Berkeley Talks

Drawing from his first-hand experience at Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual, a traditional healing center near Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, Dr. Joe Tafur reviews the role of spiritual and emotional healing in modern healthcare.Tafur gave a talk on April 18, 2019, for the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside the new exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which runs March 15 to Dec. 15.In this talk, Tafur discusses how emotional trauma contributes to medical illness, and how spiritual healing techniques can lead to improvements in the mind and body. Ayahuasca shamanism and other psychedelic-assisted therapies may be effective, in some cases, because of their ability to induce relevant changes in epigenetic imprints associated with emotional trauma stored in the psychoneuroendocrine immunologic network, which Tafur theorizes is the physiologic manifestation of the emotional body.Dr. Joe Tafur is a Colombian Ame