Ceremony

I don’t have to believe in myself, I suddenly realize

Today’s Change of Heart: An excerpt from a longer piece about my first ayahuasca experience that may or may not ever be “finished” (like everything else).

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My mat is positioned at the far wall of the maloca—a huge, circular hut, all handsome wood paneling and screens where there would be picture windows—directly opposite the swinging double-doors. Lying back on my padded mat, my head on the pillows, other participants start trickling in slowly. The room is thick with heat, and my skin already sticks to the fabric cover of my little mattress, my soon-to-be space shuttle.

“It’s like the roller coaster is on its way up,” says one of my cohort as he gets himself situated.

We’ve been instructed not to chat during this pre-ceremony time, but the rest of us chuckle and agree, lying back under the circular steeple of the maloca, all its supportive beans pointing up to the apex that will later feel like a black hole, like a portal into some other dimension.

We wait.

Once we are fully assembled—as we’d been informed earlier that day in a meeting would happen, ratcheting up the low tenor of my fear—the lights are dimmed. At the height of the ceremony, the space will be lit only by whatever moonlight can find its way in. My heart quickens, but I’ll soon understand this step’s logic: Far better for all of us that we don’t have to witness each other’s physical appearance, or our own, under the weighty thrall of ayahuasca.

The facilitators pad in and set out their essentials: a few extra pillows on the mats in the center of the room, which we all face; lanterns lit with candles; two bottles of thick, dark liquid.

The bottles sit there beside the mats, waiting for the maestros to arrive. The whole thing strikes me, somehow, as absurd; lying awake in my bed in Portland, I’d envisioned a boiling pot at the center of the room. Aside from their lack of labels, these look like regular plastic, twist-top bottles that might once have contained cola or juice.

The maestros—one male and one female Shipibo healer, who also happen to be a married couple—walk in next, officially beginning the ceremony. As they take their seats alongside the facilitators at the center of the maloca, the lights are extinguished completely. The gentle effects of moonlight and candlelight flood the room. We sit in this space of darkness together, quiet.

Now, the maestro takes and untwists the cap of one bottle, and begins to sing.

It starts in throaty whisper-tones before lifting into melody. The tune is almost jingle-like, with an upturn at the end. This is the first of the icaros we will hear tonight—healing songs that, in the Shipibo cosmology, are taught directly to the healers as they “diet” individual plants. (These diets are a long-form version of the dieta we’ve been instructed to follow, involving months-long periods of isolation and deprivation; sometimes, even water intake is limited.) During the diets, the healers listen closely to what the plants have to say—and the messages come in the form of music.

Over the course of the evening, each of us will receive two icaros directly—one from the maestro and one from the maestra. The healers, who have also drunk ayahuasca (albeit a much smaller dose than us patients), will fill the room with song for four solid hours. They’ll perform a kind of psychic surgery on each of us, using the power of their voices to shift and relieve the energy blockages la medicina enables them to see, moving from one participant to the next like the hands of a life-sized clock. 

First, though, we are invited to walk up to the center of the room and receive our dose.

The action progresses one by one from a start point that, we have been told, will shift each evening. On this night, I am the halfway point. Each of us approaches the facilitators and kneels on a pillow set out for this purpose, clutching the cup that—along with a plastic purge bucket, bottle of hand sanitizer, and small red flashlight—has been placed alongside our mat. (It looks suspiciously like the double-tall shot glasses I have seen under other, less sacred, circumstances.)

I am almost dissasociatively scared as I approach the facilitators, who smile encouragingly in the lamplight as I kneel.

The maestra carefully pours my dose. I pick it up and regard it for a moment before I do the thing I’d been convinced, from the very moment I’d booked the retreat, I would not end up doing: I drink it.

The taste of the brew is surprisingly pleasant—that first night, at least. It’s far fruitier than I’d expected of a substance that looks like electrified mud, and far thicker than the “tea” I’d long imagined. (Over the coming week, I’ll find its prune-juice-and-battery-acid flavor profile to have quickly diminishing returns.)

For maybe ten minutes, I feel nothing but the slight groan of my stomach reacting to the brew. Then, slowly, little electric flashes begin to bolt through my mind, neon blue and golden, river-like and flowing. The effect is muted and distant, as if ayahuasca is calling to me from the next room.

Ten minutes later, the world has changed.

Everything around me sparkles in flashes of sacred geometry; the room, in its darkness, looks somehow punctuated by tiny points of light—almost pixelated. There’s a kind of futuristic, haunted-comic-book aspect to the visual effect of the drug that I hadn’t expected from an ancient brew of Amazonian jungle plants; when I close my eyes, grotesque black-and-white cartoon demons flash their tongues and fingers at me. Open-eyed in the darkness, the sprawl of the tree branches outside become the cables of a massive suspension bridge.

Around me, the ceremony progresses in all its sensory richness: Each of us has a small bottle of Rao Ininti, a flowery perfume meant to help ground the participant and better connect them to the spirit of ayahuasca. We can anoint ourselves, but the facilitators, too, wander around, occasionally spraying it—or another heady mixture, agua florida—circle-wise over someone having a rough time. The healers also apply perfume liberally after each patient’s icaro; though I can’t quite tell in the dark, it sounds as though they’re spitting it onto us, usually from an impressive distance three or five feet from our mats. These florid scents combine with the thick smoke of mapacho, pure South American tobacco, which is also meant to direct and hone ayahuasca’s healing effect. We have each been given, and encouraged to light, a mapacho cigar—but if we don’t want to smoke, we are told, we can connect to the tobacco spirit simply by holding it in our hands.

The icaros progress, full-lunged and maddening, around the ring. When I close my eyes, I feel pulled, head-first, toward the voices. Throaty and guttural and sung in a mixture of Shipibo and Spanish, the songs are incomprehensible and ubiquitous, a weight in the room, a discipline. The maestro’s hearty, golden baritone tangles with the maestra’s reedier alto, rising in concert toward the zenith of the maloca. One song seems custom-built to pull poison out: Around me, maybe ten of the twenty people in the room heave at once, a chorus. The sound is baroque and raw: These are not demure spit-ups. My colleagues vomit as if they’re releasing every ounce of darkness their souls have ever carried.

This is the moment we’d prepared for that morning in the very first short “ceremony” of the retreat. We’d gathered in front of the maloca in the sunshine, eyeing warily the five-gallon buckets assembled in the grass, filled almost to their brims with a cinnamon-colored liquid. This was vomitivo: a tepid lemongrass tea which we would each chug on our early-morning empty stomachs until we puked it back up. In groups of four, we progressed to the fence railing, aiming ourselves at the parched trees for whom our efforts were a blessing. The rest of the group looked on, and after a time—in one of the most bizarre experiences of my entire life, including the actual ayahuasca ceremonies—began to cheer for us. At each station, a facilitator ladled the tea into our cups so we could drink at speed—drink, don’t think, we’d been instructed. 

When it was my turn, my body shook. “I don’t know if this will work for me,” I confessed to the facilitator standing beside me—the lithe, ballerina-like woman who had surprised me by hauling my suitcase down the hill to my room with ease. (She’d insisted.) “I haven’t vomited for something like ten years—and I’ve tried,” I said, willing her with my eyes to remember the eating disorder I’d mentioned in the previous night’s meeting.

Far from eye-rolling or condescension, her face was the perfect picture of empathy and concern. Clearly she could remember her first time being on my side of the bucket. 

“It’s pretty unavoidable,” she said, pouring the tea into my red cup. It was. After it was done, I took a glowing selfie in my room. I’d been so afraid of this part of the ayahuasca experience, I’d had nightmares about it for weeks. In the afterglow, I felt like I could accomplish anything.

Now, in ceremony, my stomach grumbles distantly—but even with the chorus around me, I don’t feel close to a purge. I listen with compassion and interest, and wrap my arms and legs around my bucket like a tether to the earth; I gaze down into its swirling depths like a portal to someplace where some important secret lives. I sway back and forth gently, then stifle a laugh, thinking of another of our facilitators. Your bucket becomes your ride or die, she’d said in that morning’s meeting. By the end of the ceremony you’re like, I love you, bucket!! We can’t be an hour and a half in, and already, she was right.

Before I’d come on the retreat, I’d heard people begin sentences with the phrase Mother Aya told me. Having had some sudden-clarity-access experience with mushrooms and LSD in my history, I thought I understood what they meant. At this point in the night, I learn I did not.

The voice I hear is my own, but bigger. It fills the room and it is also only inside my head. You’re so scared all the time, it whispers—good-naturedly, like a friend with their arm slung over my shoulder, empathetic but amused at the knots I tie myself into. You can’t control everything, silly.

I look down at my own arms and legs, at my body in this space, smiling to myself and still swaying. I’d been so, so afraid of this moment—so sure it would never actually come to pass. But here I am. I did it. Of course I did it. And somehow, it feels familiar, even cozy, like a house I’ve walked through many times before.

You can’t get away from yourself, the voice echos: my strength, beneath all the fear, and the adventurous heart that causes me to run toward that fear again and again. I’d feared losing my mind, losing myself, losing track of something important. But I feel steady, sturdy, clearer to myself than ever. I don’t have to believe in myself, I suddenly realize; I don’t have to worry whether I’ll handle everything life will bring to me. I just will.

Thank you, ayahausca, I whisper toward the vaulted ceiling, still smiling in spite of myself. 

That night, after the height of the medicine had worn off, I followed the path of starlight back to my room and opened my journal. Jamie Cattanach is someone who flies to the jungle to do ayahuasca, I wrote. I am so grateful to continue to get to know this person.