Death and Rebirth. My Experience with Ayahuasca - (Part 1)
In February 2013 I went to Peru to experience Ayahuasca and its alleged healing effects. I joined a group of people from all over the world and shared with them the lodging in a retreat centre beautifully located at the edge of the Amazonian jungle. My intention was to reconnect with myself in a deeper way and rediscover feelings of compassion and understanding that I failed to nurture in the late years of my life. Prior to my trip to Peru I had the chance to read books and watch documentaries about the ways of Andean shamanism and I was intrigued by some aspects of their practices.
Ayahuasca is a brew prepared from the stem of the Ayahuasca vine and other plants, and is used in shamanic ceremonies to bring about spiritual healing and insights. It is referred to as a medicine by local (and an increasing number of non-local) people. Although my understanding of the world is probably quite different from that of traditional shamanism, I thought I could put aside at least the semantic controversies and allow myself to live the experience, getting to the core of what it had to offer. I spent in that centre 12 days that I will never forget. Besides getting to know people themselves engaged in a path of personal growth, I was about to live the most powerful experience I could ever imagine. These twelve days have been rich, joyful, deep, frightening, insightful… There are so many things that wish to be recounted. Here however I shall only relate my first and most powerful experience with Ayahuasca, at the beginning of the retreat.
Before the first ceremony took place the organizers educated the attendees on all the possible effects deriving from drinking Ayahuasca. The experiences were said to be very different from person to person. They could also be very diverse for the same person from one time to another. One could experience virtually any sort of things, the most scary and the most blissful. The only warranty we were given was that, no matter what you go through, you will eventually come back to your normal state, although enriched and to some extent healed.
I approached the experience ahead of me with a sense of curiosity, although refraining from nurturing any expectation. When I was handed the brew I focused on the intention I had set for myself and swallowed the pungent, black, thick liquid as quickly as I could. The first hour was quite uneventful for me. I thought I was going to be the weird case amongst a group of other 17 people who were already experiencing nausea and had partly already purged (yes, Ayahuasca makes you vomit). I started to feel nauseous only later in the ceremony, but as I couldn’t vomit my sickness kept building up and up. My mind started to be hyperactive, or rather flooded by a stream of random thoughts and images in rapid succession that didn’t give me a break for a couple of hours. I didn’t know how to understand that, what was the meaning of it. Eventually the stream of thought subsided, but my sickness didn’t leave me and became unbearable. At different times I left the Maloca (the hut where the ceremony was held) to reach to the toilets but I couldn’t vomit. This was most frustrating as the sickness was killing me. Any drop of energy was drained out of my stomach. I fainted three times that night, and each time it felt like dying, in a very real sense. After the third fainting my sickness partly transmuted from a physical to an emotional unease. I was still feeling nauseous but now I could see the nausea had its roots in a deeply entrenched emotional issue.
My sense of self started to fade. I slowly came to perceive myself as a mere collection of scripts, a set of characters that I had played out at different times in my life to avoid rejection and meet, to some extent, the need to somehow fit in society. I could almost see a pile of masks above me, one on top of the other, and I knew I had to take them all off to reach my true self. But a tremendous sense of panic gripped me. I felt a deep fear that beneath the last mask, there was no face to be uncovered, there was nothing, none. Ripping off these masks felt like peeling off layers of what I perceived as my self, and in that process anything that was defining my sense of identity would have been lost and destroyed for ever. For the first time in my life I came to know in a very real way what fear of death feels like. Any sense of identity, of beingness (or rather what I perceived as such) felt like it was being erased from me, inexorably drifting toward an absolute, ultimate nothingness. In that moment I really regretted to have embarked on such an adventure. Although I knew, deep in myself, that I was going through a powerful process carrying a tremendous healing potential, the experience was so violent that I felt like I was in the hands of an unsympathetic doctor who cuts off your gangrenous limb without first taking the trouble of putting you to sleep. I hoped all that could stop, immediately. I was still striving to regain that sense of connection with myself that I felt I had lost along my way, but I was sure there would be a gentler approach.
Despite my desperate attempts to keep myself together and regain control over my emotional, physical and spiritual turmoil, nothing seemed to ease my miserable state. The intense and continuous sickness that Ayahuasca was condemning me to was draining any drop of energy out of my body. My solar plexus was like a sponge from which any remaining of life force was being squeezed out. But there was nothing I could do to stop the process. I was in hell and I had to walk all the way through. The sense of an impending death was more and more intense. I now clearly knew that a part of me HAD to die in the process; there was no way out, nothing I could do to prevent it. Hopelessness and self-pity overtook me and I started to sob as I, or a part of me (I did not know how dominant) was to die. In this realization I felt so lonely that a profound sense of desperation gripped my whole being. What will become of me? If this part of myself is going to die what will be left? Will it still be me? Who am I? The part that is dying or the one that will survive? And who is now asking these questions? The real me or that ultimate mask that does not want to be ripped off? If I am the mask and I am going to die then I will never know the liberation that this process will bring about. The bliss will be for someone else and I would have only known hell. Honestly I felt I was losing my mind.
Surprisingly I still had, at times, the lucidity to observe all that was happening to me with some degree of detachment. In those moments of desperation I realized I could understand the agony of people suffering from depression or panic attacks. I felt compassionate towards all people, all beings who suffer without seeing a way out of their misery. Interestingly, wasn’t enhancing my compassion and empathy part of my intention when the ceremony started…? I directed that sense of compassion toward myself, to that part of me who was going to die. I talked to it (or it talked to itself). The only way out of this hell was not to resist. Surrendering to what had to come was the only option I could envisage. This meant to consciously allow myself to die, to go to sleep forever, to become nothing. A tough decision. That part of me who was doomed to be erased from the universe felt some comfort in thinking that its death would have served a higher purpose, the rebirth of the true being that I was meant to be, before and beyond any mask. In that resolution a vague sense of peace started to enter my worn heart. But it was still a long way to go…
I was encouraged by some facilitators to breathe in and scream out with all the energy I had. This would have helped the process of emotional cleansing. I did as I was asked. I surprised myself in finding the emotional resources to scream as I never dared to do before. I knew it was a powerful way to overcome a deeply rooted habit of self-inhibition. I screamed once, twice, three times and all of a sudden I found myself crying like a child, liberating a heavy emotional burden that had its roots in an ancient fear of expressing myself. I saw the little child in me. I saw him in a dark corner of my heart. Left alone and neglected for years, not taken care of, not listened to, lonely and desperate to be acknowledged for what he was. A tremendous, overwhelming sense of pity overtook me. I was that child, curled up in that forgotten, dark corner, eventually reached by a beam of light after years of oblivion. I felt fragile, exposed, naked, needy of affection and recognition. In that moment I saw that pile of masks trembling in front of that long overdue acknowledgement. My crying was deep, ancient. I realised my fear of death sprang from my almost total identification with the masks I had worn for most of my life. Once they were taken off what would be left? I would have to rebuild myself, my true self, from the foundations.
It was clear now, I just had to let it happen, to surrender, to let go of any false mind-based sense of self. I started breathing as calmly as I could manage, saying “let go” at each out-breath, but I had no energy left to even say just that. “So be it!.. No more speaking, no more thinking… just let it die, die… die……” After a few minutes I started to feel the mildest sense of ease from my torments. And then, after another few minutes spent in a haze similar to when one is half asleep, no more panic. Some more time passed, and again another shift, this one projecting me into a state I could have never dreamed of in a lifetime…
