Generally speaking one can say that in contrast to smoking DMT drinking ayahuasca is more done for reasons of healing, therapy, purifying.

What I would like to know is, are there people on this forum who consider themselves ‘healed’ and do not need therapy and still use ayahuasca for pure fun. If so, what kind of trips are you experiencing? What does a trip tell you?

When I look into websites that offer ayahuasca ceremonies they always emphasize the healing, therapeutic possibilities etc. It seems like there always must be something ‘wrong’ with you. They never invite you to come just because it is so beautiful.

Anyone who's drunk Ayahuasca in a traditional ceremony will probably tell you that it wasn't really 'fun', rather 'work'. I think people come away with greater self awareness of themselves, and how their lives impact on others.

You have to remember that Websites that operate a business need to attract customers . In reality people drink Ayahuasca for many reasons, including 'curiosity', not just for healings.

There's many reasons to use Aya, and there's many ways to use Aya. I'm personally more into the esoteric, gnostic, mystical/magical occult type stuff rather than the healing but i don't really go in with any specific reason other than to experience Aya and see what all it can do. I take it on my own, never been to a ceremony, so i am free to do what i want with it and see what all it can do for me and what all i can do with it.

Engines need to change oil once in a while.

Just follow your instincts/intuition what to do, or not, is my rule.
Accept contradicting feelings about it all, it's just your probability circus that is probing.
Avoid finalization and generalization, mom said, she's right.

Each time you think to have a handle on yourself, watch closely, something is coming

As someone who drank ayahuasca in five successive ceremonies in Peru, I can say it did its work for me, there was nothing to "do" - I felt more like Aya did me, if it makes any sense

In my experience, Aya-Spirit knows exactly what we need and what we can handle. She gives just that! She is pure unconditional love and She wants to help us to grow. She is our life! So what I get is always right. It can be physical, psycho, or spiritual healing, teachings, pure bliss, beauty & harmony, hilarious fun, home-works to do, God visions, Universe structures understandings etc... My intention has little effect on what I get, but I am always fully grateful!

What is being "healed"? We all carry pain and suffering. We are all sick in some way. There is no supreme balance. Only potentials of order and chaos and we merely exist in the gradient in between. Ayahuasca gives us the choice to move towards one potential or the other in full awareness. What we consider to be healing is a movement towards the yin polarity: love, order, unity. This experience manifest in ayahuasca in an absolutely divine visionary experience. And what we consider to be disease is moving towards the yang polarity: fear, chaos, dissipation. This is manifest as extreme confusion and paranoia. But whether you want to approach this from chinese philosophy or non-equilibrium dynamics the fact remains that these concepts are ideals. Some of us may no longer need therapy but for many ayahuasca is hardly "for fun". The healing continues. Whether it's been 3 trips or 3,000 trips. We embark on a life long journey to become better than the day before because ayahuasca has shown us the high road and the low road and there is no doubt which direction we'd rather be headed. People don't get invited to simply marvel at the beauty because the mother plant doesn't work like that. I have seen the face of god on ayahuasca. I have also been submerged in my deepest fears. It would be deceptive to treat ayahuasca as a tourist attraction.

^^ that is the weirdest defining of yin and yang I've encountered

Lol this is the only definition I'm aware of. Yin is the passive polarity reflecting consolidation, togetherness, unity, order, potential energy etc. yang is the active polarity reflecting dispersion, kinetic energy, heat, chaos etc. They are only relative polarities so I used them to distinguish the polarities of the psychedelic trip as well as the polarities which reflect health. On our trips love tends to arise in a place where we feel in unity whereas fear tends to manifest in chaos. I remember my first ayahuasca trip I was stunned out how different a "good" and "bad" trip were. So different in fact that when I went from one to the other I thought I wasn't even tripping any more. The former came with divine visions of higher beings and geometry of indescribable complexity. The latter was just mass confusion and the scattering of light all over my vision

That is more as I learned it too. It was only this connection
love --> Yin
disease --> Yang
part that really didn't rime with me.
For me there cannot be a good or bad connotation to any of them because they are no absolutes, only a means for finding balance. For example love cannot exist without its yang component, and not without its yin component. They should be balanced. Same for a good trip = right balance between the two. A bad trip is any hard deviation between the two imho.

For example my personal hardest bad trip was quite active a process but me personally did not had the energy to cope with it, I was in a too yin state, I slept not enough and my energy levels were low, and I was foolish go have a large dose of pharma. I was too yin-state to cope with the intensities. If I was well rested and in good shape (more yang) I guess it was no problem at all. I think the trip itself was balanced but not my personal yin-yang balance at that given moment. It was my best lesson to not dive in just like that, but to see if I'm up to it.

The hardest part for me (pharma or aya) is the come up, because the harmalas knock me out a bit (a drop in blood pressure) getting cold/shivery and cannot do else than lying still. At that state I'm pretty yin-sided due the harmalas. Right at that time the trip starts kicking in which is a dynamic process asking to be engaged but I'm not up to it yet. My heart beat goes high, respiration goes high, I feel out of phase with the trip, sick-ish and it's scary.
It's just a matter of waiting for my yin-side to fade, to re-find a better yin-yang balance, and then the good part of the trip starts to manifest itself. Then the trip is in balance, I am in balance, and lo and behold there's nothing much that can scare me and I'm feeling quite on top of the situation, asking myself why I did not dose higher

This is why I dislike a bit a subscribing to a group session for a certain date, because I do not know in advance if I'm in balance enough even to start with. I work 3 shift system, late/early/night and my bio rhythm disturbances really fekup my yin-yang balances very often. If I show up there with some disbalanced preset condition it's almost asking for trouble. At home I feel my balance and dose accordingly or decide not to dose all right on the moment deciding.

I've found tremendously therapeutically value in low dosed pharma to relieve out of balance yin-yang conditions. For example after 5 days of early shift the overall tiredness start to kick in. If I dose in the afternoon a simple 100 rue harmalas + 25 FB deems, in the come up I got tears flowing like rivers and yawnings way deep and long, something got processed. The trip is very mild on me, just some hue over white and augmentation of hearing sensitivity and clarity in sight, nothing too fancy. But man after that, and the day after, I feel like I had a month of vacation, a major reset.
I would say in this conditions, me at the start being too yin-state, and then dosing for a yin kind of experience, the tension between the two is small and not confronting and thus very aligned. Yet the medicine can do its work.

I've never looked at it much as yin-yang but more like energy-state related, which is actually the same thing, good that you brought up this yin-yang concept into this matters, it's always nice to have more angles at things

Edit: I don't think of truth with things like yin-yang, even within TAO-istic streams there are opposite concepts about it. It's just handles to approach reality, theories/models, and if they help you to steer your life that's fine. Like Indian ayurveda they don't use 2 factors but 3 being pitta, vata and kapha, and they search for a balance between those. Whatever works...

I can almost see the OP as a rhetorical question.

Although Ayahuasca most definitely has healing properties, that is not its only use. I feel like the healing side of Ayahuasca is trumped up in order to push business. Not many people will fly half way around the world and spend thousands of dollars for the experience, but people will pull out all the stops when Ayahuasca might be the magical medicine that heals what ails them.

You're right. I got my head wrapped in a pretzel on this one. I forgot the inherent paradox of "dissipative structures". We are both dissipation and consolidation. There's an obvious role of yin/yang here but how exactly to place it is screwing with my head. The best i can come up with is that health and it's assigned emotion of love in a way is structurally yin and functionally yang and disease the reverse, on a general level at least. I feel there may be problems with that interpretation too. But when i was initially thinking of it i was only considering the structural aspects. Something about that state of divine bliss and geometry implied order and togetherness (yin) whereas the opposite "bad" trip (i too don't believe in qualifying things as good and bad and that's not what i mean by health and disease) felt very yang. Totally lacking any order and consolidation. Excessively energetic and entropic. However, i realized the inherent paradox of moving towards that orderly state is accompanied by the light and functional energy (yang) and the chaotic state by the dark and functional depression (yin). At least in my experiences. So i definitely missed something crucial. How to define health and disease simply in these contexts... The only reason i'm trying so hard to make this fit is because i see something inherently valuable in it. I've spent a long time learning about the mechanisms of chronic illness from a western perspective. When moving beyond the "body as a machine" model into the "body as a thermodynamic non-equilibrium structure" kind of approach i've noticed this old chinese themes have silently reemerged. For example looking at how pathogens dissipate in a society and whether they integrate into symbiosis or stimulate the collapse of biological systems is a very yin/yang dynamic embedded in an even larger yin/yang dynamic. I could learn about it from a purely scientific standpoint but it's hard to get broader perspective that way. I really felt, and still feel, Taoism has something invaluable to offer here. But i've discovered some roadblocks in my comprehension of it. The themes are obvious. Dissipative structures lie on the "boundary" between order and chaos. These physical chemistry concepts and Taoism share an uncanny similarity. But how to define health and disease in those terms is what's messing with me. It seems now to be an emergent polarity rather than a fundamental one. What is the relative yin/yang structure that distinguishes one from the other. What was it that felt yin about the peak and yang about the trough. What is it that feels yin about health and yang about disease. And what is the complementary quality that i'm missing. You say a bad trip is any hard deviation, but to me the quantities felt identical, but the qualities reversed. A bad trip had just as much structural yang as a good trip had functional yang. And a good trip had as much structural yin as a bad trip had functional yin. However, could an excess of functional yin be pathological? Certainly. So where does that leave me...

Good discussion though. I don't think i could have this conversation elsewhere without being called a quack. It's good to be able to be humbled in the learning process and hash out unknowns without being put down for your mistakes. Man the roads you walk to understand this world...

Quoted for profundity. This is beautiful. Ime the hardest ayahuasca experiences are the ones where you try to have a hand in it.

"Feel no need for any interfering"

Understated! Lol. My first ayahuasca experience was a "trainwreck" if i were to label it by conventional terms. But boy did i learn something from that. I had accidentally taken a dose large enough to fully pierce the veil. While there was nothing to fight on that side, it was the coming back that really revealed to me how hard i was trying to swim against the surge. I experienced both love and fear in their most concentrated forms that night and I sure know which direction I'd rather be going now LOL. In the words of one of our ceremonial songs: "This power this force, it flows like a river, surrender and flow to the sea". My successive experiences have just been a process of letting go and navigating this flow. The wonders that has done for my life are ineffable. It brings in a whole other dimension for healing

Everyone knows this symbol:
it doesn't really matter if one calls yin the white and yang the black or the other way around. What is significant is the little circles, what do these represent? Lets say yin is the white for convenience, it has a black (thus yang) core. This means it does not live only next to its yang counterpart but in it's deepest core it needs to be yang to exist. Like female has a male property inside, and male has a female side in the core.

For tao-ism it means they cannot be opposites the full way, but exist inside each other. It rids of any full on contradiction between the two.

For example say yin is calm and yang is movement.
Yin cannot become calm unless it moves toward that state, or works to maintain so. So yin needs to have itself a yang factor to become and stay yin at last.
Adversary for yang: if it was only movement, it would eventually move outside it own properties. So yang needs a brake (a yin factor) to maintain being yang as it is. Yang needs to stall itself in its state to exist. It needs a calming factor inside itself to remain itself.

Who thinks of yin/yang as opposites-only, is done for in deep tao meaning, as I understood it.

Another example: say a static painting is yin because it just is. But for it to be, the textile had to be produced, cotton has grown, the painter had to move pencils and had dynamic thoughts to make it. So yin consists purely by yang, no way around it.
Adversary the buzzy painter (yang) had to contain the pencil movements decisively, calm down his focus toward the end point product. He had to stall his hand movements in the right amount to make the painting to what it is. The resulting painting lived inside himself as a calm very static core idea where he worked to gradually. Even when the painting is an expressionistic blow, the idea of an expressionistic painting itself had lived inside himself as a very parked concept. He could not produce anything without a strong centered calm still enough concept in his core. If he would change concept all the time he would not ever come to produce an end result. Yang means nothing without yin giving it a meaning. That meaning must be still long enough for the yang movements to work toward it. Yang cannot even exist without yin giving it a meaning in time and space.

Therefore there is a black core dot in the white, and a white core dot in the black. They 'make' each other into existence. They absolutely not live 'next' to each other, but inside each other profoundly and only.

If you want to drive very fast a car trough a corner , the faster you go (more yang), the more contained (yin) your movements on the pedal must be, any erratic (yang) movement on the pedal or steering wheel will compromise the fastness of your lap time. If you want to swim fast in water, you'll have to put a diet, a stop, a moderation (= ying) to anything that works counter productive. The yang lives due ying, only.
Adversary, the more Zen you want to become (more yin), the more actively you have to work toward it, like stopping doing things in itself is an action of change what you where doing. You get more zen (ying) by producing it more. The ying lives due yang.

For tao-this-style, ying and yang cannot actually be labelled, as the one represents the other ultimately.

Applied to this:

Health could be seen as the [sickness of unhealthy-ness]. A lethal virus (or deadly bacteria colony) inside you has to be dead sick for you to be healthy.
Sickness could be seen as having/maintaining a healthy set of thriving life-compromising activities inside yourself.

True tao rids of the good-vs-bad labels. For it, anything is just a form of energy, coming to that state by a story. Like sickness being a battery of wrong voltage in your radio. But still a battery! Since it is 'energy' at last (yeah an unfortunate form of it) the tao-ist is interested to transform it if possible. This is the base of tao-ism, making use of transformation properties of energy, and (the) base of Chinese traditional Medicine. Using highways over the body (meridians) attempting to displace/relocate/re-distribute out of balance fields of energy by accupunture, siatsu,... Needless to say weird interpretations and charlatanism is part, as always.

.

I'm sure there are other meanings out there to all of that above, just sharing one of the many, one that resonates with me because it strikes me as a good news show a bit

Yes that's all correct. If i referred to anything in polarities i only meant relative. I guess this comes back to what i was saying about structural vs functional. When i was initially looking at it i was comparing health (a state of physical consolidation) to death (an inherently entropic state). Forgetting all the while that health is subtley channeling life energy while death is losing it. They truly are in one another. I've known this but made the mistake when i looked back on my Aya trips. The visual manifestations of order and dissipation where burned into my mind and the subtleties of the other polarity within them not as apparent. But if i go back now i see that those geometric shapes were twisting and bending and flying with great energy. They were definitely both there all along and i latched to one descriptive quality of the experience as the experience itself.

And i certainly don't look at the states of health and disease in terms of "good" and "bad" except from a very anthropocentric sense. Even then, it's questionable. Some of my best growth opportunities have come from illness.

Never drank Ayahuasca but I have smoked plentiful, and then some

Healing in my way of thinking is different for each person depending on the lives they have lived so far.

Smoking Ayahuasca (Vine + DMT) seems to have rid me of most or all negativity , depression and anxiety .

Therefore I would call that healed or being healed .

It is also in my mind, a work in progress and a progression of levels and experiences that I am allowed access to .
It is deeply personal and I know that she is in control of my progression.

Thanks.

Changa and Freebase DMT are certainly wonderous medicines in and of themselves! I do have to state that they are very different from ayahuasca however. There's just something about being locked into that state for 4 hours. A lot more crap comes out and is processed than otherwise.

Thanks, that makes sense .
One day I hope to try Ayahuasca but Im not in the rite situation at the moment with work , life n so on.
I very rarely have time to use Pharma .

Sometimes I rush Changa, race home from work , quick shower n so on, trying to have a smoke within the little "Me time" which I have.
Only to find the usual effects are not there and its working to a minor degree, then realise I rushed the whole process with no proper intentions and a lack of respect .

You're lucky lol. When i rushed the process the effects were there, but not so happy with my decision. I don't do that anymore lol. DMT gets more space than it needs these days.