My PTSD Brain Blocked My Ayahuasca “Trip”

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER & AYAHUASCA

“I was afraid that after drinking ayahuasca and experiencing death that I would get reckless and careless, but the exact opposite happens it appears that death is what gives life its meaning.” –Gerard Armond Powell

PREPARING FOR THE AYAHUASCA CEREMONY

“The scariest part of ayahuasca, the thing that scares us the most, is that we might see ourselves.” –Gerard Armond Powell

Once officially registered for the ayahuasca ceremony, we were instructed to avoid sex/masturbation, meat, spicy food, alcohol, and drugs for a week leading up to it. The day of the ceremony (which was to start at 5pm), we were instructed to have a light breakfast then fast for the rest of the day (my friend had to fast for several days before his first ayahuasca ceremony). I live in Cancun, Mexico, which is an hour’s drive from Playa del Carmen. The temple was out in the pretty remote jungle. There was about 30 people there–most of whom were foreigners/tourists. The ceremony was conducted in English. The price was $2,500 pesos, but we go a “local discount” of $2,000 pesos ($100 USD dollars).

When we arrived in my car, my tummy was growling! Everyone set up their sleeping bags and cushions around the floor of the temple. Then we all went outside to a fire pit where the shaman spoke and prayed. One of the things the shaman said was how we are all one and how we already have all the knowledge of the universe within ourselves to do anything. He explained that at the beginning of our “trips” that we will need to face our fears and to not get stuck in this part of the experience. He said to push through it and then once we get to the other side that we should be sure to ask the universe any and all of our questions about life and anything else. We had our auras cleansed by one of the staff members and returned to the temple.

“LA ABUELITA” AYAHUASCA

“Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.” -Terence McKenna

Once back in the temple, we all sat on our sleeping bags and cushions. Everyone was given a small bucket. They reminded us of the rules for the ceremony: don’t touch anyone else–regardless of what is happening to them, raise your hand or just say ‘help’ if you need anything, don’t leave the temple unless you are being accompanied by a staff member to the bathroom, and there would be a one-hour window in which the ayahuasca would be available to drink (in case someone felt they needed a second cup).

I had mentioned outside to the guy who cleansed my aura and to the shaman that I was concerned that consuming a full dose of ayahuasca would be too much for me. I had surgery twice back in the states. I told the anesthesiologist I’d never been drunk and was very sensitive to foreign crap in my body. He gave me a smaller dose of anesthesia based on what I said. Not only was it more than enough, but I had to be shaken violently to wake up in the recovery room. When I went up to the front of the temple to drink the ayahuasca, I asked the woman if I could just drink half and explained my situation. No one really seemed to be listening or to care. She just said, “The abuelita is very gentle.” Sigh…ok. I drank the full amount. Apparently, it was OK if my intuition told me I needed a second dose, but it was not OK if my intuition told me I only needed half.

I went back to lay down on my sleeping bag. They said the effects of the ayahuasca should start for most of us in about 15 minutes. As I laid there waiting, I just kept repeating, “I am love. I am light. I am God,” and I thought about my dad (who is dead and I was hoping to reconnect with during the ceremony). By now, it’s dark outside and there are just a few lit candles at the front of the temple. Three or four of the workers are playing musical instruments softly. I start to see some wavy lines move behind my closed eyelids.

[INSERT AYAHUASCA TRIP HERE]

“I’ve learned that ayahuasca works in levels, a little like peeling an onion. It is complex and something you really have to experience to understand.” -Zoe Helene

By now, my body feels very heavily drugged. I can’t tell if I have legs. Everything is heavy, groggy, uncoordinated. Although I felt like I was in a safe place, it was scary. Every few minutes came the sound of the others throwing up. Sounds (the soft music and the puking) started to seem very far away and echo-y. I was waiting to face my fears, as the shaman said. My friend had told me that during his first ayahuasca ceremony he had walked down a long dark hallway with many doors. The hallway was full of eyes staring at him (he has social anxiety), and he knew behind each door was something scary. But he walked through the hallway and got to the other side where all the feelings of love, peace, oneness, dead relatives, and universe Q&A was waiting for him. I kept waiting for my fears…nothing. I was saying to myself, “I surrender. I’m here to face my fears. I’m ready.” Nothing. Just laying drugged on the floor and the sound of puking.

After about 30 minutes of “nothing happening,” I finally said, “Fuck it. I’m taking charge of this thing. I started to visualize my dad meeting my daughter for the first time. A few seconds in, I stopped myself. What was the difference between what was happening now and me, for example, just visualizing this happening sober at home on my bed? Then I just started to feel like this whole ayahuasca thing was like the emperor’s new clothing. I felt the whole thing was stupid, fake, pathetic, contrived. This made me think how weak and sad my mom must be, as an alcoholic, to choose “seeing wavy lines” over reality. I thought of everything she hurt and destroyed so she could enjoy some woo-woo wavy lines and cool-sounding noises. Then I thought about all the drunk people, all the drug users…the whole world of them losing their jobs, ruining their marriages, killing innocent people on the highway for THIS???

DOWN THE HARSH RABBIT HOLE

“Psychedelics could chemically override the thought patterns in your brain so that you are open to the moment, but once the chemical loses its power the old habit patterns take over again. With them comes a subtle despair that without chemicals you are a prisoner of your thoughts. The trap of high experiences, however they occur, is that you become attached to their memory and so you try to recreate them. These memories compel you to try to reproduce the high. Ultimately they trap you…”  -Ram Dass ¹

By now, I’m in a VERY NEGATIVE space (obviously). I went on to think how all the people there were just fancy drug addicts, how all these weak people just need an excuse to dump their shitty boyfriends or quit jobs they hate (“Oh, the ayahuasca made me do it”), how I could be doing something REAL right now (like hanging out with my kid) instead of laying on the floor too drugged to swat the mosquitoes on me and listening to strangers barfing violently. I felt ayahuasca is a crutch–a short cut–for those who lack the discipline to meditate, sweat it out in a temescal, go for a long, hard run, or talk it out in therapy. If the shaman truly believed, as he said in the beginning, that we all already have all the truth and knowledge of the universe inside us, then why are we doing drugs to get to the truth and knowledge of the universe? I also thought who was running through the forest hundreds of years ago looking for which root to combine with which leaf so they could escape reality for an hour…even if it meant getting food poisoning (the vomiting of the toxic drink ingested)?

This whole time I’d been warding off the inevitable barfing that I knew was waiting for me. About this time, it finally happened. It was that violent, heaving sort of vomiting that made me feel like I’d been hit by a truck. I just kept repeating in my head, “I will never, never punish you like this again, body. This was a stupid idea. You’ve always been so good to me. Tomorrow you’re getting gallons of water, fresh fruit, whole grains. I promise. I will never hurt you like this again.”

Awhile later, my friend laying next to me starting vomiting and dry heaving for about 5 minutes. I was very worried, but I could not touch him. So I just thought to him, “I’m here. It’s almost over. You’re not alone. Get it all out. It’s OK.” After he finished barfing, he sort of sprang up on his feet, bouncing a few times. Then he said, “Ayuda! Ayuda!” and put his hand up. He pointed at his throat and said, “Agua.” I felt like some weak kid lifting a car off my injured family–I somehow managed to reach for my bottle of water, untwist the cap, and hand it to him. Other than pointing my mouth at my bucket, that was the most coordinated thing I’d done in 2 hours. I was exhausted and slumped back down on the floor. After he drank the water, he ran outside. I had no idea what was going on, but I was in no position to stand or walk.

Other people were starting to move around as well. Maybe another 30 minutes later, the shaman started speaking again. More lively music was played. Half a dozen people got up and danced and chanted around the fire pit in the center of the room. The voices and noises were angering me. While everyone else was eating fresh fruit, going to the bathroom, moving around, etc, I was still laying in a heap on the floor. I put my backpack over my head to block out their noises.

Awhile later, one of the workers came around and said I had to sit up now. I still felt very negative, but I did it. He cleansed my aura again and gave me a slice of watermelon to eat.  It took me about 30 minutes to take eat it: take a nibble, catch my breath, rest, take a nibble, catch my breath, rest. People were starting to empty their buckets now, roll up their mats, and put their shoes on. I felt like a zombie, but I wanted to get the hell out of there, so I started doing the same. Everyone else seemed perfectly normal–coordinated, strong, pleasant. Because of how slowly I was moving, we were the last people to leave. It was 4:00 AM. Now I have to drive an hour back to my house.

IS IT OVER YET?

“If the high was too powerful in comparison to the rest of your life, it overrides the present and keeps you focused on the past. The paradox, of course, is that were you to let go of the past, you would find in the present moment the same quality that you once had. But because you’re trying to repeat the past, you lose the moment.” -Ram Dass ²

When we got in my car, my friend and I gave each other a bear hug. He told me about his experience. At this point, I was pretty sure I should not say anything to anyone about what I had experienced since it was just so critical and judgemental. My friend told me he had seen his grandmother that recently died, that he had told himself more than once, “I can’t do this. I want to quit now.” When he had asked for the water, jumped up, and ran outside…all that was because he had a severe hot flash (another common side effect of ayahuasca). He said when he was throwing up that he could hear me saying that he wasn’t alone and it was almost over.

I was driving 2 miles per hour through the jungle in the pitch dark. I felt like my energy was just so low and negative at that moment that, because of the law of attraction, that I was going to be killed on the way home–like I was going to attract another car to hit us. I was fucking terrified. I had thought it through to the level of thinking that my friend was going to die too when we got hit 🙁 The only thing that kept me going was thinking that I could not die yet because my daughter needs me. My emotions just became too overwhelming and intense to keep to myself, so I did decide to tell my friend. And, let me say, that what I have written here is only the frosting on the shit cupcake of what I had experienced.

More than once while I was driving, I was certain I would throw up again. I had to pull over several times because I got scared when I’d see a big bus or something near me on the highway. Miraculously, we made it back safely. I was so exhausted from walking into my house that I crashed in bed without brushing my “vomit teeth.” I woke up a few hours later, showered, ate the healthy food I had promised my body, and was back to a nap. Waking up from the nap, I saw the wavy lines again–like I had seen while on the ayahuasca. It felt scary like a flashback. I asked my friend if we should expect to have flashbacks. He said that was common but would not last for more than a few days.

THE PTSD BRAIN ON AYAHUASCA

“When Maharajji asked Ram Dass for ‘medicine,’ Ram Dass gave him three pills, each containing 305 micrograms of LSD, a very strong dose. The guru gulped down all three pills. ‘All day long I’m there,’ Ram Dass wrote, ‘and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing—nothing happens!’ LSD didn’t affect Maharajji, Ram Dass implied, because the guru already had such a profoundly mystical outlook.” -Baba Ram Dass and the Tale of the Acid-Gobbling Guru in “Scientific American” ³

Before sleeping that night I started googling bad ayahuasca experiences. I came upon an article from a “psychedelic integration specialist” (a therapist who works exclusively with people post-psychedelic to help them process and assimilate the experience) that spoke directly to my situation. The article was called “We Need to Talk About When People Feel Worse After Drinking Ayahuasca”⁴ by Kerry Moran, MA, LPC. Here are a few excerpts:

“Yet, there is a thorny issue at the heart of the ayahuasca path that people often avoid talking about. Some people actually feel not better but worse after drinking the brew. What should we make of this fact? First, let’s consider some more examples.”

“I could offer many vignettes of beautifully transformative ayahuasca experiences. But here I’m acknowledging a truth I encounter frequently as an integration therapist, as well in my own personal work. Sometimes the ayahuasca experience appears to be traumatizing in itself. Is hallucinogenic therapy worth the trouble?”

“A basic hallmark of a traumatic experience is anything that’s ‘too much, too fast, too soon’ for a particular human nervous system to handle. A major determinant in whether an experience generates lasting trauma is how innately resourced a person is. This has a great deal to do with the degree of secure attachment and support he or she received in infancy and childhood. People who lacked secure attachment are more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in circumstances that might disturb a securely attached person…The plant medicine generates extremely strong, and sometimes fragmenting, experiences. And let’s not beat around the bush. Ayahuasca can be incredibly scary. A hundred-odd ceremonies in, I still feel apprehension every time I drink. Furthermore, I can still slide into fear when the level of intensity ratchets up. I’ve had my own experiences with something I am only semi-facetiously calling post-ceremony stress disorder or PCSD.”

“I’ve also witnessed some of the extreme reactions that can manifest in ayahuasca retreats…People tend to respond to these overwhelming experiences with whatever is their default method of control. They may go into flight, as in actually leaving the ceremony (not a good idea), or quitting mid-retreat. Or fight, which can manifest as a full-on rage attack (pity the facilitator who bears the brunt of it) or, milder, as a monologue of blame: ‘These ceremonies are not done right; this shaman is no good; this center is not safe; the guy sitting next to me is a jerk’…Some mindsets spin into obsession, panicky thinking that whirls in circles and goes nowhere. Other people dissociate and withdraw, going mute and numb.”

“Dr. Gabor Maté said some intriguing things at a Psychedelic Science 2017 workshop on ayahuasca…He suggested that what we call a ‘bad trip’ could be a reactivation of early childhood trauma. These can be overwhelming experiences, infant or even prenatal. They are encoded not in the brain’s centers of cognitive memory (these don’t develop fully until 18–24 months of age) but directly into the body. When these feelings erupt within an ayahuasca session, they can manifest as overwhelming sensations and emotions that seem unrelated to any known circumstance. Arising in disconnected, incoherent form, they’re unaccompanied by any sense of meaning. The chaotic nature of certain difficult ayahuasca experiences can lead to overwhelming sensations, incomprehensible surges of powerful emotions like terror, grief, or despair. Correspondingly these emotions parallel the overwhelming feelings a small child might experience in trauma.”

“A baby or small child can often bear an overwhelming experience, if there’s some kind of holding environment. The sustained presence of a loving, attuned adult who can empathize with the child’s experience and serve as a bigger nervous system for the energies to pass through works best. From attunement with this kind of presence, infants learn that they can endure difficult emotions, and that these will eventually pass. This is the cultivation of resilience. Knowing you can move through distress and ultimately be okay. Many children don’t have this secure holding environment or receive only a partial version of it. In these cases, the child resorts to more primal survival mechanisms. These mechanisms are often a kind of shutoff or dissociation that stuffs away the overwhelming experience in the body and brain, so that it’s present, yet unconscious. It’s repressed because it’s literally unbearable. The child’s nervous system is simply not developed enough to survive the experience in full consciousness.”

“Anna simply needed to rest, eat, and sleep before she came back for another session. By that time she was in better shape to look at her relation with her mother, and how ayahuasca, the biggest mama of all, might have triggered the childhood trauma she experienced in being terrified of the person who was supposed to protect her.”

“Researcher Jessica Nielson says that people with a self-reported past or current diagnosis of PTSD are somewhat more likely to report ayahuasca being a traumatizing experience in itself. This doesn’t mean don’t do it. It does mean be somewhat prepared for the possibility with hallucinogenic therapy. Especially if you have a history of PTSD, have some support lined up, and reach out in the aftermath as necessary to get more.” ⁵

POST CEREMONY STRESS DISORDER

“These [plant] medicines will allow you to come and visit Christ, but you can only stay two hours. Then you have to leave again. This is not the true Samadhi. It’s better to become Christ than to visit him – but even the visit of a saint for a moment is useful. But love is the most powerful medicine.” -Neem Karoli Baba (a.k.a. Guru Maharaji)  ⁶

I was relieved to have a better understanding of what I was experiencing. It seems my PTSD brain had blocked me from having the ayahuasca “trip” because it saw it as a threat, a danger. The first night after ayahuasca, I had to sleep with my light on and bring in my kid to sleep next to me. I woke up about every 30 minutes all night long just to make sure I was still in my room, everything was “real,” and there were no wavy lines.

The next day I had to get my second COVID-19 vaccination. At this point, I’d been DJing 13 years. As I was driving and had my regular music playing, I thought to myself, “I hate music.” At a stoplight, a shriveled-up, hunched-over granny approached my car with her cup extended towards me begging for money. I normally always keep coins in my cup holder for the beggars that are so common at street lights in Mexico. Today, as she approached my window, I had an image of me punching through my window and connecting with her face flash before my eyes. OK, the music thing was bad, but this terrified me. I started sobbing. Who am I right now? Even into the 2nd and 3rd days post-ceremony, I was still concerned about dying and felt weak and scared.

If anything, the experience was making me see that what I simply thought was an abusive mom was actually (apparently) something far more serious–something that had apparently re-wired my brain. I decided to pursue hypnotherapy to see if I could work through my pre-verbal memories with my mom. After I told the hypnotherapist my situation, she recommended EMDR instead. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a form of psychotherapy that helps trauma survivors literally re-program their “survival-wired” brains. If you have or have had PTSD, my personal recommendation would be to try EMDR first before ayahuasca. No toxins in your body. No puking. You’ll be in a safe place one-on-one with a trained and licensed professional (unlike ayahuasca where any Joe off the street can say they are a shaman and give people the plant medicine that is related to a date rape drug). Most importantly, you can make EMDR stop any time you want if it gets too intense, unlike ayahuasca. And, let’s be honest, no one has ever died doing EMDR. Ayahuasca does give people heart attacks and such on rare occasions. A drug is a drug–just because this one is packaged with a shaman in a temple doesn’t really make your body’s experience of it different than something packaged by the gram and sold on the street corner.

SPIRITUALVIRAGO.COM WAS BORN

“Patients reported that their psychedelic sessions were an invaluable experiential training for dying.” –Stanislav Grof 

I feel that my ayahuasca ceremony benefited me in the same way a near-death experience would have (a.k.a. a “peak experience“). Yes, it’s true I got something beneficial out of it. But I firmly believe that I consumed too much considering my history and gut feeling. I have no intention of ever repeating the experience again. I think it’s really important to understand all the facts before trying something like this. Through this situation, I really came to understand how deeply my traumas have effected me and, after a lifetime of people telling me how strong I am, I finally started to believe them.

The domain name for this website was purchased by me four days after the ayahuasca ceremony.

PTSD AYAHUASCA QUOTES: POST & SHARE

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