How Psychedelics Changed my Mind and Healed My Heart (2 of 4)

Preparing For the Ceremonies and Learning to Embrace the Lessons Mama Ayahuasca Has to Offer (Part 2 of 4)

In my last post, I wrote about my decision to travel into the Costa Rican jungle and embark on a new journey of self-discovery and healing involving the hallucinogenic plant medicine ayahuasca. I told you a little about what we did during the days, which were filled with learning and growth, as well as relaxation and rejuvenation. While that was all wonderful and would make a great week’s retreat on its own, ayahuasca—which is referred to at Rythmia as simply plant medicine—was the real reason we were there.

So of course a major component of our classroom sessions was learning about ayahuasca and the transformation we were about to embark on during our four consecutive evening ceremonies—and how it could help us heal.

Defining Trauma: Big T vs. Little t

We spent some time talking about healing and trauma, and I’ve done a bit of extra research on it myself that I think is worth sharing here. What I learned is that trauma is our emotional response to a distressing event or situation. Whether we know it or not, we are all orbiting our childhood trauma (or wounds), no matter how big or small. The Newport Institute defines two kids of trauma: “Big T” trauma is the more severe and intense kind, related to a life-threatening event such as a violent crime or a serious accident; a major psychological event, such as the death of a parent; and chronic trauma, such as repeated abuse. “Little t” trauma might result from experiences that are highly distressing and disruptive without being life-threatening, many of which are childhood occurrences that we have normalized as part of “everyday” life, like divorce, financial hardship, verbal abuse, and rejection.

What’s important in that article and what most people don’t realize is that you don’t have to have Big T trauma to need healing. While Little t trauma may not seem as “traumatic” as some of the events in labeled Big T, it can be just as harmful to an individual and those around them over time if it isn’t dealt with. Often the things that upset or trigger us in life are actually reactions to some childhood wound that we have not addressed or realized needed healing. I love the line from Rumi that says, “The wound is the place where light can enter.” To me it means that we need to first identify and then face our wounds, large or small, in order to free ourselves from them.

Little t trauma deserves just as much attention and treatment as Bit T trauma. Even Little t trauma can give rise to strong emotions and it’s really important to recognize and identify them rather than suppress them. Acknowledging and accepting that something happened to us that continues to affect us into adulthood, no matter how small it might be, is an essential part of the healing process.

How Ayahuasca Heals

Ayahuasca, which was also referred to as Mama Ayahuasca or medicine from mother earth, is a Quechua word meaning “vine of the soul.” In Amazonian mythology, ayahuasca is also called the grandmother, because while it heals you, it also gives you tough love when you need it. It teaches you what you need to learn and heals what you need healed (which may not be what you think you need to learn or heal).

The cornerstone of ayahuasca healing is shadow work: healing deep-seated emotional and psychological wounds by clearing your subconscious mind, your body and your energetic system of negative energies and fear-filled patterns that have built up over many years, through a process of witnessing, integrating and releasing these emotional traumas.

Ayahuasca, we learned, and as outlined in this article, promotes healing in several different ways.

1. Evoking and re-living experiences. Ayahuasca can allow us to visualize unresolved past experiences that are blocking our happiness and growth, and develop empathy for our younger self.
2. Releasing repressed memories. Participants in ayahuasca ceremonies can unearth buried memories, which often involve childhood trauma. By releasing these memories and the emotions that go with them, our minds are rebalanced and ready to move forward.
3.  Amplifying emotions and sensations, bringing awareness into the body. Ayahuasca triggers intensely visceral responses, often in the form of vomiting, trembling, yawning, or sensations of heat or freezing cold—all recognized signs of discharging trauma that is held in our bodies.
4.  Offering new realizations. Ceremony can bring insights or sudden understandings about past traumas, along the lines of, “It wasn’t my fault; I was just a kid” or “I did the best I could.”
5. Filling the nervous system with positive experiences. One of the hallmarks of the ayahuasca experience is a sudden sense of peace, calm, and healing, and such positive experiences can help reverse trauma’s effects on the nervous system.
6. Generating compassion and forgiveness for self and others. Participants may have visions of their injured or neglected younger selves, or even of the trauma suffered by someone else, particularly someone who inflicted trauma on the participant. The deeper understanding can help release guilt and regret, and even lead to genuine forgiveness of the perpetrator.

Four Types of Journeys

We were taught that there are four types of journeys we might go through when we drank the plant medicine:

1. Body, manifesting as shaking or physical sensations
2. Pinta, in which we would visualize a kaleidoscope of shapes and sacred geometry, vignettes, and visions
3.  Consult, in which something or someone would come and talk to us
4.  Nada, meaning nothing, i.e., we might simply sleep the whole time. This can happen when someone has such deep trauma in their past that the medicine puts them to sleep while they deal with the wound subconsciously.

The Big Four

We were also taught to keep four important instructions in our minds as we went through the ceremonies:

1. What's coming is going: If a certain memory, thought, or emotion comes up, it’s because it’s coming up to be felt and thus healed, so we should lean into it. When you are feeling something through ayahuasca, it is about to be released.
2.  Go to what’s hard: The universe rewards bravery, so we were taught that if we encountered choices in our dreams or visions, we should choose the harder path. It would not be as hard as we expected, and it would be the path to deeper healing. If we found ourselves feeling particularly affected by a certain stimulus during the ceremonies—maybe the incense smoke would have a negative effect, or the music would seem intrusive—we should go toward it. A negative reaction to something can mean there’s a repressed emotion coming up, and that we should have the courage to push through it.
3.  Don’t think just drink: We were counselled to get out of our heads and into our hearts, to push beyond what we might have thought possible in terms of drinking as much ayahuasca as possible.
4. Focus on rebirth by minding our own business: There would be a lot going on the room with fifty people each on their own journey. We were told to fix our attention on our “rebirth” by focusing on ourselves and not on what was going on around us. To help us refocus (because there would be a lot going on around us), we would need to breathe deeply and always come back to our breath.

What to Expect

We were taught to be prepared for anything. The plant medicine is powerful and indeed hallucinogenic. They said, “the paranormal will seem normal, the illogical will be logical, the nonsensical will seem sensical, the abnormal will seem normal.” And that that’s all part of the journey.

We were taught that to embark on this journey, we had to have curiosity and courage. We would not heal unless we wanted to and believed we would.

In taking ayahuasca, many people experienced intense physical purging, as I mentioned above—there would be vomit, we were told, but we should not shy away from it. People would also cry, shake, yawn, shout, move their bodies in ways they don’t normally, have diarrhea¼ all of these are part of purging the difficult emotions and challenges of our past that remained in our minds and also in our bodies. The teachers challenged us to face and embrace the difficult feelings and emotions that led to the physical purging, to think about the experiences in our lives when we’d felt those same emotions, especially the first time, and to acknowledge what it was that we were purging—and that it would soon be gone.

Setting Ceremony Intentions

Many of us took it upon ourselves to set our own intentions prior to arriving at Rythmia, but we were told to set those aside and focus on three specific intentions or requests for what the plant medicine would help us see and do:

1. Show me who I have become. You have to understand yourself in the present day in order to rid yourself of your pain and trauma (the stories you tell yourself about what happened) to heal yourself.
2. Merge me back with my soul (at all costs). Rythmia teaches that we have all split from our true souls sometime back in our childhoods. The idea is that we are born as a pure soul, untouched by the pressures or influences of life. But over the course of our childhoods, usually around the age of five, we all adopt different personality traits to try to protect our true, vulnerable selves from the world—to feel loved, safe and accepted. It may be a result of a specific trauma or just our reaction to difficult circumstances. Our goal here was to identify that moment of splitting and merge back into the soul we were born with.
3. Heal my heart. The culmination of all our work would be to get out of our heads and into our hearts and become the people we were meant to be, without all the limitations and burdens accumulated through the stories we have told ourselves our entire lives. This is the best part. For example, if as a kid you thought something was your fault, if you think you don’t deserve happiness or that you are unlovable, or if you are too hard on yourself in any way, ayahuasca can actually make you feel happy and unconditionally loved, if that’s what she wants to teach and show you.

It sounded pretty amazing to me.

The Ceremonies Themselves

All of this learning was the prelude and our preparation for participating in the ceremonies. That’s when the true transformation, the reason to come to Rythmia or any other retreat of this kind, would happen. Each of our four ceremonies took place at night, from 5:30 p.m. into the wee hours of the morning. I’ll tell you all about them in my next post.