Huachuma Ceremony with Javier, July 22nd

(pre-ceremony)

I’ve been wondering what my intention would be fore my next ceremony, since after the last two ceremonies I feel that I have released a lot of dark stuff, the darkest stuff I’ve got. And just a bit ago, it came to me when I was talking with Carlos about moodiness. I instantly thought that I haven’t yet accepted my own true nature, or my personality. I have come into awareness and love of the best parts of me, but am still trying to change the parts that don't fit my ideal of what I want to be. And my lack of acceptance of my own nature leads to my refusal to accept and understand the natures of others, especially the prickly, annoying parts. So, it seems that my intention has now emerged!

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After I finished writing this morning, my whole day plummeted. Migraine for four hours, then the early symptoms of a cold - some sinus and chest congestion, and lack of energy. A totally exhausting day, but also a day of going slow. Tomorrow, San Pedro ceremony.
Now, I want very much to do this ceremony, but I don’t want a repeat of my last ayahuasca ceremony with Diego. So, even though Javier said this ceremony should be fine for me with the symptoms I told him, I give myself total permission to stay home if that seems more in alignment with my body’s needs. That said, though, I have been given so much good, natural medicine to boost my healing, I have faith that with a good night’s rest, I will be good to go in the morning.

My intention for my ceremony tomorrow is to accept myself exactly as I am. And that includes irritating colds. This little bout of respiratory stuff is a perfect example, a perfect opportunity to practice complete acceptance. Instead of struggling against this - or anything - I can just accept what comes. And this is not only true with my health, but with everything that happens in life. Other people and their ways and problems, things that occur in the world. And in my own life. Total surrender. Conscious surrender. Not merely giving up or giving in, but accepting all things as they come, and working to make my contribution.

I have been so attached to changing things: myself, my life, other people, the world. And releasing and helping are indeed very important. But control for my own sake need have no part. Only loving myself and others, and allowing that to bring transformation as it comes. But to completely accept myself and everyone exactly as we are in each moment? That would grown passion into compassion naturally. It all is rooted in deep love. So that is my intention for tomorrow’s ceremony: to learn total acceptance and total love.

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(reflections)

Wow, in yesterday’s ceremony, I’m pretty sure that I hit the mother lode of dark, poisonous stuff in my life. All the poison stored from self-loathing and hatred, all the poison that has come from a life of living without total acceptance and love. When I set my intentions, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, no idea how deep and dark this well of discovery would run. And it was so very deep and dark that I really didn’t know if I could survive it. Yesterday, beyond any doubt, was the hardest day, full of more misery and suffering than any other day in my life. Where is this “gentle medicine” that I have heard about, the one that gave me what I felt the be “the best day of my life?”

I awoke yesterday with a full-blown cold, with plenty of chest congestion. I felt okay enough, though, to go on to Tipon. We met up at 730am, and our three taxis set off. I rode with Javier and Daniel. On the way we chatted, and Javier asked about my intention. To learn to be content with everything exactly as it is, both with myself and with others, and the whole world. Also, at one point during the ride, Javier asked me if I could draw or paint, and I replied, not well. He said that it might be worth trying, to capture the image of my body being filled with so many beautiful things. Maybe I will try!

Our group was large - eleven. Our time came to drink the medicine, and Javier determined that I needed a little less...but when he doled out three well-sized teaspoons plus the dust of one jar, I hardly felt like I had less than last week. I drank it down, bitter and gritty.
Many of the others began to stretch out in the sun. Javier sang medicine songs, and I awaited the Huachuma. After a short while, Javier took me by the hand to the spot I had occupied last week, and encouraged me in my intentions, telling me to feel into my resistances. I nodded in agreement, and he left me. I sprawled out in the grass to take in the sun, and to watch other people, to wait for the Huachuma to come into me.

I felt little for a long time. Javier came to ask me if I had had enough medicine, and I told him I thought so. I began to let my mind wander into my intentions. I thought about contentment and my barriers to it. Behind me, the sound of machetes hacking back the wild vegetation began to seem very loud. It felt like every whack of the blade was slicing into me. I thought about change, and the ways that I have embraced it. Not embraced, necessarily, in the sense that I relax into the flow of it, but instead as a clever trick of the ego. If I bring on the change first, forcefully, deliberately, then perhaps I’m outsmarting the law of change itself. How very clever! I began to think exactly that, “how very clever you are!” The thought came with great darkness, anger, sarcasm. I began to see just how much this whole intention was rooted in the creation of an identity, one that served the “me” I wanted to be in an ideal world. And I thought of all this seeking, these spiritual journeys, they have all been a part of that forced change. To create the ideal version of myself, to defeat or destroy the parts of myself that don’t fit that ideal, and to build up the parts that do. My whole purpose was to create the ideal Angela. How very clever! Again the words filled my mind.

The hacking of the machetes grew louder. I began to realize that in this forced change, that I was doing the same to myself: hacking away at the parts of myself to discard them, making my whole self grow according to this violent self-pruning...and at that point, great sadness filled me. I realized that I’d been hacking myself to bits without having any idea what would grow there to start with...I had no idea what my natural state of being was, who I was, because I’d never let that emerge. From there, the descent into the depths of despair, misery, and madness began.

I sat up, and nausea overtook me. I began to puke, much the same as last time. But the nausea didn’t release after puking. It continued to mount, and I heaved until I was gagging out nothing but foam. I felt so awful and looked around for help. Javier was far below with Ashera, and Carolynne had wandered up into the mountains. I felt desperate, out of control. I psychically begged for help, for one of them to return. Eventually I saw Javier coming back. He came to me. His words were about how who I am is more powerful and more beautiful than all of this suffering. From here, the day spun ever and ever more down. My insights are based in reflection, for my ability to reflect in the moment crashed completely.

My body shook, and I felt that I was entering a state of crisis. Sounds were loud beyond any reasonable proportion, and the waves of intense nausea hurtled me into a state of panic. I have lost track of most of what was happening. I know that I have never felt more misery or wanted to die more than this. At one point, Javier had me move into the shade and tried to help - he sang medicine songs and had me inhale the Agua de Florida, as well as blowing tobacco smoke on me. He encouraged me to stay present, and I did the best I could. But then I leaned over and puked even more, heaving and moaning and crying out. He eventually moved me back into the sun, but I couldn’t make it very far before I collapsed onto the ground. The rest of the afternoon was spent there, sometimes alone and other times with the help of Carolynne and Javier. They were kind and caring and loving.

I felt alternatively mad and ill. When the nausea came, I puked my guts out. When the nausea would subside a bit, I’d feel insane. The thought came several times to just end it all, to jump over the edge of the terrace. I felt crazy, and I could tell that I had a crazy look in my eyes. I alternatively crashed out in the grass, and tore tufts of it up in my hysteria. I pretty much felt like I’d given up everything, my whole sense of self, my whole will to live. Total surrender, total loss of pride and control. I told Javier at one point that I wanted to die, kill me now, that he could push me over the edge and no one would ever know. And he held me and told me that a lot of people would miss me. He was so good, and strong, he held the space so well. For that, I’m eternally grateful...to imagine that last week I couldn’t trust him, this really put the whole trust issue into practice.

I would try to recline in the grass and rest, but the nausea would grow, and force me upright again; I would purge up what I could, then crawl a little further away to collapse again. I felt that my whole insides had turned to poison, and every breath tasted bitter. I felt that everything inside of me was begging to be purged out. My strength was giving out, yet I wept and moaned and puked. The temperature began to cool, yet there was no end in sight. I begged for the experience to end, and Javier told me that it was nearly over, but that I needed to be strong for awhile longer. Soon after that, Carolynne told me to talk to the medicine, to thank it, but ask it for no more. I managed to say that, and felt miserable for awhile longer. Everyone began to pack up to move locations to stay in the sun. I purged again, the water and tea that I had taken. I managed to put on my socks and shoes, trembling from the cold, as well as from my own inner turmoil. We began to walk, and Javier held my right arm while Carolynne held my left. Once, twice I felt my nausea grow, and stopped to bend over...nothing. The third time, near the large rock on the center of the terrace, I felt it come. I fell to the ground by the rock, heaving like no other heaving I’ve ever known before. Carolynne took my bag. On all fours, I puked until a strange color - a greenish-yellow, fluorescent - came out of me...I could barely even breathe for the purging. But when it was done, I knew it was done. Javier and Carolynne sat with me until I was stable, and then we all moved to the ceremonial area on the high hillside.

Javier led me up, by the hand, then told me to sit on the ground. It was there that the day’s misery began to pass. It was so cold and windy, and it was uncomfortable, but I felt still, truly still. When it got too cold, we all packed up and Javier closed the ceremony. We all made our way home, and spent the evening with soup and strudel by the fire at Javier’s. I was one of the last to leave, pinned down by the amazing, sweet cat, Bella.

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In most of my previous ceremonies, the insights were the gift of the experience itself. With this one, other than the early reflections on my lack of acceptance, I was too much in the throes of the purging to be able to receive insight. The job at hand during the ceremony was a big one, and as Javier suggested, it is likely not done yet.

What is at the heart of it? Self-destructiveness. Self hatred. Pema Chodron once wrote that only by exposing yourself over and over again to annihilation do you discover that within yourself which is indestructible. But now I realize that I’ve been hearing this all wrong...it is not by deliberately causing harm to myself that I find the transcendent. And yet, on some level, my whole spiritual search has been about that...across lifetimes, I suspect. Some of those dark, toxic feelings, they were deep and hot and all-consuming. The accumulation of lifetimes of not being free. Of trying to break myself, or of being forced into being broken by others, I have made my very nature to break my spirit to contain it. But why? Why all this hatred and loathing? Where does it come from? When did it begin?

I have a lot of blank spaces in my understanding of this. I’m still not sure what it’s all about, but I feel like I get momentary glimpses of insight. Maybe yesterday was about reliving all the suffering that has been stored in my body from a lifetime of self-abuse. And then purging it out. And maybe it is also a significant part of the process of undoing the image I have been so meticulously and violently been crafting for myself. What I am feeling is that never before had I been so shattered, so out of control, and most likely, never before had I been so utterly free of identity. Free of this self that I’ve been working so hard to create, an ideal version of myself, forged in violence and non-love.

And maybe I was embodying the part of me that has wanted this destruction, maybe I was allowing it to have its way, to bring on all the change it wanted. But the other part of me was in there, too, struggling against this dark force, alternatively crying out for help and begging for the job to just be completed: kill me now please.

The joyful, smiling face, though? I can’t believe that that’s not at least somewhat authentic. I know that I have experienced true goodness and joy and love. I know that my true nature is light. But, as Javier pointed out, I have used the light to escape the darkness. Fleeing from the darkness. And that doesn’t mean that the darkness fled, too...no, it was there all the time, awaiting a time when I was ready to face it. But what is the darkness? What is it that I was facing yesterday?

Even in the greatest miseries, in the darkest moments, I never lost faith that it would pass, that I would survive the experience. Javier told me that I had remained strongly anchored in the light, and that it would have been much messier if I had not. And I can feel what it is that he means, I know that I am indeed anchored in the light. But I don’t totally get it either.
I’m struggling to find a name for what it was that I was struggling with yesterday. I feel a blank space, and I’m not sure how to go on without more clarity.

Light and darkness. That’s what it’s about in essence. Love and hatred. Creation and destruction. Have I been wearing the face of light to mask the darkness that has in turn tried to suck out the light at the heart of me?

Javier said that these dark energies are very old and very deep, and that they are reluctant to go. That they have been fed so well for so long, that they weren’t going to go without a fight. And that was what yesterday was. a fight to begin purging them.

Now it is important that I gain more understanding about what it is that I’m working with...
Javier said to me last night that I have no idea how beautiful I was, that I was becoming the woman I was born to be...so touching. Several others also commented on my glow, and that I looked different. I felt like crap from being beaten down during the day, but accepted their kind words. I felt able to accept the kind words and touches of everyone, able to be vulnerable and open...and happy to be sharing their company. God bless them: Javier, Stephanie, Ashera, Nieve, Mary, Carolynne, Sailin, Billy, Marie Therese, and Daniel.

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There is a part of me that wants to die, and another part of me that loves being alive. And maybe somewhere along the way they came to the agreement that I could go on living, but with great suffering. The two sides shook hands and the struggle began. One part determined to be alive and radiant, and the other determined to puncture that radiance with every possible opportunity. And then, the other part of me, unaware of this battle, except in glimpses of insight, all fleeting. And yet the battle continued. The wounds of the dark side were deep and awful. And the light side chose to ascend higher and higher into the light to escape the deep pain of these wounds. The light side always appeared to be winning, but grew weaker with each subsequent attack. Then yesterday came, and the whole game began to fall apart.

The dark side wanted to destroy me, to end the whole game. The light side wanted to flee, also ending the whole game. Both sides of my duality were ready to escape with Huachuma working to cleanse me yesterday. Maybe the next question would be, with both these sides of me out of the picture, who was left to live through it all? The other part of me that is beyond these battles of duality, the eternal, transcendent Self.

I have so often wanted to just skip ahead and go into the transcendence without going through the muck. I’ve been aware of that for a long time. But what is the muck about? What is the suffering about? My mind is so set on transcendence that a part of me just can’t fathom the purpose of going through the muck. And now that I see that I, like so many others, have wanted the medicine to do the work for me, to fix me. Letting go can be easy, as they say, just let it go! But I also know that that’s not true. I know there will come a time when these things fall away, but only after working through them thoroughly. and the work doesn’t have to be about the mind or thought, it is about the heart. The games of the mind and ego are so strong, and this process only causes pain because those barriers must be penetrated.