Mother Ayahuasca

Seeing God and sorting mother issues with a bitter brew

I wasn’t sure but from the thickness of the jungle I had a hunch I was in the Amazon. I walked into a clearing and looked up to see the clouds above twist to become an Aztec warrior. The warrior roared and pressed down on me and terrified, I began to shrink. As I got smaller all the pain and self-loathing I held inside grew more and concentrated, until my entire being was distilled into a ball of agony. Relief came when the warrior transformed into a giant cobra and the snake swallowed the ball of wretchedness and cast it out of me. Suddenly I was a Buddha, sitting tall and strong as bolts of radiant energy surged into my brain from the heavens above. My soul became one with the eternal and I knew that I was divine.

I opened my eyes and looked around, In the darkness, I could just barely make out the form of our shaman as he sang a Chilean icaros, or “power song” to welcome the healing spirits into the circle of about twenty sitters who had gathered to drink Ayahuasca — a powerful psychoactive brew that causes intense and prolonged hallucinations. The concoction has been used by indigenous peoples of the Amazon as part of a shamanic vision-quest tradition that dates back thousands of years. Lately, its use has been gaining traction in the West as spiritual seekers, and those struggling with unresolved trauma have turned to it for healing and insight.

According to Wikipedia, “People who have consumed Ayahuasca report having spiritual revelations regarding their purpose on earth, the true nature of the universe as well as deep insight into how to be the best person they can. This is viewed by many as a spiritual awakening and what’s often described as a rebirth. It is often reported that individuals gain access to higher spiritual dimensions and make contact with various spiritual or extra-dimensional beings who can act as guides or healers. It’s nearly always said that people experience profound positive changes in their life subsequent to consuming Ayahuasca, and it is often viewed as one of the most effective tools of enlightenment.”

If all of that sounds like hippie-dippie bullshit then you probably haven’t tried Ayahuasca. Each time I’ve sat in ceremony, the mediation group where a trained shaman distributes the bitter brew, the experience has been profound and transformative. I’ve experimented with various mind-altering substances over the years, sampling everything from magic mushrooms to LSD. Ayahuasca is unlike any of them. It doesn’t just alter your perceptions, it completely shatters your understating of reality, ushering you into parallel dimensions that are both mind-blowingly spectacular and strangely familiar. “The plant” or “The Medicine” as it is often called, doesn’t shift your consciousness; it seems to be a consciousness — a sentient teaching sprit-entity that delivers profound insights while performing what I can only describe as psychic surgery. Users report emotional purging, coupled with striking hallucinations, often involving nature imagery including snakes and rapidly growing vines.

The fact that visions of growing vines are central to the experience is fascinating when you consider that the psychoactive ingredient in the brew, dimethyltryptamine or DMT, is derived from the Amazonian Ayahuasca vine. In the Quechua language, “aya” means spirit, and “waska” means vine. In order for the DMT in the Ayahuasca vine to become psychoactive, it is combined with the leaves of the Psychotria shrub, which acts as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. For the brew to be effective both plants are necessary. The fact that primitive people figured out how to combine these two plants, out of the 80,000 plant species in the Amazon, seems extraordinary.

DMT is a naturally occurring compound that’s widespread throughout the plant kingdom. It’s also found in many higher mammals including humans. It acts as a trace neurotransmitter/neuromodulator but its specific function is unknown. For a long time, DMT was considered a “junk” molecule, but new thinking suggests that it may be a connective compound that facilitates a basic level of communication between living things. Dr. Neal Goldsmith discusses this “core language” theory in the documentary, “DMT: The Spirit Molecule.” The film explores the work of Dr. Rick Strassman, who did extensive research on DMT at the University of New Mexico in the ’90s. Strassman advanced the theory that a surge of DMT is released by the pineal gland at the time of death and that the tunnel of light was said to see upon departing this world, comes as a result of this blast of DMT. Interestingly, the pineal gland, which supplies DMT in humans, is located in the same spot as the “third eye” chakra is said to exist. It’s also a fun fact that the pineal gland becomes visible on the 49th day of fetal development — the same number of days that the Tibetan Book Of The Dead teaches that it takes a soul to reincarnate. The feeling that DMT produces is strikingly similar to experiences described in religious mysticism. A sense of timelessness, combined with a feeling of connection to all living things, and communion with a divine life force are central to both experiences. It’s not surprising then, that the same brain centers that are activated by DMT are also active in meditating yogis and monks. It’s difficult to look at Ayahuasca, without concluding that scientists studying it’s effects are just begging to climb a mountain that mystics have been perched on top of for thousands of years.

I first heard about Ayahuasca in college, but it would take me fifteen years to build up the courage to try it. The idea of inviting wild hallucinations, and uncontrollable terrors into my mind understandably gave me pause. It was the confluence of two things that got me to take the plunge. The first was the change I saw in a friend after he started using “the medicine”. Frank was in his mid-40’s. He had a successful career, and a group of good friends, but he’d reached mid-life without ever having a long-term relationship. Perhaps because of this, there was a creeping bitterness about him. He would compare his life to the ‘better lives’ he saw in Facebook photos and the resulting feelings of inadequacy would eat at him. Even surrounded by friends, his constant refrain was that he wanted to more fully belong. In search of a greater connection, he turned to yoga, which led him to take a closer look at his spiritual needs. For a few years, he flailed between gurus and spiritual self-help books, always looking but never finding. Then he stumbled upon a meditation group that practiced with Ayahuasca. After his first few sittings, the change in him was profound. The emerging bitterness had faded away, he laughed more, and he was more patient with himself and others. Within a few months of his first ceremony, he decided he needed to give back more, and he began a charity organization. Two years later that organization has grown to over 4000 members in ten cities. And recently, Frank has begun to date someone seriously. He is not a different person, but he is without question a more whole person, and his journey to a fuller self seemed to begin with Ayahuasca.

The second thing that drove my decision was the emerging research on Ayahuasca and trauma recovery. Like Frank, I too had struggled with relationships. But unlike him, I’d had several long-term partners, but nothing had stuck. I always found myself wanting out, despite the fact that they were great guys. If it had been just two failures in my wake, I might have convinced myself they were the wrong guys — but here I was on the far side of forty and I had the wreckage of five multi-year relationships in my rearview mirror. The constant in the pattern was me, and if I was going to change things I knew I had to take a closer look at myself. My hunch was that my failure at finding a lasting relationship stemmed from trauma surrounding the circumstances of my birth and my connection to my mother.

My relationship with my mother began and ended painfully. It started with my premature birth, and it ended with her tragic death. I knew that I had a well of unresolved emotion bound up around her and I hoped that Ayahuasca might allow me to cut through the emotional scar tissue. The ritual use of Ayahuasca has been shown to be effective in helping individuals process unresolved trauma. I’d read reports of it being used to help soldiers recover from post-traumatic stress. Ayahuasca hyper-activates both the neocortex, the area of the brain where we reason and make decisions, and the amygdala, which acts as a storehouse for emotional memories, specifically traumatic ones. By allowing access to repressed emotional stores, its thought that Ayahuasca can help users lance psychic boils. As they say in the group I attend, “You can’t heal it if you can’t feel it.” But could Ayahuasca help me access memories that were pre-verbal? Could it help me recover from the trauma that occurred while my brain was still forming?

I was born at five and a half months, weighing in at just two pounds twelve ounces. Even today, a child born at 22 weeks gestation, as I was, has an 80% chance of dying, and if it does live there’s a 95% chance of neurodevelopmental impairment. I was born in the 60’s, when neonatal care itself was in its infancy, so the chances of me surviving were so vanishingly small that it was impossible to quantify my odds, too few babies survived to make a calculation. I arrived, weak, blind, and unable to breathe on my own. Without my mother ever holding me, I was placed in an incubator where I was baptized, then given last rights while my casket was ordered and arrangements were made for my funeral. Then, against all probability, I didn’t die.

I spent my first two months in a glass box, undergoing dozens of procedures. The average number for a preemie is 60, many of them painful and invasive. Thus, premature infants are in a constant state of stress— all at a time when the brain is developing rapidly. Exacerbating the trauma was the fact that, as much as I’m sure she wanted to, my mother could not hold me. She could not feed me. She could not, in a very real sense, mother me. I believe that this lack of initial connection compromised our ability to bond and impacted our relationship for its duration.

For a baby, the warmth of its mother, and the nourishment of her bosom is life itself. If love is first spawned anywhere, it is surely in the space between a mother's breast and her newborns' lips. If I, as an infant, did not bond with my mother, could I reasonably expect to connect with anyone? A study published in the Journal of Contemporary Pediatrics showed that very low birth weight babies were more than twice as likely as their full-term infants to develop disorganized detachment with their mothers. It should be noted that it is thought to be child developmental issues, rather than maternal neglect, that is the key factor here, but whatever the cause, the result is often a compromised mother/child bond. A University of Minnesota study found that children with insecure attachments with their mothers reported more problems resolving relationship conflicts two decades later. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it seemed logical to me that bolstering a feeling of connection to my mother, might help me foster more lasting emotional connections in the present. But could Ayahuasca help me to re-connect with a woman who had been dead for 25 years? I had to try.

My mother, Patricia Hume, was a dark-haired beauty. The fading pictures I have of her bring Jacqueline Onassis to mind. She had been an ER nurse when she met my father. They dated and married more out of attrition than love. All their friends had coupled off and they were the last men standing. In 60‘s Toronto, there were not a lot of options for women, so she did what was expected, quit her job, and had two children. My sister Charron and I arrived quickly and my mother tried to make a happy home out of an unhappy marriage. My mother had chronic health problems, mostly related to a damaged kidney, and was constantly in and out of the hospital. For most of my childhood, I remember her being sick in bed. In retrospect, this was probably as much from depression as an illness. When her marriage to my father inevitably ended, she returned to work as a psychiatric nurse, and from all accounts she was a very good one. She seemed to finally be finding herself when she died. She was just 52, and she was working with severely depressed patients at The Clarke Psychiatric Institute in Toronto. A requirement of her particular ward was that patients had to have made multiple suicide attempts to be admitted. The fact that she would take her own life seems ironic until you consider that there was likely a reason she was drawn to that particular branch of psychiatry.

The circumstances of her death are murky. I was 22 and in college in California at the time. We were not close, so I didn’t know that in the months proceeding to her death, she had suffered a series of blackouts. She would be going about her day, and suddenly she would blackout and wake confused. She told only a few people about these episodes and it’s clear they frightened her. The night before she died, she suffered her most severe episode. She fell in a hallway at work, and when she regained consciousness she was confused and uncertain about where she was. Even after she was admitted to the hospital she did not know the year or who the Prime Minister was. Eventually, her faculties returned, and she was released to go home in the care of my amazingly strong under pressure sister. Charron stayed in her guest room, and all seemed well until the police knocked at the door the next morning and informed my sister that our mum had jumped from the 19th-floor balcony of her apartment. The emotions Charron must have gone through that morning are hard for me to imagine. I am still in awe of her strength. Did my mother have another blackout? Was she just confused? Or did she jump because she was frightened of what was happening to her? I’d like to say that I could never imagine her taking her life but I can’t. As accomplished as she was, there was a fragility about her. She was anxious and prone to depression. She was haunted by irrational fears that she’d become homeless and be a burden to her children, and she struggled with pills and alcohol. There was always in my mother, the possibility of suicide. When I first heard about her death in an agonizing six am call from Charron, in which I was told only, “Mum committed suicide,” my immediate response was not shock but anger. Interestingly, about a minute after I hung up, my girlfriend at the time, Ashton, called from the East Coast and immediately asked, “What’s wrong? What happened?” Somehow she just knew. I was thankful though, that my mother had called me the day before she died. We rarely spoke, but that day we had a pleasant talk. I remember hanging up and wondering what had prompted her to call. Only later would I realize that it might have been her goodbye. We will never know what happened that horrible day, but it’s clear that none of it would have occurred had she had not been having blackouts. So I blame her death on an undiagnosed medical condition rather than an unattended psychological one. Reflecting back on her, I find it incredibly frustrating that she’s gone. We were not close and I don’t feel like I was particularly well-loved by her. That’s hard to say about one’s own mother but it’s true and I think it’s largely because we never recovered from our initial damaged bond. My hope was that Ayahuasca might help me resolve some of my mother-issues, and by extension some of my present-day life issues.

There is a structured ritual to an Ayahuasca ceremony. Preparation for a sitting begins a week before with a limited diet and a restriction on all sexual activity. On the evening of the sitting, you arrive prepared to spend the night, as the ceremony will last until dawn. You select a spot in a circle and are given a bucket. The bucket is for purging, or vomiting into, a common reaction to the medicine. In the group, I go to there’s wide cross-section of attendees. There are a few hippie types — the kind of people you might expect to find in an all-night Amazonian drug-taking group, but most are professionals, ranging in age from 35 to 65. Many are in the field of psychology. There are addiction counselors, computer programmers, and several in media. It’s an eclectic mix, with about as many women as men.

The evening begins with a guided mediation, during which participants are asked to hold an intention in mind — this is the issue you hope to address during the ceremony. After about twenty minutes, the Shaman starts to call up the sitters one by one. He pours a small cup of a dark thick brew and you drink it. It’s incredibly bitter, with a foul taste and a gritty/slimy texture. You return to your place, rinse your mouth to get rid of the taste, then close your eyes and start to meditate. When everyone has drunk, the lights are turned out and in total darkness the Shaman begins to drum and sing Amazonian icaros’s. These are mellifluous repetitive songs that are sung to guide the mediation and to call forth helping spirits. After about 25 minutes you start to yawn and you hear people around you beginning to purge into their buckets. The first time I drank Ayahuasca, it was at this point, sitting in the dark with people vomiting all around me, and my own guts churning, that I began to question my sanity. What the hell was I doing? Surely this was a mistake. Then, just as my doubt was peaking, little flashes of refracted light began to flicker in my peripheral vision. The flickers expanded to become undulating colorful geometric patterns that moved with the steady pulse of a heartbeat, fluctuating in step with the shaman’s singing. Then, figures began to emerge from the web of pulsing light. I saw a Hindu Shiva with multiple arms. The visions were so real that I had to touch my eyes to check if they were open or closed. There was no longer a separation between my internal life and the external world. During that first journey, I became profoundly aware of the connection between all living things. Of a common life force that charged through us all. I traveled to shimmering planes above and descended like Orpheus to a dull grey underworld of trolls and wretches before re-engaging with everyday reality. It was a visual bonanza, and when it was over I was certain that I had been witness to the divine. My petty concerns paled in the face of all I had seen and I felt energized for weeks after. The low-level anxiety that I often suffered was gone, as was the mild depression that sometimes accompanied it. It was as if the Ayahuasca had power washed the gunk out of my brain and left it recharged. It was the closest thing to magic I had ever experienced.

I had not addressed the issues I hoped to, but I had every reason to believe that further work with Ayahuasca could help me to do so. In subsequent sittings, I had a range of extraordinary experiences. I saw large breasted goddesses, whose wombs radiated life force. A spirit-entity appeared before me and thrust her hands into the solar plexus. She examined me and began to make adjustments to my core as if doing surgery on me. I had a profound sense that this spirit, or whatever she was, was not a product of my drugged mind, but a real sentient being — a healing spirit who had come to help me. This feeling of contact with spirit entities is common among those who have used the medicine, and these entities are most often experienced as feminine. It’s why Shamans refer to the plant as ‘Mother Ayahuasca.” It’s as if the brew allows a connection to what the Ancient Greeks called “the eternal feminine.” The concept comes from gender essentialism, which posits that males and females have different core essences. It was an accepted philosophical truth until thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir discredited the notion as a patriarchal construct. But after experiencing Ayahuasca, I would argue that the ancients got it right. Each time I have used Ayahuasca, I’ve been almost overwhelmed by what I can only describe as a feminine life force. I’ve had visions of the fertile goddess and earth mothers pulsing with the energy of life itself. One of my most unforgettable moments came when I saw a voluptuous recumbent figure, and in her most female of female parts, there was a swirling tunnel of light — a tunnel of light that looked just like the ones described in near-death experiences. I knew that it led directly to the eye of God. I am an almost compulsively rational man, I also happen to be gay, and yet I am convinced that I saw a pathway to god between that woman’s legs. I’m fully aware of how absurd this sounds. But when you think about it, at the most basic level, that is where human life comes from, and what is life if not the ultimate expression of God?

This powerful sense of connection to a nurturing life force has been one of the most lasting effects of my Ayahuasca use. During my last two sittings, I tried to reconnect with my mother. I held in mind the happy times we had, and I hoped those memories would lead to a greater sense of connection, but it was no to be. Instead, Ayahuasca showed me how much she had suffered in her life. It let me see her pain, and understand the struggles she faced while she was alive. My self-involved feelings of not being loved by her were replaced with a sense of empathy for a woman who has suffered a lot, and who did the best she could in the circumstances. This realization was an extraordinary gift and I am at peace with her now.

As for my attempts at processing the trauma of my birth, those efforts were also effective. During my last experience with Ayahuasca, I found myself transformed into an infant. I was alone and weak, totally helpless and vulnerable when suddenly this wave of love enveloped me. It cradled me, swaddling me in warmth. Fear and anxiety were pushed aside and replaced with a sense of security, protection, and nourishment. The source of this love was not my mother, it came from somewhere far more infinite than any one individual, but it fed my soul, and filling me with the maternal love I was starved for. Even now, months afterward, I can reflect back on this intense feeling of love, and any anxiety I’m feeling abates and calm comes over me. Was this profound feeling of being loved the result of my connecting to some well of cosmic love? Or was it a feeling that was manufactured by my drug-addled brain? I can’t answer that question, but I would argue that it doesn’t matter. Whether real or imagined, the emotions I‘ve experienced during Ayahuasca ceremonies have been genuine and the insights that often come with them, have continued to resonate with me long after the ceremonies were over. I have used Ayahuasca five times now, and I am without question more at peace than I’ve ever been. A few months ago I started dating someone for the first time in a long while and it’s going very well. I can’t help but think that the spirit vine had something to do with it. Ayahuasca is not for everyone, but for those struggling to overcome trauma, or for seekers of truth — even enlightenment — this ancient bitter brew maybe a sip in the right direction.