Using psychedelics in recovery, part 2
My experience with ayahuasca and mushrooms
Disclaimers
Trigger warning. I describe drug taking (and a bad experience doing so), and I recommend if that makes you feel queasy or unsure at all that you skip this series.
This is the second installment in a series about psychedelics in recovery that I’m writing because I used them. The first installment is here, and the third and fourth will be published over the next month or so. I solicited your thoughts on using psychedelics in recovery and your resources (you can still contribute if you haven’t here). I wrote the following essay before reading any of your input so I didn’t alter my opinion or experience based on what everyone else thinks.
This essay is about my experience using mushrooms in 2020-2022, and ayahuasca this year. There’s no value judgment or analysis in here about psychedelics in recovery or psychedelics in general or even much analysis of my experience. The next two essays will be about (1) everyone else’s thoughts/experiences with psychedelics and shared resources and (2) my own sense-making of using psychedelics in recovery (i.e., analysis: how it’s impacted my sobriety and recovery, how my ideas around what sobriety is have changed because of it) w/ some answers to the questions you submitted via the survey.
I am not an expert on psychedelics or on the use of psychedelics in and for recovery. This piece is not meant to fully capture the complexities of psychedelic medicine, the psychedelic renaissance, or any of the many different issues and tangents that could be explored at the intersection of addiction recovery and drug taking (ceremonial, therapeutic, recreational). I am writing only about how I came to use these compounds, and what that experience was like as a person in recovery.
This is very long. 6,000 words.
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Mushrooms, 2019-2022
I wrote extensively in 2017 about how I considered psychedelics in the first five years of my recovery in this piece, and it’s a pretty good snapshot of that whole process — there were times (in early recovery) when I struggled deeply (with depression, trauma, other addictions) and could have benefited from the use of psychedelics, but I didn’t, and by the time I decided to try them in 2017 it wasn’t in order to feel better or heal, it was so I could experience an altered state. (Or, as I put it in that essay, so I could get fucked up). I stopped considering taking psychedelics in 2017 because it felt dangerous and slippery-sloped, compromised my career, and — most importantly — felt like it compromised my recovery.
I started to reconsider using psychedelics in late 2019, around the time I was finishing Quit Like a Woman, and only because I was so miserable during that whole process — sleeping less than 4 hours a night and almost constantly working and under an extreme amount of (increasing, unrelenting) pressure, living in a place I didn’t like (NYC), with no real community or personal support structure, with no release valve in sight. There was a heaviness I couldn’t get out from under, none of my coping or healing strategies were working, and psychopharmaceuticals (anti-depressants) were off the table for me (I used them in my early twenties, and found them destabilizing over long periods of use). My options were to keep on doing what I was doing and hope for it to pass (which is actually a fine approach that’s worked plenty for me), or consider some more intense interventions. The only thing I did at this point was discuss it with therapist friends, recovery friends, and an MD who referred patients to similar underground treatments (ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca). I didn’t get serious about trying psychedelics (specifically psychedelic-assisted therapy) until early 2020, and only because the experience of publishing my book (as in, the exposure and cruelty I experienced) destroyed my mental health.
It’s also important to mention that just like everyone else, reading How To Change Your Mind had an influence on me and made me far more likely to try psychedelics.
In early 2020, during my book tour, I had a consult in the Upper East Side of New York City with an older white man we’ll call Dan whom I’d been referred to by a psychiatrist. He was a self-identified ‘medicine man’ who had inherited an altar1. He also had a lot of official-looking paraphernalia like bird wings, beads, drums, and wooden sculptures of deities, and owned many queer books. Sitting on the floor on zafus atop a tapestry that looked like my college dorm wall-hanging, facing each other, he explained to me that for $800 he would procure a large dose of psilocybin, pulverize it into apple sauce, feed it to me, and sit with me for the 8 to 10 hours I’d be tripping, acting as my guide and also performing different types of ceremonial rite to influence my process.
Honestly, people like him weren’t easy to come by back then, so I wasn’t that discriminating, but also no significant red flags came up for me2. We planned the session for March 21st, 2020, or the spring equinox, or the day I learned to bake an apple pie from scratch instead because of covid.
We ended up rescheduling my session for September 25th, 2020, or the fall equinox.
It was still, obviously, the pandemic when I went to this asshat’s psychedelic pied-à-terre in the UES that September, though when I got there he wasn’t an asshat yet, just a slightly problematic old gay man who seemed safe enough to trust my brain with.
It was a Saturday. I drove down to the city in my car, checked into a hotel in Brooklyn, and then cabbed over to his place in grey sweatpants and a t-shirt that said Aquarius. We went over a few details, and he asked me what my intention was (“To purge the toxic black snake of energy inside of me that has its teeth sunk into my diaphragm”, I’d said), I laid down on a mat, I ate 2 grams of the apple sauce concoction, put on some eye shades, and he did his shaman stuff (chanted, made music, moved feathers over my body).
Thirty minutes in, feeling I’m not sure what but definitely not great, he stirred me to give me the second dose, 2 grams more. I want to say I didn’t really feel that I needed to take it — that there was a moment of hesitation — but I’d committed to go all the way so I did. It was some duration of time after, maybe a few minutes, maybe more, that I started to freak out.
Not that you need to be reminded, but this is the recounting of a deeply altered (and troubled) state from years later, and I couldn’t have told you much right after it let alone 1,000 days later, so take this all with a grain of salt: But what happened then was that the elevator inside of me that corporeally plummets in depression didn’t just plummet to my nethers, but free-fell into some kind of bleak eternal abyss, taking with it all of my faith, meaning, and reason for existing, and I experienced the coldest and loneliest dread I’d ever experienced. To say this was the worst feeling I have ever felt could be accurate.
When I told him that something was very wrong and what it felt like and that I couldn’t imagine surviving the next few hours, and asked to hold his hand, he said something disinterested people say and then he sighed the kind of sigh that indicated he did not want to be dealing with this shit and let me hold his passive hand and that’s when I knew for sure I was going to absolutely lose my mind and never regain my sanity and be stuck in a perpetual self-contained hell for all eternity.
From there it didn’t get much better. Over the next six or so hours I mostly rocked back and forth on my hands and knees vomiting in a metal mixing bowl, groaning and animal, while curtains of molten lava ran down the front of my vision. I thought I’d at least get a glimpse of god or infinity or even something cool like a demon but instead I got the sense that there was nothing there at all — no afterlife, no greater consciousness, no unity, no love, no god, no magic. Just a vast empty flatland with no meaning or purpose, that we’re all trapped in.
At one point I told him I thought I’d find god but instead I was losing my mind and he said something about how that was a good sign, how seeing god should melt your mind, which was the only reassuring thing he said the entire time. At another point, I asked him if I’d be able to sleep ever again and he said yes undoubtedly because I was an “exhausting” person, which he said in a way that made clear I was the most tiresome and tedious person he had ever met and betrayed his general dislike of me and our situation and his eagerness to escape it.
We’d started at 10 a.m. that morning, and he’d confirmed multiple times that he’d be with me to the bitter end. But at 4 p.m. — when I was still vomiting and very much out of my goddamn fucking mind — he asked how I was getting home. “Uber”, I’d said between spitting bile in the little metal bowl, and it was clear as I said it he was done with the whole thing, and that I’d soon be cast out into the larger world tripping balls.
I vaguely remember that around five p.m. he performed some closing ceremony, that I then went to the bathroom, and that when I came out the curtains were drawn and my shaman was changed into street clothes: trainers, slacks, an oxford shirt, all very crisp. He told me he had to go to dinner and I told him I was still too on drugs to go anywhere and he told me I’d be fine. I changed my clothes, called an Uber, and realized that I was about to be running around New York City on very much drugs holding a plastic bag for my throw-up which gave me a feeling akin to having twenty panic attacks at once. He walked me downstairs and helped me get into the car, and then I watched him walk to dinner. I know this part didn’t happen but in my memory of this moment I see him whistling like Steamboat Willie as he goes.
The bad part of the trip hadn’t ended at that point and there I was all drugged up in the back of an Uber thinking I was about to have a psychotic break, wondering how to tell the driver to take me to a hospital instead of the Hoxton, when all the sudden some wiser calmer part of me took over. This aspect asked me if I could let go, if I could just be with what I was experiencing and not add any story or shame to it, if I could simply enjoy the state I was in and not fight it. And I found that I could.
And I found that just like that, after seven hours of what I’d describe as actual torture and probably the worst afternoon of my entire life, the heaviness lifted. I felt euphoric and remained feeling that for the rest of the night. Not from psilocybin, not from any insight or revelation. Euphoria only because it was over and I’d survived it.
In my hotel that night I sat in bed and stared out the window, at one point mistaking a folded white patio umbrella for a Mother Mary statue: This was the only rewarding part of the entire experience.
I woke up the next day with a horrible headache and a level of physical anxiety I hadn’t experienced since 2003 when I had agoraphobia. I took the next day off of work and I spent the week feeling completely out of my body and trying to work my way back into it, trying to piece myself back together because I felt like I’d just been dismantled. Dan texted me mid-morning, asking if I had made it home okay. I didn’t respond.
None of this is to say I consider this entire event a waste or a mistake. Honestly? I felt grateful for it if not a little disappointed, and like I’d had the experience I’d needed over the one I’d wanted.
It made me deeply appreciative of my sobriety (I distinctly remember saying “This is why I’m sober” many times in between vomits and godless lava visuals), and it made me pretty certain psychedelics (or at least psilocybin) weren’t going to be a major part of my recovery. There were small takeaways from the session that felt important, like how clear it was that part of what I loved about sobriety was the amount of control it gave me, or how cruel I was to myself, or how much grief and pain I still had inside me. But the biggest takeaway of all was being abandoned by the person I trusted to shepherd me through it. I know that sounds a little masochistic and bypassing, but it’s what feels truest to me. I am overly in tune with other people’s judgment of me, and most of my deepest issues are around rejection and abandonment. I didn’t think it was some kind of accident that this guy was obviously annoyed by my reaction to the drug — and by me — and negligent in his duty to care for me. I thought these were pretty meaty concepts to work with, and I did.
All in all, taking a ‘heroic dose’ of psilocybin and processing it with a guide was not one of the biggest things that ever happened to me or one of the most important parts of my healing. It was only notable in and of itself — not in the context of my whole path.
Still, I wasn’t sure I was completely done with psilocybin, and I wasn’t turned off from trying psychedelics for good (even though the experience was objectively awful, there was an intuitive sense that there was something there worth exploring further). I started researching microdosing, and early in 2022 I obtained high-quality capsules (.05 grams that I took every three days) and tried them for three months. I felt absolutely nothing.
That same year (2022), I also tried (twice more) taking medium doses of psilocybin by myself, doing my own kind of guided journey (I do not recommend this at all). I think it’s worth re-establishing here that none of this was because I wanted to escape my life (I escaped plenty, just with different things) or get lit (which was fortunate because that is not what psilocybin offered me in the least). I was lost and spinning my wheels and in a significant amount of pain and willing to do anything to move myself forward. I took mushrooms because I was desperate and because no other effort seemed to make any kind of difference.
The two medium doses were very similar to the first — I regretted taking them almost immediately, I experienced an extreme onset of depression and a fear so large I thought it would swallow me, I got restless and uncomfortable, I was afraid I’d be stuck that way forever and never be ‘normal’ again…they were both one hundred percent miserable experiences. However, unlike the first time, these two sessions offered powerful insights, and I give credit to them for helping me witness the extent I was holding on to the past and unwilling to surrender. The last time I took them was April 4th, 2022, and if you’ve been around long enough, you might recall this essay, which was a direct result of the clarity that came from taking mushrooms.
Which still makes it all sound more beneficial than it was. I don’t really see any of what I’ve so far explained as having complex significance. I continue to remember all of these experiences indifferently.
Most of the people I know don’t feel indifferent about their psilocybin experience. In recovery or outside of it, most people I know who have used mushrooms therapeutically (v. recreationally: a distinction) feel quite strongly that their life path was altered by them. I don’t feel that way. I mostly feel I got the clarity I would have gotten from other sources, like my therapist or meditation or phoning a friend or a magic 8 ball; or time.
But then ask me if I would change a thing, and I wouldn’t.
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Ayahuasca, 2022-2023
After that last time with mushrooms (in April 2022) I wasn’t compelled to explore psychedelics further. I mean even, during the time I was exploring them I wasn’t compelled to explore them further. But as part of my jobby work and basic interests, I kept tabs on the emerging psychedelic space and read about what was going on (regularly, consistently, and deeply), knew many people who worked in it or researched it (psychedelics, psychedelics as mediums of healing, all drugs and drug taking, drug reform, emerging therapies/efficacies, and so on), and knew even more who used them therapeutically and had enviable results.
Though I was kind of open to trying ayahuasca (I probably would have done ayahuasca instead of mushrooms had the opportunity presented differently) I started seriously considering trying ayahuasca again around late 2022, mostly because of what I was reading about and witnessing in my actual life from friends both inside and outside of recovery who had tried ayahuasca themselves and/or provided ceremony or integration with people in addiction recovery (one of the things that started to truly make trying it a potential was my friendship with care workers in the addiction space building recovery programs around ayahuasca, like this one).
But probably the biggest factor for me considering it again was the pain I was in. Ayahuasca started to become very compelling around the time I started thinking it would be great if I just accidentally died3.
I started inquiring about it toward the end of 2022 and through friends I was put in touch with an organization that practices Yagé shamanism (yagé = ayahuasca in the Colombia lineage). I signed up for a week-long ‘retreat’ (in quotes because I need to emphasize this is not like a spa weekend! unless a spa weekend somehow has the potential to induce psychotic breaks and make you shit yourself) in January 2023, stressing in my intake call that I’d had mostly terrible experiences using psychedelics and wasn’t even sure I would try a full dose of ayahuasca, ever. I ended up not going because a few weeks before that trip I went to a week-long silent meditation retreat over winter break, and that ended up providing me what I was looking for, which was relief and closure. (I wrote about that experience here.)
Why I ended up doing it a few weeks ago, this past August, is a longer story that exceeds the focus of this essay and deserves far more than what follows. Put summarily, it was in part because a friend in active addiction did it and I saw the change in him, which was remarkable and severe.
And it was in part because I felt (and still feel, though less so) disconnected. For the last few years I’ve necessarily (and somewhat contentedly) existed without being deeply connected to the earth, spirit, wildness and joy, love and awe, god. It’s been pretty flat and soul-less over here, and I say necessarily because I think, being someone for whom connection and wonder and awe and devotion come so easily, it was important to experience living in that mostly disconnected flatness for an ongoing period of time, like a reverse remembering, or a visit to a place you forgot you could inhabit. As I told a friend recently, I feel that it’s been just as important for me to experience apathy and nihilism and finitude and anhedonia and meaninglessness these past few years as it was for me to feel their opposites in early sobriety; some fascia was formed through it, some wider understanding of how contentedness can be found even when you have no meaning, no god, no joy, which is also a much longer story way outside the scope of this one4. The point is that I felt separated from some essential life force and meaning, and ayahuasca intuitively felt like a way to get it back.
And it was in part because intuitively, it felt right.
So that was it, why I did it: (1) I saw what ayahuasca provided people I love and respect, (2) my typical practices and rituals weren’t getting at some kind of blooming rot in me and I was over it, and (3) it felt right.
In late July I sent an email to the same person I did that intake call with in December 2022 and told her I would like to participate in a ceremony the following winter (January 2024). She happened to have an earlier opening which was 3 weeks away, in Costa Rica, and I said yes — a full body yes, even though the timing was dumb, it cost more money than I had to spend, and it felt rash and impulsive.5
The full body yes is a severe point: There were times it made much more sense for me to try it but I didn’t because it didn’t feel right. This time it made no sense at all, and it felt like the rightest step I could take. I’m trying to abstain from assessment, analysis and lesson-making in this essay, but if I can offer one piece of wisdom here, it’s that when it comes to my recovery, it’s the self-trust piece — that I know what I need and I can trust myself to make decisions on my own behalf regardless of outside influence and noise. There is so much noise about what you should and shouldn’t do, what’s okay and what’s wrong and what’s relapse and what’s not sober, how your addiction is doing pushups in the parking while you’re reading Michael Pollan. To me, recovery is the process of actually listening to yourself and having the courage to trust what you hear.
What was interesting to me was how the moment I committed to the experience (to trying ayahuasca) everything started to change. I was immediately more sensitive and aware of my surroundings, especially my natural ones. The day after I committed to going I ended up at dinner with an animist eco-feminist and started reading her poetry and essays which, if you know me, is very not me. I cried more easily. The climate crisis penetrated at a deeper level and I became acutely aware of finitude and began what felt like a kind of grieving process; I could actually feel the aperture of my heart opening. I slowed down significantly. I stopped eating meat. My reverence returned; life felt more precious; I swole with grief; I started hiking again.
Once I said yes I also felt physically and mentally ungrounded, like my energy was more diffuse, like it was harder to stay in my body and mind, and that feeling only increased as I got closer to the actual ceremony.
What I’m saying is some type of process started the moment I assented, and the ceremony itself felt a lot more like the continuation of a state I’d entered weeks before the moment I’d decided I was actually going to try ayahuasca.
During this time I also told many people — most of them in recovery, enough of them in active fellowship — about my plans. What was surprising was how many of them had either done it or knew someone who had (sponsees, friends). What was even more surprising was how positively reinforced my decision was by these people. Not one person judged it or me.
(Note, I edited out the longer description of what ceremony is like from the following. If you’re not familiar with an ayahausca or yagè ceremony, I recommend reading footnote6, Fellowship of The River, or this piece by Alex Olshonsky.)
Because I think hearing people talk about their psychedelic experience is like hearing people talk about their dreams (awful) I’m not going to get too far into the details of what I experienced in the ceremony.
Over five days there were two ceremonies that took place (back-to-back, on the second and third night of the retreat, from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., roughly). This was in Costa Rica, on land stewarded by the indigenous church that was running the retreat, where the plants that made the tea were grown and the tea itself was brewed. The ceremony, ritual, and container created were the most important part of the experience to me, as were the humans who ran it and carried us through our process. There was one main leader of the ceremony, a medicine woman, and two assistants (one assisting in the ceremony and singing icaros, one to manage basic operations). There were about eight other participants.
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The first night I drank a small amount of the tea, experienced no effect, drank more, and the effect came on quickly and strongly. At first I experienced the same thing I experienced with psilocybin (I hated it, hated being altered and out of control, felt certain I was going to lose my mind, regretted it entirely, and swore to myself I would never do it again), and when I started vomiting from it (on hands and knees in the dirt, in the jungle, hanging onto a tree), ended up having a pretty major revelation around my bulimia and vomiting in general, and had what I would describe as a mild breakthrough experience around that.
The second night I repeated the same process (drank a small amount of tea, felt no effect, drank more, had the effect come on quickly and strongly, swore I’d made a terrible mistake and would never do this to myself again, resisted the experience tightly and wished it over), eventually gave into it, and spent most of the night outside sitting by a fire and hanging out with one of the facilitators.
Most people around me had peak experiences. I didn’t. I didn’t have hallucinations, I didn’t get torn apart or broken open or smashed to bits, my mind didn’t melt, I didn’t rebirth myself or chase elves or shake a snake out of my body, no alien abducted me or implanted a probe in my ass, I didn’t once think I was dying or feel separate from reality, or have any other kind of significant event associated with DMT (DMT is the active ingredient in ayahuasca).
What I experienced both times was basic: cold fear (the feeling that something is very wrong and will never be right again), depression (the feeling that something is wrong specifically with me and I’ll never be okay again), and resistance (the refusal of experiencing what I was experiencing, a willing against it and attempt to power through it) — and not just any kind of fear, depression and resistance, but the most magnified and heaviest experience of those things.
In other words, I paid a few thousand dollars and a week of my life to experience the most visceral manifestation of the things I generally try and avoid experiencing.
And let me tell you, it was the best money I’ve spent in a long time.
The net effect of this retreat is hard to explain to myself, let alone you, but I’m going to try a little bit. The most honest explanation is that I don’t know what it did to me, exactly.
I can’t tell you that it cleaned up my traumas or lessened my psychic pain or moved me along in my process or any of that — maybe it did, who knows? It definitely didn’t give me some altered view of reality or access to a different plane of existence or put things into perspective or any of that shit.
All I can really tell you is that it took me right to my edge, right to the place I spend all my time and effort avoiding or fixing or preventing, and that I totally refused that experience. I got to that edge and freaked the fuck out and I tried to run in the opposite direction as fast as I could.
It was humbling, honestly, to realize that after all these years and all this work I’m still this rigid, controlling, terrified, and resistant. And this part right here — that it gave me no choice but to sit with all that resistance and fear and terror and discomfort, that it showed me the degree to which I cannot let go of control — this was the magic. This is what has me wanting to do it again. I want to go to that edge, I want to be in that kind of terrible awful discomfort, and I want to learn to be with it and learn from it and not so identified with it or controlled by it. (This is also the reason I go on meditation retreats.)
Other noticeable and lasting benefits (5 weeks out) are many: I’m slower; I’m more content; I have a smidge less fear and a smidge more confidence; I’m more in awe of this world and more in the moment, present; when fear sizzles my nerves or depression blooms in my belly I am more engaged with it, more curious about it. I’m reading poetry and singing love songs to myself, I’m talking to trees and asking them for advice instead of my therapist and last week I ran over thirty miles of forest. I’ve been less terrible to me, more gentle to me. I don’t know if any of this is due to that experience, or if these things were already there, ready to be felt and lived. Probably both.
I say with hesitation and trepidation: I’m pretty sure ayahuasca profoundly altered my relationship with the world around me, and with myself. I also believe the depth of its effect was due in large part to many other things I have done as part of being in long-term recovery, and that I wouldn’t have wanted to do it a day earlier than I did. I feel extremely fortunate that it took me as long as it did to try it.
I plan to do it again in a few months, and will continue to do it until I don’t feel like I need to anymore, which is what I say about therapy. I doubt I’ll ever try any other psychedelic compound, and I don’t see myself becoming a psychonaut or someone who regularly participates in ayahuasca ceremonies.
I just think: this was a really important tool that mostly succeeded in helping me to see the places that scare me and sit with it and tuned back into the earth and my own sacred essence, and I’m glad I had the privilege to experience it.
The next installment of this series will be what YOU think about all this, and your experiences of considering using or using psychedelics in recovery; after that I’ll do a longer analysis about how this all impacted me, my takeaways about my own recovery and sobriety, and answer the questions you’ve asked.
Special thanks to Alex Olshonsky of Deep Fix for reading for accuracy.
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It bears repeating I’m not writing this as an expert on psychedelics or plants who deeply understands origin, lineage, tradition, or history. I understand loosely that altars can pass from one teacher/healer in indigenous/shamanic tradition to a student who has achieved a level of mastery/immersion
Except for suspected cultural appropriation, which gave me pause, but wasn’t a deal-breaker, in part because I couldn’t be sure it was cultural appropriation with how little I understood about how altars are passed, and again because there was literally no alternative to him.
This is an extremely important point and what I’m exploring in my work (nihilism and meaninglessness and apathy — fully felt and lived — as part of growth and development, not detours from it). Moving into the transpersonal, for instance, can naturally result in loss of lust for this world. From Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything, page 195-6: “The things on which I once could hang so much meaning and so much desire and so much fervent hope, all have melted into air, evaporated at some strange point during the long and lonely night. To whom can I sing songs of joy and exaltation? Who will hear my calls for help sent silently into that dark and hellish night? Where will I find the fortitude to withstand the swords and spears that daily pierce my side? And why even should I try? It all comes to dust, yes?, and where am I then? Fight or surrender, it matters not the least, for still my life goals bleed quietly to death, in a hemorrhage of despair. This is a soul for whom all desires have become thin and pale and anemic. This is a soul who, in facing existence squarely, is thoroughly sick of it. This is a soul for whom the personal has gone totally flat. This is, in other words, a soul on the brink of transpersonal.
I explored this part carefully as well — that it felt rash and impulsive — with a friend that assists in ceremony, the woman who leads ceremony, my therapist, and one of my mentors. I thought this was an interesting angle to explore because I AM rash, I make most of my decisions based on gut and since leaving my last job and being free-lance for two years without structure, I’ve seen my impulsivity lead more than it used to. In the end, even though it felt like it was an impulse buy, I felt very confident that I’d done YEARS of diligence and been moderate and thoughtful in my approach to cancel out the “wait am I just chasing a fix or treating this like buying a new pair of jeans?” In the end, I chalked it up to good timing, right timing, and felt in integrity about the decision to do it that quickly.
Without technically explaining what ayahuasca ceremony is like (there are plenty of people who are more equipped to do that), I’ll explain what my experience was. I stopped eating spicy foods, meat, and sugar a few weeks before, which was the only hard adjustment. (You are meant to refrain from drugs/alcohol, sex, spicy food, meat, sugar, and violent media.) I got more sleep than I normally did, drank more water, and read Fellowship of the River and DMT: The Spirit Molecule to understand a bit about what I was getting myself into (I like to know about things intellectually before engaging, and reading books is how I learn). I talked to my therapist about it and other friends with experience drinking ayahuasca. I upped my meditation practice to about 45 minutes to an hour a day to ground my energy. I flew to Costa Rica the day before the ceremony and upon arriving at the center was emotionally overwhelmed/I had to meditate more than normal to be in my body.
The ceremony started at 7 pm the next day (a Thursday). It was small, there were six or seven other participants, and we were in a sort of large covered outdoor space that was built specifically for this purpose; we were arranged in a circle, on mats on the floor, at the head was the altar where the two ceremony leaders sat. A woman led the ceremony and was assisted by two individuals. She was trained 22 years ago in the yagè tradition.
This was in a location that was stewarded by the church that organizes the ceremony, on the same land where the plants are grown and the tea is made — i.e., we were in the middle of the rainforest, on protected land, drinking tea grown and brewed by the same people on the same land, in a structure built exactly for the purpose of what it was being used for.
There was an hour of ritual before we were offered medicine (ayahuasca). One by one, we were measured medicine and given individualized amounts. Then we waited. Most people were affected by the medicine immediately. I was not. Eventually, the leader of the ceremony, or the medicine woman, offers more medicine (you can take it if you feel you are not having an experience). Some people take three, four or more doses throughout the night.
There is a fire burning outside and music played throughout the night; you basically sit through that, experience it, and have a very personal and isolated experience in a community there to support you. At around 3 a.m., the ceremony closes, and you either sleep in the outdoor space, or go to your cabin and go to bed.
There is much more to it. This is a quick explanation.
Thank you, Holly, for writing. It helps me to read what you write. When I got my terminal stage diagnosis almost three years ago, and everybody thought I would die soon, I had sort of the same changes as you described. A profound connection with nature, with people, with joy. I think it had to do with not having to fight anymore, not having to hold tight. I still live, incredibly, I’m still sick and not cured magically, and I’m thinking it has to do with this joy, softness and connectedness. Hugs and kudos
Thank you for sharing your trips! I admire your bravery trying ayahuasca after your challenging psilocybin experiences. I say this as someone who very much had this feeling after my own psilocybin retreat (where fortunately I had much more attentive facilitators than your “shaman”):
“a fear so large I thought it would swallow me, I got restless and uncomfortable, I was afraid I’d be stuck that way forever and never be ‘normal’ again…”
This feeling lasted months after my trip and finally dissipated thanks to therapy and Lexapro and moving. Maybe I needed the trip through hell to get to this happier place I am now but damn, was it scary to walk so close to the edge of sanity.
Appreciate you opening up space for this conversation. ✨❤️🍄✨