Date: Thursday, May 9 , 2024
Medicine: Ayahuasca
Dose: 1 cup (ayahuasca cups are small) + 2 shots
Experience:
I had read about ayahuasca before going and I had no intention of ever doing it. Ayahuasca literally translates as “vine of death” and few people describe it as pleasant. Sergey had an Ayahuascqaro named Juan visiting who was going to conduct the ceremony. Sergey assured me that Juan’s medicine is beautiful and not the nightmare’s I had heard about. I was fully putting my trust in Sergey so I agreed to do it and so did Rita. With one other guest that made 3 of us total, a nice small ceremony. By the Monday of this week, Sergey said I was one of the hardest cases he has seen (people often find joy in Huachuma by this point) and he needed Juan to give me stronger medicine to “break me”. I agreed. At about 6pm I was given a full ayahuasca cup of strong medicine + 1 shot of an additional for Vision + 1 shot for Strength. This is a LOT of ayahuasca.
Part 1: For about 20 minutes I sat on a mattress in the maloca in the dark with not much happening. Suddenly the medicine hit strong and I felt like I was launched down a hyperspace tube like in a scifi movie. At first I had a hard time breathing, got scared, and wondered if I had just killed myself doing something stupid. As I got control, I calmed down and knew I was ok. Ayahuasca visuals are absolutely nothing like Huachuma visuals for me. I was absolutely seeing things that weren’t there: people, places, and outrageous shapes and patterns that almost always morphed into grinding gears, gnashing teeth, tentacles, and monstrous things coming at me. None of it hurt and I was annoyed by it but not scared. It was just my mind painting pictures.
Part 2: As I settled in I got caught in a thought loop; “Well, this is stupid.”, “Why did I do this?”, “What a waste. This can’t help me.”, “Well, this is stupid”, “Hey, I thought that before”, and back around the loop. According to Juan I was fighting this way for almost 2 hours. I finally made a game out of trying to expand the loop by introducing new random thoughts, making the loop bigger and bigger until one new thought could grab hold.
Part 3: I broke the loop by thinking about people in my life. I would bring them individually to my mind, fully visualize them, and assign a thought to them; love, forgiveness, pride, etc… I started with Rita and went through every member of my family and close friends. All this time Juan had been singing Icaro’s, or magic songs. He has a beautiful voice and I realized I should be smiling and enjoying it. I actually started to move my hands and feet while lying down, tapping to the music.
Interlude: Juan called an end to it at about 4 ½ hours saying it was over. I still felt the medicine pretty strongly but assumed that when I got up I would shake it off. He tried performing a cleansing ritual on me and I more or less collapsed (literally face planted on the wooden floor). That’s when the other guest in the room realized I was still strongly in the medicine and translated to Juan. I was allowed to stay lying down.
Part 4: Yup, I had gotten more than I should and by fighting it for 2 hours I made it last longer. I was 4 more hours on my little roller coaster ride through hell and couldn’t stand up until 2am. Rita and Sergey’s cat Luna stayed with me the whole time.
Lesson: The saying goes that “Ayahuasca shows you what, and Huachuma shows you how and why.” I honestly couldn’t tell what Aya was trying to show me at the time. So the lesson I accepted was that I needed to get my ass kicked and prove to myself that I could commit to the process even when something like that happened. It was enough to get me to come back.