of unresolved grief

This is one of the reasons Wicks wants to take ayahuasca. Participants in sessions say that it helps them to journey back in time and space to significant moments in their lives that they haven’t dealt with and which might have damaged them psychologically. One study in particular, by Charles Grob, professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, found that it offers potential in the treatment of depression and addiction. It isn’t unusual to hear proponents of ayahuasca claim that one session on the drug is like 100 sessions in therapy.  

After a while, still pushing at my invisible door, I felt a tap on my shoulder and was told to take another cup of the tea. I drank it and the hallucinations became more graphic and disturbing. The door came back and, again, I struggled to close it. The floor beneath my feet became transparent and I could see roots travelling to the other side of the Earth.

Wherever I looked is where I felt I was. I could see everything from all angles at the same time. I remember thinking that this was omnipresence but only God – if there was one – could be omnipresent. I felt embarrassed and so looked over to the women on the other side of the church to take my mind off the door, the missing dimensions and the world beneath my feet, but they all appeared to have grown beards. It was as if the drug was saying: “Don’t look at them, Deal with this.” It wanted me to focus on my door and the grief behind it.

I was offered a third draft of ayahuasca but turned it down and went to bed. During the night, still under the effects of the brew, I journeyed in time to situations with friends, family and lovers that I hadn’t handled well, and I identified moments when I should have said “sorry”, or “thanks” or “I love you” but hadn’t.

I woke the next day with no trace of a hangover, feeling calm and refreshed. More than anything, I wish I had allowed that door to open. It took me years to get over the death of my father, but now I wonder whether the ayahuasca might have helped me deal with it there and then, in that strange church in the Amazon jungle.

So, Mr Wicks, taking ayahuasca can be terrifying. But if you think it might help you deal with your childhood, it might be right for you. Only you, and the ayahuasca, can ever know.

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