By Alejandro Tuama 

(This article originally appeared in Psychedelic Press.)

The intention of this piece is to articulate the impact that the psychedelic experience has had on my life. I am writing to give myself clarity, and to help me explain to others why I sought out this experience; what happened to me as a result; and to give some perspective as to why I still use psychedelic drugs today.

Some background

In 2011, when I was 25 years old, I travelled to South America for the first time. At this stage in my life, I was deeply immersed in Australian drinking culture (like most of my friends; dependent, bordering on addicted). I had been addicted to marijuana for a period of about one year but had successfully ended that. I regularly used MDMA, and to a lesser extent speed, and had tried LSD a few times but, for whatever reason, had not had what I would categorise as a ‘breakthrough’ psychedelic experience using that drug.

I heard about Ayahuasca for the first time from a wandering traveller at a hostel bar somewhere on the south coast of Brazil. With a friend of mine, I booked in for two ceremonies over a weekend at a small centre run by a mestizo couple in the Sacred Valley of Peru. During the first ceremony, not much happened except for a significant purge. The second ceremony was my first breakthrough psychedelic experience. It was wonderful. There were beautiful visuals, both the classic psychedelic patterns, and full-blown open-eyed visions as well. There were also difficult, challenging parts of the experience, where I was in great physical discomfort as the medicine moved through my body. I had a tremendous purge at the end of the night, and fell asleep exhausted, and a little as though a train had passed through me.

In the five years between that first trip to South America in 2011, and my second trip in 2016, I lived, studied, and worked in Melbourne. I researched psychedelics extensively, though only had two significant experiences.

The first was with Salvia divinorum, a deeply unsettling but profound experience that I shall not unpack in this essay.

The second was with DMT. Smoking the freebase DMT alone in my friend’s backyard, I was introduced to the quintessential DMT ‘space’ or ‘realm’; the tryptamine palace; the place where language fails, where the walls of reality melt down to reveal the flesh of the universe. I was astonished and admittedly, terrified by this experience. 

In 2016 I travelled to South America for the second time. At the start of my trip, I stayed with the same mestizo couple as in 2011, again for two ceremonies. This time, the experience was bitterly disappointing. It was incredibly uncomfortable physically. I had few visions, and those that I had were dark and confusing. I was emotionally distraught, having built up such a strong sense of anticipation and expectation.

About one and a half months later I stayed at a larger and far more professional Ayahuasca Healing Centre on the outskirts of Iquitos, Peru, deep in the Amazon jungle. Altogether I spent six weeks at this Centre, broken into two stints of three weeks. And it was this experience that changed my life. I have written a novel based largely on my time at the Centre, and I will devote most of this essay to unpacking the experience.

When I returned from South America in late 2016, I underwent a brutal reintegration process that lasted for about one year. I took a job as a high school teacher in early 2017 but had an emotional breakdown and quit four weeks later. Understanding that I was at a crucial juncture, I experimented with a range of trainings and therapies that would have seemed absurd to me prior to my experiences with Ayahuasca the previous year. I underwent intuitive therapy, holotropic breathwork therapy, rite of passage training, tantra training, and various personal development workshops and practices. I was also in an exceptionally challenging romantic relationship, which I ultimately ended, bringing about the close to one of the longest years of my life. When I finally broke through to the other side, it felt like I had been living in a dark cloud, or under a powerful spell, which had finally subsided.

In the three years between my challenging reintegration and the present day, I have developed a practice for using psychedelics effectively in my life. Primarily, I use psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, and San Pedro. These psychedelics perform many roles for me, developmentally, spiritually, and recreationally. However, a discussion of my current relationship to these medicines, and my practices, is beyond the scope of this essay. For now, I will unpack what happened during my time in Peru in 2016.

Why did I choose to stay at the Ayahuasca Healing Centre in the first place?

1.     Curiosity

I had been curious about the psychedelic experience since I was in high school. I remember in school, in health education classes, we looked at the effects of different drugs (of course, we looked mainly at the dangers of these drugs… but that did not discourage me). The drugs that most held my interest were those labelled ‘hallucinogens’. The concept fascinated me; that there were substances that could give you visions, that would change the way the world looked. Unfortunately for me, I lacked the social skills or networks to acquire any. I was limited initially to alcohol, and later to marijuana and ecstasy.

A spark was lit after my first experience with Ayahuasca in Peru in 2011. What I suspected as a high school student, I now knew to be true: there was something special about psychedelics, and in particular, there was something important for me to discover in this experience. I still did not have the contacts or skills to get high quality psychedelics in Australia, and something in me knew that I had to travel to Peru for an ‘authentic experience’.

Before I leave off curiosity, it is worth mentioning that a significant part of the reason I went to Peru seeking Ayahuasca is because of Terence McKenna. While I was researching psychedelics in South America in 2011, I stumbled upon a podcast overflowing with Terence McKenna recordings. This was all the push I needed to book that first weekend of ceremonies.

2.     Mental health

Before I left for Peru in 2016, I was balancing (at various levels of intensity, at different times in my life) social anxiety, depression (which was at times paralysing and occasioned in suicidal thoughts), and a lack of purpose, identity, and meaning.

I had taken antidepressant medication for a period of about a year in my early twenties, but I realised that it was not really helping me. It had not helped to address the source of my anxiety and depression, and it had simply levelled me out and left me emotionally numb and vacant.

I now believe that it was my lack of purpose, identity and meaning that spawned the anxiety and depression. Rather than addressing this lack head-on (I had no skills or understanding that would enable me to undertake such a thing at the time), I masked my confusion with alcohol and drugs. At times, this method gave me great joy, but mostly it just buried my issues further down into the dark depths.

My identity struggle reaches as far back as I can remember. For most of my life I felt like I did not belong. I did not know my place in the world. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life.

I did not know who I was when I was a teenager in school. I got into university and studied an Arts degree and did not know what I wanted to do when I graduated. I worked a long string of jobs, knowing that I could not do any of them for long. I went back to university and studied teaching. I worked as a teacher for a few years but grew disillusioned with the education system. I felt like I had something to offer the world, and I felt confident in my ability, but I did not know where to focus my energy. In many ways I was afraid of a normal life. I was afraid to settle. I was afraid I would wake up as a middle-aged man in a job I hated, with a family I felt trapped in and inadequate to protect and serve, having wasted my life. I was thirty years old and did not know who I was, or what to do with my life. I was lost.

Sometimes the feeling of not belonging grew into a feeling of not wanting to be in the world. Sometimes this feeling would come on powerfully, and the feeling of wanting to die would be extremely difficult to manage; other times it would be a subtle, draining, tedious boredom.

Tying all this anxiety, depression, lack of identity and lack of belonging together was an underlying belief that there was something wrong with me: I was wrong and needed to be fixed. There was some source to my pain that could be found, and once addressed, I would be free. And I was convinced that Ayahuasca could potentially be the cure for whatever it was that was wrong.

3.     Spirituality

In my teenage years I called myself an ‘atheist’ and an ‘existentialist’ and in many ways I had a typically youthful anti-religious frame with which I viewed the world. And yet I was still curious about matters of religion, ritual, spirituality, magic, and shamanism. At university I was able to examine these concepts (from the safety of my work desk) through the lenses of psychology and anthropology.

While I was critical of the Abrahamic religions’ obvious patriarchal projection in the form of an omnipotent Father God, I also deeply rejected mainstream Western society and its scientistic materialism, which suggested that there was a rational explanation for everything, and that nothing existed beyond that which I could touch. I held a deep suspicion that there must be something else beyond the material plane.

My study into world religions and shamanic practices, and my devotion to Terence McKenna’s lectures, coalesced in the belief that if anything was going to reveal to me truth about what exists beyond the material plane, then it would be the psychedelic experience.

What happened at the Ayahuasca Healing Centre in Peru?

 I spent three weeks at the Centre, took a break for a month, then returned for another three weeks. While I was there, I drank Ayahuasca a total of eighteen times. I also drank San Pedro. I did two Kambo (frog poison) ceremonies; and two tobacco dietas[i], which involved drinking a purgative tobacco tea over a period of four or five days and keeping a restricted diet consisting mostly of vegetable juice. I dieted with another plant, Chiric Sanango (Brunfelsia grandiflora), in a similar way to the tobacco. And I sat and chewed with a coca shaman on a number of occasions. While I was at the Centre, I kept a strict diet: no coffee, no alcohol, no meat, and I remained sexually continent.

In order to attempt to explain how the psychedelic experience changed me over the course of my time at the Centre, I will utilise three frameworks: therapy, rites of passage, and initiation.

 1.    Therapy

Each ceremony represented an opportunity to face my past: childhood traumas, my parents’ divorce, relationship issues, shame, guilt, regret. Each ceremony also presented an opportunity to face my fears: social anxieties, failure, death, or the most challenging of all… descent into madness.

Sometimes the medicine would toss me something out of the blue. Like the time I pissed my pants walking home from school. I was not expecting to confront that little gem in the throes of the psychedelic experience. But it was an opportunity to face childhood shame, and when I let it go, I felt a little lighter, and a little freer.

I had many conversations with the people at the Centre. Sometimes with other guests, but most often with the people who worked there. The most significant therapeutic conversations happened with the man who ran the Centre. My conversations with him revolved around things in my life that I wanted to change, like my relationship to alcohol and food, my relationships with women, and my anxiety and depression. This was fairly standard talk-therapy, but with the added element of a regular visionary experience that we could use as a starting point for discussion, much in the same way that therapists might use dream analysis. In many ways he was like a Zen Master. He would pose questions for me to ponder, and would come back the next day to check in on my progress.

As I spent the majority of my time at the Centre living alone, in my own little bungalow, this presented a lot of time for both talk-based and self-directed therapy, free from distractions. There was no internet, so there was no social media, no movies, no TV. I had some books to read, but what I did with my time was mostly journaling, meditating, and thinking about my life.

I journaled every day. I wrote reflections on my life, my childhood, my secrets, desires, shame, and guilt, and so on, and this formed a kind of narrative therapy, whereby I could reflect upon and reframe critical, and often difficult, points in my life.

But in addition to journaling, I also wrote creatively. I was working on a couple of pieces of fiction. The first was an autofiction novel based on my first trip to South America in 2011. I was also working on a kind of speculative, science fiction novel about a young man disengaged with his life in the city, who journeys to distant jungles to learn how to become a wizard… It is fairly obvious what was going on: I was writing what I wanted in my life into my fiction. The cool part about this was that I lived out my own fantasy in a creative narrative manifestation.

I mentioned before that I felt like I needed to go to Peru to get an ‘authentic experience’. This is a story. It is something that I had told myself. And I believed it. And, because I believed it, that made it true. Part of the power of the experience is that I had the idea in my mind that it was what I needed to do. The significance came from actually doing it. Many people think about going away to an ashram, or a yoga retreat, or whatever, but not everyone does it. I believe that an important part of my growth came from doing something that I set out to do. I had become the hero of my own story. I heard the call. And I answered it. The question of whether what I encountered was actually an ‘authentic experience’ (assuming that is even a thing) was less important; what was more important was that I believed that what I was doing was important.

 One outcome that I obtained from my time at the Centre that I was neither expecting, nor seeking, was emotional de-armouring. I was not aware of this at the time, but I had a whole lot of repressed feelings. It is typical of Westerners, especially men, to be detached from their body and their feelings. And I certainly was, though I did not realise it. Through many of my Ayahuasca ceremonies, I was confronted with ‘feelings’. Sometimes, even if the medicine was taking a long time to take effect, I would still have to deal with frustration, particularly if other people were already into their work. This frustration would turn to anger, and then to self-loathing. Sometimes in a ceremony there was fear, and sometimes that fear became terror, sometimes horror. Sometimes there was brutal, terrible sadness and despair. And sometimes there was joy, euphoria, or deep, enveloping love. I experienced a love so overwhelming that it hurt; that I could not contain it. I would gasp for air, crying, overcome by love.

I learned that I could expand my capacity to feel, although it meant that I must accept all emotions. Something I have noticed about myself, having returned from Peru, is that I am more aware of, and accepting of, my feelings. I listen to my body more. I trust my body more. I trust myself more. I allow myself to feel, without needing to label those feelings or be afraid of them. In the past, I was scared by my own sadness. What did it mean? How could I fix myself? What was wrong with me? In Peru, I realised that sadness is a human emotion. It is part of what it is to be a person. My sadness does not need to be labelled or reasoned or fixed. I just need to accept it.

The final aspect of therapy that I will touch on in this essay is the shift I experienced in my relationship with alcohol and with my diet in general. Over the course of my six-week stay at the Centre (with a month-long break in the middle where I was not strictly following the diet…), I lost ten kilos. As I was not doing any exercise, this was purely down to fasting, abstaining, dieting, and purging. I purged so much shit out of my body that I began to feel parts of my belly that I had not felt before. And in the process, I redefined what healthy feels like, I redrew the boundaries, unlocked new possibilities for how I could feel. Perhaps it is all wrapped up in the concept of self-love, but I would never again need alcohol in the same way that I did when I arrived at the Centre. I would never again treat my body as I used to.

2.     Rite of Passage

A rite of passage is a ceremony that marks an important transition period in a person’s life, such as birth, puberty, marriage, having children, and death. It formalises the progression from one stage to the next.

One of the goals of a rite of passage is to change the psyche of the individual. This can be a monumental task, as generally we are not open to change; indeed we are often actively resistant. Harvard Professor of Economics, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that: ‘Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.’[ii]

In the emerging field of contemporary rites of passage, one key argument is that when we enter ‘liminal space’, this is when we are open to change. Liminal space can be accessed unintentionally through a traumatic experience (such as a car crash), or a joyous experience (the birth of a child), but it can also be brought on intentionally, for example through experiencing a rite of passage ritual, or, through the use of powerful psychedelic drugs.

I find the rite of passage model useful to describe what I went through. The essential elements were all there: separation, challenge, and transformation. For it to be classified as a rite of passage, I needed to have moved from one stage of life to another. I was thirty years old, so while it seems odd to suggest it, one way I can frame this experience, is that it was a rite of passage from (a prolonged) adolescence, finally, into adulthood.

In a rite of passage, transition happens within a contained environment separate from the normal day-to-day world of the individual. For me, the separation was clear: I had flown to the other side of the world. Away from all my friends and family, my work, my routines, my possessions, it was a simple process to allow myself to turn into mush and be reborn as something else. But more than being in a strange place, I felt ‘contained’ within the Centre. Contained within the continent of South America, in the Amazon jungle, the isolated jungle city of Iquitos, and finally within a Centre accessible only by boat.

In a rite of passage there must be challenge. There must be risk. There has to be a chance of failure, a risk of defeat. The primary challenge of the Ayahuasca Centre is the medicine itself. Though there are other difficulties to navigate: snakes, spiders (eek!) and other insects; deprival of coffee, alcohol, and other drugs; restriction of diet; and separation from loved ones, to name a few; but these pale into insignificance when compared to the intensity and the immediacy of what goes on in an Ayahuasca ceremony.

Rebirth is tied in with the concept of a rite of passage, and in particular the stage of transformation. A good analogy is the transition of the caterpillar into the butterfly. The caterpillar enters the chrysalis and undergoes the transformation. It disintegrates before it is reborn as a butterfly. The caterpillar is dead. The butterfly is re-born. There is one ceremony where I remember rolling around on the floor, breathing as though these were the first breaths of my life. As though I was intoxicated on simply air. This experience, of course, wore off, but the memory is still there. And I cannot help but be affected by it now. That experience can never be taken away from me. Feeling so high, so much like God, that I could barely breathe.

These are the transformational experiences that are possible: to change the psyche, to be reborn, to let go of past trauma and start anew, to transition from adolescent caterpillar into adult butterfly.

But after the transformation, we must return.

In an effective rite of passage, the return of the individual into the community is recognised and celebrated. There needs to be a change in the way that the individual is treated and interacted with; an acceptance that a change has taken place. If this part of the process is not present, this can create a wounding experience for the individual. It may lead to a desire for the individual to pass back into a previous stage of transition.

Unfortunately, I had no framework for my return. My family and my community had no framework to offer. No one around me (myself included!) understood quite what had happened and what was needed for me to properly integrate back into mainstream society, let alone integrate the initiatory experience into my daily life. As such, I fell to pieces. Knowing what I know now, I would have done things differently, and yet, that year-long reintegration process, as nightmarish as it was, has been essential to my growth.

3.    Initiation

The last model I will draw on is that of initiation. One way to frame my experience is that I was initiated into the practice of Ayahuasca. Another way to look at it is that I was initiated into the world of the mystical and the visionary.

While I was at the Centre in Peru, I had a conversation with a young man about what we were going through. It was towards the end of my stay and I had just had a particularly revelatory and paradigm-shattering experience. I said to him, using the analogy of a computer game, that it felt like I had just completed Level One of Ayahuasca. The young man laughed, sat for a moment, then said, ‘what if that was just the tutorial?’ I figured he was probably right. There was a sense of completion from my stay at the Ayahuasca Centre, and yet at the same time, an awareness of the practice of Ayahuasca going deeper than I could ever have imagined.

For me, the idea that I had been initiated into the mystical or visionary experience sits more comfortably, and has greater significance. This is categorised, for me, by the feeling of transcendence. It is feeling the touch of the Divine. Transcending this body, this self, this ego, and uniting with the universal life force that permeates all, and understanding that this is the nature of reality. The Godhead. God consciousness. My time in Peru was an initiation into that experience. I sought it out. I believed that it was possible. And I felt it.

Before the experience I was a seeker, and, admittedly, I was a desperate seeker. After the experience in Peru I can rest more comfortably, knowing it is real. Knowing there is something beyond, because I have felt it. I do not know what it is. It remains a mystery. And that is perfectly fine with me.

*

The feeling of moving through a rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood, paired with the initiation into a spiritual practice, have together equipped me with a sense of identity, meaning and purpose. Unsurprisingly, when I came to the end of my desperate search, the depression and anxiety that had haunted my younger years simply slipped away, symptoms of a spiritual sickness that had been exorcised.

Robert Anton Wilson, a hero of mine, thusly quotes the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, in the introduction to Israel Regardie’s biography of Aleister Crowley, The Eye in the Triangle:

However unhappy a man may be, the moment he knows the purpose of his life a switch is turned and the light is on. He may not be able to accomplish anything at once, but the very fact of knowing the purpose gives him all the hope and vigor and inspiration and strength to wait for that day. If he has to strive after that purpose all his life, he does not mind so long as he knows what the purpose is.

Final thoughts

One of the most important shifts that I felt as a result of my experiences with Ayahuasca was letting go of the idea that there is something wrong with me. I went to Peru with the intention of ‘fixing’ my anxiety and depression and by the end it just seemed to fall away without me realising.

I have wondered if maybe I just wanted there to be something wrong with me. Perhaps I had convinced myself that because I felt out of place, unwanted, confused, depressed, anxious, unsure, inadequate, and unhappy, that there must be something wrong with me. Of course, you cannot simply be told ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’; you have to feel it for yourself.

I used to believe that the psychedelic experience was a mystery that had been intentionally hidden from humankind. I used to believe that it was the key to our salvation. That it was the answer for everyone. I have let go of this idea, realising it to be a projection. The psychedelic experience was the answer for me. It was what I needed to develop a sense of identity, purpose, love, meaning and connection. But it is not for everyone. Some people figure this out with Zen meditation, or yoga, or psychotherapy. My way was with Ayahuasca. It was a long time coming, but eventually I realised that there was nothing wrong with me. That I was fine. I was just a person, and being a person means having the full spectrum of human emotions.

It is important to note that I do not think my development—as recorded here—is solely down to Ayahuasca. Anyone reading will clearly have noticed this. There was a complex interaction between many factors (some factors I am aware of, and no doubt there are endless other factors that I am not aware of). And alone, most of these will hold great benefit for someone trying to work through the things I have.

Travel, for one, has been a great teacher for me. Getting out of my comfort zone, leaving behind my usual routines and habits. Getting into nature and away from cities and technology does wonders for a person.

Therapy, whether it is self-directed, talk-based, body-based, dream-based, or some other alternative practice, is also likely to help. Shifting your diet away from processed foods to a mostly plant-based diet is also likely to have dramatic effects, even if only adopted for a short period of time, and especially if paired with a reduction or elimination (again, this does not have to be permanent) of alcohol and other drugs.

All of these elements are likely to have a positive impact on someone going through a challenging and/or transitional period. For me, they played an important role in my development, but were all auxiliary to the powerful, beautiful, and inherently mysterious entheogen, Ayahuasca.

                                                   

[i] Dietas are a specialised form of interacting with a plant and its spirit, where the person focuses attention and mentally and physically by eating a restricted and bland diet of food, coupled with ingesting tiny amounts of the special plant. Songs and devotional practices are engaged in, and the body, mind, and soul all converse with the plant. These dietas are performed with plants which may (or may not) be medicinal but are rarely psychoactive. [Editor’s note.]

[ii] Galbraith JK (1971). ‘How Keynes Came to America’, in Williams AD (editor) A Contemporary Guide to Economics, Peace, and Laughter. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, p 50.