My Ayahuasca Ceremony got cancelled (and why I am happy it happened)
The Sense and Non Sense of Using Psychedelics to Heal Yourself.
I was supposed to go to an Ayahuasca ceremony this weekend, but instead I am writing this newsletter. Apparently it got cancelled a week ago, but they forgot to send me an email, so I only discovered it by accident about 1.5 hours before I was supposed to start driving there.
Strangely enough I didn’t feel disappointed, not even for a split second. Quite honestly I felt a little relieved. It would have been my first time and I was quite nervous for the experience. Willingly going through a purging ritual and facing your inner demons is just not something you do for fun. So the week leading up to this weekend I prepped myself physically and mentally, and even though I felt I was as ready as I could ever be, the universe had something else in store.
Actually, there was a small part of me that felt disappointed, although it wasn’t because I didn’t get to experience the ceremony… It was because of what I hoped to get from it.
These past two weeks have been challenging on many levels and I hoped that ‘The Vine of the Soul’ would have the answer for me. I wished for a vision, a sign from ‘God’, or a deep insight that would heal me, preferably instantly.
“Well, looks like I will have to do it all on my own again”, I thought.
Actually quite in alignment with the path I am already on, and the decision I made in April to take a break from all external tools and input and focus on finding the answers within.
Taking time off from actively ‘healing’ has actually been more healing than I could have ever imagined. I have become much more aware of my inner turmoil, and my tendency to flee into podcasts or YouTube videos to find a solution for something that needs nothing but loving attention. Insights and inspiration comes much faster these days, and I have noticed I am able to switch my emotional state a lot quicker. There was only one time I felt like I needed help, and reached out to my previous coach for a catch up session, only to cancel it one day later because I already got through it by myself.
Having so little input is probably the reason why I have managed to start writing consistently for weeks on end now. There is just more room to create output because I am not clogging my brain with continuous streams of new information.
That said, this is not a plea for doing everything on your own and not asking for help. I truly believe in coaches, therapists, and tools like breath work and psychedelics (I even believe that there is a time and a place for binge listening podcasts).
These tools and modalities can be extremely valuable in certain periods of your life, but at some point you need to ask yourself if your handles in life haven’t actually become your crutches, and if you have become dependent on them.
Having the ceremony cancelled made me think about my intention of taking the medicine. Was I outsourcing, once again, finding the answers that I already have within?
My mom always says that there are no shortcuts in life, and that it is the main reason she’s staying away from tools like psychedelics.
I believe that she’s partly right.
She’s right because I believe that nothing can speed up what you need to learn in life. If you’re not ready to change, you won’t. There is no guru, book or plant that can change what you’re not open to receiving. If you expect that you can pay a coach to change your life while staying the same person, you’ll get disappointed.
It’s partly why I stopped actively promoting myself as a coach. The idea of pushing healing onto someone just felt off. The more motivation I felt to ‘heal’ and change the world, the more I realized it came from a place of lack. “I have to fix you, so I can fix me”. I realized that everything I wanted from the world around me was a projection of my own desires. You can make a lot of money selling solutions for what you believe people need, but true change doesn’t come from a 5-step course that relies heavily on marketing strategies and sales tactics to even be sold.
Why I believe she isn’t right, is because I don’t believe there is long way either. If you don’t use psychedelics because you believe that meditation, or the study of a book is a better way to reach healing or enlightenment, you’re still dependent on a tool. You’re still chasing something outside of yourself to save you. The whole idea of a shortcut only exists in the light of a final destination to reach. I don’t don’t believe there is an end goal. Nor a path to take that will get you there. In yoga they say the ‘Pathless Path’ (which I just discovered is also a popular self-help book).
I was just talking to a friend who is on a very similar journey as me, and told me how she, similar to me, has been swaying between different beliefs, theories and life philosophies, ever searching for that path that feels most true. The irony is that the longer I live, the more I believe that this is the path. The looking for it, the confusion, the swaying, the questioning. It’s all part of it. And it will lead to nothing if you expect to figure it out somewhere along the way. There is no path at all, just life.
What I love about psychedelics is that it gives you a little push that helps you face your inner demons. Your shadows. The feelings you try to hide in some dark corner of your body. When you take a substance that gets you out of your left brain thinking, these feelings seem to come to the surface much more easily. It becomes harder to push them away and surrender seems to be the only option. Unless you resist that is, or try to control the experience. And that’s when people get a bad trip. Which I believe isn’t the fault of the drug, but an amplification of what you’re already doing in your life that would ultimately have lead to severe mental suffering anyways, with or without the drug. As I don’t believe a tool can heal you, I also don’t believe a tool can make you sick.
‘Our attempts to avoid pain are futile, as we’re merely postponing what needs to be felt at some point’.
I created an Instagram Reel with that text this week, as I realized something important. I wanted to face my inner demons this week in an Ayahuasca ceremony, not seeing that life was already handing me the opportunity to do exactly that. I was avoiding and postponing feeling them, only to feel them all at once during a plant ceremony.
If there is no path, nothing on your path can speed up or slow down your process of healing. Which means it doesn’t matter if you take a plant or not. If you pay attention, everything already exists in the present moment. There is no way to escape your path as it is your life.
Love,
Hannah
PS. I was offered to sign up for another ceremony in a few weeks. I don’t know if I will… It felt a little like that time I (finally) decided to sign up for a 10-day Vipassana retreat. I mentally felt I was ready, but after submitting my registration, I received an email that this location would be closed for an unknown period of time due to construction work. To this day I never signed up for another one, simply not having felt the need to do so ever since.
When in doubt, DON'T ! is a wise saying !
A pity for me haha because I love reading other people's experiences into perhaps alternate realities... :)