I was left dissatisfied and frustrated with my first Ayahuasca ceremony, because I felt that I did not receive any insights, healings from Pachamama. The morning after the 1st ceremony, the curandero HC and Brother T called for a sharing circle. We were urged to gather around in a circle in the maloca, huddled close-ish, speaking in turns about the highlights of our ceremonial experiences the previous night. Only the highlights were encouraged, as there were so many of us and also the idea was to learn from, find hope or comfort in, be inspired by each other’s insights.
Upon hearing the profound visions and experiences some of the others had had, I felt like a neglected stepchild. The pity-party commenced, in full swing. The ‘victim’ within came alive.
Try as I might, I could not stop feeling frustrated. It sort of reinforced my default feelings of ‘this is too good to be true’, ‘I am unloved and unloveable’, ‘I do not deserve amazing things such as healings’ etc.
This was quite hard to deal with, especially as I watched others look hopeful, beaming, brimming with love, insights, epiphanies post the first ceremony. One guy among us had felt so satisfied with his one ceremony that he didn’t feel the need for any more. He just packed up and promptly left for home!!! WTF!!!
My Ego went in over-drive, I felt a bit of panic, thinking – one ceremony down, only 2 more to go, will I even receive any attention/ resolution from the Grandmother energy?!? I was so desperate. Oof!
Naturally, I found myself in an awful mood the whole day, feeling cheated or short-changed. People and their harmless comments’ conversations grated on my nerves that day. It was challenging to feel this way, knowing that I was at a crucial pivotal point in my life a that moment – in the divine presence of Ayahuasca, engaging with this sacred energy – and still feeling like an absolute ass, appearing sour, jaded, cynical. I kept judging my own thoughts and felt like a petulant child, unable to fit in with the others. The inner dialogue was brutal.
Was this purely my Ego, torturing me? Was it Ayahuasca playing with me? Testing me, wringing me in this horrible way? I couldn’t be sure. Somehow – somehow, I got through that night with this inner cacophony and self-loathing chaos. A Victim’s grand gala.
After tossing and turning the whole night, I didn’t catch much rest, yet woke up feeling different than the previous day. I felt lighter, not hopeless, more relaxed. I was somehow ready to smile and feel grateful this day, the day of the second night ceremony. Checking back with my journal entry from that day, I can see that I have written two whole pages about what I was grateful for. I was practicing Gratitude that morning. Good Girl!
Around noon, we learnt that the second ceremony (Full moon) would begin earlier than the previous one so as to finish at a decent hour (unlike 3 am the last time). We were to begin around 6pm.
After a small simple meal for lunch with everyone, I headed over to the maloca, sat in the same place I had in the first ceremony, lay down for some time, aimlessly looking here and there. A few others were resting or chatting quietly as well. I closed my eyes and spontaneously started guiding myself through a meditation, self-designed. I imagined that I was opening a door, and as that door opened, there was another door ahead of it, and I reached out to open that door, then there was another door, and so on – I kept opening one door after another, and kept walking through them all. Without any sense of frustration or impatience, without any need to reach somewhere or see the end result/ outcome.
The backdrop to these doors was dimply lit outer space. I do not know where this all came from, I had never experienced such a meditation in my journey of spirituality-seeking. I followed this meditation for enough time that I fell asleep. Something had shifted.
I woke up after 40 minutes or so. I felt very relaxed, calm, rested and very open-hearted. So grateful. Beaming. This change was much needed and also so significant to me because I had been so damn nervous before the first ceremony. Another big realisation happened when I suddenly thought of my primary ask/ priority #1 intention – “healing my mother wound and inner child”. I tried to dwell on it, expecting a rush of emotion and feelings of desperation once again, but I SIMPLY COULDN’T!! Nothing! No familiar Drama. Wow. What happened?
I tried thinking of another intention for the night ceremony – words that came up organically were on the lines of ‘creative potential’, ‘unlock creativity’ etc. I let that be. I assumed whatever I have thought of and felt has been noted and logged into the energetic framework of Ayahuasca and I need not dwell on it further.
Felt so centered and un-anxious. Wow!
I also wrote in my journal – ‘I think I am not understanding that the first ceremony was not un-impactful (sorry for the double negative) for me, something has shifted, some work seems to have happened on my psyche, it may not be obvious but some transmutations and transformations are occurring’. Amen.
Around 6.30pm the ceremony started. It was about to get dark out. The Moon was bright and shiny – stunning. When the ceremony began, I joined my hands together before the curandero, and took my first serving of the night. I couldn’t help but sheepishly remark to Brother T, how tasty the thick brew tasted. Silly Me! ‘Shut Up Anjuri!’, I thought as I walked back to my mattress. The small bucket and water bottle were neatly kept next to each mattress, in anticipation of the purge. I settled down, covering myself with my blanket, mentally telling myself to “submit, surrender”, “if not now, then when?”.
Soon, I began feeling feverish and nauseous. Behing my closed eyes, I felt myself sitting underneath high-ceilinged patterned cave-like building/ structures. They felt ancient. The colours, tiles, designs on the walls kept changing over this very slick time-lapse, while I stayed planted in one corner of the structure, emaciated, unable to move, feeling sick. I sensed that there was some activity around me, I wasn’t alone there, I just couldn’t observe it in detail. It was highly uneasy being there. I reached for my bucket expecting to puke any moment. I didn’t.
I was feeling so unwell, nauseous, thinking to myself “Anjuri! Why have you done this to yourself, a second time around!? What were you thinking? Do you have no fear? Why did you volunteer for this experiment?” I was really cursing myself, that’s HOW PHYSICALLY UNWELL I felt.
Suddenly, it appeared (behind closed eyes) that I was lying down, feeling unwell, looking up at the really high ceiling of a cave, mud-coloured, light green-brown. There were towering shadows projected on the cave walls. I could only see the shadows, not the creatures casting those shadows. I could only guess at their features by looking at the outlines and silhouettes – they seemed to be really tall with some sort of antlers/ horns on their heads. There were 2 of them, they were looking down on me with a slightly detached interest. Or maybe concern. Not sure.
I felt scared of them initially. What were they going to do to me? Are they going to hurt me? Intimidate me? Kill me? But then it felt like they were examining me, moving around me. I could still only see their shadows on the cave walls. The shadow-limbs were moving, as if doing something to me, my body. Some type of clinical intervention, a surgery perhaps, while I was fully lucid/ awake in that alternate world. I didn’t feel anything much, I was just watching the shadows, no longer scared, lying still.
My intuition, accumulated experience and knowledge leads me to believe that the nausea that I had felt was possibly stemming from my lower chakras being blocked/ imbalanced. And the helpful shadows were merely fixing the energy flow and imbalance in my body, for me to be able to experience Mother Ayahuasca in the way that I was about to in the hours to follow.
By the time the shadows had stopped tinkering with my energy body, the feverish feeling completely dissipated. Phew. I began feeling neutral. Then, mildly ecstatic. Also, in that moment I also understood that I would not be vomiting at all that night, the bucket was happily set aside.
Suddenly the cave was gone. Poof.
I was now sitting up, underground (it was fully dark, barring a few twinkly things), digging deeper and deeper into the earth, with a smile on my face, longing to be reunited with the “angels/ gods” who “live deep under the ground”. I felt myself, my physical body, Anjuri’s actual arms trying to dig into the earth – I actually had to open my eyes to check whether I was really using my physical arms to dig into the floor of the maloca like an idiot (LOL!). Well I wasn’t. But my body had become arranged in a weird way, to say the least. I was sitting on the mattress, yes, but I was folded over forward, my forehead was digging into the mattress, as if trying to go inside the earth, and my legs were bent at the knees, folded under me. I was in a strange rendition of the fetal position. I genuinely, in that moment, longed to be united with the “angels and gods who live deep under the earth”. I felt such deep love and devotion to those beings, whoever they may be (I never found out).
The scene shifted again as I sat back up and rested my back against a rock structure behind my mattress. I was now seated within a glorious glass-wall, crystalline structure, with mosaic tiles of glass and crystal and mirrors. Sunlight and moonlight kept surrounding me in a time-lapse manner. The colours and light kept changing around me. I was comfortable being there, sitting in my corner against a glass wall. Maestro began singing ecstatically. I began humming along, like a backup singer. By now some Icaros sounded familiar. I had already fallen in love with a couple songs, even though I didn’t consciously know the meaning and lyrics. But I knew, at least, that the songs were loving calls, requests, invitations to the Ayahuasca energy, to our ancestors, to guide and protect us, handhold and heal.
I had no sense of how much time had passed, I opened my eyes and felt completely lucid. If I may use this limiting word that fails to capture what I mean to say here – but I felt ‘sober’, without any substance guiding me or urging me to keep my eyes closed. So, I decided to get up from my spot and walk around quietly, curiously, looking at things around with a new pair of eyes. We had been told by Brother T that it was okay to walk around, we just had to be careful because the terrain was very rough around us, uneven, also it was completely dark except for the moonlight. We had to stay close and safe, take care of ourselves.
I stepped just outside the maloca and stared up at the moon. My eyesight has always been weak (I have had to wear glasses with cylindrical and spherical powers since I was about 5 years of age). I am saying this here because what happened next was nothing short of ‘miraculous’ or ‘unreal’ given the context of my weak eyesight.
As a woman, generally in absolute mad love with the Moon on any given average day (I even taught my nieces to howl at the moon), I pause almost every night and look up at the Moon, without fail. It makes me very happy, generally. I feel a great bond with the Moon. And a sense of deep awe that we can see a celestial body floating around us, from where we are! Wow.
So, anyway, it was only natural for me to look up to admire the beauty of a Full Moon that night. I did. And as I did, I noticed that I was able to see all the fine details of the moon’s surface. I wasn’t wearing my glasses! They were neatly resting in their case in my bag, next to my mattress.
I saw the moon’s face, so clear, the craters, the greys, the whites. Wow. I also began noticing waves of very dim white light, in concentric circles, wafting outwards from the Moon. What!!!
I stood under the Moon for some time, looking up, taking it all in, ‘charging myself with its light’, soaking it all in. I was actually ‘eating’ the moon’s energy, breathing the moon’s energy through my mouth, thinking to myself “I should be doing this every night”. It was divine. I got the sense that it was shining JUST for ME. It was reassuring me, I was loved, I was seen, I was understood. That’s how I felt standing there. I felt very child-like about my body suddenly. I began stretching in all directions, bending down, touching my toes, swaying a bit, stretching up to the moon, bending backwards. It was so nice like “weeeeeeeeeeee”, “woooooaaaahhhhhhh”, “yaaaayyyyyyyyyy”. I was grinning from ear to ear.
I proceeded to look around at the trees, potted plants all around the outside of the maloca, bathed in moonlight and I could see every detail with my naked un-spectacled eyes. In fact, this is so weird and makes no sense at all even in hindsight, or rather I don’t know what to make of this but I when I looked at a plant, very common in India, with long blades of green for leaves, I felt like the plant was a soldier pointing its arrows/ swords in my direction, poised for a fight. WHAT!? It was weird, to say the least and it scared me enough that I decided to head back to my mattress, hehe.
On my way back to the maloca, I was watching people going to and from the restrooms, it was quite entertaining. They all kept changing shapes, size, matter of which they are made, some of them started dancing like crazy to Maestro’s music. I came across Brother T (this day I was determined to take a second serving if I felt the need to) and asked him “when can I have my 2nd cup?”. He stifled a laugh and whispered “Its too soon. we still have 4 more hours of the ceremony to go”. I was stunned. What is the deal with the passage of time during these ceremonies!? In the first ceremony, what felt like minutes was actually the entire ceremony’s duration. And in this second ceremony, what had felt like hours had apparently been a very short period of time.
I sat back down, in place and watched a couple of people dancing to the icaros. It was absolutely spell-binding, especially one girl in particular – this tall young 21 year old person, JJ, gracefully moving her arms and legs around, her arms extending to the roof, so fluid, sometimes vapor-like, snake-like, when she curved her body up and down, it seemed she would almost disappear into thin air, contorting, stretching, she was dancing with the gods. She was dancing with her entire soul, it seemed. Soon, more and more people joined her – until Brother T finally put a stop to it. Later, I understood it this way, we were supposed to quietly sit and observe what happens behind closed eyes. Yes, the music was ecstatic, but not the main project. Anyway, I never felt the urge to move from my place. I was content watching them dance and once they stopped, I closed my eyes and waited. Within minutes, the medicine started getting reawakened within my body, almost like a serpent rising up to Maestro’s singing. It was rising up and up and up until I started seeing faint geometric patterns behind closed eyes again. I opened my eyes to see everyone intensely shapeshifting again (like in the first ceremony), the barren leafless trees surrounding the maloca were glowing, going “boop boop boop” with a blue-white-ish light. Boop Boop Boop. It was amazing. When we exchanged notes the next day, a lot of us saw the same thing happening – boop boop boop. Fascinating. If it is all hallucination (like many naysayers claim, and I hate that word ‘hallucination’, because it typically implies that your brain making it all up, what you are seeing is not there, not ‘real’ – well after what I have experienced I say fuck that!), then how did we see the same thing?! Something to mull over.
I sensed that I was being guided from within to take that second serving. I felt so calm, relaxed and confident about this choice. It felt natural. I wasn’t scared of ‘overdosing’ because the Aya energy herself was guiding me to the second cup, I wasn’t being greedy this time. It was a beautiful feeling of “flow”.
I waited for the Maestro to finish the icaro he was singing, walked up to him, hoping to receive a second cup. My new mattress neighbour (the person who had occupied the mattress to my right the previous ceremony had already gone back home as he felt no need to do more ceremonies!) was ahead of me, kneeling down and receiving his second cup. I took mine next. I couldn’t help but whisper to Maestro “thank you for being here for us”. After all, he had travelled with his wife and young child all the way from Peru.
I settled back in place on my mattress, sitting straight up, bucket and water bottle confidently set aside. I knew I wouldn’t be needing either this night as well. There would be other ways of purging for me – yawns, tears, giggles, smiles.
(second ceremony, part 2 – continued in next post)
ArtPeace By Anjuri 
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