Life after leaving the ceremonial space, returning to the sacred mundane human life:
Its been close to 4 years since I returned home post my first set of Ayahuasca ceremonies, and even though I have well-documented journals to dip my toes into from that time, Today is still a long way away from then. In a way I am glad that I am writing about all that has passed Now, because now I have better perspective and distance from everything. It will be more objective, scientific and not exaggerated or dramatized, this is my intent.
In this post, and maybe another, I will do my best to narrate how my life took shape after meeting the Mother Energy in person, in what form and shape lessons emerged and were applied or ignored in my life template by me. I will not sugarcoat, not weave a happy-go-lucky dream-ending of any sort. I will stay as close to my actual lived experience as I possibly can, sticking to the big things as much as I can, because I want You, the reader, to get a good idea of all the magic and mundanity that can occur post ceremonies. What to expect, what not to fear, what not to do, how to handle yourself, how to just observe and flow.
I drove back with a few new Tribe members from the venue (of the Ayahuasca retreat) and reached my Bombay home where I lived by myself (back then) after we finished the day ceremony (3rd and final ceremony of the retreat). I was home by midnight. Having decided to undergo a Water-Fast (on Brother T’s advice) – ingesting nothing but drinking water for 3 whole days!
I did it, I did it. I did it! I accomplished this gigantic feat – not eating anything for 72 hours. Do you know how long an hour is when you are hungry? How long 5 hours are?
Fuck. I do.
Anyway, so I was on an empty stomach for 3 whole days. Nothing but the medicine & drinking water had touched my tongue since the last day of the retreat for a whole 72 hours or more.
The first two days were tough as I felt a weakness in my body, I napped quite a bit (and I ain’t no napper). The second & third day were particularly tough and distorted as I basically consumed a ton of food videos on Insta. I am being frank here because this needs to be shared. Just because I had come away from ingesting Ayahuasca and engaging in sacred ceremony and dieta, didn’t magically mean that I could become someone else overnight. My food dependency and obsessions came to the surface loud and clear within 24 hours of coming back home. Also, I must be kind to myself and categorically state here that this thinking and reflex (of wanting food) doesn’t make me criminal – its only natural to feel your appetite coming back to life. We humans, we eat when we feel hungry & we do feel hunger every few hours. So its cool in hindsight – but back then I was so ashamed of myself, for feeling hunger and wanting to eat yummy spicy things.
I should also recount that WHILE WE WERE ON OUR WAY BACK, three of my aya-mates (fellow participants in the retreat)who I was driving back to Bombay with – at a midway rest stop they bloody ate random regular spicy food hours after the day ceremony! At least I was more restrained than them. I kept telling them “don’t eat this boss” I mean because we had been following the dieta and hence our bodies were cleansed, empty of all spice and salt and oil (for at least 2 weeks for most of us), it would be a great shock for the organs to ingest Indian chaat/ street food suddenly. But no one listened to me. I kept my gullet shut to the food, and felt very holier than thou. Haha!
This next bit is hilarious and ironic – I broke my water fast in a rather ill-advised fashion 72 hours later – I cooked and ate potato-stuffed paranthas (our version of home-cooked bread) !!
To this day I cannot believe that this is how I broke my water fast. What a shock it must have been to my body! Blasphemy. Idiotic. Stupid. So utterly human.
All my food choices from then on – I am rather ashamed of. But I have to be honest. And I feel like whatever I ate and consumed (content) had a direct impact on my psyche, my dream world, needless to say my biology. I have to admit that I pretty much fucked myself up post ceremonies. Terrible idea.
Night after night I had nightmares, involving a lot of loss, death, evils, betrayals. And day upon day I felt totally lost, lonely, unloved, not worthy of good things.
Well, the timing and circumstance also has something to do with how I was feeling. It wasn’t all my doing. On 25th March, the Indian Prime Minister Modi announced that India was going into a self-imposed lockdown in the light of Coronovirus spreading like wildfire. A week before that the beach that I used to flock to every morning had barricades put up at all entryways. I still tried to sneak in and go meet the dogs and sit on the sand for some time but then soon there were police people guarding the beach and discouraging people like me from entering the beach area, encouraging us to stay home.
I was already home. By myself. Alone. With my thoughts. Fuck.
On 27th March I wrote in my journal about feeling a new level of panic, stress and loneliness as if its in the very air I am breathing in. And it was. Apartment buildings have floors upon floors, apartment upon apartment worth of anxiety piling up, nowhere to dissipate. I was told later, as I did experience it myself – I was now feeling it in the air. It WAS IN THE AIR. All around me. I now had a rather polished intuition antenna and was hyper-sensitive post consuming the medicine and having done the hard work of dieta to clean and cleanse my body, even though I was now compulsively filling the body up with so many different not-dieta foods suddenly.
I wish that whoever reads this and whoever sits with the medicine in their life never does what I did post retreat. Please follow the dieta with as much diligence as possible. For your own sake. For the sake of your sanity, your body. Ugh!
I have also journalled about crying incessantly through the days after the retreat. Crying at the drop of a hat. Not understanding why I was crying.
Well I have a fair idea now.
Intense feelings of ‘no one cares about me’, ‘if I were to vanish no one would care or know’ etc. plagued me for days on end. I think I was feeling my own apathy towards myself all along and projecting it onto the Ayahuasca tribe. Well, mostly.
My dreams were so vivid, so much detail, so much happening in them, all of it disconcerting, disturbing. I would wake up abruptly every morning, in a panic or unrest, not remembering any details that I could dissect or journal (most days) about.
Then there are indeed detailed descriptions of what I dreamt of, strange themes, people – a lot of dismemberment, amputation, dead white eyes, parents’ tortured bodies, my naked body being seen by those I did not invite or give consent to, my house being breached or violated by random characters etc. It was all very unsettling.
I experienced sleep paralysis once or twice too. My dying body lay stretched out in an open elevator with faulty lighting, and a hungry zombified friend from my past was trying to bite into my body, I tried to scream but no voice came forth. I woke up in a cold sweat, heart racing. So unsettled. Spooked.
I have journalled about this dream and as a P.S. I say “So much shit is happening. Fine! I am here for it! Bring it On Mumma!” haha, as some sort of pep talk, psyching myself up. Haha.
These events made me reach out to Brother T quite a bit, seeking comfort and answers. And in all his wonderful kindness, he did. He spoke to me, calmed me down, asked me to share this on the tribe chat. I did. And much to my surprise, lots of others chimed in with their intense experiences and also loving wishes for me, messages of support etc. That was nice.
This happened over and over - I kept feeling like my heart was in tatters and shared it with the Tribe a few times and when I did, others wrote in with similar accounts and it made me feel less alone. This taught me how not to totally isolate, to understand that there are certain basic human conditions, a few shared themes of emotions we collectively feel and stories we tell ourselves.
Around the same time I journal about itching to create something, to draw, to write creatively and in that vein I write:
“Only weeks ago,
Mother Aya showed me
the absolute feeling of being loved
Decades of therapy,
in a few sacred hours
Now, I ebb and flow
amidst a lockdown…
Within familiar decorated walls
Forced away from waves & greens
Exploding into salty water
Intermittently, without warning.
Mumma, what if I do not know
how to feel loved?
-Aya’s baby | Process”
I also yearned to draw/ put on paper the wonderful visions I had seen, witnessed, like that glistening blue mud-dauber that had perched on me in the day ceremony, the gathering, the shape-shifting around that time. I wanted to pay tribute to the Mother, to the experience, to share my particular magical experience with others. I thought there was no way for me to do this because it was all so other-worldly and required a particular skillset and knowhow.
I had no clue what was to come.
(continued in part 2)
ArtPeace By Anjuri 
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