Ayahuasca. Medicina. - by OneMoreRobot3021

I rang the buzzer for the yoga studio, peering into the security camera, and then the door buzzed and I pulled it open. An excited man with an Eastern European accent whose every movement and word was inexplicably hilarious walked in after me. He asked which floor I was headed to, and we both smiled as we realized we were going to the same place.

“Weʼre going to Heaven, yeah?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, clutching the pillow I had brought with me and feeling altogether surreal. “I hope so.”

The elevator doors opened and we both walked out, unsure of where to go next. The man sitting behind the front desk turned from his computer to look at us.

“Youʼre here for the uh…ceremony?”

We nodded and he directed us down the hall. I kicked my shoes off and left them near all the others. I walked down the hall, turning into a large wood-floored yoga studio with one thick red pillar running down the middle of the room. People, most of them dressed in white, were walking and talking, laughing and smiling, introducing and reconnecting. Look at all these strangers, I remember thinking.

I saw Benjamin and he hugged me hello, calling me brother and welcoming me to the ceremony. Everyone was wearing white. If my mother and sisters had been there, they would have thought I had joined a cult. There were long rectangular blankets laid perpendicular to the wall at regular intervals. I saw a spot that spoke to me and walked to it, setting down my bag. I unrolled my yoga mat, slipping it under. I fetched a cushioned meditation chair and placed it at the head of my mat.

I was overwhelmed, but calm. There were so many people. Ayahuasca, it seemed, had no target demographic. There was an equal mix of men and women and their ages spread from the twenties to the sixties. As I settled in, a friend I had met only a couple of weeks before walked in the door. Eager for a familiar face, nervous about the ceremony, I waved him over and he took the spot next to mine. There were four of us in this corner, and we were all completely new to ayahuasca. I immediately felt at ease and comfortable with my neighbors, who seemed to share the mix I felt of excitement, nervousness, and joy at being there. None of us had eaten for many hours, yet none of us felt hungry. We were all finally there. All the weekʼs dietary preparations culminated in this moment, and why be hungry? This was what we had done it for.

I took care to arrange my space with the same sense of the sacred that Benjamin had given to the room. As Benjamin walked to the four walls of the room and blew on a twist of burning sage, spreading its sweet scent, I reached into my bag and

took out a memento of my beloved friends Paul and Moira. Paul had traveled to Peru and brought back many tapestries woven by the Shipibo tribe, whose shamans use ayahuasca. I draped my tapestry with reverence over my meditation chair so that as I sat by it their energy and love would be at my back. Behind me was a windowsill, and I placed a memorial card with Margaretʼs image on it. At the foot of the card I placed a rock Iʼve carried with me for some time, a miniature headstone in white with a twisting teal portal tunneling through it. I arranged it all so that Margaret was looking through the portal, which was pointing at the Shipibo tapestry, which would be buttressing me from behind.

Benjamin made his way around the room. As I got to know my neighbors and we shared stories and hopes and fears, I watched Benjamin ask people to stand up one by one and, the burning twist of sage in his hand, blew smoke over them to cleanse their auras. I consider myself a spiritual person, but I also consider myself a skeptic. Iʼd often thought that the Protestant saying that doubt was the cornerstone of faith could easily be taken the other way around. The faith that Iʼve found through psychedelics, the feeling that everything is essentially okay and unfolding as it should, gives me the ability to be skeptical in a healthy way without being paranoid or afraid. In this case, I was happy to see myself not judging anything. I was accepting this for what it was. That was the first sign that my intention of surrender for the ceremony was true and real – I was surrendering not to the ayahuasca, but to the totality of the ceremony. When it came my turn to have my aura cleansed, I was excited to participate. I stood up and put my arms out to the side.

“Whatʼs that molecule on your forearm?” Benjamin was asking about my tattoo in his lilting British accent. I glanced at the simple arrangement of lines, a hexagon married to a pentagon with the letters N and H dangling off the latter.

“Itʼs an indole ring. Itʼs a structure common to all tryptamines.” We shared a knowing smile.

“Ah yeah, it looked like some sort of double benzene chain.” He was behind me now, and murmured by my ear, “I skipped most of my chemistry, did more…practical experimentation.”

“Me too,” I answered, and we laughed. Benjamin blew the sage against my heart chakra from behind, and I breathed out, imagining it passing through me. What I liked about Benjamin was his lack of pretense. My distrust of shamanism came from the idea of frauds. It was easy enough to call yourself a shaman. Benjamin takes his duty seriously, and sees it as a duty, a service. Heʼs honest about his roots. He doesnʼt pretend to be from South America, only to have learned there. This would ripple deep into the heart of the ceremony, I would find, as Benjamin did not try to simply extricate a South American ceremony from its home and recreate it in an urban setting, but to create what he calls a sacred healing ceremony informed by medicine music and thought that is global. It was informed by his travels and his

experiences of love and connection, but it was still about us. He wouldnʼt control our experiences. He would midwife them.

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To present my journey with ayahuasca simply as eight hours on a Saturday night would be disingenuous to the experience. It was a culmination of many things, and the beginning of many more.

At the time I drank ayahuasca, I was three weeks away from my 27th birthday. My astrologically inclined friends would call this the beginning of my Saturn return – a time of great change, of reflection upon oneʼs life and the values with which one lives. Certainly this had been a tumultuous twenty-seventh year that I had spent upon this earth. A little over a year ago, my dear friend Margaret – my employer, my mentor, my kindred spirit - was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer. On my 26th birthday, I decided that I would give up the free-wheeling part-time lifestyle she had made possible for me and go back to work for her full time. I wanted to help Margaret, to let her focus on healing. More selfishly I also craved discipline and a steady paycheck.

Soon after, an old and intense romance seemed to be building towards a reunion but suddenly fizzled out, leaving me broken hearted. I wanted to escape my loneliness and my hurt, and to do so I turned to a tool that had long been useful to me in the pursuit of deeper self-knowledge: LSD. Intentions are incredibly important when taking psychedelics, and that July 4th night when I took an incredibly large dose of LSD, my intention was to escape what was bothering me and have fun. In return, I was absolutely godsmacked. The psychedelic experience had long been an important figure in my life, and here I found it turning on me. The LSD itself seemed to say, “No, no, donʼt come back here. Thereʼs nothing for you here.” I decided to take a long sabbatical from psychedelics completely. In order to pick up the pieces of my heart and my mind, I focused on a task soon at hand, immersing myself in it completely.

For a little over a year, momentum had been building towards the wedding of two friends of mine, Paul and Moira. I hadnʼt known them for very long at all, but our bond ran soul-deep. They had asked me to marry them, and that had come at a very peculiar time in my life. Raised as Iʼd been by a militantly atheist family with little tolerance for anything that even hinted at spirituality, Iʼd been gradually unfolding to the numinous dimensions of my life and reality. When Paul and Moira asked me to take on this role normally performed by some member of the clergy, it seemed strange and right at once. I became ordained, and in August of last year I stood with them before me, surrounded by their friends and family, and I blessed and consecrated their marriage.

In autumn, I threw myself heavily into my work. With my sabbatical from psychedelics came a sharp increase in pot-smoking, and a series of alcohol

benders that had me regularly bent over the toilet the following morning. Margaret got better; and then she got worse. The cancer metastasized and spread into her liver. December came, and I learned that she was moving to hospice. The fight was over. Before she died, Margaret wrote me a letter. I visited her on her deathbed on December the 8th, sitting with her and holding her hand and telling her how I loved her. The next afternoon she died. I was prepared to speak at a wedding; I hadnʼt expected to speak at a memorial as well.

Though the year 2010 began for me in a great cloud of questioning and a search for meaning in the wake of Margaret's eath, I felt a path opening up before me. I started the year with an incredibly healing mushroom experience on New Yearʼs Eve. It was my first mushroom trip in over a year, and my first trip of any sort in nearly six months. The mushrooms felt like medicine as they worked in me, and I came to a grateful acceptance of the way things were and came to a sense of peace with Margaretʼs death as I realized she was now everywhere in everything. I felt intuitively that taking LSD would only hamper my growth, but that mushrooms had much to teach me. They had been my introduction to the family of psychedelics and that night I reconnected with them. I've never bought into the "organic vs. synthetic" argument, but to me there is a teacher element to mushrooms that is lacking in LSD, and it seems to exist by virtue of the fungus' presence in nature.

I found that I no longer wished to trip often, either. I had become much more interested in the time between trips, on integration. I moved out of the party-heavy apartment I shared with two friends, and got my own apartment where I could focus on myself and on my writing.

In April, I went to the Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century conference in California. New pathways opened up and new friendships were born. If I hadnʼt traveled there, embracing the passion for psychedelics that I had until this year failed to take as seriously as I could, I would never have met Benjamin, my guide on the ayahuasca journey. Back in New York City, I reconnected with a fellow named Neal I had met at the conference, who invited me to what was essentially a psychedelic fireside chat. A speaker whose essays I had followed for some time gave a talk about an hallucinogenic brew used by some indigenous peoples of South America: ayahuasca. In attendance was that speakerʼs friend, Benjamin, who himself conducted healing ceremonies using ayahuasca.

I have had opportunities in the past to take part in ayahuasca ceremonies, but I have a lingering mistrust of anyone who calls themselves a shaman. Part of this is a hangover from my super-secular upbringing, but another part of it is the knowledge and first-hand experience of the kind of inflated egos and power-trips that people involved with psychedelics can sometimes fall victim to. Iʼve always noticed that the word shaman has the word “sham” in it, and I was hesitant to submit myself to any experience where someone would be guiding me without having met the guide first. My first impression of Benjamin, however, from the very first time he opened his mouth and spoke, was of a well-intentioned and intelligent

man. What he called himself didnʼt matter to me and I took him at face value as a warm and loving presence. I expressed a desire to take part in an upcoming ceremony; the next day I found out I would be able to. In order to make the most of the ayahuasca experience I was advised to cleanse my body in preparation. There were also certain dietary restrictions I had to observe because of contraindications with one element of the ayahuasca brew. I started the dieta.

Two weeks before meeting Benjamin, I had taken mushrooms for the first time since New Yearʼs eve, and had quietly set an intention for myself that day with my friend Frank as we prepared to ingest the caps and stems. As I voiced my intention, I confessed to Frank that I had trouble taking myself seriously. He suggested that maybe it was time for me to start. I set my intention that day, which was to be compassionate with myself and show myself love. I achieved it, but not without overcoming many mental obstacles that were a direct result of this lack of confidence and faith in myself. I wanted to really honor this imminent ayahuasca experience, which felt like a sort of attractor pulling me towards it in the future. I had this sense that something very important was about to happen to me.

I dieted for a week, and as I spoke to some other people at the ceremony I realized that, whereas I thought I had really been slipping and cheating on the way, I had really held true to it to the point of asceticism. Aside from one small lapse into bread and two lapses into dairy (yoghurt), I fed myself for a week on rice, vegetables, fruit, whole grains, juice and water. I eschewed processed foods, meat, salt, sugar, spices, caffeine, alcohol and sexual activities. Cleansing the body as much as possible so the ayahuasca could focus on my spirit and mind, I changed my entire way of feeding myself.

Throughout the dieta, I focused my intention. I am eternally thankful to Neal, because he inspired my intention. I sometimes have difficulty “letting go” and when I talked to Neal about setting intentions, he told me that his intention for most of his trips these days was to “surrender.” Letting go and surrendering - these are two ways of saying the same thing, but there is an important difference. If you are trying to “let go” then in phrasing it that way, you are intellectually still “holding on” to something. If your focus is on surrendering, then you have already looked beyond your ego and acknowledged that something greater is at work. I spent a week meditating upon this idea of surrender. Meditating as I walked the New York City streets, as I lay in bed to go to sleep, as I ate my spartan meals, as I moved from pose to pose in yoga classes.

Other than a bit of lingering self-doubt – would I be able to do this? would I be able to surrender? – I was steadfast in my determination to get the most out of this experience. I had resumed my yoga practice, and it helped bring peace of mind. As part of my preparation for the experience, I went out of my way to spend time with important people in my life. Each night until the night before the ceremony, I had dinner with someone who brought out the best in me – my mother, my sister, old friends. We would talk about the road ahead of me and the roads that had brought

us together. These people helped me take stock of the present moment. The final night I spent by myself, quieting my mind and breathing deeply. I went to bed quite early, blissfully clueless as to what the next day would bring.

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After weʼd all had our auras cleansed, Benjamin spoke to us about the ceremony, giving us some guidelines and cautionary advice. We should stay quiet, as much as we might want to talk or sing. We should sit up, he said, and be the warrior Buddha as we face the experience. Though our neighbor may be weeping and vomiting and sound like they are in great distress, it would be best to leave it to them to make it through their difficulties themselves. Such survival would be a powerful learning experience, and if they truly did need help, Benjamin was here to be of service.

We each moved forward from our spots against the wall and formed a seated circle. With left palms facing the sky and right palms facing downward, we joined hands with our neighbors and closed our eyes as we sounded out three thunderous Ohms. The circle was open, and now it was time to share our intentions. There was no need for shame here, or secrets. If we were going to be honest with the ayahuasca and ourselves, it served us all to be open and honest with one another. Some people had personal problems they wanted to address, others were simply curious to see where the experience would lead them, and others were looking for healing of specific psychological or physical ailments. I shared my intention.

“So, back in December a dear friend of mine died, and before she did she wrote me a letter. Four words from that letter have really been the driving force in my life since then, and those four words were: Be true to yourself. Iʼve been doing my best to honor that, and as I have Iʼve seen this path open up before me. If I hadnʼt been following that path I wouldnʼt be here tonight. My intention tonight is to surrender to the ayahuasca, to let go, and let it teach me what it needs to teach me, and help me understand where that path is leading.”

And then, really as an after thought, I added,

“And, I have a lot of fear in my life. And Iʼd like help learning how to turn that fear into compassion.”

Once we had all shared our intentions, we returned to our spots along the wall. We were each given a bucket in case we needed to vomit later, as most people do when they drink ayahuasca. The sense of the sacred and beauteous extended even to the buckets, which were pink with floral patterns circling them. The lights were dimmed, a circle of candles ringing the room, and we each waited our turn to go up and receive the medicine from Benjamin. Surprisingly, I did not get nervous as it came closer to my turn. I followed my breath in and out, and then my neighbor returned with his cup of ayahuasca and I stood and walked to the small table in

front of Benjamin and sat lotus opposite him.

“Brother, Iʼm sorry, remind me of your name.”

“Danny,” I said with a smile. Benjamin put me totally at ease, and gave me the fullness of his attention.

“Danny, right. Danny, you have experience with other plant teachers/plant medicines?”

“Mm yes, a lot of experience.”

He was making very sincere eye contact with me as he decanted the brew into a cup for me, as if feeling me out and seeing how much would be good for me. It was comforting to know that the doses were specific to the person.

“And youʼve never had ayahuasca before right?”

“No, this is the first time.”

“All right, weʼll start you off with a little to let you get a feel of the medicine, and if you want to be topped off later weʼll give you some more, Iʼll come and check on you.”

“All right,” I said and smiling I walked back to my seat with a shot glass filled with only a very small amount of this bitter burgundy brew. I had heard so much about the “foul taste” from people who had drunk ayahuasca but the smell had entranced me, and I looked forward to tasting it. It smelled pungent – raw, jungle, natural.

We all waited to drink together, and there was a cascade of blessing around the circle – cheers! nazdorovya! salut! I knocked back the brew in one shot, then poured water into the empty cup to gather up all the sediment, and drank that. It tasted bitter, absolutely, but it tasted wonderful.

Earlier in the day I had taken a yoga class, and the teacher had closed it with a mantra that I whispered to myself as the ayahuasca settled in my stomach.

Health in the body. Peace in the spirit. Love in the heart. Clarity in the mind.

I settled back into my little area, making sure I knew where my water bottle and my bucket were. I turned to see Margaret one last time, taking the card in my hand and kissing it before placing it back by the rock of ocean jasper. I let my breathing settle into a deep, oceanic rhythm. The lights were turned out completely, and now only the burning of the candles ringed around the room flickered shadows on the wall. Benjamin walked the circle of candles, lifting them and blowing them out one by one until we sat in an almost utter darkness. Black curtains covered the windows to

block out almost all the city light and leave us in as close to absolute darkness as could be achieved.

Giggles rang out here and there in the room.

I assumed the lotus position and focused on my breathing, wondering when I would feel the first tickles of the ayahuasca. I am unusually sensitive to psychedelics and generally feel them coming on sooner than most people with whom I take them. In the dark, it was difficult to tell what was what. I opened my eyes and saw shapes like luminous after-images spotting the area around me. Was that the ayahuasca, or just some everyday optical illusion?

My neighbors began making strange noises. I could hear them breathing like jungle animals, sometimes laughing. Across the room, from different directions, people were reacting to something. I had read so much about ayahuasca, and I had heard so much about the feminine presence that people often made contact with when drinking it, the Mother. I wanted very badly to make contact with her, with something, and to communicate with it.

My monkey mind is going about its regular business, though I try to quiet it with my breathing. My eyes are shut in the darkness and every now and then I see a flicker of light like some impish being inside my eyelids is teasing me. I feel played with and I put my hands together in supplication.

-Mother, Iʼve prepared for you, I cleaned myself for you. Please donʼt tease me with the light but show It to me. I want to see the light in all its glory. Where are you? Why are you hiding from me?

But I receive no visions. I breathe, and breathe.

Rushes in the body, energy burning at the fingertips. A feeling of incredible vibration building from my seat – are my legs falling asleep or is this… This is… Wow. My body. Shaking but I will still it. I sit lotus and I breathe. I feel the medicine in my body, all my lower back pain is gone, I feel whole, I feel clean. Something else…my spirit. My spirit and my body. I take my shirt off. I breathe in deeply, sucking the breath down into my belly, and I place my hands upon my belly. As I breathe out, my hands follow the exhalation up my chest, to my throat, to my mouth and then they open up to the world in front of me as I let the breath out I feel I am just a vessel for breath.

Something is churning inside me but I am not nauseous. Something is churning. Again my breath is pulled down into my belly and again I guide it out but this time it passes through many channels. I think of Benjamin, how he said to imagine a ball of light at my crown and a ball of light at the base of my spine. Suddenly I understand! I understand, not intellectually but experientially, the chakra system. I feel, see, and know that my breath is moving through these channels in my body,

these nodes, and I can see them with my mindʼs eye like a rainbow assembly line turning my breath into white light as it passes out of me. I deepen my breathing and the chakras spin. I am Experiencing not Contemplating.

Mountainous vibration in the body, energy coursing, the body and the spirit alive on fire, kundalini fire. Deep sighs.

I hear the others in the room, and it seems to me that someone – Mother - is soothing them, speaking to them. For a moment I am jealous, then I let it go and wonder why it is my ego is so present. Itʼs not that my ego is struggling against dissolution, something Iʼve faced with LSD and mushrooms. There simply is no struggle. Body and spirit are surrendering but mind is here and whole. I decide not to be upset about it.

After all, I like my ego. I like what it does for me. I like the way it thinks, and I recognize and accept its faults, its imperfections. I may as well laugh at this, take joy in this, this monkey mind of mine that wonʼt shut up even as the rest of my being undergoes an incredible broadening to become the world beyond it. My shoulders are slacking and I pull myself back up into lotus and again focus on my breath, the chakras of my being churning a numinous fire from my loins to my crown and back down again.

Paul and Moira come into my mind. My hands come together once more in prayer. Oh, Mother, please bless Paul and Moira. Bless their marriage, may their love be everlasting and may their goodness touch this earth. With eyes closed I see them standing before me, Moira to my left and Paul to my right and I watch them each one at a time and then together and I feel so blessed. Tears fill my eyes I am so deeply thankful to them for asking me to marry them. They opened me up. In that moment, I felt destiny take me by the hand, as if I had always been waiting for someone to ask me to do that. For them to ask me. I love them deeply and I say Mother you are hiding from me but please bless this marriage. My hands are together at my heart and I am bending forward and sitting straight and bending forward and sitting straight saying prayers for Paul and Moira and then sitting straight and breathing deeper than I knew was possible.

…Benjamin is singing softly…”ayahuasca…medicina…o, abuela”…not a lullaby for I do not feel sleepy but I sway, I am soothed, I never knew such peace was possible…

Electric skin is wrapped around my spirit. The channels are open and my chakras spill a fervent breath out of my mouth, occasionally I roar in whisper. Health in the body. Peace in the spirit. Love in the heart. Clarity in the mind. My mind is almost too clear…

I hear footsteps at the foot of my mat and open my eyes. A foggy light approaches, and I can feel Benjaminʼs presence coming near. He kneels down on my mat in

front of me.

“Hey, Danny brother, I finally remembered your name!” A little laugh, we smile. “How are you feeling?”

“Iʼm good Benjamin. How are you?”

“Oh, Iʼm good, brother – do you feel the medicine?”

“I do, I do. I feel it working in my body, and in my spirit, but it seems to be stopping here,” and I gesture right below my eyes, “without affecting my mind. I feel it very strongly working in my body and in my spirit.”

“Right, right, well that might be good. Do you feel nauseous at all?”

In the background, people have begun to vomit. I donʼt feel nauseous at all. My stomach has churned a bit but I have soothed it with my hands and my breath.

“No, not at all.”

“All right, thatʼs great, thatʼs great. Iʼll come back in a little bit and see how youʼre feeling then and if you want to be topped off.”

“Thank you, Benjamin.”

He walks off, the diffuse light in his hand leaving a ghostly trail. My eyes are open and it seems like small translucent insects, slugs and caterpillars, are crawling on the surface of my pupils as I look around the dark room, barely able to make out any shapes. To my left, my neighbor vomits and the sound of purging around me is intensifying. I feel a touch of pride for some reason that I havenʼt puked. Yet Iʼm vaguely bothered by the fact that my ego is still so very present, and I canʼt help but wonder if the two are connected. I can tell from moans and oohs and aahs around the room that some have gone deep into the experience, deeper than I, and I let go of my envy and simply deepen my breath. I feel blessed to be here now.

Mother, where are you? Are you going to show yourself to me in any deeper way? The thing is, I could feel like this for the next eight hours and I would still be happy. My body and my spirit coursing with the truest sense of being alive. I say it in a hushed prayer and I realize I mean it, a wide smile tugging at the corners of my lips. My eyes are closed again. I am happy to be here but I am waiting for Mother to come, expecting her from somewhere outside myself.

I am thinking mundane thoughts, I am thinking all about my Self, I am thinking I am happy to be here. But the ayahuasca seems to be waning. There is a familiar feeling that reminds me of when I have smoked DMT. It is the absolute joy and gratitude at being alive, and the feeling that I am connected to something far

greater than my self. The word holy presents itself. But the energy coursing through my body has lessened, and I feel almost sober compared to how I felt timeless moments earlier.

But, I don't mourn that. I simply breathe, and lose track of all time.

Those footsteps come again and Benjamin crouches by me.

“Danny, brother, how are you feeling now?”

“Mm, I feel good.”

“Would you like to be topped off?”

I smile and nod, “Mm-hmm.”

“Great, follow me, come to the table.”

Benjamin walks ahead of me, his hand holding a cellular phone and covering its screen so as to allow only so much light to shine down on the floor. Enough to lead me and to disturb no one else, illuminating a path along the wood floor. I feel surrounded as I walk after him, as if there are spirits all around me, dancing around my shoulders and head. Benjamin sits and I sit lotus opposite him. His table is covered with crystals and cups and burning incense.

“It doesnʼt feel as strong now as when we spoke earlier. I guess I was expecting to transcend my ego, but it's very present.” I offer.

“Right, right, well maybe that's good.”

"Right! I was thinking that..."

He nods as he decants the brew from a glass bottle. He looks into my eyes. “Whatʼs your threshold like with psychedelics?”

“Iʼm very sensitive to them, but my threshold is high. I have a lot of experience smoking DMT.”

“Right, is that changa or the crystal?” Some people smoke DMT mixed with other herbs and plants, and others vaporize the crystal directly, which provides a much more potent experience.

“The crystal,” I say.

“Right…What would you call that dose you had, then – gentle…medium…?”

“Mmm…gentle.”

He is decanting the mixture. He pauses after pouring and holds the bottle still, and meets my eyes very sincerely.

“Do you want to ease further in, or do you want to go deep?”

I meet his eyes. I am present.

“I want to go deep.”

Benjamin finishes preparing my drink of ayahuasca, then leads me back to my seat from behind, illuminating a path from behind me. I feel as if I could find it on my own in the dark. It is my spot, after all. Margaret is there, and Paul and Moira are there. Waiting for me. I kneel down on my mat and take many deep breaths as next to me, my neighbor rises to go for his second dose. I drink the ayahuasca down in one shot, and it certainly feels like significantly more liquid than the first dose. I pour water into the empty cup, swirling it around to gather up all the sediment resting at the bottom, finding there to be plenty. I wash it all down with some water, and then there is nothing to do but wait.

Health in the body. Peace in the spirit. Love in the heart. Clarity in the mind.

I think about sitting back, slumping down, or laying down and waiting for it to hit. A part of me, a distant part of me quite far removed from the here and now is aware that my body is tired, having been awake at this point for nearly fifteen hours and only having eaten a very small bit, long ago. I remember Benjaminʼs imploring – be the warrior – and sit up in lotus position once more, deepening my breath and focusing on my mindʼs eye. My third eye.

…time passes but I am outside of it, unaware of it…Benjamin sings, he strums his guitar softly…songs of joy and sorrow, songs of roads we walk and rivers we swim, where we have come from, where we are going, the oneness of being together in the now…

I breathe, and I breathe, and a churning starts to build inside my stomach. I hold my hands gently to my belly, massaging and soothing. She is whimpering. My digestive system is a living entity of its own, part of me but its own life. Fractally that must expand in all directions. What am I part of? I burp, a bitter and organic gas flutters out my lips. I donʼt want to vomit but I realize I might have to.

Something is happening at the corners of my closed eyes. Concentric waves of unfolding multiverses. A fluttering, peeling sensation folding in on itself. I zoom out and I zoom in, and there is a slow awakening inside me. Mother…Mother…! All this time I was waiting for you to come from without, to descend on me, to envelope me. Of course, of course! You are inside me…you are inside me flowering from

within. Itʼs not contact itʼs Awakening. Oh god, my stomach, my stomach…I grab my bucket and heave. My body contracts, such terrible memories of mornings spent vomiting until I didnʼt even have any more bile to give, all because I drank and drank the night before, clouding my body and mind with alcohol. Those mornings I would stick my fingers down my throat, eager to purge all traces of the alcohol from within and pushing my body to the limit and then I could only spend the rest day in agony unable to eat, I donʼt want to go there. I dry heave, great rushes of air and nothing else going into my bucket, and I think okay thatʼs it. Thatʼs it. I donʼt have to vomit, I just have to almost vomit.

I set the bucket aside. Health in the body. Peace in the spirit. Love in the heart. Clarity in the mind.

I take a deep, deep breath. And then it comes. Inside me I can feel my intestines, my stomach, my liver, twisting and contorting. Not with pain, but from a desire to clean themselves, they are wringing themselves out like sponges and I feel the ayahuasca churning through them. I can feel the deepest contours of my body, I could navigate it in a tiny boat, and I realize I am being scrubbed clean and it comes, it comes. With my legs stretched out before me, I grab my bucket and wrap my arms around it, bending my head down over it and I vomit.

A great moan comes out of my mouth, and nothing is coming, but I feel it climbing from deep down, and up my esophagus. As if in labor, I have to push at first. There are solid bits and liquid and it all feels putrid and once it starts rising I realize I donʼt just want it out. I need it out. Itʼs poison. It comes, and it is just a small half-mouthful of vomit feeling purple in the dark and I spit it, not with contempt, but with satisfaction into my bucket. More dry heaves and I think Iʼm done, I set the bucket aside and just a moment later pick it back up and my body focuses all of its energy down into my belly. Where once my chakras were aligned with my breath now they are aligned with my belly and its eructations. I purge deeply.

A great rush of vomit comes out of me and I am practically screaming it out and it feels wonderful. My mind and body are one being, connected, and I know exactly what it is that I am purging. I can feel toxins leaving me, the residue of all the processed food I eat, the shit I put into my body, the different ways I poison myself out of nothing more than sheer laziness towards being healthy. As I purge I am awakening, and Mother is inside me, she IS my belly, she is my mind, she is my spirit. I was waiting for her to come from without but all along she was within. I am in a small canoe rowing lazily down a river around the great World Tree, and I vomit into the water, vomit all this poison and I let it go. I let go of the poison and I let it wash down the river and out to sea and I supplicate myself at the roots of the tree. The tree is She and she suckles me, I am purging and in the act of purging I am nursing myself from her sweet bark, her sap, her nectar. I am under the tree and the tree is within my innards and we are circling each other endlessly. I love my vomit. It feels so strange but I love my vomit, as it leaves me I feel so grateful to it for leaving, I feel so grateful to Benjamin, to the ayahuasca. I hear everyone

vomiting in turns and I think, Good for you! Now I know! Now I understand! This is good, this is good, we need to get this shit out of us. Itʼs not just for ourselves, itʼs for Mother, she wants us to clean ourselves so we can honor her. Why did I ever put this poison in my body?

It is running deeper now, deeper into my body, and I feel I am vomiting more than I thought possible. There is scarcely any food in me, and as I purge I feel a great weight leaving my mind and my shoulders and my spirit. I am vomiting out pieces of myself I have no use for. There is no need for me to hate, no need for jealousy, all my petty grudges and the harshness with which I treat myself. I let it go into my beloved bucket. Outside me, behind me outside the window and many floors down I hear the cityscape I hear people yelling and cars honking through a veiled distance and I am vomiting my culture into this bucket. I love this bucket. HONK! HONK! Keep honking and I will love you back, I will not honk at you, I love you. This bucket is precious to me because it holds everything I donʼt want inside me anymore. Get out, foul culture…this system is sick, it encourages the worst in us, it rewards us for predation, we walk all over one another, rape each other and the planet, oh god.

Oh god.

The planet.

My home. This is my home. My mother.

…a singing bowl begins to hum, ooooooommmmmm……its vibrations wash over and under us all……there is no space in the room not filled with its sound the simple sound of being all we are is an echo of everything around us…

Iʼve hit a stopping point in the purge. No more vomit comes. I set aside the bucket and breathe deeply. I go to sip some water, and put only a small bit in my body. I am sweating. It is warm in this room, my god it felt so good to purge. I never knew it could feel so good. I never want to spend one of those mornings again in front of the toilet, I donʼt know if I ever want to poison myself with alcohol again, I feel so clean. I feel so healthy. Incredible energy courses through me and I realize I am shaking, my arms are shaking with incredible energy and I lift them up to the sky and I do not have to move them they shake of their own accord and I am bowing in prayer like an Orthodox Jew, bending forward backward forward backward passionately prayerful. Still yourself. Still yourself. Be the warrior.

I take a deep, deep breath through my nose and let it out through my mouth in one of those whispered roars and draw myself up into lotus. My bucket is there if I need it but I am the warrior and I will be the warrior. All my teachers are behind me. Margaret is behind me, Paul and Moira are behind me, my mother, my sisters, my friends, and all the brothers and sisters I now have in this room. Everyone from whom I ever learned a lesson. Buddha is behind me. Buddha at my back.

My eyes are closed and filled with the most glorious light, and I am on a mountain. I sit lotus atop the highest mountain in the glorious Kingdom of Creation and it is a temple to the All. I have climbed to sit atop this mountain. I have climbed. I sit here underneath an azure sky flecked with ripples of shimmering gold and from above I see it through my third eye incredible and glorious. It is the unfolding light of Creation. It is dazzling, it is majestic, bearing down on me with the heat and the energy of a thousand suns. The light at the heart of all sacred texts. The Light. I feel myself cowering beneath it, bending, giving way. Surely my flesh will be blasted from my skeleton.

“I donʼt know if I can do this,” I say out loud, speaking for the first time in ages, my body slumping from lotus, fearful of what is coming, of this never-ending torrent of the awesome. From beside me comes a voice, my neighbor. He struggles through his own experience and reaches out a hand in voice. He offers me a whispered prayer of solidarity.

“You are sssafe here, brother!”

I breathe in deeply and pull myself up and I will not be a coward to this moment, I will face it like the warrior but that doesnʼt mean that I will fight it. I will not fight it, I will rise to meet it I will be the bodhisattva and all the fear and all the doubt I feel are all illusion and I will cast them down not through any violence not through any struggle but through surrender. I surrender, I surrender to fearlessness.

And like that, a channel opens.

My arms outstretched, my palms facing the sky, my spine erect and straight, my chakras like a chain reactor my third eye open all the energy of all is flowing down me to the base of my spine where it meets my fearlessness my fearlessness meets creation up flows compassion I am blossoming with every passing breath there is no need to fear anything there is only compassion I am looking through the center of the universe the chakra that binds us all and through it I do not just understand that I am connected to each being I simply am and each beingʼs suffering is my own I have true compassion for them all I have compassion for myself I am suffering we are all suffering as my compassion flowers it bleeds into a greater fearlessness it is within me it is the only path truly worth embracing fearlessness compassion fearlessness compassion – do you have a vision for the world of Fearlessness and Compassion? Then I call you brother. Then I call you sister.

Across the room someone is crying, not with joy like the tears that spill from my eyes but in pain and I am with you sister I have nothing but great compassion for you and I give you my fearlessness. I donʼt need it because it is endless. I give you my fearlessness, take it and run with it, run into the light. All my teachers are before me and they circle to meet me face to face, the Mother churns inside me and my mother is before me and I think about her fear. All her fear, it rules her life, I want to

give her this fearlessness she is far away and I weep for all sheʼs given me and all I can ever give to her. My head tilts side to side, oh mommy oh mommy my dear mommy I love you deeply you are always in my heart. There are strata here, there is the golden eye of All, which buttresses us all, it is the source. There is I. There is the Mother, she lives within me and acts through me and all the others in this room. We are a holy Trinity: I, Mother, golden Eye of All. Around us are the spirits of all who ever taught me anything.

I think about my father.

My father, I think about my father.

I bow my head, I am off the mountain, back in the canoe lazily making its way down the river. I start to cry for all the love he never gave me and then I realize I just donʼt want to. I donʼt need to. I raise my head and I say, I Forgive You. I Forgive You. I pull the bucket to me and I vomit him into the river, I let him go and watch him float down the river. Down, down, down the river off into eternity. For him, I have compassion. My vindictiveness is in my bucket. My wounds are in my bucket. I donʼt need them anymore.

I raise my chin and straighten my spine. Again Iʼm on the mountaintop and does this ray have any end as it shines down on me? Can I take this? Of course I can take this. I am the warrior. Words swim in my head. The mountain fades in and out, sometimes the center of my vision blackens while the periphery remains the mountain, the temple, the azure sky, the golden radiance emanating from the center in the void. Words are swimming and I am swimming in them, I am thinking of the people who I will tell about this and I feel guilty for a moment that I am thinking past this moment but I realize that everything is okay and I am a writer. I am a writer. This is what I do, I write. And so I start writing sentences in my mindʼs eye about this moment, about the luminous intensity of Godʼs eyes. The most beautiful sentences I have ever crafted. The work of rare wordsmiths, sentences that twist and fold upon themselves to betray the deepest truths of humanity and I let them go, I let them wash on down the river…I donʼt need to hold on to them because all of this is always within me and swimming around me. Let me write, and let me let go, and it is all okay. There is no reason to hold on.

…a womanʼs voice is singing now, sounding old and wizened…Mother sings through this woman, whoever she is, a voice that is nurturing and suffering all at once…its vibrato quarter-tones strike me deep and I put my hands to my stomach, Mother is in terror Mother is in joy Mother sings us all into a trance…

My body slumps against my bucket and I purge. I thought I had no more but Mother wills it out of me, and it comes in great rushes. I am on all fours, the bucket under my head, my hands on the mat, and the Earth supports me as I empty myself out. If I could get to my feet and get to the bathroom I would shit the poison out too. I consider it but it frankly seems impossible for me to rise. I hug the earth, my face

hovering over the bucket. I donʼt mind the stink at all, thank God you are out of me, thank God Iʼve purged myself of you. Please, Mother, rid me of all this poison, and I can feel the ayahuasca swimming through my guts like a strangled sea serpent ridding itself of oil so it can breathe water through its gills once more.

…now Benjamin is singing and he calms the serpent…singing it lightly into a trance, soothing it, shhhh…shhh…like some warrior of ancient myth he calms this great beast within me and though I am still vomiting I feel her settle in my stomach, suckling me again, I am in the canoe on the river, around the tree...Mother I feel you under my feet…Mother I feel your heart beat…Mother I feel you under my feet…Mother I feel your heart beat…

When the purge has come to a close I put the bucket aside and my hands are overflowing with power. My arms, from shoulders to fingertips, are wracked with heavy vibration and I need to put it somewhere. I touch them to my belly, sitting back on my haunches, and between Benjaminʼs singing and my soft massaging the Mother serpent tree inside my stomach flowers and mellows. But my arms, my arms, they are spasmodic with energy and I fall forward on my hands and knees, then rise into downward dog, and then stretch back into childʼs pose, my knees toes forehead and arms against the floor. A channel opens and I focus my third eye down into the floor, pressing my hands and arms into the mat. I can feel the energy channeling out of me, leaving me, coursing down many floors of steel girders and plaster and deep into the buildingʼs foundation beneath the city streets, into the soil. Take this, Mother Earth, please take it. Itʼs too much for me, I have too much goodness I am overflowing please just take it and heal all I can think about is the gaping wound in your side in the Gulf and the blackness leaking out and I am crying against the floor I have never felt so deeply that you are my home and all we do is rape you when we should be taking care of you we should be stewards not overlords please God Mother Earth Home take this from my hands and do yourself good I am overflowing with compassion for you that they think has no life of your own. I know you because I am you.

Ages pass and then I sit up again. My breathing is labored and deep. My chest is heaving and falling and I am crying I have touched Mother at her core and as I think about her all there is now is Margaret, Margaretʼs face her eyes her smile sometimes withered and cancerous other times younger than I ever knew her as if all her life was flowing all around me. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Margaret, oh I miss you and I thank you so much and she is here, she is here with me I hold myself and she holds me and mother holds me from inside. Iridescent flickerings from the mountaintop - the godhead holds me, we are all One cocoon we are all One. I am hunching, losing the mountain, and I straighten and I keep saying it Thank You, Margaret. Thank You, Margaret. The softest tears.

I am sitting lotus on the peak of the tallest mountain in the Kingdom of Creation. It is a temple and I have climbed it and I sit upon the peak. I am the warrior. All my teachers are at my back and all my life has been but a prelude to this one moment

which I shall carry into all moments. Warm salty tears like medicine are streaming down my cheeks and my mouth tastes of ayahuasca vomit. I straighten my spine and I am the warrior, taking breaths deep down into my belly and then passing them through all my chakra channels and out in great heaves of exhalation. My eyes have not opened for hours and I have trained them upon the space between and above them - my third eye, where I envision a prism, and through that prism shines all the light of universal glory deep into the recesses of my physical brain and down into my body and out into my spirit. I am surrendering completely. I am surrendering to everything. There is no reason not to surrender and I give myself to You completely.

A bright white fire tinged with gold burns in my third eye and a vision is born.

A vision:

All worlds melt away and I am looking at an old man. He is sitting in a study, surrounded by shelves filled with chapbooks, leatherbound tomes. On his desk many of these books are spread out, turned to various pages, references surrounding a large notebook into which he has been writing. The walls are adorned with various icons from religions and spiritual traditions. Shiva dances, Buddha sits, Christ hangs heavy, Davidʼs Star beams, tapestries weave, candles burn, incense smokes. His hair is gray and frizzy. His beard is gray and scraggly, and he toys with it contemplatively as he waxes poetically about the most arcane matters of the spirit and the mind-body-soul connection. Yet as he speaks about these almost solemn topics, there is a humor fleshed through and through every comment. It is a decidedly Jewish humor, and he is a decidedly wizened old Jewish man, his face creased with the skid-marks and folds of a life spent smiling joyfully. Joy and gratitude are beaming from his eyes.

I am him.

We contemplate one another through a continuum of time and light and then the vision fades as quickly as it came. I am back on the mountain and then I sink down and back against my seat, and slouch, awestruck. The mountain melts away from beneath me but the golden light is ever-present. I feel like a lizard deep in the Saharan desert, mercilessly scorched by the mid-day sun but anytime it begins to overwhelm me I simply smile and surrender more deeply to it.

How will I communicate this? Larry my Brother Ani my Sister Nicole Becca Moth Paul Moira how will I tell them how can I ever tell them what is happening here? Miriam comes into my mind and I think of her imploring me to write and I know I will write this for her and it will be majestic and it will be true. This is passion. That old man, he is something to strive for. If he be a future me then so be it and I aspire to find my way into his place in space and time. Books. Books. I hunger for education, on religion and the spirit, physics and consciousness, on the mind and matter. Knowledge. I want knowledge and I feel it downloading into me at vast rates

through the language of creationʼs light but I know that tomorrow is another day and there are books. It occurs to me (the ayahuasca tells me) that it is time to put up or shut up, about my passion for psychedelics and for the spirit. I have lived and lived and learned. Now I must teach and teach and learn. My thoughts once swum in archetypes and now they settle to the seabed. Strangely concrete thoughts enter my mind. Education. Graduate school. Comparative religion.

I quiet my mind, and simply bathe for some time. I bathe in the rays shining down on me. At some point Benjamin comes to me.

“Danny how are you brothe-“

Before he can even finish I say, “I definitely donʼt need any more medicine.”

“Great, great,” he says, with a quiet laugh.

Immobilized on my back and propped up on my elbows, I ask a question meekly.

“Benjamin…would you please throw my vomit out?” I know I cannot make it all the way to the bathroom.

“Sure, brother,” he answers, and in that moment I feel I have truly learned the meaning of brotherhood.

I lose myself in strange visions. A cloud of limousines and block-rockinʼ beats, honking horns and sacred forests, girls in high heels laughing and twisting their ankles with each step, ancient temples nestled into mountainsides, the beating drums of the earthʼs rotation, I am swimming in a sea of consciousness. The city and the ceremony crash together on my shore. All around me others are still vomiting and crying and I am so happy for all of us that we can be here and that we can do this. Ayahuasca. Medicina. I take my bucket and find myself vomiting once more with ease. Smiling, crying, I purge and feel grateful.

Time passes, and I move into shivasana, lying on my back with my palms facing the sky. My breathing is becoming calmer and I feel that the greatest waves of the ayahuasca have passed. I donʼt want to drink any more. I am flabbergasted with contentment and joy. I roll on to my stomach and feel again as if I am on some beach or desert, and I feel that the light truly is above me shining down upon my back. I have faced it head-on long enough, and now I need it at my back. I strengthen my back in its rays so that as I move forward into my future and the rest of my days I have it always like a guiding wind at my rear. My cheek nestles into the ground and I smile and cry softly with gratitude for an earth that holds me up each day. I wiggle my toes. I thank my feet for keeping me moving.

On my back again, I wrap my arms around myself. I love you. I love being you. You are the only you that I could ever be and I have no regrets. I hold myself, and run

my hands over my body, caressing every curve and nook and surface. I give myself firm little squeezes, appreciating each and every part of my body and swearing silent oaths to care for it for all time. I feel cleansed. I feel squeegeed. Not just my third eye, but all of me. Even my spirit feels cleaner than when the ayahuasca first washed over me. I could gather the energy to draw myself up and sit lotus once more and engage the ayahuasca in that way but I donʼt because I simply donʼt want to. I am tired. The most refreshed feeling of fatigue I have ever felt suffuses me.

The room is quieter now. Each of us is on our own journey and yet there is a net that binds us all. Benjaminʼs music has guided us each and the ambient lullabies of the early morning soothes us all. Where once there was a cacophony of vomitous madness in this room, a symphony of soul-searching, now there is only the serenity of silence. I feel and hear movement. Benjamin glides around the room, and the curtains are being lifted. The most unreal daylight I have ever felt floods the room and presses against my closed eyelids softly. I take many deep breaths and then open them slowly. At first my eyes are stung by the brightness and then I hold them open, amazed at the way everything leaves a million trails behind it. I look around the room, at the different figures on their mats. Where once I saw strangers, now I see brothers and sisters. I overflow with love and, more than love, compassion.

Everything is fluttering. I sit up and press my hands together.

I touch them to my belly. Health in the body. I spread them out before me. Peace in the spirit. I fold them over my chest. Love in the heart. I touch my fingertips to my temples. Clarity in the mind.

Though the night is clearly over, I am still outside of time. Waving my hands in the air before me, jetstreams trail behind them and then I let them drop, laying on my back once more with my palms facing the sky, receptive to the world. I let everything pass through me. I let everything go. I breathe.

“All right…everyone, good morning. Letʼs get right into the sharing.”

A loose order settled over the cozy chaos. With those words, Benjamin brought all of our attention back to the center of the circle. Each of us would now take the time to share what we had experienced and learned over the course of the night. Much like the ceremony began, here at the conclusion there was no rushing. Each person was given as much time as they needed to talk through what they had just experienced. It came to me.

“First of all, I want to thank each of you for being such wonderful human beings.” I put my hands together and swept the room with my eyes. “I feel honored to be able to share this experience with you. Thank you so much. It was really great to hear each of you vomit.” Laughter. “Every time that I heard someone throwing up, I would just think ʻGood for you!ʼ or put my fist in the air and think ʻYes! Get that OUT

of you!ʼ”

More laughs, and then I recounted for them my journey to the mountain and my vision of myself as an old man. I paused, and breathed deeply.

“So, I was raised in a militantly atheist secular Jewish household, where anything that smacked of spirit or religion was looked down upon and considered almost…barbaric. Well…I think Iʼm tired of apologizing, to myself and to my family, with the tone in which I speak about these things, for how I feel about reality and life. Iʼm done compromising myself. I feel blessed to be alive, and I think every moment is holy, and Iʼm not embarrassed to think that or to feel that or to say that. Being here tonight with all of you, I learned a lot about community. Communities arenʼt things that are gated, theyʼre open. A community doesnʼt need a place to gather, itʼs something that you carry in your heart.”

“I want to share something with you. I took a yoga class this morning, and my teacher ended the class with a mantra that I kept coming back to during my experience and that seems really relevant to everything I learned."

Making the motions with my hands as I had done before, I chanted for them.

"Health in the Body. Peace in the Spirit. Love in the Heart. Clarity in the Mind. Aho.”

“Aho,” echoed the others, and the sharing continued on until the circle came back to Benjamin. We all scooted forward, once again joining hands with our left palms facing skyward and our right palms facing the Earth. We closed our eyes and opened our mouths for a far more sonorous set of Ohms, distinctly different from the set that had begun the ceremonyy. I think each of us let our throats open a bit wider, and let ourselves sing the word with joy. We were all so much closer together at this point, even if on some level we were still strangers.

As the third Ohm came to a close, the circle was closed.

Things needed putting away, and very slowly we each began to pack our things and return blankets and chairs to their shelves. Each of us was still very much aglow. Cleaning and tidying took a backseat to hugging and sharing. When I finally stood up for the first time, I expected to feel weak and dizzy. I found that I felt healthier than Iʼd ever felt in my entire life. I stretched and twirled and hugged and put my hands together, looking skyward in awe. Did all this just happen?

I left the room for the first time since I had arrived nearly twelve hours earlier and went to the bathroom. I emptied my bucket and then lovingly washed it clean. On the way to the bathroom I still very much felt the ayahuasca working in me, and yet within minutes I was back down to baseline. There was no precipitous drop-off, no hangover, simply a smooth landing back down to the Earth with whom I had just communed so closely.

We all made our way out into the lounge area of the yoga studio, where a lively spread of fresh fruit and berries and nuts awaited us. We picked like mellow monkeys at kiwi, mango, cantaloupe and strawberries, nuts and melon and blackberries. Conversations rippled all around the room, each person processing all that they had just learned but also just taking the time to be joyful and be present. Sometimes I would speak with others, other times I would survey the room with a dumbfounded smile on my face. Friendship, kinship, and community…these things are born much more easily than we think they are. Time and space are irrelevant to love, which is the core of every moment.

With nowhere to go and nothing that needed doing, I stayed for many hours in the studio talking and laughing and getting to know my fellow journeyers. Like atomic particles we would orbit the room, sometimes bonding to just one other person for a time, at other points many people joining together to form complex new molecules. We were all kin now. I thought about how, as we rushed around New York City and went about our lives in the future, if we were to run into one another on some street-corner we would doubtlessly reclaim the timelessness we had shared in a warm embrace that set everything else aside. As time passed, more phones were turned on and people began to reconnect with the outside world. Slowly, they trickled out.

Eventually, I slipped out myself into the blaring New York City daylight, out into the street. Hands pressed together and with a bow I bid my fellows adieu, and let the city swallow me back into its folds. It was Sunday morning, and the street was pulsing with life. Traffic was congested, and human beings were hurrying to get somewhere. I stopped in the middle of the street, threw my hands up and cried out, "Hallelujah!"

Look at all these crankypants and sourpusses, I remember thinking. Not me! NOT ME!

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So Iʼve come to understand, experientially and not intellectually, the story of the Buddha. Iʼve sat atop the temple mountain, my own bo tree, and let the light of singularity fill me. I've loved it and Iʼve let it go. Iʼve let the illusions of doubt and fear wash over me and let them slip on down the river in which we all swim. Iʼve vomited my body and spirit clean and felt connected to the Earth like never before. So what? What now?

My friend Neal has said that while he learns from each of his psychedelic experiences, he has only ever had one that was truly transformative. Iʼve been thinking, since drinking ayahuasca, about my own psychedelic experiences and how theyʼve changed me. I think back to the first time I ate psilocybin mushrooms, and see how they opened me up to a new way of perceiving the world. That night I learned that our minds were capable of far more than we were led to believe in the

course of our education and that there was far more to reality than meets the eye. I perceived that everything is coursing with life and that every individual element of the universe from the smallest quark to the largest celestial body is communicating, that each is itself a form of communication.

When Paul and Moira asked me to marry them, I truly awakened to the idea that psychedelics could be considered entheogens. Theyʼd asked me to consecrate their marriage, and that night as I danced on LSD in a nightclub, religious symbols and icons of temples never known or not yet built danced around me in three dimensional space. Swaying, shifting, I put my hands together in focused prayer for maybe the first time in my life. My movements became devotional. I expressed gratitude to nothing in particular, and it felt right. I was truly grateful, and I was part of a community.

Smoking DMT had been a slow awakening to being comfortable with vocabulary I had been raised to look down upon. Coming down from those experiences, naturally unfolding into yoga poses without knowing anything about yoga, in prostration with my forehead and palms against the floor, I gave thanks and gratitude to everything that had poured into those moments. I had danced with devotion, praising all the gods and goddesses of all religions, one night even dancing with Shiva in my bedroom. I found truth in every wisdom tradition through smoking DMT, all the little experiences linking together to form one slow transformative chain.

All the trips in between were many things – mostly they were fun and I learned a lot about myself in little ways. But I don't know that any truly pushed me beyond a change in cognition to a change in action that was tangible and concrete. To say that this experience with ayahuasca was transformative would be an understatement, because more so than any experience it taught me how to change my life for the better.

The brew spoke to me in no language. It said,

Youʼre doing great. Keep up the good work. You are on a right and true path of self-awakening - remain mindful, always . Health in the body, peace in the spirit, love in the heart, clarity in the mind. Take better care of your body. Be kind to your stomach. Be good to others around you. Be grateful to the Earth that gives you life and upon whose surface you walk each day. Educate yourself and stay hungry for knowledge. Shed fear, embrace compassion. Walk the path.

Psychedelics can be catalysts for flashes of enlightenment. In the past, following these flashes I've allowed myself to grow comfortable resting on my laurels. Enlightenment, though, is fleeting. It is not a permanent state. The trick, I'm learing, is to develop mindfulness, to live consciously moment to moment. It has been a few weeks since I drank ayahuasca. I feel incredibly conscious of the connections between mind, body and spirit. This consciousness is not effortless - I am choosing

to remain mindful of these connections in every moment. I stop sometimes in the middle of the day and I repeat my mantra. Health in the body. Peace in the spirit. Love in the heart. Clarity in the mind. I was faced the very next day with the choice of mindfulness.

I went home and napped that Sunday afternoon, waking up incredibly hungry later in the evening. Inevitably, when I would trip on mushrooms or LSD, I would wind up ordering food delivered to my house, deciding what to eat based entirely on what tastes I wanted in my mouth at the time. That night I was set to do the same thing, but as I sat there holding an Indian food menu in one hand and my phone in the other, something clicked and stopped me in my tracks. I put down both the menu and my phone and walked to my kitchen which was still filled with healthy fruits and vegetables I had stocked up on for the dieta. Though I was hungry to the point of aching, I spent twenty minutes chopping and dicing and preparing a salad with care. I poured myself into the act, thinking of nothing else. Baby spinach, diced pears, slices of melon, onion and peppers. I added cheese and oil and vinegar, real luxuries compared to the dry feasts I'd had all week. I heated up some lentils and chickpeas. I took time creating a healthful meal and then gave all my attention to slowly chewing and digesting it, feeling grateful and very satisfied with myself. In retrospect, it's very important that I took that time that night.

I am what I eat, and what I eat is more than what is sitting on my plate. Itʼs the life of that plant or that animal that is sitting on my plate. Iʼve decided to take the time to educate myself about nutrition and the food chain and to stop putting things in my mouth based on what tastes I want in there, but based more so on what I need that this good green Earth can give me and with an understanding of just how that food came to be on my table. How was it grown, how was it treated? Food is more than just fuel. If I am not just a core Self, but all the actions I take, and all the actions visited upon me, who's to say the same doesn't go for all lifeforms? It was comfortable and easy for me to elevate myself out of the natural equation by virtue of existing as a human being, but the ayahuasca both lifted and humbled me at once. In the course of the ayahuasca ceremony, I was able to engage my stomach as a being with whom I live in a symbiotic relationship. I am so grateful for the work my digestive system does in keeping me alive. I donʼt want to put all the garbage back into myself that I spent all that time vomiting out. Of course, food and food residue isn't all that I vomited out that night.

It's very easy to let go of your hatred, your grudges, your jealousies and all your negative emotions in psychedelic headspace. Living your daily life is another challenge entirely. The value in drinking ayahuasca - one of many - was that I experienced a state of mind in which I did let go of all those things. Psychedelics are a catalyst - most are completely broken down by your body and metabolized quite soon after ingestion. This means that, though they start the process of unfolding in the mind, the mind is working on its own after a certain point. Essentially, this means that we can always be so conscious, and the impossible truly is possible - albeit not without hard work. I can choose to be positive. I can

choose to be a creative force rather than a destructive one. Though fear sometimes grips me, and though it may terrify me to my very core, I understand now in a way I knew but couldn't quite cognate before, that I choose to be fearful - and I choose whether or not to be compassionate.

The ayahuasca filled my mind with thoughts of education. It knew me intimately as a writer, and encouraged and insisted that I develop my craft and expand my knowledge. I have been thinking about going back to school for a long time now. I think often now about that grinning old Jewish man; he was a scholar. When that vision unfolded I felt deeply connected to Jewish history and I thought about my middle-name-sake, Isaiah. He was a visionary, and one of the greatest writers in Jewish history. I am part of a rich tradition, a heritage of thinkers. If I am truly interested in the philosophies underlying religions and spiritual traditions, and if I think that the corrupt organization of religion has co-opted beautiful basic ideas, then it seems only fitting for me to educate myself about those cores as best as possible. Religion is something I love to talk about, and yet I don't quite have the footing and the background to hold my own in the conversations I most enjoy. I want to understand how and why belief systems go wrong, and through that help people understand one another. It's not enough to just be compassionate myself, but fostering compassion in others now seems a duty.

I am cobbling together my own worldview from myriad inputs, flavored by my own experiences, both psychedelic and otherwise. I've been afraid of embracing certain parts of myself. This is partly due to my family and their misgivings but also partly due to my own lack of courage in my convictions. I'm not sure that I fit into the framework of institutional scholarship. Perhaps auto-didacticism is for me or perhaps I'm just afraid of having to work to my full potential in a university context. I'm still figuring that out. If it's the latter, there's nothing to do but to go to school; what room do I have for fear? As I learned through drinking ayahuasca, none. As Neal would say, even if something is unpleasant, the struggle and the fear are only going to make it even more so. Just surrender to the flow, to the universe. Doing so still leaves free will completely intact.

When I spoke at Margaret's memorial, I said that for me faith was waking up every day and living my life on the fundamental premise that the universe is unfolding exactly as it should and that everything is basically okay. Her death shook that faith for me, and I'm glad for anything that makes me question my beliefs and perceptions. Over the last six months since she transitioned, I've been rebuilding that faith stronger than ever. How could this life be any more perfect? What more could we ask for? Even all the pain, the hunger, the greed, the torture, all of it...it has a place, even if I don't understand it. It doesn't mean I have to like it or accept it as something that can't be changed.

I have gone back to my job. My passions are words and psychedelics/entheogens. I work with numbers and I work with alcohol. It is difficult but it also serves as a helpful counterpoint and keeps me balanced. I've just turned 27 years old, and my

Saturn Return is in full swing. Am I living in accordance with my truest values? Am I, as Margaret implored me to, being true to myself? These are important questions, and ones that cannot be answered in a day. My evening with ayahuasca has given me the fire, the motivation and the courage to approach these problems with a level head and an open heart and make the decisions that are best for me and that in turn make it possible for me to do the best I can for this world. As I watch the webcam of the oil spill a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico each day, I give thanks to this great Earth for unfolding as it has into this one moment where I sit here, what Rumi called a breath breathing human being, and I see that I have a choice in how to live in this world. My choices affect more than just myself and those around me. I am one small link in an infinite chain. I am nothing, and everything passes through me. I am a work in progress.