3rd Ayahuasca Ceremony (2020) – Part 1

The events of 10.3.2020:

It was a day ceremony, the only day ceremony amongst the 3 ceremonies at our retreat. We were to start early in the morning. It was the day of Holi (Indian festival where we play with flowers, colours and water with family and friends). We were mostly assembled and seated in our spots in the maloca by 7.30am.

Maestro spoke to us briefly before he began the ceremony. He mentioned that there would be minimal music played by him, it will be mostly silent with just ambient sound from the outdoors, there would be a flower bath for each of us at some point in the ceremony (Brother T would come over to where each of us was seated and pour marigold petals on us), and most importantly VERY LITTLE MEDICINE WOULD BE SERVED. Maestro encouraged us to simply sit in silence, closed eyes, breathe deep and observe what transpires.

Brother T had mentioned earlier that night-time ceremonies are water-based (moon-based) ceremonies, meaning you cleanse whereas a day ceremony is meant to be the one where you soak in energies from the Sun, they are supposedly the most intense. And boy, was that CORRECT!

We began by Maestro giving us all some ha-peh (spelt Rapéh).

It is basically a ground-up shamanic snuff. It contains Nicotina Rustica, a type of tobacco also known as mapacho. It’s different from the tobacco used in cigarettes (which is apparently Nicotina Tabacum).

It also contains other medicinal and sacred plants, including parts from tree bark, leaves, seeds, and various plants. Once collected, the components are pulverised with a pestle, strained through a mesh resulting in a light-coloured powder. Rapé (Ha-peh) is administered through the nose. You don’t snort or inhale it on your own. The Curandero forcefully blows it into one’e nostrils (one by one), using a V-shaped bamboo or bone pipe (aka tepi pipe).

Both nostrils get Rapé to promote balance between the two hemispheres of the brain. It awakens the pineal gland too. Some people experience tears rolling down each cheek, sneezing or vomiting and this is normal as one of the purposes of rapé is to cleanse the mind and body. The mind becomes quieter, negativity clears out, emotional tensions tend to release, leaving people feel more grounded during the experience.

So, we started with a quick Rapé (ha-peh) session before we were all given the medicine eventually.

One by one, we kneeled down in front of Maestro to take our first cups of the Ayahuasca brew. I didn’t know what to expect as it was my first-ever day ceremony – it felt so naked and vulnerable to be out there with everyone in broad daylight, unlike the comforting darkness of night ceremonies.

After feeling so loved and healed by Mamma in the second ceremony, I didn’t really know what to ask for or “intend” for this ceremony. But I wanted her to show me THE WAY FORWARD. I wanted her to tell me/ show me my life purpose, what should I do with my life now? What should I do in terms of creativity? How should I live? What shouldn’t I do?

I didn’t realise it at the time, but the previous ceremony had made me more greedy, more wanting – I WANTED MORE.

AND THIS IS WHY I GOT TOTALLY FUCKED THIS DAY!

Please read on…

When the medicine first started taking effect, it was very bright out. I kept my eyes closed and began listening to Maestro’s Icaros. Mamma began building sunlight-coloured monuments/ temples around me. It felt like I was in some desert and I was seated where typically a central statue would, in a temple, and lines made up of sunlight kept pulsing outwards around me, forming moving-shifting walls and arches. Beautiful expanding curved lines, moving to Maestro’s music.

I was gleeful. I sat and swayed in place like a very happy houseplant.

I yawned a lot. A lot! I smiled tons. The music was glorious.

When I opened my eyes – nothing.

People seated near me were having rather tough times – immediate neighbour was howling wildly, such unspeakable pain in his sobs; the woman next to him – retching uncontrollably, mostly dry-heaving.

Brother T & Maestro went to their aid one by one.

The lovely sweet lady to my left was having a devastating time too. She was unable to even hold her head up or sit straight. She needed and got the help she asked for. After the ceremony was over, she told me all about her experience and it was scary!

Apparently, she had felt as though, at first, her body was peeling off layer by layer, and then, her soul was peeling off too. She was in intense spiritual pain. She saw her soul emaciated and dried up in a corner of her ribcage, begging for nirvana, an escape, a mukti.

Maestro worked on her energy body at the time and later told her that she need never come back to Ayahuasca again. She doesn’t need it, she should just continue her simple meditation practice.

She was also later told, by the Mother, that she has only a couple of human incarnations left on this earth, after which she graduates this pane of existence. Then she will be free of this game forever. Intense stuff!

I closed by eyes again, to enjoy the music and the sunlit monuments around me, in my desert of glee.

After some time, I got up and stood just outside the maloca. I stared at the Sun for some time – I don’t understand how I could do that. There’s a background to this – I have a case of the ‘dry eyes’, and I have had weak eyesight and weak eye muscles since the age of 5. I have worn either glasses or lenses for over 30 years. Due to having dry eyes I have also suffered from a rather high degree of photo-sensitivity. That means that I can’t bear to look at any sort of light, it literally hurts my eyes. Glares hurt. Looking directly at any light, sunlight – it all hurts me. I have always slept in total darkness, not letting light in lest it disturb my sleep. I have always avoided sunshine as much as possible. One of the drastic differences my ex-husband and I had to deal with – he was a sunny-day guy and I was a cloudy-day queen, hehe.

So, I was staring at the Sun. I was basking in it. In that moment, when I was in the ceremony, looking at the sun and soaking in the sunshine, I wasn’t even aware of the dry eyes and the background stories. I was simply a different person who apparently liked looking at the Sun.

I literally felt sun-thirsty. I was soaking the Sun through my skin, I was angling and rubbing my exposed arms and legs to optimally get as much sun as possible! I was swaying in place, with my eyes closed, feeling like a plant. The warmth from the Sun felt so healing – it felt absolutely necessary to sit there.

After some time of sitting like that, I felt a voice saying “You are burning your skin” but I couldn’t move, I didn’t want to! I also remember perceiving the Sun being much closer to me than it is on an average day.

This is how I, the Vampire, became a sun-loving plant that day.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw this glorious shiny little beetle-type bug sitting on my left foot. He/ It / She looked like it was observing/ investigating my skin/ leg. I just let it be and watched it intently for what felt like hours (it was possible seconds).

I was stunned at the beauty of this little bug – so shiny, blue-black, absolutely breathtaking in detail. After some time it flew off of me and sat on the ground next to me. It seemed as though the bug was considering me. Considering my presence, possibly pleasantly surprised by my demeanour which was very calm and warm towards it. I made no move to try to shoo it away, or to squash it. It has to be said here, with great emphasis, that my instinct/ reflex before this day was to try to kill any and all insects that would be in my personal space. So, this – Me sitting there, hanging out with this insect – was a completely new event. Unprecedented. And I think, that even the bug noticed it. Hehe.

After hanging out with me for a while, the gloriously shiny bug flew off and away. I still do not know what the bug is called (Google tells me it could be a Mud Dauber Beetle or some such), but it was there for a reason – maybe it thought I was a plant? Maybe it came to tell me something? God knows.

(More about this bug later)

From what I remember next, after sitting there under the blazing sun for some more time, I got up, stretched my body in a few ways and headed back to the maloca and on to my mattress. I covered myself with the blanket, there was a chill in the air, and closed my eyes. HC, the curandero, started playing glorious music once again and it was profoundly reverberating inside the chambers, joints, nooks, crannies, corners of my body and being.

I was moved to open my eyes and when I did, I saw Brother T going around the circle to each one of us and showering each with a bucket full of marigold & rose flowers. The sight made me smile with deep glee. I waited for my turn like a little child jumping out of her seat, so excited about what’s to come. Soon, Brother T came over to where I was and poured the divinely fragrant flower petals on me, it felt so gentle, so soft and loving. And the smells were absolutely brand new (I have smelt roses and marigolds before, but this was different – more dimensional, layered, intense, inexplicable).

While he was pouring the petals on me (like a waterfall from above my head), I closed my eyes and was grinning with absolute joy. He smiled too. He then asked me to take a handful of petals and sit with them enveloped in my palms. I did that, closed my eyes and continued swaying to the delicious music Maestro was making. I had my hands joined together, resting in my lap.

What happened next blew my mind, as it still does when I recall it.

I was innocently swaying to the music, eyes closed, petals in between palms, when suddenly I noticed that there was a pulsating “boop boop boop” emanating from somewhere. I extracted my left hand from my lap, while still holding the petals with the right hand (in a fist), and put it on my heart to check whether I was hearing/ sensing my own heartbeat (boop boop boop) – that wasn’t the case.

The location of the pulsating boop-boop-boop seemed clearer than before – it was coming from my right hand. It wasn’t just a sensation that I felt, I saw it too. And that isn’t really accurate. But I saw it, with my closed eyes (like concentrically circular waves expanding outward from my right hand).

It was emanating from the petals. The petals were giving off a heartbeat, a drumbeat, a boop boop boop, continuously. When this clarity arose, when I understood where the boop boop boop was coming from, I said “Of Course!”.

Then I just felt it, with my whole awareness, my whole body, my skin, my ears, my closed eyes. The flower petals were alive, even though seemingly broken away from the mother plants/ stems – they were bloody alive. They were breathing, living, emanating energy, there – sitting in my right palm.

I was blown away. I still vividly remember the feeling, the sensation, the surprise, the wonderment, the undeniable truth, the total acceptance. Wow.

I was so moved by this – not only in the moment in the ceremony, but also every time I thought, wrote or spoke about it later – that I painted it on canvas!

I soon lost focus of this incredible discovery of the flowers’ living pulse and energy, and sank into a deeper and deeper frustration about the fact that “Mamma wasn’t talking to me at all today!!“. I began to feel more and more dejected at the lack of “anything happening” in the ceremony (How greedy & short-sighted of me and my Ego self!).

I started to cry, then pretty soon I was sobbing. With eyes closed, tears streaming down my cheeks, I felt so sorry for myself. I felt so deeply alone and abandoned. Why wouldn’t Mamma Aya talk to me today? Why wasn’t she telling me anything? Why wasn’t I being given any insights, visions, lessons, love? Why wasn’t she showing me my life’s purpose? Why wasn’t she telling me what I was supposed to do with my life? Et Cetera.

In hindsight, I was being so unreasonable and shallow. She had only been showing me love through the sunrays, the flowers, the bug, the feeling of being a plant, the music, Brother T and his flower shower. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.

In that series of moments, sitting there, I felt like I was dissolving into a deep dark puddle of misery, self-pity, all my worst feelings of frustration, abandonment, being neglected or overlooked surfaced like towering shadows threatening to swallow mw whole. And this flip from being gleeful and miserable was so instantaneous – that itself was pretty breathtaking. The power of that negativity knocked my socks off.

I got Brother T’s attention, asked him if I could take that second cup. He had a look of “Sure, at your own peril”, as if he knew something that I didn’t (it is advised to take as little medicine as possible in the day ceremony or basically to stoically avoid over-indulging in medicine since the energies are already so intense from the Sun). So, I, literally at my own peril, asked Maestro for my second cup – same routine as before – kneel respectfully, take the served cup, state your intent in your mind, drink up, go sit in your spot and wait.

Wait I did.

NOTHING.

Nothing was “happening” – I got more and more frustrated.

I must state here that the second cup was even half of the first cup served that day, and the first cup was barely half the night ceremony dose. So, as the greedy monster that I had been transforming into in that ceremony, I was frustrated even at the dose/ amount of medicine being served – holding ridiculous notions of quantity being proportional to healing/ learning.

I sat in my place, absolutely divinely miserable, slouched up against the wall behind me, arms by my sides, eyes closed, tears streaming down my soaking wet cheeks, about to break down into full blown sobs – when suddenly my eyes opened to spot Maestro doing some sort of ritual with each of us, going down the circle.

He soon reached where I was sat. He asked me to take my arms out from under the blanket and open the palms, joining them together, in order to receive an offering. I stared at him in agony, with tear-heavy eyes and a tear-soaked face, begging him silently to help me. He looked at me, as if he could see something but didn’t need to intervene. It felt like “he was refusing to help me” in that moment. That added to the tornado of frustrations building up inside me.

He performed a ritual, around me, with some sort of alcohol-like liquid, also carrying & playing a shakapa or chhakapa (I am not sure of the correct spelling, but it’s a dried-leaf instrument and makes a subtle yet glorious “chh-chh chh-chh” sound)

He put some of the alcohol/ spirit type liquid in my palms, performed a ritual and asked me smell my palms. In his face I could sense that he was well-aware of my misery and confusion, like he could not only sense but SEE what was happening in my body-mind-soul-energy-aura . Yet he moved on.

I was “all alone”. “No one cared about me”.

(I wonder what he sees when he looks at us in a ceremony – they say that curanderos can see colours and vapor-like energies around students/ participants during ceremony, this helps them decide who to provide help to, to fathom who is feeling what kind of emotion, what stage of their process they are etc.)

Maestro had moved on to the person sitting to my left. She was having immense trouble – so much so that it was evident in her moans and groans, she was barely able to sit up. I had been hearing Brother T say to her multiple times that morning “sit up sister, try to sit up, don’t lie down, you need to try to sit up“.

She was very obviously having the struggle of her life in that day ceremony. The man to my right, now a friend, had been breathlessly sobbing throughout the ceremony. The Maestro & Brother T assisted him and calmed him down, doing some energy work on him. His sobs grew quieter, but they didn’t stop.

The woman to his right had been dry-heaving throughout. She sounded like she was desperate to vomit, but just wasn’t able to. There was such pain in the sounds her body was making. Maestro had assisted her too.

Now when I write about it, I can see that the ceremony was pretty intense for a lot of people, not just me.

The fact that I wasn’t expressing my pain loud enough, yet dying quietly in my spot without asking for and receiving any guidance/ help from Maestro further ignited my childhood traumas of always feeling like no one cares how I feel, no one loves me, I don’t matter, I have never mattered, I am a sorry piece of flesh, doomed to be unloved, unattended, lost.

Closing my eyes to the “injustice” of not being helped/ cared for, I grew more and more tantrum-y and desperate and clingy in my demands of Mamma Aya. I, with more force than before, began begging Her to show me something, a vision or insight, a direction, ANYTHING! But what did I get? Loss of identity. With each passing second, I was more and more lost. I didn’t know language, I didn’t know my name, I didn’t know I had a body, I didn’t know where I was, who I was, why I was there.

For a long frustrating while it seemed that I was “namelessly” being spun around within a Rolodex of unknown stories, disjointed visions, behind stranger’s eyes. I felt like I was different people (also without names and clear identities) in quick succession, there wasn’t a coherent learning, it was just total confusion, chaos and listlessness.

Was she once again (like She briefly did in the first ceremony), in a more intense way, telling me to FORGET MY SELF/ IDENTITY/ STORY?

After the senseless barrage of random visions (none of which I remember today – I only recall the utter confusion they caused in me), I was shown a dilapidated structure resembling the college hostel where I completed my post-graduation. I was in the scene. Finally, something that made sense.

The structure/ buildings seemed half-constructed or half-demolished. There were few people walking or lying around, none taking notice of my presence (reinforcing my invisibility and sob-story). She was there too. Its not like there was a face that I could see, she was definitely a presence, a body, but I can’t describe today any discernible features of that body. I remember I was following her around like a lost puppy, feeling needy, wanting her to talk to me, but she just wouldn’t!! She kept dodging me.

Suddenly we were on a tin-roof of one of the hostel buildings, and I was sitting next to Her, yearning for a conversation. I longingly shared with her “You know Mamma, I feel quite lonely and crave male company and presence at times” – THIS WAS LITERALLY THE FIRST TIME, SINCE MY SEPARATION FROM MY EX-HUSBAND, THAT I HAD ARTICULATED THIS THOUGHT/ FEELING OUT LOUD (even though it was behind closed eyes and in the privacy of my own mind). I remember I was mid-way that sentence and She just walked off. By each passing second, my feeling of frustration and “unworthiness” KEPT GROWING OUT OF BOUNDS.

The burden was so heavy – loneliness, aimlessness, neglect – it was overwhelming, and it only kept growing.

I felt like I would burst into screams so I opened my eyes and decided to walk around. I looked around and spotted Brother T, walked up to him and complained to him “She just won’t talk to me today!“. He smiled and said knowingly, “She was showering you with love a while ago, you were grinning from ear to ear for so long earlier. She is right there with you.”

I felt angry at him. I didn’t agree. I couldn’t. The inner monster loomed too large. I was filled with rage, disappointment, tantrum energy.

After all, I was entitled to healing! Give me HEALING, GIVE ME LOVE, GIVE ME INSIGHTS, GIVE ME GIVE ME GIVE ME, ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

Oooof!

It only got worse from here on…

(continued in next post)