The Voices in My Head
I’m not schizophrenic, but sometimes I hear voices. They’re not loud, but they’re assertive and are really part of a tide of knowingness that I’ve experienced at different times in my life. So when I woke to a voice that told me I was to spend my next birthday in Santa Fe taking Ayahuasca, I wasn’t surprised.
AN EIGHT-PART SERIES, BASED ON A TRUE STORY
Originally published June 2022 on nicolejeffords.com
Part I: The Voices in My Head
Image: eskymaks
Image: Vita M (Unsplash)
I’m not schizophrenic, but sometimes I hear voices. And when I hear them, I take them seriously. They’re not loud, but they’re assertive, telling me to move to a certain city or switch up my life and study a new thing. One morning in June, 1995, I woke to a voice that said: Ho hum, you have breast cancer. (It didn’t actually say “Ho hum,” but that was the yawningly detached attitude it presented.) I went straight to my gynecologist who palpated my breasts and said there was nothing she could detect. (A small lesion deep in the breast was found on a mammogram a month later.) I could say that incident freaked me out, but it didn’t; I was used to the voices, which were really part of a tide of knowingness that I’d experienced at different times in my life. And so when, a few years later, I woke to a voice that told me I was to spend my next birthday in Santa Fe taking Ayahuasca, I wasn’t surprised. The voice in this case was quite specific. I was to take the drug in a “beautiful” dome house in the desert outside Santa Fe.
I knew nothing about Ayahuasca, and thank god I had the sense not to research it because if I had, I would never have gone near the stuff.
I wasn’t a drug taker. A little marijuana, sure, but I’d never had LSD, and at that point hadn’t even tripped on mushrooms. Coke didn’t agree with me. I was terrified of not being in control of my body. And, after twenty-four years sober from alcohol, I was very leery of anything that could take me out of normal consciousness. But Ayahuasca called to me. The only time I’d ever heard it mentioned was at a lunch with a group of dancers from my ecstatic dance group in the fall of 2003. The woman seated next to me told me she’d taken Ayahuasca over the summer. “What is that?” I asked. She had a strong French accent and I couldn’t understand her.
“A drug,” she said. “Makes you know yourself.”
Those words must’ve stuck in my head. Two years later, when I woke to a voice instructing me to take Ayahuasca in the desert, she was the person I called. I didn’t really know this woman. And I had no idea I was about to embark on a journey that would completely change – and rearrange – my life.
Part II: The Voices in My Head
Image: Filippo Carlot | Detail of a drum on the ground and the other in the hands of a player: The music that is played afd a ceremony with the use of Ayahuasca
Image: Vie Studio
Her name was Francine. She was a tiny woman with an extremely thick French accent. I didn’t know her well. In fact, I really didn’t know her at all. We agreed we would fly up to Santa Fe together. We, or rather, she, had a phone number for the people we were to meet there. All I had been told about the Ayahuasca journey was to bring white clothing.
We ended up at a large, glass-walled geodesic dome house in the desert outside of Santa Fe, just as my waking voice had predicted. It was April 15, my birthday – the voice had predicted that, too. There were thirty of us, men on one side of the circle, women on the other. We were from all over the country, and it turned out that almost every person in the group was a therapist or psychiatrist or body worker of some sort. The shaman arrived with three musicians. He was from Brazil and had a soft, round face, kind eyes and a gently smiling mouth.
The first thing he said to us was that though we might feel really terrible for a while, no one had ever died of Ayahuasca. Well, that was comforting.
One by one, we filed into the kitchen where the shaman, whose name was Carioca Freitas, dosed us each with a small tumbler of gritty, foul-tasting liquid. “Wait for thirty minutes,” he said. That was how long it would take for the drug to kick in.
In that half hour, I noticed that the light seemed to dim to a greenish gray as if the air had become more dense, and that the collective mood of the group seemed to sink and disintegrate as participants were overtaken by the drug. There was a sense of fear, uneasiness, trepidation in the air. In front of each participant was a puke bucket of some sort, and that certainly didn’t inspire confidence. Nor did the feeling of cramping and nausea that assailed my body. Suddenly, I felt awful. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Francine elegantly ducking her head to vomit in the puke receptacle balanced on her hip. The musicians sang beautiful Portuguese hymns extolling the virtues of Ayahuasca, the jungle vine that brought visions and revelations and that was closely connected to Virgin Mary, mother of all things. And as they sang, I felt sicker and sicker. In a trance, I somehow made my way to the bathroom and then to a mattress on the floor in one of the bedrooms. I was dying. No one could have convinced me otherwise.
Part III: The Voices in My Head
Image: Bryan Goff
Image: Hulki Okan Tabak
In a way, perhaps I did die on that first Ayahuasca journey. Certainly my life was never the same afterwards. To those who inquire, I say Ayahuasca is not for the faint of heart. You might want to learn about yourself and your purpose, what you’re doing on the planet, how to achieve your goals, but the ingestion of Ayahuasca is not necessarily the way to do it. For one, it’s a terrifying experience. You’re stuck between gears for a while, outside your body, untethered, feeling truly terrible as the drug forces you from the life you know and throws you into a part of your consciousness so unfamiliar to you, it might as well be the other side of the moon.
As people around me began to moan and cry out in reaction to the drug, I started to feel as if I were disintegrating into shards of pure, unadulterated panic. I experienced a psychic pain far more punishing than any actual physical pain I’d ever had, including childbirth. It was crazy! I never knew I could be that miserable or frightened, and didn’t think I’d be able to endure it now. But suddenly, things switched. As I lay writhing on a mattress, praying for something to come along and obliterate my pain and anguish, something did come along.
It wasn’t something I could touch or see, but I sure as hell could feel it – a presence that had no root in my interior landscape, that was utterly foreign and yet seemed to know all there was to know about me.
Immediately I was aware that it was a guide (I don’t like to say spirit guide, too hokey, but that’s probably what it was). “We have a lot of work to do,” it said with calm authority, “and we’re going to start here.”
You’re supposed to form an intention for an Ayahuasca journey. Mine had been to explore the universe, a really stupid one as the piece of universe I was allowed to witness was so gigantic the eye couldn’t make sense of it. But the guide had no interest in showing me the universe. It wanted me to have some sort of life review instead, and promptly began bombarding me with images of my first husband, informing me that – to move forward – I needed to understand what had gone wrong in the marriage. (Whatever revelations it offered have since, I regret to say, disappeared.)
Later, I was told by the shaman that one had to do a lot of “housekeeping” before one would be granted visions of the cosmos. That computed since my whole first journey was about clearing up the briar-patch of my alcoholic past. When I returned to normal consciousness about three hours later, I felt extremely clear and peaceful, a feeling that would last the next few weeks. But I still didn’t know why I’d been pushed to take the drug. The whole experience had been extremely unpleasant, not one I’d ever want to repeat again. And yet, a little voice inside me told me I’d have to.
Part IV: The Voices in My Head
Image: Sachin Khadka
In July of that same year, I went on a second Ayahuasca retreat, this time with a female shaman in a farmhouse outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. To my surprise, many of the same participants from the first retreat were there. We were shown into a long, narrow, darkened room, again with puke buckets at each spot. The floor was hard and uncomfortable; in the scant light we could barely see one another. As we settled in, the shaman, a tall, bone-thin woman from Peru, kneeled beside each of us for a few words about dosing. It seemed to me, I was given a larger glass of the stuff than at the retreat in Santa Fe. The effect was almost immediate: within minutes people were doubled-over, moaning and vomiting. If there was a hell, it was surely right here, right now, with everyone’s guts emptying on the floor and the crazy-seeming shaman wandering among us, singing songs we couldn’t understand at the top of her lungs.
The bathroom was in a nearby passage with the faintest gleam of light indicating where it was; I had to crawl on my belly to get there. Meanwhile, my brain was flooded with imagery I was unable to interpret, a dark jumble that looked like an obstacle course with a thin arrow of light in one corner, an image that repeated over and over again with the slightly blurry quality of a sonogram.
It took me a few minutes to understand that
I WAS IN MY MOTHER’S BRAIN.
Yes, sounds crazy, but that’s where I was, inside the brain of a ninety-five-year-old woman who was a shut-in in a Park Avenue apartment, who spent her days curled up asleep in a fetal position, so thin and desiccated that she resembled the transparent, dried-up carcass of some sort of ancient beetle.
Once I understood that, I realized my mother’s plight was the whole reason I’d been pushed to take Ayahuasca in the first place. It wasn’t just some random decision, an idle, flippant oh I’ll take this trendy drug to find out my life’s purpose, but rather an invitation to embark on a journey that would allow me to engage with my mother as she lay dying.
I immediately booked a ticket to New York.
Part V: The Voices in My Head
Image: Rey Proenza
Image: Franyo (left) and Nicole in the 1970s
My mother was a vain and difficult woman, a narcissist who could only talk about the things that interested her. When I was a child I adored her. I remember her cuddling me and speaking a made-up baby language filled with interesting words (ler ler for pee, plum plum for poo – she liked onomatopoeia). She was different from other mothers I knew – a tall, stylish woman who spoke with an accent and had no qualms about dressing down a person for dirty fingernails, messy hair, an ugly outfit. She was also one of the most creative people I’ve ever known – a talented painter, chef, guitar-player, seamstress, pastry-maker, dress designer – it seemed she could do anything with her hands. Throughout my life, however, hers was the crowing voice of disdain and mockery when it came to my own small talents.
Clearly, my mother couldn’t deal with other people’s gifts. I’m not sure she realized how much of a barrier that put between us, but it was enough for me to keep a distance; I lived in Austin, Texas, and she lived in Manhattan, and when I traveled to New York I would visit her, but stay at my sister’s apartment across the park on West 66th Street. By then my mother had suffered a few small vascular strokes and was dealing with dementia. She knew who and where she was and she had no trouble recognizing me when I appeared, but her wits were gone and conversation with her was childlike. When I arrived that day at the end of August, she was slumped over in a chair by her bedside. She had been tidied up for the visit, hair combed, a clean dressing gown on her emaciated body. As I entered the room, she remained with her head bowed over her chest, not looking up, not seeing me. To a casual observer, it would have appeared that nothing was going on, but that wasn’t true. Perhaps because of my Ayahuasca experience, I had become more sensitive to energy and could feel it – currents of raw energy – zinging back and forth between me and my mother.
It was as if we were speaking to one another energetically, although we both remained utterly silent.
A caregiver was present. As I stood there, mutely telling my mother how much I loved her, the caregiver raised her voice and said, “Talk to your mother!”
Talk? That’s exactly what we were doing.
I asked the caregiver to please leave the room.
Part VI: The Voices in My Head
Image: Zoltan Tasi
Image: Franyo (left) and Nicole nearing the end of Franyo’s life
My mother had not communicated with anyone in months, but that afternoon she communicated with me. She didn’t speak in words. Instead she looked into my eyes and what I saw there was a love I hadn’t seen since I was a child. As I spoke to her – and I did speak a few words aloud – she kept her eyes fastened to mine. “You are to follow the light,” I said, repeating the words the Ayahuasca guide had told me. “See that little bit of light at the edge of the darkness? Follow it, and it’ll take you where you need to go.” Then I assured her she’d always be in my heart and that I would always be there for her.
The remarkable thing is it worked, it clicked, she clearly understood what I was saying.
To my amazement, this wordless, almost lifeless old woman slumped in her chair raised her arm slowly, slowly and reached out to touch my chest. I was practically shaking with emotion.
She had taken in my words and we had some sort of deal, though I had no idea what this actually meant. I will tell you, however, that when I left her apartment that afternoon, she seemed lighter, freer, more animated, almost as if she had lost fifty pounds of psychic weight.
Three weeks later she was gone.
A week after the funeral, I was back in Austin and attending an afternoon dance in a large sunlit studio. As I was moving my body, shaking out my limbs, I heard my mother’s voice in my ear. It was very distinct, very emphatic. “Do this dance, this exact dance when the next practitioner comes to town.”
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I was a member of Austin’s ecstatic dance community. You didn’t need knowledge or training for that, only a desire to move your body to music that formed a wave, starting slow, going faster and faster, then slowing down again. Usually we danced on Fridays and Sundays, but this particular afternoon dance was a one-off put together by a trained facilitator who wasn’t one of our regular leaders. My mother had been very specific: Do this exact dance when the next practitioner comes to town.
That would be in six weeks, a practitioner flying in from California. I signed up for her class immediately, not thinking there was anything strange about being guided by a dead woman’s voice.
Part VII: The Voices in My Head
Image: Pavel Danilyuk
Image: Pavel Danilyuk
On the Friday night of the workshop, the facilitator, a middle-aged woman in yoga pants and a light blue tank top, told us to wear old dance clothes because we’d be painting. Painting? I thought. Screw that! I didn’t want to dilute my dance experience.
The next morning I arrived in an old pair of Lululemons. The workshop was situated in a studio I’d never been in before, a big, well-lit space with a springy wooden floor and many tall windows that looked out over a parking lot and an orchard of trees. The facilitator, whose name was Susan, told us to partner up. There were thirty of us and we divided into twos, one lying down on a long strip of butcher paper, while the other bent and outlined her form. When we returned from lunch that day, the strips of paper had been tacked to the walls and buckets of water, brushes, acrylic paint were scattered about the room. Susan put on music and told us to go for it. I went straight to the strip of paper that held my outline, which I would have recognized anywhere. (Years before, diagnosed with breast cancer, I’d had a skeletal x-ray done at M.D. Anderson, and the form, which seemed to strip me down to my essence, looked just like this.) I stared hard at it, and then I grabbed a brush.
I don’t think I can ever properly describe the thrill of dancing and painting at once, music pouring through my limbs as I whirled around in front of the drawing and began applying paint.
If there were a heaven, this would be it. I spent the next few hours thinking of nothing but perfecting the drawing, and people began coming up to me and pointing at the piece and saying, “Did you know you were an artist?”
Well, I did and I didn’t. My mother, an abstract painter, had taught me to draw when I was a child. Throughout college I’d taken art classes, but I’d never considered myself an artist because, even from early childhood on, I’d wanted to write novels.
So now what? I was unable to contain my excitement over this new-found ability to put an image on paper that people would immediately be able to recognize. As I thought about it, still dancing and wielding a paintbrush, I added a figure to the background without realizing what I was doing, a woman offering a bouquet of flowers. It was my mother, I immediately realized, letting me know from whatever afterlife she was in that she was the one who’d pushed me into joining this particular dance and discovering a whole new direction. No one could talk me out of that belief.
Part VIII: The Voices in My Head
Image: Nicole in her studio (2021)
The day after the workshop I went out and bought $400 worth of art supplies. That was seventeen years ago. I knew my goal was to eventually paint portraits but it was a long skip, hop and jump from where I was at that point to where I wanted to be. In the first year, I filled half a dozen sketch pads with smudgy drawings of people I made sit for me. I was good at resemblances, and in a way that made sense: if you drew someone it was a little like writing a story about them.
I gave myself a year and worked like a dog. I figured if I got good at drawing, I could one day move on to oil paint, which was my goal.
And so I drew and drew and drew to the point where I damaged my wrist, and still I heard my mother’s voice in my ear: Keep moving that hand!
Needing a place to work, I rented a studio in a warehouse filled with artists on Austin’s east side. A year later, I built my own studio in the tree-filled yard behind my house, a place that became a magical sanctuary for me and the people who came to visit and have their portraits painted.
Nicole and her studio mate, Lucille, in front of her studio
In the years since, I’ve painted dozens of portraits, some of them commissions, some of them people whose faces interested me. I’ve had no regrets. I’ve taken classes, studied with some fantastic painters, honed my skills.
Images of Nicole’s earlier paintings 2009-2011, from left to right - Top: Big Al, Girl with Red Hair, Leslie Cochran | Bottom: Suzanne, Craig, Arden in Dress
Now I’m at the point where I can take my time, pick and choose projects. Because of arthritis in my wrists, my focus in the past year or two has been on drawing – spot illustration – rather than painting. This has been very gratifying to me. I’ve managed to produce portraits in graphite and colored pencil that are every bit as exciting to me as portraits in oil. And so I continue with my process of capturing an image on paper, and if it’s a politician or someone controversial or well known, writing about them. I no longer hear my mother’s voice in my head, egging me on. Perhaps I’m doing something right.
