From the time I returned from Peru, until now- all has been a blur. Even though I feel like I slept for two weeks upon my arrival home, I still have a hard time singling out events and specific, disparate moments. Everything is moving - It's all been a wash. A brilliant, purgative, evolutionary wash of color, energy, and light. And sometimes horned and tailed darkness.
It's been almost two months since I came home from the Amazon. There's a bit of a delay on my entries, mostly because we have to wait for the film AND for the inspiration to sit down and write. As always, I hesitate to try and really put down what I'm feeling or thinking...or in recent cases, knowing. I've been to Atlanta, Sante Fe, New York, and Utah since flying back from Puerto Maldonado. Each trip further expanding one my experiences in the jungle. My journey with the plant medicines only just began in Peru and, as I was hoping, my life's journey was fast tracked as a result.
When I arrived at Chimbre, I didn't really know what to expect- and this was good, since I had been trying quite hard NOT to expect anything at all. I knew I'd be facing fears there and when I decided to go to Peru, only a few weeks before, I was launched immediately into new and nastier anxiety than ever before. I'm good at anxiety on my own, without help. My fear was of losing the self, a thing that I've latched onto and dug my roots into very firmly since...well, childhood. Ayahuasca (and her various relatives) notoriously brings you away from the "self". The false self. It can show you origins, the shimmering, iridescent worlds of your true ancestry or secret, magical, angelic realms. It can make you joyously forget your humanity, taking you to the core of the universe where there is no longer an "I". Of course, the medicine can also show you horrifying, psychedelic hell as you purge your darkest and most shameful faults and desires. It's the Mother, the Grandmother, the Judge. Sometimes- it's both beautiful and terrifying, simultaneously. Either way, you give the control up to the divine, you can have no idea what you're going to get. None. All you can do is surrender to it.
Yep. Pretty much my fucking worst nightmare. No knowing, no control.
Sandy, Scott, and I catching a ride back from Yacumama (the local pool public pool) from one of the very kind locals.
Anthony had a lot of those balloons. It pretty much made my universe.
So...you know, naturally I've got to leap in head first. What fresh, hadean idea is this? Lets do it! Two weeks prior I was hanging from 18 gauge fishooks which pierced the flesh over my heart chakra...and a little vacation in the rainforest- a place I've dreamed about since I was 7 years old- was in danger of causing me to panic-shit myself.
Admittedly, physical pain is somewhat of an enjoying challenge and even a little old-hat for me. Emotional pain? Yeah. Lets just say that I've got a Masters degree in avoiding that shite.
I'm not going to like saying any of these things- but in order for you to understand maybe a LITTLE bit more about what a complete freakshow I am, I've got to give you a little background.
I was born weird. As soon as I can remember my conscious thought, I remember thinking it wasn't what a baby should be thinking about. As I grew up, my sense of people and things was beyond my years. I think I came into the world a little jaded even. I tried my hand at seduction on the first-grade playground, I would breakdown privately about the state of the world when I was 6, I wanted, desperately, to reject the technologies of the world and live "of the land" when I was a little girl. I would force my friends to leave their plastic toys at home and make them weave baskets with me. Nothing felt better to me than the woods. When I was 10 I came home and announced that I would no longer be eating meat or wearing leather because factory farming was destroying our rainforests- didn't eat any meat at all for the next decade. My obsessions with the jungle, the animals, and creatures of "myth", like fairies and nature spirits was all consuming. i would cry at night over my perceived loss of these things. Convinced I could speak to the plants and animals, I would rely on nature to give me signs about what to do about my feelings of displacement. I couldn't understand or move on from a powerful feeling of homesickness which haunted me well into my 20's. To make matters more unusual- I had more than one encounter with other "beings". On top of my bizarre sleep experiences-which included somnambulance and sleep-paralysis- I would occasionally wake up to the presence of sentinel-like giants in my room with me, who appeared as towering white shadows.
This is Joey. Through and through.
Nice people take drugs.
As I moved into my teens- my feeling of being trapped in a body that wasn't mine and the feeling of homesickness became more unbearable. I developed and eating disorder and started cutting myself- thinking that if I was as thin as stained-glass than the light could shine through me. I was really fucking upset about being caged in the flesh. I came to secretly identify with angelics and felt in my heart that, for some reason I couldn't remember now, I'd chosen to be human... I knew would have some kind of job to do. I started reading and searching even more. I had past-life readings, went back to the woods to listen. I was a clandestine warrior masquerading as an earthly body. Yep.
Oh, being 15. So light-hearted and fun and totally not fucking weird.
In high_school, I began to get migraines with Aura (Aura being a floating blindspot called a scotoma that comes before the migraine itself) and after my first one, the colors I already saw around people became more pronounced. Later I learned that these were personal energy fields. The more I understood the things I saw and the more I learned about the cosmos, the more I could direct and intuit...and also, sometimes, interact with entities. But it was all clumsy, hormone-affected shit. I was definitely no fucking Merlin or Buddha.
On our way somewhere.
Luiz, one of the workers at Chimbre, and his adorable little princess.
I didn't TELL anyone about any of this, save a few people here and there, I generally don't even now. Mostly because it's fucking insane.
All of this became overwhelming around my early 20's. My outlet and release for the energy, the confusion, and for my powerful sexuality slowly became BDSM. I moved to New York- leaving a man who I sometimes now still consider the love of my life. I was so driven by the dissociation from my body, by the vague memories of an undetermined past existence that romantic love was at once frightening, coveted, but secondary. Pain was my first experimentation with altered-states...and I surely found them. Additionally, I wanted to FEEL human-to understand it- and naturally, for me, that compulsion translated as extreme-but very human- behavior. I was my own guinea pig. I was drawn to the most bizarre and shadowed circles, always the observer, even of myself. I tried everything there was to try out on my physical form- substance, discomfort, pain, D/s, sleep deprivation- and I wrote about it and researched it with the thrill and excitement of someone reading an adventure novel. My natural intuition and awareness of energies put me in the most absurd and fantastical situations and, thankfully, kept me from hurting myself beyond repair. I mean, obviously, I picked up some bad habits along the way. What I learned and the people I met in NYC I reinforced some negative beliefs...all things I still sometimes struggle to work through- some things I was afraid to face in Peru.
Believe it or not, this is the truncated version.
None of the crazy shit I did or said ever shook the hand of God from my core. It was there, but I was angry about my lifelong feeling of separateness and was, at the time, unwilling to take responsibility for it. The nagging reminder of my lost connection with my soul came in an out of my life in various ways. People I'd meet, life's "road signs"- despite my hedonistic life, it was all synchronicity and psychics to me. A man came into my life and I recklessly married him. He was a connection to God and a way i thought I could redeem myself...in my own eyes. I returned to church with a different understanding than the one I had as a young girl forced to go to bible study. There was many a night spent in prayer-trances and I found I was able to let divine energy come through me in the form of tongues and discernment. The experience itself, and all our time together was supernatural. It was full of encounters with other realms, channeling, and prayer manifested. I made a connection on our honeymoon to the desert which has never left me. Needless to say, the marriage was brief, but it was, for a moment- despite the shade and gloom it temporarily brought at it's end, beautiful and perfect. The quick light it gave off as it went down in fast-burning flames was enough to ground me, eventually, back in effulgence. I call my marriage "God's Cosmic Frying Pan". You know, to the head.
I watched these many carry a giant septic tank down miles of muddy trails.
So, blah, blah- journey, etc. A few years ago, by "coincidence" two very important people in my life turned me onto what I found to be, essentially, Quantum Theory. Well, shit. That was the ammunition I needed for my already fucking enormous guns. The last 2 years have been wave upon wave of growth, ass-calling, manifesting, and more generally weird-ass shit. I still feel like the sea crammed in a paper cup and I still sometimes feel the phantom spread of my ghost wings. I still, like, don't talk about it. I struggle with my own human bullshit, as a woman and otherwise, I fuck up and have to make right- just like everyone else. But part of me has always been, and probably always will be- play-acting this life.
Meet Dimitri. This photo sums up our general feelings for each other. Also, Dimitri is one of the coolest people on the face of the planet. He's one selfless motherfucker. You can find out some amazing things about him and his work here: http://ibogavisions.com/
And then the plants found me.
They say that you can't force Ayahuasca into your life or someone else's-that it finds you when you're ready. When I made the decision to fly to Peru-everything fell into place. I began having dreams about the plants. Dreams like I've never had before. They helped me to feel more at ease, and I know that the spirit of this ancient medicine was with me before I arrived.
This is what I imagine football in 1970's Puerto Maldonado looked like.
The winning team.
I faced many fears in the jungle. Not just giant, fluorescent insects with 8 million legs and people-teeth. Not just anacondas, strip-mining, the rape of our natural resources, or the destruction of nature's plant-hospital. I faced more than human idiocy, unrelenting humidity, and the inability, for many reasons, to leap upon and sexually assault one of the many, shirtless and handsome, foreign men wandering the compound. I confronted deep-seated, personal, PRIMORDIAL issues.
A few of the many, shirtless, young men in Chimbre's employ. Definitely not distracting in ANY way. ESPECIALLY not the foreigns. Nope.
I agree, Declan, I agree.
I thought I got off easy at first. Yes, my ceremonies with Ayahuasca and San Pedro were profound, a little scary, full of scared geometry and insight- but all in all, I remained lucid. I wasn't catapulted into hell OR heaven, like some were which was probably due to my unfortunate skill at holding onto that false sense of self- which I've honed over many years. I created my own sense of "human"ity, manipulating is as I needed, so it's not strange that because of that I can control and hold onto it better than most.
5:30 am over the rainforest canopy.
Dan EagleSpirit greeting the day and recharging his spiritual battery-which operates solely on solar energy.
At my first ceremony, I was chastised by the Aya for letting negative imagery into my life via movies or media - then was briefly shown the white light of death and powerful, universal love (a rebirth). I was told I was only allowed a little taste that night and then the vision was abruptly over. During a later vision, at a 2nd ceremony, tiny little beings came into my tent and performed what can best be described as "surgery". Laughing and taunting the entire time- they used their steampunk-eque machines to pull dead, stagnant energy and pain from my stomach, eyes, heart, and...uh...lady parts. At one point, they took from my guts an entire dead and festering bovine, hooves and all, and tossed it to the side, pointing and giggling at my primitive way of living. I haven't had a savory chunk of beef since. When it was all over I felt renewed and energetic and slightly amused- thinking that my hallucination was beneficial but not far-reaching.
Awash in rain and spirits.
But the medicine doesn't work the way you think. It's not a one time thing. It gets in you and changes your core being, and for some people, myself one of them, this happens slowly. The day after that ceremony, I got a scorching fever that lasted two days- a number of people told me that this was indicative of the beginning of a Kundalini experience (which involves the sleeping life-energy coiled at the base of your spine becoming active, working it's way through your body, and eventually busting through the crown of your head-reuniting you with the heavens). I found this a little difficult to believe. However, over the last month and a half I've had to work through emotional blocks and physical ailments, each of which occurred in one of the places the little beings worked on that night in the jungle. I came out the other end of each struggle stronger and healthier than before and having had made remarkable self-realizations. The "Kundalini" has already made it's way to somewhere around my third eye and it waits for me to take the steps to bring it further. I've begun taking classes and lessons that I've always wanted to take. I finished my first book and have already found a publisher. Taking the medicine has helped me more than years of therapy have-it stays with you and you continue to purge, emotionally, energetically- psychically- for months after. And by doing so, you draw to you- if you stay focused- even more people and events to help you on your path and in your growing. By being opened up by the plants I found people and places that have brought me even further than I ever expected I could go. I feel honored and humbled by Ayahausca's (and now, Somahuasca's) appearance in my life. It has refined and multiplied my sense of duty, my intuition, my ability to be honest with myself by hundreds of times. It has made the want to serve others, in some way, impossible to ignore. We're all in this together and it's bigger and more mind-bending than any of us can comprehend.
The universe is unflagging in it's demand for our evolution- and it will not leave us in the lurch when we put forward the effort. We're children of god and god is ever present. All you have to do is show the Divine your willingness to grow and it's energy will flow through you as naturally as a river into it's bed. The Earth itself is an abundant resource aiding our progress. From the literal dirt, answers spring forth. The keys to unlock the secrets of time and space, of our spirit, grow at our feet! We're given all the tools we need here in the form of one another and the plants growing around us. Simply knock and the doors shall be opened.
Oh. And I got to pick and eat psilocybin mushrooms in a Peruvian cow field with Dennis freaking Mckenna.
Judo Chop!
