My Ayahuasca and Bufo Experience

Towards the end of 2020, a friend invited me to participate in a New Year’s ceremony (well two ceremonies) one involving ayahuasca (a hallucinogenic tea brewed from mixing two South American plants) and the other bufo (another hallucinogen made from a South American frog’s venom). These medicines have been used by shamans and medicine men for centuries in spiritual practices and ritual healings. I was nervous, but, having heard about the immense healing such medicines have brought into the lives of so many, I agreed. The ceremonies took place on Dec 31st and Jan 1st (and it has taken me a few days to process everything—in fact, I’m STILL processing everything), but I’m sharing my experience now in hopes that hearing my story will help others.

I was served a shot glass’s worth of the medicine in the kitchen around 9pm. It was a thick reddish liquid that didn’t taste too different than a really strong tea. I then went into an adjoining room to sit in a circle with a handful of people where a fire was burning and the lights were turned down low. I was instructed to do my best to sit up because laying back might mean I’d lose control and going into the fetal position usually hindered one’s experience. IF I felt like I needed to lay down, I was encouraged to move out of the circle and return when I was able. The medicine would help my body purge the things it no longer needed, so I was handed a small tin bucket and some paper towels to contain that purge. I was told there might also be times that I'd need to purge in a different way, and if/when that urge came, I would find that I would be capable of walking to the bathroom. I asked what I was supposed to do with the bucket after I made a deposit, and I was instructed to pour it out at the base of one of the trees outside the house (as they LOVE purge). Side-note: but for a handful of nuts, I’d been fasting all day, so I imagined whatever might come out of me would be mostly water and medicine. They said the medicine would affect everyone differently, so it was very important to focus on my experience rather than that of those around me. I might hear heaving, yelling, wailing, crying, laughing or any other number of other expressions of the purge, but if I became distracted by sounds outside my personal journey, I was to focus on my breathing to pull my focus back into myself. There would be points during the ceremony that they would offer more doses of the medicine. If I wanted more, I could walk to the kitchen and more would be served to me. If I didn’t, that was totally fine. I might see visions into my past lives, or be visited by animal spirits or guides, and if I wanted, I could ask questions of them, but all I needed to do was breath. Just breath. And with that, the ceremony started.

Before I get into the actual ceremony, I wanted to briefly convey some of the spiritual experiences from my life to give some context. When I was very young (and still tormented by my homosexual leanings), I went into the woods behind my family’s home, sat on a blanket and begged God for a sign that he was real. The details are faded in my memory, but I distinctly remember a vibration that surged through my body and confirmed to me that a higher power was listening. In Jr High was a supposed to take some sort of SAT test with a few of the other kids in my grade, and the night before the test I was so scared because I hadn’t studied at all that begged and prayed to God (the one who gave his only begotten son) for a way to get out of taking the test. The next morning, I was awoken by my mother who curiously wanted to know if I’d gotten into a fight. When I went to the mirror to investigate why she was asking me that, I saw that my eye had swollen shut. In lieu of school, we went to the doctor and found out that I had a severe sinus infection and needed to have an emergency surgery immediately to release the pressure. The belief that God had brought the sickness to me as an answer to my prayer only further confirmed to me that God was there and was listening. As an adult, I’ve taken mushrooms a few times and have been able to feel that powerful connection again. By this point, I no longer thought of that connection to God as the father of Jesus, and although I no longer had a name for that higher power, I knew it was as real and as all powerful as in my youth. The first time, while under the influence of the mushrooms, the friend who volunteered to act as my guide asked me to tell him my story. With ease I recounted the moments from my life that shaped who I am. It gave me a newfound understanding of exactly who I was and who I’ve always been. I came away understanding that I had a message from a higher power, and I was on this planet in order to share that message (though I had no idea what that message was at the time). The subsequent mushroom experiences have all had a moment or two where I gained some new insight into myself or the world, and though it is sometimes accompanied by some uncomfortableness, each journey was usually saturated in beauty and peace. The Ayahuasca ceremony was nothing like that.

I HATED the ceremony. Prior to going, the facilitator told me that mushrooms often make people think they are "farther along” than they actually are, so these ceremonies might feel like a setback. Despite my best efforts to disbelieve that statement, I think she was right. As the medicine soaked into my stomach and the facilitators started chatting, drumming, and singing, I was consumed not with that feeling of connection to a higher power but instead felt trapped inside my body. I kept focusing on my breath, but my ears couldn’t tune out what was happening around me. Almost immediately one guy across the room started purging. I’ve taken care of many a sick person in my time and have heard a variety puking sounds (sick kids, drunk friends, ill parents, poisoned animals), and NONE of those memories compared to the noises this guy was making. It was so extreme that I found myself assured that he was over inflating his experience. It was as if he was using his puking to put on the performance of this life, but his acting skills weren’t quite good enough for me to suspend my disbelief. That was just the beginning. One thing after another annoyed and infuriated me: some of the facilitator’s chanting seemed nonsensical, the wailing of my friend was too loud, even my placement in the room enraged me because every time someone had to leave, I was nearly stepped on. The one thing I remember that I could appreciate was that the girl next to me purged so quietly that all I heard was the gentle slosh of water into her bucket. I was judgmental of absolutely everything. Everything! It wasn’t like I knew I was right, and they were doing it wrong, but I KNEW what was, and nothing happening around me was how it should be. I was disgusted with myself most of all for having all those thoughts. The entire ceremony, I wanted to abandon this train of thoughts but couldn’t get off the track. They served more medicine three more times, and I took more each time in an attempt to break out of my head and find that connection to the higher power like in my past, but the channel seemed blocked. Eventually I was told the ceremony was over, and yet I’d made no new awarenesses, met no spirit guides, connected with no gods, nor remembered any past lives. I was told the physical purging was one way to heal, but I hadn’t even done that!

Sometimes after midnight, people started getting up and talking and eating, I laid on a mat staring at the fire fearing that I was somehow less human that I’d previously thought. I once was afraid of hell, but once I looked inward enough to recognize that belief was one forced upon me and should be released, my life had been relatively easy. Yes, I’ve had self-doubts and heart breaks and have struggles, but had being white and male and growing up in a loving home shielded me from any real earthly torment? Or was I so out of touch with reality that I wasn’t really living a true human experience? The hours after the ceremony had ended, were spent attempting to force myself into a peaceful slumber that just wouldn’t come. I eventually had to sit up and throw up into my bucket, and that did offer some relief. It probably took another hour before I was able to stand, walk out into the cold, and pour the purge out at the foot of a twisted tree. Watching the water branch out in all directions and soak into the dirt was the first moment of peace I’d felt all night long. I went inside, tried to force down some soup to calm my stomach, and tried once again to go to sleep despite the nagging voice in my head telling me that I’d somehow messed up a ceremony that was supposed to be well outside my control.

The next day was a lot of laying around and eating fruit and bread, so I decided to create the above image. One by one everyone else went into the barn and had their individual bufo ceremonies. I was the last to go and went into the barn with the two facilitators. I was instructed to continually breath more and more of the medicine into my lungs until they were full and then hold it there as long as I could. What happened after that was hard to describe. 

I fell back and into what I’m equating to a black nothingness. I feared with this new vision I would never see the world again. That I couldn’t function in society anymore. That I would be trapped in this nothing space forever. Yet, even though my eyes had gone dark and my body was nothingness, I was still me. I wasn't even Sam, but still I existed. Though I had taken the medicine sitting on a pillow in the center of a zebra rug, I came back into my body some 6 feet away from the rug. For a time, it was as if someone else was in control of my appendages: arms shook, legs kicked out, hips raised, toes curled, and fingers clawed into the carpet. Maybe I could have stopped it, but after what I’d just experienced, I was too terrified or distracted to even try to do so. The facilitators continued their chants and songs and spoke words of nirvana and laid healing hands on me encouraging me to breath. Just breath. And I did. Once my body calmed, a sense of nausea overwhelmed it, so I leaned over the bucket they brought in at my wordless request. My arms shook so violently as I tried to steady myself over the bucket that I eventually abandoned the impulse. I breathed with my head to the ground for so long and in such a way that I had a mark on my forehead and nose for the next few days. I listened to the sounds being directed to me and focused on my breathing until I felt in control again. Less than an hour later, I knew the ceremony had ended as one facilitator sang lyrics from Robyn’s Call Your Girlfriend, and I found myself singing along (though I was so exhausted, no sound was coming out of my mouth). I sat up and opened my eyes enough to see that they were arranging candles and animal totems around me. The sun had set during the ceremony, and although the frigid desert air had started creeping into the metal barn, the cold didn’t bother me. I was just happy to be alive.

Though I immediately knew it was the most profound thing that I had ever been through, it felt beyond my ability to comprehend or contextualize what I was supposed to take away from it. I was walking and talking, but I didn’t feel like myself. Sometime before the sun rose on January 2nd, I took a salt bath which helped calm my nerves and finally fall asleep. I woke up bright and early in a puddle of my own sweat. The next few days, the memory of the black nothingness haunted the back of my mind. I kept having these micro-flashbacks accompanied by a moment of panic at an awareness that there really was nothing after this life. I meditated frequently hoping that if I could just accept that this life is all I’d have, maybe I would I be able to live every day to the fullest or something, but even that didn’t make sense. I’d already talked to god. I’d felt the connection to a high power at the core of my being, but that nothingness wouldn’t leave me. In retrospect that period didn't last long, but it was a stressful time.

On January 3rd, I spent some calming time with my neighbors and I eventually went home, laid on the couch with the lights out with a neighbor's puppy on my stomach and listened to some guided meditations from YouTube about nirvana and releasing subconscious blockages. Only then did I come to a new understanding of my recent experiences. The nothingness wasn’t showing me what was waiting for me after death. It was demonstrating to me that there was no death. The most fundamental awareness that we all grow up to understand is that the horror of death will eventually claim us all. Yet, even after my body was gone, I existed. The Law of Conservation of Matter states that energy and mass are neither created nor destroyed (aka: the total amount of mass and energy in the entire Universe is constant), so the energy that makes us up must also remain. The meditation gave the example of a cloud. When we see a cloud, it easy to assume that when it dissipates from our sight, it no longer exists, but that just isn’t true. If we look close enough, the cloud still exists as rain or ice or snow, but it does not go from being to not being. There is no great beyond or great before like the movie Soul would have us believe because there is only now. That doesn’t mean that when my body breathes its last, I suddenly stop existing, but I, just like the cloud, will continue in another form. With this understanding, I suddenly found peace in the blackness. It is the yin to life’s yang. I could not comprehend life without recognizing the absence of life, but I was never the nothingness. I am a spiritual being currently having a human experience, but even if I (for the sake of argument) was once nothingness before I was born, if I happened once (and I did because I’m writing this and you are reading it), why couldn’t I happen again? After I am done with this experience, maybe I’ll do it all again or maybe I’ll experience being something completely different or maybe I’ll choose to stay in the nothingness and take a break, but no matter what happens, I’m now 100% sure I’ll be okay. In that knowing (in the freedom from the lie that death is something to be afraid of), I have returned to a peace akin to that which can be observed in sleeping children and animals. In their “ignorance” of death they have yet to lose touch with what is real. Living is all that’s real. The death of the body I’m currently occupying will not change that.

This brings me back to the ayahuasca experience. All the judgments, anger, and self-loathing I'd experienced during that ceremony were rooted in the assumption that I knew that death was eventually coming for me. As much as I’d relished the “wisdom" that has come with aging, my wrists sometimes ached from the decades of gymnastics, my hair was thinning, people I loved kept dying, and no matter what vitamins I took or what mindfulness practices I participated in, I kept getting reminders that death was coming closer and closer every day. With this view of reality, the “wisdom" I’d been amassing gave me an entitlement to know things (like the proper way to vomit or the best way to arrange people in the room), and the ceremony was forcing me to look those wisdoms in the face and see them for what they were: assumptions and misconceptions. Seeing something as fundamental and universally accepted as death as nothing more than a cultural scare tactic, I suddenly understood that I KNEW NOTHING. My consciousness was opening up to a new way to view the world, and my brain was so attached to the lessons it had learned and meticulously catalogued over my lifetime that it was latching onto anything it could distract me with in order to keep me safe and secure behind the protection of my many wisdoms. I’d heard it is difficult to change someone’s beliefs (and I know the Trump presidency has made many of us painfully aware of the truth in that), but I didn’t realize it was SO true for me. With this new understanding, I am grateful for that horribly perfect experience that made me aware of how little I really knew.

In summation, yes, I believe that my mind has fundamentally changed for the better because I participated in these two medicinal ceremonies. I can still remember how the judgmental me might have interpreted this post; however, so to my skeptical former self, I'd say that whether I was really disconnected from my body or whether I was really able to wipe the brain’s old belief system, I believe those things happened, and a placebo can often help the body heal itself as successfully as any medication. Because of this, I expect to live the rest of this body's lifespan without fear. I expect to be open to new beliefs based on what I am currently experiencing; for even what I have experienced in the past doesn’t always hold up in the now. I expect to love and accept every being I encounter as they are, recognizing each as a uniquely perfect expression of life. I expect to speak only for myself and only from a place of love no matter the circumstance, for the only thing I’ve seen that can help one in the grips of fear (other than the consumption of a hallucinogenic substance) is love. Love is and has always been my answer. I’m only 6 days out of the ceremonies, so maybe these expectations will change or fade, or maybe I’ll need to post an amendment in a few weeks or months or years, but, as of right now, I walk into 2021 excited for any and all experiences that life brings my way.