Actually, she gave it to me about ten months ago, but I was too stupid to understand what she was saying.

I've been dealing with severe progressive neurological issues following a respiratory infection in March 2020. I have headaches that have literally made me scream out of nowhere, I forget how to write, or how to talk, or spoken English sounds like a foreign language (though my second language is fine), I randomly go deaf, I forget where I live, get lost at the grocery store, experience one sided or facial numbness. When I play the piano, my left hand will play sheet music in the wrong key, as the opposite clef, or even play entire melody lines backwards. Sometimes I get dyslexic and see numbers upside down.

Plus a whole bunch of other horrible things (my heart is involved), but something incredibly screwed up is going on. I'm not intending this as a pity party, this is just the mess I've been trying to navigate.

So this is why I started drinking Ayahuasca again. She hasn't cured me, but she is the only other thing besides IV steroids that has helped. After dosing, my symptoms turn off like a light switch. This effect lasts for 96 hours, down to the second. As long as I continue to redose on time, I will not have a resurgence of symptoms, as long as I don't overexert myself. Lifting a bag of kitty litter counts as overexerting myself.

The only thing keeping me off disability at the moment is Aya. The only reason I can remember where I live, feel emotion, or follow a sentence when someone is talking to me is because I am loaded on jungle magic. I have actually been able to return to work and work part time, thanks to jungle magic. Avoiding becoming a burden on my family is an understated magic trick.

Peter Gorman says basically if there is no way you could have imagined what you saw in your vision, it's a legit vision. I've had a few of these over the months, which have involved entities healing things, or being instructed about how to find herbs to help certain things. I will share reports about these later, I've been meaning to for a while.

But tonight, the new moon in Scorpio...

The very first time I drank Aya after getting sick, she took me to a wall of switches. There were hands everywhere, moving and doing mudras. I had the sense it was extremely important and a master control panel to something, but I had no idea what it meant. She showed it to me on numerous occasions since then.

Once you drink Aya enough to get your personal BS out of the way, I now believe there is no such thing as a random vision - if it seems nonsensical, we are probably just too stupid to understand what we're being told. There is a learning curve to this. It has happened many times. If a plant had to tell you something without speaking, how would they transmit that information to you?

She took me back to the switchboard tonight. Switches everywhere. Every switch had either a hand or a foot. All the hands and feet were doing things like flexing, opening and closing, they were all performing a binary series of different movements.

Then this skull came along. It was supposed to be a human head, but it didn't finish developing. The forehead was bone, skin was peeling off the face, I could see the veins and the muscle where the flesh was just falling off.

It went to the wall and started eating the hand. It absent mindedly, emotionlessly started chewing the fingers, eating them the way a cow would stand and chew grass. My gut reaction to this was WTF NO NO THIS IS WRONG THIS ISN'T RIGHT THIS IS DISGUSTING WTF. I cannot adequately express the horror and distress that witnessing CANNIBALISM feels like.

And then it occurred to me.

These are my motor neurons.

Something inside me has gone mad and is cannibalizing itself.

And what type of diseases does cannibalism cause? What a black omen.

I am going to diet hymenaea courbaril (rich in fisetin and does not grow mold) and brunfelsia grandiflora (chiricaspi). Both other visions of mine and pubmed would suggest these plants are probably my best shot. I am going to pair this with a juice fast and juice the hell out of anything rich in apigenin. I'm going to treat this fast like a full shamanic dieta and go all the way. I am growing mushrooms, growing salvia, and going to get some 5meo (gulp) to see if I can blast this zombie apocalypse out of my body.

I have yet to meet a neurologist that doesn't blame me for my symptoms and shuts the door in my face, because it's complicated and they don't know, so, FLUSH.

So plants it is. I haven't given up on getting help, by the way, but I suspect I'll look like the Cryptkeeper before I find a willing neurologist. Healthcare isn't always for everyone in some places, unless you are a rich, straight, white man. One neurologist asked me if I've considered eating more for breakfast.

There's also a horrific catch 22 with many autoimmune diseases, no one can do anything until your body has deteriorated to the point of showing damage at the macro level. So it's "sit here and rot until you rot substantially enough to determine which variety of rot you have, and now by the way, your body is rotten," but also, swift identification and treatment is essential to remission and retaining function.

I knew things were bad, but wasn't 100% sure what was happening. This is really something to digest, because I finally caught it red handed, lights on, pants down.

Now I know what I'm up against, anyway.

I feel for you!

A wall of switches as a representative for the e.g. neurological system is amazing. The switches being the synapses? Like an old school primal computerish mechanical switchboard that is still present in any big size modern computer, still operates as a bunch of transistors, on or off switches and from there towards functionality, or disfunctionality depending on the mastering of the switches.
We know the beloved molecules affect the activity in the synapses, it all makes some sense that way.

As for the part of what and how the switches are operated, the mastery behind all that, is another layer of the message. There the cannibalism reflects sorts of self-sabotage, it seems.

I'm very much out on a limb here, chances are huge that the following extrapolation is totally wrong but here it goes anyway, sorry for however this comes across, please forgive me, but do you still wanna live? How's your relation to existing itself? Both on a practical day to day level but maybe more important on a larger existential level?

I for one have a serious bone chewing going on existential matters (who isn't?) but death wouldn't save me from it I suppose, so I reckon self infliction is no solution. But I can imagine easily mere psychological induced semi self inflicting patterns working in the shadows (referring to the former mentioned self-sabotage) to occur to lavish the need to semi-escape existence at large, if that makes sense?

Maybe I shouldn't have said all this, maybe I'm just projecting my issues onto yours, I dunno, I really don't want to disturb you any more than the problems you already have, but on the other side this is a forum and just a forum for that matter. The questions are very rhetoric, no need for explaining here really, it was just freewheelingly hunting possibilities.

For someone experiencing such distressing neurological symptoms you are very good at writing coherent sentences. I know this is probably a dumb question but have you considered stopping taking psychedelics and asking someone you trust to take you to the neurologist while you are experiencing these horrible symptoms? What has been your longest break from taking psychedelics?

I wish you the best in your effort to heal.

Probably not a useful question, but do you take any plants on a regular or semi-regular basis since the problems began?

I’m sorry this is happening to you and I don’t think you should feel any shame in allowing us to sympathize/empathize. I probably don’t have much to add that you don’t already know much better than I, but just want to send some affirmation your way.

I got a chance to participate in the early days of aya tourism at the turn of the millennium and spent several weeks with the Shipibo on a couple of occasions. Back then it was primarily something people were seeking to get relief from chronic and terminal illnesses, and I heard many first hand anecdotes of total remission from things that people had spent decades struggling with or were expected to die from imminently.

And, of course, the Shipibo considered vine to be ayahuasca and the vine teaches us about other plants. DMT carrying plants were considered somewhat peripheral and secondary; not much more important than the other plants that aya could teach us about. Chacruna might help make it easier to find where a particular plant is growing or make it more clear what it’s properties were, especially if incorporated into a brew, but aya was the teacher. I’m glad you trust enough in ayahuasca and yourself to be receptive to her guidance.

It’s very courageous of you to fight through your symptoms for your family, but I very much doubt they would ever consider you a burden.

Sending love from you’re Nexus family too

Very sorry to hear that. I've been in a similar situation of not being able to work and needing to work part-time. My unhappy message from ayahuasca was to stop drinking it because my life was too toxic. And I didn't listen then. Bad things happened. Now I have listened.

Hope you can figure out quickly what is going on. Best of lack with your fast and next steps.

Take care.

JH

Thanks for the love, everyone. I have been coming to Aya for some kind of answer since last December, and the combination of finally having gotten it (after realizing I missed it from day one), and then the gravity of it freaked me out hard. Had a bit of a dark night of the soul this afternoon but starting to feel more grounded now.

@jungleheart

Sending good vibes to you too.

@Jees



This is where medicine work in general gets interesting, and I appreciate you asking these questions. On one hand, my immune system is attacking my CNS and the cannibalism is quite literal, the cigar is the cigar.

But nothing is ever one dimensional, and everything is the microcosm reflecting into the macrocosm ad infinitum. I absolutely do want to live. The core belief of shamanism is that everything possesses the power to self-heal.

I had a screwed up childhood though. I learned about something called the ACES score recently, and it's about how X number of childhood traumas increases the likelihood of chronic illness by X percent, and if the score is 4 or higher, it becomes statistically significant. Mine is a 7 or 8, depending on how you count it. This was why I found Aya originally, did my shadow work with her, got the message and then hung up the phone. I feel like I had a late start in life, but after that first bit of work with her, I got my act together, learned how to have functional relationships, went to school, started a career and was living my best life... until I got sick.

I think I'm still struggling with the anger of how having a late start set me back. I also don't know if you know the song by The Knife called We Share Our Mother's Health? At this point, I'm questioning how much trauma was imprinted into my body at some kind of unconscious cellular level. How much of my healing challenge going forward at this point literally has to do with unraveling ancestral trauma? My mom's whole side of the family is whacked out of their minds, and it was all dumped onto me.

I've never done any ancestral work with psychedelics. I was born into chaos. My mom took me out for lunch when I was nine years old and told me how she bitterly regretted not aborting me. For as much as I moved on from that as an individual, it comes as no shock that I developed something autoimmune later in life. I had an eating disorder in early childhood to deal with the stress of it all, too. Made peace with it as soon as I was able to get away from a toxic environment and start living on my own, but there are probably scars in the machinery of my body from it.

This is also why I want to seek 5meo, I have read so many accounts of people saying the somatic release potential is beyond that of nn. I wonder if going all the way in and reaching full exorcism status would be enough to flip an acquired immune dysfunction on its head.



I was at the point where I had given up speaking almost entirely until I started drinking Aya. She literally brought me back from the edge of some kind of horrifying catatonic abyss. At first, doctors thought it was meningitis, but it never went away. I lost the ability to type, words would come out in blobs of garbage, and my speech started to fail the same way. And if I stop drinking, I'll intermittently lose the ability to verbalize and nonsense words start coming out again. I wonder if there's a certain harmala or something that's binding or blocking a deleterious process in my brain.



I have had several periods of 3-4 weeks off Aya. As soon as it's out of my system, the weird sounds and the deafness come back. I lose my balance and control of my hands. The last time I took 3 weeks off, I fell and crashed into furniture and bruised. I would not be able to safely drive a car at this point if I stopped dosing. The only other meds that stopped this to some degree were steroids, and it's not cool to be on them 24/7 because they wreck your body.

The lowest point of this illness, combined with how it threatens my sensory integrity, and the fabric of the part of my mind that makes me a person, makes me want to avoid going back into that darkness at all costs. I was a thread away from losing myself completely.

So I'm in a unique place where I have no fear of tripping, because the consequences of stopping would be the worst possible outcome. I am a musician, I couldn't bear the loss of going deaf. Steroids stopped a lot of bad things, but didn't bring my emotions back or rehabilitate my speech and cognitive capacities.

Either plants will fix me, a neurologist will fix me, or no one can fix me but Aya has bought me some quality of life and extra time before I end up locked in a dementia ward.

It's a peculiar situation.

I had a family member die of cancer when I was young, and after seeing that, and later learning about Aya, I had decided long ago that if I ever ended up in a serious health battle, I would take it up with Aya. I had an unused stash from over a decade ago for exactly this purpose. Super happy I kept it. I didn't have the strength to brew in the beginning.

As a Schedule I substance, it has "no medicinal value."

But, psychedelics as an intelligent and targeted replacement to biologics:



https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih...pmc/articles/PMC8357986/

Hello ms manic minxx

My mum developed similar symptoms like you and she is getting a medication that is stabalising
serotonin levels. Kinda the same thing that harmalas do.
She is doing much better now and is starting a therapy to solve trauma from her childhood.

Just wanted to share that with you. Harmalas on their own are a great medicine, but you know that already. At least they take away the memory problems and the constant struggle for balance.

I wish you all the best and much love

Maybe, but unlikely. I have seen people with MS, lupis, RA etc smoke it and all still have auto immune diseases. I mean no disrespect, but having suffered for years with one, I find it crazy how much the psychedelic community wants to believe psychedelics will be functional anti inflammatories to the level where they can replace steroids. Cannabis, harmalas to some extent, and ketamine/dissos are really the only psychedelics that calm a flair for myself. Almost all others seem able to add discomfort, add exhaustion. The vasoconstriction is enough itself to make me wonder how a person too sore/stiff to move from one of these diseases, is really going to get on with things if they microdosed some mushrooms or LSD and skipped the prednisone? Its not going to fit within a realistic model of auto immune diseases, IMO.

5meo especially can leave a person feeling totally exhausted...not good when you already can hardly get upright for more than a few hours a day from heavy fatigue/nausea/vertigo etc.

Mescaline for myself even requires anti inflammatories to deal with side effects after. LSD often does it as well, and pretty much every tryptamine aside from melatonin at some point.
Just be careful and be good to your body. Tons of people take psychedelics and still need these meds. They do have some positive benefits in my experience for people suffering with these issues, but only as an adjunct to a total life overhual. IMO there is almost always some level of deep disturbance within the psyche, and the person needs real, proper rest.

If it is auto immune, how can you know your body is now not reacting to a number of different foods, herbs, spices, food coloring etc? Even throwing new herbs at your system could have unexpected results. It's pretty tricky to navigate and I feel for anyone who has to live with this confusion. It really can be extremely frustrating and confusing trying to figure these things out, so I wish you luck in finding some light at the end of that tunnel. Thats all we can hope for.

The most important thing in this line is the question mark at the end imho. Coming back to that later.

I think it's fair to say data is passed down, maybe by different systems but at least by one like e.g. dna? The motivation for this could be knowledge for surviving aka lessons learned, this suits nature very well, until this point little of woo.

What I read in mere spiritual approaches on the subject is a hard focus on those lives we know something about (parents, grandparents,..) , and go past all the data ingrained from the lives we know nothing about, going far back to the sprouting of life on earth, which are still very much working constituents inside us nonetheless, if we keep following the principle of 'passing down data'.

My point being: even if parents + grandparents data sets are weighting due being closer by in the timeline, I believe they are still outweighed by the colossal mass of innumerable datasets of which we have no dear remembrance off at all and this puts in perspective the overly importance that is sometimes given to isolated elements of the total picture.

In this light I question the spiritual hard focus on the datasets in eye sight and it allowed me let go of thinking too much about this subject as a whole, kind of a relief to not bother too much anymore on these matters. This is my 2 cents answer to that mentioned 'question mark', it works for me and just sharing here.

Did you have COVID? Curious; what was the respiratory infection a result of?

I believe you. Visions, from psychedelics as well as from dreams, can definately reveal knowledge that was lying dorment somehow, inaccesable to our normal waking counsciousness.

I don't know what to say. It's so heartbreaking to read what you're having to go through.

Whether a psychedelic like 5-MeO-DMT is going to be helpfull to you or not is probably not something that any of us know the answer to. Many psychedelics have a great therapeutic potential. I have repeatedly experienced this myself.

But i have experienced a simmilar effect from practicing meditation and mindfullness. Especially when being out in nature.

Stressfull things, and what you're going through must be stressfull, can easily trap me into endlessly ruminating over all the bad stuff.
I don't know why we humans do that, because it certainly doesn't help but only wears us down.

And just breaking away from negative thoughts is often very helpfull by itself. It takes some of all of that deadweight off your shoulders.

Autoimmune diseases are f***ing terrible. But i know someone who struggled for a long time with post covid issues, including neurological symptoms. The doctors didn't know what was going on and couldn't help her. But she did eventually get better, just by herself.

* Survival strategy patterns to be one step ahead of worst case scenario's? It could be functional in that way but asks for an investment of energy for sure.
* Worrying as in delivering those traces of adrenaline and whatnot we might get accustomed or even a degree of addicted too? Why is there such a fascination for emo and adrenaline producing movies? Hitting buttons to get a 'shot' of natural drugs?
* Escaping dullness of life?
* ...

I visited a monastery in plain nature once, talked to one monk and said: "It must be so great to live a simple life in such a peaceful setting." He nearly interrupted my sentence and said: "Do not mistake, the uproar comes from within." Then I said "Yes but this nature..." and he swiftly repeated his line again. I kept silent...

What is your diet like and when was the last time you did a lymphatic cleanse while also using kidney filtration formulas? This would fit into the juice period you're planning

Firstly, I am sorry to hear of your health struggles. I know from my experience how challenging and even bewildering that can be. It sounds like you are taking it by the horns, so to speak, and your deeply held philosophy is informing your way through this.



The ACES is a newer diagnostic tool used in mental health and addiction treatment. We are beginning to see and understand how trauma is not only prevalent but probably universal in people experiencing these struggles. I used to think of my childhood as idyllic, but the fact is is that it was anything but. I also have a high ACE score. While I think my cancer and post-op infection were caused mostly by lifestyle choices (Cigarettes and weed smoking, chemical exposure etc), I also feel on a deeper level that there has been a somatic imprint of my trauma that manifested in that illness, the environmental triggers were just the things that allowed it to emerge. At first I only saw it as a universe making me suffer for no other reason than to suffer, I now see it as that same universe forcing me to align myself and my actions with my values- making me walk my talk. Perhaps aya can give you some information about your trauma's role, if any, in your current condition.

As a person who has suffered with CPTSD symptoms for a very long time, I became a master at dissacociating from my body. I joke around that my pronouns are We, Us because I am my mind and my body and the two are not connected. My recent illness served to connect me with my somatic experience though and I am learning currently about how the body holds onto our traumatic memories when we are unable to resolve them. I am becoming aware that all the energy I put into distancing myself from my stories only entrenched the negative experiences more deeply within my body. I think that is where the work is for traumatized people. I call it the story trap. We will ALWAYS have the memories, forgetting them is impossible, and engaging in numbing strategies to ameliorate the symptoms of PTSD only serves to annihilate our creativity and deny our possibility. We need to learn how to free ourselves from the places and times where we we abused or victimized and doing energetic work is the way to do that in my opinion. I think 5meoDMT can be a great tool-perhaps the best substance to use- for energetic somatic release and if you don't have any contraindications for its use, might be a valuable asset for what you are going through.

None of this is probably useful to you, I didn't want to just relate my own trip to yours but I find comforting people and being empathic with them to be the hardest thing in the world to do. If this interests you at all and if you can relate, the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, a trauma researcher with over a half-century of experience working with combat vets, abused children and as a individual therapist has been a real eye-opener for me. While it can be very difficult to read; I need to close it and walk away sometimes to go into the feelings it brings up, it is a wonderful work. It is not dumbed down but can be easily understood even by a non-clinician like myself.

Peace, and be good to you.

Yes, i think Null24 is right. Made me think of what i belief is called the "pink elephant effect". It's when you tell people not to think about pink elephants and it results in them constantly having to think about pink elephants.

Of all the hellish bad trips i've ever had with psychedelics, i think not 99%, but absolutely all of them had a strong pink elephant compound to them.

You try not to have a certain negative thought, and as a result the negative thought becomes all there is. And the harder you fight, the more hellish it gets.

With psychedelic experiences, i find the only, or at least the by far most efficient way, to get out of that loop, is to stop fighting. But it took me a while to learn how to do that. It has something to do with trust in yourself. Being able to accept that the very dark things that haunt you, are a part of yourself. And that it is safe for you to do so.

But all of this doesn't very easily translate to traumas that have become so deeply engrained in your system that they manifest themselves on a physical level. We don't know where the on and off switches are to the things on the deepest levels of our being. They operate more or less automatically.

Aya made you aware of something though. It may be easier to find that off-switch now.

Buckwheat

@jamie

You bring up some interesting points. I haven't tried smoking anything since this happened. I do question how effective various routes of administration would be for different conditions. There are so many receptors in the gut, oral vs. inhaled for anything could produce strikingly different results. I have a medical cannabis card, and it's commonly explained that oral administration should be treated like a daily multivitamin to manage inflammation long term, and vaping should be reserved as a "rescue inhaler" for acute instances of pain. Long term oral administration should also reduce the frequency of acute episodes.

I wonder about dosage/frequency too. I initially experimented with microdosing Caapi, and that was like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt bottle. I was on steroids for MONTHS prior to that, and for me to get that same level of relief with Aya, I'm dosing twice a week. But it's kept me off them, and that's amazing, because steroids are terrible.

For psychedelics to be effective with chronic illness, they might have to be approached as more of a long term lifestyle decision, which isn't something we have a lot of cultural space for. But humira is for life. A lot of serious autoimmune conditions require 6-24 months of steroids, in combination with other infusions. Some people maintain remission with regular IVIG or rituxan treatments for life.

All of those treatments, or requiring a hip replacement from side effects of those treatments, are far more terrifying than psychedelics to me. They sound so traumatic to endure.

So, the "one trip to fix everything" seems like wishful thinking and is probably not a realistic goal. May not even be safe, depending on the person's condition. But anything that could improve quality of life is still valuable, and I really hope to see the floodgates opened on research in this lifetime. Plasmapheresis is $100k per infusion, and some people need that weekly. Syrian rue is what, $30 a kilo?

@Jees


This is a circle I get stuck in sometimes, how much is just something at face value? how much is my fault? how much is work that needs to be done? how much is me beating myself up? is that work that needs to be done in and of itself? I don't have the answers and don't know if I ever will.

@Sky Motion
I was denied PCR testing for covid because I got sick so early in the pandemic. I've been clinically diagnosed by multiple specialists and have various imaging that is highly suggestive of covid, but I never seroconverted. It's rare, but not everyone seroconverts. Definitely messed with my head though. Tested negative for over 20 different viruses so it wasn't some other infection that was obvious.

@null


Thank you, I value your input. There is definitely a teaching element to this experience. It has peeled away so many layers about how I relate to other people, and to society. And induced a serious leveling up in empathy.

I'm so glad you mentioned that book, I've been on the fence about buying it for a while!

@Kumarajiva
Buckwheat for spermadine, do you mean??

And thanks again, everyone else. One litmus test I realized I need to constantly ask myself is, "Am I having fun?" If the answer is no, I need to peace out and stop doing it. I'm ok with trying to live like that from here on out.

Buckwheat for fagomine. Incorporate into your diet. 1 cup daily. Not an instant fix but definitely will not hurt.

Part of being human I guess yet not necessarily a bad thing?

How it affects us, the gravity of it, does it drain ones selves or is it rather inspirational, is just another item with a learning curve. And one day is not the other, better to espect tides as in anyting natural.

Rollercoasters of various kinds seems to be a trademark of life. Finding out they're kind of inevitabel I'm busy to learn them riding while leaning back , meaning they can have some heart but not allowing them to hostage the heart, as an intention.