A satirical tale of my first "ayahuasca" weekend retreat
Where oh where do I start, we’ve been had! And it cost us a small fortune! My overarching desire to pour this brown sludge down my throat has dimmed my critical thinking abilities a little, I should have known you can’t drink ayahuasca in South Africa.
Sooo, I’ll try and make this not too long. Have any of you seen the movie Wanderlust with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd? Okay, that’s basically what we walked into, luckily with the exception of my car ending up in the lake!
So I found this ayahuasca pouring “shaman” online yonks ago, as I’ve written about in the beginning of this thread. Now, I’m a cautious person, so I checked him out for quite some time before committing to a ceremony with him. We were supposed to do it in May, and then I developed an ear infection for which I had to take antibiotics, and antibiotics in your system is a big no-no in the preparation instructions they send you beforehand, so we cancelled our May slot and finally booked our slots for this past weekend.
Luckily, my cult antennae is pretty well honed, as are my bullshit detectors, and we have just spent a whole weekend amongst a bunch of bohemian hippies who had seemingly drank a little too much Koolaid.
As we arrived, I saw the “shaman” in the…uhm…”temple”, as they call the drinking hut. He hugged and welcomed us, we chatted for a little bit, and I told him I have been reading about ayahuasca for ten years now, and finally I’m here. Rather late than never, “I’m just cautious like that”, I said. So he turned around, stared at me and said “what do you mean by cautious?” What I had said was pretty self-explanatory, so that was the first red flag. Less than half an hour after arriving we’re all in the hut on our mattresses and cushions, with our vomiting buckets. The “shaman” speaks for a little while, telling us what to expect, and then explains how the proceedings will go. Then he says “at a certain point after the first cup, I will announce that the altar is open and anyone who wants to have a second cup can come to me and I will ask ‘are you open?’, as in ‘have your visions started?’. Red flag number two, that’s not how ayahuasca works. He doesn’t have to ask “are you open?”, in that realm he journeys with you, and he can see what you see. But I relax, and just go along with it all.
The ceremony begins pretty much as I’d expected it, from all of my reading – we were all ‘cleansed’ with smoke and the “shaman” blew smoke into the bottle of Ayahuasca. We all have cup number one, and I wait. There are five people in the middle of the room (it’s a large round hut), and they are all facilitating. They play musical instruments and sing and make sounds and it’s all quite amazing… except for the fact that I don’t feel anything. So for round two I go again, and then again for round three, and then I just laid there and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was changing shape slightly as I stared at it, but that was it, nothing profound. I knew they had given us “something”, but it wasn’t ayahuasca. Whatever they gave us wasn’t even a hallucinogen. So eventually I go for round four, and just lie there and wait for the ceremony to end. We all made a circle afterwards, and they passed a crystal around which acted as a “talking stick”, and once each person was done talking, everyone in the group said “hush-hush”. We were seemingly the only ones unfamiliar with this protocol! No wait! There was one guy in the circle from Barcelona, and he asked “what does hush-hush mean?”, and the “shaman” said “so be it”. I thought to myself, “or we might all just say ‘so be it’, why this weird lingo?” When it was this one guy’s turn to speak, he said to the “shaman”, “I love you soooo very much” and then he started sobbing. I looked at my friend who came along with me for the weekend, and she just had this look of absolute peace over her face, and said to me she had never experienced such love in her entire life. By this point I’m wondering if I’m now the only one who didn’t experience anything… I walk out to the fire (the “sacred fire” mind you, where someone was berated for throwing his cigarette butt!) with a bunch of them sitting around and everyone is discussing their “journeys”. So I think to myself maybe tomorrow night I’ll experience something. Then I suddenly felt extreme nausea coming over me and ran into the woods and vomited it all out, whatever they had given us to drink.
The next morning things just got weirder. We all started with an 8 am yoga session, and it was a miracle that I didn’t injure myself, as the “shaman’s” girlfriend forced us into some compromising positions. Once again my friend and I were the only ones unfamiliar with the sequence; everyone else looked like they were well familiar with it and were equipped with their own mats.
Following this, the “shaman” announced it was sweat lodge time! We all hiked into the mountains for about half an hour and arrived at the sweat lodge. A clearing in the middle of the woods with a shack and a small dome on the ground, covered in loose pieces of fabric. There is a guy waiting for us who looks like he hadn’t bathed in three decades who introduces his wife and “medicine woman” to us… can I just say he looked 60 and she looked 16, so I’m thinking “okaaaaaay…….”. He also introduced his “son” and helper to us, and since his son is coloured I assumed he must have been adopted… or maybe kidnapped! Then all the guys strip down to their underwear and we all crawl into the sweat lodge. The son stands outside with a spade and puts the rocks inside, and every time he does so, he announces “grandmother coming in”, and everyone on the inside says “welcome grandmother”. Okay, this is about the point where I decided something is a little off with these people… Why are we calling each rock “grandmother”? Halfway through, another son crawled in, aged around 15, also in his underwear. At this point I was seriously considering calling Child Services! If only I’d had phone reception wherever it was that we were! At the end of the sweat lodge session this 60-something mountain dweller also starts sobbing, telling us how incredibly powerful the experience was. Everyone is just elated and emotional, yet I was just really dirty and sweaty, and thinking “I need to get us the hell out of here!”. Now, true to the Wanderlust movie, my friend had started drinking the Koolaid, she would be Jennifer Aniston, and I would be Paul Rudd. There are just red flags all over the show for me, everyone has seemingly gone cuckoo. I can’t connect with anyone, they’re just…. weird… brainwashed…. something… and everyone is so damn serious and sad. The only conversation I managed to have was with a sad and emaciated young man with a long beard and a ponytail who proudly announced that he’d been living in the woods for 6 months and had thrown all his possessions into the fire. The poor guy looked like he weighed about 40 kilos and had feasted on only pine cone seeds for the duration of this 6 months. We haven’t eaten anything for two days at this point, since we had to fast for the “ayahuasca”, and I am just ravenous. All I can think off is driving out of there and stopping at the first restaurant I can find…
Early in the afternoon there was a “Changa session”, which was smoking DMT, which I graciously declined, because I came for ayahuasca ceremonies, not drug binging. At this point I’m not a happy camper, it’s all very cultish, everyone is acting like a bunch of brainwashed zombies, and now I’m thinking they’re all just a bunch of drug addicts. The shaman announces that there will be a “fire ceremony” at 4 o’clock, and we must all be there. All I can think of is food, I will eat anything! We all gathered around the fire, and the weirdness continued. The emaciated dude announced that he had a calling 10 years ago that he had to be a….. “fire keeper”. I started losing my courteousness at this point and just rolled my eyes… He made a fire, and threw incense, tobacco, grass and all kinds of things into it, telling us how sacred fire is, and that he will keep the ashes of this ceremony. Then he took out a little bottle out of his bag from a previous fire ceremony, telling how much “metaphysics” is in the bottle. He sprinkled some of this ash over the fire as well. Then the “shaman” started speaking, giving us a lecture about integrity, talking the biggest load of crap. And by now I have decided that he’s a scam artist, and I’m an open book, so I just sat there and listened to him, trying to not show my thoughts. Whenever he looked at me, which was eerily frequently, there was something in his eyes that I just didn’t like. His eyes were not friendly, they were dark… He spoke of love but did not emanate it at all. He spoke some nonsense about the words coming out of your mouth, and that your words are your contract with the world, and they should always be kind, and I’m thinking “HYPOCRITE!”, you just called someone an a****** on national radio the other day! Okay maybe I should add this little bit as well… about two months ago this “shaman” was interviewed on national radio, and we listened to the show. Everything was going well, until they opened up the lines for callers. The first caller asked “can you please tell us about the lady who died during one of your ceremonies?”… and he said “I don’t know who you’re talking about”, and the guy said “you know very well who I’m talking about” (he later admitted the person was some kind of family friend). Then they started fighting on air and he said to the caller “you’re just an a******!”…. so yeah… there’s that… By now you must be wondering why I still went ahead with it after listening to the radio show, and all I can say is that I just wanted to have this experience so badly that I brushed all those things aside.
The rest of the fire ceremony was just madness, people taking turns “offering” things to the “sacred fire”, throwing things into it and bawling their eyes out, telling the “shaman” how much they loved him. But now, as someone who has studied cult psychology quite intensely, I’m thinking to myself “just enjoy the show”… and “as soon as the sun is up, we’re in the car making a huge dust cloud on that dirt road!” At this point I’m still holding out hope that my second ayahuasca ceremony might be… sigh… what I read about…
We went straight into the hut and there was no ceremony about it this time, we just started drinking. There was something odd about it, like the “shaman” just wanted it over with. He even left the room for about 15 minutes after we’d all drank the first time. I went for all the servings, again four. When I went for the third serving, I said to the “shaman”, “I’m not open”, and he laughed and said “we’re always open”… huh? I went back to my mattress, counted the people in the room, which was 15, thought of how much it cost us, did my math and thought “my dear shaman boy, you’ve got a very profitable business model here, and you don’t even have to feed us!”
And then I just lay there waiting for the madness to end. When they formed the circle afterwards I just walked out, and then I was overcome with nausea again and ran into the woods and vomited out whatever I was given. My friend came out as well, and I said “this wasn’t ayahuasca! Come with me, this madness ends now!” I started spilling all my misgivings about the weekend, and said “this is a fucking cult!”. Thankfully she snapped out of it. She’d been quite heavily effected by whatever it was and had a pretty bad trip this time, but agreed the effect was nothing like the countless articles we’d read about. We lay in bed for quite some time laughing about it all, about all the insanity, calling rocks grandmothers, the freakish veneration of the “shaman”, how unhappy they all looked, I’m keeping this short. We basically laid there in the dark and I was piecing it all together. It felt like a catharsis! I said to her “two words: DUST CLOUD!”. “When the first rooster crows, we are starting the car!” Then she said “uhm… there’s a closing ceremony at 9”…and I’m thinking “dear lord… I just can’t”. So we went to the closing ceremony, which lasted forever, it felt like a church service, where the “shaman” was talking endlessly, although there was nothing he said that was profound or even made sense in some cases. As the “talking” rock was passed around, people cried and professed their love for him. When it came to me, I told them what a wonderful universe we live in, how great life is, and “apologies for not sharing in your grief”. As soon as it was over, we forfeited the hugging and crying goodbyes, ran for the car and got the hell out of there!
One day I’ll make my way to the Amazon jungle, and drink the brew with a REAL shaman… sigh... I left lots of the insanity out… it was a loooong weekend and I’m exhausted!
Where oh where do I start, we’ve been had! And it cost us a small fortune! My overarching desire to pour this brown sludge down my throat has dimmed my critical thinking abilities a little, I should have known you can’t drink ayahuasca in South Africa.
Sooo, I’ll try and make this not too long. Have any of you seen the movie Wanderlust with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd? Okay, that’s basically what we walked into, luckily with the exception of my car ending up in the lake!
So I found this ayahuasca pouring “shaman” online yonks ago, as I’ve written about in the beginning of this thread. Now, I’m a cautious person, so I checked him out for quite some time before committing to a ceremony with him. We were supposed to do it in May, and then I developed an ear infection for which I had to take antibiotics, and antibiotics in your system is a big no-no in the preparation instructions they send you beforehand, so we cancelled our May slot and finally booked our slots for this past weekend.
Luckily, my cult antennae is pretty well honed, as are my bullshit detectors, and we have just spent a whole weekend amongst a bunch of bohemian hippies who had seemingly drank a little too much Koolaid.
As we arrived, I saw the “shaman” in the…uhm…”temple”, as they call the drinking hut. He hugged and welcomed us, we chatted for a little bit, and I told him I have been reading about ayahuasca for ten years now, and finally I’m here. Rather late than never, “I’m just cautious like that”, I said. So he turned around, stared at me and said “what do you mean by cautious?” What I had said was pretty self-explanatory, so that was the first red flag. Less than half an hour after arriving we’re all in the hut on our mattresses and cushions, with our vomiting buckets. The “shaman” speaks for a little while, telling us what to expect, and then explains how the proceedings will go. Then he says “at a certain point after the first cup, I will announce that the altar is open and anyone who wants to have a second cup can come to me and I will ask ‘are you open?’, as in ‘have your visions started?’. Red flag number two, that’s not how ayahuasca works. He doesn’t have to ask “are you open?”, in that realm he journeys with you, and he can see what you see. But I relax, and just go along with it all.
The ceremony begins pretty much as I’d expected it, from all of my reading – we were all ‘cleansed’ with smoke and the “shaman” blew smoke into the bottle of Ayahuasca. We all have cup number one, and I wait. There are five people in the middle of the room (it’s a large round hut), and they are all facilitating. They play musical instruments and sing and make sounds and it’s all quite amazing… except for the fact that I don’t feel anything. So for round two I go again, and then again for round three, and then I just laid there and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was changing shape slightly as I stared at it, but that was it, nothing profound. I knew they had given us “something”, but it wasn’t ayahuasca. Whatever they gave us wasn’t even a hallucinogen. So eventually I go for round four, and just lie there and wait for the ceremony to end. We all made a circle afterwards, and they passed a crystal around which acted as a “talking stick”, and once each person was done talking, everyone in the group said “hush-hush”. We were seemingly the only ones unfamiliar with this protocol! No wait! There was one guy in the circle from Barcelona, and he asked “what does hush-hush mean?”, and the “shaman” said “so be it”. I thought to myself, “or we might all just say ‘so be it’, why this weird lingo?” When it was this one guy’s turn to speak, he said to the “shaman”, “I love you soooo very much” and then he started sobbing. I looked at my friend who came along with me for the weekend, and she just had this look of absolute peace over her face, and said to me she had never experienced such love in her entire life. By this point I’m wondering if I’m now the only one who didn’t experience anything… I walk out to the fire (the “sacred fire” mind you, where someone was berated for throwing his cigarette butt!) with a bunch of them sitting around and everyone is discussing their “journeys”. So I think to myself maybe tomorrow night I’ll experience something. Then I suddenly felt extreme nausea coming over me and ran into the woods and vomited it all out, whatever they had given us to drink.
The next morning things just got weirder. We all started with an 8 am yoga session, and it was a miracle that I didn’t injure myself, as the “shaman’s” girlfriend forced us into some compromising positions. Once again my friend and I were the only ones unfamiliar with the sequence; everyone else looked like they were well familiar with it and were equipped with their own mats.
Following this, the “shaman” announced it was sweat lodge time! We all hiked into the mountains for about half an hour and arrived at the sweat lodge. A clearing in the middle of the woods with a shack and a small dome on the ground, covered in loose pieces of fabric. There is a guy waiting for us who looks like he hadn’t bathed in three decades who introduces his wife and “medicine woman” to us… can I just say he looked 60 and she looked 16, so I’m thinking “okaaaaaay…….”. He also introduced his “son” and helper to us, and since his son is coloured I assumed he must have been adopted… or maybe kidnapped! Then all the guys strip down to their underwear and we all crawl into the sweat lodge. The son stands outside with a spade and puts the rocks inside, and every time he does so, he announces “grandmother coming in”, and everyone on the inside says “welcome grandmother”. Okay, this is about the point where I decided something is a little off with these people… Why are we calling each rock “grandmother”? Halfway through, another son crawled in, aged around 15, also in his underwear. At this point I was seriously considering calling Child Services! If only I’d had phone reception wherever it was that we were! At the end of the sweat lodge session this 60-something mountain dweller also starts sobbing, telling us how incredibly powerful the experience was. Everyone is just elated and emotional, yet I was just really dirty and sweaty, and thinking “I need to get us the hell out of here!”. Now, true to the Wanderlust movie, my friend had started drinking the Koolaid, she would be Jennifer Aniston, and I would be Paul Rudd. There are just red flags all over the show for me, everyone has seemingly gone cuckoo. I can’t connect with anyone, they’re just…. weird… brainwashed…. something… and everyone is so damn serious and sad. The only conversation I managed to have was with a sad and emaciated young man with a long beard and a ponytail who proudly announced that he’d been living in the woods for 6 months and had thrown all his possessions into the fire. The poor guy looked like he weighed about 40 kilos and had feasted on only pine cone seeds for the duration of this 6 months. We haven’t eaten anything for two days at this point, since we had to fast for the “ayahuasca”, and I am just ravenous. All I can think off is driving out of there and stopping at the first restaurant I can find…
Early in the afternoon there was a “Changa session”, which was smoking DMT, which I graciously declined, because I came for ayahuasca ceremonies, not drug binging. At this point I’m not a happy camper, it’s all very cultish, everyone is acting like a bunch of brainwashed zombies, and now I’m thinking they’re all just a bunch of drug addicts. The shaman announces that there will be a “fire ceremony” at 4 o’clock, and we must all be there. All I can think of is food, I will eat anything! We all gathered around the fire, and the weirdness continued. The emaciated dude announced that he had a calling 10 years ago that he had to be a….. “fire keeper”. I started losing my courteousness at this point and just rolled my eyes… He made a fire, and threw incense, tobacco, grass and all kinds of things into it, telling us how sacred fire is, and that he will keep the ashes of this ceremony. Then he took out a little bottle out of his bag from a previous fire ceremony, telling how much “metaphysics” is in the bottle. He sprinkled some of this ash over the fire as well. Then the “shaman” started speaking, giving us a lecture about integrity, talking the biggest load of crap. And by now I have decided that he’s a scam artist, and I’m an open book, so I just sat there and listened to him, trying to not show my thoughts. Whenever he looked at me, which was eerily frequently, there was something in his eyes that I just didn’t like. His eyes were not friendly, they were dark… He spoke of love but did not emanate it at all. He spoke some nonsense about the words coming out of your mouth, and that your words are your contract with the world, and they should always be kind, and I’m thinking “HYPOCRITE!”, you just called someone an a****** on national radio the other day! Okay maybe I should add this little bit as well… about two months ago this “shaman” was interviewed on national radio, and we listened to the show. Everything was going well, until they opened up the lines for callers. The first caller asked “can you please tell us about the lady who died during one of your ceremonies?”… and he said “I don’t know who you’re talking about”, and the guy said “you know very well who I’m talking about” (he later admitted the person was some kind of family friend). Then they started fighting on air and he said to the caller “you’re just an a******!”…. so yeah… there’s that… By now you must be wondering why I still went ahead with it after listening to the radio show, and all I can say is that I just wanted to have this experience so badly that I brushed all those things aside.
The rest of the fire ceremony was just madness, people taking turns “offering” things to the “sacred fire”, throwing things into it and bawling their eyes out, telling the “shaman” how much they loved him. But now, as someone who has studied cult psychology quite intensely, I’m thinking to myself “just enjoy the show”… and “as soon as the sun is up, we’re in the car making a huge dust cloud on that dirt road!” At this point I’m still holding out hope that my second ayahuasca ceremony might be… sigh… what I read about…
We went straight into the hut and there was no ceremony about it this time, we just started drinking. There was something odd about it, like the “shaman” just wanted it over with. He even left the room for about 15 minutes after we’d all drank the first time. I went for all the servings, again four. When I went for the third serving, I said to the “shaman”, “I’m not open”, and he laughed and said “we’re always open”… huh? I went back to my mattress, counted the people in the room, which was 15, thought of how much it cost us, did my math and thought “my dear shaman boy, you’ve got a very profitable business model here, and you don’t even have to feed us!”
And then I just lay there waiting for the madness to end. When they formed the circle afterwards I just walked out, and then I was overcome with nausea again and ran into the woods and vomited out whatever I was given. My friend came out as well, and I said “this wasn’t ayahuasca! Come with me, this madness ends now!” I started spilling all my misgivings about the weekend, and said “this is a fucking cult!”. Thankfully she snapped out of it. She’d been quite heavily effected by whatever it was and had a pretty bad trip this time, but agreed the effect was nothing like the countless articles we’d read about. We lay in bed for quite some time laughing about it all, about all the insanity, calling rocks grandmothers, the freakish veneration of the “shaman”, how unhappy they all looked, I’m keeping this short. We basically laid there in the dark and I was piecing it all together. It felt like a catharsis! I said to her “two words: DUST CLOUD!”. “When the first rooster crows, we are starting the car!” Then she said “uhm… there’s a closing ceremony at 9”…and I’m thinking “dear lord… I just can’t”. So we went to the closing ceremony, which lasted forever, it felt like a church service, where the “shaman” was talking endlessly, although there was nothing he said that was profound or even made sense in some cases. As the “talking” rock was passed around, people cried and professed their love for him. When it came to me, I told them what a wonderful universe we live in, how great life is, and “apologies for not sharing in your grief”. As soon as it was over, we forfeited the hugging and crying goodbyes, ran for the car and got the hell out of there!
One day I’ll make my way to the Amazon jungle, and drink the brew with a REAL shaman… sigh... I left lots of the insanity out… it was a loooong weekend and I’m exhausted!
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