In a previous entry, I referenced Marijuana as being the gateway fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I see it just above the metaphorical eggplant, a low hanging and easy to reach fruit. Psilocybin is above that and higher up, is Ayahuasca. Now this is just how the forbidden fruit is arranged on my tree. Yours might be completely different. I wonder if Eve went back to her tree for seconds or thirds? Or was hers like mine where it yielded a variety of fruits? And if so, did she think, Well, I already ate that forbidden fruit so I might as well try another?
I didn’t know about Ayahuasca until it reached my screen one day through the algorithm.
But I didn’t seek it out, even though I was interested. Several years later, I was invited to an Ayahuasca retreat. After I said yes, I didn’t refresh my memory with much research because I didn’t want to influence my experience with expectations. In the years that followed, I attended the retreats again and again. During one of those ceremonies, as usual, I slipped into a world on the other side. There, I was brought into a room within a storehouse.
It reminded me of the back room behind the layaway counter at Walmart or K-Mart back in the day. I could see a shelf on which all of the stored packages were mine. Each held emotions which I had ignored because they were unwanted. In the background, there was a reel playing. It was of me telling someone, someone whom I couldn’t quite identify, about how I had learned to shelve certain emotions during crises. This was how I had survived my life. Before I even knew it was a practice, I practiced, if not stoicism, then something that at least resembled it.
I’m not necessarily defining stoicism as the shelving of emotions. But either way, I had always known that one day, I’d have go back to the shelf and get them. It’s time to pay up, I realized. It was time to turn, turn, turn to take the longcut. I surrendered. By then, I had learned that the easiest and quickest way to acquire the illumination that Grandmother Ayahuasca offers, is to go with her through the dark. And so while we walked through the valley of the shadow of death, together, we opened my packages which in so doing, induced labor pains.
It wasn’t contractions of the uterus of the physical body but rather those of the spiritual body.
They came in crescendoing waves, the peak of which, held the alchemy which turns pain into an elixir of bliss. The relief came only when I surrendered and I could surrender only when I focused on my breathing. I could only focus on my breathing if I stayed present. And if I stayed present, I had to feel every emotion in and of the dark, which was, by definition, taking the longcut.
I remember laboring with my firstborn. I had been worried about forgetting the exact breathing techniques I learned during Lamaze class. But when I was actually in the thick of it, the only thing I could do was breathe. And this was just like that. There was nothing to do but breathe. Let me explain. Years ago, I started swimming in the winter. When the cold water first hits my body, it takes my breath in the literal sense of the term. At first, I gasp for air. But then, I remember to breathe intentionally because it is the only way I know how to survive the cold water.
It isn’t all light and pretty, though, at least, not at first. In the beginning, I intertwine my breathing with the rhythmical chanting of swear words. All the while, I am pretending that I am a navy seal. See, there is always a point when I think I’m not going to be able to stay in the water after all. It’s too cold. Ironically, though, if I just stay in a little longer, I no longer feel cold. Instead, I feel this indescribable bliss, a kind that makes me think I could just stay here in this clear crisp water as a soft alluring mermaid siren forever.