Journey of Simon

Back in the maloka, penultimate ceremony. Waiting to be called up to drink.

Pre-ceremony terror? Check.
Crippling anxiety? Check.
Confused as to which way is up? Check.
Thinking that I am definitely going to go insane this time? Check.

I intuitively knew that I needed a large dose. Overwhelmed by energy or not, clearly taking the medium cup in the last ceremony put me in kind of a ‘halfway house’ state of mind. Although the medicine was clearly working and I was having visions, my ego was able to fight the medicine and I wasn’t fully absorbed by the experience and I was conscious enough to resist.

I knew that I needed to be forced over the edge and into the abyss. The way each Shaman serves Ayahuasca is different, and strength and intentions are never the same. In the way it is served at the Temple of The Way of Light, a large dose appeared to be the only way for me to breakthrough.

I hold the full large cup of Ayahuasca to my lips and mutter to myself ‘Please help me be free.’ The facilitators, Jason and Zuzana, smile at each other. Although in my head I feel that not much has healed, they can see the dramatic change in me since the first ceremony. I’m no longer shaking as I drink; I am determined to fully engage and to go to Hell again if need be in order to heal.

Back at my mat, 30 minutes after drinking, the medicine is starting to kick in. It’s coming on very fast, and I can feel consciousness being lifted from my body and that familiar blue, green, environment is back. I’m feeling so nauseous and I’m quietly pleading that the ikaros would start to at least feel a little bit of protection and grounding. I’m expecting the worst, as it has become quite predictable that I go to some form of Hell. Suddenly, I start to smile. The fear totally dissipates from my being and, again, I’m feeling my own sexual energy. The sexual energy transcends and I begin to feel the most profound self-love I have ever felt in my life. I’m grinning from ear to ear as I feel myself being held in a emotional state so beautiful, words cannot describe it. There is no fear, no ego, there is only divine love. I start touching my face, my hair and body (at one point I even grabbed my own nuts and was thinking “these are some fantastic balls!”) and just loving every part of myself. My mind is taken to all the wonderful things that I’ve done for people in my life. I’m shown how much I make people laugh, how magnetic my personality can be for those around me and how much I’ve given back to the world.

I start to cry with joy and thank Ayahuasca and the universe for everything – I am so eternally grateful. I start to think about all the things that were bothering me and causing me fear; Gay or Straight? Doesn’t matter! Do I need to be a Jehovah’s Witness? Doesn’t Matter! I was thinking about how much I loved all my friends, my ex-girlfriend, my family, all the brave people in the ceremony with me and the source of this universe – God. I would hear people purging and instead of the usual reaction, I began to laugh at it. There was zero fear, it was completely gone. When my personal ikaro was being sung to me, I was dancing on my mat in pure joy.

A vision ensues on the back of my eyelids – it was like a box or a TV screen. On the left side was love represented by a green colour and on the right side was thick black fear with a demon in front. It was like a battle between emotions inside of me. The demon was leading the charge for fear and I, for love. As the demon would start to win the battle, his army of fear would start to take over the green on the left side and that terror, grief and despair that I was all too familiar with would start to rise in my being. I could feel it in my body. As soon as I focused on love and aligned my emotions with it, the demon and his black fear started to retreat. This happened three or four times until, finally, I was able to completely shrink the fear into nothing. I could see the poor little tiny demon so I reached into the vision with my left hand and picked him up. I told him I loved him and held him beside me. I told him that I understood that he was part of me and there was nothing to be scared of anymore.

This was Ayahuasca’s profound teaching on how to deal with fear. You must meet the fear with love. Fear begets more fear, love shrinks it. You cannot rid fear completely, as with other painful experiences, it is part of the human emotional spectrum. It reminded me of one of my favourite quotes by Alan Watts:

You know in Zen there is a difference made between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha. If you go up to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head, nothing happens. You break your fist or your stick. But if you hit a living Buddha, he may say ‘ouch,’ and he may feel pain, because if he didn’t feel something, he wouldn’t be a human being. Buddhas are human, they are not devas, they are not gods. They are enlightened men and women. But the point is that they are not afraid to be human, they are not afraid to let themselves participate in the pains, difficulties and struggles that naturally go with human existence.

My body jumped as I felt something physically land on my chest. I thought maybe it was a bug, but couldn’t tell as it was pitch black. I quickly brushed it off and it felt like it had spikes. As I looked down at my chest, I could see my heart beating inside. It was blacker than black. I looked a bit closer and it had maggots, centipedes and all sorts of horrible bugs crawling out of it. I felt so sad. I started to rub at it and could see there was red underneath but it kept going back to black.

The next bit was simply incredible. As I write this, I feel a lump in my throat and my eyes tearing up at the memory. I held my left hand up in the air and asked the universe for a new red heart. Right there in front of me, vividly visual, a new beating red heart appeared. With the help of Ayahuasca, I started doing my own open heart surgery. I moved it down to replace the old one and now, sat inside my chest, was a brand new beautiful beating red heart. I felt a sensation of strength and compassion fill my body. I was going to take care of this heart, and it was going to help me be more loving and to combat the existential fear that I had been continually facing.

As I’m held in this state of pure divine love, I try to think of things that I would usually have a negative emotional reaction to. My mind goes to thinking about my ex-girlfriend and if she’d slept with someone else since we broke up a few months earlier. I’d torture myself thinking about this before. It would trigger crippling wounding, rejection and sickness deep inside my belly. In the state of unconditional love, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It showed me that an outlook that comes from a place of love, means I view situations from a rational place. I can see now that although the relationship is over, that I love her and she deserves to be happy without me. Who she is sexually intimate with is not important. I can honestly say, I have never felt like that in my entire life.

I thought that my night was done (when will I ever learn). What an amazing and life-changing experience I’d just had. I laid back on my mat, smiling to myself and then… I started to trip balls, again.

The darkness swoops over me, the terror, the shame and the despair far more intense than ever before. It is coming on so strong, I can’t breathe, my head is spinning and I’m so physically disorientated I don’t know where I am. The unconditional love I’d just felt is now a distant memory. I pull my purge bucket closer to me and I start to vomit over and over again. It’s so painful both emotionally and physically. My eyes are shut but as I open them briefly and look into my bucket I see hundreds of demons surrounding me. With eyes open, I see a swirling pit of terrifying red disfigured faces all laughing at me. I see black bugs scuttling on the floor around my bucket. I’m so deep in it, it’s hard to stay conscious. I put my arms around my body and hug myself and try to remember the self-love I’d just been shown. For the first time, deep in this abyss and hellish terror, I’m able to cultivate enough energy and love to remember that I need not be consumed by this darkness, that I am stronger than it and I no longer want it to rule my life. As I smile at what I’m seeing in front of me, as the trip so intensely consumes me, something unbelievable happens.

I began to feel free.

As the dark, demonic trip takes me deeper and deeper I’m just smiling away, unmovable in my efforts to keep the love flowing through me. I see my own face in front of my eyes, I become the huge demon, I’ve talked about in previous ceremonies. It’s inside of me, laughing and mocking me.

I know this demon very well. It’s my own ‘Demon of Fear’. A strange synchronicity happened about five months earlier after returning from Peru. I was recommended a book by my friend, “Eastern Body, Western Mind”. I purchased the book but never read it. It travelled with me, but I’d never even opened it. Another close friend sent me a message telling me about this fantastic book she’d read, and felt it would be good for me. It was the same book. The day after this message, I suffered a really intense anxiety attack. I’m asleep on my ex-girlfriends chest, I spontaneously wake up, my eyes looking directly at a heading in the book she is reading. “THE DEMON OF FEAR”. This chapter goes on to tell that the demon of the Root Chakra is fear. It manifests itself in many ways and called out sexuality as being a fundamental part of this Chakra.

As the intensity grew, I was clearly audible to the room and Jason came over to my mat. He took some of the grounding perfume that had been prepared by the healers for each individual and he started pouring it on my neck and my hair. He just stroked my head to calm me down but it was clear I was about to enter a very deep and intense trip. I thanked him for the support and he left. My dependency on others was greatly reduced from the other ceremonies. I felt my own independence, strength and power growing.

Over the next hour, I’m travelling through the dark realms of my subconscious experiencing all my fears and demons. It looks like computer code. Unfortunately, I can only remember the tail end of it. It was as if I was travelling a labyrinth to be able to reach a new dimension. I met a gatekeeper that tried to draw me out of my body two or three times to enter his realm. On the final attempt, he said: “He can’t come in, he’s still too heavy!”. I look down at my chest, and I could see stones on it. As if the negative worldly emotions were still holding me back from entering and there was more work to do before I could enter this divine realm.

The experience was dying off, and I was still smiling from ear to ear. I was still mildly tripping, and I kept trying to purge the huge demon of fear but I still couldn’t. I kept seeing its face and, each time I did, I would show it love. “You can come out now if you want mate… If not, that’s cool. You’re part of me and I love you”. It sounds bizarre but each time I did this the fear dramatically subsided. I finally ended up just talking to myself saying “You are a f*cking warrior of the light”. For some reason, this phrase just kept repeating itself in my head.

The ordeal was over, but for the first time, I wasn’t scared of being in the maloka. Due to the experience of the first three ceremonies at the previous retreat, I’d developed an irrational overwhelming fear of the dark, of the jungle, of the plants and pretty much everything in life. For the first time in six months, that fear had gone. I was enjoying hearing the jungle sounds, I felt more like my normal self. I was beginning to become more au fait with the medicine’s work, and learning that the majority of these emotions and visions are internal. I knew that intellectually previously, but somehow I always felt under attack by external malevolent forces. I was finally free from its crippling grip on my life.

This ceremony changed my life. I woke up the next day a different person from the day before. I still knew I had this big demon to purge, so some fear remained for the final ceremony but I had a newfound sense of power, bravery and courage. I was going to go after this demon. I would not lose this fight.

Everyone was coming down and preparing for a mild ceremony on the Arkana. A sealing of work carried out. I knew that I still had more to do…