Sapphire Song or Ayahuasca in the Amazon (part 1)

And the little gas lantern is turned off. The ceremony house is cloaked in darkness, the light from the night sky beyond the mosquito net windows not yet penetrating my eyes. The room is tense as the haunting and foreign sounds of the Shaman’s Icaros and shakapas break the silence of the vaulted, circular room surrounded by Peruvian jungle. I’m lying down on a small mat, in front of an altar of crystals, waiting for my first ever cup of Ayahuasca to start taking effect. The first-time drinkers were nervous about their first taste of the vine of the little death, the experienced drinkers more so. Even Mimi and John, the two apprentices, seem apprehensive. Mimi is a three and a half year veteran of Ayahuasca and seems well on her way to becoming a Maestro. John is a fairly new apprentice who drinks a traditional full cup every ceremony and does not speak with the Maestros of his experiences. Only the Maestros seem fully in their element. Maestro Hamilton Souther, who is originally from California and came to Peru to apprentice after a calling from the spirits, sits facing me on the left. Facing me to my right is Maestro Don Alberto Torres, who has participated in over four thousand Ayahuasca ceremonies and started drinking Ayahuasca with his Maestro Father and Grand Father at age nine.
“Everybody ready for some Ayahuasca?” Hamilton asks pleasantly. A few feeble yeses and hoots stumble their way out from the fourteen guests attending this nine day shamanic retreat at Blue Morpho. “That’s good ‘cause we just drank some!” Hamilton jests. I can just make out his tall frame and ever-present smile sitting in one of the four executive chairs at the front of the ceremony house. And the Icaros, medicine songs of the Shaman, begin again. Mimi’s matronly voice dances around the Maestro’s songs, and John sits and plays his shakapa next to Don Alberto, waiting for the spirits to teach him his Icaros so he can join in the singing. My mind and heart race as I lay listening in the dark. What will happen to me? Will I be throwing up the whole ceremony? What if I throw up to soon? Will I be a recipient of the platinum star?(awarded when a guest doesn’t make it in time to one of the toilets in the back for a lower purge). All this is running through my mind when I feel a tingle in my finger tips, like a curious ghost making his presence known for the first time to the new residents of his home.
“Ok, it’s starting.” I tell myself. My heart is racing and the tingling is spreading. Invisible hands seem to raise my hands up at the elbows and I watch them. My fingers begin to grow and spread out in dark spindly shafts, branches growing from them as they weave into their new form, domain over them no longer just mine. These must be the tree spirits I’m now sharing my body with. Along with the Ayahuasca I’m taking part in a shamanic diet. Generally only practiced by apprentices it involves the consuming of additional tree spirits through a tea prepared with the bark of the corresponding trees. This goes along with a highly restricted diet during my stay. When you take in these new spirits they live with you in your body forever, hence them trying to return to their natural form via my alien human hands. What a beautiful way to say hello I thought, while still being frightened by the fact that my body was now a shared tenement.
My heart is pounding away in my chest, and I think back to what Mimi had said to the group when preparing us for the first ceremony “when your heart starts going crazy, just talk to it. Talk to it like you would talk to a friend. Say hello, don’t worry heart we’re in a Ayahuasca ceremony and everything is going to be fine. So relax and enjoy the ride!” I repeat this to my heart and find it receptive. I am really starting to be enveloped by Ayahuasca’s embrace at this point. I find I really love my heart. I love it so much I want to give it a hug. And I realize I’m already giving it the greatest hug I’ve ever given anything. I’m hugging it with my whole body, it’s a pearl at the center of my being, being hugged the way my brain seems to hug my consciousness. My heart slows and is cool with me at least for the rest of tonight’s journey.
Peter Gorman, an investigative journalist and friend of mine, has written extensively on Ayahuasca. Something he’s said to prove the legitimacy of his experiences to himself is if he sees something he wouldn’t have expected in a million years it has to be something outside of his imagination creating it. I thought of that when I met the spirit of breakfast. I saw breakfast, who presented himself as a fried egg, casually sitting at a kitchen table, a flap of egg white hanging over the top of his chair holding a cup of coffee, another flap expertly holding a cigarette. The unimpressed look on his face as I descended some stairs to meet him said “Look at you. You were out at the bar all night with your friends when you knew you had work in the morning and now you look like hell. What am I going to do with you?”. “Here” he said and slid a plate over to me “I made you some breakfast.” I laughed as I realized that breakfast is like your cool older brother. He’s already been up for an hour by the time you drag your sorry ass out of bed, but he’s not too hard on you because he remembers when he was like that, and he’s got your back and has breakfast waiting for you when you wake up. Breakfast is cool.
The invisible hands returned, breakfast rolled his eyes and disappeared. The hands began to move my arms in a strange but somehow familiar way. It felt as though a puppeteer was moving me, as if I had rods coming out the sides of my wrist and elbows and he was master of recreating animal motions with a vessel such as my arms. I realized my arms were the front legs of a wolf. And as my arms ran through the air in perfect K9 motion I began to see the ground rushing by below me as I looked up. My back legs became the crooked hind legs of a wolf and joined in perfect unison with my front paws. I felt what it’s like to run as a four legged animal. It was my spirit animal taking me for a run through the forest. I ran through the forest at sunset, dodging trees at high speed, stopping and using my heightened senses to feel the forest and its inhabitants, then rushing on. I started to peak a hill in the tall golden grass, basking in my speed and cunning, and felt the sun shining in my eyes. And with that brightness I realized something new. This adventure of being the great grey wolf is the same adventure every little puppy dog has while playing in the living room. The same adventure every house cat has as the lion stalking around the furniture. So Ayahuasca kindly reminded me I was still a pup in her world, but I still thanked the wolf for the ride.
I sat up after my run, momentarily aware of my surroundings, but only as much as a lucid dreamer is of his. It was dark and I seemed to be the only one of us on the floor who was sitting up. The Icaros had stopped for the moment and the ceremony house was bathed in silence. I heard the strike of a lighter in front of me and an explosion of light, and saw Don Alberto’s face illuminated in the flame of his lit mapacho. “ Hola, Hagen.” He said, but not to me to my spirit. And he nailed my name which is very difficult for Spanish speakers, and Don Alberto doesn’t speak any English. And besides that I had given him my name both times we drank the tree spirits for the diet before this ceremony and both times after. But he nailed it then and he seemed to know me perfectly in my spirit form. I saw him look over to Hamilton and thought I heard him say “I like this one.” And I didn’t know how I knew he said it because I wouldn’t have been able to make that out in Spanish in my state, but I heard it. Hamilton replied “Si,Si”. I felt very honored to be noticed by the maestros.
As I sat there an Icaro started again, sung by one of the maestros it seemed to me Don Alberto. I sat facing sideways on my mat with the Maestros to my right and listened and watched the walls of the ceremony house fade away to be replaced with an American southwest scene. I was atop a mesa facing the red setting sun, the wind lightly blowing wisps of hair in my face. I felt my worries and insecurities drop away in the wind and I began to feel like this was no longer myself, but in fact the opposite was true. It was my true self, minus all my baggage. It was the clearest moment of my life. I was proud to be me.
I felt the invisible hands come and reach down into my stomach and pull out a small purge, the fear of my first ceremony being cleansed perhaps. I lay down on my mat after this, tired as a baby and curled up into a fetal position. I heard my friend, lying on the mat next to mine, moan in pain. The moan was not my friend himself, but perhaps a forgotten part of him. It was crying out “I’m deep and wise, why won’t you listen to me, why am I ignored?”. The moan started to creep over to me, tried to start enveloping me, but I said no. I took some deep breaths and made myself bigger than it and I told it “I hear you and acknowledge and respect you, but you are not my journey. I give you my blessing and love but please be on your way.”. It left me then, and I curled back up and found my toes to be flexed against the floor, as though my fetal form was encased in something. And I realized I was, I was in the womb. Time doesn’t exist linearly in Ayahuasca. As Hamilton explained it to us, you are not manifestation. Manifestation is what you were. You are limitless possibility. What Ayahuasca allows you to do is be both at the same time. So in realizing that, I didn’t know if this experience of being in the womb was an actual memory of my time spent there unlocked from it’s secret hiding place, or if there was one time that exists for me being in the womb and I was experiencing it now instead of linearly when I thought I would or should have.
I stayed there and rested for a long time and as I felt myself leaving that place I found myself adrift on my mat. The black floor surrounding my mat was no longer floor but an inky dark, and bottomless ocean. I was afraid of the dark water surrounding me. I then thought of something I had told myself that fear is the giving up of your freewill to the idea of something more powerful. The idea of the ocean swallowing me up in this case. I drove my hand into the murky water only to have it stop at the surface, once again the floor. I sat up only wanting to say thank you to the Maestros and Ayahuasca for all my journeys this night. I found my mind trying to project thank you psychically and repeatedly. Then I realized I didn’t have to do that to say thank you. In Ayahuasca you can actually be thank you. I knelt down and laid my body over my knees and pulled my arms in next to me and emanated with my being the essence of thank you. I was a stone in a river smooth, clean, and glowing a dark green of thanks for my Maestros and for the medicine. What a perfect night of meeting the medicine. And as I lay in this position the lantern was lit once more.