The universe zapped my mind — Fasting before Ayahuasca #6
Intention: Poke the part of my personality that longs to be famous.
Since forever, I have sought the attention of others. At school, I was always the class clown, and as an adult, I enviously look up to those at the top of the attention pyramid. My vision of a future me often come with a quantifiable public profile and I wanted Aya to show me what I could become if I let go of my status obsession.
Preparation: In the week before the ceremony, on Monday and Tuesday, I fasted until dinner. From Wednesday evening until Friday afternoon, I didn’t eat any food until having a light lunch 4 hours before the ceremony. A couple of hours before embarking on the journey to visit my shaman I spent a blissful time meditating and napping in a floatation tank.
In my previous ceremonies, it took around 60–90 minutes for me to feel any effect and the onset was very gradual and peaked at around 3 hours. This time, by minute 30–40 I had reached La-La-Land as I like to call the ineffably beautiful kaleidoscoping geometries that drift by your inner eye.
5–10 minutes later the intensity rose to a level that I only recognised from smoking pure DMT. The ride was getting bumpy but I managed to keep myself level with box breathing.
When I opened my eyes the room was ablaze with visual distortions. The other people looked like meringues of swirling bright energy that ran over their bodies in an upward pulse. It appeared to steam over their heads where it intertwined with the darkness. I looked down at my hands lying in my lap and they started disintegrating into molecules and atoms drifting away from me.
Having come down pretty quickly after that brief peak, I was ready to accept a 2nd cup of tea from the shaman. It kicked in equally fast and had me throwing up 15 minutes later but I relished the feeling of relief of having purged. After cleaning myself up, I snuggled back into my black hoody sweater and slipped into the music to thoroughly enjoy the onsetting light show.
That is when it happened. I had a strong hallucination that my brain was being grabbed, pushed out of my forehead into a metal box that rotated in front of my nose.
After a full revolution, the rotation stopped and the box spawned similar boxes in front of it.
The boxes kept appearing until they formed a hollow tunnel in front of me.
My thoughts briefly wandered to; WTF is happening to me, when POP (!) a big pulse of energy erupted and doused my mind’s eye in bright white light for an instant.
As the light slowly faded I felt my entire nervous system tingle.
Stunned, but in no way frightened I felt ecstatic about what had just happened.
It was like a biological mechanical connector was formed in my brain which then reach into a higher dimension and got zapped.
After that, I eased into the journey and pondered my intention to ask myself the question: if I dropped the desire to be famous, who would I become?
At some point I had a vision of a rigid skeleton from a small mammal enclosed in a coffin box without a lid. It surged towards me forcefully and I had to summon the mental energy to push back, hold it off and then push it deep into the darkness like I was burying it somewhere deep.
I remembered one of my take-away realisations from the previous ceremony: Embrace shame. Shame is helpful. Shame shows you what to address to balance yourself.
The realisation crept in that I was conflating the ideas of showing off and wanting a public profile.
The lesson I learned was that if I can stop showing off in a smug or boastful way, I will be able to spread my ideas in a way that is useful to others.
Out of the fractals, a large snake started to wind its way towards me and around the back of my neck and down my torso, to my leg and back up again before it came to rest on my body. According to my shaman, a snake symbolises the slow shedding of skin that one has outgrown and requires time to work through its transition.
Towards the end of the ceremony, I accepted the shaman’s offer to step into the adjacent room and send a healing thought to someone I care about.
The way it worked was by tipping a dose of Ayahuasca back and forth between two cups that chimed with every pour and sent healing vibrations to Anna who was at home nursing a thick cold.
When I returned from the ceremony, Anna said she experienced something odd during the night.
She woke up early in the morning, looked at her phone and saw a thumbnail photo of me she had never seen before. However, when she tapped on it, it vanished as if it had never been there.
I asked what I was doing in the photo and she said I looked quite stoned, wearing a black top and holding a cup ✨🤯
Epilogue
The afterglow lasted longer; 3 weeks this time, 2 weeks last time.
After my first recent ceremony, I told friends that I would publish my trip reports and I spent time musing on where that desire was truly coming from and I realized that I was focused on playing the role of fame rather than focusing on the authentic being of that person who becomes famous as a consequence of sharing noteworthy thoughts.
Writing this blog is a big part of my evolution and the lesson I learned was that when I stop showing off in a smug or boastful way, I will be able to spread my ideas in a way that is useful to other
My urge to be famous is still there but it has changed and I am still making sense of it. My shaman said that what I describe is an inner child response that requires love and compassion to heal.
In hindsight, I think what was zapped was the part of me that fears dying. For decades I have carried with me the notion that I would somehow, randomly die once I was on the cusp of showing the world what I am capable of and I think this irrational thought is what was expunged from my mind during the experience.
This thought has been subliminally holding me back for years and has kept preventing me from sharing these essays.
Fuck the fear.
Recently I hit publish and guess what, I’m still here :)
