One evening, in the early part of this year, while cooking and washing dishes, I was using one semi-dry finger to scroll up on TikTok. I was listening but not looking at the screen. I heard this man describing his interaction with unconditional love in like a part two or three of his story. Oh, I thought, he’s talking about his Ayahuasca experience. I was a little shaken at the end when I realized he was talking about his NDE which is a near death experience. Oh, duh, I thought as I finally made the correlation.
To varying degrees, each of my Ayahuasca experiences was a near death experience.
And that indescribable bliss which I felt after surrendering to the darkness was unconditional love. To explain it with feeling words is an overwhelming task. How does one describe the indescribable? Before Ayahuasca, I knew about such love. I had read about it over ten years ago in Dying To Be Me. And I had experienced it that day twenty years ago when the repairman paid my bill. And there were other instances as well, some of which I didn’t immediately recognize.
But to sit in it and be filled with it while under the influence of Ayahuasca, was to feel it intensely. Of all my unconditional love through Ayahuasca experiences, this one that I’m about to talk about takes the cake. That particular night, as Grandmother Ayahuasca’s essence gradually crept upon me, I felt very confident and in retrospect, perhaps arrogant. I had convinced myself that I was so surrendered, that vomiting, or purging as the Ayahuasca crowd likes to call it, was probably not going to be necessary.
Because I was lying very still and intentionally breathing through the darkness, I believed I was not resisting. Instead, I just kept wondering when the good part was going to start. It seemed like no time before my eyes popped open as I snatched up my vomit bucket. A wave of sickness hurled itself out of my body. I had deluded myself into believing I was willing, when in fact, I had resisted the sickness as long as possible. I hated vomiting. I had done enough of it during my pregnancies to last a lifetime. But soon enough, the good part came.
When I’m under Grandmother Ayahuasca’s spell, music is more alive than I’ve ever known it to be.
And this time, the music, much of which wasn’t in English, once again surged through me as it pulsated and vibrated. It was part of me. I was the music. We were one. It sounds almost cliche now. But I remember how it felt. The music was made of dancing bright and vivid colors which were styled in geometric shapes. Before Ayahuasca, I never appreciated psychedelic art. Even now, I still gravitate first towards soft buttery yellow florals contrasted with the hues of red that roses wear.
But under that influence, the displays were perfect. The good part was so good that I didn’t want to come out of it. But the need to pee was becoming more urgent. When I finally got up, I was still in it but not so much that I couldn’t walk. I looked in the mirror while I was in the bathroom. My eyes looked like those of a fandom character; one who radiates power through them. I couldn’t stop looking. I had never seen them like this before. If my eyes looked like this all the time, I thought, nobody would ever try to trick me again!
I had told the shaman in a shaky voice before drinking his brew, that I wanted to be “untrickable” and “unfoolable.”This was the first ceremony before which I had set a specific intention. The other times, I had always said I just wanted to experience whatever it was that I needed. I returned to my bed under the night sky, believing, or at least hoping, that I had obtained the power to be such a bad ass that nobody was going to try to pull anything over on me ever again. And then I accepted a second dose of the medicine from the shaman.