The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale

The shamans who are trained in the jungle and work with this stuff uses a variety of methods to work with those kinds of episodes. These are not fun, and they aren't really safe either. Some of the groups in the US are not trained or equipped to deal with it, and the more responsible ones will refuse to let someone drink if there are prior cases of psychotic breaks.

I do remember in one ceremony, one of the persons there went off on a journey. This was a group I don't usually participate with. To me, it wasn't unusual for someone to go into an episode like that. I've seen it happen in others and in myself. (And granted, I have heard of those who go somewhere and never come back but I have not seen it directly myself).

What was unusual in that case was that there no separate room set aside. Usually, the energies being whipped out of a person like that is intense enough to start inducing things in other people. What it usually induces is fear (fear of the unknown). As people started to get more and more uncomfortable, their own consciousness transmits feelings of judgement and censure ... which does not help the situation.

Ayahuasca is tricky like that. She'll allow situations like that to arise, and see if you're going to be mindful of things; or to facilitate an empathy exercise where you feel what it is like to be on the other side of those judgements. Freakouts like that can happen to anyone -- and likely, the more rigid, the more closed-minded, the more judgemental you are, the more likely it will be your turn next.

The shamans who train out in the jungle are trained directly by the plant spirit. Each plant carries an energy, a consciousness, and a host of insights and realms connected with it. The icaros of the Mestizo tradition will call upon those plant spirits with whom the shaman has gained a relationship with. And by "gain a relationship with", usually means ingesting and working with the consciousness of that specific plant -- some requiring cycles of years to establish a powerful relationship.

So when such a shaman sings, that plant spirit is brought into the ceremony space while your consciousness is open. In a group setting, it will express itself in a form that somehow blends what you need with what the group needs. This means that the medicine coming through in an Ayahuasca ceremony facilitated by someone trained in a lot of plant medicines will not just be bringing Ayahuasca to the table -- but also specialist medicines that Ayahuasca enables as a "master plant".

It's also not just the material you are using. The relationship you have with the Ayahuasca spirit will inflect and influence your own experience. Ask her about this next time you decide to try it at home again.

The day we try to standardize Ayahuasca dosages in order to create a map of causal effects ... that's the day we missed the point of this.

Every single time was difficult and challenging. Each one of them brought a theme that picked off where the last left off. What I worked on was a range of things: from physical ailments, to letting go of attachments and facing fears, to purging out BS in the mind, to spiritual ailments spanning across multiple lifetimes. I had to work through a lot of internal resistance. There were training in a variety of things at a variety of levels of being. It did not help that there was something within me that drove me to keep coming back, like I'm hurrying to make it. There was period where, by the next ceremony rolls around, I forgotten the initial suffering and I have fond memories of the peak. By the time I got to the most recent one I participated in, I could intuitively tell when I was going to work a lot.

My experiences are atypical and intense. I am sensitive to it, and it took a while to figure out where the right dosage was for me. Every person's experience and work is going to be unique to them, even if it might fall into broad, general patterns.

I'm currently on hiatus, and will probably be getting back into it... well, when the time is right again. In the meantime, I've been keeping up with my daily practices of meditation and sometimes chanting, getting into the darker spaces of my being, when necessary. If anything, my experiences in the ceremonies taught me to have courage to look. And although the hiatus was due to external circumstances, I'm training to access these visionary states without taking the medicine directly.