The First Ayahuasca Ceremony

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.