Ayahuasca 05: The Puppeteer Behind the Curtain—a Fable
Art credit: Alfredo Zagateca, follow him on Instagram for more mind-blowing visionary art.
Stepping inside
the maloka for my second ayahuasca ceremony, I was surprised to find a much cozier seating arrangement: each mat-blanket-pillow-bucket combo was spaced about three feet from the next. Tonight, our original retreat cohort of six would be joined by another group of seven.
I did not have a good feeling about this arrangement. It was already uncomfortable vomiting my brains out in a room with others present, but tonight we would be close enough to hold our neighbor’s hair back if they needed it.
I take a space near Maestro Pablo again, and the ceremony begins with the same rites as the previous night.
When the glasses are apportioned, I receive slightly more ayahuasca in my cup, five lines this time, but I am skeptical it will provide a strong experience. I feel slightly annoyed. I want a strong, “breakthrough” ayahuasca experience. In fact, I need it. At least that’s the story coming from my ego.
I recall a piece of wisdom I received when I first began doing psychedelic therapy: “You don’t get the experience you want, you get the experience you need.” I relax, and decide to trust this wisdom, the judgment of the shaman, and the universe.
An hour has passed
since we drank ‘la medicina’—my experience to this point has been largely the same as the evening before. A gurgling tummy, and a few waves of nausea that I swallowed back. But my body does feel like it needs to purge now, and not the kind of purging that’s appropriate for a plastic bucket. I stand up and begin walking to the bathroom.
Tonight there was no resistance from my body in releasing my bowels. The ayahuasca cleanse is in full effect. I emerge from the stall and begin washing my hands, but before I can finish my body implores me to return to the toilet for another round of “cleansing.”
Finally back in the maloka, I chug a liter of water to accelerate the other purge I feel is inevitably coming. I am ready to get this out of the way and be done with the bodily fluids for the evening, and maybe, just maybe, clear the way for some psychoemotional purging.
I close my eyes—and reliably, the visuals begin.
Four iridescent tentacles are directly in front of me. They are flowing and squirming, conjoined at the center, like an octopus without a head.
I am both curious and suspicious of this entity. My conscious mind knows it is a manifestation of the DMT and other psychoactive compounds I consumed, but something about it makes me feel uneasy.
It’s the sound.
I now realize there is an auditory hallucination accompanying this headless octopus—a constant, high-pitched droning, like a machine. I’m not sure I trust this entity: it doesn’t seem of this world.
As if it heard this thought, the entity stretches its slithering appendages toward me, outside my periphery as they reach beyond my visual field.
The sound intensifies, and I actually begin to feel a sensation within my skull.
My distrust turns to outright fear as I now realize what is happening—the tentacles are writhing into my brain.
Who is this entity?
What are they doing to my brain?
Is this the “psychic surgery” I came to Peru for?
Before I can ponder this vision any further, I am jolted forward by a wave of intense nausea—immediately purging into my bucket several times. I swish my mouth out with water, and settle back in. The voice of Ryan, my ayahuasca integration therapist comes to me, “Even when you see scary things, do not resist. Breathe into them, and ask them what they’ve come to show you.”✝
OK, headless octopus, I’m ready—what do you have for me?
But as I close my eyes, I now hear another high-pitched droning sound. Different than before, it is distracting and annoying. And this time, it is not a hallucination: the sound is coming from inside the maloka. Another participant has started humming, in a shrill, discordant whine, loud enough to compete with Maestro Pablo’s ikaros.
I try to re-focus my mind inward, but the sound is too distracting. As I internally debate what to do, another participant’s voice pierces the maloka.
“I know everyone’s supposed to be in their own experience, but I want you all to know… I love you guys.”
It’s Taylor—a late-20-something man from Colorado who I did not know personally, but had seen around the retreat property, typically sporting a baseball cap, CrossFit t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and athletic shorts.
I am slightly annoyed, but since he is close to me, I reply quietly “Love you buddy”—hoping an affirmation will shut him up. It didn’t…
“IT’S ALL FUCKING REAL!”
He starts yelling.
I can hear the retreat staff hurry over to his spot in the dark, trying to quieten him, but to no avail. He continues his rant—even calling out to, and engaging with, other ceremony participants in the maloka.
I feel a rising anger, heating and expanding within me.
How disrespectful. We are here to do deep psychospiritual healing work.
I am trying to heal from depression and suicidal ideations.
Kathryn, a Canadian woman in her 40s, is here with the intention of healing from debilitating fibromyalgia, after exhausting all the treatments offered to her by western medicine.
Sean, yet another individual in our group has pinned his hopes for healing from PTSD on this ayahuasca retreat.
And Taylor here has chosen to make this evening about himself, ruining the experience for others.
Disrespectful too, to the shaman and the entire Peruvian tradition of ceremonial healing with ayahuasca.*
…went my internal monologue.
(*on this last point, I later realized I was wrong. A topic I discuss at the end of this post)
But there was nothing to be done. Taylor was so deep in his non-ordinary state of consciousness, that no amount of reasoning, excoriating, or pleading would get him to stop.
I walk out of the maloka, and inhale the crisp Andean evening, amazed that it cools my simmering internal state. I exhale with a sigh.
As I walk away I can still hear Taylor yelling exuberantly about the vision he’s having—something to the effect of otherworldly beings telling him the true nature of reality or something.
I arrive at the dining room to pour myself some chamomile tea, and take it to the back garden to gaze at the stars and see if anymore visuals, or perhaps an insight, come to me. They don’t. My experience and opportunity for healing had been completely derailed by the actions of a few other retreat-goers.
• • •
The fable
of this episode, for me, is that group psychedelic work is not an optimal stage for individual psycho-emotional healing work to occur. That’s not to say it can’t happen—it can, and regularly does (as I would soon learn in my fourth and final ceremony at Etnikas). But the fact remains: when it comes to the all-important set and setting of psychedelic conventional wisdom, the setting is severely lacking in the tradition of Peruvian ayahuasca retreats.
And here we arrive at a key discrepancy that is not often discussed: the setting and culture of the ayahuasca tourism industry are very different, nigh unrecognizable, from true Indigenous ayahuasca traditions.
Traditionally, the consumption of ayahuasca in Peru was limited to a shaman or healer, who used the plant medicine to access a spiritual realm (or “heightened consciousness”) for insights and guidance on a variety of tribal issues, including: “warfare, divination, artistic inspiration, and as the main theme of cultural narratives. In healing, its uses include identification of illness origin, shamanic journeys to restore soul loss, extraction of pathogenic objects, and shamanic fights with the animated agents of illness.” [1]
So yes, ayahuasca was (and is still) used for healing individuals with physiological and spiritual ailments, but not in the way it is administered in modern retreat settings:
“Ayahuasca was not taken by patients, who would simply come to ceremony to receive the diagnosis and subsequent treatments… Indigenous healers recognize the destructive power of negative human emotions and their impact not just on the individual but the health of the whole community… Ayahuasca is also used to prescribe treatments to patients – through directing the healer to administer ikaros and plant remedies. But it is not the only plant spirit involved. Ayahuasca works with the healer in combination with a plethora of other plant-spirit doctors to provide treatment.” [2]
The modern ayahuasca scene
in Peru and elsewhere around the globe, is a puppet, dressed in ceremonial garb to give the impression of “authenticity.” But it is just a costume. The song and dance is even convincing, and has elements of true Indigenous ritual—the soil and water, the floral essences for protection, the burning palo santo, the ikaros sung by a real-life ayahuascero! The puppet dazzles its audience, most of whom are none-the-wiser.
But behind the curtain, pulling the strings of this marionette, is capitalism—a profit-driven system that demands retreat centers stuff as many tourists into a maloka as they can reasonably fit, at $100-900 per ceremony, without compromising their future revenue via poor online reviews or negative press when things go awry.
And things do go awry. My experience at Etnikas was relatively harmless—nobody was physically hurt or emotionally traumatized by the events of that evening. But it was far from a “one-off” episode: the very next evening in fact, a new cohort arrived at the retreat center. It was a “rest night” for my cohort, but the new group was sitting in their first ceremony. As I was journaling in my room I heard a ferocious, guttural screaming coming from the maloka below. Peering out my window, I see a naked man (my new roommate in fact) streaking across the retreat grounds in a wild fever state, and needing to be physically restrained by the staff.
Later in my time in Peru, I befriended two Americans who had worked as support staff at a retreat center in the jungle city of Iquitos in northern Peru, considered to be the ayahuasca capital of the world. These two told me truly jaw-dropping episodes of their time facilitating retreats there. The most harrowing of these, was a particular evening when they were in ceremony in the maloka. The ayahuasca had been served and participants were starting to feel the effects when a loud bang pierced the quiet, sacred space. Gunshots. Bandits had infiltrated the retreat property and were attempting to steal valuables from the tourist’s rooms. Retreat staff, armed with shotguns, detected them and a firefight ensued.
After hearing these accounts, and many others, including anecdotes of sexual predation by “dark shamans,” I am very grateful to Etnikas for their stringent psychological screening and safety protocols, and for the fact that I was in a relatively safe area of Peru.
Fortunately for me, and the others in my retreat, our healing work that evening was merely interrupted. The possibility of severe traumatization—or worse—is all too real, in the emerging puppet show of the ayahuasca tourism industry.
• • •
As always, thank you for reading and sharing. I tell this account not to scare anyone from considering ayahuasca—to be sure, I found great therapeutic benefit from it—but to offer a perspective and information I wish I had prior to traveling to Peru.
I welcome any feedback or comments on the Instagram platform.
With gratitude,
Jonathan
✝: Original credit to Diego Palma
References:
1. “Ayahuasca: Shamanism Shared Across Cultures” Cultural Survival. June 2003.
2. “Ayahuasca And Amazonian Shamanism” Temple of the Way of Light.
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