Five years went by between the moment I first heard the word “ayahuasca” and the moment I actually tried it. And when I first heard about it, I thought “no freaking way”. This experience was about everything I feared in my life.
So I just kept on “living”, or should I say self-destructing, either with behaviour or within toxic relationships, until I reached a certain comfort zone. I had lived enough different experiences to be able not to make the same mistakes of the past twice.
About this damn past… It was one of the main reasons I wanted to experience ayahuasca : to get rid of it. Have a fresh start and living life like I was a freshly born baby, seeing everything through innocent eyes and being able to marvel at things for the first time. I wanted to leave fears and phobias behind. I was looking for a new way to express myself, to exist somehow, and to stop identifying with the stories I was telling (also to myself) : stories of abuse, of shame, of manipulation, of being a victim, of rejection….
On a 3-day retreat with Alison, I went through multiple stages.
As a child, we usually think monsters are hiding in the bedroom or under our bed, so we hide under the bedsheets, only to come to realise that there is no actual monster, it’s all in our head. And even though the monsters don’t exist, the dread and panic do. By shifting my perspective, I realised I was just playing a movie in my head, and I just needed to turn my mental TV off to come back to the present moment, and to see that there are no monsters under the bed.
This first session allowed me to tune myself into other sources of information that have always been there, just like a multi-socket on which I can plug different cables, when I have been only plugging a single one. I went from paranoia to the opposite side of the spectrum, pronoia, where the world actually works for me and my evolution instead of just suffering the events. I don’t necessarily get what I want, but I sure do get what I need.
For the second session, my body and mind were suffering a lot. I was hoping ayahuasca would be the cure to all my problems, but instead the medicine put me in the position where I started to imagine all the possible scenarios to get ouf of this, especially all the ones where I would have to go through my fears. I went from trying to avoid the anxiety-fuelling situations to actually provoking them. And regarding the option I chose, what I feared the most never actually happened.
I went to the retreat having a mental idea of what my healing would be like, and as long as I hadn’t reached this, I would consider I failed at healing. But during the retreat, the medicine never gave me what I had mentally planned. We tend to think that our healing is located at the exact opposite side of our fear : for people scared of spiders for example, healing would look like being able to hold one. It might be an option indeed, but it is not the only one.
On the third night, I went from feeling like a total failure at being able to take care of my own healing, from feeling completely fractured, to a state of wholeness and unity, of self-love and completion, realising this was my healing : just loving each fragment of myself, no matter how damaged, ugly, beautiful or beaming.
By the end of the retreat, my views on love, fear, past, people, relationships and the world in general had already changed. My ideas and beliefs kept (and still are) transforming, up to my sleeping and dreaming patterns, and to make my dreams come true. A few months ago, I dreamt about a world where energetically speaking, everything was possible. In my dream, I started vibrating from the inside, until I woke up, only to realise I was vibrating too. Technically, the dream came true.
I kept vibrating for weeks, then they slowly faded away. Then the safe space of the retreat slowly turned back to the everyday space. And a new fear emerged : the one of not being able to stay into this state. But it is a choice, really. And this is the latest thing I’ve learned since the retreat 3 months ago : will I choose, radiate and vibrate love, or will I choose fear instead? And this is a conscious choice we have to make, every day.
L.R.