My Terrifyingly Beautiful Peyote Trip In Mexico

I love psychedelics. Here’s why:

When I radically alter my state of consciousness, my foundational beliefs about reality come into question. This makes the world mysterious and magical to me, and I’d rather live in a reality that’s magical.

Psychedelics, meditation, and breathing exercises have shown me that ideas about ourselves and the world are flimsy and open to interpretation. Psychedelic experiences open up the doors to new possibilities about the nature of reality and the nature of life itself. That’s all very exciting to me.

But sometimes, it goes off the rails. This is one of those stories.

A little background:

When I turned 31 years old, I moved to Mexico with my wife. We eventually settled in Mazatlán, Sinaloa.

But before we settled down, we bounced around the Pacific coast.

For six months, we lived in a thatched roof, palm wood cabana and surfed and fished almost everyday. We made friends and ate community dinners. There is no cell service, no internet, and no TV. It was paradise.

The village we stayed at (that I won’t share the name of) is a mix of Gilligan’s Island and Ibiza. The water is a deep blue, the waves are perfect, and there are so many fish in the water that it boils when they feed. It‘s hands-down my favorite spot on Earth.

The village is an eclectic mix of European, Australian, and American surfers who live alongside the indigenous Mexican fishermen and their families. In total, this village probably has a maximum of 300 people living there at any given time, including tourists like us.

We stayed in this village for 6 months and it was incredible…amazing surf, cool people (mostly), and good fishing.

However, the main highlight of my time there was an unplanned peyote trip.

The trip happened about 18 months ago, and I’m still untangling exactly what the fuck happened. It was the most intense experience of my life…I lost track of my body for the first time, I talked with things that definitely were not human, and I saw the future (kind of). It was literally mind-bending.

I’m not a novice regarding psychedelics. However, before this peyote trip, three years had passed since my last LSD/Mushroom trip.

I took a three-year hiatus from psychedelics for a couple reasons. At that point in my life, tripping was getting kind of redundant. I wasn’t getting much out of the LSD and mushroom experiences I was having, and the diminishing returns put me off of it.

For me, psychedelics had become kind of like partying in college…once you’ve been to one house party, you’ve been to all of them.

But I was wrong to think that there was nothing else to learn from psychedelics. Dead wrong.

…

I wasn’t searching for a peyote trip…I kind of just stumbled into it. Maybe that’s why it was so intense?

Here’s how it went down:

I was wandering around the solitary dirt road in the village, and I saw that one of the local families had built a mud hut that was used for temazcal ceremonies. I had read about temazcales before coming to Mexico. It’s a sweat lodge, basically.

Honestly, it didn’t interest me in the least. Sitting with 20 other people crammed into an oven sounded like torture. No thanks.

But, I got to talking with the family about the temazcal ceremony and what it was all about. They spoke about it with reverence, but I still didn’t want to participate when they invited me to join. The juice didn’t seem worth the squeeze.

Buuuut, they also mentioned a travelling medicine woman who visits from time to time to lead groups through peyote rituals. This piqued my interest. I thanked them for the invite to their temazcal, and I kept walking down the road.

Later on that same day, I was talking with a friend I had met in the village. We’d known each other for a few months. We both enjoyed surfing and fishing together, and we shared a lot in common (both spoke Spanish and English, both married Mexican women, both surfed and fished, etc.)

I mentioned the medicine woman I heard about. Surprisingly, he told me that he knew the medicine woman very well, and her name was Salud (Health).

This was a bit strange to hear, because this friend wasn’t Mexican. He was an American from Maine. I thought it was strange that another American could have a close connection to a medicine woman in southern Mexico.

It just so happened he had traveled all over southern Mexico with Salud and learned the peyote rituals she had been taught by her mentors.

He was specifically trained by her to take gringos on trips by using the same rituals that were used in Mexico. This blew my mind. We had shared so many intimate details about ourselves during our short friendship, but this majorly cool thing had never come up.

He spoke about the ceremony with an uncharacteristic reverence, and I could tell he was sizing me up to see if I could handle it. Normally he was pretty mellow, but this conversation was laced with seriousness.

I felt strongly that I could handle it, and I said as much. He agreed to pass the word along that I would like to join the next ceremony. It turns out I was overconfident. I had no idea what I was getting into.

It’s not that this was my first rodeo…I had taken multiple heroic doses of nearly every other psychedelic and I had never had a bad trip. But I had never eaten peyote.

I was excited to compare notes against other substances, and I was confident that it would be ultimately no big deal.

I’ve had close to 100 trips with different substances like LSD, MDMA, and different mushroom varieties (cyanescens, cubensis of different strains). Sometimes, I would trip with a combination of all of these stacked together. Like I said before, I’ve had 100% positive experiences with these drugs.

But peyote humbled me.

…

Fast forward to a few weeks later:

Salud the medicine woman showed up in the village with a posse of apprentices. She quietly announced she would hold a peyote ceremony the next day by telling 2–3 close contacts in the village and then letting the word spread.

My friend secured me a spot in the ceremony by letting Salud know I wanted to participate.

I asked how much it would cost, and my friend kind of scoffed. There was no charge.

(In the end, I was so moved and grateful for the experience that I gave a big bag of weed and some money to the apprentices. Salud declined any money.)

I had no idea what the ceremony was, or how it would go, but I was fully committed to experiencing the drug I had read about in Carlos Castaneda books.

I was raised in a household without religion, so I had never been through any kind of religious or spiritual ritual. No praying, no church, or anything like that.

The ceremony added a layer of novelty for me, although I doubted it would have an impact on my trip. I was wrong about that.

My friend said the ceremony would kick off at sunset.

I spent the rest of the day surfing and fishing. I took a nap, too. It was a good day, but I was feeling a mixture of nerves and excitement, like I was gaining altitude in a small airplane before a skydive.

The closer we got to sunset, the more I could feel the anticipation in my body like a mild electrical current. I was nervous.

The sun set, and we gathered at the point on the beach.

The ceremony was set up in a large circle around a fire. The outside of the circle was marked by a ring of river stones pulled from the nearby river. We were set up on the beach right in front of the surf on the sandy point.

To make things even more surreal, there was a bunch of bioluminescent algae in the surf that turned every wave bright blue in the fading light. It was a trippy sight without the peyote.

There were about 20 people participating in the ceremony, excluding Salud and her apprentices. There was a Dutch couple, about a dozen people from nearby Guanajuato, my friend and I, and a couple other surfers from France.

Everyone was a little nervous, except for Salud and her crew who kept smiling and chatting with everyone in an attempt to set the mood and tone for the ceremony. They seemed happy that we decided to join.

When the sun finally set, we gathered in a circle around the fire, and Salud handed everyone a wadded up piece of tobacco. Each person was instructed to recite what they wanted to learn from the ceremony, and then threw their hunk of tobacco into the fire. Since it was multilingual I couldn’t understand the Dutch or French.

Everyone else asked for healing or insight. I asked in my native English to “know myself better,” and I threw the tobacco in the fire.

Then when the last tobacco wad was thrown in the fire, Salud broke out a big clay pot with a ladle sticking out of the top.

She started ladling a kind of porridge from the clay pot into red Dixie cups. Her apprentices started to pass the party cups out to all of the participants. Each cup held about 2–3 ozs of porridge.

This was apparently the peyote concoction. I thought we would eat the cactus buttons whole, but I guessed this was how she was doing it.

My friend and I lined up and got our cups. Salud topped off his cup to the brim, while mine was kept at 2–3 ozs.

My friend let Salud know that I was all-in for the experience, and she topped me off with more peyote porridge. It was a full 16 ozs.

We clicked our red dixie cups together, and started to drink the mixture. It tasted like dirty feet and stomach acid that got shit out of a pig.

I had to choke it down, literally. I wanted to vomit the instant that it touched my mouth. But, I kept at it, intent on experiencing the full impact of peyote.

It took some effort, but we both finished.

Salud’s apprentices looked nervously at me after I had finished. I would later find out that the “mixture” wasn’t a mixture at all. It was just blended peyote buttons with a little bit of hibiscus and cinnamon to try and mask the flavor.

I had ingested over 30 peyote buttons, according to my friend. I had no frame of reference for peyote dosage, but I figured everything would be okay in the end. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?

I sat down in the sand near the fire, and I waited.

After about 30 minutes, I had to puke. I ran to the river, yakked, and returned.

I started feeling the familiar signs of slipping into an acid trip. The lingering streaks of light, the elevated mood, laughing, and not being able to speak coherently were all signs that the trip was starting.

After an hour, I started seeing everything in cartoon-vision. It was novel to me. No other psychedelic had ever brought on that kind of visual hallucination. My friend looked like Droopy the Dog from Looney Tunes. It made me laugh hysterically.

People’s appearances started to change drastically from minute to minute. After what I guess was an hour and a half, everything shifted to a new reality in one sudden moment.

In the new reality I would focus on someone’s face, I could see their skeleton. It wasn’t scary as much as it was powerful and surprising. I then understood where the Day-of The Dead makeup style originated from.

It was so novel because I had never had psychedelic visions that I couldn’t control.

For example, on mushrooms, you can make things sway back and forth, or sometimes you can see auras or different colors coming off of things. But this was more vivid than anything I’d seen. I had this weird x-ray vision that I couldn’t turn off. My thoughts were completely lucid and normal but I was seeing everyone’s skeleton.

Meanwhile, everyone was chanting and dancing and singing, and it was loud. I couldn’t focus on anything, and my perception of the world started to get more slippery by the minute. I decided to lie down and close my eyes and try to get my bearings.

That’s when I lost track of my body.

I’m not sure where I went, but I wasn’t in my body anymore. I also couldn’t hear the music and chanting, and I couldn’t see the fire. My nausea was gone. I could see my hands (even though my eyes were closed) but my fingers were blue and see-through.

I was drifting through a sea of red, green and blue clouds but I wasn’t moving. The clouds were moving around me. I just tried to stay calm and not panic. I was still lucid and had full control over my internal dialogue. I kept telling myself that I had signed up for this, and I was going to see it through, no matter what.

It crossed my mind that I might be dead.

As soon as I had that thought, a beautiful woman with dark hair dressed in a black robe like the grim reaper appeared in front of me in the clouds. She had super white skin and bright blue eyes.

She floated closer and stopped about five feet away from me. She didn’t talk, but I could understand her. I still couldn’t move.

She “told” me that everything was ok. I wasn’t dead. Stay calm.

Then, something else appeared. It had the form of a human, but it was all squiggly and red. It crouched down like a football coach does when he’s addressing an injured player, like on his haunches with bent knees and a straight back. It acted like the black-haired lady’s pet. That’s the impression I got, at least.

The red squiggly guy didn’t say or communicate anything. It didn’t have any features. It was just squiggly energy in the form of a human.

The woman moved smoothly to my left, and the squiggly red thing moved to my right. It all felt very pleasant. I was not even a little bit scared. For some reason, it felt natural that all of this was happening.

With the woman on my left and the red squiggly guy on my right, a grid appeared in front of us in an instant. The shift happened instantly, no fade in or fade out. The clouds I was floating in immediately shifted to this grid stretching out in all directions.

It’s hard to describe how fast all of this happened. It wasn’t disjointed, but it happened instantly. I don’t know how else to describe it other than smooth, instant appearance in front of me.

I could also see in 360 degrees, if that makes any sense. I didn’t have to turn my head to see behind me.

The grid was made up of green intersecting lines, and in each intersection of the lines, there was a green ball. The closest green ball looked to be about the size of a softball. The grid stretched out as far as I could see in every direction.

Floating above the grid was a giant cone, and above the cone was a giant sphere.

The woman and the red squiggly guy both pointed to the cone and sphere. She “ told” me that was the reason I was there.

It made no fucking sense to me whatsoever. I asked the woman what the hell she meant, and she just smiled and pulled her hood back. Her whole body rotated to face me, but she didn’t say anything. She just looked at me with what I can best describe as love and pity.

At this point, things started to phase out. A very rapid series of images ranging from extreme violence to mothers caring for their babies was playing in my head.

It was like someone edited together a movie made up of one frame of everyone’s life who had ever lived, and I was watching it on fast-forward.

Thousands of images per second were running across my mind’s eye. It was unpleasant and disorienting. I wanted it to stop, but it kept on for awhile.

I’m not sure how long it lasted, but before I knew it I was no longer in the grid with the pretty lady and the squiggly guy.

I could feel my body and I could hear the chanting and singing. I had to puke again. I stood up, fell over, stood up again, and staggered toward the river where I puked.

The experience kept on for another 12 hours, well past sunrise. I stayed in my body for the rest of the trip, but it was still very intense. I cried a lot, but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason for being so sad or happy.

Eventually, I went back to my cabana where my wife was still sleeping. My crying woke her up, and she was sweet and held me like a big baby. I felt like I had died and been reborn.

My perspective warped so much during my trip that it made me question everything about life and reality. Honestly, it’s been kind of hard to deal with.

I can’t ignore the things I used to. I’ve had to make peace with the chaos in my life.

It has definitely made life more rich, but also much more challenging. I discovered ugly and beautiful parts of myself that I have to address. Since the trip has ended, these revelations have been relentless.

Overall, it’s improved my quality of life, but only after some serious work and growing pains.

…

I think these substances and experiences are valuable. My peyote trip gave me access to parts of myself, life, the universe, and existence itself that were otherwise blocked.

However, I’m not advocating for universal usage. On the contrary, people shouldn’t play with this stuff. It can be extremely dangerous.

A cautionary tale:

A close friend of mine ruined his life by taking too much acid. He went from a genius microbiologist to a mental patient in five days.

In his early 20’s he took a large dose of LSD and induced schizophrenic episodes that he still struggles with 15 years later.

Don’t mess with these substances if you have a history of mental illness or you aren’t prepared to lose everything. They will change your life. Don’t fuck around unless you are ready.

Scary disclaimers aside, I think that there is a lot to gain when you use psychedelics thoughtfully and responsibly.

I like going into the unknown. I like the tension and anticipation of not knowing what’s about to happen. I love coming out the other side of a trip feeling reborn and recast as a human being.

But I’m done tripping for the time being.

…

I feel like it will take even more time and energy to decipher and unwind the meaning behind what the lady in black was trying to show me in the grid space.

Sometimes, I’ll randomly get a piece of the puzzle, but it will be something about my relationship with my Dad, or how I mistreated someone in middle school. There is never a linear path or map to show me what to do.

Nothing is clear anymore, except for the realization that I know nothing. I continue to be humbled by my peyote trip. I’m not the same person that I was before I went to that place.

I’m nicer and more patient now. I forgive more easily, and I set boundaries with people I don’t enjoy being around. I take my life more seriously, and I use my energy more purposefully. I value my life more now than I did before.

I have been shown that I am small and I don’t know anything. There are so many things I still don’t understand, but one thing is very clear:

If I’m going to live a good life, it will be because I made it that way. That’s the message that keeps repeating in my head:

It’s up to me.

Thanks for reading! Be safe and sane…