Ayahuasca on the Big Island

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To borrow a phrase from my Dad: You can't make this shit up. A series of 3 chance encounters has lead to me sitting in a condo loaned by the owner to a friend of a friend whom I met shortly after arriving to the Big Island, about to imbibe an ayahuasca brew made by a Punatic calling himself Kolomana, claiming to have been trained by Terence McKenna, with the ceremony being lead by someone who had spent substantial time in many ayahuasca ceremonies in the jungles of Peru, where the shamans have been administering this "medicine" for generations.

Ayahuasca was something I had only heard a bit about before coming to Big Island of Hawaii, but it kept coming up in conversations here, as it's become pretty popular locally, and the crowd in Puna is into this sort of thing. I heard Joe Rogan talk about DMT awhile back, which appears to be the most important ingredient in the ayahuasca brew.

The Peruvian tradition holds ayahuasca in esteem as a medicinal brew that can enable the imbiber to heal physically and mentally. Some traditional advice is to set some intentions/questions regarding issues before imbibing ayahuasca. Some try to shake a drug addiction, address trauma of the past, or find a new path forward in life. I was aiming to explore what hindrances are keeping me from greater freedom, as well as to examine the intentions underlying my interactions with others (these are connected).

We setup in our common room, and imbibed at sunset, keeping the room lit only by candle light. Our ceremony leader set a soundtrack of psyche-expanding music in lieu of more traditional chanting which the participants sometimes participate in. We were encouraged to remain silent, and meditate or just focus on our intentions/questions in the lead-in.

In the first hour, I didn't feel much beyond a bit of light headedness, the brew in my stomach, and an extra richness to our soundtrack of Kaminanda. Then sometime before 1:15 the music really pulled me in, sounding extremely rich and deep. Checkout "Riutal Ecologies" for a sample. Things peaked around 2-3 hours, with the music becoming totally enthralling, and me losing the thread of my intentions and just wandering off into sensual daydreams inspired from the music or elsewhere. Hour 3-4 continued a less intense high, and in hours 4-5 we chatted and had some lingering effects and afterglow. I tried to go for a little walk somewhere in there, and felt like I was lurching around like a zombie. Interacting with strangers was too stressful, so I cut that experiment short. Notably, we had no vomiting or diarrhea. This might seem a positive, but traditionally they are just seen as the purging of some mental impurity through the body.

I can't say that I made much progress on my intentions, although I did notice some subtleties around them in hour 1-2. But it was a rich psychadelic experience that was quite different from LSD or mushrooms. The synesthetic aspects wrt sound made it bear some resemblence to Salvia Divinorum, however the latter has been far more intense, albeit lasting for a mere 5 minutes or so.

I can see some of the potentiality ayahuasca for opening up the mind to seeing and interacting with the subconscious more directly. But to really explore that more thoroughly, I think I would need a larger dose, and possibly a bit less rich music so that the mind doesn't get too wrapped up in the auditory sensuality.

I'm grateful to our host, our brewer, and my comrade-in-ayahuasca for making this cool trip possible. I'll make it to Peru one day and see how the old-schoolers do their ayahuasca there.

Links

There are some cool documentaries on ayahuasca. I've enjoyedStepping into the fireThe Ayahuasca ExperienceAnd this TED talk

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