Into the Amazon: Mother Ayahuasca and Her Teachings
The most powerful and profound experience I've ever had
About a month ago, I ventured into the Peruvian Amazon for a seven-day spiritual healing program centered around Ayahuasca, a plant medicine.
It was the most powerful and profound experience I’ve ever had. I saw the Truth.
I first heard about ayahuasca when I began experimenting with psychoactive substances a decade ago, but never gave it much thought. A few years later, one of my close friends had attended an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, and he came back raving about his experience.
“James, I really think you should try it,” he kept saying to me over the phone.
“What’s it like?” I asked politely, but deep down I wasn’t too interested. I had mushrooms and LSD; what more could I possibly need?
“It’s… the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. You just have to go do it. I really think you should.”
“Okay, I’ll think about it.” I hung up the phone, knowing full well that I wasn’t going to think about it.
A couple of years later, my friend went back to Peru, and his phone calls to me restarted with a new fervor. “James, I really think you should try it.”
“Okay. Just… let me know the next time you go.” I hung up the phone.
What is ayahuasca, exactly?
Ayahuasca is an ancestral plant medicine used by indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin in South America. Its traditional shamanic use has been passed down for thousands of years.
Ayahuasca is a purplish liquid blend of two plants that grow wild in the Amazon Rainforest: chacruna, a leafy plant that contains DMT, and B. caapi, a woody vine and MAOI which allows the human body to orally ingest DMT.
DMT is a psychoactive compound known as the “God molecule”. It has been discovered to be inert and present in plant and animal species including rats, pigs, and toads, and it’s rumored to be released by human brains during sleep (dreaming), childbirth, and death.
In short, Ayahuasca is an extremely powerful psychedelic substance.
Ok, so what does ayahuasca do?
Ayahuasca is used as a medicine for spiritual healing. The general idea is that modern human society prevents us from releasing emotional pressures in the way Mother Nature intended. Think of a young child who is crying and told by their parents to “Stop crying!” because the parents feel embarrassed in front of other shoppers at the supermarket. The child stops crying prematurely, and these suppressed emotions become trapped in the child’s body. Other examples include abuse, neglect, and manipulation. If left unreleased, they are carried into adulthood as trauma and manifest in ways such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and anger.
Ayahuasca extracts these traumas and releases them. In the process, the participant may vividly relive these memories and purge the toxins via vomiting, diarrhea, crying, physical shaking, or screaming.
For reference, animals go through this same process in nature; somatic therapist Peter Levine shows a good example in this video (10:56 - 14:00).
As with most psychedelics, Ayahuasca facilitates new thought patterns in the brain, leading to profound insights and lessons.
Okay, fine, I’ll think about it…
Fast forward to 2022, and my friend calls me again. “James, I’m planning to go to Peru to do ayahuasca again. I’m going with another friend and we’re inviting a group to go together. I really think you should come. It’ll be good for you.”
“Uh… I just started a new job, man. Your plan is six months out, I don’t know if I can commit.” In the back of my mind, I was concerned with taking time off work as well as financial costs. In addition, I had just been to Peru a few months earlier for non-ayahuasca tourism and wasn’t keen on returning so soon. I had also generally cut back on psychedelic use after a particularly unpleasant experience I had smoking DMT in mid-2020. “But I’ll think about it and I’ll let you know.”
“Okay,” my friend replied. I caught a hint of dejection in his voice. “Let me know if you change your mind. These programs fill up pretty quickly, so think about it soon.”
I didn’t think about it all, and six months passed…
…and then I suddenly got laid off from my job. Inexplicably, one of the first thoughts that popped into my mind was that now I could, in fact, attend this ayahuasca retreat. In my nascent spirituality, I realized the timing was meant to be.
The only issue was that the retreat would start in just 7 days. I remembered that my friend had said these programs fill up quickly, so I hurriedly went to the program website and checked availability. Unfortunately, there was none; I felt unexpectedly dejected.
I decided I would call my friend regardless to let him know everything that had just happened.
“Dude -” he spoke urgently. “Remember the group we were assembling to go together? One of them just had to cancel; I don’t even think he’s told the program organizers yet. His spot is available and you should take it. It’s for you!”
Wow - the universe really was aligning. Going to Peru was a no-brainer.
Getting there and itinerary
For my practical readers, let me break down what the end-to-end process looked like for Arkana, the program I attended:
Two to four weeks prior: Begin the ayahuasca diet, which means no red meat, spicy foods, cold foods, oil, salt, dairy, coffee, sex, masturbation, street drugs, anti-depressants, and more.
Friday: Fly into Lima, Peru (LIM airport).
Saturday morning: Fly to Iquitos, Peru (IQT airport). Iquitos, a bustling city, is the primary jumping-off point for all kinds of Amazonian tourism. It’s also the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road.
Saturday evening: Pre-orientation with Arkana, including team introductions, Covid testing, and final payments.
Sunday morning: Travel from Iquitos to Arkana’s healing center. This involved 90 minutes by bus to a village named Nauta, and from Nauta 90 minutes by boat on the Amazon river.
Sunday through Saturday: Arkana 7-day program.
Saturday afternoon: Return by boat and bus to Iquitos, and either fly directly back to Lima, or stay overnight in Iquitos.
Sunday - ??: Attempt to integrate back into normal, non-ayahuasca society.
Arkana
I didn’t research different ayahuasca centers; I fully trusted my friend’s choice: Arkana.
In retrospect, I’m quite sure Arkana is the world’s premium ayahuasca healing center. Founded by a Mexican man named José who found fulfillment in sharing spiritual medicines after an unhappy life spent chasing a Harvard degree and investment banking career, Arkana has since expanded from its original Peruvian Amazon location to two more in Peru’s Sacred Valley (Cusco, Machu Picchu) and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
From the delicious wholesome food, to the daily-cleaned rooms, to the on-site gym, pool, and massage services (“bone-crusher” is the local masseuse lady’s nickname), Arkana is about as luxurious a getaway as one can get in the middle of nowhere.
I’m all for authentic tourism and roughing it when needed, so I was initially a bit put off by the fanciness of it all. But over the course of the week, I would come to realize this was no vacation. Spiritual healing is grueling and raw, and I’d settle for nothing less than a well-managed and professional spiritual hospital.
Over the years, I’d heard stories from first and second-degree connections who were sold horrific ayahuasca experiences by shady people on the streets of Peru who prey on and sometimes abuse intoxicated tourists.
This is not the way to go about doing something as powerful as ayahuasca; safety comes first.
Some Arkana participants went on to attend other ayahuasca programs by other providers, and I heard from them that those experiences weren’t run nearly as communally or socially - and the social aspect is a critical source of healing.
To anyone thinking about doing ayahuasca - I 100% recommend Arkana, especially in their Amazon location. Something about being in ayahuasca’s native jungle home makes the experience that much more special.
Who we are
We were 25 in total, hailing primarily from across the US, UK, and Australia but with participants from Mexico, Lithuania, Nepal, and Singapore as well. Everyone had come alone, except for our group of five and a couple from Australia. Some of us were on multi-week programs and had already spent 1-2 consecutive weeks at Arkana’s Amazon or Sacred Valley centers. Most of us had used psychedelics at least 2-3 times before, with some having never done them prior and others with extensive experience.
We were seeking healing from family abuse, military PTSD, debilitating addictions, unhealthy environments, and general disillusionment with society, career, and marriage. We were business owners, truck drivers, techno DJs, hospital nurses, and financiers. Our age range was approximately 20-50, with a median around 28-30. We stayed in dorms of two with random roommate assignments.
8 Arkana staff members lived and worked with us on a daily basis, all former retreat attendees and hailing from Mexico, US, UK, Argentina, and Moldova. 5 shamans from the Shipibo tribe in the Peruvian Amazon stayed on-site to lead our ceremonies: four sons and their legendary matriarch Justina. José the founder himself was in attendance that week.
We arrived at Arkana on Sunday afternoon and stayed through Saturday morning. A typical daily schedule looked like this:
07:00 - morning ritual (e.g., minor plant medicine ceremonies)
08:30 - breakfast
09:30 - group share about the previous night’s ceremony
12:00 - yoga
13:00 - lunch
15:00 - optional afternoon activity (e.g., animal sighting walk)
16:30 - floral bath
17:00 - cease drinking and eating for the day
19:00 - pre-ceremony activity (e.g., breathwork session)
19:30 - quiet time
20:00 - Ayahuasca ceremony
02:00-04:00 - end ceremony
We held ayahuasca ceremonies on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and held a Sapo (Sonoran Desert toad) ceremony during the day on Thursday. Dinner wasn’t served on ayahuasca nights. We were quite sleep and food-deprived all week, but it felt good.
Wait, before Ayahuasca -
Our first plant ceremony of the week was not, in fact, ayahuasca.
Bright and early at 7:30am on Monday morning, we gathered at the entrance to Arkana, each picked up a plastic bucket and a tall plastic pitcher, and made our way barefoot into a clearing in the jungle dirt. Each plastic pitcher was filled with six liters (1.6 gallons!) of an Amazonian lemongrass brew, which resembled a warm yellow liquid like urine (thankfully, it tasted like a floral tea). Our plastic buckets were empty.
The Arkana staff issued instructions: “You will now drink the medicine. All six liters, as fast as you can. The plastic bucket is there for you to vomit.”
We looked at each other, a half-smile and look of incredulity on our faces. “Do we have to drink all of it?” someone asked.
“Yes. As fast as you can,” the staff reiterated. “You can leave when you’ve finished all of it.”
It was go time. We picked up our pitchers and began drinking. Within one minute, someone vomited - the unmistakable guttural sound and splash of water hitting a bucket pierced the calm morning air. “Ughh,” the person heaved. A few of us looked up to take a breather, putting down our pitchers for a second. Someone chuckled at the absurdness of the scene.
“Let’s go - keeping drinking!” The staff were not here to joke around.
We chugged. We gulped. We vomited endless amounts of lemongrass brew.
My vomit was very clear, almost like water. It came out of me quickly and regularly; I had found a good rhythm. Others’ vomit were pale yellow like the lemongrass brew. Many folks struggled to vomit, jamming fingers down their throat to induce it.
A couple of participants’ vomit was red.
Like, blood red.
“Why’s your vomit red?” I couldn’t help but ask one of the participants rhetorically, knowing full well that he had no idea either.
A staff member standing nearby heard my question. “It’s purging toxins,” he answered simply.
Our spiritual healing was starting.
(I should mention - Arkana used to have a different “initiation” ceremony, one called “Kambo”. The kambo ceremony involves using a cigarette of mapacho, or Amazon tobacco, a master plant medicine, to burn each participant’s shoulder until soft tissue is exposed, then directly injecting the tissue with toad venom. This induces anaphylactic shock and the participant’s body goes into full survival mode, including profuse sweating, vomit, and uncontrollable shaking. Five minutes later, participants recover and feel better. Arkana stopped doing Kambo for two reasons: the tradition isn’t native to the Shipibo tribe, and the venom extraction process is unpleasant for the frogs.)
Later that day, I chatted with one of the staff members about the lemongrass ceremony.
“Growing up, I was never able to vomit,” she shared. “I couldn’t vomit, even when putting fingers down my throat.
“The first time I can remember vomiting was during my first lemongrass ceremony. And in that moment when I vomited, as the liquid came up my throat - I saw things. I saw visions. Memories from my past. Memories I didn’t even know I had, flashed before my eyes.”
Vomiting can induce visions? My mind splattered into smithereens.
That same day, many hours later during my first ayahuasca ceremony, I would remember that I, too, had a vision suddenly and inexplicably pop into my mind while vomiting lemongrass.
It was the Doodles NFT logo, incidentally vomiting. I saw it so brightly and vividly for a split second; it was undeniable.
Another, perhaps more meaningful vision appeared in my mind for a split second at some point during the week. I don’t remember exactly when, only that it was not during a plant ceremony, but was undeniably an induced vision.
I saw a stick-thin Chinese man, yellow skin, brown sandals, dark navy linen pants and shrt and a conical rice paddy hat on his head, eyes squinting from the glare of the Gobi desert. This is where Chinese people come from and why we have some of the physical characteristics that we do. I saw my ancestral heritage.
Cool, let’s go to the main act. Tell me about Ayahuasca.
From arriving on Sunday afternoon until the first ayahuasca ceremony on Monday night, I bombarded staff members and experienced participants with questions, trying to get a sense for what to expect.
“It’s different for every person, and it’s different every time,” is the consistent response I heard from folks.
Arkana laid out a few clear guidelines for our ceremonies:
We stay together for the entire duration of the ceremony, even if you choose to sit out (not drink) for one night. Attendance is mandatory.
We do not physically touch each other.
We do not talk to each other, and we try to keep uncontrollable noises to a minimum (screaming, laughing, etc.)
I was excited, almost giddy for my first ayahuasca ceremony. We had been preparing for it for several hours: no food after 3pm (five hours before the ceremony) and no water after 5pm. We took a “floral bath” at 4:30pm, which involved pouring a bucket of water infused with Amazonian leaves and flowers all over our bodies. This serves as protection during the ceremony against bad spirits and bad energy.
Our ceremonies were held in the Maloka, a giant circular hut and sacred space. We each sat on a designated mat arranged in a circle around the hut’s perimeter, along with a pillow, blanket, flashlight, and plastic bucket (for vomit). I brought a bottle of water and a Patagonia fleece button-up with me into the Maloka. Three staff members participated in each ceremony, and they each drank small, working doses of Ayahuasca; enough to feel connected with the group energy, but not too much to interfere with their job of helping participants in need. José himself also drank in every ceremony.
In the center of the Maloka was a smaller circle of mats where the shamans and a senior staff member sat. This senior staff member had just completed a plant dieta, an intense multi-month process by which human body and plant become deeply fused, and she was in training with the shamans.
Shortly before the ceremony, we rubbed agua de florida, a pungent citrus-based liquid, onto our arms, chest, and legs for protection. Two shamans came around smoking mapacho cigarettes, blowing smoke several times onto each of our heads.
Then the Maloka’s lights turned off, and in dim candlelight we were called up one-by-one to the shamans, who administered carefully measured Ayahuasca doses as a viscous purple liquid in medicine beakers. For some beakers, Maestra Justina would orally bless the liquid (via whispered Icaros chants) first; I’m not sure how these were chosen and I’m realizing now that I had forgotten to ask.
All in all, the scene resembled what one might imagine a sacred ritual to look like. The entire process was taken extremely seriously.
Once the final person took their dose, the candles were blown out, plunging our group of 35 into utter darkness. We sat in silence amidst the background drone of the Amazon insects. It took a few minutes for our eyes to adjust to the faint moonlight.
For twenty minutes, nothing happened. And then suddenly, I came up into the medicine extremely quickly - from zero to sixty.
My neck bent forward and my head nodded over, gazing into my lap. But I didn’t see my lap; instead, I saw my unpleasant DMT experience from two years prior, its diabolical geometric patterns pulling me ever deeper into bottomless white space, its insect-like beings whispering hypnotizing, droning chants into my ears. My neck was paralyzed in place. This was hardly a vivid flashback; I was literally reliving the moment.
I shuddered in horror. This was the experience so unpleasant that turned me off from psychedelic use for two years! Thoughts of giving up and going home consumed my mind. With what felt like immense effort, I forced myself to lift my head up, straighten my neck, and gaze back out into the Maloka.
The visions disappeared and I immediately felt better. It occurred to me that this was Mother Ayahuasca’s first test for me; I passed and healed the trauma of my previous DMT experience.
For the rest of my ceremony, I had a great time. It felt like my standard LSD and mushroom trips. “Ayahuasca is different for every person and different every time? Pshh - not for experienced folks like me,” I thought. Ayahuasca is just another run-of-the-mill psychedelic.
Not everyone was having a great time. I heard lots of vomiting, and at one point when I stood up to go to the bathroom, I saw a couple of participants sitting in the hallway, heads bent over buckets.
The next morning, I chatted with a fellow participant as we walked from our cabins to the breakfast hall together. “I had a great night. But honestly, I feel guilty saying that because there were folks vomiting hard in the hallway last night,” I sheepishly admitted.
“Oh - you mean Alexandra? I saw her too,” he replied directly and loudly. (Name changed for privacy)
I was a bit taken aback by how direct he was at someone’s perceived suffering. Just after breakfast, Alexandra’s night came up in conversation as a group of us were chatting by the pool. Alexandra herself raised her hand. “Yep, that was me,” she said with a smile, and we all shared a group laugh.
Over the course of the week, I would come to realize how open everyone was about their own antics of the previous night, especially in our guided group share sessions each morning.
“Last night, I shit my pants immediately. That was humbling,” one participant openly volunteered in our first group share session. We all stared at each other.
For the second ayahuasca ceremony, everyone increased their dosage. “You took 40ml last night,” the staff member would tell each of us in our morning group share session, the Maloka now bathed in a pleasant, friendly daylight. “What are you thinking for tonight?”
“Based on my experience last night, I think I could do a bit more. Maybe 50?” a participant might respond.
The staff member would turn around and consult silently with the shamans and José.
He turned back to the participant. “Tonight, you’ll do 70.”
Personally, I chose to drink 60ml, an increase from my first night’s dosage (40ml), and the staff agreed that would be the appropriate dose for me.
Night 2: “Here at Arkana, we call it Smackdown Tuesday”
Twenty minutes into the second ceremony, I realized that ayahuasca is, in fact, different every time.
It took me a good minute or two to realize I had started hallucinating, because it was in a completely different way than what I’m accustomed to with other psychedelics. Typically, I see colorful geometric visuals and shapes; this time, I was seeing gray fog and dark outlines, as though I were walking cautiously through a haunted wood. I suddenly felt quite nauseous, and grabbed my plastic vomit bucket for comfort.
And then - Mother Ayahuasca unleashed her full force.
I saw a terrible dystopia. Everything was dark; the sun was almost gone, and the Earth was plunged into blackness. Humans and animals alike were fighting over the last remaining resources. Cannibalism was necessary for survival. Humans banded into tribes, attempting to navigate by candlelight through the darkness. The murky, impenetrable Amazon river kept slowly flowing on, consuming anything and everything in its orbit like a black hole. Everything would be sucked in eventually.
I was convinced this chaos and destruction was the future destiny of the universe. Entropy Theory is real. Everything is doomed; all the insects buzzing around me were already in this bug-eat-bug world. Eventually, we all return to dust.
My thighs were shaking uncontrollably. I vomited into my bucket several times. I saw a black spiral that resembled a brittle star with golden tentacles spinning and extracting toxins from my body, not violently, but rather slowly and deliberate. I felt utterly alone, although around me were 25 other people filling the Maloka with a cacophony of purging noises. Some of us were screaming and others were vomiting their guts out. A man across the room was repeatedly yelling “BOOH!”. The girl next to me was sobbing into her blanket. At one point, someone whimpered loudly into the darkness, “Can somebody please help me?” The sound of that question is burned into my memory.
All five shamans were loudly belting their Icaros, their sacred songs for healing. I couldn’t focus on the music like I could in the first night. All I could think about and see was this terrible dystopia.
An hour into the ceremony, I was so deep in the medicine that I began to forget where I was and who I was. I kept muttering to myself, “I’m James, I’m me,” and touching my legs and chest to make sure my body still existed. I remember thinking, “Well, I guess it can’t get any worse,” but then five minutes later, I realized “Oh shit, it just got worse.” My only comfort was that everyone else was getting annihilated too.
At one point, two staff members rushed over to my mat, shining their soft red flashlights at something in front of my mat. One of them leaned over and whispered into my ear.
“James, you need to stand up and get off your mat.”
It took me 5 seconds to realize someone was talking to me.
“Why?”
“You spilled your vomit.”
I looked down. I had knocked my plastic bucket all over the Maloka’s wooden floor. I was so far gone that I hadn’t even realized it happened. I tried standing up, but my body immediately toppled over at just the thought. There was zero chance I could physically get up, and the staff members realized my state. Luckily, none of the vomit had gotten onto my mat, and the wooden floor was easy to wipe. So I stayed on my mat, trapped and paralyzed by my dystopian visions.
I grabbed one of the staff members’ arms as he finished wiping. “This is the most terrifying experience of my life,” I whispered desperately, as though he could do anything about it.
He held my hand. “Just breathe.”
And then all of a sudden, the terror stopped. The shamans stopped singing their Icaros. The weight of the entire Maloka noticeably lifted. Everyone stopped vomiting and crying, all at once. The synchronicity of it was unreal. I chuckled, and so did a few others. We had survived! I felt a sudden sense of elation and confidence. I grabbed a mapacho cigarette next to me and lit a puff, smiling. We were going to make it. WAGMI.
“My friends, we will now begin the second dose,” declared one of the staff members into the silence.
What? A second dose? Snickers erupted around the room. Everyone was having a rough time, and the thought of drinking more ayahuasca was blasphemy.
But then a couple of participants actually stood up from their mats and made their way over to the shamans for a second dose. “How the hell…?” I thought. My incredulity turned into horror as I realized that their re-dosing would bring our group into a collective peak again. “Please sit down,” I begged in my mind of the participants who stood up. “Have mercy on the rest of us.”
A few minutes later, we were back deeply in the medicine, and the shamans were singing their Icaros again. If I were having the most terrifying experience of my life an hour ago, I didn’t have words to describe what I was feeling now.
I shined my flashlight onto the wall behind me, a signal to summon a staff member for help. I needed to get out of the terrifying Maloka.
I ended up sitting outside in the short hallway between the Maloka and bathroom for about an hour. We’re not supposed to do this; ayahuasca is a collective experience and any time spent outside the Maloka is disruptive to the group. “The shamans want you to return inside,” staff members kept telling me.
“No no no no no - I can’t, I can’t -” I grabbed staff members’ hands, staring at them, eyes wide open with terror. The thought of going back in was horrifying. In retrospect, I think I conveyed so much terror that the staff members were okay to break the ceremony rules and let me stay outside for a bit.
Not that staying outside was any better; I was fully consumed with terror and couldn’t concentrate on any staff member trying to help me breathe and calm down. I remember sitting on the toilet for fifteen minutes, spewing endless diarrhea. “He’s overcome by fear,” I heard one of the staff members tell another. Later, this comment would come to define my healing experience.
At one point, one of the shamans came out from the Maloka to try and help me. He stood protectively over me, blowing mapacho smoke onto my head and feeding me a calming lemongrass brew. Several fellow participants stepped around me on their way to the bathroom, looking at me with concern and empathy. I was acutely aware that I was breaking a million ceremony rules and that I owned everyone a huge apology and thank you the next morning.
Eventually, I was convinced to make my way back into the Maloka, where things had quieted and calmed down a bit. I calmed down as well.
I was humbled. Ayahuasca really is different every time. And she just beat the living daylights out of me.
By the way, at the start of this ceremony, one of the shamans had brought their sleeping baby into the Maloka. This baby had slept silently through all of the vomiting and screaming. As the ceremony was coming to a close, the baby began to wake up, babbling softly as it did so, and its beautiful innocence dissipated tension in the Maloka. I felt as though the baby had just absorbed all of humanity’s traumas and pains like it was nothing; just another day in its exploration of a brand new world.
Mind blown.
What’s the Sapo toad ceremony like?
“Sapo” refers to 5-MeO-DMT, a slightly different chemical compound than ayahuasca’s DMT. The 5-MeO experience is what people typically think of when they hear “DMT”: a quick 15-30 minute, but extremely intense spiritual experience. 5-MeO is extracted from the Sonoran Desert toad, dried, and smoked at high temperatures out of a bong-like glass pipe.
Sapo is a non-ancestral, new-age medicine and doesn’t have traditional ceremonial processes. José designed and led our Sapo ceremony. It started at 11:00am in a tent smaller than the Maloka, and we sat on makeshift mat-benches around the perimeter of the tent. One of the participants, who is actually José’s Sapo supplier, went to the middle of the room and started spinning a talisman on the end of a string. Whirrr, the talisman went as his rapid spinning carved a circle into space. This opened a portal to allow other spirits to enter.
In the center of the tent, four mats were arranged in the cardinal directions, and four of us were invited to sit on the mats with everyone else in the tent an onlooking observer to “hold space”. Each of the four participants had a dedicated Arkana staff member seated by them. One-by-one, José would heat the 5-MeO in a pipe and instruct the participant to inhale. We inhaled the yellow smoke until we ran out of breath and couldn’t inhale anymore, and then José told us to inhale even more. After a few seconds, our bodies would slowly lay back onto the mats, and the Sapo experience would begin.
Most of us lay perfectly still for an entire hour, eyes fully closed. Some laughed, smiled, cried, or sobbed at times. Some shook their hands or bodies uncontrollably for a minute or two. The attending staff members would fan our bodies softly, and José himself came by with a giant feather and chant mantras, shoo’ing bad energies off of our bodies as we lay passively, unmoving. Almost everybody emerged from the hour with a huge smile on their face and a gracious bear hug for their patiently attending staff member.
I eagerly awaited my turn, and was at last called onto the mat. It was close to 2:00pm at this point. Some who had finished their Sapo ceremonies left the tent to eat lunch, but many others stayed to hold space for those still yet to go.
As I sat on the mat waiting for my 5-MeO to heat up, my attending staff member must have felt my anticipation. “Inhale, 1, 2, 3… exhale, 1, 2, 3…” she whispered into my ear, and my body followed.
After a couple of minutes, the medicine was ready, and I began inhaling the hot yellow smoke from a black rubber tube attached to the pipe. I filled my lungs, and saw the edges of my vision quickly begin to dissolve into spinning diamond shapes. Primary colors became brighter.
“More”, said José. I took a sip of empty air as we were taught to push the smoke down into our lungs, freeing up room for more medicine. I inhaled for a couple of seconds until I was at capacity again. The edges of my vision continued to quickly dissolve into a black nothingness which felt somehow friendly and kind. At this point, I could barely see. The hot air made me want to cough so badly, but somehow I kept my bodily urges in check.
“More”, said José. I sipped empty air again and José put the black tube back into my mouth. I inhaled a tiny bit and then my vision dissolved completely into a warm blackness.
I don’t know what happened, or for how long.
I was vaguely aware that I, James, no longer existed. I became part of the universal consciousness. I had no idea what was going on, but it didn’t feel scary. It felt… right. Like this was how things were supposed to be.
As the peak passed, the blackness I was seeing gave way into an orange light, as if sunlight shining through a skin membrane. I slowly opened my eyes, and was amazed at how vivid colors were. The first thing I saw was the friendly face of my attending staff member gazing down at me and smiling. I could see every wrinkle and blemish on her face; everything else behind her was blurred as though with iPhone portrait mode. Surely this is what a baby experiences and sees when they leave their mother’s womb for the first time.
As I regained awareness, I slowly came to realize that I was lying at a 45-degree angle and half of my body had come off the mat. My head was, inexplicably, laying in my attending staff member’s lap. The maternal love and energy I felt from her was undeniable.
At this moment, José came by with his giant feather. “Onihhwushure! Onigansemash!” He chanted some mantra, dusting my body with the feather as he did so and forcibly flicking it away from me repeatedly. I acutely felt each flick removing stress, negativity, and anxiety from my body. “Yes. Yes! YES!” I cried out in what can only be described as the purest of ecstasy, my body physically convulsing with ecstasy with each flick. My eyes were half open, and I saw swirling blue and green gases and stars as though I were deep in a divine galaxy. I’d never felt such ecstasy in my life.
I was acutely aware that I was acting kind of… weird, as modern society might deem it. But screw that - this was about letting go and experiencing life and emotion in their fullest. And I was in as safe an environment as spiritually possible, surrounded by trained professionals and 24 new friends who are together for spiritual healing.
I had a couple of intensely sad realizations related to my mother’s passing three years ago, one of which was that my horrific dystopian vision during my second ayahuasca ceremony was likely what my mom experienced as she lay paralyzed in her hospital bed for months. My face contorted into pure misery. “Let it go,” my staff member whispered softly, and just like that, I let it go, and I smiled again. I felt physically lighter.
I sat up and leaned over to my staff member. “What was I doing for the first 15 minutes?” I whispered into her ear. “You were hugging me,” she said softly, with the kindest and most genuine smile. That was the most intimate exchange I’d ever had with someone.
My Sapo experience was one of full rebirth. I saw many things clearly for the first time, including the idea that happiness is a choice, what it means to let go of things that no longer serve me, what I’m looking for in a life partner, and remaining traumas I carry from my mom’s passing. If Mother Ayahuasca were the stern grandmother teaching us lessons, Sapo was the kind grandfather handing us cookies and candy.
Night 3: Synthesis and reconciliation
Given the terrors of the second night, I was quite apprehensive going into my third ayahuasca ceremony, and decided to lower my dosage accordingly from 60ml to 30ml.
A few minutes after drinking the ayahuasca, the same haunted wood from the second ceremony settled into my field of vision. Oh no, I thought. Would this be a play-by-play repeat of the second night? I got extremely anxious, and suddenly became acutely aware of my heightened auditory sensitivity typical of ayahuasca. Every sound in the Maloka - someone getting up from their mat, someone spitting into their bucket - reverberated loudly in my eardrums and reminded me of the sounds I had heard the second night. They pierced the silent grey veil of the haunted wood like hunters from another dimension, stalking targets.
I started feeling quite scared and nervous. The sounds were mentally transporting me back to the second night. Why was the Maloka so quiet? Not a single person was vomiting, but I felt like I really needed to. The shamans had not yet started singing their Icaros so there was nothing to distract me from the depths of my own mind.
Soon, I found myself seeing hallucinations I’d never envisioned before. It took me a few minutes to realize that outlines of human-shaped figures were emerging out of the haunted wood, staring at me from a distance with unblinking, black beady eyes. For the first time in my storied psychedelic career, I was seeing the “DMT aliens” / “machine elves” that other people universally describe encountering.
The aliens started approaching me slowly, floating forward smoothly. They were coming from directly in front of me and from the left and right as well; I was surrounded. The aliens didn’t feel as menacing as they were curious about me, but I felt scared regardless and had a primal urge to call out for help. The absence of vomiting in the Maloka suggested to me that no one else was having a bad time, which made me feel all the more alone with my demons.
The aliens drew closer, and one of them suddenly produced a ghastly arm accompanied by what sounded like a lightsaber being unsheathed. The arm stretched forward and grabbed at me, breaking off a piece of something from me like a brick from a crumbling wall. The alien retracted its arm and absorbed that piece of something into its body, lightsaber noises cutting through the silence of the Maloka. Suddenly I realized - that was my soul! The alien took a piece of my soul!
The whole group of aliens seemed empowered, nodded at each other, and moved closer. The same alien reached out its hand again, no doubt to continue feasting on my poor soul. The curious vibe I felt from them initially had turned malicious.
I felt panic take over, but then I remembered the survival lessons I had been taught by Arkana staff after my second night. “Breathe…” I disciplined myself. The aliens drew closer, sneering without mouths.
I recalled from the Sapo ceremony earlier that day a technique for channeling positive energies towards the aliens. I decided to smile into the darkness of the Maloka. Unexpectedly, a golden ray of sunshine beamed out from my smile and pushed the aliens backwards. They cowered and shivered under the warmth of my loving positivity. I widened my smile. The more happiness I channeled, the more the aliens retreated. I focused my energies like Homelander laser-ing innocent civilians.
I felt like I had superpowers. I kept smiling, fending off soul-grabbing attacks from the aliens and rotating my head left and right to make sure I wasn’t being ambushed from a blind spot. After a few minutes, the aliens had retreated back into the haunted wood and I could barely see them anymore. I leaned on my mat, wrapped up comfortably in my blanket with golden rays of sunshine beaming from my teeth through the Maloka. Mother Ayahuasca wrinkled her face into a smile of her own and said to me, “You’ve passed the test. You’ve learned your lessons for this week.” I felt immensely proud of myself for keeping calm under pressure. I couldn’t stop smiling, now out of genuine happiness rather than spiritual self-defense. The rest of the ceremony was fun, insightful, and pleasant.
The next night, for my fourth ceremony, I realized that my work with ayahuasca was mostly finished for now. I drank a minimal dose of 10ml, felt nothing, and fell asleep during the ceremony.
Lesson 1: Fear
One of Mother Aya’s key lessons for me that week was the emotion of fear: what it is, and how to handle it.
More than anything else, what gripped me that second night was crippling fear. My fellow participants were an amazing sounding board for helping me understand this, and the Arkana staff trained me with fear-management tools, primarily controlled breathing, for subsequent ceremonies.
I became aware of fear in other parts of my life. The day after the second ceremony, I went to shower, and as per usual, closed my eyes to put my head under the water stream and wash the shampoo out of my hair. The sudden darkness of closed eyes combined with full-body, cold water immersion was shocking, and I felt terror shoot through my body. I immediately opened my eyes again and soap flowed into them, stinging. I finished washing as quickly as I could and got out of there.
During my third ceremony, Mother Aya showed me why I was feeling such terror: the combination of darkness and cold triggers my animalistic survival urges. As long as I logically realize this, I can mentally control these emotions which are no longer relevant in our modern society.
I’ll also note that I’d coincidentally been reading Lifespan by David Sinclair, in which he talks specifically about using cold to induce survival response mechanisms in our body as a means to extend lifespan. Everything comes full circle.
A month later, far away from the Amazon, I came across this tweet. It resonated with me profoundly:
Lesson 2: Love and Technology Will Save us
The vision I saw in my second ceremony of a doomed dystopia is probably a very real outcome possibility for humanity, especially in the general direction we’re headed with climate change and political polarization.
It’s become abundantly clear to me that there are two things we can do to avoid falling into this trap:
Share love, be kind to others, and lean into empathy. Give others the benefit of the doubt. Brighten someone’s day. Say “good morning” to a stranger. Agree that love is universal.
Invest in technology. Software perfection prevails where human imperfection fails.
Lesson 3: Spirituality, Collectiveness, and Synchronicity
Mother Aya showed me how interconnected we all are with each other and with nature, and how much of this can’t be explained with current science.
The beauty of Arkana comes from the collectiveness of the experience, partly enforced by mandatory attendance at each ayahuasca ceremony.
Our collectiveness triggered countless instances of synchronicity:
At the beginning of my second ceremony, remember how I hallucinated a haunted wood? One of the other participants - the one who burned “Can somebody please help me?” into my memory - independently described the beginning of his ceremony as “peering through a haunted wood.”
During the Sapo ceremony, I was starting to come back to reality as the person next to me was going deep into the medicine. Within a minute of smoking and laying down, he sat upright and let out an anguished scream. It was so anguished that I felt his pain too, and my face contorted into a grimace. “Send him your happiness,” my attending staff member whispered imperceptibly into my ear, and so I did - I mentally channeled to him my happiness. My face immediately softened and my smile returned, and his anguished scream changed as well, into a hearty belly laugh. Later that afternoon, he would explain to us that he felt that somebody was sending him happiness.
About two hours into each ceremony, I would suddenly and inexplicably sober up from my peak, as would everyone else (see my vivid description of this in Night 2 above). 10 seconds later, the staff would announce “we will now begin the second dose.” There’s an energetic coordination between the shamans, the experienced Arkana staff, and Mother Aya’s spirit.
One participant, a veteran of two ayahuasca programs in two years, reported seeing others’ visions during her first ceremony. “How do you know those are others’ visions, and not just unexpected visions of your own?” I asked. “I just know,” she replied surely.
One man reported in a group share session that the previous night, the woman next to him had put her hand on his knee for a moment during the ceremony (this violates Arkana’s rule). Privately, the male participant later told me that he had been enjoying his own psychedelic experience, and the woman’s hand on his knee immediately turned his visions into hers - a strong energy transfer.
One of my intentions that week was to think about my identity and how my ethnic Chinese background plays into it. I didn’t tell this to anyone. Yet, during the second ceremony when I was consumed by terror sitting outside the Maloka, a senior staff member who was holding my hand inexplicably started telling me about how one of her childhood friends is Chinese, and that she has two beautiful Chinese daughters. I remember smiling at the thought, and to this day I don’t know why she mentioned it.
One participant told me that, among other traumas, she was absolutely torn by this man she loved who unexpectedly passed away. The night that he did, she remembers waking up unexpectedly in that moment and not being able to fall back asleep. A couple of days later, she put together that the moment she woke up was the exact moment when he died.
Integration
The tricky part of ayahuasca is leaving the Amazon and bringing our learnings and insights back into a society and lifestyle which may not fit us well anymore. I chose not to return to New York, and am trying my best to maintain healthy habits such as frequent yoga and meditation, a cleaner diet with more vegetables and less pork, more time spent in nature, and more kindness towards strangers. It hasn’t always been easy to maintain my boundaries, especially when I’m with other people.
I have a much deeper awareness of and appreciation for Mother Nature. The Covid-19 pandemic was as blatant a warning as can be: “We can wipe out all 8 billion of you right now if we wanted. Be better.” As a collective species, we should recognize this and make changes now. This article I read last week hit home extremely hard for me.
A month later, I’m still receiving new lessons and insights. I can’t stop thinking about my experience, and I’ve heard from previous participants that I may not stop thinking about it for the rest of my life.
There was something there in the Amazon. I’ll go back in a couple of years. This time, I’ll be the one calling my friends to join.
Awesome write up, James!
James, thanks for sharing such a powerful experience in such an unfiltered and honest way. Great read and definitely got me interested in trying this someday.