Ceremony with Diego, July 11th

(written a few days following the ceremony)

Recovering...still weak and spacey...what a three days it has been. Trauma, panic, ceremony, illness, purging, sleeping. Friday night was my hardest ceremony yet. It seems that it began hours before, and continued through the day yesterday. And it wasn´t a journey of great visions and insights, which made it feel even harder to accept and appreciate for me. But even now, in my early reflections, I understand that this whole miserable few days may offer me great insight into my own nature and suffering. And for as much as as that sucks, I am grateful to at least have the desire to understand it all.

One thing about recovering from illness, I feel so still inside, very still in mind. Efficient due to weakness. A gift of slowness, rest. No great desire to do or speak, just beingness. I am sad that I didn´t get to say goodbye to Maria and Sarah, but it had to be that way.

So, I spent a couple days and one night in Cusco, and that was a good experience for the most part. Noisy, touristy, hectic. But my hostel was fine, quiet, comfortable. I began to get a headache in the afternoon. I was walking in San Blas in the afternoon, and who appeared behind me but Janna! We had tea at the Coca Shop and talked, and she showed me her hostel, which was very nice. Then I headed toward the bus station around 3pm to head back to Cusco for the night´s ceremony. The day went downhill from there.

I got on the bus, in the front seat. We left once the bus was full, as is normal. We departed and I got a funny feeling about the driver. By the time we were in the mountains just over Cusco, I had caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror several times. His eyes were slow and kept shutting...definitely the eyes of someone who´s falling asleep, and very possibly because he was intoxicated. I became nervous when he kept taking his hands off the wheel to spread a red cloth over his huge gut, apparently to keep the steering wheel from rubbing. He only took the wheel when we began to run off the road, which happened three or four times. At that point, the road was well in the mountains, but I began to worry that he was in no condition to drive, and thought of the steep cliffs ahead...

I kept a close eye on his eyes. They fluttered open and closed. He looked out the window, we hit the gravel at the side of the road. We sped up, he braked hard to a near stop, then sped up again. Yawning, his eyes fluttered closed, desperate for sleep. I began to seriously wonder if we would hit the steep cliffs and sail right over. I began to cough loudly to startle him awake. He swerved, ignoring the yellow lines. He stared out the side window. His arm flailed around for the gear shift, finding it as if blind. My fear escalated. I looked around at the other passengers to see if they noticed, but it seemed they did not. I began to send spiky thoughts to poke him awake and coherent. The cliffs appeared. More speeding and steep braking, more disregard of the yellow lines. I visualized a protective white light around the bus and prayed that we would all make it alive to our destinations. I felt angry that this asshole could endanger all of our lives out of his own lack of awareness and apathy. Several times I thought to ask just to get off the bus and walk the rest of the way back to Pisac, but didn´t. I wanted to scream and cry, but didn´t. And when the orange Pisac bridge appeared, I was grateful to step off and have my feet on the earth again.

I felt lost and distant when I got off the bus. I wandered to Ulrike´s for a mate de coca, and drank it in strange silence. I felt like I was ill, but no particular illness could be detected as I scanned my body. What I hadn´t realized is that I had fled my body in a major way, fearing seriously that the bus would go over the cliff. I was feeling weak, and decided to take a taxi home to Paz y Luz.

It was only a few hours before ceremony, and I needed to change clothes and prepare my intentions. Gray let me into Stephanie´s room, where my things were being stored. I got clothes out and changed, and felt more strange by the minute. By the time Stephanie had returned, I was under a blanket on her bed, shivering. My headache was gone, but I felt awful. Still no clear intentions, and it was an hour until I was supposed to go to Diego´s. Stephanie told me that I didn´t look good, that maybe I shouldn´t do ceremony. She also suggested a hot shower, since I was shivering. I stood under the very hot water for 45 minutes, and the heat barely penetrated the surface of my skin. My inner temperature was nearly impossible to regulate at that point, and eventually I got out of the shower and dressed. I even used Stephanie´s hairdryer to bring more heat.

7pm came, and I sat on Stephanie´s bed, unsure of what to do. I didn´t feel well at all, but I really wanted to be in ceremony. I cried in exasperation, and Stephanie said she´d clear her other bed for me, in case I wanted to sleep there, and she´d leave the door open. I told her that if I didn´t return by 9pm, I wouldn´t come.

I gathered my things and headed to Diego´s. I rang the buzzer...no answer. I started to wonder if I was alive or just a ghost, lost and wandering, if the bus had really made it to Pisac at all, or whether we had all flown off the road to our deaths. I rang a second time and was let in. I wandered in, and ran into Diego and another man. Diego greeted me, and I told him I wasn´t sure if I was getting sick or not, or if I should be there at all. He hugged me and told me to come inside by the fire.

I met Alexandra and Milagros by the porch, and Alexandra hugged me, and it was wonderful, and she talked for awhile about my poncho and the lovely colors, but I couldn´t follow her words so well. I somehow ended up telling Milagros that I was feeling sick and traumatized by my bus experience, and she asked more about it. I told her my story, and that I was feeling cold and my stomach was still off from the motion sickness. She led me in, and I sat by the fire. Diego introduced me to a couple other new guys, as well as Alexandra´s sister. I sat by the fire, said hello, and looked around the room in a panic. I felt hot and cold, and shed my bag and my poncho. Then, feeling overwhelmed and ready to cry, I fled the house and went to the porch to breathe. Carlos came walking toward me, and sat down next to me. He held me while I cried, and I tried to breathe slowly. We talked, I don´t remember much of the conversation. He asked me how long it had been since my last ceremony...not sure why...eventually he went inside.

I sat on the porch, feeling lost, like a ghost. I wandered to Kody´s room, and he wasn´t feeling well either. He and Unu were good to me. I cried and struggled to breathe, realizing that I was at the edge of a full-blown panic attack. I eventually wandered out to the temple and sat alone for awhile. Maria came in and sat with me for awhile, holding me, listening to me, comforting me. Then, after some time, Milagros came in and sat with me. Maria left.

We talked for awhile. She had never been really friendly with me before, and I had always assumed that she didn´t like me. But this night she was so kind, and listened to and comforted me. I don´t remember most of it, but what I realized in the course of our conversation was that I was more traumatized by the bus than I had realized, and that I had fled my body pretty intensely. I talked about my panic attacks, and she asked me when they began, and how I got through them before. What I knew, then, is that I wouldn´t know whether I was physically ill or not until I came back down into my body, but I wasn´t sure how to bring myself back.

In a way, I wanted either Milagros or Diego to tell me whether or not to do ceremony. They both made me feel welcome, but neither one made any effort to influence my decision.

Before Milagros left me, she told me of a Peruvian custom, an old one. When a child was frightened severely, it was believed that his or her soul would flee. Then the whole community would gather to have a ceremony to bring back the child´s soul. The one leading the ceremony would go to the place where the soul was lost with a puppet, representing the child. He would call the soul back, catching it in the puppet, and then in ceremony give the child back his or her soul. Milagros said that maybe I could ask for my soul to come back in ceremony.

Sh also shared a story of her own, of being out of body when her son was a baby, that she was preparing a bottle for him, then went to her bed and saw herself there, sleeping. She said that she wasn´t scared, just surprised, and that she awoke right away, back in her bed.

At that point, I decided that I was going to stay for ceremony, for better or worse. If I was physically ill, it would be purged. If I had a fit or panic attack, losing control, then it would come. I felt that this space, ceremony space, could contain whatever was to come.

We were about twelve in all, and I sat next to Sarah, with no one on my left. The whole atmosphere of the ceremony was a bit off for me. I wasn´t sure whether or not I was feeling physically ill, or whether it was all emotional, but I trusted the medicine. I knew that the medicine would bring whatever it was into the light, or purge it away.

I drank the medicine, and it wasn´t too bad. I sat, then, awaiting it to come into me. As time went by, the nausea mounted, and I purged powerfully. I purged a second time during the Spanish lyrics of Suddhosi Buddhosi. But the visions never came. The insights and wisdom never came. Songs came and went, and I sang as best I could. At one point, Diego asked me to play, and I did, and even beautifully, but my heart wasn´t joyful. My body was in incredible misery, my stomach was cramping more and more intensely. I begged to purge more, but my guts writhed. I thought to drink more, but my vision was slow and blurry, and my body was too much with the medicine to move. I couldn´t even purge more by ramming my finger down my throat, that ony brought more gagging and no relief. I stuck my head into my purge bucket, hoping the hideous, foul smell of ayahuasca puke would bring more purging. Nada. I swayed, making myself dizzy, hoping the same, to no avail. I felt it was hopeless. I was stuck, miserable, and yet the ceremony stretched on, endless. I whimpered, but couldn´t even cry. I sat, breathed. I wished I could have a fit or panic attack, but nothing came. The ceremony wore on. I sang, sat, breathed. At one point, I lay down on my side, hoping to sleep. Nothing. Others began to purge very powerfully, to weep. I envied their releases. I begged for my own. But nothing came. Eventually, after what felt like years, Diego lighted the candles and closed the ceremony.

I felt like I would never be well again. My stomach cramped. I tried to talk with Sarah, but I was miserable. She gave me bread, since we were hoping it might settle my stomach. I ate one or two bites. I felt worse. I wanted to die. Kody was sick, too, and went to bed right away. Milagros didn´t seem sympathetic, and when I told Diego that I felt really sick, he told me to have patience. I felt stuck, and no one seemed to have much regard for my sickness. I stumbled to the toilet, and the severe diarrhea began. I whimpered and wpt and went several more times to shit my guts out. Nearly everyone left, but the two new guys, Carlos, and Alexandra. Carlos tried to hold me, to comfort me, but I kept pushing him away. He eventually pulled me outside to do a tobacco cleansing, and he was so kind and intense, he even sang to me. Then, he tried to get me to smoke the tobacco and I resisted. He tried to suggest that I was deliberately holding on to something, but I couldn´t manage to convince him that I was actually ill. I eventually curled up on the cushions with three blankets and my sleeping bag and fell into a fitful sleep.