Working With Ayahuasca

Every time I try to write about my experiences with Ayahuasca I feel that I fall short. Its like a tumultuous passionate love relationship that is so hard to define. I love Ayahuasca and I love working with Ayahuasca, how she transforms me, how she has transformed me in all the best ways. Yet to describe her and my relationship with this extraordinary plant medicine teacher is hard.

When I first went to the Amazon to work with her in August 2014 I never thought that I would end up working with her so deeply as I have. I had worked with many plant medicines before I started to work with Ayahuasca yet I never worked with another plant this consistently and as many times as I have with Ayahuasca.

I don't remember the first time that I realised that I was a Shaman. That this was my path above all other paths. Maybe after my journey with Peyote? Maybe when I was about to embark on a course in Tantra and I felt that the plants were calling me so much more. Maybe I've always known. I don't know.

Ayahuasca is a deep and intimate relationship. Its not just a plant to me, its a spirit, a highly evolved spirit that helps me open up and evolve. Its my teacher, my friend and my own personal healer. She shows me parts of myself that I didn't know was there. She shows me skills and abilities that I didn't know I had. She has given me confidence in myself and shown me how beautiful and how extraordinary it can be to be human.

The most important work has maybe been to take me to the places that I didn't want to go. She has shown me the places deep inside of myself where I didn't want to open up. The places where I was very comfortable being shut down. The places where I preferred to be blocked.

At times (many times) I have been so deep in my own resistance. I have fought with her and myself to not open up. To not go deeper, to not clear what was making me feel safe.

One of them was my vision, I've always seen things since I was a child, as long as I remember. Not ghosts or anything like that, but lights spirits and auras around people. Always had very vivid dreams and always had a very good ability to visualise and to see things within my minds eye or so I thought.

But when I started to go deeper with Ayahuasca and I started having visions all around me the first feelings was to run. There was one night and she had just started to get intense. I was then also in a plant dieta with Toe (which I cautiously want to say that one should never dieta with unless you are under the guidance of an extremely experienced Shaman).

Toe is a visionary plant and I was put on this dieta to open up my vision. Yet when the vision started to open up all my resistance also came up. I was running and running, I left the Maloka (the ceremony space) and I kept walking and walking in circles in the garden outside.

Not wanting to go there, I was trying to find every possible way to escape myself. I didn't know why, but I knew that I didn't want to go 'there'. That place where Ayahuasca and Toe were taking me. Anywhere else was fine but just not 'there'.

The thing though is that you can't really run from Ayahuasca, she'll just keep taking you there, again and again. Until you've overcome that fear of facing yourself.

Now Ayahuasca can be very confusing at least for me personally. With many other plant medicines the guidance is very clear. Not so much with Ayahuasca. Yet I have been called back again and again to work with her. Like no other plant medicine has.

I also find that with Ayahuasca and all plant medicines really is that most of the work is done after the ceremony is over. When you are integrating the work that took place during ceremony. When you are down from the spell and a deeper understanding take place.

So after those ceremonies (they were a few...) where I kept having these immense urges to run and run. Yet being called back to ceremony again and again. I realised that I had to get to the bottom of this fear, what was I running from and why?

Then it came to me; I was running from responsibility. The fear of responsibility. The burden of responsibility.

The fear, the deep fear within me was that if I would open up more then I would carry so much more responsibility. It felt better (safer) to be somewhat shut down then to truly see. I was terrified of the changes that it might cause.

After that insight which took place in-between ceremonies I could go face my own need to run from myself and I learned to sit with it and to eventually dominate it. By dominating it I mean to learn to sit with it, even though every cell of my body was screaming run, run, run(!).

Eventually it passed as all things do when we learn to sit with them and I learned to love the opening and the expansions instead of fearing them. Looking back I don't understand what was ever so frightening to begin with?! :) But fears are like that.

As long as we resist to look at our fears they become greater and greater, we make them that big by avoiding to look at them. By giving away our power to them and as soon as we take the courage to look at them, then we start to realise that it was all just one grand illusion. It all was.

Thank you for reading, so much Love!