Hi there.

New to the forum. I came with a couple of questions about ayahuasca and saw I could not post them there, so I will post it the "welcome discussion" with the necessary background information without which the questions make probably little sense.

BACKGROUND:

Three years ago I took eleven ceremonies in Peru (Caapi+p.viridis) and were all rather unusual. It took me a while to understand the reason behind.

The first ceremony, when everybody was already tripping and the facilitator was passing by to see whether some of us needed more medicine, I was still feeling absolutely nothing, so we assumed that I needed some more.

About an hour later it all started and was the most intense experience I’ve ever had. It started with synesthesia with the ícaros being seen as a ball of light moving around the maloca, it then turned to a roulette of feelings, wherein feelings of joy, despair, amazement, sadness, fear, bliss… were randomly being presented into my conscious awareness with increased speed. I could change from the most exhilarating delight to the absolute despair in a matter of milliseconds. And then to amazement and then to sadness… The experience was not exactly enjoyable, since it was rather confusing and extremely exhausting, but very interesting. Afterwards, spasms started affecting me all over the body and my legs and particularly my arms, which had more freedom of movement, started hitting the ground, my body and moving uncontrollable all around. At this moment, a facilitator noticed that something was wrong with me and came to have a look and avoid that I hurt myself. Some time later, I had lost all contact with external reality and I was inside a loop of thought in which I remember what I interpreted to be something close to a laughter over and over and over again and which caused me a fair degree of anxiety. The ayahuasqueros considered that I had taken too much ayahuasca and that I had ended too far gone and in the rest of the ceremonies I either felt nothing because of not taking enough, completely lost it again, or fought against the medicine making me lose contact with reality with breathing techniques and all kind of desperate attempts to prevent the very unpleasant experience of being locked within myself. I never ever had any visions in any of the ceremonies and the ayahuasqueros considered that mother ayahuasca was refusing to give me the visions for some reason (it was not the right moment, I was not prepared to heal…).

It was only months later that I manage to understand at least part of what was happening. I have aphantasia, a condition which makes my mind “blind”. As soon as I close my eyes, all that I see is darkness. Nothing else. I do not know whether this is congenital or acquired due to some traumatic experience (I remember that as I was a little boy and was outside playing and talking with my imaginary friend my father scolded me screaming that I was totally crazy and I should completely stop this behaviour immediately and for good. Maybe this caused me to make my imagination go blind. But I am not sure whether I was ever able to see images in my mind. It could be inborn, as I say). This is why, while the rest are having visuals I get nothing and only when there is enough medicine in my body to severely alter the state of consciousness do I get to feel an effect, which many ayahuasqueros avoid as being simply too much ayahuasca as to keep within the helpful margins. By the way, with psylocibin-containing sclerotia a very similar experience arises and I also have no visuals.

It took me a while to consider taking ayahuasca again and it has not been until recently that I wanted to give it another try. Two weeks ago I cooked them myself (the 3x3 hours, Caapi and p. Viridis separately, with a tablespoon of apple vinegar per liter of water) and took 100g of Caapi and twenty minutes later 50g of p. Viridis. I had never had a “purga” in any of the eleven ceremonies in Perú. Just a little looseness of the bowels some of the days and always after the experience. After taking it two weeks ago, I had what it felt as the most brutal food poisoning I have ever had. I started violently puking and then having to crawl to the toilet with an unforgiving diarrhoea while I still felt the need to puke and while I could feel that I was losing my mind. I was really afraid that I would lose my consciousness and choke on my vomit or that I would end up having a serotonin syndrome if I allowed the medicine to totally get me, so I fought as crazy to keep me conscious. It was close. I had a "controlled" panic attack and had the feeling I was likely going to die this time. Fortunately, I had someone with me that helped me stay on this side of reality. She told me that she was afraid because after so much puking my lips were blue and I also had apparently bradycardia. She has a medical background and was for a while worried about my safety. I through away the rest of the medicine that I had cooked thinking I had done something terribly wrong while cooking it and did not want to take the other half.

Yesterday I tried again with a carefully cooked brew (prepared as in my first attempt). I took this time only about 25g Caapi and about 20 g Viridis (what by some is considered almost microdosing) twelve hours after my last meal to minimize the stomach issues. The effects were again very noticeable (no visions, only the feeling of an altered state of consciousness), even if it did not get to the point were I felt I would lose my consciousness. Nausea and stomach discomfort were very noticeable even if I managed not to puke. I was alone and wanted to avoid being in "puke mode" while I get higher and higher and risk losing my consciousness.

The feeling that I get when under the effects of the “mareación” from ayahuasca, probably related to the lack of visuals that probably bring the mind to another state, is, in mathematical terms, as though any thought that I have turns into an attractor towards which my whole mind rushes and then it is as if my mind were a resonant cavity and kept feeding the thought with more and more energy until a single atom of a thought remains fully occupying my mind at full volume. Yesterday I managed through meditation practices to let any coming thought pass by without staying enough to enter the loop of resonance in my mind, but it was a difficult task.


QUESTIONS:

1. Is there a way to minimize the nausea? I don’t understand why I never had any issues with it in the eleven ceremonies in Perú and I am now getting this gastrointestinal discomfort. I doubt that in Perú they were using any strategy to remove the tannins such as employing the egg white technique whose use is here strongly advised against due to the resulting loss of potency. I know most of you consider the purga as beneficial, but in my case, if a thought of body discomfort or of the need to puke pops up in my mind, it gets amplified by my mind and I get caught up in a static thought of vomit and nausea. Not an experience that I would recommend to anyone. Any idea of what could I do so that no stomach issues arise during the experience as was the case when I was in Perú or at least minimise them.

2. Everybody talks about the healing and pedagogic effect of the visions, which I don’t even remotely get. I see at most only some distortions with the eyes open. With eyes closed, blackness is all that I get. Do you think that I can get some benefit from the medicine? I do want to let the medicine teach me and help me heal, but if my aphantasia closes the door for me getting any benefit from it at all, I will have to reconsider going through this ordeal in which my mind becomes a resonant cavity of any thought.

Sorry for the long post and thank you guys in advance for your opinions and your help.

Well, that's very sad.


For GI discomfort ginger root and chamomile tea come in handy, but what you're describing goes far beyond nausea. Shamans do often use many admixture plants, though, which go beyond just vine and leaf.

It's also possible your body just doesn't appreciate ayahuasca. That goes for the lack of visuals too. Maybe you'll have a more desirable experience if you try something functionally different, like cactus or salvia.

By the way, don't imagine that the visions alome make the medicine. It's mostly the mind state that you're in from which healing comes... the visuals usually just present the point in a clear form, if they make any sense at all.

Thanks for your reply, Bismillah!



I will try to drink one of these teas before ingesting the medicine.


Indeed! At least up to now, this is a fact


The retreat in which I went in Perú advertised that they only used caapi and as light p. viridis with no other admixtures. Actually, I was present once as they prepared it and saw how they put only the two ingredients in the pot. Whether they added something later I don't know since I did not stayed the whole time, but they advertised the opposite.


I have also tried San Pedro. Only once. It was no fun to swallow it all, because even if it tastes way better than ayahuasca, you have to take so much more! From San Pedro, I got only the muscle spasms (although not as uncontrollable as with Ayahuasca), a slight stomach discomfort and also some drowsiness and strange feeling in my head as if I had drunk three or four glasses of wine. Nothing else. Certainly no visuals and no altered state of consciousness. With ayahuasca at least it is obvious that something is happening in my mind, even if it is not exactly pleasant. I think that, due to my aphantasia, unless this condition is somehow healed by one of these medicines or otherwise, visuals are not an option in offer for me.

I tried to chew salvia once, but it was possibly not enough because absolutely nothing happened (I don't plan on smoking any, since my lungs are due to chronic asthma not in good condition to inhale anything). I might try again some other time with more leaves. But I have heard so many conflicting opinions about the benefits of salvia due to the highly confusing nature of the experience, that I am also with mixed feelings about it.


Ok. Maybe I just have to keep trying some more times, but up to now the experience brutalises me quite harshly, both the body and the mind. In any case, I will stay in the low end to avoid losing consciousness. I can't imagine that my mind state up to now when under the effects of the medicine is a place of healing, but maybe there is some healing taking place in a strange and twisted way

I also have Aphantasia, i believe, i rarely ever get visuals and don't see any real value in visuals, i find visuals to be more of a distraction than anything, not that i'm against visuals, i just don't think they're important or necessary to get the benefits of Aya. I've had full on mystical experiences without any visuals, and i still get everything i need. Aya is mental-physical-emotional-spiritual medicine, not particularly visual. Some get visuals, some don't, it's not that big of a deal imo, what i get out of Aya certainly wouldn't be improved by the addition of visuals.

As for the nausea/vomiting, i recommend trying 10 drops of pure Limonene in a capsule taken at the same time as the Harmalas. Limonene is the only thing i've come across that fully blocks out the nausea/vomiting from the Harmalas. I've tried Ginger, Peppermint, Zofran, even anti-cholinergics as well, and none of those helped me at all, but Limonene definitely does.

Thanks ShamensStamen! Good to have an experience from someone with the same condition.


I guess you don't have the problem of tending to get a single thought amplified to the extreme in an endless loop and to the exclusion of all other thoughts. This mind state does not feel good. But I guess I have to get to know the medicine better. Actually, in one of the ceremonies in Peru the experience was overall positive, even if I could not stop crying, I did not completely lost my mind and I had the feeling afterwards that some cleansing had been achieved.


I will most definitely try it. The feeling of nausea gets quite in the way with creating the potential for a good state. The last two intakes of Ayahuasca at home were tainted by the ever present and exclusive thought in my mind of nausea, stomach discomfort and vomit, and then the experience is pretty miserable. But, despite the misery, it is the substance for which I see more potential, compared to my four experiences with psilocybin, which were quite flat for me, and the mescaline of San Pedro, which left me not even feeling an altered state of consciousness. I guess I should not give up yet and have some patience. It is simply hard to get to do it again, after the harsh experiences.

This could depend on the exact cactus you get. Some is more stimulating and uplifting. But we are all different in our responses, of course.

Aphantasia is so puzzling to me, being someone with quite intense visual imagination. I have trained my visualisation capabilities, so firstly would like to know if you specifically remember much of your imaginary friend - particularly whether their was any visual component, and second - do you dream? Something I've found with mescaline in particular is that the boundary between the CEVs and actual dreaming is, in a way, practically nonexistent.

Thanks downwardsfromzero!


True. I was just disappointed from the experience with San Pedro because I hardly felt anything other than the unvoluntary muscle contractions and a slight dizziness. I guess that the Peruvian Torch, belonging as San Pedro to the Echinopsis family, will likely produce a somewhat similar experience. And Peyote is so expensive that trying it when chances are that I get absolutely no altered state of consciousness from it is not a particularly attractive prospect.


I can imagine. I do have a pretty decent auditory imagery available to my mind and I guess for you the capability to form images in your mind is as easy as to form auditory images. Not for me.


I have tried to train my visualisation capabilities, but anything that goes beyond a mental construction of basic geometrical forms that perhaps have some internal image component to it is beyond me. Complex imagery, even an isolated face, even of someone I know well, is completely beyond me. I may for instance have internalised the information that a girl has brown hair, but if I don't have this information encoded as data, there is no way that I can imagine her face to determine the colour of the hair.


I cannot say. My memory of past experiences is in general very short-lived, probably due to the aphantasia, since I guess images are an important component of episodic memory. I do have a vivid recollection of the moment I was playing with my imaginary friend, so I guess the event and the reaction from my father affected me quite a lot at that age, so that it froze in my mind. I even remember that at that moment I was in my imagination pulling a rope downwards that was attached to a surface in which my imaginary friend and me were standing in order to move up as if it were a man-powered lift. But did I have at the time internal images of the experience and of my imaginary friend? I am just not sure. I don’t know. I tend to believe I must have, because otherwise the adventure experience of playing with an imaginary friend seems now to me pretty dull, but I am no longer a child now, so this is not a solid argument.

With dreams, it is similar. I have problems of insomnia and my sleep is very superficial, so I don’t dream often or at least I rarely remember having dreamt. For the cases in which I do, I have sometimes the impression that I did have images in my dreams, but I cannot tell for sure. I think it is kind of an altered state of consciousness. For instance, I cannot remember much about the ayahuasca experience the times I totally lost contact with outside reality and I was completely closed within my mind with no access to external stimuli or interoception and with no ability to control my body. I just know that at least for some time I was still “there” and not totally unconscious. But then once, with a high dose of psylocibin, I remembered that I had been in a very similar altered state of mind before with ayahuasca when closed within my mind. There, with a full load of psilocybin, I could remember the other similar altered state of consciousness.

There is a theory about how the brain access memories according to which the mind has to, at least in part, get into the state in which the situation occurred in order to recollect it. This would explain why I am not normally capable of accessing memories about this extremely altered state of mind under the effects of ayahuasca when I am “sober”, but getting in a similar state with psylocibin allowed me to remember it. Now, being sober, I only remember that I recognized the similarity at that moment, but have again no access to the memory itself. I think something similar might be happening with mental imagery. Maybe it requires a certain state of mind which is no longer available in normal waking hours for people with aphantasia. This is why I cannot tell whether my experience with the imaginary friend or my dreams have or lack images. When I think about it, only a rational description of the experience pops up in my mind with no ability to determine whether internal images were part of the experience or not. I am simply uncapable of determining it.