I first decided to try ayahuasca when my 50year old dad invited me to one of the ceremonies in Colombia where people from all over the country go to try this sacred plant. Rarely is it our parents saying “take these drugs”, so when he seemed really confident about his experience, I decided to try it for myself.
Have you ever been vomiting outside of a bar so bad, while your closest friend is holding you tightly so you don’t hit the ground, and as you think to yourself, “this is good, I really need to get this out of my body”? Well, trying Ayahuasca was like the biggest vomiting session I have ever been through, and it was not my closest friend holding me tightly but mother earth herself hugging me, caressing me and loving me, as she was letting me know that she was cleansing me from the inside out.
Although I am still not ready to talk about my experience in full and explain all the mysterious things that were shown to me, the experience was so powerful that I did want to see what ayahuasca was like for other people that had also tried the remedy (because now I see it as a remedy a not really as a drug). So at Voxpluma we decided to talk to two of our friends who had recently come into contact with the remedy and were willing to share testimonials of their own experience. Our in-house illustrator MONKC decided to create for us some beautiful illustrations that capture these intimate testimonials of self-discovery.
ANA’s STORY
I went to the bathroom thinking I was going to puke, guided by another person at the ceremony who silently understood what I needed. I saw myself in the reflection of the toilet bowl and just had this overwhelming feeling of motherly love for the girl staring back at me. Some difficult truths about my past started coming to the surface — how I had bullied my sister, how my Dad had been depressed, that I seemed externally healthy but was still practicing forms of self-hatred like overexercising and overworking.
I started crying, and visions started coming to me — I could see the never-ending universe and asked myself, “Who am I to doubt that there’s a higher consciousness?” As just a speck of dust in an infinite reality, who was I to doubt that we’re alone?
At that point, I started having visions of experiencing my own birth and death in a never-ending cycle. Every time I experienced my death I felt a lot of overwhelming emotional pain. The cycle finally broke and I had a vision of the Earth, covered in trees, oceans and mountains but with a woman’s eye. i understood at that moment that nature is female. I could sense the Earth breathing, and feel my own breathing in unison with hers.
In general this vision allowed me to shed some of my old beliefs that cultivated my self-hatred, to let go of current forms of ego that needed to go. The experience left me with the realization that I need to help women with food recovery, which is what I’m doing with my life now.
BON’s STORY
In my vision I was standing on solid ground when the Earth started to crack beneath me. A fissure started forming and I watched as the world started getting swallowed into the chasm below. I could see cityscapes crumbling, as if the Western world itself was disappearing. I braced myself on the edge along with others so we wouldn’t fall in.
I felt like I was watching western consumerism fall apart in a purging process for the earth. It reminded me that this self-harming western reality isn’t sustainable , that the earth is being manipulated by violent energies that are more interested in consumption than contributing to our interconnectedness. I asked myself why I was put on planet earth. As I continued to stop people from falling over the edge, I understood that it was to help people transition to a place where we could all start rebuilding, to live in harmony with the earth and everything on it.
