If you have not read the last two episodes, please start here (36/ drinking ayahuasca, again) for context.
I want to highlight that Ayahuasca is a very personal experience. If you were to drink the medicine, yours will be entirely different from mine. There are common elements yet our journeys and their unfolding are unique. The saying goes: Ayahuasca does not give you what you want but what you need.
After yesterday’s ordeal and no sleep, I can feel the resistance to going into ceremony again. Luckily, I have been here before and I am 100% committed to seeing this week-long retreat through. Hell, I have had a feeling that this will be a life-changing week already leading up to it. Given the process I have been in for the past weeks, I feel I am really pushing through something at last and this will be a pivotal week.
After sunrise, we all get up and clean our space so that it’s neat and tidy for tonight. I am taking my bin bag out of my bucket, tie a knot into it and throw it into a bigger garbage can where all the “purging bags” go. I'm walking out of the dome into a new day.
Back at the lodging house, we gather around the table for an integration session. Everybody shares as little or as much as they like. The focus is on what we learnt through the experience. This is a powerful and important practice, especially with Nader who is helping us to understand and reframe our experiences so we can learn from the struggles and adversity we were facing during the night. Integration is lacking in most Ayahuasca retreats where people just get “spit out” on the other side left to their own devices and interpretation.
It’s my turn to share yesterday’s experience with the group (see 37/ jumping over the edge). I shared that I had to let go of everything, money, my social media and, really, of my life as it is. Nader asks me: Are you a person that tends to extremes? I am reflecting and answer: I feel I am quite balanced and, yes, there are situations where I have been going all in. He responds: You can keep your money and accounts but use them wisely, with purpose. That resonates and, of course, I feel relief. No dramatic changes are needed. No becoming of a hermit which is how I felt I had to become yesterday night.
However, unbeknownst to me, it will turn out that my willingness to let go of everything was the shedding needed and the key to unlock what comes next. After we complete the sharing circle we get to enjoy a big vegetarian, salt and sugar-free breakfast. Our only meal each day as we go into the ceremonies fasting.
I’m going up to my bedroom to catch some sleep. My mind is still processing and trying to make sense of it all. It is also anticipating what I will be facing tonight again. Not a very useful activity as there’s no way to anticipate what is to come (and that’s the very point of it) but, oh well, the mind. It does its thing.
What a difference a night can make
It’s 8 pm. In between thinking and the noise of a shared bedroom, I barely got any sleep but it’s time for the next round. We all meet to walk up together to the ceremony dome, do our dance to connect and bring some joy into the seriousness of what we are about to do and finally take our places and receive, one after the other, our cup of the medicine. As the music starts, I close my eyes and the journey begins.
Today, I am sharing the verbatim of my journal notes from the morning after - with additional reflections in brackets:
What a difference a night can make. This was the most beautiful night of Ayahuasca or even the most beautiful night ever. Love is the answer. As Nader said during the night to me: “Vincent, you have a beautiful soul. Anger and rage are not for you.”
(I was reflecting upon this. Yes, anger and rage, why would I want to be in those emotions? They are not serving me and they make me feel bad. I really don't need them. And just like with forgiving (see 32/ forgiving everyone) I released and let them go. No more of them for me.)
The whole night was about love and how love is my natural state of being. And that there is no other way of being but to be loving and that love is the answer for me and the world.
That really sums up the whole night. I was just a shower of love and expansion. My heart was growing and I was training my heart. Every time I went into the head or outside of me or got “distracted” with the beauty around me, I came back to the heart, feeling it beating and expanding and how it powers my whole body and being. And it was connected with the gut and the two started communicating and vibing together. I saw how the whole world can be touched by love and how it is the healing agent for the world, for all the fear, toxicity and hate that is going on.
Love is the agent that glues us (back) together. It is the most powerful force in the Universe. Why would I or anybody not always act from and be in a place of love? It removes all judgment and separation. Amen.
I need to book a flight to my parents or invite them to me, “simply” to give them a hug and say I love you and to look them deep into the eyes without any negative feelings and without separation but from a place of pure love for them and our shared journey. That by itself will be beautiful and healing.
Ayahuasca really is the master teacher and it presents to me what I need to see when I need to see it. I needed to do the work (over the last seven years) to be able to absorb this message. Of course, love is the answer. Love from the heart not from the mind, and to feel how it is affecting the body when I’m loving from the heart - as Nader pointed out.
And then pictures (in my mental eye) came up of loving everybody on my path and around me. Giving the doorman and my neighbour a hug. Yes, maybe they think I am crazy but love is more powerful than that. Communicating and going through life with an open loving heart from now on - noticing whenever there’s contraction (in me) and keep moving back into the heart.
I felt it beating really strongly in my chest and it was growing and expanding. It was like a whole new system was coming online that has been waiting within me to be activated to undergo and feel this learning. And now, I am ready to go out into the world and love!
I am realising that the key to unlock this most beautiful and profound - words cannot do it justice - experience and feeling was that I was willing to let go of everything (the night before). When one is no longer in need to have and be “more than” and therefore no longer in fear but willing to completely surrender to life, it opens one to love.
This Sufi trip beautifully captures my experience that night: "One has to become empty, whole then all the poetry and all the music will come through you. This divine love occupies heart and mind... Once this divine love makes it suits in the heart, the person gets overwhelmed, drenched in this beautiful experience. Where the mind goes into the zone of silence. The whole universe then exhibits the divine dance of love. ..."
Listen to the whole Sufi trip here. It's the journey of spiritual awakening in a song.
Next: 39/ the night i met god
38/ ayahuasca - being bathed in love