The Voices in My Head (Part 4)

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 4 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

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.

The Voices in My Head - Part IV

It took me a few minutes to understand that

I WAS IN MY MOTHER’S BRAIN.

Next: Read The Voices in My Head Part 5 >>