How Ayahuasca Taught Me to Purge
Plant medicine helped me release everything that does not serve me
I’ve been a walking fist lately. I’m struggling to really feel much of anything at all and then resisting what I can feel because it’s so unpleasant. It’s creating an untenable level of discord inside me, the sensation of being burned alive from within and seeping out as insufferable petulance toward the people around me. A few nights ago, I picked up a Sharpie in desperation and started to draw, which often seems to be what my body knows how to do when under duress. And as if in direct answer to my existential call for help, these talismans of purging appeared.
Purging came into my world about six years ago when immediately after getting off a boat in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon, a medicine woman lined up 20 of us Western journeyers, handed us each a bucket of water and a cup, and instructed us to chug as much as we could as fast as we could until it all came up. That was followed by seven nights of an ayahuasca ceremony, many hours of which I spent curled over a barf bucket in the darkness. Several times a night, I would crawl on my hands and knees across the ceremony hut to the…
