In October of 2012, I travelled to Peru so that I might see. Not the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, or the sacred waters of Lake Titicaca, or even the mighty Amazon River. No, I went to Peru to catch a glimpse of myself. To disappear down the rabbit hole, and up my own arsehole as it were. As I explained to a friend, I was off on a self-indulgent neo-hippie trip to solve the mystery of me.
Let it be known that I don’t consider myself a “Woo”. I don’t decorate with crystals, howl at the full moon, or roll the bones before making life decisions. Yoga and the odd horoscope notwithstanding, the well I’ve always drawn comfort fro belongs to science, not nebulous mysticism. Still, Newtonian laws and deductive reasoning couldn’t explain a stretch of imploding, significant relationships. But I deduced a common denominator, and that common denominator was me: a 36-year-old, over-edumacated, under-employed, single white female. And so with no debt, diapers or decent excuse, I decided to set aside sense and logic to investigate my part in a series of troubling events.
My mode of transport wouldn’t be a plane, train, or automobile, but a plant decoction known as Ayahuasca, or “vine of the souls”: a traditional medicine used for thousands of years by the tribes of the traditional medicine used for thousands of years by the tribes of the Amazon basin to connect with the spirit worlds. I’d come to learn about Ayahuasca from the stories of writer- explorers such as William S. Burroughs and Wade Davis, and more recently from Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician and author who described his experience as “10 years of psychotheraphy in a cup”. I’d become intrigued by the possibility that “Mother Ayahuasca”, as it is affectionately referred to by Peru’s Quechua peoples, could offer insights into the subconscious patterns I suspected were beyond my inability to find my people, place or purpose, and the pervading fear that my life was all wrong.
And so it was that I found myself 3,690m above sea level, several kilometers outside of Huaraz, at an eco lodge nestled between the Cordilleras Blanca and Negra. Surrounded by strangers and the austere beauty of the Andes, I would submit to dormitory life and rigorous dietary and lifestyle restrictions in order to partake in six ceremonies, drinking a viscous, acrid, psychoactive brew deemed illegal by Western authorities.
Though mixtures vary, the basic Ayahuasca recipe is made from two plants native to the Amazon: the leaf of the Psychotria virdis, which contains the tea’s active ingredient, N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and a jungle vine called Banisteriopsis caapi. Ingested separately, neither plant elicits much effect. But together, they produce the most powerful psychedelic experience known to humanity.
And it’s such experiences, researchers hypothesise, that have the power to cure affliction such as depression, anxiety and addiction, and alleviate end-of-life stress for the terminally ill. Some, like Dr. Maté, believe Ayahuasca works by facilitating the re-contextualisation of traumatic experiences. Others take a more clinical perspective, pointing to DMT’s structural similarity to serotonin and melatonin. The shamans of the Amazon and the followers of syncretic churches, such as Brazil’s Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal (or UDV) and the Santo Daime are less concerned with biochemistry, and more interested in the transcendent experiences the medicine elicits. As for me, a skeptic of no faith, I didn’t care whether it was delivered by Jesus, Allah or the ghost of Jung, I just wanted a diagnosis: a clear understanding of what was wrong with me.
An Englishman by birth, Alex Good is a tall, Adonis-like figure with the gravitas and oratory ability of a cult leader. He began building his Andean retreat in 2001 from plans delivered in dreams and the limestone on his property. He called it the Way Inn and offered bed and breakfast to trekkers, climbers and those looking to escape the crowds and hustle of the Gringo Trail. Then, in 2011, after a number of years of “prophetic Ayahuasca visions”, Good banded with a friend and began offering donation-based retreats. Today the mountain outpost hosts a motley crew of volunteers who work the site’s growing permaculture farm, travelling mountaineers, and guests like myself, who have come from around the world to explore inner space.
The day of our arrival, we are led down a rocky path from the main lodge, through a vegetable garden, past a cluster of beehives to Good’s residence, which for now doubles as the ceremony space. A ramp of scrap wood leads into the stone building and a large, unfinished room. A column of plastic buckets sits ominously beside the door. Pictures of the Hindu deity Shiva decorate windowsills. A gong looms in one corner and a pile of yoga mats and thin mattresses in another. A wood stove puffs away and a colourful tapestry covers an enigmatic pile near the centre of the room. Orientation has begun. Good lights a fat, pungent, hand-rolled cigarette of wild tobacco, called a mapacho and delivers a speech about ceremonial protocol. He uncovers the mysterious pile of objects, revealing a sort of shrine comprised of crystals, carvings, feathers, rocks, containers of oil, and notably, a jaguar skull.
“You will each be provided with a mat, blanket, vomit bucket and a roll of toilet paper. If you need to shit, and you will likely need to shit, toilets are over there,” Good says motioning to two doorways covered by blankets. There are a few nervous giggles around the room.
“No point being shy,” he says. “You’ll have little to hide from eachother once the night is through.” He instructs us to return at 6pm for the pre-ceremony guided meditation and offers one final piece of advice: “Never, ever trust an Ayahuasca fart.”
Like other psychedelics DMT is classed as a Schedule 3 drug in Canada. Unlike psilocybin, MDMA or LSD, DMT is produced by the human body. Ironic, then, that one is legally required to have a license to possess it. No one is certain as to its purpose, or indeed why many who take DMT—either by smoking it, or consuming it through Ayahuasca—report similar visions and experiences; notably a deep sense of peace and universal interconnectedness. Why then does Western law enforcement apparently fear and loather plants and substances like Ayahuasca?
“Western authorities are afraid of plants because they’re afraid of the unconscious,” says Dr. Gabor Maté. “Western pharmaceuticals suppress manifestations of the unconscious. Shamanic plants call them into awareness.”
Maté spent years working with Vancouver’s Skid Row addicts. Frustrated by the limitations of approved therapies such as methadone, he travelled to the Peruvian Amazon to investigate how Ayahuasca might help his patients. He later attempted to recreate the ritual Ayahuasca experience in Canada, but it wasn’t long before authorities shut him down. He attributes the systemic failure to help society’s most vulnerable to an unwillingness to look at addiction and mental illness holistically.
“Western culture has reached a stage of alienation and disorientation so that its soul cries out for guidance and wisdom,” he says. “There is a deep need for transformation which, for all technological achievements and intellectual knowledge, we cannot attain without soul work.”
And work it is. Three hours after drinking the gasoline and dirt-flavoured tea, I’m lying on my back feeling a rage I’ve never felt before. Everything is pissing me off. The magic carpet ride on an infinite, undulating mass of identical cells initially experienced has given way to blackness. I think of the expense and 24 hours of travel it took to get here and I feel like a sucker. I want to leave, but my body isn’t cooperating. All I can do is listen to people puke, burp, gag and moan. The girl besides me sounds like she’s having sex with the Universe. Another sees to be undergoing an exorcism: Gumé, our shaman, alternately sings sacred songs called icarosand sucks air from the top of her head. The mapacho smoke is thick in the air and it’s hard to catch a breath. There’s a thud in my stomach. I battle gravity to get off the floor and stumble through the darkness to the bathroom. Despite having eaten only a banana and some sesame snacks in the past 24 hours, the torrents of white-hot diarrhea seem never-ending. I am literally full of shit. I have to vomit. I’d noticed a bucket under the sink and grab it just before my stomach convulses, delivering slimy blobs of poisonous-tasting muck. I return to my mat, rinse out my mouth and crumble into a heap. I feel better. Sober even. The maraceon, as the Ayahuasca drunk is known, seems to have passed.
Gumé makes his way around the mesa delivering ventiados, or blessings,to each of us travellers. Shortly after I return to the mat, it’s my turn. I hear him behind me singing and shaking a bouquet of dried leaves called a chakapa. He places a hand on the crown of my head and a jolt of electricity courses through my body. Though my head and a jolt of electricity courses through my body. Though my eyes are closed, a brilliant blue geometric pattern rises in my field of vision. But as soon as he removes his hand, the shape vanishes. I rest a while and steel myself for the walk back to the lodge. I’m the first to leave.
Integrating the lessons of an Ayahuasca experience isn’t easy, because they’re not always clear. We’re taught to take a literal view of life: to believe people mean exactly what they say, to value hard fact over fluffy feeling. My left-brain demanded proof: irrefutable evidence that Ayahuasca could deliver a deeply personal, understandable lesson. I didn’t get it in the first few ceremonies and started to lose patience, although I realised I was looking for pat answers, a magic bullet. I was looking for Ayahuasca the way we look to aspirin: as a means of ridding ourselves of what ails us, rather than rooting out what caused the headache in the first place.
Slowly, I start to get it. The black rage of the initial experience arose from attempts to label what I saw. Visions abated when I tried to force left-brain logic onto right-brain symbolism. I was clinging to the illusion of control over situations I had neither the business, nor the ability to control. These were less “Ah-ha!” moments, than they were, “Oh. You don’t say”. This was progress but with only a couple of ceremonies left, I was anxious for a real break through. Little did I know how far I would go.
I’m having an out-of-body experience. The shaman and his apprentice punched out and left a while ago, leaving three of us alone and prostrate, yet peaceful. I would have left too, but couldn’t get off my mat. The mat, in fact, is a distant memory, for now I’m walking in the hills at night. It’s cold, damp and I can see my breath. Not at all like a dream, it’s as if one reality dissolved and another took its place. A nebulous, metallic shape looms overhead. Oh, a UFO, comes a thought. I suppose I’ll be taken aboard now, comes another.
Instantly I’m beamed aboard in a shaft of light and whisked to the outer edges of the galaxy. Although the ship appears to be unmanned, I’m aware of many presences around me. Though with no sense of my physical body, the concept of “me” or “I” is little more than an amusing idea. These presences communicate telepathically, and they “speak” all at once: “We’re so glad you’re here,” they say. “We’ve been expecting you,” they say. I don’t ask their names, but understand them to be “The Wizards”. They tell me they’re taking me to “The School of Viberology” to teach me” what I need to know”. Over a small eternity, I’m schooled on the molecular workings of my brain. I’m told that everything in existence is vibration, including thought. “Have a thought, any thought!” they urge. But I can’t conjure a thought. I’ve given in to astonishment. “Have a negative thought!” they say. “Think about something sad!” they say. So I think of something sad and I witness this sad thought as a vibration, distorting the liquid of my brain, creating a wave, which laps against a synapse, causing a spark that releases some molecules that zip-zap through my neural network, down my spinal column, firing up some glands along the way, and releasing some hormones that enter my bloodstream. I’m suddenly aware of physical sensation, and I feel ill. “Now have a nice thought!” they say. “Think of something you love!” they say. So I think of something I love and again am shown this thought manifest as a vibration, which sets off another chain reaction, which results in happy feelings. But the lesson isn’t over. They want to demonstrate “the machine”, which they gleefully declare they will use to end the world. With insufficient hesitance, I follow them across a bridge. They show me a door and tell me the machine is inside, but I’m not allowed to see it. They start it up. I hear and feel a tone that increases in pitch. As the pitch gets higher I feel my body wherever it is, virbrating. They turn the machine up and up and it’s as if my physical self is de-materialising. I feel so sick I think I might die.
And suddenly, I’m back in my body, gasping for breath. Beyond nauseated, it takes all my energy to get to the bathroom. I can barely control my limbs. I make it to the toilet and sit down, emptying what seems like years of accumulated waste. I try to focus, but my surroundings are tenuous. My arms and legs are wave patterns blinking on and off: there for a second, gone the next. The walls and floor are similarly elusive. I grab a bucket. It falls through my hands. I try again just as I begin to vomit, but my distorted depth perception means I mostly miss. I struggle to stand and wipe up my mess. Eventually I make it back to my mat, which seems miles away. I collapse and immediately find myself back in the Wizard’s college of consciousness.
“Ah, the price of re-entry!” the wizards say. “But we’re not finished yet!” they say. “School’s not out!” They fiddle with the machine, this time turning it down. The tone drops lower and lower and I begin to feel heavy, denser and indescribably sad. I beg them to stop, so they crank up the machine and “re-entry” begins again. I’m exhausted, but the wizards are having fun and aren’t finished with me. They take me through many more experiments before I find myself alone, floating in the void. My ride has left and I’m stuck. After what seems like weeks, I begin to suspect my physical self is dead. I can’t get back to it, and there’s nothing to do but accept this is it. At that moment of acceptance, my consciousness is catapulted through space to a light show. The subject is math and geometry. Complex equations and geometrical patterns for which I have no frame of reference interact with images of DNA, of plant cells and flowers, of pyramids and stone circles. I comprehend the place where the branches of all our family trees touch. I witness the birth of the Universe coincide with my own conception. The Universe expands as I grow from a zygote to an embryo to a foetus. A feeling of security and an understanding of infinite, eternal existence, gives way to panic as I’m dragged from the womb. There’s a flash of light and a feeling of abandonment, exile.
And then the ride stops. And I’m not dead. I‘m back on my mat. I call to one of my roommates and ask if she’s there. She is. We rouse ourselves and eventually make it outside. The moon is full and The Milky Way seems close enough to touch. We turn off our headlamps and stare at the sky, giggling like children as we stumble up the path back to the lodge. She lights a fire and I collapse into bed. I hear a didgeridoo and ask if she can hear it too.
“No,” she laughs. “It’s all in your head.”
I drift off to a private performance.
It’s said that Ayahuasca gives you what you need, not what you want. I’d agree. I wanted a tidy diagnosis, and I was given metaphor and allegory. Provided you’re open to doing the work, the lessons don’t stop with the maraceon.
You could view Ayahuasca as a psychedelic exorcism, as a means of rewiring your neural circuitry, or as a vehicle for travelling to other dimensions, where gods, aliens and talking plants reside, and tricksy, invisible wizards issue lessons in how to get over yourself. Belief is a matter of choice. And the choices are infinite.
Perhaps I sought out people and situations that would reflect my own self-rejection. Or perhaps thoughts of rejection vibrated beyond the waters of my brain affecting a sort of hologram, a scaffold of fears upon which I built my reality. Maybe the ripples went out further still, disturbing the waters of the brains of others. Who knows for sure? We buy the ticket, we take the ride, and, having invested something in the experience, we are compelled to give it meaning.
Originally published in White Wall Review 37 (2013)