How Psychedelics Changed my Mind and Healed My Heart (3 of 4)

My Experiences with Ayahuasca: How It Looked, Felt, and Tasted, What I Saw, and How It Helped Me Heal

Heading into my first ayahuasca ceremony, to experience the hallucinogenic plant medicine I’d been learning about all week with my “brothers and sisters” (as the shamans would call us all) at Rythmia, I wasn’t nervous. I was actually quite excited, not knowing what was going to happen, how it was going to make me feel, or what unconscious or conscious memories I was going to face. But mostly I approached it with a sense of curiosity. Everyone’s experience was a little different, but let me tell you all about mine.

Over the course of the week, there were four plant medicine “ceremonies,” and at each one we were given a different type of ayahuasca grown in a different country (Brazil, Costa Rica and Columbia). The impact generally got stronger and more potent for me as the week went on, particularly as it was layered onto the medicine that was already in my body.

The ceremonies took place at night. The first three ran from about 5:30 p.m. to nearly 1:30 a.m. including a full-group debrief at the end, and the final ceremony, on Thursday, went from 7:30 p.m. straight through until nine o’clock the next morning.

The Set and Setting

Rythmia puts great emphasis on creating the perfect “set and setting” for the ceremonies. Set refers to your own mindset, being open and willing to embrace whatever will happen, which is why there was so much care taken in both education and relaxation leading up to these special nights. Setting refers not only to the physical space but to the entire surrounding environment, including music, incense, even the specific diet we ate each day. Every detail was designed to enhance the ayahuasca journey.

The ceremonies took place in a long breezy building called a maloca, an ancestral long house used by indigenous people of the Amazon. It had huge windows that let in the gentle jungle breeze. A fire was burning just outside the central door. Inside, there were rows of mattresses on the floor, just a few feet apart, each covered in a white sheet with a light brown fuzzy blanket on top. At the foot of each mattress was a round white bucket (you guessed it, for purging vomit) and a roll of toilet paper (just to wipe your mouth with, don’t worry; there were bathrooms for any other kinds of purging). The floor was made of soft black rubber mats that could be easily cleaned and that could cushion a fall.

Each ceremony had many shamans working at it, passing out the drinks, guiding the participants, chanting, and providing assistance (of many different kinds) to anyone who needed it. There were also two dogs, believe it or not, who seemed to be working the ceremony too—they’d often go stand next to someone who was having a hard time.

The shamans were all dressed differently. They wore modern clothes, but they also carried or wore traditional objects like feathers and rattles (often hung across their bodies so they shook as they walked through the maloca, their sounds enhancing our journeys through auditory stimulation). Some played musical instruments and others worked the room (I truly have no idea how) and helped people.

Breezes would blow down on us from fans on the high ceilings and through the open windows. Throughout many of our ceremonies, the most beautiful songs, or icaros, played through the maloca’s speakers, helping to move the healing spirits or energy around in the most heavenly way. Other times there was live music played by the shamans. Icaros are an important part of a ceremony, and each one is intentionally selected for to enhance the healing process.

We would all arrive dressed in shades of white as we’d been instructed. We’d choose a mattress and get settled, arranging our shot glasses (which we’d use for the medicine) at the foot of our beds along with any other personal items we’d brought in, making notes in our journals, connecting with others or setting intentions while we waited.

The Drink

Around 6:30 p.m. or so, the shamans would be ready to start the ceremony. They’d all stand up front in a semicircle around the pitchers of ayahuasca, chanting and singing, shaking rattles, waving feathers, burning incense—performing a ceremony to literally invite spirits (of the mountains, of the forest, and others) to come in and protect the space and everyone in it, and to help us all take the journeys we needed. Their performance was cinematic and mesmerizing, stirring up all kinds of emotions in me and igniting my excitement about what was about to happen.

When they were done, they’d announce that it was time for us to come up for our first cup of medicine. We’d take our shot glasses and line up for our drink. One by one, we’d silently set our intention, drink our drink, then go back and sit on our beds.

Let me tell you, ayahuasca tastes horrible. It’s thick, bitter and quite foul-tasting. You had to sit for 15 minutes, and after that you could lie down, or if you wanted you could wander outside, as long as you stayed within the limits of the maloca and the stretch of land in front of it. You could go to the fire, lie in a hammock, or walk around.

Once everyone had had their first cup, the shamans would turn out all the lights. One shaman would walk around with a pot containing heated copal (a tree resin burned as ceremonial incense), wafting streams of smoke toward each of us with a feather. The icaros would start.

Then we’d all settle in to see what would happen.

An hour or so later, there would be a call for the second cup. You were welcome to have more over the course of the night if you wanted. The most I had was three shots. Some people had a lot more—I think someone had fifteen one night—but I found that two was really all I needed to ride out the night.

The Journey

No talking was allowed. We were told that if we needed to focus our journey, if we ever felt like we needed to get our journey underway or back on track, to go back to our breath. The whole thing is meant to be very meditative: the idea is to just relax, get comfortable, breathe, and let the ayahuasca do the rest.

The signal that I was starting to feel the effects of the medicine was that my lower jaw would start chattering back and forth like a cartoon skeleton’s. Any kind of involuntary physical response is part of your body letting go and releasing trauma.

Then I'd yawn, another trauma release. In the top right corner of my mind (or that’s where it seemed to me to be), I could see a bright light approaching and getting bigger, like a train coming toward me in the night.

At the start of my journey I would see a sort of geometric kaleidoscope of lights, accentuated by the music. Sometimes the music would become part of my dreams or visions. The words in the music were in Spanish, but in my dreams they made perfect sense in English.

The visions I had on my first night weren’t memories but rather symbols of who I had become. For example, I had a vision of a bug stuck on its back, trying to turn over. This was clearly a reflection of an actual experience I’d had earlier that day, when I’d tried to help a flipped-over bug get back on its feet, and somehow hadn’t been able to do it, even after trying five times! To me the fact that this concept buried itself into my subconscious told me that I had important areas in my life in which I wasn’t moving forward—that in order to really thrive, I needed to flip my bug over and start moving!

Over the next few nights my visions grew stronger. One night my theme seemed to be “rebirths.” In one vision, I was literally experiencing my own birth, which was at a time when newborns were quickly whisked away from their mothers. I had this tremendous feeling of helplessness and hopelessness—I hadn’t yet been embraced or held by anyone, and I didn’t know where I was, who I belonged to, what would happen to me, who would love me or what had just happened. And the amazing thing was that I could identify other times in my life when I’d felt those same emotions.

In another I was a little baby snake inside its egg. Visions of snakes are apparently very common on ayahuasca, and there’s a lot of snake lore surrounding the medicine, with mentions of Mother Ayahuasca who reveals herself as a serpent. As I hatched in my vision, I found myself surrounded by eleven other eggs, and I felt this incredible sense of joy, excitement and love as I waited for my siblings to hatch, one by one. We were encircled by this giant mother snake, and I had this tremendous feeling of unconditional love as I played with my siblings and was watched over by our mother. Then I awoke one day and all the other snakes were gone. I looked for them everywhere, but I couldn’t find them. I was left to go about my life without them. I equated this to the loneliness I sometimes experienced in my life when I didn’t feel part of a community or group, even when I did actually belong to it. This vision really helped me to let go of many of those long-held feelings of not truly belonging.

I was grateful for these rebirth visions. We’d been taught that a rebirth dream is quite common and is kind of like an ego death, where your ego gets reorganized to see the real truth instead of the story you’ve made up and told yourself. Your story is often not the truth, and it can be very powerful to let it go.  

Another night I felt intense grief wash over me, and then I had a vivid vision that my dear friend Anne-Sophie was with me. I met Anne-Sophie in my early 20s, during my time at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. She was the closest thing I ever had to a soul sister. We were polar opposites. She was a free spirit; I was uptight. She was one of the most elegant tango dancers I’d ever seen, and a pillar of the global tango community; I could barely follow a lead. She showed me how to laugh at myself, how to be in a community¼ how to live. Late one night about a decade ago, after I finished a night’s work at 1:30 a.m., Anne-Sophie popped into my mind. I hadn’t talked to her in a little while, so I headed to her Facebook page to see what she was up to. Instead, I found several weeks’ worth of RIPs and we-miss-you-so-much tributes. To say it was a shock is a huge understatement. It felt like my heart was torn out of my chest—it was absolutely gut-wrenching. But now, in this beautiful maloca in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle, I could suddenly hear her voice. I broke down in sobs, finally grieving her passing. I’ve missed her terribly. To have her there in my head and in my heart at Rythmia, and still in my head several days later... that in itself was worth the trip.

The Purge

I don’t mean to make light of this part, but if you haven’t been through it yourself there’s no way to tell it without it sounding vulgar and outrageous. As I mentioned before, this experience involves a series of bodily purges.

Sometimes within five minutes of drinking their first dose, someone would be puking. Sometimes there would be a huge wave of vomiting—a cacophony of puking sounds all around the room. Sometimes it was so violently loud you would think someone was vomiting into a microphone.

There were bathrooms at both ends of the room, and people definitely had to make use of those, too. On the last night, I was so drunk (you don’t say “high,” you say “drunk”) from the medicine that I couldn’t walk, so I literally crawled to the bathroom—and was incredibly satisfied by this feat. On my way, a shaman sitting on a chair stopped mid-conversation with another shaman to ask, “oh, are you going for a crawl?” The things they must see! Another night, I had to have walking assistance from a shaman. All of this seemed perfectly normal and also quite entertaining in the moment. The abnormal will seem normal, they’d told us.

People sobbed, too. All of this was our trauma coming out, long-suppressed emotions being released. We were all there to heal in some way, so when I would hear someone sobbing, or vomiting, or whatever else, I would be grateful for the fact that they were having a breakthrough and purging that long-held emotion. The shamans also drank the ayahuasca so they could be connected to all of us in the room. Their job was to ease our journey and help us get through the ceremony. They typically can’t touch or talk to anyone, as that could interrupt the important work we were there to do, but they did this by surveying the room and circling those in need of help, chanting, waving incense their way and blessing them. It’s like they had this sixth sense to know where to go and how to help. If someone fell down, a group of them would rush to the scene and perform those same rituals, and the person would pop up and go back to their bed.

The Healing

It's hard to explain why all of this had such a healing effect. I was revisiting difficult emotions from my past—I was watching them, not at all reliving them, but somehow just seeing them play out allowed me to let them go. Trauma exists in your mind and in your body, and sometimes just revisiting emotions from long ago allows you to release them and stop letting them rule your mind.

We’d been taught throughout the week that ayahuasca can help you heal trauma from seven generations before you and seven generations after you. On the last night, I was surprised and shocked to feel the heaviness of the trauma of some of my female ancestors. I can’t describe it to you in any logical way. It was like a sort of cloak of dark, heavy grief came over me. It felt traumatic and devastating. It was like I was witnessing the intense disrespect, suppression and oppression that my poor, defenseless family members would have experienced in the male-dominated cultures of their time, with little to no power or ability to defend themselves. (We all just have to go back a few generations to find times when women were treated as disposable and granted no rights—it still happens in many cases today and in many cultures.) I didn’t have a specific vision or memory, and I can’t articulate it any better than this, but I felt a hurt that was wrapped in shame and never spoken about, and that was therefore never processed or healed. It felt like it went back many generations and that the result of this hurt was passed down from generation to generation to me. I felt like I was not only healing generations that came before me, but also preventing myself from passing it down to generations to come.  This was the most meaningful ceremony of all. It had purpose.

In my next post I’ll delve deeper into the effect this week had on me and what I took away from the experience.

Quick spoiler: I loved it.