What Ayahuasca Taught Me About Life & Death

Nature has much to teach us about being human.

It was dark in the maloka, the ceremonial room deep in the Amazon rain forest, and my stomach felt queasy. The two shamans were sitting quietly at the front of the room. The rest of us, all seven who had taken the plant medicine, were waiting to see if we would regret our decision to come here.

But there was no turning back; we had already swallowed the putrid brew, so all we could do was wait. Two small candles were the only sources of light. They slowly dwindled to puddles of melted wax, their light fading into pitch black. Not even the bright moonlight could penetrate the darkness.

I sat for another 15 minutes, and my stomach churned a couple of times. Then a kaleidoscopic light show began to swirl in my head. I gripped my small flashlight, making sure I would be able to navigate if I had to get up off of my cushion to make my way to the bathroom outside.

My world had been reduced to a water canteen, a blanket, and a bucket. The bucket was the centerpiece, the prime object of attention, as my stomach twisted and turned, wrestling with the earthy brew I had gulped down, the bitter taste lingering in my mouth. The shamans began to sing, and my stomach gave another turn.

Suddenly, I was dry heaving into my bucket, my arms gripping its rim like it was a life preserver. As quickly as I had buried my head in the bucket, I laid back down on the cushion, trying to catch my breath. The psychedelic light show sped up, the lights and colors swirling in my mind with an intensity well beyond my control. I felt my sense of self disappearing altogether. A crushing feeling that I would never return, never again see my family, overwhelmed me. My last thought, my only thought, was that this world was now lost to me. Awash in kaleidoscopic imagery, I had no choice but to let the panic pour through me.

Ayahuasca is liquid death. Think of it as Kali in a shot glass, or spiritual Drano. The brew that you drink is a potent mix of two plants — the ayahuasca vine and a root called chacruna. The hallucinogenic compound released by mixing these two plants is DMT. It continues to amaze me that somehow, with some combination of experimentation and divine guidance, someone discovered that this mix of these two plants could open a doorway to the wisdom and guidance of Mother Nature.

But unlike the soft and soothing comfort of sitting in nature, ayahuasca is not gentle. They call her Mother, or la madre, and sometimes Grandmother, or la abuela. On our retreat, we called her Mother.

Mother does not mess around. This isn’t some sweet mother who tucks you into bed at night, or who holds you when you scrape a knee or feel sad.

This is a tough-love mother who, with great compassion, rips open your innards as if they were an overstuffed hoarder’s apartment and starts throwing out the trash. It was magical. Mother found quite a bit to throw away, and she had a lot to say to me for three nights in a row.

The 1st Night: Clearing Out Negative Emotions

My first night, whose beginning is described above, was all about death and unresolved emotional baggage. Once I got past the psychedelic light show in my head, Mother Aya started to speak to me directly, asking me questions and explaining things to me, reviewing relationships, and reminding me of principles I had forgotten or ignored. She led me to all of the tender, wounded places still left in my emotional life, like lingering resentments or people I needed to forgive or apologize to.

I spent the first few hours wailing in tears as I witnessed all of my loved ones taken away from me. First my husband, then my two cats. At each moment, I experienced their death, and I was in mourning. I sobbed and cried that I wasn’t ready for this, that I didn’t have the strength to endure more loss. Mother didn’t listen, because … tough love. She taught me the value of non-attachment, which was not about not feeling pain at the loss of loved ones but accepting that their loss was inevitable, that there was nothing I could do to stop it.

At another point, Mother Aya said it was time to face my fear of death, even though I had already had all of my loved ones stripped of me. I could feel death approaching, and then nothing. There was nothing to fear. The fear was a product of my mind.

In the midst of all of my sobbing, Mother told me I was much too hard on my body when it came to meat. I had been a vegan for some time, but was then a vegetarian, so I didn’t eat meat. At the end of the retreat there would be a large meal at which chicken was served, and she told me directly: I want you to eat the chicken. I sobbed even more, crying out that I didn’t want them to suffer. She explained that they don’t suffer. They understand the cycle of life. And my body would need the chicken’s strength.

The 2nd Night: Releasing Past Life Pain

The second night started without any verbal communication. I started to writhe, moving back and forth, and thought to myself that it felt very much like being an animal. Mother Aya said quite clearly, “You do not understand animal consciousness. None of you does.” Her words echoed her comments from the previous night about animals and the cycle of life. They were also the last words I heard for the next several hours.

I had two enormous purges and then felt nothing but sheer agony throughout my entire body. The only word I heard, in Spanish, was “surrender” — somete. The agony was physical and emotional. Nothing made it go away, and Mother Aya wouldn’t talk to me. This went on for several hours.

Then, as I reached out for one of the assistants to ask why she wasn’t talking to me and why I was in so much pain, Mother took all language away from me, and I couldn’t speak; I could only utter guttural sounds.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the pain slowly began to shift. I realized that I was releasing pain carried in my body from previous lifetimes. It was most intense around my belly button, as if I were feeling the pain of death and rebirth again and again.

Slowly, over the next couple of hours, I went through a complete rebirth, coming through a birth canal and receiving the gift of language again. As I neared the end of this rebirthing process, I called to one of the assistants, and with my newfound grasp of words, said, “I never knew healing could go so deep.”

The 3rd Night: Death of the Ego

The third night was a complete rewiring of my mind. I spent the whole night babbling nonstop to the shamans and my fellow travelers, sharing with them all sorts of secrets and fears, many of which were sexual and tied to shame.

What was perhaps the most exceptional part is how control of my speech and my breathing was taken away from me. My breathing would stop until Mother next told me to breathe. I would take in a deep breath of air and then what felt like minutes would go by. I had no willpower, no identity, and was not in control.

Mother continually repeated to me that everything in my body was the “will of the Mother.” At one point, my mind dissolved, and I felt like I was one with the earth, as if I were dissolving into the ground itself.

I lost all sense of being a separate human, and I couldn’t remember my name or the names of other people, even though I was constantly sharing verbally. I hadn’t lost language — I had lost a sense of personal agency.

After she was complete, my breathing returned to normal, and she gave me back my identity and the names of my fellow travelers. It was blissful to regain a sense of self, without the shame attached to it.

At the end of that ceremony, Mother gave me powerful prophetic messages for every member of the group. I relayed them to each person, some of which were startling, and then the work was complete. My role was simply to deliver, not to interpret, the messages. The riddles were theirs to unravel.

From Death, New Life Springs

Each night played out a cycle of death and rebirth — my heart, my body, and my mind were killed and reborn in three nights of ceremony. Life and death went hand in hand. We drank liquid death so that we could be given new life.

Of course, not everyone had the same experience as me. Others who had done very little spiritual work spent most of their time vomiting, with little to no visions; Mother was busy pulling out a lot of psychic gunk for them — highly beneficial but deeply unpleasant too. An ayahuasca retreat is not to be undertaken lightly, and I would recommend it only to those who have already done spiritual cleansing and healing work.

Mother taught me many more lessons than I have shared here, but her overarching message was how to relate to life and death itself: Surrender to life because you are not in control, and don’t fear death, but respect it as an integral part of life.

Heeding Mother’s command from the first ceremony, I went to the chicken coop the day before our final meal together. A lone white chicken, among several gray ones, stepped forward as I crouched in front of the chicken wire. She leaned her beak against the cage so that my hand could touch her. I stared into her eyes, and she didn’t move away. At that moment I knew that she was the chicken I would eat, and somehow it felt like she knew it too. I thanked her for her sacrifice, and she stepped away.

The cook confirmed the next day at lunch that the white chicken had been slaughtered that morning for our meal. I obeyed Mother’s request and ate that chicken with a reverence I had never before felt. Having been stripped so bare for three days, my body needed that sustenance for the long trip home. Her death gave me life, and my body was thankful for that gift. I would never see nature — or life and death — the same way again.