What I Learnt, Lost and Gained from Ayahuasca

Rhonda recounts her experience of hell, heaven and surprise horniness up a mountain with shamans in Peru.

I’m an hour outside Cusco, in a ramshackle house perched precariously over a tumbling green gorge with distant views of planes soaring up from the city’s airport. I’m listening to the rush of the river that descends from an Andean ravine and inspecting the plant life, which includes mango trees and a variety of crazily shaped cacti.

Talking of local plants, two days ago I experienced my first ayahuasca ceremony with the family of Peruvian shamans who live up here, in their base down in Cusco itself. To say I’d been nervous is understating it (although I’d tried to downplay it to myself as ‘spicy yoga’). But it turned out to be an almost wholly positive experience – dark, very dark, in parts, but also hugely sexy. I hadn’t been expecting that. Hence me being here with them again. But first…

The Bit Where I Meet the Spirit Vine for the First Time

Before drinking ayahuasca, you have to set an intention, or several intentions. My main ones were to let go of control, to trust the universe and to feel serene. As discussed in other pieces, I’m a chronic over-thinker and sometimes I need my mind to just shut the fuck up and stop second-guessing life and other people so I can live in the present.

The first thing that happened when the effects of the bitter, brown, oily, but not-as -disgusting-as-it-looks drink started to take hold (on the second dose, about half an hour after the first) was that, as I attempted to picture a few significant people in my life (maybe for comfort and companionship in this journey of the unknown), the plant (which is illegal in the UK for containing DMT, which is listed as a Class A Drug) just swiped their faces away, leaving them as anonymous figures.

This I interpreted, while I was under its influence, as ayahuasca’s way of telling me that they were unimportant, either in this context or maybe even cosmically – that they don’t really exist. By this I mean if we really are all one, whether on a Buddhist or a quantum physics level (if the two are actually not basically the same thing or very similar in their implications).

Eventually I did see one of the people, someone I’ve had to let go of in recent months. In the vision, that person was feeling lost and hesitating over whether to get on a subterranean train that would take them even further away from me, into the underworld. As they continued to dither, I said, ‘I don’t care,’ and walked away blissfully, genuinely un-sad about it all.

It really didn’t matter, I thought. Nothing did. And I wasn’t vomiting or even feeling sick, as most people do with ayahuasca, so I was very happy about that too.

This attitude of acceptance/indifference continued in subsequent visions. In one, I entered into a very (physically but also existentially) dark place where a sinister male figure kept surging at me in an aggressive way, like some kind of demon. After he’d done it a couple of times, I said, again, ‘I don’t care’, then, ‘Come on and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’. Then I walked off laughing.

In fact, I was so chilled and unbothered, that far from staying frightened of ayahuasca, I started to goad it.

The Death Bit

‘Show me the worst thing,’ I told it.

And nothing much happened for a while, but eventually I had a vision in which I was taking a walk somewhere and, asking out loud where I was, was told by a disembodied voice that I was in Herculaneum, walking by the old bath houses that conceal the skeletons of people killed by the pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius. But unlike when I saw them in real life seven years ago, and found them frightening, here I felt a very calm and peaceful energy emanating from the place.

At some point, I also found myself up at the ancient quarries that were used to build the Inca town of Ollantaytambo. I’d visited them IRL a few days before, when hiking the Quarry Trail (Cachicata Trek) with the fantastic Intrepid Travel. I’d been told by my lovely Peruvian guide Adrian that he didn’t like to show hikers the tombs of the workers who’d died there because of an encounter he’d had with ‘bad energy’. But now, in my head, I was under the stones with the quarry dead – yet at the same time looking across the lovely valley and down at Ollantaytambo – and again I felt nothing but peace and positivity.

My visions were telling me there was/is nothing to be afraid of – or that’s how I understood it all. Telling me it was okay to let the universe have its way with me.

The Sex Bit

As the shaman, Christina, continued her rhythmic, repetitive chants (she had also taken ayahuasca), the experience started to become really horny. Suddenly I was lying on a river of black, slimy snakes, again in some kind of underworld, but I wasn’t afraid – in fact, I was writhing around on top of them, finding it all very sexy. (I know – send help now). I also saw couples fucking amidst giant orchids. Everything was lush and fertile and seething with life. (To be fair, I’d had great sex just before flying out to Peru, and that interlude was very much on my mind.)

In essence, everything in my trip, no matter how dark, felt like some kind of cosmic joke. I laughed a lot and said ‘fuck it’ often. Life in all its manifestations was play, illusion, a dance. This echoed my last tarot reading before my trip, when I’d got the The World card – representing ‘the integration of all parts of oneself and feeling of completeness, and an understanding of life’s perpetual motion and the dance of existence'.

Towards the end of the ceremony I felt very much like I do on nights out on MDMA in Ibiza with my besties, and hence when the shaman announced that it was over, I was disappointed. The four hours had seemed to last ninety minutes at most. More, please!

I floated out of the building and spent another couple of pleasant hours lightly tripping over Peruvian soup and an unimaginably huge plate of steak, egg and chips in a local restaurant while the potato-based decorations on the wall danced and pulled funny faces at me. The food tasted better than almost any meal I’ve ever had – although I was ravenous, because you have to fast before the ceremony and violently void your insides by drinking a litre and a half of volcanic water (a process I would not rush to repeat).

While Tracey (who had a much less enjoyable, but still hopefully ultimately beneficial experience you’ll be able to read about in our forthcoming book) was flying home the next morning, I was staying on in Cusco and was now keen to experience the full shebang in the family’s temple up in the mountains. This included, as well as an ayahuasca ceremony, four other Inca rituals.

The Bit Where I’m Beaten Up and Shouted At

Ritual number one was a coca-leaf reading – coca being of course best known for its psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine, but also a plant also widely drunk in Peru in the form of tea. Among the Incas and some modern-day Andeans it’s prized for its medicinal properties, and also for its role in sacred rites and rituals providing guidance, clarity and healing.

Of course I was beyond sceptical of the value of this ‘oracle’ and was just playing along at this point, but my shaman Joanna’s readings of my childhood and adult relationships from the way the leaves fell on the ground proved eerily accurate, and on the basis of these she offered me lots of life wisdom and advice that I have already started to act on. Her biggest point was that, having spent so much of my life putting others first, it’s time to focus on me – to mother myself, and to believe in myself.

Next up was an offering to Pachamama – Mother Earth, revered by Incas and many modern-day Peruvians. This involved Joanna creating a kind of 3D collage of various materials ranging from llama fat and mountain herbs to colourful candies, each of which had a meaning. She then made this into a packet and placed it on my head and chest and bashed it with a rattle.

If that seemed surreal, it was nothing compared to the cleansing of negative energies and bad karmas (ie exorcism) carried out by Joanna’s shamanic husband Amaru, whose repertoire out in the garden including punching me in the chest, yelling at me, whacking me around the head with a branch of rosemary that he then set on fire and planted in the ground, spitting spirit water (agua de Florida) in my face and down my knickers, beating me with a condor’s feather (very big, very hard, but sadly in no way erotic) and making me gob my five worst childhood memories into a bucket. He also made me commune with the mountain in front of me – mountains or apus were gods to the Incas and remain so for many Peruvians.

At this point, it has to be said, I was starting to question my life choices.

Next up a respite from all the purging and shouting and bashing, I was given a flower bath, whereby Amaru showered me with exotic petals and wild medicinal plants to protect me against further negative energies and to allow my life to blossom with the help of the cosmos, then placed a crown of flowers on my head. I then went to sit on the clifftop to digest all of this, one of the couple’s fat, inquisitive, one-year-old twins plumped down in my lap by Amaru, pulling petals off of me with her pudgy fingers, lost in wonderment of the everyday minutiae of life.

It was finally time to revisit ayahuasca, and this time I was given my entire dose all in one go, and it hit much faster and much harder – and gave me an entirely different kind of trip. Full of Inca gods and religious iconography, this journey was aggressive, loud, pitch-black and technicolor-bright, and hectic with webs and nets and ropes - like some kind of death rollercoaster. I quickly decided there was no way I was able or willing to cope with this for four hours.

So in spite of my own stated intention to relinquish control, and the shaman’s instructions not to resist/fight the trip, I decided I had to get mastery over it, which I did by repeatedly opening my eyes and bringing myself back into the room. This temple space within the shamans’ home had itself become a living, breathing thing in its own right, but it wasn’t scary.

I also (despite being told not to take any notice of other people in the room) focused a lot on Dave, who lay beside me. A thirty-something Melburnian acid-head I’d shared the taxi ride up the mountain with, he’d confessed to me he wasn't having an easy time of it personally. Indeed, we’d shared a lot of intimate details en route, as people often do under such circumstances. But at this moment he seemed at peace (despite the fact that his face was moving – ageing and rejuvenating – in ways I knew were a product of my imagination).

And it was fine. As the visions got less speedy, I yawned a lot, cocooned myself in my many blankets, and slipped and slithered around in my head, thinking a lot about sex again (there really is no hope for me), but also feeling very peaceful – especially during the interludes when Christina stopped chanting and Dave and I seemed to be breathing in unison, so loudly and slowly it was as if the universe itself was inhaling and exhaling. Which perhaps, in a way, it is. I also had a lot of visions of myself walking around smiling, radiant, happy in my skin – and I liked myself.

This time, when it ended (‘That was groovy!’, exclaimed Dave), there was no gliding back out into the world to waft around Cusco and giggle at potato faces squirming about inside restaurant decorations. Instead, I was left in the temple room to sleep it off for another hour. Then, at about 7pm, I was invited into the family kitchen where the babies were being fed and was given an indescribably delicious banana (my first food of the day) and a tea of mountain herbs that I promptly upended on the table – something Joanna saw as a good omen, laughter spilling out of her as she ‘read’ the patterns it made on the tablecloth.

The Verdict

As I was driven back down the mountain, wild dogs chasing the car down the rubble track, baying their farewell, I felt sluggish and hung-over, and reaching Cusco I ended up checking in for my flight and then going more less straight to bed and sleeping for at least eight unbroken hours – a rare thing for me.

I came away from ayahuasca with mixed emotions – I’d had some gorgeous, even sublime and consciousness-altering moments, and I’d had some moments that I really didn’t want to have to deal with, but that equally didn’t feel particularly personal or pertinent to my life, and therefore couldn’t be there to heal any trauma (ayahuasca is supposed to be a doctor of sorts). As such, those felt like a bit of a waste of time – merely a kind of warped entertainment.

But I did and do feel different. I feel less anxious, overall (I’ve often been wildly anxious since I started the perimenopause in 2018 and also since ending my marriage five years ago). I seem to sleep better – there’s no waking and angsting in the night. I feel I can let things roll off me and keep things in perspective/at a distance/in their right place. And a gong yoga session I did after I got home to the UK felt particularly powerful and deep, as if something inside me had shifted.

But most of all, I feel that I’ve learnt that yes, it is good and necessary to let go of control, but equally there are times in life when one absolutely has to assert it. True wisdom may lie in knowing which is which.

As to the inevitable question, would I do ayahuasca again?, I think of it like childbirth. As I was pushing out my first son, I vowed to myself I’d never do that to myself again. I went on to have two more kids.

My second ayahuasca experience may have been more scary and weird, but, like labour, the plant gave me something precious. Ayahuasca has been said to expose the gap between who you think you are and who you really are, which does sound unnerving at the very least. But it gave me the gift of realising that I’m tougher than I think – echoing Joanna’s ‘diagnosis’ that I have a heart full of sorrow but a strong mind. And perhaps because of that assessment I have come away a bit less sad, a bit less scared and a bit more hopeful – maybe helping validate neuroscientists’ growing research into ayahuasca as a treatment for depression and PTSD.

If you have any questions about the experience and where I did it, let me know - I’m happy to share more info.

Apu, Sulpayki