How has Ayahuasca impacted your life?
“I see differently, I feel more–around me, through me, of me, and of existence. I now have a sense of my experience blossoming~spiraling open and ever-evolving, ever-dancing. By this I mean that Ayahuasca has opened up how I view and relate to my experiences. My notions of ‘reality’ have shifted significantly. The solid thought-forms that I had taken as reality, I’ve seen dissolve or revealed from a new angle where its depth collapses into 2-dimensional space, like removing a slide from the view-finder. I became acutely aware that our bodies are a biological process and in connecting to the complex orchestration of my body’s movements with the breath of life, I feel the aliveness of everything around me, and from this place all is space. Operating in my everyday, I’d say that my habituated mind-state is still mostly dominant, but with the opening of my perception, how I touch experience is notably different; it seems softer, more spacious~like there’s more room to play in, and fuller with more depth~like there’s more flavors to taste.”
What is one of your most memorable ayahuasca experiences, and why?
“I was taken into a projection of my future and it felt so good to be in that scene. I was experiencing it like a visceral dream and internally my body was lighting up, emotionally reacting to this vision~sweet, bright moments, where I felt completely supported, centered and free, curious and expansive, inspired, engaged and just happy~every cell in my body was smiling. And the thought arose that this is yet just one of myriad potentialities, not necessarily how it will be, and simultaneously I flushed with a letting go of attachment and expectation for the fruition of this vision in physical form and this embrace of gratefulness to have felt this joy, this peace and exuberance of life, to have this experience in my repertoire of possibility catalogued in my mind and cellular memory. I have a strong tendency to cast projections of potentially disastrous or unpleasant outcomes, based on tales of woe or well-intentioned cautionary stories predominately from family-members in my youth…and so worry has been a close companion of mine. To drop into a long moment where all was indeed good and to sink in deep enough to saturate and actually feel it, nourishes my soul and eases my heart beyond the beyond.”
Why do you believe the medicine is on this earth?
“I believe that an aspect of our existence is to become aware of ourselves—and this medicine so fiercely lovingly reflects our constructed self and the pure state of awareness to lucid consciousness. I like to think that we are benevolent at our essence and perhaps, this is a tool of creation (I definitely feel its modern necessity as a balance to the man-made tools of destruction); it is an aide in the evolution of humanity. With this medicine in me, I feel a part of this earth, grown from this earth, of the soil and from the land and seas, through the volcanoes, through the clouds and in the stars. Folding in I sense all this and expanding out I reflect the splendor of existence.”