The Voices in My Head (Part 1)

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.

THIS IS PART 1 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

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.

Cover Image: eskymaks

The Voices in My Head - Part I

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.

Next: Read The Voices in My Head Part 2 >>