The Voices in My Head - Part II
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 2 of an EIGHT-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
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.
Cover 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