Ayahuasca is a plant medicine that is not meant to be taken lightly.
She is a spiritual tool that can also heal physical, mental, and emotional disorders...if you can get out of your own way.
During a very long depression in which nothing in my life worked out as it was "supposed" to, my soul cried Perù!!! - and it wouldn't shut up no matter how hard I tried to make it.
It didn't make any sense, but I couldn't ignore, deny, run, or hide from it; I could not stop PERÙ!!! from flowing through my veins.
Eventually I stopped fighting it. With no plan, only the awareness that I needed to tend deeply fractured parts of myself, I got on a plane and went to Perù in 2012...little did I know it was Abuela ayahuasca calling me home:
"Ayahuasca is a preparation for death," the shaman told our circle in the candlelight.
Thank the gods, I silently replied and sank into the relief that washed over my body.
For a decade at least, I had prayed countless times to unknown entities to "please, please just let me die already!!" Yoga & meditation comforted me in those last few months, but darkness still clenched me tight.
Finally finally I sat on that straw mat on the sand floor with a group of Russians in the dark of a round, windowless room in the Amazon rainforest, with a thin shaman suggesting death was imminent once we drank the ayahuasca that sat before him.
THIS is how the gods were answering my pleas for mercy. I felt the sting in my face of tears drawing to my eyes; out of habit, I held them back. I came thousands of miles for this, and I was ready for physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual death.
Our ceremony began with a prayer; the shaman, his girlfriend, and his apprentice across the room from me calling on the plants and apus - the spirits of the sacred mountains - to protect and guide us. They asked Pachamama, Mother Earth herself, to be with us while we invited Abuela ayahuasca in.
One by one, we knelt in front of him. He poured a bowlful of thick, sticky ayahuasca brew for each of us, lit a stick of palo santo, and blessed us while we drank it.
My turn came, and I proceeded solemnly to the shaman - I wondered if I was doing it right. I tried to feel some sort of mysticalness, but as usual I was mostly just numb.
The ayahuasca tasted awful. Before I could make gagging noises and laugh, a bat flew between us - a fucking bat*, man!
"That was weird," said the shaman. No shit, I said silently, and went back to my straw mat to wait for the ayahuasca to take effect.
I waited anxiously, not knowing what to expect from a "spiritual" experience or plant medicine. The air felt heavy and serious. I fiddled with my blanket and watched the others.
The apprentice puked first, and suddenly the indoor sand floor made a lot more sense.
Each mat had a plastic bucket in front of it for our purging comfort, but at first most people chose to politely step outside to hurl. As the night wore on and aya went deeper, etiquette became the last thing worth considering, and there was a steady symphony of vomiting from one side of the room to the other.
While I listened to the apprentice empty his stomach contents, I wondered what aya would feel like for me. I was starting to wonder if it would work at all when the walls of the maloka fell away...
I was in my body on a straw mat on a sand floor, but my mind was everywhere - I could "see" the jungle all around me, 360 degrees of lush greenery and plant LIFE in every direction - there was no more up, no more down, no more space at all.
No time either, only light, patterns swirling expanding growing changing illuminating every moment so much information!! No more time, that paradigm falls away...
The dim candlelight in the windowless room is not enough to illuminate even the straw mat beneath me, this thin life raft keeping me afloat through some uncharted realm.
It doesn't matter, because my eyes might be closed anyway,
but that doesn't matter either because they are not what I'm using to see.
The Universe unfolds before me, star systems expanding and exploding, I am the galaxy itself yet quite still on a straw mat in a dark room, witnessing nebulas created and destroyed in the blink of my maybe closed eyes from the floating stability of a flimsy straw raft.
The Universe unfurls its glory then wipes itself away like a damp cloth on slate, another rising up to take its place just as milk clouds puff themselves through black coffee.
Clumps of gas peppered with starlight enlarge, contract, enlarge, contract, a heartbeat in space dust and light thumping itself in and out of existence while arms of an unseen clock erase unceasing creation spiraling up immediately again to fill the void - I sit gobsmacked on the straw mat on top of the sand, a plastic bucket just within reach in case I need to puke but I have myself locked down so tight that I only do it once.
Ayahuasca in my veins, my liver, my brain, my guts; I am everything and nothing at all.
She aligns my chakras; I see the rainbow right in front of me, a line from root to crown glowing balls of light, purple light everywhere, but the red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-gold wheels spinning in front of me and I KNOW understand feel AM the importance of keeping these energy centers aligned and in flow.
Aya touches my throat - a yellow light on my throat and I open my mouth to say something because someone is calling my name somewhere and I open my mouth to respond and it feels like opening the door of an attic and a moth flies out...it has been so long since I USED my voice...and it scares me a little but there's no time, so there's no time to be scared and those chemicals drift away under the powerful chemicals in Abuela Aya who's with me and in me and inseparable from me.
Someone is singing now/then - an icaros! A spiritual guide song and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in all of existence, I hear this angel singing I know the girl in real life and I had no clue she had a voice like a whole choir of angels and HALLELUJAH the majesty of those glorious tones coming forth through another dimension from a beautiful little girl and there are hot tears rolling down my face as every cell in my body vibrates with every perfect note she SINGS!
Then something is falling - something from high high high above me, something heavy it's falling and it's falling faster and faster and faster and getting closer and closer and closer
and suddenly it hits me
POUNDS into me
I feel my body hammered, struck, punched, pummeled
and it was part of my soul - the 16 year old me that died on the day my sister died it came back and collided with my body and oh my god had that little girl part of me with her own hopes and dreams been gone this whole time???
oh my god and I hold her for awhile, she is alive again and back with me, part of me
and I thank all the stars in the sky, I feel them in my cells
they are out there
but they are in me too
and my ego tries to make sense of it all, tries to hold onto this piece and that piece so one day I may be able to tell the others,
because as many times as I wished to die over the last decade, I also wished that many times that please may my experience help others, please may I heal so that I may heal others so all this suffering makes a little more sense
but the pieces slip away because there are so many moments happening all at once and there's nothing to grasp and there's so much light
and the beautiful songs continue
and maybe I'll just lay down for a bit because there is so much happening and I'm so so tired.
and before I know it the sun is rising
and the ceremony draws to a close
and I stumble back to the main house
a new person
on a new day
And I sing an old, old song on my way through the Amazon rainforest:
"May the long time sun
Shine upon you,
All love surround you,
And the pure light within you
Guide your way on."
...
The next afternoon, we came together for a sharing circle and told our experiences and the shaman gave us feedback.
Would you like to know how that went? Please join me for part 4.
Part 1 here
Part 2 here
*I dig animal totems. It was only as I wrote this piece that it occurred to me to look up what a bat means. According to this source: "Bat is a guide through the darkness. Bat medicine releases us from our old self and opens the doors for something new and healing."
Oh, Universe, you fun place...
💛 Sara!