My First Ayahuasca Experience - Just Me and a Private Shaman in the City

My "shaman" is a friend of mine. A middle-aged dude from Brooklyn, NY who used to be a part of a ceremonial ayahuasca church in Hawaii. 

We both agreed that the medicine was the teacher, not the shaman. We also both agreed that it should be taken seriously, but not TOO goddamn seriously. He agreed to supervise/guide me through the experience and was so kind to get the ingredients and make the brew. I have done psychedelics MANY times, but I was about to find out how this is in an altogether different category. We performed a VERY casual ceremony in his apartment while he re-heated the brew and put some native Peruvian music on and played a repeating video of a still-camera that overlooked high definition nature on his bigscreen. Then he handed me a tea-mug filled with it saying: "It's your first time, start with this much. It taste really bad so just try and get it down as fast as you can. Whisper your intentions into the cup and ask it questions as you drink."  

He was right. It was the worse thing I've ever tasted. I immediately felt sick and a bit like I was going to vomit after the first big gulp. I spent the next 45-90 minutes feeling queazy and nauseous. The sick feeling didn't go away after that, but that's when I started getting powerful acid-peek esque visuals. It was very similar to taking 4 tabs of strong L, except for two things that are both strange. For one, there was no "head high" like you get from even smoking weed. I was completely sober, except I was seeing the carpet transform into moving shapes and patterns. The second odd thing is that, also unlike acid, only certain surfaces and textures brought on the trippy visuals. So I would look to my left and see everything normal as it usually was, and then look to my right and see the rug spinning and morphing. At that point, a friend of ours who was hanging around in another room was leaving to go see his girlfriend and said to me: "yeah man, it's always that rug for some reason!" 

I felt increasingly sick. I could barely enjoy the cool visuals because I just felt like utter shit. Another 30-50 minutes passed and suddenly I had a pressing need to vomit. I rested my head against the rim of a trashcan lined with a fresh bag and spent 5-10 minutes there puking like the exorcist movie and making really gross and violent purge noises that I didn't know I could make. This 5-10 minute purge was when the "head high" finally came in. It was the DMT part of the trip. 

Earlier, when I was "whispering my intentions and asking the plant teacher questions" as I drank - the main thing I kept asking was for it to give me gratitude. I knew logically that I had so much to be thankful for in life, but I just didn't feel emotionally connected to that thankfulness. And I had heard so many times that gratitude will move you forward in life. Boy, did the plant teacher give me gratitude in my purge. 

As I was sitting with my head against the trashcan rim, I had the strong sensation that I was in more than one place at once somehow. I was in my friend's apartment, but I was being taken to other places all around the world. I had the clear sensation that someone was holding a large gun to my head and that I was at there mercy. That isn't a metaphor, I mean I literally had the sensation that someone was pointing and ready to shoot if I didn't do what they wanted. I heard gunshots, screams of terror, and I heard the crackling of fire. While this was going on, I was simultaneously being shown everything in life I had to be grateful for. I was back in forth between being a hostage at gunpoint to seeing the safe forest around my childhood home, my family members, and the extreme safety of my childhood.

Pretty soon after, while this was still happening, I came into contact with the machine elves. I didn't see them, but I heard high pitched voices a lot like it sounds after you hit the helium from a balloon. There were a group of them with me, and they were all talking about me and narrating my experience. They were making fun of me, just chattering away. 

"Oh, look at that, now he knows!"

- group laughter-

"hehehe what should we do with him?" 

- group whispers- 

I purged for about 5-10 minutes. I knew it was only a short amount of time, but so much had happened. It felt like 5 minutes had passed, but it also felt like an hour at the same time. I don't think I had taken enough to go into that realm of losing a complete sense of time. I looked into the garbage bag and for all that noise and performance, I had only vomited maybe 2 glasses worth of liquid. My friend told me that it's pretty typical practice to use tobacco after the purge to center yourself so we went outside and smoked. The perimeter of his back yard was lined with a few feet of grass where plants would usually grow, except it was winter and most things were dead. Above that grassy area floating for several feet were large geometric floating lotus flower shapes that gently waved like water. 

I've heard so many stories and everyone seems to have completely different experiences on it. This was mine. It definitely gave me the gratitude that I asked for. We are all one being and we need each other to survive through the big picture. I also strangely came away from this experience feeling like a lot of things I previously cared about aren't that much worth fighting for, and that the world will simply be as it is and I was at peace with that. Another lesson I learned was that for the problems that really do matter that you decide to tackle, the most important thing is to shine a light on the problem and bring it to community awareness, and it will slowly fix itself, rather than always just attacking the problem directly. The whole experience was about 5 hours with a 5-10 minute DMT purge in the middle.