The Choice of the Medicine Drinker

The overwhelming force of the ayahuasca experience presents us with a pretty simple choice. On the one hand, we can surrender to it, opening ourselves up to the full meaning of the word "entheogen" - having Divine Presence enter every level of our being and remove every obstacle to its path in the process. On the other, we can learn to manage it.

"You shall know the tree by its fruit."

It's pretty obvious when we meet people who've chosen the former path - they have a sweetness and a light that is unmistakable. The word gets thrown about in a trite and abominable way, but in this case it's true - they are childlike. They are innocent of the crimes of this world. They are beautiful on the inside, whatever their outsides look like.

The second category can be a bit trickier. The managers of the ayahuasca experience often have a pretty good rap. It's a part of their management. They can sound good. But their actions are another story - behavior does not match rhetoric, in alarming ways. Inevitably one finds significant holes in their spiritual development.

Were they to examine these holes, they would experience profound discomfort. The avoidance of this discomfort is the reason people choose to manage the ayahuasca experience.

This management can occur at every level - physical (purging, not purging), mental (allowing or refusing to admit difficult teachings), emotional (allowing or resisting tears or other expression), spiritual (limiting or not the amount of God we allow in). We can choose not to drink at all. We can choose to smoke marijuana to mitigate the full impact of the experience.

Hah! You see where I'm going with this, don't you?

This is what makes the second category the trickiest of all - almost all of us fall into it, in one way or another. Who among us can indefinitely sustain the full force of ayahuasca dismantling? People crack up from such stuff.

The vast majority of us, particularly those of us with serious trauma in our past, have to manage our relationship to ayahuasca. To do otherwise is suicidal, and in some cases homicidal. I recently visited an ayahuasca community that had its leader murdered a few years ago - they let a young man drink with them who never should have done it, and he snapped. His was a case in which management was neglected, with terrible consequences.

For the committed medicine drinker, then, management is a necessary evil. Perhaps the crucial distinction lies between the strategic and the tactical. At the strategic level we must abandon ourselves to God as expressed through this Holy Sacrament. We must strive to have our tiny individual wills utterly supplanted by His and Hers. We must completely let go of any attempt to manage the ultimate outcome - union with the Divine.

We must also recognize that this is a very long and difficult process. This brings us to the level of the tactical, at which management is not only forgivable but necessary. We must eat this meal in bites. All the nutrition in the world won't do us any good if we choke to death taking it in.

And the entire time we are using our various tricks and tools to manage this essentially unmanageable experience, we must remember that nothing can or should stop our ultimate total surrender. That's the real trick. Never to confuse form and essence.

Perhaps that first group I mentioned, the ones who have been so utterly cleaned and purified by the medicine, were simply very adept at their management of the ayahuasca experience. Perhaps they had a keen, persistent grasp of the difference between the strategic and the tactical. Perhaps they said a prayer something like this:

"God, please bring me to you in a way that I can manage."

God bless you, whoever you are.

Ayahuasca and Marijuana, Part 2

Some months ago, after over 13 years of abstinence, I began smoking marijuana again. I did not do it lightly. I did it because I didn't really have any other choice.

I found myself in a bit of predicament. I had definitively stepped away from the world of 12-step programs and into the world of plant medicine, in a way that I found to be exclusive. I did not regret my decision at all, but after almost a year of drinking ayahuasca I was having serious doubts about the sustainability of my new path. On the one hand, the chronic and unmanageable effects of PTSD had driven me to drinking medicine to begin with, and I had seen real improvement in my life as a result. On the other, the process of clarification was itself becoming unmanageable, with each ceremony bringing up yet another layer of trauma and the negative emotion around it, when the last one had not yet cleared away.

And then a funny thing started happening. I began to get clear intuitive messages from ayahuasca that I should try smoking marijuana again. I talked about it with some trusted friends in my community, and then, finally, I did.

I am now a year into my experiment with resuming marijuana use, and here's what I have to say about it: it's great. I find her to be the perfect compliment to ayahuasca. In the warm, comforting, maternal, subtly visionary space she provides I am able to process the trauma and heartbreak that ayahuasca brings up in the first place. For me, the experience of ayahuasca tends towards the stark: truth, truth, and then more truth again. I find that marijuana softens all of those sharp edges and transforms the whole experience into something that actually works in my life.

It's funny. When I combined marijuana with alcohol, the effect was synergistic and debilitating. Marijuana accentuated the toxic effects of the booze in a way that was truly dysfunctional. Today, when I combine her with ayahuasca, the effect is the opposite: she serves to spread ceremony out throughout my day-to-day life in a way that is useful, beautiful, and inspiring.

A single ayahuasca ceremony can present a bewildering volume of information to assimilate. I find that I need more help unpacking it. A daily meditation practice helps with this greatly. So does smoking pot. Sometimes when I am high tears will come, cleansing me of a trauma that has been locked in my body for decades. Sometimes a lesson that was not fully obvious from the last ceremony will suddenly be brought into relief in a way that is clear and unmistakable. Sometimes a brand new insight will be given to me.

Always my creativity is stimulated, with music, writing, and carpentry all flowing more easily. Always my fatherhood becomes more patient, gentle, and forgiving. Always my work output is enhanced, with seemingly intractable problems suddenly unraveling themselves in the visionary light of Santa Maria.

Do I get all of this free of charge? I do not. My short-term memory is undeniably impaired, which requires me to manage appointments and scheduling more diligently. From time to time I find myself slipping into more addictive patterns of usage, in ways that feel unhealthy. I find that periodic fasts help greatly with this. In addition, ayahuasca herself tends to correct me, putting me back on the correct path and mitigating the danger of addiction.

Perhaps most troubling, I have felt the need to keep this behavior hidden from my daughter, which can result in the feeling of sneaking around her. Honestly, I blame this one primarily on the sickness of our society at large, which does not (at least in Texas) sanction the use of this plant, and in fact criminalizes it. Eventually, when the time is right and she's old enough, I'll tell her about it.

But when I think about where I was a year ago, these side-effects seem pretty insignificant. My depression has left me. I can sleep at night. My creative output has increased enormously. I am no longer troubled by thoughts of suicide.

Just as important, I have felt no urge to resume drinking alcohol. Not even the slightest. When I told my old AA sponsor about smoking pot, he only made one request of me: that I call him if I were ever thinking about drinking again. I'm happy to say that I haven't had to.

In the combination of ayahuasca and marijuana, I have found a blend of plant medicine that truly works for me. I am very grateful for that.

God bless you, whoever you are.

Ayahuasca and Marijuana, Part 1

Among some in the medicine world, I have noticed a certain taboo surrounding marijuana. I know that when I went to my first workshop, all participants were urged not to smoke for several weeks prior. I know that Graham Hancock has spoken repeatedly about being freed from a decades-long abusive relationship with it by his experiences with ayahuasca. I know that a good friend of mine, a man who is undergoing a true shamanic apprenticeship in the Shipibo tradition, casts a dim eye on its use.

All of this is easy enough for me to understand. Marijuana abuse was inextricably tied to my own bottoming out with alcohol almost 14 years ago. I smoked all day every day, and it was pretty debilitating. It also combined with alcohol in a way that was truly dangerous for me, and led to an alarming number of vomiting, blackout drunks.

So I get it. In contrast to most of my ayahuasca experiences, marijuana is physically pleasurable. Her spirit is also undeniably beautiful and feminine and seductive, and very good at pulling me in past my best interests. I have never, not even remotely, felt an addictive pull towards ayahuasca. But with marijuana, the potential is there.

So I get it.

And for the first year of my journey into the medicine world, I was content to leave her be. Anything else would have been inconceivable to me. After a dozen years sober in AA, just drinking ayahuasca was an enormous step for me. I had literally been programmed - conditioned to think in a way that was not my own. I had to work through this down in Peru. After the 2nd ceremony I broke down in terror and in tears, stricken over the fact that it felt like I had just given up 12 years of hard-won sobriety. I could almost taste the alcohol on my tongue again.

The facilitators explained to me that my body was letting go of the trauma I'd inflicted on myself with years of drug and alcohol abuse. They explained that ayahuasca was not an intoxicant, that she actually was cleaning my body of impurities, not adding them. One of them was a medical doctor. I believed them. I began to formulate a new conceptual category, distinct from booze and dope - medicine. Plant medicine.

As I continued to drink ayahuasca with my community here in the States, I became more and more comfortable with this new category. And, as categories will do, it seeks new members. Recently it found one.

I first began to reconsider my attitude towards marijuana when I learned that a number of people in my church use it as a sacrament as well, in addition to ayahuasca. As I've said, for a long time I closed it off as an option. It simply felt too dangerous, too much like a real relapse.

And then something funny happened - I began to get messages from ayahuasca herself to resume smoking. I didn't want to listen to them at first, but gradually they became clearer and more compelling. There were two main factors that created my need for this additional plant medicine:

1. The volume of trauma ayahuasca brought up in me was becoming overwhelming - seriously re-traumatizing itself and ultimately unsustainable.

2. I was experiencing a return of major depression and becoming unable to function. It got so bad that I actually tried to get back on the same SSRI I had used for years - and couldn't, because of the side effects.  Apparently ayahuasca has re-wired me so that those drugs will no longer work on my organism.

I italicize the word "need" deliberately. Any successfully programmed AA member will react to this word the same way I used to - with disdain; proof that it's just another addiction. There is no arguing with this mindset, and I won't try. All I can relate is that my experience with marijuana today is completely different than what it was like many years ago when it was tied to active alcoholism.

Because, obviously, that is where all of this is heading - my experience with marijuana today. But that can wait for the next post.

God bless you, whoever you are.

Powerlessness [Graduation]

At first I was loath to even say it out loud. I didn't want to face the full implications of it. A foundation of my self-image and my entire worldview had been shown to be false. I felt a deep fear at the change it would require in me.

It happened during my first ayahuasca workshop, probably after the 2nd or 3rd ceremony. I realized that for over a dozen years I had built my whole life around a lie - the lie of powerlessness.

Perhaps "lie" isn't even the right word. Perhaps "half-truth" would be better.

A lot of people who come to Alcoholics Anonymous desperately resist the notion of powerlessness. They are too proud, too arrogant, too ensconced in their egos to even entertain the notion that they might not be all-powerful. Some of these people die. Others finally are "beaten into a state of reasonableness" after numerous relapses.

Not me. When I showed up at my first AA meeting, I heard them read the steps and I looked at the wall and I felt tremendous relief at the idea that I could finally admit defeat and impotence. It let me off the hook for having tried, and failed, for so many years to control my drinking. It was a necessary 1st Step.

"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable."

At that point in my life this was absolutely true. I was powerless in the face of alcohol. And, as 12-step communities told me countless times in meetings and in the literature I read, I was powerless over virtually every other aspect of my life as well - money, relationships, sex, career, you name it. The fabric of my existence assumed the form of an endless litany of things over which I could never hope to exert any influence.

For me at least, that became pretty disempowering.

Powerlessness is ultimately false, but it's often necessary as an intermediate step to demolish the addict self and its illusions of control. The problem is that what starts out as a useful, necessary 1st step in recovery from addiction and despair becomes a prison. It certainly did for me.

Do I really want to make powerlessness and brokenness the cornerstones of my spiritual life? What if I grow tired of describing myself as an alcoholic? Of identifying with the problem? What if I instead choose to describe myself as a perfect and holy child of God? What if I am not separate from God? If that's true then I am, in fact, infinitely powerful. That's kind of scary. That's a lot of responsibility to assume.

Powerlessness is a great way to stay small and not have to take responsibility for my own talents, abilities, decisions, life. Shitty as it is, that's the payoff that I got from clinging to powerlessness for so many years.

My first encounters with the shamanic world tore a gaping hole in my belief in my own limitation, in my own smallness. I got to experience a visceral sense of my own strength during ceremony. At times my body seemed to pulse with energy and vigor and resilience. I felt like an oak tree, planted in the ground, channeling all of the divine terrestrial power that is my birthright as a man and as a living creature on Planet Earth.

I got some perspective on the horrific experiences I'd had as a kid. I started to quit thinking "This terrible thing happened to me" and I started to begin understanding "I was strong enough to make it through this. Intact."

My friend and facilitator revealed to me that the medicine showed him the red-tailed hawk is my spirit animal - a pretty powerful creature for a guy who'd gotten so used to thinking he didn't have any. The funny thing is that I'd always known it - he just mirrored it back to me. He wasn't afraid of my power.

When I flew to Peru, I really had no sense of how 12-step programs would fit into my life when I returned. I certainly had no plan to completely remove them from my life - to "graduate". For so many years I had heard that word thrown about sarcastically, contemptuously even, to describe people who left the rooms for one reason or another - "Oh, I guess he graduated."

But that's exactly what happened. I graduated from 12-step programs. Similarly to the way I graduated from high school. Why would I not? I have found a healing technology that completely supersedes them. It renders them obsolete in my life.

The fact that so many people in AA are still so sick after so many years spent working the steps is sad, but it's not surprising. They refuse to acknowledge that, precisely as with grade school, 12 step programs must be graduated from in order to attain higher spiritual levels.

A beloved friend down in Peru, the co-facilitator of my workshop, remarked that "It's tough for a therapist to keep up with a divine trans-dimensional being." I would submit that it's also tough for a bunch of self-described alcoholics in a shabby, smoke-stained church basement.

I went to handful of meetings when I came back. I was repelled. Was it the tired words I heard spoken in them? Yes, in part. Was it the dingy surroundings? Yes, in part.

But more than anything, it was the energy I felt in them. It was a much, much lower vibration than I had experienced among my fellow explorers in the Amazon. It was a much lower vibration than I felt in myself. It depressed the living shit out of me.

I realized that, frightening as it was to me, I was moving beyond powerlessness. Somewhere deep down I knew that I could never again have anything in common with people who clung to it like a life vest.

I was finally stepping into my power. I continue to do so every day. Sometimes it's exhilarating and sometimes it's terrifying, but one thing is undeniable: there's no going back.

To quote countless AA shares I heard over the years, for that I am truly grateful.

God bless you, whoever you are.

Ayahuasca and Intention, Part 2

I stated that my own intentions surrounding ayahuasca have been clean. I think that's a fair assessment. Unfortunately, until pretty recently they were also unrealistic and unsustainable.

I conceived of my present journey as being equivalent to draining a vast pool of trauma and the negative emotion surrounding it. In that process, my own experience of growing re-traumatization was to be ignored. It was the price demanded by this nebulous and ill-defined concept, "healing". I needed to be a dauntless spiritual warrior, limitless in my capacity to absorb pain.

This approach stopped working. A few months ago, as the intensity of my experience began to reach an unbearable level, I started considering the possibility that drinking ayahuasca was just too much for me. I considered stopping.

I talked with some very wise and trusted friends in my community about this. They were unanimous: they told me to take a break. They told me to rest and take care of myself and assimilate the vast amount of material I'd already been given to work with.

They also told me to ask the spirit of Ayahuasca for what I want. To set an intention.

This is the crucial point for me. In my life I have been an addict and alcoholic. I have gotten used to viewing substances as just that - substances; objects that I use to achieve a particular result. The notion of entering into a dialogue with the spirit contained within these plants has been a new one for me. At first it seemed strained, even false.

As it turns out, my friends were right on both counts. Taking a two-month break from drinking ayahuasca was absolutely crucial, allowing me to absorb, process, and integrate the information I had already received. Setting a clear intention for what I wanted to get out of my next ceremony was also vital to my continuing on this path.

"What I wanted" isn't even the correct phrase. I had asked for help with that before - "Give me guidance on this or that particular issue." What was different this last time was that I made requests regarding the "how" of it. Specifically, I asked that my next ceremony be as gentle as possible. That it not leave me broken afterwards. That it show me that this path I've chosen truly is manageable and sustainable in my life.

I was delighted to find that I got my request. I've now had 3 ceremonies in a row that have been gentle and nurturing in a way I didn't know the medicine could be. This experience has been hugely illuminating for me.

Growing up in an abusive home conditioned me to think of myself as powerless - an object at the mercy of the whims of crazy people. 12 years in 12-step programs, though helpful in many ways, reenforced this notion of powerlessness drastically. More and more, I am coming to see it as incompatible with medicine work.

This idea of real, meaningful agency in my own life is a new one for me. Assimilating it is both exhilarating and scary. It forces me to examine the payoff I've always gotten from my distress - if I'm a victim, I don't have to take responsibility for my own life. If I'm a victim, it doesn't matter what intention I set - the result will always be me getting hurt.

This fundamental lesson I learned as a child was a lie. Recovering from it is the central part of my healing at this point. The medicine will accept nothing less from me.

What then is my intention for working with ayahuasca? Today it sounds a little like the following prayer:

"Please gently clean and illuminate me so that I may live to my fullest potential and help show others how to do the same."

God bless you, whoever you are.

Ayahuasca and Intention, Part 1

I think it's natural to ascribe our own motives to other people. Unfortunately, it is also incorrect.

My motives in approaching ayahuasca have been straightforward and clean: to heal trauma, gain direction in my life, and manifest the full potential that God has given to me. To fulfill my Destiny rather than succumb to my Fate. To harm none, and to help as many as possible.

I like to think that they are the motives of the curandero, the healer.

The overwhelming majority of people I encounter on this path are very similarly motivated. In fact, in the medicine community I have consistently met some of the most decent human beings I've had the privilege to know.

With one or two exceptions.

On occasion I have encountered someone in ceremony who just doesn't feel right. It's always a jarring experience: What is he doing here?

I can't really know for sure. However, I have a guess.

There is another path opened up for us by these plant allies: that of the brujo, the witch. It's not a very nice one. It is an amoral path, one which seeks only one thing: power for its own sake, expressed primarily through domination over others.

It is the path my father chose. It is the path often celebrated throughout our society, from boardrooms to battlefields to street corners to cell blocks.

It is the way of the sociopath. On it, our fellow human beings are not other manifestations of the Divine who deserve care, consideration, and love in their own right. Instead, they are objects to be used and discarded as necessary in the pursuit of personal aggrandizement.

I flew to Peru last year with stars in my eyes. I was confident that I was headed to some spiritual Shangri-La, a rainforest Eden filled with light and beauty and devotion to the highest ideals known to our species.

Then I landed in Iquitos. Those who have been there will know what I am talking about. For those who haven't, all I can say is that Iquitos is a cross between a Mexican border town and Telluride, Colorado, but with Rocky Mountain kind bud replaced by the most powerful psychedelics in the world. Untuned motorcycles roar down the streets at all hours of the day and night, unwashed street kids harangue you incessantly with cheap wares, hippies follow their ayahuasca diets at earth-toned cafes, and millennia-old indigenous sacraments are hawked right next to degenerate thrill-seeking.

A friend at the workshop related that he was approached by a dealer on the street with the sales pitch, repeated over and over like a mantra, "Ayahuasca, girls, cocaine......ayahuasca, girls, cocaine....."

Separately, or all at once?

A good friend of mine has worked extensively at one of the ayahuasca centers outside of Iquitos. He describes how, in the Shipibo culture that is the basis of so much of ayahuasca shamanism, becoming a shaman is really just another trade, like becoming a carpenter or plumber. If we carry that analogy through, then ayahuasca itself is not something mystical or unknowable - it is simply another tool, like a saw or wrench or hammer.

I think there's something to this view. I know that, as I have related in earlier posts, I first approached this path of plant medicine with a lot of misconceptions. Probably the biggest one was that ayahuasca would magically lift all of my spiritual sickness from me and suddenly fill me with light.

To again quote my friend, if that were true then all of these Amazonian shamans would be enlightened beings akin to Tibetan Lamas. A review of the literature surrounding ayahuasca tourism disproves that pretty quickly, what with the various allegations of shamanic rape, robbery, black magic, disposal of inconvenient tourist corpses, etc. My friend confirms this in more prosaic form, with his descriptions of the petty, ordinary back-biting and drama that many of the shamans apparently engage in as a matter of course.

It's easy to look at Westerners eager for spiritual awakening through the medicine and scoff at them as naive and foolish. Certainly there's an element of that in this whole pursuit. We must temper our enthusiasm with awareness of reality. But at the same time, I think there's something really beautiful in approaching ayahuasca with idealism and innocence and purity of heart. Let us be wise as serpents but gentle as doves.

I think she responds well to it. The problem is that she seems to respond to darker motives, as well.

I am coming to view ayahuasca as one of the most powerful tools on the planet for manifesting human intention. Which brings me back to the title of my post. What intention are we bringing to our work with this tool, this sacrament, this divine being?

God bless you, whoever you are.

#24

Two weeks ago I had my twenty-fourth ayahuasca experience. It was almost exactly a year to the day since I drank for the first time. That makes pretty simple math: for the last year, on average, I have drunk ayahuasca twice a month.

For this man, that's a lot.

I have been challenged and confronted with trauma and age-old patterns of dysfunction and despair. I have been shown the myriad ways in which I have sold myself short, ignored my soul's higher purpose, believed lies about my own powerlessness and insignificance.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Lately it has been getting harder. I appear to be getting taken to the deepest levels of my soul's wounding - the wounds that were so enormous and cruel that they left me with a simple, brutal choice - leave my body and bury the hurt all the way down, or be utterly destroyed by it.

I took the first choice. Thank God I did. As a grown man, apparently strong enough to finally feel it in its entirety, I have felt almost completely overwhelmed by it. Some days I can barely function. As a child it would have, without question, either killed me or driven me insane. My little boy's container was simply not strong enough to withstand its full force.

Lately I've been seeing homeless mentally ill people in a new way. These days when I pass by a bearded, unwashed man on the corner, gibbering to himself and begging for enough money to silence his demons for a few precious hours of oblivion, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Oh you poor man. You poor lost soul. What happened to your precious, innocent little boy that drove him so completely out of himself?"

The only thing that separates me from those guys is my constitution: my resilience and my ingenuity and my will to survive. I was clever enough to figure out means of tolerating an intolerable situation, and strong enough to implement them without fail.

Believe me, I say this not by way of self-congratulation. Merely precision. Whatever gifts I have were God's to give, and they appear to be part of his plan for me, part of my soul's purpose. I feel only compassion for those subjected to severe trauma who do not possess them. These people are grist for the mill of our global DeathMachine. I'm glad that God loves them, because virtually no one else cares in the least.

I'm not ashamed to say it: I pray with all of my broken heart for a world that cares for every single one of its precious children. I take it on faith that our species neither can nor should survive if we refuse this challenge.

That's the terrible gift I was given by trauma and abuse and neglect: a long-dormant, finally-emerging, desperately resisted Christ consciousness. The birthright of all humanity. If it's happening to you it's happening to me. We are all God's children.

There is no longer any wall I can build that will separate me from this spiritual reality.

And then there's the question of the here and now. The job to perform; the mortgage to pay; the lights to keep turned on; the daughter to raise. Yes, by God, I am fortunate enough to have these burdens and these blessings. And being constantly torn apart by ayahuasca can make it nearly impossible to fulfill them.

Failing in my responsibilities and giving up is a dubious luxury I do not possess: even if I were willing to condemn my own soul to that fate, there's no way I'd do it to my daughter.

And so, again, I must find ways to tolerate an intolerable situation: discharging my duties as a father, a partner, an employee, and an adult in American society who does not want to be homeless, with as much Grace as I can muster, all in the midst of a complete dismantling of my ego.

Lately I've been getting creative. I've been exploring energetic healing work: there appear to be some truly gifted lightworkers on this planet who are capable of performing spiritual surgery on us when the need arises. I've also been very consciously making new friends and reaching out to old ones. It's a two-pronged weapon: it gives me help in the present moment and it contradicts my old pattern of isolation, that tool that used to serve me so well and now keeps me locked in darkness and despair. I've been exercising like crazy. I've been sitting in steam baths. I've been praying and meditating and reading spiritual texts.

In short, I've been doing every blessed thing possible to help me make it through this ordeal. Just like I did when I was little. The difference is that today the ordeal is taking me closer to the light, rather than pulling me away from it.

So that makes it especially ironic that today my coping strategies include drinking less ayahuasca. For most of the last year drinking large doses several times a month has seemed manageable and useful. In fact, it has seemed necessary. That appears to be changing.

A few days ago I did something I haven't done once in the last year - I passed on a chance to drink. I was just starting to feel some ground under my feet after the last ceremony 2 weeks before, and I got the message loud and clear - "Don't go this time. Take a rest." And so I did, and I know that it was the right choice.

I'm not totally sure when #25 will be. I'll know when it's time.

God bless you, whoever you are.