My last Ayahuasca experience

Intention: Forgive the people that hurt and humiliated me

Setting: This time round was, for the first time, very different to my previous experiences which had all been at my shaman’s house.
The setting this time was at home, in my bed watching a 7h recording of my shamans performing their usual ceremony with a set order of chants and songs.

Set: I followed a very diligent dieta for the best part of 2 weeks this time which in the past I have only taken semi-seriously. The reason I was keen to do this was to test out the theory that the more diligently you prepare for an ayahuasca ceremony, the longer the positive effects last, the so-called afterglow.

I found the preparation quite tough, not because of the food restrictions (I didn’t mind eating plain, steamed vegetables and pulses) but rather because of the need to give up smoking cannabis. I regulate my mood very effectively by micro-dosing cannabis a couple of times per week.
1h after I drank my first dose I started to notice how similar the phases of the experience are to each other, moving and transitioning in sync with the music.

Different Ayahuasca spirit animals have shown up in my ceremonies. During the dark phase which felt like struggling through mud, I swirled like being washed down a waterslide. Out of the swirls a Jaguar roared in my face. After staring at each other for a couple of tense seconds he pounced and we were tussling. The Jaguar got on top of me and pinned me to the ground.
I grabbed the tail, pulled it back and hugged it tightly with all my strength while it tried to keep me down.

As I descended deeper into the shadows of my memory I recalled many of the smacks, punches, fights and humiliations I suffered in life.
I was a cocky kid and every time I remember these things, an automatic crops up: I deserved those beatings.

However what I acknowledged that night was that at 41 years of age, my inner child was still hurting from the way I was treated in my childhood.

I was feeling hopeful I might meet a hummingbird but this time an Eagle showed up and helped me out of a couple of sticky situations.

I had gone down a dark path of thoughts and didn’t like where I had ended up and so I called for the eagle and he swooped down for me to grab his huge talons and soar into the sunset over mountainous forest landscapes in the evening glow.

At some point when I was dealing with a difficult thought the eagle grabbed something attached to my shoulders and pulled off a demon and airlifted him away until he was 10km off the ground and dropped him very far away from me on the other side of the mountain range.

As is customary by now, I had one almighty purge in a ceremony.
After I put down my sick bowl I had my head in my hands and stretched my neck. I had one hand pushing on my chin and one pulling on the back of my head
Suddenly I had a very intrusive thought.
‘I could just end it and wring my own neck’ This was immediately followed by the awful thought of my daughter returning to find my contorted corpse and the instant devastation it would rain on my family.

That night I acknowledged the thoughts of suicide that I have had for decades. I haven’t had these thoughts ongoingly for more than a handful of periods in my life but nonetheless, they come up and invade my wellbeing. To be clear it has only been stage 1 ideation and I have never made plans to kill myself.

I don’t know if or how common these thoughts are but I can imagine I’m not the only person to feel like this occasionally.
It started at puberty and I had felt it on the day before the ceremony after I had been beside myself in rage. I felt overcome by shame and anger at myself and a familiar old thought reared its ugly head — It would all just go away if you hurled yourself off the balcony.

I write this not to evoke sympathy or point a finger at those who hurt me but to highlight the enormous benefit of psychedelics to self-heal.
In the following week, I met a friend of mine who is a doctor and herself in trauma-focused therapy and she helped me find a therapist to go after these intrusive thoughts.
It’s not my first time in therapy but now there is a clear destination in sight and I’m confident that with therapy I can step into a new chapter of life.
Life could have gone on as before but this experience made me realise that I need to get help to unfold my full potential.