Shadow Forewarning
Equanimity is a cliche you hear bandied about frequently in mindfulness circles, from two bit street hawkers of Ayahuasca in Cusco to Tibetan monks in Rato Dratsang. I hear it all the time where I live in East London where there are more yoga teachers than yoga students and I often encounter people espousing New Age theories such as energy work, crystal magic, Reiki or some other scientifically dubious pseudo-mysticism.
But with plant medicine, there is no leap of faith, you ingest it and it can temporarily transpose you to a state of equanimity.
To best experience this, it is advised to prepare the body by following a restricted diet or dieta so that is what I will discuss in this article. They say in the weeks before taking Ayahuasca, the three most fundamental restrictions are street drugs, sexual activity and pork. The week before Peru, I was in Cartagena, a city awash with cocaine, salsa and chicharrones, maybe not the best choice of location but it was on the flight path. More specifically, I was not meant to have any of these:
I was paying a lot of money for this retreat and I wanted to do it properly. I did feel like a caged bull exploring the Colombian salsa clubs but obviously I have the self discipline to rise above these temptations of the flesh.
I thought the pork and sexual activity restrictions were a bit random. Apparently pork has a dense and heavy energetic quality that is the antithesis to the light energetic quality of plants. In the Shamanic view, everything is energy and everything that is ingested in the body has an impact on the body’s energetic system.
The practice of sexual abstinence stems from an acute sensitivity to the power of sexual energy. Ayahuasca dramatically increases a person’s sensitivity to energies both within and outside themselves.
Recently expressed sexual energy carries a very strong energy that collides with the healing energies of the plants. When undergoing healing, this energy is better kept inside the system, combining with the plant energies to raise the vibration of the individual. So a bit of stroking was ok but that was the limit.
According to YouTube, there are ways to circulate stagnant sexual energy without ejaculating that can help to relieve sexual tension and energize the body. One method is to use a Qigong technique called the microcosmic orbit, as taught by Mantak Chia. The perspective in this Daoist tradition is that energy in the genitals can be circulated upward instead of dissipated outward.
I got out of the city and stayed in nature in the lovely Coralina Island Boutique Hotel on the Rosario Islands and practiced my microcosmic orbits.
On the day I was due to fly to Peru, I had to get a boat back to the mainland and go directly to the airport. The temperature was nearly 35°C. Even though the boat was covered, the sun was low and blazed on me for 30 mins. I didn’t realise as I was being constantly splashed by cold sea water.
I got to the airport and I was already a deep purple before I flew to Lima.
I got up the next day for my flight to Iquitos via Tarapoto on a Star Peru Boeing 737 rust bucket. Not the Max 737 that had been grounded due to 2 crashes but I wasn’t filled with confidence. I was feeling very rough in the airport lounge but made it onto the plane, fortunately in row 1. After we were airborne, I went to the bathroom and I’ll spare you the gory details but let’s just say my purge started before I even drank Ayahuasca. Luckily, my fellow passengers, not wanting to wear a bib of my breakfast, moved to another seat and I was able to lie down.
Then I hear the intercom say “engine trouble, we have to go back to Lima as it can’t be repaired in Tarapoto”. So we turned back. We faffed around in Lima for a while until they got us another plane.
In Tarapoto we had an additional 3 hour delay on the tarmac for reasons never revealed. What should have been a 3 hour flight turned into an 12 hour vomitorium. WebMD said I had either sunstroke, noroviros or food poisoning. I had arranged to go for dinner with a number of the other retreat guests in Iquitos but I was a dehydrated violet raisin so I crashed in my hotel. Perhaps the Plant sensed me coming and was testing me.
The next morning I felt horrendous so went to the pharmacy and got some medicine. They love throwing out pills in developing countries I have noticed:
I met the group at the meet up; 22 psychonauts of many nationalities and one of the facilitators, Inma. After an 1 hour long bus ride, a 30 minute boat ride and a 30 minute hike (and a little help from the porters who carried our bags), we finally made it to the Temple. I felt like I had parachuted into the middle of scene from Apocalypse Now.
The Temple was deep in the forest and all the staff were waiting out front to greet us individually. It was very welcoming. I told the facilitators what medication I had taken and that I was beat so they showed me to my tambo (hut), gave me a load of water to drink and I passed out. I slept most of the afternoon so missed the group orientation and vapour bath.
Later, the facilitator Allen came to my tambo with some dinner for me. My appetite had come back and I wolfed it down while he informed me one of the pills I took is contraindicated with Ayahuasca so I may miss the first ceremony tomorrow. Balls. But he said they will check this with a medical doctor (not onsite) who will advise by the morning.
Potentially missing the first ceremony was a bummer but I was feeling much better so I decided to just read in my hammock and listen to the sounds of the Amazon. It had no windows, just mosquito netting. It had no electricity, just an oil burning lamp. It also had no shower (relax, that was in a central building) and it had a compost toilet. I thought it was glorious.
Ayahuasca is meant to biohack psycho-spiritual imbalances. I wanted to fastrack enlightenment and learn to connect to the superconscious without having to practice years of meditative drudgery.
I had read a lot about accessing these areas via psychedelics so I was very curious. The price of admittance was facing my shadow.
Ayahuasca brings the experiences of your inner world into your conscious awareness. This includes the “shadows” within you that lie at the root of disorder, imbalance and pain. For some reason I had a fear that my shadow was going to manifest as a giant Kafkaesque cockroach. I am really terrified of cockroaches. I remember examining a giant one scuttling around in Japan and then it started to fly. I nearly had a heart attack, not knowing they could fly. I started thinking that I was increasing my chances of my shadow being a cockroach by worrying about it. As I tried to stop thinking about cockroaches, all I could think about were cockroaches. This did not bode well.
I decided to break this feedback loop of horror and go out for a walk when I came across this:
I mean wtf is that? Google image search thinks it might be a Saturniid caterpillar… that has been stealthily imbibing Ayahuasca. Clearly my shadow was now going to take this form. They say our shadow is everything inside us that we have disowned, avoided and kept in the dark. That means I was probably going to journey through the digestive tract of a psychedelic caterpillar with poisonous stinging hairs. I clearly have a bit of a masochistic streak as I was looking forward to this. What was interesting about this is that the caterpillar is the larval stage of a butterfly before metamorphosis.
Inside the chrysalis, the body breaks itself down into imaginal cells, which like stem cells, can become any type of cell. The imaginal cells put themselves back together into a new shape. This was pretty much what I wanted Ayahuasca to do to my brain.
Now they say Ayahuasca will show you many things, but you can also ask her what to show you with an intention. Your intention is your mantra and your Ariadne’s thread back to the material realm. If you simply ask the medicine “teach me,” you may get a confusing, albeit potent , lesson. It is best to ask for something more specific. For my intention I wanted to enter a quantum superposition. In one state, I wanted to try and understand the censor in my head, the bit of me that is tirelessly analysing, second guessing and judging. In the other, I wanted to soar through the multiverse like Neo wearing a technicolour dreamcoat.
Later than night, Allen dropped by and said ideally there should be a 48 hour window between taking ciprofloxacin and doing Ayahuasca, but they consulted with a doctor in Iquitos and he signed it off. I was good-to-go for ceremony number one the following evening. I drifted off under my mosquito net with the sounds of the rainforest raging around me, eager to finally meet Mother Aya like a child on Christmas Eve.
Next article: Drink, don’t think
Written during Writers’ Hour. Join me on the next one.
