The New York Times reports:

Before their first ayahuasca ceremony, the veterans met individually with two Peruvian “maestros,” or healers, from the Shipibo community in Peru.

“Their hearts are hardened,” said Teobaldo Ochavano, who helps run the nighttime ceremonies alongside his wife, Marina Sinti. “They seemed unable to experience love or joy.”

Ms. Sinti said years of interacting with foreigners on retreats had made it painfully clear why these rituals are in such high demand.

“People in the United States and Europe are very disconnected,” she said. “From each other and from the Earth.”

Like many service members of his generation, Mr. Gonsior said he enlisted in the Marine Corps to avenge the attacks of Sept. 11, which happened when he was in high school.

In 2006, he said he deployed to western Iraq for the first of multiple combat tours. He and his men were constantly ambushed with powerful roadside bombs and shot at by snipers, he said, and 17 service members he deployed with returned home in body bags.

The experience, Mr. Gonsior said, turned him into a ruthless warrior.

“My sole goal was to survive,” he said. “I did a lot of things that I am not particularly proud of.”

Instead of relief for surviving, he felt a crushing sense of shame.

“It was just by dumb luck that I wasn’t shot and wasn’t blown up,” he said. “Like to the point where, statistically, I should be dead by now or at least seriously injured.”

In 2007, Mr. Gonsior said he joined the Army Special Forces, where he served as a sniper. It left him feeling that he had joined a “cult of death,” he said.

“The last 17 years of my life, my job in one way or another has revolved around death,” he said. “As I get older, it weighs heavy.”

Killing became mundane. But one life he took in Afghanistan in 2012 haunted him for years.

During a routine operation, Mr. Gonsior opened fire on a man on a motorcycle, believing he was an insurgent. Soon after, Mr. Gonsior learned he had killed an Afghan intelligence source working with his unit.

Mr. Gonsior said he didn’t allow himself to grieve that death properly or process the guilt until years later, when he was gripped by depression and bouts of rage that were sometimes set off by inconsequential things his children did.

Abstract thoughts about suicide eventually turned chillingly specific, he said. At the Veterans Affairs hospital where he sought help, Mr. Gonsior, 35, said he was urged to take antidepressants. He said he refused, based on the side effects he had seen fellow soldiers suffer.

Last year, after listening to a story about ayahuasca and trauma on the radio, he became fascinated by the idea that healing deep wounds requires grappling with their roots.

“There’s a lot of emotional wreckage, shipwrecks that are kind of down there,” he said. [Continue reading…]