The first time I took Ayahuasca....




The first time I took Ayahuasca was in France, with people belonging to the Church of Santo Daime. (At that time, there was no legislation on this plant).


The Church of Santo Daime was born in the Amazon in the 19th century, when Portuguese missionaries were converted to the shamanic practice of drinking Ayuhuasca (the vine of the dead) However, they added very Catholic songs to the rituals.




I met people belonging to this "church" and decided to experiment, even though I didn't really know what to expect. Ayahuasca is a very, very, very bitter beverage.




This is how I found myself dancing - two steps to the right, two steps to the left and again and again - among French and Italian people. Imagine the sound of maracas, guitars, lyrics in Portuguese...



I started to find I was very ridiculous when I started to feel sick. I felt a little bit like when you have ea ten and drunk far too much, and your liver isn't happy at all, but you still hope you won't have to throw up. The room felt like a merry- go -round, the walls weren't as vertical as they should have been, I crouched in a corner..


.


Normally when you eat and drink too much, at some point you vomit and then you feel better. But on that day, vomiting wasn't possible. The room felt more and more shaky, the walls were moving, I felt quite distressed.




Some guys helped me lie down in a corner of the room. One was leaning over me, talking some kind of nonsense: "Be open to the experience... accept something entirely new..." He had short grey hair, a short greyish beard. Hiis presence was better than nothing, but not much more...





I felt as if my life - my "sense of being myself" - was being sucked out of me by the top of my head. I felt I was taken out of my body, strongly, violently. I was extremely scared. At the same time, I noticed that I couldn't feel my feet anymore, I couldn't feel my legs, my hips... I was losing control of my body, trying to hold on like a dying man to life.... I realized that within a few seconds, I wouldn't even be able to cry out for help...




I shouted to the ceiling, atthe top of my lungs. I may not have ever shouted so strongly in my entire life.... or maybe the day I was born....?



"God! God who made me, can I trust? Can I TRUST?"




After some moments of intense panic, something strange happened. I thought of my partner and her little boy - a 10 years old with whom I had a very loving relationship - I had a vision of them in front of my grave and I felt their pain. It made me feel very sad for them. Without knowing it, without knowing how it happened, I had forgotten myself in the middle of the most intense panic. My next words were for them: "I am here to love you..."




The panic had disappeared. I felt extremely good, even though I had no control of my body. The man with the greyish hair and beard was leaning over me. Lying down, I could see his head upside down! He appeared to be as strange and familiar as a Dad might be to a new born who still doesn’t know his face.... The sound of the maracas and the female voices singing were like the presence of a mother a little bit further away... I didn't know how to move my arms and my legs. I was like a baby, feeling safe and cared for...





A little bit later, I felt cold. I asked for a blanket. A guy told me briskly: “You can dance now!" I stood up awkwardly, surprised to be able to... and I got back into the dancing square. Two steps to the right, two steps to the left...




The feeling of ecstasy lasted the entire night. Apart from a subtle and deep deep craving that wasn't healed though......

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The fish on the sink

Image
Dear unknown friend, Where were you? I was a little boy, maybe 8 years old. I had a great admiration for my uncle Raymond. He always arrived late for Sunday lunches when the family was gathering at my grandparents. Instead of wearing dull and stiff Sunday clothing, he turned up in sportswear, sweating and went for a shower. From the point of view of a little boy who would be sternly told off for being two minutes late this meant great freedom. Raymond was a fisherman. I was fascinated looking at the big fish he brought and left to die a slow and distressing death on the kitchen sink. They were barbels and so full of bones that my grandmother never prepared them. It takes hours for a fish to die. Paying close attention I could feel the exhaustion that squashed them and kept them quiet whilst the agony of being out of the water slowly built up enough strength for just another hopeless spasm… Flap! Flap flap! …. And they were quiet again, though I knew they weren’t dead and I somehow
Read more

Antivenom for the soul ()

Image
Dear  friend, Do you how antivenom is made? Venom is collected from snakes; horses are injected with it. The horses fight the venom. Then the human draw blood from the horses, the antivenom is in it. This is literally true, and this is also a metaphor. Dear friend, maybe you are a "horse" as well... It's our job to be poisoned and fight within our own souls. Whether we know it or not, we are useful. The suffering is more bearable when it makes sense though. We are making antivenom for ourselves and others... A famous verse of the Emerald Table goes like this: "That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing" A way to understand what it means is to see anything that exists in the material world as a reflection of something that exists in the invisible planes, that is the psychological and spiritual planes... If some beings, in our case horses, do make antiveno
Read more

In the psychiatric ward

Image
  When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just ill! I am still thinking of the people I met there… Let me introduce them to you.    Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger.   One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance called “the tree” Sh
Read more