Ayahuasca, part 1- HELL

Dear ayahuasca,

I had no idea how much power could be in a plant.The wisdom of mother Earth itself. Thank you for helping me, for putting me face to face with your beautiful teaching about fear and love, about the raging hell and the soaring absolute heaven present in all life, this planet and my own little soul.

DAY 1
HELL

First, before attempting to describe one of the most powerful experiences of my life, I would like to clarify something about the profound shamanic healing therapy that the use of the master-plant ayahuasca is. It is not to be taken on lightly, in fact it is one of the most powerful (read-difficult) ways of healing. The practise has to be entered first with courage and second with faith. Even if we do not have a faith system of our own, we do have to have faith that the shamans and the people involved during this process, know what they are doing. Never under any circumstances is it for people who simply want to see visions and just to have some entertainment, diversion or an experience. It is a time-honoured pure and natural gift from the deep jungles of South America, it is an ancient wisdom of the shamans for the purpose of healing and nothing less, and it has to be felt, respected and honoured. Before the actual intake of Ayahuasca the shamans were doing for us a ceremony of coca-leaves, asking permission from the plant itself and from Pachamama (Mother Earth), asking whether we had enough courage, enough heart, enough faith. It took some time for the favourable answer to come, but the ceremony did force us to unite as a group and get into the right spirit. 
And even then- with respect and just barely enough courage to enter, one should be prepared to come face to face with the deepest darkness of oneself even though of course everyone hopes to see some light. It is in fact the darkness, that is intended to be released and that is the main purpose of this pracise for if we had no darkness we would not even be on this plane of earthly school of life. With this note I will try to share how truly astounding and helpful this therapy can be. 

Fear. 

After the first session of ayahuasca, I am truly shocked that I have survived and I am astounded that no matter how much I was convinced at that time that I was dying, I am still here. Fear is indeed a thought, just like the shaman said. But oh my god- did I have a lot of that.

It started with a little cubic swirling demon-clown peeking into my vision- peekaboo! There wasn't anything threatening about this figure, or from hindsight about any of the scenery and characters I encountered on my 3-4 hours long vision quest. Yet it's hard to describe how it makes one feel to suddenly be in an altogether different reality, to have everything one is accustomed to and depends on, taken away. So when all of a sudden I was in a universe I can best compare to surrealistic cubic art- with all kinds of shapes like triangles, squares, but more than that- grotesque, moving, living shapes- coming at me at full speed and frightening intimacy, I was not prepared. It was a full universe of not only picture but also sound, all the formations were making horrible loud clicking, grinding, ticking sounds (later the shaman explained that this is the way the ayahuasca plant wakes up in the nervous system, a sign that it has reacted with the brain). Also the sounds of people vomiting all around me did not help to ease me into it, rather made everything more hellish. The vision shapes were not just objects, yet they were not fully alive either, there was something cold about it all, empty of soul.. It was like a huge surreal circus, also akin to being inside a huge multi-coloured clock, every devilish cube and tube kept winding up and coming at me.

I tried to open my eyes but the vision was there even with open eyes. It was at this point when everything spiraled out of control for me. Suddenly I felt the nausea which is the main cleansing tool of the vine Ayahuasca. The mixture used actually consists of two plants. Ayahuasca, the vine, acts like a carrier for Chacruna, another plant, which is the component that carries the active ingredient of DMT- also known of late as the spirit molecule. The Ayahuasca helps the Chacruna carry the DMT to the brain, after which it exits the body via a purge. A stunningly beautiful and perfect process of nature. 

The mixture had been swirling around my circulation for some time now, it was so easy to feel it from the first few minutes- a bit like a surge of electricity, a hot stream, bubbling at times like a hot spring of Mother Nature. It started by descending to the stomach, down my arms and legs, making a circle and moving up through the spine to the brain which is when the peekabooing started. Almost everybody vomits it, the shamans hold the vomiting the most important of the whole process, as a tool to get rid of the bad energy accumulated through the years. The more you vomit the better and if some poor souls go through 5-7 sessions of only purging and no visions, tired and disappointed at the "only negative", the shaman will smile and be happy of their progress. Some people have difficulty keeping the bitter brown liquid down for more than 5-10 minutes, I managed until about 15. And then things got really ugly. 

The setting of the therapy looks a bit like an army hospital at night. Mattresses lined up against the wall of the "patients". Darkness because the eyes cannot handle light during this process. Next to each of the mattresses the essentials- a bucket for purging, tissues for cleaning up, a huge bottle of water. And of course the participants, all wrapped up in warm clothing and sleeping bags as one of the side-effects is also freezing. 

So after 15 minutes the nausea was incredible, never-before experienced in my life. And the visions were all-encompassing, devouring me, drowning me. The vomit was the plant mixture come to life, engorged into a huge black-green vine-serpent. The bucket was a huge long black tunnel, where I was falling down along with the serpent next to me, circling me, which was at times turning into a demonic face which was making purging sounds and telling me- purge! I felt it was the vine itself speaking to me. So I purged, it was impossible not to. It was impossible to stop, the nausea just kept growing. Suddenly I could not move my head and I had to gasp for air. The collar of my jumper felt like it was choking me, killing me. I kept wanting to hide under the blanket to get away from it all but there was no getting away. I was concentrating with all my might to breathe, relax, change the vision, but nothing helped. I needed tissue and water but whenever I tried to feel around me for these, firstly the movements made me too sick and secondly I had no idea where I was or of orientation. Everything I managed to touch was soft and fuzzy and the wrong shape and texture. I felt I was losing control over the whole of my body, paralysed in fear. I kept trying to breathe as I held my head.

At some point I realised that the shaman was singing and that the helpers were making a fuss around me. I had heard them talking around me for some time but I was convinced it had nothing to do with me, so removed was I from reality. I couldn't make out any words, they seemed coming from a million miles away, also it seemed I had forgotten all English, none of the words made any sense. The fuss they were making made me feel two-fold. First- it was giving me a tiny bit of hope, just to vaguely know that there was somebody out there, far far away from the circus of animated cubism where I was, but there. At the same time it made me feel more nervous about my current state, I knew I was bad, but until then I had no idea that I was the only one having problems at that time. Why was everyone so quiet, why weren't they gasping for their lives like I was?! 
I had forgotten that I am highly sensitive to stimulation such as this, over-sensitive compared to most people, had forgotten to tell the shamans to have a lesser dose. But it was too late of course. In hindsight I know that the dose was too much for me, but I also know that I was helped so much namely because of the extremity of the experience and that there is a deep wisdom in life which never gives us more than we can handle.

At this time, though I was far away from the voices next to me, I heard a clear and loud sentence from a young 15 year old shaman apprentice (a very talented girl, in real life seeming like an ordinary teenager, but during sessions proving herself highly powerful and intuitive)- OPEN YOUR HEART! I knew this was the truth and what I had to do. I felt my heart closed, over-powered with fear and blocks that had accumulated in me which I kept releasing but which kept growing back. 

Because all this time I had been gasping over a bucket, there was a time when one of the helpers had removed it to empty it. At one horrifying moment I had no bucket, I was feeling like another purge, yet I could not open my mouth to ask for it, I could not move my hands to locate it, I was powerless, helpless, sick in torments of hell. After the helpers finally returned me to my tunnel of flying serpents, the bucket became the most important thing in my life, all that mattered. I kept feeling it. It disappeared you see. While it was under my hands, the whole molecular nature of the world was twisting constantly and sometimes becoming absent altogether. The bucket swirled, disappeared, I could never be sure if it was there, if it wasn't, the space around me was empty and not empty at the same time. Had I entered some kind of quantum reality of uncertainty?- it certainly felt like that. 

The Universe gone cubist, soulless and clownish was still raving away at me. I was drowned in it, utterly lost, with no power at all. I honestly thought that there was no come-back from this reality for me, that I would stay lost in it forever, thus forgetting the exactly opposite point the shaman had made in the preparatory talk, where she asked us to remember, no matter how we felt, that nothing lasts forever, ayahuasca, like anything else has a life-span in our bodies, an energetic curve. In other words the teaching of anicca- things always rise to pass away. 

How long passed I have no idea, it was a timeless hell. But there came a point when I heard and finally understood what one of the helpers was saying to me- relax, just relax.

So I tried again. At first I couldn't understand where was my bed, I still couldn't sense this reality. The longer I kept my eyes open and concentrated, the more I started to see however. I was on my bed still- yey! Only sitting diagonally over the bucket, that's why I hadn't been able to find anything. Slowly I lay down and after many more bouts with nausea and sitting up again to dry-purge, I could at last, with one hand on my life-line the bucket, just to make sure it was still there, rest for a while. There were still the physical feelings, of freezing and being on fire at the same time, but I was alive and back.

Other than facing terror I managed on that first night to also open my heart. While the helper was leading me down the stairs later to go to the bathroom, I felt my heart burst open in the sweet pain of over-whelming love for her. She was leading me a small step at a time, I was completely blind and I felt so much humility and gratitude, for the helpers this whole scene must have been so hard, so difficult to witness, and to try to help- when the people are as lost as that, on the border of staying lost. I hadn't felt that moved for a long time. 

And coming back, resting and relaxed, still under the effects of Ayahuasca, I heard a thought- BEHOLD BIRTH. When I looked at my experience with this thought, I understood. I had asked from the plant to help remove the blocks for me in my path of self-realization. It's crystal clear to me now that the only obstacle I ever had was fear, from a young age. Fear of this insensitive world, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of taking the first step, fear- first and foremost- of not being good enough. In order to remove that block- fear, there was nothing else to do other than to put me in the deepest fear possible. And what is the deepest fear? For some its death, I have met death and made peace with that. What is the next in line as to the fear-experiences though people tend not to remember this one? Birth. Looking at it, birth seemed exactly similar to my vision. A dark long tunnel and a completely alien world around me all of a sudden which makes no sense and because it is completely unknown and alien is utterly terrifying. Shapes we don't know coming at us, talking a language we do not understand, it's just sounds, shapes, colours. Us being completely helpless, we have no control over our bodily functions. We want to tuck away somewhere warm and dark, a comforting place that is our only experienced reality at that point. Oh the compassion I now feel for a baby being born! What a trauma!

The day after, like a new-born babe, I felt like crying all day. The whole day-time, spent alone and in noble silence, still mostly in fasting like in the day before, I was preparing myself with meditation on the heart. I knew the heart was the key, I knew that all that was necessary for this experience of rebirth was love. I was scared to death of the next session, but the shaman had promised me a small dose and I couldn't leave the process half-way, come what may.