The Voices in My Head - Part III
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 3 of an EIGHT-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
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.
Cover Image: Bryan Goff