Here is the final part of my 3-part ayahuasca experience. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out what happened ceremony 1 and ceremony 2 in order to understand how ceremony 3 ties everything together. Once again, I originally wrote this in my journal the day after the ceremony. 

Beginning of Journal Entry

Last night’s ceremony was a fucking lot. It’s 9:30pm in Lima right now and I’m still trying to process it all.

The beginning of the ceremony was pretty slow for the first hour or so. It was a very sensory experience where I could feel the medicine flowing through my body like it was trying to figure out what to target. I purged on the toilet and went back to my mattress, but nothing crazy was happening. Stace came over and gave me a little extra taste of ayahuasca to try to get something to ensue. Within minutes I threw up. This actually felt really good because all of the other times I’ve purged it was mainly shitting my brains out. 

After I purged, my body started to feel tingly and warm. It was a good feeling. Then the hysterical laughter from the first night started again. This time I wasn’t laughing at anything in particular… Laughing for the sake of laughing. I literally could not stop. I could hear other people in the ceremony purging and even crying, but I couldn’t stop laughing. This was pure joy and happiness coming out. 

I lit up a mapacho and laughed some more. I decided to go outside and sit on the deck to look out at the jungle. Another person from the ceremony was outside as well. The sheer beauty of the jungle during the full moon with the clouds surrounding it was incredible. I was thinking about how lucky I am to be able to have an experience like this and how beautiful the world is. 

I went back into the maloca, still laughing and feeling happy, but I thought to myself there has to be something deeper than this. I just couldn’t make any connections. It had been maybe an hour since the initial laughing outset, but I asked Drew to ask Stace if I could have another dose. Stace came over and told me that normally when someone is laughing like I was he wouldn’t give them more, but I looked like I was still in control of myself so he obliged. 

I took it and immediately laughed again because the taste was so fucking terrible. Directly afterwards though, the laughing stopped and I became super calm. I felt my stomach and body trying to figure out what I should be observing. I went to the bathroom and purged there again. Once I got back to my mattress I started thinking about love… And I mean really sitting and thinking about it. I was specifically thinking about how important the concept of love truly is. It wasn’t at all like the first ceremony where I was almost overwhelmed by feelings of love. This time the medicine made me merely sit there and think about how I should be leading my life with love as the driver and that I need to continuously remind myself how I’m already surrounded by so much love even when I might not feel like I am. 

I thought about almost every single person in my life. I can be reluctant to admit that I love certain people I’m not close with, but that doesn’t mean I can’t or don’t still have that true, genuine love for them. Everyone in my life came up like a rolodex, one by one. My parents, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, etc., all came to my mind. I have the capacity to love every single person in my life for who they are and not for who I want them to be. It was a powerful thought.

Lastly, I thought about myself. I went back and thought about all of the past versions of myself and how in order to love who I am today, that means loving every single one of those past versions of me too. Once again, I wasn’t being flooded with the feelings of love in the way I was during the first ceremony or in the way I was probably hoping I would be. This was better in a way because I intentionally had to stop and think about the concept of love and learn to accept it even when it might not obviously be there. I grabbed my pillow and gave myself a big hug because it just felt right. It was another beautiful moment for me.

That feeling then went away and my body began to feel weird again. I felt like something else was about to come up in my head. As I layed back down, I focused on getting comfortable with the discomfort to figure out what the medicine wanted to show me. I felt the back of my neck being targeted and lifting up like it wanted to grow. There’s been a lot of tension and pain in my neck and back for years now. I relaxed observed this feeling in my neck. No judgment. No pain. Just observation. It felt like the medicine was telling me that all of this pain and tension I feel in my back and neck is all in my head. It’s not really there. For the first time in a while, I was able to move my neck side to side without the tension I normally feel. The pain was gone just like that.

I went to the bathroom to purge again and then came back for my limpieza with Raul. My body was still feeling tingly and I felt kind of high. After my limpieza the ceremony ended. However, I wasn’t feeling quite back to normal like I did after the previous ceremonies. It felt like I was at least coming down though. I walked over to the community house to make some tea before heading to bed. As I was making my tea and discussing the ceremony with others, I started feeling the medicine in my stomach again. Fuck. I really wanted to be done at this point, but I didn’t have much of a choice. 

I went back to the bathroom near the maloca and sat on the toilet. My body was heavy and I was dizzy. As I was purging on the toilet, I felt this intense feeling in my liver, almost like a sharp pain. I think the medicine was trying to cleanse my liver, or at least tell me to stop abusing it. Long story short, I’ve done a considerable amount of binge drinking in my life and have put my liver through some abuse. I’ve gotten better since college for sure, but this was an awakening moment telling me that I can’t keep doing this to my body. I also realized during my sober month before the retreat that I don’t need to be piss drunk in order to go out and have fun. While this was going on in my head and I was still shitting, I started to feel queasy too. Simultaneously, I started throwing up in the bucket next to me.

I was truly fucking exhausted at this point, but I could still feel the medicine inside of me. I kindly asked Mother Aya to take it easy as I made my way back to the maloca and looked at my phone to check the time. It was 1:40am. 

My body started feeling euphoric. I felt calm. I went into a trance-like state and just layed there feeling my body and my mind dissolve into the universe. When I came back to reality it felt like I had to purge again. I checked the time on my phone… 4:40am. 

Three fucking hours had passed since I went first into that weird, euphoric trance, yet it felt like it happened in the blink of an eye. I was perplexed. I had no idea if I had been awake or asleep during that time period. It felt like I transcended time and space. I thought maybe this is what heaven feels like. I’m very much still trying to make sense of this part of the night because it was sincerely unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

I went to the bathroom to purge one last time. I came back to the maloca and finally fell asleep. This last ceremony was wild all the way through. It was a nice way to end my ayahuasca experience because it made me realize there’s so much more for me to discover about myself.

End of Journal Entry

This ceremony felt like a hodgepodge of topics with no true overarching theme that I’ve been able to make out. But it made me realize that there is so much more to still learn about myself. I’m also aware of the fact that I can’t solve my problems and figure it all out at once. I think that might be something this last ceremony was trying to show me. I need to continue to work on the first 2 lessons before I can start healing everything else. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, it’s a process. 

I’m going to make another post after this one to recap the entire experience and discuss how I’m going to approach the integration process. Thanks to everyone for reading and following along with me on this journey. Happy to talk to anyone more about it or answer any more questions!