Ayahuasca will not change your life.
I realized Ayahuasca had officially hit the mainstream when my 70-year-old stepmom told me she attended a ceremony. She mentioned it over the phone and with a with causal regard, as if she had spent the weekend at a scrapbooking retreat or something as equally boring and benign. But over recent years the stigma and impracticality of ayahuasca ceremonies have slowly been stripped away. For example, turn on Netflix and you can stream white, bleached blonde celebrities like Chelsea Handler and Gwenyth Paltrow experiencing it. You no longer have to save up thousands of dollars and travel deep into the amazon either as all kinds of ayahuasca ‘churches’ are popping up for us regular hamburger eating, coca-cola drinking Americans to do it right here in the good ol’ U.S.OF.A. In fact, I think it’s a requirement for residency in San Francisco now. So, what am I waiting for? I thought, as I typed ‘ayahuasca ceremonies near me’ into Google.
When I told my husband about the retreat I was planning to attend, he looked at me with that brow raised-cocked head-mouth opened-sigh face. “Why do you want to do that?” he asked me. It was hard to answer that question. I think I told him some bullshit about how I wanted to get unstuck and how I wanted to be a better person. I had read and heard about all these powerful experiences people were having, and as I looked around at my shitty life, I decided this is just what I needed to turn things around. Something mystical and foreign that would pull me out of my funk, that would make my life more exciting, more mystical more meaningful. As an almost forty-year mom with a corporate job, a mortgage and all the pressures and monotony of middle age a weekend of consuming hallucinogenics seemed like just the thing I needed. But in reality, I think the crux of what I wanted was something more. I think deep down I wanted more than being a better person or getting unstuck, I wanted this to be a life changing experience.
Like I said before, ayahuasca retreats are popping up all over the states, and so instead of going to Costa Rica or Peru I found myself in someone’s living room in Tucson for my weekend long ceremony. I’m not going to bore you with the details of the weekend or the trip itself. I think that listening to the details of someone else’s psychedelic trip is akin to listening to a co-worker tell you about the dream they had last night. No one wants to hear about it. I’ll give you the very condensed (and much more tolerable) version of my experience. The first night nothing happened. Maybe it was nerves or my mindset, who knows. I laid on my foam mat for five hours with a terrible headache, probably from the tobacco that was blown up my nose prior to the ceremony. The second day the effects kicked in towards the end of the ceremony. The music was beautiful and I mostly felt blissed out and couldn’t stop laughing and smiling, but no repressed memories, not particularly impactful insights or messages, no visions, no death of ego.
I have to admit as I left the retreat on Sunday, I was disappointed that there wasn’t something more. I sighed as I approached my car and was greeted with a giant drywall nail in my tire. A minor annoyance, but not something I wanted to deal with. My terrible headache had returned and when I finally got home there was laundry over the whole house, dirty dishes in the sink, and my daughter still in her pajamas watching cartoons while my husband laid in bed watching Youtube videos. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. I still had to go to work on Monday morning and spend 8 hours on zoom calls. I still had to get a new tire. I still had to nag my husband about the dirty dishes.
So after all that, here is my biggest insight from the retreat. Ayahuasca did not change my life. It won’t change yours either. You will have a different experience then me, of course. You may have visions and insights and messages. You may relive old memories and confront repressed trauma. You may have a glorious death of ego. But the drink itself will not change your life. It’s up to you to change your life. Ayahuasca is not going to do that. When you leave the retreat whether it’s some beautiful location in the Amazon, or someone’s living room in Tucson, you are still returning back to the life you lived before you drank the tea. Maybe you already know this. Maybe I’m just the idiot that thought this would create this new awareness and deep insights about the mysteries of my life. But maybe this was just the experience and insight ayahuasca had intended to give me after all. Maybe by not having a life changing experience, I did have one. Isn’t that meta? Instead of looking for something to give me the life I think I should be living, I can just live in the one I have. Dirty dishes, nail in tire, and all.
