Dr. Dan Engle, Integrative Psychiatrist from the US and advisor to the Temple, shares his perspectives about conventional psychiatry and how it focuses primarily on symptom management of psycho-emotional conditions, masking and suppressing distress and suffering. Dan explains how ayahuasca healing reaches into the root causes and works to cleanse the system on all levels of being – physical, psychological, emotional, and energetic.
Dr. Dan is passionate about psychiatry re-embracing its origins and soul-based medicine. He is calling for a new paradigm in psychiatry where psychiatrists are able to recognize that psycho-emotional suffering typically originates at much deeper levels than is understood or accepted in mainstream medicine, and that a return to understanding that trauma affects the soul is necessary in order to provide soul based medicine in the western world.
Underpinning the Temple’s work is our vision for the incredible mastery of indigenous healers to be respected, legitimized and honored in the modern world. We aim to cultivate a richer understanding in the West of the Shipibo system of shamanic healthcare and substantiate the efficacy of their ethno-medical traditions. Indigenous healers have a system of sacred science that has evolved over hundreds coming from a profound relationship with and understanding of hundreds of medicinal plants and trees.
In the Shipibo tradition, it takes typically six to ten years to become a fully “qualified” and authorized healer, after an arduous and highly challenging apprenticeship that could be considered a parallel to Western medical school in terms of the level of commitment, energy, and time that is required to complete the education.
By studying in the “spirit-assisted” rainforest medical school, Shipibo healers are able to take ayahuasca healing to an incredibly deep level, reaching to the roots of pain and discomfort. This level of healing is not possible when drinking ayahuasca alone and without the vast array of plant spirit medicines, energetic surgical procedures, protection and overall shamanic mastery of a trained healer.
