Conversations with Mama

Out of everything I did on my 10 month sojourn last year, nothing has garnered as much interest or received as many questions as my participation in an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru. 

This may be because it is a famous and intense hallucinogen, is administered by Shamans or sometimes induces diarrhoea and vomiting on an epic scale. 

Perhaps it is some combination of the three. 

In the past 10 years in particular, the plant medicine has shot to stardom as an apparent panacea. It has been touted to heal everything from heroine addictions to cancer and everything in between. 

There is a mounting body of scientific evidence for its medicinal qualities and many renowned research centres, both in South America and across the world, have recorded incredible successes in supporting people to overcome serious challenges, mentally and spiritually. 

For those that don’t know, Ayahuasca is a plant medicine traditionally used through Amazonian cultures in South America. It is a “tea” made from a mixture of two plants, a combination of vines and leaves distilled over hours into a brown concoction. It has been said to offer deep insight and the capacity for change by connecting users to the spiritual realm. 

I, along with Liv, chose a smaller retreat centre in the Sacred Valley, near Machu Picchu in Peru. Amazonas and Incas have been using the medicine here for thousands of years and it felt important to me for my first time to be on the land it originated from. 

Our guides were both trained Shamans and one of them was also a psychotherapist, meaning the entire experience was carefully curated and sensitive. 

You begin with a cleansing ceremony, an introduction to the medicine which often induces the purging - physically, emotionally and spiritually. 

So, at 9pm we met in the temple, which itself had been cleansed and prepared. We each had a single mattress and many blankets to protect us from the cold highland air. 

One by one, we were called up to receive our cup and drink the concoction of vines and leaves. It tasted like off, stale stout with a slight vinegar aftertaste - not particularly enjoyable.

We were then asked to lie down on our beds and the lights were turned off. Our guides began chanting a variety of mantra-like songs, occasionally accompanied by a drum. 

After around 30 minutes, the medicine began to kick in.   

Unlike the other participants around me, I didn’t purge. There was no vomiting or dry wrenching (some diarrhoea later), meaning my introduction felt quite gentle in comparison to other reports.  The first sense I had was of gentle, feminine hands moving through my body’s physical and energetic systems. I had the perception they were a vibrant green and were cleaning me, removing blockages and creating clearer pathways. 

Part of my personal purge was tears, a consistent stream of water leaking from my eyes for hours. There was no emotion attached to it - no happiness or sadness - but it, accompanied by a lot of yawning, felt like a release of some sort. 

I had this overwhelming sense of being enveloped in enormous wings; safe, secure and held by something that seemed to descend and surround me. I had a deep fascination with the Andean Condor while in South America (which also symbolises heaven in the traditional religions) and retrospectively maybe that’s what it felt like. 

Portals seemed to open as the Shamans played their drums and I could feel myself traversing not only space but time, like I was being drawn through realms by the sound of the music. I found myself around long-dead campfires, surrounded by dancing ancients clothed in animal skins calling to the spirit world I was a part of in both reverence and fear. There was a surreal sense of being there, not just watching but experiencing their dancing and chanting pulling me towards them in a palpable way. 

I had memories resurface, but nothing overtly painful or affective. Others report reliving traumas or blissful experiences in order to overcome them, but mine were more like an old-fashioned movie reel flitting in front of me. There was no sense of connection to them, more like I was an objective observer seeing snippets from another life. 

I felt the smaller parts of my identity dissolve and join with something greater, something infinite - my own experience of collective consciousness. 

My innate sense was, and is, that the material world and the spiritual world are not separate, nor is one higher than the other or ‘better’. It is like they overlay one another and, due to our existence in the material being so immersive via our senses, we can easily forsake the spiritual as ‘unreal’. 

This was only the cleansing process of the plant. Although my experience was deep and immersive, I always felt in control and myself - even when I could hear other people being violently sick around me. 

The next day was the full ceremony: a far higher concentration of the plant and a trip into another realm I thought I was fully prepared for, but clearly wasn’t! 

I’ll save that for next week.