The Untamed Beast: A Descent into Inherited Darkness
The first ceremony opened my mind and soul. The second dragged me into the darkness beneath them.
There were about twenty of us at the retreat in Spain. At the beginning of the week, we were asked who believed in God, the afterlife and realities beyond the material world. Only a handful of people raised their hands.
I was one of them.
Yet even with my hand raised, I was not completely certain. I believed in Allah, but my belief had not penetrated every part of me. It existed in my words, habits and inherited identity, but it had not yet become the unshakeable knowledge I feel today.
I did not then realise that the coming ceremony would force me to confront the distance between outward belief and inner surrender.
A darkness enters the room
A different shaman was leading the second ceremony. This time, it was a woman.
I immediately judged her.
I had liked the shaman from the previous night and felt safe in his presence. When I saw the woman preparing to lead us, a dismissive thought arose within me: “Great. What is she going to do?”
Before she had sung, spoken or served the medicine, I had already decided that something was wrong. I projected suspicion upon her and carried that judgement with me as I approached the cup.
By then, it had become a joke among the group that I would always be the first person to purge. The medicine entered me quickly and deeply. Everyone took their turn, and when mine came, I drank, returned to my place and sat down.
Within ten or fifteen minutes, my stomach turned.
I purged.
But this purge did not bring relief. Something remained.
The atmosphere felt different from the previous night. The beauty and tenderness had vanished. In their place was a heaviness so dense that it seemed to press against my body. I could not see it, but I felt surrounded by something hostile.
The darkness did not appear to be merely around me.
It felt as though it had awakened inside me.
The beast beneath the skin
A sound began forming deep within my body.
It did not feel as though I had consciously chosen to make it. It rose from somewhere beneath ordinary speech—from somewhere primitive, wounded and uncontrollable.
I began to growl.
The sound became deeper and more guttural. It seemed to rise from the bottom of my stomach, push through my chest and tear its way out of my throat. My human voice disappeared beneath it.
I felt as though I had become an animal.
I could not see the creature’s body or identify what kind of animal it was. Yet I could feel its weight, aggression and untamed force. It was not walking beside me. It appeared to be moving through me, wearing my body and using my throat.
My body became its cage, and the growl was the sound of something trying to break free.
This creature felt ancient. It carried rage without language, pain without memory and a hunger that could never be satisfied. It seemed less like something newly entering me and more like something that had always been there—buried beneath years of routine, distraction, pride and denial.
The medicine had not created the beast.
It had uncovered it.
For years, I had occasionally sensed something unresolved within myself. When I heard the adhan, I sometimes felt a sudden jolt in my heart—as though something inside me had been startled by the call to prayer. I noticed it, but I ignored it. I did not question why the remembrance of Allah disturbed something within me.
I simply continued with my life.
Outwardly, I believed I was doing reasonably well. I prayed some of my salah and missed others. I tried to be a good Muslim, husband and father. I knew the correct actions and performed enough of them to reassure myself.
But I was confusing the appearance of faith with surrender.
I had become capable of performing Islam almost mechanically. I was playing the role of a Muslim while avoiding the transformation that worship demands. I gave myself just enough religion to remain comfortable, but not enough to challenge the ego ruling my inner life.
That is one of the most dangerous forms of spiritual sleep: believing we are awake simply because our body knows the movements of prayer.
The growling creature confronted me with everything I had refused to see. Whether it represented the untamed nafs, accumulated pain, something spiritual or a terrifying construction of the psychedelic state, I could not know with certainty.
In that moment, however, it felt completely real.
The attack
Then the experience intensified.
I felt dark entities rushing towards me and entering my body one after another. Each arrival felt violent, as though invisible forces were hurling themselves into me.
I screamed.
I cried.
The ceremony descended into chaos around me. The entities seemed furious at my presence, as if they recognised me as an enemy. Their anger felt personal and ancient. I could not understand what I had done or why I had been brought into their path.
The previous night, I had floated through beauty, love and impossible colours. Now I had been dropped into a realm that seemed stripped of mercy.
My thoughts fractured into panic:
“What is happening?”
“Where am I?”
“What are these things?”
“How do I make them stop?”
I did not know how to protect myself. I had no grounding practice, no spiritual discipline for navigating such a state and no understanding of how to respond. I felt spiritually naked.
To put it bluntly, I absolutely shit myself.
The weight upon me became unbearable. It felt as if several bodies were pressing down upon my chest and shoulders, crushing me towards the ground.
The female shaman was sitting on the other side of the room. In desperation, I began crawling towards her.
There was nothing dignified about it. The man who had prejudged her only minutes earlier was now dragging himself across the floor, growling, crying and begging her to help him.
Halfway across the room, terror consumed me.
“Help me,” I cried. “Please help me.”
I asked for water. Someone tried to give me a drink, but I pushed it away and repeated the word: “Water. Water.”
One of the assistants understood. He poured water over my body.
The water struck me, and I purged again. I was exposed before everyone—soaked, sick, frightened and stripped of every illusion of control. Any image I had of myself as composed, intelligent or spiritually capable had collapsed.
I was completely humiliated.
Yet perhaps that humiliation was part of the medicine. Something in me needed to be brought to the ground. The ego that judged the shaman, blamed my wife and believed it understood the world had to crawl across the floor and ask for help.
They took me outside and tried to ground me beside the fire. Eventually, I was given hapé, which helped pull me out of the experience.
The ordeal had lasted only about an hour.
But that hour tore open something that could not easily be closed again.
“Ancestors. Your familia.”
I did not drink another cup that night. I sat quietly and listened to the music, trying to understand what had happened.
Other participants also appeared to be passing through difficult experiences. An Irish woman began speaking in a language or form of speech that sounded ancient and unfamiliar to me. Cries, movement and strange sounds travelled through the room.
The ceremony seemed to have entered a collective darkness.
By morning, fear had hardened into suspicion. I remained convinced that the female shaman had caused what happened.
I confronted her.
“What were you trying to do to me?” I demanded. “You know that I am Muslim. Was this connected to jinn? What was happening?”
She looked at me and gave a brief answer:
“Ancestors. Your familia.”
Her words confused me. I did not hold a spiritual belief in ancestors returning to influence the living. Her explanation did not fit comfortably within my Islamic understanding.
Yet the phrase remained with me.
“Your familia.”
It became a key that would unlock the next stage of the journey.
The curse carried through blood
Within the darkness, I had seen images involving the women in my family—my mother, my sisters and wombs that appeared hardened or crystallised. They seemed surrounded by blackness, as though pain had solidified around the place from which life should emerge.
At the time, I interpreted these visions through the language available to me: black magic, dark energy or a curse. One of my sisters had been unable to conceive for thirteen years, and the imagery appeared to connect her suffering to something much older.
In later ceremonies, a story began unfolding before me. I perceived events reaching back seven or eight generations, perhaps further, involving Muslim and Hindu ancestors on my mother’s side.
I saw persecution, women being taken and blood being shed. I cannot verify the historical details, and I do not present the visions as documentary evidence. They were the symbolic and spiritual language through which the ceremony communicated with me.
At the centre of the vision were women carrying unbearable grief and rage. I sensed that they had made a vow never to live peacefully or submit willingly within the religion into which violence had brought them.
Whether that vow was literal, symbolic or a manifestation of inherited family pain, its force seemed to echo through generations.
What I had initially called a curse began to reveal itself as generational trauma: pain that had never been acknowledged, grief that had never been mourned and rage that had never found words.
A curse is not always a supernatural sentence spoken over a bloodline. Sometimes it is a wound repeated so faithfully that each generation mistakes it for personality, culture or fate.
The original event may be forgotten, but its emotional pattern survives. Fear becomes control. Violation becomes mistrust. Suppressed anger becomes conflict. Hurt people unknowingly pass their pain to their children, who then carry feelings whose origins they cannot explain.
The beast I encountered may have represented this inheritance.
It was the rage that could not speak.
It was the grief that had never been buried.
It was the terror passed from parent to child until no one remembered where it began.
And it was also mine.
That was the most difficult discovery. I could not separate myself from the darkness by calling it an entity, a curse or an ancestor. Whatever its origin, it had found expression through my life—through my anger, my resistance, my marriage and my distance from Allah.
The beast was not defeated by denying it.
It had to be witnessed.
Returning to the darkness
When I awoke the following morning, I remained shaken—but something inside me had changed.
Fear gradually became determination.
I thought, “I am going back. I want to see these ancestors again. I want to understand these entities. I want to know what this darkness is.”
I spoke to the shaman and the other facilitators. I asked how I could protect myself and remain grounded if I returned to that realm.
Part of me was terrified, but another part understood that running away would leave the door open behind me. I had spent much of my life avoiding what was painful, uncomfortable or spiritually demanding.
This time, I wanted to turn around and face it.
The second ceremony did not feel beautiful. It did not leave me floating in love or marvelling at celestial colours. It humiliated me, frightened me and forced me to confront the untamed creature beneath my cultivated identity.
Yet darkness can also be a form of revelation.
The first ceremony showed me my wife’s pain. The second showed me the pain buried within myself and what I experienced as the suffering carried through my family.
I had entered believing that evil was something external—something that attacked from outside. I began to understand that darkness also survives through the wounds we refuse to examine, the patterns we repeat and the parts of ourselves we keep hidden from the light.
I had met the beast.
Now I intended to return and discover what it was protecting.