Crazy Life Stories

Italy, not far from the Swiss border. Zonka, a little village in the mountains. Huge stone houses with wooden balconies running around them, facing the steep slopes covered with trees. Most were empty. The rooves were thick slates, as grey as the walls. Magnificient. One of these houses belonged to K, the guy with the grey hair and beard who was leaning over me when I was shouting to God and the ceiling, the first time I took Ayahuasca. I found myself entrusted with the noble task of picking up flowers to ornate the room where the ceremony would take place in the evening. Ayahuasca. We called it Daime. Santo Daime. The room was big and wide. We were thirty or forty people feeling at ease, forming the circle. There were no wallpaper, no plaster, just stone and wood. To go to the toilets, we had to get onto the wooden balcony, walk up to its extreme end, and sit facing the mountains. When your poo was done, it dropped 20 meters below, between the trees. Better not to feel dizzy. It is no...

The first time I took Ayahuasca was in France, with members of the Church of Santo Daime. (At that time, there was no legislation on this plant). The Church of Santo Daime originated in the Amazon in the 19th century, when Portuguese missionaries were converted to the shamanic practice of drinking Ayuhuasca (the vine of the dead) They made up their own ritual.  I met people belonging to this "church" and decided to experiment.  I didn't really know what to expect. Ayahuasca is a very, very, very bitter beverage. I found myself dancing - two steps to the right, two steps to the left over and over again and again - among a group of French and Italian people. Imagine the sound of maracas, guitars, lyrics in Portuguese... I felt very ridiculous and then I started to feel sick. It was the feeling you get after overindulging in food and drink, then your liver isn't happy at all, but you still hope you won't have to throw up. The room was a merry- go -round, the walls w...

This is the narration of one of the most powerful Ayahuasca session of my life… The group officially called “Association for the protection of the Rainforest” was settling for a prolonged weekend of Ayahuasca rituals in an isolated farm in the middle of the countryside. It belonged to the family of one of our members, nobody else was around, we were between ourselves, in the middle of vineyards in the South of France… Emma smiled when I arrived. Emma was the kind of girl many men fall in love at first sight with. She seemed to enjoy being endowed with Aphrodite’s powers. She had a Yorkshire Terrier, Renoir would have loved painting her. She was also a kind and sensitive soul. She had a disease, which I don’t remember the name of. She needed a crutch to walk. This was a kind of incurable slow evolving thing that has the power to get even an Aphrodite’s daughters to focus on non erotic issues such as the meaning of life. Emma offered me to draw a card from a new deck ...