Words by:
LLoyd Harry-Davis
On my mattress, I realise that my first ayahuasca ceremony isn’t panning out the way I expected. There are no crazy visuals. I’m not hearing things. I see no ghosts. I begin to think about the structure of my life.
I grew up as a closeted teenager who learnt to hate himself because of the religious dogma and rampant homophobia in the country I grew up in. When I was 15, I woke up one morning to find my father seizing on the living room floor, where he died shortly after as I knelt by him helplessly.
It was just us two living together. And during my time at university, I’d struggled a lot with suicidal thoughts and self-harm. I’d spoken about these things in therapy for four years. I’d read a lot about grief and for the most part, I thought I was already quite self-aware.
But to be honest my life hadn’t changed. I felt more powerless than ever, my future _felt _heavy and burdensome, and life felt like a minefield. I’m at ayahuasca hoping that something becomes clearer and the fog clouding my understanding of how to live lifts.
At the ceremony, the lights dim and people’s silhouettes become barely visible. I try to settle into my mattress and breathe through the meditations. I’m alert, ready — impatient, even. But slowly, any excitement I have gets confused and I can’t tell if, really, I’m just nervous.
I’m thinking about how much direction I want and more than anything I’m praying that things just make sense. I start to mentally scroll through all of my preparation, trying to find any faults in the run-up to coming here. I had tried to account for every single possible thing for the ceremony to be as efficient as possible.
I stuck to the diet, I gorged on water for weeks, watched countless videos on what to do and what not to do. I’d read stories of people seeing loved ones who had died (would I experience that?) and other stories about people claiming to receive cosmic secrets that gave them some deep, unalterable self-understanding.
There were also the other stories of people who saw demons, who had psychotic breaks or who got stern, harsh messages that made their lives even more confusing. The ceremony isn’t even underway yet and suddenly the tapestry of any remaining confidence I have is fast unravelling.
What if this doesn’t work? I didn’t know what exactly I’d experience, but would things be clear? How would I know? What if I didn’t get the intense experience; the big pointy, flashing arrows saying GO THAT WAY!_ _so that there was no chance I’d miss what I was being told?
This kind of obsessive knowing wasn’t new. I’d been like this for as long as I could remember. After I take the tea, I wait. Then wait. And wait some more. I tell myself I’m not fidgeting, I’m just not comfortable yet.
I start to think about how intimidated I’d felt by the people I met there — so many confident, calm, beautiful people who moved with a self assurance that made me rabid with envy. I wanted that. Moments later, I feel my limbs go heavy, but I tell myself maybe it was the ambiance making me tired.
I open my eyes, check on the others, close them again, restart my meditation, then debate lying down or staying seated. An hour later, my body is tripping, sure, but there aren’t any insights to be found and I’m stewing in uncertainty.
I start to feel disappointed. I think maybe it didn’t work properly, so when there’s the call for the second round of tea, I go to receive another — only this time, I also brave the hapé, stumbling back to my spot while coughing and feeling like someone has just rammed a knife through my skull.
Finally, I start to see things — fractal patterns and spirals, but it’s not enough. I’m breathing heavily and I want more. I think if I shut my eyes harder, concentrate better, I’ll see more, know more. There’s absolutely no allowing in this process and clearly, I don’t know what ‘flow’ means.
Suddenly, I hit a barrier and the patterns become so bold I think my eyes have been open the whole time. But none of it is pleasant — in fact, it’s terrifying. The terror comes with a thought, an angry one that doesn’t feel like mine.
It says “Enough. Stop trying to know everything.”
I bolt upright, and I’m engulfed in fear. Actually no, it’s not that — it’s shame. I feel chastised. My obsession with thinking I could control how this ceremony would unfold now looks like the acts of an insane person and I’m instantly humbled.
It’s humility that breaks me open and in my shock, I become more allowing and receptive than I’d been all evening. The message deepens, saying: your mind is overactive and you think way too much. Get this under control.
It hits me in reverberations, sinks deeper and deeper into my stomach until I feel myself on the verge of crying. Why is it so painful to finally see yourself so clearly? Is it because the real wound, the one you thought didn’t exist, suddenly becomes clearly defined?
I realise my toxic identification with ‘thinking’ and how needing to know everything was a mechanism I’d been using to control my life. But not only was that impossible, it was also preventing me from living at all.
I’d been thinking my way through everything under the guise of “seeking” and “understanding”, but really, if I had to ask so many questions before doing anything, then did I even trust in life? Did I even ever trust in myself? I always knew that my traumas had made me feel helpless, but I saw the effects more clearly then.
Having faced constant unknown fears when closeted in a country where it felt dangerous to be gay, as well as losing a parent so suddenly and so gruesomely too, left me with a scarring belief of life as frantic and chaotic. Something that desperately needed to be tamed.
To deal with that, I’d been micromanaging the universe (or trying to) without even realising it; and it had caused me to push many things and many people away, my own desires included. And spending so many years only taking actions on things I could absolutely predict therefore meant that I’d never learnt how to take confident risks or face the unknown.
In a strange way, what I was really looking for was confidence and fearlessness. Confidence to know that if the unknown happened, that I’d be able to handle it. That I would be smart enough to see a way forward, persistent enough to overcome sudden challenges, intuitive enough to discern what was happening.
As I continue to surrender, I try to conceive of what it would mean to live my life one step at a time and, for some reason, it makes me cry. It’s the thought of moving through so much chaos, of having to move so slowly. Then, another message plops to the surface.
It’s just a thought, but it’s so gentle, and it says “Your mind is strong and it is a gift. But _you _have to use it, not the other way around.” It wasn’t just about seeing how my mind had held me back in life, but also in seeing the great gift that it was.
There was a smaller lesson in that, too — one about remembering to always see both sides of the coin and not blowing any one thing to such extremes that there was never any balance. And isn’t balance what we’re always told to strive for?
The morning after, during the sharing circle, it surprises me how much lighter I feel, but it’s the spirit of humility that’s still present. I feel open, more grounded and more grateful that I could see what my own faults were and that they weren’t permanent — that they could be fixed.
I felt more held than I had in a long time, and it came from being reminded not to live life by peering over the edge. I began to ask myself more often: _what if something good comes from this? _Because nothing good came from picking apart the details of the present until there was nothing left.
Today, I still feel those fears and those instinctive reactions to wonder what everything could mean, but I let the thoughts go if I don’t need them. I’m still practising to trust life more — it might be a life-long practice, with new circumstances to test it against — but my trust has slowly blossomed into faith since my first ceremony.
I try to focus on the only things worth knowing:
_What do I feel? _
What can I do?
What doesn’t matter?
Everything else will sort itself out.
