Pod Insights The Tim Ferriss Show #768: What Happens When Israelis and Palestinians Drink Ayahuasca Together? About this episode Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast. For this episode, I’m doing something different. I’m featuring a very special episode from a brand-new podcast called Altered States https://psychedelics.berkeley.edu/altered-states-podcast/.
Here’s the teaser for the episode you’re about to hear: “For the last couple of years, producer Shaina Shealy has been following Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who have been coming together to drink the psychedelic brew ayahuasca in an effort to heal their collective intergenerational trauma. It seemed to be helping them when suddenly the region erupts into chaos and violence.”
Shaina Shealy was a fellow from the Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship https://fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/bcsp/, which offers ten $10,000 reporting grants per year to journalists reporting in-depth print and audio stories on the science, policy, business and culture of this new era of psychedelics. The fellowship is supported by my foundation, the Saisei Foundation https://saiseifoundation.org/, and made possible in collaboration with Michael Pollan, Malia Wollan, and others at UC Berkeley.
Altered States looks at how people are taking psychedelics, who has access to them, how they're regulated, who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society.
[00:00] An intro to the Altered States podcast and its mission.
[00:02:24] Shaina Shealy explains what ayahuasca is and how it affects the human brain.
[00:03:47] Palestinian Sami Awad’s peace activism and ayahuasca journey.
[00:17:18] Dr. Rachel Yehuda and the science of intergenerational trauma.
[00:19:27] How the Israeli-Palestinian ayahuasca experiment came about.
[00:25:47] Participants share their experiences.
[00:38:35] How the violent events of October 7th affected the participants and the project.
[00:45:52] Reflections on the experiment’s effectiveness and participants’ continued commitment to peace.
[00:50:29] Closing credits.
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Transcript 7,460 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Tim Ferriss? At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.
0:06 Speaker 01 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:08 Speaker 02 No, it would seem inappropriate.
0:12 Speaker 01 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
0:24 Tim Ferriss? Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. For this episode, I am doing something very different. I'm actually featuring a special episode from a brand-new podcast called Altered States. And I listen to a lot of podcasts. I test out a lot of podcasts. I found this one to be particularly impressive. It's very well-reported, very well-researched, very well-produced. Here's the teaser for the episode that you're about to hear. It's not a long one, but it is a very nuanced one, a very powerful one. Quote, "For the last couple of years, producer Shaina Shealy has been following Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who have been coming together to drink the psychedelic brew ayahuasca in an effort to heal their collective intergenerational trauma.
1:09 Tim Ferriss? It seemed to be helping them when suddenly the region erupts into chaos and violence." Shaina Shealy, as background, was a fellow from the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. That's how I actually heard about the podcast. And the fellowship offers 10 $10,000 reporting grants per year to journalists reporting in-depth, print, and audio stories on the science, policy, business, and culture of this new era of psychedelics. It's been going for a few years now, and a lot of amazing pieces have come out of it. The fellowship is supported by my foundation, the Saisei Foundation. You can find that, S-A-I-S-E-I, foundation.org if you want to see what types of projects and grants and so on we've made.
1:48 Tim Ferriss? And it is made possible in collaboration with Michael Pollan, Molly Owallan, and others at UC Berkeley. So thanks to the entire team over there. Altered States, the podcast, looks at how people are taking psychedelics, who has access to them. They actually have an amazing episode where they walk through in real time someone's first experience with psilocybin, how they're regulated, who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society. It's hosted by journalist Arl Doom Ross, and you can find it wherever you find your podcasts. And now, the Peacekeepers episode from Altered States.
2:26 Speaker 03 Welcome to Altered States. I'm Ariel Zumroth. This week, we are traveling thousands of miles away from where I am in Oregon to the Middle East to hear about another kind of psychedelic experiment. This one involves ayahuasca. Producer Shaina Shealy brings us this story.
2:44 Speaker 03 So, Shana, welcome. First off, I know some folks might be familiar with ayahuasca, but others have probably never heard of it. Tell me, what exactly is ayahuasca?
2:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, so ayahuasca, people typically drink it as a sort of tea, and it's made out of a vine from South America, which is often brewed together with another plant. It's a type of shrub. And that shrub contains something called DMT, or dimethyltryptamine.
3:11 Speaker 03 So what do we know about what ayahuasca does to the brain?
3:15 Speaker 04 So usually about 30 minutes after drinking it, some people start having these hallucinations. Others have out-of-body experiences or euphoric feelings. There's often vomiting involved. For some people, there are visions. Researchers have found that ayahuasca can promote what's called neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to adapt and build new connections. In this case, increased adaptability is thought to be able to help people heal from traumatic experiences.
3:48 Speaker 03 A few years ago, you came across these peace activists who were using ayahuasca to heal, and eventually you started reporting on that story. So can you tell me more?
3:58 Speaker 04 So these activists are Israeli and Palestinian, and they gather to drink ayahuasca in an attempt to heal trauma, both personal trauma and collective trauma. And I knew a bunch of them from previous reporting in the region, and I was really interested just in the links that these people went to to build empathy.
4:18 Speaker 04 And then October 7th happened.
4:25 Speaker 04 Suddenly, the work of healing was interrupted by this massive shockwave. And these activists sort of looked to the group and to one person in particular to help them navigate it all. That person was Palestinian peace and justice activist, Sami Awad.
4:42 Speaker 03 And that's why your story starts with Sami in his home in late summer 2023.
5:01 Speaker 04 In Sami Awad's kitchen, near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, a small group of people are gathered around a table. A handful of Israelis, a woman from Brazil, one guy from Ramallah. They're all sitting there around plates of eggs and zatar, watermelon, balls of cured labanah and olive oil. They were laughing, eating breakfast.
5:25 Speaker 04 Sami describes his home as sort of an oasis for Israeli and Palestinian activists from all over. It's where they can be together and find refuge from the harsh reality of living under forced separation.
5:39 Speaker 04 Sami's home office is filled with hundreds of books on meditation, yoga, psychedelic medicine, healing. He's in his 50s, and he's been working in the world of peace building for over 25 years.
5:54 Speaker 04 Sami's peace work started when he was 12 years old. He was with his uncle, an influential nonviolent peace activist. They were planting trees on a Palestinian farmer's land that was under threat of confiscation by Jewish settlers.
6:08 Speaker 05 I remember Michael saying, "No matter what happens, you're here to plant trees."
6:12 Speaker 04 The group of activists was mixed, Palestinian and Israeli. They were hours into planting when a group of Israeli soldiers approached them.
6:21 Speaker 05 A soldier coming, pulling the tree out of the ground that I was planting and throwing it on some rocks. And in that moment, there was this split decision. What do I do? Because as a 12-year-old, you know, what options? I could run away. I could hide, run to my uncle crying. A 12-year-old. And I was like, "You're here to plant the trees." And I decided, "I'm going to go back and bring the tree and plant it." And I did that. That sense of feeling, wow, empowerment and then losing the fear.
6:54 Speaker 05 That action changed my life. It made me actually want to commit my life to this work.
6:59 Speaker 04 The work of peace building through nonviolence. Days after Sammy went with his uncle to plant trees, he learned that the land had been confiscated by Israeli settlers, that all the trees they had planted were uprooted. Still, Sammy would go on to plant even more trees. By the time he was in his twenties, he was organizing boycotts and peace demonstrations, sometimes alongside Israeli peace activists. But his actions kept getting shut down. He was beaten, imprisoned, put on lockdown. And then, in 1993, came the Oslo Accords, a deal between Israeli and Palestinian leadership that was supposed to kick off a peace process in the region,
7:43 Speaker 04 including limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Then-President Bill Clinton served as a diplomatic broker.
7:53 Speaker 06 Let us today pay tribute to the leaders who had the courage to lead their people toward peace, away from the scars of battle, the wounds and the losses of the past, toward a brighter tomorrow. The world today, thanks, Prime Minister Rabin, Foreign Minister Perez, and Chairman Arafat.
8:16 Speaker 04 Sammy was optimistic.
8:18 Speaker 05 There was billions of dollars of funds coming to create and sustain that peace that was being created. And all of a sudden, you started seeing NGOs begin to emerge, begin to rise, money pumping in like crazy.
8:33 Speaker 04 He built his own organization, Holy Land Trust. It became well-known for nonviolent activism trainings. But even with this tireless dedication to peace, the world around Sammy became more and more violent.
8:49 Speaker 07 Both sides committed to negotiating an end to the conflict and charting a path to Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. It triggered a violent backlash from religious extremists among both Israelis and Palestinians, including Hamas.
9:05 Speaker 05 We're beginning to see this continuous loop of failures in the peace process.
9:09 Speaker 07 And in 1995, a right-wing Jewish extremist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itzak Rabin.
9:18 Speaker 04 This big plan towards peace began to unravel almost immediately.
9:25 Speaker 04 Over the next decade, there was the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, deadly attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
9:33 Speaker 05 During that time, we began to understand the need to heal collective trauma as part of peacemaking as well, understanding how much the past influences us.
9:41 Speaker 04 It was 2007. Sami was in his mid-30s and had begun to take an interest in reading up on trauma when he was invited to go on a pretty unconventional trip to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He spent eight days there, sleeping at the camp, eating all his meals there.
10:01 Speaker 05 So we were there every day, doing our own ceremony and prayer and visuals, remembering the people that died. I had like lists of names of people that we were all given to recite continuously, so like eight-hour meditations we were doing. I began to really see that, wow, this is something that is not an incident that just happened in the past, this is something that continues until this day.
10:28 Speaker 04 Pre-COVID, around 40,000 Israeli students visited concentration camps as part of their school curriculum each year. The trips are sponsored by Israel's Education Ministry, typically right before mandatory military service. While Sami was there, he kept seeing school group after school group.
10:47 Speaker 05 Israeli kids with Israeli flags wrapped around them, big flags, and they're walking and singing. I heard Israeli teachers tell these kids, "The Holocaust is not over. As Jews, we are always threatened, we're always attacked. Many people want to destroy us." And of course, then it's followed by, "This is why we have to be strong, this is why we have to be resilient, this is why security above everything, and this is why we never trust anybody." What the hell is happening here? Like, how can you be even talking about peace with somebody when the the foundation is we don't trust them?
11:22 Speaker 04 That night, Sami slept in Birkenau, in the barracks where children were imprisoned. He was there with a Jewish person from Israel and a Muslim person from Bosnia.
11:36 Speaker 05 We just had candles and our very thick coats and sleeping bags. And just remembering, like being in that place where these children were there and were dying. But also having these discussions about this issue of inherited trauma.
11:52 Speaker 05 I began to realize that this whole peace process that we were in, that I was in, that I was even supporting and advocating for, was embedded from a space of existential fear and threat. The Palestinians, we have a similar narrative, that our existence is underlined, we need to do something about it. If we don't do something about it, we will cease to be as a people.
12:19 Speaker 05 What happened to us is too shameful, too painful. We don't talk about it.
12:24 Speaker 04 Sami says a lot of Palestinians don't really acknowledge the full scope of pain that their families have endured. Like the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, or really any other traumatic events.
12:41 Speaker 05 We have a generation growing up not knowing what happened and listening to propaganda. And the propaganda is, we are resilient, we are strong, we will return, we will defeat them. Not acknowledging, like, there is grief that needs to happen. There is pain that needs to be expressed of what happened to us as a people. There's a healing. But to not address these issues makes us unhealthy in how we're dealing with things.
13:06 Speaker 04 When he got back to Bethlehem, this is what Sami wanted to focus on: healing. To address the trauma that gets passed down from generation to generation. He read books on this intergenerational trauma. He studied the Rwandan genocide and the healing journey that followed.
13:27 Speaker 04 He also met with Israelis studying trauma, including faculty at Hebrew Union College. They developed tools for Israelis and Palestinians to work through their pain together. At the same time, foreign governments were pouring billions of dollars into the region to advance these peaceful coexistence programs between Israelis and Palestinians. There were summer camps, organizations that raised up the voices of parents who had lost children, theater troops, art projects. And still, around two decades after Oslo, Sami felt things were worse than ever.
14:04 Speaker 05 You see the wars in Gaza. You see settler violence towards Palestinians. See how Palestinians are treating each other. What do I... All of this money, all of this investment, where is it all? All of this peace processes, 25 years of negotiating. The reality is as messed up as it's ever been. Things now are worse than any time before. All of the peace work, all of the money that was spent. And so for me, I was in this place, we need something new. We need something new.
14:31 Speaker 04 That's when he got a phone call. It was from an Israeli couple around 2012.
14:37 Speaker 05 And they say, "We have a peace project that we want to involve you with."
14:42 Speaker 04 Sami rolled his eyes. More Israelis who think they have the answers. He almost hung up.
14:49 Speaker 05 And the woman started yelling at me. "No, we have to come and we have to meet you, and it's very important, and don't bring anybody, and it's just you."
14:56 Speaker 04 His interest was piqued. He went to meet them.
15:00 Speaker 05 I said, three things came to my mind. Either this is some money laundering scheme, something to do with drugs, or something to do with weird sex. And she just started laughing, laughing. I said, "It has to do with the second one." And then the guy looked at me. He looked at me straight in the eyes, and he said, "Have you done medicine before?"
15:19 Speaker 04 He was talking about the psychedelic brew ayahuasca. As the man explained his vision, all Sammy could think about were the dangers. Sammy says drugs are kind of taboo in Palestinian society.
15:31 Speaker 05 It's not just illegal, it's immoral, it's illegitimate, it goes against religion, it goes against social values.
15:40 Speaker 04 People who drink ayahuasca have described emotional breakthroughs, conversations with anthropomorphic spirits, catharsis of traumatic events, and connections with ancestors. So even though Sammy was terrified, he thought it might be worth trying. He traveled through checkpoints into Israel to join the couple for an ayahuasca ceremony. He downed a cup full of the sludgy tea, and soon, he was vomiting.
16:09 Speaker 05 It's an energy that comes out. It's, uh, I, my Persian is very loud, for example, people know me for this. It's like moaning and yelling out, it's releasing something that's coming out of your body.
16:23 Speaker 04 Sammy continued going to these ayahuasca rituals, and he felt that the ayahuasca actually helped him understand his own wounds more clearly.
16:33 Speaker 05 For me, my, my trauma, I would say, is more coming up from my experiences living under occupation that I had to, to live through and, and work with.
16:44 Speaker 04 He saw slashes of memories, confrontations with soldiers as a child, getting arrested.
16:51 Speaker 05 Having my oldest daughter born during the siege of Bethlehem in 2002, when everything was under lockdown.
16:58 Speaker 04 Having to sneak his wife to a hospital while she was in labor. Sammy says the experience was like watching his subconscious being tumbled around in a washing machine. He felt that maybe something in this extreme vulnerability could be key to healing.
17:16 Speaker 05 I felt, I felt there was something in it.
17:19 Speaker 08 I would define intergenerational trauma as the idea that the effects of extreme stress can be passed to future generations.
17:30 Speaker 04 Dr. Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, and she's the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division and the Center for Psychedelic Therapy Research at Eichen School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She's interested in the way trauma affects the body. Someone whose ancestors experienced trauma might have a hyper vigilant response to fear, both in the brain and the endocrine systems.
17:58 Speaker 08 That is some in substance, really, of the intergenerational biology. You've got a better threat detector. It's like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop and you're not enjoying even the peace and security as much as you could.
18:14 Speaker 04 When someone, like Sammy, is constantly in fight or flight mode, always seeing or anticipating danger, it can be exhausting. And if you come from generations of people who have also survived in that kind of traumatized state, that core fear and anxiety is compounded. And that's what perpetuates the cycle.
18:36 Speaker 08 You don't have choices about being able to erase the past. But you can decide to use all your energy to make sure these things don't happen to other people. You could say, "Never again." Or you could feel very paralyzed by the very real scars that are often inflicted as a result of trauma.
19:04 Speaker 04 And by tapping into what Yehuda calls "the reservoirs of inner consciousness," ayahuasca could offer a way to revisit those scars.
19:14 Speaker 08 If you can tap into ancestral wisdom, and not just ancestral burden, that you can really be in a position to cope better.
19:27 Speaker 04 Soon after Sammy Awad's first ayahuasca rituals with Israelis, he began bringing other Palestinians with him into Israel. Eventually, he brought the brood back into the West Bank and started inviting Palestinians and Israelis from his peace activist circles to join him in ayahuasca ceremonies.
19:46 Speaker 05 And then slowly inviting people and in these spaces to see like what happens when Palestinians and Israelis are in ceremony together.
19:54 Speaker 04 These ceremonies were all underground. The legal risks were high, for Palestinian participants especially. But people came. Sammy doesn't know the exact number, because all of this was happening informally. But he guesses around 50 Palestinians and twice as many Israelis were taking part in these ceremonies. And Sammy says that ayahuasca is not some kind of panacea. The intention of the people drinking it is what matters.
20:23 Speaker 05 Ayahuasca is not a peace medicine or a love medicine. There is abuse of the medicine. There are people that use medicine to create racism. I mean, there are neo-Nazis that use medicine to achieve their goal. There are settlers not far from where I live that drink ayahuasca to receive confirmation from God that this is their land and it belongs to them. If you are with Palestinians and Israelis with intention, you experience that sense of oneness, of we are one, as one community. The connection, the boundaries that are let go, the fear that is let go, the singing, hearing Israelis sing in Hebrew, and Israelis hearing Palestinians sing in Arabic, and
21:04 Speaker 05 reciting the Quran, and like, there is healing.
21:10 Speaker 04 These ayahuasca rituals weren't solving any geopolitical conflicts. But compared to the hundreds of peace-building activities Sammy had led, he felt that the ayahuasca actually helped people connect across barriers of mistrust. Because when people drank it, they seemed to confront their own deeply embedded fears.
21:32 Speaker 05 For the first time, I experienced deep, deep healing in that spaces.
21:39 Speaker 04 At the same time, thousands of miles away, an Israeli neuroscience and psychology researcher studying psychedelics in the UK had heard about these underground circles in Israel and Palestine.
21:52 Speaker 09 And there is something funny about it, in some ways. There's something very hopeful about it. There's something maybe even very triggering about it.
22:02 Speaker 04 Lior Rosman grew up in a Jewish family in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. Now, he has a PhD from the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, and works as a senior lecturer and researcher in the Psychology Department at the University of Exeter. A few years into these underground ayahuasca circles, a friend put Sammy in touch with Lior. They met around 2019, and they decided to put together a research project. They wanted to know if ayahuasca could maybe help soften people's national identities, to move beyond these identity groups and into a feeling of oneness.
22:43 Speaker 04 It sounds wishy-washy, but the organizers define peacebuilding as not just a state of harmony, but a striving for political liberation as well, for a movement against Israel's occupation of Palestine and the oppression that comes with it. Lior felt ayahuasca had the potential to inspire some sort of radical political shift.
23:05 Speaker 09 Sometimes, we think about psychedelics based on oneness, and harmony, and acceptance, and all these things that are nice. We're all from the Middle East, we all eat hummus, we all in the oneness of the medicine. But you know, you dilute the political anger. So it's kind of like, the risk there is that it dilutes the forces that also bring change. There are also other experiences, like especially those of insights of something that ruptures like our consciousness, that bring something new. Like, there's also this revelatory, revolutionary potential there that excites, can excite people. Can be visions of collective trauma, it can be apocalyptic visions, it can be very painful visions, and then they inspire people to bring change.
23:51 Speaker 04 Bringing change was the goal.
23:55 Speaker 04 And Sammy Awad also felt this wouldn't happen without difficult visions or revelations.
24:01 Speaker 05 You cannot just jump into it, sit together and celebrate with each other. Because that will be just a fake thing that will happen. You have to go through deep journeys, dark, dark places for many people, very, very painful places.
24:15 Speaker 04 Sammy and Lior had this idea that psychedelics can manifest both unity and diversity at the same time. When trauma expert Rachel Yehuda first heard about the project, she was curious but skeptical. She considers ayahuasca to be an ego dissolving drug, and she figured that taking it could help people confront their inherited pain and fear.
24:40 Speaker 08 You know, it's a fantasy, it's a wish, and yet it's probably worth trying.
24:47 Speaker 04 But, Yehuda says, it's not a pharmacological silver bullet.
24:52 Speaker 08 Look, if you want to know what I think the magic ingredient of this here, it's the fact that you wanted to do this. It's the fact that you wanted to come together in a room with people who were Israeli or Palestinian. People wanted that intergenerational healing. Intention is so powerful.
25:16 Speaker 04 Sammy and Lior decided that the experiment would take place in the summer of 2022 in the mountains of Spain, where authorities seemed to turn a blind eye to psychedelics. They chose 15 Israelis and 18 Palestinians for the program. There was also a Brazilian medicine man, a Palestinian medicine woman, and an Israeli group therapist helping Sammy and Lior facilitate. One prerequisite for participating in the program was that participants had to have used ayahuasca previously. The first few days of the experiment focused on the past. There was Suli, who was from a town outside of Jerusalem.
25:55 Speaker 10 And my family has been living there, like for centuries.
26:01 Speaker 04 People answered questions about their personal identities and shared family stories. There was also Rotem.
26:09 Speaker 11 I have grandparents from Russia, Poland, and one from Morocco.
26:15 Speaker 11 They see themselves as like those who established the state.
26:19 Speaker 04 And Sharon.
26:21 Speaker 12 Everyone was Zionist, everyone wanted to be combat soldiers.
26:26 Speaker 04 And Mariam, who grew up in a Bedouin township.
26:29 Speaker 02 The townships, a lot of shoots, people die. Even the infrastructure is not a real infrastructure. I was scared to speak in Arabic because they would make fun of me. And no matter how good and nice you will be, you will always say, "Arab, your nanny, no matter what you do."
26:50 Speaker 04 People shared their stories as part of an effort to set the intention of the group for this ayahuasca experience. The purpose was healing and envisioning a collective future together. Sammy and Lior facilitated and observed. After a day of fasting, the study participants dressed in white and sat together in a dark room, illuminated by a single candle. One by one, people stepped forward to drink ayahuasca. The researchers recorded.
27:30 Speaker 02 And I took the ayahuasca and the ayahuasca tastes like chocolate with lemon and with chocolate with like expired chocolate.
27:46 Speaker 02 Like brown black, like oil, and it's very thick. So for me, it was really hard to swallow. And then the first struggle was to keep it inside. Because first it get in, then it want to get out. It just sat on my stomach, then I vomited and it was so loud. It was with like a scream, "Get out of me, Annie."
28:15 Speaker 13 And the song that we started singing there was, "Ya fatima, ya fatima, lakiru, ya fatima."
28:27 Speaker 13 It was very strong, like it was really a strong night, a lot of crying. I can really feel myself melting into the way she sings.
28:38 Speaker 02 And we hugged like for, it felt like an hour.
28:48 Speaker 04 As the sun rose, the effects of the ayahuasca wore off. People slept or chatted. The next day, Sammy and Lior and a group therapist facilitated day-long integration circles where they made meaning out of their experiences. Some people made art, paintings and sculptures. Others wrote commitment letters with lists of new commitments to themselves and others. Not everything fully made sense to everyone, but people went around sharing takeaways and trying to put words to their experiences.
29:25 Speaker 02 The medicine she just gave me, so many visuals that really embodied what is the problem with myself.
29:37 Speaker 04 One participant, Mariam, spoke about how the experience helped her realize that her peace activism came from a place of anger.
29:45 Speaker 02 It's the only way that I know how to work.
29:48 Speaker 04 Mariam is a Palestinian Bedouin in her 20s. She's the one who thought the ayahuasca tasted like expired chocolate. She grew up in Israel, going to Israeli schools and encountering racist bullying daily.
30:03 Speaker 02 It was a horror, like, what are you? You are terrorists, you're anti-Semitic.
30:09 Speaker 04 She was first introduced to ayahuasca in one of Sammy's ayahuasca circles. And she's using a pseudonym for this story because she feels it's dangerous not to.
30:19 Speaker 02 I need to stay anonymous because what I do is comes against my religion, my community.
30:28 Speaker 04 After Mariam purged, she fell asleep.
30:31 Speaker 02 And then I have a lot of beautiful visuals in my uterus.
30:37 Speaker 02 Flowers, a lot of flowers. And then when they got to my head, they turned to like swam flowers, like stuck in my head and like the kind of flowers that looks very not good. And then I remembered like visions of memories, like very hard ones.
30:56 Speaker 04 She saw herself as a child.
30:59 Speaker 02 Like, actually, wow, I did really good in the circumstances that I was put in. And in the moment that I was starting to feel so much empathy, and I was feeling mercy for everyone in the room. I was laughing a lot, I was crying a lot. And then in some point, I just saw my ancestor in front of me. And then she was telling me that I need to go deeper, like to know them more, like to ask my parents more about them, and they will lead me to the answer. And I saw their faces and they go looping, looping around my head. And I was like, God.
31:36 Speaker 04 The answer, she says, was love.
31:39 Speaker 02 So I take my time like thinking what I want to do. And my activism now looks spreading more love than, spreading more love for one's culture first, like to love himself. And I think it helps to meet the other.
32:03 Speaker 04 Others in the experiment discovered hidden connections.
32:07 Speaker 13 Meeting with the other side was something that I felt is healing. My pain that I had from the army, or my pain that I had in my life and my family.
32:19 Speaker 04 Liel is Jewish, grew up in a right-wing Zionist family outside of Tel Aviv. During the Second Intifada, a bloody time in Israel's history, he and his family joined demonstrations against the peace process. Two of Liel's grandparents survived the Holocaust. Others fled Libya in the 60s, after the state confiscated Jewish property and Jews were subject to violent attacks. This was the anxiety that Liel had inherited and carried with him his entire life.
32:51 Speaker 13 The main idea was that the world is an ugly place, a violent place, and every people should take care of themselves because no one else would take care of them.
33:03 Speaker 04 This was the wound he was hoping to heal when he signed up to participate in the experiment. He had been working on it for a while. During his mandatory military service, he had a kind of political shift. And he eventually left and moved to the desert to become a farmer. He later joined various peace groups and signed up to facilitate dialogue with teens.
33:26 Speaker 13 But eventually, when I tried to bring it home, you feel a displacement ideologically, mentally, politically. There was no place to hold it.
33:37 Speaker 04 He was hoping the experiment in Spain would provide something different, something more sustainable. When he got there, one of the first things he noticed was participants were encouraged to bring their own songs and rituals, like this one woman in his group.
33:53 Speaker 13 She sang this song around Fatima. Ya Fatima, ya Fatima. La kiroh ya Fatima.
34:03 Speaker 04 During the ayahuasca ceremony, after Liel had drank and purged, the group sang. Liel says he just melted into the words of the song.
34:14 Speaker 13 And I felt them like I couldn't feel beforehand. The feeling maybe created the most powerful experience for me, which is like the fear from the language or the trauma around their language is being melted.
34:29 Speaker 04 The song was in Arabic, a language that Liel's father speaks, but that, as a kid, Liel never wanted to learn.
34:37 Speaker 13 The wound of my family, being expelled from Libya, caused a wound between them and the Arabic people and Arabic culture in general. So if we believe in intergenerational trauma, like needing to hide this language, it has ingrained in me.
34:55 Speaker 04 But ayahuasca presented him with this sort of instant connection with the language.
35:00 Speaker 13 Something that belonged to the past or was connected to a wound of displacement, disconnection. So for me, being with Palestinians is a way to heal that historical trauma of the Jews in general. But being able to feel safe, to trust the world again, to be in a place of healing and forgiving and for change.
35:28 Speaker 04 After the Spain experiment, Liel went back to his peace dialogue groups in Israel with a reinvigorated energy. In the process of bringing people together, Mariam made plans to start a political art magazine. The content, she said, would stem from a place of love rather than anger. And over a dozen participants came together to start a new project to celebrate and protect a river valley called Wadi Kelt from being destroyed by encroaching Israeli settlements. Some participants met for additional integration circles in the desert of Jericho. Others met for integration circles on Zoom. A year after the Spain project,
36:11 Speaker 04 many of the participants were still meeting regularly to integrate the experience but also to just hang out. They throw parties where they're living out this new vision of Israelis and Palestinians just being together.
36:32 Speaker 04 In late summer of 2023, I went to witness this in person at Liel's birthday party on a farm. People spoke English and Hebrew and Arabic.
36:45 Speaker 02 I think in a first glance, you see just like a normal party where everyone like having a good time. But then you hear Arabic, Hebrew languages almost equally. And you're not, of course, in a hospital.
37:01 Speaker 04 I caught up with Mariam there at the farm.
37:04 Speaker 02 And I think for people coming from the outside, it will be like abnormal, I would say. Like, is it even impossible? Like, to be Palestinian and Israel isn't so close and just like...
37:19 Speaker 02 Normal, not in a normalizing way, but normal in a very radical way. And a lot of fun. Being in this community where you're always been seen in the best light you can be seen at. It's really helped you to love yourself, actually, unconditionally.
37:39 Speaker 04 This love, she says, is the only thing that helps her feel hopeful for the future.
37:45 Speaker 02 Like, you're so secure for who you are. So when you meet the other person, it creates a real interaction. And it will make him automatically, or her, to have the same approach.
38:00 Speaker 04 Sami and Lior have been compiling their notes into a research study about the project, which hasn't been published yet. And while they haven't concluded that the experiment brought Palestinians or Israelis closer or further away from peace, they do say that, based on participants' surveys, the project culminated in high ratings of comunitas, a sense of togetherness among the participants.
38:27 Speaker 05 We are kind of like in the first steps of a consciousness shift that's happening. And maybe others will follow.
38:35 Speaker 04 Months after my conversations with Sami and Lior, Mariam and Liel, violence erupted in the region.
38:43 Speaker 14 The Islamist militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel. The assault began early in the morning with Hamas firing thousands of rockets from the Gaza Strip into neighboring Israel.
38:56 Speaker 03 Shana's story continues after the break. Stay with us.
39:09 Speaker 03 Welcome back to Altered States. I'm Ariel Zomoros. Before the break, producer Shaina Shealy was recounting how she reconnected with the peace activists she had been reporting on following October 7th and the start of Israel's war on Gaza. Shana tells the story from here.
39:25 Speaker 04 On October 15th, a week after the deadliest attack in the history of the Israeli state, followed by deadly airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian participant from the Spain Project, Suli, sent me this voice note.
39:42 Speaker 10 Exactly the time that we need all the love and the forgiveness and big hearts. Like, where is my conscious sitting? Actually, it's really to keep my soul, my heart, open for compassion for people in Spain, no matter which sides. And I really hate the word "sides" to say. Yeah, some people go back to their tribe right now. A lot of people, even among activists, unfortunately, because they can't take it. And I'm sticking to my...
40:17 Speaker 04 Throughout the devastation, this group of ayahuasca drinkers has continued to meet, mostly virtually, since movement across Israeli checkpoints has been limited since October 7. While Sammy has been facilitating these groups, he also says they've been helpful for him personally.
40:35 Speaker 05 There is this continuous intention to understand hatred towards the other. And that the moment we deeply understand where it's coming from, then maybe we have access to working with it and to healing it and to ending it.
40:51 Speaker 04 Lior, the Israeli researcher, also went to these first gatherings over Zoom. He remembers people talking about just how isolated they felt.
41:02 Speaker 09 Because they are a lonely voice, in a way. They have fights with their own family and people around them that are close to them. If you are alone with that idea, it's uncomfortable.
41:17 Speaker 04 And they say that, in general, Palestinians and Israelis, even those who have been involved in peace work their entire lives, became more polarized, blaming violence on the other. And even though many people from the Spain Project were in some way holding on to their hope and commitment to peace and justice, many struggled.
41:39 Speaker 04 On October 7th, one of Liel's students was killed at the Nova Music Festival. Another close friend lost both of his parents. He has other friends whose entire communities were burned to the ground. Weeks after October 7th, he met up with some Israeli and Palestinian friends from the Ayahuasca Experiment to process the horror of what was happening in Israel and Gaza.
42:03 Speaker 15 It was beautiful also to cry together.
42:06 Speaker 04 But the group couldn't really manage to come up with any actions to take. It all felt so hopeless.
42:13 Speaker 15 As if we can do something, yeah? As if like, you know, the Secretary of State of the US trying to stop Israel and doesn't manage. So like our demonstrations in the street would not do better.
42:27 Speaker 04 Liel became more and more disappointed.
42:30 Speaker 15 I feel I'm in pain and angry and I'm like, I'm really in a point of like, this region is rotten.
42:37 Speaker 04 When we spoke several months ago, Liel was in Brazil. He had left Israel.
42:45 Speaker 15 My values do not belong to any of the systems that are operating there. And I have many friends there and many people that I love, but all of them are outsiders to their society. It feels very sad, melancholic, heavy energy, suffocating, with no ability to imagine a brighter future.
43:08 Speaker 04 It's now been nearly two years since the experiment in Spain. Some participants, like Liel, have left out of frustration. Others have disengaged with the project, like Mariam. She's living in Israel and hasn't really had the bandwidth to speak with me since October 7th. Suli has been on speaking tours in Washington DC and Germany, talking about his commitment to peace and justice in the wake of violence. Many have continued to meet and talk. This one Israeli, Rotem, is even gathering with people from the project for direct action at the Gaza border, kilometers away from a population on the brink of famine.
43:51 Speaker 11 Like to demonstrate there and to try and give, bring food and open the way for the trucks because the settlers just blocked the way.
44:01 Speaker 04 Still, Rotem and many from this cohort feel scattered and disillusioned.
44:08 Speaker 11 We felt like so much unity in Spain and really, I have never felt so much unity. But suddenly you come back here and you are again separated.
44:18 Speaker 11 And you are, in a way, like, you don't have agency over the reality. You don't feel like you can change it. Reality is so horrific that,
44:31 Speaker 11 that how can we, like, we support each other, of course, but at some point,
44:38 Speaker 11 how can you stay sane
44:42 Speaker 11 when people don't have food? Like, how can you eat even, you know?
44:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:50 Speaker 11 When one hour from your home, like, people don't have food and they die from starvation.
44:56 Speaker 12 It's horrible. I'm heartbroken.
45:00 Speaker 12 Every day.
45:02 Speaker 04 Another Israeli I spoke with, Sharon, is still engaging with the group. After standing against Israel's military violence for decades, he has similar expectations for his Palestinian counterparts. But a few days after October 7th.
45:19 Speaker 12 A friend of mine was like,
45:23 Speaker 12 like, every resistance is legitimate. Listen, I know the story. I understand the power dynamics. And I'm like, I'm not surprised. I'm in pain. In Judaism, we have a tradition that's called the Shiva. When someone dies, you mourn for seven days.
45:42 Speaker 12 And I would really appreciate if you let us have that right now. And we, yeah, we don't really talk now. It's very lonely.
45:52 Speaker 04 While the ayahuasca experiment may have offered participants a temporary off-ramp from old wounds, their work wasn't over after they took ayahuasca together. Particularly because it was not just what trauma expert Rachel Yehuda calls ancestral burdens. New acts of violence and hate were all around them.
46:14 Speaker 08 It's confusing because you got used to the idea that we can be humanistic and maybe if we just listen to each other, we can heal. And then something happens to you that is a direct violation of your physical integrity and your people, and it is because of your race and ethnicity. And it can become overwhelming.
46:45 Speaker 04 Sammy sees that while this kind of healing work can be helpful, it's hard to escape when it's ongoing.
46:52 Speaker 05 There isn't this absolute healing from trauma. There is a deep understanding of it, there is coping to it, there's ability to place it in a place that it doesn't control you, but to understand that these things can be triggered. So you can't do just one reset and then think that everything is fine.
47:09 Speaker 04 Sammy Awad is still dedicated to helping people heal. He recently led a ceremony with only Palestinians and says Israelis have also met on their own, with the intention of working more deeply within their own communities to heal. He says that even during this time when there's so much hate all around, most participants from the Spain Project are still dedicated to the work of a more peaceful future. Inside themselves, between themselves, and out in the larger world. And in a way, that commitment was sort of a goal of the ayahuasca experiment.
47:49 Speaker 05 I think that there is something that worked, where people are very, very aware of how collective trauma makes people say things.
47:58 Speaker 05 that are very violent towards the other and have not fallen for the most part into these traps. Within the Palestinians that have been in the Spain project, there is a beautiful discussion that we don't fall into this sense of deep victimization and blaming the other for everything that's going. And part of this is also taking responsibility. We need change in our political ideologies and our structures and our leadership and our vision.
48:30 Speaker 04 Many Israelis he's spoken with are also working through their pain and fear.
48:35 Speaker 05 Fully understanding that there would be anger and frustration and complete despair that anything will work after this, especially when you lose loved ones. But they were able to step out much faster than, like many other Israelis who are still in that loop of revenge and retaliation and power over the Palestinians.
48:58 Speaker 04 Lior agrees. He says there's something in this experiment that worked.
49:03 Speaker 09 Something really worked in the sense that they are, their ethos of conflict was not activated as easily, right? But it also means that it's hard for them.
49:21 Speaker 04 Sammy and Lior and the rest of the ayahuasca-drinking crew, they pretty much know that ayahuasca is not the key to solving violence in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter. But they also know that with the right intention, ayahuasca rituals helped them move towards personal healing and feelings of interconnectedness in a visceral way that they hadn't felt before. And those things, they say, are better than nothing at all.
49:56 Speaker 05 There is anger, there is frustration, there is sadness, there is grief. But at the end of the day, we are people that believe in peace, believe in justice. The reason we did this project to start with is a deep belief that there is a better future for Palestinians and Israelis.
50:29 Speaker 03 This story was reported and produced by Shaina Shealy, with the support of the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.
50:42 Speaker 03 Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. Adisa Egan is our senior editor. Jenny Cataldo is our senior producer. Our associate producer is Cassidy Rosenbloom. Our audio engineers are Tommy Bazarian and Terrence Bernardo. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. Rotating BCSP script readers are Michael Pollan, Michael Silver, and Bob Jesse. Our executive producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez and Malia Wallen. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. I'm your host, Ariel Zimross. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Altered States wherever you get your podcasts. Most well-known psychedelics remain illegal around the world, including the United States,
51:25 Speaker 03 where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics with few exceptions. Altered States does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or offer instructions in their use. We'll be back next week.
51:43 Tim Ferriss? Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
52:26 Tim Ferriss? And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
Previous #767: Jerry Colonna — Tim and Uncle Jerry Tackle Life, Big Questions, Business, Parenting, and Disco Duck Next #769: Q&A with Tim — Reinvention, Visualization Techniques, Making “Risky” Decisions, Parenting Considerations, Intuition, New Hobbies, Dating, and More Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
