What Ayahuasca Showed Me About Healing and Letting Go

The night I finally let go.

This was the third time I did ayahuasca. This one was special because for months I was waiting for a ceremony to show up and eventually one did... on the night of my birthday. It was gifted to me by a close friend and it's easily one of the best birthday presents I have ever received. Not only was this special for being on my birthday, but this was the first ceremony I was finally able to purge.

The weeks leading to this ceremony, I had a conversation with my father. I asked him how he dealt with stress, and he gave me a very interesting answer:

"After all these years I learned that God always had my back at the end of a stressful situation.
Every single time it worked out, so now I don't stress.
I let God handle everything as He always has done in the past."

There was something so freeing about this sentence. Letting go in the purest sense — and frankly, I experienced this same feeling as well. Something always stresses me out, and after it passes and I look back, I see how perfectly things worked out, like when I was looking for a space for my psilocybin ceremony.

His wisdom coincided perfectly with a meditation insight I received and was learning to integrate, which was: as long as I listened to my thoughts, I would always be pulled in all these different directions, especially while in ceremony. Speaking from experience here, when you enter ceremony and the medicine starts hitting, the medicine will also sort of ignite my thoughts and my ego. They not only turn on, but seem to be amped up quite a bit, which makes sense since a lot of your senses are heightened.

What happened to me before was that I used to have a thought come up which would appear to hold the solution to a problem I was facing: "How do I become more confident?" And then I would go through these visual experiences and understandings where these ideas — which all seemed like the truth — would pop up, and I would be mesmerized by the knowledge.

Although a lot of knowledge was shared with me, I know that a lot of these tunnels were simply my mind spinning around. For example, if you enter and say "How do I become more confident?" and you get all these ideas of working out more, taking more supplements, trying this new technique or method out... you may miss the truth, which would show you that something within you is blocking your raw confidence. There is a thought pattern or a negative belief that you aren't even aware that you are holding dearly, that is what is preventing you from just letting yourself be and accepting yourself.

So, to clarify: the medicine will heighten your ego and try to give you a glimpse of it by letting you play on its edge. It will amp up and give you all these great ideas on how to solve a problem. But as I wrote in a few other blogs (link here and here), your ego is the one that created the problem in the first place, and the medicine is trying to show you this.

Don't be frustrated or disappointed in yourself for not seeing it. One of the hardest things ever is to show someone their ego and help them separate themselves from it. It's the essence of what spirituality has been working on for all of time.

Think of it like one of those illusion images you'd see on social media. At first you just see some shapes, maybe something that looks like a cup, but then something clicks and now you see a face. Or the one with the bunny that is also a rabbit. Once you see the image, it's impossible not to see it anymore. That's kind of how beliefs work.

This mechanism of your mind is what ayahuasca is trying to help you out of. And all you need to do is trust in the medicine. (Plot twist: you are the medicine giving yourself the way out. You just need to trust what comes up to help you.)

Back to our regular programming. After realizing this thing my mind does, where it presents solutions and sends me down this tunnel of concepts and ideas that all seem great, I took my dad's advice and decided I would just let go. I would trust in the medicine to do its work. Whatever thoughts came up, I would acknowledge them as thoughts, nothing more, and would actively stop listening to them and return to my breath as the anchor.

The ceremony took place overnight inside of a small old airplane hangar that had been remodeled into a ceremony space. There were mats for us to lie on and the shaman, Shaman Omar, began with a bit of a sermon as to what to expect. This time was a bit different because he added a disclaimer about how intense the taste of the ayahuasca he had was that night.

Absolutely vile to say the least, and with utmost respect. It tasted like fermented puke mixed with dirt and it was STRONG. Super strong.

After taking my first serving, I immediately started to gag from the taste until I was able to hold it down. I went to my bed and sat up in a meditative pose.

"Hmm... when will this start taking effect?"
No. I am going back to my breath...
"Should I sit up or lie down?"
No. I am going back to my breath...
"I feel like I need to do more breathwork. I stopped working on that side."
No. I am going back to my breath.

No thoughts were allowed here in this sacred space.

With the help of a song called Paparuy, I stood firm against my thoughts and the sacred space was held up within me. As I took in a new breath, I began to feel a cold tunnel of air spiral onto me and I knew it was God's presence. Something in me told me to lie down as this cold air landed on me. It became immensely uncomfortable and I felt as though a surgery was being done on my body. I began to phase out and lose consciousness and then suddenly awoke in pure stillness.

I heard the music and the people around me beginning to purge and let out noise and tears. I was staring at the ceiling but when I decided to look around the room, I noticed these dark stormy clouds with lightning flashing around inside. I saw ayahuasca and the soul of the person flying all around the cloud above them. I understood those clouds to be some sort of Chaos.

As I looked around, I noticed a woman lying near me in a beautiful red gown. It was the spirit of Ayahuasca herself. I also noticed there wasn't a storm cloud above me.

I turned to her and all I could muster was,

"No chaos tonight?"
and she responded,
"Not tonight Eli. It's your birthday so I'm going to tell you directly what we'll be working on.
When you were a child, people around you would lose patience with you. That is all."

And that was it. I laid there with her by my side and a movie started to play in my mind that was extremely painful to watch.

I was a young child and my dad asked me to throw the garbage out. I was about 3–4, something very young. So, eager to help, I grabbed the garbage bag and walked over to the garbage can. I laid the garbage bag on top of the can and walked back up the stairs of our home and told my dad the job was done. He looked outside and in frustration exclaimed why it was so hard for me to do something so easy.

At first glance, this may seem so silly, but I was only here on this earth for a few years. My father had been here for decades. Naturally, he was a professional at taking out the garbage and I was what you would call a complete rookie.

I witnessed another scene as a baby where I was sitting in my baby chair in the kitchen with my mom. She was busy with some chores and put a baby sippy cup of water in front of me to drink. I was dying of thirst and I wanted to drink so badly, but every time I went to pick up the bottle, I would spill it onto the floor. After the second or third time spilling it, my mom exclaimed in frustration towards me for not being able to drink from the sippy cup. Something so simple to her but for me was completely new.

This pain taught me that you need to do things perfectly right at the start. This learned system blocked me from being able to truly learn and allow myself to make mistakes and learn from them.

I saw a staircase sort of shape and Ayahuasca explained to me that here is the learning path:

"Try (starting point), fail (horizontal arrow right), learn (vertical arrow going up), try, fail, learn, and this is how you learn."

There isn't failure. It doesn't exist as something negative. It's the stepping stone towards truly learning.

It made complete sense to me and I thanked her for showing me this deep rooted pain within me. I continued to watch these scenes and it became more and more painful for me. By pain, I mean terribly sad to watch. It was wrenching my gut to witness those moments up until I jerked up instantly and felt a strong urge to purge.

Almost instantly, Shaman Omar was by my side with a bucket and I began to purge. Initially, I was gagging intensely but nothing was coming out. Finally, in between the purging motions, time stopped and a voice told me quickly and calmly:

"Eli, hold the sound that comes out when you start the motion of puking for 2 seconds longer."

And I followed the instructions. I began the motions of purging and I began making the noise you make when puking but this time I held it for a few seconds longer.

Success. Finally. I finally purged for the first time ever in ceremony. Tears ran down my face as I puked out this gunk from within myself. It left such a horrible taste and the ayahuasca was already so vile that I threw up a few more times purely because of the taste. (A helpful gift from ayahuasca.)

It was horrible and once I knew I was finished, I looked up to Shaman Omar smiling and wishing me a happy birthday.

I laid down and felt sore. I knew that the surgery from earlier reached a culminating point where it was time to remove something from within me. I saw a vision of a bone that was split, broken within me that was rotting the flesh inside my body. The surgery removed that bone and I purged it out of my system because this broken piece kept rotting my flesh no matter how hard I tried healing with other modalities.

I fell asleep almost instantly and I awoke to my friend, who participated with me, asking me to go outside with her and the other participants. I always become very heavy in ceremony so she helped me outside. I laid on the grass and stared up into the stars. Beside me, Shaman Omar and another attendee. He started reading poetry from his book and it was truly beautiful. The words were landing so deep inside and the insight he shared was transformational.

I laid up staring at the stars and began flying into them. I would fall into a vision of God showing me symbols and hieroglyphs that were of great importance. He called to me to look at Him as He turned into a hieroglyph which showed me how every single thing in all existence was within His body. All galaxies and all distance was within Him.

He then showed me a drawing which looked like a computer chip and told me how important this image was for humanity.

I then landed in another vision where I was lying by the bank of a river with my legs inside the water. In the sky was God's name written in Hebrew. The letters called out to me and asked me to let go of my pain and that they would gladly take it away from my body as their mission was to consume it.

I let go and saw the pain and sadness in my stomach lift up into the letters and watched them grow in weight. It was tremendously healing.

I stood up and spoke with another attendee who was a spiritual coach, which frankly couldn’t have been better timing. He asked me all the right questions to help me go deeper. As I spoke to him, I noticed a little boy version of me sitting by my side.

After we spoke, I laid back down on the grass and began falling asleep. I started to see a vision of a spirit dressed up as Spiderman creep his way out of the darkness and make his way over to me. I could tell he was trying not to scare me, which is exactly what terrified me. I was becoming so afraid especially because I thought I was alone outside. I didn’t realize there was another attendee near me who began moaning and that scared the living crap out of me. I jerked up instantly in fear and he was like

"Ohhh my god I’m sorry for scaring you"
which, looking back, was funny as hell.

I then started to feel more pain within me and the urge to puke but I wasn’t able to. I looked up and saw the young boy version of me and asked him what to do and he told me to simply start spinning around.

I barely did half a spin and immediately started to purge. Thank you, younger boy version of me.

After I finished, I went inside to use the bathroom which was dark and lit up by a single tealight candle. I turned to the glass doors of the shower and was startled to see a man staring back at me. Yes, I jumped and shrieked in fear, but once I got a good look at his face. He smiled back and his hair and beard grew long and I knew it was Jesus. I knew we came from the same place of God, which was a crown. It’s hard to explain, but God showed me this vision of His body and (random stuff He collects) and there was a crown He placed on a display shelf and told me that is the part of God that I come from. It's a very old part and that's all I got from that.

I smiled back at the man in the reflection which turned into me. I knew immediately that the ayahuasca had left my body and I had landed back.

Each ceremony is transformational and the healing that comes after the ceremony is so powerful. It's not one moment, it's patiently moving through life and seeing the flower that I am bloom and flourish.

Aho!