Episode 3: The Peace Seekers

[00:00:00] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Welcome to Altered States, I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. 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. So, Shaina, welcome. First off, I know some folks might be familiar with ayahuasca, but others have probably never heard of it.

[00:00:27] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Tell me, like, What exactly is ayahuasca? 

[00:00:30] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:00:46] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: So what do we know about what ayahuasca does to the brain?

[00:00:50] Shaina Shealy: So usually about 30 minutes after drinking it, Some people start having these hallucinations. Others have out of body experiences or euphoric [00:01:00] 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.

[00:01:14] Shaina Shealy: In this case, increased adaptability is thought to be able to help people heal from traumatic experiences.

[00:01:24] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: A few years ago, you came across these peace activists who were using ayahuasca to heal, and eventually you started reporting on that story. Can you tell me more? 

[00:01:33] Shaina Shealy: So these activists are Israeli and Palestinian, and they gathered to drink ayahuasca in an attempt to heal trauma, both personal trauma and collective trauma.

[00:01:43] Shaina Shealy: And I knew a bunch of them from previous reporting in the region, and I was really interested just in the lengths that these people went to to build empathy. And then October 7th happened.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:00] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:02:17] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: And that’s why your story starts with Sami. In his home in late summer of 2023 

[00:02:37] Shaina Shealy: 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 za’atar, watermelon, balls of cured labneh and olive oil. They were laughing, eating breakfast.[00:03:00] 

[00:03:01] Shaina Shealy: 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. Sami’s home office is filled with hundreds of books on meditation, yoga, psychedelic medicine, healing.

[00:03:21] Shaina Shealy: He’s in his 50s. And he’s been working in the world of peacebuilding for over 25 years.

[00:03:27] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:03:44] Sami Awad: I remember my uncle saying, no matter what happens, you’re here to plant trees.

[00:03:47] Shaina Shealy: The group of activists was mixed, Palestinian and Israeli. They were hours into planting when a group of Israeli soldiers approached them. 

[00:03:56] Sami Awad: A soldier coming, pulling the tree out of the ground that I was planting and [00:04:00] throwing it on some rocks. And in that moment, there was this split decision, what do I do?

[00:04:06] Sami Awad: Because as a 12 year old, you know, what options? I could run away. I could, uh, hide, uh, run to my uncle crying, you know, like a 12 year old. And I was like, you know, I’m here to plant the trees. And I decided I’m gonna go back and bring the tree and plant it. And I did that. That sense of feeling, wow, empowerment.

[00:04:24] Sami Awad: And then losing the fear.

[00:04:29] Sami Awad: That action changed my life. It made me actually want to commit my life to this work. 

[00:04:34] Shaina Shealy: The work of peace building through nonviolence. Days after Sami 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.

[00:04:48] Shaina Shealy: Still, Sami would go on to plant even more trees. By the time he was in his 20s, he was organizing boycotts and peace demonstrations, sometimes alongside Israeli peace activists. [00:05:00] 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, including limited Palestinian self governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

[00:05:24] Shaina Shealy: Then President Bill Clinton served as a diplomatic broker.

[00:05:28] Archive Clip: 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.

[00:05:51] Shaina Shealy: Sami was optimistic. 

[00:05:53] Sami Awad: There was billions of dollars of funds coming to create and sustain [00:06:00] 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. 

[00:06:09] Shaina Shealy: He built his own organization, Holy Land Trust. It became well known for nonviolent activism trainings.

[00:06:16] Shaina Shealy: But even with this tireless dedication to peace, the world around Sami became more and more violent. 

[00:06:24] Archive Clip: 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.

[00:06:40] Sami Awad: We’re beginning to see this continuous loop of failures in the peace process. 

[00:06:45] Archive Clip: And in 1995, a right wing Jewish extremist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. This big plan towards peace began to unravel almost immediately. [00:07:00] 

[00:07:00] Shaina Shealy: Over the next decade, there was the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, deadly attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

[00:07:08] Sami Awad: 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. 

[00:07:17] Shaina Shealy: 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.

[00:07:30] Shaina Shealy: He spent eight days there, sleeping at the camp, eating all his meals there. 

[00:07:36] Sami Awad: 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.

[00:07:50] Sami Awad: 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 [00:08:00] day.

[00:08:03] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:08:23] Sami Awad: Israeli kids with Israeli flags wrapped around them, big flags, and they’re walking in and singing.

[00:08:29] Sami Awad: 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.

[00:08:48] Sami Awad: 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? 

[00:08:57] Shaina Shealy: That night Sami slept [00:09:00] in Birkenau in the barracks where children were imprisoned He was there with a Jewish person from Israel and a Muslim person from Bosnia.

[00:09:11] Sami Awad: 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. 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.

[00:09:42] Sami Awad: The Palestinians, we have a similar narrative that our existence is on the line. We need to do something about it. If we don’t do something about it, we will cease to be as a people.

[00:09:54] Sami Awad: What happened to us is too shameful, too painful. We don’t talk about it. 

[00:09:59] Shaina Shealy: [00:10:00] 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, are really any other traumatic events?

[00:10:16] Sami Awad: You 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.

[00:10:32] Sami Awad: There’s a healing. But to not address these issues makes us unhealthy in how we’re dealing with things.

[00:10:42] Shaina Shealy: 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 [00:11:00] the healing journey that followed. He also met with Israelis studying trauma, including faculty at Hebrew Union College.

[00:11:08] Shaina Shealy: 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 troupes, art projects.

[00:11:33] Shaina Shealy: And still, around two decades after Oslo, Sami felt things were worse than ever. 

[00:11:40] Sami Awad: You see the wars in Gaza, you see settler violence towards Palestinians, you see how Palestinians are treating each other. What do all of this money, all of this investment, where is it all? All of the peace processes. 25 years of negotiating.

[00:11:53] Sami Awad: The reality is as messed up as it’s ever been. Things now are worse than any time before. All of the peace work, [00:12:00] all of the money that was spent. And so for me, I was in this place, we need something new. We need something new. 

[00:12:06] Shaina Shealy: That’s when he got a phone call. It was from an Israeli couple, around 2012. 

[00:12:12] Sami Awad: And they say, we have a peace project that we want to involve you with.

[00:12:17] Shaina Shealy: Sami rolled his eyes. More Israelis who think they have the answers. He almost hung up. 

[00:12:24] Sami Awad: And the woman like 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. 

[00:12:32] Shaina Shealy: His interest was piqued. He went to meet them. 

[00:12:35] Sami Awad: I said, three things came to my mind.

[00:12:37] Sami Awad: 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? 

[00:12:54] Shaina Shealy: He was talking about the psychedelic brew, ayahuasca.

[00:12:58] Shaina Shealy: As the man explained his vision, [00:13:00] All Sami could think about were the dangers. Sami says drugs are kind of taboo in Palestinian society. 

[00:13:07] Sami Awad: It’s not just illegal, it’s immoral, it’s illegitimate, it goes against religion, it goes against social values. 

[00:13:15] Shaina Shealy: People who drink ayahuasca have described emotional breakthroughs, conversations with anthropomorphic spirits, catharsis of traumatic events, and connections with ancestors.

[00:13:27] Shaina Shealy: So even though Sami 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. 

[00:13:44] Sami Awad: It’s an energy that comes out. It’s uh, I, my purging is very loud, for example.

[00:13:50] Sami Awad: People know me for this. It’s like moaning and yelling out. It’s releasing something that’s coming out of your body. 

[00:13:59] Shaina Shealy: Sami [00:14:00] continued going to these ayahuasca rituals, and he felt that the ayahuasca actually helped him understand his own wounds more clearly. 

[00:14:09] Shaina Shealy: For me, my trauma, I would say, is more coming up from my experiences living under occupation that I had to live through and work with.

[00:14:19] Shaina Shealy: He saw flashes of memories, confrontations with soldiers, as a child, getting arrested. 

[00:14:26] Sami Awad: Having my oldest daughter born during the siege of Bethlehem in 2002 when everything was under lockdown. 

[00:14:33] Shaina Shealy: Having to sneak his wife to a hospital while she was in labor. Sami says the experience was like watching his subconscious being tumbled around in a washing machine.

[00:14:45] Shaina Shealy: He felt that maybe something in this extreme vulnerability could be key to healing. 

[00:14:51] Sami Awad: I felt, I felt there was something in it. 

[00:14:54] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: I would define intergenerational trauma as the idea that the effects of extreme [00:15:00] stress can be passed to future generations. 

[00:15:02] Shaina Shealy: 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 Iken School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

[00:15:20] Shaina Shealy: She’s interested in the way trauma affects the body. Someone whose ancestors experienced trauma might have a hypervigilant response to fear, both in the brain and the endocrine systems. 

[00:15:33] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: 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 that as much as you could.

[00:15:50] Shaina Shealy: When someone, like Sami, is constantly in fight or flight mode, always seeing or anticipating danger, it can be exhausting. And if you come from [00:16:00] 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.

[00:16:11] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: 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.

[00:16:40] Shaina Shealy: And by tapping into what Yehuda calls the reservoirs of inner consciousness, ayahuasca could offer a way to revisit those scars. 

[00:16:50] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: If you can tap into ancestral wisdom and not just ancestral burden, that you can really be in a position to, [00:17:00] um, cope better. 

[00:17:02] Shaina Shealy: Soon after Sami Awad’s first ayahuasca rituals with Israelis, he began bringing other Palestinians with him into Israel.

[00:17:10] Shaina Shealy: Eventually, he brought the brew back into the West Bank and started inviting Palestinians and Israelis from his peace activist circles to join him in ayahuasca ceremonies. 

[00:17:21] Shaina Shealy: And then slowly inviting people and in these spaces to see like what happens when Palestinians and Israelis are in ceremony together.

[00:17:29] Shaina Shealy: These ceremonies were all underground. The legal risks were high, for Palestinian participants especially. But people came. Sami 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.

[00:17:50] Shaina Shealy: And Sami says that Ayahuasca is not some kind of panacea. The intention of the people drinking it is what matters. 

[00:17:58] Sami Awad: Ayahuasca is not a [00:18:00] 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.

[00:18:11] Sami Awad: 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 a 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, the hearing Israelis sing in Hebrew, and Israelis hearing Palestinians sing in Arabic, and reciting the Koran, and Like, there is healing.

[00:18:46] Shaina Shealy: These ayahuasca rituals weren’t solving any geopolitical conflicts. But compared to the hundreds of peacebuilding activities Sami had led, he felt that the ayahuasca actually helped people connect across barriers [00:19:00] of mistrust. Because when people drank it, they seemed to confront their own deeply embedded fears.

[00:19:06] Shaina Shealy: For the first time I experienced deep, deep healing in that spaces. 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. 

[00:19:27] Leor Roseman: And there is something funny about it in some ways.

[00:19:30] Leor Roseman: There’s something very hopeful about it. There’s something maybe even a very triggering about it.

[00:19:34] Shaina Shealy: Leor Rosman grew up in a Jewish family in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. Now, he has a Ph. D. 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 Sami in [00:20:00] touch with Leor.

[00:20:01] Shaina Shealy: 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. It sounds wishy washy, the organizers define peacebuilding as not just a state of harmony, but a striving for political liberation as well.

[00:20:28] Shaina Shealy: For a movement against Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the oppression that comes with it. Leor felt Ayahuasca had the potential to inspire some sort of radical political shift. 

[00:20:40] Leor Roseman: Sometimes we think about psychedelics. Based on oneness and harmony and acceptance and all these things that are nice and we’re all from the Middle East.

[00:20:48] Leor Roseman: We’re all eat hummus. We all in the oneness of the medicine. But you know, you, you dilute the political anger. So it’s kind of like the, the risk there is that they dilute [00:21:00] the, the forces that also bring change. There are also other experiences, like especially those insights of something that ruptures like our consciousness that brings something new.

[00:21:09] Leor Roseman: Like there’s also this revelatory revolutionary potential there that excites, can excite people. It can be visions of collective trauma. It can be apocalyptical visions. It can be very painful visions. And then they inspire people to, to, to, to bring change. 

[00:21:26] Shaina Shealy: Bringing change was the goal. And Sami Awad also felt this wouldn’t happen without difficult visions or revelations.

[00:21:36] Sami Awad: You cannot just jump into, let’s sit together and, and, 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. 

[00:21:50] Shaina Shealy: Sami and Leor had this idea that psychedelics can manifest both unity and diversity at the same time.

[00:21:58] Shaina Shealy: When trauma expert Rachel [00:22:00] 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. 

[00:22:15] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: You know, it’s, it’s a fantasy, it’s a wish, and yet it’s probably worth trying. 

[00:22:23] Shaina Shealy: But Yehuda says, it’s not a pharmacological silver bullet.

[00:22:28] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: Look, if you want to know what, 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. 

[00:22:52] Shaina Shealy: Sami and Leor decided that the experiment would take place in the summer of 2022 in the mountains of Spain, where authorities seemed to turn a [00:23:00] blind eye to psychedelics.

[00:23:02] Shaina Shealy: 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 Sami and Leor facilitate. One prerequisite for participating in the program was that participants had to have used ayahuasca previously.

[00:23:23] Shaina Shealy: The first few days of the experiment focused on the past. There was Souli, who was from a town outside of Jerusalem. 

[00:23:31] Souli: And my family has been living there, like, for centuries. People answered questions about their personal identities and shared family stories. 

[00:23:42] Shaina Shealy: There was also Rotem. 

[00:23:43] Rotem: I have grandparents from Russia, Poland, and one from Morocco.

[00:23:50] Rotem: They see themselves as like those who established the state. 

[00:23:55] Shaina Shealy: And Sharon. 

[00:23:56] Sharon: Everyone was Zionist. Everyone wanted to be combat [00:24:00] soldiers. 

[00:24:01] Shaina Shealy: And Mariam, who grew up in a Bedouin township. 

[00:24:05] Mariam: The townships, a lot of shoots, people die. Even the infrastructure, it’s 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’ll always stay Arabian. And no matter what you do. 

[00:24:25] Shaina Shealy: 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.

[00:24:37] Shaina Shealy: Sami and Leor 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.[00:25:00] 

[00:25:05] Mariam: And I took the ayahuasca and the ayahuasca taste like chocolate with lemon and with chocolate with like expired chocolate. Hahaha. 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.

[00:25:41] Mariam: 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. 

[00:25:50] Mariam: And the song that we started singing there was, uh, 

[00:25:53] Mariam: It was very strong. [00:26:00] Like, it was really a strong night. A lot of crying. 

[00:26:08] Mariam: I can really feel myself melting into the way she sings. 

[00:26:14] Mariam: And we hugged, like, for, uh, it felt like an hour.

[00:26:24] Shaina Shealy: As the sun rose, the effects of the ayahuasca wore off. People slept, or chatted. The next day, Sami and Leor 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.

[00:26:50] Shaina Shealy: Not everything fully made sense to everyone. But people went around sharing takeaways and trying to put words to their [00:27:00] experiences. 

[00:27:01] Mariam: The medicina she just gave me, so many visuals. That really embodied what, uh, what is the problem with myself. One participant, Mariam, spoke about how the experience helped her realize that her peace activism came from a place of anger.

[00:27:21] Mariam: It’s the only way that I know how to work. 

[00:27:24] Shaina Shealy: Mariam is a Palestinian Bedouin in her twenties. 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. 

[00:27:38] Mariam: It was a horror, like, what are you? You’re a terrorist, you’re anti semitic.

[00:27:45] Shaina Shealy: She was first introduced to ayahuasca in one of Sami’s ayahuasca circles. And she’s using a pseudonym for the story because she feels it’s dangerous not to. 

[00:27:55] Mariam: I need to stay anonymous because what I do is comes [00:28:00] against my religion, my community. 

[00:28:04] Shaina Shealy: After Mariam purged, she fell asleep. 

[00:28:07] Mariam: And then I have a lot of beautiful visuals in my uterus.

[00:28:12] Mariam: Flowers. A lot of flowers, and then when they got to my head, they turned to be like swamp 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. 

[00:28:32] Shaina Shealy: She saw herself as a child. 

[00:28:35] Mariam: Actually, wow, I did really good in the circumstances that I was put in.

[00:28:40] Mariam: And in the moment that I was starting to feel so much empathy, then I was feeling mercy for everyone in the room. I was laughing a lot, I was crying a lot, and then at 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, [00:29:00] like to ask my parents more about them and they will lead me to the answer.

[00:29:05] Mariam: And I saw their faces and they go looping, looping around my head and I was like, God. 

[00:29:12] Shaina Shealy: The answer, she says, was love. So I take my time like thinking what I want to do and my activism now looks, uh, spreading more love than, uh, spreading more love for one’s culture first, like to love himself. And I think. It helps to meet the other.

[00:29:38] Shaina Shealy: Others in the experiment discovered hidden connections. 

[00:29:43] Liel: 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. 

[00:29:55] Shaina Shealy: Liel is Jewish. Grew up in a right wing Zionist family outside of Tel Aviv. [00:30:00] During the Second Intifada, a bloody time in Israel’s history, he and his family joined demonstrations against the peace process.

[00:30:09] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:30:26] Liel: The main idea was that, um, the world is a ugly place, a violent 

[00:30:32] Liel: place, and every people should take care of themselves because no one else will take care of them.

[00:30:38] Shaina Shealy: 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 [00:31:00] dialogue with teens.

[00:31:01] Liel: But eventually when I tried to bring it home, You feel a displacement ideologically, mentally, politically. There was no place to hold it. 

[00:31:12] Shaina Shealy: 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.

[00:31:29] Liel: She sang, uh, this song around Fatima. Ya Fatima, ya Fatima La kiroch, ya Fatima 

[00:31:39] Shaina Shealy: During the ayahuasca ceremony, after Liel had drank and purged, the group sang. Liel says he just melted into the words of the song. 

[00:31:49] Liel: And I felt them like I couldn’t feel beforehand. They feel maybe created the, the most powerful experience for me, which is like the fear from [00:32:00] the language or the trauma around their language is being melted.

[00:32:04] Shaina Shealy: The song was in Arabic. A language that Liel’s father speaks, but that, as a kid, Liel never wanted to learn. 

[00:32:12] Liel: The wound of my family, being expelled from Libya, caused the wound between them and the Arabic people and Arabic culture in general. So if we believe in, like, in intergenerational trauma, like, needing to hide this language, it has ingrained in me.

[00:32:30] Shaina Shealy: But Ayahuasca presented him with this sort of instant connection with the language. 

[00:32:36] Liel: Something that belonged to the past, 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 [00:33:00] change.

[00:33:03] Shaina Shealy: 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. 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.

[00:33:35] Shaina Shealy: 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, 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 [00:34:00] just being together.

[00:34:07] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:34:17] Mariam: I think in a first glance, you see just like a normal party where everyone like having a A good time, but then you hear Arabic, Hebrew languages, almost equally. And you’re not, of course, in a hospital.

[00:34:36] Shaina Shealy: I caught up with Mariam there, at the farm. 

[00:34:39] Mariam: And I think for people coming from the outside, it will be, like, abnormal, I would say. Like, is it even impossible? Like, uh, to be Palestinian and Israel isn’t so close, and just, like, Normal, not in a normalizing way, but normal in a very radical way. [00:35:00] And a lot of fun.

[00:35:02] Mariam: Being in this community where you’ve always been seen in the best light you can be seen at, it’s really helped you to love yourself, actually, unconditionally. 

[00:35:15] Shaina Shealy: This love, she says, is the only thing that helps her feel hopeful for the future. 

[00:35:21] Mariam: Like, you’re so secure of who you are, so when you meet the other person, it creates a real, uh, interaction.

[00:35:29] Mariam: And it will make him automatically, or her, to have the same approach. Sami and Leor 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 participant surveys, the project culminated in high ratings of communitas, a sense of [00:36:00] togetherness among the participants.

[00:36:02] Leor Roseman: We are kind of like in the first steps of a consciousness shift that’s happening, and maybe others will follow. 

[00:36:11] Shaina Shealy: Months after my conversations with Sami and Leor, Mariam and Liel, violence erupted in the region. 

[00:36:18] Archive Clip: 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.

[00:36:36] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Shaina’s story continues after After the break, stay with us.

[00:36:54] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Welcome back to altered states. I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Before the break, producer Shayna Scheele was recounting how [00:37:00] she reconnected with the peace activists she had been reporting on following October 7th and the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. Shayna tells the story from here. 

[00:37:10] Shaina Shealy: On October 15th, a week after the deadliest attack in the history of the Israeli state, followed by deadly airstrikes in the Gaza Strip.

[00:37:20] Shaina Shealy: A Palestinian participant from the Spain Project, Souli, sent me this voice note. 

[00:37:27] Souli: This is exactly the time that we need all the love and the forgiveness and big hearts. Like, uh, we’re just sitting actually is really to keep my soul, my heart open for compassion for people in Spain. No matter which sides, and I really hate the white sides, to say.

[00:37:50] Souli: Yeah, some people go back to their tribe right now, a lot of people, even among activists, unfortunately, because they can’t take it.[00:38:00] 

[00:38:01] Shaina Shealy: Throughout the devastation, this group of ayahuasca drinkers has continued to meet, mostly virtually, since movement across Israeli checkpoints has been limited since October 7th. While Sami has been facilitating these groups, he also says they’ve been helpful for him, personally. 

[00:38:20] Sami Awad: There is this continuous intention to understand hatred towards the other.

[00:38:27] Sami Awad: 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. 

[00:38:35] Shaina Shealy: Leor, the Israeli researcher, also went to these first gatherings over Zoom. He remembers people talking about just how isolated they felt. 

[00:38:47] Leor Roseman: 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, [00:39:00] it’s uncomfortable. 

[00:39:02] Shaina Shealy: 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.

[00:39:14] Shaina Shealy: And even though many people from the Spain Project were in some way holding onto their hope and commitment to peace and justice, many struggled. 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.

[00:39:37] Shaina Shealy: 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. 

[00:39:48] Liel: It was beautiful also to cry together. 

[00:39:50] Shaina Shealy: But the group couldn’t really manage to come up with any actions to take. It all felt so hopeless.

[00:39:58] Liel: As if we can do [00:40:00] something, yeah? As if like, You know, the Secretary of State of the U. S. is trying to stop Israel and doesn’t manage. So like our demonstrations in the street would not do better. 

[00:40:11] Shaina Shealy: Liel became more and more disappointed. I still am in pain and angry and I’m like, I’m really in a point of like this region is rotten.

[00:40:22] Shaina Shealy: When we spoke several months ago, Liel was in Brazil. He had left Israel. 

[00:40:29] Liel: 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 the society. It feels very sad, melancholic, heavy energy, suffocating.

[00:40:47] Liel: with no ability to imagine a brighter future. 

[00:40:53] Shaina Shealy: It’s now been nearly two years since the experiment in Spain. Some participants, like Liel, [00:41:00] 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.

[00:41:11] Shaina Shealy: Souli has been on speaking tours in Washington, D. C. 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.

[00:41:35] Rotem: Like to demonstrate there and to try and give, bring food. Uh, and opened the way for the trucks because the settlers just blocked the way. 

[00:41:45] Shaina Shealy: Still, Rotem and many from this cohort feel scattered and disillusioned.

[00:41:53] Rotem: I felt like so much unity in Spain and really I have never felt so much unity, but suddenly you come back here and you [00:42:00] are again separated and you are in a way like you don’t have agency over the reality.

[00:42:10] Rotem: You don’t feel like you can change it. Yeah, it is so horrific that, that how can we, like we support each other, of course, but at some point. How can you stay sane when people don’t have food? Like how can you eat even, you know? Yeah. You went one hour from your home like people don’t have food and they die from starvation.

[00:42:41] Sharon: It’s horrible. I’m heartbroken. Every day. 

[00:42:46] Shaina Shealy: 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 [00:43:00] counterparts, but a few days after October 7th, 

[00:43:03] Sharon: a friend of mine was like, like every resistance is legitimate.

[00:43:10] Sharon: Listen, I know the story. I understand the power dynamics. Then I’m like, I’m not surprised. I’m in pain. In Judaism, we have a tradition that’s called the Shiva’ah. When someone dies, you mourn for seven days. And I would really appreciate if, like, you let us have that right now. And we, yeah, we don’t really talk now.

[00:43:35] Sharon: It’s very lonely. 

[00:43:37] Shaina Shealy: 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.

[00:43:59] Dr. Rachel Yehuda: It’s [00:44:00] 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 that. of your physical integrity and your people. And it is because of your race and ethnicity. And it be, it can become overwhelming.

[00:44:29] Shaina Shealy: Sami sees that while this kind of healing work can be helpful, it’s hard to escape when it’s ongoing. 

[00:44:37] Sami Awad: There isn’t this absolute healing from trauma. There is a deep understanding of it. There’s 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.

[00:44:49] Sami Awad: So you can’t do just one reset and then think that everything is fine. 

[00:44:53] Shaina Shealy: Sami Awad is still dedicated to helping people heal. He recently led a ceremony [00:45:00] 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.

[00:45:34] Sami Awad: I think there’s something that worked where people are very, very aware of how collective trauma makes people say things 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’s a beautiful discussion that we don’t fall into.

[00:45:59] Sami Awad: This sense of [00:46:00] 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, in our structures, in our leadership, in our vision. 

[00:46:15] Shaina Shealy: Many Israelis he’s spoken with are also working through their pain and fear. 

[00:46:20] Sami Awad: Fully understanding that there will be anger and frustration and complete despair that anything will work after this, especially when you lose loved ones. But, 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.

[00:46:43] Sami Awad: Leor agrees. He says there’s something in this experiment that worked. 

[00:46:49] Leor Roseman: Something really worked in the sense that they are, uh, their ethos, their ethos of conflict was not activated as easily, right? But it also [00:47:00] means that they are, that it’s hard for them.

[00:47:06] Shaina Shealy: Sami and Leor, 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.

[00:47:31] Shaina Shealy: That they hadn’t felt before.

[00:47:36] Shaina Shealy: And those things, they say, are better than nothing at all. 

[00:47:42] Sami Awad: There is anger, there is frustration, there is sadness, there is grief, but at the end of the day we, we are people that believe in peace, believe in justice. The reason we did this project to start with is a deep belief that, uh, that there is a better future for [00:48:00] Palestinians and Israelis.

[00:48:00] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: This story was reported and produced by Shaina

[00:48:15] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Shealy with the support of the Ferris UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.

[00:48:26] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. Adizah Eghan is our senior editor. Jennie Cataldo is our senior producer. Our associate producer is Cassidy Rosenblum. Our audio engineers are Tommy Bazarian and Terrence Bernardo. Fact checking by Graham Heysha.

[00:48:45] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Rotating BCSP script readers are Michael Pollan, Michael Silver, and Bob Jesse. Our executive producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez and Malia Wollan. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Be sure [00:49:00] 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, where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics, with few exceptions.[00:49:17] Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Altered States does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics, or offer instructions in their use. We’ll be back next week.