Journey of Simon

As mentioned in the previous post, I was told by the facilitators that the healers were still trying to clear the energy of the American Ayahuascero from the previous retreat as they could still see it on me. That was a slow process so as not to damage my psyche too much as the Shamans, facilitators and integration support noticed that I’m very sensitive to energies and that I carry characteristics of an empath.

Ceremony two starts, still terrified, I drink the suggested small dose but I am totally exhausted. It’s been impossible for me to sleep and recuperate any energy as every time I close my eyes alone in my tambo (the wooden jungle accommodation – similar to small huts), my mind would start to race, take me to negative places and I’d start to have an anxiety attack. The maloka is pitch black as they blow out the candles, the only thing providing a small bit of light in the heart of the jungle. The only thing that helps with the anxiety and fear is when the first ikaro comes in, there is something about this ikaro that makes me feel as if my heart is opening to love. I begin to cry, again, just out of pure of gratitude for this opening healing song.

I’d like to add at this point, I don’t believe I’ve ever truly been ‘in love’ in my life. When living in the throes of fear and anxiety, it felt almost impossible to cultivate love. They are opposite energies. I had always assumed that love and hate were polarities but it is now my belief that in 99% of instances, fear is the driving force behind hate, anger and the spectrum of negative emotions. When you experience any narcissists in your life, I’m almost certain their neuroses are deeply programmed subconscious fears. I know because for a long time, I was one. I spent many years being a compulsive liar, not because I wanted to deliberately hurt people but because I felt it necessary to create this false pseudo-self, to make the opposite sex believe that I was something I wasn’t. The fear of another person knowing who I really am, deep down, insecurities, flaws and all would certainly mean I would be rejected.  I manipulated people to ensure my own safety. I kept the unconscious illusion that if I remained in control of all situations and how people perceived me, I could ensure I that wouldn’t be hurt, rejected and abandoned. I feel so deeply sorry to those women that were in my life at that time, I was acting from an unconscious state and my inner child was extremely wounded. I’ve made so many mistakes and hurt a lot of people, but I am trying to right those wrongs and be a better human being on this planet. To love myself, to be the change, and in turn, to have a positive effect on those around me.

The majority of ceremony two is rather uneventful for me. I slowly begin to realise that I’m in a protected space and the twenty three other people around me are all going into battle with their own demons. My mind goes back to a month earlier, back in London where I’m working with an experienced Shaman who, through energy work, is trying to help me release from the constant fight or flight that I’m frozen in. She is giving me advice about going back to work with the medicine (she has participated in over 100 Ayahuasca ceremonies) and she keeps reiterating how important it is that I trust the process, and allow ‘myself to be held’ by the Maestros and Maestras. My attitude changes and I try to engage and surrender to the medicine as much as I can. I close my eyelids, the Ayahuasca in my stomach starts buzzing and I begin to see minor visions. The first being a big rock, like a boulder and the boulder has a crack in it. Within the crack is beautiful bright white light beaming through, as I start to really focus in on that light, a huge spider scuttles over it. Spiders are interesting for me. In first my Ayahuasca ceremony I inhabited the body of many animals, among these, a black panther, a hawk, a frog and finally a spider. Since I returned from the jungle after that first retreat, in the space of six months I seemed to attract an abnormal amount of spiders of all shapes and sizes. I often would find money spiders on my body and I’d just spend time with them rather than flicking them off. I wouldn’t say I ever had an abnormal fear of spiders, but since that retreat, I lost a lot of that fear. Unless it’s those huge mother f*ckers you find in the bath, that fear remains!

I pulled the following excerpt from spirit-animals.com:

This insect totem teaches you balance between the past and future, physical and spirit, male and female. She is strength and gentleness combined. She awakens creative sensibilities and reminds you that the past is always interwoven with the future. Tarantulas (and all spiders) are the keepers of the primordial alphabet and can teach you how to write creatively. Her body is shaped like the number 8 and she has 8 legs, which is symbol of infinite possibilities of creation. Her 8 legs represent the 4 winds of change and the four directions of the medicine wheel. Spider’s message is that you are an infinite being who will continue to weave patterns of life and living throughout time. Do not fail to see the eternal plan of creation. Those who weave magic with the written word usually have this totem.

Who knows.

The boulder vision passes and then a very strange and sickening vision arrises. I’m witnessing my mother having sex with a black man (which makes some logical sense, as my mother had an affair with a black bodybuilder during the end of her marriage to my father) and I start to feel very uncomfortable, blinking hard to try and get rid of the vision. Then suddenly, I become the person having sex with her… I feel like I’m going to purge and grab my bucket but I don’t. I begin to cry instead. I’m not sure why. The affair happened when I was 16 years old, and I didn’t feel in the least bit emotionally affected by it. The marriage was unhealthy for years before, but what followed was the common toxic aftermath of many divorces. I felt like my sister and I didn’t treat my father very well but my mother was such a dominant force and she blamed the affair on him, that he drove her to it rather than taking responsibility for her own actions. In some aspects of their interactions, my mother insisted that we side with her and that she was the victim in this. The bodybuilder was an ego-driven tit, a womaniser, and not surprisingly, abruptly finished the fling with my mum when things got heavy.

My relationship with my mum is very complicated and volatile. Around two and a half years ago, after starting my own healing journey and being in therapy for some time, I decided to calmy and respectfully confront her about things that had happened in my childhood. Specifically, the emotional and sometimes physical abuse. The conversation ended prematurely with her calling me a pathological liar, storming out of my flat and us not speaking a word to each other for well over 18 months. In my first ever Ayahuasca ceremony, I received a message to ‘reconcile’ the relationship. I attempted to do this when I returned from Peru last time around. It went very badly. I received an email response from her full of ammunition that she’d obviously been stewing on for the whole time we hadn’t spoken and she just unloaded against me for everything bad I’d ever done. Some of it true, some of it hugely fabricated. She blamed me, my father and being a Jehovah’s Witness for over 20 years (she has now left because has a new boyfriend outside of the organisation) for being unhappy her entire life. It’s very difficult to reconcile a relationship with someone who is in total denial of their shadow side and who narcissistically projects continuously. I’m really OK with not having her in my life right now, she has her own very severe childhood trauma that I don’t believe she has even began to deal with. I’m sure things will change between us at some point in the future but I’m just not sure when that would be. I have the feeling that she will actually have to be on her deathbed before she would ever apologise or accept responsibility for her own actions and stop blaming others for the way she feels.

Back in the maloka, thankfully, the vision passes and the ceremony ends. I feel even more f*cked up than when I started. I lie on my mat feeling fearful and a guy two mats down (who I later became great friends with) is purging like all hell is breaking loose. The purge can come in many ways, primarily through vomiting or sh*tting yourself but also sweating, shaking, crying are all seen as ways of purging. For anyone reading that hasn’t sat in an Ayahuasca ceremony, the vomiting purge is not like a normal sickness such as when you have food poisoning or even when using other shamanic tools like Kambo to induce vomiting. It’s like something that is not of this world, its dark, violent and terrifying and can often sound as if the person purging is totally out of control. I start getting these sensations as if I can actually feel the negative energy from his purge, I try to remain as positive as possible and reassure myself that it’s a good thing, that he is releasing something that does not serve him but it just sends me deeper into my deep black hole of anxiety and fear. I roll over and finally manage to sleep for three or four hours.

The following day we had another group share. A number of people are talking of these divine experiences their having, scary but beautiful teachings they are getting from the medicine. When it comes around for my turn to share, there is a lump in my throat and I’m holding back tears. I relay the visions of the previous two nights and go on to say to say how pathetic I feel. I feel so emasculated, powerless and a poor excuse for a man. I go on to say how confused I am as to why the vision arose of my mother and I don’t understand what is wrong with me, how can I be so f*cked up. I am well and truly stuck in a deep state of grief, despair and fear, I feel like I’m victimised by my own life and there is just no way out. There is a civil war going on in my body, mind and soul.

The evening after the group share, we had no ceremony, a night off which I was thankful for. Instead, we drank the specific plant medicines as prescribed in the physical consultation along with any other massages and steam/flower baths that were necessary. These prescriptions were specific for each individual although there some common plant remedies among the majority of the group. I was drinking a plant remedy for autoimmune conditions, and I, out of the whole group had an extra flower bath with different plants (we all participated in one flower bath per day, but at one point, I was having three a day). The facilitators translated one of the Maestras passing comments to me in so much as to tell me that they were still seeing ‘bad spirits’ on me, and these extra baths were necessary for cleansing – “Absorb the power and protection of the plants” they said. What this did do was push me into another fear loop. BAD SPIRITS? Are you kidding me? All my historic childhood Jehovah’s Witness wounding was flaring massively, and honestly, I was f*cking terrified. I began to feel like I was disassociating and that I wasn’t safe in my own body. I grew up learning the world was an unsafe place, and I’m just constantly reaffirming this by engaging in these shamanic activities. I kept feeling like it was the work of the Devil or evil.

I asked to speak to the Integration Director at the Temple, Dr. Tanya Maté. She assured me that the ‘Bad Spirits’ was just the terminology that the healers used. It could also be referred to as negative thought forms or dark energies. She told me categorically that this stuff was now not from my previous retreat, this was the real work and that is was more likely to be inherited generationally and through my childhood upbringing. She went on to say that they are all picking up on how sensitive I am, and I am subconsciously ‘collecting energies’ from people and internalising them. Being brought up in a shame and fear-based religion, dysfunctional environment, a mother that would hop between over the top caregiving and rage attacks and to top that off, generational sexual abuse (not to me specifically), this means the medicine will be working through multiple layers and that I need to understand that this will not all be solved in one twelve-day workshop. Before we parted ways for the evening,

she also told me to not get too attached to the vision of my mother having sex, saying “As the fear is leaving your body, it can manifest itself in many ways, not all of it is true or has a direct meaning that you need to be concerned about.”

The talk helped me a lot, but that night, alone in my tambo I was once again in a panic attack, terrified I had something negative attached to me. I felt as if I wanted to die, that I was doomed and that this retreat wasn’t going to help me. I simply could not go on, I really felt on the brink of a psychotic break.

A number of fundamentalist religious doctrines talk of Hell, but seriously how the f*ck can it be any worse than where I am now? I am literally living in Hell on earth within this body I’m in. This soul-shattering rock bottom terror was about to propel me to go all out in the next ceremony…