My 6-day retreat kicked off on a Saturday morning. The only other option was a 12-day retreat, which wasn’t possible on account of work. About eight of us joined the 12-day group halfway through, making a group of about two dozen souls. They hailed from all over, but mostly North America even if they were from elsewhere like Italy, Serbia, or Belarus.
When you arrive at Gaia Sagrada, the staffers and volunteers line up to welcome you with a genuine hug, as opposed to a perfunctory one. This really set the tone for the week, which was consistently one of love, openness, humility, and acceptance. Every paying guest, myself included, instantly adopted and co-opted this energy for themselves and others. I hugged complete strangers as though I’d known them forever. If that sounds odd, it is — but only at first, and only because that’s not how most of us were raised to be. But I’m here to tell you that skipping the usual arm’s-length BS and going straight for a real hug feels good.
The daily schedule is posted on a whiteboard every morning. Generally, it begins with a breakfast buffet and includes a variety of activities, all optional, that vary based on what the volunteers bring to the table. When I was there, you could sign up for a massage, a Tarot reading, dream analysis, art therapy, and the like. Some cost extra, some don’t. If you only wanted to nap or walk around the property, you were free to do so. They like to know where everyone is, but nothing is mandatory.
All I signed up for the first day was a limpia, or cleaning, given by a shaman named Fernando. Anyone can get a limpia in Cuenca at the mercados on weekends, which mainly involves being swatted by a bundle of plants while an old indigenous woman mumbles things in Quechua and “reads” an egg to discern what ails you. That takes about five minutes and costs $5.
This was way more involved, but the fundamental idea is the same: to cleanse your energy. Now, I’m way more woo-woo than I was just a few years ago, but I’ve had a couple of limpias and I haven’t felt differently afterward. Even so, I was up for anything (what was the point otherwise?) and sprung for the limpia.
The centerpiece, if you will, of Fernando’s limpia was something called rapeh (rah-PAY). It’s a mix of very finely ground tobacco, ash, and other medicinal plants that gets (ahem) blown into your nostrils by means of an angled pipe. In so doing, it forms a thin layer in your sinuses that is almost instantly absorbed. I’d never heard of the stuff, so I had no idea whatsoever what was coming.
It was about how I’d imagine snorting white pepper would be like. It burned, and my eyes watered as profusely as my mouth. He encouraged me to think of something I needed to expel (spiritually speaking), and then bade me to spit into the very wad of plants he’d been swatting me with earlier. He spoke some words over that mess and cast it aside. That done, he handed me a small bucket in which to spit and a wad of tissues for blowing my nose.
If you’ve ever had a cigarette or chewing tobacco, then imagine that initial blast of nicotine but 20X stronger. That’s rapeh. As it turns out, tobacco is every bit as sacred to the native peoples of Latin America as ayahuasca, San Pedro, peyote, and the like. Only it dates back much further, as early as 3000 B.C. In that sense, it’s a great example of how something that was natural and sacred eventually became adulterated.
Once the initial heady wave subsided and I cleared the stuff from my nostrils, they were as clear and open as they’d ever been, which for me is saying something. Did I feel clean? Sort of, at least in the sense that I could breathe spectacularly. As for my energy, I mainly just I felt open to the main event coming the next day.
The First Ayahuasca Ceremony: Pre-Drinking
The word “ceremony” gets thrown around a lot. Wedding ceremony. Awards ceremony. And yeah, in the sense that there are specific actions done in a certain order, they’re ceremonies. But you haven’t seen a ceremony until you’ve been to an indigenous plant medicine ceremony.
We gathered in the circular maloca — by definition a ceremonial space — at about 5:30 p.m. We arranged ourselves around the perimeter on comfy foam pads and waited while the ceremony “team” prepared. There was the shaman, a translator, and a fire keeper. The shaman prepares the ayahuasca itself and leads the singing of icaros, which are tuneless chants. The translator both translates and assists with the icaros (much more on those later).
Ultimately, the fire is the literal and figurative center of the ceremony. The logs are carefully and precisely stacked in a V shape pointing north. When they collapse, the fire keeper rebuilds it. Exhausted embers are fastidiously swept away and arranged into the shape of a creature like a butterfly or a firebird. It’s quite fascinating to watch.
Fussing over the fire and tossing in various seeds and herbs takes quite some time, much of which occurs in silence. Only once darkness has fallen and the fire is roaring does the main event take shape. In our case, it began by bringing around a bottle of tobacco water, which is exactly what you’d expect — water in which tobacco has been simmered and strained. They pour a bit into your cupped hand, and then you snort it. Weird, I know, but if you go into something like this with an open mind, your posture becomes one of, “Looks like we’re doing this now,” versus, “What are we doing and why?”
As a guy with chronic nonallergic rhinitis, I think someone needs to bottle tobacco water because it works like an absolute champ to clear your sinuses. That, presumably, is the point. You do get a wad of toilet paper to blow your nose, and helpers come around to collect it.
Around then it’s a good idea to locate your bucket. We’ll come back to that, too.
We were then exhorted to approach the sacred fire from the south (the open end of the V), take a handful of cedar seeds, and silently revisit our intention for the ceremony. Nobody gives you much of a guideline for this, as it’s deeply personal and meant to be between you and the spirits. But basically, it’s the reason why you’re there. I want to understand my depression. I want to uncover the source of my addition. I want to release my anger. That kind of thing.
But, as the shaman and others will remind you, the purpose of holding your intention isn’t to steer or direct your experience. That’s why they call it an intention and not a goal. “Mama Ayahuasca,” as they call her, will ultimately show you what you need with little or no regard to what you want.
Drinking
You’re not supposed to wear a watch or have any technology with you, so I’m only guessing when I say we drank at about 7:30. They come around with the bottle of prepared concoction, which is a mix of two plants. The active ingredient in ayahuasca is DMT, or dimethyltryptamine. We don’t naturally have the ability to metabolize it because of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase. That’s why one plant contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Effectively, it frees the DMT to be absorbed by the gut. I think it’s impressive that an ancient culture somehow figured out the complex chemistry of this.
The shaman pours you a shot glass of the stuff, which is dark brown and about the viscosity of milk. To me, it tasted like a combination of very bitter chocolate, a flat imperial stout beer, and mud. It’s vile, but not as aggressively so as San Pedro. Mercifully, you don’t have to down any more of it than if some well-meaning drunk buys you a shot of Jagermeister.
Once everybody drinks, there isn’t anything to do but wait for it to kick in. You’re not supposed to eat much beforehand, and if you don’t, you might start feeling the effects in a half hour or less. For me, it took a solid hour of just laying there and waiting while the ceremony “crew” launched into the icaros.
The Experience
My eyes were closed when the first geometric shapes materialized out of the dark. Much of it felt like a movie was playing on the backs of my eyelids, and I only had to watch.
Eventually, the shapes became something that I immediately dubbed The Everything Thing. It felt as though I was in deep space slowly floating past an object vaguely shaped like an angular spaceship. Its parts kept folding and unfolding slowly. As I got closer, I saw that its surface comprised tiles that constantly flipped and rotated to reveal new things. Scenes. A rainbow. A smiley face emoji. Stars. I got the sense that every tile represented somebody or something in the universe, always shifting but always still a part of this impossibly large object.
At one end of the object, its contiguous, solid-seeming nature bled into millions of long, hairlike filaments that tapered to nothing. It gave me the sense that it was radiating out into the universe from there. But as fascinating as it was, it all felt very cold and mechanical, and I was alone in my observation.
Soon, that scene morphed into something much more organic. I was in a beautiful forest a safe distance from a wasp nest affixed to a long branch. Wasps were flitting about. As I watched, though, they became much larger and black, multiplying before my eyes until there was a whole cloud of them. I didn’t specifically hear anyone say, but more got the impression that I was being shown, I could fill the skies with these if I wished. So many that they would blot out the sun. Do you understand?
The message resonated strongly with me. It reminded me that the conditions for our existence are improbable. That there is way more good than bad in nature, but that it can change on a dime and there’s nothing we can do about it. I even got the sense that, with apologies to Belinda Carlyle, heaven isn’t some place we need to fantasize about. It’s all around us, sometimes hiding in plain sight. I felt I was being reminded to pay attention to this fact. To be present. To rediscover the wonder of being in nature.
That was about the time I threw up.
The buckets are there for what they call “purging,” which is a euphemism for puking. According to plant medicine enthusiasts, purging is a physical manifestation of releasing something dark, like when the creepy kid in a possession movie throws their head back and projectile vomits onto the ceiling. Only instead of black, tarry goo, it’s the remains of vegan spaghetti and a banana. I had my bucket ready in plenty of time and hurled for maybe a minute, which wasn’t bad at all. Others had a much harder time, and it may emerge from either or both ends. Vigilance is key.
For “visions,” that was about it, and it was because of the icaros.
Enough with the Chanting Already
The shaman and his helpers drink as well, and it’s fair to say that they enter a sort of trance. Playing a drum or shaking a bundle of dried leaves, they sing icaros from the time you drink until the time the ceremony is completed, which came to about seven hours of tuneless chanting.
I found it very difficult to continue going inward with so much external stimulation and deeply craved silence. I happened to have my travel backpack along and thought I might have earplugs, which I mercifully did. They went in, I pulled my hat over my ears, and if I buried my head deep under the thick wool blankets, I could almost shut off the music. There, I enjoyed a self-directed flight of fancy about an old 80s-style TV ad like they used to do for compilation albums, this one titled, Now That’s What I Call Seven Hours of Tuneless Chants!
Featuring such hits as:
- Dentro de Ti
- Medicina Sagrada
- Para Ver
- Ni Ni Ni Ni
I was cracking myself up imagining such an ad while the woman beside me cried for several hours. I could’ve requested another shot of aya, and a handful of people did, but I felt like the one major lesson I got out of the deal was valuable enough that I didn’t need more. Plus, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of being back in the medicine and likely purging again.
The ceremony concluded around 3:15 a.m. We were invited to enjoy some food at the nearby maloca kitchen, and we ate for a while as we shared our experiences. Nobody had remotely the same experience or learned the same lessons, which reflected the oft-repeated truism that no two experiences are the same. A few people said they simply fell asleep and had no real experience. Someone else had a long conversation with a fox.
I turned out the light in my cold little room at about 4:10 a.m. Though I wasn’t “in” the medicine, it was still in me, and good sleep was elusive. By the time I finally drifted off, my only thought was, Am I really doing this again on Wednesday?