In the early moments of 2020, I was a mess.

Fresh out of a break up and deeply alone, I wandered along farm fencelines in Southland, knee-deep in mud, vaguely set on completing the walking distance from Bluff to Picton in the South Island of Aotearoa. I was not in a mental state to do so, as I was reminded of on frequent occasions when walkers from the previous hut 20km away would arrive before I was out of my sleeping bag, or at 11am call out to me in my lone tent in the bush, concerned I had fallen into trouble which looking back on it, I clearly had.

I wasn’t sleeping but when I did, demonic versions of my ex-partner woke me up with sharp audible commands or reached out to me in my dreams to breathe into my mouth against my will. My body felt like ejecting the spirit it housed, such was the grief in my heart. I was unfocussed and – try as I might – wasn’t able to keep away from the painful memories. Sleeping most of the days away, I opted to stumble through the bush by night, losing trail markers and eating dehy on the move. By constantly listening to music or podcasts, I tried to keep my screaming conscience from being heard and from acknowledging the threadbare ties that kept my mind tied to the body that withered beneath it.

In between teary phone calls to friends and whenever I could find the data, I was keeping an eye on the shrinking waitlist for Temple of The Way of Light, an Ayahuasca Retreat just out of Iquitos in the Amazon Jungle, Peru. My name was on that list because I craved catharsis. I craved answers for my heavy depression and to the perils of my relationship with my ex. I didn’t want medication or therapy, despite having never tried either. Along with the millions of disillusioned and hurting young westerners pouring into India and the Amazon every year, I wanted something real; something spiritual and enduring.

Ayahuasca – for those not in the know – is a vine found in Las Amazonas which naturally contains the compound N, N-Dimethyltryptamine commonly known as DMT. The locals refer to it as the Vine of The Dead as consumption of its molasses-like brew brings the consciousness of the drinker to a place where they communicate with Mother Ayahuasca herself, the Spirit of The Vine as well as various human and non-human spirits. Mother Ayahuasca is known for her heavy-hitting style of healing – “tough love” if you like. The easiest way to think about it is how you might feel if you combined twenty years of psychotherapy into one excruciating experience of the pain you have caused others and spontaneous, stomach-lurching insights into what is getting in the way of you living as a compassionate and self-aware human being.

Having read enough testimonies of gushing, humbled westerners who have tumbled in broken droves into the Amazon over the last few decades, I was certain that DMT and the Ayahuasceros of Peru would be able to guide me through their healing icaros and the transporting properties of the drug to give me sharp, cathartic relief, as I sought to right the wrongs in my psyche and ensure I would make decisions and live my life from a balanced and loving place.

Once I saw my name drop into the participant list, the only thing that was holding me back from getting on that flight out of Auckland, was fear.

Why?

The visceral nature of the experience is considerable and Ayahuasceros will frequently encourage participants to fast from toxic foods and alcohol for a period of days or weeks before imbibing the brew. Purified or not, most partakers will immediately (and often copiously) vomit the black and viscous material in what is thought of as a purge of toxins – physical or otherwise – that must needs be exorcised before the medicine can do its work. Having been a counsellor, I am more than familiar with the dark night of the soul aspect that comes before healing: without a period of acute discomfort, no catharsis or self-realizations can seem to be truly made, so I was comfortable with the purging aspect as it had its own gritty logic and lined up with the transitional sickness experiences of other psychedelics I’d taken like Magic Mushrooms and Mescaline.

What set DMT and Ayahuasca apart from other psychedelics apart for me was that I genuinely didn’t believe them to be psychedelics (or “mind manifesting”). These substances, far from simply creating hallucinogenic effects and egolessness, seem also to positively blast the user into another realm, which – if you read Rick Strassman’s “The Spirit Molecule” – is invariably described by participants as a place “more real than this one”. In the studies done by Strassman, he describes that almost to a person, the users of DMT in its distilled form (smoked, lasting 15 minutes on this side) say that the place that they go is real and the entities they encounter there know them intimately.

As for the nature and form of the entities themselves, descriptions are varied. Aliens, “machine elves”, mantises, clowns, reptiles, stick figures, spiders and “balls of light” are forms that are thrown around as are the attendant fractals and pleasing visual hallucinations. Some people describe a familiarity with the realm they enter and the beings awaiting them. Others are “operated on” by the beings, clearing out the traumas and blockages that are holding them back, reminiscent of a UFO abduction or Kundalini’s disposition toward working on the bodies of the ‘enlightened’. It’s important to note that this can be distressing for some, especially if trippers are hesitant/in a bad space emotionally and the beings go ahead and operate anyway. Still others describe being shown by the “elves” how to create energy and matter from pure consciousness. This reminds me of the reports of patients during Past-Life Regression Therapy where memories they have of the in-between world before coming to this life are accessed under hypnosis. In this in-between or Golden City, “spirit guides” are busy teaching inexperienced spirits about the nature of reality and how it can be manipulated through their individual will, a hallmark of occult science.

When I read the descriptions of the laughing, sometimes creepily unperturbed nature of the elves, what immediately comes to mind are the stories told the world over of “The good folk” or faeries. Believe what you might about the reality of such tales, there is startling evidence that many, many cultures from Celts to Indigenous Colombians to Māori share a belief in small, often red-haired, blue-eyed nature spirits which can’t be trusted and must be revered for fear of provoking their menacing disposition toward causing harm or trouble to those who travel in the bush unawares, as I now was on the track between Invercargill and Te Anau.

On many late night wanderings, I had read and heard enough about these entities to feel a healthy caution about provoking them or putting myself in a position – psychologically or spiritually – where I was handing over access to my being. I decided that before I would place the sovereignty of my spirit into the hands of Shamans I didn’t know and a drug potentially acting as a portal to these entities, I would scour the internet for every negative experience on the drug I could find, in order to make a balanced decision.

Although I still feel a slight tug toward reconsidering, this period of research marked the end of the courting period Ayahuasca and I enjoyed…

Graham Hancock, the fascinating author and psychonaut (name given to those who take psychedelics to explore their own consciousness) tells a harrowing tale of his time on one of many Ayahuasca Retreats, in what he believes was an interaction between the participants on the retreat and a negative entity hellbent on harming them. Hancock himself is a believer in the powerfully healing aspects of the plant but in his journalistic bent, does not shy away from being open and honest about the dangers of psychedelics and DMT. In a series of letters he describes a relatively peaceful series of trips before the 4th session turns suddenly nasty when an entity appears in his midst. He first interprets the figure as a “Trickster” archetype, the name given to a spirit who prods and provoke drinkers of the medicine into realizations about themselves that might at first take a scary form. He also notices a similarity in his appearance to another of the group members but dismisses it as coincidence. Over multiple sessions however, Hancock and others are harassed by this being and at one point he is “pummelled around like a spiritual basketball” completely against his will. Throwing up shields of light (a common form of protection in the astral realm), invoking the protection of Mother Ayahuasca and entreating with this entity do nothing to slow his abuse. Hancock is used up, spent and confused: he has never, in scores of difficult Ayahuasca Retreats through his life, experienced anything like it:

Waiting in line to receive the sacrament in the following session, a man among their number steps up to a woman in the line performing similar complex and violent hand movements before breathing a chest full of air into her face. Outrage ensues among the group and the mortified woman as they turn on him. The man stubbornly explains that he was offering her a blessing and the service continues in which multiple people are haunted by this spirit, including a participant who upon trying to escape its torment, feels his body freeze up as he leaves the room and falls down the stairs with a crash. The Ayahuascero in charge later reveals that as soon as he touched the tormented man in the stairs he was similarly oppressed and a heavy dread fell upon him like a cloak. It takes the full reserve of his 40 years of learning with the Medicine for him to expel the entity and bring the participant back around.

Confronting him, Hancock hears from this person that he considers himself a “Basement DMT visionary”, someone who regularly “travels to other worlds” by smoking the drug and attends retreats like these to “carry out this work”. He urges Hancock to understand how much courage it has taken him to own up to this and the effect his actions have had on the group. The woman he breathed on is furious with his self-concern and discards his apology out of hand. He leaves the next day and it is then that a psychotherapist on the retreat discloses a conversation he had shared with Mother Ayahuasca in the preceding session, where he asked her what the hell had happened and why this evil had been unleashed on them. The Spirit’s reply still gives me goosebumps:

For myself, I am undecided whether Mother Ayahuasca is who she says she is. According to a reddit user in the know, new Ayahuasceros are routinely asked by the plant whether they intend to conduct a healing ceremony or cast a curse on an enemy as it seemed the man in Graham Hancock’s Retreat was attempting to do. Whether or not this claim actually holds water, there is no denying the healing that takes place in the vast majority of these retreats, where set and setting are carefully curated and the facilitation of the ceremony is placed firmly in the hands of trustworthy Peruvian Ayahuasceros whose penchant for working with the medicine spans multiple generations of shamanic learning.

However, there is still room for concern. Witches or brujos who work with the plant have been known to extort or sexually abuse retreat participants and instances of cults that have sprung up around the central Ayahuasca sacrament have involved themselves in other appalling practices like child sacrifice. A close friend of mine fresh off the plane and wandering through Iquitos was ignoring the cries of Ayahuasca Tourist Guides when she heard her name stated plaintively behind her: “Wendy”. When she turned, she saw a man whom she had never met before beckoning her over, his eyes locked onto hers. She hurried away.

Deaths are the exception but not unheard of. Young New Zealander Matthew Dawson-Clarke who died of cardiac arrest a few years back while on a Tobacco-Ayahuasca blend was likely to have been the victim of a terrible luck rather than any foul play but it is frustrating to hear the shaman in charge say it was “his destiny” to die. It is not unusual to hear of young Ayahuasca tourists being taken advantage of or needing months of therapy after a trip goes wrong, often finding it difficult to know who to turn to if there are serious spiritual repercussions and the shaman is unable to help any further. Perhaps this is to be expected with any pilgrimage phenomenon.

Perhaps not.

People on the ground who are either witness to the mass migration of westerners into the amazon or disturbed participants themselves have brought my online attention to some strange occurrences linked to the retreats. In one case, a participant, after being seduced by the spirits “of the dead” engages in sexual intercourse with them and they haunt him, even after the trip is over, back to his dormitory where there is no escape. Another person based in the Iquitos area sensitive to the spiritual realm, has noticed entities tied to the auras of unsuspecting tourists as they leave the jungle in an otherwise state of bliss. Funnily enough, one reddit user, after being harrassed by entities dressed as clergy uses the name of Jesus Christ to repel them and they are driven instantly back by a powerful force. The person then confusingly interprets the content of his experience as his Christian upbringing not meaning anything. Still others like Australian Influencer Celeste Amore have smoked the synthesized form of DMT only to have hellish experiences in which they feel they are going to die. Amore for instance was instantly surrounded by lizard men in an underground vault, who tormented and attempted to drag her further underground over what felt like an eternity. She takes months to recover her sense of self and will to live. Another, Joshua, is similarly tormented on psychedelics (mushrooms in this case) in an incredible Out of Body Experience which involved reptilian demons and the figure of Jesus coming to his rescue when he felt his soul was in peril of being lost.

It’s a lot, for sure!

I am open to the fact that if a space is cleared appropriately (such as in the preparatory work done by Ayahuasceros), due diligence is at least paid to the possibility of malevolent entities intruding on people’s minds and bodies during an Ayahuasca session. But the tone of dread and vomiting and sudden overwhelming patches of fear before insights can be made – while logical in a therapeutic sense – doesn’t always strike me as particularly safe spiritually. Is there such a thing as safe? In this life or the next? Isn’t that where we grow? Perhaps, to an extent, this is true but the maxim “No such thing as a bad trip” is clearly, demonstrably false with drugs as powerful as DMT. The spiritual vulnerability combined with the difficulty in discerning which entities are there to help and which to wreak havoc was ultimately what put me on my guard against doing Ayahuasca. The onus is on all holders of these spaces to sufficiently warn people of the risks, while doing their utmost to mitigate them.

In the end, I opted for therapy, prayer and sunlight over Plant Medicine and edged my way back to sanity and insights in the following months.

Sometimes when it comes to personal growth…slow and steady wins the race.

…More to come…