Wednesday, June 18, 2008.  In the Amazon, near Iquitos, Peru

A quiet morning.  I awoke around 7 and made my way to the dining malloca for tea and quiet time.

Yesterday was pretty much a day of rest and recapitulation. Today we're having consultations with the shaman about our experiences with the first ceremony.  Then we visit the Yakuna trie which lives nearby, and then we have the second ceremony late tonight.

My intention for the first ceremony was to introduce myself to the medicine and cleanse me so that the teachings could penetrate me.

My intention for the second ceremony will be to open my heart to prepare me for love and fearlessness.  Perhaps to give me a glimpse beyond the doorway of our normal perception. I want to better see and understand our energy body and its relationship to creation.  So whatever we can do to move forward along those lines will be welcome.

I"m beginning to realize that a fundamental part of this work is the building of community. There are 14 of us participating (two are not partaking of the ayahuasca but are attending ceremony) and we are each letting down our barriers.  It's hard to keep up walls when we all barf together.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008  in the Amazon near Iquitos, Peru

The ceremony was quite beautiful.

Ayahuasca didn't taste as vile as described in books or articles that I had read prior to coming. Intensely green is about the closest I could come to it.  It was thick and everyone took a cup of it.  Some cups were fuller than others; the shamen seemed to vary the amount based on the person receiving it.

I could feel it moving throughout my body and began to see visions fairly quickly, though they were faint and transient.... before forming into one shape completely, they would morph into another.

During the icaros, I felt myself singing along and dancing as if in a dream.

During one of the later icaros, I saw clearly a stream full of serpents-- not quite at eye level; I seemed to be on a road and seeing at road level with the snakes in a ditch to the side of it.

In general, I felt this twining, double-helix viney growth rip through me... the direction seemed always upward.

At one point, I opened my eyes and looked up to the ceiling of the malloca--the ceremonial hut we were in--and saw the universe with a whirl of stars inside the malloca.

Near the end of the ceremony I suddenly felt very hot--I began to sweat profusely--and filushed and as if all my hairs were being pulled out. Not long after that, I purged by barfing. I didn't have much to give, but I gave what I had.

Afterwards, I felt very light-headed and unstable.

The ceremony ended after 2 AM.  Almost 6 hours.  Where did the time go?

I slept until 7:15 or so and then got up and had my flower bath with DR.

Reading about the flower bath that follows each ceremony, it's easy to get romantic about it.  Ah, the shaman would bathe you in a specially prepared bathwater with rose petals and exotic flowers of the jungle.  Right.  The reality is much more like this:  you sit down in your skivvies and he blows tobacco over your still-weak body and then dumps cold water with lots of leafy matter and flowers all over you. And then he beats your head with a leaf rattle as he whistles a tune three times. It's brisk and shocking to your system, and it is designed to be so.  It seals your body after having been opened up so widely with the Ayahuasca.

It really did smell wonderful.  We were encouraged to leave the scent on us for as long as we could.  I waited until mid-day to take my shower.  (The showers were solar heated, so if you wanted a hot shower, you tried to take it after lunch but before too many others took theirs.  Otherwise, it was amazon-river temp.)

I was amazingly hungry and so went down to eat.

Monday, June 16, 2008.  In the Amazon, near Iquitos, Peru

Today we helped make the Ayahuasca brew... the psychotropic medicine that the amazonians have used for hundreds of years to heal and receive visions and information from the plant spirits.

The jungle shaman, Don Rober (DR), and his son, Carlos, beat the large vine to a pulpy mix and we questers tore up the chicaruna and borbanzoga leaves--and some others--into fine bits, and then we headed out into the jungle to watch them boil and brew the stuff.

DR sang icaros--songs to awaken the spirit of the ayahuasca and the other plant additions.

Every plant has its own song, and he knows hundreds of songs.  I was able to record our last ceremony and I'll post an excerpt with his beautiful whistling and singing after I return.

I smoked my first cigarette today...actually two of the natural peruvian tobacco mapachos, as they're called.  We did so to send our intentions for the ayahuasca ceremony and  open sacred space to the seven directions... South, West, North, East, Earth, Heaven, and the inner dimension.

The mapachos made me a little giddy.  The taste was to remain with me during the entire ceremony.

After we completed our personal ceremonies to the seven directions, Howard Lawler {Howard is the owner of SpiritQuest, the jungle lodge, and is the principal shaman. He goes by the medicine name of Otorango Banco -- the white jaguar. I'll abbreviate his name as OB} blew mapacho smoke into our head and crown chakras and DR patted our heads with a leaf rattle as he whistled an icaro.  I could feel the energy blow clean through my body and into my limbs.

So far I'm very happy with the high level of integrity that I feel is given to the ceremony and the entire process.

May I be open to receive the healings of the plant spirits and accept the healing in each of my cells.

***

It's so damp here.  Everything is limp.

***

It's raining now.  Almost 8 PM.  At 8:30 we'll have our first ceremony. I'm a little nervous. Trepidation, it's called.

It rained this hard last night, too. Buckets of rain, falling on the thached roofs. It helped me sleep. I imagine it will help with the ceremony, too.

Well, I´m in Lima, Peru...  integrating the experiences from the time I spent in the Amazon.  Julie flies in tomorrow (actually only a few hours away... 2 in the AM) and then we travel to Nazca, Paracas, Arequipa, and end up in Cuzco for my 50th birthday on July 5th.

I´d love to write more about the time in the amazon with mother ayahuasca.  what an experience.  Unfortunately, I haven´t yet mastered the latin spanish keyboards and their unique key arrangements....  and so it takes a little longer to write and lots of editing and corrections.

Briefly, I went to Iquitos and then was ferried to Howard Lawler (don Otorongo Blanco)´s SpiritQuest Shamanic Retreat some forty minutes upriver. Great place. Amazing food.

The ayuahuascero, don Rober, was amazing... he held the space strongly and with integrity. I have a lot of respect for his work (he has to smoke an amazing amount of tobacco in the course of his job) and his voice as he sang the icaros was amazing.  I recorded some, and so when I get a chance to download them, I´ll post them so that you can hear a sample.  Fortunately, I recorded the last of the five ceremonies and most of the purging was complete by then, so the icaros are without the symphonic accompaniment of barfing and calls for ¨baño!¨

Something that Howard said the afternoon before the 5th session stayed with me and actually became the core of my experience in the ceremony.  ¨No matter how relaxed you are, you can always relax a little more.¨

I´m not sure even what it referred to, but my mind keyed in on it and even before I drank my little cup of jungle juice (as my mind recalled the body memories of how vile the stuff tasted), I began to relax into it and put forth a sincere conscious effort to avoid any sort of judgement.  ANY.  so the vile taste of the ayahuasca became simply a flavor, neither good or bad. just a sensation. And it went down without so much as a flinch.

So the experience went... any time I found myself breathing a heavy sigh, i knew I was making a judgement and holding on, so I released the judgement and relaxed.  release and relax. release and relax.   At one point, I was so relaxed I thought that I might actually pour myself through the webbing in the chair, like jello.

Anyway, the experience continued to get even better... just pure sweetness and love.  I died three times... it seemed to be important that I go through the process more than once, but because I was so relaxed, the experience was one of sweetness and floating into death instead of the violent surrender that some of my compatriots had to endure the previous session.

Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you thank you thank you.

Today is the day I travel to Peru. Or so I thought.

Well, it's official that we've given notice to move out of our cute little bungalow in Salt Lake City's Avenues neighborhood.

I have decided that on my 50th birthday I would change my name. I made this declaration when I turned 49, 10 months ago. On my vision quest, I tried out the name Ki Sugati. While I like it in concept, it sounded so hard when spoken. It wasn't exactly lilting. It had about it more of that germanic or danish glottal stop.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I grew exceptionally tired after all of that arguing and praying, and the surrender of knowing that it would end the next day removed all of the trying and wanting.  There was only the doing.

In an earlier trip, I had to deal with the fears that somehow creep up on us from some deep ingrained societal urge for security and a need to overpower that which is other. Fear of the unknown.  As I lay there that first night, I would occasionally get a little daydream (for I was awake) that a bear or cougar might wander by (there were droppings and prints, after all) and then I'd witness the unfortunate encounter... sometimes I'd slay, sometimes I'd be slain or maimed, sometimes we would simply watch and avoid each other.

Just returned from the mountain and am currently enjoying the hot springs of Ojo Caliente, NM.