Vile Brew

What an ayahuasca orgasm taught me about the nature of reality

Some of you know that I was originally scheduled to speak on a panel about psychedelics and Christianity at the end of March. Unfortunately, it was cancelled. No, I don’t really understand why either. It seems the topic might have been to much for some people, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, here’s one of the stories I might have told if I’d had time. I’ve shared it before, but not here at The Unfolding. If you’re interested in some of my other experiences, specifically as they relate to Christianity, I touch on them in this post.

The Experience

We sat around a table shoved up against one side of a small kitchen—me, a couple whom I’d just met, and the shaman, to whom the apartment belonged.  After a prayer calling to the four directions and a litany of jungle spirits—I distinctly remember a jaguar being invoked—we downed a chalky, bitter, and puckeringly tannic brown sludge. She’d advised us to pound it as quickly as possible rather than sip, and I wasn’t about to draw out the experience of tasting the vile brew.

We moved into the living room, which was dominated by the three beds and one couch posted in each of the corners. The shaman, who was originally from Mexico and had spent time apprenticing with healers in Peru, took up a spot on the floor in the center of the room, armed with a tobacco pipe and Agua de Florida, while the rest of us claimed our beds. 

Music wafted out from a speaker, a vaguely Middle Eastern melody with a light trance beat. A recorded voice guided us into a meditation through the seven chakras. By the time the meditation was finished, I was lying down, shimmying my hips to the beat. The shaman was making the rounds, checking on each of us to determine whether we would require an additional dose. 

“Are you in?” she asked me. 

“Um, maybe,” I said with a lazy slur. “I don’t really see anything. It’s hard to tell because this music is moving all its snakes through me.” 

“Yeah, you’re in.”

As the technicolor visions developed, I was thrown into a world of pulsating light, undulating to the rhythm, feeling the notes and beats, and seeing the colors and shapes move through me as I was carried along on a wave of wonder and pleasure. I felt alive and unbound, and yet there was a tension moving through me, spiraling upward in ever-tightening circles. It ran from the base of my spine and stretched toward my mouth. I realized at some point that I was now on all fours and beginning to retch ever so slightly. 

“Here you go.” The shaman was at my side, holding the barf bucket that had been placed at my bedside. I realized I was vomiting, but I didn’t mind. I was writhing, moaning in pleasure, feeling the tension mount as the rainbow serpent readied to burst forth from my mouth, knowing that at the moment of emesis I would obtain the most delicious release. 

Oh. I was having an orgasm. A vomiting, ayahuasca orgasm.

For a split second, I marveled at this. Then I realized I was making what could only be described as sex sounds and that I was in a room with three people who I didn’t really know at all, and I was deeply mortified. In that moment, everything turned as if a switch had been flipped. It was as if I were in the depths of hell. Waves of nausea washed over me, and I began to puke my guts out. The swirling geometric visions took on a frightening, leering quality. 

The odd thing was that at the level of raw sensation, I knew that what I was experiencing hadn’t really changed. Whatever energy was moving in my body was still hitting me in the same places and causing me to perform the same action—that is, retching and evacuating my stomach. It was my perception of the whole business that had changed. As soon as I had taken myself out of my bodily experience and succumbed to the shame of “but what will the neighbors think?” (even though they were busy with their own dramas), I’d been plunged into my worst nightmare. It was as if the Ayahuasca was saying, “Oh, you don’t like this amazing experience I’m giving you? How about this one?”

I tried to get back. I said I was sorry and that I didn’t care what anybody else thought of me. I tried to think ecstatic thoughts. I tried to find the switch and flip it back. I thought that maybe if I just puked a little bit more, I’d have purged my shame, and I’d be back to the light show. It was no good. The agony continued, on and on and on, until I’d emptied myself of bile and was dry-heaving over and over. When will it be over? I thought. What did I do to deserve this? Whywhywhywhywhy?

All of this turmoil was taking place in my head, or so I thought, until the shaman came to intervene. 

“Chill the fuck out,” she said. “It’s going to be fine; you just need to accept it and relax. You need to calm down. You’re disturbing the others.” 

Whoops. Apparently I’d been carrying on and moaning even more embarrassingly than I had when I was in the throes of ecstasy.

The rest of the night was not terribly fun. As the drug wore off, my nausea gradually lessened. I did have some insights—I saw the personal stories I told myself and how I was living them out over and over, taking myself on emotional roller coaster rides. I went through all my chakras, viewing a new story with each one, then releasing it, and as I ascended toward my crown, they lessened in emotional intensity. My sense was that I couldn’t avoid living out stories, necessarily, but that I could learn to handle the ups and downs better and maybe tell myself more constructive, less self-centered ones. 

How I Got There

I’d been wanting to do ayahuasca for a while, but I wasn’t sure where to begin. An old colleague had sent me the website of a couple who performed ceremonies up and down the West Coast, but the thought of experiencing something so intensely vulnerable in a room full of strangers felt a little overwhelming. I met my shaman at a free energy healing exchange at the spiritual school I attended. Once a month, my teacher opened the doors for anyone in the community to come and receive a service from her network of volunteers—massage therapists, Reiki and Healing Touch practitioners, that sort of thing. The shaman was offering free herbal consultations. I was a regular at these events, but I’d never seen her before. 

It turned out she’d met my teacher, Nancy, years before, after a series of disturbing visions upended her life. In late 2010 and early 2011, she began seeing visions of tidal waves, large structures swept out into the ocean, and a building being inundated and spreading contaminants into the sea. Death. Lots of deaths. She was convinced that something bad was going to happen and that people needed to be warned. She started to tell everyone she knew. Nobody believed her. They talked her into seeing a psychiatrist, who tried to convince her that the visions and dreams meant nothing and that she was delusional. 

When a 9.0 earthquake hit Japan in March 2011, triggering a massive tsunami, flooding a nuclear power plant, and killing an astonishing 20,000 people, the psychiatrist called and apologized for not believing her. 

I knew a lot of people with similar stories of having pre-cognition or other psychic experiences that nobody else understood. I’d had my own experiences, though none as impressive as that. I felt a kinship with her—it was hard to be a mystical girl living in a fully rational, material world—and when she told me about her ayahuasca sessions and the small size of the group, I thought, OK, I can do this. 

She offered one-night or three-night mini-retreats at her home in Seattle. She said if you did more than one night, the second night was really rough. You’d be dismantled and taken apart, and you’d need the third night to be put back together. I decided to do it one night with the understanding that I could come back the following month if I wanted the full three-dose experience. 

After that first journey, I thought that there was no way in hell that I was ever, ever doing that again. The couple in the room with me had gone through very different experiences—he said his was interesting but fairly underwhelming, while hers was full of rainbows and butterflies.

“Why me?” I thought again. “Why did I get the hellscape?”

In the end, I couldn’t shake the tantalizing promise of that initial euphoric experience. What if I could get back there? Would it heal me? Would it make me whole? Would I feel like a brand new person? I went back the following month for three more nights, but that’s another story.

What I Learned

In some ways, I think this initial ayahuasca experience was the most powerful of my six full psychedelic doses—four with ayahuasca and two with mushrooms. I learned something very strange about the nature of human experience: It is highly dependent on the state of our minds—our attitudes, emotions, and mental frameworks. It’s not a lie when someone says your thoughts create your reality, at least to some extent. At the same time, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to create a new one. As I learned that night (and in my later experiences with Ayahuasca), it’s not so easy to flip that switch in your brain that lets you experience nausea and vomiting as pure bliss. Even if we could, I don’t think it would necessarily be good or healthy to do so in our everyday lives. Pain and suffering are teachers, and they provide necessary warnings. 

But I did start to get curious about a lot of the mental and emotional pain I was experiencing. Could I really lay the blame for all my suffering at the feet of sexist men, unevolved parents, or capitalist hierarchies? Or was some of it caused by the way I was choosing to engage with the world?

The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has done some fascinating work on the way our brains construct emotions. She says they’re not intrinsic entities that are hardwired into us. There’s no anger circuit, happiness circuit, or schadenfreude circuit in our brains unless we construct them. At their core, emotions are composed of two basic vectors, what Barrett calls arousal and valence. Arousal has to do with whether you’re stimulated and alert—as in the classic “fight or flight” state—or at rest and relaxed. Valence has to do with whether you experience that sensation as positive or negative. If you’re happy and in a high arousal state, you might construct that as excitement and anticipation. If you are in a high arousal state and perceive a threat, you will probably interpret that as anxiety and fear. 

The same goes for a low-arousal state. If you’re relaxed and positive, you’re probably feeling restful and at peace. But a negative low-arousal state can mean despair and depression. Physiologically, a lot of really different emotions can look pretty similar, at least initially. But the way we interpret and make meaning of them can unleash a cascade of mental and physical effects. Barrett’s theory and research are complex, and there’s no way I can do them justice here. (If this stuff interests you, I suggest you check her work out for yourself.)

She’s not telling us to just “think positive thoughts” or to pretend things are fine when they’re not. We need to be able to accurately perceive and assess threats to stay alive. But often, our past experiences, the expectations we create for ourselves, and even our language and cultural assumptions have a profound effect on the way the brain constructs what’s happening in the moment. And they can pretty easily take us off course. We see this in something like PTSD, where a person who has experienced a profoundly traumatizing event learns to perceive all sorts of stimuli as threats even when they’re not. 

Putting it Together

I share all of this because I’ve been wanting to dive deeper into the nature of mystical and visionary experiences. So many people are waking up to the notion that there are “more things in heaven and earth” than our modern philosophical and scientific frameworks can handle. Whether it’s psychedelic visions, psychic phenomena like pre-cognition, synchronicities, or even experiencing UFO’s, a lot of us are having intense experiences that can’t be denied. 

At the same time, there’s a lot of confusion and fear about it—for good reason! These experiences can be profoundly helpful and healing for some. For the ayahuasca shaman, her precognition of the Japanese tsunami was incredibly disturbing, but ultimately led her to a new path and purpose in life. For others, experiences like these can lead to a lifetime of mental illness and marginalization. 

I’ve had a number of these experiences myself. I’ve done work to cultivate them further—mostly various forms of meditation as well as studying esotericism and psychology. I’ve learned to do aura, tarot, and astrology readings for people, and I still utilize these methods in my spiritual direction from time to time. There can be real wisdom at work in all these practices and experiences—and a fair amount of confusion, fantasy, and narcissism. 

I was telling my friend the other day that I’d like to write more about these things—supernatural and paranormal experiences and how to make sense of them—but that I was afraid to do so. It’s silly, in some ways, because I haven’t exactly been secret about it in the past. I’ve offered intuitive readings to people; I have a public website for that work; and I’ve written about magic and mysticism here at the ‘Stack in the past. But I always struggle with feeling stuck in between opposing paradigms. I have too much innate skepticism to feel comfortable with some of the expressions of the mystical community, and too much faith (and personal experience) to be a hard-core rationalist. I am a practicing Christian, and I have a lot of respect for some of the most traditional expressions of it, but I also appreciate other faiths and spiritualities, and I keep one foot in the magical and animist communities. I’m aware that for a lot of people, I’m too much of one thing and not enough of another. 

No matter. We all have our own personal fears. The point is, I want to write about these things from a sane and grounded perspective, in a way that helps people make sense of their own experiences and practice discernment, and to be open-minded and curious while retaining my critical faculties. 

I’m currently working on some posts that I hope will provide a grounding framework to explore everything from mystical and paranormal experiences to myth and magic.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear more about your experiences.