I have eight years of experience with various psychedelics, but I am new to ayahuasca (or mimosahuasca to be exact). I have only two experiences so far in exploratory dosages, but I am already in love with it. I want to describe my second experience, which I had last weekend. Rather than go through the experience chronologically, I will just extract the most notable moments and insights. I tripped by myself in a dark and silent room, lying on bed with my eyes closed.
First of all, both my experiences give me the impression that aya has much more agency of its own in comparison to other psychedelics I have used, like LSD. I have had traumatic memories and emotions be released by LSD and 4-AcO-DMT, but this appears more a side-effect of the ‘doors being opened’ rather than something intentionally caused by the substance. With aya, I get the distinct feeling that it WANTS me to look at specific memories or issues. I have not yet experienced a sense of the often mentioned ‘femininity’ or ‘motherliness’ of aya, but I do feel a distinct agency in the substance. Very interesting. (I have only felt this with one other substance, salvia divinorum, but that plant seemed to just enjoy messing with me!)
This time, I was brought back to high school and the chronic sadness and isolation I felt for many years. There was no special event or anything that came up in memory. It was just an image of me at 17, sitting in class and feeling sad and alone. I did some cathartic crying and realized that I am still carrying these emotions in my mind and body, that they still affect me way of being-in-the-world, although it is very much unconscious. Remembering this gave me an opportunity to forget this sadness and the story that accompanies it, making me more a child of the present moment than one of the past.
Somewhat related to the above, is that throughout the experience I noticed a continual tendency of my mind to remember all the insights and ideas that I was having throughout the experience, that my mind constantly clung to all these amazing things by trying to memorize them. But I also noticed that this tendency had a very fragmentary effect on my experience of being alive and got in the way of me fully living in the present moment— this tendency counteracted exactly that which it wanted to persist. I often managed to let go of this tendency, but it seems incredibly deeply rooted because it always came back. I would (ironically) end up writing down the following: ‘Memory drowns the NOW’, and ‘Remember only the Now-- thinking is to forget God’.
There was indeed a strong urge to give up thinking altogether. I also wrote down (again, ironically) that ‘Silence is omniscient’, which would make thinking (a form of noise) entirely redundant. I wanted to dissolve my mind into silence and let that silence take care of everything, permanently.
As I cried, I also had a strong feeling that culturally, ‘we’ have a dysfunctional relationship to emotions. When someone cries, we panic and ask what is wrong, as if the emotion is automatically a problem that must be fixed. Conversely, you cannot be ecstatically happy in the office because people will think you are mentally ill. There is an unspoken imperative to be ‘vaguely happy’— only in that way do we feel at ease with one another. Anything else offends a false standard of normalcy. I imagined a world where you can cry or be sad and it is seen as a normal part of life, rather than something that must automatically worry others and yourself, i.e. a world where others can just be present with you as you experience emotions without making a big deal of it. Something like “Oh, s/he is having emotions. That’s ok.” Talking is an option, but not obligatory.
Because of this, I also felt skeptical toward psychotherapy, or especially psychoanalysis, ‘the talking cure’. This cultural notion that we must always talk about our emotions, it seemed to me, reflects an unhealthy dominance of the rational intellect over other faculties of experience, like feeling. A possible fallacy of psychotherapy is the assumption that one’s state of being is reducible to words and that the solution to psychic suffering lies in intellectualizing differently. I strongly felt that this is not the case— that oftentimes emotions only need to be fully felt in order to remain healthy ones, that oftentimes we do not even need to ask ‘why’ we are having an emotion but instead just respect that it is a part of our experience when they present themselves. Aside from not be reducible to words, they might not even always be explicable in words, at all. It is attention that is curative and not words or talking.
However, I do see that psychotherapy can provide a context for you to give attention to your state of being and someone to guide you toward those aspects of your life that require attention. I also acknowledge words as vehicles for emotions etc. that can then be brought under the spotlight of attention (whereas without the words they would potentially stay hidden from consciousness). Moreover, sometimes it would be healing to address false assumptions and ideas etc. that a person may hold; for that, talking can also be the solution.
Then I remembered that I have always believed in God, but that this belief has been suppressed all my life. (I was even radically atheistic in high school). It felt profoundly liberating and healing to remember my belief in God, but at the same time I had no idea what I even meant by this. I cannot explain what I mean by God nor even what I mean by believing in it. It is as though believing in God is something I ‘just do’… but what is a belief without a corresponding content? I still don’t know. Under ayahuasca, this seemingly irrational notion made perfect sense and I joyously basked in my belief in God. It seemed entirely unnecessary and indeed impossible to explain this rationally. I imagined ‘coming out of the closet’ as a believer to my colleagues and confusing them with this, and that I would with full confidence and a smile on my face simply say “Try to understand that without your intellect”. But this confidence is no longer present, although I do not experience this as a problem. I am happy just being fascinated with this experience and pondering it once in a while.
Then during the come down I also had a flash of insight, which is that I am very lonely. So lonely in fact that I avoid other people, because they make me feel how alone I feel. And I wondered if loneliness is something other people can fix, or if it is a problem in the psyche of the lonely. Strangely, I was just happy about this insight and no sadness accompanied it. I just felt good about understanding myself a little better now.
Those were the highlights… I already look forward to my next experience, as I feel tremendous potential in aya!
“Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy” -C.G. Jung
"When in the body of a donkey, enjoy the taste of grass." -Tibetan Buddhist saying