Post-ceremony ‘Process’ (2)

One of the big missteps I took back then, right after coming back from my first Ayahuasca retreat was to stay in the mind, not grounding myself to this reality. All I wished to do was to escape. To escape back into the DMT world, with its dark tunnels of snake skin, with its dimly lit neon patterns, I wanted to make coherent contact with the space vessels that had revealed themselves to me. I wanted to feel the third eye/ my forehead tingle.

As I write this down, I am reminded of the then-hysterical sound healer’s warnings – to reiterate, she had said that if I do not keep grounding myself I will “fly off” and suffer.

I did suffer. Quite a bit.

Around the first week of Covid lockdown I had joined The Gateway Program. Please read up about it for details. Bob Monroe, its inventor, called Gateway “a voyage of self-discovery through the gateway of expanded awareness.” Its a guided meditation program which takes one on a crazy unexpected journey within and without. My experience with it was wild, to say the least. The experience itself deserves a dedicated post to itself.

It was a 21 or 30 day program maybe. I was encouraged to join by the 1000 Petals gang. Wonderful suggestion and invitation, but I wish I had had the good sense to also ground myself to this earth, into my body, into my 3D life reality.

Oof. In hindsight, its painful to watch me working only from the top 2 chakras, not giving any love or attention to the lower ones, operating only from the third eye and its visions+dreams, not really feeling my body or honouring it but wanting to escaping it. Bad idea!

The Gateway Program brought me unprecedented sensory highs, new meditation “achievements”, I felt absolutely mind-bending things. Day after day, I followed the program that comprised of 6 waves, with accompanying literature and guided meditation audio files and shared my experience with the group I was a part of with 1000 Petals.

Soon, big electronics in my house started failing. YES. My refrigerator, my mobile phone, my big TV – one by one they all failed. Crashed. When I shared this (via my iPad or laptop) with the group guide, he said this sort of thing happens often if you are practicing high frequency/ vibrational stuff in your space – technology starts to fail around you. I don’t understand the science behind it categorically, but I do get the emotional logic to it.

Imagine this – single woman, alone in nationwide quarantine in her Bombay apartment, without a mobile phone & a broken fridge. It was crazy the panic I felt at first. The lockdown lasted 3 months or so, I was without a working cellphone the entire time. Thankfully the landline that used to be required to be installed for broadband installation was there. I was transported to the good old days of landline calling. So weird it was.

I started making calls to my friends and family one by one – to inform them of my situation about the crashed mobile phone – and most of them screened my calls at first (as it was an unknown landline number). My parents picked up of course and were concerned for me seeing as I was by myself during an unprecedented unpredictable historical nationwide, heck worldwide event.

The lockdown feels like a custom-designed isolation “process” for those of us who finished their ayahausca retreats just days before the lockdown was announced. What a crazy thing! Do you get it?

Through the lockdown (March 25-June 22, 2020) I suffered intense nightmares, the worst feelings of self pity, loneliness, emotional isolation and the feeling of being invisible – no one cares for me, if i were to vanish or die in this apartment no one would know or care. Why do I initiate all the FaceTime checks with loved ones, friends, long-lost contacts from college and corporate work-life days? No one seemed to care whether Anjuri existed except for my parents of course. Good on them.

Everyone was too busy with their own insanities – the lockdown chores, limitations, impositions. But it felt like apathy and loneliness to poor old me. Hehe.

I relegate most of this way of feeling to what I was putting in my body as food. I was not following any protocol conducive to a good post-ceremony process, and I suffered for it. Please keep your bodies clean and treat them sacredly for as long as is possible for you after ingesting the medicine. I say this from tortured experience (self-inflicted torture).

Here, I have to also cut myself some slack because it was just an unprecedented time/ sequence of events. All playbooks had been thrown out the window. Never before had I ingested a plant medicine of such serious import. Never before had I had to isolate, not by choice, due to a global pandemic. All shit was breaking loose. It was a crazy new world.

Another crazy specific piece of the process shaped up like this for me – I kept having dreams of my father dying – different ways each dream. I would wake up howling in the middle of the night. Most nights I would come awake abruptly, crying, sobbing – feeling as if Papa had really died. It would take a few minutes for me to realise that it had only been a Dream. So elaborate, felt so real. As real as the skin on my body.

Upon realising it had been a dream, I would become hysterical, laughing maniacally. I became scared of my own self in those wee hours of night, in that dark room I was in, slivers of street light wafting in through my not-so-dark curtains. I found myself yelling at Her, “why are you doing this to me!? Do you hate me so much!?” “Why should I have to see my father die in so many different ways? Don’t you love me but at all!?”

Oof it was torture. I would fight with Her as if She was there in my room, in physical form. I would shout at Her, abusing her, calling Her names, fuck this, fuck that, fuck you.

I sound crazy, don’t I? Not really. It felt very real, it felt very grave. Each time after I would wake up from such a nightmare (of which there were many and regular), I would wind up in the bathroom, freshening up after the storm in me had quieted down, heart still racing, mind still reeling. I would try hard to articulate the “insight” I was supposed to have gained about my worst fearful belief. I don’t know where this understanding came from, but based on what I had been experiencing (and the world at large had been too re: Covid lockdown) I assumed that I am being shown my worst fears with nowhere to hide really.

I would think my worst fear is “my father dying and me not being there to say goodbye.” My heart would still go on racing. It would stay restless through the next day. This cycle continued for many days. I had become afraid of falling asleep.

One such night, when I had the last nightmare of this series (of my father dying abruptly) I went through the whole process/ cycle – waking up howling, actually believing he died suddenly without my knowledge or presence, soon realising that it had been only a dream, cursing Her out, shouting at Her, becoming quieter after I had shouted and vented, heading to the bathroom to freshen up, when while still sitting on the pot to pee, I tried to articulate an “insight” yet again so that I can stop these nightmares from recurring. My logic was this – as soon as I am able to articulate and ‘face’ the reason I am being shown these nightmares, they would stop – because She needs me to know myself better, my demons better so that I can wilfully face them, not hide from them. Face the Shadow and whatnot. (I was so angry at Her and Myself, at having signed up for this crazy nonsense!)

So, as I went through the familiar routine of the nightmare, the reaction and trying to get Her off my back by formulating the ‘insight’ I thought of the ‘obvious’ – I am afraid of my father dying – well, duh! All this while my heart racing frantically, an uncomfortable physical sensation. And then in addition to this obvious thought I heard a voice from within add “I am afraid of not being able to fend for myself once my dad passes away”. And as soon as that sentence was thought/ uttered within the walls of my body, my heart stopped racing. There was an absolute silence within. I felt the silence within.

That nightmare didn’t repeat itself again after that night.

After what I went through wrt to the heavy emotions I kept feeling through the days and these situation-specific nightmares, night after night, I can say this confidently:

The problem with only working with my mind, behind closed eyes (I went for a couple of sessions of my favourite Lucia no.3 Light therapy in the 2 week period between my retreat and the lockdown & the gorgeous and powerful Gateway Program) AND NOT DOING ANY GROUNDING INTO MY BODY, NOT EXERCISING MY BODY AND EATING CASUALLY WITHOUT RESTRAINT completely unhinged me from my body as such. A sure-shot way to feel the wrath of the Mother, her tough-as-nails love. She wants you to work on You, to see your Higher Self, to not look away, to look at all the garbage that resides within. And if you try to hide the garbage under flavour, spice, taste, orgasm – you are inviting a forced intervention of sorts. Because the energy is omnipresent and working on You. Best to work WITH HER, rather than not.

I don’t know how else to explain this. Now, 4 years on, I know that every time I use my mind to visualise or sense or perceive otherworldly information, I habitually ground myself. I have to forge a connection with the earth I am standing on. I must embody in my body, be present in my physical form, in this 3D life, not look down on it, aspiring to “ascend” to higher dimensions. I have to want to be here, willing to do the work, willing to look in.

Now, I enjoy the mundane (and when I don’t, I try to). I do not actively hate on my life, my family, my circumstance, and when I find myself doing so – I remind myself of all the struggle I went through trying to “escape’.

I visualise being rooted to this earth I am standing/ sitting/ laying/ hovering on, like a tree, with roots going deep and wide into layers of earth. Get it?

And this helps. I have not been attacked by my own psyche very much since I have understood this simple equation. When you sign up for transformation, do not stand in your own way. Let the work happen.

I am not claiming to have mastered this, not in the least, but I have understood the basic flow of how it WILL work out once you get on the train. She loves Me. That is the underlying truth. Do I love myself (and my human form) enough is the question. Am I willing to? To at least try?

Ask yourself this before you get on this sacred ride.

I went through so many emotional, spiritual adventures in those 3 months of the first-ever COVID lockdowns, that it’ll be a mini-book if I get into all of those. I learnt lessons at the speed of light, so many lessons, such large mirrors were shown to me to look at myself in, my intuition became crazy sharp, so much so that I will talk about it here, to end this post.

Towards the last ten days or so of the India lockdown (around June 15-20th, 2020), I began to feel feverish, sitting in my house alone, not having had any contact with the outside world. My thermometer thought otherwise. Normal temp.

I bought another one from the downstairs medical store, thinking mine was faulty. I had been feeling this immense heat exuding from my face and the back of my neck nonstop. The new thermometer also indicated I didn’t have a fever. When this heat didn’t stop exuding from me for a couple of days, I panicked. I thought I am unwell. Hence, I arranged a tele-consultation with a physician. We did a Q&A and after going through my answers about ‘my symptoms’, she did not think I had COVID. That was a relief of course, but I still wasn’t sure what was happening to me. Big heat coming out from my face and base of neck. What the hell!

A couple days later I happened to speak to my sister and she informed me that Dad had fallen sick a few days ago – fever had been building up since. Further in the conversation it turned out it was around the same day as I began feeling “the heat” exuding from me. I made a note of this “coincidence”, but mostly started panicking about Dad potentially having COVID and me being so far away. My nightmare narrative began haunting me. I was mad that the family hadn’t informed me etc.

All through the time that he was sick (diagnosed COVID Negative repeatedly) with high fever and a high level of infection in his body due to an underlying condition, I had this heat coming out from my body. It was such a weird uncomfortable physical sensation. I went through a crazy amount of stress thinking about how to safely get to my hometown to where my father was hospitalised in such a globally stressful time (flights from Bombay still hadn’t been okayed by the government, even though there were whispers that the lockdown would soon be relaxed/ lifted with certain public utilities/ amenities starting back up again).

Long story short, I was able to fly out of Mumbai on the second day of flights re-starting from Mumbai to certain cities. It was so scary, the whole process. I kept having this urgent heat exuding from me, so I feared that it would be caught on one of the many thermometer checkpoints outside and inside the airport. It was so crazy, like a bad sci-fi movie, trying to get a COVID test done at home, where a PPE wearing faceless human man came to collect my sample. It was so crazy, to live through that. I was alone, by my myself, with a sick parent so many cities away, with an inexplicable heat coming from my face and neck. Jesus.

Somehow I managed to pack 15 kilos worth of essentials and my Bombay life into a large blue suitcase (one that had travelled the world with me in the preceding years), shut down the Bombay house, and landed near my hometown, got home. My father had been discharged from the hospital, was on heavy medication and had been asked to quarantine from Me, since I was coming from Bombay, a COVID hub at the time. He and I were separated for 2 weeks by a glass door that naturally divides the house.

The interesting thing is this – the moment I climbed the stairs to my family home’s main door, the heat coming from my face and neck STOPPED. THIS CANNOT BE MADE UP.

TRUTH IS COLOURFUL ENOUGH.

Ever since I landed in my hometown on June 25th, 2020, I have more or less stayed here. I have gone back to Bombay each year to take care of our Bombay house, but I have come back each time. The city for which, at best I had felt apathy and indifference, and at worst hated or looked down upon (having become a high-flying Bombay girl) has become very dear to me since 2020. The family home that I didn’t consider home for so many years, has definitively become my home. The family (my nuclear family of 4-5 people) whom I used to want to escape after a 3-4 day visit has become loved fixtures in my life since (of course we still share a lot of familiar dysfunctions, but I now actually love my family, I miss them when I am not with them, I care for them, I play my role in the family dynamic willingly etc.)

It’s a brave new world.

I am sitting in the family home at my desk, where the “guest room” has now become Anjuri’s room and writing this post now in 2024, and it all seems pre-ordained and so bloody poetic.

Things that I was sure would NEVER HAPPEN, have happened since I signed up for Ayahuasca ceremonies. Countless things. Countless lessons, countless adventures, countless pleasures, countless ordeals.

I reiterate here – it is not a party, fun-ride, it is not a trip, it is not a trivial fun thing to do. It is serious work, with many trials and tribulations. Its a whole crazy package, that encompasses the entire human condition and experience.

Make sure to be willing to go through all of it when you sign on for it.