Ayahuasca Experience June 2026
My last ayahuasca experience was in June this year. I was reluctant to go because the previous times I had been had been really, really difficult. I wasn't particularly keen on going through that again.
But I was persuaded. I would meet some old friends, and I thought, okay, I'll go, take a small dose and just chill.
I made an intention. to be more trusting, to let go.
That was because, in the previous experiences, I felt as though I could never really let go. I would keep my eyes open. I wouldn't surrender. which makes the whole thing harder. I had this feeling that if I let go completely, it was going to take my soul.
This time I wanted to let go.
The ceremony was again presided over by the Yawanawa, with Hushnu, the well-known female shaman from the tribe. She is incredibly powerful.
The ceremony started around nine or ten.
I went up and took the very small dose I had decided on. It was mild, very mild.
I didn't really have much effect at all. In fact, it was the first time I had been able to properly hear the icaros without being completely out of it. I could actually sit there and listen to them.
And because it was so mild, and because nothing difficult was happening, I thought I was okay.
So I decided to take a second cup.
Normally, when people go up for the second cup, they are finished by the time everyone else is finished. There is this kind of rhythm to the ceremony. You take the medicine, it builds, you go through the experience, and then it comes down. People are encouraged to moving and, dance to let the load go.
So I thought, okay, I'll take the second one and I'll be fine. I wasn't. The second cup hit me.
I could feel it coming on, (the humming the waves running through you) and then the communication started.
It's difficult to describe because it wasn't like hearing a voice. It was more like someone talking to you telepathically. There was a conversation going on in my head—questions, answers, explanations—but there was no actual voice.
And yet it didn't feel like I was thinking these things myself. It felt like something else was talking to me. Or was it me.
Not me in the sense of my normal thoughts, my ego or my everyday personality. It was as though something deeper was telling me things, but that something else was also me.
There was a “you” and there was something apparently communicating with that “you”, but when you looked more deeply at it, the thing doing the communicating was also you.
Everything was happening inside my head, but it didn't have the quality of ordinary thinking. It had the quality of being told something. like a profound realisation
And this is where it began to address the intention I had gone in with.I had wanted to learn to trust.
And the communication was essentially:
*Look. You're having real difficulty. Look at the people around you. They're helping you.*
The guy sitting next to me was a helper, and he was helping me. One of the other trip sitters had come over as well.
I had wanted to learn to trust, and here I was in a situation where I couldn't manage myself and other people were looking after me.
But then it became really difficult. I got stuck.
Everyone else was up and moving around. People were dancing. The ceremony was continuing.
And I was sitting there heaving. I must have heaved for about an hour and a half, almost continuously.
Nothing came out. It was just this constant heaving, and every time I heaved it seemed to be connected to something happening in the experience. Like my physical self couldn't process it.
At one point, one of the trip sitters told me that I needed to come out of my head.I needed to come down into my body.
I needed to breathe. That was the only way I was going to get unstuck.
But my head was looping. And the questions weren't small questions.
They were things like: *What is this reality?**What is your role in it?*
And there were answers.
But they weren't answers like, you need to deal with your business partner differently, or you need to navigate government bureaucracy better.
They were much more profound than that.
For the last three years I had been trying to understand these experiences. I'd looked into mysticism, Sufism, idealism, all sorts of things, because I was trying to make sense of what was happening.
And now all of those questions seemed to be coming back at me.
One of the things it focused on was my business.
I'd been having difficulties with the business, with government restrictions, rules, regulations and red tape. These were things I normally thought of as external things happening to me.
But the experience said:
*This is you.*
And I remember thinking, what do you mean, this is me?
How can government bureaucracy be me?
Then it moved to my relationship with my business partner.
It was pointing towards what I understood as a kind of codependency between us.
Again:
*This is you.*
And this is where it became different from ordinary psychological advice.
It wasn't saying, you're behaving badly with your business partner, or you need to change the way you communicate.
It was more like it was saying that these things were somehow manifestations of something deeper.
Not me in the sense of my ego.
Not me in the sense of my conscious decisions.
Not me as the person I normally think I am.
Something deeper than that.
Something about what I am.
This was where my thoughts went towards Ibn ʿArabi and the idea of the **ʿayn thābita**, the fixed or immutable entity, and the idea that there is something about the fundamental nature of a person that manifests itself through their existence.
I wasn't thinking that I was consciously creating government bureaucracy.
It was more like the experience was asking whether the things that happen in my life might somehow be related to something deeper about what I am.
how does something inside me become something apparently outside me?
How does it become bureaucracy?
How does it become a relationship?
How does something about my nature manifest itself as the circumstances of my life?
And every time these ideas came, I would heave.
Then it went somewhere much more difficult.
It said:
*You know your wife and your children? They're not real.*
That was painful and saddening.
My wife and children?
No.
What is left of Reality?
I couldn't accept the idea that the people I loved were somehow not real, and so i heaved again.
And by this point I wasn't really sure what was happening around me either.
People were coming over to help me, but I wasn't sure whether they were actually there.
One of the trip sitters came over with some kind of balm or ointment on his hands. He put his hands close to my face and said, *Breathe in.*
I remember it happening.
But I didn't know if it had actually happened.
Afterwards, I had to ask whether these people had really come over to me.
Eventually someone took me outside.
I was still completely out of it. I couldn't really get up and had to be supported, almost carried, because I had spent so long heaving.
I sat outside for twenty or thirty minutes.
Eventually I became aware that the person helping me needed to go, and I said I was fine.
By then people were having breakfast.
I went and had breakfast, but people were looking at me and asking if I was still okay. They were telling me I needed to sit down.
I was still very much in it.
Eventually I came back enough to function normally.
But I was exhausted.
## The Second Ceremony
The following day, my first thought was that I wasn't going to do it again.
I'd had enough.
Before the second ceremony started, one of the trip sitters spoke to me about my relationship with the medicine.
She said that we needed to change my relationship with it because it was always so difficult for me.
And then she said something that really struck me.
Perhaps I didn't feel that I deserved the warmth and love that the medicine seemed to bring to other people.
That made me think about something much bigger than ayahuasca.
How much of the meaning I give to my life is actually tied up with struggle?
Because I do know how to struggle.
I know how to strive, resist, overcome and endure.
But perhaps that's not the same thing as simply being.
Maybe I'd become so accustomed to struggle that struggle itself had become part of how I understood myself.
That was uncomfortable to think about.
But it also connected back to what had happened the night before.
I had gone into the experience wanting to trust, but I had spent hours fighting, resisting and trying to get unstuck.
And perhaps the question wasn't simply whether I could trust the medicine.
Perhaps it was whether I knew how to exist without struggling against something.
They encouraged me to take another cup, even though I had said I didn't want to.
They said they would bless the cup.
So I agreed.
This time it was very mild.
Very mild.
I basically slept through the whole thing.
And that was it.
## What Stayed With Me
Looking back, the first night was almost like a spiritual psychosis.
I don't mean that as a clinical diagnosis. I mean that the normal boundaries by which I understand myself and reality seemed to break down.
Everything I experienced seemed to be me. But not me in the physical sense. Not my ego. Not my personality.
Not my conscious human self. Something deeper.
It was more like everything was somehow a reflection of me at a deeper level of reality.
And this is where the image of the polished mirror reflecting God comes in.
Not that the mirror is God, and not that the mirror is the source of what it reflects.
It is only a tiny mirror amongst millions of mirrors, reflecting only a tiny speck of what is being reflected.
And perhaps what I was experiencing as “me” was not my physical self or my ego at all, but this deeper reflection.
The mirror doesn't create what it reflects.
It only reflects it.
And if that is the case, then perhaps what I experience as myself is only a tiny, partial reflection of something infinitely greater than me.
That was where the experience began to move into the question of free will.
If something deeper than my conscious self is manifesting through my life, then what does that mean for free will?
Perhaps I experience myself as having free will because that is how reality appears from my perspective.
But from God's perspective, there isn't an unknown future.
God already knows the path.
So perhaps free will is real from our perspective, but not in the same way from God's perspective.
And then there was the question of duʿāʾ.
If I pray for something to happen, or ask God to change something, am I changing a predetermined path?
Or is the duʿāʾ itself part of that path?
Perhaps the prayer is itself feedback within the determined path.
I experience myself as asking God to change something, but perhaps the asking itself was always part of what was going to happen.
I don't know.
And that is probably the important point.
I didn't come out of the experience with a neat answer.
I came out with a set of ideas that seemed to connect together incredibly strongly while I was in the experience.
But I also knew that I had been in an extraordinarily altered state.
And yet I couldn't simply dismiss it either.
Because some of the questions were questions I had already been asking for years.
The experience seemed to take those questions and push them somewhere much deeper.
The problem was that I still had to come back.
I had to go home.
I had a wife and children. I had businesses. I had responsibilities.
I couldn't continue everyday life with the knowledge , nothing is Real.
So I had to suppress it.
Or perhaps partition it.
I had to put the experience somewhere else in my mind so that I could carry on normally.
I went into the experience wanting to learn how to trust.
What I got was something much more difficult.
I was confronted with questions about what the self actually is, whether the things that happen to us are somehow connected to our deepest nature, what free will means if God already knows the path, whether duʿāʾ is itself part of that path, and whether I have become so accustomed to struggle that I don't really know what simply being feels like.
I still don't have answers to those questions.
But they are still there.