My Ayahuasca Journey

To be held and to behold

Recently I attended a ceremony in which I ingested the plant medicine known as Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is known in many circles as the grandmother of all psychedelics, both for its potency and for its persona. 

I have to say, this was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had. I went in with the intention to embody unconditional love, purify my ego, and achieve inner stillness. 

What I learned -- which is something I’ve been sitting with intellectually, but which I really felt spiritually and somatically — is that unconditional love is hard to achieve yet necessary to heal ourselves, our society, and the planet around us. 

Unconditional love requires loving all aspects of yourself and showing compassion towards yourself, including the parts of yourself that may be painful and hard to look at. 

Because we are conditioned (and here, contrast that word with “unconditional”) to want to be perfect, we are less likely to accept things about ourselves that we feel shame or fear around. But in my journey with the plant medicine, I learned to hold my pain instead of running away from it. I learned to carry it the way a mother holds her child. This feeling of being held throughout all walks of life is what can open us up to love. 

In an interview with Joe Rogan, noted physician Gabor Mate points out that when children are not held by their parents, especially in times of stress, anger, fear, and longing, the signal that is sent to the child is that their parents do not care for them. “Unconsciously,” he says, "the child makes the distinction that ‘something is wrong with me. I’m unlovable, the world is an unsafe place,’ because we learn about the world in how we interact with our caregivers. That’s the template.” 

Consider that we have been feeling incredibly high amounts of stress, anger, fear, and longing these past few years. Covid, the break down of community between people of different ethnicities and faiths, political extremism and polarization, these are all stress points that have marked our days. Because we lack the resources to deal with these feelings on both global and local scales, we are more likely to gravitate to hate and other forms of extremism as a way to numb our pain. 

James Baldwin said that the reason why people cling to their hatred is because they don’t know how to deal with pain. We can see this right now in the tragic downfall of Kanye West, a man who has defined his sense of self worth according to a) the amount of money he has in his account, b) which women find him attractive, and other material, surface-level indications. Much of this has been taken away and has depleted Kanye’s sense of self worth. But instead of doing the necessary work of learning to (be)hold his own pain, West is trying to numb his pain by blaming the Jewish community for his suffering. This of course causes more damage that, if the Jewish community internalizes, will increase the likelihood of returning hatred for hatred, bitterness and resentment, and more suffering. 

Ayahuasca taught me to see that unconditional love requires learning how not to cling to any one emotion or experience you have, whether pleasurable or painful. Pleasurable and painful sensations are but energies oscillating within us from one moment to the next. If we get caught up in clinging to one or denying the other, we end up rejecting the fabric of reality which is constant change. And then, more suffering comes. 

I believe this is why they call ayahuasca the grandmother medicine: it teaches us to hold and be held in our emotions, our feelings, the vast richness of our experiences, just as we may have been physically held by our grandmothers and their grandmothers before them. Ayahuasca contains a very deep and ancestral wisdom that many of us have forgotten in our dopamine-intensive worlds that are full of noise and distraction and starved of affection, attention, and connection. 

Ayahuasca also teaches us how to purge which sometimes manifests in ceremony as vomiting and crying. Though we are often ashamed of these methods, in certain contexts, these are ways the body gets rid of toxins and cleans itself. Given that we were taught to behave in poisonous and harmful ways towards ourselves and each other, we ought to learn how to rid ourselves of these fumes, to mourn our losses, and to purify our hearts. I certainly had many good cries throughout ceremony.

In the new year may we all learn to behold and be held. It just might help clear the noise and muck we're swimming in, and reconnect to our higher selves, and Mother Aya may just be a medicine guide to help us down that path. 

And one more thing

This week my talk with Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast comes out so be sure to listen. I speak with Bari, Bret Stevens, Kmele Foster, and Eli Lake about the rifts between Blacks and Jews, the history of the ideas Kanye West is swimming in, and how we can heal. 

As always, be sure to check out my podcast The Heart Speaks and my practice, Theory of Enchantment, if you're interested in taking up a sustained practice that gets you into greater alignment with your deepest stirrings and highest truth. 

Aho.