Jack Canfield helped to build the best-selling book series in publishing history on a simple bet, that one stranger’s true story can change your life. Chicken Soup for the Soul® has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide since 1993 and spun off into hundreds of titles, two Guinness World Records, and a permanent spot in the core memory of most Gen Xers and Millennials. He became a featured teacher in the popular documentary The Secret, landed in the National Speakers Association’s Speaker Hall of Fame, trained more than a million people across 50 countries and made the rounds from Oprah to Larry King. At this point he has nothing left to prove in publishing, which is what makes the subject of his new book so unexpected.
Canfield drank ayahuasca for the first time in Ecuador many years ago, when he worked with a guide who was bringing people deep into Achuar territory to rally support for protecting the rainforest. He and his wife flew to the town of Shell, then took a four-seat plane to an airstrip cut into the jungle. The village looked two thousand years old, chickens roamed freely, and random crops grew in wild and chaotic tangles.
The ceremony started at dark, and as Canfield lay on a banana leaf under the stars, it was impossible to get comfortable, because the leaf was killing his back. “If you’ve ever laid on a banana leaf, there’s a big spine down the middle,” he says. “I’m totally uncomfortable, going, this sucks.”
The leader of the journey asked if he was okay. He told her about how uncomfortable his spine was, so she got him a second leaf so he could lie between them. It was a small fix, but it cracked open an unlikely revelation. “I realized in that moment I never asked for things when I was uncomfortable,” Canfield says. “I just gutted it out.”
As the ceremony went on, the shaman sat in front of a fire and shook a rattle all night. “For like four or five hours, endlessly,” Canfield says. Ayahuasca sharpens hearing, and at one point he was certain the shaman had crossed the clearing and was rattling next to his ear, but when he opened his eyes the shaman hadn’t moved.
Then came a powerful vision, where he was walking through the jungle in his mind. Canfield found a door in a giant tree that led down to a black onyx table, and figures asked him to lie down, then one raised a knife shaped like a lightning bolt over his heart.
“My mind clicked in, which it’s not supposed to do, and it said, what if you let him do that? You might die of a heart attack.” He opened his eyes and the vision vanished.
The next day, through two translators, he told the Achuar shaman what happened, and the shaman’s response was “Too bad.” Had Canfield let it happen, his heart would have been initiated into a new level of opening. He could come back next year and finish though, if he wanted to, but had no plans to repeat the plane and the boat and the river.
However, when the medicine calls you back, you answer.
Ayahuasca for the Soul
Years later, and a continent away, he found the medicine again at Rythmia in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where he has since sat in ceremony dozens of times and where he now serves on the board alongside Kelly Slater, Ron White, Frank Biden, Cesar Millan and NYX Cosmetics founder Toni Ko.
What he kept noticing wasn’t only his own breakthrough, it was everyone else’s. His new book, Ayahuasca for the Soul follows the same formula that endeared millions of readers to Chicken Soup for the Soul ®, and gathers 79 first-person accounts from people who drank plant medicine around the world, most of them at Rythmia, including Millan, Iyanla Vanzant, AnnaLynne McCord and Southern Charm’s Shep Rose. Four of the stories are Canfield’s own, three come from combat veterans, and the rest belong to parents, former addicts in recovery, successful CEOs, and every day human beings who had never so much as smoked a joint before they got on the plane. The range is the point, and the book goes to show how a Navy SEAL and a reality star can often be working on the same core wound.
The veteran stories are the ones Canfield can’t stop thinking about. Every one of them, he says, went into ceremony carrying horrific war trauma, and the medicine took them somewhere else entirely, back to when they were children. One, a former Navy SEAL, remembered being home alone as a boy and adopting a scrawny stray cat. He fed it milk, and the cat got sick all over the house. His mother, who was a single parent, came home from work and exploded at him. “He decides it’s not safe to be compassionate, it’s not safe to be kind,” Canfield says. “I have to control my environment and control myself.” Every veteran he spoke with found some iteration of that moment, and with it, the reason they enlisted.
Show Me Who I’ve Become
Rythmia was much different than his experience in the jungle. The Western amenities at the luxurious center are a bonus, but the structure around the week is what was standout for him. An integral part of the Rythmia Way Program’s structure is built around their intentions. The first is “Show me who I have become,” but Canfield has his own, rather endearing, name for it. “I call it Show Me Where I’m an Asshole Night,” he says. During that experience with the first intention, he saw where he fell short as a father, a husband, a boyfriend all the way back to high school, a son and a brother.
Night two is where you ask the medicine to merge you with your soul no matter the cost, but Canfield didn’t initially have that experience. However, by night three, “Heal my heart,” when he went looking for answers, the conversation that followed played out in his head “like a cell phone conversation,” complete with text bubbles.
His soul told him he was too attached, and afraid. Canfield admitted he was scared that if he handed over the wheel to what the medicine would ask of him, he’d be sent to chant in orange robes outside a movie theater in Westwood. His soul offered a deal. If he surrendered, it wouldn’t ask him to do anything he didn’t want to do for a year. When he agreed, a rush of energy flew out of his body, but then a new bubble appeared: Sell your house.
“And I write back, you motherfucker,” Canfield says. “Then my soul said, just kidding. And I realized my soul has a sense of humor, which is my essence.”
What People Get Wrong
When we ask Canfield what keeps people away from the medicine, he starts with the bucket. The fear of purging is the first thing that comes up in every conversation he has about ayahuasca, and he thinks most of that fear is borrowed from bad memories of the flu.
“When it’s time to throw up, you throw up. It’s over, and it’s a cleansing.” The medicine moves through the body, sorting what to release, he explains, whether toxins, tension, guilt or old memories, and it leaves through purging, sweating, shaking, laughing or tears.
The other big fear is that people will come home and blow up their lives. Canfield says he mostly sees the opposite, with people loving their kids more and seeing where they’ve been sabotaging their marriages. He’s also clear about who shouldn’t drink. People on antidepressants or living with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder need to sit this one out, which is why he’s adamant about medical screening. At Rythmia, he says, there’s an EMT in the room, doctors and nurses on property and an ambulance on standby.
Jack’s Favorite Medicine Music
Since this is SPIN, we had to ask him what his favorite ceremony songs are. Canfield still hunts down the original music that moved him, and when he recently typed “ayahuasca music” into Apple Music and found a flood of it, including tracks he recognized from his ceremonies.
“Coração do Mundo” by Carioca, “Que Mi Medicina” by Peia and “Ritual” by Beth Quist are some he deeply appreciates. But, the one that undid him is “Blessed We Are”, which is also by Peia—he calls this one haunting and heart-moving. The line that always gets him is the one about remembering why you came here and remembering that your life is sacred.
The English-language songs he loves the most include: “Thank You for This Day” by Karen Drucker, “The Dance” by Garth Brooks, and “Open Up and Fly” by Damage Control.
He loves the pure icaros and rattle as much as the full band. “You are drinking raw nature,” one shaman once told his group, and the music is what carries you through it. A rattle for four hours will take you deep into your journey, but when the right song lands at the right moment, it can be out of this world.
What He Wants For Readers of Ayahuasca for the Soul
Canfield is 82 and, by his own description, “out on the skinny branches these days,” between aliens, past lives, near-death experiences and psychedelics. “Who would have thought when I was in my mother’s womb in Fort Worth, Texas, that this would be my destiny?” he says.
“I wanted to create a collection of stories that showed the amazing breakthroughs, transformations, and healings that happen for people during an ayahuasca ceremony, to inspire them to have the courage to move past their fears and take advantage of this amazing plant medicine,” he says. “There is so much needless suffering in the world. Anxiety, guilt, shame, loneliness, depression, addiction, low self-esteem. All of which can be released and transcended with ayahuasca. I’m hoping people will read these profoundly moving stories and say to themselves, ‘Wow, I want that for me, too,’ and then decide to do it.”
His read on why ayahuasca is suddenly everywhere is blunter. “The plant world is basically saying, hey guys, you are fucking up big time. We are now stepping forward to help you rediscover the truth of who you really are and get back on track before you destroy all of us and yourselves.”
Ayahuasca for the Soul is now available.