Flickering
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2011
- Messages
- 1,118
Overview
I have spent the past month digesting this experience, and I'll likely continue to process it for a long while to come. This was one of the toughest things I have ever lived through. Over the course of a weekend in Peru, the brew dowsed me repeatedly and without mercy in my own worst fears and memories. It broke me in a way I have never been broken before. I spent the following week contemplating suicide. Yet for all of it, I'd do it again. The things the Mother showed me about myself, I would never have discovered any other way, and looking back, I am grateful for every last terrifying, nauseating, miserable fucking second.
This took place in a circle of almost four dozen people, led by a shaman. I actually would not do it this way again. Reflecting on the experience, I don't feel the need to have a shaman on hand, and I would prefer to drink alone or with a few trusted friends at most. Lead-up rituals of chastity, plain eating and abstinence from other drugs may help, but are not essential. It seems to me the most important thing is to speak your intent out loud before you drink, so you have a clear idea of what you hope to gain from it. Some may perhaps feel I've missed the point of the substance by saying such things, but I have gone into this for my own reasons, and those are the personal conclusions I've come to.
There is little point me telling the tale sequentially. I could write a book about it that way, so much happened over those two nights. Instead, I'll divide this into the main things I took away from the journey.
The Altered State
Let's begin with what it's like superficially. There's no question ayahuasca makes for a profound voyage. Yet in many ways, I did not find it overly different from other hallucinogens, simply more powerful and consuming. I'd loosely compare the dose I took the first night to seven or eight hits of acid in terms of effects - visuals, tracers, body high, mind expansion. The second night, I took a double shot. Needless to say things got a little weird.
There's a certain atmosphere or 'buzz' to the trip that felt quite unlike anything else I've ever tried. It's radiant, austere and electrifying. I could not overstate the sense of depth about it. Things became utterly surreal. With my eyes open, I interpreted the outside world as though it were more curious than the strangest dream - yet I was mostly able to interface with it in full cognisance when I needed to. My imagination became incredibly vivid. At times I would imagine sensations so viscerally I could almost feel them, and some of these were deeply disturbing. I felt wide open to the cosmos of my own mind and vulnerable throughout. This sense of exposure was part and parcel to the experience, as I had to come to terms with my own discomfort in a thousand different ways.
Very odd things would come and go with little warning. At one point about half of my body was braced in a direct experience of divine energy. I found this confronting because it wasn't something I was making up in my head; it was real, and happening to me with or without my volition. Once I relaxed into it, however, I realised it was a physical feeling of pure love. There was a sense of presence about the whole thing. It was impossible to deny I was being watched over by forces I could barely comprehend, and they were offering their blessings for what was to come. This is just one example, and there were other, zanier things, such as the entire room taking on a quality of pumpkin soup (it made about as much sense as it sounds like). It could get very disorienting.
My awareness of my own thoughts and feelings, of their origins and of their effects on me and my environment, came to focus as though I had spent a lifetime in meditation. This degree of insight was staggering. I'm still processing the things I found out about my subconscious. My philosophical alacrity took me to a higher dimension of thought and opened up a world I'd always suspected was there, but that I now had a direct experience of. You can't understand unless you've been there yourself. Things simply became self-evident. I was beyond cultural conditioning, outside of subjective reality. The Mother would not allow ego to interfere with my perception any longer. She snaked through layers of my consciousness as an etheric vine, changing the rhythms of my mind with intent and wisdom. I could observe my own brain down to the beating of my heart, the flow of my blood and the world beyond my body that I was not, and never had been, disconnected from. Answers came that my sober mind could never have conjured. It was a glimpse of the truth, and I understand now why so many people become converts after taking their first cup.
I experienced little in the way of closed-eye visuals. They weren't what I came for.
Light and Dark
I'd come to heal. This was not supposed to be easy.
For three hours on the first night, the Mother showed me the brightest side of myself. I saw a little boy who wanted nothing but peace and happiness for the whole world. Reality, he believed, ought to be modeled around play, not around suffering and death. He showed me what his idea of heaven looked like. It took my breath away. The purity of my intent to the world was what it took to see the light in myself, and I started weeping uncontrollably as I finally allowed myself to believe again that I was a good person. Events from my preteen and adolescent years had led me to doubt my integrity, but these wounds were sealing now into mere scars, as I at last found the self-acceptance I'd been desiring for years. Confidence returned to me and permitted me to feel comfortable in my own skin. The abusers and misconceptions of my past could not affect me anymore. I would cease to hold myself to their perfect standards. From here on, I would treat myself with understanding and respect. There was nothing but love. Rejuvenation into light and love.
But, light casts a shadow. Visions of heaven contrasted with the reality of our world. Beneath the walls of my defenses, the same child I saw in myself was lost in despair and confusion. Of all the infinite worlds we could live in, he needed to know why it had to be THIS one.
I was a beggar on the streets of Bethlehem. Sick, without hope, sitting here in this temple with all these other impoverished souls. Disorder, chaos. I was the king at the top of the tower, refusing to see my fellow human beings who suffered at my hand below, gazing pointedly away from the water rising outside my window. Easier to believe everything was where it ought to be.
I was a killer, enormous and clad in black, cutting down civilians in the street. I had no care for compassion. There was only power, and I was powerful. It was power that dictated the course of human history, manifest in millions of other soulless warriors, encouraged and rewarded by natural selection.
And then, I was looking at a knife, sharp enough to part flesh, being thrust into the chest of a child. I was the child, innocent and helpless, dying as my whole world went insane. I felt my physical being get penetrated by the blade, sharpness and the most excruciating pain you can imagine, then an adult hand reaching into my chest, reaching inside me, and wrenching my beating heart clean out. Blood. Pain. Power. Hell. The shock of realising my most basic function of survival had failed, in the moment before blackness clouded my thoughts. This was it. And it was my own fellow man doing it to me, primates gone completely crazy and sacrificing their own kids to the sun. You could not get a more poignant image of the corruption of this world. The most twisted perversion imaginable of what should have been such a beautiful thing: adults raising children into the world, welcoming them, teaching them, loving them… and, now and then, cutting out their fucking hearts.
I cannot stress how real this part was. It replayed itself for hours. I clawed at my face and hair and moaned and pressed a hand to my own chest, stricken with terror at the thought that someone could do this to me too. I looked around the room at all these people, spewing, rocking back and forth, crying… it was in their genetic code, the potential to murder their own children. This entire reality must have gone wrong, for that to even be possible. And it hammered itself into me. This is real. It happened, in a sense is still happening. And we are in hell. This planet is hell.
The strong dominate the weak. Survival of the fittest. Fuck this world, I want out.
The adult in me got it. The kid in me could not understand. Rage and fear, rage and fear. Despair swallowed me over and over again, I could not get out no matter what I tried. Reality was a black hole that sucked me in and feasted on my emotions all night long.
This, said Mother Ayahuasca, is why you are without hope. Now let's look at the rest of your mind.
Angels and Demons
Every negative thought in my head was a living demon. My personality determined which demons I was susceptible to, but in every case, I was freely handing them power. Over the years they had festered into a network of anxiety, paranoia, sadness and despondency that I had loosely termed 'depression'.
My mind had never been mine. Every thought and feeling exists on a spiritual plane of archetypal thought-forms. The imagination is our gateway to that world. Every abstract concept conceivable is real in some literal sense. Though our bodies have not evolved to perceive them directly the way we see the material world, their influence over reality remains indisputable. If millions of people believe in a god, or a nation, they give their idea power over the world. If a team of construction workers come together around some building schematics, the lines and symbols on the paper become concretely manifest as the workers use them to put a very real building together. This is the essence of magic.
And then you realise the building itself is only a concept, its boundaries drawn by our minds. Your body is a concept. So is your personality. So is your society. So is every molecule and atom. So is time and distance. These borders only exist insofar as we believe them to.
Holy fucking shit, I thought, as I watched my brain devolve into an ecology of astral entities. It was enough to drive the wrong person psychotic.
The only way to escape your depression, said Mother Ayahuasca, is to give power to the angels inside you. Only these beings of love and wisdom can set you free.
You create your own reality, she said. Every thought you have is a decision. Every demon is really God trying to teach you how to take control. Only once you accept this can you truly begin to awaken.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I threw up.
Nightmare
Having been there and back, I now know things about myself that I had previously paid little attention to. Even at my most spiritual, I am deeply irreverent. I cursed Mother Ayahuasca for the things she put me through. Figured if I had to watch little kids getting their chests cut open, the least I could give back was to call her a bitch. I got the impression the spirit world didn't mind. We're inculcated into an Abrahamic tradition of respect for God, but over the last century, mankind's existential crisis has carried us into a perception of our own horrifying freedom. I say embrace it. Fuck God right up the asshole and may anyone who takes offense to that drown in the shifting sands of time. That's how you sculpted me, Father, so accept it. It was funny, because I was thinking these things while everyone else was in a deep state of reverence, and I felt so empty.
On the second night, the instant I'd taken the extra shot, the deepest sense of dread came over me. What had I just done? Hadn't the first night been enough? I was asking for it, and now I was really going to get it. And sure enough I did.
It started with childhood memories. Simple ones, and often beautiful. I could see my own thoughts at the time unfolded in a digital network that spanned from my conscious personality down to my genetic structure and out to my environment. I was the boy swimming in the pool who'd been enjoying himself until he sliced his foot on something sharp and cried out in pain as chlorine lit up his pain receptors. Simultaneously, I was the function of his memory categorising this experience into his burgeoning worldview… I was his parents cradling him as he cried… I was the chlorine in the water, and the flowers in the bushes nearby, and the ocean beyond. It was total deconstruction into the greater whole.
I saw myself die and get born. These temporal boundaries do not really exist. There is only the region of itself that the universal mind focuses on. An organism assembles itself out of surrounding matter with infinite intelligence. It segregates its awareness to focus with full efficiency on the parts of its environment most relevant to its survival. In so doing it develops a sense of self, of identity, and forgets that it is all and everything. It believes itself to be an infant, a child, a teenager, an adult. It perceives itself to be ME. Then one day it dies, and those ideas dissolve, and the personality that was nothing to begin with becomes nothing again, and once more I am everything, everywhere.
My consciousness was in a dozen complex layers at once. Seeing outside this human body while trying to process everything through its limited faculties made for total information overload. My ego began to disintegrate. Suddenly there were no more concepts. There was only percept. It was impossible to make sense of anything. The world, and my thoughts, had become an incomprehensible blur. Through this I regressed to my base instincts, to the person underneath the identity, to my childhood emotions. A loop of corresponding traumatic memories played in my mind. I was stripped bare once again. No defenses. No way to escape it. I have never, in my entire adolescent and adult life, known anything so horrible.
It was only later the next day that I realised the Mother had given me a gift. She'd shown me what I was without my walls.
But at the time, you see, I was screaming. Begging for it to stop. Crying. I was lost in deep space. The room and its music on one layer. The operation of my body on another. The ENTIRE UNIVERSE on another. And a circle of the worst things I've ever felt recurring simultaneously in another. For hours.
"STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP PLEASE MAKE IT STOP, STOP IT!"
You're an idiot, a freak, you're defective, you're pathetic, weak, infantile, pathetic, useless, pathetic, you should be ashamed of yourself, listen to the fucking noise you're making you moron, you fucking shitbag, how could anyone ever love you, why don't you just kill yourself, you're an idiot, a freak, you're defective…
Life, death, time, concept, percept, body, consciousness, mind, pain, heaven, justice, hellfire, hellfire, life, death, time, hellfire…
Beating heart, muscles contracting, relaxing, deep psychological functions, blood flowing in a futile battle against necrosis, beating heart, muscles…
And, one of the others was there, bracing me in her arms and telling me to focus on my breathing while I whined and made a spectacle of myself.
And this is one of the other things I learned. My deepest fear is shame. I am terrified of failure, of humiliation. That night, I lived it.
Aftermath
In conclusion, ayahuasca is a pretty strong drink.
It's worth mentioning how the group reacted the next day. Some of them, I think, were pissed that I'd been panicking besides them during their own trips. Fair enough. I felt truly ashamed about it. I've never lost control like that in my life. Never had any idea how it felt to simply freak out. I've been assaulted, mugged, thought I was going to die, gone through trips where I KNEW I was losing my mind, and I still never reacted like that. I've spent the last eight years wishing I could cease to exist, the main thing stopping me being I don't want to hurt the people who care about me. So I thought nothing could faze me. I cannot tell you how foolish I felt. Just wanted to vanish; I was beyond hating myself, I'd let go of all self-worth altogether. Had not been aware there was a thing in the world that could cause me to behave in that way.
What saved me, I think, was that others in the group did in fact seem to understand. Came up and asked what had happened. I found myself getting hugs from people I barely knew, words of advice that cut straight to the heart of it and that I'm still mulling over now. I was so deep in self-loathing that it all caught me completely off-guard. But I'm so thankful for it now.
As humiliating and awful as it was, without that experience I never would've seen myself at my weakest. It was total regression. I understand now why I've been so unhappy all these years. Beneath the mask, that misery and panic is what I've been feeling. Ayahuasca did not CAUSE those emotions so much as force me to stop hiding from them. They say you'll confront your worst fears, and that's true. But nothing will prepare you for it until you've been there.
And so I'm not finished with this path. Many lessons learned, many more to come. This first exposure to the Mother is not a thing I'll forget as long as I'm alive. The experience is exhausting, it strips you bare and leaves you naked before the truth. It's cold, shattering, devastating. Shakes your insecurities like an atom bomb to the soul. I hope this report conveyed some ounce of that. Treat it with respect. You WILL come back changed.
I have spent the past month digesting this experience, and I'll likely continue to process it for a long while to come. This was one of the toughest things I have ever lived through. Over the course of a weekend in Peru, the brew dowsed me repeatedly and without mercy in my own worst fears and memories. It broke me in a way I have never been broken before. I spent the following week contemplating suicide. Yet for all of it, I'd do it again. The things the Mother showed me about myself, I would never have discovered any other way, and looking back, I am grateful for every last terrifying, nauseating, miserable fucking second.
This took place in a circle of almost four dozen people, led by a shaman. I actually would not do it this way again. Reflecting on the experience, I don't feel the need to have a shaman on hand, and I would prefer to drink alone or with a few trusted friends at most. Lead-up rituals of chastity, plain eating and abstinence from other drugs may help, but are not essential. It seems to me the most important thing is to speak your intent out loud before you drink, so you have a clear idea of what you hope to gain from it. Some may perhaps feel I've missed the point of the substance by saying such things, but I have gone into this for my own reasons, and those are the personal conclusions I've come to.
There is little point me telling the tale sequentially. I could write a book about it that way, so much happened over those two nights. Instead, I'll divide this into the main things I took away from the journey.
The Altered State
Let's begin with what it's like superficially. There's no question ayahuasca makes for a profound voyage. Yet in many ways, I did not find it overly different from other hallucinogens, simply more powerful and consuming. I'd loosely compare the dose I took the first night to seven or eight hits of acid in terms of effects - visuals, tracers, body high, mind expansion. The second night, I took a double shot. Needless to say things got a little weird.
There's a certain atmosphere or 'buzz' to the trip that felt quite unlike anything else I've ever tried. It's radiant, austere and electrifying. I could not overstate the sense of depth about it. Things became utterly surreal. With my eyes open, I interpreted the outside world as though it were more curious than the strangest dream - yet I was mostly able to interface with it in full cognisance when I needed to. My imagination became incredibly vivid. At times I would imagine sensations so viscerally I could almost feel them, and some of these were deeply disturbing. I felt wide open to the cosmos of my own mind and vulnerable throughout. This sense of exposure was part and parcel to the experience, as I had to come to terms with my own discomfort in a thousand different ways.
Very odd things would come and go with little warning. At one point about half of my body was braced in a direct experience of divine energy. I found this confronting because it wasn't something I was making up in my head; it was real, and happening to me with or without my volition. Once I relaxed into it, however, I realised it was a physical feeling of pure love. There was a sense of presence about the whole thing. It was impossible to deny I was being watched over by forces I could barely comprehend, and they were offering their blessings for what was to come. This is just one example, and there were other, zanier things, such as the entire room taking on a quality of pumpkin soup (it made about as much sense as it sounds like). It could get very disorienting.
My awareness of my own thoughts and feelings, of their origins and of their effects on me and my environment, came to focus as though I had spent a lifetime in meditation. This degree of insight was staggering. I'm still processing the things I found out about my subconscious. My philosophical alacrity took me to a higher dimension of thought and opened up a world I'd always suspected was there, but that I now had a direct experience of. You can't understand unless you've been there yourself. Things simply became self-evident. I was beyond cultural conditioning, outside of subjective reality. The Mother would not allow ego to interfere with my perception any longer. She snaked through layers of my consciousness as an etheric vine, changing the rhythms of my mind with intent and wisdom. I could observe my own brain down to the beating of my heart, the flow of my blood and the world beyond my body that I was not, and never had been, disconnected from. Answers came that my sober mind could never have conjured. It was a glimpse of the truth, and I understand now why so many people become converts after taking their first cup.
I experienced little in the way of closed-eye visuals. They weren't what I came for.
Light and Dark
I'd come to heal. This was not supposed to be easy.
For three hours on the first night, the Mother showed me the brightest side of myself. I saw a little boy who wanted nothing but peace and happiness for the whole world. Reality, he believed, ought to be modeled around play, not around suffering and death. He showed me what his idea of heaven looked like. It took my breath away. The purity of my intent to the world was what it took to see the light in myself, and I started weeping uncontrollably as I finally allowed myself to believe again that I was a good person. Events from my preteen and adolescent years had led me to doubt my integrity, but these wounds were sealing now into mere scars, as I at last found the self-acceptance I'd been desiring for years. Confidence returned to me and permitted me to feel comfortable in my own skin. The abusers and misconceptions of my past could not affect me anymore. I would cease to hold myself to their perfect standards. From here on, I would treat myself with understanding and respect. There was nothing but love. Rejuvenation into light and love.
But, light casts a shadow. Visions of heaven contrasted with the reality of our world. Beneath the walls of my defenses, the same child I saw in myself was lost in despair and confusion. Of all the infinite worlds we could live in, he needed to know why it had to be THIS one.
I was a beggar on the streets of Bethlehem. Sick, without hope, sitting here in this temple with all these other impoverished souls. Disorder, chaos. I was the king at the top of the tower, refusing to see my fellow human beings who suffered at my hand below, gazing pointedly away from the water rising outside my window. Easier to believe everything was where it ought to be.
I was a killer, enormous and clad in black, cutting down civilians in the street. I had no care for compassion. There was only power, and I was powerful. It was power that dictated the course of human history, manifest in millions of other soulless warriors, encouraged and rewarded by natural selection.
And then, I was looking at a knife, sharp enough to part flesh, being thrust into the chest of a child. I was the child, innocent and helpless, dying as my whole world went insane. I felt my physical being get penetrated by the blade, sharpness and the most excruciating pain you can imagine, then an adult hand reaching into my chest, reaching inside me, and wrenching my beating heart clean out. Blood. Pain. Power. Hell. The shock of realising my most basic function of survival had failed, in the moment before blackness clouded my thoughts. This was it. And it was my own fellow man doing it to me, primates gone completely crazy and sacrificing their own kids to the sun. You could not get a more poignant image of the corruption of this world. The most twisted perversion imaginable of what should have been such a beautiful thing: adults raising children into the world, welcoming them, teaching them, loving them… and, now and then, cutting out their fucking hearts.
I cannot stress how real this part was. It replayed itself for hours. I clawed at my face and hair and moaned and pressed a hand to my own chest, stricken with terror at the thought that someone could do this to me too. I looked around the room at all these people, spewing, rocking back and forth, crying… it was in their genetic code, the potential to murder their own children. This entire reality must have gone wrong, for that to even be possible. And it hammered itself into me. This is real. It happened, in a sense is still happening. And we are in hell. This planet is hell.
The strong dominate the weak. Survival of the fittest. Fuck this world, I want out.
The adult in me got it. The kid in me could not understand. Rage and fear, rage and fear. Despair swallowed me over and over again, I could not get out no matter what I tried. Reality was a black hole that sucked me in and feasted on my emotions all night long.
This, said Mother Ayahuasca, is why you are without hope. Now let's look at the rest of your mind.
Angels and Demons
Every negative thought in my head was a living demon. My personality determined which demons I was susceptible to, but in every case, I was freely handing them power. Over the years they had festered into a network of anxiety, paranoia, sadness and despondency that I had loosely termed 'depression'.
My mind had never been mine. Every thought and feeling exists on a spiritual plane of archetypal thought-forms. The imagination is our gateway to that world. Every abstract concept conceivable is real in some literal sense. Though our bodies have not evolved to perceive them directly the way we see the material world, their influence over reality remains indisputable. If millions of people believe in a god, or a nation, they give their idea power over the world. If a team of construction workers come together around some building schematics, the lines and symbols on the paper become concretely manifest as the workers use them to put a very real building together. This is the essence of magic.
And then you realise the building itself is only a concept, its boundaries drawn by our minds. Your body is a concept. So is your personality. So is your society. So is every molecule and atom. So is time and distance. These borders only exist insofar as we believe them to.
Holy fucking shit, I thought, as I watched my brain devolve into an ecology of astral entities. It was enough to drive the wrong person psychotic.
The only way to escape your depression, said Mother Ayahuasca, is to give power to the angels inside you. Only these beings of love and wisdom can set you free.
You create your own reality, she said. Every thought you have is a decision. Every demon is really God trying to teach you how to take control. Only once you accept this can you truly begin to awaken.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I threw up.
Nightmare
Having been there and back, I now know things about myself that I had previously paid little attention to. Even at my most spiritual, I am deeply irreverent. I cursed Mother Ayahuasca for the things she put me through. Figured if I had to watch little kids getting their chests cut open, the least I could give back was to call her a bitch. I got the impression the spirit world didn't mind. We're inculcated into an Abrahamic tradition of respect for God, but over the last century, mankind's existential crisis has carried us into a perception of our own horrifying freedom. I say embrace it. Fuck God right up the asshole and may anyone who takes offense to that drown in the shifting sands of time. That's how you sculpted me, Father, so accept it. It was funny, because I was thinking these things while everyone else was in a deep state of reverence, and I felt so empty.
On the second night, the instant I'd taken the extra shot, the deepest sense of dread came over me. What had I just done? Hadn't the first night been enough? I was asking for it, and now I was really going to get it. And sure enough I did.
It started with childhood memories. Simple ones, and often beautiful. I could see my own thoughts at the time unfolded in a digital network that spanned from my conscious personality down to my genetic structure and out to my environment. I was the boy swimming in the pool who'd been enjoying himself until he sliced his foot on something sharp and cried out in pain as chlorine lit up his pain receptors. Simultaneously, I was the function of his memory categorising this experience into his burgeoning worldview… I was his parents cradling him as he cried… I was the chlorine in the water, and the flowers in the bushes nearby, and the ocean beyond. It was total deconstruction into the greater whole.
I saw myself die and get born. These temporal boundaries do not really exist. There is only the region of itself that the universal mind focuses on. An organism assembles itself out of surrounding matter with infinite intelligence. It segregates its awareness to focus with full efficiency on the parts of its environment most relevant to its survival. In so doing it develops a sense of self, of identity, and forgets that it is all and everything. It believes itself to be an infant, a child, a teenager, an adult. It perceives itself to be ME. Then one day it dies, and those ideas dissolve, and the personality that was nothing to begin with becomes nothing again, and once more I am everything, everywhere.
My consciousness was in a dozen complex layers at once. Seeing outside this human body while trying to process everything through its limited faculties made for total information overload. My ego began to disintegrate. Suddenly there were no more concepts. There was only percept. It was impossible to make sense of anything. The world, and my thoughts, had become an incomprehensible blur. Through this I regressed to my base instincts, to the person underneath the identity, to my childhood emotions. A loop of corresponding traumatic memories played in my mind. I was stripped bare once again. No defenses. No way to escape it. I have never, in my entire adolescent and adult life, known anything so horrible.
It was only later the next day that I realised the Mother had given me a gift. She'd shown me what I was without my walls.
But at the time, you see, I was screaming. Begging for it to stop. Crying. I was lost in deep space. The room and its music on one layer. The operation of my body on another. The ENTIRE UNIVERSE on another. And a circle of the worst things I've ever felt recurring simultaneously in another. For hours.
"STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP PLEASE MAKE IT STOP, STOP IT!"
You're an idiot, a freak, you're defective, you're pathetic, weak, infantile, pathetic, useless, pathetic, you should be ashamed of yourself, listen to the fucking noise you're making you moron, you fucking shitbag, how could anyone ever love you, why don't you just kill yourself, you're an idiot, a freak, you're defective…
Life, death, time, concept, percept, body, consciousness, mind, pain, heaven, justice, hellfire, hellfire, life, death, time, hellfire…
Beating heart, muscles contracting, relaxing, deep psychological functions, blood flowing in a futile battle against necrosis, beating heart, muscles…
And, one of the others was there, bracing me in her arms and telling me to focus on my breathing while I whined and made a spectacle of myself.
And this is one of the other things I learned. My deepest fear is shame. I am terrified of failure, of humiliation. That night, I lived it.
Aftermath
In conclusion, ayahuasca is a pretty strong drink.
It's worth mentioning how the group reacted the next day. Some of them, I think, were pissed that I'd been panicking besides them during their own trips. Fair enough. I felt truly ashamed about it. I've never lost control like that in my life. Never had any idea how it felt to simply freak out. I've been assaulted, mugged, thought I was going to die, gone through trips where I KNEW I was losing my mind, and I still never reacted like that. I've spent the last eight years wishing I could cease to exist, the main thing stopping me being I don't want to hurt the people who care about me. So I thought nothing could faze me. I cannot tell you how foolish I felt. Just wanted to vanish; I was beyond hating myself, I'd let go of all self-worth altogether. Had not been aware there was a thing in the world that could cause me to behave in that way.
What saved me, I think, was that others in the group did in fact seem to understand. Came up and asked what had happened. I found myself getting hugs from people I barely knew, words of advice that cut straight to the heart of it and that I'm still mulling over now. I was so deep in self-loathing that it all caught me completely off-guard. But I'm so thankful for it now.
As humiliating and awful as it was, without that experience I never would've seen myself at my weakest. It was total regression. I understand now why I've been so unhappy all these years. Beneath the mask, that misery and panic is what I've been feeling. Ayahuasca did not CAUSE those emotions so much as force me to stop hiding from them. They say you'll confront your worst fears, and that's true. But nothing will prepare you for it until you've been there.
And so I'm not finished with this path. Many lessons learned, many more to come. This first exposure to the Mother is not a thing I'll forget as long as I'm alive. The experience is exhausting, it strips you bare and leaves you naked before the truth. It's cold, shattering, devastating. Shakes your insecurities like an atom bomb to the soul. I hope this report conveyed some ounce of that. Treat it with respect. You WILL come back changed.
