Just had my first full home ayahusaca experience and have come out mostly shaken but also stirred, and with what is probably a healthy lesson in respect for these substances. I'm interested to hear if any of this is familiar.
Some background:
I meddled with psychedelics for a short while as a mid-nineties troubled teen (along with various 'ecstasy' pills, few of which probably actually contained MDMA, and copious amount of speed and weed), but was not in a great solid mental place to really get the benefit from LSD or Psilocybe semilanceata, and one occasion mixing LSD and some sort of unidentified 'brown dove' led to one of the most horrifying experiences of my life, in which I had a series of seizures and primal terror of the most existential kind for what seemed like an eternity. As a result of this and my other abuse of my system at the time I suffered a bout of terrible depression that took me years to truly recover from. As a result I steered clear of anything psychedelic for a long time. With hindsight I came to the conclusion that perhaps I'd suffered from some sort of serotonin syndrome reaction.
After some years trying to deal with the aftermath of a psychologically problematic adolescence, in my early twenties I ended up in the Ecuadorian Oriente region of the upper Amazon basin working as a volunteer at an idyllicl forest nature reserve for a few months. After hearing of ayahuasca, and its healing potential, and feeling that this seemed completely different to the dark compounds I'd encountered at home, I arrranged a meeting with a shaman who lived just up the river. After two intensive sessions I felt genuinely purged of my demons, and I feel that this was the final piece of the puzzle in putting right what had gone wrong in my earlier years. It was an amazing and beautiful ordeal.
Aside from a brief dalliance with fresh cubensis mushrooms for the brief window in which they were legal, I didn't go near psychedelics or entheogens for years. Then last year my best friend was killed in a car crash and I was forced on another journey into the soul. After seeing some fly agarics in the woods I felt compelled to take them home and research their entheogenic usage. I didn't have enough to have much effect but my research had piqued my interest and alerted me to the breadth of information and material available on the internet.
This led me to research ayahuasca, that wonderful brew that had done me so much good, which in turn led to me finding out that one could isolate DMT relatively easily. A number of very enjoyable forays into freebase followed, none of which gave me any fear, in the contrary they seemed like an extraordinarily effective anti-depressant and soul tonic. I then decided to make my own ayahuasca.
I had been taking a low dose of citalopram for a few months to take the edge off the immediate mourning, which had been intense enough so as to make work difficult. I stopped this, thinking that it had served its purpose, and knowing I could not continue to take it if I wanted to explore ayahuasca, which I felt would be a much more holistic and long term solution.
In the meantime I used a large crock pot to brew 375g of black caapi and 125g of Brazilian whole leaf Chacruna, brewing each three times for 9 hours with vinegar and reducing until I had two bottles of thick brown liquid in my fridge.
After four weeks of abstinence from the citalopram, I felt it was time to start experimenting. I had continued to take piracetam, as it had great effects on my mental clarity and I had read that it shouldn't have any contraindications with MAOIs. Knowing the potential power of the vine, and having read on the subject as thoroughly as I could, I decided to start by getting to know the vine.
On the first day I drank the equivalent of 75g of black cap. I definitely noticed effects - a feeling of well-being, mild sedation and an afterglow that enveloped me until well into the next day. There was no purging, although the brew was not pleasant to drink (I can still picture the taste very strongly and it makes me shudder a little, a sort of sickly bittersweet heaviness with overtones of something almost vanilla-y).
I repeated the next day, with similar effects. I was working as well, so probably not giving my system much time to recover. No purge then either.
On the third day I repeated the dose, and felt very relaxed in front of the fire, and really enjoyed watching a science documentary, feeling an almost psychedelic altered clarity, with heightened senses resulting in a 'hyper-3-d' view of the surrounding world, hearing every sound in the streets beyond. I switched it off and sat in front of the fire. I felt it might be time to 'add some light'.
I had recently made some changa with a blend of mullein, caapi leaf, pau d'arco, cats claw and guayasa, with a pinch of plain salvia leaf, and infused with 1/4 spice and a few hundred milligrams of crude harmala freebase, and had yet to give it a proper go. I didn't want to push this too far, so had the tiniest pinch and puffed it back. I definitely felt it, but it was still subtle. I repeated a couple of times and found myself becoming entranced very pleasantly by the fire.
Then on the final blast I found myself drifting in and out of a wilfully dreamy state, imagination freed to run wild. I lay back on the rug and stared at the concentric circles surrounding the chandelier. They seemed to be almost pulsating, spiralling, inviting me to let myself go and accept myself into another world, the boundless world of the unfettered subconscious.
The next thing I knew I was imagining myself to be on a distant beach in some alternate spirit world, feeling for all the world like a wide-mouthed totemic statue, I could feel my real mouth pulled wide in a spastic grimace, at the same time I knew this wasn't real but enjoyed the experience of it feeling very real, feeling what it really felt like to be this strange idol, before it faded, my mouth still pulled wide. It was a glorious feeling of escape, of allowing my mind to really break free. I went to bed in a glorious dreamy state, very impressed by the incredible synergy of caapi and spice.
The next day I was receiving a visit from an old friend who had expressed an interest in such things. I showed him my brews and we discussed giving it a gentle test run, as we had made a loose plan to do something similar in the woods. I had originally intended the 125g chacruna brew to make three doses of just over 40g, which I had gathered was about the minimum likely to have much of an effect. My friend was quite keen to be very conservative with it though, and after a chat I agreed with him, halving the dose of chacruna to the equivalent of 20g each, which I felt might just break through placebo level. This would turn out to be wrong.
Paying no attention to any diet, in fact quite the opposite - we had a breakfast of bacon, sausage, egg and tomato baguette, and a lunch of steak sandwich - with hindsight probably very disrespectful - I mixed the two 75g black cap brews and two 20g chacruna doses into one pan, reduced for half an hour and we choked down half the foul, dark brew each, sipping it an as large gulps as our constricting gullets would permit. A couple of drops of lemon oil were dabbed on the tongue to reduce instant nausea, working very well.
It didn't take long to come on, and by about half an hour we were both giggling in awe at the strength of this sacred tea. I went to purge, and as I hunched over the toilet, looking down into it, throwing up the remnants of my lunch, the experience hit me like a ton of bricks. The vomit and toilet bowl seemed a strangely transfixing scene, bubbling and swirling like it was alive. WHen I got up and wiped my mouth I was well and truly through the wormhole, feeling absolutely charged and disorientated.
I was still in very good spirits, if physically and mentally confused and bolted back downstairs to lie on the carpet in front of the fire. The visuals were beaming ever stringer by the second, sheets of liquid, continually metamorphosing patterns in many layers, each of them moving independently in different directions, filling my closed eyes, so intense in their motion I was feeling dizzy. They were incredibly beautiful, very aztec codex in nature, endless opening mouths one minute, swarming vines and snakes the next.
It was stunning but starting to make me clench my mouth in the intensity, it felt like my brain was about to explode. As the sound of my friend's guts sluicing clean echoed down the hallway from upstairs, the physical feeling of intense pressure in my head kept building, and I felt almost on the brink of a seizure. The feeling was still largely one of pleasure but becoming almost unbearable in intensity, as though my brain was about to pop. My friend and I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity we felt.
As an hour passed, I seemed to be getting more and more physically affected, until I could barely move, whereas my friend seemed to be coming down from the experience quite rapidly. I don't know the reason for this mismatch was - my guesses were that either my persistent use of cap for four days in a row had rendered me much more sensitive, or he was naturally very resistant - but it did not work well - he didn't have the experience to know what it could do and as he was returning to full function didn't realise what a helpless condition I was in, so started talking to me normally and jokingly berating me for being incapacitated, which was not helpful in my current condition. I was barely able to move or to speak properly and the swimming visuals were intense as ever, I had also been up since 6am so we decided that he may as well go and I could try to sleep it out.
This was a bad idea. I went to bed and tried to sleep, but the intensity of visuals and thoughts meant that was completely impossible. My head still felt like it would burst, I was very physically uncomfortable at this point, which was not a nice place to be when so mentally incapacitated and one's own. Eventually, deep, dark memories of my former voyages to realms of psychic hell came bubbling to the surface and a sense of terrifying impending existential doom came creeping in at the margins.
The stronger I thought about the stronger it got, feeding on my fear when my natural defences were down. I tried to regain control over my body and mind, and getting up and wandering about the house aimlessly seemed to stave off the worst of the horror.,but I was completely uncoordinated and could only move in short bursts. The sheer intensity of the physical pressure (possibly imagined) on my head combined with endless torrents of now malevolent seeming visuals made me feel like I was about to have a seizure. In an attempt to prove to myself I sit lad some controlI endlessly and spasmodically whacked my feet against the bed, keeping some tenuous link to reality, tapping harder and harder in the hope I could shake this fever out of my head. It helped a tiny bit, reminding myself I was still alive.
As well as faint shades of the horrible LSD experience recounted earlier, this feeling of delirium and physical danger reminded me very strongly of the time i'd nearly died in hospital a couple of years before, when a streptococcus infection took me over in the course of a few hours and put me in a horrific fever, nearly leading me to need to have my arm amputated (thankfully ten days on an antibiotic drip saved my life and my arm).
Panic was starting to get out of trouble, and my delirious mind started running through the worst case scenarios. I seriously started thinking I'd given myself serotonin syndrome or a hypertensive crisis due to not following dietary considerations, through doing too much cap for a few days in a row or from residual SSRIs in my system from a month before. My girlfriend was due back in a few hours and the still logical part of my brain that remained was telling me to just count down the minutes until it began to wear off. I ran a bath, thinking it might help relax me, but I was much worse when lying down in the bath. Though I could barley physically function, moving around at least distracted form the fear. I had a shower and starting uttering a repetitive noise in an attempt to bring myself out of this anxiety attack. I couldn't shake the fear that I'd done myself serious harm, and promised to respect the vine a lot more if I got through this.
I became very angry at myself for having been so arrogant as to throw myself into the pursuit of ethnobotanical knowledge with such abandon, and pledged to destroy all related items. i would have given anything for a shaman right then. In a bid to wrest some sort of power back I cast the remainder of the chacruna brew down the sink, followed by my filtering 250g rue extraction. This gave me a sense of returning control that helped assuage my terror slightly. I luckily managed to control my fantasies of destroying my ethnobotanical indoor garden, and lay down again, feeling some brain function returning, enough to look at the clock and calculate that it would not be so long before it began to fade - unless my paranoid anxiety demons were correct and I'd permanently damaged myself with serotonin poisoning.
I recalled that fearing you would die is not uncommon on ayahuasca but felt bad enough that I couldn't shake the idea I had poisoned myself by not following protocol. Eventually, some four hours after t+0 the visions and fever began to fade and my dominion over my mind and body allowed me to start picking up the pieces. Tidying the house for my other half's imminent arrival helped make me feel better, as did the thought I would have some company - being alone had not been good for me. My pupils were still as dilated as they ever had been - I almost had no irises. I gradually calmed down and had a couple of quick phone conversations which helped ground me.
I still felt shaken and had an intense headache, but at least had logical thought processes back and fear of death or permanent brain damage was becoming easier to dismiss. Now, three days later, I still feel exhausted and have occasional minor flashbacks to the terror for a second or two but am still alive and very very happy to be here.
I do intend to partake in another ayahuasca journey but don't want that to happen ever again. I'm guessing I need to go in with the utmost of respect next time, certainly with a purer, stronger body and mindset...
So - has anyone else thought they were going to die on 20g of chacruna?
Some background:
I meddled with psychedelics for a short while as a mid-nineties troubled teen (along with various 'ecstasy' pills, few of which probably actually contained MDMA, and copious amount of speed and weed), but was not in a great solid mental place to really get the benefit from LSD or Psilocybe semilanceata, and one occasion mixing LSD and some sort of unidentified 'brown dove' led to one of the most horrifying experiences of my life, in which I had a series of seizures and primal terror of the most existential kind for what seemed like an eternity. As a result of this and my other abuse of my system at the time I suffered a bout of terrible depression that took me years to truly recover from. As a result I steered clear of anything psychedelic for a long time. With hindsight I came to the conclusion that perhaps I'd suffered from some sort of serotonin syndrome reaction.
After some years trying to deal with the aftermath of a psychologically problematic adolescence, in my early twenties I ended up in the Ecuadorian Oriente region of the upper Amazon basin working as a volunteer at an idyllicl forest nature reserve for a few months. After hearing of ayahuasca, and its healing potential, and feeling that this seemed completely different to the dark compounds I'd encountered at home, I arrranged a meeting with a shaman who lived just up the river. After two intensive sessions I felt genuinely purged of my demons, and I feel that this was the final piece of the puzzle in putting right what had gone wrong in my earlier years. It was an amazing and beautiful ordeal.
Aside from a brief dalliance with fresh cubensis mushrooms for the brief window in which they were legal, I didn't go near psychedelics or entheogens for years. Then last year my best friend was killed in a car crash and I was forced on another journey into the soul. After seeing some fly agarics in the woods I felt compelled to take them home and research their entheogenic usage. I didn't have enough to have much effect but my research had piqued my interest and alerted me to the breadth of information and material available on the internet.
This led me to research ayahuasca, that wonderful brew that had done me so much good, which in turn led to me finding out that one could isolate DMT relatively easily. A number of very enjoyable forays into freebase followed, none of which gave me any fear, in the contrary they seemed like an extraordinarily effective anti-depressant and soul tonic. I then decided to make my own ayahuasca.
I had been taking a low dose of citalopram for a few months to take the edge off the immediate mourning, which had been intense enough so as to make work difficult. I stopped this, thinking that it had served its purpose, and knowing I could not continue to take it if I wanted to explore ayahuasca, which I felt would be a much more holistic and long term solution.
In the meantime I used a large crock pot to brew 375g of black caapi and 125g of Brazilian whole leaf Chacruna, brewing each three times for 9 hours with vinegar and reducing until I had two bottles of thick brown liquid in my fridge.
After four weeks of abstinence from the citalopram, I felt it was time to start experimenting. I had continued to take piracetam, as it had great effects on my mental clarity and I had read that it shouldn't have any contraindications with MAOIs. Knowing the potential power of the vine, and having read on the subject as thoroughly as I could, I decided to start by getting to know the vine.
On the first day I drank the equivalent of 75g of black cap. I definitely noticed effects - a feeling of well-being, mild sedation and an afterglow that enveloped me until well into the next day. There was no purging, although the brew was not pleasant to drink (I can still picture the taste very strongly and it makes me shudder a little, a sort of sickly bittersweet heaviness with overtones of something almost vanilla-y).
I repeated the next day, with similar effects. I was working as well, so probably not giving my system much time to recover. No purge then either.
On the third day I repeated the dose, and felt very relaxed in front of the fire, and really enjoyed watching a science documentary, feeling an almost psychedelic altered clarity, with heightened senses resulting in a 'hyper-3-d' view of the surrounding world, hearing every sound in the streets beyond. I switched it off and sat in front of the fire. I felt it might be time to 'add some light'.
I had recently made some changa with a blend of mullein, caapi leaf, pau d'arco, cats claw and guayasa, with a pinch of plain salvia leaf, and infused with 1/4 spice and a few hundred milligrams of crude harmala freebase, and had yet to give it a proper go. I didn't want to push this too far, so had the tiniest pinch and puffed it back. I definitely felt it, but it was still subtle. I repeated a couple of times and found myself becoming entranced very pleasantly by the fire.
Then on the final blast I found myself drifting in and out of a wilfully dreamy state, imagination freed to run wild. I lay back on the rug and stared at the concentric circles surrounding the chandelier. They seemed to be almost pulsating, spiralling, inviting me to let myself go and accept myself into another world, the boundless world of the unfettered subconscious.
The next thing I knew I was imagining myself to be on a distant beach in some alternate spirit world, feeling for all the world like a wide-mouthed totemic statue, I could feel my real mouth pulled wide in a spastic grimace, at the same time I knew this wasn't real but enjoyed the experience of it feeling very real, feeling what it really felt like to be this strange idol, before it faded, my mouth still pulled wide. It was a glorious feeling of escape, of allowing my mind to really break free. I went to bed in a glorious dreamy state, very impressed by the incredible synergy of caapi and spice.
The next day I was receiving a visit from an old friend who had expressed an interest in such things. I showed him my brews and we discussed giving it a gentle test run, as we had made a loose plan to do something similar in the woods. I had originally intended the 125g chacruna brew to make three doses of just over 40g, which I had gathered was about the minimum likely to have much of an effect. My friend was quite keen to be very conservative with it though, and after a chat I agreed with him, halving the dose of chacruna to the equivalent of 20g each, which I felt might just break through placebo level. This would turn out to be wrong.
Paying no attention to any diet, in fact quite the opposite - we had a breakfast of bacon, sausage, egg and tomato baguette, and a lunch of steak sandwich - with hindsight probably very disrespectful - I mixed the two 75g black cap brews and two 20g chacruna doses into one pan, reduced for half an hour and we choked down half the foul, dark brew each, sipping it an as large gulps as our constricting gullets would permit. A couple of drops of lemon oil were dabbed on the tongue to reduce instant nausea, working very well.
It didn't take long to come on, and by about half an hour we were both giggling in awe at the strength of this sacred tea. I went to purge, and as I hunched over the toilet, looking down into it, throwing up the remnants of my lunch, the experience hit me like a ton of bricks. The vomit and toilet bowl seemed a strangely transfixing scene, bubbling and swirling like it was alive. WHen I got up and wiped my mouth I was well and truly through the wormhole, feeling absolutely charged and disorientated.
I was still in very good spirits, if physically and mentally confused and bolted back downstairs to lie on the carpet in front of the fire. The visuals were beaming ever stringer by the second, sheets of liquid, continually metamorphosing patterns in many layers, each of them moving independently in different directions, filling my closed eyes, so intense in their motion I was feeling dizzy. They were incredibly beautiful, very aztec codex in nature, endless opening mouths one minute, swarming vines and snakes the next.
It was stunning but starting to make me clench my mouth in the intensity, it felt like my brain was about to explode. As the sound of my friend's guts sluicing clean echoed down the hallway from upstairs, the physical feeling of intense pressure in my head kept building, and I felt almost on the brink of a seizure. The feeling was still largely one of pleasure but becoming almost unbearable in intensity, as though my brain was about to pop. My friend and I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity we felt.
As an hour passed, I seemed to be getting more and more physically affected, until I could barely move, whereas my friend seemed to be coming down from the experience quite rapidly. I don't know the reason for this mismatch was - my guesses were that either my persistent use of cap for four days in a row had rendered me much more sensitive, or he was naturally very resistant - but it did not work well - he didn't have the experience to know what it could do and as he was returning to full function didn't realise what a helpless condition I was in, so started talking to me normally and jokingly berating me for being incapacitated, which was not helpful in my current condition. I was barely able to move or to speak properly and the swimming visuals were intense as ever, I had also been up since 6am so we decided that he may as well go and I could try to sleep it out.
This was a bad idea. I went to bed and tried to sleep, but the intensity of visuals and thoughts meant that was completely impossible. My head still felt like it would burst, I was very physically uncomfortable at this point, which was not a nice place to be when so mentally incapacitated and one's own. Eventually, deep, dark memories of my former voyages to realms of psychic hell came bubbling to the surface and a sense of terrifying impending existential doom came creeping in at the margins.
The stronger I thought about the stronger it got, feeding on my fear when my natural defences were down. I tried to regain control over my body and mind, and getting up and wandering about the house aimlessly seemed to stave off the worst of the horror.,but I was completely uncoordinated and could only move in short bursts. The sheer intensity of the physical pressure (possibly imagined) on my head combined with endless torrents of now malevolent seeming visuals made me feel like I was about to have a seizure. In an attempt to prove to myself I sit lad some controlI endlessly and spasmodically whacked my feet against the bed, keeping some tenuous link to reality, tapping harder and harder in the hope I could shake this fever out of my head. It helped a tiny bit, reminding myself I was still alive.
As well as faint shades of the horrible LSD experience recounted earlier, this feeling of delirium and physical danger reminded me very strongly of the time i'd nearly died in hospital a couple of years before, when a streptococcus infection took me over in the course of a few hours and put me in a horrific fever, nearly leading me to need to have my arm amputated (thankfully ten days on an antibiotic drip saved my life and my arm).
Panic was starting to get out of trouble, and my delirious mind started running through the worst case scenarios. I seriously started thinking I'd given myself serotonin syndrome or a hypertensive crisis due to not following dietary considerations, through doing too much cap for a few days in a row or from residual SSRIs in my system from a month before. My girlfriend was due back in a few hours and the still logical part of my brain that remained was telling me to just count down the minutes until it began to wear off. I ran a bath, thinking it might help relax me, but I was much worse when lying down in the bath. Though I could barley physically function, moving around at least distracted form the fear. I had a shower and starting uttering a repetitive noise in an attempt to bring myself out of this anxiety attack. I couldn't shake the fear that I'd done myself serious harm, and promised to respect the vine a lot more if I got through this.
I became very angry at myself for having been so arrogant as to throw myself into the pursuit of ethnobotanical knowledge with such abandon, and pledged to destroy all related items. i would have given anything for a shaman right then. In a bid to wrest some sort of power back I cast the remainder of the chacruna brew down the sink, followed by my filtering 250g rue extraction. This gave me a sense of returning control that helped assuage my terror slightly. I luckily managed to control my fantasies of destroying my ethnobotanical indoor garden, and lay down again, feeling some brain function returning, enough to look at the clock and calculate that it would not be so long before it began to fade - unless my paranoid anxiety demons were correct and I'd permanently damaged myself with serotonin poisoning.
I recalled that fearing you would die is not uncommon on ayahuasca but felt bad enough that I couldn't shake the idea I had poisoned myself by not following protocol. Eventually, some four hours after t+0 the visions and fever began to fade and my dominion over my mind and body allowed me to start picking up the pieces. Tidying the house for my other half's imminent arrival helped make me feel better, as did the thought I would have some company - being alone had not been good for me. My pupils were still as dilated as they ever had been - I almost had no irises. I gradually calmed down and had a couple of quick phone conversations which helped ground me.
I still felt shaken and had an intense headache, but at least had logical thought processes back and fear of death or permanent brain damage was becoming easier to dismiss. Now, three days later, I still feel exhausted and have occasional minor flashbacks to the terror for a second or two but am still alive and very very happy to be here.
I do intend to partake in another ayahuasca journey but don't want that to happen ever again. I'm guessing I need to go in with the utmost of respect next time, certainly with a purer, stronger body and mindset...
So - has anyone else thought they were going to die on 20g of chacruna?
