Meeting Dr Ayahuasca

Our ayahuasquero, maestro, was impeccable, trained by the plant during the nine years he lived alone in the jungle.  He prepares his brew in the jungle, fasting and praying as he harvest the ayahuasca from the a special vine and a certain type of chacruna leaf for his ceremonies.  The vine and the leaves are cooked over a wood fire in the jungle until the right consistency is met.  The whole time maestro is fasting and praying.

We have the opportunity to meet meet “Dr. Ayahuasca” the day we arrive.  Ceremony at 8 PM.  We enjoy a light lunch, but must skip dinner to partake.  The first night we meet in a circular room in the jungle compound far from the rooms of the other guest.  This is important, for later, there will be sounds of screaming, retching and vomiting.

We sit in a circle on well used cushions from old discarded lounge chairs.  We are instructed to sit upright was we would when waiting for a a friend until Dr. Ayahuasca comes.  We are also instructed to not drink water and refrain from vomiting for the first 30 minutes.  Maestro comes around dispensing his brew.  He travels the circle in a sun wise manner asking us what we want to work on, Health, Love, Wealth, Career, or Projects.  

My turn comes and I choose health, I take the full and well worn cup and down the hatch it goes.  The taste is vile.  It feels as though that everyone else drank from a thimble and I some how drew a coffee can, in reality the cup is about 3 or 4 ounces.  It immediately wants to come right back up, but with a couple of swallows and all the saliva I can muster it stays down for the time being.  Next comes the rose water.  It is poured into our hands and we cleanse our hands and face and inhale it up to our third eye.  Then come the tobacco.  Maestro has a ceremonial pipe that is cooked with the brew and he come over and blesses us and our altars with the smoke.  When all is done we will smell like a night of bad behavior.  

I wait for the good doctor as maestro walks around the center of the circle singing and whistling to us and holding sacred space.  We are in ceremony.

At first I sit and then slowly I make it to lying down.  The doctor is with me, I can feel him looking through my body looking for the places in need of healing.  Last year when I had my first ayahuasca experience I did not vomit until the very end and that was one quick purge.  In the back of my mind I am thinking that and wondering if I could get off so easy this time.  No such luck.

I am resisting it, this need to purge and finally the doctor tells me to let it go.  I get up and walk across the room to the toilet and struggle with the door.  I finally figure out that you have to reach through the open window and open the lock from behind.  I make to the toilet just in time.  The retching starts in my toes and next I am vomiting like I have ate tainted meat in India again.  The poison leaves my body, it is blood red as best I can tell in the candle light that keeps the bathroom lit.  Will this stop, no another, then another and finally I can make to back to my cushion.  I curl up in the fetal position and wait.

“I am taken into the ground of the jungle by the vines and woven into the fabric of the mother”.  This is what I write in my journal the next day.  It felt if I was being swallowed by the jungle and reorganized at my very core.  It is like my DNA is being rearranged.  I am lying on my back twisting and turing as this healing is taking place.  I feel good as I am being rebuilt on this molecular level.  And then I need to vomit.  I resist and am reminded that a big part of healing is letting go, so I trudge to the bath room for the second purge of the night.

Back on the cushion I see my life reduce to a comic book.  It was some 70’s cartoon comic book playing the bad scenes of my life with Frank Zappa playing in back ground.  I watch with amusement as they are reduced to the ridiculous and torn from the book and balled up and tossed from my life.  It is if the bad things that have defined me are being removed.  Twice more during this process I have to vomit until there is nothing left to purge.  The message is clear, do not hang on, let it go.  This goes on and finally I am left with a shape like an strange eye that keeps appearing.  But it not a living eye it more geometric, as shape that reminds me of something that I can not place, something archetypical. 

Things are dying down and I return in my body to the cushion.  On cue, Maestro ends the ceremony.  I get up and am cold and spent.  I walk back to my room and notice how much I have fallen in love with the jungle.  We are on a nutshell path and the trees are lit by kerosene lanterns.  It is beautiful.  And I feel complete, at ease and in love with the jungle.

As I enter the room I try not to wake my roommate.  No such luck the door make a huge squeak and I see him toss. I can’t remember if we exchange pleasantries or if he falls back to sleep, but I spend the better part of the next hour on the toilet clearing my bowels.  Tonight is a double ended purge.  I finally get some air and go to bed, but as I dose off one more little reminder of humility creeps out my ass and I am up to clean myself, letting it all go, including my pride.  This ends the first night in the Amazon.

The next morning I feel fine, hungry, actually and though I miss yoga, I make to breakfast and have fresh fruit and banana bread.  

After breakfast, we head across the river to Monkey Island.  Our guides bring bananas to the monkeys every day.  We take a walk in jungle and meet 4 or 5 different species of monkey.  This day a little monkey, about the size of rabbit, uses my face as tree as it leaps from her tree to the table where the bananas are served.  Reminder to never get between a wild animal and a free lunch.  Back for lunch, a lounge in the hammock and ceremony at 8 PM.  

Tonight we head to Monkey Island for an outdoor ceremony.  The ceremony is held on this sand bar that is visible during the dry season.  We take boats across the river and lay out the old worn cushions in a circle.  The moon is about three quarters in partly cloudy sky.  Tonight, I am asking for love and expect a sweet night on the beach.  But the doctor has other plans.

My cushion is in the east, so is my journey, so I think that this is cool.  The same ceremony as the night before take place.  And soon, we are lying down with the doctor.  

I soon realize that I have a cushion next to one or the girls that was screaming from the night before.  Whatever, demon she is fighting it is not giving up easily.  I try to show compassion, without trying to rescue her or take on her demon, but I can not enter fully the dream state of the doctor.  And I am vomiting, like the night before.  It is a vile, bitter, awful substance that leaves my body this night.  In the sand I see a face of a bitter old man and realize that this was inside of me.  My retching is coming from around my heart, clearing whatever defense that I place there from getting hurt again.  I discover love is not always sweet, but being able hold space for someone in their struggles and being able to keep the heart free of bitterness.   Maybe I will grow up someday, after all.

The ceremony ends and we pick ours selves up and mill around the beach as the guides call for the boats.  “Bote, bote, bote” they yell.  Soon a light and the sound of a outboard motor.  I get first boat and make it back to my room.  My roommate enter shortly, after taking the second boat. 

I slept with out incident.  

The next day we take a boat ride to one of the tributary rivers upstream.  It is a pleasant walk in the forrest.   We return and have lunch.  Tonight is the final night of ceremony with the doctor and as much as I hate to drink that brew again I feel I have to.  Our teacher calls us the “diehards” those you have to keep going back to the vine of the soul and her lessons.  

This night we are again back on Monkey Island.   The whole sky was cloudy except for a circle over head.  There was lighting going off on the horizon and if we were not in ceremony I would have predicted rain.  But we just knew that we where safe from the elements tonight. 

I force down another cup of the brew and waited for the doctor to come.  Tonight, I will be taking this ride through the perceptual states, of body, mind, energy and spirit.  

I started in body at the first chakra and was slithering through the jungle like a snake.  The jungle was very alive and had a florescent quality about it.  The leaves of grass glow in their green as I was a snake in my domain.  I climbed up a branch and surveyed the trees on the horizon.  Then back down through the grass to the river where I eat a frog before shifting into the mind.

This was accessed at the second chakra and I immediately had to get up and vomit.  I should not have ate the frog. It’s over quick, one pass around my heart to clear it.  I get back to the cushion and started across the rainbow bridge when it clasps into a surf board and I keep riding this wave to infinity.  It’s like all of time keep rolling under the board I an standing on.  I can jump off an any time I want to or I could keep riding this for forever.

So I shift to the world of energy accessed at the sixth chakra and my world was transformed to trillions of rainbow color string vibrating forming the fabric of life.  Into this world there appear these bubbles, that I understood as our thoughts and prayers that are bubbling up and changing the fabric of life.  The fabric contorted and expanded around our thoughts and prayers and the strings would change their vibration, colors and sound as these bubbles come through.  It was like viewing an interactive IMAX movie where the mood of the audience affected the outcome from inside the projector.

It is now time to bring my intention up to spirit where we all connect.  I was immediately brought to a place of bliss.  It was a surreal world and the geometric eye from the first night played a part in the architecture.  There was a soft vibration in my ears and I felt much peace and love in this world.  I was held in pure love when I felt a rushing from my heart into the world I was visiting.  I asked what was that and the doctor told me that was pure love from my heart, you must feed this world with pure love so it can feed it back to your world.  

Then I was back in my body, lying on Monkey Island in the Amazon, under a 3/4 moon, in a clear circle of sky with scorpio over head, bliss out, feeling a connection to all the creatures, all the plants, all the stones, dirt and grains of sand and all the people of the world.  I was not alone, I was connected to my fellow shaman on the beach and to my fellow shaman having ceremony across the river and our dreams of the world were feeding the universe who in turn was feed us back what we dreamed.  I was lying there in the sweetness of love that only the divine can bring.  Wow what a way I have come, I never could have imaged a night like this as kid growing up.

It took a while for the ceremony to end.  I lied there watching our maestro come around singing and whistling his songs as others where still in their dreams.  I lied there feeling a profound since of gratefulness.  I lied there feeling this strong connection to the jungle and to the whole world.  I did not know what I had come to the Amazon for, until that moment.

The ceremony ended and I felt much love to all the participants.  I wandered for group to group listening to their experiences and sharing some of mine.  There was lots of hugging.

I finally made it back to my room and the sound of the jungle was amazing.  I had never noticed so loud as before.  There was laugher from another room which I saw as multi-colored ice cream cones rolling across the sky.  I fell into a dream state and I was in a bed in the middle of the jungle.  The bed was decorated with flowers and vines and was alone in a clearing surrounded by the jungle and lit by moonlight.   As this symphony of bugs played on, I lied in this beautiful bed which I understood as my honeymoon bed for I was married to the jungle.