bosharpe said:
Can I ask you what change you experienced after your first time taking Aya?
Sure thing! But to make it undertstandable I think I have to write quite a bit.
My first ayahuasca experience might be unlike other people's experience. It certainly was different from what I expected. I started with conventional therapy and was reading a lot about self improvement and so on. But at some point I decided that just wouldn't cut it. So I managed to get an invitation to a ceremony. After that I took the dieting really seriously. They handed out a sheet with info, basically what you can read here about food interactions with MAOIs.
The very moment I clicked to the button for participating online I started purging. I was totally sober, so it wasn't induced by booze or something. It may have come from something I ate or whatever, but to me it doesn't really matter. The way I understood it I made a decision to do things differently from now on. And that really is a difference to the desire of
being someone else. It doesn't change you. But if you are open minded the experience allows you to look at yourself and decide to act differently.
So at the day of the ceremony I travelled by bus to the place about a hundred miles away. In the bus I talked to a girl sitting next to me. She told me a friend of hers did it and had an increased amount of awareness afterwards, faced his deamons and stuff like that. It got me worried again. But then I remembered that was the reason for me to go there in the first place. So I managed to improve my mind set before the ceremony even started. Like "Inner deamons? Bring 'em on, I'm ready!"
The shaman showed up two hours late, but everybody in the room was content with him-/ herself and nobody complained. I guess everybody was aware that it was about working on your inner self and therefore it would be useless to shout at the world around you. Now that kind of atmosphere might not be there in your experience if you decide to have one. But I think it's vital to remember that you don't necessarily have influence on the things that go on around you and you have to accept the flow as it is. Whatever the set up may be, just roll with it.
The ayahuascero had a western background which was very nice for me, because his introduction speech was rooted in a culture I can perfectly understand. About toxicity he said there are maybe a dozen people dying from Ayahuasca each year. Mostly because they were confusedly walking close to a cliff and fell off or the ayahuascero would use too much mapacho in the brew which contains nicotine. But there are thousands of people dying from painkillers taken as prescribed every year. Remember that nicotine is potentially deadly if you eat as much as one cigarette. Then again, forget about that, because maybe your ayahuascero might use some in his brew. Some pre flight jitters are fine, but I don't want to set up your mind in a way that you are scared of dying. If you have the feeling of dying during the experience, again: There are some things in the world around that you cannot change. Just roll with it. It's no use fighting against it. If youdie, you die. That's not a bad thing to happen. It's actually very natural to do so sooner or later.
And he used a very powerful mindset to distinguish the specific qualities of ayahuasca from what we usually think of as a drug. A drug in the western mindset usually makes you feel good instantly and on the day after you have a hangover and feel bad. With Ayahuasca you instantly have a hangover, purge and feel bad. But if you let the experience happen you might over time feel better afterwards.
As I said, I had a good mindset to start from. So at the time the medicine kicked in I knew what to do. In the beginning I had a vision of alien surveillance cameras checking me out. And I was like: "Come on, pot makes me paranoid! This image has the potential to scare me!" And with that thought the image instantly changed to something still alien checking me out but without any paranoid connotation. Fine! So there are things I can control! And that is how I see the world (I didn't think that in the moment, but afterwards. What people call "integrating the experience)".
I heard other people purging without feeling the need to chime in. As I said I had done the purging way before, like two weeks or so. In retrospect I find this the most amazing thing about the experience.
Then I saw like a spirit guide or something. It had an orange outline against a brownish background. Maybe it was an image of the shaman, maybe something not rationally explainable. The next thing I felt was fingers going up my spine and reaching my brain. A very tactile hallucination of the medicine seeping into my body. I felt the fingers reaching my forehead from the inside and starting to pick and discard little black shards from inside my brain, mostly the prefrontal cortex. I guess this could be interpreted as a very unpleasant thing to happen but to me it felt like a nice massage.
After that there wasn't really too much going on. I mean yes there were strange unknown landscapes and three dimensionally shifting wall patterns that would make me a famous artist or architect if I could rebuild those. But there was no meaning attached to it. It was a very nice ride from there on. I even took a second glass of medicine thinking I would have to face my deamons in order to have a full aya experience. Well, there were none present. I translate that as a consequence of me sticking to the diet very strictly. I usually don't stick to things very strictly. And it was kind of hard to quit the coffee in the morning. Took me a while to realize that black tea wasn't a fitting substitute either. But maybe the gradual refraining from caffeine was a good idea after all.
Integrating the experience: I had a beautiful afterglow the day after and felt like I was hugged the whole night by somebody who really loved me. It took me months to realize that this person was probably me. Because I was laying on an sleeping mat quite uncomfortably on the side with my arms crossed. Only without the discomfort because I had catlike sleeping skills. But I also have the feeling that I didn't get the whole spectrum of the aya experience. Because I wasn't being authentic with myself. Ayahuasca is a very bodily experience and with the MAOIs/ RIMAs heavily related to your eating/ drinking behaviour. As I said earlier. In the preparation I acted differently than normal. I guess smoking DMT can't offer you that part of consumerism criticism. But what I learned is there is always somebody who loves you. And that is yourself. I think this a good basis for doing more ayahuasca work. Because from there on one can experience that your surrounding family and their love might be toxic. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe they don't know any better. And there is still somebody who loves you. Yourself. And even if interdependency is ubiquitous, codependency is not the only way to go. And two steps ahead and one step back may look as a step back, but it's also the simplest dance on earth. You decide how you look upon it.
I should add that I picked up smoking during this time again after five years of having quit. But the motivation for quitting was externally, not internally. So what mother aya tought me was to be authentic with myself and not judge myself by other people's standards. What I have left open on my to-do list is an experience without dieting first so I can move through my everyday behaviour with substance dependencies and their correlation with unhappiness. Don't expect it to be the medicine you want, but the one you need. And dance!
The shaman was very open about possible side effects, too: Not believing in god anymore, suddenly believing in god, quitting your job (moving out of you parents' home

),... The whole setting was very open, too. On the morning after the ceremony everybody was invited to share the experience with anybody, but nobody was forced to.
So I think you see how much you remind me of myself. I didn't live with my parents anymore, though. I hope whatever experience ayahusca will offer you benefit from it as much as I did. Maybe it is a good idea to go somewhere where it isn't illegal to take the substance. Just to make sure your subconscious doesn't bother you with a man made set of rules that are basically arbitrary. Maybe it's not necessary. You have to decide.
And keep in mind to go with the flow. If there is a snake that seems to want to bite you, tell it to swallow you whole! Even if it doesn't, accept it! That also means you are not neurotic. You may act in a neurotic way. But don't let other people's standards define what or who you are and what not! And acting is a interdependent thing to do. It is also susceptible to the will to change. It might be beneficial to remove yourself from your environment in order to change your way of acting. It might be unnessecary.
If you really want to improve your situation I advise you to not only trust in an effect from the outer world (no, not even ayahuasca does this trick for you), but to take your improvement into your own hands. I read "The Tools" by Phil Stutz and Barry Micheals around the time I went to the ceremony. Not during the ceremony, mind you.

I also began to love talks from Alan Watts. He's all over youtube...